triple Stuart monarchy and maintain their pre-eminent position in Irish society. This was prevented by their religious dissidence and the threat posed to them by the extension of the Plantations. The Protestant settler-dominated Government of Ireland tried to confiscate more land from the native landowners by questioning their medieval land titles and as punishment for non-attendance at Protestant services. In response, Irish Catholics appealed directly to the King, first to James I and then Charles I, for full rights as subjects and toleration of their religion: a programme known as The Graces. On several occasions, the Monarchs appeared to have reached an agreement with them, granting their demands in return for raising taxes. However, Irish Catholics were disappointed when, on paying the increased levies, the King postponed the implementation of their demands. What was more, by the late 1630s, Thomas Wentworth, Charles's representative in Ireland, was proposing further widespread confiscations of native land to break the power of the Irish Catholic upper classes. It is likely that this would eventually have provoked armed resistance from Irish Catholics at some point, but the actual rebellion was sparked by a political crisis in Scotland and England that led to civil war in the three Kingdoms. Civil wars, Land confiscations and Penal Laws (1641–1691) The fifty years from 1641 to 1691 saw two catastrophic periods of civil war in Ireland 1641–53 and 1689–91, which killed hundreds of thousands of people and left others in permanent exile. The wars, which pitted Irish Catholics against British forces and Protestant settlers, ended in the almost complete dispossession of the Catholic landed elite. The Confederate War and Cromwellian conquest In the mid-17th century, Ireland was convulsed by eleven years of warfare, beginning with the Rebellion of 1641, when Irish Catholics, threatened by expanding power of the anti-Catholic English Parliament and Scottish Covenanters at the expense of the King, rebelled against English and Protestant domination. The Rising, launched in Ulster by Féilim Ó Néill, provoked an outbreak of anarchic violence around the country, after which it was joined by most Irish Catholic lords and their followers. In some respects, the rebellion was the end product of the long term alienation of Irish Catholics with English policies in Ireland. However, it was sparked off by the fear of impending civil war in the British Isles as a whole. The rebellion was marked by a number of massacres of Protestant