Irish noblemen who had converted to Protestantism – notably Earl Inchiquin – sided with the settler community. Cromwellian land confiscation (1652) Over 12,000 veterans of the New Model Army were awarded land in Ireland in place of their wages due, which the Commonwealth was unable to pay. Many of these soldiers sold their land grants to other Protestants rather than settle in war-ravaged Ireland, but 7,500 soldiers did settle in Ireland. They were required to keep their weapons to act as a reserve militia in case of future rebellions. Taken together with the Merchant Adventurers, probably over 10,000 Parliamentarians settled in Ireland after the civil wars. Most of these were single men, however, and many of them married Irish women (although banned by law from doing so). Some of the Cromwellian soldiers thus began to be integrated into Irish Catholic society. In addition to the Parliamentarians, thousands of Scottish Covenanter soldiers, who had been stationed in Ulster during the war, settled there permanently after its end. Some Parliamentarians had argued that all the Irish should be deported to west of the River Shannon and replaced with English settlers. However, this would have required hundreds of thousands of English settlers willing to come to Ireland, and such numbers of aspirant settlers were never recruited. Rather, a land-owning class of British Protestants was created in Ireland, and they ruled over mostly Irish Catholic tenants. A minority of the "Cromwellian" landowners were Parliamentarian soldiers or creditors. Most were pre-war Protestant settlers, who took the opportunity to obtain confiscated lands. Before the wars, Catholics had owned 60% of the land in Ireland. During the Commonwealth period, Catholic landownership fell to 8–9%. After some restitution in the Restoration Act of Settlement 1662, it rose to 20% again. In Ulster, the Cromwellian period eliminated those native landowners who had survived the Ulster plantation. In Munster and Leinster, the mass confiscation of Catholic-owned land after the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, meant that English Protestants acquired almost all of the land holdings for the first time in these territories. In addition, under the Commonwealth regime, some 12,000 Irish people were sold into indentured servitude to the Caribbean and North American colonies. Another 34,000 Irish Catholics went into exile on the Continent, mostly in the Catholic countries of France or Spain. Recent research has shown that although the native Irish land-owning class was subordinated in this period, it never