Vincent Gookin (surveyor-general)

Vincent Gookin (1616?–1659) was an English surveyor-general of Ireland. He represented Irish constituencies in the Protectorate parliaments. He published pamphlets (1665) deprecating enforcement of orders for transplantation of Irish to Connaught. He was a man of strong religious convictions, and an ardent republican.

Gookin was the eldest son of Sir Vincent Gookin and his first wife Mary Wood. He appears shortly after the death of his father to have disposed of his Gloucestershire property to a Dr. Samuel Bave, and to have migrated to Ireland, where he continued to reside during the remainder of his life. Although a firm believer in the "plantation policy" as a means of reducing Ireland to "civility and good government", he was one of the few colonists who really seem to have had the interest of Ireland at heart. He is chiefly known to us as the author of the remarkable pamphlet, The Great Case of Transplantation discussed; or certain Considerations, wherein the many great inconveniences in Transplanting the Natives of Ireland generally out of the three Provinces of Leinster, Ulster, and Munster into the Province of Connaught are shown, humbly tendered to every individual Member of Parliament by a Well-wisher to the good of the Commonwealth of England, 4to, London, for J. C., 1655.

In this pamphlet Gookin endeavoured to prove that if not indeed impossible, it was certainly contrary to "religion, profit, and safety", to strictly enforce the orders and instructions for the removal of all the Irish natives into Connaught, based upon the act for the satisfaction of the adventurers of 26 September 1653. This pamphlet is evidently very rare. It is not mentioned by Ware in his Writers of Ireland. There is a copy (perhaps unique) in the Haliday collection in the Royal Irish Academy. John Patrick Prendergast, who first called attention to it, gave a fairly complete abstract of it in his Cromwellian Settlement. Though exceedingly temperate in its tone, it immediately elicited a sharp rejoinder from Colonel Richard Lawrence, a prominent member of the committee of transplantation. Gookin replied in The Author and Case of Transplanting the Irish into Connaught vindicated from the unjust aspersions of Col. R. Lawrence, London, 1655. He had been charged with being a degenerate Englishman, and with having been corrupted by the Irish. He denied the charge, saying that he was elected by the English of Kinsale and Bandon to the Barebones Parliament, and his constituents had shown their regard for him by offering to pay his expenses to England.

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