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• History of England In the Eighteenth Century.
• Chapter V.: The Colonies and Scotland.
• Chapter VI.: Ireland Before the Eighteenth Century.
• Chapter VII.: Ireland, 1700–1760.
• Chapter VIII.
• Chapter IX.: The Religious Revival.

CHAPTER VII.

ireland, 1700–1760.

Having now given a brief outline of the events that led to a complete Protestant ascendency in Ireland, I shall proceed to analyse the conditions of Irish society in the period immediately following the Revolution, to trace the effects of legislation and of social and political circumstances on the character of the people, and to investigate the reasons why the history of Ireland in the eighteenth century differs in most respects so widely from the contemporaneous history of Scotland. One part of this task I have already in part anticipated, for the penal laws against the Catholics have already passed in a summary form under our notice. Their influence, however, meets us at every page of Irish history; and the reader will, I trust, pardon me if I find it necessary in the course of my narrative to recapitulate some of their leading provisions.

We have seen that the progress of Scotland, in as far as it was due to legislation, may be chiefly ascribed to four causes. These were the establishment of the Church of the great majority of the nation, the introduction of an admirable system of parochial education in which all classes could participate, the destruction of the feudal privileges of the Highland chiefs, and, lastly, the removal of all restrictions on industrial and commercial enterprise. By these measures religious peace was secured, a high standard of general knowledge was diffused, the authority and impartiality of the law courts were established, and an industrial civilisation was created.

In Ireland the course of legislation on all these points was directly opposite. The chief advantage of the establishment of one form of religion is that it secures the religious instruction of the poor. The Irish Establishment was the Church of the poor in the sense that they paid for it, but in no other. Its adherents were certainly less than one-seventh of the population, and they belonged exclusively to the wealthiest class. And this astonishing Establishment was mainly supported by tithes. Pasture land, it is true, was almost entirely exempted by a resolution of the House of Commons in 1735; and thus the great graziers, who were by far the richest of the agricultural population, were nearly free, and the whole burden was thrown on the tillers of the soil. The mass of the Irish Catholics were cottiers living in an abject, hopeless poverty hardly paralleled in Europe, and deriving a bare subsistence for themselves and their families from little plots of potato ground often of not more than ten or fifteen perches. The tenth part of the produce of these plots was rigidly exacted from the wretched tenant for the benefit of a clergyman who was in violent hostility to his religion, whom in many cases he never saw, and from whose ministrations he derived no benefit whatever. As it was difficult or impossible for the clergyman, even when he resided in his parish, to levy these duties himself, he usually farmed them out, sometimes for the whole period of his incumbency, to a class of men called tithe proctors, who were among the most rapacious and detested members of the community.1 The ‘great tithes’ of the corn appear to have been but little disputed, but the potato tithe produced the fiercest, and it must be admitted the most natural, resentment. It was the source of a large part of the Whiteboy outrages, which convulsed the South of Ireland during the latter half of the last century, and of innumerable murders, riots, and savage outrages in the early years of the present century, and it is no exaggeration to say that until the Act was passed in 1838 for the commutation of tithes, the religious Establishment in Ireland was, next to the penal code, the most powerful of all agents in demoralising its people.

Such an Establishment was assuredly the most absurd and insulting, and one of the most oppressive in recorded history. This was, however, but one part of the ecclesiastical system. As we have already seen, a main object of the law of Ireland was the extirpation of the religion of about four-fifths of the Irish people. The Catholic bishops only lived in the country by connivance; the Catholic worship was surrounded by the most humiliating restrictions. The simple profession of the Catholic faith excluded a man from every form of political and municipal power, from all the learned professions except medicine, from almost every means of acquiring wealth, knowledge, dignity, or influence. It subjected him, at the same time, to unjust and oppressive taxation, deprived him of the right of bequeathing his property and managing his family as he pleased, enabled any Protestant who was at enmity with him to injure and annoy him in a hundred ways, and reduced him, in a word, to a condition but little superior to that of absolute serfdom. Of the relation of the Irish law to the religion of the Irish people, it is sufficient to say that the governors of Ireland as the representatives of the Sovereign formally and repeatedly, in times of perfect peace, and in speeches from the throne, described their Catholic subjects as enemies. Lord Pembroke, in 1706, referred to them as ‘domestic enemies.’ The Lords Justices, in 1715, urged upon the House of Commons such unanimity in their resolutions’ as may once more put an end to all other distinctions in Ireland but that of Protestant and Papist.’ Lord Carteret, in a similar speech, said, ‘All the Protestants of the kingdom have but one common interest, and have too often fatally experienced that they have the same common enemy.’ As late as 1733 the Duke of Dorset called on the Parliament to secure ‘a firm union amongst all Protestants, who have one common interest and the same common enemy.’ The phrase ‘common enemy’ was in the early part of the eighteenth century the habitual term by which the Irish Parliament described the great majority of the Irish people.1 To secure the empire of the law not only over the actions but over the sympathies of the people is the very first end of enlightened statesmanship, and the degree in which it is attained is the very best test of good government. In Ireland nothing of this kind was done, and the strongest of all moral sentiments, the authority of religion, was for about a century in direct opposition to the authority of law.

A second great remedial measure by which Scotland attained her high position among civilised nations was the institution of parochial schools, open to all classes, which speedily raised the intellectual level, and evoked, to an almost unexampled degree the dormant energies of the nation. In this, as on other points, the course pursued in Ireland was directly opposite. A law had, it is true, been enacted under Henry VIII. for obliging every clergyman to have a school in his parish for teaching English; but in the vicissitudes of politics and the ravages of civil war this had long since fallen into desuetude. Schools of this kind were very rare, and what few existed were attached to the Protestant Churches, and had no kind of influence on the surrounding Catholic population. As we have already seen, the Catholics were excluded, by different provisions of the penal code, from the educational institutions of their country, and all Catholic education was absolutely forbidden. If it was carried on—as it undoubtedly was2 —this was only by connivance, by the illegal exertions of individuals under circumstances of extreme discouragement. The object of the law was to maintain in compulsory ignorance about four-fifths of the people, unless they chose to avail themselves of the Charter Schools, which were originated by Marsh, the Bishop of Clogher, and afterwards adopted by Primate Boulter in 1733. These schools were intended, in the words of their programme, ‘to rescue the souls of thousands of poor children from the dangers of Popish superstition and idolatry, and their bodies from the miseries of idleness and beggary.’ The design was a very skilful one. The great mass of the Irish Catholies were in a condition of extreme and abject poverty. There was absolutely no legal provision made for the poor, and a bad season was sufficient at all times to produce a literal famine. Under these circumstances the society proposed to the Catholic parents to take their half-starving children, between the ages of six and ten, to feed, clothe, and lodge them gratuitously, to give them not only a free general education, but also an industrial training which would be of the highest possible benefit to their prospects, to teach the boys farming and the girls the elements of domestic economy, and lastly, to apprentice the boys, and provide the girls with places, and even with a small portion when they married. The indispensable condition was that the children should be educated as Protestants. In order that the work of conversion should be carried on unimpeded, they were carefully removed from their Popish parents, were forbidden to hold any communication with them, and were apprenticed only to Protestants. It was found that in seasons of famine, when the Catholic parents saw their children drooping with hunger, and were unable to obtain them bread, they sent them for a time to the schools, and withdrew them when the pressure was past. To prevent this, a law was made, providing that once the children had been placed in the schools of the society, the parents lost all control over them, and therefore all power of withdrawing them. By the same law, the officers of the society were empowered to take up children between the ages of five and twelve who were found begging, and to educate them as Protestants in their schools. The funds were at first derived from private donations and legacies, aided by a grant of 1,000l., given by George II. from his privy purse; but the society soon became a national concern. In 1745 the Irish Parliament, in answer to a petition from the managers, compelled hawkers and pedlars to take out licences, and appropriated the proceeds to the support of the schools, and the policy which was thus begun was rapidly extended. Large annual grants of public money were soon given. Between 1745 and 1767 it was computed that the society received from Parliament and the royal bounty 112,200l.1

Such was the outline of a scheme of education which has received in our own day unqualified eulogy,2 but which excited in Ireland an intensity of bitterness hardly equalled by any portion of the penal code. Had the object of the Charter Schools been simply to give a good industrial education, without interfering with the religious convictions and the domestic happiness of the people, they might have regenerated Ireland. The passion for knowledge among the Irish poor was extremely strong, and the zeal with which they maintained their hedge schools under the pressure of abject poverty, and in the face of the prohibitions of the penal code, is one of the most honourable features in their history. The Charter Schools offered a people thirsting for knowledge a cup which they believed to be poison, and sought, under the guise of the most seductive of all charities, to rob their children of the birthright of their faith. The consequence was what might have been expected. After a few years of partial or apparent success, their character was fully realised. Their later history, though it does not fall properly within the limits of this chapter, is too significant to be omitted, and it may be very briefly told. As early as 1757 the managers of the society stated, in a petition to Parliament, that, in spite of all the advantages they offered, they found it difficult, except in time of scarcity, to procure children to fill the schools, and it was found necessary to add a new and important feature to the institutions. It was thought that it might be easy to tempt many mothers to abandon their children in early infancy, and accordingly ‘a nursery’ was established in Dublin, and soon after another in each of the four provinces, for receiving infant children, who were afterwards to pass into the schools. Whatever may have been the effects of this measure on the prospects of the Established Church, it is not difficult to understand its effects upon domestic morals; and it is not surprising that four years later no less than twenty children were found exposed among the carpenters' shavings around the nursery at Monastrevan.

No effort, however, could give any real vitality to schools which were universally looked upon by the Catholic population as the most insidious and demoralising of all forms of bribery. It is doubtful whether, at any period of their existence, they had 2,000 pupils, and it was only in time of famine that any considerable number flocked to them. Though primarily intended for the conversion of Catholics, other children were at first not excluded from them; but in 1775 the managers of the society resolved ‘not to admit any but the children of Papists.’ Though the system of transplanting the children to distant parts of the country, in order to separate them entirely from their Popish relatives, was one of the leading features of the Charter system, and one of the features on which its advocates most insisted, there were for a time day-schools affiliated to the society, in which the children were not separated from their parents, who in their turn had the care of supporting them, but these schools also were soon abolished. The endowments from the Irish Parliament were increased, and large estates were gradually vested in the society, but no favourable results followed. Campbell, the author of the well-known ‘Philosophical Tour in the South of Ireland,’ which was published in 1778, stated that he was assured ‘that a Papist would suffer any loss except that of his child, rather than send it to one of these schools. Such,’ he added, ‘is the bigotry of these deluded people, that nothing but absolute want could prevail on them to suffer their children to receive an education which, as they conceive, endangers their salvation.’1 Wesley, who visited in 1785 one of the most noted of these schools, left an emphatic testimony to its neglect and inefficiency;1 but it was to Howard, the philanthropist, that the exposure of their scandalous abuses is chiefly due. When investigating the state of the Irish prisons in 1788, he turned aside to examine the Charter Schools, and was soon convinced of the existence of evils almost as frightful as any he had discovered in the prisons of England or of the Continent. In his book on ‘The State of Prisons,’ he declared that the numbers of alleged pupils in the schools, in the official documents, published annually by the society, were grossly and systematically exaggerated; that the children were for the most part ‘sickly, naked, and half-starved;’ and that the state of most of the schools he visited ‘was so deplorable as to disgrace Protestantism and to encourage Popery in Ireland rather than the contrary.’2 A committee of the Irish parliament was appointed in 1788 to inquire into the truth of these allegations. Howard and several other competent witnesses gave evidence before it, and the result of a detailed examination into the Charter Schools throughout Ireland was a revelation of abuses perhaps as horrible as any public institution has ever disclosed. The public money was found to be systematically and profligately misused. In most of the schools the children were half fed, were almost naked, were covered with vermin, were reduced to the condition of the most miserable of slaves. Children at a very early age were compelled to work in the fields for the profit of their masters for eight hours at a time. That they might do so, their instruction was so neglected that there were those who having been eight, ten, or twelve years at the schools could neither read nor spell. Whole schools were suffering from the itch or other maladies due to dirt, cold, or insufficient food. The rooms, the bed-covering, the scanty clothes of the children were alive with impurity, and the sad expression of their countenances showed but too plainly how effectually they had been severed from all who cared for them, and, in many cases, how near was the last sad deliverance that awaited them. This was the result of a system set up, no doubt with the best intentions,1 under the highest ecclesiastical auspices in the country, for the civilisation of Ireland. This was the result of a system which, in the supposed interests of religion, made it a first object to break the tie of affection between the parent and the child. The institution, however, still continued. The Irish parliament steadily endowed it till the Union, and bequeathed it to the Imperial parliament. How it was looked upon in the early part of the present century is well told by an English writer thoroughly acquainted with Irish affairs, who said that the Irish peasant seldom passed the school without a curse or an expression of heartfelt anguish.2 For twenty-five years after the Union the Charter Schools dragged on their endowed existence, and during that time the Imperial parliament voted 675,707l. for their support, though they maintained on an average only 1,870 children.3 The Kildare Street Schools, which were also, though to a very modified extent, sectarian, next rose to favour; but the real education of the Irish people dates only from 1834, when that system of unsectarian education was founded which, though violently assailed by conflicting bigotries, has proved probably the greatest benefit imperial legislation has ever bestowed upon the Irish people.’4

The third class of remedial measures to which the prosperity of Scotland has been mainly ascribed, consisted of those diminishing the excessive power of the Highland chiefs. The Scotch aristocracy indeed were of the same race and of the same creed as their followers. Their authority rested on the traditions, and often on the undisturbed possession of centuries, and they resided habitually among a people who were attached to them by the strongest ties of duty and affection. At the same time their excessive power was incompatible with the real progress of the nation, and it was therefore a main end of wise legislation to diminish it. In Ireland, on the contrary, it was the object of the law to create an aristocracy without any of the traditional ties of the Scotch chiefs. By three great measures of confiscation about nine-tenths of the soil of Ireland had been wrested from the old proprietors, whose descendants were often found cultivating as cottiers the land that would naturally have been their own. The new proprietors were conquerors, they were Englishmen, they were Protestants, they were maintained in their position by a foreign power, they were very commonly absentees. In the nature of things they could have no real sympathy with their tenants; and, taking human nature as it is, it is not surprising that in very many cases their single desire was to extract the utmost revenue from the soil. They did not, it is true, possess the hereditary jurisdiction of the Scotch chiefs, but their tenants were for the most part so ignorant and so poor, and the powers which the law gave to a Protestant in conflict with a Catholic were so overwhelming, that they were virtually despotic. The only resistance they could really dread was that which took the form of conspiracy and outrage. After the confiscations under William, about 300,000 acres were restored to Catholics who were adjudged by the commissioners to be comprised within the articles of Limerick or Galway, or who had been freely pardoned by William; but, as we have already seen, it was the object of one large department of the penal code gradually to dissociate the Catholics from ownership, and from all that resembled ownership, of the soil. This was the end of the laws forbidding any Catholic to purchase land, to invest money in mortgages on land, to hold any long or valuable lease, compelling the equal division of the land of a Catholic after death unless the eldest son became a Protestant, consigning the children of a Catholic parent who died when they were minors to the guardianship of a Protestant. The obvious effect of these laws was to maintain an aristocracy of race by making the line of class division as nearly as possible coincident with that of creed.

The last great contrast between Scotland and Ireland lies in the development of industrial and commercial enterprise. In Scotland, as we have seen from the time of the Union in 1707, complete free trade with England and the colonies was established; and as a consequence of this measure, a powerful industrial class was created, bringing in its train settled habits of order, comfort, and luxury. The natural capacities of Ireland for becoming a wealthy country were certainly greater than those of Scotland, though they have often been exceedingly exaggerated. Under no circumstances indeed could Ireland have become in this respect a serious rival to England. She is almost wholly destitute of those great coalfields on which more than on any other single cause the manufacturing supremacy of England depends. Owing to the excessive rainfall produced by proximity to the Atlantic, a large proportion of her soil is irreclaimable marsh; a still larger part can only be reclaimed or kept in proper order by large and constant expenditure in draining, and the evil in the eighteenth century was seriously aggravated by the law forbidding Catholics from lending money in mortgages on land, which considerably diminished the amount of capital expended in agricultural improvement. It is also no small disadvantage to Ireland materially, and a still greater disadvantage to her morally and politically, that she is isolated from Europe, the whole bulk of England being interposed between her and the Continent. In England, too, most forms of manufacturing industry date from the Plantagenets and the Tudors. During many centuries the increase of capital and the formation of industrial habits were uninterrupted, for with the doubtful exception of the civil war under Charles I., there had been no conflict since the Wars of the Roses sufficiently serious and prolonged to interfere with industrial progress. Ireland had barely emerged into an imperfect civilisation in the time of Elizabeth, and had then speedily passed into a long period of desolating and exterminating war. On the other hand, the greater part of the Irish soil is extremely fertile, in the opinion of the best judges more fertile than that of any other part of the kingdom. Though very unsuited for wheat, it is preeminently adapted for several other kinds of crop, and it forms some of the richest pasture land in Christendom. Irish cattle has always been famous, and Irish wool in the last century was considered the best in Europe. No country in the world is more admirably provided with natural harbours. It is not without navigable rivers. It is abundantly supplied with water power, and its position between the old world and the new points it out as a great centre of commercial intercourse.

A country of which this may be truly said may not have been intended to take a foremost place in the race of industry and wealth, but it was certainly not condemned by nature to abject and enduring poverty. Up to the time of the Restoration no legislative disability rested upon Irish industry, but the people who had but recently acquired the rudiments of civilisation had been plunged by the Cromwellian wars into a condition of wretchedness hardly paralleled in history. At last, however, peace had come, and it was hoped that some faint gleams of prosperity would have dawned. Crowds of Cromwellian soldiers, representing the full average of English energy and intelligence, had been settled on the confiscated lands, and in the utter ruin of the native population the resources of the country were to a great degree in their hands. The land was chiefly pasture, and the main source of Irish wealth was the importation of cattle to England. The English landowners however speedily took alarm. They complained that Irish rivalry in the cattle market lowered English rents, and laws were accordingly enacted in 1665 and 1680, absolutely prohibiting the importation into England, from Ireland, of all cattle, sheep, and swine, of beef, pork, bacon, and mutton, and even of butter and cheese.1

In this manner the chief source of Irish prosperity was annihilated at a single blow. Crushing, however, and fatal as was this prohibition, it was not the only one. The Irish, though far too poor to have any considerable commerce, had at least a few ships afloat, and there were some slight beginnings of a colonial trade. It was feared that under more favourable circumstances this might attain considerable proportions. The two great geographical advantages of Ireland are her proximity to America and her admirable harbours. In the original Navigation Act of 1660 Irish vessels had all the privileges accorded to English ones, but in the amended Act of 1663 Ireland was omitted,2 and she was thus deprived of the whole colonial trade. With a very few specified exceptions no European articles could be imported into the English colonies except from England, in ships built in England and chiefly manned by English sailors. With a very few specified exceptions, no articles could be brought from the colonies to Europe without being first unladen in England. In 1670 the exclusion of Ireland was confirmed,3 and in 1696 it was rendered still more stringent, for it was provided that no goods of any kind could be imported directly from the colonies to Ireland.4 In this manner the natural course of Irish commerce was utterly checked. Her shipping interest was annihilated, and Swift hardly exaggerated when he said: ‘The conveniency of ports and harbours which nature bestowed so liberally on this kingdom, is of no more use to us than a beautiful prospect to a man shut up in a dungeon.’5

Such measures might easily have proved fatal to the industrial development of such a country as Ireland. In the period however that elapsed between the Restoration and the Revolution a very remarkable industrial spirit had arisen, and serious and persevering efforts were made by the Protestant colonists to utilise the great natural advantages of the country. Ireland at last enjoyed a period of profound peace, and the religious liberty which was established effected a rapid improvement in her social condition. It was true that the great mass of the people were impoverished, half-civilised, and divided, but it was also true that taxes were lower than in England, that land, living and labour were extremely cheap, and that the events of the civil war had drawn into the country great numbers of able and energetic Englishmen. Being forbidden to export their cattle to England, the Irish landowners turned their land into sheep-walks, and began, on a large scale, to manufacture the wool. As early as 1636 Strafford noticed that there were some small beginnings of a clothing trade in Ireland, and he promised to discourage it to the utmost, lest it should interfere with the woollen manufacture in England. ‘It might be feared,’ he added, ‘they might beat us out of the trade itself by underselling us, which they were well able to do.’1 But after this time the manufacture was for some years unmolested and even encouraged by several Acts of Parliament.2 The export of raw wool from Ireland to foreign countries had been forbidden under Charles II., but as the same restriction was imposed on English wool,3 Ireland was in this respect at no disadvantage. It was no doubt a grave disadvantage that she was excluded by the Navigation Act from the whole colonial market, but the rest of the world at least, was open to her manufactures. On the prohibition of the export of Irish cattle, the manufacture began to increase. The quality of the wool, as I have said, was supremely good. A real industrial enthusiasm had arisen in the nation. Great numbers of English, Scotch, and even foreign manufacturers came over. Many thousands of men were employed in the trade, and all the signs of a great rising industry were visible. If it was an object of statesmanship to make Ireland a happy country, to mitigate the abject and heartrending poverty of its people, and to develop among them habits of order, civilisation, and loyalty, the encouragement of this industrial tendency was of the utmost moment. If it was an object beyond all others to make Ireland a Protestant country, the extension of a rich manufacturing population, who would for some generations at least, be mainly Protestant, would do more to effect this object than any system of penal laws or proselytising schools. Unfortunately there was another object which was nearer the heart of the English Parliament than either of these. After the Revolution, commercial influence became supreme in its councils. There was an important woollen manufacture in England, and the English manufacturers urgently petitioned for the total destruction of the rising industry in Ireland. Their petitions were speedily attended to. The House of Lords represented to the King that ‘the growing manufacture of cloth in Ireland, both by the cheapness of all sorts of necessaries of life, and goodness of materials for making all manner of cloth, doth invite your subjects of England, with their families and servants, to leave their habitations to settle there, to the increase of the woollen manufacture in Ireland, which makes your loyal subjects in this kingdom very apprehensive that the further growth of it may greatly prejudice the said manufacture here.’ The House of Commons in very similar terms urged William ‘to enjoin all those you employ in Ireland to make it their care, and use their utmost diligence to hinder the exportation of wool from Ireland, except to be imported hither, and for the discouraging the woollen manufactures.’ The King promised to do as he was requested. A parliament was summoned in Dublin, in September 1698, for the express purpose of destroying the Irish industry. The Irish Parliament was then, from the nature of its constitution, completely subservient to English influence, and, had it been otherwise, it would have had no power to resist. The Lords Justices in their opening speech urged the House to encourage the linen and hempen manufacture instead of the woollen manufacture, which England desired to monopolise. The Commons in reply promised their hearty endeavours to establish a linen and hempen manufacture in Ireland, expressed a hope that they might find ‘such a temperament’ in respect to the woollen trade as would prevent it from being injurious to that of England, and proceeded, at the instance of the Government, to impose heavy additional duties on the export of Irish woollen goods. The English, however, were still unsatisfied. The Irish woollen manufactures had already been excluded by the Navigation Act from the whole colonial market; they had been virtually excluded from England itself, by duties amounting to prohibition.1 A law of crushing severity, enacted by the British Parliament in 1699, completed the work and prohibited the Irish from exporting their manufactured wool to any other country whatever.2

So ended the fairest promise Ireland had ever known of becoming a prosperous and a happy country. The ruin was absolute and final. ‘Ireland,’ wrote Swift a few years later, ‘is the only kingdom I ever heard or read of, either in ancient or modern story, which was denied the liberty of exporting their native commodities and manufactures wherever they pleased, except to countries at war with their own prince or state. Yet this privilege, by the superiority of mere power, is refused us in the most momentous parts of commerce; besides an Act of navigation, to which we never assented, pressed down upon us and rigorously executed.’3 The main industry of Ireland had been deliberately destroyed because it had so prospered that English manufacturers had begun to regard it as a competitor with their own. It is true, indeed, that a promise was made that the linen and hempen manufacture should be encouraged as a compensation; but, even if it had been a just principle that a nation should be restricted by force of law to one or two forms of industry, there was no proportion between that which was destroyed and that which was to be favoured, and no real reciprocity established between the two countries. The linen manufacture may, indeed, be dimly traced far back into Irish history. It is noticed in an English poem in the early part of the fifteenth century. A century later Guicciardini, in his description of the Low Countries, mentions coarse linen as among the products imported from Ireland to Antwerp. Strafford had done much to encourage it, and after the calamities of the Cromwellian period, the Duke of Ormond had laboured with some success to revive it. But it had never attained any great extension; it was almost annihilated by the war of the Revolution, and in 1700 the value of the whole export of Irish linen amounted to little more than 14,000l. The English utterly suppressed the existing woollen manufacture in Ireland in order to reserve that industry entirely to themselves; but the English and Scotch continued as usual their manufacture of linen. The Irish trade was ruined in 1699, but no legislative encouragement was given to the Irish linen manufacture till 1705, when, at the urgent petition of the Irish Parliament, the Irish were allowed to export their white and brown linens, but these only, to the British colonies, and they were not permitted to bring any colonial goods in return. The Irish linen manufacture was undoubtedly encouraged by bounties, but not until 1743, when the country had sunk into a condition of appalling wretchedness. In spite of the compact of 1698, the hempen manufacture was so discouraged that it positively ceased. Disabling duties were imposed on Irish sailcloth imported into England. Irish checked, striped, and dyed linens were absolutely excluded from the colonies. They were virtually excluded from England by the imposition of a duty of 30 per cent., and Ireland was not allowed to participate in the bounties granted for the exportation of these descriptions of linen from Great Britain to foreign countries.1 We have a curious illustration of the state of feeling prevailing in England in the fact that two petitions were presented in 1698 from Folkestone and Aldborough complaining of the injury done to the fishermen of these towns ‘by the Irish catching herrings at Waterford and Wexford and sending them to the Straits, and thereby forestalling and ruining petitioners’ markets';2 and there was even a party in England who desired to prohibit all fisheries on the Irish shore except by boats built and manned by Englishmen.3

The effect of the policy I have described was ruinous in the extreme. It had become abundantly evident to all reasonable men that England possessed both the power and the will to crush every form of Irish industry as soon as it became sufficiently prosperous to compete in any degree with her own manufactures. It appeared useless to persist, and a general commercial despondency prevailed.4 The leading manufacturers at once emigrated to England, to America, or to the Continent. Many thousands of Irish Protestants took refuge in the Colonies, and the possibility of balancing the great numerical strength of the Catholics was for ever at an end. The Irish, forbidden to export their woollen manufactures to any country whatever, or their raw wool to any country except England, were driven almost necessarily to seek a market for their produce in a smuggling trade with France. The configuration of the Irish coast was eminently favourable to it. Wool was secretly shipped from every bay, a great impetus was given to the French woollen manufacture, which was the most serious rival to that of England, and another was added to the many powerful influences that were educating all classes of Irishmen into hostility to the law. The relations between landlord and tenant were already sufficiently harsh, strained, and unnatural, but they were fearfully aggravated when the destruction of manufacturing industry threw the whole population for subsistence on the soil. It was computed by a contemporary writer that the woollen manufacture, which was ruined in 1699, afforded employment to 12,000 Protestant families in the metropolis, and to 30,000 dispersed over the rest of the kingdom.1 For nearly fifty years after its destruction the people were in such a state of poverty that every bad season produced an absolute famine. The Journals of the Irish Parliament are full of complaints of the decay of trade, and the miserable destitution of the people. It was found necessary to reduce the army. The revenue repeatedly fell short. In 1703, 1705, and 1707 the House of Commons resolved unanimously that ‘it would greatly conduce to the relief of the poor and the good of the kingdom, that the inhabitants thereof should use none other but the manufactures of this kingdom in their apparel and the furniture of their houses,’ and in the last of these sessions the Members engaged their honour to conform themselves to this resolution.2 Swift supported the policy in his well-known ‘Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufactures,’ which appeared in 1720; and he declared with emphasis that ‘whoever travels through this country and observes the face of nature, or the faces and habits and dwellings of the natives, would hardly think himself in a land where either law, religion, or common humanity was professed.’ A remarkable letter, written by an Irish peer in the March of 1702, has been preserved, complaining that the money of the country was almost gone, and the poverty of the towns so great that it was feared the Court mourning for the death of William would be the final blow.1

The linen manufacture had, however, been of late much extended in the north. A patent was granted to some French refugees in 1700, and Crommelin, a native of St. Quintin, laboured for many years with great skill and energy to spread the industry. He maintained that the soil and climate of Ireland were eminently adapted for the cultivation of flax, and that as good hemp could be grown over the whole country south of Dundalk as in any part of the world.2 It was represented that it would be extremely desirable if Crommelin could be induced to settle in the centre of the island, and spread his industry among the half-starving population. He agreed to establish himself at Kilkenny, provided he obtained an extension of his patent and an immediate payment of 2,500l. But this small sum was beyond the resources of the country, and a letter is extant in which the Lords Justices complain that Ireland was at this time too poor to raise it, and recommend that, instead of money, the patent should be extended for a somewhat longer period.3 But a characteristic difficulty now arose. Although the encouragement of the linen manufacture was the great compensation which England had offered for the ruin of Irish wool, no sooner was there a prospect of that manufacture being extended to the wretched population of Leinster than a fierce opposition sprang up. It was feared that if Irish linen displaced Dutch linen in England, the Dutch might no longer care to admit English woollen manufactures into Holland, and that the prosperity of the Irish industry might therefore be indirectly injurious to England. The English Commissioners of Customs strenuously opposed the scheme. The Lord High Treasurer advised that, if the patent were extended, it should at least be under the restriction that no linen except the coarsest kind should be made, and it was only after a prolonged struggle, and by the urgent representations of the Duke of Ormond, that the small boon was conceded.1 The Irish Parliament did what it could. In 1708 spinning-schools were established in every county, and premiums were offered for the best linen, and a board of trustees was appointed in 1710 to watch over the interests of the manufacture; but the utter want of capital, the neglect of the grand juries, the ignorance, poverty, and degradation of the inhabitants, made the attempt to create a new manufacture hopeless.2 In the meantime great districts in the southern and western parts of the island were absolutely depopulated; and in order in some degree to revive agriculture, a colony of Palatines was planted in 1709. In the north, matters were only a little better, and a considerable part of the scanty capital which had been accumulated was swept away in the South Sea panic. Bishop Nicholson, who was translated in 1718 from the see of Carlisle to that of Derry, gives, in a series of letters to the Archbishop of Canterbury,3 a vivid description of the misery both of the towns and of the country districts. ‘Our trade of all kind,’ he wrote in 1720, ‘is at a stand, insomuch as that our most eminent merchants who used to pay bills of 1,000l. at sight, are hardly able to raise 100l. in so many days. Spindles of yarn (our daily bread) are fallen from 2s. 6d. to 15d., and everything else in proportion. Our best beef (as good as I ever ate in England) is sold under 3/4d. a pound, and all this not from any extraordinary plenty of commodities, but from a perfect dearth of money.’ Though apparently a hard and selfish man, the scenes of wretchedness which he witnessed on his journey from Dublin to his diocese moved him to a genuine compassion. ‘Never did I behold,’ he writes, ‘even in Picardy, Westphalia, or Scotland, such dismal marks of hunger and want as appeared in the countenances of most of the poor creatures I met with on the road.’ He dilates upon the rack-rents, the miserable hovels, the almost complete absence of clothing; and he tells how, one of his carriage-horses having been accidentally killed, it was at once surrounded by fifty or sixty famished cottagers struggling desperately to obtain a morsel of flesh for themselves and their children. In the wilds of Donegal, as in the Highlands of Scotland, in bad seasons, the cattle were bled, and their blood, boiled with sorrel, gave the poor a miserable subsistence.1 ‘The poor,’ wrote Sheridan in 1728, ‘are sunk to the lowest degree of misery and poverty—their houses dunghills, their victuals the blood of their cattle, or the herbs of the field.’2 More than sixty years after the campaign of Cromwell, the churches which he had battered down in Drogheda and in many other places remained in ruins, and every town on the east of Ireland bore clear traces of the desolation he had wrought.3

The Irish tracts of Swift, and especially his admirable ‘Short View of the State of Ireland,’ which appeared in 1727, and that ghastly piece of irony, ‘The Modest Proposal for Preventing the Poor of Ireland from being a Burden to their Parents and Country,’ which was written in 1729, tell the same tale. The latter tract appeared at a time when three terrible years of dearth had reduced the people to the last extremities.1 ‘The old and sick,’ Swift assures us, were ‘every day dying and rotting by cold and famine and filth and vermin. The younger labourers cannot get work, and consequently pine away for want of nourishment to a degree that if at any time they are accidentally hired to common labour, they have not strength to perform it.’ There were tumults at Limerick, Cork, Waterford, and Clonmel, to prevent the corn from going northwards, and bitter complaints both among the gentry and the poor that the export was still permitted, that large quantities of oats were shipped from Cork at a time when the people at home were starving. In the beginning of 1730 two ships laden with barley were stopped at Drogheda by a fierce mob, and were compelled to unload.2 In twenty years there were at least three or four of absolute famine, and that of 1740 and 1741, which followed the great frost at the end of 1739, though it has hardly left a trace in history, and hardly excited any attention in England, was one of the most fearful upon record. ‘Want and misery,’ wrote a contemporary observer, ‘are in every face, the rich unable to relieve the poor, the roads spread with dead and dying bodies, mankind the colour of the docks and nettles they feed on, two or three sometimes on a car going to the grave for want of bearers to carry them, and many buried only in the fields and ditches where they perished. The universal scarcity was followed by fluxes and malignant fevers, which swept off multitudes of all sorts, so that whole villages were laid waste.’1 This writer maintained—it is to be hoped with great exaggeration — that 400,000 persons probably perished at this time through famine or its attendant diseases. Berkeley, who was then Bishop of Cloyne, in a letter to his friend Prior, dated May 1741, writes: ‘The distresses of the sick and poor are endless. The havoc of mankind in the counties of Cork, Limerick, and some adjacent places hath been incredible. The nation probably will not recover this loss in a century. The other day I heard one from the county of Limerick say that whole villages were entirely dispeopled. About two months since I heard Sir Richard Cox say that five hundred were dead in the parish, though in a county I believe not very populous.’2 Skelton, a Protestant clergyman of considerable literary talents, and of great energy and benevolence of character, who was then officiating at Monaghan, wrote at the close of the famine a very remarkable letter ‘on the necessity of tillage and granaries,’ which he looked upon as the sole means of in some degree preventing a recurrence of the calamity. He tells us ‘it was computed by some, and perhaps not without reason, that as many people died of want, or of disorders occasioned by want, within the two years past as fell by the sword in the massacre and rebellion of 1641. Whole parishes in some places were almost desolate; the dead have been eaten in the fields by dogs for want of people to bury them. Whole thousands in a barony have perished, some of hunger and others of disorders occasioned by unnatural, unwholesome, and putrid diet.’1

‘By a moderate computation,’ said another writer who lived in the county of Tipperary, ‘very near one-third part of the poor cottiers of Munster have perished by fevers, fluxes, and downright want;’ and he described with a terrible energy the scenes which he witnessed around his own dwelling. ‘The charity of the landlords and farmers is almost quite exhausted. Multitudes have perished, and are daily perishing under hedges and ditches—some by fevers, some by fluxes, and some through downright cruel want in the utmost agonies of despair. I have seen the labourer endeavouring to work at his spade, but fainting for want of food, and forced to quit it. I have seen the aged father eating grass like a beast, and in the anguish of his soul wishing for his dissolution. I have seen the helpless orphan exposed on the dunghill, and none to take him in for fear of infection; and I have seen the hungry infant sucking at the breast of the already expired parent.’2 Primate Boulter exhibited in this wretched period an admirable example of charity, hundreds were daily fed by the Archbishop of Cashel, by Mr. Damer, by the authorities of Trinity College, and by some others; and a few obelisks still remain which were built at this time to give employment to the poor,3 but the country was so drained of its wealth that but little could be done. The cottiers depended wholly on their potato plots, and when these failed they died by thousands. In the county of Kerry the collectors of hearth-money in 1733 returned the number of families paying the tax at 14,346. In 1744 it had sunk to 9,372, about a third part having disappeared.4

It will be observed that the conduct of England in destroying the trade and the most important manufacture of Ireland was a much less exceptional proceeding than Irish writers are disposed to maintain. England did to Ireland little more than she had done to America and to Scotland, and she acted in accordance with commercial principles that then governed all colonial policy. It was a fundamental maxim that the commercial interests of a dependency should be wholly subordinated to those of the mother country, and to an English mind there was no reason why this maxim should not be rigidly applied to Ireland. Davenant, who in the early years of the eighteenth century was the most influential writer on commercial questions, strenuously maintained that the greater cheapness of living and labour in Ireland rendered her a dangerous rival, and that therefore every form of industry which could compete with English manufacture should be discouraged or suppressed. All encouragement, he says, that can possibly consist with the welfare of England should be given to Irish planters, and he suggests that the admission of Irish cattle into England would be, on the whole, advantageous to England and the best means of diverting the Irish from manufactures, but he strongly supports the absolute prohibition of the Irish wool manufacture and objects to all encouragement of the linen manufacture.1 The Catholics, who formed the bulk of the Irish people, were looked upon in England with unmingled hatred. The Irish Protestants owed their ascendency to England, and she had but lately re-established it by an expensive war. The real peculiarity of the case lay much less in the commercial legislation of England than in the situation of Ireland. Scotland possessed an independent parliament, supported by the entire nation, and she was therefore able to make herself so troublesome that England purchased the Union by ample commercial privileges. The American colonies contained within themselves almost unlimited resources. No legislation could counteract their great natural advantages. They were inhabited by a people who, from the circumstances of the case, possessed much more than average energy, and they were so large and so distant from the mother country that it was practically impossible very seriously to injure their trade. The position of Ireland was totally different. Her parliament was wholly dependent on that of England. Her ruling caste were planted in the midst of a hostile and subjugated population. She lay within a few hours of the English coast. The bulk of her people were crushed to the very dust by penal laws,1 and most of the men of energy and ambition were driven from her shore. She was thus completely within the grasp of England, and that grasp was tightened till almost every element of her prosperity was destroyed.

According to the maxims then prevailing, the policy was a very natural, but, as far as the true interests of England were concerned, it was a very short-sighted one. If the Protestants were to be treated as an English garrison in Ireland, it was the obvious interest of the mother country that they should be as numerous, as powerful, and as united as possible. England, on the contrary, by her commercial laws, deliberately crushed their prosperity, drove them by thousands into exile, arrested the influx of a considerable Protestant population from Great Britain, prevented the formation of those industrial habits and feelings which are the most powerful support of a Government, and inspired the Presbyterians of the north with a bitter hatred of her rule. Not content with this, she proceeded to divide her friends. The English Toleration Act was not extended to Ireland, and the Nonconformists in the first years of the eighteenth century only celebrated their worship by connivance. The sacramental test was inserted by the English ministers in the Anti-Popery Bill of 1704, and the Dissenters were thus excluded from all municipal offices. Their marriages, unless celebrated by an Episcopal clergyman, were irregular, and subjected them to vexatious prosecutions in the ecclesiastical courts; and in 1713 the English Parliament extended the provisions of the Schism Act to Ireland. The Catholics were, no doubt, for a time paralysed, but in this quarter also the seeds of future retribution were abundantly sown. By a long course of atrocious legislation, directed expressly against their religion, they were educated into hatred of the law. The landlords of their own persuasion, who would have been their natural and their most moderate leaders, were, as a class, gradually abolished. Education, industrial pursuits, ambition, and wealth, all of which mitigate the intensity of religious bigotry, were steadily denied them. Every tendency to amalgamate with the Protestants was arrested, and the whole Catholic population were reduced to a degree of ignorance and poverty in which the normal checks on population wholly ceased to operate. Starvation may check the multiplication of population, but the fear of starvation never does. In a peaceful community, in which infanticide is almost unknown and gross vice very rare, the real check to excessive multiplication is a high standard of comfort. The shame and dread of falling below it, the desire of attaining a higher round in the social ladder, lead to self-denial, providence, and tardy marriages. But when men have no such standard, when they are accustomed to live without any of the decencies, ornaments, or luxuries of life; when potatoes and milk and a mud hovel are all they require and all they can hope for; when, in a word, they are so wretched that they can hardly, by any imprudence, make their condition permanently worse than it is, they will impose no restraint upon themselves, and, except in periods of pestilence, famine, or exterminating war, will inevitably increase with excessive rapidity. In Ireland early marriages were still further encouraged by the priests, partly, no doubt, as conducive to morality, and partly, it is said, because fees at weddings and baptisms were of great importance to an impoverished clergy, excluded from every kind of State provision. In this manner, by a curious nemesis, one of the results of the laws that were intended to crush Catholicism in Ireland was, that after a few years the Catholics increased in a greater ratio than any other portion of the population.1

The same complete subordination of Irish to English interests extended through the political system. Of the revenue of the country the larger part was entirely beyond the control of Parliament. The hereditary revenue, as it existed after the Revolution, still rested substantially on the legislation of Charles II., and it grew in a great measure out of the confiscations after the Rebellion. The lands which had been then forfeited by the Irish, and which were not restored by the Act of Settlement, had been bestowed during the Commonwealth on English soldiers. If the Crown at the Restoration had exercised its legal right of appropriating them it would have obtained a vast revenue; but as such a course would have been extremely difficult and dangerous, it was arranged by the Act of Settlement that the Crown should resign its right to these forfeitures, receiving in compensation a new hereditary revenue. The older forms of Crown property were at the same time either incorporated into this revenue or abolished with compensation, and the new hereditary revenue, as settled by Parliament, was vested for ever in the King and his successors. It was derived from many sources, the most important being the Crown rents, which arose chiefly from the religious confiscations of Henry VIII. and from the six counties that were forfeited after the Rebellion of Tyrone, the quit rents which had their origin in the confiscations that followed the rebellion of 1641, the hearth-money, which was first imposed upon Ireland under Charles II., licences for selling ale, beer, and strong waters, and many excise and Custom House duties. For many years this revenue was sufficient for all the civil and military purposes of the Government, and no Parliament, with the exception of that which was convoked by James after his expulsion from England, sat in Ireland in the twenty-six years that elapsed between the Restoration and the Parliament which was summoned by Lord Sidney in 1692. The increase of the army, the erection of barracks, and other expenses resulting from the Revolution had made the hereditary revenue insufficient, and it became necessary to ask for fresh supplies. This insufficiency of the hereditary revenue laid the foundation of the power of Parliament, and that power was increased when the Government found it necessary in 1715 to borrow 50,000l. for the purpose of taking military measures to secure the new dynasty. The national debt, which had before this time been only 16,000l., became now a considerable element in the national finances. It grew in the next fifteen years to rather more than 330,000l., and a series of new duties were imposed by Parliament for the purpose of paying the interest and principal.1

These circumstances led to the summoning of Parliament every second year, and to the gradual enlargement of its power, but its legitimate prerogative was a matter of constant and vehement dispute, and its actual position was one of most humiliating dependence. It exercised a partial and imperfect control over the finances of the country, and claimed unsuccessfully the sole right of originating Money Bills; but the English Parliament, though it refrained from taxing Ireland, assumed and repeatedly exercised the right of binding it by its legislation without any concurrence of the national legislature.1 By a declaratory English Act of George I. this right was emphatically asserted, and even in its own legislation the Irish Parliament was completely subordinate to the English Privy Council. Its dependence rested upon Poyning's Act, which was passed under Henry VII., and amended under Philip and Mary. At one time the Irish Parliament could not be summoned till the Bills it was called upon to pass were approved under the Great Seal of England; and, although it afterwards obtained the power of originating heads of Bills, it was necessary before they became law that they should be submitted to the English Privy Council, who had the right either of rejecting or of altering them, and the Irish Parliament, though it might reject, could not alter a Bill returned in an amended form from England. The appellate jurisdiction of the Irish House of Lords was withdrawn from it by a mere act of power in the Annesley case in 1719. The constitution of the House of Commons was such that it lay almost wholly beyond the control of public opinion. By an English law passed at a time when the Irish Parliament was not sitting, the Catholics were precluded from sitting among its members, and as they were afterwards deprived of the suffrage the national legislature was thus absolutely cut off from the bulk of the Irish people. The Nonconformists were not formally excluded, but the test clause, which was also of English origin, shut them out from the corporations by which a large proportion of the members were elected.1 At the same time the royal prerogative of creating boroughs was exerted to an extent unparalleled in England. No less than forty boroughs had been created by James I., thirty-six by the other sovereigns of his house, and eleven more boroughs were for the first time represented in the Parliament which met in 1692. The county representation appears to have been tolerably sound, but out of the 300 Members of the Irish House of Commons, 216 were elected by boroughs and manors, and of these Members 176, according to the lowest estimate, were elected by individual patrons, while very few of the remainder had really popular constituencies. It was stated in 1784 that fifty Members of Parliament were then elected by ten individuals.2

Even this, however, is not a full statement of the case. The Habeas Corpus Act, the great guarantee of personal liberty in England, did not extend to Ireland, and it was carefully excluded from the chief constitutional benefits of the Revolution. Parliaments in England were made triennial and afterwards septennial, but in Ireland they might last for a whole reign, and that of George II. was actually in existence for thirty-three years. The Irish judges still held office at pleasure. An Irish Bill containing the chief provisions of the Bill of Rights was sent to England under the Viceroyalty of Lord Sidney, but it was never returned. The Established Church, representing as it did an infinitesimal fraction of the people, was made a chief instrument of government. So large a proportion of peers in the beginning of the eighteenth century were habitual absentees that in the time of Swift the bishops constituted about half the working majority of the House of Lords;1 they even returned by their borough influence some of the Members of the Lower House, and they were conspicuous among the Lords-Justices who governed Ireland during the prolonged absence of the Viceroy. From 1724 to 1764 the chief direction of affairs was, with little intermission, practically in the hands of three successive primates—Boulter, Hoadly, and Stone. Every bishop who was appointed was expected to use his influence in favour of the Government.2 The peerages were given almost exclusively to large borough owners, and it was stated in the latter half of the century that fifty-three peers nominated 123 Members of the Lower House.

It has always seemed to me one of the most striking instances on record of the facility with which the most defective Parliament yields to popular impulses and acquires an instinct of independence that a legislature such as I have described should have ever defeated a ministry, or constituted itself on any single subject a faithful organ of public opinion. The state of the administration was not less deplorable than that of the Parliament. The Irish establishments were out of all proportion to the wealth and to the needs of the people, and they formed a great field of lucrative patronage, paid for from the Irish revenues, at the full disposal of the English ministers, and almost wholly beyond the cognisance of the British Parliament. How such patronage would be administered in the days of Newcastle and Walpole may be easily imagined. Until Lord Townshend's administration the Viceroys were always absent from the country from which they derived their official incomes for more than half, usually for about four-fifths, of their term of office. Swift, in one of his ‘Drapier's Letters,’ written in 1724, has given a curious catalogue of the great Irish offices, some of them perfect sinecures, which were then distributed among English politicians. Lord Berkeley held the great office of Master of the Rolls; Lord Palmerston that of First Remembrancer, at a salary of nearly 2,000l. a year; Dodington was Clerk of the Pells, with a salary of 2,500l. a year; Southwell was Secretary of State; Lord Burlington was Hereditary High Treasurer, Mr. Arden was Under-Treasurer, with an income of 9,000l. a year; Addison had a sinecure as Keeper of the Records in Birmingham Tower; and four of the Commissioners of Revenue lived generally in England.1 The Viceroy, the Chief Secretary, and several other leading political officers were always English. In the legal profession every Chancellor till Fitzgibbon was an Englishman,2 and in the first years of the eighteenth century, every chief of the three law courts. In the Church every primate during the eighteenth century was an Englishman, as were also ten out of the eighteen archbishops of Dublin and Cashel, and a large proportion of the other bishops.3 Swift said with perfect truth that ‘those who have the misfortune to be born here have the least title to any considerable employment, to which they are seldom preferred but upon a political consideration,’ and he compared Ireland to a hospital where all the household officers grow rich, while the poor, for whose sake it was built, are almost starving.4 The habit of quartering on Ireland persons who could not be safely or largely provided for in England was inveterate. The Duke of St. Albans, the bastard son of Charles II., enjoyed an Irish pension of 800l. a year; Catherine Sedley, the mistress of James II., had another of 5,000l. a year. William bestowed confiscated lands exceeding an English county in extent, on his Dutch favourites, Portland and Albemarle, and a considerable estate on his former mistress, Elizabeth Villiers. The Duchess of Kendal and the Countess of Darlington, the two mistresses of George I., had pensions of the united annual value of 5,000l. Lady Walsingham, the daughter of the Duchess of Kendal, had an Irish pension of 1,500l. Lady Howe, the daughter of Lady Darlington, had a pension of 500l. Madame de Walmoden, one of the mistresses of George II., had an Irish pension of 3,000l. The Queen Dowager of Prussia, sister of George II., Count Bernsdorf, who was a prominent German politician under George I., and a number of other less noted German names may be found on the Irish pension list.1 Towards the close of the century, as the increased authority of the Irish Parliament and the appearance of an independent party within its walls made the necessities of corruption more imperious, the pension list assumed a somewhat different character and much more considerable dimensions, but in the first half of the eighteenth century the acknowledged pensions exceeded 30,000l. a year.2

The manner in which the Church patronage was administered had such important effects that it may be advisable to dwell upon it at a little more length. The possibility of converting the Irish to Protestantism had indeed, before the Revolution, wholly ceased. What faint chances there had before been, had been destroyed by Cromwell, whose savage rule had planted in the Irish mind a hatred of Protestantism and a hatred of England which is even now far from extinguished. But the Church might at least have exercised a great civilising influence in a country where the presence of a class of resident gentry and the example of a faithful and decorous performance of public duty were peculiarly needed, and its prizes might have greatly stimulated Irish education. It is popularly supposed that the Irish Catholics and the Irish Protestant Dissenters were all sacrificed to the members of the Established Church, and that these at least were the pampered children of the State. But a more careful examination will much alter this impression. The wealth of the Church had for a long time been diminishing. Many churches had been destroyed during the civil war and had never been rebuilt. The revenues of many parishes had been appropriated by laymen, and never been restored. The tithe war had not yet begun, but the poverty of the Catholics, the minute subdivision of land, the difficulty and expense of collecting numerous small dues, and, it must be added, the hostility, not only of Catholics and Presbyterians, but also of Protestant Episcopalian landlords, made the real income of the clergymen much less than was supposed.1 In 1710, indeed, chiefly through the intercession of Swift, the Irish Church obtained from the Queen the remission of the twentieth parts, and the application of the first-fruits to the purposes of purchasing glebes, building houses, and buying impropriations for the clergy, but these benefits were very inconsiderable. The twentieth parts, which had hitherto been paid to the Crown, were a tax of 12d. in the pound, paid annually out of all ecclesiastical benefices as they were valued at the Reformation, and their whole value was estimated at 500l. a year. The first-fruits, which were paid by incumbents upon their promotion, are said not to have amounted to more than 450l. a year.2

But this small advantage was much more than counterbalanced in 1735. A bitter feud had for many years been raging between the clergy and the landlords about the tithe of agistment, the technical name for the tithe of pasturage for dry and barren cattle. In the north this description of tithe appears to have been regularly paid, but over a great part of the country it had fallen into desuetude. The claim, though often resisted, was established by the law-courts in 1707, in 1722, and in several later suits, but the whole landlord class were violently opposed to it. It would have been impossible to carry a Bill abolishing it through the House of Lords, but the House of Commons, which consisted chiefly of landowners, acted with a high hand. It passed a series of resolutions describing the tithe of agistment as new, grievous, and burthensome to the landlords and tenants, and likely, by the conflicts it produced between the laity and the clergy, to encourage Popery and infidelity, and to drive many useful hands out of the kingdom. It asserted that ‘the allotments, glebes, and known tithes, with other ecclesiastical emoluments ascertained before this new demand,’ were ‘an honourable and plentiful provision for the clergy of the kingdom,’ and it recommended that ‘all legal ways and means should be made use of’ to resist the claims of the clergy. These resolutions, though they had no legal validity, had practically the effect of law. Supported by the House of Commons, the landlords all over Ireland formed into associations for the purpose of resisting the tithes; a common purse was provided, and a treasurer chosen for the purpose of maintaining all lawsuits against the clergy; and the House showed an alarming disposition to appoint a committee to inquire into the behaviour of the bishops and clergy in their pastoral cures. The clergy were completely intimidated. No convocation had been suffered to assemble in Ireland since 1711, so there was no formidable clerical organisation. The abuses of the Church were so gross that an inquiry might have shaken it to the basis, and the position of the country clergy, scattered thinly through great Catholic or Presbyterian districts, would have been completely untenable if the landlord class were opposed to them. The tithe of agistment accordingly ceased to be exacted,1 and the Church thus lost considerably more than it had gained under Queen Anne.

The letters of Archbishop King are full of curious illustrations of the wretchedness of its condition. In the country parts of his own diocese he assures us that the union of ten or eleven parishes was necessary to make a competency.2 Of the 131 parishes in the diocese of Ferns, 71 were impropriated in lay hands, and of those which were held by clergymen many were so poor that sixteen united only made a revenue of 60l. a year.3 There were some great prizes, but most of them were given to Englishmen, to relations or followers of the leading officials, to mere politicians, to those hangers-on upon the Castle who were known in Dublin under the expressive name of ‘Kingfishers.’ In 1716 King wrote: ‘His Majesty has disposed of six bishoprics in Ireland since his accession to the throne, and only two of them have been given to persons educated in Ireland. The same method was taken in her late Majesty's time, especially towards the later part of her reign, when the Primacy, Kildare, Ossory, Derry, and Waterford were given to persons educated at Oxford.’4 Swift was probably accurate when he stated that ‘there were hardly ten clergymen throughout the whole kingdom, for more than nineteen years preceding 1733, who had not been either preferred entirely upon account of their declared affection for the Hanoverian line, or higher promoted as the due reward of the same merit.’5 If the evil had ended with the appointment of Englishmen or of mere politicians to bishoprics, it would have been endurable. It was found, however, that every such bishop had sons, nephews, chaplains, or college companions to provide for, and that they speedily monopolised the livings in his gift. The whole number of beneficed clergymen in Ireland was only about 600,1 and the preferments of many of them were very small. ‘There are not 200 good benefices,’ Archbishop King wrote, ‘in all Ireland, half of which are in the Crown; and our chief governors changing in a year or two, they complain that there are not avoidances enough to prefer the chaplains they bring along with them. Most of the others are in the bishops, and they bring their chaplains also; so that as things are likely to be ordered, for aught I can see, we must consent to be curates, or take up with the refuse of strangers.’2 Primate Boulter, who for many years took the chief part in the government of Ireland, continually urged it as the main and almost the sole maxim of a good Irish policy ‘gradually to get as many English on the bench here as can decently be sent hither.’3 At the close of 1725 Archbishop King asserted that ‘the Government, since the accession of Carteret to the vice-royalty, had disposed of 20,000l. a year in benefices and employments connected with the Church, to strangers, and not 500l. to natives of Ireland.4 The natural result of this system was to give the Church an exotic and anti-national character, fatal to its prosperity, and at the same time to cast a shadow of deadly discouragement over the University which was the heart and the centre of Irish intellectual life.

The abuses of the Church patronage from the time of the Restoration were probably unparalleled in Europe. A few bishops there were, no doubt, who would have done honour to any Church. The history of Protestantism hardly contains a greater or purer name than that of Berkeley. King was a considerable theological writer and an able and honest administrator, and while Archbishop of Dublin he created a chair of Divinity at Trinity College, and built no less than nineteen churches. Archbishop Synge appears to have also been a prelate of great zeal and very considerable abilities. But many of the bishops were men who would never have been tolerated in England, and who were in fact habitual absentees. Thus Hacket, Bishop of Down, held that diocese for no less than twenty years, during the whole of which time he never once entered it, but lived habitually at Hammersmith, and put up his benefices for sale. The scandal at last became intolerable, and he was deprived in 1694.1 Digby, who was Bishop of Elphin from 1691 to 1720, was generally an absentee. He owed his promotion, we are told, to his great skill in water-colours, by which he ‘recommended himself to men in power and ladies; and so was early made a bishop.’ During his episcopate his large diocese fell into such wreck and ruin, that when he died, it did not contain more than thirteen Protestant clergymen.2 Pooley, who was Bishop of Raphoe from 1702 to 1712, resided during all that time barely eighteen months.3 Ashe, who was bishop of Clogher from 1697 to 1716, was generally non-resident.4 Fitzgerald, who was bishop of Clonfert for more than thirty years, and who lived to the great age of eighty-eight, was for a long period sunk in imbecility, and the whole diocese was scandalously managed for the last twelve years of his life by a young woman of twenty, whom he had married.5 One of the richest and most important of the Irish sees was that of Derry. It lay in the heart of Protestant Nonconformity, and a resident bishop was peculiarly necessary to protect the interests of the Church. It was at one time administered by King, who, whatever may have been his faults, was always an active and vigilant prelate; but his successor was generally a non-resident. Bishop Nicholson was then promoted, in 1718, from the see of Carlisle, and the letter is still preserved in which he expressed his astonishment and indignation at receiving the king's orders that he must reside in his diocese.1 He did so, however, and a letter of Archbishop King, written in the May of 1722, notices that, since the new bishop had come into office, three of the best livings in his diocese had fallen vacant, all of which he had given to his relations.2 At the close of 1725 the Archbishop writes that the Bishop of Derry had by this time given about 2,000l. in benefices to his English friends and relations,’ and that ‘the Bishop of Waterford has not only given all livings of value in his gift to his brothers and relations, but likewise his vicar-generalship and registry, though none of them reside in the kingdom.’3 Many of these prelates, and those by no means the worst, almost dropped their ecclesiastical character, and were simply great noblemen, distinguished for their wealth and their conviviality. It was said that Berkeley, when appointed Bishop of Cloyne, sent down to his diocese twenty-two cartloads of books and one hogshead of wine, but that another prelate, who was appointed nearly at the same time, sent to his see in the North one load of books and twenty-four hogsheads of wine.4 Cumberland, who visited Dublin about 1767, was filled with astonishment at the ‘Polish magnificence’ of Primate Stone, and he remarked that, in Ireland, the professional gravity of character maintained by English dignitaries was usually laid aside, and ‘in several prelatical houses the mitre was so mingled with the cockade, and the glass circulated so freely, that it was evident that the spirit of conviviality was by no means excluded from the pale of the Church of Ireland.’1 When Mrs. Delany was passing through Killala, in 1732, she found the whole town full of excitement about the horse races given under the patronage of Bishop Clayton for the amusement of the people.2 ‘A true Irish bishop,’ said Archbishop Bolton, with a sarcasm which derived its point from many examples, ‘has nothing more to do than to eat, drink, grow fat, rich, and die.’3

The abuses which were so common in the episcopacy naturally extended to the minor clergy. Several laws had indeed been made to secure the residence of the parochial clergy, but they were not observed, and in many cases it was scarcely possible that it should be otherwise. Archbishop Synge, who, like King, distinguished himself during the whole of his long episcopate by his zeal in remedying the abuses of his Church, and who made large pecuniary sacrifices with that object,4 declared in 1723 that ‘in three parts out of four of this kingdom the parochial clergy either have no glebes at all, or so small a spot, and often so inconveniently situated, as to make it impossible for them in the sense of the law to reside,’5 and they certainly exhibited very little disposition to overcome the difficulty. In 1707 the Lords-Justices complained to the Duke of Ormond that the chaplains appointed to several regiments quartered in Ireland considered their posts sinecures, and did not even leave England, abandoning the care of the soldiers to the chance ministrations of some resident curate.1 Rectors in Ireland well knew that the best chances of preferment were found in a residence in Dublin, and pluralities and non-residence combined to deprive vast districts of all pastoral care. Thus when Dr. Delany was appointed Dean of Down he found that his predecessor had only been in his parish for two days in six years, and some of the poor told him they had never seen a clergyman in their lives except when they went to church.2 Archbishop King mentions incidentally that in the diocese of Clonfert about half the beneficed clergy were non-resident.3 Bishop Nicholson, in one of his letters, describes a visitation which he made in company with the Bishop of Meath through the diocese of the latter prelate. ‘The churches,’ he says, ‘are wholly demolished in many of their parishes, which are therefore called non-cures: and several clergymen have each of them four or five, some six or seven of them. They commonly live at Dublin, leaving the conduct of their Popish parishioners to priests of their own persuasion, who are said to be now more numerous than ever.’4 The long quarrel between Archbishops Boulter and King arose in a great degree from the bitter language in which the latter prelate censured the conduct of the primate, who had ordained and placed in an Irish living a man named Power, who had been one of the famous Hampshire deer-stealers known as the Waltham Blacks, and had only saved himself from the gallows by turning informer against his comrades.5 ‘You make nothing in England,’ wrote King to Addison, ‘to order us to provide for such and such a man 200l. per annum, and when he has it, by favour of the Government, he thinks he may be excused attendance, but you do not consider that such a disposition takes up perhaps a tenth part of the diocese and turns off the cure of ten parishes to one curate.’6 In some of the wild Catholic districts the few scattered Protestants were suffered to sink into a Pagan ignorance. Skelton, one of the ablest and best men in the Irish Church, officiated for a time in one of the remote districts of Donegal, and he assures us that he had parishioners, and those not of the lowest class, who were unable to say how many Commandments or even how many Gods there were. Some members of his congregation used to come intoxicated to church. In order to dispel their ignorance he was accustomed from time to time, without giving any previous notice of his intention, to have the doors shut and bolted as soon as the congregation had assembled for Sunday service, and he then proceeded to catechise his reluctant prisoners.1

These examples are sufficient to explain the lethargy and the paralysis of the Established Church. In truth, Catholics and Presbyterians in Ireland, though they had many grievances, had at least one inestimable advantage in the competition of creeds. The English Government had no control over the appointment of their clergy. From the very highest appointment to the lowest, in secular and sacred things, all departments of administration in Ireland were given over as a prey to rapacious jobbers. The real fault was not in the nature of Englishmen or in the nature of Irishmen, but in the institutions of the country. A long course of events had produced in England a race of statesmen who were very selfish and corrupt, but in England there were representative institutions sufficiently free and sufficiently powerful to restrain the extreme forms of malversation. In Ireland there was no such restraint. The English Parliament knew nothing and cared nothing about Irish patronage. The Irish Parliament was so powerless and so constituted that it was impossible it could exercise an efficient control. Occasionally, it is true, demonstrations were made against the more scandalous pensions, and one or two measures of real importance were carried. In 1701, at the time when the destruction of the woollen trade had ruined Ireland, pensions to the amount of 16,000l. were struck off; and through fear of the House some of the more scandalous pensions were sometimes withheld.1 In 1729, at the time of the great famine, a measure was carried by which all the salaries, employments, places, and pensions of those who did not reside six months in the year in the country, were taxed four shillings in the pound, but the unfortunate qualification was added ‘unless they shall be exempted by His Majesty's sign manual.’2 The attempt, indeed, to resist was almost hopeless. With the immense majority of the nation wholly unrepresented, with the immense preponderance of legislative power concentrated in the hands of a few great men who could be easily bribed by peerages or pensions, or of officials who were directly interested in the continuance of corruption, there was no real safeguard. The greatest of all evils in politics is power without control, and this evil never acquired more fearful dimensions than in Ireland in the early years of the eighteenth century.

How bitterly the state of things I have described must have been contemplated by Irishmen of real intelligence and patriotism may easily be imagined. To enable the reader to realise their feelings I can hardly do better than quote a few lines from a very remarkable paper which has, I believe, never been printed. When Lord Halifax was appointed Lord Lieutenant in 1761, the well-known writer Charles Lucas, who was then Member for Dublin, wrote him a long letter expressing his warm hope that under the new reign the conditions of Irish government would change, and he recounted at the same time the chief causes of the failure of his predecessors.3 The majority of these, he asserted, ‘submitted to take on them the government of a wretched people with the sole view of aggrandising themselves and providing for a long train of hungry minions at the expense of a miserable, misrepresented kingdom.’ ‘To evince this,’ he continued, ‘your Excellency may easily look back and see the splendid figures some of the most necessitous of men put into this employment have been able to make upon their return home, after enjoying this place for a session or two. See some of them and their worst tools loaded with excessive pensions for numbers of years. Take a view of the favourites they have provided for in the Church and the State, and the army. Your Excellency will often find the most infamous of men, the very outcasts of Britain, put into the highest employments, or loaded with exorbitant pensions; while all that ministered and gave sanction to the most shameful and destructive measures of such viceroys never failed of an ample share in the spoils of a plundered people.’ That this should be the case, he maintains, is not surprising, considering the constitution and the duration of the Parliament. Its Members, instead of being the true representatives of the people, are ‘a packed convention—a faction so far from being elected by the people that they were confessedly appointed in opposition to the sense of the electors, and held in servile bondage by some one man or junto of a few crafty persons grown rich and powerful by the spoils of a plundered and abused nation. “Serving the Crown,”’ he continues, is a phrase which in Ireland ‘has been frequently extended to the giving money to a minister for the erecting of forts that were perhaps never intended to be founded, for arms that never were or will be made, or for raising funds upon any other frivolous pretence, to enable a viceroy to gratify himself and his no less mercenary minions with the most immoderate douceurs and boundless pensions. These are what have usually passed with us for serving the Crown, the King's business, and the like; and in long-lived Parliaments a supple majority was seldom wanting to give sanction to the sordid deed, while a sufficient number of the members were gratified with a share of the spoils.’

Serious, however, as was this drain upon the revenues of a country so miserably poor, it was trivial compared with that produced by the absenteeism of the Irish landlords. Swift asserted that at least one-third of the rent of the country was spent in England, and nearly all the Irish writers of the last century dilate upon the evil, though they differ somewhat as to its magnitude. Prior, in 1730, calculated the rental spent by absentees in England at about 620,000l. Another list, drawn up in 1769, put the value at no less than 1,200,000l. Hutchinson, in his ‘Commercial Restraints,’ which was published in 1779, stated that ‘the sums remitted from Ireland to Great Britain for rents, interest of money, pensions, salaries, and profit of offices amounted, on the lowest computation, from 1668 to 1773 to 1,110,000l. yearly.’ Arthur Young, in 1779, estimated the rents alone of the absentees at about 732,000l.1 The causes of the evil are not difficult to discover. A very large part of the confiscated land was given to Englishmen who had property and duties in England, and habitually lived there. Much of it also came into the market, and as there was very little capital in Ireland, and as Catholics were forbidden to purchase land, this also passed largely into the hands of English speculators. Besides, the level of civilisation was much higher in England than in Ireland. The position of a Protestant landlord, living in the midst of a degraded population, differing from him in religion and race, had but little attraction; the political situation of the country closed to an Irish gentleman nearly every avenue of honourable ambition, and owing to a long series of very evident causes, the sentiment of public duty was deplorably low. The economical evil was not checked by any considerable movement in the opposite direction, for after the suppression of the Irish manufactures but few Englishmen, except those who obtained Irish offices, came to Ireland.

The moral effects of absenteeism, and especially its influence on the land question, can hardly be exaggerated. One of its first results was the system of middlemen, which continued till within the memory of living men almost universal in Ireland. The landlord, disliking the trouble and difficulty of collecting his rents from numerous small tenants, in whose welfare he took no interest, and looking solely at his property as a source of emolument, abdicated all his active functions, and let his land at a long lease to a large tenant, who raised the rent of the landlord as well as a profit for himself by subletting, and who undertook the whole practical management of the estate. The tenants were therefore under the immediate control of men of a wholly inferior stamp, who were necessarily Protestant, but who had none of the culture and position that soften the asperities of religious differences, and who at the same time, having no permanent interest in the soil, were usually the most grasping of tyrants. As the demand for land increased, or the profits of land rose, the head tenant followed the example of his landlord. He often became an absentee. He abandoned all serious industry. He in his turn sublet his tenancy at an increased rent, and the process continued till there were often three, four, or even five persons between the landlord and the cultivator of the soil.

The poor, in the meantime, sank into the condition of cottiers—a condition which has been truly described as ‘a specific and almost unique product of Irish industrial life.’1 Unlike the peasant proprietor, and also unlike the mediæval serf, the cottier had no permanent interest in the soil, and no security for his future position. Unlike the English farmer, he was not a capitalist, who selects land as one of the many forms of profitable investment that are open to him. He was a man destitute of all knowledge and of all capital, who found the land the only thing that remained between himself and starvation. Rents were regulated by competition, but it was competition between a half-starving population, who had no other resource except the soil, and were therefore prepared to promise anything rather than be deprived of it.1 The landlord did nothing for them. They built their own mud hovels, planted their hedges, dug their ditches. They were half naked, half starved, utterly destitute of all providence, and of all education, liable at any time to be turned adrift from their holdings, ground to the dust by three great burdens—rack-rents, paid not to the landlord but to the middleman; tithes, paid to the clergy—often the absentee clergy—of the Church of their oppressors; and dues, paid to their own priests. Swift declared that Irish tenants ‘live worse than English beggars.’2 The few travellers who visited the country uniformly described their condition as the most deplorable in Europe. ‘I never met,’ writes a very intelligent tourist who visited Ireland about 1764, ‘with such scenes of misery and oppression as this country, in too many parts of it, really exhibits. What with the severe exactions of rent, even before the corn is housed—a practice that too much prevails here among the petty and despicable landlords, third, fourth, and fifth from the first proprietor … of the parish priest—who, not content with the tithe of grain, exacts even the very tenth of half-a-dozen or half-a-score perches of potatoes, upon which a whole family perhaps subsists for the year—and of the Catholic priest … who comes armed with the terrors of damnation, and demands his full quota of unremitted offerings … the poor reduced wretches have hardly the skin of a potato left them to subsist on … The high roads throughout the southern and western parts are lined with beggars, who live in cabins of such shocking materials and construction that through hundreds of them you may see the smoke ascending from every inch of the roof, for scarce one in twenty of them have any chimney, and the rain drips from every inch of the roof on the half-naked, shivering, and almost half-starving inhabitants within. … The case of the lower class of farmers, indeed, is little better than a state of slavery. … The land, though often rich and fertile, almost universally wears the face of poverty, from want of good cultivation, which the miserable occupiers really are not able to give it, and very few of them know how if they were, and this indeed must be the case while the lands are canted (set to the highest bidder, not openly, but by private proposals, which throw every advantage into the hands of the landlord) in small parcels of 20l. or 30l. a year, at third, fourth, and fifth hand from the first proprietor. From the most attentive and minute inquiries at many places, I am confident that the produce of this kingdom, either of corn or cattle, is not above two-thirds, at most, of what by good cultivation it might yield. Yet the gentlemen, I believe, make as much or more of their estates than any in the three kingdoms,1 while the lands, for equal goodness, produce the least. … The landlords first and subordinate get all that is made of the land, and the tenants, for their labour, get poverty and potatoes.’ ‘Ireland,’ continues the same writer, ‘would be indeed a rich country, if made the most of, if its trade were not reduced by unnatural restrictions and an Egyptian kind of politics from without, and its agriculture depressed by hard masters from within itself.’2

This description is amply borne out by other authorities, and it is easy to explain it. The mass of the people became cottiers because in most parts of Ireland it was impossible to gain a livelihood as agricultural labourers or in mechanical pursuits. This impossibility was due to the extreme paucity of circulating capital, and may be chiefly traced to the destruction of Irish manufactures, and to the absence of a considerable class of resident landlords, who would naturally give employment to the poor. The popular remedy in Ireland for the latter evil was an absentee tax, but as most of the absentees lived in England, it was felt by men of sense that such a measure could never obtain the assent of the authorities in that country.1

The economical evil at the same time was aggravated at every stage by the laws against religion. The facility of selling land, and its value in the market, were unnaturally diminished by the exclusion of all Catholics from competition. Its agricultural condition was enormously impaired by the difficulty of borrowing money on landed security in a poor country, where this form of investment was legally closed against the great majority of the people. All real enterprise and industry among the Catholic tenants were destroyed by the laws which consigned them to utter ignorance, and still more by the law which placed strict bounds to their progress by providing that if their profits ever exceeded a third of their rent, the first Protestant who could prove the fact might take their farm. For reasons which have been often explained, Catholicism is on the whole less favourable to the industrial virtues than Protestantism, but yet the cases of France, of Flanders, and of the northern States of Italy, show that it is possible that a very high standard of industry may under favourable circumstances be attained in a Catholic country. But in Ireland the debilitating influence of numerous church holidays, and of a religious encouragement of mendicancy, was felt in a society in which employment was rare, intermittent, and miserably underpaid, and in which Catholic industry was legally deprived of its appropriate rewards. Very naturally, therefore, habits of gross and careless idleness prevailed, which greatly aggravated the poverty of the nation. At the same time the class of middlemen, or large leaseholders, was unnaturally encouraged, for while they escaped some of the most serious evils of the landlord, they were guarded by law from all Catholic competition, and accordingly possessed the advantage of monopoly. It was soon discovered that one of the easiest ways for a Protestant to make money was by taking a large tract of country from an absentee landlord at a long lease, and by letting it at rack-rents to Catholic cottiers.1 The Irish tenant, said a high authority on this subject, speaking of the middlemen class, ‘will not be satisfied unless he has a long lease of lives of forty, fifty, or sixty years, that he may sell it, and 'tis rare to find a tenant in Ireland contented with a farm of moderate size. He pretends he cannot maintain his family with less than 200 acres—nay, if at any distance from town, 200 or 300 acres.’2

Another influence which aggravated the sufferings of the people was the tendency to turn great tracts of land into pasture, which produced numerous evictions, and greatly restricted the scanty resources of the poor. This tendency is, indeed, not one which can be regarded with unqualified condemnation. It is certain that pasture is the form of agricultural industry which the conditions of soil and climate make most suitable to Ireland. At the time of the wool trade much of the land had taken this form; and even after the English restrictions on Irish wool, want of capital, want of energy, and the profits of the smuggling trade with France prevented any great change.1 Irish beef also was admitted freely to every country except England, and a large and profitable trade was carried on. Besides this, pasture required little skill, and was therefore natural to a country where the people scarcely possessed the rudiments of agricultural knowledge. It required little capital, and was therefore well suited to a country which was extremely poor, in which a great portion of the people were forbidden by law to invest their money in land, and in which, owing to recent confiscations, property was still insecure. It simplified the conditions of property, and therefore had a peculiar attraction to a proprietor who imagined with reason that his tenants were his enemies, and who inherited all the multifarious disadvantages and dangers attached to the position of an Irish landlord. The tendency was artificially strengthened by the very unjust resolution of the Irish House of Commons in 1735, relieving pasture land from the burden of tithes,2 and still more by the penal laws which paralysed the agricultural industry of the Catholics. Their operation in this respect has been well described by Lord Taaffe, a Catholic nobleman, who published in 1766 a valuable pamphlet on the condition of the country. ‘No sooner,’ he writes, ‘were the Catholics excluded from durable and profitable tenures, than they commenced graziers and laid aside agriculture; they ceased from draining or enclosing their farms and building good houses, as occupations unsuited to the new post assigned them in our national economy. They fell to wasting the lands they were virtually forbid to cultivate, the business of pasturage being compatible with such a conduct, and requiring also little industry and still less labour in the management. This business also brings quick returns in money, and though its profits be smaller than those arising from agriculture, yet they are more immediate, and much better adapted to the condition of men who are confined to a fugitive property, which can so readily be transferred from one country to another. This pastoral occupation also eludes the vigilance of our present race of informers, as the difficulty of ascertaining a grazier's profits is considerable, and as the proofs of his enjoying more than a third penny profit cannot so easily be made clear in our courts of law. The keeping the lands waste also prevents in a great degree leases in reversion, what Protestants only are qualified to take, and what (by the small temptation to such reversions) gives the present occupant the best title to future renewal. This sort of self-defence in keeping the lands uncultivated had the further consequences of expelling that most useful body of the people called yeomanry in England, and Sculoags in Ireland—communities of industrious housekeepers who in my own time herded together in large villages and cultivated the lands everywhere, till as leases expired some rich grazier negotiating privately with a sum of ready money, took their lands over their heads. … The Sculoag race, that great nursery of labourers and manufacturers, has been broken and dispersed in every quarter, and we have nothing in lieu but those most miserable wretches on earth, the cottagers—naked slaves who labour without food, and live while they can, without houses or covering, under the lash of merciless and relentless taskmasters.’1

Under these influences the few Catholic landlords almost universally, and a very large proportion of the Protestants turned their land into pasture. A similar movement had begun in England under Henry VII. and had extended during the three following reigns, and it produced an amount of misery perhaps greater than is to be found in any other portion of English history. But that movement had at least taken place in a country where the landlords were resident, where capital had already been largely accumulated, where many forms of industrial life were open to the poor, and where, by a long train of favourable circumstances, industrial habits were largely developed. In Ireland, where none of these conditions existed, the misery produced was appalling. Over a great part of Ireland the cottiers were driven for the most part to the mountains, where they obtained little plots of potato ground, too small, however, to support them during the year. They eked out their subsistence by migrating from place to place during the summer and autumn in search of work. The rate of wages was usually sixpence in summer and fourpence in winter,1 but even at this rate continuous work could seldom for any long period be counted on. Saving was therefore impossible, and the people depended for their very existence on the produce of the year. Their houses and dress were so miserable that food was almost their only expense, and it was computed that 10l. was more than sufficient for the whole annual expense of an Irish family.2 But the first bad year brought them face to face with starvation. The practice of houghing cattle in Connaught, which was the most prominent form of agrarian crime in Ireland during the first half of the eighteenth century, was probably largely due to this rapid conversion of arable land into pasture, which drove the people to the verge of starvation;3 and to the same cause Boulter mainly attributed the great stream of recruits who passed from Ireland into the armies of the Continent.4 The tendency to throw land into pasture became very general about 1715, when the peace opened the ports of the Continent to Irish beef. The average export of corn of all sorts during that and the two preceding years was 189,672 barrels, but from this time it steadily declined.5 Boulter, Swift, Berkeley, Dobbs, Madden, Prior, and Skelton all agreed in representing the excessive amount of pasture as a leading cause both of the misery and the idleness of the people. In 1728 and 1729 the paucity of tillage greatly aggravated the severity of the famine. The distress was so poignant that the Parliament tried to remedy it by an artificial encouragement of tillage, but its measures were feeble and vacillating, and it was hampered by the jealousy of England, which feared lest Irish corn should enter into competition with her own. Swift had strongly censured a system, that had sprung up in his time, of landlords forbidding their tenants to break up or plough their land; and the House of Commons in 1716 passed a resolution against such covenants.1 It endeavoured more than once without success to obtain the sanction of the English authorities to a bill granting a small bounty for the encouragement of corn. It passed resolutions for the erection of public granaries, and in 1727, amid the horrors of the famine, it succeeded, after several failures, in inducing the English Government to assent to a Bill enjoining that five out of every 100 acres should be under the plough.2

It is very creditable to the Irish Parliament, in which the tenants were entirely unrepresented, and in which the landlord influence was overwhelmingly preponderant, that it should have carried such a measure; but it was one thing to pass a law, it was quite another to carry it into execution in a country where it was almost hopeless for a Catholic tenant to obtain legal redress against a Protestant landlord. No measures appear to have been taken to enforce the Act, and the famine of 1741 and 1742 repeated in a very aggravated form the horrors of 1728. In the north, among the Protestant population, and in the neighbourhood of the linen manufactures, tillage was still largely practised,1 but in the other provinces great districts were nearly depopulated. ‘I believe I may venture to affirm,’ wrote a very competent authority in 1737, ‘that Ireland, inconsiderable as it is in extent, hath exported more beef for many years than all the rest of Europe.’2 In some of the finest counties the traveller might go for ten or fifteen miles without encountering a single house or seeing a single field of corn.3 Whole villages were often turned adrift.4 ‘In Munster and Connaught,’ said a writer in 1741, ‘many single persons of the Popish religion hold from 2,000 to 10,000 acres of land uncultivated, or tenanted by none but Papists, in their own hands.’5 ‘I live,’ said another writer in the same year, ‘in the county Tipperary, a county abounding with pasture, where vast tracts of land are held by single persons, where not only farmers but gentlemen keep from three to six or seven, nay, eight thousand acres in their own hands, flocked but for the most part with sheep, without any inhabitants but herdsmen and a few, a very few, cottiers to do the necessary drudgery, or rather slavery, about their houses. The same I may with equal truth affirm of the county of Limerick, with only this small difference, that the greatest part of that county is stocked with black cattle. By these means the inhabitants of these counties, who are in a continual state of migration, have generally for several years past been obliged to betake themselves to the mountains, where they take little farms at exorbitant rates, often at the second or third hand, which they planted chiefly with potatoes, with which they endeavoured to make their rents, and with which and some oats they generally maintained their numerous families. The great frost last season destroyed almost all their plantations of potatoes, which had so long been the principal, if not the only, subsistence of the poor of these provinces.’1 Wesley reported in 1760 that Connaught was supposed to contain scarcely half the inhabitants it had eighty years before.2 In 1761 a long-continued murrain among cattle in England and on the Continent raised immensely the value of pasture-land in Ireland, and the numerous evictions which then took place were the immediate cause of the Whiteboy organisation.3 In 1767 the value of corn exported from Ireland was only 447l., while that of the corn imported was 133, 161l.4

The moral and economical conditions of nations are closely connected, and it is not surprising that under such circumstances as I have described, industrial habits should have been almost entirely wanting among the Irish poor. In the emphatic words of Berkeley, they grew up ‘in a cynical content in dirt and beggary to a degree beyond any other people in Christendom.’ Their ‘habitations and furniture’ were ‘more sordid than those of the savage Americans,’ and the good bishop asked ‘whether there be upon earth any Christian or civilised people so beggarly wretched and destitute as the common Irish?’ An inevitable consequence, too, of the pressure of pasture upon population was an enormous increase of that nomadic pauperism which is one of the chief sources of national idleness and crime. We have already seen, from the testimony of Fletcher of Saltoun, the gigantic proportions this evil had attained in Scotland, and Defoe represents it as a very serious one even in England. Arthur Dobbs, in a work published in 1731, gives us a corresponding picture of its magnitude in Ireland. Numerous ejections and the absolute necessity of going from place to place in search of work contributed largely to maintain it, and great multitudes who began their wanderings under the pressure of want soon acquired a taste for an idle, vagrant, and adventurous life. Work was scanty and intermittent. Its rewards were so miserably small that providence was almost useless and saving almost impossible. A spirit of humble charity was very widely diffused, and the poorer classes had been reduced to such a condition of squalor that food was almost their only want. Under these circumstances extreme idleness and wretched habits of mendicancy naturally spread. There were, Dobbs assures us, 2,295 parishes, and an average of at least ten vagrants begging in each the whole year round, and above thirty for three or four months in the summer. For the whole year he computes the number of strolling beggars at 34,000. The great increase during the summer he ascribes to the fact that in the mountainous parts of the country, great numbers who have houses and farms sufficient to maintain them, as soon as they have sown their corn, planted their potatoes, and cut their turf, were accustomed either to hire out their cows, or to send them to the mountains, to shut their houses, and with their whole families to go begging till harvest time.1 Farmers as a speculation gave fixed sums to labourers for their chance of a summer's begging. Servants often quitted their service, and day labourers their work, giving as their reason that they could gain more by begging. Petty thieving, and the other forms of crime that always accompany this mode of life, inevitably increased, and there was one graver evil which we should hardly have expected. The strong domestic attachment which binds together the members of the poorest family has been for above a century a conspicuous feature of the Irish character; but Dobbs assures us that in his time beggars often mutilated or even blinded their children, in order, by making them objects of compassion, to increase their earnings; and that children who were quite able to support their parents often sent them abroad as vagrants when they became old, without giving them any more relief than they would give to common beggars.2 The prevailing idleness extended through both sexes. The custom of making the women do the severe field-work, while the men looked on in idleness, which scandalised every English traveller in Scotland, appears to have been unknown in Ireland. Women were, on the contrary, singularly exempt from those labours to which in a low state of civilisation they are usually condemned; but there were loud complaints that, except in the north, where they were largely employed in the linen trade, they lived for the most part in perfect idleness.1

The great evil of strolling beggars in Ireland, as in Scotland, had assumed dimensions that made it very formidable to the State.2 Berkeley was so struck with it that he argued that all able-bodied vagrants should be compelled, as a warning to others, to work in public and in chains.1 Archbishop King made praiseworthy efforts to alleviate it by founding almshouses, and by establishing in Dublin a system of giving badges to beggars, and forbidding them to beg out of their own parishes.2 Dobbs urged with much force the necessity of erecting workhouses, supported by local taxation, with stern, compulsory labour for the able-bodied, and schools for the children. A policy of this kind within certain restricted limits was actually pursued. The English poor law of Elizabeth was never applied to Ireland, and there was no general system for the relief of the destitute; but the Irish Parliament, as early as the reign of Charles I., had ordered that a house of correction should be built in every county for the punishment of ‘rogues, vagabonds, sturdy beggars, and other lewd and idle persons.’3 In 1703 an Act was carried, enjoining the erection of a workhouse in the city of Dublin, ‘for employing and maintaining the poor thereof,’ and the creation of a corporation with large local powers, not only of punishing vagabonds, but also of relieving the destitute within the city.4 Its members were enabled to arrest all idle vagrants and beggars found in the streets, to set them at work in the workhouse for a time not exceeding seven years, to take into their service all children above five years old who were found begging, to keep them till they were sixteen, and then to apprentice them to Protestants, the males till the age of twenty-four, the females to the age of twenty-one. A tax levied on hackney coaches and sedan chairs, and a rate of three-pence in the pound on every house in Dublin, were appropriated to the support of the institution, which in 1728 was so enlarged as to include a foundling hospital.5 By another measure carried in 1715, the minister and churchwardens of every parish in Ireland were enabled with the consent of a justice of the peace to give over any child they found begging, either as a menial or an apprentice for a term of years to any respectable Protestant housekeeper or tradesman who would accept the task.1 In 1735 a workhouse and a corporation substantially similar to those of Dublin were established at Cork,2 and a very significant provision was made that the children of the Cork and Dublin workhouses might be exchanged, in order to prevent the possibility of Catholic parents interfering with the Protestant education of their children. In this, indeed, as in nearly all Irish matters, the determination to sap the religion of the Catholics was conspicuous. Poor parents whose children were taken from them by force to be educated as Protestants must have been often reduced to a wretchedness which no words can describe, and it was made a complaint to the Government that there was frequently ‘some collusion between the mothers and the people employed to find nurses in the parishes, the mothers contriving to get themselves accepted as nurses of their offspring.’ Sometimes the children were quite old enough to have confirmed religious convictions, and an eye-witness stated how, not unfrequently on Fridays or other fast-days, children ‘would not use the broth prepared with meat as it was, and it used to be poured down their throats against their will.’3 The long journey of 170 miles on clumsy carts between Dublin and Cork was fatal to multitudes of children, and the fixed determination of the Government, in the interest of religious proselytism, in the workhouses and foundling hospitals, as well as in the Charter Schools, to cut all ties of connection between parents and their children, was felt by the Catholics much more keenly than many of the measures against their faith which have obtained the largest place in Irish history.

It is probable that under the circumstances I have enumerated, the population of Ireland during the first half of the eighteenth century remained almost stationary. For many years after the great rebellion of 1641 the country had been extremely under-populated, and the prevailing habit of early and prolific marriages would naturally have led to very rapid multiplication, but famine, disease, and emigration were as yet sufficient to counteract it. Unfortunately, our sources of information on this subject are very imperfect. No census was taken; our chief means of calculating are derived from the returns of the hearth-money collectors; and the number of cabins that were exempted from the tax, as well as the great difference in different parts of the country in the average occupants of a house, introduce a large element of uncertainty into our estimates. It appears, however, according to the best means of information we possess, that the population in the beginning of the century slightly exceeded two millions, and that it increased in fifty years by about 300,000.1 The proportion of Roman Catholics to Protestants is also a question of much difficulty. In the reign of Charles II. Petty had estimated it at eight to three. In a return based on the hearth-money collection, which was made to the Irish House of Lords in 1731, it was estimated at not quite two to one.2 It is probable, however, that the inequality was considerably understated. The great poverty of many of the Catholics, and the remote mountains and valleys in which they lived, withdrew them from the cognisance of the tax-gatherer; and Primate Boulter in 1727 expressed his belief that there were in Ireland at least five Papists to one Protestant.3 He adds a statement which, if it be unexaggerated, furnishes an extraordinary example of the superiority of Catholic zeal in the midst of the penal laws, and at a time when Protestantism enjoyed all the advantages of an almost universal monopoly. He says, ‘We have incumbents and curates to the number of about 800, whilst there are more than 3,000 Popish priests of all sorts here.’1

Of the many depressing influences I have noticed in the foregoing pages, there is, perhaps, no one that may not be paralleled or exceeded in the annals of other countries; but it would be difficult, in the whole compass of history, to find another instance in which such various and such powerful agencies concurred to degrade the character and to blast the prosperity of a nation. That the greater part of them sprang directly from the corrupt and selfish government of England is incontestable. No country ever exercised a more complete control over the destinies of another than did England over those of Ireland for three-quarters of a century after the Revolution. No serious resistance of any kind was attempted. The nation was as passive as clay in the hands of the potter, and it is a circumstance of peculiar aggravation that a large part of the legislation I have recounted was a distinct violation of a solemn treaty. The commercial legislation which ruined Irish industry, the confiscation of Irish land, which disorganised the whole social condition of the country, the scandalous misapplication of patronage, which at once demoralised and impoverished the nation, were all directly due to the English Government and the English Parliament. The blame of the atrocious penal laws rests, it is true, primarily and principally on the Parliament of Ireland; but it must not be forgotten that this Parliament, by its constitution and composition, was almost wholly subservient to English influence, and that it was the English Act of 1691 which, by banishing Catholics from its walls, rendered it exclusively sectarian. There are, however, other circumstances to be taken into account, which will considerably relieve the picture. Whoever desires to judge the policy of England without passion or prejudice will remember that Ireland was a conquered country, and that the war of the Revolution was only the last episode of a struggle which had continued for centuries, had been disgraced on both sides by revolting atrocities, and had engendered the most ferocious antipathies. He will remember that the bulk of the Irish people were Catholics, and that over the greater part of Europe the relations of Protestantism and Catholicism were still those of deadly hostility. He will remember that from a much earlier period than the Revolution it had become a settled maxim in England that Ireland was the most convenient outlet for English adventurers, and that Irish land might be confiscated without much more scruple than the land over which the Red Indian roves. The precedents were set by Mary, Elizabeth, and James I. The confiscations after the Revolution appeared to most English minds the normal result of conquest, and when this one step was taken, most of the other results inevitably followed. Above all, it must be remembered that the policy of a nation can only be equitably judged by a constant reference to the moral standard of the age, and that it is equally absurd and unjust to measure the actions of statesmen in one stage of civilization by the rules of conduct prevailing in another. The more the history of bygone centuries is examined, the more evident it will appear that an intense class and national egotism then dominated all politics; that in the scheme and theory of government which under many external forms was almost universally accepted, the interests of the masses were habitually sacrificed to those of the ruling class, and the interests of the subordinate parts of an empire to those of the centre. This was not peculiarly English: it was true, to perhaps an equal extent, of every considerable power on the Continent.

These considerations will somewhat mitigate the judgment which a candid reader will pass upon the history of Ireland. They do not, however, affect the fact that a long train of causes of irresistible power were crushing both the moral and material energies of the country. One of the most obvious consequences was that for the space of about a century she underwent a steady process of depletion, most men of energy, ambition, talent, and character being driven from her shores. The movement, it is true, was by no means new, for long before the English power had crossed the Channel, Irish talent and Irish energy had shown a remarkable tendency to seek a sphere for action on the Continent. From about the middle of the sixth till near the close of the eighth century, Irishmen had borne a part second to that of no other European nation in the great work of evangelising Europe. ‘From Ireland,’ in the words of St. Bernard, ‘as from an overflowing stream, crowds of holy men descended upon foreign countries.’ The fame of St. Columbanus in Gaul and in Italy almost rivalled that of St. Benedict himself. The Irishman St. Kilian was the apostle of Franconia. The Irishman St. Gall converted a large part of what is now Switzerland. Nearly all the North of England, and a great part of Scotland, owe their Christianity to a long succession of Irish monks, who issued from the cloisters of Iona and Lindisfarne, and, in the words of a great antiquary, ‘there is scarcely an island on the west side of Scotland which does not acknowledge an Irishman as the founder of its church.’1 Obscure Irish missionaries traversed the greater part of Gaul, of Germany, and of northern Italy, and they are said even to have penetrated as far as Iceland. Among many less illustrious establishments, Irishmen founded important monasteries at Luxeuil in Burgundy, at Bobbio and Pavia in Italy, at Wurtzburg in Franconia, at St. Gall in Switzerland, at Regensburg on the Danube. In the eighth century the Irishman St. Virgilius taught the existence of the antipodes, at Salzburg. In the ninth century, the Irishman Scotus Erigena founded a rationalistic philosophy in France. After the religious convulsions of the sixteenth century, and the great disasters to Ireland which followed, a new train of causes came into action which drew a large proportion of able and energetic Irishmen to the Continent. Thus Luke Wadding, the one great scholar of the Irish Franciscans, and the historian of the order, lived chiefly in Rome, where he founded an Irish college, and died in 1657. Colgan, one of the most remarkable of early Irish antiquaries, and the collector of the Lives of the Irish Saints, though a native of Donegal, was professor at Louvain, where he died in 1658. O'Daly, an Irish monk, born in Kerry, founded an Irish convent at Lisbon, represented Portugal at the court of Lewis XIV., refused two bishoprics, and died Vicar-General of Portugal in 1662. Many Irish passed into foreign service after the suppression of the rebellion of Tyrone,1 and Spenser has recorded in a remarkable passage the high repute that Irish soldiers had already acquired on the Continent.2 Their number was greatly increased by the emigration that followed the confiscations under James I.,3 and I have already noticed how Petty estimates at no less than 40,000 the number of Irishmen who enrolled themselves in foreign armies, after the desolation of their country by Cromwell.4

All this took place long before the Revolution. But the changes that followed that event made the movement of emigration still more formidable. It would be difficult indeed to conceive a national condition less favourable than that of Ireland to a man of energy and ambition. If he were a Catholic he found himself excluded by his creed from every position of trust and power, and from almost every means of acquiring wealth, degraded by a social stigma, deprived of every vestige of political weight. If he were a Presbyterian, he was subject to the disabilities of the Test Act. If he were a member of the Established Church, he was even then compelled to see all the highest posts in Church and State monopolised by Englishmen. If he were a landlord, he found himself in a country where the law had produced such a social state that his position as a resident was nearly intolerable. If his ambition lay in the paths of manufacture or commerce, he was almost compelled to emigrate, for industrial and commercial enterprise had been deliberately crushed.

The result was that a steady tide of emigration set in, carrying away all those classes who were most essential to the development of the nation. The landlords found the attractions of London and Bath irresistible. The manufacturers and the large class of energetic labourers who lived upon manufacturing industry were scattered far and wide. Some of them passed to England and Scotland. Great numbers found a home in Virginia and Pennsylvania, and they were the founders of the linen manufacture in New England.1 Others, again, went to strengthen the enemies of England. Lewis XIV. was in general bitterly intolerant to Protestants, but he warmly welcomed, encouraged, and protected in their worship, Protestant manufacturers from Ireland who brought their industry to Rouen and other cities of France.2 Many others took refuge in the Protestant States of Germany, while Catholic manufacturers settled in the northern provinces of Spain and laid the foundation of an industry which was believed to be very detrimental to England.3

The Protestant emigration, which began with the destruction of the woollen manufacture, continued during many years with unabated and even accelerating rapidity. At the time of the Revolution, when great portions of the country lay waste and when the whole framework of society was shattered, much Irish land had been let on lease at very low rents to English, and especially to Scotch Protestants. About 1717 and 1718 these leases began to fall in. Rents were usually doubled, and often trebled. The smaller farms were generally put up to competition, and the Catholics, who were accustomed to live in the most squalid misery and to forego all the comforts of life, very naturally outbid the Protestants.1 This fact, added to the total destruction of the main industries on which the Protestant population subsisted, to the disabilities to which the nonconformists were subject on account of their religion, and to the growing tendency to throw land into pasture, produced a great social revolution, the effects of which have never been repaired. For nearly three-quarters of a century the drain of the energetic Protestant population continued, and their places, when occupied at all, were occupied by a Catholic cottier population, sunk in the lowest depths of ignorance and poverty. All the miserable scenes of wholesale ejections, of the disruption of family ties, of the forced exile of men who were passionately attached to their country were enacted.2 Carteret, in 1728, vainly deplored the great evil that was thus inflicted on the English interest in Ireland, and urged the Presbyterian ministers to employ their influence to abate it.3 Madden ten years later echoed the same complaint and declared that at least one-third of those who went to the West Indies perished either on the journey or by diseases caught in the first weeks of landing.4 The famine of 1740 and 1741 gave an immense impulse to the movement, and it is said that for several years the Protestant emigrants from Ulster annually amounted to about 12,000.1 More than thirty years later, Arthur Young found the stream still flowing, and he mentioned that in 1773, 4,000 emigrants had sailed from Belfast alone.2 Many ignorant and credulous passed into the hands of designing agents, were inveigled into servitude or shipped by false pretences, or even with violence to the most pestilential climates.3 Many went to the West Indies,4 and many others to the American colonies. They went with hearts burning with indignation, and in the War of Independence they were almost to a man on the side of the insurgents. They supplied some of the best soldiers of Washington. The famous Pennsylvanian line was mainly Irish, and Montgomery, who, having distinguished himself highly at the capture of Quebec, became one of the earliest of the American commanders in the War of Independence, was a native of Donegal.1

In the meantime the Catholics who retained any energy or ambition as well as great numbers who were simply ejected from their homes, enrolled themselves in multitudes in foreign service. The 14,000 men who surrendered at Limerick and who passed at once by the treaty into French service, formed a nucleus, and the Irish who fought under the white flag may be reckoned by tens of thousands.2 Spain had for a long time five Irish regiments in her service, and as late as 1760 we find one in the service of Naples.3 The Austrian army was crowded with Irish soldiers and officers,4 and there was scarcely a siege or a battle between the Revolution and the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in which Irish troops did not take part. At Fontenoy they formed a large part of the column whose final charge broke the ranks of the English. When Cremona was surprised by Eugene, the Irish troops first arrested the progress of the Imperialists, and to their stubborn resistance the salvation of the town was mainly due. When the Germans had surprised the Spaniards at Melazzo in Sicily, the Irish troops in the Spanish service turned the scale of victory in favour of their side. In the great battle of Almanza the denationalising influence of religious persecution was strangely shown. An English general commanded the French troops and a French general the English. A regiment of Huguenot refugees, under the command of Cavalier, the heroic leader of the Cevennes, were the very foremost soldiers in the army of England, while the Irish troops of Berwick and O'Mahony contributed their full share to its defeat. Sarsfield having taken part in the glories of Steinkirk, closed his heroic career in the arms of victory at Landen. Irish troops shared the disasters of the French at Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde, and Malplaquet. They fought with Vendome at Luzzara, Cassano, and Calcinato, at Friedlingen and Spires, in the campaign of Catinat in Piedmont, in the campaigns of Berwick in Flanders and in Spain.

It is in these quarters that the real history of the Irish Catholics during the first half of the eighteenth century is to be traced. At home they had sunk into torpid and degraded pariahs. Abroad there was hardly a Catholic country where Irish exiles or their children might not be found in posts of dignity and power. Lord Clare became Marshal of France. Browne, who was one of the very ablest Austrian generals, and who took a leading part in the first period of the Seven Years' War, was the son of Irish parents; and Maguire, Lacy, Nugent, and O'Donnell were all prominent generals in the Austrian service during the same war. Another Browne, a cousin of the Austrian commander, was Field-Marshal in the Russian service and Governor of Riga. Peter Lacy, who also became a Russian Field-Marshal, and who earned the reputation of one of the first soldiers of his time, was of Irish birth. He enlisted as a mere boy in the army of James, left Ireland at the time of the Treaty of Limerick, was compelled to quit the French army on the reduction of the forces which followed the Peace of Ryswick, and having entered the service of Russia, he took a leading part in organising the army of Peter the Great, and served with brilliant distinction for the space of half a century in every Russian campaign against the Swedes, the Poles, and the Turks. He sprang from an Irish family which had the rare fortune of counting generals in the services both of Austria, Russia, and Spain. Of the Dillons, more than one obtained high rank in the French army, and one became Archbishop of Toulouse. The brave, the impetuous Lally of Tollendal, who served with such distinction at Dettingen and Fontenoy, and who for a time seriously threatened the English power in Hindostan, was son of a Galway gentleman, and member of an old Milesian family. It is a curious fact that Sir Eyre Coote, his opponent and conqueror in India, was an Irish Protestant. Among Spanish generals the names of O'Mahony, O'Donnell, O'Gara, O'Reilly, and O'Neil sufficiently attest their nationality, and an Irish Jacobite named Cammock was conspicuous among the admirals of Alberoni. Wall, who directed the government of Spain with singular ability from 1754 to 1763, was an Irishman, if not by birth, at least by parentage. MacGeoghegan, the first considerable historian of Ireland, was chaplain of the Irish Brigade in the service of France. The physician of Sobieski, King of Poland, and the physician of Philip V. of Spain were both Irish, and an Irish naturalist, named Bowles, was active in reviving the mining industry of Spain in 1752. In the diplomacy of the Continent Irish names are not unknown. Tyrconnel was French Ambassador at the Court of Berlin. Wall, before he became chief minister of Spain, had represented that country at the Court of London. Lacy was Spanish Ambassador at Stockholm, and O'Mahony at Vienna.1

These examples might easily be increased, but they are quite sufficient to show how large a proportion of the energy and ability of Ireland was employed in foreign lands and how ruinous must have been the consequences at home. If, as there appears much reason to believe, there is such a thing as a hereditary transmission of moral and intellectual qualities, the removal from a nation of tens of thousands of the ablest and most energetic of its citizens must inevitably, by a mere physical law, result in the degradation of the race. Nor is it necessary to fall back upon any speculations of disputed science. In every community there exists a small minority of men whose abilities, high purpose, and energy of will, mark them out as in some degree leaders of men. These take the first steps in every public enterprise, counteract by their example the vicious elements of the population, set the current and form the standard of public opinion, and infuse a healthy moral vigour into their nation. In Ireland for three or four generations such men were steadily weeded out. Can we wonder that the standard of public morals and of public spirit should have declined?

But not only were the healthiest elements driven away: corrupting influences of the most powerful kind infected those who remained. It is extremely difficult in our day to realise the moral conditions of a society in which it was the very first object of the law to subvert the belief of the great majority of the people, to break down among them the sentiment of religious reverence, and in every possible way to repress, injure, and insult all that they regarded as sacred. I have already described the principal provisions of the penal code. I have given examples of the language employed on the most solemn occasions and in their official capacities, by viceroys and by judges; but it is only by a minute and detailed examination that we can adequately realise the operation of the system. In all the walks and circumstances of life the illegal character of the faith of the people was obtruded. If a Catholic committed a crime, no matter how unconnected with his creed, the fact that he was of the Popish religion was usually recorded ostentatiously in the proclamation against him. If a petitioner could possibly allege it, his Protestantism was seldom omitted in the enumeration of his merits. A Catholic, or even the husband of a Catholic, was degraded in his own country by exclusion from every position of trust from the highest to the lowest, while Frenchmen and Germans were largely pensioned, avowedly in order to strengthen the Protestant interest. The form of recantation drawn up for those who consented to join the Established Church was studiously offensive, for it compelled the convert to brand his former faith as ‘the way of damnation.’1 In the eyes of the law the prelates and friars, whom the Catholic regarded with the deepest reverence, the priest, who without having taken the abjuration oath celebrated the worship which he believed to be essential to his salvation, the schoolmaster who, discharging a duty of the first utility, taught his children the rudiments of knowledge, were all felons, for whose apprehension a reward was offered, and who only remained in the country by connivance or concealment.

Their actual condition varied greatly at different times and in different counties. Some bishops lived chiefly on the Continent, and only ventured from time to time to come to Ireland. Others lived under assumed names, in some obscure farm-house among the mountains.2 At ordinations several hands were laid at the same moment on the head of the candidate, in order that if examined in the law courts he might be ignorant of the person who ordained him.3 Sometimes, too, at mass a curtain, for the same reason, was drawn between the priest and the worshippers.4 The priests, after the imposition of the abjuration oath, were at the mercy of the Government, for most of them had accepted the system of registration. Their names and addresses were known, and they were now called upon to take a new oath, which their Church pronounced to be sinful. The recusants were obliged to fly from their homes and conceal themselves. In many districts the Catholic worship for a time ceased, and many of the clergy abandoned their country and took refuge in Portugal. The persecution, however, was soon suspended; but the position of the priests remained completely precarious. The last Tory ministry of Anne was accused of being favourable to them, and it was alleged that many at this time came over in hope of a restoration, but in 1711 a proclamation was issued for the rigid execution of the laws against Papists.1 In January 1712 the Tory Chancellor, Sir Constantine Phipps, in a speech to the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of Dublin, strongly urged upon them the duty of ‘preventing public mass being said, contrary to law, by priests not registered, and that will not take the abjuration oath;’ and he complained that the negligence of the Corporation in enforcing the law had produced great licence throughout the kingdom.2

In the correspondence of the Government at this time we have many curious glimpses of the condition of the Church, and of the actual working of the law. Thus, on the proclamation for putting the laws against Popish priests and dignitaries into force, coming down to Armagh, in the beginning of the October of 1712, it was at once reported to Walter Dawson, a cousin of the secretary at the Castle, that there was in the neighbourhood a Popish Dean of Armagh. He proved to be an old bed-ridden man of ninety, long since sunk into idiocy, fed like a child, and living by charity. The old man was carried off to gaol, but the brother of his captor wrote to the Government, remonstrating at the inhumanity of the proceeding, and urging that it could not fail to bring serious discredit upon the law. A few months later we learn the sequel of the story in a letter from Walter Dawson to his cousin at the Castle, stating that in pursuance of the proclamation he had arrested Brien M'Guirk, Popish titular Dean of Armagh, that he had obtained witnesses against him, but that on February 13, before the Assizes had begun, his prisoner died in gaol, and Dawson hoped that this mischance will not deprive him of the reward of 50l. which he would have obtained on conviction.1 In the county of Sligo, at the same time, many Papists were compelled to answer on oath, when, where, and from whom they last heard mass, and whether they knew of any Catholic bishops, friars, or schools. It appears from their answers that they had heard mass from different registered but nonjuring priests, and that they were ignorant of the existence of any Catholic schools. One deponent, however, stated that a certain MacDermott was Bishop of Elphin, and one Rourke, of Killala, that the former lived somewhere in Roscommon, that the deponent had heard mass in Donegal, celebrated by friars, and that he believed there were several other friars in that county, though he did not know their address.2 In the September of 1712 a constable named Freeny informed the magistrates of the county Roscommon that during the last seven or eight months great multitudes of friars had appeared in the county, begging through the villages, and that it was a common discourse among the inhabitants that the old abbeys would soon be rebuilt, and the monks restored.3 In the preceding year a magistrate at Listowell, in the county of Kerry, gave the Government a curious picture of one of these itinerant friars. A man named Bourke, a native of Connaught, appeared in Kerry, ‘barefoot, bareheaded, and a staff in his hand, exhorting the common people to forsake their vices and lead a godly life. He had a catechism, which he read and pretended to expound to the people in Irish. … At the end of a discourse he usually set up a cry, very common in Connaught (as I am told), after which he would scourge himself until the blood ran down his back.’ The magistrate, hearing that he was followed by multitudes, and believed by the common people to work miracles, sent to apprehend him; but he succeeded in escaping, and was afterwards heard of, preaching to as many as 2,000 or 3,000 persons in the county of Limerick. As far as the magistrate was able to learn, he had no objects except the promotion of piety.4

A priest-hunter, named Edward Tyrrell—pronounced by the chancellor to be ‘a great rogue’—now appears frequently in the Government correspondence. In October 1712 he drew up some injunctions in Dublin against priests, boasted that he had taken many, but complained of the remissness and ill-will of the magistrates. He had seen the Popish primate, MacMahon, in Flanders, and believed him to be at this time in Ireland. At Cork two nonjuring priests, Patrick Carthy and William Henessey, had, upon the information of Tyrrell, been in the same year convicted and transported. In November 1712 he accompanied the magistrates of Ferbane, in search of priests, through a very wild and uninhabited country, to a house belonging to a Mr. John Coghlan, ‘in a most retired place, far distant from any high road;’ but though they found in the house a great number of beds and books and large quantities of provision, they found no human being except some women. From Clonmel, Tyrrell writes that he had ‘been disappointed in serving the Government in the county Wexford, by the ill management of some of the justices of the peace there,’ but that he hoped, if the Government would send down assistance, to be more successful at Clonmel. He had been present in the mass-house when Thomas Ennis, who was believed to be a bishop, celebrated high mass before a vast congregation, and had seen the people kiss his hand and also the ground on which he trod. Another priest, calling himself Burke, but whose real name was Salt, had, he believed, taken on himself the title of bishop.1 The career of this active priest-hunter was, however, prematurely shortened, for a paragraph in a Dublin newspaper of May 1713 announces that ‘this day Terrel, the famous priest-catcher, who was condemned this term for having several wives, was executed.’2

A magistrate, writing from Melford, in the county of Galway, in September 1712, announced that he had succeeded, with great difficulty, in apprehending and committing to Galway Gaol Father Neal Boyle. ‘Great numbers,’ he adds, ‘of the Irish, from all parts of the country, flocked to see him, and would even fain have bailed him.’ Some persons offered to lodge as much as 1,000l. as security for him.1 ‘I can make nothing,’ wrote another magistrate, from another part of the same county, ‘of this matter of the priests … they still abscond and keep out of the way, notwithstanding our utmost endeavours to bring them in. I am certain that they do not say mass in their usual place.’2 In the county of Down great efforts were made to seize James Hannal, who was looked upon ‘as the most dangerous priest in all the county.’ On the very night when the proclamation came down he disappeared, but in searching his room they found among his papers one summoning authoritatively several priests to meet him, under pain of excommunication; thus proving that he exercised jurisdiction. The magistrate believed him to be not a bishop, but a vicar-general. Rather more than three months later the same magistrate writes that Hannal had been at last arrested. ‘The Papists in this country are very much alarmed and disturbed at his being taken, and so exasperated at the man who took him that I have been obliged to give him arms to defend his house from their insults … The sub-sheriff has been with me since the priest's confinement, and told me that he had clapped a new arrest upon him for marrying a couple of our Church clandestinely, which crime I leave to the Government to consider whether it be bailable.’3 Captain Hedges writes at the same time, from Macroom, in the county Cork, that he had arrested the priest of the parish, and sent him to Cork Gaol, on his refusing to take the abjuration oath. ‘His name,’ writes the magistrate, ‘is Donagh Sweeney, a doctor of the Sorbonne, registered for this parish. I had him to Cork, in my Lord Wharton's time, when at an assizes he refused to take the oath, and was bailed in court by the judges, as many others were. Whether he be a dignitary, or it be on account of his being a doctor, the other priests used to pay him reverence above his fellows, and about half a year ago, after the death of a priest eight miles from hence, he sent, as I was informed, a young fellow as curate of the parish … but on my making search for him, he fled out of the kingdom, and was drowned on his passage. Another attempted to get up there since, but found the quarters not safe for him, and is gone.’ Dr. Sweeney desired the magistrate to testify to ‘his peaceable behaviour and civil carriage,’ and to implore the Government to accept bail. ‘Being old, feeble, and poor,’ writes Captain Hedges, ‘he fears he shall soon die in gaol, if he be detained there; and if he come out he will say mass, so that I mean not to make any request for him.’1 The high sheriff of the county Longford writes that at the last assizes in the county two men, named Patrick Ferall and John Lennan, were convicted of being Popish schoolmasters, and sentenced to transportation. He begs that the secretary will ‘let the Government know that there are two such men in the gaol of Longford, under the rule of transportation,’ and hopes they will speedily send over the order for the execution of the sentence, the prisoners being a charge upon the county.2

It is only by collecting a number of these isolated cases that it is possible to give a true and at the same time a vivid picture of the actual condition of the Catholics under the penal laws. The subject has been disfigured on both sides by much exaggeration; and as I am desirous that my readers should be able, as far as possible, to form their own judgments, I shall make no apology for relating a few more cases, which, however insignificant in themselves, will conduce to that end.

The year 1714, when the new dynasty came into power, and the year 1715, when rebellion was raging in Scotland, were naturally troubled years for the Catholics, and in the former a proclamation was issued for putting the laws strictly in force, and the mayors and sheriffs all over Ireland were required to send in reports about the prisoners under the Acts, in their gaols, and about the degree in which the law was observed. Very many of these reports are preserved, and they show that in most cases the priests succeeded in evading the vigilance of the magistrates, but also that the law was very far from a dead letter. Thus the high sheriff of Dublin reports that there are in the gaols of that county, ‘under sentence of transportation, two Popish schoolmasters, and no more.’1 From Lismore, the chief magistrate writes that he and his colleague had been making strenuous efforts to enforce the Acts, had summoned many Papists in each parish, had obliged them to swear when and where they last heard mass, but had been quite unable to arrest the priests. The absconding priest of his own parish was said to ordain, but as the magistrate was unable to get sworn information, he feared he could only prosecute him as a common priest.2 The sheriff of Limerick reports that one unregistered priest had been found guilty in his county, and had been in the gaol since the assizes of the previous year.3 The Mayor of Cork regrets that, though the magistrates there had frequently had information against priests, they never could take any since those who were convicted by the evidence of Tyrrell. For three weeks past they heard that all mass-houses in the city and suburbs were closed, and no priest appears.4 The Mayor of Carrickfergus believed that there was ‘no Popish priest inhabiting in that county.’5 At Kilkenny, one Martin Archer, a Popish priest, had been convicted of officiating without taking the abjuration oath, and had been sent to Waterford for transportation.1 The Mayor of Galway reports that two priests, named Alexander Lynch and Thomas M'Dermot Roe, had been convicted, and had been transported. There remains now only ‘James French, a regular Popish clergyman, who has lain a long time in gaol, being committed for high treason for returning from beyond seas after being transported; he could not hitherto be tried here, for want of a Protestant jury of freeholders, who are thin in this place.’2 In Dundalk, in Londonderry, in the county of Kerry, the gaols at this time contained no criminal under the Popery Acts. In the county of Leitrim no less than thirty-one priests and three Popish schoolmasters were presented by the grand jury, but the attempts to arrest them were unsuccessful. ‘It is very difficult,’ writes the high sheriff, ‘the much greater part of this county being Papist, to take priests or other ecclesiastical persons, and the few Protestants in it are afraid of meddling with them.’3

A similar difficulty, arising from the same cause, was found in many other quarters. Thus in Sligo, though the magistrates were active in putting the law in force against the priests, none of them were in gaol. ‘The Papists are so numerous in this county, that without the assistance of the army there is no good to be done.’4 A magistrate writes from Castlemaine, in the county Kerry, complaining to the Government that his district being wild, mountainous, and purely Popish, many priests live there with impunity, and that though the magistrates signed warrants for their apprehension, it was found impossible to execute them.5 In Kinsale one unregistered priest was arrested; ‘he is a drunken fellow, and was very favourable to the Protestants in King James's time,’ and he was commonly called King William's priest. ‘He had been twice sent to Cork Gaol, but came back like a bad penny.’6 A letter from Kinsale, about seven months later, probably alludes to the same person, when it states that the priest ‘who for many years officiated in this town is now in the gaol of Cork, under conviction, and has lain there for some months, as I am informed, afflicted with sickness.’1 In the King's county, although the magistrates had been for two years doing all in their power to arrest non-juror or unregistered priests, although several bills had been found by the grand jury, and several persons had been bound over to prosecute, they had only been able to procure the conviction of one priest. Two others were on bail, the magistrates having received affidavits that they were too ill to attend. Others, they were informed, still officiated, in spite of the warrants against them, and threats of violence against those who molested priests were not uncommon.2 In Kildare the magistrates had issued warrants against several priests and schoolmasters. They had all absconded, but every effort was being made to take them. A priest named James Eustace, under the sentence of transportation, had, however, been lying for several months in the gaol. The order for his transportation had not yet come down, and in the meantime he was kept in ‘close confinement.’3 In the county of Wicklow a priest, named M'Tee, had been convicted last summer of saying mass, and sentenced to transportation. The warrant for the execution of the sentence had come down, but for want of shipping in the port of Wicklow it was still unexecuted.4 The high sheriff gives an animated description of his efforts to suppress the devotions of the Papists at the shrine of St. Kevin, near the lovely shores of Glendalough. He had been informed that on St. Kevin's day the Catholics had ‘designed to convene a riotous assembly, from all parts of the kingdom, at the seven churches, contrary to Act of Parliament, in order to pay a superstitious worship to St. Kevin.’ The Popish assembly, though in legal phrase a ‘riotous’ one, appears to have been as harmless as possible, and intended for no other purpose than that of devotion, but it was resolved to suppress it. A posse comitatus was raised, and several of the magistrates, ‘being accompanied with a great number of Protestants, inhabitants of the said county, well mounted (but very badly armed), rode all night, and met at the seven churches by four in the morning of the 3rd of June inst., the usual anniversary day for that purpose. On approach of our forces the rioters immediately dispersed. We pulled down their tents, threw down and demolished their superstitious crosses, filled up and destroyed their wells, and apprehended and committed one Toole, a Popish schoolmaster.’ ‘The Protestant inhabitants of this county,’ adds the high sheriff, ‘are unanimous in their inclinations and resolutions, and will exert themselves with all diligence and zeal for His Majesty's service in putting all the laws in every respect strictly in force against the Papists.’1

The reports of 1714, coming in regularly from all parts of the kingdom, enable us to form a tolerably complete picture of the position of the Catholics at this time. But for many succeeding years no such reports were exacted, and we are reduced for our information on the subject to a few casual notices in the correspondence of the time. Thus, for example, in 1716 we find a man named Porter, writing from the county of Cork, asking for a pension from the Government, on the ground of ‘his diligence and care in prosecuting many of the regular and secular Popish clergy who have presumed to come from foreign nations into several parts of this kingdom, particularly those who have been sheltered in the county of Cork.’ He mentions especially that in the last August ‘he apprehended, at the peril of his life, and brought to justice two Popish priests … for saying mass, not registered, who obstinately refused to take the oaths, as likewise Owen McCarthy, a schoolmaster, who taught a school contrary to law,’ all of whom were convicted before Chief-Justice Foster. He dilates on the danger he incurred from Popish mobs, and upon his refusal of Popish bribes, and two years later he petitions for the reward due to him for the conviction of another priest.1 A certain Brody, convicted of being a Popish friar, had been transported. He returned to Ireland, and in 1717 the grand jury of Clare presented him as guilty of high treason, and offered a reward to anyone who would bring him ‘to condign punishment.’2 A man named Garzia, who is said to have been a priest either in Spain or in Portugal, but who now called himself a Protestant, was very active about 1720 in priest-hunting. Several priests were convicted upon his testimony, and he received some reward from the Government, and liberty to lodge in the Castle of Dublin to protect him from the insults of the Papists.3 In 1723, Carteret, being the Lord-Lieutenant, writes to the Lords Justices that the King of Spain had made, through his ambassador, an application in favour of an Augustinian monk named Comin, who had been lying ‘for some months in Wexford Gaol,’ ‘being under the rule of transportation.’ Carteret suggests that he should be permitted to transport himself to Spain.4 James Tankard was indicted in 1724 ‘for that he, being a Papist, kept a public school, and instructed youth without having taken the oaths pursuant to the statute.’ He confessed his crime and was ordered to be transported.5

About this time many monks came over to Ireland, and ventured secretly to establish small communities in different towns. In 1721 the Dominicans had thus settled in Dublin, Limerick, Cork, Cashel, Drogheda, Sligo, and Galway, and also in some country districts,6 and in 1727 a Protestant writer complains that the laws were in this respect so imperfectly executed that many such establishments were known to exist in the country. He mentions especially ‘a famous convent in Channel Row, Dublin, where the most celebrated Italian musicians help to make the voices of the holy Sisters more melodious, and many Protestant fine gentlemen have been invited to take their places in a convenient gallery to hear the performance.’1 In 1730 John Waldron made an affidavit that about twelve or thirteen years before, Timothy Sullivan, a reputed Papist, kept a school in Dublin, which the informant had attended, that Sullivan had also committed the crime of converting two students of Trinity College to Popery, that he had been tried, committed to prison, and ultimately transported, but that he had returned to Ireland and was now under another name teaching a school in a little town in the county Limerick.2

Towards the first quarter of the eighteenth century the spirit of persecution, as shown by the resolutions and other acts of the House of Commons, seems to have been very intense, but it soon after began to subside. Persecution can hardly be really stringent when met by the passive resistance of the great majority of a nation. The priests, with great courage, continued to defy the law. Many mass houses were built when the system of registration began; they continued to be employed though the officiating clergymen had never taken the oath of abjuration, and new ones, though usually of a very humble and unobtrusive description, were rising. Much depended on the character of the landlords, on the disposition of the neighbouring magistrates, and on the proportion the Catholics bore to the Protestants. Priests were nearly everywhere numerous, but in many districts the mass was still celebrated in some old barn or secluded hovel. Sometimes it was celebrated in the fields or on the mountains. A moveable altar was placed under the shadow of a great tree, and there the priest gathered the worshippers about him, and distributed to them the sacred elements.1 At the instigation of Primate Boulter, who was a bitter enemy of the Catholics, the House of Lords, in 1732, appointed a committee to inquire into the state of Popery in Ireland; and a report, based upon evidence sent in by the Protestant clergy in each district, was drawn up. It stated that there existed in Ireland 892 regular mass-houses, and 54 private chapels, served by 1,445 priests, that there were 51 friaries containing in all 254 friars, that there were 9 nunneries and not less than 549 Popish schools. Of the mass-houses 229 had been built since the death of George I. The Papists, it was added, attended their mass-houses as openly as the Protestants their churches, but the regulars lived in more concealment.2 It is probable that this report, being derived exclusively from a hostile clergy, rests largely on conjecture, but there is no doubt that a great organisation existed in defiance of law. O'Gallagher, Roman Catholic bishop of Raphoe, ventured in 1735 to publish seventeen Irish sermons at Dublin. Fagan, the Catholic Archbishop, resided in that city unmolested for many years. Bernard Macmahon, the Roman Catholic Primate, lived, from 1738 to 1749, under the name of Mr. Ennis, in a farmhouse in the county Meath.3

At the close of 1743 and the beginning of 1744 there were new apprehensions of a French invasion, which produced new severities against the Catholics. A proclamation was issued offering large rewards for the capture of Popish dignitaries, priests, and friars, and for the conviction of anyone giving refuge to a Popish bishop. The mass-houses in many quarters were closed, the monks were compelled to take flight, and the magistrates were directed by the Government to send in new reports about the number and position of the priests within their districts. I shall not trouble my readers with a detailed examination of these reports, but it may not be uninteresting to notice that there were still some districts in which Catholicism had scarcely obtained a footing. Thus the Provost of Bandon writes that ‘no priest or Papist was ever, since the late King James his reign, suffered to reside within this town. The inhabitants are all Protestants, and by our corporation laws no others can live among us.’1 In 1749, when Wesley visited the town, it was still exclusively Protestant, and it is a rather singular fact that it was one of the few towns in Ireland in which he encountered some vehement opposition.2 From Belturbet the mayor wrote, ‘We of this corporation have not one Popish family in our liberties.’3 In Carrickfergus there was still no resident priest, and there were only about thirty Popish families, ‘generally very poor.’4 In Coleraine and the adjoining districts one priest with his curate officiated over four parishes, ‘in the fields, there being no mass-houses in any of those places.5 In Middleton, in the Popish county of Cork, ‘no mass-house has been suffered.’6 As late as 1762, when Wesley visited Enniskillen, it was the boast of the citizens that their town did not contain a single Papist.7 In 1769, however, when he again visited it, he found that it had ‘lost its glorying, having now at least five Papists to one Protestant.’8

After 1744 the condition of the Catholics greatly improved. Chesterfield, during his brilliant vice-royalty, strongly discouraged all attempts to interfere with their worship, though he believed it possible to subvert their religion by the charter schools, and by the Gavel Act. He was accustomed to say that Ireland had much more to fear from her poverty than from her Popery, and that Miss Ambrose, who was then the reigning beauty in Dublin society, was the only really ‘dangerous Papist’ he had encountered. He refused, during the rebellion, to listen to those who counselled him to close the chapels, and to take coercive measures against the priests; and the Catholics being left in peace remained perfectly tranquil at a time when both England and Scotland were convulsed by civil war.1 The complete absence of Irish Catholic sedition during this critical period, the downfall of the Jacobite cause at Culloden, and the growing spirit of toleration among all classes led slowly to religious liberty. A terrible tragedy which took place in Dublin had some influence in accelerating it. A priest named Fitzgerald was celebrating mass before a large congregation in the upper room of an old house, when the floor gave way, the priest and nine members of his congregation were crushed to death, and several others were mortally wounded.2 From this time mass-houses, though without any regular legal sanction, appear to have been freely permitted, and religious worship was celebrated without fear. We have some valuable illustrations of the internal condition of the Catholic Church in Ireland in the middle of the century in the minutes of an examination, by the Government, of Nicholas Sweetman, the Catholic Bishop of Ferns, in 1751 or 1752. There were, he said, twenty-four bishops and archbishops in Ireland. There were a few foundations for students, and meat, drink, and clothing were provided them. They stayed there six years, and learnt ‘humanity alone,’ but seldom Greek, and were commonly ordained on the Continent. The Nuncio at Brussels decided all questions of disputed jurisdiction, and exercised a general supervision over the Irish Church. The Archbishops could not visit without a provincial council, and no such council had been held in his time. When he was parish priest his income the first year was 30l., the second year 34l., the third year 42l. As bishop he held the most valuable parish in his diocese, but its annual value was only 40l., a third of which he gave to his coadjutor. He received, however, some other dues, among others a guinea from each of his thirty-two parishes at the distribution of oils. Common parishes were usually worth about 30l. or 35l. Some priests got corn and other small articles from their people. There were a few friars of the Franciscan, Augustinian, and Carmelite orders. There was a friary at Wexford, but it contained only three inmates.1

The Church, though poor, ignorant, and suffering under both social and legal stigmas, was steadily advancing. A Bill was introduced into the House of Lords, in 1756, to revive the system of registration in a very severe form, providing that only one priest should be allowed in each parish, that the nomination of his successor should be vested with the grand juries, subject to the veto of the Privy Council and Lord-Lieutenant, that proselytism should be again strenuously forbidden, and that all Catholic bishops and friars should be banished; but the measure never became law, and it is remarkable that three archbishops and nine bishops voted against it. Proselytism, however, was still dangerous, and was sometimes punished. Thus in 1750 we find a priest named John Hely indicted for endeavouring to pervert a dying Protestant gentleman, and as the priest did not appear for trial, he was proclaimed by the grand jury, in the usual form, as ‘a tory, robber, and rapparee, of the Popish religion, in arms and on his keeping.’1

These examples may be sufficient to illustrate the position of the Catholic worship and clergy in Ireland during the first half of the eighteenth century. It is easy to understand how pernicious must have been the effect of this opposition between law and religion on the national character. In England many particular legislators or laws have been unpopular, but if we except a few years that followed the Reformation, and also the brief period of Puritan ascendency, law, as a whole, has always been looked upon as a beneficent agency representing the sentiments, securing the rights, and commanding the respect of the great body of the community. Generation after generation grew up with this sentiment, and reverence for law became in consequence a kind of hereditary instinct lying at the very root of the national character. The circumstances of Scotland were much less favourable, and in the first half of the eighteenth century it was certainly more lawless than Ireland. Until after the abolition of the hereditary jurisdictions English law was practically inoperative in the Highlands, but it was disliked chiefly as a form of restraint, without any peculiar inveteracy of hatred, and certainly without any moral reprobation. In Ireland, except in a few remote districts in the south and west, law was recognised as a real, powerful, omnipresent agent, immoral, irreligious, and maleficent. All the higher and nobler life of the community lay beyond its pale. Illegal combination was consecrated when it was essential to the performance of religious duty. Illegal violence was the natural protection against immoral laws. Eternal salvation, in the eyes of the great majority of the Irish, could only be obtained by a course of conduct condemned by the law.

It would, no doubt, be possible to exaggerate this aspect of the penal code. Irish history did not begin with the eighteenth century, and a long train of causes had before this time made the people but little amenable to law. Irish crime has very rarely been directly connected with religion, and its great ebullitions may usually be traced either to the pressure of extreme poverty, or to disputes about the possession or the occupancy of land. But the penal code had an influence which, if indirect, was at least enormously great. It rendered absolutely impossible in Ireland the formation of that habit of instinctive and unreasoning reverence for law which is one of the most essential conditions of English civilisation, and at the same time by alienating the people from their Government, it made the ecclesiastical organisation to which they belonged the real centre of their affections and their enthusiasm. It made the Irish people the most fervent Catholics in Europe, but yet it was not without an injurious influence on the moral side of their religion. No class among them had such moral influence as the priests, but few classes have ever subsisted under more demoralising conditions. Springing for the most part from the peasant ranks, sharing their prejudices and their passions, and depending absolutely on their contributions, miserably ignorant, and miserably poor, they were an illegal class compelled to associate with smugglers, robbers, and privateers, to whose assistance they were often obliged to resort in order to escape the ministers of justice. Their bishops were at the same time in a position of such peculiar danger that the exercise of ecclesiastical discipline was often almost impossible. It could hardly be expected that a class so situated should be either able or disposed to set themselves in bold opposition to disloyalty or popular crime. From the Government they could expect nothing beyond a contemptuous toleration, while every motive of self-interest and of ambition urged them to identify themselves thoroughly with the passions of their people. Their conduct, indeed, in many respects was very noble. The zeal with which they maintained the religious life of their flocks during the long period of persecution is beyond all praise. In the very dawn of the Reformation in Ireland, Spenser had contrasted the negligence of the ‘idle ministers,’ the creatures of a corrupt patronage—who, ‘having the livings of the country opened unto them, without pains and without peril, will neither for any love of God, nor for zeal for religion, nor for all the good they may do by winning souls to God, be drawn forth of their warm nests to look out into God's harvest’—with ‘the zeal of Popish priests,’ who ‘spare not to come out of Spain, from Rome and from Remes, by long toil and dangerous travelling hither, where they know peril of death awaiteth them, and no reward or riches is to be found, only to draw the people unto the Church of Rome.’1 The same fervid zeal was displayed by the Catholic priesthood in the days of the Cromwellian persecution, and during all the long period of the penal laws. Their singular freedom from those moral scandals that have so often accompanied a celibate clergy has been admitted by the most malevolent of their detractors. The strength of their principles was sufficiently shown by their almost unanimous refusal of the abjuration oath, and by the extreme paucity of conversions among them at a time when a large reward was offered for the apostacy of a priest. But their influence, though sometimes exerted to save life and to repress disorder, has not on the whole been favourable to law. Inheriting the traditions, they have exhibited many of the tendencies, of an illegal class, and have sometimes looked, if not with connivance, at least with a very insufficient abhorrence upon crimes which as religious teachers it was their first duty unsparingly to denounce.2

The moral influence of the penal laws was not less baneful in that part which related to property. The scandalous, unscrupulous misrepresentation of those writers who have described the code as a mere dead letter can hardly be more strikingly evinced than by glancing at the place which property cases under the code occupy in the proceedings of the Irish law courts. Even in trade the Catholics were, as we have seen, by no means free from disabilities, and the law gave their Protestant rivals such means of annoying them that they were compelled to acquiesce in the most illegal exactions. In ‘the case of the Roman Catholics of Ireland,’ which was drawn up by Dr. Nary in 1724, we have an illustration of the galling injustice to which the Roman Catholic tradesman was subject. ‘At present,’ he writes, ‘there is not one freeman or master of any corporation, nor of any other of the least charge (bating that of a petty constable), of the Roman Catholic religion in all the kingdom; neither are any of the tradesmen or shopkeepers of this religion suffered to work at their respective trades, or sell their goods in any of the cities of Ireland, except they pay exorbitant taxes, which they call quarterage, to the respective masters of their corporations; and upon refusal of paying the same (because there is no law for it) they are sure to be summoned to take the oath of abjuration, in order to frighten them into compliance.’1 In the most Catholic parts of Ireland many of the most lucrative trades were long a strict monopoly of the Protestants, who refused to admit any Catholic as an apprentice.1

But the condition of the Catholic tradesman was far preferable to that of a Catholic landlord or tenant. In 1739 a petition was presented to the sovereign by the Catholics, in which they represented in touching terms how they were ‘daily oppressed by the number of idle and wicked vagrants of this nation, by informing against their little leases and tenements, if the law gets any hold thereof,’ and they asserted that two-thirds of the business of the four courts in Dublin consisted of Popish discoveries.2 How successfully the process of spoliation was carried on is shown by a Protestant writer in the same year, who tells us ‘that it is confessed that there are not twenty Papists in Ireland who possess each 1,000l. a year in land, and the estates belonging to others of a less yearly value are proportionately few.’3 About thirty years later a Protestant lawyer named Howard undertook to make a collection of all the cases relating to property, under the Popery laws, which were deserving of publication, but he found the task much too considerable, and he resolved to confine himself to a selection of important and typical cases. Yet that selection contains upwards of a hundred.4 A whole profession of spies and informers was called into being. A Protestant gentry grew up, generation after generation, regarding ascendency as their inalienable birthright; ostentatiously and arrogantly indifferent to the interests of the great masses of their nation, resenting every attempt at equality as a kind of infringement of the laws of nature. The social distinction was carefully preserved. A Catholic could not carry the arms that were still the indispensable sign of the position of a gentleman, without a licence, which it was often very difficult to obtain;1 and he only kept his hunter or his carriage-horses by the forbearance of his Protestant neighbours. A story is told of a Catholic gentleman who once drove into Mullingar at the time of the assizes in a carriage drawn by two beautiful horses. A man stopped the carriage, and tendering ten guineas, in accordance with the Act of William, claimed the horses for his own. The gentleman, drawing a brace of pistols from his pocket, shot the horses dead upon the spot.2 The class feeling, indeed, produced by the code was much stronger than the purely theological oppugnancy. Archbishop Synge truly wrote, ‘There are too many amongst us who had rather keep the Papists as they are, in an almost slavish subjection, than have them made Protestants, and thereby entitled to the same liberties and privileges with the rest of their fellow subjects.’3

And behind all this lay the great fact that most of the land of the country was held by the title of recent confiscation, and that the old possessors or their children were still living, still remembered, still honoured by the people. It was the dread of a change of property springing from this fact that was the real cause of most of the enactments of the penal code. It was this that paralysed every political movement by making it almost impossible for it to assume national dimensions. It was this which gave the landlord class most of their arrogance, their recklessness, and their extravagance. It was this above all that made them implacably hostile to every project for ameliorating the condition of the Catholics. In 1709 the House of Commons presented an address to the Queen, urging strongly the fatal consequences of reversing the outlawries of any persons who had been attainted for the rebellions either of 1641 or of 1688, on the ground that any measure of clemency would shake the security of property. ‘The titles of more than half the estates,’ they said, ‘now belonging to the Protestants depend on the forfeitures in the two last rebellions, wherein the generality of the Irish were engaged.’1

This fact lies at the very root of the social and political history of Ireland. In Scotland the greater part of the soil is even now in the possession of the descendants of chiefs whose origin is lost in the twilight of fable. In England, notwithstanding the fluctuations which great industrial fortunes naturally produce, much of the land of the country is still owned by families which rose to power under the Tudors, or even under the Plantagenets. In both countries centuries of co-operation, of sympathy, of mutual good services, have united the landlord and tenant classes by the closest ties. But in Ireland, where the deplorable absence of industrial life marks out the landlords as preeminently the natural leaders of the people, this sympathy has been almost wholly wanting. Only an infinitesimal portion of the soil belongs to the descendants of those who possessed it before Cromwell, and the division of classes which was begun by confiscation has been perpetuated by religion, and was for many generations studiously aggravated by law. Its full moral significance was only felt at a much later period, when political life began to stir among the great masses of the people. It was then found that the tendons of society were cut, and no fact has contributed more to debilitate the national character. In an army, if once the confidence of the soldiers in their officers is destroyed, the whole organisation is relaxed, discipline gives way, military courage rapidly sinks, and troops who under other circumstances would have been full of fire, enthusiasm, and steady valour, degenerate into a dispirited and vacillating mob. With nations it is not very different. Few things contribute so much to the strength and steadiness of a national character as the consciousness among the people that in every great struggle or difficulty they will find their natural leaders at their head—men in whom they have perfect confidence, whose interests are thoroughly identified with their own, who are placed by their position above most sordid temptations, to whom they are already attached by ties of property, tradition, and association. A nation must have attained no mean political development before it can choose with intelligence its own leaders, and it is happy if in the earlier stages of its career the structure of society saves it from the necessity, by placing honest and efficient men naturally at its head. The close sympathy between the Scotch people and the Scotch gentry in most of the national struggles has been one great cause of that admirable firmness of national character which learnt at last to dispense with leadership. In Ireland, in spite of adverse circumstances, this attachment between landlord and tenant in many particular instances was undoubtedly formed, but in general there could be no real confidence between the classes. When the people awoke to political life, they found their natural leaders their antagonists; they were compelled to look for other chiefs, and they often found them in men who were inferior in culture, in position, and in character, who sought their suffrages for private ends, and who won them by fulsome flattery, false rhetoric, and exaggerated opinions. And the same evil is only too apparent in literature. That proportion of the national talent and scholarship which ought in every country to be devoted to elucidating the national history, has in Ireland not been so employed. Something, as we shall hereafter see, of real value was done in this direction in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and not a little has been accomplished within the last thirty years, but still Irish history is shamefully chaotic, undigested, and unelaborated, and it presents in this respect a most humiliating contrast to the history of Scotland. The explanation is very obvious. For a long period the classes who possessed almost a monopoly of education and wealth, regarded themselves as a garrison in a foreign and a conquered country. Their religion, their traditions, and the tenure by which they held their properties, cut them off from all real sympathy with the people. The highest literary talent was accordingly diverted to other channels, and Irish history has passed to a lamentable extent into the hands of religious polemics, of dishonest partisans, and of half-educated and uncritical enthusiasts.

The effect of all this upon the character, the politics, and the literature of the Irish Catholics is very obvious. Its effect on the ruling caste was not less pernicious. As I have already noticed, one of the most successful parts of the English system of government has been its action upon the higher classes. It has succeeded to so great a degree in associating dignity with public service, and in forming a point of honour in favour of labour, that it has induced a larger proportion of men of rank and fortune to utilise for the public good the great opportunities of their position than can be found in any other nation. In Ireland a long train of complicated, connected, and irresistible causes operated in the opposite direction. The upper classes were exposed to all the characteristic vices of slaveholders, for they formed a dominant caste, ruling over a population who were deprived of all civil rights and reduced to a condition of virtual slavery. They were separated from their tenants by privilege, by race, by religion, by the memory of inexpiable wrongs, and it was one of the worst moral features of their situation that a chief element of their power lay in their complete control of the administration of justice. At the same time, the penal laws secured a perpetual influx into their ranks of men of lax principles or tarnished honour. The poor remained steadfast and devoted to their religion, but many of the more educated Catholics conformed, in order to secure their estates, to enter professions, or to free themselves from social and political disabilities. Apostacy was the first step in the path of ambition. In 1727, Primate Boulter complained that ‘the practice of the law, from the top to the bottom, is at present mostly in the hands of new converts, who give no further security on this account than producing a certificate of their having received the sacrament in the Church of England or Ireland, which several of those who were Papists at London obtain on their road hither, and demand to be admitted barrister in virtue of it on their arrival; and several of them have Popish wives, and mass said in their houses, and breed up their children Papists. Things are at present so bad with us, that if about six should be removed from the bar to the bench here, there will not be a barrister of note left that is not a convert.’1 It was stated in 1739 that the Act by which the lands of Papists descended in gavelkind, unless the eldest son conformed to the Established Church, ‘hath brought over more Papists than anything else that has been calculated for the same end.’2 A very able writer on the state of Ireland in 1738 observed that since the Penal Act of 1703, ‘about 1,000 persons (not a few of whom are possessed of considerable fortunes) have declared themselves converts.’1 The converts were carefully registered, and the list in the eighty-five years that followed the Act of 1703 comprises about 4,800 names.2 It is no breach of charity to assume that the overwhelming majority were actuated simply by temporal motives, and differed chiefly from their Catholic neighbours in the greater looseness of their principles. Add to this that the absenteeism of the great proprietors made the abdication of duty a fashionable thing and was imitated as far as possible in every rank, that the political condition of the country excluded Irish gentlemen from most of the fields of honourable ambition, that the dignity of the peerage, with the social influence it commands, was habitually made the reward of corruption, that most of the highest posts in the government and the professions were disposed of by scandalous jobbery, and that the legal suppression of the wool trade had thrown multitudes of all ranks into smuggling, and the corruption of the Irish gentry will not appear surprising.

The vices of Irish society have been often described, and they lay at the surface. The worst was the oppression of the tenantry by their landlords. The culprits in this respect were not the head landlords, who usually let their land at low rents and on long leases to middlemen, and whose faults were rather those of neglect than of oppression. They were commonly the small gentry, a harsh, rapacious, and dissipated class, living with an extravagance that could only be met by the most grinding exactions, and full of the pride of race and of the pride of creed. Swift and Dobbs bitterly lament this evil, and nearly every traveller echoed their complaint. Chesterfield, who as Lord-Lieutenant studied the conditions of Irish life with more than ordinary care, left it as his opinion that ‘the poor people in Ireland are used worse than negroes by their lords and masters, and their deputies of deputies of deputies.’1 We are assured on good authority that it was ‘not unusual in Ireland for great landed proprietors to have regular prisons in their houses for the summary punishment of the lower orders,’ that ‘indictments against gentlemen for similar exercise of power beyond law are always thrown out by the grand jurors,’ that ‘to horsewhip or beat a servant or labourer is a frequent mode of correction.’2 What the relations of landlord and tenant were in the first half of the eighteenth century may be easily inferred from the description which Arthur Young gives of its state in 1776, when the memory of the confiscations had in a great degree faded, and when religious animosity was almost extinct. He tells us that ‘the age has improved so much in humanity that even the poor Irish have experienced its influence, and are every day treated better and better.’ Yet, even at this time, he assures us, ‘the landlord of an Irish estate inhabited by Roman Catholics is a sort of despot, who yields obedience, in whatever concerns the poor, to no law but that of his will. … A long series of oppressions, aided by many very ill-judged laws, have brought landlords into a habit of exerting a very lofty superiority, and their vassals into that of an almost unlimited submission. Speaking a language that is despised, professing a religion that is abhorred, and being disarmed, the poor find themselves in many cases slaves even in the bosom of written liberty. … A landlord in Ireland can scarcely invent an order which a servant, labourer, or cotter dares to refuse to execute. Nothing satisfies him but an unlimited submission. Disrespect, or anything tending towards sauciness, he may punish with his cane or his horsewhip with the most perfect security. A poor man would have his bones broken if he offered to lift his hand in his own defence. Knocking down is spoken of in the country in a way that makes an Englishman stare. Landlords of consequence have assured me that many of their cotters would think themselves honoured by having their wives and daughters sent for to the bed of their master. … It must strike the most careless traveller to see whole strings of cars whipped into a ditch by a gentleman's footman, to make way for his carriage. If they are overturned or broken in pieces, it is taken in patience. Were they to complain, they would perhaps be horsewhipped. The execution of the laws lies very much in the hands of the justices of the peace, many of whom are drawn from the most illiberal class in the kingdom. If a poor man lodges his complaint against a gentleman, or any animal that chooses to call itself a gentleman, and the justice issues a summons for his appearance, it is a fixed affront, and he will infallibly be called out.’1

Duelling in the eighteenth century was very frequent in England, but the fire-eater and the bravo never attained the position in English life which was conceded him in Ireland. The most eminent statesmen, the most successful lawyers, even the fellows of the university, whose business was the training of the young, were sometimes experienced duellists. An insolent, reckless, and unprincipled type of character was naturally formed. Drunkenness and extravagance went hand in hand among the gentry, and especially among the lesser gentry, and the immense consumption of French wine was deplored as a national calamity. Berkeley noticed that while in England many gentlemen with 1,000l. a-year never drank wine in their houses, in Ireland this could hardly be said of any who had 100l. a-year.1 ‘Nine gentlemen in ten in Ireland,’ wrote Chesterfield, ‘are impoverished by the great quantity of claret which, from mistaken notions of hospitality and dignity, they think it necessary should be drunk in their houses,’2 and he declared that except in providing that their claret should be two or three years old, the Irish gentry thought less of two or three years hence than any people under the sun.3 ‘Would not a Frenchman give a shrug,’ said an anonymous writer in the middle of the century, ‘at finding in every little inn Bordeaux claret, and Nantz brandy, though in all likelihood not a morsel of Irish bread?’4 In Ireland, as in Scotland, there were many stories of decanters which, having no flat bottom, would never stand still; of wine glasses with their stems broken off, in order that they should be emptied as soon as they had been filled; of carousals that were prolonged day and night, till the most hardened drinkers were under the table. Horse-races were so extravagantly numerous that the Parliament in 1739, pronouncing them a great source of the idleness of the farmers, artificers, and day labourers of the kingdom, endeavoured to diminish their number by enacting that no horses should run for prizes, wagers, or plates of less value than 20l., under pain of the confiscation of the horse together with a fine of 20l. imposed on the owner and also of a fine of 5s. on every spectator.1 There ran through the whole country a passion for gambling, sporting, drinking, cockfighting, acting, and dancing; a strong preference of brilliancy, generosity, and reckless daring to public spirit, high principle, sobriety, order, and economy; a rude but cordial hospitality, a general love of ostentation and extravagance. A class whose property was not derived from the accumulated savings of industrious ancestors, but from violent and recent confiscations, and who held that property under the sense of perpetual insecurity, were very naturally characterised by a reckless extravagance, and it was equally natural that the traditions of that extravagance should descend to their successors. Sir W. Temple only expressed the sentiments of all intelligent well-wishers of Ireland when he urged those who presided over its destinies to make it their first aim ‘to introduce a vein of parsimony through the country in all things that are not of native growth.’2

This extravagance did not run through every form of expenditure. Houses, especially in the country districts, were often extremely mean in proportion to the fortunes of their owners.3 There was little of the orderly beauty, the domestic economy, the quiet comfort of English life; but horses, servants, and idle retainers were absurdly numerous; the tables exhibited a profusion of dishes unknown in England, and a coarse, disorderly ostentation was very prevalent. The dramatist Cumberland, whose father was appointed, by Lord Halifax, Bishop of Clonfert, in the county of Galway, has left us a curious picture of Connaught country life in his description of a prominent nobleman in a wild district on the borders of the Shannon. Though now an old man, Lord Eyre had never been out of Ireland. Proprietor of a vast but unproductive tract of soil, inhabiting a spacious but dilapidated mansion, he lived with a lavish but inelegant hospitality. His table groaned with abundance, but order and good taste in arrangement were little thought of. ‘The slaughtered ox was hung up whole, and the hungry servitor supplied himself with his dole of flesh sliced from off the carcass.’ ‘From an early dinner to the hour of rest he never left his chair, nor did the claret ever quit the table.’ He had no books. He cared little or nothing for conversation. His chief pride was in his cocks, which were considered the best in Ireland. Furious quarrels, ending in duels, were frequent among his neighbours, and they were sometimes inflamed by religious or political animosity, when in a mixed company some drunken squire, laying his pistol, cocked, upon the table, called for the toast of the ‘glorious, pious, and immortal memory.’ The neighbouring town was practically ‘unapproachable by any officers or emissaries of the civil power, who were universally denounced as mad dogs and subject to be treated as such.’ Yet this wild and neglected population was very far from being unamenable to reason. The bishop, in spite of the ridicule of his neighbours, tried to reclaim them, and he soon succeeded, by a little patience and a little tact, in introducing over an extensive district English husbandry, and even a large measure of English comfort, and in making himself one of the most popular men in the country.1

Another curious but somewhat more favourable sketch of Irish country life is furnished by Mrs. Delany. Travelling from Dangan to Killala, in 1732, she stopped at Newtown Gore, in a house which she described as nothing more than a large cabin. ‘It belongs,’ she writes, ‘to a gentleman of 1,500l. a year, who spends most part of his time and fortune in that place. The situation is pretty, being just by the river side, but the house is worse than I have represented. He keeps a man cook, and has given entertainments of twenty dishes of meat! The people of this country don't seem solicitous of having good dwellings or more furniture than is absolutely necessary. Hardly so much. But they make it up in eating and drinking. I have not seen less than fourteen dishes of meat for dinner, and seven for supper, during my peregrination, and they not only treat us at their houses magnificently, but if we are to go to an inn they constantly provide us with a basket crammed with good things. No people can be more hospitable or obliging, and there is not only great abundance, but great order and neatness.’1

In the towns the law was generally respected, but in the more remote country districts, where it was virtually in the hands of an uncontrolled oligarchy of landlords, it was constantly disregarded. As Protestants, as magistrates, and as landlords their power was almost unlimited, and like all absolute power it was often grossly abused. Duels were never, abductions were rarely, punished. Smuggling did not carry with it the faintest moral stigma. In cases where class interests were at stake, law was often defied with complete impunity. Many of the landlords, Lord Moles-worth assures us, ‘taking advantage of the unsettled state of the times, and of the fearfulness of Papist tenants, who dare not contest with them,’ had even stopped the common roads for the convenience of their estates.2 It is not easy to say whether such a condition of society was more demoralising to the Protestants, among whom it produced the vices of monopolists and of slaveowners, or to the Catholics, among whom it produced those of conspirators and outlaws. No reasonable person will wonder that a country with an agrarian history like that of Ireland should have proved abundantly prolific in agrarian crime.

There is no class who have improved more conspicuously or more incontestably during the last hundred and fifty years than the country gentry both in England and Ireland, and the Squire Westerns of the one country were hardly of a higher type than the Lord Eyres of the other. Irish magistrates, scattered thinly over wild, hostile, Catholic districts, and stimulated to vigilance by the constant fear of rebellion or outrage, were placed under circumstances likely to elicit in a really superior man some high qualities of administration and command; and their correspondence with the Government, which is still preserved, exhibits a very respectable level of culture and intelligence. School and university education among the Irish Protestants in the first half of the eighteenth century appears to have been fully equal to what then existed in England; and the great prevalence of social habits did something to soften the tone both of manners and of feeling. But on the whole, and in the most important respects, the country gentry in Ireland were greatly inferior to the corresponding class in England. They inherited traditions of violence, extravagance, and bigotry. Their relations to their tenants were peculiarly demoralising. Their circumstances were eminently fitted to foster among them the vices of tyranny; and a narrow oligarchy, disposing almost absolutely of county revenues and of political power in a country where nearly all political and professional promotion were given by favour, and where all government was tainted by monopoly, soon learnt to sacrifice, habitually, public to private interest. Spendthrift and drunken country gentlemen, corrupt politicians, and jobbing officials were, indeed, abundantly common in England in the first half of the eighteenth century, but in Ireland the tone of dissipation was more exaggerated, and the level of public spirit was more depressed. There was little genuine patriotism, and political profligacy was sometimes strangely audacious. The shameful jest of the politician who thanked God that he had a country to sell is said to be of Irish origin, and it reflected only too faithfully the prevailing spirit of a large section of the gentry.

These vices were more or less diffused through the whole class, but they attained their extreme development in the small landlords, and especially in the middlemen. At a time when in England economical causes were steadily weeding out the poorer and less cultivated members of the squirearchy, and replacing them by large landlords, the tendency in Ireland was precisely opposite. Absenteeism drew away a great part of the richer landlords, while the middlemen rapidly multiplied. A hybrid and ambiguous class, without any of the solid qualities of the English yeomen, they combined the education and manners of farmers with the pretensions of gentlemen, and they endeavoured to support those pretensions by idleness, extravagance, and ostentatious arrogance. Men who in England would have been modest and laborious farmers, in Ireland sublet their land at rack-rents, kept miserable packs of half-starved hounds, wandered about from fair to fair and from race to race in laced coats, gambling, fighting, drinking, swearing, ravishing, and sporting, parading everywhere their contempt for honest labour, giving a tone of recklessness to every society in which they moved.1 An industrial middle-class, which is the most essential of all the elements of English life, was almost wholly wanting; and the class of middlemen and squireens, who most nearly corresponded to it, were utterly destitute of industrial virtues, and concentrated in themselves most of the distinctive vices of the Irish character. They were the chief agents in agrarian tyranny, and their pernicious influence on manners, in a country where the prohibition of manufactures had expatriated the most industrious classes and artificially checked the formation of industrial habits, can hardly be overrated. They probably did more than any other class to sustain that race of extravagance which ran through all ranks above the level of the cottier,1 and that illiberal and semi-barbarous contempt for industrial pursuits, which was one of the greatest obstacles to national progress.2 False ideals, false standards of excellence, grew up among the people, and they came to look upon idleness and extravagance as noble things, upon parsimony, order, and industry as degrading to a gentleman.

These are the signs of a society that was profoundly diseased, and it is not difficult to trace the causes of the malady. It must, however, be added that there was another and a very different side of Irish life. Its contrasts have always been stronger than those of England, and though the elements of corruption extended very far, it would be a grave error to suppose that in the first half of the eighteenth century everything in Ireland was frivolous and corrupt, that there was no genuine intellectual life, no real public spirit moving in the country. Considering how unfavourable were the circumstances of the nation, the number of its eminent men, in the period of which I am writing, was very respectable. During a considerable portion of that period Swift was illuminating Dublin by the rays of his transcendent genius, while Berkeley, who was scarcely inferior to Swift in ability and incomparably his superior in moral qualities, who was, indeed, one of the finest and most versatile intellects, and one of the purest characters of the eighteenth century, filled the See of Cloyne. Archbishop King is still faintly remembered as a writer by his treatise ‘On the Origin of Evil,’ and Browne, who was Provost of Trinity College and afterwards Bishop of Cork, published among other works an elaborate treatise ‘On the Limits of Human Understanding,’ which had once a considerable reputation and which is remarkable as anticipating the doctrine of a modern school about the generic difference of Divine and human morality and the impossibility of human faculties conceiving either the nature or the attributes of God.1 Among the other clergy of the Irish Church were Parnell the poet, who was Archdeacon of Clogher, and Skelton, who, though now nearly forgotten,2 took a prominent part in the Deistical controversy, and has also left several valuable tracts on Irish and on miscellaneous subjects. The greatest name among the Irish Nonconformists was Francis Hutcheson. He was of Scotch extraction, and was educated at Glasgow, but he was born in Ireland in 1694, lived there the greater part of his early life, and published there his ‘Letters of Hibernicus,’ directed against the philosophy of Mandeville, his ‘Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue,’ and his ‘Essay on the Conduct of the Passions and Affections.’ He kept a school at Dublin, and was warmly befriended by Archbishop King; but in 1729 he was summoned, as professor of moral philosophy, to the University of Glasgow, where he won for himself a place in the history of the human mind that can hardly perish, for he was the founder of that school of Scotch philosophy which was adorned by the great names of Reid, Adam Smith, and Dugald Stewart. Leland, who was one of the most popular writers on the side of orthodoxy in the Deistical controversy, though born in England, lived all his life in Ireland, and was for many years pastor of a Presbyterian Church in Dublin. The ‘View of the Principal Deistical Writers,’ by which he is now chiefly remembered, appeared in 1754. Toland and Sir Hans Sloane, though Irish by birth, lived all their lives in England, and neither Sterne, Goldsmith, nor Burke had risen to notoriety by the middle of the century; but Henry Brooke, the author of ‘Gustavus Vasa,’ and of ‘The Fool of Quality,’ and the first editor of the ‘Freeman's Journal,’ lived and wrote in Dublin. The great wave of the experimental philosophy had passed the Channel. ‘The Dublin Philosophical Society’ was founded in 1684 by the illustrious Molyneux, and under the presidency of Sir William Petty, after the model of the Royal Society, with which it placed itself in connection, and to which it regularly transmitted abstracts of its proceedings. A botanic garden, a museum, and a laboratory were speedily created, and numerous scientific papers were published. The civil war interrupted the labours of the Society, but it revived in Trinity College, in 1693, and continued for many years a centre of scientific interest in Dublin.1 In 1744 a ‘Physico-Historical Society’ was founded, ‘to make inquiries into the natural and civil history of the kingdom.’ A critical and literary review of some merit, containing a record both of English and foreign literature was also founded in Dublin in 1744, and continued to appear every quarter until the death of its editor, in 1751. It was conducted by a refugee clergyman named Droz, who officiated in a French church in Dublin. The economical condition of the country was investigated with much skill in a series of tracts on trade, agriculture, and political arithmetic, by Arthur Dobbs, the Member for Carrickfergus. This remarkable man carried through Parliament in 1732 an Act that proved of great importance, for the purpose of encouraging the enclosure of waste lands, and the planting of trees; and his promotion soon after to the post of Governor of Carolina was a great loss to Ireland.1

The most important, however, of the signs of public spirit in Ireland was the Dublin Society, which was founded in 1731, chiefly by the exertions of Thomas Prior, and of Samuel Madden a very benevolent and very able clergyman of the Established Church, for the purpose of improving husbandry, manufactures, and other useful arts. The part which this society plays in the history of Irish industry during the eighteenth century is a very eminent one. It attracted to itself a considerable number of able and public-spirited members, and it was resolved that each member, on his admission, should select some particular branch, either of natural history, husbandry, agriculture, gardening, or manufacture, should endeavour as far as possible to make himself a complete master of all that was known concerning it, and should draw up a report on the subject. The chief object of the society was as far as possible to correct the extreme ignorance of what was going on in these departments in other countries which, owing to poverty, to want of education or enterprise, and to the isolated geographical position of the country, was very general. The society published a weekly account of its proceedings, collected statistics, popularised new inventions, encouraged by premiums agricultural improvement and different forms of Irish industry, brought over from England a skilful farmer to give lessons in his art, set up a model farm and even model manufactories, and endeavoured as far as possible to diffuse industrial knowledge through the kingdom. The press cordially assisted it, and for some years there was scarcely a number of a Dublin newspaper that did not contain addresses from the society with useful receipts or directions for farmers, or explanations of different branches of industry, and at the same time offers of small prizes for those who most successfully followed the instructions that were given. Thus—to give but a few out of very many instances—we find prizes offered for the best imitation of several different kinds of foreign lace; for the best pieces of flowered silk, of damask, of tapestry, of wrought velvet; for the farmers who could show the largest amount of land sown with several specified kinds of seed, or manured with particular kinds of manure; for draining, for reclaiming unprofitable bogs, for the manufacture of cider, of gooseberry wine, and of beer brewed from Irish hops; for the best beaver hats made in the country; for the baker who baked bread or the fisherman who cured fish according to receipts published by the society; for every cod crimped in the method that was in use in England and Holland, which was brought on a certain day to the market on Ormond Quay.

Such methods of encouragement would be little suited to a high stage of commercial or agricultural activity, but they were eminently useful in a country where, owing to many depressing circumstances, industrial life was extremely low. For many years the society was supported entirely by the voluntary subscriptions of the Irish gentry, and Chesterfield said with truth that ‘it did more good to Ireland with regard to arts and industry than all the laws that could have been formed.’ In 1746, however, it obtained a small annual bounty of 500l. from the Civil List. In 1750 it received a Royal Charter, and it was afterwards assisted by considerable grants from the Irish Parliament.1 About 1758, when there was still no public institution for the encouragement of art in England, the Dublin Society began to undertake this function in Ireland and it discharged it during many years with great zeal. At an early period of Irish history, as the round towers and the relics of churches and monasteries existing in the country abundantly show, a real and remarkably original school of architecture existed in Ireland; but it perished in the anarchy that followed the English invasion,2 and the circumstances of the country were for many generations such that it was scarcely possible that any art could have arisen. In the first half of the eighteenth century three Irish portrait-painters—Jervas, Howard, and Bindon—had risen to some distinction, and the first, who is now chiefly remembered by the beautiful, but exaggerated, eulogy of Pope, was for some years at the head of his profession in London. One form of architectural ornamentation—that of stucco tracery upon ceilings—was carried in the eighteenth century to a very high degree of perfection in Dublin houses. A school of engraving also of some merit had grown up, and Henry Luttrell, a native of Dublin, is said to have been the first person who practised the art of mezzotinto in London.1 There were, however, probably scarcely any specimens of good painting in Ireland in the beginning of the eighteenth century, though a traveller who visited it in 1775 noticed that at that time Lord Moira had a large and fine private gallery in Dublin, and that there were also some good pictures in the Houses of Lord Charlemont, Mr. Stewart, and Mr. Henry.2 The Dublin Society established an academy under the presidency of a drawing-master named West, who had studied on the Continent under Boucher and Vanloo. It also collected models, gave premiums, assisted poor artists, and held annual exhibitions. George Barrett, who was once noted as a landscape painter, and who was one of the founders of the Royal Academy in London, was educated in the schools of the Dublin Society. At the exhibition of 1763 much enthusiasm was excited by a picture representing the baptism by St. Patrick of the King of Cashel, the work of a hitherto unknown artist, the son of very poor parents at Cork. It was the first painting submitted to the public by James Barry, who in a few years gained a place in the foremost rank of British artists.3

The exertions of the society in stimulating industrial life were powerfully seconded by Berkeley, who was on terms of close intimacy with Madden and Prior. It was chiefly to support their efforts that he published his ‘Querist,’ a work which is in itself sufficient to give him a place among the greatest economists of his age. Probably no other book published in the first half of the eighteenth century contains so many pregnant hints on the laws of industrial development, or anticipates so many of the conclusions of Adam Smith and of his followers. Two points in this admirable work may be especially noticed as evincing both the sagacity and the rare liberality of this Protestant bishop. He clearly perceived the disastrous folly of the system which was divorcing the Catholics from all ownership of the soil, and suggested that they should be permitted to purchase forfeited land as tending to unite their interest with that of the Government. He also advocated their admission into the National University, in order that they might attain the highest available education without any interference with their religion. The first part of the ‘Querist’ was published anonymously in 1735 and was edited by Dr. Madden.

The liberal views of Berkeley, though very remarkable, were by no means unparalleled. It was impossible for any candid and intelligent man not to perceive that the degraded condition of the Catholic population lay at the root of the calamities of Ireland, and that the nation, as Madden truly said, resembled ‘a paralytic body where one half of it is dead or just dragged about by the other.’ Unfortunately, however, the charter schools had given a false direction to the energies of philanthropists, and the policy of educating the Catholics broke down because it was thought necessary to combine that education with a system of direct proselytism assisted by enormous bribes. This scheme was for a time very popular, and was supported by the upper classes with an energy not common in Ireland. Fifteen bishops and seventeen peers, as well as a large number of the other gentry, signed the petition to the King asking for a charter for the schools. Large subscriptions were collected. The corporations of Dublin, Waterford, Kilkenny, Cashel, and Trim made grants out of their estates for encouraging the schools. Carteret recommended the project to the Duke of Newcastle as one which the principal persons of Ireland had very much at heart, and Primate Boulter devoted himself with great zeal to carrying it into effect. The extreme importance of separating the children from all intercourse and correspondence with their Catholic relations, and of removing them to remote parts of the country was continually and emphatically urged. In 1746, when there were great rejoicings throughout Ireland on account of the battle of Culloden, many of the more patriotic gentry who desired to discourage the excessive drinking which was common, agreed on this occasion to refrain from wine and to devote the money they thus saved to the support of the charter schools.1

There were, however, some traces of a wiser and more liberal spirit, and Ireland can furnish a few remarkable contributions to the history of the growth of religious tolerance in the eighteenth century. In 1723 Viscount Molesworth published a pamphlet called ‘Some Considerations for the Promotion of Agriculture and Employing the Poor,’ in which he exposed with a skilful and unsparing hand the gross defects of Irish agricultural economy, and at the same time proposed a series of remedies, which, if they had been carried out, might have made Ireland a happy and a prosperous country.2 He desired that in every county a school of husbandry should be established, under an expert master, for the purpose of teaching the best English methods of agriculture, that these schools should be thrown open to children of every creed, that all distinctive and proselytising religious teaching should be excluded from the course of education, but that opportunities should be provided for the children of each religion daily and freely to practise their own religious rites. Such a system of eminently practical and at the same time perfectly unsectarian education, would have met the greatest wants of the country, and have laid the foundation for unlimited progress. With equal boldness and sagacity Lord Molesworth proposed to deal with the question of the position of the priesthood. He expatiated upon the extreme hardship of the burden which rested upon the wretched cottier in having to pay both his own clergy and those of the Establishment, and he argued with much reason that there could be no real progress in Ireland until the mass of the tenantry were raised above the level of extreme destitution. He accordingly proposed that the State should charge itself with the payment of the priests. Such a policy would put an end to their ambiguous and illegal position, which was a source of innumerable moral and religious evils. It would do more than any other single measure to attach them to the Government. It would improve the economical condition of the country by freeing the cultivators of the soil from an oppressive burden; and, as its benefits would be felt and understood in the meanest hovel, it would do very much to create a feeling of loyalty through the Catholic population. In common with most Irish writers, Lord Molesworth advocated the establishment of public granaries under Government supervision, like those of Geneva and Flanders; but he was greatly in advance of his time in contending that the only efficient remedy for political corruption was to be found in a real Parliamentary reform, enlarging the basis of representation, and extending the suffrage from the freeholders to the leaseholders.

This pamphlet excited much discussion in Ireland, and it would be difficult to name any other more rich in a wisdom beyond the age in which it appeared. Another, though less remarkable, example of the same kind was a sermon which was preached before the Irish House of Commons in 1725, by Edward Synge, on the anniversary of the rebellion. The preacher was prebendary of St. Patrick and son of that Archbishop Synge who for many years exercised a great influence over all Irish policy, and it was published by order of the House. Taking for his text the words ‘Compel them to enter in,’ which had been so often employed in justification of persecution, and adopting substantially the reasoning of Locke and of Hoadly, Synge proceeded to examine with considerable ability the duty of a Protestant legislature in dealing with a Roman Catholic population. Coercion, he maintained, which is directed simply against religious teaching as such, is always illegitimate and useless. Its only good end could be to release men from error, but this involves a change of judgment, which cannot be effected by external force. ‘All persons, therefore, in a society, whose principles in religion have no tendency to hurt the public have aright to toleration.’ The case, however, of religions whose principles are directly hostile to the State is different, and Synge devoted much of his discourse to examining what measures a legislator may justly take against the professors of such a religion. He contends that he may limit their property, prevent them from making new acquisitions, exclude them from fortified places, forbid large meetings, and provide ‘that their children be educated under public inspection, that so, being free from all early ill impressions, they may, when they come to a full use of their reason, be disposed to choose those principles which, with regard to religion, are true.’ He may even in extreme cases remove them from the society, but only with a full liberty to transport their effects. Considering the Catholics, then, merely as erring men, ‘no Church, no magistrate has any right to use force against them.’ The sole justification of the penal laws is to be found in the civil dangers arising from the tenets of Catholicism. Two of these tenets are especially, and in the highest degree, dangerous—the belief that the Pope may depose heretical princes and that he may absolve subjects from their oath of allegiance. But while it is quite certain that these doctrines had been taught and acted on in the Church, it was also certain that the whole body of the Gallican Catholics repudiated them. Synge accordingly urged that the Irish Catholics should be given an opportunity of in like manner disclaiming them, and that if they did so ‘they should at least be allowed some benefit of toleration.’ The best method of dealing with Popery was to establish a society like that for the Propagation of the Gospel, and to make full provision for the support and residence of the Protestant clergy, and for the education of the poor under public inspection.

These sentiments appear to have been shared by several of the higher clergy. It is worthy of notice that some of them exhibited, on more than one occasion, a greater moderation in dealing with Catholics than either the Irish House of Commons or the English Government. I have quoted in a former chapter some instances of the atrocious provisions that may be found in measures against Catholics, which were proposed, but which never became law. Among them one of the worst was a clause in a Government measure, with the specious title of ‘A Bill for the better security of the King's person,’ which was brought before the Irish Parliament in 1697. In a country where the magistrates were exclusively Protestant, where religious animosity was then raging with the most furious intensity, where avarice and intolerance continually went hand in hand, and where it was the bitterest grievance of the dominant sect that a small part of the confiscated land had just been restored to its former owners, it was proposed to empower the majority of the magistrates, at any quarter sessions, to summon before them any person they chose, and to compel him, on pain of prœemunire—that is to say, of perpetual imprisonment and the confiscation of all his goods—to renounce the superiority of any foreign power in ecclesiastical and spiritual matters within the realm. Considering the circumstances of the country, a measure of baser or more cruel tyranny could hardly have been proposed; but it was carried, though not without resistance, through the Commons. In the Lords, however, it soon became apparent that the preponderance of opinion was against it. King, who for his sufferings under James II. and his great services to the Protestant cause in the struggle of the Revolution, had lately been appointed Bishop of Derry, and who during his whole long life was one of the most unflinching opponents of Jacobitism, was prominent in opposition,1 and seven other bishops voted with him in the majority against the Bill.1 In the same humane and honourable spirit they laboured to mitigate the severity and diminish the number of the attainders after the Revolution,2 and they retarded and protested against some of the savage provisions of the penal Acts of Anne.3 At a later period Archbishop Synge, who was one of the most active writers against the Catholic theology, desired that the oath of abjuration should be altered so as to meet the objections of the Catholics, and that they should thus be drawn within the pale of legal toleration;4 and we have already seen his opposition to the infamous Bill of 1723, by which the House of Commons proposed that all priests who, after a certain date, refused to take that oath of abjuration which their Church had authoritatively pronounced to be sinful, should be hung, drawn, and quartered.5 Other bishops showed a similar spirit.6 Downes, the Bishop of Elphin, brought forward, in January 1725–6, a proposal to put an end to the complete anarchy into which this department of legislation had fallen, by licensing 600 priests for the wants of the Catholic population in Ireland, by permitting one Catholic bishop to reside in Ireland for the purpose of ordaining new priests, and by allowing all Catholic students, or at least those who were intended for the priesthood, to receive their education in Trinity College, without the obligation of attending chapel, or performing any other duties inconsistent with their faith.1

This last proposal, when we consider the period in which it was made, is very remarkable. The difficulties, however, of carrying such measures through such a body as the Irish Parliament, and of obtaining the assent of such a body as the English ministry, were at this time insuperable, and Archbishop Boulter was violently opposed to the Catholic interest. The spirit of tolerance, however, steadily grew, and it was accompanied by a strong desire, based upon economical motives, to permit Catholics to invest money in land. Being almost restricted to trade, they had gradually acquired a pre-eminence in this field, and at a time when the dearth of money was extremely great, and when agriculture was suffering bitterly in consequence, it was found that a very large, if not the greater part of the ready money of the country was in their hands.1 The more ardent Protestants added that the law dividing equally the landed property of the Catholic among his children, unless the eldest consented to conform, had produced more converts than any other agency, and they predicted that if the Catholics were permitted to take beneficial leases with the restriction that these should descend by preference to the children who embraced Protestantism, the movement of proselytism would be greatly stimulated.2

The laws were at the same time suffered to fall in a great degree, over large districts and for long periods of time, into comparative desuetude. The decline of religious fanaticism among the Protestants, their indignation at the commercial disabilities, and at English patronage and pensions, as well as the natural feelings produced by neighbourhood and private friendships, all conspired to this result. Besides this, over a large part of Ireland there were fifteen or twenty Catholics for one Protestant, and it was impossible to carry out such a system as the penal code without a perpetual employment of military force. Society cannot permanently exist in a condition of extreme tension, and it was necessary for the members of both religions to find some way of living together in tolerable security. The very features of the Irish character that make it slow to remedy abuses—its careless, easy good-nature, its good-humoured acquiescence in the conditions in which it finds itself—were here of great service, and a lax and tolerant administration gradually mitigated the severity of intolerant laws. The aspect of the country was not altogether what might be inferred from a mere perusal of the statute-book. The division of classes was very profound, but it may be doubted whether class hatred in Ireland was ever as intense as that which existed between the French peasants and the French nobles at the time of the Revolution, or as that which at a still later period divided the middle and working classes in great French cities. The Catholic worship for many years, and in many parts of Ireland, was celebrated with little less publicity than the Protestant worship. Galway and Limerick were intended to be exclusively Protestant, but early in the eighteenth century they were almost exclusively Catholic, and in spite of the laws and of many isolated acts of persecution the country was full of friars, Catholic schoolmasters, and unregistered priests.

The code was in most respects extremely demoralising, yet some fine qualities of friendship, confidence, and honour were fostered under its influence. Though the law expressly condemned such evasions, a few Catholic families preserved their land undivided, and even purchased fresh land by the assistance of Protestants, in whom the nominal ownership was vested, and the confidence was scarcely ever abused.1 Protestant friends enabled the Catholic parent to evade the savage law which doomed his young children, if left orphans, to a Protestant education. In 1714, a violently anti-Catholic magistrate wrote to the Castle, complaining bitterly of the difficulty of seizing the arms of Catholics, on account of the conduct of Protestants. ‘I know very well,’ he wrote, ‘that putting the laws in execution against the Papists is very acceptable. But I am at a loss to know what I shall do, when Protestants, under the colour of lending, borrowing, and changing arms with the Papists, have obstructed Papists’ arms from coming to the hands of the justices of the peace, according to the intent of the law and the proclamation.’1 Local magistrates often discouraged prosecutions, furnished information to the threatened Catholics, or strained the letter of the law to its extreme limits in their favour. A story is told of a Protestant, who, tendering the legal five guineas, endeavoured to seize a valuable horse which a Catholic was riding. A rapid blow stretched the aggressor on the earth, and the magistrate to whom the case was referred justified the Catholic, on the ground that he was defending himself against a robber, as the law gave the Protestant no right to the bridle which he had seized. A Catholic bishop, who was much persecuted by a priest-hunter, is said to have owed his safety to a neighbouring magistrate, who not only gave warning whenever a pursuit was contemplated, but even gave the hunted prelate a refuge in his own house. An upper room, looking on the garden, was kept habitually locked. A report spread abroad that it was haunted, effectually kept the servants at a distance, and in times of danger the bishop climbed into it by a ladder, which lay in the garden beneath the window.2 The extreme paucity of Protestants in many districts made the employment of Catholics almost essential, and we sometimes find them acting in capacities we should least have expected. Thus in 1711, at the time when the houghing of cattle was carried to a great extent in the neighbourhood of Galway, and when the authorities of the county were discussing a project for seizing all the boats upon Lough Corrib, the high sheriff wrote to the Government, ‘Most of the constables in this county are Papists, and it is hard to trust them in this affair.’1 Hardly any figure is supposed to represent the worst aspects of the Irish Established Church more clearly than the tithe-jobber, who was accustomed to purchase from the clergyman, for a fixed sum, his right to tithes, and whose exactions often drove the poor cottiers to the verge of despair. Lord Molesworth, in 1723, speaks in strong terms of the oppression exercised by members of this class. The tithe-jobber, he says, ‘is commonly a litigious, worthless, wrangling fellow, a Papist, and a stranger.’2

The Government, too, though very bad, was not without its redeeming features. A Parliament, representing almost exclusively a single class in a country where religious disqualifications and recent confiscations made class divisions very profound, was naturally on many questions exceedingly selfish and arbitrary. But an assembly of resident landlords can hardly fail to take a real interest in the material welfare of their country, or to bring a large amount of valuable experience to legislation. Many measures of practical, unobtrusive utility were passed, and a real check was put upon the extravagance of the executive. Had there been no Parliament—had the whole revenues of the country remained under the control of such statesmen as Newcastle or Walpole, there can be no reasonable doubt that the condition of Ireland would have been much worse. Some tens of thousands of pounds were annually squandered in scandalous pensions or sinecures; but still taxation was moderate, and it had little tendency to increase. A very able Englishman who was Chief Secretary under Lord Townshend has observed that since the first year of George II., for the space of fifty years, the only additional taxes imposed in Ireland were some inconsiderable duties, appropriated to the payment of the interest and principle of the debt, and some small duties, the produce of which was specifically assigned to the encouragement of tillage or of some particular branch of Irish trade or manufacture.1 As in England, there were some constituencies which were really open, and in the first half of the eighteenth century the expenses at elections appear to have been extremely moderate. Some interesting letters are preserved describing a severely contested election which took place in 1713 in the great county of Londonderry, in which Joshua Dawson, the active Secretary of the Castle, was defeated. The writer speaks of the cost of this election as very great, yet he estimates the expenses of the victorious party at only 400l.2 The viceroys lived for most of their term of office in London; but the great mass of Government correspondence which is still extant shows that the Government officials discharged the ordinary duties of administration with considerable industry and fidelity.

The character of the poorer classes was forming under circumstances that were on the whole exceedingly unfavourable. It was impossible, as we have seen, that the habits of respect for law which had been already created in England, and which were gradually forming in Scotland, should have grown up under the shadow of the penal laws, and the conditions of the nation were equally unfavourable to the political and to the industrial virtues. But other qualities, which are, perhaps, not less valuable, were developed under the discipline of sorrow. In the earlier periods of Irish history, English writers constantly speak of the licentiousness of the people, and of their extreme laxity in marriage. Spenser, Campion, and Davis dwelt upon it with equal emphasis. But in the eighteenth century such complaints had wholly ceased. Under the influence of the religious spirit which was now pervading the nation, a great moral revolution was silently effected. A standard of domestic virtue, a delicacy of female honour, was gradually formed among the Irish poor higher than in any other part of the empire, and unsurpassed, if not unequalled, in Europe. The very extension of poverty and mendicancy had produced among them a rare and touching spirit of charity, a readiness to share with one another the last crust and the last potato. Domestic affections were more than commonly warm. The memorable fact that in the present century not less than twenty millions of pounds have been sent back in the space of twenty years by those who went for the most part as penniless emigrants to America, to their relatives in Ireland,1 illustrates a side of the Irish character which was already noticed by many observers; and in modern times, concerning which alone we can speak with confidence, infanticide, desertion, wife-murder, and other crimes indicating a low state of domestic morality have been much rarer among the Irish poor than among the corresponding classes in England. The division of classes in the middle of the eighteenth century was still very deep, but very often where the landlord lived among his people, and treated them with kindness, the old clan spirit was displayed in an attachment as fervid, as uncompromising, and as enduring as was ever shown by the Highlander to his chief.

Religious convictions acquired a rare depth and earnestness. A strangely chequered character was forming, tainted with some serious vices, very deficient in industry and energy, in self-reliance, self-respect, and self-control, but capable of rising, under good leadership, to a lofty height of excellence, and with its full share both of the qualities that attract and fascinate the stranger, and of the qualities that brighten and soften the daily intercourse of life. It was at once eminently passionate and eminently tenacious in its gratitude and its revenge. It rewarded kindness by a complete and life-long devotion. It bowed before the arrogance and transient violence of authority with a tame submission and absence of resentment scarcely conceivable to the Englishman, but when touched to the quick by serious wrong it was capable of the most savage, secret, and deliberate vengeance. A traditional religion strengthened its retrospective tendencies. No people brooded more upon old wrongs, clung more closely to old habits, were more governed by imagination, association, and custom. There was a strange and subtle mixture of rare stability of tendency and instinct, and of a vein of deep poetic, religious melancholy, with a temperament in many respects singularly buoyant, light-hearted and improvident, with great quickness, vividness, and versatility both of conception and expression. Catholicism, compelled to take refuge in mud hovels, associated with sordid poverty and degradation, and obliged to avoid every form of ostentation, was unable to become the instrument of æsthetic culture which it has proved in other lands; but every traveller was struck with the natural courtesy, the instinctive tact, the gay, hospitable, and cheerful manners of the Irish peasant, and with the contrast they presented to the deplorable poverty of his lot. The country was naturally very fertile, and the cheapness of provisions in some districts was probably exceeded in no part of Europe.1 This cheapness was, no doubt, on the whole, an evil, and arose from the wretched condition of the country, which made it impossible for the farmer to find sufficient markets for his produce; but it, at least, secured in good years an abundance of the first necessaries of life, and stimulated the spirit of hospitality in the poorest cabin.1 Owing, probably, to the dense, smoky atmosphere of the hovels, in which a hole in the roof was often the only chimney, blindness was unusually common, and innumerable blind fiddlers traversed the land, and found a welcome at every fireside. Dancing was universal, and the poor dancing-master was one of the most characteristic figures of Irish life. Hurling was practised with a passionate enthusiasm. The love of music was very widely spread. Carolan, the last, and it is said the greatest, of the old race of Irish bards, died in 1737. When only eighteen, he became blind through the small-pox, and he spent most of his life wandering through Connaught. His fame now rests chiefly upon tradition, but all who came in contact with him appear to have recognised in him a great genius; and Goldsmith, who was fascinated by his music in early youth, retained his admiration for it to the end of his life.2

The gradual extension of roads was at the same time steadily reclaiming the west and south from Highland anarchy; the traditions and habits of civil war were slowly subsiding both among the conquerors and the conquered, and religious bigotry more rapidly diminished. It is, of course, impossible to mark out with accuracy the stages of this progress, but the fact is altogether incontestable. Few legislative bodies ever exhibited a more savage intolerance than the Irish Parliament in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. In the last quarter of the same century the Irish Parliament showed itself far more liberal in its dealings with Catholics than the Parliament of England, and measures which would have been utterly impossible in England were carried with scarcely perceptible difficulty in Ireland. Duelling and drinking, though both scandalously prevalent, were steadily diminishing, and, before the century had closed, the Irish gentry appear to have been little more addicted to the latter vice than the corresponding class in England.1

What I have written may be sufficient to show that Irish life in the first half of the eighteenth century was not altogether the corrupt, frivolous, grotesque, and barbarous thing that it has been represented; that among many and glaring vices some real public spirit and intellectual energy may be discerned. It may be added that great improvements were at this time made in the material aspect of Dublin.

In the middle of the eighteenth century it was in dimensions and population the second city in the empire, containing, according to the most trustworthy accounts, between 100,000 and 120,000 inhabitants. Like most things in Ireland, it presented vivid contrasts, and strangers were equally struck with the crowds of beggars, the inferiority of the inns, the squalid wretchedness of the streets of the old town, and with the noble proportions of the new quarter, and the brilliant and hospitable society that inhabited it. The Liffey was spanned by four bridges, and another on a grander scale was undertaken in 1753. St. Stephen's Green was considered the largest square in Europe. The quays of Dublin were widely celebrated, but the chief boast of the city was the new Parliament House, which was built between 1729 and 1739 for the very moderate sum of 34,000l., and was justly regarded as far superior in beauty to the Parliament House of Westminster. In the reigns of Elizabeth and of the early Stuarts the Irish Parliament met in the Castle under the eyes of the Chief Governor. It afterwards assembled at the Tholsel, in Chichester House, and during the erection of the Parliament House in two great rooms of the Foundling Hospital. The new edifice was chiefly built by the surveyor-general, Sir Edward Pearce, who was a member of the Irish Parliament, and it entitles him to a very high place among the architects of his time.1 In ecclesiastical architecture the city had nothing to boast of, for the churches, with one or two exceptions, were wholly devoid of beauty, and their monuments were clumsy, scanty, and mean; but the college, though it wanted the venerable charm of the English universities, spread in stately squares far beyond its original limits. The cheapness of its education and the prevailing distaste for industrial life which induced crowds of poor gentry to send their sons to the University, when they would have done far better to send them to the counter, contributed to support it,2 and in spite of great discouragement, it appears on the whole to have escaped the torpor which had at this time fallen over the universities of England. It is said before the middle of the century to have contained about 700 students.3 A laboratory and anatomical theatre had been opened in 1710 and 1711. The range of instruction had been about the same time enlarged by the introduction of lectures on chemistry, anatomy, and botany, and a few years later by the foundation of new lectureships on oratory, history, natural and experimental philosophy. The library was assisted by grants from the Irish Parliament. It was enriched by large collections of books and manuscripts bequeathed during the first half of the eighteenth century by Palliser, Archbishop of Cashel, by Gilbert, the Vice-Provost and Professor of Divinity, and by Stearn, the Bishop of Clogher, and its present noble reading-room was opened in 1732.1 Another library—comprising that which had once belonged to Stillingfleet—had been founded in Dublin by Bishop Marsh, and was incorporated by Act of Parliament in 1707.

The traces of recent civil war and the arrogance of a dominant minority were painfully apparent. The statue of William III. stood as the most conspicuous monument opposite the Parliament of Ireland. A bust of the same sovereign, bearing an insulting distich reflecting on the adherents of James,2 was annually painted by the corporation. The toast of ‘the glorious, pious, and immortal memory’ was given on all public occasions by the Viceroy. The walls of the House of Lords were hung with tapestry representing the siege of Derry and the battle of the Boyne. A standing order of the House of Commons excluded Catholics even from the gallery.3 The anniversaries of the Battle of Aghrim, of the Battle of the Boyne, of the Gunpowder Plot, and, above all, of the discovery of the rebellion of 1641, were always celebrated. On the last-named occasion, the Lord-Lieutenant went in full state to Christ's Church, where a sermon on the rebellion was preached. At noon the great guns of the Castle were fired. The church bells were rung, and the day concluded with bonfires and illuminations. Like London and Edinburgh, Dublin possessed many elements of disorder, and several men were killed and several others hamstrung or otherwise brutally injured in savage feuds between the Ormond and the Liberty boys, between the students of the University and the butchers around St. Patrick, between the butchers and the weavers, and between the butchers and the soldiers. As in most English towns, bull-baiting was a very popular amusement, and many riots grew out of the determination of the populace to bait cattle that were being brought to market. Occasionally, too, in seasons of great distress there were outbreaks against foreign goods, and shops containing them were sacked. The police of the town seems to have been very insufficient, but an important step was taken in the cause of order by the adoption in 1719 of a new system of lighting the streets after the model of London, which was extended to Cork and Limerick. Large lanterns were provided at the public expense to be lighted in the dark quarters of the moon from half an hour after sunset till two in the morning, in the other quarters of the moon during which there had previously been no lights, whenever the moon was down or overshadowed.1 There was not much industrial life, but the linen trade was flourishing, a Linen Hall was built in 1728, and there was also a considerable manufactory of tapestry and carpets.

Among the higher classes there are some traces of an immorality of a graver kind than the ordinary dissipation of Irish life. In the early Hanoverian period a wave of impiety broke over both islands, and great indignation, and even consternation was excited in Ireland by the report that there existed in Dublin, among some men of fashion, a club called the ‘Blasters,’ or ‘The Hell-fire Club,’ resembling the Medmenham brotherhood which some years later became so celebrated in England. It was not of native growth, and is said to have derived its origin, or at least its character, from a painter named Peter Lens, who had lately come into the kingdom, and who was accused of the grossest blasphemy, of drinking the health of the devil, and of openly abjuring God. A committee of the House of Lords inquired into the matter in 1737, and presented a report offering a reward for the apprehension of Lens, and at the same time deploring a great and growing neglect of Divine worship, of religious education, and of the observance of Sunday, as well as an increase of idleness, luxury, profanity, gaming, and drinking.1 The existence of the hell-fire club has been doubted, and the charges against its members were certainly by no means established, but there can be little question that the report of the Lords' Committee was right in its censure of the morals of many of the upper classes. The first Lord Rosse was equally famous for his profligacy and for his wit;2 and in 1739 Lord Santry was arraigned and found guilty of murder by the House of Lords, for having killed a man in a drunken fray.

The number of carriages in proportion to the population of the city was unusually great. It is said that as many as 300 filled with gentlemen sometimes assembled to meet the Lord-Lieutenant on his arrival from England.3 There were about 200 hackney-carriages and as many chairs,1 and it was noticed as a singularity of Dublin, which may be ascribed either to the wretched pavement or to the prevailing habits of ostentation, that ladies scarcely ever appeared on foot in the streets.2 They were famous for their grace in dancing, as the men were for their skill in swimming.3 The hospitality of the upper classes was notorious, and it was by no means destitute of brilliancy or grace. No one can look over the fugitive literature of Dublin in the first half of the eighteenth century without being struck with the very large amount of admirable witty, and satirical poetry that was produced. The curse of absenteeism was little felt in Dublin, where the Parliament secured the presence of most of the aristocracy and of much of the talent of the country; and during the residence of the Viceroy the influence of a court, and the weekly balls in the winter time at the Castle, contributed to the sparkling, showy character of Dublin society. Dorset, Devonshire, and Chesterfield were especially famous for the munificence of their hospitality, and the unnatural restriction of the spheres of political and industrial enterprise had thrown the energies of the upper classes to an unhealthy degree into the cultivation of social habits.

On the whole, however, the difference between society in Dublin and in London was probably much less than has been supposed. An English lady who moved much in both, and whose charming letters furnish some of the best pictures of Irish life in the first half of the eighteenth century, writing from Dublin in 1731, says: ‘As for the generality of people that I meet with here, they are much the same as in England—a mixture of good and bad. All that I have met with behave themselves very decently according to their rank; now and then an oddity breaks out, but never so extraordinary but that I can match them in England. There is a heartiness among them that is more like Cornwall than any I have known, and great sociableness.’1 Arthur Young, nearly half a century later, when drawing the dark picture I have already quoted, of the reckless and dissipated character of the Irish squireens, took care to qualify it by adding that ‘there are great numbers of the principal people residing in Ireland who are as liberal in their ideas as any people in Europe,’ and that ‘a man may go into a vast variety of families which he will find actuated by no other principles than those of the most cultivated politeness and the most liberal urbanity.’2 The ostentatious profusion of dishes and multiplication of servants at Irish entertainments which appeared so strange to English travellers, and which had undoubtedly bad moral effects, were merely the natural result of the economical condition of the country which made both food and labour extremely cheap.3 Another difference, which was perhaps more significant, was the greater mixture of professions and ranks;4 and the social position of artists and actors was perceptibly higher than in England. Handel was at once received with an enthusiastic cordiality, and Elrington, one of the best Irish actors of his day, refused an extremely advantageous offer from London in 1729 chiefly on the ground that in his own country there was not a gentleman's house to which he was not a welcome visitor.5

Booksellers were numerous; and the house of Faulkner, the friend and publisher of Swift, was for many years a centre of literary society. For the most part, however, they were not occupied with native productions, but were employed in fabricating cheap editions of English books. As the Act of Anne for the protection of literary property did not extend to Ireland, this proceeding was legal, the most prominent English books were usually reprinted in Dublin, and great numbers of these reprints passed to the colonies. It is an amusing fact that when Richardson endeavoured to prevent the piracy by sending over for sale a large number of copies of ‘Pamela’ immediately on its publication, he was accused of having scandalously invaded the legitimate profits of the Dublin printers.1 ‘The Dublin News-letter,’ which seems to have been the first local newspaper, was published as early as 1685. ‘Pue's Occurrences,’ which obtained a much greater popularity, appeared in 1703, and there were several other papers before the middle of the century.2

The taste for music was stronger and more general than the taste for literature. There was a public garden for musical entertainments, after the model of Vauxhall; a music-hall, founded in 1741; a considerable society of amateur musicians, who cultivated the art and sang for charities;3 a musical academy, established in 1755, and presided over by Lord Mornington. Foreign artists were always warmly welcomed. Dubourg, the violinist, the favourite pupil of Geminiani, came to Dublin in 1728, and resided there for many years. Handel, as we have seen, first brought out his ‘Messiah’ in Dublin. Roubiliac, at a time when he was hardly known in England, executed busts for the University. Geminiani came to Dublin about 1763. Garrick acted ‘Hamlet’ in Dublin before he attempted it in England. There were two theatres, and a great, and indeed extravagant, passion for good acting. Among the dramatists of the seventeenth century Congreve and Farquhar were both Irish by education, and the second, at least, was Irish by birth.1 Among the Irish actors and actresses who attained to great eminence on the English stage during the eighteenth century we find Wilkes, who was the contemporary and almost the equal of Betterton; Macklin, the first considerable reviver of Shakespeare; Barry, who was pronounced to be the best lover on the stage; Mrs. Woffington, the President of the Beefsteak Club; Mrs. Bellamy, whose memoirs are still read; as well as Elrington, Sheridan, and Mrs. Jordan. The Dublin theatres underwent many strange vicissitudes which it is not necessary here to record, but it may be mentioned as a curious trait of manners that when Sheridan had for a time reformed the chief theatre it was warmly patronised by the Protestant clergy. ‘There have been sometimes,’ he stated, ‘more than thirty clergymen in the pit at a time, many of them deans or doctors of divinity, though formerly perhaps none of that order had ever entered the doors, unless a few who skulked in the gallery disguised.’ In 1701 the fall of a gallery in the theatre during the representation of ‘The Libertine,’ one of the most grossly immoral of the plays of Shadwell, had produced for a time a religious panic, and the play was for twenty years banished from the stage; but in general there appears to have been little or nothing of that puritanical feeling on the subject which was general in Scotland, and which in the present century became almost equally general among the clergy of Ireland.1

The civilisation of the nation was concentrated to a somewhat disproportionate extent in the capital, yet provincial life had already in its leading features more of its modern aspect than has sometimes been imagined. Resident country gentlemen, and especially improving country gentlemen, were much rarer than in England, but there were few counties in which some did not exist, and there were some parts of Ireland where they were numerous.2 Considerable attention was paid to the improvement of the roads. After about the first quarter of the eighteenth century the journals of the House of Commons are crowded with notices of works of this kind in almost every part of the country. When Whitefield visited Ireland for the first time in 1738 he was especially struck with the cheapness of the provisions and the goodness of the roads.3 An English traveller in 1764, who traversed the three provinces of Ulster, Leinster, and Munster, states that he found no serious difficulty during his journey, that the roads were in general tolerably good for riding, but by no means equal to those in England for carriages, and that there were turnpikes on all the principal highways.4 In 1776 Arthur Young found their condition greatly improved, and described them as, on the whole, superior to those in England.5 Inland navigation was also considerably extended, especially in the counties of Armagh and Down.

There were the usual meetings of country gentlemen at the assizes; there were county races and county fairs, and long before the middle of the eighteenth century Dublin actors were accustomed to make their rounds by Mullingar, Clonmel, Carlow, and other county towns.1 A taste for private theatricals was very general about the middle of the century, and they were a favourite amusement in country houses.2 In the vicinity of Dublin highwaymen were numerous, but in the rest of the country they appear to have been at least as rare as in England, and in the worst periods of political disturbance and of Whiteboy outrages travellers were usually unmolested.3 The strong belief in the value of mineral waters which was then at its height in England extended to Ireland, and appears to have given some stimulus to travelling.4 The deer which once wandered in numbers over the mountains were growing rare. The last wolf was shot in Kerry in 1710.5 With the increased facilities of locomotion, and in part perhaps through the operation of the charter schools, the Irish tongue over large districts was rapidly disappearing. A very competent authority in 1738 states that not more than one person in twenty was ignorant of English;6 and another writer, who described the County of Down a few years later, declared that Irish was there only prevalent among the poorer Catholics, and that they showed a strong desire that their children should learn English.7 In the preceding century Bedell and Boyle had clearly seen that to translate the Bible and to spread the doctrines of Protestantism in the native language was the true method of encountering Catholicism in Ireland. The Lower House of Convocation in 1703 passed a resolution desiring the appointment in every parish of an Irish-speaking minister. Archbishop King supported the plan. Trinity College made arrangements for eaching Irish to students. The English Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge gave some assistance; and two or three clergymen devoted themselves with eminent success to preaching to the people in their own tongue. The Government, however, which desired to eradicate the language, discountenanced their efforts. Several of the bishops in consequence threw obstacles in their way, and in the general religious apathy of the first Hanoverian reigns, they appear to have entirely ceased.1

A feeble provincial press had arisen, but it seems as yet to have been confined to three cities. The first Cork newspaper was published about 1716, and three or four others existed, though probably not simultaneously, in the next forty years. The ‘Waterford Flying Post’ was founded in 1729, the ‘Belfast News-letter’ in 1737, and English newspapers and periodicals were occasionally reprinted.2 Country gentlemen in the beginning of the century were everywhere very illiterate, and the wealthier members of the class among whom cultivation would most commonly be found were usually absentees, so that the little intellectual life in the provinces emanated chiefly from the clergy. The names of Swift, Berkeley, King, Madden, Parnell, Browne, and Skelton are sufficient to show how prominent they were among Irish writers. A Cathedral library had been founded at Kilkenny by Otway, Bishop of Ossory, in 1692, and others appear to have been established in the next half-century at Cork, Derry, and Raphoe.3

A serious and enduring change passed over the material aspect of the country in the forty years that followed the Revolution, from the rapid destruction of its finest woods. The history of this destruction is a curious and a melancholy one. When the English first established themselves in Ireland no country in Europe was more abundantly wooded. According to Giraldus Cambrensis, the woodland even exceeded in extent the plain or open ground,1 and Spenser has commemorated, in lines of much beauty, this aspect of Irish scenery.2 In the long wars with the English these woods naturally played a great part; they were the favourite refuge of the natives, and it became a common saying that ‘the Irish could never be tamed while the leaves were upon the trees.’ At the close of the thirteenth century a law was enacted for cutting passages through the forests in order to repress the boldness of the Irish; and the policy of felling the woods, as a military measure, was afterwards pursued by the English on a gigantic scale during the wars under Elizabeth and in the long peace that followed.3 The confiscations that resulted from the Revolution almost completed the work. The new proprietors had none of the associations which attached the Irish to the trees that had sheltered their childhood and which their forefathers had planted; and, fearing lest a political change should deprive them of their estates, they speedily cut down and sold the woods, and thus inflicted an almost irreparable injury on the country. Few subjects fill a larger place in the descriptions of the economical condition of Ireland in the last years of the seventeenth and the early years of the eighteenth century. The Commissioners appointed by Parliament to inquire into the disposal of the confiscated estates gave it a prominent place in their report. ‘Dreadful havoc,’ they wrote, ‘has been committed on the woods of the proscribed. … Those on whom the confiscated lands have been bestowed or their agents have been so eager to seize upon the smallest profits that several large trees have been cut down and sold for sixpence each. The destruction is still carried on in many parts of the country.’1 Trees to the value of 20,000l. were cut down, soon after the Revolution, upon the single estate of Sir V. Brown in Kerry.2 Wetenhall, who was Bishop of Kilmore from 1699 to 1713, distinguished himself by cutting down and selling for his own profit, timber on his diocesan property which would soon have attained an equal value. Hickman, who was Bishop of Derry from 1703 to 1713, was guilty of the same peculation.3 At the time of the great confiscations in Ulster one of the chief inducements held out to the English who were invited to settle on the old Irish territory was the abundance of the woods—‘the goodliest and largest timber, that might compare with any in his Majesty's dominions,’4 but before the century had closed the aspect of the country had wholly changed. A paper laid before the Irish House of Commons describes the immense quantity of timber that in the last years of the seventeenth century was being shipped from Coleraine and Belfast, and how the ‘great woods in the counties of Londonderry, Down, and Antrim were almost destroyed.’5 The evil, in the years that followed the confiscation, was so great that an Act was passed under William enjoining the planting of a certain number of trees in every county,1 but it was insufficient to counteract the destruction which was due to the cupidity or the fears of the new proprietors. The iron-works planted by the English settlers after the Restoration, and pushed on with little or no regard for the permanent well-being of the country, continued the work.2 The destruction of the woods of Munster, which was begun on a large scale early in the seventeenth century by the Earl of Cork,3 was continued by the iron-works of Sir W. Petty,4 and in 1697 an able observer declared that the oldest and most magnificent timber was already ‘destroyed to such a degree that in twenty years there will hardly be left in all probability an oak in Ireland.’5 ‘Within these sixty years,’ wrote the historian of English commerce in 1719, ‘Ireland was better stocked with oak timber than we are now, but the iron-works set up there have in a few years swept away the wood to that degree that they have not small stuff enough left to produce bark for their tanning nor timber for common uses.’6

The state of agriculture was miserably low. A law of Charles I., which is strikingly indicative of the barbarous condition of the nation, mentions and condemns the common practices of attaching ploughs and harrows to the tails of horses and of pulling off the wool from living sheep instead of shearing them.1 Both of these practices we have already detected in the Highlands of Scotland, and in Ireland the former custom long survived the law which condemned it. Sir W. Temple, in an essay published in 1678, speaks of it as very general.2 Madden, in 1738, noticed that it still lingered in some districts.3 Arthur Young, as late as 1777, found it common in the counties of Mayo and of Cavan,4 and tiaces of it in some remote quarters may be found even in the present century.5 Over a great part of Ireland towards the middle of the eighteenth century only a single kind of plough, and that of the most primitive description, was employed.6 A slow but steady improvement, however, had begun under the auspices of the Dublin Society. A gentleman named Edwards brought over some English farmers to teach the Irish tillage,7 and Bolton, Archbishop of Cashel, who died in 1744, and Hoadly, Archbishop of Armagh, who died in 1746, are said to have both done good service to the country by draining bogs and improving husbandry.8 The extreme precariousness, however, of tenures, and the extreme ignorance and abject poverty of the cottiers, made great progress impossible. The detailed examination of Arthur Young showed that Irish husbandry continued still far inferior to that of England, though hardly, I think, to that of France; and a writer who visited Ireland about the same time, notices that at Limerick the farmers habitually flung their manure into the Shannon, on the supposition that their land was already sufficiently rich.1 The great development of pasture was unfavourable to agriculture, but the cattle trade brought a considerable amount of wealth into the country. It was not until the dearth of 1758 that the Irish were allowed to send salted beef, pork, and butter to England, but the continental market was so great that the prohibition was probably but little felt, and most of the energy of the farmers was turned in this direction. A great advance, however, was made in gardening in the first half of the eighteenth century, and many new plants, fruits, and flowers were introduced.2

The linen manufacture also greatly increased, but especially in the North, where, the population being in a great degree Protestant, the paralysis of the penal laws was comparatively unfelt. The English Government gave it some real encouragement in the form of bounties, and Irish linen was admitted freely to England, while that of other countries was clogged by heavy duties. ‘In the reign of George II.,’ said a writer in 1760, ‘the north of Ireland began to wear an aspect entirely new; and, from being (through want of industry, business, and tillage) the almost exhausted nursery of our American plantations, soon became a populous scene of improvement, traffic, wealth, and plenty, and is at this day a well-planted district, considerable for numbers of well-affected useful and industrious subjects.’3 Belfast, though still ranking very low in the list of Irish towns, was beginning to emerge into prominence. At the time of the execution of Charles I. its Presbytery courageously published a protest against that act which appears to have excited some attention, and it was answered in a strain of great scurrility by Milton, who speaks very contemptuously of Belfast as ‘a barbarous nook of Ireland.’1 Belfast continued to be a great centre of Presbyterianism, and it was the scene of an important doctrinal schism in 1722. In 1707–8 when the Government were taking measures to ascertain the number of Catholics in each part of Ireland and to arrest the priests, the chief magistrate of Belfast wrote to the secretary Dawson that he had just thrown into gaol the only priest within his jurisdiction; and that, having had lists made of all the inhabitants, he had ascertained that there were not more than seven Papists living in the town and not more than 150 in the whole barony.2 In 1757, when the first regular census was made, Belfast contained 1,779 houses and 8,549 inhabitants, of whom but 556 were Catholics. The first barrack was erected in 1737, and in 1757 the town contained 399 looms.3

The fisheries seem to have been carried on with more energy than agriculture. They were stimulated by bounties granted by the Irish Parliament, and were probably in some degree fed by the smuggling trade, which produced a race of bold and skilful sailors. Towards the middle of the century, however, those of the southern coast had greatly fallen off, through the disappearance of the fish from their old haunts. Bantry had risen into a thriving town, chiefly in consequence of the great shoals of pilchards that frequented the bay, and several thousand pounds' worth were exported to Spain, Portugal, and Italy. But towards the middle of the century all this changed. For several years not a single pilchard was caught off the coast, and the town sank rapidly into decay. Dungarvan experienced a similar vicissitude. In the first years of the eighteenth century it was frequented by numerous fishing-boats from different parts of Ireland, and even from England. Hake, a kind of fish between a cod and a haddock, appeared there in immense quantities; great numbers were transported to Spain, and the inhabitants were noted for their skill in curing them. The wasteful system of trailing nets, however, which was illegal in France, had been introduced into the Irish fisheries about 1738, and the destruction they caused among the seaweed and among the spawn is believed to have been one cause of the decline of the fisheries. However this may be, the fact is certain. Haddocks, which a few years before had been in great plenty in the neighbourhood of Dungarvan, almost disappeared. Hake had so diminished that, while a few years before a boatful of fishermen constantly took with hook and line 1,000 of these fish, with many others of other kinds in a single night, it had now become very rare to bring in half the quantity. Great shoals of herring had formerly visited the Irish coast, and a lucrative fishery had been established to the north of Waterford harbour, but this too had dwindled almost to nothing, and the same complaint of the disappearance of herrings was made from the north.1

Of county towns Cork, in the middle of the eighteenth century, was by far the most important. Its population at this time was probably not less than 60,000.2 In the middle of the seventeenth century it was still only fourth of the Irish towns, but, owing to its admirable harbour, and to the great trade which had sprung up in beef, it had considerably outstripped both Waterford and Limerick. The exports of beef and butter from Cork in the middle of the eighteenth century are said to have been greater than those of any other city in the king's dominions. ‘From Michaelmas to Christmas,’ wrote a traveller, ‘a stranger would imagine it was the slaughter-house of Ireland.’1 Except the great natural beauty of its situation, it exhibited little or nothing to attract the eye of the artist, but it had all the animation of a gay, prosperous, and improving town. Two handsome bridges had been built over the Lee in 1712 and 1713. New barracks were erected in 1719. The cathedral, having fallen into decay, was wholly rebuilt between 1725 and 1735, and several other Protestant churches were about the same time erected or restored. There were several Catholic chapels, the two principal of which, in the north and south suburb, were both built in 1729. The town contained also a French church, a Quaker meeting-house, an Anabaptist and a Presbyterian chapel, as well as a great number of local charities. An important institution called the Green-coat Hospital, for the education of the poor, was founded in 1715. The advancing commercial prosperity was shown in the new exchange, in the new corn market, in the new shambles, in the canals that already intersected the city, in the great increase of the port revenue. There were two coffee-houses, supplied with English and Dublin newspapers; a good theatre, where Dublin actors performed during part of the summer; an assembly room, a Mall or public promenade, and a large bowling-green. The temper of the common people was said to be mild and humane, and the manners of the wealthier classes were closely imitated from those of Dublin. ‘Card-playing in the winter evenings,’ says the writer I am following, ‘is an entertainment observed to be more used in Ireland among polite people than in England. The ladies are rather fonder of this amusement than the men … for which purpose here is a weekly drum, besides the assembly, where card-playing is intermixt with dancing. Besides the public concerts, there are several private ones, where the performers are gentlemen and ladies of such good skill that one would imagine the god of music had taken a large stride from the Continent over England to this island; for indeed the whole nation are of late become admirers of this entertainment, and those who have no ear for music are generally so polite as to pretend to like it. A stranger is agreeably surprised to find in many houses he enters Italic airs saluting his ears, and it has been observed that Corelli is a name in more mouths than many of our Lord-Lieutenants.’1

Of the other county towns the most important were Limerick, Waterford, and Kilkenny. The first, in the middle of the eighteenth century, is said to have contained 3,959 houses.2 It was divided, like many Irish cities, into an English and an Irish town. It retained a stronger Milesian character than any other considerable centre out of Connaught, and travellers found much in the customs of its inhabitants that reminded them of Spain.3 The provision of the penal code, which forbade Catholics from residing in Limerick without special permission, speedily became a dead letter. After 1724 the formality of registration was no longer exacted, and long before that date the population had become chiefly Catholic,4 though no special building for the Catholic worship was erected within the walls till 1744.1 Much of the surrounding country was extremely wild and lawless, but the town itself seems to have seldom given serious trouble to the Government, and in 1760 it was declared no longer a fortress, and was dismantled. About 1736 we find a society, probably connected with that of Dublin, and comprising many of the leading gentry, instituted ‘for the improvement of tillage, arts, and manufacture,’ in the county, and occupied in distributing prizes for different branches of industry.2 The inhabitants of Limerick were accustomed to export serges to Spain and Portugal; they had a small glove manufactory, and a considerable trade in cattle, but for the most part they lived in great idleness. Like most Irish towns, Limerick had more than one place of amusement, and it was remarkable for the cheapness of its living. Arthur Young, writing in 1776, mentions the case of a gentleman with 500l. a year who kept ‘a carriage, four horses, three men, three maids, a good table, a wife, three children, and a nurse.’ The city was so poor that between 1740 and 1750 there were only four gentlemen's carriages in or about it, one of which belonged to the bishop, another to the dean, and a third to another Protestant clergyman.3 After the middle of the century, however, the beef trade, and with it the prosperity of the town, very greatly increased; and before the century had closed a local writer was able to dilate upon the many graceful country seats that already fringed the Shannon between Limerick and the sea, and upon the crowds of all ranks who resorted every summer to the superb cliff scenery on the coast of Clare.4

Waterford, though somewhat smaller than Limerick, was more actively commercial. It had a large fishery, and considerable dealings with Newfoundland, while Kilkenny, which derived some wealth from the neighbouring coal mines, was noted for a school which was the most important in Ireland, for its manufactures of frieze, flannel, and druggets, for the purity of its air and water, and for its four annual fairs. Owing, perhaps, to the influence of the great though decaying family of Ormond, it possessed a more agreeable society than any other provincial town; it was the scene of numerous private theatricals,1 and it was early connected with Dublin by a turnpike road, with good inns at intervals of ten or twelve miles.2

There was one other provincial town which is deserving of a brief notice, for though less populous and wealthy than those I have mentioned, it had a great military and geographical importance, and its history presents features of considerable interest. Like Limerick, Galway had been subject to special provisions of the penal code, intended to make it an essentially Protestant town, and like Limerick, it was suffered to become almost exclusively Catholic. It had been provided that, after March 1703, no person of the Popish religion, except seamen, fishermen, and day labourers, who did not pay upwards of 40s. a year rent, should come to live within its walls; that no Papist should purchase any house or tenement in the city or in its suburbs, and that those who were living there at the date of the enactment should be compelled to find Protestant sureties for their good behaviour. The town, however, at this date was almost entirely Catholic. It was the capital of the wildest, the most untravelled, the most purely Catholic part of Ireland. It was far removed from the beaten track of commerce and civilisation, and in spite of the penal code it continued intensely Catholic, Celtic, and anti-English; the centre of a great smuggling trade, the favourite landing-place of Popish ecclesiastics from the Continent, and of recruiting agents for the Irish brigade. The penal laws were, indeed, frequently enforced, but their intermittent action was more injurious to the prosperity than to the Catholicism of the town. In 1708, on the rumour of an intended invasion by the Pretender, all the Popish inhabitants were expelled, and many priests were imprisoned. In 1711, many ecclesiastics were again arrested, and the mayor was ordered to continue his ‘endeavours to banish the priests, those enemies of our constitution, out of the town, and cause those who were apprehended, to be prosecuted with the utmost rigour.’ In 1715 the Papists, except about twenty merchants, were once more turned out, and other severe measures were taken. The Protestant population was at this time put under arms, and it appeared that they mustered only 317 effective men. The stream of Catholic immigrants still flowed in, while the number of Protestants steadily diminished, and a large proportion of the rulers of the town were probably Catholics at heart, though in compliance with the law they had gone through the form of conversion. However this may be, a petition was presented to the Irish Parliament from some of the Protestant inhabitants in 1717, complaining bitterly that for some years past the majority of the corporation had favoured the Popish and discouraged the Protestant interest; that nunneries and other places of refuge for monks and priests were connived at in distinct defiance of the law, that by the notorious neglect of the magistrates great numbers of Papists were suffered to dwell in the city, that it was found impossible to obtain a jury of Protestant freeholders to try offenders against the code, and that in consequence of this state of things priests, friars, and dignitaries of the Church of Rome were continually landing. The House, after mature investigation, pronounced the allegations to be proved, and a Bill was carried to strengthen the Protestant interest in Galway. It offered special inducements to Protestants to settle in the town, extended the area from which Protestant juries might be drawn, and imposed new and severe restrictions upon the election of town officers.

Galway was at this time under stern military government. Trade was subject to vexatious regulations, and the gates of the city were for a long time closed at four. In 1731 another raid was made on the monasteries and nunneries which were known to exist, but the monks and nuns had fled. Strict orders were at the same time given to arrest Popish bishops, monks, or other ecclesiastical persons found within the walls. From this time, however, a policy of toleration appears to have prevailed, and no measures of coercion were taken during the Scotch rebellion of 1745, though it was alleged that many made no secret of their sympathy with the Pretender. In 1747 and during several successive years the town was governed by Colonel Stratford Eyre, a member of a family of great local influence and a very vehement and aggressive Protestant. He had once received the thanks of Parliament for his activity in discovering friaries, and his letters from Galway give a curious picture of the condition of the town, and of the relations of the governors and the governed. ‘I act with all possible caution,’ he writes, ‘and Heaven knows how difficult it is to carry my cup even, when the Egyptians outnumber us thirty to one … In every corner of the streets I meet friars and priests, and last Wednesday and Saturday nights the Papists ran about 2,000l. of Indian goods, in defiance of law.’ He states that ‘there are in this town and suburbs above 180 Popish ecclesiastics;’ that ‘a large Popish chapel was building in the middle street;’ that within a pistol-shot of the walls there were three friaries, inhabited by about thirty friars, who appeared like other inhabitants in the streets, and who, though ‘they behave very quietly and inoffensively to outward show, may receive and convey intelligence to the enemy;’ that the mayor and corporation, and also ‘the poor, busy, 50l.-a-year vicar,’ were continually thwarting him in his efforts to enforce the law. Of the corporation he speaks with the utmost bitterness—‘all, put together, have not 1,000l. property in the world. They live on the corporation revenues, they mortgage every year the tolls and customs … The mayor is the son of a man who was my Lord Tirawly's footman; one sheriff is a beggar, the other a shoemaker and a poor one, Alderman Ellis a broken dragoon, and the deputy recorder a poor, antiquated man of seventy, who is supported by the Papists.’ He complains very bitterly that they disobeyed his orders to arrest unregistered priests and friars, that they would not even billet soldiers upon the priests, that ecclesiastics just arrived from the Continent ‘appeared publicly in the streets; and to such a degree of insolence were the Papists grown in the town that one of them insulted a clergyman of the Established Church, others struck the town sheriff, and many notoriously interested themselves in the election of town magistrates, and appeared in plaid vests.’ Riots and mobs were frequent, and ‘within the last twelve months three sentinels had been knocked down, one of them by two Dominican friars, and the other two by Papists.’ The policy of Eyre was to bring more troops into the town, to enforce stringently the laws against priests and monks, and to revive the early closing of the gates of Galway, which had lately been abolished, and was extremely unpopular among the citizens.1

The Government, however, refused to pursue a course violently hostile to the great majority of the inhabitants, and from the very fragmentary correspondence that remains we may clearly gather that the highly-coloured assertions of this hotheaded and impulsive governor must be received with some caution. Among those who censured his policy, we find not only the corrupt corporation of Galway, but also the Prime Serjeant, the Bishop of Elphin, Lord Howth, and Lord Athenry. In the controversy between him and the mayor about the opening of the gates, the Government decided in favour of the latter. It is also a suspicious fact that Eyre had some years before, for some reason which is not assigned, been deprived of the commission of the peace, and that the Government positively refused to reappoint him,1 and an incidental notice of a later period shows that some of the charges which he brought proved signally destitute of foundation.2 He was probably an honest and well-meaning man, but full of violent personal and religious animosities, intolerant of opposition, and much more fit for the command of a regiment than for the difficult task of governing a Catholic town.

The town was sinking rapidly into decay. Enterprise in every form had died out. The corporation, being narrowed to the utmost in order to keep the control of the city in the hands of a few Protestants, became even more corrupt than others in Ireland. Extortion and vexatious local taxation drove away the most energetic tradesmen, and great numbers of young fishermen emigrated. The whole aspect of the town became one of ruin and desolation. About the middle of the century the fortifications were entirely out of repair, the gates were falling from their hinges, the main wall of the city was full of holes made by smugglers for the convenience of their trade. De Burgo, the historian of the Irish Dominicans, who was himself a native of Galway, stated about 1753 that he had heard from persons of credit then living that they had seen eighty merchant vessels in the Bay of Galway, but that in his own time there were scarcely three or four. In a report of the House of Commons in 1762 on the condition of the city, it was said that for about twenty years the trade of Galway had been rapidly declining, that from 1734 to 1738 its merchants had fourteen or fifteen ships at sea, but that in 1762 there were but three or four belonging to the town. The population of Galway was at this time estimated at 14,000, of whom scarcely 350 were Protestants.1

One of the most useful elements in Irish society in the first half of the eighteenth century was the large body of Protestant refugees who had come over from Germany and France. Such men were especially valuable on account of the many influences that were at this time driving native talent and energy to the Continent. They were of two kinds—French refugees expelled from their country after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and German Palatines who were brought over in 1709.

Of the latter there is not much to be said. They consisted of rather more than 800 families, chiefly of the humblest classes, and they were settled for the most part in the counties of Limerick and Kerry, where they appear to have occupied themselves exclusively with agriculture. They were brought over by a few considerable landlords, assisted by a small grant from the Irish Parliament,2 and unlike the native Irish they usually obtained their farms at leases of three lives and at low rents. The experiment was only moderately successful. As early as 1711 we find the House of Lords lamenting, the load of debt which the nation had incurred ‘in bringing over numbers of useless and indigent Palatines;’ and Arthur Young, who visited the German settlements sixty-four years later, reports that although they had undoubtedly greatly improved their farms, they had done so to a less extent than the natives on the rare occasions in which the latter had been treated with a similar indulgence.1 The Germans continued for about three-quarters of a century to preserve their distinct identity and customs, and even appointed a burgomaster to settle their disputes; they usually adhered to some Nonconformist type of Protestantism, but lived on good terms and often intermarried with their Catholic neighbours, were peaceful and inoffensive in their habits, and without exercising any wide or general influence upon Irish life were honourably distinguished from the population around them by their far higher standard of sobriety, industry, and comfort. As agriculturists they were greatly superior to the natives; they introduced a wheelplough, and a new kind of cart, and appear to have practised drill husbandry earlier than any other class in Ireland. They were not however, generally imitated. A great part of their superiority seems to have been due to the very exceptional advantages they enjoyed, and when in the course of time their leases fell in, and they passed into the condition of ordinary Irish tenants, the colony rapidly disappeared.2

The part which was played by the French refugees was a much more distinguished one. They came over in great numbers after the Revolution, and are said to have comprised an unusually large proportion of members of the higher classes. The Irish Parliament passed in 1692 and renewed in 1697 an Act giving them perfect freedom of worship. There were no less than three French congregations established in Dublin. There were congregations in Cork, Waterford, Carlow, Kilkenny, and Lisburn; and Portarlington, which was built on land granted to Ruvigny, the Earl of Galway, became in a great degree a French settlement. Most of the exiles conformed to the Established Church, and translated its liturgy into their own language. They threw themselves very actively into every form of industry, and identified themselves thoroughly with Irish interests. As we have already seen, the first literary journal in Ireland was edited by a French pastor, and the first florists' society was established by refugees. The linen manufacture, which is the most important branch of Irish industry, owed to them very much of its extension and prosperity. The silk manufacture was introduced into Ireland from the French colony at Spital-fields. Portarlington became noted for its schools, great numbers of pupils being attracted by the opportunity of learning French, which was the common language of the town. Among the refugees who ultimately took up their abode in Ireland was Abbadie, who became Dean of Killaloe, and whose treatise on the truth of the Christian religion was pronounced by Pitt to be the most powerful defence of the faith.1 Cavalier, though he died in England, was brought over to Ireland, and rests among his friends in the refugee burial-ground near Stephen's Green.2 Crommelin received the thanks of Parliament and a donation of 10,000l. for the eminent service he had done the country in the establishment of the linen manufacture.3 The name of Latouche has for more than a century been foremost in every good work in Ireland, and the family who bore it were long the most prominent bankers in Dublin. Barré, who distinguished himself at the siege of Quebec, and who was conspicuous in English parliamentary life during the early years of George III., was a member of a refugee family in Dublin, and the families of De Vœux, Lefanu, L'Estrange, Maturin, Saurin, and Lefroy all rose in different ways to some distinction. A school for the education of the children of impoverished refugees was established in Dublin in 1723, and still existed in 1818; and in the beginning of the nineteenth century French churches founded by refugees still existed in Dublin, Cork, and Lisburn. In Portarlington the service was celebrated in French till 1816, when it was found that the language had almost died out. Even at the present day the French names of many of its inhabitants, and the title of French Church still retained by one of its places of worship, preserve the memory of its Huguenot origin.1

It is not surprising that the amount of crime and disorder in the country should have been very considerable. Extreme poverty, nomadic habits, the antagonism of law and religion, recent civil war, and the prevalence of smuggling were obvious causes, and there was another influence peculiar to Irish life. While the more enterprising members of the innumerable families that were driven from their ancestral properties found honourable careers upon the Continent, most of the feebler and the baser elements remained. Ejected proprietors whose names might be traced in the annals of the Four Masters, or around the sculptured crosses of Clonmacnoise, might be found in abject poverty hanging around the land which had lately been their own, shrinking from servile labour as from an intolerable pollution, and still receiving a secret homage from their old tenants. In a country where the clan spirit was intensely strong, and where the new landlords were separated from their tenants by race, by religion, and by custom, these fallen and impoverished chiefs naturally found themselves at the head of the discontented classes; and for many years after the Commonwealth, and again after the Revolution, they and their followers, under the names of tories and rapparees, waged a kind of guerilla war of depredations upon their successors.1 After the first years of the eighteenth century, however, this form of crime appears to have almost ceased; and although we find the names of tories and rapparees on every page of the judicial records, the old meaning was no longer attached to them, and they had become the designations of ordinary felons, at large in the country. The tradition of the original tories, however, had a very mischievous effect in removing the stigma from agrarian crime, while, on the other hand, the laws against them bore clear traces of the convulsions of civil war. Felons at large were proclaimed by the grand juries ‘tories in arms and on their keeping.’ By a law of 1697, any tory who killed two other proclaimed tories, was entitled to his pardon.2 By a law which was enacted in 1717, and which did not finally expire till 1776, the same indulgence was conceded to any tory who brought in the head of one of his fellows.3 When Bishop Nicholson first visited his diocese in the north, he found the heads of numerous rapparees placed in all the northern counties over the gaols, and their quarters (for they were executed as for treason) gibbeted through the country.4 Small bands of armed men might be found in many districts attacking houses and levying black mail. Thus, in 1705, a band under a noted tory named Callihan — numbering at one time five or six, at another as many as fourteen men—infested the counties of Kerry and Cork. In the same year a magistrate of Dungannon speaks of about fifty tories who were then out in the country. In 1725 a band of this kind hovered about the mountains where the Queen's county, the county of Kilkenny, and the county of Carlow touch. In 1739 and 1740 a large band struck terror through the county of Carlow. In 1743 the horrors of famine produced a great increase of highway robbery, and in 1760 a formidable party of agrarian criminals, under a leader known as Captain Dwyer, committed numerous outrages in Tipperary.1

In these facts, however, there is little that was distinctive or peculiar to Ireland. If a bishop had occasionally to be escorted through the mountain passes by guards as he travelled to his diocese, if in advertisements of county fairs we sometimes find notices that the roads on these occasions would be specially protected, such incidents might easily have happened in England. The neighbourhood of London swarmed with highwaymen, and many parts of England were constantly infested by bands which hardly differed from the Irish rapparees.2 The Whiteboy movement had not yet arisen; the magistrates were on the whole active and efficient, and over about five-sixths of Ireland, life and property during the first half of the eighteenth century appear to have been little less secure than in England.

The condition of the remaining part was, however, very different. In the greater part of the county of Kerry, in the more remote districts of the counties of Cork and Limerick, and in a very large section of Connaught, a state of society subsisted to which we find no parallel in England, but which bore a striking resemblance to that which was then existing in the Highlands of Scotland. These districts—consisting almost exclusively of wild mountains and bogs, doomed by the nature of the soil to great poverty, traversed by few or no regular roads, far removed from all considerable centres of civilised life, and inhabited chiefly by a wild and wretched population of Catholics—lay virtually beyond the empire of the law. Smuggling was the one lucrative trade, and it was practised equally by landlord, middleman, and tenant, by Catholic and Protestant. The officers of the revenue were baffled by a conspiracy of all classes, and informers were in such danger from popular outrage that they soon abandoned their trade. In the deep natural harbours among the mountains, privateers found their shelter, priests and friars from the Continent landed in safety, recruits were shipped by hundreds for the service of France, and the finest native wool was exchanged for the wines and brandies of the South. Here and there barracks were built, but regular soldiers employed to discharge police functions were in such a country very inefficient. From time to time some half-starved robber appeared with the bloody head of his comrade, claiming pardon and asking for reward or at least for food. From time to time tory hunts were undertaken in the mountains, but in the face of a sullen or hostile population they had little result. An English officer writing to the Government from Newcastle in Kerry, in 1703, gives a graphic picture of the exploits that were common. He had received information that a famous tory named Teige Finagan had sprained his leg, and was now to be found sheltered either in a hut that was pointed out or in a neighbouring haystack. He at once despatched a corporal with six men to arrest him. They went first to the haystack, but he happened to be in the hut, and at once rushed out at the alarm. ‘My men,’ writes the officer, ‘were so eager for the sport’ that they all fired at once; but though the distance ranged from twenty to five paces, they all missed him except one, who shot him through the body between the shoulders. In spite of his sprained leg, in spite of the blood that streamed from the wound, he darted like an arrow across the bogs and mountains, the soldiers rapidly pursuing. The race lasted for no less than five miles. Village after village was passed; at least 200 persons saw the chase, but not a hand was stretched to arrest the fugitive, who at last disappeared among the wild crags of Glenflesk, leaving the mortified soldiers to console themselves by the reflection that he must necessarily die from the loss of blood.1

The laws against Catholics having arms were here utterly disregarded; the humblest cottier, if he had nothing else, had at least the long skean or Irish knife, and the old clan spirit still continued a living reality. There were chiefs of the old lineage who could always find among their wild, smuggling tenants a sufficient force to defy the law. Glenflesk near Killarney had a reputation very like that of Glencoe in Scotland, as a nest of thieves and smugglers; and ‘so,’ wrote an experienced Kerry officer, ‘it will always be till nine parts of ten of O'Donohue's old followers be proclaimed and hanged on gibbets on the spot.’2 The mountains round Bantry Bay were long the favourite resort of smugglers, privateers'-men, and deserters, the scene of numerous acts of lawless violence.3 The grand jury of the county of Limerick reported in 1724 to the Lords Justices that one Butler, of Ballymuty, in a remote district of that county, had his house full of arms, had gathered around him a clan of desperate persons, had committed many outrages, and had hitherto withstood every attempt to arrest him.4 One of the great grievances of the Catholics was a quit-rent due to the Crown, charged upon all confiscated lands which had reverted to them at the Restoration. By the original Act of Settlement of 1662 it was charged on all lands conquered from Irish rebels and granted to soldiers or adventurers; but by the Act of Explanation of 1665, ‘innocent Papists,’ who had taken no part in the rebellion, were also made liable to it, though the Protestant proprietors, whose land was restored under similar circumstances, were exempted.1 Every device was employed to evade the payment, and the quit-rent collector was one of the most unpopular men in Ireland. An unfortunate member of this class, who had tried to enforce the law in the wildest districts of Kerry, has left, in some petitions to the Government and in some depositions before the magistrates, a curious picture of the terror exercised over the districts between Killaney and Kenmare by Daniel Mahony of Dunlow, a great middleman on the estate of Lord Shelburne. His house was regularly fortified, and was the most formidable stronghold in the county except Ross Castle. His tenants numbered, according to one account, 3,000, according to another 4,000 persons, all of the Popish religion; and he had always at least eighty men ready at the shortest notice to do his bidding. They were known as ‘Daniel Mahony's fairesses,’ and they waged an implacable war against collectors of hearth-money or quit-rent, gaugers, informers, bailiffs, and against all persons who had become obnoxious either to their master or to his friends. Dressed in women's clothes, with their faces blackened, and armed with stout hazel sticks, they went abroad by night, attacking houses, beating their victims, and compelling them by repeated ill-usage to abandon the country. On one occasion, the deponent avers, no less than sixty ‘fairesses’ went through the town of Killarney searching the houses in hopes of finding him. Lord Shelburne never visited the country. His rents appear to have been regularly paid, and his name, therefore, rather served to strengthen than to weaken his great tenant; who also ‘paid such annuities to counsellors-at-law and attorneys that, be it right or wrong, he carries all before him and suppresses all his adjacent neighbours, especially those that will not humble themselves before him,’ and who soon acquired such ‘mighty power that no Papist in the kingdom of Ireland hath the like.’1

In Connaught there were large districts, if possible, even more lawless than Kerry. A traveller in 1709 declared that ‘the Sheriff of the county scarce dare appear on the west side of Galway bridge,’2 and even in the middle of the eighteenth century, the district known as Eyre Connaught lying to the west of Galway was still almost entirely without roads, inhabited by a wild and half-savage population of smugglers and wreckers.3 As late as 1747 Governor Eyre declared that Robert Martin, ‘a most dangerous, murdering Jacobite,’ could ‘bring, in twenty-four hours, to the gate of Galway, 800 villains as desperate and as absolutely at his devotion as the Camerons of Lochiel.’4

It was in Connaught that the one great explosion of agrarian crime during the period we are considering broke out. The practice of houghing or slaughtering cattle began in the early part of 1711 in the county of Galway, and spread with great rapidity through the counties of Mayo and Clare, and through part of the counties of Roscommon and Sligo. Of the causes that produced it, some, at least, are sufficiently manifest. The growth of pasture was restricting more and more the means of subsistence of the people, and a new tenantry from the plains had been planted among them who were raising the price of land, introducing new ways of life into the province, outraging the clan spirit, and steadily driving the natives to the mountains. In the Highlands of Scotland, as we have seen in a former chapter, it was practically impossible at this time for any stranger to settle among the clans. His life was at once in danger, he was sure to be exposed to violence and plunder, and one of the most common forms of Highland depredation was mutilating or killing cattle.1 In the wild western districts of Ireland a similar spirit prevailed, and another cause contributed to make the poorer classes look with great favour on these outrages. In a single night hundreds of sheep or cows lay dead or hamstrung upon the fields. Markets were far off, and the famished cottiers, who, in the morning, pressed eagerly to the spot, usually succeeded without much difficulty in obtaining gratuitously or for a few pence a meal for their families.2

Whether these causes were the only ones that produced the Connaught houghing, will always remain doubtful. It is at least certain that the movement was organised with the skill and conducted with the resolution and the energy of a regular insurrection. It was noticed that among those who were known or suspected to be houghers were men in the position of gentlemen. Almost all who were arrested were able to read and write. Large bail was freely offered for the prisoners, and large sums seemed always ready if it were possible by bribes to unlock the prison-door. There were few or no outrages on human beings, but bands of men, usually on foot, though sometimes on horseback, silently traversed the country by night, houghing or slaughtering cattle by hundreds. Very often their faces were blacked. On one occasion a shepherd in the county of Gralway, having concealed himself, saw eight men, well mounted, wearing white shirts over their clothes, and with white linen bands tied low about their heads, ride into a park and deliberately kill the sheep. It appeared, from the confessions of some who were arrested, that there was a regular discipline among them, that they had their captains, lieutenants, and ensigns, that pay was distributed among the men. Soon the name of Captain Eaver was spread abroad as that of their leader. Ballads were sung in his honour. Threatening letters, signed by his name, intimidated witnesses, denounced prompt vengeance against all new stock-masters, and enjoined the shepherds, on pain of having their houses burnt, to remain within doors by night. The outrages extended over such a large area, and were perpetrated by such formidable parties and with such secrecy and promptitude that the obnoxious farmers were almost helpless. Some of them paid black mail, in order to save their flocks, and the money thus raised contributed to support the organisation.

It was evident that the movement was planned and conducted by men of no mean intelligence and audacity, and it was equally evident that almost the whole population were in its favour. Its nearly simultaneous appearance in five counties almost paralysed the law, and the terrified magistrates feared, with much reason, that it was not purely agrarian, but was the prelude to a general insurrection. Reports of the most alarming kind were abroad. ‘It is a general rumour,’ wrote the High Sheriff of Galway, ‘in my county, that there are several men with scarlet clothes, and that speak French, who go up and down the country by night. The gentlemen of the country are in great fear and apprehension.’1 A magistrate in Roscommon wrote that it was certain that Irish French officers were landed in his neighbourhood by privateers, that they were supported by greater people than the mob, that some considerable men out of France were lurking and sheltered in the country, and it was feared they would outbid the Government in the rewards they offered.2

In November 1711, at a time when the houghing was at its height, a soldier of the Galway garrison, who was shooting not far from the town, met a considerable armed party. The leader had a gold ring on his hand and gold in his purse. He called the soldier by his name, said he had met him in Dublin, and tried to induce him to join the party. He took nothing from him but his powder, and even this he at last consented to restore, saying they had abundance of ammunition; and he dismissed him, unharmed, with a message, warning the Governor that if any attempt were made to pursue them, the officer who led the party would be assuredly decapitated.1 Nearly at the same time a pedlar in the county of Mayo appeared before the magistrates, and informed them that within three miles of Ballinarobe he had been stopped by a party of no less than eighteen men, well armed and with disguised faces, who obliged him to open his box of linen and other wares, purchased his goods with ready money at his own rate, and then dismissed him, after compelling him to swear that he would not reveal what he had seen for twenty-four hours.2 All these reports seemed to point to a military movement. In a country of pathless mountains and bogs, open along a long line of coast to privateers from the Continent, disarmament was impossible; and, in spite of the laws, it was well known that Connaught was full of weapons.

The magistrates, however, exerted themselves with great promptitude. Large rewards were offered for the apprehension of houghers. Orders were given to burn the flesh of the slaughtered animals, in order that the cottiers should derive no benefit from the crime, to compensate the owners by rates levied on the district, to arrest all night-walkers, all who travelled in the daytime without a pass beyond their parishes, all idlers who were unable to give a satisfactory account of themselves, and finally to execute rigidly the laws against the priests. There is no evidence of any real value that the priests, as a body, were concerned in the movement, but it is probable that some of them sympathised with it; it was natural that they should be the first objects of suspicion to a violently Protestant magistracy, and it is by no means surprising that they seldom ventured to take any step in the interests of the law or of the landlords that could offend the congregations on whom they depended absolutely for their subsistence. In most districts, when attempts were made to arrest them, they absconded; but in Roscommon eight were thrown into prison. About a month later we find them petitioning for release, on the ground that they were most, if not all, so poor that they could not long subsist of themselves, that no cattle had been houghed in the parts where they were registered, and that so far from encouraging the practice, they looked on it with the strongest reprobation.1 A discoverer who, by order of the Government, employed himself in inquiring into the names and sentiments of the priests of Galway, and who appears to have succeeded in entering into relations with many of them, reported, from Tuam, to the Lord-Lieutenant that he had never heard that any priest exhorted against houghing, but had heard that some prayed for Eaver. One Father Fliggan at mass had openly prayed for Eaver, and the discoverer was told that a parish priest near Tuam, named Edmund Burke, had preached a sermon, ‘earnestly exhorting the rich and stockmasters to reduce their flocks, and to let their lands to the poor people. He enlarged with much eloquence in praise of Eaver, and extolled his Christian and charitable undertakings, all which tend to relieve the poor from the oppression of the rich.’ The discoverer adds, however, that a priest who was present expressed great indignation at this sermon.2 Gilbert Ormsby, an old magistrate in the county of Roscommon, who was very active at this time, ascribed the crime, though apparently on very slender grounds, chiefly to the priests; and his very characteristic letters to the Government are a curious illustration of the sentiments prevailing among some who as magistrates were exercising, in time of peace, an almost despotic authority over large Catholic populations. ‘It appears evidently,’ he says, ‘that the priests have been at least conniving in all this villany.’ He urges that ‘nothing can contribute more to the preventing this mischief than the total prohibiting of masses, for 'tis there they meet and concert their villany, and our discoverer affirms that several of the houghers have confessed their wickedness to the priest and received absolution.’ ‘I reckon,’ he says in another letter, ‘that all our unhappiness and misfortune proceeds from the priests, to whom the greater men communicate their designs, and they stir up the common people to execute them; nor do I believe we shall ever be safe and quiet till a wolf's head and a priest's head be at the same rate. Such a time I remember, and then there was not a quieter populace in the world than the Irish.’1 Another active magistrate of the same county, who was in general violently opposed to the priests, wrote, ‘I have no examination or evidence that the Popish priests advise these practices. No doubt they would be pleased to see the land planted with people instead of the stock, because it is their only profit; yet I am told they exhort their people against this practice. If it has effect, I will believe them.’2

The houghing suddenly ceased in 1713. Though many persons were arrested, the difficulty of obtaining evidence was very great, but a few prisoners were convicted and executed, and two or three confessions were obtained. The disturbances did not spread to other parts of Ireland, and as no Jacobite movement ensued it is probable that they had no political significance. With this exception, we find in the first sixty years of the eighteenth century but few traces of that agrarian crime which some years later became so conspicuous, though the country was on the whole less organised and civilised, and though most of the elements of disorder were more rife. The bands of tories in the mountains were sometimes recruited by desperate men who landed from privateers, and by deserters from the English army.1 The deep channel which divides the island of Valentia from the mainland was long a secure refuge for privateers, and their devastations were so extensive that in 1711 the Roman Catholic inhabitants of Kerry petitioned that 250l. might be levied upon them for the purpose of rebuilding the old fort at Valentia.2 The position of a loyal Catholic gentleman in these districts was indeed peculiarly trying, for while he was perpetually exposed to plunder, he was forbidden by law to keep arms for his defence, and was at the same time compelled to pay for the damage that was done to his Protestant neighbours. The army itself was not always on the side of order, and there are several signs that the high modern standard of military discipline had been by no means attained. In 1710, at the time when the Church quarrels under Queen Anne were at their height, a number of the officers quartered at Limerick went to the house of the bishop and to the house of a conspicuous Tory alderman, ‘making a grievous noise, and there drank confusion, damnation, plague, pestilence and famine, battle, murder, &c., to all archbishops, bishops, and priests, and to Dr. Sacheverell and all his well-wishers.’ On another occasion, as a Limerick magistrate complained to the Government, in the dead of the night ‘they got together a pack of about twenty couples of hounds and a fox, went first to the bishop's house with them, and led the fox three or four times round his house, the dogs in full cry and three hunting horns winding, which very much frightened my Lord Bishop and his family, being fast asleep when the noise began.’1 The officers of a dragoon regiment which was quartered at Dungannon, having quarrelled with an inhabitant of the town, they drew out their soldiers, marched against his house, fired into it, broke it open and wrecked it, in spite of all the remonstrances of the Provost of the town.2 On another occasion, two soldiers having been imprisoned in Ballinarobe, a party of soldiers stormed the gaol, released their comrades, and shot dead a constable who opposed them.3 Wesley in his Journal relates the following incident which had just taken place at Bandon when he visited that town in 1785: ‘A soldier walking over the bridge met a countryman, and taking a fancy to his stick strove to wrest it from him. His companion knocked the soldier down. News of this being carried to the barracks, the whole troop of soldiers marched down and without any provocation fell upon the countrymen coming into the town, pursued them into the houses where they fled for shelter and hacked and hewed them without mercy. Forty-two were wounded, several maimed, and two killed on the spot.’4

The condition of the prisons was very insecure and the great number of escapes from them no doubt contributed largely to the encouragement of crime. Nor was the mismanagement shown only in the ordinary gaols. At Kinsale there was a great establishment for French prisoners of war which appears to have exhibited every kind of shameful irregularity. In 1710 one of its directors complained that the prison was so bad and that the sentinels were so corrupt that ten, twenty, even thirty men sometimes escaped in a month or six weeks.5 On the other hand Lord Inchiquin having a few months later investigated the condition of the prison reported to the Lord Lieutenant that the conduct of the officers in charge of it was such ‘that several hundreds of the poor wretches perished in prison for want of those necessaries that the Queen's allowance was very sufficient to have supplied them with, that the bread given them a hungry boy could not eat, that their meat was little better, in great scarcity, and not half boiled,’ ‘that no proper necessaries were allowed for the sick,’ and that ‘sick and well lay promiscuously together crowded in dirty cellars which were hardly ever cleaned out.’1 In 1747 a fearful catastrophe took place at Kinsale, when the prison having accidentally caught fire no less than fifty-four unhappy Frenchmen perished in the flames.’2

There was one form of outrage prevalent in the eighteenth century which is worthy of special notice, both as exhibiting the extremely lawless, condition of a part of the country and also as furnishing a remarkable example of a form of crime which was once inveterate in the national life, but which has been so completely extirpated that its very memory and tradition have almost passed away. I mean forcible abduction, and especially the abduction of heiresses. The extent of this crime has, it is true, been exaggerated. In a large part of Ireland it seems to have been almost or altogether unknown, but still it was frequent, widely diffused, and regarded by public opinion with a very scandalous toleration. It had many different degrees of enormity. Sometimes it was committed with the consent of the weaker party and this method was employed to overcome the resistance of her parents. Sometimes it was the end of an unfortunate courtship, and the girl was dragged away by the man whom she had refused. Sometimes when a girl in the opinion of her neighbours had remained too long unmarried they selected her husband, stormed her cabin, and compelled her by terror to marry him. In part of Ireland a strange custom existed on these occasions of summoning the competitors to a hurling match and allotting the girl as a prize to the winner.3 The worst cases, however, were those which were inspired either by vengeance or more commonly by a desire for gain. An unmarried married woman who was known to possess some small fortune was attacked in her own or her father's house in the dead hours of the night by bands of five, ten, or twenty armed ruffians, dragged screaming from her bed, thrown across the neck of a horse before the man who desired to marry her, and thus carried away to some wild district among the bogs or mountains, where after sometimes days of captivity, far removed from all help, and terrified by threats of dishonour, she consented to go through the marriage service. Cases of this aggravated description were not common, but they did occur, and, by a strange perversion of the moral sentiment, a man who ran away by force with an unwilling heiress to make her his wife seems to have been looked upon, at least by the peasantry, with very little disapprobation. In a few cases these abductions were committed by bands of robbers, and were probably inspired by a desire for ransom, or by simple lust. More frequently the perpetrators and the victims both belonged to the class of cottagers, but it was by no means unusual for men in the position of gentlemen, and even for landed proprietors to be concerned in them, and middlemen and squireens appear in this as in other forms of Irish crime to have been prominent. The audacity of some of the criminals was extraordinary. Thus in 1718, when Rebecca White was carried away from the county of Tipperary, the place which the captors selected to deposit her in was the public barrack at Pallas.1 In 1741, an old lady named Elizabeth Dobbin was seized at nine in the morning, in the important town of Belfast, and carried to the scarcely less important town of Carrickfergus, where the marriage ceremony was performed.2 But the most wonderful of these instances of the audacious defiance of law was that of Henry Grady, of the county of Limerick, who had been outlawed for the abduction of Susannah Grove. Nothing, I believe, is known of the motive of the crime or of the circumstances or previous relations of the parties, but the lady had either been rescued or had escaped when the following scene took place. On a Sunday in the June of 1756, the Rev. John Armstrong was celebrating Divine Service in the Protestant church in the town of Tipperary, Susannah Grove being among the congregation. In the midst of the service Henry Grady, accompanied by a body of men armed with blunderbusses, pistols and other weapons, entered the church, called out to the congregation that anyone who stirred would at once be shot, struck the clergyman on the arm with a hanger and cut through his surplice and gown, and hastening to the pew where Susannah Grove was sitting, dragged her out. The party then retired slowly with their faces turned and their arms presented towards the congregation, shut and locked the door of the church and carried away the key.1

These anecdotes evince a condition of extreme lawlessness in the country, but an attempt has recently been made to take them out of the category of ordinary crime, and to attribute to them a much deeper significance. They have been represented as an organised form of guerilla warfare, carried on by Catholics against Protestants, with the full sanction of their Church, for the purpose of avenging the confiscations of property and obtaining converts to Popery. In the words of the writer to whom I am referring, a ‘set of young gentlemen of the Catholic persuasion were in the habit of recovering equivalents for the land of which they considered themselves to have been robbed, and of recovering souls at the same time to Holy Church, by carrying off young Protestant girls of fortune to the mountains, ravishing them with the most exquisite brutality, and then compelling them to go through a form of marriage, which a priest was always in attendance ready to celebrate.’ ‘The priests, secure in the protection of the people, laughed at penalties which existed only on paper, and encouraged practices which brought converts to the Faith and put money in their own pockets.’ ‘These outrages,’ we are told, ‘were acts of war, done in open day in the face of the whole people, and supported by their sympathy.’ They were ‘encouraged by the clergy, and much in favour with general society,’ and they form a complete justification of the whole penal code, by which the Irish Parliament ‘strove to uproot a system from the soil which shielded the most atrocious of crimes.’1

We have here then a very definite charge, and a graver or more horrible one was probably never brought against a Christian Church. I propose to examine with some care the evidence on which it rests. Situated as the different religious bodies were in Ireland, it was natural that the dominant sect should have the strongest disposition to magnify the religious element in crime. Religious animosity flamed fierce and high. In the eyes of the law the Protestant and Catholic stood on a wholly different level. An outrage committed by a Catholic on a Protestant rang through the land, while a similar outrage committed by a Protestant on a Catholic or by a Catholic on a Catholic was almost unnoticed. If an aggrieved Protestant in his petitions or complaints could truly aver that the person who injured him was a Papist, this element of aggravation was rarely omitted. It was natural also that by far the greater part of the crime of Ireland should have been committed by Catholics. They were the great majority of the people. They comprised almost all the more indigent and more ignorant classes. They were especially numerous in the wildest districts. They were all more or less in the position of outlaws. And the preponderance of Catholic crime appeared even greater than it was, for the power of property and the administration of justice were so completely in the hands of Protestants that Catholics seldom ventured to prosecute them before the law-courts.

Considering all these circumstances, and considering also that the Protestant farmers were usually much richer than the Catholic ones, it is not surprising that in abduction cases the criminal was sometimes a Catholic and the heiress a Protestant, that these cases should have attracted a particular attention, and that two or three letters may be adduced in which abduction is spoken of as a crime which was common among Papists.1 But that it had absolutely nothing of the sectarian character which has been ascribed to it may be abundantly proved. Our information about the abductions in the eighteenth century consists mainly of the large collection of presentments by grand juries and of depositions of witnesses, preserved in the Castle of Dublin. This collection does not, it is true, comprise all the crimes that were committed, but it may very reasonably be regarded as containing the most conspicuous; and as the presentments were drawn up by exclusively Protestant bodies, and as the depositions were sworn by the persons who were injured and by their families, we may be quite sure that no element of sectarian aggravation that could plausibly be alleged is omitted. In this collection we may trace during the first sixty years of the eighteenth century twenty-eight cases of attempted or accomplished abduction. In just four of them there is evidence that the perpetrator was a Catholic and the victim a Protestant. In three others the victim appears to have been a Protestant,2 but there is no evidence of the religion of her captor. In three or four other cases the criminals are said to have been Papists,1 but there is nothing said of the religion of the victims. In all the other cases there is a complete silence about the religion of the parties, which is a strong presumption either that they were both Catholics, or that the criminal was a Protestant. In a single case we find the criminal trying to force the Protestant farmer girl he had run away with to go to mass,2 but, with this exception, I have been unable to discover the faintest trace of the religious element which has been represented as the very mainspring of the crime.

In some cases Protestants were undoubtedly concerned. In the case of Rebecca White, which has already been referred to, it is expressly stated in the proclamation that one of the party who carried her off was a Captain Cahill, at a time when all Catholics were rigidly excluded from the army. In another and less culpable case the chief actor was a major in King William's army. Being quartered at Loughrea, in the county of Galway, he formed an attachment to a rich heiress, the daughter of Dean Persse. He asked her hand in marriage, but was refused by the father, on the ground that having nothing but his commission, he could settle no jointure upon her. Soon after ‘a previous arrangement having been made,’ the Major surrounded the Dean's house at Roxborough with a party of horsemen—the tradition of the county says that they were a company of the regiment he commanded—and peremptorily demanded the hand of the lady. It was stated that he threatened, if his demand was not complied with, to decapitate her father, but this assertion was afterwards denied. The lady, who very probably knew something of his intention, on being questioned, declared herself ready to be married. The dean, yielding to necessity, performed the ceremony, and the property so acquired remains in the family of the bridegroom to the present day.1 Among the few persons who were executed for abduction in Ireland was an attorney named Kimberley, at a time when no one but a professing Protestant could be enrolled in that profession.2 The squireens and middlemen were always noted for this crime, but these classes were necessarily chiefly Protestant, in a country where probably more than nine-tenths of the land belonged to Protestant owners, and where Catholics were forbidden by law to hold long leases. No fact connected with the abductions was more shameful than the indulgence or apathy with which they were looked on by the governing classes and by the law courts. But it is utterly incredible that tribunals that were wholly in the hands of Protestants should have looked with such feelings on the crime if it were a religious war carried on by their enemies against themselves.

Nor is this all. If the abductions had the sectarian character that was ascribed to them—if their object was by forced marriages to obtain possession of Protestant property, they would have been most effectually suppressed by the act which in 1745 made marriages celebrated by priests between Protestants and Catholics null and void. But, as late as 1775, Arthur Young still found them scandalously prevalent. He has dwelt on the subject with just indignation, but he never hints that they either were or ever had been in any way associated with difference of religion.1 Nor would it, I believe, be possible to find a trace of this charge in any of the long discussions that preceded the abolition of the penal code, though it is quite certain that if the assertion that Catholics were accustomed to carry on a religious war against their enemies by abducting and violating their daughters, had possessed the smallest truth, or even the smallest plausibility, it would have occupied the very first place in the speeches of their opponents.2

The truth is that the crime was merely the natural product of a state of great lawlessness and barbarism, and it continued in some parts of Ireland later than in other countries, because, owing to circumstances described in the present chapter, the formation of habits of order and of respect for law was unnaturally retarded. It is probable that it has at one time prevailed in most countries.1 The stories of the rape of the Sabine women, and of the 400 virgins seized by the tribe of Benjamin, are typical. Lord Kames has noticed the very curious and significant marriage custom which lingered in Wales even in his own day, perpetuating the memory of ancient violence. ‘On the morning of the wedding day,’ he writes, ‘the bridegroom, accompanied with his friends on horseback, demands the bride. Her friends, who are also on horseback, give a positive refusal; upon which a mock scuffle ensues. The bride, mounted behind her nearest kinsman, is carried off, and is pursued by the bridegroom and his friends with loud shouts. … When they have fatigued themselves and their horses, the bridegroom is suffered to overtake his bride, and leads her away in triumph.’2

In Scotland, where the conditions of creed and property were wholly different from those in Ireland, abductions, and especially abductions of heiresses, were for a long period extremely common. In Pitcairn's collection of the criminal trials of that country there are at least fourteen cases of precisely the same kind as those in Ireland.3 More than one woman has been dragged away by armed men in the very streets of Edinburgh. We find parties of eight, nineteen, even sixty men, attacking houses and carrying away girls. We find men of the very highest rank engaged in these enterprises, and we find exactly the same love of lawless violence as in Ireland, palliating or condoning them. In Scotland, indeed, abduction has been glorified in a whole literature of songs and ballads.1 It was very common all through the seventeenth century, and although it became much rarer in the eighteenth century, it was by no means extinct. Thus, in 1750, a young widow, twenty years old, named Jane Key, was living with her mother in her own house at Edinbilly, in Stirlingshire. Her husband had died two months before, leaving her some property, and some members of the McGregor clan resolved to raise the fortunes of the family by a forced marriage. In the middle of a dark December night the sons of the well-known Rob Roy, with a gang of armed men, burst into the house. They intimidated the males with guns, pistols, and swords. They dragged the young widow from her hiding-place, tore her screaming from her mother's arms, and placed her on a horse before one of the gang. She flung herself off, and in so doing wrenched her side. They then threw her double over the pommel of the saddle, and fled with her into the darkness. The party stopped at more than one house, but no one ventured to interfere, and the victim was soon forced into a marriage with the brother who had been selected for her. The pursuit being very hot, she was at last liberated, but such was the condition of society, that even in Edinburgh itself it was necessary for her protection to guard her with sentinels day and night, and during the few months she survived the shock, she never ventured to return to her own home. Of the three brothers who organised the crime, one was arrested and tried in 1752, but though the jury brought in a special verdict against him, eleven of their number signed a memorial to the court in order to save him from capital punishment, and he speedily succeeded in making his escape from Edinburgh Castle. Another was tried and acquitted. The third brother, who had been the bridegroom, was at last taken in 1754, tried, found guilty, and hung, but he was as far as possible from being an object of general abhorrence. His corpse was borne to the tomb with the loud lamentations of his clan. His achievement was celebrated in a stirring ballad, which was once one of the most popular in the land, and Sir Walter Scott, who tells the story, has noticed the sympathy that, long years after his execution, was aroused in Scotland by his fate.1

It will be evident, I think, from the foregoing considerations, how utterly futile has been the recent attempt to make these outrages in Ireland available for the purpose of exciting sectarian animosity by representing them as incidents of a religious war. The one fragment of truth upon which this edifice of calumny has been reared is the fact that marriages in abduction cases were usually celebrated by Catholic priests. A class of disreputable priests known commonly by the name of ‘couple beggars,’ did undoubtedly exist in Ireland, who were always ready, for money, to celebrate any description of irregular and clandestine or illegal marriages. As the ceremony they performed was, before the Act of 1745, equally valid whether the persons married were Protestant, or Catholic, or mixed, the presence of such a priest forms no presumption of the religion of the parties, and it is probable that the services of these priests were asked and given with a most complete indifference to this condition.1 They were a class precisely analogous to the Fleet parsons, who at this very time were so conspicuous in England. No writer of the most ordinary candour would make the whole Anglican Church, and the whole body of the Anglican clergy, responsible for the proceedings of these parsons. Yet even this imputation would be more excusable than the corresponding charge against the Catholic priesthood. The Protestant clergy at least belonged to a Church which was established and endowed by the State, and in which ecclesiastical discipline was enforced by the authority of the law. The Catholic priests consisted in a large degree of poor, mendicant, migratory friars, living under the ban of the law, absolutely dependent for their livelihood on the contributions of the people, and placed by the illegal character of their Church in a great degree beyond the control of their ecclesiastical superiors. That a class so situated should have produced some men like the Fleet parsons was extremely natural. It is, however, also certain that the ‘couple beggars’ were not exclusively priests. In 1725, when recommending a Bill for the prevention of clandestine marriages, the Irish Privy Council wrote: ‘It is remarkable that almost every clandestine marriage in this kingdom has been solemnised by counterfeit or degraded clergymen, or by Popish priests.’2 The law which was enacted in 1725 for the purpose of making void all marriages, either between two Protestants or between a Protestant and a Catholic celebrated by a Popish priest or a degraded clergyman, bears witness to the same truth. It expressly states that ‘clandestine marriages are for the most part celebrated by Popish priests and degraded clergymen.’3

A few traces of the latter may still be found. Thus in 1726 we find Swift writing to Pope, ‘I am just going to perform a very good office. It is to assist with the archbishop in degrading a parson who couples all our beggars. … I am come back’ (he afterwards writes), ‘and have deprived the parson, who by a law here is to be hanged the next couple he marrieth. He declared to us that he resolved to be hanged; only desired when he was to go to the gallows, the archbishop would take off his excommunication. Is not he a good Catholick? And yet he is but a Scotchman. This is the only Irish event I ever troubled you with, and I think it deserveth notice.’1 ‘Yesterday,’ we read in a Dublin newspaper of 1740, ‘Mr. Edward Sewell, a degraded clergyman, who lived for some time past at the World's End, and followed the business of coupling beggars together, was tried and convicted of marrying the son of an eminent citizen to a Roman Catholic young woman, and is to be executed for the same Saturday se'night.’2 In another Dublin newspaper of 1744, we read, ‘This last term a notorious couple beggar, one Howard Fenton, who pretends to have received holy orders in England, was excommunicated in the Consistory Court by the Vicar-General of this diocese, on account of his persisting in this scandalous trade, which he had taken up, to the undoing of many good families. He was so keen at this mischievous sport of marrying all people that came in his way, that he has been known to refuse three times a higher fee not to solemnise a clandestine marriage than he was to receive or did receive for doing it.’3

In general, however, as might have been expected, the ‘couple beggars’ belonged to the illegal Church of the poor majority and not to the established and endowed Church of the rich minority. They were probably in most instances itinerant friars. But, in order to bring home to the Irish Catholic Church as a whole the guilt of their proceedings, it is necessary to show that they were countenanced or connived at by their ecclesiastical authorities. Such an accusation is scarcely less improbable than it is odious. It is an accusation which could only be justified by the most ample proof. It is an accusation for which it is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that not one particle of evidence can be adduced. Our knowledge of the internal discipline of the Irish Catholic Church during the time of the penal laws is very scanty, but it is a curious fact that among the four or five documents relating to it preserved among the archives of the Irish Government, is a form of ex-communication by which a Catholic bishop in quaint, violent, and almost grotesque language excluded from the offices of the Church priests who were guilty of this very crime, and enumerated the stringent measures he had taken to suppress it.1

To these considerations it is only necessary to add that it is entirely untrue that the measure rendering null and void all marriages celebrated either between two Protestants, or between a Protestant and Papist, by a Popish priest or by a degraded clergyman, was exclusively or even mainly due to the frequency of abductions. It was intended, like the English Act of Lord Hardwicke, to strike at all kinds of clandestine marriages, and it was intended also to put an end to what was esteemed the great political danger of intermarriage between Catholics and Protestants. No feature of Irish history is more conspicuous than the rapidity with which intermarriages had altered the character of successive generations of English colonists. As early as the reign of Edward III. the danger had been deemed so formidable that a law was enacted providing that any Englishman who married an Irishwoman should forfeit his estates, be hung, disembowelled while still living, and then shamefully mutilated.1 A petition of Cromwellian officers in Ireland in 1653 complained that many thousands of the descendants of the English who came over under Elizabeth, ‘had become one with the Irish as well in affinity as idolatry,’ and that many of them ‘had a deep hand’ in the great rising of 1641.2 The poet Spenser in a passage which painfully reflects the national animosities of his time, advocated the subjection of the native Irish by the process of systematic starvation. His grandson was expelled from house and property under Cromwell as an Irish Papist.3 The conquest of Ireland by the Puritan soldiers of Cromwell was hardly more signal than the conquest of these soldiers by the invincible Catholicism of the Irish women. Ireton, when Lord Deputy, foresaw the danger, and ordered that all officers or soldiers who were guilty of taking Irish wives should be at once cashiered, but it was found impossible to prevent it.4 Forty years after the Cromwellian settlement it was stated that ‘many of the children of Oliver's soldiers in Ireland cannot speak one word of English,’5 and it is a well-known and a most curious fact that some of the most violently Catholic parts of Ireland are inhabited in a great degree by the descendants of Cromwellian settlers. Only seven years after the battle of the Boyne it was noticed that many of William's soldiers had thus lapsed into Catholicism.

By the penal code intermarriages between Protestants and Roman Catholics were strenuously repressed. The first statute on the subject was enacted in 1697, and was called ‘An Act to Prevent Protestants Intermarrying with Papists.’1 It alleged that mixed marriages tended to the dishonour of Almighty God, to the perversion of Protestants, to weakening the Protestant interest, to the sorrow and displeasure of Protestant friends and relatives, to the ruin of Protestant properties, and it proceeded to enact that no Protestant woman, who either possessed or was heir to any form of real property or who possessed personal property to the value of 500l., should marry a Papist under penalty of losing her whole property, which passed at once to the nearest Protestant relation. Any clergyman or priest who married such woman without a certificate proving the Protestantism of the husband was liable to a year's imprisonment and a fine of 20l. No Protestant man was to be permitted to marry without a certificate from the bishop or magistrate proving his bride to be a Protestant, under pain of being himself regarded as a Popish recusant and disabled from being heir, executor, administrator, or guardian, from sitting in Parliament, and from holding any civil or military employment, unless he should, within a year after his marriage, procure a certificate that his wife had become a Protestant. It was enacted at the same time that any Popish priest or Protestant clergyman who should marry any soldier without a certificate proving that the woman was a Protestant should forfeit 20l.

Intermarriages between Protestants and Catholics were thus necessarily clandestine, as few parish clergymen would venture to celebrate them. They, still, however, continued, and accordingly a new and very severe law was carried in 1725. I have already cited the words of the preamble, which refers only to clandestine marriages and to the ruin they produce. The law proceeds to make it felony for any Popish priest or degraded clergyman under any circumstances to marry either two Protestants or a Protestant with a Catholic. In order to secure the execution of this sentence any two justices of the peace were empowered to summon any persons whom they suspected of having been present at such a marriage, as well as the parties suspected of having been married; and if these persons refused to appear, to declare upon oath their knowledge of the facts, or, after declaration of the facts, to enter into recognisances to prosecute, they were liable to three years' imprisonment.1 In this way it was hoped that all marriages between Protestants and Catholics would be stopped. The arrangement about the certificates made it impossible to celebrate them in a legal manner. To celebrate them clandestinely was to incur the penalty of death, and the most stringent measures were taken to enforce conviction. At the same time the theological doctrine, that any marriage celebrated under any circumstances by an ordained priest or clergyman is valid and indissoluble was the basis of the whole English law of marriage and as yet no considerable party were prepared to alter it.

The measure, as might have been expected, was to a great extent inoperative. Laws which are in direct opposition to human nature can never prove successful. In a country where Protestants and Catholics were largely mixed it was absolutely certain that attachments would be formed, that connections would spring up, that passion, caprice, and the associations of daily life would in many cases prove too strong for religious or social repugnance. The vast mulatto population of the United States is a sufficient proof how inevitable such connections are, even where there is a difference of race and of colour, as well as the greatest possible difference of social position. It was quite certain that attachments would be formed between Irish Protestants and Catholics, and the real question was whether they should take the form of regular marriages or of illicit connections. As a matter of fact the marriages continued to be numerous, and all the evils that might be expected to spring from them were necessarily aggravated by the fact that they were clandestine and illegal. It was natural that they should act in favour of the Catholics. A majority in such cases always tends to absorb a minority thinly scattered among them, and there were bitter complaints that the settlements of poorer Protestants were dwindling away. English regiments were planted in purely Catholic towns, and the soldiers inevitably formed connections with the townswomen. The high standard of female purity reigning among the Irish poor rendered illicit connections more than commonly difficult, and there were complaints that English soldiers were secretly married to Irish Papists, and that some had in consequence been perverted, persuaded to desert, and lured into foreign service. The priests, and especially the itinerant friars, performed and undoubtedly encouraged these marriages. Their motives were probably very various. They had long laboured in Ireland, with especial zeal and success, to maintain among their flocks a high sense of the sinfulness of all extra-matrimonial attachments, and secret marriages were often the only means of avoiding them. Besides this, begging friars, living always on the verge of starvation, gladly welcomed the gratuities they obtained on these occasions, and it is also, of course, possible that in some cases a desire to win converts and weaken the Protestant interest may have operated.

For all these reasons the marriages became so frequent that the Protestants were extremely alarmed, and the Irish Parliament several times passed heads of Bills which were not returned from England, for making void all marriages celebrated between two Protestants or between a Protestant and a Papist, by priests or degraded clergymen. Forcible marriages or abductions formed only a very small part of the marriages which it was intended to suppress, and it is a gross misrepresentation to thrust them into the foreground, as if they were the main motive of all the legislation about mixed marriages. They are not even mentioned in the Acts of 1697 or of 1725, or in the heads of Bills sent over to England in 1732 and 1733, or in the letters of the Irish Council recommending those bills.1 In 1743 the House of Commons having voted unanimously the ‘heads of a Bill for annulling all marriages celebrated by any Popish priest or degraded clergyman between Protestant and Protestant or between Protestant and Papist’ took the unusual step of presenting it in a body to the Lord-Lieutenant, and the Lord-Lieutenant and council in Ireland, in a letter addressed to the Duke of Newcastle, recommended it in strong terms to the authorities in England. Neither in the Bill itself2 nor in the letter of recommendation is there any specific allusion to abductions. ‘We herewith,’ write the Irish Council, ‘transmit to your grace, under the great seal of this kingdom, an Act for annulling all marriages celebrated by any Popish priest or degraded clergyman between Protestant and Protestant or between Protestant and Papist. The heads of this Bill took their rise in the House of Commons, where they passed nemine contradicente, and were by that House in a body, with the Speaker, brought to the Lord-Lieutenant. This Bill is judged by the Commons to be of the greatest consequence to the security of His Majesty's government, the public peace, and the Protestant interest of the kingdom; and we agree with the Commons in this opinion. We find that, notwithstanding the laws already made for the prevention thereof, unregistered Popish priests and regulars are now as numerous in this kingdom as at any time before or since the Revolution, and have reason to believe they are in a great measure supported by gratuities on occasion of such marriages as are made void by this Bill. We have also reason to believe that many of His Majesty's soldiers, in the several regiments on this establishment are by such priests and regulars married to Popish wives, and by them tempted to desert, and very often enlist themselves in Irish regiments in the service of foreign princes. We are also of opinion that this Bill will in a great measure prevent the seducing of many others of His Majesty's subjects to the Popish religion, it being a matter of notoriety that many Protestant settlements in this kingdom, of the lowest sort of people, have degenerated into Popery, occasioned chiefly if not entirely by such clandestine marriages as this Bill is intended to prevent. We therefore recommend the same to your Grace, as a Bill of great importance and expectation.’ The Lord Lieutenant in a separate letter recommended the bill. He dwelt exclusively on the tendency of mixed marriages to produce converts to Popery, and his letter does not contain a single allusion to abductions.1 The measure of 1745, which at last became law, does, it is true, contain one clause rendering the condemnation of those who were guilty of abduction more easy, but the main body of the Act is substantially merely a reproduction of the Bill of 1743. It is directed mainly against mixed marriages and clandestine marriages. Its preamble simply states that ‘the laws now in being to prevent Popish priests from celebrating marriages between Protestant and Protestant, or between Protestant and Papist, have been found wholly ineffectual,’ and it was recommended by the Irish Council on precisely the same grounds as the Bill of 1743. By this law all marriages between Protestants and Catholics or between two Protestants, celebrated either by a priest or a degraded clergyman, were pronounced null and void.1 By another law it was provided that, although these marriages carried with them no civil consequences, those who celebrated them were still liable to the punishment of death.2

This Act, invalidating for political reasons marriages which were ecclesiastically complete, is one of the many instances in which a principle has been first introduced into English legislation in Ireland, and has afterwards extended to the sister country. It preceded, as we have seen, by several years, the Regency Act, and the Marriage Act of Lord Hardwicke, which were the first English laws admitting this principle. In spite of the measures against clandestine marriages, they continued in Ireland. There were always cases of attachment in which the weaker partner would yield to the solicitation of the stronger, but only on condition of the performance of a ceremony which satisfied her religious scruples, though it was unrecognised by law. Marriages which were regarded as morally legitimate, but which in the eyes of the law were simple concubinage, existed side by side with more regular unions; and the confusion of properties and families and titles resulting from them has been shown in conspicuous instances even in our own day.

I regret that this portion of my narrative should have assumed so polemical a character. The less such an element enters into history the better, and I should certainly not have introduced it but for what appears, to me at least, to be a very unusual amount and malignity of misrepresentation. In writing the history of a people it is neither just nor reasonable to omit the record of its prevalent crimes; but it is one thing to relate these, it is quite another thing to select the criminals of a nation as the special representatives of its ‘ideas.’ A writer who adopted the ‘Newgate Calendar’ as the chief repertory of English ideas, or who, professing to paint the various aspects of English life, discharged his task chiefly by highly-coloured and dramatic pictures of the worst instances of English crime, would hardly produce a picture satisfactory to a judicial reader. In Ireland, where part of the country was still in a condition of Highland barbarism, while another part was not far behind English civilisation, where a long train of singularly unhappy circumstances had disorganised the national life, where neither law nor property nor religion rested upon their natural basis, and where the tradition of former struggles was still living among the people, it was natural and indeed inevitable that there should be much violence, much corruption, many forms of outrage, a great distortion of moral judgments. It is peculiarly necessary that the history of such a nation should be written, if not with some generosity, at least with some candour, that a serious effort should be made to present in their true proportions both the lights and the shades of the picture, to trace effects to their causes, to make due allowance for circumstances and for antecedents. When this is not done, or at least attempted, history may easily sink to the level of the worst type of party pamphlet. By selecting simply such facts as are useful for the purpose of blackening a national character; by omitting all palliating circumstances; by suppressing large classes of facts of a more creditable description, which might serve to lighten the picture; by keeping carefully out of sight the existence of corresponding evils in other countries; by painting crimes that were peculiar to the wildest districts and the most lawless class as if they were common to the whole country and to all classes; by employing all the artifices of a dramatic writer to heighten, in long, detailed, and elaborate pictures, the effect of the crimes committed on one side, while those committed on the other are either wholly suppressed or are dismissed in a few vague, general, and colourless phrases; by associating even the best acts and characters on one side with a running comment of invidious insinuation, while the doubtful or criminal acts on the other side are manipulated with the dexterity of a practised advocate;—by these methods, and by such as these, it is possible for a skilful writer, even without the introduction of positive misstatement, to carry the art of historical misrepresentation to a high degree of perfection.

My own object has been to represent as far as possible both the good and the evil of Irish life, and to explain in some degree its characteristic faults. Irish history is unfortunately, to a great extent, a study of morbid anatomy, and much of its interest lies in the evidence it furnishes of the moral effects of bad laws and of a vicious social condition. It will appear clear, I think, from the foregoing narrative, how fully the circumstances under which the national character was formed explain its tendencies, and how superficial are those theories which can only account for them by reference to race or to religion. Without denying that there are some innate distinctions of character between the subdivisions of the great Aryan race, there is, I think, abundant evidence that they have been enormously exaggerated.1 Ethnologically the distribution and even the distinction of Celts and Teutons are questions which are far from settled,2 and the qualities that are supposed to belong to each have very seldom the consistency that might be expected. Nations change profoundly in the very respects in which their characters might be thought most indelible, and the theory of race is met at every turn by perplexing exceptions. No class of men have exhibited more fully the best of what are termed Teutonic characteristics than the French Protestants. The noblest expression in literature of that sombre, poetic, religious imagination which has been described as especially Teutonic is to be found in the Italian Dante. The Teutonic passion for individual independence and consequent inaptitude for organization have not prevented the modern German Empire from attaining the most perfect military organization in the world. The Irish were at one time noted for their sexual licentiousness. For the last two centuries they have been more free from this vice than the inhabitants of any other portion of the empire. As late as the eighteenth century Arthur Young traced the chief evils of France to the early and improvident marriages of the French peasantry.1 Such marriages are now probably rarer in France than in any other considerable country in Europe. Different nations of the same sub-race exhibit very different qualities, and the more the circumstances of their history are examined the more fully those qualities are usually explained.

But even if the distinctive characteristics of different races were fully established, they would throw little light on English or Irish history. In England, the succession of invasions and settlements in the early part of its history, and to a certain extent the later immigration of foreign elements, have produced such a mixture of races that no inference about the connection between race and national character could be safely drawn from English experience. The whole or nearly the whole island at the time of the Roman invasion appears to have been inhabited by a Celtic population, speaking a Celtic tongue; and although the Roman influence was very superficial, and the Teutonic Saxons obtained a complete ascendency, the Celtic element was still far from extinguished in at least the western half of the island. The Norman invasion, refugee immigrations, and constant intermarriages added to the mixture of races. About a third part of the English language, a large part of English institutions, a still larger part of English industries, may be traced to other than Teutonic sources; and if race has indeed the power that has been attributed to it, the great infusion of extraneous elements must have been the origin of many features of the national character. In Scotland, in addition to the earlier Celtic population, there were the great immigrations from Ireland after the fifth century; and language, the most faithful key to remoter history, attests the Celtic ascendency; but it was qualified by large Scandinavian immigrations from the North, and by large Saxon immigrations from the South. In Ireland the original Celtic stock had been tinctured even before the Norman invasion with a Scandinavian element, and long before the eighteenth century successive English and Scotch immigrations had made its predominance extremely doubtful. As early as 1612 Sir John Davis said ‘there have been so many English colonies planted in Ireland, that if the people were numbered at this day by the poll, such as were descended of English race would be found more in number than the ancient natives.’1 In 1640, in the Remonstrance of Grievances drawn up against the government of Stafford, it was urged that the people of Ireland were ‘now for the most part descended of British ancestors.’2 The Cromwellian period greatly increased the predominance of the English element, both by the introduction of new settlers, and by the extirpation of a great part of the old race, and a similar though less sanguinary process of change continued for many years after the Revolution. There is indeed every reason to believe that in Leinster and Ulster, which are the provinces that have played by far the greatest part in Irish history, the Saxon and Scotch elements have long been predominant, and a great modern authority was probably perfectly accurate when he asserted that there is no difference of race between the native of Devonshire and the native of Tipperary.1 The more the question is examined, the more fallacious will appear the reasoning that attributes most Irish evils to the Celtic character. Tipperary and other counties, which are largely inhabited by the descendants of English settlers, in a great degree by descendants of Cromwellian Puritans, have been foremost in Ireland for the aggressive and turbulent qualities of their inhabitants; while, for a long period at least, no parts of the British empire have been more peaceful, more easy to govern, and more free from crime than some of the purely Celtic districts in the west or in the south. A proneness to crimes of combination has been one of the worst and most distinctive evils of modern Irish life. But that proneness has been nowhere more conspicuous than in counties where the inhabitants are chiefly descended from Englishmen; it has not been a characteristic of other Celtic nations; and it is a curiously significant fact that it has never been shown among the great masses of Irishmen who are congregated in England, the United States, and the Colonies, though in other respects their moral character has often deteriorated.2 The national development of Scotland has been wholly different from that of Ireland, though the elements of race are very similar; and the Welsh character, though it approaches the Irish in some respects, diverges widely from it in others. Hostility to the English government is so far from being peculiar to Celts, that it has long passed into a proverb that in this respect the descendants of English settlers have exceeded the natives, and there have been few national movements in Ireland at the head of which English names may not be found. Nor can anyone who follows Irish history wonder at the fact. ‘If,’ wrote an acute observer in the beginning of the eighteenth century, ‘we had a new sette [of officers] taken out of London that had noe knowledge or engagements in Ireland, yet in seven years they would carry a grudge in their hearts against the oppressions of England; and as their interest in Irish ground increased, soe would their aversion to the place they left. So it hath been these five hundred years; so it is with many of my acquaintance but lately come from England; and so it is likely to be till the interests be made one.’1

For these reasons it appears to me that although the Celtic element has contributed something to the peculiar development of Irish character and history, the part which it has played in later Irish history has been greatly exaggerated. It is probable indeed that climate has been a more important influence than race, both in determining the prevailing forms of industry and in its direct physical operation on the human being.

The influence of the prevailing religion has no doubt been very great. Catholicism, like all other religions that have approved themselves to the hearts and consciences of great bodies of men, brings with it its own distinctive virtues, and it has contributed much both to the attractive charm and to the sterling excellences of the Irish character. But it is on the whole a lower type of religion than Protestantism, and it is peculiarly unsuited to a nation struggling with great difficulties. It is exceedingly unfavourable to independence of intellect and to independence of character, which are the first conditions of national progress. It softens, but it also weakens the character, and it produces habits of thought and life not favourable to industrial activity, and extremely opposed to political freedom. In nations that are wholly Catholic, religious indifference usually in some degree corrects these evils, and the guidance of affairs passes naturally into the hands of a cultivated laity actuated by secular motives, and aiming at secular ends. But no class of men by their principles and their modes of life and of thought are less fitted for political leadership than Catholic priests. It is inevitable that they should subordinate political to sectarian considerations. It is scarcely possible that they should be sincerely attached to tolerance, intellectual activity, or political freedom. The theological habit of mind is beyond all others the most opposed to that spirit of compromise and practical good sense which is the first condition of free government; and during the last three hundred years the gradual restriction of ecclesiastical influence in politics has been one of the best measures of national progress. It may indeed be safely asserted that, under the conditions of modern life, no country will ever play a great and honourable part in the world if the policy of its rulers or the higher education of its people is subject to the control of the Catholic priesthood. In Irish history especially the dividing influence of religious animosities is too manifest to be overlooked, and there is no doubt that the Catholicism of the bulk of the people has in more than one way largely contributed to their alienation from England. It deepens the distinctive differences of the national type. The Church as an organised body becomes the centre of the national affections, bringing in its train political sympathies, affinities, and interests wholly different from those of the great majority of Englishmen. Besides this, Catholicism, when it has once saturated with its influence the character of a nation, has a strangely antiseptic power, giving a wonderful tenacity to all old traditions, habits, prejudices, and tendencies.

But, notwithstanding all this, it would have been politically comparatively innocuous had it not been forced by oppression into antagonism to the law; had not the policy of confiscations thrown upon the priesthood the leadership of the people; had not the commercial spirit, which is the natural corrective of theological excesses, been unduly repressed. As it is, its injurious effects have been greatly exaggerated. The Act of William against ‘robbers, rapparees, and tories’ shows that Protestants and reputed Protestants as well as Papists and reputed Papists were concerned even in the outrages that followed the confiscations of the Revolution;1 and in the latter half of the eighteenth century, if the outrages of the White Boys and the Rockites were perpetrated by Catholics, the outrages of the ‘Hearts of Steel’ and of the ‘Hearts of Oak’ were perpetrated by Protestants. Protestants bore a great part in the rebellion of 1798, and they must bear the chief blame of the religious riots which still disgrace the civilization of Ulster. I have already noticed the very remarkable fact that in the eighteenth century the middlemen and squireens, who under the operation of the Penal Laws were necessarily for the most part Protestants, exhibited more than perhaps any other class the worst defects of the Irish character. The many admirable qualities of modern Scotland have often been attributed almost exclusively to the Reformation; but a large part of them date only from the industrial movement that followed the union, or from the abolition of hereditary jurisdictions, in 1746. Writers who are accustomed to attribute the differences between Scotland and Ireland solely to the difference of their religion, forget some of the most salient facts in the national history. They forget that during seventy memorable years that followed the Scotch union, while Scotland enjoyed perfect free trade, and was advancing with gigantic strides in industrial prosperity, Ireland still lay under the weight of the commercial disabilities, and the most energetic classes were driven to the Continent. They forget that for nearly a century after the establishment of the Scotch Kirk the great majority of the Irish people were crushed and degraded by the Penal Code. They forget that Scotland had never known to any considerable extent that confiscation of lands which in Ireland has produced not only a division, but an antagonism of classes, and has thrown the mass of the people for political guidance into the hands of demagogues or priests.

Religious convictions during the long oppression of the eighteenth century sank deeply into the minds of the people. In the upper classes the tendencies of the time, the profligacy of public life, and the great numbers who went through a nominal conversion in order to secure an estate, or to enter a profession, gradually lowered the theological temperature; but it was otherwise with the poor. They clung to their old faith with a constancy that has never been surpassed during generations of the most galling persecution, at a time when every earthly motive urged them to abandon it, when all the attraction and influence of property and rank and professional eminence and education were arrayed against it. They voluntarily supported their priesthood with an unwearying zeal, when they were themselves sunk in the most abject poverty, when the agonies of starvation were continually before them. They had their reward. The legislator, abandoning the hopeless task of crushing a religion that was so cherished, contented himself with providing that those who held it should never rise to influence or wealth, and the penal laws were at last applied almost exclusively to this end. Conversion to Catholicism was a criminal offence, and was sometimes punished as such,1 but in the darkest period of the penal laws not a few of the scattered Protestant poor lapsed into Catholicism.2 Stringent enactments had been made for the suppression of all religious pilgrimages, and for the destruction of every cross, picture, or inscription that could attract devotees; ‘but notwithstanding all this,’ said a contemporary observer,’ pilgrimage is continued as much as ever. When any superstitious place is defaced or demolished, the people repair to it, and seem more inclined to resort to it than formerly. They account it meritorious to resort to a practice prohibited by heretics; and if any punishment be inflicted upon them, they believe they suffer for righteousness' sake.’1 Foremost among these places of pilgrimage was the island in Lough Derg, the seat of the Purgatory of St. Patrick. Through the greater part of the Middle Ages it had attracted pilgrims from distant parts of Europe, and the legend connected with it had for many centuries sunk deeply into the popular imagination of Christendom, had been inserted in the Roman Missal of 1522, and had afterwards been made the subject of one of the dramas of Calderon. In 1632 the Lords Justices of Elizabeth destroyed the shrine, forbade the erection of any monastery on the island, and made all pilgrimages to it penal. In the Act of Anne against pilgrimages, it was singled out on account of its importance as specially obnoxious to the legislators; but in spite of every prohibition it was resorted to by thousands. Many others flocked to the hermitage of St. Finbar, on the solemn and lonely shore of Gouganebarra; to the cross said to have been erected by St. Colman on the banks of Lough Neagh; to the well of St. John in the county of Meath, which was popularly believed to be connected by a subterranean passage with the Jordan; or to some of the many less celebrated wells or relics that in every part of Ireland had been invested with a halo of legend.1 Others bolder, nimbler, or more devout performed the devotion of the Stations on the great Skellig, a small rocky island once occupied by a monastery of St. Finian, and lashed by the most furious waves of the Atlantic. Women as well as men, by means of shallow holes cut in the rock, climbed the smooth and dizzy cliff called ‘the Stone of Pain,’ which rises many fathoms above the sea; visited the cross on its summit, and performed their last perilous devotions at the extreme end of a projecting ledge of rock, but two feet in breadth, which hangs at a fearful height over the boiling waves.2 Priests and friars, drawn from the peasant class, and almost wholly destitute of human learning, but speaking the Irish tongue, and intimately acquainted with the Irish character, flitted to and fro among the mud hovels; and in the absence of industrial and intellectual life, and under the constant pressure of sufferings that draw men to the unseen world, Catholicism acquired an almost undivided empire over the affections and imaginations of the people. The type of religion was grossly superstitious. It consecrated that mendicancy which was one of the worst evils of Irish life. Its numerous holidays aggravated the natural idleness of the people. It had no tendency to form those habits of self-reliance, those energetic political and industrial virtues in which the Irish character was and is lamentably deficient; but it filled the imagination with wild and beautiful legends, it purified domestic life, it raised the standard of female honour, it diffused abroad a deep feeling of content or resignation in extreme poverty,3 an unfaltering faith in a superintending Providence, a sentiment of reverence which is seldom wholly wanting in an Irish nature, and which has preserved it from at least some of the worst vices that usually accompany social convulsions and great political agitations on the Continent.

It is remarkable, too, that superstition in Ireland has commonly taken a milder form than in most countries. Irish history contains its full share of violence and massacre, but whoever will examine these episodes with impartiality may easily convince himself that their connection with religion has been most superficial. Religious cries have been sometimes raised, religious enthusiasm has been often appealed to in the agony of the struggle; but the real causes have usually been conflicts of races and classes, the struggle of a nationality against annihilation, the invasion of property in land, or the pressure of extreme poverty. Among the Catholics at least, religious intolerance has never been a prevailing vice, and those who have studied closely the history and the character of the Irish people can hardly fail to be struck with the deep respect for sincere religion in every form which they have commonly evinced. Their original conversion to Christianity was probably accompanied by less violence and bloodshed than that of any equally considerable nation in Europe; and in spite of the fearful calamities that followed the Reformation, it is a memorable fact that not a single Protestant suffered for his religion in Ireland during all the period of the Marian persecution in England. The treatment of Bedell during the savage outbreak of 1641, and the Act establishing liberty of conscience passed by the Irish parliament of 1689 in the full flush of the brief Catholic ascendency under James II., exhibit very remarkably this aspect of the Irish character; and it was displayed in another form scarcely less vividly during the Quaker missions, which began towards the close of the Commonwealth, and continued with little intermission for two generations.

This curious page of Irish history is but little known. The first regular Quaker meeting in Ireland was established in Lurgan by an old Cromwellian soldier named William Edmundson, about 1654. In the following year the new creed spread widely in Youghall and in Cork, and speedily extended to Limerick and Kilkenny. George Fox himself came to Ireland in 1669. It was at Cork that William Penn was first drawn to the Quaker community by the preaching of a Quaker named Loe, and a swarm of missionaries came over from England, advocating their strange doctrines with a strange fanaticism. Thus Edward Burrough, having vainly attempted to obtain a hearing in the church, preached on horseback through the streets of Limerick. Barbara Blaugdon followed her acquaintances into the churches, protesting against the service, and on one occasion she appeared in the courts of justice in Dublin to exhort the judges on the bench. William Edmundson and several of his friends were moved by the spirit to give up shop-keeping and take farms for the sole purpose of testifying their principles by refusing to pay tithes. Solomon Eccles, having stripped himself naked from the waist upwards, and holding a chafing dish of coals and burning brimstone upon his head, entered a Popish chapel near Galway while the congregation were at their devotions, exclaiming ‘Woe to these idolatrous worshippers! God hath sent me this day to warn you and to show you what will be your portion except you repent.’ Thomas Rudd walked through the streets of Dublin shouting ‘Oh! the dreadful and Almighty God will dreadfully plead because of sin.’ John Exham appeared in like manner in the streets of Cork covered with hair-cloth and with ashes. John Hall went through towns and villages, announcing that a great plague was about to fall upon the land and to sweep away thousands of its inhabitants. ‘They shall lie dead,’ he predicted, ‘in their houses and dead in the streets. There shall scarcely be a people living found willing to bury them, their stench shall be so great.’ The success of these grotesque missionaries is shown by the deep root which Quakerism struck in Ireland, and the very considerable place it has attained in Irish life. The first quakers suffered much from magistrates and from clergymen, who continually fined and imprisoned them for disturbing public worship, for unauthorised preaching, for refusing to pay tithes or to take oaths, and for the other eccentricities of their conduct. They were often the objects of popular indignation on account of their refusal to shut their shops on Christmas Day, and in the anarchy of the Revolution they underwent many hardships, but on the whole few facts in the history of Quakerism are more striking than the impunity with which these itinerant English missionaries, teaching the most extreme form of Protestantism, and wholly unsupported by the civil power, traversed even the wildest and most intensely Catholic districts of Ireland, preaching in the streets and in the market-places. Thomas Loe thus passed on foot from Munster to Dublin. John Burnyeat spent twelve months traversing in the same manner the greater part of Ulster, Leinster, and Munster, preaching wherever he stopped. Thomas Rudd went in the same way through the greater part of Ireland, preaching in the streets and squares as far as Galway and Sligo. Katherine M‘Laughlin preached in Irish in the market-place of Lurgan. James Hoskins, accompanied by several Dublin Quakers, went in 1712 through Connaught, which was then almost exclusively Catholic, and was more anarchical than any other part of Ireland, and he met with no molestation except at Castlebar, where the resident magistrates interfered to prevent the people from attending him, and at last threw him into prison.1

The experience of Wesley half a century later was very similar. He certainly found more eager and more respectful listeners among the Catholics of Ireland than in most parts of England, and he has more than once in his ‘Journal’ spoken in terms of warm appreciation of the docile and tolerant spirit he almost everywhere encountered. Novelty and the resemblance which the itinerant preacher bore to the missionary friar may have had in these cases some influence, but they are insufficient altogether to account for it. Many of the politicians whom the Irish Catholics have followed with the most passionate devotion have been decided Protestants; and while in elections in England the Catholicism of a candidate has almost invariably proved an absolute disqualification, a large proportion of the most Catholic constituencies in Ireland are usually represented by Protestants. The tithe war was a species of agrarian contest in which the Protestant clergy occupied the position of landlords, and in the course of it many of them were brutally illtreated; but with this exception, no feature in the social history of Ireland is more remarkable than the almost absolute security the Protestant clergy, scattered thinly over wild Catholic districts, have usually enjoyed during the worst periods of organised crime, and the very large measure of respect and popularity they have almost invariably commanded, whenever they abstained from interfering with the religion of their neighbours.

We may add to this the very curious fact that the Irish people, though certainly not less superstitious than the inhabitants of other parts of the kingdom, appear never to have been subject to that ferocious witch mania which in England, in Scotland, and in most Catholic countries on the Continent has caused the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent women. The case of Dame Alice Kyteler and her accomplices, one of whom was burnt at Kilkenny for witchcraft in 1324, is well known1 ; but there was no Irish law against witchcraft till after the Reformation. Coxe mentions that in 1578 the Lord Deputy ‘executed twenty-two criminals at Limerick and thirty-six at Kilkenny, one of which was a blackamoor, and two others were witches, who were condemned by the law of nature, for there was no positive law against witchcraft in those days.’1 In 1586 a law was enacted against witchcraft, but the Irish cases of capital punishment for this offence were very few, and it is probable that more persons have perished on this ground in a single year in England and Scotland than in the whole recorded history of Ireland. One case which seems to have excited some attention, occurred at Youghal in 1661,1 and another in Antrim in 1699,2 and in 1711 a certain panic on the subject appears to have existed among the Protestant and half-Scotch population of Carrickfergus. Eight women were accused of having bewitched a woman in the island Magee. The judges were divided as to the nature of the evidence; the jury convicted the prisoners, and they were imprisoned and pilloried.3 This, as far as I have been able to discover, was the last trial for witchcraft in Ireland.

Of active disloyalty among the Catholic population there was surprisingly little. No doubt an intense animosity against the Government smouldered in the minds of a considerable number of the priests and of the more intelligent laymen, but several powerful causes conspired to counteract it. The conduct of Charles II. at the time of the Act of Settlement, the conduct of James II. after the battle of the Boyne, and the ferocious laws which had been passed against the Catholics under Anne—the last English sovereign of her house—had together destroyed all enthusiasm for the Stuarts; and the Hanoverian sovereigns having in their German dominions shown a remarkable toleration of the Catholics, their accession to the British throne was received in Ireland rather with satisfaction than the reverse. The few Catholic nobility and gentry had fairly given up the struggle. They desired chiefly to retain their property and position, and they showed themselves steadily, sometimes even extravagantly loyal. The tendency of the Church in the eighteenth century was everywhere to strengthen authority. The mass of the people were reduced to a condition of ignorance, degradation, and poverty, in which men are occupied almost exclusively with material wants, and care very little for any political question; the Irish brigade drew away to the Continent nearly all the active elements of disaffection; and the Jacobites who remained at home clearly saw that the most valuable service they could render to their cause was to send fresh recruits to be disciplined in the armies of France or of Spain. These are, I believe, the causes of the very remarkable fact that, during the first sixty years of the eighteenth century, though Great Britain was convulsed by two rebellions, and though Ireland was more than once menaced by a French invasion, the Irish people remained perfectly passive. Alarms, indeed, were not unfrequent. In 1708, on the rumour of an intended invasion of Scotland by the Pretender, forty-one Roman Catholic noblemen and gentlemen were, as a matter of precaution, imprisoned in Dublin Castle.1 We have seen how the houghing in 1711 and 1712 was attributed by many to a Jacobite source, and how the troubled aspect of English politics in 1714, 1715, 1743, and 1744 led to sterner repressive measures against the Catholics of Ireland. In 1721, when Alberoni had espoused the cause of the Pretender, letters from abroad were intercepted, foreshadowing an invasion of Ireland, and some alarm was expressed at ‘the very extraordinary devotions, fastings, and penances, among the Irish all over the country.’ It was said that many hundreds went daily, barefooted to church, that men who had long been confined to their houses or their beds now joined in the devotions, and that when they were asked the reason, they replied ‘that they were commanded to do it for the good of their souls and the advantage of another person.’2 But whatever truth there may have been in these rumours, it is at least certain that not a shot was fired in rebellion, and the complete tranquillity of Ireland during the struggle of 1745, as well as the entire absence of all trace in the papers of the Pretender of Irish conspiracy, attest beyond dispute that disloyalty as an active principle was not powerful in the country. In 1756, when war was raging with France, and when rumours of invasion were abroad, Wesley was astonished at the absolute security he found reigning in Ireland.1 In 1760, when these rumours were revived, another English traveller bears testimony to the good service rendered by some of the priests in warning their congregations against the seduction of French politics.2 An army of 12,000 men was indeed habitually maintained, and was especially useful in keeping order in remote districts; but, as we have seen in a former chapter, in seasons of danger a great part of it was usually withdrawn. The existence of so large a body, paid altogether from Irish resources, at a time when there was an extreme jealousy of a standing army in England, was justly regarded as a great source of strength to the empire.3

It is, however, certain that during all this time the legitimacy of the title of Pretender was a received doctrine among the priests. In a few cases priests appear to have been concerned in enlistments for the Continent. Among the presentments of the grand juries in 1744, is one of the grand jury of Kilkenny, stating that Colman O'Shaugnessy, the titular Bishop of Ossory, had been domestic chaplain to the Pretender, and was appointed at his special request.4 Another Bishop of Ossory—the illustrious De Burgo—in his great work on the ‘Irish Dominicans,’ which appeared as late as 1762, enunciated sentiments so glaringly Jacobite, that a council of Irish Bishops held at Thurles, ordered a portion of the book to be expunged. It was not, however, until the present century that the very curious fact was acknowledged, that by virtue of an indult conceded to James II., both his son and his grandson retained and exercised to the end of their lives the privilege of nominating bishops to the Roman Catholic sees in Ireland.1

There can be little doubt that if the Catholics had been permitted to enlist in the British army they would have availed themselves in multitudes of the privilege, and would have proved as loyal and as brave under the British flag as they have in every campaign during the present century. Such a permission would have attracted to the British service numbers of courageous soldiers who actually found their place among the enemies of England. It would have been an inestimable economical boon to a country where a large proportion of the population were often reduced to the verge of starvation. It would have exercised a moral influence of a kind peculiarly beneficial to the national character, and by identifying Irish Catholic names with great English triumphs, would have reacted very favourably on the political situation. The remarkable military capacities of the Irish people were already well known on the Continent, and Irish Protestants occupied a considerable position in the British army. The cavalry regiment of Lord Ligonier consisted almost entirely of them, and the brilliant part which it played in the battle of Dettingen was employed by the advocates of the Charter Schools as an argument in favour of proselytism.2 Archbishop Boulter, however, who then directed the affairs of Ireland, while urging on the Duke of Newcastle in 1726 the propriety of making Ireland a recruiting ground, did so only on the condition that the permission should be restricted to those who could bring certificates of their being Protestants and children of Protestants.1 The officers were accustomed to make severe inquiries in their regiments, lest any doubtful Protestant should have found his way into the ranks, and several persons were expelled on a bare suspicion of Catholicism.2

During the long period of their proscription,3 the stream of recruits for foreign armies never ceased. The Grand Jury of Dublin in 1713 complained bitterly of the accounts received from many parts of the country of daily enlistments, and year after year the same story was told in numerous informations and complaints that were laid before the provincial magistrates. In 1721 the Duke of Grafton wrote to the Lords Justices that information had arrived at the Admiralty that no less than 2,000 men were lurking in the mountains of Dungarvan waiting for ships to carry them to Spain.1 In the same year the Commissioners of Oyer and Terminer wrote from Cork ‘to acquaint the Lord Lieutenant and Council that the papists who have of late been enlisted for some foreign service have appeared in such great numbers and in so public a manner that’ as they say, ‘we are apprehensive the civil power alone will hardly be able to disperse them.’ They ask for troops to be sent ‘especially towards the sea-coast, from whence we have reason to believe at least 20,000 men have been of late or are now ready to be shipped off.’2

Yet it is probable that only a small part of the movement was known to the Government. The vast extent of coast fringed by barren and gloomy mountains, inhabited almost exclusively by Catholics, indented by deep bays and shady creeks, and infested by smugglers and privateers, rendered enlistment peculiarly easy, and the flights of the ‘wild geese,’ as they were called, were for many years almost unimpeded. Very often the corpse of an old woman was followed by a long train of apparently decorous mourners, to one of the many secluded churchyards that were scattered through the mountains, and there, unwatched and unsuspected, the recruiting agent chose his men and told them off for the service of France.1 There were a few prosecutions, and in 1726 a man named Nowland was condemned to death, with all the horrid circumstances of butchery usual in cases of high treason, for having enlisted men for the service of the Pretender.2 Two others, named Mooney and Maguirk, were executed in Dublin for foreign enlistments in 1732;3 but for some time the Government appear to have been so glad to get rid of the more energetic Catholics, that they connived at the movement, provided the emigrants did not direct their course to a country with which England was actually at war. The confidential letters of Primate Boulter supply clear evidence of this fact. In May 1726 we find him writing to the Duke of Newcastle, ‘There seems likewise to be more listing in several parts, but whether for France or Spain is uncertain, though they pretend the former.’ In the same year and month he wrote to Lord Carteret, ‘Every day fresh accounts come to us that there are great numbers listing here for foreign service.’ In March 1727 he writes to Newcastle, ‘Everything here is quiet except that, in spite of all our precautions, recruits are still going off for Spain as well as for France.’ In 1730 we find traces of a very curious episode illustrating the friendship which at that time subsisted between the Governments of England and France. An officer in the French service named Hennesy came to Ireland to raise recruits, and he actually had a letter of recommendation from the Duke of Newcastle to Primate Boulter. It was necessary to observe much secrecy so as to escape the notice of the Opposition in England. The difficulty was enhanced by the fact that every justice of the peace was competent to arrest and commit a recruiting agent, who could then only be released in due course of law, or by a formal pardon; and it was justly feared that the zeal of many magistrates would be stimulated if they knew the levies were secretly countenanced by a Government with whose politics they disagreed. Boulter urged these difficulties strongly upon the ministers. He assured them that as many recruits as they proposed to allow the French agent to levy had been clandestinely enrolled annually for several years; that ‘all recruits raised here for France or Spain are generally considered as persons that may some time or other pay a visit to this country as enemies,’ and that the Lords Justices apprehended serious difficulties from the intervention of the Government; and he added, ‘What has happened to several of them formerly when they were raising recruits here in a clandestine way (though as we knew his Majesty's intentions, we slighted and, as far as we could, discouraged complaints on that head), your Grace very well knows from the several applications made to your Lordship by the French ambassador.’

The predictions of the primate were verified by the event. The proceedings of the Government became known. They were attacked in the ‘Craftsman,’ and created so violent an explosion of hostile opinion in England as well as in Ireland, that it was thought necessary to recall Hennesy as speedily as possible.1 In 1741 the ‘Sieur de la Mar,’ an officer in FitzJames's regiment of horse, was prosecuted for enlisting men for foreign service in Ireland. The French ambassador interposed energetically on his behalf, and the Government ordered the prosecution to be stopped ‘in consideration of the humanity shown by a French squadron to the crew of the “Wolf” sloop, consisting of three officers and sixty-two sailors, who were cast away on an uninhabited island where there was no fresh water, and rescued by the French.’2

Of pure politics there was very little. Independently of the division between Protestants and Catholics, there was the conflict between the High Church party and the Nonconformists. Among the Protestants of Ireland, soon after the Revolution, and especially in the reign of Anne, there were a considerable number of High Churchmen whose opinions in a few cases verged upon Jacobitism. Dodwell, who was one of the most learned and most fantastic, and Lesley, who was one of the most acute and disputatious of the nonjurors, were both Irishmen, educated in Trinity College, and Sheridan, the bishop of Kilmore, threw in his lot with the same sect. Berkeley, though neither a Jacobite nor a nonjuror, maintained the doctrine of passive obedience hardly less emphatically than Filmer. The systematic preference of Englishmen to Irishmen in ecclesiastical, legal, and political patronage was naturally felt with a peculiar keenness by the educated men of the University, and its prevailing spirit was in consequence usually hostile to the Government. Boulter hated it, and described it as a seminary of Jacobitism, and there is reason to believe that there was some ground for the imputation. In 1711, a fellow named Forbes was expelled for aspersing the memory of William, and in 1713 some students underwent the same punishment for defacing his statue. In the same year, Bishop Browne, who had formerly been Provost of Trinity College, preached and published a very curious sermon, assailing the prevailing Whig custom of drinking ‘to the glorious, pious, and immortal memory’ of William, on the ground that drinking to the memory of the dead was a sacramental act, and that the homage could not without blasphemy be offered to a creature. Archbishop King complained bitterly of the conduct of some of his clergy on the accession of George I. There was no disturbance, but on the first Sunday after the change sermons were delivered in many churches against consubstantiation. Lutheranism, the religion of the new sovereign, was denounced as at least as bad as Popery, and the 137th Psalm, describing the emotions of the Jewish exiles when carried captive by their oppressors, was sung.1 In 1718, the soldiers quartered at Waterford were withdrawn by their officers from the Cathedral Church, on the ground that the preaching of the Bishop tended to alienate them from the Establishment.2 Among the many High Churchmen who were altogether untainted by Jacobitism was Swift, who hated the Dissenters with a peculiar intensity, and wrote with much force and persistence against the efforts that were made to repeal the sacramental test.

The existence of this High Church spirit contributed something to the intolerance shown to Dissenters; but there were other causes of a more serious nature. For some years after the Revolution a steady stream of Scotch Presbyterians had poured into the country, attracted by the cheapness of the farms or by the new openings for trade, and in the reign of Anne the Nonconformists boasted that they at least equalled the Episcopalian Protestants in Ireland, while in the province of Ulster they immensely outnumbered them.3 In 1715, Archbishop Synge estimated at not less than 50,000 the number of Scotch families who had settled in Ulster since the Revolution.4 Three years later Bishop Nicholson, writing from Londonderry, states that this parish—which extended far beyond the walls—though one of the most Episcopalian in the province, contained 800 families of Protestant Nonconformists, and only 400 of Conformists, while in some of the parishes in his diocese there were forty Presbyterians to one member of the Established Church.5 But the political power of the Dissenters even before the imposition of the test, was by no means commensurate with their number, for they were chiefly traders and farmers, and very rarely owners of the soil. In the House of Lords they were almost unrepresented. In the House of Commons they appear to have seldom if ever had more than twelve members. When the Test Act expelled them from the magistracy only twelve or thirteen were deprived. In the province of Ulster, Archbishop Synge assures us that there were not in his time more than forty Protestant Dissenters of the rank of gentlemen, not more than four who were considerable landowners, and, according to Bishop Nicholson, they had not one share in fifty of the landed interest in that province.1

At the same time they were rapidly becoming a great and formidable body, and their position was extremely anomalous. The Toleration Act, which established the position of the English Dissenters after the Revolution, had not been enacted in Ireland. William, it is true, had endeavoured with his usual liberality to promote such an act, but Sir Richard Cox and the bishops, who formed about half the active members of the House of Lords, strenuously maintained that it would be fatal to the Irish Church unless it were accompanied by a Test Act like that of England, and they succeeded in defeating the attempts of Lord Sydney and Lord Capel in the direction of a legal toleration. The dissenters themselves appear to have preferred a simple indulgence to an assured position encumbered by a Test Clause, and though lying beyond the strict letter of the law, their worship was not only openly celebrated, but was even to a small extent endowed. The Regium Donum bestowed upon the ministers, which was first given by Charles II.2 and afterwards revived and increased by William III., amounted only to an annual sum of 1,200l., but it involved the whole principle of legal recognition, and it continued to be paid in spite of the protest of Convocation, and of resolutions of both Houses of Parliament. The attitude of the Presbyterians was at the same time as far as possible from conciliatory, and it formed a curious contrast to that of the Catholics. The latter, conquered, dispirited, deprived of their natural leaders, and reduced to a miserable poverty, continued with quiet and tenacious courage to celebrate their rites in mud cabins or in secluded valleys; but they cowered outwardly before the Protestants, shrank from every kind of collision, and abstained for the most part from every act that could irritate or alarm. But the Presbyterians, who were conscious of their unswerving attachment to the existing Government, who boasted that the great majority of the heroic defenders of Londonderry had sprung from their ranks,1 and who were indignant, and justly indignant, at the ingratitude with which they were treated, stooped to no evasion. They were chiefly of Scotch birth or extraction, and they were endowed with a full share of Scotch stubbornness, jealousy and self-assertion. Not content with building their meeting-houses and celebrating their worship, they planted under the eyes of the indignant bishops an elaborate system of church government not less imperious, and far more efficient than that of the Established Church, and imported into Ireland the whole machinery of Church judicatories which had made the Kirk almost omnipotent in Scotland. In the words of Archbishop Synge, ‘their ministers marry people, they hold synods, they exercise ecclesiastical jurisdiction, as is done in Scotland, excepting only that they have no assistance from the civil magistrate, the want of which makes the minister and his elders in each district stick the closer together, by which means they have almost an absolute government over their congregations, and at their communions they often meet from several districts to the number of 4,000 or 5,000, and think themselves so formidable as that no government dares molest them.’2

The irritation on both sides was soon as strong as possible. The sin of schism became a favourite topic in the pulpits of the Established Church, while catechisms, describing Episcopacy as idolatrous and anti-Christian, were circulated broadcast over Ulster.1 Some landlords, and all bishops, in letting their lands inserted clauses prohibiting the erection of meetinghouses.2 Presbyterians were prosecuted and fined by the ecclesiastical courts for celebrating their marriages. Some, who refused to take the abjuration oath, were obliged to abandon their ministry. There were disputes at the graves about the service for the dead. There were disputes about the payment of church dues. ‘I understand,’ wrote Archbishop King, in 1698, ‘that the people of Belfast are very refractory, and do many irregular things; that they will not consent to enlarge their church, lest there should be room for all their people; that they bury, in spite of the law, in the church, without prayers, and come in with their hats on; that they break the seats, and refuse to deliver their collection for briefs, according to the order of the council, to the churchwardens.’3 In 1698, a Presbyterian minister from Limerick was arrested, imprisoned, and compelled to appear before the authorities at Dublin for having divided the Protestant interest, by preaching in Galway, where no Nonconformist worship had been celebrated for many years; and although he was soon released, it was ordered that no Presbyterian missionaries should for the present visit the capital of the West.4

The Presbyterians, however, rapidly threw out their branches; they sent missionaries among the Roman Catholics, and occupied many parishes which Episcopalian neglect had left almost deserted. Their attitude grew more and more defiant. A story was often repeated of how one of their most distinguished advocates in parliament shook the Bishop of Killaloe by the lawn sleeves, telling him in a threatening tone ‘that he hoped to see the day when there should not be one of his order in the kingdom.’1 They were accused of continually insulting the clergy, of forming a separate interest in the North, of engaging no apprentices except of their own sect, of planting their farms exclusively with Presbyterians, of favouring them systematically when serving as jurymen.2 The landlords saw, with no small apprehension, the rise of a new organised power which threatened to subvert their ascendency. ‘The true point,’ wrote Archbishop King, some years after the test clause had been imposed, ‘between them and the gentlemen is whether the Presbyterians and lay elders in every parish shall have the greatest influence over the people, to lead them as they please, or the landlords over their tenants. This may help your Grace in some degree to see the reason why the Parliament is so unanimous against taking off the test.’3

It is not surprising, under these circumstances, that when the English Government, in 1704, apparently without the solicitation of anyone in Ireland, thought fit to tack the test clause to a bill for the repression of Popery, it should have been accepted by the Irish Parliament. It is still less surprising that when the test had in this manner become law, the Irish House of Lords, in which the bishops commanded a majority of votes, and the Irish House of Commons, in which ecclesiastical influence was very strong, should have maintained it on the Statute Book for more than seventy years. The Presbyterians were thus expelled from all civil and military offices under the Crown. Their political importance was lowered, and another deep line of disqualification was introduced into Irish life. Most of the great evils of Irish politics during the last two centuries have arisen from the fact that its different classes and creeds have never been really blended into one nation, that the repulsion of race or of religion has been stronger than the attraction of a common nationality, and that the full energies and intellect of the country have in consequence seldom or never been enlisted in a common cause. We have already seen how fatally the division between Protestants and Catholics was aggravated by its coincidence with the division of classes, and how by a strange and singular infelicity the same train of causes that greatly diminished among the lower classes the capacity of self-government made the higher class peculiarly unfit to be the guardians and the representatives of their interests. The Test Act was another great step in the path of division, and it did much to make Protestant co-operation impossible.

At the same time the invectives that have been directed against the bishops for using their great influence to prevent the repeal appear to me exceedingly misplaced. They acted as sincere men of their profession and in their circumstances would inevitably act, making the first object of their policy the safety of their Church. In judging their conduct it must not be forgotten that the Test Act was law in England, and that English opinion regarded it as so essential to the security of the Established Church that the powerful Whig Governments that followed the Revolution, and the still more powerful Whig Governments that followed the accession of the House of Hanover, were unable to repeal it. If this was the case in England where the bishops formed only a small fraction of the Upper House, it would have been strange if it had been different in Ireland. The English Established Church rested upon the natural basis of an overwhelming preponderance of numbers, and had very little to fear from its feeble and divided opponents. But the Irish Church was a purely artificial structure. Its first and most vital interest was to identify its position as closely as possible with that of the Church of England; it was confronted, and was likely soon to be outnumbered, by a powerful, united, and hostile Nonconformist body, derived from the same stock and animated by the same sentiments as the Presbyterians in Scotland. What those sentiments were was abundantly shown. It was shown in the violence and outrage with which at the Revolution the Episcopalian clergy in Scotland were everywhere treated. It was shown in the invectives against all toleration of Episcopacy that were for years a commonplace in the Scotch pulpit; in the Solemn Remonstrance in which the highest authority in the Kirk pronounced the Toleration Act of Anne to be a grievous sin. It was shown not less clearly by the Dissenters in Ireland, who constantly reprinted with their catechisms that ‘Solemn League and Covenant’1 by which their ancestors had bound themselves, ‘without respect of persons, to endeavour the extirpation of Popery and Prelacy, that is, Church government by archbishops, bishops, deans and chapters, archdeacons, and all the ecclesiastical officers depending on that hierarchy.’ Among the many Scotchmen who were compelled by Presbyterian persecution to abandon their country was the father of King, the prelate who had most weight with the Irish clergy,2 and this fact had probably some influence on his policy. It was idle indeed to suppose that there was no danger to the established Episcopal Church in the political ascendency of men who in their own country had treated the bare toleration of Episcopacy as sinful, and Bishop Nicholson was probably not greatly in error when he predicted that if the test were abolished ‘Presbytery would forthwith extirpate Episcopacy in the province of Ulster.’3

These considerations are far from justifying the test clause from a political standing-point, but they explain the motives of its supporters. In 1708 and the two following years, the Whig element having again become supreme in England, the Government was very desirous of retracing its steps, and the administration of Lord Wharton did all in its power to induce the Irish Parliament to repeal the test. It soon, however, discovered that in neither House of Parliament was it possible to carry the repeal. The bishops were unanimous against it.1 Only a single voice was raised for it in Convocation,2 and in the House of Commons a similar feeling prevailed. The Presbyterians by this time numbered rather more than 130 congregations in Ulster, besides a few in Leinster and Munster.3 In the North their worship seems to have been at this time entirely unrestricted, but the absence of a legal toleration put a ready weapon into the hands of malignant or fanatical men, and in Drogheda a High Church dean and a High Church mayor gave much trouble to two successive Presbyterian ministers, who had been sent on a missionary expedition by the synod of Armagh, and they even kept one of them for some weeks in confinement. The Government interposed in their favour, and Archbishop Marsh, who was then primate, strongly censured the intolerant zeal that had been displayed.4 When the ministry of Godolphin was shattered, and the Church power was again in the ascendant in England, the Regium Donum was withdrawn, some meeting-houses in the North were closed,5 and the English Parliament, by its own authority, extended the Schism Act to Ireland. But the death of the Queen speedily changed the aspect of affairs, and the accession of George I. placed the friends of the Dissenters for a long period at the helm.

The Regium Donum was at once restored, and in 1718 it was increased to 2,000l., but the efforts to abolish the test were frustrated by an opposition led chiefly by Archbishop King, whose high character, and great abilities and experience, made him by far the most important of the Irish bishops, and by Synge, whose influence with the country gentry was even greater.6 Neither of these prelates were very high Churchmen. Both were men of unblemished integrity, and of apostolic zeal, and both were free from all suspicion of Jacobitism. King had, indeed, done more than any other Irish churchman for the Revolution, and his undeviating adherence to the Protestant succession was recognised by his immediate appointment as Lord Justice at the very critical moment when George I. ascended the throne.1 Unfortunately, however, both he and his brother prelate had adopted as the cardinal principle of their policy the necessity of maintaining the complete identity, in legal position, of the English and Irish Churches. A Toleration Act like that of England they were perfectly ready to concede, but such an Act was now scornfully repudiated.2 It involved a subscription to the doctrinal Articles, which was represented as a sign of servitude and inferiority, and the Dissenters declared that the only toleration they would accept was one like that which was enjoyed by the Scotch Episcopalians. The Test Act, on the other hand, existed in England, and the Church party maintained it to be indispensable for the security of the Church in Ireland. In 1715, when rebellion was raging in Scotland, the Irish Presbyterians, with a very praiseworthy loyalty, and with the full assent of the Government, enrolled themselves in the militia, and held commissions in it, in defiance of the test, and the ministers undertook not only to bring in an indemnity, but also, under cover of that indemnity, to strike a fatal blow at the test. They proposed that the indemnity should be not only retrospective but also prospective, covering all who in the future held commissions in the militia, and all who for ten years held commissions in the army. The House of Commons was strongly in favour of the measure, but King carried through the House of Lords a Bill confining the indemnity to the past. It became evident that the more liberal Bill would never pass the peers. Both were accordingly dropped, and the Dissenters were only protected from prosecution by resolutions of the House of Commons. In 1719 a Toleration Act like that of Scotland was at last carried, partly by the assistance of some English bishops, in spite of the efforts of King to reduce it to the limits of the English Act, and it was accompanied by an indemnity securing from prosecution Nonconformists then holding civil or military offices, and receiving pay from the Crown.1 Similar indemnity Acts were from this time passed almost every session in Ireland as in England, and they reduced to small practical importance the grievance of the test. In 1733 Walpole, who was continually urged by his Nonconformist supporters in England to take some measure in their favour, and who feared to provoke the Church feeling which he knew would be aroused by any attempt to repeal the Test Act in England, made a new effort to repeal it in Ireland, but although Boulter, who then occupied the primacy, was warmly in its favour, it was abandoned as impracticable. King was now dead, and Hoadly, a brother of the great latitudinarian bishop of Winchester, held the see of Dublin, but his influence was quite unable to carry the repeal, and the House of Commons was but little less hostile to it than the House of Lords.1 Boulter calculated that there were nearly three to two against it in the Commons, and at least two to one in the Lords.2 In 1737, however, an important Act was carried, which, without formally authorising marriages by Presbyterians, secured them from prosecution in the ecclesiastical courts, and thus put an end to a large amount of vexatious and expensive legislation.1 It was not, however, till a much later period, when the sentiment of nationality had begun to animate the Irish legislature, and the ecclesiastical spirit had greatly declined, that the last disabilities of the Dissenters were removed.

It appeared probable in the early years of the eighteenth century that the most formidable Church conflicts in Ireland would be those between the Established Church and the Presbyterians. But the expectation was not fulfilled. The Presbyterians were, it is true, free from the innumerable restrictions and oppressions relating to property and to education which ground the Catholics to the dust, but they soon found that Ireland was no country for an enterprising and ambitious population. The commercial restrictions had struck a death-blow to its prosperity, and as leases fell in, and as famine after famine swept over the land, the emigration of Presbyterians continually increased, diminishing their numbers, and carrying away their more enterprising members. At the same time powerful intellectual causes were corroding their belief. Few probably of those who protested against the introduction into the Toleration Act of all subscription to the doctrinal Articles of the Church of England, anticipated that the Toleration Act would be immediately followed by a protest on the part of many Presbyterian ministers against a subscription to the Westminster Confession of Faith. But the principles of Locke, of Hoadly, and of Hutcheson were abroad. A rationalistic spirit which revolted against all formularies intended to check the freedom of theological inquiry was widely diffused among educated men. It was especially strong in the University of Glasgow, where a large proportion of the Irish Presbyterians were educated, and it found a very able leader in Ireland in a young Presbyterian minister named Abernethy. With the authority of human formularies the Athanasian doctrine of the Trinity speedily gave way, and Arian, or semi-Arian, doctrines became common in the Presbyterian pulpit. The body was thus divided against itself. Religious controversy passed from questions of Church government to questions of dogma; a tone of thought began to prevail which was wholly incompatible with the old fanaticism, and many who were scandalised at the new doctrines took refuge in the Established Church.1 In 1726 the ‘New Light Movement,’ as it was called, culminated in an open schism, twelve congregations with their ministers seceding and announcing as their distinctive principle freedom from all forms of subscription. The number of the seceders was not greatly increased, but they carried with them much of the culture of the body, and they exercised a wide influence beyond their border.

This schism was followed by another of a very different kind, but which had some of the same results. The lay patronage, which was the proximate cause of the schism of the Associate presbytery in Scotland, did not exist in Ireland, but the main object of the movement was to revive the old fanaticism of the League and Covenant in an age when all the strongest intellectual tendencies were in a very different direction. About 1746 the secession spread to Ireland, and as early as 1752 a very curious information, sworn by some dissenting farmers of Donegal before the Mayor of that county and sent by him to the Government, described the seceders in the north of Ireland as already reckoning some thousands.2 The ministers were accustomed, the deponents state, to oblige their followers to swear the Solemn League and Covenant for the extirpation of Popery and Prelacy, they refused to take the oath of allegiance to any sovereign who had not subscribed the Covenant, they denounced as sinful the Scotch Union, the oath of abjuration, the test clause, the form of kissing the book when swearing, the superstitious practice of keeping holidays at the close of December, the superstitious worship of the Church of England set up in every corner of the land. The new preachers found much acceptance among the poorest and most ignorant of the Presbyterians of the North, and many seceding congregations were formed, but they appear to have been merely simpleminded and well-meaning fanatics, and they exercised no political influence on the country. The main body of the Presbyterians, however, was somewhat weakened, and it was more and more confirmed in a moderation of doctrine which contributed largely to religious harmony in Ireland.

Still more important than the conflict between the Church and the Nonconformists was that between the English and the Irish interests. The latter had, indeed, no sympathy or connection with the great majority of the Irish people, but it represented the English colony, it aimed at a government intended for its benefit, and it included a large amount of political discontent. In the Irish as in the English Church the prevailing doctrine of passive obedience alienated some of the clergy from the Revolution, and there are a very few instances of Irish Protestants being accused of connection with the Pretender, but on the whole Jacobitism was probably extremely rare among them. The owners of immense masses of confiscated land scattered thinly among a subjugated Catholic population, would have been little short of mad had they detached themselves from the English Government and the Protestant succession; and the proceedings of the Parliament of James II. remained to show the spoliation which would have inevitably followed a renewed Catholic ascendency. Still there was a large amount of deep, sullen, and aimless discontent, due in almost equal proportions to the merits and the faults of the government of William. On the one hand, that rare enlightenment which led him at one stage of his career to propose as the solution of the religious difficulty an equal division of the Church property between the contending sects, at another to sign the Articles of Limerick, at a third to sanction the wise and generous policy of restoring on different pretexts to impoverished Catholic families about one-seventh of the confiscated lands which were not included under the Treaty of Limerick, placed him far above the sympathy of fanatics and tyrants. On the other hand, he must bear a large share in the responsibility of that commercial legislation which blasted as in an hour the rising prosperity of the nation, and was the most crushing disaster that ever befell Irish Protestantism. The poverty of the country was greatly aggravated by the Revolution, while the expenses of the Government were increased. Patronage and pensions were distributed with quite as little regard to its interests as under the Stuarts. The Irish Parliament was, it is true, convoked anew, but only because additional supplies were required. The English Parliament lost no occasion of asserting the dependent position of its weaker sister, and the diminution of the power of the Crown, and the aggrandisement of the English commercial classes, were far from advantageous to Ireland. The King had no interest opposed to the general prosperity of the nation, and the richer it became the more his hereditary revenue would rise. But the very first principle of English commercial policy was to drive every competitor from the market, to crush in the very germ every trade or industry that might one day rival its own.

A power actuated by such dispositions exercised an almost absolute authority over Irish affairs, and it is not surprising that even among the Protestants discontent should have been very rife. Jacobite agents, deceived by their wishes and realising imperfectly the deep chasm that separated the Protestant from the Catholic, easily imagined that it might be employed for their purposes. Among the Jacobite papers of the Cardinal who managed the affairs of the Catholics in England in the reigns of William and of Anne, there is one on the state of Ireland, drawn up in the early part of the latter reign, which gives a vivid picture of the kind of projects that were floating in many minds. ‘It is certain,’ the writer says, ‘if one examines closely the affairs of Ireland that even the Protestants would gladly do all in their power to free themselves from the tyranny of the English, as these latter destroy their commerce and their liberty, bind them by what laws they please, overrule both their courts of justice and their Parliament, and subject them to innumerable other inconveniences. But the Protestants can undertake nothing for their deliverance for want of the assistance of the Catholics, who outnumber them, and who are their enemies on account of the land that has been unjustly confiscated.’ It was possible the agent thought to offer such inducements to the Irish as would put an end to their antagonism and unite both parties against the Government of the Revolution. In the first place Ireland should be rendered independent, not of the King but of England, its Parliament being recognised as possessing the same powers as that of Scotland. In the next place the question of the confiscated land must be boldly dealt with. It was impossible to do anything for the Catholics whose property had been confiscated under Elizabeth, and this was of the less importance because much of that land was in possession of the Scotch, who were deadly enemies of the English and of the English Church, and who would be only too glad to have their commerce again. The property, however, that had been confiscated under Cromwell must be divided, half reverting to its old possessors, and the other half remaining with its present owners. Nor would the latter, it was said, suffer any real loss; for the establishment of perfect freedom of trade, and of legislative independence, as well as the security that would follow a definite arrangement, would at least double the value of land. It was further proposed that all religious disqualifications should be abolished, that all posts should be shared between the rival creeds, that the Church property should be equally divided, and that the heir of the House of Stuart as well as the Kings of France and of Spain should guarantee the Treaty. Lord Granard, it was added, possessed such an authority over the Scots of the North that he could easily lead them, and Lord Granard was completely gained to the Jacobite cause.1

These were the dreams of conspirators who had a very inadequate conception of the conditions of Irish life. A desire, however, to secure for the country some measure of independence, and to put a stop to the system under which it was treated, to use the graphic expression of a writer of the time, merely as the milch cow of England, was very general among the Irish Protestants. They were, however, almost absolutely helpless. Divided among themselves, cut off from the great body of the nation, excluded from the highest political and judicial offices, living in a poverty-stricken, ignorant, and degraded country, they could do little but utter a few barren protests. In 1698, amid the downfall of Irish commerce through English legislation, Molyneux published his well-known ‘Case of Ireland,’ in which he maintained by strong historical arguments that the English colonists who first annexed Ireland to the English Crown had been authorised to regulate their affairs in Ireland with the same liberty as the English in their own country, that they were conceded a constitution which was a counterpart of that of England, that their Parliament had originally sole legislative authority in the Pale, and that it was only by a series of unwarranted encroachments, assisted by the disturbed and divided condition of the country that they had been divested of constitutional liberty. The writer was a very eminent scientific man, a friend of Locke, and Member for the University of Dublin, and nothing could be more sober, moderate, and decorous than the language of his book; but by order of the English Parliament it was at once committed to the flames. In 1703, when the Scotch Union was contemplated, the Irish Parliament evinced a strong desire for a similar measure, which, while it consolidated the two countries, would give the great blessing of free-trade to the weaker one. Petty, at an earlier period, had advocated such a measure. The House of Commons enumerated in an address to the Queen the many grievances of the country, and added, ‘We cannot despair of your Majesty's goodness being extended towards us . … by restoring to us a full enjoyment of our Constitution or by promoting a more firm and strict union with your Majesty's subjects in England,’ and the Chancellor, Sir Richard Cox, warmly but unavailingly supported the prayer for an union.1 In 1707, the House of Commons when congratulating the Queen on the accomplishment of the union with Scotland, inserted in their address this significant prayer: ‘May God put it into your royal heart to add greater strength and lustre to your crown by a yet more comprehensive union!’2 The Irish Catholics were at this time politically dead, and there seems no reason to doubt that an union like that of Scotland would have been most gratefully received by the most vehement of what was termed the Irish party, if only it could have secured the country the same commercial liberty as existed in England.3 Commercial jealousy was probably the one reason that prevented it.

The division, therefore, between the two parties continued, and the faint struggle was maintained on questions of patronage and on questions of constitutional right. The systematic exclusion of men born in Ireland from the highest posts in the country was an obvious grievance. Sunderland, it is true—who during his short vice-royalty, never came to Ireland—made most of his legal and ecclesiastical appointments in the Irish interest;1 and Carteret promoted several persons on the recommendation of Swift;2 but such examples were very rare.

In the Irish episcopacy the antagonism between the English and the Irish bishops was soon apparent, and reacted upon other classes and upon general politics. King, the Archbishop of Dublin, led the Irish interest, and the college and most of the resident clergy and gentry supported it. The character and motives of King I believe to be unimpeachable, but many of the supporters of the Irish interest were very ordinary placehunters. They were struggling, however, against a real grievance, and one that was fertile in calamity to the nation. The monopoly of the highest offices which was claimed for Englishmen was simply an expression of that policy which in the internal government of Ireland habitually sacrificed Irish to English interests. The letters of Primate Boulter, who led the English party, furnish abundant evidence of the keenness of the antagonism. ‘The only way to keep things quiet here,’ he wrote, ‘is by filling the great places with the natives of England.’ ‘I must request your Grace,’ he wrote to the Duke of Newcastle, ‘that you would use your influence to have none but Englishmen put into the great places here for the future.’ Within six months of his appointment to the Primacy, we find him urging the Government to appoint an Englishman to the archbishopric of Dublin as soon as it fell vacant, and to fill up in the same manner the vacant Chancellorship and Mastership of the Rolls. He watched with an eager, cat-like vigilance every sign of decaying health, that made it probable that some great man would soon drop from his post, and sometimes even before the catastrophe, sprang forward to secure the place for an Englishman. Few matters, indeed, occupy a larger place in his letters.

The constitutional conflicts of the time have long since lost their interest, and they may therefore be very summarily told. They consisted chiefly of abortive efforts of the dependent legislature to obtain the same control over the Irish finances as the English parliament possessed over the finances of England. The first attempt of this kind was in 1692, when the House of Commons, summoned by Lord Sydney, rejected a money Bill which was sent over from England, on the ground that it did not take its rise in the House, and although on account of an urgent financial necessity it consented to pass a similar Bill, it accompanied it by a resolution asserting ‘the sole and undoubted right of the Commons of Ireland to propose Bills for raising money.’ The judges, however, to whom the question was referred, pronounced adversely on the claim of the House of Commons, and it afterwards accepted several money Bills which did not originate with itself. In 1703, as we have already seen, there was a vigorous effort to retrench useless pensions; in 1709 a money Bill was rejected because it had been altered in England, and in the last days of Queen Anne the vehement Whig policy of the Irish House of Commons so seriously impeded the Tory, if not Jacobite, policy of the Government, that Sir Constantine Phipps appears to have contemplated the possibility of reducing the expenditure of the country to the limits of the hereditary revenue and governing without a parliament.1 In 1719 a violent constitutional conflict broke out on another question. A lawsuit for the possession of an estate, between Hester Sherlock and Maurice Annesley, had been decided a few years before in favour of the latter, but the Irish House of Lords, on appeal, reversed the decision. Annesley then carried his appeal to the English House of Lords. There appears to be little or no doubt that originally the Irish House of Lords possessed exactly the same final right of jurisdiction in Ireland as the English House of Lords possessed in England, and it had repeatedly exercised it, but parliamentary government had long worked very irregularly, Parliaments during long periods had not been sitting in Ireland, and there had been a few instances, all of very modern date, of appeals being carried from the Irish Court of Chancery to the English House of Lords. That body resolved to assert its power. It reversed the decision of the Irish House of Lords, and ordered the Irish Court of Exchequer to put Annesley in possession of the estate. The court obeyed, but Alexander Burrowes, the sheriff of the county of Kildare, refused to execute its order in disobedience of the House of Lords of his own country. He was accordingly fined 1,200l., and he brought his case before the Irish House of Lords.

The Irish House in the first place took the opinions of the judges, who pronounced that it possessed the final right of jurisdiction for Ireland. It then asserted its rights by resolution, applauded the conduct of the sheriff of Kildare, and even took the bold measure of imprisoning the Barons of the Exchequer for acting on the decision of the English House. It at the same time forwarded a powerful representation to the King. But the question was not one of argument, but of power. The English Parliament was resolved to maintain, in the most stringent form, the subjection of the Parliament of Ireland, and an Act of Parliament was passed which not only asserted that subjection in the most emphatic terms, but also denied all power of appellate jurisdiction to the Irish House of Lords.1

The indignation produced in Ireland by these proceedings was very great, and it was all the more bitter because there seemed no possibility of resistance. In 1720, when the country was reduced to a state of extreme wretchedness, Swift wrote his admirable tract, urging the exclusive use of Irish manufactures, in order to relieve the poverty of the people. The printer was at once prosecuted, and Chief Justice Whitshed, who conducted the trial, showed a partiality that could hardly have been surpassed by Jeffreys or by Scroggs. Nine times the jury desired to return a verdict of not guilty, and nine times they were sent back by the judge. He placed his hand on his breast and declared his belief that the pamphlet was written in the interests of the Pretender. He prolonged the disgraceful scene for eleven hours till the jury, wearied out, brought in a special verdict, leaving the matter to the judge himself. The unpopularity of the proceeding, however, was so great that the Government did not venture to proceed farther. A second trial was contemplated, but on the arrival of the Duke of Grafton, as Viceroy, more moderate counsels prevailed, and a nolle prosequi was granted.1

At last, however, public opinion spoke with effect, but it was in a cause which, compared with religious and commercial liberty, seemed very insignificant. There was in 1722 an undoubted want of small change in Ireland, and the sovereign resolved to exercise one of the most unquestionable of his prerogatives in supplying the deficiency. As usual, however, in Irish matters, the measure was connected with a job, and was executed with a supreme indifference to Irish opinion. In England, as in other civilised countries, the coin of the country issued from a regular mint, and the coinage was undertaken by the officials of the Government. In Scotland there had been a special provision in the Act of Union for maintaining such an establishment in the country. In Ireland there was no mint, and the Government was accustomed to grant patents to private persons authorising them, for their private emolument, to coin the required sums. The Irish had again and again petitioned for a mint, but in vain.2 In 1634 both Houses of Parliament joined in an address to the King beseeching him that such an establishment should be erected, that the coin of Ireland should be of the same standard and intrinsic value as that of England, and that the profits of the coinage should accrue to the Government. But although Wentworth, who clearly saw the great evils which a debased coinage brought upon the country, supported the address, private interest in England prevailed, and it was refused.1 The old system of coinage still continued. Thus we find under James II. a patent granted ‘to Sir J. Knox, Knight, for issuing copper halfpence in right of his wife, the only child of Richard, late Earl of Arran,’ and a similar privilege in the following reign was conceded for many years to Lord Cornwallis. The abuses of Irish coinage had been very great, and had left a deep impression on the popular mind. In 1600 Elizabeth, desiring, it is said, to prevent Tyrone and his confederates from purchasing arms, ammunition, and provisions from the Continent, had flooded the country with base coin, had strictly prohibited the importation of any other, and had in this manner spread ruin, misery, and confusion over the whole island.2 In 1689 James II. had issued base coinage to the nominal value of nearly a million sterling, intrinsically worth about one-sixtieth of that sum; he had compelled all persons to receive it as legal tender, and had thus disorganised the whole financial system of the country. In 1697–8 there were new complaints, and an address was carried by the House of Commons requiring security to be taken from the present patentee for changing the halfpence then coined. In 1700 a petition of Lord Cornwallis, asking for a renewal of his patent was referred to the Lords Justices, and in a very unfavourable report they stated that they could not advise the coinage of more base money, ‘which, not being of an intrinsic value, the House of Commons here in their last Session were very apprehensive might at some time prove a great loss to the kingdom.’ The Lords Justices strenuously urged that a mint should be erected, and that the money should be coined by the Government, and not by the subject, but begged that if the King thought differently, ‘strong security should be required that the coins should be of intrinsic value.’1

But these remonstrances were unavailing. No mint was erected. In 1722 a memorial was presented to the Lords of the Treasury complaining of the base quality of the copper coinage then circulating,2 and when in the same year the resolution was taken to issue a new coinage, the privilege of supplying it was granted to the Duchess of Kendal, the mistress of the King, who sold it to an English ironmonger named Wood. By the terms of the patent one pound avoirdupois of copper was to be coined into halfpence and farthings to the nominal value of 2s. 6d. It was acknowledged that the market price of this quantity of uncoined copper was only 12d. or 13d.3 It was acknowledged also that the intrinsic value of the Irish copper coinage would be considerably below that of the English coinage, for in England only 23d. were coined out of the amount of copper from which 30d. were to be coined in Ireland.4 It was urged, however, in behalf of the patent that copper prepared for the mint cost 1s. 6d. per lb., that the expenses of coinage were 4d. per lb., and that owing to the exchange and to a small duty on importation, which increased the cost of the transaction, the difference in value between the English and Irish halfpence was not unreasonable, considering that the latter were to be struck in London.5 It must be added too that the patent obliged no one who was not willing, to receive the coin.

The most serious objections to it were of another kind. The patent was granted without consulting the Irish Privy Council or any other authority in Ireland, and in order that the profits should be very large, a sum of no less than 108,000l. was to be coined. In the judgment of the best authorities in Ireland 10,000l. or 15,000l. would have amply met the requirements of the country.1 In England the copper coinage seldom exceeded in value a hundredth part of the whole currency. It served only for the convenience of change, and its intrinsic value was a matter of indifference. In Ireland the whole current coin was believed not to be more than 400,000l.,2 and it was proposed to coin in copper more than a fourth part of that sum. The proportion was monstrous, and it was contended in Ireland that the entirely abnormal position it gave to copper coinage made the question of intrinsic value vitally important, for the new coins would necessarily enter into all large payments, would gradually displace gold and silver, and would place the country at a ruinous disadvantage in commerce with other powers. Rightly or wrongly, all classes believed that under these circumstances the small amount of precious metals in the country would all or nearly all pass to England in the shape of rent, leaving nothing but a debased copper coinage at home. And all this took place at a moment when a bitter, jealous discontent was smouldering in the colony, and when only a spark was needed to kindle it into a flame.

The explosion was instantaneous, and it was sustained by the grossest exaggerations. The House of Commons reported that even if the patent were rigidly observed, it would result in a loss to the country of 150 per cent., and Swift afterwards, with the utmost confidence, averred that the coin was so base that there would be a loss in purchases of nearly 11d. in the shilling, and that if the new coinage were received the whole rents of the country would be diminished certainly by half, and probably by five-sixths. These statements were enormous, and probably wilful, exaggerations. The coinage, it is true, was not uniform, and no less than four varieties were struck,1 but most of it was superior to the very bad copper coinage of the three previous reigns, none of it was debased to the extent that was alleged, and on the whole the terms of the patent appear to have been faithfully fulfilled. The objections to the scheme, however, were real and grave, and Wood had added to the indignation by a foolish boast that he would ‘pour the coin down the throats of the people.’ The great mass of smouldering discontent now burst into a flame; and, as the question was happily unconnected with party or with creed, the movement spread through all classes. Both Houses of Parliament and most of the corporations voted addresses against the coinage, and there was a general resolution to refuse it. It was in vain that the Government, in order to allay the tumult, had some of the coin tested by Sir Isaac Newton, the Master of the Mint, and published his report affirming that the coins which he examined were quite as good as the terms of the patent required and much better than the Irish halfpence coined under Charles II. and his two successors.2 It was in vain that the sum to be coined was reduced from 108,000l. to 40,000l. In the beginning of 1724 Swift, who appears to have remained passive till the tempest had fairly risen, entered upon the scene. In the character of a Dublin tradesman, and in letters which are among the most perfect models of popular political eloquence and argument, he took up the subject, adopted all the prevalent exaggerations, poured a torrent of ridicule and caustic irony upon Wood and upon his project, and having lashed the nation into a fury, proceeded at once to a higher and more important theme. In his famous fourth letter he reasserted with commanding power the principles of Molyneux, claimed for the Irish legislature the right of self-government; drew with a firm and unfaltering hand the line between the prerogative of the sovereign and the liberty of the people; laid bare the scandalous abuses of the Irish Government, and, urging that ‘government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery,’ struck a chord which for the first time vibrated through every class in Ireland. The Government was exceedingly alarmed. The Duke of Grafton was thought too weak to contend with the storm, and was recalled, and Carteret was sent over in his place;1 but that able, fearless, and experienced statesman found himself equally powerless. A reward of 300l. was offered for the apprehension of the author of the letter, but though he was generally known, no evidence could be obtained. A prosecution was directed against the printer, but the Grand Jury, in spite of the strenuous exertions of Chief Justice Whitshed, refused to find the bill. Not content with this, it presented all who consented to receive the money. The gentry at the quarter sessions everywhere condemned it. Archbishop King and the Chancellor Middleton were both prominent in opposition.2 Boulter, though the bitterest opponent of what was called the Irish party, strongly urged in private letters the economical evils of the scheme. Ballads encouraging resistance were sung at every street corner, and Swift even brought the subject into the pulpit. No one dared to accept the coins in payment, and the passions of the people ran so high that there was no alternative except to withdraw the patent. The compensation allotted to Wood for the profits he had to forego was no less than 3,000l. a year for eight years.1

Such are the main facts of this episode, which occupies so conspicuous a place in Irish history. It is impossible to doubt that a gross and scandalous job was defeated, but it is equally impossible to deny the unscrupulous exaggerations of the Irish leaders. The patriotism of Swift himself was of a very mingled order. Though Irish by birth and education, he always looked upon his country as a place of exile, and upon the great mass of its people with undisguised contempt. He had seen without a word of disapprobation the enactment of the most atrocious of the penal laws, which crushed the Catholics to the dust, and though declaring himself that there was no serious disloyalty among them,2 he looked forward with approval to the legal extirpation of their religion by the refusal of the Government to permit any priest to celebrate its rites.3 If there was any hope of the Irish people maintaining their position in the face of English jealousy, it could only be by their union; but not content with cutting himself off from the Catholics by his approval of the penal laws, he allowed his passions as a Churchman to impel him to the bitterest animosity towards the Protestant Nonconformists. The Irish party in the Church during the first half of the eighteenth century being usually in opposition to the Government, which was Whig, and therefore supported by the Dissenters, threw itself into the opposite scale, and became in general supporters of the Test Act. From a national and patriotic point of view, no blunder could have been more egregious; but Swift lent it all the weight of his genius and of his influence. Much of his indignation was, no doubt, due to personal disappointment acting on a nature singularly fierce, gloomy, and diseased, and to bitter animosity against the Whig party, which had crushed his hopes and scattered his friends. Nor should it be forgotten that, though in the Drapier controversy he spoke with much severity of the contempt which Wood had shown for the Irish Parliament, no sooner had that Parliament, by its resolutions concerning the tithe of agistment, touched the interests of his order, than he did everything in his power to discredit it, by an invective which is perhaps the most savage in English literature.1

Yet in spite of all this, Ireland owes much to Swift. No one can study with impartiality his writings or his life without perceiving that, except in questions where ecclesiastical interests distorted his judgment, he was animated by a fierce and generous hatred of injustice, and by a very deep and real compassion for material suffering. Endowed by nature not only with literary talents of the highest order, but also with the commanding intellect of a statesman, accustomed to live in close intimacy with the governing classes of the empire, he found himself in a country where all popular government was reduced to a system of jobbery, where the most momentous material and moral interests were deliberately crushed by a tyranny at once blind, brutal, and mean, where the people had lost all spirit of self-reliance and liberty, and where public opinion was almost unknown. He succeeded—no doubt by very questionable means—in uniting that people for great practical ends. He braced their energies; he breathed into them something of his own lofty and defiant spirit; he made them sensible at once of the wrongs they endured, of the rights they might claim, and of the forces they possessed; and he proved to them for the first time, that it was possible to struggle with success within the lines of the constitution. The independent and at the same time practical tone of his writings, and the many admirable principles and maxims they contain, made them an invaluable tonic for the Irish mind, and the seed that he had sown sank deeply and germinated hereafter. Already, in the first half of the century, we can trace with some distinctness the lines of division of future conflicts. ‘I find,’ wrote the Primate Boulter in 1724, ‘by my own and other inquiries, that the people of every religion, country, and party here are alike set against Wood's halfpence, and that their agreement in this has had a most unhappy influence on the state of the nation by bringing on intimacies between Papists and Jacobites, and the Whigs, who before had no correspondence with them.’1

For the rest, there was little, during the period I am noticing, of political interest in Ireland. The management of the national debt, which had grown, between 1715 and 1729, from 50,000l. to more than 220,000l.; the erection of barracks in different parts of the country; bills for increasing the pay of the army; for securing toleration to the Quakers, and giving their affirmation the value of an oath; for replacing, as in England, Latin by English in the written proceedings of the law courts; for altering the gold coinage; for making roads and harbours, and encouraging by bounties different forms of enterprise and industry; together with the occasional censure of libels or heterodox books, personal questions on local incidents—make up, during the first half of the eighteenth century, the chief part of the work of the Irish Parliament, when it was not engaged in persecuting the Catholics. Much of it, though entirely devoid of literary or historical interest, was very useful; and although, in particular cases, there was gross jobbery, the very moderate taxation of the country shows that the Parliament was, on the whole, a vigilant guardian of material interests. In the erection of barracks, which was prosecuted with much energy, there were some grave abuses. A very large proportion of the national debt had been incurred for this purpose. The gentry were accused of looking mainly, in their recommendations, to the interests of their estates; and, in 1753, a member of the House, who was also an engineer and surveyor, entrusted with the construction and repair of barracks, was expelled for gross embezzlement in the execution of his contract.1 In 1731, during the first administration of the Duke of Dorset, a new financial question arose about a fund which had been provided for paying the interest and principal of the national debt. The Court party, ever desirous of with-drawing the control of the finances from Parliament, desired that this sum should be granted to His Majesty, his heirs and successors, for ever, redeemable by Parliament. The Opposition insisted that it should be granted, in the usual constitutional manner, from session to session. The Court party proposed, as a compromise, to vest it in the Crown for twenty-one years, and this proposition was put to the vote. The numbers were at first equal, but, at the last moment, Colonel Tottenham, the member for New Ross, who had ridden over in haste to be present at the division, appeared, in boots and in a riding attire splashed with mud, in the midst of an assembly which then always met in full dress, and his vote turned the balance against the Government. The Viceroyalty of the Duke of Devonshire which followed, and which lasted for seven years, was chiefly remarkable for the great famine, and for the munificence of the Viceroy, who built a quay at his own expense, and preseated it to the nation. An incident which happened about this time had some effect in strengthening the spirit of opposition among the Irish gentry. Lord Clancarty succeeded in inducing the English Cabinet to consent to a Bill for reversing his attainder, and restoring property of the estimated value of 60,000l. a year. Such a measure, menacing, as it did, the titles of a large proportion of the landowners of Ireland, excited great indignation and alarm. It was dropped by the Government, but the House showed its feelings by some angry resolutions, and the mere proposal was not speedily forgiven.

The Viceroyalty of Chesterfield, though it unfortunately only lasted for eight months, was eminently successful. He came over in the beginning of the rebellion of 1745,1 and the care with which he watched over the material prosperity of the country, the happy ridicule with which he discouraged the rumours of Popish risings, the firmness with which he refused to follow the precedent of 1715, when all Catholic chapels were closed during the rebellion, the unusual public spirit with which he administered his patronage, and the tact he invariably exhibited during the very critical circumstances of the time, made his government one of the most remarkable in Irish history, and probably contributed largely to the tranquillity of Ireland at a time when England and Scotland were torn by civil war. It was followed by that of Lord Harrington, during which the dead calm that had long prevailed in Irish politics was slightly ruffled. Outside the House a political agitation was organised and directed by Charles Lucas, a Dublin apothecary of very moderate means and position, who now rose to a prominent place in Irish politics. He was a cripple, wholly destitute of oratorical power, and bitterly intolerant to his Catholic fellow-countrymen; and there is nothing in his remains to show that he possessed any real superiority either of intellect or knowledge, or even any remarkable brilliancy of expression. He was, however, courageous, pertinacious, industrious, and vituperative. He detected and exposed some serious encroachments that had been made in the electoral rights of the Dublin citizens. He became the most popular writer in the Dublin press, advocating the principles of Molyneux and Swift, and urging especially the necessity of shortening the duration of Parliament; and he made himself so obnoxious to the ruling powers that the Parliament, in 1749, at the instigation of the Government, voted him an enemy to the country, issued a proclamation for the seizure of his person, and thus compelled him to go for some years into exile.

The movement, however, which he had originated survived, and it was strengthened by the unpopularity of Archbishop Stone. This prelate was the brother of a confidential friend of the Duke of Newcastle. He had been made successively bishop of Ferns, of Kildare, and of Derry, became Primate in 1747, when he was not more than forty, and now managed the English interest. Boulter, who had for so many years occupied this position—though a narrow, intolerant, and dull man, singularly devoid of all religious enthusiasm—had at least an unimpeachable private character. He was in the main honest and well-meaning; he had very justly received the thanks of Parliament for the rare munificence of his charities in a period of great distress, and he attested his sincerity by bequeathing the bulk of his fortune for the use of his Church. Of Stone we know very little, and that little has come to us through an atmosphere so charged with calumny that it must be received with great caution. It is clear that he was an abler man than Boulter, that his manners in private life were eminently seductive and insinuating, that he was much more of a politician than an ecclesiastic, and that he leaned strongly towards a toleration of the Catholics; and his name is preserved in literary history as having been one of the very few persons who recognised, on its first appearance, the merits of the history of Hume.1 He was said, however, to have been selfish, worldly-minded, arrogant, ambitious, and ostentatious; and he was accused, though very probably falsely, of the grossest private vice. In Parliament, a formidable opposition was organised by Boyle, the Speaker of the House of Commons, supported by the Prime Sergeant, Anthony Malone, a man of great genius, and by far the foremost lawyer and orator in the assembly.1 The conflict was in reality little more than a question of place and power, but of course all the legitimate elements of discontent were drawn into it. Boyle had for a long time been one of the most considerable men in the kingdom. He had sat in Parliament for forty years, had been Speaker since 1733, had been treated with great deference by Chesterfield, Devonshire, and Harrington, and he was connected with some of the chief governing families in Ireland, and possessed much borough interest and no small amount of Parliamentary talents. A jealousy had sprung up between him and the Primate, and it was greatly strengthened after the appointment, for the second time, of the Duke of Dorset, in 1751, as Viceroy, and of his son, Lord George Sackville, as Secretary of State for Ireland. The latter was in close alliance with the Primate. An attempt is said to have been made, by the offer of a peerage and a pension, to induce Boyle to relinquish the Speakership, and he went with bitter resentment into opposition. In 1749, under the administration of Lord Harrington, there had been a very unusual gleam of prosperity; the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle had been followed by a sudden increase of Irish commerce, a surplus of over 200,000l. appeared in the Exchequer, and it was resolved to appropriate 120,000l. towards the payment of the national debt. Heads of a Bill for this purpose were sent over to England; but the English authorities maintained that the surplus belonged to the Crown, and that the Irish Parliament could not even discuss its disposition without the previous consent of the King. To establish this principle, the Duke of Dorset opened the session of 1751 by a speech signifying the royal consent to the appropriation of a portion of the surplus to the liquidation of the national debt. The House, on the other hand, passed such a Bill, but carefully omitted taking any notice of this consent. The Bill, when it was carried in Ireland, was sent over to England, and returned, with an alteration in the preamble, signifying that the royal consent had been given, thus establishing the principle. The House succumbed, and passed the Bill in its altered form. In 1753 the contest was renewed. The speech from the Throne again announced the consent of the sovereign to the appropriation of the new surplus towards the payment of the national debt. The opposition, however, was now stronger. The reply to the address took no notice of the consent of the sovereign. The Bill was sent over, as in the previous session, omitting to notice it. It was returned, with the same alteration as before, and this time, after an excited debate, the House, by a majority of five, rejected the Bill on account of the alteration. The Government dealt with the subject with a very high hand. All the servants of the Crown who voted with the majority were dismissed, and a portion of the surplus was applied, by royal authority, to the payment of the debt.

These proceedings, though not in themselves very interesting, had some important consequences. In the first place, a serious Parliamentary Opposition was at last organised. It has been noticed that, before this struggle, the Opposition in the House of Commons, though it had gained two or three isolated victories, could never count upon more than twenty-eight steady votes against any Government.1 Now, however, a formidable and organised party had arisen. Lord Kil-dare, the eldest son of the Duke of Leinster, took a prominent part on the side of the Opposition, and even presented a memorial to the King complaining of the proceedings of his ministers; and the lines of the party division had become evident. It had grown to be a contest for pre-eminence between the great Irish families and the English ministers. To describe the former as disinterested patriots, or to describe them as mere selfish place-hunters, is alike an exaggeration. Their motives were extremely chequered. They were men among whom, owing to a long series of unfavourable causes, the standard of public duty was very low. They were an ascendant class, still standing aloof from the great body of their fellow-countrymen, and with many of their leaders the monopoly of place and power was the only object. They were, however, a class among whom there existed some real patriotism and ability—a class who, from their residence and interests in the country, knew its wants and cared for its prosperity—a class, above all, who were struggling against ruinous misgovernment. However corrupt, selfish, or mingled was their policy, they at least sought to make parliamentary control a reality in Ireland, to put an end to a system under which Irish interests were habitually sacrificed, and Irish patronage was regarded simply as a reward for the most questionable services to the English minister.

The consequences were by no means uniformly good. The conduct of the Government in dealing with the surplus was such that the Opposition resolved that no further surplus should exist, and began accordingly to appropriate public money largely to local improvements. The system of bounties had long existed in Ireland, as in England; and in a country where the mass of the people are sunk in torpor, poverty, and ignorance, where there are neither the material means nor the moral requisites of industrial progress, and where industrial habits are very rare, there is, I think, more to be said for it than is now generally admitted.1 It is, however, most essential that it should be restricted within narrow limits, and that it should be really intended to help industry. In Ireland, though many useful public works were unquestionably assisted, the excessive expenditure in this field led undoubtedly to great private peculation and political jobbery, and weakened the spirit of self-reliance. As long as Parliament lasted for a whole reign, as long as it represented only a fraction of a fraction of the nation, as long, in a word, as there was virtually no external restraint upon the corruption of its members, it was inevitable that this should be the case. As political parties became more balanced, the system of corruption was enlarged, the pension list rose with startling rapidity, and one of the first signs of the growing importance of Parliament was the great increase in the price of boroughs. In 1754 an Irish borough sold for three times as much as in 1750.2 The extraordinary interest now taken in the proceedings of Parliament was shown in Dublin by considerable and sometimes very riotous popular demonstrations, in the country and especially in the north, by the formation of patriotic societies, and by innumerable petitions, addresses, and resolutions supporting the Speaker.3 In 1755, however, a comparative parative calm ensued. The Duke of Dorset was replaced as Viceroy by Lord Hartington, who soon after became Duke of Devonshire. The influence of the Primate was almost destroyed. Boyle was made Earl of Shannon, and received a pension of 2,000l. a year; and several other members of the Opposition obtained places or pensions. The effect of these measures was clearly shown when a Bill for securing the freedom of Parliament, by vacating the seats of such members of the House of Commons as should accept pensions or places from the Crown, was defeated, in 1756, by 85 against 59, many members of the former Opposition opposing it. Some strong resolutions were carried in the following year condemning improper pensions, and especially pensions to persons not resident in Ireland; but they seem to have produced no effect, for only a few months later, and in spite of the depressed eondition of the finances, a pension of 5,000l. a year on the Irish Establishment was granted to the Princess of Hesse Cassel, and 2,000l. a year to Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick.1 The Viceroy, as usual, spent only one winter in every two years in the country, and the chief management of affairs rested with the Lords Justices. The predominant power among them now rested with great Irish borough-owners, who were known as ‘undertakers,’ and who, in consideration of a large share of the patronage of the Crown, ‘undertook’ to carry the King's business through Parliament.

The transient prosperity which had produced the surpluses in 1751 and 1753 soon passed. In 1755 war broke out between Great Britain and France, and in the three following years the Irish revenue steadily decreased. In 1756 and 1757 the potato crop failed, and great numbers throughout the country are said to have perished by famine. The Duke of Bedford came over as Viceroy in 1757, and one of the first acts of his administration was to provide a sum of 20,000l. for the relief of the poor. Rumours of invasion seriously affected credit; three Dublin banks failed in 1759. A new national debt was created, and, in order to encourage tillage, a law was passed granting bounties on the land carriage of corn and flour to the metropolis. The Primate Stone had by this time returned to power, though he never regained his former ascendency; and a remarkable letter by him is extant, dated August 1758, in which he speaks very despondingly of the material condition of the country. ‘Its substance and manners,’ he said, ‘are not to be estimated by the efforts towards luxury and splendour made by a few in the metropolis. The bulk of the people are not regularly either lodged, clothed, or fed; and those things which in England are called necessaries of life are to us only accidents, and we can and in many places do subsist without them. The estates have risen within these thirty years to more than double the value, but the condition of the occupiers of the land is not better than it was before that increase.’1 In 1759 there were rumours that a legislative union was contemplated, and a riot broke out among the Protestants in Dublin, which was perhaps the most furious ever known in the metropolis. The mob burst into the Parliament house, placed an old woman in the chair, searched for the journals which they desired to burn, stopped the carriages and killed the horses of the members, insulted the Chancellor and some of the bishops, erected a gallows on which they intended to hang an obnoxious politician, and compelled all who fell into their hands to swear that they would oppose the measure. The Catholics, on the other hand, received the rumour with indifference, and were at this time forward in their professions of loyalty; and on the news of approaching invasion, a deputation of Catholic gentry tendered an expression of their loyalty to the Government, and received a very gracious reply.

The Duke of Bedford was the first Lord-Lieutenant who showed himself unequivocally in favour of a relaxation of the penal code. The Catholic gentry began to organise and take measures for obtaining a removal of their disabilities, and three men of considerable ability—Curry, O'Conor, and Wyse—appeared in their ranks. The laws were now directed almost exclusively against property, but there were occasional menacing symptoms of reviving persecution. The Bill already mentioned for restoring the now obsolete system of registering priests had been carried through the House of Lords in 1757, in spite of the opposition of Primate Stone and the bishops, but had been thrown out by the Privy Council. In a law case, in 1759, a Catholic was reminded from the bench that ‘the laws did not presume a Papist to exist in the kingdom, nor could they breathe without the connivance of the Government.’ An order had been issued to deface all ensigns of honour borne by persons who had no legal title thereto, and the armorial bearings of Lord Kenmare were erased from his carriage in the very yard of the Castle.1

On the whole, however, the position of the Catholics in the last years of the reign of George II. was evidently improving. Religious fanaticism had greatly subsided; a new line of party division was forming. The nearer balance of parties rendered it certain that one side would at length seek support from the Catholics, and a spirit of nationality had arisen, which, though as yet very feeble and deeply impregnated with baser motives, could not fail sooner or later to be advantageous to the great majority of the people. The perfect absence of disturbance among them, when the country was very seriously menaced with invasion, strengthened their cause. The threatened danger was indeed in a great degree averted by the defeat of the fleet of Conflans at Quiberon by Hawke; but Thurot, one of the most enterprising commanders in the service of France, succeeded in escaping from Dunkirk, and, with three frigates, surprised Carrickfergus. His success, however, ended there. There was no rising whatever in his favour. A large body of volunteers from Belfast marched to attack him, and, after holding the town for five days, he was compelled to re-embark, was overtaken by the English fleet, and lost his life in the combat.

Here, for the present, we must leave the course of Irish history. I have dwelt upon it at somewhat disproportionate length because it has usually been almost wholly neglected, and because it has sometimes been very seriously misrepresented. It remains for me now to follow that broader and more majestic stream of events which was rapidly bearing the fortunes of England to the first place among the empires of the world.

[1]See, for example, the case of Abbadie, who in a period of distress let out for 120l. a year the proceeds of preferments that were usually worth 300l. a year. Boulter's Letters, i. 90–91.

[1]Plowden's Hist, of Ireland, vol. i. 219, 240, 282.

[2]Thus in the petition of the managers of the Charter Schools requesting aid from Parliament, in 1769, we find them complaining ‘that a great number of schools were dispersed in many parts of the kingdom tinder the tuition of Popish masters, contrary to the sense of several Acts of Parliament.’ See Stevens, On the Abuses of the Charter Schools, pp. 20, 21.

[1]Stevens, On the Charter Schools, p. 19.

[2]‘The Charter Schools were the best conceived educational institutions which existed in the world.’—Froude's English in Ireland, ii. 450.

[1]Philosophical Survey, pp. 271, 272.

[1]Journal, May 1785.

[2]Howard, On Prisons, p. 208.

[1]See the very well-meaning letters of Primate Boulter suggesting the schools, in Boulter's Letters, 11. 10–13.

[2]Wakefield's Account of Ireland, ii. 410–414.

[3]Porter's Progress of the Nation, pp. 712–713.

[4]The history of the Charter Schools is chiefly to be collected from the resolutions and petitions relating to them in the Commons Journals. Most of these documents, including the terrible report of 1788, will be found in Stevens' Inquiry into the Abuses of the Chartered Schools in Ireland. See, too, the official reports published for many years with the annual sermon in favour of the institution; Harris's Description of Down, pp. 77, 109; Froude's English in Ireland. A Brief Review of the Incorporated Society for promoting English Protestant Schools (Dublin, 1748). O'Conor's Hist, of the Irish Catholics; Wakefield's Account of Ireland, ii. pp. 410–414.

[1]18 Charles II. c. 2.; 32 Charles II. c. 2. One effect of these laws which Sir W. Petty notices, was that whereas three-fourths of the trade of Ireland had been previously with England, for many years after not more than one-fourth took that direction. The French were at this time engaged in planting their sugar plantations, and their task was much facilitated by the provisions sent from Ireland. See an interesting speech on Irish commercial restrictions, by Murray (Lord Mansfield), in Holiday's Life of Mansfield.

[2]15 Charles II. c. 7.

[3]22 & 23 Charles II. c. 26.

[4]7 & 8 Gul III. c. 22. This prohibition was slightly relaxed in 1731 by 4 Geo. II. c 15.

[5]Short View of the State of Ireland.

[1]Stafford's Letters, ii. p. 19.

[2]See Hutchinson's Commercial Restraints, pp. 169–170.

[3]12 Charles II. c. 32; 13 & 14 Charles II. c. 18.

[1]12 Charles II. c. 4, and after-wards 11 George I. c. 7.

[2]10 & 11 Gul. III. c. 10. A full history of all matters relating to this legislation will be found in IIcly Hutchinson's Commercial Restraints of Ireland (1779). See, too, Macpherson's Annals of Commerce.

[3]Short View of the State of Ireland.

[1]Hutchinson's Commercial Restraints, pp. 130–150 Dobbs' Essay on Irish Tiade. Crumpe's Essay on the best means of providing employment for the people, p. 304 An Inquiry into the State and Progress of the Linen Manufacture in Ireland (Dublin, 1757). See too a paper on the history of Irish commerce by W. Pinkerton in the third volume of the Ulster Journal of Archæology.

[2]Hutchinson's Commercial Restraints, p. 125.

[3]See a very remarkable letter (Jan. 1697) in the Southwell Correspondence, by King, who was then Bishop of Derry. Brit. Mus., Bibl. Egert. 917.

[4]‘I am sorry to find so universal a despondency amongst us in respect to trade. Men of all degrees give up the thought of improving our commerce, and conclude that the restrictions under which we are laid are so insurmountable that any attempt on that head would be vain and fruitless.’—An Essay on the Trade of Ireland, by the author of Seasonable Remarks (1729).

[1]See O'Conor's Hist, of the Irish Catholics, p. 149. According to Hely Hutchinson, in two years after the prohibition, from 20,000 to 30,000 workers in wool had to be supported by charity. Commercial Restraints, pp. 209, 210.

[2]Hutchinson's Commercial Restraints.

[1]British Museum, Bibl. Egert. 917. This letter is in the Southwell Correspondence.

[2]Essay towards improving the Hempen and Flaxen Manufacture of Ireland, by Louis Crommelin (Dublin, 1734), p. 4.

[3]British Museum Add. MSS. 9,717, p. 19.

[1]G. Dodington to J. Dawson, July 17, 1708, enumerates the objections to the proposed patent. The first is, ‘that, by encouraging and paying rewards to such persons as make fine linen in Ireland, the Flemings and Hollanders are provoked to discourage the woollen manufacture of Britain.’—Departmental Correspondence, Irish State Paper Office. There are several other letters on the same subject in this series of papers. The old patent was prolonged for six years. Davenant argued against all encouragement of the Irish linen manufacture on the same grounds as those stated by Dodington. Davenant's Works, ii. 256–257.

[2]An Inquiry into the State and Progress of the Linen Manufacture in Ireland, 1757, pp. 42–44. Lord Moles-worth says that the law which required the grand juries in each county to give premiums to the women who had made the three best pieces of linen cloth broke down because the young jurymen insisted on always giving them to the three prettiest girls. Some Considerations on the Promotion of Agriculture, by R. L. V. M. (1723), p. 36.

[3]British Museum Add. MSS. 6,116.

[1]Burdy's Life of Skelton, p. lxxxi.

[2]Intelligencer, No. vi.

[3]Ibid.

[1]Primate Boulter, writing in March 1727, thus describes the earlier stage of the distress: ‘Last year the dearness of corn was such that thousands of families quitted their habitations to seek bread elsewhere, and many hundreds perished; this year the poor had consumed their potatoes, which is their winter subsistence, near two months sooner than ordinary, and are already, through the dearness of corn, in that want that in some places they begin already to quit their habitations.’—Boulter's Letters, i. p. 226. Swift in the same year gave this vivid description of the condition of the country: ‘It is manifest that whatever stranger took such a journey [through Ireland] would be apt to think himself travelling in Lapland or Ysland, rather than in a country so favoured by nature as ours, both in fruitfulness of soil and temperature of climate. The miserable dress, and diet, and dwelling of the people; the general desolation in most parts of the kingdom; the old seats of the nobility and gentry all in ruins and no new ones in their stead; the families of farmers who pay great rents living in filth and nastiness upon buttermilk and potatoes, without a shoe or stocking to their feet, or a house so convenient as an English hogsty to recerve them—these may, indeed, be comfortable sights to an English spectator who comes for a short time to learn the language, and returns back to his own country, whither he finds all our wealth transmitted. Nostra miseria magna est.’—Short View of the State of Ireland See, too, for much evidence of the depression of the country. Hutchinson's Commercial Restraints.

[2]Letters of Marmaduke Coghill to Southwell. Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 21,122. Wesley describes a curious scene of this kind which occurred at Sligo in 1758. The forestallers had ‘bought up all the corn far and near, to starve the poor and load a Dutch ship which lay at the quays; but the mob brought it all out into the market and sold it for the owners at the common price. And this they did with all the calmness and composure imaginable, and without striking or hurting any one.’—Wesley's Journal.

[1]The Groans of Ireland, a pamphlet quoted in the Gentleman's Magazine, for 1741, pp. 638–640. This pamphlet, and some others relating to the same famine, will be found in the Halliday collection of pamphlets in the Irish Academy—an invaluable collection to all who are studying Irish history.

[2]Fraser's Life of Berkeley, p. 265.

[1]Skelton's Works, v. p. 352.

[2]Letter from a country gentleman in the province of Munster to His Grace the Lord Primate. Dublin, 1741.

[3]Eg., on Killiney Hill, near Maynooth, and at Portarlington.

[4]Smith's Account of the Co. of Kerry (1756), p. 77.

[1]Davenant's Works, ii. 237–257.

[1]The way in which the penal laws reacted in industrial life is well put in a pamphlet which appeared during Lord Hartington's Viceroyalty. ‘In 1703 the penal and excluding laws against the Roman Catholics were assented to by Queen Anne. In the year following, our lands fell under 10 per cent. Every branch of industry fell in consequence and in proportion, and although it would be unfair to charge to the abjection and incapacities of the Papists all the evils we then laboured under, yet it is beyond all doubt owing to the numberless restraints laid upon them that the kingdom showed few or no symptoms of recovery for many years. The sensation of real and the prospect of perpetual bondage produce woeful counteractions in the human mind. … Where any considerable body of the people are thrown into this political apathy, arts and manufactures must languish of course, and inward decays must come in aid of the exterior wounds of the State.’—The Case of the Roman Catholics of Ireland (1755), p. 45. As another writer says, ‘three-fourths or two-thirds of the people being Papists made the Protestants cause laws for their own security which in their consequences discourage the labour and industry of the Papists, and keep the lower people so poor, and prevent agriculture, that there is no store or reserve of grain, and every three or four years there is a scarcity.’—Loose papers relating to Ireland (British Museum, Lansd. 242), pp. 61–62

[1]The effect of the penal laws in promoting the rapid multiplication of the Catholic population is well treated by Sir Cornewall Lewis in his Essay on Irish Disturbances—one of the best books on Irish history and on the conditions of Irish life The early marriage of Papists is noticed in Madden's Reflections and Resolutions. ‘Our Protestants do not marry young, but they wait for a tolerable portion and some settlement to live easy on; whereas the Papists are careless as to wealth and portion, and will have wives, let them be maintained how they will’ (p. 194). Dobbs imagined that ‘the Papists make it a principle of conscience to increase their numbers, for the good of the Catholic religion, as they call it,’ and that their religious zeal was the explanation of their many babies. Dobbs on Trade, part 2, p. 13.

[1]See Howard On the Revenue of Ireland, i. 28–30 Lord Macartney's Account of Ireland. An Account of the Revenue and National Debt of Ireland (London, 1754). Proceedings of the House of Commons of Ireland in rejecting the Altered Money Bill, on Dec. 1753, vindicated (Dublin, 1754). The net hereditary revenue for the year ending March 25, 1753, was 442,682l.

[1]See a long list of these Acts in Crawford's Hist. of Ireland, ii. pp. 236–238, 243.

[1]Thus, in a case relating to a contested election for Belfast in 1707, the Commons resolved, ‘that by the Act to prevent the further growth of Popery, the burgesses of Belfast were obliged to subscribe the declaration and receive the Sacrament according to the usage of the Church of Ireland, and that the burgess-ship of the said burgesses of Belfast who had not subscribed the declaration and received the Sacrament pursuant of the said Act was by such neglect become vacant.’—Mant's Hist. of the Church of Ireland, ii. p. 137.

[2]See Lord Mountmorres's Hist. of the Irish Parliament. Letter to Henry Flood on the State of Representation in Ireland (Belfast, 1783). Grattan's Life, by his son. Grattan's Speeches on Parliamentary Reform. Massey's Hist. of England, iii. pp. 117–118. Killen's Ecclesiastical Hist. of Ireland, ii. 181.

[1]Swift's Letter concerning the Sacramental Test. Archbishop King, in a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury (Sept. 1714), says: ‘The laity complain that the bishops are already too numerous in Parliament for the lay lords, there being twenty-two bishops that generally attend the session, and seldom so many temporal lords. We have more, but most of them have no estates in Ireland or live in England and do not attend.’—Mant's Hist. of the Church of Ireland, ii 285.

[2]In 1764 we find the Duke of Bedford bitterly opposing the promotion of Robinson to be Primate of Ireland, on the ground that, although he had made him Bishop of Kildare, he refused ‘to give his interest in a borough belonging to his former bishopric, according to the Duke of Bedford's recommendation.’—Grenville Correspondence, ii. 479.

[1]Letter iv. See, too, a very remarkable letter on the state of Ireland, written from Dublin, 1702, by Lord B. of J., in the Southwell Correspondence. The writer complains of ‘all employments being in deputation. The Government, Chancery, Master of the Rolls, Clerk of the Council, Registrar of the Chancery, both Protonotaries, Remembrancers, &c., by which the subject is oppressed and the money sent away.’—British Museum MSS., Bibl. Eger. 917, p 186.

[2]See O'Flanagan's Hist. of Irish Chancellors, ii. 201.

[3]Perry's Hist. of the Church of England, iii. 539.

[4]Short View of the State of Ireland.

[1]See the numerous letters relating to these pensions in the Irish State Paper Office, especially the list in the Lord-Lieutenant and Lords-Justices' Letters, vol. xvii. Some of the pensions stood under other names. Thus we find the Duke of Devonshire, when Lord-Lieutenant (Aug. 5, 1738), transmitting to the Lords-Justices a warrant granting an annuity of 3,000l. for thirty-one years to the Earl of Cholmondeley and Lord Walpole for the sole use of Sophie Marianne de Walmoden.

[2]See, e.g., Commons Journals, vi. p. 477. It is not probable that the sums inserted in the national accounts ever represented the whole money thus bestowed. In 1757 the Duke of Bedford, who was then Lord-Lieutenant, stated in a confidential letter that the pension list then amounted to 55,253l. 15s. Bedford Correspondence, ii. 273.

[1]Several passages illustrating these difficulties from the writings of Swift and Boulter are collected in Mant's History of the Church, ii. 570–575.

[2]See the Memorial of Dr. Swift to Mr. Harley, presented Oct. 7, 1710.

[1]Plowden's Hist. of Ireland, ii. 100–101. Mant, ii. 554–558. Boulter's Letters, ii. 153, 192, 217, 232. This episode was the occasion of Swift's bitter lampoon against the Irish Parliament, called the ‘Legion Club,’ and perhaps of his well-known description of the Irish gentry, beginning, ‘Every squire almost to a man is an oppressor of the clergy, a racker of his tenants, a jobber of all publick works, very proud, and generally illiterate.’

[2]Mant's Hist. of the Irish Church, ii. 205.

[3]Ibid. pp. 206, 373.

[4]To Archbishop Wake. Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 6, 117, p. 22.

[5]Mant, ii. p. 568.

[1]Mant, ii. p. 289.

[2]Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 6,117, p. 61. See, too, Mant, ii. pp. 425–426. In another letter, King says: ‘You make nothing of recommending a cast clergyman, whom you are not willing to prefer in England, to 200l. per annum in Ireland, and do not consider that in many dioceses 200l. per annum is near a fifth part of the maintenance of the clergy of the whole diocese; that to make up 50l. per annum very often ten parishes must be united, and after all, an ill, an insufficient clergyman does ten times more mischief in Ireland than in England… I laid the state of the diocese of Dublin before my Lord Pembroke, and showed that there were not in the whole diocese, besides the city cures, above six or seven clergymen that had 100l. per annum, and some of those had nine, some ten, and one eleven parishes to raise it.’—Mant, ii. 289. Swift very justly said, ‘There is not another kingdom in Europe, where the natives, even those descended from the conquerors, have been treated as if they were almost unqualified for any employment either in Church or State.’ Ibid. p. 428.

[3]Boulter's Letters.

[4]Mant, ii. 445.

[1]Killen's Ecclesiastical Hist. of Ireland, ii 183. Mant, ii. 41, 42.

[2]Mant, ii. 366.

[3]Ibid. p. 282.

[4]Ibid.

[5]Ibid., ii. 380. See also Killen's Ecclesiastical Hist. of Ireland, ii. 184–186.

[1]British Museum Add. MSS. 6,116, p. 117.

[2]British Museum Add. MSS. 6,117, p. 136.

[3]Mant, ii. 445.

[4]Michael Clancy's Memoirs (1750), p. 43.

[1]Cumberland's Memoirs, i. 228, 229.

[2]Mrs. Delany's Correspondence, i. 373.

[3]Mant's Hist. of the Irish Church, ii. p. 581. Swift's description of the Church patronage is well known. ‘Excellent and moral men have been selected on every occasion of vacancy. But it unfortunately has uniformly happened that as these worthy divines crossed Hounslow Heath on their way to Ireland to take possession of their bishoprics, they have been regularly robbed and murdered by the highwaymen frequenting that common, who seized upon their robes and patents, come over to Ireland, and are consecrated bishops in their stead.’

In 1640 Atherton, Bishop of Waterford, was hung in Dublin for an unnatural offence. He was chaplain of Strafford, who raised him to the bench, and his case is said to have given rise to the only law against this crime on the Irish Statute-Book.—Lord Mountmorres, Hist. of the Irish Parliament, i. 365–366.

[4]Mant, ii. 381.

[5]See his Account of the Laws in Force for Encouraging the Residence of the Parochial Clergy (Dublin, 1723).

[1]Letters from Lords Justices, Irish State Paper Office.

[2]Mrs. Delany's Correspondence, ii. 358–359

[3]Mant's Hist. of the Irish Church, ii. 380.

[4]Brit.Mus.Add.MSS.6,116,p.120.

[5]Marmaduke Coghill to Southwell (Dec. 23, 1725). British Museum Add. MSS. 20,122. Boulter had made this appointment at the recommendation of Lord Townshend. See Mant, ii. 443–445.

[6]Mant, ii. 288. See, too, a remarkable letter by Swift. Mant, ii. p. 568.

[1]Burdy's Life of Skelton, pp. lxx-xcix.

[1]The Duke of Bolton, in a letter (Aug. 26, 1718), mentions that some of the pensions were then in arrear on account of the unfavourable remarks on them by the Committee of the House of Commons.’—MSS. Irish State Paper Office.

[2]3 Geo. ii. c 2. There are a number of letters in the Departmental Correspondence (Irish State Paper Office), exempting pensioners from the tax. Lord Mountmorres says (Hist. of the Irish Parliament, i. 424), that the pensions could not be legally granted out of the hereditary revenue, but out of what was called the aggregate fund.

[3]Sept. 19, 1761. MSS. Irish State Paper Office.

[1]See Lewis on Irish Disturbances, pp. 451–454.

[1]See the admirable analysis of the condition of the Irish cottier, in the ‘Fragments on Ireland,’ in Professor Cairnes's Political Essays. These ‘Fragments’ are among the most valuable contributions ever made to Irish industrial history.

[1]One very natural result of this is told by Swift: ‘It is the usual practice of an Irish tenant rather than want land to offer more for a farm than he knoweth he can ever be able to pay; and in that case he groweth desperate and payeth nothing at all.’—A Proposal to Pay the Debt of the Nation.

[2]Short View of the State of Ireland.

[1]‘In this country I fear the tenant hardly ever has more than one-third of the profits he makes of his farm for his share, and too often but one-fourth or one-fifth part, as the tenant's share is charged with the tithe.’—Boulter's Letters, i. 292.

[2]Bush's Hibernia Curiosa, pp. 29–33. Archbishop King, in a letter written in 1719, says. ‘The landlords set up their farms to be disposed by cant; and the Papists, who live in a miserable and sordid manner, will always outbid a Protestant… This is that which forces Protestants of all sorts out of this kingdom, since they can have no prospect of living with any comfort in it. I have inquired, and am assured that the peasants in France and Turkey live much better than tenants in Ireland.’—Mant's Hist. of the Irish Church, ii. 332. An able Irish writer gives the following description of the middlemen: ‘A horde of tyrants exists in Ireland in a class of men that are unknown in England, in the multitude of agents to absentees; small proprietors, who are the pure Irish squires; middlemen, who take farms and squeeze out a forced kind of profit by re-letting them in small parcels; lastly, the little farmers themselves, who exercise the same insolence they receive from their superiors on those unfortunate beings who are placed at the extremity of the scale of degradation, the Irish peasantry.’—An Inquiry into the Causes of Popular Discontents in Ireland (1804).

[1]In Oct. 1729, at the end of the great famine I have already noticed, Boulter wrote to the Duke of Newcastle: ‘There is a very bad spirit, I fear, artfully spread among all degrees of men amongst us, and the utmost grumbling against England as getting all our money from us, either by trade or otherwise, and this spirit has been heightened by a book lately published here about the absentees… I believe among less intelligent persons they are for taxing the absentees four shillings in the pound; but I am satisfied the men of sense in either House are too wise to make an attempt of that nature, which they know could only exasperate England without even having such a Bill returned to us.’—Boulter's Letters, i. 330. An absentee tax was powerfully advocated by Prior in his List of the Absentees of Ireland.

[1]‘There are a set of people, and these not of inconsiderable figure in the world, who have made it their business to take long leases of farms in abundance in several counties and provinces, on purpose to let these out again to underlings.’—Some Considerations for Promoting Agriculture and Employing the Poor, by R. L. V. M. [Lord Molesworth], (Dublin, 1723), p. 13.

[2]Ibid. p. 11.

[1]Swift complained very bitterly of this, and added: ‘Ajax was mad when he mistook a flock of sheep for his enemies. But we shall never be sober till we have the same way of thinking.’—Answer to a Memorial of the Poor of Ireland.

[2]See Crumpe's Essay on the Best Means of Employing the People, p. 245.

[1]Observations on Affairs of Ireland from the Settlement in 1691 to the Present Time, by Viscount Taaffe (Dublin, 1766), pp. 12, 13. See, too, Crawford's Hist. of Ireland, ii. p. 267.

[1]See a remarkable description of the condition of the Irish cottier in the Tribune—a very able periodical published in Dublin, in 1729—pp. 131–134. Dobbs reckons the wages of the common labourer for the whole year round, at only 4d. a day. On Trade, part ii. p. 47.

[2]Dobbs, On Trade, part i. p. 34.

[3]Newenham, On Population, p. 48.

[4]Boulter's Letters, i. 222.

[5]Newenham, On Population, p. 52.

[1]In 1727 (Feb. 17), Carteret and the Irish Privy Council, while strongly recommending a tillage Bill which had been passed in Ireland, for the assent of the English Privy Council, say: ‘The provinces of Leinster, Munster, and Connaught are in a great measure divided into farms, vastly large, from 800 to 4,000 acres plantation measure in the hands of one man. Five acres of this measure are equal to eight acres English measure. Under these great landholders (except in our towns and villages) there are no inhabitants except a very few cottiers, labourers, dairymen, herds and shepherds. The tillage is very little and the stocks large. … Besides this, of late years many landlords have begun a practice to tye down their tenants by express covenants not to break up or plow their lands, by which covenants (highly prejudicial to the public good of the country) our desolation and want of tillage is increasing. The unanimous sense of the House of Commons is, that these covenants ought so far to be broke through as that, notwithstanding such covenants, the tenant ought to be obliged to plow five acres in each hundred he possesses.’—Irish State Paper Office Council Book.

[2]1 Geo. II. c. 10.

[1]See a valuable pamphlet called A Dissertation on the Enlargement of Tillage and the Erecting of Public Granaries (1741), p. 27.

[2]Some Thoughts on the Tillage of Ireland (London, 1737), p. 30. This pamphlet was warmly recommended by Swift.

[3]Boulter's Letters, i. 222.

[4]Dobbs, On Trade, part ii. p. 7. The same writer strongly dwells on the moral evil of the fluctuating tenancies in Ireland. ‘The want of yeomanry is the principal evil to be removed in Ireland, from whence most of our inconveniences flow. It is greatly the cause of our indolence and inactivity, and a spur to our extravagance. Could I ever hope to see all our nobility and gentry so generous to their country, to their posterity, and I may say to themselves, as to fix the tenures and possessions of their tenants upon a lasting and certain foundation by leases of lives renewable, or fee farms, I would not doubt to find our people soon become industrious and frugal to the utmost.’—Ibid. p. 77.

[5]A Dissertation on the Enlargement of Tillage, p. 6.

[1]Letter from a Country Gentleman in the province of Munster to His Grace the Lord Primate (1741), pp. 2, 3. It appears, however, that in the time of the author of the Reflections for the Gentlemen of Ireland, meat was in some parts of Ireland more eaten than at present. He says the people ‘fed on very bad flesh’ the greater part of the year, and he speaks of their strict observance of Lent as reducing them to a state of extraordinary weakness (p. 97). In the south of Ireland the Catholics often eat gannets (a kind of puffin) during Lent—its flesh tasting strongly of fish.—Smith's Account of Kerry, p. 112. Boulter speaks of potatoes as ‘the usual winter food.’ — Boulter's Letters, i. 222. A writer in the Tribune (1729) describing the wretchedness of the cottiers says, ‘Their choicest food is potatoes, cabbage, and milk which they only enjoy one part of the year—during the rest they must content themselves with such herbs as they can pick up in the fields.’ P. 131.

[2]Wesley's Journal.

[3]See Sir C. Lewis's most valuable work on Irish Disturbances. In a book published in Ireland a year before the Whiteboy outbreaks it was said: ‘Would not a foreigner start even at our humanity as well as our want of national wisdom and economy on seeing the best arable land in the kingdom, in immense tracts, wantonly enjoyed by the cattle of a few petulant individuals; and at the same juncture our highways and streets crowded with shoals of mendicant fellow-creatures reduced through want of proper sustenance to the utmost distress.’—‘Essay on the State of Ireland,’ quoted in Macpherson's Annals of Commerce, iii. 319. See, too, Hutchinson's Commercial Restraints of Ireland, pp. 44–47.

[4]Newenham, p. 52.

[1]This harsh judgment was no doubt true of many, but there has always been in Ireland a great increase of real distress during the summer. Sir C. Lewis thus describes the state of things in the early years of the present century; ‘In the summer, when the stock of old potatoes is exhausted and the new year's crop is not yet fit for food, the country is covered with swarms of occasional mendicants, being labourers’ wives and families, who go about from one farm-house to another, frequently to a considerable distance from their homes, in order to collect potatoes. When the extremity is over they cease to beg, which they consider a disgrace, and to which they are only driven by necessity.’—Irish Disturbances, p. 311.

[2]Dobbs' Essay on Trade (1729 and 1731), part ii. pp. 45–48. See, too, the Reflections and Resolutions for the Irish Gentry, p. 146, and Berkeley's Exhortation to the Roman Catholic Clergy.

[1]No women are apter to spin well than the Irish, who, labouring little in any kind with their hands, have their fingers more supple and soft than other women of the poorer condition among us.’—Sir W. Temple's ‘Essay on the Advancement of Trade in Ireland.’ Works, in. p. 11. ‘As for the women and children, they are wholly useless everywhere, excepting in the north.’—Skelton's Works, v. 357. ‘In the north of Ireland, the inhabitants holding small farms which did not furnish them with labour through the winter, nor with necessaries through the year, set their women to spin and their young lads to weave when they could be spared from other work. By these means an ordinary sort of cloth began to be made, but it yielded a profit, and being further improved by practice, and the example of the French settled at Lisburn, it became the support of the nation. Thus the women, who in Leinster, Monster, and Connaught are scarce of any other use than to bear beggar children, in the north give birth to all the wealth of the kingdom, and bear a race of brave and able-bodied men to defend that wealth from all invaders.’—Ibid. v. 365. ‘In many parts of Ireland, more especially near the great city of Dublin, the women and wives of the poor small farmers and labourers are generally of little or no service to the maintenance of their families, not applying themselves to any useful work.’—Considerations for the Promotion of Agriculture, by R. L. V. M. [Lord Molesworth], 1723, pp. 31, 32. This writer speaks of them as only occupied in gleaning. Arthur Young, in 1777, found the habits of the Irish women a little, but only a little, changed. Speaking of the German colonists, he says: ‘The industry of the women is a perfect contrast to the Irish ladies in the cabins, who cannot be persuaded on any consideration even to make hay, not being the custom of the country. Yet they bind corn and do other works more laborious.’—Tour in Ireland, i. 482. It is curious that Petty, towards the end of the seventeenth century, speaks of ‘every housewife in Ireland being a spinner and dyer of wool and yarn.’—Political Arithmetic, p. 131.

[2]The prodigious number of beggars throughout this kingdom in proportion to so small a number of people is owing to many reasons—to the laziness of the natives, the want of work to employ them, the enormous rents paid by cottagers for their miserable cabins and potato-plots, their early marriages without the least prospect of establishment, the ruin of agriculture, whereby such vast numbers are hindered from providing their own bread, and have no money to purchase it; the mortal damp upon all kinds of trade, and many other circumstances too tedious or invidious to mention.’—Swift's Considerations about Maintaining the Poor. Skelton, in a very valuable tract published in 1742, says: ‘Of all nuisances and grievances incident to poor Ireland strolling beggars are the worst.’ He computes their number at above 50,000, and says. ‘Theft and beggary are the offspring of want, and want of idleness and pasturage. No nation ever so infamously swarmed with thieves and beggars as this wretched island.’—Works, v. 357.

[1]Querist.

[2]D'Alton's Archbishops of Dublin, pp. 306, 322.

[3]10 & 11 Charles I. c. 4.

[4]2 Anne, c. 19.

[5]1 George II. c. 27.

[1]2 George I. c. 17.

[2]9 George II. c. 25.

[3]Wodsworth's Hist. of the Ancient Foundling Hospital of Dublin, p. 5.

[1]See a collection of statistics on this subject, in Nicholls's Hist. of the Irish Poor Law, p. 11. Newenham On Population in Ireland. Dobbs, in his Essay on Irish Trade, pt. ii. (published in 1731), p. 9, calculating the average of families at 4.36, estimates the population at that time as low as 1,669,644, but adds, ‘I don't insist upon this as a just computation; I am apt to believe it is rather within the truth.’

[2]1,309,768 to 700,453.

[3]Boulter's Letters, i. 210. In another letter, dated Dec. 1731, he says: ‘The Papists, by the most modest computation, are about five to one Protestant, but others think they cannot be less than seven to one,’ ii. 70. Newenham gives more credit to the return of the House of Lords. It must be remembered that at this time Connaught was exclusively Catholic, while in Munster Berkeley estimated the Catholics as seven to one. Coghill, a very intelligent Irish politician and Member for Trinity College, however, in a letter to Southwell, dated Nov 1733, said he was firmly persuaded that Papists did not outnumber the Protestants by more than three to one. The whole population he estimated at rather below two millions (British Museum Add. MSS. 21,122). Abernethy, one of the best Presbyterian authorities, wrote about 1751: ‘The number of Papists in this kingdom exceeds that of Protestants of all denominations in the proportion, some have said of eight to one, others of six to one, but the lowest computation which deserves any regard is that of three to one.’—Abernethy's Scarce Tracts, p. 59. Archbishop King, writing in 1727, said: ‘The Papists have more bishops in Ireland than the Protestants have, and twice (at least) as many priests.’—Mant, ii. 471.

[1]Boulter's Letters, i 210. See, too, p. 223.

[1]See Wattenbach's ‘Memoir on the Irish Monasteries in Germany,’ translated and annotated by Dr. Reeves. Ulster Journal of Archæology, vol. vii.

[1]Fynes Moryson's Hist. of Ireland, bk. iii. ch. 1.

[2]‘I have heard some great warriours say that in all the services which they have seen abroad in foreign countries, they never saw a more comely man than the Irishman, nor that cometh on more bravely in his charge. … When hee cometh to experience of service abroad, or is put to a peece or a pike, hee maketh as worthie a souldier as any nation hee meeteth with.’—View of the State of Ireland.

[3]Leland's Hist. of Ireland, ii. 473.

[4]Political Anatomy of Ireland.

[1]Burke's Settlements in America, ii. 174–175, 216.

[2]Dobbs, On Irish Trade, pt. i. pp. 6, 7 (1729).

[3]Ibid.

[1]See a remarkable letter of Archbishop King (June 1717), in Mant's Hist. of the Irish Church, ii. 331–332.

[2]Newenham, who in his book On Irish Population has collected much information on this subject, remarks: ‘If we said that during fifty years of the last century the average annual emigrations to America and the West Indies amounted to about 4,000, and consequently that in that space of time about 200,000 had emigrated to the British plantations, I am disposed to think we should rather fall short of than exceed the truth.’ P. 60. See, too, Hutchinson's Commercial Restraints, p. 141. The Intelligencer, No. 19.

[3]Departmental Correspondence (Dublin State Paper Office), Feb. 11, 1728.

[4]Reflections and Resolutions for the Gentlemen of Ireland, p. 28. The Irish Privy Council in 1729, speak of ‘the numbers of Protestant inhabitants who have been seduced out of this kingdom in hopes of obtaining advantageous settlements in America.’ ‘Many of these poor people,’ they add, ‘have perished at sea by the fraud of the masters of ships, who have been paid beforehand for their passage, and some of them have been carried to France and Spain, and forced, contrary to law, to enlist themselves in foreign service.’—Council Books, Irish State Paper Office.

[1]See Killen's Ecclesiastical Hist. ii. 261–262.

[2]Young's Tour, i. 164.

[3]The following is part of the report of a Parliamentary Committee in 1735: ‘Resolved, that it appears to your committee that Thomas Cumming and his accomplices have been guilty of great barbarities and violence towards many Protestant passengers, seduced and taken by him on board the ship called the ‘George of Dublin,’ bound for North Carolina; and that there is good reason, from the scarcity of provision and other circumstances of his behaviour on board the said ship, to believe that the said Cumming never intended to have carried such passengers thither. Resolved, that it is the opinion of this committee that there hath been of late years, and still continues to be carried on, a wicked and dangerous practice of seducing, by false representations and other deceitful artifices, the Protestant inhabitants of this kingdom to several parts of America, to the utter ruin of most of them, and detriment of His Majesty's Government and of the Protestant interest of this kingdom.’—Commons' Journals, vii. 399. In 1752, we find a Bill before the Commons for the prevention of the system of kidnapping children for America, which appears to have prevailed in Ireland as well as in Scotland. Commons' Journals, viii. 267. Boulter also notices how shipmasters and agents from the colonies were attracting emigrants by false promises. Boulter's Letters, i. 261. ‘Many persons,’ writes a magistrate from Carlingford in 1725, ‘have been decoyed on board ships trading to America and there detained by force.’ W. Stannus to the Lords Justices. Irish Record Office.

[4]‘We are under great trouble here about a frenzy that has taken hold of very great numbers to leave this country for the West Indies… Above 4,200 men, women, and children, here have been shipped for the West Indies within three years, and 3,100 this last summer … The whole north is in a ferment at present, and people every day engaging one another to go next year to the West Indies. The humour has spread like a contagious disease. … The worst is that it affects only Protestants, and rages chiefly in the north.’—Boulter's Letters (1728), i. 260–262.

[1]McGee's Hist. of the Irish Settlers in North America. Ramsay's Hist. of the American Revolution, ii. 218.

[2]The Abbé MacGeoghegan, in his history of Ireland, makes this extraordinary assertion: ‘Par les calculs et les recherches faites an bureau de la guerre on a trouvé qu'il y avait eu depuis l'arrivée des troupes Irlandoises en France, en 1691, jusqu'en 1745, que se donna la bataille de Fontenoy, plus de 450,000 Irlandois morts au service de France.’—Hist. d'Irlande, iii. p. 754. This statement is to me perfectly incredible, but Newenham, in his valuable work On Population in Ireland, says: ‘Upon the whole, I am inclined to think that we are not sufficiently warranted in considering the Abbé MacGeoghegan's statement as an exaggeration’ (p. 63); and O'Callaghan, in his Hist. of the Irish Brigade in the Service of France, cites two MS. authorities, professedly based on researches made in the French War Office, which place the number even higher (p. 163).

[3]Chatham Correspondence, ii. 35.

[4]On the great number of Irish officers in the Austrian service, see some curious statistics in O'Callaghan's Irish Brigade, p. 602.

[1]Much information on the history of Irishmen in foreign service, will be found collected with great industry, though not always with great discrimination, in O'Callaghan's Hist. of the Irish Brigade in the Service of France. See, too, O'Conor's Military History of the Irish, D'Alton's Illustrations of King James's Army List, Forman's Courage of the Irish Nation. The different histories of the campaigns I have mentioned, the lives of some of the most noted Irish exiles in the Biographic Universelle, and the admirable sketch of Spanish history in Buckle's Hist. of Civilisation in England, may also be consulted with fruit. Several letters from obscure Irishmen in the Spanish service—full of affection for those who were left at home, and of a most touching and beautiful piety—fell into the hands of the Government, and are preserved in the Record Office in Dublin. See too the melancholy letter of Sir C. Wogan to Swift. Swift's Works (Scott's ed), xviii. pp. 10–60. Sir C. Wogan writing in 1732, estimates the number of Irish who had enlisted in foreign service in the preceding 40 years at more than 120,000.

[1]Howard, On Popery Cases, p. 175. According to Howard, the terms of the recantation had a considerable effect in preventing conversions.

[2]See some very curious instances of this, in Fitzpatrick's Life of Bishop Doyle, i. 169. Brenan's Ecclesiastical Hist. of Ireland, ii. 328–329.

[3]8 Anne, c. 3. sec. 25.

[4]This is noticed in the ‘heads of a Bill for explaining the Acts to prevent the growth of Popery,’ which were carried through the Irish Parliament in 1723, but were dropped in England. MSS. Irish Record Office.

[1]See The Conduct of the Purse of Ireland (London, 1714).

[2]This speech is printed in a pamphlet called Resolutions of the Irish House of Commons against Sir C. Phipps.

[1]Irish Record Office (Irish Civil Correspondence, Miscellaneous).

[2]Irish State Paper Office, Presentments and Informations of Grand Jurors, Co. Sligo.

[3]Ibid. Co. Roscommon.

[4]J. Julian to the Right Hon. the Lord of Kerry, Aug. 13, 1711. Irish Record Office.

[1]Informations and Presentments of Grand Juries, City of Dublin, Irish State Paper Office. The Mayor of Cork to the Lords Justices, June 1714; Mr. Moore and other Magistrates of Ferbane to the Government, Nov. 1712; E. Tyrrell to the Lords Justices, Jan. 20, 1712. Irish Record Office.

[2]Dublin Intelligencer, May 23, 1713.

[1]Mr. Miller to J. Dawson, Sept. 2, 1712. Irish Record Office.

[2]G. St. George to J. Dawson, Carrick, Dec. 5, 1712. Ibid.

[3]H. Maxwell to J. Dawson, Oct. 8, 1712, Feb. 2, 1712–13. Ibid.

[1]Captain Hedges to J. Dawson, Oct. 16, 1712. Irish Record Office.

[2]John Kennedy to Jos. Dawson, June 6, 1713. Ibid.

[1]William Thornton to the Government, Nov. 20, 1714. Irish Record Office.

[2]Richard Baggs to the Lords Justices, July 14, 1714. Ibid.

[3]H. Baylee, Oct. 30, 1714. Ibid.

[4]The Mayor of Cork to the Government, June 22, 1714. Ibid.

[5]June 23, 1714. Ibid.

[1]Oliver Cramer to the Government, Oct. 25, 1714. Ibid.

[2]Robert Blakeney to the Government, Oct. 26, 1714. Ibid.

[3]Thos. Crofton to Government, July 28, 1714. Irish Record Office.

[4]W. Smith, Mayor of Sligo, Oct. 29, 1714. Ibid.

[5]Presentments of Grand Juries, Co. Kerry. Irish State Paper Office.

[6]J. Dennis to J. Dawson, June 11, 1714. Irish Record Office.

[1]Mr. Chudleigh to Government, Jan. 31, 1715–16. Ibid.

[2]Report of the Justices of the Peace, May 28, 1714. Ibid.

[3]D. Ponsonby to Lords Justices, Jan. 12, 1714. D. Ponsonby to E. Budgell. Irish Record Office.

[4]Thos. Ryves to the Clerk of the Privy Council, Oct. 30, 1714. Ibid.

[1]Thos Ryves to the Lords Justices, June 4, 1714. Ibid.

[1]Petitions. Irish State Paper Office.

[2]Presentments and Informations of Grand Juries, Co. Clare. Ibid.

[3]Archbishop Synge's Letters, British Museum Add. MSS. 6,117, p. 136. The Catholics asserted that Garzia was in reality a Jew. De Burgo, Hibern. Dominic., c 8. According to this writer, seven priests were apprehended and banished by the means of Garzia. Another priest-hunter named Cusack was remembered by a satirical epitaph:—

• God is pleased when man doth cease to sin.
• The devil is pleased when he a soul doth win,
• Mankind are pleased whene'er a villain dies,
• Now all are pleased, for here Jack Cusack lies
• Lemhan's Hist. of Limerick.

[4]Departmental Correspondence. Irish State Paper Office.

[5]Miscellaneous Informations. Irish State Paper Office.

[6]De Burgo, Hibern. Dominic.

[1]A Serious Inquiry whether a Toleration of Popery should be enacted, by Stephen Radcliffe (Dublin, 1727), p. 69.

[2]Presentments and Informations, Co. Limerick. Irish State Paper Office.

[1]See some interesting passages quoted in Prendergast's Cromwellian Settlement (2nd ed.), p. 325.

[2]A Report made by Primate Boulter from the Lords' Committee appointed to inquire into the state of Popery in Ireland (Dublin, 1732).

[3]Killen's Ecclesiastical Hist. ii. 252–253.

[1]Ralph Clear, Provost, to John Lyons, March 6, 1743. Irish Record Office. The reader will remember the lines Swift wrote on the gate of Bandon—

• Jew, Turk, and Atheist,
• May enter here, but not a Papist.

[2]Wesley's Journal, May 1749.

[3]J. Jones to the Government, March 14, 1743.

[4]W. Chaplin to the Government, March 7, 1743.

[5]W. Jackson to J. Lyons, March 10, 1743.

[6]W. Ward to John Lyons, March 9, 1743.

[7]Wesley's Journal, May 1762.

[8]Ibid., May 1769.

[1]He afterwards wrote: ‘As for the Papists in Ireland, you know I never feared them; but on the contrary, used them like good subjects, and to a certain degree made them such; for not one man of them stirred during the whole rebellion. Good usage, and a strict adherence to the Gavel Act, are the only honest and effectual means that can be employed with regard to the Papists.’—Miscellaneous Works, iv. 523.

[2]Brenan's Eccl. Hist. ii. 313–314.

[1]Dublin State Paper Office. Miscellaneous Informations. This curious paper is unsigned and undated, and endorsed only ‘The examination of N. S.’ Mr. Fronde has quoted a large part of it (English in Ireland, i. 569), but he is mistaken in assigning it to 1745, and in his conjecture that ‘the initials are probably incorrect.’ The bishop, in his examination, states that he was consecrated in 1745, that his predecessor was Dr. Walker, and that at the time he was examined Linigar had been Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin for eighteen years. From these data I have been able without much trouble to identify him. N. S. are the initials of Nicholas Sweetman, who succeeded Dr. Walker (also known under the name of Callaghan), about 1745, as Bishop of Ferns. Wexford, which is so particularly mentioned in the examination, is in the diocese of Ferns. Linigar was consecrated Archbishop of Dublin about 1734. From a letter in the Irish Record Office (E. Hay to Sir Arthur Gore, Dec. 4, 1751), it appears that at the end of 1751 Sweetman was in custody on a charge of enlisting soldiers for foreign service, and it was probably at this time that the examination took place. The writer of the letter speaks very highly of Sweetman's character, and says: ‘You'll find that our neighbour, James Doyle, the degraded priest, was at the bottom of it [the arrest], who, I think, is capable of contriving as wicked a thing as any man living. He has often threatened that he would be revenged if he was not admitted to enjoy his parish quietly … It would be a great blessing to the public if the same punishment should be inflicted on perjury that is on felony. … Mr. Doyle is abandoned by his own Church, can find no refuge there, and has, I suppose, formed some scheme to himself of getting bread, which will gratify his malice. … I am convinced that Mr. Sweetman was never directly or indirectly guilty.’

[1]Presentments of the Grand Juries, Co. Tipperary.

[1]State of Ireland.

[2]E.q., Bishop Nicholson wrote to Archbishop Wake, May 1723: ‘The present insolence of our Popish clergy is unspeakable… Our law makes it death for any of them (not qualified and licensed as the Act of Parliament directs, by taking the oath of abjuration) to officiate; and yet I am abundantly assured that very lately, in my own diocese, four or five masses were openly said, by as many different priests, over the corpse of an executed robber, whose funeral rites were celebrated with as pompous and numerous an attendance as if the man had died knight of the shire.’—British Museum Add. MSS. 6.116. Strong statements of the manner in which the priests, by their denunciations of oppressive landlords from the altar, have encouraged agrarian crime in the present century will be found in Senior's Journals, and in some of the letters in Lord Palmerston's Life. It will be remembered that most of the great periods of agrarian crime have been produced by the numerous ejections arising from the desire of the landlords to turn arable land into pasture; and as the Catholic clergy subsisted solely upon the dues of the people, these ejections tended directly to deprive them of their means of livelihood.

[1]Reilly's Hist. of Ireland, p. 94. This grievance appears to have continued through nearly the whole century. Burke, writing about seventy years after Dr. Nary, says, ‘No tradesman of that [the Catholic] persuasion is capable, by any service or settlement, to obtain his freedom in any town corporate, so that they trade and work in their own native towns as aliens, paying, as such, quarterage, and other charges and impositions.’—Tracts on the Popery Laws.

[1]See some very remarkable facts in Sigerson's Modern Ireland, p. 343. Arthur Young speaks of an ‘aristocracy of 500,000 Protestants crushing the industry of two millions of poor Catholics.’—Tour in Ireland.

[2]English Record Office. Irish State Papers.

[3]Some Considerations on the Laws which incapacitate Papists from Purchasing Lands, from taking Long and Beneficial Leases, and from Lending Money on Real Securities (Dublin, 1739), p. 16.

[4]Howard, On Popery Cases (1775).

[1]A writer in 1741 speaks of ‘the rich Papists who have withdrawn themselves to other countries, out of resentment, because the legislature would not permit them to carry arms, or for some other reason.’—Dissertation on the Enlargement of Tillage, p. 13. A few years earlier a curious correspondence on this subject took place between an official at the Castle and a certain Mr. James Macdonnel, a Catholic gentleman. The former wrote: ‘I must acquaint you that my Lord Lieutenant has not by his own single authority a power to dispense with a Roman Catholic carrying arms, that power being lodged in the Government and Privy Council, so that if you think it worth while to apply for a licence to wear arms, it must be to them in form of petition; but at the same time, it may not be improper to tell you that there was, not long since, an application of that sort made by a gentleman of rank in his Imperial Majesty's service, I think a field officer, in which he did not succeed.’ In 1733 Lord Gormanstown and Richard Barnwell were apprehended, and indicted at the County Meath assizes for wearing swords when they went to pay their respects to the judges and gentlemen of the county at the assizes. The imperial ambassador and several other persons of distinction made representations in their favour, and the Duke of Dorset, who was Lord-Lieutenant, wrote to the Lords Justices urging them to temper the rigour of the law.—Departmental Correspondence, Irish State Paper Office.

[2]Killen's Ecclesiastical Hist., ii. 178.

[3]Archbishop Synge's Letters, Add. MSS. Brit. Mus., 6,117, p. 106.

[1]Irish Commons' Journal. (June 20, 1709). A very similar address was voted by the Commons, Dec. 17, 1735.

[1]Boulter's Letters, i. 226. In a letter of nearly the same date, the Irish Privy Council complain to the English Government of this evil. ‘It is found by sad experience that temporal considerations make many men pretend to be converts who are not really and sincerely such. That this is so in fact, most manifestly appears, in that many such converts continue to breed their children, or some of them, Papists, suffer mass to be often said in their houses, and upon all occasions give great countenance to the Popish interest, which under the masque of being Protestants they have the better opportunity of promoting; they themselves all the while seldom or never appearing at any public Protestant worship’ (Feb. 27, 1727). Irish Council Books, State Paper Office. A pamphlet published in 1714, gives a graphic description of these legal converts: ‘These persons, till the very moment of their being called to the Bar, or till they have certain expectation of other advantage … continue in the profession of the Romish religion … They frequently, after their conversion, retain their former intimacy with the Papists, and are as well and as cordially received by them as ever. They never make or endeavour to make any new acquaintance or alliance with the old Protestants; they rejoice with the Papists, and when they are cast down it is so with them also… In a word, excepting that they sometimes go to church, they remain in all respects to all appearance the very same men they were before their conversion.’—The Conduct of the Purse of Ireland, pp. 14, 15.

[2]Some Considerations on the Laws which incapacitate Papists from Purchasing Lands or taking Long Leases (Dublin), p. 16.

[1]Reflections and Resolutions for the Gentlemen of Ireland, 1738 [by Dr. Madden], p. 79. Swift said: ‘Their lands [those of the Papists’] are almost entirely taken from them, and they are rendered incapable of purchasing any more; and, for the little that remains, provision is made by the late Act against Popery that it will daily crumble away. To prevent which, some of the most considerable among them are already turned Protestants, and so in all probability will many more.’—Letter on the Sacramental Test. According to Howard, ‘between 1703 and 1709 there were only thirty-six conformists in Ireland. … In the next ten years the conformities were 150.’—Howard, On the Popery Cases, pp. 211, 212. It was stated in the Irish Parliament that in seventy-one years 4,055 persons conformed under the system. Some curious particulars about the conforming Papists are collected in Lenihan's very interesting History of Limerick, pp. 372–379.

[2]The Convert Roll is in the Irish Record Office.

[1]Lord Stanhope's Hist. of England, v. 123.

[2]‘An Inquiry into the Causes of Popular Discontents in Ireland,’ by an Irish Country Gentleman. Quoted in Lewis, On Irish Disturbances, p. 53.

[1]Tour in Ireland, ii. 126–128. A later writer says: ‘In the month of June 1809, at the races of Carlow, I saw a poor man's cheek laid open by the stroke of a whip. The inhuman wretch who inflicted the wound was a gentleman of some rank in the country. The unhappy sufferer was standing in his way, and without requesting him to move he struck him with less ceremony than an English squire would a dog. But what astonished me even more than the deed, and which shows the difference between English and Irish feeling, was, that not a murmur was heard, nor a hand raised in disapprobation.’—Wakefield's Statistical and Political Account of Ireland, ii. 723.

[1]Querist. This is fully corroborated by Madden, who says: ‘This affectation of drinking wine has got even into the middle and lower ranks of our people, and the infection is become so general that a little hedge inn would be forsaken by our drovers, horse-jockeys, &c., if they wanted it, or, at least, something which the merchants have given a strong resemblance of wine to’—Reflections and Resolutions, p. 45. It is a curious fact—which shows how untrustworthy a single testimony to national manners may be—that no less a person than Chesterfield, after he had been a long time in the Government of Ireland, imagined that the habit of wine-drinking in Ireland was restricted to a smaller class than in England. He says. ‘5,000 tuns of wine imported, communibus annis, to Ireland, is a sure but indecent proof of the excessive drinking of the gentry there, for the inferior sort of people cannot afford to drink wine there, as many of them can here.’—Chesterfield's Miscellaneous Works, iv. 339.

[2]Ibid. iv. 231.

[3]Ibid. iv. p. 334.

[4]Macpherson's Annals of Commerce, iii. 319.

[1]13 Geo. ii. c. 8.

[2]Miscellaneous Works.

[3]Arthur Young noticed in 1776 that this was rapidly changing, but even at this time he writes: ‘There are men of 5,000l. a year in Ireland who live in habitations that a man of 700l. a year in England would disdain.’—Tour in Ireland. ii. 236.

[1]Cumberland's Memoirs, i. 258–263, 278, 283.

[1]Mrs. Delany's Correspondence, i. p. 351.

[2]Some Considerations for the Promoting of Agriculture, by R. L. V. M. (Dublin, 1723), p. 28, See, too, Campbell's Philosophical Survey, pp. 154–155.

[1]The following very graphic description of the middlemen is given in an Irish periodical which appeared in 1729: ‘This motley generation of half landlords, half tenants, fills the country with a sort of idle half gentry half commonalty, who abound at all races, cock fights, and country fairs, and are the very pest and bane of the nation. They are in constant emulation with our gentry to keep up a rank and character to which they are in no way entitled, and for that purpose are perpetually running to the most expensive and extravagant methods of living. … These vice-landlords are the great inlet and support, both by their practice and example, to our luxury and idleness, and the cause of many if not most of the grievances under which the kingdom labours.’—The Tribune, p. 140. ‘I must now come to another class,’ wrote Arthur Young, nearly half a century later, ‘to whose conduct it is almost entirely owing that the character of the nation has not that lustre abroad which I dare assert it will soon very generally merit. This is the class of little country gentlemen, tenants who drink their claret by means of profit rents, jobbers in farms, bucks, your fellows with round hats edged with gold, who hunt in the day, get drunk in the evening, and fight the next morning … these are the men among whom drinking, wrangling, quarreling, fighting, ravishing, &c., are found as in their native soil, once to a degree that made them the pest of society.’ He adds, however, that ‘from the intelligence I have received even this class are very different from what they were twenty years ago, and improve so fast that the time will soon come when the national character will not be degraded by any set.’—Tour in Ireland, ii. 241, 242.

[1]‘All ranks amongst us seem to be of a kind of emulation which of them shall soonest run out of their wits and their fortunes by pressing close upon their superiors in all high and expensive methods of living. One would be tempted to think that Hamlet prophesied of us when he observed that the toe of the peasant comes so near to the heel of the courtier that he galls his kibe. If we look all the country over, we shall find every station of life driven forward at least two degrees beyond its natural position. Our country gentlemen appear in the equipage of the first quality. Our farmers and graziers are turned gentlemen, and come to fairs in their coaches to buy and sell cattle; and our tradesmen live in as much splendour and drink as large quantities of claret as formerly fell to the share of our richest merchants.’—The Tribune, p. 100.

[2]See on this contempt for trade, Arthur Young, ii. p. 343.

[1]See Leslie Stephen's English Thought in the Eighteenth Century. i. pp. 113–117. A similar doctrine appeared in King's Origin of Evil, and it was powerfully assailed by Berkeley.

[2]Wesley was a great admirer of Skelton. He said of him: ‘When there is occasion he shows all the wit of Dr. Swift, joined with ten times his judgment.’ — Wesley's Journal, June 1771.

[1]See many particulars about this society, in Gilbert's Hist. of Dublin, vol. ii.

[1]Gilbert, iii. 98 See, too, the introduction of C. Smith's Hist. of Waterford (1746), and Lord Mountmorres' Reflections on the Present Crisis (1797).

[1]See the volumes of its collected reports. Gilbert's Hist. of Dublin. Arthur Young's Tour.

[2]See Lord Dunraven's Notes on Irish Architecture.

[1]Gilbert, ii. 17–21.

[2]Twiss's Tour in Ireland in 1775.

[3]Gilbert, ii. 290–295.

[1]Carteret to the Duke of Newcastle, May 20, 1730. Irish State Paper Office. A Brief Review of the Rise and Progress of the Incorporated Society in Dublin for Promoting English Protestant Schools (Dublin, 1748). Faulkener's Journal, April 29, May 3, 1746.

[2]Published with his initials, R. L. V. M. This pamphlet is noticed by Bishop Nicholson. British Museum Add. MSS. 6,116.

[1]Writing to the Archbishop of Canterbury, King said: ‘My Lord, we have hardly any Jacobites among the Protestants in Ireland, and yet I can assure your Grace that this Bill, as it was drawn, did disgust most of them, and even those that were for the Bill confessed that it was hard to subject about 800,000 persons, without distinction of age, sex, or quality, to the discretionary power of two Justices of the Peace, in a matter that reached not only to their liberty and property, but to their very lives. But it did concern the bishops more particularly to be tender in the case; all severe laws in matters of conscience, and arbitrary proceedings being laid at their door, though they have had the least hand in them. Besides, we understand that His Majesty was, both by nature, principles, and education, against persecuting any upon mere conscience: and I assure your Grace that these considerations did weigh very much with such bishops as voted against the bill’—Mant, ii. 79.

[1]Mant's Hist. of the Irish Church, ii. 78–85. Froude's English in Ireland, i. 260–261. Mr. Froude denounces, with great bitterness, the bishops and other peers who rejected this Bill, and he regards the disputed clause with warm and unqualified approbation. This is, of course, a matter of opinion but when this writer proceeds to ascribe the conduct of its opponents to Jacobitism, he is advancing a charge which is, I believe, utterly unfounded. As far as King is concerned it is almost grotesquely untrue, and it is remarkable that of the eight bishops who were in the majority every one had been appointed by William. See Mant, ii. 81.

[2]Froude, i. 253.

[3]Dalton's Archbishops of Dublin, p. 461. See, too, the virulent attacks upon their conduct, in Froude.

[4]See his letters, British Museum Add. MSS. 6,117, pp. 147–155.

[5]See vol. 1. p. 324.

[6]Bishop Nicholson wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dec. 1725, I confess to your Grace, I rather dread than hope from the changes which some of them [Privy Councillors], and they members also of our bench, were pleased to propose (without success) in the House; such as the licensing marriages by Popish priests, Presbyterian teachers, and Quakers, on the same conditions with those of the Established clergy; the fixing a Popish bishop by public authority at Dublin; the educating of them in this college, &c. These proposals, coming from a quarter whence I least expected them, have made this Session very irksome.’—British Museum Add. MSS. 6,116, p. 294.

[1]‘The Bishop of Elphin (who is a Privy Councillor, and a favourite one) was the person who chiefly signalised himself on this occasion. … He moved (1) that the number of licensed priests might be ascertained, so as not to exceed 600; (2) that to preserve a succession of these, one Popish bishop should be allowed constantly to reside in this kingdom; (3) that the gentlemen and others of that communion might be permitted to have their children (such of them, at least, as were designed to take orders) educated at the college here, with an exemption from an attendance at chapel, prayers, and some other special duties, incumbent on their colleagues as Protestants. The same prelate moved for legitimatising the marriages of Quakers and all sorts of Protestant Dissenters in their own way. The Archbishop of Tuam [Synge] said he had met with a great many Popish priests who professed their readiness to abjure all manner of power in the Pope to absolve them from their allegiance, while they were ready to swear in the most binding and solemn manner to King George; but they pointed to an expression or two in the oath of abjuration which they thought might be omitted without any hazard to the Government, and his Grace seemed to intimate his own intention shortly to give the House his reasons for agreeing in the same opinion.’—Bishop Nicholson to Archbishop Wake (Jan. 1725–26). British Museum Add. MSS. 6,116, pp. 295–296.

[1]I have before quoted Petty's remark about dissenters from the established religion being usually most conspicuous in trade. It is remarkable that among other instances he illustrates it by the case of Ireland. ‘It is not to be denied that in Ireland, where the Roman religion is not authorised, there the professors thereof have a great part of the trade.’ — Political Arithmetic, pp. 118, 119. In 1719, Archbishop King wrote: ‘By the Act against Popery that hinders Papists to purchase land, they have turned themselves entirely to trade, and most of the trade of the kingdom is engrossed by them.’—Mant's Hist. ii. 332. ‘While Protestants are prevented from entering into commerce, some by the greater and surer gain which now arises from the purchase of lands, and others by the disadvantages which attend the sale of them [from the fact that Protestants only were allowed to buy], and by the difficulties which obstruct the borrowing of money on real securities, Papists being incapacitated either to purchase land or to lend money on such securities, have engrossed to themselves a great share of the trade and commerce of this island, and of consequence annually come into possession of a considerable quantity of the wealth accruing to it.’—Some Considerations on the Laws which incapacitate Papists from Purchasing Lands, from taking Long and Beneficial Leases, and from Lending Money on Real Securities (Dublin, 1739), pp. 23, 24. In 1741 a very anti-Popish writer complains that ‘the Papists are daily engrossing what little trade remains, and consequently the greatest part of our current cash into their own hands.’—A Dissertation on the Enlargement of Tillage (Dublin, 1741), p. 6.

[2]This was the notion of Chesterfield. He says ‘Allow the Papists to buy lands, let and take houses equally with the Protestants, but subject to the Gavel Act, which will always have its effect upon their posterity at least. Tie them down to the Government by the tender but strong bonds of landed property, which the Pope will have much ado to dissolve, notwithstanding his power of loosing and binding.’—Miscellaneous Works, iv. p. 272. The same view is strongly advocated in a pamphlet called, A View of the Grievances of Ireland, by a True Patriot (Dublin, 1745).

[1]One scandalous case of a Protestant trustee becoming discoverer against a Papist, is cited in O'Flanagan's Lives of the Chancellors of Ireland, ii. 43.

[1]William Caulfield to Joshua Dawson, Sept. 1714. Irish Record Office.

[2]Cogan's Diocese of Meath, i. 268, 269.

[1]D. Power to the Government, Galway, Feb. 22, 1711. Irish Record Office.

[2]Some Considerations for the Promotion of Agriculture, by R. L. V. M. (Dublin, 1723), p. 24.

[1]Lord Macartney's account of Ireland in 1773, in the second volume of Barrow's Life and Writings of Lord Macartney, p. 127. See too Arthur Young's Tour, ii. 232.

[2]Robert Norman to Joshua Dawson, Nov. 15, 1713. Irish Record Office. In the same year B. Butler, an official in London, writes to Dawson: ‘I am sorry bribery is not in fashion for elections in Ireland. I could sell them my place for a much less sum than a borough costs here’ (Sept. 8, 1713). Departmental Correspondence, Irish State Paper Office.

[1]Compare Maguire's Irish in America, p. 331, with O'Rourke's Hist. of the Irish Famine, p. 503. In their report of 1863 the Commissioners of Emigration state that the money sent through banks and commercial houses alone since the famine up to the end of 1862, was 12,642,000l., and they estimate the sums sent by other channels at half that amount. According to a later report the sums sent home in the twenty-three years from 1848 to 1870 inclusive through banks and commercial houses alone, was upwards of 16,330,000l.

[1]There is a letter in the Irish Record Office from Mr. William Wallard of Gallbally, in the county of Limerick, to Edward Southwell, the Chief Secretary. dated Aug. 21, 1705, urging the retention of a barrack which had been established in that neighbourhood for the protection of a linen manufacture. The writer says, ‘The market is revived, and so plentiful that the soldiers buy a goose for 2d., a duck for 1d., a hen for 1d., chicken for 1/2d., and twenty-four eggs a penny in this place, which is but half-a-mile from the barrack, and all other provisions proportionately cheap.’ A pamphleteer in 1729 says: ‘All the necessaries of life in Ireland are at lower prices than in any other country on this side of the globe. The people are encumbered with very few taxes, and labour is cheaper than in any neighbouring country.’ On the prices in the latter half of the century, see Arthur Young's Tour, ii. 232.

[1]See the striking picture in Arthur Young's Tour, ii. 118.

[2]Goldsmith's Essays, vi. For further particulars about Carolan, see Nichols's Literary Illustrations of the Eighteenth Century, vii. pp. 683–694, and Hardiman's Irish Minstrelsy. Swift's well-known poem on O'Rourke's feast was translated from a poem by Carolan, and some of his airs were adopted by Moore for his melodies.

[1]It is extremely unfortunate that the popular English conceptions of Ireland in the closing years of the eighteenth century are derived mainly from Sir Jonah Barrington, who lived in the most dissipated section of Irish society, and who habitually coloured, for the sake of effect, whatever he described. Arthur Young, writing in 1776, says: ‘Drinking and duelling are the two charges which have long been alleged against the gentlemen of Ireland; but the change of manners that has taken place in that kingdom is not generally known in England. Drunkenness ought no longer to be a reproach… Nor have I ever been asked to drink a single glass more than I had an inclination for. I may go further, and assert that hard drinking is very rare among people of fortune.’ — Four, ii. p. 238. Campbell gives a similar testimony. ‘With respect to drinking I have been happily disappointed. The bottle is circulated freely, but not to that excess we have heard it was.’ Philosophical Survey of the South of Ireland, p. 39. The decline of drinking is also noticed in Luckombe's Tour through Ireland (1780), and Twiss (who generally took a very unfavourable view of Irish life) declared that neither hospitality nor drinking were carried to great excess. Tour in Ireland in 1775. Crumpe, in 1793, speaks of the middlemen alone as ‘the class among whom what remains of the ferocious spirit of drinking which formerly disgraced the kingdom is still to be found.’—Essay on the Best Means of Providing Employment for the People, p. 237.

[1]Compare Lord Mountmorres' Hist. of the Irish Parliament, i. pp. 390–391. Gilbert's Hist. of Dublin, iii. 73–77.

[2]‘It is peculiar to this island that almost every family in it of any fortune or substance send their sons to the college in order to qualify them for the preferments in their own country.’—Madden's Proposal for the General Encouragement of Learning in Dublin College (Dublin, 1732), p. 10. See too Arthur Young's Tour, ii. 343.

[3]Description of the City of Dublin, by Edward Lloyd (1732).

[1]Campbell's Philosophical Survey. Taylor's Hist. of the University of Dublin. Edwards's Hist. of Libraries. Goldsmith, in his Life of Parnell, notices that the entrance examination at Dublin was much more stringent than at Oxford or Cambridge, and Chesterfield, in a letter to the Bishop of Waterford (Nov. 30, 1731), says: ‘The Irish schools and universities are indisputably better than ours.’—Chesterfield's Miscellaneous Works, iv. p. 237. There is a curious picture of student life in Dublin University during the first half of the eighteenth century, in Burdy's Life of Skelton.

[2]‘May we never want a Williamite To kick the breech of a Jacobite!’

[3]Commons' Journals, iii. 976.

[1]6 Geo. I. c. 18.

[1]The report of the Lords' Committee will be found in Madden s Hist. of Periodical Literature in Ireland, ii. 417–420. Berkeley alludes to the hell-fire club, and a curious anecdote is related in Burdy's Life of Skelton of a nobleman, a member of the club, to whom Dr. Madden went to obtain a subscription to a charity, and who drove him out of the house by appearing stark naked. See, too, Gilbert's Hist. of Dublin, ii. 14. A ‘Hell-fire Club,’ apparently of the kind, existed at Edinburgh early in the eighteenth century. Chambers's Traditions of Edinburgh, p. 170.

[2]He died in 1741. When on his death-bed he received a letter from the Dean of Kilmore, urging him to repentance, and dilating on his great and notorious profligacy. One of the last acts of the dying nobleman was to send this letter, with a false address, to the Earl of Kildare, one of the most religious and at the same time most punctilious men of his time, who was thrown into convulsions of indignation at the supposed aspersion of his character, and who at once lodged a complaint with the Archbishop against the Dean. It was not until after the death of Lord Rosse that the error was discovered. See O'Flanagan's Irish Chancellors, 11. 78–80.

[3]Lloyd's Description of Dublin.

[1]Lloyd's Description of Dublin.

[2]Campbell's Philosophical Survey, pp. 45, 46. Swift was particularly angry with Irish ladies for their dislike to walking. Forster's Life of Swift, p. 101.

[3]Kirkman's Life of Macklin, i. pp. 24, 25.

[1]Mrs. Delany's Memoirs, i. 291.

[2]Tour in Ireland, ii. p. 241.

[3]A traveller who visited Dublin in 1739 gave the following list of the prices then current. ‘It is now the month of October, and on exact inquiry I find the price of victuals, &c., in Dublin market, to be as follows: good beef, Id. a pound, and other butchers’ meat in proportion; a turkey, 1s.; a goose, 10d.; butter, 3d. per lb.; coal, 14s. a ton; candles, 3 1/2d. a lb.’—Four Letters, originally written in French, relating to the Kingdom of Ireland (Dublin, 1739), p. 22. Swift, in 1701, recommended Mrs. Dingley and Stella to live in Ireland rather than England, on the ground that ‘all necessaries of life were at half the price.’—Forster's Life of Swift, p. 125. King, in a letter written in 1697 (British Museum MSS., Bibl. Eger. 917), says provisions were 50 per cent, cheaper in Ireland than in England. Arthur Young found servants' wages on an average 30 per cent. cheaper than in England, and there was no tax on servants as in England. Tour in Ireland, ii. 232.

[4]Cumberland's Memoirs, i. 228.

[5]Hitchcock's Hist. of the Irish Stage, i. 68.

[1]In the Dublin Spy, Nov. 5, 1753, will be found a violent invective against Richardson, because ‘to carry his black designs against this kingdom into execution, when he published Pamela he sent over one Bacon, and gave him 1,500 sets of the novel, to the great loss of our printers and stationers here, who could have printed it here and sold it at half-price.’ In a previous letter in the same paper (Oct. 29, 1753), there is a complaint that London booksellers were beginning habitually to take this course, and thus to forestall Irish editions. See, too, on this subject, Warburton and Whitelaw's Hist. of Dublin, ii. 1157, and the Anthologia Hibernica, ii. 407.

[2]Madden's Hist. of Periodical Literature in Ireland, i. 199–226.

[3]This form of charity was probably more general in Dublin than in any other city of the empire. There was ‘The Charitable Musical Society for the benefit of imprisoned debtors,’ ‘The Charitable Musical Society, held at the Bear at College Green,’ ‘The Musical Society for the enlargement of Stevens’ Hospital,’ ‘The Musical Society in Werburgh Street.’—See Horatio Townshend's Account of the Visit of Handel to Dublin, p. 33.

[1]Of Congreve, Dr. Johnson says ‘It was said by himself that he owed his nativity to England, but by every one else that he was born in Ireland.’ Both Congreve and Farquhar were educated at Trinity College, but the latter is said to have been expelled on account of a very profane witticism. See Leigh Hunt's Biographical Notice. Congreve supports the high view I have taken of Irish education in the early years of the eighteenth century. Macaulay says of him: ‘His learning does great honour to his instructors. From his writings it appears not only that he was well acquainted with Latin literature, but that his knowledge of the Greek poets was such as was not in his time common, even in a college.’—Essays, ii. 165.

[1]Gilbert's Hist. of Dublin. White-law's Hist. of Dublin. Hitchcock's Hist. of the Irish Stage. Madden's Hist. of Irish Periodical Literature. Reflections and Resolutions for the Gentlemen of Ireland. The Memoirs of Macklin, Garrick, and Mrs. Bellamy. Lloyd's Description of Dublin. Campbell's Philosophical Survey; and the Tours of Arthur Young, Bush, Twiss, and Derrick.

[2]See the detailed accounts in Smith's County Histories.

[3]Tyerman's Life of Whitefield, i. 147.

[4]Bush's Hibernia Curiosa, p. 37. He adds: ‘The Englishman of temper and discretion will meet with as few difficulties travelling through this kingdom as in his own’ (p. 132). Cumberland notices ‘the wretched accommodation of the inns, particularly in the west,’ and says that travelling in Ireland is ‘not much unlike travelling in Spain.’—Memoirs, i. 256

[5]Arthur Young's Tour, ii. 150, 151. See, too, the similar judgment of Twiss, Tour in Ireland in 1775, p. 197.

[1]Hitchcock's View of the Irish Stage, i. 101.

[2]Grattan's Life, i. 144–147.

[3]Twiss' Tour in Ireland, p. 197. Ginckel noticed that after the capitulation of Limerick, it was safer to travel in Ireland than in England. See the curious Dutch journal of Huygens (private secretary of William), p. 529.

[4]See Rutty's Hist. of Mineral Waters in Ireland, and the copious notices on the subject in Smith's Histories of Kerry, Waterford, and Cork.

[5]Anthologia Hibernica, ii. 249. Smith's Hist. of Cork, 226. The last wolf killed in Scotland was about 1680, by Sir Ewan Cameron. Pennant's British Zoology, i. 88.

[6]Reflections and Resolutions for the Gentlemen of Ireland (1738). This book was written by Dr. Samuel Madden, the most conspicuous among the founders of the Dublin Society.

[7]Harris's Description of the Co. Down (1744), p. 109.

[1]An interesting account of these efforts will be found in two little books by John Richardson—one of the most active of the evangelists—called A History of the Attempts to Convert the Popish Natives of Ireland (2nd ed. 1713), and A Proposal for the Conversion of the Popish Natives of Ireland (1712). See, too, Perry's Hist. of the Church of England, iii. 534, 535. Boulter warmly patronised Richardson, who, he said, lost several hundreds of pounds in having the Prayer-book printed in Irish. Boulter's Letters, ii 29. See, too, Killen's Ecclesiastical Hist. ii. 206–208.

[2]Madden's Hist. of Periodical Literature in Ireland.

[3]Edwards's Hist. of Libraries, vol. ii.

[1]Giraldus Cambrensis, Topographia Hibernica, Dist. 1.

[2]

• ‘Whylome when Ireland florished in fame
• Of wealth and goodness, far above the rest
• Of all that bear the British island's name,
• The gods then used for pleasure and for rest
• Oft to resort thereto, when seemed them best.
• But none of all therein more pleasure found
• Than Cynthia, that is sovraine queene profest
• Of woods and forests, which therein abound
• Sprinkled with wholesome waters more than most on ground.’
• Fairy Queen, canto vi. 38.

[3]See an interesting paper on the woodlands of Ireland, in the Ulster Journal of Archœology, vol. vi. Boate says: ‘In ancient times, as long as the land was in full possession of the Irish themselves, all Ireland was very full of woods on every side, as evidently appeareth by the writings of Giraldus Cambrensis. … But the English having settled themselves in the land, did by degrees greatly diminish the woods in all the places where they were masters, partly to deprive the thieves of their refuge and partly to gain greater scope of profitable lands… Since the subduing of the last great rebellion before this, under the conduct of the Earl of Tirone … the remaining woods have been very much diminished, and in sundry places quite destroyed, partly for the reason last mentioned, and partly for the wood and timber itself … and for the making of charcoal for the iron works.’—Boate's Natural Hist. of Ireland (1652), pp. 99, 100.

[1]§ 77.

[2]Ibid.

[3]See on these two cases, Mant's Hist. ii. 553.

[4]See Godkin's Land War in Ireland, p. 156.

[5]British Museum Add. MSS. 9,750, p. 63. The London company, which under the name of the Irish Society built Londonderry, under James I., obtained in 1609 permission from the king to cut down for that purpose 50,000 oaks, 100,000 ash, and 10,000 elms.—Tracts Relating to Ireland, printed by the Irish Archæological Society, vol. ii. pp. 78, 79.

[1]10 Gul. III. 2 c. 12.

[2]See Boate's Natural Hist. of Ireland. He says: ‘It is incredible what quantity of timber is consumed by our iron work in a year, and whereas there was never an iron-work in Ireland before, there hath been a very great number of them erected since the last peace in every province, the which to furnish with charcoal, it was necessary from time to time to fell infinite numbers of trees’ (p. 100) The importance of Irish woods for the purposes of manufacture appears to have been occasionally recognised at an earlier period. ‘It appears,’ writes the historian of the Protestant refugees, ‘that in 1589 there were fourteen glass-houses in England, and a great quantity of wood was used in the manufacture. There was a petition in that year of George Longe, for a patent for making glass, urging as an inducement, that he would only have two glass-houses in England, and the rest in Ireland, whereby the English woods would be preserved and the Irish superfluous woods used.’—Burns's Hist. of Protestant Refugees, p. 254.

[3]Boate's Natural Hist. p. 102.

[4]Smith's History of Kerry (1756), p. 95.

[5]British Museum MSS., Bibl. Eger. 917, p. 151.

[6]Macpherson's Annals of Commerce, iii. 73. Mr. Froude, with his usual accuracy and candour, attributes the demolition of the Irish woods exclusively to the perversity of the native Irish. ‘The sun never shone on a lovelier country as nature made it; they [the native population] have pared its forests to the stump, till it shivers in damp and desolation’!—The English in Ireland, i. 22.

[1]10 & 11 Charles I. ch. 15. The grounds alleged are partly the injury done to the breed of horses, but partly also the ‘cruelty used to the beasts.’ This is, perhaps, the first occasion in which that consideration appeared in British legislation. The fine for this method of ploughing was at one time treated as a regular tax. See Gordon's Hist. of Ireland, i. 338, 339.

[2]Temple's Works (Essay on the Advancement of Trade in Ireland), iii. 16, 17. The object was to save the expense of harness.

[3]Reflections and Resolutions for the Gentlemen of Ireland, p. 105

[4]Young's Tour, i. 248, 286, 303.

[5]See an interesting essay on this subject in the Ulster Journal of Archœology, vol. vi.

[6]Reflections and Resolutions for the Gentlemen of Ireland, pp. 104, 105.

[7]Dobbs, On Irish Trade, part i. p. 45.

[8]Mant's Hist. of the Irish Church, ii. 581–597.

[1]Campbell's Philosophical Survey, p. 220. There is a good examination of the state of Irish agriculture in the latter half of the century, in a very able though now almost forgotten book, Crumpe's Essay on the Best Means of Providing Employment for the People (1793).

[2]Mrs. Delany notices (Correspondence, iii. 129) that Lord Trimleston was, in her time, especially famous as a florist, as well as for his skill in medicine and his goodness to the poor.

[3]‘Essay on the Ancient and Modern State of Ireland,’ quoted by Macpherson, Hist. of Commerce, iii. 318.

[1]Killen's Ecclesiastical Hist. ii. 104, 105.

[2]George Macartney to Jos. Dawson, March 24, 1707–8. Irish Record Office. The priest, whose name was O'Hamel, came voluntarily to surrender. ‘His behaviour,’ said Macartney, ‘has been such among us since, and was at the late revolution so kind to the Protestants by saving several of their goods in those times, that I had offered to me the best bail the Protestants of this country afford.’

[3]Historical Collections Relative to the Town of Belfast (1817).

[1]Smith's Hist. of the Co. of Waterford (1746), pp. 259–269. Harris's Description of the Co. Down, pp. 242–247. See, too, on the Irish fisheries, many curious details in Dobbs's Essay on the Trade of Ireland, pt. ii. (1731). The Parliament in 1737 passed some severe resolutions for the protection of the fisheries (Commons' Journals, vi. vii. p. 503).

[2]There were no accurate accounts of population in Ireland in the last century, but the houses were numbered. There was a great difference in the average number of occupants in different parts of Ireland. Anderson reckons the general average at seven to a house, and computes the population of Cork in 1760 at 57,876 (Macpherson's Annals of Commerce, iii. 325). Smith, however, who in his Hist. of Cork, published in the middle of the century, has collected several statistics on the subject, reckons it 73,000. Smith's History of Cork, i. 401.

[1]Bush's Hibernia Curiosa (1769), p. 42. An earlier authority notices that beef, hides, butter, and tallow were exported from Cork to most parts of the known world, and adds: ‘The last slaughtering season as they term it, which generally begins about the middle of August and ends near Christmas, the merchants killed near 90,000 head of black cattle. The war has a little damped their exportation this year.’—A Tour through Ireland by two English Gentlemen (London, 1748).

[1]Smith's Hist. of Cork, i. 400.

[2]‘New Geography of Ireland, for 1752,’ quoted in Macpherson's Annals of Commerce, iii. 326. According to another estimate given by Anderson it contained, in 1760, 3,640 houses and 25,480 inhabitants. Arthur Young, in 1776, computed the number of the inhabitants at 32,000, but states that it had much increased during the preceding twenty years. Tour in Ireland, i. 366.

[3]Campbell's Philosophical Survey, pp. 220, 221.

[4]In a despatch written from Limerick by Brigadier Tiffin to the Lords Justices, dated Aug. 8, 1701, I find it stated that ‘there are near ten Papists to one Protestant in this town.’—Despatches from the Lords Justices of Ireland. British Museum Add. MSS. 9,716, p. 108.

[1]Fitzgerald's Hist. of Limerick, ii 456, 463. The Catholics had, however, a chapel, a little outside the Thomond Gate.—Lenihan's Hist. of Limerick, p. 339.

[2]Pue's Occurrences. June 5–8, 1736.

[3]Arthur Young's Tour, i. 362–367. This writer, speaking of the state of things in his time, says: ‘Four years ago there were above seventy coaches and post-chaises in Limerick and one mile round it. In Limerick district, now 183 four-wheeled carriages and 115 two-wheeled ditto.

[4]A Short Tour; or, An Impartial and Accurate Description of the Co. Clare.

[1]Full particulars about Waterford will be found in C. Smith's Hist. of the Co. Waterford. There is an interesting description of Kilkenny in 1761, in a Limerick periodical called The Magazine of Magazines (Oct. 1761), and at a later date in Campbell's Philosophical Survey. Dunton, in his Account of my Conversation in Ireland, had at an earlier period visited Kilkenny, which he appears to have liked better than any other Irish town.

[2]‘Letter of the Archbishop of Cashel to Swift’ (May 1735), Swift's Correspondence iii. 135.

[1]These letters are in the Civil Correspondence, at the Irish Record Office. A few other letters are quoted in Froude's English in Ireland, vol. i. Governor Eyre, being violently anti-Catholic, and fond of strong military measures, is one of Mr. Froude's heroes. It is, I believe, impossible to speak with just confidence of the merits of a controversy which can only be gathered out of a few letters consisting of the uncontrolled statements on one side.

[1]He speaks more than once of himself as under the displeasure of the Government, and in one of his letters (April 17, 1748) he says: ‘Mr. Boyle, the Speaker, having applied to the Lord Chancellor to restore me to the Commission of the Peace, I hoped such powerful mediation, and my own reported submission and humility in eight years’ trial, and the expediency of having one active, faithful magistrate added to the few there are in the Co. of Galway, would have softened his lordship, and that I should have been not only reinstated in the county at large, but also put into commission in the town … but as prejudice and oppression still pursue me I bring my appeal before his Excellency.’

[2]Sir R. Wilmot to Thos. Waite, St. James Street, March 29, 1759. ‘Governor Eyre having lately transmitted to the Duke of Devonshire the enclosed memorial [not preserved], a copy of which seems, by a note at the bottom, to have been presented to the Lords Justices, on the ninth of last month, his Grace has directed me to send it to you, and to desire, as the service was performed in consequence of orders from England during his Grace's administration, that you will remind their Excellencies thereof, that Mr. Eyre may be repaid all reasonable charges; but the Duke of Devonshire leaves it to the Lords Justices to determine whether Governor Eyre is entitled to the reward which he claims for apprehending such persons. His Grace recollects that what was suggested against the friars was so far from being founded that they proved to be not only very inoffensive men, but objects of compassion, and were relieved by his Grace accordingly.’—Departmental Correspondence, Irish State Paper Office.

[1]See Hardiman's Hist. of Galway, a book of great interest and research.

[2]Forty shillings a year was granted to each family of Palatines in Ireland for seven years for buying stock and utensils. The Duke of Ormond to Lords Justices, April 5, 1712. Irish Departmental Correspondence.

[1]‘They had houses built for them; plots of land assigned to each at a rent of favour, were assisted in stock, and all of them with leases for lives from the head landlord. The poor Irish are very rarely treated in this manner; when they are, they work much greater improvements than common among these Germans; witness Sir W. Osborne's mountaineers!’—Tour in Ireland, ii. 107.

[2]See Arthur Young's Tour, i. 468, 480–2; ii. 107; and Wesley's Journal A few other facts relating to the Palatines will be found in Mitchell's Hist. of Ireland, i. 47, and in Curry's State of the Catholics in Ireland, ii. 245.

[1]Stanhope's Life of Pitt, iv. 84. It is a curious illustration of the manner in which Church patronage was dealt with in Ireland, that Abbadie was promised, in King William's time, the first considerable preferment that fell vacant, although he was entirely unable to speak English. The Deanery of St. Patrick was the first vacancy, but it was thought too strong a measure to give him this, so he received instead the Deanery of Killaloe, with a promise of additional preferment at a future time. Boulter's Letters, i. 90, 91, 101, 102.

[2]Weiss's Hist. des Réfugiés Protestants, i. p. 320.

[3]Smith's Hist. of Waterford (1746), p. xv.

[1]Whitelaw and Warburton's Hist. of Dublin, ii. 841, 842. Burns's Hist. of Protestant Refugees in England, p. 247–251. Smiles's Huguenots in England and Ireland. Smith's Hist. of the Co. Waterford, p. xi. Weiss's Hist. des Réfugiés Français, i. 280, 281. Some interesting particulars about the French settlement at Portarlington will be found in the Appendix to the Mémoires inédits de Dumont de Bostaquet. See, too, a valuable series of papers on the refugees in the Ulster Journal of Archœology.

[1]Many particulars about the Tory depredations between the Act of Settlement and the Revolution will be found in Russell and Prendergast's Report to the Master of the Rolls on the Carte Manuscripts, pp. 92–98, and also in Mr. Prendergast's pamphlet (unfortunately only printed for private circulation) on The Tory War in Ulster.

[2]9 Will. III. c. 9.

[3]4 Geo. I. c. 9.

[4]British Museum Add. MSS. 6,116, p. 195.

[1]I have taken these cases from the Presentments of Grand Juries (Irish State Paper Office) and the Civil and Miscellaneous Correspondence (Irish Record Office).

[2]In a state of society like that of Ireland, the fears of the small dominant class naturally exaggerated any disturbance In a letter of Colonel Maurice Hussey to the Castle, from Flosbrige, Co. Kerry (July 12, 1707), he says: ‘It is usual at the arrival of any Lord-Lieutenant into this kingdom, and especially in Parliament time, to make a mighty noise of tories and rapparees… In my Lord Sydney's time, twenty-five M.P.'s came in a body to acquaint his Excellence that there were 1,500 men in arms in the west of Ireland, formed in companies, with flying colours, against the Government. My Lord sent for me in all haste, having the honour of being intimately acquainted with him in Charles II.'s time. … I told him the naked truth of what I knew, which was that there were but six tories in the county Tipperary, and four in the county of Cork, upon the borders of Kerry, and two garsoons.’ The Lord-Lieutenant found on examination, that this was perfectly correct. In Lord Ormond's time a M.P. wrote a letter to the Speaker stating that there were some thousands in arms against the Queen, but it was found that there were at this time not more than eight tories in the whole province of Munster. ‘My Lord-Lieutenant must know that Yorkshire is seldom free from having eight or ten highwaymen, and must it therefore follow that all Yorkshire-men are in rebellion?’ Irish Record Office.

[1]Lieutenant Maxwell to E. South-well. Irish Record Office.

[2]Col. Hussey, Sept. 28, 1712, Irish Record Office.

[3]R. Orpen to Lieutenant Whittingham, Aug. 3, 1703. Irish Record Office.

[4]Irish State Paper Office.

[1]See Howard on the Revenue of Ireland, i. 43, 221.

[1]Special State Papers, Irish State Paper Office. The very carious papers relating to this case are printed at length in Miss Hickson's Old Kerry Records (2nd series), a book of much original research. Miss Hick-son thinks that the word ‘fairesses’ was a corruption of ‘fearraidhes,’ the plural of the Irish word fear, i.e. a man.

[2]See the extracts from the journal of Molyneux in the Tracts relating to Ireland printed for the Irish Archæological Society, ii. p. 7.

[3]Hardiman's Hist. of Galway, p. 181.

[4]Nov. 20, 1747, Irish Record Office.

[1]See Pitcairn's Criminal Trials of Scotland for numerous instances of this crime.

[2]‘I have directed the flesh of all the cattle near me to be burnt, for I heard that the poor did usually gather about the slain beasts, and either snatch it away or buy it cheap, to their great satisfaction, which tended greatly to promote the mischief… At the sight of burning the flesh hundreds who came to be the better for it went away dissatisfied.’—W. Caulfield to Jos. Dawson, Feb. 23, 1711–12. Irish Record Office.

[1]D. Power to the Government, b. 22, 1711. Record Offi ce.

[2]Gilbert Ormsby to J. Dawson, March 8, 1711. Ibid. Feb. 23.

[1]Presentments and Informations, Co. Galway.

[2]Presentments of Grand Jurors, Co. Mayo.

[1]The High Sheriff of Roscommon to the Government, March 5, 1711. Irish Record Office.

[2]George Fowler to the Lord-Lieutenant, March 3, 1712. Ibid.

[1]G. Ormsby to J. Dawson. Irish Record Office.

[2]W. Caulfleld to J. Dawson, Feb. 23, 1711–12. Ibid. The materials about the houghing are chiefly to be found in the Presentments of the Grand Juries in the different counties where the crimes occurred, in the special state papers in the Irish State Paper Office, and in the civil and miscellaneous correspondence in the Irish Record Office.

[1]See a report of Captain Hedges from Ross Castle, Killarney, Jan. 20, 1711. Irish Record Office.

[2]Mr. Brewster to the Lords Justices, June 12, 1711. Irish Record Office. See, too, the Presentments for the Co. Kerry. Irish State Paper Office.

[1]W. Parker to J. Dawson, Oct. 27, 1710. Irish Record Office.

[2]Presentments of Grand Juries, 1728 (Co. Tyrone).

[3]Ibid., Co. Mayo, 1757.

[4]Wesley's Journals.

[5]J. Pepper to J. Dawson, Feb. 4, 1709–10. Irish Record Office.

[1]Lord Inchiquin to the Lord Lieutenant, Aug. 26, 1710. Ibid.

[2]Mr. Barber to the Castle, Jan. 729, 174. Irish State Paper Office.

[3]Arthur Young found this custom (which he describes as a very old one) prevailing in Londonderry. Towr in Ireland, ii. 37.

[1]Presentments and Informations, Co. Tipperary and Co. Limerick. Irish State Paper Office.

[2]Presentments and Informations of the Grand Jurors, Co. Antrim. Ibid.

[1]Presentments, &c., Co. Tipperary. Ibid.

[1]Fronde's English in Ireland, i. 417–427. So again, ‘Abduction and rape were not the only weapons with which the Irish carried on the war against their conquerors’ (p. 436).

[1]There are, as far as I know, just three passages in which abductions are so spoken of. A certain G. Til-son writes to Mr. Delafaye (Jan. 2, 1731), ‘I believe you know it is a common practice in Ireland for a tall Papist to hurry away a pretty girl with a good fortune into the mountains, and there commit acts of horror and violation, and that the poor undone maid is glad at any rate to be made an honest woman. This is readily performed by the holy men who are at hand to assist their lay friends on such occasions. These outrages, besides many other evils arising from forced and clandestine marriages, have engaged the whole bench of Irish bishops to come into this law.’—Departmental Correspondence, Irish State Paper Office. The Lords Justices wrote to the Duke of Grafton (Jan. 21, 1722), ‘Though this practice of carrying away by force women of fortune has been very frequent among the Papists, notwithstanding the severity of the Act made to prevent it, no person has been apprehended and brought to justice since the Act passed, though several notorious breaches have been since committed.’—Ibid. Archbishop King, in a letter to Southwell in April 1728, enumerates with great bitterness, the different disorders prevalent among the Papists. Among others, ‘They take away by force women of fortune, and they depend on Popish ambassadors’ interest for pardon.’—Mant, ii. 487.

[2]I do not include among these the case of Honor Kerin (not Keris, as Mr. Froude spells it) who was abducted by William Blood. Mr. Froude says (English in Ireland, i. 423), that she belonged to ‘a family of Protestants,’ but after reading carefully all the depositions, I have been unable to find any indication of the religion of any of the parties in the case.

[1]In one of these cases the abducting party consisted of five Papists and one ‘who went to church.’

[2]The case of Jean Tubman, Presentments of the Co. Cavan. Froude's English in Ireland, i. 427–431. Mr. Froude (very characteristically) tells this story as if it were typical of a considerable class. I believe it would be impossible, in the whole collection of depositions about abductions in the State Paper Office, to discover another instance of the same kind Protestant heiresses (as well as Roman Catholic ones) were no doubt sometimes abducted, but this was not because they were Protestants but because they were heiresses. There is one case, however, mentioned by Mrs. Delany (which does not appear to have fallen under Mr. Froude's notice), of a Catholic heiress whose faith was shaken and who afterwards became a Protestant, being run away with by her cousin. But even if the story be true (which seems not quite certain) there is no evidence that the theological perplexities of the lady had anything to say to the abduction. Mrs. Delany's Correspondence, ii. 348–353. In addition to the abductions recorded in the depositions of the Grand Juries I have found allusions to three cases in the Government correspondence. In one case, which acquired considerable notoriety, the culprit was James Cotter, a member of a considerable and very popular Catholic family, and the victim a young Quakeress. In the two other cases(which will be found in the civil and miscellaneous correspondence) there is no indication of the religion of any of the parties.

[1]This case is not among the Presentments in the State Paper Office, and I am indebted for my knowledge of it to the kindness of Mr. Henry West, Q.C., Crown Counsel of the Co. of Galway. The depositions relating to it have been printed in The Proceedings of the Balgair Cause. June 1806. Printed by Alexander Chapman, Forrester's Wynd, Edinburgh.

[2]Compare O'Flanagan's Lives of the Irish Chancellors. ii. 59, 61, and Boulter's Letters, ii. 15–19. Kimberly assisted a Mr. Mead in carrying off and marrying an heiress. One of the abduction cases related in full by Mr. Froude, is that of Mrs. Dobbin. In a Dublin newspaper I find that Thomas Jemyson and Brian Taylor (one of them a principal and the other an accessory) were executed at Carrickfergus for this abduction. Dublin Gazette, May 4–8, 1742. The papers relating to abductions in the State Paper Office, are only informations laid before the grand juries, and give no information about the defence, the trial, or the verdict, so there are very probably other cases in which criminals were executed for this offence These are sufficient to show the inaccuracy of the assertion of Arthur Young, reproduced by Mr. Froude, that there is but one instance [that of James Cotter] on record where a person guilty of forcible abduction had been executed. English in Ireland, i. 418. It is, however, quite true that this, like most crimes of violence, was looked upon with great indulgence by the populace in Ireland, that very few of the culprits were brought to justice, and that the execution of Cotter—who on other grounds was very popular—produced an explosion of mob violence against the Quakers. Lord Clonmell, about 1780, appears to have done good service in suppressing abductions, and some prominent criminals were at this time hung. Fitzpatrick's Ireland Before the Union.

[1]Arthur Young's Tour in Ireland, ii. 240.

[2]A few additional particulars about abductions in Ireland, will be found in Crofton Croker's Researches in the South of Ireland. Ireland Sixty Years Ago. Fitzpatrick's Ireland Before the Union. Maxwell, in his Wild Sports of the West, notices their frequency in some of the wilder districts of Donegal in the early years of the present century. I learn from Mr. West that thirty or forty years ago they were very common crimes in the Co. of Galway and that there have been occasional instances much later. I need hardly add, that none of these authorities give the smallest countenance to the notion that abductions either were, or ever had been, part of a religious war.

[1]A great deal of evidence relating to the diffusion of this form of marriage will be found in McLennan's Primitive Marriage.

[2]History of Man. Book I. sk. 6.

[3]Pitcairn's Criminal Trials, under the heads of abduction, forcing, and rape. There are many other cases which are so briefly given that it is impossible to say what was their precise character. See, too, for examples of Scotch abductions, Chambers's Domestic Annals of Scotland, i. 223, 415, 465; ii. 251, 319, 390, and also the Introduction to Scott's Rob Roy. The case of Bothwell and Mary Stuart (whatever may be thought of the private relations of the parties) is one conspicuous example. Carrying away heiresses under twelve years old to marry them was a common Scotch crime in the seventeenth century. See Chambers, ii. 250, 251.

[1]See Sir Walter Scott's Introduction to Rob Roy. Appendix No. vi.

[1]See the Introduction to Rob Roy. Sir W. Scott says: ‘This sort of enterprise was so common along the Highland line as to give rise to a variety of songs and ballads. The annals of Ireland, as well as those of Scotland, prove the crime to have been common in the more lawless parts of both countries; and any woman who happened to please a man of spirit who came of a good house and who possessed a few chosen friends and a retreat in the mountains, was not permitted the alternative of saying him nay. What is more, it would seem that the women themselves, most interested in the immunities of their sex, were, among the lower classes, accustomed to regard such marriages … as “pretty Fanny's way,” or rather, the way of Donald with pretty Fanny. It is not a great many years since a respectable woman above the lower rank of life expressed herself very warmly to the author on his taking the freedom to censure the behaviour of the McGregors, on the occasion in question. She said “that there was no use in giving a bride too much choice upon such occasions; the marriages were the happiest lang syne which had been done off-hand.” Finally she averred that her “own mother had never seen her father till the night he brought her up from the Lennox, with ten head of black cattle, and that there had not been a happier couple in the country.”’

[1]I have already quoted a case (p. 294) where a priest was charged with celebrating a clandestine marriage between two Protestants.

[2]Jan. 1725. Letters of the Lords Lieutenants and Lords Justices, vol. xvii. Irish State Paper Office.

[3]12 George I. c. 3. This fact is acknowledged by Mr. Froude, English in Ireland, i. p. 418.

[1]Swift's Correspondence, Nov. 17, 1726.

[2]Dublin Gazette, Oct. 25–28. Sewell obtained a short respite, but was hanged Nov. 29.

[3]Faulkener's Journal, Oct. 6–9.

[1]This paper is so curious that I quote it at full. It is dated Sept. 8, 1751: ‘Whereas, the three following priests, James Doyle, Nicholas Nevil, and Nicholas Collier, by their wicked and abominable lives became the greatest pest and nuisance of the diocese of Ferns—the first, by his infamously libelling his superiors and equals, by his non-payment of his lawful debts, by his disobedience and exercising priestly functions under excommunication, by his perfidious and Judas-like endeavours to destroy his superiors, by stirring up persecutions and troubles against them, by his clandestine marriages and his other numberless immoralities too many to be here inserted; the second, by his being the most abandoned, scandalous sot and drunkard, perhaps in human nature, by his being a most famous or rather infamous couple-beggar, tho' sworn on the mass book before several congregations never to marry clandestinely any more; the third, by being the most professed and public couple-beggar in the nation, tho' likewise sworn solemnly on the mass book before six different congregations never to marry clandestinely again. These are, therefore, to command all Roman Catholick pastors whatsoever, of the diocese of Ferns … to denounce and declare excommunicated and accursed, by God and His holy church, the aforesaid reprobate priests, and to charge the Christians not to harbour them or converse with them under pain of being treated in the same manner themselves. Given under our hands, Oct. 31, 1750, as the only remedy in our power to put a stop to such enormities. Nicholas Sweetman.’ The paper is countersigned by other ecclesiastical authorities of the diocese, and ordered to be read on three consecutive Sundays at each station in the diocese. Irish Record Office. I may mention that Mr. Froude has quoted (English in Ireland, i. 549, 550) a long account of a drunken priest, out of the very bundle of papers from which I have taken the curious document cited in this note. That document, however, is inconsistent with the impression he wishes to convey, and accordingly no trace of it will be found in his book. It need scarcely be added that this writer has never given his readers the faintest intimation of the fact that the crime which he represents as a distinctively ‘Irish idea’ had been for generations equally common in Scotland.

[1]See Prendergast's Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland, p. 33.

[2]Ibid. p. 142.

[3]Ibid. p. 117.

[4]See the very curious particulars on this subject collected by Mr. Prendergast, pp. 230–234, 259–271. An old poet commemorated the few heroic Puritans, who—

• rather than turn
• From English principles would sooner burn.
• And rather than marrie an Irish wife,
• Would batchellors remain for term of life.

[5]Prendergast, p. 266.

[1]9 Will. III. c. 3. It was not until 1792 that intermarriages between Protestants and Catholics, if celebrated by Protestant clergymen, ceased to be a legal or ecclesiastical offence. One of the clauses of a law passed in that year, is, ‘Be it further enacted that it shall and may be lawful to and for Protestants and persons professing the Roman Catholic religion to intermarry, and to and for archbishops, bishops, and all persons having lawful jurisdiction, to grant licenses for marriages to be celebrated between Protestants and persons professing the Roman Catholic religion.’ 32 George III. c. 21.

[1]12 Geo. I. c. 3.

[1]The heads of bills for annulling marriages between Protestant and Papist, or between two Protestants, celebrated by Popish priests or degraded clergymen, will be found in the Irish Record Office, and the letters of the Council recommending them in the Council Books, Irish State Paper Office. The Council dwell upon the fact that these marriages ‘have generally ended in the perversion of the Protestant parties to the Popish religion,’ and on ‘the mischiefs they produce, particularly amongst his Majesty's troops.’

[2]The following are the heads of the Bill: ‘Whereas the laws now in being to prevent Popish priests and degraded clergymen from celebrating marriages between Protestant and Protestant, or between Protestant and Papist, have hitherto been found ineffectual; for remedy whereof we pray it may be enacted that every marriage which shall be had or celebrated after Aug. 1, 1744, between a Protestant or any person having professed him or herself a Protestant at any time within three years before, and Papist, or between two Protestants, if celebrated by a Popish priest or degraded clergyman, shall be and is hereby declared absolutely null and void, to all intents and purposes whatsoever.’ Then follows a long clause about reading this law in churches, &c. Heads of Bills, 1743. Irish Record Office.

[1]He says the Commons ‘allege, and I believe with truth, that the priests direct their people to marry Protestants, as experience shows that in these cases the whole family become papists, and that the former Act does not reach those who have not, or are not heirs to, a certain estate, and the grievance intended to be remedied is among the common people.’—The Duke of Devonshire to the Duke of Newcastle, Dec. 25, 1743, English Record Office. Although there is not a single word about abductions either in the letter of the Duke of Devonshire or in the Bill of 1743 which the Duke of Devonshire was recommending, Mr. Froude has thought fit (English in Ireland, i. 418) to quote the first part of this passage as if it applied exclusively to that crime—to the exploits of those ‘young gentlemen of the Catholic persuasion who were in the habit of recovering equivalents for the lands of which they considered themselves to have been robbed, and of recovering souls at the same time to holy Church by carrying off young Protestant girls,’ &c The words in italics he has not quoted.

[1]19 George II. c. 13.

[2]23 Geo. II. c. 10 The motives which produced mixed marriages were creditable, or at least not discreditable, to the Irish people, while the abductions were atrocious crimes. It therefore suits the purpose of Mr. Froude's book to exaggerate the latter to the utmost, and to represent the legislation annulling mixed marriages celebrated by priests as if it were entirely or almost entirely due to them. This Mr. Froude has accordingly done (English in Ireland, i. 418, 594, 595), and he has given his case an appearance of great plausibility by garbling one of the documents he quotes. His quotation (English in Ireland, i. p. 418) is as follows: ‘We have reason to believe the priests are in a great measure supported by gratuities, on occasions of such marriages as are made void by this Bill.’—Memorandum of the Irish Council on sending to England ‘the heads of a Bill to make more effectual an Act to prevent the taking away and marrying children against the wishes of their parents and guardians.’ — MSS. Dublin Castle, 1745. Most of Mr. Froude's readers have no doubt accepted this quotation as a conclusive proof that the Act of 1745 was directed mainly against abductions, and that in the opinion of the Irish Council the priests were to a great extent supported by gratuities received on the occasion of abductions. As a matter of fact, the true title of the Bill as it is set forth in the Memorandum which Mr Fronde professes to quote, is, ‘An Act for annulling all marriages to be celebrated by any Popish priest or degraded clergyman between Protestant and Protestant or between Protestant and Papist, and to amend and make more effectual an Act passed in this kingdom in the sixth year of the reign of her late Majesty Queen Anne, entitled, an Act for the more effectual preventing the taking away and marrying children against the wills of their parents and guardians.’ Only a single clause of the Bill relates to abductions, and the grounds upon which the Council recommended the Bill (including the words cited by Mr. Froude) are copied word for word from the letter of the Council recommending the Bill of 1743, in which there was no allusion whatever to abductions. The whole passage in the letter of 1743, as far as the words ‘such clandestine marriages as this Bill is intended to prevent,’ was transcribed by the Council in the letter of 1745. It is only after that passage that they add that a clause has been added in this Bill for the more effectual punishment of principals and accessories in abduction cases. Council Books, Irish State Paper Office.

[1]I cannot resist the pleasure of transcribing some judicious observations of Sir H. Maine on this subject. ‘The study of the Brehon law leads to the same conclusion, pointed at by so many branches of modern research. It conveys a stronger impression than ever of a wide separation between the Aryan race, and races of other stocks, but it suggests that many, perhaps most of the differences in kind alleged to exist between Aryan sub-races, are really differences merely in degree of development. It is to be hoped that contemporary thought will, before long, make an effort to emancipate itself from the habits of levity, in adopting theories of race, which it seems to have contracted. Many of those theories appear to have little merit except the facility they give for building on them inferences tremendously out of proportion to the mental labour which they cost the builder.’ (Early Hist, of Institutions, pp. 96, 97.) Mill justly says: ‘Of all vulgar modes of escaping from the consideration of the effect of social and moral influences on the human mind, the most vulgar is that of attributing the diversities of conduct and character to inherent national differences.’—Political Economy, i. 390.

[2]The reader may find an interesting discussion on this subject in a very remarkable lecture by Mr. Huxley ‘On the Forefathers of the English People,’ reported in the Pall Mall Gazette, Jan. 10, 1870. The Latin writers describe a large proportion of the Celts as tall, light-haired, and blue-eyed.

[1]Arthur Young's Tour in France.

[1]Discovery of the True Causes, p. 2.

[2]Leland's Hist, of Ireland, iii. 60.

[1]Huxley, Mr. Huxley adds: ‘It is quite possible, and I think probable, that Ireland, as a whole, contains less Teutonic blood than the eastern half of England and more than the western half.’—On the Forefathers of the English People. The Jacobite Parliament of 1689 has been described as peculiarly and typically Celtic, but the names of more than two-thirds of its members are clearly English.

[2]This is noticed by Sir C. Lewis, On, Irish Disturbances. Mr. Pike has collected evidence to show that for some time after the Norman invasion, agrarian crimes of combination, directed by the Saxons against the ascendant race, were quite as prevalent in England as they have ever been in Ireland.

[1]Letter from Lord B. of J., March 1702, Southwell Correspondence, Brit. Mus. Bibl. Eger, 917, p. 186.

[1]7 Gul. III. c. 21. See Sigerson's Hist, of Land Tenures in Ireland, p. 37.

[1]In the Gentleman's Magazine for April 1748, is the following notice: ‘Ireland. One George Williams was convicted at Wexford assizes for being perverted from the Protestant to the Popish religion, and sentenced to be out of the king's protection, his lands and tenements, goods and chattels to be forfeited to the king, and his body to remain at the king's pleasure.’

[2]Thus Archbishop Boulter writes: Instead of converting those that are adults, we are daily losing several of our meaner people, who go off to Popery,’ and in another letter: ‘Till we can get more churches or chapels, and more resident clergymen, instead of gaining ground of the Papists we must lose to them, as in fact we do in many places; the descendants of many of Cromwell's officers and soldiers here béing gone off to Popery.’—Boulter's Letters, i. 223; ii. 12. Great numbers of Scotch from the western islands, who could only speak Gaelic, came over after the Revolution and settled on the northern coasts of Antrim, and as the Catholic priests were the only clergy whose language they could understand, many of them in a few years lapsed to Popery. After some time an Irish-speaking Protestant clergyman was sent among them, and many were reconverted. (Richardson's Hist, of the Attempts to Convert the Natives of Ireland, pp. 101, 102.) In 1747 we find bitter complaints from Galway that ‘of late years several old Protestants, and the children of such, had been perverted to the Popish religion by the indefatigable assiduity, diligence, and unlimited and uncontrolled access Popish ecclesiastics had to the town and suburbs.’—Hardiman's Hust. of Galway, 180.

[1]Richardson's Folly of Pilgrimages in Ireland.

[1]See John Richardson's Folly of Pilgrimages in Ireland, especially of that of St. Patrick's Purgatory (1727). Skelton, Description of the Pilgrimage to Lough Derg, and Wright's Purgatory of St. Patrick.

[2]See the graphic description of this devotion, in Smith's Kerry (1756), pp. 113–117. Smith says that ‘Many persons, about twenty years ago, came from the remotest parts of Ireland to perform their penances, but the zeal of such adventurous devotees hath very much cooled of late.’ It was believed ‘that no bird hath the power to fly over that part of the island where the chapels and walls stand, without first alighting on the ground, which they walk gently over and then take wing.’

[3]This characteristic, which must have struck all who have come in contact with the Irish poor in times of distress, was not long since forcibly noticed in the Report of the Devon Commission. ‘We cannot forbear,’ they wrote, ‘expressing our strong sense of the patient endurance which the labouring class have generally exhibited, under sufferings greater, we believe, than the people of any other country in Europe have to sustain.’ (ii. 1116.)

[1]Butty's History of the Irish Quakers.

[1]It has been printed by the Camden Society.

[1]Coxe's Hist, of Ireland, i. 354.

[1]Glanvill's Sadducismus Triumphatus, Relation vii. It is not said whether the culprit was executed. There is no Irish case in the long catalogue of executions in Hutchinson's Hist, of Witchcraft.

[2]I mention this on the authority of a letter by Crofton Croker in the Dublin Penny Journal, i. p. 341. Croker, whose knowledge of Irish local literature was very great, says that this case and the three at Kilkenny are the only Irish instances of capital punishment for witchcraft he has met with.

[3]McSkimin's Hist, of Carrickfergus, p. 22. See, too, the Dublin Penny Journal, i. 341, 370.

[1]Curry's Historical Review, ii. 243.

[2]L. Osborne to J. Busteed. Cork, Dec. 12, 1721. Irish Record Office.

[1]Wesley's Journal, April 1756.

[2]Derrick's Letters from Liverpool, Chester, Cork, and Killarney (1767).

[3]Dobbs, Part i. p. 65. Trenchard's Hist. of Standing Armies (1739). These troops were frequently sent on foreign service. In 1729 Boulter reports the bitter complaints on account of the Irish regiments being sent to Gibraltar (Boulter's Letters, i. 330), and the defenceless state in which Ireland was left, was, at a later period, the origin of the Volunteers.

[4]Informations and Presentments, Irish State Paper Office. One letter relating to an episcopal appointment was intercepted by the Government. It was written by one Laurence Connellan to Joseph Wodberry, at the Hague, Feb. 28, 1752, asking him to make use of his interest with the friends of the Pretender, that the writer should be appointed successor to Dr. McDonagh at Ennis. The writer says the priests of Ennis had sent to the Chevalier a postulatum, giving in order the names of several priests, one of whom they desired to be named. The letter fell into the hands of Lord Holdernesse. Departmental Correspondence, Irish State Paper Office.

[1]This fact was first made generally known by Bishop Doyle, in his evidence before a Parliamentary Committee. Fitzpatrick's Life of Doyle, i. 396. See, too, Lenihan's Hist. of Limerick, pp. 615–617. We have seen in a former chapter, that the Scotch Protestant bishops were likewise nominated by the Pretender.

[2]Harris's Description of Down (1744), p. 19. Madden complained that ‘this kingdom has been terribly exhausted by sending the flower of our people, and our Protestant people too, into the army, to the loss of many thousand heads and families.’—Reflections and Resolutions, p. 198.

[1]Boulter's Letters, i. 148. There is, however, one very curious instance about this time of the Government authorising the enlistment of a few Irish Catholics. On Aug. 6, 1720, Horace Walpole wrote to James Belcher: ‘My Lord Stanhope having recommended it to my Lord Lieutenant to cause twenty or thirty men to be raised in Ireland, at His Majesty's charge, either Protestants or Papists, provided they be of an extraordinary size, to be presented by His Majesty to the King of Prussia; His Grace has thought fit to entrust the execution of this service to Col. Ramsay. … Papists as well as Protestants may be equally useful if duly qualified by their stature.’ In Oct. 1722, another order came from the King to enlist more men in Ireland for the King of Prussia's life-guards. Departmental Correspondence (Irish State Paper Office).

[2]There are some papers relating to this matter in the Informations and Presentments of Grand Juries, Co. Limerick. Lieut.-Colonel Allen stated (1716), ‘that the colonel and every officer made it their business to find out if there were any Papists amongst them, and … that several were committed prisoners upon suspicion, and though no certain proofs could be made of their being Papists they were turned out of the regiment.’ (Irish State Paper Office.) In 1724 a report had got abroad that some of the soldiers in the regiment of Col. Fleming at Galway, went to mass. Col. Fleming wrote to Lord Tyrawly that this report was ‘a notorious falsehood,’ and that if there were any truth in it it could not fail to be found out. His men, he says, ‘go in great formality to church on Sundays, but if they take any more of it the week after, or go to either church or mass but when they cannot help it, they are not the men I take them for. … Soon after my arrival here from Dublin, I had suspicion of one Oliver Brown, a recruit, born in Hampstead, near London, that he was a Papist, which I afterwards discovered by some of the old men; the day following I had him tried by a regimental court-martial, who ordered him to be three times whipped through the regiment and then to be drummed out of the garrison, which was accordingly put into execution.’ (June 12, 1724.) Irish Record Office.

[3]It has been more than once stated (See Killen's Ecclesiastical Hist. ii. 275) that Catholics were first admitted into the army in 1757, in the administration of the elder Pitt; but this assertion seems to be erroneous. In 1757 the Duke of Bedford wrote that recruits might be made in the northern parts of Ireland, but that the recruiting officers must ‘take the utmost care not to enlist papists or persons popishly affected, his Majesty being determined to show his utmost displeasure against such officers as shall be found to have been remiss in their duty in that respect’ (Jan. 29). On March 31, 1759, he permitted recruits to be enlisted in any part of Ireland, ‘provided they be Protestants, and were born of Protestant parents,’ and he enjoined the Lords Justices ‘to prevent Papists being enlisted in His Majesty's army.’ Departmental Correspondence, Irish State Paper Office.

[1]Departmental Correspondence. These papers, as well as the Presentments of Grand Juries, and the Civil and Miscellaneous Correspondence in the Irish Record Office, contain numerous allusions to the enlistments.

[2]Letter from St. John Broderick and others. Irish Record Office.

[1]Information of Gilbert Fitpatrick (Co. Cork).

[2]Madden's Hist. of Irish Periodical Literature, i. 259–260.

[3]Dublin Gazette, Feb. 13–17, 1732.

[1]Boulter's Letters, i. 72, 151–74; ii. 30–38. Bishop Nicholson writes to Archbishop Wake, Jan. 20, 1721–22: ‘Your Grace will observe that the Lord Lieutenant takes no notice in his speech to Parliament of the late enlisting of soldiers for foreign service, notwithstanding the great noise that has been lately made against us on that head both in proclamations and the debates of both houses; which inclines me to hope that the levies are truly intended for Spanish service against the Moors, and are made here by (at least) his Majesty's connivance. If this be the case, we have reason to wish that whatever the numbers may be that are already sent over, they might be doubly increased, since all that have hitherto been shipped off are bigoted Papists.’ British Museum Add. MSS. 6,116.

[2]See a letter from the Duke of Newcastle, May 1, 1742, English Record Office, and a letter from the Duke of Devonshire to the Lords Justices. Departmental Correspondence, Irish State Paper Office.

[1]Mant's Hist. of the Church of Ireland, ii. 275, 276, 291.

[2]Departmental Correspondence, 1718. The Duke of Bolton to the Lords Justices. Irish State Paper Office.

[3]Killen's Ecclesiastical Hist. of Ireland, ii. 242.

[4]Synge's Letters, British Museum Add. MSS. 6,117, p. 50.

[5]Nicholson's Letters, British Museum Add. MSS. 6,116, p. 127.

[1]Archbishop Synge's Letters, p. 35, British Museum Add. MSS. 6,117. Nicholson's MSS. Letters, p. 157. Abernethy gave a higher estimate in 1751. He says: ‘The Protestant Dissenters in Ireland are half of its Protestant inhabitants in the Province of Ulster. As appears by authentic accounts lately sent from it there are about 50,000 families of Dissenters, and consequently about 216,000 souls. In three counties (Down, Antrim, and Tyrone), there are about sixty Dissenting gentlemen who possess estates from 200l. to 1,400l. a year.’—Abernethy's Scarce Tracts, p. 61.

[2]Killen, ii. p. 139.

[1]Abernethy says the Presbyterians in Londonderry were to the members of the Established Church, according to one account, as sixteen to one, according to another as ten to one. Scarce Tracts, p. 61.

[2]British Museum Add. MSS. 6,117, p. 47. ‘They summon people to their synods,’ wrote King, ‘examine witnesses, censure and punish them in such a manner that if the ministers of the Established Church should do so they would incur the danger of a præmunire, and perhaps be prosecuted.’—Mant, ii. p. 333.

[1]Mant, ii. p. 333.

[2]There is a curious letter of Swift extant, to Sir Arthur Langford, rebuking him for allowing a conventicle to be built on his property, and threatening to take measures to shut it up (Oct. 30, 1714). Swift's Correspondence (ed. 1766), ii. 19–21.

[3]Mant, ii. 98.

[4]Killen, ii. 188, 189. Reid's Hist. of the Irish Presbyterians, iii. 75. He was released by the intercession of the Archbishop of Tuam.

[1]Swift's Letter from a Member of the House of Commons concerning the Sacramental Test.

[2]A Letter from the Lord B. of J. (Dublin, March 1702). Southwell Correspondence, British Museum Bibl. Eger. 917. See, too, Mant ii. 126.

[3]To the Archbishop of Canterbury, Aug. 1719. Mant, ii. 336.

[1]Mant, ii. p. 333–334.

[2]D'Alton's Lives of the Irish Archbishops, p. 299.

[3]Bishop Nicholson's Letters, British Museum, p. 133.

[1]Mant, ii. 191. Reid's Hist. of the Irish Presbyterians.

[2]Dr. Lloyd. He married a cast-off mistress of Wharton, who endeavoured to reward him by making him Bishop of Cork, but the Queen, on the remonstrance of the English archbishops, refused her consent. Mant, ii. 192.

[3]Killen, ii. 214.

[4]D'Alton, p. 298.

[5]Killen, ii. 218, 219.

[6]He was at this time Bishop of Raphoe, but was appointed Archbishop of Tuam in 1716. His letters, transcripts of which are in the British Museum, form a very valuable contribution to Irish history. Coghill notices the great popularity of Synge with the country gentry and the very important assistance he gave the Government during the administration of Lord Carteret. Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 21,123 (April 2, 1733).

[1]D'Alton. Mant. It would be difficult to find a prominent man in Ireland to whom the charge of Jacobitism is less applicable than Archbishop King. The whole tenor of his life, his letters, and the unanimous judgment of his contemporaries, attest its absurdity. I will quote one testimony which will probably be esteemed conclusive. When he was in violent opposition to the Government on the question of Wood's half-pence, the Duke of Grafton, who was then Lord-Lieutenant, wrote to Walpole describing with much irritation the trouble King gave him in the House of Lords, and proceeded to draw his character. ‘He is very indiscreet in his actions and expressions, pretty ungovernable, and has some wild notions which sometimes make him impracticable in business, and he is to a ridiculous extravagance national’ But he added, ‘In justice to him I must inform you that he is very well affected to the King, and hearty in supporting the present settlement of the Crown, and an utter enemy to the Pretender and his cause. He is charitable, hospitable, a despiser of riches, and an excellent bishop, for which reasons he has generally the love of the country, and a great influence and sway over the clergy and bishops who are natives; to those who are sent over from England he does not show much courtesy.’—Coxe's Walpole, ii. 357. Yet in page after page of Mr. Froude's English in Ireland, the Episcopal party, which was led and inspired by King, is described as Jacobite, and their Jacobitism is represented as the reason why they opposed the removal of the sacramental test, and occasionally showed some humanity to the Catholics (e.g. i. pp. 252, 254, 383, 385). Mr. Froude has at the same time withheld all the real arguments by which they justified their course.

[2]‘Now we find toleration granted in England to Dissenters, and we were all willing to grant the like here.’ King to Archbishop of Canterbury, Dec. 1, 1719. Mant, ii. p. 339. In another letter he writes. ‘As to granting the Dissenters a toleration such as is granted them in England, it has been offered them again and again and it has been refused by their leaders (p. 333; see too p. 336). So Archbishop Synge (March 4, 1715–16) writes recommending that a Toleration Act like that of England should be passed, which he says would take away all just cause of complaint, ‘but,’ he adds, ‘such an Act as this they have ever since the Revolution declined, and many of them declared against.’—Archbishop Synge's Letten, British Mus., p. 47. See, too, a remarkable letter from the Duke of Bolton, in Reid s Hist, of the Irish Presbyterians, iii. 216, and also Swift's Letter from a Member of Parliament on the Sacramental Test.

[1]6 George I. c. 5, 9.

[1]A meeting was held at the Castle to discuss the prospects of the Bill. The Primate, Chancellor, Archbishop of Dublin, the Speaker, General Wynne, and some others were present. ‘All the Lords, the Speaker, and the General, were all unanimousof opinion the attempt for the repeal would be without success, and a great majority against it. The Archbishop of Dublin declared tho' he was for it he found everybody of his friends and acquaintances with whom he had any intimacy against it, and could not influence any of them to be of his opinion.’ Letters of M. Coghill to Southwell, British Museum Add. MSS. 21,123. In a letter to Lord Egmont (Nov. 1733), the same writer says that the Dissenters held a meeting and agreed that it was impossible to carry the repeal. They talked of getting the Government to dissolve. ‘If they should prevail to have this done I am confident the next Parliament would be stronger against them, for the power of elections through the whole kingdom is chiefly in Churchmen, and they will take care to choose such members as are of opinion to secure the Church.’ The Archbishop of Dublin, he adds, said he had thought the Bill for repealing the test ‘might be a means of reconciling all Protestants and uniting them in one common interest, but he saw it had the contrary effect, and therefore thought it advisable not to press it, especially since there was not the least hope of success in either House, which he affirmed to his knowledge there was not, and that his own particular friends who would oblige him in anything else that he could reasonably ask them, have declared to him that the repeal of the test was what they could not come into.’ ‘I don't think,’ Coghill adds, ‘the Parliament of Ireland will ever be induced to repeal the test, and the Dissenters begin to have the same sentiments, and therefore threaten us with the repeal in England.’ In 1708 the Dissenters tried to induce the ministers to repeal the test by an Act of the English Parliament (Reid, iii 124). By thus supporting a claim of the English Parliament fatal to the liberty of the nation, they greatly added to their unpopularity, and it is remarkable that they were themselves among the first persons to suffer from the usurpation they invoked, for the English Parliament by its own authority extended the Schism Act to Ireland.

[2]Boulter's Letters, ii. 112.

[1]11 Geo. II. c. 10.

[1]July 1725. Bishop Nicholson wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury of the Presbyterians: ‘Their anti-Trinitarian New Lights have much distracted and disjointed them; so that our churches (not only in this diocese but throughout the whole province) fill apace.’ British Museum Add. MSS. 6,116, p. 283.

[2]Presentments of the Grand Juries, Co. Donegal. Sworn before Andrew Knox. See too Reid's Hist, of the Irish Presbyterians.

[1]Papers of the Cardinal Gualterio, British Museum Add. MSS. 20,311.

[1]Commons Journals, Oct. 20, 1703. Froude's English in Ireland, i. 302, 303. Mr. Froude has done more than any preceding writer to illustrate this page of Irish history, and has quoted two curious pamphlets on the subject.

[2]Commons Journals, July 9, 1707. Defoe argued strongly for an union between England and Ireland in his Hist, of the Scotch Union, and such a measure was afterwards advocated by Madden in his Reflections and Resolutions for the Gentlemen of Ireland, by Dobbs in his Essay on Trade, and many years later by Campbell and by Arthur Young.

[3]In the Southwell Correspondence there is a remarkable letter dated Jan. 1697, from King, who was at that time Bishop of Derry. He is answering certain threats which had been made of governing Ireland still more despotically. He says: ‘As to the expedient that no Parliament be held in Ireland but that it be governed by the Parliament law of England, we shall like it very well, provided we be allowed our representatives in the English Parliament, as I find it has been formerly, but I hope the English that came into Ireland and by conquest enlarged the dominion of England, did not thereby forfeit the liberty of Englishmen, which, I think, consists in being governed by laws to which they have given their consent.’ British Museum MSS., Bibl. Eg. 917. In April 1721, Bishop Nicholson, who had described with great bitterness the rise of an Irish party, adds: ‘As fond as we are here of our independency we shall most thankfully accept of such incorporation into the United Kingdom of Great Britain as hath been allowed to the Scots, and we shall shortly be in a more uneasy state (if possible) than now we are, unless somewhat of that kind be granted us.’ British Museum Add. MSS. 6,116, p. 208.

[1]‘Lord Sunderland carried the compliment to this country too far by choosing out of the natives all the chief and most of the other judges, and the bishops too, which has been attended with very mischievous consequences to the English interest.’ The Duke of Grafton to R. Walpole. Dec. 1723. Coxe's Walpole, ii. p. 356.

[2]See Swift's Correspondence (1766), iii. pp. 204, 255.

[1]He ‘concerted the project of breaking all the army in Ireland; this project was at that time owned by all his friends, and the reason given for it was that they would thereby, and by striking off all pensions, reduce the expenses of the Government to an equality with the produce of the hereditary revenue of the kingdom, so as that the Queen should not be under a necessity of calling any more Parliaments in Ireland.’—The Conduct of the Purse in Ireland (1714), pp. 32, 33. This is also noticed in the State Anatomy of England (ascribed to Toland), p. 52.

[1]The case of the Irish House of Lords was very powerfully stated in the protest of the Duke of Leeds in the English House. Rogers' Protests of the Lords.

[1]See Swift's Letter to Pope (Jan. 10, 1720–21).

[2]Ruding's Annals of the Coinage, iii. 484. A mint appears to have been established in Ireland by Edward I., and it existed in the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth, but it disappeared during the confusion of the times that followed. Carte's Ormond, i. 79. Fynes Moryson's Itinerary, part i p. 383.

[1]Carte's Ormond, i. 79, 80.

[2]Moryson's Itinerary, part i. 283, part ii. 90, 196, 262. See too Leland, ii. 379–380.

[1]Report of the Lords Justices upon the petition of Lord Cornwallis ‘for a new grant for making and uttering copper halfpence in this kingdom for the term of twenty-one years’ (Aug. 15, 1700). Irish Departmental Correspondence, Irish State Paper Office. See too Monck Mason's Hist, of St. Patrick's Cathedral (Life of Swift), p. 334.

[2]Monck Mason. Hist, of St. Patrick's, p. 334.

[3]See Sir I. Newton's Report. Monck Mason, p. 340.

[4]Ibid. p. lxxxviii.

[5]Walpole to Townshend, October 1 and 18, 1723. Coxe's Walpole.

[1]Boulter's Letters, i. 4, 11.

[2]Ibid. i. p. 10. Boulter says that even 40,000l. added to the existing copper coinage would make the copper money at least one-eighth of the whole specie. Archbishop King wrote, ‘We have more halfpence than we need already. It is true we want change, but it is sixpences, shillings, halfcrowns, and crowns.’ Monck Mason, p. xciii. The Chancellor Middleton denied that any additional copper coin was needed. Coxe's Walpole, ii. 393.

[1]Ruding, iii. 477.

[2]See a minute discussion of this point in Monck Mason's Hist. of St. Patrick's Cathedral (Life of Swift). This very learned writer contends that while Sir Isaac Newton's report referred only to the coinage of 1723 (which was never uttered in Ireland), Swift and the Commons' Committee referred to that of 1722 (p. 340). Swift met the report of Sir Isaac Newton by alleging that Wood had sent some good coin to the Tower, but that it did not fairly represent the average. Drapier's Letters, ii. It is certain that some of the coin issued was below the stipulated value, but not to anything like the extent that was alleged. Ruding asserts that if the terms of the patent were fully observed the loss to Ireland would have been 60,480l. If all the coinage was of the same kind as the worst that was issued it would be 82,000l. Annals of the Coinage, iii. 476, 477.

[1]Walpole also wished to remove him from English politics. Coxe's Walpole, ii. 295, 296.

[2]Middleton, however, supported the prosecution of the Drapier's letters, and he strongly opposed the notion that the English Parliament could not bind Ireland, which was, he said, ‘a darling point of his Grace.’ Middleton to T. Brodrick. Coxe's Walpole, ii. 398.

[1]Nearly all the English accounts of this episode are taken without question from the very misleading and imperfect history of it in Coxe's Walpole. Monck Mason, in his Annals of St. Patrick, has stated with great fulness and learning the case on the other side and has printed a very remarkable series of letters by King relating to it. See too Ruding's Annals of the Coinage, vol. iii. Froude's English in Ireland, vol. i

[2]‘As to the Pretender, his cause is at once desperate and obsolete. … Even the Papists in general of any substance or estates, and their priests almost universally, are what we call Whigs, in the sense which by that word is generally understood. They feel the smart and see the scars of their former wounds, and very well know that they must be made a sacrifice to the least attempts towards a change; although it cannot be doubted that they would be glad to have their superstition restored under any prince whatever.’—7th Drapier's Letter.

[3]‘We look upon them [the Papists] to be altogether as inconsiderable as the women and children. Their lands are almost entirely taken from them … The Popish priests are all registered, and without permission (which I hope will not be granted) they can have no successors, so that the Protestant clergy will find it, perhaps, no difficult matter to bring great numbers over to the Church; and in the meantime, the common people without leaders, without discipline or natural courage, being little better than hewers of wood and drawers of water, are out of all capacity of doing any mischief if they were ever so well inclined.’—Letter on the Sacramental Test.

[1]The Legion Club.

[1]Boulter's Letters, i. p. 8.

[1]See The Case of the Roman Catholics of Ireland, p. 32. The Hist. of the Chief Governors of Ireland, p. 67. Lord Macartney's Account of Ireland in 1773, by a late Chief Secretary of that kingdom. The Hists. of Ireland by Gordon and Crawfurd, and the Commons' Journals.

[1]He had been appointed, however, in Dec. 1744, but was sent immediately after on an embassy to Holland.

[1]‘I scarcely indeed heard of one man in the three kingdoms considerable for rank or letters that could endure the book. I must only except the Primate of England, Dr. Herring, and the Primate of Ireland, Dr. Stone, which seem two odd exceptions. These dignified prelates separately sent me messages not to be discouraged.’—Hume's Autobiography. Of the liberality of Stone to the Catholics some instances are given in Curry's State of the Catholics. Short notices of Stone will be found in Mant. ii. 601–603, Campbell's Philosophical Survey, and Walpole's George II. There may possibly be unpublished family papers in Ireland that would throw a clear light on this period and on the characters of its chief men, but the accessible materials are so scanty that it is impossible, with any confidence, to give more than a bare outline of the history.

[1]‘Mr. Malone, one of the characters of 1753, was a man of the finest intellect that any country ever produced. “The three ablest men I have ever heard were Mr. Pitt (the father), Mr. Murray, and Mr. Malone; for a popular assembly I would choose Mr. Pitt; for a Privy Council, Murray; for twelve wise men, Malone” This was the opinion which Lord Sack-ville, the Secretary of 1753, gave of Mr. Malone to a gentleman from whom I heard it. “He is a great sea in a calm,” said Mr. Gerard Hamilton, another great judge of men and talents. “Aye,” it was replied, “but had you seen him when he was young you would have said he was a great sea in a storm.” And like the sea, whether in calm or storm, he was a great production of nature’—Grattan's Pamphlet in Answer to Lord Clare. Lord Camden, in a letter written in 1767, speaks very highly of the character as well as the ability of Malone (Campbell, Chancellors, vi. p. 388), and a few other particulars relating to him will be found in Grattan's Life. Malone was the uncle of the well-known editor of Shakespeare.

[1]Horace Walpole's Memoir of George II. i. p. 281.

[1]The very able writer on Irish trade in the first half of the eighteenth century, thus states his views on the subject: ‘Premiums are only to be given to encourage manufactures or other improvements in their infancy, to usher them into the world and to give an encouragement to begin a commerce abroad; and if, after their improvement, they cannot push their own way by being wrought so cheap as to sell at par with others of the same kind it is vain to force it.’—Dobbs' Essay on Trade, part ii. p. 65.

[2]Hardy's Life of Charlemont, i. 82.

[3]Many of the proceedings in the North will be found in the Historical Collections relating to Belfast, and those in the South, and especially in Cork, in a periodical called The Universal Advertiser, which appeared in Dublin in 1753 and 1754, and was afterwards republished in a volume. There was a furious riot in the Dublin theatre—which was reduced to a mere shell—because an actor refused to repeat a speech in the tragedy of Mahomet, which was supposed to reflect upon the Lord Lieutenant (Gentleman's Magazine, March 1754).

[1]Bedford Correspondence, ii. 270–275, 335–338, 354, 355.

[1]Bedford Correspondence, ii. 357.

[1]O'Conor's Hist. of the Irish Catholics. Curry's State of the Irish Catholics. See, too, the Hists. of Plowden, Gordon, and Crawfurd.