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Studies in Irish History,
1603-1649

Being a Course of Lectures

Delivered before the Irish Literary Society of London

EDITED BY

R. BARRY O’BRIEN

SECOND SERIES

BROWNE AND NOLAN, LIMITED

DUBLIN, BELFAST & CORK

London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., Ltd.

Stationers’ Hall Court, E.C.

1906

Contents

THE PLANTATION OF ULSTER

By the REVEREND S. A. COX, M.A., T.C.D.

The Plantation of Ulster

“The truth is, they that gape after poor Irishmen’s lands do what they can to have a colour to beg them”—(State Papers, Ireland, 1610, p. 415).

These words were written in an appeal for justice, or even the formality of a trial, by one who was betrayed by the English whom he had served. Sir Donnell O’Cahan had left his own people to seek an English alliance, and was rewarded by an imprisonment of nineteen years, without ever being brought up for trial. He was goaded into a just indignation by rumours that reached him in the early days of his imprisonment in Dublin, of Lady O’Cahan’s destitution and insanity, but after a couple of years he was moved to the Tower of London, where he, and other noblemen who were confined because men hungered after their lands, languished away till death gave them release. It will not surprise most of our readers to know that his letters were intercepted and carefully studied with a view to finding something treasonable in them. Truly Ireland’s share in the privileges of Magna Carta has been a small one.

The opening of James I’s reign in Ireland was auspicious enough. The battle of Kinsale was an effort of an United Ireland, aided by Spanish troops, to meet and expel the English in the battle-field: it failed, and with it came to an end the hopes of the great Irish lords to do anything by open warfare. James found Ireland decimated by war and famine: some parts like the Ards in the County Down had been literally cleared of their inhabitants.[^[1]] The chiefs were willing enough to submit, if submission meant that they were to become great Palatine lords, with no interference from the Crown in their relations with their vassals, or in the exercise of their religion. The once turbulent Anglo-Irish lords had nearly all conformed to the Protestant religion, and become loyal. The people, with the gaunt figures of famine and desolation that they remembered so well, would have been glad to have peace, if not “at any price,” at any rate at any price that might allow them to remain in their own land and worship as their fathers had done. By his descent James had claims upon the loyalty of the Irish that could not have been urged for the Tudor line. And it looked at first as if a new era of prosperity was dawning upon Ireland.

James began by a policy of conciliation and toleration. He actually appointed a man as a bishop in 1603, because of his knowledge of the Irish language (this was Robert Draper, Rector of Trim, who was made Bishop of Kilmore and Ardagh).[^[2]] He accepted Tyrone’s homage, and created Rory O’Donnell Earl of Tyrconnell. The public worship of the national religion, if not legalized, was at least tolerated: and the people hoped that his mother’s son would continue to pursue a friendly policy. But a few short years showed how vain this idea was. Perhaps the king was really in terror from the Guy Fawkes conspiracy; perhaps he did really believe that Spain was still intriguing against England’s power; perhaps he was in hopes that somehow the acquisition of Irish land might help him to make money to meet his financial needs. Whatever the real cause may have been, a wretched anonymous charge was levelled against the two Northern Earls, and they fled for their lives. This may look like weakness, but the memory of the sufferings endured by Tyrconnell’s brother, Hugh Roe,[^[3]] in his imprisonment and his assassination in exile, would naturally make Irish leaders of that time very shy in placing themselves in English hands when a serious charge was made against them.

Juries of the time were pliable, or, if they showed signs of independence, there was a court of Castle Chamber, corresponding with the Star Chamber of English history, that could use means to bring them into line. That the two Earls were innocent of the plot alleged against them is a moral certainty. The fact that when they fled, it was not to Spain they went, seems strong evidence of this. Any evidence of a plot depends on the word of St. Lawrence, Lord Howth, whose character may be judged from what we read about him in the State Papers.[^[4]] There was an armed fight in 1609 between him and Sir Roger Jones, the son of the Lord Chancellor. Speaking of it Sir A. Chichester refers to the “wrongs done by the Earl of Howth to the Lord Chancellor”; while the latter writes to the king of “the murderous attack made by Howth and his cut-throat (sicariorum) retainers upon his son.” Plowden gives the following quotations to show the unreality of the whole alleged conspiracy, and the base character of St. Lawrence. “Dr. Anderson in his Royal Genealogies (p. 786), dedicated to the Prince of Wales in 1736, says: ‘Artful Cecil employed one St. Lawrence to entrap the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell, the Lord Delvin, and other Irish chiefs into a sham plot, which had no evidence but his. But those chiefs being basely informed that witnesses were to be hired against them, foolishly fled from Dublin, and so taking guilt upon them, they were declared rebels, and six entire counties in Ulster were at once forfeited to the Crown, which was what their enemies wanted.’ That this St. Lawrence was a fit instrument for such a design is clear, from what Camden relates of him (Eliz. 741), viz., that he offered to murder Lord Grey de Wilton and Sir Thomas Gerald, to prevent their conveying reports of Essex to the Queen; which bloody service Essex rejected with indignation. No history whatever mentions any symptoms of rising in the North at this time.”[^[5]]

In the subsequent references to the flight of the Earls, even the king himself tacitly dropped the charge of conspiracy, and dwelt upon the disaffection they showed in quitting the kingdom without leave, which was treated in those days as a crime. Sir John Davies says that the Bill laid before the Grand Jury in Donegal was read in public in English and in Irish, “so as to discover a great deal of the evidence to all the hearers to the end that all the country might be satisfied that the State proceeded against them upon a most just ground, and that the people, knowing their treacherous practices, might rest assured that their guilty consciences and fear of losing their heads was the only cause of their running away, and not the allurements of any foreign prince.”[^[6]] Possibly the Earls may have had communications with Spain or Rome that they thought would compromise them. On their arrival in Rome they sent King James a statement of their grievances. These embraced arbitrary interference with their own rights and possessions; exactions of cattle and other goods levied on their tenants, who were miserably poor after the late war; pretended claims to church lands of enormous extent; and what, perhaps, are the worst things, in each case they showed that attempts were perpetually being made to have charges of treason supported against them, and also their free exercise of religion was interfered with. Tyrconnell gave an instance of one Owen M’Swyne who was to be executed. Sir Henry Folliott, with the authority of the Lord Deputy, sent privately promising him his life and large rewards if he would charge the Earl with some detestable crime. “Furthermore,” he says, writing in the third person, “the said Earl can justify by good proofs, that of twenty and seven persons that were hanged in Connaught and Tyrconnell, there was not one but had the former promises, upon like conditions, made to them.” Of Chichester’s threat to Tyrconnell that he must attend church, the latter says, “For this only respect of not going to church, he resolved rather to abandon lands and living, yea, all the kingdoms of the earth, with the loss of his, than to be forced utterly against his conscience and the utter ruin of his soul to any such practice.” Tyrone wrote in a somewhat similar way.[^[7]] It speaks well for the loyalty of the peasantry to the Earls that the attempts to get up charges against them failed so completely. I shall have to refer later on to the unreality of the religion which the English party tried to introduce by bribes and threats into the land. It is plain that the leaders of Irish government knew of the unreliable character of Lord Howth, who admitted having gone to England looking for employment or pension from the king: but indeed there has never been a time in Ireland when the use of base means has not been practised.

However, the dreary record of the illegalities and confiscations inflicted upon a half-famished nation is somewhat relieved by the grotesque absurdities which the State Papers sometimes reveal. For example, Government stooped to accept the evidence of a professional beggar. This worthy’s name was Teig O’Falstaf, and he had gone to Spain simply to beg his way, and we find the Government solemnly accepting his evidence that he had heard the Irish priests in Spain cursing the Lord Deputy in public service.[^[8]] Salisbury’s espionage on Tyrone after his flight was a most elaborate affair: his pilot was a spy, and when he got to Rome another spy named Richardson was ever watching his movements to fix something treasonable upon him, and we have his instructions, endorsed by Salisbury himself, in which he is told of the roundabout way he is to send his information to England, writing as if to a Mr. James Brokesby: he is minutely instructed how he is to write, as if from one Catholic to another, and we have a specimen in a letter (endorsed by Salisbury) which gives an account of a canonization at Rome, conveying news of several religious Orders, enclosing a packet of Agnus Deis with apologies for not sending more, and sending Father Parson’s commendations.[^[9]] In a previous reign Mountjoy’s plots against Tyrone are recorded in Docwra’s Narrative.[^[10]] What did all this tissue of espionage before submission, after rendering homage, and in exile, succeed in proving? Nothing against Tyrone, but much against the persons who employed such unworthy methods. From those days down to the forgery that The Times paraded against Parnell, and possibly even to a later date, England has been industriously cherishing everything that tends to lead her astray about Ireland, and forgetting the solid fact that, in the length and breadth of the Empire on which the sun never sets, there is not another of her colonies or dependencies that she could hold for a week if she applied the methods of Irish government to it.

The idea of colonization was not a new one. It had been tried officially and unofficially in various parts of Ireland. When done officially the attempts had been failures, but the private colonizations had occasionally been successful—from the colonists’ point of view. Early in King James’s reign Chichester had brought over a number of Englishmen from Devonshire and planted them in Carrickfergus and Malone, near Belfast, and it was undoubtedly this which led to the bold project of colonizing six whole counties in Ulster. If the matter had been left to Chichester it would have taken a milder form. But Sir John Davies began to take a lead in the project, and in the end he became the working agent of the whole affair. He was Irish Attorney-General. This was just the time for unscrupulous and cunning men to rise to power, for practically everything in the country was in a state of transition. It had been even suggested that the standing seat of the Deputy and the law should be translated from Dublin to Athlone, as being the centre of Ireland. The proposal was that the Deputy should have two presidents, one in Munster at Kylmalocke, the other in Ulster at Lyeller (probably for Lyffer or Lifford).[^[11]] Such proposals as these show the feeling of powerlessness that marked the English councils, and when the idea of a plantation was put forward, it became more and more popular with the Government, increasing in the harshness of the method of plantation until in the end it became only a grotesque parody of what was put forward, a parody in fact so grotesque that it never worked and never would have worked. Salisbury and Chichester seem to have had some idea of humanity in their proposals, but Davies’ suggestions were cunning, specious, and harsh. Salisbury proposed to Chichester to take natives as tenants of part of the lands, not giving too much to one planter. Sir Oliver St. John advised that no part of the land to be planted should be given away, but that it should be let to the natives at high and dear rates. Chichester though doubtless acquisitive in the extreme seems to have had some feeling for the sufferings of others; in a letter to Salisbury he says, “the word of removing and transplanting is as welcome to the natives as the sentence of death.”[^[12]] His proposal was to divide the land among the inhabitants, letting each have as much as he can manage by himself or his tenants; the rest of the land to be bestowed upon servitors and men of worth. This was the plan he preferred, but he felt the need of immediate action, because when he wrote in September, 1607, after the flight of the Earls, he said the people were gone to put on their arms, so he gave as an alternative, the plan to drive out the natives of Tyrone, Tyrconnell and Fermanagh, over the rivers of the Bande (Bann), Blackwater, and Lough Erne, there to inhabit the waste lands.[^[13]] Sir John Davies favoured the policy of rooting out the natives from their holdings, for their own good, of course! He says transplanting the natives is like moving a fruit tree, to make it bring forth better fruit, and not to destroy it. His plan was accepted.

Notwithstanding his learned lore about fruit trees, we shall see that there was no enthusiasm about the farming operations of the Davies clique in the subsequent enquiries and surveys of the plantation. To him was due the idea of excluding the Irish from the colonies.

But before the lands could be handed over to the English and Scotch adventurers, there was a little preliminary violation of a solemn pledge. Perhaps a Stuart’s word never counted for very much, yet in passing we may as well record that after the flight of Tyrone and Tyrconnell, James solemnly declared that their vassals (for such they were rather than tenants) should be protected in their rights. There are no less than three proclamations to this effect, of the dates 7th September, 1st November, and 9th November, 1607. Let me quote the title of one. “Proclamation declaring that the King had taken into his hands all the lands and goods of the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell, Cowconnaght Oge Magwir and their other fellow-fugitives, and that he would preserve in their estates and protect all the inhabitants of those counties who held under the persons who had thus forfeited.”[^[14]] It would appear that the rising of Sir Cahir O’Dogherty, which was limited to Inishowen, a small portion of Tyrconnell, was made the excuse for violating the solemn pledges we have quoted, pledges which referred to the Celts of six counties. The fact was that after these proclamations were made, Davies the Irish Attorney-General and Bacon, then the English Solicitor-General, decided that the natives must be rooted out, and if O’Dogherty’s rebellion had not occurred, some other convenient excuse would have been made. O’Dogherty’s rising originated in the violent and overbearing disposition of Sir George Paulett, the governor of the colony at Derry. Sir Richard Cox says,[^[15]] “Undoubtedly the Government well enough understood, that this rebellion was designed to be the most general that had ever been in Ireland; and that the Confederates had better assurance, or at least a stronger expectation of foreign aid, than in any rebellion heretofore.” These words can surely have no truth in them. There seems to have been a dispute concerning rent between O’Dogherty and Tyrone. Sir Cahir had been foreman of the Grand Jury of Donegal when the Commission met that was sent to inquire into the attainted estates of Tyrone and Tyrconnell.[^[16]] In fact until he resented the personal indignity put upon him by Paulett (who struck him) he had been a loyal and willing subject of the Crown, and there was naturally nothing in his previous career to make him a leader who could rally a large force of insurgents around him. Instead of showing a great organized revolt, the comparative success of his brief rising points to the deep detestation of the Ulster men against their English rulers, and their willingness to follow any leader who could assume the headship over them. The following is quoted from the Celtic Society’s Miscellany, a note on Docwra’s Narration[^[17]]: “It is not generally known that Sir Cahir O’Dogherty was knighted for his bravery in fighting against the O’Neills. Such, however, was the case, as is clear from our author’s text. He was as great an enemy to O’Domhnaill as was Niall Garbh, and his rebellion when too late had its origin in a personal insult.” In fact until he went out into open revolt, Sir Cahir and Lady O’Dogherty (and especially the latter) had always shown a preference for English society.[^[18]]

The rules for the Plantation of Ulster are to be found in MacNevin’s Confiscation of Ulster. The lands were to be divided into portions of 1,000, 1,500 and 2,000 acres. They were originally to have been given by lot, but this was afterwards abandoned. The rent for the English and Scotch adventurers was £5 6s. 8d. for 1,000 acres, or 1⅓d. per acre. Taking the value of money then at 12 or 13 times the present value, this was not a heavy charge. Any “meer Irish” who got grants of land had to pay double;[^[19]] besides, the rent for the English and Scotch was remitted for the first two years, but the natives were not excused, on the ground that they had no charges for transportation. The Plantation acre was invented to make up for any deficiency in the acreage caused by mountain and bog. The expressions ‘Fengal measure,’ and ‘great country measure,’ are also to be met with in the documents of the period: I do not know what their exact significations are.[^[20]] Every undertaker was to build in proportion to his grant: the 2,000 acre man was within two years to build a castle, with a strong court or bawn around it. The 1,500 acre man a stone or brick house with a bawn about it; and the 1,000 acre undertaker to build at least a strong court or bawn. They were to have free timber for the two years. They were to have a store of arms. Thus in a grant to Lady Lambert it is specified that in the house she is to build at Cavan, they are “to keep therein 21 muskets and callivers, and 21 hand weapons as arms for 42 men, for defence against rebels and enemies; also 9 muskets and callivers, and 9 hand weapons, and also 12 muskets and callivers and 12 hand weapons, according to the instructions for the Plantation of Ulster.” A formidable little provision for arming 84 men in one house.[^[21]] Every undertaker to take the oath of Supremacy; not to demise any land to the meer Irish; not to leave the country for five years. Restrictions were put upon their demising the land within five years. They were not to create tenancies at will, but for a number of years, for life, in tail or in fee-simple. Irish systems of tenure were abolished. The undertakers were given special privileges in the remission of customs, both for the importation of manufactured goods, and the exportation of the produce of their lands. It would be a mistake to suppose from these insolent rules about the “meer Irish” that none of them got any land. The outside undertakers got the good grants, but the natives got their leavings. The mountainous slopes and remote lands and other parts that were not likely to be productive, were given to the native element. The plan was to concentrate the intruders into villages and towns, and to scatter the Irish as much as possible, putting the servitors (or English who had been in Ireland for some years in military service) near to the natives to keep them in awe. There was always some land that it was quite necessary to let the Irish get, if it was ever to be saved from becoming absolutely waste land. Sir R. Jacob (the Solicitor-General for Ireland) showed both humour and acuteness in a letter he wrote to Salisbury in 1609, in which he urged the safety of allowing the natives to keep some land, and also suggests that the very inferior parts might go to them, he says: “The arrantest knave of the Byrne’s answered Sir Henry Sydney, when accused of dwelling on the Archbishop’s lands without paying rent, ‘My Lord, if I dwelt not there, none but thieves and outlaws would.’ So he says civil men will not plant themselves in mountain, rocks or desert places, even if they have it for nothing.... The Irish had no leader and no arms; they had 20,000 fighting men in Ulster if they had arms. O’Dogherty could not have made the progress he did, if he had not first lighted upon the king’s storehouse so as to arm his men.”[^[22]] Those natives who got grants of a substantial amount obtained them as a special reward for subserviency in some form or other: for instance, Art McBarron was given 2,000 acres in Orior to induce him to clear out of O’Neilan, Chichester considering that his removal would be a great help in getting other natives to go out. In that case the grant was only for the lives of Art McBarron and his wife.[^[23]] Similarly when Sir Tirlagh McHenry O’Neale was willing to be moved out of the Fewes, a request was made that orders be sent to the Lord Deputy to provide some convenient place in Cavan or elsewhere to settle him, in order to plant servitors in his country. Are we really so like sheep? There is yet to be told even a more absurd illustration than the case of McBarron to show how much our rulers in King James’ day believed we played the game of “follow my leader.” As a matter of fact, so far was this from being the case, that the native gentry who got grants of land became degraded in position, so that those who were gentry children in 1610 were in 1670 old men in frieze coats, farming small scraps of land. Few of the Irish who got somewhat liberal grants were able to retain them until the time of Pynnar’s inspection in 1618-1620.

It is not clear that conforming to the Act of Supremacy was essential in the native grantees, though we may be sure from what we see about the encouragements given to Irishmen of position who conformed, that as much use as possible was made of the plan of bribing people into Protestantism. So we must seek for other reasons for the failure to keep their possessions: there was the requirement of an English or stone house to be built; the abolition of the old tribal land systems and introduction of another system that they did not understand; the depression resulting from the discovery that they were now become a part of the English garrison. To which we must remember to add, that the natives’ grants of lands were in the most barren and rocky parts of Ulster. As a people we are mainly pastoral, and this was more conspicuously the case in the days of the Plantation, as everyone who has read Spenser’s View of Ireland will remember. The only hope of doing much with nearly all of the land given to the natives lay in tillage, a thing which the Irish of that day had a very imperfect knowledge of. Hill mentions one case where the ownership of the land continued on all right: it was in the grant to Tirlagh Oge O’Neale’s widow; and in that case the Irish custom was specially permitted by the Government grant.[^[24]] In his Survey Pynnar says the English did not plough or use husbandry, being afraid to incur the risk, and that the Irish did not because they did not know when they might be moved. So the Scotch were the only ones who supplied food. The British lived on the heavy rents paid them by the Irish grazing tenants. If the Irish were to take away their cattle, he says, the British must either forsake their dwellings or endure great distress on the sudden. “Yet,” he says, “the co-habitation of the Irish is dangerous.” This report tells us there were most Irish on the London Company’s lands; five proportions were not estated; it was more profitable to take Irish on them; seven proportions were leased for 61 years, and the lessees affirmed they were not bound to plant English on them. There were sixty natives in Tyrone who got small grants, generally of 60 acres each. They were all transplanted into portions of the barony of Dungannon which neither undertakers nor servitors would occupy.[^[25]] Here are some of the figures of natives grants. It is necessary to mention that it very often happens that one grant is made out for a number of persons.

Oriel, 4,080 acres in forty grants.

Dungannon, 4,080 acres in forty-nine grants.

Kilmacrenan, 13,752 acres in nineteen grants.

Clonemahowne, 3,587 acres in eight grants.

Tullagarvy, 6,012 acres in eight grants.

Clinawly, 6,208 acres in fifty-two grants.

Coole and Tircannada, 4,160 acres in five grants.

Tullaghah, Cavan, 4,900 acres in twenty-one grants.

Castle Rashen, 5,700 acres in eighteen grants.

Concerning the district among these in which the largest amount of land was assigned to the natives, Kilmacrenan, let us hear what its character was. After a mention of the commencement of some work having been made by Captain Will Stewart, in Kilmacrenan, we are told “the rest of the servitors have done nothing by reason of the wildness of the land, being the worst in all the country, insomuch that the natives are unwilling to come to dwell upon it until they be forced to remove.”[^[26]]

Grants of refuse land having been assigned to a few hundred of the natives, what became of the others, the unfortunate people who found aliens suddenly planted upon the land of their fathers, and had no other provision made for them? Government provided that they should go. It does not seem to have been at all a worry to Government where they should go, as long as they went. The only thing needful was that they should be got away from the lands to be planted. Some were impressed into the service of the King of Sweden, some were transported to the newly-formed colony of Virginia, some went to the natives’ parts, and some to work on the Bishops’ or servitors’ lands. The great thing was that they should go. The leading Irishmen were all killed; banished or imprisoned on frivolous charges, or occasionally on no charges at all. The most brilliant of them, Brian MacArt O’Neill, the son of Art McBarron, was accused on a false charge of slaying a man at a family party in the house of Turlough McHenry O’Neill of the Fews, and was arrested and hanged. He had been the rising hope of the natives; it was thought he would proclaim himself “The O’Neill.” His name is perpetuated near Belfast in MacArt’s Fort, on the Cave Hill, Ballymacarrett, and O’Neill’s Fort.[^[27]] Three men of high position, all bearing English titles, were imprisoned in the Tower by Chichester. Sir Donnell Ballagh O’Cahan was one of Tyrone’s sons-in-law; he had left Tyrone in 1600 when Docwra landed at Derry with a large force. A promise was made him that he would be given a territory independent of Tyrone. Sir Henry Docwra honourably maintained this promise, but after the Queen’s death it was repudiated by Chichester. O’Cahan spoke bitterly. He does not seem to have contemplated any violent step, but when he heard of the two Earls making for Derry, he hastened to join them, as if he wanted to quietly leave the land that was now cursed by the wiles and the falsehood of the strangers. But haste as he would, the poor man failed to join the two Earls, and then like a squeezed lemon, he was cast aside. He was imprisoned first in Dublin and then in the Tower. Never tried; he had committed no crime save that of Esau; for he wanted to escape from his responsibilities, and to leave his lands and his vassals to the possession of the race he could now trust no longer. For nineteen years in lonely imprisonment he lived to curse the day when he allowed himself to be overcome by English blandishments. Another person whose existence was inconvenient was Sir Cormac O’Neill, the brother of Tyrone. He brought to Dublin Castle the news of the flight of the Earls; he asked to be custodian of his brother’s lands and premises till his return; but lawyer Davies had already an eye to the plunder of the Ulster lands, so with grim humour he wrote, “We took a custodian of the knight himself.” The third prisoner, Sir Neal Garve O’Donnell, had a claim to the chiefry of Tyrconnell, he was married to the Earl’s sister, Nuala. It was impossible to get a jury to convict him.[^[28]] It was some consolation to Sir Neal in his imprisonment to know that his wife was not starving or insane like Sir Donnell O’Cahan’s; for Lady O’Donnell went into exile with her brother, and soothed his dying hours. Many of the people preferred voluntary exile to remaining in Ireland under the altered conditions. The Earls and leaders were banished or in prison or dead. In 1611 Chichester revived a proclamation of 1605 for the banishment of priests; so many went of their own accord to Spain or the Netherlands.

Then with a thoughtful feeling for Irish prejudices, Government even provided some of the people with free passages out of the country; but in this case they were not sent to Spain, but into the service of the King of Sweden. When we remember that it was in the days of Gustavus Adolphus, “the Lion of the North, and the Champion of the Protestant Faith,” it will be seen that this measure of emigration was eminently calculated to show the considerateness of our English rulers. The men who took the people to Sweden were Captains Sandford and Bingley. I shall quote the reference from the Calendar of Patent Rolls. “King’s letter for a grant to Captain John Sandford, for ever, of all the mountain lands, bogs and woods in Ulster, escheated to the Crown, by the attainders of the Earls of Tyrone and Tierconnell, or any of their adherents, or any other traitors, or which otherwise belong to the Crown, and are not now in charge, to be holden under the conditions of the Plantation of Ulster, at a yearly rent of £10. This grant is to be made in consideration of Captain Sandford’s absence, during the distribution of the escheated lands in Ulster, in consequence of which no portion was assigned to him, he being then engaged in conducting the loose kerne and swordsmen of that province to the service of the King of Sweden, disburthening the country by that means of many turbulent and disaffected persons who would otherwise have troubled the peace.” (It will, perhaps, be satisfactory to learn that, in addition to this grant, Sandford secured lands in Donegal from Sir Richard and Sir Ralph Bingley, and Sir John Davies.) This Sweden business seems to have been eminently successful from the Government point of view. Sir R. Jacob wished that 1,000 more could be sent from each province; and hopes were expressed that the swordsmen, not only of Ulster, but of Connaught, could be transmitted to Sweden or Virginia.[^[29]] We have the follow-my-leader theory again; for the Lords of the Council proposed to Chichester that native gentlemen should be sent to be leaders and heads for the troops who were transported into Gustavus Adolphus’s service. The charges were £1 each for clothing, 5d. per day per man for thirty-one days, carriage 10s. per man, and a sum amounting to 10s. per man for fee for pressing them into a foreign service.

If the rules about the non-employment of natives, and not letting them get on the land, had been strictly observed, it would certainly have led to a complete turning out of the people, and perhaps have precipitated the rising of 1641. And it was from no want of will on the part of the intruders that the law was not rigidly followed. The truth was, English and Scotch settlers were difficult to get; so, however unwillingly, the undertakers admitted Irish tenants and labourers, who in their despair were willing to come to any terms. Chichester saw clearly all along that an impossible thing was being attempted. He wrote in 1610 strongly opposing any change of policy about the natives, and speaks of the folly of crowding large numbers of servitors and natives in half a barony (as in Tyrone),[^[30]] and says the natives will rather die than be removed to the small proportions assigned to them, or will seek a new dwelling in other counties. The Viceroy, as we see, was never in earnest in enforcing the laws for the expelling of natives; and so those laws were never fully carried out. The squatters required the Irish as hewers of wood and drawers of water. These restrictions were abolished before the end of James’ reign, and in 1626 the original undertakers, having failed to comply with the Plantation rules preventing them having native tenants, and having thus rendered themselves liable to forfeiture under Charles I, were allowed to surrender their titles, and get a re-grant under new conditions, one of which was that one quarter of each proportion was to be let to native tenants.

Thus a period of less than two decades saw the final disappearance of the obnoxious parts of the Plantation system. But they had never had vitality, and indeed the agents of the Irish Society from the very beginning insisted on letting their lands to Irish tenants. When the representatives of the Londoners came over on a tour of inspection, the officials who met them were given strict injunctions to put everything in the best light, and one of their cares was to prevent the Londoners from having any unnecessary fears of the Irish. In this they succeeded so well that they overshot the mark. The London Companies could get very few British tenants in O’Cahan’s country or Laughinsholin, where the people kept so many pikes, so they insisted on having Irish tenants. Hill says, “The Companies stoutly maintained the right of holding the Irish as their tenants, of preventing their expulsion; and to these Londoners we are indebted, more perhaps than to the servitors or Bishops, for the thriving and vigorous native population in Ulster at the present day. Indeed the whole business furnishes a curious illustration of the following words of the poet:—

The best laid schemes of mice and men,

Gang aft aglee,

And leave them naught but grief and pain

For promised joy.”[^[31]]

In 1622 the king sent a charge to enforce the law requiring the natives to leave the planted land. In it he admits that the law has not been at all carefully complied with. He speaks of “the continual unconformity, as well of those natives as of the undertakers, upon whose portions they remain,” and concludes, “In this particular we were always resolved, and yet are, not to spare those undertakers and their tenants, until we have reformed them, but rather if they persist still in their ingratitude and disobedience, to use the advantages which our laws and their own manifold contempt have given us against them, in a more severe manner than hitherto we have done.”[^[32]]

The treatment of the aged Eochaidh or Oghie O’Hanlon, the chieftain of Orior in County Armagh, seems to have been unnecessarily harsh, though I can hardly agree with the denunciations of the Rev. Geo. Hill on the meanness of it. This venerable man, who represented a race which had been supreme in Ulster ages before the O’Neills had any prominence, was uniformly loyal to the English connexion. He had a son who was a leading man in Sir Cahir O’Dogherty’s rising, and the aged father was guilty of the crime, if such it could be called, of giving his son shelter for a night in his castle at Tandragee during the revolt. This, of course, was treason, and the father might have been hanged. But he had often borne the standard of the Irish on the English side, so his penalty was commuted to the forfeiture of his estates, and he was offered £80 a year pension as compensation. He did not live to draw one quarter’s payment, for he was a broken-hearted old man, and died, literally of grief, on hearing that his son’s wife, who was a sister of Sir Cahir O’Dogherty, had perished in the woods after having given birth to a child.[^[33]] Nowadays £80 is a small sum, but it would seem that three hundred years ago, it was worth about £1,000 of our money. So we can hardly agree with Mr. Hill’s statement that there was meanness in giving O’Hanlon such a pension. O’Hanlon Junior kept up his guerilla warfare as the leader of a number of outlaws of the Robin Hood type, called woodkerne, and the trouble they gave was only brought to an end when they allowed themselves to be transported to Sweden, to fight for Gustavus Adolphus, a service which they hated, and took every opportunity of deserting to his opponent, the King of Spain.

It is only fair, too, to mention that the Lady Mary, Sir Cahir O’Dogherty’s widow, was given an annual pension of £80,[^[34]] and that the widow of Sir Cowconnaght Macgwire received compensation for the lands she had to surrender in Fermanagh. I am not sure whether she got £100 or £200 a year. The legal documents first mention a surrender of her lands for an annuity of £100 a year, and then a pension of £100, and I do not know whether the two statements refer to one salary of £100 or two. Also that Tyrconnell’s widow, Bridget, Countess of Tyrconnell, was given a yearly pension of £300. Compared with the posthumous savagery of Government to Pamela, Lord Edward Fitzgerald’s widow, this was generosity indeed.

Now who were the planters in Ulster, and what rules were made about the distribution of the land? The new owners were formally divided into three classes, (i) English and Scottish, who were to plant their proportions with English and Scottish tenants; (2) Servitors in Ireland, who might take English or Irish tenants at their choice; (3) Natives of Ulster, who were to be freeholders. But in reality they included samples of a great many social grades. “Cook’s son, duke’s son,” were to be found among them. English gentlemen of little or no property, Scotch lairds and noblemen with their innumerable clans of relations, soldiers and adventurers, royal grooms and servants. Shurley and Case were footmen when they received grants of land in Longford.[^[35]] Wray was a groom when he was appointed to the responsible task of seeing that the natives were cleared off the escheated lands; he was to levy fines on them and to keep the money. Then there were the London Companies. Then there were the true patriots; the men who at home had distinguished themselves by crime, or by debt, and found it desirable to leave their native land; these fulfilled the saying of the famous Irish pickpocket, Barrington, in the prologue that he wrote for a play performed by convicts in Botany Bay:

True patriots we, for be it understood

We’ve left our country for our country’s good.

Among these we should class the Graemes, who had been outlaws, cattle-lifters, and border-robbers on the banks of the Tweed. They had been transplanted in a body to Roscommon in Elizabeth’s reign; but even the residence in the Land of Saints did not reform their ideas of property, so they were dispersed and scattered through Ulster in 1610. All were unanimous in one thing only, that they would make as much as they could out of the property, and then go. But, owing to the force of circumstances, the Scotchmen stuck with more pertinacity to their possessions than did most of the other settlers. The English undertakers were mainly from the Eastern counties, Norfolk and Suffolk. They brought no following with them. So they met with difficulty in getting workers and tenants, being forbidden to accept the natives. There were constant bickerings among the undertakers themselves, and with the Bishops about church rights, real or pretended. None of these things worried the canny North Britons, who looked upon Ulster as a veritable Eldorado. A ferry was established between Donaghadee and the Rynnes of Galloway or Portpatrick.[^[36]] Over it there poured such a ragged regiment as the Irish Sea has never witnessed before or since. Not singly they came, but in battalions; the Scotch Bishop of Raphoe (Montgomery, Bishop of Clogher, Derry and Raphoe, grand-uncle of William Montgomery of the Manuscripts) received permission at one grant for the denization of three hundred of his countrymen whom he should bring over. They had candidates for denization among all classes: younger brothers and sons-in-law and cousins to get grants of land, and workmen and farmers ready to settle down on industrial pursuits. As they did not absolutely rely on the offices of the State church for their religion, we find many ministers of the Presbyterian community coming over and being given licence of denization, and in course of time this third religion became a settled thing in the land. Oily and smooth-tongued these were; willing, with some canting expressions, to change over and become clergymen of the English Church if an opportunity of making anything by the change came in their way. The descriptions of the careers of some of these men (in Reid’s Presbyterianism in Ulster) are very amusing. Hamilton was ordained by the Protestant Bishop of Down (Echlin). Robert Blair left Glasgow where he had a professorship, because Dr. Cameron, who had been appointed Principal, with the view of bringing the college to approve of prelacy, had opposed Blair. The latter came to Ireland, and Lord Claneboy proposed he should be rector of Bangor, County Down. But about his opposition to prelacy? The Bishop said, “Will you not receive ordination from Mr. Cunningham and the adjacent brethren, and let me come in among them in no other relation than a presbyter?” So thus, hungering after the flesh-pots of prelacy, he entered into a church whose fundamental tenets he disagreed with.[^[37]]

The Scotch undertakers had previously been made acquainted with Ulster by the colonizations in Elizabeth’s reign in Down and Antrim. They felt more at home in a land where their friends had gone previously. The geographical position was favourable to them. So they and their followers settled permanently in sufficient numbers to give the movement a thoroughly Scotch aspect. Yet for all that, Mr. Prendergast says,[^[38]] “Ulster continued to be the dangerous part of Ireland till after the war of the Revolution, when it was nearly colonized anew by the Scotch settlers and camp-followers of King William’s foreign forces. Eighty thousand small Scotch adventurers came in between 1690 and 1698 into different parts of Ireland, but chiefly into Ulster.”

Let me give a contemporary picture that is pleasant enough of a set of these Scotch settlers of James I’s reign. They were the holders of land in the barony of Mountjoy, Co. Tyrone; they had fallen into a goodly possession, and the industry we see them all conspicuous for is not to be looked upon as typical of all the adventurers, but only of those who were favoured by circumstances and surroundings. The men were, Andrew Stewart, Lord O’Chiltree; he was of old Scottish descent, and the fourth Lord O’Chiltree. He had fallen into difficulties, and was obliged to sell his barony to Sir James Stewart; the title went with the barony, so it was only a courtesy title by which he was called; but the king, to encourage him and his son, conferred on the young man the title of Earl of Castlestuart; Robert Stewart of Hilton, an Edinburgh man; Sir Robert Hepburn, a Scotch soldier; George Crayford or Crawford, Laird of Loughnorris, an Ayrshire man, belonging to an old family; Bernard and Robert Lindsay, who belonged to Leith; Robert Stewart of Rotton, an uncle of Lord O’Chiltree, and finally a brother of Robert Stewart of Hilton. These two Stewarts of Edinburgh, and the two Lindsays were all servants or caterers in some fashion to the king. In 1611, a year after they had taken out their patents, Carew makes the following report[^[39]]: “Lord Ucheltrie, 3,000 acres; being stayed by contrary winds in Scotland, arrived in Ireland (at the time of our being in Armagh, upon our return home) accompanied with 33 followers, gents of sort [i.e., gentlemen of position], a minister, some tenants, freeholders and artificers, unto whom he hath passed estates; he hath built for his present use three houses of oak timber, one of 50 feet long and 22 feet wide, and two of 40 feet long, within an old fort, about which he is building a bawne. There are two ploughs going on his demesne, with some fifty cows and three score young heifers landed at Island Magy in Clandeboy which are coming to his proportion, with some twelve working mares. Sir Robert Hepburn, Knight, 1,500 acres; sowed oats and barley the last year upon his land, and reaped this harvest 40 hogsheads of corn; is resident; hath 140 cows young and old, and 8 mares; is building a stone house 40 feet long and 20 feet wide, already a storey high; intends to have it three stories high, and to cover it, and the next spring to add another storey to it; good store of timber felled and squared, and providing materials to finish the work. The Laird Loughnorris, 1,000 acres; being deceased himself, as we are informed, had his agent here, Robert O’Rorke; hath timber felled and is preparing materials for building against the spring. Bernard and Robert Lindsay, 1,000 acres apiece; have taken possession personally in the summer, 1610, returned into Scotland’s agent, Robert Cowties resident; a timber house is built on Robert Lindsey’s proportion; hath eight mares, and eight cows with their calves, and five oxen, with swine and other small cattle, and a competent portion of arms. Robert Stewart of Haulton, 1,000 acres: hath appeared in person, and brought some people; timber felled, and preparing materials for building. Robert Stewart of Robstone, 1,000 acres, hath appeared in person, with tenants and cattle; timber felled and squared, and providing materials for building. The Castle of Mountjoy, upon Lough Chichester [Lough Neagh] beside the old fort, wherein are many inhabitants both English and Irish, together with Sir Francis Roe’s foot company. Here is a fair castle of stone and brick, covered with slate and tile, begun in the late Queen’s time, and finished by his Majesty. It is compassed about by a good strong rampier of earth, well ditched and flanked with bulwarks. In this Castle Sir Francis Roe, the constable, and his family dwell.” This seems a happy sort of family; it represents the most industrious type of undertaker, who brings his family influence to bear in getting workers into the place. One would look upon them as intending to settle with their families for ever; but, alas for the good intentions of King James, when Pynnar’s survey was made in 1619 five of these proportions had passed to other hands, mostly by sale. Just as the young fellows who improve land now in Canada try to make something on it in a few years by sale, so a large number of the Ulster Plantation lands went the same way. Nearly all the king’s servants who obtained grants, sold them as soon as possible. Sir James Craig was clerk of the wardrobe and had probably begun life as a tailor. The brothers Achmootie were also servants of the king, and sold their lands.[^[40]] Their common greed for money was the distinguishing point of all these worthies. Some of them are specially worthy of note for their acquisitiveness. Touchet, Lord Audelay, and his clan, were amongst these. This nobleman came from Staffordshire, and had entirely failed as a planter in Munster. When the northern confiscations began, he made a modest request for 100,000 acres. I don’t know whether the word “land-grabber” was then in vogue, but at any rate his demand was rejected; but he and his interesting family got the barony of Omagh among them, which was set down as having 11,000 arable acres. Lord Audelay got 3,000 acres; Sir Marvin Audley, his son, 2,000; Sir Ferdinand Audley 2,000; Sir John Davies, his son-in-law, 2,000; Edward Blount, another son-in-law, 2,000. The old man was made Earl of Castlehaven, and Davies the lawyer became ancestor of the Earls of Huntingdon, by his daughter marrying a Mr. Hastings. Davies’ grants in all parts of Ulster were enormous; many of the properties were beyond his powers to manage, and he sold them. Here is a report of work done, the date is 1611. “Cavan Precinct of Loughtie. Sir John Davys, Kt., 2,000 acres, has made over his proportion to Mr. Richard Waldron, who passed the same to Mr. Regnold Home, who sold his estate to Sir Nicholas Lusher, Kt., nothing done.”[^[41]]

Davies got grants of land, confiscated properties and so forth, literally in every county in Ireland. He also received a grant of 100 marks for his services about the parliament. The grant just quoted in Omagh alone must have worked out for the family at nearly the 100,000 acres asked for. On Lord Audley’s death it was found that his property contained not only the 3,000 acres granted, but also 3,000 of meadow, 3,000 of pasture, 2,000 of wood, 2,000 of briars and whins, and 200 of bog; thus extending his original 3,000 to 13,200, these additions having been thrown in as unprofitable or waste land. So greedy were these men that there was a special commission appointed to correct any blunders that had been made in the grants to the little family group. Davies, Touchet’s son-in-law, the Irish Attorney-General, and the evil genius of the whole Plantation, was described by Tyrone as being more fitted to be a stage-player than a lawyer. In the case of this Audley crew, the enquiries showed that they neglected the land shamefully, and did not even reside.

Hamilton, the first Earl of Abercorn, and his crowd, were an example of the hungry Scotch lairds. James Hamilton was the head of this family party; he was grandson of the second Earl of Arran. He, his brother Sir Claud, his brother Sir George, his kinsman another George, his brother-in-law Sir Thomas Boyd, got out of O’Neill’s property the greater part of the barony of Strabane. Sir George afterwards incurred Royal displeasure and lost his property by becoming a Roman Catholic, and his grandson was a general in the Jacobite army in Ireland.[^[42]] Sir Arthur Chichester got Inishowen as his plunder for having been viceroy, and especially for his subserviency in the Parliamentary dispute. He also got large tracts of country where Belfast now is. These three, the Chichesters, the Hamiltons, and the Touchets must have taken an enormous amount of land amongst them.

Then there were the London Companies. The city was very slow in taking up the idea of a settlement in Ireland, and when they did consent to the plan insisted on getting their own way, without any regard to the Plantation rules. As one looks back on the history of the Irish Society, and a chequered history it has been, the best we can say of it is that this gigantic system of absenteeism has not been as bad as one might have prophesied.

The grants and leases to the natives were of very small value, mostly 60 acres, and were only given to a small number. In a great number of cases they were limited either by being only given for one or two lives, with remainders to Englishmen, or by the possibility of forfeiture under the regime of a new landlord. The Derry see lands were at first let out thus; to English or Scotch on lease for sixty years; to Irish for twenty-one years or three lives, with power of revocation by the succeeding Bishop.[^[43]] Before eight years had elapsed we find that the tenants had been compelled to surrender their leases and take out new ones “on increased rents, by means whereof the revenues were well increased, to the honour of Almighty God.” Occasionally a native appears with 1,000 acres opposite his name, but it is pretty rare. For example, “Only forty natives in the whole extensive County of Donegal obtained small grants in the dreary regions of Doe and Fanet, now Kilmacrenan. Several of them were representatives of noble Irish families, and the remainder belonged to the class of native gentry. The prevailing surnames amongst them were those of O’Donnell, MacSwyne, O’Gallagher, and O’Boyle. A few very old people got pretty liberal grants, but with remainders to Sir Ralph Bingley and Sir Richard Hansard.”[^[44]] Some of the conditions attached to grants in this reign are very striking:

Dowry to be forfeited on marrying an Irishman.

Not to take tenants nor employ anyone who could only speak Irish.

Not to destroy passes or bridges unless they led into the Irishmen’s land.

Not to take the names of O’Rourke, O’Mulloy, The Fox, McCoghlan, O’Doyne, The Great O’Ferrall, The Great O’Carroll.[^[45]]

It looks a little absurd when some Smith or Brown of an English county, or a Menzies or a Montgomery from Scotland, is enjoined so seriously that he must never take the name of The Fox, or The Great O’Carroll.

We must turn now to the religious ideals of the Plantation, and we all know King James was nothing if not religious. I shall try to approach the subject with a dispassioned candour, and speak as an Irishman who loves his country, and as a churchman who longs to see the day when the Protestant Church in Ireland shall become converted to Irish ideas in politics. That Church has been given ecclesiastical Home Rule, and has made full use of its privileges, for it treats theological matters in a way quite independent of English churchmanship. May we not hope for the day when politically it shall cease to allow itself to be dragged at the tail of one English political party? In the Plantation it was intended that the church by the State established should have an endowment in every place; the idea being that in every 1,000 acres sixty should be reserved for the support of the clergyman. And an additional endowment was given by the lands and the patronage of parishes handed over to Trinity College, Dublin. It was, doubtless, hoped that a settled and established Protestant ministry would lead the people all to turn over in time to that faith. And in the meantime, Government was prepared to do all it could by fears and bribery to lead the people in the way it was wished they should go. For a native squire or peasant to conform was the passport to get a miserable patch of land. Lord Coursye was given a pension of £100 a year for good service, and it was continued and increased to £150 to his eldest son because he had become a Protestant. In another case, Sir James Dillon was made Lord Dillon and Baron of Kilkenny because his eldest son had conformed.[^[46]] Yet with all these brilliant prospects before them, the people did not flock in their thousands around the preachers of the Established Church. The reason of this was that there was practically no Protestant church in Ulster. It existed only on paper; it was a regular Army Corps. The ecclesiastical buildings were ruinous and desolate; the clergy, where such existed, were the offscourings of the English church, men of depraved life, or so ignorant that they could hardly perform their duties properly. From the bishops down, pluralities were the common and recognized thing; occasionally even we see a man actually holding an English living and a lot of Irish ones at the same time; thus the same man was Archdeacon of Dublin, Treasurer of Cashel Cathedral, Vicar of Galballydrome and Leighlin Macvoge, and Rector of Battersea in Surrey.[^[47]] John Todd, who seems to have been even below the average of the Irish clergy of that time, as we shall see presently, is found on his appointment as Bishop of Down in 1610 writing to Norton to ask him to intercede with Salisbury that he may not lose his right to the mastership of the Savoy. Even men of high character like Archbishop Usher themselves benefited by these abuses. The fines of the recusants—i.e., the Catholics—were to go to pious purposes like the building of Protestant churches, or were impounded by the Archbishop of Armagh for charity, and no account given. The Ulster bishops were mostly ignorant and greedy Scotchmen, for ever quarrelling with all the other planters about their church possessions, and not always getting the best of the quarrels either. This is what we read in one place in the Patent Rolls: “King’s Letter to the Lord Deputy to confirm Andrew Moneypenny in the Archdeaconry of Connor by putting in force all the orders made by Lord Viscount Grandison against Nicholas Todd, a tailor by profession, an unlearned man, placed in that situation by his unworthy brother John Todd, late Bishop of Down and Connor, and deprived of said dignity for notorious causes, both of insufficiency of learning and corruption in manners.” Chichester as usual impresses us as seeing into these abuses in a clearer and more sensible way than the rest of the Castle set of that time. We find him writing to the Lord Justice and Davies about religion, when he says all is confused and out of order, as if it were in a wilderness where neither Christianity nor religion was ever heard of. He says, “the Bishops claim too much land and have too little.” He wishes the king would make a new allotment, as if in a new Plantation in America. The state of Munster was even worse, owing to the rapacity of the notorious Miler Magrath, who bled immense numbers of parishes for his children. In Mullognony or Newchapel, County Tipperary, (where I was rector from 1895 to 1898) Miler’s son Terence had got the profits of the prebend from the nominal incumbent, who was in such a wretched state that in 1607 Terence Magrath had to give him a cloak to present himself before the Commission that enquired into the abuses. The undertakers, not, I suppose, seeing that the Established Church was making much way, with its grasping Bishops and ruined churches, and absentee ministers, opposed the episcopal claims with all the ardour of Wee Free Kirkmen appealing to the House of Lords, and in a great many cases imported Presbyterian ministers from Scotland. So we can see that even if the native element had been willing to conform, there was practically no established religion for them to join. James began to recognise this when too late in the day, and there is an amusing State Paper in which we see a patent plan of his, that young natives should be caught up, and educated in Trinity College Dublin, to work as Protestant clergymen among the natives, and then if any livings of small value should become vacant, they should be appointed to them.

It was twenty-seven years since a Parliament had been held in Dublin, and when the Ulster Plantation was finished it was decided to convene one in 1613. The histories mostly say that it was called to give legal sanction to the Plantation; if so, it was a case of a late locking of the stable door. It seems more likely that the object, if any, of the Parliament was for the dominant English party to triumph over the fallen natives, and to pass Bills of a further intolerant character. We can see in its constitution, but in a more pronounced form than they would have dared to show in England, symptoms of the abuses and the arbitrary acts which culminated in the total overthrow of the Stuart dynasty. We shall follow the usual order of that period, to execute first, and judge afterwards; so first we shall look into the Parliament and its doings, and then take a brief survey of the subsequent enquiries into its constitution.

It was a most disorderly scene, especially in its earliest stage. Each party had hoped for a majority, but the numbers were slightly in favour of the English party. These latter proposed Davies as Speaker in the Lower House; whereupon Sir James Gough, Sir Christopher Nugent, and William Talbot, late Recorder of Dublin, proposed Sir John Everard, late a judge of the Queen’s Bench, but displaced by King James on account of his religion. The affirmative (the supporters of Davies) went out to be numbered; the negative, as was the custom then, remaining behind. But instead of letting themselves be numbered, the Irish party proceeded as if they were the whole house, chose Everard, and put him in the chair. The Englishmen, coming in and finding they numbered 125 in a house of 226, knew they had a majority, and put Davies on Everard’s lap. The English then began to remove Everard, by pulling at his legs, while the Irish held him in his place by the collar, Davies still sitting on his knees. Sir John Everard was old and infirm; he was got out of his place with only slight injuries to his leg, whereupon the Irish members withdrew altogether from the house. Then the Catholic lords wrote to the king, and the Irish commoners wrote to the Privy Council of England, both complaining of the business about the Speakership, and the legality of the new boroughs, the members of the Lower House also asking to be excused from attending. To the Lords’ complaints answer was made that the Commons’ business did not concern them, to which they replied that though not in the Lower House, they made yet but one body and one Parliament. Then the Lord Deputy commanded the Irish commoners to attend to pass the Act of recognition of the King’s Title; upon which they sent him a petition recognizing the King’s Title, but utterly refusing to sit in the house, unless their Speaker Everard was approved, and the new burgesses rejected. The Lords now acted similarly, and as the Irish element was strong in Dublin, Parliament was adjourned to the 27th of July, 1614.[^[48]]

Looking at the matter from the standpoint of mere legality, we are obliged to acknowledge that the Irish party were in the wrong more than once in these transactions. When they had been left together for the purpose simply of being numbered, they chose to ignore the other party, and would not let themselves be counted, but proceeded forcibly to put Everard in the chair. Then, of course, the Lords were interfering in a way that would not be allowed nowadays, when they declined to go on till the matters in the Commons had been settled. And finally, if there were any illegalities in the new boroughs (and there were many, as we shall see), the correct thing, of course was for Parliament first to meet, and then for any errors in the returns to be dealt with. But we need not blame the Irish party for these little blunders. There had not been a meeting of Parliament for a generation, and they went there in a high state of tension and exasperation, first at the confiscations, and then at the conduct of the returning officers.

On the return of the Parliament, there was a controversy about the precedence of the Lord of Slane over the Lord of Kerry; this being ended, Parliament passed ten Acts: An Act of recognition of the King and his action in Ulster, stating with delicate irony, that James had established his government in the hearts of his people. One removing benefit of clergy in certain cases. Repeals of old Acts against admitting and associating with Scots, and against having commerce with the Irish enemies. An Act of General Pardon. An Attainder of Tyrone, Tyrconnell, Sir Cahir O’Dogherty and others. And a subsidy. Sir R. Cox, who was a violent Protestant, tells us, that on Chichester’s being summoned to England, “Irish affairs were so well managed by the Lord Deputy, that the King was fully convinced of the seditious designs of the Irish.”

When the recusant lords appealed to the king, his reply was insolent and silly; it was intended to drive them into further opposition. It is not worth quoting. He admits that two returns were proved false, and he foreshadowed the future failures of the Stuart race by such violent words as these, written to the noblemen: “You that are of contrary religion must not look to be the only law-makers. You that are but half-subjects should have but half privilege; you that have an eye to me one way and to the Pope another way.”

Now let us turn to the Commission and its findings.[^[49]] They were directed not only to inquire into the disputes about the elections, but to find out if any of the elected members could not speak English, and to find out whether there were any combinations or conspiracies not to elect Protestants, and to see if any Jesuits or priests had any meddling in such matters. They also were directed to see if any general assessments and levies of money were made without authority, and to report if the priests and Jesuits were responsible; also to report generally on abuses in Ireland; and on the prospects of a Plantation in Wexford. The names of the Commissioners were, Lord Chichester, Sir Humphrey Winche, Sir Charles Cornwallis, Sir Roger Wilbraham, and George Calvert. They found that: In Armagh an Irish freeholder and candidate was kept out by an armed man at the door, upon which he, Henry McShane O’Neale, withdrew with most of the Irish freeholders. That in Cavan, Captain Fleming, an Irish freeholder, had appealed to the sheriff for an adjournment of nominations, and had been given hopes of one, but, the sheriff not adjourning, the Irish were not represented at the election. In the King’s County, the Irish candidates, one of whom could not speak English, had the greater number of names on their nomination paper, yet the under-sheriff returned the two English candidates. In this case two whose names were written down for the Irish candidates, disavowed their signatures, and another confessed to having put his name on the list after the election was done, and Sir Terence O’Dempsey gave his vote by proxy. In Limerick it was questioned whether the English or Irish candidates had the greater number of freeholder votes; the sheriff did not take the obvious course of numbering the freeholders, but returned the Englishmen. He denied that it was his duty to number the polls. In Fermanagh, neither of the Irish candidates responded to the Commissioners’ invitation to be present, for good reasons: one could not speak English, and the other “indicted for treason, broke prison, and hath betaken himself to the woods.” They found that at this election Captain Gower did not pull Brian McGuire’s beard from his face, but only shook him by the beard. In Roscommon the Irish candidates’ witnesses seem to have been rejected, because of their “speaking only the Irish language, and being men of mean condition, as they seemed to us.” In passing we may mention that two of Sir John Everard’s supporters in Parliament could only speak Irish. In Dublin, the Mayor being absent, the recusants duly elected two aldermen at the County Court; later the Mayor proclaimed an election at Hoggin, when two English candidates were nominated by the Mayor. To see which had a majority, he made the parties divide, and then, without counting the polls, he declared the Englishmen, his nominees, elected. In Trim there were two elections, as there did not seem to be any proper authority for fixing a date. In Kildare borough, the sovereign returned two, whom the Commission declared to be not elected, deciding that the Irish candidates were returned. In Wicklow there was a confusion between the reputed portriff and the deputy-constable about the proper date, and finally two English candidates were returned. In Cavan, the sovereign and inhabitants held an election, without waiting for the sheriff’s permission, and declared two natives elected. The Ulster men all resented the intrusion of the sheriffs upon them.[^[50]] Then the sheriff directed his warrant to the sovereign, and another election was held. The greater number voted for the natives, yet the sovereign declared the English candidates returned, though they had fewer voices. The Commission here says: “At this election Sir Oliver Lambert with a little walking-stick, did strike one George Brady, one of the inhabitants, for using towards him some rude behaviour, and giving him some unfitting speeches; and upon view by us, it did not appear to us, that his head had been broken.”

They found there was a general combination against electing Protestants; the reason being, the natives believed laws would be propounded concerning religion and for banishment of priests. They found that the Roman Catholic knights of the shire and burgesses levied contributions to pay for sending their agents for their appeal to England. And the moneys obtained by the priests seem to have been dues of the most ordinary kind. In fact, the dragging in of the priests and Jesuits, first suggested in James’s commands to the Commission, proved to be a perfect mare’s nest. They found that two burgesses were returned from Clogher, which had never sent members before, and had no charter to do so. The Commission then went on to describe the disorderly scene at the meeting of Parliament. It appeared that several of the new corporations had no right to return members, their charters bearing date after the Commission for the holding of the Parliament, and some after the summons to the Parliament.

After that, they go into the general grievances of the country. Juries will not present recusants. “The small number, less sufficiency, and little residence of the ministers. The want and defect of churches, either wholly ruined, or so out of repair as to be unfit for the service of God.” Remedy, to enforce the laws of conformity, and to do away with idle and scandalous ministers. The soldiers extort; officers take money not to cess; the provost-marshal’s men extort. The people are afraid to make complaint for fear of worse impositions. The extortion of clerks and multiplying of new offices. The clearing out of Wexford for a new plantation; some old freeholders restored to their land or portion, but with some of the English party holding it in trust for them; while 390 freeholders, and 14,500 other people “may be removed at the will of the patentees, notwithstanding few are yet removed.” For this plantation a jury was appointed and found “ignoramus” to the King’s title. They were bound over to appear again, and then eleven agreed to find for the title; but five, who refused, were committed to prison, and censured in the Castle Chamber. After that come figures about the Wexford Plantation and the rent reserved, which was £5 per 1,000 acres for the English, and £6 6s. 8d. for the natives.

Here ends the Commissioners’ finding. It was worded with caution, but we can see they felt that the condition of Ireland was one of gross misgovernment. In fact, it would be impossible to feel anything else, if the subject were dealt with from the point of view of legality. Notice that no fault or crime was urged against the native population except those violations of the law which come from their adhesion to their own views in politics and religion. On the other hand, every constitutional law was being broken by the misgovernors of the land. How James could assert there were only illegalities in the cases of two members of Parliament, it is difficult to say. Even if the King’s County case was doubtful, the Kildare case, the Cavan case, and the Clogher case, would clearly make six. Some of these findings, as about the military impositions, and the Wexford peasantry being tenants at will, must have been bitter reading for Sir John Davies, who had written so strongly against that sort of thing, and who, though rapacious and heartless, may be fairly described, in the writer’s humble opinion, as the father of the Ulster custom.

The Commission, as far as it touched Parliamentary matters, dealt only with the House of Commons. The constitution of the House of Lords was as bad. On the eve of the meeting of the Parliament, on 31st March, 1613, a King’s letter was issued to call to the Upper House by writ, Lord Abercorn, Lord Henry Brian, son of the Earl of Thomond, Lord Audley, Lord Ochiltree, and Lord Burleigh. The letter also said if the right of Lord Barry, Viscount Buttevant was questioned because he had an elder brother who is deaf and dumb, the question was to be silenced by the king’s commandment, because of his dutiful behaviour, and because he had enjoyed the title for many years without contradiction. A letter in the Carew Papers shows that Lord Henry Brian or O’Brien was summoned because he was a Protestant, where we also read that Lord Athenrie, who was too poor to attend, was to be induced to give his proxy to some Protestant lord.[^[51]]

A good many of the intended mushroom boroughs came to nothing. Virginia was meant to be a borough, but was never incorporated. Charlestown and Jamestown were intended to be the county towns respectively of the counties of Roscommon and Leitrim, but the ill-omened names have disappeared from our maps, though the village of Jamestown became a pocket borough, returning two members till the Union.[^[52]]

It may be necessary to mention that the colonization of Down and Antrim are quite separate matters. About the beginning of the fifteenth century, the MacDonnells, Lords of the Isles, came to Antrim, and in 1584 a thousand Scottish highlanders, called “Redshanks,” of the septs of the Cambiles, MacDonnells and Magalanes, led by Surleboy, a Scottish chieftain, invaded Ulster. And early in James’s reign some English from Devon were brought over by Chichester and settled in Carrickfergus and Malone, near Belfast. These formed the Planters of Antrim; and Down was colonized through the interference of a laird named Montgomery. Con O’Neill had got into trouble with the Government, and his wife (a lady of great abilities, and a sister of Brian MacArt and half-sister of Owen Roe MacArt) appealed to Montgomery to help him to secure his pardon. Montgomery did secure it; but with the result that the patent for his share of Con’s land specified that the lands should be planted by British undertakers, and that no grants of fee-farms should be given to any of Irish extraction.[^[53]] Then James Hamilton came in and got a share, Con, Hamilton and Montgomery having one-third each. In 1606 O’Neill had to part with his property, giving it up to Montgomery. The latter founded Newtown (or Newtownards), Donaghadee, Comber and Grey-Abbey; and Hamilton founded Bangor, Holywood, Killileagh, and Ballywalter. So these wily Scotchmen got practically the whole of the County Down; and the Scotch settlers who came over in hundreds filled up the land. The barony of Iveagh, which contained so much highlands, was held by the Magenises. They seem to have been astute enough. Though often law-breakers, they did not transgress politically, and when the barony was specially settled in 1617 they got most of the land in Iveagh, and they had only to pay twice as much as the English.[^[54]] Here is a brief contemporary description of the head of the family. “Sir Hugh McEnys was the civilest of all the Irishry of those parts. He was brought by Sir Nicholas Bagnall from the Bonaghe of the O’Neyles to contribute to the Queen. In this place only amongst the Irish of Ulster is the rude custom of tanistship put away. Maginis is able to make 60 horsemen and 80 footmen. Every festival day he wears English garments.”

Besides the Ulster counties, in this reign there were also plantations of King’s County and Longford at a rent to the Crown of 2½d. per acre for pasture land, and ½d per acre for bog and wood, Wexford at rent 1¼d. per acre, Upper Ossory (Queen’s County) at 3d. per acre. Westmeath and Cork. There were also grants in Meath and Louth; but, though large, they hardly professed to be the basis of a plantation.

Many continental immigrants became naturalized in Ireland in this reign; they hailed mostly from Antwerp and Brabant.[^[55]]

Now what has the introduction of the North Britons done for Ireland? It has added complications to the religious problems of the country, by adding a third element. To all who study the history of Ireland, it tends to increase the sense of injustice and wrong, to see how the North and its industries have always been pampered for the three centuries intervening. It has not tended to the consolidation of the Empire, for every Ulster so-called “Loyalist” is a Home Ruler of a type of his own, for he approaches all Imperial problems from a local point of view. In the troublous times when political convulsions come in Belfast, as in 1886 and 1892, the most hated class of men is found to be the body that is representative of law and order, the Royal Irish Constabulary. Ulster is loyal as long as she gets her own way. Her good temper is very like what Sir Antony Absolute says of himself, “You know I am compliance itself—when I am not thwarted; no one more easily led—when I have my own way.” Her vices are worse than the traditional vices of the rest of the land. In morality the South and West of Ireland people are superior; while in temperance, it may at least be said they are not inferior. The virtues of Ulster are economy and industry and determination. They have an unreasoning decision, a blind enthusiasm, in political and religious matters that carries them along in a way that will never be copied by the more thoughtful and more depressed Southern. Ulster has shown the rest of Ireland that, however attractive the land may be, it is well to have trades and industries that do not depend, or only depend partly on the land. The crowning merit of James’s work in Ulster is that there is one part of the country where landlord and tenant, squire and labourer, think very much alike in religion and politics, so that a good understanding should be looked for between the various parties. Had he left Tyrone and Tyrconnell and O’Dogherty with their vassals, the same result would have been arrived at, without all the unconstitutional things I have referred to. Unconstitutional! We have seen the beginning of the Stuart rule; we know how it ended.

And in the struggles that intervened, Ulster was invariably against the Crown. To the English and Scotch squatters, and the Irish Society, were given arable and pasture lands, fishings, courts leet and baron, ferries, bishoprics and livings, mountain-lands and bogs, courts of pie-powder, exemptions, titles, licences to beg, recusants’ fines, wardships and marriages of minors, charters of the staple, customs on tobacco-pipes, and monopolies of all kinds, and in a few score years the grandchildren of these favoured persons made themselves famous by their bitter opposition to James’s grandson. Thus the whirligig of time brings its revenges.

Notes

[1]. Tract by Sir Thomas Smith on the Colonisation of Ards, in Co. Down, 1572.

[2]. Patent Rolls, 1 James I., lxx., 22, Dorso, p. 5.

[3]. See The Broken Sword of Ulster, by R. Cuninghame.

[4]. State Papers, Ireland (1609), p. 330, (1608), pp. 108, 109.

[5]. Plowden’s History, I., p. 341.

[6]. Calendar State Papers, Ireland (1608-10), Preface.

[7]. Broken Sword of Ulster, p. 153, &c. For the earlier plots of Mountjoy against Tyrone, see Docwra’s Narrative, Celtic Society’s Miscellany, Notes, p. 315.

[8]. State Papers, Ireland (1608), p. 31.

[9]. State Papers, Ireland (1608), Preface, p. xli.

[10]. Celtic Society’s Miscellany, Docwra’s Narrative, Notes, p. 315.

[11]. Carew Papers, “Discourse for the Reformation of Ireland” (1583). See also Sir J. Perrott’s Proposals, same vol., II., p. 368; II., p. 415.

[12]. Hill, Plantation of Ulster, p. 222.

[13]. State Papers, Ireland (1607) Preface, p. lvii.

[14]. Enrolled Patent Rolls, 16 James I., pp. 419, 420.

[15]. History, Vol. II., p. 14.

[16]. Broken Sword of Ulster, pp. 153, 168.

[17]. P. 313. Note.

[18]. Broken Sword of Ulster, p. 179.

[19]. MacNevin (Confiscation of Ulster, p. 137, note) says the Irish had to pay £10 13s. 4d. for 60 acres. He does not state how he gets at this fact. The grants to the natives seem to have been at the rate of £1 1s. 4d. for 100 acres, which would work out at £10 13s. 4d. for 1,000. (See Patent Rolls, James I., passim.)

[20]. Rev. George Hill, Montgomery MS., p. 55, note. Patent Rolls, 14 James I., lxiii., 4, Dorso, and 15 James I., xll., 3, Dorso.

[21]. Patent Rolls, Ireland, 19 James I., Part II., xvii., 41.

[22]. State Papers, Ireland (1609), p. 196.

[23]. Hill, Plantation of Ulster, pp. 220, 223.

[24]. Hill, Plantation Papers, p. 77.

[25]. Plantation Papers, p. 77.

[26]. Carew Papers, p. 228.

[27]. Plantation Papers, pp. 13, 14.

[28]. Hill, Plantation of Ulster. See Sir J. Davies’ letter to Salisbury, 27th June, 1609, about Sir Neale. When the jury were found to be favourable to him they were dismissed by a trick. Davies recommends to have him tried by a jury in Middlesex, or kept till the colonies of English or Scotch may be planted in Tyrconnell.

[29]. Patent Rolls, II James I.; 5 lv., 31, p. 250. 14, March 10th. See pp. 257, 293. Carew MS., pp. 49, 88; State Papers, Ireland (1609), pp. 264, 299; (1610), p. 416.

[30]. State Papers (1610), pp. 502, 503.

[31]. Plantation Papers, p. 96.

[32]. Patent Rolls, 20 James I., Part III., lxii., 27 Dorso.

[33]. Plantation Papers, p. 29. An early and unsuccessful attempt to plant had been made on Sir Oghie O’Hanlon’s land in 1569; it had been taken from him and given to Captain Chatterton. Chatterton was killed, and as nobody would venture to plant the land, it was restored to O’Hanlon. An interesting proclamation of Carew’s in 1603, on the subject of the rate of wages in the North of Ireland, is given in Plantation Papers, p. 79.

[34]. Patent Rolls, 12 James I., I., viii., 2. Lady O’Dogherty was about to proceed to London in pursuit of relief, and as Chichester found that her marriage money had never been paid by her brother, Lord Gormanstown, he got the king to give her £40 a year during pleasure out of the rents of Inishowen. State Papers (1609), p. 216. Patent Rolls, 14 James I., lxxxii., 14 Dorso, Part I., and 14 James I., vi., 8, Part 2, Facie.

[35]. Patent Rolls, James I., pp. 48, 443. Plantation Papers, pp. 19, 190, 119.

[36]. Patent Rolls, James I., pp. 312, 314. Plantation Papers, pp. 19, 119, 190.

[37]. Reid, Presbyterianism in Ulster, I., pp. 103, 104.

[38]. Prendergast, Ireland from the Restoration to the Revolution (1660-1690), p. 98.

[39]. Hill, Plantation Papers, p. 67, ff.

[40]. Plantation Papers, pp. 26, 189.

[41]. See Patent Rolls, passim; Carew Papers, p. 227; Plantation Papers, p. 52.

[42]. Sir R. Cox, History, II., p. 29. Plantation Papers, p. 64.

[43]. Patent Rolls, 14 James I., Part I., cvi., 27 Dorso.

[44]. Plantation Papers, p. 146.

[45]. See Patent Rolls, James I., pp. 492, 512, 532, &c.

[46]. Patent Rolls, James I., pp. 455, 473.

[47]. Patent Rolls, 11 James I., 5, cv., 17 Dorso; 18 James I., lxxxvii., 37 Dorso; pp. 314, 555. 22 James I., cxiv., 47 Dorso. State Papers (1610), pp. 31, 64, 391. See also the Inquiry into the state of Dioceses of Cashel and Emly and Waterford and Lismore in the State Papers. Patent Rolls, 18 James I., xxxiv., 6 Dorso.

[48]. Sir R. Cox’s History; Plowden; and the report of Commission mentioned below and printed in the Patent Rolls. The fullest account is by Cox, where the Acts of the Parliament and the King’s letter to the remonstrant Lords are described.

[49]. Patent Rolls, 16 James I., pp. 369-401.

[50]. Camden’s Ireland, pp. 123, 125.

[51]. Patent Rolls, 11 James I., lxv., 36 Facie. Carew Papers, p. 147.

[52]. Patent Rolls, 10 James I., 1, v. 7 Facie. 20 James I., xlii., 11 Dorso. See Lewis’s Topographical Dictionary of Ireland.

[53]. Patent Rolls, James I., p. 236.

[54]. Patent Rolls, 16 James I., xv., Dorso. State Papers, Ireland (1608), 10, Preface, p. xi.

[55]. While these people were coming over from Belgium, it is of interest to note that as well as at Louvain, there was an Irish College at Tournai in 1607. State Papers (1607), p. 230.

STRAFFORD

PART I

THE GRACES

By PHILIP WILSON

Strafford

PART I
The Graces

The reign of James the First had been, if we except one petty and insignificant outbreak in Ulster, a period of tranquillity for Ireland; and, at the accession of his son, the prospects of the country might have seemed to a superficial observer more promising than they had yet been. But, in fact, the ostensibly pacific and constitutional measures of James had produced results more disastrous, and aroused animosities more enduring than even the exterminating policy of his predecessor. Henry Carey, Lord Falkland, who three years earlier had succeeded Grandison as Lord Deputy, was at this time confronted with two problems which have since taxed to the uttermost the abilities of many wiser and more resolute men than he. During the preceding reign the laws which prohibited the exercise of the Roman Catholic religion had been fitfully and spasmodically enforced. Minorities have often been dragooned into conformity; but it is not easy by such means to change the religion of an entire nation; and the dread of a rebellion in Ireland, no less than the necessity of maintaining friendly relations with foreign Catholic powers, repeatedly led the English Government to place a curb upon the frantic zeal of the ascendancy party at Dublin. The latter consideration had recently derived additional force from the marriage of Charles, then Prince of Wales, to a Catholic princess; and, on the accession of the young king, the co-religionists of his consort began, not unnaturally, to hope for something more than the precarious and extra-legal toleration which was all that they had hitherto enjoyed. On the other hand, the fact that the king was disposed to treat the Catholics with leniency was in itself enough to inflame the hostility of the Puritan party, which comprised the majority of the English middle class and had already obtained the ascendancy in at least the Lower House of Parliament. To satisfy the wishes of the Irish without raising a storm in England was a task beyond the abilities of either Falkland or his master.

A still more serious source of discontent was to be found in the general sense of insecurity which pervaded the Irish gentry. During the last years of James’s reign, the precedent which had been set in Ulster had been followed on a smaller scale in Leitrim, Longford, Wexford, and King’s County. All those counties, or parts of them, had, at some time since the Norman invasion, been occupied by English colonists, who had afterwards been driven out by the original inhabitants. During many generations the latter had remained in undisturbed possession; but few of them had taken the trouble to obtain title-deeds which would be valid by English law—a science of whose mysteries they were profoundly ignorant. If in a few instances such documents had once existed, they had generally been lost or destroyed during the long period of anarchy and civil war. It was now decided that these gentlemen, being unable to produce satisfactory title-deeds, were intruders upon the estates of the Anglo-Norman adventurers who had despoiled their ancestors some centuries before; and, when the heirs of the latter were not forthcoming, the lands, in default of any other claimant, were adjudged to have lapsed to the Crown.[^[56]]

The alarm and indignation to which these proceedings naturally gave rise were especially great in the western province. During the last three reigns a series of confiscations had been carried out in Leinster, Munster and Ulster, but the Connaught landowners had hitherto escaped spoliation, and they had very lately obtained for their estates a security which, it might have been thought, would have proved a barrier against the rapacity of the most unscrupulous government. In 1585 Sir John Perrott, then Lord Deputy, had effected an arrangement, known as the “Composition of Connaught,” by which the gentlemen of that province were secured in the possession of their estates; but, owing probably to the troubles which not long afterwards broke out in Ulster, the formalities necessary in order to give validity to this transaction were never carried out. In the thirteenth year of his reign, however, James consented, in consideration of a bribe of £3,000, to issue a commission remedying this defect. The Irish gentry loyally performed their part of the agreement; but, owing to some negligence, or, more probably, some trickery on the part of the officials of the Court of Chancery, the patents were incorrectly enrolled, and were afterwards pronounced by interested and unscrupulous lawyers to be null and void. Shortly before the death of James it began to be rumoured that the Government intended to avail themselves of this technical irregularity in order to establish a Plantation in Connaught on the model of the Plantation of Ulster. The rumour, as might have been expected, excited the most painful apprehensions in Ireland; but no actual steps had been taken towards the Plantation when the king died.[^[57]]

Charles was not altogether indisposed to treat his Irish subjects with fairness; but his strongest desire, then as always, was to secure a revenue which would render him independent of the English Parliament. The Irish Catholics, on their side, were willing enough to contribute to the relief of the king’s necessities, if by so doing they might obtain toleration for their religion and security for their estates. The first act of the young sovereign was admirably calculated to attract the popular goodwill. By a statute of the second year of Elizabeth, all mayors, sheriffs, and other municipal officers were required to take the Oath of Supremacy; but, owing to the scarcity of Protestants, the law, except in Ulster, had generally been a dead letter. In 1618, however, Sir Oliver St. John had procured the forfeiture of the charter of Waterford—a city which had persistently elected recusant magistrates.[^[58]] As an earnest of the royal favour this charter was now restored, and, to the scandal of zealous Protestants, a Roman Catholic mayor was once more installed in office.[^[59]]

A few days later, Falkland, acting under instructions received from England, convened an assembly of the Irish nobility and gentry to consider the measures to be taken to relieve the financial embarrassments of the Government, and to hear the concessions which the king was willing to make in return for their assistance.[^[60]] But an unexpected obstacle intervened. Justly conceiving that the proposed concessions would put an end to the monopoly hitherto enjoyed by their sect, the Protestant prelates, with Archbishop Usher at their head, drew up and published a “Judgment concerning toleration in religion,” which may be commended to the attention of those pious persons who are accustomed to declaim against the bigotry of the Vatican.

“The religion of the Papists is superstitious and idolatrous; their faith and doctrine erroneous and heretical; their Church, in respect of both, apostatical. To give them, therefore, a toleration, or to consent that they may freely exercise their religion and profess their faith and doctrine is a grievous sin, and that in two respects. For,

“First. It is to make ourselves accessory, not only to their superstitious idolatries and heresies, and, in a word, to all the abominations of Popery, but also, which is a consequent of the former, to the perdition of the seduced people which perish in the deluge of the Catholic apostacy. Secondly. To grant them a toleration in respect of any money to be given, or contribution to be made by them, is to set religion to sale, and with it the souls of the people whom Christ our Saviour hath redeemed with His Most Precious Blood. And as it is a great sin, so it is also a matter of most dangerous consequence, the consideration whereof we commit to the wise and judicious, beseeching the God of truth to make them who are in authority zealous of God’s glory, and of the advancement of true religion: zealous, resolute and courageous against all Popery, superstition, and idolatry. Amen.”[^[61]]

A little later Downham, Bishop of Derry, preaching before the Lord Deputy, denounced toleration in still more unmeasured terms. These outbursts of episcopal intolerance aroused the sympathy of the English House of Commons, who passed a resolution: “That the Popish religion is publicly professed in every part of Ireland, and that monasteries and nunneries are there newly erected and replenished with votaries of both sexes, which will be of evil consequence unless seasonably repressed.”[^[62]]

The opposition of the Protestant bishops in Ireland and of their English sympathisers retarded for a considerable time the progress of the negotiations between the Government and the recusants; but in the spring of 1628 the agents of the latter had a personal interview with Charles at Whitehall, when an agreement was arrived at which, it was hoped, would prove satisfactory to all parties. In one important particular the concessions which were now promised were less liberal than those which in the preceding year the Catholics had been led to expect. Charles had then been willing to consent to the repeal of the Act which imposed a fine of one shilling on persons absent from the Protestant parish churches on Sundays. Out of deference, probably, to the protest of the episcopate, this concession was now withdrawn. But, in spite of this omission, “the Graces,” as they were called, were well calculated to redress the most serious grievances of the Irish. A new oath of a purely civil character was substituted for the Oath of Supremacy, and recusants were thus enabled to sue their liveries and to practise at the bar without fear of molestation. An undisturbed occupancy of sixty years was to afford a prescriptive title against all older claims of the Crown. The deficiencies in the titles of the Connaught landowners were to be supplied by an Act of the Parliament which, it was expected, would be shortly summoned. Other grievances of a more general kind, which affected Protestants no less than Catholics, were also remedied. In return for these concessions the Irish agents undertook to raise a “voluntary contribution” of £120,000, to be paid in quarterly instalments ranging over three years.[^[63]]

It was arranged that the Irish Parliament should meet in November. The writs were issued, and some, at least, of the elections had actually taken place, when the English Council discovered that by summoning a Parliament without having first transmitted to England a statement of the Bills which it would have to consider, the Lord Deputy had been guilty of a technical violation of Poynings’ Act. The writs were accordingly cancelled, and the holding of the Parliament indefinitely postponed.[^[64]] In spite of this disappointment the Irish, who had not yet fathomed the duplicity of their sovereign, paid the first instalments of the contribution with punctuality and were rewarded with a less rigorous execution of the penal statutes.

Falkland did not long retain office after this humiliating rebuff. The embarrassments which Charles anticipated from the promise of concessions which he was already anxious to evade made him eager to entrust the government of Ireland to stronger and more resolute hands, and a popular pretext was soon found for the recall of the obnoxious Deputy. During the reign of James, Falkland, urged on by Sir William Parsons, afterwards the notorious Lord Justice, had attempted to despoil a sept named O’Byrne by the kind of legal jugglery which was then fashionable, but had met with unexpected opposition from the English Government, which was beginning to entertain doubts of the merits of the Plantation system. A few years later he discovered, or professed to have discovered, a formidable conspiracy in which the O’Byrnes were involved. Phelim O’Byrne, the head of the sept, and his six sons were arrested, tried by a jury composed partly of their hereditary enemies, and partly of persons who coveted their estates, convicted and imprisoned, and their lands divided among English adventurers. In this transaction Falkland had received the support of a majority of the council with Lord Cork at their head, but had been opposed by a minority, among whom the Chancellor, Lord Loftus of Ely, and Sir Francis Annesley, afterwards Lord Mountnorris, were the most conspicuous. Neither Loftus nor Mountnorris were men of unblemished character, and their opposition to the Lord Deputy was probably due at least as much to personal jealousy as to any disinterested sympathy with his victims; but to whatever motives it is to be ascribed, there can be no doubt that their conduct was in this instance fully justified. In the autumn of 1628 these gentlemen induced Charles to institute an inquiry into the means by which the evidence against the O’Byrnes had been obtained. Falkland protested, but his protests were disregarded. It soon transpired that his Excellency had had good reason to desire concealment. The original accusers of the O’Byrnes turned out to have been criminals under sentence of death who had been released on undertaking to swear as the Lord Deputy desired. More respectable witnesses deposed that they had been compelled by torture to corroborate the evidence thus obtained. In consequence of this inquiry the O’Byrnes were released, but their lands were not restored to them.[^[65]]

This exposure effectually destroyed what little reputation Falkland had left. In January, 1629, it was decided to recall him; but it was not until the following August that he surrendered the sword, having a few months previously issued a proclamation declaring that “the late intermission of legal proceedings against Popish pretended or titulary archbishops, bishops, abbots, deans, vicars-general, Jesuits, friars and others of that sort, that derive their pretended authority and orders from the see of Rome, hath bred such an extraordinary intolerance and presumption in them as that they have dared here of late not only to assemble themselves in public places to celebrate their superstitious services in all parts of this kingdom, but also have erected houses and buildings called public oratories, colleges, mass-houses, and convents of friars, monks and nuns in the eye and open view of the State, and, by colour of teaching and keeping schools in their pretended monasteries and colleges, do train up the youth of this kingdom in their superstitious religion, to the great degradation and contempt of his Majesty’s regal power and authority”; and commanding them in his Majesty’s name thenceforth to “forbear to preach, teach, or celebrate their service in any church, chapel, or other public oratory or place, or to teach any school in any place or places whatsoever within this kingdom.”[^[66]]

After the dismissal of Falkland the administration of Irish affairs was entrusted to Lord Chancellor Loftus and to the Earl of Cork as Lords Justices. Adam Loftus, grandson and namesake of the first Protestant Archbishop of Dublin, brought to his high office an inherited instinct for peculation, which he transmitted in undiminished splendour to his descendants.[^[67]] His colleague was in every respect a more remarkable man. Born at Canterbury in 1566 Richard Boyle came to Ireland at an early age with twenty-seven pounds in his pocket; obtained, by means of letters of introduction which were afterwards discovered to have been forged, one of those subordinate posts in the government of which the direct emoluments were small, but which afforded boundless opportunities for illegitimate gain; and, in the confiscations which followed the Desmond war, acquired one of the largest estates in Munster. Like most of the Munster planters he was for a while ruined by Tyrone’s rebellion, but more fortunate than many better men, eventually regained more than he had lost. In 1598 he was examined before the English Privy Council on a charge of holding treasonable correspondence with Spain; but, though his defence can scarcely be regarded as convincing, he succeeded, with his customary good fortune, not merely in outwitting his accusers but in recommending himself to the favour of his sovereign. During the reign of James, Boyle throve rapidly, and not only rose to some of the highest places in the State but built up a colossal fortune, which his family motto ascribed to the providence of God, but which, in the general estimation of his contemporaries, might be traced to a very different source. His uniform severity towards the Catholics has won for him from a certain school of historians the praise of exemplary piety; but an impartial student of his political career will probably pronounce him an unscrupulous adventurer, whose zeal against Popery sprang in large measure from a desire to enrich himself at the expense of the Papists.[^[68]]

The Lord Chancellor was not less fanatical than his colleague; but, in spite of the identity of their political opinions, the personal feud between the two Lords Justices was so bitter that the king was obliged to send a special agent from England to compose it.[^[69]] The reconciliation thus effected was superficial, but the two noblemen cordially co-operated in repressive measures against the recusants. An incident which took place not long afterwards throws a curious light on the temper of the governing faction and the precarious position of the Catholics. In the autumn of 1629, according to a contemporary Protestant writer, “the Romish Catholics began to rant it in Ireland, and to exercise their fancies called religion so publicly as if they had gained a toleration. For, whilst the Lords Justices were at church in Dublin on St. Stephen’s day, they were celebrating Mass, which the Lords Justices taking notice of, they sent the Archbishop of Dublin, the mayor, sheriffs and recorder of the town to apprehend them, which they did, taking away the crucifixes, chalices and paraments of the altar, the soldiers hewing down the image of St. Francis. The priests and friars were delivered into the hands of the pursuivants, at whom the people threw stones and rescued them. The Lords Justices, informed of this, sent a guard and delivered them, and clapt eight Popish aldermen by the heels for not attending their mayor. Upon the account of this presumption fifteen houses, by direction from the Lords of the Council here, were seized to the King’s use, and the friars and priests so persecuted as two hanged themselves in their own defence.”[^[70]] The persecution, which had begun in the capital, was rapidly extended throughout the country. During the next three years numerous monasteries and convents were dissolved. In the summer of 1630, a university which the Catholics, who were excluded from Trinity College by the Oath of Supremacy, had recently erected for their own use, was suppressed, and its revenues transferred to its Protestant rival. Two years later a shrine of St. Patrick in Lough Derg, which was much frequented by pilgrims, and was regarded by the people with a veneration no less national than religious, was, by order of the Lords Justices, dug up and destroyed.[^[71]]

These oppressive proceedings were, no doubt, acceptable to the English Council; but in other respects the administration of the Lords Justices could not be considered satisfactory. A Parliament was again promised, and again postponed. By the beginning of 1632 the revenue showed a deficit, the pay of the troops was in arrear, the coast was exposed to the attacks of Moorish pirates, and the public buildings—arsenals, churches, even Dublin Castle itself—were everywhere in decay. The voluntary contribution would soon be at an end, and it was unlikely that the Catholics, who had begun to suspect the king’s sincerity in the matter of the Graces, would consent to renew it. Their lordships could think of no means of meeting expenses except the enforcement of the shilling fines.[^[72]]

Such was the condition of affairs when Thomas Wentworth assumed the government of Ireland. His appointment bears date January, 1632, but it was not until the middle of the succeeding year that he proceeded to Dublin.[^[73]] Before leaving England he had contrived with characteristic dexterity to relieve the financial embarrassments of the Government. Cork and Loftus had, as we have seen, been anxious to exact the recusancy fines. Wentworth took care that their wishes should be generally known. He then despatched an agent, himself a Catholic, to negociate secretly with his co-religionists. This gentleman informed the leading recusants that the Lord Deputy was averse to persecution, but that, if no other means could be devised for the relief of the king’s necessities, he would be compelled to act upon the Lords Justices’ advice. Alarmed at this intimation and eager to conciliate one who might prove either a dangerous enemy or a most valuable friend, the Catholics agreed to levy an additional “voluntary contribution” of £20,000. The Protestants, who were wholly dependent on the Government, did not venture to resist.[^[74]]

The sum thus obtained was sufficient for his immediate requirements; but, in order that the finances might be placed on a satisfactory basis, it was necessary that the Irish Parliament, which had not met for nearly twenty years, should be again summoned. The step was certain to be popular, and Wentworth was eager to take it; but it was difficult to convince Charles, whose experience of Parliamentary government in England had not been happy, of its wisdom. The Lord Deputy, who prided himself, not without reason, upon his powers of parliamentary management, explained with great frankness the course which he intended to adopt. As soon as the Houses met they were to be informed that business would be extended over two sessions; the first of which was to be devoted to the relief of the king’s necessities, and the second to “the enacting of all such profitable and wholesome laws as a moderate and good people may expect from a wise and gracious king.” With the hope of a ratification of the Graces thus dangled before them, the Commons might be relied upon to grant supplies for the next three years; and when the money had been voted the Government could fulfil as much or as little of their engagements as they found convenient. His Majesty had no reason to be afraid of any dangerous exhibition of Parliamentary independence. Apart from the restrictions imposed by Poynings’ Act, which made the Irish Parliament a mere instrument for registering the decrees of the English Privy Council, that body was so constituted as to be wholly at the mercy of the Castle. In the Upper House the bishops and the English adventurers who had been ennobled during the preceding reign gave the Government a permanent majority over the old national aristocracy. The management of the Lower House would be more difficult; but Wentworth undertook to secure a majority by tampering with the elections as Chichester had done. In one respect his task differed from Chichester’s. In 1613 the entire body of the Protestants had been on the side of the Government, and the Lord Deputy had been able to make sure of a majority by multiplying boroughs wherever the colonists predominated. Since that date the breach between the court party and the Puritans had grown wider, and a large proportion of the new settlers were now scarcely less hostile to the administration than the Catholics. Wentworth had accordingly determined so to manage the elections “as that neither the recusants nor yet the Protestants shall appear considerably more one than the other, holding them as much as may be upon an equal balance”; and at the same time to procure the return from some of the smaller and more corrupt constituencies of “captains and officers, who, having immediate dependence upon the Crown, may sway the business betwixt the two parties which way they please.”[^[75]] With many misgivings Charles consented to the experiment. “As to that hydra,” he wrote, “take good heed, for you know I have here found it cunning as well as malicious.” “I fear,” he added, with an obvious recollection of his unlucky promises, “they have some ground to demand more than is fit for me to give.”[^[76]]

In July, 1634, the Parliament met and the Lord Deputy’s forecast was justified. The Catholic and Protestant parties were almost equal; the officers turned the scale in favour of the latter. The result had not been arrived at without some difficulty. The priests, who apprehended fresh penalties against their religion, had exerted themselves on behalf of the Catholic candidates. Wentworth put his foot down upon a policy which threatened to divide the country into a Catholic and a Protestant party, a thing, he wrote, “to be avoided as much as may be, unless our numbers were the greater.” The sheriff of Dublin “carried himself mutinously,” or, in plain English, refused to foist the Lord Deputy’s nominees upon an unwilling constituency. The over-scrupulous official was dragged before the Castle Chamber, fined, and deprived of his office; a successor of more accommodating principles was found, and his Excellency’s protégés declared duly elected.[^[77]]

On the 15th the Lord Deputy addressed the Houses, warning them with characteristic arrogance against imitating the factious conduct of the late English Parliament. On the 16th his secretary, Wandesford, moved for a grant of six subsidies, which were immediately voted. On the 2nd of August the Houses petitioned for the introduction of the promised Bills, and were informed that they would be considered in the following session. On the 21st Parliament was prorogued.[^[78]]

It met again in November. During the recess Wentworth had submitted to his master his opinion of the course which it was expedient to adopt with reference to the Graces. Some were to be granted immediately, some others postponed; the two most important—that which established a prescriptive right against the claims of the Crown, and that which supplied the defects in the Connaught titles—were to be firmly and finally refused. If his Majesty was unwilling to incur the odium of so flagrant a breach of faith, the Lord Deputy was ready to take upon himself the responsibility of having intervened between the people and the royal favour.[^[79]] To this magnanimous proposal Charles assented with characteristic alacrity.[^[80]] On November 27th Wentworth announced the withdrawal of the expected concessions. The announcement provoked an outburst of indignation, which was the more formidable because, “by the negligence of the Protestant party,” the Government were for the moment in a minority. The Catholics, assisted by some discontented Protestants, notably by Sir Piers Crosby, a distinguished soldier and a member of the Privy Council, “rejected hand over head all that was offered them by his Majesty and the State. The Bill against bigamy they would not should be engrossed; the law for correction houses they absolutely cast out; the law against fraudulent conveyances and to secure purchasers against the practised cozenage of the natives here they would have none of; a law for the bailments tasted not with them; the burgesses that served for the new boroughs, being most of them Protestants, they questioned, as not having rights to sit there. The statutes of uses and wills we durst not adventure a reading unto, for fear some blemish might be put upon them by these men, that in all these things never gave or answered reason, but plainly let us see their wills were set together to refuse all, but to refute nothing.”

Wentworth acted with characteristic promptitude. Crosby was deprived of his place at the Privy Council, the absent members were ordered to resume their attendance, and a ministerial majority was again secured. Within little more than a fortnight the Bills which the Lord Deputy desired had been carried, and the Parliament was once more prorogued.

In the following year two other short sessions were held, and many wise and useful laws enacted with the general concurrence of all parties. The Lord Deputy was anxious that the Parliament should be continued. The House of Commons, he wrote, was “very well composed”; there was a Protestant majority “clearly and fully for the King,” and the recusants could be coerced into voting as the Government dictated by an intimation that the majority would otherwise be used “to pass upon them all the laws of England concerning religion.” If there was a dissolution it might not be possible again to manage the elections so successfully.[^[81]] Charles, however, in whose heart his English experience still rankled, was of opinion that, supplies once voted, the sooner a Parliament was sent about its business the better. “Parliaments,” he wrote, “are of the nature of cats, they ever grow curst with age, so that, if you will have good of them, put them off handsomely when they come to any age, for young ones are ever most tractable.”[^[82]] The Lord Deputy was obliged to submit, and the Parliament was dissolved.

As soon as the revenue had been placed on a satisfactory basis Wentworth began to turn his attention to the two great measures for which his Irish administration is chiefly famous—the Plantation of Connaught and the reform of the English Church in Ireland. It was to the latter subject that his attention was first directed. It was certainly high time that something should be done. It is difficult to say which stood in more urgent need of improvement—the material condition of the churches or the morals of the clergy. In a letter to Laud, Wentworth graphically sums up the situation: “An unlearned clergy, which have not so much as the outward form of churchmen to cover themselves with, nor their persons anyway reverenced or protected; the churches unbuilt; the parsonage and vicarage houses utterly ruined; the people untaught through the non-residency of the clergy, occasioned by the unlimited shameful numbers of spiritual promotions with cure of souls, which they hold by commendams; the rites and ceremonies of the Church run over without all decency of habit, order, or gravity, in the course of their service; the possessions of the Church to a great proportion in lay hands; the bishops aliening their very principal houses and demesnes to their children, to strangers, farming out their jurisdiction to mean and unworthy persons; the Popish titulars exercising the whilst a foreign jurisdiction much greater than theirs; the schools, which might be a means to season the youth in virtue and religion, either ill-provided, ill-governed for the most part, or, which is worse, applied sometimes underhand to the maintenance of Popish school-masters: lands given to these charitable uses, and that in a bountiful proportion, especially by King James of ever-blessed memory, dissipated, leased forth for little or nothing, concealed, contrary to all conscience and the excellent purposes of the founder: the college here, which should be the seminary of arts and civility in the elder sort, extremely out of order, partly by means of their statutes, which must be amended, and partly under the government of a weak provost: all the monies raised for charitable uses converted to private benefices: many patronages unjustly and by practice gotten from the Crown.”[^[83]]

There is abundant evidence that this disgraceful picture was not in the least over-coloured. Bedell, writing to Laud four years previously, informed his correspondent that the parish churches were “all in a manner ruined and unroofed and unrepaired,” and that his diocese contained only “seven or eight ministers of good sufficiency, and which is no small cause of the continuance of the people in Popery still, English: which have not the tongue of the people, nor can perform any divine offices, or converse with them: and which hold, many of them, two, three, four or more vicarages apiece: even the clerkships themselves are in like manner conferred upon the English: and sometimes two or three or more upon one man, and ordinarily bought and sold, or let to farm.”[^[84]] Even in 1638, in spite of the vigorous efforts of the Lord Deputy, Leslie, Bishop of Down, found the clergy generally negligent and disorderly, and the churches “kept no better than hog-styes.”[^[85]]

But even these were not in Wentworth’s eyes the most serious of the abuses with which he had to deal. A Protestant Church established and maintained by the civil power in the midst of an intensely Catholic people inclined by an inevitable law towards an extreme and fanatical form of Protestantism. It is not, therefore, surprising that the Irish articles, which had been drawn up by Usher, then professor of divinity in Trinity College, Dublin, and adopted by Convocation in 1615, should have been decidedly more puritanical in tone than the Thirty-nine Articles of the English Church.[^[86]] “I doubt much,” wrote Bramhall, “whether the clergy be very orthodox.”[^[87]] At the same time, a great number of benefices continued to be held by those whom the Lord Deputy and the English Primate regarded as schismatics. On the one hand the Catholic priesthood not only continued to exercise their functions in contempt of penalties which it was practically impossible to enforce, but remained in many places in possession of the churches.[^[88]] On the other hand, the Scotch settlers “brought with them,” in the words of an Anglican historian, “such a stock of Puritanism, such a contempt of bishops, such a neglect of the public liturgy and other divine offices of the Church, that there was nothing less to be found amongst them than the government and forms of worship established in the Church of England.”[^[89]] Ministers hostile to the doctrines and discipline of the Establishment had been frequently introduced into livings after an irregular ordination by the influence of lay patrons and the connivance of puritanical bishops, and threatened to give at least as much trouble to the ecclesiastical authorities as the Catholics.[^[90]] Attacked by Roman Catholics on the one hand and by Presbyterians on the other, the English Church in Ireland was still more cruelly despoiled by the rapacious oligarchy who yielded her a nominal allegiance. In the words of Bramhall’s biographer, there was not one diocese in the province of Cashel that had not “the marks of the sacrilegious paw upon it.”[^[91]] The ecclesiastical courts, whose duty it was to remedy these evils were in the hands of unprincipled officials, who did little save plunder Catholics and Protestants with complete impartiality. “Among all the impediments to the work of God amongst us,” Bedell wrote to Laud, “there is not any greater than the abuse of ecclesiastical jurisdiction.”[^[92]] Bedell himself waged an unsparing war upon abuses of all sorts; but he got little support from his brethren. Archbishop Usher sympathised, but was too timid to swim against the stream.[^[93]] The majority of the bishops thought of nothing but their pockets.[^[94]]

To this scandalous state of things Wentworth was fully determined to put an end. His efforts to abolish pluralities and absenteeism, to repair the churches, and to restore to the clergy the tithes which had been dishonestly appropriated by laymen deserve high praise. But he had another and less creditable object in view. He wished to drive both the Puritan settlers and the native Catholics into the pale of the Established Church, and at the same time to force that Church itself into closer conformity to the English model. But if, in common with most, if not all, of his contemporaries, he had scant reverence for the rights of conscience, he was at least wise enough to see that the internal reform of the Establishment must precede the attempt to enforce conformity. It was idle, he told Laud, to inflict penalties for recusancy “where as yet there is scarcely a church to receive or an able minister to teach the people.”[^[95]]

At a very early period of his administration Wentworth’s zeal for ecclesiastical reform involved him in the first of those personal disputes with powerful and corrupt officials which contributed far more than his oppressive treatment of the native Irish to discredit his administration in England. Lord Cork, who never allowed his Protestant enthusiasm to interfere with strict attention to his pecuniary interests, had contrived to appropriate property belonging to the diocese of Lismore of the annual value of £1,600. He was summoned before the Castle Chamber, and not merely compelled to disgorge his ill-gotten gains, but sentenced to a heavy fine. Laud, with whom Wentworth kept up a constant correspondence on the affairs of the Church, expressed his satisfaction in very unepiscopal language.[^[96]]

A second quarrel between Cork and Wentworth arose, like the former, out of the ecclesiastical policy of the Lord Deputy. The earl had erected a stately tomb of black marble, containing the remains of his wife, in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, on the spot where the high altar had once stood, where, as Laud thought, it ought still to stand. To an English High Churchman such a proceeding seemed a wanton sacrilege. Urged on by the archbishop, and probably only too pleased at the opportunity of inflicting a fresh annoyance on his enemy, Wentworth caused the unsightly monument to be removed to a less sacred place.[^[97]] In both these cases the Lord Deputy’s action was in full accordance with the general principles of his policy; but the pertinacity with which Cork had opposed his measures in the Council had probably some share in exciting him to severity against that too acquisitive peer.

St. Patrick’s was not the only church with whose internal arrangements the Lord Deputy felt called upon to interfere. He laboured, not always successfully, to introduce into the public offices of the Church a decency and a solemnity which had been too seldom seen, and at the same time to force upon the clergy practices which would now be called ritualistic. He was no fanatic; but he knew that uneducated men are more readily influenced by ceremonies which appeal to their imagination than by dogmas which they do not understand; and he probably thought that the difficulty of inducing the Catholics to conform to the established religion would be lessened if its form of worship did not perceptibly differ from that to which they had been previously accustomed.

But it is by his dealings with the Convocation of 1634 that Wentworth’s ecclesiastical policy must be chiefly judged. In England it had been the custom from very early times for a Convocation of the clergy to be summoned simultaneously with Parliament. In Ireland for many centuries there had been no such custom. The division between the English and Irish clergy before the Reformation, the prevalence of recusancy among the priesthood since that epoch may perhaps account for this omission. In 1560, it is true, Sussex had received instructions from Elizabeth “signifying her pleasure for a general meeting of the clergy of Ireland and the establishment of the Protestant religion through the several dioceses of that kingdom.”[^[98]] But it was not until the reign of James the First, when the reformed Church had been, nominally at least, extended through all parts of the island, that the first formal Convocation of the Irish clergy was held.[^[99]] The ecclesiastical assembly which was then convened was modelled upon the Convocation of Canterbury, with this difference, that, whereas the latter body represented only the clergy of a single province, the Irish Convocation contained delegates from all parts of the kingdom. It was by this body that the Irish Articles, to which allusion has already been made, had been adopted; and Wentworth now resolved to make use of the same machinery to procure their reform. In accordance with the precedent which had been set twenty years earlier, Convocation was again summoned simultaneously with Parliament. Before it assembled Wentworth informed Archbishop Usher, the compiler of the older formula, of the course which he intended to adopt. Out of respect for the character and station of the Archbishop, the Lord Deputy would not insist on the formal abrogation of the Irish Articles. He proposed instead that they should be tacitly but effectively superseded by the adoption of the Articles of the Church of England—a course for which the expediency of bringing the two Churches into closer harmony afforded a decent pretext. To this suggestion, Usher, who was not remarkable for moral courage, gave a reluctant assent.[^[100]] In November their reverences assembled, and were informed that it was the Lord Deputy’s pleasure that they should adopt not only the Articles, but the Canons of the English Church. The upper house, under the presidency of Usher, instantly complied. The representatives of the inferior clergy were less submissive. Instead of adopting the entire body of English Canons, as the Lord Deputy had desired, they referred them to a committee, who divided the Canons into two parts, expressing their approval of some, and setting others aside for further consideration. Into the first Canon, which required subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles, they inserted a clause declaring that these were not intended to supersede the Articles already in use. It was some time before Wentworth, whose attention was wholly engrossed by the management of the House of Commons, found leisure to enquire into their proceedings.[^[101]] When he was informed of the attitude which they had adopted his anger knew no bounds. How he dealt with the refractory clergy shall be related in his own words:—

“I instantly sent for Dean Andrews, that reverend clerk, who sat forsooth in the chair at this committee, requiring him to bring along the book of canons so noted in the margin, together with the draught he was to present that afternoon to the House. This he obeyed; but when I came to open the book and run over the deliberandums in the margin, I confess I was not so much moved since I came into Ireland. I told him certainly not a Dean of Limerick, but an Ananias, had sat in the chair of that committee; however, sure I was an Ananias had been there in spirit, if not in body, with all the fraternities and conventicles of Amsterdam; that I was ashamed and scandalised with it above measure. I therefore said he should leave the book and draught with me; and I did command him, upon his allegiance, that he should report nothing to the House from that committee till he heard again from me.

“Being thus nettled, I gave present directions for a meeting, and warned the Primate, the Bishops of Meath, Kilmore, Raphoe and Derry, together with Dean Leslie, the prolocutor, and all those who had been of the committee, to be with me the next morning.

“Then I publicly told them how unlike Churchmen, who owed canonical obedience to their superiors, they had proceeded in their committee; how unheard a part it was for a few petty clerks to presume to make Articles of Faith without the privity or consent of State or bishop; what a spirit of Brownism and contradiction I observed in their deliberandums, as if, indeed, they purposed at once to take away all government and order forth of the Church, and to leave every man to choose his own high place where liked him best. But these heady and arrogant courses they must know I was not to endure; nor, if they were disposed to be frantic in this dead and cold season of the year, would I suffer them either to be mad in the Convocation or in their pulpits.”

Terrified out of their wits by the language of the overbearing Deputy, the clergy made a hasty and ignominious submission, and accepted the English Articles without further discussion. To punish Dean Andrews, whom he regarded as mainly responsible for the opposition, Wentworth promoted him to the See of Ferns, the emoluments of which were considerably less than those which he had enjoyed as Dean of Limerick.[^[102]]

At the same time the University of Dublin, which from the date of its foundation had been a hotbed of Puritanism, was made to feel the reforming vigour of the Lord Deputy. The “weak provost” already referred to—Robert Usher, a relative of the Primate—was, like Andrews, politely kicked upstairs; and his successor, Chappell, a man after Laud’s own heart, proceeded to remodel the college in accordance with the highest standard of Anglican orthodoxy.[^[103]]

One other innovation of a more serious character was made. Immediately after the dissolution—for the step was too unpopular to be taken while Parliament was sitting—Wentworth proceeded on his own authority to erect a court of high commission in Dublin similar to that already existing in England, “conceiving the use of it might be very great to countenance the despised state of the clergy, to support ecclesiastical courts and officers, to provide for the maintenance of the clergy and for their residence, either by themselves or able curates, to bring the people here to a conformity in religion, and, in the way of all these, to raise perhaps a good revenue to the Crown.”[^[104]]

Parliament and Convocation being both dissolved, Wentworth was at leisure to devote his energies to the great business of his administration—the establishment of an English colony in Connaught. It would be difficult to say which was the more scandalous, the pretext which the Lord Deputy put forward for this measure or the steps by which he attempted to carry it into effect. More than four hundred years earlier Henry the Third, with that princely generosity with which sovereigns have so often disposed of the property of their subjects, had granted the entire province to Richard de Burgh, with the exception of five cantreds about Athlone, which were reserved to the Crown. De Burgh had succeeded in making good his claim to a great part of the province, corresponding to the modern counties of Galway and Mayo; the rest continued in the possession of the aboriginal inhabitants. By the death of the last Earl of Ulster about a century afterwards the title to these lands passed to his daughter Elizabeth, then an infant; but the actual possession remained with his collateral heirs, the MacWilliams, ancestors of the Earls of Clanricarde and Mayo. By the marriage of Elizabeth de Burgh to Lionel, Duke of Clarence, the title to the Connaught estates of her ancestors had descended lineally to Edward the Fourth; and the actual occupants, whether of native or Anglo-Norman descent, were pronounced by the Lord Deputy to be intruders on the possessions of the Crown. Neither the prescriptive right derived from an undisturbed occupation of centuries, nor the recent promises of James and Charles, were suffered to constitute a barrier against this monstrous claim. The Articles concluded with Perrott were pronounced invalid on the plea that that statesman had exceeded his instructions; the patents granted by James on the ground of the technical flaw already noticed.[^[105]]

Shortly after the dissolution a Royal Commission was issued “for inquiry into defective titles;” and in July the Lord Deputy set out for Connaught to superintend the work of robbery in person. The concurrence of the judges had already been ensured by promising their lordships a commission of four shillings in the pound upon the profits of the plantation; “which, upon observation,” Wentworth afterwards declared, “I find to be the best given that ever was. For now they do intend it with a care and diligence such as if it were their own private. And most certain, the gaining to themselves every four shillings once paid shall better your revenue ever after at least five pounds.”[^[106]] Great pains were taken to seek out jurors who “might give furtherance in finding a title for the King.” The sheriffs were instructed to select “gentlemen of the best estates and understanding,” whose verdict in favour of the royal title would carry the more weight, since they would be “as much concerned in their own particulars as any other;” while on the other hand they would be able to “answer the King a good round sum in the Castle Chamber if they should prevaricate.”

The Commission was first opened in Roscommon, where Wentworth addressed a jury, composed as he had directed, in a highly characteristic speech. His Majesty, he said, desired only to make them “a civil and rich people;” and a plantation was necessary in order to accomplish this benevolent purpose. He did not intend “to take from them anything that was justly theirs, but in truth to bestow amongst them a good part of that which was his own.” He “came not to sue them to find for him as needing any power of theirs to vindicate his own right, for without them, where his right is so plain, he could not in justice have been denied possession upon an information of intrusion. The Court in an ordinary way of Exchequer must have granted it on the first motion of the Attorney-General.” To the King, therefore, their decision was a matter of indifference: with a verdict, or without it, he intended to take their property; “the path to his right lay elsewhere, open and fair before him.” But, as regarded their own interests, “as one that must ever wish prosperity to their nation, I desired them, first, to descend into their own consciences and take them to counsel, and there they should find the evidence for the Crown clear and conclusive. Next, to beware how they appeared resolved or obstinate against so manifest a truth, or how they let slip forth of their hands the means to weave themselves into the royal thoughts and care of his Majesty, through a cheerful and ready acknowledgment of his right and a due and full submission thereunto. So, then, if they would be inclined to truth and do best for themselves, they would undoubtedly find the title for the King. If they were passionately resolved to go over all bounds to their own will, and, without respects at all to their own good, to do that which were simply best for his Majesty, then I should advise them roughly and pertinaciously to deny to find any title at all. And there I left them to chant together, as they call it, over the evidence.”[^[107]]

Owing partly to this adroit mixture of chicanery and menace, partly, as it would seem, to private negotiations between the Lord Deputy and individual jurymen,[^[108]] a verdict acknowledging the royal title was returned. The juries of Sligo and Mayo were equally complacent; but in Galway, as Wentworth had anticipated, and indeed desired, considerable opposition was made. The county was the headquarters of the De Burghs; and the Earl of Clanricarde and his dependents were understood to be very hostile to the proposed plantation. “But whether it be so or not,” Wentworth wrote to Charles: “I could wish their county would stand out, for I am well assured it shall turn to your Majesty’s advantage if they do. For certain it is a county which lies out at a corner by itself, and all the inhabitants wholly natives and Papists, hardly an Englishman among them, whom they keep out with all the industry in the world; and therefore it would be a great security if they were thoroughly lined with English indeed.” His wishes were gratified. Although the royal title was made out in such manner as appeared “most just, honourable, and unquestionable to all equal-minded men,” the jury “obstinately and perversely refused” to find for the Crown. For this obstinacy, Wentworth offered three explanations. First, “there is scarce a Protestant freeholder to be found to serve his Majesty on this or any other occasion in this country, being in a manner altogether compounded of Papists.” Secondly, “the counsellors at law, being all of them recusants, showed themselves over-busy even to faction, in this service against the King.” Lastly, the Earl of Clanricarde had exerted the influence derived from his “great estate” and “far-spread kindred” to frustrate the plantation. In support of this last assertion, Wentworth appealed to the following facts. First, John Donnellan, the Earl’s steward, had received messengers with letters from the Earl out of England; “and, whereas we were certainly informed that divers gentlemen were resolved to have acknowledged the King’s title, upon these men’s arrival they altered their resolutions, and since stand in opposition thereunto.” Secondly, Lord Clanmorris, a nephew of the Earl, “appeared openly before us to countenance the opposition of the country.” Thirdly, Richard Burke, of Derrymacoghlan, another nephew of the Earl and a member of the jury, had pulled a fellow juror by the sleeve, “labouring to divert the said juror from declaring that his conscience led him to find for his Majesty.” Fourthly, “the Earl’s principal servant and steward, John Donnellan, being one of the jury, we saw plainly that he guided the rest which way he pleased.” Fifthly and lastly, “most of the jurors are of the Earl’s kindred or near alliance, or his dependents.”

Wentworth was not the man to be deterred by an adverse verdict. He had warned the jury that, if they refused to find the verdict which he desired, it would be the worse for them, and he now showed that this had been no idle menace. D’Arcy, the Sheriff, whom the Lord Deputy held responsible for what he regarded as a gross miscarriage of justice, was imprisoned and fined £1,000 “for returning an insufficient and, as we conceived, a packed jury.” The jurors themselves were summoned before the Castle Chamber and fined £4,000 each. A proclamation was next issued, by which the other landowners of the county were recommended to disassociate themselves from the recalcitrant jurors, and save a portion of their estates by acknowledging the royal title. The Court of Exchequer, by Wentworth’s direction, issued an order “to seize for his Majesty the lands of the jurors, and of all that should not lay hold on his Majesty’s grace offered them by the proclamation.” With Clanricarde himself the Lord Deputy insisted that no terms would be made. The Earl and his son were at this time in London; and there Wentworth advised that they should be detained until the work of spoliation had been carried out. Wentworth further advised that the fortifications of Galway should be repaired, and that that city and Athenry should be strongly garrisoned while the plantations were proceeding.[^[109]] Charles signified his concurrence.[^[110]]

And now comes the mysterious part of the business. The Commission sat in 1635; the Lord Deputy continued to hold office until the spring of 1641; yet the plantation was never carried out. No satisfactory explanation has yet been offered for this omission. It is certain that, so long as Wentworth lived, the scheme was never definitely abandoned.[^[111]] In all probability the task was found to be more difficult than had been anticipated. The settlement of Ulster had been a simple matter in comparison. In the northern province Mountjoy had prepared the way for the planters by exterminating the best part of the original inhabitants; and the flight of the earls had left the scanty remnant destitute of their natural leaders. In Connaught, which had been comparatively peaceful during the Elizabethan wars, there was a numerous and warlike population, not yet cowed by famine and massacre, to be reckoned with; and their leader, Lord Clanricarde, a great English noble as well as a great Irish chieftain, could exert more influence at the Court of England than any “mere Irishman” could have done. These considerations may have induced Wentworth to proceed slowly and with caution. During 1636 and the two following years the province continued to be strongly garrisoned, and a few English settlers seem to have been introduced; but they were very few, and Connaught was still almost wholly in Catholic hands when the troubles that broke out in Scotland compelled the Lord Deputy to turn his attention elsewhere.[^[112]]

During the next three years Wentworth devoted himself to securing for his master a revenue independent of Parliamentary control. With this object, inquisitions into defective titles were held not only in Connaught, but in every part of the island. No fresh plantations were made; but any landlord in whose title the smallest technical flaw could be discovered was compelled to pay heavily for a fresh patent. These exactions pressed hard upon natives and colonists alike. The former had generally inherited their lands according to some Irish custom not recognised by English lawyers; while many of the latter had neglected to fulfil the onerous and intricate conditions imposed upon them by the Articles of the plantations. The O’Byrnes of Wicklow, who had already been so harshly treated, were compelled to pay £15,000 before they recovered their estates.[^[113]] The London companies were prosecuted in the Star Chamber on a charge of mismanaging their Ulster property, and condemned to forfeiture and a fine of £70,000.[^[114]]

At the same time the Lord Deputy exerted himself with characteristic energy to develop the material resources of the country. The extraordinary advances which Irish commerce made under his government have been acknowledged by historians the most hostile to his memory.[^[115]] In one respect, it is true, his commercial policy deserves severe blame. He found in Ireland, on his arrival, the beginnings of a flourishing woollen manufacture; and this manufacture, out of deference to the jealous fears of English traders, he promptly proceeded to destroy. The injury thus inflicted was more than compensated by the enormous development of the linen trade; a development which must be ascribed in large measure to the judicious and munificent patronage of Wentworth. He imported great quantities of flax from Holland at his own expense; introduced skilled workmen from France and the Low Countries; and did so much for the improvement of this industry that, although it had existed in Ireland at least as early as the fifteenth century, he is still spoken of in popular tradition as its founder.[^[116]]

In spite, however, of the increasing prosperity of the country, the Lord Deputy continued to be an object of aversion to every section of the community. His unpopularity was due in almost equal measure to the merits and to the faults of his administration. The more violent Protestants were indignant at the introduction of the English Articles, as well as at Wentworth’s persistent refusal to exact the recusancy fines. The Catholics were kept in constant alarm by the inquiries into defective titles, and by the penal laws, which, though their execution was temporarily suspended, the Lord Deputy, as they were probably aware, was fully resolved to enforce, as soon as he should feel able to do so with impunity.[^[117]] At the same time a crowd of rapacious officials, who had enriched themselves under the government of his incompetent predecessor, were exasperated by his vigorous attempts to repress jobbery and extortion. For this at least must be acknowledged to Wentworth’s honour, that, if he was a tyrant, he suffered no tyranny but his own.

The hostility of these men proved far more injurious to the Lord Deputy than the indignation of the native gentry. Of his quarrel with Lord Cork I have already spoken. His treatment of two other officials was made the subject of still harsher criticism. At the beginning of his administration Wentworth had been opposed by a majority of the Irish Council, but supported by a minority led by Lord Chancellor Loftus and Lord Mountnorris, both conspicuous for their hostility to his predecessor.[^[118]] Within a very few years he had made both these men his bitter enemies. Mountnorris, when Wentworth took office, was Vice-Treasurer, and was believed by Lord Cork, then Treasurer, to have been guilty of gross mismanagement, if not of actual malversation.[^[119]] Wentworth was not as a rule disposed to pay much attention to Cork’s statements; but misappropriation of public moneys was the last thing which he felt inclined to tolerate; and he instituted an inquiry which resulted in the conviction of Mountnorris, not, indeed, of personal corruption, but of scandalous negligence in tolerating the corruption of his subordinates.[^[120]] Although Mountnorris was not at once deprived of his office he evidently considered himself aggrieved, and thenceforth intrigued persistently against the Lord Deputy. In the spring of 1635 the quarrel came to a head. A younger brother of Mountnorris, an officer in Wentworth’s own regiment, was guilty of some trivial breach of military discipline. He was rebuked by Wentworth, and answered with an impertinent gesture. The Lord Deputy, whose naturally choleric temper was at this time aggravated by an attack of gout, struck him lightly with his cane, telling him that, if the offence was repeated, “he would lay him over the pate.” A few days later, at a levée at Dublin Castle, a gentleman-in-waiting, who was also related to Mountnorris, contrived to overturn a stool on the Lord Deputy’s gouty foot. At a dinner party given not long afterwards by the Lord Chancellor, the occurrence was discussed, and Mountnorris hazarded an opinion that it had not been entirely accidental. “Perhaps,” said he, “it was done in revenge of that public affront that the Lord Deputy had done me formerly. But,” he added, “he has a brother who would not take such a revenge.”[^[121]]

What Mountnorris may have meant it is impossible to say. In all probability he meant nothing, for the words were uttered after dinner, and he was not a man of abstemious habits. Be that as it may, he had soon reason to rue his imprudence. His words were repeated to the Lord Deputy, probably by Adam Loftus the younger, who was anxious to succeed him as Vice-Treasurer. Wentworth, who had previously been in communication with the king on the subject of Mountnorris’s financial irregularities, now wrote to request his Majesty’s permission to bring the Vice-Treasurer before a court-martial on the monstrous charge of inciting to a mutiny in the army. The permission was granted in July,[^[122]] but it was not until six months later that the trial was held. The delay may have been due to the affairs of Connaught, which left the Lord Deputy little leisure to prosecute a personal quarrel; but it is also possible that Wentworth did not intend to proceed further in the matter unless fresh provocation was given. In the autumn, unfortunately for himself, Mountnorris engaged in an intrigue which kindled afresh the smouldering anger of the Lord Deputy. He proposed to the king an iniquitous scheme of taxation, which would, if it had been adopted, have increased his Majesty’s revenue from £8,000 to £20,000.[^[123]] Wentworth, eager as he undoubtedly was “to raise a good revenue for the Crown,” was wise enough to understand that there is a point beyond which taxation cannot advantageously be pushed. He also knew his master quite well enough to feel sure that the permanent interest of the country would have little weight with him against the prospect of an immediate pecuniary gain. He resolved to crush Mountnorris without delay.

On December 12th, the unfortunate officer was summoned to a council of war at Dublin Castle. On his arrival he found several other persons present, but no one could inform him of the purpose for which their attendance was required. Wentworth presently arrived and told the company that it would be their duty to hold a court-martial on Lord Mountnorris, whose language at the Lord Chancellor’s dinner-party constituted a breach of two of the articles of war by which the army was governed. By the 41st article it was ordered that no man should “give any disgraceful words or commit any act to the disgrace of any person in the army or garrison, or any part thereof, upon pain of imprisonment, public disarming, and banishment from the army”; by the 13th that “no man should offer any violence, or contemptuously disobey his commander, or do any act or speak any words which are like to breed any mutiny in the army or garrison, or impeach the obeying of the general or principal officer’s directions, upon pain of death.” The words, “a brother who would not take such a revenge” were intended, according to the Lord Deputy’s interpretation, as an instigation to young Annesley to revenge himself in some more violent fashion than by the mere dropping of a footstool.

Mountnorris was stunned by this unexpected blow. He could neither deny the words imputed to him, nor offer any plausible explanation of them. The court, after a short deliberation, returned a verdict of guilty; and Mountnorris was sentenced “to be shot to death or to lose his head at the pleasure of the General.” Wentworth, who had been present at the proceedings but had taken no part in them, then addressed the prisoner and told him that he need be under no apprehensions so far as the capital sentence was concerned. “I had rather,” he said, “lose my hand than you should lose your head.” Mountnorris was kept for a short time in prison, deprived of his office of Vice-Treasurer, and dismissed from the army.[^[124]]

These oppressive proceedings added yet another to the numerous enemies of Wentworth. Lord Cork, who had been compelled to disgorge the plundered revenues of the Church, and Lord Wilmot, who had been disgraced for embezzling the property of the Crown,[^[125]] were already intriguing to procure his recall. With greater justice the De Burghs complained of his severity to the Galway jury. The Earl of Clanricarde was lately dead; and, though he was certainly an old man, his end was generally believed to have been hastened by vexation at the tyranny of the Lord Deputy.[^[126]] D’Arcy, the sheriff of Galway, had also died not long after his committal to prison; and his death too was laid at Wentworth’s door.[^[127]] By the beginning of the following year the outcry against him had become so loud that he found it advisable to proceed in person to London to justify himself before the king. He pointed with a not unjust pride to the undoubted reforms which he had effected in the government of Ireland. He had found the country on the verge of bankruptcy; he had established a large and rapidly-increasing revenue, and that without resorting to the dangerous and unpopular expedient of exacting the recusancy fines. He had transformed the Irish army from a disorderly rabble into a disciplined and efficient force; had suppressed piracy; and had developed the material resources of the island. He had set his foot upon the jobbery of the Dublin officials, and had done something, if not much, to improve the scandalous condition of the Established Church. His most arbitrary acts had been committed in his master’s interests, and were therefore such as that master was only too ready to condone. Charles signified his approval in the most gracious terms. After a few months’ absence Wentworth returned to Ireland with his enemies silenced and his position apparently impregnable.[^[128]]

Rather more than a year after the Mountnorris court-martial Wentworth became involved in a dispute with another official which brought upon him an even fiercer storm of obloquy. In his conflict with Cork he had had the support of Mountnorris and Loftus; he had afterwards had the support of Loftus in his conflict with Mountnorris. The Chancellor himself was destined to be the next victim. In 1621, on the occasion of his son’s marriage to the daughter of Sir Francis Raishe, his lordship had entered into an agreement to settle £300 a year on the bride, and £1,200 in land on her children. Fifteen years afterwards he attempted to evade his obligations, alleging some technical irregularity in the marriage contract. On the petition of Sir John Giffard, the legal representative of the lady’s family, the affair was referred to the Privy Council. Loftus protested that the claim of the Privy Council to interfere was unconstitutional, and that the plaintiff ought to have filed a bill against him in his own court. He would then have been judge as well as defendant—an arrangement which promised obvious advantages to a litigant with a lax conscience and a bad case.[^[129]] But it is dangerous, the old proverb tells us, to prosecute Beelzebub in the court of Hell; and Giffard was no doubt of opinion that it would be equally imprudent to proceed against the Lord Chancellor in the Court of Chancery. The Privy Council decided against Loftus, who renewed his protests—protests which came with a singularly bad grace from one who had repeatedly sat upon the same tribunal upon occasions when there had been much less cogent reasons for a departure from the orthodox method of procedure. He was thereupon deprived of the seals and imprisoned for contempt; but subsequently released on acknowledging the jurisdiction of the court. It does not appear that he had any defence on the merits; but the exalted position of the delinquent and an abominable, but apparently groundless rumour that his daughter-in-law had been Wentworth’s mistress, induced the enemies of the Lord Deputy to give the affair as much prominence as possible.[^[130]]

Notes

[56]. In Harris’s Fiction Unmasked, pp. 53-60, there is an excellent summary of the pretexts put forward for these plantations. The most important papers relating to the plantation of Leitrim will be found in Desiderata Curiosa Hibernica, II., 52-77. Miss Hickson (Ireland in the Seventeenth Century, II., 276-299) has printed some interesting papers relating to the plantations of Longford and Ely O’Carroll. For an Irish view of the plantations, see David Rothe’s Analecta Sacra.

[57]. For the Composition of Connaught compare Roderick O’Flaherty’s Chorographical Description of Iar-Connaught, pp. 309-362, where the articles are given in full; Government of Ireland under Sir John Perrott, pp. 79-86; Rawlinson’s History of Sir John Perrott, p. 149; Wentworth to Coke, August 25, 1635. (Strafford Letters, I., 450-454.) In the Calendar of Irish State Papers, 1615-1625, there are several letters containing suggestions for a plantation of Connaught.

[58]. Docwra to ——, March 3, 1618. (Calendar, 1615-1625, 399.)

[59]. Falkland to Conway, September 11, 1626. (Calendar, 1625-1632, 438.) Falkland, however, had recommended this step even before the death of James. Falkland to the Privy Council, December 11, 1624. (Calendar, 1615-1625, 1324.)

[60]. Diary of the Assembly. (Calendar, 1625-32, 713.)

[61]. Elrington’s Life of Usher, pp. 73-74.

[62]. A Remonstrance presented to his Majesty by the Parliament in June, 1628.

[63]. The Graces in their amended form are given in Wentworth’s letter to Coke, October 6, 1634. (Strafford Letters, I., 312-328.) The earlier draft is printed in the Calendar of State Papers, 1625-1632, 446. The eighth article runs: “The fine of 12d. a Sunday and holiday for not going to church shall be remitted for recusants except in particular cases.”

[64]. Rushworth’s Historical Collections, II., 19.

[65]. These depositions, as well as the report of the Commissioners and Falkland’s defence, are printed in Gilbert’s History of the Confederation and War in Ireland, I., 167-217.

[66]. Proclamation, April 1, 1629. (Rushworth, II., 21.) Similar proclamations had been issued in 1617, 1623, and 1624, but they had had very little effect.

[67]. For the conduct of Archbishop Loftus, see Ware’s Bishops of Ireland and Elrington’s Life of Usher, pp. 6, 115, and for that of some later members of his family Lecky’s History of Ireland, V. 295. With regard to the Chancellor himself, I have collected some evidence in a later part of this paper.

[68]. Lord Cork was the author of an extremely mendacious autobiographical fragment, entitled True Remembrances, which is prefixed to the collected edition of his son’s works. In Wright’s History of Ireland, Bk. V., ch. 21, this remarkable able paper is carefully analysed and its statements compared with the evidence of more trustworthy documents.

[69]. Charles to Wilmot, August 5, 1629. (Calendar, 1625-1632, 1449.) See also with regard to this quarrel the repeated and bitter attacks on Loftus in Lord Cork’s Diary (Lismore Papers, 1st series). The quarrel seems to have originated in the refusal of the Chancellor to decide a lawsuit in Lord Cork’s favour some years earlier.

[70]. Hammond L’Estrange, Annals of the Reign of Charles the First, p. 116. Compare Foxes and Firebrands, pt. 2, p. 71; Wilmot to Dorchester, January 6, 1629-30. (Calendar, 1625-1632, 1570.) “Tharchbishop of Dublin, and the Maior of Dublin, by the direction of vs, the Lords Justices, Ransackt the howse of f. fryer in Cook Street,” Lord Cork’s Diary, December 26, 1629.

[71]. The Catholic University seems to have given particular offence to the Protestant clergy. Thus Bedell, writing to Wentworth, complains that “his Holiness hath erected a new university at Dublin to confront his Majesty’s college there.” (Strafford Letters, I., 147.) The documents relating to the seizure of its property will be found in Mahaffy’s Epoch of Irish History, ch. V.

For an account of St. Patrick’s Purgatory see Richardson’s Folly of Pilgrimages, p. 44, and for its destruction Lord Cork’s Diary, September 8, 1632. In October, 1638, the Queen wrote to Wentworth begging him to allow it to be restored. He declined on the ground that it was “in the midst of the great Scottish plantation.” (Strafford Letters, II., 221, 222.)

[72]. Lords Justices to Wentworth, February 26, 1631-2. (Ibid., I., 67-70.)

[73]. Charles to the Lords Justices, January 12, 1631-2. (Ibid., I., 62-63.) Miss Hickson has quoted a most significant entry from the MS. journal of an Anglo-Irish official: “July 23, 1633. The Lord Viscounte Wentworth came to Ireland to govern ye kingdom: manie men feare.” (Ireland in the Seventeenth Century, I., 52.) Lord Cork expressed his dissatisfaction still more forcibly: “A moste cursed man to all Ireland and to me in particular.” Diary, July 23, 1633.

[74]. Wentworth to Cottington, October 1, 1632. (Strafford Letters, I., 74-77.)

[75]. Wentworth to Charles, April 12, 1634. (Ibid., I., 182-187.)

[76]. Charles to Wentworth, April 17, 1634. (Ibid., I., 233.)

[77]. Wentworth to Coke, June 24, 1634. (Ibid., I., 269, 270.)

[78]. Wentworth to Coke, August 18, 1634. (Ibid., I., 276-282.)

[79]. Wentworth to Coke, October 6, 1634. (Ibid., I., 304-328.)

[80]. “Your last public despatch has given me a great deal of contentment, and especially for keeping off the envy of a necessary negative from me of those unreasonable Graces that that people expected from me.”—Charles to Wentworth, October 23, 1634. (Ibid., I., 331.)

[81]. Wentworth to Coke, December 16, 1634. (Ibid., I., 345-353.) For the proceedings of this Parliament I have also consulted the Irish Commons’ Journals, I., pp. 59-119, but they add very little to our information. For its legislation see Irish Statutes, 10 and 11, Charles I.

[82]. Charles to Wentworth, January 22, 1634-5. (Strafford Letters, I., 365.)

[83]. Wentworth to Laud, January 31, 1633-4. (Ibid., I., 187-189.)

[84]. Bedell to Laud, April I, 1630. (Burnet’s Life of Bedell, pp. 35, 36.)

[85]. A full Confutation of the Covenant, lately sworn and subscribed by many in Scotland: delivered in a speech at the visitation of Down and Connor, September 26, 1638. By Henry Leslie.

[86]. The Irish articles are printed in Elrington’s Life of Usher, Appendix, xxxiii.—L.

[87]. Bramhall to Laud, August 10, 1633. (Collier’s Ecclesiastical History, VIII., 72-75.)

[88]. “Every parish hath its priest, and some two or three apiece; and so their mass-houses also; in some places mass is said in the churches.” Bedell to Laud, April 1, 1630. Compare a report some years earlier on the ecclesiastical state of the province of Armagh, from which long extracts are printed in Mant’s History of the Church of Ireland, I., 395-408.

[89]. Heylin’s History of Presbyterianism, p. 393.

[90]. See the autobiographies of Robert Blair and John Livingston, two of the ministers who obtained benefices by these means; also Adair’s True Narrative of the Rise and Progress of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, 1623-1670; and Dr. Killen’s preface.

[91]. Vesey’s Life of Bramhall.

[92]. Bedell to Laud, August 7, 1630. (Two Lives of William Bedell, pp. 311-314.)

[93]. Clogy’s Life of Bedell, p. 118.

[94]. See much evidence of this in Ware’s Bishops of Ireland.

[95]. Wentworth to Laud, December, 1633. (Strafford Letters, I., 171-173.)

[96]. “My Lord, I did not take you to be so good a physician before as now I see you are; for the truth is, a great many Church cormorants have fed so full upon it that they are fallen into a fever; and for that no physic better than a vomit, if it be given in time; and therefore you have taken a very judicious course to administer one so early to my Lord of Cork. I hope it will do him good, though perchance he thinks not so, for if the fever hang long about him or the rest it will certainly shake either them or their estates in pieces.”—Laud to Wentworth, November 15, 1633. (Ibid., I., 155, 156.)

[97]. Laud to Wentworth, March 11, 1634. (Ibid., I., 211.) See also several letters in the Lismore Papers, 2nd series, and Mason’s History and Antiquities of the Collegiate and Cathedral Church of St. Patrick, pp. liii., liv.

[98]. Ware’s Annals of Ireland, A.D. 1560.

[99]. The best accounts of the Convocations of 1613-15 and 1634-35 are in Elrington’s Life of Usher, pp. 39-49, and 165-187.

[100]. Wentworth to Laud, August 23, 1634. (Strafford Letters, I., 298-301.)

[101]. “The Popish party, growing extreme perverse in the Commons House, and the Parliament thereby in great danger to have been lost in a storm, had so taken up all my thoughts and endeavours that, for five or six days, it was not almost possible for me to take an account how business went among them of the clergy.”—Wentworth to Laud, December 16, 1634. (Ibid., I., 342-345.)

[102]. Ibid.

[103]. Mahaffy’s Epoch of Irish History, ch. VI.

[104]. Wentworth to Laud, January 31, 1633-34. (Strafford Letters, I., 187-189.)

[105]. Brief of his Majesty’s title to Connaught. (Ibid., I., 454-458.) For the history of the settlement of the De Burghs in Connaught compare Matthew Paris, Historia, p. 230, etc.; Annals of Lough Cé; preface to Lord Clanricarde’s Memoirs; The O’Conor Don’s O’Conors of Connaught, pp. 88-95.

[106]. Wentworth to Charles, December 9, 1636. (Strafford Letters, II., 41.)

[107]. Wentworth to Coke, July 14, 1635. (Ibid., I., 442-444.)

[108]. “Sir Lucas Dillon, the foreman of the jury, hath behaved himself with so much discretion and expressed all along so good affections, as I cannot choose but here to mention him, and hereafter to beseech his Majesty he may be remembered when upon the dividing of the lands his own particular come in question. In truth, he deserves to be extraordinarily well dealt withal.”—(Ibid.)

[109]. Wentworth and the Commissioners to Coke, August 25, 1635, and enclosures. (Ibid., I., 450-458.) For the fining of the jury we have Wentworth’s own admission; if his enemies may be believed, they were also “pilloried with loss of ears, bored through the tongue, and marked in the forehead with a hot iron, with other like infamous punishments.”—Irish Commons’ Journals.

[110]. Coke to Wentworth, September 20, 1635. (Strafford Letters, I., 464-465.)

[111]. It was finally abandoned in April, 1641. See Gardiner’s History of England, X., 45, where a letter of the Lords Justices is quoted.

[112]. “The Plantations prove a most laborious work; I could not imagine their march had been so heavy.”—Wentworth to Charles, June 5, 1638. (Strafford Letters, II., 175.) In another letter he recommends that a body of cavalry should be sent into Connaught “as fit lookers-on whilst the plantations are settling.” Wentworth to Coke, August 10, 1638. (Ibid., II., 197-201.) For the influence of Lord Clanricarde in preventing the plantation, see Wentworth to Coke, May 18 and July 9, to Charles, July 9 and August 13, 1639, (Ibid., II., 340, 366-369, 381.)

[113]. Wentworth to Charles, June 5, 1638. (Ibid., II., 175-176.)

[114]. Wentworth has been generally blamed for this sentence, which was one of the principal matters urged against him at his trial; but, though it is evident from several passages in his Letters that he regarded it with approval and was ready to turn it to the King’s advantage, the case had actually been pending for some years before he came to Ireland. See the correspondence between Charles I and the Lords Justices in 1631. (Concise View of the Irish Society. Appendix, pp. 185-188.)

[115]. Reid’s History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, I., 213. Leland’s History of Ireland, III., 40, 41.

[116]. “There was little or no manufacture amongst them, but some small beginnings towards a clothing trade, which I had and so should still discourage all I could, unless otherwise directed by his Majesty and their lordships, in regard, it would trench not only upon the clothings of England, being our staple commodity, so as if they should manufacture their own wools, which grew to very great quantities, we should not only lose the profit we made now by indraping their wools, but his Majesty lose extremely by his Customs, and, in conclusion, it might be feared they would beat us out of the trade itself, by under-selling us, which they were well able to do.”—Wentworth to Wandesford, July 25, 1636. (Strafford Letters, II., 13-23.) For his encouragement of the linen trade see the same letter.

[117]. Wentworth to Coke, November 28, 1636. (Ibid., II., 38-39.)

[118]. Wentworth to Coke, August 3, 1633. (Ibid., I., 97.)

[119]. Townshend’s Life and Letters of the Great Earl of Cork, pp. 180-181.

[120]. Wentworth to Coke, March 25 and April 7, 1635 (Strafford Letters, I., 391, 392, 400-407.)

[121]. Wentworth to Coke, December 15, 1635. (Ibid., I., 497-501.) Rushworth’s Trial of the Earl of Strafford. The account in Clarendon (History of the Great Rebellion, III., 111-114) is inaccurate.

[122]. Charles to Wentworth, July 31, 1635. (Strafford Letters, I., 448.)

[123]. Laud to Wentworth, January 2, 1635-6. (Laud’s Works, VII., 216) and Wentworth’s reply, March 9. (Strafford Letters, I., 517.)

[124]. Wentworth to Coke, December 14 and 15, 1635. (Ibid., I., 497-501.) Sentence on Lord Mountnorris, enclosed in the preceding. Somers Tracts, IV., 202-208. Rushworth’s Trial of the Earl of Strafford, pp. 186-204.

[125]. Coke to Wentworth, October 26, 1635, enclosing Lord Wilmot’s submission. (Strafford Letters, I., 477.)

[126]. “This last packet advertised the death of the Earl of St. Albans, and that it is reported my harsh usage broke his heart. God and your Majesty know my innocency; they might as well have imputed unto me for a crime his being three-score and ten years old.”—Wentworth to Charles, December 5, 1635. (Ibid., 491-493.)

[127]. “I am full of belief they will lay the charge of D’Arcy the sheriff’s death unto me; my arrows are cruel that wound so mortally; but I should be more sorry by much the King should lose his fine.”—Wentworth to Wandesford, July 25, 1636. (Ibid., II., 13-23.)

[128]. Wentworth’s own defence of his administration is contained in the letter to Wandesford quoted in the preceding note.

[129]. “And, forasmuch as relief could only be sought for upon the said agreement in a course of equity, which was most proper to be had in the High Court of Chancery of this kingdom, where his lordship should become both judge and party; therefore, and to the intent justice might be done, he (Giffard) prayed that the said matter might be referred to the Lord Deputy and Council of Ireland to be by them heard and determined.”—Report by Arthur, Earl of Essex, August 18, 1674.

[130]. Report by J. T. Gilbert on the MSS. of the Marquis of Drogheda. (Historical MSS. Commission, 9th report, pp. 293-330.) Clarendon’s History of the Great Rebellion, III., 115-117.

STRAFFORD

PART II

THE EVE OF “1641”

By PHILIP WILSON

Strafford

PART II
The Eve of “1641”

The real or fancied grievances of Loftus and Mountnorris excited far more indignation in England than the wrongs of the native population; but it is not by his dealings with a few powerful and corrupt functionaries, but by his treatment of the mass of the Irish people that Wentworth’s administration must be judged. Of his action in the matter of the Connaught plantation it is impossible to speak too severely. In other respects his government was just and equitable; too equitable, indeed, to secure the approbation of the colonists, who conceived that they had an inalienable right to trample upon the older inhabitants. On the subject of religious liberty his views, while by no means consonant to modern notions of justice, were, on the whole, in advance of those of his contemporaries.

Bacon, in the preceding reign, had recommended toleration, not as a thing desirable in itself, but as a temporary expedient which the peculiar circumstances of Ireland required.[^[131]] Wentworth’s view was substantially the same as Bacon’s. He undoubtedly looked forward to the ultimate suppression of every religion other than that legally established. But he was far too wise a man to have recourse to violent and indiscriminate coercion. “I am not ignorant,” he wrote to Cottington, “how much every good Englishman ought, as well in reason of state as conscience, to desire that kingdom were well reduced to conformity of religion with us here, as indeed shutting up the postern gate to many a dangerous inconvenience and mischief. But,” he added, “it is a great business, hath many a root lying deep and far within the ground, which would be first thoroughly opened before we judge what height it may shoot up into, when it shall feel itself once struck at, to be loosened and pulled up.”[^[132]] “It were too much,” he says in another letter, “at once to distemper them by bringing plantations upon them and disturbing them in the exercise of their religion, so long as it be without scandal; and so indeed very inconsiderate, as I conceive, to move in this latter till that former be fully settled, and by that means the Protestant party become by much the stronger, which in truth as yet I do not conceive it to be.”[^[133]] Under his government, therefore, the priests performed their functions without interference; and this modified tolerance was afterwards made a prominent grievance by the Puritan party.[^[134]]

There was another section of the community which Wentworth was not disposed to treat with equal leniency. As has been already mentioned, a great number of the northern benefices were at this time filled by ministers who refused to conform to the established ritual. During the reign of James these persons had occupied an extremely anomalous position, being unmolested by the Government, but not enjoying a legal toleration. To Wentworth the sectaries, as they were called, were at least as odious as the Catholics; and the bishops whom he promoted exerted themselves for the suppression of irregularities at which their more tolerant predecessors had connived. Bramhall, who had accompanied the Lord Deputy to Ireland as his chaplain, and had subsequently been advanced to the see of Derry, and Henry Lesley, Bishop of Down and Connor, were especially active in the persecution of the Nonconformists.[^[135]] Clergymen who refused to subscribe the new canons were deprived of their cures, and, in many cases, driven from the country. Some fled to Scotland, others to New England. The majority made a pretence of submission, while secretly animating their flocks to resistance. After the riots which broke out in Edinburgh in 1637 the situation became still more critical. Of the inhabitants of Ulster a large majority were Scotchmen, and of the Scotchmen in Ulster at least nine in ten were Presbyterians. Between these men and their kindred in the western shires of Scotland a constant correspondence was maintained—partly by itinerant preachers, partly by persons engaged in trade, and partly by landowners who possessed estates in both countries. It is not, therefore, surprising that the success of the Scotch insurgents should have produced important results in Ireland. The Puritan party, who had lately cowered beneath the tyranny of the bishops, now adopted a firmer and more menacing attitude; openly proclaimed their sympathy with the Covenanters; and began to express a hope of obtaining concessions similar to those which the Government had been compelled to make in Scotland.[^[136]] In July, 1638, Charles, realising that a peaceful accommodation with the Scots was no longer possible, despatched a secret agent to Wentworth to inquire what assistance he might expect from Ireland in the approaching struggle. The Lord Deputy’s reply was not encouraging. During the past four years the Irish army had been greatly improved in quality; but it was still very inadequate in point of numbers. It amounted in all only to two thousand foot and six hundred horse, “which, in a time better secured, is rather too little than otherwise to ascertain the peace and tranquillity of this government and subject.” The plantations in Connaught and other parts of the kingdom, were still unsettled, “and the people more apt, consequently, to stir upon so great an alteration as these will bring amongst them than at another time.” There were also “great numbers of Scotch in Ulster, undoubtedly of the same affections your Majesty finds in Scotland, and by so much the more diligently to be attended, by how much the nearer they are to the mutual encouragement and succours they may communicate, the one to the other.” Under these circumstances to withdraw any part of his small forces would be “a means to raise and spread the flame, to have the fire here also kindled, whilst they find us not in so full power to contain them, as now by God’s blessing I conceive we are.” He thought, however, that it would be possible to raise some additional levies, “whereof as many as may be to be English. For, howbeit the Irish might do very good service, being a people removed from the Scottish, as well in affections as religion; yet it is not safe to train them up more than needs must in the military way, which, the present occasion past, might arm their old affections to do us more mischief, and put new and dangerous thoughts into them after they are returned home again, as of necessity they must, without further employment or provision, than what they had of their own before.” Meanwhile he intended to move the greater part of his present army into Ulster “as near Scotland as may be,” both to reduce that province to obedience “and perchance cause some little diversion on the other side, by reason of our being so close upon them.”[^[137]] In November, in response to a renewed appeal from his master, Wentworth agreed to send a body of five hundred picked men to the defence of Carlisle; the places of these troops being immediately supplied by new levies.[^[138]]

At the beginning of the following year the Lord Deputy, finding that the disturbances in Ulster still continued, and that a design had been formed to surprise the town of Carrickfergus, had recourse to an act of tyranny more outrageous than any upon which he had yet ventured. An oath, called by the Presbyterians “the Black Oath,” was framed by the Irish Council and imposed upon all the inhabitants of Ulster above the age of sixteen years, “upon the holy evangelists, and that upon pain of his Majesty’s high displeasure, and the uttermost and most severe punishments which may be inflicted according to the laws of this realm on contemners of sovereign authority.” The oath ran as follows: “I do faithfully swear, profess and promise that I will honour and obey my sovereign lord King Charles, and will bear faith and true allegiance unto him, and defend and maintain his royal power and authority, and that I will not bear arms or do any rebellious or hostile act against him, or protest against any of his royal commands, but submit myself in all due obedience thereunto; and that I will not enter into any covenant, oath, or band of mutual defence and assistance against any persons whatsoever by force, without his Majesty’s sovereign and regal authority. And I do renounce and abjure all covenants, oaths and bands whatsoever, contrary to what I have herein sworn, professed, and promised. So help me God in Christ Jesus.”[^[139]]

“The generality,” says a Presbyterian historian, “did take it, who were not bound with a conscience; others hid themselves or fled, leaving their homes and goods; and divers were imprisoned and kept in divers gaols for a considerable time. This proved the hottest piece of persecution this poor infant church had met with, and the strongest wind to separate between the wheat and the chaff. However, God strengthened many to hazard all before they would swallow it. In the county of Down not only divers left their habitations and most of their goods, and followed to Scotland, but others were apprehended and imprisoned, and they were kept long in the prison, till thereafter Wentworth was executed in England. In the county of Antrim, likewise, many were necessitated to flee, wherein they sustained great loss in the goods they left behind them; and yet were provided for, and lived sparingly in Scotland under the Gospel; and those men who were fit for war were made use of in the levies of Scotland about that time. The like suffering befell those of the Scottish nation who were godly in the counties of Tyrone and Londonderry; fewer of them going at first to Scotland they were subject to the more suffering. Upon refusing the oath they had their names returned to Dublin, from whence pursuivants were sent to apprehend those who were refractory. Divers were apprehended and taken prisoners to Dublin; others, though sent for, yet by special and very remarkable providences escaped the pursuivants who were most earnest to apprehend them. Thus that spirit raged amongst them before the rebellion, persecuting and imprisoning all who would not conform and take the Black Oath; amongst whom were divers women eminent in suffering with patience and constancy, which become the godly.”[^[140]]

It was by the common people that these oppressive proceedings, for which a petition signed by a handful of Episcopalian residents in Ulster was considered a sufficient pretext, were chiefly felt; but Wentworth was equally ready to strike at more exalted offenders. Among the refugees whom the tyranny of the Puritan party had driven from Scotland was a clergyman of considerable literary talents named John Corbet. In the summer of 1639 this gentleman fled to Dublin, where he published a pamphlet in which he inveighed against the proceedings of his countrymen with an acrimony which even the persecution which he had suffered cannot wholly excuse.[^[141]] This production recommended him to the favour of the Lord Deputy, who presented him to a valuable living in the diocese of Killala. The see of Killala was at this time filled by Archibald Adair, a Scotchman, who, in spite of his episcopal office, appears to have entertained a secret bias in favour of the Presbyterian discipline. Adair was imprudent enough to rebuke Corbet with some asperity for his hostility to the Covenant; the latter immediately complained to Wentworth; and the bishop was dragged before the High Commission Court and deprived of his bishopric. He was succeeded by John Maxwell, formerly Bishop of Ross, one of the prelates who had been driven from their sees during the recent ecclesiastical revolution in Scotland.[^[142]]

On March 18, 1640, Wentworth, now Earl of Strafford and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, returned from England to Dublin, where a parliament met two days later. The financial embarrassments produced by the Scotch war had at length compelled Charles to summon a parliament in England; and Strafford, who had himself urged his master to have recourse to this most unpalatable expedient, thought it advisable that the Irish legislature should meet some weeks earlier. He believed that he would be able to extort from that body a sum which would not only prove extremely serviceable to his Majesty, but might have the effect of stimulating the liberality of his English subjects. Nor was his confidence altogether misplaced. Although the whole country was seething with discontent the Parliament professed the most extravagant loyalty. The Catholics, intensely as they resented the plantations, dreaded the fanaticism of the Puritans even more than the tyranny of the Viceroy. The settlers had their own grievances, but, surrounded as they were by a hostile population, did not dare to come to an open rupture with the Government. Many of the smaller constituencies were represented by civil and military officials who voted at the dictation of the Lord Lieutenant. A grant of four subsidies was proposed, and carried with enthusiastic unanimity. A few days later a letter from the King was received, intimating that, if the rebellion in Scotland continued, even this enormous supply might not be sufficient. Two additional subsidies were proposed, and voted with equal alacrity. Not satisfied with these practical proofs of their loyalty, the Commons prefixed to their grant an elaborate panegyric on the Lord Lieutenant, and a declaration of their unswerving devotion to the royal person.[^[143]] Indeed the only incident which occurred to disturb their harmony had its origin in the intemperate zeal of the Upper House. The Lords were eager to concur in the loyal declarations of the Commons; and, at the suggestion of the Earl of Ormond, the zealous friend of the Lord Lieutenant, a resolution was carried congratulating the Commons on their liberality, and expressing a wish that the intended declaration might be made the joint act of both Houses. This well-meant proposal aroused unexpected indignation. The Commons claimed the exclusive right of taxation; they resented the action of the peers as an unconstitutional encroachment on their privileges, and peremptorily refused to unite with them in the proposed declaration. The Lords were compelled to rescind the obnoxious resolution and to content themselves with a separate declaration, which was duly entered in their own journals.[^[144]] On the 1st of April the Houses, having served the purpose for which they had been convened, were adjourned until the following June. Two days later the Lord Lieutenant sailed for England, having entrusted the civil government to Wandesford, and the command of the forces to the Earl of Ormond.

Strafford had resolved to devote the sums which were now at the disposal of the Government to the increase of the Irish army. During his absence the task devolved upon Ormond, who performed it with amazing rapidity. By the middle of the summer a body of eight thousand foot and one thousand horse was collected at Carrickfergus—the point whence they might be most easily employed for the invasion of Scotland. It is significant of the change which had taken place in Strafford’s views during the past year that, whereas the old army had been exclusively composed of Protestants, the new levies were mainly or entirely Roman Catholic.[^[145]] A few months earlier the Lord Lieutenant had been vehemently opposed to the enlistment of the native Irish. In July, 1638, Charles, who was then meditating the invasion of Scotland, had received an offer of assistance from an unexpected quarter. In the preceding century a number of clans from the Hebrides and the Western Highlands had established themselves upon the coast of Ulster, and had subsequently played an important part in the civil wars of the province, occasionally assisting the Government, but generally co-operating with the natives, whose language and customs did not materially differ from their own. Of these clans the Macdonnells were by far the most powerful.[^[146]] During the reign of Elizabeth, Sorley Boy Macdonnell, chief of the clan, had been engaged in frequent hostilities with successive governors. On the accession of James his son Randal had been confirmed in the possession of his estates, to which he had succeeded two years previously. This gentleman married a daughter of the Earl of Tyrone, and, after the flight of his father-in-law, appears to have become an object of suspicion to Chichester, then Lord Deputy. He speedily, however, made his peace with the Government, was raised to the peerage in 1618 as Viscount Dunluce, and, a few years later, created Earl of Antrim. His son, Randal, the second earl, married in 1635 the widow of the unfortunate Duke of Buckingham, by whose means he obtained a considerable influence at the court of England, where his fervid Catholicism secured for him the favour of Queen Henrietta Maria. When disturbances broke out in Scotland and it became known that the Covenanters had entrusted the principal command to the Earl of Argyle, the hereditary enemy of the Macdonnells, Antrim undertook to raise an army of Irish and Highland Catholics to assist the King in the reduction of the Scotch rebels. The offer was tempting, for the earl commanded an extensive following in both countries, and Charles was eager to avail himself of it; but Wentworth, who hated all Celts, and particularly detested Antrim, expressed his disapproval in the strongest terms. To Antrim himself, whom, in deference to the King’s wishes, it was necessary to make a show of consulting, the Lord Deputy hinted that he had perhaps underrated the difficulty of the enterprise; that, while it would be easy to raise troops, it would be less easy to pay and feed them; that the cost of arms and transports would be enormous; that the hazards of the attempt would be great and the consequences, in the event of failure, serious. To his colleagues in the English council he explained his real objections with greater frankness. The earl was the grandson of Tyrone, and therefore an object of distrust and aversion to the Englishry. Of the officers whom he proposed to employ, some had passed their lives in the Spanish service and were believed to retain Spanish sympathies. His troops would necessarily be recruited from amongst the native Irish, “children of habituated rebels,” from whom, if they were once armed, some sudden outrage might be apprehended. It would be a grave scandal if the King were to make use of a Roman Catholic army and a Roman Catholic general. It would afford the Scotch, who were very numerous in Ulster, a plausible pretext for arming to defend themselves, and thus the whole province might be thrown into a blaze. These arguments were pronounced by Windebank to be “very solid and unanswerable”; and, after some months spent in fruitless negotiations, the scheme was abandoned.[^[147]] In the spring of 1640, however, the hour for such scruples had gone by. It was necessary, if the Crown was to retain any vestige of authority, to raise an army in Ireland. It was impossible in their present temper to have any confidence in the loyalty of the Protestant settlers; and Strafford, who never hesitated to adapt his policy to circumstances, appealed to the native population. Perhaps no act of his administration contributed in so large a measure to bring upon him the vengeance of the English Parliament.

The Houses met again on the 1st of June. Although only two months had elapsed since the last session, the political situation had completely changed. The Covenanters were victorious in their own country, and were preparing to invade England. A Parliament had been held at Westminster in April, and, having refused to grant supplies, had been suddenly and ungraciously dismissed. This arbitrary act inflamed the popular discontent. The disaffected in Ireland—and there were few of any class or creed in Ireland who had not good grounds for disaffection—were encouraged by the disturbances in the sister kingdoms, and no longer cowed by the presence of the terrible viceroy. The officers, on whom Strafford had been wont to rely for the management of the House of Commons, were absent, detained by their military duties; and the Catholic and Puritan parties, whose mutual jealousies it had been a main object of his policy to foster, had agreed to suspend their former quarrels, and formed a close alliance for the purpose of embarrassing the Government. On many points the wishes of the two parties were irreconcilable; but there were two feelings which were shared in equal measure by both sections of the opposition—indignation at the tyranny of the Lord Lieutenant, and hatred of the Established Church. A remonstrance denouncing the corruption of the ecclesiastical courts and the exorbitant fees demanded by the Anglican clergy was proposed and carried by a large majority. The Commons next complained that the supplies voted in the preceding session were excessive; and, without actually rescinding their recent grant, suggested an alteration in the manner of collecting the subsidies which would greatly reduce their value. Alarmed at their violence, Wandesford prorogued the Parliament until October, when he perhaps hoped that the Lord Lieutenant might be able to resume his duties.[^[148]]

In October, however, Strafford was still in England; and the ill-humour of the Houses had increased rather than diminished during the recess. The third session of the Irish Parliament was even more turbulent than the second. A number of unpopular laws had been enacted in the last Parliament: these laws were now declared to be grievances, and an address to the Lord Deputy was carried requiring him to suspend their execution. In June the Commons had resolved that the remaining subsidies should be collected “in a moderate parliamentary way;” they now explained their wishes more precisely, and insisted that no man should be taxed to more than the tenth part of his income. On both these points Wandesford was obliged to comply with their demands.[^[149]]