Ireland breathes anything but the ferocity ascribed to him. About religion
he speaks in his unctuous Puritan way, but in a tone far from savage.
"First let me tell you, in divers places where we come, we find the people
very greedy after the Word, and flocking to Christian meetings; much of
that prejudice that lies upon poor people in England being a stranger to
their minds. And truly we have hoped much of it is done in simplicity; and
I mind you the rather of this because it is a sweet symptom, if not an
earnest of the good we expect."[1]
His words on the social question in the same letter show tenderness of
feeling. "Sir, it seems to me we have a great opportunity to set up until
the Parliament shall otherwise determine, a way of doing justice among
these poor people, which for the uprightness and cheapness of it may
exceedingly gain upon them who have been accustomed to as much injustice,
tyranny, and oppression from their landlords the great men, and those that
should have done them right as (I believe) any people in that which we
call Christendom.... Sir, if justice were freely and impartially
administered here, the foregoing darkness and corruption would make it
look so much the more glorious and beautiful and draw more hearts after
it." This is not the language of hatred, much less of extermination.
Critics of Cromwell fail to notice that his mind opened as he rose,
notably in the way of religious toleration. The Ironside had now become a
great statesman. "Savage" the writer of his domestic letters surely can
never have been.
The representatives of Ireland in the Parliament of the Protectorate, it
is true, were nominees. A popular election on the morrow of the Civil War,
and with its embers still glowing, would have been out of the question.
The union of the Parliaments effected, and representation granted, popular
election would have come in time. Meantime, there was the sheltering and
controlling authority of the Protector and the Council of State.
To charge Cromwell with having misunderstood the genius of the Irish
nation and wronged it by his policy seems absurd. There was, in reality,
no Irish nation. There was an island inhabited partly by the wreck of
Celtic tribes, partly by conquerors and colonists of another race, the two
races differing widely in character, speaking different languages, having
antagonistic religions, not alien only, but desperately hostile to each
other. Deadly experience had shown that, left to themselves, they could
not live at peace. There was no political union, no attachment to a native
dynasty, no tradition or sentiment truly national among the wreckage of
the septs. The religious bond, it is true, had been greatly strengthened
among them by the conflict, and formed something like a national tie. But
adaptation of his policy to Catholic character and sentiment could hardly
be expected of a Puritan chief in the age of the Spanish Inquisition.
The European war between Catholicism and Protestantism, and the consequent
mingling of religious with political strife, were everywhere a fatal
stumbling-block to statesmanship in that day. It does not seem that
Cromwell dealt with the difficulty in England or Ireland less wisely and
liberally than did statesmanship elsewhere. Perhaps the greater share of
liberality was his. The signs of his personal inclination were certainly
on the liberal side.
VII
The death of the Protector before his hour, and the military anarchy which
ensued, brought on the Restoration. The Restoration brought claims on the
part of dispossessed Royalism for restitution in both countries. The
occupants of confiscated lands in Ireland, seeing what must come, had
under the leadership of opportunist politicians, such as Broghill and
Cork, worshipped with politic rapture the return of the Royal Sun. The
disinherited on the other hand clamorously pressed their claim to
restitution. To that claim honour bade and sympathy inclined Charles II.
to give ear. But the adventurers were a formidable body, and while their
professions were fervently loyal their hands were on their swords. Nor did
Protestant England, even in its hot fit of loyalty, love the Irish
Catholic or forget the massacre of 1641. There ensued a vast controversy,
desperately embarrassing to Clarendon, Charles's chief adviser, to Charles
himself no doubt an insufferable bore. Intrigue and corruption, in which
the possessors were strong, contended with argument in the fray. The
government at last took refuge in the appointment of a commission
instructed to decide claims to restitution on the principle of complicity
or non-complicity in the rebellion of 1641; a criterion rather difficult
of application, since Charles I. had on the one hand assented to the Act
of Forfeiture, and on the other hand by treating with the Confederates had
practically recognized their loyalty to the crown. The upshot was an Act
of Settlement with a supplementary Act of Explanation, under which the
possessors retained about two-thirds of the lands, the disinherited
getting the other one-third, eked out with scraps, which by escheat or
forfeiture for regicide were at the disposal of the crown. The Act of
Settlement was thenceforth in the eyes of the Protestant possessor the
great charter of proprietary right, to be upheld at whatever cost; in the
eyes of the dispossessed Catholic, the hateful muniment of proprietary
wrong, to be cancelled whenever he had the power. The net result of the
Act of Settlement and Explanation was that Ulster was left, as it remains,
a Protestant pale.
The Anglican State Church recovered all its possessions and privileges,
and was once more planted on the neck of a Catholic people. It is sad to
learn that Jeremy Taylor, who, when under persecution, had eloquently
defended liberty of prophesying, as a bishop of the restored Irish
establishment defended that liberty no more. But how could a hierarch of
the State Church of Ireland fail to don its spirit with his mitre?
The whole of the Protector's work was undone. The union of Scotland and
Ireland with England was broken. Ireland was again reduced to the state of
a dependency, and of a dependency unloved and unrespected, whose interests
were to be always sacrificed to those of the country which was the seat of
power. Of this she was soon made fatally sensible. Protectionism was the
creed of that dark age. Ireland as a fine grazing country had been doing a
profitable export trade with England in cattle, pork, bacon, and dairy
produce. The English grazier demanded of his Parliament protection against
the free importation of food, denounced by him as a "nuisance." On his
demand an act was passed prohibiting the trade. Good sense and the public
interest struggled hard. The debate was unusually fierce. Ominous
expressions of contempt for the Irish were heard, and led to a challenge.
The king had the good sense to disapprove the measure, but gave way, as he
was sure to do. The patriotic policy of the grazier triumphed. Irish fish
narrowly escaped prohibition at the same time. This was the first of a
line of prohibitive acts fatal to the commerce of Ireland and to her
commercial civilization. At the same time she came under the Navigation
Laws, which were fatal to her shipping trade.
Ireland, however, had the good fortune to be during the greater part of
the reign of Charles II. under the government of that Duke of Ormonde who
had commanded for the king in the Civil War. The duke was a statesman,
like Clarendon and Southampton, of the old and honourable cavalier school,
untainted by the political profligacy or the social dissoluteness of the
men of the Cabal. He governed as impartially as the anti-Catholic laws and
his own strict Anglicanism would let him; did his best to keep the peace
between the factions, political and religious; promoted manufactures and
trade, encouraged and endowed education, founded a college of medicine,
organized a national militia. He heartily identified himself with Irish
interests, and opposed the Cattle Act with an energy and a force of
argument which entitle his memory to the respect of free traders. It is
the sad truth that of Irish history between the Conquest and the Union the
one bright period is the viceroyalty of Ormonde.
Ireland unhappily, though her interests were out of the pale of English
care, was not out of the pale of English faction and revolution. The
Stuart brothers, plotting with their French patron the subversion of
English religion and liberty, looked to Catholic Ireland for help in their
plot. They cultivated the Catholic interest there, and against the law
promoted Catholics to office and command. Richard Talbot, lying Dick,
afterwards Duke of Tyrconnel, one of the lowest of their wonderfully low
agents, as well as about the most violent, appeared upon the scene. It was
probably by thwarting or refusing to promote this conspiracy that Ormonde,
a strict Protestant though of the Anglican school, and constitutional
though a monarchist, incurred temporary dismissal from his viceroyalty.
Possibly in the same quarter may be sought the explanation of the
mysterious attempt at murdering him by Blood, of the criminal connection
of the court with whom there can be little doubt. On the other hand, the
cruel anti-Catholic panic, created in England by the well-founded
suspicion of danger to Protestantism from Stuart intrigue with France
which gave birth to the Popish plot, extended its rage to Ireland. The
last and most pitiable of the innocent victims of that frenzy was the
Catholic Archbishop Plunket.
VIII
Signs of preparation for the Stuart attack on Protestantism and liberty
were visible in Ireland as well as in England in the last years of Charles
II. But the blow was suspended during the life of the Merry Monarch, who
preferred the calm of the seraglio to the stir of a great enterprise, and
did not want to go again upon his travels. With the accession of Charles's
fanatical and blundering brother, the crisis came. The Viceroy Clarendon,
a Tory of Tories, but an Anglican, was deposed from the viceroyalty, and
quitted Ireland with a stream of Protestant refugees in his train. Into
his place vaulted Dick Talbot, now Duke of Tyrconnel, drunk with the fury
of Romanizing and despotic reaction. A Catholic reign of terror set in.
Protestants were disarmed; driven from places of authority, political,
judicial, or municipal; practically outlawed, plundered, outraged,
compelled to fly for their lives. The country seethed with a general orgie
of insurrection and revenge. The people swarmed to the standard of
Catholic and agrarian revolution, rather than to that of the English
king, for whom they cared little and who cared little for them. Presently
came James, ejected from England, with the power of his French patron at
his back. Under him a packed Parliament repealed the Act of Settlement by
which the Protestants held their lands, proclaiming reconfiscation and
expulsion on a vast scale. Not satisfied with this, the Parliament passed
a monstrous Act of Attainder against a large portion of the Protestant
proprietary. Nor can it be assumed that the frantic hatred which inspired
this act would have confined itself to spoliation, for which the repeal of
the Act of Settlement might have pretty well sufficed. A long lifetime had
not yet passed since 1641. James, who was not an Irish patriot but an
English king out of possession, would have vetoed the Act of Attainder had
he dared. But he dared not. He even suffered himself in this case to be
divested of the royal prerogative of pardon. Another prerogative, that of
regulating the coin, he exercised by sanctioning a base issue on a large
scale, which, being made legal tender, completed the ruin of the
Protestant trader.
But Protestantism, the stern Protestantism of the Calvinist, rallied on
its own ground, and behind the mouldering walls of Derry made against a
Catholic host one of the heroic defences of history, a worthy theme in an
after time for the most brilliant of historians. In the battle of Newtown
Butler, Protestantism again triumphed over odds. Succour at length came
from England. It came first in the person of the renowned Schomberg, whose
army, however, made up of raw recruits, ill supplied by fraudulent
contractors, and filled with disease by the moisture of the climate,
miserably rotted. At last the bonfires of jubilant Protestantism announced
that William of Orange had landed. On the Boyne he gained a small battle
but a great victory, which decided that the Protestant Saxon, not the
Catholic Celt, should be master of Ireland. James fled to the luxurious
asylum of his French master, and with him fled the last hope of the
Catholic cause.
Once more, however, at Aghrim, the Catholic, under the command of the
French General St. Ruth, accepted the wager of battle in open field. He
fought well, and the fortune of the day wavered, when a cannon shot took
off St. Ruth's head. Protestantism owed its victory largely to a regiment
of French Huguenots exiled by the bigoted tyranny of their own king.
All was over in the field. The irresistible Marlborough reduced Cork and
Kinsale. But in Limerick, by soldiers pronounced untenable, Catholicism
had its Derry. Its hero Sarsfield, by a daring march, cut off William's
siege artillery, and, after a fierce assault, gallantly repulsed, William
was fain to raise the siege. After his departure Ginkell again invested
the place, and Sarsfield, finding that the last hour of the last Catholic
stronghold had come, capitulated on terms. The military terms of the
surrender were strictly observed. The political terms, securing a measure
of religious liberty to Catholics, though endorsed by William in his wise
Dutch love of toleration, were repudiated by Parliament. The "violated
treaty of Limerick" was an ugly business, though there seems to have been
no protest at the time. But James had fled. The garrison of Limerick had
no status but a military one, to which surrender put an end. Politically
they were merely insurgents. Could any political terms made with them have
bound the sovereign authority of the Irish and British Parliaments in
dealing with their own citizens forever? Can Sarsfield have thought that
they did?
A crowd of Irish women and children lined the shore at Limerick, watching
with tearful eyes the receding sails of the fleet which bore away their
husbands and fathers, the garrison of the last Catholic stronghold, to
service in foreign lands. The defenders of Limerick were thus exchanged
for the Huguenot exiles who had charged and conquered at Aghrim. Those
men, with many an exile from Catholic Ireland who followed in their track,
went to form the Irish brigade and to redeem on foreign fields battles
lost in their own land.
IX
In that mortal struggle, had the Catholic won, he would have deprived the
Protestant certainly of his land, perhaps of his life. The Protestant,
having won, proceeded at once to avenge and secure himself by binding down
his vanquished foe with chains of iron. Chains of iron indeed they were.
By the series of enactments called the Penal Code, passed by the Irish
Parliament with some assistance from that of England, the Irish Catholic
was reduced to helotage political and social, while measures were taken
for the extirpation of his religion. To crush him politically he was
excluded from Parliament, from the franchise, from municipal office, from
the magistracy, from the jury box, as well as from public appointments of
all kinds, and even from the police force. To crush him socially he was
excluded from all the higher callings but that of medicine, from the
bench, from the bar, and from the army. He was denied the armorial
bearings which denoted a gentleman. To divorce him from the land, he was
forbidden to acquire freehold or a lease beneficial beyond a certain
rate; he was debarred from bequeathing his estate; and his estate was
broken up by making it heritable in gavelkind. The gate of knowledge was
closed against him. He was shut out of the university; forbidden to open a
school; forbidden to send his children abroad for education. That he might
never rise against oppression, he was disarmed and prohibited from keeping
a horse of more than five pounds' value. He might not even be a gamekeeper
or a watchman.
The law, without actually prohibiting the Catholic religion, provided, as
was hoped, for its extirpation. All priests were required to be
registered, and were forbidden to perform service out of their own parish.
All Catholic archbishops and bishops were banished, and were made
punishable with death if they returned, so that in future there could be
no ordinations. Monks and friars also were banished. Catholic chapels
might not have bells or steeples. There were to be no pilgrimages or
wayside crosses. Rewards were offered to informers against Catholic
bishops, priests, and schoolmasters, and their trade was lauded as
honourable service to the state. Marriage of a Catholic with a Protestant
was prohibited; to perform it was a capital offence; so was conversion of
a Protestant to Catholicism. Religious hatred outraged domestic affection
by enacting that if the son of a Catholic turned Protestant the
inheritance should at once vest in him, his father being reduced to a life
interest; that the wife of a Catholic turning Protestant should be set
free from her husband's control and entitled to a settlement; that a
Catholic could not be a guardian, so that, dying, he had to leave his
children to the guardianship of an enemy of their faith.
Representatives of the government designated the Catholics officially as
"our enemies." The Irish Parliament was exhorted to put an end to all
distinctions except that between Protestant and Papist. To such a relation
between races under the same government history can scarcely show a
parallel, unless it be the case of the Moriscos in Spain.
"It was," says Burke, "a complete system full of coherence and
consistency; well digested and well composed in all its parts. It was a
machine of wise and elaborate contrivance and was as well fitted for the
oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people and the debasement
in them of human nature itself as ever proceeded from the perverted
ingenuity of man." It was the panic rage of a garrison which had narrowly
escaped extermination, and less cruel than the treatment of the Huguenots
by the Catholic king at the instigation of the Jesuit and with the
approbation of the Catholic Church in France. The fires of the Inquisition
were still burning, and continued for some time to burn. If the British
Parliament shares the guilt of the Penal Code, twice had an army of Irish
Catholics been raised for the destruction of English liberties. When last
those liberties were in the extremity of peril, a force of Irish Catholics
had been encamped at Hounslow. Nor was Catholicism merely a religion. It
was allegiance to a power which claimed the suzerainty of Ireland, which
had launched the decree of deposition against Elizabeth, which, after the
rising of 1641, had sent its nuncio to the rebel council of Kilkenny.
These memories on both sides ought long ago to have been consigned to a
common grave.
At the same time it was deplorable that the settlement of the Catholic
provinces after their reconquest should have been left to the Protestants
of Ireland, transported with rage and fear. The true course, had it been
possible, was the union of Ireland with England. Representatives of the
loyal districts of Ireland might have been called at once to the
Parliament at Westminster. The rest of the island might have been placed
under a strong government of pacification and settlement, till peace and
the reign of law had been thoroughly restored. It is needless to say that
such a solution could not even suggest itself to the mind of any statesman
at that time.
In extirpating the Catholic religion the policy of the Penal Code failed.
To the faith which was their only comfort and sole redemption from utter
degradation the people more than ever clung. The priests braved the law,
celebrated mass in hiding-places, furtively ordained, several hands being
laid on at once that the man ordained might be able to swear that he did
not know who had ordained him. They taught in hedge schools, and, though
but coarsely educated themselves, preserved the scantling there was of
knowledge and civilization among the people. In their celibacy they had a
great advantage for such work. Interested conversions among Catholics of
the higher class, especially as passports to the bar, seem not to have
been uncommon. An old lady of an ancient line is said to have embraced
Protestantism avowedly against her conscience, saying that it was better
that one old woman should burn than that the estates of the house of
Tomond should go out of the family. But disinterested conversions there
were none. On the other hand Protestants in isolated settlements were
turned Catholic by social contagion.
Other parts of the code took deadly effect. The Catholics generally ceased
to own land. Of their landed gentry, some went into exile. The people,
bereft of their natural leaders, sank into apathetic helotage and mute
despair. Neither in 1715 nor in 1745, when a pretender again unfurled the
banner of the House of Stuart, was there the slightest political movement
among them. Socially, the iron had entered their souls and they cowered
under the yoke of the ascendancy. Once, an informer having tendered a
Catholic the legal ten pounds for his pair of fine horses, the Catholic
drew his pistol and shot the pair. But this was a rare spark of
self-respect on the part of the helot.
The cup of woe was not yet full. In England, with revolution principles,
the mercantile party had mounted to power, and commerce in those days was
everywhere ridden by the fallacy of protectionism, which killed the only
good articles in the Treaty of Utrecht, those opening free trade with
France. Ireland, the English protectionist regarded as a foreign country,
and a particularly dangerous enemy to his interest. The cattle trade
having been killed by the act of Charles II., the Irish had taken to the
export trade in wool and to woollen manufactures. The wool grown on Irish
sheepwalks was of the finest, and was eagerly purchased by France and
Spain. This industry also English monopoly killed by prohibiting the
exportation of wool to foreign countries and the importation of Irish
woollen goods into England. The same jealous rapacity seems to have
successively killed or crippled the cotton industry, the glove-making
industry, the glass industry, the brewing industry, to each of which
Ireland successively turned; English greed being bent, not only on
excluding the Irish competitor from its own market, but on keeping the
Irish market to itself. Ireland had been promised free enjoyment of the
linen trade, which Strafford had encouraged by promoting the growing of
flax while he discouraged the wool trade; yet even this promise Irish
financiers could accuse England of eluding by tricks of the tariff.
England needing more bar iron than she could produce, the importation of
bar iron from Ireland was allowed; but the consequence was a consumption
of timber for smelting which denuded Ireland of her forests.
Cromwell's union would have secured to Ireland exemption from the
disabilities of the Navigation Laws. The Restoration imposed them. They
killed her trade with the colonies and killed her shipping interest at the
same time. "The conveniency of ports and harbours," said Swift, "which
nature has bestowed so liberally upon this kingdom, is of no more use to
us than a beautiful prospect to a man shut up in a dungeon."