THE PERIOD OF THE PENAL LAWS.
The flight of James II brings us to the era of the "penal laws." To
one who lives in the twentieth century and is embued with the spirit
of modern thought, the whole subject is more than painful--it is
detestable. But to pass it over in silence is impossible; and in order
to get a clear view of the position it is necessary to examine
what the penal laws were, what they were not, and what were the
circumstances of the time during which they were in force.
The penal laws were a series of enactments carefully planned so as to
harass the Roman Catholics at every moment of their lives, in the hope
of inducing them to abandon their religion. The unhappy people were
prohibited from becoming or voting for members of Parliament; they
were excluded from corporations, the army, the navy and the legal
profession. They were forbidden to bear arms, or even to possess a
horse worth more than £5. Education was denied to them, as they could
not send their sons to the university and were forbidden either to
have schools of their own in Ireland or to send their children abroad.
They were not allowed to possess freehold estates in land, and even as
to leaseholds they were seriously restricted. On the death of a Roman
Catholic his estate was divided amongst his children equally, unless
the eldest son became a Protestant, in which case he inherited the
whole. And as no Roman Catholic was allowed to act as a guardian, a
man never knew that if he should die his children might not be brought
up in a faith that he detested. The performance of Roman Catholic
worship was barely tolerated, as no bishops or other dignitaries were
allowed to remain in Ireland, and the only priests authorized to
say mass were those who were "registered" and had taken the oath of
abjuration--that is, an oath declaring that the Pretender had no right
to the throne.
Such in brief were those terrible statutes. But without attempting
to excuse them, there are various matters which must be taken into
account if we are to judge them fairly. In the first place, the
political aspect of the question should not be forgotten. The
Protestant minority might justly fear that if the Roman Catholic party
were as powerful as their numbers would naturally cause them to be,
they would aid in bringing about a French invasion for the restoration
of the Stuarts and the re-establishment of the system which had been
in evidence under James II. An army was actually formed in France, and
on more than one occasion was in readiness to start. The Stuarts were
regarded by the Pope as the rightful sovereigns. The Roman Catholic
prelates whose entry into Ireland was forbidden were appointed by
the Pretender and were his political agents; it was that fact, and no
doctrinal reason, that caused their expulsion. It is necessary to make
this quite clear, as there has been as much exaggeration on this point
as on most other subjects connected with Irish history. The words of
the "oath of abjuration" were as follows:
"I do solemnly and sincerely declare that I do believe in my
conscience that the person pretended to be Prince of Wales
during the life of the late King James and since his decease
taking upon himself the style and title of King of England by
the name of James III hath not any right or title whatever to
the crown of this realm."
A modern Roman Catholic writer has thus described the oath:--
"By the Oath of Abjuration the priest was ordered to swear
that the sacrifice of the mass and the invocation of the
Blessed Virgin and the saints were damnable and idolatrous. In
other words, the priest was ordered to apostatize, or fly for
his life."
And even if Roman Catholics took the oath of allegiance, the old
difficulty arose as to the papal right to depose princes and to order
their subjects to rebel. So late as 1768, when a declaration was drawn
up which it was hoped the leaders of the Roman Catholic party would
sign, so that the penal laws might be finally done away with, the
Papal Nuncio vetoed the proposal because the declaration contained a
reprobation of the doctrines that faith need not be kept with heretics
and that if the Pope banned a sovereign his subjects might depose and
slay him. It is but fair to add, however, that a large number of Roman
Catholics did sign the declaration; and the penal laws (which had been
relaxed from time to time when it was seen that the Irish took no
part in the Stuart rebellions of 1715 and 1745) were soon afterwards
practically abolished.
Then it must be borne in mind that the Irish penal laws, although
to some extent modelled on the legislation of Louis XIV against the
Huguenots, were absolutely insignificant compared with those which
were in force at the time in every Roman Catholic country in Europe.
Galling though the Irish laws were, they never went so far as to
make the mere holding of heretical opinions criminal. Thus no one in
Ireland was ever put to death for believing in transubstantiation;
whereas in one diocese of Portugal 20,000 people were sent to the
stake for denying it. As every one who has visited the Madrid picture
gallery will recollect, it was still the custom in the eighteenth
century for the King of Spain to preside in state at the burning of
heretics; and it was not until that century was drawing to a close
that it was for the first time enacted in Portugal that sentence of
death for heresy when passed by the ecclesiastical court should not be
carried into effect unless the order was countersigned by the king. In
France, for two or three heretics to meet for worship anywhere (their
churches had of course all been pulled down) was a crime punishable
with death; and any Huguenot caught whilst attempting to escape from
the country was sent to the galleys--a fate worse than mere death,
for it meant death by slow torture. And every child was forcibly
taken from its heretic parents at the age of five, and educated in a
convent.
But more than that: Roman Catholics who fled from the tyranny of the
penal laws at home had no scruple, when they reached the Continent, in
taking part in persecutions far more terrible than anything they had
seen in Ireland. During the dragonnades in Languedoc, Louis XIV's
Irish brigade joined eagerly in the butchery of old men, women
and children and the burning of whole villages. The same heroes
distinguished themselves by destroying everything they could find in
remote Alpine valleys so that the unfortunate Waldenses might die of
starvation. And the Irish troops under Lord Mountcashel aided in the
burning of 1,000 villages in the Palatinate of the Rhine, in which
all the inhabitants--men, women and children--were slain by the sword,
burnt to death, or left to perish from hunger. These persecutions were
practically brought to an end by the French Revolution and the rise
of modern ideas; but the ecclesiastical authorities, though they
have lost their power, have shown no sign of having changed their
principles. Even in the middle of the nineteenth century King Victor
Emmanuel was excommunicated by Pope Pius IX for allowing his Vaudois
subjects to build a church for themselves at Turin.
Of course it may be said with perfect truth that two blacks do not
make one white. Still, the constant complaints about the tyranny of
the penal laws have less force when they come from the representatives
of a party who acted in the same way themselves whenever they had the
opportunity.
It is indeed frequently urged as a matter of aggravation that whereas
other persecutions were those of a minority by a majority, this was of
a majority by a minority. To me, so far as this makes any difference
at all, it tells the other way. As a matter of morality, I fail to
see any difference; putting all the inhabitants of an Alpine valley
to death as heretics does not seem to me one whit the less horrible
because the sovereign also ruled a large Catholic population on
the plains. On the other hand, the fact that the Roman Catholics
in Ireland formed the majority of the population prevented the
persecution from being strictly carried out. It was comparatively
easy for Louis XIV to surround a heretic district with a cordon of
soldiers, and then draw them closer together searching every house as
they went, seizing the clergy and taking them off to the galleys; but
it was impossible to track unregistered priests through the mountains
and valleys of Munster. Hence the law as to the registration of
priests soon became a dead letter.
There was indeed one great difference, between Irish and continental
persecution. On the continent it was the holiest and best men who were
the keenest persecutors. (This may seem strange to modern readers;
but anyone who has studied the lives of Bossuet and San Carlo Borromeo
will admit that it is true.) Hence the persecution was carried out
with that vigour which was necessary to make it a success. In Spain,
if a heretic under torture or the fear of it consented to recant, the
Holy Office was not satisfied with a mere formal recantation; for the
rest of his life the convert was watched day and night to see that
there was no sign of back-sliding; and even the possession of a
fragment of the New Testament was considered as sufficient evidence
of a relapse to send the wretched man to the stake. Consequently, in a
generation or two heresy became as extinct as Christianity did amongst
the Kabyles of North Africa after the Mohammedan persecution. In
Ireland, however, persecution was always against the grain with
religiously-minded Protestants. Seven bishops protested against the
first enactment of the Penal Laws; and during the period when they
were in force, the bishops repeatedly spoke and voted in favour of
each proposed mitigation of them. (With this one may contrast the
action of the French bishops who on the accession of Louis XVI in
1774 presented an address to the new king urging him to increase the
persecution of the Huguenots which had become somewhat slack during
the later years of his predecessor. By the irony of fate the same men
were a few years later pleading vainly for the mercy which they had
never shown in the days of their power.) Nor was this tolerant feeling
confined to the bishops. By the aid of the Protestant gentry, the laws
were continually being evaded. Protestants appointed by the Court as
guardians of Roman Catholic children, used to carry out the wishes of
the Roman Catholic relations; Roman Catholic proprietors frequently
handed over their estates to Protestant friends as Trustees, and,
though such Trusts were of course not enforceable at law, there were
very few instances in which they were not faithfully performed. Many
strange stories are told of the evasions of the Acts. On one occasion
whilst it was still illegal for a popish recusant to own a horse of
a greater value than £5, a man met a Roman Catholic gentleman who
was riding a handsome horse; he held out £5 in one hand, and with the
other caught hold of the bridle. The rider, naturally infuriated at
this, struck the man with his whip so heavily that he fell down dead.
When he was tried for murder, the judge decided that as the man had
laid a hand on the bridle, the rider had reason to suppose that he
intended to take it as well as the horse, which would have been
an illegal act; consequently he was justified in defending himself
against highway robbery; and therefore the charge must be dismissed.
Again, a Roman Catholic proprietor found out that an effort was likely
to be made to deprive him of his estate. He rode up to Dublin on a
Saturday; on Sunday he received the Holy Communion at a Protestant
Church; on Monday he executed a deed transferring his estate to a
Protestant friend as Trustee; on Tuesday he was received back into
the Church of Rome; and on Wednesday he rode home again, to enjoy his
estate free from further molestation.
The schools which were founded in order to convert the rising
generation were a strange contrast to the admirably conducted
institutions established in France and Spain for a similar purpose.
They were so disgracefully mismanaged that the pupils who had passed
through them looked back on everything that had been taught them there
with a lifelong disgust.
It is needless to say that laws thus carried out were a dead failure
as far as winning converts was concerned. On the other hand, they
became in one sense the more galling as the enforcement of them fell
into the hands of a low class of informers who had no object beyond
making money for themselves. Still, public feeling was so strong that
by the middle of the century the laws had almost fallen into abeyance.
Brook, writing in 1762, says: "Though these laws are still in force,
it is long since they have been in action. They hang like a sword by a
thread over the heads of these people, and Papists walk under them in
security and peace; for whoever should adventure to cut this thread
would become ignominious and detestable." And in 1778 and 1782 (that
is, when, as an Irish Roman Catholic writer has pointed out, there was
still neither toleration nor peace for Protestant populations in any
Catholic state in Europe) the Irish Protestant Parliament formally
repealed nearly all the penal laws.
Probably their most lasting effect was that relating to the tenure
of land. If free purchase and sale regardless of religion had been
allowed throughout the eighteenth century, one may conjecture that
the effect of the Cromwellian confiscations would long since have died
away. But these laws perpetuated that peculiar state of things which
has been the cause of so much unhappiness in Ireland--the landlords
generally belonged to one religion, and their tenants and dependents
to another.
It may be asked, As these odious laws all came to an end generations
ago, what is the good of recalling the sorrows of the past which had
much better be forgotten? I reply, None whatever; and very glad I
should be if the whole subject were quietly dropped. But unfortunately
that is just what the Roman Catholic party in Ireland will not do. One
of the ways in which religious animosity is being kept alive (and I
regret to say is being steadily increased) is by the teaching in
the Roman Catholic schools of exaggerated accounts of the penal laws
without referring to any of the mitigating circumstances. Even in the
present year--1913--the Lenten pastoral of one of the bishops goes
back to the same old subject. If other countries acted in a similar
manner, how could the grievances of bygone centuries ever be
forgotten? The Jews, cruelly treated though they were during the time
of the Norman kings, do not harp on the subject in England to-day. It
may be doubted whether all the religious persecutions of Europe
put together were as great a disgrace to Christendom as the slave
trade--in which, I am ashamed to say, England strove to obtain the
pre-eminence amongst European nations and which she forced upon her
colonies against their will. Yet I should regret it deeply if that
were the one passage of history selected for study in the schools and
colleges for coloured pupils in the West Indies at the present day.
When a man who has suffered wrong in former years broods over it
instead of thinking of his present blessings and his future prospects,
one may be sure that he is a man who will not succeed in life; and
what is true of individuals is true also of nations.
The expression "Protestant ascendancy," although it never came into
use during the period with which we are dealing, has so frequently
since then been employed with reference to it, that it is necessary
to explain its meaning. Probably no word in the English language
has suffered more from being used in different senses than the word
"Protestant." In Ireland it frequently used to be, and still sometimes
is, taken as equivalent to "Anglican" or "Episcopalian"; to an
Irishman of the last century it would have appeared quite natural to
speak of "Protestants and Presbyterians," meaning thereby two distinct
bodies. This is a matter of historical importance; for so far from
the Presbyterian element being favoured during the period of the Penal
Laws, the English Toleration Act had not been extended to Ireland;
Presbyterians were by the sacramental test excluded from all municipal
offices; their worship, though never in practice interfered with,
remained technically illegal. Their share in "Protestant ascendancy"
was therefore very limited.
But if the Established Church was the one favoured body, it had to pay
dearly for its privileges. In truth, the state of the Irish Church
at this period of its history, was deplorable. All the positions of
value--bishoprics, deaneries and important parishes--were conferred
on Englishmen, who never resided in their cures, but left the duties
either to be performed by half-starved deputies or not at all. Many
of the churches were in ruins, and the glebes had fallen into decay;
a union of half-a-dozen parishes would scarcely supply a meagre
salary for one incumbent. A large proportion of the tithes had been
appropriated by laymen; how small a sum actually reached the clergy
is shown by the fact that the first-fruits (that is, the year's income
paid by incumbents on their appointment) did not amount to more than
£500 a year in all. It may be that the standard of religious life
was not lower in Ireland than it was in England when the
spiritually-minded non-Jurors had been driven out and Hanoverian
deadness was supreme; but in England there was no other Church to form
a contrast. In Ireland the apathy and worldliness of the Protestant
clergy stood out in bold relief against the heroic devotion of the
priests and friars; and at the time when the unhappy peasants, forced
to pay tithes to a Church which they detested, were ready to starve
themselves to support their own clergy and to further the cause of
their religion, the well-to-do Protestant graziers and farmers were
straining the law so as to evade the payment of tithes, and never
thought of doing anything further to support the Church to which they
were supposed to belong. (It is but fair, however, to state that
this condition of things has long since passed away; the Evangelical
revival breathed new life into the dry bones of Irish Protestantism.)
But it was not merely in religious matters that Ireland suffered
during this melancholy period. Students of modern history whose
researches usually commence with the early part of the nineteenth
century, are wont to gather from text-books the idea that the policy
of the manufacturing party in England has always been liberal,
progressive and patriotic; whereas that of the landed interest has
been retrograde and selfish. There cannot be a greater delusion.
English manufacturers have been just as self-seeking and narrow-minded
as other people--no more and no less; they have been quite as ready
to sacrifice the interests of others when they believed them to be
opposed to their own, as the much-abused landowners. At this time
every nation in Europe regarded the outlying portions of the Empire
as existing only for the benefit of the centre; in fact, the English
development of the "Colonial System" even then was more liberal than
those of Spain or Holland. The English system, if perfectly carried
out, was by no means unfair. The ground idea was that the mother
country voluntarily restricted herself in matters of trade for the
benefit of the Colonies, and the Colonies had to do the same for the
benefit of the mother country. Thus, when England refused to admit
timber from the Baltic in order to benefit the Canadian lumber trade;
and placed a prohibitive duty on sugar from Cuba so as to secure the
English market for Jamaica; it was but fair that the trade in other
articles from Canada and Jamaica should be directed to England. To
say that the whole thing was a mistake, as such restrictions really
injured both parties, is no answer, as no one at that time dreamed of
such a thing as free trade. The real answer is that it was impossible
to keep the balance true; some slight change of circumstances might
render that unfair which up to then had been perfectly equal. And
as the English merchants were on the spot and commanded votes in
Parliament, any injustice against them would be speedily rectified;
the colonists living at a distance and having no means of making their
voice heard, would be left to suffer.
In applying the colonial system to Ireland, it is true that in theory
England undertook to protect her by means of the British army and
navy, from foreign foes; but beyond that, the system was to Ireland
all loss and no gain. Every branch of Irish industry was deliberately
ruined by the English Government. By the Navigation Act of 1663, trade
between Ireland and the British Colonies was forbidden; soon after,
the importation of Irish beef, mutton, pork and butter into
England was prohibited; then, at the request of the English woollen
manufacturers, the export of woollen goods from Ireland to any country
was stopped; and finally, with a refinement of cruelty, the export of
linen articles--the one industry that had hitherto been left to
the unfortunate country--was restricted to the coarsest and poorest
varieties, for fear of offending the Dutch.
The result of all this wretched misgovernment was not merely
destitution bordering on famine, but a wholesale emigration. Whilst
the Roman Catholics were leaving the country to avoid the penal laws,
the most skilful and industrious of the artizan class,--the very
backbone of the nation--were being driven out by the prohibition of
their trades. It is said that no less than 30,000 men were thrown out
of employment by the destruction of the woollen industry alone. These
were nearly all Protestants; to encourage them would have done more to
Protestantize the country than all the penal laws and charter schools
put together; but they were ruthlessly sacrificed to the greed of the
English manufacturers. Some went to the Continent, many more to New
England and the other American colonies, where they prospered, and
they and their sons became some of Washington's best soldiers in the
War of Independence.
It was only natural that thoughtful men in Ireland should cast envious
eyes on Scotland, which had recently secured the benefit of union
with England, and consequently was able to develop her commerce
and manufactures unhindered. But though the subject of a union was
discussed, and even referred to in addresses from the Irish Parliament
to Queen Anne, no active steps were taken.
Still, in considering these commercial restrictions, as in the case of
the penal laws, we must not lose sight of the fact that the state
of circumstances we are dealing with has long passed away. It is
necessary for a historian to refer to it, even if he finds it hard to
do so in a perfectly dispassionate way; but it is waste of time and
energy for the present generation to go on brooding over woes which
had come to an end before their grandfathers were born. Yet that is
what the Nationalists of to-day are doing. Not long ago, the Old
Boys' Association of an Irish Roman Catholic College resolved, very
laudably, to found an annual prize at their alma mater. The subject
they selected was an essay on the treatment by England of Irish
industries before the year 1800! Had it been a Scotch or a German
College, the subject chosen would probably have been, The progress
in scientific knowledge during the last century, or, Improvements in
means of travel since 1820; and one must ask, which subject of study
is likely to be most profitable to young men who have to make their
way in the modern world?
It may be asked, why did the Irish Parliament do nothing to stay this
national ruin? The answer is that the Irish Parliament possessed very
little power. The Bill of Rights of course did not apply to Ireland;
general elections were very rare, and a large number of members
were paid officers of the Government; the English Parliament had a
co-ordinate power of legislating for Ireland; and since Poyning's Act
(as explained by the declaratory Act of George I) was still in force,
no Bill could be introduced into the Irish Parliament until it had
been approved both by the Irish and the English Councils; and the
Irish Parliament might then pass it or reject it but had no power to
amend it.
And the use which the English Government made of the Irish Parliament
was as disgraceful as their treatment of Irish industries. Miserably
poor though the country was, it was burdened by the payment of
pensions of a nature so scandalous that the English Parliament even of
that period would not have tolerated them.
The conditions of land tenure also added to the miseries of the
country. It is often said that the land belonged to wealthy English
absentees, and the unfortunate occupiers, who had no security of
tenure, were ground down by the payment of exorbitant rents. This is
literally true; but, like most partial statements, misleading. Much
of the land was owned by wealthy Englishmen--which of itself was a
serious evil; but they let it in large farms at low rents on long
leases, in the hope that the occupiers would execute their own
improvements. Instead of that, however, their tenants sublet their
holdings in smaller lots to others; and these subtenants did the same
again; thus there were sometimes three or four middlemen, and the rent
paid by the actual occupier to his immediate landlord was ten times
the amount the nominal owner received. As the rate of wages
was miserably low, and the rent of a cabin and a plot of ground
scandalously high, how the wretched occupiers managed to keep body and
soul together is a mystery. Much has been written about the useless,
dissipated lives of these middlemen or "squireens"; and no doubt it is
to a great extent true, although, like everything else in Ireland, it
has been exaggerated. Travellers have told us of some landlords
who resided on their estates, did their utmost to improve them, and
forbade subletting (in spite of the unpopularity caused by their doing
so). And one of the remarkable features of later Irish history is that
whenever there was a period of acute difficulty and danger there were
always country gentlemen to be found ready to risk their lives and
fortunes or to undertake the thankless and dangerous duties of county
magistrates.
It is curious how close a parallel might be drawn between the way
in which Norman Ireland was Ersefied and that in which Cromwellian
Ireland was Catholicized. Many of those who became large landowners
by the Cromwellian confiscations, having no religious prejudices (some
might say, no religious or humane feelings), when the leases of
their tenants fell in, put the farms up to auction regardless of the
feelings of the occupiers. As the Roman Catholics were content with
a simpler manner of life than the Protestants, they generally offered
higher rents; the dispossessed Protestants, driven from their homes,
joined their brethren in America. Then in the South, the poorer of
Cromwell's settlers, in some cases, neglected by their own pastors,
joined the religion of the majority; in others, intermarrying with the
natives, allowed their children to be brought up in the faith of their
mothers. Hence we arrive at the curious fact that at the present day
some of the most ardent Romanists and violent Nationalists, who are
striving to have the Irish language enforced all over the country,
and pose as the representatives of ancient Irish septs, are really the
descendants of Cromwell's soldiers.
So passed the greater part of the eighteenth century; and the unhappy
country seemed as far off from progress and prosperity as ever.