the day of Aughrim, its garrison claiming and obtaining the right of
marching out with all the honours of war. Tyrconnel was dying, and had
long lost, too, what little reputation he had ever had as a soldier.
Sarsfield, however, stood firm to the last. Fresh reinforcements were
hoped for from France, but none came until too late to be of any use.
The town was again invested and besieged. An English fleet held the
mouth of the Shannon so as to prevent any relief from coming to its aid.
From the middle of August to the end of September the siege went on, and
the walls, always weak, were riddled with shot and shell. Still it
showed no symptoms of submission. Ginkel, who was in command of
William's army, dreaded the approach of autumn, and had instructions
from his master to finish the campaign as rapidly as possible, and with
this end in view to offer good and honourable terms to the Irish. An
armistice accordingly was agreed to for three days, and before the three
days ended the famous "Articles of Limerick" were drawn up and signed by
Sarsfield on the one hand, and the Lords Justices, who had just arrived
in camp from Dublin, on the other.
The exact purport of these articles, and the extent to which they were
afterwards mutilated and perverted from their original meaning has been
hotly disputed, and is too large and complicated a question to enter
into here at any length. Suffice it to say, that they engaged that the
Roman Catholics of Ireland should enjoy the same privileges as they had
previously enjoyed in the reign of Charles II.; that they should be free
to follow the same trades and professions as before the war, and that
all who were in arms, having a direct commission from King James, "with
all _such as were under their protection_" should have a free pardon and
be left in undisputed ownership of their lands and other possessions.
It is over the clause placed in italics that controversy has waxed
fiercest. That it was in the first draft is admitted; that it was not in
the document itself is equally certain. Had it been intentionally or
accidentally excluded? is the question. William's own words were that it
had been "casually omitted by the writer." The evidence seems clear, yet
historians, who on other matters would hardly question his accuracy,
seem to think that in this instance he was mistaken. That his own mind
was clear on the point there can be little doubt, seeing that he made
the most honourable efforts to get the clause in question carried into
effect. In this he failed. Public opinion in England ran furiously
against the Irish Catholics, and the Parliament absolutely refused to
ratify it. The essential clause was accordingly struck out, and the
whole treaty soon became an absolute dead letter.
On the other hand, the military one, which was drawn up at the same time
and signed by the two generals, was carried honourably into effect. By
its terms it was agreed that such Irish officers and soldiers as desired
to go to France should be conveyed there, and in the meantime should
remain under the command of their own officers. Ginkel made strenuous
efforts to enlist the Irish troops in his master's service. Few,
however, agreed to accept his offer. A day was fixed for the election to
be made, and the Irish troops were passed in review. All who would take
service with William were directed to file off at a particular spot; all
who passed it were held to have thrown in their lot with France. The
long procession was watched with keen interest by the group of generals
looking on, but the decision was not long delayed. The vast majority
unhesitatingly elected exile, only about a thousand agreeing to take
service with William.
The most piteous part of the story remains. Sarsfield, with the soldiers
under him who had elected to go to France, withdrew into Limerick, and
the next day proceeded to Cork, where they were to embark. The news had,
in the meanwhile, spread, and the roads were covered with women rushing
to see the last of husbands, brothers, sons. Wives, mothers, and
children followed the departing exiles to the water's edge, imploring
with cries of agony not to be left behind. In the extremity of his pity
Sarsfield proclaimed that his soldiers might take their wives and
families with them to France. It was found utterly impossible, however,
to do so, since no transport could be provided for such a multitude.
Room was found for a few families, but the beach was still crowded with
those who had perforce to be left behind. As the boats pushed off the
women clung desperately to them, and several, refusing to let go, were
dragged out of their depth and drowned. A wild cry went up as the ships
began to move. The crowd rushed frantically along the shore from
headland to headland, following them with their eyes as long as they
remained in sight. When the last ship had dropped below the horizon, and
the dull autumn dusk had settled down over sea and shore, they dispersed
slowly to their desolate homes. Night and desolation must indeed have
seemed to have settled down for good upon Ireland.
XLV.
THE PENAL CODE.
We are now upon the brink of a century as full of strange fortunes for
Ireland as any that had preceded it, but in which those fortunes were
destined to take a widely different turn. In the two preceding ones
revolts and risings had, as we have seen, been the rule rather than the
exception. In this one from the beginning down to within a couple of
years of its close when a rebellion--which, in most impartial
historians' opinion, might with a little care have been averted--broke
the peace of the century, hardly a symptom of any disposition to appeal
to arms is discoverable. Two great Jacobite risings convulsed England;
the American revolt, so fraught with momentous consequences, was fought
and carried, but Ireland never stirred. The fighting element was gone.
It was in France, in Spain, in the Low Countries--scattered over half
the battlefields of Europe. The country which gave birth to these
fighters was quiet; a graveyard quiet, it may be said, but still
significant, if only by contrast with what had gone before.
One advantage which the student of this century has over others is that
it has been made the subject of a work which enables us to thread our
way through its mazes with what, in comparison to other periods may be
called ease. In his "History of the Eighteenth Century" Mr. Lecky has
done for the Ireland of one century what it is much to be desired some
one would hasten to do for the Ireland of all. He has broken down a
barrier of prejudice so solid and of such long standing that it seemed
to be invulnerable, and has proved that it is actually possible to be
just in two directions at once--a feat no previous historian of Ireland
can be said to have even attempted. This work, the final volume of which
has not yet appeared, so completely covers the whole ground that it
seems to afford an excuse for an even more hasty scamper over the same
area than the exigencies of space have elsewhere made inevitable.
The task to which both the English and the Irish Parliaments now
energetically addressed themselves was--firstly, the undoing of the Acts
passed in the late reign; secondly, the forfeiture of the estates of
those who had taken the losing side in the late campaign; thirdly, the
passing of a series of Acts the aim of which was as far as possible to
stamp out the Roman Catholic religion altogether, and in any case to
deprive it of any shadow or semblance of future political importance.
To describe at length the various Acts which make up what is known as
the Penal code--"a code impossible," as Mr. Lecky observed in an earlier
work, "for any Irish Protestant whose mind is not wholly perverted by
religious bigotry, to look back at without shame and indignation," would
take too long. It will be enough, therefore, if I describe its general
purport, and how it affected the political and social life of that
century upon which we are now entering.
In several respects it not a little resembled what is nowadays known as
"boycotting," only it was boycotting inflicted by the State itself. As
compared with some of the enactments passed against Protestants in
Catholic countries, it was not, it must be said, sanguinary, but its aim
seemed to be to make life itself intolerable; to reduce the whole
Catholic population to the condition of pariahs and outcasts. No Papist
might possess a horse of the value of over £5; no Papist might carry
arms; no Papist might dispose as he chose of his own property; no Papist
might acquire any landed freehold; no Papist might practise in any of
the liberal professions; no Papist might educate his sons at home,
neither might he send them to be educated abroad. Deeper wrong, more
biting and terrible injury even than these, it sowed bitter strife
between father and son, and brother and brother. Any member of a family,
by simply turning Protestant, could dispossess the rest of that family
of the bulk of the estate to his own advantage. Socially, too, a Papist,
no matter what his rank, stood below, and at the mercy of, his
Protestant neighbours. He was treated by the executive as a being
devoid, not merely of all political, but of all social rights, and only
the numerical superiority of the members of the persecuted creed can
have enabled them to carry on existence under such circumstances at all.
For it must be remembered (and this is one of its worst features) that
those placed under this monstrous ban constituted the vast majority of
the whole country. In Burke's memorable words, "This system of penalty
and incapacity has for its object no small sect or obscure party, but a
very numerous body of men, a body which comprehends at least two-thirds
of the whole nation; it amounts to two million eight hundred thousand
souls--a number sufficient for the constituents of a great people[13]."
"The happiness or misery of multitudes," he adds in another place, "can
never be a thing indifferent. A law against the majority of the people
is in substance a law against the people itself; its extent determines
its invalidity; it even changes its character as it enlarges its
operation; it is not particular injustice, but general oppression, and
can no longer be considered as a private hardship which might be borne,
but spreads and grows up into the unfortunate importance of a national
calamity."
[13] "Tracts on the Popery Laws."
As was natural under the circumstances, many feigned conversions took
place, that being the only way to avoid been utterly cut adrift from
public life. For by a succession of enactments, not only were the higher
offices and the professions debarred to Roman Catholics, but they were
even prohibited--to so absurd a length can panic go--from being
sheriffs, jurymen, constables, or even gamekeepers. "Every barrister,
clerk, attorney, or solicitor," to quote again Burke, "is obliged to
take a solemn oath not to employ persons of that persuasion; no, not as
hackney clerks, at the miserable salary of seven shillings a week." It
was loudly complained of many years later, that men used to qualify for
taking the oaths required upon being admitted as barristers or attorneys
by attending church and receiving a sacramental certificate on their
road to Dublin. Others, to save their property from confiscation,
sacrificed their inclinations, often what they held to be their hopes of
salvation, to the exigencies of the situation, and nominally embraced
Protestantism. Old Lady Thomond, for instance, upon being reproached by
some stricter co-religionist for thus imperilling her soul, asked with
quick scorn whether it was not better that one old woman should burn
than that the Thomonds should lose their own. The head of the house
would thus often present himself or herself at the parish church, while
the other members of the family kept to the old faith, and the chaplain,
under the name of the tutor or secretary, celebrated mass in the
harness-room or the servants' hall.
To the credit of Irish Protestants it may be said that, once the first
violence of fanaticism had died out, there was little attempt to enforce
the legal enactments in all their hideous atrocity. According to the
strict letter of the law, no Roman Catholic bishop, archbishop, or other
dignitary; no monk, nun, or member of any religious fraternity, could
set foot in Ireland; and any one who harboured them was liable at the
third offence to confiscation of all his goods. A list of parish priests
was also drawn up and certified, and their names entered, and when these
had died no others were by law allowed to come, any so doing being
liable to the penalties of high treason. As a matter of fact, however,
they came with very little hindrance, and the succession was steadily
kept up from the Continent. The attempt to stamp out a religion by force
proved to be the most absolute of failures, although, as no rule is
without its exception, it must be added that in England, where exactly
the same penal laws were in force, and where the number of Roman
Catholics was at the beginning of the century considerable, they
dwindled by the end of it almost to the point of extinction. In Ireland
the reverse was the case. The number of Roman Catholics, according to
the most trustworthy statistics, increased rather than diminished under
the Penal code, and there were many more conversions from Protestantism
to Catholicism than there were the other way.
This, no doubt, was in great measure due to the neglect with which the
scattered Protestant communities were treated, especially in the south
and west. The number of Protestant clergymen was extremely small, as
many as six, seven, and even ten livings being frequently held by a
single individual, and of these many were absentees, and their place
filled by a curate. Thus--isolated in a vast Roman Catholic community,
often with no church of their own within reach--the few Protestants
drifted by a natural law to the faith of their neighbours. On the
emphatic and angry testimony of Archbishop Boulter, we know that
conversions from Protestantism to Catholicism were in his time extremely
common amongst the lower orders. By law, too, no marriage between a
Protestant and Catholic was recognizable, yet there were many such, and
the children in most cases seem to have reverted to the elder faith.
[Illustration: "TIGER" ROCHE, A FAMOUS IRISH DUELIST, BORN IN DUBLIN
1729.]
The best side of all this for the Catholics showed itself in that
feeling of devotion and fealty to their own faith which persecution
rarely fails to awaken, and for which the Roman Catholics of Ireland,
high and low alike, have always been honourably distinguished. The worst
was that this sense of being under an immoveable ban sapped at all the
roots of manliness and honourable ambition. Amongst the well-to-do
classes the more spirited of the young men went abroad and enlisted
under foreign banners. The rest stayed at home, and fell into an idle,
aimless, often disreputable, fashion of existence. The sense of being of
no account, mere valueless items in the social hive, is no doubt
answerable for a good deal of all this. Swift assures us that in his
time the Catholic manhood of Ireland were of no more importance than its
women and children; of no more importance, he adds in another place,
than so many trees. With a patience pathetic in so essentially impatient
a race, both priests and people seem to have settled down after awhile
into a sort of desperate acceptance of the inevitable. So complete
indeed was their submission that towards the close of the century we
find the English executive, harassed and set at nought by its own
Protestant colonists, turning by a curious nemesis to the members of
this persecuted creed, whose patience and loyalty three quarters of a
century of unexampled endurance seemed to have gone far to prove.
XLVI.
THE COMMERCIAL CODE.
All power, place, and authority had thus once more swung round into the
hands of the Protestant colony--"The Protestant Ascendency," as it came
after a while to be called. They alone had seats in Parliament, they
alone, until near the end of the century, were competent to vote. Taxes
were collected over the whole island, but only Protestants had a voice
in their disposal. All the parliamentary struggles of this century, it
must clearly be understood, were struggles between Protestants and
Protestants, and the different political parties, "patriotic" and
others, were parties formed exclusively amongst the Protestants
themselves. Protestantism was not only the privileged, but it was also
the polite, creed; the creed of the upper classes, as distinguished from
the creed of the potato-diggers and the turf-cutters; a view of the
matter of which distinct traces may even yet be discovered in Ireland.
If Protestants, as compared with their Roman Catholic brethren, were
happy, the Protestant colony was very far from being allowed its own
way, or permitted to govern itself as it thought fit. Although avowedly
kept as her garrison, and to preserve her own power in Ireland, England
had no notion of allowing it equal advantages with herself, or of
running the smallest risk of its ever coming to stand upon any dangerous
footing of equality. The fatal theory that it was the advantage of the
one country that the other should be kept poor, had by this time firmly
taken root in the minds of English statesmen, and to it, and to the
unreasonable jealousy of a certain number of English traders, the
disasters now to be recorded were mainly due.
Cromwell had placed English and Irish commerce upon an equal footing.
Early in Charles II.'s reign an Act had however been passed to hinder
the importation of Irish cattle into England, one which had struck a
disastrous, not to say fatal, blow at Irish agricultural interests. Then
as now cattle was its chief wealth, and such a prohibition meant nothing
short of ruin to the landowners, and through them to all who depended
upon them. So far Irish ports were open, however, to foreign countries,
and when the cattle trade ceased to be profitable, much of the land had
been turned by its owners into sheepwalks. There was a large and an
increasing demand for Irish wool upon the Continent, in addition to
which a considerable number of manufacturers had of late started
factories, and an energetic manufacture of woollen goods was going on,
and rapidly becoming the principal form of Irish industry. The English
traders, struck by this fact, were suddenly smitten with panic. The
Irish competition, they declared, were reducing their gains, and they
cried loudly, therefore, for legislative protection. Their prayer was
granted. In 1699, the last year of the century, an Act was passed
forbidding the export of Irish woollen goods, not to England alone, but
to _all_ other countries.
The effect of this Act was instantaneous and startling. The
manufacturers, who had come over in large numbers, left the country for
the most part within six months, never to return again. A whole
population was suddenly thrown out of employment Emigration set in, but,
in spite of the multitude that left, famine laid hold of many of those
who remained. The resources of the poorest classes are always so low in
Ireland that a much less sweeping blow than this would at any time have
sufficed to bring them over the verge of starvation.
Another important result was that smuggling immediately began on an
enormous scale. Wool was now a drug in the legitimate market, and
woollen goods had practically no market. A vast contraband trade sprang
swiftly up upon the ruins of the legitimate one. Wool, which at home was
worth only 5d. or 6d. a lb., in France fetched half-a-crown. The whole
population, from the highest to the lowest, flung themselves
energetically on the side of the smugglers. The coast-line was long and
intricate; the excise practically powerless. Wool was packed in caves
all along the south and south-west coast, and carried off as opportunity
served by the French vessels which came to seek it. What was meant by
nature and Providence to have been the honest and open trade of the
country was thus forced to be carried on by stealth and converted into a
crime. It alleviated to some degree the distress, but it made Law seem
more than ever a mockery, more than ever the one archenemy against which
every man's hand might legitimately be raised.
Even this, if bad enough, was not the worst. The worst was that this
arbitrary Act--directed, it must be repeated, by England, not against
the Irish natives, but against her own colonists--done, too, without
there being an opportunity for the country to be heard in its own
defence--struck at the very root of all enterprise, and produced a
widespread feeling of hopelessness and despair. Since this was the
acknowledged result of too successful rivalry with England, of what use,
it was openly asked, to attempt any new enterprise, or what was to
hinder the same fate from befalling it in its turn? The whole
relationship of the two islands, even where no division of blood or
creed existed, grew thus to be strained and embittered to the last
degree; the sense of hostility and indignation being hardly less strong
in the latest arrived colonist than in the longest established. "There
was scarce an Englishman," says a writer of the time, "who had been
seven years in the country, _and meant to remain there_, who did not
become averse to England, and grow into something of an Irishman." All
this must be taken into account before those puzzling contradictions and
anomalies which make up the history of this century can ever be
properly realized.
XLVII.
MOLYNEUX AND SWIFT.
The early half of the eighteenth century is such a very dreary period of
Irish history that there is little temptation to linger over it. Two
men, however, stand out conspicuously against this melancholy
background, neither of whom must be passed over without a few words.
The first of these was William Molyneux, the "Ingenious Molyneux," as he
was called by his contemporaries, a distinguished philosopher, whose
life was almost exclusively devoted to scientific pursuits. Molyneux is,
or ought to be, a very interesting figure to any one who cares, even
slightly, about Ireland. He was one of the chief founders of the
Philosophical Association in Dublin, which was the parent both of the
present Dublin Society and of the Royal Irish Academy. He was also a
Fellow of the Royal Society, and a friend of John Locke, with whom he
constantly corresponded. Both his letters, and those of his brother, Dr.
Thomas Molyneux, show the most vivid and constant interest in everything
connected with the natural history of Ireland. Now it is a moving bog,
which has scared the natives in its neighbourhood out of their senses;
now, again, some great find of Irish elks, or some tooth of a mammoth
which has been unearthed, and it is gravely discussed how such a
"large-bodied beast" could have been transported over seas, especially
to a country where the "Greeks and Romans never had a footing," and
where therefore the learned Mr. Camden's theory, that the elephants'
bones found in England were the remains of those "brought over by the
Emperor Claudius," necessarily falls to the ground. Both the brothers
Molyneux belong to a band of Irish naturalists whose numbers are,
unfortunately, remarkably limited. Why it should be so is not easily
explained, but so it is. When Irish archaeology is mentioned, the names
of Petrie, of Wilde, of Todd, of Graves, and, last but not least, of
Miss Margaret Stokes spring to the mind. Irish geologists, with Sir
Richard Griffiths at their head, show as good a record as those of any
other country, but the number of Irish naturalists whose fame has
reached beyond a very narrow area is small indeed. This is the less
accountable as, though scanty as regards the number of its species, the
natural history of Ireland is full of interest, abounding in problems
not even yet fully solved: the very scantiness of its fauna being in one
sense, an incentive and stimulus to its study, for the same reason that
a language which is on the point of dying out is often of more interest
to a philologist than one that is in full life and vigour.