WE now approach a period of Irish history from which we would gladly

escape, if we could; a period degrading to Ireland, disgraceful to

England, and shocking to humanity. We are about to deal with the dark

and bloody period of the revived penal code, in Ireland, following fast

upon the capitulation of Limerick. Many writers have extolled the

fair-mindedness and liberality of William III, but his course toward

Ireland does not sustain the justice of their eulogies. That he was an

indifferentist in matters of religion is not doubted, yet he permitted

persecution for conscience’ sake in his Irish dominion. That he was an

able man has not been disputed, yet he permitted English jealousy to

destroy the trade and industries of His own supporters in Ireland,

thereby driving thousands on thousands of the Irish dissenters to the

American colonies, which their descendants, in 1775-83, did so much to

make “free and independent.” We can find nothing to admire in the Irish

policy of William III. Had he been an honest bigot, a fanatic on the

subject of religion, we could understand his toleration of the

legislative abominations which made the Irish Catholic a helot on his

native soil. Had he been an imbecile we could understand how English

plausibility might have imposed upon him in the matter of Irish

Protestant commerce. However, not much of moral stamina could be

expected from a man who estranged his wife and his sister-in-law, Anne,

from their own father; or from a nephew, and son-in-law, that did not

scruple to play the cuckoo and eject his own uncle and father-in-law

from the royal nest of England. Add to this his heartless policy toward

the Macdonalds of Glencoe, in Scotland, the order for whose massacre he

countersigned himself, and we find ourselves utterly unable to give

William of Orange credit for sincerity, liberality, or common humanity.

He was personally courageous, a fair general, and a cautious statesman.

These about summed up his good qualities. But he interposed no objection

when, notwithstanding the solemn civil articles of Limerick, he

permitted the estates of the adherents of King James, to whom his Lords

Justices, by royal sanction, guaranteed immunity, to be confiscated.

Mitchel, a Protestant in belief, says in his “History of Ireland,” page

3: “The first distinct breach of the Articles of Limerick was

perpetrated by King William and his Parliament in England, just two

months after those articles were signed. King William was in the

Netherlands when he heard of the surrender of Limerick, and, at once,

hastened to London. Three days later he summoned a Parliament. Very

early in the session, the English House of Commons, exercising its

customary power of binding Ireland by acts passed in London, sent up to

the House of Lords a bill providing that no person should sit in the

Irish Parliament, nor should hold any Irish office, civil, military, or

ecclesiastical, nor should practice law or medicine in Ireland, till he

had first taken the oaths of allegiance _and supremacy_, and subscribed

to the declaration against transubstantiation. The law was passed, only

reserving the right [of practice] to such lawyers and physicians as had

been within the walls of Galway and Limerick when those towns

capitulated.” Thenceforward there were repeated violations of the

treaty, during the reign of William and Mary, although the penal laws

did not reach the acme of their crushing severity until the reigns of

their immediate successors, Queen Anne, George I, and George II. Lord

Macaulay himself, who does not admit that William III was ever wrong,

acknowledges, in his “History of England,” that “the Irish Roman

Catholics complained, and with but too much reason, that, at a later

period, the Treaty of Limerick was violated.” The main opposition to the

confirmation of the treaty came, as might be expected, from the party of

Protestant ascendency in Ireland, which had in view “the glory of God,”

and wholesale confiscation of Catholic property. Their horror of what

they called “Popery” was strongly influenced by a pious greed for cheap

real estate. There were, of course, many noble exceptions to this

mercenary rule among the Protestants of Ireland, even in the blackest

period of “the penal days.” If there had not been, the Catholics must

have been exterminated. It is only fair to say that the majority of the

poorer Protestant Irish—particularly the Dissenters—had little or no

part in framing the penal code, and that many members of the Irish House

of Lords, including Protestant bishops, indignantly protested against

the formal violation of the Articles of Limerick, contained in the act

of the “Irish” Parliament, passed in 1695.

Lord Sydney, William’s Lord Lieutenant in Ireland, summoned the first

Irish Parliament of his master’s reign, in 1692, and this was the only

Parliament, except that called together by King James in 1689, which had

met in Ireland in six-and-twenty years. No act of Catholic

disqualification for Parliament existed in Ireland at that time, and,

therefore, a few Catholic lords and commoners presented themselves, on

summons, and took their seats. They had forgotten that the “paternal”

English Parliament had, in 1691, provided for such an emergency, and

were taken aback when the clerks of Parliament presented to them “the

oath of supremacy, declaring the King of England to be head of the

Church, and affirming the sacrifice of the Mass to be damnable.” Mitchel

says, further, of what followed: “The oath was put to each member of

both Houses, and the few Catholics present at once retired, so that the

Parliament, when it proceeded to business, was purely Protestant. Here,

then, ended the last vestige of constitutional right for the Catholics;

from this date, and for generations to come, they could no longer

consider themselves a part of the existing body politic of their native

land, and the division [of the Irish] into two nations became definite.

There was the dominant nation, consisting of the British colony, and the

subject nation, consisting of five-sixths of the population, who had,

therefore, no more influence upon public affairs than have the red

Indians of the United States.” In order to more fully reduce the

Catholics of Ireland to the condition described, an act was passed by

the Irish Parliament in 1697 which provided that “a Protestant marrying

a Catholic was disabled from sitting or voting in either House of

Parliament.” We may add that, following up this policy, the same

Parliament, thirty years later, fearing that the Catholics were not even

yet sufficiently effaced from political life, passed another bill by

which it was enacted that “no Catholic shall be entitled, or admitted,

to vote at the election of any member to serve in Parliament, as a

knight, citizen, or burgess; or at the election of any magistrate for

any city or other town corporate; any law, statute, or usage to the

contrary notwithstanding.”

Mitchel, commenting on the severity of the penal laws, presents a

curiously contradictory situation in the Ireland of King William’s time

when he says: “But though the inhabitants of Ireland were now, counting

from 1692, definitively divided into two castes, there arose

immediately, strange to say, a strong sentiment of Irish

nationality—not, indeed, among the depressed Catholics; they were done

with national sentiment and aspiration for a time—but the Protestants of

Ireland had lately grown numerous, wealthy, and strong. Their numbers

had been largely increased by English settlers coming to enjoy the

plunder of the forfeited estates, and very much by conversions, or

pretended conversions, of Catholics, who had recanted their faith to

save their property or their position in society, and who generally

altered or disguised their family names when these had too Celtic a

sound. The Irish Protestants also prided themselves on having saved the

kingdom for William and the ‘Ascendancy,’ and having now totally put

down the ancient nation under their feet, they aspired to take its

place, to rise from a colony to a nation, and to assert the dignity of

an independent kingdom.”

Even the Irish Protestant Parliament of 1692 quarreled with Lord

Lieutenant Sydney over a revenue bill, which originated in London, and

which it rejected, although it passed another bill, having a like

origin, on the ground of emergency. During the debate on these measures,

several members denied the right of England to tax Ireland without her

consent, and insisted that all revenue bills, which called for Irish

taxation, should originate in Ireland, not in England. This bold spirit

angered Lord Sydney, who immediately prorogued that Parliament, not,

however, before he made an overbearing speech, in which he rebuked the

action of the members and haughtily asserted the supremacy of the

British Parliament over that of Ireland. His remarks left a sting in

Protestant Ireland and served to strengthen, rather than weaken, the

national sentiment alluded to by Mitchel.

In 1693, King James the Vacillating, then a pensioner of the King of

France, at St. Germain, issued a declaration to his former subjects of

England in which he made humiliating promises, at variance with his

previous record, and in which, among other things, he promised if

restored to the throne to keep inviolate the Act of Settlement, which

deprived his Catholic supporters in Ireland of their estates! This

perfidious document aroused great indignation among the Irish military

exiles, and James, through his English advisers in France, attempted to

smooth matters over by promising that, in the event of his success, he

would recompense all who might suffer by his act, by giving them

equivalents. Lord Middleton, a Scotch peer, is held chiefly responsible

for having led King James into this disgraceful transaction—the most

blameful of his unfortunate career. “There was no such promise [of

recompense] in the declaration” (to the English), says the historian

recently quoted, “but, in truth, the Irish troops in the army of King

Louis were, at that time, too busy in camp and field, and too keenly

desirous to meet the English in battle, to pay much attention to

anything coming from King James. They had had enough of ‘Righ Seamus’ at

the Boyne Water.”

Lord Sydney, although inimical to the claim of Irish Parliamentary

independence, was rather friendly to the persecuted Irish Catholics, and

was, therefore, at the request of the “Ascendancy” faction, speedily

recalled, not, however, before, after two proroguements, he had

dissolved the Parliament convened in 1692. Three Lords Justices—Lord

Capel, Sir Cyril Wyche, and Mr. Duncombe—were given the government of

Ireland in his stead, but, owing to serious dissensions among

themselves, Capel was finally appointed Lord Lieutenant, and, in 1695,

summoned a new Parliament to meet in Dublin. This assembly was destined

to be infamous. Its first act was to bring up the articles of the Treaty

of Limerick for “confirmation,” and it “confirmed” them by vetoing all

the important and agreeing to all the trivial provisions. The

enumeration of all the penal laws passed by this Parliament would be

tedious in the extreme, and a bare outline will suffice to show their

demoralizing tendency. It was enacted that Catholic schoolmasters were

forbidden to teach, either publicly or privately, under severe penalty;

and the parents of Catholic children were prohibited from sending them

to be educated abroad. All Catholics were required to surrender their

arms, and, in order to enforce the act more thoroughly, “right of

search” was given to magistrates, so that Catholic householders could be

disturbed at any hour of the day or night, their bedrooms invaded, and

the women of their family subjected to exposure and insult.

Notwithstanding the clause in the Treaty of Limerick which was supposed

to secure the Catholic landholders in certain counties in the possession

of their property, Parliament made a clean sweep by confiscating the

property of all, to the extent of over a million acres, so that now, at

long run, after three series of confiscations, there remained in

Catholic hands _less than one-seventh_ of the entire surface of the

island. The Protestant one-sixth owned all the rest.

It was agreed not to seriously disturb the parish priests, who were

incumbents at the time of the treaty, but no curates were allowed them,

and they were compelled to register their names, like ticket-of-leave

men, in a book furnished by government. They had, also, to give security

for their “good conduct,” and there were other insulting exactions—the

emanation of bitter hearts and narrow brains. All Catholic prelates, the

Jesuits, monks, and “regular clergy,” of whatever order, were

peremptorily ordered to quit Ireland by May 1, 1698. If any returned

after that date, they were to be arrested for high treason, “tried,”

and, of course, condemned and executed. The object was to leave the

Catholic people without spiritual guides, except Protestants, after the

“tolerated” parish priests had passed away; but, in spite of the penal

enactment, a large number of devoted proscribed bishops and priests

remained in Ireland, and the prelates administered holy orders to young

clerical students, who, like themselves, had defied penalties and risked

their lives for the service of God and the consolation of their

suffering people.

In order to still further humiliate the unfortunate Irish Catholics,

this Parliament of bigots decreed that no Catholic chapel should be

furnished with either bell or belfry. Such smallness would seem

incredible in our age, but the enactments stand out, in all their

hideousness, in the old statutes of the Irish Parliament, still

preserved in the government archives in Dublin and London. It was this

Parliament that decreed, further, that no Catholic could possess a horse

of or over the value of £5 sterling. On offering that sum, or anything

over it, any Protestant could become owner of the animal.

The Irish peers who protested against this tyranny were Lords

Londonderry, Tyrone, and Duncannon, the Barons Ossory, Limerick,

Killaloe, Kerry, Howth, Kingston, and Strabane, and the Protestant

bishops of Kildare, Elphin, Derry, Clonfert, and Killala—to whom be

eternal honor.

But the penal laws were not yet completed. They had just about begun. In

1704, when the Duke of Ormond, grandson of the Ormond of Cromwellian

days, became viceroy for Queen Anne, another Irish Ascendancy Parliament

enacted, among other things, that the eldest son of a Catholic, by

becoming Protestant, could become the owner of his father’s land, if he

possessed any, and the father become only a life tenant. If any child,

of any age above infancy, declared itself a Protestant, it was ordered

placed under Protestant guardianship, and the father was compelled to

pay for its education and support. If the wife of a Catholic turned

Protestant, she could claim a third of his property and separate

maintenance. Catholics were prohibited from being guardians of their own

children, to the end that, when they died, the helpless ones might be

brought up as Protestants.

Catholics were debarred from buying land, or taking a freehold lease for

life, or a for a longer period than thirty-one years. No Catholic heir

to a former owner was allowed to accept property that came to him by

right of lineal descent, or by process of bequest. If any Protestant

could prove that the profit on the farm of a Catholic exceeded one-third

of the rent paid by the latter, the informer could take immediate

possession of the land.

We have already alluded to the measures taken to exclude Catholics from

civil and military service, by operation of the odious test oaths, which

were also used to prevent them from entering Parliament, and from even

voting for members of Parliament, although the latter had to be

Protestants in order to be eligible. The Irish Dissenters—Presbyterians

and others—were also subjected to the test-oath indignity, which,

together with the tyrannical restrictions on trade, imposed by the

English and servile Irish Parliament, drove many thousands of them to

America. The Irish Presbyterians, in particular, resented the “test” and

“schism” acts, and refused to apply to Episcopal bishops for license to

teach in schools; or to receive the sacrament after the fashion of the

Church of England. Rewards were held out for all who would reveal to the

government the names of Catholics, or others, who might violate the

provisions of the barbaric laws summarized in this chapter. The scale of

the rewards, as given by McGee and other authors, is a curious study.

Thus, “for discovering an archbishop, bishop, vicar-general, or other

person exercising any foreign ecclesiastical jurisdiction, £50; for

discovering each ‘regular’ clergyman and each ‘secular’ clergyman, not

registered, £20, and for discovering each ‘Popish’ schoolmaster, or

usher, £10.” If any person refused to give evidence of the residence of

any proscribed person, he was fined £20, or else had to go to prison for

a year. Many noble-hearted Protestants who, in spite of penal laws,

loved their Catholic fellow-countrymen, suffered pains and penalties,

under these enactments, and became objects of hatred to the more

malignant section of their co-religionists, who were after the Catholic

spoils. Thus, public distrust became epidemic, and the infamous “reward”

policy begot, as a natural result, a host of professional informers,

whose shocking avocation was mainly exercised in the spying out of the

places of concealment of proscribed prelates and priests, and who are

still remembered in Ireland as “priest-hunters.” These malignants also

directed their efforts vigorously against the teachers of

“hedge-schools”—that is to say, schools held in the open air, generally

under the shelter of a tall hedge, or on the edge of a wood, and

presided over by some wandering schoolmaster, who bravely risked

liberty, and often life, in teaching the Catholic youth of Ireland the

rudiments of education.

There existed a mean “toleration” of Catholic worship, in parishes whose

priests were “registered,” according to the provisions of the penal

code, but, in parishes where the priests were not registered, and they

were numerous, priests and people, who wished to celebrate and assist at

the consoling sacrifice of the Mass, had to retire to ocean cave, or

mountain summit, or rocky gorge, in order to guard against surprise and

massacre. The English government of the day did not scruple to lend its

soldiers to the priest-hunters, to enable the latter to more effectively

accomplish their odious mission; just as in our day it has lent the

military to the sheriffs to carry out those cruel evictions which the

late Mr. Gladstone called “sentences of death.” It was the custom to

place sentinels around the places where Mass was being celebrated, but,

despite of this precaution, the human sleuthhounds occasionally crept

unobserved upon their unarmed victims—for then, as now, the Irish were

systematically disarmed—and often slew priest and people at the rude

altar stones, called still by the peasantry “Mass rocks.”

So great was the enforced exodus of priests from Ireland, at this awful

period of its history, that, says McGee, “in Rome 72,000 francs annually

were allotted for the maintenance of the fugitive Irish clergy, and,

during the first three months of 1699, three remittances from the Holy

Father, amounting to 90,000 livres, were placed in the hands of the

Nuncio at Paris for the temporary relief of the fugitives in France and

Flanders. It may also be added here that, till the end of the eighteenth

century, an annual charge of 1,000 crowns was borne by the Papal

treasury for the encouragement of Catholic poor schools in Ireland.”

Of the penal code which produced this dreadful condition of affairs, in

and out of Ireland, Dr. Samuel Johnson, the great English scholar and

philosopher, said, “They are more grievous than all the Ten Pagan

persecutions of the Christians.”

Edmund Burke, the illustrious Irish statesman, who passed most of his

career in the British Parliament, and was, of course, a Protestant, or

he could not have sat there, denounced them, substantially, as the most

diabolical engine of oppression and demoralization ever used against a

people or ever devised by “the perverted ingenuity of man.”

And the Protestant and English historian, Godkin, who compiled Cassell’s

“History of Ireland,” for English readers, says of the penal laws: “The

eighteenth century was the era of persecution in which the law did the

work of the sword, more effectually and more safely. There was

established a code framed with almost diabolical ingenuity, to

extinguish natural affection, to foster perfidy and hypocrisy, to

petrify conscience, to perpetuate brutal ignorance, to facilitate the

work of tyranny, by rendering the vices of slavery inherent and natural

in the Irish character, and to make Protestantism almost irredeemably

odious as the monstrous incarnation of all moral perversions.” This

honest Englishman grows indignant when he says, in continuation, “Too

well did it accomplish its deadly work on the intellects, morals, and

physical condition of a people, sinking in degeneracy from age to age,

till all manly spirit, all virtuous sense of personal independence and

responsibility, was nearly extinct, and the very features, vacant,

timid, cunning, and unreflective, betrayed the crouching slave

within.... Having no rights or franchises, no legal protection of life

and property, disqualified to handle a gun, even as a common soldier or

a gamekeeper, forbidden to acquire the elements of knowledge at home or

abroad, forbidden even to render to God what conscience dictated as His

due, what could the Irish be but abject serfs? What nation in their

circumstances could have been otherwise? Is it not amazing that any

social virtue could have survived such an ordeal?—that any seeds of

good, any roots of national greatness, could have outlived such a long

and tempestuous winter?”

But the seeds of good, although chilled, did not decay, and the manly

spirit of the Old Irish race—the Celto-Norman stock, with the former

element in preponderance—survived all its persecutions, and

“—Exiled in those penal days,

Its banners over Europe blaze!”

The great American orator and philanthropist, Wendell Phillips,

lecturing on Ireland, and alluding to the enforced ignorance of a former

period, said: “When the old-time ignorance of the Catholic Irish people

is reproachfully alluded to by the thoughtless, or illiberal, it is not

Ireland but England that should bow her head in the dust and put on

sackcloth and ashes!”

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CHAPTER II

Restrictions on Irish Trade and Manufactures—All Creeds

Suffer—Presbyterian Exodus to America—Death of Royal

Personages—Accession of George I

SINCE the days of Charles II, and probably before his reign, a

contemptible jealousy of the growth of Irish commerce had taken

possession of the commercial element in England. We have already said

something about the crushing of the Irish cattle trade, while yet the

“Merry Monarch” was on the throne; but a far deadlier blow was struck at

Irish prosperity when, in 1698, the English manufacturers had the

assurance to petition Parliament against the Irish woolen industry—then

among the most prosperous in Europe. This petition was strongly indorsed

by the English House of Lords, in an address to King William, wherein

they, unconsciously, perhaps, paid a high tribute to Irish manufacturing

genius. They virtually admitted that the superiority of Irish woolen

fabrics made the English traders apprehensive that the farther growth of

the Irish woolen industry “might greatly prejudice the said manufacture

in his Majesty’s Kingdom of England.” Not content with this display of

mean selfishness, the English fisheries’ interest protested against

Irish fishermen catching herrings on the eastern coast of their own

island, “thereby coming into competition with them [the English].” The

Colonial Parliament of Ireland basely yielded to English coercion, and,

in 1699, actually stabbed the industries of their own country in the

back, by placing ruinous export duties on fine Irish woolens, friezes,

and flannels! And this hostile legislation was aimed, not against the

Catholic Irish, who had no industries, but against the Protestant Irish,

who possessed all of them!

The English Parliament, thus secured against effective opposition,

immediately passed an act whereby the Irish people were forbidden to

export either the raw material for making woolen goods, or the goods

themselves, to any foreign port, except a few English ports, and only

six of the numerous Irish seaports were allowed even this poor

privilege. The natural result followed. Irish prices went up in England,

and, in spite of the acknowledged excellence of Irish manufactures, the

English people would not purchase them at an advanced cost. The Irish

traders could not afford to sell them at a moderate price, and, within a

few years, most of the latter were absolutely ruined. Dr. P. W. Joyce,

in his “History of Ireland,” estimates that “40,000 Irish

Protestants—all prosperous working people—were immediately reduced to

idleness and poverty—the Catholics, of course, sharing in the misery, so

far as they were employed, and 20,000 Presbyterians and other

Nonconformists left Ireland for New England. Then began the emigration,

from want of employment, that continues to this day. But the English

Parliament professed to encourage the Irish linen trade, for this could

do no harm to English traders, as flax growing and linen manufacture had

not taken much hold in England.”

This, according to Dr. Joyce, was the beginning of that smuggling trade

with France which Ireland carried on for more than a century, and a

close acquaintance, therefore, sprang up between the French and Irish

traders and sailors. Ireland could sell her surplus wool to great

advantage in France, and received from that country many luxuries,

which, otherwise, she could not have enjoyed. French wines became common

at Irish tables, above those of the working-class, and French silks

decorated the fair persons of Irish maids and matrons. Moreover, this

adventurous trade developed a hardy race of Irish sailors, and, by means

of the Irish smugglers and their French copartners, the Irish priests

found a convenient avenue of transit to and from the Continent; and

brave young Irish spirits, registered as “Wild Geese,” found their way

to the ranks of “the bold Brigade,” whose fame was then a household word

in Europe. But the Irish masses, both Catholic and Nonconformist, were

reduced to abject poverty, and each succeeding year brought fresh

commercial restrictions, until, finally, almost every Irish industry,

except the linen, was totally extirpated in the island. The smuggling

trade, alone, kept some vitality in the commercial veins of the ruined

country, and, in defiance of English and Anglo-Irish enactments against

it, it continued to flourish down to the beginning of the nineteenth

century.

Well-meaning foreign writers, who did not make a study of Anglo-Irish

relations in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, have

expressed astonishment at the paucity of Irish industries, outside of

linen, and have ascribed it to Irish non-adaptability to manufacturing

pursuits! Not alone did England compel Ireland to fine her own traders,

by levying export duties on their output, but she also, as we have seen,

by her own Parliament, limited such exports to the meanest possible

proportions! Of course, at this slavish period of the old so-called

Irish Parliament, duties to limit the importation of English goods and

to foster home industries were not allowed. Ireland was stripped of

everything but linen and “homespun,” and then left a beggar. This is a

most disgraceful chapter in the history of the political connection of

Great Britain and Ireland—one that led to untold bitterness, and that

caused the great orator, Grattan, in after years to exclaim,

prophetically, in the Irish House of Commons: “What England tramples in

Ireland will rise to sting her in America!” He alluded to the

Presbyterian and Catholic exodus, which so materially aided the American

Revolution.

The last hope of King James again attaining the throne of the “Three

Kingdoms” disappeared with the terrible defeat inflicted on the French

fleet at the battle of La Hogue, 1692, and, thereafter, his life was

passed sadly—for he had ample time to ruminate on his misfortunes—at St.

Germain, until he died, in 1701. His rival, William III, whose wife,

Queen Mary II, had preceded him to the grave, died from the effects of a

horseback accident, in March, 1702. He was immediately succeeded by

Queen Anne, the last of the Stuart line who occupied the throne of

England. Her reign was one of glory for Great Britain and one of hate

and horror for Ireland. We have already mentioned some of the penal laws

passed while she held sway. Her ministers, of course, were responsible

for her acts, because she herself possessed only moderate ability.

Unlike most of the Stuart family, she swam with the current, and so got

along smoothly with her English subjects. The most important domestic

event of her reign was the legislative union of England with

Scotland—which virtually extinguished Scotland as a nation. This event

occurred in May, 1707, and was accompanied by acts of the most shameless

political profligacy on the part of the English minister and the Scotch

lords and commons. In fact, the independence of Scotland, like that of

Ireland ninety-three years later, was sold for titles, offices,

pensions, and cold cash. The masses of the people, to do them justice,

had little to do with this nefarious transaction, which was subsequently

satirized by the great Scottish poet, Robert Burns, in his lyric, one

verse of which runs thus:

“What English force could not subdue

Through many warlike ages,

Is sold now by a craven few

For hireling traitors’ wages!

The English steel we could disdain—

Secure in valor’s station—

But English gold has been our bane—

Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!”

The deeds in arms of Anne’s great general, Marlborough, who was a

traitor to both King James and King William, have been partially related

in the chapters bearing on the career of the Franco-Irish Brigade and

need no farther mention in this history.

In the days of William III appeared a pamphlet called “The Case of

Ireland Stated,” which was written by William Molyneux, a member of

Parliament, for the Dublin University. It appeared in 1698, and made, at

once, a powerful impression on the public mind. It, in brief, took the

ground that Ireland—that is, Protestant, colonial Ireland—was, of right,

a separate and independent kingdom; that England’s original title of

conquest, if she had any, was abrogated by charters granted to Ireland

from time to time, and, finally, denied that the king and Parliament of

England had power to bind the kingdom and people of Ireland by

English-made laws. The English Parliament was, of course, greatly

shocked and scandalized at the idea of a “mere Irishman” putting forth

such theories, and solemnly ordered his book to be burned, publicly, by

“the common hangman”—a functionary always in high favor when Ireland

needs to be “disciplined.” The book was burned accordingly, but its

spirit did not die then, nor is it yet dead, or likely to die, while

Ireland contains a population. King William, in replying to the English

Parliament’s address on the subject of Molyneux’s utterance, assured its

members that “he would enforce the laws securing the dependence of

Ireland on the imperial crown of Great Britain.”

In the chapter on the penal laws, many of the enactments of the reign of

Anne have been summarized. Her sway was a moral nightmare over Ireland,

and it is a remarkable historical coincidence that the Green Isle

suffered more, materially and morally, under the English female than the

male sovereigns. Under Elizabeth and Anne, the Irish Catholics were

persecuted beyond belief. Under Victoria’s rule, which the British

statistician, Mulhall, has called “the deadliest since Elizabeth,” they

starved to death by the hundred thousand or emigrated by the million.

The régime of Queen Anne, like that of her predecessors and successors

on the throne, gave the government of Ireland into the hands of

Englishmen, who held all the important offices, from the viceroyalty

downward, and who chose their sub-officers from among the least national

element of the Irish people. This system, although somewhat modified,

continues to the present day. In the Irish Parliament, there was an

occasional faint display of sectarian nationality, but it proved of

little advantage when the English wanted matters in that body to go as

they wished. Ireland then, as a majority ruled by a minority, “stood on

her smaller end,” and so it is even in our own times, notwithstanding

occasional “concessions” and “ameliorations.”

But, from the day when the pamphlet, or book, of Molyneux saw the light,

a Patriot party began to grow up in the Irish Parliament. The old Irish

nation had, indeed, disappeared, for a period, but the new one soon

began to manifest a spirit that roused the bitter hatred of England.

Such infatuated Irish Protestants as still believed that they would be

more gently treated on account of common creed with the stronger people

were soon bitterly undeceived.

The death of Queen Anne, all of whose children by the Prince of Denmark

had died before her, occurred in July, 1714. It is said that she

secretly favored the succession of her half-brother, acknowledged by

Louis XIV, and the Jacobite party in Great Britain, as James III of that

realm, but the last Duke of Ormond, the Earl of Orrery, Bishop

Atterbury, and Lord Bolingbroke, the Jacobite leaders in England, lost

their nerve after the Queen’s death and allowed the golden opportunity

of proclaiming the exiled Stuart king to pass away. The Hanoverian

faction, which called James “the Pretender,” took advantage of their

vacillation to proclaim the Elector of Hanover, who derived his claim

from the Act of Succession or Settlement (which ignored the Stuart male

line, or any of its Catholic collateral branches, and excluded them from

the throne), under the title of George I. He derived his claim, such as

it was, from James I, whose daughter, the Princess Elizabeth, had

married the King of Bohemia. Her daughter, Sophia, married the Elector

of Hanover and became mother of King George, who was a thorough German

in speech, manner, and habit, although not in person or in manly

characteristics. But he was a Protestant, and that sufficed for England.

On August 1, 1714, he was proclaimed in London and Edinburgh, and on the

8th of that month in Dublin. The Scotch Jacobites ridiculed his

accession in a racy “skit,” which began with—

“Oh, wha the deil hae we got for a king

But a wee, wee German lairdie!”

Ireland, broken in spirit and disgusted by the memory of King James II,

remained quiescent, but, in 1715, Scotland and a portion of the north of

England rose in rebellion, the former under the Earl of Mar and the

latter under young Lord Derwentwater. They were not heartily supported.

Both met with defeat, and Derwentwater, together with several English

and Scotch adherents of note, was captured, beheaded, and had his

estates confiscated to the “crown.” The English Parliament offered a

reward of £50,000 ($250,000) for the “apprehension” of “the Pretender,”

who had been previously “attainted,” but there were no takers, “the

Pretender” aforesaid being safely housed in Paris. This bloody episode

ended Jacobite “risings” in Great Britain for a generation.

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CHAPTER III

Further Commercial Restrictions—Continued Exodus of Working

People—Jonathan Swift—“The Patriot Party”—Tyranny of Primate Boulter

SEEING that Ireland had taken no part in the attempted Stuart revolution

at the beginning of his reign, it might be imagined that George I showed

some favor to the Irish people, but he did nothing of the kind. On the

contrary, the penal laws were enforced with greater virulence than ever,

and several new enactments of a most oppressive character—chiefly

bearing on the franchise—were passed. In 1719, the Patriot party in the

Irish Parliament threw down a challenge to English supremacy. The Irish

House of Lords annulled, on appeal, from the Dublin Court of Exchequer,

a judgment in favor of one Annesley and gave it to the opposition

litigant, Hester Sherlock. The former appealed to the English lords, who

overrode the decision of the Irish House, by reversing judgment in favor

of Annesley. As the sheriff in whose jurisdiction (Kildare) the writ ran

refused to obey the English decree, he was heavily fined. The Irish

House retaliated by remitting the fine, applauding the sheriff and

arresting the judges of the Dublin court who had decided for Annesley.

The anger of England became boundless, as it usually does when Ireland

asserts itself, and the English Parliament, without color of right,

passed the drastic enactment, known as the 6th of George I, which

definitively bound Ireland by English enactments, and took the right of

appeal away from the Irish House of Peers. Thus was the chain begun by

the Poynings’ Law, in the reign of Henry VII, made complete, and, at one

fell swoop, Ireland was reduced to a provincial status. Thenceforth,

until 1780, the Irish Parliament was merely a machine for registering

the will of England, in the matter of Irish government.

At the same time, England continued her war on the few remaining Irish

industries—nothing seemed to satisfy the jealousy and covetousness of

her merchants. The glaring outrages committed against the business of

Ireland aroused the ire of the famous Jonathan Swift, Protestant Dean of

St. Patrick’s, who was the son of an Englishman. He wrote, anonymously,

several bitter pamphlets against the selfish policy of England, and

urged the Irish people to use nothing but native manufactures. In one of

these fulminations, he used the memorable phrase: “Burn everything that

comes from England, except the coal!” But his patriotic influence rose

to the zenith when he attacked “Wood’s half-pence”—base money coined to

meet a financial emergency—in 1723. His philippics became known as the

“Drapier’s letters” from the signature attached to them, and, in the

end, he compelled the government to cancel the contract with Wood.

England foamed with rage, and had the printer of the letters prosecuted.

However, no judge or jury in Dublin was found vile enough to convict

him.

Swift, although an Irish patriot, was a Protestant bigot, and detested

the Celtic Catholics quite as much as he did the English, whom, from a

political standpoint, he hated. Yet, he was the idol, during his long

lifetime, of the Catholics, because he had stood by Ireland against the

common enemy. This brilliant man, whose writings have made him immortal,

and whose private sorrows can not be estimated, finally “withered at the

top,” and died insane, after having willed his property to be used for

the building of a lunatic asylum. In a poem written some time before his

sad death, he alludes to his bequest in the following lines:

“He left what little wealth he had

To build a house for fools and mad—

To show, by one sarcastic touch,

No nation needed one so much!”

No writer better knew how to enrage the English. He took a savage

delight in tormenting them, wounding their vanity, and exposing their

weaknesses. Neither did he spare the Irish; and, as for the Scotch, he

rivaled Dr. Samuel Johnson in his dislike of that people. In our day,

the average summer-up of merits and demerits would describe Jonathan

Swift as “a gifted crank.”

Associated with him in the moral war against English interference in

Ireland’s domestic concerns were such other shining lights of the period

as Dr. Sheridan, ancestor of Richard Brinsley, and others of that

brilliant “ilk”: Dr. Stopford, the able Bishop of Cloyne, and Doctors

Jackson, Helsham, Delaney, and Walmsley, nearly all men of almost pure

English descent. McGee also credits “the three reverend brothers

Grattan”—a name subsequently destined to immortality—with good work in

the same connection.

Whatever the private faults of Swift, Ireland must ever hold his memory

in reverence, with those of many other Irish non-Catholic patriots, who,

although they had little or no Celtic blood in their veins, and were

brought up under English influences, nobly preferred the interests of

their unfortunate native country to the smiles and favors of her

oppressors. And so Ireland, considering these things, blesses

“—The men of patriot pen,

Swift, Molyneux, and Lucas,”

as fervently as if they belonged to the race of the Hy-Niall or

Kinel-Conal.

Nor must it be supposed that the Patriot element, led by Swift, escaped

persecution at the hands of the Protestant oligarchy, although they,

too, were of the Established Church. Swift himself was discriminated

against all his life, because of his advocacy of Irish manufactures, his

discrediting of Wood’s “brass money,” and his defeat of the mischievous

national bank project, which was germane to it. As diocese after diocese

became vacant in Ireland, he saw dullards promoted to the sees, while he

was deliberately overlooked, simply because he had advocated justice to

Ireland! This injustice afterward passed into a proverb. Said an Irish

orator, in after years, speaking of another great Irishman who had also

suffered from English resentment: “The curse of Swift was upon him—to

have been born an Irishman, to have been blessed with talents, and to

have used those talents for the benefit of his country!”

But Swift was not the only sufferer. There were other distinguished

offenders against English sentiment. It is true they had not provoked

the government by their writings to offer a reward of £300 for their

identity, as was Swift’s fortune, but they had done enough to be made

“horrible examples” of. Thus, Right Rev. Dr. Browne, Protestant Bishop

of Cork, had been threatened with deprivation for protesting against the

insulting language toward Catholics contained in the notorious Orange

toast to the memory of William III; and Dr. Sheridan was deprived of his

“living” in Munster, because, says McGee, “he accidentally chose for his

text on the anniversary of King George’s coronation: ‘Sufficient for the

day is the evil thereof!’ Such,” he continues, “was the intolerance of

the oligarchy toward their own clergy. What must it have been to

others!”

About this period, too, the differences between Episcopalians and

Nonconformists—the latter having again repudiated the test oaths—became

more bitter than ever. Swift took sides against the Dissenters, whom, as

a fierce Church of England champion, he despised. “They were glad,” he

said, they or their fathers, “to leave their barren hills of Lochaber

for the fruitful vales of Down and Antrim.” He denied to them, with

bitter scorn, the title they had assumed of “Brother Protestants,” and

as to the Papists they affected to contemn, they were, in his opinion,

“as much superior to the Dissenters as a lion, though chained and

clipped of its claws, is a stronger and nobler animal than an angry cat,

at liberty to fly at the throats of true churchmen.” Of course, the

Church of England faction triumphed and the exodus of the Nonconformists

from Ireland received a fresh impetus. “Outraged,” says McGee, “in their

dearest civil and religious rights, thousands of the Scoto-Irish of

Ulster, and the Milesian and Anglo-Irish of the other provinces,

preferred to encounter the perils of the wild Atlantic rather than abide

under the yoke and lash of such an oligarchy. In the year 1729, five

thousand six hundred Irish landed at the single port of Philadelphia; in

the next ten years they furnished to the Carolinas and Georgia the

majority of their immigrants; before the end of this reign [George I]

several thousands of heads of families, all bred and married in Ireland,

were rearing up a free posterity along the slopes of the Blue Ridge in

Virginia and Maryland, and even as far north as the valleys of the

Hudson and the Merrimac. In the ranks of the thirteen United Colonies,

the descendants of those Irish Nonconformists were to repeat, for the

benefit of George III, the lesson and example their ancestors had taught

to James II at Inniskillen and Derry.”

We do not purpose entering into a chronological account of the several

viceroys—most of them rather obscure—who represented English

misgovernment in Ireland during the reigns of the early Georges. They

simply followed out the old programme of oppression and repression with

tiresome monotony. No matter who “held court” in Dublin Castle, the

policy of England toward Ireland remained unchanged. If ever there came

a lull in the course of systematic persecution, it followed immediately

on some reverse of the English arms on the Continent of Europe. An

English victory meant added taxes and further coercion for the Irish

Catholics and Dissenters.

George I had died in 1727, leaving behind him an unsavory moral

reputation, and regretted by nobody in England, except his Hanoverian

mistresses, who were noted for their pinguid ugliness. He was succeeded

without opposition by his son, who mounted the throne as George II. He,

too, was small of stature, un-English in language and appearance, and

inherited the vices of his father. He was not deficient in personal

bravery, as he proved at Dettingen, and elsewhere, in after times, and

he had the distinction of being the last king of England who appeared

upon a field of battle.

The penal code was continued in full force during most of this reign,

although it had lost favor among the English governing class in the time

of the king’s father, when the Protestant Ascendency party in the Irish

Commons brazenly proposed to the English Privy Council the passage of an

act whereby a proscribed prelate or priest arrested in Ireland would be

made to suffer indecent mutilation. Bad as the English privy councilors

generally were, where Ireland was concerned, they would not stomach such

revolting savagery, and the hideous proposition was heard of no more.

And yet England, knowing the ferocious character of the fanatics who

proposed it, left Ireland virtually helpless in their hands! She could

have, at any time, put an end to the intolerable persecutions visited

upon the masses of the people by a heartless oligarchy, actuated about

equally by cupidity and fierce intolerance. Had she done so, she might

have won the Irish heart, as France won that of German Alsace and

Italian Corsica, but she preferred to use one section of the Irish

people against the other, in her lust of empire, and “Divide and

Conquer” became, as in the Elizabethan times, the pith of her Irish

policy.

The great English minister, Sir Robert Walpole, impressed by the

necessity of breaking down the spirit of independence evoked by Swift

and his able and patriotic colleagues, who had indeed “breathed a new

soul” into the Ireland of their day, appointed that inveterate

politician and corrupt diplomat, Lord Carteret, viceroy. He also

promoted the Right Rev. Hugh Boulter, Bishop of Bristol, also an

Englishman of the virulent type, to the Archbishopric of Armagh—the

primal see of Ireland. Boulter was Castlereagh’s precursor in policy.

Possessed of high office and vast wealth, he did not hesitate to use

both prestige and money in the interests of England, and his corruption

of many members of the Irish Parliament was so open and flagrant as to

scandalize even the brazen chiefs of the atrocious “Court party”—the

Prætorean guard of Lord Carteret. This unscrupulous churchman was the

virtual head of the English interest in Ireland for eighteen years, and,

within that period, overshadowing even viceregal authority, he made the

English name more hated among not alone the Celtic, but the Scoto and

Anglo-Irish than it had been for a century. He was the greatest

persecutor of the Catholics that had appeared since the period of

Cromwell, and he it was who manipulated the machinery of Parliament to

deprive them of the last vestige of their civil and religious liberty in

the closing days of the brutal reign, in Ireland, of George I. Nor did

the Presbyterians and other dissenters fare much better at his hands.

His black career terminated in 1742, and a weight of horror was lifted

from Ireland’s heart when the welcome news of his death spread rapidly,

far and wide, over the persecuted country.

What made “Primate Boulter” particularly odious to the Catholic people

of Ireland was his institution of the “Charter Schools”—used openly and

insultingly for the perversion of the majority of the population from

the Roman Catholic faith. Since that period, English politicians have

not hesitated to use the influence of the Roman See, with more or less

success, to curb political movements in Ireland. Even then, when England

was enforcing the penal laws against the Irish Catholics with fire and

sword, she was the ally of Catholic Austria against the French, and

glibly advocated toleration for the Protestants of the Hapsburg empire,

while her “priest-hunters” industriously earned their putrid “blood

money” in unfortunate, Catholic Ireland. We may say, in passing, that

Primate Boulter was succeeded in the primacy by another Englishman,

Right Rev. George Stone, who proved himself worthy of his predecessor.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER IV

Official Extravagance—Charles Lucas, Leader of Irish

Opposition—Chesterfield Viceroy—His Recall—Dorset’s Vile Administration

AN attempt made in 1729 to place an extortionate estimate on the public

expenses, and which emanated from “the Castle of Dublin,” had the effect

of consolidating the Irish opposition in Parliament. These legislators

protested in a dignified manner against extravagance in public

expenditure. Under the administration of the Duke of Devonshire, in

1737, they set their faces against his method of corrupting the public

conscience by a display of lavish generosity, which is always popular in

a capital where trade depends to a great extent on courtly favor. The

leaders in the House of Commons were Sir Edward O’Brien, of the House of

Inchiquin; his son, Sir Lucius; the Speaker, Henry Boyle, and Mr.

Anthony Malone, whose father had been an efficient ally of Sir Toby

Butler, in defending Catholic rights under the articles of Limerick.

These gentlemen were ably assisted by Dr. Charles Lucas, who, although

not a member of the House, possessed a vast outside influence, because

of his great talent and moral worth. The doctor was also a druggist by

profession, but could use a virile pen even better than he could a

pestle and mortar. In 1741, he began hammering the government in public

prints, on the lines of Molyneux and Swift, and with almost as great

success. But “the Castle” censor came down upon him, and he was

compelled to leave Ireland for a period. Like Swift, he was rather

antagonistic to Catholic claims, but, as in the case of the great Dean,

the Catholics forgave him because he was true to Ireland. After some

years of exile, he returned to Dublin, was elected to Parliament, and

became a leader of the Patriots in the House of Commons. In the House of

Lords, the Earl of Kildare, afterward first Duke of Leinster, was the

Patriot leader.

The famous Earl of Chesterfield became Viceroy of Ireland in 1745, and

showed, from the first, a thorough disgust for the penal laws and the

oligarchs who supported them. He connived at Catholic toleration to such

an extent that he became an object of suspicion, if not of hatred, to

the Ascendency faction. The government of England, with habitual

cunning, had selected this finished courtier to rule in Ireland, because

of disquieting rumors of an invasion of Great Britain contemplated by

Charles Edward Stuart, son of “the Pretender,” James III. Also, about

the same time, came the stirring news of the victory of the Irish

Brigade, in alliance with the French, over the Duke of Cumberland’s

column at glorious Fontenoy. “Accursed,” old George II is said to have

exclaimed, on being told of the Franco-Irish victory, “accursed be the

laws that deprive _me_ of such soldiers!” But Chesterfield was, in

reality, friendly to the Irish. He liked their wit and esprit and took

no pains to conceal the fact, greatly to the disgust of the Ascendency

clique. But Charles Edward’s attempt to recover the British crown

utterly failed. Highland Scotland fought for him heroically. The

Jacobites of England held, for the most part, aloof, and, beyond the

officers of the Irish Brigade, who went with him from France, Ireland

hardly furnished a man to aid his hardy and romantic enterprise—thus

showing how completely her spirit was subdued during that momentous

crisis. Charles Edward was a leader that, in the preceding century, the

Irish would have been proud to follow. He was a great improvement on

both his sire and grandsire, although he ended miserably, in his old

age, a career begun so gloriously in his youth.

Chesterfield remained only eight months in his Irish office. He was

recalled within ten days after the battle of Culloden. There was no

further need, for the time being, to conciliate the Irish. The heir of

the unhappy Stuarts was a houseless wanderer in the land over which his

forefathers had reigned for centuries and their cause was hopelessly

lost. The Earl and Countess of Chesterfield, on their departure from

Dublin, received “a popular ovation.” They walked on foot, arm in arm,

from the viceregal residence to the wharf, where lay the vessel that was

to bear them back to England, and the warm-hearted, “too easily deluded

people” prayed loud and fervently for their speedy return. They came

back no more, but Chesterfield was enabled to assure George II, when he

reached London, that the only “dangerous Papist” he had seen in Ireland

was the lovely Miss Ambrose, afterward Mrs. Palmer, Dublin’s reigning

beauty of the period. Chesterfield made much of her at “the Castle,” and

laughed politely at the bigots who looked upon her as a species of

Delilah. As Miss Ambrose enjoyed, also, the friendship of Lady

Chesterfield, her enemies could evoke no scandal from the platonic

intimacy. The earl’s mild, insinuating system of government had enabled

him to spare four regiments from Ireland for service in Scotland, during

the Jacobite insurrection. His “Principles of Politeness,” practically

applied, were much more effective in the cause of the House of Hanover

than all the repressive enactments of the vicious bigots of the party of

Ascendency.

The last Jacobite expedition was organized in France, in 1759, and was

under orders of an admiral named Conflans, who, when a short distance

out from Brest, was encountered by an English fleet under Admiral Hawke

and totally defeated. A wing of this expedition, under Commodore Thurot,

whose real name was O’Farrell, did not arrive in time to take part in

the battle, but succeeded in entering the British Channel without

interruption. A storm arose which drove Thurot’s five frigates to seek

shelter in Norway and the Orkney Islands, where they wintered. In the

spring, one frigate made its way back to France. Another sailed with a

similar object, but was never heard from afterward. The remaining three,

under Thurot, made for the Irish coast and entered Lough Foyle, but made

no attempt on Londonderry. They soon headed for Belfast Lough, and

appeared before Carrickfergus about the end of February, 1760. Thurot

demanded the surrender of the place, which was stoutly refused by the

military governor, Colonel Jennings. The Franco-Irish sailor immediately

landed his fighting men and took the town by a rapid and furious

assault. Then he levied on the place for supplies and again put to sea.

Off the Isle of Man he fell in with three newly commissioned ships of

war under the English Commodore, Elliott. A sanguinary encounter

followed. Thurot, alias O’Farrell, and three hundred of his marines and

sailors were killed. The French vessels were fearful wrecks, and the

victorious English towed them in a sinking condition into Ramsay. Thus

terminated one of the most gallant naval episodes of the eighteenth

century.

When the Earl of Harrington, afterward Duke of Devonshire, became Lord

Lieutenant some time after the recall of Lord Chesterfield, the odious

Primate Stone—accused both in England and Ireland of unspeakable

immorality—ruled Ireland as completely as had his less filthy

predecessor, Primate Boulter. Ireland, at the outset of the new régime,

was astonished to find a respectable surplus in her treasury, and Lord

Chesterfield, who always, while he lived, took a deep interest in Irish

affairs, sent a congratulatory letter on the seeming prosperity of the

country to his friend, the Bishop of Waterford. The Patriot party in the

Commons, led by the sagacious and eloquent Malone, advocated the

expenditure of the surplus on public works and needed public buildings

throughout Ireland and in the capital. But Stone and the Castle ring

fought the proposition bitterly, contending that the money belonged to

the crown and could be drawn by royal order on the vice-treasurer,

without regard to Parliament. When the Duke of Dorset succeeded

Harrington as viceroy, in 1751, the question had reached an acute stage.

Opposition to the royal claim on the Irish surplus had led to the

expulsion of Dr. Lucas from Ireland. But Malone and Speaker Boyle kept

up the fight in the Commons, and, after having sustained one defeat, on

a full vote, finally came out victorious by having the supply bill,

which covered all government service in the kingdom, thrown out by a

vote of 122 to 117. Government showed its resentment by canceling

Malone’s patent of precedence as Prime Sergeant, and striking Speaker

Boyle’s name from the list of privy-councilors. This was outrageous

enough, but what followed was still more so. The king (George II) by

advice of Dorset, Stone, and their clique, overrode the action of the

Irish Parliament and despotically, by operation of a king’s letter,

withdrew the long-disputed surplus from the Irish national treasury.

This crowning infamy was consummated in 1753, and so great became public

indignation that Stone and the obnoxious ministers were mobbed, and the

Duke of Dorset could not appear on the streets of Dublin without being

hooted at and otherwise insulted. Anglo-Ireland seemed on the brink of

revolution, but the popular leaders took a conservative attitude and

thus avoided a violent crisis. Dorset, alarmed by the tempest he had

himself created, virtually fled from Dublin, followed by the execration

of the multitude. He left the government in the hands of three Lords

Justices, one of whom was Primate Stone, whose very name was hateful to

the incensed people.

The viceroy was followed to England by the popular leader of the Irish

House of Lords, James Fitz-Gerald, 20th Earl of Kildare, who had married

the daughter of the Duke of Richmond, and, consequently, had a powerful

English backing. Kildare presented to King George, in person, a memorial

in which he strongly denounced the misgovernment of Ireland by Dorset,

Stone, and Lord George Sackville, Dorset’s intermeddling son. This

memorial has been described as “the boldest ever addressed by a subject

to a sovereign.”

Although Lord Holderness, an English courtier, in a letter to Chancellor

Jocelyn, says that the bold Geraldine “was but ill-received and very

coolly dismissed” by the king, Kildare’s policy soon prevailed in

Ireland. Dorset was recalled in the succeeding year, and Primate Stone,

with whom Kildare refused to act as Lord Justice, was removed from the

ministry of Ireland.

The Duke of Devonshire, formerly Lord Harrington, or Hartington,

succeeded Dorset, and immediately began the congenial work, to an

English statesman, of breaking up, and rendering harmless, the Irish

Patriot party. Boyle was made Chancellor of the Exchequer and was raised

to the peerage as the Earl of Shannon, receiving also a pension of

£2,000 per annum for thirty-one years. Malone would have accepted the

Lord Chancellorship gladly, but was restrained by both private and

public opinion from doing so openly. But Mitchel says that while Boyle

remained nominal chancellor, Malone quietly pocketed the profits of the

position, and his patriotic eloquence declined in proportion to the

growth of his profits. Other leaders of the Patriot party were also

“taken care of,” and England managed to get rid of one of her most

troublesome “Irish difficulties.”

The purchased Patriots, however, may be fairly credited with having

forced the beginning of the public works, such as canals and highways,

in Ireland, and the construction of some of those splendid official

edifices which still, even in their decay, “lend an Italian glory to the

Irish metropolis.”

Lord Kildare stands accused of having entered into the negotiations with

the new viceroy for the “placation” of the Patriot party in the Commons.

Such, however, were the political “morals” of the times, and the offices

were, nominally at least, Irish and, therefore, quasi, not fully,

national—seeing that Ireland was what might be called a semi-independent

colonial province, distrustful of England, but without strength or

resolution to snap her chains. The earl soon became Marquis of Kildare,

and, subsequently, Duke of Leinster, but he is best remembered as the

father of the gallant, unselfish, and devoted Lord Edward Fitzgerald, of

1798 fame.

An attempt made, in March, 1756, to pass a bill in the Irish Commons to

vacate the seats of such members as should accept “any pension or civil

office of profit from the crown,” was defeated by a vote of 85 to

59—thus giving plain notice to the English viceroy that the Parliament

was up for auction, and, within less than fifty years from that date, it

was, accordingly, like that of Scotland, “knocked down to the highest

bidder.” How could it be otherwise? When, as Mitchel truly says in his

Continuation of McGeoghegan’s “History of Ireland,” “The English

Protestant colony in Ireland, which aspired to be a nation, amounted to

something under half a million of souls, in 1754. It was out of the

question that it should be united on a footing of equality with its

potent mother country by ‘the golden link of the crown,’ because the

wearer of that crown was sure to be guided in his policy by English

ministers, in accordance with English interests; and, as the army was

the king’s army, he could always enforce that policy. The fatal weakness

of the colony was that it would not amalgamate with the mass of the

Irish people (_i.e._ the Catholics) so as to form a true nation, but set

up the vain pretension to hold down a whole disfranchised people with

one hand and defy all England with the other.” And this insensate policy

was pursued, with little modification, to the end, and in the end proved

fatal to both “the colony” and the nation.

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CHAPTER V

More Persecution of Catholics Under George II—Secret Committee

Formed—Snubbed by the Speaker—Received by the Viceroy—Anti-Union Riot in

Dublin

THE Duke of Bedford became Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1757, and came

as a “conciliator,” with a smile on his face “and a bribe in his

pocket.” His mission was to “soften” the penal laws, which had again

become too scandalous for the “liberal” and “civilized” reputation of

England on the Continent. One Miss O’Toole, a Catholic, had been pressed

by some Protestant friends to “conform” to the Established Church, so as

to avoid persecution, and fled to the house of a relative named Saul,

who resided in Dublin, in order to escape disagreeable importunity. Mr.

Saul was prosecuted and convicted, under the penal code, and the judge

who “tried” the case said, in his charge, that “Papists had no rights,”

because the “law” under which poor Saul was punished “did not,” in the

language of the court, “presume a Papist to exist in the kingdom, nor

could Papists so much as breathe the air without the connivance of

government!” This judge, harsh as his language may now seem, did not

misstate the case, for such, indeed, was the barbarous “law of the land”

at that period, and for a considerable time afterward.

The bigots in the Irish Commons, soon after the arrival of the Duke of

Bedford in Dublin, had prepared a new and even more drastic bill of

penalties against Catholics than already existed, and so intolerable

were its proposals that several leading Catholics among “the nobility,

gentry, and professional [clandestinely] classes” got together, and,

after a time, formed, in out-of-the-way meeting places, the first

“Catholic Committee” of Ireland—the precursor, by the way, of the many

similar organizations conducted by John Keogh, Daniel O’Connell, and

other Catholic leaders of succeeding generations.

The chief men of this committee were Charles O’Conor, the Irish

scholar and antiquary; Dr. Curry, the historical reviewer; Mr. Wyse, a

leading merchant of the city of Waterford; Lords Fingal, Devlin,

Taaffe, and some others less known to fame. These amiable gentlemen

were, at first, frightened by the sound of their own voices, but they

gradually grew bolder, although they did not proceed far enough to

bring down upon their heads the full wrath of “government.” Indeed,

they were, on most occasions, obsequiously “loyal” to the “crown,”

which meant the English king and connection. But the iron had entered

their souls, and the stain of its corrosion lingered long in their

veins. When the Duke of Bedford, by the instructions of the elder Pitt

(Chatham), who acted for King George, informed the Irish Parliament

that France contemplated a new invasion and called upon the Irish

people to show their loyalty to the House of Hanover, Charles O’Conor

drew up an abjectly “loyal” address, which was signed by 300 leading

Catholics, and had it presented at the bar of the House of Commons

(Dublin) by Messrs. Antony MacDermott and John Crump. The speaker, Mr.

Ponsonby, received the document in dead silence, laid it on the table

in front of him, and coolly bowed the delegation out. The Duke of

Bedford, however, took “gracious” notice of the address, and caused

his answer thereto, which was appreciative—England being then in

mortal terror of the French—to be printed in the Dublin “Gazette,”

which was the “government’s” official organ. And the poor Catholic

gentlemen, who had signed the cringing document, went into convulsions

of joy because of this “official recognition” of their slavish

professions of “loyalty” to a foreign king, who cared less for them

than for the blacks of the West Indies!

But Mitchel, the Protestant historian, who understood his country’s sad

story better, perhaps, than any writer who ever dealt with it, makes for

the Catholic committee this ingenious apology: “We may feel indignant,”

says he, “at the extreme humility of the proceedings of the committee,

and lament that the low condition of our countrymen at that time left no

alternative but that of professing a hypocritical ‘loyalty’ to their

oppressors; for the only other alternative was secret organization to

prepare an insurrection for the total extirpation of the English colony

in Ireland, and, carefully disarmed as the Catholics were [and still

are], they, doubtless, felt this to be an impossible project. Yet, for

the honor of human nature, it is necessary to state the fact that this

profession of loyalty, to a king of England, was, in reality, insincere.

Hypocrisy, in such a case, is less disgraceful than would have been a

genuine canine attachment to the hand that smote and to the foot that

kicked.”

But Bedford, in his policy of conciliation, had even a deeper motive

than fear of France. The statesmen of England, jealous of even the poor

and almost impotent colonial Parliament of Ireland, so early as 1759,

contemplated that “legislative union,” which was to be effected in later

times. Bedford’s design was the truly English one of arraying the Irish

Catholics against the Protestant nationalists, who had, with England’s

willing aid, so cruelly persecuted them. When this project got mooted

abroad, the Protestant mob of Dublin—the Catholics were too cowed at the

time to act, and their leaders were committed to Bedford by their

address—rose in their might, on December 3, 1759, surrounded the Houses

of Parliament and uttered tumultuous shouts of “No Union! no Union!”

They stopped every member of Parliament, as he approached to enter the

House, and made him swear that he would oppose the union project. They

violently assaulted the Lord Chancellor, whom they believed to be a

Unionist, together with many other lords, spiritual and secular, and

“ducked” one member of the Privy Council in the river Liffey. The

Speaker and Secretary of the House of Commons had to appear in the

portico of the House and solemnly assure the people that no union was

contemplated. Even this assurance did not quell the tumult, and,

finally, a fierce charge of dragoons and the bayonets of a numerous

infantry, accompanied by a threat of using cannon, cleared the streets.

Following up the policy of “conciliation,” the Catholic leaders, with

slavish haste, repudiated the actions of the Protestant mob, and thus

produced a contemptuous bitterness in the Protestant mind, which

aggravated the factious feeling in the unfortunate country. England’s

work was well done. She had planted, as a small seed, the idea of

absorbing the Irish Parliament some day, and was willing to let it take

its own time to ripen into Dead Sea fruit for Ireland. The Catholic

helot had been cunningly played off against his Protestant oppressor,

and thus the subject nation had been made the forger of its own

fetters—at least in appearance, although England was the real artificer.

Many Catholics in humble life may have joined in the Dublin anti-union

riots, but the Catholic chiefs, who had their own axe to grind, were

resolved to appear “loyal”—all the more so because some of the

Protestant leaders in the late disorders sought to fasten the

responsibility on the members of the proscribed faith. The outbreak, as

was well known, was mainly the work of the followers of Dr. Lucas, then

in exile, but soon to be a Member of Parliament, and the fiercest

opponent of a legislative union with Great Britain.

“It deserves remark,” says a historian of the period, “that on this

first occasion, when a project of a legislative union was really

entertained by an English ministry, the Patriot party which opposed it

was wholly and exclusively of the Protestant colony, and that the

Catholics of Ireland were totally indifferent, and, indeed, they could

not rationally be otherwise, as it was quite impossible for them to feel

an attachment to a national legislature in which they were not

represented, and for whose members they could not even cast a vote.”

George II died of “rupture of the heart”—probably from the bursting of

an arterial aneurism in that region—in 1760. He was never popular in

England, because of his German ways and affections, and the Irish people

regarded him with indifference. They had never seen him, and he was

about as much of a stranger in his Irish realm as the Shah of Persia or

the Khan of Tartary. His reign had lasted twenty-eight years, and, in

all that period, the estimated population of Ireland—for there was no

regular census—increased only 60,000. Presbyterian and Catholic

emigration to the colonies—superinduced by the penal laws against

both—was mainly the cause of this remarkable stagnation. There had been

two famines also, and the victims of artificial scarcity—a condition

produced by restrictions on trade and manufacture—were numerous.

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CHAPTER VI

Accession of George III—His Character—Boasts of Being “a Briton”—Death

of Dr. Lucas—Lord Townsend’s Novel Idea of Governing Ireland—Septennial

Parliament Refused

THE long reign of George III, grandson of the late monarch, began in the

month of October, 1760, when he had attained the age of 22 years. His

father, Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales, was a dissolute and almost

imbecile person, and was hated by his own father, George II, with a most

unnatural hatred. No doubt he, in great measure, deserved it, for a

member of his own family described Frederick Louis as being “the

greatest brute and ass in Christendom.” George III, when he mounted the

English throne, was a dull, commonplace young man, without pronounced

personal vices, but exceedingly obstinate and subject to spells of

temper, when strongly opposed, that gave assurance of future mental

weakness. He was not, by nature, cruel, but circumstances developed

gross cruelty under his régime, in India, in America, and in Ireland. He

had enough of the Stuart blood in him to be a stickler for “the right

divine” of kings, and he was enough of a Guelph to have his own way with

even his most persuasive ministers. His father’s politics, so far as he

had any, leaned toward Whiggery, but after that prince’s death his

mother had placed him under the tutelage of the Marquis of Bute, who was

an ardent Tory. Consequently, the young king had had the advantage of

being taught in the two great English schools of policy, but, in the

long run, the Tory in his nature prevailed over the Whig, and George III

finally developed into a fierce and intolerant despot. All that could be

said in his favor was that, after he married—and he married young—his

court became, at once, a model of propriety and dulness. The painted

harlots, fostered by his grandfather and great-grandfather, were not

succeeded by others of their kind, and the prudent mothers of England no

longer feared to allow their handsome daughters to enter the precincts

of the royal palace. The English masses were, at first, greatly

astonished at the personal purity of their sovereign, but, after a

while, became reconciled to the belief that a monarch need not,

necessarily, be a libertine.

King George evidently borrowed a leaf from the book of Queen Anne when

he assumed the crown. She had assured her subjects that hers was “an

entirely English heart.” George’s first address from the throne opened

with the words, “Born and educated in this country, I glory in the name

of Briton.” Coming from a king, this sentiment, addressed to a people in

general so fervidly “loyal” as the English, produced a most favorable

effect, and, to the end of his long reign, was never forgotten, even

when his mule-like obstinacy wellnigh goaded them to desperation. George

III, from first to last, in his love of domination, impatience of

opposition, carelessness of the rights of other peoples, egotism,

intolerance, and commercial greed, stood for John Bull. Behind John Bull

stood England, very much as she still stands to-day. The address

continued by declaring that the civil and religious rights of his

“loving subjects” were equally dear to him with the most valuable

prerogatives of the crown. It was his fixed purpose, he said, to

countenance and encourage the practice of true religion and virtue. The

eyes of all Europe, he declared, were on that Parliament and from it

“the _Protestant_ interest hoped for protection.” At the end of the

speech, King George intimated that the toleration of the Catholics—that

is, connivance at their existence, particularly in Ireland—would not be

interfered with. But the penal statutes remained unrepealed, and the

Irish Catholics continued to be persecuted, although rather less

brutally, particularly as regarded their religious observances, in their

own country. They were not allowed to vote, or hold office, or have any

say whatever in public affairs, although they were subject to taxes and

fines. They could not be educated, and were debarred from practicing any

profession under long-established penalties. In short, they were very

little better off during the earlier years of George III’s reign than

under the sway of his two immediate predecessors.

The Irish Protestant mind, however, did not lose its patriotic impulse,

because of the interested silence of Malone, Boyle, and the former

leaders of the Patriot party. Members of Parliament had hitherto been

elected to serve during the life of the sovereign, and, in the beginning

of the reign of George III, the new Irish Parliament began an earnest

agitation for octennial Parliaments. Among the able men—of them destined

to be famous—who were elected to the new body were Hussey Burgh, Dennis

Bowes Daly, Henry Flood, and Dr. Lucas. It should have been stated that

the original Irish demand was for a seven years’ Parliament, and bills

were passed, in 1761 and 1763, embodying the proposition, but the king

and English Privy Council, to whom they had to be submitted, under the

Poynings’ Act, coolly “pocketed” them, and they were heard of no more.

This arbitrary conduct of an alien monarch, and advisory body, aroused

great public indignation, and the clamor became so loud, in 1767, that,

finally, the bill was returned from England, changed to octennial, or

eight years, and, with this amendment, it passed the Irish Parliament

and received the royal sanction in February of the succeeding year.

Under the new act, a Parliament was elected in 1768, and all the

advocates of the new dispensation were re-elected. Where all did noble

work, it is not detracting from their merit to remark that Dr. Lucas was

the real leader of the movement, and was generally recognized as such.

He lived only two years after his great triumph, and was almost

universally mourned—the only exceptions being the members of the corrupt

Court party. He was formally eulogized in the Irish House of Commons,

and at his funeral the pall-bearers were Lord Kildare, Lord Charlemont,

Henry Flood, Sir Lucius O’Brien, Hussey Burgh, and Speaker Ponsonby.

The Patriot party continued, in the new Parliament, under the

administration of Lord Townsend, a vigorous opposition to unjust pension

lists, and other evils which afflicted the nation. The Lord Lieutenant,

who was jolly and persuasive, also corrupt, attempted to break up the

opposition after the good old English fashion, but made no impression on

the able phalanx led by Flood, who, after the death of Lucas, was looked

upon as the chief of the Patriot element in the Commons. Kildare,

notwithstanding his peculiar action in the days of Malone, _et al._,

continued to champion the popular cause in the House of Peers.

Resistance to the supply bill, which changed the Irish military

establishment from 12,000 to 15,000 men, brought about the prorogation

of Parliament session after session for nearly two years. Meanwhile, the

Castle was quietly “seeing” the members, and, in spite of Flood and

Speaker Ponsonby, an address of confidence, carried by a bare majority,

was passed by the Commons. The Speaker refused to present it and

resigned his post. A Mr. Perry was elected to succeed him, and, for a

time, it looked as if the Patriots might be broken up. But Mr. Perry, in

spite of his suspicious conduct in accepting the speakership, vacated by

his friend, Mr. Ponsonby, remained faithful to Irish interests and the

ranks of the opposition became even more formidable than before.

Lord Townsend, the jolly old corruptionist, became so unpopular that

nearly every public print in Dublin was filled with lampoons upon him,

and, finally, he requested retirement and was succeeded by Lord

Harcourt, in 1772. He began well, but ended badly, as is usual with

English viceroys in Ireland, who have seldom failed to fall eventually

under Dublin Castle influences. He attempted to throw unjust burdens on

Ireland, but was resisted at every point, particularly when he sought to

make the supply bill extend over two years instead of one. Henry Flood

delivered one of his best speeches in opposition to this dishonest

innovation. Hussey Burgh promised that if any member in future brought

in such a bill he would move his expulsion. But the climax was reached

when the Hon. George Ogle, of Wexford, author of the well-known lyric,

“Molly Astore,” which has retained its popularity for more than a

century, proposed that the bill, as introduced, be burned by the

hangman. The Speaker reminded Mr. Ogle that the document was decorated

with the great seal. “Then,” replied the witty poet, “it will burn all

the better!” Mr. Ogle’s suggestion was not carried out, but the bill was

subsequently modified to suit the ideas of the House of Commons.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER VII

The Peace of Paris—Agrarian Warfare in Ireland—Judicial Murder of Father

Sheehy—All who Swore Against Him Die Violent Deaths—Societies

THE Peace of Paris, 1763, brought the Seven Years’ War to a conclusion

on the Continent of Europe. Frederick the Great retained Silesia,

formerly an Austrian province, to which he had no just title; and there

were other territorial changes of less importance. England had triumphed

over the French interest in America; for Wolfe’s victory of the Plains

of Abraham, at Quebec, in September, 1759, decided the game of war in

favor of the British, although other battles were fought by the opposing

forces after that event.

Agrarian oppression in Ireland, particularly in the South, had caused

the peasantry to organize themselves into secret societies for mutual

protection. It was thus that the famous “White Boys” of the last

century—so-called from wearing linen shirts, or white woolen jackets,

over their other clothes, so as to give them a uniform appearance—came

into existence. Their methods were crude, wild, often fierce and

sometimes cruel. They defied the law because they had found no element

of protection in it. Rather had they found it, as administered by the

landlord oligarchy, in whose hands it was placed by the evil genius of

England, an instrument of intolerable oppression. No justice was to be

obtained by any appeal they might make to their tyrants, and so they

resorted to what an Irish orator has called “the wild justice of

revenge.” As usual, some naturally bad men found their way into these

organizations, and often vented their malice on individuals in the name

of the trampled people. The landlords took advantage of the commission

of crime to get up another “Popish plot” scare, and succeeded in making

shallow and timid people accept the slander as truth. The real object of

the “White Boys” was to secure low rentals on tillage land, and to

preserve “commonage rights”—that is, grazing lands in common at a

nominal cost, or else free, something that had long been the usage—for

their stock. The landlords, not satisfied with levying exorbitant rents,

and grown, if possible, harder and more greedy than ever, finally

abolished and fenced in “the commons.” This action aroused the fury of

the peasantry, particularly in the Munster counties, and they collected

in large bodies and demolished the landlords’ fences. This gave the

tyrants an excuse to call for military aid—the argument being that the

people were in arms against “the crown,” which, of course, was false.

The poor peasantry struck at their nearest and most visible oppressors,

and never thought about “the crown.” The king was, to them, very like a

myth. It would seem that many of the poorer Protestants joined with the

Catholics in the demonstration against the inclosures, which, of course,

showed the absurdity of the “Popish plot” story. Still, the affair was

not to terminate until it begot a cruel tragedy. The parish priest of

Clogheen, County Tipperary, in 1765, was the Rev. Nicholas Sheehy, a

high-minded and saintly man, whose heart was deeply touched by the

sufferings of the poor tenants, whose ardent and eloquent champion he

became. The Cromwellian “aristocracy” of the county, headed by the

Bagnals, the Maudes, the Bagwells, the Tolers, and a parson named

Hewitson, resolved to get rid of Father Sheehy, and only waited for a

good chance to insnare him in their toils. Two years previous to the

date already given, they had had the young priest arrested on a charge

of swearing in “White Boys,” but, because of insufficient evidence, he

was acquitted. Soon after he was released, one Bridge, who had been a

principal witness against him, mysteriously disappeared. The oligarchs

had the priest arrested immediately on a charge of murder. The witnesses

employed to appear against him were a horse-stealer, named Toohey, a

vagrant youth named Lonergan, and an immoral woman, named Dunlea. He had

lain in Clonmel jail, heavily ironed, for several months before he was

brought to trial. The prosecution did not have their witnesses fully

instructed. At last, March 12, 1765, Father Sheehy was brought up for

trial. He succeeded in proving an alibi, but that was of no avail. His

destruction was determined upon, and, on March 15, he suffered execution

by hanging and subsequent decapitation. This atrocious murder aroused

the anger of the country. Protestants and Catholics alike joined in

execrating the crime. Yet, he was not the only victim. In May of the

same year, Edward Sheehy, a cousin, and two other young farmers, were

convicted and hanged on the same testimony that had sent Father Sheehy

to his untimely grave. McGee says: “The fate of their enemies is

notorious; with a single exception, they met deaths violent, loathsome,

and terrible. Maude died insane, Bagwell in idiocy; one of the jury

committed suicide, another was found dead in a privy, a third was killed

by his horse, a fourth was drowned, a fifth shot, and so through the

entire list. Toohey was hanged for felony, the prostitute, Dunlea, fell

into a cellar and was killed, and the lad, Lonergan, after enlisting as

a soldier, died of a loathsome disease in a Dublin infirmary.”

Another attempt at persecution of the priests was made in 1767, but

Edmund Burke, the illustrious statesman, and other liberal Protestants,

came to the rescue with funds for the defence of the accused, and the

oligarchy were unable to secure the conviction of their intended

victims. The fate of the perjured informers, who swore away the lives of

Father Sheehy and his fellow-sufferers, was well known throughout the

country, and, no doubt, had a wholesome effect on other wretches who

might have been bribed into following their example.

The “White Boys” were not the only secret organization formed in Ireland

at that period. Some were composed of Protestants, mostly of the

Presbyterian sect, who combated in Ulster the exactions of the

landlords. They bore such names as “Hearts of Steel,” because they were

supposed to show no mercy to “the petty tyrants of their fields”; “Oak

Boys,” because they carried oaken boughs, or wore oak leaves in their

hats. The “Peep o’ Day Boys” were political rather than agrarian, and

professed the peculiar principles afterward adopted by the Orange

Association. They confined themselves mainly to keeping up the

anniversary of the Boyne and making occasional brutal attacks on

defenceless Catholics. The respectable Protestant element kept

scrupulously away from association with these rude fanatics. The

successors of the “White Boys” in Munster were the equally dreaded

“Terry Alts,” who existed down to a very recent period, and belonged,

mainly, to the County Tipperary. Like the “White Boys,” they raided the

houses of “the gentry” and their retainers for arms, and severe, often

fatal, conflicts resulted from their midnight visitations. They also

killed, from time to time, obnoxious landlords and their agents, and

were hanged by the score in retaliation. The government was not

over-particular regarding their guilt or innocence. The object was to

avenge the slain land-grabbers, and also to “strike terror.” As usual,

many base informers were found to betray their fellows, but, in justice

to the “White Boys” and “Terry Alts,” it may be stated that the

betrayers of their secrets were mostly Castle spies, or detectives,

employed for the purpose of entrapping the unwary. Very few of the

regular members, who lived among their own relatives, accepted blood

money. In many cases, the peasantry committed unnecessary acts of

violence, but, in general, they only visited with severe punishment

landlords or their agents who were notorious evictors, or farmers who

“took the land” over the heads of the evicted tenants.

The Catholic Church was the consistent opponent of the agrarian

organizations, because of the mutual bloodshed between them and the

landlord element, but, much as the Catholic peasants held their bishops

and priests in reverence, the admonitions of the latter had small effect

on the young men of their flocks while wholesale evictions were in

progress. The “boys,” with rough logic, would say, among themselves:

“The clergy mean well, but we had better be hanged than starved to

death, and, besides, revenge on our tyrants is sweet.” There is hardly

anything in Old World history more ghastly than the long, desultory, and

deadly war of tenant against landlord in Ireland, from the days of

George II to the latter part of Victoria’s reign. It is a chapter we

gladly turn away from, with the remark that the cruel oligarchy, who

wantonly provoked a naturally humane people to crime, were infinitely

more criminal than the poor, oppressed peasants they made desperate.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER VIII

Flood and Grattan—Sudden Rise of the Latter—Speaks for a Free

Commerce—The Volunteer Movement—England Yields to Irish Demand

IT was unfortunate for both America and Ireland that Henry Grattan, who

had entered Parliament in December, 1775, had not attained to the

leadership of the Patriot party when the colonies revolted against the

tyranny of George III. Flood held that position when hostilities

appeared imminent, and his influence, somewhat ignorantly exerted, had

much to do with voting 4,000 troops from the Irish establishment for

service against the Americans. At the time, the American case was not as

well understood in Ireland as it was later on, and, besides, an

accommodation was hoped for. In the course of his speech supporting the

policy of the government, Flood said that the troops from Ireland were

“armed negotiators”—a most unfortunate phrase, which Grattan, in after

days, turned against him to good effect, when he uttered that fierce

philippic against his quondam friend during an acrimonious debate which

arose soon after the Irish Parliamentary triumph over England in 1782.

It must be remembered by American readers that the Irish Parliament

which voted men to put down the American revolutionists was Protestant

in creed and mainly English in blood. Not a Catholic sat in it, and but

few men of Celtic origin. The sympathies of the Catholic and dissenting

masses were unmistakably with the Americans, and Grattan in the Irish

Legislature, and Burke and Brinsley Sheridan in the English House of

Commons, were their eloquent champions. Flood, although a man of fine

intellect and an accomplished orator, soon found himself rather

outclassed by Grattan, who was young, ardent, and animated by a

“pentecostal fire,” which prompted him to utter some of the most

inspiring speeches that ever flowed from the lips of man. Flood,

following the example of Malone at another period, had accepted office

under the Harcourt administration, and it was openly charged by his

enemies, and probably with some degree of truth, that he had been

influenced in his action against America by the circumstance. He had

also supported the embargo measure, imposed by order in council, which

debarred Irish food products from exportation to the American colonies

in revolt. Naturally, conduct of this kind produced dissatisfaction

among his friends and followers, and his popularity immediately

declined.

The decline of Flood as a Patriot leader left a free field for Grattan

and his best-known competitors for oratorical honors, Hussey Burgh,

Bowes Daly, and Yelverton. At first, Grattan was rather chary of speech

in the House, but, gradually, he gained confidence in himself, and,

although his gestures were awkward and his elocution generally faulty,

the matter of his addresses was so full of fire, energy, and logic that

he soon became the acknowledged chief of what Byron happily termed in

his “Irish Avatar” the eloquent war. The restrictions on Irish commerce

demanded his first attention, and his earlier utterances in Parliament

were mostly devoted to that question. It has been erroneously stated

that Henry Grattan was a “free trader” in the American and British sense

of that term. On the contrary, he believed in a moderate tariff for the

protection of Irish industries, and also for the accumulation of a

revenue, and this was fully exemplified by the action of the Irish

Parliament, when, from 1782 to 1800, it became virtually independent, in

enacting tariff laws for the objects stated. It is true the tariff in

regard to English imports was comparatively low, but still high enough

to give the Irish manufacturer a good chance to compete with the

manufactures of the richer country. What Grattan and his followers

wanted was free commerce—an exemption from the export duties, which

crippled Irish merchants; and freedom to export Irish goods, without

hindrance from English customs officers, to any country of the world.

When the news of the battle of Saratoga and surrender of Burgoyne to the

American army reached Ireland, in 1777, it produced a profound

impression. Grattan, who always favored the American cause, moved an

address to the throne in favor of retrenchment, which meant reduction of

the military establishment, while Bowes Daly moved, and had carried,

another address, which deplored the continuance of the American war, but

professed fidelity to the royal person. As usual, when England got the

worst of it abroad, small concessions were made to the Irish Catholics,

and the Irish Parliament was permitted to pass a bill “authorizing

Papists to loan money on mortgages, to lease lands for any period not

exceeding 999 years, and to inherit and bequeath real property.” This

bill had “a rider” which abolished the test oath as regarded the

Dissenters, and, no doubt, this provision had much to do with the

success of the bill as a whole, which did not, however, pass without

strenuous opposition.

An attempt made by Lord Nugent in the English Parliament to mitigate the

severity of the navigation and embargo acts, as regarded Ireland, was

howled down by the English manufacturers, merchants, and tradespeople

generally. The knowledge of this action spurred on Grattan and his

followers and, thenceforward, “Free Trade” became their rallying cry.

Protestant Ireland, since the year of Thurot’s bold exploit, had lived

in much terror of another French invasion, on a larger scale. When

France, in 1778, became the ally of the United States of America, which

had declared their independence on July 4, 1776, this feeling of alarm

increased. Their leaders demanded military protection from the

government, and were informed that the latter had none to give, unless

they would accept invalids and dismounted cavalrymen. Henry Flood,

seconded by Speaker Perry, had long advocated the formation of a

national militia, and these gentlemen were cordially supported in the

proposition by Grattan, Lord Charlemont, and other noted leaders of the

Patriot party. A bill authorizing a volunteer militia passed the Irish

Parliament in 1778. After a great deal of discussion, it was deemed more

prudent to form the force from independent organizations of volunteers,

armed by the state, but clothed and otherwise equipped by themselves.

They were left free to elect their own officers. Immediately, a

patriotic impulse permeated the nation, and the Protestant Irish, who

were alone permitted to bear arms, rallied to the armories and

parade-grounds by the thousand. Belfast and Strabane claimed the honor

of having formed the first companies. The richer among the Catholics

supplied money to the poor among their Protestant neighbors for the

purchase of uniforms and other necessaries. This patriotic action on

their part naturally resulted in an immediate mitigation of the penal

discrimination against them and the entrance of hundreds of them into

the ranks of the volunteers was, at first, connived at, and soon openly

permitted. The result was that, by the spring of 1780, there were, at

least, 65,000 men under arms for Ireland in her four provinces—Ulster

leading in numbers and enthusiasm. The rank and file were artisans,

farmers, and clerks, while the officers were, in general, selected from

among the wealthy and aristocratic classes. Many of these officers

equipped their companies, or regiments, at their own expense. The Earl

of Charlemont—a weak but well-meaning nobleman—was elected commander by

the Ulster volunteers, while the amiable Duke of Leinster—the second of

that proud title—was chosen by those of Leinster. Munster and Connaught,

not being quite as well organized as their sister provinces, deferred

their selections. All English goods were tabooed by the volunteers,

their families, and friends, and a favorite maxim of the period was that

of Dean Swift, already quoted, “Burn everything coming from England,

except the coal!”

The now feeble shadow of English government, holding court at Dublin

Castle, viewed this formidable uprising with genuine alarm, and did its

utmost to prevent the issuance of arms to the volunteers, but the Irish

leaders were not to be cajoled or baffled, and, in the summer of 1779,

the new Irish army was thoroughly armed, drilled and ready for any

service that might be demanded from it. The leaders had now the weapon

to enforce their rights in hand, and did not fail to make good use of

it. They met and formed plans for the coming session of Parliament, and

were delighted to receive assurances from Flood, and other

officeholders, that they would support Grattan and his allies in the

demand that Irish commerce have “free export and import.”

An address, covering the points stated, with the amendment “free trade”

substituted by Flood for the original phrase, passed the Houses, when

they met, and on the succeeding day the House of Commons, with the

Speaker at its head, proceeded to the Castle and presented the address

to the viceroy. The volunteers, commanded by the Duke of Leinster,

occupied both sides of the streets through which the members had to pass

and presented arms to the nation’s representatives, many of whom wore

the diversified uniforms of the Patriot army. Dublin, in all its varied

history, never witnessed a grander or more inspiring spectacle.

Alderman Horan, of Dublin, precipitated a crisis by demanding freedom of

export for some Irish woolens to Amsterdam, and he filed his demand, in

due form, at the custom house. This was in defiance of the prohibitory

enactment of the reign of William III and an English man-of-war was

stationed in Dublin Bay to enforce it. Mr. Horan, not being provided

with a battleship, was fain to content himself with leaving his demand

on file, but he had gained his point by directing public attention to an

insulting grievance with a stern object lesson. Ireland saw, at once,

that English monopoly would yield nothing, except to force, or the

threat of force. Henry Grattan, in the Commons, replied to the shotted

guns of the English frigate in the bay by introducing an amendment to

the supply bill, which declared that “at this time, it is inexpedient to

grant new taxes.” This was carried overwhelmingly, and England began to

think that, after all, Irish votes were a match for English guns.

Grattan gained a further triumph over the government by causing the

defeat of a bill providing duties for the support of the loan fund.

Lord North, when confronted with the ominous news from Ireland,

remembering his unfortunate experience with the American patriots,

determined to back down from his former despotic position. He brought in

resolutions which gave Ireland the right to trade with British colonies

in America and Africa, and granted free export to glass and woolens. The

Irish Parliament adopted similar resolutions, and the main portion of

Ireland’s commercial grievances was, thereby, removed.

END OF VOLUME ONE

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● Transcriber’s Notes:

○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.

○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.

○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only

when a predominant form was found in this book.

○ Text that:

was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).