HOW TO LOSE AN EMPIRE.
In the century which followed the reign of the Stuarts no record
worth mention remains of the doings of Lord Donegall’S descendants.
Gaelic annalists, who would have cherished local chronicles, had
been driven out; and British civilisation had not overtaken or
undertaken their work. That the Chichester frauds formed part of a
long-continued system practised by the heads of the Executive appears
from another exposure made, nearly a century later, in the English
House of Commons. After the Revolution, Charles Montagu (subsequently
Earl of Halifax, who was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in
1694), was accused on the 16th February, 1698, of having in the
previous year obtained for himself a grant, under the name of Thomas
Railton, of forfeited estates in Ireland worth some £13,000. The
lands included those of Lord Clancarty. Montagu, having a majority
in the House, defiantly admitted the charge. In 1701, however, he
was impeached, on this and other grounds. He again did not deny the
facts, and pleaded the authority of King William III. Ultimately, the
impeachment was abandoned as impracticable, but Montagu was struck
off the Privy Council.
Many of the Elizabethan and Stuart grants reveal a purpose, not only
to seize the land of the natives, but to reduce them into slavery.
Elizabeth’s charter to the Smiths in 1571 gave, with the territory
to be conquered, “native men and women” as chattels. Chichester
declared in 1602 that the Irish “should be made perpetual slaves to
her Majesty”; and he wished to send O’Cahan to the Virginias instead
of to the Tower. In 1605 Hamilton was awarded by James I. “native
men and women villeins and their followers.” In 1613 the charter to
the Londoners enabled them to take “estrayed bondmen and bondwomen
and villeins and their followers.” A Patent of Charles I. presented
Hamilton, after he became Lord Claneboy, with “natives and villeins
with their sequels.” Cromwell’s shipments of Irish youth as slaves to
the Barbadoes was merely a development of this policy.
Small additional infamy, therefore, attaches to the “Protector” for
giving effect to the designs of his predecessors. The spirit of the
17th century monarchs and his was the same towards the nation of
which Attorney-General Davis declared:
“The Irish be a race of great antiquity, wanting neither wit nor
valour. They received the Christian faith above 1,200 years since,
and were lovers of music, poetry, and all kinds of learning, and
possessed of a land abounding with all things necessary for the civil
life of man.”
Earlier than Davies, Spenser of the “Faerie Queene” wrote in 1596:—
“The Irish are one of the most ancient nations that I know of at this
end of the world.... They come of as mighty a race as the world ever
brought forth ... very present in perils, great scorners of death.”
For the uprooting of such a breed, high political and moral reasons
had to be invented, but when the natives were got rid of and their
persecutors could discover no political or religious pretexts to
cloak their greed, they fastened nakedly on the input and earnings of
the settlers from England and Scotland.
These supplanters of the Gael were in the third and fourth generation
harassed and skinned as thoroughly as if they had belonged to the
outcast race. In the province where Papists were almost forbidden to
breathe, the framers of the Penal Code, in the name of “the rights
of property,” taught the humbler Protestants the scantiness of their
mercies.
The descendants of the “great Deputy” did not attempt to enforce
their Patents while knowledge of their origin prevailed and
malodor beset them; but in the reign of George III. their baleful
activities had consequences which were empire-wide. The extravagance
and rapacity of the Chichesters led to the enforced emigration of
the children of the Planters, and powerfully contributed in 1776
to the loss of the American Colonies. The armies of Washington
were so largely recruited from the evicted tenants of Ulster that,
according to the evidence presented to a Parliamentary Committee,
half the Revolutionary soldiers were Irish. For this Lord Donegall
and his imitators were to be thanked. The “flight of the Earls,”
which the “great Deputy” promoted, had for its sequel the flight of
the peasants, provoked by his descendants; and with it the breakdown
of the imperial tie between Britain and the greatest part of North
America.
The American upheaval was itself preceded by a rebellion amongst the
Ulster Protestants. A close connection can be traced between the
failure of the one outbreak and the success of the other. In July,
1770—only eighty years after the Battle of the Boyne—the offspring of
the Planters in the Counties of Antrim, Down, Derry, and Tyrone rose
in arms. British writers like J. A. Froude and John Wesley, Irish
historians like Lecky and Benn, agree as to the responsibility of the
landlords who provoked the insurrection. Froude links together as
cause and effect the atrocities of the Marquis of Donegall and the
loss of the American Colonies.
He says:—“Sir Arthur Chichester, the great Viceroy of Ireland under
James I., was, of all Englishmen who ever settled in the country,
the most useful to it. His descendant, the Lord Donegall, of whom it
has become necessary to speak, was perhaps the person who inflicted
the greatest injury to it. Sir Arthur had been rewarded for his
services by vast estates in the County Antrim. The fifth Earl and
first Marquis of Donegall, already by the growth of Belfast and the
fruit of other men’s labours, while he was sitting still, enormously
rich, found his income still unequal to his yet more enormous
expenditure. His name is looked for in vain among the nobles who, in
return for high places, were found in the active service of their
country. He was one of those habitual and splendid absentees who
discharged his duties to the God who made him by magnificently doing
as he would with his own. Many of his Antrim leases having fallen
in simultaneously he demanded £100,000 in fines for the renewal of
them. The tenants, all Protestants, offered the interest of the
money in addition to the rent. It could not be. Speculative Belfast
capitalists paid the fine and took the lands over the heads of the
tenants to sub-let.
“Mr. Clotworthy Upton, another great Antrim proprietor, imitated the
example, and at once the whole countryside were driven from their
habitations. Sturdy Scots, who in five generations had reclaimed
Antrim from the wilderness, saw the farms, which they and their
fathers had made valuable, let by auction to the highest bidder; and,
when they refused to submit themselves to robbery, saw them let to
others, and let in many instances to Catholics, who would promise
anything to recover their hold on the soil.
“The most substantial of the expelled tenantry gathered their
effects together and sailed to join their countrymen in the New
World, where the Scotch-Irish became known as the most bitter of the
Secessionists.”
Mr. Froude traces to these evictions the uprise of the “Peep of Day”
and the “Hearts of Steel” conspiracies, and adds:—
“It is rare that two private persons have power to create effects so
considerable as to assist in dismembering an Empire and provoking
a civil war. Lord Donegall, for his services, was rewarded with
a marquisate; and Mr. Clotworthy Upton with a viscounty (Lord
Templetown). If rewards were proportioned to deserts, a fitter
retribution to both of them would have been forfeiture and Tower
Hill....
“Throughout the revolted Colonies, and therefore probably in the
first to begin the struggle, all evidence shows that the foremost,
the most irreconcilable, the most determined in pushing the quarrel
to the last extremity, were the Scotch-Irish, whom the Bishops and
Lord Donegall and Co. had been pleased to drive out of Ulster.”
Mr. Lecky declares the outbreak “was mainly attributable to the
oppression of a single man—the Marquis of Donegall.... The conduct
of Lord Donegall brought the misery of the Ulster peasantry to a
climax; and in a short time many thousands of ejected tenants, banded
together under the name of Steelboys, were in arms.”
Their “formidable insurrection,” he says, caused “the great
Protestant emigration” from Ulster to America. “In a few years the
cloud of civil war, which was already gathering over the Colonies,
burst; and the ejected tenants of Lord Donegall formed a large part
of the revolutionary armies which severed the New World from the
British Crown.”
Benn’s “History of Belfast” states:—
“An estate in the County Antrim, a part of the vast possessions of
the Marquis of Donegall (an absentee), was proposed, when its leases
had expired, to be let only to those who could pay large fines; and
the agent of the marquis was said to have extracted large fees on his
own account also. Numbers of the former tenants, neither able to pay
the fines nor the rents demanded by those who, on payment of fines
and fees, took leases over them, were dispossessed of their tenements
and left without means of subsistence. Rendered thus desperate, they
maimed the cattle of those who had taken the lands, committed other
outrages, and, to express a firmness of resolution, styled themselves
‘Hearts of Steel.’ One of their number, charged with felony, was
apprehended and confined in Belfast in order to be transmitted to
the county gaol. Provided with offensive weapons, several thousands
of the peasants proceeded to the town to rescue the prisoner, who
was removed to the barrack and placed under a guard of soldiers
(23rd December, 1770).... Being delivered up to his associates, they
marched off in triumph.... So great and wide was the discontent that
many thousands of Protestants emigrated from those parts of Ulster
to America, where they soon appeared in arms against the British
Government; and contributed powerfully, by their zeal and valour,
to the separation of the American Colonies from the Crown of Great
Britain.”
On the 6th April, 1772, George III. wrote to the Lord Lieutenant
(Townshend):—
“His Majesty’s humanity was greatly affected by hearing your
Excellency’s opinion that the disturbances owe their rise to private
oppression, and that the over-greediness and harshness of landlords
may be a means of depriving the kingdom of a number of his Majesty’s
most industrious and valuable subjects. The King does not doubt but
that your Excellency will endeavour, by every means in your power, to
convince persons of property of their infatuation in this respect,
and instil into them principles of equity and moderation, which, it
is to be feared, can only apply an efficient remedy to the evil.”
In November, 1772, the Lord Lieutenant proclaimed a pardon to
“the wicked and dangerous insurgents who in July, 1770, assembled
themselves in arms in large numbers in the counties of Antrim, Down,
Armagh, Derry, and Tyrone.” It was too late.
The Belfast “News Letter” of the 16th April, 1773, computed that
“within forty years past 400,000 people have left this kingdom to go
and settle in America.” In the three years from 1771 to 1773 alone,
101 ships left Ulster ports, carrying over 30,000 emigrants.
On the 15th June, 1773, John Wesley in his diary writes:
“When I came to Belfast I learned the real cause of the insurrection
in this neighbourhood. Lord Donegall, the proprietor of almost the
whole country, came hither to give his tenants new leases. But when
they came they found two merchants of the town had taken their farms
over their heads; so that multitudes of them, with their wives and
children, were turned out to the wide world. It is no wonder that, as
their lives were now bitter to them, they should fly out as they did.
It is rather a wonder that they did not go much further; and, if they
had, who would have been most in fault? Those who were without home,
without money, without food for themselves and families, or those who
drove them to this extremity?”
A dispatch to the “Irish Society” of the London Corporation in 1802
says of the Right Hon. Richard Jackson, a middleman of the London
Clothworkers’ estate near Coleraine:—
“It is commonly reported in the country that, having been obliged
to raise the rents of his tenants very considerably, in consequence
of the large fine he paid, it produced an almost total emigration
among them to America, and that they formed a principal part of that
undisciplined body which brought about the surrender of the British
Army at Saratoga.”
Unmoved by a riven empire, the Nero-like Marquises of Donegall, in
unbroken succession, were quietly hatching out schemes to enforce the
recognition of their Patent for the waters of Lough Neagh and the
Bann.