“ That peace will ever be made between the King and the Parliament is improbable, nor would it be to our advantage, for if they combined, we should be necessitated to surrender. It is likely, 254however, that before long one side will become powerful enough to dictate to the other. If the Parliament prevail—which God forbid—all Ireland will fall under their arbitrary power; the swords of the Puritans will be at our throats, and we shall lose everything except our faith. ”

“ The real or fancied grievances of Loftus and Mountnorris excited far more indignation in England than the wrongs of the native population; but it is not by his dealings with a few powerful and corrupt functionaries, but by his treatment of the mass of the Irish people that Wentworth’s administration must be judged. Of his action in the matter of the Connaught plantation it is impossible to speak too severely. ”

“ A section of the Anglo-Irish Confederates imagining themselves still English, looking only towards England, and never dreaming that a day might come when they with the poet Spenser’s grandsons would be forced to transplant to Connaught as Irish Papists, urged the granting of a truce, and though the Old Irish protested against this throwing away of their advantages, they respected the Oath of Confederation too much to make any violent opposition. ”

“ He had found the country on the verge of bankruptcy; he had established a large and rapidly-increasing revenue, and that without resorting to the dangerous and unpopular expedient of exacting the recusancy fines. He had transformed the Irish army from a disorderly rabble into a disciplined and efficient force; had suppressed piracy; and had developed the material resources of the island. He had set his foot upon the jobbery of the Dublin officials, and had done something, if not much, to improve the scandalous condition of the Established Church. ”

“ The English interest in Ireland therefore remained in the hands of the Lords Justices, nominally acknowledging the King, but in reality, devoted to the Parliament and the policy of confiscation, and in those of the Marquis of Ormond, entirely devoted to the King, but with some sympathy for the Catholic nobility and gentry, especially those of the Pale, as he saw they had been driven through despair at the threatened confiscation, to join the Old-Irish in their uprising. ”

“ To the English and Scotch squatters, and the Irish Society, were given arable and pasture lands, fishings, courts leet and baron, ferries, bishoprics and livings, mountain-lands and bogs, courts of pie-powder, exemptions, titles, licences to beg, recusants’ fines, wardships and marriages of minors, charters of the staple, customs on tobacco-pipes, and monopolies of all kinds, and in a few score years the grandchildren of these favoured persons made themselves famous by their bitter opposition to James’s grandson. Thus the whirligig of time brings its revenges. ”

“ Should the King triumph, we may expect much from his goodness and kindness, and much from the Queen’s intercession. It is uncertain, however, what laws or terms may be imposed on us in such circumstances. The King, should he succeed by the aid of the Protestants, would be in a manner engaged to them. They, as usual, would oppose freedom of religion in Ireland, and insist on the punishment of our ‘rebellion,’ as they style it, to enable them to seize our properties and occupy our estates. ”

“ If, then, by means of this Catholic army, you can obtain from His Majesty the revocation of the penal laws against the Catholics, the abolition of the proposed Oath of Fidelity and freedom in religion, that is that the Catholics be able to hold all appointments in the Kingdom and in Parliament like his other subjects, we may hope in a few years for the conversion of the whole Kingdom—a most important step towards the eradication of heresy from the whole North, and without which the Irish can never hope to enjoy in peace the conditions granted in favour of the true faith in Ireland. ”

“ It looks a little absurd when some Smith or Brown of an English county, or a Menzies or a Montgomery from Scotland, is enjoined so seriously that he must never take the name of The Fox, or The Great O’Carroll.
We must turn now to the religious ideals of the Plantation, and we all know King James was nothing if not religious. I shall try to approach 49the subject with a dispassioned candour, and speak as an Irishman who loves his country, and as a churchman who longs to see the day when the Protestant Church in Ireland shall become converted to Irish ideas in politics. ”

“ On the other hand, the fact that the king was disposed to treat the Catholics with leniency was in itself enough to inflame the hostility of the Puritan party, which comprised the majority of the English middle class and had already obtained the ascendancy in at least the Lower House of Parliament. To satisfy the wishes of the Irish without raising a storm in England was a task beyond the abilities of either Falkland or his master. ”

“ The outside undertakers got the good grants, but the natives got their leavings. The mountainous slopes and remote lands and other parts that were not likely to be productive, were given to the native element. The plan was to concentrate the intruders into villages and towns, and to scatter the Irish as much as possible, putting the servitors (or English who had been in Ireland for some years in military service) near to the natives to keep them in awe. There was always some land that it was quite necessary to let the Irish get, if it was ever to be saved from becoming absolutely waste land. ”

“ Now what has the introduction of the North Britons done for Ireland? It has added complications to the religious problems of the country, by adding a third element. To all who study the history of Ireland, it tends to increase the sense of injustice and wrong, to see how the 67North and its industries have always been pampered for the three centuries intervening. It has not tended to the consolidation of the Empire, for every Ulster so-called “Loyalist” is a Home Ruler of a type of his own, for he approaches all Imperial problems from a local point of view. ”

“ The virtues of Ulster are economy and industry and determination. They have an unreasoning decision, a blind enthusiasm, in political and religious matters that carries them along in a way that will never be copied by the more thoughtful and more depressed Southern. ”

“ His Holiness commands me to say that if by letter from Father Scarampi or from others to be relied on, you are convinced that the peace between the Catholics of Ireland and the King of England is established with the articles and in the manner described, he will be content that you do not prosecute your journey to Ireland, and that you shall wait for further orders from His Holiness; but if the intelligence your Excellency receives does not convey the assurance that the peace is certainly concluded, then you will at once pursue your journey. ”

“ May we not hope for the day when politically it shall cease to allow itself to be dragged at the tail of one English political party? In the Plantation it was intended that the church by the State established should have an endowment in every place; the idea being that in every 1,000 acres sixty should be reserved for the support of the clergyman. And an additional endowment was given by the lands and the patronage of parishes handed over to Trinity College, Dublin. ”

“ Sir John Davies says that the Bill laid before the Grand Jury in Donegal was read in public in English and in Irish, “so as to discover a great deal of the evidence to all the hearers to the end that all the country might be satisfied that the State 12proceeded against them upon a most just ground, and that the people, knowing their treacherous practices, might rest assured that their guilty consciences and fear of losing their heads was the only cause of their running away, and not the allurements of any foreign prince.” ”

“ The ecclesiastical buildings were ruinous and desolate; the clergy, where such existed, were the offscourings of the English church, men of depraved life, or so ignorant that they could hardly perform their duties properly. From the bishops down, pluralities were the common and recognized thing; occasionally even we see a man actually holding an English living and a lot of Irish ones at the same time; thus the same man was Archdeacon of Dublin, Treasurer of Cashel Cathedral, Vicar of Galballydrome and Leighlin Macvoge, and Rector of Battersea in Surrey. ”

“ The lands of the Irish were not to be set out to the adventurers until Parliament should declare the war at an end. The King was also deprived of the power to pardon the insurgents, for the effect of pardons would be to deprive the adventurers of their security. In this way, the mass of the Irish proprietors would be forced into rebellion, while for that reason the King would be prevented from entering into any terms with them, whereby he might call the English garrison in Ireland to his assistance in the coming struggle with the Parliament, or receive help from the insurgents. ”

“ Glamorgan, eager to lead 10,000 Irishmen to the help of the King, was ready to promise anything, and as Chester, the only port at which they could now be landed, was threatened by the Parliamentarians, the Supreme Council agreed to allow him take an advanced guard of 3,000 men there at once. But Glamorgan could not do so until he had Ormond’s consent to his appointment as commander of this force, and to the arrangement with Rinuccini by which the political treaty was not to be published until the religious articles, of which Ormond knew nothing as yet, had been ratified. ”

“ So far from the last-mentioned being one of the objects in view, “there was,” says Maguire, “a fear of the Scots conceived, that they would presumably oppose themselves, and that would make the matter more difficult; to avoid which danger it was resolved not to meddle with them or anything belonging to them, and to demean ourselves toward them as if they were of us, which we thought would pacify them; and if the Scots would not accept that offer, we were in good hope to cause a stir in Scotland that might divert them from us.” ”

“ His views are embodied in a document drawn up by those of the Old-Irish most in his confidence, which is worth quoting at some length, as it is the whole case of the national party as distinguished from those who thought more of the King’s and the English interest, than that of their country. “We should undoubtedly,” they say, “carry on our work to establish the Catholic Faith, the authority of Parliament, and the security of our country by arms and intrepidity, not by cessations and indolence. ”

“ It was, doubtless, hoped that a settled and established Protestant ministry would lead the people all to turn over in time to that faith. And in the meantime, Government was prepared to do all it could by fears and bribery to lead the people in the way it was wished they should go. For a native squire or peasant to conform was the passport to get a miserable patch of land. ”

“ There are Parties on the back of Parties, at war with the world and with each other. There are Catholics of the Pale, demanding freedom of religion under my Lord this and my Lord that. 232There are Old-Irish Catholics under Pope’s Nuncios under Abbas O’Teague of the excommunications and Owen Roe O’Neill demanding, not religious freedom only, but what we now call ‘Repeal of the Union,’ and unable to agree with the Catholics of the English Pale. Then there are Ormond Royalists of the Episcopalian and mixed creeds, strong for King without Covenant ”

“ To which we must remember to add, that the natives’ grants of lands were in the most barren and rocky parts of Ulster. As a people we are mainly pastoral, and this was more conspicuously the case in the days of the Plantation, as everyone who has read Spenser’s View of Ireland will remember. The only hope of doing much with nearly all of the land given to the natives lay in tillage, a thing which the Irish of that day had a very imperfect knowledge of. Hill mentions one case where the ownership of the land continued on all right: it was in the grant to Tirlagh Oge O’Neale’s widow ”

“ Wentworth’s view was substantially the same as Bacon’s. He undoubtedly looked forward to the ultimate suppression of every religion other than that legally established. But he was far too wise a man to have recourse to violent and indiscriminate coercion. “I am not ignorant,” he wrote to Cottington, “how much every good Englishman ought, as well in reason of state as conscience, to desire that kingdom were well reduced to conformity of religion with us here, as indeed shutting up the postern gate to many a dangerous inconvenience and mischief. ”

“ During the reign of James, Falkland, urged on by Sir William Parsons, afterwards the notorious Lord Justice, had attempted to despoil a sept named O’Byrne by the kind of legal jugglery which was then fashionable, but had met with unexpected opposition from the English Government, which was beginning to entertain doubts of the merits of the Plantation system. A few years later he discovered, or professed to have discovered, a formidable conspiracy in which the O’Byrnes were involved. ”