If I have, in these my plain and simple discourses, offended your majesty any way, I most humbly ask pardon for the same. As the physician cannot cure the disease of his patient, until he both know and take away the cause thereof, so neither are the calamities of your majesty's kingdom of Ireland to be remedied, until your majesty be both rightly advertised of the same, and put in practice the redress of the great abuses there; which can't be better done (in my simple skill) than by making an example of some one who has served your majesty corruptly in that place; and the greater the personage is, the greater the justice, and the more your honor in making a precedent of such a one : for your inferior officers can punish small offenders, but it is in your majesty only to correct the mighty transgressors. And so may your majesty (if so you will vouchsafe) look down by degrees, and in time survey your highness's captains, who serve you there; discerning, by a little observation, the good from the bad; which is easily done, if every one be called to account, what service he hath done you, what traitors he hath cut off, having full authority for it, or else how your highness's subjects have been defended by him and his soldiers. He who hath not performed one of these two, is unworthy to have command, or have pay. Furthermore, when some experienced captain shall make offer of his best endeavours, let him (if it please your highness) be hearkned unto, and especially when it tendeth greatly to the advancement of your majesty's service, without encrease of charge. And let them not (I beseech your highness) be put off so grossly as they have been, with saying, it is too small a proportion of soldiers to perform so great a service. For that is not the cause (most dread sovereign), but this; if they should allow of those services, when they are offered, it would discover, as many think, some of their great abuses, which your majesty may perceive, when you see great services done with 100 where 500 have been employed, and your highness's subjects no whit the better defended. There is no well advised captain will make offer of service, but he hopeth to perform, or lose his life; and especially when he shall not gain thereby; for his soldiers must be paid, or else they will not serve; besides he must keep them, or else he cannot effect the service undertaken, so that his only hope of gain resteth in reputation, reward, and preferment from your majesty, as he shall deserve, and not in polling and pilling the soldiers and your majesty's subjects. These good services then being accepted, and the abuses reformed, there is no doubt but your majesty's kingdom of Ireland shall quickly flourish in true subjection and due obedience, to your majesty's honor and comfort; which I beseech the Almighty to grant and continue. The consideration (most gracious sovereign) of my own estate, who have engaged myself and my friends very far, for means to live, and do your majesty service, hath many times (in the penning of this discourse) sought to withhold me from discovering to your highness these causes of discontentments of your poor people in that kingdom, and the bad managing of your majesty's affairs there, with the means of quieting them, of advancing your majesty's service, and advantaging your revenues, assuring myself that the doing of such an office would neither procure me any friends, nor pay any of my debts: besides it's against my profession (being a soldier) to be a penman, or so earnesty to seek for peace. Yet nevertheless, when I considered what due honor may be done unto God, what true service to your highness, and what good to that poor commonweal, it made me utterly neglect my own fortune, and respect of my own private benefit, and emboldened me to discharge my duty to God and your majesty, and disclose my zeal for benefitting that poor realm. And if these my labours shall be rightly conceived of by your majesty, and your most honorable council, I shall think my time happily spent, and enjoy as much as I desire. And thus, most humbly beseeching pardon for this my bold and rude distourse, and praying on my knees to Almighty God, the director of all princes hearts, that it may please him to move your majesty's mind duly to consider of the premises, and pitifully to regard the present state of that your poor kingdom, and beseeching him to bless your highness with all honour, health, and princely happiness, long to reign over us, I most humbly conclude with this my petition. I humbly beseech your majesty, if it be your gracious pleasure to accept the earl of Tyrone into your highness's protection, that he may safely come in unto your majesty, or to your lord deputy, and hither at your pleasure, that I may be the messenger; because at my coming over he reposed great trust in me, to deliver unto your majesty those things, wherewith he found himself grieved, wherein I doubt not but to do your highness acceptable service, by reason of the poor credit I have with him. But if your majesty be minded to deal otherwise with him (because it hath been reported by those who are adversaries both to him and me, that I am a great friend unto him) to show what manner of love mine is towards him, there is none of them, or any other, who shall do greater service than I will, if it please your majesty to command me, and enable me fit for it; if not, my service and myself, rest at your highness's command to be disposed, as it shall please you, for whom, as is my bounden duty, I will daily pray, &c. Remonstrance of divers Lords of the Pale to the King, concerning the Irish Parliament in 1613. [See Review, p. 79.] MAY it please your majesty, such is the excessive grief and anxiety of mind and conscience, which we, the nobility of this your highness's kingdom, whose names are here under-written, do conceive, by the more preposterous courses holden in parliament, as we must be inforced, before we descend further, most humbly with tears, to implore your gracious favour, that if the due regard of your majesty's sacred honor, the careful consideration of the good peace and tranquillity of this your realm and country, the tender and feeling respect of our bounden and obliged duty to both, do carry us in aught beyond the limits of a well-tempered moderation, your highness will be graciously pleased to pardon our excess herein, so far as pius dolor and justa iracundia, do in themselves deserve. It would far pass the compass of a letter, if we should insist to particularise the manifest, old, precedent disorders, and such as still do accompany this intended action; only your highness shall understand, that many knights from counties, and citizens and burgesses from cities and towns, have, contrary to the true election, been returned; and in some places force, and in many others fraud, deceit, and indirect means have been used for effecting of this so lawless a course of proceeding. Neither can we but make known to your majesty, that under pretence of erecting towns in places of the new plantation, more corporations have been made since the beginning of last month, or a little more, than are returned out of the whole kingdom; besides, the number whereof (as we conceive it) contrary to your highness's intended purpose, are dispersed throughout all parts of this kingdom; and that in divers places, where there be good ancient boroughs, and not allowed to send burgesses to the parliament; and yet these new created corporations, for the most part are so miserable and beggarly poor, as their tuguria cannot otherwise be holden or denied than as tituli sine re, et figmenta in relis; for divers of which (their extreme poverty being not able to defray the charges of burgesses, nor the places themselves to afford any one man fit to present himself in the poorest society of men) and for others, we must confess, that some of great fashion have not sticked to abase themselves to be returned: the lord deputy's servants, attornies, and clerks, resident only in the city of Dublin, most of them having never seen or known the places for which they were returned, and others of contemptible life and carriage. And what outra geous violence was offered yesterday to a grave gentleman, whom men of all sorts that know him, do and will confess to be both learned, grave, and discreet, free from all touch and imputation, and whom those of the lower house, to whom no exceptions could be taken, had chosen to be their speaker, we leave, for avoiding tediousness to your highness, to their own further declaration. And forasmuch as, most renowned and dread sovereign, we cannot in any 'due proportion of reason expect redress in these our distressed calamities, where many of those who represent the body of your estate were the chief authors of them, upon the knees of our loyat and submissive hearts, we humbly pray, that it would please your majesty to admit some of us to the access of your royal presence; where, if we fail in the least point of these our assertions, and declarations of other evils, which do multiply in this estate, we willingly submit ourselves to any punishment, as deserved, which it shall please your highness to lay and inflict upon us. For we are those, by the effusion of whose ancestors blood, the foundation of that empire, which we acknowledge your highness by the laws of God and man to have over this kingdom and people, was first laid, and in many succeeding ages preserved. To us it properly apper taineth, both in the obligation of public duty and private interest, to heed the good thereof, who never laid the foundation of our hopes upor the disturbance of it, garboils and dissentions being the downfall of our estate, as some of us now living can witness; and therefore, we cannot, but out of the consideration of our bounden duty and allegiance, make known unto your highness the general discontent which those strange, unlooked for, and never heard of courses particularly have bred; whereof, if the rebellious and discontented of this nation abroad do take advan tage, and procure the evil-affected at home, which are numbers, by reason of that already settled, and intended plantation, in an hostile fashion to set disorders on foot, and labour some underhand relief from any prince or estate abroad, who peradventure might be inveigled, and drawn to commiserate their pretended distresses and oppressions; however, we are assured the prowess and power of your majesty in the end will bring the authors thereof to ruin and confusion; yet it may be attended with the effusion of much blood, exhausting of masses of treasure, the exposing of us, and others your highness's well affected subjects, to the hazard of poverty, whereof the memory is very hively and fresh among us; and finally, to the laying open of the whole commonality to the inundation of alt miseries and calamities, which garboils, civil war, and dissentions to breed and draw with them, in a rent and torn estate. For preventing whereof, we nothing doubt but your majesty will give redress, by the equal balance of your highness's justice, which we beseech the Almighty, with your royal person, ever to maintain and preserve, NUMBER III, [From Desiderat. Curios. Hibern.] To the Right Honorable the Lords of his Majesty's Most Honorable Privy Council. The humble Petition of the Knights, Citizens and Burgesses of the Counties, Cities, and ancient Boroughs of Ireland. [See Review, p. 79.] MOST humbly declaring to your lordships, that the assurance of his majesty's most princely inviolable justice, whereof your lordships, in matters of state and government, are the high and supreme distributors, doth embolded us, in our oppressions, to address these our submissive lines to your honors; wherein our purpose is, not to be pleaders, the strangeness of our extremities finding no fit words to express them; and therefore, in declaration of the naked truth, your lordships shall understand that we, the knights, citizens, and burgesses of the counties, cities, and ancient boroughs of this realm, coming, according to our bounden duties, into the parliament house, we find there fourteen counsellors of state, three of the judges, having before received writs to appear in the higher house, all his majesty's council at law; and the rest of the number, for the most part, consisting of attornies, clerks in courts, of the lord deputy's retinue, and others his household-servants, with some lately come out of England, having no abiding here; and all these, saving very few, were returned from the new corporations erected, to the number of forty or thereabouts, not only in places of the new plantation, but also in other provinces, where there be corporations of antiquity; few or none of them having been ever resident, and most of them having never seen these places: the rest, who possessed the rooms of knights of shires, save four or six, came in by practice, and dishonest devices, whereunto themselves were not strangers; and some there were from ancient boroughs, who intruded themselves into their places, by as undue and unlawful means: as the knights and burgesses duly elected were ready at the par liament door to prove and avouch. For redress whereof, we of the - ancient shires, cities, and towns, to whom no exceptions could be taken, being desirous to take the usual and accustomed course, what outrageous violence ensued, by the fury of some there, we humbly leave to your lordships to be informed by our declarations; whereunto a schedule, by direction of my lord deputy, subscribed with our hands, is annexed. And forasmuch, right honorable, as the strangeness of these proceedings, in a christian commonwealth is such as we think his majesty and your lordships will hardly be induced to believe; they being, in the likelihood of impossibility, equal to that of Messalino, unto the emperor Claudius in ancient Rome; or to any other accident, how rare soever, transmitted to posterity in modern or ancient shires, we humbly pray, that your lordships, in commiseration of our distress, will be a mean to his highness, that some of us, with some of our nobility, may be licensed to present ourselves there, for the proof of our assertions; wherein if we fail in any one point, we utterly renounce all favour; and that in the mean time his majesty will be pleased to suspend his gracious judgment, in the apprehension of what to our prejudice may be informed here; those from whom his highness doth usually receive information, being the authorį of the carriage of what is done amiss. NUMBER IV. [From Desiderat. Curios. Hibern.] Abstract of the Report and Return of Commissioners sent by the King to Ireland, to enquire into the Grievances and Complaints of the Irish, in 1613. [See Review, p. 89.] UPON our arrival in Dublin the 11th of September, we caused his majesty's commission and instructions to be inrolled, and presently directed our letters to the governors of Munster and Conaught, as also to divers lords, archbishops, and bishops, and to several of the sheriffs of counties, and others, concerning the articles of the said instructions, whereby our arrival, and the cause of our employment were made known to the people in most parts of the kingdom. Yet during the space of one month at the least, after our landing, no one petition was exhibited to us complaining of any grievances. Nevertheless afterwards, upon the coming over of the lord Killeene and sir Christopher Plunket, two of the late petitioners to his majesty, they exhibited unto us particular instances of oppression and exactions by soldiers, provost-marshals, and some others, specially those that reside nearest the state; out of which particulars, being many, we selected three-score or thereabouts, as meetest to be examined; whereby we might discern, what were the several kinds of the soldiers oppressions towards the people; for proof of which selected articles, divers days were assigned to them to produce their witnesses: at which time some of the captains of horse and foot, provost-marshals, and some of their soldiers we warned to appear before us, and thereupon we proceeded in presence of the lord Killeene and sir Christopher Plunket, and some of the parties grieved, and we proceeded to a summary examination of those disorders; and by these examinations, and by other means, it doth appear unto us, that the soldiers, both horse and foot, have extorted upon his majesty's subjects in manner following: first, in all their journies and thoroughfares, where, by their warrant from the lord deputy, they are commanded to take meat and drink in the country, paying ready money, or giving tickets for the same: the soldiers nevertheless, for the most part, neither pay money, nor give tickets, as they ought to do; and in cases where the collectors receive tickets for the payment of the country for victualling of soldiers, they, and sometimes persons authorised by the principal gentlemen of the country, do get these tickets into their hands, and obtain payment from his majesty's treasurer, and seldom make distribution to the poorer sort to whom it is due. The soldiers, where they are cessed, do extort money from the poorer people (besides meat and drink) for every night's lodging three shillings for a horse-man, and two shillings for a foot-man, sometimes more, and sometimes less; and certain petty sums are also taken for their boys and attendants, besides victuals; and it happeneth sometimes, that the soldiers that take cess, take money, as well for themselves as for other soldiers absent, which the country call Black-men, because they are not seen; and sometimes soldiers in pay, and others discharged out of pay, and divers vagrants in the name of soldiers, take meat and money of the people without warrant, or after the date of their warrant is expired, in extortious manner, by two or three or more in a company. And in all these cases, when the people have not money to pay them, they take divers times, forcibly, either some of their cattle, or some of their household stuff for pawns in lieu thereof, whereby breach of peace and affrays are occasioned. Likewise the soldiers, although they be always enjoined by the lord deputy's warrant to pass to and fro the direct way in their journies, yet do they sometimes make a circular and long course in their thoroughfare, |