In the reign of Edward III. it was promulgated "by royal mandate, that no mere Irishman should be admitted into any office or trust in any borough, city, or castle, in the King's land." Next, by the statutes of Kilkenny, it was enacted that "marriage, nurture, or gossipred with the Irish should be considered and punished as HIGH TREASON!" It was also made highly penal in the English to "permit their Irish neighbours to graze their lands, to present them to ecclesiastical benefices, or to receive them into monasteries or religious houses." It was made penal also" to entertain their bards who perverted the imagination by romantic tales." We remember in our own times hearing of a poetic revenge being taken by one of the last of the bards, poor Carolan, upon a porter called O'Flynn, who refused him the access to which he considered himself traditionally entitled-On leaving the door of the inhospitable mansion, he immediately struck up his harp to the following witty and bitter impromptu. Those who know the energy and comprehensiveness of the Irish language will readily believe that it does not gain by the translation.

Irish

ment to compel him to stand his ground could only have been passed by an Irish Legislature." It was in the eleventh year of this reign enacted, that "no Irish enemy should be permitted to depart from the realm." enemy was the current appellation given by the invaders to the people, amongst whom they came to settle. Thus those who remained were excluded from every constitutional privilege or human right, and those who attempted to escape from the unnatural helotry were condemned as criminals! Suffering under such impolitic and oppressive infliction, this people over and over again appealed to the Kings of England for protection. The appeals and the answers are on record. Such was the British policy up to the period of Henry VIII. whom we find, with the utmost simplicity, expressing his surprise that "his subjects of this land should be so prone to faction and rebellion, and that so little advantage had been hitherto derived from the acquisitions of his predecessors, notwithstanding the fruitfulness and natural advantages of Ireland." "Surprising, indeed (exclaims Captain Rock), that a policy, such as we have been describing, should not have converted the whole country into a perfect Atlantis of happiness should not have made it like the imaginary island of Sir Thomas More, where tota insula velut una familia est!' Most stubborn, truly, and ungrateful must that people be, upon whom, up to the very hour at which I write, such a long and un

O'Flynn,

So surly a dog would let nobody in.

The reader will not be surprised to hear that the natives, ground down by these infamous enactments, were weary of their birth-place, and desired to leave it-he will, however, doubtless, scarcely credit the fact that, though their country was thus rendered intolerable to them as a residence, they were, by a statute of Henry IV, actually forbidden to emigrate. "Those whom the English refused to incorporate with as subjects, they would yet compel to remain as rebels or as slaves. We have heard of a bridge of gold for a flying enemy, but an Act of Parlia

cations, and insurrection acts, has been tried, without making them in the least degree in love with their rulers!" Under such circumstances, it is not much to be wondered at that the Captain formed a treaty offensive and defensive with the Mac Cartys, and O'Briens, and all those whom the title of Mac or O proved to be genuine Milesian-a title, it appears, which precludes the success of any alien intruder.

Per Mac atque O tu veros cognoscis HiHis duobus demptis, nullus Hibernus adest.

bernos ;

thus translated by one of our celebrated poets:

By Mac and O

You'll always know
True Irishmen, they say;
For if they lack

Both O and Mac,
No Irishmen are they..

Such were the acts by which the people of Ireland were prepared for the reformation. Under any circumstances, a total and radical change in the religion of a country is not easily effected; but when that change was advocated by those who had grown hoarse in shouting the war-cry against the selected converts, there was no wonder that it was "fiercely and at once rejected." The hands which erected the altar of Protestantism in Ireland were red with the blood of the natives, and those who survived naturally shrunk from what they considered not the shrine of peace, but the sanctuary of murder. Many who preached the reformation in that country, indeed, set about the good work rather with the fury of renegades than the zeal of Christians. Let us hear what Leland says on this subject. Leland is the "only Irish authority" on which Captain Rock rests, but he says (and says very truly, unless the character of the Fellows of Trinity College Dublin was much more liberal in Leland's time than it is now), that this historian "was sufficiently protected against any undue partiality to his country by a fellowship in the university of Dublin, a Prebend in St. Patrick's cathedral, and a Chaplaincy at the Castle all good securities against political heterodoxy." "Under pretence," says he, "of obeying the orders of the state, they (that is, the advocates of the reformation), seized all the most valuable furniture of the churches, which they exposed to sale without decency or reserve. The Irish annalists pathetically describe the garrison of Athlone issuing forth with a barbarous and heathen fury, and pillaging the famous church of Clonmacnoise, tearing away the most inoffensive ornaments, so as to leave the shrine of their favourite saint, Kieran, a hideous monument of sacrilege." These Vandal reformers even burned the venerated crozier of St. Patrick, an act of barbarism as useless as it was inhuman. There was but one body of men in Ireland who grasped with, at least an appa

the

rent, cordiality the bloody hand of Reformation-strange and almost incredible to relate, that body was the bishops!" Most of the temporal Lords," adds Leland, "were those whose descendants, even to our own days, continue firmly attached to the Romish communion; but far the greater part of the prelates were such as quietly enjoyed their sees by conforming occasionally to different modes of religion." This discreditable versatility, however, did not extend beyond the church; the laity were stedfast in their faith, and Captain Rock at once triumphantly vindicates his Milesian, and gratifies his anti-Saxon prejudices by the declaration that "the obstinate perseverance of the Irish in their old belief is not perhaps more remarkable than the readiness with which the people of England veered about from one religion to another during the three reigns that succeeded the reformation; "they were (says he, quoting Loyd), during the interval between Mary's accession and her first parliament, like the Jewish children after the captivity, speaking a middle language, between Hebrew and Ashdod.' The Captain, of course, is no great friend to the statesmen and bishops of any country; but, to do him justice, he is impartial in his animosity, and, lest those of England should sneer at the harlequinade just described as having been so nimbly performed by the Irish prelacy, he declares, quoting good authorities as he goes-that the great reformer Latimer changed his opinion no less than eight different times!-that Cranmer's faith was continually changing, he being at one time a persecutor of all who denied transubstantiation, a stickler for pilgrimages, purgatory, &c. and at another denouncing all such principles as heretical-that many eminent and excellent worthies contrived, notwithstanding the very opposite. interests that prevailed in the reigns of Henry, Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth, to hold situations of trust under all those sovereigns, and, though last not least, that Sir Anthony St. Leger, who had been entrusted with the government of Ireland, when the new regulations of divine worship were to be established in the reign of Edward, was again made Deputy in the time of Mary, when these same re

gulations were to be all abolished!! What a picture is this of human consistency! Little then is it to be won dered at that Captain Rock should usher in the reign of the regal reformer himself with the following paragraph of bitter jocularity. "Henry VIII. who was as fond of theology as of dancing, executed various pirouettes in the former line, through which he, rather unreasonably, compelled the whole nation to follow him: and, difficult as it was to keep pace with his changes, either as believer, author, or husband, or to know which of his creeds he wished to be maintained, which of his books he wished to be believed, or which of his wives he wished not to be beheaded, the people of England, to do them justice, obeyed every signal of his caprice with a suppleness quite wonderful, and danced the hays with their monarch and his unfortunate wives through every variety of mystery and murder into which Thomas Aquinas and the executioner could lead them." Popery, however, as England still remembers, made a desperate, though fortunately an ineffectual rally in this country during the reign of Mary, and it certainly is a singular and striking circumstance, that this period, every hour of which might be counted by blood-drops in England, was in Ireland an "interval of peace and quietness." Nay, such, says Ware, was the tranquillity of the time that "several English families, friends to the reforma tion, fled to Ireland, and there enjoy ed their opinions and worship, without notice or molestation." A strange fact! That the only part of the kingdom in which the reformers found safety and toleration, was precisely that in which they had forfeited every claim to both!.... The reign of Elizabeth presents however a very different scene-a scene of wholesale robbery and extermination! The Queen herself seems to have been at length conscience-struck at the conduct of her Viceroys, and exclaimed, on receiving some representation of grievances, "Alas, how I fear lest it be objected to us, as it was to Tiberius, by Bato, You, you it is that are in fault, who have committed your flocks, not to shepherds, but to wolves.' There was but little wonder that she should

thus express herself, when we find, under the government of Lord Grey, the comfortable assurance given her, that "little was left in Ireland for her Majesty to reign over but carcasses and ashes!" That the Viceroy himself was nothing loth in prosecuting this system of benevolence, we may collect from his butchering in cold blood the garrison of Smerwick in Kerry, consisting of seven hundred men, who had surrendered to him on mercy! They were first disarmed and then murdered, and the English reader will start, we doubt not, when he hears that the head butcher on the occasion stands eminent in the annals of his country-" it is not without pain,(says Leland,) that we find a service, so horrid and detestable, committed to Sir Walter Raleigh!" The effect of this policy in Munster, the most beautiful and richest part of Ireland, is best described by Spenser the poet, in his tract on the state of that unfortunate country. "Notwithstanding that the same was a most rich and plentiful country, yet, ere one year and a half, they were brought to such wretchedness as that any stony heart would rue the same. Out of every corner of the woods and glynns, they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them; they looked like anatomies of death; they spake like ghosts crying out of their graves; they did eat the dead carrions, yea, and one another soon after; insomuch as the very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of their graves, and if they found a plot of water-cresses or shamrocks, there they flocked as to a feast for the time, yet not able to continue there withal; that in short space there was none almost left, and a most populous and plentiful country suddenly left void of man or beast!!!" Who would imagine that in the midst of such scenes the "Fairy Queen" was written? Time, and Vandalism, in Ireland more ruinous than time, have left some traces still of the castle, in which the poet, by the redemption of his genius, endeavoured to atone for the depravity by which he was surrounded. Into the rebellion, the effect of which is thus piteously described, was the Earl of Desmoud driven by Elizabeth's governors, who had long looked with a watchful eye, (says

Spenser,) on his immense possessions, and thinking him too tempting as an enemy to be suffered to remain as a friend, wrung him into undutifulness." Their inhuman policy was successful -five hundred and seventy four thousand six hundred and twenty-eight acres were on this occasion the wages of blood. In Ulster and Munster the same system was adopted. "In these provinces, the soldiers, (says Morison,) encouraged by the example of their officers, every where cut down the standing corn with their swords, and devised every means to deprive the wretched inhabitants of the necessaries of life. Famine was judged the speediest and most effectual means of reducing them. The like expedient was practised in the northern provinces. The governor of Carrickfergus, Sir Arthur Chichester, issued from his quarters, and for twenty miles round reduced the country to a desert. Sir Samuel Bagnal, with the garrison of Newry, proceeded with the same severity and laid waste all the adjacent lands." Captain Rock has left it out of the power of any partizan of the "good Queen Bess" to screen her from a participation in these sanguinary measures. The very best evidence is produced against her herself. "Be not dismayed (said she, on hearing that O'Neal meditated some designs against her government), tell my friends, if he arise it will turn to their advantage; there will be estates for them who want." Indeed, it appears that her fears, as expressed above, of being assimilated to Tiberius, were perfectly understood by her political advisers. It would be difficult for any profligate minister to give more odious counsel to the Roman monster than that which Elizabeth unblushingly received and basely acted on. "Should we exert ourselves (say her deputies, in a dispatch addressed to their royal mistress), in reducing this country to order and civility, it must soon acquire power, consequence, and riches. The inhabitants will be thus alienated from England; they will cast themselves into the arms of some foreign power, or perhaps erect themselves into an independent and separate state. Let us rather connive at their disorders: for a weak and disordered people never can attempt to detach themselves from the crown

"

of England!" The reign of James I. seems to have inspired the Irish with some hopes of amelioration, but certainly those hopes were founded on very slender grounds, arising, as they, did, from the ambiguous toleration of a monarch who declared, that "he was loth to hang a priest only for religion-sake and saying mass.' James however, pedant and coxcomb as he undoubtedly was, was still an honest bigot; and, lest the matter should remain at all in doubt, he forthwith issued a proclamation, from which the following is an extract: "Whereas his Majesty is informed that his subjects of Ireland have been deceived by a false report, that his Majesty was disposed to allow them liberty of conscience and the free choice of a religion; he hereby declares to his beloved subjects of Ireland, that he will not admit any such liberty of conscience as they were made to cxpect by such report!!" Immediately after this, to prove to his " beloved” subjects that he was in earnest, James banished the priests- denounced all who harboured them-forbade the exercise of the Roman Catholic religion-forced the Roman Catholics to attend Protestant worship on appointed days, and, to cap the climax of his oppressions, established Roman Catholic inquisitors, whose duty it was to inform against their own brethren who in any way infringed upon the penal statutes! Well and truly might James tell his beloved that he would not allow them liberty of conscience. Having thus settled all controversial points on the subject of religion like a true theological disputant, he then paternally set about the regulation of their civil concerns. "After (says Captain Rock) some centuries of hints from the people themselves, it was at last found out by the Attorney General of King James, that my countrymen were by nature fond of law and justice; but, as both together would have been too much for their unenlightened minds, it was so contrived as to give them the former without the latter; and it is a curious proof of the amari aliquid,' which has always mingled with even the benefits we have received from England, that the first use made of the English law, on its first regular introduction into Ireland, was to rob thousands of the unfortunate na