"The fourth is, that no schools or academies are allowed in Ireland, the English being desirous to keep the people in ignorance, lest they should learn the difference between liberty and slavery, and knowing well that the inhabitants are warlike and courageous, and capable of supporting every fatigue, they fear lest they should be instructed in the art of war. For the same reason they never allowed artists to settle there, lest the inhabitants, by learning how to avail themselves of the natural resources of the country, might become rich and powerful, and shake off the foreign yoke; for it yields abundance of metal for every sort of armour, and for the munitions of war.

"As to the troops that will be necessary for the conquest of the kingdom, it is certain that as the eyes of England are now opened to the importance of the island, greater forces will be required than heretofore. Considering, however, the importance of the enterprize, and the increase of the Catholic faith, the expense will be but trifling; and I think that with five thousand well-armed troops, such an end may easily be attained.

"There can be no difficulty in disembarking the troops; there are so many ports in the island that it would be impossible for the enemy to occupy them all.* There are many of the Irish chieftains both in Rome and Spain, who are excellently acquainted with the country.

"As regards the good will of the inhabitants, were it merely for the motive of religion, all would unite themselves at once with any Catholic power, and still more so with the Roman pontiff.

"The queen of England is so occupied with the war in Flanders, and other wars abroad, as well as with the guerillas of the Irish chiefs at home, that it will be impossible for her to send an army to oppose the invading troops; and as to the cities which she at present occupies, the citizens, being all Catholics, will hail with delight the friendly troops, and shake off the tyrannical yoke of the English. And even should it not be so, there is not a single city in the whole kingdom which could resist for four days against a battery of four pieces of cannon. ... In fine, the conquest being thus most easily accomplished, not only will new power and glory be obtained, but the Irish nation being the most devoted to the Holy See, the most firmly rooted in the attachment to the Catholic faith, and the greatest enemy of all heretics, especially of the English, it will be a perpetual bulwark against all the heretics of the west, and serve as a bridle to check those of England and Scotland."

*Tacitus (in Vit. Jul. Agric.) says of his time: "Quod Hiberniæ quam Britanniæ melius aditus portusque per commercia et negotiatores cogniti." Peter Lombard (loc. cit. c. xi.) also writes: "Plurimi sunt et optimi portus qui nimirum et accessum habent facilem et fidam præbent stationem adeo quidem ut in ista etiam parte Hibernia longe Britanniam superet."

CHAPTER IV.

PERSECUTION OF THE IRISH CATHOLICS DURING
THE REIGN OF ELIZABETH.

1. General View of this Persecution.-2. Sufferings of the Irish Church.-3. Devastation of the Country.-4. Famine which ensued.-5. Examples to Illustrate the Persecution of Elizabeth.-6. Constancy of the Irish Catholics.-7. Condition of the Protestant Church in the time of Elizabeth.

1.-General View of the Persecution.

FEW penal laws were enacted by the Irish parliament during the reign of Elizabeth. In its first meetings, indeed (1559), an effort was made by the government to lay the foundations of a penal code, on which an ample superstructure might subsequently be raised. Not only was spiritual supremacy, as enjoyed by Henry VIII. and Edward VI., restored to the crown, and all the acts of queen Mary in favour of the Catholic religion repealed, but it was further commanded, that all officers and ministers, whether lay or ecclesiastical, should, on pain of forfeiture, take the oath of supremacy; that all persons in any way maintaining the spiritual supremacy of the Holy See, should forfeit, for the first offence, all his estates, real and personal (or be imprisoned for one year, if not worth £20), incur a præmunire for the second offence, and become guilty of high treason for the third offence; that the use of the book of Common Prayer, instead of the Roman Catholic liturgy, should be enforced as in England; that any clergyman who refused to use the book of Common Prayer in his church, or who used any other form of worship, rite, ceremony, or celebration of the Lord's Supper, openly or privately, than was laid down in the said book of Common Prayer, should, for the first offence, forfeit one year's income, and be imprisoned for six months; for the second offence be deprived of office, and suffer imprisonment at pleasure; and for the third offence, be imprisoned for life; that every person should resort to the established church and attend the new

H

service, under pain of ecclesiastical censures, and of the forfeiture of twelve pence for every offence, to be levied by the church-wardens, by the distress of the lands or chattels of the defaulter; that the first fruits and twentieths of all church revenues should be given to the crown, and that the old form of congé d'élire should be superseded by the letters patent of the crown, by which, in future, all collations to vacant sees should be made.*

It was only by a stratagem, however, that the wishes of the queen, in regard of these penal laws, received the sanction of the commons; and the promise of the viceroy that they would not be put in execution, made them for some years remain as a dead letter on the statute-book. Other enactments, embodying the cruel code that was enforced in England, were proposed in 1585; but the Catholic party in parliament was successful in its opposition, and the agents of persecution were never able to palliate their cruelty, by appealing to the acts of the Irish legislature.

Some English writers dwell with complacency on this lenity of the government, and extol the mildness with which the new religion was sought to be enforced in Ireland; and whilst they acknowledge that torrents of blood were poured out in England by the intolerant bigotry of Elizabeth, they have not hesitated to affirm, that Ireland was wholly free from such scenes of persecution, and that our Catholics were allowed peaceably to pursue the dictates of their own conscience. And yet, whosoever impartially considers the contemporary monuments of our history, must be convinced, that a bitter unremitted persecution was at this period carried on in Ireland against the Catholic faith; that the agents of the government pursued, in regard of the Irish Catholics, the same sanguinary code which had been enacted in England; and that every torture which their malicious ingenuity could devise, was inflicted with impunity on the natives of our island,

One of the most learned men to whom Ireland gave birth in the sixteenth century, was Peter Lombard, archbishop of Armagh.

* Liber Mun. Hib. statut. 1 Elizab. chap. i. 2. This act of parliament is given in full, with interesting notes, in the "Analecta" of Dr. Roothe, the learned bishop of Ossory.

Educated in his early youth at Oxford, he ever cherished a warm sympathy for the English nation, which he more than. once takes occasion to eulogize in his celebrated "Commentarius de Regno Hiberniæ." This work was written in the year 1600, and we adopt the following calm and unimpassioned words with which it sketches the ordeal of persecutions to which our country was subjected during Elizabeth's reign:

"I shall present (he says), arranged under certain heads, a sketch of the persecution which was begun, indeed, under Henry the Eighth, was continued under Edward the Sixth, but raged with special fury under Elizabeth; for during her reign, whatsoever means could be devised to seduce the Irish Catholics from the faith and their allegiance to the Apostolic See, whether by force or fraud, by threats of torments or the seductions of the world, were eagerly carried into execution.

1. "And, first, as to the sanctuary and the ornaments of religion : no country was more enriched with noble monasteries, many of which were opulent, and able, at all times, to give meet hospitality to the richest noblemen of the island. These, wheresoever the sway of the English monarchy extended, were plundered and destroyed; their property, whether sacred or domestic, was pillaged and dissipated; their revenues were seized by the crown, and the sites themselves were either abandoned to ruin or applied to profane purposes. The same,

indeed, must also be said of many of the Catholic churches, whilst in others, the sacred worship of God being abolished, and the monuments and relics of Christ and His saints being desecrated, the schismatical and heretical rites were introduced.

2. "As to persons: it was first prescribed and commanded, that all who were assumed to public offices should take the oath of abjuration, which was drawn up through hatred of the Apostolic See, and declared that supreme power and authority, as well in spirituals as in temporals, in Ireland as in England, belonged to the aforesaid kings of England, as heads of the church. Should any, through unwillingness to take this oath, decline such offices and honours, they, by the very fact, incurred the royal displeasure. And should it happen, as it often indeed occurs, that this oath was tendered to individuals for the purpose of testing their faith, by refusing it, they incurred the penalties of high

treason.

3. "As it was well known that the Irish revered men of learning and eloquence, it was resolved, the more effectually to inculcate the royal tenets, to send to Ireland those ministers who were most distinguished in England and Scotland for their ability and eloquence. Such were Goodman, the leader of the Calvinists in England, who, moreover, during Mary's reign had published a treatise against female government; Cartwright, distinguished amongst the Puritans; Jansons, famed for his preaching; Burchley, so zealous in preaching, that besides his sermon on the Lord's day, he also added every week two catechetical

discourses; Brady, a bishop of the Anglican tenets; Meade, known for the vehemence of his sermons; Craik, a Scotchman, made bishop of Kildare, also a famous preacher, etc.

4. "In various parts of the island there were excellent literary schools, the rectors or masters of which being Catholics, instructed the youth not only in science, but also in Catholic doctrine and morality; in some, too, there was a class of exposition of the Catholic catechism: now, all these schools, under various pretexts, are subjected to vexation and oppression, and most of them have been wholly swept away.

5. "To provide instruction for the natives, and to display a greater earnestness in its regard than had hitherto beeen shown (for often had the erection of an university been in vain solicited from the crown), a most ample and splendid college was erected a few years ago in the vicinity of Dublin, by royal decree, but at the expense of the inhabitants, in which it is commanded that all liberal arts shall be taught by heretical teachers. As such heretical masters, however, could not be found in Ireland, they were sent thither from England; and the better to establish and propagate their teaching, they received the mission to preach the evangelical doctrines in Dublin, and were directed, moreover, to exact the oath of the queen's supremacy, in all ecclesiastical matters, from the students whom they should educate.

6. "That they might the more freely persecute the Catholics, as if, not for religion's sake, but for the violation of the civil laws, some statutes were enacted, not indeed in Ireland, but in the parliament of England, so full of cruelty and folly, that the mere practices of Catholic piety are declared to be civil and capital crimes, and some of them, too, equivalent to high treason; for instance, to celebrate or assist at the adorable sacrifice of the altar-to refuse to assist at the schismatical and heretical rites--to have in your possession or be bearers of missals, breviaries, offices of the Blessed Virgin, agnus Deis, crosses, beads, medals blessed by the Roman pontiff to make a confession of sins, or to absolve from them-and especially to reconcile anyone to the Catholic Church. Forsooth, our English legislators imitated in this the princes and satraps of the Medes and Persians, who being desirous to achieve the ruin of Daniel, and seeing that they could find no pretext except in his observance of the law of God, devised a royal statute, which enacted that anyone found praying to any God or man, except the king, should be cast into the lion's den.

Although these laws and statutes were not only not received but were even rejected in the Irish parliament, still oftentimes were they carried into execution with far more unbridled cruelty in Ireland than in England;* and those members of the clergy or laity who conciliated the

* Ranke cites a contemporary Italian discourse on Ireland, in which the government of Elizabeth in that country is described as most tyrannical, "as she abandoned it to the care of ministers who, to ensure their own aggrandizement, employed every art, no matter how tyrannical, and sought to maintain wars and dissensions amongst the natives themselves." In the Codex Urbinus,