A. D. 1367. receive him into a monastery or other religious house; to entertain an Irish bard, minstrel, or story-teller; or to admit an Irish horse to graze on the pasture of an Englishman! It appears to have been from the same circumstances, that this parliament was convened so far south as Kilkenny, and that no bishops but those of the southern dioceses assisted in its deliberations. During the invasion of Edward Bruce, the English inhabitants had been nearly extirpated out of Ulster and the adjacent parts of Connaught; and thenceforward, until the great plantation under James the First, the country north of Dundalk, formed to the English usages, civil and religious. It had been enacted at Cashel, that the Irish church should be assimilated in its rites and discipline to that of England: but we are informed by the decisive testimony of Dr. Lanigan, that, wherever the natives maintained their independence, clergy and people followed their own ecclesiastical rules, as if the synod of Cashel had never been held." Many will be scandalized at this information: it is however unquestionable, that in those distant times, as well as the present, there were two churches in Ireland; the one, the church of the parliament and the ascendant party, or, as notwithstanding its popery, it might be called in the modern phrase, the Orange Church; its preachers corresponding exactly to that description which J. K. L. has given of the first Protestant ministers, following the camp of the invaders "in the name of Christ, to watch the baggage and collect the spoils;" the other, the church of "the Irish clergy and people." The former, though a plant of foreign growth, had certain facilities for striking root, and overwhelming a rival in the night shade of its branches, which the genius of Protestantism does not allow to its successor; yet under every disadvantage the native church lingered for three centuries, and discovered some languishing symptoms of life as late as the reign of Henry the Seventh. There is yet extant a bull of pope Innocent the Eighth, dated the 8th of February, 1484, for the erection of a collegiate church at Galway. It recites, "that the people of the parish of St. Nicholas were civilized men, living in a walled town, and observing the decency, rite, with the exception of a few insignificant garrisons, remained in the hands of the original possessors. The English interest lay in the southern towns, and in various colonies of settlers, distributed over a triangular space, of which Cork, Dundalk, and Galway were the extreme points, and Kilkenny might almost be considered as the centre. At Kilkenny, accordingly, the parliament assembled, as if shrinking on every side from the vengeance it was about to provoke; and the diocesans of the surrounding territory, three archbishops and five bishops, leaving their brethren of the other dis and custom of the church of England; and that their customs. differed from those of the wild Highlandmen of that nation, who harassed them so that they could not hear the offices or receive the sacraments of the church, according to the form which they and their ancestors of "old time were accustomed to follow." Then follows the enactment, that the college shall consist of one warden and eight presbyters, all civilized men, and duly holding the rites and order of the church of England in the celebration of divine service." It is obvious from this document, (which is given at large by Dr. Burke in his Hibernia Dominicana,) that those wild Irish Highlanders, as the pontiff rather uncourteously styles them, still adhered to their own religious ceremonies, or at least had not yet conformed to the Roman ritual. Even in the next reign we discover a circumstance, which proves that their conversion was still very incomplete. Soon after Wolsey had been created the pope's Legate a Latere, he manufactured a supply of bulls and dispensations for the Irish market; but his supercargo, Allen, wrote him a complaining account that the commodities went off but slowly. "The Irish," he said, "had so little sense of religion, that they married within the prohibited degrees, without dispensations; they also questioned his grace's authority in Ireland, especially outside the pale."-Cox, p. 210, quoting from Lib. ccc. Lambeth. Ill would it fare with the Irishman, who should now presume to marry so irreligiously; his cow, if he had one, would be an inadequate propitiation to offended infallibility. A. D. 1367. A. D. 1367. tricts to conciliate as they might, the exasperated natives, gave their sanction to its proscribing decrees. Had they been content with the civil penalties of the act, it might be supposed that they had drifted, in passive servility, with the general tide of colonial politics; but when they are found throwing the weight of their spiritual power into the scale of national hatred, we are no longer at liberty to award them this comparative praise. Whether the appetite for persecution had become importunate-whether they felt that they had an especial interest in the perpetuation of discord-or whether we ought rather to say of communities as of individuals, that men seldom forgive those whom they have greatly injured,-it is certain, that they published a formal anathema against all transgressors of the statute of Kilkenny. Thus, as if oppression were not sufficient, the most taunting insult was offered to the noblest sentiments of a people, who were at once devoted to the usages of their fathers, and deeply susceptible of religious impressions; every thing Irish was denounced as an object of abhorrence both to God and man, and the bitterness of civil strife impregnated with the deadly poison of fanaticism. There was a cold and exquisite malevolence in this measure, attainable only by a class of beings, which had abjured, or had never known, the kindly sympathies of humanity; and the event proved, that it was no less imprudent than unnatural. Placed under the double bann of the church and the lay authorities, all the English whom policy, good feeling, the natural influence of neighbourhood, or the social qualities of the natives, had taught to lay aside the arrogance of conquest, were now drawn into closer alliance with their new and only remaining connexions. Rebellions increased in strength and frequency; from Cork and Galway the jurisdiction of government was gradually narrowed to Carlow; and in the next century it became a proverb, that "they who lived west of the Barrow lived west of the English law."It deserves to be noticed, that of the eight Orange prelates who attended this parliament, three were apostate Irish, and no less than seven of papal appointment; their spiteful anathema is therefore to be ascribed, not to English insolence or English policy, but to the spirit of the order. a a These were O'Carroll, of Cashel; O'Grady, of Tuam; and O'Cormocan, of Killaloe.-See Ware's Bishops. "The statute of Kilkenny," says Lord Clare," has been much extolled by Sir John Davies, as eminently qualified to reform the degenerate English, as he calls them; it seems difficult, however, to reconcile it to any principle of sound policy. It was a declaration of perpetual war, not only against the native Irish, but against every person of English blood, who had settled beyond the limits of the pale, and from motives of personal interest or convenience, had formed connexions with the natives, or adopted their laws and customs and it had the full effect which might have been expected; it drew closer the confederacy it was meant to dissolve, and implicated the colony of the pale in ceaseless warfare and contention with each other, and with the inhabitants of the adjacent district."-Speech on the Union, p. 5. The account of the state of Ulster after Bruce's invasion is taken from the incomparable Spencer. A. D. 1376. Nothing is more remarkable in the history of this body, than its early proficiency in an art which is cultivated in our own times, with rival assiduity, but by no means proportionate success ;-the art of uniting the most hard-hearted oppression of the people to a factious contempt of the authority of the state, and a swaggering affectation of public spirit. Nine years after the passing of the statute of Kilkenny, we find the character of lawless violence-the proverbial reproach of the country and the time-branded alike upon the prelates and the lay lords, by the impartiality of a harassed government. In the patent issued to the earl of Ormond upon his appointment to the lieutenancy, he had been granted a general power of pardon; but in a subsequent writ, this power was explained as not extending to the pardon of "any prelate· or earl, for an offence punishable by loss of life, member, lands, or goods." Justice, conscious weakness, and the obvious policy of dividing the oppressive weight of the temporal and spiritual grandees, would have prevented the executive from including the latter in this opprobrious reservation, had not the habitual outrages of the two orders displayed equal insolence, and attained equal notoriety.- -In the same year a transaction took place, so far beyond the licentiousness of modern opposition, that it seems to require a particular detail. The revenue being greatly reduced, a a 2 Cox, 132. |