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a flagrant falsehood. Charles, delighted and enraptured to be screened from the performance of his engagement, and to find his satrap assume the odium of the perfidy, of which his Irish subjects were the victims, wrote him, with his own hand, a letter of the most unqualified approbation :

"Wentworth,

"Before I answer any of your particular letters to me, I must tell you that your late public despatch has given me a great deal of contentment; and especially for the keeping off the envy of a necessary negative from me of those unreasonable graces that people expected of me."154

Perfidious as was this conduct, I do not pretend that Charles deserved thereby the fate that then impended over him. But this I dare aver, and do not fear much contradiction, that it must materially diminish the commiseration that upright men might feel for his downfal.

154 Strafford, I. 331.

CHAPTER VI.

Security of person, during lord Clarendon's millenium. Martial law. Acts of state. Jurors punished with imprisonment and mutilation.

"This tyrant, whose sole name blisters our tongues.

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We have considered the question of religious liberty, during the forty years' millenium, the glories of which lord Clarendon has so elegantly recorded. We now proceed to consider that of personal security, on which ground, it is obvious, that to justify the noble writer, it would be indispensably necessary that the subject should be free from injury or molestation in his person, unless, by the infraction of some known law, he rendered himself amenable to its penal sanctions.

This was so far from being the case, that throughout this whole "blessed period of peace and security,” martial law was uninterruptedly in force, and carried into execution whenever and wherever it suited the purposes of the government or its partisans.

Acts of state too, or, in other words, acts of the Privy Council, had all the force of the laws of

155 Shakspeare.

the land; and were enforced by arrest, fine, and imprisonment.*

Jurors who refused to give verdicts agreeably to the wishes of the judges and the government, were cited before the Star-Chamber Court, and ruinously fined, and most grievously imprisoned.†

On the two first points, the characteristic infi delity of the historians of Irish affairs stands glaringly conspicuous. With such important features in the political economy of the government, we should be almost wholly unacquainted,

*Extract from the Impeachment of lord Strafford.

"Article 4. The said earl of Strafford said that he would make the earl [of Cork] and all Ireland know, so long as he had the government there, any act of state, there made or to be made, should be as binding to the subjects of that kingdom, as an act of Parliament."156

"As for the words, he confessed them to be true; and thought he said no more than what became him; considering how much his master's honour was concerned in him; and that if a proportionable obedience was not as well due to acts of state, as to acts of Parliament, in vain did councils sit; and that he had done no more than what former deputies had done."157

"He proved by the lord Dillon, in the lord Chichester's and lord Grandison's time, that the acts of state were by the judges reputed as laws of the land for the present, and proceeded by arrest, imprisonment, and fines, upon contempt, which Sir Adam Loftus confirmed." 99158

"Concerning the sentencing of jurors, and the questioning them in the Star-Chamber," said lord Strafford, on his trial, "it is true; divers of these sentences were past.

156 Baker, 499.

158 Nalson, 11. 58.

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157 Frankland, 883.

159 Idem, 45.

but for the trial of lord Strafford, which threw a glare of light on these, as well as many other of the heavy grievances of the country, that were by the historians passed in silence, or glossed over with frothy extenuations and mitigations.

Lord Strafford, during the whole of his administration, proceeded on the iniquitous principle, "that Ireland was a conquered country, and that the king was the lawgiver, in all matters not determined by acts of Parliament.”* This principle he openly avowed on his trial, when his life was in jeopardy, for this and other causes and this fully accounts for the despotic authority he assumed, for his outrageous proceedings with Parliament,-for his attempted depredation on the province of Connaught, which shall be detailed in a future chapter; and for all the endless variety of injustice and oppression, which marked his despotic career, as lord deputy of Ireland.

One awful feature of his administration, which he likewise admitted on his trial, and for which

*Article 3, of the Impeachment.

"He did declare and publish, that Ireland was a conquered nation; and that the king might do with them what he pleased."160

"True it is,' he said, 'Ireland was a conquered nation ; which no man can deny: and that the king is the lawgiver, in matters not determined by acts of Parliament, he conceived all loyal subjects would grant.'

160 Baker, 499.

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161 Frankland, 883.

he pleaded precedent as a justification, was sending parties of soldiers to execute orders of state, or decrees of courts.* It is easy to conceive the oppression that would be committed by such officers of justice, let loose on the objects of his vengeance. On the extent of this grievance, which existed during the whole of lord Clarendon's millenium, the evidence of Sir Arthur Tyringham, who was cited in Strafford's defence,

*"Article 15. That the said earl did, by his own authority, without any warrant or colour of law, tax and impose great sums of money upon the towns of Baltimore, Bandonbridge, Tallagh, and divers other towns or places, in the said realm of Ireland; and did cause the same to be levied upon the inhabitants of those towns by troops of soldiers, with force and arms, in a warlike manner: and, on the ninth of March, in the twelfth year of his now majesty's reign, traitorously did give authority unto Robert Saville, a sergeant-at-arms, and to the captains of companies of soldiers in several parts of the realm, to lie on the lands and houses of such as would not conform to his orders, until they should render obedience to his said orders and warrants; and after such submission, and not before, the said soldiers to return to their garrisons; and did also issue the like warrants unto divers others, which warrants were in warlike manner put in execution accordingly: and by such warlike means he did force divers of his majesty's subjects of that realm to submit themselves to his unlawful commands."162

To this article the earl replied, "that to this day nothing hath been more usual in Ireland, than for the governors to appoint soldiers to put all manner of sentences in execution; which he proved plainly to have been done frequently, and familiarly exercised in Grandison's, Faulkland's, Chichester's, Wilmot's, Cork's, and all preceding deputies' times."163

162 Baker, 502.

163 Idem, 511.

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