all the honours and courtly favours with which apostates were welcomed and caressed.

On the 22nd of September, 1590, Loftus, then Protestant Archbishop of Dublin, wrote* a doleful letter of complaint, respecting the failure of the Reformation, to Lord Burghley, Lord Treasurer of England. He admitted 'that there hath been in this people a general disposition to Popery, as to a thing wherein they are misled from their cradle," but attributed the general recusancy to the criminal clemency of Sir John Perrott,† late Lord Deputy, in not enforcing persecution. He assures Lord Burghley that the obstinacy of the Papists is such, that, "unless they be forced, they will not come to hear the word preached," and mourns that "it is almost a bootless labour for any man to preach in the country out of Dublin for want of hearers, the people are grown to so general a revolt." He recommends the " ecclesiastical commission" to be put in action, the renewal of fines and imprisonment, and concludes:

"This course of reformation, the sooner it is begun the better it will prosper; and the longer it is deferred the more dangerous it will be."

Chichester, Lord Deputy in the reign of James I., remarked:

"I know not how this attachment to the Catholic Church is so deeply rooted in the hearts of the Irish, unless it be that the very soil is infected and the air tainted with Popery; for they obstinately prefer it to all things else: to allegiance to their king, to respect for his ministers, to the care of their own posterity, and to all their hopes and prospects."-(Cambrensis Eversus, translated by Dr. Kelly, vol. ii., p. 605.)

Fitzsimon, who had been a Protestant, and who wrote early in the seventeenth century, testifies:

"That he had never witnessed greater tenacity of the old

* State Paper Office, London. Quoted in full in Archbishops of Dublin, by Dr. Moran, p. 150, &c.

† Sir John Perrott refuted this charge, and proved his efficiency in uprooting Popery.-See his History, p. 30, &c.

faith amid so many storms of persecution; greater veneration for religion, where pastors were so few, and wolves so numerous and ferocious; or a more profound knowledge of the principles of faith, even when its teachers were banished, and all the aids of books and instructions proscribed. It is an almost incredible, but yet a most indubitable fact, that during full sixty years neither the most atrocious penalties, nor the most tempting rewards, have been able to seduce into the ranks of heresy more than 200 persons in that whole country." -(Cambrensis Eversus, p. 607.)

Edmund Spencer, writing a short time before his death, in 1598, contrasts the zeal of the Catholic clergy with the conduct of the Reforming ministers:

"It is a great wonder to see the odds between the zeal of Popish priests and the ministers of the Gospel; for they spare not to come out of Spain, from Rome, and from Rheims, by long toil and dangerous travelling hither, where they know peril of death awaiteth them, and no rewards or riches are to be found, only to draw the people to the Church of Rome : whereas some of our idle ministers, having a way for credit and esteem thereby opened unto them, without pains and without peril, will neither for the same, nor any love of God, nor zeal of religion, nor for all the good they may do by winning souls to God, be drawn forth from their warm nests to look out into God's harvest."-(View of the State of Ireland, p. 254-5.)

From the foregoing, and various other authorities that could be quoted, it is clear that the diocese of Meath, situated in the very heart of the English Pale, and thereby more prominently exposed, from the very onset, to the action. of English and Protestant influences, continued faithful, under every phase and trial, to the Catholic Church; and that, although her bishop lingered in a dark dungeon as a punishment for his orthodoxy-though the see was long left vacant, through prudential motives, during the reign of terror-though the sword was long unsheathed to goad into conformity-yet a kindred apostolic spirit pervaded and permeated clergy and people, and stimulated all to suffer the sacrifice of property, liberty, and life, rather than deny the faith inherited from their fathers.

The

same heroic attachment to Catholic worship, and unflinching devotion to the See of Peter, characterised successive generations, under the hard-hearted deputies and mandarins of Elizabeth, James, and Charles; and hence Protestantism, as such, took no root in our diocese until the wars and confiscations of Cromwell had massacred and uprooted the people, and colonised the green hills and fertile plains of Meath with the sanguinary and canting troopers.

CHAPTER III.

1. DR. DEASE.-2. THE INSURRECTION OF 1641.-3. THE CATHOLIC CONFEDERATION-DEATH OF DR. DEASE.

1. Dr. Dease.

THOMAS DEASE was born at Turbotstown, County Westmeath, about the year 1568. He was descended of an ancient and highly respectable family,* which had been for centuries situated in Westmeath, and one of the few which have contrived to preserve faith and, at the same time, ancestral property, to the present day. His mother was a Lady Eleanor Nugent, of Carlanstown, a noble branch of the house of Delvin, and by this means he was related to the Flemings of Slane, and many of the aristocracy of the Pale. Thomas was the second of three sons, and in after years, on the death of his elder brother, he succeeded to the family property. From his childhood he

* Burke, in his Landed Gentry, remarks that "the family of Dease (formerly spelt Deece) is one of the oldest in Westmeath. The list of forfeited estates in that county shows that the Deases are the sole present occupiers who held property in 1641 in the district where they still reside. In a manuscript of the time of Henry VIII. occurs, among the gentry of Meath, the name of Richard Dees, of Turbotstown, and in the Magna Panella of Westmeath, of 1703, that of Jacobus Dease, de Turbottstown."

See notices of this family, spelt Dease, Deece, Deize, Deyse, and Deis, in Inquisitions of Westmeath, James I., Nos. 25 and 31; Charles I., 64 and 71.

manifested an ardent desire to embrace the ecclesiastical state, and as he was gifted with great abilities, he soon mastered the classics and the other preliminary studies previous to his ordination. We next find him in Paris, graduating in philosophy, theology, and cannon law, where in course of time he became a doctor of the Sorbonne, a professor of theology in that renowned university, and subsequently President of the College of Forlet. He was consecrated bishop of Meath on the 14th of May, 1622,* privately, in order not to attract the attention of the British government, in a town near Paris, and he left that city for Ireland on the 10th of October following. Having arrived in his diocese, his first anxiety was to convoke a synod of his clergy, for the purpose of reforming whatever abuses might have crept in during the long period of religious persecution and civil anarchy which preceded, and of restoring the discipline of Regulars and Seculars, as far as was practicable, and reconcilable with the intolerant spirit of the age. His next object was to secure a regular succession of pastors in the various parishes of the diocese; and as the monasteries and colleges of Ireland had been long since plundered and dissolved, his only hope of success consisted in invoking the potent aid of the religious orders. This his tact and patronage effectually accomplished, and he had the pleasure of beholding almost every order of the Church represented in the diocese of

*

Henry Fitzsimons, in the preface to his work De Sacrificio Missæ, published in 1611, a copy of which is in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin, is said to have called Dease and Rothe bishops. Hence O'Connor (Columbanus), in a note, p. 164, remarks:-' -"So far back as 1611, I find him (Rothe) and Dease of Meath coupled together as the most learned and pious of all the Irish bishops.'

J. W. Hanna, Esq., who has collected much valuable information on Irish Ecclesiastical History, communicates to me that in a MS. in Trinity College, marked " E, 3, 15," entitled "A Note of Archbushoppes and Bushoppes Consecrated and Authorized by the Pope," it is stated, about the year 1613, that "Thomas Deis" was "ellected bushopp of Meath, and lives in Parish (Paris), President of College of Forlet, and has a pension from a Lord-Abbott.' It appears the dignity was offered to Dr. Dease several years previous to his consecration, but he declined. From a contemporary document, communicated to me by Dr. Moran, it is certain that the date mentioned in the text is accurate.

Meath. At that time the Irish youth, at their peril, went in numbers to the Continent, and studied for the Irish mission, either as seculars or regulars, in the various colleges of Europe. After the completion of their course they returned home, in obedience to authority, and cheerfully devoted their lives to the salvation of the people. Thus in the darkest and saddest hours of our history, the religious orders supplied the Church of Ireland with numbers of learned, self-sacrificing missioners; and each order vied with the other, and the seculars with all, in consoling the people under their multiplied grievances, and in teaching them how to bear with Christian fortitude the loss of all worldly goods, and the severance of all earthly ties, rather than part with the faith of their fathers. Dr. Dease now applied himself to compose unseemly differences, to weed out discord, to vindicate from unjust and ungenerous aspersions some whose only ecclesiastical crime was superior efficiency, and thus to unite his clergy, regular and secular, in happy harmony. An occasion arose, at this time, which elicited from him a noble vindication of the Irish Jesuits from the ridiculous calumnies with which, through a senseless spirit of jealousy, the worthy Fathers were then assailed and harassed. On the 23rd of November, 1623, he wrote to Mutius Vitelleschi, then General of the order, at Rome, in which he castigated, in scathing terms, the miserable enemies of the Society, and paid a high tribute to the Jesuit Fathers for their love of peace, their learning, piety, zeal, and indefatigable labours in the cause of religion." Another matter now claimed his attention, and this was the long-agitated controversy between the regulars and seculars regarding

* Dr. Dease was a great admirer of the Jesuits, and had a college established in the diocese, under the management of the learned and accomplished Fathers of the Society.-Memoir of Dr. Plunket, by Dr. Moran, p. 98. His letter to the General of the Jesuits shall be published (D. V.) in the Appendix to Vol. III. It is said that Father St. Leger, the Jesuit, wrote a life of him.-Hibernian Magazine, January, 1864, p. 9. Lynch, in his Alinthonologia, is lavish of his praises on Dr. Dease; but it must be 1emembered that both Lynch and Dease were Anglo-Irish Conservative Catholics.