CHAPTER VII

THE ABYSS

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HE native Irish were now broken, disorganized,

THE

and underfoot. When Sarsfield had capitulated at Limerick a treaty had been formally signed by which the Catholics should be safe from further persecution; and the Catholics meant five-sevenths of the people. "Both sides," says the English historian Green, "were, of course, well aware that such a treaty was merely waste paper, for Ginkel had no power to conclude it, nor had the Irish lords justice." The treaty was waste paper, to the English. William, a disbeliever in persecution, tried to honor the pledges that had been made to the Irish. But he was king on sufferance: the parliaments of England and Anglo-Ireland were too strong for him. Public opinion was the new ruler in England, and at the moment public opinion was cowardly, vindictive, and resentful.

Out of these moods came the penal laws. These

were laws intended to finish the work which England had begun in the reign of Henry VIII. From 1550 to 1700, as the English viewed it, the Irish had shown a diabolic spirit. First, they were foreign: they spoke Gaelic, had a strange land system, wore queer clothes, resisted when attacked, were rustic and yet not convinced of their inferiority.

Henry VIII had tried to solve their "problem" (the problem, that is, of conquering them) by making their chiefs into earls and giving them a parchment title to the land which their kinsmen had always held. This ignored the claims of the sub-chiefs and their adherents. The work of forcing all these hot-headed people to take the "solution" made in London for English convenience was too much for English temper. When England added a state church to the rest of its superiorities, it developed a cold anger toward Ireland and did not take long to discover a moral basis for that anger.

From the age of Elizabeth we derive the authorized English version of Irish character. By the time the war was over it was already clear to the English that the Irish were (1) barbarous, (2) lawless, (3) treacherous, (4) malicious. In other words, the enemy. At this very time, unluckily, the English had learnt how

to deal with the enemy in savage lands. They saw in Ireland another America, peopled by equally wicked aborigines, and they thought it perfectly proper to

seize their possessions. The insurrection of 1641 was, in their view, the attempt of red Indians to massacre white people. Hence the popish, Gaelic-speaking, blanket-wearing Irishman became an object of moral

reprehension. A good Irishman was a dead Irishman. A natural desire for easy profit and "honest graft" heightened this feeling. Cromwell saw the Irish as hardly human: he massacred them with a complete conviction of outraged Puritan ideals, half hoping that his use of force might drive out the devil. But the devil in the Irish combined with the devil in the Stuarts and Jacobites. When James II was in power he had the reckless audacity to appoint Tyrconnel as viceroy, whose friendliness to Catholics revived every fear of the English settlers. The wickedness of this procedure was evident. Whatever terms were agreed upon at Limerick, English-in-Ireland, hereafter to be called the Ascendancy, had no use for them. Nothing appeared more natural, in the flush of victory, than to devise a succession of laws which would humiliate, injure, and forever weaken the remnants of the Irish nation.

What resulted, according to Green, was a hundred years of "the most terrible legal tyranny under which a nation has ever groaned."

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The penal laws were based on the fixed Catholicism of the common Irish. Accepting Catholicism as a

superstitious and idolatrous practice to which the Irish were too ignorant not to cling, the men who had benefited by confiscation now proceeded to put the finishing touches to the conquest. They first limited the number of priests to eleven hundred, and banished the bishops who might ordain successors. They illegalized mass, except in the case of registered priests. Having thus endeared the church to the common Irish, they turned their attention to the laymen.

The Irish Catholic was excluded from the vote, from municipal and parliamentary offices, from even sitting in the gallery of the parliament. He was not allowed to become a barrister or solicitor, a sheriff or a constable. He was prohibited from residing in either Limerick or Galway. He was compelled to pay special and extra taxes. He was not allowed to carry arms, make arms, sell them, or sell them, or join the army. He was forbidden to print books or newspapers, to take more than two apprentices in any trade except linen manufacture, or to become an apprentice in any trade to any Protestant.

He was forbidden to teach school. He was forbidden to attend Catholic school or college. He was forbidden to send his children abroad to school or college.

He was not allowed to lease land for more than