case, which if he disregarded he must return to exileby his duty to Ireland itself, which, brief as had been its period of repose, was rising into prosperity such as it had never known before, under the impulse of the vigorous race which had been established there by the late Protector, he was compelled to leave untouched in a large degree the disposition by which the old owners of Ireland had been either driven beyond the Shannon, or converted into landless exiles. As soon as it became clear that Richard Cromwell would be unable to hold his place, his brother Henry, who was then in command in Ireland, with a loyalty supremely honourable to him, acquiesced without condition or stipulation in the restoration of the Stuarts. He was popular with all parties; he might have made a party among his father's soldiers strong enough to have enabled him to make terms for his own Irish estates. The revolution was too momentous to allow him to remember so small a matter as his personal interests. Smaller men were naturally less high-minded. After Henry Cromwell, the two persons most trusted by the Protector were Sir Charles Coote, who had assisted so efficiently in ending the rebellion, and Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill, third son of the great Earl of Cork. Both had acquired enormous estates under the new settlement. Their influence with the army was second only to that of Henry Cromwell, and seeing how the tide was running, and foreseeing the difficulties which would arise, they were among the first, in the army's interests as well as their own, to speak of the Restoration, and to bind the King to them by inviting his return. CHAP. III. 1660 BOOK I. The Court of Charles on the Continent was thronged with exiled Irish patriots. No sooner was the ap1660 proaching change known, than of course he was beset on all sides by clamours for reparation. He put the petitioners off with promises till he was established in England. In the autumn of 1660 a Commission sate at Westminster, to consider their claims; and counsel were heard on their side. The first attempt was for a really equitable compromise. Sir James Barry, the Irish Lord Chief Justice, sketched briefly the history of the massacre, some scenes of which he had himself witnessed. He proposed that the Irish claimants should be heard in detail before separate juries, and that those who could prove that they had borne no share, direct or indirect, in murder, should have their claims allowed. Some test of this kind was at last ultimately adopted; not however till on both sides there had been much unreal declamation. Sir Nicholas Plunket, who represented the Irish, spoke with national fervour of their loyalty and their sufferings in the royal cause. Lord Broghill showed in answer, that the King's real friends had been the Protestant army, which had been so forward in promoting the Restoration. To the Irish professions of loyalty he replied by producing three documents, which, considering how confused a business the war had been, proved practically extremely little: an order from the Kilkenny Council, at one stage of the conflict, to prosecute Ormond with fire and sword; an offer of Ireland, from the same Council, to any Catholic prince who would take the country under his protection; and lastly an acknowledgment, signed by the Irish leaders in the last campaign, of the authority of the Rump Parliament. To have served under Cromwell was at least as great an offence as to have acknowledged the Parliament; and the charge, as coming from Lord Broghill, partook of an insolence which probably arose from a knowledge that the cause was already privately determined. The Irish deputies were dismissed, and the King declared his resolution. He admitted the difficulty of the case. The Act of the English Parliament under which money had been raised by debenture bonds on Irish forfeited estates, and on which half the confiscations rested, had been confirmed by Charles the First, and he could not disavow his father's act. It was true that, when English rebels were subsequently meditating regicide, he had himself made peace with his Irish subjects, and had accepted their help to prevent if possible that infamous crime from being consummated. He did not deny that, in so doing, he had entered into obligations which he ought not to forget. Yet to fulfil these obligations under existing circumstances would be against the interests of Ireland herself. The titles of the adventurers and soldiers might not bear perhaps minute examination, but he found himself, he said, rather inclined to mercy than to law. He had made up his mind to leave them undisturbed, or, if disturbed from their present holdings, to allow them an equivalent in land elsewhere. The debentures still unpaid should be acknowledged also. But while justice was thus done on one side, the other should not be left unconsidered. When every bond was settled there would still remain enormous estates unallotted with which to reward the really deserving. Protestant Royalists like Ormond and Lord Inchiquin were to be reinstated at once, and intruders settled on their territories were to CHAP. III. 1660 BOOK I. 1660 receive lands in some other place. Innocent Catholics too, whose only fault was their religion, were not to suffer, and should be replaced in their homes; and a list followed of persons said to have merited particular favour the great Anglo-Irish Catholic nobles, Clanrickarde, Westmeath, Dillon, Gormanstown, Fingal, Mountgarret, Netterville, and many others, who in their hard position, compromised as they had been in many ways, and responsible for terrible bloodshed, had yet desired throughout to confine the insurrection within the lines of opposition to Parliament and the Puritans as distinct from the English Crown. There remained others-those who had been criminal, but had shown repentance, and had done good service later, either in Ireland or abroad. Of these, such as had accepted lands in Connaught were expected to abide by their bargains. They might consider their case a hard one, but no more could be done for them. Those who had preferred exile might look for favour in time, but must wait and be patient. English families who had sold their interests at home, had transplanted themselves to Ireland, and built and fenced and enclosed there, could not at once be dispossessed and ruined. Great changes could only be accomplished by degrees. The innocent must be pro vided for first. Two classes of persons were to receive no favourthose who had been concerned actively in the massacres, or, if they were dead, their heirs and representatives; and, to balance these, the regicides, whom, although it was through them, and only them, that England had any authority left in Ireland to exercise, the conditions of the case made it possible, and even necessary, to exclude. Thus the King hoped all parties would be satisfied. The wicked would be deterred from wickedness by such signal evidence of justice, and the good be encouraged in loyalty by the favour and mercy shown to them.1 More than this Charles could not have done; less he could not honourably have tried to do. However miserable in its consequences might be the overthrow of Cromwell's policy, however fatal the redistribution over the country of so many elements of mischief— some measure of the kind was a price necessarily to be paid for the blessing of a restored monarchy. No less inevitably followed the re-establishment of the Irish Church, the dissolution of the short-lived union, and the restoration of the political constitution. Coote, created for his services Earl of Mountrath, and Lord Broghill, created Earl of Orrery, presided as Lords Justices at the re-inauguration of the Royal authority. The Parliament met in Dublin on May 8, 1661. In 1641 the Catholics were in a majority. In 1661, so completely had they been crushed, out of 260 members they had but one. But the Protestantism of the assembly made its task only the more difficult. They had to declare themselves happy in the restoration of a sovereign against whom most of them had fought. They had to condemn, as an atrocious usurpation, the power of which they had been the instruments, yet maintain the fortunes which they had won for themselves in the service of that power, to preserve the reality of the conquest, and to fling a veil over it of unmeaning phrases and hollow affectations. 1'The King's Declaration, November 30, 1660.' 14 & 15 Charles II. Irish Statutes. CHAP. III. 1661 |