BOOK 1692 SECTION III. AMONG the Scotch and English settlers in Ireland none had deserved better than the Nonconformists. None had been worse rewarded. When the High Church party went with Ormond and the Kilkenny Council, at the close of the rebellion of 1641, a Puritan army recovered the country to England. The Restoration, which brought back the bishops, brought back the persecutions. The Presbyterian clergy had been suspended or imprisoned. Half the Cromwellian settlers had been driven from the country; and the children of the other half had been flung back, for want of ministers or schoolmasters, into open Popery. The same story was repeated in 1689. The bishops and clergy of the Establishment prayed for James till William entered Dublin. The Ulster Calvinists had won immortal honour, and saved England half the labour of reconquest, by their share in the defence of Derry. In them there was a vigorous and living power in antagonism to Popery. In the existence in Ireland of free Protestant communities, beyond the episcopal Pale, lay its chief attraction to the Huguenot, the Palatine, and the English Puritan. The full and free equality of privilege which they had honourably earned, it was William's desire to secure to them by law. The tolerant spirit which made him reluctant to interfere with the liberties of Catholics rendered him doubly anxious to protect the rights of subjects who had stood by him when others were found wanting, and whose opinions were virtually his own. To foreign immigrants the desired liberty had been conceded. Dissenters, on the other hand, of Irish, Scotch, or English birth, were still under the Act of Uniformity, and their position was peculiar. In England the Toleration Act had given them their chapels, but they were excluded by the sacramental test from public employment. In Ireland there was no sacramental test. The Oath of Supremacy had answered the purpose as long as it was maintained; but to the substituted oaths of allegiance and abjuration their objections did not apply. They had become eligible for the magistracy, or for commissions in the army. They could sit in Parliament, or be members of corporations. They were in possession of all their secular rights as citizens; yet, notwithstanding, the exercise of any form of worship, except that of the Established Church, was prohibited under severe penalties. The King, while personally in Ireland, had shown his opinion of the state of the law, and his recognition of the Presbyterians' services, by assigning a grant to their ministers, out of the Belfast customs, of 1,2007. a year the original of the fund known afterwards as the Regium Donum. The Church authorities refused to hold themselves bound by the pleasure of a prince whom in their hearts many of them still looked on as a usurper. On the return of quiet, Lemuel Mathews, the Archdeacon of Down, took on himself to imprison a Presbyterian minister at Hillsborough for having presumed to preach a sermon. The King had seen the necessity of placing the ministers beyond the reach of the petty Church officials; and, in 1692, Lord Sydney submitted to the Irish Council the heads of a toleration bill, identical with the English, with a view to its being laid immediately before Parliament. CHAP. I. 1692 BOOK II. 1692 To unite the Protestant interest in the presence of a common enemy, to avoid the repetition of the worst mistakes of the Restoration, and establish if not intercommunion yet political equality between parties who had fought and suffered for the same cause, was so obviously desirable, that it is hard to see how such a proposal could have been opposed by reasonable men. It was not only opposed, but opposed with a bitterness of animosity which only the remembrance that the parties to it were ecclesiastics, or under ecclesiastical influence, enables us even faintly to understand. The Irish Established clergy, the Irish peers, and the great landowners were ardent High Churchmen, dreading nothing so much as to be confounded with the Cromwellians, to whom most of them owed their estates; and, though reconciled outwardly to the Revolution by the want of discrimination in James's Parliament, which had not distinguished between them and the Calvinists, yet they were loud as ever against principles of church government which tended, as they were pleased to say, to republicanism. Though forming but a third of the nominal Protestants, and an eleventh of the entire population, the Church party chose to believe that Ireland was theirs; that it was for them to dictate the terms on which either Catholics or Dissenters should be permitted to abide among them. The Bishops argued that, if they agreed to a toleration act, they must be protected by a sacramental test; Nonconformity must be laid under a ban of some kind; and, if liberty of worship was allowed, the army and navy, the learned professions, and the Civil Service, must be reserved to Churchmen. From a passage in one of Sydney's letters, it would I. 1695 seem that he himself shared the prejudices of his CHAP. order, and that while he submitted to carry out the King's instructions, he loved the Dissenters as little as the Prelates loved them.1 He received orders to go on with the bill whether the Bishops liked it or not, and though it would have been thrown out by the Lords, it would have been laid before the Commons, and probably, in the existing humour of that House, might then have been carried there but for the altercation which broke up the Parliament. Relieved of this danger, the Bishops pursued their triumph. They regarded the Regium Donum as an intolerable affront. The payment was suspended, and Sir Cyril Wych and Mr. Duncombe, who were associated with Capel on his first arrival as Lords Justices, advised, at the Bishops' instance, that the grant should be discontinued. The King declined to yield to such intemperate bigotry, and, when the Second Parliament met, insisted once more on the introduction of the Toleration Act. The Dissenters belonged chiefly to the middle and lower ranks. They were farmers, shopkeepers, and merchants, and even in the Lower House were feebly represented. But the violent Protestant humour of the first session, which might have shown them favour had cooled; and as it was understood that the bill would be met in Parliament by a second attempt to impose a test, they appealed to Irish opinion in a general remonstrance. They said truly that without toleration it was vain to expect that Protestant settlements in Ireland could thrive. The 1 Londonderry on the death of the mayor has chosen another that was never at Church in his life. It is the work of the Scotch faction. If the King thinks of sendVOL. I. R ing Scotch regiments here, advise BOOK II. 1695 Test Act in England had been designed to exclude Catholics. If extended to Ireland, it would cut off one arm from the Protestant interest. They would prefer to remain as they were, they said, liable to prosecution under the Act of Uniformity, rather than be disabled from doing service to their country. The Bishops, or the Bishop of Dromore as their representative, replied that the Presbyterians were at heart rebels and Covenanters. If they had deserved well in the war, the Royal bounty was reward sufficient for them. To take the sacrament on admission to employment, the Bishop of Dromore called 'a trivial and inconsiderable mark of compliance with the state order;' and he added with pretty sarcasm, that Episcopalians were opposed to toleration that they might preserve power to show their tenderness to their Dissenting brethren.'1 The Toleration Bill was introduced into the Commons. Capel furthered it to the best of his power, but it was lost. The Earl of Drogheda tried to carry the heads of another bill to the same purpose in the Upper House; but the Bishops mustered in strength and defeated him. Bishop King, writing bitterly to a friend in England, in complaint of Capel, who had promoted a Nonconformist to some post of consequence, said: 'If we have such governors put upon us, 'twill be impossible, whatever reason or Scripture be against schismatics, to hinder them from multiplying. Most people value If Dissenters be their interest above their religion. 1 Reid's History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, vol. ii. p. 451. |