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1703

left to the Viceroy to dispense with it. This power the Committee alleged to have been abused, and begged that it might be withdrawn. The Limerick and Galway clause reappeared, but was prospective in its operation. No Catholic should, for the future, acquire property in those towns, or come to reside within them. The present inhabitants might remain on finding sureties for their good behaviour.

These positions, with a clause disabling Catholics from voting at elections without taking the oaths of allegiance and abjuration, constituted the chief features of the Repression of Popery Act, as the heads left the Irish House of Commons and were sent to England for final revision. It is to be observed that the reservation of power to the Catholics to buy and inherit land among themselves was still maintained, in spite of the exception which had been taken by the English Cabinet. The Speaker, attended by the whole House, presented the bill to the Viceroy, to be forwarded to London.

'The opposition constantly made in England,' they said, by the Papists of Ireland, against whatever might tend to the security of her majesty's Protestant subjects, induced them to lay the heads before his grace in that solemn manner. They thought it the more particularly necessary, being informed and convinced that great sums of money had lately been raised by them to oppose the passing of a Bill of that nature in England.'1

Communication between Dublin and London was still irregular. In mid-winter especially the passage yacht was sometimes detained indefinitely at Holy

1 Commons' Journals, November 24.

head by heavy westerly weather; and Ireland, after the dispatch of the heads of this and the Priests Registration Bill, remained for six weeks in a fever of suspense and excitement.

Rumour said that England meant to favour the Catholics. The short December days had brought Rapparee outrages. The extreme Protestant party made use of them to excite terror and indignation; and the Solicitor General (Brodrick) was so violent, that Ormond gave him a public reprimand.' The Commons intimated plainly, that if the Popery Bill returned to them materially changed, they would refuse the supplies after all; and both Southwell and the Viceroy wrote to deprecate alterations in the strongest language. The House of Commons,' they said, 'was extremely intent upon it. They entreated Nottingham to see personally to its progress and dispatch.' 2

There was no occasion for their alarm. At the end of January news came that the bill was coming back, and coming in a shape which would be welcome to all good Protestants. On the 10th February it arrived. From Ormond's anxiety it might have been inferred, that the disposition in England was really unfavourable. Yet the bill had been changed, not in a direction to make it bear less heavily on the Catholics, but to bring it rather more close to the English Act, and to abridge the small indulgence which the Irish Council had endeavoured so earnestly to preserve. In the shape in which this celebrated statute was

1 'Southwell to Nottingham, January 18, 1704.' MSS. Record Office.

2'Letters from Secretary South

well and the Duke of Ormond,
December 1703 and January 1704.'
Ibid.

CHAP.

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returned from England to be passed into law by the Irish Parliament, the provisions of it were these:

The first part of the preamble had been struck out, perhaps as reflecting too severely on the imbecility of the executive government. Emissaries of the Church of Rome,' it was thought sufficient to say, 'taking advantage of the weakness and ignorance of some of her majesty's subjects, and the sickness and decay of their reason and senses, daily perverted them from the Protestant religion, to the disquiet of the realm, and the discomfort and disturbance of private families. In their hatred of true religion, persons professing Popery had refused to provide for their Protestant children. They had evaded the laws designed to keep them in check. They had it in their power to make divisions by their votes at elections, and to use other means, to the destruction of the Protestant interest. Perversions therefore from Protestantism to Popery were brought under the premunire statute, as the heads had recommended. The penalties of the Foreign Education Act were extended to all Catholics who sent their children abroad without licence. Power was given to the Court of Chancery to compel Catholic parents to make sufficient allowances to their children of another religious profession than their own; and then coming to the great matter, the act declared, that where the eldest son of a Catholic father was a Protestant, the father became tenant for life only, and was disabled from selling his estate if he desired it. No Catholic might be guardian or trustee to orphan children though born of Catholic parents. If the parents were living, and one of them was a Protestant, the Court of Chancery was directed to

see that they were brought up in the Communion of the Established Church.

A middle course was taken with the debated purchase and inheritance question. Under no condition whatsoever were Catholics to be permitted to buy lands, or gain any additional hold on the real estate of the country. They were not even to take leases for more than thirty-one years. Lands already in the hands of Protestants must descend to the Protestant nearest of kin. Lands in possession of Catholics, whose children were Catholics also, were to descend in gavelkind, as the Irish Committee had proposed. The eldest son, however, might inherit, as the Committee recommended under the common law, and retain his privilege as sole heir to the real estate if he declared himself a Protestant within a year of his father's death."

An act, passed under Charles the Second, had required the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy as a condition of acquiring property in corporate towns. Had the law been observed, the late rebellion would have been prevented. Limerick and Galway being places of great military importance, the English Council had now consented to the clause which forbade fresh Papist families from settling there; while Papists already occupying tenements within the walls were required to find security for their good behaviour. A blow was aimed also at local superstitions, by an order that all crosses, pictures, inscriptions, and

1 The Court of Chancery in such cases was to make an order for the maintenance of the younger children up to a third of the value of the estate. Nor did the act, as is sometimes imagined, enable a

younger brother to supplant the
eldest by conforming. The eldest
son alone was laid under a direct
temptation to change his religion
from interested motives.

CHAP.

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BOOK objects of public devotion should be destroyed by the magistrates; gatherings at stations and places of pilgrimage were to be treated as riotous assemblies, and persons collecting on such occasions were to be fined or publicly whipped.1

Such was this act as it affected Catholics after being remodelled by the English Cabinet; but provisions were attached which reflected the doubleedged intolerance of the members of the Anglican Communion. A special section declared that no person should take benefit by the act as a Protestant, who did not conform to the Church of Ireland as by law established. If, on the death of a Protestant landowner, the natural heir was a Catholic, the Catholic was disabled; but if the Protestant next of kin, to whom the estate would lapse, happened to be a Presbyterian, he was to be passed over in favour of a more remote member of the Establishment. As if this was not enough, the English Test Act, of which in the previous correspondence not a word had been breathed, was found to have been introduced as a parenthesis. The taking the sacrament, according to the rites of the Established Church, was made a condition of holding any office, civil or military, under the crown, above the rank of a constable. The exclusive privileges, so long desired by the Irish Bishops, were thrown into their hands as a makeweight in a bill of a totally opposite tendency. The Presbyterians, the Independents, the Huguenot immigrants, the Quakers, not protected in their public worship, like the English Dissenter, by a Toleration Act, were swept under the same political dis

1 2 Anne, cap. 6. Irish Statutes.

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