BOOK II. 1713 91 their heats.' He enquired whether, if they were allowed to continue to sit, 'they would drop the matter against the Chancellor.' His labour was thrown away. They threatened to send a Committee to London to lay their grievances before the throne, and the Viceroy found himself compelled to dispense with the supplies, and to prorogue the Parliament till the following autumn. The expenses of the Government were reduced on all sides, to be brought, if possible, within the limits of the hereditary revenues; and Bolingbroke determined to show Ireland that he intended to be her master, and that if she could not be trusted to legislate for herself, he could legislate for her from London. So closed the session, which was to have laid Ireland at the feet of ecclesiastical Toryism, and prepared the way for the accession of the Pretender, and the exclusive dominion there of the Peers and High Church Bishops, who were mad enough to believe that, when the Whigs were put down, and the Presbyterians and French Calvinists driven out of the kingdom, they could themselves hold a monopoly of power, and fashion people and country after their own formulas. Shrewsbury returned to England, leaving the sword in his absence to the detested Phipps and the secretary Sir John Stanley. The army had shown dangerous tendencies; being devoted to Marlborough, and especially indignant at the peace of Utrecht, it was feared that in case of disturbance, the soldiers might side with the Whigs, and orders were sent to disband the suspected regiments. This order was carried out with difficulty. Ker's 1 Shrewsbury to Bolingbroke, January 5, 1714.' MSS. Record Office. dragoons at Cavan and Colonel Pepper's at Athlone refused to part with their arms; five companies of infantry openly mutinied; but they were all at last persuaded or overawed into submission,' and the country lay still in sullen calm. Bolingbroke, meanwhile, was carrying through the English Parliament the famous Schism Act.2 By a singular combination of accidents Queen Anne's last ministry proved able for a time practically to repeal the Toleration Act; to prohibit Dissenters, under severe penalties, from teaching their own opinions to high or low, in school or college. Political liberty, as Bolingbroke well understood, had its root in liberty of religion. With religion once safely encircled with an iron ring of Prayer-Book and Articles, the revolutionary spirit would be broken; and, under the supremacy of a Church, where zeal was impossible and enthusiasm suffocated in formulas, intelligent statesmen could resume a control, with which Protestantism, while it continued alive, was for ever interfering. He carried his bill through the Parliament at Westminster. He had intended, doubtless, that a willing House of Commons should pass a similar bill for him in Dublin. As Ireland was mutinous, she could be at once taught that her constitution existed on sufferance, and that the desired work could equally well be accomplished by a clause attached to the English act. Bolingbroke himself rose in the House of Lords, and moved that the provisions of the law should be extended to Ireland. 1 'Stanley to Bolingbroke, April 15, 1714.' MSS. Record Office. 2Act to prevent the Growth of Schism, and for the further Se curity of the Churches of England CHAP. II. 1713 BOOK II. 1714 Shrewsbury, himself fresh from a conflict which had taught him better to appreciate the relative value of Irish parties, attempted to stay the progress of so rash a measure. The Church bigots, led blindly by a chief who in his heart despised them more heartily than the most contemptuous of Whigs, clamoured down opposition. The motion was carried, thirty-three liberal Peers, among whom to their honour were four Bishops,' leaving on record their ineffectual protest. But the castle in the air was no sooner finished than the foundation sunk, and the ambitious superstructure fell down in ruins. On the 1st of August, 1714, the day on which the Schism Bill was to come into operation, the Queen died; and the Tory ascendancy, on which the liberties of England and Ireland had so narrowly escaped shipwreck, was over. In a few weeks another Parliament met, and Oxford went to the Tower, and Bolingbroke and Ormond were attainted fugitives. 1 Ely, St. Asaph, Bangor, and Llandaff. 2 The miseries we apprehend here are greatly enhanced by extending this bill to Ireland, where the consequences of it may be fatal. For since the number of Papists in that kingdom far exceeds the Protestants of all denominations together, and that the Dissenters are to be treated as enemies, or at least as persons dangerous to that Church and State, who have always in all times joined, and still would join, with the members of that Church against the common enemy of their religion; and since the army there is very much reduced; the Protestants thus unnecessarily divided seem to be exposed to the us. danger of another massacre, and the Protestant religion in danger of being extirpated. We may fear the Scots in Britain, whose national church is Presbyterian, will not so heartily join with us in our defence when they see those of the same nation, same blood, and same religion, so hardly treated by And this will be still more grievous to the Protestant Dissenters of Ireland, because, while the Popish priests are registered, and so indulged by law as they exercise their religion without molestation, the Dissenters are so far from enjoying the like toleration, that the laws are by this bill enforced against them.'-Parliamentary History, vol. vi. pp. 135, 136. The House of Hanover was established firmly on the throne, and the political supremacy of the Bishops of the Church of Ireland was at an end for ever. Yet the baneful influence of principles, the absurdity of which is now so patent to the simplest student of the Irish problem, survived for two generations to work disaster and confusion, and to paralyse the sinews of Protestantism. Jealousy of the Presbyterians rankled still in the most powerful intellects which the Church of Ireland produced. It made useless to the true interests of his country the gigantic understanding of Swift. It led Berkeley into the same theories of passive obedience, which had crippled the resistance to Tyrconnell; had perplexed and irritated William; had divided those who, united, might have prevented the second civil war, and might have made unnecessary the second series of confiscations. Worse than all, it perpetuated the disunion of the two great branches of the Protestant colonists, who, if the Reformation was a lawful revolt against unjust authority, were in essentials one. It prolonged the disabilities of that section of the Protestants who alone possessed missionary power, whose crime was the ability to make proselytes among the Celtic Catholics. Last of all, in our own days, the spent force of the division of the Protestant interest in Ireland has shown itself in the disestablishment of the once haughty Church which, had she taken the Presbyterians within her limits, when they were willing and eager to be her friends, might have defied for another century the malice of her enemies. CHAP. II. 1714 BOOK 1715 CHAPTER III. PROTESTANT ADMINISTRATION. SECTION I. THE loyalty or the apathy of the Irish Catholics in the rebellions of 1715 and 1745 has been pleaded as an argument to prove the injustice or the folly of the penal laws. We are asked to believe, that their devotion to England was proof even against gratuitous cruelty; that twice they let pass an opportunity for achieving their freedom, rather than soil their honour with the taint of rebellion. It is true, and it is the most remarkable fact in Irish history, that Ireland did remain, on these occasions, undisturbed. Even when, later in the century, encouraged by the revolt of the American colonies, the Irish Protestants rose at last and wrenched out of the grasp of the English Parliament the legislative instruments of oppression, by which they had been so long racked and tortured; when the sympathy between the Irish Nonconformists and the American States was so keen that Paul Jones found a welcome in every Irish harbour that was unoccupied by an English squadron; when English commerce swept out of St. George's Channel, and the Holyhead passage yachts were searched and plundered by privateers under the American flag, fitted out and was |