manned by Protestant adventurers from Wexford and Dublin, it is true, that the staunchest friends which the English Government possessed in the island were the representatives and great grandfathers of the Catholic Irish peasantry, to whom America is now the land of promise, and whose dream is a liberated Ireland under the protectorate of the Stars and Stripes. In 1760, when Munster was in agrarian revolt, and the French, striking, as they supposed, at a vulnerable point in England's armour, attempted an invasion there, the minutest scrutiny failed to detect either correspondence or sympathy between Versailles and the Tipperary Whiteboys. In 1745, Irish Catholic Bishops were in communication with the Castle, prepared, should any movement be attempted in favour of the Pretender, to give information of it; but the occasion never arose. The inference, notwithstanding, that a people so well disposed ought to have been trusted and encouraged, may be premature, and even altogether erroneous. This attitude of the Catholic clergy was due to their having learned to look on England as their protector against the Protestant Parliament. The Catholic masses, deprived of political power, had ceased to struggle against their chains. Mutilated and miserable as the penal legislature had been made; immoral in its details, unaccompanied with any one of those remedial measures, without which coercion becomes tyranny, yet the distinct assertion of authority had produced an impression on the imagination of the people, and in its partial success pointed to the only method by which England and Ireland could really be made one. Among the peculiarities of the Celtic peasantry, one of the most striking is a contempt for CHAP. III. 1715 II. 1715 BOOK those who are afraid of them; a submissiveness and even real attachment, which is proof against much injustice and many cruelties, to a master who is a master indeed. The relations of men to one another become healthy only when the truth is seen and confessed. Elizabeth forbade her viceroys to meddle with religion, and she had to encounter three bloody insurrections. Under Charles the First there was a Catholic majority in the Irish Parliament with the practical enjoyment of civil and religious equality. The reward was the rebellion and massacre of 1641. A third of the confiscated estates was restored to the Catholics at the Restoration. The titular bishops were received at the Castle. Catholic laymen became magistrates, sheriffs, judges, officers in the army. At length they had their own Parliament; and they showed their gratitude for these indulgences by repealing the acts of settlement, and by attainting 3,000 Protestant landowners. Once more they had been made to yield to superior force, and this time the force had not been afraid to assert itself. The beaten party was compelled to know that they had no alternative but to yield, and ninety years followed of undisturbed political tranquillity; good humoured submissiveness in the place of chronic anarchy; and, instead of indignation against a tyrannical law, a feeling rather of gratitude for the comparative lenity with which, in general, the law was enforced. In 1715 the exasperation and bitterness produced by the last war were subsiding, but had not yet disappeared entirely. There were many officers still in Connaught who had fought at Aghrim, and Galway had been lately prepared to receive a French expedi tion. Tens of thousands of young Irishmen were in the French service, and thousands more were continually recruited under the name of Wild Geese, and shipped off from the secluded bays of Cork and Kerry. They went out as for ever expatriated, but they intended to return in better days with the French army, which was to give them back their liberties; and had Bolingbroke succeeded in gaining a footing for the Pretender in England, or had Ormond afterwards effected his intended landing at Waterford, it would have been seen that the old party of Tyrconnell and Sarsfield had life enough remaining to strike once more for Irish liberty. On the whole, however, except among the Bishops and Anglo-Irish Jacobites, the cause of James the Third created no enthusiasm. The native Catholics had no cause to love the House of Stuart. They had not forgiven the Act of Settlement. They had not forgotten the cowardice and flight of the Pretender's father. Unless they could separate the crowns of the two kingdoms as well as the legislatures, they had reason to believe that the policy of one English king towards them would not differ very widely from that of any other English king; and, taught by the experience of 1692, they preferred that the battles of Ireland should be fought elsewhere. 'The Papists,' said Swift in 1725, and his great authority is echoed by every contemporary document, 'would doubtless gladly have their superstition restored under any prince whatever, yet the Pretender's party is at an end. Very few now alive are in his interest. The Papists in general of any substance or estate, and the priests almost universally, CHAP. III. 1715 BOOK II. 1715 are what we call Whigs in the general sense of the term. They feel the smart and see the scars of their former wounds. They well know they must be made a sacrifice to the least attempt towards a change.1 Thus the accession of the House of Hanover passed off as quietly in the wilds of Kerry as in Kent and Sussex. Guns were fired, bonfires lighted, tuns of claret broached and emptied in the streets of every town in the four provinces; and no word of disaffection was heard above a whisper from the Giant's Causeway to Valentia. Address of the Drapier to both Houses of Parliament.'—Swift's Works, vol. vii. SECTION II. THE persistent determination to govern under the forms of the constitution, to maintain the exterior show of liberty among a people who could not be trusted with the reality, although under some aspects plausible and honourable, yet prolonged the agony of the Irish nation, and, like all insincerity, created more evils than it cured. The Irish Parliament was to be maintained; but, to prevent the Parliament from being troublesome, it was chained by Poynings' Act; three-quarters of the population were disfranchised; and, when the Parliament was recalcitrant, laws were passed in England over its head. Trial by jury, the most precious birthright of Englishmen, was regarded as the inalienable privilege of every subject of the British Crown, and as such it was maintained in Ireland, but the forms of freedom avail only to those who can make a wholesome use of them. Convictions could not be obtained against Catholic bishops and unregistered priests, and the destruction of the Catholic religion had to be pursued through the circuitous action of a law which undermined the foundations of society. The acts of Anne for the repression of Popery had been framed to throw into Protestant hands the entire land of Ireland. The opportunities for evasion had been at length closed so carefully that, for a family to preserve their estates who continued to avow themselves Catholic, had been made really difficult. The CHAP. III. 1715 |