Page images
PDF
EPUB

II.

1716

BOOK military strength of Protestant Ireland lay, as they well knew, in the despised Dissenters; and to disqualify brave and loyal men for advancement in the regular army because they professed a creed which was the established religion of Scotland, was too intolerably absurd. The bill was postponed till the bench of Bishops could be leavened with some healthier elements. The Commons passed a resolution that the Dissenters who had received commissions had done seasonable service, and that whoever prosecuted them was an enemy to the King and the Protestant interest. There, for the moment, the matter was allowed to drop. An attempt was made to bribe the Presbyterians into dropping the further prosecution of their claims, by promising them instead of a removal of the Test, the English Toleration Act, which would leave their religion undisturbed, while the disqualifications for service were maintained. They declined an offer which they justly regarded as an insult. They insisted that they were entitled to the same privileges which were conceded to the Scotch Episcopalians; who, though as disloyal as they were themselves loyal, and, like themselves, were Dissenters from the Established religion, yet suffered under no vexatious exclusion from civil or military employment.

Stanhope would not part with the hope of securing them substantial justice at last. After 1715 the Irish Parliament met only in alternate years, voting double supplies. In 1719, under the Viceroyalty of the Duke of Bolton, the opportunity was taken of a fresh alarm to revive the question. The Duke, in opening the session, recommended a better agreement among Protestants in the presence of the strict union

and notorious disaffection of the Catholics. A sketch of a bill had been sent from England to be produced if the temper of the two Houses promised favourably. It was an equivalent to a simple repeal of the Sacramental Test clause. Conolly, when asked his advice by the Viceroy, recommended that the initiative should be left to the Irish Parliament. Whether the Lower House would concede a large measure of relief he considered extremely doubtful. The Peers would reject any measure of relaxation, however mild, if it was recommended from England. The bill was, therefore, kept back. The Viceroy told the Parliament, that he trusted they would discover some means by which an agreement could be brought about; and the King sent a special message of earnest entreaty, that the Presbyterian claims should receive consideration.

The humour of the Upper House, it very soon appeared, was unchanged; while the Commons, as the rebellion was forgotten, were less disposed to geneorsity than before. The Brodricks had hitherto been steady on the Liberal side. The old Speaker, now Lord Midleton, continued constant to his principles. His son, young Alan, for some unknown reason, had gone over to the Bishops' faction; and, backed by a knot of High Churchmen, who were called the Cork squadron, resisted a relaxation of the Test with the fiercest determination.' Archbishop King, failing to see the sarcasm which he was uttering against the Establishment, declared that the tests were its only protection, and that, without them,

1 The Bishops had introduced clauses into their leases, forbidding the erection of meeting-houses on

any part of their estates. They
had induced many great land-
owners to follow the example.

389

CHAP.

III.

1719

BOOK

II.

1719

Protestant Ireland would be Presbyterian. A Toleration Act, such as they had refused before, more meagre than that which now stands on the Irish statute book-a bill giving Nonconformists a bare permission to meet for worship in their own chapels, while the tests were sternly upheld, this was all that could be obtained. The heads were sent to England; and the Viceroy wrote, that nothing more need be looked for.1

Stanhope gave up the contest. No longer attempting to throw open even the commissions in the militia, he contented himself with adding a paragraph, giving the benefit of the act to Dissenters already under prosecution. Even this slight amendment was received with suspicion. Young Brodrick argued that, under cover of such a clause, a Dissenter might have stolen into a fellowship at Trinity College, or might have taught in a village school, and yet escape punishment. His chimerical terrors were with difficulty removed by the crown lawyers, and, on the 16th of October, this wretched mockery of justice and common sense passed through the Lower House.

For the Peers, lean as it was, the bill proved almost too much. The majority of Irish noblemen were already absentees; but on a question on which passion was stirred so deeply the attendance was unusually large. Had the Bishops' phalanx been

The practice was spreading. The
Government party brought the
subject before the Commons, and
proposed a resolution that, in lay
leases, such clauses should be
inadmissible. The opposition was
so strong, however, that they did

not venture to press a division.'The Duke of Bolton to Secretary Craggs, July 16, 1719.' MSS. Ireland. Record Office.

to

1 The Duke of Bolton Secretary Craggs, July 18.' Ibid.

III.

1719

unbroken, they would have still been irresistible, CHAP. and the bill would have been lost. Fortunately the advice to supply the vacant sees from England had not been neglected. Sixteen Prelates were in their places: of them the Viceroy had now secured the support of six, and the neutrality of a seventh. The three Archbishops struggled as if the Christian faith itself was at stake. The Primate called schism a damnable sin. The Archbishop of Dublin insisted, in the usual style, that a door was being opened to every kind of wild extravagance. The bill was eventually carried by a majority of 39 to 26.1 The minority, with the Archbishops at their head, recorded their protest in the Journals. Archbishop King complained to his brother of Canterbury, that the good cause had been betrayed by false brethren intruded on the bench from England. Unless God, by unforeseen Providence, supported it, the Church of Ireland he considered to be lost; and the occasion of his panic was the simple permission to the Presbyterians, who had saved Ireland from Tyrconnel, who formed two-thirds of the Protestant population of Ulster, to open chapels of their own. Though they were incapacitated from holding public employments, though their marriages were invalid, though they were forbidden to open a single school, or hold any office in town or country above the rank of petty constable, the mere existence of Nonconformists as a body legally recognized was considered of fatal omen to the Church of Ireland. The

1 Of the six Bishops who voted for the Government five were English Whigs appointed since the accession of George the First,

and only one was an Irishman.
Of the nine who were in the
minority, seven were Irish and
two English.

BOOK Church of Ireland must have been a very feeble institution.1

II.

1719

And now recommenced the Protestant emigration, which robbed Ireland of the bravest defenders of English interests, and peopled the American sea-board with fresh flights of Puritans. Twenty thousand left Ulster on the destruction of the woollen trade. Many more were driven away by the first passing of the Test Act. The stream had slackened, in the hope that the law would be altered. When the prospect was finally closed, men of spirit and energy refused to remain in a country where they were held unfit to receive the right of citizens; and thenceforward, until the spell of tyranny was broken in 1782,

1 Irish Statutes, George I. cap. 3. The hesitation of the Government and the long delay in the promotion of Berkeley, is a favourite subject of complaint of complaint among Irish Protestants; nameless Englishmen having been promoted over the head of their most distinguished scholar. Berkeley's Toryism was more extreme than Swift's, and what Irish clerical Tories were, the reader will have partly seen. His Treatise on Passive Obedience was published during the Harley-St. John ascendancy, and was written avowedly in support of Phipps and Ormond and the Jacobite conspirators. Lord Stanhope had, notwithstanding, been so struck with Berkeley's genius, that he had intended to promote him in 1716. An Irish clergyman, an acquaintance of Lord Molesworth, wrote to remonstrate against an appointment, which would mischievously strengthen Archbishop King. The treatise' (on Passive Obedience), this person said, 'came out at a time when a dangerous attack was made by the late

ministry on the liberties of the
kingdom, for which service Dr.
Berkeley has been highly esteemed
by all the Jacobites in Ireland.
He travelled with Lord Peter-
borough; has been, and still is, a
creature of Dean Swift; and is
reckoned here as much in the

Tory interest as the highest
Churchman of them all.'-'Rev.
Duke Tyrrell to the Right Hon.
R. Molesworth, May 14, 1716.'
MSS. Record Office.

Molesworth interfered, and the good intentions of the Government towards Berkeley were postponed. The world forms its judgments heedlessly; and seeing that Berkeley was a great man, and that he was long passed over in favour of his inferiors, it rushes to the conclusion that he was unfairly neglected. When men of genius lend themselves to politics and the support of measures like the Presbyterian disabilities, their opinions may be at least as legitimate a disqualification for office as the religious belief which they detest.

« PreviousContinue »