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firmed by a law of parliament; and the insincerity of his professions was not yet completely discovered. The people therefore chearfully submitted to the Carte. contribution, by which these graces had been purchased. Every party concurred in this extraordinary supply; but the whole merit was assumed by the recusants, who indeed formed the majority of the nation. They professed the most zealous loyalty; but secretly exulted in the persuasion, that the army, and of consequence the authority of the crown in Ireland, could not be maintained without their assistance.

LORD Faulkland seems to have been more distinguished by his rectitude than abilities. In a government which required vigour and austerity, he was indolent and gentle; courting, rather than terrifying the factious. He was harassed by the intrigues and clamours of the king's ministers, whom he could not always gratify to the full extent of their desires; his actions were severely interpreted and maligned at the court of England; his administration of consequence was cautious and embarassed. Such a governor was little qualified to awe the numerous and powerful body of recusants, relying on their merits, and stimulated by their ecclesiastics to the most imprudent excesses. Their religious worship was once more celebrated with public solemnity, and with the full parade of their ostentatious ritual. Churches were seized for their service; their ecclesiastical jurisdiction was avowedly and severely executed; new friaries and nunneries were erected; and even in the city of Dublin, under the immediate notice of the state, an academical body was formed, and governed by an ecclesiastic of some note, for the education of popish youth. The clergy, by whose influence these violent proceedings were directed, were by their numbers, and by their principles, justly alarming to government. They swarmed into the kingdom from foreign seminaries; where they had imbibed the most

invete

invetera'e prejudices against England, and the most abject and pestilent opinions of the papal authority. Seculars and regulars alike had bound themselves by solemn oath, to defend the papacy against the whole world; to labour for the augmentation of its power and privileges; to execute its mandates, and to persecute heretics. Their whole body acted in daugerous concert, under the direction of the pope, and subject to the orders of the congregation de propaganda fide, lately erected at Rome; and many of them, by their education in the seminaries of Spain, were peculiarly devoted to the interests of that monarchy; habituated to regard the insurrections of the old Irish in the reign of Elizabeth as the most generous exertions of patriotism, and taught to detest that power which had quefied this spirit, and established a dominion on the ruins of the antient dignity and pre-eminence of their countrymen.

THE protestant party were no less zealous in their detestation of popish idolatry. The inferiors of their clergy were poor, and sometimes so scandalously profligate, as to occasion a sarcastical observation of an Irishman to be recorded, that the king's priests were as bad as those of the pope. But there were not wanting many to whom the purity of the faith was an object of especial moment; and who, with the support of some grave and respectable prelates, as well as some of the officers of state, of English birth, and puritanic education, remonstrated warmly to Faulkland, on the turbulence of the recusants, and the dangerous tendency of their present practices. The temper of this deputy disposed him, and his instructions from England directed him to moderation and indulgence in the affair of religious controversy. But the repeated instances of his council could not be neglected. He issued a proclamation importing, that "the late intermission of legal proceedings against popish pretended titular archbishops, bishops, abbots, deans, vicars-general, jesuits, friars,

" and

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" and others, deriving their pretended authority from the see of Rome, in contempt of his majesty's royal power and authority, had bred such an extravagant insolence and presumption in them, that he was necessitated to charge and com"mand them in his majesty's name to forbear the "exercise of their popish rites and ceremonies."

THE proclamation was published and received without the common respect due to an act of state; nor did the deputy think himself warranted to proceed to any further severity. The popish worship was still maintained; nor was the new college, erected by the recusants in Dublin, suppressed by government: for the chief governor attended minutely to his instructions from London; and these were not unfavorable to that party which possessed the greatest share of power in Ireland. But the least restraint or discouragement was sufficient to awaken the resentment of the recusants. They now began, in the melancholy tone of discontent, to lament the weight and grievance of the public burdens. They inveighed against those agents whom they had lately sent into England, and complained that, without due commission or authority, they had consented to a tax too grievous to be supported. They, who were still harassed by vexatious inquisitions into the titles of their estates, they, who from any motives were flattered with the hopes of being relieved from public burdens, easily united in this clamour, which soon became so violent and alarming, that the government condescended to a sort of compromise, and accepted a quarterly payment of five thousand, instead of ten thousand pounds, until the whole voluntary subsidy should be discharged. The impatience of Charles and his ministers at this murmuring of the Irish bjects, and this manifest reluctance to fulfil their engagements, made them readier to listen to any complaints against the conduct of the chief governor. Lord Faulkland was recalled, and the

A. D. 1630

administration entrusted for the present to two lords justices, united by friendship and affinity, and of considerable consequence in Ireland, Adam Loftus, viscount Ely, lord chancellor, and Richard earl of Cork, lord high-treasurer of this kingdom.

THE first of these chief governors derived his fortune and station from the activity and prudence of Loftus, archbishop of Dublin, in the reign of Elizabeth. The earl, head of the noble family of Boyle, had arrived in Ireland as a private adventurer in the same reign; and, by a fortunate marriage, by industry and judicious conduct, by purchasing from Sir Walter Raleigh his portion of the Desmond forfeitures, and by introducing English colonies into his estates, had risen gradually to the first degree of consequence. He had been knighted, created, baron Boyle, viscount Dungarvan, and earl of Cork, and was now advanced to the government of Ireland; a progress in which he possibly was the speedier and more successful, as the heads of the two leading families in Ireland, Kildare and Ormond, were in the State of minority. The power of the first of these houses he afterwards contrived to connect in some sort with his own interests, by giving one of his daughters in marriage to the young ear of Kildare.

THE earl of Cork was possessed with a spirit suited to his exalted rank; not with a despicable pride of family that reposes fastidiously on its advantages, with a contemptuous disregard of all inferiors; but with a liberal and generous solicitude for the welfare of those he governed. On his own lands he had fixed a numerous, well regulated, and well defended body of English protestants; which soon rewarded him by the natural effects of such generous cares, industry, affluence, and civility. With the same principles, and by the same means, he studied to promote the general welfare of the nation in his public conduct. With particular assiduity

assiduity he laboured to execute a scheme of transplanting into the re:ote quarters of the South those turbulent Irish septs of Wicklow, who had for ages harassed the English government, and filling the neighbourhood of the capital with more peaceable and industrious inhabitants. The errors of popery were offensive to his religious principles; and that_barbarism, which generally attended it in Ireland, was equally repugnant to his schemes of political improvement. Without consulting the ministry of England, or waiting for any instructions from the king, the lords justices fell at once with great severity on the recusauts, and threatened all absenters from the established worship with the penalties of the statute, enacted in the second year of Elizabeth's reign. They were however soon informed, that this severity was not acceptable to the king, nor deemed consistent with his present interests in Ireland: and the recusants, as usual, were immoderate in their triumph.

A fraternity of Carmelites appeared in the habit of their order, and publicly celebrated their religious rites, in one of the most frequented parts of Dublin. The archbishop of the diocese, and the chief magistrate of the city whose indignation was roused at this defiance of law and government, led a party of the army to their place of worship, and attempted to disperse the assembly. The friars and their congregation repelled the attack by force, and obliged the assailants to consult their safety by a precipitate flight. The incident was represented in England in the most offensive manner, and seemed to reproach that mistaken lenity which had encouraged the recusants to this outrage. It was deemed neither safe nor politic to connive at such insolence: by an order of the English council, fifteen religious houses were seized to the king's use, and the popish college erected in Dublin was assigned to the university, who for the present converted it into a protestant seminary.

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