bishops were not called to the House of Lords, and only five new peers were made, one of them being the Chancellor and another the Chief Justice, but the outlawry which had deprived a large proportion of the Catholic peerage of their honours was reversed; fifteen Catholic peers were thus restored to their seats, and they appear to have formed nearly half of the active members of the House of Lords. The members of the House of Commons were almost all new men, completely inexperienced in public business and animated by the resentment of the bitterest wrongs. Many of them were sons of some of the 3,000 proprietors who without trial and without compensation had been deprived by the Act of Settlement of the estates of their ancestors.2 To all of them the confiscations of Ulster, the fraud of Strafford, the long train of calamities that followed were recent and vivid eyents. Old men were still living who might have remembered them all, and there was probably scarcely a man in the Irish Parliament of 1689 who had not been deeply injured by them in his fortunes or his family. It will hardly appear surprising to candid men that a Parliament so constituted, and called together amid the excitement of a civil war, should have displayed much violence, much disregard for vested interests. Its measures, indeed, were not all criminal. By one Act which was far in advance of the age, it established perfect religious liberty in Ireland, and although this measure was, no doubt, mainly due to motives of policy, proxy the protest in the Lords against the repeal of the Act of Settlement. King, p. 169. Somers' Tracts, xi. 410. 1 King says four, but he omits Col. Bourke, who was made Baron Boffeen in April. A list of honours conferred by James II. MSS. Irish State Paper Office. 2 King says: 'The generality of the Houses consisted of the sons and descendants of the forfeiting persons in 1641.'-State of the Protestants in Ireland, p 172. its enactment in such a moment of excitement and passion reflects no small credit on the Catholic Parliament. By another Act, repealing Poynings' Law, and asserting its own legislative independence, it anticipated the doctrine of Molyneux, Swift, and Grattan, and claimed a position which, if it could have been maintained, would have saved Ireland from at least a portion of those commercial restrictions which a few years later reduced it to a condition of the most abject wretchedness. A third measure abolished the payments to Protestant clergy in the corporate towns, while a fourth ordered that the Catholics throughout Ireland should henceforth pay their tithes and other ecclesiastical dues to their own priests and not to the Protestant clergy. The Protestants were still to pay their tithes to their own clergy, but as the Catholics formed the immense majority of the Irish people, almost the whole religious property of the country was by these measures transferred from the Church of the small minority to that of the bulk of the nation. No compensation was made for existing vested interests, and the measure was, therefore, according to modern notions, very unjust, but the Irish Parliament can hardly be blamed without great anachronism on this ground. The principle of compensation was as yet wholly unknown. No compensation had been 1 There is, however, a very remarkable letter from the Catholic Bishop Molowny to Bishop Tyrrell which was found among the papers of the latter, sketching what Molowny thought the true principles of settling Ireland. He desired that the adventurers who had displaced the old proprietors by the Act of Settlement should be all removed and the former proprietors restored, subject to a compensation for those who had purchased from the adventurers. In the case of the Church benefices he wished also that the Catholics should be restored, but 'that a competent pension should be allowed to the Protestant possessor during his life; for he can pretend no longer lease of it; or that he should give the Catholick bishop or incumbent a competent pension, if it were thought fitter to let him enjoy his possession during life.' granted when at the Reformation the Church property was transferred to the clergy of an infinitesimal fraction of the nation. No compensation had been granted in any of the transfers of Church property in England. The really distinctive feature of the Irish legislation on this subject was that the spoliated clergy were not reduced to the category of criminals, but were guaranteed ful! liberty of professing, practising, and teaching their religion. Several other measures-most of them now only known by their titles-were passed for developing the resources of the country or remedying some great abuse. Among them were Acts for encouraging strangers to plant in Ireland, for the relief of distressed debtors, for the removal of the incapacities of the native Irish, for the recovery of waste lands, for the improvement of trade, shipping and navigation, and for establishing free schools.1 If these had been the only measures of the Irish Parliament it would have left an eminently honourable reputation. But, unfortunately, one of its main objects was to re-establish at all costs the descendants of the old proprietors in their land, and to annul by measures of sweeping violence the grievous wrongs and spoliations their fathers and their grandfathers had undergone. The first and most important measure with this object was the repeal of the Acts of Settlement and Explanation. The nature of this Act is almost universally misunder King's State of the Protestants of Ireland, Ap. 17. King says, what is probably very true, that the Protestant clergy had much practical difficulty in recovering the tithes that remained to them, and that they were often treated with great violence and injustice by their Catholic neighbours. A list of the Members and of the Acts of the Parliament of 1689 was printed in London in 1 stood on account of the extreme inaccuracy or imperfection of the description of it in the brilliant narrative of Lord Macaulay. The preamble asserts that the outbreak of 1641 had been solely due to the intolerable oppression and to the disloyal conduct of the Lords Justices and Puritan party; that the Catholics of Ireland before the struggle-had concluded had been fully reconciled to the Sovereign; that they had received from the Sovereign a full and formal pardon, and that the royal word had been in consequence pledged to the restitution of their properties. This pledge by the Act of Settlement had been to a great extent broken, and the Irish legislators maintained that the twenty-four years which had elapsed since that Act, had not annulled the rights of the old proprietors or their descendants. They maintained that these claims were not only valid but were prior to all others, and they accordingly enacted that the heirs of all persons who had possessed landed property in Ireland on October 22, 1641, and who had been deprived of their inheritance by the Act of Settlement, should enter at once into possession of their old properties. The owners who were to be displaced were of two kinds. Some of them were the adventurers or soldiers of Cromwell, and these were to be dispossessed absolutely and without compensation. No inquiry was to be made into the particular charges alleged against the original proprietor at the time of the confiscation. No regard was 1 By far the best and fullest account of this Parliament with which I am acquainted is to be found in a series of papers upon it (which have unfortunately never been reprinted), by Thos. Davis, in the Dublin Magazine of 1843. In these papers the Acts of Repeal and of Attainder are printed at length, and the extant evidence relating to them is collected and sifted with an industry and a skill that leave little to be desired. I must take this opportunity of expressing my grateful thanks to Sir Charles Gavan Duffy for having called my attention to these most valuable, but now almost forgotten papers. to be paid to the fact that the adventurers had obtained their land in compensation for sums of money lent on that condition to the Government, under Act of Parliament. No allowance was to be made for the large sums which in innumerable cases the adventurers had expended in buildings or in other improvements. At the time of the Act of Settlement, when it was found impossible to satisfy the just claims of both parties, the Irish were invariably sacrificed, and by the Irish Parliament this rule was reversed. The confiscation, it maintained, was from the first fraudulent, the claims of the old proprietors must override all others, and a wrongful enjoyment for twenty-four years was a sufficient compensation to the adventurers for the money they had lent. In the same category with the adventurers were placed all persons who had obtained their land from them, either through marriages or by inheritance. A large proportion, however, of the confiscated land had been sold after the Act of Settlement, and had passed into the hands of men who could not without the greatest injustice be despoiled. They were not military adventurers who had obtained their land when they were in rebellion against their Sovereign, and who had kept it at the Restoration, in a great degree because the Government feared to displace them. They were in many cases peaceable and loyal men who had taken no part in politics, who had no special interest in Ireland, who had invested all the savings of honest and laborious lives in the purchase of land under the security of an Act of Parliament passed when the royal authority was fully restored. English law knew no more secure title, and in law and in equity it was equally invincible. The Act of the Irish Parliament has been described as if it completely disregarded it, and swept away the property of these purchasers without compensation. But whatever may have been the faults of the Irish Parlia |