and a steady stream of emigration soon carried off all the Catholic energy from the country. Deprived of their natural leaders, sunk for the most part in the most brutal ignorance and in the most abject poverty, the Irish Catholics at home remained perfectly passive, while both England and Scotland were convulsed by Jacobitism. It is a memorable fact that the ferocious law of 1703, which first reduced the Irish Catholics to a condition of hopeless servitude, does not allege as the reason for its provisions any political crime. It was called 'An Act to prevent the further growth of Popery.' It was justified in its preamble on the ground that the Papists still continued in their gross and dangerous errors, that some Protestants had been perverted to Popery, and that some Papists had refused to make provision for their Protestant children. A considerable military force was, indeed, kept in Ireland, but this was chiefly because the ministers desired to keep under arms a more numerous standing army than Parliament would tolerate in England, and also to throw upon the Irish revenue a great part of the burden; and whenever serious danger arose, a large proportion was at once withdrawn.

The evidence we possess on this subject is curiously complete. In the great rebellion of 1715 not a single overt act of treason was proved against the Catholics in Ireland, and at a time when civil war was raging both in England and Scotland, the country remained so profoundly tranquil that the Government sent over several regiments to Scotland to subdue the Jacobites. In 1719, when the alarm of an invasion of England was very great, the Duke of Bolton, who was then Lord Lieutenant, wrote to the Government that if they did not fear a foreign invasion of Ireland they might safely withdraw the greater part of the army for other services; and he only

1 Mémoires de Berwick, ii. 159.

urged that the nation, on account of its extreme poverty, might be relieved from the necessity of paying the troops during their absence. A few weeks later a leading official, writing from Dublin Castle, states that seven Irish regiments were at this time out of the kingdom, that they were still paid from the Irish revenue, and that four more were about to embark.' The next great Jacobite alarm was in 1722, and in the very beginning of the danger six regiments were sent from Ireland to England. The Lord Lieutenant vainly asked that they might be paid, while in England, from the English revenue, and his request being refused he begged that they might return as soon as possible, not on account of any danger in Ireland, but because it was 'reasonable that the advantages of entertaining those regiments should accrue to that kingdom from which they received their pay.' In 1725, Swift, who had no sympathy with the Catholics, declared that in Ireland the Pretender's party was at an end, and that the Papists in general, of any substance or estates, and their priests almost universally, are what we call Whigs in the sense which by that word is generally understood.'4 In the great rebellion of 1745, when Scotland was for a time chiefly in the hands of the Pretender, when the Highland army

third time we have done so since his Majesty's accession to the throne, and withal preserved the kingdom from any insurrection or rebellion, which is more than can be said for England or Scotland.'-Archbishop King to the Archbishop of Canterbury (May 1722), British Museum MSS. Add. 6117.

3 The Duke of Grafton to the Lords Justices, November 24, 1722. MS. Irish State Paper Office.

Seventh Drapier's Letter.

had marched into the heart of England, and when the Protestant succession was very seriously endangered, there was not a ripple of agitation in Ireland; and soon after the struggle was over, Archbishop Stone, the Protestant Primate, delivered in the House of Lords the most emphatic testimony to the loyalty of the Catholics. He declared that in the year 1747, after that rebellion was entirely suppressed, happening to be in England, he had an opportunity of perusing all the papers of the rebels and their correspondents, which were seized in the custody of Murray, the Pretender's secretary, and that after having spent much time and taken great pains in examining them (not without some share of the then common suspicion that there might be some private understanding and intercourse between them and the Irish Catholics), he could not discover the least trace, hint, or intimation of such intercourse or correspondence in them, or of any of the latter's favouring or abetting, or having been so much as made acquainted with, the designs or proceedings of these rebels.'1 There was some exaggeration, but there was also a large element of melancholy truth, in the assertion of Burke, that all the penal laws of that unparalleled code of oppression were manifestly the effects of national hatred and scorn towards a conquered people whom the victors delighted to trample upon and were not at all afraid to provoke. They were not the effect of their fears, but of their security. . . Whilst that temper prevailed, and it prevailed in all its force to a time within our memory, every measure was pleasing and popular just in proportion as it tended to harass and ruin a set of people who were looked upon as enemies to God and man, and,

1 Curry's State of the Irish Catholics, ii. 261. See also, on the profound tranquillity of Ire

land, Horace Walpole, Memoirs of George III. p. 278.

CH. II. RESPONSIBILITY OF THE ENGLISH GOVERNMENT. 145

indeed, as a race of savages who were a disgrace to human nature itself.'1

It must be added that all attempts to acquit the English Government of blame in this matter, by throwing the responsibility of the penal laws on Irish Parliaments which had not been parties to the Treaty of Limerick, are wholly sophistical. An English Act of Parliament made the Irish Parliament an exclusively Protestant body. The royal veto which could have arrested any portion of the penal code was still in full force. The vast multiplication of small boroughs gave the English Government an enormous influence over Irish legislation, while the provisions of Poynings' Act placed it completely at their mercy. No Irish Bill could be laid before the Irish Parliament which had not received the approval of the English Privy Council. No Irish Bill could become law except in the precise form which the English Privy Council had sanctioned. It was sometimes beyond the power of the English Government to induce the Irish Parliament to carry measures which they desired, though even in this case they claimed, and occasionally exercised, the power of binding Ireland by English Acts. But they had no difficulty in preventing the enactment of any Irish law which they disliked.

Almost all the great persecutions of history, those of the early Christians, of Catholics and Protestants on the Continent, and, after the Revolution, of Catholics in England, were directed against minorities. It was the distinguishing characteristic of the Irish penal code that its victims constituted at least threefourths of the nation, and that it was intended to demoralise as well as degrade. Its enactments may be divided into different groups. One group was intended to deprive the Catholics of all civil life. By an Act of

VOL. I.

1 Burke's Letter to Sir Hercules Langriske.

L

the English Parliament they were forbidden to sit in that of Ireland: They were afterwards deprived of the elective suffrage, excluded from the corporations, from the magistracy, from the bar, from the bench, from the grand juries, and from the vestries. They could not be sheriffs or solicitors, or even gamekeepers or constables. They were forbidden to possess any arms; two justices, or a mayor, or a sheriff, might at any time issue a search warrant to break into their houses and ransack them for arms, and if a fowling-piece or a flask of powder was discovered they were liable either to fine or imprisonment or to whipping and the pillory. They were, of course, excluded on the same grounds from the army and navy. They could not even possess a horse of the value of more than 5l., and any Protestant on tendering that sum could appropriate the hunter or the carriage horse of his Catholic neighbour.2 In his own country the Catholic was only recognised by the law, 'for repression and punishment.' The Lord Chancellor Bowes and the Chief Justice Robinson both distinctly laid down from the bench that the law does not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish Roman Catholic.'3

The effect of these measures was to offer the strongest inducements to all men of ability and enterprise to conform outwardly to the dominant creed. If they did not, every path of ambition and almost all means of livelihood were closed to them, and they were at the same time exposed to the most constant, galling, and humiliating tyranny. The events of the Revolution had divided the people into opposing sections bitterly hostile

13 William and Mary, c. 2. English. The other measures of the code were enacted by the Irish Parliament, and will be found in the Irish Statutes.

27 William III. c. 5; 10 William III. c. 8 and 13; 2 Anne,

c. 6; 6 Anne, c. 6; 8 Anne, c. 3; 2 George I. c. 10; 6 George I. c.10; 1 George II. c.9; 9 George II. c. 3; 15 and 16 George III. c. 21. Scully On the Penal Laws,

3

p. 344.