the Church of Ireland.' When Mrs. Delany was passing through Killala, in 1732, she found the whole town full of excitement about the horse-races given under the patronage of Bishop Clayton for the amusement of the people. A true Irish bishop,' said Archbishop Bolton, with a sarcasm which derived its point from many examples, has nothing more to do than to eat, drink, grow fat, rich, and die.' 2 3 The abuses which were so common in the episcopacy naturally extended to the minor clergy. Several laws had indeed been made to secure the residence of the parochial clergy, but they were not observed, and in many cases it was scarcely possible that it should be otherwise. Archbishop Synge, who, like King, distinguished himself during the whole of his long episcopate by his zeal in remedying the abuses of his Church, and who made large pecuniary sacrifices with that object,4 declared in 1723 that 'in three parts out of four of this kingdom the parochial clergy either have no glebes at all, or so small a spot, and often so inconveniently situated, as to make it impossible for them in the sense 1 Cumberland's Memoirs, i. 228, 229. 2 Mrs. Delany's Correspondence, i. 373. 3 Mant's Hist. of the Irish Church, ii. 581. Swift's description of the Church patronage is well known. 'Excellent and moral men have been selected on every occasion of vacancy. But it unfortunately has uniformly happened that as these worthy divines crossed Hounslow Heath on their way to Ireland to take possession of their bishoprics, they have been regularly robbed and murdered by the highwaymen frequenting that common, who seized upon their robes and patents, come In 1640 Atherton, Bishop of of the law to reside,"1 and they certainly exhibited very little disposition to overcome the difficulty. In 1707 the Lords Justices complained to the Duke of Ormond that the chaplains appointed to several regiments quartered in Ireland considered their posts sinecures, and did not even leave England, abandoning the care of the soldiers to the chance ministrations of some resident curate.2 Rectors in Ireland well knew that the best chances of preferment were found in a residence in Dublin, and pluralities and non-residence combined to deprive vast districts of all pastoral care. Thus when Dr. Delany was appointed Dean of Down he found that his predecessor had only been in his parish for two days in six years, and some of the poor told him they had never seen a clergyman in their lives except when they went to church.3 Archbishop King mentions incidentally that in the diocese of Clonfert about half the beneficed clergy were non-resident. Bishop Nicholson, in one of his letters, describes a visitation which he made in company with the Bishop of Meath through the diocese of the latter prelate. The churches,' he says, ' are wholly demolished in many of their parishes, which are therefore called non-cures; and several clergymen have each of them four or five, some six or seven of them. They commonly live at Dublin, leaving the conduct of their Popish parishioners to priests of their own persuasion, who are said to be now more numerous than ever.'5 The long quarrel between Archbishops Boulter and King arose in a great degree from the bitter language in which the latter prelate censured the conduct 1 See his Account of the Laws in Force for Encouraging the Residence of the Parochial Clergy (Dublin, 1723). 2 Letters from Lords Justices, Irish State Paper Office, 3 Mrs. Delany's dence, ii. 358, 359. Correspon Mant's Hist. of the Irish Church, ii. 380. 5 British Museum Add. MSS. 6116, p. 120. of the primate, who had ordained and placed in an Irish living a man named Power, who had been one of the famous Hampshire deer-stealers known as the Waltham Blacks, and had only saved himself from the gallows by turning informer against his comrades. You make nothing in England,' wrote King to Addison, 'to order us to provide for such and such a man 2007. per annum, and when he has it, by favour of the Government, he thinks he may be excused attendance, but you do not consider that such a disposition takes up perhaps a tenth part of the diocese, and turns off the cure of ten parishes to one curate.'2 In some of the wild Catholic districts the few scattered Protestants were suffered to sink into a Pagan ignorance. Skelton, one of the ablest and best men in the Irish Church, officiated for a time in one of the remote districts of Donegal, and he assures us that he had parishioners, and those not of the lowest class, who were unable to say how many Commandments or even how many Gods there were. Some members of his congregation used to come intoxicated to church. In order to dispel their ignorance he was accustomed from time to time, without giving any previous notice of his intention, to have the doors shut and bolted as soon as the congregation had assembled for Sunday service, and he then proceeded to catechise his reluctant prisoners.3 These examples are sufficient to explain the lethargy and the paralysis of the Established Church. In truth, Catholics and Presbyterians in Ireland, though they had many grievances, had at least one inestimable advantage 1 Marmaduke Coghill to Southwell (Dec. 23, 1725). British Museum Add. MSS. 20122. Boulter had made this appointment at the recommendation of Lord Townshend. See Mant, ii. VOL. I. 443-445. 2 Mant, ii. 288. See, too, a remarkable letter by Swift. Mant, ii. 568. 3 Burdy's Life of Skelton, pp. lxx, xcix. Р in the competition of creeds. The English Government had no control over the appointment of their clergy. From the very highest appointment to the lowest, in secular and sacred things, all departments of administration in Ireland were given over as a prey to rapacious jobbers. The real fault was not in the nature of Englishmen or in the nature of Irishmen, but in the institutions of the country. A long course of events had produced in England a race of statesmen who were very selfish and corrupt, but in England there were representative institutions sufficiently free and sufficiently powerful to restrain the extreme forms of malversation. In Ireland there was no such restraint. The English Parliament knew nothing and cared nothing about Irish patronage. The Irish Parliament was so powerless and so constituted that it was impossible it could exercise an efficient control. Occasionally, it is true, demonstrations were made against the more scandalous pensions, and one or two measures of real importance were carried. In 1701, at the time when the destruction of the woollen trade had ruined Ireland, pensions to the amount of 16,000l. were struck off; and through fear of the House some of the more scandalous pensions were sometimes withheld.1 In 1729, at the time of the great famine, a measure was carried by which all the salaries, employments, places, and pensions of those who did not reside six months in the year in the country, were taxed four shillings in the pound, but the unfortunate qualification was added unless they shall be exempted by his Majesty's sign manual.' The attempt, indeed, to resist was almost 2 1 The Duke of Bolton, in a letter (Aug. 26, 1718), mentions that some of the pensions were then in arrear on account of the unfavourable remarks on them by the Committee of the House of Commons. MSS. Irish State Paper Office. 23 Geo. II. c. 2. There are a number of letters in the Departmental Correspondence (Irish State Paper Office), exempting pensioners from the tax. Lord Mountmorres says (Hist. of the hopeless. With the immense majority of the nation wholly unrepresented, with the immense preponderance of legislative power concentrated in the hands of a few great men who could be easily bribed by peerages or pensions, or of officials who were directly interested in the continuance of corruption, there was no real safeguard. The greatest of all evils in politics is power without control, and this evil never acquired more fearful dimensions than in Ireland in the early years of the eighteenth century. How bitterly the state of things I have described must have been contemplated by Irishmen of real intelligence and patriotism may easily be imagined. To enable the reader to realise their feelings I can hardly do better than quote a few lines from a very remarkable paper which has, I believe, never been printed. When Lord Halifax was appointed Lord Lieutenant in 1761, the well-known writer Charles Lucas, who was then Member for Dublin, wrote him a long letter expressing his warm hope that under the new reign the conditions of Irish government would change, and he recounted at the same time the chief causes of the failure of his predecessors.1 The majority of these, he asserted, submitted to take on them the government of a wretched people with the sole view of aggrandising themselves and providing for a long train of hungry minions at the expense of a miserable, misrepresented kingdom.' To evince this,' he continued, 'your Excellency may easily look back and see the splendid figures some of the most necessitous of men put into this employment, have been able to make upon their return home, after enjoying this place for a session or two. See some of them and their worst Irish Parliament, i. 424), that the pensions could not be legally granted out of the hereditary revenue, but out of what was called 6 the aggregate fund. 1 Sept. 19, 1761. MSS. Irish State Paper Office. |