the great majority of the freeholders. They included most of the great old English families, and they were no longer content with the mere toleration of connivance. On the other hand, the Protestant party in the spirit of that time were inflexibly opposed to a full toleration. An assembly of prelates, convened by Archbishop Usher in 1626, declared that the religion of Papists is superstitious and idolatrous; their faith and doctrine erroneous and heretical; their Church, in respect to both, apostatical; to give them, therefore, a toleration, or to consent that they may freely exercise their religion and profess their faith and doctrine, is a grievous sin.'1

Usher and other prelates preached vehemently against toleration, and the English House of Commons supported them by a remonstrance to the King, complaining bitterly that 'the Popish religion was publicly professed in every part of Ireland, and that monasteries and nunneries were there newly erected.' In the same spirit, Falkland, who immediately preceded Wentworth as Deputy, and who was much inclined to tolerate Catholics, was compelled by the Puritanical party to issue a proclamation complaining of the growing insolence of the Popish ecclesiastics since the intermission of prosecutions, and peremptorily ordering them, in his Majesty's name, to forbear the exercise of their Popish rites and ceremonies."2 The site of the Purgatory of St. Patrick, which was the object of deep reverence among the Irish Catholics, was by order of the Government dug up and defaced. Trinity College had been founded by Elizabeth for the support of Protestantism, and as no students were admitted without taking the Oath of Supremacy, the Catholics had established an educational institution of their own. They had also boldly erected churches and monasteries

1 Bernard's Life of Usher (1656), pp. 60, 61.

2 Leland, iii. 5. Mant, i. 413433.

in Dublin, and in one of them Carmelite monks officiated in their robes. The Archbishop of Dublin and the chief magistrate of the city invaded this church at the head of a party of soldiers, and tried to disperse the congregation, but an angry scuffle ensued, stones were thrown, and the Protestants were compelled to retire. The English Council at once issued an order confiscating for the King's use fifteen religious houses, and also the new college which the Catholics had founded, and handing over the latter to its Protestant rival. The negotiation about the Graces was chiefly carried on by Popish recusants, who paid the greater part of the voluntary subsidy to the Government, in the vain hope of obtaining security for their estates. Wentworth abstained from all direct interference with their religion, but he extorted additional subsidies from them by threatening, in case of their non-compliance with his demands, to enforce the laws against Popery, and it is probable that they understood that his project of planting Connaught with Protestant settlers would be the prelude to the suppression of their worship. That this, at least, was the intention of the Deputy we know by his own words. In one of his letters he expressly states that the suppression of every other religion than that established by law was one great aim of his policy; that he thought it wise to defer the execution of that policy till the confiscations in Connaught had been duly accomplished, and that he hoped by the new plantation to secure such a Protestant predominance as would enable him to accomplish his design.2

1 Leland, iii. 5–7.

2It will be ever far forth of my heart to conceive that a conformity in religion is not above all other things principally to be intended. For, undoubtedly, till we be brought all under one form

of Divine service, the Crown is

never safe on this side. . . . It were too much at once to distemper them by bringing plantations upon them and disturbing them in the exercise of their religion, so long as it be without scandal; and so, indeed, very inconsiderate, as I conceive, to

Meanwhile, from another quarter, new and terrible dangers were approaching. The Puritan party, inspired by the fiercest fanaticism against Popery, were rising rapidly into power. The Scotch rebellion had the double effect of furnishing the Irish Catholics with an example of a nation taking up arms to establish its religion, and of adding to the growing panic by placing at the head of Scotch affairs those who had sworn the National Covenant against Popery, and from whom the Papists could look for nothing but extirpation. It was rumoured through Ireland that the covenanted army had threatened never to lay down arms till uniformity of religion was established through the whole kingdom; and a letter from Scotland was intercepted, stating that a covenanted army under General Lesly would soon come over to extirpate Catholicism in Ulster. In the English Parliament, one of the first and most vehement objects of the Puritan party was to put an end to all toleration of Popery. By an address from the House of Commons, all Roman Catholic officers were driven from the army. An application was made to the King to enforce the confiscation of two-thirds of the lands of the recusants, as well as the savage law which in England doomed all Catholic priests to the gallows. Some of them were arrested, but reprieved by the King, and this reprieve was made a prominent grievance by the Parliament.2 Reports of the most alarming character, some of them false or exaggerated, flew rapidly among the Irish

move in this latter, till that former be fully settled, and by that means the Protestant party become by much the stronger, which in truth I do not yet conceive it to be.'-Strafford's Letters, ii. 39. See, too, Carte's Ormond, i. 212.

1 See Rushworth, ii. 734-741.

2 Parl. Hist. ii. 248-250, 710, 712, 713. Commons Journals, Dec. 1, 1640, Jan. 27, 1640-1. After the Irish rebellion broke out both Houses petitioned that seven priests who were then in custody in England should be executed. Parl. Hist. ii. 968. Carte's Ormond, i. 200.

Catholics. It was said that Sir John Clotworthy had declared in Parliament that the conversion of the Irish Papists could only be effected with the Bible in one hand and the sword in the other; that Pym had boasted that the Parliament would not leave one priest in Ireland; that Sir William Parsons predicted at a public banquet that within a twelvemonth not a Catholic would be seen in Ireland. Petitions were presented by the Irish Presbyterians to the English Parliament praying for the extirpation of prelacy and Popery in Ireland. It was believed with much reason, that there was a fixed design among the Puritan party, who were now becoming supreme, to suppress absolutely the Catholic worship in Ireland, and to the publishing of this design' Ormond ascribed the great extension of the rebellion which now broke out.2

1 Carte's Ormond, i. 160, 182, 199, 200, 235, 236. Nalson's Collections, ii. 536. Lord Castlehaven's Memoirs, p. 10. See, too, the excellent summary in the remonstrance of Lord Gormanstown and the other confederate Catholics, presented to his Majesty's Commissioners, March 17, 1642.-Curry's Civil Wars in Ireland, ii. 333-346. According to Walker, The Independents in the Parliament insisted openly to have the Papists of Ireland rooted out and their lands sold to adventurers.'-Walker's Hist. of Independency, p. 200.

2There is too much reason to think that, as the Lords Justices really wished the rebellion to spread, and more gentlemen of estates to be involved in it, that the forfeitures might be the greater, and a general plantation be carried on by a new set of

English Protestants all over the kingdom, to the ruin and expulsion of all the old English and natives that were Roman Catholics; so, to promote what they wished, they gave out speeches upon occasions, insinuating such a design, and that in a short time there would not be a Roman Catholic left in the kingdom. It is no small confirmation of this notion that the Earl of Ormond, in his letters of Jan. 27 and February 25, 1641, to Sir W. St. Leger, imputes the general revolt of the nation, then far advanced, to the publishing of such design. . . . After acknowledging the receipt of those two letters, St. Leger useth these words: "The undue promulgation of that severe determination to extirpate the Irish and Papacy out of this kingdom, your Lordship rightly apprehends to be too

The rebellion was not, however, due to any single cause, but represented the accumulated wrongs and animosities of two generations. The influence of the ejected proprietors, who were wandering impoverished among the people, or who returned from military service in Spain; the rage of the septs, who had been deprived of their proprietary rights and outraged in their most cherished customs; the animosity which very naturally had grown up between the native population and the alien colonists planted in their old dominions; the new fanaticism which was rising under the preaching of priests and friars; all the long train of agrarian wrongs, from the massacre of Mullaghamast to the latest inquisitions of Wentworth; all the long succession of religious wrongs, from the Act of Uniformity of Elizabeth to the confiscation of the Irish College under Charles— all these things, together with the opportunity caused by the difficulties of England, contributed to the result. Behind the people lay the maddening recollections of the wars of Elizabeth, when their parents had been starved by thousands to death, when unresisting peasants, when women, when children, had been deliberately massacred, and when no quarter had been given to the prisoners. Before them lay the gloomy and almost certain prospect of banishment from the land which remained to them, of the extirpation of the religion which was fast becoming the passion as well as the consolation of their lives, of the sentence of death directed against any priest who dared to pray beside their bed of death. To the most sober and unimpassioned judgment, these fears were reasonable; but the Irish were at this time as far as possible from sober and unimpassioned. The air

unseasonably published; albeit I cannot conceive that any such rigorous way of forcing conscience and men's religion would ever have

been attempted or enterprised, but upon such an occasion of a general revolt of the Irish.". Carte's Ormond, i. 263.