was as yet only half done. The deputy persuaded James that a perline Girald be ailed It was twenty-seven years since one had been bes Ireland; but the vast preponderance of population property, viz ence was still on the side of the Catholics, ad to trek tr år great deal was to be done in the shape of pralaidary stages The deputy demanded, and easily obtained from the king, ample for these preparations, with which he undertook to secure a szitaj majority in both bosses Seventeen new counties had been formed the last parliament; but many of these would send Catholic repren dives, and it was by the creation of new boroughs that Chittez posed to overwhelm the Catholic rank and population of the or Forty new boroughs were accordingly created, many of them pu flages or scattered houses, inhabited only by some half dozen of u new Ulater settlers, and several of them not being incorporated until the writs had been inned No previous communication of the dan Commz parliament, or of the laws intended to be enacted, had been at pareant to Poyning's act and the Catholics justly apprehen led a de to impose fresh grievances upon them. A letter signed by six Cath lords of the Pale was accordingly addressed to the king, bat be tre their remonstrance with contempt. He pronounced their memoth : be a rash and insolent interference with his authority, and the lordputy was allowed to pack his parliament as he pleased. The first of strength was in the election of a speaker. Sir John Everard, who in resigned his position as justice of the king's bench, rather than take t oath of supremacy, was proposed by the recusants, and Sir John Dr. the attorney-general, by the court party. The proceedings w ensted were scandalous. The recusants deemed the numerical maj of their opponents to be factions and legal, as it really was, and in t absence of the court party in another room to be counted, according the forms then in use, they placed their own candidate in the speake chair. On the return of the court party into the house a tumulto scene took place. These placed sir John Davis in the lap of sir J Everard, and then pulled the latter out of the chair, tearing his garmaa in the act. The Catholic party thereupon seceded from parliament, a

• Of the 252 members returned. 125 were Protestants 101 belonged to the "recusant” or Cath in party, and 6 were absent. The Upper House consisted of 16 temporal barons, 25 Protestant pre lates, 5 viscounts, and 4 earis, of whom a considerable majority belonged to the court part Thwinder, observes Plowden, is, how so large a majority of Protestants was obtained, on

w very few of the Irish had adopted the new doctrines; not sixty, says the Ato down to the reign of James.

ATTAINDER OF O'NEILL, ETC.

503

sent a deputation to London to lay their complaints before the king, eight peers and about twice as many commoners being chosen for this purpose, parliament having in the meantime been prorogued.*

The reception given to the Catholic delegates was harsh and insulting. Two of the members, Talbot and Luttrell, were committed, one to the Tower, and the other to the Fleet prison; but ultimately James dismissed them after a severe rating in his own peculiar style,† and a commission of inquiry was granted; one of the concessions made being, that the members for boroughs incorporated after the writs were issued had no right to sit. In the subsequent sessions of this parliament, until it was dissolved in October, 1615, no further display of angry feelings between the two parties took place. There appeared, indeed, to have been mutual concessions. An intended penal law, of a very sweeping character, was not brought forward;‡ and while, on the other hand, large subsidies, which gratified the insatiable rapacity of the monarch, were voted, an act of oblivion and general pardon was passed in return; and the Irish in general were, for the first time, taken within the pale of the English law. But the measure which renders this parliament of James's most memorable was that for the attainder of Hugh O'Neill, Hugh Roe O'Donnell, sir Cahir O'Doherty, and several other Irish chiefs—an unjust and vindictive act for which the grounds were never proved, and which, as being sanctioned by the Catholic party in a suicidal spirit of compromise, assumed, remarks Mr. Moore, "a still more odious character, and left a stain upon the record of their proceedings during this reign."§

"It may be here remarked," observes Mr. Moore, "as one of the proofs of the sad sameness of Irish history, that nearly 200 years after these events, when, by the descendants of these Catholic lords and gentry, the same wrongs were still suffered, the same righteous cause to be upheld, it was by expedients nearly similar that they contrived to resist peaceably their persecutors. In the separate assembly formed by the recusants we find the prototype of the Catholic Association; while the large fund so promptly raised to defray the cost of the deputation to England was, in its spirit and national purpose, a forerunner of the Catholic Rent."— History of Ireland, vol. iv. p. 166.

This silly, pedantic despot, whom his flatterers styled the "British Solomon," and who has been lauded by Hume and others for his Irish legislation, taunted the Irish agents as "a body without a head; a headless body; you would be afraid to meet such a body in the streets; a body without a head to speak!" and he asked "what is it to you whether I make many or few boroughs. My council may consider the fitness if I require it; but if I made forty noblemen and four hundred boroughs-the more the merrier, the fewer the better cheer." As to his Irish government, he told them, there was nothing faulty in it, "unless they would have the kingdom of Ireland like the Kingdom of Heaven!" See his curious incoherent speech, which was addressed to the lords of the council in presence of the Irish delegates, given in full by Cox. See O'Sullevan's Hist. Cath. pp. 310-312. Ed. 1850.

§ It has been argued that the Irish chieftains possessed only the suzerainté and not the property of the soil; and that therefore the rights of their feudatories to the latter could not have been forfrited by the rebellion of the chiefs. See translator's note to De Beaumont's Ireland, p. 57. Mr. O'Connell, in his Memoir of Ireland (p. 172), argues that James undermined his own title to the

A.D. 1616.*-Sir Arthur Chichester having completed h received as his reward an additional grant of Irish lands, to the title of baron of Belfast, withdrew from the Irish gove was replaced by sir Oliver St. John, afterwards created vi dison, whose instructions were to enforce with extreme inflicted on Catholics for absence from the Protestant s penal tax was not only most galling to the feelings of Cath most oppressive in a pecuniary point of view; for while t each time was only twelve pence according to the law, it w to ten shillings by the fees always exacted for clerks an the appropriation of the penalty to works of charity, as th was shamefully evaded, as it was argued that the poor b themselves were not fit to receive the money, but " like penalty themselves."

In 1617 a proclamation was issued for the expulsion regular clergy, and the city of Waterford was deprived and liberties in consequence of the spirited and steadfast oath of supremacy by its corporation. In 1622 Henry C Faulkland, was sent over as lord deputy, and at the c inauguration, the celebrated James Ussher, then Prote Meath, and soon after made archbishop of Armagh, tal the words of St. Paul: "He beareth not the sword vered a fanatical harangue, which filled the Catholics finally, in the following year, another proclamation wa banishment of all the "Popish clergy," regular and them to depart from the kingdom within forty days, an one to hold intercourse with them after that period. penal code, although then only in its infancy, rapidly acme of cruelty which it afterwards reached.

six confiscated counties of Ulster by declaring that the exiled earls had n possessions forfeited. These, however, are but speculative objections. voted the attainder of O'Neill, they were chiefly Anglo-Irish.

The Four Masters desert us at this date, under which they give the of Hugh O'Neill; and for the few preceding years, from the death of E information they afford is very scanty.

† Rom. xiii. 4. For Ussher's Puritanism, see note, p. 501.

P. O'Sullevan Beare, who wrote towards the close of the reign of not know the number of ecclesiastics then in Ireland; but he was awa through its spies, ascertained the names of 1,160 priests, regular and se his note on this passage (Hist. Cath. p. 298), says, he once saw a list in Ireland at this time, but that at present it is not easily accessible were 120 Franciscan friars, of whom 35 were preachers in Ireland: be their studies at Louvain when he wrote (about 1616). It is said in

WHOLESALE SPOLIATION IN LEINSTER.

505

The systematic rapine called "plantation" was so successful in Ulster, that James was resolved to extend it into other parts of the kingdom. For this purpose he appointed a commission of inquiry to scrutinize the titles and determine the rights of all the lands in Leinster, that province being the next theatre of this iniquitous spoliation; and so rapid was the progress of the commissioners, that in a little time land to the extent of 385,000 acres more was placed at the king's disposal for distribution. Old and obsolete claims, some of them dating as far back as Henry II., were revived; advantage was taken of trivial flaws and minute informalities. The ordinary principles of justice were set at naught; perjury, fraud, and the most infamous arts of deceit were resorted to; and, as even Leland tells us, "there are not wanting proofs of the most iniquitous practices of hardened cruelty, of vile perjury, and scandalous subornation employed to despoil the fair and unfortunate proprietor of his inheritance."* From Leinster the system was extended into Connaught, but its principal operation in the latter province was reserved for the next reign. James I. died on the 27th of March, 1625; and in consequence of his wholesale plunder, oppression, and persecution of the Irish, left a woeful legacy to his unfortunate successor.†

that there were but four Dominicans in Ireland at the time of Elizabeth's death. The Jesuits, though not numerous, were exceedingly active. F. Verdier reported that there were 53 Fathers, 3 coadjutors, and 11 novices of the Company of Jesus in Ireland in 1659. The affairs of the Irish Church were chiefly managed by the four Archbishops, the succession of whom was well kept up by the Pope. These appointed Vicars-General, with Apostolic authority in the suffragan dioceses, and these, again, appointed the parish priests. O'Sullevan gives the names of the four Archbishops when he wrote (1618) as, Eugene Magauran, of Dublin; David O'Carny, of Cashel; Peter Lombard, of Armagh; and Florence O'Mulconry, of Tuam. He mentions, as then established, the Irish seminaries of Salamanca, Compostella, and Seville, in Spain; Lisbon, in Portugal; Louvain, Antwerp, and Tournay, in Flanders; and Bordeaux, Toulouse, and Paris, in France. Irish students were also received in other colleges, but in some of the places just mentioned the seminaries for the Irish were not yet regularly founded.

* History of Ireland, B. iv. c. 8. See as an illustration of this scandalous plunder, and of the unprincipled ingenuity and perseverance of the "discoverers," as they were called, the account of the spoliation of the O'Byrnes of Ranelagh, in Wicklow, as given in Taylor's History of the Civil Wars in Ireland, vol. i. pp. 243, 246, and quoted in full in O'Connell's Memoir of Ireland, pp. 161, &c. The native septs of the Queen's County were transplanted to Kerry; and in many instances proprietors, as in the case of the Farralls, were dispossessed without receiving any compensation.

† Some of the minor crimes of James's Government against the Irish, are thus summed up by Leland (B. iv. c. 8.): "Extortions and oppressions of the soldiers in various excursions from their quarters, for levying the king's rents, or supporting the civil power; a rigorous and tyrannical execution of martial law in time of peace; a dangerous and unconstitutional power assumed by the Privy Council in deciding causes determinable by common law; the severe treatment of witnesses and jurors in the Castle-chamber, whose evidence or verdicts had been displeasing to the State; the grievous exaction of the established clergy for the occasional duties of their functions; and the severity of the ecclesiastical courts." As to the punishment of jurors, it was laid down as a principle by Chichester that the proper tribunal to punish jurors, who would not find for the king on “sufficient evidence," was the Star-chamber; sometimes they were "pillored with loss of ears, and bored through the tongue, and sometimes marked on the forehead with a hot iron, &c."-Commons' Journal, vol. i. p. 507.

CHAPTER XXXVII

REIGN OF CHARLES I.

Hopes of the Catholics on the accession of Charles, and corresponding alarm Intolerant declaration of the Protestant bishops.-The "graces."-The roy Renewed persecution of the Catholics.-Outrage on a Catholic congregati Confiscation of Catholic schools and chapels.-Government of Lord Wen He summons a Parliament-His shameful duplicity.-The Commission for Connaught.-Atrocious spoliation in the name of law.-Jury-packing. Galway jury-Their punishment.-Plantation of Ormond, &c.-Fresh Parliament.-Strafford raises an army of Irish Catholics-He is impeache execution.-Causes of the great insurrection of 1641.-Threats of the Pu Catholic religion in Ireland.-The Irish abroad-Their numbers and in ments among the Irish gentry-Roger O'More-Lord Maguire-Sir Phel from Cardinal Richelieu.-Officers in the King's interest combine with covery of the conspiracy.-Arrest of Lord Maguire and MacMahon.-A outbreak in Ulster-Its first successes-Proclamation of Sir Phelim O'N sion from the King-Gross exaggeration of the cruelties of the Irish.remonstrance from Cavan.-The massacre of Island Magee.-The fable of the Catholics refuted.-Proclamations of the Lords Justices.-The Catholic the Pale insulted and repulsed.-Scheme of a general confiscation.-Ap Irish to the Pale-They take Mellifont and lay siege to Drogheda.-Sir ties in Wicklow.-Efforts of the Catholic gentry to communicate with t troopers-The gentry of the Pale compelled to stand on their defence.Crofty. The lords of the Pale take up arms.-The insurrection spreads naught.-Royal proclamation.-Conduct of the English Parliament.-Siege of Drogheda raised.-The battle of Kilrush.-The general asse

[FROM A.D. 1626 TO A.D. 1642.]

HE well-known moderation of Charle Irish Catholics with hope of a mitigati ance under which they groaned, but alarm was manifested by the Protesta mercy should be extended to their op Faulkland, who was still lord deputy, lics to send agents to the king, encour pect some favor in return for pecun taking this implied promise for a reali have boasted too readily of the relief pated. This kindled the zeal of all cla The Protestant pulpits resounded wit the subject; and archbishop Ussher, v of the state church, joined in a protest, declaring