ment, and granted his protection to the students of the new seminary, some years after its first establishment; but the dawn of public instruction was greatly clouded by the sad examples of fanaticism which some of the ecclesiastical colonists exhibited at this period. Charges of heresy were brought by private resentment and vengeance against the most distinguished families, and the punishment of the church made instrumental to the gratification of malice and ambition. Richard Ledred, bishop of Ossory, a man of violent and vindictive passions, encouraged the persecutions of the fanatic; and charges of heresy were brought against the magistrate as well as the peasant, who in many instances were destroyed by the faggot, or withered away in a prison. The bishop of Ossory himself became a victim in turn, and was obliged to fly the country which he had visited with the fury of his superstition.

We do not find that the accession of Edward III. to the British throne, contributed in any degree to restrain the violence of faction, or to prevent each English baron from pursuing, as usual, his own personal schemes of ambition. He despised the authority of the deputy, and treated with equal contempt the royal mandate of Edward, who wrote letters to the principal barons, enjoining them, on their allegiance, to pay due obedience to the chief governor, Thomas Fitzjohn, earl of Kildare.

Private wars continued to be waged as usual; and the calling a name, or offering a personal insult, involved the Irish chiefs, with their respective followers, in the most sanguinary contests. Hence the destructive battles of Maurice of Desmond with John de la Poer. The king ́commanded them to lay down their arms; and at length the apprehension that the native Irish would take advantage of their divisions, put an end to hostilities which desolated the English territories.

Another effort is now made by the native Irish to enjoy the shelter of British law, and no longer to be the vic

tims of the ambition and avarice of the contending barons, who were perpetually oppressing the Irish, and goading them to insurrection, in order to plunder them of their properties. The Irish petition for the privileges of English subjects, and their petition is insolently rejected by an Anglo-Irish parliament, whose monopoly could only be preserved by the persecution of the people. The conse quence of such contumelious treatment was a most formidable insurrection of the Irish; and so formidable was this Irish insurrection, that the power which could not be conquered by the sword, they practised on by bribery. Maurice of Desmond was invited by the English to join their forces, and promises of the most alluring kind were held out to this Irish prince, if he deserted the ranks of his countrymen. They created him earl of Desmond, and bestowed new territories on him.

The Irish, with the celebrated O'Brien at their head, continued to harass the English settlement, and almost threatened it with annihilation. Sir Anthony Lacy was appointed to the government of the colony. He determined, by a prosecution of the war, to reduce the Irish, as well as to disconcert that formidable confederacy formed by the English barons to circumscribe his power. He summoned a parliament to meet him at Dublin: his order was neglected; he seized the earl of Desmond, Mandeville, Walter de Burgo, William and Walter Birmingham.

It was about this period, (1330) that Edward III. declared his intention of visiting Ireland. He issued some ordinances for the better regulation of the kingdom, and the more impartial administration of justice: he resumed all the Irish grants made during the reign of his mother, and her favourite, Mortimer.

Notwithstanding the magnitude of the preparations which Edward made for his visit to Ireland, it soon appeared that his real object was the invasion of Scotland, and, imitating the example of his illustrious grandfather, to re

cover the dominion of that important kingdom. Ireland was thus left to be preyed upon by new competitors for her riches, and new adventurers for plunder. The denunciations of a rigorous government subsided into the timid concessions of a weak and impotent administration; and the assassination of the earl of Ulster completed the despair of all those who trembled for the security of the English colonists. Many of the English barons declared for the Irish; and the governor had not only to contend with the common enemy, but with the treason of those chieftains on whose allegiance he thought he might reasonably rely. He seized two of the noble house of De la Poer; he confined Maurice Fitzmaurice of Kerry, and visited with severe punishment those who had disturbed the peace, of Leinster.

Such a state of things as we have been describing, was ill calculated to enrich the treasury of the ambitious and martial Edward. His Irish resources were far below his expectations; and his disappointment at the alarming deficiency so extreme, that he withdrew all confidence from those of his Irish servants who had the administration of Irish affairs. He therefore resolved on the most violent and offensive measures: all the principal ministers and officers of government were discharged; the justices of the king's bench and common pleas. He issued the most rigid and severe ordinances for the future regulation of his possessions in Ireland; and by one very remarkable order, he withdrew his confidence entirely from all those Englishmen who held any Irish properties, under the impression that they were interested in the distractions of that unhappy country, which gave them an opportunity of increasing the extent of their territories, and plundering the devoted natives. The spirit and purport of this order is so very singular, and so well describes the total sacrifice of the English interests by the colonists to their own aggrandizement, that we shall set it down here for the satisfaction of the reader.

"The king to his trusty and beloved John D'Arcy, justiciary of Ireland, greeting.

"Whereas it appeareth to us and to our council, for many reasons, that our service shall the better and more profitably be conducted in the said land, by English officers, having revenues and possessions in England, than by Irish or Englishmen married and estated in Ireland, and without any possessions in our realm of England; we enjoin you that you diligently inform yourself of all our officers greater or lesser within our land of Ireland aforesaid; and that all such officers beneficed, married, and estated in the said land, and having nothing in England, be removed from their offices: that you place and substitute in their room other fit Englishmen, having lands, tenements, and benefices in England; and that you cause the said offices for the future to be executed by such Englishmen, and none other, any order of ours to you made in contrarywise notwithstanding,"

The effect of such an order was the immediate disaffection of all the principal barons of the colony, whose pride was wounded, and whose past services were thus rewarded by the most wanton and contumeliqus insult. The chief governor, sir John Morris, undistinguished by birth or by property, deemed it necessary to summon a parliament in Dublin on this critical occasion; but the lords whom he had to govern, were determined not to be insulted with impunity. They therefore embarrassed, by every possible expedient, the administration of the colony. Under the direction of Desmond, they convened a parliament at Kilkenny; they styled themselves the prelates, nobles, and commons of the land; and prepared a remonstrance to be transmitted to the British monarch. In this remonstrance the barons charged the viceroy with a base and unprincipled neglect of the king's interests; the desertion of his castles; the abandonment of his territories to the native Irish, which cost so much treasure and blood in the ac

quisition; the insolent exercise of authority over the nobles of the land; the plunder and extortion of their properties, and an infamous monopoly of the wealth of the country. They complained that they had been misrepresented to the throne, by mean, ignorant, and avaricious adventurers. from England; that they had been ever faithful in their allegiance to his majesty; that they had borne arms in his cause at their own expense; and that, in return for such services, they had been plundered of their properties, and insulted in their feelings. To this remonstrance, Edward replied in a gracious and condescending tone;-he promised a milder administration, and a future correction of the evils complained of by his subjects.

The remonstrance, which we have just mentioned as be ing presented by the English lords of the colony, against the rapacity of the new adventurers, is a good picture of the oppression and sufferings of which the native Irish could have complained, and with the perpetration of which they might have justly charged those very lords, who were now swept away by the new tide of rapacity, which rushed in from the chief source of misfortune. It was a just retalation for the barbarities inflicted on the ancient Irish, and the great retribution of Providence for the miseries which they had inflicted on an unoffending people;" Whatever measure you measure unto others, the same measure shall be measured unto you."

In the course of this history, it will be found that one wave of English enterprise washed away the preceding; that every fresh swarm of English adventurers annihilated their predecessors, and gave them the exact measure which was given to the ancient inhabitants.

The dissensions and discontents were but little diminished by the royal promise to redress the grievances of the remonstrancers. The spirit of monopoly among the new rulers of the pale, counteracted the purpose and interests of the monarch; and the same jealousies between the old

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