by attending the heretic worship, he at the same time admonished and required them to refuse the Oath of Allegiance, and all such oaths; exhorting them rather to submit to all tortures, and even to death itself, than to consent to take them. This goodly advice was in the year following confirmed in a second brief of the same pontiff, and afterwards again repeated and enforced by the succeeding pope, Urban;† and it was also adopted and acted upon by some of the misguided followers of such counsellors, not however without a protesting voice of remonstrance from the more temperate supporters of the religion of Rome. The acceptance of the king's Oath was on the other hand enforced by an act of the Gunpowder Plot parliament, which began to sit at Westminster on the 5th of November, 1606, and was continued on to the month of May following. A. D. 1606. About this time there occurred a circum- Case of Robert exercising Ireland. stance worthy of being briefly noticed here, as Lalor, prosethrowing some light on the penal statutes which cuted for had been recently enacted against the authority foreign juof the Bishop of Rome, and showing that they risdiction in formed no new feature in the constitution of the realm, but were only a re-enactment, with a new sanction, of laws already passed at a much more ancient period. The republication of the A. D. 1606. Act of Uniformity of the second year of Queen Elizabeth by the authority of the Lord Deputy, Sir Arthur Chichester, was followed, as we have seen, by a proclamation ordering the papal clergy to leave the kingdom. This act, however severe in appearance, was administered so mildly as to produce but little effect. One person, however, named Robert Lalor, who was claiming for himself, by the pope's authority, the title of Vicar General of Dublin, Kildare, and Ferns, was apprehended in 1606 for disobedience to the proclamation here mentioned, and indicted upon the statute of Elizabeth, for upholding foreign His volun- jurisdiction within this realm. But he humbled nition of the himself to the court, and made a voluntary conroyal supre fession upon oath, that he was not a lawful vicar general in the dioceses aforesaid, that the king was supreme governor in all causes ecclesiastical and civil in this realm, and that no bishops made by the pope's authority had any rightful power to resist the lawful prelates of the country. tary recog macy, made His duplicity, and second trial. On this confession the court, adopting a milder disposition towards Lalor, would have proceeded to give orders for his liberation; but his friends, to whom he denied in private what he had done publicly, raised now "a religious cry" against the government, and extolled Lalor as a confessor who was undergoing persecution for the sake of conscience and the faith; whereupon, 66 to satisfy the Irish how grossly their credulity was A. D. 1606. imposed upon," the prosecution on the statute of the second of Elizabeth was quashed, and a new prosecution instituted on the statute of Pramunire (as it was called,) passed in the sixteenth year of Richard II. c. 5; and on this new indictment he was once more tried and found guilty. But the sentence of the law, though pronounced upon him, was never, it appears, carried into execution. sion and trial. The plan of indicting Lalor a second time of the occaupon the Act of Præmunire, rather than upon meaning of any new statute, passed since the Reformation, this new was adopted, as we are informed by Sir John Davis, the Attorney-General of that day, in order to convince the Irish, "that even popish kings and parliaments thought the pope an usurper of those exorbitant jurisdictions which he claimed," and of those unreasonable encroachments, "which tended to nothing less than to make our kings his lacqueys, our nobles his vassals, and our commons his slaves and villains." As for the individual whose case is here noticed, "he," says a learned Roman Catholic writer, "was justly prosecuted, not persecuted, on the Catholic statute of Præmunire, enacted in the Catholic reign of Richard II., for the • O'Conor's Historical Address, ii., quoted in Phelan's Policy, pp. 208, 209, notes. A. D. 1607, security of a Catholic state." ... "Never," adds the same respectable authority, "did man incur the penalty of the law more deservedly than Lalor."* Visitation of three In the summer of the year 1607, the Lord Counties of Deputy, Sir Arthur Chichester, accompanied by the north by certain other members of the Irish government, Deputy, &c. and attended by a sufficient military guard, set A. D. 1607. out (on the 17th of July) to make a visitation of the Lord Ruinous condition of the parish this time. three counties in Ulster, namely, Monaghan, Fermanagh, and Cavan; which, comprehending the wildest and most unsettled parts of the north, appeared to require special attention at that time. A letter, still extant, written by Sir John Davies, who was one of the party, contains an account of the expedition, and furnishes us at the same time with some interesting particulars relative to the state of the Church and country in those places which they visited.† This letter, first mentioning incidentally the state of the churches of Ireland in general, churches at informs us that so little care had been taken for the re-edifying and repairing of them, that the greatest part, even of those within the Pale, were lying still in ruins, "so as the common people, whereof many, without doubt, would + Letter from * O'Conor, ut sup., and Cox, ii. 10, 11. Sir John Davies to Robert Earl of Salisbury, 1607. Tracts, p. 722, Dublin, 1787. Mant, i. 353, seqq. ا وو bents in conform themselves, have no place to resort A. D. 1607. unto, where they may hear divine service." Then as for Monaghan, the first of the three The incumcounties visited by them, there "It appeared Monaghan that the churches, for the most part, are utterly Romish, but waste, . . . . . and that their incumbents are stances popish priests, instituted by bishops authorised ready to from Rome, yet many of them, like other old priests of Queen Mary's time in England, ready to yield unto conformity." in many in conform. non-resi Monaghan is in the diocese of Clogher, The bishop which had been without a bishop from A.D. dent. 1570 to A D. 1605, when King James had appointed to the united sees of Derry, Raphoe, and Clogher, (comprehending within their limits the greatest part of Ulster,) George Montgomery, a native of Scotland. But this prelate, though it was now two years since he had been appointed, had not yet come to reside and attend to his episcopal duties; which, says Sir J. Davies, "hath been the chief cause that no course hath been hitherto taken to reduce this poor people to Christianity, and therefore majus peccatum habet." of the country. So desolate and uncivilised was the state of Wildness the country at this time, that the roads by which the Lord Deputy and his company journeyed For more on the state of the Irish churches in 1633, vide Appendix, lxvi. inf., at the end of the article. VOL. III. B |