CHAPTER I
Anti-Catholic Penal Laws—Their Drastic, Brutal and Absurd Provisions—Professional Informers, Called “Priest-Hunters”
WE now approach a period of Irish history from which we would gladly escape, if we could; a period degrading to Ireland, disgraceful to England, and shocking to humanity. We are about to deal with the dark and bloody period of the revived penal code, in Ireland, following fast upon the capitulation of Limerick. Many writers have extolled the fair-mindedness and liberality of William III, but his course toward Ireland does not sustain the justice of their eulogies. That he was an indifferentist in matters of religion is not doubted, yet he permitted persecution for conscience’ sake in his Irish dominion. That he was an able man has not been disputed, yet he permitted English jealousy to destroy the trade and industries of His own supporters in Ireland, thereby driving thousands on thousands of the Irish dissenters to the American colonies, which their descendants, in 1775-83, did so much to make “free and independent.” We can find nothing to admire in the Irish policy of William III. Had he been an honest bigot, a fanatic on the subject of religion, we could understand his toleration of the legislative abominations which made the Irish Catholic a helot on his native soil. Had he been an imbecile we could understand how English plausibility might have imposed upon him in the matter of Irish Protestant commerce. However, not much of moral stamina could be expected from a man who estranged his wife and his sister-in-law, Anne, from their own father; or from a nephew, and son-in-law, that did not scruple to play the cuckoo and eject his own uncle and father-in-law from the royal nest of England. Add to this his heartless policy toward the Macdonalds of Glencoe, in Scotland, the order for whose massacre he countersigned himself, and we find ourselves utterly unable to give William of Orange credit for sincerity, liberality, or common humanity. He was personally courageous, a fair general, and a cautious statesman. These about summed up his good qualities. But he interposed no objection when, notwithstanding the solemn civil articles of Limerick, he permitted the estates of the adherents of King James, to whom his Lords Justices, by royal sanction, guaranteed immunity, to be confiscated.
Mitchel, a Protestant in belief, says in his “History of Ireland,” page 3: “The first distinct breach of the Articles of Limerick was perpetrated by King William and his Parliament in England, just two months after those articles were signed. King William was in the Netherlands when he heard of the surrender of Limerick, and, at once, hastened to London. Three days later he summoned a Parliament. Very early in the session, the English House of Commons, exercising its customary power of binding Ireland by acts passed in London, sent up to the House of Lords a bill providing that no person should sit in the Irish Parliament, nor should hold any Irish office, civil, military, or ecclesiastical, nor should practice law or medicine in Ireland, till he had first taken the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, and subscribed to the declaration against transubstantiation. The law was passed, only reserving the right [of practice] to such lawyers and physicians as had been within the walls of Galway and Limerick when those towns capitulated.” Thenceforward there were repeated violations of the treaty, during the reign of William and Mary, although the penal laws did not reach the acme of their crushing severity until the reigns of their immediate successors, Queen Anne, George I, and George II. Lord Macaulay himself, who does not admit that William III was ever wrong, acknowledges, in his “History of England,” that “the Irish Roman Catholics complained, and with but too much reason, that, at a later period, the Treaty of Limerick was violated.” The main opposition to the confirmation of the treaty came, as might be expected, from the party of Protestant ascendency in Ireland, which had in view “the glory of God,” and wholesale confiscation of Catholic property. Their horror of what they called “Popery” was strongly influenced by a pious greed for cheap real estate. There were, of course, many noble exceptions to this mercenary rule among the Protestants of Ireland, even in the blackest period of “the penal days.” If there had not been, the Catholics must have been exterminated. It is only fair to say that the majority of the poorer Protestant Irish—particularly the Dissenters—had little or no part in framing the penal code, and that many members of the Irish House of Lords, including Protestant bishops, indignantly protested against the formal violation of the Articles of Limerick, contained in the act of the “Irish” Parliament, passed in 1695.
Lord Sydney, William’s Lord Lieutenant in Ireland, summoned the first Irish Parliament of his master’s reign, in 1692, and this was the only Parliament, except that called together by King James in 1689, which had met in Ireland in six-and-twenty years. No act of Catholic disqualification for Parliament existed in Ireland at that time, and, therefore, a few Catholic lords and commoners presented themselves, on summons, and took their seats. They had forgotten that the “paternal” English Parliament had, in 1691, provided for such an emergency, and were taken aback when the clerks of Parliament presented to them “the oath of supremacy, declaring the King of England to be head of the Church, and affirming the sacrifice of the Mass to be damnable.” Mitchel says, further, of what followed: “The oath was put to each member of both Houses, and the few Catholics present at once retired, so that the Parliament, when it proceeded to business, was purely Protestant. Here, then, ended the last vestige of constitutional right for the Catholics; from this date, and for generations to come, they could no longer consider themselves a part of the existing body politic of their native land, and the division [of the Irish] into two nations became definite. There was the dominant nation, consisting of the British colony, and the subject nation, consisting of five-sixths of the population, who had, therefore, no more influence upon public affairs than have the red Indians of the United States.” In order to more fully reduce the Catholics of Ireland to the condition described, an act was passed by the Irish Parliament in 1697 which provided that “a Protestant marrying a Catholic was disabled from sitting or voting in either House of Parliament.” We may add that, following up this policy, the same Parliament, thirty years later, fearing that the Catholics were not even yet sufficiently effaced from political life, passed another bill by which it was enacted that “no Catholic shall be entitled, or admitted, to vote at the election of any member to serve in Parliament, as a knight, citizen, or burgess; or at the election of any magistrate for any city or other town corporate; any law, statute, or usage to the contrary notwithstanding.”
Mitchel, commenting on the severity of the penal laws, presents a curiously contradictory situation in the Ireland of King William’s time when he says: “But though the inhabitants of Ireland were now, counting from 1692, definitively divided into two castes, there arose immediately, strange to say, a strong sentiment of Irish nationality—not, indeed, among the depressed Catholics; they were done with national sentiment and aspiration for a time—but the Protestants of Ireland had lately grown numerous, wealthy, and strong. Their numbers had been largely increased by English settlers coming to enjoy the plunder of the forfeited estates, and very much by conversions, or pretended conversions, of Catholics, who had recanted their faith to save their property or their position in society, and who generally altered or disguised their family names when these had too Celtic a sound. The Irish Protestants also prided themselves on having saved the kingdom for William and the ‘Ascendancy,’ and having now totally put down the ancient nation under their feet, they aspired to take its place, to rise from a colony to a nation, and to assert the dignity of an independent kingdom.”
Even the Irish Protestant Parliament of 1692 quarreled with Lord Lieutenant Sydney over a revenue bill, which originated in London, and which it rejected, although it passed another bill, having a like origin, on the ground of emergency. During the debate on these measures, several members denied the right of England to tax Ireland without her consent, and insisted that all revenue bills, which called for Irish taxation, should originate in Ireland, not in England. This bold spirit angered Lord Sydney, who immediately prorogued that Parliament, not, however, before he made an overbearing speech, in which he rebuked the action of the members and haughtily asserted the supremacy of the British Parliament over that of Ireland. His remarks left a sting in Protestant Ireland and served to strengthen, rather than weaken, the national sentiment alluded to by Mitchel.
In 1693, King James the Vacillating, then a pensioner of the King of France, at St. Germain, issued a declaration to his former subjects of England in which he made humiliating promises, at variance with his previous record, and in which, among other things, he promised if restored to the throne to keep inviolate the Act of Settlement, which deprived his Catholic supporters in Ireland of their estates! This perfidious document aroused great indignation among the Irish military exiles, and James, through his English advisers in France, attempted to smooth matters over by promising that, in the event of his success, he would recompense all who might suffer by his act, by giving them equivalents. Lord Middleton, a Scotch peer, is held chiefly responsible for having led King James into this disgraceful transaction—the most blameful of his unfortunate career. “There was no such promise [of recompense] in the declaration” (to the English), says the historian recently quoted, “but, in truth, the Irish troops in the army of King Louis were, at that time, too busy in camp and field, and too keenly desirous to meet the English in battle, to pay much attention to anything coming from King James. They had had enough of ‘Righ Seamus’ at the Boyne Water.”
Lord Sydney, although inimical to the claim of Irish Parliamentary independence, was rather friendly to the persecuted Irish Catholics, and was, therefore, at the request of the “Ascendancy” faction, speedily recalled, not, however, before, after two proroguements, he had dissolved the Parliament convened in 1692. Three Lords Justices—Lord Capel, Sir Cyril Wyche, and Mr. Duncombe—were given the government of Ireland in his stead, but, owing to serious dissensions among themselves, Capel was finally appointed Lord Lieutenant, and, in 1695, summoned a new Parliament to meet in Dublin. This assembly was destined to be infamous. Its first act was to bring up the articles of the Treaty of Limerick for “confirmation,” and it “confirmed” them by vetoing all the important and agreeing to all the trivial provisions. The enumeration of all the penal laws passed by this Parliament would be tedious in the extreme, and a bare outline will suffice to show their demoralizing tendency. It was enacted that Catholic schoolmasters were forbidden to teach, either publicly or privately, under severe penalty; and the parents of Catholic children were prohibited from sending them to be educated abroad. All Catholics were required to surrender their arms, and, in order to enforce the act more thoroughly, “right of search” was given to magistrates, so that Catholic householders could be disturbed at any hour of the day or night, their bedrooms invaded, and the women of their family subjected to exposure and insult.
Notwithstanding the clause in the Treaty of Limerick which was supposed to secure the Catholic landholders in certain counties in the possession of their property, Parliament made a clean sweep by confiscating the property of all, to the extent of over a million acres, so that now, at long run, after three series of confiscations, there remained in Catholic hands less than one-seventh of the entire surface of the island. The Protestant one-sixth owned all the rest.
It was agreed not to seriously disturb the parish priests, who were incumbents at the time of the treaty, but no curates were allowed them, and they were compelled to register their names, like ticket-of-leave men, in a book furnished by government. They had, also, to give security for their “good conduct,” and there were other insulting exactions—the emanation of bitter hearts and narrow brains. All Catholic prelates, the Jesuits, monks, and “regular clergy,” of whatever order, were peremptorily ordered to quit Ireland by May 1, 1698. If any returned after that date, they were to be arrested for high treason, “tried,” and, of course, condemned and executed. The object was to leave the Catholic people without spiritual guides, except Protestants, after the “tolerated” parish priests had passed away; but, in spite of the penal enactment, a large number of devoted proscribed bishops and priests remained in Ireland, and the prelates administered holy orders to young clerical students, who, like themselves, had defied penalties and risked their lives for the service of God and the consolation of their suffering people.
In order to still further humiliate the unfortunate Irish Catholics, this Parliament of bigots decreed that no Catholic chapel should be furnished with either bell or belfry. Such smallness would seem incredible in our age, but the enactments stand out, in all their hideousness, in the old statutes of the Irish Parliament, still preserved in the government archives in Dublin and London. It was this Parliament that decreed, further, that no Catholic could possess a horse of or over the value of £5 sterling. On offering that sum, or anything over it, any Protestant could become owner of the animal.
The Irish peers who protested against this tyranny were Lords Londonderry, Tyrone, and Duncannon, the Barons Ossory, Limerick, Killaloe, Kerry, Howth, Kingston, and Strabane, and the Protestant bishops of Kildare, Elphin, Derry, Clonfert, and Killala—to whom be eternal honor.
But the penal laws were not yet completed. They had just about begun. In 1704, when the Duke of Ormond, grandson of the Ormond of Cromwellian days, became viceroy for Queen Anne, another Irish Ascendancy Parliament enacted, among other things, that the eldest son of a Catholic, by becoming Protestant, could become the owner of his father’s land, if he possessed any, and the father become only a life tenant. If any child, of any age above infancy, declared itself a Protestant, it was ordered placed under Protestant guardianship, and the father was compelled to pay for its education and support. If the wife of a Catholic turned Protestant, she could claim a third of his property and separate maintenance. Catholics were prohibited from being guardians of their own children, to the end that, when they died, the helpless ones might be brought up as Protestants.
Catholics were debarred from buying land, or taking a freehold lease for life, or a for a longer period than thirty-one years. No Catholic heir to a former owner was allowed to accept property that came to him by right of lineal descent, or by process of bequest. If any Protestant could prove that the profit on the farm of a Catholic exceeded one-third of the rent paid by the latter, the informer could take immediate possession of the land.
We have already alluded to the measures taken to exclude Catholics from civil and military service, by operation of the odious test oaths, which were also used to prevent them from entering Parliament, and from even voting for members of Parliament, although the latter had to be Protestants in order to be eligible. The Irish Dissenters—Presbyterians and others—were also subjected to the test-oath indignity, which, together with the tyrannical restrictions on trade, imposed by the English and servile Irish Parliament, drove many thousands of them to America. The Irish Presbyterians, in particular, resented the “test” and “schism” acts, and refused to apply to Episcopal bishops for license to teach in schools; or to receive the sacrament after the fashion of the Church of England. Rewards were held out for all who would reveal to the government the names of Catholics, or others, who might violate the provisions of the barbaric laws summarized in this chapter. The scale of the rewards, as given by McGee and other authors, is a curious study. Thus, “for discovering an archbishop, bishop, vicar-general, or other person exercising any foreign ecclesiastical jurisdiction, £50; for discovering each ‘regular’ clergyman and each ‘secular’ clergyman, not registered, £20, and for discovering each ‘Popish’ schoolmaster, or usher, £10.” If any person refused to give evidence of the residence of any proscribed person, he was fined £20, or else had to go to prison for a year. Many noble-hearted Protestants who, in spite of penal laws, loved their Catholic fellow-countrymen, suffered pains and penalties, under these enactments, and became objects of hatred to the more malignant section of their co-religionists, who were after the Catholic spoils. Thus, public distrust became epidemic, and the infamous “reward” policy begot, as a natural result, a host of professional informers, whose shocking avocation was mainly exercised in the spying out of the places of concealment of proscribed prelates and priests, and who are still remembered in Ireland as “priest-hunters.” These malignants also directed their efforts vigorously against the teachers of “hedge-schools”—that is to say, schools held in the open air, generally under the shelter of a tall hedge, or on the edge of a wood, and presided over by some wandering schoolmaster, who bravely risked liberty, and often life, in teaching the Catholic youth of Ireland the rudiments of education.
There existed a mean “toleration” of Catholic worship, in parishes whose priests were “registered,” according to the provisions of the penal code, but, in parishes where the priests were not registered, and they were numerous, priests and people, who wished to celebrate and assist at the consoling sacrifice of the Mass, had to retire to ocean cave, or mountain summit, or rocky gorge, in order to guard against surprise and massacre. The English government of the day did not scruple to lend its soldiers to the priest-hunters, to enable the latter to more effectively accomplish their odious mission; just as in our day it has lent the military to the sheriffs to carry out those cruel evictions which the late Mr. Gladstone called “sentences of death.” It was the custom to place sentinels around the places where Mass was being celebrated, but, despite of this precaution, the human sleuthhounds occasionally crept unobserved upon their unarmed victims—for then, as now, the Irish were systematically disarmed—and often slew priest and people at the rude altar stones, called still by the peasantry “Mass rocks.”
So great was the enforced exodus of priests from Ireland, at this awful period of its history, that, says McGee, “in Rome 72,000 francs annually were allotted for the maintenance of the fugitive Irish clergy, and, during the first three months of 1699, three remittances from the Holy Father, amounting to 90,000 livres, were placed in the hands of the Nuncio at Paris for the temporary relief of the fugitives in France and Flanders. It may also be added here that, till the end of the eighteenth century, an annual charge of 1,000 crowns was borne by the Papal treasury for the encouragement of Catholic poor schools in Ireland.”
Of the penal code which produced this dreadful condition of affairs, in and out of Ireland, Dr. Samuel Johnson, the great English scholar and philosopher, said, “They are more grievous than all the Ten Pagan persecutions of the Christians.”
Edmund Burke, the illustrious Irish statesman, who passed most of his career in the British Parliament, and was, of course, a Protestant, or he could not have sat there, denounced them, substantially, as the most diabolical engine of oppression and demoralization ever used against a people or ever devised by “the perverted ingenuity of man.”
And the Protestant and English historian, Godkin, who compiled Cassell’s “History of Ireland,” for English readers, says of the penal laws: “The eighteenth century was the era of persecution in which the law did the work of the sword, more effectually and more safely. There was established a code framed with almost diabolical ingenuity, to extinguish natural affection, to foster perfidy and hypocrisy, to petrify conscience, to perpetuate brutal ignorance, to facilitate the work of tyranny, by rendering the vices of slavery inherent and natural in the Irish character, and to make Protestantism almost irredeemably odious as the monstrous incarnation of all moral perversions.” This honest Englishman grows indignant when he says, in continuation, “Too well did it accomplish its deadly work on the intellects, morals, and physical condition of a people, sinking in degeneracy from age to age, till all manly spirit, all virtuous sense of personal independence and responsibility, was nearly extinct, and the very features, vacant, timid, cunning, and unreflective, betrayed the crouching slave within.... Having no rights or franchises, no legal protection of life and property, disqualified to handle a gun, even as a common soldier or a gamekeeper, forbidden to acquire the elements of knowledge at home or abroad, forbidden even to render to God what conscience dictated as His due, what could the Irish be but abject serfs? What nation in their circumstances could have been otherwise? Is it not amazing that any social virtue could have survived such an ordeal?—that any seeds of good, any roots of national greatness, could have outlived such a long and tempestuous winter?”
But the seeds of good, although chilled, did not decay, and the manly spirit of the Old Irish race—the Celto-Norman stock, with the former element in preponderance—survived all its persecutions, and
“—Exiled in those penal days,
Its banners over Europe blaze!”
The great American orator and philanthropist, Wendell Phillips, lecturing on Ireland, and alluding to the enforced ignorance of a former period, said: “When the old-time ignorance of the Catholic Irish people is reproachfully alluded to by the thoughtless, or illiberal, it is not Ireland but England that should bow her head in the dust and put on sackcloth and ashes!”