Since the plantation of Ulster, religious persecution had been aggravated by an established system of confiscation, under the name of the "Irish Titles Act." In the mean time the "Nonconformists" of England and Scotland having taken up arms against King Charles, made a solemn vow to exterminate the Catholics of Ireland, and the apprehensions of the latter were soon alive to the emergency. Groaning so long under civil and religious exactions, they looked on the king's difficulty as a most suitable event to petition for a removal of their grievances. But their action was anticipated, and while their leaders were considering a course of procedure, a series of outrages was perpetrated in the province of Ulster which precipitated them at once into the vortex of rebellion. A garrison of Scotch soldiers, stationed at Carrickfergus, in the dead of night, and without premonition, made a descent on Island Magee, a peninsula in the neighborhood, and drove all its inhabitants, to the number of 3,000, over the cliffs into the sea; scarce a soul escaping to tell their cruel fate. The Catholic inhabitants of the surrounding counties flew to arms, and the flames of rebellion were soon lit throughout the province. The Protestants rose to oppose them, and excesses were perpetrated on both sides. This hastened the action of the Catholic leaders. The Irish chiefs, the Catholic Lords of the English Pale, and the bishops of the Catholic Church convened at Kilkenny for mutual protection and right, under the name of the "Confederation of Kilkenny," and inaugurated one of the boldest efforts for civil and religious liberty known in the country's history.
In the mean time, the war between the king and the Parliamentarians progressed in England. The king's affairs grew desperate, and overtures were made to the Irish Confederates by the king's adherents in Ireland, the principal of whom were the Earls of Clanricarde and Ormond. The Confederates held out with great tenacity for their stipulated measures of redress; yet these the king, even in his direst extremity, refused to concede. But through the intrigues of the two royal agents, the councils of the Confederation were at last distracted; two parties, one for the king, and one for Catholic right, were formed; the soldiers took sides with their respective leaders, and made war against each other. So they fought for some time, the latter being generally successful, and the king at last offered concessions, but too late to redeem his fallen cause. The result is history; the king lost his head; Cromwell invaded Ireland; O'Neil, the only soldier capable of opposing him, is said to have been poisoned, and after his death Cromwell met with but futile opposition. The son of the decapitated king, after a few abortive attempts to secure the crown, became a refugee until the death of Cromwell, when he was recalled, through a popular reaction, and crowned as Charles II.:—and this is called the Restoration. It is called the Restoration, because it restored the throne to its lawful successor; because it restored the High Church party its privileges; and because it restored some of the lands confiscated in England during the Commonwealth to their former owners. But it was ushered in by an odious concession. It left the English rebels in full enjoyment of their lands and immunities, both in England and Ireland. In the latter country the confiscations of Cromwell were legalized, nor was the property of those who joined the late king's cause ever restored to them! But then, in England, it was a Parliament that rebelled against a sovereign; in Ireland, it was a people that demanded rights older than sovereign or Parliament,—that made all the difference.
Under the Protectorate of Cromwell 5,000,000 acres of arable land were confiscated, and the Restoration continued the robbery, by searches into titles which produced litigations, generally settled in English courts, to which all Irish questions were then transferable. It is needless to say that those suits terminated in establishing defective titles in the natives: the lands became the prey of the crown or its cormorants, and expatriation or slavish dependence was the award of the complainant. Five-sixths of the land passed away from the native race, and the population became dependents, without law or appeal, on the soil which had been theirs from time immemorial.
These confiscations had great effect in satisfying the vulture appetite of England. But as this business approached completion, the national mind reverted to the one great question—that of Protestant succession. The days of Charles drew towards a close. As yet the British Constitution had not debarred the heir-presumptive, though he should be a Catholic; and this was a thorn in the national heart. The fears of "popery" became again the national theme, and nobles and people alike brooded on this impending calamity. The hostility to James, always bitter, grew more open and violent as the king declined. In 1680, the Earl of Shaftesbury had him indicted in Westminster Hall, as a popish recusant; but the Chief-Justice dismissed the suit. In 1681, during a temporary illness of the king, a rebellion was set on foot by Shaftesbury, the Duke of Argyle, Lord William Russell, and others. The avowed object was the restoration of The Protectorate, but the covert design, to supplant the Duke of York, and place Monmouth, the natural son of Charles, on the throne. The king recovered; the plot exploded, Monmouth was banished the court, and retired to the Continent, and Argyle and Shaftesbury were attainted, but fled to Holland, to concoct new schemes for barring the succession of James. On the 6th of February, 1685, Charles died, unhonored and unlamented, save in so far as his death opened the way to an unwelcome successor, and all looked in fearful boding to that dreaded event.
The reign of Charles was a weak and inglorious one. His was a kind of passive existence, spent in connivance at the treason of a corrupt court, and the regicides of the last reign, while they connived at his secret carousals and studied profligacy. His youth was one of promise, and it is even asserted by some of his biographers that his indifference to all the great ends that excite the ambition of princes was an exemplification of practical wisdom. That such a reign was the only one that could have secured his permanency on the throne is now a matter of speculation. The received opinion is, that he believed it was, and acted in accordance with that belief. His well-known repartee to the Duke of York, who endeavored to rouse him from his apathy, would more than indicate this—that "he was too old to go again upon his travels." Yet it scarcely serves as an excuse for a long life wasted, and the noble ends of government neglected. But this much is well known in Ireland,—too well to be forgotten,—that he mulcted his English subjects to carry on his debaucheries; that he despoiled the Irish Catholics to remunerate his English creditors, and when both sources failed, he became a stipendiary on the bounty of the French king, bequeathing to his successor an exhausted exchequer, a turbulent people, a crown pawned for many a debt, and yet with many an heir-expectant. It required but a short time for James to establish facts which were patent to all minds but his: that the nobles by whom he was surrounded were irreconcilable to his views; that a time-server might wield and direct them if he pandered to their passions; but a king could not rule in peace, and retain the faith he had chosen. Yet, with all the evidence of the three last reigns before him to the contrary, he had an abiding faith in the justice of the English people. He knew that he was the choice of the Irish, and believed the native pride of the Scotch would not admit of the alienation of their crown; but above all, he trusted in the justice of his views, and he came to the throne with a fixed resolve to harmonize the conflicting elements of the State, and to make England, what he believed it ought to have been—a really free and happy nation.
CHAPTER II.
THE REIGN OF JAMES II. IN ENGLAND.—THE INVASION OF WILLIAM, PRINCE OF ORANGE.—FROM 1685–1688.
The accession of James was not met by any overt act of opposition. On the contrary, it was hailed by the rejoicings of the people, and the parliamentary leaders of the High Church party, at that moment plotting his expulsion, received him with the usual congratulations and addresses of loyalty. The Catholics of England and Scotland, who were still a respectable minority, felt their long-suppressed hopes kindle anew, and by their Irish brethren the event was hailed with undisguised satisfaction. Nothing could shake the loyalty of this oppressed people to the house of Stuart. The cruel exactions, broken pledges, and studied persecutions of the last three reigns were at once forgotten. The advent of each false king after the other, had been represented as sure to redress the grievances which the former one had inflicted, and after every outrage they became more steadfast in their devotion. If, during the rebellion of 1641, their attachment to this house was sufficient to withdraw a large portion of them from the standard of their native chiefs, then battling for their lands and religious liberty, how then must they have felt when the house of Stuart presented them a Catholic king, and one who gave unmistakable signs that justice and toleration should at last be extended to them; that persecution for conscience sake was at an end, and that the exiled of many years might again return to their native land!
That James knew the dangers that beset him in England, there can scarcely be a doubt; but the measures of redress which he contemplated being just and beneficent, he believed they would in a short time harmonize all interests. He had faith in his own justice, but miscalculated in attributing so noble a sense to the dominant and intolerant nobles by whom he was surrounded, and was still more mistaken when he expressed an abiding faith in the justice of the English people. Yet filled with the hope of marking a glorious page in the annals of England, he assumed the sceptre with a bold and kingly hand. His speech before the assembled council of the nation was all that a generous or magnanimous people could desire, and all his subsequent acts are marked by a strict adherence to the principles which he then enunciated. "I will endeavor," said he, "to preserve the government of Church and State in the manner by law established. I know that the Church of England is favorable to monarchy, and those who are members of it have made it appear on various occasions that they were faithful subjects. I will take particular care to defend and support it. I know likewise that the laws of the kingdom are sufficient to make the king as great as I could wish. As I am determined to preserve the prerogative of my crown, so I will never deprive others of what belongs to them. I have often hazarded my life in defence of the nation; I am still ready to expose it to preserve its rights."
He eschewed the tendency to despotic power which his enemies had circulated, or any design to call in question the titles or hereditaments of such as acquired lands through the Reformation. His object was not to disrupt but to harmonize and adjust, and blend all interests for an onward movement in civilization. He declared civil liberty to be the right of Catholics and Protestants alike. He proclaimed liberty of conscience, and took immediate action to secure it by liberating several thousand Catholics confined in the prisons of Ireland for non-attendance on Protestant worship, and also twelve hundred Quakers who had been imprisoned for a like offence. He declared the abolition of all penal laws, all religious test-oaths, and even oaths of allegiance on the assumption of civil office. He extended the same rights to the people of Ireland and Scotland as to those of England, and enjoined the bishops to announce in their churches that liberty of conscience was henceforth the law of the land. Here, 'tis said, he made his first royal blunder. Proclaiming liberty of conscience from a pulpit is hardly in accordance with that right of denouncing heresy and schism, which every church, whether founded on human will or divine right, has asserted from the days of Abram. But, then, on the other hand, the Church of England, which had been proclaiming that and every thing else the royal reformers of the last century chose to dictate, might have announced this liberal measure of a king, the goodness of whose motives were well understood. But they denounced the innovation as a license to sin, though he intended only to have it announced that persecution for conscience sake had ceased in his dominions. The order was obeyed by some of the bishops, but by the majority it was stubbornly resisted. The king prosecuted for contumacy. The judges in some cases executed the royal mandate and the bishops were imprisoned; in others they refused, and bishops and judges joined issue in a passive resistance. Still the king bated not a tittle of the principle laid down. The establishment of civil and religious liberty for all classes and denominations had been the great object of his life, and he was not to be driven from his purpose. He believed that the majority of the nobles were tired of persecution for conscience sake, and wished for a restoration of social harmony. He believed that the masses yearned for it, and he calculated on their loyalty. He believed that the Restoration was a proof that legitimacy would never again be assailed, and he took no precautions against conspiracy; nay, he scouted the warnings of his friends, that one was ripening among the members of his council, and that even his own children were spies upon his actions, and plotting his destruction. But an event soon transpired that removed his incredulity, and awakened him to a sense of the difficulties and dangers that beset him.
The first rebellion of the Duke of Monmouth and its result have already been noticed. On its suppression, the chief conspirators, Shaftesbury and Argyle, fled to the continent. The former died shortly after, but the latter linked his fortune to that of Monmouth, plotted on, and gave direction to the ambition of this English favorite. Repairing to Holland, it is said that they received both counsel and a promise of aid from the Prince of Orange to attempt another invasion. After the death of Charles, William detached himself from this conspiracy, for his own pretensions to the British throne had become greater than those of Monmouth, and indeed it is hard to reconcile the conduct of William unless we accept a charge, which is not without supporters, and which is greatly to that Prince's discredit:—that of urging the wayward Duke to his destruction, and thus removing an obstacle to his own ambition. However that be, William disconnected himself from the conspiracy, and Monmouth soon after retired to Brussels, where he was joined by Argyle and continued his preparations for an invasion. Getting counsel and assistance from his partisans in England and Scotland, he prepared for a descent at the earliest opportunity; and the excitement created by the troubles between King James and the bishops gave him at once both a hope and a pretext. With a fleet of three ships and one hundred followers, he landed at Lyme, in Dorsetshire, and in a few days he had a following of above two thousand men. He proclaimed the king a traitor and a popish usurper, and called on the country to rise in opposition to his rule. At Taunton he was presented with a pair of colors and a copy of the Bible, by twenty young ladies, and assumed the title of king. Here his army increased to six thousand. At Sedgemoor he attacked the royal forces under Feversham and Churchill, and was completely overthrown; and, flying for shelter through the country, he was taken and finally executed. His evil genius, Argyle, met with a similar fate; the greatest rigor was exercised against the scattered refugees of this ill-advised rebellion, and many of the nobles of the land were attainted of treason.