BOOK VII
NARRATING THE MANY PENAL STATUTES AGAINST THE CATHOLICS, AND CARRYING THE STORY DOWN TO THE ACQUIREMENT OF A FREE COMMERCE BY THE IRISH PARLIAMENT, UNDER THE LEADERSHIP OF GRATTAN, A.D. 1780
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.