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.”