But Swift was not the only sufferer. There were other distinguished offenders against English sentiment. It is true they had not provoked the government by their writings to offer a reward of £300 for their identity, as was Swift’s fortune, but they had done enough to be made “horrible examples” of. Thus, Right Rev. Dr. Browne, Protestant Bishop of Cork, had been threatened with deprivation for protesting against the insulting language toward Catholics contained in the notorious Orange toast to the memory of William III; and Dr. Sheridan was deprived of his “living” in Munster, because, says McGee, “he accidentally chose for his text on the anniversary of King George’s coronation: ‘Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof!’ Such,” he continues, “was the intolerance of the oligarchy toward their own clergy. What must it have been to others!”
About this period, too, the differences between Episcopalians and Nonconformists—the latter having again repudiated the test oaths—became more bitter than ever. Swift took sides against the Dissenters, whom, as a fierce Church of England champion, he despised. “They were glad,” he said, they or their fathers, “to leave their barren hills of Lochaber for the fruitful vales of Down and Antrim.” He denied to them, with bitter scorn, the title they had assumed of “Brother Protestants,” and as to the Papists they affected to contemn, they were, in his opinion, “as much superior to the Dissenters as a lion, though chained and clipped of its claws, is a stronger and nobler animal than an angry cat, at liberty to fly at the throats of true churchmen.” Of course, the Church of England faction triumphed and the exodus of the Nonconformists from Ireland received a fresh impetus. “Outraged,” says McGee, “in their dearest civil and religious rights, thousands of the Scoto-Irish of Ulster, and the Milesian and Anglo-Irish of the other provinces, preferred to encounter the perils of the wild Atlantic rather than abide under the yoke and lash of such an oligarchy. In the year 1729, five thousand six hundred Irish landed at the single port of Philadelphia; in the next ten years they furnished to the Carolinas and Georgia the majority of their immigrants; before the end of this reign [George I] several thousands of heads of families, all bred and married in Ireland, were rearing up a free posterity along the slopes of the Blue Ridge in Virginia and Maryland, and even as far north as the valleys of the Hudson and the Merrimac. In the ranks of the thirteen United Colonies, the descendants of those Irish Nonconformists were to repeat, for the benefit of George III, the lesson and example their ancestors had taught to James II at Inniskillen and Derry.”
We do not purpose entering into a chronological account of the several viceroys—most of them rather obscure—who represented English misgovernment in Ireland during the reigns of the early Georges. They simply followed out the old programme of oppression and repression with tiresome monotony. No matter who “held court” in Dublin Castle, the policy of England toward Ireland remained unchanged. If ever there came a lull in the course of systematic persecution, it followed immediately on some reverse of the English arms on the Continent of Europe. An English victory meant added taxes and further coercion for the Irish Catholics and Dissenters.
George I had died in 1727, leaving behind him an unsavory moral reputation, and regretted by nobody in England, except his Hanoverian mistresses, who were noted for their pinguid ugliness. He was succeeded without opposition by his son, who mounted the throne as George II. He, too, was small of stature, un-English in language and appearance, and inherited the vices of his father. He was not deficient in personal bravery, as he proved at Dettingen, and elsewhere, in after times, and he had the distinction of being the last king of England who appeared upon a field of battle.
The penal code was continued in full force during most of this reign, although it had lost favor among the English governing class in the time of the king’s father, when the Protestant Ascendency party in the Irish Commons brazenly proposed to the English Privy Council the passage of an act whereby a proscribed prelate or priest arrested in Ireland would be made to suffer indecent mutilation. Bad as the English privy councilors generally were, where Ireland was concerned, they would not stomach such revolting savagery, and the hideous proposition was heard of no more. And yet England, knowing the ferocious character of the fanatics who proposed it, left Ireland virtually helpless in their hands! She could have, at any time, put an end to the intolerable persecutions visited upon the masses of the people by a heartless oligarchy, actuated about equally by cupidity and fierce intolerance. Had she done so, she might have won the Irish heart, as France won that of German Alsace and Italian Corsica, but she preferred to use one section of the Irish people against the other, in her lust of empire, and “Divide and Conquer” became, as in the Elizabethan times, the pith of her Irish policy.
The great English minister, Sir Robert Walpole, impressed by the necessity of breaking down the spirit of independence evoked by Swift and his able and patriotic colleagues, who had indeed “breathed a new soul” into the Ireland of their day, appointed that inveterate politician and corrupt diplomat, Lord Carteret, viceroy. He also promoted the Right Rev. Hugh Boulter, Bishop of Bristol, also an Englishman of the virulent type, to the Archbishopric of Armagh—the primal see of Ireland. Boulter was Castlereagh’s precursor in policy. Possessed of high office and vast wealth, he did not hesitate to use both prestige and money in the interests of England, and his corruption of many members of the Irish Parliament was so open and flagrant as to scandalize even the brazen chiefs of the atrocious “Court party”—the Prætorean guard of Lord Carteret. This unscrupulous churchman was the virtual head of the English interest in Ireland for eighteen years, and, within that period, overshadowing even viceregal authority, he made the English name more hated among not alone the Celtic, but the Scoto and Anglo-Irish than it had been for a century. He was the greatest persecutor of the Catholics that had appeared since the period of Cromwell, and he it was who manipulated the machinery of Parliament to deprive them of the last vestige of their civil and religious liberty in the closing days of the brutal reign, in Ireland, of George I. Nor did the Presbyterians and other dissenters fare much better at his hands. His black career terminated in 1742, and a weight of horror was lifted from Ireland’s heart when the welcome news of his death spread rapidly, far and wide, over the persecuted country.
What made “Primate Boulter” particularly odious to the Catholic people of Ireland was his institution of the “Charter Schools”—used openly and insultingly for the perversion of the majority of the population from the Roman Catholic faith. Since that period, English politicians have not hesitated to use the influence of the Roman See, with more or less success, to curb political movements in Ireland. Even then, when England was enforcing the penal laws against the Irish Catholics with fire and sword, she was the ally of Catholic Austria against the French, and glibly advocated toleration for the Protestants of the Hapsburg empire, while her “priest-hunters” industriously earned their putrid “blood money” in unfortunate, Catholic Ireland. We may say, in passing, that Primate Boulter was succeeded in the primacy by another Englishman, Right Rev. George Stone, who proved himself worthy of his predecessor.
CHAPTER IV
Official Extravagance—Charles Lucas, Leader of Irish Opposition—Chesterfield Viceroy—His Recall—Dorset’s Vile Administration