We should be unjust if we were to regard this infamous dishonesty as simply an accident of the Restoration time. Many of my American readers have doubtless heard of an island called Ireland, which is much nearer to England than Newfoundland. Lecky tells us how the English land-owners, always foremost in selfishness, procured the enactment of laws, in 1665 and 1680, absolutely prohibiting the importation into England from Ireland of all cattle, sheep, and swine, of beef, pork, bacon, and mutton, and even of butter and cheese, with the natural result that the French were enabled to procure these provisions at lower prices, and their work of settling their sugar plantations was much facilitated thereby.
In the Navigation Act of 1663 Ireland was deprived of all the advantages accorded to English ones, and thus lost her colonial trade; and, after the Revolution, the commercial influence, which then became supreme in the councils of England, was almost as hostile to Ireland as that of the Tory landlords. A Parliament was summoned in Dublin, in 1698, for the express purpose of destroying Irish industry; and a year later the Irish were prohibited from exporting their manufactured wool to any other country whatever. Prohibitive duties were imposed on Irish sail-cloth imported into England. Irish checked, striped, and dyed linens were absolutely excluded from the colonies, and burdened with a duty of 30 per cent. if imported into England. Ireland was not allowed to participate in the bounties granted for the exportation of these descriptions of linen from Great Britain to foreign countries. In 1698, two petitions, from Folkestone and Aldborough, were presented to Parliament, complaining of the injury done to the fishermen of those towns "by the Irish catching herrings at Waterford and Wexford, and sending them to the Straits, and thereby forestalling and ruining petitioners' markets"; and there was even a party in England who desired to prohibit all fisheries on the Irish shore except by boats built and manned by Englishmen.
Not only were the Irish prevented from earning money, but they were forced to pay large sums to the mistresses of English kings. Lecky tells us that the Duke of Saint Alban's, the bastard son of Charles II., enjoyed an Irish pension of £800 a year. Catherine Sedley, the mistress of James II., had another of £5,000 a year. William III. bestowed a considerable Irish estate on his mistress, Elizabeth Villiers. The Duchess of Kendall and the Countess of Darlington, two mistresses of the German Protestant George I., had Irish pensions of the united value of £5,000. Lady Walsingham, daughter of the first-named of these mistresses, had an Irish pension of £1,500; and Lady Howe, daughter of the second, had a pension of £500. Madame de Walmoden, mistress of the German Protestant King George II., had an Irish pension of £3,000. This king's sister, the queen dowager of Prussia, Count Bernsdorff, a prominent German politician, and a number of other German names may be found on the Irish pension list.
Lecky's description of the Protestant Church of Ireland is just as revolting. Archbishop Bolton wrote, "A true Irish bishop [meaning bishops of English birth and of the Protestant Church] has nothing more to do than to eat, drink, grow fat and rich, and die."
The English primate of Ireland ordained and placed in an Irish living a Hampshire deer-stealer, who had only saved himself from the gallows by turning informer against his comrades. Archbishop King wrote to Addison, "You make nothing in England of ordering us to provide for such and such a man £200 per annum, and, when he has it, by favor of the government, he thinks he may be excused attendance; but you do not consider that such a disposition takes up, perhaps, a tenth part of the diocese, and turns off the cure of ten parishes to one curate."
From the very highest appointment to the lowest, in secular and sacred things, all departments of administration in Ireland were given over as a prey to rapacious jobbers. Charles Lucas, M.P. for Dublin, wrote in 1761 to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, "Your excellency will often find the most infamous of men, the very outcasts of Britain, put into the highest employments or loaded with exorbitant pensions; while all that ministered and gave sanction to the most shameful and destructive measures of such viceroys never failed of an ample share in the spoils of a plundered people."
Arthur Young, in 1779, estimated the rents of absentee landlords alone at £732,000; and Hutchinson, in the same year, stated that the sums remitted from Ireland to Great Britain for rents, interest of money, pensions, salaries, and profit of offices amounted, on the lowest computation (from 1668 to 1773), to £1,110,000 yearly.
If, in treating of Newfoundland, I have made many extracts from Mr. Lecky's references to Ireland, it is in order that I may show Mr. Spearman the danger of laying too much stress on the French claims as the cause of the present distress in England's oldest colony.
France had no claims in Ireland, and yet the conduct of the British government and the British tradesman to that unfortunate island is one of the blackest infamies of the eighteenth century.
Mr. Lecky says in Chapter V., page 11, of his history: "To a sagacious observer of colonial politics two facts were becoming evident. The one was that the deliberate and malignant selfishness of English commercial legislation was digging a chasm between the mother country and the colonies which must inevitably, when the latter had become sufficiently strong, lead to separation. The other was that the presence of the French in Canada was an essential condition of the maintenance of the British empire in America."