The Popish priests are the cause of every misery in Ireland;
The wolves are a misery:
Therefore the priests are to blame for the existence of the wolves.
"By a similar process of reasoning," observes Mr. Prendergast, "it is proved that the Irish have caused the ruin, the plundering, and the desolation of the country, from the first invasion, for so many ages." And this is undoubtedly true; for if there had been no Irish, no Irish could have been plundered; and if there had been no plunder, there could not have been the misery of the plundered. The number of wolves to be destroyed may be estimated from the fact, that some lands valued at a high rate were let for a stipulated number of wolves' heads in lieu of rent. But the wolves were more easily got rid of than the priests. The priests were accustomed to be persecuted, and accustomed to be hunted. They came to Ireland, as a general rule, with the full knowledge that this would be their fate, and that if they ended their lives, after a few years' ministration, by hanging, without any extra torture, it was the best they could hope for, as far as this world was concerned. Some, however, would have preferred the torture, expecting an additional recompense for it in the next. But there were parts of the country where it was incomparably more difficult to hunt out a priest than a wolf; so the Government gave notice, on the 6th of January, 1653, that all priests and friars who were willing to transport themselves, should have liberty to do so for twenty days. But the priests and friars had no idea of leaving the country. They had gone abroad, at the risk of their lives, to fit themselves in some of the splendid continental colleges for their duties, and to obtain authority to administer the sacraments; they returned, at the risk of their lives, to fulfil their mission; and they remained, at the risk of their lives, to devote them to their own people, for whose sakes they had renounced, not only earthly pleasures and joys, but even that quiet and peaceful life, which, as Christian priests, they might have had in foreign lands. The people for whom they suffered were not ungrateful. Poor as they were, none could be found to take the proffered bribe. Long lists may be found of priests who were captured and executed, and of the men who received the rewards for their capture; but you will not see a real Irish name amongst them; you will perceive that the priest-catchers were principally English soldiers; and you will remark that the man in whose house the priest was discovered generally shared his fate. But it was useless. They were hung, they were tortured, they were transported to Barbadoes, and, finally, such numbers were captured, that it was feared they would contaminate the very slaves, and they were confined on the island of Innisboffin, off the coast of Connemara. Yet more priests came to take the place of those who were thus removed, and the "hunt" was still continued.
The number of secular priests who were victims to this persecution cannot be correctly estimated. The religious orders, who were in the habit of keeping an accurate chronicle of the entrance and decease of each member, furnish fuller details. An official record, drawn up in 1656, gives the names of thirty Franciscans who had suffered for the faith; and this was before the more severe search had commenced. The martyrdom of a similar number of Dominicans is recorded almost under the same date; and Dr. Burgat[[502]] states that more than three hundred of the clergy were put to death by the sword or on the scaffold, while more than 1,000 were sent into exile.
The third "beast" was the Tory. The Tory was the originator of agrarian outrages in Ireland, or we should rather say, the English planters were the originators, and the Tories the first perpetrators of the crime. The Irish could scarcely be expected to have very exalted ideas of the sanctity and inviolable rights of property, from the way in which they saw it treated. The English made their will law, and force their title-deed. The Anglo-Normans dispossessed the native Irish, the followers of the Tudors dispossessed the Anglo-Normans, and the men of the Commonwealth dispossessed them all. Still the Celt, peculiarly tenacious of his traditions, had a very clear memory of his ancient rights, and could tell you the family who even then represented the original proprietor, though that proprietor had been dispossessed five or six hundred years. The ejectments from family holdings had been carried out on so large a scale, that it can scarcely be a matter of surprise if some of the ejected resented this treatment. There were young men who preferred starving in the woods to starving in Connaught; and after a time they formed into bands in those vast tracts of land which had been wholly depopulated. The men were desperate. It is difficult to see how they could have been anything else, when driven to desperation. They were called robbers; but there was a general confusion about meum and tuum which they could not understand. Strangers had taken possession of their cattle, and they did not comprehend why they should not try to obtain it again in any possible way. Young men, whose fathers had landed estates of £2,000 a-year, which were quietly divided amongst Cromwell's Life-Guards, while the proprietor was sent out to beg, and his daughters compelled to take in washing or do needlework, could scarcely be expected to take such a change in their circumstances very calmly. A man who had been transplanted from an estate worth £2,500 a year near Dublin, which his family had owned for four hundred years, and whose daughters were given the munificent gratuity of £10 a-piece by the Council Board, and forbidden for the future to ask for any further assistance, might certainly plead extenuating circumstances[[503]] if he took to highway robbery. Such circumstances as these were common at this period; and it should be borne in mind that the man whose holding was worth but £40 a-year felt the injustice, and resented the inhumanity of his expulsion, quite as much as the nobleman with £4,000. So the Tories plundered their own property; and, if they could be captured, paid the penalty with their lives; but, when they were not caught, the whole district suffered, and some one was made a scapegoat for their crime, though it did not seem much to matter whether the victim could be charged with complicity or not. After some years, when even the sons of the proprietors had become old inhabitants, and the dispossessed generation had passed away, their children were still called Tories. They wandered from village to village, or rather from hovel to hovel, and received hospitality and respect from the descendants of those who had been tenants on the estates of their forefathers, and who still called them gentlemen and treated them as such, though they possessed nothing but the native dignity, which could not be thrown off, and the old title-deeds, which were utterly worthless, yet not the less carefully treasured. Yet, these men were condemned by their oppressors because they did not work for their living, and because they still remembered their ancient dignity, and resented their ancient wrongs. To have worked and to have forgotten might have been wiser; but those who are accustomed to ease are slow to learn labour, even with the best intentions; and those who had inflicted the wrongs were scarcely the persons who should have taunted the sufferers with the miseries they had caused.
Charles II. commenced his reign de facto in 1660, under the most favourable auspices. People were weary of a Commonwealth which had promised so much and performed so little; of the name of liberty without the reality; of the exercise of kingly power without the appurtenances or right of majesty. But the new monarch had been educated in a bad school. Surrounded with all the prestige of royalty without its responsibilities, and courted most ardently by followers whose only object was their own future advancement, which they hoped to secure by present flattery, it is scarcely a matter of surprise that Charles should have disappointed the hopes of the nation. In England public affairs were easily settled. Those who had been expelled from their estates by the Cromwellian faction, drove out[[504]] by the new proprietors; but in Ireland the case was very different. Even the faithful loyalists, who had sacrificed everything for the King, and had so freely assisted his necessities out of their poverty, were now treated with contempt, and their claims silenced by proclamation; while the men who had been most opposed to the royal interest, and most cruel in their oppression of the natives, were rewarded and admitted into favour. Coote and Broghill were of this class. Each tried to lessen the other in opinion of their royal master as they ran the race for favour, and each boasted of services never accomplished, and of loyalty which never existed. The two enemies of each other and of the nation were now appointed Lord Justices of Ireland; and a Parliament was assembled on the 8th of May, 1661, the first meeting of the kind which had been held for twenty years.
The Catholic, or national interest, was certainly not represented; for there were present seventy-two Protestant peers, and only twenty-one Catholics; while the House of Commons comprised two hundred and sixty members, all of whom were burgesses except sixty-four, and the towns had been so entirely peopled by Cromwell's Puritan followers, that there could be no doubt what course they would pursue. An attempt was now made to expel the few Catholics who were present, by requiring them to take the oath of supremacy. The obsequious Parliament voted £30,000 to the Duke of Ormonde, whose career of duplicity was crowned with success. It is almost amusing to read his biographer's account[[505]] of the favours bestowed on him, and the laudations he bestows on his master for his condescension in accepting them. Carte would have us believe that Ormonde was a victim to his king and his country, and that the immense sums of money he received did not nearly compensate him for his outlays. Posterity will scarcely confirm the partiality of the biographer.
The Bill of Settlement was opposed by the Irish Catholics through their counsel, but their claims were rejected and treated with contempt. Charles had told his Parliament, on his restoration, that he expected they would have a care of his honour and of the promise he had made. This promise had been explicitly renewed by Ormonde for the King, before he left for Breda; but the most solemn engagements were so regularly violated when Irish affairs were concerned, that nothing else could have been expected. A Court of Claims was at length established, to try the cases of ejectment which had occurred during the Commonwealth; but this excited so much indignation and alarm amongst the Protestants, that all hope of justice was quickly at an end, and the time-serving Ormonde closed the court. The grand occupation of each new reign, for the last few centuries, appears to have been to undo what had been done in the preceding reigns. An Act of Explanation was now passed, and a Protestant militia raised, to satisfy that party. It was provided by the new Act that the Protestants were, in the first place, and especially, to be settled; that any doubt which arose should be decided in their favour; and that no Papist, who, by the qualifications of the former Act, had not been adjudged innocent should at any future time be reputed innocent, or entitled to claim any lands or settlements. It will be remembered that Ormonde had cut short the sittings of the court to satisfy Protestant clamour; in consequence of this, more than 8,000 Catholic claimants were condemned to forfeit their estates, without even the shadow of an inquiry, but with the pretence of having justice done to them, or, as Leland has expressed it, "without the justice granted to the vilest criminal—that of a fair and equal trial."[[506]]
Although it would seem to the ordinary observer that the Catholics had been dealt with severely, the dominant faction were still dissatisfied; and Ormonde was obliged to threaten a dissolution, and to expel some members for complicity in a plot to overthrow the English Government, which had just been discovered, and of which the ringleader was a man named Blood. It was now ascertained that the Cromwellian distribution of lands had been carried out with the most shameful injustice towards the very Government which had sanctioned it; and that the soldiers, who went with texts of Scripture on their lips, and swords in their hands, to destroy Popery, had cheated[[507]] their officers and self-elected rulers with shameless audacity.