[278] Clarendon’s letters to Rochester, May 4, 1686, and from September 9 to October following, and a letter to Ormonde of September 28, in Ormonde Papers, vol. vii. John Dunton saw the Curragh races in September 1698. He found the plain partly covered with heath, sheltering grouse and hares. Life and Errors, ii. 606. In 1673 Temple gave Essex elaborate advice as to the encouragement of horse-racing, Works, iii. 23.
[279] James Bonnell to John Ellis, August 7, 1688, Ellis Correspondence, ii. 112. Dr. Dun to Dr. King, April 8 and 26, 1684, in King’s A Great Archbishop of Dublin. Dun was fond of claret and of good living generally, see his prescription in Gilbert’s Hist. of Dublin, i. 177.
[280] Petty’s Political Anatomy of Ireland, published in 1691 after his death, but written much earlier; his Political Arithmetic, and his Treatise of Ireland, written for James II. in 1687. Clarendon’s letters of May 4 and September 28, 1686. Stevens’s Journal in 1689, p. 49. Dineley’s Tour in 1681, pp. 18, 21. Sir W. Temple’s observations on the United Provinces in his Works, ed. 1814, i. 165, and his Advancement of Trade in Ireland, ib. iii. 3. In the quarto edition of Arthur Young’s Tour, 1780, there is a good picture of an Irish cabin without chimney or window and with smoke rolling out of the doorway. There were many such cabins a generation ago, and there may still be a few in out-of-the-way places. The mode of constructing them and the state of their inhabitants are described by John Dunton, who saw many in 1699, Life and Errors, ed. 1818, ii. 605.
[281] Dineley’s Tour, p. 162. Sir W. Temple on trade in Ireland, Works, iii. 17. See above, vol. i. p. 124.
[282] Petty’s Political Anatomy, chap. ii., Dublin Bills, appx. (Graunt), further Observations on these Bills (1681), postscript, Political Arithmetic (1686). Sir Charles Wogan to Swift, February 27, 1732-3, in Swift’s Works, ed. Scott, xvii. 457. Walter Harris’s Hist. of Dublin, 1766, chap. v. Gilbert’s Hist. of Dublin, ii. 11, iii. chap. ii. Clarendon and Rochester Correspondence, ii. 101. See the first two essays in C. L. Falkiner’s Illustrations of Irish Hist. Not many years ago there was but one set of dining tables between the Castle and the Lodge in Phœnix Park, and they had to be carried to and fro. For the Dublin ale-houses, see my Ireland under the Tudors, iii. 448. In Additional MSS. 14422, an ‘exact account’ makes the population of Dublin 40,508 in January 1695, including Trinity College and Kilmainham. Lord Meath’s great house had formed part of St. Thomas’s Abbey.
[283] John Stevens found the Bantry people so poor that half a crown could hardly be changed, ‘and guineas were carried about the whole day and returned whole.’
[CHAPTER LVI]
THE THREE IRISH CHURCHES
The Establishment.
In the year 1756 Archbishop Stone made a speech in the Irish House of Lords which the reporter said was much the best he had ever heard there. Stone showed that the Reformation never had a fair chance in Ireland. In England the people had been ripe for change, but in the smaller island it was far otherwise: ‘The establishment at first of the Protestant religion was an act of power quite opposite to the inclination of the natives, who were, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, generally in rebellion, with the Spanish Court to inflame them more on this account.’ During the reigns of the first two Stuarts this feeling continued unabated, and after the massacre of 1641 all attempts to reclaim the natives were hopeless. Strafford had done something, and would have done more ‘had he not been entirely governed by a peevish, weak, narrow-spirited Archbishop Laud, who placed more importance in the colour of a rag or erecting a monument in the east or middle of a church than in the great essentials of religion.’ Ussher, the only man who might have united the Protestants, was laid aside, and the Scotch colony prevented the settlement of Ulster from serving the Church. Papists were encouraged by these dissensions, and would have driven the Reformation altogether out of Ireland but for the constant support of England. Stone was an Englishman and by no means a model Primate, but he had studied without prejudice the history of the country in the government of which he had so large a share.[284]