The result of the first day spent by the Commissioners in hearing claimants was that two were declared innocent and one nocent. ‘If,’ said Ormonde, ‘the lottery would hold out so to the end of their commission it would prove no ill one for the Irish,’ and they accordingly began to indulge in extravagant hopes. The more violent among them declared that Orrery and the other leaders who had restored the King should be rooted out as heretics and damned traitors as soon as the army became ‘Catholic loyal.’ It was said, probably with truth, that many forged conveyances were produced and admitted by the Court. There was angry consternation among the Adventurers and soldiers who did not believe in the impartiality of the Commissioners. The House of Commons, meeting after a short recess, lost no time in giving a voice to the prevailing discontent. Ormonde had forwarded the explanatory Bill as desired, but it was altered in England, and when it came back was, as he foretold, promptly thrown out by the Commons on the motion for a second reading. ‘When,’ he wrote to Clarendon, ‘anybody of credit among these people finds himself like to be pinched in his interest he causes a cry to be raised that all is lost to the English and that the Irish be their masters.’ Timid people sold their goods and departed, while the alarmists stayed and got cheap bargains. Monks and friars added to the panic by holding chapters as openly as in Spain, while prudent Roman Catholics would have liked a sharp proclamation against the regulars as a protection to themselves. The House of Commons were bent on making the Act of Settlement more stringent, and unanimously agreed to twenty proposals for the purpose. Founding an argument upon the last clause of the Act which gave the Lord Lieutenant power to alter the procedure of the Commissioners before a date which had already passed, they called upon him to define the English quarters as existing from time to time until he left Ireland in 1647, no witnesses outside the line being admitted to prove innocence, since the rest of the island was assumed to be rebels’ quarters. Another proposal was that no claimant once adjudged nocent should be allowed to make any other claim. Ormonde was asked to admit a committee of the House to confer with a committee of the Council, the action of the Commissioners being suspended in the interim. The House of Commons had of course no jurisdiction over the Court of Claims, and Clarendon reported that the King was ‘horribly angry’ at their presumption in seeking to treat with the Council.[30]
Speaker Mervyn represents the malcontents.
Titles not regarded as permanently valid.
Though fully determined not to yield to parliamentary pressure, Ormonde promised that the proposals of the House should have ‘such speedy answer as the weight and number of these would permit.’ The Lord Lieutenant was treated with respect throughout, but the Speaker’s speech on the occasion was not conciliatory in substance. The Act of Settlement, he said, was the Irish Magna Charta and not to be infringed in any way: ‘our strength lies in this as Sampson’s in his locks; if those be cut we are as weak as others when the Philistines shall fall upon us.... I shall never forget that expression of His Majesty at a full council "my justice I must afford to you all, but my favour must be placed upon my Protestant subjects."’ He descanted with some force upon the anomalous powers of the Commissioners who both found the facts and laid down the law. The House of Commons asked for juries, since they were certain to be composed of Protestant freeholders. Mervyn clearly understood that Irish claims would still be made whatever law or lawyers might say, and to defeat them proposed to impound all nocents’ title-deeds. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘in the North of Ireland, the Irish have a custom in the winter, when milk is scarce, to kill the calf and preserve the skin, and stuffing it with straw they set it upon four wooden feet which they call a Puckan, and the cow will be as fond of this as she was of the living calf; she will low after it and lick it and give her milk down, so it stands but by her. Sir, these writings will have the operation of this Puckan, for wanting the land to which they relate they are but stuffed with straw, yet, sir, they will low after them, lick them over and over in their thoughts, and teach their children to read by them instead of horn-books. And if any venom be left they will give it down upon the sight of these puckan writings, and entail a memory of revenge, though the estate tail be cut off.’ This was prophetic: for many generations and perhaps even to this day obsolete title-deeds were handed about, though useless for any purpose but to make property insecure and to perpetuate the memory of wrongs long past.[31]
The Court of Claims satisfied no one.
The Commissioners continued to sit during the spring and summer of 1663, but no one was satisfied, and the sheriffs made difficulties about executing their decrees unless they were backed by the ordinary courts of law. The time for hearing claims expired in August, when it was estimated that only one-sixth of the applicants had been heard, but that 800,000 acres had been restored to them. Many Protestants sought decrees of innocence, as a precaution no doubt, for Ormonde and Cork were among them. In March the Lord Lieutenant sent an answer to the Speaker reproaching the Commons with having caused general insecurity so that many English Protestants had been frightened into ‘selling their lots and adventures at vile and under rates, or compounding with the old proprietors on very ill terms.’ He announced the discovery of a plot by so-called Protestants to seize the Castle, and the Commons could only resolve to live and die with His Grace. Average politicians might be a little startled at the military conspiracy, but what they really feared was quite different, and they presented bills for the suppression of the Popish hierarchy and for imposing the oaths of supremacy and allegiance upon all officials and others in positions of trust. Five days later the House adjourned for six weeks, but before the time had expired the Lord Lieutenant prorogued Parliament by proclamation and it did not meet again for more than two years. Both he and the King were almost tempted to dissolve at once, and he was empowered to do so at his own discretion.[32]
Discontent among soldiers.
Many cavaliers served the Parliament.
Ireland could not be governed without a standing army, and the cost of maintaining one, even on the most reduced scale, made it impossible to balance the public accounts. As there was no money to spare in England, the force upon which everything depended was irregularly paid and of course discontented. Ormonde refused to be coerced by hot-headed cavaliers into discharging all officers and men who had served the Protector, though he weeded them as closely as possible. Those who were discharged all remained in the country. A wholesale proscription would affect nearly all the English in Ireland, ‘and many of your own party,’ he told the King, ‘were forced by the persecution that followed them in England to shelter themselves in Ireland, and as they were able to make friends, to get into the army some as inferior officers, some as private soldiers.’ The revolutionary politicians thought it safer to get them out of England even on these terms. They were Royalists all along, and showed it when the time came. Many who never served against the King and some who had actually fought for him in England, ‘their interest and detestation of the Irish assisting their mistake,’ thought they might conscientiously oppose him when treaties with the rebels were being made in his name. They also believed, or wished to believe, that the late King had handed over the whole war to the Parliament once for all. National feeling and the folly of the clerical party made them receive Cromwell in certain towns, but they had since repented. He declined to cashier such men, though he took care to admit no recruits that had not a clear record. There were therefore heads to conspire and plenty of hands to execute, but Ormonde was aware that the plot in the North of England had sympathisers in Ireland. It was reported that Ludlow had returned to put himself at the head of the malcontents, and the Ulster Presbyterians might have been goaded by the bishops into rebellion. Spies were not wanting, and Colonel Vernon, Henry Cromwell’s old antagonist, made himself very useful. Robert Shapcote, representing the borough of Wicklow, was arrested as a ringleader, and the House of Commons could not interfere during prorogation. It does not appear that more than two or three Presbyterian clergymen were in any way concerned, nor any of the more responsible sectaries. Ormonde’s suspicions fell, perhaps not unnaturally, upon Henry Cromwell’s old chaplain, Stephen Charnock, but there seems no reason to suppose that he was implicated, and in any case he eluded all attempts to arrest him either in England or Ireland.[33]
The Castle plot.