In this course matters proceeded. In 1662, by an Act drafted by the suspicious hand of Sharp, Episcopacy was restored, but restored under auspices that reflected little credit on the statecraft that guided its restoration. The details of Scottish political intrigue—culminating in a deadly struggle of irresponsible tyranny with all the forces of enthusiastic religious frenzy—do not belong to Clarendon's life. But he could view their progress, so far as he himself was concerned in it, with nothing but disappointment. He was powerless to break down what he believed to be the narrow-minded obstinacy of national prejudice. He saw that the apparent triumph of Episcopacy was achieved by agents who made themselves contemptible in the eyes of their countrymen, and that it was bought at the price of arousing indomitable and stubborn resistance. He saw his own more immediate adherent, Middleton, playing into the shrewder hands of the far abler Lauderdale, by every error of tactics, by perverse neglect of the simplest rules of statecraft, by blundering deceptions and undisguised self-seeking. Again and again he found that the King, who, after all, cared but little for the distinctions between the sects of Protestantism, was alienated from the work by the folly of his own agents. By a strange freak of miscalculation Middleton and his friends thought to end Lauderdale's influence by excluding him from the Indemnity, and pronouncing him incapable of holding office. It was an easy matter for Lauderdale to turn the tables upon them. They incurred the censure both of Charles and of Clarendon. Before Clarendon's fall came, the triumph of Lauderdale over his rivals was assured; but before Clarendon's life ended he might have learned to what a height of self-aggrandizement, and of unscrupulous oppression, the popular wiles of that astute tactician had helped him to attain. Had Clarendon been blessed with agents wiser than Middleton and more honest than Archbishop Sharp, the Government of Scotland might have been consolidated; the bitterness, to which her religious fanaticism was goaded, might have been assuaged; and one of the darkest pages in her annals, which was to follow within the next few years, might have been left unwritten. The Union might have been brought about thirty years earlier than it was, and it might not have bequeathed so many seeds of jealousy, and so much offence to national pride.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE PROBLEMS OF IRELAND
If the conditions of the new settlement in Scotland were a problem hard of solution to Hyde, the entanglement was even greater in the case of Ireland. He was ignorant of the real characteristics of Scotland, and alienated from the country by his antipathy to Presbyterianism. But Ireland was a hot-bed of faction, the intricacies of which baffled his discernment. There was no party there which was not honeycombed with treachery, and none to which there was not imputed, on fair grounds, actions of flagrant cruelty and injustice to one another, and of disloyalty to the Crown for whose favour they were now keen competitors. No wonder that the Chancellor, in his own words, "made it his humble suit to the King, that no part of it might ever be referred to him;" and that even the Duke of Ormonde, whose own interests were most deeply concerned of all in the future settlement there, "could not see any light in so much darkness that might lead him to any beginning." In the whole of Ireland it was difficult to find any one upon whose wholehearted loyalty the Crown could rely. The best were those who could allege some fancied injury from the late authority, which might atone for their own repeated acts of opposition to the Royalist interests. The Presidents of the two provinces of Munster and Connaught were Lord Broghill—who was created Earl of Orrery in 1660—and Sir Charles Coote. Both had been in close confederacy with Henry Cromwell, the son of the Protector, and both had "depended upon him and courted his protection by their not loving one another, and being of several complexions and constitutions, and both of a long aversion to the King by multiplications of guilt." Under the short administration of Ludlow, [Footnote: Ludlow, full of hope that true Republicanism was now in sight, after Cromwell's death, had been sent over to Ireland as Commander- in-Chief, in July, 1659, and remained there till October, during which time he had established a regime that satisfied him, but that quickly fell to pieces after his departure.
Edmund Ludlow's long life, from 1617 to 1692, saw many changes, in which he was himself no inconspicuous actor, and for some part of which his Memoirs add considerably to our knowledge. He belonged to a family of some importance, although its political sympathies alienated it from its own class. His father, Sir Henry Ludlow, was a member of the Long Parliament, and was referred to in one of the King's Declarations drawn by Hyde (May 26, 1642) as having said in Parliament that the King was not fit to reign; and he was one of those whose impeachment the King desired (Rebellion, Bk. v. 280, 441). By that father's persuasion, Edmund Ludlow joined the Parliamentary army when war broke out, and he proved himself a zealous and doughty fighter. But he was stubborn and quarrelsome, and fanatically attached to an abstract scheme of Republicanism which was the abiding object of all his life. To him the question involved was, "whether the King should govern as a god by his will, and the nation be governed by force like beasts; or whether the people should be governed by laws made by themselves, and under a government derived from their own consent." It could hardly be possible to express the dispute in terms more distant from the truth. But with all the fanaticism of a narrow and pedantic nature he pursued this will-o'-the- wisp to the end. He afterwards, in 1646, entered Parliament as member for the village of Hindon, from which Hyde took his first title, of Baron Hyde of Hindon (then returning two members), and attached himself to the party led by Henry Marten. He was bitterly opposed to all compromise, and was one of the most conspicuous of the regicides. He could not see how any view but one was possible to any man who did not desire to be a slave; and yet, in his fanciful scheme of liberty, he did not hesitate to apply coercive measures to Parliament. The nation was to be governed by its own consent; but its consent was to be interpreted by the will of his own little clique. When Cromwell assumed more than monarchical power, he fiercely opposed him, and hailed his death as offering new hopes for Republicanism. He had long been employed in Ireland, and on this account assumed its administration in 1659. When the Restoration took place, he fled to Switzerland: and so active had he been, that his machinations were dreaded for many years. In 1689 he returned for a time; but the memory of his misdeeds as a regicide made even the Parliament under William III. unwilling to receive him, and he was obliged again to withdraw.
He was a zealous, narrow, pedantic, but honest partisan, whose enthusiastic belief in his own abstract ideas seemed to him to justify the most ruthless cruelty in Ireland.] which followed the fall of Richard Cromwell and his brother Henry, who had been Lieutenant of Ireland, they had managed to hold their places and authority, and when Ludlow's power crumbled it was a race between them who might first proffer their obedience to the King, and enhance the value of that obedience by most effective promises. They watched assiduously the action of Monk. Each was anxious that his offers might be concealed from his rival. Each managed to secure some informal recognition of his offers of loyalty, and presumed himself authorized to make proposals to others on the King's behalf. They both professed a single-hearted endeavour to settle the King's authority, and each managed by underhand influence, and by lavish promises, to secure some powerful support. Lord Broghill was the abler of the two, and by his profuse devotion "quickly got himself believed." The Chancellor's scorn of such a man is best expressed in his own words. Lord Broghill, he says—
"Having free access to the King, by mingling apologies for what he had done with promises of what he would do, and utterly renouncing all those principles as to the Church or State (as he might with a good conscience do) which made men unfit for trust, made himself so acceptable to his Majesty that he heard him willingly, because he made all things easy to be done and compassed; and gave such assurances to the bedchamber men, to help them to good fortunes in Ireland, which they had reason to despair of in England, that he wanted not their testimony upon all occasions, nor their defence and vindication when anything was reflected upon to his disadvantage or reproach."
It was the familiar picture of which the Chancellor was already tired, of a King whose experience had taught him that Government was a thing of subterfuge, and of balancing between professed adherents whose loyalty was to be valued according to the estimate which trickery could place upon it. These new adherents vied with one another in promoting measures for restoring the bishops, and the laws of the Episcopalian Church, of which they had lately been bitter opponents. No wonder that the Chancellor has more respect for such a man as Sir John Clotworthy, who did not dissemble his dislike of bishops and their rule, even while he laboured honestly to restore the prerogatives of the Crown.
The central difficulty in this seething mass of jealousy, corruption, and self-seeking was the question of land settlement. A reckless system of forfeitures and new grants, carried out under the successive supremacies of different interests, had left an inheritance of hopeless confusion, destined to be the lasting curse of Ireland. Twenty years of the bitterness of civil war had ended in a rough and ready settlement under the rule of Cromwell, where the spoils had been ruthlessly handed over to the victors. The Irish had been evicted with a cruelty that had no thought of justice, and those who had not been sent abroad to seek death or a precarious livelihood in the ranks of foreign armies, had been driven into the barren tracts of Connaught, any of them found outside those limits being hunted down like wild beasts. To have shown any sympathy with the Royalist cause, or even to have resisted the fierce rule of the Cromwellian soldiery, was enough, when added to their adherence to a tabooed religion, to mark them as beyond the pale of humanity. It was counted even as a mercy that they were allowed to earn a scanty subsistence in the most barren corner of the island. Strongly as he disliked their deep-rooted attachment to the Roman Catholics' religion, the Chancellor never deemed it an excuse for ruthless cruelty, and, in spite of their religion, their occasional display of enthusiastic loyalty to the Crown won for them something of his sympathy. But he is compelled to admit the appearance of prosperity which was reared upon the military oppression—an oppression which was rendered the more heinous in his sight because it involved also the absolute forfeiture of their vast estates in the case of Ormonde and other loyalists, against whom no suspicion of Roman Catholic leanings could be alleged. Its very ruthlessness gave it an appearance of outward settlement and peace.
"It cannot be imagined," says Clarendon, "in how easy a method, and with what peaceable formality this whole great kingdom was taken from the just lords and proprietors, and divided and given amongst those who had no other right to it, but that they had power to keep it; no man having so great shares as they who had been instruments to murder the King, and were not likely willingly to part with it to his successor." "Ireland," he tells us, "was the great capital, out of which all debts were paid, all services rewarded, and all acts of bounty performed. And, what is more wonder, all this was done and settled within little more than two years, to that degree of perfection that there were many buildings raised for beauty, as well as use, orderly and regular plantations of trees and fences and enclosures throughout the kingdom, as in a kingdom at peace within itself, and where no doubt could be made of the validity of titles. And yet in all this quiet there were very few persons pleased or contented."