Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon — Volume 02

by Sir Henry Craik

It was the sort of settlement for which history has exacted, as it always exacts in such cases, a rigid and long-drawn-out retribution.

But however specious might be the appearance of prosperity under the recent settlement, it was beyond all question that it must be disturbed. A Royalist Restoration could not leave in possession those whose property was held as a reward for fighting against the Royalist cause. Certain claims were of necessity revived, and no prescription could prevail against them. The Church lands must be resumed, and the Episcopal domains must be wrested from those who had gained them as the avowed enemies of the Church. About these there could be no question. Crown lands also must revert to the Crown, and had this source of revenue been duly husbanded, it might have supplied a means of dealing with many claims that proved a source of endless and insoluble difficulty. There were certain outstanding Royalists, like Ormonde, whose loyalty was so indisputable, and whose claims were so easy of proof, that restitution in their case was simple, and any resistance to it would have amounted to a confession of rebellion. Lord Inchiquin [Footnote: Murrough O'Brien, Earl of Inchiquin, had been much concerned in the curbing of the Irish Rebellion, in which he acted as the ruthless enemy of the Roman Catholics, whose religion he detested, and upon whom he inflicted the most merciless vengeance. His ardent Protestantism brought him to an understanding with the Parliament, and he acted sometimes as their agent rather than that of the King. But, in 1654, he had become as ardent a Roman Catholic, and managed to recover favour at Court, and was restored to his property after the Restoration. He died in some obscurity in 1674.] was able to bring himself within the same category on somewhat more doubtful grounds. Fortunately large tracts of domain had been retained by Cromwell, nominally as the property of the State, and in reality to secure his own power; and out of these many of the most indubitable claims could be met. But the harder questions were those involving claims which were more doubtful, between claimants whose rivalry rested upon more assailable grounds. Were all genuine Royalists to have a right to claim what was once their property? If forfeitures were to be redressed, were those who were forced to sell at nominal prices, or under the pressure of innumerable fines, to have no redress? Which Royalist support was the more valuable, that which had been steadfast from the first, and had been crushed by Cromwell's soldiers, or that which had atoned for rebellion in the past by opportune and efficacious support during the last few months? Much of the land had been granted to the "Adventurers," as those were called who had advanced money on the faith of Parliamentary pledges to meet the expenses of crushing the Irish Rebellion. The Adventurers could allege the security of an Act of Parliament, to which the assent of the King had, however unwillingly, been given. But it was well known that the most of the money so raised had been employed, not to fight Irish rebels, but to crush English Royalists; and those Adventurers alone had been able to retain their claims who had been found ready to supplement their original contributions by payments avowedly made to the war chest of the Parliament, when civil war in England engaged all their attention. How were such grants to be dealt with, and how was a due balance to be kept between condoning rebellion and undermining the faith built upon an Act of Parliament? Others held their lands in lieu of military pay long in arrear; and the fact that they had not turned their arms against those who were contriving the Restoration, might seem to give them a claim to generous treatment. The Irish Catholics could adduce many instances of their own conspicuous loyalty in the past, and it was difficult to furnish convincing proof of what might fairly be suspected, that such loyalty was prompted more by bitter hatred of the Presbyterians and Roundheads than by fervent devotion to their King.

The Chancellor might well be repelled from participation in this embroiled struggle, where it was hard to find any satisfactory clue which might lead to settlement. To satisfy all was impossible; and it was almost as difficult to suggest any principle or set of principles which could be uniformly applied. Every case varied; every claim was supported or opposed by evidence, equally abundant, and equally suspect.

At first the Adventurers and the representatives of Cromwell's troopers were most successful in establishing their claims before the commissioners who were sent to inquire. One settlement after another was attempted. The Roman Catholic Irish were able, a little later, to win some sympathy from Charles, which the Chancellor seems to have partly shared. Another set of commissioners reopened the inquiry, and suggested another settlement, in which each faction was obliged to abate something of their claims. The Irish claim to loyalty was refuted by proof of their readiness, in their direst straits, to invite foreign aid, and to offer to repay it by the betrayal of the Royalist cause, and by breaking their allegiance to the King. One influence, and one influence alone, contributed to a solution, and that was the earnest desire of all, even at the cost of some diminution of their own claims, to escape from the palsying influence of uncertainty and doubt. The Chancellor accepted the different reports of the commissioners, and the successive projects of settlement, with a certain despair of any scheme of abstract justice, with little hope of even a peaceable solution, and with a not unnatural desire to rid himself of the whole unsavoury embroglio, and to detach himself from the angry and envenomed faction fight in Ireland. The Irish settlement was no part of Clarendon's work, and enters only indirectly into his life. Even more strongly than in the case of Scotland he abandoned any thought of an incorporating Union, and was glad to see the revival of an Irish Parliament. The task he had in hand was too hard to allow him willingly to add to it the baffling problem of restoring peace to Ireland.

But he could find little satisfaction in contemplating the work of those to whom the task was entrusted. The appointment of Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland had been only one of many gratifications which had been bestowed upon Monk, when he was created Duke of Albemarle, in recognition of the substantial benefits to the King which had resulted, when the long-drawn disguises of his tortuous and self-interested policy had gradually unmasked themselves. As general over the Irish army under the Cromwellian administration, he had contrived to secure an estate in Ireland worth some four thousand a year, and it was of the first importance to him to retain a hold over any land-settlement in Ireland.

But Albemarle looked upon his post as Lord-Lieutenant only as an enhancement of his own importance in the State, and as a means of assuring that his own material interests in Ireland should be safeguarded. He had no thought of taking upon himself the burden of Irish administration in person, or of absenting himself from the English Court. It was necessary, therefore, to find some one also who, as deputy, would undertake the arduous task. "There were some few," says Hyde, "fit for the employment who were not willing to undertake it; and many who were willing to undertake it who were not fit." The powers of a deputy were liable to be eclipsed, if Albemarle ever thought fit to go to Ireland; and such a post was one which those of the highest rank scarcely cared to fill. Under these circumstances the choice fell upon Lord Robartes, who had rendered some good service in Cornwall, and who had the reputation of more than respectable abilities, of careful and plodding industry, and of an integrity which was at least above the moderate average standard of Charles's Court. But he had defects of character which were apparent to a judge so acute as the Chancellor, and these soon made themselves plain. Clarendon gives expression to them with all the verve and dexterity of analysis of which he was a past master. "Robartes," he tells us, "was a sullen, morose man, intolerably proud, and had some humours as inconvenient as small vices, which made him hard to live with." That he was esteemed to have Presbyterian leanings did not make him the more acceptable to the King, or to the Chancellor himself; but such suspicions he was able to allay. But a long habit of associating with men inferior to himself had crippled his intelligence, and made him suspicious and jealous of his position. When he found himself deputy to Monk, he recalled, with a grudge, the fact that, coming from the same south-western corner of England, he was of superior birth, and he forgot the services which in Monk's case more than squared the balance. In his dealings with those who were to be associated with him in Irish administration, he showed the jealousy of a small-minded man, and ensconced himself behind the bulwark of reticence and inaccessibility. There could hardly have been a more unfit instrument for that dexterous manipulation which the tangled knot of Irish politics required than this narrow, pedantic, tactless peer. The Chancellor soon saw that endless petty bickering would be the result of continuing him in the post. His petty pride was offended by having to serve as deputy to Albemarle. He was ingenious in detecting legal difficulties, and wearied the patience of the Attorney-General by pointless criticisms even on the wording of his patent of appointment. He treated those Irishmen who were obliged to deal with him with a haughty superciliousness which exasperated them to fury. The King soon found that a morose gravity and a punctilious pride were the worst ingredients for an Irish governor. The only question was how to get rid of one who was too respectable to be contumeliously cast aside, but too much of a pedant to be entrusted with a delicate administrative operation. "They who conversed with him knew him to have many humours which were very intolerable; they who were but little acquainted with him took him to be a man of much knowledge, and called his morosity gravity." The Chancellor and Lord Southampton were commissioned by the King to confer about his transfer to another office, where his peculiarities might be less inconvenient. They were to arrange that he should be Privy Seal, and the precedence which that post would give him was to be a solace to his susceptible pride. The transaction had to be managed dexterously. They found him in a suspicious mood, but fortunately were able to persuade him that the new appointment would enhance his dignity. He accepted the new post, and although his touchiness and pedantry as to trifles were still a source of trouble, they could lead to no such difficulty in the comparative obscurity of Privy Seal, as they would have involved in Ireland. The transfer was carried out with satisfaction to all concerned; and the fact is no small testimonial to the tact of the Chancellor and Lord Southampton.

One source of friction was gone in getting rid of Lord Robartes. But the tangled knot still remained, and after the restoration of the Crown and Church domains, and the reinstatement of such notable Royalists as Ormonde and Inchiquin, the greatest part of the problem still remained unsettled. The fiercest fight was that between claimants of different race and of different religion, all of whom inherited a tradition of bitter and irreconcilable hatred. On the one hand there were the native Irish, recommended to the King by that community, at least, in religious feeling, which his residence abroad had instilled into Charles, although there is no real evidence of the oft-repeated story of his having already become a Roman Catholic. Linked to the Royalist cause by a common detestation of Presbyterianism, the Roundheads, and the Cromwellian soldiery, and attracting not unnatural sympathy both from Charles and from Hyde by the oppressive cruelties which they had suffered, and by glaring instances of injustice perpetrated upon them, they could fairly assert their early loyalty, and could allege in excuse for subsequent defections the supreme law of self-preservation. On the other hand, there were the soldiers and Adventurers, fortified by the strong claim of possession; able to cover their former rebellion by the indubitable benefit which they conferred in abstaining from armed resistance to rebellion against Parliamentary rule, and behind whose new-found loyalty there always lurked a veiled threat of a fresh resort to arms which might prove dangerous. The commissioners sent to compose matters found themselves suspected by all whose titles were insecure, and actively opposed by those whom they dispossessed. They were swayed by opposite factions, now to accept doubtful claims, and now to confirm existing settlements upon insufficient evidence of right. The examination of all claims was transferred to England; and Charles for a time seems to have interested himself deeply, and with edifying industry, in attempting to find a solution, and to have shown praiseworthy care in hearing and investigating all complaints. During these hearings the Chancellor must certainly have been an active and interested member of the council, and could not divest himself, much as he may have desired to do so, of participation in the decisions. Necessity drove the King and the Chancellor himself into a course which was often repugnant to them. In grave and well-considered words Hyde lays before us the paramount considerations of supreme expediency which forced the hands both of his master and of himself, and compelled them to accept a settlement which did nothing to redress Irish wrongs, and left, as the baneful alternative to a renewal of civil war, a legacy of bitter racial antagonism.

"It cannot be denied," he writes, "that if the King could have thought it safe and seasonable to have reviewed all that had been done, and taken those advantages upon former miscarriages and misapplications, as according to the strictness of that very law, he might have done, the whole foundation, upon which all the hopes rested of preserving that kingdom within the obedience to the Crown of England must have been shaken and even dissolved, with no small influence and impression upon the peace and quiet of England, itself. For the memory of the beginning of the rebellion in Ireland (how many other rebellions soever had followed as bad, or worse, in respect of the consequences that attended them) was as fresh and as odious to the whole people of England, as it had been in the first year. And though no man durst avow so unchristian a wish as an extirpation of them (which they would have been very well contented with) yet no man dissembled his opinion that it was the only security the English could have in that kingdom, that the Irish should be kept so low, that they should have no power to hurt them." [Footnote: Life, ii. 44.]

These words expressing the deliberate opinion of Hyde, upon a fateful crisis in history, are pregnant with tragedy. The memory of a great wrong never can be obliterated; but dire necessity may leave no alternative but to shape political action on the basis of that legacy from civil strife. England and Scotland had redeemed their rebellion.

"But," thus writes Hyde, "the miserable Irish alone had no part in contributing to his Majesty's happiness; nor had God suffered them to be the least instruments in bringing his good pleasure to pass, or to give any testimony of their repentance for the wickedness they had wrought or of their resolution to be better subjects for the future; so that they seemed as a people left out by Providence, and exempted from any benefit from that blessed conjunction in his Majesty's restitution. And this disadvantage was improved towards them by their frequent manifestation of an inveterate animosity against the English nation and the English Government, which again was returned to them in an irreconcilable jealousy of all the English towards them." [Footnote: Life, ii. 47.]