In July, 1634, the Parliament met and the Lord Deputy’s forecast was justified. The Catholic and Protestant parties were almost equal; the officers turned the scale in favour of the latter. The result had not been arrived at without some difficulty. The priests, who apprehended fresh penalties against their religion, had exerted themselves on behalf of the Catholic candidates. Wentworth put his foot down upon a policy which threatened to divide the country into a Catholic and a Protestant party, a thing, he wrote, “to be avoided as much as may be, unless our numbers were the greater.” The sheriff of Dublin “carried himself mutinously,” or, in plain English, refused to foist the Lord Deputy’s nominees upon an unwilling constituency. The over-scrupulous official was dragged before the Castle Chamber, fined, and deprived of his office; a successor of more accommodating principles was found, and his Excellency’s protégés declared duly elected.[[77]]
On the 15th the Lord Deputy addressed the Houses, warning them with characteristic arrogance against imitating the factious conduct of the late English Parliament. On the 16th his secretary, Wandesford, moved for a grant of six subsidies, which were immediately voted. On the 2nd of August the Houses petitioned for the introduction of the promised Bills, and were informed that they would be considered in the following session. On the 21st Parliament was prorogued.[[78]]
It met again in November. During the recess Wentworth had submitted to his master his opinion of the course which it was expedient to adopt with reference to the Graces. Some were to be granted immediately, some others postponed; the two most important—that which established a prescriptive right against the claims of the Crown, and that which supplied the defects in the Connaught titles—were to be firmly and finally refused. If his Majesty was unwilling to incur the odium of so flagrant a breach of faith, the Lord Deputy was ready to take upon himself the responsibility of having intervened between the people and the royal favour.[[79]] To this magnanimous proposal Charles assented with characteristic alacrity.[[80]] On November 27th Wentworth announced the withdrawal of the expected concessions. The announcement provoked an outburst of indignation, which was the more formidable because, “by the negligence of the Protestant party,” the Government were for the moment in a minority. The Catholics, assisted by some discontented Protestants, notably by Sir Piers Crosby, a distinguished soldier and a member of the Privy Council, “rejected hand over head all that was offered them by his Majesty and the State. The Bill against bigamy they would not should be engrossed; the law for correction houses they absolutely cast out; the law against fraudulent conveyances and to secure purchasers against the practised cozenage of the natives here they would have none of; a law for the bailments tasted not with them; the burgesses that served for the new boroughs, being most of them Protestants, they questioned, as not having rights to sit there. The statutes of uses and wills we durst not adventure a reading unto, for fear some blemish might be put upon them by these men, that in all these things never gave or answered reason, but plainly let us see their wills were set together to refuse all, but to refute nothing.”
Wentworth acted with characteristic promptitude. Crosby was deprived of his place at the Privy Council, the absent members were ordered to resume their attendance, and a ministerial majority was again secured. Within little more than a fortnight the Bills which the Lord Deputy desired had been carried, and the Parliament was once more prorogued.
In the following year two other short sessions were held, and many wise and useful laws enacted with the general concurrence of all parties. The Lord Deputy was anxious that the Parliament should be continued. The House of Commons, he wrote, was “very well composed”; there was a Protestant majority “clearly and fully for the King,” and the recusants could be coerced into voting as the Government dictated by an intimation that the majority would otherwise be used “to pass upon them all the laws of England concerning religion.” If there was a dissolution it might not be possible again to manage the elections so successfully.[[81]] Charles, however, in whose heart his English experience still rankled, was of opinion that, supplies once voted, the sooner a Parliament was sent about its business the better. “Parliaments,” he wrote, “are of the nature of cats, they ever grow curst with age, so that, if you will have good of them, put them off handsomely when they come to any age, for young ones are ever most tractable.”[[82]] The Lord Deputy was obliged to submit, and the Parliament was dissolved.
As soon as the revenue had been placed on a satisfactory basis Wentworth began to turn his attention to the two great measures for which his Irish administration is chiefly famous—the Plantation of Connaught and the reform of the English Church in Ireland. It was to the latter subject that his attention was first directed. It was certainly high time that something should be done. It is difficult to say which stood in more urgent need of improvement—the material condition of the churches or the morals of the clergy. In a letter to Laud, Wentworth graphically sums up the situation: “An unlearned clergy, which have not so much as the outward form of churchmen to cover themselves with, nor their persons anyway reverenced or protected; the churches unbuilt; the parsonage and vicarage houses utterly ruined; the people untaught through the non-residency of the clergy, occasioned by the unlimited shameful numbers of spiritual promotions with cure of souls, which they hold by commendams; the rites and ceremonies of the Church run over without all decency of habit, order, or gravity, in the course of their service; the possessions of the Church to a great proportion in lay hands; the bishops aliening their very principal houses and demesnes to their children, to strangers, farming out their jurisdiction to mean and unworthy persons; the Popish titulars exercising the whilst a foreign jurisdiction much greater than theirs; the schools, which might be a means to season the youth in virtue and religion, either ill-provided, ill-governed for the most part, or, which is worse, applied sometimes underhand to the maintenance of Popish school-masters: lands given to these charitable uses, and that in a bountiful proportion, especially by King James of ever-blessed memory, dissipated, leased forth for little or nothing, concealed, contrary to all conscience and the excellent purposes of the founder: the college here, which should be the seminary of arts and civility in the elder sort, extremely out of order, partly by means of their statutes, which must be amended, and partly under the government of a weak provost: all the monies raised for charitable uses converted to private benefices: many patronages unjustly and by practice gotten from the Crown.”[[83]]
There is abundant evidence that this disgraceful picture was not in the least over-coloured. Bedell, writing to Laud four years previously, informed his correspondent that the parish churches were “all in a manner ruined and unroofed and unrepaired,” and that his diocese contained only “seven or eight ministers of good sufficiency, and which is no small cause of the continuance of the people in Popery still, English: which have not the tongue of the people, nor can perform any divine offices, or converse with them: and which hold, many of them, two, three, four or more vicarages apiece: even the clerkships themselves are in like manner conferred upon the English: and sometimes two or three or more upon one man, and ordinarily bought and sold, or let to farm.”[[84]] Even in 1638, in spite of the vigorous efforts of the Lord Deputy, Leslie, Bishop of Down, found the clergy generally negligent and disorderly, and the churches “kept no better than hog-styes.”[[85]]
But even these were not in Wentworth’s eyes the most serious of the abuses with which he had to deal. A Protestant Church established and maintained by the civil power in the midst of an intensely Catholic people inclined by an inevitable law towards an extreme and fanatical form of Protestantism. It is not, therefore, surprising that the Irish articles, which had been drawn up by Usher, then professor of divinity in Trinity College, Dublin, and adopted by Convocation in 1615, should have been decidedly more puritanical in tone than the Thirty-nine Articles of the English Church.[[86]] “I doubt much,” wrote Bramhall, “whether the clergy be very orthodox.”[[87]] At the same time, a great number of benefices continued to be held by those whom the Lord Deputy and the English Primate regarded as schismatics. On the one hand the Catholic priesthood not only continued to exercise their functions in contempt of penalties which it was practically impossible to enforce, but remained in many places in possession of the churches.[[88]] On the other hand, the Scotch settlers “brought with them,” in the words of an Anglican historian, “such a stock of Puritanism, such a contempt of bishops, such a neglect of the public liturgy and other divine offices of the Church, that there was nothing less to be found amongst them than the government and forms of worship established in the Church of England.”[[89]] Ministers hostile to the doctrines and discipline of the Establishment had been frequently introduced into livings after an irregular ordination by the influence of lay patrons and the connivance of puritanical bishops, and threatened to give at least as much trouble to the ecclesiastical authorities as the Catholics.[[90]] Attacked by Roman Catholics on the one hand and by Presbyterians on the other, the English Church in Ireland was still more cruelly despoiled by the rapacious oligarchy who yielded her a nominal allegiance. In the words of Bramhall’s biographer, there was not one diocese in the province of Cashel that had not “the marks of the sacrilegious paw upon it.”[[91]] The ecclesiastical courts, whose duty it was to remedy these evils were in the hands of unprincipled officials, who did little save plunder Catholics and Protestants with complete impartiality. “Among all the impediments to the work of God amongst us,” Bedell wrote to Laud, “there is not any greater than the abuse of ecclesiastical jurisdiction.”[[92]] Bedell himself waged an unsparing war upon abuses of all sorts; but he got little support from his brethren. Archbishop Usher sympathised, but was too timid to swim against the stream.[[93]] The majority of the bishops thought of nothing but their pockets.[[94]]
To this scandalous state of things Wentworth was fully determined to put an end. His efforts to abolish pluralities and absenteeism, to repair the churches, and to restore to the clergy the tithes which had been dishonestly appropriated by laymen deserve high praise. But he had another and less creditable object in view. He wished to drive both the Puritan settlers and the native Catholics into the pale of the Established Church, and at the same time to force that Church itself into closer conformity to the English model. But if, in common with most, if not all, of his contemporaries, he had scant reverence for the rights of conscience, he was at least wise enough to see that the internal reform of the Establishment must precede the attempt to enforce conformity. It was idle, he told Laud, to inflict penalties for recusancy “where as yet there is scarcely a church to receive or an able minister to teach the people.”[[95]]
At a very early period of his administration Wentworth’s zeal for ecclesiastical reform involved him in the first of those personal disputes with powerful and corrupt officials which contributed far more than his oppressive treatment of the native Irish to discredit his administration in England. Lord Cork, who never allowed his Protestant enthusiasm to interfere with strict attention to his pecuniary interests, had contrived to appropriate property belonging to the diocese of Lismore of the annual value of £1,600. He was summoned before the Castle Chamber, and not merely compelled to disgorge his ill-gotten gains, but sentenced to a heavy fine. Laud, with whom Wentworth kept up a constant correspondence on the affairs of the Church, expressed his satisfaction in very unepiscopal language.[[96]]