A brief reference to the rebellion of 1641 in Ulster gives us the most convenient starting-point. The dispossessed Clansmen, availing of the troubles between Charles I and the English Parliament, suddenly seized on their ancestral lands and drove out the settlers. Much has been written of the cruelties of both sides in a keen struggle for existence in a semi-barbarous age. The insurgents have been charged with a massacre of Protestants, the number of slain, according to some accounts, being greater than that of the whole English population of the island, as if the outbreak were one undertaken from religious motives. Religion had nothing to do with it. It was the eternal Land Question in its original and most crude form—nothing more. It was unfortunate as furnishing a valuable pretext that was readily availed of for a general confiscation by the Puritan Parliament that the settlers were Scotch and English Protestants, but it cannot be doubted that, had they been Spaniards or Italians with an Archbishop at their head, they would have fared in precisely the same manner. From the point of view of the great mass of the Irish proprietors both Old-Irish and Anglo-Irish, it was an enormous tactical blunder.
A detail of the rebellion which had serious consequences, was the use of a forged Commission from Charles I, whereby some chiefs and others of the old proprietors who were hanging back, were induced to come out. Charles was in Edinburgh collecting evidence against the Inviters at the time of the outbreak, but was unwilling to leave until he had finished. Seeing, however, the use that would be made of any hesitation on his part in putting down a rebellion alleged to have been organized under his Commission, he ordered the Parliament to arrange for sending an Army into Ireland. That Assembly strung to the highest pitch of fanatical fury by the grossly exaggerated accounts of the Lords Justices and others interested in future forfeitures in February, 1642, passed an Act whereby 2,500,000 acres of Irish land in parts not concerned in the rebellion, were offered as security to whomsoever should subscribe towards the raising of the army.
On the 8th April, 1642, the King offered to go to Ireland and take command of the English garrison against the rebels, but the Parliament, believing he intended only to bring those troops into England, told him if he went, it would be looked on as an act of abdication. It can easily be seen that the rebellion was a great advantage to the Parliament, since the King could not withdraw his troops from Ireland without giving support to the story circulated by the Parliament, “that he and his Popish Queen had authorized the rising.” But, apart from the loss of popularity suffered by the King, the most important gain to the Parliament was the power to raise money and troops under the Act of Confiscation. The subscriptions obtained from the adventurers, or, as we should now call them, shareholders, were not to be paid into the Royal Exchequer, but to a Committee composed of Members of the House of Commons and Adventurers, and these were to appoint the Commander and Officers, the King being allowed only to sign the Commissions. The lands of the Irish were not to be set out to the adventurers until Parliament should declare the war at an end. The King was also deprived of the power to pardon the insurgents, for the effect of pardons would be to deprive the adventurers of their security. In this way, the mass of the Irish proprietors would be forced into rebellion, while for that reason the King would be prevented from entering into any terms with them, whereby he might call the English garrison in Ireland to his assistance in the coming struggle with the Parliament, or receive help from the insurgents.
In considering the attitude of the Parliament and the English people in all these matters, it must not be forgotten that they were then about to be forced into a life and death struggle against an autocracy. They knew that Strafford had, but a short time before, declared the King’s Government to be as autocratic in Ireland as that of any absolute monarch in Europe, and that both he and the King had lively hopes of bringing about the end of parliamentary government in England. They had an acute dread that the King’s power in Ireland might be greater than it really was, and that it would be used to crush their liberties. For this reason, if for no other, they were more determined than ever to extinguish the Irish as a nation. We know now that Charles was an admirer and correspondent of that Alexis Romanoff, who, after swearing to uphold them, had destroyed such germs of representative Government as then existed in Russia, and which the Russian people are still vainly striving to recover. After bearing with the King’s tyranny, vacillation, and faithlessness through many years, the time was now rapidly approaching when the conflict between the principles of autocracy and those of popular government would have to be decided by the sword.
Of the religious intolerance shown by all parties in these dissensions, it can only be said that men’s minds were yet quite unprepared to accept, or even understand, anything like toleration, and when opposing creeds met in open hostilities, both sides were often disgraced by cruelties that showed they were little influenced by such Christian principles as they were supposed to hold in common.
The Executive Government in Dublin Castle was, during most of the period with which we are concerned, in the hands of the Lords Justices in the absence of Lord Leicester, who had been appointed Lord Lieutenant, but who, already inclining to the popular side in England, never took up his office. The Lords Justices were, nominally, Sir William Parsons and Sir John Borlase. Parsons, from a needy and vulgar adventurer, by the grasping chicanery then, and long after necessary to the establishment of a great position in Ireland, had wormed his way into his present eminence. Sir John Borlase, the Commander of the Ordnance, was an old soldier, well stricken in years, and practically a nonentity by the side of his powerful colleague. The English garrison in Ireland, already largely imbued with Puritan principles, was under the command of the Earl—afterwards Marquis—of Ormond.
The character of Ormond has been viewed from so many standpoints, that it is difficult to decide impartially between the extremely different views given of it. He was originally a Catholic, but taken to England by the Court of Wards in his youth, had been brought up a Protestant. By birth, the head of one of the greatest Catholic Anglo-Irish families of the Pale, amongst whom he had many relatives and connections, he naturally sympathised with them in their troubles, but he also shared with them the firm belief that they were not Irish, but merely English colonists in Ireland. A fervent Royalist, devoted to the King and his interests, as long as there was any chance of helping him, he was distrusted by the Lords Justices, especially Parsons, “the guiding spirit of confiscation and destruction,” to such an extent, that even on such military expeditions as he undertook against the insurgents by their orders, he was constantly thwarted, interfered with, and even recalled when he had gained some success, lest, by his means, the King’s party should grow too strong for that of the Parliament. He was in a most difficult position, and it always seemed to me an error to denounce Ormond as a traitor to the Irish cause. He entered into no engagements to serve it, though he was disposed, as far as possible, to favour his kinsmen and dependents of the Pale, but he was, first of all, an English colonist, a soldier in the King’s service, with no pretensions to any feeling of Irish nationality, which, as a matter of fact, far from having displaced the narrower ties of clanship, was even then, only approaching the throes of birth.
For some years, the Catholic Anglo-Irish proprietors, especially of the Pale, had been endeavouring, but in vain, to come to some accommodation with the King, heedless of what might befall their hereditary enemies, the Old-Irish. They had addressed petitions and remonstrances to Charles, but these, for the most part, had been suppressed by the Lords Justices. It would be impossible, in this rapid sketch to trace the course of these earlier negotiations. The passing of the Acts of Confiscation were a rude awakening for the Anglo-Irish. They were at once made to feel that for all their claims to English descent, they were looked on by those in power in England not as Englishmen, not even as “merely Englishmen with bad accents,” but purely and simply as Irish Papists, fomenters and favourers of rebellion and murder, whom it would be meritorious to exterminate.
They were accordingly forced, though, as they truthfully declared, most reluctantly, to ally themselves with the Old-Irish. This they did in a half-hearted way, being, most of them, rather inclined to temporise with the King through Ormond than to boldly adopt the policy of their allies, and by securing with their help the command of the country, be in a position to dictate terms. At a Synod of the Clergy of the Province of Armagh, in March, 1642, it was decided that an Assembly, representative of the whole of Ireland, should be convened. In May, a meeting of the clergy and principal laity took place at Kilkenny, and a Supreme Council of nine members was chosen as a Provisional Government to arrange the convention of the General Assembly. When the Lords Justices heard of the establishment of the Catholic Confederacy, they and the Irish House of Commons took steps to prohibit all intercourse with Catholics, and the House resolved that no one refusing the Oaths of Supremacy should be allowed to sit. The General Assembly of the Confederation held its first meeting on October 24, and the Rev. Father Meehan, in his History of the Confederation of Kilkenny, draws a glowing picture of the scene in St. Canice’s, where, for the first time probably since the battle of Clontarf, the representatives of the Irish nation assembled together for a common national object. Every county and every borough had chosen its representatives, and the body thus deputed was practically an Irish Parliament, though out of respect for the King, not having been summoned by his writs, it disclaimed that title. Its first business was to elect a new Supreme Council of twenty-five members. There were also Provincial and County Councils. The cumbrous procedure adopted, whereby every member of the Supreme Council had to be consulted in all important matters, did much to hamper its action, and was productive of delays in a time when rapid decision was most needful, and this contributed in some measure to its ultimate failure to effect the objects for which it was called into being.
Amongst the most important of the first declarations of the Assembly, was their resolution to maintain the rights and immunities of the Catholic Church agreeably to the Great Charter. They commanded all persons to bear faith and allegiance to the King, and to maintain his just prerogatives, while they denied and renounced the Irish Government administered in Dublin Castle by “a malignant party to his Highness’s great disservice and in compliance with their confederates, the malignant party of England.” The Church was to re-enter on its ancient rights, all ecclesiastical property was to be vested in the Bishops, but Abbey lands were not to be restored by the lay possessors, many of whom were sitting in the Assembly itself. This question of the Abbey lands at once became a bone of contention between the Religious Orders and some of the most powerful of the laity, and was a potent factor of the disunion which followed. The Assembly did not enter into the question of the ownership of land, beyond refusing to recognise the results of the insurrection. Land was to be considered the property of those who were in possession on October 1, 1641. On this point Gardiner says: “The land policy proclaimed was a policy of land owners, and was unlikely to conciliate those who had formed the strength of that agrarian revolution which had well nigh swept the English out of Ulster. It is, however, impossible to doubt that if the efforts of the Assembly had been crowned with success, it would have found itself powerless to reinstate the English and Scottish colonists in the lands which they had recently lost, and it is not very probable that Catholic Ireland would have granted to Protestants, a toleration which was denied to Episcopalians in Presbyterian Scotland, and had lately, when Charles’s authority was supreme, been denied to Presbyterians in Episcopalian England.” On this point of Gardiner’s, it may be remarked that where questions of religion alone were concerned, and apart from temporal considerations, Catholic Ireland has always shown an example of tolerance even in ages when tolerance was unknown in countries supposed to be more advanced in modern civilization.