This process began with an Act of Philip and Mary, supported by the Roman Catholic Church, which was still the Church of the English rulers rather than that of the Irish people; and the Lord-Deputy Sussex was required to permit the Primate to “exercise and use all manner of ecclesiastical censures against the disordered Irishry.” Leix and Offaly, where the O'Conors and O'Mores had rebelled under Edward VI., were confiscated to the Crown and converted into King's and Queen's Counties. They were to be planted partly [pg 259] with English settlers and partly with such Irish as would abjure their native language, laws, and customs. But it took more than half a century to carry out the plantation, and eighteen rebellions broke out before the natives could be eradicated from the soil; even when the miserable remnants had been transplanted to Kerry, many of them straggled back to live as hirelings on lands that had been their own. Such was the new model on which Ireland was to be moulded into “civility and good government;” and in 1622 a Royal Commission pronounced this plantation to have been well begun and prosperously continued.
Literally, it was a war of extermination, which spread into other parts of Ireland, and brought political and religious issues in its train. A year after the Plantation Act, but before Mary Tudor's death, Sussex wrote that the native Irish were denying England's right to Ireland, and preparing to assist the French and Scots. The events of Elizabeth's reign taught them to look rather to Spain and to the Papacy, and by degrees Philip II., after whom King's County and its capital, Philipstown, had been named, became the patron of the Irish who suffered from the plantation. Religion, too, came into play. The first Jesuit missionaries had returned in despair from their labours on the unresponsive Irish soil. But expropriation left the peasants with little solace save religion, and their religion would not be that of their oppressor; to them Protestantism meant plantation. The links between English Government and Roman Catholic hierarchy had been broken; and Catholicism, which has no natural affinities with nationalism, became the adventitious ally of the Irish people in their resistance to the intruding imperialism of their English foes.
This coalition of hostile forces supplied the English [pg 260] Government with what it considered convincing arguments for persisting in its course; fresh Jesuit missions to Ireland, and intrigues between Irish chiefs and Spanish ambassadors sped the policy of plantation by provoking rebellion in Munster. The way seemed to have been prepared by the death of 30,000 Irish from starvation in that province within six months, and the pick of England's aristocracy, Raleigh, Grenville, Herbert, Spenser, and Norris, undertook the work of civilisation. They performed it mostly by bailiffs, who let the land at rack-rents to its former proprietors; and the whole fabric vanished in the rebellion which flamed out in 1598 on the news of Tyrone's victories in Ulster. With the assistance of Spain, Tyrone shook English rule in Ireland almost to its foundations; but they remained firm, embedded in the sea. The Spanish squadrons were annihilated in Kinsale and Castlehaven Harbours, and Tyrone was granted terms of peace. Ireland was conquered as it never had been before, but England had not yet learnt how to pacify a conquered country. Four years later Tyrone and Tyrconnell fled to Spain; the claims of their natural successors were set aside; and their lands were divided among the Scottish and English founders of modern Ulster. Thousands of natives, however, remained as tenants on the land of which they had been robbed, “hoping,” wrote the Lord-Deputy, “at one time or other to find an opportunity of cutting their landlords' throats.” The unique character and the success of the Ulster plantation were due less to the original planters than to the Calvinistic Scots who found there a refuge from Laud and the Stuarts, and like the Pilgrim Fathers regarded themselves as a people chosen to root out the Amalekite and Philistine natives. Like the founders of New [pg 261] England, too, their relations with the natives were far worse than those of the southern planters in Ireland, and the southern planters in North America.
Thirty years later the natives of Ulster found their opportunity, and wreaked on their landlords, in the massacre of 1641, vengeance for a generation of robbery and oppression. There ensued a decade of indescribable confusion, in which native Irish, Anglo-Irish, Ulster Scots, English parliamentarians, and Royalists fought one another, until Cromwell repaid the massacre of 1641 by those of Drogheda and Wexford, and by a further process of expropriation called the Cromwellian Settlement. More than two-thirds of Irish land had now passed into the hands of Englishmen; and although the Cromwellians had to disgorge a part of their spoil at the Restoration, it was estimated by Sir William Petty in 1664 that not more than one-third of the land belonged to the native Irish, including in that category the descendants of Anglo-Norman families; of the remainder, about half belonged to Elizabethan and Jacobean planters, and half to the Cromwellians. Nor was the process yet complete: the new expropriation was followed in 1689-90 by yet another attempt on the part of the Irish to recover their inheritance, and the failure of that attempt by further confiscation. At the beginning of the eighteenth century three-quarters of the land was owned by the English garrison, and the progress of the century was marked by fresh evictions. Political reasons had ceased, but economic causes supplied their place; and wide stretches of pasture were needed in order that the landlords might turn their property to the most profitable grazing purposes. Only land that would not do for cattle was left to the Irish peasants; from the bogs there looked up, from the barren hills there looked down, the Roman [pg 262] Catholic disinherited upon the smiling meadows of their Protestant supplanters.
Upon this broadening basis of plantation was developed the Irish Parliament, a Parliament doomed from the first by the very conditions of its being to a sterile and troubled existence. Here and there from the days of Elizabeth a native name may be traced in the lists of its members, but it was almost exclusively the Parliament of a caste, the instrument of oppression. Ten counties only sent representatives to Elizabeth's Parliament of 1560; plantation increased the number to twenty-seven in 1585; and the tale was fairly complete when, after the plantation of Ulster, James I. next summoned a Parliament in 1613. But the “Irish interest” which struggled therein against the “English interest” represented only the Anglo-Irish families, who had struck some roots in the soil and resented the dictation of English officials. The “native interest” had no voice in Parliament until O'Connell's triumph in 1828. Hence the pitiful impotence of this Parliament, the emptiness of the sound and fury of its constitutional debates. The beneficiaries of conquest could not in logic use the armoury of consent. The dependence of the colonists upon England placed their Parliament at the mercy of the English Government. They relied upon English force to expropriate the native Irish and to proscribe the Roman Catholic religion; and this reliance deprived them of moral and material grounds of resistance to the political, commercial, and industrial tyranny of their masters. The power which gave the planters their land could laugh at their constitutional pretensions. So the Dublin Parliament idly strove to emulate its exemplar at Westminster, and clamoured in vain for responsible government, for control of the [pg 263] Irish Executive. In spite of its Irish Parliament, Ireland has never been given the chance of governing itself.
But nothing could eradicate the “protest of the sea” against union with England, or the tendency of dwellers on Irish soil to become Irishmen. The Anglo-Normans had grown Hibernis ipsis Hiberniores in the middle ages, and nothing short of the Tudor Conquest would have perpetuated English dominion; for even the gentry of the Pale rebelled in Elizabeth's reign against “cess,” a form of arbitrary taxation compared in its constitutional bearings with ship-money. In their turn the Tudor planters were gripped by the Irish soil, and resisted the rule of Strafford; and a fresh immigration of Cromwellian settlers alone enabled William of Orange to hold Ireland against Tyrconnell and James II. Even their descendants, too, became part of the “Irish interest” in the eighteenth century; and Pitt's Act of Union was England's final effort to circumvent the insinuating strength of Irish nature.
The more Ireland's Parliament succumbed to Irish ideas, the more it was flouted by England, and the greater the efforts made to secure in it the predominance of the English interest. England, in spite of itself, was creating an Irish nation. It had destroyed the system of septs which it could divide and play off against one another; by imposing on all a grinding tyranny it had crushed out local distinctions and family feuds, and had evoked a national spirit which could not be corrupted by bribes or disarmed by division. Poynings' Laws were the first attempt at the new methods of control which led to the Act of Union. They were soon found insufficient. Not only must Irish legislation be curbed by the [pg 264] English Privy Council; the English Parliament must also have the power of initiating and passing laws for Ireland; and this practice grew up against which Molyneux vainly protested in 1694. In 1719 the practice was confirmed by an English statute, which transferred to the British House of Lords the appellate jurisdiction claimed by the Irish peers, and expressly asserted the right of the British Parliament to legislate for Ireland and override Irish laws. Similarly the Irish electorate was more and more rigidly restricted to the English interest; members of both houses were, by an English statute of William and Mary, required to be Protestants, and in 1727, by an English statute of George II., Catholics, who numbered four-fifths of the Irish people, were excluded from the franchise.
The same fear of a nascent Irish nationalism was the real motive for the Irish penal code, which assumed its worst features under Anne, and was largely extended under George I. and George II., although no Jacobite rebellion in Ireland threatened those sovereigns, and the only provocation was the silent growth of Irish national feeling. That its cause was not religious is clear, for there was little religious persecution, and the penal code in Ireland was at its worst in the heyday of English latitudinarianism. The design was really to shut out the Irish by means of their religion from political and social influence. Hence their exclusion from the legal and teaching professions, from the university, from the army and the navy, from corporations, grand juries and vestries; hence the barbarous laws by which a son converted to Protestantism could reduce his Catholic father to a mere life-tenant, by which no Catholic could buy or bequeath land or inherit or receive it as a gift from Protestants, by which he could not act as a [pg 265] guardian, a constable, or a gamekeeper, possess a horse worth more than £5, or keep more than two apprentices. A Protestant husband who married a Catholic wife fell under this penal code; a Protestant wife who married a Catholic husband was deprived of her inheritance; and an Act of George II. declared that mixed marriages should be null, and that the priests who made them should be hanged. Some knowledge of Irish history is required in order to appreciate the virtuous indignation roused by the Pope's Ne Temere decree. In the eighteenth century, wives were bribed by the law to turn against Catholic husbands, and children against their Catholic fathers; the fractious wife, the unnatural son had only to feign conversion in order to secure immunity and reward for undutiful conduct, and to deprive those whom they had injured of the management and disposal of their estates. Such was the system begotten by force and fraud through the breach of the Treaty of Limerick, when William III.'s generals, in order to pacify Ireland, guaranteed to the Irish people the enjoyment of their religious liberties. The arts which earlier English Governments had used to set chief against chief and clan against clan, were now employed on a more generous scale to set a dominant caste against the people they ruled, and to place at the absolute disposal of an alien garrison the lives, the liberties, the conscience, the property, and the domestic happiness of the nation it had robbed, maltreated, and betrayed.
Dominion, however, was not in the eighteenth century an end in itself, but a means for securing wealth. The age of commercial rivalry had set in during the latter half of the seventeenth century, and English traders, who had clamoured for the destruction of the Protestant Dutch, valued their hold over [pg 266] Catholic Ireland as a means for exploiting its markets and crushing its competition. One after another of Ireland's infant industries was massacred to satisfy English jealousy. Strafford's boasted encouragement of Irish linen was a blind to cover his campaign against Irish woollens. In the reign of Charles II. the importation of Irish cattle into England was prohibited because it lowered English rents, and Ireland's magnificent harbours were kept empty by its exclusion from the Navigation Acts, lest its incipient colonial trade should compete with England's. Deprived of their market for cattle, the Irish developed sheep-rearing and woollen manufactures; in 1699 the English Parliament accordingly prohibited the export of Irish manufactured wool to any country whatever. The hypocritical plea was anxiety to stimulate Irish linen, which the English Parliament thereupon practically excluded by a duty of 30 per cent. Having thus impoverished Ireland, Englishmen based their case against Irish claims to self-government on the thriftlessness of its people.
All classes in Ireland, Catholics and Protestants, landlords and tenants, traders and farmers, were, however, involved in this common misfortune, which in its helpless position the Irish Parliament was powerless to avert; and in spite of the discord sown with malignant ingenuity between the English, the Irish, and the native interests, in spite of the perverted skill of viceroys and primates in maintaining the English faction by purchasing boroughs and corrupting parliaments, a common impulse began to pervade the carefully dislocated members of the Irish body politic. Scandals like “Wood's Halfpence” provoked a national protest in Swift's “Drapier's Letters”; a common feeling began to mitigate the ferocity of the penal code, [pg 267] and to inspire a united demand for Irish freedom from English oppression. The opportunity came with the War of American Independence. Formed to provide a defence which England could not afford, the Irish Volunteers demanded the price for their services, and England had to pay it in Grattan's Parliament. The history of Ireland's packed and bribed and muzzled Parliament affords no proof of Ireland's incapacity to rule itself; rather it shows the lengths of cruelty and violence to which English Parliaments, in spite of their political genius, of their “glorious Revolution” of 1688, of their vaunted love of civil and religious liberty, have been driven by fruitless efforts to govern a gifted people against its will. England sought, and inevitably failed, to rule Ireland on principles the reverse of those on which were based its own proud liberties and democratic Empire.