Cromwell’s wars were even more cruel, and left Ireland in a condition, if possible, more wretched still. Half the people had perished; and the survivors were dying of hunger in the bogs and glens in which they had sought refuge from the fury of the troopers. Wolves prowled around the gates of Dublin, and wolf-hunting and priest-hunting became important and lucrative occupations. But it is needless to dwell longer upon this painful subject. Let us remark, however, that it would be unjust to hold Elizabeth or Cromwell responsible for these cruelties. They but executed the will of the English people, who still cherish their memories and justify these outrages. No English ruler ever feared being called to account for harshness or tyranny in dealing with Ireland. The public opinion of the nation considered the extirpation of the Irish as a work to be done, and applauded whoever helped forward its consummation. This much we may affirm on the authority of Protestant witnesses.
“The favorite object of the Irish governors,” says Leland, “and of the English Parliament was the utter extirpation of all the Catholic inhabitants of Ireland.”
“It is evident,” says Warner, “from the Lords-Justices’ last letter to the Lieutenant, that they hoped for an extirpation, not of the mere Irish only, but of all the English families that were Roman Catholics.”
The feeling against the Irish was even stronger than against the church, so that the English seemed to feel a kind of pleasure in the adherence of the Celtic population to the old faith, since it widened the chasm between the two races. They really made no serious efforts to convert the Irish to Protestantism. They neglected to provide them with instructors capable of making themselves understood. They put forth no Protestant translation of the Bible in the Irish language, but contented themselves with setting up a hierarchy of archbishops, bishops, and rectors whose lives were often scandalous, and who, as Macaulay says, did nothing, and for doing nothing were paid out of the spoils of a church loved and revered by the people. Some justification for the extermination of the Irish race would be found in the fact that those who perished were only papists. War, famine, confiscation, and exile had, by the close of the seventeenth century, either destroyed or impoverished the native and Catholic population of Ireland. The land was almost exclusively in the hands of Protestants, who had also taken possession of all the cathedrals, churches, and monasteries which had escaped destruction. The Catholics, reduced to beggary, were driven from the towns and, as far as possible, from
the English settlements into the bleak and barren hills of Connaught. In many instances the confiscated lands had been given to Englishmen or Scotchmen, with the express stipulation that no Irish Catholic should be employed by them, even as a common laborer. In this extremity the Irish people were helpless. Every line along which it was possible to advance to a better state of things was cut off. Their natural leaders had been driven into exile or reduced to abject poverty; their spiritual guides had been murdered or banished; or if any had escaped their pitiless persecutors, a price was set upon their heads, and they led the lives of outlaws, unable to administer the sacraments even to the dying, except by stealth.
All their institutions of learning had been destroyed; and England permitted no instruction except in the English tongue—which the Irish neither spoke nor were willing to speak—and in Protestant schools, from which she knew the Catholics were necessarily shut out. They not only had nothing, but were in a condition in which it was impossible that they should acquire anything. Indeed, the little security which was still left them to drag out a miserable existence was found precisely in their utter helplessness and wretchedness. They could no longer be plundered, for they had nothing; they could not be butchered in battle, for they were powerless and without weapons; and so their persecutors paused, not, as the poet says, to listen to their sad lament, but from sheer contempt and indifference, thinking it no longer worth while to take notice of their hapless victims.
Three-fourths of the population of the island were nevertheless still Irish Catholics; and in spite of
the persistent efforts to drive them all beyond the Shannon, the moment the violence of persecution abated large numbers showed themselves in other parts of the country, especially in the province of Munster. It was at this time, and to meet any danger that might arise from the mingling of the Irish Catholics with the Protestant colonists, that the Penal Code was enacted, by which the entire population that still held to the ancient faith was deprived of all rights and reduced to the condition of helots and pariahs. This Code, the most inhuman ever contrived by the perverted ingenuity of man, was the work of the Irish Parliament, which, it is almost needless to say, represented only the Protestants of Ireland. Violence had done its work; the Catholic Irish had been reduced to a condition as wretched as it is possible for man to suffer and live; and now the form of justice and the semblance of law are invoked to make this condition perpetual. Suddenly, and for the first time, the Protestants of Ireland seem animated with religious zeal for the conversion of the Catholics. The extermination of the Irish race was abandoned as hopeless; and, indeed, there seemed to be no good ground for believing that a people who had survived the wars, famines, and exiles by which Ireland had been drained of its population during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could be extirpated. Nothing remained, therefore, but to convert them. This was the pretext with which men sought to hide the monstrous iniquity of the penal laws. All bishops and monks were ordered to quit Ireland before the 1st of May, 1698, under pain of imprisonment and transportation; and, in case they should return, they were to
suffer death. Heavy fines were imposed upon all who harbored or concealed the proscribed ecclesiastics; and rewards were offered for their discovery or apprehension. Care was taken at the same time to exclude all foreign priests. By thus cutting off from Ireland the fountain-source of orders and ecclesiastical jurisdiction, it was confidently expected that in a few years the Catholic priesthood would cease to exist there, and that the people, left without priests or sacraments, would have no alternative but to become Protestants. Every exterior sign of Catholic worship was suppressed, and it was tolerated only as a hidden cult, whose ceremonies were performed with bated breath, clandestinely in cabins and unfrequented places. Whatever appealed to the heart or the imagination was condemned. The steeple that pointed to heaven; the bell whose religious tones thrilled with accents of a world of peace; the cross that told of the divinity that is in suffering and sorrow; the pilgrimages in which the people gathered to cherish sacred memories and to do homage to worthy deeds and noble lives, were all proscribed. And even the poor huts in which it was possible to offer the Holy Sacrifice were carefully watched by the officers of the law, as to-day, in the great cities, places of infamy are put under the surveillance of the police.
Having suppressed the hierarchy and shorn the Catholic religion of its splendor, the rulers of Ireland next proceeded to adopt measures by which every imaginable inducement to apostasy was held out both to the clergy and the laity. An annual pension, first of twenty, then of thirty, and finally of forty pounds sterling was offered to all priests