Irishman found east of the Shannon. "To Hell or Connacht!" was the law and the policy of Cromwell.

Never has a more savage design been put into execution, at any rate in modern times, than this project of destroying a whole nation and planting another in its place. Yet, even Cromwell did not dare to complete the work, and for this he has been censured by Froude and other writers. The Irish race was not entirely extinguished, and Irishmen continued to exist not merely in Connacht but throughout the whole island. The need for manual labour caused the new colonists to preserve the former inhabitants “as hewers of wood and drawers of water," if nothing better. Ireland was so far from becoming English that less than half a century later she was again strong enough to join battle with the English; once again, strange though it seem, in the cause of the Stuarts. Yet it was Cromwell who brought modern Ireland into being and fashioned it into what it is; and it is he who is ultimately responsible for all its troubles. Any inquiry into the Irish question must begin by a consideration of his measures, for even the Jacobite reaction interfered little with his handiwork. When Charles II. was restored in England he granted a general confirmation of the "settlement," although in truth Cromwell's "planters planters" had turned out no better than those of Elizabeth and James I. Charles also maintained the laws by which the Catholic religion was proscribed, and it was in his reign that Archbishop Talbot of Malahide was imprisoned in Dublin Castle, where he died, and that the Venerable Oliver Plunket, Archbishop of Armagh, was dragged before a mock tribunal in London by which he was condemned to death, and suffered martyrdom. But when the second revolution broke out in England, James II., being in sore need of the assistance of the Irish, set himself to flatter the hopes of Catholics, and made promises of restoration to those whose lands had been confiscated. Hence, when he was driven out of England all the "papists" in Ireland rose in his favour, or rather rose against the English. An Irish Catholic

Parliament was assembled, which proclaimed religious liberty for all men in 1689, and set itself to restore Irish rights by measures of violence, which, however, were not in all cases without justification.10 What followed is matter of history; William's landing in Ireland; James's flight to the Boyne; the brave stand of the Protestants at Derry; the splendid defence of Limerick by the Catholics. A treaty of peace was signed at Limerick in 1691, but the war had the same fatal issue as all other Irish insurrections; a million acres were confiscated by William, and planted anew with Englishmen and Protestants. This was the last of the long series of English "Plantations" in Ireland.

What then was the final outcome of all these insurrections, of that cruel era of conquest which began with the first of the Tudors and ended only with the reign of the last Stuart, a period in which plantations, wars and massacres, followed one the other with a dire monotony unparalleled in modern history? There resulted from them not a single and united Irish nation, but rather two hostile Irelands, the one superimposed on the other, such as we find to-day. But the line of demarcation between the two nations was no longer one of race; the division was a political, a religious, and a social one. On the one side were the Protestants, of Scotch or English descent, the last conquistadores of Ireland, the men who had benefited by the last plantations, or those who had succeeded to their rights. All the land, all the wealth, and all the political power in the country were in their hands. Their Church was the State Church. They constituted the English "colony," the Ascendancy, the Anglo-Saxon Hegemony or Aristocracy of Ireland. On the other side was the mingled mass of the whole former Catholic population of Ireland-Irish, Anglo-Irish, English-now brought together and made one by misery

10 Macaulay's judgment upon the Parliament of 1689 is not impartial. See Lecky's more moderate view (op. cit. II., 183-196). The Act of Attainder against the Orangemen bears a curious resemblance to the Decrees of the Convention against Emigres.

D

and persecution. Most of them had been reduced to the condition of helots. Some even worked as tenant-farmers the land once owned by their ancestors. The common enemy was the designation usually applied to them. Two centuries of massacre and persecution had planted ineradicably in their hearts an undying hatred of England.12

V. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: THE PENAL LAWS.I

Out of these two Irelands, England, in the course of the eighteenth century, could have, and ought to have, made one united Ireland. The country was exhausted, the English conquest firmly established. The Jacobite movements of the eighteenth century did not affect Ireland. Lord Chesterfield might well say that the only "papist danger" he knew of was the beauty of Miss Ambrose, a reigning belle of the time in Dublin.

The nation," says Lecky,2

the hands of the potter "

was as passive as clay in No country," he tells us later, "ever exercised a more complete control over the destinies of another than did England over those of Ireland for three-quarters of a century after the Revolution."

II Lecky, op. cit. II., 205. 12 Ib., II., 199. The total population of Ireland was very much reduced after Cromwellian times. Sir William Petty estimated it in 1672 at but 1,100,000 souls. Afterwards it rapidly increased. Petty, in the 17th century, estimated the proportion of Protestants to Catholics at 38; Coghill, in 1733, at 1:3; Primate Boulter, about the same time, at 15. (Cf. Lecky, op. cit. II., 255).

I See especially for this period the works of Swift, Berkeley, Burke, Arthur Young, and lives and speeches of Grattan and Flood, the letters of Primate Boulter and Archbishop Synge. Sir J. Barrington's Rise and Fall of the Irish Nation, 1833. Sir G. Lewis, Irish Disturbances, London, 1836. Two Centuries of Irish History, edited by James Bryce, 1888. Froude, The English in Ireland in the 18th Century, London, 1872, and The Two Chiefs of Dunboy. Lecky, Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland. 2nd edition, 1871, and 3rd edition, 1903 (it is interesting to compare the two editions, which exhibit striking differences). G. De Beaumont in the first volume of Ireland: Social, Political, and Religious (p. 75 to 131) gives a very clear exposition of the Penal Laws and their consequences. Cf. in regard to the Penal Laws the laments of the Irish poet, O'Rahilly, whose works have been lately edited by Fr. Dineen (3rd vol. of the Irish Texts Society, London, 1900).

2 Op. cit. II., 256-As to Chesterfield's met, see ib., 278.

Thus the union of the two peoples, the two nations, that then existed in Ireland, would not have been difficult to accomplish; and if left to themselves, the Irish would, no doubt, soon have assimilated the new rulers, as they had assimilated the old. Even the planters" of Elizabeth's time had already become Irish in large part. Many of them had assisted in stirring up the insurrection of 1641. The grandson of Spenser, the poet, had himself been driven out of his land by Cromwell's army, as an Irish papist. We have it on the word of a contemporary that forty years after Cromwell's time, many of the children of the Protector's soldiers could not speak a word of English; and seven years after the battle of the Boyne, many of William III.'s soldiers had already become Catholics. "The conquest of Ireland by the Puritan soldiers of Cromwell," observes Lecky, "was hardly more signal than the conquest of these soldiers by the invincible Catholicism of the Irish women."3 To fashion these two Irelands into one and then to civilise and develop this new Ireland, such was the task that lay before the English government. But this task it consistently refused to perform, and preferred instead to widen the chasm between the two nationalities, using the one to keep down the other, whilst in reality it oppressed and exploited both, till at last, at the closeof the century, the two united in a common insurrection, against English rule.

Ireland's great misfortune at this period was that it had two masters, first England, and secondly, the English "garrison" in Ireland, the English Government on the one hand, and the Protestants of Ireland on the other. From a political point of view, the regime thus imposed upon the country was the worst that could possibly be imagined; namely, a combination of the government peculiar to a colony, or dependency, with that of a ruling caste, which, though all-powerful in Ireland, was yet not

3 Op. cit. II., 371. Cf. Modern Ireland, by Dr. George Sigerson, London, 372, 1868, p. 382 to 383.

itself independent.4 Had England governed Ireland directly mere self-interest must have made it protect the weak against the strong. Had it, on the other hand, handed over all power to the ruling caste, self-interest would have induced that caste to promote efficient government. But, as it was, Ireland was controlled by the "garrison," and the "garrison was ruled by England, with the result that all sense of responsibility, all zeal for the common interest, entirely disappeared. Protestant Ireland," as Grattan put it, "knelt to England on the necks of her countrymen." In one aspect they were tyrants, in another they were slaves. They were at once oppressors and oppressed. There was a sort of "deal" between them and the English Government, by which the public welfare was to be sacrificed to the English Government, Government, the Irish Catholics to the "garrison."5 We must then consider this two-fold oppression, that of Ireland as a whole by England on the one hand, and that of the Irish Catholics by the garrison" of English Protestants on the other.

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For Irish Catholics, the eighteenth century was the epoch of persecution under forms of law. "Popery had lived through the bloody persecutions of former times; it was now thought to be a simpler and a surer method to put it down by a system of penal enactments. Liberty of conscience had indeed been guaranteed to Catholics by the Treaty of Limerick. But the obstacle did not prove a serious one. The treaty was torn up, and from 1695 to 1709 the Protestant Parliament of Ireland passed a series of penal laws, which, in the words of Edmund Burke, "were not the effect of their fears but of their security."6 The purpose of this legislation was to crush Catholicism and Irish Catholics by legal means in such a way that there might never afterwards be anything to fear from them.

4 Two Centuries of Irish History, p. xxi. 5 G. De Beaumont, op. cit. I., 81, et seq. 6 Letters to Sir Hercules Langrishe.