The terms of the Act of Settlement very clearly indicated that the political influence of the adventurers and soldiers was in the ascendant, whilst that of the Catholics was virtually extinct. Nevertheless, the Protestants in Ireland were so discontented with the arrangement that the clouds of a fresh rebellion rolled up, and a Bill explanatory of the Act and consolatory to the tender susceptibilities of the Protestants had to be passed. The Act of Explanation provided that the adventurers and soldiers should give up a third of their grants to be applied to the purpose of increasing the fund for reprisals; that the Connaught purchasers should retain twothirds of the lands they possessed in September 1663; that in all cases of competition between the Protestants and Roman Catholics every ambiguity should be interpreted in favour of the former; that twenty more of the Irish should be restored by special favour, and that all the other Catholics, whose claims had not hitherto, for want of time, been decided by the Commissioners, should be treated as disqualified. In this manner more than three thousand old proprietors were, without the benefit of a trial, without a word in their own defence, for no other reason than that of Protestant greed, excluded for ever from the inheritance of their fathers. The immense Cromwellian confiscations were confirmed, and by the time the cup of injustice was full it was estimated that the Protestants possessed fourfifths of the whole kingdom, whilst of the Protestant landowners in 1689 two-thirds are said to have held their estates under the Act of Settlement of 1660. But the shuffling of the cards was not yet complete.

At the end of 1687 Ireland was ripe for another struggle. Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnel, who had succeeded Clarendon 2 as Deputy that year, had denounced the Act of Settlement, and was apparently meditating another huge transfer of Irish land. In 1688 the Irish rose, and 100,000 levelled their pikes for the exiled James in spite of the memory of Stuart tyranny and the dishonesty of kings. In 1689 James II landed at Kinsale and summoned a Parliament, which met at Dublin on May 7 and sat until July 18, and in the Lower House of which there are reported to have been only half-a-dozen Protestant members. It immediately proceeded to repeal the Settlement of 1660, actuated as it was by the desire to re-establish the descendants of the old proprietors upon their ancestral lands. This was followed by James' impolitic and sweeping Act of Attainder, which practically aimed at another complete subversion of the existing Irish land system. A list of more than two thousand landowners was drawn up who were to be attainted of high treason, and whose estates were to be forfeited, unless they could prove 1 (1630-1691), titular Duke of Tyrconnel.

2 Henry Hyde, second Earl of Clarendon (1638-1709), eldest son of the first earl.

themselves to be innocent and appear for that purpose in their own defence. The whole proceeding was grossly unfair, for every member of the Parliament was encouraged to contribute the names of those of his neighbours whom he believed to be disloyal or happened to have a grudge against. The Act, however, was nipped in the bud, and the rickety fabric of Stuart legislation hurled to the ground in the general ruin of the Boyne and Aghrim. The Treaty of Limerick followed in 1691, and Sarsfield's 1 heroes, kicking off the dust of their feet against Ireland's rulers, embarked for a foreign shore. But they tasted their revenge, for the Irish exiles of Limerick and their descendants took their part in defeating British troops at Stainkirk, Landen, Almanza, and Fontenoy. The violation of the Treaty was the next step, followed by a fresh shuffle of Irish estates. Under the Treaty of 1691 the Irish people had been granted freedom of worship, the use of their arms, the possession of their estates, and the right to sit in Parliament and vote at elections, as well as the right to practise law and medicine, and to engage in trade and commerce. Lord Sydney, the Viceroy, had opposed the breach of a sacred pact and was driven out in consequence, but his successor, Capel, one of the Lords-Justices, had a tougher conscience more suited to his masters, and the violation was quietly carried out, the two other Lords-Justices, Wyche and Duncombe, who shared Sydney's scruples, being forced to retire. A so-called "Confirmation of the Treaty of Limerick " was, as a preliminary move to the premeditated breach, enacted in 1697, by which the first Article of the Treaty was omitted which secured the Catholics in the free exercise of their religion, and an alteration made in the second Article which practically cancelled it, the words which William had reinserted with his own hand being deliberately struck out. That portion of the Treaty was also excised which guaranteed to the Catholics "the use and practice of their several and respective trades and callings," and the 4th, 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th Articles were rejected in a body. This, indeed, was an Irish "confirmation" with a vengeance. Not long afterwards, in 1699, a commission, which had been appointed by the English Parliament to inquire into the condition, extent, and value of the forfeited lands in Ireland, reported upon the result of its investigations, and as a result a Bill of Resumption was passed in April 1700, by which all the King's grants, with the exception of seven, were resumed, 391,412 acres being restored to their former owners, and 716,374 acres sold. This Act, we may well believe, drew iron tears down William's

1 Patrick Sarsfield, titular Earl of Lucan, died of his wounds at Huy in 1693. His wife, who was the daughter of Lord Clanricarde, subsequently married the Duke of Berwick.

2 Henry Sydney, Earl of Romney (1641-1704), appointed Lord-Lieutenant in March 1692. 3 Sir Henry Capel, created Lord Capel of Tewkesbury, 1691–2.

cheek, for by it Mrs. Villiers (Countess of Orkney) lost 95,000 acres, which this prim Protestant had bestowed upon her as the price of their unlawful amours.

The shuffling of Irish lands for the past hundred years had been such that a large part of Ireland had been confiscated two or three times in the course of a century. This was recognized by Lord Clare in the Irish House of Lords during the debate on the Union in 1800, when he said

"The superficial contents of the island are calculated at 11,042,682 acres. The state of the forfeitures was as follows-In the reign of James I, the whole province of Ulster, 2,836,837 acres; Set out by the Court of Claims at the Restoration, 7,800,000 acres; Forfeitures of 1688, 1,060,792 acres: Total number of acres forfeited, 11,697,629. So that the whole of your island has been confiscated, with the exception of the estates of five or six families of English blood, some of whom had been attained in the reign of Henry VIII, but who recovered their possessions before Tyrone's rebellion, and escaped the pillage of the republic inflicted by Cromwell, and no inconsiderable portion of the island has been confiscated twice, or perhaps thrice in the course of a century. The situation therefore of the Irish nation at the Revolution stands unparalleled in the history of the habitable world. . . . What then, was the situation of Ireland at the Revolution and what is it at this day? The whole power and property of the country have been conferred by successive monarchs of England upon the English Colony, composed of three sets of English adventurers, who poured into this country at the termination of three successive rebellions. Confiscation is their common title; and from their first settlement they have been hemmed in on every side by the old inhabitants of the island, brooding over their discontents in sullen indignation."

Here is the answer to the Irish riddle in a nutshell. The Celt never forgets. He has a more enduring memory and more tenacious instincts than the Anglo-Saxon, and, until he is re-established upon the land on the terms that he believes he is entitled to, we shall have our Irish question and the disgrace that has attached to it.1 The difficulty has been different to that experienced by most conquerors in history. Other countries have been overrun by strangers and lands confiscated, but the former inhabitants have generally either been exterminated or driven out, or the victors have settled down in their midst to rule them. In the case of Ireland the conquerors left the great majority of the inhabitants where they found them, and instead of settling among the conquered and attempting to govern, have resided in the original country of their birth as absentees; the only connection between the two parties being the rent drawn from the land. This is one of the primary

1 The Land Act of 1903 has gone a great way towards effecting the necessary reform, and was passed after this passage was written.

reasons why Ireland has always been a discontented country, and why the old wounds have never properly healed.

We will now consider with a dispatch rendered congenial by natural aversion to the subject a few of those grievances under which the people of Ireland groaned, when the convulsions of rebellion and the rage of civil war had done their work; wrongs that darkened nearly every poor threshold, and rankled in the breast of every sufferer who was not constitutionally a slave. We will discuss the Catholic Penal Code as a whole more particularly later on, and at present confine our view to the commercial restrictions, the Pension List, the abuses in the Established Church, the prohibition of intermarriages (a part of the Penal Code), and the agrarian system, which taken together form a suitable and sombre background to the picture of later Irish history.

Up to the time of the Restoration the free play of Irish industry was practically unimpeded by any legislative restriction, but after 1660 English landowners began to be alarmed lest Irish enterprise, backed by pluck and patriotism, should impair their State-fed monopolies and increase Irish power, and laws were passed in 1663, 1665 and 1680, which absolutely prohibited the importation from Ireland into England of all cattle, sheep and swine, of beef, pork, bacon and mutton, and even of butter and cheese.1

By the original Navigation Act of 1660 Irish vessels had enjoyed all the privileges accorded to English ones, but in 1663 Ireland was omitted from the amended Act, and thus deprived of the whole colonial trade. With a very few specified exceptions, no European articles could be imported into the English Colonies except from England, in ships built in England, and chiefly manned by English sailors. In 1670 this exclusion of Ireland was confirmed, and in 1696 it was further enacted that no goods of any kind could be imported directly into Ireland from the Colonies. But worse was to follow. After the Revolution the English wool manufacturers, trembling at the thought of what Irish energy and ability might do, petitioned with tears in their eyes for the total and instant destruction of that Irish industry which was their bugbear, and an accommodating Parliament was summoned in Dublin in 1698 for the express purpose of realizing their wish. Laws were passed imposing heavy additional duties upon the export of Irish woollen goods, sufficiently penal, it was hoped, to cripple all the advantages derived from a persistent and honourable labour. But their

1 James Anthony Froude wrote of this legislation

"The real motive for the suppression of agricultural improvement was the same as that which led to the suppression of manufactures-the detestable opinion that to govern Ireland conveniently, Ireland must be kept weak. The advisers of the Crown, with an infatuation which now appears like insanity, determined to keep closed the one remaining avenue by which Ireland could have recovered a gleam of prosperity."

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greed was not yet surfeited, and in spite of the warning voice of Molyneux1 another Bill was carried in 1699 prohibiting the exportation of manufactured wool from Ireland to any other country whatever. Thus, as Jonathan Swift said, "the conveniency of ports and harbours which nature had bestowed so liberally on this kingdom, was of no more use to us than a beautiful prospect to a man shut up in a dungeon." These were the steps by which the English wool manufacturers were to clamber to the wealth of Dives, and down which the Irish Parliament was to slink, almost unconscious of its base servility, to its bribed and final extinction.2 There was no need to put Bishop Berkeley's 3 question-"What hindereth us Irishmen from exerting ourselves, using our hands and brains, doing something or other, man, woman, or child, like all the other inhabitants of God's earth?"

The Irish Pension List was another measure of the moral worth of Irish rule. It was the shameful custom to quarter upon Irish poverty those bawds and bastards whom public opinion would have made it dangerous to provide for on the English Pension List. The Duke of St. Albans, one of the illegitimate spawn of Charles II, received an Irish pension of £800 a year; and Catherine Sedley, the concubine of James II, one of £5,000. Erengard Schulenburg, Duchess of Kendal, and Duchess of Munster in the Irish peerage, and the Countess of Darlington, the two concubines of George I, enjoyed Irish pensions of the united value of another £5,000; Lady Walsingham, the daughter of the former, had one of £1,500; Lady Howe, the daughter of the second, one of £500; and Madame Walmoden, one of the concubines of the second George, a pension of £3,000 a year; whilst there were many other such who battened upon Irish indigence, equally deserving, both on account of the high example of their private virtue, as well as the long and distinguished record of their public services. In fact, the Irish Pension List amounted in the first half of the eighteenth century to more than £30,000 a year, while the men who countenanced this gross and naked scandal were those righteous Solons who presumed to censure the conduct and to legislate for the morals of the Irish people.

In regard to the Protestant Church in Ireland an impartial historian has given it as his opinion that, "the abuses of Church patronage from the time of the Restoration were probably unparalleled in Europe," nearly the whole of the extensive patronage being concentrated upon Englishmen, who were relations or followers of the leading officials, the parasites of the Castle, or

1 William Molyneux (1656–1698), one of the representatives of Dublin University. 2 Appendix VIII, quotations from Jonathan Swift, and from Cæsar Otway's report. George Berkeley (1685-1753), Bishop of Cloyne.