A CURSORY VIEW OF ENGLAND AND IRELAND ANTERIOR TO THE ACCESSION OF JAMES II.
Few monarchs ever ascended the English throne under more unfavorable auspices than James II. Though he reached it in the order of legitimate right, it was at a time when the monarchy of England was well-nigh divested of its most vital prerogatives, and when the voice of the sovereign had little more weight in the national councils than that of any ordinarily dissentient member; and to this were superadded rivalries, jealousies, and hatreds, which having their sources in remoter times, gathered strength like the rivers, and grew deeper and darker in their course.
As a representative of Scottish royalty, he inherited many a bitter memory from Bannockburn to Flodden, and as a descendant of the unfortunate Mary, he was an object of hatred to the old reform families of England, with whom her persecutor, Elizabeth, was still a hallowed memory; he was a grandson of James I., whom neither the acquisition of a kingdom, nor the confiscation of Ireland,—so grateful to every English adventurer,—could redeem from national contempt; a son of Charles I., whom the revolutionary elements evoked in Church and State by the pedantry of his father, had brought to the scaffold; and brother to the second Charles, one of the most indolent and dissolute monarchs that ever disgraced a throne. Through the last three reigns, the name of Stuart had been a term of distrust or hatred, both to the High Church party of England, and the fanatics of Scotland; but through some unaccountable cause, it had one, and only one, abiding-place,—the heart of Catholic Ireland,—whose people, through every phase of that dynasty, had experienced nothing but treachery, confiscation, and proscription.
Other circumstances, too, though of a domestic nature, tended to establish the unpopularity of James, and to raise up difficulties in his road to royalty. In 1671, his wife, the Duchess of York, though nominally a Protestant, died in communion with the Catholic Church, and from that time forward he himself made open profession of Catholicity. Towards the beginning of 1673 he was married to Mary of Modena, a Catholic, and the daughter of a royal house then in close alliance with France. The Parliament, which met shortly after, expressed great indignation at this event, and gave practical effect to its resentment. A declaration of indulgence which had been issued by Charles in 1671, granting to dissenters from the High Church the public observance of their religion, and to Roman Catholics the right to hear Mass in private houses, was censured, and repealed in its application to the Catholics. In this session was also passed the "Test Act," which continued in full legal force down to the reign of George IV., and which, with some modifications, is virtually observed at the present day. By the passage of this act, every Catholic official in the realm was removed, and the Duke of York lost the command of the British navy, in which he had won high distinction, and which he had brought to a greater degree of efficiency than it had hitherto known. These and similar marks of disapprobation were specially meant for James, who was then heir-presumptive, and showed him the dangers that beset his way to the throne. He, however, continued on unwavering in his principles, while every exercise of conscience on his part was met by a check on the king's prerogative, or a direct censure on himself. But when it became known, after the demise of Charles, that he, too, had received the last sacraments at the hands of a Catholic priest, and that James had been instrumental in the conversion of his reprobate brother, the rage of the High Church party knew no bounds, and their denunciations were echoed through every recusant party in the land. Comfort they knew none; their forbearance was stretched to the utmost tension; their cup of hatred was filled to the last drop; and even that drop was pendent, as from a leaf; the next wind might shake the branch, and then——
But still they had one hope. James was a good round age; as yet he had no issue male by his Catholic queen; his daughters, by his former wife, were educated in the Protestant faith, and had each been espoused to a Protestant prince; and in a few years, the throne would apparently revert to a Protestant sovereign.
William, Prince of Orange, the husband of the elder, was the ostensible head of the Protestant Alliance, and a devoted enemy to France. This was a relief in their present misfortunes, and a little forbearance was thought better than much blood-letting. The Duke of Monmouth, too, the natural son of Charles, was a great favorite with a large portion of the English people, and had even, during the life of his father, struck for the crown; and though banished the realm for that offence, he was still a centre to rally round, in case of necessity. These were the considerations which alleviated the misfortunes of James's enemies, and made his accession, even for a moment, tolerable.
The reign of James I., commonly called the "Pedant," from his affectation of learning, his uncouth appearance, and slovenly habits, was not marked by any act that elevates a people, or adorns a crown. It was chiefly employed in religious disquisition, which, giving rise to innumerable sects, greatly disturbed the interior spirit of the nation. That part of his time not so devoted, was spent in securing to the reform party the lands, lay and cleric, which had been confiscated during the reign of his immediate predecessors. But he was never popular. Though his low garrulity and set apothegms were hailed by the vile minions by whom he was constantly surrounded, as the sublimation of wisdom, they never failed to plant a thorn in the breast of the nobles, and with them he was an object of unmitigated contempt—deeply felt, but not openly expressed. Still the courtiers and the king got along pretty well, and each improved after a mutual acquaintance. He knew their instincts and their passions, and they secured his favor by sacrificing to his egotism. In them he discovered an inordinate appetite for plunder, and in him they saw an obtusity of honor, and an unscrupulousness of conscience, that could be made sure instruments in securing the spoils of an incomplete reformation. He resolved to cater to their appetite, and they determined to obey his rule, though they did not at all reverence his majesty.
The death of Elizabeth had left England in a profound peace, which was scarcely disturbed during his reign; and this fortuitous circumstance, more than his innate cowardice, won for him the name of "the peaceful monarch." He has had many satirists and many eulogists, and some who were both as occasion answered. Among the latter may be reckoned Sir Walter Scott, by whom we are told that the restless spirits of the former reign might calmly enjoy "the peace which James the peaceful gave." But, then, this was only in poetic romaunt, and by one who greatly despised him in romantic prose. Such eulogiums, however, had only reference to the influence of his reign on England and Scotland; the tyranny of an English king towards Ireland had been, in all times, his surest passport to popularity, and there his reign was one of terror, vengeance, persecution, and spoliation.
The prince who connived at the murder of his royal mother, could lay little claim to the respect of the good or high-minded in any age or nation, and so he lived an object of contempt and loathing to all that was good or honorable in the land. But though men of honor shunned his court, the venal there held high jubilee. The king's natural avarice was keen, and it was still further whetted by Scotch self-seekers, who thronged lobby and vestibule in all their greedy officiousness. Their rapacity had to be appeased. The people of England, too, were grown sullen and discontented; a spiritual madness had lately overspread the land, and produced a state of society always ominous of evil to the monarch; hence the public mind should be diverted from its sombre broodings. To secure himself on the throne, he saw the necessity of opening a way to the enterprise of the incongruous elements by which he was surrounded, and many precedents pointed to Ireland as the never-failing outlet for English discontent.
The latter half of Elizabeth's reign had been disturbed by a series of revolutions in Ireland. The first of these was headed by the Earl of Desmond, in defence of religious liberty; it extended all over Munster, and ended in his death and the confiscation of that province. Shortly after it was revived by Hugh O'Neil, Earl of Tyrone, and assuming national proportions, continued with almost unvaried success to the battle of Kinsale, in 1602, and terminated in a treaty which was wantonly violated after the queen's death. These wars extended through a period of more than twenty years, and left Ireland greatly prostrated on the accession of James I.; but the country was beginning to revive, and, under a fostering hand, it would soon have been content and prosperous. It was hoped, too, that as James, while king of Scotland, had contributed much to foment the uprising of O'Neil, he would be as instrumental in allaying the causes that led to it. The English "Undertakers," however, looked on an Irish war as a prelude to a general confiscation, and felt bitter disappointment at the terms accorded to the Irish rebels by the late queen. The apportionment of one province, which took place after the death of Desmond, did not satisfy them, while Ulster, a wealthy and populous one, was still left in the possession of the natives. The Scotch followers of James could not understand the thing at all, and attributed it to the dotage of the queen. In this state of affairs, the king saw an opportunity of rendering himself acceptable alike to his English and Scotch subjects. It was an age fruitful in plots and expedients, when plunder took the name of civilization, and avarice stalked forth under the cloak of religion. "The artful Cecil," the contriver and discoverer of many plots, was consulted by the king, and a scheme was laid for the violation of the compact of Mellifont, and the confiscation of Ulster. Lord Chichester was then deputy for Ireland;—but the words of Dr. Jones, the king's bishop of Meath, will tell the matter with sufficient brevity:1 "Anno 1607, there was a providential discovery of another rebellion in Ireland, the Lord Chichester being deputy; the discoverer not being willing to appear, a letter from him, not subscribed, was superscribed to Sir William Usher, clerk of the council, and dropt in the council-chamber, then held in Dublin Castle, in which was mentioned a design for seizing the Castle and murdering the deputy, with a general revolt and dependence on Spanish forces; and this also for religion; for particulars whereof I refer to that letter, dated March the 19th, 1607."—This letter was read, and O'Neil, the late leader of the Irish, was singled out as the head and front of the supposed conspiracy.
O'Neil, who had been educated at the English court with a view to the advancement of the English interest in Ireland, was apprised of the conspiracy designed for his ruin, and at once detected the master-spirit—"The artful Cecil." From this he knew that his doom was sealed should he abide the action of the council, before which he had been summoned. He accordingly notified the chiefs of Ulster of the impending blow, and advised flight as the only means of safety. Most of them followed this advice, and he himself, collecting his household, retired to Rome, where he died in 1616.
The flight of O'Neil accomplished all that the conspirators wished, and with far less trouble than they anticipated. Wholesale confiscation, without resistance, was out of their calculation, even in a country borne down by the protracted strife of nearly twenty years. There still remained an element in Ulster, which, though it could not work the deliverance of the nation, could wreak summary vengeance on many a hungry Undertaker; but this settled all at once, to the great "joyousness" of the king: and he lost no time in proclaiming his satisfaction, in words of which the following is an extract: "Wee doe professe, that it is both known to us and our council here, and to our deputie and state there, and so shall it appeare to the world (as cleare as the sunne) by evident proofes, that the only ground and motive of this high contempt, in these men's departure, hath been the private knowledge and inward terrour of their own guiltinesse," etc. "But," says Mitchell, "no attempt to give these proofs was ever made," and never will be. The very manner of their departure is a proof of innocence. Had there been a conspiracy, they would have abided the result, and sold their lives with their lands at a price dear enough to the English enemy. But they went in the belief that their lives and lands alone were what the king sought, and that by quitting the country, they would save the minor chieftains and their clansmen from the greed of England. They calculated erroneously, for this did not accord with the design of the infamous king, and the whole province soon became the spoil of the "Undertakers." An act of Parliament—the English Parliament—immediately followed the king's proclamation, declaring that "Whereas the divine justice hath lately cast out of the province of Ulster divers wicked and ungratefull traytors, who practised to interrupt those blessed courses begun and continued by your majestie for the general good of this whole realm, by whose defection and attainders great scopes of land in those parts have been reduced to your majestie's hands and possession," etc.—and of course awaited but the royal pleasure to be transferred to his loyal subjects of the realm. Nor was the royal assent long withheld, for the royal coffers were always open, even to smaller windfalls than the revenues arising from a confiscated province.
The work of settlement was soon commenced, under the supervision of the king, privy council, committees of conference, committees of inquiry, contractors, undertakers, speculators, and commissioners names of ominous import in Ireland and so often revived there that her people can rehearse them like a catechism. "In the six counties of Donegal, Tyrone, Derry, Farmanagh, Cavan, and Armagh, a tract of country containing 500,000 acres, was seized upon by the king and parcelled out in lots to Undertakers." 2 The "domains" of the attainted lords were assumed to include all the lands inhabited by their clans, and so far were the king's new arrangements from respecting the rights of the ancient natives, that "the fundamental ground of this plantation was the avoiding of natives and planting only with British."
That this cruel policy was carried out to the letter, would seem scarcely credible. But let the authority already quoted settle that matter. "It is true," says Sir Thomas Phillips, in "Harris's Hibernia," "that after the prescribed number of freeholders and leaseholders were settled on every townland, and the rents therein set down, they might let the remainder to natives, for lives, so as they were conformable in religion, and for the favor to DOUBLE THEIR RENTS!" Even so, to double their rents, if natives, though conformable in religion. A high favor, and all for the love of God!
This is but a very imperfect outline of the plantation of Ulster, and the manner of effecting it; and it is alluded to in these pages, only in so far as it illustrates the subject-matter of them, on which that settlement has a direct bearing. Its immediate and subsequent effects on the Irish race, though the theme of many a commentator, have never been told, and never will be. Even its remoter consequence at the present day can scarcely be alluded to without opening up wounds but imperfectly healed, and memories too bitter for wholesome reflection. It renewed, by one dash of the royal pen, all the wrongs of the preceding centuries, and filled the last stronghold of the Irish race with a people inimical to their interests, and who, with the exception of one short epoch in the country's history, have remained a cancer on the body politic, and, as if by a special providence, though meant to strengthen the dynasty of the Stuarts, were mainly instrumental in causing its extinction.
The reign of Charles I. was an eventful and a bloody one. In 1625 he ascended the throne; in 1649 he ascended the scaffold; and through the intervening period of twenty-four years, it was a continual struggle for the preservation of the royal prerogatives. These prerogatives were yielded, one by one, to the fanatical spirit of the age, and the last royal prerogative, that of life—for it is held a standing apothegm, that the king can do no wrong—terminated in a disastrous civil war which drenched the three kingdoms in blood.
England had been in a state of transition since the reign of Henry VIII. The religion of the country had undergone a change which had left more than one-half of its population—and that the more powerful one—adherents of the new faith. New manners and new morals had kept pace with the change of religion. The lands, too, had undergone as great a change as the people. Most of the old manors were possessed by new lords; and as for the Church, its glebes had passed to the early conformists, and its cash to the royal coffers. Hatred on the one hand, and revenge on the other, the usual concomitants of all violent changes in civil or ecclesiastical bodies, were the order of the day. Among those who had become recipients of the spoils, a feeling of insecurity was predominant. These changes had all been wrought through the will of the sovereigns—the royal prerogative, and it required no prophetic ken to know, that while that prerogative remained unimpaired, some future sovereign might undo all that his predecessors had accomplished; and this continual apprehension was the parent of each successive reform: and self-preservation the object.
The reign of James I. sowed the seed of religious discontent; that of Charles I. reaped the harvest. The old faith had been too closely drawn towards the political arena, and had suffered by the contact; the new one whirled in its vortex, and the result was the worst state of human society—civil and religious anarchy. A church had been established by law, and richly endowed by the spoils of the old one, antecedent to the accession of Charles, and its followers were called the "High Church" people. But outside its communion, innumerable sects overspread the land, known by the general name of "Nonconformists." The highways and by-ways of England and Scotland resounded with their religious disquisitions; every man had become an interpreter and a prophet. The most powerful of those sects were the Puritans of England, and the Covenanters of Scotland, who, though differing in religious principles, closely assimilated in their hatred of all monarchical government, and of the outward ceremonies of divine worship. Practising greater simplicity, they laid claim to greater purity of religion, until they at length believed themselves invested with a divine mission to eradicate "popery," "prelacy," and monarchy. The materials of combustion had been long preparing, and nothing was wanting but some partisan more daring or fanatical than the rest to apply the match, and he was at last found in Oliver Cromwell, a great king-hater, and one of the most daring military spirits of that or of any other age. Putting on "the armor of the Lord," and the "Shield of Righteousness," they seized the "besom of destruction," and went forth under his banner to complete the purgation of the land.
How this war, between the King and Parliament, progressed and terminated, forms a bloody chapter in English history, but it can be noticed in this place no further than its effect on Ireland; there it helped to swell the tide of oppression; it brought another war, another defeat, another confiscation, and another wholesale expatriation of the native race.
Since the plantation of Ulster, religious persecution had been aggravated by an established system of confiscation, under the name of the "Irish Titles Act." In the mean time the "Nonconformists" of England and Scotland having taken up arms against King Charles, made a solemn vow to exterminate the Catholics of Ireland, and the apprehensions of the latter were soon alive to the emergency. Groaning so long under civil and religious exactions, they looked on the king's difficulty as a most suitable event to petition for a removal of their grievances. But their action was anticipated, and while their leaders were considering a course of procedure, a series of outrages was perpetrated in the province of Ulster which precipitated them at once into the vortex of rebellion. A garrison of Scotch soldiers, stationed at Carrickfergus, in the dead of night, and without premonition, made a descent on Island Magee, a peninsula in the neighborhood, and drove all its inhabitants, to the number of 3,000, over the cliffs into the sea; scarce a soul escaping to tell their cruel fate. The Catholic inhabitants of the surrounding counties flew to arms, and the flames of rebellion were soon lit throughout the province. The Protestants rose to oppose them, and excesses were perpetrated on both sides. This hastened the action of the Catholic leaders. The Irish chiefs, the Catholic Lords of the English Pale, and the bishops of the Catholic Church convened at Kilkenny for mutual protection and right, under the name of the "Confederation of Kilkenny," and inaugurated one of the boldest efforts for civil and religious liberty known in the country's history.
In the mean time, the war between the king and the Parliamentarians progressed in England. The king's affairs grew desperate, and overtures were made to the Irish Confederates by the king's adherents in Ireland, the principal of whom were the Earls of Clanricarde and Ormond. The Confederates held out with great tenacity for their stipulated measures of redress; yet these the king, even in his direst extremity, refused to concede. But through the intrigues of the two royal agents, the councils of the Confederation were at last distracted; two parties, one for the king, and one for Catholic right, were formed; the soldiers took sides with their respective leaders, and made war against each other. So they fought for some time, the latter being generally successful, and the king at last offered concessions, but too late to redeem his fallen cause. The result is history; the king lost his head; Cromwell invaded Ireland; O'Neil, the only soldier capable of opposing him, is said to have been poisoned, and after his death Cromwell met with but futile opposition. The son of the decapitated king, after a few abortive attempts to secure the crown, became a refugee until the death of Cromwell, when he was recalled, through a popular reaction, and crowned as Charles II.:—and this is called the Restoration. It is called the Restoration, because it restored the throne to its lawful successor; because it restored the High Church party its privileges; and because it restored some of the lands confiscated in England during the Commonwealth to their former owners. But it was ushered in by an odious concession. It left the English rebels in full enjoyment of their lands and immunities, both in England and Ireland. In the latter country the confiscations of Cromwell were legalized, nor was the property of those who joined the late king's cause ever restored to them! But then, in England, it was a Parliament that rebelled against a sovereign; in Ireland, it was a people that demanded rights older than sovereign or Parliament,—that made all the difference.
Under the Protectorate of Cromwell 5,000,000 acres of arable land were confiscated, and the Restoration continued the robbery, by searches into titles which produced litigations, generally settled in English courts, to which all Irish questions were then transferable. It is needless to say that those suits terminated in establishing defective titles in the natives: the lands became the prey of the crown or its cormorants, and expatriation or slavish dependence was the award of the complainant. Five-sixths of the land passed away from the native race, and the population became dependents, without law or appeal, on the soil which had been theirs from time immemorial.
These confiscations had great effect in satisfying the vulture appetite of England. But as this business approached completion, the national mind reverted to the one great question—that of Protestant succession. The days of Charles drew towards a close. As yet the British Constitution had not debarred the heir-presumptive, though he should be a Catholic; and this was a thorn in the national heart. The fears of "popery" became again the national theme, and nobles and people alike brooded on this impending calamity. The hostility to James, always bitter, grew more open and violent as the king declined. In 1680, the Earl of Shaftesbury had him indicted in Westminster Hall, as a popish recusant; but the Chief-Justice dismissed the suit. In 1681, during a temporary illness of the king, a rebellion was set on foot by Shaftesbury, the Duke of Argyle, Lord William Russell, and others. The avowed object was the restoration of The Protectorate, but the covert design, to supplant the Duke of York, and place Monmouth, the natural son of Charles, on the throne. The king recovered; the plot exploded, Monmouth was banished the court, and retired to the Continent, and Argyle and Shaftesbury were attainted, but fled to Holland, to concoct new schemes for barring the succession of James. On the 6th of February, 1685, Charles died, unhonored and unlamented, save in so far as his death opened the way to an unwelcome successor, and all looked in fearful boding to that dreaded event.
The reign of Charles was a weak and inglorious one. His was a kind of passive existence, spent in connivance at the treason of a corrupt court, and the regicides of the last reign, while they connived at his secret carousals and studied profligacy. His youth was one of promise, and it is even asserted by some of his biographers that his indifference to all the great ends that excite the ambition of princes was an exemplification of practical wisdom. That such a reign was the only one that could have secured his permanency on the throne is now a matter of speculation. The received opinion is, that he believed it was, and acted in accordance with that belief. His well-known repartee to the Duke of York, who endeavored to rouse him from his apathy, would more than indicate this—that "he was too old to go again upon his travels." Yet it scarcely serves as an excuse for a long life wasted, and the noble ends of government neglected. But this much is well known in Ireland,—too well to be forgotten,—that he mulcted his English subjects to carry on his debaucheries; that he despoiled the Irish Catholics to remunerate his English creditors, and when both sources failed, he became a stipendiary on the bounty of the French king, bequeathing to his successor an exhausted exchequer, a turbulent people, a crown pawned for many a debt, and yet with many an heir-expectant. It required but a short time for James to establish facts which were patent to all minds but his: that the nobles by whom he was surrounded were irreconcilable to his views; that a time-server might wield and direct them if he pandered to their passions; but a king could not rule in peace, and retain the faith he had chosen. Yet, with all the evidence of the three last reigns before him to the contrary, he had an abiding faith in the justice of the English people. He knew that he was the choice of the Irish, and believed the native pride of the Scotch would not admit of the alienation of their crown; but above all, he trusted in the justice of his views, and he came to the throne with a fixed resolve to harmonize the conflicting elements of the State, and to make England, what he believed it ought to have been—a really free and happy nation.