the Roman Catholics of Ireland what Father Walsh truly calls "a fair opportunity of being not only eased of all their pressure from the Penal Statutes, but rendered as happy as they could in reason desire, or even wish, under a Protestant King and Government." 1

It is unfair to the memory of the dead to rail against the Penal Laws without weighing carefully the causes which, in the judgment of their authors, rendered them necessary. We may be sure that the Englishmen, who faced Europe in defence of their country and of their religion, would not lightly have inflicted penalties on their fellow subjects. If the seditious doctrines connected with the Papal claims to depose princes had never been propagated in England, no such enactments would ever have been heard of in that country. If these doctrines had never been taught in Ireland, if Papal invasions had not been despatched to the island, and if an irreclaimable disaffection to the English name had not been inculcated by the bulls and briefs of the Popes and by their ministers in the kingdom, no Penal Laws would ever have been enacted. The men who passed the Irish Penal Statutes were intelligent enough to know that such laws must diminish the wealth of the nation and the value of their own estates. It is inconceivable that laymen, a class generally free from theological odium, should have voted for such laws if they did not consider them necessary

1 Address to the Roman Catholics of England, Ireland and Scotland, p. 27.

2" Had these men (the Roman Catholic clergy who retired to foreign schools) remained at home, patient of present evils, and submissive as far as might be to the laws .. no jealousy would have been excited, and no penal statutes, we may now pronounce, would have entailed misfortunes upon them and their successors (Rev. Joseph Berington). "Had these seminaries never existed, we had not heard of the seditious doctrines which I have mentioned, nor should we have been oppressed by the subsequent cruel laws enacted against our religion" (Sir John Throckmorton).

for their own preservation. They had nothing to gain by them. No property was by any of them taken from Roman Catholics and transferred to themselves. The Irish Parliament had granted not only toleration but political equality to the Roman Catholics before the Great Rebellion. Some new reasons must have arisen to alter their minds, and it is not difficult to point these reasons out. The immediate causes of the Irish Penal Laws, which were principally enacted in the reigns of William and Anne were the rebellion and massacres of 1641; the refusal of the Roman Catholics of an oath of allegiance in 1666; the persecution and beggaring of the Protestants by Tirconnell; the cruel laws of the Jacobite Parliament of 1689, and the existence of an Irish army, "near 30,000 " 1 strong, in the service of France and ready at a moment's notice to invade Ireland. Before Sarsfield left Ireland he issued a proclamation to his troops, declaring that they were going to France only to return as a conquering army.2 It was this series of circumstances which led the Irish Parliament to adopt the opinion of the English Parliament, that the Irish were irreconcilable and that "the only way of securing that kingdom to the Crown of England was the putting it out of the power of the Irish again to rebel, gentle means having hitherto always proved ineffectual "". An Irish Roman Catholic Bishop deposed in 1825 that "the connection of the Roman Catholics with the Stuarts was such as justified and even made it necessary for the English Government to pass some Penal Laws against the Catholics". The Bishop deplores their harshness, but whilst we acknowledge their severity let us ask ourselves

1 This is the estimate of James II. Clarke's Life, ii., p. 465.

2 Story, Continuation, p. 259.

3 Journals of the English Commons, xi., p. 57.

Evidence of Dr. Doyle, Digest of Evidence, p. 399.

66

one question. What would have been the fate under any
other Government than the English of a body of Dissenters,
who held that their chief pastor could depose their lawful
sovereign and absolve themselves from their obedience,
and who refused to give any guarantee of their allegiance.
They would have been banished, as were the Protestants
from Bohemia, Bavaria and Salzburg, or exterminated
as was attempted in France in the case of the Huguenots.
"What King in the world," say the Secular priests,
would not make the best trial of them [his subjects] he
could for his better satisfaction whom he might trust to?
In which trial, if he found any that either should make
doubtful answers, or peremptorily affirm that, as the case
stood betwixt him and his enemies, they would leave him
their Prince and take part with them; might he not justly
repute them for traitors and deal with them accordingly?
Sure we are that no king or prince in Christendom would
like or tolerate such subjects within their dominions, if
possibly they could be rid of them."1

221

CHAPTER XI.

CONDITION OF IRELAND FOR MANY YEARS AFTER THE WAR OF THE REVOLUTION-POYNINGS' LAW-THE REVENUE OF IRELAND.

WHEN the Williamite war was ended by the capitulation of Limerick in October, 1691, Ireland was in a deplorable condition. The island which only five years before had been "the most improved and improving spot of ground in Europe" had become a waste. As early as the end of 1688, Chief Justice Keating, a strong Jacobite, declared that the country was "a meer Acheldama and totally desart". All the sources of its natural wealth had disappeared. Its manufacturers had been driven away. Its herds of cattle and flocks of sheep had been destroyed, and cultivation had ceased. Its principal towns, as Cork, Limerick, Derry, Athlone, Enniskillen and Kinsale, had suffered greatly from siege; and many of the smaller, as Omagh, Middleton, Doneraile and Rathcormack,2 had been burnt by the Irish; while the country at large had been ravaged by the rapparees, the unpaid soldiery of Tirconnell, and the contending armies. The revenue, which had been farmed in 1678 for £300,000, amounted, for the period between June, 1690, and September, 1692, to little more than a third of that sum,3 and in 1697 it became necessary

1 Letter of Chief Justice Keating to Sir John Temple, 1688 (Appendix to King).

2 Commons' Journals, ii., pp. 25, 81.

3 Clarendon, Sketch of the Revenue of Ireland, p. 29.

to remit a large portion of the Crown quit rents, as much of the lands from which they issued had been returned as waste from Lady Day, 1692, to the same day in 1695.1

After the Elizabethan and Cromwellian conquests, Ireland had shown wonderful recuperative powers. But this recovery must be attributed not to the native race, but to the new colonies which arrived at the end of these wars. Ulster, which had been totally devastated during the Tyrone insurrection, and which was chiefly inhabited by pastoral families or communities, wandering up and down with their cattle, became the settled home of a hardy and industrious race from Scotland and the border counties. The new possessors cleared the country of its dense forests, drained its bogs, built stone houses, and commenced the work that has made that province the garden of Ireland, though its soil was then and long afterwards regarded as the poorest in the kingdom. Subsequently to the plantation of Ulster, the adventurers and Cromwellian soldiers occupied Leinster, Munster, and a portion of the Northern

4

3

1 Abstract of the arrears of quit rents in the four provinces, Commons' Journals, ii., pt. 2, pp. 22-28; 9 Will. III., c. 4; 2 Anne, c. 4, s. 6.

2" In 1652 the bulk of the inhabitants of our province continued to live as creaghts . . . according to their ancient but barbarous manner of life, having no fixed habitations, but wandering up and down with their families and substance. . . . In peaceable times the men of a sclocht or community of these herd-people lay at night in a circle round a fire among their women and children, hardly superior in outward appearance to the animals they herded with " (Ulster Archæological Journal, vi., p. 124).

3 In the church of Coleraine there is a tablet to the memory of the wife of Edward Dodington, Captain of the Castle of Dungevin, in the county of Coleraine, now Londonderry County, "who there first built after the English fashion "—qui ibi primus edificabat more Anglicano. She died 1610.

4 The rates at which Irish lands were to be assigned to the adventurers who advanced their money under the 17th of Charles I. were: 1,000 acres in Ulster, £200; in Connaught, £300; in Munster, £450; in Leinster,