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James I came to the throne under what
seemed favourable auspices for Ireland. The descent of the Stuarts from
Fergus Mór, the Irish prince who had founded the Scottish colony
of Dalriada in Argyllshire in the sixth century, gave the Irish a feeling
of personal attachment to the Stuart kings—an attachment shown in
acts of enthusiastic loyalty on more than one occasion during the struggle
of Charles I with his Parliament. It was proved, too, by the fidelity
with which the Irish clung to the Old Pretender through all the years
of his retirement at St Germain and to the hope with which they looked
forward to the return of "the fresh young branch," the young
Pretender.[1] Another cause of their satisfaction at the accession of
James sprang from the general belief that, as the son of Mary Queen of
Scots, he would be favourable to the open practice of the Catholic religion,
even if he were not, as many supposed, at heart a Catholic. This belief
found expression in the sudden re-opening of the Catholic churches in
the South of Ireland and in processions of priests and friars parading
the streets with banners "with as much pomp as in Rome itself."
[1] See John Lynch, Cambrensis Eversus (ed. M. Kelly, 1848) iii, 53-69.
Mountjoy, as Deputy, made a hasty descent on Waterford to suppress this
rising Catholic spirit, reinforcing his orders alike by quotations from
St Augustine, a copy of which he always had in his tent, and by the more
material argument of placing small garrisons in the recalcitrant towns.
At Cork he feared trouble; the Recorder, William Meagh, urged Thomas Sarsfield,
the Mayor, not to submit; but Mountjoy's appearance with a thousand men
reduced the city to obedience, and Meagh took refuge abroad. This was
Mountjoy's last act in Ireland. He sailed from the country on June 2,
1604, and never returned, though as Earl of Devonshire his advice was
often sought in Irish affairs. He left Sir George Carey to administer
the country with Davies as his adviser, but Carey was soon replaced by
Sir Arthur Chichester, who was sworn in on February 3, 1605, and remained
at the head of the Government until the close of 1615.
Chichester is the leading figure in the events that followed the flight
of the Earls. He was a Devonshire man, like Raleigh, Sir Humphrey Gilbert,
Sir George Boucher, Sir George Carew, and many others who played their
part in the Ireland of the Tudor and Stuart periods. They were men who
had seen hard service and cruel deeds in many parts of the world before
they came to repair ruined fortunes in Ireland. It is remarkable that
many of the principal planters and officers who came to Ireland were from
the county that gave to England "the sea-dogs" whose daring
recklessness was carrying the flag of Britain from Cadiz to the Spanish
Indies and round the Straits of Magellan into the Pacific. Their sensibilities
were blunted and their greed and ambition aroused by the lives they led.
Their creed resolved itself into killing Spaniards and glorifying England
and the Maiden Queen; their business was the selling of negroes and the
capture of gold-ships. Their puritanism was fired by the horrors of the
Spanish Inquisition, which had dragged their fellow-seamen to rot in the
dungeons of Spain, and their passion for revenge was stirred by deeds
like the assassination of the Prince of Orange, or by threats of fanatics
like Somerville "to shoot the Queen with his dagg [pistol],"
or of officers of distinction like Sir William Stanley who said that he
would "pull Elizabeth down, yea, even from her throne." Chichester
had served under Lord Sheffield against the Spanish Armada in 1588, and
had commanded one of the Queen's ships in Drake's last expedition in 1595.
He was with Essex at Cadiz in 1596; and at Ostend he was picked out by
Cecil for service in Ireland, in which country he had passed some years
of his turbulent youth in hiding, having, while a student at Oxford, "robbed
one of Queen Elizabeth's purveyors." In the execution of his offices
in Ireland he was said to be "swift of dispatch and easy of access."
In the matter of legal fees he was "found to be upright"; but
this did not prevent him from enriching himself with some of the best
lands in Ulster.
The laws against the public profession of the Catholic faith had been
fitfully enforced. The close of Elizabeth's reign had seen a great revival
of the Catholic religion in Ireland. The laws against priests had been
relaxed with the passing away of the dread of Spanish invasion, and they
were flocking back in large numbers into the country; everywhere the exercise
of the religion of the people was being carried on with apparent connivance
by the authorities. During the whole of the Stuart period the enforcement
of recusancy fines, a constant source of irritation to the rich and of
oppression to the poor, depended largely on the position of affairs in
England. The alarm caused by the Gunpowder Plot, universally believed
to have been the work of disaffected Catholics, led to their rigorous
enforcement, while the negotiations for the Spanish marriage of the King's
eldest son Charles caused their relaxation for a long interval, during
which Spanish and Italian clergy and friars came over freely and opened
churches and schools with little interference from the Government. A Scottish
bishop in 1611 says that these foreign clergy seemed to be the chief burden
of the ships coming to Ireland, and the commission sent over to inquire
into the Parliamentary election in 1613-14 was struck with the number
not only of Popish priests, friars and Jesuits, but also of Catholic schoolmasters.[2]
Jesuits, Dominicans, Franciscans, and Carmelites were busy repairing and
roofing their monasteries and abbeys, and Lady Kildare was building a
beautiful church in Dublin.
[2] Cal. S. P. I., James I (1613), p.446; and see Ibid. (July 2, 1603),
No. 82, pp. 66-68.
In 1628 Sir John Bingley reports that "there are at present in that
city fourteen houses for the exercise of the Mass and one more remarkable
than the rest for the Jesuits"; and the Bishop of Ossory gave the
names of thirty priests working in his diocese. The general relaxation
of the penal laws could not be better shown than by the multitude of English
priests and Jesuits who took flight to Ireland for safety from the severe
enactments that were the result of the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot
in 1605, two years after James's accession to the throne, and by the advice
given by Davies that priests and Jesuits, when captured in Ireland, should
be sent over to England, where the penal laws could deal with them. The
same thing happened in the North. Catholics from Scotland came flocking
into Ulster to escape the severe penal laws "which gave them no rest"
in their own country. They settled on the estates of the Earl of Abercorn
and of Sirs William and Richard Hamilton, and of other Scottish nobles
who welcomed them on their properties in accordance with the planters'
desire to encourage English and Scottish tenants. It looked as if the
efforts of James to make Ulster Protestant as a part of his "civilizing"
policy were destined to failure, and that Ulster would speedily become
as Catholic as the South; the Bishop of Derry complained to Claude, Master
of Abercorn, that his diocese had become "a sink for all the corrupt
humours purged out of Scotland." It is probable that many families
of the present population of the North, looked down upon by the Protestant
interest as Irish Catholics, are descendants of this immigration of Catholic
Scots.
It cannot be said that James gave his approval to this relaxation of
the penal laws. His declaration on his accession repudiated the idea that
he intended "to give liberty of conscience or toleration of religion
to his Irish subjects contrary to the express laws and statutes enacted"
in that country. He was constantly being warned that the foreign priests
were devoting themselves to undermining the allegiance of the people,
and it was rather the political than the religious aspect of their mission,
and the ever-lurking dread of interference from Rome, from which centre
the priests officially took their orders, that weighed with James in his
enforcement of the oaths of supremacy and allegiance from the foreign
as well as the native clergy. His view was tersely expressed when he wrote
in 1616, "I confess I am loth to hang a priest only for religion's
sake and saying Mass; but if he refuse to take the oath of allegiance...those
that so refuse the oath and are holy pragmatic recusants, I leave them
to the law. It is no persecution but good justice." The idea that
the spread of the Roman faith meant the extension of Roman political power,
anti-English in its sentiment, was an article of belief strongly grounded
in the mind of every Englishman. To James, his Catholic subjects were
"but half-subjects," and entitled only to "half-privileges."
In his shrewd, sardonic way he reminded the Irish peers in his Parliament
of 1613 that the Pope was their father in spiritualibus and he in temporalibus
only, "and so you have your bodies turned one way and your souls
drawn another way, you that send your children to the seminaries of treason.
Strive henceforth to become good subjects, that you may have cor unum
et viam unam, and then I shall respect you all alike." [3] It was
this underlying sense of a double allegiance, which could, in fact, hardly
be denied, that made the whole question of religious tolerance so difficult.
A different religion implied, at least, a different orientation of the
mind and an uncertain acceptance of the authority of the Crown. James,
therefore, felt no hesitation in levying the recusancy fines for non-attendance
at the Protestant service. In 1623 these fines were regularly collected
even from the poorest Catholics, £500 a year being raised in Co.
Monaghan alone. In Co. Cavan the sum thus raised is said to have amounted
to no less than £8000 in the year 1615, though this seems hardly
credible. The money was supposed to be spent on the repair of churches,
but by far the larger part went into the pockets of the collectors. To
them it was a profitable business. In Co. Cork an English observer says
that five thousand people were prosecuted at one assize; "and without
question," he remarks, "the clerks, sheriffs, and their like
do make an extraordinary hand this way." [4]
[3] J. Lodge, Desiderata Curiosa Hibernica (1772), i, 309-310 and Carew
Cal. (1614), No. 15, pp. 15-16.
[4] Advertisements for Ireland, ed. George O'Brien (1923), pp. 15-16
Later on Charles used the threat of recusancy fines as a means of raising
revenue, and when Wentworth went over to Ireland and found the revenue
in a depleted condition the Roman Catholics offered £20,000 on condition
of escaping the hated tax for another year. Nevertheless, Catholics met
with little hindrance in the exercise of their vocations; barristers trained
at the English Inns of Court practised their professions in Ireland, and
it was a long step toward toleration when one of the 'Graces' proposed
that they should be admitted on taking a simple oath of allegiance, without
abjuration of the Papal authority. They became Justices of the Peace,
sheriffs, Privy Councillors, and were admitted to many offices of trust,
both civil and military, where Protestants were discountenanced. A Catholic
Justice of the King's Bench, Sir John Everard, universally respected for
his learning and honourable life, contested the Speakership of the House
in James's Parliament of 1613, the first Parliament held in Ireland since
Perrot's Parliament of 1585. It was a Parliament largely composed of Catholics
both in the Upper and Lower Houses. James freely created new boroughs
to redress what he considered an unfortunate balance of power; thirty-nine
new boroughs, many of them in the freshly planted and growing towns of
Ulster, but others made out of wretched villages, were enabled to send
members to this Parliament. The Catholic Lords refused to attend an assembly
so irregularly constituted, and the Commons protested against their liberties,
which were to be under consideration, being entrusted to the goodwill
of ignorant and prejudiced representatives of country villages, sent up
entirely for the purpose of voting against them.[5] The Parliament was
not a success. An unseemly struggle took place between the supporters
of Sir John Everard and those who had elected Sir John Davies to the Speakership;
it ended in the withdrawal of the Catholic party in a body and the drawing
up of a formal protest to the King, which, with Chichester's full permission,
was sent over by Lords Gormanston and Dunboyne, with Sir Christopher Plunket,
Sir James Gough, Edward FitzHarris, and Sir William Talbot. The last named
acted as legal adviser to the opposition, and was the father of the afterwards
famous Dick Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnel, who played his part in the wars
against William of Orange in Ireland. The petition they carried over was
the model of many subsequent petitions to the Crown during the Confederate
Wars.
[5] Cal. S. P. I. (1613), No. 668, p. 342; J. Lodge, op. cit., i, 220-5
It is well, therefore, to see what the Catholic gentry of Ireland, most
of whom remained during the whole Stuart period unswervingly loyal to
the Crown, put forward as their considered grievances. In the first place
the Bill of Attainder against Tyrone was passed by the Catholic representatives
without a single dissentient voice. Sir John Everard spoke in favour of
it. "No man," he strangely said, "ought to arise against
the Prince for religion or justice," and he regarded the many favours
bestowed on Tyrone by the late Queen and present King as greatly aggravating
his offence. In their letter to the King they speak of themselves as those
"by the effusion of whose ancestors' blood the foundation of that
empire which we acknowledge your Highness by the laws of God and man to
have over this kingdom and people, was first laid and in many succeeding
ages preserved." After setting forth the main cause of their complaint,
the packing of the Parliament then sitting with ignorant men, absentees,
officers, and clerks under the control of a few great men, and others
from new corporations "never before heard of by us," they go
on to complain of the extortions of the soldiers ranging through the country
and impoverishing the people on a number of pretences; the deciding of
cases in the Council Chamber that ought to be brought before the civil
courts; the threats held over jurors who refused to give a perjured verdict
that they would be brought before the Star Chamber, and fined, tortured
or imprisoned; the inquiry into old rights in land with a view to its
transfer to new applicants; the shilling fine for non-attendance at church,
and the greed and heavy charges of the lawyers. Their complaints were
well founded. For example, the army was often two years in arrear, and
is said to have been composed of men with "tottered carcases, lean
cheeks, and broken hearts."[6] If they sometimes mutinied or provided
themselves with what they could get in the country it is hardly to be
wondered at.
[6] Cal. S. P. I. (1621), No. 786, p. 337; (1622), No. 837, p. 349.
The King, whom Chichester had taken care to influence by sending over
a counter-deputation, received the petitioners in a characteristic manner.
At his first interview he was cordial, receiving the Irish lords with
all respect, and discoursing with them at large about conditions in Ireland.
But he suddenly posed them with the question, "Whether they thought
the Pope had the right to depose princes, or deprive them of their lives
on religious grounds?" Some of them answered doubtfully that they
thought he might; whereupon two, Talbot and Luttrell, were committed prisoners,
one to the Tower and the other to the Fleet, while Sir Patrick Barnewell
was closely examined and forced to make submission, stating that such
a doctrine "is most profane, impious, wicked, and detestable."
The others were kept in London from May 1613 to April 1614 awaiting a
reply. It could not have encouraged them to hope for a favourable answer
to find Chichester standing beside the King at their final audience, high
in favour and fully acquitted of any hard dealing or maladministration.
The King treated the Irish Lords to a long disquisition, flavoured with
that canny Scotch wit and those frequent Latin quotations which caused
Henry IV of France to call his royal brother "the wisest fool in
Christendom." He had heard, he said, of Church recusants, but Parliament
recusants were new to him; and of the complaints presented to him of the
Irish Government he had discovered nothing faulty, "except you would
have the kingdom of Ireland like the kingdom of heaven." "As
to the newly created boroughs, what is it to you whether I make many or
few boroughs?...The more the merrier, the fewer the better cheer...God
is my judge, I find the new boroughs, except one or two, to be as good
as many of the old boroughs, comparing Irish boroughs new with Irish boroughs
old"; wherein the jocular monarch probably spoke the truth.[7] Thus,
rated like naughty children by their monarch, the disappointed noblemen
of the Pale, Norman or Englishmen all by descent, and loyal by habit and
tradition, returned to Ireland. The immediate result of their petition
was that during the year all counsellors-at-law in Ireland who would not
take the oath of supremacy were forbidden to plead, and pensioners in
similar circumstances were deprived of their pensions. In Dublin a young
man, more pliant than his seniors, took the oath and was elected Mayor
of Dublin, while around him were "many grave and grey-haired men,
whose turn was to have been mayors before him," but who would not
take an oath which practically shut them out of their own communion. The
Parliament was prorogued and finally dissolved on October 24, 1615, after
passing an abortive Bill for abolishing the Brehon law, and some minor
measures. No other was called till Wentworth's Parliament of 1634.
[7] The whole of this controversy will be found in J. Lodge, op cit.,
i, pp. 151 seq.; 302-312; Carew, Cal. (1613), No. 146, p. 270; No. 151,
p. 288.
Much of the reign of James was taken up in additional projects of plantation
in Wexford, Wicklow, Monaghan, Fermanagh, and Leitrim. Settlements were
also projected in Connacht, but these were postponed for a time. Had these
settlements been carried out as originally planned by James and Chichester,
they would have been accepted without much difficulty by a people weary
of war and of the uncertainty of land tenure. The Wexford commissioners
reported in 1613 that a tract of land containing 66,800 acres, chiefly
belonging to the sept of the Kavanaghs, was claimed by the King as having
passed to the Crown on the submission of Art MacMorrogh Kavanagh in the
reign of Richard II; a claim more respectable for its antiquity than for
its justice. Certain lands held by patent were first confirmed to Sir
Laurence Esmonde, Sir Edward Fisher, Sir Richard Cook, and others, after
which the surrender of one-fourth of their land was called for from the
original inhabitants, to be placed in the hands of new settlers, on condition
of retaining the remaining three-fourths on a firm title as freeholders.
Little objection was made to this, and had the arrangement been honourably
carried out the people might have felt themselves not unfairly treated.
But in practice quite half instead of one-fourth of the country was made
over to new settlers, and to nearly fifteen thousand of the population
no grants whatever were made. About fifty-seven freeholders of Irish and
English descent were created out of the old inhabitants, but only about
one in ten got any lands at all; others were, if not turned out of their
holdings, yet shifted about and pressed steadily out of the better into
the worse districts.[8] Of these unfortunate people a contemporary writer
observes: "They have no wealth but flocks and herds, they know no
trade but agriculture or pasture, they are unlearned men, without human
help or protection. Yet, though unarmed, they are so active in mind and
body that it is dangerous to drive them from their ancestral seats, to
forbid them fire and water...Necessity gives the greatest strength and
courage, nor is there any sharper spur than that of despair." [9]
Bishop Rothe spoke truly. These outlaws joined bodies of desperate men
from Ulster and the other plantations; they took to the mountains or swarmed
down upon the towns. In 1622 the Lords Justices reported that they were
coming up to Dublin in multitudes, seeking for sustenance. The country
was pestered, too, with the smaller gentry, whose easy, thriftless life
spent in living upon their tenants and fighting their neighbours had passed
away with the clan system which made these things possible. St John reported
in 1619 that the country was full of the younger sons of gentlemen "who
have no means of living and will not work."[10] They were elements
of danger to the community and ready for all sorts of misdeeds and reprisals.
This was the fuel which the spark of rebellion in 1641 was to set on fire.
As Carew had long ago foretold, "events were marching towards an
explosion."
[8] Carew, Cal. (1611), No. 122, p. 211; (1614), No. 153, p. 299; (1616),
No. 164, p. 321; William F. T. Butler, Confiscation in Irish History (1917),
60-74.
[9] Rothe, Analecta Sacra (1617), vol. iii, Art. 19.
[10] Lord Deputy to the Privy Council, Sept. 29, 1619, Cal. S. P. I.,
No. 582, p. 262.
END OF CHAPTER I
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