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A History of Ireland.Volume 2 by Eleanor Hull 1931 |
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III.—WENTWORTH IN IRELAND |
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; | The reign of James I had been passed in one long and constant effort to make the King's authority over his English kingdom absolute. The great struggle began when James erased from the Journals of the House of Commons the page that reasserted the liberties of Parliament, with the exclamation, "I will govern according to the commonweal but not according to the common will." Though the climax of the sovereign's struggle for autocratic power was not reached till the reign of Charles I, all the elements of future conflict were to be found in James's defiance of the Remonstrance addressed to him by the Commons on his illegal taxation and his assumption of ecclesiastical prerogatives. Charles's doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings was only an expansion of the same principle. A brief period of arbitrary government was to end in England in the execution of the monarch; in Ireland it brought about the rebellion of 1641. Already in Mountjoy's time the royal claim had been boldly laid down. "My Master," he declared at Waterford, "is by right of descent an absolute King, subject to no prince or power upon the earth." Wentworth, in the following reign, echoed these sentiments. He silenced all objections to his proposals by "a direct and round answer," and warned his Irish Council that in consulting what might please the people they "began at the wrong end, when it better became a Privy Councillor to consider what might please the King." The same man who in England, as Governor of the North, had drawn up the Petition of Right--the charter of the English people's liberties,--and who, in words of fire, had called upon his countrymen to "vindicate their ancient liberties," in later life gave his Irish Parliament to understand that even discussion was beyond their rights. There is no more singular change of front in history than that which transformed Wentworth from the patriot leader into the willing agent of despotism. But the change had been accomplished before he crossed to Ireland. He came over as the avowed instrument of the King. His system of government was communicated in various letters to his friend Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury. "Let us, therefore, in the name of God, go cheerfully and boldly; if others do not their parts, I am confident the honour shall be ours and the shame theirs; and thus you have my Thorough and Thorough." This phrase became a watchword with Wentworth. "But let it go as it shall please God with me, believe me, my Lord, I shall be still Thorough and Thoroughout, one and the same." [1] [1] Strafford, Letters and Dispatches (ed. Knowler, 1739), i, III, 298,
329. [2] Strafford's defence at his trial, 1656. It was with the two sons of this independent chieftain, Phelim and Redmond, that Falkland came into contact. They had joined Tyrone's rebellion and in May 1599 Phelim had routed a strong force under Sir Henry Harington. He was pursued by Mountjoy, who surrounded his dwelling and found him at supper with his family; and he barely escaped by jumping out of the window and concealing himself in the forest, leaving Mountjoy and his men to consume his supper. But in May 1601 he was pardoned, and in 1613 he represented Co. Wicklow in Parliament. Fifteen years later, in 1628, Lord Falkland set on foot his scheme of planting the O'Byrne lands and he twice tried to involve Phelim in a charge of conspiracy. But the Commissioners of Irish affairs stepped in, and when Falkland shut up Phelim in Dublin Castle a demand came over from England that a full enquiry should be made by a committee of the Irish Privy Council. Phelim was declared innocent and set at liberty, and the verdict was followed by the astonishing sequel of the dismissal of the Lord Deputy, who had certainly never contemplated the possibility of the King taking the part of the 'rebels' against his Deputy. Was he not merely "reducing Phelim's country to the conformity of other civil parts"? "Was the Court of England to become the resort and sanctuary of the traitors of Ireland?" he wrote angrily.[3] But his querulous letters were of no avail; the King ignored them, and Falkland had to go. Phelim was said to be "of such extraordinary obedience that discreet men would be respondents for him." [3] Cal. S. P. I., Charles I, Vol. ccxlvii, No. 1192 (October 20, 1628),
and No. 1269 (December, 1628). [4] Cal. S. P. I., Charles I, Vol. ccxliii, No. 528 (March 29, 1626). [5] Advertisements for Ireland, written in the Reign of James I, ed.
George O'Brien (1923), pp. 5, 10, 11, 14. Wentworth's opinion of the Council with which he was to work was tersely expressed in his first letter from Dublin. "I find them in this place," he writes, "a company of men the most intent upon their own ends that ever I met with."[6] "They had no edge at all for the public" and were leagued to keep the Deputy in the dark about everything. Sir William Parsons, the chief mover in the Wexford plantation, he found "from first to last the driest of all the company," and with Lord Cork he was on the worst terms. There was a certain incorruptibility as to personal gain in Wentworth which was incomprehensible to these men, all intent on their own advancement. "Old Richard," as he calls Lord Cork, had his opportunity later when, as Lord Strafford, he stood arraigned for treason to the master whose cause it had been his one wish to serve, and he did not fail to take it. "Old Richard," he writes from the Tower, "hath sworn against me gallantly, and, thus battered and blown upon on all sides, I go on the way contentedly, and gently tread those steps which, I trust, lead me to quietness at last."[7] Richard Boyle, first Earl of Cork, had substantial reason for his hatred, for Strafford fleeced him unmercifully for the public good. He said in 1640 that he was the worse for him by £40,000 in his personal estate and £1200 a year in his income.[8] No doubt the Deputy felt that the money would be much more advantageously employed in the King's service. A hardly less irritating cause of complaint was Wentworth's insistence on the removal to one side of the pompous monument erected by Cork to his wife's virtues in front of the altar in St. Patrick's Cathedral. --a snub that the Earl was not likely to forget.[9] [6] Strafford's Letters (1739), i, 97. It is from the remarkable series of Wentworth's own letters that we learn best his aims and character. From his first appearance among his Council the gauntlet was thrown down. He made no attempt to be conciliatory, and he prepared for the great struggle against the 'Graces' by an attempt to make both the Council and the Parliament subservient to his will. His first demand was that a "voluntary contribution," made in 1628, early in Charles's reign, should be continued for another year, to meet the urgent costs of the army and the government. The earlier contribution had been made by the Catholics, but he warns the gentry that on this occasion the appeal would be to Protestants, and he advised them to save themselves by offering the contribution with a request for a Parliament in return. He made them "so horribly afraid that the money should be assessed on their properties that it was something strange to see how instantly they gave consent with all the cheerfulness possible." The history of this contribution and of the 'Graces' with which it was connected leads us back into the previous reign. Even before the time of James I the experiments in plantations had resulted in a general sense of uncertainty and unrest all over the kingdom. No owner of land, whether he were an Irishman holding by immemorial custom and in complete ignorance of English land laws, or the old settler who now saw his property included in the vast tracts claimed on one excuse or another by the Crown, could any longer feel security for his possessions. In the universal fear of losing all they owned Englishman and Irishman suffered alike. In Connacht a confiscation had long been threatened and as far back as 1585, when Sir John Perrot was Deputy, the gentlemen of the province had safeguarded their rights by entering into a pact known as the Composition of Connacht, which secured them in their properties. By far the largest landowner was the Lord St Albans and Clanricarde, whose vast estates about Portumna made him practically Lord Palatine over the larger part of Co. Galway. By some oversight, which it is impossible in the conditions of the time to ascribe simply to forgetfulness, the legal formalities required to make these arrangements binding in law were never carried out. The enrolments were not correctly entered, and though in James's reign a sum of £3,000 had been paid by the landlords to the King for the completion of their patents, it was found that there were legal flaws in them which permitted the Courts to regard them as a dead letter. It was now proposed to take advantage of these flaws to carry out the general confiscation and replantation of the province. The new plantations in Ulster, Wexford, and Longford gave urgency to the claims of the Connacht gentlemen to have their rights made clear; and early in Charles's reign they approached him with a petition embodying their desires. Charles received the representatives graciously. He was intent on making himself independent of his English Parliament, and for this purpose he was anxiously looking elsewhere for the necessary funds to carry on his government. The result of the agreement made between him and the Irish gentry was the confirmation of certain privileges to the Connacht landlords, called 'Graces,' in return for a voluntary contribution from them of another sum of money, this time £120,000, to be paid in quarterly instalments spread over three years. The Graces originally contained fifty-one articles dealing with a number of matters relating to the better government of Ireland, such as the regulation of trade, the excesses of the soldiery and their support, the oppressions of the Court of Wards, the non-residence of landlords, and the maladministration of justice in the courts of law. But the two Graces [10] most eagerly sought after were those clauses concerning the surrender of titles in Connacht and Clare or Thomond, and for the recognition of a sixty years' title to property, as settled by the Act, 21 Jacobi, but since brought seriously into question. The first of these Graces demanded the legal enrolment in Chancery of the surrenders of property made under James on the faith of his promise of confirmation of their titles, for which they had so long waited; the second made illegal the ancient and half-imaginary titles of the Crown to lands, such as had been made the excuse for the Wexford and other plantations, and confirmed the present owners in their rights. [10] I.e., Nos. 24, 25, in the official document. Time drifted on, the Church party taking full advantage of the interim to stir up opposition to the relaxation of the recusancy laws; then came Falkland's recall and, in 1633, the arrival of Wentworth to succeed him. The new Viceroy had come over with fixed views. He intended to encourage trade and commerce, especially the linen trade, in order by natural means and through the prosperity of the country to raise large funds to make Ireland pay its own way, instead of being a constant source of expense to England; and he intended to proceed with the plantation of Connacht.[11] For the expediting of the second project he proposed to re-establish the Commission upon Defective Titles, or, in other words, to give full rein to the discovery of flaws in titles to ownership of lands, which had proved so lucrative a means of ousting landowners out of their properties in all parts of the kingdom. In the carrying out of this second project two obstacles stood in the Viceroy's way; first, the Graces, designed to put a stop to this very evil which Wentworth now proposed to revive; secondly, the promise of a Parliament, which could hardly be longer ignored, and which was urgently required for the passing of money bills. [11] See Wentworth's letter to the King from Chester, written when he
was on his way to Ireland, July 16, 1633. In the next session the question of the Graces could no longer be deferred. The Commons pointed to the immense gifts and loans amounting to £310,000, raised in the last two years, exclusive of the last large grant, and they pressed in return for the carrying out of the royal promises, and especially the confirmation of their titles. Even the King feared they had "some ground to demand more than it was fit for him to give." But the Graces, as transmitted by Wentworth to the King, were accompanied by his recommendations, dividing them into three parts--those not at all to be granted, which he did not even transmit (an exercise of prerogative clearly illegal), those which might well be granted, and those which might be accepted by way of instruction but not passed into law. Among those "not at all to be transmitted" were the two Graces (Nos. 24 and 25) so anxiously coveted by the gentry of Ireland. The act of perfidy was complete, and the plantation of Connacht ready to proceed. A Commission was sent down to the West, mock courts were set up to secure obedience, and by intimidating juries, inflicting heavy fines on recalcitrant jurors, and the brow-beating of the Deputy himself, who presided at these mock Courts, verdicts were found for the King over the larger part of Connacht. So successfully did Wentworth cajole the jurors and so patiently did Serjeant Calelin "wipe away" all objections, that in Roscommon, Sligo, and Mayo his Majesty's title was found "with great freedom and forwardness of affection." But in Galway, on Lord Clanricarde's property, in spite of the example of the other counties and the absence of the Earl in London, men "with great want of understanding" were found who "most obstinately and positively" refused to find for the King. Only a packed jury and fines to the amount of £1000 imposed on the sheriff and of £4000 on each of the jurors, with the still more effective threat of the Star Chamber, brought them to a more pliable state of mind. The old Earl died suddenly a short time afterwards, and "it was boldly said that the Deputy's hard usage broke his heart." Wentworth, who complains that there were none but Irish tenants on the Clanricarde estates, considered that the opportunity ought to be taken to people them with English. But in fact the plans of Wentworth came to naught, and Connacht remained unplanted until the great 'trek' into that province of English and Irish together in the days of Cromwell, twenty years later. In 1640 the Deputy, who was created earl of Strafford in this year, was recalled to England. END OF CHAPTER III |
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