| ; |
The outstanding event of European
history during the second half of the seventeenth century was the gradual
decline of the power of Spain and the growth of French ascendency. French
wealth and French supremacy, of which the foundations had been laid by
Richelieu, increased rapidly under the rule of his successor Mazarin and
during the long rule of Louis XIV, whose reign of seventy-two years began
when Charles I was King of England and lasted until the accession of George
I. The great armies of France were constantly engaged in civil and foreign
wars, while her growing navy and her aggressive diplomacy made her the
most formidable state in Europe. The downfall of Spanish supremacy was
sealed by the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659, and the only other Continental
nation that could challenge the paramount position of France was that
of the Dutch, whose fleets had shown themselves the equal of those of
England on the seas and whose rapidly expanding trade threatened that
of her great rival. This new balance of power which had been taking place
during the Protectorate and the reigns of the later Stuarts profoundly
affected affairs both in England and Ireland.
A contemporary author speaks contemptuously of the battle of the Boyne
as "but a skirmish between nine regiments without cannon or entrenchment
and an army of thirty-six thousand choice men, for the defending and gaining
of a few passes upon a shallow river";[1] but posterity has more
justly judged it as one of the decisive battles of history. It was a European
battle fought, almost by chance, on Irish soil, and on the decision there
arrived at depended not only the fate of James and William as rivals for
the throne in England and Ireland, but the question whether the influence
of France was to be paramount in English politics, and whether England
was to become again a Catholic power resting upon the alliance with France.
Its European character is shown by the varied bodies of troops that fought
on both sides. William's troops were a mixture of Dutch, Swedes, Germans,
and Danes, along with his English and Scottish army. Their commander was
Marshal Schomberg, a stout old Huguenot soldier still in arms at the age
of eighty-two.[2] The forces of James, largely composed of French troops,
were also officered by French commanders. De Rosen, De Lauzun, and St
Ruth were at different times in command of bodies of the foreign forces
that fought with James's army, and even of his Irish troops. It was clearly
a battle between Catholic France and Protestant Holland as much as a battle
between rival kings for an English throne. It is necessary to grasp the
position clearly if we would understand the importance of the campaign
of James and William in Ireland, and we must therefore look back to the
causes which brought William over in 1690 to fight in Ireland for the
crown of England.
[1] J. T. Gilbert, A Jacobite Narrative of the War in Ireland, 1688-1691,
called "A Light to the Blind" (1892), p. 102.
[2] The Duke of Schomberg, though he had risen to be Marshal of France,
had been obliged to leave that country after the revocation of the Edict
of Nantes in 1685. He entered the service of William of Orange in 1687.
During the whole of the Stuart period the ties between the Stuart princes
and France had been growing closer. From the time of Mary of Guise, the
French wife of James V of Scotland, the Stuarts were half French by birth
and temperament, as well as more than half Catholic in religion. Their
daughter, Mary Queen of Scots, was far more French than Scottish; her
grace and brilliance and the voluptuous passions which brought about her
ruin drew little from her father's side. In her girlhood she had been
married to the Dauphin of France, and French designs in England centred
round her fortunes. Charles I had for his wife the clever and intriguing
Queen Henrietta Maria, whose Court during her exile at Saint Germain was
the gathering place for refugees from England. She endeavoured to direct
their affairs in her own and her husband's interest, often to the confusion
and despair of statesmen at home, whose plans did not always coincide
with hers. She openly professed the Catholic faith, and she brought up
her children with a strong leaning in that direction. Though Charles II
postponed the avowal of his faith until his deathbed, he was only withheld
from an earlier confession by the invincible distaste of his English subjects
and the fear of losing his newly regained crown.
James was always a Catholic at heart. His life in England had been a
continuous struggle for the confirmation of his right to the succession
against a Parliament and people bent on his exclusion. At times the feeling
against him was so strong that he had to withdraw from Court and live
privately in Scotland or abroad. Even his marriage to a Protestant wife,
Anne Hyde, daughter of that uncompromising churchman the Earl of Clarendon,
and the marriage of one of his daughters, Mary, to William of Orange,
did not suffice to allay the prejudice against the prospect of the reversion
of the crown to a Catholic successor. But the Duchess of York, in spite
of her Protestant upbringing, became a Catholic before she died, and the
popular scare rose to a panic when, in 1673, James took as his second
wife a niece of Cardinal Mazarin, Mary of Modena. Though James had not
at this time openly acknowledged himself to be a Catholic it was evident
that English Protestant kings were continuing the Stuart practice of marrying
Catholic wives, whose sons would have a tendency to adhere to the faith
of their mothers; and when his wife presented him with a son shortly before
his flight from England in 1688 it seemed that the fears of the country
would be realized. It was this final event which forced upon James the
practical sacrifice of his crown. No effort was spared to spread the belief
that the infant was not the son of James but a counterfeit boy palmed
off as his child; but time proved the falsity of these ideas, and the
babe survived to be known in later days as "the Old Pretender,"
the centre of Jacobite and Irish affections until they were transferred
to his more attractive son, Charles Edward, the "fresh young branch"
of Irish tradition.
There is no reason to doubt that James II came to the throne with a sincere
desire for a general toleration in religious matters. His first act on
his accession in February 1685 was a pledge to preserve the laws inviolate
and to protect the Church. He had experienced in his own life the miseries
inflicted by religious intolerance and suspicion, and he had no wish to
lay the same burdens upon his subjects. Catholic at heart though he was,
and determined that Catholics should in his time receive equal treatment
with others, he showed no desire to force men's minds. " 'Tis by
gentleness, instruction, and good example people are to be gained and
not frightened into" the Catholic Church, "Our blessed Saviour
whipt people out of the Temple, but I never heard He commanded any should
be forced into it," are the sentiments he endeavoured to impress
upon his son in 1692.[3] On one notable occasion he appealed to William
Penn, the Quaker, who appears to have exercised a strong and wholesome
influence over the King's mind, for a recognition of his views. Penn was
returning thanks for the Quakers after the Declaration of Indulgence,
which relieved them from sufferings which "would have moved stones
to compassion." The King replied: "Some of you know (1 am sure
you do, Mr. Penn) that it was always my principle that consciences ought
not to be forced and that all men ought to have liberty of their consciences."[4]
His firm adhesion to the tenets of his own Church made his desire to extend
toleration to those of other ways of thought respected. In his own person
the Sovereign was showing his disbelief in the maxim so long accepted
that "it was impossible for a Dissenter not to be a rebel."[5]
[3] J. S. Clarke, Life of James II (1816), ii, 621 ; and see ibid., ii,
109 seq.
[4] Somers' Tracts (1813) (James 11), ix, 34.
[5] Ibid., ix, 57 ; i.e., all, including Catholics, who dissented from
the doctrines of the Established Church.
But if James was before his day in his views on religious toleration he
was not always wise in his methods of giving them effect. His attitude
was that of a Catholic prince tolerating other bodies rather than of a
nominally Protestant prince freeing Catholics from disabilities. In England
the rapid admission of Catholics into offices of state and into the army,
the swearing-in of four Catholic peers as members of the Privy Council,
the large increase of troops, and even the gorgeous religious ceremonies
at St James's Chapel might have been forgiven, but the public reception
of a Papal Nuncio, the attempt to dictate to the authorities of the Universities
whom they should elect as their Provost and Fellows, the King's tyrannical
interference in Church matters, and, above all, his appointment of Tyrconnel,
a strict and over-zealous Catholic, as Commander of the forces in Ireland,
were too sudden and marked to be borne. A storm of opposition arose, which
culminated in a renewal of the correspondence with William of Orange,
who had long been watching from the Hague the career of his father-in-law
and the course of events in England. It had not helped to lighten the
difficulties of James that in the very year of his accession (1685) the
policy of toleration in France had been abandoned, and the dragonnades
or butchery of the Protestants by dragoons let loose upon the province
of Languedoc were at their height; nor that in the same year the Edict
of Nantes, which afforded protection to the Huguenots, was revoked. In
six weeks eighty thousand Protestants were "whipped back" into
the Church of Rome, and Englishmen saw over four hundred thousand Huguenots,
many of them peaceful and industrious citizens, driven to take refuge
on her shores by French tyranny.[6]
[6] Saint-Simon says about those who adjured: "From torture to adjuration
and from that to communion there was often only twenty-four hours' distance,
and executioners were the conductors and witnesses of the converts."
E. Pilastre, La Religion au temps du duc de Saint-Simon (1909), pp. 291-292.
Neither Charles II nor James II could be called bigots. Charles II had
endeavoured to follow a path of reconciliation by publishing in 1672 his
Declaration of Indulgence, ordering that "all manner of penal laws
on matters ecclesiastical against whatever sort of Nonconformists or recusants"
should be suspended. Though the desire of Charles may have been to effect
the relief of the Catholics, the Declaration permitted to them only the
private exercise of their religion, while it permitted public worship
to be held by Nonconformists. Among the multitudes of persons who profited
by this measure the Quakers were specially numerous. These quiet, peaceful,
determined people, who refused to take oaths or bear arms, were a source
of constant irritation to their rulers; they went to prison without a
murmur, and held immovably to their tenets alike in times of toleration
and of persecution.[7] In Ireland a Quaker was held to be "worse
than a Papist." Now they came back in thousands with the other Nonconformists
from the gaols where they had lain since the Act of Uniformity was re-imposed
in 1661. But the liberal views of King Charles were not shared by his
Commons. They suspected a new "Popish plot" and refused supplies
until the Declaration of Indulgence was withdrawn. Not content with this,
they forced the King to sign the Test Act of 1673, requiring the oaths
of allegiance and supremacy from every one holding office, civil or military,
with a declaration against transubstantiation and the reception of the
Sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England. The results
were startling. James, the King's brother, then Duke of York, resigned
his post as Admiral of the Fleet, and the resignations of hundreds of
others in high civil and military offices followed. The people took this
as a confirmation of their fears. They saw their King and Queen, and their
future king and queen, all open or secret members of the Church which
they were determined should not rule in England and, moreover, in close
alliance with Catholic France, from which source Charles was not ashamed
to draw a pension to strengthen him in independence of his own Parliament.
During the ten years that followed the country gave itself up to one of
those fits of uncontrollable panic that occasionally seize upon the populace
of England. The panic was carefully engineered. Several supposed Popish
plots, of which that of Oates in 1678 was the first, were invented to
keep up the public terror. "The aversion to Popery had become in
the English mind a sort of mania,"[8] and it was easy to impose upon
it with the most absurd inventions. One wild tale succeeded another, with
the result of making the religion of the Duke of York execrated and the
determination to exclude him from the throne more than ever fixed. But
in the end the desire to preserve the dynasty so lately restored prevailed
over even these panic fears, and when Charles died his brother succeeded
to the throne without opposition.
[7] Somers' Tracts (1813), ix, p. 28, seq.
[8] J. R. Seeley, Growth of British Policy (1895), ii, 181.
The moment at which James II became King was eminently one for prudent
and conciliatory action. But James was neither prudent nor conciliatory,
and the risings in Scotland under Argyll and in the west of England under
Monmouth were symptoms of the growing discontent. James would make no
concessions in what he believed to be matters of conscience, and on the
day of the acquittal of the Seven Bishops from the Tower a formal invitation
to come over and take the crown was sent to the Prince of Orange, James's
Protestant son-in-law. The flight of James to France and the defection
of his English supporters, even among the members of his own family, threw
the King once more upon the hospitality of the French monarch, and the
long exile at Saint Germain, though broken by attempts to regain his crown,
began with the arrival of the flying King in December 1688. To the English
the flight of James brought his power to an end; but to the Irish Saint
Germain became, for the next fifty years, the centre of their interests
and the cradle of their hopes. To James, on the other hand, Ireland was
the one possible gateway through which he might return to England and
recover his English throne. When the day of effort came he did not fail
to utilize it. A Jacobean onlooker of the day remarks of James: "The
King feared the Deity so much that he sacrificed his crown, life, and
all that he had in the world at the altar of that holy fear."[9]
The cynical remark contains the secret of the revolution of 1688. He had
so "forced some wheels that he found the whole machine stop."[10]
[9] Tract called "A Light to the Blind," in Gilbert, A Jacobite
Narrative of the War in Ireland, 1688-91 (1892). The tract has also been
printed in the Royal Historical Manuscripts Commission's Tenth Report,
Pt. v. (1885).
[10] J. S. Clarke, James II, ii, 156-157.
It has been the great misfortune of English rule over Ireland that changes
of dynasty and changes of government which have grown out of some necessity
of state in England and are acceptable to the people of that country have
been at times totally opposed to the needs and wishes of the people of
the sister country. In England, where the Catholic population was a small
minority of the entire nation, the accession of a Protestant monarch seemed
to the bulk of the nation a matter of paramount importance; the choice
of William of Orange was, in fact, that of the people at large, however
determined they were to put limits to his sovereign power. In Ireland
no such need was felt. In spite of confiscations and plantations the Catholics
were still in a large majority. Out of a total population of about 1,100,000
at the Restoration, some 800,000 were Catholics, the remainder being Protestants
of all denominations, including members of the Established Church, Presbyterians,
and Nonconformists. All had suffered in turn under the various Acts for
the regulation of religion which the reign of Charles had seen passed
in England, the Catholics perhaps least of all, for Ormonde's government
had been, under Charles's direction, a lenient one. But during what may
be called the years of the "Popish panic" in England, from 1678
to 1683, when imaginary plots were ascribed to the Papists of both countries,
and wild, unfounded rumours were industriously spread and readily believed,
measures of extraordinary severity were passed in quick succession. The
most distinguished victim was Dr. Oliver Plunket, the revered Primate
of Armagh, whose exemplary life and scholarly character made him as respected
among Protestants as Bishop Bedell had been among Catholics forty years
before. He was accused of being implicated in the invented plot of Titus
Oates, and was brought to London and executed at Tyburn in 1681.[11] Some
renegade friars whom he had reprimanded were suborned to swear away his
life, when no witness, Protestant or Catholic, would appear against him
from his own diocese.
[11] Moran, Memoirs of the Most Rev. Oliver Plunket; W. P. Burke, Irish
Priests in the Penal Times, 1660-1760 (1914), p. 78, seq.
In the seventeenth century, Irish Catholicism stood with the bulk of the
people for conservatism to the Throne, while England had passed rapidly
from monarchy to republicanism, then through a military despotism and
back to monarchy, only to overthrow the Stuart dynasty a second time in
favour of a foreign king—all this in the course of less than half
a century. A foreign observer remarked of the English of this period that
they were a nation "dont la légèreté est connue;
ils changent souvent d'idées."[12] The remark was equally
true of the internal and external policies of the nation. But Ireland,
through all these changes, stood unwaveringly behind the Stuarts, supplying
money and troops as they were called for, following them into exile, suffering
at their hands one disillusion and disappointment after another, but ready
to welcome back James II when he fled forsaken by his friends and his
nearest relatives on the arrival of William III. They welcomed him, indeed,
with enthusiasm as the first of the kings that, as they believed, had
visited their shores since Henry II; the brief visits of John and Richard
II having faded in the course of centuries from the popular recollection.
[12] Torci, quoted in Seeley, Growth of British Policy, ii, 274, and
see ibid., ii, 169.
On March 12, 1689, James landed at Kinsale, attended by a French fleet
of over thirty warships, with thirteen attendant vessels of 2,223 guns
and 13,000 seamen, and provided with 500,000 crowns in money. He was met
at Cork by his Viceroy, Tyrconnel, and they reached Dublin on March 24,
where they were received with expressions of joy. During the events that
led up to and succeeded the visit of James, Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnel,
was the most conspicuous figure in Irish affairs. He had been appointed
Viceroy in 1686 in succession to Lord Clarendon, son of the Chancellor
and historian of the Rebellion, and thus a kinsman to the King.
Clarendon was a Protestant, and when the King became possessed with the
design to make Ireland his place of refuge if the English should deprive
him of his throne, he recalled Clarendon and appointed Tyrconnel, who
had long really held the reins as Commander-in-Chief in Ireland, in his
place. The new Viceroy was of good Anglo-Irish family, son of Sir William
Talbot, who had been a representative lawyer of the Confederate party
during the reign of James I. The Duke of Berwick says of him that he was
a man of experience of the world, and, as the Duke of York's retainer,
accustomed to good company.[13] " He was a man of very good sense,
very obliging, but immoderately vain and full of cunning." Hamilton
[14] describes him as "one of the largest and most powerful-looking
men in England...with a brilliant and handsome appearance and something
of nobility, not to say haughtiness, in his manners." He had had
an extraordinary history. He was in Drogheda when Cromwell sacked the
city, and was wounded and left for dead, but managed to escape in a woman's
clothes, and made his way to Spain and Flanders, where he attached himself
to the fortunes of the Duke of York; on whose return to England he became
a gentleman of James's bedchamber.
[13] Memoirs of the Duke of Berwick (1779), i, 94-95.
[14] A. Hamilton, Memoirs of Grammont, ed. Sir W. Scott (1905), pp. 243-249;
295-298.
Handsome, reckless, and intriguing, "fighting Dick Talbot" or
"lying Dick Talbot," as he was styled by his friends and enemies,
became the talk of the town. His amours with the Court beauties, Lady
Shrewsbury, Miss Hamilton (Lady Grammont), whom he married as his second
wife, and Fanny Jennings, were varied by fighting in wars or in duels.
On one occasion he called out Ormonde, and was clapped, not for the first
time, into the Tower. But on Ormonde's recall from Ireland his regiment
was given to Talbot, who soon afterwards was placed at the head of the
Irish army. He lost no time in endeavouring to bring to pass his own prophecy
that the Catholics would soon be in power and would pay off old scores.
When he took leave of the Irish Privy Councillors on going to wait on
King James at Chester to have his appointment confirmed, he characteristically
told them that he had put the sword into their hands, and he prayed God
to damn them all if they ever parted from it![15] He disbanded the Protestant
militia and drove thousands of Protestant soldiers and officers out of
the army, Ormonde's regiment among the rest. They fled, many of them,
to Holland, and came back with William to fight the battle of the Boyne.
The corporations and the army were made predominantly Catholic, and Catholic
sheriffs, judges, and magistrates were appointed all over the country,
Protestants being removed to make room for them. Tyrconnel followed the
example of James in trying to force a Catholic Provost on Trinity College,
Dublin. Finding themselves in the hands of men who showed every sign of
making life in Ireland impossible, many Protestants left the country.
[15] King, State of the Protestants in Ireland, (1692), p. 39.
Rumours of intended massacres filled the land, memories of "the 1641"
were revived, and a forged letter to Lord Mount-Alexander, warning him
of a general rising, confirmed the fears of the Protestants. The result
of the flight of the Protestant industrial classes is shown in a letter
written from Dublin in 1689 which said that in eighteen months Tyrconnel
had reduced Ireland from a place of briskest trade and the best-paid rents
in Christendom to ruin and desolation.[16] He kept constantly in touch
with France, and the French generals with whom he fought were friendly
to him and never failed to speak well of him. D'Avaux said that "Tyrconnel
was as zealous for King Louis as any French Viceroy could be." This
was the condition of things when James arrived to win back his English
crown by way of Ireland. His Jacobite chronicler insists that the eyes
of the King were constantly fixed on this one point. He had not come to
Ireland for any Irish purpose, but solely to regain his English crown.
His affection for England breaks out at inconvenient moments. When d'Avaux
hastened to James with the cheering news, as he conceived it to be, that
the French fleet had beaten the English fleet, James burst out, "C'est
bien la première fois, donc." No ingratitude or provocation,
he often declared, should ever induce him to take the least step contrary
to the interest of the English nation, which he ever did and must look
upon as his own. In his Parliament in Dublin, the so-called "Patriot
Parliament" of 1689, he could hardly be induced to abrogate the laws
against his co-religionists,[17] "lest it might alienate from him
the hearts of his Protestant subjects in England, whom he always courted";
and the huge Act of Attainder against the Protestant landowners, which
was designed to repair his brother's unjust Act of Settlement, was wrung
from him against his will. It is not, however, beside the mark to recall
that James himself, as Duke of York, had been one of the largest profiteers
by the Act, for under it he became possessed of over 120,000 acres of
the best land in the country, recovered from Cromwell's regicides. This
was not, however, the plea he put forward for the retention of the Settlement;
he felt that the Act would drive from him his Protestant subjects without
satisfying his Catholic adherents.[18] "Alas!" he exclaimed,
as he signed this Bill, which went contrary to all his declarations of
tolerance, "I am fallen into the hands of a people who ram that and
many other things down my throat."[19]
[16] Chief Justice Keating's letter to King James.
[17] Charles O'Kelly, Macariae Excidium, ed. J. C. O'Callaghan, pp. 34,
36. This curious tract is written in the form of an allegory, the places
and character's mentioned in it being introduced under feigned names.
The writer was a colonel in James's Army and an eyewitness of the events
he relates. A cheap edition, with the actual names, has been published
by Count Plunkett and Rev. Edmund Hogan, under the title The Jacobite
War in Ireland (1894).
[18] His reasons are given in Clarke, James II, ii, 355-361.
[19] C. Leslie, Answer to a Book entitled The State of the Protestants
in Ireland, (1692), pp. 100, 125.
As an Act condemning to death and confiscation the persons and properties
of over two thousand human beings, in and out of the country, this Bill
of Attainder is probably one of the most extraordinary documents ever
drafted. It seems more like an indiscriminate act of vengeance than a
legal memorandum. It is full of errors in personal and place names, and
the same names occur in different parts as subject to different penalties.
It includes men of all ranks, from the Duke of Ormonde and the Earls of
Cork, Roscommon, Meath, Drogheda, Leinster, Inchiquin, etc., down to merchants,
yeomen, clerks, tailors, hosiers, brewers, and others of the trading classes,
all, in fact, who were known or suspected of being in sympathy with or
actively helping the party of the Prince of Orange.[20] Even the names
of some of the supporters of James occur in it by mistake. Religion is
not mentioned in it, but its general intention was to restore to the families
of the old Catholic holders the lands taken from them by the Cromwellian
settlement, for the recovery of which they had in vain looked to Charles
II. It was preceded by a reversal of the Act of Settlement; it swept away
12,000,000 acres from the Protestants and from those Catholics who had
in many cases purchased lands from them, and drove away in terror a multitude
of owners, who now followed the fifteen hundred families who had already
taken refuge in Scotland under Tyrconnel's administration So far as this
Bill related to the restoration of properties to the original owners it
cannot be said to be wholly unjust, but it was accompanied by a general
condemnation to death, and it was as indiscriminate as any previous Act
passed by the dictators of the country's fortunes. James himself said
that the great improvement made in many of the estates under their new
owners had so enhanced their value that the old possessors could have
obtained an equal profit to that lost by their ancestors even if a competent
income had been left to the new purchasers from the results of their own
labours.[21] But the party uppermost at the moment was determined to take
every advantage of the opportunity afforded to them to recover "not
only their fathers' estates, but whatever else they had it in their power
to enrich themselves by." "Reckoning themselves sure of their
game...they thought of nothing but settling themselves in riches and plenty
by breaking the Act of Settlement."[22] These are the comments of
their own prince, who found himself embarrassed by the importunity of
his Irish subjects and forced by them into acts certain to alienate his
English supporters, thus risking the defeat of his main ambition to recover
his English throne.
[20] Of the copies of these lists in existence, all differ from each
other in numbers as well as in details. Harris, Life of William III, Appendix,
pp. xliv-lvi gives 2461 names, but in this list some names are repeated
twice; the London Gazette of July 1, 1689, records 2209 names. King, State
of the Protestants in Ireland, gives a smaller number. For the terms of
the Act see a tract entitled An Account of the Transactions of the late
K. James in Ireland, (1690).
[21] J. S. Clarke, James II, ii, 358.
[22] Ibid., ii, 354.
The Bill, which was directed against those "notoriously joined in
the rebellion and invasion of the Prince of Orange or who had been slain
in the rebellion, and all those absenting themselves in England,"
as being implicated in his attempt, only gave the accused seven weeks
in which to appear and stand their trial for treason. The delays in printing
the Bill shortened even this brief period, and many of the accused must
have seen it first in the London Gazette. A point which infuriated King
James was that the Bill deprived him of his right, as sovereign, to pardon
any of the accused, thus taking from him one of the main privileges and
undoubted rights of the Crown. The flight of the King after the battle
of the Boyne brought to an end the designs of his Irish supporters. Had
he been victor he would undoubtedly have been called upon to put these
Bills into effect, and Ireland would have seen another transference of
property on a wholesale scale. Whether the death sentences would have
been carried out it is impossible to know; in any case, there would have
been an era of Catholic instead of Protestant ascendency. The Irish Parliament
of James II met on May 7, 1689, while the siege of Derry was proceeding,
and sat till July 18. Twenty-eight seats were vacant, because the occupants
were on the fighting front. The 224 members who were returned represented
every party in Ireland, except Ulster, which was in rebellion against
James and fighting for the Prince of Orange.
Protestants and Catholics, English, Anglo-Irish, and old Irish for the
first time since Henry VIII sat together in an Irish Parliament in Dublin.
Members of the families of the O'Neills, O'Reillys, Maguires, and MacCarthys,
the O'Tooles and O'Byrnes of Leinster, and the Kirwins, Blakes, and Martins
of Connacht, sat with the Plunkets, Barnewells, and Butlers of the Pale.
In the Upper House fifty-four members sat,[23] of whom four were dignitaries
of the Protestant Church. Their leader was the notorious Anthony Dopping,
Bishop of Meath, who led the opposition; Tyrconnel, recently created a
Duke, being the leader of the temporal Peers. The new creations were the
Lord Chancellor Fitton, who now became Lord Gosworth; Colonel MacCarthy,
created Lord Mountcashel, soon to be known as the colonel of the famous
"Mountcashel's Brigade"; Browne, who became Lord Kenmare; and
Bourke, son of Lord Clanricarde, who was created Lord Bofin. Another afterwards
famous name was that of Sir Daniel O'Brien, Lord Clare, who led "Clare's
Brigade" in many a fight in the service of France. The Protestants
in the Lower House were few, but this is not surprising when we remember
that most of them were in sympathy with or in arms for William against
James. Two of them were returned for Trinity College, Dublin. To the Irish
nation, James was still rightful King of England and Ireland, come over
to regain his crown, and the followers of William were regarded as rebels
fighting against their lawful sovereign. Compared with the Dublin Parliaments
of the past it might well be accounted the first really representative
Irish assembly. It sat, too, under the personal authority of the Sovereign
and in his presence. Among the thirty-five Acts passed by this Parliament
were the Act of Recognition of James as Sovereign of England and Ireland,
an Act for liberty of conscience, an Act repealing the Acts of Settlement
and Explanation, an Act removing "all disabilities from the natives
of this kingdom," and Acts to restrain counterfeit coinage, to raise
money, to regulate tithes and rent, and to encourage industries.
[23] This is the calculation made by Thomas Davis in his The Patriot
Parliament of 1689, but he seems to have included some who were absent.
No Catholic Bishop was called to attend. The Acts of this Parliament were
expunged by the Parliament of 1695 and ordered to be burned.
The Acts concerning tithes and rent were particularly calculated to relieve
injustices in the past, and were far more considerate than those passed
by later Irish Parliaments. Tithe was to be levied as hitherto, but was
to be paid by Catholics and Protestants each to their own clergy. The
levies made for the King's war expenses were to be paid by the occupier,
but, where the land was let at half its value or less, the tenant was
to pay only half the tax, "owing to the difficulty found by the tenants
to pay their rents in these distracted times." But by far the most
important Act of this assembly was that declaring anew the independence
of the Irish Parliament, and repudiating the binding clause of Poynings'
Act. The preamble runs as follows: "Whereas his Majesty's realm of
Ireland is, and hath always been, a distinct kingdom from that of his
Majesty's realm of England...it is hereby declared that no Act of Parliament
passed or to be passed in the Parliament of England, though Ireland should
be therein mentioned, can be or shall be in any way binding in Irelaand,
excepting such Acts passed or to be passed in England as are or shall
be made into law by the Parliament of Ireland." No writs of appeal
were to be allowed from the Irish courts to England, the High Court of
Parliament in Ireland being the supreme tribunal in Irish cases. Here
we have clearly laid down that independence of the Irish Parliament for
the recognition of which so strenuous a contest was to be fought out during
the following century. It supplied the text on which Molyneux, Swift,
and Grattan were to preach the sermon.
END OF CHAPTER IX
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