Part 2 (1/2)
Then came the terrible episode of the Cromwellian war, in which Romanist and Royalist alike went down before the Puritan force. Still, though he would be a bold man who could attempt to excuse--much less to justify--the barbarities that took place, it may be doubted whether all the Cromwellian outrages put together equalled a single one of those which the Imperial troops had committed during the war which had been raging for thirty years in Germany--such for instance as the sacking of Magdeburg. It is estimated, however, that about 600,000 people (of whom 500,000 were of the Irish race and 100,000 of the English) perished by the sword, pestilence or famine in the fearful years between 1641 and 1652--in other words, about a third part of the population was wiped out. And the war was followed by a wholesale confiscation--having fought for the king being considered as much an act of treason as having rebelled against him. The confiscated lands were allotted to soldiers, to persons who had supplied money to the Parliamentary forces, and to other supporters of the new Government.
It is but just, however, to add that 700,000 acres of profitable land in Connaught were allotted to dispossessed Romanists, and that they were allowed to occupy 100,000 acres in other parts of the country; a striking contrast to the lot of the unhappy Waldenses who were at that time being driven from their homes and slaughtered without mercy for no crime but heresy; or to the treatment a few years later by Louis XIV of his Huguenot subjects whose lands were confiscated without compensation and who were only given the choice of death or the galleys.
At the Restoration some effort was made to undo the injustice of the Cromwellian confiscations. But the matter was one of great difficulty.
In many cases land had been allotted by Cromwell in payment for money received; in others the grantees had sold their holdings to purchasers who had paid in cash, regarding the original grant as indefeasible.
A reconfiscation of such lands would obviously have worked a great injustice; and it is a common maxim of law that between two claimants each with a good t.i.tle the one in possession is to be preferred. Still it cannot be said that the decisions of the Royal Commissioners were always equitable according to our ideas; for instance, the award of 80,000 acres to the Duke of York (afterwards James II) of land which had been forfeited under Cromwell because the owner had fought for his father, would be hard to justify on any possible grounds. Still, an Act of Settlement was pa.s.sed, by which a certain amount of justice was done; it is difficult to arrive at the figures accurately, but it appears that after the pa.s.sing of the Act nearly one-third of the Island was vested in Roman Catholic proprietors. Archbishop King estimated that at the time when he was writing--1689--two-thirds of the Protestant landowners held their estates under the Act of Settlement. And Lecky says, ”Only an infinitesimal portion of the soil belongs to the descendants of those who possessed it before Cromwell.”
But Archbishop King was influenced by the fear he had felt as to what the effect of a repeal of the Act would be; and there can hardly be a doubt that his feelings led him to overestimate the number. With regard to Lecky's remark, one can only take it as a strange instance of a gross exaggeration having crept into a book which is usually careful and accurate. It may be that the statement was not very incorrect according to the evidence the author had before him; but if so, that only proves that the evidence was wrong; for the proceedings in the Land Courts which have been set up in Ireland during the last half century have shown that the proportion of t.i.tles to estates which date from an earlier period was far larger than people had supposed.
During the peaceful and tolerant reign of Charles II the country made steady progress.
Under James II, however, everything was reversed. That unhappy monarch, having ascended the throne tranquilly, with many protestations of toleration and justice to all, succeeded in less than two years in making it clear to the people of England that his object was to confine liberty to those who professed his own creed and that his idea of good government was something like that which was then existing in France and Savoy. Driven from Great Britain, on his arrival in Ireland he issued a proclamation declaring that his Protestant subjects, their religion, privileges and properties were his especial care; and he had previously directed the Lord Lieutenant to declare in Council that he would preserve the Act of Settlement inviolable. But the Protestants soon had reason to fear that his promises were illusory and that the liberty which might be allowed to them would be at best temporary. In a word, what the one party looked forward to with hope and the other with dread was ”a confederacy with France which would make His Majesty's monarchy absolute.”
In order to understand what that meant, to Irish Protestants, it is well to glance at the condition of France at the time. Louis XIV had begun by directing that the Edict of Nantes was to be interpreted by the strictest letter of the law; and soon after that the condition of the Huguenots became more unhappy than that of the Irish Roman Catholics ever was during the penal laws. The terrible ”Dragonnades”
commenced in 1682; soldiers were billeted on heretics, and unfortunate women were insulted past endurance; Huguenots were restricted even as to holding family prayers; children at the age of seven were encouraged to renounce their faith, and if they did so they were taken from their parents who, however, were obliged to pay for their maintenance in convent schools. Protestant churches were closed, and their endowments handed over to Roman Catholic inst.i.tutions. Huguenot children were forbidden all education except the most elementary. No heretic was allowed to sue a Catholic for debt. All this, however, did not satisfy the monarch or his ecclesiastical advisers. On the 18th of October 1685, he issued his famous Revocation of the Edict of Nantes:--
”We by the present Edict which is perpetual and irrevocable, revoke the Edict given at Nantes in 1583 together with every concession to the Protestants of whatever nature they be.
We will that all temples of that religion be instantly demolished. We prohibit our Protestant subjects to a.s.semble for wors.h.i.+p in any private house. We prohibit all our lords to exercise that religion within their fiefs under penalty of confiscation of property and imprisonment of person. We enjoin all ministers of the said faith to leave the kingdom within fifteen days of the publication of this Edict, under penalty of the galleys. We enjoin that all children who shall be born henceforth be baptized by the Catholic curates. Persons awaiting the enlightening grace of G.o.d may live in our kingdom unhindered on account of their religion on condition that they do not perform any of its exercises or a.s.semble for prayer or wors.h.i.+p under penalty of body and wealth.”
This Edict met with cordial approval from the Catholic party in France. The famous Madame de Sevigne wrote: ”I admire the king for the means he has devised for ruining the Huguenots. The wars and ma.s.sacres of former days only gave vigour to the sect; but the edict just issued, aided by the dragoons, will give them the _coup de grace_.”
The Irish Protestants saw with alarm that amongst the soldiers who came from France to aid King James were some who had taken an active part in the dragonnades organized by Louis XIV in order to carry out his edict. Then one Act was pa.s.sed by the Dublin Parliament repealing the Act of Settlement; and by another 2,461 persons were declared guilty of high treason unless they appeared before the Dublin authorities on a certain day and proved they were not guilty. What steps King James was prepared to take in order to subdue the rebels of Derry who held out against him can be gathered from the proclamation which he directed Conrade de Rosen, his Mareschal General, to issue.
He warned the rebels that if they did not surrender immediately, all the members of their faction, whether protected or not, in the whole neighbourhood, would be brought close to the walls of the city and there starved to death; that he would ravish the countryside, and see that no man, woman or child escaped; and that if the city still held out he would give no quarter and spare neither age nor s.e.x, in case it was taken by force.
Even if there had been no Derry to relieve and no Protestants in other parts of the country, the conquest of Ireland was a political necessity to King William. England was at this time in much the same position that it had been in the days of Elizabeth, subst.i.tuting the name France for Spain. The continental powers were again united in a supreme effort to stamp out Protestantism, and England once more stood almost alone. In Spain and Portugal, heresy was of course still punishable with death; the Pope had celebrated the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes with a triumphal _Te Deum_; a terrible persecution was raging not only throughout the Protestant districts of France but also on the Rhine, in Hungary, Savoy and the Alpine Valleys; if Ireland had remained a separate kingdom ruled by the ally and admirer of Louis XIV, the next step would certainly have been an invasion of England by the joint forces of France and Ireland. All that we in modern times include in the term ”religious liberty” hung on the issue of the battle that was fought and won on the banks of the Boyne.
CHAPTER V.
THE PERIOD OF THE PENAL LAWS.
The flight of James II brings us to the era of the ”penal laws.” To one who lives in the twentieth century and is embued with the spirit of modern thought, the whole subject is more than painful--it is detestable. But to pa.s.s it over in silence is impossible; and in order to get a clear view of the position it is necessary to examine what the penal laws were, what they were not, and what were the circ.u.mstances of the time during which they were in force.
The penal laws were a series of enactments carefully planned so as to hara.s.s the Roman Catholics at every moment of their lives, in the hope of inducing them to abandon their religion. The unhappy people were prohibited from becoming or voting for members of Parliament; they were excluded from corporations, the army, the navy and the legal profession. They were forbidden to bear arms, or even to possess a horse worth more than 5. Education was denied to them, as they could not send their sons to the university and were forbidden either to have schools of their own in Ireland or to send their children abroad.
They were not allowed to possess freehold estates in land, and even as to leaseholds they were seriously restricted. On the death of a Roman Catholic his estate was divided amongst his children equally, unless the eldest son became a Protestant, in which case he inherited the whole. And as no Roman Catholic was allowed to act as a guardian, a man never knew that if he should die his children might not be brought up in a faith that he detested. The performance of Roman Catholic wors.h.i.+p was barely tolerated, as no bishops or other dignitaries were allowed to remain in Ireland, and the only priests authorized to say ma.s.s were those who were ”registered” and had taken the oath of abjuration--that is, an oath declaring that the Pretender had no right to the throne.
Such in brief were those terrible statutes. But without attempting to excuse them, there are various matters which must be taken into account if we are to judge them fairly. In the first place, the political aspect of the question should not be forgotten. The Protestant minority might justly fear that if the Roman Catholic party were as powerful as their numbers would naturally cause them to be, they would aid in bringing about a French invasion for the restoration of the Stuarts and the re-establishment of the system which had been in evidence under James II. An army was actually formed in France, and on more than one occasion was in readiness to start. The Stuarts were regarded by the Pope as the rightful sovereigns. The Roman Catholic prelates whose entry into Ireland was forbidden were appointed by the Pretender and were his political agents; it was that fact, and no doctrinal reason, that caused their expulsion. It is necessary to make this quite clear, as there has been as much exaggeration on this point as on most other subjects connected with Irish history. The words of the ”oath of abjuration” were as follows:
”I do solemnly and sincerely declare that I do believe in my conscience that the person pretended to be Prince of Wales during the life of the late King James and since his decease taking upon himself the style and t.i.tle of King of England by the name of James III hath not any right or t.i.tle whatever to the crown of this realm.”
A modern Roman Catholic writer has thus described the oath:--
”By the Oath of Abjuration the priest was ordered to swear that the sacrifice of the ma.s.s and the invocation of the Blessed Virgin and the saints were d.a.m.nable and idolatrous. In other words, the priest was ordered to apostatize, or fly for his life.”
And even if Roman Catholics took the oath of allegiance, the old difficulty arose as to the papal right to depose princes and to order their subjects to rebel. So late as 1768, when a declaration was drawn up which it was hoped the leaders of the Roman Catholic party would sign, so that the penal laws might be finally done away with, the Papal Nuncio vetoed the proposal because the declaration contained a reprobation of the doctrines that faith need not be kept with heretics and that if the Pope banned a sovereign his subjects might depose and slay him. It is but fair to add, however, that a large number of Roman Catholics did sign the declaration; and the penal laws (which had been relaxed from time to time when it was seen that the Irish took no part in the Stuart rebellions of 1715 and 1745) were soon afterwards practically abolished.
Then it must be borne in mind that the Irish penal laws, although to some extent modelled on the legislation of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, were absolutely insignificant compared with those which were in force at the time in every Roman Catholic country in Europe.
Galling though the Irish laws were, they never went so far as to make the mere holding of heretical opinions criminal. Thus no one in Ireland was ever put to death for believing in transubstantiation; whereas in one diocese of Portugal 20,000 people were sent to the stake for denying it. As every one who has visited the Madrid picture gallery will recollect, it was still the custom in the eighteenth century for the King of Spain to preside in state at the burning of heretics; and it was not until that century was drawing to a close that it was for the first time enacted in Portugal that sentence of death for heresy when pa.s.sed by the ecclesiastical court should not be carried into effect unless the order was countersigned by the king. In France, for two or three heretics to meet for wors.h.i.+p anywhere (their churches had of course all been pulled down) was a crime punishable with death; and any Huguenot caught whilst attempting to escape from the country was sent to the galleys--a fate worse than mere death, for it meant death by slow torture. And every child was forcibly taken from its heretic parents at the age of five, and educated in a convent.