Part 5

To cast all on Cromwell is most unfair. He had nothing specially to do with Ireland till he came to put an end to the war. He left it forever when he had struck his decisive blow. He could no more have given back the contested land to the Catholics than he could have turned the Shannon to its source. The act under which the land had been forfeited in advance and a loan on it raised had been passed by the unanimous vote of Parliament and had received the assent of the king. The soldiers who held land-scrip for their pay presented their claims. As little would it have been possible for Cromwell, even if he had desired it, to license the celebration of the Mass, which in Puritan eyes was a sign, not only of idolatry, but of allegiance to a foreign power, that power the mortal enemy, not of the Protestant religion only, but of the Protestant State. With liberty of conscience Cromwell declared that he would not interfere. This was something in an age when the rack and the stake of the Inquisition were still at work and when Irish troopers in the service of a Catholic power were butchering the Protestant peasantry of Savoy. If the Nuncio Rinuccini had got the upper hand in Ireland, a retirement of heresy into the sanctuary of conscience would scarcely have saved it from the stake. Cromwell does not appear to have persecuted in Ireland or to have given the word for persecution.

The Protector united Ireland as well as Scotland to England, thus bringing the factions under the control of a strong government, Ireland's only hope of peace. Union assured her free trade with Great Britain and the dependencies, an inestimable boon, not in the way of material wealth only, but in that of commercial civilization, as its withdrawal afterwards fatally proved. Her shipping was at the same time assured of exemption from the disabilities of the Navigation Laws. The Protector sent her a good governor in the person of his son Henry, who seems to have identified himself with the welfare of her people. He sent her a liberal law reformer in the person of Chief Justice Coke, proposing to himself to treat her as a blank paper, whereon he could write reforms such as professional bigotry debarred him from effecting in England. His mortal enemy Clarendon, after dilating on the iniquities of the settlement, says, "And, which is more wonderful, all this was done and settled within little more than two years to that degree of perfection that there were many buildings raised for beauty as well as use, orderly and regular plantations of trees, and fences and enclosures raised throughout the kingdom, purchases made by one from the other at very valuable rates, and jointures made upon marriages, and all other conveyances and settlements executed, as in a kingdom at peace within itself, and where no doubt could be made of the validity of titles." If these material improvements were at first limited to the domain and race of the victor, they would in time have spread.

Cromwell's own letter to Sadler on the administration of justice in Ireland breathes anything but the ferocity ascribed to him. About religion he speaks in his unctuous Puritan way, but in a tone far from savage. "First let me tell you, in divers places where we come, we find the people very greedy after the Word, and flocking to Christian meetings; much of that prejudice that lies upon poor people in England being a stranger to their minds. And truly we have hoped much of it is done in simplicity; and I mind you the rather of this because it is a sweet symptom, if not an earnest of the good we expect."[1]

His words on the social question in the same letter show tenderness of feeling. "Sir, it seems to me we have a great opportunity to set up until the Parliament shall otherwise determine, a way of doing justice among these poor people, which for the uprightness and cheapness of it may exceedingly gain upon them who have been accustomed to as much injustice, tyranny, and oppression from their landlords the great men, and those that should have done them right as (I believe) any people in that which we call Christendom.... Sir, if justice were freely and impartially administered here, the foregoing darkness and corruption would make it look so much the more glorious and beautiful and draw more hearts after it." This is not the language of hatred, much less of extermination.

Critics of Cromwell fail to notice that his mind opened as he rose, notably in the way of religious toleration. The Ironside had now become a great statesman. "Savage" the writer of his domestic letters surely can never have been.

The representatives of Ireland in the Parliament of the Protectorate, it is true, were nominees. A popular election on the morrow of the Civil War, and with its embers still glowing, would have been out of the question. The union of the Parliaments effected, and representation granted, popular election would have come in time. Meantime, there was the sheltering and controlling authority of the Protector and the Council of State.

To charge Cromwell with having misunderstood the genius of the Irish nation and wronged it by his policy seems absurd. There was, in reality, no Irish nation. There was an island inhabited partly by the wreck of Celtic tribes, partly by conquerors and colonists of another race, the two races differing widely in character, speaking different languages, having antagonistic religions, not alien only, but desperately hostile to each other. Deadly experience had shown that, left to themselves, they could not live at peace. There was no political union, no attachment to a native dynasty, no tradition or sentiment truly national among the wreckage of the septs. The religious bond, it is true, had been greatly strengthened among them by the conflict, and formed something like a national tie. But adaptation of his policy to Catholic character and sentiment could hardly be expected of a Puritan chief in the age of the Spanish Inquisition.

The European war between Catholicism and Protestantism, and the consequent mingling of religious with political strife, were everywhere a fatal stumbling-block to statesmanship in that day. It does not seem that Cromwell dealt with the difficulty in England or Ireland less wisely and liberally than did statesmanship elsewhere. Perhaps the greater share of liberality was his. The signs of his personal inclination were certainly on the liberal side.

VII

The death of the Protector before his hour, and the military anarchy which ensued, brought on the Restoration. The Restoration brought claims on the part of dispossessed Royalism for restitution in both countries. The occupants of confiscated lands in Ireland, seeing what must come, had under the leadership of opportunist politicians, such as Broghill and Cork, worshipped with politic rapture the return of the Royal Sun. The disinherited on the other hand clamorously pressed their claim to restitution. To that claim honour bade and sympathy inclined Charles II. to give ear. But the adventurers were a formidable body, and while their professions were fervently loyal their hands were on their swords. Nor did Protestant England, even in its hot fit of loyalty, love the Irish Catholic or forget the massacre of 1641. There ensued a vast controversy, desperately embarrassing to Clarendon, Charles's chief adviser, to Charles himself no doubt an insufferable bore. Intrigue and corruption, in which the possessors were strong, contended with argument in the fray. The government at last took refuge in the appointment of a commission instructed to decide claims to restitution on the principle of complicity or non-complicity in the rebellion of 1641; a criterion rather difficult of application, since Charles I. had on the one hand assented to the Act of Forfeiture, and on the other hand by treating with the Confederates had practically recognized their loyalty to the crown. The upshot was an Act of Settlement with a supplementary Act of Explanation, under which the possessors retained about two-thirds of the lands, the disinherited getting the other one-third, eked out with scraps, which by escheat or forfeiture for regicide were at the disposal of the crown. The Act of Settlement was thenceforth in the eyes of the Protestant possessor the great charter of proprietary right, to be upheld at whatever cost; in the eyes of the dispossessed Catholic, the hateful muniment of proprietary wrong, to be cancelled whenever he had the power. The net result of the Act of Settlement and Explanation was that Ulster was left, as it remains, a Protestant pale.

The Anglican State Church recovered all its possessions and privileges, and was once more planted on the neck of a Catholic people. It is sad to learn that Jeremy Taylor, who, when under persecution, had eloquently defended liberty of prophesying, as a bishop of the restored Irish establishment defended that liberty no more. But how could a hierarch of the State Church of Ireland fail to don its spirit with his mitre?

The whole of the Protector's work was undone. The union of Scotland and Ireland with England was broken. Ireland was again reduced to the state of a dependency, and of a dependency unloved and unrespected, whose interests were to be always sacrificed to those of the country which was the seat of power. Of this she was soon made fatally sensible. Protectionism was the creed of that dark age. Ireland as a fine grazing country had been doing a profitable export trade with England in cattle, pork, bacon, and dairy produce. The English grazier demanded of his Parliament protection against the free importation of food, denounced by him as a "nuisance." On his demand an act was passed prohibiting the trade. Good sense and the public interest struggled hard. The debate was unusually fierce. Ominous expressions of contempt for the Irish were heard, and led to a challenge. The king had the good sense to disapprove the measure, but gave way, as he was sure to do. The patriotic policy of the grazier triumphed. Irish fish narrowly escaped prohibition at the same time. This was the first of a line of prohibitive acts fatal to the commerce of Ireland and to her commercial civilization. At the same time she came under the Navigation Laws, which were fatal to her shipping trade.

Ireland, however, had the good fortune to be during the greater part of the reign of Charles II. under the government of that Duke of Ormonde who had commanded for the king in the Civil War. The duke was a statesman, like Clarendon and Southampton, of the old and honourable cavalier school, untainted by the political profligacy or the social dissoluteness of the men of the Cabal. He governed as impartially as the anti-Catholic laws and his own strict Anglicanism would let him; did his best to keep the peace between the factions, political and religious; promoted manufactures and trade, encouraged and endowed education, founded a college of medicine, organized a national militia. He heartily identified himself with Irish interests, and opposed the Cattle Act with an energy and a force of argument which entitle his memory to the respect of free traders. It is the sad truth that of Irish history between the Conquest and the Union the one bright period is the viceroyalty of Ormonde.

Ireland unhappily, though her interests were out of the pale of English care, was not out of the pale of English faction and revolution. The Stuart brothers, plotting with their French patron the subversion of English religion and liberty, looked to Catholic Ireland for help in their plot. They cultivated the Catholic interest there, and against the law promoted Catholics to office and command. Richard Talbot, lying Dick, afterwards Duke of Tyrconnel, one of the lowest of their wonderfully low agents, as well as about the most violent, appeared upon the scene. It was probably by thwarting or refusing to promote this conspiracy that Ormonde, a strict Protestant though of the Anglican school, and constitutional though a monarchist, incurred temporary dismissal from his viceroyalty. Possibly in the same quarter may be sought the explanation of the mysterious attempt at murdering him by Blood, of the criminal connection of the court with whom there can be little doubt. On the other hand, the cruel anti-Catholic panic, created in England by the well-founded suspicion of danger to Protestantism from Stuart intrigue with France which gave birth to the Popish plot, extended its rage to Ireland. The last and most pitiable of the innocent victims of that frenzy was the Catholic Archbishop Plunket.

VIII

Signs of preparation for the Stuart attack on Protestantism and liberty were visible in Ireland as well as in England in the last years of Charles II. But the blow was suspended during the life of the Merry Monarch, who preferred the calm of the seraglio to the stir of a great enterprise, and did not want to go again upon his travels. With the accession of Charles's fanatical and blundering brother, the crisis came. The Viceroy Clarendon, a Tory of Tories, but an Anglican, was deposed from the viceroyalty, and quitted Ireland with a stream of Protestant refugees in his train. Into his place vaulted Dick Talbot, now Duke of Tyrconnel, drunk with the fury of Romanizing and despotic reaction. A Catholic reign of terror set in. Protestants were disarmed; driven from places of authority, political, judicial, or municipal; practically outlawed, plundered, outraged, compelled to fly for their lives. The country seethed with a general orgie of insurrection and revenge. The people swarmed to the standard of Catholic and agrarian revolution, rather than to that of the English king, for whom they cared little and who cared little for them. Presently came James, ejected from England, with the power of his French patron at his back. Under him a packed Parliament repealed the Act of Settlement by which the Protestants held their lands, proclaiming reconfiscation and expulsion on a vast scale. Not satisfied with this, the Parliament passed a monstrous Act of Attainder against a large portion of the Protestant proprietary. Nor can it be assumed that the frantic hatred which inspired this act would have confined itself to spoliation, for which the repeal of the Act of Settlement might have pretty well sufficed. A long lifetime had not yet passed since 1641. James, who was not an Irish patriot but an English king out of possession, would have vetoed the Act of Attainder had he dared. But he dared not. He even suffered himself in this case to be divested of the royal prerogative of pardon. Another prerogative, that of regulating the coin, he exercised by sanctioning a base issue on a large scale, which, being made legal tender, completed the ruin of the Protestant trader.

But Protestantism, the stern Protestantism of the Calvinist, rallied on its own ground, and behind the mouldering walls of Derry made against a Catholic host one of the heroic defences of history, a worthy theme in an after time for the most brilliant of historians. In the battle of Newtown Butler, Protestantism again triumphed over odds. Succour at length came from England. It came first in the person of the renowned Schomberg, whose army, however, made up of raw recruits, ill supplied by fraudulent contractors, and filled with disease by the moisture of the climate, miserably rotted. At last the bonfires of jubilant Protestantism announced that William of Orange had landed. On the Boyne he gained a small battle but a great victory, which decided that the Protestant Saxon, not the Catholic Celt, should be master of Ireland. James fled to the luxurious asylum of his French master, and with him fled the last hope of the Catholic cause.

Once more, however, at Aghrim, the Catholic, under the command of the French General St. Ruth, accepted the wager of battle in open field. He fought well, and the fortune of the day wavered, when a cannon shot took off St. Ruth's head. Protestantism owed its victory largely to a regiment of French Huguenots exiled by the bigoted tyranny of their own king.

All was over in the field. The irresistible Marlborough reduced Cork and Kinsale. But in Limerick, by soldiers pronounced untenable, Catholicism had its Derry. Its hero Sarsfield, by a daring march, cut off William's siege artillery, and, after a fierce assault, gallantly repulsed, William was fain to raise the siege. After his departure Ginkell again invested the place, and Sarsfield, finding that the last hour of the last Catholic stronghold had come, capitulated on terms. The military terms of the surrender were strictly observed. The political terms, securing a measure of religious liberty to Catholics, though endorsed by William in his wise Dutch love of toleration, were repudiated by Parliament. The "violated treaty of Limerick" was an ugly business, though there seems to have been no protest at the time. But James had fled. The garrison of Limerick had no status but a military one, to which surrender put an end. Politically they were merely insurgents. Could any political terms made with them have bound the sovereign authority of the Irish and British Parliaments in dealing with their own citizens forever? Can Sarsfield have thought that they did?

A crowd of Irish women and children lined the shore at Limerick, watching with tearful eyes the receding sails of the fleet which bore away their husbands and fathers, the garrison of the last Catholic stronghold, to service in foreign lands. The defenders of Limerick were thus exchanged for the Huguenot exiles who had charged and conquered at Aghrim. Those men, with many an exile from Catholic Ireland who followed in their track, went to form the Irish brigade and to redeem on foreign fields battles lost in their own land.

IX

In that mortal struggle, had the Catholic won, he would have deprived the Protestant certainly of his land, perhaps of his life. The Protestant, having won, proceeded at once to avenge and secure himself by binding down his vanquished foe with chains of iron. Chains of iron indeed they were. By the series of enactments called the Penal Code, passed by the Irish Parliament with some assistance from that of England, the Irish Catholic was reduced to helotage political and social, while measures were taken for the extirpation of his religion. To crush him politically he was excluded from Parliament, from the franchise, from municipal office, from the magistracy, from the jury box, as well as from public appointments of all kinds, and even from the police force. To crush him socially he was excluded from all the higher callings but that of medicine, from the bench, from the bar, and from the army. He was denied the armorial bearings which denoted a gentleman. To divorce him from the land, he was forbidden to acquire freehold or a lease beneficial beyond a certain rate; he was debarred from bequeathing his estate; and his estate was broken up by making it heritable in gavelkind. The gate of knowledge was closed against him. He was shut out of the university; forbidden to open a school; forbidden to send his children abroad for education. That he might never rise against oppression, he was disarmed and prohibited from keeping a horse of more than five pounds' value. He might not even be a gamekeeper or a watchman.

The law, without actually prohibiting the Catholic religion, provided, as was hoped, for its extirpation. All priests were required to be registered, and were forbidden to perform service out of their own parish. All Catholic archbishops and bishops were banished, and were made punishable with death if they returned, so that in future there could be no ordinations. Monks and friars also were banished. Catholic chapels might not have bells or steeples. There were to be no pilgrimages or wayside crosses. Rewards were offered to informers against Catholic bishops, priests, and schoolmasters, and their trade was lauded as honourable service to the state. Marriage of a Catholic with a Protestant was prohibited; to perform it was a capital offence; so was conversion of a Protestant to Catholicism. Religious hatred outraged domestic affection by enacting that if the son of a Catholic turned Protestant the inheritance should at once vest in him, his father being reduced to a life interest; that the wife of a Catholic turning Protestant should be set free from her husband's control and entitled to a settlement; that a Catholic could not be a guardian, so that, dying, he had to leave his children to the guardianship of an enemy of their faith.

Representatives of the government designated the Catholics officially as "our enemies." The Irish Parliament was exhorted to put an end to all distinctions except that between Protestant and Papist. To such a relation between races under the same government history can scarcely show a parallel, unless it be the case of the Moriscos in Spain.

"It was," says Burke, "a complete system full of coherence and consistency; well digested and well composed in all its parts. It was a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance and was as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people and the debasement in them of human nature itself as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man." It was the panic rage of a garrison which had narrowly escaped extermination, and less cruel than the treatment of the Huguenots by the Catholic king at the instigation of the Jesuit and with the approbation of the Catholic Church in France. The fires of the Inquisition were still burning, and continued for some time to burn. If the British Parliament shares the guilt of the Penal Code, twice had an army of Irish Catholics been raised for the destruction of English liberties. When last those liberties were in the extremity of peril, a force of Irish Catholics had been encamped at Hounslow. Nor was Catholicism merely a religion. It was allegiance to a power which claimed the suzerainty of Ireland, which had launched the decree of deposition against Elizabeth, which, after the rising of 1641, had sent its nuncio to the rebel council of Kilkenny. These memories on both sides ought long ago to have been consigned to a common grave.

At the same time it was deplorable that the settlement of the Catholic provinces after their reconquest should have been left to the Protestants of Ireland, transported with rage and fear. The true course, had it been possible, was the union of Ireland with England. Representatives of the loyal districts of Ireland might have been called at once to the Parliament at Westminster. The rest of the island might have been placed under a strong government of pacification and settlement, till peace and the reign of law had been thoroughly restored. It is needless to say that such a solution could not even suggest itself to the mind of any statesman at that time.