Part 6

In extirpating the Catholic religion the policy of the Penal Code failed. To the faith which was their only comfort and sole redemption from utter degradation the people more than ever clung. The priests braved the law, celebrated mass in hiding-places, furtively ordained, several hands being laid on at once that the man ordained might be able to swear that he did not know who had ordained him. They taught in hedge schools, and, though but coarsely educated themselves, preserved the scantling there was of knowledge and civilization among the people. In their celibacy they had a great advantage for such work. Interested conversions among Catholics of the higher class, especially as passports to the bar, seem not to have been uncommon. An old lady of an ancient line is said to have embraced Protestantism avowedly against her conscience, saying that it was better that one old woman should burn than that the estates of the house of Tomond should go out of the family. But disinterested conversions there were none. On the other hand Protestants in isolated settlements were turned Catholic by social contagion.

Other parts of the code took deadly effect. The Catholics generally ceased to own land. Of their landed gentry, some went into exile. The people, bereft of their natural leaders, sank into apathetic helotage and mute despair. Neither in 1715 nor in 1745, when a pretender again unfurled the banner of the House of Stuart, was there the slightest political movement among them. Socially, the iron had entered their souls and they cowered under the yoke of the ascendancy. Once, an informer having tendered a Catholic the legal ten pounds for his pair of fine horses, the Catholic drew his pistol and shot the pair. But this was a rare spark of self-respect on the part of the helot.

The cup of woe was not yet full. In England, with revolution principles, the mercantile party had mounted to power, and commerce in those days was everywhere ridden by the fallacy of protectionism, which killed the only good articles in the Treaty of Utrecht, those opening free trade with France. Ireland, the English protectionist regarded as a foreign country, and a particularly dangerous enemy to his interest. The cattle trade having been killed by the act of Charles II., the Irish had taken to the export trade in wool and to woollen manufactures. The wool grown on Irish sheepwalks was of the finest, and was eagerly purchased by France and Spain. This industry also English monopoly killed by prohibiting the exportation of wool to foreign countries and the importation of Irish woollen goods into England. The same jealous rapacity seems to have successively killed or crippled the cotton industry, the glove-making industry, the glass industry, the brewing industry, to each of which Ireland successively turned; English greed being bent, not only on excluding the Irish competitor from its own market, but on keeping the Irish market to itself. Ireland had been promised free enjoyment of the linen trade, which Strafford had encouraged by promoting the growing of flax while he discouraged the wool trade; yet even this promise Irish financiers could accuse England of eluding by tricks of the tariff. England needing more bar iron than she could produce, the importation of bar iron from Ireland was allowed; but the consequence was a consumption of timber for smelting which denuded Ireland of her forests.

Cromwell's union would have secured to Ireland exemption from the disabilities of the Navigation Laws. The Restoration imposed them. They killed her trade with the colonies and killed her shipping interest at the same time. "The conveniency of ports and harbours," said Swift, "which nature has bestowed so liberally upon this kingdom, is of no more use to us than a beautiful prospect to a man shut up in a dungeon."

In all this Ireland was treated as a colony, meant only to be a feeder to the imperial country. But her position was worse than that of the colonies, in which commercial restrictions generally were loosely enforced, and which, when strict enforcement was attempted by Grenville, rose in arms. The colonies, moreover, were regarded with pride and affection. Popish Ireland was regarded with contempt and hatred.

The lawful trade in wool with foreign countries England had suppressed. Its place was partly taken by a smuggling trade, for which the inlets of the Irish coast afforded the best of havens, and which had the people everywhere for confederates. Thus, in every line, religious, social, educational, and commercial, the Irishman found the law his inveterate enemy. Could he fail to be an inveterate enemy of the law?

Cut off from manufactures and from trade, the people were thrown for subsistence wholly on the land, and land for the most part better suited for pasture than for tillage. For the land they competed with the eagerness of despair, undertaking to pay for their little lots rents which left them and their families less than a bare subsistence. On such a scene of misery as the abodes of the Irish cotters the sun has rarely looked down. Their homes were the most miserable hovels, chimneyless, filthy. Of decent clothing they were destitute. Their food was the potato; sometimes they bled their cattle and mixed the blood with sorrel. The old and sick were everywhere dying by cold and hunger, and rotting amidst filth and vermin. When the potato failed, as it often did, came famine, with disease in its train. Want and misery were in every face; the roads were spread with dead and dying; there were sometimes none to bear the dead to the grave and they were buried in the fields and ditches where they perished. Fluxes and malignant fevers followed, laying whole villages waste. "I have seen," says a witness, "the labourer endeavouring to work at his spade, but fainting for want of food, and forced to omit it. I have seen the helpless orphan exposed on the dunghill, and none to take him in for fear of infection. And I have seen the hungry infant sucking at the breast of the already expired parent."[2] There was an enormous amount of vagrancy and mendicity, as there was in Scotland before the union. This was under the government of the first of free nations, and in the era of Newton, Addison, and Pope.

Reduced to living like beasts, the people multiplied their kind with animal recklessness. The result was fatal overpopulation, the pressure of which, aggravated by occasional failures of the treacherous potato, could be relieved only by the tragic remedy of emigration on an immense scale.

Of the landowners, who might have had compassion on their serfs, many were absentees; residence in Ireland, especially when agrarian war began, being hardly pleasant. Their place was taken by the middleman, through whose ruthless agency they extorted their rents and who frequently sublet, sometimes even three or four deep, so that the cotter groaned under a hierarchy of extortion. From the ranks of the middlemen were partly drawn the upstart gentry, or squireens, a roistering, debauched, drinking, and duelling crew, whose tyrannical insolence scandalized Arthur Young, ruling with the horse-whip a peasantry cowering under the lash and hopeless of redress by the law. The peasantry still largely spoke Erse, another badge of their social inferiority, and a further barrier between them and the ruling class.

To the extortion of the middleman was added that, even more hated, of the tithe proctor. The Protectorate had at all events relieved Ireland of the Anglican State Church. That incubus the monarchy reimposed, and the peasant was compelled out of the miserable produce of his potato field or patch of oats, besides the exorbitant rent, not only to provide for his own priest, but to pay tithe to a clergy whose mission was to extirpate the peasant's religion. The Anglican bishoprics were rich. The rectories for the most part were miserably poor, so that pluralism might be necessary to make an income. But pluralism of the most scandalous kind also prevailed, and we have a dean holding two groups of livings, fourteen livings in all, one group twelve miles away from the other. Some of the clergy, on the plea that there were no glebe houses for them, were drawing their tithes in the pump room and at the card tables of Bath. Bishops were sometimes non-resident as well as scandalously secular and inert. Most of them were English, and appointed to keep up the English interest. There were bright exceptions, such as Bolter, King, above all Berkeley, but they were few. Swift could say of Irish bishops that government no doubt appointed good men, but they were always murdered on Hounslow Heath by the highwaymen, who took their credentials, personated them, and were installed in their place. There have been worse institutions than the State Church of Ireland; there was never a greater scandal. Even if Anglicanism had been less alien to the Irish heart, what chance would such missionaries as these have had against the devoted emissaries of Rome? What must have been the feelings of the Irish peasant when of his crop of potatoes, all too scanty for him and his children, the tithe proctor came to claim a tenth part in the name of a Christian minister?

There were prelates of a better stamp who sought to do well by the people. Under their auspices were set up the chartered schools, to give poor Irish children an industrial education. But the work of charity was marred by bigotry. The children were taken from their Catholic parents and forcibly brought up as Protestants, whereby the heart of the Catholic parent was filled with anguish, and more bitter offence, it seems, was given than by any other kind of repression. The schools at last became a sink of abuse, inhumanity, and corruption.

Rural Ireland was a recruiting ground for the armies of the Continent. On some lonely hillside the recruiting agent reviewed the youth of the neighbourhood, picked out the strong, the flower of the population, and turned back the feeble to their miserable homes.

If anything was to be done for the extension of Protestantism, union among the Protestant minority was indispensable, and the enthusiasm of the Calvinist, sombre as it was, might have had its attractions for the Celt, as it had for the Celts of the Scottish Highlands, among whom it gave birth to the hill preachers, and for those of Wales with whom Calvinistic Methodism prevailed. But the bishops of the State Church hated the Presbyterian even more bitterly than they hated the Catholic. After their brief and hollow alliance with the Nonconformists, when their own interest was threatened, they had speedily relapsed into High Anglicanism, and under the not unsuitable leadership of the infidel Bolingbroke had taken to persecuting Nonconformity in England. They extended the persecution to Ireland, excluding by the Sacramental Test the defenders of Derry from municipal office and military service. They imported the Schism Act, forbidding Nonconformists to open schools. They threatened interference with Presbyterian worship, Ireland having no Toleration Act. They disputed the validity of Presbyterian marriage. They thus set flowing a stream of Presbyterian emigration from the north of Ireland to the American colonies. The stream was afterwards swelled by the rapacity of Lord Donegal and other landed proprietors of Ulster, who, being owners of great estates, when the leases of their tenants ran out, instead of renewing them to the tenant, put them up to the highest bidder. Starving Catholics, in the desperate competition for land, outbidding the Protestants, a number of Protestant families were driven from their homes. The consequence was, first, aggressive insurrection under the names of the Heart of Oak Boys and the Steel Boys, ultimately emigration to America. Thus the Church and the landlord between them were charging the mine of American revolution.

X

Presently, too, inexorable nature made her voice heard, proclaiming that Ireland, with its rich pastures and watery skies, was in the main not an arable but a grazing country. There was a good market for meat. Speculators began buying up land and throwing it into large grazing farms. The cotter was ejected and driven to the bogs and mountains. This overtaxed even a cotter's submission, and there broke out an agrarian war, the most deadly perhaps in history, the canker and disgrace of British government, protracted in varying phases and with fluctuating intensity almost from that day to this. Companies of men, wearing white shirts over their clothes, and thence afterwards called Whiteboys, harried the grazing farms by night, and the stillness of the night air was broken by the bellowings and moanings of hamstrung cattle.

Irish outrage has been essentially agrarian, rather than religious. The division of churches coincided generally with the social division. The middleman was necessarily Protestant, since, under the penal law, no Catholic could acquire a beneficial lease; and the antagonism of religion and language emphasized and embittered that of class and interest. But a Catholic generally suffered like a Protestant if he provoked the wrath of the people. A Protestant settling in a Catholic district, if he was in any way obnoxious, was especially liable to maltreatment. Later on there was a hideous instance of this in the case of a Protestant schoolmaster settling and opening his school in a Catholic district. He and his family were mangled with horrible cruelty.

Nor can it be said that the landlords as a class were the objects of hatred and outrage apart from the agrarian quarrel. A landlord who resided and did not oppress his tenantry, especially if he were affable, jovial, and hospitable, was generally the object of a clannish affection, though his mansion might be a "Castle Rack-rent" and his serious duties might be very indifferently performed.

The commercial restrictions and the Navigation Acts were fatal to the prosperity of the whole island, while the penal inability of the Catholics to invest could not fail to lower the value of land. This would be felt by the conquering as well as by the conquered race and sect. Scotland, cut off by the repeal of Cromwell's union from trade with England and the dependencies, had so suffered commercially and industrially that she swarmed with vagrants, and the ardent patriot, Fletcher of Saltoun, proposed slavery as a remedy for the evil. The union, opening free trade with England, brought commercial prosperity in its train. The English in Ireland stretched out their hands to the British government for a union like that which was being made with Scotland, and were coldly repelled. To English protectionism the chief blame for the refusal no doubt is due. But unwillingness to incorporate a large Catholic population may also have played its part. Let the cause have been what it may, there is hardly anything in the records of British statesmanship more deplorable than this refusal of union to Ireland. Protectionism here again pleads the excuse of universal delusion, and in no case is the excuse more needed.

Moreover, the Protestants of Ireland, British in blood and, as lords over a subject race in their own country, more than British in pride, were denied the enjoyment of British freedom. A Parliament they had; but that Parliament could legislate only by grace of the English council and of a council named by the lord lieutenant in Ireland. Its control even of money bills was not recognized, while the Crown had a hereditary revenue which made it almost independent of Parliamentary grants. In the Upper House, owing to the large absenteeism of lay lords, the bench of bishops, nominees of the Crown and agents of the British interest, largely held sway. Of the three hundred seats in the House of Commons more than half were filled by nominees of the patrons of pocket boroughs, which the Crown had been always creating at its will, and the nominations were sold like common merchandise. The House, moreover, swarmed with placemen and pensioners. The Parliament was elected for a whole reign, so as to be scarcely responsible even to such a constituency as it had. The Irish Parliament of George II. continued for thirty-three years. There was a session only in every other year. The English House of Lords arrogated to itself the jurisdiction of final appeal. The judges held only during pleasure. There was no annual Mutiny Act. There was no Habeas Corpus. There were large sinecures, instruments of corruption in the hands of the government. The pension list, swollen beyond bounds, was a privy fund for kings' mistresses and for jobs too dirty for the English list. The high appointments, ecclesiastical, administrative, and judicial, were treated as patronage by the English government and generally reserved for Englishmen. The face of their king the Irish never saw. The viceroy resided only during a small part of his term, and his place was filled in his absence by lords justices who were often bishops, English themselves, and bent above all things on securing the ascendancy of the English interest. Three archbishops in succession practically ruled Ireland. Presbyterians and other Protestant Dissenters, victims of episcopal intolerance, had crying wrongs of their own.

Union with England had been refused, and the protection of England being no longer so manifestly indispensable to her garrison in Ireland as it had been, a craving for self-government took its place. Molyneux, and after him Lucas, alarmed and exasperated authority by writing in favour of the independence of the Irish Parliament. But a far more potent artificer of discord appeared in Swift, who, balked of preferment in England by the wreck of his political party, exiled to a native land which he abhorred, was eating his heart, and ripe for mischief, especially for any mischief which could avenge him on the Whig government, above all on Walpole, its chief, by whom it seems the path of this model Christian and pure writer to a bishopric had been crossed. That a feeling of justice and of pity for the sufferings of the Irish people, which Swift has vividly described, had their place in his heart beside malice and vengeance, may be true; though his sense of justice was not strong enough to prevent him, profane and really sceptical as he was, from vehemently upholding the Penal Code and the Sacramental Test; while his pity for the people led to no philanthropic effort of a practical kind, and was not very tenderly expressed in his satirical suggestion that they should appease their hunger by eating their babies. His proposal to exclude English goods would gratify his malice as well as his patriotism, and had it been adopted would probably have led to a large increase of smuggling.

One of the grievances of Ireland was that there was no Irish mint. A new copper coinage was needed. The contract was given by the English government to the king's mistress, and by her sold to Wood, a respectable manufacturer. As the coinage was approved by Sir Isaac Newton, then master of the mint, it can hardly have been very bad. But Irish jealousy cast suspicion upon its character. Then rose a storm of popular fury, improved by Swift into a whirlwind on which he rode in his glory. Swift's "Drapier Letters" are monuments of his genius for pamphleteering, his intense malice, and his freedom from the restraints of truth. They produced an immense effect, made him the idol of Dublin for the rest of his days, and forced Walpole to give way and call in the halfpence. Their author did not mention among the evils of an English connection that he and the members of his State Church were enabled by the support of the British power to set their feet upon the necks of four-fifths of the Irish people and to wring from the starving Catholic the income of the dean of St. Patrick. The letters ranged far beyond the immediate occasion, and appealed strongly to the growing desire of independence, which we may be pretty sure that Swift, had he been nominated by Bolingbroke to an English bishopric, would have fiercely opposed. The Parliament to which his revolution would have consigned Ireland is described by himself as a den of thieves of which he devoutly desired the extirpation.

Presently there arose a patriot party in the Irish Parliament. It found a leader in Flood, a man of solid ability and powerful in debate, while the purity of his patriotism was not so clear. At Flood's side, or rather perhaps, as the event proved, on his flank, there presently arose the far more illustrious Grattan, whose purity and patriotism were unquestionable, whose oratory was brilliant, his admirers thought divine. The objects sought by the patriots were reduction of the duration of Parliaments, control of money bills, an annual Mutiny Bill, Habeas Corpus, tenure of the judges during life or good behaviour, reduction of the pension list, exclusion of placemen and pensioners from the House of Commons, taxation of the rents of absentees. On the first and most important point they succeeded through a bargain with the Crown on the amount of the military force. The duration of Parliament was cut down to eight years, that number being preferred to seven, because it was only in alternate years that Parliament sat. This was a very important change. War, with imperfect success, was waged on the question of money bills. On the other points reform made no way, the English government clinging obstinately to all its powers and using its veto, while the lord lieutenant was able to avert a crash by buying up a majority in the Irish Parliament. Taxation of the rents of absentees, a measure very popular and much pressed, was vetoed by the English government. The protest of the absentees against it was evidently the work of Burke, whose patron, Lord Rockingham, had an estate in Ireland. Burke argued that the double land-ownership was a link of union between the two countries; which it might have been if the residence as well as the proprietorship had been shared. The advocates of the tax might have cited the original character of land grants to which feudal service was annexed and which were forfeited by the failure of absentees to perform it. Chatham supported the tax. For a moment, unhappily for a moment only, his thoughts were turned to Ireland. A far greater service he would have rendered his country by pacifying Ireland as he pacified the Highlands than by his conquest of Canada, of which the loss of the American colonies was the result. In the background there was a growing sentiment in favour of independence, the flag of which was by Grattan presently unfurled.

It was not in Ireland as it was in England, where the regular party system prevailed and the minority changed with the majority in Parliament. The Castle called to the council whom it pleased, without regard to the existence of a political connection among them, though it was, of course, under the necessity of calling those who could bring it support at the time. The party tie was accordingly very loose and connections were shifting. Flood had no scruple in providing for himself, apart from his friends, by acceptance of a rich sinecure under the government. Hely Hutchinson, a free lance, could use his personal influence in forcing the government to make him provost of Trinity College.

For a time the Castle put itself into the hands of a junto of great lords and owners of Parliamentary boroughs, who undertook to supply it with a majority at the price of patronage and power. To break this ring and restore the free action of government, an effort was made by the Lord Lieutenant Townshend. But Townshend's boisterous energy, successful for a time, in the end failed, and the Castle fell back into the routine of government by intrigue and corruption, aided by viceregal dinners and balls.