country. The fierce contest has been renewed, with fearful cost to each side, in almost every generation since. And there are perhaps to-day, no two peoples on the globe, more thoroughly embittered towards each other, than the natives proper of the sister-islands, England and Ireland. Nor is this all. It is impossible to study the internal history of the British Empire within the present century, without perceiving how distinctively this state of things, has been, and remains, as well a chronic peril to the national existence of England, as a disease blasting the peace of almost every Irish home.

As human nature is much the same everywhere, and like causes produce like results, we may rest assured, evils of this very kind will, without some improvement not now indicated, be here the fruitful progeny of unauthorized coercion on one side, and ineradicable resentment on the other.

It is to be remarked that these tremendous evils existed, to an extent almost incredible, during the four hundred. years after the Anglo-Norman invasion, to the era of the Reformation, while the oppressors and the oppressed were all of the same general faith, and ecclesiastical household. There were no religious differences then, to stimulate this. mutual animosity. It was the common story of the world's wretchedness,-the tyranny of the strong. And it was witnessed without forbearance, indeed even with occasional aggravations, under the sixteen monarchs, from the second to the eighth Henry, comprising seven Henrys, five Edwards, three Richards, and one John.

That a mock Parliament was employed in Ireland, to invest iniquity with sham forms of law, rendered the misrule perhaps still more irritating. This assembly, organized within the limited district actually under English control, scarcely ever during those centuries embracing more than a third of the island, and sometimes very much. less, and legislating solely with a view to English interests, perpetrated the vilest enormities in the sacred name of law. For instance, in the fortieth year of Edward III, (A. D. 1336,) this Anglo-Irish Parliament sitting at

Kilkenny, enacted, that 'alliance by marriage, nurture of infants, and gossipred, (or the relation of god-parents to god-children,) with the Irish, are by this statute made high treason.' Also, if anie man of English race should use an Irish name, Irish language, or Irish apparel, or any other guise or fashion of the Irish, if he had lands or tene. ments, the same should be seized; and if he had no lands, his bodie should be taken and imprisoned.'

'But the most wicked and mischievous custom of all,' says the honest English official who discoursed on Irish. affairs, two hundred and fifty years ago, English attorneygeneral in Ireland, 'was that of coygne and livery which consisted in taking of mansmeate, and horsemeate, (subsistence for men and horses), and money, of all the inhabitants of the country at the will and pleasure of the soldier-who as the phrase of Scripture is, "did eat up the people as it were bread." This crying sinne,' (placing life, property and chastity all over Ireland at the mercy of every ruffian in the English military service,) adds the virtuous old attorney, 'did drawe down greater plagues upon Ireland, than the oppression of the Israelites did draw upon the land of Egypt. Those of Egypt, though grievous, were of short continuance, but the plagues of Ireland have lasted four hundred years.' Seven hundred, we may now write. 'This extortion,' adds the chronicler, 'did produce notorious effects; it made the land waste, and it made the people ydle; and hereupon of necessity came depopulation, banishment, and extirpation of the better sort of subjects.' Of an abomination like this, continued in some form nearly if not quite to the present time, the strong language, quoted by Sir John Davies, from an old document, is scarcely an exaggeration: though it were invented in Tophet, yet if it had been practised there, as it hath been in Ireland, it had long since destroyed the very kingdom of Beelzebub.'*

If such were the disasters resulting from hostile foreign misrule, when all parties professed the same religion, it may readily be inferred how intolerably distressing became Plowden Hist. Ireland. Vol. I. pp. 35-37.

that perversion of government, when to all other elements of mischief, were added the horrors of religious persecution.

The arbitrary and remorseless temper of Henry VIII, operating upon and through the corrupt, servile body called Parliament in Ireland, was itself of a nature greatly to intensify iniquitous administration there; but when, at the bidding of that lustful and implacable patron of Protestantism, the mock-legislature proceeded to reverse in a day, under heaviest penalties, the cherished faith of a nation, transmitted from sire to son for ages, and bound to their hearts by the powerful sentiments of patriotism and filial piety, in addition to their belief in its divinity,and when they dared to pronounce, as they did, any adherence to the old religion, felony, they not only proclaimed their own wicked folly in thus enacting the impossible, but profaned the sanctity of law by pretending to give its sanction to one of the direst mischiefs that has ever cursed the earth ;—dishonoring religion, heaven's own remedy for human woes, attaching infamy to Protestantism, and rendering impassable the great gulf of crimination and hatred, between Catholics and Protestants, in that ill-fated land. The evil was even aggravated by the successful exercise of state-craft, on the part of the imperious Tudor; in buying up certain of the less high-toned among the old chieftains, enriching them with confiscated lands of their dispossessed countrymen, endowing them with peerage privileges in the local parliament, engaging them to nominal compliance with Protestant worship, and associating them with the English interest ;-so as, if possible, to produce a wider and more deadly breach between hostile factions.

What had thus been initiated by her tyrannical father, was wrought into fury by the no less arbitrary Elizabeth. Her subservient Irish Parliament made it high treason to maintain the spiritual supremacy of the Roman Pontiff, enforced the book of Common Prayer, commanded, under heavy penalties, all persons to attend the established worship, and abolished all ecclesiastical jurisdictions not specifically appointed by the crown. Of such absurd out

rages, the effects are thus described by Dr. Leland, an Irish historian who wrote near the beginning of the present century; the people were particularly provoked by the violence offered to their religious prejudices. The partizans of Rome inveighed against the heretical queen and her impious ministers. The clergy, who refused to conform, abandoned their cures ; no reformed ministers could be found to supply their places; the churches fell to ruin; and the people, even in places of most civility, were left without any religious worship or instruction.'

As if this burden of misery were not enough, insults were heaped upon the old population, by acts of attainder, constructed to ruin and render odious their ancient royal line; confiscations and spoliations were decreed on a scale scarcely credible; alluring bribes were offered to English adventurers to come in and dispossess the inhabitants of the southern quarter of the kingdom, Munster, and the atrocious purpose was avowed, to transfer all property, destroy the original owners, and change the very face of the country.*

From administration thus inhuman, blood could not but flow, and accordingly it was shed abundantly in relentless war between oppressors and oppressed, during the haughty virgin-queen's protracted reign. So general became the mutual devastation, that 'the produce of that fertile island no longer sufficed to support its wretched inhabitants. The putrefied bodies of multitudes that fell daily, more by famine than the sword, brought on a pestilence which threatened to clear the land of its original race. The advantages of this awful state of calamity were of course with the English, who, by commanding the coasts, were supplied with means of subsistence from abroad.'

Elizabeth did not live to see the reduction of Ireland consequent upon these sufferings. Her successor, the weak, pedantic James I, was therefore the first of the nineteen. English monarchs since their seizure of the country, who could boast of wielding control over its entire compass.

The rule of this first Stuart was signalized, among other * Plowden. Vol. I, pp. 65-78.

acts of oppression, by a measure which afterwards recoiled in disaster upon his house, and prodigiously increased the wretchedness of Ireland, by augmenting sectarian animosities. Adopting for Ulster, the northern quarter of the kingdom, the scheme conceived by Elizabeth for the southern province, of ejecting the old inhabitants and introducing new settlers, he invited thither adventurers, who flocked in chiefly from the neighboring shores of Scotland, and among them he parcelled an immense territory, wrongfully wrested from its ancient proprietors. Thus, the north of Ireland became occupied in part by sturdy Scotch Presbyterians, and imbued with that Covenanter spirit, which could endure no companionship with Popery, and not only in the end cost the Stuarts dearly, but added another potent agency to the contending elements in distracted Ireland. It must be confessed, too, that steadfast to their convictions as Presbyterians have generally been, staunch in defence of their sentiments of liberty, as have been those especially of Scotland and their descendants, and valuable as are numbers of our own most exemplary citizens whose blood is derived from those Covenanter colonists in Ulster two and a half centuries ago,-those primitive Scotch-Irish, just in so far as they accepted advantage from the spoliation of their neighbours, were partakers in a crying wrong.

The cruel robbery of Irish proprietors effected under Elizabeth in the South, and James in the North, was under Charles I, and by his inexorable deputy Strafford, extended through means the most flagitious, to the western province, Connaught. So that almost the entire ancient population, had by that time been thoroughly despoiled of the possessions, dignity, and privileges, inherited from an ancestry inferior, as we have seen, to scarcely any other in Europe.

These iniquities were all enacted in the ultra-Protestant interest, and through the agency of a local Parliament, so manipulated as to represent that interest; though the Protestants were, in point of numbers, far inferior to the Catholics. It was therefore inevitable that the latter should