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combine with all the energy of desperation, superadded to patriotic feeling, religious fervour, and traditionary animosity, against the agents of such intolerable griefs. Hence the great uprising of 1641, mainly directed against the misrepresenting Parliament, and the bitterly persecuting Puritans then in power. Seldom has human blood flowed more copiously, if Clarendon and other historians of the time are to be credited, than in that tremendous contest between aggressive Puritan radicalism, then fresh in its career, and the defenders of their ancient faith, homes, and possessions.

The Stuarts, indeed, like their predecessors, atrociously wronged the Irish, and yet in the gigantic religio-social convulsion of the seventeenth century, between classes represented by the Puritan and Cavalier, when that family, alike erring and unfortunate, became the special object of revolutionary rancour, readily did the children of sires. whom O'Neal had ruled, and St. Patrick taught a thousand years before, lend their stout hearts and strong arms to oppose persecution, and stay, if possible, the course of destructive innovation. Thus implicated in the bloody drama, more even than a full share of misery did they bear from its eventful vicissitudes. Of this our limits will not allow us to give even the most meagre recital. Scenes under Cromwell, of which the bloody massacre at Drogheda is a specimen, and between the second James and William of Orange, of which the dramatised siege of Derry is a type, can be barely mentioned.

The momentous evil of confiscation, however, which continued even under the generally liberal William, must be called to mind. As stated by the Earl of Clare in the Irish Parliament the first year of the present century, 'The Irish having made a final effort for the recovery of their ancient rights, and being once more defeated by an English army, the slender relics of their possessions became the subject of fresh confiscation.' It is,' added the speaker, a very curious and important speculation, to look back to the forfeitures of Ireland incurred in the seventeenth century. The superficial contents of the island are calculated at less

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than twelve millions of acres,' (arable, the honorable peer must have meant, as Alison assigns to Ireland twelve millions of arable acres, and five millions of mountain waste,)* ' and this has been the state of forfeitures.'

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'Under James I, all Ulster confiscated,-nearly 3,000,000 acres.
By the court of claims at the Restoration,-
Under William,—

8,000,000 over 1,000,000

Total, over 11,500,000

'So that the whole of the island has been confiscated, with the exception of the estates of five or six families of English blood; and no inconsiderable portion of the island has been confiscated twice, or perhaps thrice, in the course of a century. The situation therefore of the Irish nation at the Revolution of 1688, stands unparalleled in the history of the world.'+

Ireland, crushed and ruined by injuries so oft repeated and so protracted, instead of sharing the benefits of those liberal principles which William's accession represented, became the victim of additional severities. The parliament of England in which there was no voice from the sister-Island, assumed fully to legislate for Ireland, repealing some of the local laws, and disqualifying all Roman Catholics, from ever holding seats in the legislature of their country. This course of ever-accumulating rigour was pushed even farther in the next reign. Queen Anne, who held the throne against her brother, by the distinctive tenure of Protestantism, was not strong enough to resist the sectarian clamour of the time for additional disabilities on the great body of Irish Catholics. Under her auspices therefore was enacted a new code surpassing in severity all former acts of tyranny. This single provision may show its character. Adherents of the Roman Catholic faith, as they had formerly been deprived of their inheritance, were now disabled, under heavy penalties, from ever acquiring an inch of land in the kingdom.‡ Imagination can scarce picture a system more atrocious than that under which the

Hist. Vol. II, p. 252.

† Plowden. Vol. I, p. 165. Ibid. Vol. I, p. 183.

wretched population thus groaned. And, although as already intimated, circumstances have led to some reluctant concessions on the part of imperial British authority, to certain mitigations of those incredible enormities, and to the introduction of a few ameliorating measures, Ireland and its people continue to this day, in spite of all the acknowledged excellences of the British constitution, among the worst governed, and most afflicted of Christian nations.

The Hanoverian sovereigns, more phlegmatic, or of milder temper than their predecessors, were probably disposed to alleviate the sufferings of Ireland, as the supposed interests of the Empire, and the intrigues of party might seem to admit. This led to a measure of relaxation, not in oppressive laws, but in their severest execution.

A revival to considerable extent of the spirit of the people, as generations passed, a development of something of the Irish feeling of home, country, and independence, in the descendants of English settlers, influences resulting from the successful revolt of the American Colonies, and, no doubt, also, the diffusion of just sentiments by such great philosophic statesmen as Chatham, Fox, and Burke, satisfied the authorities of Britain, that they could not forever, as they had done, turn a deaf ear to the wailings of Ireland. When therefore in 1782, the Irish parliament, moved especially by the extraordinary power and eloquence of the celebrated Henry Grattan, claimed from that of England, a renunciation of the prerogative it had usurped of legislating for Ireland, and a recognition of the principle announced by Grattan, that, 'no power on earth, save the king, lords, and commons of Ireland, had a right to make laws for Ireland,' the demand was actually granted, and the right of that island to its own uncontrolled legislature admitted.

Important, however, as seemed this concession, it really secured little relief for Ireland, under all the disabilities of her Catholic population, all the antagonism of interest and feeling cherished by the minority in power, and all appliances of crown-patronage towards preventing forever anything like fair representation. Hence misrule, oppres

sion, suffering, and agitating combinations, culminating under agencies connected with the French Revolution, in the great rebellion of 1798; followed, in consequence of the perils of the empire, by more earnest efforts than ever before, to patch up some pacification for the heaving heart of an agonized people. The result was that absorption in 1800 of the Irish into the English parliament, known as the Union of the two Kingdoms, which now exists, and opposition to which continues, as it has been from the first, a never-ceasing theme of embittered agitation.

Sincerely intended by the younger Pitt, then presiding in the British ministry, as a substantial benefit to Ireland, no less than to the empire at large,- as it might have been could the injuries of ages be obliterated in a day, had the Irish people really assented, and the associated ameliorations proposed by the great Premier been adopted,— this great measure has proved any thing but a beneficial and tranquilizing arrangement. The conditions requisite for its benign working unhappily did not exist. The whole moral basis of human nature must be revolutionized before two people, the one relentlessly oppressing, and the other cruelly injured, as in this case, during more than a third of the entire Christian age, can be, by one mere legislative form, moulded into a single harmonious nationality. Accordingly, convictions of leading Irish patriots, and the earliest feelings of the island's teeming millions, were directly and notoriously opposed to the Union, which was voted through the misrepresenting Irish parliament, solely by the combined influence of patronage and terrorism, so plied by representatives of the crown as to secure a majority. And besides all this, the large-souled William Pitt had actually to relinquish the helm of state, because under the absurd scruples of George the Third, he could not obtain some reasonable relief to the long abused Irish Catholics. No wonder the patriotic enthusiast Emmett and his associates spurned such a Union, and sought in 1803 opportunity to strike a blow for the liberation of their country, though failure cost them life, as it had done. so many thousands before, and as it has done so many

thousands since. And no wonder O'Connel and his coajutors, backed by a powerful Catholic association, untiringly agitated the country through so many years, in behalf first, of some justice to Irish Catholics, and then for a repeal of the detested Union.

As to the first of these, a measure of Catholic relief, the pressure brought to bear was not wholly in vain. A tardy and imperfect abatement of Catholic disabilities, under the sounding designation of Catholic Emancipation,' was, in 1829, forced from the reluctant English powers, by absolute and obvious necessities of the case. The tremendous agitations involved therein, with probable issue in civil war, and endless increase of difficulty and danger, could not be longer trifled with, and the poor boons were granted, as if most liberal favours, to the vast mass of the Irish people, to live unassaulted and unimprisoned, and not quite so much proscribed as previously for their religion, and to have a score or two of their own representatives enrolled among the five hundred members of the British Parliament.

This measure, deemed by English partizans extremely liberal, yet infinitely short of what the Irish people imperatively need, and of what reason and justice require, Alison admits to have proved a failure; * though with strange incapacity for historical justice, he lays the blame exclusively upon Irish 'indolence, improvidence, recklessness, extravagance, and over-populousness' in connection with devotion to the See of Rome.' That most of these evils do exist to dreadful extent in harassed Ireland cannot be questioned; nor can it be denied that they are even at present, characteristic traits of the people, and that they are fruitful in miseries which no mere legislation can possibly alleviate, especially such as is clogged by adaptations to the complex needs of a colossal empire. Much less can they be remedied by legislation always foreign, supercilious, reluctant, unsympathizing, and most generally hostile and coercive.

If the Irish are indolent, reckless, and improvident,' Vol. II, p. 312.

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