callings as freely as they did in the said reign, provided they shall not refuse to take the oath of allegiance."

9th. By this article it is agreed that no oath but the oath of allegiance shall be administered to such Roman catholics as submit to their majesties' government.

These articles, if observed, would have placed Roman catholics nearly in the same position, religious and civil, as that in which they have happily been since the Relief Bill or Emancipation Act, of 1829. But they were not observed. At the gloomy period of the capitulation, public faith was exonerated from all its obligations, if a catholic had any interest in them. At that time intolerance was a creed, persecution a duty, and plunder a profession. The articles were violated in the most outrageous manner. The Roman catholics were insulted, hunted, exiled, and robbed by indiscriminate confiscation. The treaty was signed by the lords justices of Ireland and the commander-in-chief of the king's forces, and was afterwards ratified by the king himself, by impeximus under the great seal of England. William

always asserted the validity of the compact, and its obligation on his honour and conscience. It was, therefore, virtually and constitutionally out of the power and competency of parliament to make laws in contravention of it. The king never assented to those laws except ostensibly, and so far as he was forced to break his royal word, by parliaments who thought his majesty had as little right to be honest, as they had inclination.

Under the political articles the Irish army had the choice of remaining at home, or emigrating to France. The latter alternative was taken by nearly the whole body. About 19,000 men followed the deposed king, and volunteered into the French service. These formed the nucleus of that celebrated band, known as the "Irish Brigade," whose brave deeds subsequently won the admiration of Europe.

The country was now in a state of helpless orphanage. She was deprived of the protection of her sons; her frame was shattered; her strength prostrated; her heart

broken; and the greedy, persecuting, pitiless enemy was at her door. Her only hope was in William's honour. That honour made a manly struggle to preserve to her the rights he had guaranteed as king and soldier. But the struggle had small chance against an Irish parliament whose fanatics meditated a pious extermination, and whose rapacious leaders had their eyes fixed on four thousand confiscations, and one million one hundred thousand fertile acres; and the struggle was rendered still more unavailing by the countenance which the English parliament vouchsafed to their senatorial brethren in Ireland.

CHAPTER XXIII.

WILLIAM III. 1691-1702.

DURING the quarter of a century preceding the year 1862, more substantial improvements in the moral and political principles which are the support of healthy society and stable government, have been effected, than can be traced in the previous five hundred years. At last we have become sensible of humanity, and have attained a sounder understanding of Christian charity, than had ever before existed at any period. Having discovered the worthlessness and wickedness of civil and religious hate, we have agreed to acknowledge the justice and wisdom of universal equality before the laws, as the divine right of all mankind. Penalties are no longer imposed for the bent of the mind, any more than for the bend of the body-for the colour of the creed than for the colour of the countenance. We are, therefore, in a condition to review the past, when different sentiments were entertained, with candour and composure. In the retrospect we shall find much for wonder, and much for censure; but, whatever be the record borne by history, history should be employed, not to irritate the passions,

but to assuage them; not to mislead, but to rectify, the judgment. We have lived to see the blessed effects of forgiveness and forbearance; and, consequently, we should cultivate those virtues, till, with all parties, the future shall entirely condone for the past.

It has been almost always the policy of the conqueror to reduce the conquered to poverty and dependence; to deprive them of every means of resistance to a licentious will; to crush their spirit; and even to exterminate them, if necessary to domination and plunder. Such was the policy of the Saxons towards the Britons; of the Normans towards the Anglo-Saxons; and of the AngloSaxons towards the Irish; but it was more decided, comprehensive, and remorseless in the last case than in either of the others. In Ireland the leading features of that policy are conspicuous for a period of three hundred and forty years, commencing at the invasion. At the accession of Henry VIII. it began to mitigate; and for a quarter of a century the Irish breathed in partial security. The policy, however, had not expired. In 1537 the deputy, lord Grey, proposed to Henry's government the extermination of all the natives bordering on the Pale, by the burning of their ripe corn, the slaughter or seizure of their cattle; and the destruction of everything that could afford food, raiment, shelter, or defence. Up to this period it was the annihilation of a race that was aimed at, but henceforth the extinction of a creed.

What had been originally intended had nearly been accomplished before Henry broke with Rome, in 1537: the Irish as a nation had ceased to exist; the SaxoNormans and Anglo-Irish had almost rooted out the Celts. After the "Act of the Supreme Head," extirpation diverted the sword from race to religion. It was not employed, however, with any remarkable degree of animosity for twenty years. At Elizabeth's accession it was brought into more earnest play. Sir Henry Sydney visited the presidencies of Munster and Connaught in 1567; and thus describes the scene to his mistress :

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"Like as I never was in a more pleasant country in my life, so never saw I a more waste and desolate land. Such horrible and lamentable spectacles are there to behold as the burning of villages, the ruin of churches, the wasting good towns and castles: yea, the view of the bones of the subjects who died in the fields partly by murder, partly by famine, as, in truth, hardly any Christian with dry eyes could behold." And, again :"There are not left alive, in these two provinces, the twentieth person necessary to inhabit the same."

During the reign of James I. we have seen religious persecution carried on with great success; so that the Roman catholic proprietors and tenants of an entire province were expelled, and their estates and holdings sold for pence to protestant servitors and undertakers. In his reign, and that of his successor, the puritans had risen into note. This party acquired ascendancy, in the beginning, by the probity of its leaders; by questioning of the royal prerogatives; by advocating the power of parliaments; and by prescribing a greater austerity of life and stiffness of manner than the established church made pretension to. The first leaders were rather honest than able men; but their energy and inflexibility of purpose quickly invited to their cause not only true zeal, but ability of the highest order. Their number was vastly increased by accessions from hypocrisy; which usually finds wide scope and security in times of religious enthusiasm and political change. From the outset they were distinguished by their virulent denunciation of papists; and this brought them vast popularity; for violence and fury are short cuts to the suffrages of the multitude, by whom moderation is always suspected or despised. These men, though themselves obnoxious to persecution, were the bitterest enemies of the Roman catholics, and the most active in urging the most insulting and aggressive measures against them, which were put in force during the times of James I., Charles I., and Cromwell. At the restoration the puritans sided with the country faction, afterwards known as whigs, and

were led in the lower house by the profligate and freethinking of that party, as well as by some of their own. These, by their writings and harangues, their arts and practices, cajoled and corrupted, inflamed and terrified the protestantism of the people; and to them may be traced the pretended popish plots, the harassing and oppressive proclamations, the test and corporation acts, &c.

The intolerant principles of the puritans long survived their power. With them nearly the whole protestant community of both kingdoms had become infected. Accordingly, on William's accession, the Irish parliament proceeded to imitate the statutes of the English, and to commence that lamentable series of enactments known as the "penal laws." Before this time, although the most tortuous and galling enactments had been passed against the detested disciples of Rome, the Irish statute-book had not been written in blood. The state of things may be sufficiently, though not accurately understood, from what Macaulay says in his reign of James (History of England, vol. ii. p. 127):-"The Irish statute-book, afterwards polluted by intolerance as barbarous as that of the dark ages, then contained scarce a single enactment imposing any penalty on papists as such. On one side of St. George's channel, every priest who received a neophyte. into the church of Rome was liable to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. On the other side he incurred no such danger. A jesuit who landed at Dover took his life in his hand; but he walked the streets of Dublin in security. Here no man could hold office, or even earn his livelihood as a barrister or a schoolmaster, without previously taking the oath of supremacy; but in Ireland a public functionary was not under that necessity, unless the oath were formally tendered to him. It therefore did not exclude from employment any person whom the government wished to promote. The sacramental test, and the declaration against transubstantiation, were totally unknown; nor was either house of parliament closed against any religious sect."