place or places whatsoever within the kingdom." Fifteen religious houses in Dublin were seized to the king's use, and the college, or seminary, founded in the fourteenth century by Archbishop De Bicknor, was confiscated, and added to the endowments of Trinity College. - The second deputy who ruled Ireland for King Charles confirmed all the fears of the Catholics, especially of such as kept possession of property. Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, not excepting Mountjoy, was the ablest of all Irish viceroys a man of great foresight, perfect hypocrisy, a sonorous, military eloquence, both in writing and speaking, and an iron resolution. Money being the immediate want of his master, he offered to the Catholics, on his arrival, in 1633, for and in consideration of £150,000, certain "royal graces," or restrictions of the penalties on "recusants." The principal concession was, that the crown should advance no claim to estates not forfeited within the previous sixty years-a proviso which covered all the remaining titles of the "recusants" in Leinster and Connaught. They consented; but he continued to keep the details in debate, while he drew the money in advance; and then, having raised a regular standing army, an institution at the time unknown in either island, he proceeded "to inquire into defective titles" in Connaught. Having created sixty new boroughs and got a Parliament to do his bidding, he began in 1634 with Roscommon. The grand jury of that county, refusing to find defective titles, were imprisoned and heavily fined; another was impanelled, and found for the crown. The Galway jury resisted, and was served in like manner; Mayo and Sligo were yielded without a struggle; £40,000, in fines, were wrung from jurors in this campaign, and a great part of the estates of Connaught were seized and sold as crown land. In the seven years of his viceroyalty, this able despot not only contrived to acquire large possessions for himself, to build his "folly " at Naas and "park" in Wicklow, to expend over - *Rushworth's Collections, vol. ii. p. 21. £100,000 of public money in Ireland, but also to make the island the chief source of the king's revenue. To Wentworth belongs the first systematic attempt at proselytizing Irish children. The schools of "King's Wards," in London, Canterbury, and Dublin, originally designed for the heirs and hostages of suspected chiefs, had become thoroughly Protestant institutions. The Court of Wards, in 1617, decided that all minors claiming property should attend these schools. Lord Orrery complains that frequently these unfortunates were "sold like cattle in the market;" Sir Edward Coke's infamous argument for their perpetual imprisonment in the Tower remains in irrevocable type; the Catholics of Ireland, in their remonstrance, dated Trim, 17th March, 1642, assert that "the heirs of Catholic noblemen and other Catholics were most inhumanly dealt with" by the Court of Wards. Male and female, the king "disposed of them in marriage as he thought fit." Indeed, whenever we find an Irish apostate or renegade during the rest of the century, we may be almost certain that he graduated in "the School of Wards." * Among his various oppressions, Strafford had trodden hard on several of the Scotch planters at the north. They, as Presbyterians and Scots, appealed to their brethren in England and Scotland; their murmurs were soon lost in the sterner accents of their co-religionists, who, when they drove the viceroy to the scaffold, felt the terrible reality of the power they had so long sought. The Puritans, as this party were called, deserve our special attention. Beginning under King Edward, this sect was fostered by the example of Hooper, Jewell, and Grindall, among the reformed bishops. They had active principals in Tyndal, Coverdale, Fox, White, and Robert Browne, who all taught that the Bible was not only the revelation of God, but the strict law of civil and religious government; that the king's headship, bishops, holy * On the School and Court of Wards, see Burnet's History of his Own Times, vol. i., or Carte's Ormond, vol. i. orders, saints' days and ceremonies, were an abomination and a hissing, odious to the Lord. Their formal existence dates from the year 1566, and their action, as a political party, from the violence with which, twenty years later, Elizabeth's archbishop, Whitgift, assailed their conventicles. Thenceforth every Parliament was full of their petitions, and every prison had some of their preachers. On arriving in England, in 1603, James invited their chief men to dispute with his bishops, and `decided, if they did not conform, to "harrie them out o' the land;" their opinions soon after began to get into the press, and their brother Protestants found it impossible to defeat arguments based upon the radical principles of the reformation. The churchmen became more prelatic, and the Puritans more fanatic; the one contending that the Episcopal order was innately independent of the priesthood, and the others warring on love locks and archery sports, as vehemently as on church music and vestments. The weak King James published his Book of Sports and Orders in Council to encourage Whitsun ales and Morris dances of Sundays; Laud, Charles's Archbishop of Canterbury, strove to make "thorough" riddance of the crop-eared knaves; still the party spread through the rural districts, embracing in its circles not only artisans and country folk, but many distinguished scholars, able commoners, and even some of the peerage. The two first Stuarts, by pushing obedience into strict conformity, had forced a junction between republicanism and Puritanism. At James's accession, the Puritans were among the most loyal in England; yet that same gener ation lived to take off his son's head, and to change the whole fabric of the government. Scotch Presbyterianism excited and aided this change, Henderson and Gillespie being the natural allies of Calamy, Selden, and the Vanes. A common policy and a common heresy bound England and Scotland in as close unity as the nature of the two nations allowed. To both parties Ireland was a hateful name. Nothing good, in their eyes, could come out of that Nazareth. In Scotland, there were many, who, "foreseeing that Ireland must be the stage to act upon, it being unsettled, and many forfeited lands therein altogether wasted, proceeded to push for fortunes in that kingdom." The Puritans of England, with their brethren in America, exclaimed, "Cursed be he that holdeth back his sword from blood! yea, cursed be he that maketh not his sword drunk with Irish blood!" + In this spirit the plantation of the northern lands was undertaken by the Scotch; in this spirit war was made by the Puritans. It may be conjectured how the natives were to fare at the hands of both. From Charles's licentious court and excessive taxation gave his enemies texts enough for seditious sermons. his accession till his forced flight from London to throw himself on the country, he was unhappy in his favorites, his measures, and his temper. The ship money and the property tax, though not the causes, were the fuel of the faction which, in truth, began with the Puritan preachers. The king, as head of the church and patron of the bishops, was from the first their chief target, and their followers were only logical in extending hostility to his temporal, as included in his spiritual supremacy. The Irish Catholic leaders saw clearly into the king's dangers, and when we find them overlooking his duplicity, excusing his dishonor, and going three fourths of the way to patch up broken covenants with him, we should remember that they did not yield so much from servility as because, at bottom, his cause was their own. His deliverance was their hope, as his prostration would inevitably let in the accumulated Puritan deluge upon them and their people. Events in England hurried rapidly on; the controversy between the king and his Parliament was daily becom * The Simple Cobbler of Agawam, in America. London reprint, 1647. This work was written by Rev. Nathaniel Ward, pastor of Agawam, near Plymouth, Massachusetts. Ward also drew the first charter of that colony He returned to England, and died there in 1653. † Montgomery Manuscript, quoted in McNevin's Confiscation of Ulster. ing more imbittered, and Irish affairs more frequent subjects of debate. In 1642, the king suddenly fled from London, and sent his heir and queen, for safety, to Holland. The Parliament proceeded to raise an army, and to remodel the Reformed Church on Puritan principles. Presbyterianism, recognized as the church of Scotland in 1580, was now declared to be the church of England. In June, 1643, the Westminster Assembly of Divines met in Henry VII.'s Chapel. The parliamentary ordinance had summoned one hundred and fifty-one persons by name to this convocation ten lords and twenty commoners, one hundred and twenty-one divines. Scotland was represented by four divines and two laymen; from Ireland, Archbishop Usher and "Joshua Hoyle, D. D.," of Dublin, were invited. Neither of these persons answered the summons. For four years this assembly sat, and besides "the Westminster Confession of Faith," it originated "the solemn league and covenant," which was ratified by the English Parliament in 1643, and the Scotch Parliament in 1644.* This memorable treaty bound its signers to attempt "the reformation and defence of religion, the honor and happiness of the king, and the peace and safety of the three kingdoms of Scotland, England, and Ireland;" "the preservation of the reformed religion in the church of Scotland;" to endeavor "to bring the churches of God in the three kingdoms to the nearest conjunction and uniformity in religion;" and "in like manner, without respect of persons, [to] endeavor the extirpation of Popery, prelacy, superstition, heresy, schism, profaneness," "in the three kingdoms."† Further, "to endeavor the discovery of all such as have been, or shall be, incendiaries, malignants, or evil instruments by hindering the reformation of religion, dividing the king `from his people, or one of the kingdoms from one another" that is, all Irish Catholics, lay and clerical, were to be so "discovered" and brought "to condign punishment." "And this covenant we make " so it *King Charles II. was constrained, when in custody of the Scottish Covenanters, to sign "the solemn league" at Spey, June 23, 1650, and again to re-sign it at Scone, January 1, 1651. + Hetherington's History of the Westminster Assembly, p. 118. |