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can preach;) and for his own part shall use the English order and hab it, and move as many as he can to the same, and shall keep, or cause to be kept, within the place or parish where he shall be promoted, a school to learn English, if any children of his parish come to him to learn the same, taking for his salary (for keeping the same) as the custom of the country is.

Every archbishop, bishop, &c, having power to give orders or to admit, &c. offending herein contrary to the rules aforesaid, shall forfeit for every time 34. 6s. 8d. one moiety to the king, and the other to that person that will sue for the same as aforesaid. And every person promoted to any spiritual promotion, that does not observe the effect of the said oath, shall (upon conviction thereof as aforesaid) forfeit for the first time 6s, and 8d. for the second time 208. and for the third, all such spiritual promotion; and the patron may present or give the same to any other sufficient and able person, in like manner and form as if the incumbent were dead. This act shall not prejudice any beneficed within this land, that are bound to keep residence in any metropolitan cathedral or collegiate church, not being a student in any university, or in the king's service, or out of the land by the king's command; but that those who officiate under them, shall during their abgence, teach the English tongue, and keep a school as the act directs, upon pain that every such parish-priest, for every year he omits the same, shall forfeit 20s.This act to take no effect until it be openly proclaimed in due form.

SECOND EPOCH.

From the Reformation to the Revolution.

If the reformed religion had been presented to the Irish under any inviting or persuasive aspect; if the monarch who established it as law, had been a saint-like personage, of a holy and pious life, and faithful to all the relations of life; constant and steady in his own belief; tender of the rights and consciences of his subjects; patient, tolerant, and merciful, it would have been time enough to have accused the Irish for not instantly quitting the faith inculcated by the venerated Saint Patrick.

If the clergy sent over to teach the new religion had been able to fastruct the Irish in its blessings and advantages, in a language that they could understand; men holy in their lives and reverend in their

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example, professing charity and doing good, it would have been less violent to treat them as wicked and obstinate. But if this reforming monarch was the greatest monster that history exhibits; who had established creeds and articles, and forced men under penalties to swear to them and believe them, and then for the purposes of lust and murder, violating every tender relation, and every feeling of human nature, established creeds and articles directly the reverse, under penalty of ruin, death, and infamy; and if the missionaries of the new gospel were the scum of the earth, low, vulgar, ignorant and rapacious; wantonly exposing their own religion to scorn, that fines might be levied for not conforming to it; with the sentiments of horse-jockeys and the hearts of wolves; then why should a people having no vicious motives, no wives to murder, no wish to bastardise their own issue, quit what they believed to be the word of God, to go to church and hear the word of Henry the Eighth, and the prayers and preachings of clergy who reviled what they held sacred, although they had themselves been so lately enjoined by statute to “bid the beads" to the Irish in the English tongue.

The statutes enforced against the Irish during this second epoch are of pure English mauufacture, and may be found in any lawyer's library, in the English statutes at large, in all the abridgements of those statutes, and in the most familiar abridgements of the law, particularly that of Bacon, and through all the reports and treatises, civil and criminal, under the heads of popery and papist, heresy, witchcraft, dissenters, recusants, offences against God and religion, conformity, uniformity, &c.In England they fell upon a smaller number, in Ireland they were visited upon a whole people. The operations of the ecclesiastical commissioners, the star chamber, (or castle chamber) and the spiritual courts, went hand in hand with the commissioners of defective titles, and between these and forfeitures by acts of attainder and forfeiture for treason and rebellion, there was scarcely an acre of land that was not seized and confiscated, and sometimes a second and a third time, even in the hands of the confiscators themselves.

The statute upon which most money was raised was 2 Eliz. c. 2. § 3. which commands all persons to resort to the parish church, or some usual place where such service of God, as in the book of common prayer, shall be used, and to abide there soberly and orderly during the time of prayer or preaching, upon pain of punishment by the censures of the church, and of 12 pence for every Sunday or holiday, to be levied by way of distress by the church wardens.

The ecclesiastical courts, says Bishop Burnet in his life of Bedel; p. 37, were managed by a chancellor who bought his place, and made of it all the profits he could, and their whole business seemed to be nothing but oppression and extortion. "The solemnest and sacredest of all church ceusures, excommunicatioon, went about in so sordid and base a manner that all regard to it as a spiritual censure was lost, and it became an intolerable tyranny. The officers of those courts thought they had a right to oppress the natives, and that all was well got that was wrung from them," Bulls went bare-faced, and the exchange they made of penance for money, was the worst of simony. It is related by Carte, and also in the Analectica Sacra, that Sir Oliver St. John, on coming over from England as Lord Deputy, did put the statute 2 Elizabeth and all other penal statutes, in strict execution. He caused presentments to be made in the different parts of the kingdom. The effects of his rigor were dismal and extensive. The treasures of the rich were soon exhausted, and the poor, not being able to pay this tax upon their consciences, every where fled into dens and caverns, from the cruel collectors of it, where they were sometimes pursued by blood-hounds, set on and followed by a sheriff and a posse of disbanded soldiers, equally furious and unrelenting; and even the dead bodies of those who fell under those holy censuvers, did not escape the cruelty, but were denied christian burial, and their corpses were thrown into holes dug in the high-ways, with every mark of ignominy that could be devised and inflicted by their wicked and bigotted judges. See also Doctor Curry. Mem. Civ. Wars, vol. 1.. p. 102.

The Irish Commons once remonstrated to the king (Irish Com. Jour. v. 1. p. 258) that the judges of the ecclesiastical courts took money for holy water, for anointing, for mortuary muttons, mary gallons, St. Patrick's ridge, soul money, and the like: and that the protestant bishops exposed their religion to sale and to contempt in those ecclesiastical courts, and that the catholics were willing to redeem themselves from these exactions, by maintaining for the king Charles I. an army of five thousand foot and five hundred horse.— Against this there was a protest by primate Usher and twelve bishops, which was solemnly read by the bishop of Derry before the Deputy and Privy Council in Christ's Church. This prevailed; the offer was scornfully rejected, and the sufferers and their religion scurrilously abused.

Lord Strafford, the lord deputy, (State letters, v. 1. p. 76) informs the king that it was impossible to improve the revenue but by impo sing 128. a Sunday upon the recusants. This same deputy had before written [ib. p. 19.] that the duties from the Irish were indeed violent takings, rather ravishments of the poor, than the modest quiet levies of a pious and christian king. And yet he at another time proposed to his master to make him out a title to all Connaught; and writes (ib. p. 442) that he had given orders to his managers in Connaught, that when he went there to hold an inquisition gentlemen of the best estates in the different counties should be returned on the juries which were to be on the first trials to be instituted on “defective titles,” because the fear of a round fine in the Castle Chamber would produce a better effect than in persons who had little to lose.

In one case where a jury refused to find for the king against the proprietor (ib. v. 1.) he says, we bethought ourselves of a course to vindicate his majesty's honour upon this occasion, not only against the persons of the jurors, but also against the sheriff in a thousand pounds to his majesty; and we have fined the jurors four thousand pounds each. Their estates are seized, and themselves imprisoned till the fine be paid."

And in one of the above letters he says, I labour to make as many captains and other offices, burgesses of this parliament as I can, who having immediate dependance on the Crown, may sway the business ás I please.

It is remarkable that this his own packed parliament voted against the grievances of his administration. The Irish Cóm. Jour. p. 94, refer to these very transactions, saying, "the jurors who give in their verdict according to their consciences, were censured in the star chamber, or castle chamber, in great fines; sometimes pillored with loss of ears, and bored through the tongue, sometimes marked in the forehead with an iron, and other infamous punishment." And Doctor Leland writes, vol. 3, p. 32. that the jurors of Gallway remained in prison till each paid his fine of £4,000, and acknowledged his fault apon his knees.

Thus were the Irish deprived of their estates by false inquisitions upon feigned titles, wherein neither traverse nor petition of right was admitted, and jurors who listened to the admonitions of conscience were devoted to ruin and disgrace. One hundred and fifty letters patent were declared void in one morning. See the remonstrance of

Trim. sect. 2. Cartes Ormond, v. 3.

This corrupt deputy began his public career in conjunction with Pym and the others, but was gained over by the king and made a peer and governor of Ireland. He was afterwards impeached and convicted of high treason; the king signed his death-warrant and he was beheaded on Tower-Hill; a victim not so much of his real crimes as of party-spirit, and party-spirit on the other hand has held him up as a martyr.

THIRD EPOCH.

From the revolution to the present reign.

The persecutions of this period are purely religious. It is no longer for wearing the beard upon the upper lip, nor yet for being Irish that the people are robbed and murdered, but having been already plundered and impoverished for being Irish, for wearing their beards, and for not conforming to a church rendered odious to them, a new and curious system of torment is devised, under the title of "laws to prevent the further growth of popery."

In the former period we have seen how the English deputies bored the tongues of the jurors who could not find inquisitions for the king. We shall now see with what industry the tormentor sought out every tender part where the moral being could be afflicted, and cruelly conveyed the maddening poison through every organ of most exquisite sensibility; insulting religion, reversing the principles of law, violating parental affection, private friendship, filial duty, conjugal love, promoting family dissention, preventing education, proscribing industry, and having done all this, setting a bar against all future acquisitions of wealth, influence, or knowledge; in short, leaving nothing that hell could invent unattempted, in order to brutalise and enfeeble a race of beings whose courage and intellect was still formidable even in this abject state. To prove these assertions the statutes shall be distributed under appropriate titles.

EDUCATION.

7 W. 3. s. 1. c. 4. Sending a child abroad to be educated in the popish religion, either in a public seminary or a private family, or sending any thing for its maintenance, was punished with disability to

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