subjects, endeavoured to get rid of their importunity. At the same time, the commissioners of the Irish parliament and council were so bent on the ruin of the catholics, that they scarcely hesitated to say that they would be satisfied with nothing short of their complete "eradication."* The English parliament were also actuated by a hostility no less bigotted; and the English people regarded both the Irish and their religion+ with extreme horror and aversion. To contend with these hostile influences, the poor Irish had neither money, nor friends at court, nor leaders of influence. The result was, that they were soon sacrificed to the stronger party. It is true, Ormond, who was known to be in the interest of the opposite party, offered his advice, and recommended the Irish catholics to approach the throne in a whining, supplicatory manner, and to "humbly" submit themselves to the royal mercy. The catholics, however, preferred to plead their cause on the grounds of justice, and its real merits. Ormond was offended at their non-compliance with his request, and at once withdrew from all negociation with them. The advocate whom they chose was Colonel Richard Talbot, a rising favourite with the king, but a man of violent and impetuous temper. He went to work more like a soldier than a diplomatist. Having gone to remonstrate with Ormond respecting his secret counsels to the king against the interests of the Irish catholics, he did so in such a huffing" manner, that the duke construed it into a challenge, and went direct to his majesty, and asked "if it was his pleasure, at this time of day, that he should put off his doublet, to fight Dick Talbot?" The consequence of this representation was, that Talbot was sent to the Tower, though he was shortly after released upon his submission.

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Charles now became annoyed at the pertinacity of the Irish commissioners. He had no intention of doing anything for them, and was ready to take the earliest opportunity of getting rid of them. Besides, he had already made large grants of the disputed estates to his venal and profligate creatures, which he was not now disposed to revoke he had given 120,000 acres to his brother, the Duke of York, and also conferred large grants of land on the Duchess of

Lord Clarendon, in his Life, states that when the memorials of the catholics, in justification of their claims, were discussed before the English council, the commissioners from the Irish parliament who attended upon the occasion, however they differed about their private interests, all agreed in their implacable hatred to the Irish; "insomuch that they concurred in their desire that they might gain nothing by the king's return, but be kept with the same rigour and the same incapacity to do hurt, which they were then under. And though eradication was too foul a word to be uttered in the hearing of a Christian prince, yet it was little less or better that they proposed, in other words, and hoped to obtain."

The following incident affords a rather singular illustration of the popular furor of this period. Nell Gwynne, one of King Charles's mistresses (and he had a great number of them, supreme head of the church" though he was), on passing through Oxford in her coach, was insulted by the mob, who mistook her for the Duchess of Portsmouth, another mistress of the king, but who was a "papist," and therefore obnoxious to the public. Nell, with her usual good humour and effrontery, on finding the passage obstructed, coolly put her head out of the coach window, and said to the crowd, "Pray, good people, be civil; I am the Protestant we!" This laconic speech, it is said, drew down on her the blessings of the populace, and she was at once allowed to proceed without further molestation.

Cleveland, one of his numerous mistresses, as well as on various other of the noisome reptiles which now crawled about the precincts of the court. An opportunity was soon found for getting rid of the Irish petitioners; and Charles was not slow to take advantage of it, as the result proved. By some means or other, the protestant agents of the Irish parliament had got into their possession the original documents agreed to by the supreme council at the disastrous conferences at James'-town, by which their agents, the Bishop of Ferns and Sir Nicholas Plunket, were commissioned to make a tender of the kingdom of Ireland to the pope, and if he refused to accept it, to any other catholic prince. Now it so happened, by an extraordinary coincidence, that the identical Sir Nicholas Plunket, one of those very agents, now stood before the king and the committee in the capacity of deputy for the Irish Catholics! His name was attached to the document, and he was at once asked "whether that was his signature and handwriting?” He acknowledged that it was; and the negociation was immediately brought to an end. Charles affected the utmost indignation. He instantly ordered that no farther petition or address should be received from the Roman catholics of Ireland; and commanded that the Act of Settlement should immediately pass into law without any mitigation of its terms in reference to the innocency of the petitioners. The bill was accordingly finished, transmitted, and soon after passed by both houses of the Irish parliament; and the Duke of Ormond was sent over to Ireland, in great state, to see the national settlement carried into effect.

Great indignation was expressed throughout Ireland, on the provisions of the Act of Settlement being made known, and on the first decisions of the commissioners of claims being published. Singularly enough, the puritans were among the loudest in their condemnation of the government. The restoral of several of the Irish nobility and gentry to their estates was deemed an unpardonable concession to "the popish party." The refusal of the claims made by them on the strength of the "doubling ordinance," increased their discontent. The restoration of the church-lands was no less objectionable. And worse than all, many of the Irish who had been dispossessed by the Cromwellians of their estates, were found "innocent" by the English commissioners, and reinvested with their estates, without making any provision for the reprisal of those who were thus dispossessed. Out of the 4,000 claims put in, only 800 were examined, but of these a large proportion were found "innocent," and according to the act, were immediately to be reinvested with their estates. The old soldiers and adventurers were confounded by these decisions. The intelligence came upon them like a thunder-clap. They feared that the whole of their ill-gotten spoil was now to be wrested from their clutches; and without more ado, they determined to take to resist the decrees and decisions of the government. A formidable

up arms

conspiracy was now entered into, ramifying throughout the whole country, to seize the castle of Dublin, upset the royal authority, and reëstablish the long parliament. A private committee of officers, among whom was the famous Colonel Blood, was appointed to conduct the rising, and one of those betrayed the whole scheme to Ormond. He ordered the principal conspirators to be apprehended, on the eve of the day on which Dublin castle was to be seized. About five-and-twenty of them were taken, and rewards offered for the apprehension of those who escaped. But the government was now too weak, and stood too much in awe of the still powerful Cromwellian party, to proceed with severity against them. Only a few of the more dangerous of the conspirators were condemned and executed; the rest received the king's pardon. We need scarcely say how different would have been the result had the conspirators been catholics instead of protestants.

All parties were now wearied out with the protracted discussion as to proprietorships of the Irish estates; and Charles, acting by the advice of his lieutenant Ormond, at length resolved to bring them to an end. We have already stated that of the 800 Irish catholics whose claims had been investigated, a very large proportion had been found innocent. Now, this would not at all suit the protestant or "English interest" party in Ireland; and it was therefore resolved at once to quash all farther investigation. The expedient hit upon was, that the court should sit only for a certain time, after which it should close, and should never again be reopened, whether the claims of the petitioners had been investigated or not. But this was not all. The famous, or rather infamous, Bill of Explanation, called The Black Act by the Irish, and The Magna Charta of Irish Protestants by the Cromwellian party, was next prepared under the eye of the viceroy, and subsequently enacted, by which all who, up to that time, had not been judged innocent, were for ever to be debarred from any further claim; adventurers and soldiers were to be confirmed in their possessions within two months; protestant officers serving before 1649 were to retain their lands where not already decreed away by the commissioners; and other arrangements were fixed upon, all equally favourable to the protestant English, and flagrantly unjust to the catholic Irish.

By this black act, which closed the settlement of Ireland, thousands of the most respectable and ancient families of Ireland were consigned to hopeless ruin and wretchedness. Three thousand two hundred claims, the investigation of which Charles had guaranteed according to his own Act of Settlement, were summarily got rid of; and the applicants were stript of their property, without so much as the form of a trial. Their repeated applications for a hearing of their cause-a privilege granted to the meanest criminal-were pertinaciously refused by the monarch for whom they had sacrificed their all; while the men who had rebelled against his father, and resisted his own authority, were rewarded with at least two-thirds

of the best lands in Ireland; and thus they gained by rebellion, what the catholics lost by loyalty. The Irish families who were ruined by this act were among the most ancient in Ireland, and had held possession of their lands from time immemorial. The MacGuires, Mac Mahons, MacGuinesses, Mac Carthys,* O'Rourkes, O'Sullivans, O'Moores, O'Ferrals, O'Connors, and numbers more of the most ancient and noble families, were involved in one common ruin, and reduced to a level with the poorest peasant in the land. The principal author and promoter of the Acts of Settlement and Explanation, the Duke of Ormond, did not go without his reward. One hundred and thirty thousand acres were allotted to him as his share of the spoil, besides his estates of inheritance, discharged from all chiefries, leases, grants, or incumbrances; the Act of Settlement artfully annulling and making void all existing leases and incumbrances upon lands. The most instructive commentary upon Ormond's policy and management is the simple fact that his income at the commencement of the civil wars did not exceed £7,000 per annum ; whereas at the close of them, after the lapse of ten or eleven years, by his accumulations of rapine during that period, his annual income amounted to upwards of £80,000, or more than eleven times the former amount. Of course the Irish people, in the bitterness of their hearts, cursed him as the author of much of their sufferings; and did not cease to reproach him for the iniquity and rapine of which he had been guilty. But Ormond, brooding over his heap of spoils, and basking in the sunshine of an abandoned and profligate court, heeded not their reproaches, but thought only of other means for still further coercing and oppressing the unfortunate Irish.

The part which Charles played throughout these transactions was even more heartless and infamous than was usual with that debauched and beastly monarch. He violated every promise which he had formerly made to his Irish subjects, and sacrificed them to those who had been the leaders of the rebellion against him. He granted large portions of the lands wrested from the rightful owners,

"The fate of the once formidable clan of the Mac Carthys," says Mrs. Hall, in her IRELAND, "is similar to that of nearly all the ancient families of Ireland: the descendants, in a direct line, may be often found working, as day-labourers, around the ruins of castles where their forefathers had ruled; and as, in many instances, a period of little more than a century and a half has passed between their grandeur and their degradation, it can excite no marvel if, at times, they indulge the idea, that what was swept from them by the strong hand of conquest, the eddy of events may bring back to them again. We have ourselves seen the legitimate heir of one of the ancient rulers and owners of West Carbery, pause, as he delved the soil, lean on his spade, and point to the mountains and the valleys stretching far as the eye could reach, and speak, as if they were still his own, of the wide district of which his great grandsire was the chief. The touching story which Mr. Crofton Croker tells of the representative of the MacCarthy (Muskerry) family, may find its parallel in every barony in Ireland. The existing proprietor of a portion of these forfeited estates observed, one evening, in his demesne, an aged man stretched at the foot of an old tree, "sobbing as though his heart would break." On expressing sympathy, and inquiring the cause of such excessive sorrow, he received this answer,-"I am a Mac Carthy, once the possessor of that castle and these broad lands: this tree I planted, and I have returned to water it with my tears. Tomorrow I sail for Spain, where I have been an exile and an outlaw since the revolution. To-night, for the last time, I bid farewell to the place of my birth and the home of my ancestors."

to members of his own family, to his courtesans and his strumpets, and to numbers of the other nameless creatures that crawled about his court. He increased his own revenue from Ireland by above £80,000 per annum. Charles also put down the Irish parliament, -a thing that Cromwell had never attempted. No sooner had the act of settlement been consummated, than parliament was dissolved, and was not called together again for twenty-seven years after. Every vestige of representation was put an end to, and Charles and the English parliament thenceforward exercised a despotic and altogether irresponsible control over the kingdom of Ireland. But the venal and corrupt Irish parliament, chiefly composed as it was of protestant ascendancy men, had paved the way for this flagrant and unconstitutional usurpation; for they settled on Charles and his heirs and successors, a large hereditary revenue, thereby giving up the control over the public purse, and rendering the crown independent, and parliaments virtually unnecessary.

Well might Swift say that "loyalty is the foible of the Irish," and Moore that it is "a superfluous luxury;" when, after all the iniquitous oppressions and cruelties inflicted on them by the Charleses, we still find them, of all other subjects of the British crown, the most devoted in their attachment to the infamous house of Stuart, and the readiest to shed their blood in defence of their hereditary right and privilege to oppress. "The stupidity of their attachment," says an author, himself a catholic, "cannot be accounted for, unless by the force of an opinion, then and long after prevalent among them, that the hereditary right of kings was of divine origin, and consequently paramount to every rule of public and private right. It was their stupid attachment to the Stuarts that made popery and slavery synonimous terms, and heaped such a pile of misfortunes on this unhappy nation.”*

CHAPTER XXI.

England at the Restoration-The Commonwealth and the Monarchy contrasted— Distress in England-Fall in rents-The importation of Irish cattle prohibited -Absurd conduct of the English Parliament-Opposition to the measure-The consequences to Ireland prove beneficial-Free trade conceded-Irish prosperity -The Cabal-Ormond dismissed-Lord Robarts-Lord Berkeley's administration -Favours the Catholics-Remonstrants and Anti-Remonstrants-Alarm of the -Protestant party-Berkeley dismissed-The Earl of Essex-Ormond again Lord Lieutenant-The Sham Popish Plots-Ormond's conduct-Execution of the Archbishop of Ardagh-The Plot exploded-Death of Charles.

THE fever-flush of joy which followed the Restoration had scarcely subsided, ere the English people found themselves again the prey of a system of the most heartless and frivolous tyranny. The contrast between the stern and stoical government of the Puritans and the

O'Connor's History of the Irish Catholics, p. 103.