TWO CHAPTERS OF IRISH HISTORY.* THOUGH Dr. Ingram's services in
placing the real facts of Irish history before the people of England have already been many and conspicuous, no work undertaken by him has been more important than his present attempt to make intelligible the true story of the only independent Irish Parliament that ever assembled in Dublin,—the Catholic, Celtic Parliament of James II.
A hundred years ago, the people of England were looked upon by themselves and by their neighbours as being the most boastful and self-confident people on the face of the earth. Now, however, we have changed all that. Instead of holding that in practice the English race can do, and could have done, no wrong, we find it difficult to believe that it can ever have done right. Whenever things go wrong where people of English race are concerned, we at once feel certain that the wrong must be with the English. Not content, too, with loading our own generation with this double dose of original sin, we are perpetually scanning history with an eager eye to discover occasions in which the principle of "the English are always wrong" can be applied with some show of truth. Yearning for the delights of self-denunciation and self- accusation, we are ready, on the very slightest evidence, to lift our voices in a wail of self-righteous condemna- tion, and to call each other to witness how cruel, wicked, base, and brutal we have always been. No doubt this tendency towards depreciation of ourselves, if not carried too far, may sometimes be a very wholesome corrective to the fatuity of indiscriminate national laudation. At the present moment, however, we are apt to go so much too far in the direction of humility, that it is necessary to protest against a fashion which may as readily corrupt the sources of history as the desire to flatter and to glorify, the victories and achieve- ments of our race. In regard to Irish history, the tendency at this moment has a political as well as a historical danger. Either party in the State is eager to appeal to history in support of its own contentions, and on all sides arguments drawn from the past are admitted as of the greatest import- ance. The public feels strongly the force of Lord Beacons- field's words, quoted by Dr. Ingram on his title-page :--" Irish policy is Irish history, and I have no faith in any statesman who attempts to remedy the evils of Ireland who is either ignorant of the past, or will not take lessons from it." But if the public is prepared to be influenced on historical grounds to take a decision of the very, greatest moment, it is essential that the * Two Chapters of _Trish, History :—(1') The /rich-Parliament of Tames H.— (2.) The Alleged nolation of the Treaty of Limerick. By T. Dunbar Ingram, LL.D. London: Macmillan and Co. 18138.
facts, the whole] facts, and nothing but the facts, should be put before them, and that history should neither be coloured so as to unduly glorify or to unduly depreciate the action of the English in Ireland.
How great is the danger of the public entirely misconceiving the teachings of history may be realised from a study of Dr.
Ingram's book, which in several essential particulars shows how inaccurate and unfair to the Irish Protestants is the version of the facts usually accepted as correct. There are two points in Irish history which are often written about and spoken about, and yet almost always misunderstood. These are the manner in which James II.'s Celtic Roman Catholic Parliament treated the Protestant Anglo-Irish, and the policy of repression pur- sued by the Irish Protestant Parliament in regard to the defeated Roman Catholics after the capitulation of Limerick.
Into both questions Dr. Ingram enters fully. In dealing with the first of these—the Irish Parliament of James 11.—Dr. Ingram gives, by way of preface, a short account of Ireland at the outbreak of the Rebellion of 1641—a rebellion, be it remembered, voluntarily entered into by the Catholic Irish— which is well worthy of attention. At that time, more than two-thirds of the land of Ireland was held by Roman Catholics who were Celts by blood or tradition. These Roman Catholics were by no means harshly treated by the Government, but lived in comfort and prosperity, commerce of all kinds flourishing exceedingly. The Irish Catholics, however, con- ceived the notion that they would gain by revolt, and accordingly, they plunged the country for eleven years into an anarchy worse than even that which existed in Germany during the Thirty Years' War. When the armies of the Commonwealth finally gained complete possession of the desolated and famine-stricken island, which had lost by pestilence, sword, and hunger some six hundred thousand of its people, a. new settlement was made by. the English Parliament. "The general scope of the settlement," says Dr. Ingram, "was to punish the Irish aristocracy and gentry who had misgoverned their country, arrested the
growing prosperity of Ireland, plunged the land into a scene of bloodshed and anarchy compared with which the French Revolution was a peaceful reform." -Under it the poorer classes were treated with great leniency, but confiscation on the largest scale overtook all the proprietors who had not re- mained loyal. The settlement, however, only lasted a few years,
for with the Restoration the whole basis on which it rested was theoretically destroyed. Charles II. could not, however, and did not desire to dispossess the Cromwellisn adventurers. Accordingly, a compromise was arrived at bywhich the Roman Catholics obtained back lands which made them hold, at the beginning of James II.'s reign, one-third or so of the land of Ireland. The prosperity which began with the Cromwellian settlement went on steadily through the reign of Charles II., and on the accession of James II. the country was in the most flourishing condition. The position of the Roman Catholics under the settlement was by no means intolerable, for though the Commonwealth had forfeited the greater part of the property of the Catholics, it had made no attempt to extirpate their religion. This is Dr. Ingram's account of the Catholic disabilities at the accession of James U. :—
"The position of the Irish Roman Catholic was very different from and far superior to that of his English co-religionist. The penal enactments on the Irish Statute Book were fewer and less severe than those in England. In England every priest who received a convert into the bosom of the Church of Rome was liable to be hanged. In Ireland he incurred no such danger. A doubtful but favourable construction was placed on the Irish Act of Supremacy, and enabled Roman Catholics to fill public offices. 'In England,' says Macaulay, no man could hold office, or even earn his livelihood as a barrister or a schoolmaster, without pre- viously taking the oath of supremacy ; but in Ireland a public functionary was not held to be under the necessity of taking that oath unless it 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 unknown; nor was either House of Parliament closed against any religious sect.'"
We quote another passage from Dr. Ingram, to show the amount of toleration at this time enjoyed by the Irish Roman Catholics :—
" But the best test of the toleration granted to the Roman Catholics may be derived from their own conduct. Did they show by the humility of their proceedings that they considered them- selves as oppressed and as excluded from freedom of action ? Did their Bishops and clergy refrain from the open exercise of their functions, and was their carriage that of those who felt themselves to be persecuted ? At or about this time it was death, or what was worse than death, the galleys, for a Protestant divine to celebrate the offices of his religion in the Catholic countries of Europe. The conduct of the Roman Catholic ecclesiastics in Ireland presents a lively contrast to the state of things on the Continent. Within three months after his arrival from Rome in 1870, Archbishop Plunket solemnised two synods of ,his clergy, and, moreover, convened and presided at a general synod of the Irish Bishops, which was held in Dublin ; and before the month of September in the • same year we.find him summoning A provincial council of Ulster, and enacting many salutary decrees for the correction of abuses and the advancement of eoclesiastical discipline in that province.' In 1678 the same prelate convoked another provincial synod at Ardpatriek, where decrees were made and enactments passed. In 1670 Peter Talbot, titular Archbishop of Dublin, appeared before the Privy. Council in his episcopal habits, a thing of which there had been no precedent since the Reformation. On another occasion, the same Archbishop applied to the Lord-Lieutenant for the loan of some of the-State hangings, silver candlesticks, plate, and other utensils, for the purpose of making use of them at the celebration of high mass. The request was complied with. But this is not all : we are informed by Arch- bishop Plunket, in- a letter to the 'Nuncio in the year 1673, that the same Peter Talbot, 'during the past four years, waged an open war against the Dnke ef Ormond, who is the most powerful sub- ject of his Majesty in this kingdom.' Let us imagine, if we can, what would have been the fate of a Protestant ecclesiastic in Austria, Spain, Prance, or Savoy, who would at this time have opposed, not a powerful ex-Viceroy, but even a parish officer."
"It was in a country," says Dr. Ingram, "so circumstanced, rapidly advancing in prosperity, and in which the Roman Catholic subject enjoyed a toleration which was absolute freedom when compared with the position of Protestants under the Catholic Governments of Europe, that the King, Tyrconnel, and the Irish priesthood entered upon a conspiracy which was to end. in the desolation of the island." Into Dr. Ingram's account of the attacks made upon the Protestants by James's Irish Parliament, of its Bill of Attainder, by which 2,445 persons, of all ages and sexes and degrees, were pro- scribed by name—any Member of Parliament put down any name on the list he liked—we cannot enter. We must, how- ever, notice Dr. Ingram's correction of the popular notion that the Irish Roman Catholics were treated with special severity. As a matter of fact, the Irish Parliament softened rather than increased the violence of the anti-Catholic legis- lation which it modelled on that of England :— " Burke describes the Irish system as an unparalleled code of oppression,' and Macaulay speaks of the Irish Statute Book as being polluted by intolerance as barbarous as that of the dark ages.' If these writers had made themselves acquainted with the jurisprudence of England, they would have learned that the penal code of their own country was more severe than that of Ireland. They-would have discovered that many enactments borrowed from the English code had been mitigated and softened down before they were adopted by the Irish Parliament. Thus in England it was death for a priest to receive a convert into the bosom of the Church of Rome ; in Ireland the penalty was imprisonment only. In England the Legislature attempted—happily without avail— to prevent a Roman Catholic succeeding to the estate of his father ; in Ireland this was softened into a descent of the estate in gavel. kind. In England no Roman Catholic could purchase a lease or term of the shortest duration ; in Ireland Roman Catholics were _allowed to acquire terms for thirty-one years. Even the law which excluded Irish Roman Catholics from. Parliament was passed, not by the Irish, but by the English Legislature. An Irish Protestant may recall with pride and satisfaction the fact that of the three governments in the Empire the Irish Parliament was the first to relax the penal laws against the Roman Catholics."
With the remainder of Dr. Ingram's volume, and with his defence of the Irish Protestants from the charge of having violated the Treaty of Limerick, we cannot deal. He certainly seems to offer something like tolerable excuses for that breach of treaty, though before pronouncing on this point we should like to see a Nationalist's answer to many of his allegations. Still, no excuse, however impressive, can exonerate the Irish 'Protestants from grave blame for their conduct. It is little consolation to know that they were no worse than other people.
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