at the present day might well be troubled for the same cause, for who is there that does not speak well of Lord Dufferin? Sir Hugh Clotworthy, ancestor of Lord Masserine, also exerted himself as a religious and social reformer, and was a man of much influence. Through their exertions and those of the eminent ministers they induced to settle in the country, a great and permanent improvement was effected among the people.

According to Dr. Reid, the learned historian of the Presbyterian Church, most of the northern clergy in possession of the parish churches were at this period Nonconformists both in principle and practice. They conformed only just so far as was requisite for their security and maintenance under the protection of the legal establishment. In some of the dioceses this was all the bishops required. When succeeding prelates became more strict in exacting uniformity, the clergy generally yielded, though with reluctance, the canonical obedience required by their superiors. But in the seclusion of the parishes they continued to observe the Presbyterian forms so congenial to the habits and prejudices of their people. A more searching intolerance was soon after enthroned in high places. The good Primate Ussher was not disposed to molest them, but when the Lord Deputy Wentworth arrived, a policy of persecution was carried out with relentless severity. The consequence was that a number of the Nonconformist ministers were suspended by the bishops. Blair, one of the most eminent of the sufferers, went to London to appeal to the king, Charles I., armed with letters from noblemen and gentlemen to their friends at Court. Lord Stirling, then Secretary of State, promised to forward his suit, at which the good minister was so overjoyed that he said I did literally exult and leap. But when the timorous man did see my forwardness, he, fearing Bishop Laud more than God, did faint, and break his promise.' Another minister laid the petition before the king, who returned a gracious answer directed to Lord Strafford, who had not yet arrived in Ireland; for, although appointed Lord Deputy in January 1632, he did not enter upon his government until the July following. Mr. Blair lost no time in waiting upon him in Dublin; but his reception from that imperious churchman was anything but encouraging. He reviled the Kirk of Scotland and

rebuked the petitioner, bidding him come to his right wits and then he should be regarded. With this intelligence I went to Archbishop Ussher, which was so disagreeable to him that it drew tears from his eyes; but he could not help us.' All hopes of relief were thus blasted, and in the tone and manner of the Deputy they discerned the storm that was gathering blackness throughout the kingdom.

6

By the Graces' of Charles I., it had been stipulated that all Scottish men, undertakers' in Ulster and other places, should be made free citizens of Ireland, and that no advantage for want of denization should be taken against the heirs or assigns of those that were dead. The king consented to the calling of parliament to give the sanction of law to those Graces'; but he did not keep his word. When the Irish parliament assembled in July, 1634, having voted an extraordinary supply, the Commons presented a remonstrance to the king urging the ratification of the Graces.' But Lord Strafford refused to transmit this remonstrance to his royal master, for which unconstitutional proceeding the latter was peculiarly grateful. Writing soon after, the king said, Your last public despatch has given me a great deal of contentment, and especially for keeping off the envy of a necessary negative from me of those unreasonable "Graces" that that people expected from me.' Subsequently, however, as already intimated, the Irish parliament passed an Act for the naturalization of all the Scottish nation which were born before his late Majesty King James's accession to the throne of England and Ireland. Those persons having been regarded by the laws as foreigners,' being made capable of legally acquiring or holding property within the realm, the king was assured in the preamble that the grievance in question was a sad discouragement and disheartening unto many of his subjects of Scotland that would otherwise have planted themselves here for the further civilising, strengthening, and securing this realm against rebels at home and all foreign invasion.'

The truth of this was so obvious, and the condition of the English colony was often so critical, that it seems almost unaccountable that the Scottish settlers were not received from the first joyfully, and invested with all the rights of British subjects. But the Irish parliament was composed exclusively of Episcopalians and

ruled by the Bishops, and by the peers who were their relatives and intimate friends, and by whom the members for the House of Commons were for the most part nominated. All this hateful exclusiveness was most detrimental to the country, and so degrading to the king, on whom it imposed a policy of evasion and treachery, meanness and duplicity, that it must have exposed him to the contempt of all honest men.

CHAPTER X.

THE ESTABLISHED CHURCH UNDER CHARLES I.,
LAUD, AND STRAFFORD.

Now let us see what was the spiritual state and the social and civilising utility of the ecclesiastical body for which those sacrifices were made. Archbishop Laud was a reformer after his fashion,—a restless, energetic man, irritable and arbitrary, with the highest possible notions of sacerdotal power; and he was naturally very much provoked at the prevalence of Puritanism in the Irish Church. Lord Strafford was a man after his own heart in this respect, being at the same time utterly unscrupulous as to the means he employed to carry out his purposes. Carried out they must be, no matter what obstacle stood in the way. He instituted enquiries, and found that throughout the greater part of the country, owing to the neglect of the bishops, the parish churches, and even the cathedrals, were in a wretched state of dilapidation, a great part of the church revenues having been alienated and appropriated to the aggrandisement of their own families. The Ecclesiastical Courts were mere engines of oppression and extortion,-engines which were worked with the most ruinous effect. Bishop Burnet, in his Life of Bedell, says: Bribes went about almost barefaced, and the exchange they made of penance for money was the worst sort of simony, being, in effect, the very same abuse which gave the world such scandal when it was so indecently practised in the Church of Rome.' Bishop Bedell himself sent to Laud a sketch of the religious condition of the kingdom. His own cathedral, together with the bishop's house, were down to the ground.' The parish churches were all in a manner ruined, unroofed, and unrepaired. The clergy, being Englishmen, had not the tongue of the people,' and could not converse with them or perform for them any divine offices. Many

of them held two, three, or four or more vicarages each. This account was corroborated by Bramhall, an English prelate of a very different stamp, whom Oliver Cromwell called the Canterbury of Ireland, from his resemblance to Laud. In a letter to that primate he wrote-It is hard to say whether the churches be more ruinous and sordid, or the people more irreverent.' He found one of them in Dublin, a parish church, converted to the Lord Deputy's stable; a second, to a nobleman's dwelling-house; the choir of a third to a tennis court, the vicar acting as the keeper. In Christ Church, the principal church in Ireland, whither the Lord Deputy and Council repaired every Sunday, the vaults, from one end of the minster to the other, are made into tippling rooms for beer, wine, and tobacco, let all to popish recusants, and by them to others,-much frequented in time of Divine service! The inferior sort of ministers, Bramhall described as below all degrees of contempt in respect to their poverty and ignorance. He then proceeds: The boundless heaping together of benefices by commendams and dispensations in the superior courts is but too apparent; yea, even often by plain usurpations and indirect compositions made between the patrons as well ecclesiastical as lay, and the incumbents; by which the least part, many times not above 40 shillings, rarely 107. in the year, is reserved for him that should serve the altar; insomuch that it is affirmed that by all or some of these means one bishop in the remoter parts of the kingdom doth hold three-and-twenty benefices with cure! Generally their residences are as little as their livings. Seldom any suitor petitions for less than three vicarages at a time.'

This is the way in which those English shepherds used the church property they had seized at the Reformation for the purpose of converting and civilising the wild Irish! This was the example of honesty they set to an impoverished people denounced for their thievish propensities! This is the way in which the new Anglican nobility, shooting up from the Church establishment, struck its roots into the Irish soil and derived its sap from the fat of the land. But the ecclesiastical reformers who began their work under Charles I. had as little idea of justice and fair dealing, or fidelity to public trust, as the aristocratic hierarchy