CHAPTER III.

PROTESTANT ASCENDENCY AND ITS WORKS.

A.D. 1702-1756.

NOT by all the penal laws against Roman Catholic priests could it be hoped, by the most fanatical disciple of brute force, that the old faith could be ever supplanted by the new, so long as the condition of the English Church in Ireland continued to be nothing else but a scandal. While there were no less than three thousand registered Roman Catholic priests, there were for all the parishes in the island but six hundred resident Protestant incumbents, and of these six hundred the large majority were wretchedly poor, their incomes being but about £100 per annum, notwithstanding the fact that they were all pluralists, some holding as many as twelve or thirteen benefices. Numbers of parishes had no church at all, or only a battered ruin, in which no service was ever performed. Few had schools, and the few Protestant families, who were to be found in the south and west, were left to shift for themselves, and in course of time fell away.

The bishops, on the other hand, had absorbed all the Church revenues, and were very wealthy. The land belonging to Irish sees was estimated at 623,598 Irish acres or 998,000 English acres, about one-nineteenth of the entire soil of the island. All of them of the extreme Laudian type, they had through good and evil times preached the doctrine of passive obedience; and though from their experiences under James they had had reason to modify these ideas, they still continued Jacobites at heart, and were ever the rallying point of disaffection to the house of Hanover. Their political influence was very considerable. As members of the Upper House, which the absentee system had largely depleted of its lay element, they were an important and an impracticable faction, which the Government were constantly compelled to humour. Ecclesiastical influences had always been remarkably felt in the Dublin Privy Council, the primate for the time being filling the office of a lord justice in the absence of the lord-deputy, or lord-lieutenant.

In proportion to the smallness of the influence of the Church upon the mass of the people was the jealousy shown by the bench of bishops towards the Presbyterians. The bitterness and injustice with which the latter had been attacked in the reign of Charles II. was redoubled in the reign of Anne. A clause * had been slipped into the penal statute of the second of Anne by the English Privy Council, as a sop to the bishops, to secure their adherence to the bill, imposing the test

* Section 15.

The

on Nonconformists as well as on Roman Catholics. taking of the sacrament according to the rites of the Episcopal Church was made a condition precedent to their holding any office civil or military above the rank of a constable, and by this means every Dissenter was subjected to the same disabilities as a Roman Catholic. Armed with a new Test Act, the bishops hastened to extirpate schism. Nonconformists were cleared out of Derry and Belfast, and dismissed from the commission of the peace in Ulster. They were prohibited from opening a school. Their marriages were attacked, and declared void; and men were prosecuted in the Consistory Courts as fornicators for living with their own wives. Even the Regium Donum, an annual subvention granted to the Presbyterian clergy by King William as an acknowledgment of their loyalty and determination in 1688, was suspended.

All efforts by the Government to repeal the test clause or even to pass a Toleration Act to secure to them the use of their chapels were rejected through the violence of the bishops in the Upper House, and it was not till after the exposure of Jacobite rascality on the death of the Queen, and the fall of Bolingbroke and the Tory party, and after the Irish bench had been leavened by the appointment of pliant men from England, that a meagre Toleration Act took its place upon the statutebook.* Even this did not stem the stream of emigration to New England, and a steady drain went on of the best blood of the north to join their Puritan kinsmen in * 6 Geo. II., c. 5.

a land where liberty of conscience was respected. Nor was the condition of the parish clergy improved. The only sign of activity was an effort made by the Protestant laity in 1733, under the auspices of Archbishop Boulter, to found industrial schools under a royal charter in different parts of the country, where the children of the poorest Roman Catholics were taught, fed and clothed, and apprenticed to a trade.

The Irish Parliament was torn by factions, and it was the pleasing task of the English Government and the lord-lieutenant to play off one against the other, and to purchase the support of the most refractory by the gift of places and pensions in order to get the estimates passed, or to carry any Government bill which was determined on. Appointments in the Church, the law, and the civil services were invariably filled up with Englishmen, unless it was necessary to buy off some determined member of the opposition.

The opposition originally consisted of disappointed Jacobites, who with the support of the bitter pen of Swift, the disappointed Dean of St. Patrick's, applied their energies to the persecution of the Presbyterians and to proving themselves a thorn in the side of the Government. They called themselves the "Patriotic " party, and were gradually joined by all those who were indignant and disgusted at the selfish policy of England. They were a small party, temporarily swelled from time to time by the vote of self-interested and factious politicians, which prior to 1753 could not count on more than twenty-eight steady votes against the Government.

The bulk of the house was composed of the nominees of the great Protestant landowners. Their influence in the counties, where the number of freehold voters was but limited, was overwhelming; while the boroughs, nearly all of which were erected on land owned by some great freeholder, and in which the franchise was usually limited to some half a score of aldermen and the mayor, or "sovereign," who composed the corporation and were the freeholder's creatures, were to all intents and purposes the private property of the "Patron." The consequence was that a very large proportion of the borough and county members sat by favour of a few magnates-peers and others-who could accordingly control the votes of their clientèle upon a division. The great object of the powerful and wealthy families of the Protestant ascendency was to get the command of as many seats as possible. The control of votes meant political influence and power, and grew into a most effectual engine for the extraction of lucrative posts from the Government. A combination between two or three persons who could each direct the recording of some dozen or more votes in the Commons could hardly be otherwise than irresistible.

There was no limit to the existence of an Irish Parliament; it sat on year after year till the king chose to dissolve it, or a dissolution came in course of law by his death. A mere provincial assembly for the granting of supplies and the confirmation of Government bills, it gradually lapsed into the practice of sitting but once in two years, and voting money bills for the two twelve