They were particularly sore at the power vested in the Lord Lieutenant, to dispose of the territories of Leix and Offaly in royal grants, which defeated the inheritable rights of the native owners of those lands. O'Sullivan says, that notwithstanding Mary's zeal for supporting and promoting the catholic religion, yet was her administration injurious to Ireland *. She died on the 17th of November 1558. * Qua tametsi Catholicam religionem tueri et amplificare conata est, ejus tamen præfecti et conciliarii injuriam Ibernis inferre non destiterunt. Sull. Cath. Hist. p. 81. 1558. Effects of this parlia ment. tholic religion had been renewed, should be repealed; So much had Sussex been alarmed by the opposi tion he had encountered in parliament, though he * It sat from the 12th of January to the 12th of February. ultimately succeeded, that he found it necessary quickly 1561. to dissolve it. He repaired to England to give to the Queen, in person, a minute and faithful account of the reception these new laws had met with from the Irish nation. The people were provoked by the violence offered to their religious prejudices. The partizans of Rome inveighed against the Queen as an heretic. The non-conforming clergy abandoned their cures ; no reformed ministers could be found to supply them; the churches fell to ruin; the people were left without religious worship; and the statutes lately made were evaded or neglected with impunity. convenes a liament. Under this general discontent the kingdom was for Elizabeth several years convulsed, either by internal feuds, or second par the grand insurrection of O'Nial, that ended by his treacherous murder at a banquet in the camp of the Scotch adventurers. In order to put down faction and disturbance, to provide for the necessities of government, and forward reform, Elizabeth*, in the eleventh year of her reign, convened 2 Lel. p. 226. The late Lord Clare, who was less ignorant than desirous of the good of Ireland, has fairly described the state of the kingdom under Elizabeth. "It seems difficult to conceive any more unjust or impolitic act of government, than an attempt to force new modes of religious faith and worship by severe penalties upon a rude, superstitious, and unlettered people. Persecutions or attempts to force conscience will never produce conviction. They are calculated only to make hypocrites or martyrs: and accordingly the violence committed by the regency of Edward, and continued by Elizabeth, to force the reformed religion cn Ireland, had no other effect, than to foment a general disaffection to the English government; a disaffection so general, as to induce Philip II. 1556. revoked every Various acts of the innovation which had been introduced into the ecclesiastical establishment by the proclamation of her infant brother. After her marriage with Philip King of Spain, a parliament* was convened, in which were repealed all the acts touching religion, passed after the twentieth year of her father's reign, and the civil establishment of the catholic religion was precisely restored to the state, in which Henry VII. had left it. The protestant bishops were deprived, and catholic bishops substituted to their sees. The church lands, which had passed into lay hands, were confirmed to the possessors, as they had been in England, by the concurrent approbation of the Lords spiritual and temporal, the Sovereign and the Pope. This parliament annulled all sentences of divorce, and all acts passed in the reign of Henry VIII. by which the succession to the crown had been settled to the prejudice of Mary, and her legitimacy was fully ascertained. Several statutes of the English parliament for defining such offences against the King and Queen, as should be deemed treason, and for the government and administration of the realm by their issue were adopted in Ireland. Besides the acts passed in this parliament for the Irish legis restoration of the civil establishment of the catholic religion, others were passed for the civil government of the realm. The usual subsidy, and for the usual lature. * 3 and 4 Philip and Mary. + Borlase in his Reduction of Ireland, p. 117, says, that the Earl of Sussex passed many acts to the benefit of the nation, and returned into England, December 4, 1557. term was granted to the Queen, for the special pur- 1556. pose, as the act expresses it, of enabling her Majesty to expel the Scotch Highlanders, who had emigrated from their own country, as an avowed band of mercenaries. These adventurers having come over upon the speculation of profiting of the internal dissentions of the Irish chieftains, were open to any party, which held out the most lucrative terms. Their numbers were so considerable, and their outrages so alarming, that it was made high treason to invite them into Ireland, or to engage or pay them, and felony to intern arry with them without license of the Lord Lieutenant. The advantages gained by the Earl of Sussex over two of the most powerful septs of Leinter, the O'Moors and the O'Connors, enabled the English to extend the pale, by reducing their territories of Leix and Offaly into two counties: they were by act of parliament vested in the crown, and converted into shire-land. Leix was denominated the Queen's County, and its principal fort was stiled Maryborough and with a like compliment to her royal consort, Offaly was called the King's County, and its fort was called Phillipstown; which, as Sir John Davies observes," were the two first counties, that had been made in this kingdom since the 12th year of King John*. This noble earl having thus extended the jurisdiction of the English into two counties more, was not satisfied with that addition, but took a resolution to divide all the rest of the Irish counties unreduced into several shires; and to that Dav. Disc. 248. |