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1560.

Effects of

tholic religion had been renewed, should be repealed; that the Queen should be enabled to appoint commissioners to exercise ecclesiastical jurisdiction; that all officers and ministers ecclesiastical or lay should on pain of forfeiture and total incapacity take the oath of supremacy; that every person, as well as his aider, abettor, or counsellor, who should in any way maintain the spiritual supremacy of the Bishop of Rome, should forfeit for the first offence all his estates real and personal (or be imprisoned for one year if not worth 207.), incur a præmunire for the second offence, and become guilty of high treason for the third; that the use of the Common Prayer should be enforced as in England; that every person should resort to the established church, and attend the new service under pain of ecclesiastical censures, and of the forfeiture of twelvepence for every offence, to be levied by the churchwardens by distress of the lands or chattels of the defaulter; that the first fruits and twentieths of all church revenues should be restored to the crown; and the old writ and form of congé d'élire superseded by the King's letters patent, by which in future all collations to vacant sees were to be made. These ordinances were followed by an act of recognition of the Queen's title to the crown; and it was made a case of præmunire to speak, and treason to write against it.

So much had Sussex been alarmed by the opposithis parlia- tion he had encountered in parliament, though he

ment.

*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.

1558.

Elizabeth finds the Irish peaceably disposed.

Commencement

of surveys.

7

CHAPTER IV.

The Reign of Elizabeth..

UPON the demise of Mary, Queen Elizabeth mounted the English throne without opposition, under the act of succession made in the thirty-fifth year of Henry VIII. She found the Irish nation more generally submissive to the English government, than it had been under any of her predecessors. She prudently continued in the lieutenancy the Earl of Sussex, who was acceptable to most of the natives, and had with a garrison of 320 horse and 1360 foot kept Ireland in peace and quiet. Notwithstanding the general disposition of the nation to submit to the English government, none of the provinces were altogether free from internal dissention. Much of the pacific conduct of the Irish during the short reign of Mary was attributable to the general satisfaction, which the redintegration of the civil establishment of the catholic religion afforded to the nation at large.

No sooner had Elizabeth declared for the Reformation, than general discontent pervaded the nation within and without the pale. Amongst the instructions sent to Sussex written in Cecil's own hand, were directions to make a survey of all lands spiritual and temporal; that none should be letten but upon the best survey, and that the lands of Leix and Offaly should be disposed of to the best advantage of

the Queen and the country. Every province was 1558, thereby thrown into a state of commotion, or provoked to insurrection. Munster was distracted by the inveterate enmities and animosities of the O'Briens, Thomond, Desmond, and Ormond. Connaught was miserably harassed by the feuds subsisting between Clanricarde and another sept of the De Burgos. In Leinster, the survivors of the old families of Leix and Offaly considered themselves deprived of their inheritances by an iniquitous scheme of fraud, treachery, power, violence, and oppression: they were stimulated by revenge and a spirit of reprisal to rise in arms against the grantees of their lands. John O'Nial, upon the death of his father in confinement at Dublin, claimed the sovereignty of the province of Ulster.

mation

parliament.

Elizabeth's first concern was to promote the re- The refor formed religion through Ireland, as successfully as she enacted by had through England, not only as to the spiritual supremacy, which alone her father had attempted, but as to several dogmatical points of faith. Conscious that this innovation would be strongly opposed even by a parliament of the pale, she gave special instructions to her lieutenant to predispose the members to forward her views, and ordered writs to be issued to the representatives of ten counties instead of six, as had heretofore been usual. Being tolerably secure of a majority in both houses, a parliament was convened in the second year of her reign; by which it was enacted, that the spiritual jurisdiction should be restored to the crown; that all the acts of her sister Mary, by which the civil establishment of the Roman ca

1560. tholic religion had been renewed, should be repealed; that the Queen should be enabled to appoint commissioners to exercise ecclesiastical jurisdiction; that all officers and ministers ecclesiastical or lay should on pain of forfeiture and total incapacity take the oath of supremacy; that every person, as well as his aider, abettor, or counsellor, who should in any way maintain the spiritual supremacy of the Bishop of Rome, should forfeit for the first offence all his estates real and personal (or be imprisoned for one year if not worth 20 l.), incur a præmunire for the second offence, and become guilty of high treason for the third; that the use of the Common Prayer should be enforced as in England; that every person should resort to the established church, and attend the new service under pain of ecclesiastical censures, and of the forfeiture of twelvepence for every offence, to be levied by the churchwardens by distress of the lands or chattels of the defaulter; that the first fruits and twentieths of all church revenues should be restored to the crown; and the old writ and form of congé d'élire superseded by the King's letters patent, by which in future all collations to vacant sees were to be made. These ordinances were followed by an act of recognition of the Queen's title to the crown; and it was made a case of præmunire to speak, and treason to write against it.

Effects of

this parlia

ment.

So much had Sussex been alarmed by the opposition he had encountered in parliament, though he

*It sat from the 12th of January to the 12th of February.

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