claimed in London, and directing a like proclamation to be made to all her subjects of Ireland. All the great officers of state were confirmed in their several departments : a ge neral pardon was granted to all her subjects, and a license was published as in England for the exercise of the catholic religion without penalty or compulsion. 2. The death of Edward VI. and the short reign of his sister Mary, gave some respite to the troubled state of Ireland. The only measure of the British cabinet in the late reign affecting Ireland related to the ecclesiastical system. The first act of Mary's reign which touched that system was a proclamation, by which she revoked every innovation which had been introduced into the ecclesiastical establish ment 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 After her marriage with Philip, king of Spain, a parliament* was convened, in which were repealed all the acts touching religion, passed after the twentieth year of her father's reign, and the civil establishment of the catholic religion was precisely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 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. 3. Besides the acts passed in this parliament for the 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 term, was granted to the queen, for the special purpose, 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 * 3 and 4 Phillip 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. upon the speculation of profiting of the internal dissensions 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 intermarry with them without license of the Lord-lieutenant. The advantages gained by the earl of Sussex over two of the most powerful septs of Leinster, 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 twelfth year of king John. 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 end he caused an act* to pass in the same parliament, authorizing the lord chancellor, from time to time, to award commissions to such persons as the lord deputy should nominate and appoint, to viewe and perambulate those Irish territories; and thereupon to divide and limit the same into such and so manie several counties, as they should thinke meete; which being certified to the lord deputie and approved by him, should bee returned and enrolled in the chancery, and from thenceforth be of like force and effect, as if it were doone by an act of parliament. Thus did the earl of Sussex lay open a passage for the civil government in the unreformed partes of this kingdome; but himself proceeded no farther than is before declared." " This 4. So confident was the English government of the pacific disposition of the Irish in this reign, that the army was reduced to about 1000 men. The renewed turbulence, however, of some of the Irish chiefs to each other, and the law *To show the precarious title of the crown out of the pale, the preamble of this act particularly recites, that as these territories were known not to be within any shire of the kingdom, no title for the crown could be found, as will be seen at large in the first section of 2 chap. of 3 and 4 of P. and M. less conduct of the Scottish adventurers, soon rendered it necessary to increase it with reinforcements from England. Although the Irish were in general gratified by the restoration of the catholic religion to its ancient footing, they were dissatisfied with the civil administration of the power of the crown within the kingdom. They were particularly soré 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, the Irish annalist, says, that notwithstanding Mary's zeal for supporting and promoting the catholic religion, yet was her administration injurious to Ireland. died on the 17th of November, 1558. She CHAPTER IV. 1558.-ELIZABETH. 1 UPON the demise of Mary, queen Elizabeth mounted the English throne without opposition, under the act of succession made in 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 dissension. 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. 2. 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 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. 3. Elizabeth's first concern was to promote the reformed religion through Ireland as successfully as she 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 catholic 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 or personal (or be imprisoned for one year if not worth 20%.), incur a præmunire for the second offence, and become guilty of high treason for the third; and 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 ecclesiastial censures, and of the for F feiture of twelve pence for every offence, to be levied by the churchwardens by distress of the lands and 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. * 4. So much had Sussex been alarmed by the opposition he had encountered in parliament, though he ultimately succeeded, that he found it necessary quickly 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. 5. Under this general discontent the kingdom was for several years convulsed, either by internal feuds, or 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 another parliament, * It sat from the 12th of January to the 12th of February. + 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, 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 on Ireland, had no other effect than to foment a general disaffection to the English government; a disaffection so general as to induce Philip II. of Spain to attempt partial descents on the southern coasts of this island, preparatory to his meditated attack upon England." Speech of Lord Clare in the Irish House of Lords, 10th February, 1800, p. 9. |