of the royal prerogative.* He pronounced it be a rash and insolent interference with his authority. 12. The lord deputy continued to increase the number of the new boroughs, for which court candidates were returned, until he had secured a majority of that party. Forty new boroughs were created, of which several were not incorporated till after the writs had issued. Violent altercations attended the meeting of this parliament, not only upon the election of Sir John Davies for the speaker of the house of commons, in opposition to Sir John Everard (" a recusant," says Leland, "of respectable character, who had been a justice of the king's bench, and on resigning this station, rather than take the oaths, was indulged with a pension,") but also on account of the illegality of many of the returns of the court members, which the country party ve hemently protested against. Two hundred and thirty-two members had been returned: six were absent: of the remainder one hundred and twenty-five were protestants; and one hundred and one formed the recusant party. The upper ment. And to the end to remove from your subjects' hearts those fears and discontents, that your highness further will be graciously pleased to give order, that the proceedings of this parliament may be with the same moderation and indifferency as your most royal predecessors have used in like cases heretofore; wherein moreover, if your highness shall be pleased, out of your gracious clemency to withdraw such laws as may tend to the forcing of your subjects consciences here in matters concerning religion, you shall settle their minds in a most firm and faithful subjection. The honour which your majesty, in all your actions and proceedings, bath hitherto so well maintained, the renown of your highness's transcendant understanding in matters of estate and government, and in particular the exemplary president of your majesty's never-to-be forgotten moderation, in not descending to such extraordinary courses for effecting the union of both kingdoms so much desired, doth give us full hope and assurance that your highness will duly weigh and take in good worth these considerations by us layed down, and most graciously grant this our humble submissive suit, in which hope we do, and will always remain, your majesty's most humble and dutiful subjects, Dublin, 25 Nov. 1612. GORMANSTON, ROB. TRIMBLETTSTOWN, * In his speech to parliament, 1609, he told them, "I would wish you to be careful to avoide three things in the matter of greevance. 1st, That you doe not meddle with the maine points of government, that is my craft, tractent fabrilia fabri; to meddle with that were to lesson me." James's Works, fo. ed. p. 537. house consisted of sixteen temporal barons, twenty-five protestant prelates, five viscounts, and four earls, of which a considerable number, says Leland, were friends to the administration.* 13. The catholic party was so disgusted and provoked at this factious majority, that for a time they seceded from parliament; and were only induced to resume their seats by the assurances of the lord deputy, that no other bill should for the present be propounded than that for recognizing the king's title. The parliament was prorogued, to give time for the violence of passion on both sides to abate. In the mean while the catholic party dispatched agents to lay their grievances at the feet of their sovereign. The deputy also sent his agents to counteract their efforts.† Two of the catholic agents were, immediately on their arrival, committed prisoners, one to the Tower, the other to the Fleet. James received the petition of their associates in a most ungracious manner, and, in violation of the independent rights. of the Irish parliament, referred the full determination of it to the English privy council. The result of this appeal to the sovereign was a most disgraceful dismissal of the ca * The majority of protestant members returned to this parliament is very surprising, considering how very few of the Irish had then given into the reformation. Geoghegan asserts, that there were not sixty down to the reign of James I. The catholic agents were the lords Gormanstown and Fermoy, Sir James Gough, Hussey, Lutterel, and Talbot. The lord deputy's were the earl of Thomond, Sir John Denham, the chief justice of the King's Bench, and Sir Oliver St. John. Whoever wishes to form a candid opinion of the conduct of James is referred to the remonstrance of divers lords of the pale to the king concerning the parliament; and the king's speech to the lords of the council before the Irish agents. In the former the lords thus complain: "It would far surpass the compass of a letter, if we should insist to particularize the manifest, old, precedent disorders, and such as still do accompany this intended action; only your highness shall understand, that many knights from counties and citizens and burgesses from cities and towns have, contrary to the true election, been returned; and in some places force, and in many others fraud, deceit, and indirect means have been used for effecting of this so lawless a course of proceeding. Neither can we but make known unto your majesty, that under pretence of erecting towns in places of the new plantation, more corporations have been made since the beginning of last month or little more than are returned out of the whole kingdom; besides the number whereof (as we conceive it) contrary to your highness's intended purpose, are dispersed through. out all parts of this kingdom; and that in divers places, were there be good ancient boroughs, and not allowed to send burgesses to the parliament, and yet these new created corporations for the most part tholic agents; a rejection of their demands; the imprisonment of Sir James Gough, on his return to Ireland for boasting of the king's promise to grant redress, and the remuneration of Chichester by fresh grants. Chichester thus supported by the king found little difficulty in passing every act, as it was proposed, by means of his majority. Yet he found it prudent, in this heat of parties, to drop a bill for the banishment of the whole catholic clergy, and other penal bills against the catholics, which had been prepared and were intended to have been brought forward. 14. James's passion for plantations induced him to extend them to other parts of the kingdom. He appointed a commission of inquiry to scrutinize the titles and determine the rights of all the lands in Leinster and the adjoining districts. Such rapid progress did these commissioners of defective titles make in their mission, that in a short time James deemed himself entitled to make a distribution of 385,000 acres in those counties. These were apportioned to English settlers and to some few of the natives, under regulations nearly similar to those by which he had settled the colony in Ulster. In executing this scheme little regard was had to the plainest dictates of justice. Old obsolete claims were received even as far back as the reign of Henry II. and advantage was taken of the most trivial flaws and minute informalities. In Connaught immense estates were declared forfeited to the crown, because are so miserable and beggarly poor, as their tuguria cannot otherwise be holden or denied than as tituli sine, et figmenta in rebus, tor divers of which (their extreme poverty being not able to defray the charges of burgesses, nor the places themselves to afford any one man fit to present himself in the poorest society of men) and for others, we must confess, that some of great fashion have not sticked to abase themselves to be returned: the lord deputy's servants, attornies, and clerks, resident only in the city of Dublin, most of them having never seen or known the place for which they were returned and others of contemptible life and carriage." The latter is a curious specimen of the pedantic raillery of James to the deputies representing the bulk of his Irish subjects. Amongst other quaint - taunts, he calls them a body without a head; a headless body; you would be afraid to meet such a body in the streets; a body without a head to speak-Nay half a body-What a monster was this—a very bug-bear!-and-what is it to you whether I make many or few boroughs? My council may consider the fitness, if I require it; but if I made 40 noblemen, and 400 boroughs—the more the merrier-the fewer the better cheer. And again, You that are of a contrary opinion must not look to be the law-makers; you are but half subjects, and should have but half privileges. the recent grants made to the proprietors upon their surrenders of them to James had been neglected to be enrolled by the clerks in chancery, although the new grantees had paid above 3000l. into their hands for the enrolments, and these clerks alone could make them. Perjury, fraud, and the most infamous acts of deceit were successfully practised by rapacious adventurers and informers: and Leland, who gives an accurate detail of these enormities, refers to authentic proofs of the most iniquitous practices of hardened cruelty, of vile perjury, and scandalous subordination employed to despoil the fair and unoffending proprietor of his inheritance. Thus was every man's possession precarious and doubtful; and to complete the measure of abuse, the juries who refused to find a title in the crown were censured and fined in the castle chamber. 15. The remainder of James's reign was an uninterrupted scene of vexatious oppressions of the recusants, grievous extortions of the soldiery and their officers* upon the people, the execution of martial law in time of peace, the abusive exactions of the clergy and ecclsiastical courts, the unconstitutional interference of the privy council and castlechamber in causes which ought to have been determined by common law, the invasion of property in the different plantations, and extreme rigour in executing the penal laws. Such were the means by which James estranged the affections of his Irish subjects from the English government, reduced them to want and misery, and consequently predisposed them to rise against their oppressors, whenever the opportunity should present itself of doing it with effect. A woeful legacy to his unfortunate successor! in the 59th year of his age, on the 27th of March, 1625, after having been king of Ireland about 22 years. James died * Who, as Leland observes, were privy counsellors, and men of great property and influence, too powerful to be complained of for any grievance occasioned by their soldiers, and too deeply engaged in one common interest to call each other to account. p. 471. CHAPTER VI. 1625.-CHARLES I. 1. THE reign of Charles the first is the part of Irish history which has been the most misrepresented by cotemporary and modern historians.* The quick sensibility of the * Of all the English writers upon the civil wars of Ireland Dr. Warner is the most to be relied on. He had better means and sources than any of his predecessors, and has made fairer use of them. His judgment upon the most reputable of his predecessors is curious and just; and an excellent warning to the strayed traveller who wishes to arrive at the temple of truth and concord. (Pref. to his History of the Rebellion) "The original protestant Irish writers of this period are Sir John Temple and Dr. Borlase; the first, who was master of the rolls and a privy councillor, has confined himself entirely to the massacre and rebellion in the early part of it, and the sense of what he suffered by the insurrection, together with his attachment to the ministry, led him to aggravate the crimes and cruelties of the Irish: the other was the son of Sir John Borlase, one of the lords-justices of that time, and seems to have been an officer in the civil wars, who hath made great use of Temple's History; and, as far as he liked it, of lord Clarendon's Vindication of the marquis of Ormonde. If both these authors are to be read with great suspicion of partiality, as they certainly are, except in the copies of original papers, and the facts which tally with them, Sir Richard Cox, who has done little more than transcribe the accounts which they have given, is entitled to no less merit, and yet open to the same suspicion. When he had no longer these to be his guide, the remainder of his work is little more than an extract from the newspapers and pamphlets of the time, and in no part deserves the name of a history.' "There are no original English historians that I know of who write any thing fully of this event in Ireland besides the earl of Clarendon and Mr. Carte: the former in his History of the Rebellion and Civil War in England, and in a little piece in the vindication of the marquis of Ormonde, which in the late editions goes under the title, very improperly, of the History of the Rebellion and Civil War in Ireland. The noble historian's attachment to the cause of Charles I. hath evidently given a bias to the whole of his great work: and on the most critical part of the king's conduct with regard to Ireland, his commission to the earl of Glamorgan, his lordship to our astonishment is entirely silent. Neither doth he enter much into any transaction in that country wherein the king was not personally concerned. Mr. Carte treats professedly of this whole rebellion in his life of the duke of Ormonde, and is by much the most copious and best writer upon it; but there are so many flagrant instances of his partiality for the king, and of his prejudice against the Irish ministers at the breaking out of the Irish insurrection, that he is never to be read, where the ill conduct of the first is palliated or the other censured, without the |