DECISIONS OF COURTS OF CLAIMS.

57

seized the opportunity to petition by agents in their CHAP. own favour.

I. A.D. 1661.

The contending parties were repeatedly heard by Charles himself; and the Irish had reason to expect a favourable result, when they marred their cause by their imprudence. In the ardour of declamation, Sept. they not only defended themselves, but assailed others. Why, they asked, were they to be deprived of their estates in favour of rebels and traitors? Because, it was answered, they stood there covered with the blood of one hundred thousand Protestants massacred by them during their rebellion. They indeed denied the charge; they retorted it in the face of their accusers; murder was a crime with respect to which they were more sinned against than sinning. Their only wish was that an inquiry should be instituted; and that the real murderers, whatever were their religion, should be excluded from the benefit of the bill of indemnity. But the patience of Charles (he had hitherto attended the debates with the most edifying assiduity) was exhausted; he longed to withdraw himself from the recriminations of these violent

1 See Ormond's Letter in Carte, ii. 233.

2 Walsh (Irish Colours Folded, p. 3) asserts that their opponents raised the number to three hundred thousand. Mrs. Macauley (Hist. vi. 62) tells us that no attempt was made by the papists to disprove the assertion" respecting the massacre. Most assuredly she could never have heard of the several tracts written at the time, and provoked by this charge; such as the Irish Colours Folded, by P. W.; a Collection of some of the Massacres and Murders committed on the Irish since 1641; or Walsh's Reply to a Person of Quality; or to a Person of Quality's Answer; or his Letter to the Bishop of Lincoln, p. 225-230; or a Letter to a member of Parliament, showing the Hardships, Cruelties, &c.; or a Briefe Narrative of Cruelties committed on the Irish. In Ireland's Case briefly Stated, p. 41, an attempt is made to prove that the number of persons murdered by the Protestants exceeded by six times that of those murdered by the Catholics.

I.

CHAP. disputants; and on the discovery of an obnoxious AD. 1661. paper, formerly signed by Sir Nicholas Plunkett, one of the agents, ordered the doors of the council to be closed against the deputies of the natives. The heads of the bill were then arranged, returned to Dublin, and ultimately passed into a law by the parliament.1

1662. May.

But to execute this act was found to be a task of considerable difficulty. By improvident grants of lands to the church, the dukes of York, Ormond, and Albemarle, the earls of Orrery, Montrath, Kingston, Massarene, and several others, the fund for reprisals had been almost exhausted; and yet it was from that fund that compensation was to be furnished to the forty-nine officers, to the ensignmen, or those who had served in Flanders, and to the soldiers and adventurers, who might be compelled to yield up their 1663. plantations by the Court of Claims. Among this class, Aug. 15. indeed, a general alarm was excited; for in the course

Feb. 15 to

of six months, during which the commissioners sat, several hundred decrees of innocence had been issued, and three thousand petitions still remained for investigation. To secure themselves, they demanded an explanatory act; the duke of Ormond, now lord-lieutenant, repaired to London, and ten months were spent in useless attempts to reconcile the jarring interests of the different parties.

From the very beginning of these transactions, the actual occupants of the lands had displayed a bold defiance of decency and justice in their efforts to bring

1 Clar. 106-115. Carte, ii. 245. Memoirs of Orrery, 67-70. The obnoxious paper was the copy of instructions from the supreme council in 1648 to their agent, to offer Ireland to the pope, or any Catholic power that would undertake to defend them against the parliament.-Carte, ibid.

OBSTACLES FROM REMONSTRANCES.

59

I.

1661.

Dec. 2.

the cause to a favourable termination. 1. They had CHAP. recourse to bribery. A fund of more than twenty A.D. 1663. thousand pounds was subscribed, and placed in the hands of Sir James Sheen, who hastened to London, and purchased, at different rates, the patronage and good offices of persons supposed to possess influence in the council, or over the mind of the king.' 2. To keep up the irritation of the public mind against the Irish Catholics, they had circulated reports of an intended rebellion, forwarded to the council informations respecting imaginary plots, and at length produced a treasonable letter supposed to be written by one clergyman to another, and dropped by the latter, as he made his escape from the officers of justice. Many priests were immediately apprehended; all Catholic shopkeepers and mechanics were banished out of the principal towns: and the houses of the Catholic gentry were searched for the discovery of arms and ammunition. But the two clergymen, the Dec. 2. supposed writer and receiver of the letter, boldly came forward and proved the forgery to the entire satisfaction of the council, and the confusion of those who had fabricated the pretended conspiracy.

1 Orrery Letters, 101. Carte, ii. 232.

On this occasion a protestation of allegiance, composed by Richard Bellings, was approved at a private meeting in Dublin, and transmitted to London, where it was signed by the principal of the Irish Catholics in the capital, one bishop, several clergymen, and many peers and gentlemen. By Charles it was graciously received; but certain passages in it were disapproved in Rome, and censured by the university of Louvain. This did not prevent the leading Catholics in Dublin from subscribing their names to a circular letter exhorting the laity to sign the protestation or remonstrance. Ormond, however, ordered the letter to be suppressed; and when other instruments were offered to him, similar in their object, but less offensive to the court of Rome in their language, he rejected them as unsatisfactory. In 1666 a synod of the clergy subscribed a new form, founded on the celebrated articles of the Gallican

СНАР.

I.

February.

The Irish House of Commons, which was composed A.D. 1661. of persons deeply interested in the result, submitted to the approbation of the lord-lieutenant a new code of rules to be established in the Court of Claims. By him it was rejected, on the ground that such rules would render the proof of innocence almost impossi 1663 ble; and its authors, in a moment of irritation, moved and carried a bold and dangerous vote, pledging the house to defend the Protestants of Ireland against the unjust decisions of the commissioners. The consequence was soon apparent. The knowledge of this vote awakened from its slumbers the revolutionary spirit of the settlers, who had formerly borne commissions in the republican armies. They had won their lands with the sword, why should they not defend them with the sword? Associations were formed; plans of attack were arranged; and two plots, having for their object to seize the castle of Dublin, and secure the person of the lord-lieutenant, were defeated by the previous disclosures of some among the conMay 25. spirators. Of these, the greater part merited pardon by the humble confession of their guilt; several suffered the penalty of death.1

The duration of this perplexing controversy at last induced the most obstinate to relax from their pretensions; and the soldiers, the adventurers, and the grantees of the crown, unanimously consented to augment the fund for reprisals by the surrender of onechurch, but this he also refused to accept.-See Walsh, History and Vindication, &c. 97, 694. What was Ormond's real motive? "My "aim," he says in a private letter, was to work a division among "the Romish clergy, and I believe I had accomplished it, to the "great security of the government and the Protestants, and against "the opposition of the pope, and his creatures and nuncios, if I had "not been removed."-Carte, ii. App. 101.

1

Carte, 261, 265, 266, 270. Orrery, Letters, 34.

CHAP,
I.

third of their acquisitions. The king by this measure was placed in a situation, not indeed to do justice, but A.D. 1665 to silence the most importunate or most deserving among the petitioners; and, by an explanatory act, he gave to the forty-nine Protestant officers the security which they sought, and added twenty Catholics to a former list of thirty-four nominees, or persons to be restored to their mansion-houses, and two thousand acres of land. But when compensation had thus been made to a few of the sufferers, what, it may be asked, became of the officers who had followed the royal fortune abroad, or of the three thousand Catholics who had entered their claims of innocence ? To all these, the promises which had been made by the act of settlement were broken; the unfortunate claimants were deprived of their rights, and debarred from all hope of future relief. A measure of such sweeping and appalling oppression is perhaps without a parallel in the history of civilized nations. Its injustice could not be denied; and the only apology offered in its behalf was the stern necessity of quieting the fears and jealousies of the Cromwellian settlers, and of establishing on a permanent basis the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland.1

Though, to facilitate the execution of the act, it was provided that any doubt on its construction should be interpreted in favour of the Protestant party, yet so many difficulties occurred, that several years elapsed before the settlement was completely accomplished. The following is the general result. The Protestants were previously in possession of about one moiety of all the profitable lands in the island; of the second moiety, which had been forfeited under the common1 Clar. 112, 134. Carte, 310-316. Irish St. vol. iii. 2—137.