A modern historian, who has displayed rare literary skill in defending many forms of oppression and of cruelty, has lately made the penal code familiar to the public. His great objection to this legislation is that it was not strenuously enforced, and with the exception of the law offering the estate of the Catholic to his eldest son, in the event of his apostasy, he has apparently discovered but little in its provisions repugnant to his sentiments either of justice or of humanity. As regards the system of direct religious repression, it is true that it became, as we shall hereafter see, gradually inoperative. It was impossible, without producing a state of chronic civil war, to enforce such enactments in the midst of a large Catholic population. Rewards were offered for the apprehension of priests, but it needed no small courage to face the hatred of the people. Savage mobs were ever ready to mark out the known priest-hunter, and unjust laws were met by illegal violence. Under the long discipline of the penal laws, the Irish Catholics learnt the lesson which, beyond all others, rulers should dread to teach. They became consummate adepts in the arts of conspiracy and of disguise. Secrets known to hundreds were preserved inviolable from authority. False intelligence baffled and distracted the pursuer, and the dread of some fierce nocturnal vengeance was often sufficient to quell the cupidity of the prosecutor. Bishops came to Ireland in spite of the atrocious penalties to which they were subject, and ordained new priests. What was to be done with them? The savage

very humane man, speaks with much horror of this bill. If,' he says, 'any Papist or Popish priest will not solemnly upon oath renounce the Pretender and also the Pope's power of deposing princes and absolving subjects from their allegiance, let him leave the kingdom or be dealt with as a traitor. But if such a man is ready to do all this, and farther to give security to the Government for his good and loyal behaviour, I must own that I cannot come into a law to put him to death, under the name indeed of high treason, yet

in reality only for adhering to an erroneous religion and worshipping God according to it.' Archbishop Synge's Letters, British Museum Add. MSS., 6117, p. 169. Mr. Froude strongly (though I hope inaccurately) denics that the failure of the bill was due to the greater tolerance of the English Government. He says: 'The Wood hurricane was at this moment unfortunately at its height, and absorbed by its violence any other consideration.'English in Ireland, i. 559–561.

sentence of the law, if duly executed, might have produced a conflagration in Ireland that would have endangered every Protestant life, and the scandal would have rung through Europe. The ambassadors of Catholic Powers in alliance with England continually remonstrated against the severity of English anti-Catholic legislation, and on the other hand the English ministers felt that the execution of priests in Ireland would indefinitely weaken their power of mitigating by their influence the persecution of Protestants on the Continent. The administration of the law was feeble in all its departments, and it was naturally peculiarly so when it was in opposition to the strongest feelings of the great majority of the people. It was difficult to obtain evidence or even juries. It was soon found too that the higher Catholic clergy, if left in peace, were able and willing to render inestimable services to the Government in suppressing sedition and crime, and as it was quite evident that the bulk of the Irish Catholics would not become Protestants, they could not, in the mere interests of order, be left wholly without religious ministration. Besides, there was in reality not much religious fanaticism. Statesmen of the stamp of Walpole and Carteret were quite free from such a motive, and were certainly not disposed to push matters to extremities. The spirit of the eighteenth century was eminently adverse to dogma. The sentiment of nationality, and especially the deep resentment produced by the English restrictions on trade, gradually drew different classes of Irishmen together. The multitude of lukewarm Catholics who abandoned their creed through purely interested motives lowered the religious temperature among the Protestants, while, by removing some of the indifferent, it increased it among the Catholics, and the former grew in time very careless about theological doctrines. The system of registration broke down through the imposition of the abjuration oath, and through the extreme practical difficulty of

1 Catholics were not excluded from petty juries in ordinary cases, but they were excluded (6 Anne, c.

6) in all cases relating to the Anti Catholic laws.

enforcing the penalties. The policy of extinguishing Catholicism by suppressing its services and banishing its bishops was silently abandoned; before the middle of the eighteenth century the laws against Catholic worship were virtually obsolete,' and before the close of the eighteenth century the Parliament which in the beginning of the century had been one of the most intolerant had become one of the most tolerant in Europe.

In this respect the penal code was a failure. In others it was more successful. It was intended to degrade and to impoverish, to destroy in its victims the spring and buoyancy of enterprise, to dig a deep chasm between Catholics and Protestants. These ends it fully attained. It formed the social condition, it regulated the disposition of property, it exercised a most enduring and pernicious influence upon the character of the people, and some of the worst features of the latter may be distinctly traced to its influence. It may be possible to find in the statute-books both of Protestant and Catholic countries laws corresponding to most parts of the Irish penal code, and in some respects surpassing its most atrocious provisions, but it is not the less true that that code, taken as a whole, has a character entirely distinctive. It was directed, not against the few, but against the many. It was not the persecution of a sect, but the degradation of a nation. It was the instrument employed by a

As early as 1715 Archbishop King wrote to Sunderland: 'By law they [the Roman Catholics] are allowed a priest in every parish, which are registered in pursuance of an Act of Parliament made about ten years ago. All bishops, regulars, &c., and all other priests then not registered, are banished, and none allowed to come into the kingdom under severe penalties. The design was that there should be no succession, and many of those then registered are since dead; yet for want of a due execution of the laws many are come in from foreign parts, and there are in the country Popish bishops concealed, that ordain many. Little inquiry of late has been made into these matters.'-Mant's

Hist. of the Church of Ireland, ii. 212. See, too, a very interesting report of the House of Lords in 1731, appointed to consider the state of Popery in this kingdom. O'Conor's Hist. of the Irish Catholics, Append. p. xxiii.

2 Arthur Young, who was in Ireland between 1776 and 1778, says: 'I have conversed on the subject with some of the most distinguished characters in the kingdom, and I cannot after all but declare that the scope, purport, and aim of the laws of discovery as executed, are not against the Catholic religion, which increases under them, but against the industry and property of whoever professes that religion.'-Arthur Young's Tour in Ireland, ii. 141.

conquering race, supported by a neighbouring Power, to crush to the dust the people among whom they were planted. And, indeed, when we remember that the greater part of it was in force for nearly a century, that the victims of its cruelties formed at least three-fourths of the nation, that its degrading and dividing influence extended to every field of social, political, professional, intellectual, and even domestic life, and that it was enacted without the provocation of any rebellion, in defiance of a treaty which distinctly guaranteed the Irish Catholics from any further oppression on account of their religion, it may be justly regarded as one of the blackest pages in the history of persecution. In the words of Burke, 'It was a complete system, full of coherence and consistency, well digested and well composed in all its parts. It was a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance, and as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man.' The judgment formed of it by one of the noblest representatives of English Toryism was very similar. 'The Irish,' said Dr. Johnson, are in a most unnatural state, for we there see the minority prevailing over the majority. There is no instance, even in the Ten Persecutions, of such severity as that which the Protestants of Ireland have exercised against the Catholics.' 1

1

The penal laws against the Roman Catholics, both in England and Ireland, were the immediate consequence of the Revolution, and were mainly the work of the Whig party. In Ireland some of them were carried under William, but by far the greater number of the disabilities were comprised in what Burke has truly described as the ferocious Acts of Anne.' These laws

'Burke's letter to Sir H. Langrishe. Boswell's Life of Johnson, c. xxix. The judgment of Hallam is but little less emphatic. To have exterminated the Catholics by the sword or expelled them like the Moriscoes of Spain would have been little more repugnant

to justice and humanity, but incomparably more politic.'-Hist. of England, iii. p. 401. Mr. Gladstore describes the code as that system of penal laws against Roman Catholics at once pettifogging, base, and cruel. The Vatican Decrees, p. 24.

were carried in 1703-4 and in 1709, and the last of them was brought forward by the Government of Wharton, one of the most conspicuous members of the party. It is somewhat remarkable, however, that the Catholics were not at this time directly deprived of the elective franchise, except so far as the imposition of the oath of abjuration operated as a disqualification. Their extreme poverty, the laws relating to landed property, and their exclusion from the corporations, no doubt, reduced the number of Catholic voters to infinitesimal proportions, but the absolute and formal abolition of the class did not take place till 1727, and appears to have been due to the influence of Primate Boulter, who was also the author of severe laws against nominal converts. In England, as in Ireland, William would gladly have given toleration to the Catholics,' but he was not prepared to risk any serious unpopularity for their sake. The English Act of 1699 is said to have been brought forward by opponents of the Government in order to embarrass him, but it was accepted by a ministry of which Somers was the leading member, and, in spite of the promises which William, before the Revolution, had made to the Emperor, Bishop Burnet assures us that the Court promoted the Bill.' 2

The extent and complication of the Irish penal code, and the great importance of its political consequences, has made it necessary for me to dwell upon it at considerable length, but it will appear evident from the foregoing review that, severe as were the Irish laws, they were exceeded in stringency by those which were imposed upon the English Catholics. In the latter case, however, an evasion was much easier, nor could the Catholics, except under very abnormal circumstances, become a

That he [William] favoured the Roman Catholics as far as he could, and that he was frequently called upon by the Emperor to do so, is most certain.'-Lord Dartmouth's note to Burnet, ii. 228, 229.

2 Burnet's Own Times, ii. 228, 229. Burnet (who supported this Bill) appears to think it originated with the Jacobites, who wished to set

William in opposition to the national sentiment. Lord Dartmouth in his note says: "He [Burnet] does the Jacobites a great deal of wrong; for it was the Whigs gave out that the King was turned Jacobite.' At all events it seems clear that the Bill originated with the Opposition and was adopted by the Government.