AND IRELAND ANTERIOR TO

land was well-nigh divested of its most vital prerogatives, and when the voice of the sovereign had little more weight in the national councils than that of any ordinarily dissentient membe

ation of Ireland,-so grateful to every English adventurer,-could redeem from national contempt; a son of Charles I., whom the revolutionary elements evoked in Church and State by the pedantry of his father, had brought to the scaffold; and brother to the second Charles, one of the most indolent and dissolute monarchs that ever disgraced a throne. Through the last thre

their religion, and to Roman Catholics the right to hear Mass in private houses, was censured, and repealed in its application to the Catholics. In this session was also passed the "Test Act," which continued in full legal force down to the reign of George IV., and which, with some modifications, is virtually observed at the present day. By the passage of this act, every Catholic official in the realm was removed, and the Duke of York lost the command of the British navy, in which he had won high distinction, and which he had brought to a greater degree of efficiency than it had hitherto known. These and similar marks of disapprobation were specially meant for James, who was then heir-presumptive, and showed him the dangers that beset his way to the

en; his daughters, by his former wife, were educated in the Protestant faith, and had each been espoused

than much blood-letting. The Duke of Monmouth, too, the natural son of Charles, was a great favorite with a large portion of the English people, and had even, during the life of his father, struck for the crown; and though banis

fiscated during the reign of his immediate predecessors. But he was never popular. Though his low garrulity and set apothegms were hailed by the vile minions by whom he was constantly surrounded, as the sublimation of wisdom, they never failed to plant a thorn in the breast of the nobles, and with them he was an object of unmitigated contempt-deeply felt, but not openly expressed. Still the courtiers and the king got along pretty well, and each improved after a mutua

as occasion answered. Among the latter may be reckoned Sir Walter Scott, by whom we are told that the restless spirits of the former reign might calmly enjoy "the peace which James the peaceful gave." But, then, this was only in poetic romaunt, and by one who greatly despised him in romanti

ural avarice was keen, and it was still further whetted by Scotch self-seekers, who thronged lobby and vestibule in all their greedy officiousness. Their rapacity had to be appeased. The people of England, too, were grown sullen and discontented; a spiritual madness had lately overspread the land, and produced a state of society alway

llaying the causes that led to it. The English "Undertakers," however, looked on an Irish war as a prelude to a general confiscation, and felt bitter disappointment at the terms accorded to the Irish rebels by the late queen. The apportionment of one province, which took place after the death of Desmond, did not satisfy them, while Ulster, a wealthy and populous one, was still left in the possession of the natives. The Scotch followers of James could not understand the thing at all, and attributed it to the dotage of the queen. In this state of affairs, the king saw an opportunity of rendering himself acceptable alike to his English and Scotch subjects. It was an age fruitful in plots and expedients, when plunder took the name of civilization, and avarice stalked forth under the cloak of religion. "The artful Cecil," the contriver and discoverer of many plots, was consulted by the king, and a scheme was

he master-spirit-"The artful Cecil." From this he knew that his doom was sealed should he abide the action of the council, before which he had been summoned. He accordingly notified the chiefs o

fes, that the only ground and motive of this high contempt, in these men's departure, hath been the private knowledge and inward terrour of their own guiltinesse," etc. "But," says Mitchell, "no attempt to give these proofs was ever made," and never will be. The very manner of their departure is a proof of innocence. Had there been a conspiracy, they would have abided the result, and sold their lives with their lands at a price dear enough to the English enemy. But they went in the belief that their lives and lands alone were what the king sought, and that by quitting the country, they would save the minor chieftains and their clansmen from the greed of England. They calculated erroneously, for this did not accord with the design of the infamous king, and the whole province

eople can rehearse them like a catechism. "In the six counties of Donegal, Tyrone, Derry, Farmanagh, Cavan, and Armagh, a tract of country containing 500,000 acres, was seized upon by the king and parcelled out in lots to Undertakers." 2 The "domains" of the attainted lo

bernia," "that after the prescribed number of freeholders and leaseholders were settled on every townland, and the rents therein set down, they might let the remainder to natives, for lives, so as

entator, have never been told, and never will be. Even its remoter consequence at the present day can scarcely be alluded to without opening up wounds but imperfectly healed, and memories too bitter for wholesome reflection. It renewed, by one dash of the royal pen, all the wrongs of the preceding centuries, and filled the last

ars, it was a continual struggle for the preservation of the royal prerogatives. These prerogatives were yielded, one by one, to the fanatical spirit of the age, and the last r

d manors were possessed by new lords; and as for the Church, its glebes had passed to the early conformists, and its cash to the royal coffers. Hatred on the one hand, and revenge on the other, the usual concomitants of all violent changes in civil or ecclesiastical bodies, were the order of the day. Among those who had become recipients of the spoils, a feeling of insecurity was

and, known by the general name of "Nonconformists." The highways and by-ways of England and Scotland resounded with their religious disquisitions; every man had become an interpreter and a prophet. The most powerful of those sects were the Puritans of England, and the Covenanters of Scotland, who, though differing in religious principles, closely assimilated in their hatred of all monarchical government, and of the outward ceremonies of divine worship. Practising greater simplicity, they laid claim to greater purity of religion, until they at length believed

t it can be noticed in this place no further than its effect on Ireland; there it helped to swell the tide of oppressio

s. But their action was anticipated, and while their leaders were considering a course of procedure, a series of outrages was perpetrated in the province of Ulster which precipitated them at once into the vortex of rebellion. A garrison of Scotch soldiers, stationed at Carrickfergus, in the dead of night, and without premonition, made a descent on Island Magee, a peninsula in the neighborhood, and drove all its inhabitants, to the number of 3,000, over the cliffs into the sea; scarce a soul escaping to tell their cruel fate. The Catholic inhabita

st each other. So they fought for some time, the latter being generally successful, and the king at last offered concessions, but too late to redeem his fallen cause. The result is history; the king lost his head; Cromwell invaded Ireland; O'Neil, the only soldier capable of opposing him, is said to have been poisoned, and after his death Cromwell met with but futile opposition. The son of the decapitated king, after a few abortive attempts to secure the crown, became a refugee until the death of Cromwell, when he was recalled, through a popular reaction, and crowned as Charles II.:-and this is called the Restoration. It is called the Restoration, because it restored the throne to

all Irish questions were then transferable. It is needless to say that those suits terminated in establishing defective titles in the natives: the lands became the prey of the crown or its cormorants, and expatriation or sl

this impending calamity. The hostility to James, always bitter, grew more open and violent as the king declined. In 1680, the Earl of Shaftesbury had him indicted in Westminster Hall, as a popish recusant; but the Chief-Justice dismissed the suit. In 1681, during a temporary illness of the king, a rebellion was set on foot by Shaftesbury, the Duke of Argyle, Lord William Russell, and others. The avowed object was the restoration of The Protectorate, but the covert design, to supplant the Du

pathy, would more than indicate this-that "he was too old to go again upon his travels." Yet it scarcely serves as an excuse for a long life wasted, and the noble ends of government neglected. But this much is well known in Ireland,-too well to be forgotten,-that he mulcted his English subjects to carry on his debaucheries; that he despoiled the Irish Catholics to remunerate his English creditors, and when both sources failed, he became a stipendiary on the bounty of the French king, bequeathing to his successor an exhausted exchequer, a turbulent people, a crown pawned for many a debt, and yet with many an heir-expectant. It required but a short time for James to establish facts which were patent to all minds but his: that the nobles by w