safely perform his publick ministrations. To enumerate all the acts of violence which they endured were infinite. But Dr. King has mentioned the names of sixteen or seventeen clergymen, and specified the outrages which were offered to them by assault, by imprisonment, by menaces, by imprecations; by the musket and the lighted match, by the naked sword, and by the bludgeon; in the street and in the highway, in the church and in the churchyard, in the reading-desk and in the pulpit; whilst conducting the devotions, or ministering to the instructions of the living, or whilst performing the last solemn offices over the dead. Their visitations of the sick and the dying were impeded or interrupted by the Popish priests; who with insults and threats pretended to be acting by the king's authority, and claimed the faithful Protestant and member of the Church as a convert to the Romish corruptions.

Archbishop of

missary.

The conduct of Dr. King himself at this trying Dr. King, the crisis is worthy of grateful recollection. The Arch- Dublin's combishop of Dublin, when compelled to fly for his personal safety, substituted Dr. King as his commissary, to visit and take care of his diocese during his absence. But a doubt having arisen about the legal execution of the commission, Dr. King declined the office; and prevailed upon the two chapters of Christ Church and St. Patrick's, of the latter of which he had been elected dean, to choose the Bishop of Dopping, bishop Meath as administrator of the spiritualties, in the absence of the archbishop. He himself nevertheless took an active and zealous part in assisting the bishop to meet the spiritual necessities, and promote the comfort and benefit, of those distressed members of the Church who were precluded by poverty from fleeing into England; or who, having secured some

of Meath.

Excellent conduct of Bishop Dopping.

small remnant of their property from plunder, continued to reside at home with the hope of preserving it. And thus, by the zealous co-operation of these good men, the churches of the diocese were regulated, and the deserted parishes supplied with wellqualified curates, so that scarce a congregation was destitute of a pastor.

The Bishop of Meath, who had distinguished himself by attacking Popery in the pulpit so early as January, 1686, with such energy and effect as to have caused the king to remark upon it in a letter to Lord Clarendon, was moreover now again honourably distinguished for the eloquence, fortitude, intrepidity, and magnanimity with which he laboured to support the sinking cause of the Church; frequently applying, by petition, to the government in its behalf; and speaking in the House of Lords, in 1689, with great freedom, energy, and decision, against the iniquitous and nefarious proceedings of King James, in co-operation with the parliament, which at that time he caused to assemble.

These proceedings, indeed, stand upon the page of history as an example of the most flagitious and unprecedented iniquity, the particulars of which it is now our business to state.

SECTION II.

The King's arrival in Ireland.

A Parliament.

Mode of

Its

calling it. ts composition. Repeal of the Act of Settlement. Act of Attainder. Proscriptions under it. atrocity.

The king's arri- THE king having been defeated in his attempts to

val in Ireland.

undermine and subvert the Church of England, and to establish Popery upon its ruins in that kingdom,

and having compensated the unholy enterprise by the sacrifice of his crown, abandoned that lost portion of his hereditary dominions, and, after a brief sojourn in France, threw himself into the arms of his Popish subjects in Ireland, who cordially welcomed him to their shores. Landing at Kinsale on the 12th of March, 1689, he was received by the March 12, 1689. Lord Deputy Tyrconnel, lately elevated to the rank

of a duke, and conducted to Cork, where in the chapel of the Franciscan monastery, celebrated for the possession of a well, blessed with supernatural powers by the miraculous intercession of the founder,

Cork.

he heard mass, being supported through the streets Hears mass at of the city by two friars of St. Francis, and attended by others of the brethren arrayed in the habits of their order'.

host in Dublin, March 24.

Proceeding thence to Dublin, which he entered Worships the with a large train of attendants on the 24th of the same month, his entrance was greeted by the whole body of the Popish hierarchy and clergy, invested with all the pride, pomp, and circumstance of their appropriate habiliments and decorations, and bearing with them, in solemn procession, the consecrated wafer, before which he bowed with the most lowly adoration, amidst the acclamations of a vast multitude of the people.

We have hitherto noticed the fostering of Popery, and the injuries inflicted on the Church, under the auspices, indeed, of the sovereign, but by the intermediate agency of his Viceroy. We have now to record proceedings, designated in the preceding section, as of the most flagitious and unprecedented iniquity, sanctioned by the immediate authority and 'SMITH'S History of Cork, i, 389.

Proceedings

under the autho

rity of the king.

Parliament summoned, March

25, 1699.

Acts of Settlement and Explanation.

supervision of the sovereign himself. And if in the sequel he was constrained to adopt the course that he followed, notwithstanding his own inclination to the contrary, and if he had any real pretension to the character which has been generally attributed to him, of a well-intentioned and upright, although a weak and ill-judging man, he must have been keenly sensible of the extravagant and distressing price which he paid for his Irish reception and support; that price was paid by his consent to the measures of the parliament which he was immediately induced to assemble, especially and first of all by his consent to the Act for attainting the Protestants of Ireland, and forfeiting their estates.

This act was passed in a parliament, which was summoned by the king's proclamation, dated March the 25th, the day after his arrival in Dublin; and . met on the 7th of May, 1689, and continued its sittings till the 20th of the following July. The calling of the parliament has been supposed to be compulsory on the part of the king; and the result of applications, which he was unable to resist, forcibly pressed upon his reluctant acquiescence by the Popish claimants of estates, which had been forfeited in the Rebellion of 1641, and which, by the "Acts of Settlement and Explanation," in King Charles the Second's reign, had been confirmed to the Protestant proprietors, by whom they had been since, and still continued to be, possessed.

Lord Clarendon, on being sent to Ireland as lord lieutenant, had it in charge from King James to declare, that he would preserve the Acts of Settlement and Explanation inviolable. He accordingly made the declaration in council: and further gave corresponding injunctions to all the judges, who

solemnly declared the same on the bench in their respective circuits. In obedience also to the king's commands, Sir Charles Porter, at that time lord chancellor, made solemn declaration from the bench of his majesty's assurance, that he would preserve those acts as the Magna Charta of Ireland: a declaration, which was afterwards repeated by his successor, Lord Chancellor Fitton. Two-thirds of the lands of Ireland were now held by the tenure, recognised, determined, and established by these acts: some of the lands having been obtained by original grants from the crown; to others the possessors having succeeded by inheritance; others, again, having been procured from their lawful possessors by purchase for valuable considerations.

pealing them

In order to repeal those acts, and so to recover Purpose of repossession of the property, its former owners, or their representatives, are said to have compelled the unhappy and embarrassed king, reluctant as he was in giving his consent, to the assembling of a parliament, which, being composed of such materials as they should select and compact, might be instrumental in accomplishing their purposes.

the parliament.

The composition of the parliament was thus Composition of artfully managed. The House of Lords consisted of about thirty-five temporal peers, Papists, including those who had been outlawed after the Rebellion of 1641, and whose attainder was now reversed, that

they might be qualified to sit; and of several new Temporal peers. creations, recently made by the king himself for the occasion, such as the Lord Chancellor Fitton, created Lord Gosworth; Nugent, Lord Riverstown; Macarthy, Lord Mountcashel; Browne, Lord Kenmare; and some others. On the other hand, there