to the constitution of the kingdom1." The "government of the church by archbishops and bishops was declared to be against the Word of God, and to be an enemy to the propagation of the true reformed protestant religion; and, therefore, to be utterly abolished, and their lands given to the king, his heirs, and successors." They wrenched the power of calling parliament together out of the king's hands, and which were to assemble once in three years upon a certain day, without any summons from the king; and all the great officers of State were to be nominated by parliament, independent of the king. All these acts, and whatsoever else the Covenanting lords demanded of him concerning either church or state, the weak and subdued monarch ratified and confirmed. Not contented with conferring unmerited honours upon his enemies in proportion to the mischief they had done or were capable of doing, he depressed his loyal friends, and submitted to the degradation of soliciting their pardon from the Covenanters upon condition that "they came not near the king's presence, nor received any benefit from him." The king's unnatural and unkingly conduct disgusted his loyal friends, some of whom became indifferent how his affairs went, and therefore made no farther attempts to support him; whilst others of more generous dispositions continued their duty, and said "that men ought to do what belongs to conscience and honour; but if any engaged for him out of hope of reward, they might be readily disappointed." And the lord Carnwath, who was most faithfully attached to his majesty, jocularly remarked, when he saw the golden shower falling amongst well-known traitors, "that he would go to Ireland and join Sir Phelim O'Neale, the chief of the rebels, and then he was sure the king would prefer him 2." In short, none but a man stricken with judicial madness could have acted as Charles unfortunately did. "He seemed," says the noble historian of the rebellion, "to have made that progress into Scotland, only that he might make a perfect deed of gift of that kingdom, which he could never have done so absolutely without going thither3." In the conclusion of the parliament, the newmade earl of Loudon, the chancellor, in the name of the nobility, and Sir Thomas Hope, jun. in the name of the Commons, after moistening "the king's hand with Covenanting tears," made the most adulatory speeches to his majesty for the satisfaction,

1 Clarendon's History of the Rebellion, ii. 35, 36.

2 Guthry's Memoirs, 94.

3 Clarendon's History of the Rebellion, ii. 38.-Guthry's Memoirs, 92.-. Napier's Montrose and Covenanters.

that is, for the real power which he had conceded to them, and for the contentment concerning religion and liberty; so that now they said "a contented king was to depart from a contented country;" but the saluting cannon from the castle was quickly reverberated on the fields of Naseby and of Marston Moor. With a stretch of hypocrisy almost unparalleled, the Covenanters revived an old statute, and caused it to be proclaimed throughout the whole kingdom," that it should be detestable and damnable treason, in the highest degree, for any of the Scottish nation, conjunctly or singly, to levy arms or any military forces, upon any pretext whatsoever, without the king's royal commission." "But," says Nalson, "it seems presbyterians and papists agree in this particular, that no faith is to be kept with heretics; for they shortly after proved their own popes, and absolved themselves and the nation from the obligation of this law, by raising men and joining with the English rebels, as in due time we shall see.'

WHILST THE KING was suffering under the mental malady or monomania of concession, and was actually signing away all his royal power and authority, he received a bloody warning against his folly in the accounts brought to him of the Irish rebellion. Seeing him madly engaged in conceding his crown and his life away, the Irish papists took the opportunity of revolting and seizing his castles and magazines, and, at the instigation of their priests, of massacring the loyal reformed catholics. At the moment when they were in open rebellion, Sir Phelim O'Neale and other chiefs published declarations of the loyalty of their hearts, and the uprightness of their intentions, and, like their fellow rebels in Scotland, they solemnly took God to witness of their devotion and loyalty to the king, and that they designed not the least diminution of his majesty's greatness, but rather that they were a contented people with a contented king. Various causes have been assigned for this dreadful and unparalleled massacre, so much at variance with the spirit of Christianity; but the true one was the bull issued by pope Urban VIII., in which he says, "in imitation of their godly and worthy ancestors, to endeavour by force to deliver their thralled nation from the oppressions and grievous injuries of the heretics, wherewith this long time it hath been afflicted and heavily burthened; and gallantly do in them what lieth to extirpate and totally root out these workers of iniquity, who in this kingdom of Ireland had infected, and were always striving to infect, the mass of catholic purity with the pestiferous leven of heretical

[malignant] contagion1." It is curious to remark the coincidence of the words of this bull and of the solemn League and Covenant; to root out the great bulwark of protestantism, the reformed episcopal church, they both use exactly the same word, extirpate, and both parties understood it in the same literal meaning: although the Scotch had not the opportunity to carry it to the same extent, and to the same bloody effect, as the Irish rebels had, yet the will and the intention were the same in both.

Sir James Ware says he could find no traces of the reformation in Ireland earlier than about nine years previous to the death of Henry VIII. when it was nominally introduced into that kingdom; but the revenues of the church continued in the possession of the Romish hierarchy, some of whom pretended to conform, that they might have the greater power of injuring the reformed catholic church. Bishop Taylor says that the popish bishops and priests seemed to conform, that, keeping their bishoprics, they might enrich their kindred and dilapidate the revenues of the church, which, by pretended offices, false informations, fee-farms at contemptible rents and ungodly alienations, were made low as poverty itself, and unfit to minister to the needs of them that served at the altar, or for the noblest purposes of religion. The state of religion was very little, if any, improved in the reign of Edward VI. John Bale, bishop of Ossory, says that those prelates and clergy which had only pretended to conform to the reformation were engaged in the most licentious practices. The Supper of our Lord "was altogether used as a popish mass, with the old apish toys of antichrist, in bowings and beckonings, kneelings and knockings; the Lord's death, after St. Paul's doctrine, neither preached nor yet spoken of. There wailed they over the dead with prodigious howlings and patterings, as though their souls had not been quieted in Christ and redeemed by his passion." If the bishops were apish hypocrites, the inferior clergy were equally infected with the same sin, as bishop Bale distinctly shews. During the short and inglorious reign of bloody Mary, "the apish toys of antichrist" were re-established in their full vigour; but even in the reign of her successor there was very little improvement in the church of Ireland; for "she slept secure amidst the orthodoxy of her English reformers, and permitted that abandoned and devoted country to continue in its cheerless idolatry." Sir Henry Sidney, her deputy, in one of his letters to the queen, says, "the church is foul, deformed, and cruelly crushed but your majesty may believe it, that, upon

'Musgrave's Irish Rebellion.

the face of the earth, where Christ is professed, there is not a church in so miserable a case1." To many of the dioceses no bishops had ever been presented during Elizabeth's or her three predecessors' reigns; and up to James the first's time, Ulster had never enjoyed even a nominal reformation.

James's accession to the crown of England was a happier era in the ecclesiastical affairs of Ireland; and his plantation of Ulster is a monument of his wisdom and patriotism evident to this day. His deputy, lord Chichester, said he found the churches "all ruinous, and many utterly defaced;" and "the estates of the bishops in Ulster were much entangled, and altogether unprofitable to the bishops." James ordered all the ecclesiastical lands to be restored to the bishops, he compelled the patentees to accept compositions for the sites of cathedral churches and lands which they had surreptitiously obtained, and recommended the bishops to vacate all their impropriations, and to relinquish all tithes paid to them by incumbents, and instead he granted them the crown lands. The gunpowder plot, and the intrigues of the jesuits in Ireland, alarmed James, and made him draw the reins tighter over the popish recusants, when they universally withdrew from the parish churches. which they had previously frequented, and thus they commenced by their separation, that schism which they have ever since kept up. But the chief fault lay in there having been no translation of the Scriptures and Liturgy into the native language of the people; for, to the great majority, the prayers in English were as little understood as the mass in Latin.

Charles's embarrassments by foreign war and domestic factions excited an universal ferment among the native Irish. The papists watched with intense interest the progress of the puritans and the covenanters, and looked with complacency on the disorder and distractions of his reign, with his insane concessions, as peculiarly favourable to the aggrandizement of popery; and they manifested the utmost contempt for the penal statutes which had been made for the protection of the established church. At the commencement of his reign, the church was in the most deplorable condition. Many of the cathedrals, and most of the parish churches, were roofless, and unfit to be repaired, the glebe houses ruined, and the possessions of the church alienated. Though the bishoprics were numerous, yet they were of trifling value; hence the ruinous system of uniting two or more of them under one bishop. The protestant clergy are represented as having been illiterate, loose in their morals,

1 Sir John Davie's Tracts.-Sir Henry Sidney's Letters, i. 112-113.

and careless in the performance of their sacred duties. They were surrounded by a multitude of the most bigoted and ferocious papists, on the one hand, and, on the other, by a host of equally bigoted and sworn enemies, the Scottish covenanters, who had been imported into Ulster by Sir Hugh Montgomery, and other planters, and who daily offered insults to the government and worship of the established church. The earl of Strafford sincerely and in earnest endeavoured to restore the regularity and decency of divine worship in the churches in Dublin; and he next inquired into the state of the church and clergy throughout the kingdom. In a report which he made to archbishop Laud, he says,-" that the church suffered from an unlearned clergy, which had not so much as the outward form of churchmen to cover themselves with, nor their persons any way reverenced or protected; that the churches were unbuilt-the parsonage houses utterly ruinedthe people untaught, through the non-residence of the clergy— rites and ceremonies of the church run over without all decency of habit, order, or gravity, in the course of the service, -the possessions of the church chiefly in lay hands,-the bishops alienating their very principal houses and demesnes to their children and strangers, and the popish titulars exercising the whilst a foreign jurisdiction, much greater than theirs." This melancholy account is amply confirmed by bishop Bedell, who says, in a letter to archbishop Laud," and shortly to speak much ill nature in a few words, the church is very miserable."

Burnett says that the popish "priests were a strange sort of people, that knew generally nothing but the reading of their offices, which were not so much as understood by many of them, and they taught the people nothing but the saying their paters and aves in Latin. For they had no sort of notion of christianity, but only knew that they were to depend on their priests, and were to confess such of their actions as they call sins, and were to pay their tithes." The fury of the covenanting persecution drove many of the Scottish clergy, who had refused to sign that bond for their own extirpation, out of their livings, with acts of violence and cruelty, and many of them took shelter in Ireland. Among these was one Corbett, who published a book in Dublin, and drew a lively and exact parallel between the covenanters and the jesuits. Great exertions were made, under the protection of Archibald Adair, a Scotchman, bishop of Killala, to introduce the covenant into the province of Ulster; for which he was deprived, and Dr. John Maxwell, bishop of Ross, who had been driven from his