man would not bear exportation across St. George's Channel. As soon as the Cavalier arrived in Ireland, and found that, without the hearty and courageous assistance of his Puritan neighbours, he and all his family would run imminent risk of being murdered by Popish marauders, his hatred of Puritanism, in spite of himself, began to languish and die away. It was remarked by eminent men of both parties that a Protestant who, in Ireland, was called a high Tory would in England have been considered as a moderate Whig.[1]
The Protestant Nonconformists, on their side, endured, with more patience than could have been expected, the sight of the most absurd ecclesiastical establishment that the world has ever seen. Four Archbishops and eighteen Bishops were employed in looking after about a fifth part of the number of churchmen who inhabited the single diocese of London. Of the parochial clergy a large proportion were pluralists and resided at a distance from their cures. There were some who drew from their benefices incomes of little less than a thousand a year, without ever performing any spiritual function. Yet this monstrous institution was much less disliked by the Puritans settled in Ireland than the Church of England by the English sectaries. For in Ireland religious divisions were subordinate to national divisions; and the Presbyterian, while, as a theologian, he could not but condemn the established hierarchy, yet looked on that hierarchy with a sort of complacency when he considered it as a sumptuous and ostentatious trophy of the victory achieved by the great race from which he sprang.[2]
Thus the grievances of the Irish Roman Catholic had hardly anything in common with the grievances of the English Roman
- ↑ In a letter to James found among Bishop Tyrrel's papers, and dated Aug. 14. 1686, are some remarkable expressions. "There are few or none Protestants in that country but such as are joined with the Whigs against the common enemy." And again: "Those that passed for Tories here (that is in England) "publicly espouse the Whig quarrel on the other side the water." Swift said the same thing to King William a few years later "I remember when I was last in England, I told the King that the highest Tories we had with us would make tolerable Whigs there." — Letters concerning the Sacramental Test.
- ↑ The wealth and negligence of the established clergy of Ireland are mentioned in the strongest terms by the Lord Lieutenant Clarendon, a most unexceptionable witness.
