SECTION VI. FROM the picture of this astonishing Parliament we turn to the people whom it represented. England in her better days had planted Ireland with Protestant colonists, who were designed to reclaim and civilize it. Of these colonists the natural leaders enjoyed a selfgranted and perpetual leave of absence. The mother country having exchanged Puritan godliness for the commercial gospel, thought fit to paralyze those who remained and were industrious, for the benefit of the Scotch and English manufacturers. The settlers, finding selfishness and injustice the rule of the country, followed naturally so inviting an example. Before the Whiteboy agitation had abated in Tipperary, similar disturbances, rising from analogous causes, had appeared among the Presbyterian farmers of Ulster. In the south the especial grievances had been the tithing the potato gardens, the enclosure of commons, and the raising of rents. To these, which existed in equal force in the north, was added a form of extortion in the county cess. 'Neither the laws,' wrote Lord Townshend to the Home Secretary, 'nor provincial justice, are administered here as in England. Neither the quarter sessions nor the grand juries give the counties the same speedy relief, nor maintain the like respect, as with us. The chief object of the grand juries is so to dispose of the county cesses as best suits their party views and private convenience. The sums raised by CHAP. II. 1772. BOOK V. 1772. these gentlemen throughout the kingdom amount to not less than 130,000l. per annum, which is levied upon the tenantry, the lower classes of which are in a state of poverty not to be described. It may easily be imagined what the poor people feel when these charges are added to rents already stretched to the uttermost.' 91 The Ulster Protestants, being more patient and law-abiding than the Catholics of the south, had been peculiarly exposed to these exacting and oppressive cesses. 'It is notorious,' Captain Erskine reported, who was sent by Townshend to the north to examine into the complaints which were brought to him, 'what use is made by grand juries of the powers given them to lay cess for roads and bridges. Jobs upon jobs, one more infamous than another, serve to support the interests of some leading men in the country. I do not believe the roads in any part of the world are as bad as in these five counties;2 yet I am told they have, from time immemorial, been cessed by their grand juries at 50,000l. a year.'s In 1764 parties of the poorer tenants collected under the name of Oak Boys, to bring the landlords into more moderate dealing with them. Cattle were houghed or slashed. Farmsteads were burnt. Combinations were formed to resist cess and rent and tithe. The Oak Boys, however, never became for midable, and the landlords had gone on in the high oppressive style which had become natural to them. The increase of the linen trade in the first years Townshend's Government gave them fresh opportu of 3 Captain Erskine to Mr. Lee, April 10, 1772. S. P. O. nities. The northern Protestants,' in a 'remonstrance' which they sent up to the Government, drew an instructive picture of the treatment to which they had been subjected. During the first half of the century, they said, 'the wise conduct and encouragement of the nobility of Ulster' had so developed the flax manufacture, that the workpeople had been enabled to make decent settlements and live comfortably. The arable lands were all occupied and well cultivated. The inhabitants multiplied, the country prospered. The landlords thirsted to share the people's benefits by raising their rents, which would have been very reasonable in a moderate degree, but of late they had run to great excesses.' 'When the tenant's lease was ended they published in the newspapers that such a parcel of land was to be let, and that proposals in writing would be received for it. They invited every covetous, envious, and malicious person to offer for his neighbour's possessions and improvements. The tenant, knowing he must be the highest bidder or turn out, he knew not whither, would offer more than the value. If he complained to the landlord that it was too dear, the landlord answered that he knew it was so, but as it was in a trading country, the tenant must make up the deficiency by his industry. Those who possessed the greatest estates were now so rich that they could not find delicacies in their own country to bestow their wealth on, but carried it abroad, to lavish there the entire days' sweat of thousands of their poor people. They drained the country, and neglected their own duties. Nature assigned the landlord to be a father and counsellor of his people, that he might keep peace and order among them, and protect them and CHAP. II. 1772. BOOK V. 1772. encourage industry. Though the order of things had made it necessary that the lower should serve under the higher, yet the charter of dominion had not said that the lower should suffer by the higher.'1 Political economy, though passing into practical life, had not yet become the rule of administrations. George the Third ordered Townshend to do his utmost to convince the landlords of their infatuation.'2 Townshend himself had already introduced a Tenants' Protection Bill into the Irish Parliament, but had been defeated by the popularity-hunting party in the House of Commons.'s At length a flagrant and enormous act of tyranny set light to the fuel which was lying everywhere ready to kindle. Sir Arthur Chichester, the great Viceroy of Ireland under James the First, was of all Englishmen who ever settled in the country the most useful to it. His descendant, the Lord Donegal of whom it has become necessary to speak, was, perhaps, the person who inflicted the greatest injury on it. Sir Arthur had been rewarded for his services by vast estates in the county Antrim. The fifth Earl and first Marquis of Donegal, already, by the growth of Belfast, by the fruits of other men's labours while he was sitting still, enormously rich, found his income still unequal to his yet more enormous expenditure. His name is looked for in vain among the nobles who, in return for their high places, were found in the active service of their country. He was one of those habitual and splendid absentees who discharged his duties to the God who made him by consenting 1 'Remonstrance of the Northern Protestants.'-Irish MSS., 1772. S. P. O. 2Rochford to Townshend, April 6, 1772.' 3 Townshend to Rochford, March 11.' S. P. O. to exist, and to the country which supported him by CHAP. magnificently doing as he would with his own. Many of his Antrim leases having fallen in simultaneously, he demanded a hundred thousand pounds in fines for the renewal of them. The tenants, all Protestants, offered the interest of the money in addition to the rent. It could not be. Speculative Belfast capitalists paid the fine, and took the lands over the heads of the tenants to sublet. A Mr. Upton, another great Antrim proprietor, imitated the example, and at once a whole country side were driven from their habitations.' The sturdy Scots, who in five generations had reclaimed Antrim from the wilderness, saw the farms which they and their fathers had made valuable let by auction to the highest bidder; and when they refused to submit themselves to robbery, saw them let to others, and let in many instances to Catholics, who would promise anything to recover their hold upon the soil.1 6 1 The law may warrant these proceedings, but will not justify them,' wrote Captain Erskine, when the evicted peasants and artisans were meeting to express their sense of them. 'Should the causes of these riots be looked into, it will be found that few have had juster foundations. When the consequences of driving six or seven thousand manufacturing and labouring families out of Ireland come to be felt, I question whether the rectitude of these gentlemen's intentions will be held by the world a sufficient excuse for the irreparable damage they are doing."2 1 I am not ignorant that Arthur Young palliates these evictions. He wrote before the consequences which extended from the Old World to the New had distinctly developed 2 Captain Erskine to Mr. Lee, II. 1772. |