Fractured Emerald: Ireland by Emily Hahn

Author:Emily Hahn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2014-05-11T01:17:48+00:00

Chapter 13

The Protestants of Ireland had had a bad scare and were determined not to be caught again. James II was gone, it was true, but who could be sure that he would not be smuggled back in? The only way to be safe was to stamp out popery altogether, said the extremists, and to stamp it out one must get rid of the priests. The less extreme favored stamping out by easy stages, arguing that wholesale action would call down retaliatory measures from Spain, France, and the Holy Roman Empire, or Austria. Ireland’s Catholic clergy had proved itself tenacious, hanging on all through the years without legal provision for their livings. But if by some other method than starvation they could be eradicated, everyone would have to become Protestant whether he wanted to or not, and the Catholic Church would wither away.

It was out of such simple processes of reasoning that the Dublin parliament, by this time of course exclusively Protestant, evolved the notorious anti-popery acts. The period of the Penal Laws, as history calls them, has become one of the leading scandals in the scandal-filled story of Anglo-Irish relations, and no one has been harsher on the subject than the Protestant Edmund Curtis, who condemns William III and his sister-in-law Anne quite as severely as he does the legislators who actually drew up the laws. Panic and cruel spirit animated parliament throughout the period, he says, especially when they passed an act that disarmed the so-called papists. “No ‘papist’ might own a horse worth above five pounds, and no gunsmith might take a Catholic apprentice….Another act made it illegal for Catholics to go for education abroad and forbade them to keep a public school at home. The University of Dublin was already closed to them as regards degrees, fellowships, and scholarships….William indeed and the noble spirits of England should have vetoed [the parliament’s] enactments, but it was much easier to yield to the ‘No Popery’ spirit in both countries” (A History of Ireland, p. 280). The picture is accurate as far as it goes—sweeping generalizations are unavoidable in comprehensive histories. It remains for other writers, who work in smaller areas, to demonstrate that not all non-Catholics in Ireland and England subscribed to the views of the No Popery group. Mrs. Maureen Wall in The Penal Laws, 1691-1760 shows us that there were dissenters and Dissenters, and that their efforts, combined with the passive resistance of the Catholics themselves, frustrated panic and cruel spirit in the end.

The opening attack in the anti-popery campaign was the Banishment Act of 1697, which called for the expulsion from Ireland of all Catholic bishops and other high ecclesiastical dignitaries—”all papish archbishops, bishops, vicars general, deans, Jesuits, monks, friars and all other regular popish clergy and all Papists exercising ecclesiastical jurisdiction.” These were to be out of the country by May 1, 1698, on pain of being transported. Any who returned after transportation would be judged guilty of high treason and punished accordingly, as would persons harboring such ecclesiastics and justices of the peace who spared them.

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