Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon Part 4

As a curb upon the national spirit of rebellion, Clarendon thought that, although they were monuments of Cromwellian rule, the garrisons were essential. He did all he could to maintain them; but Lauderdale was able to carry the King with him in their abolition on the plea of their injury to national pride, and their certain result in national discontent, and Clarendon's advice was set aside. The popularity which thereby resulted was a strong a.s.set in Lauderdale's favour.

A question of even more importance was that of the method of administration. Although the Scottish Parliament was restored, Clarendon was no favourer of unrestricted Home Rule, and rightly discerned its dangers at once to the Crown and to responsible Government. He insisted that the Committee of Privy Council, which dealt with Scotland, should meet in London, and that six English Privy Councillors should be members of it. Here, again, it was an easy matter for Lauderdale to urge the offence that would thus be given to Scottish feelings. His real motive for resistance was the curb that would thus be placed on that power which he was plotting to engross in his own hands. Had it been preserved, that council would have formed a defence of Scottish liberties; its tincture of impartial statesmans.h.i.+p would have checked the growth of the petty local tyrants, and limited their influence. For two or three years Clarendon was able to maintain this independent council; it was only when his vigilance failed, and when his attention was otherwise engaged, that Lauderdale's pertinacity was rewarded, and a pernicious system of local tyranny admitted. [Footnote: It is not unimportant to note that even Burnet's Scottish sympathies and confirmed Whiggism did not prevent his outspoken preference for Clarendon's plan over that of Lauderdale.]

But the central point of combat was that regarding the restoration of the Episcopal form. It was only natural that Clarendon, from his own tastes and traditions, as well as from the memory of his first master's desires, should have placed this object first. Even at Breda, Sharp--afterwards Archbishop of St. Andrews--had obtained audience of Clarendon, and as the accredited agent of Middleton and Glencairn, had shown a readiness to transfer his own allegiance from Presbyterianism to Episcopacy.

Clarendon's sympathy led him to give to Sharp a trust that was little merited, and he became, through Sharp's means, involved in an intricate maze of double-dealing which sought to lull the suspicions of the Presbyterians to sleep, while secretly paving the way for a complete Episcopal restoration. Sharp's dominating motive was unabashed personal ambition. He was ready to make compromising concessions in points of principle, in order to obtain the outward recognition of Episcopacy, and the re-establishment of the Episcopal sees. Clarendon knew well, from old experience, the danger of exciting national susceptibilities, and was wise enough to urge caution to his subordinates; but cautious and wary statesmans.h.i.+p was the last thing to be expected from the double dealing of Sharp, or in the drunken counsels of Middleton and his adherents.

Meanwhile Lauderdale, while he did not hesitate to decry the Covenant, and to make eager profession of his own recantation of its bigotry, urged that no premature steps should be taken for restoring Episcopacy. That it would come in time he had no doubt; but it would be the height of folly to arouse susceptibilities that might easily be soothed by cautious dealing into a peaceable acceptance of the ecclesiastical forms that were approved at Court.

[Ill.u.s.tration: JOHN MAITLAND, DUKE OF LAUDERDALE. (_From the original by Sir Peter Lely, in the National Portrait Gallery._)]

But Middleton and his adherents were now determined to carry matters with a high hand. Clarendon must have chafed to see a policy, with which in general he agreed, pressed with a recklessness that was certain to defeat itself. An Act was pa.s.sed rescinding at one stroke all Acts pa.s.sed since 1633. Burnet's phrase about it is, for once, scarcely too strong. "It was a most extravagant Act, and only fit to be concluded after a drunken bout." In that it agreed only too closely with other projects devised by Middleton and his convivial band. Lauderdale protested; and this time, if we are to believe Burnet, Clarendon found himself obliged to side with the Scottish Minister whom he most profoundly suspected.

In this course matters proceeded. In 1662, by an Act drafted by the suspicious hand of Sharp, Episcopacy was restored, but restored under auspices that reflected little credit on the statecraft that guided its restoration. The details of Scottish political intrigue--culminating in a deadly struggle of irresponsible tyranny with all the forces of enthusiastic religious frenzy--do not belong to Clarendon's life. But he could view their progress, so far as he himself was concerned in it, with nothing but disappointment. He was powerless to break down what he believed to be the narrow-minded obstinacy of national prejudice. He saw that the apparent triumph of Episcopacy was achieved by agents who made themselves contemptible in the eyes of their countrymen, and that it was bought at the price of arousing indomitable and stubborn resistance. He saw his own more immediate adherent, Middleton, playing into the shrewder hands of the far abler Lauderdale, by every error of tactics, by perverse neglect of the simplest rules of statecraft, by blundering deceptions and undisguised self-seeking. Again and again he found that the King, who, after all, cared but little for the distinctions between the sects of Protestantism, was alienated from the work by the folly of his own agents.

By a strange freak of miscalculation Middleton and his friends thought to end Lauderdale's influence by excluding him from the Indemnity, and p.r.o.nouncing him incapable of holding office. It was an easy matter for Lauderdale to turn the tables upon them. They incurred the censure both of Charles and of Clarendon. Before Clarendon's fall came, the triumph of Lauderdale over his rivals was a.s.sured; but before Clarendon's life ended he might have learned to what a height of self-aggrandizement, and of unscrupulous oppression, the popular wiles of that astute tactician had helped him to attain. Had Clarendon been blessed with agents wiser than Middleton and more honest than Archbishop Sharp, the Government of Scotland might have been consolidated; the bitterness, to which her religious fanaticism was goaded, might have been a.s.suaged; and one of the darkest pages in her annals, which was to follow within the next few years, might have been left unwritten. The Union might have been brought about thirty years earlier than it was, and it might not have bequeathed so many seeds of jealousy, and so much offence to national pride.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE PROBLEMS OF IRELAND

If the conditions of the new settlement in Scotland were a problem hard of solution to Hyde, the entanglement was even greater in the case of Ireland. He was ignorant of the real characteristics of Scotland, and alienated from the country by his antipathy to Presbyterianism. But Ireland was a hot-bed of faction, the intricacies of which baffled his discernment. There was no party there which was not honeycombed with treachery, and none to which there was not imputed, on fair grounds, actions of flagrant cruelty and injustice to one another, and of disloyalty to the Crown for whose favour they were now keen compet.i.tors.

No wonder that the Chancellor, in his own words, "made it his humble suit to the King, that no part of it might ever be referred to him;" and that even the Duke of Ormonde, whose own interests were most deeply concerned of all in the future settlement there, "could not see any light in so much darkness that might lead him to any beginning." In the whole of Ireland it was difficult to find any one upon whose wholehearted loyalty the Crown could rely. The best were those who could allege some fancied injury from the late authority, which might atone for their own repeated acts of opposition to the Royalist interests. The Presidents of the two provinces of Munster and Connaught were Lord Broghill--who was created Earl of Orrery in 1660--and Sir Charles Coote. Both had been in close confederacy with Henry Cromwell, the son of the Protector, and both had "depended upon him and courted his protection by their not loving one another, and being of several complexions and const.i.tutions, and both of a long aversion to the King by multiplications of guilt." Under the short administration of Ludlow, [Footnote: Ludlow, full of hope that true Republicanism was now in sight, after Cromwell's death, had been sent over to Ireland as Commander- in-Chief, in July, 1659, and remained there till October, during which time he had established a regime that satisfied him, but that quickly fell to pieces after his departure.

Edmund Ludlow's long life, from 1617 to 1692, saw many changes, in which he was himself no inconspicuous actor, and for some part of which his _Memoirs_ add considerably to our knowledge. He belonged to a family of some importance, although its political sympathies alienated it from its own cla.s.s. His father, Sir Henry Ludlow, was a member of the Long Parliament, and was referred to in one of the King's Declarations drawn by Hyde (May 26, 1642) as having said in Parliament that the King was not fit to reign; and he was one of those whose impeachment the King desired (_Rebellion_, Bk. v. 280, 441). By that father's persuasion, Edmund Ludlow joined the Parliamentary army when war broke out, and he proved himself a zealous and doughty fighter. But he was stubborn and quarrelsome, and fanatically attached to an abstract scheme of Republicanism which was the abiding object of all his life. To him the question involved was, "whether the King should govern as a G.o.d by his will, and the nation be governed by force like beasts; or whether the people should be governed by laws made by themselves, and under a government derived from their own consent." It could hardly be possible to express the dispute in terms more distant from the truth. But with all the fanaticism of a narrow and pedantic nature he pursued this will-o'-the- wisp to the end. He afterwards, in 1646, entered Parliament as member for the village of Hindon, from which Hyde took his first t.i.tle, of Baron Hyde of Hindon (then returning two members), and attached himself to the party led by Henry Marten. He was bitterly opposed to all compromise, and was one of the most conspicuous of the regicides. He could not see how any view but one was possible to any man who did not desire to be a slave; and yet, in his fanciful scheme of liberty, he did not hesitate to apply coercive measures to Parliament. The nation was to be governed by its own consent; but its consent was to be interpreted by the will of his own little clique. When Cromwell a.s.sumed more than monarchical power, he fiercely opposed him, and hailed his death as offering new hopes for Republicanism. He had long been employed in Ireland, and on this account a.s.sumed its administration in 1659. When the Restoration took place, he fled to Switzerland: and so active had he been, that his machinations were dreaded for many years. In 1689 he returned for a time; but the memory of his misdeeds as a regicide made even the Parliament under William III.

unwilling to receive him, and he was obliged again to withdraw.

He was a zealous, narrow, pedantic, but honest partisan, whose enthusiastic belief in his own abstract ideas seemed to him to justify the most ruthless cruelty in Ireland.] which followed the fall of Richard Cromwell and his brother Henry, who had been Lieutenant of Ireland, they had managed to hold their places and authority, and when Ludlow's power crumbled it was a race between them who might first proffer their obedience to the King, and enhance the value of that obedience by most effective promises. They watched a.s.siduously the action of Monk. Each was anxious that his offers might be concealed from his rival. Each managed to secure some informal recognition of his offers of loyalty, and presumed himself authorized to make proposals to others on the King's behalf. They both professed a single-hearted endeavour to settle the King's authority, and each managed by underhand influence, and by lavish promises, to secure some powerful support. Lord Broghill was the abler of the two, and by his profuse devotion "quickly got himself believed." The Chancellor's scorn of such a man is best expressed in his own words. Lord Broghill, he says--

"Having free access to the King, by mingling apologies for what he had done with promises of what he would do, and utterly renouncing all those principles as to the Church or State (as he might with a good conscience do) which made men unfit for trust, made himself so acceptable to his Majesty that he heard him willingly, because he made all things easy to be done and compa.s.sed; and gave such a.s.surances to the bedchamber men, to help them to good fortunes in Ireland, which they had reason to despair of in England, that he wanted not their testimony upon all occasions, nor their defence and vindication when anything was reflected upon to his disadvantage or reproach."

It was the familiar picture of which the Chancellor was already tired, of a King whose experience had taught him that Government was a thing of subterfuge, and of balancing between professed adherents whose loyalty was to be valued according to the estimate which trickery could place upon it.

These new adherents vied with one another in promoting measures for restoring the bishops, and the laws of the Episcopalian Church, of which they had lately been bitter opponents. No wonder that the Chancellor has more respect for such a man as Sir John Clotworthy, who did not dissemble his dislike of bishops and their rule, even while he laboured honestly to restore the prerogatives of the Crown.

The central difficulty in this seething ma.s.s of jealousy, corruption, and self-seeking was the question of land settlement. A reckless system of forfeitures and new grants, carried out under the successive supremacies of different interests, had left an inheritance of hopeless confusion, destined to be the lasting curse of Ireland. Twenty years of the bitterness of civil war had ended in a rough and ready settlement under the rule of Cromwell, where the spoils had been ruthlessly handed over to the victors. The Irish had been evicted with a cruelty that had no thought of justice, and those who had not been sent abroad to seek death or a precarious livelihood in the ranks of foreign armies, had been driven into the barren tracts of Connaught, any of them found outside those limits being hunted down like wild beasts. To have shown any sympathy with the Royalist cause, or even to have resisted the fierce rule of the Cromwellian soldiery, was enough, when added to their adherence to a tabooed religion, to mark them as beyond the pale of humanity. It was counted even as a mercy that they were allowed to earn a scanty subsistence in the most barren corner of the island. Strongly as he disliked their deep-rooted attachment to the Roman Catholics' religion, the Chancellor never deemed it an excuse for ruthless cruelty, and, in spite of their religion, their occasional display of enthusiastic loyalty to the Crown won for them something of his sympathy. But he is compelled to admit the appearance of prosperity which was reared upon the military oppression--an oppression which was rendered the more heinous in his sight because it involved also the absolute forfeiture of their vast estates in the case of Ormonde and other loyalists, against whom no suspicion of Roman Catholic leanings could be alleged. Its very ruthlessness gave it an appearance of outward settlement and peace.

"It cannot be imagined," says Clarendon, "in how easy a method, and with what peaceable formality this whole great kingdom was taken from the just lords and proprietors, and divided and given amongst those who had no other right to it, but that they had power to keep it; no man having so great shares as they who had been instruments to murder the King, and were not likely willingly to part with it to his successor." "Ireland," he tells us, "was the great capital, out of which all debts were paid, all services rewarded, and all acts of bounty performed. And, what is more wonder, all this was done and settled within little more than two years, to that degree of perfection that there were many buildings raised for beauty, as well as use, orderly and regular plantations of trees and fences and enclosures throughout the kingdom, as in a kingdom at peace within itself, and where no doubt could be made of the validity of t.i.tles.

And yet in all this quiet there were very few persons pleased or contented."

It was the sort of settlement for which history has exacted, as it always exacts in such cases, a rigid and long-drawn-out retribution.

But however specious might be the appearance of prosperity under the recent settlement, it was beyond all question that it must be disturbed. A Royalist Restoration could not leave in possession those whose property was held as a reward for fighting against the Royalist cause. Certain claims were of necessity revived, and no prescription could prevail against them. The Church lands must be resumed, and the Episcopal domains must be wrested from those who had gained them as the avowed enemies of the Church. About these there could be no question. Crown lands also must revert to the Crown, and had this source of revenue been duly husbanded, it might have supplied a means of dealing with many claims that proved a source of endless and insoluble difficulty. There were certain outstanding Royalists, like Ormonde, whose loyalty was so indisputable, and whose claims were so easy of proof, that rest.i.tution in their case was simple, and any resistance to it would have amounted to a confession of rebellion.

Lord Inchiquin [Footnote: Murrough O'Brien, Earl of Inchiquin, had been much concerned in the curbing of the Irish Rebellion, in which he acted as the ruthless enemy of the Roman Catholics, whose religion he detested, and upon whom he inflicted the most merciless vengeance. His ardent Protestantism brought him to an understanding with the Parliament, and he acted sometimes as their agent rather than that of the King. But, in 1654, he had become as ardent a Roman Catholic, and managed to recover favour at Court, and was restored to his property after the Restoration. He died in some obscurity in 1674.] was able to bring himself within the same category on somewhat more doubtful grounds. Fortunately large tracts of domain had been retained by Cromwell, nominally as the property of the State, and in reality to secure his own power; and out of these many of the most indubitable claims could be met. But the harder questions were those involving claims which were more doubtful, between claimants whose rivalry rested upon more a.s.sailable grounds. Were all genuine Royalists to have a right to claim what was once their property? If forfeitures were to be redressed, were those who were forced to sell at nominal prices, or under the pressure of innumerable fines, to have no redress? Which Royalist support was the more valuable, that which had been steadfast from the first, and had been crushed by Cromwell's soldiers, or that which had atoned for rebellion in the past by opportune and efficacious support during the last few months? Much of the land had been granted to the "Adventurers," as those were called who had advanced money on the faith of Parliamentary pledges to meet the expenses of crus.h.i.+ng the Irish Rebellion. The Adventurers could allege the security of an Act of Parliament, to which the a.s.sent of the King had, however unwillingly, been given. But it was well known that the most of the money so raised had been employed, not to fight Irish rebels, but to crush English Royalists; and those Adventurers alone had been able to retain their claims who had been found ready to supplement their original contributions by payments avowedly made to the war chest of the Parliament, when civil war in England engaged all their attention. How were such grants to be dealt with, and how was a due balance to be kept between condoning rebellion and undermining the faith built upon an Act of Parliament? Others held their lands in lieu of military pay long in arrear; and the fact that they had not turned their arms against those who were contriving the Restoration, might seem to give them a claim to generous treatment. The Irish Catholics could adduce many instances of their own conspicuous loyalty in the past, and it was difficult to furnish convincing proof of what might fairly be suspected, that such loyalty was prompted more by bitter hatred of the Presbyterians and Roundheads than by fervent devotion to their King.

The Chancellor might well be repelled from partic.i.p.ation in this embroiled struggle, where it was hard to find any satisfactory clue which might lead to settlement. To satisfy all was impossible; and it was almost as difficult to suggest any principle or set of principles which could be uniformly applied. Every case varied; every claim was supported or opposed by evidence, equally abundant, and equally suspect.

At first the Adventurers and the representatives of Cromwell's troopers were most successful in establis.h.i.+ng their claims before the commissioners who were sent to inquire. One settlement after another was attempted. The Roman Catholic Irish were able, a little later, to win some sympathy from Charles, which the Chancellor seems to have partly shared. Another set of commissioners reopened the inquiry, and suggested another settlement, in which each faction was obliged to abate something of their claims. The Irish claim to loyalty was refuted by proof of their readiness, in their direst straits, to invite foreign aid, and to offer to repay it by the betrayal of the Royalist cause, and by breaking their allegiance to the King. One influence, and one influence alone, contributed to a solution, and that was the earnest desire of all, even at the cost of some diminution of their own claims, to escape from the palsying influence of uncertainty and doubt. The Chancellor accepted the different reports of the commissioners, and the successive projects of settlement, with a certain despair of any scheme of abstract justice, with little hope of even a peaceable solution, and with a not unnatural desire to rid himself of the whole unsavoury embroglio, and to detach himself from the angry and envenomed faction fight in Ireland. The Irish settlement was no part of Clarendon's work, and enters only indirectly into his life. Even more strongly than in the case of Scotland he abandoned any thought of an incorporating Union, and was glad to see the revival of an Irish Parliament. The task he had in hand was too hard to allow him willingly to add to it the baffling problem of restoring peace to Ireland.

But he could find little satisfaction in contemplating the work of those to whom the task was entrusted. The appointment of Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland had been only one of many gratifications which had been bestowed upon Monk, when he was created Duke of Albemarle, in recognition of the substantial benefits to the King which had resulted, when the long-drawn disguises of his tortuous and self-interested policy had gradually unmasked themselves. As general over the Irish army under the Cromwellian administration, he had contrived to secure an estate in Ireland worth some four thousand a year, and it was of the first importance to him to retain a hold over any land-settlement in Ireland.

But Albemarle looked upon his post as Lord-Lieutenant only as an enhancement of his own importance in the State, and as a means of a.s.suring that his own material interests in Ireland should be safeguarded. He had no thought of taking upon himself the burden of Irish administration in person, or of absenting himself from the English Court. It was necessary, therefore, to find some one also who, as deputy, would undertake the arduous task. "There were some few," says Hyde, "fit for the employment who were not willing to undertake it; and many who were willing to undertake it who were not fit." The powers of a deputy were liable to be eclipsed, if Albemarle ever thought fit to go to Ireland; and such a post was one which those of the highest rank scarcely cared to fill. Under these circ.u.mstances the choice fell upon Lord Robartes, who had rendered some good service in Cornwall, and who had the reputation of more than respectable abilities, of careful and plodding industry, and of an integrity which was at least above the moderate average standard of Charles's Court. But he had defects of character which were apparent to a judge so acute as the Chancellor, and these soon made themselves plain.

Clarendon gives expression to them with all the verve and dexterity of a.n.a.lysis of which he was a past master. "Robartes," he tells us, "was a sullen, morose man, intolerably proud, and had some humours as inconvenient as small vices, which made him hard to live with." That he was esteemed to have Presbyterian leanings did not make him the more acceptable to the King, or to the Chancellor himself; but such suspicions he was able to allay. But a long habit of a.s.sociating with men inferior to himself had crippled his intelligence, and made him suspicious and jealous of his position. When he found himself deputy to Monk, he recalled, with a grudge, the fact that, coming from the same south-western corner of England, he was of superior birth, and he forgot the services which in Monk's case more than squared the balance. In his dealings with those who were to be a.s.sociated with him in Irish administration, he showed the jealousy of a small-minded man, and ensconced himself behind the bulwark of reticence and inaccessibility. There could hardly have been a more unfit instrument for that dexterous manipulation which the tangled knot of Irish politics required than this narrow, pedantic, tactless peer. The Chancellor soon saw that endless petty bickering would be the result of continuing him in the post. His petty pride was offended by having to serve as deputy to Albemarle. He was ingenious in detecting legal difficulties, and wearied the patience of the Attorney-General by pointless criticisms even on the wording of his patent of appointment. He treated those Irishmen who were obliged to deal with him with a haughty superciliousness which exasperated them to fury. The King soon found that a morose gravity and a punctilious pride were the worst ingredients for an Irish governor. The only question was how to get rid of one who was too respectable to be contumeliously cast aside, but too much of a pedant to be entrusted with a delicate administrative operation. "They who conversed with him knew him to have many humours which were very intolerable; they who were but little acquainted with him took him to be a man of much knowledge, and called his morosity gravity." The Chancellor and Lord Southampton were commissioned by the King to confer about his transfer to another office, where his peculiarities might be less inconvenient. They were to arrange that he should be Privy Seal, and the precedence which that post would give him was to be a solace to his susceptible pride. The transaction had to be managed dexterously. They found him in a suspicious mood, but fortunately were able to persuade him that the new appointment would enhance his dignity. He accepted the new post, and although his touchiness and pedantry as to trifles were still a source of trouble, they could lead to no such difficulty in the comparative obscurity of Privy Seal, as they would have involved in Ireland. The transfer was carried out with satisfaction to all concerned; and the fact is no small testimonial to the tact of the Chancellor and Lord Southampton.

One source of friction was gone in getting rid of Lord Robartes. But the tangled knot still remained, and after the restoration of the Crown and Church domains, and the reinstatement of such notable Royalists as Ormonde and Inchiquin, the greatest part of the problem still remained unsettled.

The fiercest fight was that between claimants of different race and of different religion, all of whom inherited a tradition of bitter and irreconcilable hatred. On the one hand there were the native Irish, recommended to the King by that community, at least, in religious feeling, which his residence abroad had instilled into Charles, although there is no real evidence of the oft-repeated story of his having already become a Roman Catholic. Linked to the Royalist cause by a common detestation of Presbyterianism, the Roundheads, and the Cromwellian soldiery, and attracting not unnatural sympathy both from Charles and from Hyde by the oppressive cruelties which they had suffered, and by glaring instances of injustice perpetrated upon them, they could fairly a.s.sert their early loyalty, and could allege in excuse for subsequent defections the supreme law of self-preservation. On the other hand, there were the soldiers and Adventurers, fortified by the strong claim of possession; able to cover their former rebellion by the indubitable benefit which they conferred in abstaining from armed resistance to rebellion against Parliamentary rule, and behind whose new-found loyalty there always lurked a veiled threat of a fresh resort to arms which might prove dangerous. The commissioners sent to compose matters found themselves suspected by all whose t.i.tles were insecure, and actively opposed by those whom they dispossessed. They were swayed by opposite factions, now to accept doubtful claims, and now to confirm existing settlements upon insufficient evidence of right. The examination of all claims was transferred to England; and Charles for a time seems to have interested himself deeply, and with edifying industry, in attempting to find a solution, and to have shown praiseworthy care in hearing and investigating all complaints. During these hearings the Chancellor must certainly have been an active and interested member of the council, and could not divest himself, much as he may have desired to do so, of partic.i.p.ation in the decisions. Necessity drove the King and the Chancellor himself into a course which was often repugnant to them. In grave and well-considered words Hyde lays before us the paramount considerations of supreme expediency which forced the hands both of his master and of himself, and compelled them to accept a settlement which did nothing to redress Irish wrongs, and left, as the baneful alternative to a renewal of civil war, a legacy of bitter racial antagonism.

"It cannot be denied," he writes, "that if the King could have thought it safe and seasonable to have reviewed all that had been done, and taken those advantages upon former miscarriages and misapplications, as according to the strictness of that very law, he might have done, the whole foundation, upon which all the hopes rested of preserving that kingdom within the obedience to the Crown of England must have been shaken and even dissolved, with no small influence and impression upon the peace and quiet of England, itself. For the memory of the beginning of the rebellion in Ireland (how many other rebellions soever had followed as bad, or worse, in respect of the consequences that attended them) was as fresh and as odious to the whole people of England, as it had been in the first year. And though no man durst avow so unchristian a wish as an extirpation of them (which they would have been very well contented with) yet no man dissembled his opinion that it was the only security the English could have in that kingdom, that the Irish should be kept so low, that they should have no power to hurt them." [Footnote: _Life_, ii. 44.]

These words expressing the deliberate opinion of Hyde, upon a fateful crisis in history, are pregnant with tragedy. The memory of a great wrong never can be obliterated; but dire necessity may leave no alternative but to shape political action on the basis of that legacy from civil strife.

England and Scotland had redeemed their rebellion.

"But," thus writes Hyde, "the miserable Irish alone had no part in contributing to his Majesty's happiness; nor had G.o.d suffered them to be the least instruments in bringing his good pleasure to pa.s.s, or to give any testimony of their repentance for the wickedness they had wrought or of their resolution to be better subjects for the future; so that they seemed as a people left out by Providence, and exempted from any benefit from that blessed conjunction in his Majesty's rest.i.tution. And this disadvantage was improved towards them by their frequent manifestation of an inveterate animosity against the English nation and the English Government, which again was returned to them in an irreconcilable jealousy of all the English towards them." [Footnote: _Life_, ii. 47.]

Some settlement must be reached--that it should be good or bad was of less importance than that it should be fixed. Commissioners were set to work.

But either they were too closely interested themselves in the decisions to be reached, or, having no personal interest, they were slack in their attendance. Those on the spot were too apt to be partial; others were sent from England, and their methods were rough and ready. The available land was squandered in lavish grants to courtiers, and amongst others Lady Castlemaine managed to secure an ample share. It was in vain that the Chancellor declined to pa.s.s such grants; the recipients found means to get them pa.s.sed by the Courts in Ireland.

The best that could be made of a bad business was to hurry on some decision, before the means of even partially satisfying the most urgent claims were dissipated by the King's reckless prodigality.

Meanwhile the administration of Ireland, after the transference of Lord Robartes, was entrusted to three Lords Justices--Sir Maurice Eustace, the Irish Chancellor; Lord Broghill (created Lord Orrery); and Sir Charles Coote, created Earl of Montrath. The first was a worn-out old man. The second was a dexterous manager, who knew how to captivate friends and how to outwit enemies; the third was "proud, dull, and very avaricious." Both Orrery and Montrath had their own ends to serve, and were bitter enemies; and when Montrath died, as Hyde expresses it, "they who took the most dispa.s.sioned survey of all that had been done, and of what remained to be done, did conclude that nothing could reasonably produce a settlement, but the deputing one single person to exercise that government." The Duke of Albemarle had now reaped all the advantage that he could hope for from his post of t.i.tular Lord-Lieutenant. His own estate had been secured, and as an Irish landlord he desired a firm administration. He was not prepared to undertake the task himself, and made his suit to the King that the Duke of Ormonde should be sent in his place. To the mind of the King, this seemed to offer the best prospect of a settlement, and he and Albemarle together persuaded Ormonde to accept the charge before the Chancellor was consulted. To Hyde it seemed a plan fraught with dangers and difficulties on every side. In such a case, he was, as he was himself aware, too much inclined to express his views with somewhat uncourtly directness. When the King asked for his opinion of Ormonde's appointment, he could find no more diplomatic answer than that "the King would do very ill in sending him, and the Duke would do much worse if he desired to go." Charles took the easiest course for one who wishes to push aside unpalatable advice: "the matter was decided, and there was nothing for it but to prepare instructions." Hyde was not to be turned aside; Ormonde, he urged, was needful to the King in London, and would be useless in Ireland. Hyde did not even take the trouble to make his objections palatable to Ormonde. The Duke, he said, had since his return from exile led a life of ease and indulgence, and was now unfit for the laborious task of Irish administration. With still less of courtier-like complaisance, Hyde urged that, however good the appointment might have been "when the Duke was full of reputation, and the King was more feared and reverenced than presumed upon," it was otherwise now when the Duke had withdrawn from business and "let himself fall to familiarities with all degrees of men," and when the King had been exposed to all manner of importunities, had received all men's addresses and made promises without deliberation, had become so desirous to satisfy all men that he was irresolute in all things. He must first fix his own resolutions, and then only could the Lord Lieutenant do him service, or save him from scorn and affronts. [Footnote: _Life_, ii. 55.]

However sound the advice, Hyde's fas.h.i.+on of expressing it could scarcely be called conciliatory; and even the easy humour of the King must have found it hard to brook such plain speaking from his Minister. It was fortunate, however, that Charles's sense of humour was sufficient to save his vanity from suffering under contradiction, except when his own personal ease was at stake. He might resent reflections on his behaviour to a mistress, but his pride was not wounded by being told that his statecraft was folly; it took at least a long course of such plain- speaking from his trusted Minister before his patience was exhausted.

Ormonde, too, received from Hyde advice that was quite as candid.

"He would repent his rash resolution; he would not influence Irish affairs in Dublin as much as he could have done in London; his absence would give his enemies the opportunity of slander that they desired; he and the King suffered from the same infirmity in equal degree--'an unwillingness to deny any man what they could not but see was impossible to grant, and a desire to please everybody, which whosoever affected should please n.o.body.'"

Hyde's friends, as well as his master, had need to practise an almost stoical imperturbability of temper.

It gives us a key to Hyde's att.i.tude towards Irish affairs that he breaks the chronological order of his narrative to tell the story to the end. It was a subject that vexed and wearied him, and in regard to which he was conscious only of work incompletely done; of business from which he vainly strove to hold aloof, and of a huddled settlement from which his soul revolted. He hurries on to the end of the whole transaction, which at last deprived him of his most trusted ally and his most cherished friend.

Ireland stole away from him Ormonde, whose support had done so much to uphold him in the dangerous currents of the Restoration. It was four years and a half after the Restoration that, in the autumn of 1664, Ormonde crossed to Ireland. The clouds were already gathering about the Chancellor's course, and the loss of his closest friend increased the gloom, and brought the threatening dangers nearer.

It was after Ormonde's entry upon the Lieutenancy that the third and final settlement of the Land Commissioners was arrived at. The latest Commissioners had allowed themselves to be swayed powerfully by the Irish interest, and had raised, in the same proportion, the antipathy of the English. Very weariness forced the combatants at length to a compromise.

The soldiers and Adventurers consented to abate one-fourth of their claims; with this the most urgent of the Irish claims were appeased, and the baneful unrest was at last ended.

Clarendon closes the sorry story of the Irish settlement by a disclaimer of any share in Irish affairs, further than that which fell to him as a member of the inner Council. Perhaps his influence was greater than he is ready to admit; but Ireland certainly received no larger share of his attention than necessity forced upon him. He is careful to give us a succinct account of the one incident which involved him, almost against his will, in some sort of personal interest in Irish property.

In the early days of the Restoration, when the question as to the disputed settlements was only at its first stage, overtures had been made to Hyde, which it was fancied might earn from him some mercenary favour for those who might be the intermediaries, It was proposed that a special grant of land might be made to him, or that a sale might be effected in his favour on nominal terms, which would make it almost equal to a free gift. It was consistent with all his action in such matters that these overtures met with a peremptory refusal from Hyde. If he was to be of use in effecting a settlement, he must have no t.i.tle of his own to bias his inclinations.

Rather later, but when negotiations were still in their earlier stages, certain sums raised upon Irish land were a.s.signed for the King's use, "to be disposed of to those who had served him faithfully, and suffered in so doing." The grants were pa.s.sed as a matter of official routine, without the knowledge of the Chancellor. About two years later, Orrery, who was an adept in the art of posing as the chosen instrument of convenient favours, wrote to the Chancellor informing him that certain sums were standing at his credit, and inquiring to whom they should be paid. Hyde had no doubt that a mistake had been committed, and asked Ormonde, as Lord Lieutenant, to inform him what the announcement meant. Orrery wrote again more explicitly, stating that 12,600 had been paid in to his use, and that another sum of the same amount would be received in the course of six months. "To whom," he asked again, "was the money to be paid?"

It was only after this second letter that the Lord Lieutenant's explanation arrived. The notification had its source, so it appeared, from Lord Orrery himself, who had urged upon Ormonde that a portion of the royal grant should be a.s.signed to Hyde. The suggestion commended itself both to Ormonde and the King, and by the special instruction of the King, who knew Hyde's scruples and was resolved to overcome them, the royal signature was given through Hyde's good friend, Secretary Nicholas, and all knowledge of the matter was carefully kept from the intended recipient. Nicholas had now to account for it to Hyde, and he could only plead the strong injunction of secrecy that had been laid upon him by the King. The plot was an instance, it may be, of mistaken and ill-judged kindness; but not the strictest political purist of the day could have arraigned the grant, and it would have been churlish for an old and impoverished servant to have refused so gracious a favour from the King, few of whose lavish grants had so much justification as this. It was granted with delicacy, and was accepted with grat.i.tude, as cementing that bond of loyal affection which long years of faithful service had created.

At this juncture, as it happened, Bulstrode Whitelocke and Lord Lovelace [Footnote: John, Lord Lovelace (1616-1670) was an ardent Royalist, and one of those Peers who signed the Declaration at Oxford on behalf of the King in 1642. Clarendon (_Hist. of Rebellion_, vii. 174) speaks of him as one "of whose good affections to his service the King had always a.s.surance."] were involved in a dispute about some land in Wilts.h.i.+re which Whitelocke had bought when his own former party was in the ascendant, and when Lovelace was hard pressed for money. The balance had now s.h.i.+fted, and Lovelace, as the price of giving confirmation to Whitelocke's t.i.tle, was pressing for a sum more adequate to the value than that paid in Whitelocke's day of triumph, when the dominant purchaser could coerce the unwilling seller. It was expedient to end a dispute between two men who were now both in the interest of the King, and Hyde thought that the most convenient way of doing so was that he should become the purchaser of the land, which adjoined his own property in Wilts.h.i.+re. Relying on the Irish windfall, he consented to do so, and thus became bound for a sum largely in excess of anything he received. Instead of a double payment of 12,600, he never received more than 6000 of the first instalment. Orrery's promises were more lavish than his performances; and the only result of Charles's kindly thought was to involve Hyde in a heavy debt and to give food for baseless suspicions of his venality. Personally, therefore, he had good ground to fear the gifts that came from Ireland. That country remained an unhappy battle-ground of racial and religious feud; its settlement had galled him by its many features of injustice; he saw its resources crippled by lavish grants to a host of unworthy recipients which he was powerless to prevent, and it had robbed him of that support which he might have had from his most faithful friend, the Duke of Ormonde. It is no wonder that he turns in disgust from the review of Irish affairs which had in it so little that could satisfy his conscience or his sense of political wisdom.

CHAPTER XIX