In the century which followed the reign of the Stuarts no record worth mention remains of the doings of Lord Donegall’S descendants. Gaelic annalists, who would have cherished local chronicles, had been driven out; and British civilisation had not overtaken or undertaken their work. That the Chichester frauds formed part of a long-continued system practised by the heads of the Executive appears from another exposure made, nearly a century later, in the English House of Commons. After the Revolution, Charles Montagu (subsequently Earl of Halifax, who was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1694), was accused on the 16th February, 1698, of having in the previous year obtained for himself a grant, under the name of Thomas Railton, of forfeited estates in Ireland worth some £13,000. The lands included those of Lord Clancarty. Montagu, having a majority in the House, defiantly admitted the charge. In 1701, however, he was impeached, on this and other grounds. He again did not deny the facts, and pleaded the authority of King William III. Ultimately, the impeachment was abandoned as impracticable, but Montagu was struck off the Privy Council.
Many of the Elizabethan and Stuart grants reveal a purpose, not only to seize the land of the natives, but to reduce them into slavery. Elizabeth’s charter to the Smiths in 1571 gave, with the territory to be conquered, “native men and women” as chattels. Chichester declared in 1602 that the Irish “should be made perpetual slaves to her Majesty”; and he wished to send O’Cahan to the Virginias instead of to the Tower. In 1605 Hamilton was awarded by James I. “native men and women villeins and their followers.” In 1613 the charter to the Londoners enabled them to take “estrayed bondmen and bondwomen and villeins and their followers.” A Patent of Charles I. presented Hamilton, after he became Lord Claneboy, with “natives and villeins with their sequels.” Cromwell’s shipments of Irish youth as slaves to the Barbadoes was merely a development of this policy.
Small additional infamy, therefore, attaches to the “Protector” for giving effect to the designs of his predecessors. The spirit of the 17th century monarchs and his was the same towards the nation of which Attorney-General Davis declared:
“The Irish be a race of great antiquity, wanting neither wit nor valour. They received the Christian faith above 1,200 years since, and were lovers of music, poetry, and all kinds of learning, and possessed of a land abounding with all things necessary for the civil life of man.”
Earlier than Davies, Spenser of the “Faerie Queene” wrote in 1596:—
“The Irish are one of the most ancient nations that I know of at this end of the world.... They come of as mighty a race as the world ever brought forth ... very present in perils, great scorners of death.”
For the uprooting of such a breed, high political and moral reasons had to be invented, but when the natives were got rid of and their persecutors could discover no political or religious pretexts to cloak their greed, they fastened nakedly on the input and earnings of the settlers from England and Scotland.
These supplanters of the Gael were in the third and fourth generation harassed and skinned as thoroughly as if they had belonged to the outcast race. In the province where Papists were almost forbidden to breathe, the framers of the Penal Code, in the name of “the rights of property,” taught the humbler Protestants the scantiness of their mercies.
The descendants of the “great Deputy” did not attempt to enforce their Patents while knowledge of their origin prevailed and malodor beset them; but in the reign of George III. their baleful activities had consequences which were empire-wide. The extravagance and rapacity of the Chichesters led to the enforced emigration of the children of the Planters, and powerfully contributed in 1776 to the loss of the American Colonies. The armies of Washington were so largely recruited from the evicted tenants of Ulster that, according to the evidence presented to a Parliamentary Committee, half the Revolutionary soldiers were Irish. For this Lord Donegall and his imitators were to be thanked. The “flight of the Earls,” which the “great Deputy” promoted, had for its sequel the flight of the peasants, provoked by his descendants; and with it the breakdown of the imperial tie between Britain and the greatest part of North America.
The American upheaval was itself preceded by a rebellion amongst the Ulster Protestants. A close connection can be traced between the failure of the one outbreak and the success of the other. In July, 1770—only eighty years after the Battle of the Boyne—the offspring of the Planters in the Counties of Antrim, Down, Derry, and Tyrone rose in arms. British writers like J. A. Froude and John Wesley, Irish historians like Lecky and Benn, agree as to the responsibility of the landlords who provoked the insurrection. Froude links together as cause and effect the atrocities of the Marquis of Donegall and the loss of the American Colonies.
He says:—“Sir Arthur Chichester, the great Viceroy of Ireland under James I., was, of all Englishmen who ever settled in the country, the most useful to it. His descendant, the Lord Donegall, of whom it has become necessary to speak, was perhaps the person who inflicted the greatest injury to it. Sir Arthur had been rewarded for his services by vast estates in the County Antrim. The fifth Earl and first Marquis of Donegall, already by the growth of Belfast and the fruit 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 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 magnificently doing as he would with his own. Many of his Antrim leases having fallen in simultaneously he demanded £100,000 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 sub-let.
“Mr. Clotworthy Upton, another great Antrim proprietor, imitated the example, and at once the whole countryside were driven from their habitations. 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 on the soil.
“The most substantial of the expelled tenantry gathered their effects together and sailed to join their countrymen in the New World, where the Scotch-Irish became known as the most bitter of the Secessionists.”
Mr. Froude traces to these evictions the uprise of the “Peep of Day” and the “Hearts of Steel” conspiracies, and adds:—
“It is rare that two private persons have power to create effects so considerable as to assist in dismembering an Empire and provoking a civil war. Lord Donegall, for his services, was rewarded with a marquisate; and Mr. Clotworthy Upton with a viscounty (Lord Templetown). If rewards were proportioned to deserts, a fitter retribution to both of them would have been forfeiture and Tower Hill....
“Throughout the revolted Colonies, and therefore probably in the first to begin the struggle, all evidence shows that the foremost, the most irreconcilable, the most determined in pushing the quarrel to the last extremity, were the Scotch-Irish, whom the Bishops and Lord Donegall and Co. had been pleased to drive out of Ulster.”
Mr. Lecky declares the outbreak “was mainly attributable to the oppression of a single man—the Marquis of Donegall.... The conduct of Lord Donegall brought the misery of the Ulster peasantry to a climax; and in a short time many thousands of ejected tenants, banded together under the name of Steelboys, were in arms.”
Their “formidable insurrection,” he says, caused “the great Protestant emigration” from Ulster to America. “In a few years the cloud of civil war, which was already gathering over the Colonies, burst; and the ejected tenants of Lord Donegall formed a large part of the revolutionary armies which severed the New World from the British Crown.”
Benn’s “History of Belfast” states:—
“An estate in the County Antrim, a part of the vast possessions of the Marquis of Donegall (an absentee), was proposed, when its leases had expired, to be let only to those who could pay large fines; and the agent of the marquis was said to have extracted large fees on his own account also. Numbers of the former tenants, neither able to pay the fines nor the rents demanded by those who, on payment of fines and fees, took leases over them, were dispossessed of their tenements and left without means of subsistence. Rendered thus desperate, they maimed the cattle of those who had taken the lands, committed other outrages, and, to express a firmness of resolution, styled themselves ‘Hearts of Steel.’ One of their number, charged with felony, was apprehended and confined in Belfast in order to be transmitted to the county gaol. Provided with offensive weapons, several thousands of the peasants proceeded to the town to rescue the prisoner, who was removed to the barrack and placed under a guard of soldiers (23rd December, 1770).... Being delivered up to his associates, they marched off in triumph.... So great and wide was the discontent that many thousands of Protestants emigrated from those parts of Ulster to America, where they soon appeared in arms against the British Government; and contributed powerfully, by their zeal and valour, to the separation of the American Colonies from the Crown of Great Britain.”
On the 6th April, 1772, George III. wrote to the Lord Lieutenant (Townshend):—
“His Majesty’s humanity was greatly affected by hearing your Excellency’s opinion that the disturbances owe their rise to private oppression, and that the over-greediness and harshness of landlords may be a means of depriving the kingdom of a number of his Majesty’s most industrious and valuable subjects. The King does not doubt but that your Excellency will endeavour, by every means in your power, to convince persons of property of their infatuation in this respect, and instil into them principles of equity and moderation, which, it is to be feared, can only apply an efficient remedy to the evil.”
In November, 1772, the Lord Lieutenant proclaimed a pardon to “the wicked and dangerous insurgents who in July, 1770, assembled themselves in arms in large numbers in the counties of Antrim, Down, Armagh, Derry, and Tyrone.” It was too late.
The Belfast “News Letter” of the 16th April, 1773, computed that “within forty years past 400,000 people have left this kingdom to go and settle in America.” In the three years from 1771 to 1773 alone, 101 ships left Ulster ports, carrying over 30,000 emigrants.
On the 15th June, 1773, John Wesley in his diary writes:
“When I came to Belfast I learned the real cause of the insurrection in this neighbourhood. Lord Donegall, the proprietor of almost the whole country, came hither to give his tenants new leases. But when they came they found two merchants of the town had taken their farms over their heads; so that multitudes of them, with their wives and children, were turned out to the wide world. It is no wonder that, as their lives were now bitter to them, they should fly out as they did. It is rather a wonder that they did not go much further; and, if they had, who would have been most in fault? Those who were without home, without money, without food for themselves and families, or those who drove them to this extremity?”
A dispatch to the “Irish Society” of the London Corporation in 1802 says of the Right Hon. Richard Jackson, a middleman of the London Clothworkers’ estate near Coleraine:—
“It is commonly reported in the country that, having been obliged to raise the rents of his tenants very considerably, in consequence of the large fine he paid, it produced an almost total emigration among them to America, and that they formed a principal part of that undisciplined body which brought about the surrender of the British Army at Saratoga.”
Unmoved by a riven empire, the Nero-like Marquises of Donegall, in unbroken succession, were quietly hatching out schemes to enforce the recognition of their Patent for the waters of Lough Neagh and the Bann.