When Henry VIII. ascended the throne of England, the policy of peace in Ireland was continued during the early portion of his reign.  Then came Henry’s break with the Pope over the royal divorce.  The Irish beyond the Pale, and many within it, were loyal to the Church of their fathers, to the faith of Patrick, the faith of the Roman See.  To Henry and his daughter Elizabeth, the daughter of Anne Boleyn, who displaced Henry’s lawful wife, this was treason.  Henceforth, to the bitterness of race hatred and the pride of the conqueror were to be added the blackest of religious feuds, the most cruel of religious persecutions in the history of the world.  Again let Goldwin Smith, the English Unionist, describe the result:  “Of all the wars waged by a civilized on a barbarous (sic) and despised race these wars waged by the English on the Irish seem to have been the most hideous.  No quarter was given by the invader to man, woman, or child.  The butchering of women and children is repeatedly and brutally avowed.  Nothing can be more horrible than the cool satisfaction with which English commanders report their massacres.”  Famine was deliberately added to the other horrors.  What was called law was more cruel than war:  it was death without the opportunity for defense and with the hypocrisy of the forms of justice added.

Out of this situation came the infamous Penal Code, which, by the period of William the Third, about 1692, became a finished system.  This is the “Irish Code” of which Lord Brougham said:  “It was so ingeniously contrived that an Irish Catholic could not lift his hand without breaking it.”  And Edmund Burke said:  “The wit of man never devised a machine to disgrace a realm or destroy a kingdom so perfect as this.”  Montesquieu, the great French jurist-philosopher, the author of the epoch-making Spirit of the Laws, commented:  “It must have been contrived by devils; it ought to have been written in blood; and the only place to register it is in hell.”  Yet for two hundred years this code of death, national and individual, was the supreme law of Ireland.

Wendell Phillips, the great American orator, in his lecture on “Daniel O’Connell,” summed up this Penal Code in words that will not soon be forgotten by the world.  His reference to Mr. Froude is to James Anthony Froude, the English historian.  He says: 

“You know that, under it, an Irish Catholic could not sit in the House of Commons; he could not hold any commission from the Crown, either civil or military; he could be a common soldier—­nothing more.  He could neither vote, nor sit on a jury, nor stand on a witness stand, nor bring a suit, nor be a doctor, nor be a lawyer, nor travel five miles from his own home without a permit from a justice of the peace.  The nearest approach that ever was made to him was a South Carolina negro before the war.  He had no rights that a Protestant needed to respect.  If he was a land-holder, if all his