Queen banished for adultery, lived in England or abroad upon incomes drawn from the impoverished Irish Exchequer.  Nor was it only a question of pensions.  Quantities of valuable sinecure offices were habitually given to Englishmen who never came near the shores of Ireland.  In short, the English policy towards Ireland was similar to Spain’s policy towards her South American Colonies, minus the grosser forms of physical cruelty and oppression.  Yet Ireland, like the American Colonies until the verge of the revolutionary struggle, was consistently loyal to the Crown both in peace and war.  The loyalty of Catholic Ireland, poverty-stricken, inarticulate, almost leaderless, and shamefully misgoverned, does not, from the human standpoint, appear worthy of admiration, but it was a fact.  The few Catholic noblemen outdid the Protestants in expressions of devotion; the Whiteboy risings were as little disloyal as religious.  Not a hand stirred for James or his heirs when Jacobite plots and risings were causing grave public danger in England and Scotland.  Catholic Lord Trimleston offered exclusively Catholic regiments with Catholic officers to George III. for foreign service in 1762, though they were vetoed by what his Viceroy Halifax called the “ill-bred bigotry” of the Irish Parliament.  Nor was it till thirty years after that date that Protestant discontent, under intolerable provocation, assumed an anti-dynastic and Republican form.  To compare the Imperial spirit displayed by America and Ireland in their views and action is difficult, partly because the various American Colonies differed widely, partly because there existed in Ireland no organ of government which could express popular feeling.  Neither country, of course, paid any cash contribution to Imperial expenses, though both could fairly claim that the English monopoly of trade imposed an indirect tribute of indefinite size, while Ireland, in pensions, rents to absentees, and sinecure appointments, was drained of many millions more.  American patronage was an element of substantial value to England, but it was not on the Irish scale.  America on the whole, perhaps, showed less patriotic feeling than Ireland.  With full allowance for the lack of sympathy and understanding shown by the British regulars to the American volunteers in their co-operation in the French wars, it can scarcely be denied that the colonists, together with much heroism and public spirit, showed occasional slackness and parsimony in resisting the penetration of a foreign Power which threatened to hem in their settlements from the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi.  Ireland during the Seven Years’ War, and until the Peace of Paris in 1763, maintained a war establishment of 24,000 troops.  She maintained a peace establishment of 12,000 troops, and from 1767 onwards of 15,000 troops.  There never seems to have been a whisper of protest from the Catholic population against these measures, nor, except in the matter of the American War, to which we shall come presently, from the Protestants.  It may be added that, after 1767, Catholics in considerable numbers were surreptitiously enlisted in the ranks, in spite of the Penal Code, and from then until the present day have fought for the Flag as staunchly as any other class of the King’s subjects.