subverting the fundamental laws and established Government of this Kingdom.”  Strafford fell, but the insurrection and massacre of 1641 were the natural result of his intrigues with the Irish Parliament and the Irish chiefs.  It was under the impression of this manifest danger that Cromwell—­a century and a half before his time—­abolished the Dublin Parliament and summoned Irish representatives to the first United Parliament at Westminster.

As the power of Spain declined, France came to be the chief menace to England and to the peace of Europe.  Again Ireland instinctively allied herself with the enemy.  Tyrconnel now played the part of Strafford, and with the aid of French troops and French subsidies, and a sympathetic Irish Parliament, endeavoured to destroy the Ulster Plantation, and make Ireland a jumping-off place for the invasion of England.  The Irish Parliament, in the meantime, did its part by confiscating the estates of the settlers, driving out the Protestant clergy, and outlawing English sympathisers by name in “the hugest Bill of Attainder which the world has seen."[3] It was the successful defence of Derry and Enniskillen by the Scotch and English colonists that saved Ireland and gave King William and his troops the foothold that enabled them to save England, too, in the Irish campaign of the following year.

Not the least remarkable instance of the use to which separate Parliaments within the Kingdom could be put for the ruin of England occurred during the activity of James the Second’s son, the so-called “Old Pretender.”  In 1723 his chief adviser, the Earl of Mar, presented to the Regent of France a memorial setting out in detail a project for betraying Britain into the power of France by dismembering the British Parliament.[4] The Irish Parliament, in close alliance with a restored Scottish Parliament, was to be used to curb the power of England.  “The people of Ireland and Scotland,” according to Mar, “are of the same blood and possess similar interests,” and they should thus always be allied against England and oppose their “united strength”—­backed, of course, by that of France—­to any undue growth of the English power.  The scheme came to nothing, but if the Pretender had possessed a little more energy and capacity; if the French Court had been in earnest, and if Ireland and Scotland had each possessed a separate Parliament, “with an executive responsible to it,” and with the control of a national militia, the story of 1745 might have ended differently.

It is necessary that these facts should be kept in mind when complaint is made of the oppressive and demoralising Irish Penal Code.  That Code no one defends now, although it was lauded at the time by Swift as a bulwark of the Church against the Catholics on the one hand, and the Presbyterians on the other.  It was the product of a cruel and bigoted age, and at its worst it was less severe than similar laws prevailing against Protestants in those parts of the Continent where the Roman Church held sway.[5] Spain and France were at that time vastly more powerful, populous, and wealthy countries than England:  England was never free from the dread of foreign invasion, and to the would-be invader Ireland always held a guiding light and an open door.