1727.

George I.

Little else worth recording happened during the remainder of George's reign, that affected Ireland. Death of His Majesty was suddenly taken ill in his carriage, as he was travelling through Holland to visit his electoral dominions. The attendants, that were in his carriage, perceived in the morning after he had left Delden, where he had supped heartily and slept soundly, that one of his hands was motionless: they chafed and rubbed it with spirits without effect: his tongue soon began to swell, and he had barely strength to order them to hasten to Osnaburgh. His senses failed him, and he died the next morning, in the 68th year of his age, and in the 13th of his reign.

of the reign

of George 1.

The violence of political bias, under which the cha- Character racter and reign of this monarch have been handed to posterity has palmed upon the public a very unfaithful portrait of both. The inclination of the nation to favour the Whig party, which, during the whole of this reign, governed the King, senate, and people with a despotism little congenial with their avowed principles of civil liberty, and the crushing of the rebellion in favour of the Pretender, who more from his religion than politics, was disrelished by the nation, encouraged the successful party to flatter, and deterred the depressed party from publishing even a faithful representation of that portion of our history. George, from his arrival in England, threw himself without reserve into the arms of the party, which seated

tells Lord Townsend, "I must likewise acknowledge the obligation we all lie under here for your procuring so great an instance of his Majesty's goodness, as the revoking of Wood's patent."

1727. him on the throne. Throughout his reign he may be said to have been rather governed by the leaders of party, than to have governed a free people. To their passions and interests, rather than to their council and advice, he was totally subservient. They commanded a majority in parliament, and George too well knew, that his title to the British throne was wholly parliamentary. He came to the throne at the mature age of fifty-four years: his comportment was reserved and formal, and little reconcileable with the liberty he allowed himself with the sex. The Duchess of Kendall, his lefthanded wife or avowed mistress, and the Countess of Darlington, enjoyed at the same time the royal protection and latterly Mrs. Ann Brett, an English lady, was formally admitted into the seraglio of St. James's, with the promise of a title, which the King lived not to grant. They were constant food for the venom of the Jacobites, and systematically supported by the Whig party. The influence, which these ladies exercised upon the royal mind, opened and kept up during the whole of the reign, a regular system of ministerial intrigue, which ever must accompany such predilections of the monarch. The various plots and counterplots of Lord Bolingbroke, Bishop Atterbury, and others of the Jacobitical party, which were generally defeated by the address of Sir Robert Walpole, scarcely produced even a remote effect on Ireland. George had the good fortune to have the merit of his reign attributed personally to himself, and its defects thrown upon the corruption and false principles of his ministers.

CHAPTER IV.

The Reign of George II.

of George

dressed by

lics.

UPON the demise of George the First, his son 1727. ascended the throne without disturbance or opposi- Accession tion. Now, for the first time since the revolution, I. Addid the catholics of Ireland venture to approach the the cathothrone by a public act of their body. The penal laws had been somewhat multiplied, and rigorously executed during the late reign. It was still fresh in their minds, that the severe laws of Queen Ann were said to have been passed against them, as a punishment for their having neglected to address her on her coming to the throne. The extreme virulence, with which they were calumniated from the press, the pulpit, and the senate, on the demise of that Queen, had deterred them from offering any address upon the accession of the Hanover family. At this juncture, however, they drew up an address of congratulation, which in a dignified manner expressed loyalty to their sovereign, and pledged them to a continuance of their peaceful and quiet demeanour. It was presented to the lordsjustices by Lord Delvin and several respectable catholic gentlemen; but it was received with silent contempt. The lords-justices*, who were humbly en

*They were Primate Boulter, Thomas Wyndham, and William Conolly.

1727. treated to transmit it to his Majesty, never condescended to make an answer to those, who presented

Boulter's principle of

it; nor is it known to this day, whether it reached the hands of the sovereign, or were strangled in its birth by the heads of the English interest, who dreaded nothing so much as the united loyalty of the people of Ireland.

The great engine, patron, and supporter of the governing English interest in Ireland, was Primate Boulter. He affected to confound under one common denomination of the disaffected, and King's enemies, all the Tories and patriots, who preferred an Irish to an English interest in their native country. Sensible that his means of supporting the English interest would not bear the light, his Grace insidiously effected a very strong and unjust measure, which would probably have failed, had it been fairly proposed and freely debated in the then prevailing temper of the public mind. Not one of the acts of Elizabeth or Ann had gone the length of depriving the catholics of their elective franchise. By the 2d of Ann, An Act to prevent the further Growth of Popery, every elector was required to take the oaths of allegiance and abjuration; to which no catholic objected. The attention, which the nation began to pay to their civil rights, and the political weight, which the catholics bore in elections, awakened the primate's jealousy and alarm, and drove him to the desperate resolution of upholding the English interest in Ireland by disfranchising

*As much of Primate Boulter's letters as the editor has favoured us with, openly avows this prelate's principles upon the subject.

above four-fifths of its population. An opposition 1727. to the English interest, which it ever was the pride of this prelate to support, was dreaded from the patriots, who systematically opposed any foreign ascendancy over the native rights and interests of their country. It was not natural, that the body of the Irish people should be forward in supporting such foreign ascendancy, whether English or Protestant. The catholics' address to the throne was not carried without a considerable division of the catholic body*; of which the primate so dexterously availed himself in the then pending elections, that on the 24th of Au

Within three weeks after the death of the King, he writes to the, Duke of Newcastle, (vol. I. p. 177.) "Every thing here is very quiet:" and on the same day he informs Lord Townsend (p. 176), "We have no other bustle amongst us, than what arises from the warm canvass going on in all parts about the election of members for the ensuing parliament." He had three days before apprised Lord Carteret, then lord-lieutenant, (p. 173), " that the whole kingdom was in the utmost ferment about the coming elections. I can safely appeal (said his Grace) to your Excellency for my having to the best of my power served his late Majesty, and supported the English interest here."

* On the 20th of July, 1727, the primate wrote to Lord Carteret: "I hear this day, that the address yesterday presented by some Roman Catholics, occasions great heats and divisions among those of that religion here." (Vol. I. p. 188.) That the constant view of this prelate was the maintenance of an English ascendancy, and to keep down the native influence of Ireland, appears from the whole tenor of his correspondence. His editor assures us, that these letters will ever remain the most authentic history of Ireland, for the space of time, in which they were written; viz. from 1724 to 1742, during which his Grace was thirteen times one of the lords-justices.