The conquest was not only a military but a religious subjugation. The 27th of Elizabeth—the old act of uniformity—was rigorously enforced. The Catholic lawyers were disbarred and silenced; the Catholic schoolmasters were forbidden to teach, under pain of felony. Recusants, surrounded in glens and caves, offering up the holy sacrifice through the ministry of some daring priest, were shot down or smoked out like vermin. The ecclesiastics never, in any instance, were allowed to escape. Among those who suffered death during the short space of the Protectorate, are counted "three bishops and three hundred ecclesiastics." The surviving prelates were in exile, except the bedridden Bishop of Kilmore, who for years had been unable to officiate. So that, now, that ancient hierarchy which in the worst Danish wars had still recruited its ranks as fast as they were broken, seemed on the very eve of extinction. Throughout all the island no episcopal hand remained to bless altars, to ordain priests, or to confirm the faithful. The Irish church as well as the Irish state, touched its lowest point of suffering and endurance in the decade which intervened between the death of Charles I. and the death of Cromwell.
The new population imposed upon the kingdom, soon split up into a multitude of sects. Some of them became Quakers: many adhered to the Anabaptists; others, after the Restoration, conformed to the established church. That deeper tincture of Puritanism which may be traced in the Irish, as compared with the English establishment, took its origin even more from the Cromwellian settlement than from the Calvinistic teachings of Archbishop Usher.
Oliver died in 1658, on his "fortunate day," the 3rd of September, leaving England to experience twenty months of republican intrigue and anarchy. Richard Cromwell—Lambert—Ludlow—Monck—each played his part in this stormy interval, till, the time being ripe for a restoration, Charles II. landed at Dover on the 23rd of May, 1660 and was carried in triumph to London.
BOOK X. FROM THE RESTORATION OF CHARLES II. TO THE ACCESSION OF GEORGE I.
Hope is dear to the heart of man, and of all her votaries none have been more constant than the Irish. Half a century of the Stuarts had not extinguished their blind partiality for the descendants of the old Scoto-Irish kings. The restoration of that royal house was, therefore, an event which penetrated to the remotest wilds of Connaught, lighting up with cheering expectation the most desolate hovels of the proscribed. To the Puritans settled in Ireland, most of whom, from the mean condition of menial servants, common soldiers and subaltern officers, had become rich proprietors, the same tidings brought apprehension and alarm. But their leaders, the Protestant gentry of an earlier date, wealthy, astute and energetic, uniting all their influence for the common protection, turned this event, which seemed at one time to threaten their ruin, to their advantage and greater security. The chief of these greater leaders was the accomplished Lord Broghill, whom we are to know during this reign under his more famous title of Earl of Orrery.