At the same time the University of Dublin, which from the date of its foundation had been a hotbed of Puritanism, was made to feel the reforming vigour of the Lord Deputy. The “weak provost” already referred to—Robert Usher, a relative of the Primate—was, like Andrews, politely kicked upstairs; and his successor, Chappell, a man after Laud’s own heart, proceeded to remodel the college in accordance with the highest standard of Anglican orthodoxy.[103]
One other innovation of a more serious character was made. Immediately after the dissolution—for the step was too unpopular to be taken while Parliament was sitting—Wentworth proceeded on his own authority to erect a court of high commission in Dublin similar to that already existing in England, “conceiving the use of it might be very great to countenance the despised state of the clergy, to support ecclesiastical courts and officers, to provide for the maintenance of the clergy and for their residence, either by themselves or able curates, to bring the people here to a conformity in religion, and, in the way of all these, to raise perhaps a good revenue to the Crown.”[104]
Parliament and Convocation being both dissolved, Wentworth was at leisure to devote his energies to the great business of his administration—the establishment of an English colony in Connaught. It would be difficult to say which was the more scandalous, the pretext which the Lord Deputy put forward for this measure or the steps by which he attempted to carry it into effect. More than four hundred years earlier Henry the Third, with that princely generosity with which sovereigns have so often disposed of the property of their subjects, had granted the entire province to Richard de Burgh, with the exception of five cantreds about Athlone, which were reserved to the Crown. De Burgh had succeeded in making good his claim to a great part of the province, corresponding to the modern counties of Galway and Mayo; the rest continued in the possession of the aboriginal inhabitants. By the death of the last Earl of Ulster about a century afterwards the title to these lands passed to his daughter Elizabeth, then an infant; but the actual possession remained with his collateral heirs, the MacWilliams, ancestors of the Earls of Clanricarde and Mayo. By the marriage of Elizabeth de Burgh to Lionel, Duke of Clarence, the title to the Connaught estates of her ancestors had descended lineally to Edward the Fourth; and the actual occupants, whether of native or Anglo-Norman descent, were pronounced by the Lord Deputy to be intruders on the possessions of the Crown. Neither the prescriptive right derived from an undisturbed occupation of centuries, nor the recent promises of James and Charles, were suffered to constitute a barrier against this monstrous claim. The Articles concluded with Perrott were pronounced invalid on the plea that that statesman had exceeded his instructions; the patents granted by James on the ground of the technical flaw already noticed.[105]