Note 30 — PREFACE.
Reading edition
It is farther particularly notable that James, the friend and correspondent of Pope Clement VIII. and the special protector of the Irish Catholics, first established in Ireland a Protestant ascendancy in parliament, in obedience to the advice of the Lord Deputy Chichester. With the inconsistency which ever accompanies a want of principle, he occasionally amused himself at the expense of the very people he affected to favour. When Chichester made King James a present of a beautiful horse, his Majesty asked him if it were an Irish horse: on being answered in the affirmative, the King swore his favourite oath, “Then it must be a Papist,” for he verily believed that all things produced in Ireland were Papists, even the very animals themselves.