Note 520 — Chapter XVIII · ON THE CONSTITUTION OF IRELAND

"The church is now so spoiled," says Sir Henry Sidney in 1576, "as well by the ruin of the temples, as the dissipation and embezzling of the patrimony, and most of all for want of sufficient ministers, as so deformed and overthrown a church there is not, I am sure, in any region where Christ is professed." Sidney Papers, i. 109. In the diocese of Meath, being the best inhabited country of all the realm, out of 224 parish churches, 105 were impropriate having only curates, of whom but eighteen could speak English, the rest being Irish rogues, who used to be papists; fifty-two other churches had vicars, and fifty-two more were in better state than the rest, yet far from well. Id. 112. Spenser gives a bad character of the protestant clergy. P. 412.

An act was passed (12 Eliz. c. 1) for erecting free schools in every diocese, under English masters; the ordinary paying one-third of the salary, and the clergy the rest. This, however, must have been nearly impracticable. Another act (13 Eliz. c. 4) enables the Archbishop of Armagh to grant leases of his lands out of the pale for a hundred years without assent of the dean and chapter, to persons of English birth, "or of the English and civil nation, born in this realm of Ireland," at the rent of 4d. an acre. It recites the chapter to be "except a very few of them, both by nation, education, and custom, Irish, Irishly affectioned, and small hopes of their conformities or assent into any such devices as would tend to the placing of any such number of civil people there, to the disadvantage or bridling of the Irish." In these northern parts, the English and protestant interests had so little influence that the pope conferred three bishoprics, Derry, Clogher, and Raphoe, throughout the reign of Elizabeth. Davis, 254; Leland, ii. 248. What is more remarkable is, that two of these prelates were summoned to parliament in 1585 (Id. 295); the first in which some Irish were returned among the Commons.

The reputation of the protestant church continued to be little better in the reign of Charles I., though its revenues were much improved. Strafford gives the clergy a very bad character in writing to Laud. Vol. i. 187. And Burnet's Life of Bedell, transcribed chiefly from a contemporary memoir, gives a detailed account of that bishop's diocese (Kilmore), which will take off any surprise that might be felt at the slow progress of the reformation. He had about fifteen protestant clergy, but all English, unable to speak the tongue of the people, or to perform any divine offices, or converse with them, "which is no small cause of the continuance of the people in popery still."—P. 47. The bishop observed, says his biographer, "with much regret, that the English had all along neglected the Irish as a nation not only conquered but undisciplinable; and that the clergy had scarce considered them as a part of their charge; but had left them wholly into the hands of their own priests, without taking any other care of them but the making them pay their tithes. And indeed their priests were a strange sort of people, that knew generally nothing but the reading their offices, which were not so much as understood by many of them; and they taught the people nothing but the saying their paters and aves in Latin."—P. 114. Bedell took the pains to learn himself the Irish language; and though he could not speak it, composed the first grammar ever made of it; had the common prayer read every Sunday in Irish, circulated catechisms, engaged the clergy to set up schools, and even undertook a translation of the Old Testament, which he would have published but for the opposition of Laud and Strafford. P. 121.