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VIII.

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1612.

Nov.

1613.

Aug.

if it fall down to mean men, then it is as it was at the last. But neither of these ways concerns me in particular,—but if it should in a middle region go to lawyers, then I beseech your Lordship have some care of me. The attorney and solicitor are as the King's champions for civil business, and they had need have some place of rest in their eye for their encouragement. The Mastership of the Rolls, which was the ordinary place kept for them, is gone from them. If this place should go to a lawyer, and not to them, their hopes must diminish. Thus I rest, your Lordship's affectionate, to do you humble service,

F. BACON.

He feels so certain of this suit that he orders the new clothes for his servants; yet the suit fails. He wants the Court of Wards and Liveries as a right, and will not buy it. Sir Walter Cope, a man of larger fortunes and smaller scruples, while Bacon alleges service, tells down his money and buys the place. The wags of the Mitre have their laugh. "Sir Walter," they say, "has got the Wards, Sir Francis the Liveries."

19. If he sue without success for the Court of Wards, he is constantly consulted or employed in the most weighty, the most delicate business of the Crown. Most conspicuous, perhaps, of the cases which now engage his mind is the old, old story of Irish broils.

Of Ireland itself he never speaks but in words of tenderness and grief. With him the green lustrous island is "a country blessed with almost all the dowries of naturewith rivers, havens, woods, quarries, good soil, temperate climate, and a race and generation of men, valiant, hard,

19. Bacon to Carr, Nov. 14, 1612, S. P. O.

CHICHESTER'S IRISH GOVERNMENT.

177

and active, as it is not easy to find such confluence of commodities, if the hand of man did join with the hand of nature; but they severed,-the harp of Ireland is not strung or attuned to concord." More the pity, thinks its generous and sagacious friend!

20. Sir Arthur Chichester, the wisest, firmest man ever
sent from England to rule the Celt,-after driving out the
rebels O'Neile and O'Donnel, crushing O'Dogherty and
the assassins who ravished and destroyed Derry,—has
built a new city on Lough Foyle, garrisoned and calmed
Strabane, Ballyshannon, Omagh, and the forts along
the lines from Kerry to Inishoan, and peopled with
the germs of a new race the wastes of Antrim and
Down, of Londonderry and Coleraine. Strong in his
genius and in his success, after founding an English state
in Ulster on the ruins of the great Celtic insurrection,
he calls a Parliament in Dublin to sanction what has
been done, and to resume, for the first time in the
remembrance of living men, a regular mode of civil
and popular government. For seven years he has ruled
by the sword. He wishes to lay it down. But blood is
hot and feuds run high. The Saxon and the Celt, the
Protestant and the Papist, meet in Dublin, less disposed to
sit on the same benches and hear each other prate than to
pluck out the sharp skean and fly at each other's throats.
At the first meeting they fall to blows.
One party says

Sir John Everard shall be Speaker; the other, Sir John
Davis. Everard is in opposition, Davis the Irish Attorney-
General; Everard the candidate of the monks, Davis of

20. An Account of the Right Hon. Sir Arthur Chichester, Lord Belfast,
Lord Deputy of Ireland; by Sir Faithful Fortescue: with Notes and a
Memoir of the Writer by Lord Clermont; 1858. Ellis's Orig. Letters,
Third Series, iv. 173.

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the Crown. Chichester can but follow the Imperial law. Usage good in Westminster must be held good in Dublin. Davis must be Speaker. Indeed, the majority elect him. But a crowd of men summoned from the Bog of Allen, from the banks of Lough Swilly, from the wilds of Sligo and Mayo,―representatives of the MacOiraghtys and Mac Coghlans, of the O'Doghertys, O'Donnels, and O'Concannons, who have scarcely ever heard of a precedent, have not learned to respect a majority of votes. When the Protestants file into the right lobby, instead of filing into the left the Roman Catholic members seat Everard in the chair. They refuse to move or to be counted like a drove of sheep! Davis, voted into the chair by a majority of twenty-eight, is taken up to his seat by two members, as in the English House of Commons. Everard will not stir. Davis plumps into his lap. In a wild Irish uproar, Everard, caught by the crowd, is thrust out neck and crop. The Celtic members grasp their skeans. If Chichester, wise in time, had not prudently set them in a ring of steel, the members, instead of hearing each other's grievances, would have cut each other's throats. Such a House of Commons is an impracticable instrument for preserving the peace of Ireland, and Chichester dissolves it. On the evening of the row, to show his scorn of such brabbles, the Lord Deputy goes out to play his usual rubber.

21. Everard and his friends come over to complain at Whitehall. They talk of their wrongs. They object to the new boroughs planted by the English; they require that these boroughs shall not be allowed to send representatives to an Irish House of Commons! They whine of

21. Abbot, Aug. 4, 1613, S. P. O.; Add. MSS. 19, 402, fol. 37.

ADVICE CONCERNING IRELAND.

179

danger to their persons, of a Gunpowder Plot to blow them into the sky.

The King consults Bacon. Anxious for Parliaments, but aware that Parliaments presuppose habits of order and discussion, respect for opinion, submission to majorities, Bacon gives the King this advice:

BACON TO JAMES.

Aug. 13, 1613.

MAY IT PLEASE YOUR MOST EXCELLENT MAJESTY,

I was at my house in the country what time the commission and instructions for Ireland were drawn by Mr. Attorney, but I was present this day the forenoon, when they were read before my Lords and excepted to, some points whereof use was made, and some alterations followed, but I could not in decency except to so much as I thought there might be cause, lest it might be thought a humour of contradiction or an effect of emulation, which, I thank God, I am not much troubled with, for, so your Majesty's business be well done, whosoever be the instrument, I rest joyful. But because this is a tender piece of service, and that which was well directed by your Majesty's high wisdom may be marred in the manage, and that I have been so happy as to have my poor service in this business of Ireland, which I have minded with all my powers, because I thought your estate laboured, graciously accepted by your sacred Majesty, I do presume to present to your Majesty's remembrance (whom I perceive to be one of the most truly politic princes that ever reigned, and the greatest height of my poor abilities is but to understand you well) some few points in a memorial enclosed which I wish to be changed. They tend to this scope principally, that I think it safest for your Majesty at this time, hoc

VIII.

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1613.

Aug. 13.

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Aug. 13.

agere, which is to effect that you may hold a parliament in
Ireland with sovereignty, concord, contentment, and mode-
rate freedom, and so bind up the wound made without
clogging the commission with too many other matters. . . .
whereas these instruments are so marshalled as if the
grievances were the principal. The grievances which were
not commended to these messengers from the party in
Ireland, but slept at least a month after their coming
hither, and . . . are divers of them of so vulgar a nature
as they are complained of both in England and Ireland,
and both now and at all times. For your Majesty to give
way upon this ground, to so particular an inquiry of all
these points, I confess I think is unworthy of majesty, for
they are set down like interrogatories in a suit in law.
And my fear is they will call up and stir such a number of
complaints and petitions, which not being possible to be
satisfied, this commission meant for satisfaction will end in
murmur. But these things which I write are perhaps but
my errors and simplicities. Your Majesty's wisdom must
So most humbly craving

steer and ballast the ship.
pardon, I ever rest your Majesty's most devoted and
faithful subject and servant,

FR. BACON.

Government acts on this counsel of maintaining in Dublin a firm and inflexible justice. A Parliament meets within twelve months, the members of which quarrel indeed among themselves, as is only national and natural; but which proves itself as capable of transacting public business as almost any Parliament in Palace Yard. It gives peace to Ireland for thirty years.

For nearly all that is most gracious and noble, most wise and foreseeing in the Irish policy of the Crown in this

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