sea.

by the Protestant army; and a strong squadron of English ships of war, lying in the river Shannon, precluded all relief to them, from France, by The fortifications of the place were contemptible; their number alone could afford them anyprotection; and that, under their circumstances, was precarious in a high degree. The small remainder of the rebel army, outside the town, and dispersed through a few parts of six counties of the kingdom, only half armed, almost naked and famished, without artillery did not amount, in the whole, to three thousand men, and in no one place were there five hundred of them in a body. Under all these circumstances it was notorious, that they could not protract the siege even for a fortnight, and were compelled to petition for a capitulation, and cry for quarter. (See Ralph's History of England, vol. 2, page 308.) King William, who was a generous enemy and a merciful prince, and at that time involved in a war on the continent, to rescue Europe from the grasp that ambitious monarch Louis the Fourteenth, had given instructions to his Generals to receive the Irish Romanists to mercy; and under such circumstances was the capitulation of Limerick agreed to, and two sets of articles executed; one called the military, the other the civil articles. No complaint has ever been made of the breach of the military articles; but it has been daringly

of

asserted by Romish writers, that all the laws made, since the revolution, in Ireland, against the growth of Popery, have been violations of the civil articles of Limerick; and such assertions are made in direct contradiction to the articles themselves. Doctor Browne late one of the fellows of, and one of the representatives in, the Irish parliament for the college of Dublin, in the year 1783, published a short tract entitled "a Brief Review of the Question, whether the articles of Limerick have been violated," in which he indeed entered very fully into that question, and exposed the falshood of such an assertion, so effectually, that the Romanists never dared to make any reply, and the question seemed to be put to rest for ever. But it has uniformly been the practice of the Romish writers to revive and republish every, falsehood which has, from time to time, been propagated by them, though fully refuted, suffering a convenient period to escape between the refutation, and the republication; that the falsehood may again revive and flourish when the refutation is forgotten. Now, therefore, they come forward with this old reprobated lie, that the articles of Limerick were violated by the enaction of the Popery laws in Ireland in the reigns of King William and Queen Anne; but their acrimony and rancour must for ever be disappointed, in this particular, as long as the articles themselves re

main on record; for the very recital of the articles is sufficient to prove to any reasonable man, who understands the English language, the groundless nature of such charge against the honour and good faith of the Protestant government of England and Ireland, and the absurdity of the arguments, if they can be called arguments, by which it is supported.

The articles themselves are set forth in this History of the Penal Laws, and they will be found in the Appendix to this publication : and how will the reader be surprised to find, on the perusal of them, that the first of them alone relates to all the Romanists of Ireland! the others wholly relate to Romanists of the description contained in the articles, being certain minute portions of the Romish inhabitants of six Irish counties only, under certain conditions, and to some officers in the rebel army. King William never could prevail on the Irish parliament to ratify the first of these articles; such parts of it, therefore, which required the sanction of an act of parliament to warrant their execution, are to be considered as obliterated from the articles of the capitulation, which exceeded the constitutional power of the crown or its ministers to grant or to execute. These civil articles, so far as the execution of them depended on the constitutional power of the crown, being alone binding, and those which

required the sanction of parliament to enforce their execution being utterly invalid, if the parliament refused its sanction to them. This first article shall be here inserted verbatim, and then a specimen of the conclusions drawn from it in the History of the Penal Laws.

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First, the Roman Catholics of this kingdom shall enjoy such privileges in the exercise of their religion, as are consistent with the laws of Ireland, or as they did enjoy in the reign of King Charles the Second; and their majesties, as soon as their affairs will permit them to summon a parliament in this kingdom, will endeavour to procure the said Roman Catholics such further security, in that particular, as may preserve them from any disturbance upon the account of their said religion."

The deduction, in the History of the Penal Laws, from this article is the following: "So long as the true principles of justice shall have their due influence, the majority of mankind can never consider this first article of the treaty of Limerick in any other light than as a complete and perpetual exemption of the Irish Catholics from all political and religious disqualification on account of their religion."

In the page immediately preceding this curious deduction, is inserted a statement taken from the report of the Committee of the House of Commons

appointed in 1697, to consider what penal laws were then in force against the Roman Catholics. This committee reported as follows "1st. An act against the authority of the Bishop of Rome. It enacts that no person shall attribute any jurisdiction to the see of Rome; that the person offending shall be subject to a premunire; and that all who have any office from the king, every person entering into orders or taking a degree in the university, shall take the oath of supremacy.

"2d. An act restoring to the crown the ancient jurisdiction over the state ecclesiastical and spiritual it likewise enacts that every ecclesiastical person, and every person accepting office, shall take the oath of supremacy.

"3rd. An act for the uniformity of common prayer. It enacts that every person having no lawful excuse to be absent, shall every Sunday, resort to some place of worship of the established church, or forfeit twelve pence.

"4th. An act by which the chancellor may appoint a guardian to the child of a Catholic.

"5th. An act by which no Catholic schoolmaster can teach in a private house, without a licence from the ordinary of his diocese, and taking the oath of supremacy.

"6th. The new rules, by which no person can be admitted into any corporation without taking