History of the Irish (Presbyterian) Church from the Death of Charles to the Accession of James II. (2)

From Scotch and Irish Seeds in American Soil by Rev. J. G. Craighead

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CHAPTER VIII. … continued

Richard Cromwell, who succeeded his father in the Protectorate, soon proved himself wholly incapable of holding the reins of government, and Charles II. was invited to resume the crown as his hereditary right. But a fatal mistake was made when the king was invested with power without assigning proper limits to the royal prerogative, and thus protecting the freedom of his subjects. Unfettered by any conditions, Charles II. soon exhibited the same disposition to exercise arbitrary authority which his father had attempted, and with like results.

Notwithstanding his fair promises to Presbyterians, who, having so steadily refused to take the engagement oath, were surely entitled to his favor, it was soon apparent that they were to expect nothing but severity at his hands. Everything indicated the approach of a season of suffering and persecution. In the face of all his solemn declarations, he determined to replace the Episcopal Church on its former basis, and only desired to quiet all opposition until he could carry out his resolution. The effects of his policy were soon felt in Ulster, when Bramhall and Leslie, who still survived, were returned to their vacant sees and began to evince all the bitterness of their old intolerance. Other bishops were appointed, and measures adopted for crushing out the very existence of the Presbyterian Church. At the instigation of the bishops, the lords-justices issued a proclamation forbidding all unlawful assemblies and directing the sheriffs to prevent or disperse them. The object was to prevent the meeting not only of presbyteries, but also of congregations. Among the very foremost to incite the persecution of the Presbyterians, were those members of the court who had formerly renounced their allegiance to Charles I. and held office under Cromwell and his son Richard. These mercenary men were now the most active in denouncing, as disloyal and unworthy of toleration, those same ministers whom they had before persecuted for their loyalty and attachment to monarchy, when they themselves were the supporters of the usurper Cromwell.

While the bishops were preparing to put in force the proclamation of the lords-justices, the Presbyterian ministers held a meeting, and sent four of their number from their several presbyteries to Dublin, to remind the justices of the king’s promises to them, and to remonstrate against the cruel measures contemplated to be employed. They reminded them also of their loyalty and sufferings under the Pretender, their present loyalty to Charles II., which was shown by the readiness with which they had welcomed him back to his throne, and their past peaceable spirit and their future resolution to remain loyal and dutiful subjects. But it was all to no purpose. The reply returned to the petition from the members of the presbyteries requesting liberty to exercise their ministry in their respective parishes, as they had formerly done, clearly indicated that nothing less than entire conformity to prelacy was intended by the council, instigated, as they were, by such bishops as Bramhall and Leslie. In their answer they said, “We neither could nor would allow any discipline to be exercised in church affairs but what was warranted and commanded by the laws of the land,” and they told the ministers that “they were punishable for having exercised any other.”

Even the celebrated Jeremy Taylor, bishop of Down and Connor, exhibited the same exclusive and intolerant spirit. The author of the eloquent work entitled Liberty of Prophesying tarnished his fair reputation by repudiating his avowed principles. In his conference with the nonconformist clergy he treated them sharply, and even rudely; and in reply to the conscientious scruples which they had assigned for not appearing at his visitation services, he declared that “a Jew or a Quaker would say so much for his opinions.” The Presbyterian ministers, though grievously disappointed with their reception, returned to their congregations resolved to breast as best they could the coming storm. Nor had they long to wait; for this bishop shortly afterward, in a single day, declared thirty-six of their churches vacant, and sent curates to take possession of part of them, while in others the regular pastors were violently arrested as they were entering their pulpits.

The situation of these ministers was peculiarly distressing. They were not only excluded from their pulpits and deprived of their means of living, but were forbidden, under heavy penalties, to preach, baptize or publicly exhort among their people. These privations, however, they willingly endured rather than violate their consciences and submit to a form of government and worship which they considered unscriptural.

Other prelates of the Established Church speedily followed the example set by Jeremy Taylor —“the impersonation and special jewel of Anglicanism,” as Froude calls him—so that in Ulster alone sixty-one Presbyterian ministers were deposed from the ministry and ejected from their charges. Of these, sixteen were of the presbytery of Down, fourteen of Antrim, ten of Route, eight of Tyrone and thirteen of Lagan.

Of the Act of Uniformity, which was thus enforced, Mr. Froude says: “To insist that none should officiate who had not been ordained by a bishop was to deprive two-thirds of the Protestant inhabitants of the only religious ministrations which they would accept, and to force on them the alternative of exile or submission to a ritual which they abhorred as much as popery, while, to enhance the absurdity, there were not probably a hundred episcopally ordained clergy in the whole island. Yet this was what the bishops deliberately thought it wise to do. . . . Every clergyman had to subscribe a declaration that a subject, under no pretence, might bear arms against the king, and that the oath to the League and Covenant was illegal and impious. . . . Nonconformists became at once the objects of an unrelenting and unscrupulous persecution.”

Only seven out of nearly seventy clergymen conformed to prelacy. The trials and hardships of the ejected ministers, though terrible, were heroically endured. “They set an example,” says the historian, “of fortitude and integrity which prepared and encouraged their brethren in the sister-kingdoms to act with similar magnanimity, for they enjoyed the painful though honorable preeminence of being the first to suffer in the three kingdoms, and are therefore eminently entitled to the admiration and gratitude of posterity.” Had they proved faithless in their day of trial, Presbyterianism in Ireland would have scarcely survived the subsequent persecutions of the prelates and the disastrous wars of the Revolution.

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