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Sir Thomas Cusack, who held the office during the reigns of Edward VI. and Mary, appears to have been a very able man, and, what was singular in his position, he really endeavoured, in administering justice, to engraft some of the Celtic usages on the ungenial plant of English law; but he appropriated Church lands without the least scruple, although probably a professing Catholic, and, a trait not noticed in these volumes, he bravely declared that there was nothing wrong in a plot to assassinate an Irish chieftain. Archbishop Curwen, who, by the way, gave its succession to the late Established Church, was one of the meanest of timeservers; and the name of Loftus, Chancellor and Primate, and founder of the University of Dublin, stands out as that of an audacious jobber, and is still remembered in Irish annals as stained with inhumanity of the deepest dye.

The reigns of James I. and his son form an important era in Irish history. The island had been completely subdued; the last hopes of the brilliant Tyrone had perished after the day of Kinsale; the Pale extended over more than three provinces ; and the nation awaited the will of its conquerors. Society had assumed the shape of a colony, forming an aristocracy of the sword, and in possession of much of the land of the country torn from its ancient owners by violent means, and of a subjugated people oppressed and despoiled and separated by wide divisions from its rulers. These lines of demarcation were deepened by the hostility of two rival churches, and by the conflict between the modes of life prevailing among the settlers and the nation. The crisis was one which demanded statesmanship of a generous and enlightened kind; and it would be unfair to say that the first Stuarts and their ministers had no idea of the nature of the situation. The Settlement of Ulster by which, notwithstanding a great deal of high-handed wrong, a real attempt was successfully made to reconcile the claims of the two races who dwelt in enmity upon the soil, and to plant the germs of a thriving community, remains a monument to the wisdom of Bacon; and the writings of Coke, and even of Davies, breathe a spirit of justice, nay of goodwill, towards the mass of the Irish people. But-what Mr. O'Flanagan has not pointed out with the clearness of one who understands the period-the effort to civilise and reclaim Ireland was frus. trated by three distinct causes, and the result was a calamitous failure. In the first place, the constitution of the country was fashioned on a sectarian model; Protestant ascendency became supreme in the State, and while the dominant colony monopolised all social and political power, the Church of the nation

was jealously proscribed. In the second place, with a narrowness of view, not however surprising in that age, peculiar care was taken to obliterate the usages of the Irish people; their customs were treated as barbarous and absurd; the few lands that remained to their leaders were brought under the control of English tenure, known to them as an expedient of coalescation; and their ancient institutions and organisation were placed under the protection of the law. And, in the third place, most important of all, if not a few of the statesmen of England had really noble designs for Ireland, the Government at the Castle fell into the hands of a succession of unscrupulous harpies, or of spoliators on a huge scale, who enriched themselves by multiplying forfeitures, and treated the country as a conquered province to be portioned out among Stuart favourites. On pretexts simply infamous or false, whole tracts were wrested from their former possessors and transferred to these official plunderers; the title of every estate in the king'dom,' it was said, 'was thrown into confusion and peril;' and the tale of wrong was grandly completed by the rapine of Strafford, who tried to confiscate the whole of Connaught for his master. The consequences were that the whole nation, including even the Catholics of the Pale, was exasperated against England and the Protestant colony, and that the hopes of security and peace on which progress depended were blasted; nor can it be doubted that these iniquities provoked the rising of 1641.

Mr. O'Flanagan's sketch of the Irish Chancellors, of the part they played in this evil trial, and of contemporaneous legal history, is very feeble and insufficient. From 1605 to 1619 the Seals were held by Thomas Jones, who also occupied the See of Dublin, and seems to have been a competent lawyer. This legal prelate proved himself a stanch supporter of the Protestant interest, which was dominant in Church and State; he gave his influence to Sir John Davies, in the well-known contest of 1613; and his visitation charges breathe little save an orthodox hatred of Irish Papists. It is said that he had some share in carrying out the Settlement of Ulster; but this probably was merely ministerial, for the design of that comprehensive scheme was foreign to his bigoted understanding; but we may readily believe that he approved or inspired the sweeping decision of the Irish Courts, which, with compendious presumption and harshness, pronounced the whole of the Brehon laws-laws, that even by the admission of Sir John Davies, possessed a curious mixture of natural equity' and governed the relations of the native race-a set of lewd and intolerable

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'customs,' not to be maintained in a well-regulated state. The successor of Jones was a grandnephew of Loftus, the Elizabethan Chancellor of whom we have said a few words; he seems to have been a man of small parts, who, however, contrived to follow in the steps of his ancestor by enriching himself, with little scruple as to the means. It is not improbable that this guardian of the Irish conscience of the first Stuarts took an active part in the shameful proceedings for robbing Irish proprietors of their lands by suggesting inquiries into defective titles, which were too common in those days, nor yet that he pocketed the rewards of this traffic. We find that in 1639 he was dismissed from his office for malversation, in a great degree through the influence of Wentworth, who, if he was a beast of prey in Ireland, at least despoiled in the interest of the Crown, and had no sympathy with mere greedy jackals. Loftus, who, for services of a questionable kind, had been raised to the Peerage of Ely, was followed, in 1642, by Sir Richard Bolton, a lawyer of eminence as his writings prove, but whose career as Chancellor was cut short by the outbreak of the rebellion of 1641. We should wish to think well of this personage, for he has left on record sentiments with respect to the Irish race that do him honour, and that were not common in that age; but as, unfortunately, he assisted Strafford in his notable scheme for appropriating Connaught, his practice and speculation may have differed from each other. As regards the Irish Bar in those reigns, it seems to have increased in importance, owing probably to the number of lawsuits caused by the extinction of the Brehon customs and the general insecurity of titles. The Law Courts were permanently removed from the Castle; in the reign of Elizabeth it had been proposed to transfer them to St. Patrick's Cathedral; but Archbishop Loftus, fearing lest an inquiry into the interests of the Prebends might disclose some of his pleasant doings, had contrived piously to prevent this sacrilege.

After the subjugation of Ireland by Cromwell the Irish Seals were put in commission. The Commissioners, of whom the regicide Corbet was the most notable, seem not to have taken part in the settlement' of the country recorded carefully by Mr. Prendergast; this was carried out by the executive Government under the auspices of two special commissioners. At the Restoration, Sir Maurice Eustace, a scion of one of the families of the Pale, became Chancellor, and co-operated in the enactment of the celebrated statutes which, to this day, form the principal basis of title to most of the soil of Ireland. Mr. O'Flanagan properly condemns the injustice which stained the Acts of

Settlement and Explanation; but it was hardly to be expected that the English Legislature would eject the Cromwellian colonists wholesale; and the most odious feature of the arrangement was the favouritism of the King, and the repudiation of the claims of the demands of Catholic proprietors, who had at least a right to a hearing. Sir Maurice Eustace, we think, acted like an honourable man in these transactions; he did much to stop the malevolent reports against the loyalty of the Irish Catholics, which the Protestant Irish sedulously circulated; and his hands remained clean in a scramble for property from which too many of the Castle profited. The memory of this eminent magistrate has not yet been wholly forgotten; and though his lands have passed, in the strange vicissitudes of Irish property, to the descendants of the ancient Huguenot family of La Touche, the peasant near Harristoun, in the County Kildare, can still point out the ruins of the mansion built and adorned by the worthy Chancellor.

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The next holder of the Irish Seals was Michael Boyle, Bishop of Cork and Archbishop of Armagh and Dublin, the last and not the least distinguished of the mitred jurists who have filled the highest office in the land in these kingdoms. This prelate was a nephew of Richard Boyle, in after years the 'great Earl of Cork,' one of the most successful of the adventurers who, towards the close of the sixteenth century, made their good swords and their orthodox creed passports to honours and wealth in Ireland, and who, in some instances, and conspicuously in that of the noble House of Boyle, became the founders of families which have proved a blessing to their adopted country. Dr. Boyle first attracted public notice by his able advocacy of the claims of the Protestant settlers in the Diocese of Cork, when the Act of Settlement was under discussion; and, having been selected by the Irish Government as an agent to watch the progress of the Statute in its passage through the two English Houses, he received the thanks of the House of Lords for the services he performed on this occasion.' He became Chancellor of Ireland in 1663, and held the office for twentytwo years, during the period of superficial repose which preceded the rising of 1688-9. Although bred an ecclesiastic, he was certainly a very able judge; and he enjoyed a reputation on the Irish Bench not much inferior to that of Lord Nottingham, his great English contemporary. His Chancery orders' 'orders' are still extant, and show that Equity had, by this time, acquired in Ireland a scientific form, and must have been assiduously studied by a learned and well-trained body of lawyers. Dr. Boyle was charged with having been

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'a pluralist and jobber' in official life; but, as he was dismissed by James II. in 1686, when that sovereign was inaugurating his calamitous and reckless Irish policy, we are inclined to think that he was not only an able but an upright public

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The next name that appears on our list is that of one of the best of the Irish Chancellors. Sir Charles Porter was an English barrister who first became known in Westminster Hall as one of the counsel who became involved in the disputes in the reign of Charles II. touching the jurisdiction of the House of Lords in Equity Appeals in cases in which a member of the House of Commons was interested. Porter was arrested by the Serjeant-at-Arms, without being allowed 'to finish an argument he was addressing to the Master of the 'Rolls,' for having contended for the right of the Upper House; but his brief imprisonment proved fortunate, for he soon attained considerable practice. In 1686 he received the Irish Seals from James II., at a conjuncture of great political moment, calculated to test the worth of public men. King at this time had formed the design of humiliating the Protestant colony of Ireland, and of changing the constitution of the country by the mere exercise of arbitrary power; and for this purpose he resolved to make dangerous encroachments on the Act of Settlement, and to violate fundamental laws by raising Catholics to high places in Ireland, and practically giving them civil ascendency. Admitting—and who will contradict?-that the existing order of things in the country was essentially unjust and grievous; that the Act of Settlement was tainted with wrong; and that the proscription of the Catholic nation of Ireland was lamentable and perilous in the extreme, still the revolution meditated by James was a mere outrage on public right; and, as might have been expected, it only ended in prolonging for generations the misfortunes of Ireland. The conduct of Sir Charles Porter at this difficult time was much to his honour. He assented to a compromise that would have considerably modified the Act of Settlement; he even acquiesced in the elevation of Catholic Judges to the Bench; but he refused to sanction the foolish violence of Tyrconnel against the Protestant interest; and for this he was removed from office. In his case, however, probity was not to prove the truth of the saying of Juvenal, and it was given him, in his subsequent career, to uphold the rights of the ill-fated race of which, doubtless, he appeared to James the prejudiced and harsh adversary. Sir Charles Porter returned to the Bar and practised until 1690; but when after

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