The Catholics Hope Much from King James
Above : Picture Of Hugh O’Neill
The news of the death of Elizabeth was welcomed with satisfaction by the Catholics of the Irish towns, and by those of the rural districts in and round the Pale. The clansmen elsewhere had not yet come to consider themselves as subjects of the Crown. Although, during the O’Neill wars, the exercise of the Catholic religion had, from motives of policy, been little interfered with, yet none of the persecuting laws had been repealed, and they might at any time be brought again into force, at the mere caprice of an official; so that there was a general feeling of insecurity as long as the old Queen lived. From James much was hoped.
Though he had himself been educated in the Reformed Doctrines, his mother, Mary Stuart, had been all her life the great champion of the Catholic cause. He had for some years been intriguing with Hugh O’Neill, and promising him assistance, the nature and extent of which were not known. He had on various occasions alluded with considerable pride to his own supposed descent from the ancient Kings of Ireland. These things being so, he would not, it was argued, refuse, at least, the free and public exercise of the religion which had been his mother’s to the people from whose royal race his ancestors had sprung
Acting on this assumption, the priests and people of Waterford, Cork, Limerick, Kilkenny and several other towns and cities proceeded to take possession of, throw open and reconsecrate, the churches which had once been theirs. Masses were celebrated with all the pomp of pre-Reformation times ; bells were rung, sermons preached, and there were processions through the streets. In the midst of all this, there came, like a thunderbolt, the stern order of Mountjoy to stop these proceedings at once, and following closely, the Lord Deputy himself at the head of an army marched into Munster to see that his commands were obeyed. Remonstrances were brushed aside, and the town authorities were informed that stern punishment would follow the least attempt at resistance. There was no course open but to submit.
Though Mountjoy’s actions so far were in general, if not in detail, dictated by the King, and though James was fully determined to uphold the ascendancy of the Reformed Religion, which, as the State Church,he regarded as an essential part of the Government itself, he was still by no means inclined to persecute the Catholics, or to interfere with the private and unobtrusive exercise of their religion. To the representations of the Irish officials who, headed by Sir John Davys the Attorney-General and Loftus the Archbishop of Dublin, kept urging him to severity, he turned for some time a deaf ear.