For the next decade and a half, Irish history again became inseparably intertwined with crises in English politics, both foreign and domestic. Central was Charles's desire to reassert his sovereignty against the jealousies of parliament. He had already lost his feudal or hereditary revenues and was confined to revenues granted for life by parliament. When those revenues were insufficient he would have to turn to parliament for more revenues, which would mean summoning the members into session. At that point parliament might make demands on or criticisms of royal policy in domestic or foreign matters. All of this might seem perfectly normal in parliamentary democracies of the 19 th, 20th, and 21st centuries, but it was something quite irregular in an earlier age, especially in the 16 th and 17th centuries, which were characterized by royal absolutism.
The parliament of the 17th century, whether in England or in Ireland, was scarcely a democratic body. One house, the Lords, was composed of hereditary members and bishops of the established church. The other house, the Commons, consisted of representatives from the counties or shires, elected by a restricted franchise, and members selected from assorted towns or boroughs by varying electorates, usually extremely limited. In a sense, the impending struggle was between the friends of the king, who later would be nicknamed the Tories, after the Irish Catholic outlaws, because of allegations of the king's softness toward Catholics, and those who hoped to further augment the authority of the parliament against the power of the monarch, labeled the Whigs after more extreme Calvinists in Scotland. The Whigs were usually people of enormous economic strength and disposed toward a Calvinistic attitude toward religion, even if they nominally conformed to the established church. The Tories, on the other hand, were loyal adherents to the church and suspicious that the Whigs and religious nonconformists were at heart potential "republicans," as had been the Cromwellians.
Charles's difficulties with parliament, especially in getting revenues, led him to secretly agree to accept direct subsidies from his cousin, Louis XIV, the most Catholic king of France, in return for supporting certain of Louis's territorial aspirations against the Netherlands, with whom England had successfully warred in the 1660s, gaining New York. Charles also promised certain concessions to the Catholic population of England and Ireland, and to ultimately become a Catholic himself. One specific action taken by Charles that caused immediate outrage was his issuance in March 1672 of a Declaration of Indulgence suspending penal laws against Catholics (or recusants) and nonconformists. These were laws that had imposed penalties for nonconformity to the established church. The following year the House of Commons declared the declaration invalid and a Test Act was passed requiring all officeholders to take communion in the established church. These actions were to be applied in Ireland as well. In October of that year all Catholic bishops and clergy who were members of religious orders were ordered to leave the country. However, the measure was not strictly enforced. Persistent fears of Catholicism were stoked by the marriage of the king's brother, James, the duke of York and his probable successor in view of the king having no legitimate heir, to Mary of Modena, a Catholic to whose religion James would convert.
The several successors to Ormond as lord lieutenant of Ireland all failed to provide the desirable revenues and Charles reappointed Ormond in 1677. A certain amount of Ormond's energies in the first year of his reappointment were taken up with military preparation in fear of a militant Presbyterian uprising in Ulster stimulated by zealots in Scotland. The crisis passed. His next major problem was the extension to Ireland of the "Popish Plot" hysteria. An allegation was advanced by Titus Oates that there was a Catholic plot to assassinate Charles and replace him with their coreligionist, his brother James. The theory fueled efforts by the Whigs to pass exclusion legislation that would bar the succession by the Duke of York. The anti-Catholic fears occasioned the imprisonment of great numbers. In Ireland, Oliver Plunkett, the archbishop of Armagh since 1669, was arrested in 1679 on grounds of aiding an alleged Catholic plot. Peter Talbot, the Catholic archbishop of Dublin, was arrested in 1678 and detained in Dublin Castle for two years until his death. Plunkett's trial in Ireland ended without his being indicted, but he was then charged for high treason before the court of the King's Bench in London, where, on the perjuring testimony of disgruntled priests, he was convicted and executed on July 1, 1681.
World History
