Irish subjects, declared his intention to make no difference between
Catholics and Protestants, and that loyalty and good conduct should be
the only passport to his favour. He stated his earnest wish that good and
wholesome laws should be enacted, for the encouragement of trade and of
the manufactures of the country, and for the relief of such as had
suffered injustice by the Act of Settlement; that is, the act by which
the lands of the Catholics had been handed over, wholesale, to Cromwell's
soldiers and other Protestants.

Bills were speedily passed, abolishing the jurisdiction of English courts
of law and of the English parliament in Ireland, and other bills were
passed for the regulation of commerce and the promotion of shipbuilding.
The bill for the repeal of the Act of Settlement was brought up on the
22d of May. It was opposed only by the Protestant bishops and peers, and
became law on the 11th of June. Acts of attainder were speedily passed
against some two thousand Protestant landed proprietors, all of whom had
obtained their lands by the settlement of Cromwell.

A land tax was voted to the king, of twenty thousand pounds a month, and
he proceeded to raise other levies by his private authority. The result
was that the resources of Ireland were speedily exhausted, money almost
disappeared, and James, being at his wits' end for funds, issued copper
money stamped with the value of gold and silver; and a law was passed
making this base money legal tender, promising that, at the end of the
war, it should be exchanged for sterling money.

This was a measure which inflicted enormous loss and damage. At first,
the people raised the prices of goods in proportion to the decrease in
the value of the money, but James stopped this, by issuing a proclamation
fixing the prices at which all articles were to be sold; and having done
this, proceeded to buy up great quantities of hides, butter, corn, wood,
and other goods, paying for them all with a few pounds of copper and tin,
and then shipping them to France, where they were sold on his own
account. It need hardly be said that conduct of this kind speedily
excited great dissatisfaction, even among those who were most loyal in
his cause.

Captain Davenant was shocked at the state of things he found prevailing
in Dublin.

"I regret bitterly," he said, when alone with his wife and mother, "that
I have taken up the sword. Success appears to me to be hopeless. The
folly of the