law forbade such promotions.

On the principle observed throughout these Memoirs, of avoiding all
reference to the political struggles and controversies of the passing
hour, the Author will make no reflections on the past, the present, or
the future policy of England towards a country whose destinies seem so
indissolubly bound up with her own. He humbly prays that HE, who says
to the tempest "Peace, be still!" and is obeyed, may so guide and
govern the religious and moral storms by which our age is shaken on
the subject of Ireland, that in His own good time the troubled
elements may be calmed; and that truth, peace, and charity may
prevail, and bless both countries, then at length become like "a city
that is at unity in itself."

By most of those who take a wide and comprehensive range of its
history, the dissensions which have distracted Ireland, and from time
to time torn it in pieces, and caused it to flow with the blood of its
neighbours and of its own children, will probably be ascribed, not
more to the difference of religion among its inhabitants, than (p. 233)
to the difference of origin. The struggles have been, not more
between Protestants and Romanists, not more between Catholics of the
church of England and Ireland, and Catholics in communion with the
sovereign pontiff, than between English and Irish, between those who
have regarded themselves as the aboriginal sons of the soil, and those
of Saxon or Norman descent, whom they have hated and abhorred as
intruders and invaders. The conflicts between these classes in
Ireland, as they may be traced in its chronicles, were just as
dreadful and as sanguinary before the Reformation, as ever they have
been since the separation of the reformed church from the see of Rome.
At all events, whatever may be the nature of the unhappy causes of
disunion in the present day, till within comparatively modern times
the struggles have been not more of a religious than of a national, or
perhaps of a predial, character. Authentic history teems with evidence
bearing directly on this point; and even the original documents,
references to which are interspersed through this volume, are quite
sufficient to establish it.

Among other documents confirmatory of the view here taken, which it
would be beyond the province of these Memoirs to recite, the statute
of 4 Hen. V. (1416), referring as it does to similar enactments of
previous reigns, and strongly expressive of the bitter je