e, did its part by confiscating the estates of
the settlers, driving out the Protestant clergy, and outlawing English
sympathisers by name in "the hugest Bill of Attainder which the world
has seen."[3] It was the successful defence of Derry and Enniskillen by
the Scotch and English colonists that saved Ireland and gave King
William and his troops the foothold that enabled them to save England,
too, in the Irish campaign of the following year.

Not the least remarkable instance of the use to which separate
Parliaments within the Kingdom could be put for the ruin of England
occurred during the activity of James the Second's son, the so-called
"Old Pretender." In 1723 his chief adviser, the Earl of Mar, presented
to the Regent of France a memorial setting out in detail a project for
betraying Britain into the power of France by dismembering the British
Parliament.[4] The Irish Parliament, in close alliance with a restored
Scottish Parliament, was to be used to curb the power of England. "The
people of Ireland and Scotland," according to Mar, "are of the same
blood and possess similar interests," and they should thus always be
allied against England and oppose their "united strength"--backed, of
course, by that of France--to any undue growth of the English power. The
scheme came to nothing, but if the Pretender had possessed a little more
energy and capacity; if the French Court had been in earnest, and if
Ireland and Scotland had each possessed a separate Parliament, "with an
executive responsible to it," and with the control of a national
militia, the story of 1745 might have ended differently.

It is necessary that these facts should be kept in mind when complaint
is made of the oppressive and demoralising Irish Penal Code. That Code
no one defends now, although it was lauded at the time by Swift as a
bulwark of the Church against the Catholics on the one hand, and the
Presbyterians on the other. It was the product of a cruel and bigoted
age, and at its worst it was less severe than similar laws prevailing
against Protestants in those parts of the Continent where the Roman
Church held sway.[5] Spain and France were at that time vastly more
powerful, populous, and wealthy countries than England: England was
never free from the dread of foreign invasion, and to the would-be
invader Ireland always held a guiding light and an open door.

Finally, it must also be remembered that at a time when the chances
seemed fairly even