Page:Studies in Irish History, 1649-1775 (1903).djvu/101

Charles II the brief viceroyalty of Lord Berkeley that Catholics were admitted, to the intense disgust of the English Parliament, to the commission of the peace.

The civil power was thus entirely in the hands of the Protestant caste. Their monopoly of the military power was not less absolute. A standing army of some 6,000 men, to which Roman Catholics were very seldom if ever admitted, and a Protestant militia of about four times that number, served to protect the Government and the Cromwellian landowners against the hostility of the aboriginal population.

The great majority of the Irish people were thus excluded from all direct share in the government of their country. Their Church was at the same time still further weakened by internal schism. While the negociations which eventually resulted in the Act of Settlement were as yet incomplete, Father Peter Walsh, an Irish Franciscan, who had been conspicuous among the opponents of the Nuncio, and who had more recently distinguished himself in a controversy with the Lord Justice Orrery, had drawn up a declaration of loyalty known as the "Loyal Remonstrance," intended to remove the popular distrust of Roman Catholicism by proving the compatibility of fidelity to a temporal sovereign 89