Page:Studies in Irish History, 1649-1775 (1903).djvu/309

After Limerick develop the existing resources of Ireland, and each time the King had been able to raise forces and supplies in the country with which he had tried to stamp out the constitutional rights of England. One difficulty was that Ireland was a separate kingdom and that the English Parliament had legally no direct authority over her. Another difficulty was that the greater part of the Irish revenue was vested in the King and his successors for ever, and completely out of the control of both the English and the Irish Parliaments. Any increase in Irish wealth necessitated an increase in the King's hereditary revenue, and therefore rendered him more independent of the English legislature. It was all this which made England nervously anxious to restrict Irish resources in all those directions which might even indirectly interfere with the growth of English power.

The religion of the mass of the Irish people naturally complicated matters still further and gave England fresh political reasons for interfering in Ireland. There was always a curious fear haunting the legislature that the Irish Catholics might support the Pretender, and this fear continued to exist long after the reasons for it had died away. English statesmen deliberately set themselves to hunt down and persecute all 297