Page:Studies in Irish History, 1649-1775 (1903).djvu/324

After Limerick All through the eighteenth century the pension list swelled, and whenever the King wished to give a pension to a particularly scandalous person he granted it on the Irish establishment, well knowing that the Irish Parliament could do little, while the English legislature would never have allowed such pensions to be placed on the English establishment. During the first half of the century many Irish offices were in deputation, and Archbishop King tells us that a regiment was often commanded by a lieutenant, all superior officers being absent in England. An immense number of Irish offices were given to English politicians, most of them absolute sinecures. In the Irish Church matters were no better. Every Lord Primate during the eighteenth century was an Englishman, the majority of the bishops were also Englishmen, while all the most lucrative benefices were given to Englishmen as a matter of course. Every English bishop who came over to Ireland had friends or relations to be provided for. Archbishop King, who was an Irishman, and one of the few patriotic and enlightened Protestant churchmen of the day, was loud in his denunciations of this policy. "The Bishop of Derry," he writes in 1725, "since his translation to that See, has given about £2000 in Benefices to his English Friends and Relations, Lord 312