Page:The Irish Parliament; what it was, and what it did.djvu/24

 of the various penal statutes that disgrace the ferocious reign of Queen Anne, and the still more scandalous period of George I. On one measure only do we find the Bishops opposing Government, and then not as the friends, but as the enemies, of the people. The Government wished to mitigate, in the case of the Presbyterians, the horrors of the Penal Code. They accordingly strove to procure a repeal of the Test Act, which placed that loyal body under such grievous disabilities. Again and again Bills for the relief of Dissenters were strangled by the influence of the Bishops in the House of Lords. The Bishops were out of sympathy with the people for reasons easily perceived. They were aliens alike in religion, thought, feeling, and race. They were the nominees of the British Ministry; the Irish clergy had no voice in their selection. "During the eighteenth century every Primate of Ireland was an Englishman, as were also ten out of the eighteen Archbishops of Dublin and Cashel, and a large proportion of the other Bishops." In 1769, out of the twenty-two Irish Bishops, fifteen were Englishmen. In 1796 Mr. Grattan computed that half the Irish Episcopate were English. "Look," he said, "at your Bench of Bishops; one half, I believe, English." A visitor to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge would be easily led, by the number of portraits of Anglo-Irish