Small additional infamy, therefore, attaches to the “Protector” for giving effect to the designs of his predecessors. The spirit of the 17th century monarchs and his was the same towards the nation of which Attorney-General Davis declared: “The Irish be a race of great antiquity, wanting neither wit nor valour. They received the Christian faith above 1,200 years since, and were lovers of music, poetry, and all kinds of learning, and possessed of a land abounding with all things necessary for the civil life of man.” Earlier than Davies, Spenser of the “Faerie Queene” wrote in 1596:— “The Irish are one of the most ancient nations that I know of at this end of the world.... They come of as mighty a race as the world ever brought forth ... very present in perils, great scorners of death.” For the uprooting of such a breed, high political and moral reasons had to be invented, but when the natives were got rid of and their persecutors could discover no political or religious pretexts to cloak their greed, they fastened nakedly on the input and earnings of the settlers from England and Scotland. These supplanters of the Gael were in the third and fourth generation harassed and skinned as thoroughly as if they had belonged to the outcast race. In the province where Papists were almost forbidden to breathe, the framers of the Penal Code, in the name of “the rights of property,” taught the humbler Protestants the scantiness of their mercies. The descendants of the “great Deputy” did not attempt to enforce their Patents while knowledge of their origin prevailed and malodor beset them; but in the reign of George III. their baleful activities had consequences which were empire-wide. The extravagance and rapacity of the Chichesters led to the enforced emigration of the children of the Planters, and powerfully contributed in 1776 to the loss of the American Colonies. The armies of Washington were so largely recruited from the evicted tenants of Ulster that, according to the evidence presented to a Parliamentary Committee, half the Revolutionary soldiers were Irish. For this Lord Donegall and his imitators were to be thanked. The “flight of the Earls,” which the “great Deputy” promoted, had for its sequel the flight of the peasants, provoked by his descendants; and with it the breakdown of the imperial tie between Britain and the greatest part of North America.