The same fear of a nascent Irish nationalism was the real motive for the Irish penal code, which assumed its worst features under Anne, and was largely extended under George I. and George II., although no Jacobite rebellion in Ireland threatened those sovereigns, and the only provocation was the silent growth of Irish national feeling. That its cause was not religious is clear, for there was little religious persecution, and the penal code in Ireland was at its worst in the heyday of English latitudinarianism. The design was really to shut out the Irish by means of their religion from political and social influence. Hence their exclusion from the legal and teaching professions, from the university, from the army and the navy, from corporations, grand juries and vestries; hence the barbarous laws by which a son converted to Protestantism could reduce his Catholic father to a mere life-tenant, by which no Catholic could buy or bequeath land or inherit or receive it as a gift from Protestants, by which he could not act as a guardian, a constable, or a gamekeeper, possess a horse worth more than £5, or keep more than two apprentices. A Protestant husband who married a Catholic wife fell under this penal code; a Protestant wife who married a Catholic husband was deprived of her inheritance; and an Act of George II. declared that mixed marriages should be null, and that the priests who made them should be hanged. Some knowledge of Irish history is required in order to appreciate the virtuous indignation roused by the Pope’s _Ne Temere_ decree. In the eighteenth century, wives were bribed by the law to turn against Catholic husbands, and children against their Catholic fathers; the fractious wife, the unnatural son had only to feign conversion in order to secure immunity and reward for undutiful conduct, and to deprive those whom they had injured of the management and disposal of their estates. Such was the system begotten by force and fraud through the breach of the Treaty of Limerick, when William III.’s generals, in order to pacify Ireland, guaranteed to the Irish people the enjoyment of their religious liberties. The arts which earlier English Governments had used to set chief against chief and clan against clan, were now employed on a more generous scale to set a dominant caste against the people they ruled, and to place at the absolute disposal of an alien garrison the lives, the liberties, the conscience, the property, and the domestic happiness of the nation it had robbed, maltreated, and betrayed.