r of L5,000 a year. William III.
bestowed a considerable Irish estate on his mistress, Elizabeth
Villiers. The Duchess of Kendall and the Countess of Darlington, two
mistresses of the German Protestant George I., had Irish pensions of
the united value of L5,000. Lady Walsingham, daughter of the
first-named of these mistresses, had an Irish pension of L1,500; and
Lady Howe, daughter of the second, had a pension of L500. Madame de
Walmoden, mistress of the German Protestant King George II., had an
Irish pension of L3,000. This king's sister, the queen dowager of
Prussia, Count Bernsdorff, a prominent German politician, and a number
of other German names may be found on the Irish pension list.

Lecky's description of the Protestant Church of Ireland is just as
revolting. Archbishop Bolton wrote, "A true Irish bishop [meaning
bishops of English birth and of the Protestant Church] has nothing
more to do than to eat, drink, grow fat and rich, and die."

The English primate of Ireland ordained and placed in an Irish living
a Hampshire deer-stealer, who had only saved himself from the gallows
by turning informer against his comrades. Archbishop King wrote to
Addison, "You make nothing in England of ordering us to provide for
such and such a man L200 per annum, and, when he has it, by favor of
the government, he thinks he may be excused attendance; but you do not
consider that such a disposition takes up, perhaps, a tenth part of
the diocese, and turns off the cure of ten parishes to one curate."

From the very highest appointment to the lowest, in secular and sacred
things, all departments of administration in Ireland were given over
as a prey to rapacious jobbers. Charles Lucas, M.P. for Dublin, wrote
in 1761 to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, "Your excellency will often
find the most infamous of men, the very outcasts of Britain, put into
the highest employments or loaded with exorbitant pensions; while all
that ministered and gave sanction to the most shameful and destructive
measures of such viceroys never failed of an ample share in the spoils
of a plundered people."

Arthur Young, in 1779, estimated the rents of absentee landlords alone
at L732,000; and Hutchinson, in the same year, stated that the sums
remitted from Ireland to Great Britain for rents, interest of money,
pensions, salaries, and profit of offices amounted, on the lowest
computation (from 1668 to 1773), to L1,110,000 yearly.

If, in treating of Newfoun