"That is just like John," his mother said. "He was ever thoughtful for
others. I am more pleased, a hundred times, that he should have so risked
his life to obtain food for the little ones, than if he had taken part in
the fighting and proved himself a very champion of Derry."

Parliament had met on the 7th of May. The session had been opened by a
speech from the throne, in which the king commended the loyalty of his
Irish subjects, declared his intention to make no difference between
Catholics and Protestants, and that loyalty and good conduct should be
the only passport to his favour. He stated his earnest wish that good and
wholesome laws should be enacted, for the encouragement of trade and of
the manufactures of the country, and for the relief of such as had
suffered injustice by the Act of Settlement; that is, the act by which
the lands of the Catholics had been handed over, wholesale, to Cromwell's
soldiers and other Protestants.

Bills were speedily passed, abolishing the jurisdiction of English courts
of law and of the English parliament in Ireland, and other bills were
passed for the regulation of commerce and the promotion of shipbuilding.
The bill for the repeal of the Act of Settlement was brought up on the
22d of May. It was opposed only by the Protestant bishops and peers, and
became law on the 11th of June. Acts of attainder were speedily passed
against some two thousand Protestant landed proprietors, all of whom had
obtained their lands by the settlement of Cromwell.

A land tax was voted to the king, of twenty thousand pounds a month, and
he proceeded to raise other levies by his private authority. The result
was that the resources of Ireland were speedily exhausted, money almost
disappeared, and James, being at his wits' end for funds, issued copper