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Title: Eleanor Hull (1860-1935)
Author: A History of Ireland and Her People (1931)
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Language:  English
Date first posted: February 2008
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A HISTORY OF IRELAND AND HER PEOPLE

by

Eleanor Hull

(1931)

CONTENTS

VOLUME 1—To the Close of the Tudor Period

Preface
I. Pre-Christian Ireland
II. Early Christian Ireland
III. The Northmen
IV. Clontarf and After
V. The Normans in Ireland
VI. The O'Conors of Connacht and the O'Briens of Thomond
VII. The Invasion of Edward Bruce and the Gaelic Revival
VIII. The Statute of Kilkenny
IX. The Geraldines: The House of Desmond and the House of Kildare
X. The New Policy of Henry VIII
XI. The Change in Religion
XII. Sir Henry Sidney
XIII. Shane O'Neill and the Scots in Ulster
XIV. The First Plantations
XV. The Desmond Rebellion
XVI. Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone
XVII. Essex in Ireland and the Ulster Campaign
XVIII. The Munster Planters
XIX. Fineen (Florence) MacCarthy Reagh
XX. The Battle of Kinsale
XXI. The Flight of the Earls and the End of Mediaeval Ireland

APPENDICES

I. Pope Adrian's Bull "Laudabiliter" and Note upon It
II. Letter from Cathal Crovdearg O'Conor, King of Connacht, to Henry III,
          circa 1224
III. Extract from a Letter written by Richard II to his Uncle, the Duke of York,
          on his Arrival in Dublin, February 1, 1395
IV. Intelligence Message for Henry IV on the State of Ireland in 1399
V. List of Books belonging to the Library of Gerald, Ninth Earl of Kildare, 1526
VI. Letter of Conn O'Neill during his Imprisonment in Dublin Castle, 1552
VII. Letter of Shane O'Neill to the Earl of Sussex, Viceroy of Ireland, 1561
VIII. Historical Work done by Sir George Carew relating to Ireland

VOLUME 2—From the Stuart Period to Modern Times

I. James I and Ireland
II. The Plantation of Ulster
III. Wentworth in Ireland
IV. The Rebellion of 1641-42
V. The Confederate Wars in Ireland
VI. The Ormonde Peace
VII. Cromwell in Ireland
VIII. The Restoration
IX. James II in Ireland
X. James II's Irish Campaign
XI. After Limerick
XII. Commercial Disabilities
XIII. The Struggle for Legislative Independence
XIV. Grattan's Parliament
XV. Revolution and Rebellion
XVI. The Union
XVII. O'Connell and Emancipation
XVIII. The Famine
XIX. Young Ireland and the Fenians
XX. Remedial Legislation
XXI. Parnell and the Land League
XXII. John Redmond and Home Rule
XXIII. Sinn Fein and the Rising of Easter Week, 1916
XXIV. War and Conciliation
XXV. The Treaty
Epilogue. 1922-1930

APPENDICES

I. Phelim O'Neill's Commission from King Charles I
II. Oration of P. H. Pearse over the grave of O'Donovan Rossa
III. Proclamation of the Irish Republic, April 24, 1916
IV. Commission given by Eamon de Valera to the Envoys to the British Government,
          October 7, 1921
V. The Three Oaths
VI. Articles of Agreement on the Boundary Question
VII. Speech of Arthur Griffith in Dail Eireann on December 19, 1921,>
          in moving the approval of The Treaty
VIII. Poem 'Renunciation' by P. H. Pearse
IX. 'Moral Force' by Terence MacSwiney

A HISTORY OF IRELAND AND HER PEOPLE

VOLUME I

PREFACE

Old Matthew Paris writes: "The case of historical writers is hard; for if they tell the truth they provoke men, and if they write what is false, they offend God." Of all histories this dictum is perhaps most true of Irish history, which has been studied rather in terms of present-day political issues than in terms of actual retrospect. The most urgent of these political issues having been, up to a recent moment, the relations of England toward Ireland, this part of the history has to a certain extent, though often with much prejudice, been dealt with by all writers on Ireland; but the conditions of the country under native rule have been much more inadequately studied. It is taken almost for granted by patriotic writers that native Ireland was enjoying a Golden Age from which she was rudely awakened by the irruption of the English, who, in destroying it, put in its place a ruthless despotism, increasing in severity from age to age There is no more exacting problem than that of the rule of a dependency by an outside power; and in studying this problem, as Lecky truly says, "Irish history possesses an interest of the highest order...In very few histories can we trace so clearly the effects of political and social circumstances in forming national character, the calamity of missed opportunities and of fluctuating and procrastinating policy; the folly of trying to govern by the same methods and institutions nations that are wholly different in their character and their civilization." [1] The problem was much more complicated than modern writers allow; the conditions in Ireland itself account for much; and it is perhaps because the theory of a Golden Age breaks down upon closer study that the internal history of the country, as exhibited in its own annals, has been scrupulously avoided by Irish writers anxious to lay all the blame of misgovernment upon forces over which Ireland had no control. In the new situation, now that Ireland has once more regained freedom of action unhampered by outside interference, a reconsideration of the whole subject seems urgent. The professed desire of many of the younger school of Irishmen is for a return to the conditions, the methods, and the laws of the past as a rule of guidance for to-day. A clear understanding as to where this ambition leads calls for a reading of history which takes into account both sides of the problem, and endeavours fairly to estimate the actual conditions of native life in Ireland as well as the many and varied attempts of England to deal with it. The early intentions of the ruling power to act justly toward Ireland broke down in a despair that led to the most ruthless methods of resettlement. The fault was partly English, partly Irish, but still more largely that of the officials, who intervened between the English Crown and the Irish people. How Ireland would have developed had the Normans never set foot in Ireland is a question as impossible to answer as a similar question concerning England. The coming of the Normans was as inevitable in the one case as in the other; nothing at that time could withstand the sweep of their victorious onrush over Western Europe; and the result of their conquests was in both cases permanent and mixed of good and evil.

[1] Historical and Political Essays.

I have endeavoured in the following history to interpose as little as was possible between the reader and the contemporary authorities to which all writers of history must go, if they would study the matter at first hand. The result has been in numberless cases a surprise to myself; so different is the report of the man on the spot from the commonly received opinion of the present day. Irish history is a series of contradictions; its unexpectedness creates its absorbing interest; it refuses to march along the simple lines marked out for it by the modern political writer; it is illogical, independent, averse to rule. In these circumstances it has seemed best, so far as space permitted, to let the original writers speak for themselves.

By this means some portion of that fresh flavour which we taste in old personal documents, letters, and memoirs of the time may be retained, and the fault which Montaigne charges against "the middle sort of historians" that "they will chew our meat for us" is partly avoided. The writers of the day were undoubtedly often prejudiced, partial, or even false; but their memorials are all we have to depend upon; and especially in the Tudor period, when Irish history is well documented on all sides, they never held their tongues. We might like them better if they had not talked so much; but at least we have their unbiased opinion, and it is not difficult for any intelligent reader to make the necessary deductions for their individual points of view. To know the history of any period we must know the men who made that history; the personal element can never be omitted with safety in preference for wide general deductions. History never repeats itself, for the men who made it yesterday are different from the men who are making it to-day. But it is upon the men that the trend and conclusions of history depend.

I have to acknowledge with gratitude the kindness of the following noblemen and gentlemen who have allowed the use of photographs of portraits from their private collections for this work: His Grace the Duke of Devonshire, for a portrait of the first Earl of Cork, called the 'Great' Earl of Cork, now at Hardwick Hall, formerly at Lismore, attributed to Paul van Somers; the Right Hon. Lord Sackville, for the portrait of Katherine FitzGerald, the "Old Countess of Desmond," at Knole; the Right Hon. Lord de l'Isle and Dudley, for the portrait of Sir Henry Sidney, at Penshurst Place; Lady Nesta FitzGerald, for the portrait of Garrett Oge, ninth Earl of Kildare, at Carton, Maynooth; the Hon. Francis Agar-Robartes, for the portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh, at Wimpole; Mr Francis Joseph Bigger, for the portrait of Shane O'Neill, at Castle Shane, Ardglass; and the Rev. F. H. Hodgson, for the portrait of Sir George Carew, first Earl of Totnes, at Clopton House, Stratford-on-Avon. I have been unable to discover the owners of the two interesting portraits of Hugh O'Neill, second Earl of Tyrone, which were exhibited in the Loan Collection of Portraits, London, in 1866. Though known as a portrait of Hugh O'Neill, the younger of the two portraits has a faint inscription across the top of the picture, which seems to read, "Haec est Christophori simulaia canalis imago quem jaculum transfixa coxendice peremit."

To Mr Newport B. White I am indebted for kindly translating King Cathal "Crovdearg" O'Conor's letter in the Appendices, and to my brother, Mr C. M. Hull, for help in proof-reading and indexing.

ELEANOR HULL

I.—PRE-CHRISTIAN IRELAND

When Agricola in the fifth year of his British campaign (A.D. 82) "manned with troops that part of the British coast which faces Hibernia, with a forward policy in view," [1] the fate of Ireland, for good or ill, hung in the balance. Wherever the Roman arms made themselves felt, wherever by conquest or colonization Imperial law, religion, ideas, extended themselves, there followed as an inevitable consequence the profound modification, if not the extinction, of the native habits of life, and mythology. Ireland for many hundreds of years fell under no such yoke as that imposed by the Roman rule in Britain and Gaul. In spite of the Roman general's belief that "with one legion and a fair contingent of irregulars Hibernia could be overpowered and held," he never set foot upon her shores; for seven centuries after Agricola's day no important attempt was made by any outside power to subdue and colonize Ireland. Set apart by the surrounding ocean from the overwhelming catastrophes that overtook Europe after the fall of Rome, Ireland was left undisturbed to work out her own destiny. In Gaul and Britain, with the dying out of the native tongue and the adoption of a debased form of Latin, the native records, oral or written, were to a great extent lost; our knowledge of the customs, traditions, and beliefs of these countries, except for a few inscriptions and monuments, is derived solely from the observations of the conquerors.

[1] Tacitus, Agricola, xxiv.

In Ireland, on the other hand, thanks to its exemption from Roman dominion and the preservation of the native tongue, a mass of traditions, which were later preserved in writing, remain. Most of them have come down to us in the form of stories connected with special districts and relating to personages some of whom appear to have had an actual existence in history, and they are so full of detail as to habits, dress, and ways of life that we can form from them a clear idea of social conditions in Ireland at a time before history proper can be said to begin. They supply the most complete record of a civilization during the pre-Christian period preserved by any European nation north of the Alps. They claim to represent the life of the first century of the Christian era and onward; and the results arrived at by archaeology serve to confirm the truth of this tradition. Some of the ornaments described in the tales, for instance, are known to have ceased to be worn elsewhere within the first century of our era; and, though this does not preclude the possibility that in a country so remote from the general current of European influences as Ireland was they may have continued to be worn until a later period, it does tend to prove that the extant descriptions date from a period when these ornaments were still familiar to the story-tellers. Such are the beautiful brooches of the La Tène period and especially the leaf-shaped fibulae found in Ireland, descriptions of which occur as part of the dress of heroes in the Cuchulain tales; in Britain and Gaul, where they were also worn, they fell into disuse before the close of the first century. Though not nearly so common as the penannular brooch, with the circle pierced by a long pin, of which the Tara brooch is the best-known example, six specimens of the fibula have been found, three having been discovered at Emain Macha or Navan Rath, the centre of the Cuchulain tales in which these descriptions occur. It is evident that the bards who recited these stories, and possibly those who first committed them to writing, must have seen such brooches actually in use, otherwise they could not have been so accurately described.

The earliest tales of Ireland are partly concerned with mythological personages who seem to have been regarded as deities, known as the Tuatha De Danann, and partly with the doings of a group of heroic men and women, of whom the hero Cuchulain is the central figure. The chief centre of the group was Emain Macha in Ulster. In this district the outlines of forts, burial-places, and chariot-paths may still be seen, and the neighbourhood still retains old names and traditions corresponding to the legends as we have them written down in manuscripts of the tenth and eleventh centuries. The same may be said of the neighbourhood of Rath Cruachan, now Croghan, in Connacht, which is the centre of a similar group of Connacht traditions. In general the tales relate to an ancient struggle for pre-eminence between Ulster and Connacht, which was then ruled by a queen named Meave (Medhbh) as formidable as the British warrior-queen Boadicea (Boudicca). She is said to have gathered to the contest the "Four Great Fifths"or provinces into which Ireland was then divided and to have invaded Ulster, primarily to regain possession of a famous bull, but actually to assert the authority of Connacht and the South over that of the North. The incidents and fights into which the war resolved itself, in which her chosen warriors fought in single combat the champion of Ulster, Cuchulain, form a long and varied story. The Táin bó Cualnge is the chief epic of early Ireland.

There has been much dispute as to how the early division into five provinces was made. According to an old tradition, the first partition was carried out in the time of the Firbolg, one of the pre-Gaelic peoples of Ireland, and was later confirmed by the Milesians (or Clann Mileadh), the last invaders of ancient Ireland. According to this division Ireland consisted of Leinster, Connacht, Ulster, and two divisions of Munster. At the date of the Cuchulain or Ulster cycle of tales the monarch of Ireland, Eochaidh Feidhlioch (pronounced Yohee Feiloch), the father of Queen Meave of Connacht, redistributed the country in exactly the same way; which was, as Keating says, "the most permanent division ever made in Ireland." [2] This was also the tradition related to Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis) when he came to Ireland with Henry II. Professor Eoin MacNeill gives prominence to the Leinster tradition, which divided Leinster, instead of Munster, into two sections, and included Tara in the northern half, but this division was probably only temporary. [3] The erection of Meath into a separate province was only accomplished, according to an old belief, in the reign of Toole the Legitimate (Tuathal Teachtmhar), who reigned for thirty years at the end of the first and beginning of the second century. The local sept were the Luighne of Tara, a branch of a family of the same name settled in the Sligo district. At the close of the Ulster cycle we find the reigning king, Cairbre Nia Fear, giving his name to the territory of Meath as "Cairbre's Fifth" or Province, and disposing of part of his inheritance by gift to Conor (Conchubhar), King of Ulster, in return for the hand of his daughter in marriage. But from the earliest times the kings of Tara would seem to have exercised some undefined superiority over the provincial princes, and the repartition of the provinces by Eochaidh while monarch of Ireland shows that this right was submitted to and recognized. But all these ancient traditions must be received with caution. It was to the interest of each province to claim for itself the glory of having given High-kings to Tara, and the local writers did their best to give expression to these provincial aspirations. From an historical point of view little reliance can be placed on them.

[2] Keating, History of Ireland, ed. P. S. Dinneen (Irish Texts Society), 1, 107, 109, 185. There is a comparatively late cycle of tales dealing with Eochaidh, which may reflect the ideas of later days about the High-kingship.

[3] Phases of Irish History. Professor MacNeill does not give references; but has argument seems to be founded on the late composite Leinster text, Cath Ruis na Ríg, ed. E. Hogan, pp. 23 seq., which has been copied by Keating.

As time went on frequent changes took place. The early Ulster stories place the centre of the Northern power in the eastern portion of the province, with Emain Macha as its chief seat of authority. The chief incidents in the stories occur in parts of the present counties of Louth, then called Murthemne or Cuchulain's country, which was included in Ulster, and in Armagh, Down, and Antrim. Western Ulster takes no part. But during the Norse period the centre of power has swung west, and we find the princes of Ulster reigning from Aileach, five miles north-west of Derry in Co. Donegal, where a great fort is still to be seen.

In Tudor times the large part of Ulster west of the Bann was in the hands of the two powerful families of the O'Neills and O'Donnells, with their underlords or "Urraghs." The O'Neills occupied Tir-Eoghan or Tyrone, which then comprised, besides the present county of this name, the whole of Derry north to Lough Swilly, while the principality of the O'Donnells occupied Tir-Connell or Donegal.

The other provinces underwent similar changes. Munster, in Norse times, was divided between the Eoghanachts with Cashel as their capital, and the Dalcais or Dalcassians under the great family of the O'Briens, who made their chief seat at Kincora, near Killaloe on the Shannon, the succession to the kingship of Munster alternating between the two families. But later the province was partitioned into North Munster or Thomond, ruled by the O'Briens, which sometimes included Tipperary, Clare, and part of Limerick, sometimes only Clare; and South Munster or Desmond, which extended over Kerry, Cork, Waterford, and the south of Limerick. Co. Clare seems by geographical position to belong naturally to Connacht, and it passed back to that province about 1579 during the viceroyalty of Sir Henry Sidney, though the Earls of Thomond resisted the change.

The chief business of each province was transacted at public assemblies, to which people from all parts of the province congregated and to which merchants, native and foreign, brought their wares for sale. At these meetings laws were promulgated, the genealogies and provincial records rectified, and decisions come to by the brehons. Games and horse-racing formed part of the recreations of the assembly, and they may have had a religious significance. At the time of the marking out of the territory of Meath several of the sites where these gatherings (aonach) were accustomed to be held were brought within the limits of the central province, and forts were built beside them for protection. The meetings seem to have been connected with the quarterly festivals, for the assembly of Tlachtgha met with sacrificial rites at the beginning of winter (samhain), and that of Usneach at the beginning of summer (bealtaine). At the assembly of Taillte, held at the beginning of August (lughnassa), the marriages of the young people were arranged by their parents for the year, the men keeping themselves apart on one side and the girls on the other, while the arrangements were talked over and contracts made. Contracts for service seem also to have been part of the business of the fairs.

Originally these festivals had been the provincial assemblies of the separate provinces of Munster, Connacht, and Ulster, but they seem to have assumed a more general character with the readjustment of the provinces to form the new province of Meath. Ossory or Southern Leinster retained its own important fair of Carmen, which was divided into three parts, "a market of food, a market of live stock, and a great market of foreign goods." It is said to have been attended by Greeks, bartering gold and splendid clothing. One slope was given up to racing, another to cooking, and a third to women employed in making embroideries. The preliminary public business of law-giving and the execution of justice being disposed of, debts having been settled, arrests and distraints composed, and horse-racing tricks reprimanded, the company gave themselves over to gaiety and buying, while jugglers, bone-men, fiddlers, pipers, and masked actors carried on their trades in one part, and storytellers related the ever-fresh Fenian tales of destructions, cattle-preys, and courtships to crowds who never wearied of hearing them. [4]

[4] O'Curry, Manners and Customs, iii, App., 523-547.

These annual or triennial festivals served the purpose of keeping all parts of a province in touch. They were meeting-places for friends from a distance, and probably, like the still existing 'pardons' of Brittany, they had a religious purpose. Each was established on the site of the burial-place of some ancient female deity, and no doubt arose out of celebrations organized in her honour, with sacrifices and ceremonies which kept alive the cult. [5]

[5] Keating, History of Ireland, ii, 245-253.

The assembly or feis of Tara was the most important of all these meetings. It met once in three years in times of peace, and was attended by representatives of all the provinces. It was a sign of unusual disturbance if it were omitted. There the laws were promulgated or recited and rectified, annals and records added to, and genealogies brought up to date. It formed the central authority for the whole country, and was the main symbol of union between the provincial kingships. Men of rank attended it from all parts of Ireland, each captain of a band of warriors being followed by a shield-bearer. The monarch of Ireland or Aird-Rí presided, and banquets of great ceremony were held, each guest having his appointed place arranged beforehand according to rank and marked by the hanging of the owner's shield behind the seat he was to occupy. The women were provided for in a separate chamber, just as they had separate portions of the ground set apart for them at the fairs. The trumpet sounded three times as the guests entered and took their seats, each under his own shield. In the time of Cormac mac Art these assemblies were solemnized with great splendour; the dress of the king and his nobles being described as magnificent. That these old descriptions are substantially correct is rendered probable by the beauty of the ornaments actually recovered, such as finely decorated brooches, torques or waist-belts, rings and collars, all of which must have been worn by persons of rank. [6] Very fine examples of inlaid or chased bronze scabbards have also been found. Sickles and reaping-hooks for cutting rushes or reaping corn show that the custom was to cut the ears of the grain, which was then frequently stored in underground granaries for safety in times of turmoil. The cultivation of wheat was so general that it is referred to as a standard of value; barley was grown for malt; and ale was drunk, as well as mead, from early times.

[6] Armstrong, Catalogue of Gold Ornaments, National Museum, Dublin; W. Ridgeway, Date of the Cuchulain Saga; Macalister, Ireland in Pre-Celtic Times (1921); G. Coffey, The Bronze Age in Ireland; and cf. article on "The Distribution of Gold Lunulae in Ireland," in Proceedings of the Royal lrish Academy, vol. xxvii, Section C.

The High-kingship of Cormac mac Art in the third century may be accepted as historical; it represents the climax of the power of the kings of Tara in pre-Christian times. His reign is the centre of a number of stories pointing to the magnificence of his Court and the extent of his influence, but so many of the legends surrounding him are clearly folktales, that the whole tradition must be treated with reserve. It, however, incorporates one certainly historical fact, that of the dispersion of the clan of the Deisi, who migrated from Meath to the south of Ireland and to South Wales about this time. It is possible that at one time Connacht occupied a similar position of eminence to that which Tara obtained in Cormac's reign, for the pre-Christian kings of Ireland were buried at Clonmacnois, where the monastery of St. Ciaran was afterward built. From early times this seems to have been a sacred spot.

Tara itself was undoubtedly a religious centre before becoming the political headquarters of the High-king, and the rites with which the king was initiated point to a religious sanction for his election, and also to the belief that in his person he represented a divine idea. Though he was possessed of special privileges his life could hardly have been a happy one, for he was encompassed with taboos (geasa) which he dare not break without forfeit of his life or good fortune, and omens accompanied his every action. His existence must have been hampered at every point by ancient regulations. All Irish kings were subject to these restrictions, but they accumulated about the person of the king of Tara, as being the superior ruler, and a semi-divine personage. [7]

[7] Book of Rights, ed. O'Donovan, xlii-xlviii, 2-25; Folklore, March 1901; R. A. S. Macalister, "Tara" in P.R.I.A. vol. xxxiv, Section C, No. 10.

How the election of a king of Tara was carried out is not clear. The choice was probably in the hands of representatives from the different provinces, but it had to be ratified by certain ancient omens, such as the crying out of the Lia Fail, or "Stone of Destiny," when he stood upon it. Such omens were probably worked, as in other primitive societies, by the priests or Druids. The election of the provincial kings was also accompanied by curious and, to us, sometimes repugnant ceremonies, which continued in the native parts of the country up to a late date. Each king had his fixed retinue of officers of the household—his bards, law-givers, story-tellers, porters, stewards, and military body-guard, who attended to the regulation of the royal precincts, and to the arming or provisioning of the household. [8]

[8] Kilkenny Archaeological Journal, vol. ii.

If any uncertainty as to the succession existed the aid of soothsayers seems to have been resorted to. These men, after incantations, proclaimed the successor in a dream or ecstasy. In such a case as the election of King Conaire, the person indicated by them was quite unexpected by the electors. In the choice of Lugaidh of the Red Stripes a Convention of the Four Provinces of Ireland was held, attended by princes from all parts of Ireland, and this may have been the ordinary procedure. [9]

[9] Dá Derga, ed. Wh. Stokes, pp. 14, 17; Hull, Cuchulain Saga, pp. 231-32.

The inauguration ceremonies varied in different parts of the country. They took place on special hills or under ancient trees of great size, consecrated by time and tradition to this use. Though Keating and other Irish historians contest the truth of the old accounts, they are undoubtedly not imaginary, for they correspond closely to those of many peoples in a similar stage of progress. Some of the rites, such as that of handing to the newly elected chief a white rod as a symbol of the justice that ought to attend his rule, are of a solemn and suggestive character. A high standard of moral rectitude was set before the king, and such precepts as the following were laid down for him by his instructors. They are an appeal to the old wisdom of the fathers. "Speak not haughtily Mock not, insult not, deride not the old. Make no demands that cannot be met...Let not prescription close on illegal possession...Let the heir be established in his lawful patrimony; let strangers be driven out by force of arms. Do not sacrifice justice to the passions of men." [10]

[10] Instructions of King Cormac mac Art, R.I.A. Todd Lect., vol. xv.

In historical times elections were made in a more regular manner. The election was by popular vote and was taken at a mound (dumha), where the electors assembled and recorded their decision by shout or proclamation. The claimant had to be of the ruling family, and he was "the best of the noble heroes in knowledge, true learning and princely honour." If the election was disputed, both claimants appeared richly attired and armed, and when the decision was made the chief nobles placed their hands in his in token of fealty and placed the royal diadem (mind-righ) round his head, giving thanks to God for sending him. They then gave hostages for fidelity to the newly made king. Such an election is recorded of Callachan, King of Cashel, in the tenth century. [11]

[11] Caithreim Callachan Caisil, ed. A. Bugge, p 61.

Disputes and consequent wars for the succession were of constant occurrence. Primogeniture was not recognized, and sons born out of wedlock were equally eligible with the legitimate sons. The claimant was seldom the son of the late chief, but usually a cousin or nephew, chosen within certain family limits [12] for his position or capability. Though this system was good in theory, as being directed to the selection of the strongest candidate, the uncertainty with which elections were attended led to perpetual family feuds, murders, and mutilations, in order to get rid of possible rivals, a mutilated man being incapable of holding the princely office. This gave rise to the system of 'tanistry' in later times, by which the incoming chief was chosen during the lifetime of the reigning king, and thus secured the recognition of the sept, with the hope of a peaceful succession. But even this did not always secure the end in view; and the question of the succession of the Irish princes was one of those crucial points on which the English and Irish differed seriously throughout the Tudor period.

[12] Eoin MacNeill, Celtic Ireland, pp. 114-143

For centuries, from the date of the battle of Ocha (483) in the reign of Laery, we find the High-kingship of Tara held by the line of the Northern and Southern Hy-Neill in regular and alternate succession; but after the death of Malaughlan II (1022) it was seized by the O'Lochlans, a branch of the same house, and held by them in contest with the O'Conors of Connacht, one of whom, Roderick O'Conor, was in power at the date of the Anglo-Norman invasion. Once before, in the reign of Dathi (d. 428), Connacht had been the superior power, but only for a short interval. Munster had never placed a king in the royal seat until Brian wrenched the sceptre from Malaughlan II and reigned till his death at Clontarf; his son was sometimes reckoned as his successor. But through centuries, Ulster held, almost undisputed, the supreme power.

The old tales and laws present us with a picture of a warlike people whose children were trained from their boyhood to the use of arms, the sons of chieftains being admitted to knighthood at the age of seven and girded with miniature weapons suited to their age. This custom was continued up to a late period, for when the four provincial kings, O'Neill of Ulster, O'Conor of Connacht, MacMorrogh of Leinster, and O'Brien of Thomond, were invited to Dublin to meet King Richard II and offered English knighthood, they replied that they had been knighted when they were seven years of age. The little spears put into the hands of the young aspirant to knighthood were not empty symbols; they were intended to test his expertness in the actual implements of warfare which he would be called upon to use in after life, war being considered as the natural activity of the vigorous man.

Instruction in horsemanship, hurley, swimming, and shooting was given at an early age even to sons of the smaller chiefs, while children of the lower ranks were taught the care and herding of lambs and calves, kids and young pigs, kiln-drying, combing wool and wood-cutting; girls learned the use of the quern for grinding corn, and also kneading, dyeing, and weaving. They afterward took a large part in the work and superintendence of the farm and agriculture. Girls of high rank were trained in sewing, cutting out, and embroideries. The fine needlework of the Irish women was famous. The 'Raven-banner' of Earl Sigurd the Stout of Orkney, carried by him at Clontarf, which spread out in the wind like a flying bird, had been wrought for him by his Irish mother, a daughter of King Carroll (Cearbhal) of Ossory; and one of the prettiest pictures from old Irish romance is that of Emer, daughter of Forgall, seated in the pleasure-ground before her father's fort at Lusk, teaching the daughters of the neighbouring farmers fine needlework and embroidery.

Children of high rank were brought up and taught by foster-parents, fosterage forming among the Irish and Scotch Gaels the most enduring and the closest tie, as it was the most perfect expression of the unity of the clan as one family. From the son of the chief downward, every child of the higher ranks was nurtured by a family of a lower class. This formed an indissoluble bond of affection and a sure foundation of mutual sympathy between members of the clan. The chieftain who had been brought up in a farmer's family and had passed the first seventeen years of his life among his children had a knowledge of the conditions of life among his own retainers and a sense of their needs such as could have been gained in no other way. On the other side, the love of the foster-parents for their foster-children exceeded the affection which they bestowed upon their own offspring, and the families who fostered the chiefs felt for them a passionate affection. It was a bond at once sane and romantic, and it was seldom broken through life. The foster-son was bound to aid or support his foster-parents in old age or poverty just as much as the fosterer was bound to train and instruct him in youth. The obligations and the affection were mutual. The laws of fosterage were rigorously laid down; the fosterling's food, his clothes, his instruction, his payments, being all regulated by law. The child went provided with suits of clothes according to his rank; satin and scarlet, with silver on the scabbards and brass rings on the hurling-sticks, and brooches of gold for the sons of kings; plain black and white or saffron woollens for the humblest grades. Each child had to bring at least two suits of clothes, one new and one worn, the children of the highest chiefs wearing two colours every day and new clothes of two colours every Sunday, embroidered with gold and silver; the richness and variety of the colours worn corresponding to the rank of the wearer. They probably wore tartans.

The food of the poor child was 'stirabout' with salt butter; the higher-born child ate the same, but it was made with new milk and wheaten meal, while the sons of kings had fresh butter and honey. Chess-playing, the chief recreation of the higher classes in Ireland from the earliest times, was taught to boys of these classes along with more solid occupations. Girls paid a larger fosterage fee than boys, as being less useful to their foster-parents, but less was expected from them by way of return. The girl was of full age at fourteen years, the boy at seventeen; but if he were a king's son he was presented with a horse at seven. It was the duty of his tutor to instruct him fully in preparation for his degree, and to chastise him without undue severity. [13]

[13] Ancient Laws of Ireland, 11, pp. 147-103, 349.

The old laws show that the position of women in early Ireland was legally high, and the position of the 'wife of equal rank' where the marriage was made with the full consent of both parties was a good one. It carried with it equal rights between the husband and wife. Each owned the property—lands and household stuff and cattle—brought in at marriage, and both retained their rights over their own share, all family decisions about the children being made by mutual consent. In cases of separation, which had to be open and public, the woman took away with her all that she had contributed to the marriage stock. In law their word was equal, the evidence of the woman being equally admissible and equally valid with that of the man. Wedding gifts were divided, one-third going to the woman and two-thirds to the man, but the man, not the woman, paid the dowry. The wife received a stipulated share of all profits on farming or industry carried on by her; and, as the care of the farm as well as of wool and cloth-weaving, dyeing, malting, and similar pursuits, seems to have been in her hands, this must have amounted to a considerable regular income in the case of large farming operations. If she had been "a great worker" during her married life she was entitled on separation to one-ninth of the increase. [14] All women might give presents to their poor neighbours out of their separate property, and the woman might entertain half the company allowed to her husband. In the absence of her husband she could make contracts or reclaim debts. If she failed to enforce a debt there was a curious provision by which the contending parties might make "a lawful combat with their distaffs and comb-bags" in the presence of their guardians. The elaborate provisions relating to separated couples show that separation was frequent. A variety of other connexions besides regular marriage between men and women are provided for, the woman who bore sons having always a superior claim to the sonless woman. "The woman of equal rank, and the first wife with sons and without sons, and the adulteress with sons, these four women may give their own 'honour-price' in excess (of the actual debt) in presence of their husbands or in their absence, in loan and in lending at interest, in bargains and contracts. The adulteress without sons shall not give, in the absence of the man, anything but a hook and a distaff and such implements; and she shall not give in his presence anything but what her partner may order." [15] The power to exact an 'honour-price' in case of injury received showed that the aggrieved person held a position of dignity recognized by the clan. The ordinary sufferer from an injury could only exact compensation for the actual injury done him; but the man or woman of position claimed, over and above this, an extra compensation equivalent to their rank, rising by stages until it reached the 'honour-price' of the chief. If the culprit failed to pay the due compensation, it fell to his relatives to pay it, or in the last resort to the chief. Fines were regulated and debts reclaimed by the laws of ' distress ' which form a very large part of the Irish 'customary law.' [16] They were paid, as a rule, in cattle, which were driven into the village pound and retained there until the debt was discharged. Only persons of the lowest class, who owned no property that could be used to repay a debt, were imprisoned. Such a man was fettered or chained about the neck and fed on the smallest possible amount of food until the chief compelled him to do his duty. [17]

[14] Ibid , p. 391.

[15] Anc. Laws, ii, 379, 387.

[16] Ibid., i, 85 seq.

[17] Ibid., i, 105-7.

The descriptions of the dress of high-born women, as well as of kings, and of their utensils are of the most elaborate kind. Eochaidh, King of Ireland, is said to have seen Etain "at the edge of a well with a bright comb of silver adorned with gold, washing in a silver basin wherein were four golden birds and little bright gems of purple carbuncle in the rims of the basin. Her mantle folded and purple, a beautiful cloak with silvery fringes and a brooch of fairest gold. Her kirtle long, hooded, of green silk with red embroidery of gold. Marvellous clasps of gold and silver in the kirtle on her breasts and shoulders. On her head two golden-yellow tresses, each plaited in four locks, with a bead at the point of each lock. The hue of her hair seemed like the flower of the iris in summer, or like red gold after the burnishing." [18]

[18] Togail Bruidne Da Derga, ed. Wh. Stokes, p. 6.

The wide cloak, reaching to the knees or the feet, was common to all classes and periods and served many purposes, but a short cape with hood and tight-fitting jerkin with kilt were also worn. The linen undergarment was loose and thickly pleated and usually dyed saffron-colour.

Weapons were the broad sword, used for a downward stroke, spears and javelins of many kinds, and large bronze, hide, or wooden shields. Warriors fought from chariots, some of which were scythed like those of the Britons. Chiefs and charioteers were experts in the management of the horses, as they became in later times in horsemanship, when riding took the place of the chariot. Irish feats of skill in springing on to running horses, riding without saddle, and executing feats of agility on horseback were recorded with wonder by many visitors to the country, and horsemanship is still a passion in Ireland. Chariots were the usual means of entering into battle up to the seventh century, and decorated bronze bits have been discovered in Co. Mayo, adorned with late Celtic designs. Battles were, in the main, a series of single combats, ending with a general engagement. The duels were frequently fought in streams on the borders of territories, and a stranger was challenged in passing from one province to another by the warrior appointed to watch the ford.

One chief cause of wars was the raid for cattle, in which, along with personal and household goods, the wealth of a tribe consisted. Position depended upon the number of herds and flocks possessed by a tribesman, and there was an elaborate system by which cattle were loaned out by the chief or by large owners to those who needed them, in return for services rendered. According to the amount obtained, the borrower took a higher or lower place in the community, and rendered heavier or lighter service. It would appear that these middlemen were the 'Brugaid' or 'Bruigfer' of whom we hear as occupying large farms, which also acted as inns or houses of hospitality for wayfarers at central points along the main roads.

From the earliest times of which we have any record the inhabitants of Ireland were a Gaelic-speaking race, though it is not to be inferred that this language was aboriginal. At least for 1500 years the Celtic tongues have been spoken only in the extreme west of Europe—in Ireland, and the west of Scotland, the Isle of Man, Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany. They once had a wider range, but were pushed west by the spread of Roman culture and of the Latin language and by the Teutonic tribes who invaded the western half of the Empire and brought about its fall. It was probably from the mountain zone of Central Europe that the Celtic tongues spread over to the west. These people lived in pile-dwellings and were not given to movement.

Of the earliest inhabitants of the Celtic lands we know little with certainty. The latest researches in ethnology suggest the conclusion that the earliest race of which remains have been found in Ireland was a short, dark, and long-headed people, correlated with the Mediterranean European stock, who maintained intercourse with their brethren over the sea. Their blood, however, was not quite pure, and remains of individuals of alien racial character have also been found. These people are assigned to the late Stone (Neolithic) and Early Bronze Ages; they were the builders of the dolmens, or cromlechs, whose structures remain over an area extending from Japan, India, and Syria, along the north coast of Africa, and round by Spain, France, Holland, and Denmark, besides Cornwall, Wales, and Ireland. This race has given to Wales, Scotland, and Ireland the majority of their small brunette inhabitants. The wide distribution of their monuments would suggest a seafaring people, coasting along the shores, for the larger number of the dolmens are near the coast. They must have had a solemn cult of the dead; no one who has visited the great tombs of New Grange or Dowth on the banks of the Boyne, or who has seen the impressive alignments and the massive menhirs, or standing stones, at Carnac in Brittany, can fail to feel the reality of their belief in some form of worship connected with the dead.

These people were traders and workers in metal—copper, tin, and gold; and long before the arrival of the conquering race of tall, fair-haired people, who became dominant over many parts of Ireland, they were working gold in Wicklow and exporting, among other articles, the beautiful gold lunulae, or crescent-shaped neck ornaments, which have been found in Denmark, the north of France, Belgium, and Germany, in Cornwall, Wales, and Scotland, and in great numbers in Ireland itself. History has no beginning, and more than a thousand years before Christ traders may have been exchanging their wares along the Mediterranean shores, by way of Sicily, Spain, and Ireland, and so north to the Baltic.

At a period which is supposed not to be older than between 350-400 B.C. a new race came to Ireland. These were a tall race of fair-haired people, who brought with them the use of iron, and their arrival in Ireland marks there the beginning of the Iron Age. A people of Nordic origin, they came from the north of Europe. They were much like the Northmen and Normans, who in later days were to dispute with them the supremacy in Ireland, forerunners perhaps of the vikings who were to pour into Ireland in the ninth and tenth centuries. Being equipped with better weapons, they conquered [19] and assured domination over the original inhabitants, who probably differed from them, not only in race, but in religion and language; and, though there is no reason to think that the older peoples were inferior in courage and skill to their conquerors, the new-comers oppressed them as slaves and enacted laws to prevent intermarriage between the conquered and the conquerors. The old inhabitants seem to have sunk into the 'unfree communities' (daer-chlanna) or serfs; they had no rights, being despised by the ruling race as inferiors and reduced to servile ways of making a livelihood. [20]

[19] R. A. S. Macalister, Ireland in Pre-Celtic Times (1921). Cf. G. Fletcher, Ireland, pp. 82-94; H. J. E. Peake, The Bronze Age and the Celtic World;, H. J. Fleure, The Races of England and Wales; G. Coffey, Bronze Age in Ireland.

[20] For the castes in Irish society see Ancient Laws of Ireland, vol. iv.

The earlier Mediterranean people seem to have had a matriarchal form of life and government, memories of which lingered on in the tradition that the provincial assemblies, such as those of Tara and Taillte were founded in commemoration of famous women, and were held in celebration of their burial-feasts. War and learning were alike presided over by women-goddesses; there was a group of three war-goddesses, Morigan (or Neman), Macha, and Badb; another group, collectively called Brigit, presided over poetry and art. The cult of fairies and of well, stream, and forest spirits, and perhaps also the worship of animals, seems to belong to the most primitive forms of belief, and was widespread; but attempts to analyse the different strata of ancient beliefs can at present only be conjectural.

The old Irish traditions of origin, which describe the arrival in the country of a succession of peoples called the race of Partholan, the sons of Nemhed, the Firbolg, and the Milesians or children of Mileadh, are not to be regarded as having an historical basis. The actual facts of ethnology do not support these myths. But they in a general way indicate the early belief in the existence of races older than the dominant fair-haired, tall people of historic times, who were known as Milesians. The old legends describe the earlier race, called the Firbolg, as a small dark people who were despised by the conquering Milesians; they were supposed to be possessed of every evil trait of character. To the newer and superior race the Firbolg were as truly "meere Irish" as the Gaelic speaker was in later days to the speaker of English, and he was despised accordingly.

A body of people, known as the Erainn, seem to have been dominant in Munster and to have emigrated from the north of Kerry into Co. Antrim, while portions of the same communities are found in Connacht and Meath. These people have been thought to have given their name to the country, but this derivation is very doubtful. [21] They may have been scattered fragments of a population more widely spread in ancient times. Ptolemy, writing about A.D. 150, speaks of Brigantes in South-eastern Ireland similar to the inhabitants in the north of Roman Britain of the same name, and of Manapii on the coast of Wexford, whose name associates them with the Belgic people on the Continent. More important were the Cruithne or Picts, whom we meet in historical times occupying the whole of Scotland north of the Forth to the Orkneys, as well as the islands of Skye and Lewis. In Ireland they peopled the parts of Eastern Ulster, now known as Cos. Down and Antrim. Tradition gives them a much wider area; they seem to have occupied large parts of the present counties of Armagh, Tyrone, Derry, and Fermanagh. It would seem likely that they were once the dominant race in Ireland as in Scotland, although no trace of their language remains in Ireland. In Scotland there are a number of place-names which retain the word, such as Clais-nan-Cruitneachad, "Hollow of the Picts," in Sutherland; Carnan Cruitneachad, "Cairns of the Picts," in Ross; and Cruitneachan or "Pict's places" in Inverness. [22] The constant Irish tradition is that they passed over from Ireland to Scotland.

[21] Dr Pokorny suggests Ever as the true base of the name, which the Romans changed into Hibernia from the Iverni of Ptolemy.

[22] A. B. Scott, The Pictish Nation, People and Church (1918).

In early Christian days several well-known teachers from the North of Ireland went over to teach Christianity to these Pictish peoples of Scotland. St Finnbarr, Abbot of Moville, in Co. Down, St Moluag of Bangor in the same county, SS Comgall and Cainnech or Kenneth, the companions of St Columcille, were all north of Ireland Picts, who made their home among the Picts of Scotland; dedications to them are found all over Pictland. Another headquarters of Pictish missions was St. Ninian's "White House" in Galloway, then also a Pictish district. The descent of the Picts and Scots on Northern Britain in the latter part of the fourth century was probably the result of a combination of the Northern Picts of Ireland with those of Caledonia. The link of race would make the two peoples natural allies. Roman, British, and Saxon records alike confirm the accounts of the Irish chronicles as to the onslaught made upon Britain by the Picts and Scots or Irish. Ammianus Marcellinus says: "At that time the trumpet, as it were, gave signals for war throughout the Roman world...The Picts, Scots, Saxons, and Atticotti harassed the Britons with incessant invasions." Later he tells us that Theodosius had been sent to Britain to drive back the Picts from the gates of London. [23] Gildas writes that Britain groaned in amazement under the cruelty of two foreign nations, the Scots from the north-west and the Picts from the north. "The Britons abandoned their cities and the protection of the wall, dispersing in flight, and the enemy pursued them with unrelenting cruelty, butchering our countrymen like sheep." Bede tells us that they came at two intervals, being checked for a time by the return of the Roman troops at the appeal of the Britons and by the building of the second wall between the Forth and Clyde, to endeavour to push the invaders back into the mountainous parts of Britain. In this they appear to have been unsuccessful.

[23] Ammianus, xx, xxvi-xxviii; Gibbon, iii, 44-46 (Bury, 5th ed.)

The Irish annals place these events in the reigns of Crimthan (Criffan) the Great, who "gained victories and obtained sway in Alba [Scotland], Britain and France," and in that of his successor, Niall of the Nine Hostages, who reigned from 379 to 405. "The power of the Cruithne [Picts] and of the Gaels advanced into the heart of Britain and drove the inhabitants to the Tyne. Their power increased over Britain, so that it became heavier than the Roman tribute, because the aim of the northern Cruithne and Gaels was the total expulsion out of their lands." [24]

[24] The Irish Version of Nennius, ed. J. H. Todd (Irish Archaeological Society, 1848), p. 73.

It was into an almost solid Pictish population that, near the close of the fifth century, Fergus the Great, son of Erc, with his brothers, Loarn (Lome) and Angus, passed over with a body of followers from Dalriada in Ulster (now Co. Antrim) into Argyllshire, and made a settlement there. The title of Lome is still retained in the family of the Dukes of Argyll as that of their eldest sons. Their new home, then called Alba, henceforth became known as Scotia Minor, to distinguish it from Scotia Major, the name by which Ireland was commonly known at least up to the fifth century at home, and much later on the Continent. Scotia, or Scotland, was finally adopted as the general name for Alba and gradually dropped as a title for Ireland. In 563 the great-grandson of Fergus granted the island of Iona (or Hi) to St Columcille, known in Scotland as St Columba, and the saint repaid this courtesy by arranging for the release of the young colony from some of its dues to the mother-country and by officiating at the coronation of Aedan, its king. Scottish Dalriada grew in power and influence, and in the reign of Kenneth MacAlpin (d. 858) the submission of the Picts and the marriage of the King to a Pictish princess united the country under one crown. But the religious bonds which held together the monasteries under the Columban Rule in both countries, and the love of both for their great founder, kept the two Dalriadas of Antrim and Argyll closely united, and it was only the Norse descents on the coasts of Cantyre at the end of the eighth century that finally severed the connexion of Argyllshire with the old country.

Coming farther south, the study of place-names shows that there was a large infiltration of Gaelic peoples throughout the north-western portions of England, while in Anglesea, the Isle of Man, and over considerable districts in Wales they formed an important element in the population. The intermixture of the Cymric and Gaelic races probably began very early, but the distinction between the two was recognized well into historic times in Britain, and we hear much of the Gwyddel or Gael in old Welsh literature. In the Isles of Man and Anglesea a Gaelic population of Irish origin and speaking Irish inhabited the islands up to the Norse period. They were only partly driven out by the Norse from Man, and of the names occurring in the early inscriptions in that island almost half are Gaelic. The island had been Christianized by the Irishman MacCuil, originally one of the most violent adversaries to St Patrick's mission. To show his penitence he placed himself, at the saint's suggestion, in an open boat, his feet being locked together with an iron fetter, the key of which he threw into the sea. He had neither rudder nor oar, and only one small and poor garment for covering. Departing quickly "from this Irish land," he was bidden by the saint to come to shore wherever the boat might drift, there to remain obeying the commandments of God. He came to the coasts of Man (Evonia) and found there two holy bishops, with whom he worked, succeeding them on their deaths in the episcopate. [25]

[25] Muirchu, Life of St Patrick, ch. xxiii.

In Central and South Wales and in the neighbouring counties of Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall traditions of large Irish settlements are found in both Welsh and Irish literature, and these are confirmed by the existence of ogham inscriptions in a form of Irish older than that of any existing manuscript and by the large number of Gaelic place-names. An old statement in Cormac's glossary of ancient words, written probably in the tenth century, says that the Irish made great depredations in these districts, and that in the middle of the third century they built forts in Cornish Britain; "for not less was the power of the Gael in the West over the sea than it was in Ireland itself." He speaks also of forts built by Crimthan the Great a century later. Allowing for national exaggeration, we may yet accept this old account as substantially true. About the time of Cormac MacArt, in particular, very close relations seem to have existed between the Britons and the Irish kings. Armies of British came over to assist in Irish wars, and there were frequent intermarriages between princes and princesses of the British and Irish royal houses. [26] A well-substantiated story relates that in his day (254-277) a sept named the Deisi were expelled from their patrimonial lands in Meath and driven south, part of them settling in Leinster and South-eastern Munster, and another body crossing over to South Wales and making their home there. [27] The Welsh Iolo manuscripts mention three invasions of Wales by the Irish, in one of which the leader, Aflech Goronawg, took possession of Garth Madryn, but, having married the daughter of the king of the country and won the goodwill of the inhabitants, he obtained the rule of the district for himself and his descendants, who remain still intermixed with the original Welsh. [28] They were the parents of Brychan, the head of the great family of saints of that name, one of the "three saintly tribes of Britain," the other two being Cunedda and Caw. They are largely represented in North-east Cornwall, having settled down among the Irish already established there, but their original home was in Brecknock, which, with Carmarthen and Pembroke, was to a considerable extent peopled by Irish, who probably had the upper hand until the withdrawal of the nation from foreign wars after the death of Dathi early in the fifth century.

[26] Silva Gadelica, ed. S. H. O'Grady, ii, 355; Keating, History, ii, 281, and see ibid., p. 239.

[27] For this story see Y. Cymmrodor, xiv, 101-135; Anecdota from Irish Manuscripts, (1907), i, 15 seq; Ériu, iii, 135 seq.

[28] Iolo Manuscripts, p. 78.

These settlers appear to have come chiefly from two centres, Leinster and Co. Kerry. The former band belonged almost exclusively to Wexford, Waterford, and Ossory, and a number of Ossorian names are found both in Cornwall and in West Brittany on lapidary inscriptions. Of Kerry names Map Laithen, said to have been erected in Cornwall in the time of Crimthan, was probably the work of the Hy-Laithen from that county. The Maccodechet stone at Tavistock shows that a portion of the Deceti sept from Kerry settled in this neighbourhood; their name is found also in Anglesea. Of two stones at Lewannic, one bears the Kerry name Ullagnus (Olcan or Olacon) and the other the Irish word ingen, a daughter. When we come to Christian times proofs of intercommunication multiply. Christian inscriptions in Irish begin about the middle of the fifth century. Of these Wales has a hundred and thirty-five, Devon and Cornwall thirty-three, and there are others in the Isle of Man. They show that Christian teaching must have been accepted among the Irish for some time in their own country, if it had found its way at this date among the immigrants into Britain. The discovery of these Irish Christian inscriptions strongly supports the ancient and persistent tradition that the south-eastern portions of Ireland had received Christian teaching at a very early date. It is with this district that the names of the pre-Patrician saints and churches are connected, and we find episodes in the Lives of these saints which show a constant intercourse with Britain. The chief of the pre-Patrician saints are St Ailbe in Emly, Co. Tipperary; St Ibar of Bec Éire, or 'Little Ireland,' in Wexford Harbour; the pilgrims from which place gave their name to Bec Éire, now Beckery, at the sacred haunt of Glastonbury, which was constantly visited by Irish from this district; St Abban of Moyarney, on the borders of Wexford; and St Declan of Ardmore, in Co. Waterford. Some Lives add St Kieran of Saigher (Seir), in King's County, who is identified with St Piran of Cornwall, but he seems clearly to be of later date. The exact dates of all these early saints are uncertain. Whether pre-Patrician or not— and the weight of testimony certainly is on the side of a date earlier than St Patrick—these little Churches must have arisen independently of his preaching. Passages in St Declan's Life show that they prided themselves on their separate origin and organization, and difficulties arose when Patrick presented himself in the Deisi country. The controversy between the two Churches may be only a reflection of a later dispute for priority between Cashel and Armagh, thrown back into the time of the principal founders of the Churches of Northern and Southern Ireland; but it is exactly the sort of controversy that was inevitable if these Southern Churches looked back to an independent origin and an earlier date than that of the Apostle of Ireland, whose later glory had obscured their own. [29]

[29] Life of St Declan, ed. P. Power (Irish Texts Society), xvi, 34-37; Vitae Sanc. Hib., ed. C. Plummer, i, 8, 55, 217-218, and ii, 40, 45.

We may note that there was a close connexion between these early saints. Declan, Ibar, and Ailbe were friends, and St Ibar was Abban's maternal uncle as well as his teacher. He is said to have crossed from his own monastery of Bec Éire, or Beckery, in Wexford to the west of Britain, where he landed among pagans and built a church at a place called by him by the same name; this is undoubtedly the site of Glastonbury, which, like the original oratory beside which the great church of Malmesbury was afterward built, was founded by Irish hermits. Both Britain and Ireland are said to have been largely heathen in his time, and in Wexford few would listen to his teaching. Yet pilgrims, anchorites, and monks passed in large numbers both to and from Ireland. Three thousand went with Ibar. In an Irish Litany which is one of the most ancient documents of the Irish Church there is an invocation to thrice fifty clerics who went with St Abban on pilgrimage, and also to thrice fifty other pilgrims who came with him to Ireland, of the men of the Romans and Letha (Armorica or Latium?). In spite of the confusions in date in these old Lives, it seems unnecessary to reject their witness to the existence of small communities of Christians in the South of Ireland before St Patrick which are otherwise in accord with all we know from other sources. Eventually reports of the existence of these churches were carried to the Bishop of Rome, and in the year 431 Palladius was sent by Pope Celestine to preach to the Scots "believing in Christ."

Outside the borders of Ireland itself there are undoubted proofs that the country was recognized as Christian before the time of St Patrick. Already about 350 we find an Irish bishop presiding over the see of Toul, named Mansuetus, or Mansuy, of whom a twelfth-century writer says: Fuit idem venerandus Pater, sicut relatu maiorum didicimus, nobili Scotorum genere oriundus. [30] In Gaul, about 430, we find an early Irish Christian with the undoubtedly Gaelic name of Michomeri, which Professor Meyer thinks to be a corruption of Michomairle. He lived at Auxerre and died in Champagne. Heric's versified Life of Germanus says of him: Discipulus qui sanctum virum de Hibernia fuerat prosecutus, cui Michomeri vocabulum fuit. We remember also that, before 432, St Patrick found at Auxerre and brought back with him to Ireland a bishop named Iserninus, born on the borders of Carlow and Wicklow. The native name of this bishop was Fith. The intercourse with Gaul was constant, both in commercial and Church matters, and the Life of St Ailbe tells us that he had been long a pupil in the school of Hilary, Bishop of Poitiers (350-356). Jerome, who was still a young man at the time of his death, likens Hilary's Latin eloquence to the rush of the river Rhone. He was, too, the first writer of church hymns, and his hymn Hymnum dicat is found among the ancient collections used in the Irish churches. It may have set the example of the use of hymns in the Irish church offices, for the Irish hymnologies are among the oldest in Western Europe. Those used in liturgical worship were all in Latin, but there are besides a number of religious poems composed for personal ends, many of them in honour of saints or as charms to ward off danger or disease, both in Latin and Irish. The beautiful eucharistic hymn Sancti venite is purely Irish in origin.

[30] Martene and Durand, Thesaurus Novus Anecdotorum (Paris, 1717), iii, 991; Kuno Meyer, Learning in Ireland in the Fifth Century (1913), p. 23, note 17.

It is through the writings of St Jerome that we know that one of the two exponents of the Pelagian heresy, either Pelagius himself or his companion Coelestius, was of Irish birth. He tells us that he was descended from the Scots (Irish) de vicinia Britannorum, and that he was "reared on Scotch porridge." He would appear to be speaking of the author of the teaching he was combating and not, as is usually thought, of Coelestius, its principal exponent. Both travelled widely. Though the teaching of Pelagius found its most numerous adherents in Britain, he did not address himself to the Britons; he is found in Rome, in Sicily, and in Palestine. Had he not retired from Rome before the descent of Alaric with his Goths in 409-410, he would with his own eyes have witnessed the sack of the Eternal City. It may, perhaps, be permitted us to suppose that it was the stir made by his doctrines which was the immediate cause of the mission of Palladius to Ireland, as it was the cause of the mission of Germanus to Britain. Two years after the first visit of Germanus from Gaul in 429 Pope Celestine consecrated Palladius and "sent him to the Scots believing in Christ as their first bishop," so that, to borrow the words of Prosper of Aquitaine, "while he laboured to keep the Roman island [Britain] Catholic he also made the barbarous [i.e., pagan] island [Ireland] Christian." [31]

[31] Prosper, Lib. Cont. Collatorem, ch. xxi, 2 (Migne, Pat. Lat., li, 271); Bede, Eccl. Hist., Bk. I, ch. xiii.

It was during the wars of Niall of the Nine Hostages (379-405), who was himself of mixed Irish and British blood, his father Eochadh Muighmheadhon having married Cairionn of the dark ringlets, daughter of the King of Britain, [32] that Patrick was brought as a slave-boy to the land in which, in after days, his lot was to be cast. The ambition of this prince plunged his country into the wars both of Britain and of the Empire. Irish onslaughts in company with the Picts had obliged the leaders of the Britons to implore the return of the Roman legions which had been drawn off to protect the Empire from the assaults of the barbarians at their own gates. When these troops were finally withdrawn Britain, harassed by the Picts and Scots on the north as well as by Saxon pirates on the south, and abandoned by the Romans, rallied at last to attempt its own deliverance. Under Maximus and under the later Constantine, who were elected leaders of the revolt in Britain, British armies passed over to Gaul to contest the title to the Empire of the West. Both were received with acclamations, and before both the Roman and German armies retired across the Alps; in 408 Constantine became master of Gaul and Spain. In these important events, which have been much obscured by modern historians, bodies of Scots or Atticotti took part; they formed two bands or brigades, called the Honorians, and fought on the frontiers of Gaul along with mixed mercenary bodies of Moors and others who took the same name. Many of these Atticotti, whom St Jerome says he had met in Gaul, seem to have been drawn from the Irish settlers in Argyllshire and from Ireland. This accords with the Irish accounts, which say that Niall passed over to Gaul with a mixed body of troops drawn from Scottish Dalriada as well as from Ireland. He is said to have plundered in the neighbourhood of the river Loire, and there he met his death, but not by the armies against whom he was fighting. For a king of Leinster, who had been banished by Niall to Alba, accompanied the Dalriadian contingent to Gaul, and one day while Niall was resting in the shade by the river he had his revenge by casting an arrow at the King from the shelter of an oak grove on the opposite side, and so slew him. King Niall was succeeded by Dathi, a Connacht prince, who continued the wars of his predecessor in Gaul and who is said to have been killed by a flash of lightning in the Alps. Dathi's body was brought back to Ireland and buried at Cruachan, the place of interment of the Connacht kings. With his death the external wars of Ireland came to an end, and the country, freed from the distraction of foreign expeditions, had time to organize its internal affairs and to build up its system of social and religious life. The power of Niall's family did not pass away with his death. With one brief interval, when Dathi's son, Olioll Molt, was king, the race of Niall sat for five centuries without a break upon the throne of Ireland. They were elected alternately from two branches of the family, and were known as the Northern and Southern Hy-Neill.

[32] Keating, History, ii, 373. Niall's son Eoghan married the daughter of a Saxon king; see Silva Gadelica, ed. S. H. O'Grady, ii, 516.

END OF CHAPTER I

II.—EARLY CHRISTIAN IRELAND

The wars of King Niall in Britain and the bringing over of large bodies of Irish and Scoto-Irish troops to aid the British wars on the Continent must have greatly strengthened the intercourse already existing between the two countries. It has been a favourite doctrine with one class of historians that Irish interchange with Britain was practically non-existent, and that during all the early centuries Irish commerce and mercantile intercourse passed over and round the island that lay closest to its shores, making its way to the Continent by routes that skirted north and south of it. Such a doctrine, unlikely in itself, is denied by all we know from archaeology, language, and history as to the early relations between the two countries. They were, as we have seen, not only in constant communication, but there was a large intermixture of Gaelic blood all along the western districts, those lying closest to Ireland. Intermarriages, which took place even in the kingly families, must have been frequent among the fighting and mercantile classes, and the period upon which we are now entering saw those ties drawn yet closer by a sympathy in the practice and aims of the religious life and by the frequent interchange of teachers and scholars between the two countries. Early Irish history shows no sign of a desire for isolation; its people kept up a natural intercourse with the whole West of Europe from Norway to Spain, but, as was only to be expected from the geographical position of the two countries, it was most constant with Britain and Scotland. A new and abiding link was now to be formed by the coming of St Patrick to Ireland, and it ought to have been of happy augury for the future good relations between the neighbouring islands that the Irish, instead of choosing as their patron saint one of "the host of the saints of Ireland," a native of their own race and country, gave that honour to a man of British race.

The strangest doctrines as to the birthplace of St Patrick have been put forward from time to time, but it is clear that the main authority on the question must be the writings of the saint himself. His own testimony is explicit. In his Confession he frequently mentions the land of his birth. In chapter xxiii he writes, "And again, after a few years, I was in Britain with my kindred, who received me as a son and in good faith besought me that at all events now, after the great tribulations I had undergone, I would not depart from them anywhither." Elsewhere he speaks of proceeding to Britain, "and glad and ready I was to do so, as to my fatherland and kindred, and not only that, but to go as far as Gaul..." (chapter xliii). The earliest life of St Patrick, that by Muirchu, is still more explicit. It opens thus: "Patrick, who was also called Sochet, was of the British race and born in Britain." These passages have been transferred to Brittany in Gaul by many writers from the time of Keating onward; but it is impossible that they could refer to that country, which up to the middle of the sixth century, at least, was known as Armorica, and only adopted the name of Brittany after the flight of the Britons before the Saxons, when large numbers of the persecuted Britons passed overseas and settled on the opposite coasts. [1] For more than a hundred years after Patrick's birth, the date of which must have been 389 or thereabouts, this exodus had not begun. But it was a British population which eventually took root there.

[1] At the Second Council of Tours, in 567, the inhabitants were spoken of as the Britons and Romans of Armorica; and see J. Loth, L'Émigration bretonne en Armorique (1883).

The exact place in which Patrick was born is, and will probably always remain, uncertain. Muirchu calls it Bannavem Thaburinde, or Taberniae, and says that it was "not distant from our sea" (i.e., the Irish Channel), which is a clear indication that it was somewhere on the sea-coast of Britain. Very early Irish writers identify it with Ail-cluide, i.e., "the Rock of Clyde," or Dumbarton. It is so identified in a very ancient note on the name 'Nemthur' in the hymn Genair Patraicc; and also in the Hymn of St Secundinus in praise of the saint, called the first hymn made in Ireland, where it is said, "Now Patrick, of the Britons of Ail-cluide was his origin." Notes found on early copies of his Life in Oxford [2] and in Trinity College, Dublin, [3] make the same statement. There was evidently no prejudice against his British origin in the minds of the early Irish ecclesiastical writers.

[2] Rawl. B. 512, at the foot of fol. 21a.

[3] MS. H. 3. 18, p. 520, 1 20; see Tripartite Life of St Patrick, ed. W. Stokes. PP. xv, xlvii.

The Roman legions at the time of Patrick's birth still retained their hold on Britain, from which they did not finally withdraw till about 418, when the lad had grown to manhood. The Roman organization, though it was gradually breaking up over parts of the country with the recall of the army and officers to the defence of Rome, still held sway over the northern province. The year of his birth had witnessed the defeat and death of Maximus, who had drawn out of Britain a great army, many of whom afterward settled in Armorica as the first contingent of that army of fugitives which was to make a little Britain of their Frankish home, and also the triumphal entry of Theodosius into Rome. During his youth the tidings of the revolt of the barbarians, the invasions of Italy by Alaric and Radagaisus, and the flight of the Emperor Honorius must have been received with eagerness and terror in Britain. The triumphs of Stilicho must have been the more welcome from the protection he had, in an earlier day, extended to their own shores but they were followed, while Patrick was yet but a youth, by the frightful news of the Gothic sieges and sack of the Eternal City under the terrible Alaric. In all these startling events the young Patrick would feel an almost personal interest; his family, whether natives of Strathclyde or Roman in descent, formed part of the Roman organization in Britain; he had been brought up proud of his "free birth" and "noble rank" as the son of a Roman decurion; and it was one of the highest sacrifices he was afterward to be called upon to make when he "sold his noble rank for the profit of others; and became a slave in Christ to a foreign nation [Ireland] for the unspeakable glory of the eternal life which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." [4] Patrick's call to work among this "foreign nation" did not come very early in his life. If, as seems probable, he was born in the year 389 he must have been over forty years of age when Palladius was sent as bishop to the Irish people in 431. [5]

[4] Letter to Coroticus, ch. x, p. 56. Newport White's translation (1920) is used in these quotations. There are also translations of the Saint's writings by Archbishop Healy and others.

[5] The date of St Patrick's birth was probably 389 (this is the date accepted by Prof. Bury in his St Patrick); that of his return to Ireland as bishop, 432; and of his death, 461.

The mission of Palladius had not been a success. Three little churches on the coast of Wicklow attest the reality of his visit, but he soon retired, and died, Nennius tells us, among the Picts. Muirchu, the earliest biographer of St Patrick, says that "the wild and rough people" to whom Palladius was sent "did not readily receive his teaching, nor did he himself desire to spend a long time in a land not his own." It is easy to understand that a foreigner unable to speak the tongue of the people to whom he was sent, and assuming among them episcopal functions, would not be warmly welcomed. Palladius showed, indeed, no anxiety to continue his work among an unwilling nation, whom he perhaps despised, because their ways of life and their primitive form of Christianity were wholly unlike anything to which he had been accustomed.

St Patrick first came to Ireland as a young lad with no official status and with little knowledge of religion. It was during the time of the distant raids and wars of Niall of the Nine Hostages that he and other British youths were carried away from their homes into slavery in Ireland. His own account of himself in his Confession, written in old age when his work was almost done, is our safest guide to a knowledge of his early life. It begins thus: "I, Patrick, the sinner, am the most illiterate and the least of all the faithful, and contemptible in the eyes of very many. My father was Calpurnius, a deacon, one of the sons of Potitus a presbyter, who belonged to the village of Bannavem Taberniae. Now he had a small farm near by, where I was taken captive. I was then about sixteen years of age. I knew not the true God; and I went into captivity to Ireland with many thousands of persons, according to our deserts, because we departed away from God, and kept not His commandments, and were not obedient to our priests who used to admonish us for our salvation. And the Lord poured upon us the fury of His anger and scattered us among the heathen, even to the ends of the earth, where now my littleness may be seen amongst men of another nation." [6]

[6] Confession, ch. i, p. 31.

Thus, humbly and simply, opens the testimony of the man whose work was to leave so deep an impression on the nation to whom he first came as a slave. The Confession, found in the Book of Armagh, is not an autobiography giving the events of his career in order; it is written hurriedly and late in life, under the stress of deep feeling, to defend himself against evil reports put out by his enemies. They hoped to destroy the effect of his work in Ireland by bringing up against him some error of conduct committed in his extreme youth, when he was not yet fifteen years old, and had not yet learned to believe in the living God. [7] He points to the wonderful success of his mission to Ireland as a testimony of its acceptance by God, against the malice of those 'elders' who endeavoured to undermine it. St Patrick's own writings are two in number, but only one is found in the venerable book which takes its name from Patrick's primatial see of Armagh, being long preserved in the abbey church of that city. The writings were copied by a scribe, Ferdomnach by name, [8] at the request of the then abbot, and from a note at the close of the Confession it would seem that he was copying from a manuscript believed to have been written by the saint's own hand. The note runs, "As far as this folio [53 of the manuscript] was written by Patrick's own hand." If we may judge by the difficulty the scribe appears to have had in deciphering it, and the gaps that are found in it, it must have been an old and worn copy.

[7] Ibid. ch. xxvii, p. 40.

[8] Probably between A.D. 807 and A.D. 846.

The chief facts that we learn about the saint's early life are that he was the son of a deacon of noble rank who was also a decurion, or civil officer under the Roman administration, and the owner of a farm on which the boy was brought up. He was of good birth and, as he proudly asserts, a free-born citizen under Roman law. That his father was a man of some wealth is shown by the mention of the manservants and maidservants of whom the marauders made havoc when they attacked his home. [9] The combination of offices held by Calpurnius, which seems strange to us, was not uncommon under the later system of Roman administration. The duties of an Imperial decurion were so onerous that those holding the office often fell heavily into debt. They were responsible for the collection of the taxes of their districts, as well as for the upkeep of the roads and other matters; and many of them entered the army or the church to escape from their obligations to the state. [10] If Patrick's father and grandfather were men of this type it is likely enough that religious teaching took but a small place in the household, and we can understand how the boy, brought up in a family outwardly Christian, could grow up without education and in ignorance of the true God.

[9] Letter to Coroticus, ch. x, p. 56.

[10] See S. Dill, Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire (1899), pp. 250-253, and Bury, History of the Later Roman Empire (1923), ch. i, p. 59. The curiae, or corporations of the cities, were formed of the richest landowners, who bore the burdens of the municipality on their shoulders.

An early and almost universal tradition places the scene of Patrick's captivity with a pagan farmer of Co. Antrim. Here, as he tells us, "tending flocks was my daily occupation; and constantly I used to pray in the daytime. Love of God and the fear of Him increased more and more, and faith grew and the spirit was moved...Before daybreak, I used to be roused to prayer in snow, in frost, in rain, and I felt no hurt...because the spirit was then fervent within me." [11] Muirchu, his earliest biographer, tells us that the name of his master was Miliuc and that his house lay on the southern slopes of Slieve Mis, or Slemish (Co. Antrim). Later in his life, when he returned to Ireland from Gaul, Patrick's first act was to make his way north, carrying in his hand the price of his release from service. But the pagan, "hearing that his old slave was coming to see him to endeavour to make him adopt a religion which he disliked," and fearing that his former slave "would lord it over him," gathered all his property round him and set fire to the house in which he lived as chief. Patrick, coming full of a gracious purpose, was so stupefied at the sight of the blazing pyre that he was speechless for two or three hours. [12]

[11] Confession, ch. xvi, p. 36.

[12] Muirchu, Life of St Patrick, ch. xii, p. 81.

St Patrick's life was a varied one. After his escape from slavery he was taken on board a ship by heathen men carrying in their cargo a number of hounds, probably the already famous Irish wolfhounds which were considered meet gifts for princes in after days. He landed after a stormy passage, on a desert shore, probably in Gaul, which was then wasted by the invasions of the Goths. He seems again to have fallen into captivity; later, he apparently visited his kindred in Britain, who "received him as a son" and besought him, after the great tribulations he had undergone, not to depart again. [13] But Patrick was haunted by visions of "a man coming from Ireland with countless letters," who gave him one, entitled "The Voice of the Irish"; and as he read he thought he heard the voice of them who lived beside the wood of Foclut, which is nigh to the Western Sea, crying with one mouth, "We beseech thee, holy youth, to come once more and walk among us." [14] This vision decided Patrick's future life. He spent some years in Gaul, travelling much, and studying, according to the summary of Tirechan, at the monastic island of Lerins (Atalanensis) and, according to Muirchu, under St Germanus of Auxerre; probably he passed some time in both centres of learning. There is no direct mention of a visit to Rome by his earliest biographers, but it is not improbable that Patrick visited the central church of Christendom at some time during his stay on the Continent. Muirchu speaks of him as "the venerable traveller" when he re-crossed to Ireland, and he himself speaks of being "nearly worn out" when he returned. But the fervour of his soul carried him through nearly thirty years of work in Ireland, work which left an impress on nearly every part of the country. He says that he baptized many thousands and ordained clergy everywhere, "not demanding from any even the price of my shoe"; "sons and daughters of Scotic [Irish] chieftains becoming monks and virgins of Christ." [15]

[13] Confession, ch. xxiii, p. 38.

[14] Ibid. ch. xxiii, pp. 38-39.

[15] Confession, ch. 1, p. 48; ch. xli, p. 45.

His task was a hard one. He was plundered and bound in irons by a chief who "eagerly desired to kill him"; he faced Laery, King of Tara, surrounded by his host of Druids; he had to grieve over the raids of Coroticus, a British king, who carried off newly baptized Christians "still in the white array" of their baptism, to sell them into the hands of Scots and apostate Picts of Strathclyde, cruelly butchering and slaughtering others with the sword. He revised the native system of law and committed it to writing. He taught everywhere the Latin tongue, the language of the Church and of the Scriptures, as he used them. He had to face slander both from the elders of the Church in Britain, and even from "his dearest friend," whom he does not name, but who would seem from the context to have been St Germanus, his teacher at Auxerre, who also gave him consecration. [16] But he succeeded where Palladius had failed; partly, no doubt, because of his familiarity with the Irish tongue, acquired during his years of slavery, but still more because of the simple sincerity of his own life and teaching. In his old age he writes thus in the opening of his Epistle to Coroticus: "Patrick, the sinner, unlearned verily; I confess that I am a bishop, appointed by God in Ireland. Most surely I deem that from God I received what I am. And so I dwell in the midst of barbarians, a stranger and an exile for the love of God. He is witness if this be so." It was undoubtedly the intention and hope of St Patrick to establish in Ireland a Church system similar to that with which he had been familiar in Britain, in Rome, and in Gaul. Roman Britain had long been Christian, and three British sees had been represented at the Council of Arles in 314, and a larger number at the Councils of Sardica in 347 and of Rimini in 359. At an even earlier date Christianity had spread into parts of Britain where the Roman arms had never penetrated, for Tertullian, in 208, had already spoken of "districts in Britain, inaccessible to the Roman arms, but subdued to Christ." [17]

[16] Ibid., ch. xxxii, p. 41. St Germanus was born about 378 and died in 448. He visited Britain twice, in 429 and 447.

[17] Adv. Jud., vii.

Whence this original Christianity had penetrated to Britain it is impossible to say. But the Roman districts of Britain, at least, were early organized into sees, and Patrick, who was proud of his Roman faith and citizenship, [18] and who came to Ireland the second time as an ordained bishop, would naturally endeavour to establish in the country of his adoption the orderly system to which he had been accustomed at home and abroad. In accordance with this desire he founded the earliest bishopric in Ireland, that of Armagh--the first, and for the next 650 years the only fixed episcopal see in Ireland. It is interesting that he chose as the site a spot close to Emain Macha (Navan Fort), the old centre of the heroic tales of Ulster, then disused, so far as we know, but evidently still retaining something of its old prestige. There seems no other reason for the choice of so retired a spot for his bishopric. The few Christian communities in the south-east of Ireland grouped themselves round native teachers, but they were growing up on native lines, with special peculiarities. In particular, they had no episcopal organization, or fixed sees, and the efforts of the Apostle of Ireland to introduce the system prevailing generally in the churches of Western Christendom did not prove a success For centuries afterward bishops in Ireland did not occupy fixed sees, and the country was not laid out in dioceses. They exercised their episcopal functions within the monasteries in a position subordinate to the abbot, who was their head and superior officer. Some others were wandering bishops, who moved about within or outside the country on missionary journeys. Even Armagh did not long retain its metropolitan character. On the death of St Patrick in 461-462, he was succeeded in the bishopric by his pupil, St Benen, and from that time till the death of Ailill, the fifth of his successors, there was a regular sequence of bishops of Armagh after the usual Church manner of organization; but from 526 onward the title of bishop is, except in rare instances, dropped, and the holders of the see are styled abbots, the future bishops being apparently, as in other Irish monasteries, subject to the abbot. [19] Thus Armagh, unable to resist the pressure of native custom, fell into line with the other Christian settlements all over the country and became primarily a monastic centre. It was not until the twelfth century that the archbishopric of Armagh was restored, and the bishopric of Cashel substituted for the abbacy of Cashel in the south, by the direct action of the Pope. Between the time of St Patrick and this late date the native Irish Church had quietly pursued her way, covering the land with Christian settlements formed on a tribal basis and within the limits of the tribe, each under some noted saint or teacher who was the inspiring spirit of his group and the abbot of his monastery. The importance attached to the office of abbot in Ireland is quaintly expressed by the Irish custom of calling the Pope Abbot (Abb) of Rome instead of Bishop of Rome, while in a singular invocation known as the "Path Protector" St Columcille speaks of Christ as "Son of Mary, the Great Abbot." It was only slowly, in the course of centuries, that the native Church gave up certain national peculiarities, such as the form of the Irish tonsure, and the old date of keeping Easter. It retained its marked monastic character all through the period of its greatest activity, and it carried on that work of evangelization and education not only within, but far beyond the limits of Ireland, which has ever since been considered its greatest glory.

[18] "Church of the Scots," he exclaims, "nay, of the Romans! In order that ye be Christians as well as Romans ye must chant in your churches at every hour of prayer that glorious word, Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison" (Dicta Patricii, from the Book of Armagh). Even if these words are later St Patrick's day they seem to convey the spirit of his teaching.

[19] H. J. Lawlor, in P.R.I.A., vol. xxxv, Sect. C, No. 9 (1919).

St Brigit's monastery of Kildare formed a link between the Church of St Patrick and the monastic foundations that sprang up all over the country with an almost simultaneous growth from about 530 onward. It was a mixed convent, and Cogitosus, the father of Muirchu, who wrote her life, [20] tells us that in his time the church of Kildare was large and lofty, with many pictures and hangings and ornamental doorways. It had a partition which ran down the church lengthways, dividing the men who sat on the right from the women who sat on the left side of the nave. It was in her church that the Welsh historian of the Norman conquest saw in 1185 the illuminated book which was of such great beauty that he was ready to assert that it was the work of angelic and not of human skill. Kildare may have been one of the centres for this exquisite work; very early it possessed a school which produced chalices, bells, and shrines.

[20] Trias Thaumaturga (Louvain), p. 524. This must have been the earliest life of any Irish saint.

During the twenty-five years after Brigit's death many of the most famous of the Irish foundations were established and were in full working order. Nendrum, in Strangford Lough, now Inish Mahee, or Mahee Island, under Abbot Mochaoi; Clonard and Moville, Co. Down, under the two Finnians; Clonmacnois on the Shannon under Ciaran; Bangor under Comgall, Glasnevin under Mobhi, were among the earliest of which we know the history, but the two monasteries of Birr and Clonfert, under the two Brendans, that of Molaise of Devenish in Lough Erne, and that of Senan on Scattery Island in the Shannon, were probably founded about the same date. Many of these famous men studied together in the school of Finnian of Clonard and formed lasting friendships. The latter was known as "Finnian the Wise, teacher of the saints of Ireland." The most important group of monasteries was that founded by the great Columcille, the future founder of Iona, or Hi, in Scotland, who in rapid succession established the monasteries of Derry, Raphoe, Durrow, Glencolumcille, Lambey, Swords, and many others, the head of the group being Kells, in Co. Meath.

The extension of the monastic system was abnormal, and it cannot be understood unless we have formed a clear idea as to what an Irish monastic foundation of this period was like. It was no single building of large size capable of holding numbers of persons. It generally arose around the person of some teacher whose fame had gone abroad and around whose hut, often intended originally as a hermitage or retreat, the cells of his pupils began to be raised by their own hands, made, according to the conditions of the district, either of wattle or of stone. Gradually, as people gathered, and fresh huts and oratories were constructed, the place would assume the aspect of a regular settlement. Rules were laid down, and a regular order was introduced into the work and worship of the day, and some of these establishments attracted as many as three thousand persons. They were partly educational, partly agricultural, and wholly religious. They came gradually to include the larger part of the entire Christian population. Each establishment was self-contained, having its own fields for growing corn and vegetables, its own mills, kilns, storehouses, and barns. The students and monks did the entire work of the place, sowing, reaping, carrying burdens to the mill, grinding corn, and performing in general the duties of the settlement. Even the abbots and bishops are found ploughing the fields, grinding corn, and fulfilling other agricultural offices. The extreme simplicity of life in these early monasteries must be carefully borne in mind. Part of each day was set apart for the instruction of students and part for active duties, while the offices of the Church were regularly and minutely observed. It was a system suited to the needs of a primitive and unlettered people and well calculated to guide and elevate them. These communities set before the entire population a new ideal of ordered, industrial life, sanctified by religion and enlarged by study. The highest saints retained to the end this primitive simplicity. St Brigit, after she had founded Kildare, still milked the cows, herded sheep, baked bread, churned milk, and carried on the ordinary work of a household, besides her care of the sick and lepers. When Columcille went to Bishop Etchen for consecration, he found him ploughing in his fields; when, in later life, he visited Clonmacnois the monks gathered hastily from the little grange farms on which they were working in order to receive him with honour. He himself and St Ciaran of Clonmacnois reaped and ploughed, and even ground corn in the quern, which was the office of the women-slaves. Nor did they look upon such labours as derogatory; they rather felt them to be ennobling and elevating. St Nathalan, a Scottish Celtic monk, believed "that in the lowly work of cultivating the earth, he approached nearest to the divine contemplation; therefore, though of noble birth, he practised with his own hands the lowly art of cultivating the fields," and this must have been the attitude of many even greater than he.

Reading and writing, the copying and multiplication of copies of the Gospels and the Psalms, the study of Latin and the making of ecclesiastical bells, crosses, book-satchels, and covers for illuminated books, occupied all of the day not occupied in religious or agricultural matters. The industry of many of these great teachers in copying books, chiefly the Gospels and Psalms, was remarkable. St Patrick is said to have "sowed the four books of the Gospel in Erin"; and St Columba is stated to have written three hundred books with his own hand, this being his chief occupation whenever he went for a time into retreat in the island of Eigg. St Finnian of Clonard is said to have given a copy of the Gospels to every church he founded. Besides the books needed for the services of the Church, we read of boys going to school with leather satchels of books upon their backs, and in the libraries that gradually grew up in connexion with the monastic schools these hand-written volumes were preserved in such satchels hung round the walls on pegs. A few have survived the lapse of time and still exist.

In the beginning few, if any, of the copies were illuminated; they were designed solely to meet the needs of the oratories scattered over the country; but two at least of the most elaborate and precious specimens of Irish illuminated art, the Book of Durrow and the Book of Kells, now in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin, come down from the seventh and eighth centuries, proving that already the art of book-illumination had reached its highest beauty of execution. Kells was the central church of the large Columban group of monasteries, taking precedence even of Iona, so there was a reason for the preservation there of this exquisite specimen of the draughtsman's art. It once had a wonderful cover of great value from the precious stones with which it was inlaid, but at an early period this cover was stolen, and it no longer exists. The Book of Durrow had a special sanctity from the belief that it was the work of Columcille's own hand; it seems, at least, to have been copied from his original. Both books are copies of the Gospels. The metal covers, on which the gold-workers of the day lavished their most careful art, are of later date; they were used for enclosing bells, manuscripts, and relics.

An ancient Irish Catalogue of Saints mentions that one of the special features of the 'second order' of saints was the great variety in their masses and monastic rules, one of which was said to have been introduced into Ireland by the British or Welsh bishops David, Cadoc, and Gildas. There is no doubt that the rules varied in different monasteries, each founder framing his own rule for the guidance of the monks who joined his foundation. They differed considerably in length and strictness. Some contained only general admonitions to penitence, love of God, fasting, and prayer, with a spirit apart from the world and devoted to the contemplation of heavenly things. Many are in verse, no doubt in order to be more easily remembered or for chanting. One of them, ascribed to the King-abbot of Cashel, Cormac MacCuilennan, in the ninth century, describes the low-voiced congregation singing the melodious song of the believers; he calls on them to join in the chanting of the rule, "the song which the ancients have sung." [21] In some rules we can trace the gradual introduction of severer admonitions, added to the original simpler regulations, and imposing greater mortifications. Of one called "An old Irish metrical rule" we have two versions. One, which apparently gives the original standard of an early date, says "These are thy three rules--have thou nought else more dear --patience, humility, and the love of God in thy heart." The other enjoins more explicit humiliations: "Three hundred prostrations every day and three at every canonical hour; two hundred blows on the hands every Lent will be a help." [22] There still exist rules attributed to SS. Ciaran, Manach Liath, or "the grey monk," Carthach or Mochuta of Rathin, Columban, Maelruain of Tallaght, and other well-known founders of monasteries. They were probably in use in the foundations established by the saints whose names they bear. Some were of great severity; the rule of St Columban, which divided the working day between copying manuscripts, teaching in the schools, and labour in the field and forest, enjoined severe punishments for the least infraction of the orders, amounting to two hundred stripes for some offences or rigorous and prolonged fasting for others. The discipline in the monastery of St Fintan at Clonenagh was so stern that the neighbouring clerics, feeling that the life of these monks was a reproach to them, begged Fintan, for the love of God, to relax its extreme rigour. His monks were not allowed to have any animals or ever to eat meat; even milk and butter were not permitted and, if offered, must be refused. He finally consented to make some changes for the brethren, but continued the same way of life for himself.

[21] Ériu, ii, 63 seq.

[22] Ériu, 1, 191 seq.

The old Irish tract De Arreis shows to what a pitch punishments for ecclesiastical offences could be carried in the Irish Church. [23] There were, however, monasteries where such excessive austerities were discouraged. In the rule of St Ailbe it is said that if the erennach, [24] who had under his charge the secular affairs and provisioning of the establishment, were wise, his rule should not be too harsh; "as the food shall be, so will the order be." "Let it not be too strict, neither let it be lax; let it not be a rule without knowledge, so that each may be able to bear his yoke." [25] In Tallaght, where Maelruain the Abbot did not approve of listening to music, as distracting the mind from its religious duties, and would allow neither a morsel of meat to be eaten nor a drop of beer, "the liquor that causes forgetfulness of God," to be drunk during his lifetime, we are told that fasting was not commended, but that a regular measured pittance was preferred by the Abbot. To a man much given to severe austerities he even refused admission, saying, "Those who are here, while they do their proper share of work, are able to eat their rations. Thou wilt not fit among them. Thou wilt neither do active work nor be able to eat thy rations." [26]

[23] Revue Celtique, xv, 485 seq.

[24] The erennach (airchinneach) seems to have combined the offices of archdeacon and steward; he farmed the Church lands. See O'Laverty Down and Connor (1887), iv. 61-62.

[25] Eriu, iii, 97 seq.

[26] P.R.I.A., vol. xxix, Sect. C, No. 5 (1911).

Of the monastic schools of Northern Ireland the three most important were Armagh, Bangor, and Clonmacnois. We have the fullest account of Bangor, preserved by the pen of the great St Bernard, in his life of St Malachy, or Mael Maedoc Ua Morgair, who in the twelfth century rebuilt the monastery, destroyed by the raids of the Danes in the early ninth century, when "its learned men and bishops were slain by the sword," and the relics of Comgall, its founder, shaken out of their shrine. But the tradition of its ancient fame was fresh in the mind of Malachy as he set about to rebuild, and he had communicated to his close friend, St Bernard, his own enthusiasm for the original Bangor of the sixth century. "For, indeed," the latter writes, "there had been formerly a very celebrated monastery under the first father, Comgall, which produced many thousands of saints, bringing forth most abundant fruit to God, so that one of the sons of that holy community, Lugaid by name, is said to have been the founder, himself alone, of a hundred monasteries." Bangor was founded in 559, and according to the Latin life of Comgall, so great a number of monks resorted to him that there was not room for them, and he had to found cells and monasteries in different parts of Ireland and Scotland to contain them all. He is said to have presided over three thousand monks, but such figures have to be accepted with caution. Still, the numbers in some of the Irish and Welsh foundations were very large. St Columban the most distinguished of the Bangor saints "who poured forth like a flood into foreign lands," is said by St Bernard to have established at Luxeuil the system of continuous church worship practised at Bangor, where the choirs succeeded each other in turn, "so that not a moment of the day or night was empty of praise." The Antiphonary of Bangor, found at Bobbio, shows that St Columban founded his cycle of the divine offices on the order familiar to him in his old monastery. The continuous office may have been a feature of the many monasteries called Bangor, or Benagher, in Ireland and Wales.

No less distinguished was the school of Clonmacnois on the Shannon, founded by St Ciaran near the site already famous as the burial-place of ancient kings, but now to become still more famous as the principal seat of learning and literature in the West. To Colcu, its fer-leginn, or chief professor, Alcuin addressed a letter from the Court of Charlemagne, enclosing a contribution of fifty shekels "from the King's bounty" and from himself fifty shekels, with a request that they will pray for him and for King Charles. He also sent a gift of oil to divide among the bishops, oil being now "a scarce article in Britain." He addresses Colcu, who has left a curious poem called "The Besom of Devotion," as "the blessed master and pious founder," and his letter is full of interesting details on matters of public interest in France and Europe generally, showing that even an isolated school like Clonmacnois was concerned about the current events of the larger world. Much literary and historical work of value was accomplished in later times at Clonmacnois. There the Leabhar na h-Uidhre, or "Book of the Dun Cow," was compiled about 1100; it contains the most ancient surviving collection of the old romances, together with much other material. The oldest existing annals, written by Tighernach partly in Latin and partly in Irish, were also produced there in the eleventh century, and the Chronicum Scotorum was probably written there. There must have been an extensive library in the monastery, for Tighernach quotes freely from Latin authors as well as from Irish and British authorities. The remains of its churches, its round tower, and its splendid crosses attest its former importance; but of Bangor not a trace is left.

The Norse raids of the ninth century made a break in the continuity of the schools, large numbers of the professors and scholars passing over to the Continent so that they might carry on their work in safety; but when quiet returned the old haunts in Ireland again became homes of study. It was at this time that Clonmacnois and Armagh attained their highest position as places of learning, the number of fer-leginn or professors increased, and Armagh, in particular, held so high a position that it was ordained at the Synod of Clane in 1162 that no one should henceforth be permitted to give public lectures in Holy Scripture or in theology unless he had spent some time studying at Armagh. This would seem to imply that Armagh was then considered the chief school or university. When the city was burned down in 1020 the library fortunately escaped, though the books in the dwellings of the students, all of course in manuscript, were destroyed.

During these centuries the borders of Ireland had been freely opened to the world, and commerce and friendly intercourse were encouraged with all who desired it. In the most active period of her early Christianity pilgrims seem to have gathered from every land to her shores. A Litany of Saints, known popularly as the Litany of Aengus, [27] composed about the seventh century, mentions lists of these foreigners who came to enter the Irish monasteries, or to make their home in the country. Roman pilgrims to various foundations are mentioned, and Gauls appear to have come in considerable numbers. The presence of Romans in Ireland is also attested by the inscription Septem romani in the churchyard of St Brecan at Aranmore. [28] In the life of St Senan we hear of a ship's crew of fifty Italians "from the lands of Latium" coming on pilgrimage to Ireland. [29] A Frankish priest and an English archdeacon are said to have settled in Glendalough, and seven Egyptian monks in Desert Kilaigh. Greeks are said to have trafficked at the Irish provincial fairs, and some of them appear to have settled down permanently, for as late as Ussher's day there was a Greek church at Trim in Co. Meath, its site retaining the name of Greek Park up to recent times.

[27] Edited by Charles Plummer (Henry Bradshaw Society), vol. lxii (1925), pp. 54 seq.

[28] Petrie, Christian Inscriptions, ii, Pl. XIV.

[29] Lives of the Saints from the Book of Lismore, ed. W. Stokes (1890) p. 209, l. 2069.

Nor were her nearest neighbours excluded. One of the most important settlements, frequently mentioned, was that of the Saxons in Mayo, in a district which bore the name of "Mayo of the Saxons" until much later times. It was the adverse result of the Synod of Whitby in 664, where the Columban and the Continental teachers disputed the question of the correct date for keeping Easter, that determined the emigration of these Columban monks under Bishop Colman from Northumbria to Iona and thence to Ireland. Colman was accompanied by many of the nobility and of the lower ranks of the English nation, who thought as he did, and they passed over in the year of the great plague, called in Ireland the Buidhe Conaill, which was raging alike in Ireland and England, and settled in the solitary island which Bede calls Inis-bo-finde, or "the Isle of the White Cow," now Inisbofin, off the coast of Connemara. Here he founded a monastery for the Columban monks of both nations. [30] They were willingly received by the Irish, who supplied them with books and food, but they do not seem to have agreed well, for they eventually separated, the Irish monks remaining at Inisbofin, while the English monks settled in Mayo (Magheo, "the Yew Plain" ), where a large establishment grew up, which was constantly recruited from England. Some of them devoted themselves to conventual life, but others, choosing to apply themselves to study, wandered about from one teacher to another according to the Irish plan. The Litany of Saints speaks of 3300 students who settled in Mayo, under Bishops Gerald [31] and Egbert, the latter a young English noble "who long lived a stranger in Ireland for the sake of the eternal kingdom." He afterward became Abbot of Iona and did much to induce the monks to adopt the Roman date for the celebration of Easter, having been enjoined to do so in a vision, "because their ploughs do not go straight." He was stricken with the plague, but recovered, and passed a long and strenuous life in combating the peculiarities of the Columban Church customs and bringing them into conformity with the general Western use. [32] Bede mentions the names of many others who went over to Ireland, either to adopt the hermit's life or for study. One of these was Wictbert, who became the first missionary to Friesland.

[30] Bede, Eccl. Hist., Bk. III, ch. xxvi-xxvii, and Bk. IV, ch. iv; Calendar of Aengus, ed. W. Stokes (1880), August 8, and note on p. cxxx.

[31] P. 57; and see "Life of St Gerald," Vitae Sanc. Hib., ii, 106 seq.

[32] Bede, Eccl. Hist., Bk. III, ch. xxvii; Bk. IV, ch. iii; Bk. V, ch. ix, xxii.

In the notes to the Calendar of Aengus [33] we hear of several early settlements of English besides those of Inisbofin and Mayo in Connacht. One was in the barony of Cianachta, in the present Co. Londonderry; another at Tullalease of the Saxons (Tulach-leis na Saxan), in Co. Cork; still another at O'Connell Gawra (Ui Conaill Gabhra), in Co. Tipperary. This shows that up to the twelfth century, when many of these notes were added to the Calendar, distinct English settlements were recognized in different parts of the country. They must have been still existing when Henry II came over. In the tenth century, when the schools of Armagh were at the height of their influence, they were resorted to in such numbers by English students that one-third of the monastic city was set apart for them. It was known as Trian Saxan, or the "Saxon Third," or "Quarter," and retained this name up to a late period.

[33] Calendar of Aengus, note on December 8, pp. clxxx-clxxxi; and see also p. cxxxv, where the district of the Little Saxons is mentioned, near Scattery Island, in the Shannon.

There are numerous records both of friendly and warlike relations between the two peoples during the early centuries which accord well with the known facts. Keating remarks that Ireland was a place of refuge for Britons who fled from the oppression of the Romans and Saxons, and that they found land there for themselves and their families, teaching their children Irish and carrying back with them many Gaelic words to England. He speaks of townlands named after them Graig na mBreathnach ("the Hamlet of the Britons" ), Baile or Dun na mBreathnach ("the Village or Fort of the Britons"), etc. [34] Intermarriages between Welsh and Saxon princesses and Irish chiefs are mentioned in many of the old stories. Later on, Keating quotes Hanmer's record of the visit of a king of Wales named Cadualin, who was banished to Ireland by Edwin, son of Æthelfred, in 635, and of two British princes, Haralt and Conan, who fled to Ireland in 1050 and were protected by the Irish; also of another Welsh chief, Bleithin ap Conan, who was maintained there in 1087. "Thus from age to age did they cultivate alliance and intercourse with one another."

[34] Keating, History, ii, 69,70-72, quoting Hanmer's Chronicle for the latter statement.

An earlier Lord of Pembroke than Strongbow is said to have married a daughter of Murtogh O'Brien in 1101; and Griffin ap Conan, the prince who occupied the throne of Wales in the time of Henry I of England, could boast that both his mother and grandmother were Irishwomen, and that it was in Ireland that he was born and educated in polite manners. The Norman-Welsh who accompanied Henry II to Ireland came to a country with which they were familiar, and with which they had long had intimate dealings.

In the North of Ireland the connexion was particularly close. Though the Romans had never, in a military sense, set foot in Ireland, Agricola says that in his day her harbours were well known at Rome. A considerable number of silver coins dating from the time of Constantius II to that of Honorius, with others about the same date, have been found in the North of Ireland, especially about Coleraine, showing that a certain amount of trade was in progress with Roman Britain, or Gaul. [35] During the seventh and eighth centuries the British took part on several occasions in the wars of Dalriada, or Eastern Ulster, on one side or the other. A host out of Britain, Saxon-land, and France is said to have assisted Con-gal Claen in the great historical battle of Magh Rath, or Moira, against his fosterfather King Donnell, prince of the peoples of Conaill and Eoghan, in 637. [36] This battle is mentioned by Adamnan and called by him Bella Roth.

[35] See Sir W. Ridgeway's paper on Niall of the Nine Hostages (Journal of Roman Studies, 1924).

[36] Battle of Magh Rath, ed. J. O'Donovan (Irish Archaeological Society, 1842).

Besides the intercourse with Britain there was also an independent trade with Gaul and Spain. The oldest version of the "Wooing of Emer," one of the most famous of the Cuchulain stories, speaks of "wine of Gaul" being brought to Ireland by one who purported to come on an embassy from the King of the Gauls--an early example of a trade destined to continue for many centuries. In the life of St Ciaran of Clonmacnois we hear of "a cask full of wine from the land of the Franks" being bestowed upon him. This was one of those acts of friendly intercourse which show that a constant interchange was kept up between that now retired spot and the Frankish Court and nobility. In Jocelyn's Life of St Patrick we are told that wine, honey, iron, and salt were imported into Dublin from ancient times, while the exports were mead, beer, shoes, and gloves. Wine was at all times a large article of import. Spanish and French wines were the usual beverage drunk in all the larger houses from the fourteenth century onward, whisky (uisge beathadh) becoming common about the sixteenth century, though the bards ignored and perhaps despised it. We hear of a chief of the Hy-Many who received an annual tribute in wine from one of his underlings; it was shipped into a harbour in Connacht, and carried up to his house. The "sea-laws" of the Book of Aicill relate to trading regulations for vessels arriving either from Britain or from abroad on the Irish coasts; [37] and Jonas in his life of St Columban, who crossed from Ireland to Nantes, speaks of a ship "which plied for the sake of commerce" between the two countries. Among the articles of commerce were the splendid wolfhounds bred in Ireland, which were so highly esteemed throughout the Middle Ages that they were offered as royal gifts to friendly potentates up to the seventeenth century; St Patrick's vessel sailing to Gaul contained a pack of these noble dogs. [38]

[37] Ancient Laws and Institutes of Ireland, iii, 423.

[38] Confession, ch. xix, p. 37.

From an early period Leinster was closely connected with Gaul, and a considerable portion of its inhabitants derived their origin from that country. "There was," says Keating, quoting old traditions, "a special friendly understanding between the Leinstermen and the French." He makes the curious statement that in early times "every province in Ireland had formed a special alliance of friendship beyond the sea, the Clann Neill [of Western Ulster] with the Scots, the men of Munster with the English, the [Eastern] Ulstermen with the Spaniards, the men of Connacht with the Welsh, and the Leinstermen with the Franks." [39] He quotes this from a poem of the bard John, son of Torna O'Mulconaire, who lived early in the fourteenth century, when these traditions were still alive among the people. The story that King Lowry (Labhraidhe) the Exile sought an asylum in France and returned bringing with him many foreigners "who were not of the Gael" seems to have confirmation from other sources. There is a tradition that the province of Leinster (Laighin) was named from the broad green-blue iron heads of the spears (laighne) of the foreigners who accompanied him; and those newcomers, known as Galian, were looked upon with jealousy by the older inhabitants on account of their superior celerity and expertness in matters of camp-warfare, as the story of the Táin bó Cúalnge shows. [40] The name is sometimes applied to the whole of the Leinstermen. The only instance of a chariot-burial being alluded to in Irish story is in connexion with this Lowry, who may have become familiar with this mode of burial of chiefs in Gaul. [41] There are many Gaulish names in the Irish genealogies, and we hear in early times of a place in Westmeath called Bordgal, the Irish form of the French Burdigala, or Bordeaux. The Litany of Saints mentions seven bishops of the Irish Bordgal, and in the life of St Colman MacLuachan [42] it is stated that two places were bestowed upon the saint in what was afterward Queen's County, called Bordgal and Lemchail. There seems to have been still another place of the same name, commonly corrupted to Bordwell, in the parish of Aghaboe; old records give it under the earlier form. It would seem likely that these places in Ireland were named by settlers from the French Bordgal, or Bordeaux.

[39] Keating, History, ii, 167, 168.

[40] Windisch, Táin bó Cúalnge, p. 51; Hull, Cuchullin Saga, pp. 125-126.

[41] Dobbs, "Chariot-burial in Ireland," in Zeit. für Celtische Philologie (1912), viii, 278.

[42] Todd Lectures, R. I. A. (1911), p. 63, and note on p. 116.

Dr Kuno Meyer, [43] following up an interesting suggestion made by Professor Zimmer, ascribes the revived intellectual impulse visible in Ireland from the sixth century onward to the arrival from Gaul of a body of learned men flying in the fifth century before the irruption of the Goths and Huns, and he relies for this explanation on a passage in the writings of a Gaulish grammarian named Virgilius Maro, who lived in the fifth century, near the time of the exodus of which he speaks, and whose works were read in Ireland. Virgilius says that "the depopulation of the entire Empire commenced...and owing to their devastations all the learned men on this side of the sea fled away, and in transmarine parts, i.e., in Hiberia and wherever they betook themselves, they brought about a very great advance of learning to the inhabitants of those regions." Zimmer and Meyer would read "Hibernia" for "Hiberia," or Spain, which would not be called a "transmarine" district or be reached across sea. The comparative quietude of Ireland would make it a natural place of resort for the hunted scholars. However this may be, it is certain that Ireland never lost touch with the main currents of classical and theological literature in Europe and the East, and that traditions, legends, and apocryphal literature, as well as some knowledge of Greek and a full competence in Latin, survived there, much of which was stamped out elsewhere by the inroads of the barbarians. Ireland never suffered the decay of religion and learning consequent on the devastations which befell Gaul and threw back its civilization for nearly three hundred years.

[43] Learning in Ireland in the Fifth Century (1913).

We may take it that Ireland had, before the seventh century, absorbed into its population large numbers of foreigners Leinster was intermixed both with British and Gaulish settlers, the South must always have had a considerable Spanish element, and Ulster an admixture both of Norse, Picts, and Scots. There were English or Saxon centres in Ulster, Connacht, and Munster. Even before the historical period of the Norse incursions, which brought in a large new element, the Irish nation, far from being a pure race, must have been one of the most varied in Western Europe; but long before the eighth century these had become absorbed into the older populations, speaking their language, and living in large part like the people among whom they had settled. The stranger, from whatever country he hailed, if left to himself without outside interference made himself speedily at home and grew proud to call himself an Irishman. It was outside influences alone that interrupted this natural process.

In the seventh century we find, on the other hand, Irish students crowding the classes of Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury, who had come to England from Rome in 664, and whose instruction in Greek made his school a centre for those who desired the higher learning. The restless Irish scholars seem to have had some sharp passages at arms with their teacher. Aldhelm, who was also a student, describes how they baited the Archbishop, who, however, proved more than a match for his unruly pupils. "He treated them as a truculent boar treats the Molossian hounds. He tore them with the tusk of grammar and shot them with the deep and sharp syllogisms of chronography, till they cast away their weapons and hurriedly fled to the recesses of their dens."

At the same time that Irish students were studying Greek with Theodore at Canterbury, and Latin and the arts under the teachers of Malmesbury, English youths were resorting to Ireland, thus bringing about an interchange of thought and learning which was to the advantage of both countries. Among the numerous students whom Bede mentions as having gone for study to the Irish schools was Aiden, first bishop of Lindisfarne (635), who is said to have spoken English so imperfectly on his return that Oswald, King of Northumbria, who had also made himself proficient in the Irish tongue during a long banishment in that country, went about with him to translate his sermons. Later the young Northumbrian prince Aldfrid (sometimes erroneously confused with Alfred the Great), who had been excluded from the throne on account of illegitimate birth, and who was of a studious disposition, crossed over to devote himself to literature, "suffering a voluntary exile to gratify his love of knowledge." He was recalled to the throne on the death of his brother Egbert and proved a worthy and noble king. He is said to have been "most learned in the Scriptures," and he "nobly retrieved the ruined state of the kingdom while confining it within narrower limits." In Ireland he was known as Flann Fina, from his mother, Fina, who according to Irish accounts was of the Irish race of Niall. He loved the country of his exile, and a poem in its praise is ascribed to him. Among other students of high rank was the Frankish prince who afterward became King Dagobert II, who passed his youth in foreign lands as an exile from his country, and whose student days were spent at the school of Slane, in Westmeath. It is a testimony to the widespread reputation of the Irish schools in the seventh century that one of them should have been chosen for the education of this Frankish prince by the lords of his household. On his return home in 670 the young prince was attended by a train of Irish friends, one of whom, St Arbogast, he raised to the see of Strassburg. His successor founded there a monastery for ' Scots ' or Irish in 687. Another of his followers, Maelceadar, an Irish warrior, became a person of distinction at Dagobert's Court. His wife, St Waldetrude, the patroness of Mons, accompanied her husband when he went on a visit to his native land to invite Irish teachers to come over and settle in the Frankish kingdom.

Students repairing to Ireland for study were free to pass from school to school and to choose their own masters. There must have been some great attraction in the Irish student's life, for Aldhelm, in a letter addressed to three young men just returned from Ireland, exclaims, "Why does Ireland pride herself on a sort of priority, in that such numbers of students flock there from England, as if here upon this fruitful soil there were not an abundance of Argive and Roman masters to be found, fully capable of solving the deepest problems of religion and satisfying the most ambitious students?" [44]

[44] The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, under 891, speaks of three Irish pilgrims who arrived in England in a boat without any oars, and who were cared for by King Alfred the Great. Their names were Dubhslane, Macbeth, and Mealinmun.

Many of the foremost of the Welsh teachers and saints gained part of their education in Ireland. St Gildas, the historian, frequently visited the country and is said to have "revived faith and discipline" and to have given to it a special Mass. St Cadoc, or Cathmael, the Wise, founder of the important monastery of Llancarvan, had been baptized and instructed by an Irish hermit named Tathai, who had settled in Wales and who taught St Cadoc grammar, the Scriptures, and the liberal arts for twelve years. Determining to perfect himself in the advanced learning then only to be acquired in Ireland, St Cadoc passed over in a coracle built by himself to Lismore, where he was received by "the master of the city [monastery] and all the clergy," and he remained three years "perfecting himself in the learning of the West." All his life he continued to wear the rough and hairy mantle "such as the Irish wear out of doors," and one of his special treasures was a small bell of peculiar sweetness which he brought back from Lismore. [45] St Padarn, St Cybi, and others built churches in Leinster, and as late as 1058 St Sulien the Wise, founder of the college of Llanbadarn Fawy, "stirred by the example of the fathers," spent thirteen years studying in Ireland. Some valuable manuscripts of his family and school remain. On the other hand, many of the chief Irish founders of monasteries passed part of their early life in Wales. It is even said that when the "Priority and Headship" of the Welsh Church was in question, the population being undecided whether to elect St David or St Gildas, the young Finnian of Clonard, who was standing among the huge assembly, was called upon to give an impartial opinion. He gave his award for St David "in such good Welsh that it might have been his mother-tongue." [46] An example of what was constantly going on is the story of the "fleet of Irish ships" which one day sailed into the harbour of Hayle, in Cornwall, where they were attacked by the inhabitants and many killed. The few who escaped entrenched themselves on a hill, and they gradually extended their power over the Land's End district. A large part of Cornwall became Irish, the original inhabitants taking flight overseas to Brittany, along with emigrants from Devon and Wales. There are also a great number of dedications to Irish saints in Brittany. From the north of Scotland southward to Cornwall we find Irish dedications in great plenty; St Brigit is found all over the Hebrides, St Finnbarr of Cork in Argyllshire, St Cainnech of Aghaboe is the St Kenneth of St Andrews. St Bees Head is so called from St Bega, and Brandon Head, near Bristol, from St Brendan, the navigator saint. The wide influence of the Irish Church in early times is clearly shown. [47]

[45] W. J. Rees, Lives of the Cambro-British Saints, pp. 313-317, 326, 352.

[46] Stokes, Lives of the Saints from the Book of Lismore, pp. 222-223.

[47] Plummer, Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae, Introduction, pp. cxxiv-cxxvi; Baring-Gould and Fisher, British Saints, Introduction.

In the heart of Somerset the romantic village of Glastonbury was in old days known as "Glastonbury of the Gaels." It was founded by an Irish monk and seems to have been the special resort of pilgrims from Beggery Island in Wexford Harbour. The Irish tradition is very strong in Glastonbury. On either side of the figure of St Dunstan on the great seal of the monastery are found those of St Patrick and St Brigit. It was an old belief that St Patrick died here, but this "Sen-Patrick," or old Patrick, was probably another saint of the same name. Nevertheless, this tradition was one of the most persistent causes of the flocking to Glastonbury of Irish students and pilgrims. The life of St Dunstan says that "men of the Irish nation inhabited the place in large numbers, men who were most skilful and had fully given up their mental energies to the prosecution of the liberal arts; who, that they might the more entirely devote themselves to philosophy, leaving their native land and laying aside all their old habits, had hastened to Glastonbury, attracted by love of their first preacher St Patrick, whose corporal shell is from antiquity said to have been deposited there." [48] It is possible that it was the presence of these Irish students that infused into the severe mind of St Dunstan that love of music and the liberal arts for which he and his monastery became celebrated, just as in the neighbouring monastery of Malmesbury, founded by an Irish hermit named Maelduf, Aldhelm found a congenial atmosphere for the cultivation of that love of music which led him in later days to sing, on open ways and bridges, songs and religious poems to the chance passer-by.

[48] Vita Sancti Dunstani, ed. William Stubbs (1874), pp. 10, 74, 256, etc.; cf. William of Malmesbury, De Antiquitate Glastoniensis.

Though the western coasts were naturally the first to be invaded many Irish wanderers found their way farther afield. The dreamer of one of the earliest visions of heaven and hell, St Fursey, or Fursius (b. 633), was a Galway youth "of noble Irish blood, but much more noble in mind than in birth." He made his way across England and settled in the kingdom of Sigebert of the East Angles, in order to escape from the crowds that followed him in his own country. There he built his monastic cells "pleasantly situated in the woods and with the sea not far off," wherein he might the more freely indulge his heavenly studies. It was there he saw his strange vision of the other world, the earliest of those apocalyptic writings which were to find their culmination in the thirteenth century in the Divina Commedia of Dante. [49] Fursey seems to have been accompanied by a band of Irish followers, for, when he decided to cross to France to found his two monasteries of Péronne and Lagry on the Marne, he left behind him at his older foundation two priests of Gaelic name, Gobban and Dicuil, and took with him another named Ultan to join his anchorite cell in France.

[49] Bede, Eccl. Hist., Bk. iii, ch. xix.

This is not the place to relate at length the lives and labours of the Irish evangelists abroad. The place of honour must be assigned to Columban, who passed forth with twelve companions from the great school of Bangor, Co. Down, landed in Gaul, and reached Burgundy about the year 574, at the age of thirty-one. He settled down among the forests of the Vosges, building his simple monastery under the walls of a ruined castle at Annegray, and living chiefly on the wild fruits and herbs of the woods. Here he composed the rule for his monks, and though it was severe the gentle character of its followers drew many to join his order. He boldly attacked the vices of the three kings who ruled in Gaul, and he won over one of them, Sigisbert, who offered him land on which to build. Twice he was called into Italy to combat the Arian heresy and his conversion of the Lombard king, Agilulph, who began his reign in 590, led to the offer of any piece of land he might choose if he would consent to stay in Italy. He longed for solitude and chose a spot high among the Apennines which was destined to become famous as the monastery of Bobbio, the fourth of the monasteries founded abroad by Columban, the other three, Annegray, Luxeuil, and Fontaines being in Gaul. The grant of King Agilulph, making over the land to Columban, still exists, as do also a knife, cup, and bell said to have belonged to the founder. But the most splendid memorial of Bobbio is the valuable collection of manuscripts, many of them now in Rome, Turin, and Milan, which formed its library. A catalogue drawn up in the tenth century and attributed to Abbot Gerbert (967-972), who afterward became Pope Silvester II, contains a list of 700 volumes, 220 of which had been presented by scholars who are named, while the rest had been acquired from various unstated sources. The explanations of passages in the classical books and on copies of portions of the Bible made by Irish students in their own tongue are among the oldest surviving specimens of the Irish written language. They are known as the Turin and Milan 'glosses.' Eighteen monasteries in Germany and Switzerland, over thirty in France, and many in Italy and the Netherlands (to give these countries their modern names) earned on into the Middle Ages the work and memory of their Irish founders. The canton of St Gall was named after one of the companions of St Columban, who was so much attracted by the quietude of the region that he refused to cross the Alps into Italy, a country then rent by religious disputations. His monastery became one of the chief houses of call in the Middle Ages for pilgrims passing into Italy to visit Rome. At Salzburg, in the Tyrol, the bishopric dates back to Fergal, or Virgil, once Abbot of Aghaboe in Queen's Co. Over the canton of Glarus still waves the figure of St Fridolin, its Irish patron saint. St Cathaldus, patron of Taranto in Southern Italy, and St Colman, patron of Lower Austria, were Irishmen. When travellers enter Florence by the western gate they pass under the portals of St Fredianus, or Finnian, the Irish preacher and Bishop of Lucca. As they climb the sweet slopes of Fiesole they may rest beside the spot where Donat or Donatus built his hut and chapel.

Outside the city of Paris may be visited the holy well of St Fiacre, an Irishman whose shrine was so much frequented in the Middle Ages that it gave a special name to the carriages that bore pilgrims thither, and in Paris a cab is still a fiacre. From the shores of Iceland and the Faroe Isles down to the vine-clothed hills of Italy we find the cells, the traditions, and the manuscripts of Irish monks and travellers.

Among the twenty-nine chief monasteries which in the eighth century obeyed the Columban rule were, besides those we have mentioned, the almost equally well-known foundations of Péronne, Reichnau, Ratisbon, Seckingham, and Würzburg. When, in 723, the Saxon Winifred, better known as Boniface, was sent to the Franks as Papal legate, not one of the German or Bavarian tribes to which he went could be considered pagan, and in this work of Christianization the Irish had borne a considerable part. The last of the Irish foundations to be recognized as such was St James's of Ratisbon, known as the Monasterium Scotorum. But when the word 'Scotia' ceased to be applied to Ireland, and Scotsmen from Scotland claimed the monastery as their own foundation, it was handed over to them by Pope Leo X, and the remaining Irish monks were forced to leave.

It was during the disturbance of the monastic life at home through the onslaughts of the Northmen that Europe was flooded for a second time with Irish missionaries and teachers. The schools in Ireland were broken up, and life and property were rendered insecure. As the Norsemen and Danes penetrated farther into the country the monasteries became the chief points of attack, and the quiet pursuit of learning became more and more difficult. Then the thoughts of Irish men of letters turned naturally to the already existing Irish foundations abroad. The story of the foreign work of the Irish teachers thus falls into two parts. There were first the early missions like those of Columban and St Gall; of Finnian of Moville, known abroad as St Frediano of Lucca (500-588); of Ursus of the Val d'Aosta (c. 550); and of Cathaldus of Waterford (c. 618), who became Bishop of Taranto about 680, and whose brother Donatus founded a church near Naples about the same date. These men were followed in the ninth century by the great influx of learned men who gathered principally round the schools of Charlemagne and of Charles the Bald; from which centre they spread gradually over all Southern and Central Europe. The earlier movement was inspired by the love of adventure, the desire for solitude, and the craving to undertake missionary work among foreign nations. The later effort was made in response to the well-known ambition of Charlemagne to make the schools at Paris a centre of advanced learning. He welcomed with enthusiasm teachers who could assist him in carrying out his aims.

An old story, which, even if it be rather a parable than an historical fact, well describes what actually happened, tells us that "when the illustrious Charles began to reign alone in the West, and literature was everywhere almost forgotten, it happened that two Scots of Ireland, Clemens and Albinus, came over with some British merchants to the shores of France. These Scots [Irishmen] were incomparably skilled in human learning and in the holy Scriptures. As they had not merchandise for sale, they used to cry out to the crowds flocking to the churches, 'If anyone is desirous of wisdom, let him come to us and receive it, for we have it to sell.'" [50] The report of these men came to the ears of Charles the Great, who, being a lover of wisdom, ordered them to be brought before him without any delay. He asked them whether the report was true that they did really possess wisdom. They replied that it was so and that they were ready to impart such as they had to any who would seek it worthily. They required nothing in return but food and raiment, a convenient dwelling, and ingenuous minds. This was about the year 772. Clemens remained in France, and became magister palatinus or Instructor to the Imperial Court, teaching all children of the nobility and of the lower ranks who desired to attend his classes. Albinus was sent as ambassador to Pope Adrian I (772-795) by King Charles, who had succeeded to the Frankish throne in 769; [51] later he was placed by him in charge of the monastery of St Augustine in Pavia, where he continued to lecture until his death to all who desired to receive his instruction. Charles had added the kingdom of Lombardy to his dominions when, in 774, he entered Pavia and took its king Desiderius prisoner.

[50] The story is related by a monk of St Gall of the ninth century, and is accepted by Muritori, Ussher, Lanigan, and Hadden.

[51] Charles was crowned Emperor in the year 800; he died in 814. Lothaire succeeded Louis le Débonnaire in 817 and died in 855.

Pavia became a great centre of Irish learning. In 825 the French King Lothaire, who had been educated under two Irish teachers in the schools of his grandfather Charlemagne, desired one Dungal to accept the post of Principal of Pavia University, while Clemens remained at Paris. The edict of Lothaire declares that "through the extreme carelessness and indolence of certain superiors, true learning had been shaken to the very foundations on all sides"; therefore it had pleased him to desire that students should assemble from Milan, Brescia, Lodi, Vercelli, Genoa, Como, and other neighbouring towns, to the instruction to be given at Pavia under the superintendence of Dungal, and that neither poverty nor distance should serve as an excuse to the people. Dungal was one of that "vast train of philosophers" who, Eric of Auxerre says, removed to France in the ninth century, along with "almost all Ireland" flying as refugees before the Norse and carrying with them their books and valuables. The Irish saints' names scattered so thickly about Belgium, France and Brittany, and the great number of Irish manuscripts in foreign libraries, attest the truth of this passage. Dungal had arrived at the Court of Charles the Great about 780. He was a poet, theologian, and astronomer, and he became the trusted friend of the Emperor, to whom he wrote a letter that is still extant. In a Latin poem addressed to Charles he calls himself the Irish exile (Hibernicus exul). It begins, "These verses the Irish exile sends to King Charles." His letter is on the subject of a double eclipse of the sun which occurred in 810; the phenomenon so much excited the curiosity of the Emperor that he asked Dungal, then a recluse in St Denis, to write for him an explanation of the event. At Pavia he speedily attracted students from the surrounding states, many of whose names are still remembered, and his school acquired wide celebrity. He greatly esteemed Virgil and was acquainted with the early Christian Latin poets, such as Prudentius and Fortunatus. His numerous Latin verses prove his taste and his love of poetry. In a poetic address to the Emperor he exclaims, "Dost thou demand of what avail are the verses of our song? Ah, my friend, dost thou not know the names of the Muses, or can it be that scornfully thou dost despise their gifts? While the starry worlds revolve in their loftiest orbits...so long will be heard throughout the ages the everlasting names of the Muses by whom the glorious deeds of kings are celebrated." [52] Another Dungal, whose tracts show some acquaintance with the works of Greek as well as of Latin authors, took part in the discussion that rent the Church during part of the eighth century about the honour that should be paid to images. He was called upon as the only man able to enter into controversy with the Spanish bishop, Claudius, on this subject of the Western iconoclasm. [53]

[52] Martène and Durand, Vet. Scrip. Coll. (1729), vol. vi, p. 811. Quoted by M. Stokes, Six Months in the Apennines, pp. 213-214.

[53] Yet another Dungal presented his valuable library to Bobbio at a later date. Traube, in his O Roma nobilis, distinguishes five Dungals, all of Irish birth, but this seems uncalled for; see also L. Gougaud, Les Chrétientés Celtiques, pp. 287-288.

Nearly all the chief Irish saints wrote hymns and poems, both religious and secular, sometimes in Latin and sometimes in the native tongue. We find chance compositions penned on the borders of old manuscripts at home and abroad, such as the "Student's Address to his Cat" or the "Lines to the Blackbird"--the one written on the margin of a codex of St Paul's Epistles in the monastery of Carinthia, the other as a marginal note on a copy of Priscian found in the monastery of St Gall. [54] Columcille wrote his tender and patriotic verses in both tongues; his contemporary and namesake, Columban, left several Latin poems written while he was abroad, notably the charming epistle addressed to his friend Fedolius in Adonic verse, in which he prays him "not to despise these little verses by which Sappho loved to charm her contemporaries." The Book of Hymns of the ancient Church of Ireland has a number of early hymns and eulogies of Irish saints both in Irish and Latin. The poetic fervour of the hermit monks, who lived in the closest intimacy with nature, brought forth a group of poems, both on religious subjects and on the natural beauties of the woods and streams and stormy ocean beside which they passed their peaceful days. These poems are unsurpassed in any literature for the delicacy of their sentiment and their vivid perception of the life of bird, and beast, and insect, the humble companions who lent interest to their solitude.

[54] Originals and translations in Stokes and Strachan, Thesaurus Palaeo-hibernicus, ii, 290, 293; and cf. Hull, Poem-book of the Gael, pp. 132, 139.

The most important of the gifts of knowledge which the Irish were able to restore to a rent and distracted Europe was the study of the Greek tongue. From a very early period the study of Greek seems to have formed part of the curriculum in Irish monastic schools. Columcille is said as a child to have "learned Greek grammar," though his earliest lessons were given him by a bard. The abbot Aileran of Clonard, writing about the year 600 a curious work on the mystical meaning of the names in our Lord's genealogy, quotes apparently from Philo as well as from Origen, Jerome, and Augustine. The old glossaries occasionally give Greek equivalents for Irish words, and Greek vocabularies and paradigms have been found in Irish manuscripts abroad. These occasional words in glossaries do not necessarily argue any extensive acquaintance with the language, but they show that its study was still alive in Irish monastic schools in the ninth century. It was from St Gall that the Greek copy of St Paul's Epistles with a Latin translation between the lines, known to scholars as Codex Boernerianus, was brought to Dresden. It dates from the ninth century and was therefore probably acquired or copied either in the time of the abbot Moengal (under whom the school of St Gall attained its greatest fame both as a seat of learning and as a school of music) or in that of Grimald, who was abbot from 854 to 872, and who bestowed upon the library a collection of valuable manuscripts. The few fragments in Irish script still remaining at St Gall are made up into miscellaneous collections, in which the precious St Gall palimpsest of Virgil is found side by side with several very ancient fragments of the Gospels. [55]

[55] H. J. White, Old Latin Biblical Texts, Nos. II, III.

Two Irish scholars of the ninth century are admitted to have been the first Greek authorities of their day. These were Sedulius Scotus ('the Irishman') and Johannes Scotus. Sedulius, who was Abbot of Kildare about 820, sought the Court of Charlemagne and was appointed by him to an important post at Liege, where he remained for many years. He arrived there one winter's day, through deeply drifted snow, exhausted by hunger and fatigue, but he received a welcome appropriate to his gifts and learning, and soon entered upon his professorial duties. He continued at Liege from 840 to 860 and died soon afterward at Milan. He tells us that "many learned grammarians" from his country were studying under his tuition at Liege. It is probable that his Treatise on Government was written for the instruction of Charlemagne's grandson, Charles the Bald, for whom also he composed numerous poems. When Charles visited the monastery Sedulius the Irishman presented a poem in his honour. He wrote commentaries in which he displays his reading by the variety of works from which he quotes. He corrects his Latin New Testament by a Greek original and he refers to the Hebrew readings. He composed a grammatical treatise on the basis of Priscian and Donatus, as well as the Treatise on Government of which we have spoken, which was discovered in the Vatican Library by Cardinal Mai. He was not only a man of exceptional erudition and versatility, but he was also a graceful Latin poet. His verses on "The Lily and the Rose" in which these flowers contend in rivalry for the palm of beauty are worthy of Thomas Moore. He is not to be confused with the fifth-century Italian poet of the same name who wrote the Carmen Paschale.

Undoubtedly the most remarkable thinker produced by the Irish schools and one of the foremost thinkers of the Middle Ages was John 'Scotus' or 'Scotigena,' or 'John the Irishman,' though he preferred to call himself John Ériugena, from Ériu, the old native name of his country. [56] John lived at a time when Western Europe was disturbed by the invasions of the Northmen, who were pouring down upon Northrumbria and Ireland, sacking the towns of Western France, Bordeaux, Rouen, Toulouse, and making their way inland to the gates of Paris. It was "with the din of war crashing around him" that, sometime about 847, John crossed over to France to obey the behest of Charles the Bald, who, amid the terrors of war, was building up under his own immediate care a school of philosophy at which learned men from every country were welcomed and given the opportunity of promulgating their ideas. The man, "little of stature but of merry wit," who came at his call from Ireland captivated the affection of the King, as his teaching was speedily to stir the attention of Europe.

[56] An alternative form is Ierugena; in later manuscripts the incorrect form Erigena appears. Ériu is the oldest form of the name of Ireland in the native tongue, with dative Érinn or Ére, from which the forms Erin and Ierne seem to be taken.

It was John's knowledge of the Greek language that induced the French King to invite him to his Court. Though his capital was then at Laon, he was attracted to Paris by its neighbourhood to the abbey of St Denis, which Charlemagne had chosen as the burial-place of his house, and which was then universally believed to have been founded by Dionysius the Areopagite, the earliest Athenian convert of St Paul. Works attributed to this man were supposed to have been discovered, but the knowledge of Greek, the language in which they were written, had so completely died out in the west that no one could be found to translate them. Charles probably remembered that an Irish teacher in the schools of his grandfather Charles the Great, and whom he had met at Liege, was not only a learned Latinist and a graceful Latin poet, but possessed as well some knowledge of Greek. The memory of Sedulius induced him to send for help to Ireland, and John, on his arrival, was able to carry out the wishes of his patron, and produce a translation which, owing to the then general ignorance of the language, threw Anastasius, Librarian of the Vatican Library, into the deepest astonishment. "It is wonderful," he exclaimed, "that this uncivilized man, dwelling on the confines of the world, should have been able to understand such things and to translate them into another tongue."

It was from his knowledge of Greek philosophy, especially of Plato, that John rose to the conception of things which he elaborated in his great work On the Division of Nature. "In the simplicity of his general plan," it has been said, "he surpasses all the philosophers of the Middle Ages." He accepts Plato's conception of a world of ideas as the pattern on which the sensible universe is made, thought to him being the only reality and goodness its essential significance. The inherent dignity of man's nature must assert itself in the end. "The soul may forget her natural goods, may fail in her striving towards the goal of the inborn virtues of her nature; the natural powers may move, by fault of judgment, towards something which is not their end," but not for ever, for the universal tendency of things is upward. "Our nature is not fixed in evil;...it is for ever moving, and seeks nought else but the highest good, from which as from a beginning its motion takes its source and to which it is hastening as to an end." Since all things proceed from God, so in God they find their final perfection. John was not a pantheist, for he believed in personal immortality. "This," he writes, "is the end of all things visible and invisible, when all visible things pass into the intellectual, and the intellectual into God, by a marvellous and unspeakable union; but not, as we have often said, by any confusion or destruction of essences or substances." His effort was to produce a philosophy of religion; he was led to conclusions on the essential goodness of human nature, and the negative and transient nature of evil, which were not acceptable in his own day, but many of which were revived, perhaps unconsciously, in the works of later thinkers. This belief in the dignity of human nature and its innate desire for good marks the conceptions of two mediaeval Celtic teachers, Pelagius and John Scotus, The one, with restless energy, was untiring in endeavouring to get his views accepted by a Church to which they were unwelcome; his doctrine is still the only heresy against which, in the Articles of the English Church, its adherents are warned by name. The other addressed himself to a more limited audience; and up to the death of his patron, Charles the Bald, John continued to enjoy the protection of this enlightened prince, whose scholar's instinct led him to encourage unfettered discussion, and whose respect for learning made him the personal friend of the scholars who gathered round him.

John came to a dreadful end at the hands of his own pupils and his own countrymen. On the death of Charles in France he was invited to repair to England by King Alfred the Great, and placed by him in charge of Malmesbury Abbey. Here he is said to have fallen a victim to the turbulence of his Irish pupils, who set upon him with the sharp ' stiles ' with which they wrote, inflicting wounds of which he died. [57]

[57] For an admirable essay on John Scotus see R. Lane Poole, Mediaeval Thought and Learning, ii, 46-68, from which the above quotations are taken. The question of the identity of John Scotus with the teacher of Malmesbury is fully discussed in Appendices I and II of the above-mentioned work.

It was not only in classical studies that Irishmen of the ninth century stood in the forefront of the knowledge of their time. They were also geographers and mathematicians. Fergal, or Virgil, of Salzburg has the double reputation of being a teacher of geometry and a missionary. At home he had been abbot of Aghaboe, and he must have been beloved in his native land, for he is one of the few among the host of Irish teachers who went abroad who is remembered in the annals and martyrologies of the homeland. His death is recorded in the Annals of Ulster under the date 784. On going to France he was recommended to Odilo, Grand Duke of Bavaria, by King Pepin (752-768), to fill the see of Salzburg. He had already achieved a reputation before leaving Ireland, for he was known there as the Geometrician; from his Greek studies he had learned the theory that the earth was a sphere and that there are antipodes. This theory was believed to run counter to the religious doctrines of the day, and Fergal was condemned again and again by the ecclesiastical authorities. But he still continued to maintain that the world was round, that the sun and moon passed beneath it, and that there must be inhabitants on the other side. No measures were actually taken against him, and he seems to have gone on quietly administering his diocese, while occasionally he startled the mediaeval world with new knowledge, wrought out in his study in the intervals of episcopal work.

An equally interesting writer was Dicuil, who lived about 820 or later, and who wrote in his old age a geographical work called De Mensura Orbis Terrae, which was discovered by M. Letronne about 1812 in the French National Library. Dicuil was a very intelligent man who was not content merely to compile an account of the world's geography from the records of the classical writers, though he was familiar with these and quotes from Solinus, Pliny, Isidore of Seville, Priscian, and many others. But he was also at great pains to find out any new material which could be contributed at first-hand by those who had travelled in little-known regions. The island of Iceland, for instance, was not discovered and peopled by Norsemen before 874, but Dicuil, who probably wrote half a century earlier, gives a long account of it. He corrects the common idea of his day that the island was surrounded with a sea of ice, remarking bluntly that those who made such reports "have evidently lied"; but he says that at a day's sail farther north the frozen ocean had been found, for certain clerics who visited the island went beyond it in the depth of winter. He describes, among other interesting details, the long days near the solstice, when the sun "hardly disappeared at all, but seemed only to hide itself behind a hill, so that, even during its short absence, the light of day does not fail." All this, he says, he had learned from some Irish anchorites who had visited the island over thirty years before and had remained there from the month of February till August. The account he gives of these hardy wanderers, who, despairing of finding nearer home the quiet they longed for, had pushed their way into the frozen seas, remarkably bears out the tradition handed down in the Icelandic Landnámabóc, which gives the history of the settlements on Iceland by the Norse. This old book says that when the Norse arrived in the island, flying before the harsh laws of Harold Fairhair, they found there already "Irish bells, books, and croziers." This passage is so interesting, as bearing on the wanderings of the Irish anchorites, that it will be well to quote it in full. It occurs in the prologue to this native record of the 'land-takes ' of Iceland and runs as follows: "Before Iceland was peopled from Norway there were in it men whom the Northmen called Papas [Fathers]; they were Christian men, and it is held that they must have come oversea from the west, for there were found after them Irish bells, books, and crooks [croziers], and more things besides, from which it could be understood that they were Westmen. These things were found east in Pap-isle, and it is stated in English books that in those times voyages were made between those countries." [58]

[58] Landnámabóc, Prologue.

It is an important testimony to the accuracy of this Icelandic record to find that Dicuil had conversed with those who knew some of these early explorers. He had also met a "man worthy of trust" who related to his master, the abbot Sweeney (Suibhne), how he had landed on the Faroe Isles after having navigated "two days and a summer night in a little vessel of two banks of oars." He found that they also had been inhabited nearly a hundred years before by eremites who had gone out of "our Scotia [Ireland]," but whom the inroads of the Northmen had driven away from Faroe, since which time the islands had been inhabited by an innumerable multitude of sheep, who were probably the descendants of those introduced and reared by the Irish hermits. To this day the sheep that are found on the Faroe Islands are of a breed unknown in Norway, but resembling those of the Western Isles of Scotland and the inhabitants have a peculiar method of rearing their sheep, unlike that of Norway. The name Faroe or Faerey Isles means "The Sheep Islands." [59]

[59] P. A. Munch, Chronica Regum Manniae et Insularum (1860), p. viii. Dicuil also wrote a remarkable treatise on astronomy which has been printed by M. Esposito in P.R.I.A., vol. xxvi, Sect. C, p. 378 seq. (1906-7).

As life at home became increasingly difficult for learned men new colleges of Irish began to spring up abroad, and Würzburg, Ratisbon, Fulda, Mayence (Mainz), Constance, and Nürnberg were all crowded with Irish students. They have left behind them many precious manuscripts, the fruit of their learning and patience. In the Imperial Library at Vienna is a copy of the Epistles of St Paul transcribed by a Donegal monk of Ratisbon in 1079. His name, Marianus "Scotus," shows the country of his birth, and his book was written "for his pilgrim brethren" who joined him from Ireland. Seven of his immediate successors were natives from the North of Ireland. Another Irish monk of the same name is associated with the Irish abbeys of Cologne and Fulda. He was educated at Moville in Co. Down, but, leaving his native land, he became an enclosed monk of the abbey of St Martin at Cologne. Though living as a solitary he wrote there a History of the World and various tracts of a controversial nature. His reputation spread, and when Siegfried, the Superior of Fulda Abbey, visited Cologne in 1058 he induced Marianus to return with him and take up his residence at Fulda. He became for the second time a professed 'incluse' in May 1059, taking up his abode in a cell in which another Irish incluse had lived and died sixteen years before. He died at Mayence, having followed his friend Abbot Siegfried thither, the remaining thirteen years of his life being passed in seclusion. All this we learn from his own diary, which has fortunately been preserved. A touching marginal note in a copy of his History gives a glimpse of the feelings which passed through the mind of an Irish scribe when, in foreign lands, he received tidings of events passing at home. It reads: "It is pleasant for us to-day, O Maelbrigte [i.e., Marianus], incluse in the inclusory of Mayence, on the Thursday before the feast of Peter, in the first year of my obedience to the Rule; namely, the year in which Dermot, King of Leinster, was slain. [60] And this is the first year of my pilgrimage from Scotia [Ireland]. And I have written this book for love of the Scots all, that is, the Irish, because I am myself an Irishman."

[60] King Dermot MacMaelnamo (Mael-na-mbó) of Leinster, who died in 1072.

At home the growing power of the Church had, even so early as the days of St Columcille, led to a struggle between the founders of monasteries and the central authority of Tara. The abbots began to exercise an authority independent of the secular arm and claimed, among other powers, the right to shelter criminals behind the 'law of sanctuary,' refusing to give them up to justice. Thus a merciful provision, intended to shelter an accused man from the vengeance of his pursuers until his case had been lawfully tried, was interpreted into a defiance of all legal punishment, the abbots in this way claiming an authority superior to that of the State even in matters not directly concerning the Church. The question was fought out by a test case in the reign of Dermot MacCarroll (Cearbhall), High King of Ireland about 538-565, a man of just aims and high ideals and determined to uphold the authority of the state. The story has taken the form of a parable in which the twelve chief saints of Ireland, as representing the Church, solemnly excommunicate Dermot by ringing of bells and "fasting upon" him. [61] Their action led to the downfall of Dermot and, with him, of the central supreme authority of Tara. After his time its position waned, and it was deserted as the seat of government. Thus the kingship was weakened just at the moment when a strong government would have been invaluable to the country. The last feis, or triennial festival, of Tara is recorded in the reign of Dermot. The Calendar of Aengus, composed late in the Norse period, speaks of "Tara's mighty town with her kingdom's splendour" as having perished, though the chief monastic foundations, in spite of Danish assaults, still survived, and "a multitude of champions of wisdom abode yet in great Armagh." But though Tara was deserted the name and title of Áird-rí continued up to the reign of Rory O'Conor, who submitted to Henry II, and during the Norse period a succession of powerful princes occupied the throne. Among signs of advance was the checking by St Columcille of the overgrown numbers of the bards, who were accustomed to go about the country in large bodies demanding entertainment and impoverishing the population. The exemption of women from warfare was obtained by St Adamnan, or Eunan (d. 704); and the adoption by the Irish Church of the customs and discipline of the Catholic Church in such matters as the date of keeping Easter and the form of the tonsure was largely secured by the persistent efforts of the same reformer. His powerful influence was exercised both at Iona (Hi), of which he was abbot, and in Ireland, where he held two important Synods, one at Armagh and another at Tara, where spots still known as the "Tent" and "Chair" of Adamnan are shown. He, like his great predecessor at Iona, St Columcille, was a Donegal man, and he wrote the most authoritative life of the founder, besides a book on the Holy Land highly praised by Bede. He was, as his writings show, a man of force and imagination.

[61] Silva Gadelica, ii, 70-74, 82. A speech of great dignity is put into Dermot's mouth. To "fast upon" a man from whom a debt was due was the legal form of enforcing a demand upon a man of higher rank under the Brehon law. It has recently been revived as the 'hunger-strike.' See Ancient Laws and Institutes of Ireland, i, 83, 113.

The state of the country during the close of the seventh and the eighth centuries declined with the decline of the restraining influence of the monastic schools, which had to a large extent replaced that of the secular arm. Disputed successions and enfeebled princes combined to produce a condition of disorder, and the gloom and misery of the period was accentuated by frequent and terrible visitations of pestilence which spared neither princes nor abbots, while the common people were swept away in vast numbers. Abbots of Clonard, Fore, Clonmacnois, and other monasteries, died of it. About 666-669 four abbots of Bangor, Co. Down, succumbed to it in succession. These plagues were followed by a great mortality among the cattle, which added the misery of famine to that of sickness. Extreme frosts are said to have occurred at the same time.

With the passing away of the founders of the greater monasteries the reverence in which these institutions were held seems to have declined. Early in the eighth century began that sacrilegious system of burning the monasteries which the Northmen copied but did not originate. In the period immediately preceding the first recorded Norse descents there is not a year in which the destruction of some old foundation is not noted. For instance, in 774 Armagh, Kildare, and Glendalough were burned. In 777 Clonmacnois was destroyed, in 778 again Kildare, in 783 Armagh and Mayo, in 787 Derry, in 788 Clonard and Clonfert, besides numerous smaller monasteries and churches. [62] The Danish fury shows us nothing worse than this. Quarrels and actual conflicts between the brethren were frequent. Both monks and students were armed and obliged to attend the warlike expeditions of their chiefs in the same way as other subjects; it is perhaps not surprising that, being trained and expected to fight, they should often have turned their arms against each other. They even appear in Church councils fully armed. [63] It was not until 803 that the clergy were legally exempted from hostings and wars. But a custom sanctioned by time did not easily die out; we shall find the clergy taking an active part in tribal warfare up to the beginning of the tenth century, though by that time a feeling seems to have been growing up that it was unseemly for monks and clergy to appear on the battlefield.

[62] Annals of Ulster, at above dates.

[63] Ibid., 806, 816. Notices of students "with shields and spears in their hands" at the monastery of St Aedh of Ferns will be found in the Life of St Aedan. Cf. W. J. Rees, Lives of the Cambro-British Saints, p. 566.

Never had Ireland been in a weaker condition morally and politically than at the moment when the foreign invader first arrived upon her shores; never was she less prepared to resist the fierce attacks of the Northmen whose conquering arms, spreading westward, fell at the close of the eighth century on the undefended coasts of Ireland.

But a great need called out the finer elements in the nation, and, in spite of the terror of the Norse incursions, the period was one of revival. A succession of purposeful rulers resisted with energy the onsets of the Northmen, and the gradual amalgamation of the two peoples brought to each some elements which were needed for the permanent benefit of both nations. The Danish period in Ireland, usually regarded as one of destruction and fury only, was, in fact, one of distinct advance both in material and intellectual conditions. It found Ireland an open country without large towns or solid fortifications, its chief centres the groups of simple huts gathered round the monastic foundations or along the river-mouths. The close of the Norse occupation left her with a number of walled towns, the beginnings of the larger towns of the present day, with fleets capable of penetrating to the Hebrides or Man, and with a commerce that made cities such as Dublin and Limerick centres of wealth and activity. Stone-built bridges, churches, and round towers showed an advanced style of building and the use of the true arch brought about a revolution in architecture; stone buildings also began to replace the old stockaded forts of the native princes. From the same period come many of the sweetest lyrics that Ireland has ever produced and a large body of prose literature. The most important religious poem of Ireland, the Psalter of the Verses (Saltair na Rann), relating Biblical events from the creation of the world to the final judgment, and containing a hundred and fifty poems in imitation of the Psalter, was composed toward the close of the tenth century.

It may be called the Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained of early Ireland. Few Irish poems are written on so extended a plan. To reach this state of renewed life the country had to go through a baptism of fire; but, comparing the Ireland of the eighth century with that of the eleventh, there is no question but that a great step forward had been taken, if not in the direction of internal peace at least in the direction of external prosperity.

END OF CHAPTER II

III.—THE NORTHMEN

The "fury of the Northmen" from which the mediaeval litanies of these islands and of Brittany prayed to be delivered began to fall upon Ireland toward the close of the eighth century. It was the backwash of a mighty movement which embraced all Southern and Western Europe and extended itself to the borders of Russia, then an almost unknown country. All the Scandinavian nations took part in it, but it was only the fleets of the Norsemen and Danes that visited the shores of Britain and Ireland, the main direction of Swedish expansion being toward the East. When the first recorded fleet of the foreigners appeared before Rechra in 795, and burned Inis Patraic [1] in 797 (798), the rumours of their descents on the shores of Northumbria had already reached Ireland. The Annals of Ulster speak of the "devastation of all the islands of Britain by Gentiles" or heathen men, under the year 793. This report doubtless refers to the ravaging of Lindisfarne, the news of which seems to have reached Ireland soon after the event. Though the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle speaks of these first-comers as Danes, it is almost certain that they came from Norway, not from Denmark. The place from which they started was Haerethaland, now Hordaland, on the west coast of Norway, directly opposite the northern shores of the British Isles. The Irish name for Norway, Ioruaith or Hirotha, may be a reminiscence of this word. But even before 793 there must have been settlements of Norse in Northumbria, for we hear of a synod held at Finn-Gall or " Fair Foreigners," a place evidently named after the Norse invaders, in the north of England in 788. The descents of the Norse on Ireland were by way of the Orkneys, Caithness, and the Hebrides; those of the Danes chiefly by the south coasts of England and Wales. The Norse were hardy seafarers, who pushed out north-west to the shores of Greenland, Iceland, and North Britain, and thence made their way down the western coasts of Scotland to Ireland; the Danes, who were not naturally a sea-loving nation, were inclined to hug the shores. They landed on the coasts of Britain and eventually established themselves as kings of England, a monarchy which, though shortlived, was remarkable for the vigour of the great Canute, whose vast realm at one time included Britain, Denmark, and Norway and came near to adding Sweden as well. Canute's dream of a Northern confederation of nations, to be ruled from Britain, though it was never realized, became very nearly an accomplished fact; but the weakness and follies of his successors dissipated all that his genius had achieved.

[1] It is uncertain whether this was the island of that name, near Skerries, Co. Dublin, or a place now called Holm-Peel in the Isle of Man. Probably it was the former.

Thus the two peoples, Norsemen and Danes, met upon the shores of Ireland, the one descending from the north, by way of Scotland and the Hebrides, the other from the south, by way of England and Wales. In Ireland they tried their mutual strength, for the aim of the Danes was to oust the earlier Norsemen from the fruit of their conquests and to establish settlers from Denmark in their stead. To a large extent they succeeded, for the Norse kingdom of Dublin, firmly established by Olaf the White in 853, came to an end, and the Danish kingdoms of Dublin, Waterford, and Limerick took its place. It is the Danes, not the Norse, who are remembered in Ireland. In the Irish Chronicles the distinction is usually well preserved, the Norse being called Finn-Gaill, or "Fair Foreigners," and the Danes Dubh-Gaill, or "Dark Foreigners." The plunderers of Rechra appear to have been a chance party of the Danes who had been ravaging in Glamorgan and South Britain, the first serious attempts at conquest being made by the Norse who fell upon the North of Ireland. The Gwentian Chronicle calls the plunderers of Rechra "black pagans from Denmark" and adds that when the Cymry, or Welsh, had driven them into the sea and killed very many of them they went to Ireland and devastated Rechreyn (Rechra). This was probably Lambay Island, off the coast of Co. Dublin, and not Rathlin on the Antrim coast, which would have been quite out of their way. The Annals of Clonmacnois also call them Danes (A.D. 792, recte 795).

The viking period began in these islands earlier than is usually supposed and lasted longer. Zimmer shows that the Norse were settled in the Orkneys two centuries before their first descents recorded in history, and even then were carrying on trade between Ireland and Scandinavia. They came both for booty and on trading expeditions, often combining both professions as occasion served. The earliest mention of Limerick is in the Icelandic Landnámabóc, where Hrafn, the Limerick-farer, is said to have spent a long time in Limerick in Ireland, which looks as if the town had already become a trading centre. Dublin, too, was very early a resort of the vikings, and the old song of Starkad, who was slain by Ragner Lodbrok, relates among his hero-deeds, "having taken the chief of the Irish race, I rifled the wealth of Dublin."

Lodbrok himself is said to have slain King Melbrik (Mael-brigde) of Dublin and to have found the city "full of barbarian wealth." In Egil's saga we hear of ships fitted out "for the Irish trade"; and many of these searovers settled down, married Irish wives, and made the trading towns they had established in Ireland their headquarters. One Bjorn, "a right doughty man," went sometimes on freebooting and sometimes on merchant voyages. His father refused his request for a fighting ship, but made him master of a trading vessel and bade him "go south to Dublin, for that voyage is now most highly spoken of." [2] The division of the descents of the Northmen on Ireland into two periods, a preliminary movement consisting of raids round the coast and up the waterways, in order to become familiar with the country, and a later period of settlement, is only a very partial description of what actually occurred. The building of towns and settlements in the country by no means put an end to plunderings for booty. The Norse lord, whether he lived in Norway or in the Hebrides (Sudreyer), [3] made his spring-viking and his autumn-viking as regularly as the seasons came round, with a space for sowing his seed and reaping his harvest between each distant raid. The terror of the Northmen was not confined to a brief period; it went on until late into the twelfth century, practically up to the time of the Norman invasion, for the coasts of Ireland lay conveniently within the range of coasting voyages. Half a century before we have any records of their doings in the Norse annals we hear of them pushing their way up the Irish rivers, robbing the monasteries of their ornaments, sacred books, and valuables, and burning the fragile structures to the ground. They made trading centres at every important river-mouth, to which the peasants of the interior brought down their goods for barter, and out of which were to grow the chief seaport towns of Ireland—Dublin, Waterford, Wexford, Cork, and Limerick. As early as the middle of the ninth century we hear of a mixed race called the Gall-Gael (Gaill-Gaedhil) of partly Scandinavian and partly Irish blood, who began to collect formidable armies. Intermarriage and settlement must thus have been frequent at a date when it is customary to think of the Norse as mere occasional raiders along the coasts. To the Irish it seemed that "great sea-cast floods of foreigners" poured in at every harbour and river-mouth and began to overrun the whole country by means of its waterways. Two fleets of sixty sail appeared simultaneously on the Boyne and Liffey, and, though their landing was disputed with vigour, the invaders succeeded in penetrating to Lough Erne and raiding Meath. For the first time, in 836, Ath-Cliath, henceforth to be known as Dyflin or Dublin, fell into their hands, and by a stroke of high policy they determined to make it their headquarters in Ireland. Standing on one of those splendid natural harbours which the Romans had envied, it lay within direct touch of the western coasts of Britain and was to form the main future passage for commerce and navigation between the two countries. Hitherto, as its name indicates, it had been the main ford across which ran the highway between the south-east and Tara, carried over the Liffey by a hurdle-bridge. Probably a village existed on the banks of the river where the bridge crossed it. But in the hands of the Norse it was to become not only a trading town and the capital of Olaf the White, but a chief link with the Scandinavian kingdoms of Northumbria and the Western Isles. There they planted their 'Thing-mote' for the administration of justice in the Scandinavian manner; there they built a fort on the site occupied by Dublin Castle in later days; and round "entrenched Ath-Cliath" they made their walls and gates. Norse names, such as Howth, Lambay, Leixlip, Skerries, cluster about the district north of the city which is still known as Fingall, or the place of the Fair Foreigners, as the Irish termed the Norse.

[2] The Saga of Egil Skalligrimson. It describes conditions in the middle of the tenth century.

[3] The Sudreyer, or Sudreys, were the Southern Hebrides. Later the word was corrupted into Sodor, which is now used in the title of the Bishops of Sodor and Man.

The choice of Dublin as the capital of the Norse kingdom brought about a corresponding change in the position of Armagh, which from the time of St Patrick onward had, both ecclesiastically and nationally, been looked upon as the metropolis of Ireland. Its great age and its connexion with the patron saint, its important schools and its abbatial dignity, had made it the real capital of the North. It was on this account that Turgeis, or Turgesius, styled in the Annals Lord of the Gall or Foreigners, who arrived in the North of Ireland in 842, with "a great royal fleet" attacked Armagh, plundering it three times in one month, the first of these dreadful experiences which had befallen it at the hands of the foreigners. Turgeis, who is said to have come "to assume the sovereignty of the Gall of Ireland," appears to have had two chief aims; first he desired to unite under his rule the Norse settlers, who had hitherto been without any definite central authority, and to consolidate their conquests in the face of the incoming Danes, who were already beginning to "exercise authority" over the Norse who preceded them; and, secondly, he wished to re-establish paganism in Ireland. To give himself the necessary position of authority he "usurped the abbacy" of Armagh, claiming thereby the spiritual as well as the temporal power over the North. He aimed at a pagan revival in the very place specially consecrated to Christian worship, and Forannan, Abbot of Armagh, had to fly into Munster. He next set up his wife, Ota (Old Norse, Audr), as a priestess and giver of oracles in the second great centre of Christian influence in Northern Ireland, Clonmacnois, and she pronounced her oracles from the high altar of St Ciaran's city. Turgeis has been identified with Thorgils, whom the historian Snorro Sturleson believed to be a son of Harald Fairhair, and who is said to have gone on a viking expedition into Ireland. The dates, however, are difficult to reconcile. If he was a devotee of the god Thor, as this name would indicate, his anxiety to establish the worship of Thor in Ireland would be explained. In Scandinavia the priesthood did not form a separate caste; the head of a family or village was also its priest and offered sacrifices to Thor.

The attempt of Turgeis to introduce the worship of Scandinavian deities into Ireland was not so hopeless as might at first appear. The intermarriages between Irish women and Norse husbands had brought about a widespread reversion toward paganism, the converts becoming even more fierce and sacrilegious than the foreigners themselves. Turgeis died a miserable death in 845, having been taken prisoner by the King of Ireland and drowned by him in Loch Owel in Westmeath, but his evil influence survived him. We hear that "many of the Irish forsook their Christian baptism and joined the Lochlanns or Norse, plundering Armagh and carrying away its riches. They even adopted the name of Norsemen, with the religion and customs of their former foes," and "though the original Norse were bad to the churches, these were far worse, in whatever part of Erin they chanced to be." The writer of this passage ascribes the awakening of this anti-Christian spirit to the fostering by the newcomers of Irish children, who thus imbibed from infancy ideas contrary to their own country and religion. Fosterage was equally common among both peoples, few Norse or Irish children being reared at home. Norse children were 'knee-seated' with some distinguished friend of the family, who, exactly as in Ireland, brought them up and set them out in life, frequently making the adopted child the heir. From this intercourse sprang the mixed race called Gall-Gael, who formed a considerable section of the nation and had their own fleets and armies. They formed bodies of mercenary troops, whom each party tried to bring over to its side, and were difficult to reckon with; they entered the forces of the Danes, Norse, or Irish indifferently, and are found fighting sometimes for and sometimes against their country.[4]

[4] MacFirbis, Three Fragments of Annals, ed. J. O'Donovan (1860), pp. 127, 129, 139. These Gall-Gael are not to be confused with the mixed Norse-Gaelic population of the same name in Galloway, though they sometimes fought in alliance with them; see Annals of the Four Masters, 1154.

After the death of Turgeis his conquests seem to have collapsed, and the next attempts were made by foreigners in the south. When King Malaughlan I came to the throne in 846 the seas between Ireland and the Scottish coasts swarmed with vessels, "so that there was not a point of Erin without a fleet." Forts sprang up on all the rivers along which the raiders could navigate their ships, and these gradually assumed the appearance of a network over the whole country. The King's first step was to clear out the nests of marauders or "sons of death" who were plundering from centres such as Loch Ramor in Cavan, after which he turned his arms against the foreigners of Meath and inflicted on them a severe defeat at Sciath Nechtan. Here fell the chieftain Tomar, who is called tanist (or heir) to the King of Lochlann and who seems to have been the ancestor of the Norse kings of Dublin. "The Sword of Carlus and the Ring of Tomar" were treasured as royal heirlooms in the city; in later times they were carried off by Malaughlan II by force in token of the supremacy that he had gained over the Norse of Dublin, who went by the name of the "Race of Tomar" or "Tomar's Chieftains." [5] The Ring of Tomar may have been one of the sacred iron rings on which it was customary with the Norse to swear judicial oaths. The Sword of Carlus seems to have been part of the royal insignia of the foreign kings of Dublin. Carlus was son of Olaf the White. He was killed in the battle of Killoderry in 866 (869). It may have been in consequence of the fall of Tomar, a scion of the royal house, that Olaf the White arrived in Dublin in the year 853 with a prodigious fleet. He seems to have been a Norse chief from the Hebrides, though his genealogy is given differently in the Northern and Irish accounts. The story of his wife, Aud the Deep-wealthy, who returned to Iceland by way of the Hebrides after the death of her husband, is told in Laxdaela Saga. Olaf came to Ireland to dispute the supremacy over the Irish with the Danes, who were making rapid advances both in the North and in Munster, and who, in the year succeeding the accession of King Malaughlan, had captured and plundered Dublin, the seat of Norse authority. These Dubh-Gaill or "Black Foreigners," as the Irish called them, probably rather on account of their deeds than their complexion, brought terror alike to the Norse and the Irish. They had the fierce habits and also the accommodating spirit, half pagan, half Christian, which characterized the Northmen of the viking period. When trading with Christian folk they were 'prime-signed,' or marked with a cross, so that they might enter into fellowship with Christian men, but at home they worshipped Thor as their ancestors had done. "I am prime-signed, but not baptized," said a man named Toki to King Haraldson, "because I have been in turn with heathen and Christians, though I believe in the White Christ." So the Danes who now arrived in the North of Ireland adopted Patrick as their protector and offered their spoils to his church at Armagh. Malaughlan was forced to come to terms with the Norse against the Danes, "but though Olaf promised many things and swore to observe them, he did not observe the smallest of them after leaving Malaughlan's house, but plundered all his land."

[5] Book of Rights, ed. J. O'Donovan (1847), p. xxxvi.

Malaughlan's efforts against the foreigners were impeded by the struggles of two restless foes who were disputing the monarchy with him, Aedh Finnliath, his successor, and Carroll (Cearbhal or Kjarval) of Ossory, a prince whose power so impressed the Northmen that we find him mentioned in the opening passage of the Icelandic Landnámabóc as King of Dublin at the same time that Harald Fairhair reigned in Norway and Alfred the Great in England. He was on friendly terms with the Norse and married his large family of daughters to famous vikings of the Hebrides or Iceland. His daughter Rafarta married Eyvind the Eastman, a great trader, who had a fleet fitted out specially for raiding the Irish coasts. Another, Aithne, married the father of Sigurd the Stout, who fell at Clontarf carrying the raven-banner which she had wrought. His descendants went home to Iceland and founded families there, calling their children partly by Norse and partly by Irish names. Carroll is said to have been "a person worthy to possess all Erin for the goodness of his countenance, hospitality, and valour," but he was an uncertain ally, and a thorn in the side both of the foreigners and of the Irish King. He crushed the Norse chief Orm, or Horm, in Munster, but he failed the Munstermen at the moment of battle, and involved them in a hopeless defeat. He wasted Leinster, and in 858-859 the King of Ireland had to summon a convention of princes and abbots to force Carroll to pay him his dues. He died in 887. But in 902, the year after the death of Alfred the Great, whose activities in England had broken the strength of the foreigners in that country, the invaders met with so severe a reverse in Ireland that they are said to have been expelled from the country and to "have escaped half dead, having been wounded and broken." Thus the first period of their power ended in rout and defeat.

A partial pause in hostilities or "forty years' rest" is reckoned in the annals between 876 and 916, years during which the Danes found it necessary to withdraw their troops in order to concentrate against the wars of expulsion that Alfred was waging against them in England. But fighting was going on all the time, and, in spite of it, the Norse kings of Dublin were again consolidating their power. Ivar, brother of Olaf the White (?), who in the Annals of Ulster is styled Rex Nord-mannorum totius Hiberniae et Britanniae,[6] was succeeded in turn by Ivar, his grandson, Sitric Gale and Olaf Godfreysson.

[6] He may have been Ivar Beinlaus, son of Ragnar Lodbrok.

Under Olaf Cuaran, or Olaf of the Sandal, whose name is famous in romance and history, the power of the Dublin Norse rose to its greatest height. Ragnall (d. 921) captured York in 919, and he and his successors ruled a kingdom which included all Northumbria south to the Humber, making their headquarters sometimes at York and sometimes in Dublin. But at the battle of Brunanburh, or Brumby, fought near the mouth of the Humber in 937, their power was broken in the defeat of the most formidable combination ever made by the Norsemen, including Scottish and Irish contingents, by Athelstan, King of England; and Olaf Cuaran, the Norse leader, only escaped back to Dublin "with a few," leaving five kings dead on the field.

In their nailed barks the Northmen departed
Bloody relic of darts, on roaring ocean
O'er the deep water Dublin to seek,
Back to Ireland, shamed in mind.[7]

[7] Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 937.

In Ireland the power of the Norse attacks had been weakened even during the forty years' truce by a series of determined rulers, of whom the greatest were Niall Glundubh, or "Black-knee," and his son Murtogh of the Leather Cloaks in the North, and Cormac MacCuilennan and Callachan of Cashel in the South. These princes kept up a continuous fight, though with varying success, against the invaders.

The least warlike but in many ways the most remarkable of these princes was Cormac, who reigned for seven years (901-908) from his capital on the rocky cliff of Cashel which rises out of the plain of Tipperary. The existing group of buildings, consisting of the palace and cathedral, and the chapel of wonderfully rich decoration known as Cormac's Chapel now crowded on its summit, are all later than the tenth century, but they occupy the site of an earlier fort or palace.[8] The round tower was built, like most of the round towers of Ireland, about this date, as a protection against the Danish pirates. Cormac belonged to a race of abbot-kings, who in his day occupied the throne of Cashel. His predecessor and his successor were, like himself, at once abbots and princes, combining in their persons the religious and royal functions. His temperament was quiet and peaceful, and devoted to studious pursuits. He has left a glossary of obscure Irish words which were already, in his time, falling out of use, and he either initiated or continued a work called the Psalter of Cashel, containing "all the inhabitations, events, and septs that lived in this land, from the first peopling and discovery thereof," which seems to have been compiled after his accession to the throne. He is described as "a most excellent scribe, bishop, and anchorite," and "as a holy man, master of Gaelic and Latin; proficient in law, in wisdom, knowledge, and science; most pious, most pure." [9] But the times in which he lived and the influence of the warlike ecclesiastic Flaherty, Abbot of Scattery Island, who was Cormac's successor, involved him in wars against his better judgment. In the fateful battle of Ballymoon, in which Cormac fell (908) fighting against the men of Leinster, the clergy of Leinster are said to have abused Flaherty roundly for inducing the King to enter the battle to his own destruction. "Nobles of Munster," exclaimed one of the leaders, "fly from this abominable battle and leave the clergy, who could not be quiet without coming to battle, to fight it out between themselves." The law exempting ecclesiastics from warfare had evidently become a dead letter, if it had ever been enforced at all, and "the life of a cleric in battle was not more spared than that of a layman." Cormac was killed by the fall of his horse into a trench, just as he was urging a foster-son "who was an adept in wisdom and jurisprudence, in history and Latin" to escape. When Cormac's head was brought to Flann, King of Ireland, he was filled with horror. "It was a monstrous thing," he exclaimed, "to have taken off the head of the holy bishop," and he had it interred with reverence.[10]

[8] Cormac's Chapel was built in 1127 by King Cormac MacCarthy.

[9] MacFirbis, op. cit., p. 215. The Psalter of Cashel was continued by King Brian, who brought it up to date. The Book of Rights is believed to be a portion of this book.

[10] MacFirbis, op. cit., pp. 209, 213. O'Donovan tells us that the stone on which King Cormac's head was cut off is still shown on the site of the battle two and a half miles north of Carlow.

The last days of old Flann Sinna, who reigned as King of Tara for over thirty-six years, saw the outbreak of new and more determined attempts to establish a permanent footing in the South. From this time may be dated the seacoast towns, of which the most important were Waterford and Limerick, ruled by branches of the great house of Ivar; but even the less important trade centres, Cork, Youghal, and Wexford, seem at this period to have undergone a rapid expansion. Wexford is described by Giraldus in 1170 as having walls, towers, and battlements.[11] But Waterford (Port Lairge) continued to be the seat of the Southern line of Danish princes and the capital city of the Munster Danes. Already in the "Kraku-Mal" of the Ragnar Lodbrok cycle we hear of Waterford as one of the places visited by his viking troops.

[11] Giraldus Cambrensis, Conquest of Ireland, ch. iii.

Marstein, Erin's king, whelm'd by the irony sleet,
Allayed the hunger of the eagle and the wolf;
The slain at Wadras ford [Waterford] became the raven's booty;
We hewed with our swords!
South in Leinster, at break of day, we held our game of war.[12]

[12] Vigfusson and F. York Powell, Corpus Poeticum Boreale (1883), ii, 343. Marstein was the Melbric of Saxo.

Probably the first settlement was at Gaultire, or Gall-tire, "the Foreigner's Country," where there had been a settlement since 891. Waterford, like Dublin, had its walls and gates and its 'Green,' or Thing-mote, of judgment.[13] This nucleus was added to from time to time, especially after the "forty years' rest," when Ragnall, grandson of Ivar, and Ottar the Black, with "innumerable hordes," are said to have arrived. They raided all Munster, subdued it, and demanded from it heavy taxes. Though independent of Dublin, both Waterford and Limerick were in close contact with the Scandinavian kingdom of the Isles and with Man; their princes are found fighting in the Hebrides on the way to and from Ireland. The position of Waterford made it a centre from early times for trade with Britain, especially with Bristol. When the Normans landed there they found a merchant ship with a cargo of corn and wine lying in the harbour; and it became the port for the extensive slave trade carried on with Bristol. Limerick and Waterford seem to have been on friendly terms, and though each had its own line of princes, we do not hear of fighting between them. Limerick became an important harbour for Danish fleets; they anchored round what is now King Island (Inis Sibthonn) in the Shannon, and the arrival, about 919-920, of Tamar, son of Elge, with an immense fleet, enlarged this then small settlement in the river-mouth into a regular resort for Danish fleets. They speedily pushed their way northward; and their "mighty deeds" included raids on Loughs Derg and Ree,[14] from whence they made their way into Connacht and even across to Meath.

[13] Alexander Bugge, Caithreim Callachan Caisil, p. 70.

[14] Wars of the Gael with the Gall, ed. J. H. Todd, p. 39.

The heavy blows inflicted by the Irish on the Danes of Limerick must have greatly weakened the colony, and we hear of Morann, the viking chief of the island of Lewis in the Hebrides, coming to the help of the Danish city.[15] The Irish fought at a great disadvantage, for they wore no armour, but only tunics, with shields for protection; their weapons were swords, spears, clubs, and arrows; but the Northmen were encased in suits of armour, upon which the blades of the Irish took no effect, while the helmets of the Danes were impervious to the blows delivered with their clubs.[16] The battleaxe, later the favourite weapon of the Irish, was introduced by the Northmen; but both nations used it at the time of the Norman invasion.

[15] Caithreim Callachan Caisil, pp. 61, 65.

[16] Ibid., p. 64.

The years of the brief reign of Niall Glundubh (917-919) were the worst hitherto experienced by the Irish. Sixteen fleets are said to have arrived simultaneously to ravage Munster, one of them being commanded by the celebrated Inghen Ruadh, or "Red Maiden," the woman-warrior of whom terrible stories are told. The necessity of self-defence forced the Irish to imitate the Danes in building fleets of fighting vessels, and from this time we hear of considerable fleets of "brown-planked" barks in Munster used by the Irish. Regular levies of warships, "ten from each cantred," were raised and could be mustered on occasion. We hear of "Limerick of the ships and bulwarks" and the "king of Foyle of the ready ships." The fleet with which Murtogh of the Leather Cloaks penetrated to the Hebrides, "after gaining victory and triumph," was evidently a full fighting fleet. Most of the Irish words connected with ships and shipping, and many of those connected with commerce and markets, are of Norse origin. The native Gaelic words for boats, such as currach, a canvas or skin-covered bark, or ethar, a ferry-boat, indicate a very primitive sort of craft, which could not have met the "nailed barks" of the Norse on equal terms. The Irish also adopted Norse weights and measures, and the first coins minted in Ireland bear the names of Ivar and Sitric.

Building and fortifying went on all over the country; the massive tower known as Ragnall's or Reginald's Tower, in Waterford, still bears the name of its Danish ruler. Limerick is spoken of as "Limerick of the riveted stones," and even Armagh is called "Armagh of the great towers," while in Dublin arose the battlemented tower from which King Sitric looked out on the battle of Clontarf. Beneath it lay the bridge over the Liffey, called Droichet Dubhgall, or "the Dane's Bridge," later, when the Normans had driven the Danes into Ostmanstown on the north side of the river to be called Ostman's or Eastman's Bridge.

In addition to the ordinary articles of tribute, cattle, cauldrons, drinking horns and vessels, chariots and swords, we now hear of "imported gold and silver," "steeds brought across the green sea," and "foreign shields," as part of the tributes paid from prince to prince, or from the foreigners to the Irish princes. Bondsmen and bondswomen formed an important article of tribute, in one case "ten foreigners without a knowledge of Gaelic" being among the demands. Irish girls of high rank were carried away into slavery, as we know from the beautiful story of the daughter of King Myrkiartan, probably Murtogh of the Leather Cloaks, who was carried to Iceland as a slave, and whose son, Olaf the Peacock, or Olaf Pa, is the hero of Laxdaela Saga. Tributes were also paid from the Irish to the Danes, "a severe tribute" being demanded by the Dublin Norse from Leinster. On the other hand, the Danes had to attend the kings of Cashel in battle, in return for maintenance by them in their territory.[17] In 919 Niall Glundubh, or "Black-knee," King of Aileach, in Donegal fell in the fierce battle of Kilmashog, near Dublin, in a vain effort to recover the city from Sitric Gale, the Norse king. One of the few Irish entries in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records, but incorrectly, under the year 921: "This year King Sitric slew Neil his brother." Though victorious, Sitric left Dublin the next year and never returned, Dublin falling into the hands of his brother or cousin Godfrey, and the great kingdom of the Norse became henceforth divided.

[17] Book of Rights, ed. J. O'Donovan (1847), pp. 51, 207.

Around the Irish princes who succeeded Niall Glundubh a number of stories or sagas have grown up, written in their praise by their poets and chroniclers. Murtogh of the Leather Cloaks, Callachan of Cashel, Brian Boromhe, or Boru, has each his story, written in the romantic manner of the bards. Substantially true, these stories are yet coloured by poetical imagination or provincial pride. This form of historical romance seems to have grown out of the union of the two nations who were at this period brought into such close contact. It also influenced several of the sagas of Iceland; some bear Irish names, as Cormac's Saga and Njal's (Niall's) Saga, others deal with Irish subjects, such as Thorstein's Saga or Brian's Saga, which take the battle of Clontarf as their central topic. The saga, as we may call it, of Murtogh, King of the Northern Hy-Neill, son of Niall Glundubh, who reigned from his fort of Aileach in Donegal, describes a tour made by him round the provinces of Ireland in the depth of winter in assertion of his authority after a series of defeats of the foreigners. He was accompanied by an imposing force of a thousand picked men, who were clad in sheepskin or cowhide cloaks, which served as wraps by day and tents by night, and from which he received his sobriquet of "Murtogh of the Leather Cloaks." He received tribute from the Norse of Dublin and "blood-money of red gold," besides a prince of their royal house as hostage. From Munster he carried off King Callachan of Cashel in fetters—an audacious stroke of policy, which made a noise in its day; and in Connacht a young son of Teigue of the Three Towers was entrusted to his care. On their arrival at Aileach the captive princes were received with honour and treated to a banquet, at which Murtogh himself and his queen waited on the hostages, after which they were delivered by him voluntarily to the King of Ireland as his superior lord. This chivalrous and successful prince fell in battle at Ardee in the same year (943) by the sword of Blacaire, Lord of the Foreigners, and the feeling of his countrymen is voiced by the chronicler: "Alas! since Murtogh does not live, the country of the Gael will ever be orphaned!" [18]

[18] The courtesies of Murtogh to his captives remind us of the later chivalries of the Black Prince. For the poem of Cormacan, Murtogh's bard (ed. J. O'Donovan), see Tracts relating to Ireland, (Irish Archaeological Society 1841), vol. 1.

A romantic tale has also grown up round Callachan of Cashel, the prince of Munster whom Murtogh took as a hostage. Like the King of Aileach he made a strong stand against the Northmen, but he was less fortunate in his efforts than his Northern rival, for he was twice a prisoner in their hands. They endeavoured also to entrap him by arranging a marriage between him and a sister of Sitric, lord of Dublin,[19] in order to entice him into their power. When he was on his way to Dublin to bring about the match Callachan was secretly warned by Sitric's queen that it was intended to take him prisoner. The warning came too late. As he turned to retrace his way he found himself surrounded by ambushed troops, who bore down upon him, killed his followers, and took him captive to Dublin and thence to Armagh. The men of Munster lost no time in collecting a great army to rescue their chief. They marched north to Armagh, only to find that the Northmen had got notice of their intentions and had quietly sent Callachan off with an escort to Dundalk, and thence to their ships in the harbour. Destroying as they went, the angry Munstermen pursued the party down to the brink of the sea. Their wrath was fierce when they saw their king bound with ropes and suspended from the mast of Sitric's ship. At this moment the Munster fleet under Failbe, King of Desmond, which had been making its way round by sea, entered the harbour. The Norse were caught between the land and sea forces, and a furious battle began. Failbe boarded Sitric's ship, a sword in each of his hands, and, while he kept the foe at bay with his right hand, with his left he cut down the ropes that bound Callachan and set him free. The two warriors cut their way back to Failbe's ship, but Failbe was overpowered and his head cut off on the side of his own boat. Callachan escaped safely and returned home in triumph to resume the sovereignty of Munster and to carry his revenge upon the Danes as far as the cities of Cork, Waterford, and Limerick. The Munster story speaks of Callachan's great size and ruddy face. The Northern chroniclers are not so favourable, and the annalists of Clonmacnois describe him as "that unruly king that partaked with the Danes," probably in memory of the fact that he and the foreigners had once plundered their monastery in company. But Callachan acted with magnanimity on more than one occasion, and he succeeded in keeping down the Danish advance in the south. He is said to have fought fifteen battles with the enemies of his country in the course of his career.

[19] This may have been the Sitric taken prisoner by Murtogh. He is otherwise unknown.

The wars and miseries of the city of Dublin during the perpetual attacks and sacks of the cramped mediaeval town led to their natural results. In 950-951 the unfortunate city was visited by a terrible pestilence, called in the Annals of Ulster "a great leprosy and bloody flux," which became known in Ireland as the Dolor Gentilium. It was followed by a plague among the cattle and bees, so that the country must have been in a miserable state of sickness and famine, in addition to the constant terrors of war. In the Annals of the Four Masters we hear that the famine was so intolerable that "the father would sell his son or his daughter for food." It is to the same period that the worst oppressions in Munster are also ascribed. The clergy had to go into hiding and many of the Irish were reduced to servitude. Heavy imposts were laid upon them: "an ounce of gold yearly from every man in Ireland or else the nose from his face." Foreign overseers were placed over every townland and every household was forced to take in a foreign soldier, who, if he were not satisfied with his treatment, could summon his host before the assembly. The milk of the babes of one year and of the sick had to be given to the soldier.[20]

[20] Keating, History, iii, 175-177; Wars of the Gael with the Gall, pp. 49-51.

But toward the close of the tenth century a check was given to the power of the Danes by the rapid rise of two rulers, one in the North and the other in the South, whose able and persistent efforts came near to bringing the foreign dominion to an end. Had not Brian of the Tributes been so fortunate in his eulogists, posterity would probably have regarded Malaughlan II (commonly miscalled Malachy) as one of the most commanding figures that ever occupied the seat of the High King of Ireland. His fame has, however, been overshadowed by that of his rival Brian, who deposed him, and whose poets and chroniclers put forth unusual efforts to glorify the first prince from Munster who succeeded in breaking through the long tradition of monarchs drawn from the Northern branches of the family of the Hy-Neill. Malaughlan II came to the throne in 980, and it was only after a reign of twenty-three years that Brian deposed him. During all that time he had pursued a steady and successful policy of opposition to the common enemy, similar to that which Brian was carrying on in the South. In the first year of his reign he inflicted on the foreigners of Dublin, at the battle of Tara, one of the heaviest defeats they had ever experienced. It is safe to say that Clontarf was rendered possible by this weakening defeat. As a result, Olaf Cuaran withdrew from Ireland and sought an asylum in Iona among those Columban monks whom the Norse had so often ravaged. With his retirement the whole of the North was freed from subjection to the foreigners of Dublin. Malaughlan forced the Danes to set free the Irish hostages and all slaves, and obliged them to give him hostages in token of subjection. Ragnall, Olaf Cuaran's son, fell in the battle, and Sitric, another son by Gormliath, succeeded to the rule of the Danes of Dublin. This was Sitric Silkenbeard (Silki-skeggor), the Danish king who was present at the battle of Clontarf. He had an uneasy reign. He was expelled from Dublin in 994, when his foe Ivar of Waterford unseated him, but he returned and drove out Ivar a couple of years afterward and reinstated his authority. Malaughlan allowed his enemies no rest. He immediately followed up his success at Tara by a three days' and three nights' siege of Dublin, which gave way before his "great army." He carried off booty and hostages and issued a proclamation bidding every Gael who was in servitude to the foreigner to return to his own territory in peace. So complete was the triumph of Malaughlan that the Annals of the Four Masters add that this was the end of the "Babylonian Captivity of Ireland; next, indeed, to the captivity of hell."

Two years later we find Malaughlan, who was doubtless aware of the growing power of Brian, descending on his sept, the Dalcais, and plundering Thomond. He cut down the ancient tree of Magh Adhair, under which, according to Irish custom, the chiefs of the O'Briens were inaugurated, following up this humiliation by marching on Waterford and inflicting a defeat on Ivar, with the men of Leinster along with him. He took prisoner Gilla-Phadraic, Ivar's son,[21] ravaged Leinster and passed on to inflict a similar fate on Connacht. In 989 he fell again upon the fort of Dublin. For twenty nights he besieged the fort, the Danes within having meanwhile nothing to drink "but the saltish water of the seas." He took the fort with great slaughter of the defenders and wrung from them his full demand, an ounce of gold out of every garden and croft in the city, to be paid for ever on Christmas Night. Shortly afterward Malaughlan asserted his supremacy over the Danes of Dublin by carrying off the royal insignia, the Ring of Tomar and the Sword of Carlus, which were taken by him forcibly with many other jewels. This possession of the Danish trophies and the imposition of the first annual tax upon them shows that the tide had turned in favour of the Irish kings. At this moment of their greatest power Malaughlan and Brian entered into friendly negotiations against their common enemy. "To the joy of all the Irish" they joined their armies and together obtained hostages from the Danes and plundered Dublin. A year later, in 1000, the two armies united in Co. Wicklow and inflicted on the foreigners a crushing defeat at Glenmama, a battle which was sternly contested on both sides. Brian and Malaughlan pursued the retreating Danes to Dublin, where they again burned the fort and expelled Sitric, Brian remaining encamped in the town from Christmas to Epiphany. The account of the wealth found in the city is surprising. Besides quantities of gold and silver, bronze and precious stones, goblets and buffalo horns, the poets of the day sing:

[21] It is curious to find a Danish prince calling himself the gilla, or servant, of Patrick.

We brought silk out of the fortress,
We brought bedding, we brought feathers,
We brought steeds goodly and fleet,
We brought blooming fair white women.

This was "the barbarian wealth of Dublin" of which the Northern saga speaks. Every yeoman in Munster gained enough to furnish his house with gold and silver and coloured cloths and property of all sorts. As a part of the "mutual peace" agreed upon between them the monarch of Ireland handed over to Brian all hostages held by him from the South of Ireland, whether foreign or Irish, thus acknowledging Brian's undivided authority over Munster, in return for a solemn renunciation on Brian's part of any claims on the High Kingship. In a few months' time this compact was broken by Brian's designs on the throne of Ireland, which were fully revealed in the following year.

At this turning-point in the story we must trace the rise to power of the King of Munster. The early career of Brian had been one long adventure. He and his elder brother Mahon were sons of Kennedy, a prince of the Dalcais who had withdrawn his claim in favour of Callachan of Cashel of the rival house of Eoghan, or Owen, an old arrangement between the two houses having provided for the alternate succession of the two Munster houses of the Eoghanacht and the Dalcais. The former had their seat in Cashel, the latter in Clare. The fort of Kincora, the 'Head of the Weir,' near the present town of Killaloe, on the Shannon, was the palace of the Dalcais. Kennedy of the Dalcais never reigned, but on the death of Callachan the succession passed by right to Mahon, who determined to continue Callachan's policy of a steady resistance to the Danes. After a period of waiting Brian stirred up his brother to more vigorous action, and he took the bold step of marching on Limerick to attack the Danish camp outside the city. The two armies met at Sulcoit, and after a fierce encounter the Danes were routed and the Munstermen pursued them into the city and sacked it, "the fort and good town being reduced to a cloud of smoke and red fire." A terrible orgy followed on the hills above the town, every man being put to the sword, and every "soft youthful matchless girl and every blooming silk-clad woman" of the Danes being degraded and enslaved "for the good of the souls of the foreigners who were killed," as the writer adds with a grim attempt at irony.[22] Mahon followed up the important defeat of Sulcoit (968) by seven routs of the Danes, and the people, encouraged by his successes, everywhere turned on the foreign soldiers billeted in their families and killed them. At the height of his success the career of Mahon was cut short by the jealousy of two rival clans under their chiefs Donovan and Molloy, who treacherously invited Mahon to their house and had him killed. Even the Bishop of Cork, under whose protection he had put himself, took part in the murder.

[22] Wars of the Gael with the Gall, pp. 77-83.

The horrid deed brought Brian to the throne as the undisputed head of the chiefs of Munster. He inflicted a just retribution on the murderers of his brother, slaying "that ripe culprit Donovan" along with his Danish ally Harald, or Aralt, and then set himself to continue Mahon's policy. He took hostages from Leinster and pushed his way up the Shannon into Meath and Connacht. In 998 he made his first compact with Malaughlan, who was closely watching the advance of his ambitious designs, now revealing themselves as directed against the monarchy. It was in the very year of the combined victory of Glenmama over the foreigners (1000) that we find the record, "The first turning of Brian against Malaughlan," to which the Northern Annals of Tighernach add "through guile and treachery." A brief entry in the same annals: "Brian of the Tributes reigns," announces the accomplishment of his ambitious purpose, but the Four Masters give the date of his accession as 1002. The Annals of Ulster do not mention his elevation to the kingship, but they later speak of him as King of Ireland, while his rival is named King of Tara.

Brian is said to have attained the age of seventy-six years when he replaced Malaughlan on the throne. The Annals of the Four Masters give the date of his birth at 925, and he is said to have been twenty-four years older than his rival. According to the Annals of Ulster, however, Brian is said to have been born in 941, which would make him sixty-one at the time of his accession, a much more probable age. The ambition of every prince who had risen to power by his own exertions was to secure the public recognition of his position by making an armed circuit of the provinces of Ireland, to obtain the open submission of the provincial chiefs by taking hostages from them. In the second year of Brian's reign he attempted such a circuit, but was refused entry into the North and was obliged to turn back. Not till after the delay of a year did the North consent unwillingly to give hostages to Brian rather than to go to battle with him. It was during Brian's circuit into Ulster that he visited the city of Armagh, where he spent a week discussing the question of the primacy as between the foundation of St Patrick and Brian's own abbatial church of Cashel. In the end Brian solemnly confirmed to Armagh the ecclesiastical supremacy over the whole of Ireland which the clergy of Armagh might well have feared would, on the accession of a prince of Munster to the throne of Ireland, pass from them to the Southern Church. There is still to be seen in the Book of Armagh an inscription written on this occasion by Brian's scribe under the eyes of the King himself, confirming these rights to the Church of Armagh. The entry ends as follows: "I, that is Calvus Perennis [i.e., Maelsuthain, Brian's secretary], have written under the eyes of Brian, Emperor of the Scots [Irish], and what I have written he determined for all the kings of Maceria [i.e., Cashel]." [23]

[23] O'Curry, Manuscript Materials, pp. 76-79, 529-531; the original of this inscription is given, ibid., pp. 653-654 (1861). The Book of Armagh is now in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin.

Ten years before this visit of Brian to Armagh a great misfortune had befallen the city in the destruction by lightning of the chief part of its religious buildings, "both houses and churches and its belfry and sacred wood," say the annals. Doubtless one of the most treasured objects in the city was the Book of Armagh, in which Brian inscribed his name and which contained some of the writings of St Patrick. When a few years later, in 1020, nearly all the city was again burned down, including its fort, the damhlaic or great church with its leaden roof, the bell-house with its bells, along with several oratories and houses, and the old preaching-chair and abbot's chariot, fortunately the library or house of the manuscripts was spared. Had it been burned with the rest the Book of Armagh would have been lost to us. Brian completed his patronage of Armagh by laying twenty-two ounces of gold upon the altar, after which he returned to Munster bringing the hostages of Eastern Munster with him. Next year he carried out his design of enforcing his imperial supremacy over Ireland by making the grand circuit of the provinces.

Having now accomplished his aims, Brian settled at home, and for nine years, up to the close of his life, he occupied himself with little interruption in securing the well-being of his own province of Munster. He made bridges and roads, built or strengthened a number of fortresses in different parts of the South, living himself chiefly at his favourite fort or palace of Kincora in Co. Clare. Close to it was a place called Boromhe (pronounced Boru) to which the tributes of cattle were brought to be given to Brian, and from which he came to be called, from the number of the tributes, Brian Boromhe, or "Brian of the Tributes." [24] He built churches and belfries, executed justice, and encouraged learning. He exercised a wide hospitality, and the peace of his reign is symbolized by the story of the solitary woman who could pass in safety from one part of the country to the other, carrying a gold ring on a horse-rod.[25] He sent professors over the sea "to teach wisdom and knowledge and to buy books beyond the sea and the great ocean, because the books and writings in every church and in every sanctuary had been burned and thrown into the water by plunderers; and Brian himself gave the price of learning and the price of books to each one who went on this service."

[24] His title had nothing to do with the special tribute out of Leinster known by the same name. For the fort of Boromha and Brian's name see Wars of the Gael with the Gall, p. 141; Ériu, vol. iv, Part I, pp. 68-73. The name Brian in this form is Breton, and only became common in Ireland after this date.

[25] The same legend is told of the reign of King Edwin of Northumbria, in Bede, Eccle. Hist., Bk. II, ch. xvi; and see Annals of the Four Masters, 1167.

But though things were outwardly prosperous there were signs of coming trouble. Leinster was restive under Brian's restraining hand and the necessity forced upon it of giving large tributes to him. The Norse were smarting under the defeats that they had received, and were showing unusual activity in forming alliances, fomenting dissatisfaction, and gaining adherents both within and without the country. Brian on his side was not unaware of what was going forward, and he was gathering the whole of the forces over whom he had control in one final effort to drive the Danes permanently out of Ireland.

END OF CHAPTER III

IV.—CLONTARF AND AFTER

Things came to a climax in 1014, when on Good Friday from sunrise to sunset was fought, under the walls of the Danish fort of Dublin, the famous battle of Clontarf, in which Brian and many of his auxiliaries fell, but which ended in a defeat of the Danes so decisive that though they were not driven from Ireland they never again regained their former supremacy over the Irish people. The battle of Clontarf is famous alike in Irish and Northern story. Of few battles have we so many independent accounts. Besides the long recital of the fight and the causes that led up to it in the Wars of the Gael with the Gall, we have a Norse account of the battle in Njal's Saga and fragments of a separate saga called the Saga of Thorstein, Sidu Hall's son, which is later than Njal's Saga and quotes from it. Both may, as Vigfusson thinks, be parts of a lost Brian's Saga. Were it not for these saga tales we should hardly have realized the importance of the battle from the Icelandic point of view.

The spark that started the conflagration was struck by a woman. It arose out of a family quarrel which quickly enlarged into a national struggle. Gormliath was the fiercest and most dreaded woman of her day. The saga says that "she was the fairest of women and the best gifted in everything that was not in her own power, but it was the talk of men that she did everything ill over which she had any power." Her natural gifts were great, that is to say, but she did nothing with them but what was bad. Already when she comes into the story as wife of Brian Boromhe she had been married to two husbands, first to Olaf of the Sandal (Cuaran), by whom she became mother of Sitric Silkenbeard, the reigning king of the Dublin Danes, and later to King Malaughlan, who had handed her over to Brian, perhaps as part of the spoils of war or in token of their alliance, as was customary in those times.

These unions may have been all irregular. At the date of her death, which did not occur till 1030, when she must have been a very old woman, the annals speak of Gormliath's "three leaps, which no woman shall ever take again, a leap at Dublin [to Olaf], a leap at Tara [to Malaughlan], a leap at Cashel of the goblets above all," this last being in reference to her marriage with Brian. We find her at Kincora when our story opens, but there was no love lost between her and Brian, and she was busily engaged in stirring up against him her brother Maelmora, King of Leinster, who had always rendered the tributes exacted by Brian from Leinster with great ill-will. At the battle of Clontarf she is found back in Dublin, with her son Sitric, egging him on to the defeat of Brian. "So grim," say the Northern sagas, "had she become against King Brian after parting with him that she would gladly have had him dead."

A false move in a game of chess was the immediate cause of the outburst. Maelmora, who had come to Kincora to bring his tribute of ship-masts to Brian, was teaching Conang, a young lad, to play chess with Morrogh, Brian's son. He advised a move which lost the game to Morrogh. Angry words arose. "It was thou that gavest advice to the foreigners at the battle of Glenmama by which they were defeated," Morrogh said angrily. "I will give them advice again, and they will not be defeated," retorted the King of Leinster. Without taking leave of anyone, Maelmora departed next morning in a furious passion, and hardly had he returned home when he began to stir up the chiefs of his own province, declaring that he had received insult in the house of Brian. They declared for war, and were joined by the princes of Ulster, who were only too glad of an opportunity to throw off the unwelcome yoke of Brian. Great hosts began to assemble. Gormliath in Dublin was gathering a formidable alliance of Danes from the Orkneys and the Isle of Man to the aid of her son Sitric, whom she brought into the quarrel to support her brother Maelmora, and all over the country the stormclouds gathered.

A vivid account is given in Njal's Saga of the arrival on Yule-night at the Orkneys of Sitric Silkenbeard's heralds to demand aid from Sigurd the Stout, Jarl (or Earl) of Orkney, in his rising against Brian. Sigurd's mother had been Audna, or Eithne, one of the daughters of Carroll (Cearbhal), King of Ossory, and he was familiar with affairs in Ireland, for he made constant viking expeditions there. Eithne, who was something of a soothsayer or 'wise woman,' had on a former occasion shown her mettle when her son had hesitated to go on an expedition against a jarl in Scotland, on the ground that his enemy's forces were seven to one "Had I known that thou wouldst wish to live for ever," she replied, "I should have reared thee up in my wool-bag. It is fate that rules life, and not the place where a man may go. It is better to die with honour than to live with shame." She had woven for him the raven banner, which floated in the form of a bird over the host, and which brought Sigurd to his death at Clontarf. It was said to bring victory to him before whom it was borne, but death to him who carried it. Sigurd at first refused to go out against Brian, but the promise of the kingdom of Ireland if they slew King Brian, with the hand of Gormliath, Sitric's mother, finally induced him to give his promise.

Gormliath, when she sent her son abroad to seek for help, had said to him, "Spare nothing to get them into thy quarrel; whatever price they ask, give it." All those to whom he went conspired to say the same thing; when he went on from Orkney to interview the chiefs of two fleets of thirty viking ships lying off the Isle of Man, they also asked as their reward the kingdom of Ireland and the hand of Gormliath. Sitric at once promised, only stipulating that they should keep the terms a secret from Sigurd the Stout. He went home with the news that the pirates of Man and the Earl of Orkney would be prepared to join their forces to those of the Danes of Dublin and the Leinstermen by Easter time of the new year. No doubt the Danes in Ireland hoped for the foundation of a kingdom similar to that which King Sweyn Forkbeard of England (1013-14) was endeavouring to found between Britain and Denmark. But it was not destined that a Danish Canute should ever rule a united kingdom from Ireland.

The battle of Clontarf was fought on Good Friday, 1014. Brian and his forces marched on Dublin, burning all the way, so that the Norsemen when they arrived in Dublin Bay saw all the land one sheet of flame. The battle was fought on the north side of the river Liffey, on the low lands beside Clontarf, and up to the wooded country on the higher ground now known as Phoenix Park. Here, with the wood of Tomar behind them, the Irish forces were drawn up, facing the bay by which the Danish auxiliaries were landing from their ships. On the south side of the river stood the Danish fort, from the height of which Sitric and Gormliath followed the course of the battle going on below them. Another spectator watched beside them. This was Sitric's wife, who was Brian's daughter, married to the chief of her country's foes. Her feelings must have been a strange compound indeed of fear and hope. All day long the contest lasted, from high tide in the morning, when the foreign troops landed and beached their boats, to high tide at night, when they sought their boats' in order to flee seaward. But the low tide of midday had carried the boats out to sea, and they had no place of retreat, seeing that they were cut off between the Bay and Dubhgall's bridge on the one hand, and between it and Tomar's wood on the other. They retreated to the sea "like a herd of cows from the heat of the sun, or pursued by gadflies." There they were cut off and lay dying in heaps and hundreds. To the watchers on the battlements of Dublin Castle it seemed all day like the reaping down of a field of oats. Sitric believed that it was his mercenaries who were gaining ground. "Well do the foreigners reap the field," he said brutally to his wife, whose secret heart he knew to be with her countrymen; "many a sheaf do they cast from them." "By the end of the day the result will be seen," was her reply. Later, when the terrible rout of the Danes on the shores of Clontarf was going on, Brian's daughter had her revenge. "It seems to me," she said, "that the foreigners have gained their patrimony. They are going to the sea, their natural inheritance. I wonder are they cattle, driven by the heat? But if they are, they tarry not to be milked." The answer of her husband was a blow across the mouth. Close to the weir of Clontarf, where the river Tolka seeks the sea, Turlogh, the young grandson of Brian, pursued a flying Norseman across the stream. But the rising tide flung him against the weir, and, being caught on a post, he was drowned, still grasping the hair of the Norseman, who lay dead beneath him.

The age of Brian, who was seventy-three years old when the battle was fought, prevented him from taking a leading part in the fight. His tent was pitched at some distance behind the fighting hosts, on a slight height, from which the contest could be seen. He had, in any case, been unwilling to engage on Good Friday, and he remained all day from dusk to eve absorbed in prayer. A lad who tended him stood at the door of his tent and reported from time to time the ebb and flow of the battle. Toward nightfall a viking chief from the Isle of Man, named Brodir, made his way to the tent. This Brodir bore an ugly character, even in the North. He had been a Christian, but, in the words of the saga, he had become "God's dastard, and now worshipped pagan fiends and was of all men most skilled in sorcery." He came up the hill with intent to kill Brian, for his wizard arts had told him that if the fight were on Good Friday, though Brian's hosts would win the day, he himself would fall. Brian's lad had just reported the disastrous news that the banner of Morrogh, Brian's son, which led the Irish troops, had fallen, and he was in the act of endeavouring to induce Brian to mount his horse and fly, when Brodir entered the tent. Brian had refused to take refuge in flight, and was making his last bequests, still kneeling on his cushion, as he had knelt all day, with his psalter open before him. But as the blue-armoured foreigner rushed in he rose and unsheathed his sword.

Brodir passed him by, and noticed him not. One of his two followers had in former times been in Brian's service, and he said, "Cing, Cing, this is the King." "No, no," said Brodir, "but Prist" ("it is a priest"). "By no means so," replied the man; "this is the great King Brian." Then Brodir turned, and swung his gleaming, double-bladed axe above Brian's head. The old King made a cut at the ferocious viking with his sword, wounding his leg, and both fell together, Brian's head being cleft through by the axe. Then Brodir stood up and with a loud voice exclaimed, "Now may man tell his fellow-man that Brodir hath felled King Brian." But his triumph was shortlived; he was taken by the Munstermen and put to a horrible death on the spot. The slaughter on that day was terrible. Hardly a leader on either side was left alive. Both Morrogh, Brian's son, and Maelmora, King of Leinster, on the other side, were among the slain. Jarl Sigurd the Stout of Orkney fell, carrying the fatal raven's banner under his cloak. A young Icelander of his bodyguard, as fearless as he was brave, took up his stand with a few others beside Tomar's Wood, refusing to fly. When, seeing the rout, all beside him turned to run, Thorstein stooped down to tie his shoestring. An Irish chief, coming up at the instant, asked him why he did not fly with the others. "Because I am an Icelander," said Thorstein, "and were I to run ever so fast I could not reach home to-night." Struck by his coolness, the Irish chief set him at liberty, and Thorstein went to Munster with Brian's sons, and was well beloved in Ireland. When, a week later, Hrafn the Red, one of Sigurd's men, returned to Orkney, having escaped with his life, he was asked by Jarl Flosi, "What hast thou to tell me of my men?" Hrafn could make no reply other than, "They all fell there."

Considerable differences are to be observed in the accounts of the battle as to the part taken in it by King Malaughlan. A long Munster report, put into Malaughlan's own mouth, says that he was so horrified by the storm and contest of the battle that he and his forces were too frightened to take part in it. Nothing could be more unlikely than that the victor of the battle of Tara, during whose reign the foreigners had been repeatedly beaten down and reduced to slavery, would have been affected in such a way by the sight of a battle. Still less is it likely that he would have publicly proclaimed himself a coward. The Annals of the Four Masters distinctly assert that he took part in the battle, and that the enemy forces "were afterward routed by dint of battling, bravery, and striking by Malaughlan from the river Tolka and Finglas to Dublin against the foreigners and Leinstermen." The Annals of Ulster say nothing of his defection. It would seem that the Meath troops were stationed behind the Dalcais, at some distance in the rear, and the Wars of the Gael with the Gall states that an understanding had been entered into between Malaughlan and the Danes that if he would not attack them they would refrain from attacking him. It is quite likely that Malaughlan, who had all to regain by Brian's overthrow, was, as the Annals of Clonmacnois say, "content rather to lose the field than win it." In the earlier part of the day he probably stood aside, but when he saw the foreigners apparently winning he broke in with his troops and took his part in the struggle. This theory at least would reconcile the conflicting accounts. The death of Brian restored Malaughlan to the throne of Ireland, and up to the last days of his life he continued without intermission to harry and attack the foreigners. He reigned eight years after Clontarf, dying in 1022. Those of the annalists who do not admit the right of Brian to the throne of Tara give him a reign of forty-three years in all. He died in retirement at Cro Inis, opposite his fort of Dun-na-sciath on Lough Ennell, in Westmeath, with the Abbot of Armagh and the leading men of Ireland beside him.

The battle of Clontarf was an incident rather than a conclusion. It did not close the Danish period in Ireland, but it inaugurated a new phase. For the next two hundred years or more we find the Norse existing in the country as a separate nationality, adhering to their own interests and holding the cities they had founded round the coasts. Dublin remained in Danish hands. Kings of Norway and jarls of the Isles and Man could still look to Ireland with the assurance of a friendly welcome or even with the hope of a possible reconquest, and the fleets of both nations met on the seas for merchandise or war. Some of the Northern jarls claimed great possessions in Ireland as well as in Scotland. Thorfinn, youngest son of Earl Sigurd the Stout of Orkney, who fell at Clontarf, held rule "from Thurso-skerry to Dublin" and was everywhere beloved in his wide-flung dominions. Important battles, not mentioned in the Irish chronicles, are remembered in the sagas. A great battle, much heard of in the North, was fought at Ulkfeksfiord (?Dundalk Bay) by a jarl of Orkney, in which an Irish king Konofogor (Conor) gained a victory, so that Earl Einar had to flee back to Orkney after losing his men and all his booty. This was in 1018, and is not mentioned in the Irish annals.[1] Of Guthorm, the nephew of St Olaf, King of Norway, it is said about the year 1050 that Ireland was for him a land of peace and that he had his winter-quarters in Dublin and was in great friendship with King Margad.[2] They are found plundering together in Bretland (Wales), but they quarrelled about the division of the booty, and in this unfriendly fight Margad fell. They fought on St Olaf's Day, and the booty was so great that Guthorm is said to have made an image of St Olaf out of every tenth penny of the loot.[3] This Irish king would seem to have been a king of Dublin called in the annals Eachmargadh (?Each-marcach, "The Rider of a Steed"), who came to the throne in 1035, was deposed by Ivar, son of Aralt, in 1038, but was restored in 1046, when Ivar was expelled. In spite of his Irish name he was a nephew of King Sitric, who left the kingdom to him when he went overseas to Rome. In 1052 Eachmargadh also went overseas, apparently on the Welsh expedition from which he never returned. At this time the kingship of the Danes of Dublin seems to have been disputed between princes of the Norse or Danish race and the kings of Leinster, for Dermot, son of Maelnambo, King of Leinster, succeeded him. He was the ancestor of King Dermot MacMorrogh, who took his family title from this Dermot's son. He and his son Morrogh were both styled "Kings of the Danes of Dublin."

[1] Saga of St Olaf Haraldsson, ch. lxxxvii (Heimskringla, Laing's edn., ii, 382.

[2] Saga of Harald Hardrade, ch. lvi (op. cit., iii, 410).

[3] Ibid., ch. lvii (op. cit., iii, 412).

But the Norse king whose memory is most clearly preserved in Ireland was Magnus Barelegs (reigned 1093-1103), so called because on his return from his Western viking raids he and his men adopted the Scottish and Irish custom of wearing the plaid and kilt. "They walked barelegged in the streets and wore short kirtles and over-wraps" to the great astonishment of their people. Magnus came three times on expeditions to the West and spent many years in Ireland. His close relations with Murtogh Mór [4] O'Brien, King of Munster, make it necessary that we should take up the course of events in Ireland after the battle of Clontarf.

[4] It is not to be supposed that such words as Mór ='Great,' Oge = 'Junior,' Fionn = 'Fair,' Donn = 'Dark,' Liath = 'Grey,' Boy (buidhe) = 'Fairhaired,' Reagh (riabhach) = 'Swarthy,' etc., were part of the Christian name or surname ; they were personal adjectives, which sometimes were adopted to distinguish different branches of the family. The MacCarthys Reagh were a junior branch of the MacCarthys, of which the MacCarthy Mór was the head ; the O'Conor Donn (now Don) was the senior branch in rank of the O'Conors. In other cases the adjective denotes the district ruled over, as O'Conor Faly (Failghe) or O'Conor Kerry (Ciarraidhe). We use the double 'n' in this name where the family seems to be distinct from the ruling family of Connacht, such as the O'Connors of Offaly, or O'Connors Faly, Offaly being a district comprising parts of Leix.

The shattered army of Munster had fought its way back to the Shannon carrying the wounded on litters, but they were impeded by the unpatriotic attempt of the prince of Ossory to hinder the return by throwing his clansmen across the path of the marching troops. But the wounded warriors caused themselves to be tied upright to stakes set in the ground among the fighting men, so that they might bear their part in the conflict. Struck with fear and pity, the army of Ossory refused to fight such dauntless heroes and allowed them to pass on.

The rise of Brian and the intrusion of a king of Munster into the line of the High Kingship of Ireland, hitherto alternating between the Ulster and Meath branches of the race of Niall, had interrupted the custom of centuries. The interruption was more than momentary, for it had established a precedent which the princes of the South naturally thought might well be followed by Brian's descendants. Hence a new uncertainty arose regarding the succession to the throne of Ireland and a fresh cause of strife. Brian, during the course of his long reign, had come nearer than any king before him to establish his authority over the whole island; only Ulster, as always, had refused to recognize him and gave him, only when forced into it, a grudging and unwilling submission. The personal nobility of Brian, his benevolence and wisdom, added much to the dignity of his reign. To the Northmen he was "the best-natured of all kings, who would thrice forgive outlaws the same offence before he would have them judged by the law," while the Munster Chronicles loudly proclaim the justice of his rule and the benevolence of his heart, praising his patronage of learning and devotion to religion. Though on his fall Malaughlan, King of Meath, returned to the position from which Brian had ousted him, the brilliant possibility of attaining to the High Kingship was never absent from the minds of Brian's powerful family. A short interregnum was filled by the joint regency of two good and learned men, Cuan O'Lochain, a chronicler and judge as well as a poet, of the distinguished family of the O'Lochains of Meath, and Corcran the cleric, who was connected with the Waterford district of Lismore. They governed the land like a free state, and not as kings; but the arrangement was brought to an end by the slaying of Cuan by the men of Teffia two years afterward, in 1024, an act which brought that family into great disrepute. The interregnum, however, lasted for eighteen years after his death.

Then began a series of reigns most of which are accounted by the chroniclers reigns "with opposition," that is, they were not acquiesced in by the whole country, and there was generally a rival king who disputed the title to the throne. Three kings of the O'Brien family of Munster, two of the O'Conors of Connacht, and two of the O'Lochlans of Ulster held at various times the coveted title, though "with opposition"; and more than once a monarch of Leinster aspired to it. Some of these kings, in particular Murtogh O'Brien (d. 1119) and Turlogh O'Conor (d. 1156) were men of great power as well as of vast ambition. Each fought steadily for his own hand, and between them "great storms of war" swept through Ireland or, as the annals express it, Ireland became between them "a trembling sod." They succeeded in making their names and influence felt outside their own country, willingly entering into foreign alliances in order to strengthen their claims at home. The respect felt outside Ireland for Murtogh Mor (called Murchad by the Norse), the strongest representative of his house next to King Brian, is shown by the request that came to him from "the nobility of the Isles," that is, from the Hebrides and Man, who, on the death of their ruler Lagman, son of Godred Croven, asked Murtogh to send them some worthy person to act as regent until Godred's son should come of age to govern. Murtogh sent over his nephew Donald MacTeige, impressing upon him the duty of ruling a country which was not his own with all possible bounty and moderation. But the choice was unfortunate. Donald's rule was so tyrannical and his crimes so great that the Hebridean chiefs formed themselves into an association and expelled him from the Isle of Man. He is said to have been killed by the men of Connacht in 1115 during a raid into his own country.[5]

[5] P. A. Munch, Chronica Regum Manniae, at 1095.

Murtogh Mór instituted friendly relations not only with the Northmen of Dublin, the Isle of Man, and Norway, but also with the kings of England. William of Malmesbury tells us that Murtogh, King of Ireland, and his successor were so "devotedly attached" to Henry I that they wrote no letters but such as tended to soothe him and did nothing but what he commanded. He adds, however, that on one occasion Murtogh acted for a short time rather superciliously toward the English and had to be brought to a better mind by the suspension of navigation and foreign trade, upon which Ireland largely depended; this seems to have had the desired effect, seeing that "soon after his insolence subsided." "For," adds the chronicler, "of what value could Ireland be, if deprived of the merchandise of England?" [6] This mercantile dependence on England is illustrated in the twelfth century by the facility with which the largest of the towns, such as Dublin, could be reduced to starvation when an English blockade was established by sea, the inland trade being evidently quite insufficient to cope with an emergency.[7] That there was a trade in fine cloth as well as provisions is shown by the well-known story of the Skrud-viking, or "Broadcloth cruise," of the great viking chief of the Orkneys, Swein Asliefsson, who, when he was approaching Dublin with his ships for a raid about 1150, met two merchant ships coming from England laden with English cloth and other merchandise bound for Dublin. He set upon and plundered the vessels and "took every penny out of them," leaving to the merchants "only a small quantity of provisions and the clothes they stood up in." They sailed away to the Orkneys with the fine cloth sewn to their sails, so that it looked as though these were made entirely of rich cloth.[8]

[6] Chronicle of William of Malmesbury, Bk. V, 1119.

[7] Giraldus Cambrensis, Conquest of Ireland, ch. xix, xxii.

[8] Orkneyinga Saga. Skrud means fine or costly material.

It is possible that King Murtogh found it difficult to keep on good terms with princes so much opposed to each other as King Henry I of England and King Magnus of Norway, for both of them accused him of uncertain conduct. Murtogh was second son to Turlogh O'Brien and reigned thirty-three years. A letter from Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, written in 1074 to this Turlogh, styles him, "Magnificent King of Ireland," and the Archbishop remarks that the Almighty showed great mercy toward the Irish people when He gave Turlogh supreme power over that land. But it detracts a little from this praise that by the very same messenger who transmitted this letter to Turlogh, Lanfranc sent another epistle to Godred, or Godfrey, at that moment Danish king both of Man and Dublin, calling him also "glorious King of Ireland." This letter recommends to him Patrick (Gilla-Phadraic), whom he had just consecrated as the second Danish bishop of Dublin in 1074.[9] Turlogh was never, in fact, supreme king of Ireland, though he came near to asserting his claim when, in 1080, he marched at the head of an army into Meath attended by the clergy of Munster. He then received the submission of Malaughlan, King of Tara, who brought with him the Bishop of Armagh carrying the famous relic, the Bachall Isa, or "Staff of Jesus," supposed to have been given by our Lord to St Patrick.[10] But his claims were never acknowledged by the princes of the North, and after his death, six years later (1086), he is usually styled "King of Ireland with opposition." [11] Turlogh died at Kincora after a long illness. His son Murtogh Mór who succeeded him, as we have seen, set about immediately to assert his claim to the throne of Ireland, in opposition to a formidable rival in Western Ulster, Donal MacLochlan, who claimed the overlordship against the O'Briens. During the greater part of a long reign this contest continued. The fury with which it was waged is shown by the frequent efforts made by the abbots of Armagh to bring the sanguinary struggle to an end, but the most they could do was to impose a truce upon the combatants from time to time.[12] The hewing down of several of the sacred trees under which from very early times the kings had been inaugurated shows also the bitterness with which these wars were conducted.[13] Both princes were men of determination and ability, and both felt that the contest was finally to decide the rival claims between the North and South. In the course of the struggle each combatant razed to the ground the principal palace of the other, Murtogh ordering his men, in the vehemence of his anger, to carry away the very stones of which the fortress of Aileach, the royal seat of the Hy-Neill, was built, a stone in every sack of their provisions, all the way from Donegal to Kincora. He declared that he would rebuild his own destroyed residence out of the ruins of that of his enemy.

[9] Godred styled himself Rex Hiberniae. In the Annals of Loch Cé his death is recorded under 1075 . "Goffraidh, son of Ragnall, King of Ath Cliath [Dublin] mortuus est."

[10] Giraldus Cambrensis, Topography of Ireland, ch. xxxiv.

[11] The Annals of Loch Ce call him King of Erin.

[12] Ibid., under dates 1097, 1099, 1102, 1105, 1107, 1109, 1113, etc.

[13] In 1099 the craebh-thelcha or "spreading tree of the hill," under which the kings of Ulidia were inaugurated, was cut down by the Cinel Eoghan. It gave its name to Crewe, a townland in Co. Antrim. In 1111, in retaliation, the sacred trees or grove of the Cinel Eoghan at Telach-og, or Tullyhog, in Co. Tyrone were hewn down by the Ulidians ; and in 1143 Turlogh O'Brien hewed down the Ruadh-Bheithigh, or Red Birch, the royal tree of the Hy-Fiachrach of Connacht. The inauguration tree of Murtogh's own race had been cut down by Malaughlan, King of Tara, in his wars with Brian Boromhe; it stood on Magh Adhair in Co. Clare.

It was in the course of this struggle that Murtogh came into close relations with King Magnus Barelegs, who came three times to Ireland and affianced his son Sigurd to Murtogh's daughter. The marriage took place in 1102 on Magnus's last visit to the country. The Norse King came over with the definite intention of making himself master of the country. "On hearing of the delightfulness of Ireland, the abundance of its pro duce and the salubrity of its climate, Magnus could think of nothing else but the conquest of the country." His first step was to send over his shoes from the Isle of Man to Murtogh, "bidding the Irish King carry them on his shoulders through his palace on Christmas Day, in presence of the envoys," in token of Magnus's superior authority. The courtiers, furious at such a request, prayed the King not to agree to it. But Murtogh said that he "would not only carry the shoes, but eat them, rather than that Magnus should ruin a single province of Ireland." [14] They renewed their friendship, plundering together in Dublinshire, and the Norse King passed a winter in Kincora with the King of Munster. "Why should we think of faring home?" he sang shortly before his death. "My heart is in Dublin. Youth makes me love the Irish girl better than myself." He was fated to fall in the country of his affection. While waiting for the arrival of some cattle needed to provision his homeward voyage from Ulster, he and his men fell a prey to an ambush in the swampy ground at the head of Strangford Lough below Downpatrick. The King was conspicuous by his armour and the emblems on his shield. He fell under a stroke from an Irish axe, such as the Danes had taught the Irish to use. This was in 1103.[15] This is the last descent of a Norse king upon the shores of Ireland until King Hakon Hakonsson's abortive attempt in 1263, shortly after the fatal battle of Down. But viking raids continued regularly up to the Norman period, well-known vikings such as Swein Asliefsson plundering the Isles and the coasts of Ireland twice a year, in their spring and autumn seafaring. It is probable that the landing of the first band of Normans on the Southern shores was looked upon by many of the inhabitants as one of these old accustomed viking raids. But the Normans had come to dispute with the Norse the possession of the towns. An interesting remark made by MacFirbis the genealogist early in the seventeenth century tells us that up to his own day the greater part of the merchants of the city of Dublin belonged to the descendants of the son of Olaf Cuaran, that is Sitric Silkenbeard, showing that the Norse commercial activity survived in the old Norse city even after the Norman conquest. It is difficult to imagine the posterity of this fierce and ambitious prince developing into a trading community; but the Norse added to the original population a fresh and vigorous stock possessed of much practical ability. At the end of the thirteenth century the Annals of Clonmacnois mention the families of Dalemare, Ledwitch, ffrayne, and MacCabe as of the remnant of the Danes who remained in the kingdom.[16]

[14] P. A. Munch, op. cit., 1098; Keating, History, iii, 309.

[15] Magnus Barelegs' Saga, ch. xxvii (Heimskringla, Laing's edn., iv, 111).

[16] Annals of Clonmacnois, 1299.

They evidently looked on the Normans as of Danish or Norse stock. There were of true Norse stock the MacCabes and MacLeods, the MacKeevers (Ivar), the O'Hagans (Hakon), MacSorleys (Somhairle), Kettles (Ketel), MacManus (Magnus), MacCaffereys (Godfred), Cottars (Ottar), and MacAwleys (Olaf), who not only became thoroughly nationalized but in some cases chiefs of Irish districts. It is difficult not to see in the MacLochlans and the fierce MacSweeneys, or MacSwines, the descendants of mixed Norse and Irish blood. Lochlann was the common Irish name for Norway or, perhaps, rather for the Hebrides, from which so many of the race descended upon the North of Ireland. MacFirbis gives a considerable list of Danish settlers in different parts of the country. The intermarriages and consequent interchanges of name began early and went on apace, showing the terms of comradeship and familiarity on which, in spite of wars, the two peoples stood.[17] A number of Norse place-names replaced the earlier Irish names, especially on the east coast. Howth, Skerries, Lambay, Dalkey, Leixlip, near Dublin, are names given by the foreigners, as are also Smerwick in Kerry, Waterford, Wexford, Arklow, and Carlingford and Strangford Loughs or fiords. Donegal means "the Fort of the Foreigners," and the old Irish names of three provinces added the Norse termination 'ster' to the original Irish name.[18]

[17] MacFirbis, On the Fomorians and the Norsemen, ed. Alexander Bugge (1905).

[18] Joyce, Names of Places; A. Walsh, Scandinavian Relations with Ireland during the Viking Period (1922).

The adoption of Christianity by the Danes about the beginning of the eleventh century brought about great changes in the life, as in the architecture, of the Danish towns of Dublin, Waterford, and Limerick. Olaf Cuaran, Sitric's father, died at the Columban monastery of Iona, which in the past the Danish vikings had ruthlessly wrecked, and his brother-in-law, King Olaf Tryggvsson (995-1000) had been baptized "to the West over in Ireland," probably in the Skellig Isles off the Kerry coast.[19] They would therefore appear to have united themselves to the Irish native Church. But Sitric and his successors were sharply divided from it. Their bishops sought consecration from Canterbury and held no intercourse with the Irish clergy for at least half a century. We may ascribe this adoption of the non-Celtic system of Church government to Sitric's visits to Rome, where he probably received baptism. On his return he set up a Church organization in the city of Dublin in every way formed on the Roman model. Bishops, and not abbots, ruled in the Danish cities, and each bishop had his own diocese. The men chosen by the Danes as their first bishops appear all to have been Irishmen, but they were Irishmen who had received their training in England or abroad, and had been brought up under the discipline of the Anglo-Roman Church. [20] Donogh O'Hanley had been a monk at Canterbury; Samuel O'Hanley, a monk at St Albans; Patrick of Dublin, "who had been nourished in monastic institutions from his boyhood," was well known to Archbishop Lanfranc, and Gilbert of Limerick was the friend of Anselm, whom he had met in Rouen when Anselm was called over to the deathbed of William the Conqueror. Malchus of Waterford had been a monk at Winchester. They were all men with a knowledge of affairs outside their native land, and they had been educated in the Roman methods of Church government. From the first they set about to organize their dioceses on the model in which they had been trained. They professed obedience to Canterbury, from which they had received consecration, five bishops of Dublin, one of Waterford, and one of Limerick having been consecrated in Canterbury in the time of Archbishop Theobald (1138-61). When Cellach of Armagh, as Primate of the Irish Church, claimed the obedience of the Danish bishops to his authority, they wrote to Ralph, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1121, "We will not obey his command, but desire to be always under your rule." [21]

[19] This is Worsaae's opinion. It is erroneously assumed that Olaf was baptized in the Stilly Isles, off Cornwall. Olaf was for some time in Ireland, and took home an Irish wolfhound, which never left his side during his life. After Olaf's death at the fatal battle of Svold the dog was found dead on the mound which he thought contained the remains of his master. See Saga of Olaf Tryggvsson, ch. xxxii, xxxv (Heimskringla, Laing's edn., ii, iii, 115).

[20] The dates of the earliest bishops of Dublin are; Donat, 1038-1074; Patrick, 1074-84; Donat O'Hanley 1085-9 ; Samuel O'Hanley, his nephew, 1095-1121; Greine, or Gregory, first Archbishop, 1121-61; Laurence O'Toole, 1162-80.

[21] See also the submission of Patrick, second Bishop of Dublin, to Canterbury, in Ussher, Works, iv, 564.

The churches that they erected bore foreign names, such as St Olaf (or Olave), St Werburgh, and St Audeon, and they enshrined in them the relics of foreign saints. The rapidity of their church building shows that the Danish people as well as their princes had become Christian. About 1040, twenty-five years after the battle of Clontarf, the foundations were laid of the church of the Holy Trinity, known later as Christ Church Cathedral, church dedications to native saints beginning about this time to give way in favour of dedications to the Trinity, or to the Blessed Virgin and Church saints. Its history had a complete parallel development to that of Christ Church at Trondhjem. It remained so Danish in sympathy that even at the end of the fourteenth century no Gael could get employment in connexion with this church. All these churches were crowded together within the narrow limits of Danish Dublin, close round the fort or castle. In later days the Norman successor to Archbishop O'Toole built St Patrick's outside the walls as a rival to the Danish cathedral, the ancient differences between the two cathedrals and their struggles for priority witnessing to the double national and spiritual life existing side by side. In the end priority was secured by the older church.

Nevertheless, just as the Danes had bishops of Irish nationality, so they were supported in their church extension by the Irish population of the towns. The Irish contributed grants of land to Dunan, or Donatus, the first bishop, for the foundation of his church and the episcopal palace beside it. The Danes seem to have taken part in the popular election of the bishops, a novel and interesting feature of the Danish Church system in Ireland, and at the Synod of Athboy in 1167 Ragnall, chief of the foreigners, attended, surrounded by a bodyguard of a thousand horsemen. At the Synod of Kells (Ceanannus), held in 1152 and presided over by Cardinal John, who brought the pallia for the four archbishops, Dublin, Cashel, Tuam, and Armagh, Danish and Irish bishops sat together and conferred in common on the new arrangement of the dioceses.[22] Possibly the example of the Danish Church in their midst may have helped to bring about the abandonment of the ancient system of Church government, hitherto so tenaciously adhered to, and consecrated by the example of the founders of the Church. Leading ecclesiastics, both of the Irish and Danish sees, united in an effort to bring the Celtic Church into conformity with the Roman discipline. The energy with which they applied themselves to the task is shown by the number of conferences and synods held during this century, seven meetings having been held between 1110 and 1167. They must have been imposing assemblies. As many as twenty-five bishops and over three hundred clergy "both monks and canons" attended one of them. At the Synod of Usneach in 1105 "three hundred and sixty priests and one hundred and forty deacons and many other clerics" were present.[23] At later meetings large numbers of laity attended, thirteen thousand horsemen, of whom, as we have seen, one thousand were Danes, having been present at the Synod of Athboy in 1167. It was at the Synod of Rath-breasal, held in 1110 and presided over by Gilbert of Limerick in his capacity of legate of the Holy See, that the question of regulating the diocesan system was seriously taken up.[24]

[22] Keating, History, iii, 315.

[23] Keating, History, iii, 297.

[24] Gilbert was an Irishman though he was bishop of the Limerick Danes. His name is a Latinized form of the Irish Gilla espuig or "Servant of the Bishop," often anglicized to Gillespie. He signed his name in Irish below the Acts of this Synod, for which see Keating, History, iii, 299-307, quoting from the lost Annals of Clonenagh. See also H. J. Lawlor, St Malachy, xxxvii seq.

The general plan adopted was that of two archbishoprics, Armagh and Cashel, under whom ten bishops were appointed for the North of Ireland and ten for the South. It is noticeable that their decisions in respect of Leinster and Connacht are put in the form of suggestions rather than commands, these two provinces being too independent of the rule of Cashel or Armagh for it to be taken for granted that they would adopt the decisions of the archbishops and clergy of either. The views of the Danes of Dublin, in particular, were, no doubt, an uncertain factor in the situation. But the first bold step had been taken. The principle had been laid down that a bishop, in Ireland as elsewhere, must be attached to a diocese, and the first efforts were made to mark out these new dioceses, which naturally followed the general limits of the tribal boundaries. The wandering unattached bishop and the bishop attached only to a monastery disappeared as an institution with the signing of the Acts of the Synod of Rathbreasal (1110).

As the head of his diocese the bishop took henceforth an independent and superior position. He was brought out of the monastery into the world. There does not seem to have been any wide opposition to the change among the bishops, but the old abbacies naturally resented a change which placed them under the jurisdiction of the bishop in whose diocese the abbey stood. Great foundations, proud of their descent from the early saints and counting their origin from the first days of Irish Christianity, could not easily accustom themselves to the new position. In spite of all efforts to bring them into the general scheme, monasteries like Clonmacnois, Derry, and Fenagh remained even up to the fifteenth century quite outside it.[25] The old "evil custom" of hereditary succession and the familiar tribal organization were too deeply rooted to be broken through. While, in general, the South and East of Ireland, with the towns, conformed, Connacht and Ulster stood out for the preservation of their independence. The reformers got much support from the O'Briens and MacCarthys of Munster, but they got none from the O'Neills of Ulster, and with Ulster went Connacht and the West. Ecclesiastically as well as politically, the North and West lay outside the radius of reforming movements, and their customs and ways of life underwent little change.

[25] Book of Fenagh, ed. W. Hennessy (1875).

The chief agent in bringing about the new system was St Malachy, the friend and correspondent of St Bernard, whose beautiful life of the Irish Primate [26] is an invaluable record of the conditions of Church life in Ireland as seen from the Roman standpoint. Malachy, whose real name was Maél Maedóc ua Mórgáir, was born in Armagh in 1095. He was educated by a Danish recluse, Ivar O'Hacon, or Hagan, from whom and from a three years' stay with Malchus, Bishop of the Danish church of Waterford, he imbibed the ideas of church discipline of which he became so ardent a champion. He became Bishop of Connor and Abbot of Bangor and in 1137, for a short time, and most unwillingly, Primate of Armagh. His humility, his love of voluntary poverty, and his energy as a missionary teacher in his backward diocese, of the condition of which he gives a distressing account, disinclined him to undertake the duties of the Primacy. But he was called to larger work even than this. The decisions of the Synod of Rathbreasal were incomplete without the bestowal of palls on the two Archbishops, and Malachy was empowered to undertake the long journey to Rome to beseech their bestowal on the Archbishops of Armagh and Cashel. Twice he had to make the journey across the Alps, the Pope not considering his credentials sufficient on the first occasion; but the labour was atoned for to Malachy by the opportunity it gave him of cultivating the friendship of St Bernard, at whose Cistercian monastery he rested and where, on his second visit, death overtook him. The almost womanly tenderness felt for him by St Bernard is shown by the letters he addressed to him and by the beautiful memorial sermons delivered to his monks by the great saint on the anniversaries of Malachy's death. When St Bernard died five years later he was buried in the habit worn by his friend.

[26] St Bernard's Life of St Malachy has been translated by H. J. Lawlor (1902). The letters and sermons are included.

The formal appeal for the palls was not without effect. At the Synod of Kells (1152) Cardinal John Paparo brought over four palls, one for each province, thus erecting Dublin and Tuam into archbishoprics along with Armagh and Cashel, an unexpected act of generosity not altogether pleasing to the Irish people, who saw the new Danish see of Dublin placed on a level with the ancient Primacy of St Patrick. But the gift had a purpose; it severed the connexion between the Danish Church and Canterbury, and made it part of the Church of Ireland.[27] Henceforth, in spite of local differences, there was up to Elizabeth's day but one Church in the country with four Archbishops, and Rome as the final court of appeal. It was largely to the untiring energy of St Malachy that this consummation was due.

[27] For the Synod of Kells see Keating, History, iii, 313-317.

St Malachy had fallen upon an evil time. The synods which met during the twelfth century were not altogether occupied with questions of organization; they were also called upon to deal with social reform. The sweeping condemnation of Malachy when he first undertook the charge of the diocese of Connor, however much we may discount its bitterness as the result of a different point of view in ecclesiastical matters, must have been true of many of the outlying parts of Ireland. There were few priests and neither preaching nor singing in the churches. The people were "dead in regard to rites, impious in regard to faith, barbarous in regard to laws, and shameless in regard of morals"; "though Christians in name, they were in fact pagans." The Acts of the Synods and the pages of the annals alike bear out these terrible accusations. The restraints of life had been removed during the long Norse sway. The old monastic system had broken down over large parts of the country, and the new diocesan and parochial system had not yet been established to take its place. It is no wonder that St Malachy was so anxious for a change of organization. Raid-ings, burnings of dwellings and villages, and the marchings and assaults of bodies of armed men made peaceful occupations impossible. Feuds between bishops and abbots became more frequent. Wars and pestilences were not occasional; they never ceased; the country lived under arms, not only for certain seasons as the vikings did, but at all times.

The annals of the eleventh and twelfth centuries give a lamentable account of the general state of the country, especially in the North and West. There was no sanctity for church or abbot; abbots were killed at the door of their own monasteries, and churches and round towers full of people were ruthlessly fired if they stood in the path of a passing body of troops. The sanctity of oaths, even when sworn on the most sacred objects, was disregarded, and men were killed by treachery and guile even when placed under the special protection of the clergy.[28] The different states were at constant war with one another, and the uncertainty of succession to the chieftainship opened the way for interminable broils within the limits of each state. Among the numerous aspirants within the same family who were more or less eligible for election to the chieftainship the most sanguinary wars arose, all the more embittered because the warfare was between men of the same kith and kin. Even after the introduction of tanistry, by which the successor was designated by the reigning chief and recognized by the people during his lifetime—a system intended to put an end to these tribal disputes—personal ambition or force of character continued to disturb the regularity of the succession. To guard against this there were to be found in every chieftain's courtyard a number of unfortunate youths of high position who were held in confinement, either to secure them from disputing the position of the chief or as hostages for the fealty of their families. Many of them passed long periods in imprisonment, and they were liable at any moment to be blinded or killed in their fetters if their friends showed any disposition to support their claims or if their captors had any reason to doubt the fidelity either of their relations or of their clan. On almost every page of the annals we read of the blinding or execution of some one or more of these unhappy lads, whose only crime was to have been born within the limits of the succession to the lordship of their people.[29]

[28] Annals of Loch Cé, 1055, 1060, 1089, 1128, 1138, 1170, 1185, etc.

[29] No less than eight young men of the O'Brien family were blinded by their near relations between 1153 and 1185, four of them by Donal Mór, who died in 1194. See also Annals of Loch Cé, 1092, 1093, 1265, 1266, 1368, etc.

Nor, when the chief was elected and inaugurated, was the clan permitted to settle down in peace. Every prince or chief, as soon as he was elected, thought it incumbent on him to prove his right to the chieftaincy above his competitors, whom his elevation had defeated and disappointed, by reducing any outstanding province or state that declined to recognize his authority. These expeditions were known as the creacht righi, or regal raids, and they were a constant pretext for external wars. The rule of succession to the High Kingship equally forbade any possibility of quiet; for any aspirant to the high position from the North to become eligible must possess, besides his own province of Ulster, one province in the South; and an aspirant from Munster must in like manner have the command of Connacht or one of the other provinces besides his own kingdom. Hence the warlike expeditions and circuits made by princes aiming at the supreme power, often undertaken even before the death of the reigning monarch, with a view to establishing their right to the succession. Such a custom cut at the root of any consolidation of the monarchy and led to interminable wars for the supreme authority.[30] Thus, although in many directions progress had been made during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the political organization showed no tendency toward settling down into any shape that promised a peaceable or progressive native rule. The Ireland into which the Normans precipitated themselves toward the close of the latter century found the country, so far as the general administration of the provinces was concerned, in a state of anarchy. They added one more factor to the already entangled situation.

[30] Annals of the Four Masters, 1083, 1265, 1559, 1562.

If from a political point of view the country showed little progress, it is otherwise when we turn to art, architecture, and poetry. The Irish continued to build their churches on the small scale founded on traditions believed to have been handed down by St Patrick, and when St Malachy, fresh from seeing the great churches of York, Clairvaux, and Rome, proposed to erect a stone oratory at Bangor in 1140 the people were scandalized. They "drew attention to Malachy's frivolity, shuddered at the novelty, and exaggerated the expense." [31] But the richness with which these small buildings were decorated gives them a distinct place in the original developments of Romanesque. Cormac O'Cillan, Abbot of Clonmacnois (d. 964), King Brian (d. 1014), and Conor O'Kelly, who built Clonfert in 1166-67, were all great ecclesiastical architects working on purely Irish models. The chapel erected by King Cormac MacCarthy on the Rock of Cashel in 1127 shows this type of design in its greatest luxuriance.[32] Most of the round towers also date from the Norse period, and the finest of the high crosses and metal work. Before the coming of the Normans the erection of the first Cistercian monastery, Mellifont on the Boyne, consecrated in 1157, began a new era in church building.

[31] Lawlor, Life of St Malachy, pp. 109-110.

[32] Margaret Stokes, Early Christian Architecture in Ireland (1920), pp. 126 seq.

It is of great interest that there remain certain charters given to monasteries, written both in Irish and Latin, dating from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, which show that grants of land and privileges were legally witnessed and executed before the coming of the Normans to Ireland. The earliest of the Gaelic charters conveys a grant of land at Kells, "with its vegetable garden, to God and pious pilgrims," no pilgrim having any right in it until he should have devoted himself to God and proved his piety. The grant included two tracts of pasture-land "with their meadows and their bogs...with their houses and outhouses, and with their lawns as far as the Cathach of Domnach Mòr [Donaghmore]." This charter, which was drawn up about 1080, was made by the King of Tara and the Abbot of Kells, with all the clergy, for a priest of Kells and his kinsmen who had purchased the ground for twenty ounces of gold, and a large number of influential persons became securities for the grant "as they were passing round the land and through the middle of the land;" an early example of 'beating the bounds.' A similar grant in Irish was made to Kells (c. 1128-40) also for the support of pilgrims, "in the year when the cattle and swine of Erin perished by a pestilence." This deed is witnessed, among others, by Tiernan O'Rorke, whose wife ran away to Dermot MacMorrogh, in the presence of his sons, Donchad and Sitric. Most of these early grants secured the land given from any future claims of rent, tribute, or coigny from king or chief.[33]

[33] Gilbert, Facsimiles of National Manuscripts of Ireland, Pt II, Nos. LIX, XLIV.

Even more interesting is a Latin charter founding the monastery of Duisk,[34] in which the signature of King Dermot MacMorrogh himself appears as the founder along with those of the donor, Dermot O'Ryan, chief of Odrone, Lawrence, Archbishop of Dublin, and others. These charters show that lands were regularly conveyed or purchased in the ordinary manner, and also that the Latin hand and language as well as Gaelic were used for such purposes before 1170.

[34] Now the monastery of Graigue-na-managh, Co. Kilkenny See ibid., No. LXII (1).

END OF CHAPTER IV

V.—THE NORMANS IN IRELAND

It was while the country was in this unsettled condition that a new turn was given to the course of events by the appeal of Dermot MacMorrogh, King of Leinster, to King Henry II of England to become his ally in his quarrel with Tiernan O'Rorke, Prince of Breifne (Counties of Leitrim and Cavan). This was the first step in the drama of events which led to the permanent establishment of the English in Ireland. The coming of the English has been often treated as if it were an isolated occurrence, a sudden bolt from the blue for which nothing in the previous history of Ireland had made preparation. But, as we have seen, the relations between the two countries had become increasingly close in the twelfth century, and both in politics and commerce the two neighbouring kingdoms had frequent interaction. When, therefore, an Irish prince made his appeal for help to an English king against his personal enemy there was nothing to cause special surprise either to his own people or to the sovereign to whom he applied. Nor was the idea of adding Ireland to his great empire a new one to Henry. Lord already of Normandy, Anjou, Aquitaine, Maine, Touraine, Poitou, suzerain of Brittany, King of England, prince of dominions which made England the centre of power in the West, Henry had long turned his thoughts toward Ireland. Already in 1155 he had considered that the island to the west would be a fair gift to make to his favourite brother William, and he had made tentative preparations by consulting his Council of Winchester about its conquest and had sent the learned John of Salisbury, then coming into notice as one of the most remarkable men of his day, to the English Pope, Adrian IV, to request permission to add the island of Ireland to his dominions. But the King's mother, the Empress Maud, or Matilda, resisted the project, and it was temporarily dropped, though after the death of Prince William in 1164 the thoughts of the King still occasionally returned to the idea, with the object of making his son John lord of Ireland.

But the Papal permission and benediction, often erroneously styled a Bull, lay in his archives unused till long after Adrian's death, and the ensuing contest between rival Popes made it, for the moment, of little avail for the purpose for which it had been given.[1] Henry's mind was fully occupied with the affairs of his unwieldy and disunited empire; most of his time was spent in France, and to his English subjects this king, who only visited his English kingdom for short intervals with absences of from four to eight years between the visits, was almost a foreigner. He spoke no English but only French or Latin with a smattering of many other tongues "from the Bay of Biscay to the Jordan." Only gradually did this descendant of the conquering Normans, who by marriage or inheritance was also lord of the greater half of France, come to recognize the superior importance of his English possessions. He was absorbed at the moment in the affairs of his French territories, and the dream of a conquest of Ireland might never have been revived but for the sudden appearance of an Irish King coming in his own person to request that Henry would help him in the recovery of the kingdom of Leinster, from which his rebellious sub-chiefs had driven him. This unexpected appeal revived all Henry's old ambitions; it gave an excellent opening, which might prove profitable to himself, for interference in the affairs of Ireland. His gracious reception of Dermot showed that the proposal was not unwelcome to him.

[1] For the Bull Laudabiliter see Appendix I.

It was soon after Christmas in the year 1166 that Dermot MacMorrogh, King of Leinster (b. 1110), sought Henry's aid to extract him from the difficulties that his own misconduct had brought upon himself and his province. Wild as were the times in which he lived, Dermot is singled out among the princes of his period as being so intolerable that he was expelled by the chiefs over whom he ruled. Gerald of Wales avers that "the cruel and intolerable tyranny which he imposed upon the chiefs of the land" was the result of youth and inexperience, but this can hardly be accepted as an excuse for a prince who had occupied the throne for over thirty years when he was driven out. Already in 1133 he is stated to have imposed "great tyrannies and cruelties" upon his Leinster nobles, seventeen of whom he had blinded or slain. He had confirmed himself in the possession of his kingdom by the killing of two princes and the blinding of a third. He spoiled churches without compunction. A still more brutal and unseemly act was the forcing of the Abbess of Kildare to leave her convent and to marry one of his people; at the same time he slew nearly two hundred of her nuns and townsmen who endeavoured to defend her. He was in perpetual strife with the men of Ossory and the King of Meath, as well as with the O'Rorkes of Breifne and the O'Kellys of Oriel.[2]

[2] A large district west of Lough Neagh and the Lower Bann.

He fought with the Dublin Danes against the Danes of Waterford. All this was much in the manner of the times, but the fact that Leinster was 'confirmed' to Dermot on more than one occasion shows that he held his position with an unusual degree of precariousness. He is said to have been "hated by his Leinstermen." Dermot is described by Gerald, the historian of the conquest, as very tall, "of a large and great body, a valiant and bold warrior of his nation and by reason of his continual halowing and crying, his voice was hoarse; he rather chose to be feared than loved; a great oppressor of his nobility, but a great advancer of the poor and weak. To his own people he would be rough, and grievous and hateful to strangers. He would be against all men and all men against him." [3] The act for which, according to the popular judgment, Dermot was driven out of Ireland, his abduction of Dervorgil, wife of Tiernan O'Rorke, Prince of Breifne, occurred in 1152, fourteen years before his expulsion.[4] Tiernan belonged to a family noted for its pride and turbulence from the days of Art O'Rorke, "the Cock," who in 1031 had descended the Shannon in boats to menace Thomond (Clare) and had met with a signal defeat at the hands of Donogh O'Brien, to those of Elizabeth. Descended from old kings of Connacht, they never forgot their high estate or ceased to try to recover it. They had been ousted by the O'Conors, and pushed back into the narrower limits of Breifne, which they shared with the O'Reilleys. Standing thus in the gangway between the warlike Cinel Eoghan of Tyrconnel in Ulster and the province of Connacht, their country was perpetually overrun with armies in whose wars they became involved; but in the eleventh century they were chiefly bent on recovering their position by a series of wars with Thomond. In 1084 the son of "the Cock" had fallen in battle with Murtogh O'Brien, and his head had been cut off and exposed by O'Brien on the hills above Limerick. It was recovered four years later by Rory O'Conor and Donell MacLochlan, and Limerick and Kincora were burned by them in revenge.

[3] Giraldus Cambrensis, or Gerald of Wales, was of the great family of the FitzGeralds, or Geraldines. He came over twice to Ireland, first in 1183 with his brother Philip de Barry and Richard de Cogan, and later, in 1185, with Prince John. To him we owe much of our knowledge of contemporary events and personages.

[4] Grace, Annales Hiberniae, 1167, says that Dermot MacMorrogh, Prince of Leinster, "while O'Rorke, King of Meath, was far from his country, ravished his wife with her own consent, and at her own solicitation." The date, at least, is incorrect.

Tiernan (or Tighernan) O'Rorke, who now plays an important rôle in the annals of his country, had been stripped of fresh portions of his territory alike by the kings of Ulster and Connacht. In the Book of Fenagh, written in O'Rorke's own district of Breifne, Dervorgil, his unfaithful wife, is called "the wife of one-eyed Tiernan of many crimes." One of these crimes for which the annalist says no equal had previously been found in Erin, and which earned the malediction of both laymen and clergy, was the profanation, openly in his own presence, of the Abbot of Armagh and the plundering of his retinue, many of whom were slain; even a young cleric, specially protected, was killed. The annalist exclaims that this act was like contempt of the Lord Himself and that it produced a universal distrust of any protection throughout the country.[5]

[5] Annals of Loch Ce, 1128.

Dervorgil may have been weary of life with such a man; she is said to have been carried off by her own consent and at the instigation of her brother, who had his own scores to pay off against Dermot for the latter's rebellion against their father the King of Meath. A year later, Dervorgil was restored, with the rich dowry of cattle and valuables that she had carried with her on her elopement. But though this act made some sensation at the time, and though years afterward O'Rorke demanded a heavy eric of a hundred ounces of gold from Dermot (probably nearly £5000 of our money), "more for the shame than the loss that he had suffered," the event had no immediate influence on Irish affairs beyond the fresh cause of revolt and disaffection that it provided. It had all been over long before Dermot sought King Henry in Aquitaine. The restless energy and ceaseless journeyings of Henry II made it always difficult to know in what part of his widespread dominions he would be found. "The King," said one of his courtiers, "never sits down, but is on his legs from morning till night." When Dermot, after searching for him "up and down, forwards and back," at last arrived before him, he was far away beyond seas in the remote parts of Aquitaine and, as always, "much engaged in business." The meeting of these two men, who represented in their persons the future relationship and destiny of their two countries, is interesting. There was probably something sympathetic between the English King, with his square, stout build, his muscular arms and neck bent forward, and his grey eyes that flashed so readily into anger, and the Irish Prince, whose huge frame and tall stature announced the warrior and whose voice had become hoarse by constantly raising his war-cry in battle. Henry, brought unexpectedly face to face in a French city with a representative of a country that had often been in his thoughts, at once agreed to Dermot's request. He gave him a letter authorizing all who desired it to go with Dermot, and liberally provided him with gifts and with the money necessary for his enterprise. Dermot returned to Bristol, where he stayed on both journeys with one Robert FitzHarding, an influential citizen and friend of King Henry, who assisted him in his efforts to induce the nobles of South Wales to accompany him to Ireland.

Though Dermot was forced to return to Ireland alone and to lie hidden for a time in his house at Ferns or at the monastery near by, he had been successful in securing a promise of help from several of the Norman lords who had recently carved out for themselves at the sword's point properties in South Wales, and who promised to follow him as soon as their preparations were complete. Many of them were men of good birth but broken fortunes, who, in the free manner of the Norman kings, had been granted lands in different parts of England and Wales "if they were able to conquer them," as rewards for their services at the battle of Hastings and elsewhere. Others were mere freebooters, whose advent into Wales was marked by the most frightful cruelties to the inhabitants and many of whom were in sore need of money to support their impecunious families. To all of them Dermot held out a variety of tempting baits; and to the most powerful of them all, Richard of Striguil, Earl of Pembroke, the ancestor of the house of the de Clares, later to be more familiarly known by his sobriquet of "Strongbow," he offered the great bribe of the hand of his daughter, Aoife, or Eva, with the succession to the kingdom of Leinster after his own death. Earl Richard had forfeited the royal favour by his support of King Stephen, and to a man who possessed high titles, but little means to support them, the prospect of restoring his fortunes in Ireland out of the way of the royal displeasure must have been an attractive one. To Robert FitzStephen, who had been kept a close prisoner by Rhys, the Welsh king, for three years, but who was now released at Dermot's request, were promised the town of Wexford and some adjoining lands to be held in fee by him and his half-brother Maurice FitzGerald. The town of Wexford, being a Danish city and in Danish hands, could, like most of Dermot's other gifts, only be obtained by conquest.

"A knight, bipartite, shall first break the bonds of Ireland." So ran an ancient prophecy attributed to Merlin, and men thought they saw the prophecy fulfilled when FitzStephen, who was on his father's side an Anglo-Norman, or rather Welsh-Norman, and on his mother's a Cambro-Briton, and whose armorial bearings were bipartite, gave his word to follow Dermot across seas. He was the first of that remarkable family who supplied no less than eighteen knights to take part in the conquest of Ireland, and who were the progenitors of the famous line of the Geraldines, Earls of Kildare and Lords of Desmond. They brought with them also one of their own family to be the historian of the conquest, the Archdeacon Gerald de Barry, called Cambrensis, or "the Welshman," through whose vivid pages, supplemented by an old French poem for which the materials were supplied by the scribe and interpreter of Dermot MacMorrogh, we are enabled to follow the fortunes of each member of the family. It is an unusual piece of historical good fortune that we should possess these two independent reports, which supplement each other and which tell the same story from two different points of view, both of the writers being closely interested in the persons and events of which they supply the record.

Though the adventure which Dermot-na-nGaill, or "Dermot of the Foreigners," set on foot is commonly spoken of as the coming of the English to Ireland, few of the adventurers could be called Englishmen. The leaders were Normans, French-speaking Lords, recently settled in Wales, the most westward offshoots of that turbulent and ambitious race which, starting from the same Northern homes from which the earlier race of Northmen had come, had in their piratical raids southward gradually established their rule in Normandy and up the Seine, and swept round the coasts of Spain to find a footing in Sicily, Apulia, and Calabria. Just a hundred years before Dermot sought the help of Henry II, William of Normandy had completed the onward march of his race by his conquest of England, but the two nations were only slowly uniting into a homogeneous population. All the differences of language, tradition, and systems of law and tenure, which were to complicate the future relations of the two peoples in Ireland, were now in process of being fought out in the neighbouring country. As later in Ireland, the conquering knights who were spreading over the land stood haughtily aloof from the main body of the population, whom they were endeavouring to accustom to new feudal relations as their underlings. Most of the knights who volunteered to follow Dermot to Ireland had made their homes in the extreme south-west of Wales, from which Earl Richard de Clare, or "Strongbow," took his title of Earl of Pembroke, a district often known as "little England beyond Wales." Their men-at-arms were largely Flemings who had come over from Flanders in the reign of Henry I, and had been settled by him among his enemies the Welsh, in the hope that their solid virtues, their love of industry and commerce, and their brave and robust character, might ease his task in subduing the rebellious Welshmen. These Flemings were destined to form a useful and permanent element in the towns of Leinster, and to give their name to the family of the Flemings, Lords of Slane.[6] Of these Normans, Welsh, and Flemings, few would have styled themselves Englishmen, though there may have been an admixture of English citizens from Bristol, interested through the efforts of FitzHarding in Dermot's enterprise. The Annals of the Four Masters speak of the "fleet of the Flemings" which Dermot induced to come over, and of "seventy heroes, dressed in coats of mail." The Irish looked on this little army with contempt; the great hosts collected by Rory O'Conor and O'Rorke "set nothing by the Flemings." The arrival of these new gaill, or foreigners, may have seemed to them only one more attack, and an insignificant one, of their old foes the vikings, who still from time to time descended on the coasts, carried off their prey, and departed again. What the coming of these "seventy heroes" meant for Ireland they were only slowly to discover.

[6] A Richard Fleming established himself in a castle at Slane before 1176. In that year all his followers, a hundred or more, were destroyed by the King of the Cinel-Eoghan of Ulster. See Annals of Loch Ce, 1176.

The so-called conquest of Ireland falls into three sections: the arrival of the first-comers under FitzStephen, FitzGerald, and Maurice de Prendergast in May 1169; the landing of Earl Richard, or "Strongbow," and the events following this in August 1170; and, finally, the visit of Henry II in October of the next year, 1171.

When Dermot had returned to his own country it did not seem as though the Norman lords who had promised him their aid were in any hurry to carry out their engagements. No forces seemed to be arriving to the support of the few men who had accompanied him on his return. In his impatience Dermot sent over his companion and interpreter, Morice Regan, to whom we owe the French poetical version of this history, to stir up the dilatory barons. He increased his offers by a general promise of land, horses, armour, and money to any who would volunteer. Robert FitzStephen led the way, and in his party came Meiler FitzHenry, Miles FitzGerald, son of the Bishop of St Davids, Maurice de Prendergast, and Hervey de Montmaurice, all Norman-Welsh scions or connexions of the great house which derived from Nesta, or Nes, the daughter of Rhys ap Teudwr, last independent king of South Wales, by her two husbands and by Henry I, who was grandfather to Meiler and Robert FitzHenry. They were thus closely allied by blood with Henry II. FitzStephen marched straight on Wexford, and after a short contest the town surrendered and was handed over, with the adjoining lands, to the newcomers. The victorious army then marched northward into Ossory to reinstate Dermot; by a sudden charge of cavalry they met and defeated a large body of men who had entrenched themselves behind stockades in a difficult country of woods and bogs. To the savage delight of King Dermot two hundred heads of his enemies were laid dripping at his feet.

But a strong combination was being formed against Dermot. "The wheel of fortune turned and those that were above were threatened with a sudden fall." Rory (or Roderick) O'Conor, King of Connacht, had just succeeded to the sovereignty of Ireland on the death of Murtogh O'Lochlan, a prince of the house of Ulster. Rory was destined to be the last king of an independent Ireland. A hundred years before, the aged Donogh, son of King Brian Boromhe, being deposed, had taken the pilgrim's staff and set out to end his days in Rome. It was said that he took with him the crown of Ireland, which remained in the possession of the Popes until Pope Adrian gave it to King Henry II after the latter's conquest of the country. The story must be metaphorical, for we hear of no crown in the possession of Henry, nor did he even style himself King of Ireland. But it symbolizes the condition of the supreme monarchy during the century that elapsed between the death of Donogh and the death of Rory O'Conor, in whose time the overlordship came to an end. All the kings who reigned between these two had ruled with disputed authority. The balance of power had swung from the O'Briens of Munster away to the O'Lochlans of the north-west of Ulster; but Connacht, which had been advancing in power and influence, was able to place on the throne two of her princes during the twelfth century. The policy of Rory O'Conor, who for years had been reigning king of Connacht before he attained to the throne of Ireland, had been to try to weaken the other provinces and at the same time to satisfy the rival aspirations of the underlords by subdividing the provinces between them. Three times he had enforced a division of Munster between the O'Briens and MacCarthys, princes ever at war for ascendancy; twice he had divided Meath and once Tyrone (Tir Eoghan) in Ulster. But the only result of his policy had been still further to weaken the already enfeebled country. So far from showing a disposition to unite, Ireland during the last years of her independence was more broken up into rival chieftainries than ever before.

Rory had usually sided with O'Rorke and Malaughlan of Meath against Dermot, and on hearing of his advance northward accompanied by foreign troops armed in such coats of mail as had never before been seen in Ireland he sent messengers all round the island and convoked a great assembly to march against him. He also tried to detach FitzStephen from Dermot's side with large offers, and when these were declined he appealed to Dermot to come over to his side and aid him in exterminating the foreigners, on an undertaking to restore to him his kingdom of Leinster. These offers having been likewise refused, the armies were drawn up in battle, but at the last moment peace was made between the rival kings, on condition of the restoration of Dermot to the throne of Leinster and his recognition of Rory as King of Ireland Dermot gave his son Canute (Cnut) to Rory as a hostage and secretly engaged to bring no more foreigners over to Ireland.

The peace was a fortunate one for Dermot, for already some of his 'fair-weather friends' were falling off and desiring to return to Wales. The most serious defection was that of Maurice de Prendergast, who fell out with Dermot and offered his services to MacGillapatrick of Ossory, Dermot's old enemy, who "leaped to his feet with joy" when he heard the news. Henceforth Prendergast is known as Maurice of Ossory, but he did not long remain in Ireland. Hearing of plots to massacre him and his followers, he watched an opportunity to escape to Waterford and take ship to Wales. His defection was partly atoned for by the arrival of FitzGerald, half-brother to FitzStephen; but still Dermot's plans, which had been expanding with each success, did not ripen as he wished. Leinster, which he had won back, no longer sufficed him; he aspired to replace Rory as King of Ireland. In the autumn he wrote to Earl Richard in this strain: "We have watched the storks and swallows; the summer birds have come and are gone with the wind of the south; but neither winds from the east nor the west have brought your much-desired presence." Strongbow had indeed been prudently waiting to hear the result of the successes of the first adventurers. He was of a more gentle build and retiring nature than most of Dermot's helpers. His grey eyes, feminine features, and weak voice bespoke the quiet gentleman rather than the bold man-at-arms. Out of the camp he had the air of a simple soldier, and he was at all times more disposed to be led by others than to command. But, encouraged by Dermot's assurances that he had regained his kingdom, he set about preparing for the great hazard. Having obtained the King's permission to go, he sent forward Raymond le Gros, a brave and stout soldier, who crossed over, erected a fort between Wexford and Waterford, and after a sharp skirmish brought to his camp seventy of the principal townsmen as hostages. The first act of wanton cruelty shown by the adventurers stained their bravery on that day. Raymond, in a noble speech, prayed for pity on these citizens, but the fighting men, worked upon by Hervey de Montmaurice, gave their voices for their immediate execution; and the unfortunate hostages were beheaded, it is said by a girl, and their bodies thrown over the cliff into the sea.

When Earl Richard arrived from Milford Haven he took Waterford by assault after severe fighting and entered the town, slaughtering as he went. The Danish rulers, Reginald (Ragnall) and the two Sitrics, held out for a time in Reginald's Tower, the massive Danish stronghold which still stands to prove the solidity of their defences, but the Sitrics were finally taken and put to the sword, Reginald and an Irish chief named MacLoghlan of Offaly being saved by Dermot's intervention. Then, the town having been garrisoned, Dermot was sent for to bring his daughter, Strongbow's promised wife and prize, and the marriage of Strongbow and Eva was solemnized with great state, a symbol of the union, for good and evil, between the two countries.[7] The news of the fall of the Danish towns of Wexford and Waterford filled the citizens of Dublin with dismay. From all parts of Ireland they summoned help, and Dermot received tidings that between Dublin and the South all roads were blocked and passes barricaded, and that Rory with an immense army lay at Clondalkin ready to oppose his passage. He summoned the Earl and laid before him a bold plan. Avoiding the open ways, he marched straight across the mountains of Glendalough, appearing before the gates of Dublin with an army of over five thousand men. The citizens, having the fate of the Danish cities of the South before their eyes, sent Laurence O'Toole, Archbishop of Dublin, to treat for peace. While negotiations were going on, young Miles de Cogan, with a party of hot-headed followers, grew impatient of the delay and fell suddenly on the city, taking it by a surprise attack. Asculf, the Danish king, fled away by sea, and Strongbow entered the town, of which, in reward for his services, he appointed de Cogan the Warden.

[7] The celebrated picture of this event painted by Maclise errs in making the marriage take place immediately after the slaughter of the inhabitants and among the slain. This is a pictorial exaggeration.

At this critical stage of the story a break occurs. In the manuscript of the poem which has related his history there are dashed across the page the words Si est mort li rei Dermot. Propitius sit Deus anime! ("King Dermot is dead. May God have mercy on his soul!").[8] He died, according to the Annals of the Four Masters, on May 1, 1171, at his home in Ferns "without will, without penance, without the body of Christ, without unction, as his evil deeds deserved." To his own retainers in Ireland he had a better aspect. "Very rich and powerful" they held him; "he loved the generous, hated the mean, the noble king who lies buried at Ferns." Dermot of the Foreigners had some good qualities. He founded the priory of All Hallows in Dublin, and the Cistercian monastery at Baltinglas; and the famous Book of Leinster, which preserves the records of his Province, was drawn up at his instigation. It was written by a Bishop of Kildare in Dermot's reign. Dervorgil also devoted herself to church-building. The beautifully decorated church of the nuns of Clonmacnois was erected by her, and she made munificent gifts to the new Cistercian monastery of Mellifont near Drogheda, which the enthusiasm of Archbishop Malachy was founding on the Continental pattern. He had liberal helpers in Tiernan O'Rorke, Dervorgil's husband, and in Donagh O'Carroll of Oriel, while the erring wife presented a chalice of gold to the new church, with fine cloth for the altars and threescore ounces of gold. Dervorgil, who died in 1195, at the age of eighty-five, was buried in the monastery she had helped to endow. The abbey church had been consecrated with great solemnity in 1157, several princes and seventeen bishops, with the Papal legate, being present. It was the mother-church of five Cistercian houses founded about this time by Irish princes. These buildings mark in a definite way the dying out of the old native forms of organization and the closer union with the Roman Church and system. The visits of Papal legates, beginning at the date when Cardinal Paparo presided over the Synod of Kells in 1152, also point to a definite change of position. The liberality of Dervorgil to two religious foundations, of which one belonged to the old form of Irish Christianity and the other to the foreign orders now for the first time making their home in Ireland, is symbolic of the double allegiance of the people, and of their lingering affection for a system now gradually to pass away. Between 1139 and 1272 thirty-four abbeys of the Cistercian order were founded in Ireland, of which twelve were established before 1172. These include St Mary's, Dublin, and Mellifont, founded in 1142, with the latter's daughter-abbeys—Bective, in Meath, called De Beatitudine; Baltinglas, in Wicklow, called De Valle Salutis; and Boyle, in Roscommon.[9] The introduction of the Cistercian and Augustinian orders led to a great architectural outburst all over the country, in which the Irish princes took the lead. The Norman adventurers, men of the race which was covering England and Normandy with splendid cathedrals and abbeys, entered into the work, and, besides the massive keeps and castles which gradually replaced the earlier earthen forts all over the provinces, there arose during the thirteenth century stately abbeys, whose outlines we admire in their ruin to-day.

[8] The Song of Dermot and the Earl, ed. G. H. Orpen (1892).

[9] See the list given in Grace's Annales Hiberniae, Appendix I, pp. 169-170.

At this moment it must have seemed to Strongbow that he had realized all the hopes with which he had come to Ireland. He had married Aoife (Eva), who brought him a rich inheritance; and Leinster, from Waterford to Dublin, was subdued. King Dermot was dead, and it only remained to enter peacefully into his promised lordship as his successor. But, just when all seemed fair, he found himself encompassed with difficulties. First came a demand from Henry, who in his far realm of Aquitaine had from time to time received exaggerated reports of the doings of his knights in Ireland, that all his feudatories should return to England before Easter on pain of forfeiting their lands, a command that he followed up by ordering a blockade of the Irish ports. All supplies and reinforcements at once ceased, and the Earl, much embarrassed, sent off Raymond le Gros to the King with the following letter: "It was with your licence, if I remember rightly, my Lord and King, that I crossed to Ireland to aid your faithful vassal Dermot...Whatever lands I have had the good fortune to acquire here, inasmuch as I owe them all to your gracious favour, I shall hold them at your will and disposal." The letter was a politic one and gave the Earl time to plan out his future movements. Events pressed upon him. The Irish, to whom the idea of an Irish prince bequeathing his kingdom outside his family, and moreover to a foreigner, was hitherto unheard of, rose in revolt; "all the Irish of Ireland" were suddenly ranged against Strongbow, save his wife's brother, Kavanagh, and two minor chiefs. They lay, sixty thousand strong under Rory's banner, at Castleknock outside Dublin, Tiernan O'Rorke being in their company. Archbishop Laurence O'Toole exerted himself to strengthen the combination by going through the country and rousing up the chiefs, and by inviting over Godred of Man and the lords of the Isles, who were to blockade the city on the sea-coast side, while the Irish, including the Archbishop's troops, surrounded it on the north, west, and south. A two months' siege ensued, during which, partly owing to the Norse blockade and partly to that carried out by Henry's orders, no food could be got into the town, and provisions were running short. Moreover, news was brought that Robert FitzStephen was closely besieged in his half-built fort at Carrick, and, soon after, that he had been captured and sent prisoner to Wexford. Strong-bow attempted to treat with Rory, but again the young knight-errant Miles de Cogan cut a straight road out of the difficulty. Keeping the matter secret, a little band of six hundred knights with some Irish under Donal Kavanagh suddenly sallied out of the town and crept close up to the stockades of the Irish camp before they were perceived, with Miles at their head shouting his war-cry of "De Cogan!" The Irish were quite unprepared for the attack. Rory and many of his men were bathing in the river at some distance from the camp, and, being left without leaders, the unarmed Irish "fled through the moors like scattered cattle."

After collecting the spoils, which sufficed for a whole year, Earl Richard marched straight to Wexford, hoping to release FitzStephen; but, hearing that his captors would put FitzStephen to death if he advanced, he abandoned the attempt, and, receiving an urgent message from Henry, who was now in England near Gloucester gathering a large force to take with him over to Ireland, Strongbow hastily delivered Dublin into the care of Miles de Cogan and Waterford to Gilbert de Boisrohard, and set out to face his angry liege. It required some courage to confront the blazing eyes of Henry "Curtmantle" when "the demon blood of Anjou" mounted to his face, but the Norman poem says that Henry assumed a friendly manner toward the Earl and at this time made no show of anger. On reflection the King may well have thought that a subject who had gained a fifth of Ireland with its two chief towns, and who was ready to resign all claim to Dublin and the coast towns and fortresses, holding the remainder as a fief under himself, had not done so badly for his kingdom. The matter was settled for the time, and the King set out with his usual promptitude for Waterford, accompanied by the Earl and a splendid fleet. He had in his army 4500 knights and archers. On October 17, 1171, Henry landed at Crook, a little below Waterford.

Henry's stay in Ireland had the aspect of a triumphal progress. As far west as Limerick and as far north as the borders of Ulster the Irish chiefs came in and made submission to him. It was recognized that the prime object of his visit was not to fight the Irish, but to take over the Norse towns and to check the growing power of his own barons; and kings who had stoutly withstood the aggressions of a set of Norman knights, apparently each fighting for his own hand, now came in without a contest and made their submission to the overlord. Dermot MacCarthy, King of Cork, Donal O'Brien, King of Limerick, who surrendered his capital into Henry's hands, MacGillapatrick, Lord of Ossory, and Malachy O'Phelan, chief of the Decies, and after them the lesser chiefs of Munster, came in, and were courteously received and sent away with gifts. In Dublin Tiernan O'Rorke and other chiefs submitted.

Henry brought over a considerable army, but he did not shed Irish blood. "All the Irish in Ireland" had risen against the barons when they found Dermot giving away the tribal lands, or the barons conquering them, but they did not rise against Henry; on the contrary, they seem to have looked on him as their natural protector against the aggression of his nobles. A curious instance of the general attitude is shown in the action of the citizens of Wexford, who had imprisoned FitzStephen. They informed Henry that they had acted on his behalf against his rebellious vassal, who had invaded the country without the King's licence. Henry, "who loved the baron much," taking his cue from this curious argument, had FitzStephen brought before him to Waterford, soundly rated him, and committed him to prison in Reginald's Tower with great show of wrath and anger, "for he feared the Irish would murder him." At Waterford he had him under his own eye. He took an early opportunity of setting him at liberty, though he did not hesitate to reap advantage from his present helplessness by requiring him to relinquish the town and lands of Wexford into the King's hands—a method of asserting his suzerainty which Henry had already practised with success in dealing with his barons in South Wales.[10]

[10] Giraldus Cambrensis, Conquest of Ireland, Bk. I, ch. xxxi.

The most significant of the submissions made to Henry was that of the Aird-ri of Ireland, Rory O'Conor, who took the oath of allegiance on the borders between his own province of Connacht and that of Meath, side by side with O'Brien, King of Thomond, his then ally. This submission of the High King to the foreign sovereign was an act of the greatest importance. It can hardly be said to have been obtained by conquest or even by an overwhelming show of military force. The Irish kings had bowed to the inevitable, but they do not seem to have bowed unwillingly, for they believed that Henry alone could keep in check his marauding nobles. Rory by his submission recognized an authority in the kingdom superior to his own, a High Kingship to which even his own must look up. From this moment the office of High King of Ireland practically came to an end, for Rory had no successor; he was the last of the historic line. The office from henceforth was felt to have been transferred into the hands of the English King.

The relations for the moment were of the friendliest kind. The festival of Christmas 1171 saw these Irish princes gathered with their retainers to the Danish city of Dublin, then "a very thronged port, emulating our London in commerce," [11] as the guests of the English King. They were entertained in so sumptuous a style that provisions threatened to run short and were sold at excessive prices, no cargo vessels having been able to cross on account of the severe tempests. For the accommodation of the guests Henry had a palace of peeled osiers or wattle constructed "after the manner of the country" just outside the then narrow walls of Dublin on the rise of the Howe over the Stein, where St Andrew's Church now stands, This was the site of the Danish Thing-mote, or national assembly, and was called in the tenth century Hoggen-green, from the Scandinavian word hoga or howe, a hill or tumulus. It is only within the last couple of centuries that this historic site has been levelled and its mould spread over the present Nassau Street. In Henry's day it looked out over the ' Green ' of the town, stretching down to the borders of the Liffey, which then flowed through open fields to the bay at Clontarf. The 'Stein,' then the usual landing-place for Dublin, was so called from the long stone on which capital sentences were carried out under Norse rule, after decrees of death had been passed at the Thing-mote; it was only removed in the seventeenth century. The novelty of Henry's entertainment and the splendour with which it was carried out astonished his guests, who "learned to eat crane's flesh, which they had hitherto disliked." Meanwhile the Norman archers stationed at Finglas amused their leisure by wantonly cutting down and burning as firewood the old yews and ash-trees which had been planted in former days by Abbot Kenach round the cemetery.[12]

[11] Chronicle of William of Newburgh, ed. Thomas Hearne (1719), pp. 194-195.

[12] Very old yews still form a walk at Glasnevin, close to Finglas, perhaps the descendants of these groves. It is now known as Addison's Walk.

From Christmas to Lent Henry was busy visiting parts of his new dominions and settling the future administration of the country. He appointed Hugh de Lacy first Justiciar, and garrisoned the towns. He visited Lismore and Cashel, and in pursuance of the conditions laid down by the Pope he arranged for a synod at the latter place for the correction of morals and to introduce the payment of tithes. He was occupied in planning a new fort for Lismore when, the wind changing at last, he received at Wexford ill news of great importance. Two legates, commissioned by the Pope, had arrived in England to inquire into the murder of Archbishop Thomas a Becket and were threatening to lay the country under an interdict; at the same inauspicious moment he learned that his sons had risen in rebellion against him. Such tidings were too urgent to be ignored, and, breaking off his plans in Ireland, the King set sail from Wexford on Easter Day 1172, "after the celebration of Mass," [13] landing in St David's Bay at noon of the next day. "Thus," say the Annals of Clonmacnois quaintly, "the King's Majesty made a final end of an entire conquest of Ireland."

[13] Annals of Loch Ce, 1172.

When Henry left Ireland he had received hostages as overlord from Leinster, Meath, Munster, and the chiefs of Oriel and of Eastern Ulster,[14] besides the still more important submission of Rory of Connacht. Thus every province was represented in the formal acts of submission to the King of England. Such general offers of fealty had never been made in Ireland save to the acknowledged Aird-ri, and even then, as a rule, only when exacted by force. It is the more remarkable that they should have been obtained by Henry without the use of compulsion and that the whole country should have participated in making them. This submission, however, did not include any acceptance of the rule of Henry's Norman barons, whose advance was checked in a practical way by the heavy defeat of Strongbow at Thurles by Donal O'Brien and King Rory in 1174, two years after Henry's departure, while in Meath the Irish demolished the forts which de Lacy was erecting to secure his new grants. But in the following year, after consultation, Rory O'Conor and Donal O'Brien were ready to renew their allegiance to the King of England in the most formal and solemn manner at the Council of Windsor (October 6, 1175), in the presence of the King, barons, and bishops of England. As his representatives at this council Rory sent three of the highest ecclesiastics in Ireland: the distinguished Laurence (or Lorcan) O'Toole, traveller, scholar, and statesman, who had been transferred from his abbey at Glendalough, in Wicklow, to the posts of Archbishop of Dublin and Chancellor; the Archbishop of Tuam (Co. Galway); and the Abbot of St Brendan. Through them, with every circumstance of solemnity, the Aird-ri ratified his former treaty, promising "to hold his lands well and peaceably of the English King as his liege lord," and in token of this to pay an annual tribute of a tenth of all choice skins of animals slain in Ireland, to be approved by dealers, and of birds (of the chase), and wolfhounds. The Danish cities of Dublin and Waterford, with the adjacent lands as far as Dungarvan, and the whole province of Leinster, pledged by Dermot MacMorrogh to Strongbow, were reserved to be held of the King directly. Apart from these reserved lands, Rory was to hold sway over the lesser chieftains and to receive their tributes as of old, King Henry's tribute being added as an additional claim.[15]

[14] Ibid., 1171.

[15] Henry of Hovenden, Annals, 1175. The destruction of wild birds in Ireland has been wholesale. In a Parliament held in 1480 duties were imposed on the export of hawks and falcons to restrain the carrying of them out of the land. Even at that date they were in danger of becoming extinct. The last golden eagle was shot at Killarney only some forty years ago.

In case any of the chiefs should rebel against the King or against Rory or refuse to pay tribute, the King of Connacht was authorized to judge them, and if necessary to remove them from their possessions, to be helped therein by the King's Constable of Ireland. Two years later, in 1177, a council was convened at Waterford, and the solemn compact of Windsor was renewed in the presence of the Papal legate, Cardinal Vivianus, "who openly showed the King's right to Ireland" and enforced it by a threat of Papal excommunication against all who should refuse obedience to Henry's authority. Thus in a series of explicit steps the office of overlord was confirmed to the King of England. Into the hands of the new overlord Rory and his successors placed their hostages in token of homage and fidelity, as formerly they had been committed to the Aird-ri. Rory's own hostage was his son, and it was while conducting him to Normandy in November 1180, to place him in Henry's keeping, that Archbishop O'Toole fell ill in the monastery of Eu and died there.[16]

[16] The common idea that Rory was ignorant of the import of his acts cannot be maintained. For some years he had considered the matter before sending his son as hostage. His adviser, Laurence O'Toole, was one of the most able and learned, as well as devout, prelates of the day, and fully qualified to deal with State affairs.

When exhorted by the monks of Eu to make his will, "God knows," he said, "out of all my revenues I have not a coin to bequeath." It was at the Council of Waterford that the much-disputed and misnamed "Bull" of Pope Adrian was first brought forward, conferring on Henry II the papal approval of his expedition to Ireland, and the right of dominion over the island. It was given in accordance with the general claim made by the Popes over all islands, which it was believed were under the special protection of the Papal See, and was conditional on his promise to endeavour to reduce the country to social and ecclesiastical order. Pope Adrian, who was an Englishman, bade the King of England go forth to the conquest "for the enlargement of the Church's borders, for the restraint of vice, the correction of morals and the planting of virtue, the increase of the Christian religion, and whatsoever may tend to God's glory and the well-being of that land." Shortly before, Pope Alexander II had given his approval in a similar manner to William I on his Norman conquest of England. In September 1172 the then Pope, Alexander III, also had given his benediction to the enterprise in Ireland in three letters, couched in very similar terms, to the King himself, to the Legate of the Apostolic See in Ireland with the archbishops and bishops, and to the kings and princes of Ireland, exhorting obedience to the sovereign, and saying that "he has learned with joy that they have taken Henry as their king." He commanded the prelates to assist Henry in his government of Ireland, and to smite with ecclesiastical censures any of its kings, princes, and people who shall dare to violate the oath of fidelity they have sworn." [17] Thus, supported by Papal authority, the Synod of Cashel met some time in 1172, soon after the departure of Henry, under the presidency of Christian O'Conarchy, Bishop of Lismore and Papal Legate; Gelasius (Gilla MacLiag), the Primate, being too far advanced in age to be present, though he later travelled to Dublin to express his approval of the measures passed. These chiefly made for Church discipline and for the contract and observance of lawful marriages; and the prelates took their first step in the Anglicizing Church policy afterward pursued by ordering that all divine offices should be celebrated according to the forms of the Anglican Church, "for it is right and just that as Ireland has received her lord and king from England she should accept reformation from the same source." Though several Irish bishops were present no voice was raised in dissent, and thus, approved and supported by ecclesiastical as well as secular authority, began the rule of England over Ireland.[18]

[17] Sweetman, Calendar of Documents, 1, No. 38.

[18] Gesta Henrici, i, 28; Roger of Hovenden, ed. W. Stubbs, ii, 31.

It must be allowed that the claim of the English kings to govern Ireland was at least as good as that by which any European monarch held his throne. The excuse provided by the invitation of Dermot to Henry made it even stronger than most of these others. It was better than that by which the Normans held England, which was purely the right of conquest, and in which no general submission of those in power had ever been obtained. Henry or his successors would undoubtedly have attempted the conquest of Ireland at some time; the island lay too close at hand for a people who had conquered large parts of Western Europe to remain indifferent to it, and we have seen that to acquire Ireland had been long projected in Henry's mind. The circumstances under which the new relations began were auspicious; but the retirement of the King placed the centre of authority at a distance, and the English monarchs were forced to leave the actual power in the hands of the ambitious Norman nobles who ruled in their name on the spot. To them the acquisition of lands and authority was the only object aimed at; and the quarrels of these foreigners among themselves for position and property were not less fierce and persistent than those they carried on with the Irish whose lands they coveted. The Crown could only step in at intervals, and its authority gradually faded into the distance before the always present domination of the barons, which soon developed into semi-independence; it became a matter of individual choice with them whether they became Irish and renounced their allegiance to the English Crown or whether they remained English and strangers in their adopted country. Thus a sense of division which no length of time has healed, sprang up from the beginning; neither good rule nor bad rule served to lessen it in the eyes of a considerable section of the people; to the native Irish the English remained a foreign nation, whose right was disputed, and whose rule was accepted only through necessity. They continued to be looked upon as interlopers.

A permanent result of the visit of Henry II to Dublin was the giving of a charter conferring that city on the inhabitants of Bristol, the town which had most cordially aided the King and Dermot MacMorrogh in raising troops for the Irish undertaking. This remarkable charter, the oldest municipal document relating to any Irish town, is the first of seven original extant charters of dates between 1172 and 1320 concerning Dublin issued by English kings. It was designed to bring to an end the Norse authority over the Irish capital, and to transfer the city definitely under English control. Up to this time the Norse rulers still looked upon it as the capital of their Irish dominions; though for some time back this assumption of authority had been challenged by the Irish princes of Leinster who had never abandoned their claims on Dublin as part of their possessions, so that we find both Irish and Norse governors styled kings of Dublin. Up to the arrival of the Normans all the larger towns were occupied chiefly by Danes or Norse, and had Danish or Norse governors. We have seen that when Miles de Cogan entered the city the governor of the capital was Asgall, or Asculf, son of Ragnall mac Torcaill, and that he fled away by sea. He is sometimes called king, but Ragnall, his father, is styled Mór Maer, or High Steward of Dublin, the latter title being probably a more correct designation; Asgall was taken and beheaded by the English in 1171, after a battle fought "on the green of Dublin" between de Cogan and Tiernan O'Rorke accompanied by the men of Meath and the Danish troops.[19] Henry, when making his grants to his barons, expressly retained in his own hands the Danish towns with some part of the surrounding districts.

[19] Annals of the Four Masters, 1171; Annals of Loch Ce, at same date; Giraldus Cambrensis, Conquest of Ireland, Bk. I, ch. xxi.

He designed to attach them directly to the Crown, and to make them centres of English influence, which, in fact, they remained through centuries. By the Bristol charter,[20] which gave to Bristol men settling in Dublin all the privileges possessed by them at home, he encouraged merchants of that city, doubtless old traders between the two towns, to come over and establish themselves in Ireland; the charter was enlarged in 1174, and gave to the burgesses of the capital liberty to transact business throughout the entire land of England, Normandy, Wales, and Ireland, free of any toll or customs whatever, and these privileges were confirmed more than once in the reign of King John. The giving of the Bristol charter was followed by a large influx of merchants from all parts of England, Scotland, South Wales, and even from Flanders, Brabant, and France. An old list of names of citizens shows that towns as far separated from each other as Edinburgh, Lincoln, Cardiff, and Cirencester, contributed their quota to the inhabitants of Dublin as tailors, mercers, spicers, goldsmiths, and followers of many other occupations. They formed themselves into merchant guilds, and carried on an active trade during the thirteenth century in corn,[21] cattle, and derivative products; live stock, fish, and skins; silk and cloth of gold; English and Irish and foreign cloth, worsted, linen, and the thick Irish mantle or 'falaing,' as well as iron, brass, steel, glass, lead, and timber. Irish products were on sale in England and abroad in 1207; a 'tymbre' of forty Irish marten-skins was ordained by Philippe Auguste to be furnished by merchants coming from Ireland to the port of Rouen; and both peltry and silk from Ireland paid tolls in Paris in the thirteenth century; while droguet, or drugget, is said to have taken its name from Drogheda.[22]

[20] Sir John Gilbert, Historical and Municipal Documents of Ireland (1870) charters of 1171 and 1185, at pp. 1, 2, 49.

[21] For the mention of large shipments of corn to France, see Gilbert, Facsimiles of National Manuscripts, Pt. II, No. LXXXIII; to England, Sweetman, Calendar, 1, Nos. 756, 1052, 1055, etc.; to Galloway and the Isles, ibid., No. 1040.

[22] Francisque Michel, Recherches sur le commerce des étoffes de soie (Paris, 1854), ii, 244.

Of these merchants a fair proportion came from Bristol, several of them becoming free citizens between 1225 and 1250, and holding posts of distinction such as those of Provost and Mayor of Dublin. As time went on, the old Scandinavian inhabitants were pushed out, and they settled on the north side of the Liffey in a suburb which became known as Villa Ostmannorum (later corrupted into Oxmantown),[23] similar settlements being made in Cork, Waterford, and Limerick, as the English colony increased in number in these cities. Though they are seldom named in charters, they kept a firm hold over trade, and they were associated by King John in an inquiry held in Dublin in 1215. One Richard Olaf was Keeper of the Exchange of the King of England in the reign of Edward I. In Waterford, a charter of denization was granted by Henry II, and later confirmed by Edward I, to certain old Ostman inhabitants of the town, and Ostman jurors served on inquisitions in all the old Danish cities. In Limerick, which long continued to be mainly a Danish town, twelve English and an equal number of Ostmen and Irish jurors took part in an inquisition as to the property of the See of Limerick, taken by William de Burgh in 1202. The cantred of the Ostmen in that town lay on both sides of the Shannon, and under its first charter the Provost was a Syward.

[23] Ostman, or Eastman, became a general title for the Scandinavian inhabitants about this time, and included all these nationalities.

In 1200 the King still retained in his own hands "the cantred of the Ostmen and the Holy Isle," when he granted the custody of the city to William de Braose. In these civic communities the Irish had no legal part unless they became Anglicized, though the fact that they acted as jurors in equal numbers with English and Danes in Limerick shows that they took more part in civic affairs than is generally supposed. There was constant traffic between them and the English settlers in the towns, as the list of native commodities proves; but the frequent changes of name at this time make attempts at identification impossible. Numbers of the sons of Irish chiefs were called by Norse names, Olaf, Sitric, Magnus, etc.; even Dermot MacMorrogh called his son Cnut. The Irish no doubt found it more convenient to trade with the newcomers under Norman or English names. An example of this is furnished by the deed of Anglicization of an Irish-born merchant of Dublin who called himself Robert de Bree. He only secured his charter of Anglicization in the reign of Edward I, but he held considerable properties in the city, and his descendants intermarried with leading citizens. There must have been many similar cases. The privileges of Dublin were enlarged both under Prince John and Henry III, and were extended to other towns. Traders who were not citizens might not tarry in Dublin beyond forty days, nor buy corn, wool, and hides except from citizens. They could not sell cloth by retail, nor keep wineshops except on shipboard.[24] The import of wine was very large and brought in a good revenue to the kings.

[24] Gilbert, Historical and Municipal Documents of Ireland (1870), charter of 1192, p. 51.

In pre-Norman days the principal drink seems still to have been mead or ale, though there had been a trade in French wines from the earliest times. When Kincora was burned down in 1107 it is recorded that sixty keeves, or vats, of mead and ale ('brogoid' or 'bragget') were destroyed. Later on, wine became more common, and we learn that when the army of Edward Bruce entered Dundalk in 1315 the abundance of wine found there made it difficult for him to keep his men in hand. English weights and measures were introduced into Ireland early in the thirteenth century, though the old Irish 'crannock,' or wicker basket, was still used as a measure; and strong walls and forts and good bridges were proceeded with, special aids of money being subscribed by the townsmen of Dublin and Drogheda for the purpose. The Dublin mayoralty was established in 1229. Annual fairs were permitted in all the chief cities for eight days each, and the afterward notorious Donnybrook Fair became the chief annual market for Dublin.

Merchants of Lucca seem to have been specially active in the Irish trade. They are frequently mentioned. In 1291 a petition was sent in by the company of Richardi of Lucca, praying for relief. They complained that they had been unlawfully seized by the King's Treasurer and his agents at Ross, Waterford, Limerick, Kilkenny, Youghal, and Cork, and imprisoned with confiscation of their goods. These Lucca merchants were money-lenders on a large scale.[25] But the forced prisages as loans taken from merchants became very oppressive, and in 1220 it was complained that the cities had become so impoverished by them that merchants hesitated to bring their merchandise thither. Dublin had become "odious to traders."

[25] Gilbert, Facsimiles of National Manuscripts, Pt. II, No. LXXXI.

We must return to the date of King Henry's departure for England. Neither to the Irish nor to the Norman knights left behind him was there any finality in Henry's 'conquest.' His last acts before his departure put an end to all hope of this He made a new disposition of the lands and offices of his grantees, plainly designed to weaken the power of Earl Richard and to divide the Geraldines. It was the first step in that policy of keeping the Norman colony weak and separated in order to preserve the distant influence of the Crown that was to prove in later days so frequent a source of demoralization to the settlers. Nothing, as we may well believe, could have prevented the ambitious and restless Norman barons who had reached the extreme westerly coasts of Wales from ultimately crossing to the country which on a fine day they could see distinctly from the opposite headlands. It became, therefore, the plain policy of the King either to support his vassals and bind them to the Crown by fair treatment, or to let them set up semi-independent, strong principalities of their own. But he did neither. He granted all Meath to Hugh de Lacy [26] by service of fifty knights, and made him Constable of Dublin, passing over Strongbow; the gallant Miles de Cogan he took with him to Wales, where Raymond le Gros, who had been refused Earl Richard's sister in marriage, soon followed him. His retention in his own hands of the coast towns, and of a strip of land on the Wicklow shore, was plainly designed to keep Strongbow in check and to weaken his power. On another of his nobles, the afterward famous John de Courcy, Henry, after the manner of many earlier Norman grants, bestowed Ulster "if he could conquer it." These are new names—barons who had come over with Henry and who had borne none of the struggles of the first-comers—and though de Courcy and de Lacy proved to be among the ablest of Henry's settlers and the best fitted for the work in hand, their appointments must have been received with chagrin by their predecessors.

[26] The de Lacys took their name from their property in Normandy. The first baron had fought with William the Conqueror at Hastings, and received in reward a grant of land in the Welsh Marches. Hugh was the fifth baron. The family estates included Ewyas Lacy, Stanton Lacy, and Ludlow Castle. One of the family founded Llanthony Abbey.

That the King, although he appeared to slight Strongbow, had not lost faith in him is shown by his sending for him and de Lacy shortly afterward to Normandy to aid him in his troubles with his rebellious sons. With them went many of the veteran troops that had served in Ireland to fight for the King, apparently with Irish followers, against the Earl of Leicester and the King of Scotland. Earl Richard's prompt obedience and valuable help restored him to favour, and he was shortly afterward sent back to Leinster, granted Wexford and the castle of Wicklow, and appointed to the custody of the coast towns. Strongbow returned none too soon; during his absence the country had risen in revolt against the new lords. Tiernan O'Rorke, who saw the castles of de Lacy advancing farther west and the foreigners pushing their way into his country, demanded redress. A meeting had been arranged at Tlachtgha, or the "Hill of Ward," near Athboy, in Meath, at which Tiernan attended with a large following. While the discussion was going on between him and de Lacy the latter was surrounded and would have been killed but that his bodyguard, who suspected treachery, had lingered within sight on the pretence of tilting in the French fashion, and came up to his rescue. One of them ran his spear through O'Rorke and the horse he was mounting, slaying at the same time three of his clansmen who at the risk of their lives had brought him his horse. This is the English version of the old chief's death. The Irish accounts say that he was treacherously slain by Hugh and Donal O'Rorke, members of his own family. His head was cut off and sent to the King in England, and his body was hung, feet upward, on the north side of Dublin. This was the first of those horrible exhibitions which defaced the walls and castle-gates of Dublin from century to century. With the country in revolt, and confronted with the prospect of his troops throwing down their arms and returning to Wales, Strongbow bethought him of Raymond le Gros. The troops roundly declared they would fight under no other leader. Raymond's cheerful easy temperament made him the favourite of his men. His care for his army was such that he would pass whole nights without sleep, taking the rounds himself to see that all was well in the camp, and though his stoutness brought him the nickname of "le Gros" his activity prevented this from being an encumbrance. In war he was prudent as well as fearless, and he thought more of the welfare of his men than of being their commander. They liked a general who allowed them to carry off booty and to raid at will. Hervey de Montmaurice, who had been placed in command of the forces on Raymond's withdrawal to Wales, was a very different man. He was no soldier, and his only thought in joining the expedition to Ireland had been to repair his broken fortunes. He was the rival and bitter enemy of Raymond, a cruel and ruthless man, who, when Raymond had pleaded for mercy, insisted (in the early days of the invasion) on throwing the unfortunate citizens of Waterford over the cliff.

Strongbow now sent for Raymond, promising that he would at last give him his sister if he would come over at once to his aid.

The most notable of Raymond's exploits was the capture of Limerick in October 1175. The events that led up to this expedition had occurred during the absence of Raymond in Wales; and to understand it we must revert to the condition of things in Munster. The family of the O'Briens, which had attained its greatest power during the century and a quarter between the reigns of King Brian and Murtogh Mór (d. 1119), was now represented by Donal O'Brien, who had made submission to Henry on his landing, owing perhaps to his alliance with Dermot MacMorrogh. Donal had married Dermot's daughter, resigning at the same time the city of Limerick into his hands. But no sooner was Henry back in England than the South rose in revolt, Dermot MacCarthy recapturing Cork, from which the English garrison had been withdrawn, and Donal O'Brien repossessing himself of Limerick. Hervey de Montmaurice saw in these moves an occasion to recover his waning popularity. He induced Strongbow to join him in an expedition against Munster, and called the Danes of Dublin to their aid. Rory O'Conor, hearing of the coming struggle, advanced into Ormond to the assistance of his former foe, O'Brien, who flung himself with his whole strength between the army of Strongbow and the advancing Danes from Dublin. He was completely successful in his manoeuvre. The English forces suffered their first considerable defeat at the pass of Thurles (Co. Tipperary) (1174), and left four of the leaders and a large number of men dead on the field.[27] Strongbow shut himself up in the fort of Waterford, while several of the Leinster princes, who had given in their submissions, headed by Donal Kavanagh, a natural son of Dermot MacMorrogh, declared against the English.

[27] The different authorities give accounts of this battle varying in some details.

In the North Rory was putting forth all his efforts to rouse the princes of Ulster to make common cause with the South. Raymond arrived in Ireland to find the Earl shut up in Waterford and the citizens threatening to massacre every Englishman they could lay hands on. His old troops, too, had broken out and had restored their spirits by a raid into Offaly, from which they returned with new mounts and an immense booty of food and plunder, fighting their way by sea through an attack by the ships of Cork, and sailing into Waterford Harbour with the captive vessels in tow. In the city Strongbow still held out in Reginald's Tower with the remnant of his garrison. Having relieved the Earl, and fought his way through with him to Wexford, Raymond demanded the fulfilment of the promises made to him, and messengers were dispatched in great haste to Dublin to bring Basilia, Strongbow's sister, to whom Raymond was married straightway with great festivities. In the midst of the wedding feast news was brought that Rory of Connacht had raided Meath right up to the walls of Dublin. "Forgetting wine and love," Raymond sprang to arms, but, before he could reach Meath, Rory, who had previously had experience of Raymond's furious onslaughts, prudently retired to his own country. For a time all was quiet. Raymond occupied himself in rebuilding the Meath castles which Rory had razed to the ground, while Strongbow and Hugh de Lacy set about the work of parcelling out the provinces of Leinster and Meath among their followers on a fixed feudal tenure which ignored completely the rights of the original inhabitants. Each of the new owners endeavoured to sustain himself in his possessions by building castles and forts in which he could lie entrenched against attack. At first the forts were mere erections of wood or earth, with wooden stockades, but gradually these gave way to massive and imposing buildings of stone, the remains of which are still to be seen wherever the Normans settled. Earl Richard's own castle at Kildare, Hugh Tyrrell's great fortress at Trim, Maurice FitzGerald's stronghold at Naas, of which the outlines still remain, are only examples of the solid fastnesses in which the barons entrenched themselves all over the East of Ireland. Some of the grants then made became permanent; such was that of Howth to St Laurent, which has been held by his heirs the St Lawrences as Barons or Earls of Howth in direct descent to the present day.

Donal O'Brien had celebrated his great victory at Thurles by an orgy of frightful atrocities on members of his own family, with the object of removing out of his way all possible competitors to the throne of Munster. He blinded two of his nearest relations, one of whom died soon after, and put two neighbouring princes to death. So great were his crimes that Rory O'Conor descended on Thomond and drove out O'Brien, who, in revenge, laid siege to the city of Limerick, where the garrison was ill-provided with food. Hearing of its condition, Raymond flew to the relief of the city. It was a hazardous expedition, for the town was now surrounded by a wall and dike, as well as by the strong waters of the Shannon. But Raymond had with him the intrepid Meiler FitzHenry, whom no force could daunt, and Donal MacGillapatrick, King of Ossory, whose services Raymond accepted with some mistrust, but who pledged his faith to commit no deceit or treachery against him and to conduct him safely to Limerick. When they arrived before the town they found the river so swollen by the winter rains that the ford was impassable. Two young soldiers plunged on horseback into the rushing stream, but one was carried away by the torrent, and no one seemed disposed to attempt to join the survivor on the opposite bank. Nevertheless, Meiler, spurring his horse, dashed furiously into the river. He managed to brave the flood, and crossed safely to the far shore, though attacked on all sides by the stones and darts of the Irish, which he warded off as well as he could with his helmet and shield. Raymond, seeing the danger to his friend, in great agitation called on his troops to follow him as he plunged into the river. They crossed with few losses, and drove back the enemy within the walls. They then followed them up and entered behind them, taking the town by assault, enriching themselves with a great spoil. Having placed the command of the town in the hands of his cousin, Miles de Cogan, Raymond returned into Leinster.

During his absence Raymond's crafty enemy Hervey de Montmaurice had been using his opportunity to undermine his influence with the King. He misrepresented his actions and assured Henry that Raymond was aiming not only at the dominion of Limerick, but at the sovereignty of Ireland. Raymond found himself faced with a recall to England; but, while he was preparing to obey, hurried messengers from Limerick arrived with the intelligence that the town was once more blockaded by a vast army under Donal O'Brien and that all the stores were exhausted; they implored that immediate help might be sent. Again the troops declared that except under Raymond's command they would not move, and in this strait, after consulting with the commissioners sent by the King to recall him, Raymond consented to lead the relief party, which consisted of some eighty knights and five hundred trained troops, with Irish contingents from Ossory and Wexford. On their way they learned that O'Brien had raised the siege and was awaiting them behind a strongly fortified and entrenched rampart at the pass of Cashel. On this spot the Prince of Ossory, whose kinsman O'Brien had murdered, made an ominous speech to the small body of Norman troops whom he was accompanying: "Brave soldiers," he proclaimed, "and conquerors of this island,...look well to yourselves, for if we find your ranks give way, which God forbid, it may chance that, in conjunction with the enemy, our Irish battleaxes may be turned against you. It is our custom to side with the winning party and to fall on those who run away. Trust to us, therefore, but only while you are conquerors." Spurred to action, as was intended by this threat, Meiler, who led the van, rushed like a whirlwind upon the enemy, cutting them down right and left, and forcing his way through with great slaughter. They entered Limerick, restored order, and held a lengthy conference with O'Brien and Rory O'Conor outside the city near Killaloe, in which these princes renewed their fealty to the English King and gave hostages for their obedience. Raymond also received a fresh submission from MacCarthy of Desmond in return for his help in replacing him on his throne, from which his own son had ejected him. Raymond accepted for his service to this prince a valuable grant of land in Kerry, which has ever since remained in the hands of a branch of the FitzGerald family, who hold the title of Knights of Kerry.

While Raymond was so occupied a secret letter from his wife, Basilia, was put into his hand. It ran thus: "Be it known to your sincere love that the great jaw-tooth which of late gave me so much trouble has just dropped out. Wherefore, if thou hast any regard for thyself or me, delay not thy return." He recognized in the cryptic message an intimation that her brother, Earl Richard, who had never approved of her marriage to Raymond le Gros, was dead. He had been very sick when Raymond left Dublin. Raymond hastened his return, and all arrangements for the burial of the Earl in the new Cathedral of the Holy Trinity were made before the news became generally known, and Richard de Clare was laid to rest under a stately tomb by Archbishop Laurence O'Toole in June 1176. So long as Strongbow lived and was present on his lands quiet seems to have prevailed. He was rather a statesman than a soldier of fortune, and his marriage with an Irish wife shows that he had definitely thrown in his lot with Ireland. His natural successor was Raymond le Gros, but the King's jealousy of the brilliant services he had performed, and the favour with which he was regarded, again stood in the way of his advancement. His recall was not waived, and he was allowed to leave Ireland, after the resignation of his offices. A noble, closely attached to the King's interests and allied to him by blood, William FitzAudelin, was sent over in his place, thus once more proving Henry's purpose to strengthen the authority of the Crown at the expense of that of his barons.

Meanwhile in Limerick things had not gone well. On his departure Raymond had committed the government of the town into the hands of O'Brien, as a baron of the King who had just renewed his oath of fealty and given his solemn promise to keep the peace. But hardly had Raymond evacuated the town than O'Brien cut down the bridge over the Shannon behind the departing troops, and, looking back, Raymond saw the city flaming in every quarter, the fierce descendant of Brian Boromhe having declared that Limerick should no longer be "a nest for foreigners." When the news of the taking of Limerick was reported to King Henry he shrewdly said: "The attack on Limerick was a bold adventure; greater still its relief; but only in its evacuation was there wisdom."

The man whom Henry sent over to replace Raymond was of very different character. FitzAudelin [28] is said by Gerald of Wales to have been a smooth and courtier-like man, but crafty as a snake in the grass. Whom he honoured one day he calumniated the next; a man who never, in the course of his tours of inspection, neglected his own interests, or failed to collect all the gold he could lay hands upon. Gerald displays a natural anger against a man who came over with the fixed intention of ruining the family of the Geraldines, but his prejudices are shown to have been well merited by all FitzAudelin's acts. One of the first incidents recorded of him on his arrival at Wexford, where Raymond le Gros awaited his coming in order to hand over the Sword of State, shows him in his true character. Seeing Raymond and Meiler on horseback surrounded by their followers all in polished armour and with the same Geraldine device upon their shields, he whispered to his friends, "I will bring all this bravery to a speedy end; those shields shall soon be scattered." Raymond, however, with apparent cordiality, offered him his congratulations, embracing him in a friendly manner and placing his official positions in his hands, retaining only his own personal baronies and those of Fotherd and Odrone in Carlow, which came to him with his wife. This is the last we hear of the most brilliant of the adventurers. With FitzAudelin came a group of twenty knights, and John de Courcy, Robert FitzStephen, and Miles de Cogan were ordered to attend him, each with a train of ten knights. About the same time Hugh de Lacy, who had long been sharing the King's wars in France, seems to have returned to Ireland, and his grant of Meath was confirmed to him with additions in Offaly, Kildare, and Wicklow. Hugh de Lacy was a great castle-builder, and his memory is chiefly preserved on account of the numerous moats, or forts, built by him to secure Meath and Leinster to the Norman lords.

[28] Wilham FitzAudelin and William de Burgh, who founded the family of the de Burghs, or Burgos, are often confused. They do not seem to have been Jdentical, though of the same family, FitzAudelin's ancestor, Arlotta, mother of the Conqueror, having married a de Burgh. Later the de Burghs became known as Burkes.

Castles were erected by him at Clonard, Kells, Kildare, and probably Drogheda; while Castleknock near Dublin, Granard on the borders of Breifne (Co. Longford) and other moats were the work of his feudatories. Among the later grantees he was the wisest ruler, a man of firm and steadfast character, very attentive both to his private affairs and to the administration of his province. He was not attractive in appearance, being short and ill-proportioned, with a swarthy complexion and black, sunken eyes; nor was he a successful commander. In private life he is said to have been avaricious and of lax morals. But, unlike the other Norman lords, he recalled the peasants who had been violently driven out, reinstated them on their lands, and ruled them with a firm and gentle hand. The unoccupied districts became cultivated and stocked with herds of cattle.

Quiet and order reigned in his territories, and he won the hearts of the Irish people and drew around him their native leaders, as none other of the newcomers had done. Like Strongbow, he showed his intention of throwing in his lot with his adopted country by marrying in 1180 an Irish wife, Rose, daughter of King Rory O'Conor of Connacht. He had previously been married to another Rose "of Monmouth" {Roysya de Monemue), by whom he had two sons, Walter and Hugh, who succeeded him in the Lordship of Meath. As the marriage of Strongbow to Eva had aroused the anger and suspicions of Henry, so that of de Lacy to Rose O'Conor, which had been carried through without asking his licence, moved him to jealousy.[29] Again a whisper went about that Hugh intended to make himself King of Ireland, and the strong fortresses that he was building all over his territories gave strength to the rumour. He had been appointed Constable or Governor, of Dublin in 1178, but in the midst of his work of settlement he was twice recalled, being finally superseded in 1184, when the King sent his son, Prince John, to Ireland But he remained in the country, continuing the erection of castles at every point of vantage, until an abrupt end was put to his career. He was out inspecting a new castle that he was building at Durrow, near the borders of Westmeath, beside or on the site of one of St Columcille's most famous monasteries when a youth whom he was superintending suddenly, as he stooped to show him how to work, struck off his head with one blow of his axe, having been instructed to perform the act by his foster-father, the chief of the O'Caharnys of Teffia. The desecration of so sacred a spot may have also inflamed the mind of the young peasant. Thus fell one of the best of the invaders, and we learn that Henry, on hearing the news, "rejoiced thereat." [30] The result of Hugh's efforts was that by 1186 "Meath from the Shannon to the sea was full of castles of foreigners." and Grace's Annals add that "the subjugation of Ireland went no further."

[29] The marriage is said to have been "according to that country's custom" (secundum morem patriae illius). Rose's eldest son, William Gorm, married a daughter of Llewelyn, Prince of Wales, and was killed in 1233 fighting with Cathal O'Reilly. The Lynches of Galway and Pierce Oge Lacy, the famous rebel of Elizabeth's day, were descended from him. Her other sons seem to have adopted the name of le Blund. Rose was still alive in 1224.

[30] Chronicle of William of Newburgh, ed. Thomas Hearne, 1, 285; Annals of Loch Ce, and Grace, Annales Hiberniae, 1186.

Among other sweeping grants made by Henry quite irrespective of the claims of the ruling princes were those of "the kingdom of Cork from Cape St Brandon [in Kerry] to the river Blackwater [in Waterford]," for the service of sixty knights, to Robert FitzStephen and Miles de Cogan, except the city of Cork, which the King retained in his own hands; and the equally extensive grant of the kingdom of Limerick, again excepting the city, to Herbert FitzHerbert and others. These grants did not take immediate effect, as the grantees declared that the country had not been conquered and was not subject to the King. They slowly set about taking possession of portions of these territories, but the fickleness of the King, who from time to time apportioned the same lands to different barons whom for the moment he wished to honour, made the settlement of the South impossible. The city of Limerick, especially, was kept in perpetual turmoil by the family of de Braose, to whom it was afterward (1203) granted for a large annual payment, which was seldom forthcoming; the squalid story of his wrangles with the authorities ended in miserable tragedy.[31] Miles de Cogan and Ralph FitzStephen retained some properties in Cork and Limerick, and endeavoured to extend them by speculative grants to their followers; but they fell victims to a treacherous assault upon their party by MacTire, chief of Imokilly, at a parley held near Lismore in 1182. The Barrys, de Prendergasts, and de Carews took land about this time, and the Geraldines, of whom Maurice FitzGerald was the head, were destined to become the great and unhappy line of the Earls of Desmond. Many of the massive castles which were to be scenes of sieges during the wars of Elizabeth's reign date from the end of the twelfth and the thirteenth century, such as Askeaton, Shanid, and Croom, Adare and Grene (or Pallas Green). Eventually all belonged to the Desmond family.

[31] Sweetman, op. cit., 1, Nos. 146, 235, 271, etc.

In the North also matters were stirring. John de Courcy had returned to Ireland among the advisers of FitzAudelin. This man, whose great stature, strong and muscular limbs, and love of fighting, marked him out as a born warrior, became from his exploits the centre of the most extravagant legends, so that it is now difficult to disentangle truth from fiction. Men told how, in later days, after he had been captured by Hugh de Lacy the Younger in 1202, King John sent for him from the Tower of London, where he had been long immured, and brought him over to France to fight on his behalf against a chosen champion of the King of France, whom no one dared approach. But the champion, on seeing the immense frame and grim aspect of the man opposed to him, was seized with terror and took to flight. De Courcy, in order to let off his ire, is said to have set up a helmet and coat of mail on a wooden block, and to have struck his sword clean through it, the weapon sinking so deep into the wood that no one could withdraw it. When asked by the princes why he had looked so terrible before he struck the blow, he replied "By St Patrick of Down in Ireland, if I had missed my purpose in striking this stroke, I would have slain both of you kings and as many as I could more, for the old sores I have felt at your hands." [32] Such a man was the conqueror of Ulster. The "stalwart doings" or gestes of this mighty warrior are related at length in the Book of Howth, and the narrative of the affection between him and the lord of Howth, Sir Amory St Laurent, and of their deeds together reads like one of the romances of the Round Table.[33] He was so eager for a fight that when he was in command he was apt to forget his duties as a leader, and to charge forward impetuously at the head of his troops; but in private life he was sober and modest, "giving God the glory of his victories."

[32] Book of Howth, in Carew, Miscellany, p. 114.

[33] Ibid., pp. 80-94.

It was natural that two men so unlike as FitzAudelin and de Courcy should not agree well together. The guile and smooth speech of the Governor, at once a bully and a coward, revolted the blunt soldier, and he determined to carve out an independent career for himself. Recalling Henry's former grant to him of Ulster "if he could take it," he gathered around him a little band of twenty-two men-at-arms and three hundred common soldiers, who were complaining in the garrison of Dublin of want of pay and provisions, and boldly set out on his raid upon Ulster. The attempt to force his way into a country which had hitherto resisted all efforts of the English to set foot in it, and which had maintained an independent position even in the native wars, seemed like an act of knight-errantry, but in spite of its hardihood it was destined to succeed. Men recalled the old saying: "A white knight sitting on a white horse and having birds on his shield shall be the first to enter Ulster by force of arms." John fulfilled the prophecy in every detail. Fair, and riding a white steed, he bore on his shield the device of three griphs or geires gules, crowned or. The resemblance was possibly not wholly accidental; de Courcy may have heard the tradition.[34] On the morning of his fourth day's march he entered the city of Down without opposition, the King, Roderick MacDonlevy, who was taken completely by surprise, having made a hasty flight before him.

[34] De Courcy is said to have kept a book of the prophecies of St Columcille constantly by him.

Down was an important ecclesiastical centre, the burial-place, as was commonly supposed, not only of St Patrick, but of St Brigit and St Columcille. It was the capital of Eastern Ulster, and quite independent of the princedoms of Tyrone and Tyrconnel. Its cathedral stood on a height, and below lay the marshlands of the river Quoile, west of Strangford Lough. At the moment of de Courcy's raid the Papal legate, Vivianus, had arrived in the city from Scotland and the Isle of Man. He attempted mediation between the combatants, but, all efforts failing, he advised the Irish to fight for their native land and heartened them with his blessing and prayers. Thus encouraged, the King of East Ulster sent to all parts to assemble forces. Within eight days ten thousand warlike men gathered round him, the men of the North being, as Gerald says, more truculent than those of the South. Distrusting the weak fort which was all the defence the city offered, de Courcy descended to the swampy marshes near the seashore. The battle must have been fought almost on the same spot as that on which King Magnus Barelegs fell seventy-four years before. A terrific struggle ensued. John was seen on every part of the field with flourished sword, "with one stroke lopping off heads, with another arms." As with the Norse in the earlier battle of Down, the vast multitudes of the Irish troops found it difficult to manoeuvre in the narrow dykes between the bogs, and great numbers fell as they tried to make their escape along the shore; they sank in the quicksands as their pursuers pressed them forward through water dyed with blood. Report said that this also had been foretold. A superstitious dread accompanied every action of de Courcy's little force, no doubt tending to ensure its victory. The battle was fought in 1177, and the Normans were completely victorious. In another battle contested shortly afterward on the same spot, in which the O'Neills joined the Irish forces, accompanied by the Primate of Armagh and many clergy with their sacred relics, the same result followed, even the precious Book of Armagh falling into de Courcy's hands. The book was restored, but the relics were captured and many of the clergy slain. De Courcy showed his interest in the Irish traditions of Down, which became his capital, by inviting Jocelyn, a monk of Furness Abbey in Lancashire, to write a life of St Patrick. This work is still extant. Gradually, in spite of some checks, de Courcy pushed forward his conquests, till nearly all Eastern Ulster was in his hands. His territory included Down and Antrim, which he ruled like an independent prince, free from the interference of king or viceroy. He strengthened his position by his marriage with Affreca, daughter of Godred, King of Man; and when in 1204 he was driven out by Hugh de Lacy the Younger the King of Man came to his assistance. He coined his own money, extended his moat-castles over the country, and made munificent benefactions to the churches and abbeys which he founded For twenty years Uladh seems to have been at peace under his strong rule.

But though de Courcy succeeded in establishing himself in Eastern Ulster he was by no means uniformly fortunate in the field. His worst defeats were in his wars in Connacht, and to understand them we must take up the history of that province from the date of King Rory's submission to Henry at the Council of Windsor in 1175. Having sent his son to England as hostage for his fidelity and wedded his daughter Rose to Hugh de Lacy, Rory might well have expected quiet in his old age. But revolts in his own family put an end to all hope of this. Already, in 1177, his son Murtogh had led an army into Connacht with the help of Miles de Cogan and the English, but they had been driven out with the loss of their men. Now his eldest son, Conor Moinmoy, headed a rebellion against him and succeeded in driving him into Munster. This may have been the determining cause of Rory's retirement from the throne into the monastery of Cong, where, except for a short interval when he attempted to regain his kingdom, he remained till his death in 1198. His retirement was the signal for a general war among his sons and grandsons on the one side and his brother, Cathal Crovdearg "of the Red Hand" on the other. Each party was supported by one of the rival Norman barons, who hoped to reap advantages for himself. Cathal of the Red Hand was aided by John de Courcy, and the opposite party, of whom another Cathal, grandson of Rory, was the head, by William de Burgh of Limerick with the O'Briens of Munster. The war between these cousins went on for years, William de Burgh changing sides with surprising facility. Twice Cathal of the Red Hand was banished from the province, but on the death of Cathal Carragh in 1201 he assumed the kingship. At this juncture we find William de Burgh fighting on his side. The story of Cathal Crovdearg is so characteristic of the times that it will be well to tell it more at length.[35]

[35] A full account of the Norman Settlements will be found in Mr. Goddard H. Orpen's Ireland under the Normans, 1169-1233 (1911-20).

END OF CHAPTER V

VI.—THE O'CONORS OF CONNACHT AND THE O'BRIENS OF THOMOND

Cathal Crovdearg was younger brother of Rory, and son of Turlogh Mór O'Conor, the powerful prince whose successful wars against Ulster and Munster had prepared the way for the supremacy of his son. Turlogh built the first three stone castles of Irish Ireland and the first stone bridges over the Shannon and the Suck. He will ever be remembered as the founder of the cathedral of Tuam with its splendid chancel-arch and the unique cross, thirty feet high, which stands beside it. At Clonmacnois, where he is buried, the great belfry was built under his auspices. But more interesting still is the cross of Cong—a magnificent specimen of Irish filigree metal work, inlaid with precious stones. In its centre a polished crystal contained a relic of the wood of the true Cross sent to the King from Rome in 1125, and round it runs the inscription, "A prayer for Turlogh O'Conor, King of Ireland, for whom this shrine was made." He was justly proud of the exquisite workmanship and purpose of this cross, ordering it to be carried in procession throughout Ireland and honoured with the greatest devotion. His reign and that of his sons formed the climax of Connacht's pre-eminence He erected a mint at Clonmacnois for the coinage of silver money, and the arts of peace as well as of war flourished under his rule. The artists who designed and the men who ordered such delicate works of art as the cross of Cong, the Ardagh chalice, or the shrine of St Manchan, all produced by this school, must have been possessed of taste and culture. There had been, from early times in Ireland, families or castes of metal-workers, devoted to their craft, and these may still have existed; but it may have been a daughter of Rory O'Conor who designed the lovely adornments of the chalice of Ardagh, "the silver chalice with a burnishing of gold upon it," which we still admire to-day. She died in 1247 at Clonmacnois. In 1129 a great misfortune occurred. A Dane entered the church of Clonmacnois and stole from the high altar the precious vessels with which it was adorned. These included three gifts bestowed upon the church by King Turlogh: a silver cup with a gold cross over it, a drinking-horn with gold, and a silver chalice, besides a model of Solomon's Temple among other valuables. The thief was taken and executed a year later, and the treasures were restored. [1]

[1] Annals of the Four Masters, 1129.

The story of Cathal of the Red Hand is a romantic one. Tradition says that he was the illegitimate son of Turlogh, whose wife pursued him with such hatred that his mother was obliged to flee with him into Leinster. She also, with a magical charm, turned his hand wine-red. When he grew up he took service with a farmer, always keeping his right hand covered. He was one day reaping rye in a field when a herald passed by, proclaiming that the King of Connacht was dead, and that the people would elect no other successor save Cathal, if he could be found. He would be known, it was said, by his right hand, which was red like wine. For some minutes Cathal Crovdearg stood on the ridge in silent thought. Then, pulling off his glove, he exhibited his hand to the herald, who, recognizing him by his likeness to his father, fell at his feet. Flinging away his sickle on the ridge, the youth exclaimed, "Farewell, sickle; now for the sword." "Cathal's farewell to the rye" is a proverb meaning a farewell never to return.[2]

[2] Annals of the Four Masters, 1224, and note. The story is not alluded to by the O'Conor Don in his history of his family, or by Dr O'Conor. But it follows an old tradition.

According to more historical sources Cathal was the son of Turlogh's second wife, Dervorgil, daughter of O'Lochlan of Ulster, later monarch of Ireland, and thus stepbrother to Rory, Turlogh's successor. Cathal's life was spent in struggles with the members of his own family to maintain himself on the throne. Rory, on his retirement to the monastery of Cong in 1183, had resigned the sovereignty to his son Conor Moinmoy, thus carrying out the English principle of primogeniture. But on his "return from his pilgrimage" in 1185 his son refused to resign the throne, and a general war broke out between the different members of the family, no less than five of whom aspired to the kingship. These were, besides Rory himself, his two sons Conor Moinmoy and Conor O'Dermot; Cathal Carragh, son of Conor Moinmoy; and Cathal Crovdearg, Rory's brother. The inherent weakness of the Irish rule of succession, by which a group of relatives could all claim the kingship, could not be better illustrated. The murder of Conor Moinmoy by his own people in 1189 and the death of Rory in 1198 removed two of the competitors and left the two Cathals face to face to fight out their contest for the throne. A fierce and prolonged struggle ensued, in which the local chiefs, especially Crovdearg's mortal foes the O'Flahertys of West Connacht, took part. It seemed as though the contest would terminate in favour of Cathal Carragh, who was supported by two of the O'Briens and the fierce and ruthless Norman baron William de Burgh, whose combined armies pillaged the province, stripping the priests in the churches, carrying off the women, and plundering the country without pity.[3] Crovdearg, on his side, appealed for help to the O'Neills of Ulster and to John de Courcy. The O'Neills refused to be drawn into the warfare, and Hugh de Lacy the Younger took their place, only to share in a severe defeat at Kilmacduagh, and to escape ignominiously with his allies across Lough Ree back into his own district of Meath. This was in 1202. Finding Cathal and de Courcy both in his power, de Lacy, who was aiming at the downfall of de Courcy, took advantage of his opportunity, arrested both the fugitives, and sent John de Courcy to Dublin, where he was forced to give pledges for obedience to the Government, of which he had hitherto been practically independent.

[3] Annals of Loch Cé, 1200, 1202.

On his release Cathal Crovdearg seems to have thrown himself into the hands of his old enemies, William de Burgh and the O'Briens, who marched with him into Connacht, devastating as they went. Cathal Carragh himself was accidentally killed while watching a fight between his own army and that of his former supporter, de Burgh. But a fearful vengeance fell on de Burgh and his people for their destruction of the province. A rumour was circulated that he had been killed, and one night every man in the province who had any of de Burgh's soldiery quartered in his household rose and murdered his guests, nine hundred in all, so that he returned with a remnant only into Munster. To chastise de Burgh, Meiler FitzHenry, who had become Justiciar of Ireland in 1200, came into Munster with Walter de Lacy; they marched to Limerick and banished de Burgh, handing over the custody of Limerick to William de Braose. William de Burgh was called over to England to answer for complaints made against him by FitzHenry, but he eventually returned to Munster with his castles of Askeaton and Kilfeakle restored to him, though the King retained Connacht in his own hands. William's stormy career came to an end in 1205 or 1206. He had established himself in Munster and is said to have married a daughter of Donal O'Brien to strengthen his connexion there; and he had vigorously exerted himself to make good a vague grant in Connacht made to him by Prince John, first by his war-alliance with Cathal Carragh and, when he died and the cause of Cathal Crovdearg was taken up by the English Government, by going over to the winning side. His actual possessions seem to have been limited to the castle of Meelick, which he had built in Co. Galway, using for the core of his structure the largest church in the place. He made an attempt also to fortify the monastery of Boyle (Ath-da-Larag) and to use it for a barracks, but was interrupted in the course of this work. In later days it frequently became a centre of war and one of the stormiest districts in the whole province. No sense of having desecrated sacred sites seems to have troubled de Burgh in carrying out these schemes. William was the founder of the family of the de Burghs or Burkes, future Earls of Ulster, and of the Burkes of Munster and Connacht, the latter province being regranted to his son Richard in 1222-23.

We must now return to the later history of Cathal Crovdearg and his immediate successors. It was probably at the synod held at Athlone in 1202 under the presidency of the Cardinal John, and soon after the death of his rival, Cathal Carragh, that the claims of Cathal to Connacht were formally ratified. Either then or earlier he had received the regular inauguration of his people, which was still carried out with all the old solemn ceremonial up to the reign of his grandson, Felim, whose chief chronicler, O'Mulconry, has left an interesting account of the ritual at which, in 1315, he acted as the principal official. Twelve bishops and twelve of the greater chieftains must always be present at the ceremony, with representatives of the minor septs. It took place at the huge cairn called Carnfree (Carn Fraoich) on the plains of Rathcrogan, in Co. Roscommon.[4] Only a prince chosen by the suffrages of his people was eligible for this popular election. The Irish steadfastly held to the old habit of selection between candidates who, being born within the limits prescribed by Irish law, were all equally eligible for election to the sovereignty. They knew nothing up to Rory's time of the English system of primogeniture.

[4] Transactions of the Kilkenny Archaeological Society (1852-53), ii, 341-347; Hardiman's edition of O'Flaherty's Iar Connacht (1846), pp. 139-140.

In the long disputes with the turbulent Hugh de Lacy the Younger, Cathal ranged himself on the side of the English King against their common enemy, as he held de Lacy to be. But Prince John's grant to Hugh de Lacy of six cantreds of Connacht on the borders nearest Meath was destined to prove a thorn in the side of Cathal. With his elder brother Walter, Hugh had inherited the rich grant of Meath made to their father, but, not satisfied with this, he aspired also to the rule of Eastern Ulster as well as to the lands in Connacht. In Ulster he spared no effort to dispossess John de Courcy by war and treachery.[5] That brave knight had fallen out of favour, it is said because he took no care to conceal his horror of King John's dastardly murder of his young nephew, Arthur, in Brittany. The King, therefore, was ready to further de Lacy's schemes to bring him to ruin. The brothers de Lacy pursued him into Ulster and two years later, in 1203, they defeated him at the battle of Down, taking him prisoner either in that or the following year. It is said that Hugh's soldiers were so afraid of the great warrior that they dared not attack him in his armour; therefore they fell on him on the Good Friday following the battle, when, unarmed and barefooted, he was making his devotions at the church of St Patrick in Down. With the help of some of his own men, who had been bribed by de Lacy, he was captured after a fight in which he defended himself with a cross-pole until it broke in his hand having killed thirteen of those who attacked him. But when the traitors appeared before de Lacy to claim their reward he had them hanged and their goods plundered. Hugh, however, had achieved his will. On May 2, 1205, he went over to England and in the same month he received a grant of all the lands held by de Courcy in Ulster, with the title of Earl of Ulster, the first Anglo-Norman dignity of which there is a record extant. The later career of de Courcy is something of a mystery.

[5] Hoveden, Annals ed. William Stubbs (1871), iv, 176.

The common story of his imprisonment in the Tower of London, and of his release in order to fight the French champion, may or may not be true. The Annals of Loch Ce (1204) speak of his having been released after being 'crossed' for the Crusades, but it is unlikely that he ever went to Palestine. The Chronicle of Man says that he sought help from his wife's relations in the Isle of Man, and that he returned with a large army and a hundred ships, which sailed up Strangford Lough, but they were surprised by Walter de Lacy and put entirely to rout. John de Courcy must have lived for some years longer, for there are licences extant permitting him to come to his friends in England in 1207. When King John came to Ireland in 1210 to drive out de Lacy, whose tyrannies had made his rule insufferable, de Courcy appears to have accompanied him and to have had the satisfaction of seeing his old enemy fleeing before him to Carrickfergus.[6] Thence de Lacy went to France, where he and his brother took refuge in a monastery at St Taurins in Normandy, working as lay brethren until their identity was eventually discovered by the Abbot. They were partially restored to favour through his intercession,[7] only to work still more havoc in Ireland in later life. On Hugh de Lacy's death in 1243 the lands of Ulster definitely reverted to the Crown, and were only regranted in 1264, twenty-one years later, to Walter de Burgh, having in the meantime been given as part of his appanage to Prince Edward, afterward Edward I, on his marriage with Eleanor of Castile.

[6] Sweetman, i, Nos. 358 (1207), 409 (1210); and cf. Nos. 482 (1213), 833 (1218).

[7] Grace, Annales Hiberniae, 1210.

It is evident that Cathal Crovdearg had sufficient grounds for believing that the turbulent de Lacy had by the year 1223 become as much the King's enemy as his own. Cathal's letters are of extreme interest as indicating the terms on which he stood as the ally of Henry III in Ireland. He complains that "Hugh de Lacy, enemy of the King, of the King's father, and of Cathal, whom King John by Cathal's advice expelled from Ireland, has without consulting the King, come to that country to disturb it. Against Hugh's coming, Cathal remains, as the Archbishop of Dublin [i.e., Henri, the then Justiciar] knows, firm in his fidelity to the King. But the closer Cathal adheres to the King's service the more he is harassed by those who pretend fealty to the King, but, as the Justiciar knows, shamefully fail against the enemy, so that, between Hugh de Lacy on the one hand and those who feign to be faithful on the other, Cathal is placed in extreme difficulty. Wherefore, unless it is better that the peace of Ireland should be subverted by this disturber and by default of some of the King's subjects, Cathal prays the King to send a force thither to restrain Hugh's insolence." [8] It seems likely from the tone of this letter that it was written just after the retirement of the allied troops from Ulster, and that Cathal had cause to suspect the sincerity of some of the combatants His second letter was probably written in 1224. It is addressed to his "very dear Lord, Henry King of England, Lord of Ireland, etc., to whom Cathal O'Conor, King of Connacht, sends greeting." O'Conor believes that Henry has heard, through the faithful counsellors of himself and his father, King John, that he had never failed in his fidelity; nor will he ever swerve therefrom. He possesses a charter of the land of Connacht from King John to himself and to his heirs and to his son and heir, Aedh; and for the latter he now solicits a similar charter from Henry. This would render his son and people more zealous for the King's interest, and he urges his request, that the lands of Ubriun, Conmacni, and Calad, in Connacht, held by his enemy, William de Lacy, brother of King Henry's enemy, should be given to his own son, who is ready to do homage for them; O'Conor prays an answer by the bearers of the present letter, in whom confidence may be placed.[9]

[8] Sweetman, 1, Nos. 1174, 1184; original in W. W. Shirley, Royal Letters (1862), 1. 183.

Cathal Crovdearg, after the death of his competitors, seems to have been in the favoured position of an elected King of Connacht who was also approved and supported by the English Government. On several occasions he addressed himself directly to the throne instead of to the deputy. In a mandate from Henry III appointing Archbishop Henri de Londres Justiciar in 1221, in the place of Geoffrey de Marisco, who was accused of using the revenues of the country for his own advantage, "Kathel of Connacht" is addressed first of the Irish kings; following him come "King of Kenelon [Aedh O'Neill, King of the Cinel Owen], Dunekan and Muriadac O'Bren [O'Brien], Dermot Macarthi [MacCarthy], Loueth MacDonahod [MacDonoghue], and the Norman barons." [10] Protections for Cathal "and for his chattels, lands, and possessions," were issued in 1219 and 1224, and a letter written by the Justiciar to the King speaks of Cathal and his son as "the King's faithful subjects, who have loyally assisted the Archbishop and obeyed the King's mandates." [11] There is no doubt, from the frequent friendly correspondence between Cathal and his immediate successors and the English kings, that they endeavoured faithfully to carry out the terms of compact made between Henry II and Cathal's brother Rory. Cathal made a personal submission to John at Ardbracken in Meath on that king's second visit to Ireland in 1210, and accompanied him on his tour as far as Carrickfergus, though he refused, on the advice of his wife, to entrust his son Aedh into the King's hands.

[9] This letter is given in Appendix II, and in Gilbert, Facsimiles, ii, No. LXXI.

[10] Sweetman, i, No. 1001.

[11] Ibid., 1, Nos. 530, 928, 1164, 1183; W W. Shirley, op. cit., p. 178.

The exact position of the King of England toward Cathal is not very clear. In 1204 we find the then Justiciar, Meiler FitzHenry, reporting that Cathal had quit-claimed to the King two-thirds of his province, retaining the other third by right of inheritance at a yearly rent of a hundred marks; for the two-thirds he was to pay three hundred marks, the King of England, however, claiming as his own portion "the best towns and harbours; those fittest for the King's interest and for fortifying castles." Cathal was to give hostages for his faithful service, and for the forwarding of the King's interests to the best of his judgment; he was to strengthen castles, found towns, and assess rents in those parts. To these immense claims Cathal seems to have agreed, raising his tribute first to four hundred marks for the whole province, and in 1215, when the charter was actually received by him, to five thousand marks, to be paid in two portions annually. This great advance in the payments given must have been the result of the consultations between the two kings during John's second visit to Ireland.[12] Cathal never seems to have grudged tribute; and when in 1224 his son Aedh appealed to the English, who were holding a court at Athlone, for aid against Turlogh O'Conor, his cousin, who had been elected by the popular vote and installed as King at Carnfree instead of himself, they willingly assisted him; for "every one of them was a friend of his, for his father's sake and his own; for he and his father before him were very liberal of stipends." [13] These large claims made and admitted over Connacht, whether enforced or not, practically transformed the kings of that province into feudal barons. They now held their lands as grants of the English monarchs and not by the old prescription and right. The King's gift, in 1214, of "scarlet robes, to be given to the kings of Ireland and other faithful subjects of the King" emphasized this new position; the recipients were regarded as the King's lieges.

[12] Sweetman, i, Nos. 222, 279, 654, 656. An equal tribute was demanded of William de Braose for the custody of the city of Limerick.

[13] Annals of Loch Cé, 1225.

This bestowal of robes of office had special reference to Cathal, for it followed immediately on the protection accorded to him and his men in that year, which led up to the final confirmation of his grant. This change of position must be clearly realized, for all that followed depends upon it. By the English sovereign the Irish princes, up till now independent rulers, came to be regarded as feudatories, ruling still as kings within their own domains, but holding their lands at the will of the English monarch, paying tribute to him, and being removable at his pleasure if they proved recalcitrant or failed to pay their dues. This claim was one that could easily be used for purposes of aggression when the occasion arose. In the case of the O'Conors the memory that they had once been independent kings seems to have quickly faded from the minds of the English monarchs, for we find Edward I, in an order to Richard de Burgh, Earl of Ulster, in 1305, speaking of King Felim of Connacht, son of Cathal Crovdearg, as "a certain Irishman named Felim O'Conor, who called himself King of Connacht." In the meantime things might have gone on quietly, Cathal and his successors paying tribute and receiving protection and support in return, but for the old vague grants made to the de Burghs before John became king. William de Burgh had never been able to enforce what he conceived to be his rights in spite of the support he had given to the two Cathals in turn, but the claim was to be revived by his son, Richard de Burgh, Earl of Ulster, in the reign of Cathal's son Hugh (Aedh). During Cathal's lifetime the King's claims proved abortive; Cathal continued to be styled "King of Connacht" and to exercise full authority. His appeal to the English King in the last year of his life for protection on behalf of his son, whom, adopting the English custom, he indicated as his successor, shows that the relationship between the two powers was friendly, and that Cathal had no intention of rupturing the new connexion. But, feeling death approaching and weighed down by the cares of a stormy life, he decided in 1224 to retire to the abbey of Grey Friars at Knockmoy, which he had himself founded in 1189. He and his favourite poet, Morrogh O'Daly, called Muredach Albanach, or "Murray the Scot," from his connexion with Scotland, entered the monastery on the same day, and there has been preserved a curious poem supposed to have been composed by them while their hair was being tonsured. This poet was the turbulent bard who was driven out of Ulster for killing a steward of the O'Donnells who was attempting to extract a rent from him. He was forced to take refuge in Scotland, where he wrote some beautiful religious poems, which seem singularly out of keeping with his irascible temper. He must have travelled, for a poem written from shipboard in the Levant to Cathal exclaims that it would be "the joys of heaven to find himself off the Scottish coast or breathe the breath, of Ireland."

This O'Daly, called "bard of Erin and Alba," was the first of the race of the Scottish MacVurrichs, bards of the MacDonalds of Clanranald.[14] Cathal must have been a favourite with the poets, for many poems are addressed to him. The Irish Annals, also, break out into lamentations of unusual sincerity on the death of Cathal of the Red Hand. Among his other virtues, one that seems to have struck the writers of his day as particularly surprising was that he was content with one married wife and that after her death he remained single.[15] It may well have been an example of extraordinary virtue in his family. Turlogh had three wives and at least twenty legitimate and illegitimate children, and it is said that the Pope offered to allow King Rory O'Conor six wives if he would be satisfied with that number. Rory refused the offer, and the annalists ascribe to this the extinction of the monarchy of Ireland in his line, as a punishment for his sins.[16] No doubt Cathal's death in the Grey Habit, his institution of tithes, and the splendid abbeys built by him in his native province partly serve to account for the warmth of the monastic chroniclers' praises. Even so, the panegyric pronounced upon him by Torna O'Mulconry, his own and his son's official bard, is so startling, as a symbol of the standards of virtue in the thirteenth century, that we quote a few words from it: "Cathal Crovdearg, son of Turlogh Mór O'Conor, King of Connacht, died. He was a man calculated to strike fear and dread more than any other Irishman of his day; he was a man who burned the greatest number of homesteads, and took the greatest number of preys from both the English and Irish who opposed him; he was the most valorous and undaunted man in opposing his enemies that ever lived. It was he who blinded, killed, and subdued the greatest number of rebels and enemies...He was the most gentle and peaceable of all the kings that ever reigned in Ireland." [17]

[14] For his poems see Book of the Dean of Lismore; S. H. O'Grady, Catalogue of Manuscripts in the British Museum, pp. 333-338; Hull, Poem-book of the Gael, pp. 156, 157, 159.

[15] His wife was More, daughter of Donal O'Brien; she died in 1218

[16] Annals of Loch Cé, 1233.

[17] Transactions of the Kilkenny Archaeological Society (1852-53), ii, 337-339.

Cathal was succeeded, in turn, by his two sons Aedh (1224-28) and Felim (1228-65), but their reigns were a long contest for the throne with their cousins, the sons of Rory, of the elder line. Cathal had endeavoured to provide against this by getting Aedh recognized as his successor before his death, and it augured well for the introduction of the hereditary form of succession that it was remarked that "no crime was committed on account of his accession, save one act of plunder and one woman violated." [18] But though the English upheld the claims of Aedh, the eldest son, the people supported the sons of Rory and inaugurated one of them, Turlogh, on the cairn of Carnfree, with the help of Hugh O'Neill. Three armies entered the province, from the north, east, and south, for the O'Briens, aided by the English of Munster, flung themselves into the conflict. The country was devastated, and the inhabitants died of sickness, cold, and famine. These wars led the English troops into parts of Connacht into which they had never before penetrated; and Aedh's appeals for help "were cheerfully responded to, for these expeditions were profitable to the Foreigners, who obtained spoils without encountering danger or conflict." [19] The O'Flahertys were persistent and bitter enemies of Aedh, but with the help of his English allies he succeeded in subduing them, even driving them for a time out of parts of West Connacht. He patched up a transient peace with Donogh Cairbrech O'Brien, who a few months before had made a treaty "of drowning of candles" [20] with Aedh's enemies. In Mayo he compelled the O'Haras to submit. Aedh was now at peace, and the English Justiciar, escorted by him, had retired for the second time over the Shannon and into Athlone. But behind Aedh's back Richard de Burgh was intriguing to get Connacht into his hands. Already in 1219 he had made large offers to Henry III for the realization of what, on the ground of King John's loose promise to his father, he professed to claim as his right.[21]

[18] Annals of Loch Cé, 1224.

[19] Ibid., 1225.

[20] Annals of Loch Cé, 1225. That is, with excommunication of the party who broke the peace, the extinction of candles being a part of the ceremony of excommunication. The expression is frequently used.

[21] Sweetman, i, No. 900.

During Cathal's life the matter was waived, but on his death Richard again began to urge his demands with offers of increased tribute to the Crown. By a sudden and disgraceful change of government policy Aedh was summoned to Dublin to surrender the land of Connacht, "forfeited by his father and himself," for it was to be handed over to de Burgh at a fixed rent. Aedh did not come. He was dealing with Geoffrey de Marisco, one of the most crafty Justiciars who ever ruled in Ireland, a man whose crooked ways got him twice into disgrace and ended in his flight to France, where he died friendless and in poverty. De Marisco was bent on capturing Aedh by fair means or foul. He attempted to detain him, and would have succeeded but for the timely warning of Aedh's faithful friend, the noble and incorruptible Earl William Marshal the Younger, second Earl of Pembroke, whose family, in an epoch of subtle craft and scheming, stands out as a line of great soldier-statesmen, stern, dignified, and faithful. As his father had befriended William de Braose when he fell into disgrace, so the son befriended Aedh; his steady opposition to the scheme of confiscation led to the enmity of the King toward his house, and to persecution from the Justiciar.[22] But in the following year, 1228, de Marisco again invited Aedh to his house, where, by accident or design, he was killed by the stroke of an axe from the hand of a carpenter, jealous of the handsome face of Aedh. The carpenter's wife, according to the custom of the times, had bathed the guest "with sweet balls and other things" and washed his head. The carpenter was immediately hanged by the Justiciar; but Connacht again became the scene of sanguinary quarrels for the kingship.[23]

[22] Annals of Loch Cé, 1227.

[23] The O'Conor Don, in his O'Conors of Connaught, has followed earlier writers in confusing the friend of Aedh with Marisco, or Marsh, his worst enemy; but see Transactions of the Kilkenny Archaeological Society, ii, 339. It was usual for guests to be bathed by women attendants.

It was in this year that Richard de Burgh, or, as he now came to be called, from the name of his father, MacWilliam Burke, replaced de Marisco as Justiciar, and was thus in a position from which he could carry out his projects. A fresh war broke out in Connacht led by the sons of Rory, whose followers, the MacDermotts of the Rock,[24] declared and pledged their word "that they would not own any king who would make them submit to the Foreigners," [25] and MacWilliam led an army into that province to expel Aedh, son of Rory, and place Felim, the late King's brother, on the throne. In this case the English seem to have ignored altogether their own principle of primogeniture. With a mixed army of English and Irish, who from this time onward are constantly found fighting on both sides, MacWilliam overran the province as far west as Mayo and Galway, and succeeded in placing Felim on the throne, banishing his cousin and rival to the O'Neill country. This happened in 1230. A steady policy on the part of Richard de Burgh might have settled the distracted province and consolidated the power of Felim, who appears to have been a man of greater force of character than his elder brother, the late King. But to settle the country was not MacWilliam's aim. The very next year we find him unseating Felim and imprisoning him at Meelick Castle and setting up his recently expelled rival in his place. But the flood of de Burgh's prosperity received a check. His near kinsman, Hubert de Burgh, who had been for fifteen years (1217-32) Justiciar of England, standing between the young King Henry III and the bad counsels of his French favourites, had fallen; and a band of hungry and mean-spirited Poitevins was filling England with anarchy and the Court with corruption. The change was reflected in Ireland in the disfavour into which Richard de Burgh suddenly fell. He was ordered to release Felim and deliver up the King's castles; and Felim, whose right to the sovereignty was strengthened by the defeat and death of his rival, Aedh, in 1233, began to carry out the order by himself, demolishing the castles that had been recently built, and setting up what promised to be a strong administration. But again de Burgh, who was partially restored to favour, gathered a great army, and assisted by Hugh de Lacy and Maurice FitzGerald (who is called "MacMaurice" or "MacMorrish" in the Annals, and who now became Justiciar), for the third time invaded Connacht and Thomond in his campaign of 1235. Felim made peace, and the five cantreds held by the English King were returned to him for a fixed tribute, which amounted to a practical partition of the province between him and de Burgh.

[24] I.e., the Rock of Loch Ce, famous for the Annals of that name; it was one of the principal residences of the MacDermott, who was chieftain of Moylurg.

[25] The technical term for such submission in Irish is "went into his house."

In 1240 Felim followed the example of his predecessors and appealed directly to the English King against the depredations of the barons and of their Irish allies. He was invited to visit London and lay his case in person before Henry; he was received with great honour by the King and "came home safely, joyfully, contentedly." The reception given to Felim in London undoubtedly changed his position at home for the better and put him out of reach of the designs of his enemies, and in 1245 we find him accompanying the Justiciar with a great Irish army to aid the King in his wars against Llewelyn in Wales. So effectually did he represent his case that the King sent his command to FitzGerald that he should "pluck up by the root that fruitless sycamore, de Burgh...nor suffer it to bud forth any longer." But the Justiciar himself soon fell into disgrace. His reply to the King's request for troops for the Welsh expedition had not been so prompt as might have been wished. The Norman-Irish barons had put in a plea for exemption from the duty of attending the King beyond the realm, and the King had to promise that the present occasion should not be taken as a precedent. But when at last FitzGerald and Felim presented themselves side by side in battle array with a numerous army, Henry thought it prudent to "wink awhile in policie at the tarriance and slow coming of Maurice FitzGerald," though he manifested his displeasure soon afterward by dismissing him from his post as Lord Justice. The provisions required for this miserable expedition, in which the troops suffered much from inclement weather and lack of food, were largely supplied from Ireland.

For the next twenty years affairs in Connacht went on much in the same manner. The rivals to the throne never relaxed their efforts, nor did de Burgh, whose lands were restored in 1247,[26] cease to push forward on every opportunity. More than once a delusive peace was patched up,[27] and from time to time Felim brought his case directly to the notice of the English King by ambassadors, "always obtaining from him everything he asked."[28] His son and successor took a prominent part in the wars of the province and kept at bay the rival princes. He seems to have been much with the English troops, for he is always styled Aedh-na-nGall, or "Hugh of the Foreigners," from his friendly relations with them. But the province was torn with dissensions, and the constant passage of great armies from end to end, preying and burning, brought it into a condition of wretchedness such as it had never experienced before.

[26] Sweetman, i, No. 2908.

[27] Annals of Loch Cé, 1255, 1256, 1257, etc.

[28] Ibid., 1255.

It was while things were in this condition that a determined effort was put forth to bring matters to a climax. An old Irish proverb says, "From the North comes help," and on more than one critical occasion it has been to Ulster that the warring factions have looked for a deliverer. The resolution of the Ulster kings to hold themselves aloof from the provincial wars of their neighbours had rarely been broken since the North had ceased to give its princes to the throne of Tara.

But at this moment a prince of more than usual force named Bryan O'Neill ruled in Tyrowen and Tyrconnel, whose septs he appears to have united under his sway. Probably he would still have held himself apart behind the protecting mountains that formed the frontiers of his territory but that the Justiciar, MacMaurice FitzGerald, harried him into action. Again and again the latter invaded Cinel Conaill on various excuses, and O'Neill felt that the castle of Caol-uisce, or "Narrow-Water," which had been built in 1212 by John de Gray, the then Justiciar of Ireland, in the gangway between Tyrconnel and Fermanagh to guard the main western pass of entry into his province, was a perpetual threat to his independence.[29] Since then it had been strengthened or re-erected by MacMaurice (1252), and he had forced Felim to build another castle not far off, at Sligo, out of stone and lime taken from a hospice that had been presented not long before by him to Bishop Claras MacMailin in honour of the Holy Trinity.[30] Thus threatened, Bryan O'Neill put forth all his strength to resist the invaders of his territory. On more than one occasion the English armies were forced to turn back, having obtained no pledges or hostages from O'Neill. In 1253 he made war on them on his own account; he demolished castles, burned 'street-towns'[31] and desolated the levels of Co. Down. In 1257 the castle of Caol-uisce was razed to the ground and its garrison slain, and the English of Sligo routed. The exploits of Bryan made all eyes turn to him as a possible saviour of the country, and a great meeting summoned to Caol-uisce in 1258 included not only Bryan O'Neill and Hugh, or Aedh, Felim's son, but also a representative of the O'Briens of the South. The Ulster and Connacht-men elected O'Neill sovereign of the Gael of Erin, and placed their hostages in his hands, Hugh at the same time receiving hostages from the O'Reilleys and other subject clans.

[29] The editors of the Annals of Loch Cé strangely confuse this place with Narrow-water, near Newry, Co. Down. See under 1252, note 4.

[30] Ibid., 1242, 1245, 1250.

[31] I.e., villages of one long street, of the kind still common in Ireland. At this period they are frequently mentioned in the Annals.

In 1260 the combination was complete, and Hugh hosted with the men of Connacht into the North, joining Bryan and his people in Tyrowen, and together they marched to Downpatrick. But their hopes were shattered by a terrible defeat. Bryan himself fell, and with him a long list of chieftains, both of Ulster and Connacht, fifteen being of the people of the O'Kanes (Muinter Cathain). The battle of Down put a definite end to the possibility of a combination strong enough to check the advance of the foreigner, and, until the confederation under another O'Neill, the great Tyrone, more than three centuries later, no similar united effort was organized by the Irish. Each provincial prince fought his own wars and made his own alliances, but there was no attempt to place themselves under a central ruler as King of Ireland. The special position of "Bryan of the battle of Down" was recognized by the English. His seal was afterward found near Beverley, in Yorkshire, with the inscription round a mounted warrior brandishing a long sword, Sigillum Brien, Regis de Kinel Eoghan. According to a poem written by his bard MacNamee, his head was carried to London and buried "under a white flagstone" in some church there, while his body was laid in Armagh.

MacWilliam Burke followed up the victory by fresh hostings into Connacht, and MacMaurice into Munster. They seem to have made an annual peace with their foes, Hugh O'Conor on one occasion even "sleeping cheerfully and contentedly in the same bed with MacWilliam Burke," but these were only momentary halts in the path of attempted conquest. MacWilliam's attention was distracted from Connacht for a time by his wars with the FitzGeralds of Munster, and meanwhile the strength of Felim and his son increased; in a conference at Athlone in 1264 they came so strongly attended that they secured their own terms, the English feeling it prudent to conclude a treaty with them. Felim died in the following year, having held his own with remarkable courage against the invaders. His tomb, bearing a dignified recumbent figure in white stone representing the King, still remains in the abbey of the Friars Preachers in Roscommon. About 1261, soon after the battle of Down, Felim had written to Henry III "returning infinite thanks to his Majesty for the various honours conferred on him, but chiefly for the King's orders to the Justiciar to cause restitution to be made to him for the losses which Gaultier [Walter] de Burgh had caused" of a portion of the lands in the cantreds of the King and elsewhere in the province, amounting in all to nine thousand marks. The Justiciar having died before the King's letter reached him, Felim states that Walter still continues to burn churches and slay nuns and ecclesiastics. The letter concludes: "For no promise made to him by the Irish had Felim receded, nor would he recede, from the King's service. He places himself, his people, and all he has under the protection of the King, and of the Lord Edward; and confides to the Lord Edward from then until the arrival of the latter in Ireland all his property and all his rights, if any he has, in Connacht." [32] There is something pathetic in the phrase "if any [property and rights] he has in Connacht," but between the various claimants among whom from time to time Felim heard of his lands being distributed, he may well have wondered where his own rights came in. The allusion to Lord Edward, the King's eldest son, afterward Edward I, refers to the proposal long entertained by Henry to make Prince Edward resident Lord of Ireland, and to transfer to him the practical government of the country. This proposal may have arisen out of the suggestion made on the King's accession by the then Justiciar, Geoffrey de Marisco, that the late Queen Isabella, widow of John, or her second son Richard should reside in Ireland, an admirable piece of advice which would have tended to check the insolent truculence of the barons and to give a much-needed central authority which the distant English kings could not wield.

[32] The original of this letter is in the Public Record Office, London; and see Gilbert, Facsimiles, ii, No. LXXIII.

Henry's later project to send over his eldest son, would have given the future king an intimate acquaintance with the affairs of Ireland, and it would undoubtedly have tended to consolidate that loyal sentiment of which the native kings were giving ample proof as opportunity arose. Unfortunately the plan broke down. In July 1255 the immediate departure of the Prince is spoken of; in August he is commanded to cross over from Gascony and proceed to Ireland for the winter as speedily as he can. But it does not appear that the Prince ever actually went over, and on his departure for the Holy Land vicegerents were appointed to act for him in relation to Ireland. Thus a plan fraught with favourable possibilities was allowed to drop, and the very rare visits of the English kings ill compensated for the actual residence of a prince of the royal blood in this part of the King's dominions.[33]

[33] It is seldom realized how rare and brief these visits were: Henry II, 1171; John, 1210; Richard II, 1394 and 1399; James II, 1689; William III, 1690; George IV, 1821; Victoria, 1849, 1853, 1861, 1900; Edward VII, 1903, 1904, 1907. These dates do not include visits before coronation.

Hugh, or Aedh, O'Conor succeeded his father, and during the years 1270-72 he made a most determined and successful stand against the English, defeating them in the field, demolishing their castles, and driving his victorious arms as far east as Meath. In 1271 his bitterest foe, Walter de Burgh, Earl of Ulster, suddenly died in Galway; and in 1274 the nine years of Hugh's vigorous reign were closed by his death, after he had cleared his province from the invaders. But his loss meant the revival of the old dissensions for the kingship, and in the same year three of his grandsons were successively kings of Connacht, each being slain by his rival cousins within a few weeks of his succession. Between 1274, when Hugh died, and 1315, when Edward Bruce landed in Ireland, there were thirteen kings of Connacht, of whom nine were slain, usually by their own brothers or cousins, and two were deposed. When Edward Bruce landed the throne was occupied by a foster-son of the powerful chief of the MacDermotts, who gathered round him a strong following, and called upon William Liath de Burgh to support him. The MacDermotts were violently opposed to any English connexion, and the young prince called on his adherents to swear "that for the future we will not stain our swords with the blood of Irishmen, or flourish them with parricidal hands, but will draw them against the Saxon assassins, the enemies of our country and of the human race." Matters were in this condition when the news of the landing of Brace on the coasts of Ulster in 1315 gave events a new direction.

We must now turn our attention to contemporary affairs in the South of Ireland. The country of Thomond during the latter years of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth centuries was disturbed to an unusual extent by the wars between the O'Briens and de Clares, commonly known as the Wars of Thomond. It would seem that from the time of Donal, the prince who submitted to Henry II, the family had abandoned to a certain extent their claims to the sovereignty, though they continued to be inaugurated at Magh Adhair for some time longer. Donogh Cairbrech, Donal's son and successor (1194-1242) was the first O'Brien to adopt the name as that of his family "after having dropped the royal style and title that were ever customary to his ancestors." [34] Similar changes were going on all over Ireland, for many of the family names date from this period. In 1210, when King John landed, Donogh swore fealty, and the castle of Carrigogonnell was delivered over to him. He abandoned the ancient palace of Killaloe, the seat of the sovereignty since the time of Kennedy, father of Brian Boromhe, and built a new castle at Clonroad (Cluain-ramh-fhoda), near Ennis, which henceforth became the chief dwelling of the family. But it was one thing to swear allegiance to a distant sovereign and quite another to have the territories that had belonged to the sept of the Dalcais for many centuries trampled down and annexed by the subjects of that prince. The yearly encroachments of the "foreign adventurers, who, through excess of rapacity that grew and settled in them, were committing oppression and injustice, violence and constant pillage, on the old natives and stripping them of their estates and blood everywhere they could," aroused the Irish to the necessity of combining to elect a supreme king of Ireland, who should hold them together in a united effort to drive back the foreigner.

[34] The Triumphs of Turlogh (1194-1355), from which the following details are largely taken, is a lengthy tract written by John MacRory MacGrath, historian of the Dalcais, about 1459. Though it is compiled in the inflated style of the bardic chroniclers, it gives details not to be found elsewhere. But the dates need correction. The story of the meeting of Teige and Bryan at Caol-uisce, for example, is antedated by six years.

To the conference of Caol-uisce Conor O'Brien, the reigning prince, had sent his son Teige to represent him. But it would seem that both Teige and Bryan O'Neill expected to be the chosen candidate for the sovereignty, and when Teige sent a present of a hundred steeds to O'Neill, as from the lord to his vassal, O'Neill returned them with the addition of two hundred more, each decked out with a golden bridle. Furious at the return of his gift, Teige ordered an armed trooper to mount on every steed, and in this warlike guise the whole body swung back and drew up before O'Neill "in order to secure his submission by fair means or by force." But O'Neill, "seeing O'Brien's pride and haughty mind," drew away in anger, and the conference broke up, both the chief representatives returning home in wrath. Thus a much-needed combination between the North and the South ended in the old way, tribal pride weighing more with the leaders than even the desire to rid the country of the enemy. O'Neill, forsaken by his chief supporter, marched to the battle of Down and fell there with the men of Ulster and Connacht around him, while Teige returned to his own province to fight single-handed against an enemy "whom he hated and abhorred more than any animal or creature under heaven; nor would he suffer one of the English progeny to inhabit so much as a nutshell of a pauper's hut throughout the country under his sway." So says the panegyrist of his house, Rory McGrath, writing a couple of hundred years after him. He inflicted a severe defeat on the English at Limerick, but he died before he was of age. Conor O'Brien, after his son's death, "was filled with despondency and a loathing and contempt for the world." He retired into private life, and his subjects revolted from his rule and refused to pay their royal dues. But in 1267, summoning his resolution, he gathered together his forces for a raid northward against Conor O'Lochlan, leaving the country behind him "in red flashes of blazing fire and wreathed in crimson-tinted smoke," only to fall in a wood in Clare named Siudan, from which he is called Conor na Siudaine.

On Conor's death the whole province was rent between opposing claimants for the title of King of Thomond. His son Brian Roe O'Brien was unanimously elected at Magh Adhair, but the MacNamaras and O'Deas disputed his claim, and he was forced to fly across the Shannon, while the opposing party put up Turlogh, his nephew, son of Teige, in his stead. It was at this moment of family feud that Brian Roe took the resolution to follow Dermot MacMorrogh's example and to appeal to the English for help. He sent his son Donogh to Thomas, son of the Earl of Clare, in Cork offering to him and his heirs in return for his aid, all the land between Limerick and Athsollas. The offer must have been as agreeable as it was unexpected. Shortly before, de Clare had received permission from Henry III to make what acquisitions he could among the Irish, but he could scarcely have reckoned on the good fortune which, without effort on his own part, threw so fine a demesne into his grasp by gift. He readily consented, and in 1277 the de Clares and O'Briens, joined by the Geraldines and Butlers, with large bodies both of Irish and English, met at Limerick and marched from thence to Clonroad, hoping to find Turlogh there. But he was gone south to receive the fealty of the MacMahons, and was collecting an army which was to include the O'Kellys, O'Maddens, and O'Madigans from Connacht, and the MacNamaras, O'Deas, O'Quins, and MacMahons, supported by the de Burghs, who were never loath to have a fight with their hereditary foes the Geraldines. Thus the whole South was quickly astir with English and Irish fighting equally on both sides, as they were to fight for many centuries afterward. De Clare had found time, during the short pause, to erect at Bunratty a castle of lime and stone and to banish the old inhabitants and settle his expectant soldiers, both English and Irish, on his new lands; but the return of the Cullenans (Clann Culien), the former inhabitants, made their lives a burden. The great armies met at Moygressan, where Turlogh inflicted on Brian party a complete defeat, the remnant flying in rout to Bunratty. Many of the leaders were killed, among them the brother of de Clare's wife, Patrick FitzMaurice. In her anger at his loss she persuaded her husband to a frightful revenge upon their hapless ally. Brian was seized and "bound to stern steeds" to be torn to pieces, according to one account: but the Triumphs of Turlogh say that he was hanged.[35] In any case it was an act of inexcusable treachery, for the two allies had sworn a solemn oath together, and had formed 'gossipred' or sponsorship for their children, exchanging mutual vows "by the relics, bells, and croziers of Munster." According to the old Irish custom, they had even mingled their blood in the same vessel in token of unity.[36] The anger of the Dalcais was so great that de Clare had to build a double ditch round his castle for defence; subsequently the de Clares and Geraldines were driven into the Slievebloom Mountains, where they were forced by famine to capitulate and acknowledge the O'Briens as sovereigns of Thomond.

[35] So also the Dublin copy of the Annals of Innisfallen. The same account is given of the death of Tiernan O'Rorke in the Book of Fenagh, where he is said to have been drawn by wild horses, but there is no support for this. It was, however, a common form of punishment for great crimes at this period.

[36] Annals of Loch Cé, 1277.

This wasting and cruel war lasted for over fifty years with varying fortunes. De Clare dreaded the success of Turlogh, who was a strong prince and uniformly successful in the field, and he took the course of deliberately stirring up hostilities between the rival houses. The uproar was, even for Ireland, so unusual that it penetrated to Westminster, and the King sent for the Lord Justice to answer in person for the tumult that was going on in the land. Turlogh proved a formidable foe. In 1285 he defeated de Clare and laid waste English Thomond to the walls of Bunratty. In 1287 he repeated his success, and Thomas de Clare, FitzMaurice, and others were slain. He built in Ennis the first castle erected by a native prince of Thomond all of stone. In 1304 he received hostages from all the chiefs of North Munster, demolished the English castles as far as Youghal, and forced Richard de Clare to acknowledge him. His reign was one of uninterrupted prosperity. But the wars continued after his death in 1306, and were still in progress when Edward Bruce landed in 1315. The race of Brian Roe O'Brien was nearly extirpated at the battle of Corcomroe, leaving the line of Turlogh in the ascendant; and the de Clares were expelled from Thomond, leaving no trace of their occupation behind. After the fatal battle of Dysart O'Dea in 1318, in which de Clare was slain, his wife and followers abandoned the country and went back to England, never to return. The O'Briens had prevailed.

By the end of the thirteenth century the larger part of Ireland, except O'Neill's and O'Donnell's vast territories in Western Ulster, Oriell (Co. Louth), and the O'Rorkes' country of Breifne (Cos. Leitrim and Cavan), were claimed by various Norman barons in right of grants from English sovereigns, often overlapping each other, equally a matter of contention between opposing feudatories as between them and the Irish kings whom they were endeavouring to displace. The great Liberties of Meath, Carlow, Kilkenny, and Wexford were practically independent principalities, in which quiet was enforced by the garrisons occupying the motes or castles scattered thickly about the country. The family of the Butlers, later to become Earls, and finally Dukes, of Ormonde, who came over for the first time with King John in 1210, settled down on estates in Upper Tipperary; and the larger part of the estates of Strongbow had passed into the hands of the family of Mareschal, or Marshal, who became, by the marriage of William Marshal with the daughter and heiress of Strongbow, Earls of Pembroke and Striguil, and possessors of her great position and estates. Of all the Norman lords who founded families in Ireland, Earl Marshal bears the most unblemished character. He worthily carried on the tradition left by Strongbow in Leinster by endeavouring to build up a peaceable and settled principality in which the Irish inhabitants and English settlers could live in amity side by side. His was a romantic career. He had grown up during the wars of Stephen, when England was reduced to a condition of anarchy and misrule perhaps never equalled in her history.

As a boy he had been handed over to Stephen as a hostage, (1152), and he only escaped a horrible death by being shot out of a huge catapult used for storming castles by his childish prattle about the weapon, which he thought was only a pretty toy, thus attracting the attention and liking of Stephen, His youth was spent in the wars of Poitou and in the Crusades, where his exploits brought him into prominence and aroused the jealousy of his rivals. His whole early life was beset by the endeavours of enemies to undermine his influence with Henry II, whose part he took against his rebellious sons, John and Richard, but his incorruptible loyalty and his nobility of character carried him to the highest offices of the realm. He took his family name from the high position held by himself and by his father before him as Lords Marshal of England. He came to Ireland for the first time in 1207, but he was constantly recalled to England either on official business or by the intrigues of his enemies in Ireland, who envied him his great estates. Meiler FitzHenry, the younger de Lacy, and afterward Geoffrey de Marisco were the determined adversaries of his house, and plunged him and his sons and successors, William Marshal the Younger and Richard Marshal, into perpetual wars; but the earls showed their steadfastness and independence of mind by sheltering de Braose of Limerick from the wrath of his sovereign and Kings Aedh and Felim of Connacht from the designs of their enemies. The elder Marshal, of whom it was said that "He who made him was a great architect," spent the latter years of his long life, passed under four English monarchs, in his favourite town of Kilkenny,[37] beautifying it by building the splendid castle and abbeys by which it is adorned and founding the Cathedral of St Canice, from which the city takes its name. It quickly became a town of repute, second only to Dublin in historical interest, and several of the earliest Irish Parliaments assembled there. He and his sons developed Ossory, encouraged trade, established markets, and watched with interested eyes the progress of the new towns and villages springing up around the Norman keeps and castles all over Southern Leinster. New Ross they specially fostered as a possible rival to Waterford.

[37] Kilkenny Castle was purchased by James, third Earl of Ormonde, in 1392 from Sir Hugh le Despencer, Earl of Gloucester, to whom it had passed on the failure of male heirs to William Marshal the Younger, and it has ever since been the chief seat of the Ormonde family. See deed of transfer in Gilbert, Facsimiles, iii, No. XX.

When William Marshal the elder died in 1219 [38] he left five sons and five daughters; the sons were successively Earls of Pembroke and Marshals of England, and the two eldest succeeded him in his Irish estates, but they all died without issue. Giraldus remarks on the paucity of male descendants among the Geraldines; and in the second generation the lack of legitimate sons to the Norman lords continued. Neither Richard de Burgh nor the de Lacys left adult male heirs, and the great inheritance of the Earls Marshal was parcelled out among the five daughters of the first of their line. By the marriages of these ladies into the families of the Bigods, Earls of Norfolk, the de Clares, Earls of Gloucester, the de Warennes, Earls of Surrey, and others of the highest families of England, King Dermot's daughter Eva (Aoife) became the ancestress of many English lines of distinction closely connected in some cases with the throne. Richard Marshal, the third earl, with the usual fearless rectitude of his house endeavoured to resist the evil influence which "the mean brood of Poitevin favourites" was exercising over the mind of young Henry III, and suffered outlawry for his fidelity; in Ireland he was beset by intrigues and finally fell a victim to a combination formed against him; abandoned by his own people, he fought single-handed against his enemies and was mortally wounded in the battle of the Curragh of Kildare in 1234. The annalist adds, "This deed was one of the greatest deeds committed in that time."

[38] The father and son were buried in the Temple Church, in London. The office of Earl Marshal passed to the Bigods, Earls of Norfolk, and through them to the Mowbrays and Howards, the present Earls Marshal.

There are various indications that at this time many of the Irish leaders desired to throw themselves on the side of law and order and to support any honourable officer who set himself to bring about peaceable relations between the contending parties in the country. An instance of this is found in the action of certain Irish chiefs in Ulster, who had been assisting Sir William FitzWarenne to restore peace between the English and Irish in that district and who wrote to the King that they had endeavoured with all their might to support the seneschal by pursuing and routing the King's Irish enemies, but had only been oppressed by some of the Council of Ireland as their reward. They pray that these evildoers may not escape punishment, otherwise they fear that this war will serve as an example for others to follow.[39] They are referring especially to the discord stirred up in the district by the evil deeds of Sir Henry de Mandeville, who had been appointed bailiff in Twescard, in the north of the present Co. Antrim, at a moment when, through the exertions of de Warenne, the whole land of Ulster had been brought into a condition of peace, and hostages had been rendered for the continuance of these good relations. But with the entry of this fire-eating knight all was changed. Though himself an Anglo-Norman, he set himself to stir up the Irish to commit crimes on all the surrounding Norman settlers and their dependents, in order to secure their properties for himself; he had defrauded the revenue and "by rapine and unjust extortion to his own use had brought the land into a state of ruin." The whole community "as well of English as of Irish" threatened to rise if the bailiwick were granted to Sir Henry, "saving their fealty to Lord Edward." No country could settle down with violent men like de Mandeville setting his neighbours by the ears, and instigating one party to murder the other, and there were unfortunately always some officials in the Government in Dublin to support these evildoers. A three-cornered contest between the de Burghs, FitzWarennes, and de Mandevilles, which was carried on from father to son, culminated in 1333 in the awful tragedy of the murder of the youthful Brown Earl of Ulster, William de Burgh, by Richard de Mandeville, when they were quietly riding home together from morning prayer in apparent friendship.

[39] Sweetman, ii, Nos. 929, 952, 953.

In Ulster, Munster, and Connacht alike jealousies and treacheries between the Anglo-Norman families were ever ready to break out, as one member more ambitious or warlike than the others got the upper hand; each was ready to combine with the Irish princes against his own compatriots or to use Irish quarrels to further his own ends. From time to time the distant kings intervened, pointing out how "Ireland is depauperated by discord and wars," and expressing their disturbance and anxiety of mind thereat; "desiring much that these controversies and wars should be appeased and that peace and tranquility should prevail." [40] But these desires had little effect on men intent upon their family disputes and ambitions in Ireland. In the year 1311 the compiler of the Annals of Clonmacnois, copying from an earlier writer "whom he would take to be an authentic author who would tell nothing but the truth," says that in his time "there reigned more dissensions, strifes, warres and debates, between the Englishmen themselves than between the Irishmen, as by perusing the warres betweene the Lacies of Meath, John Courcy, Earl of Ulster, William Marshal and the English of Meath and Mounster, mac Gerrald [FitzGerald], the Burkes, Butlers and Cogan may appear." In addition, the constant changes of policy in England produced a perpetual ferment. They were always destined to be a source of weakness and unrest in Ireland, and especially so during the frequent revolutions and changes of dynasty which disturbed England throughout the period of the Plantagenet and Yorkist wars. Though not directly concerned in the dynastic conflicts raging round the English throne, the Anglo-Irish barons were inevitably dragged into them, and rival parties were formed which took different sides in these distant struggles.

[40] Sweetman, ii, No. 1155.

From the time of John's visits in 1185 and 1210, first as prince and later as king, the barons in Ireland began to experience sudden changes of royal favour. From his day the old settlers began to fall into disfavour and were forced to make way for the "new English," as the later comers were loosely called. John had brought with him to Ireland a swarm of dissolute favourites, "talkers, boasters, enormous swearers," Angevin and Poitevin by birth, men who were "bold in the town but cowards in the field" and "who in Ireland would be far from the west and nigh to the east and the sea, as though they had a mind to flee rather than to fight." They clung round the Court in order to receive favours, though they gave none. The Irish christened the new lords, French and English alike, the Dubh-Gaill, or "Black Foreigners," when comparing them with the great barons of an earlier day, as in times gone by they had so named the Danes in comparing them with the more friendly Norsemen who had preceded them.[41] These men of the old nobility were thrust aside and only young favourites were called to the Council. Thus, while busily engaged in building up their Irish estates, the Anglo-Irish lords were forced all the time to keep one eye fixed on affairs in England and on the policies of English kings. At any moment they might find themselves fallen into disfavour, either through a change in State policy or through the whispering of some malicious enemy near the throne who was anxious to undermine their influence. They became, in consequence, more and more independent of outside interference, and each baron ruled within his own domain like a free prince in his palatinate.

[41] Annals of Ulster, 1310, and Annals of the Four Masters, at same date.

END OF CHAPTER VI

VII.—THE INVASION OF EDWARD BRUCE AND THE GAELIC REVIVAL

The wars with Scotland, which occupied so much of the reigns of Edward I and Edward II, and into which Ireland was now to be drawn, had arisen largely out of the new relations which existed between England and Scotland after the marriage of Henry I with Matilda, daughter of King Malcolm, a princess of the Scottish line. The Court of Malcolm became filled with families from the South, of which two, the Norman Bruces and Balliols, were destined to play a leading part in Scottish history. The enforced consent of William the Lion, extracted from him during his captivity in England, to hold his crown in fief from the English kings, with the right of homage from the Scottish lords, though for nearly a hundred years held in abeyance, provided a convenient pretext for interference when the occasion should arise; and the passing of the succession from the direct line of William the Lion to that of the daughters of his brother David brought into the field a number of claimants, who were quite ready to appeal to Edward I to support their rival pretensions. Of these John Balliol was descended from David's eldest daughter and Robert Bruce from the second daughter. Their appeal to the English King gave the latter the opportunity of asserting a right to overlordship not expected by the Scottish claimants and vigorously resisted by the general body of the Scottish lords. Balliol gave way; his claim to the sovereignty as a representative of the elder line was allowed, but he received it as the suzerain of the English King. The wars that followed were a protest against the carrying out of the pact in its various implications; and the terrible massacre at Berwick (1296), which compares in horror with Cromwell's later sack of Drogheda, the battle of Falkirk in 1298, and the surrender of Stirling in 1305, completed the conquest of Scotland.

Wallace, the hero of these earlier struggles, had refused mercy, and his head was placed on London Bridge; Balliol was confined in an English prison. For a short time after the Convention of Perth quiet reigned in the North, but it was soon to be broken by a revolt of the whole country under Robert Bruce, who again came forward on the death of Balliol to lay claim to the Scottish crown. For four years his enterprise was a desperate adventure, until the weakness of the second Edward and his absorption in the internal troubles of his kingdom gave Bruce his chance. One after another the towns fell into his hands, and in 1313 he was strong enough to invest Stirling. It was under those exalted walls that the battle of Bannockburn was fought on June 24, 1314, when the footmen of Bruce totally overthrew the thirty thousand horsemen sent to oppose them, and "the feld so cleyn was maid of Inglis men, that nane abad."[1] The King of England himself barely escaped from the field. The news of the English defeat at Bannockburn stirred the Irish as no event for many years had done. Their attention had been frequently turned to the Scottish wars by the drawing off of troops from Ireland to aid the English kings, whose appeals for help in their Scottish expeditions had been made not only to their Norman barons, but also to the Irish princes. The Red Earl of Ulster was the natural leader in these expeditions. His vast estates and claims in Ulster and Connacht gave him almost the position of an independent prince, the maker and unmaker of Irish kings and the most powerful man in Ireland. He took a foremost place in the Parliaments of the country and signed his name in important documents before that of the Justiciar. In 1302 he took what appeared at the time a strange step in marrying his daughter Elizabeth to Robert Bruce, then practically an outlaw; for his struggle for the independence of his country had only just begun. Yet we find de Burgh in the following year (1303) again carrying over a great Irish army to fight against his son-in-law. This marriage had the natural result of casting suspicion upon the fidelity of the Red Earl, especially during the wars of Edward Bruce in Ireland. He seems, indeed, throughout their course to have played a double and uncertain game.

[1] This and the following Scottish quotations are taken from Barbour's Bruce, a poem which deals, among the other exploits of the Bruce family, with the expedition of Edward Bruce to Ireland.

The arrival of Edward Bruce in the North of Ireland in 1315 was not an unexpected event. His brother Robert had since 1312 been coasting round North Ulster and had been repulsed by the inhabitants; he had then sailed out for the Isle of Man, where he destroyed MacDowell's castle and hanged its owner. His marriage with the daughter of the Red Earl had brought the two countries into close connexion; and the news of his wonderful success at Bannockburn had been received with enthusiasm among the Irish. A definite resolution was taken by the native princes of Ulster to invite over a member of the house of the successful leader and to make him king of the whole country. They regarded the Braces as in some sort belonging to their own nation, by virtue of their descent from Dermot MacMorrogh in the female line, while de Burgh's daughter, Bruce's wife, was of the race of Rory O'Conor It is quite probable that those who planned the invitation to Bruce's brother, Sir Edward, believed that an outside claimant to the throne might unite the Irish princes as no one of themselves could hope to do; and they might well consider that a king living and ruling in Ireland itself would be more effectual in keeping quiet in the country than a monarch across seas could ever be. An old account says that the envoys sent were Hugh O'Neill, Bishop of Derry, Brian, son of Donal O'Neill, Manus O'Hanlon, Lord of Orior, and the chief 'ollave' or law-adviser of the O'Neills. Bishop Hugh was the speaker.[2]

[2] Louth Archaeological Journal, 1, 77 seq. This tract is called "The Battle of the Fochart of S. Bridget," ed. H. Morris.

Among other steps they appealed for help and countenance to Pope John XXII, in a Remonstrance which has ever since been regarded as the extreme statement of the views and sufferings of the Irish people at the time in which it was written. The Remonstrance begins thus: "It is extremely painful to us that the vigorous detractions of slanderous Englishmen and their iniquitous suggestions against the defenders of our rights should exasperate your Holiness against the Irish nation. But alas! you know us only by the misrepresentations of our enemies, and you are exposed to the danger of adopting the infamous falsehoods which they propagate, without hearing anything of the detestable cruelties they have committed against our ancestors and still continue to commit, even to this day, against ourselves." They then recite a number of bad cases, such as the murder of O'Brien by de Clare, in which the Norman barons had behaved with cruelty to the Irish lords. They speak of the gift of Ireland to Henry II by the Pope's predecessor, Adrian, and complain that the terms of the grant had been violated, and the bounds of the Church narrowed. "Through the oppressions of the English," they exclaim, "we have been driven to the woods and the rocks, and fifty thousand of both races have perished by the sword alone in virtue of Adrian's Bull." They complain of the uneven laws directed against the Irish, and declare that "the middle nation" in Ireland differs so widely in their principles of morality from those of England and all other nations that they may be called a nation of the most extreme degree of perfidy. The Remonstrance is addressed to Pope John by "his attached children, Donaldus Oneyl, Rex Ultoniae, true heir by hereditary right of all Ireland" (a title which would certainly not have been admitted by the princes of Munster) "as well as the kings, nobles, and Irish people in general of the same realm." The appeal prays the support of the Pope for Bruce, whom the Irish people have chosen as their deliverer, and in whose favour O'Neill is ready to resign his rights to the throne. It speaks as though this decision had only recently been come to, but, as Pope John was not elected till August 1316, the appeal must have been written after that date, certainly after Edward Bruce had been crowned king in May 1316, and probably when the sudden turn in his fortunes had made his permanent success doubtful.[3]

[3] Miss Olive Armstrong, in her Edward Bruce's Invasion of Ireland (1923), summarizes the arguments for a late date in her note on p. 113.

The appeal had little effect; the Pope merely passed it on to King Edward II, with a recommendation that he should inquire into the complaints contained in it, and if they were true should endeavour to put them right. He was, at that very moment, contemplating the excommunication of Robert Bruce for rebellion against England, and the time was not favourable for an appeal on behalf of a member of his house.

The Irish invitation to Bruce came most auspiciously to the young Scottish lord, for Edward, like his brother, was ambitious, and he desired to share with his brother the throne of Scotland. He was now Earl of Carrick, a brave man and proving himself a successful general, and he had no liking to take a second place in the kingdom. The idea of making himself king of Ireland and ousting the English was a tempting one, and on May 26, 1315, he crossed over with a fleet of three hundred ships and six thousand men-at-arms, having with him Sir Philip de Mowbrey, the Earl of Moray, Sir Alan and John Stewart, Sir John Campbell, and Sir Robert Boyd; with these he landed on the coast of Antrim.[4] But his reception was hardly such as he had been led to expect. Of the Irish, only the O'Neills and their 'urraghs,' or dependent chieftains, such as O'Kane, O'Hanlon, and O'Hagan, rose; many held back because they were dissatisfied with O'Neill's alliance, "for they held their own power, dignity, and course of policy in too high estimation." [5] The old Scottish and English settlers in Co. Antrim, such as the Bysets, Logans, and Savages, far from welcoming a Scottish ruler, united with the Mandevilles to resist him and fight for their own, and an alliance was made between them and the Red Earl of Ulster, Richard de Burgh, to oppose him. But in a great battle on the Bann this formidable army was put to flight, and "the Flower of Ulster was tane and slain," the Red Earl himself flying from the field. After this propitious victory Sir Edward Bruce cut his way through to Dundalk, forcing the Pass of Moira, called by Barbour the Pass of Endnellan, which was held by two Irish chiefs against him. The English combination which resisted Bruce's entry into Dundalk included the Justiciar, Edmond le Boteler, or Butler; Maurice FitzThomas, who was later created first Earl of Desmond; and John FitzThomas FitzGerald, afterward first Earl of Kildare. They were usually commanded by Richard de Clare, who held a position of great authority in the army during the wars of Bruce.[6] He is called by Barbour "lieutenant of all Ireland," an error to which his prominence as commander in the field may well have given rise. He was later pardoned a debt and given special privileges " for his great labour and cost in repelling...the Scottish enemies." [7] The combination was joined by the Red Earl with an army that had ravaged its way through Connacht with savage cruelties, the Earl having sworn to the Justiciar that he would deliver to him Bruce alive or dead.

[4] Barbour calls the place "Wokingis Fyrth," which was probably Larne , Pembridge calls it "Clondonne" and Grace's Annals "Glondonne" or Glendun; these are all in Co. Antrim. The course of events and the names of the associates of Bruce also differ in the different authorities.

[5] Louth Archaeological Journal, loc. cit.

[6] Bain, Calendar of Documents relating to Scotland, iii, No. 469.

[7] Ibid., iii, No. 488.

Persuaded by O'Neill, Bruce thought it prudent to retire on Eastern Ulster, where he was followed by the English armies. His retreat was beset with difficulties. He was led astray by an Irish chief, named O'Dempsey, who had sworn fealty to him, but who guided his men into a morass from which the weary army had much ado to get away. At the passage of the Bann Bruce found no boats sufficient for his wants until a pirate vessel or "scummer of the sea" came up and ferried them over. Nevertheless, he inflicted another total defeat on the English at Connor, Co. Antrim, killing many of the leaders and capturing William de Burgh, 'the Grey'; the defeated English fled for refuge into Carrickfergus Castle, where they valiantly maintained themselves against the Scots during a long siege, while the Red Earl led the shattered remnants of his army back to Connacht.

The terror of Bruce's successes spread through Ireland, all the land being said to "shake with fear." He again marched south, routing an army of fifteen thousand men under Roger Mortimer at Kells, and sending him and the de Lacys flying to Dublin. He kept Christmas triumphantly in Meath, and caused himself to be crowned King of Ireland, Fleming and de Lacy offering their submission and promising their support. At the opening of the New Year he defeated the Lord Justice at Ardscull, near Athy. Wherever the Scottish army went it ravaged the country, destroying the remnants of an already bad harvest and leaving famine and suffering in its train. Acts like the burning of Ardee Church full of refugees—men, women and children—on its first march south added to the dread of veterans who in nine months had dispersed and defeated three armies. The Lords of Leinster and Meath met in solemn consultation and bound themselves with an oath to unite in defence of the country against the Scots. Famine, partly caused by his own devastations, forced Bruce to retire into Ulster while he sent to Scotland for reinforcements. There, as King of Ireland, he took hostages, collected the revenues, and forced the lords to deliver to him the regalities belonging to the King of England. This would have been the moment for concerted action on the part of his Irish adherents had they really desired to drive the English from their country. But the most powerful of them made no move, save to appeal to these very English for help. Bruce intrigued first with King Felim, who had followed the army of de Burgh out of Connacht and then with his rival Rory, as he thought each in turn was getting the upper hand. To Felim he offered undivided sway in Connacht if he would forsake the Earl; to Rory a free hand to expel the English, but not to "commit spoliation on Felim or enter his lands." Such a stipulation had little effect on Rory, and soon Felim was forced to fight his way step by step home across the Shannon, for news came from Connacht that Rory was using his opportunity during Felim's absence to advance his own cause; he had good hopes of being elected king of the province, since all the chiefs except MacDermott, Felim's foster-father, had by this time submitted to him. The affairs of Connacht were in a desperate state, there being three native princes alive who each claimed to have been duly elected king; and the country was "entirely convulsed" their internal quarrels, even at the moment when a foreigner was rapidly advancing into the heart of the land.

Felim fell at the early age of twenty-three years, with his standard-bearers around him, bearing the leopard flag, the arms of the O'Conors. Twenty-eight of the O'Kelly family lay dead in that rout, with a host of other chiefs and tanists. On the return of the Red Earl, who was practically in flight before Bruce, the dispossessed chieftains "flocked to his house" to acknowledge his authority and claim his help. But de Burgh was in no position to render aid at this moment. His castles had been burnt down in the wretched struggles for power that had afflicted the province; he had been turned out of Ulster by the victorious arms of Bruce; he was in ill-odour with the authorities because he had tartly told the Justiciar at Dundalk that he did not need his assistance to drive Bruce out of the country, but could deal with him alone; and he was shrewdly suspected of a leaning to the Scottish cause. For a year he wandered about, unable to intervene, while his brother, the Grey William de Burgh, was a prisoner in Scotland, whither he had been conveyed by the Earl of Moray.

It was now noised abroad that Edward Bruce was again moving southward with twenty thousand men and that his brother, the King of Scotland, was come over to join him. From time to time the people of Dublin had heard of the stern justice that Bruce had been meting out in his Parliaments in the North. He had put the Logans to death and hanged many others; while rumour said that the English shut up in Carrickfergus were "living upon hides for want of victuals and had eaten up eight Scots whom they had taken"! Before long Edward Bruce was at Castleknock, close to Dublin, and had formed a junction with his brother at Leixlip. Moreover, the O'Mores, the O'Tooles, and the O'Byrnes were reported to be 'out,' and David O'Toole was discovered hiding with eighty of his men in the woods of Cullinswood, almost beneath the walls. On that "Black Sunday" grave citizens thought they saw the dead rising from their tombs and fighting with each other, shouting their old battle-cry of "Fennok aboo!" Stricken with fear, they hastened to burn down Thomas Street, St John's Church, and other buildings to make the town more easy to defend, but the flames extended farther than was intended, and most of the suburbs were destroyed. The city authorities showed unwonted activity. The de Lacys, who appear sometimes on one side and sometimes on the other, were called upon to clear themselves of collusion with the Scots, and the Red Earl was apprehended by the Mayor as a measure of security, even the intervention of the King not proving sufficient to set him free. Sir Thomas de Mandeville had thrown himself across the path of the Scots near Carrickfergus, with men from Drogheda, having previously replenished the beleaguered city with men and provisions during a time of truce agreed upon for the celebration of Easter; de Mandeville deliberately broke the truce for this purpose. But, "as falsat [falsehood] evir mair sall haif [have] unfayr and ewill ending," the attack ended in the defeat of the Government troops, "auld Schyr Thomas" falling on the field of battle. On emerging into the plain from the Moira Pass, where Sir Richard de Clare was awaiting them, hoping to cut in twain the two divisions led respectively by Robert and Edward Bruce, the six thousand hardy and seasoned veterans led by King Robert fell upon de Clare's troops and cut them to pieces.

But from this moment the luck of Edward Bruce seemed to desert him. Together the two brothers marched to Naas and thence to Tristledermot, the de Lacys being again in their party. Here, however, they were defeated by Edmond Butler, and the resolution made by the invaders "to hold their ways through all Ireland, from one end to the other," was brought to an end within sight of Limerick, where they turned and began a disastrous retreat to the north, on receiving the news that Roger Mortimer had landed at Youghal on April 7, 1317, to take over the administration. The Pope, who a short time before had intervened to endeavour to call a two years' truce between Robert Bruce and the King of England, which had been refused by Robert, now excommunicated the two Scottish brothers and the clergy who supported them. On the other hand, a general pardon was sent over from England to all who would come in; but the de Lacys, who refused it, Were driven into Connacht and their lands taken from them.

Dearth and famine prevailed over the whole country, and when by forced marches the Braces arrived in Ulster, having slipped past the English army by another route, they found the province so impoverished and poverty-stricken that the people were digging up dead bodies and using them for food. The two Bruces were not on the best terms, Edward being determined to take the credit of any victory to himself, and it was this jealousy that brought about the final scene in the drama of King Edward's attempt on Ireland. Learning that Sir John Bermingham was marching north against him with fifteen hundred troops, Edward, whose army, except for the Irish contingents, was much reduced, declared that he would fight before his brother could come up, even if, as he said, the English army were "tryplit or quadruplit" in number. His best advisers besought him to await the arrival of other troops, but his "outrageous succudry [pride] and will" prevailed; the Irish leaders, however, refused to take any part in the battle. The battle was fought between Faughard and Dundalk, on October 13 or 14, 1318, after a long lull in hostilities. The Scots were unwisely drawn up in three divisions, too far apart to support each other, and were completely routed, most of their leaders being mortally wounded or falling in the fight.[8] Edward Bruce was slain by John Maupas, whose body was found stretched across the dead body of Bruce. A story in Barbour says that Edward refused on that day to wear his surcoat bearing his coat-of-arms, and that his faithful body-servant, Gib Harper, "that men held als withouten peir," donned it and was killed in mistake for the King. It seems, however, unlikely that anyone else could be mistaken for Bruce, who certainly fell in the battle, though the change of armour may have caused a momentary doubt. Sir John Bermingham brought Bruce's head to the English King and received the earldom of Louth and the barony of Ardee as his reward; and, though the country people still point out the grave of Bruce in the burial-ground of Faughard, it is probably true that his hands and heart were carried to Dublin and his limbs were sent to different places The remnant of the troops fought their way out to Carrickfergus, but with difficulty, "for they were mony tymes that day assalit by the Irischry," who turned against them on their defeat; finally they made their way back to Scotland.

[8] The numbers that fought are very variously estimated, from 5800 to 8274 Scots being stated to have fallen. Bruce seems to have had only a small Scottish army, with a very large following of Irish, who would not fight.

A universal cry of relief went up both from the English and the Irish on the defeat of Bruce. The man to whom the Irish had looked to drive the English out of their land, the man whom they had formally invited over as their king, and for whom they had besought the Pope's assistance, had become in their experience a more formidable danger than the English whom they wished him to displace. The Annals of Clonmacnois, representing Connacht opinion, exclaim: "Edward Bruce, destroyer of all Ireland in general, both English and Irish, was killed by the English in main battle by their valour, at Dundalk, October 14, 1318, together with MacRory, King of the Isles, and MacDonnell, prince of the Irish of Scotland, with many other Scottish men. Edward, fearing his brother Robert would get the credit of the victory over the English...was himself slain, as is declared, to the great joy and comfort of the whole kingdom; for there was not done in Ireland a better deed that redounded better or more for the good of the kingdom since the creation of the world and since the banishment of the Fomorians out of the land than the killing of Edward Bruce; for there reigned scarcity of victuals, breach of promises, ill performance of covenants, and the loss of men and women throughout the whole realm for the space of three and a half years that he bore sway, insomuch that men did commonly eat one another for want of sustenance during his time." [9] A still more remarkable expression of opinion on the career of Bruce in Ireland was given by a Connacht bard, chief poet to the family of Eoghan (or Owen) O'Madden, who died in 1347. His relations with the foreigners of whom he speaks in the passage about to be quoted had been chiefly confined to the near neighbourhood of the de Burghs, who had established themselves in his district of Hy-Many and possessed themselves of great slices of his territory.

[9] We may hope that this final disaster is, like the eating of the eight Scots at Carrickfergus, added for rhetorical effect.

Though he had fought the invaders in his youth, Eoghan appears to have accepted a compromise with the Red Earl, to whose fortunes he and his people attached themselves with the utmost fidelity. He united his forces to de Burgh's on the side of Felim against that prince's rivals for the throne of Connacht, and carried his arms successfully as far as Meath and Ulster. He refused a lordship equal to the extent of his own territory rather than prove unfaithful to the Earl, and won from his bard the praise of having "taught truth to the chieftains and kept his people from treachery and fratricide, checking their evil customs and dissentions and instilling charity and humanity throughout his goodly territories." He did not, like other chiefs, find it necessary to take hostages for fidelity, nor did he have recourse to fetters; and to all he was ready to extend gifts of food, horses, or kine. He improved his lands and enlarged them, built a castle of stone, and repaired churches. It is the bard of this enlightened ruler who speaks thus of the Brace adventure: "In his [Eoghan's] time Scottish foreigners less noble than our own foreigners [i.e., the Norman barons] arrived; for the old chieftains of Erin prospered under those princely English lords who were our chief rulers, and who gave up their foreignness for a pure mind, their surliness for good manners, and their stubbornness for sweet mildness, and who had given up their perverseness for hospitality. Wherefore it was unjust to our nobility to side with foreigners who were less noble than these, like the O'Neills, who first dealt treacherously with their own lords, so that at this juncture, Ireland became one trembling wave of commotion, except the territory of Eoghan [O'Madden] alone, seeing that he would not violate his truth, fearing to act treacherously towards his lord [the Red Earl] without strong cause...Therefore the chieftains of Ireland in general perished through their excessive pride, except Eoghan only, whom God protected in consequence of his good deeds."[10]

[10] Tribes and Customs of the Hy-Many, ed. J. O'Donovan (Irish Archaeological Society, 1843), pp. 136-139.

Such a statement as this shows a new aspect of the relations between the English barons and the Irish chieftains among whom they settled; it is one that makes us reflect that the whole truth about those relations has not generally been understood. There were evidently instances where the position of the Anglo-Irish lord and that of his Irish neighbours was of a friendly nature, recognized as beneficial to both. De Burgh acceded to the wish of Eoghan that no English steward should have authority over his Gaels, but that his own (Irish) stewards should act for both the English and Irish resident in his territory, either in towns or castles; and the same conditions were adhered to by his son William de Burgh. Richard, great fighter as he was, seems to have won his way with the Irish, to whom a forcible character appealed, and even his misfortunes did not lower their esteem for him. When he died in 1326 he is spoken of as "the choice Englishman of all Ireland."[11]

[11] Annals of Clonmacnois, 1326.

In spite of the original invitation to Bruce there was no general rising to support him, even at the moment of his sweeping successes. On the contrary, even those bodies of Irish who were nominally under his banner forsook him on critical occasions, and in more than one instance it was through the misleading of his Irish allies that his troops got into difficulties. The Irish showed no disposition to seize the opportunity of a distracted and weakened authority to combine in an effort to rid themselves of the English; the favourable opportunity to drive the foreigner out of Ireland passed harmlessly away.

The end of the wars of Bruce found the English diminished in numbers, their positions isolated and scattered, and in many instances surprised and cut off. In Ulster, Connacht, and Munster the native Irish were to a great extent regaining their former possessions, and they had followed the example of the Normans in building castles all over the country, into the bawns of which the cattle could be driven on the warning of a raid. The de Clares were gone from Munster,[12] and the Power of the de Burghs in Ulster and Connacht had been seriously weakened. On the death of the Red Earl his grandson, styled the Iarla Donn, or "Brown Earl," born in 1312, succeeded him. He married Maud Plantagenet, granddaughter of Henry III, and daughter of Henry, Earl of Lancaster, thus allying himself to the royal family of England. But the treacherous murder of this young earl in 1333, by his neighbour, Richard de Mandeville, extinguished the senior male line of the de Burghs; and the chiefs of the junior branches of the family in Connacht, fearing the transfer of his possessions into strange hands by the marriage of his only daughter and heiress, Elizabeth, seized upon his estates in that province. The Earl's widow fled into England with her infant daughter, then only a year old. In later life the child was to return as the wife of Prince Lionel, Duke of Clarence, third son of Edward III, who became Viceroy of Ireland in 1361, and whose daughter's descendants, the Mortimers, laid claim on her account to the earldom of Ulster and the lordship of Connacht in addition to their great patrimonial estates in England and Scotland. In the reign of Edward IV these titles became the appanage of the Crown.

[12] Their downfall occurred before the death of Edward Bruce. See Chapter 6.

In Connacht the two most powerful of the great family of de Burgh's or Burkes, as we may henceforth call them, were Sir William (or Ulick) Burke, ancestor of the Earls of Clanricarde, and Sir Edmond Albanach, the "Scottish" Burke, ancestor of the Earls of Mayo. They banded themselves together and declared themselves independent, adopting the Irish title of MacWilliam Uachtar, or the "Upper" Mac William, i.e., the Clanricardes of Galway, and MacWilliam Iochtar, or the "Lower" MacWilliam, Lords of Mayo, under which names they terrorized the entire province. They flung off English dress and habits with the English or French tongues to which they were accustomed, and adopted the ways of life of the Irish around them, their territories descending by the native rule of tanistry, which led to perpetual broils between the aspirants. So well did they accomplish their purpose that Sir Henry Docwra in Elizabethan days thought the Lords of Mayo were of Irish descent, and the compiler of the Book of Howth seems to have regarded the Clanricarde family as of the old Gaelic race. In Sidney's day it had become worthy of note that MacWilliam spoke "very good English."

The English Government was too feeble to enforce English law in Connacht, and the decline of its influence in the province was rapid. From this time onward we hear little of the doings of the native princes, but much of the wild deeds of the Norman Burkes, grown Irish. Joined with the O'Rorkes and O'Conors, they formed a league of "the proudest, wildest, and fiercest clans" in Ireland, and they and the O'Flahertys were considered "the greatest nation and possessors of the strongest country of any people in Ireland," "noble of mind and of good courage."[13] Sir John Davies in the reign of James I says that "there were more able men of the name of Burke than of any name whatsoever in Europe,"—high praise from an English judge. The Clanricarde branch of the family had the wildest reputation. Their nicknames of "Burke of the Heads," "The Devil's Hook," etc., show what manner of men they were. Many of the Burkes, from the close of the thirteenth century onward, added an Irish 'Mac' to their Norman names [14] and became MacPhilbin, MacMeyler, or MacHubert; others became Jennings or Gibbons, with many other variations which effectually concealed their name of origin. The Berminghams became the Clann Fheorais, or MacPheorais (Piers), a name probably adopted from the time of Piers Bermingham (d. 1308), who is called in Grace's Annals "the noble tamer of the North." Their Leinster lands round Carberry were called Claniores (Clann Fheorais); in Connacht their possessions lay round Dunmore and Athenry. In like manner the de Nangles became MacCostellos; the Stauntons, MacEvillys; the FitzSimons of Westmeath, MacRudderys. The Jordans, Prendergasts, FitzStephens, and others, all descended from old Norman families, threw off the English Government; it was powerless to protect them, and its energies for the next three centuries had to be concentrated on holding its own within the limits of the Pale. This district, which included only the present counties of Louth, Dublin, and Kildare, with part of Meath, was so called from a wall or ditch which was erected to enclose it as a protection from the Irish, who came up to its very borders. Outside, the old families speedily became indistinguishable in manners and language from the native septs among whom they dwelt. They were looked upon as rebels, and large portions of their lands were confiscated as such in the seventeenth century. While Sir Henry Sidney was Viceroy, he used to try to recall them to the memory of their origin by reverting to their original family names; MacCostello (Lord Nangle) he styled de Angulo; MacSurtan (Lord Desert) he addressed as Jordan de Exetore; but in his time they had become "very wild Irish," and he had no easy task to reclaim them.[15]

[13] Lord Deputy to Walsingham, 1589.

[14] The 'Ua' or 'O' was never adopted by the Normans; it remained as the patronymic of the pure Gaelic families.

[15] Book of Howth, in Carew, Miscellany, p. 23.

It is strange to find such families as the d'Exeters of Gallen, who became known as the MacJordans from Jordan d'Exeter, and who had entered the province as English sheriffs of Connacht, thus grown into "very wild Irish" in 1571. In days to come the Stauntons had to set forth to the Privy Council their English descent and protest that they had revolted from their old loyalty because some of her Majesty's officers had cast longing eyes on their pleasant lands and their lives had been endangered in consequence. It was this universal sense of danger that caused Barrys of Cork to become Mac-Adams; de la Freignes of Kilkenny to become MacRickies; Bysets, MacEoin or M'Keon; FitzUrsules, MacMahons; and so on. Early in the seventeenth century it was still recognized that some who called themselves MacNamaras had once been Mortimers, as some MacSwines had been Savages, some O'Dowds had been Dowdalls, some O'Byrnes Barnewells. The Desmond FitzGeralds had long been commonly known as MacMorishes i.e., sons of Maurice FitzGerald. To say which of these families now bearing Irish names are of Irish and which of English or Norman origin would be quite impossible.

Some of these old Norman lords even took service under Irish chiefs and princes. An instance of this was the case of Gilbert de Nangle, or de Angelo, to whom Hugh de Lacy gave Morgallion in Meath; he took service under Cathal Crovdearg in 1195 against his own people and was rewarded by a grant of land near Loughrea. The Irish called him Gillipert MacGoisdealbh (Costello), i.e., son of Jocelyn. The original dependence of the Irish kings upon the help of the Norman barons was slowly, all over the country, changing into the dependence of their descendants upon the Irish chiefs. They threw themselves eagerly into the quarrels of the Irish septs and at times took their part against the Government. The battle of Knockdoe (Cnoc Tuadh), the "Hill of the Battleaxes," was fought in 1504 between Gerald, the Great Earl of Kildare, then Deputy, and MacWilliam Burke, who is said to have had on his side "the greatest power of Irishmen that had been seen together since the conquest," the O'Briens, MacNamaras, and O'Carrolls. It was caused by the bad treatment received by a daughter of the Deputy at the hands of Mac-William, her Connacht husband, and resulted in the complete defeat of MacWilliam's forces, great as they were.[16] The English become Irish are said by Campian to be "quite altered into the worst rank of Irish rogues; such a force hath education to make or to mar." To the Irish chiefs found fighting on the English side, the title of Gall, or 'Foreigner' was often given.

[16] See the Book of Howth, op. cit., pp. 181-186, for a detailed and lively account of this battle.

The family of Dermot, elected King of Connacht in 1315, for instance, were so named.[17] The old Welsh and British settlers, such as the Brannachs, Barretts, Joyces, Lawlesses, Merricks, etc., who had come into the country in early times, were at least as turbulent in their lives as the ' original Irish ' among whom they dwelt. The savage incident of the blinding of the Lynnotts by the Barretts of Tirawley is unequalled for its cruelty in the annals of the country; the Barretts, in vengeance for the murder of a brutal rent-collector employed by themselves, drove their tenants of the Lynnott family Minded across the stepping-stones of Cloghan na nDall, and, if any passed without stumbling, blinded him a second time.[18] But everywhere the Irish families were re-establishing themselves and winning back their old lands from the Normans. The O'Kellys reasserted their authority over Hy-Many, and the O'Dowds of Hy-Fiachrach settled down again on their hereditary lands, and the old free life was reorganized among them. In 1351 William MacDonogh O'Kelly invited to his house at Christmas "all the Irish poets, brehons, bards, harpers, gamesters, jesters, and others of their kind in Ireland," where every one of them was well entertained and used, and departed thanking him for his bounty.[19]

[17] Annals of Loch Cé, 1315, 1328.

[18] Dugald MacFirbis, Tribes and Customs of Hy-Fiachrach, ed. J. O'Donovan (1844), pp. 335-339.

[19] Annals of Clonmacnois, 1351.

As far as was possible, the town of Galway held itself aloof from the stirs of the province. From the fifteenth century it prided itself, and justly, on the solid, handsome buildings of hewn stone, erected by Galway citizens or Spanish merchants, which still show above their portals the arms of their founders, and on its splendid bay which became, through the energy of the citizens, the chief commercial port of the West, surpassing even the older merchant city of Limerick in the extent of its French and Spanish commerce. Vaults capable of storing 1000-1400 tuns of foreign wines were built at Athboy in Meath in early Tudor times, to contain the imports of wines from Galway, which were transmitted to Drogheda and Dublin for sale. The Blakes, d'Arcys, ffrenchs. Martins, Lynchs, Kirwins, and other families of Norman, Irish, and Welsh descent, who had settled in the town between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, later were to become known to the scoffing Cromwellian army as "the Tribes of Galway" on account of their attachment to each other and to their city. Already in 1375 the town was of sufficient commercial importance to have the king's staple established for the sale of wool, sheepskins, and leather, a privilege hitherto conceded only to Cork and Drogheda. In spite of enemy ships constantly hovering round the Aran Islands at the entrance to the bay, and in spite of the turmoils of the O'Conors outside their gates, foreign and home trade steadily increased. Though themselves of mixed descent, they looked down with urban superiority and the pride of unstained loyalty to English rule on the "mountainous and wild people" of the countryside, by whom they "were sometimes robbed and killed." [20] They passed severe laws against trade with the Irish, or letting to them any land or tenement within the walls. "No 'O' or 'Mac' should strut or swagger through their streets." In ancient days the furious descents of the inhabitants of the mountainous districts of Joyce's country and West Connacht had inspired the petition inscribed above the west portal of the town, "From the ferocious O'Flahertys, good Lord deliver us."

[20] See letter to Pope Innocent VIII, in Dutton, Statistical Survey of County Galway (1824), Appendix, p. 6.

But even the O'Flahertys settled down in time, and became so observant of the law that in the seventeenth century during thirty years of peace "there was not one person executed out of their whole territories for any transgression."[21] Intermarriages and the necessities of life were stronger than trade laws, and the Mayors of Galway granted the country people certain protections, which were, however, liable to be removed on account of "wilful disobedience, lying and deceit, or of the impossibility of recovering debts or robberies." But the townspeople found the wheat, barley, oats, and rye, as well as the cheese, beef, butter, tallow, and hides, none the worse because they were brought to market from the Aran Isles or from West Connacht. The ground manured with seaweed was so prolific that they sowed in March with as little seed as possible, being sure that not a grain would fail to fructify. Like all the chief merchant towns of Ireland, Galway held closely to the English interest. Its fine church of St Nicholas was, in 1484, erected into a collegiate body with warden and vicars, and was taken over from the jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Tuam in order that it might follow the English rite and custom in matters of religion. There was an ordinance enacting that all should wear cloaks and gowns and doublets and hose after the English fashion, even if made of the country's cloth. Society in Galway prided itself on keeping in touch with the latest output in English literature. Sir John Harington, on visiting the city early in Elizabeth's reign, found that his recently published translation of Ariosto had been "entertained into Galway" before he came. With the pardonable conceit of the literary man at finding his work appreciated and known in so remote a city as Galway, he exclaims delightedly: "When I got thither, a young lady, a fair lady, a great lady, read herself asleep, nay, dead, with a tale of it."

[21] Roderick O'Flaherty, Iar-Connacht, ed. J. Hardiman (1846), pp. 16-17.

There were fleets of galleys belonging to the O'Malleys and the O'Flahertys on the Galway coasts, and on the southern coasts the O'Driscolls of Baltimore and the le Poers, or Powers, of Waterford had each their fleet, carrying on constant hostilities with each other and with the citizens of Cork and Waterford. There were numerous sea-fights, which must have kept the coasts lively, between the "merchants, strangers and Englishmen," who were plying their trade along the shores, and the galleys of these lords; mayors and sheriffs seem to have taken part in them. In one of these small naval battles in 1368 the le Poers and O'Driscolls made a united attack on the citizens of Waterford, in which the Mayor and sheriffs and justices of the peace were slain, together with thirty-six citizens and sixty merchants, strangers and Englishmen. Sometimes there were reprisals. In 1413 Mayor Simon Wicken and the bailiffs of Waterford with a band of men in armour arrived at supper-time on Christmas Eve at O'Driscoll's great house in Baltimore. A message was sent in that the Mayor of Waterford had arrived with a ship of wine, always good news in an Irish port. The Mayor and his company were readily admitted. Bidding O'Driscoll and his guests not to fear, for "he meant not to draw no man's blood of them, but to dance and drink and so depart," the Mayor sat down among them to sup, after which all joined in the dance. "After singing a carol," at a sign from the Mayor, each of his men held his partner fast, and O'Driscoll and his family found themselves being borne away to the ship, the Mayor explaining that they should finish their carol at Waterford and make merry with them that Christmas.[22]

[22] Carew, Miscellany, pp. 470-471; and cf. p. 474, apparently taken from the Waterford Book.

The condition of the 'march' or borderlands scattered throughout the island between the native and the English districts was much more pitiable. Though nominally under the authority of English proprietors, they were usually barren and waste lands, chiefly inhabited by Irish, and they were the natural paths by which the incursions of disaffected Irish were made into the districts of English occupation. By day and night they were the channel for surprises and raids. Laws were constantly being passed ordering the protection of the marches by owners of property, and forbidding intercourse with such natives on the borderlands as were in arms against the Crown. Special efforts were made to prevent private wars, so that "there be one peace and war throughout the entire land," in which all were to be called on to assist. But in spite of this the petty raiding and feuds never ceased, and all attempts to improve the march-lands ended in failure. In the circumstances it is not surprising that a large proportion of the proprietors of these borderlands became absentees; no fines or threats of punishment sufficed to keep them from flying to England to escape their costly and unpleasant duties at home. The heavy fines collected from absentees were spent in keeping up horses and soldiery to guard the marches; border castles were ordered to be built, 'paces' or wide avenues cut through the forests, and the highroads kept passable.[23] It was impossible, nevertheless, to secure quiet in these districts; bands of lightfooted Irish marauders swooped down on the villages and towns, or waylaid passing travellers, while the heavy-armed soldiery were unable to follow them into the wild and tangled country into which they disappeared again with marvellous swiftness. The evil system of 'black rents' (dubh cios) had to be resorted to in order to buy off these border-septs, especially the O'Mores of Leix, the O'Byrnes of Ranelagh, and the O'Tooles of Wicklow, who were in the habit of making sudden and terrifying descents on the inhabitants of Dublin from the west and south.

[23] For statutes regarding the march-lands and absentees see the Acts of 25 Edw. I (1297), 3 Edw. II (1310), 1 Hen. IV (1399), in Berry, Statutes and Ordinances, i, 199, 273, 500.

These black rents were gradually extended throughout the country. In 1360 Mahon Moinmoy exacted them from the English of North Munster, and in 1380 Brian O'Brien in alliance with Richard de Burgh forced the payment of "great gifts and tribute" from Munster. Two years earlier the warlike Murchad O'Brien of Ara began to spoil the demoralized English of the Pale, and a special Parliament was called at Tristledermot to deal with him. "With a great force of Irishmen he threatened to destroy parts of Leinster," and a hundred marks were paid to him to induce him to withdraw. It was a ruinous policy, which increased the evil it was designed to prevent. In the reign of Edward IV large sums of money had to be paid annually to O'Connor of Offaly, O'Carroll of Tipperary, O'Brien in Limerick, and MacCarthy in Cork. All these rents were raised out of the incomes of the English settlers. Wexford had to contribute eighty marks yearly to pay off MacMorrogh Kavanagh, while the English of Ulster paid black rents to O'Neill. According to a tract called An Abbreviate of the getting of Ireland and of the decaye of the same the black rents amounted annually to £740 of the contemporary currency. To maintain themselves against such odds became to the English a matter of constant anxiety; they had to keep armed retainers about their houses; and in 1475 even a bishop of Meath when summoned to repair to England pleaded that he was so occupied with hostings that he dare not leave his camp even to meet Parliament.

The English resident in Ireland had no easy time of it. There were exactions from Viceroys and English kings, black rents to Irish chiefs, and heavy costs for maintaining troops, with the continual harassing strife alike with their own countrymen and with the "Irish enemy." Absenteeism grew, and could not be checked; even the appropriation by the Council of two-thirds of the rents of absentees did not suffice to bring back those who had left their estates in the hands of stewards while they lived in England. In 1361 Edward III summoned before him in London sixty-three landowners, lay and clerical, earls, countesses, knights, and abbots, who were absentees from their establishments in Ireland, and ordered them at once to proceed to their Irish estates; but all threats and commands proved useless. In 1371 a case was brought into court, and it was decided that a baron refusing to go into Ireland could not be forced to do so, because, under the provisions of Magna Charta, no free man could be obliged to abandon the realm of England unless by Act of Parliament.[24] Ecclesiastics and landowners alike represented themselves in appeals to the English kings as "continuing in a land of war, environed by Irish enemies and English rebels, and in point to be destroyed." [25]

[24] Gilbert, Viceroys of Ireland, p. 233.

[25] Ibid., pp. 216, 229, 244, etc.

It was often as much a desire of self-preservation as a matter of choice to fall back upon the native method of life, adopt Irish dress, customs, and language, and become one with the people among whom they lived. All of them were dependent on Irish labourers to till their fields and serve their families, and all of them were followed to war by troops of Irish kerne. They envied the provisions of the Brehon law, which punished homicide only with a fine, whereas under English law the culprit (always excepting when the victim was an Irishman) was liable to capital punishment. They had necessarily to learn the language of the country if they would hold any communication at all with their neighbours and dependents, and the native garb, a tunic with a wide, hooded cloak over it, they found to be well suited to the life and climate. Above all, they were glad to be free of the exactions of successive Governments, and they rejoiced in the Irish custom of 'coyne and livery' or free entertainment for man and beast at the expense of their dependents, a habit of which they took full advantage. Gradually most of those who lived outside the Pale dropped into all the native ways, even to the adoption of the 'culan' (cuilfhionn), or long lock at the back of the head, or the 'gibbe' in front over the forehead, while the use of the moustache, "a beard on the upper lip alone," and the Irish manner of riding without a saddle became habitual.

END OF CHAPTER VII

VIII.—THE STATUTE OF KILKENNY

One outcome of the invasion of Bruce was the creation of the great earldoms of Kildare, Ormonde, and Desmond. On May 16, 1316, John FitzThomas, Baron of Offaly, was created Earl of Kildare for his steady loyalty during Bruce's advance into Leinster. In 1328 James Butler became Earl of Ormonde, with a grant of the liberties of Tipperary, and in 1329 Edward III conferred on Maurice FitzThomas the title of Earl of Desmond, with the County Palatine of Kerry added to his already great possessions. Thus came into existence within the same century the three most powerful earldoms of Ireland. Several of the descendants of these Earls became Viceroys during the ensuing centuries. It was hoped that the erection of these three peerages, held directly under the King, would have kept the Anglo-Norman gentry of the South of Ireland quiet and loyal to English rule. But a variety of causes tended to prevent this wished-for result. In the first place there was the tendency already showing itself to relapse into the habits and ways of the people by whom they were surrounded. This was especially the case with the Desmond family, whose palatinate was far from the Pale and who gradually became Irish in all but origin. Against such tendencies the Irish Parliaments in vain directed laws forbidding imitation of, or union with, the native race. Intermarriages were always going on, even in the families reckoned the most English in the land; in the fifteenth century Sir James Butler, who became Deputy under Edward IV, was married to an Irish wife, Sabh (or Sabina) Kavanagh, daughter of Donal MacMorrogh of Leinster, and her third son, Sir Piers Butler, became Earl of Ormonde in 1515. Her husband styled himself Chief Captain of his nation, after the Irish form, and had great influence among the people of his district. An Act of the Irish Parliament had to be obtained to entitle Sabh, as a native Irishwoman, to rights under English law. The father of this Sir James Butler, Edmond MacRichard, had assumed the Irish title as an Irish chief, and evidently spoke and read Gaelic, for two books in that language were compiled for him by one of the O'Clerys about 1453, called The Gaelic Book of MacRichard Butler [1] and the Book of Carrick. They were given as part of his ransom when he was defeated in battle by Thomas, Earl of Desmond, in 1462, such manuscripts having a high value in mediaeval Ireland. If such an intermixture of races was going on even among the Butlers, it is less surprising to find the frequency with which marriages with the daughters of Irish houses occurred among the Burkes.

[1] Now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. It contains parts of the Psalter of Cashel, The Book of Cong, The Yellow Book of Ferns, etc.

It was one such marriage, that of Richard MacWilliam Burke, Lord of Clanricarde (d. 1383), to the Lady More O'Madden, which brought the estate of Portumna into the Clanricarde family. Such households would naturally be conducted in the Irish way, and the children would learn from their earliest days to speak the language of their adopted country. These powerful lords grew restive under the interference of successive Deputies, who never ceased to thwart them in order to check their increasing influence, and who constantly transmitted to England official reports which were calculated to bring their acts into suspicion. These causes, and universal fighting and broils in the country among the English of Norman descent, made frequent Parliaments necessary during the half-century succeeding the invasion of Edward Bruce. The last public appearance of the Red Earl of Ulster was at a Parliament at Kilkenny in 1326, when he entertained the barons in splendid style, retiring after the ceremony to die in the abbey of Athassel; his heir, William Donn, or 'the Brown Earl,' being then a boy of fourteen. By 1327 the quarrels between the barons had become so violent that the de Burghs, the le Poers of Waterford, the de Berminghams, Butlers, and Geraldines, were commanded, on pain of forfeiture, to desist from mustering soldiery and making war on one another. In the South these broils were so constant that the inhabitants of Cork, Kinsale, and Youghal addressed a petition to the Viceroy and Council begging them to send down "two justices and some good English captains and men," without which they say, "we are all cast away, and then farewell Munster for ever." The citizens dared not walk outside the walls for recreation without a body of armed attendants, and as a result of this seclusion they were forced to intermarry, so that "well-nigh the whole city is allied together." [2] The restlessness of men's minds was aggravated by rumours of heresies and trials for witchcraft, but still more by repeated outbreaks of the plague. These outbreaks in Ireland were the final wave of the Black Death, which had swept away more than half the population of England in 1348.

[2] Campian's History, in Ware's Ancient Irish Histories (1809), Bk. II. pp. 141-142. Campian wrote in 1571.

The succession of viceroys reflects the attempts of English monarchs to govern Ireland by a series of experiments. In early times the office of Justiciar (Capitalis Justiciarius) was placed in the hands of the most powerful of the Norman nobles; but their jealousies led to the substitution for them of a series of ecclesiastical rulers, men of European experience, but with little knowledge of the country they were called upon to administer. After them a return was made to the rule of nobles on the spot. The most beneficial tenure of office in the early period was that of Sir John Wogan, who arrived in Dublin in 1295 and brought about a short truce in the Burke and Geraldine wars. In 1307 he suppressed the Knights Templars, whose pretensions had become intolerable, and whose priors, ruling from Kilmainham, defied Deputies in a way difficult to be borne. During his tenure of office he held three Parliaments at Kilkenny, that of 1310 being memorable as the first to which elected representatives of the cities and boroughs were summoned, as well as the spiritual and lay peers, and knights who represented the counties and Liberties. But it was not until 1541 that members of Irish blood were called on to attend. The early Parliaments were exclusively of Anglo-Normans, occupied with the interests and quarrels of their own class. They were, as a rule, anti-Irish in spirit. The condition of things existing in the fourteenth century had never been contemplated in the early days of English rule. All the records go to show that it was the original intention of the sovereigns of England to make no distinction between the people of the two nationalities, but to treat them in every respect alike. Various early Church grants were signed together by Norman and Irish lords, and Irish bishops signed the ordinances of synods or joined the barons in such matters as the decree of 1205 about the body of Hugh de Lacy.[3] The King's mandate appointing Henri de Londres as Justiciar in 1221 was sent to the Irish princes as well as to the Norman knights.[4] In the following year, 1222, when a question as to a writ of bounds came up which was contrary to the law of England, it was laid down that "the laws of Ireland and England are, and ought to be, the same," though in a later comment on the same subject it was arranged that in the lands inhabited by Irishmen Irish custom was to be adhered to, and in the English parts that used in England was to be enforced.[5]

[3] Register of the Abbey of St Thomas, Dublin, ed. J. Gilbert, pp. 315-316, 348-349.

[4] Sweetman, i, No. 1001.

[5] Ibid., 1, Nos. 1033, 1081.

It was one consequence of the submission of the Irish princes that they became henceforth eligible for the protection of English law. Their oath of fealty placed them in this new position. When O'Neill of Ulster, O'Conor of Connacht, O'Brien of Thomond, MacMorrogh of Leinster, and Malaughlan of Meath made their submissions they were recognized as equally capable of enjoying English law with the Norman nobles. Theoretically, English law was thus granted to the whole country, for their rule extended over the larger part of the five provinces. They were known as the "Five Bloods who enjoyed English law," and this placed them in a position of superiority to those who were not so favoured. This is often referred to in legal pleas, as when, in the reign of Edward II, O'Kelly is described as an Irishman "not of the blood or progeny of those who enjoy the laws of England." [6] There seems no doubt that it was intended that English law should become the general usage of the septs of the submitters, and thus gradually be introduced throughout the whole country; but in fact no such drastic change as the substitution of a foreign system of law was possible in a country which had lived for centuries under its own native regulations formed upon a manner of life wholly different from that which had given rise to English law. It could not be universally enforced until the plantations had brought an English population to replace the native inhabitants, people who carried with them the laws, customs, and language of their own country. Up to the reign of James I the Senchus Mór or Brehon law, which the English called "the law of the hills," still held its own over the native parts of the country, and the Brehon, as expounder of that law, retained his authority among the people. But the chiefs who were brought into contact with the English officials, and the merchants, traders, and others who had constant dealings with English people in the Pale felt the practical inconveniences arising from a double system of administering justice, and they made repeated attempts to obtain the protection of English law.

[6] "Praedictus Gulielmus O'Kelly est Hibernicus et non de sanguine aut progenie eorum qui gaudeant lege Anglicana, quoad brevia portanda. Qui sunt O'Neale de Ultonia, O'Connochur de Connacia, O'Brien de Thotmonia, O'Malachlin de Midia, et MacMorrogh de Lagenia." (Archives of Bermingham Tower, 3 Edw. II).

In 1277 Robert d'Ufford transmitted the intelligence that "the Irish had offered 7000 marks for a grant from the King of the common laws of the English," and three years later, in 1280, the request was renewed.[7] The King commanded that a conference should be called immediately to discuss the question; but we hear nothing of it further; probably, like other well-intentioned proposals between the kings and their Irish subjects, the plan was defeated by the men on the spot, whose whole aim it was to widen the differences between the two peoples and to hold down the Irish as an inferior race. About this date the O'Byrnes, the MacCarthys,[8] and even the O'Flahertys of West Connacht appealed for the gift of English law, the latter saying that though they were "meere Irish" they had always been loyal. Many instances of denization to private persons are recorded;[9] it was especially necessary to merchants trading with the towns, in order to put them on an equal footing before the law with the English. Henry III declared that "all Irishmen who chose were to be admitted into the peace of the King and Prince Edward"; [10] but Sir John Davies makes it clear that "the pride, covetousness, and ill counsel of the English planted in the country" interfered to prevent these good designs.[11]

[7] Sweetman, ii, Nos. 1400, 1408, 1681.

[8] Sweetman, ii, No. 2362.

[9] Ibid., ii, No. 1602 ; and see Davies, Discovery of the true causes why Ireland was never entirely subdued (Morley, 1890), pp. 262 seq.

[10] Ibid., 11, Nos. 919, 2298.

[11] Davies, op. cit., p. 281; Grace, Annales Hiberniae, pp. 84-85, note.

During this period of general unrest Parliaments were summoned at frequent intervals; in 1329 one met in Dublin to make peace between the Earl of Ulster and Maurice FitzThomas, Earl of Desmond, and others were called in 1330 and 1331 at Kilkenny when similar disputes had broken out. Violent measures were adopted, which up to this time had been unknown, by weak and vindictive Justiciars, such as Sir Antony Lucy and Sir Ralph d'Ufford (1344), to regain their waning authority, but they only resulted in still further stirring up opposition and increasing disaffection. The Earl of Desmond, though he had received the King's pardon, was captured at Limerick by Lucy and shut up in prison. Sir William Bermingham and his son Walter were taken at Clonmel, and, notwithstanding the King's charter, imprisoned in Dublin Castle. In 1332 Sir William, who is called "a bold and noble gentleman, of rare excellence in war," was hanged in Dublin, to the open grief of many. His son was set at liberty. Campian says quaintly, "William Bermingham, a warrior incomparable, was found halting...and so hanged was he a knight among thousands odd and singular [i.e., remarkable above his fellows for his qualities]." D'Ufford came over in July 1344, after a time of "universal war through the whole of Ireland," and during his period of maladministration the wars between the Desmonds and the Burkes were at their height.

Sir Maurice (or Morish) FitzThomas FitzGerald, first Earl of Desmond, whose great possessions were second only to those of the de Burghs, was the son of that Thomas a nAppagh, or 'of the Ape' whose marvellous escape from the burning house when he was an infant in the cradle, by the aid of a pet monkey, had left him the sole survivor of his family. His father and kin had been wiped out at the battle of Callan (1261) near Tralee by the MacCarthy Mores, of whose lands they had possessed themselves. Thomas lived to grow to man's estate and to avenge the destruction of his family. He was Justiciar in 1295, when Sir John Wogan came over to take office, and he died in 1298. His son Morish FitzThomas extended his influence by a marriage in 1312 with Katherine, daughter of Richard de Burgh, Earl of Ulster, and his fiery temper is shown by his attack on Arnold le Poer for calling him in public a 'rimer.' Morish rose high in favour with Edward III, to whom he had rendered signal services in his Scottish wars, and was by him created first Earl of Desmond in 1329, with a grant of the Liberty or Palatinate of Kerry, to be held of the English Crown, and a grant of the advowson of Dungarvan. He scoured the Irish Sea with a fleet confided to him by the King, and kept the coasts free of pirates. He held the native chiefs in subjection, forcing on them obedience to the English sovereign. The O'Nolans and O'Mores felt his hand in turn. He had ten thousand men of the O'Briens at his back, and the MacCarthys were never free from fear. He turned his hand against his own wife's family, the de Burghs of Ulster, and involved the country in war. Viceroys like Lucy and d'Ufford were not the persons to deal with a proud noble like Desmond, whose power and pretensions were growing to an inconvenient height; both the combatants were shortly afterward captured at Limerick and shut up in prison. Desmond escaped, but was recaptured and sent to Dublin, where he lay in confinement for eighteen months.

Subsequently he was liberated, the highest nobles in the kingdom standing as sureties for his fidelity. But when he was summoned to attend a Parliament in Dublin in 1345, Desmond again, as in 1331 and 1341, "came not"; and d'Ufford, "with the King's banner displayed," marched into Munster, against the consent of the great lords, commanding Desmond on pain of forfeiture of his lands to repair to him. Morish had replied by summoning an independent Parliament at Kilkenny (November, 1341), where, after swearing fidelity to the Crown, a formal complaint was drawn up, to be transmitted to the King, against the policy and greed of "the needy men sent from England without knowledge of Ireland." They proposed three questions for the King's consideration: (1) how a realm at war could be governed by one unskilful in all warlike services; (2) how an officer under the King who entered very poor should in one year have grown to more excessive wealth than men of great patrimony in many years; (3) how it happened, seeing they were all called lords of their own, that the Lord of them all (the King) was not a penny the richer for them? These queries were aimed directly at the Deputies, who were robbing Desmond's castles, revoking patents for grants of land, imprisoning people without cause and extorting from them sums of money, little of which went into the public treasury. The twenty-six noble sureties of Desmond were especially suffering from their depredations, the Earls of Ormonde and Ulster alone being too high placed for him to dare to touch them. A dangerous precedent was set up when, under the influence of men like the Justiciar, Edward III showed his intention of superseding these powerful and independent descendants of the old Norman conquerors by new men, "English born in England," who knew nothing of the country, but flocked over in order to enrich themselves at the expense of the great lords whose influence it was the main object of the officials in power to subdue. After the receipt of the formal complaints made by Desmond's Parliament, d'Ufford was called to England to answer for his misdeeds and for the incessant frays allowed under his government between the Anglo-Norman nobles.

He is said to have replied that "he thought it expedient to wink at one knave cutting off another; it would save the King's coffers and purchase peace in the land," whereat, it is added, "the King smiled." [12] In 1346 the Justiciar died, "to the greatest public joy of all men," and in the same year a truce was granted to the Earl of Desmond. He sailed from Youghal to England with his wife and two sons to state his own case against d'Ufford, and to surrender to the King. Here he remained for three years in nominal confinement within the bounds of London, being allowed twenty shillings a day by the King for his expenses from the time he set foot in England. He became very friendly with Edward III, and was sent home in 1349. In 1355 he was taken under the King's special protection and his sureties were restored to him. In the same year he became Viceroy, but he died in 1356, "not without great lamentation of them that did love quietness and peace." His character is curiously summed up in the words of an Anglo-Irish chronicler: "He was a good man and a just who hanged even his own relations for theft and well castigated the Irish." [13]

[12] This phrase is constantly, but erroneously, taken to apply to the native Irish.

[13] Grace, Annales Hiberniae, 1355 ; Book of Howth, in Carew, Miscellany, p. 166.

Maurice FitzGerald, fourth Earl of Kildare (1318-90), had suffered hardly less from the malpractices of d'Ufford than Desmond had done. He was equally averse to the new policy of superseding the English born in Ireland by English born in England. He had been enticed to Dublin by d'Ufford and arrested while sitting in Council at the Exchequer. But he was released in the following year, and in 1347 was with Edward III at the siege of Calais, where he was knighted by the King. He became Justiciar in 1356, and held the office from time to time till his death. But the evil policy against which he and Desmond protested continued and gave all the old nobility a sense of insecurity which did not tend to peace.

In 1340-41 the King, weary of the tidings of incessant wars in Ireland, petulantly revoked "all grants made either by his father or himself to any person whomsoever in whatsoever way, whether Liberties or possessions or other goods," by which measure almost the whole country was moved to insurrection.[14]

[14] Grace, Annales Hiberniae, 1340-41.

It was unfortunate that his proposal to visit his Irish dominions, made in 1332, was never carried out. His personal dealings with the Earls of Kildare and Desmond, when they sought his intervention, show that he desired to act justly toward them and to undo as far as was possible the evils caused by his representatives on the spot, but he was ill served by the men in power. In June 1364 he ordained that any Englishmen, whether born in England or in Ireland, who should raise any dissension, reproach, or debate between themselves, should be liable to a fine and two years' imprisonment.[15] But such regulations were of little avail to stop feuds among lords surrounded by fighting kerne and jealous of each other's greatness. He therefore, in 1361, took the step of sending his son Lionel, Duke of Clarence, brother to the Black Prince, to represent him in Ireland, ordering all nobles in England who held lands in that country to attend him. The appointment looked like an attempt to revive the policy of Edward I, and to regard Ireland as the appanage of an elder son of the English king, who was to be resident in Ireland. The Viceroyalty of Lionel was ushered in by the creation of many new knights, whose families, such as the Prestons, Talbots, Cusacks, de la Hydes, and de la Freigne (de Fraxinis), became established in the country. Lionel's wife, Elizabeth, the daughter of the murdered Earl of Ulster, accompanied him. Their only daughter married Edmund de Mortimer, Earl of March, whose son Roger, made Viceroy by Richard II in 1397, was the direct heir to the throne; he laid claim to the great possessions of the de Lacys in Meath, the de Burghs in Connacht and Ulster, and the Marshals in Leinster. It was in the desperate hope that it might still be possible to recall the semi-independent Anglo-Norman lords to their allegiance that in 1366 Lionel called together the Parliament which passed the famous Statute of Kilkenny. This Parliament was attended by a number of bishops, and on its conclusion the Bishops of Dublin, Cashel, Tuam, Lismore, Waterford, Killaloe, Ossory, Leighlin, and Cloyne fulminated an excommunication against all who should transgress the law. The lords and commons sat together at the making of the Statute of Kilkenny, and the Statute itself is in French, which was still the language of the law and of society both in England and in Ireland.[16]

[15] Rymer, Foedera (1708), vi, 442.

[16] For the Statute of Kilkenny see Berry, Statutes and Ordinances, i, 430-469.

It is important to remember that the Statute of Kilkenny was not aimed directly at the Irish nation, but at the Anglo-Norman lords; it was inspired by the conviction that these old English were rapidly passing away from their allegiance to the Government, and that their broad lands were dropping back into independent states; and it was an attempt to stop this process before it was too late. The Statute was drawn up by the Irish Parliament, and represents the policy of the Anglicizing party in Ireland itself; and, as such, it is intensely anti-Gaelic in spirit. The earlier policy of endeavouring to draw the two races together was to be abandoned, and a new policy adopted of keeping them apart; it being believed that only in this way could the great principalities be preserved in any semblance of fealty to the Crown. Bitter feeling between the two races was in the ascendant. Lionel had himself witnessed an example of this soon after his landing. He had, on his arrival, engaged in war with the O'Byrnes of Wicklow, and, as a matter of precaution, he had ordered that none of Irish birth should come near his army. He was surprised to learn soon afterward that at least a hundred of his own men were missing; and he discovered that these men were Irishmen in his own army. His English soldiers had taken advantage of his order to massacre their Irish comrades.[17] This unexpected incident so impressed his mind that he afterward "advised himself and united the people, showing a like fatherly care to all." Nevertheless, he presided at the Parliament of Kilkenny.

[17] Grace, Annales Hiberniae 1361.

Though the statutes of this Parliament are in many ways a repetition of earlier legislation, especially of the laws passed at Wogan's Parliament, its provisions are much more detailed and explicit than any former Act had been. In its preamble it states that "whereas for a long time after the conquest of Ireland the English in Ireland used the English language, mode of riding, and apparel, and were governed and ruled with their dependants by English law... thus living in subjection, now many English of this land forsaking the English language, fashion, mode of riding, laws and usages, live and govern themselves according to the manners, fashion, and language of the Irish enemies; and also have made divers marriages and alliances between themselves and the Irish enemies aforesaid, whereby the said land and the liege people thereof, the English language, the allegiance due to our Lord the King, and the English laws there are put in subjection and decayed, and the Irish enemies exalted and raised up, contrary to right. The King has summoned this Parliament in answer to the grievous complaints of the commons of Ireland...for the better observance of the laws, and punishment of evildoers."

The Act deals principally with persons of English origin who are in good position, and it discourages by severe threats of punishment any imitation of or intimate connexion with the native Irish. Marriage or concubinage with them are forbidden and also the close ties of 'gossipred,' and fosterage (Art. II). The English language is to be spoken in English parts and English fashions kept up, and the Irish living among the English are also to use the English tongue. It would seem that things had gone so far that even many of the clergy living among the English could not speak the English tongue, and it is ordered that they shall be given a respite in order to learn it (Art. III). They must also ride with saddles in the English fashion and not bareback. Among English people disputes are to be settled by English and not by Brehon law, and there is to be no difference made between the English born in England, or "new English," and those born in the country, or "old English." It would seem that the feeling between them ran so high that the one called the other "English hobbe" and "Irish dog." It is curious to think of a de Burgh or Geraldine being styled "Irish dog" by some degenerate sycophant from the other side, and little wonder that they retorted by flinging "English hobbe" in the faces of their opponents. All are henceforth to be known alike "as lieges of our lord the King" (Art. IV). There are several clauses dealing with peace and war, the practice of arms, and to prevent the selling of arms to the Irish. No war is to be undertaken by private persons, but only by the Council on the advice of Parliament (Arts. II, IV, X). The practice of keeping kerne at the expense of the retainers is to be stopped, and such kerne, if kept at all, must be at the lord's expense (Art. XVII). Inducements are held out to 'idlemen' [18] to settle down on waste lands (Art. XVIII). An Englishman who breaks a peace or truce made by the authorities between him and the Irish is to be imprisoned and forced to make restitution (Art. XXVII).

[18] 'Idlemen' were gentlemen or persons of good birth, not common vagrants. The word comes from aedel, 'noble.' But they speedily degenerated into outlaws. A viceregal dispatch says: "These English rebels style themselves men of noble blood and idlemen, whereas, in truth, they are strong marauders" (Gilbert, Viceroys of Ireland, p. 288).

Many of these laws were, in the circumstances of the time, just and necessary, and they protected the Irishman at peace, as they protected the Englishman, from the exactions and tyranny of their overlords. Had it succeeded, the Statute of Kilkenny might have been commended as founded in reason and necessity. But it was impossible that it should succeed. The barons to whom it chiefly applied could easily place themselves beyond the reach of the law, and in spite of punishments and excommunications no regulations such as these, which entered into every part of the family and social life, could be enforced. Though successive Parliaments confirmed the Statute of Kilkenny with some modifications, it was practically dead, so far as its objects were concerned, almost before it could be put into operation. With the death of Lionel "the laws died with him also," though Davies says, rather erroneously, that they "restored the English government in the degenerate colonies for divers years." In a country where several of the founders or leaders of the greatest Norman families had taken Irish wives whose descendants were among the chief nobility of England, such rules proved particularly difficult to enforce. These marriages went on, in spite of all laws, and at the close of the fifteenth century three heads of the junior branch of the Ormonde family married the daughters of Irish chiefs, and three daughters of Gerald, Earl of Kildare. Deputy of Ireland, followed this example. The same thing was going on in private families all over the country.

Fosterage with Irish families was adopted almost as frequently by the settlers as by the old inhabitants, and they were unwilling to give it up. Frequent petitions were made and licences granted for dispensing with this statute in particular cases. By it the Norman lord was united with his Irish tenants in the closest bond of affection and interest. In later days it was to the devotion of his foster-parents that many a hunted scion of the old Norman stock owed his safety when in hiding from the English officers of the law. But from the point of view of the maintenance of English authority it is easy to see that these customs were regarded as objectionable, making the law of the land very difficult to enforce. Nevertheless, these regulations, though impossible to carry out, formed a ready excuse in after days for the suppression of the old Anglo-Irish nobility. The apology for the execution of the eighth Earl of Desmond was that he had broken his allegiance by an "Irish alliance and fosterage"; in 1466 an Act attainted the Earls of Kildare and Desmond and Edward Plunket "for alliances, fosterage, and alterage with the King's Irish enemies." The restrictions about modes of dress, fashions of cutting the hair and beard, riding, and using native sports like hurling and 'coiting' might be merely irritating, though they irritated at every moment of life and at every point; but questions of marriage, fosterage, and 'gossipred' entered into the intimacies of family life. In spite of laws to the contrary, the day was to come when one of the greatest of Irish Deputies, Sir Henry Sidney, was to act as ' gossip ' or sponsor to a child of Shane O'Neill.

To the native Irish dwelling among the English these laws proved short and sharp if they went into open rebellion, and very irritating if they remained at peace. Such Irishmen, whether tenants, servants, or merchants, were forbidden to use their own language, even among themselves, under pain of imprisonment and forfeiture of lands, until the offender found sufficient sureties that he would adopt and use the English tongue (Art. III). Such a law must have borne heavily on the Irish of the towns and prevented many willing Irish workers from settling where work was to be had. All Irish minstrels, tympanours, pipers, story-tellers, rimers, and harpers were forbidden to come among the English under threat of fine or imprisonment and the forfeiture of their instruments (Art. XV). This provision was intended as a protection against spies "finding out the secrets, customs, and policies of the English, whereby great evils have often happened." But the Irish piper and minstrel was a welcome guest at the houses of English and Irish alike, and an Anglo-Irishman could enjoy a story of Cuchulain or Finn MacCool quite as much as any O'Sullevan or O'Kelly. Even the most English circles applied at times for permission to keep rimers and minstrels in the family, for the amusement of long evenings and the pleasure of guests. That it was in their power, in the course of their wanderings from house to house, to pick up a good deal of information that was useful to the chiefs regarding the plans and dispositions of the English need not be doubted. The bards gathered news, advised, warned, and encouraged; they stirred up the lagging chief to fresh efforts and applauded his successes. For substantial rewards they sang the praises of their chiefs, welcomed their rise to power, and bewailed their deaths.[19] All this they appeared to be as willing to do for an ' old ' English loyalist who was willing to pay the price as for any Irish 'rebel.' Tadhg MacDaire MacBrodin in later days (he died in 1652) could write a panegyric to an Elizabethan Earl of Thomond, or pen the praises of the Barrys, Bourkes, and Clanricardes, who were fighting against Tyrone, with apparently the same freedom from compunction and in just the same flowery language as though he was lauding his Irish chief.

[19] In the sixteenth century blind Tadhg O'Higgin received as a reward for a single poem in praise of the house of MacSweeney "a dappled horse, one of the very best in Ireland, a wolf-dog that might be matched against any, a book that was a well brimful of the very stream of knowledge, and a harp of special fame" from the bard of MacWilliam Burke, who was present on the occasion. The rentals of a chief bard sometimes amounted to £4000-£5000 a year, exclusive of rewards.

To the English the bards were a well-recognized source of danger, and as such were the object of stringent laws intended to suppress their activities. When caught they were liable to be hung out of hand or driven out of their broad lands, as when, in 1415, Lord Justice Talbot "harried a large contingent of Ireland's poets, as O'Daly of Meath, Hugh oge MacGrath, Duffy and Maurice O'Daly." But these acts of severity were occasional; there was no general massacre of the bards as in Wales; and in Spenser's day they were still playing and singing the beautiful native airs in English houses as freely as in the Irish houses of the chiefs, and everywhere winning praise for their skill and intelligence. Schools of bards and scribes continued to flourish all over the country, and in the Gaelic revival, which no laws could do more than check, they became like the old professional companies of early days. In 1451 Margaret O'Conor Faly, who took the bards under her special care, is recorded to have made a feast at Killeigh, in Leix, at which 2700 poets, musicians, and antiquarians were royally entertained.

The exemptions from the legal restrictions imposed by laws like those promulgated at Kilkenny were frequent, so impossible was it to carry them out. Applications from the towns for permission to trade with the Irish were especially common and seem seldom to have been refused. Applications to "parley with" the Irish of the borderlands were also frequent, such parleyings being generally carried on with bodies of troops held in readiness in case of treachery on either side. The laws were not all framed to hamper the Irishman; if he would but live at peace they helped and protected him. But to live at peace too often meant to sink into the position of a serf to his lord, and to become English in language and custom; the "Five Bloods" gradually lost their old position of superiority as the possessors of English liberty and law.

One of the most severe of the laws enacted against the Irish was that excluding them from holding any religious office in "any cathedral or collegiate church or benefice amongst the English." It was the declared intention to fill the churches of the Pale exclusively with English clergy and the monasteries with English monks. This caused great and natural discontent among the Irish, who "looked on their exclusion from the legal profession as an offence against man, but that of keeping them out of Church dignities as offending against God." Up to a recent date the tendency had been all the other way. Mellifont, the first Cistercian house and the chief of Irish abbeys, admitted no monks who would not swear that they were not of English descent; and so late as 1324 Edward II complained to the Pope that the Irish refused to admit English into their monasteries.[20] The chapter of 1323 expresses its detestation of such damnable divisions, introduced by the enemy of the human race. Retaliatory laws to exclude Irishmen seem to have been passed soon afterward. In 1337 Edward III mentions that his father, Edward II, had ordained that no Irishman should be admitted to any Irish monastery, but had afterward revoked the command. He now ordains that all loyal Irishmen shall be admitted in the same way as Englishmen. But as the bitter feeling between the two nations increased, it penetrated into the monasteries of the new orders, even those of the Cistercians and the Franciscans. These had built their first friary in Dublin in Francis Street before 1232 and became missionaries to the poor. During the campaign of Bruce many Franciscans took part with the invader openly or secretly, while others acted in close concert with the English Government. The difference became so marked that it led to a division in the society, the Southern houses, including Cork, Limerick, and Timoleague, being handed over to the English friars, while an attempt was made to concentrate the Irish friars in a group including Athlone, Galway, and Armagh. By 1327 Athlone had become a purely Irish house, while Cashel, curiously enough, was English.[21] The rapid spread of the Franciscan Society in Ireland, from its foundation in 1231-32, shows the need that existed for some organization that should come into intimate touch with the poor and the ignorant.

[20] R. Cox, Hibernia Anglicana, p. 100 ; Rymer, Foedera (1707), iv, 55.

[21] E. B. Fitzmaurice, Material for the History of the Franciscan Province of Ireland, 1230-1450 (1920), Introduction, pp. xxiv-xxv.

After the Statute of Kilkenny had been passed ecclesiastical prohibitions against Irishmen were rigorously enforced and confirmed in all particulars, a writ in this sense being promulgated in the Kilkenny Parliament of 1380, and sent to eighteen monasteries.[22] The law affected the 'old English' as well as the pure Irish. In 1332 Edward III enjoined that "all holding benefices or married or estated in Ireland, but without possessions in England, be removed" and those having estates in England be substituted. This reads like a penal law of later days. Even the Popes, who in former times had set their faces against rules of mutual exclusion, now approved them, as part of their policy of supporting the English authority in Ireland.[23] More astonishing is it to find the Irish Archbishop of Cashel, Maurice MacCarwell, approving such measures and denouncing a sentence of anathema against any who infringed the statutes of the Parliament of 1310, which enacted, among other things, that "no meere Irishman [i.e., of pure Gaelic birth] shall be received into a religious order among the English in the land of peace in any parts of Ireland," the "land of peace" meaning those districts living under English law.[24] In the native districts, such as Kilmore, Clogher, Clonmacnois, Derry and Raphoe, Tuam, Killaloe, Elphin and Ross, few English names occur in the lists of bishops up to the fifteenth or, in some cases, the sixteenth century; in others they are mixed or wholly English.[25]

[22] 4 Ric. II (1380), in Berry, Statutes and Ordinances, i, 481.

[23] See the Papal rebukes made in 1220 and 1224 in this sense, in Theiner, Vetera Monumenta, No. 36, p. 16, and No. 55, pp. 142-144.

[24] Ware, Bishops (ed. Harris), p. 476.

[25] See the lists given in Ware, Bishops (ed. Harris).

In all cases alike the disposal of ecclesiastical dignities was claimed by the Crown. In spite of legal statutes, licences had frequently to be granted to Irish clerks owing to the lack of sufficient clergy within the Pale, it being impossible to induce priests to come over from England in the required numbers. Many of the bishops elected never went over to their dioceses at all, or speedily returned to England when they had visited them. The Church fell into a miserable condition for want of clergy; even in Dublin, at St Patrick's Cathedral, vespers had to be given up for lack of officiating priests. In 1565 the Privy Council complained that "as for religion, there is but small appearance of it; the churches uncovered and the clergy scattered, and scarce the being of a God known." Laws and regulations founded on false economic and social theories such as were those formulated in the Statute of Kilkenny, which held apart peoples naturally formed to intermingle with one another, are bound to fail; a hundred years later the districts within which these laws could be enforced had shrunk to portions of the counties of Dublin, Meath, Louth (Uriel), and Kildare;[26] and in Poynings' Law (1494) which confirms many of the provisions of the Statute of Kilkenny, the attempt to enforce the speaking of English among Irish people or the riding with saddles is expressly abandoned, earlier laws having failed to enforce these customs.[27]

[26] Parl. of Trim, 5 Edw. IV, 1465, ch. iii, in Berry, Statutes and Ordinances (1914), iii, 345.

[27] Poynings' Parl., Drogheda, 10 Hen. VII, 1495, ch. viii, in Irish Statutes (1885), vol. i.

But in various ways restrictions continued to be placed on the efforts of Irish gentlemen to rise in their several callings and to fill the professions of teaching, the Church, or the law which were open to them. Much has been made of the restrictions applying to students resorting to Oxford for education. Irishmen had entered Oxford in considerable numbers from early times, and many of them had risen high in their several colleges, a native of Dundalk having become Chancellor of the University early in the fourteenth century. But laws which may have been necessary and salutary were passed from time to time, chiefly by the Irish Parliament, to prevent begging students or men "adhering to the enemies" from passing oversea "under colour of going to the schools of Oxford, Cambridge, or elsewhere." Poynings' Act against Vagabonds [28] includes these men "who go about begging, not being authorized under the seal of the University" along with proctors and pardoners who also go about without authority living on the alms of the city. It is evident that men went to England with purposes of their own under pretence that they were going as students to Oxford, and it became necessary that they should get a letter of recommendation from the Deputy or some one in authority under the Great Seal, as a passport for their good behaviour. "Clerks, beggers, chamber-deacons and unattached students" were no more welcome in Oxford than elsewhere. Nor yet were the " felonies and manslaughters" which were a main cause of the restrictions against Irishmen entering a university "which is the fountain and mother of our Christian faith." These have been committed "to the great fear of all manner of people." But from all these regulations "graduates of schools and professed religious persons" and also "graduates or apprentices in law" are expressly exempted. They applied only to improper or turbulent persons, not to serious scholars. Of these there was a constant supply, especially during the sixteenth century, and that no hindrance was placed in their advance to higher posts is shown by the records of Fellows of All Souls and Merton and Oriel of Irish birth, and of learned men who became schoolmasters in their own country on their return, such as Richard Stanihurst and Peter White, the former an historian, the latter a passionate student and teacher of Greek learning at his school in Waterford.[29] The difficulties they had to encounter were chiefly from unfriendly neighbours and officials in their own country.

[28] Ibid., ch. xv.

[29] Lists of Irish students in Oxford and Cambridge are given by Hooker in Holinshed, Chronicles (1586), "Description of Ireland," ch. vii, pp. 39-44, and by Mrs. A. S. Green in her Making of Ireland and its Undoing (1908).

It was the fear that Ireland might slip entirely from the grasp of the English Crown and revert to native conditions under lords of Norman descent but with Irish sympathies that brought over Richard II in 1394. Roger Mortimer, fourth Earl of March (1374-98), a member of this princely family which gave four Viceroys to Ireland in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, accompanied the King as Lord-Lieutenant. He was the direct heir to the throne. His father Edmund Mortimer had held the same position in 1379, as his vast estates, acquired in Meath and Ulster, partly through the forfeitures of the de Lacys and partly through his marriage with Philippa, had necessitated his presence in that country. Both kept up an almost regal splendour, though in later life, during his second term of office, Roger assumed Irish dress and horse trappings. These accoutrements were to prove the direct cause of his death, for he fell in a rash attack on some of the Leinster clans at Kells in 1398, his dress having prevented him from being recognized. His son, the younger Edmund, was also destined to die in Ireland, being cut off by plague in the midst of negotiations with the Irish chiefs in 1425.

The title of Justiciar, or Chief Justice, at this time begins to be dropped (except for temporary appointments in the interim between two Viceroys) and the more important title of Viceroy or Lord-Lieutenant was adopted. When, as frequently happened, the chief official was absent from his post, a Deputy filled the office, but these titles are loosely used; and the Deputy was frequently a more important personage than the nominal Viceroy, as being actually in residence in Ireland. Richard came over on October 2, 1394, to study affairs on the spot. The result of his inquiries is contained in a letter written by him from Dublin to his uncle the Duke of York, stating that he proposes to hold a Parliament in that city. He writes that "in his land of Ireland there are three sorts of people, wild [i.e., unsubdued] Irish, his enemies; Irish rebels; and loyal English. The King and Council consider that the Irish have become rebels in consequence of the grievous wrongs inflicted on them, for which no remedies were afforded, but that if wisely treated and given hope of grace they would not join with the King's enemies." He has in the meantime taken them into his protection until Easter week in order that they may have time to come in and state their case.[30] By Irish rebels he evidently means the 'old English,' who had become "more Irish than the Irish," such as the Poers (or Powers), Geraldines, Berminghams, Barretts, and Dillons, who are stated a few years later to be in rebellion [31] and who during Richard's visit showed none of the alacrity of the native chiefs to come in and acknowledge fealty to the King. The wiser treatment of which Richard spoke was seldom applied, and the opinion of an old writer that the Irishmen were "enclined to Englisshe rule and order, where Englisshmen would rebelle and digresse from obedience of lawes" [32] was true, for most of the rebellions against the Crown up to Elizabeth's day were organized by the descendants of the old English settlers, and not by the native Irish. In the reign of Henry VIII we have this striking testimony as to the combined result of English policy and Irish social life on the English themselves. The Lord Deputy, writing in 1536 to the King, says: "Your Highness must understand that the English blood of the English conquest is in a manner worn out in this land...some by attainders, others by persecution and murdering of [by] Irishmen and some by departure from hence into your realm of England. And contrarywise, the Irish blood ever more and more increaseth." [33]

[30] See Appendix III for this letter, and Gilbert, Facsimiles, III, No. XXII. The original is in French, still the language of the Court.

[31] See Appendix IV for this information sent to Henry IV in 1399 in a note by Alex. Balscot, Guardian of Ireland and the Council.

[32] Cotton MS., Dom., xviii. British Museum.

[33] Calendar of State Papers, Hen. VIII, ii, Pt. Ill, p. 338.

So far as Richard II was concerned, these Anglo-Norman "Irish rebels" kept prudently in the background during his stay in Ireland, though William de Burgh and Walter Bermingham resorted to the King's ship in May 1395 and were knighted by the King. But of much more importance were the submissions of the Irish kings, again, as in the time of Henry II, led by the representatives of the four provinces, now once more almost independent, O'Neill of Ulster, O'Conor Donn of Connacht, Art MacMorrogh Kavanagh of Leinster, and O'Brien of Thomond, who are said to have submitted "by love and fayreness, and not by batayle nor constraynte." The most remarkable of these submissions was that of young O'Neill, who, acting for his aged father, made his homage to the King at Drogheda on March 16, 1395. He had already written to Richard on his arrival in Ireland, offering him welcome, and assuring him that nothing he had done was to be interpreted as renouncing Richard's lordship, "for I have always recognized the same and do so now." The kings were received on honourable terms and once more restored to full legal rights and confirmed in their lands as holding of the Crown. They represented in their persons the great body of their underlords all over the country, and O'Brien even went so far as to declare that he had acquired no lands by conquest, but only by grant of the King's predecessors to his ancestors.[34] The terms seemed satisfactory to both parties. The Irish kings henceforth had an indisputable right in English law to the lands now confirmed to them, and the English King could boast the allegiance of native Ireland.

[34] These indentures have recently been printed in E. Curtis' History of Medieval Ireland, pp. 308-311, from the instruments in the Public Record Office, London. They are of exceptional interest.

The story of King Richard's doings in Ireland is told in the graphic pages of Froissart and also in a French metrical history of Richard II. In Richard's train there came a French knight named Henry Castide, who had spent many years in Ireland and knew the Irish tongue well. In after days he related his experiences to Froissart, who included the account in his chronicles. He describes the wild life lived by the Irish in the forests and the narrow passes where it was impossible to follow them. So light were they of foot that no horseman, were he ever so well mounted, could overtake them. Castide remarks that they sometimes leapt from the ground behind a rider, grasping him so tightly that it was impossible to shake off the assailant. He himself had had a curious experience of this kind, for, his horse taking fright in the middle of a skirmish, a runner leapt on its back and pressed it forward at full speed into the woods, until they arrived at a village in a retired spot, surrounded by palisades. Here the Frenchman lived, separated from his friends, for seven years. He became much attached to his handsome host, Bryan Costeret, and married his daughter, by whom he had two children, and one of these returned with him to Bristol when at length he gained his liberty by exchange of prisoners. He tells us that the Irish language was always spoken in his family and that he introduced it among his grandchildren as much as he could. The language proved of special use to him, for he was chosen on that account by King Richard to instil English ways and manners into the four Irish princes who had given in their submissions and whom he desired to create knights. Castide did his best to transform them into Englishmen in the short month allotted to him, but in spite of all his efforts "to soften their language and nature" he laments that very little progress had been made. They still insisted on dining with their retainers and minstrels around them, without any distinction of rank, "for they had everything in common except their bed."

Nevertheless, they went through the solemn ceremony of knighthood, watching all night in the cathedral and being robed in magnificent silken cloaks lined with fur, in which they afterward dined with the King. Castide, relating the story to Sir John Froissart, says they were much gazed upon, "for it was certainly a great novelty to see four Irish kings." There is a touch of sarcasm in Froissart's inquiry as to how it came about. "You have said it was accomplished by a treaty and the grace of God; the grace of God is good, and of infinite value to those who can obtain it; but we see few lords nowadays augment their territories otherwise than by force." Neither a treaty nor the grace of God will suffice where the treaty is not founded on justice, and in one instance Richard had departed from the usual upright way in which he had dealt with the Irish kings. This was in his dealings with Art MacMorrogh Kavanagh who had recently submitted. He had been elected king of Kavanagh's country, a district of thirty miles between Carlow and the sea, in 1357, when he was still a youth. Since the reign of Edward III the Kavanaghs had received from Government eighty marks a year in return for their protection to English settlers in these districts, and to keep the sept quiet. But this subvention was frequently unpaid, and disputes arose as to the non-fulfilment of the agreement. In addition to this, Kavanagh had married a daughter of the fourth Earl of Kildare, whereupon her vast estates were seized by the Crown, since she had, under the Statute of Kilkenny, forfeited them by marrying a 'meere' Irishman.

Naturally exasperated, Kavanagh wasted Leinster and took up an attitude of defiance. When Richard came over with his army of four thousand men-at-arms and thirty thousand archers it was chiefly with a view to chastising Art and recovering his lands for the Crown. When the King had cut his way through Leinster to Dublin, and Kavanagh, following the example of O'Neill, came in to submit, the terms made with him were of a kind quite different from those entered into with the other kings. He was required "by the first Sunday of Lent to quit the whole land of Leinster with all the armed men of his following." They were given leave to conquer any other lands now occupied by the King's enemies His rent and the heritage of his wife were secured to him. This last provision, which had been the chief cause of quarrel, is the one generous point in the indenture. But the order to remove from his ancient inheritance could not be carried out. Hardly had Richard left the country when Art was 'out' again, renouncing his allegiance and inflicting a severe defeat on the English forces at Kells in Co. Kilkenny in which Richard's young cousin, Roger Mortimer, whom he had left as Viceroy was slain. Furious at the news, Richard resolved on a second expedition to Ireland, to subdue his rebellious vassal. Again he gathered a formidable army, and men were pressed for Ireland wherever they could be found. After ten days spent at Milford Haven the King crossed to Waterford.

His chronicler says that the King's courage was extraordinary, and indeed that unhappy prince never wanted in personal fearlessness; but those that saw him leave London judged truly when they said: "Well, Richard of Bordeaux has taken the road to Bristol for Ireland. It will be his destruction; he will never return thence to joy." Richard's expedition was from the first ill-fated. His supplies did not arrive, and MacMorrogh cut off those in the country. "Some even of the knights did not eat a morsel for five days together." When at last three ships came into harbour from Dublin the knights plunged into the sea to seize the food from the boats. "Many a cuff passed between them, and over a thousand were drunk that day." MacMorrogh's uncle came in to surrender with a withy round his neck and his followers barefoot and stripped behind him. But when the King pardoned him and sent word to Art that he would admit him also to mercy, and give him castles and lands in abundance if he would do the same, MacMorrogh replied that he "would do no such thing for all the treasure of the sea." Finally, however, Art sent a begging friar to ask for a parley, as the King was slowly making his way north to Dublin. A place of parley being arranged, the King's uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, was sent with two hundred lancers and a body of archers to meet him. An onlooker describes the meeting. "Between two woods," he says, "at some distance from the sea, I beheld Macmore [MacMorrogh] and a body of the Irish more than I can number, descend the mountain. He rode a horse without housing or saddle, which was so fine and good, that it had cost him, they said, four hundred cows. In coming down it galloped so hard that I never in my life saw hare, deer, or sheep, I declare of a certainty, run with such speed. In his right hand he bore a great long dart, which he cast with much skill. He was a fine large man, wondrously active. To look at he seemed very stern and savage and an able man." The two leaders could not come to an agreement; "they took short leave and hastily parted." Art would give no terms other than that he should never be molested or interfered with. The King grew pale with wrath and swore that he would never depart from Ireland till he had Art in his power, alive or dead. He offered a hundred marks of gold to anyone who would bring him in. But Richard never got hold of MacMorrogh. When wind and storm permitted news to come over from England they brought tidings of a general revolt, which was to end only in the deposition and death of the King and the coronation of Henry IV.

Among those who accompanied Richard II on his expedition to Ireland was the young Duke of Lancaster, afterward to become king as Henry V; he had been knighted by Richard amid the blazing woods of Leinster. He was covered with shame and distress when the account of his father's rebellion was brought to him, but though he was held in light confinement in Trim Castle as a hostage for his father, the good relations between him and Richard do not seem to have been disturbed. His first act on his accession was to pay funeral honours to the remains of the murdered king.

MacMorrogh continued fighting to the close of his life. He never submitted, and though living close to the Pale he succeeded in maintaining his independence. He died in New Ross during the Christmas season of 1417, after a reign of forty-two years. Tradition says that he and his chief brehon, who died on the same day, had been poisoned by a woman.

END OF CHAPTER VIII

IX.—THE GERALDINES: THE HOUSE OF DESMOND AND THE HOUSE OF KILDARE

The history of the fifteenth century was in England largely occupied by the savage dynastic struggles known as the Wars of the Roses. In Ireland it was a century in which similar struggles were carried on by the three great families of the Ormondes, Kildares, and Desmonds, whose efforts for power kept Ireland in a like state of turmoil. The Wars of the Roses had a direct effect upon Ireland, for the Ormondes as Lancastrians and the Desmonds as Yorkists took an active part in the contests, fighting on opposite sides. Large bodies of Irish kerne were drawn off to serve in the English and Continental wars, the kerne of the MacCarthys, O'Kellys, MacManuses, MacGeoghegans, O'Keeffes, and other purely Irish families being sent in as large numbers as those of the families of English extraction. The pretenders to the throne on the Yorkist side, Jack Cade and 'Perkin' or Peter Warbeck, created a much greater enthusiasm in support of their claims in Ireland than they did in England. Cade (1450) believed himself to be a Mortimer, a family whose representatives were well known in Ireland on account of the successive Viceroys of that name; Lambert Simnel, in 1487, gave himself out to be the Duke of Warwick; and Perkin Warbeck, in 1497, was believed to be the younger of the two princes murdered in the Tower. All of them put forward claims to recognition sufficient to bring them the support of influential persons at home and abroad; and all of them, especially the last, found vigorous partisans in Ireland. Warbeck besieged Waterford with Maurice of Desmond and an army of 24,000 men; but the ships sent to their assistance having been captured, he fled to Cork and thence to Leper's Island, near Kinsale, where he took ship in a Spanish bark and escaped to Cornwall. Here he was apprehended, taken before King Henry VII at Exeter, and afterward executed.[1] Simnel was still more popular; he was carried through Dublin in triumphal procession on the shoulders of leading nobles and crowned in Dublin Castle by the Earl of Kildare, who was then Governor, all the Lords and Commons supporting him.[2] He seems to have been a handsome boy who bore himself well. It was the loss of so many scions of royal blood in the unnatural family wars of the Roses that made it possible for pretenders to impersonate these missing princes. Men were imprisoned or disappeared, and none but those most responsible knew what had become of them. The heads of the greatest in the land fell freely on both sides. When Richard III suddenly felt himself possessed of "inward compassion" for the cruel and unjust execution of Thomas, Earl of Desmond, he could truthfully point "to his brother, his nigh kinsmen and great friends" who had similarly suffered.

[1] Carew, Miscellany, p. 472.

[2] Ibid., pp. 188-190, 472-473.

One cause which strengthened the Yorkist claims in Ireland was the sending over of Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, the head of the White Rose party, as Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland in 1449. By his mother, Anne Mortimer, he was the direct representative of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, and he had reasonable and strong hopes of succeeding to the throne. His beautiful wife, the 'Rose of Raby,' was mother of two kings, Edward IV and Richard III. He came over with much pomp and splendour, as Lord-Lieutenant for Henry VI, and, unlike some others of the royal line, who about this period were successively appointed to the post of Viceroy, he remained some time in Ireland, and ruled well and justly. He was a successful Viceroy, for he not only attracted to himself and his line most of the English in Ireland and stayed the tendency toward disaffection, but his beneficent measures brought in the Irish lords in great numbers. It was said that the influence of the Duke of York was so great that "ere twelve month come to end the wildest Irishman in Ireland will be sworn English." The list of Irish lords who came in and brought their kerne with them included O'Byrne, O'More, O'Farrell, O'Nolan, O'Dempsey, MacMorrogh, MacGeogheghan, O'Hanlon, and O'Neill. Besides these, Magennis, lord of Iveagh, brought with him 600 horse and foot, MacMahon 800 men "well harnessed," the O'Reilleys 700, "with many other that be the King's liege men." The head of the O'Byrnes, after a sharp reminder of the King's power, was "sworn the King's true subject, his wife and his children to learn English and wear English array, and the King's laws to be suffered throughout his land." The Norman lords followed suit. De Cogans, Roches, Barretts, Desmond the White Knight, and the nobles of Eastern Ulster and Leinster, described as "kings, dukes, earls, and barons," bound themselves by indentures and hostages as sworn liegemen of the King. It was time that something should be done, for a memorial addressed to Richard Plantagenet by the liegemen of Co. Kildare in 1454 complained that "this land of Ireland was never at the point finally to be destroyed since the conquest as it is now," no loyalists even in Leinster or Meath daring to appear in the King's courts, or to ride to market towns for dread to be slain, or having their goods spoiled, through the misrule and violence of "divers gentlemen of the counties," of whom the Lords of Kildare were the worst offenders, "more destruction being committed by them than was done by Irish enemies and English rebels long time before."

The hopes of the Duke of York were cut short at the disastrous battle of Wakefield in 1460. He led a great army of Irish kerne over to England to support his claims to the throne and joined them with the English troops. They met with a decisive defeat; Richard Plantagenet fell, fighting bravely, but in the following year his son, Edward IV, ascended the throne as the representative of the house of York. Thus ended the career of one who as Viceroy of Ireland had, during his ten years' government, "exceedingly tied to him the hearts of the noblemen and gentlemen of that land."[3] One of the most independent of the native princes, MacGeoghegan of the Hy-Fiachrach, hitherto always ready to combine with the English rebels, was treated by him with such honour that he went home boasting that "he had given peace to the King's Lieutenant."

[3] Gilbert, Viceroys, p. 368.

It was in the last year of Richard Plantagenet's life that the Irish Parliament, sitting under his presidency, made an effort to enlarge its independent powers. In the later years of the reign of Edward III the members had claimed the privilege of refusing to send representatives to England on the demand of the sovereign, and had protested "the rights, privileges, and usages which the Lords and Commons from the time of the conquest of the land of Ireland had possessed and enjoyed." [4] Now, in 1460, stimulated by the Duke's presence, and strengthened by the memory of their late services to the Crown, they made a further step in asserting their liberties. The Commons affirmed that Ireland, being corporate in itself, was "bound only by such laws as the Parliament or Great Councils of Ireland itself held, accepted, and proclaimed." It was the first clear enunciation of the principle of Irish Parliamentary independence, stated in unmistakable language. This principle, which was thrown to the winds during the Tudor period, when it was the aim of the sovereigns to make Ireland directly dependent on the will of the Crown, was one for the recovery of which Ireland was to fight for centuries; it was the principle which in after days was to be reaffirmed by Molyneux, Grattan, and Parnell. It was violently resisted thirty-four years later in Poynings' Law (1494), which rendered the Parliaments of Ireland completely dependent on those of England. The immediate cause of the passing of this law lay in the disputes of the leading Anglo-Irish families which had lowered the Irish Parliament into a mere tool in the hands of whichever party was in power, and had utterly destroyed any representative character which it had possessed. Butlers, Kildares, and Desmonds had used it in turn to advance the interests each of his own house. It only remained for a Tudor autocrat, watching his opportunity, to put an end to these unseemly quarrels by robbing it of its former independence of action.

[4] Gilbert, Facsimiles, iii, No. XIX.

Poynings' Law had also another purpose; it was intended to prevent any further efforts of the Irish nobility to influence the course of events in England. During the long dynastic wars Desmond and Kildare had carried on a struggle on behalf of the house of York which had helped to decide the succession in a direction contrary to that which finally prevailed, and the Lancastrian Henry VII was determined that this should never occur again. He designed to render the Anglo-Irish gentry powerless outside their own country and seriously to diminish their influence within it. In the Parliament called by the Lord Deputy Poynings at Drogheda in December 1494 there was passed the Act which bore his name and which for three centuries was to deprive the Parliament of Ireland of even the shadow of independence. Judges and other officials were to hold office during pleasure and not by patent as heretofore; the chief castles were to be placed in English hands; to carry weapons or wage private wars, or to excite the Irish to take up arms, was made illegal and high treason, and the chief measures of the Statute of Kilkenny were re-enacted. The principal clause provided that no Parliament should be summoned in Ireland except under the Great Seal of England, or without due notice to the English Privy Council; and that no Acts of the Irish Parliament should be valid unless previously submitted to the same body. A still more controversial measure followed, which declared that all laws "late made in England" should apply to Ireland, even if they had never been approved by the Irish Parliament or made known to them, and subsequently even this stretch of the prerogative was exceeded by the decision that this should apply to all laws whatsoever passed in England up to that date. This article reads as follows: "Be it ordained and established by authority of this present Parliament...that all statutes late made within the said realm of England concerning and belonging to the common and public weal of the same be henceforth deemed good and effectual in the law, and over that be accepted, used, and executed within this land of Ireland in all points at all times requisite according to the tenour and effect of the same; and over that by authority aforesaid, that they and every of them be authorized, proved, and confirmed in this land of Ireland. And if any statute or statutes have been made within this said land hereafter to the contrary, they and every of them by authority aforesaid be revoked, void, and of none effect in the law." [5]

[5] Irish Statutes, 1 Hen. VII.

Thus by Poynings' Law not only was the Irish Parliament rendered helpless to pass regulations for its own country and made completely subordinate to that of England, but Ireland was also saddled with a whole body of laws in the making of which she had no part and which were designed for England only. A slight modification was made in Mary's reign, and during the rebellion of 1641 Charles I promised its repeal, but this was never carried out. On the contrary, the principle was extended by a statute passed in 1719, enabling the English Parliament to legislate for Ireland without reference to the Irish Parliament, and it required the lengthened struggle at the close of the eighteenth century to bring about the repeal of these laws. Yet, though Poynings carried out the purpose with which he was sent to Ireland, it was not easy by Act of Parliament to deprive the Anglo-Irish nobility of all semblance of independence. The Pale was reduced to the weakest point, and the country was unable to pay its way. In spite of the intention of filling all posts with Englishmen sent over with that object, the gentry of the country had again to be called upon, the new English not being willing to face the prevailing conditions. Kildare was once more installed as Deputy, and the Geraldine supremacy lasted till 1534, when the outbreak of the rebellion of "Silken Thomas" brought it to an end.

It is necessary at this stage to sketch the past history of the two branches of the great house of the Geraldines, the Desmonds and Kildares, whose ancestors had been the first to respond to the appeal of Dermot MacMorrogh for help, and who had carved out for themselves large tracts of Leinster and Munster as their reward. The FitzGeralds, or Geraldines, traced their descent traditionally to the powerful family of the Gherardini of Florence, who up to a late date acknowledged the connexion by keeping up a friendly correspondence with the two Irish houses.[6] We have seen the rapid rise to power of the family after their arrival in Ireland and the vast estates controlled by them. They had become thoroughly Irish, speaking the native language in their home life and encouraging native brehons, bards, and historians in their families. Their war-cries of "Crom-aboo" and "Shanad-aboo" were heard in many a fray and were answered by the "Lamh-laidir-aboo" of the O'Briens over the border.[7]

[6] There are letters extant written by Gerald, Earl of Kildare, in May, 1507 to the Gherardini family at Florence, and a letter to the Earl of Desmond (Earls of Kildare, p. 65).

[7] Croom and Shanad were castles of the Geraldines; the cry meant "Up with Croom" and "Up with Shanad." The O'Brien cry was "Up with the strong hand."

It required an Act of Parliament in 1495 to suppress these dangerously exciting battle-cries. The FitzGeralds, unlike the Ormondes, with whom their houses carried on an hereditary feud from century to century, were always inclined to alliance with the native chiefs. It will be well to speak of the Desmonds and the Kildares in turn, and to trace their history up to the outbreak of the Geraldine rebellions.

The Desmonds were unfortunate in their family succession. On more than one occasion the deaths of the direct heirs by accident, or the disputes between different members of the family, led to such confusion that the succession is reckoned differently by various genealogists. Gerald, or Garrett, the third (or fourth) Earl (d. 1398) received the estates from his elder brother Maurice, who died young, on condition of marrying Eleanor, daughter of James Butler, the second Earl of Ormonde (d. 1382), who, in the reigns of Edward III and Richard II, had received many gifts of lands and who was then, in 1359, Viceroy of Ireland. The object of this marriage was to bring to an end the wars between the two houses, which had been carried on from year to year and were destructive to the country. But no plans, however well laid by English kings, availed to stay this family feud, which was to be further increased in the reign of Henry V by the close friendship between James the "White" Earl of Ormonde and Thomas of Lancaster. This made adherence to the Lancastrian cause traditional in the house of Ormonde, while the Desmonds were strongly Yorkist. Though the Desmonds remained loyalist up to the time of the Reformation (which threw them definitely on the side of the anti-English Catholic confederation, and produced the rebellion of Elizabeth's reign) they were increasingly Irish in their habits and sympathies. Gerald even gave his son James to be fostered by the O'Briens.

Gerald is styled "the Rhymer" or "Poet," and some very charming poems in Anglo-Norman French, founded on French models, delicate and ingenious lyrics like the Court poetry of the Elizabethan period in England, remain to prove the European strain of culture that mingled with the Irish tradition in his mind, and the union of which produced an aristocratic love-poetry of the type of that of Wyatt and Surrey. Some poems written by members of his house are to be found in a manuscript in the British Museum,[8] and have for heading the title Proverbia Comitis Desmonie. His Gaelic poems and those of his family, some of which may be earlier than this date, remain in the Scottish Book of the Dean of Lismore. This Gerald is a romantic figure, "a nobleman of wonderful bounty, mirth, and cheerfulness of conversation, charitable in his deeds, easy of access, a witty and ingenious composer of Irish poetry, and a learned and profound chronicler," say the historians of his country. In 1367 he succeeded Lionel, Duke of Clarence, as Justiciar, acting at other times as his Deputy to uphold the King's policy in Munster. But to his own people he was famous chiefly for his erudition; they looked on him as a mathematician and the possessor of magic arts. Such a man could not die, and tradition says that in 1398, after being thirty years earl, he disappeared under the waters of Loch Gur, where he sleeps, save once in every seven years, when he awakens and passes over the waters of the lake, riding upon its ripples.

[8] Harleian MS. 913, fol. 156, called "the Book of Ross and Waterford" See T. F. O'Rahilly and R. Flower, Dánta Grádha (1926), xiii.

Again, on his departure, the succession was disputed, two of his sons and his brother having died young, leaving no children. Finally his third son, James, O'Brien's foster-son, succeeded in displacing his nephew Thomas, who had more direct claims to the earldom. Of this Thomas it is said that in him "the pernicious disease that infested his posterity first took rooting," for he went twice into rebellion, forfeiting his estates, and "after many turnings and windings up and down the realm" he died in 1446 in banishment in France.[9] James was father of the eighth or "Great" earl, Thomas FitzGerald, by his wife Mary, daughter of Ulick Burke, who succeeded to the family estates in 1462, and in the following year was appointed Deputy to the Duke of Clarence, the Lord-Lieutenant. Being a strong Yorkist, Thomas attached himself warmly to the fortunes of Edward IV, fighting on his side in nine battles against the Lancastrians and rising high in the King's favour and personal friendship. As a hostage for the loyalty of his house he had been educated at Court, and he was thoroughly at home in England. He was a man of great activity and occupied himself in building border-castles to defend the Pale and in garrisoning the passes of Offaly; he was "a lord wise, learned in Latin, in English, and in the old Gaelic writings," combining in his person the best knowledge of both countries. He relaxed the orders against trafficking with the Irish, in spite of prohibitions passed in the Irish Parliament; and he set himself to do justice and show humanity to all. For some years he ruled nobly and discreetly and then retired to his estates in Munster. But "the old malice that had been between the bloods of the Desmonds and Butlers," as Lord Grey said at a later date, broke out afresh in 1463, and the Earl entered and devastated the Butlers' lands. Complaints were transmitted to London by those who were jealous of his power and influence, accusing him of taking "coyne and livery" contrary to the law, of relaxing the orders against "trafficking with the Irish enemy," and of entering into treasonable correspondence with the Irish. But he laid his case in person before the King in 1464, and Edward, with whom "he was in singular favour" and "who took pleasure and delight in his talk," [10] refused to listen to the accusations of his enemies. On the Irish Parliament certifying that "he had always governed by English law and had brought Ireland to a reasonable state of peace, having, moreover, rendered great services at intolerable charges and risks," he was restored to office by the King, and six manors in Meath were granted to him. In his own district he devoted himself to improvements.

[9] Unpublished Geraldine Documents, ed. S. Hayman and J. Graves (1870).

[10] J. Clyn, Annalium Hiberniae Chronicon, ed. R. Butler (1849), at date.

At Youghal, where he lived, he founded a college with a Warden, eight Fellows, and eight choristers, who lived together in a collegiate manner, having a common table and all other necessaries allowed them.[11] In his time representatives went from Cork to the Irish Parliament. This great man was cut off in a sudden and mysterious manner. Sir John Tiptoft (or Tibotot), Lord Worcester, who was his determined enemy, was sent over as Viceroy in 1467, apparently at the wish of Edward's Queen, Elizabeth Woodville, who had long been jealous of Desmond's influence with the King and was watching her chance to bring down the Earl's pride. Desmond had been opposed to the King's marriage with Elizabeth, whom he considered as a woman unsuited to Edward's rank and position, and he is said to have counselled the King to divorce her. Some whisperings of this had reached the Queen's ears, and hardly was Tiptoft well in office than she sent over an order, as though in the King's name and sealed with his privy seal, ordering him to take and execute Desmond.[12] On receiving her injunction he hastily called a Parliament at Drogheda, to which Desmond and Kildare were both summoned; they were arraigned, and Desmond was speedily executed, "to the great astonishment of the whole nobility of Ireland." With him was executed Edward Plunket. This event, which happened on February 14, 1468, when Thomas was only forty-two years of age, sent a thrill of horror through the land. English and Irish alike condemned a crime committed "without cause, without guilt, without right at law, but only through jealousy and envy." The vague charges brought against the victims might equally have been brought against any great lord who lived in amity with his Irish neighbours, and other nobles must have felt their heads in danger. "The King was wondrously offended," and the Queen, the author of the whole mischief, had to fly to sanctuary. Even Richard, the King's brother, afterward King Richard III, himself soon to become an expert in swift and needless executions, described Desmond as "atrociously slain and murdered by colour of law against all reason and sound conscience." Long afterward, when Sir Henry Sidney came over as Deputy, he had Desmond's body removed to a tomb in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin.

[11] S. Hayman, New Handbook of Youghal (1858).

[12] This is the story given in the Book of Howth in Carew, Miscellany, pp. 186-188; and see Annals of the Four Masters, 1468.

The death of Desmond loosened the bonds which had up to this time held the Anglo-Norman lords of the South attached to the Crown. It showed how difficult it was for even the most esteemed among them to keep in favour with the Government of his country if he were known to act justly and mercifully toward his Irish tenants. Such acts of humanity could easily be represented as "aiding the King's enemies" by anyone maliciously inclined toward the offender. The representatives of these great houses were in a difficult position; they felt themselves and were, indeed, looked upon as neither Irish nor English. They were "Irish to the English and English to the Irish." Close as they were to their adopted country in their sympathies, they had not yet forgotten their English origin and allegiance. The immediate result of Desmond's judicial murder was an outbreak by his sons; the first of those devastating rebellions which in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were to reduce the fertile province of Munster to a desert. They wasted the country up to the gates of Dublin. Tiptoft was recalled for maladministration, and not even the Queen's letter, which he produced, could purchase his life; he had to "make satisfaction for the angry ghost of Desmond." By his execution "God was held to have avenged this treachery," and the King made the largest offers of pardon and restitution to the young men who had taken up arms to avenge the death of their father. His letters were so conciliatory that on reading them the Desmonds decided to lay down their arms, receiving in return extended privileges and large additions to their lands in Kerry, with the town and castle of Dungarvan. Four of them in turn succeeded to the earldom, and they were said to be "wyse and politicke men" who advanced the position of their house at the expense of their Irish neighbours and to the envy of their friends.

Meanwhile, the House of Kildare was also playing a leading part in the history of the country. John FitzThomas FitzGerald, sixth Baron of Offaly, created Earl of Kildare by a patent of Edward II dated May 16, 1316, was in the fourth generation from Maurice FitzGerald (d. 1176), the invader of Ireland and founder of the family fortunes. His greatgrandfather Gerald, son of the invader, had erected Maynooth Castle and fixed his seat firmly in Kildare; and Maurice, son of Gerald, held the high post of Justiciar in 1229 and 1232. The family had proved themselves good servants of the Crown, both in the wars with Bruce in Ireland and with the Scots in Scotland, and had steadily advanced in the royal favour. Thomas Fitzjohn FitzGerald, who died in 1328, had held the post of sheriff for County Kildare, and was twice Justiciar, presiding in that capacity at the Dublin Parliament of 1324 at which the nobles pledged themselves to support the Crown. His son Richard died, a boy of twelve, in 1331, and the earldom devolved on the youngest brother Maurice (1318-90), who became the fourth Earl. Much of his life was occupied in supporting the opposition led by the Earl of Desmond to the new policy of d'Ufford and Sir John Morice, which aimed at the superseding of the English born in Ireland, such as the Geraldines themselves were, by English born in and brought over from England. Like Desmond he was pursued with malignancy by the anglicizing Deputy. He was enticed to Dublin and arrested at the Council table; but, as we have said, he was released next year, and he accompanied Edward III to the siege of Calais in 1347, being knighted by him for his services. He was sent back to Ireland as Justiciar in 1356. In spite of being closely watched by English Viceroys jealous of their superior influence, the Kildares maintained their position as the leading magnates of Ireland and were steadily supported by successive sovereigns.

From 1455 to 1459 Thomas FitzGerald, the seventh Earl (d. 1477), acted as Deputy for Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, and welcomed him to Ireland on his flight from the Lancastrians. He it was who built the dyke round the now narrowed English Pale, from which it took its name. For its defence he founded the "Brotherhood of St George," a body of archers and spearmen, and excluded from the garrisons all disloyal Irish. He lived in perilous times; the Lancastrians in vain sought to intrigue with the Irish against him; but he could not escape the bitter animosity of the Deputy Tiptoft, and became involved in the attainder of Desmond at Drogheda. But his attainder was reversed by the King and repealed at the Parliament of 1468, and Thomas was reappointed Deputy and remained in office till 1475.

On his death in 1477 he was succeeded by the eighth Earl, Garrett or Gerald, known as the "Great Earl of Kildare." The latter was appointed Deputy in the following year, but the disputes between his family and the Butlers rose to such a height that Edward IV resolved to set aside both rivals to the position of honour, and sent over Lord Grey of Codnor as Deputy in Kildare's place. Kildare refused to acknowledge his authority, alleging that the letters dismissing him were only sealed with the King's private signet and were not official. He called a Council at Naas, which passed an Act authorizing him to adjourn or prorogue Parliament at his pleasure, and the curious spectacle was witnessed of two rival Deputies refusing to acknowledge each other and presiding over rival Parliaments. Annoyed at these feuds, the King summoned before him both the Earl and Grey; but Grey, tired of the contest, retired from office, and Kildare, in the manner of his forefathers, returned with a new commission. He ruled with vigour and justice "his name alone aweing his enemies more than an army." He is described as tall of stature and of a goodly presence; and, unlike the "secret and drifty" Ormonde, he was "open and plain, hardly able to rule himself when he was moved; in anger not so sharp as short, being easily aroused and sooner appeased." [13] He carried his arms into the country of the O'Mores, with whom his family were constantly at war, and he took part in the Ulster wars on the side of his son-in-law, Conn O'Neill. He married his daughters into the houses of Irish chiefs and Norman representatives alike, Lady Eleanor marrying the MacCarthy Reagh; Lady Alice, Conn O'Neill; Lady Eustacia, the Lord of Clanricarde; and Lady Margaret, in the vain hope of healing the breach between the two families, wedded Sir Piers (or Pierce) Butler, who later became the eighth Earl of Ormonde and first Earl of Ossory. This lady, who was known as Mairgread Gerroid, or sometimes playfully as Magheen, or "Little Margaret," on account of her lofty stature and character, has left long traditions behind her. Like her father, the "Great Countess of Ormonde" was a woman of remarkable ability, "able for wisdom to rule a realm, had not her stomach overruled herself." She set herself to reclaim her husband's country "from the sluttish and unclean Irish custom to the English habits, bedding, housekeeping, and civility"; but her marriage failed of its prime object, for the feuds between her father's and her husband's family soon broke out more furiously than ever.

[13] Edmund Campian's History, in Ware's Ancient Irish Histories (1809) p. 158.

The house of Ormonde was now at the height of its power; it was the only Anglo-Irish family that rivalled the Geraldines and from which, besides their own, successive Deputies were chosen. Sir Piers was twice Deputy, once in 1521 and later in 1529, before the arrival of Sir William Skeffington. It had been the intention of Henry VIII to marry him to Anne Boleyn, with whose family he was already connected, for a daughter of the seventh Earl had married Sir William Boleyn, and thus their son Thomas became grandfather to Queen Elizabeth. The zealous Lancastrian sympathies of the Butlers dated from the days of the fifth Earl, James Butler (1420-61), who was knighted by Henry VI and created an English peer in 1449. He had commanded at the decisive battle of Wakefield in December 1460, and he it was who slew Richard, Duke of York, on that bloody field. But at the battle of Towton he was taken prisoner and beheaded, his estates being forfeited for a time; though, with the exception of the Essex properties, they were afterward restored to his brother and successor, Sir John. Thomas, the seventh Earl, was reputed to be the richest subject of the Crown; on his death he left £40,000 in money, and besides his Irish estates he possessed seventy-two manors in England. He was the only Irish peer whom Henry VII or Henry VIII had called to the House of Lords. His family had a high tradition for good looks and nobility of bearing.

Edward IV used to say of his elder brother, Sir John Butler, the sixth Earl, that "he was the goodliest knight he ever beheld and the finest gentleman in Christendom; and that if good breeding, nurture, and liberal qualities were lost to the world, they might all be found in the Earl of Ormonde." He was a man of European culture, with a thorough understanding of many languages, and had served as ambassador at nearly every European Court. He resigned his earldom to his brother Thomas, and went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, dying on the way in 1478. Such was, in brief, the history of the family into which Margaret FitzGerald married. Her husband, Sir Piers, was the third son of Sir James Butler, his two elder brothers being illegitimate, and his mother was Sabh Kavanagh, of whom we have already spoken. He was a man of ungovernable temper, spending his life in suppressing Irish rebellions and warring with Desmond and Kildare in turn. The Talbots got him removed in 1524, but the King, Henry VIII, appointed him Lord Treasurer in Ireland. "No man," it was said, "dare complain of Kildare except Ormonde." In 1527 he surrendered the earldom to Sir Thomas Boleyn, the grandson of the seventh Earl, and was created instead Earl of Ossory, but the older title was restored to him. With the help of his energetic wife he brought over weavers and artificers from Flanders and established industries for the production of tapestries, carpets, diapers, etc.[14] His eldest son was created Viscount Thurles in 1535 and later became ninth Earl of Ormonde. But he was the victim of unjust suspicions of hostility to the Government and was destined to fall in a mysterious way by poison at Ely House, Holborn, in 1546. His son Thomas, who succeeded to the earldom, was the famous "Black Earl," who played a leading part in Elizabeth's reign.

[14] The effigies of Sir Piers Butler and his wife, Margaret, are still to be seen in the Cathedral of St Canice at Kilkenny.

Through the whole of the later life of the eighth Earl of Kildare and the earldom of the ninth Earl the old jealousies between the great families disturbed the country, each house resenting any advance in power bestowed on the other. But during the life of the Great Earl of Kildare, all the efforts of the Ormondes did not succeed in overthrowing his authority. His readiness to confess his faults, backed by his immense influence in his own country, always extricated him from difficulties. He emerged not only unscathed, but with added marks of royal favour. He was Deputy, with breaks, under Edward IV, Richard III, Henry VII (who playfully nicknamed him his "rebel"), and Henry VIII, though the frequent changes in the succession to the English throne made the task of remaining loyal a difficult one. Through the unceasing machinations of his old foe, the Bishop of Meath, he was captured in Dublin and committed to the Tower, where he remained two years; his wife, who was devoted to her husband, died of grief. Brought at length before the Council, at which the Bishop of Meath was his chief accuser, Kildare's ready wit had the effect of embarrassing his enemies and amusing the King. Accused of having set fire to the cathedral of Cashel, he exclaimed, "By my troth, I would never have done it but that I thought the Bishop was in it." He added that the Bishop, being a learned man, might easily outdo him in argument, on which the King humorously replied that Kildare was at liberty to choose a counsellor, but that "it behoved him to get counsel that was very good, for he doubted that his cause was very bad." "I will choose the best in England," quoth the Earl, "the King himself; and by St Bride I will choose no other." "A wiser man might have chosen worse," replied the King. The Bishop, feeling that he was getting the worst of the argument, exclaimed angrily, "All Ireland cannot rule this man." "Then shall he rule all Ireland," replied the King. He was restored to all his estates and honours and sent back as Deputy, but his eldest son, Gerald Oge, was held in pledge for his father's fidelity.[15] The chief event in Kildare's later life was the battle of Knocdoe, "the Hill of the Battle-axes" (1504), about five miles from Galway, an Anglo-Norman contest in which nevertheless "all the Irish in Ireland" are said to have been involved. It was a battle unequalled for its losses, the O'Kellys, his allies, especially suffering severely. The Irish and the Burkes were so discouraged that they surrendered Galway without resistance, and Henry bestowed the Garter on Kildare as a reward for his victory. On returning to the Pale, he distributed thirty tuns of wine among his soldiers. The old Earl died in 1513 from the effects of a shot from one of the O'Mores of Leix, and he was buried in state in the choir of Christ Church Cathedral, in a tomb which now no longer exists.

[15] Book of Howth, in Carew, Miscellany, pp. 179-180; Campian's History, in Ware's Ancient Irish Histories (1809), pp. 164-171.

His son Gerald, or Garrett Oge FitzGerald, succeeded him as ninth Earl, one of the handsomest men of his day and a fighter like his father. The Annals of the Four Masters speak of him as the most illustrious of the English and Irish of Ireland in his time, his fame and exalted character being heard of in distant countries by foreign nations, as well as being spread through Ireland. Like most of the young Anglo-Irish nobles of his period he had been educated in England, while he was detained as hostage for his father's fidelity. He was a man of learning and interested in books, for he encouraged the writing of chronicles and kept one Philip Flattisbury for this purpose at a town near Naas. He collected a considerable library of Latin, French, English, and Irish books, of which a list still remains.[16] A volume called The Earl of Kildare's Rental also exists showing the methodical care with which his estates were managed. He followed his father's example in attacking and subduing the Irish chiefs on the borders of the Pale; he relieved his own country of cess and improved his lands. He was appointed Lord Deputy on the death of his father, and in 1519 he accompanied King Henry VIII, then in the prime of his youth and splendour, to the Field of the Cloth of Gold, where Kildare was distinguished by his brilliant appearance and bearing. But his successes awakened the jealousy of his enemies, and secret reports of maladministration were sent over to London and were eagerly seized upon by Wolsey, who desired his downfall. He was summoned to England, where he married as his second wife a near kinswoman of the King, the Lady Elizabeth Grey, daughter of the Marquis of Dorset. The influence which he gained by this marriage placed him close to the Court, and in October 1520 the King wrote to the Earl of Surrey, who had replaced Kildare in Ireland, that they had "noon evident testimonies" to convict the Earl, who was accordingly acquitted and returned to Dublin in 1523.

[16] See Appendix V

Surrey was a Viceroy who directed the whole of his powers to the establishment of quiet, and generally with success; the Irish kept their indentures under his rule, and the poor and simple people thought he was the King's son," all English and Irishmen alike "on their knees praying devoutly that his generation should continue." He is said to have been so just a judge that no man departed from him without the law and right he ought to have, and he used to say that he would eat grasses and drink water rather than feast at a banquet with a heavy heart and the curse of the poor.[17] He paid full and ready money for all he took, so that the markets followed wherever he went. But with regard to Kildare his pacific efforts failed. The whole island had, in Surrey's words, been agitated at the prospect of the return of Garrett Oge; but his foes would not leave him in peace. His brother-in-law Piers, now Earl of Ormonde, had joined with the Earl's other enemies and abetted Wolsey's designs to get rid of Kildare's dominant influence in Irish affairs, his wife throwing herself vigorously into the quarrel of her husband against her brother. Surrey's attempts to patch up the quarrel had been unavailing, and Kildare's wife wrote to the King that she lived in continual fear, for she had known the Earl, who was as good and kind to her "as eny man may be to hys wif," twice in one morning warned ere he rose out of bed. Each Earl transmitted to London accusations against the other, the chief point against Kildare being that he had allowed his kinsman Desmond to escape when ordered to arrest him on the charge of high treason. The State Papers report that "he went his waye as wise as he came," and it is quite likely that he shut his eyes to Desmond's escape. In 1526 he was ordered to go to England and was committed to the Tower.

[17] Book of Howth, in Carew, Miscellany, p. 191.

When brought before the Council, Wolsey began to pile accusations against him in a violent manner, but Kildare, checking him, demanded to have leave to answer each point in turn. He made a dignified and spirited speech, not without sharp shafts at the insolence and greed of the Cardinal. "I would you and I had changed kingdoms, my Lord, but for one month; I would trust to gather up more crumbs in that space than twice the revenues of my poor earldom." The Cardinal, "perceiving that Kildare was no babe, rose in a fume from the Council table," and recommitted Kildare to the Tower, going so far as to send an order on his own authority for his execution; but the King, "controlling the sauciness of the priest," sent his ring in token of countermanding the order. Even the Cardinal, in his saner moments, was of opinion that it would be inexpedient to remove him from his office as Deputy, there being no one in the kingdom able to replace him; but it was not till August 1530 that he returned to Ireland in the company of Sir William Skeffington, whom he soon succeeded as Deputy. Unfortunately he used his power with great lack of discretion. He despised Skeffington, and never failed to take an opportunity to humiliate him; he displaced Archbishop Alen, Wolsey's friend, who was his opponent; he ravaged the territories of the Butlers and allowed O'Neill to invade Uriel (Louth). Reports of these high-handed proceedings were not long in reaching London. His enemies complained that the Council "were partly corrupted with affection towards him and partly in dread of him," so that no man will do anything that shall be "displeasant" to him. In 1533 he was again summoned by King's letters to England. "He received the summons with reverence and made no answer, but prepared himself for his journey to London." [18] He called a Council at Drogheda, where he appointed as Deputy during his absence his son Thomas, a lad of twenty-one, afterward to be known as "Silken Thomas." He solemnly charged him to act only by the advice of the Council, and to behave himself so wisely in his green years that he might enjoy the pleasure of summer and glean the fruits of harvest. Hardly had the brave old Earl been again committed to the Tower when news reached him that his son had broken out into rebellion and that the Archbishop of Dublin had fallen a victim. A copy of the Papal excommunication pronounced against his son for this murder, which was shown to him by the Lieutenant of the Tower, seems to have been the final stroke of misfortune. He was suffering from a wound received in his last fray with O'Carroll, and from privations endured in prison, and on December 12, 1534, the old man died and was buried in St Peter's Church within the Tower walls.

[18] "Examination of Robert Reyley, on the Rebellion of Silken Thomas, August 5 1536," Carew, Calendar, 1, No. 84, p. 98.

His son Thomas, who now comes to the front, was his only son by his first wife Elizabeth, daughter of Sir John Zouche. By his second marriage to Lady Elizabeth Grey, whose brother, Lord Leonard Grey, was shortly afterward to be sent over as Marshal, he had two children who became famous, one for his adventures, the other for her beauty. These were Garrett (or Gerald), eleventh Earl of Kildare, who was saved by the devotion of his people from the ruin which overtook his family after the rebellion of his half-brother, "Silken Thomas," and Lady Elizabeth, the "Fair Geraldine" whose charms were sung by the poet Henry, Earl of Surrey, and of whom Sir Walter Scott has left an unfading picture in his Lay of the Last Minstrel. The beautiful girl, who was only seven years old when her father died, lived after his death with her mother at her uncle's house, Beaumanoir, in Leicestershire. When Surrey first saw her at Hunsdon she was twelve years old, and was being educated with the future Queen Mary. She left Hunsdon to become one of the ladies-in-waiting to Queen Katherine Howard, and in 1543, at the age of fifteen, she was married to Sir Anthony Browne, a man much older than herself. Before her second marriage to Lord Admiral Clinton, Surrey had been sent to the block. It is unlikely that there was anything more than admiration between the poet and the girl. Her portrait remains at Carton, the seat of the Dukes of Leinster, with the one we here reproduce of her father, Garrett Oge. On both sides of her family the Fair Geraldine saw one after another of her relations hurried to the scaffold. At Beaumanoir the gentle and learned Lady Jane Grey, who was closely related by marriage to her family, was growing up, only to be pushed by her ambitious kinsfolk into the disastrous project which was to involve herself and her whole family in ruin. On her father's side the Lady Elizabeth was to witness the equal ruin of the great house of Kildare to which she belonged, by the execution of her uncles and her half-brother in one terrible act of vengeance provoked by that half-brother's ill-advised and hasty rebellion. Her only real brother, Gerald, was for years a fugitive at home and abroad. Lady Elizabeth lived much at Court, where she acted as maid-of-honour to Princess Mary. She survived to see the restoration of the family estates and honours when Mary became Queen of England.

There seems no doubt that the young Vice-Deputy, Thomas, Lord Offaly (1513-37), into whose hands his father had committed "a naked sword" at the early age of twenty one, was hurried into rebellion by reports sedulously spread abroad or conveyed to him in secret letters that his father had been, or was about to be, "cut shorter" in the Tower. The house of Kildare had many enemies only too ready to take advantage of the inexperience and rash spirit of the youthful Deputy. A slip of paper, which reached his hands by strange means, announced to him the Earl's supposed death. Unheeding the counsels of the Chancellor and of some of his nearest relations, he flung down the Sword of State in the Council chamber, exclaiming, "I am none of Henry his Deputy, I am his foe." This was on June 11, 1534, five months after his father's departure for England. Thomas rode through the city in state, attended by 120 horsemen, whose silken hangings attached to their helmets brought him the sobriquet of "Silken Thomas," besides 340 galloglas and 500 kerne.

At St Mary's Abbey he publicly renounced his allegiance and formally declared war on the Government, placing himself at Oxmantown at the head of the army. The Mayor of Dublin was ordered by the Council to arrest him, but the plague in the city had been so fatal that he had not men to send. Many who disapproved of the rising took refuge in Dublin Castle or escaped to England. Archbishop Alen, who had been a chief agent in the removal of his father, and who was trying to escape from Clontarf, was driven back, and in the attempt to seize him he was either designedly or accidentally killed. The insurrection, though a serious one and prolonged for three years, was destined to failure from the first. The high traditions of his family, the sympathy felt for his anxieties, and his personal beauty attracted to Thomas the affections of the populace, but the great lords stood aloof. The Butlers refused to join him and wasted Kildare, though Thomas offered, if successful, to halve the kingdom with the son of the Earl of Ossory. His assault on Dublin Castle was repulsed, and he narrowly escaped capture in the Abbey of Grey Friars in Francis Street. The promised help from Scotland and Spain showed no sign of coming, and an excommunication from the Pope for the murder of Archbishop Alen by his followers weakened his cause in the eyes of his countrymen. There were tidings of the return of Sir William Skeffington (called "The Gunner," from having been Master of the Ordnance under Henry VIII) with an English army. Though this was held up by storms under Lambey Island, Sir William Brereton succeeded in landing with a portion of the troops, while Skeffington, whose age and weakness were not suited to prompt action, failed in an attempt to go round by Waterford. Offaly had then an army of 7000 men, and after intercepting Brereton he fell back on Maynooth, on which Skeffington did not march until March in the following year, 1535.

Thomas is described as "a man of great natural beauty, of stature tall and personable, in countenance amiable, a fair face and somewhat ruddy." He possessed the rich utterance of his countrymen, and is said to have been "of nature flexible and kind, very soon carried where he fancied; in matters of importance an headlong hotspur, yet nathless taken for a young man not devoid of wit, were it not, as it fell out in the end, that a fool had the keeping thereof." He was a youth who in quiet times would have been beloved, but scarce fitted to lead a forlorn hope. The chief event of the year was the fall of Maynooth Castle, which Lord Offaly, who was now tenth Earl of Kildare, had strongly fortified. It might have proved impregnable even to Skeffington's heavy artillery, had it not been betrayed by its governor, Christopher Parese, the foster-brother of the Earl, whom he had left in command while he went into Offaly to raise additional forces. This unusual act of treachery on the part of a foster-brother—considered the most sacred of Irish relationships—was fitly rewarded by Parese's execution by the Government, his "voluntary service" being even to the captors "so thankless and unsavoury that it stinketh." But his head did not fall alone; twenty-five of the defenders were beheaded and one was hanged "for the dread and example of others," an act cynically spoken of in the State Papers as "The Pardon of Maynooth." The great spoil taken shows that Maynooth was one of the richest earls' houses under the crown of England. Beds, hangings of silk, plate, garments, and furniture were in abundance. The stout towers still remaining prove the great original strength of the castle.

After the fall of Maynooth hope was at an end, and the army of kerne "melted away from the Earl like a snowdrift." He made an attempt to sail into Spain, but O'Brien dissuaded him, and he could do no more than keep up a desultory warfare with the help of O'Brien and O'Conor Faly, who held to him when O'More and MacMorrogh submitted and the head of the Keatings called off his clansmen. The rebellion would probably have been suppressed more quickly but for the slow feebleness of Skeffington, who died in 1535. But the arrival of Lord Leonard Grey as Marshal of the army hastened events. He landed in July 1535, and found Earl Thomas, who was his step-nephew, entrenched in a strong house of earth, so ditched and watered that it seemed well nigh impregnable, hidden in a wood. This he burned and destroyed, and very soon afterward Lord Thomas sent in his submission and surrendered to Grey and Lord Butler. It is probable that he hoped for favourable terms from his kinsman, for the Council reported that he would yield himself to none other but only to him. "To allure him to yield" Grey seems to have held out hopes of pardon which were by no means approved in England. Probably Lord Grey found his service against his step-nephew distasteful; it is certain that he took no pains to hunt down his true nephew, Gerald, Lord Thomas' half-brother, for one of the accusations later brought against him, and for which he suffered death, was that he had allowed the boy to escape. But his action toward Lord Thomas can find no justification. When, after the youth was sent to London and imprisoned in the Tower, Grey's promise to him of personal safety was brought forward, Grey's mouth was stopped by the bribe of a "great rent" and other even less seemly gifts. His treacherous arrest at a banquet of Kildare's five uncles, his own kinsmen, two of whom had been opposed from the first to the rising and were in no way implicated, is one of the worst instances of that detestable Machiavellian policy which ruled in the Courts of Europe generally and in that of England during the seventeenth century. This made friendship, honour, and honesty alike subservient to political ends. On February 3, 1537, Kildare's five uncles suffered the traitor's death at Tyburn, thus at one blow wiping out of existence all the male representatives of one of the great families of the country, save for the child Gerald, who was later to restore the title and position of his house. The seizure of the Geraldines struck terror into the Pale, and a letter written to Cromwell, Henry's adviser, by an alderman in Dublin informed him that the gentlemen of Co. Kildare were "the most sorryest affright men in the world." Lord Thomas survived his uncles for five months. On the walls of the State prison in the Tower may still be read the words "THOMAS FITZ G." It would seem that the inscription was cut short by his summons to death.

His half-brother, a child of ten years of age at the time of the arrest of Lord Thomas, was lying ill of smallpox in Donore. His nurse wrapped him up, and he was conveyed by the devotion of a priest named Thomas Leverous, who remained faithful to him throughout his wanderings, to the care of his half-sister, Lady Mary, who had married Brian O'Conor Faly, chief of Offaly. The most strenuous efforts were made to save this boy, who was adored as the remaining hope of his family and adherents. He was handed on secretly from one place to another, and his aunt, Lady Eleanor, widow of the MacCarthy Reagh, even consented to a second marriage with Manus O'Donnell of Tyrconnel, a man whom she seems to have detested, in order, as she thought, to provide her nephew with a safe asylum. But some years later, in 1540, suspecting that her husband intended to surrender Gerald to the English Government, she sent him over with his tutor, Leverous, disguised in a saffron-coloured shirt "like one of the natives," to St Malo. He was everywhere received with the greatest respect and was protected in turn by the King of France, the Emperor Charles V, and his kinsman, Cardinal Pole. He passed some years in Italy and entered the service of Cosimo de Medici in Florence. His travels in foreign Courts and the care bestowed upon his education made him an accomplished gentleman. It is probable that his oft-expressed desire to become reconciled to the English King was sincere, but he remained abroad until after the death of Henry VIII. He was received into favour by Edward VI, and by him and Queen Mary he was restored to his honours and estates. His faithful tutor, Leverous, was raised to the episcopal bench as Bishop of Kildare and made Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin.

END OF CHAPTER IX

X.—THE NEW POLICY OF HENRY VIII

The net result of the Irish policy of the long Kildare viceroyalty and that of the eighth Earl of Ormonde had been the return to Irish habits and ways of the larger part of Ireland outside the Pale. The official reports of the early sixteenth century are full of this topic. In 1515 we learn that the King's laws were only obeyed in Louth, Meath, Dublin, Kildare, and Wexford, and only in half of these counties. In the other halves and in Connacht and Ulster there was neither justice nor sheriff, and "all the Englyshe folke of the said countyes ben of Iryshe habyt, of Iryshe language and of Iryshe condytions except the cyties and wallyd townes...and though many of them obey the King's Deputy when it pleaseth them, yet there is none of them all that obeyeth the King's laws."

Ten English counties paid annual tribute to Irish chiefs, ranging from £20 to £300. "Sir Piers Butler, knight, and all the Captains of the Butlers of the Co. Kilkenny followeth the Irish order and every one of them maketh war and peace for himself without any licence from the King." [1] A similar independent report addressed to Wolsey in 1526 bears the same testimony. It states that "the great rulers have each his Irish Judge who decrees according to Irish law. Scarcely a word of English is heard in the County of Kildare...Irish habits are also worn for the most part, tonsures above the ears, with overlips [moustaches] and garments so that they cannot be distinguished from Irishmen, except that the latter have better manners and are more obedient to order. The Earl of Kildare [Gerald FitzGerald, ninth Earl], being Deputy has power to reform all these enormities, so it must be supposed that he hath reasons for tolerating them...Except in Dublin, Drogheda, and a few lords' houses all the Pale has of late become Irish...Thus is the King's jurisdiction diminished. When the Sword of State was given to Kildare all the wolves became lambs." [2] Thus when Henry VIII ascended the throne in 1509 only the Pale and the cities and garrison towns outside it adhered to their allegiance; the rest was purely Irish. The condition of the Irish districts showed a great increase in their forces and organization; cashels, or piles, had considerably increased in number, especially in Munster, "and where at the conquest there had not been five outside the cities, there now be five hundred."

[1] There is a summary of this paper in Calendar of State Papers, Hen. VIII (1515), ii, No. 1366, p. 371; Miss C. Maxwell gives part of the document in her Irish History from Contemporary Sources (1923), p. 79 seq.

[2] Lansdowne MS. 159, fol. 3.

The forces under Irish authority amounted to a formidable army, each head of a sept being able to put a good number of horse and foot into the field—trained men, obliged to respond to an immediate summons when required. In a paper entitled A Description of the Power of Irishmen, written early in the sixteenth century, the Irish forces of Leinster are numbered at 522 horse, 5 battalions of galloglas (galloglaigh] and 1432 kerne, and those of the other provinces were in like proportion. MacCarthy Mór, commanded 40 horse, 2 battalions of galloglas, and 2000 kerne; the Earl of Desmond 400 horse, 3 battalions of galloglas, and 3000 kerne, besides a battalion of crossbowmen and gunners, the smaller chieftains supplying each their quota of men. In the year 1517, "when the reformacion of the countrye was taken in hand," it was reported that the Irish forces in Thomond were 750 horse, 2324 kerne, and 6 "batayles" of galloglas, the latter including 60 to 80 footmen harnessed with spears; each of these had a man to bear his harness, some of whom themselves carried spears or bows. Every kerne had a bow, a 'skieve' or quiver, three spears, a sword, and a skene, each two of them having a lad to carry their weapons. The horsemen had two horses apiece, some three, the second bearing the 'knave' or his attendant.

The galloglas was a heavy-armed footman, wearing a shirt of mail and a helmet, and carrying a halbert or battleaxe six feet in length, with a blade like a long and broad knife. The kerne (ceatharnach] was lightly armed with target, bow, and arrows, or else three darts which he cast with wonderful facility. The tract continues: "They be for the most part good and hardie men of war, and can live hardly and fit for great misery. They will adventure themselves greatly on their enemies, seeing time to do it. Good watchers by night; as good soldiers by night as others by day. The captain or Lord Keeper [hath] none of his lands in his own hand, but giveth it to his followers, by whom he is maintained with all things necessary, or what pleaseth him to take; for all that they have is at his commandment." [3] A few years later, in 1529, James, Earl of Desmond, was writing to the Emperor Charles V stating that he had increased his force to 16,500 foot and 1500 horse, and that his friends and allies are "Princeps Oberayn [O'Brien], who could place in the field 600 horse and 1000 foot; Theobald de Burgh, with 100 horse and 600 foot; O'Donyll of Ulidia, with 800 horse and 4000 foot; and seven others, his allies, with 300 horse and 18,000 foot, all ready to fight against the Deputy Sir Piers Butler and the English King's cities of Limerick, Waterford, and Dublin. But he is much in need of artillery." [4]

[3] Cotton MSS., Dom., xviii, fol. 101-102 ; title, "In Thomond, anno 8 Hen. VIII." There is a later and incorrect copy of this return in Trinity College, Dublin, MS. G. 2. 16.

[4] Add. MSS. 28, 578, fol. 194 ; and 28, 579, fol. 329. These are copies of manuscripts in Brussels.

James was secretly corresponding with the Emperor Charles V, who was believed to be contemplating an invasion of Ireland, and had already in 1527 made a tentative invasion of England, by throwing twenty thousand Irish on the coast of Pembrokeshire, in Wales. He acknowledged Charles V as Emperor, and addressed him as "most invincible and most sacred Caesar ever august." It was James of Desmond who "first put the abominable use of coygn and livery on the King's subjects in his country," an example quickly followed by the other magnates. Thomas had gone further and made it obligatory in the Pale during his term of office as Deputy, with all the other impositions used by the native captains over their people and in defiance of the King's laws; and this was alleged to have been one chief reason of his being put to death. A Deputy who openly defied the laws was in an anomalous position which could hardly be condoned by the authorities. But the country parts of Ireland undoubtedly advanced in wealth and prosperity during the period in which this policy of encouraging native customs was in force. Markets were held all over the country, churches and castles were rebuilt, and the ports, such as Limerick, were doing a thriving foreign trade. During the fifteenth century numerous complaints are recorded from the Pale that fairs and markets were being held by "divers Irish enemies, whereby they get great profit."

Henry's first intention seems to have been to continue the policy of his predecessor and govern through the great Anglo-Irish lords, but so early as 1520, fifteen years before the fall of the house of Kildare, he had proposed to Surrey, then appointed Lord Deputy, a new view as to the government of Ireland. He held that "circumspect and politic ways should be used" to bring the independent Irish captains into obedience, "which thing must as yet be practised by sober ways, politic drifts, and amiable persuasions, founded in law and reason, rather than by rigorous dealing." Henry had come to the conclusion that "to spend so much money for the reduction of that land, to bring the Irish in appearance only of obeisance...were a thing of little policy, less advantage, and least effect." He despaired of conquering the land, but he believed that if the Irish lords, instead of being "impressed by fearful words" into the belief that it was the intention, as had been already mooted, to expel them from their lands, felt that they were to be conserved in their own and brought to aid and advise the King, as faithful subjects, to recover his inheritance, each would be able not only to live quietly on his own but would see his lands inhabited, tilled, and laboured for his own most advantage.[5] He even proposed to mitigate the rigour of the laws, and find out from them under what manner and by what laws they will be ordered and governed; only, that it is of necessity "that every reasonable creature be governed by a law." Here was a reasonable and statesmanlike policy which was destined to lead to good results. The personal popularity of Lord Leonard Grey prepared the way for the inauguration of this new policy and for the submission of the great lords under the Viceroyalty of his successor, Sir Anthony St Leger. Though to Grey was confided the unpleasant task of declaring at the Parliament of 1536-37 the abolition of the Papal authority and the establishment of that of Henry VIII as head of the Church,[6] and following on this the abolition of the houses of religion, his personal fearlessness and confidence in the Irish made him well liked. Even after his seizure of the Geraldines his popularity did not die out. When in 1540 he passed through the wildest parts of Munster with a small bodyguard, "trusting only to the Irish," O'Conor had the way over Togher Croghan mended into the heart of his country, and O'Molloy victualled him and conducted him safely on his way.

[5] Letter to the Earl of Surrey, September 1520 (S.P., Hen. VIII, ii, 51-54).

[6] 26 Hen. VIII, in Irish Statutes (1786), i, 90.

Even Donogh O'Brien "played an honest and true part" toward one who so implicitly trusted himself among them. Asked to provide an escort through his country, O'Brien sent one galloglas with a silver spear or axe, and the hilt hanging full of silk, to be his guide. When Ulick Burke remonstrated with Grey on the hazard he had run he pointed to the lad, saying, "Lo, seest thou not yonder standing before me O'Brien's axe for my conduct?"[7] Yet the country was at this time already seething with unrest, and the object of Grey's second visit was to try to win over the "pretended Earl of Desmond," as Sir James Fitzjohn FitzGerald is called in the State Papers, whom he met "with no English with him, where they drank wine together and chatted a long part of the night." Two years later, in 1542, Desmond made his formal submission to Henry, and he brought with him O'Brien, with whom he was then in league. Henry's policy of conciliation had been especially marked toward the Desmond family. When the true heir to the earldom, James FitzMaurice, wished to lay claim to his possessions Henry had sent him home from England, where he was staying at the King's Court, "sufficiently furnished with all things fitting for such an enterprise." The Desmonds had been much in England, and were in friendly relations with the King, being supported by him against the MacCarthys and O'Briens. After parting with the King, James FitzMaurice landed in Cork, in 1540, but he fell into a trap set for him by his rival and kinsman, Sir Maurice of Desmond, when passing through Lord Roche's country, and was slain. This fierce and treacherous old man, known as Maurice na dtoitane, "of the burnings," on account of his depredations, who lived to be an octogenarian and was still at that age furiously fighting foes and friends alike, fell at last a prisoner to his own father-in-law, and was hacked to death by his followers.

[7] "Information against Lord Leonard Grey, Carew," Calendar. i, No. 149, pp. 167-168.

Grey's two visits to Desmond's country are among the first of those state progresses afterward indulged in by Lord Justice Cusack, Sir Henry Sidney, and others, the reports of which give us so vivid and personal an acquaintance with the country and with the principal actors in the drama of the Elizabethan times. In his first tour in 1536 Grey was much impressed by the fertility and beauty of the country through which he was travelling. One of his train breaks out: "If there be any paradise in this world, the counties from Dublin to Thomond may be accounted for one of them, both for beauty and goodness. The town and castle of Kilkenny is well walled and well replenished of people and wealthy. The city of Limerick is a wondrous proper city and a strong and standeth environed with the river Shannon; it may be called Little London for the situation, but the castle hath need of reparation." Desmond's island-stronghold on Loch Gur they found "desolate and unwarded" by Sir James, and it was easily captured, the roofs and windows being repaired and a garrison placed in it.[8] At that date (1536) they failed to get O'Brien "to condescend to any conformity," though he came in later, but Desmond "showed himself very reasonable" submitting his claims to the Deputy and Council, and giving his two sons as hostages. The orders from London were that he was to be "handled in gentle sort," but in his own country there was much doubt of his loyalty. [9]

[8] Carew, Cal. i, No. 86, pp. 105, 103.

[9] Carew, Cal. i, No. 88, p. 108.

The child Garrett (or Gerald) of Kildare was known to be then hidden away in Munster, and Silken Thomas, his kinsman, had only recently been lodged in the Tower. When it was certainly known that Garrett was safe in France Desmond declared his readiness to come in, and on January 16, 1541, he swore fealty in the usual form, recognizing his Majesty the King of England as his sovereign, and "utterly forsaking the Bishop of Rome and his usurped primacy." [10] He formally renounced the privilege of his predecessors exempting them from appearing in Parliaments and Grand Councils, or from entering walled towns in the King's obedience, and declared himself ready to sit in the Dublin Parliament. Though he refused to treat with Ormonde, he made his submission on bended knees to St Leger at Youghal, and the Viceroy reports that he found him "a very wise and discreet gentleman." Attended by a splendid retinue, he proceeded to England, where in 1542 he made his act of submission to Henry in person,[11] being received with the greatest distinction and sent back with new honours. He left his son "to be brought up and instructed after the English sort" with the young Prince Edward, and the lad became his prince's attached friend and companion. On the death of Ormonde, Edward, now become king, created the Earl Lord Treasurer of Ireland and President of Munster, and he continued in office until his death in 1558. He was buried at Tralee Abbey of the White Friars. During the same year in which Desmond had made his submission the head of Lord Grey had fallen on Tower Hill on an indictment of ninety counts, among which the escape of young Garrett and his leniency to the Desmonds formed a part.

[10] Ibid., No. 153, p. 174.

[11] Sir Anthony St Leger to Henry VIII, February 21, 1541, S. P., Hen. VIII, iii, 285 seq.

It was the formation, by the efforts of Conn O'Neill, prince of Tyrone, of the Geraldine League in 1537, after the execution of the six Geraldines, that brought the North once more into intimate touch with the South. Conn's mother was Alice, daughter of Gerald FitzGerald, the Great Earl of Kildare, and it was in Donegal, as being the safest spot and least accessible to English troops, that the young Garrett of Kildare now lay in hiding. When his aunt, the Lady Eleanor, married Manus O'Donnell, in order to find with him an asylum for her nephew, Conn drew together a league which included, besides the Northern lords, the O'Briens, Desmonds, and MacCarthys of the South; and, until the activities of the English Government to capture Garrett made it advisable to convey the boy abroad, they formed a guard of young chiefs for his protection. This Manus O'Donnell was a remarkable personality; he was a good soldier and a man of culture. To him we owe the most complete existing biography of his great ancestor, St Columcille, which, though founded on the Latin Life by Adamnan, adds to it the traditions about the saint current in his own district. He wrote it as a youth, and, though he tells us that he had help in translating the Latin Life and explaining the old Gaelic words, he "dictated the whole out of his own mouth with great labour" in the intervals of a life spent in warfare, chiefly among members of his own family.[12] More remarkable still are the exquisite lyrics with which he, in common with several of the FitzGeralds, Pierce Ferriter, one of the MacCarthys, and other chiefs—refined and cultivated gentlemen of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—adorned the literature of their native land. They were evidently not out of touch, even in wild Donegal, with the contemporary European tradition.

[12] Betha Coluimchille, ed. A. O'Kelleher and G. Schoepperle (1918).

Some of the poems of Manus seem to have been written to Eleanor, whom he calls the "Earl's daughter," and there are two plaintive little poems—"The sorrow of parting" and "To-night my cup of sorrow is full"—which may well have been the expression of his grief when, after Garrett's flight abroad, she decided on leaving him to return to her native province.[13] She never seems to have cared for Manus. Only force of affection for her nephew drove her, after long hesitations, to marry him, and she left him with disdainful words as soon as her purpose was fulfilled. Probably she never trusted him. Twice he had made submission to an English Viceroy, and he had promised Lord Leonard Grey to do as good service as ever his father did to the uttermost of his power. When Lord Deputy St Leger met Manus in 1540 he was surprised to find before him an elegant gentleman, magnificently dressed in crimson velvet, who had for his chaplain "a right sober young man, well learned, and brought up in France." He states that he found Manus "a sober man and one that in his words much desireth civil order." Eleanor plainly thought that her husband's friendship with St Leger, who by Henry's command offered to create him Earl of Tyrconnel, might even induce him to give up young Garrett. Manus had come into power in early life, for he had been responsible for the government of his territories during the absence of his father, Dark Hugh O'Donnell, who had made a pilgrimage to Rome and whose ill-health on his return obliged him to pass on the reins to his son. But his rule was embittered by the jealousy of his brothers—one of whom he hanged and two others he carried in chains to Dublin—and by the turbulence of his son Calvagh. St Leger in vain tried to settle their differences. Being finally taken prisoner by Calvagh, Manus was kept "under easy restraint" until near the time of his death at Lifford in 1564. He was buried with great respect in the peaceful Franciscan monastery on the shores of Donegal Bay.

[13] Dánta Grádha, ed. T. F. O'Rahilly and R. Flower (1926).

It was an unusual thing for an alliance to be formed between the O'Donnells and O'Neills, such as that which momentarily held together Conn Bacach, or "the Lame", O'Neill and Manus O'Donnell, on behalf of Garrett FitzGerald. How far either of these chiefs were playing fair toward Garrett on the one hand or toward the English Government on the other it would be difficult to say. Manus's protection, as a sworn liegeman of the Crown, was clearly not to be implicitly relied upon. Conn O'Neill had gone even farther; as representative of the Northern princes he had acknowledged the sovereignty of the English King over all Ireland and made submission to him. After the fall of Maynooth and the break up of the rebellion of Silken Thomas in 1535 he had twice made a formal submission to Lord Leonard Grey, but this may have been only to secure his own safety. Grey was uncertain of him. He found him "very tractable in words, but obstinate in refusing to put in pledges for his good behaviour." He was, in fact, then secretly forming his league for the protection of young Kildare. But in 1541, when Garrett was safely in France, he sent in his son as hostage and offered unqualified submission. He even crossed over to London to make his formal act of allegiance to Henry VIII in person. In October 1542 he was received with great ceremony by the King in the Queen's closet at Greenwich, which was "richly hanged with cloth of Arras and well strewn with rushes" for the occasion. In return for his surrender of his hereditary title of O'Neill he was created Earl of Tyrone, with remainder to his illegitimate son Matthew, who was made Baron of Dungannon. Conn would have preferred the title of Earl of Ulster, but that was held from old times to be an adjunct to the Crown, and Henry would not consent to part with it. For the solemnity, Conn was led in by the Earls of Hereford and Oxford, while Viscount Lisle bore the sword before him. He wore the robes of state proper for his new title, and the King placed round his neck a collar of gold worth threescore pounds and presented him with a hundred marks in money. His style was henceforth Du très haut et puissant Signeur Con, Conte de Tyrone, en la Royaulme d'Irlande.[14]

[14] The negotiations with Conn O'Neill and his articles of submission will be found in Carew, Cal., i, No. 167, p. 188, and No. 174, p. 199 ; Morrin, Calendar of Patent Rolls, i, 85 ; Cal. S. P. , Hen. VIII, xvii, Nos. 884 and 885 p. 511 ; MS. Titus B, xi, 385 (British Museum).

O'Donnell and Magennis were knighted on the same occasion, and when Conn had returned thanks in a speech translated by his chaplain a state dinner followed. Conn remained long in London. Like Calvagh O'Donnell he seemed to prefer the "civility" of the capital to the troubles of his own province. But when he did return to his native land it was to hold the ancient tribal possessions of his ancestors with the name, state, and title as the "mere gift" of the King. Conn's complications were not over. The tyranny of officials on the spot went far to bring to naught any policy of conciliation. A series of letters show that he was imprisoned on his way back through Dublin; and he complains not only of this unexpected and unjust imprisonment, which is, he says, injuring his own province, but of the harsh treatment he had received from Lord Chancellor Cusack.[15]

[15] One of these shrewd and sensible letters of Conn O'Neill will be found in Appendix VI. For his imprisonment see Carew, Cal. i, No. 248, p. 367.

The submission of the head of the oldest family of Irish princes made a great sensation in Ireland. Since the days of Richard II, nearly a hundred and fifty years before, such a thing had not been heard of, and the clans of the North had drifted back into their old position of haughty independence, holding themselves aloof not only from English entanglements, but also, so far as was possible, from the wars and quarrels of their own country. Having got rid of the de Courcys and de Burghs out of the North, their efforts were directed to holding back the Scots from their coasts, and the only feuds in which they took part were those of their own and the Connacht borderland. The old pride of superiority over the South, as a race which had, in ancient days, placed forty-seven kings upon the throne of Tara, while the South, during all its long history, had only once been in undisputed occupation of the coveted honour of the High Kingship, was as strong as ever. "Forty-seven kings to one" is the theme of the Ulster poems in the Contention of the Bards,[16] sustained in a lively poetic controversy during the seventeenth century. The fact gave the North a pre-eminence that Ulster was not likely to forget. Thus the act of submission of Conn O'Neill was a matter of high importance. It was speedily followed by that of O'Brien, who was created Earl of Thomond, representing Munster, and MacWilliam Burke from Connacht, now created Earl of Clanricarde. Thus once again the three independent provinces acknowledged fealty to the Crown. If we ask what was the inducement which made these leading families submit we find it in the promise of support offered by the Crown to the selected ruler as against all applicants to the chiefdom, with the right of descent in a single line, thus giving an hereditary interest in the tribal lands. The acceptance of the English system of descent from father to son entirely altered the old method of succession by concentrating in the hands of a single branch of the princely houses the rights belonging in former days also to the collateral branches of the family, and requiring the confirmation of the suffrages of the whole clan. Many of the chiefs, either through avarice or through weariness of the system of election by tanistry, which introduced an element of uncertainty into every succession and tore the fair provinces to pieces from century to century in endless internecine strife, hailed the hope of a quiet possession passing on from father to son in regular descent and assuring in their own branch the hereditary ownership of the tribal lands. It tended to make each of these chiefs supreme in his own clan against all comers.

[16] Edited by L. McKenna for the Irish Texts Society (1918).

The immediate result of the new system seemed to be all that could be desired. Sir Thomas Cusack reports in May 1553 that "the policy that was devised for the sending of the Earls of Desmond, Thomond, Clanricarde, and Tyrone, and the Baron of Upper Ossory, O'Carroll, Magennis, and others into England was a great help in bringing those countries to good order, for none of them who went into England committed harm upon the King's Majesty's subjects. The winning of the Earl of Desmond was the winning of the rest of Munster at small charges. The making of O'Brien an earl made all that country obedient. The making of MacWilliam Earl of Clanricarde made all the country during his time quiet and obedient, as it is now. The making of MacGillapatrick Baron of Upper Ossory made his country obedient." [17] All looked well for the success of the new experiment. The country was as near 'settlement' as ever it had been in the course of its history. It was therefore a particular misfortune that Conn, for what reason we know not, chose as his heir not his eldest son Shane, who ought to have succeeded him under the English rule of descent which he had just accepted, but a boy irregularly born into his family, if indeed he belonged to his family at all, which seems doubtful. This boy's mother was a woman of Dundalk, the wife of a blacksmith named Kelly. At the age of fourteen she presented this lad to Conn as his son, and Conn was so delighted with the boy that he not only adopted him into his family, but made him his heir.[18] The English authorities accepted Ferdoragh (called in English "Matthew") on Conn's recommendation, giving him the title of Baron of Dungannon, with succession to the Earldom of Tyrone, but Shane on coming to manhood refused to acknowledge him, and naturally asserted his own superior claims. Thus the family strife which it was the aim of the new settlement to heal was destined soon to break out afresh and to make the succeeding years the most turbulent that Ulster had known in the course of its long history. Nevertheless, St Leger might well think that Ireland was at last at peace. The submissions of the great lords were followed by those of the minor chiefs, each contented to be confirmed in the territory he ruled by Henry's policy of surrender and regrant, which made him independent of the suffrages of his people, and enabled him to feel behind him the support of English authority.

[17] Carew, Cal., i, No. 200, pp. 245-246.

[18] Shane said that Conn, his father, "being a gentleman, made it a rule never to refuse paternity to any child brought to him as his own"—a remark which illuminates the habits of the chiefs with regard to their clans-people.

It was at a Parliament in which, for the first time in history, native princes sat side by side with Anglo-Norman lords that Henry VIII was proclaimed King, instead of Lord, of Ireland. This Parliament met on June 13, 1541, in the presence of the Earls of Ormonde and Desmond (here seated for once together), of Donogh O'Brien, the O'Reilley, and a great company of nobles and ecclesiastics, both Irish and Anglo-Irish; and it was proclaimed, amid universal rejoicings, that "forasmuch as your Majesty had always been the only defender and protector, under God, of this realm, it was most meet that your Majesty and your heirs should from henceforth be named and called King of the same." The proclamation was repeated in the Lower House, "where it was likewise passed with no less joy and willing consent," and it was publicly announced after solemn Mass in St Patrick's Church in the presence of two thousand persons "with great joy and gladness to all men." The contents of the Act were translated into Irish by the Earl of Ormonde, "greatly to the contentation" of the said lords.[19] Such are the official reports of this important event. St Leger, reporting the proceedings to the King on June 26, declares that he felt "no less comfort than to be risen again from death to life." When St Leger left Ireland for the first time in the spring of 1546 it was amid the weeping and lamentation of the people, and the Earls of Desmond, Thomond, and Tyrone promised to see the country defended to the uttermost of their powers until the Deputy's return. None could be found of better conformity than those Irish lords, and the "honest obedience" of the land warmed the heart of men like Sir Thomas Cusack. "Thanks be to God," he exclaims, "those who would not be brought under subjection with 10,000 men, cometh to Dublin with a letter, which is no small comfort to every faithful heart to see."

[19] 23 Hen. VIII, inIrish Statutes, vol. 1, 176 ; and see Cal. S. P., Hen. VIII, xvi, No. 926, p. 446.

It was twelve years later, in May 1553, that Cusack, who had become Lord Chancellor in 1551, made the tour round the South of Ireland to which we have already referred. It is interesting to note the actual results of Henry's pacific policy after the lapse of these twelve years and before the South was again devastated by the Desmond wars. He reports that Munster, under the rule of such lords and captains as be there and of the Earl of Desmond, is in good quiet so that the Justices of the Peace ride their circuit in the counties of Limerick, Cork, and Kerry, being the farthest shires west in Munster, and the sheriffs are obeyed. "The lords and captains of those countries, as the Earl of Desmond, the Viscount Barry, the Lord Roche, the Lord FitzMorris and divers others [all lords of old English blood], which within few years would not hear speak to obey the law, beeth now in commission with the Justices of the Peace to hear and determine causes...The Irish captains in those quarters do not stir, but live in such quiet that the English captains at Cork with forty horsemen cause the offenders to stand to right. MacCarthy Mór, who is the most powerful Irishman in Ireland, is now very conformable to good order." Leinster also he reported to be "in meetly good stay," the Kavanaghs being weakened and even the O'Byrnes and "such other of Irish sort dwelling in the rest of Leinster being of honest conformity." Thomond was quiet since O'Brien had been created earl, and the wild country that lay between Limerick and Tipperary, where a few years before the MacWilliams, O'Mulryans, and other Irishmen of good power were all wild, was now so conformable and well-ordered "that men may pass through the countries at pleasure, quietly, without danger of robbing or other displeasure." The same cheerful report of peace and progress comes even from Clanricarde's country, long wasted by the family quarrels of the Burkes. Where, at the time of Cusack's first visit, there were not forty ploughs in all the country "but all waste through war," two hundred ploughs were now at work, and the number was increasing daily. The country was universally inhabited, and people were able to leave their ploughs, irons, and cattle in the fields without fear of their being stolen.[20] Such a report is a remarkable testimony to the beneficial effects of the stability brought about by the new system.

[20] Carew, Cal., i, No. 200, pp. 235 seq.

It is the fashion among certain writers to scoff at the idea of any quiet or "good conformity" brought about by English rule, but there is no doubt that many of the large owners of property were heartily weary of the incessant wars which turned their fertile lands into a waste and depleted them of inhabitants, and that they were anxious to bring them under the more regular working of English law. The Irish in early times never disliked English law, though they strenuously resisted its abuse as a means of repression. This report was written just before the accession of Queen Mary, twelve years after the declaration of the King's supremacy. Again, it is often said that the troubles in the Tudor period were caused by the dissatisfaction of the small holders because their rights as tenants were overlooked in the new arrangement under which the chief held directly of the Crown. Theoretically, indeed, these rights were ignored; they were not, in fact, affected by the new relations between the lord and the Government; for while the lord's position entered on a new phase, that of the tenant toward his lord remained exactly as heretofore. He received his portion of land and paid his dues in cattle and kind after the submission of the chiefs exactly as he had done before.[21] Up to the time of the plantations his position with regard to his chief was unaltered in any way. The lot of the tenant in the native parts of the country does not appear to have been at all a happy one. According to Fynes Moryson he paid no regular rents, but the lord exacted from him all that he needed for his spendings and maintenance, "the countrypeople living under the lord's absolute power as slaves" and having no settled property, for their portions were partitioned among them only for one, two, or three years, so that they had no encouragement to build or improve their holdings.[22] Certain changes he was conscious of under the new system, of which the most important one to him was that he had no longer any choice in the election of his chief, which was now settled over his head between the Government and the ruling house; and, secondly, that the sheriff made his appearance in the country—a token that chief and tenant alike were henceforth to be ruled by English law. Both these changes, when realized, led to disturbance. The chosen chief might welcome them as signs that his authority would be upheld against all pretenders, but to the clansman they were the symbols of a lost status which he never afterward was able to regain. Thus, in theory, the individual rights of every clansman passed into the hands of his lord, who now held them under the Crown; but the actual conditions as between the lord and his tenant remained unchanged until the uprooting of all the old native ways came about with the confiscations and replantations after the Desmond and Tyrone wars.

[21] See "Tyrone's Rental" December 18, 1610, described by Sir Tobias Caulfeild, in Cal. S.P.I., James I, No. 931, p. 532 seq.

[22] Fynes Moryson, The Commonwealth of Ireland, in C. L. Falkiner's Illustrations of Irish History, pp. 242, 246.

The system of pacification was at this time fairly attempted, and the plans for the settlement of the luxuriant but wasted provinces of Munster and Ulster with English, which had been recommended by successive travellers and considered by successive Viceroys as a possible alternative to the old native rule, were for the moment set aside, to be revived again and carried out with rigour when the experiment of ruling through and with the concurrence and help of the native chiefs and Anglo-Irish lords had proved a failure. The causes of this failure are not far to seek. Garrett of Kildare was still abroad, a centre round whom the affections of the people twined. The jealousies of the great lords were irrepressible and ready at any moment to break out afresh. But, beyond these local causes of unrest, the determination of the sovereigns to force the recognition of their new claim to be the Head of the Church, which to a Catholic people was sacrilege, and the effort to oblige them to attend Protestant services and accept the revised Book of Common Prayer, aroused widespread discontent, especially when it was accompanied by the destruction of the monasteries and the breaking up of images and relics. The new causes of disturbance were religious, not political or social. Catholic leagues began to be formed throughout the country, and as the efforts to enforce the tenets of the Reformation grew more vigorous, carrying with them the persecution of priests and friars, the smouldering discontent was ready to burst into a flame. The closer connexion with Spain and France, both from an educational and political point of view, brought in agents who encouraged and guided the movement, and fanned the growing antagonism to English dictation into a passion. Yet both the O'Neill rebellion in the North and that of the Geraldines in the South arose out of personal and private quarrels, as we shall see, and might in other circumstances have been easily dealt with. The union of the North and South made them formidable, and the proclamation of a religious war turned them into a crusade. The work of reconciliation was suddenly to be cast to the winds on both sides. Persecution, rebellion, and plantation were to follow each other in rapid succession, and the whole conditions in Ireland were to be radically changed.

END OF CHAPTER X

XI.—THE CHANGE IN RELIGION

Of all the causes of unrest by far the most important was the rise of the movement known as the Reformation, and the gradual spread of its doctrines through North-western Europe. Henry VIII himself was no reformer. When Luther hurled defiance at the authority of the Roman see and disputed the truth of its doctrines, the young Tudor prince entered the lists against him with a tract on the Assertion of the Seven Sacraments, for which the Pope, Leo X, rewarded him with the title of 'Defender of the Faith.' But with the growth of his ambition came the design of making himself supreme not only in the State, but in the Church, the chief check hitherto existing upon the absolutism of the Crown. The gifted young monarch, who in his early life corresponded with Erasmus and debated with More, was in his later years to inaugurate the Tudor despotism which laid its heavy burden upon Church and State alike. The Act of Supremacy vested all ecclesiastical authority in the Crown, and the clergy learned, by one injunction after another, that they were only allowed to retain their offices on condition of becoming the mouthpieces of the King, who dictated alike the form of their faith and the manner in which it was to be preached. Pushed on from one act of absolutism to another by the ruthless ambition of his minister, Thomas Cromwell, arbitrary acts of taxation, of legislation, and of imprisonment followed each other with startling rapidity. "He is a prince," said the dying Wolsey, as he lay under arrest at the Abbey of Leicester, "of most royal courage; sooner than miss any part of his will, he will endanger one half of his kingdom." The passionless and calculating rigour which startles and appals us in reading the State Papers of the Tudor period had its effect in England in revolts all over the country, suppressed with ruthless severity, and in the fall of the noblest heads in England. Leaders of great houses like the aged Countess of Salisbury, and men of the highest virtue and learning like More, fell swiftly one after another upon the block.

It was in such an age and with such a spirit that the question of religious change was approached in Ireland. That country had been little touched by the expansion of intellectual enquiry which was elsewhere stirring in Europe, and which we vaguely designate as the Renaissance. Both on the intellectual and on the religious side the Irish people were quite unprepared for any change in their religious beliefs, with which they were fully satisfied and which were commended to them by many faithful and devoted lives among the native priests and more especially among the friars. There was, in Ireland, little or no complaint of those monastic irregularities which formed a ready excuse for their despoiling in England when their accumulated wealth was wanted for State purposes or for the reward of needy courtiers and impecunious kings. What was best in the 'New Religion' never had any chance of appeal in Ireland, and the greedy time-servers on whom alone Henry could rely to carry out his designs were not the type of men to recommend to a people any changes in the form or spirit of their religion. The crowd of priests, rectors, and vicars whom Sir Thomas More saw crowding into the courtyard at Lambeth, hurrying to take the Oath of Supremacy for the refusal of which he himself sat awaiting the summons of death, were not likely to attract to their 'faith' any of the unconvinced. The men sent over to Ireland to preach the new tenets and enforce the King's claims were of the type of these subservient clerics. The chief agent of Henry's will was a man named George Browne, Provincial of the Augustinian order in England, who had thrown himself zealously into the plans of the King's minister Cromwell for the "advance of the King's affairs," and who in March 1535 was consecrated Archbishop of Dublin to succeed Dr Alen, who had been so brutally murdered by the followers of Silken Thomas during his rebellion in the preceding year. Browne was an ignorant and overbearing friar, whom even the King rebuked for his arrogance and inefficiency, and whom Lord Deputy Grey called "a polshorn friar." Indecent in life and blustering in manner, Browne neither won the adhesion of the English of the Pale nor that of the clergy and laity in the provinces. His first duty was to proclaim the Act of Supremacy and force it through the Irish Parliament. Then followed the removal of all religious images out of the cathedrals and churches of his diocese. The suppression of the monasteries came next.[1] From this time the Priory of the Blessed Trinity was changed into a deanery and chapters, and it henceforth bore the name of Christ Church Cathedral.

[1] See the protest made by St Leger, May 21, 1539, in S.P., Hen. VIII, iii, 130-131. This letter and "The Form of the Beads" may be conveniently read in Miss C. Maxwell's Irish History from Contemporary Sources, pp. 127, 123.

To Browne's initiative can be traced the first proposals for converting St Patrick's Cathedral into a university for the education of clergy, a plan which figures largely in the correspondence of the time. Among the most revered relics lost in the general destruction was the famous 'Staff of Jesus,' believed by old tradition to have been given to St Patrick by Jesus Christ. It had been removed from Armagh to Dublin in 1180. The destruction of the sacred places and images, which was carried out with a total disregard of the feelings of the populace, awakened an hostility more vigorous than was the later protest when in 1551 the English liturgy was ordered to be read in the churches. Browne was strenuously opposed by Cromer, Archbishop of Armagh, and by his successor Dowdall, although the latter had been appointed by Henry and might have been expected to support his policy. A commission from the Pope prohibiting the acknowledgment of the King's Supremacy arrived in 1538 to support the efforts of the resisting party. Browne's report to Cromwell, on whose commission he acted, could hardly have been pleasing to that minister. "The countryfolk here much hate your lordship," he writes frankly, "and despitefully call you, in their Irish tongue, the blacksmith's son." His forewarning that the new measures were beginning to have the effect of making both the Irish and English races lay aside their old quarrels, "and will, if anything will, cause a foreigner to invade this nation," was destined to be speedily fulfilled.

Even at that moment Conn O'Neill, as Browne had the wit to see, was trying to form with Desmond a Catholic League of the North and South. The violence and rapacity of the Reforming prelates and clergy did more to weld together such leagues than any sense of national or internal union could do; the defence of the old faith provided a link that it was felt drew together all classes of the people, in every part of the country, English and Irish alike. It began for the first time what we may recognize as a widespread movement directed against English policy, which in the later years of the Tudor tyranny was to become consolidated into a national resistance to English rule. Up to the time of the Reformation any resistance to the claims of England over Ireland had been local, the result of temporary irritation, but no general desire seems to have been felt to rid the country of a supremacy which was taken, after a term of three and a half centuries, almost for granted. In the still independent districts only was the English suzerainty contested or ignored. There was a general submission to the English Crown, and such outbreaks as there were resulted from special acts of injustice or cruelty, such as the beheading of Desmond or the sacrifice of the five uncles of Silken Thomas on the suppression of his rebellion. But the efforts of Browne and his party did what no political difficulties had ever done. Such a command as that contained in Browne's official exhortation, called "The Form of the Beads," bidding them "obediently to recognize the King's Highness to be supreme head in earth of the Church of England and Ireland...and to show and teach how the Bishop of Rome hath heretofore usurped not only upon God, but also upon our princes," exhorting all to deface him from their primers and other books,[2] was a trumpet-blast which united the nation against the King and gave to the hitherto disunited bodies a common ground of action. Browne reported that neither by gentle exhortation, evangelical instruction, or sharp correction had he once succeeded, even in the Pale, in getting any to preach the word of God or the just title of the prince.[3] Even in St Patrick's the parish priest had hardly begun the Beads when the choir began to sing and put a stop to them. To St Leger Browne's energies were hateful. "Go to, go to," he exclaimed, as he saw his work of appeasement being undone by these zealots, "your matters of religion will mar all." [4]

[2] S.P., Hen. VIII, ii, 564 seq.

[3] S.P. Hen. VIII, ii, p. 539; Carew, Cal., i, No. 114, p. 135, and No. 120, p. 139.

[4] See also the sharp rebuke addressed to Browne by the King, S.P., Hen. VIII, ii, 465.

It was during the introduction of the English Book of Common Prayer in Edward VI's reign, which it was sought to make compulsory in Ireland, that opposition first became general. St Leger, to whom it fell to call a convention in 1551 for the purpose of introducing the new Liturgy, was no persecutor, and his affection for the old religion was made the chief ground of complaint against him on his downfall.[5] But in virtue of his office he was obliged to summon an Assembly to enforce the use of the Liturgy in its revised and English form. A stormy scene ensued. George Dowdall, Archbishop of Armagh, exclaimed, "Then shall every illiterate fellow read Mass." [6] "Your Grace is mistaken," replied Sir Anthony mildly, "for we have too many illiterate priests amongst us already, who can neither pronounce the Latin, nor know what it means, no more than the common people that hear them; but when the people hear the Liturgy in English, they and the priest will understand what they pray for." It seems clear that the intention was to apply the use of the Prayer Book only in English-speaking districts, but the crude and ridiculous attempt was afterward made to force it also on native congregations. Dowdall was deprived of his position for his resistance, and Browne was rewarded for his pliancy by being intruded into the Primacy in his place. A few years later we find him bitterly repenting his choice, and praying to be sent to a less conspicuous diocese in place of the poor and difficult post he had been so anxious to obtain in the wild country of Shane O'Neill. Dowdall was eventually obliged to fly to the Continent, but he was recalled under Mary, and though he had originally been appointed by the Crown his recall was approved by the Pope, and he was reinstated in March 1553.

[5] Evelyn P. Shirley, Original Letters and Papers illustrating the History of the Church of Ireland in the Reign of Edward VI, etc. (1851), No. XXIII.

[6] Harleian Miscellany, v, 601.

It is little wonder that the new doctrine made small progress in Ireland. It was neither recommended by the preaching nor by the lives of its first promoters. The monasteries fell into ruins, and the churches languished for lack of clergy. The clergy who remained, "though," in Browne's words, "they could and would preach after the old sort and fashion till right Christians were weary of them, would not once open their lips to proclaim the King's supremacy" or to use the new service book. The Observants were "worse than all the others; for I can make them neither swear nor preach among us." The choirs began to sing their loudest when the new forms of prayer were read. In 1562, Lord Deputy Sussex reported that the people were without discipline, utterly void of religion, and that they came to divine service as to a May game. A futile effort was made to attract them to church by ordering the new Liturgy to be read in Latin, but when this was discovered it only led to fresh disorders. Even Elizabeth was on one occasion heard to say that she feared the same reproach might fall on her which had been made to Tiberius: "It is you, you, that are to blame for these evils; you have committed your flocks, not to shepherds, but to wolves."

All the threats of the Government had little effect outside the English Pale. A commission held in 1549 asked the question, "How many friar houses and others remain using the old Papist sort [form of Mass]?" The answer was: "All Munster in effect, Thomond, Connacht, and Ulster." And in 1565 Adam Loftus, Archbishop of Armagh, reported that still "the nobility and chief gentry frequent the Mass." Besides the immediate result which the forcing of the new doctrines upon the country had in strengthening and combining the Catholics of the North and South, it had the further effect of attracting the attention of Catholic powers abroad and of bringing France and Spain into closer touch with Ireland during their wars with England, to the great disadvantage and peril of that country. Ireland, during the next hundred years, was to act as one chief pivot of the Continental wars, and was to prove a centre of intrigue and a point of constant danger to England. Moreover, the Papal authority which had, from the time of Henry II onward, been steadily on the side of the English Crown now naturally was thrown upon a contrary policy; the Irish Catholics were called upon to support a league which was outwardly, at least, designed for the preservation of the Catholic religion. Hitherto the Popes had always been ready to excommunicate either Scottish or Irish princes and people who were not "buxom nor obedient to their Lord King of England," and it was not till the Catholic League was fully formed in Elizabeth's reign that the Pope blessed it with his approval, and the Bull of excommunication against the Queen was promulgated by Pope Pius V, and supported by his successor, Pope Gregory XIII.

At the accession of Queen Mary the question arose whether she, as a sincere Catholic, would abjure the title of Head of the Church adopted by her father and give up the Oath of Supremacy which distressed the minds of so many of her Catholic subjects; but neither she nor her husband, Philip of Spain, showed any disposition to limit the prerogatives of the Crown, though in a general way they "set forth the honour and dignity of the Pope's Holiness and See Apostolic of Rome," and recommended the suppression of all heretics and "damnable sects." On Mary's accession, Pope Paul IV, despairing of recovering a title which had been now claimed by two kings of England, and which the present occupier of the throne showed no sign of abandoning, decided to bless a condition of things he could not alter, by ignoring the action of Henry VIII, and "erecting the island into a kingdom, so that the world might believe that the Queen used the title as given by the Pope, not as decreed by her father." He thus once more re-established his own claim to a superior authority by giving away, as Adrian had done before him, the actual power to the kings of England, to be held once more as the gift of the Holy See.[7]

[7] Carew, Cal., i, No. 205, p. 251.

That the condition of the Church in Ireland had been in a satisfactory state before the Reformation is much to be doubted. A State Paper of May 31, 1534, gives a lamentable account of the ruin which had fallen upon the monasteries and churches and the secular purposes to which they were put. We know from other sources that some of the cathedrals in the Irish districts were used entirely for such purposes as fortresses, storehouses, and barracks. Tuam was for three hundred years used as a fortress by the neighbouring gentry, "without the holy sacrifice or divine office," according to the report of the Papal emissary, Father David Wolf, until the appointment of Christopher Bodkin, the Government Archbishop, who had "with a great risk of his own life" cleared out the horses and beasts that inhabited the cathedral and had restored the divine worship in decency and quiet. Wolf says of Bodkin that "his morality is unimpeached, and he is well liked by everyone," and he strongly recommends that his appointment should be accepted and confirmed by the Pope, as he was better fitted for the post than the "true and legitimate archbishop," Art O'Fredir. Achonry Cathedral had been used as a fortress up to 1561, according to the interesting letter of the same apostolic delegate, written in that year to the Cardinal to whom he is reporting.[8] "It does not retain one vestige of the semblance of religion."

[8] The letter is quoted in full in Cardinal P. F. Moran's History of the Catholic Archbishops of Dublin, pp. 85-87.

Armagh Cathedral had long been used as a military centre both by Shane's party and by the English, who made it into a barracks and used it for their military headquarters during their wars in Tyrone. The complaints as to the sort of men who occupied posts in the native churches before the changes can also not be without some ground of truth. The State Paper to which we have already referred complains of "the unlearned persons, murderers, thieves, and [persons] of other detestable dispositions (such as light men of war)" who had been intruded into the churches, having expelled the rightful incumbents, and who spent and wasted the lands given for the service of God.[9] Creagh's account of the State of the Church in Ulster confirms this. Sidney declares that the Church is "foul, deformed, and cruelly crushed;" out of two hundred and twenty-four churches in the diocese of Meath, a hundred and five were leased out to farmers, and no parson or vicar was resident on any of them; very simple or sorry curates, mostly Irish-speakers and quite unlearned, were appointed to serve them, without houses to dwell in and living on the gain of Masses and other "bare altarages." This was in the best-peopled diocese in the country.[10] The obligation to take the Oath of Supremacy, and the new doctrines, began to empty the churches in the towns also. Even Justices of the Peace and bailiffs refused the Oath of Supremacy in Cork, and where the bishop of that diocese had been accustomed to preach to a thousand or more he had now not five. The correspondents of the time impute this increasing stubbornness to the activities of foreign agents, whom the English classed under the comprehensive name of Jesuits. There is no doubt that large numbers of priests, schoolmasters, and friars were coming into the country purposely to support the Catholic League as well as to carry on their ordinary functions. Some were Italians and Spaniards; others were Irishmen who had been educated abroad and had imbibed the views of the countries in which they had spent their youth. This continued throughout Elizabeth's reign. "They land here secretly in every port and creek of the realm (a dozen of them together sometimes, as we are credibly informed) and afterwards disperse themselves into several quarters, in such sort that every town and country is full of them...The people in many places resort to Mass now in greater multitudes, both in town and country, than for many years past."[11] Though the ports were watched and the houses searched, these teachers, half missioners and half political agents, continued to arrive; and their teaching was followed by a revival of Church life, "solid and brilliant," as the letters of Father Fitzsimon declare, as well as by the awakening of a violently anti-English spirit among the people.

[9] Carew, Cal., i, No. 42, p. 55.

[10] Sidney, Letters, ed. Collins, i, 112-113 (April 28, 1576).

[11] Cal, S.P.I., Eliz., cxci, pp. 14-16 (July 6, 1596); Cal. S.P.I., James I, No. 419, pp. 309-310 (October 27, 1607).

Of actual bodily suffering on account of religion there was at this time considerably less in Ireland than in England and abroad. There were no burnings at the stake, and none of those holocausts such as were being suffered for the sake of religion in France, Spain and the Low Countries. Compared with these the sufferings of the Irish were light. Yet there were a considerable number of severe punishments inflicted, and fines and often long imprisonments were the reward of those who refused to take the Oath of Supremacy—a refusal which could easily be construed as an act of disloyalty and was punishable as treason. Nor could the order for the suppression of the monasteries be carried through without great hardships, though in Henry's reign pensions were promised to the ejected abbots and priors. The order made in 1538 could not be carried into immediate execution; and in the remote parts of the country the monasteries continued to carry on their work practically untouched. Sir John Davies, in the reign of James I, remarks that the abbeys and convents in Tyrone, Tyrconnel, and Fermanagh had never been reduced. But before the close of 1539 twenty-four of the chief monasteries had been effectually suppressed in the districts over which the English held sway. A number of priors and abbots and many monks were imprisoned or put to death for resisting the dismantling of their monasteries, or for refusing to accept the King's supremacy. The main period of persecution began after the restoration of the Act of Uniformity in 1560, when a number of bishops, priests, and friars suffered long periods of imprisonment, and in some cases torture or death. One of the most pathetic cases was that of Dr. Dermod O'Hurley, Professor of Philosophy at Louvain and of Canon Law at Rheims, who left his congenial and learned posts to become Archbishop of Cashel at a time when "the Irish mission" was one of almost certain imprisonment or death. For a time he carried on his work in the face of constant danger, but, being tracked down at last, he suffered in prison extreme torture, which he bore with admirable patience and serenity, till in 1584 he was put to death by being strangled with a withe.[12] Fourteen bishops and a number of other clergy are remembered by name as having suffered imprisonment, death, or exile between the years 1577 and 1597, during which period the persecution was at its height. To hunt priests was a meritorious act, and was rewarded by the Government, often on the testimony of such infamous informers as Miler Magrath, one of the few Irish ecclesiastics who acknowledged the supremacy of Elizabeth and whose grasping disposition was rewarded with many honours. He employed himself in hunting down men more honest than himself, and shamelessly invented accusations against them. "Very few of them," he writes to Cecil in 1593, "escape the whip of my censuring discoveries." His career runs through the State Papers of his day like the track of some vile reptile, and it is only a slight satisfaction to know that the same violent death that he had been instrumental in inflicting on others eventually overtook himself.

[12] David Rothe, Analecta, ed. P. T. Moran, Introd., pp. xiii-xlvi. Cornelius O'Devany, Bishop of Down and Connor, was executed in February 1612, in the reign of James I, Ibid., pp. xciii seq.

The laws were spasmodically enforced, but in the larger number of cases, though a Catholic priest might be forced to quit the country if found celebrating Mass or teaching Catholic children, and though the fines for non-attendance at the Protestant churches were frequently levied, severe corporal punishments were rare. Such documents as the Italian Report of 1613,[13] the declarations of O'Sullevan Beare regarding Elizabeth's reign,[14] and the similar statements of Pope Innocent X in 1645 [15] are sufficient evidence of this. In 1613 there were still 800 seculars, 130 Franciscans, 20 Jesuits, and some members of the other orders at work in Ireland; and though the terror of imprisonment hung over them if they were found taking part in political affairs, they seem generally to have been left in peace. But the disabilities that beset a Catholic in every walk in life were as degrading and harassing as the later penal enactments. A Catholic might not study under one of his religion at home, and if he were caught going overseas for his education he was liable to imprisonment and heavy fines. No Irish Catholic could plead in court, nor was he eligible for any civil employment, nor might a merchant share in the privileges of his town without taking the Oath of Supremacy, going to church, and promising to bring up his children as Protestants; hence all official employments passed into the hands of English Protestants.[16]

[13] Archivium Hibernicum (1914), iii, 300.

[14] P. O'Sullevan Beare, Historia Catholicae Iberniae Compendium, vol. iii, Bk. I, ch. i, iii.

[15] Instructions of Innocent X to Rinuccini, Embassy in Ireland, xxix-xxx.

[16] Memorial presented to the King of Spain on behalf of the Irish Catholics, 1619. See Archivium Hibernicum

In 1556 the long Deputyship of St Leger, broken into four parts by three short recalls, came to an end. He had been in power, with intervals, since 1540. He was succeeded by Sussex, Lord FitzWalter, under whom, from 1556 onward, Sir Henry Sidney acted as Lord Justice and Vice-Treasurer, acquiring an intimate knowledge of the country's conditions and needs during his seven years of active association with him before he was appointed to follow him as Lord Deputy in 1565. In 1558 Mary died, and with the accession of Elizabeth to the throne the most stirring period of Irish history begins. At the date of the new Queen's accession there were signs of difficulties ahead in the North. Shane O'Neill was smarting under a sense of injury in having been set aside by his father in favour of an older man whom he persistently declared to be only "the son of a blacksmith," and who was supported in his position, at Conn's request, by the English Government.[17] Conn, his reputed father, died in 1559, and Shane, who was now coming to manhood, determined to assert his claims.

[17] Carew, Cal., i, No. 228, pp. 305-307.

END OF CHAPTER XI

XII.—SIR HENRY SIDNEY

The Tudors did not spare their most distinguished servants when an appointment had to be made in Ireland. In 1556, during the absence of Sussex, Sir Henry Sidney, who had served under Sussex as Vice-Treasurer and had accompanied him on his expeditions to the North, was appointed Lord Justice. In 1565 he succeeded as Lord Deputy, and from that time, with short intervals, Sidney passed the greater part of his life in Ireland. "Three times hath her Majesty sent me her Deputy into Ireland," he writes to Walsingham in March, 1583, "and in every of the three times I sustained a great and violent rebellion, every one of which I subdued and with honourable peace left the country in quiet. I returned from each of those three deputations £3,000 worse than I went." [1]

[1] Sidney's "Summary Relation of his Services in Ireland," Carew, Cal., ii, No. 501, pp. 334 seq.

Sidney was a man of great position, inheriting large grants of land in Kent and Sussex, with the beautiful manor of Penshurst, where his gifted son, Sir Philip Sidney, was born. He was an accomplished man and a vigorous and successful ruler. Stern as was his rule, the Irish believed him to be just and honest.[2] The Annals of the Four Masters call him "a knight by title, nobleness, deed, and valour," and to the populace he was known as "Big Sir Harry." He rebuilt Dublin Castle, then in a ruinous condition, and he arranged for the preservation of the State Papers, which had not hitherto been kept, a great service to future generations. As a young man his activity was so great that when pursuing Shane O'Neill "his vauntcurrers felt Shane's couch warm" where he lay the night before; and on one occasion, when word was brought to Shane that the Deputy was near at hand, he exclaimed, "That is not possible; for the day before yesterday I know he dined and sat under his cloth of state in the hall of Kilmainham." "By the hand of O'Neill," quoth the messenger, "he is in thy country, for I saw the red bractok with the knotty club [Sidney's crest] and that is carried before none but himself; meaning [Sidney adds] my pensell with the ragged staff." [3] When Sidney first came over as Deputy Shane was at the height of his power, and he marched north immediately against "this monstrous monarcall tyrant" to whose son he, when Lord Justice, had stood godfather. The campaign was a severe and trying one. "How pleasant it is in this time of year with hunger and sore travail to harbour long and cold nights in cabins made of boughs and covered with grass, I leave to your indifferent judgment," writes the owner of Penshurst at the close of a letter to London.

[2] His most questionable act was his acquiescence in the murder of Shane O'Neill.

[3] Carew, Cal., ii. No. 501, p. 336.

Sidney had great influence over the Munster lords, who accompanied and entertained him as he passed through the province, and his popularity extended through all parts of the country. It is perhaps no wonder that at a time when Lord Grey de Wilton, Ormonde, or Pelham were carrying an unsheathed sword through Munster, especially during Lord Grey's term of office from 1580-82, Sir Henry Sidney was the man "generally desired," and that he "was cried for by the children in the streets." "If Sir Henry can but sit in his chair," wrote Malbie to Walsingham in 1582, when Grey's recall in disgrace began to be mooted, "he will do more good than others with all their limbs;" [4] and Sidney had to go back to another term of office, in spite of growing infirmities and increasing age, when he had hoped to spend the rest of his life at home. "And so, being wearied with often sending for, I resolved to go thither again; the place, I protest before God, which I cursed, hated, and detested." Yet he "hoped to be able to do somewhat that had not been done before and to hit where others had missed." The chief personal difficulty of Sidney's life in Ireland arose from the jealousy of Ormonde, who was constantly in London and whose splendid presence and abilities made him a prime favourite with the Queen. To her, every act of Sidney was reported. This hampered him seriously in dealing with the quarrels of the Butlers, Ormonde's brothers, and surrounded him with an atmosphere of suspicion and espionage most galling to a man of honest intentions. His dealings with the Desmonds were fair and patient and might have been successful in staving off the Munster rebellion had his plans not been overturned by others. Of this we have to speak later. During his long terms of office he learned to know Ireland as few Viceroys ever knew it, and he endeavoured to encourage industry and found schools supported by the State.

[4] Sidney was suffering from lameness and lumbago.

The main lines of his policy, or what he called "his fixed principle," were "the dissipation of the great lords and their countries, and the reducing of the lands of the Anglo-Norman lords into many hands," for he saw in the immense power held by the few owners of the great estates a constant source of danger to the State. He believed in plantation schemes, and thought that Essex's 'plot' for the reformation of the North was the best and surest foundation on which to build.[5] He highly disapproved the "cowardly policy," recommended by some of the Queen's advisers, "of keeping the Irish by all possible means at war between themselves for fear lest, through their quiet, might follow I know not what;" if this system were to be persisted in, he begs the Queen to choose some other minister. "Ireland," in Sidney's view, "could only be reformed by justice and by making it possible to practise the arts of peace." [6] Soon after his appointment as Deputy, Sidney continued that good practice of making occasional circuits of the provinces begun by Cusack. His lengthy reports, full of character and detail, remain.

[5] Carew, Cal., ii, No. 36, p. 43.

[6] Sidney to the Queen, April 20, 1567, in A. Collins, Letters and Memorials of State (1746), i, 29.

The first of these journeys was made in April 1567, through the Pale and Munster, the second in 1575-76, when he visited in turn all the provinces of Ireland. Starting northward, he found Eastern Ulster desolate and waste, and the towns impoverished, except Drogheda, which Essex had made his headquarters, spending very bountifully while he was there, and increasing the wealth of the city. O'Reilley's country was an exception to the general disorder, "very well ruled by him; the justest Irishman and the best-ruled Irish country, by an Irishman, that is in all Ireland"; farther south, Upper Ossory was equally well governed and defended by the young Baron, who was so firm in his decision to adopt the recognized English rule of succession that "it made no matter, even if the country were never shired." [7] Kilkenny, on the contrary, was in very bad case, "the sink and receptacle of innumerable cattle and goods stolen out of many other countries," the fruits of the interminable wars of the Butlers. Nevertheless, Sidney was honourably feasted and entertained by the Earl of Ormonde, who accompanied him to Waterford, where the Deputy was received "with all shows and tokens of gladness and pomp, as well upon the water as on the land." [8] A similar reception awaited them in Cork, where they remained six weeks, Youghal being in too reduced a condition to entertain high personages like the Deputy. The journey from this point onward was like a royal progress. They moved about attended by the Earls of Desmond, Thomond, and Clancar, the Earl of Desmond having 'come in' only a few days before; the Bishops of Cashel and Cork, the Viscounts Barry and Roche, the Barons Courcy, Lixnaw, Dunboyne, Power, Barry Oge, and even Louth, who "only to do Sidney honour," came down from the north of the Pale to Cork.[9] Divers of the Irish, "not yet nobilitated," were of the party, such as the Lords of Carbery and Muskerry, Sir Donogh MacCarthy, and Sir Cormac MacTeigue MacCarthy—men Sidney wished to see made barons, at least, "though in respect of their territories Muskerry and MacCarthy were fitted to be made Viscounts."

[7] Carew, Cal., ii, No. 33, pp. 31-33.

[8] Ibid., ii, No. 33, p. 34.

[9] Ibid., ii, No. 36, pp. 38-39. See also Collins, Letters and Memorials of State, i, 18-31, for the report of the journey in 1567; and i, 75-80, 81-85, 89-97, 102-110, for the journey in 1575.

Besides these, there were Sir Owen O'Sullevan, and the son and heir to O'Sullevan Mór, "the father not being able to come by reason of his great years and impotency," Sir William O'Carroll and MacDonoghue, "never a one of them but for his lands might pass in rank of a baron, either in Ireland or England." Of the Irish, too, were the sons of MacAwley and O'Callaghan, "the old man not being able to come by reason of extreme age and infirmity," and O'Mahon and O'Driscoll "each of them having land to live like a knight, here or there." Of the descendants of the old English were Sir James FitzGerald, Sir Theodore Butler, "who lawfully and justly enjoyed the lands of his uncle and cousin the Barons of Cahir," Sir Thomas, Sir John, and Sir James of Desmond, brothers to the Earl, and, besides all these, many of the "ruined reliques of the ancient English inhabitants, as the Arundels, Rocheforts, Barretts, Flemings, Lombards, Terries (Tirrells), whose ancestors did live like gentlemen, knights some of them, and now all in misery, either banished from their own, or oppressed upon their own." Lastly, there was a group of captains of galloglas, the MacSwynes, "a brood not a little perilous to this province," who "made the greatest lords of the province both fear them and be glad of their friendship." All of these, according to the Viceroy, "seemed to loathe their vile and barbarous manner of life and were all ready to offer fealty and service for ever to her Majesty and to perform it at Westminster." Truly Sidney might feel that the ends of English rule in Ireland had been attained, as this princely company of 'meere' Irish, old English, and 'newly nobilitated' lords, each of them with his wife during all the Christmas season "the better to furnish out the beauty and filling of the city," gathered round him, "all of them keeping very honourable, at least very plentiful houses; many widow ladies were there also, who erst had been wives to earls and others of good note and accompt." [10]

[10] Carew, Cal., ii, No. 36, pp. 40-48.

This splendid progress was followed by practical results.

A great number of the Irish and old English lords submitted, even, as Sidney travelled westward, in the districts bordering on the Shannon. Burkes, Lacies, Purcells, the Red Roche, O'Mulrian, and several of the O'Briens and MacNamaras repaired to the Deputy at Limerick, all lamenting the waste and ruin of their countries, and praying for English laws to be planted among them and English sheriffs to execute those laws. The lesser lords called for the imposition of a settled subsidy instead of the local cess exacted from them by force; on this point Sidney found them "very tractable, though the matter in handling was somewhat tough." Except in the Palatinates of Kerry and Tipperary, the Queen's writ ran everywhere in the South and assizes were held. Owing to Perrot's administration Munster showed "great towardness of reformation" since the Deputy's last visit in 1567.

In Connacht affairs were not so satisfactory, though the Deputy entered the province with an imposing train of lords owning their lands in the west who here replaced those of Munster and the Pale.[11] The Earl of Thomond, heading a large company of O'Briens, accompanied him, "all gentlemen of one surname, and yet no one of them friends to another, and sometime have been named kings of Limerick"; as also the Earl of Clanricarde, the Archbishop of Tuam and Bishop of Clonfert, the Baron of Athenry, a now needy representative of the great family of the Berminghams, "the ancientest in this land"; with O'Flaherty, O'Kelly, O'Madden, O'Naughton, at the head of their respective lords and captains, besides Burkes under their adopted names of MacDavy, MacRedmond, MacHubbert, and many more. The old Galway Prendergasts, MacCostelloes, Lynches, and Barretts were all well represented, and all alike besought that they might hold their lands of the Crown directly instead of being at the mercy of their provincial lords, who so tyrannized over them that many who had once been lords and barons in Parliament had not now three hackneys to carry them home. The whole province was suffering from the misdeeds of Ulick and John Burke, the two "hopeless sons" of the Earl of Clanricarde, whom no promises or oaths would restrain from their execrable evil deeds. Galway had been so decayed through the "horrible spoils" committed by these young men, that the inhabitants had almost forgotten that they were a corporate town. The place was fortified like a city at war, its walls nightly watched, and its gates daily guarded by armed men. Athenry, "a town full as big as Calais, with a fair high wall," had been totally burned by them, college, parish church, and all; "yet the mother of one of them was buried in the church." [12] In this former great and ancient town, which had three hundred good householders, Sidney found now "only four and they poor, and, as I write," he says, "ready to leave the place. The cry and lamentation of the poor people was great and pitiful and nothing but thus, `Succour, succour, succour.'

[11] Carew, Cal., ii, No. 38, pp. 48-51.

[12] Carew, Cal., ii, No. 38, pp. 49-50.

The Earl of Clanricarde could not deny but that he held a heavy hand over them." Sidney set about to raise a tax on the country for the rebuilding of the town, and the two youths publicly submitted in St Nicholas' Church of Galway, where Sidney caused a countryman of their own named Lynch, "sometime a friar at Greenwich, but a reformed man, a good divine and preacher in three tongues, Irish, English, and Latin" to preach a sermon to them on the wickedness of their actions.[13] But their reformation was short. After a brief confinement in Dublin they were set free, provided that they would never again pass the Shannon into Connacht. But hardly were they at liberty than they recrossed the river, flinging off their English habit and apparel and putting on their wonted Irish weed with the remark, "Lie there for one year at least." They rejoined their "loose rascall and kerne," tore down the new buildings in Athenry, and again set the province in an uproar. Their father, Richard or Redmond, known as the 'Sasanach Earl' on account of his English leanings, who was accompanying the Deputy, "very humbly on his knees had besought protection for himself and his two sons," but on their fresh outbreak his castles were delivered into Sidney's hands and he himself sent into England, the Deputy congratulating himself that he had in his power the father, an earl, and his followers, instead of "two beggerly bastard boys." The old Earl "took his leave of this world" in 1582, and the sons continued their struggles for the title of Earl, in spite of a division of their immense properties between them and their frequent promises of a better life.[14]

[13] Ibid., ii, No. 501, pp. 352-353.

[14] Carew, Cal., ii, No. 498, pp. 330, 331.

The Mayo branch of the great family of the Burkes Sidney on his journey to Galway found more amenable. Though at first MacWilliam Burke sent word that he would not come, he relented when he found that seven chief men of his galloglas, the Scottish Clandonnells, had submitted themselves, and he came "very willingly." The Deputy "found MacWilliam very sensible, though wanting the English tongue yet understanding the Latin. He desired to suppress Irish extortion and to expulse the Scots," and he agreed to hold his lands directly of the Queen. Sidney conferred on him the honour of knighthood, "whereof he seemed very joyous," and gave him "some other little trifles, as tokens between him and me." [15] Sidney found him a great man, owning territory three times as large as Clanricarde, his lands lying along the coast, wherein were many goodly havens. So long as he lived he remained loyal and seems to have endeavoured to keep the country quiet, but the untamable wildness of his family, followed by the ruthless regime of Bingham in Connacht ten years later, made peace impossible. Of the Gaelic Connacht chiefs, O'Conor excused himself by letters, but for O'Conor Sligo, O'Rorke, and O'Donnell, Sidney looked in vain. But a year later they had all submitted, with copious promises of being "good subjects" and paying rents. As a rule the rents were, as O'Conor said of his own tributes from O'Conor Sligo, "never taken without violence" and indefinitely delayed.

[15] Ibid., ii, No. 38, p. 49.

Among the local chieftains who came in and submitted to Sidney during his visit to Galway was Owen O'Mayle, or O'Malley, Lord of Borishoole, Co. Mayo, the father of the celebrated Grania O'Malley, who became famous in song as Grania Mhaol (pronounced Wael). The exploits of this Connacht chieftainess, who defied Elizabeth and her Government from her sea-fortress, so impressed her time and nation that her name became a synonym for Ireland itself, and there are popular national songs addressed to the country under this title. She was wife to the "Iron" Richard Burke, who was brought in by her to make his submission. Sidney's account of the scene reflects the general curiosity aroused by the personality of this remarkable woman. His report goes: "There came to me a most famous feminine sea-captain, called Grany O'Mallye, and offered her service unto me wheresoever I would command her with three galleys and two hundred fighting men, either in Ireland or Scotland; she brought with her her husband, for she was by sea as by land more than Mrs Mate with him...This was a notorious woman in all the coast of Ireland. This woman did Sir Philip Sidney see and speak withall; he can more at large inform you of her." [16] This interview between Sidney's famous son, the most accomplished poet-soldier of his day, with the powerful and independent chieftainess of the Connacht seaboard must have been of singular interest. We could wish that the record of it had remained. Grania ruled her husband and her district with equal vigour, commanding her fleet and army from her almost impregnable castle at Carrick-a-Uile, near Newport in Co. Mayo. Her ships scoured the wild seas of the West and made sudden descents on English armies and fleets, committing depredations far and near. Sir Richard Bingham considered her as "the nurse of all the rebellions in the province for forty years." Grania had many narrow escapes. In 1577-78 she was a prisoner in Desmond's hands, until Sir William Drury had her brought to Dublin and set her free. Her first husband was an O'Flaherty, cousin of Sir Morrogh O'Flaherty of the Axes (na dtuagh), recognized by Queen Elizabeth as the head of his clan; but on his death she was united to Richard Burke. She was seized by Sir Richard Bingham in 1586 for plundering Aran Island. He bound her and threatened to hang her, but let her off on receiving a pledge from her wild son-in-law, popularly known as "the Devil's Hook" or "the Fiend of the Sickle" (Deamhan an chórrain). On his rising in rebellion she fled into Ulster to O'Neill and O'Donnell, till Sir John Perrot sent her the Queen's pardon, on which she returned to Connacht; but her fleet was dispersed, and she fell into great poverty and had to appeal to Burghley for the restoration of one-fifth of her husband's lands. Tradition says that she was buried on Clare Island.

[16] Carew, Cal., ii. No. 109, p. 141 ; No. 501, p. 353.

The disturbed condition of the district had been aggravated by the harsh and irritating dealings of Sir Edward Fitton, who was appointed first Governor of Connacht in 1569, soon after Sidney's visit to the province. He was a man better fitted for his later post of Treasurer than as a general called upon to cope with a country in rebellion. He was replaced in January 1576-77 by Colonel Nicholas Malbie, who was given the charge of the castles of Roscommon and Athlone and all Clanricarde's houses, and who later, in March 1579, was appointed President. Under his administration the province quieted down. He brought with him a band of soldiers which included two hundred of the Scottish Clandonnells of Leinster, who formed the Queen's body of galloglas, and some kerne in her Majesty's service. At the same moment two thousand Scots were on their way over to fight with the Earl's sons and were "doing as much harm and mischief as they could." The Scottish tartan must frequently have been seen on both sides in these Irish wars. Otherwise the wars in Connacht were carried on almost entirely by Irish troops on both sides. There was never any difficulty in raising bodies of kerne for the Queen's armies, and, except for the great expeditions such as that of Essex against O'Neill, when English troops were sent over, nearly all the field campaigns were carried on with kerne raised in the locality. The English soldiers were almost exclusively used for garrisons in the towns and castles. For Bingham's ruthless campaign in Connacht kerne came swarming in from Munster to enrol under the English flag, so that he had no need of any outside help in subduing the unruly Burkes and Joys; he boasted that his wars had not cost a penny to the Queen. He reports that he had to turn away "many companies of kerne who came to me out of Munster and other places to serve here; they came up so fast that I think I must be forced to turn upon them and drive them out of the province."

The old provincial jealousies were not yet extinct, and any occasion served to revive them. It was in 1584, when the stirrings of the Burkes of Mayo and the descents of the Scots from the out-islands had between them left Connacht in a ferment, that Perrot sent Sir Richard Bingham to 'quiet' the country, giving him the title of President of Connacht. His intention was to make the people English as quickly as possible, for which purpose he introduced a 'plot' to make them directly dependent on the State His next step was to deprive them of the right of using the old 'Macs' and 'O's' before their names, applying the prohibition particularly to MacWilliam Burke, who was as proud of his title as any MacLean or MacLeod in the Scottish highlands. It is plain that these old Norman de Burgos were now looked upon and probably looked upon themselves as "original Irish" and they flew to arms to assert their right. They refused to appear at sessions and shut themselves up in their castle in Lough Mask, where Bingham besieged them by boat. "He so hunted them from bush to bush and hill to hill that in a short time no news was to be heard where any of them were." Young Richard Burke, called by the English "the Pall of Ireland," the most dangerous and active of the family, he executed under martial law, and he razed their castles to the ground. Again and again cautions came from the Lord Deputy that he was to stay his hand and not drive the province into war. No caution or command could check the movements of this capable but callous officer, who harried his foes from place to place, giving them no time for food or rest, till at last they all came in, being "so pined away for want of food and so ghasted with fear that they looked rather like ghosts than men."

William Burke, called "the Blind Abbot," submitted himself very humbly, offering one of his sons in pledge, and so did Richard Burke, "the Devil's Hook." [17] But they soon broke out again on the same point of honour. "They said they would have a MacWilliam or they would go to Spain for one; and that they would admit no sheriff nor answer at any assize." [18] But when it came to the election of a new MacWilliam self-government did not appear so easy. Of the eight competitors for the title, O'Donnell, who was called in to decide, put four in irons and required hostages for the rest. He caused to be elected a favourite of his own, Theobald of the Ships (Tibbot na long), a strong man and "hated by the English." They filled the province with reports of Spanish landings, English defeats, the Queen dying, and the Scots in arms. When Bingham was first recalled in 1587 the general dread of the landing of the Spaniards was at its height. The year of his return (1588) was the date of the Armada, and he ordered that all Spaniards landing on the coast should be hanged in Galway, an order which he boasted got rid of a thousand men. But when the Spaniards actually landed at Kinsale, Theobald of the Ships was found supporting Mountjoy against them, and he received knighthood for his services. In the reign of James I, he took over his lands on English tenure, and Charles I created him Viscount Bourke of Mayo in 1626-27.

[17] Carew, Cal., ii, No. 621, pp. 430-432.

[18] Carew, Cal. ii, No. 621, p. 431 ; O'Flaherty, Iar-Connacht, pp. 268-273, 387.

Bingham's great feat was his destruction of the Scottish army which had come over to fight for O'Donnell. They had with them Sir Arthur O'Neill and Hugh Maguire, and Bingham heard that they were marching through O'Rorke's country into Tirawley. Bingham, who had now been joined by a considerable body of English troops, "dealt with his guide to bring him the nearest way he could to them." The guide, one MacCostello, found out a priest who had that day escaped from imprisonment among the Scots and who undertook to lead the army if he might have with him a couple of horsemen of the O'Hara's, otherwise he durst not. An hour or two after midnight Sir Richard arose, and in the moonlight marched directly toward the enemy, led by the priest and keeping to the lower flanks of the mountain, all moving in great silence, till they came within sight of the Scots. These were taken completely by surprise, and he set on them and slew them, save eighty who swam across the Moyne into Tirawley and escaped.

All Bingham's undoubted military skill and all his cruelties could not quiet the distracted province. He was disliked not only by the Irish, but by many of his own countrymen. Lord Deputy Perrot says of him that "he is arrogant and hated and shall have £500 given him by the country where he governeth towards his passage into England, so that they may be rid of him...Let him go, in the name of God, to Flanders." [19] The Queen, wearying of the reports of his severities and of the disorders which he seemed unable to quell, recalled him in 1596. The usual fate of the men who undertook office and lost their credit in Ireland befell him, and he was committed to the Fleet Prison on his arrival in London; but the news of the difficulties and defeats suffered by the Queen's generals in Ulster coming in at the same time, Elizabeth thought that Bingham's action might have been justifiable and released him. On O'Neill's outbreak in 1598 he was sent back as Marshal of Ireland. There exists a curious document, dating from the third year (1586) of Bingham's sojourn in Connacht, in which the Burkes give their own account of the causes of their rising. They make no complaint of cruelty, but they say that Bingham had been restraining the lords and great men from the extortions and 'cuttings' on their tenants to which they had been accustomed, and though this was for the benefit of the tenants the gentry disliked it, saying that "this new governor would shortly make their churls their masters," while they would "become beggars for want of their cuttings and spendings." They were angered, too, by a proposal that they should join the English armies in Flanders, which "seemed so strange that we knew not in the world what to do." It was not the execution of the bad Burkes, they protested, which had caused their rebellion, "for we did know that they were very bad members of the commonwealth and great practisers of this rebellion and all other mischiefs, maintainers of thieves and evil-disposed persons, and have most justly deserved death." The real cause of the rebellion, they admit, was the taking away of the MacWilliamship and the division of lands and inheritances; "this and none other, whatever hath been pretended or reported to the contrary." [20]

[19] Carew, Cal., ii, No. 627, p. 442.

[20] S.P., Eliz., cxxvi, p. 201 (November 16, 1586). Bingham died in Dublin on January 19, 1598-99. See also "Docwra's Relation of his Acts in Connacht," Miscellany of the Celtic Society (1849).

END OF CHAPTER XII

XIII.—SHANE O'NEILL AND THE SCOTS IN ULSTER

The new claimant to the title of O'Neill, Shane "The Proud" (an diomas) proved to be one of the most formidable antagonists of the English authority in Ireland with whom Elizabeth's agents had to deal. The sense of wrong with which Shane naturally regarded his position no doubt increased in him that arrogance of temper which not only comes out in his own speeches, but is commented on by every English Deputy with whom Shane had to do, "I believe Lucifer was never puffed up with pride and ambition more than that O'Neill is," wrote Sidney to Leicester in one of his most exasperated moods. Shane had some cause for his pride, for in the height of his power he could put into the field a thousand horse and four thousand foot, and he moved about accompanied by a bodyguard of six hundred armed men. A prince constantly in communication not only with Scotland, but with Charles IX and the Cardinal of Lorraine, who armed all his peasants, and who, as the Viceroy admitted, "is able, if he will, to burn and spoil to Dublin gates and go away unfought," was a menace such as the Crown had seldom encountered, and it was safest to deal with him cautiously.

The Baron of Dungannon had early been put out of his way by assassination, as it was believed, at the direct instigation of his rival Shane. On Elizabeth's accession to the throne she decided to recognize Shane's claims to the earldom of Tyrone, and in return she called upon Shane to submit to Sussex, then her Deputy in Ireland. The chief, however, flatly refused to meet Sussex without hostages for his safety. He had just been elected O'Neill by the suffrages of his sept, and he was engaged in large designs, which gradually took shape in his mind as a Catholic confederation of which he should be the head, to oppose alike the attempts to establish the new faith and the supremacy of the English kings over the Church and country. He was inviting the Scots to his aid, although his private opinion of them was that "than the Scots he can see no greater rebels nor traitors"; he was defeating successive incursions from the Pale into Ulster, and was carrying on endless wars with his turbulent neighbour, Calvagh O'Donnell. He refused to surrender his 'urraghs' or rights over his subject chieftains. The authorities "found nothing but pride and stubborness in Shane" when they went to 'parle' with him; they reported that he was "all bent to do what he could to destroy the poor country";[1] and "after some arrogant words spoken" they had to depart without him.

[1] Carew, Cal., i, No. 200, p. 244.

Shane's disinclination to come within the power of the English Deputies was not without cause. At a later date he set out at length for the benefit of the Queen a long list of accusations of atrocious attempts that had been made upon his own life and that of other chiefs by poison and assassination, even when they had come in on pledges of safety.[2] This list reads like an Italian State Paper under the Medicis, and though, later, Elizabeth expressed her horrified displeasure at the attempt of one Smith, in 1563, brother to a Dublin apothecary, to poison Shane in his wine and committed the would-be murderer to prison,[3] there is no doubt that Sussex, and later even Sidney, were persistent in their attempts to put Shane quietly out of the way. It is little wonder that when Sidney proposed that Shane should meet him at Drogheda the latter arranged a date on which he knew Sidney could not attend. He wrote that although "he knew Sidney's sweetness and readiness for all good things," his "timorous and mistrustful people" would not allow him to run the risk of leaving his own territories. Shane's quick wit and Irish humour, which never failed him in any emergency, made a way out of the difficulty. He invited Sidney instead to visit him. He had a new-born son about to be christened; he would like Sidney to stand as sponsor. A tie so close and spiritual would be a bond of common faithfulness on the strength of which he was ready to do all that the queen desired of him. Sidney agreed, and was magnificently entertained, Shane's liberality in household expenditure being famous. Until the christening was over, no question of business was discussed. Then, in a lengthy conference, Shane laid his claims to the headship of his sept before the future Deputy, then Lord Justice. He had an unanswerable position, and he placed it with such skill and clearness before Sidney that he seems to have acquiesced in the justice of his cause. Shane, in spite of the degradation of his later life, was a man of great natural ability. He wrote excellent letters both in Irish and Latin, seasoned with a sharp caustic flavour, which showed him well able to maintain his cause even against the Machiavellian statecraft of his day. It is clear that Sidney was impressed by the man with whom he was dealing, and he concluded the conference by an assurance that the Queen would without doubt act justly by Shane, advising him to live at peace until her pleasure should be known. Shane seems to have taken this advice, and until Sussex replaced Sidney in the negotiations the bond of amity remained unbroken.

[2] Ibid., i, No. 248, pp. 368-369.

[3] Ibid., i, No. 241, pp. 360-361.

Shane's chief ambition was the retention of the title of O'Neill, a dignity that stretched back to Niall of the Nine Hostages in the fifth century. In comparison with it, the title of the Tudors to the throne might well seem to its holder a mushroom growth, and the title of Earl of Tyrone, which Elizabeth was willing to grant, had a new and unaccustomed sound. His contempt for the English dignity was shown by his gift of the robes and gold collar bestowed on his father by Henry VIII to the Duke of Argyll, when he sought for his help against Calvagh O'Donnell. When the time came the Queen had to receive Shane in state in his saffron shirt. But neither Shane nor Ferdoragh (Matthew) could adopt the title of O'Neill without the suffrages of the whole clan, and it was not till 1559, after his father's death, that Shane was elected O'Neill with all the ancient ceremonies, in open defiance of English law. Between Shane and Sussex friction was constant, each one endeavouring to gain an advantage over the other. But in 1561 an invitation came from the Queen to Shane to visit her in London, and Shane agreed to go, having first stipulated for a large sum of money to pay all the expenses of the journey for himself and his retinue—a request only reluctantly admitted, for there was little certainty that the money would be applied to the purpose for which it was provided. It might quite conceivably, in Shane's hands, be used against the Government that provided it.[4]

[4] See Shane's letter to Sussex, Viceroy of Ireland, dated 1561, Appendix VII.

Shane arrived in the capital on January 4, 1562. He and his galloglas strode through the astonished crowds in London, clad in native attire, a loose, wide-sleeved saffron tunic with shaggy mantle flung across the shoulders. Their heads were bare, their hair was curled down on their shoulders and clipped short just above the eyes in front. In spite of Sussex's suggestion that he should have a cool reception, as best fitted for a rebellious chief, Elizabeth, who, notwithstanding her imperious temper and the subtlety of her statecraft, was a woman, received him with such warmth that a joke went round among the courtiers that this was "O'Neill the Great, cousin to St Patrick, friend to the Queen of England, and enemy of all the world beside." [5]

[5] Campian, History, ed. Ware, p. 189.

The form of Shane's submission in a manuscript now in the British Museum runs as follows: "O my most gracious sovereign lady and queen, like as I, Shane O'Neill, your Majesty's subject of your realm of Ireland, have of long time desired to come into the presence of your Majesty to acknowledge my humble and bounden submission, so am I now here upon my knees (by your gracious permission) and do most humbly acknowledge your Majesty to be my sovereign lady and Queen of England, France, and Ireland. And do confess that, for lack of civil education, I have offended your Majesty and your laws for the which I have required and obtained your Majesty's pardon...And I faithfully promise, here before Almighty God and your Majesty, as a subject of your land of Ireland as any of my predecessors have or ought to do. And because my speech [in] Irish is not well understood, I have caused this my submission to be written in English and Irish, and thereto have set my hand and seal...Mise O'Neill. [I am O'Neill]." [6] There were present on this occasion attending the Queen, the Duke of Norfolk, the Earls of Arundel, Huntingdon, Bedford, Warwick, and others of the English nobility, and with them the ambassadors of the King of Sweden and the Duke of Savoy. The Queen capitulated completely to the seductions of Shane. She confirmed her former promise as to his retention of the coveted title of O'Neill "until he should be decorated by another honourable name"; and handed over to him the service and homage of his 'urraghs' or tributary lords, who had been relieved of their obedience to his father Conn by Henry VIII.[7] The rents paid by these tributary chiefs, the Magennesses, O'Hanlons, Maguires, and others had often to be exacted by force, and were the cause of bloody battles between the 'urraghs' and their provincial head. They sometimes claimed even from the O'Donnells. "Send me my rent," said an O'Neill, "or if you don't...!" "I owe you no rent," was an O'Donnell's retort, "and if I did...!" Shane was retained long in London, for though Elizabeth's word had been given for his safe return, nothing had been said about the length of his stay. Neither side trusted the other. Shane was forced to sign conditions against which he protested in vain; and on his way home attempts were made to waylay and assassinate him. His own view of the real trend of events is contained in a letter written to arouse Desmond's brother John FitzGerald, against the English. "Certify yourself that Englishmen have no other eye but only to subdue both English and Irish of Ireland, and I and you especially. And certify yourself also that those their Deputies, one after another, hath broken peace and did not abide by the same. And assure yourself, also, that they had been with you ere this time but for me only." [8]

[6] MS. Titus, B. xii, p. 22, verso; and Pembridge, Annals.

[7] Carew, Cal., i, No. 239, p. 352.

[8] Ulster Journal of Archaeology (1855), iii, 45.

In spite of the treaty of peace signed at Benburb in November of the next year, 1563, it seems only too probable that Shane's suspicions were justified. Two years after his visit to London we find the Queen writing to Sidney: "As touching your suspicion of Shane O'Neill, be not dismayed nor let any man be daunted. But tell them that if he arise, it will be for their advantage; for there will be estates for those who want." This sinister suggestion is perhaps the first open avowal of the policy of plantation which was forming itself in the official mind, and the results of which were to transform the whole conditions of the country. Shane, on his side, played a double game. He intrigued with the Queen of Scots and with the Cardinal of Lorraine, promising to become the subject of France if he could get assistance in expelling the English. On the other hand, when he refused to set free the Lord of the Isles, James MacDonnell, he declared that "the service that he went about was nothing but his Prince's" and that "it lay not in himself to do anything but according to the Queen's direction"; and MacDonnell died soon after from the miseries to which he was subjected. Shane soon "breaks his bryckle peace"; he invaded the Pale, burned Armagh, then occupied by English troops, and tried to incite Desmond to rise. His attempt to make a reconciliation with the Scots was intercepted and stopped by Sidney, who marched with a large army into Tyrone and Tyrconnel, and captured Donegal, Bally-shannon, Belleek, and Sligo. Shane had been proclaimed a traitor in August 1566; and the union of the O'Donnells with the English brought about a defeat which nearly annihilated his forces near Letterkenny. It was in these circumstances that he accepted the treacherous invitation to meet the Scots at Cushendall which resulted in his miserable death. The invitation was ostensibly to lead to a permanent alliance between him and Alexander Oge, fourth brother of Sorley Boy MacDonnell, but its acceptance was, in the words of the Annals of the Four Masters, "an omen of the destruction of life and cause of death." His treatment of their chiefs had earned their undying enmity, and once they had him in their power they showed him no mercy.[9]

[9] For an account of Shane's death see infra, p. 344-45.

During the long wars of Shane with the English Government it is said that three thousand five hundred of the Queen's forces were slain and that the cost to her Majesty was £147,000. More than once the English troops seem to have been daunted in their attacks on him. "He is the only strong man in Ireland" was Sidney's comment on returning from his visit to the north in 1565. At the height of his power, he would boast that he never made peace with the Queen but by her own seeking. "I confess that she is my sovereign; but my ancestors were kings of Ulster, and Ulster is mine, and shall be mine. O'Donnell shall never come into his country, nor Bagenal into Newry, nor Kildare into Dundrum or Lecale. They are now mine. With the sword I won them; with this sword I will keep them"—an excuse equally valid for possessions unjustly or justly won.[10] The pride that was at the bottom of Shane's character came out with equal vigour in the estimates he formed of his fellow-chiefs. When he heard that MacCarthy had been created Earl of Clancar, "A precious earl!" quoth he, "I keep a lackey as noble as he." In spite of the exhortations constantly given him by his English friends "to change his clothes and go like a gentleman," Shane seems to have retained the manners of his ancestors, after a brief exercise of "civility, justice, and Christian charity" which followed on his visit to London. But his province was not uncultivated, in spite of the curse laid by Conn his father on any who among his posterity should "learn to speak English, sow wheat, or build castles," and the English troops cut down his corn fields as they wasted Ulster in their pursuit of him. Between Shane's own wars and the efforts of the English to subdue him western Ulster lay waste, Shane's own share in the destruction of his province being not a small one. "The Calvagh O'Donnell is witness that five hundred competent persons, besides above four thousand poor have perished through Shane O'Neill's spoils," reads one report. There was much of the Oriental despot about Shane. Of his cruelties to Calvagh we shall have to speak later.

[10] The same reply was made by MacCarthy Reagh to Captain Stephen ap Harry; see Carew, Cal., i, No. 61, p 77.

When he was besieging Dunseverick he kept Sorley Boy, who was in his power, for three days without food in order to induce the Scottish garrison to yield. Yet more brutal was his treatment of the women who fell into his hands. When he could not wreak his vengeance on Calvagh he captured his wife, Catherine MacLean, who had formerly been wife of Archibald Campbell, fourth Earl of Argyll, What this "very sober, wise, and no less subtle woman," a refined and cultured lady, "not unlearned in the Latin tongue, speaking good French and it is said some Italian," must have suffered in Shane's castle it is not difficult to imagine. Her captor "kept her chained all day to a little boy" and only released her for his amusement in his drunken bouts. She was at first his mistress, but in 1565 he seems to have married her. She was the mother of Hugh Gavelock (gaimhleach), "of the fetters," who was killed by order of Tyrone as a rival in 1590, and of Art, who with his stepbrother Henry and Hugh Roe O'Donnell made the memorable escape from Dublin Castle across the Wicklow Mountains in 1591. Shane's private life was dissolute and brutal even for his day. Sidney reports, "Shane hath already in Dundrum two hundred tun of wine, as I am credibly informed, and much more he looketh for," and we find comments on "the superfluity of wine which Shane daily useth and his pernicious counsellors." Nevertheless he was a foe of whom the English had cause to speak with respect. Sir George Carew, who was not given to speaking well of his Irish opponents, calls him "a prudent, wise captain, and a good giver of an onset or charge upon his enemies...from the age of fourteen always in the wars. Some however said he was the last that would give the charge upon his foes and the first that would flee." In Carew's opinion "he could well procure his men to do well, for he had many good men according to the wars of his country." Carew also says of him that he was "a courteous, loving, and good companion to those he loved, being strangers to his country." He had already planned and partly carried out a plantation of his own people in the Ards, pushing out the Earl of Kildare, who had proposed to do likewise, and he had strongly fortified Ardglass, a trading town whose commerce he was enlarging and the old Norman towers of which still remain to show that the now sleepy fishing village had once been a centre of importance. So quiet and attractive were some districts of Ulster in Shane's time that not only Scots, but farmers from the Pale, came to settle down in his country. The free life under Shane was ess burdensome than the constant turmoils of the Pale and the heavy charges and rates incurred there. Sidney's early opinion was: "His country was never so rich and so inhabited; he armeth and weaponeth all the peasants of his country, the first that ever did so of an Irishman; he hath agents continually in the Court of Scotland and with divers potentates of the Irish Scots."

A very remarkable episode in Shane's career is that of his relations with Richard Creagh, appointed Papal Archbishop of Armagh under Shane's rule. Shane expected the support of Creagh in stirring up disaffection in his province. Instead, the Archbishop steadily preached loyalty to the Crown even from the pulpit of Armagh Cathedral. On one occasion Shane attended at the head of six hundred of his fighting men to hear a sermon that he had beforehand instructed his archbishop to preach to encourage his retainers to attack their English enemies. Instead, the sermon was addressed to encouraging loyalty in the troops. Shane, furiously angry, swore "with most loud angry talk" (the report is by the Archbishop himself) "to destroy the Cathedral, which thing he performed a few days later, causing all the roofs to be burned and some of the walls broken." "He swore that there was no one he did hate more than the Queen of England and his own archbishop" and never again would he hear him preach. But the sermon bore fruit in bringing over O'Donnell to the Queen's side, he "leaving Shane and giving high thanks to the preacher."

Though Shane tried to buy the Archbishop with gifts and, when these failed, endeavoured to undo him as a heretic, no fear would make Creagh shrink from doing "his duty owed to God and sworn to his prince," and he excommunicated Shane in the open field. The loyalty of Creagh is the more remarkable when we know the life of peril that he led; it did not save him from the fate which lay before many of the devoted men who braved the terrors of the time to return to Ireland and preach to the Catholic people. We learn the outline of Creagh's life from his own replies to interrogatories made at various times during his imprisonments. They are stamped with the mark of a simple sincerity. He was a native of Limerick and had been educated at Louvain, where he took the degree of Bachelor of Divinity, and then he seems to have returned to his native town as a teacher of children, until, at the command of a Papal nuncio who had been sent to examine into the state of the episcopal sees in Ireland, he felt obliged to go to Rome with a recommendation that he should be consecrated to the Archbishopric of Cashel or of Armagh. The humility of his mind and the fear of what he would have to face made Creagh most unwilling to undertake either post. He earnestly besought that he might be permitted to enter a religious order, and it was only at the express command of the Pope that he consented to receive consecration and to proceed to Armagh to take up his duties as archbishop. He was uncertain whether Shane would regard him as friend or foe, for Shane had wished to appoint another man. Creagh tried to induce Shane to erect schools "wherein the young might be brought up in good manners and the beginnings of learning; thinking earnestly that they should long ago forsake their barbarous wildness, cruelty, and ferocity, if their youth were brought up conveniently in knowledge of their duty toward God and their princes." Creagh gives a terrible account of the moral condition of Shane's country, in which no punishment was done for the most heinous crimes and ill-living.[11]

[11] For the letters and examinations of Richard Creagh see Shirley, Original Letters, LXIII, LXIV, LXV, CVI, CXX, CXXI; Moran, Spic. Oss., i, 45 seq., and the State Papers of the time. Stuart's History of Armagh gives an account of his dealings with Shane.

The Primacy itself carried with it so small an income that the Government's bishop, Loftus, some years later, prayed to be transferred to the Bishopric of Meath, because he could not live on the £20 a year which was all that it brought in Creagh's career was a troubled one. He was distrusted and disliked by Shane, because of his loyalty to the Crown, yet in the eyes of the Government he was only "a feigned bishop," as having been appointed by the Pope, and therefore, to the official mind, a man whom it was good service to apprehend. The Crown did not recognize bishops sent by the Popes and owning their authority; while the Crown appointments were not held valid in Rome. From the early days of the Reformation two distinct hierarchies existed side by side in Ireland, though in the dangerous years of Elizabeth's reign many of the bishops sent over by the Pope never reached their dioceses, which they could only visit at the peril of their lives or liberty. Bishop Creagh was imprisoned at different times in Dublin and twice in the Tower, his escapes having been, even in his own eyes, little short of miracles. There is a letter of Creagh's extant in which he complains that he was in such poverty in the Tower that he could neither by night nor day change his shirt, not having one penny of his own or from any other to pay for the washing of the "broken shirt that is on my back, besides the misery of cold without gown or convenient hose." He died in the Tower in 1585.

On the death of Shane, in 1567, one of his old rivals, Sir Turlogh Lynogh [12] O'Neill, stepped again to the front to dispute the claims of Hugh O'Neill. Turlogh belonged to another branch of the great O'Neill clan, and was cousin to Shane. During Shane's lifetime he had lost no opportunity of trying to supplant him, and he had waylaid and murdered Brian, Hugh's brother, whom he looked upon as a possible competitor. The clan stood behind Turlogh, whom they had elected tanist, and he went on steadily strengthening his position by fortifying his two castles on the Bann, though he resided for the most part at Dunnalong, on the Tyrone side of Lough Foyle. He warned the Government that in Hugh they had "reared up a whelp they would not easily pull down." The long life of Turlogh and his constant intrigues make his name prominent in the State Papers of his period. He was regularly inaugurated chief of his clan at Tullahogue, with all the accustomed ceremonies, but he offered to prove his loyalty by sending away his Scottish mercenaries, a promise the sincerity of which was somewhat weakened by his marriage with Lady Cantyre, the widow of James MacDonnell of the Isles. He had proposed to her in 1567, sending his message by two of his bards, who were instructed to say that he would be happy to marry "either herself or her daughter." The following year she made up her mind to accept him, and in July 1569 she came over to the Isle of Rathlin, which in olden days had belonged to the Kingdom of the Isles, where Turlogh met her, and they passed a fortnight in festivities.

[12] So styled from the name of the family by whom he was fostered.

In spite of Turlogh's promises to the English Government, she came accompanied by a fleet of galleys and an army of Scots; so much so, that Turlogh is said to have eaten himself up by supporting such a host of Scottish allies. In 1572 he had a thousand Scots at Lough Foyle. and the numbers increased rapidly. Lady Cantyre did her best to keep her husband quiet; she had known many troubles in her own family, and wished for peace. She told her husband, when he was contemplating joining the Desmond insurgents, declaring that "he would be O'Neill, whoever thought evil of the same," that her Scottish relatives, the Earl of Argyll and others, possessed greater lands and titles than his, yet were content to submit their causes to the laws and themselves to the King's pleasure. For a time her persuasions were not without effect. Turlogh is reported "very tractable"; he was created Earl of Clanconnell in May 1578 for life, and the Queen's general pardon in 1581, from which Desmond alone was excepted, had Turlogh specially in view. The offer of this pardon, which was the Queen's own act and made upon her own initiative, came like a thunderbolt to Lord Grey de Wilton, the then Deputy, who was just returning from his ruthless campaign against. Desmond and preparing to attack the insurgents of Leinster and the North. He made vigorous protests. The proclamation of a general pardon would, he assured the Queen, be a great dishonour. "If her Majesty will not go through, better deliver Ireland over to the Irish and call all Englishmen away. The Irish are not to be reclaimed by courtesy, but with severe justice and rigour." Such were the impassioned messages sent hurriedly across the Channel by the men on the spot, using arguments hardly outworn up to recent date. Nevertheless, the pardon came, and Grey was forced to leave his army behind and carry the offer of pardon to Turlogh, who, though he had gone into camp with over four thousand men, ready to stir if the Scots should decide to march on England, submitted at once; "he put off his hat and joyed that he had peace." On hearing of his submission many others followed his example and came in.

The new settlements of the Scots in the North, which occupied so much of the attention of Shane and Turlogh O'Neill, as well as that of the English Government, must now be dealt with, Elizabeth's declared resolve that no Scot should set foot in Ulster, had it been possible to give effect to it, might have eased one perennial Irish problem. But however a Tudor sovereign might desire to give no fresh footing to her bitterest foes, who were then intriguing with France for the restoration of Mary of Scots, the natural movement of peoples whose territories lay within sight of each other across a narrow channel, and who had been closely associated from the early sixth century could not be stopped. The arrival of the family of the Bysets, or Bissetts, expelled from Scotland for supposed complicity in the murder of the Earl of Atholl in the thirteenth century, seems to have been the first of the later immigrations. They settled in Rathlin Island, off the Antrim coast, and in the Glynnes or Glens of Antrim. By the marriage of Margery Byset to John More MacDonnell of the Isles toward the close of the fourteenth century the Byset estates passed into his family. It was on the rocky island of Rathlin that Robert Bruce lay in hiding in his outlaw days, and there it is that he is said to have learned his lesson of perseverance from a spider. But it was through the disastrous wars between the O'Neills and O'Donnells in the early sixteenth century that the Scots began to come over in such numbers as to present for the first time an 'Ulster problem.' Both sides sought to strengthen their armies by the importation of those redoubtable 'Redshanks' (so called because they wore leggings of red-deer skins) who were always ready to sell their services to the highest bidder, or to form an alliance with the Scottish MacConnells or MacDonnells. "Three hundred Scots are harder to vanquish than six hundred Irishmen," wrote Sidney to the Queen in 1568, and it gave no pleasure in London to learn that eight Irishmen had been soliciting the aid of the Scottish king for O'Neill or that O'Donnell had his agents out in the Isles to induce the Redshanks to assist him for pay. "The Scots in the North build, manure the ground, and settle, as though they would never be removed," complains a State Paper in 1571; and later it was one of the chief objects in view in the plantation of Ulster to banish these unwelcome Scots.

The Scottish chief who plays the largest part in the history of the sixteenth century was Sorley Boy (Somhairle buidhe) MacDonnell,[13] youngest son of Alastair, Lord of Isla and Cantyre and of the Glynnes of Antrim, who usually lived at Ballycastle, where he was visited by Shane. Sorley was Lord of the Route and of Dunluce Castle, whose perilous approach still gives a striking example of the old warlike conditions in the North of Ireland. He had been imprisoned for a year in Dublin and had spent the years 1565-67 in durance under Shane. He fought in turn against the O'Neills and O'Kanes (O'Cahans), and disputed successfully the lordship of the Route [14] with the MacQuillans. Later he disputed every foot of his territory with Elizabeth's best generals. From the coasts of Antrim he carried the banner of the Clandonnell over Clannaboy, and "the slogan of his warlike Scots was heard alike on the hills of Derry and in the straths of Tyrone." The keynote of his policy was that "playnly Englische men had no right to Yrland [Ireland]." He "playnly" thought that Scotsmen had every right to it; but the English opinion was different. "It is to be hoped that the most part will take their journey towards heaven," wrote Burghley to the Lord Deputy in 1591. But by that date they were so firmly rooted in Antrim that there was little hope that Burghley's friendly wish would be fulfilled. In 1554 Calvagh O'Donnell had returned with a large army of Redshanks, who took part in his wars against his own father as well as against Shane O'Neill. He was taken prisoner by Shane, and his long and cruel imprisonment put an end to all plans for the time. He was hurried about in the recesses of Tyrone to avoid capture by Sussex, and barbarously tortured in the attempt to force him to give up his jewels. He was at last so far crushed by suffering that he secured his release by the surrender of Lifford and his claims on Inishowen in Donegal, with the payment of a good ransom; yet he and his people still had to be starved into surrender. He crossed over to London to lay his case before the Queen, and was listened to sympathetically, the Queen commiserating the state of destitution into which he had been brought. In 1566 he marched with Sidney into Tyrone and Tyrconnel, the towns as they fell being handed back to Calvagh. Of this journey Sidney wrote, "Your Majesty hath recovered a country of 70 miles in length and 48 in breadth, and the service of 1000 men, now restored to O'Donnell." But Calvagh shortly afterward fell from his horse in a fit, with his dying words adjuring his clansmen to be loyal to the Queen.

[13] From the Norse sumer and lidi, summer-soldier or viking, an old name in the MacDonnell family. Buidhe means fair or yellow-haired.

[14] The Route is in the north-east of Co. Antrim.

The Scottish MacDonnells had in vain endeavoured to preserve a neutral attitude during the wars between the O'Neills and O'Donnells. Shane, early in 1562, in his newly found friendship with Elizabeth after his submission, proposed to the Queen to inflict a signal punishment upon the Scots, who were fast gaining a firm footing in his borders, and whom he wished to sweep out of his path. The offer met with unqualified approval, and he set to work with vigour, passing over the country with fire and sword. A report was sent to London from the authorities that Shane's dealings had been "most commendable." The fresh contingents sent over by James MacDonnell, Lord of Isla, elder brother to Sorley Boy, were not sufficient to stop his progress, and when the chief himself came over in the following spring it was to find his castle in flames and Sorley Boy in full retreat. The Scots, indeed, were almost annihilated and their officers captured or killed in a bloody battle at Ballycastle in May 1565. Shane was able to report in courtier language: "By divine aid I gave them battle, in which many of Sorley's men were slain, the remnant fled; we took large spoils on that day, and at night we occupied the camp from which Sorley had been expelled...God, best and greatest, of His mere grace, and for the welfare of her Majesty the Queen, gave us the victory against them...Glory be to God, such was the result of my services undertaken for her Majesty in the Northern parts." And he adds, "Not here alone, but everywhere throughout Ireland where my aid may be required, I am ready and prepared to make sacrifices for her Grace...I am O'Neill."[15] The old chief, James MacDonnell, was left to die in Shane's prison, a leader of whom the Annals of the Four Masters say "that his own people would not have deemed it too much to give his weight in gold" if Shane would have accepted a ransom. Sorley was also imprisoned, like Calvagh in former days. Consternation was felt in England at the rapid increase of Shane's power; but the two years' struggle had so exhausted him that he could fight no longer, and he was hardly dissuaded by his followers from making a fresh and abject submission to Sidney with a halter round his neck. His miserable end was brought about by the Scots in revenge for his ill-usage of their leaders. It seems to have been planned by the English, probably in conjunction with Sorley Boy and the Countess of Argyll, Calvagh's former wife, so vilely abused by Shane. She and Sorley both had sufficient reason to hate the tyrant who had had them in his power, and they must often have conversed together during Sorley's imprisonment in Shane's house. Both of them were present at the banquet at which Shane was assassinated. He had been invited to attend a family assembly at Cushendun on June 2, 1567, ending with a banquet to celebrate a new reunion between the O'Neills and the MacDonnells. For two days all went well, but a dispute arising as to the claims to precedence between the two families, Shane being heated with wine, his pride and temper carried him away into insulting speeches, which the Scots so much resented that they fell upon him with their dirks and literally hacked him to pieces. His body, "wrapped in a kerne's old shirt," was thrown into a pit.[16]

[15] Letter to Lord Justice Arnold, in George Hill, Macdonnells of Antrim, pp. 133-135.

[16] Letter to Lord Justice Arnold, in George Hill, Macdonnells of Antrim, pp. 140-143, and Notes.

Captain Piers, Governor of Carrickfergus, "by whose device the tragedy was practised," having succeeded in getting hold of the head, sent it "pickled in a pimpkin" to Sidney and obtained the reward for the capture. It was seen on a pole over Dublin Castle by Campian in 1571. Sixteen years later the Scots were still looking for the reward for the killing of Shane which had been given to Captain Piers. Sidney, on the contrary, ordered them to depart the country. It seems clear that Sidney, who was usually averse to treacherous deeds, was a party to the assassination of Shane. He thanked heaven for having made him the instrument of the "killing of that pernicious Rebell." The body was privately buried in the Franciscan monastery of Glenarm. An old tradition says that some years later a friar from Armagh stood at the gate of Glenarm, to beg the body of Shane that it might be buried beside his ancestors in Armagh. "Have you," inquired the Abbot, sternly, "brought with you the body of James MacDonnell, Lord of Antrim and Cantyre? For know you that so long as ye trample on the grave of James of Antrim and Cantyre, we will trample on the dust of your great O'Neill." [17] The Scottish position in the North was much strengthened by a series of marriages between Scottish ladies of high rank and Irish chieftains. About the same time as the marriage of Lady Cantyre to Turlogh O'Neill, her daughter, the Ineen Dubh MacDonnell, daughter of the fourth Earl of Argyll, was wedded to Hugh O'Donnell of Donegal. She became the mother of Hugh Roe O'Donnell, or 'Red Hugh,' who was thus of mixed Irish and Scottish descent. These marriages brought about an interval of quiet, and all the efforts made by Elizabeth to get the Scots out of Antrim proved unavailing. Sorley Boy had landed again in 1567 with fresh followers, swearing that he would never depart out of Ireland with his goodwill. On the English refusal to confirm him in his new conquests he took possession of all the English garrison forts along the coast, except Dunluce, and repeopled them with his own tribesmen. The Queen began to realize that the Scots were come to stay. It was the tidings of their rapid increase that gave Sir John Perrot an excuse for his crusade in the North in the year in which he was appointed Deputy, 1584. His original intention had been "to look through his fingers at Ulster, as a fit receptacle for all the savage beasts of the land," but the arrival of large bodies of Scots changed his views. He marched north with an immense army, taking with him an imposing array of the protected Lords from the South, the principal leaders of the O'Connors and O'Mores, with the Earls of Ormonde and Thomond and Clanricarde, Sir John Norris and Hugh O'Neill. They divided into two sections, marching along both banks of the river Bann to Dunluce; but they saw nothing of Sorley, who prudently kept out of their path. Rumours went about that there was no Scottish invasion, and sharp letters from his parsimonious sovereign reminded the Deputy "that she would rather spend a pound forced by necessity than a penny for prevention," an unsound policy for a ruler always in straits for money.

[17] Ibid., p. 145, Note 84.

The story of young Hugh Roe O'Donnell's capture belongs to the time of Perrot's administration. The lad, who was only fourteen years of age, was already looked upon as the hope of his country. Prophecies were going about in Donegal that when two Hughs, father and son, should succeed each other as O'Donnell, the second would become monarch of Ireland. The old Hugh, though weak and feeble, had been determined in one thing—he would neither give hostages nor pay tribute to the English Crown, and the English dared not enforce their authority, knowing that the country was ripe for rebellion and that any rash move would bring out the sept and its Scottish supporters. Perrot, usually an honourable man, though a severe officer, on this occasion stooped to a trick in order to get into his hands the lad whom his father refused to give him by way of hostage. He induced a Dublin merchant by bribes, promises, and threats to load a ship with wines and beer, especially with the sack "which the Irishmen love best," and sail round to Donegal to try to find an opportunity to entrap the young O'Donnell. Fifty soldiers provided by the Viceroy sailed with the ship, armed with weapons of war. They arrived on the shores of Lough Swilly and dropped anchor under the village of Rathmullen, in the MacSweeney's country. It was not long before their purpose had been accomplished. The young lords from the castle came down to traffic with the merchant ship, and the wines were good. It chanced that Hugh Roe arrived late, with a troop of youthful companions, and more wine was sent for to the ship. It was refused on the ground that it was running short; but it was suggested that if the gentlemen would come down to the ship they could get sufficient for their entertainment out of what remained. While they were feasting the anchor was weighed, and the ship began to put off into deep water. The youths, when they found this out, discovered also that they were enclosed under hatches and unable either to fight or escape. As soon as the country people got wind of what was happening they put off in boats to try to stop the ship and offer other hostages. The MacSweeneys were allowed to depart on giving their sons in their place, but Hugh Roe was carried off to Dublin, examined and committed to the warder of Dublin Castle, where he joined the sad group of chiefs' sons, young fellows from the open hillsides and plains of the country, condemned, for no crime of their own, to spend their days "in the grate," begging their bread from the passers-by, as hostages for the good behaviour of their families. Anything more corrupting to youth or more embittering against the Government than this system it would be difficult to imagine. Hugh, the most important of the hostages, was kept in chains for three years and three months, and it is not surprising that these high-spirited lads spent their time in their "close prison" railing upon the unjust sentences and harsh treatment meted out to themselves and their people, and vowing revenge if their chance should come.[18]

[18] In September 1588 there were thirty of these lads held as hostages in Dublin Castle, "some of them boys of ten, twelve, or sixteen years, or thereabouts," Cal. S.P.I., Eliz. cxliii, No. 45, pp. 154-155; ibid., cxxxvi, No. 18, pp. 11-12.

Dublin Castle had been enlarged and decorated during the Lieutenancy of Sir Henry Sidney. It was solidly built and surrounded by a trench of water over which a drawbridge gave entry to the castle yard; yet on two occasions Hugh, with the help of friends outside, managed to escape. On his first flight he succeeded in getting out of the city and across the Three Rock Mountain in the night, hoping that Phelim O'Toole, whom he regarded as a friend and who had offered to help him, would give him shelter; but the treacherous chief handed him over to the Government, and he was more closely incarcerated than before. Again, on Christmas night 1591, when their fetters were removed for supper, and probably some extra liberty was allowed on account of the festival, Hugh, with two companions, Henry and Art, sons of Shane O'Neill, who had been confined since boyhood, effected their escape by sliding down a drain, and again took their way across the Dublin mountains southward. It was a bitterly cold night and the rain was pouring down. The mountain was slippery with melting snow, and their clothes were thin and scanty. Henry was separated from the others in the darkness, and Art, who had grown stiff and corpulent from long confinement, began to fail, and finally could go no farther. He had to sit down under a cliff in the bitter cold, which was so severe that the great toes on Hugh's feet were frozen. They were depending on the help of Fiach macHugh of Glenmalure, "the great firebrand of the mountains between Wexford and Dublin," as Perrot's biographer calls him. He had promised to send horses, but had contented himself with sending a guide. Now that they could walk no farther, they sent this man on to tell Fiach of their distress; but so closely were all his movements watched that it was not until the third night that four of his men reached the cave with food and drink. It was too late to save Art, who died before their eyes; but Hugh, who was younger, and who had eaten grass to still the pangs of hunger, was still alive. When he had been forced to take some drink he was lifted from the ground and carried to Glenmalure, from whence, when he was able to mount a horse, he was escorted home to Ulster, almost miraculously escaping capture by the way, for every movement was watched. He found that Henry O'Neill had arrived in Ulster before him. Hugh O'Neill's system of keeping a number of the border English in his pay pledged to aid and support him proved, on this occasion, of real service, for they were conveniently blind to the fact that an O'Donnell was passing through their districts. Indeed, many believed that the incoming Lord Deputy, Fitzwilliam, himself had a hand in his prisoner's escape; the avaricious Fitzwilliam was not a man to refuse a bribe and Hugh O'Neill is said to have paid him £1000 for this service. Perrot declared that he could have had £2000 for the same purpose.

Hugh Roe O'Donnell's country had not been faring well in his absence; in spite of his father's protests, sheriffs of the very worst type had been appointed in the North, one Captain Willis being the most objectionable. Captain Lee, an Englishman who knew the conditions well, says that Willis had with him "three hundred of the very rascals and scum of that kingdom, who did rob and spoil the people, ravished their wives and daughters, and made havoc of all;...men whom no well-advised captain could admit into his company." It was to the acts of these men that Lee ascribes a great part of the unquietness of O'Donnell's province.[19] "Old age lay heavy" on the old O'Donnell, and he was already falling into senile decay. But a new era began with the return of his son. The father resigned his position, which fell into Hugh Roe's hands, and no sooner was the latter inaugurated chief on the rock of Kilmacrenan than a vigorous policy was adopted designed to restore to Tyrconnel its former freedom from outside interference. He swept the sheriffs out of his country, cleared the monastery of Donegal of the soldiers quartered within its precincts, and attacked old Turlogh O'Neill, who was opposing Hugh O'Neill on the English side, in his castle at Strabane. He deposed him and shut him up in a small island in a lake, where he remained till his death two years afterward. All this time Hugh Roe was suffering severely from the effects of his terrible journey across the Dublin mountains on the winter's night of his escape. For a year he had to lie on his bed in his castles of Donegal and Bally-shannon, directing operations in which he could take no active part. The physicians at length removed his toes, and he began slowly to recover. It was while he was in this condition that Hugh O'Neill proposed to him that they should repair together to the Viceroy and give in their submissions. To this surprising suggestion O'Donnell responded unwillingly, and only after much persuasion was he induced again to put himself within the power of the men from whom he had so recently escaped. With great difficulty he was got upon a horse, and with O'Neill he journeyed to Dundalk, where "the next day in church before a great assembly he delivered his humble submission, making a great show of sorrow for his misdemeanours committed...and very willingly yielded himself to be sworn to perform the several parts of his submission." They parted from Fitzwilliam with mutual goodwill and blessings, and, after some days spent in friendly feasting at O'Neill's house at Dungannon, O'Donnell returned to his own castle in Donegal, standing on the shores of the Bay. Sir Henry Sidney, who visited it in 1566, says of it: "It is one of the greatest that I ever saw in Ireland in any Irishman's hands, and would appear in good keeping one of the fairest, so nigh a portable water as a boat of ten tons may come within twenty yards of it." It had been built by Hugh's ancestor, another Hugh Roe, grandson of Turlogh of the Wine, between 1505 and 1511, and added to in 1564.

[19] "Brief Declaration of the Government of Ireland," in Desiderata Curiosa Hibernica (1772), i, 106. See also Carew, Cal., in, No. 218, p. 152; Cox, Hibernia Anglicana, i, 399.

Some years later, O'Donnell felt himself called upon to destroy his own fair castle to prevent it from falling into the hands of his brother-in-law, Niall Garbh, and his English allies. Near it, on the smooth sward that borders the lovely bay of Donegal, stood the buildings of the Franciscan monastery, the head of its order in Ireland, built in 1474 by Nuala, daughter of O'Conor Faly, and enriched by the munificence of succeeding O'Donnells. Hard by the windows of the refectory was the wharf, where for centuries foreign ships had taken in their cargoes of hides, fish, wool, lining cloth, and falding, and where came the galleons of Spain, laden with wine and arms in exchange for the merchandise which the Lords of Tyrconnel sent annually to the marts of Brabant, then the great emporiums for the North of Europe.[20] Up to 1601 the community still consisted of forty friars; they had dispersed into the mountains, carrying with them their altar-plate and valuables, when the English troops and sheriffs swooped down upon Donegal in the dead of night and occupied the monastery as a garrison; but they speedily returned when O'Donnell once more came among them. The effect of Hugh Roe's submission was to bring him a period of peace, "for he had no fear, having entered into peace and friendship with the Lord Justice," and the members of his sept who had hitherto been opposed to his election now came in and willingly made their submissions to him. Even Niall Garbh, "the Rough," whose name fitly describes the fierce vindictive character given to him by all parties, now came in, though only out of fear of Hugh's power.

[20] Meehan, Rise and Fall of the Franciscan Monasteries in Ireland. His description of Donegal is taken from the contemporary record of Father Mooney, one of the dispersed monks, who employed his leisure at the convent of St Antony, at Louvain, in writing an account of the Franciscan monasteries of his own country. It is therefore a first-hand authority.

But O'Donnell, with or without his will, soon found himself involved in the disturbances going on around him. Maguire was fighting Bingham in Connacht and Bagenal in Ulster, the latter being assisted by O'Neill, who, until events proved too strong for him, remained true to his oath of allegiance. When Maguire was besieged in his castle of Enniskillen in 1594 O'Donnell felt bound to go to his assistance, and on the castle falling by treachery into the hands of the English he sat down before it and proceeded to starve the garrison into surrender. After Maguire's rout of the relieving party at the Ford of the Biscuits, Enniskillen and soon afterward Belleek fell into O'Donnell's hands. O'Donnell was now openly in arms against the English, and beginning to intrigue with Spain, not altogether with the goodwill of O'Neill, who was of the two by far the more long-sighted and experienced soldier. He thought that Hugh was inclined to be hasty, and feared that his own larger and more ambitious designs might be wrecked by a rash move of his ally. But O'Donnell's unrivalled knowledge of the country, his swiftness of movement and combination, and the devotion with which he was followed made his constant raids a terror to his enemies.

While O'Neill in the east of Ulster was building up the formidable army which was to defeat the English at Clontibret and the Yellow Ford, O'Donnell was indulging with equal success in a series of wide-sweeping raids into Connacht, baffling Bingham and the watching English troops posted on his path by taking circuitous routes well known to him but impossible for the transport of Bingham's artillery and heavy-armed troops. It was the kind of warfare that the Irish loved and which the English could not imitate and did not know how to circumvent. At one moment he would be sweeping Mayo and Sligo, dividing his men into marauding parties who cleared the country far and wide of cattle, herds of sheep, and booty of all sorts, returning to their homes "with vast treasures and great joy"; at another time they would chase the horses of the English cavalry into their camp when they were being led out for exercise. On one occasion their expedition carried them south as far as Thomond into the country of the O'Briens, the Earl of Thomond having proved faithful to his oath of allegiance all through the Munster wars. Wherever O'Donnell raided the country was "completely gleaned by him," and he did not hesitate "to put a heavy cloud of fire on the land all round" any district selected for a raid. It was the old accustomed way of fighting adopted by Irish and English troops alike. The enormous herds of live-stock driven off and of treasure accumulated in these descents is equally surprising whether we consider the condition of the inhabitants of the country districts or the possibility of their survival at a time when such raids occurred regularly during every fighting season.

END OF CHAPTER XIII

XIV.—THE FIRST PLANTATIONS

The idea of planting parts of Ireland with English settlers had long been mooted in London, and the chief visible result of Queen Mary's short reign was the attempted plantation of Leix and Offaly, which were shired under the names of King's and Queen's Counties, and granted during the Vice-royalty of Lord Sussex to sundry tenants, most of whom were "mere English," but who were soon so ruined by the old inhabitants that many of them had relet their grants to the original Irish owners. This was the first attempt at one of those plantations which were to be tried in various parts of Ireland with varying success during the next reign. It was among the articles of instruction given to Sir Henry Sidney when he first came over as Deputy in 1565 that he was to consider how these counties were to be settled with good subjects and the O'Connors and O'Mores expelled. Full powers were put into his hands to let lands and to make grants of any land void by "death, escheat, or forfeiture." [1]

[1] Carew, Cal., ii, No. 20, p. 18 (August 2, 1575).

It was hoped that the leader of the O'Mores, Rory Oge, might be induced to "renounce his aspiring imagination of title to the country" which he and his forefathers had possessed, and be content with such portion of freehold as the Deputy thought meet for him. But neither Rory Oge nor his clan were so easily disposed of. Placed on the borders of the Pale, they carried on a fierce and prolonged struggle against English rule. They fought through eighteen insurrections in sixty years, and up to the time of Essex their attempted suppression had cost the State over £200,000, large garrisons having to be maintained in the newly planted towns of Maryborough and Philipstown. The most ruthless means were taken for the extirpation of the chief inhabitants. Perrot writes in April 1587, "I caused to be hanged Conell MacLysaghe O'More, Lysaghe MacWilliam O'More, three notable men of the Kellys, and I have Conell MacKedagh O'More's head upon the top of the Castle so that there remaineth not one principal of the O'Mores, but Shane MacRosse...and Walter Roghe, whose heads I am promised very shortly. I have also taken the young fry of all the O'Mores, saving one whom I am promised to have. So I do not know one dangerous man of the sept left." [2] Rory Oge and his elder brother Callogh had been educated in England. At Ormonde's request in 1571, and in spite of orders that no O'More should hold land in Leix, Callogh was given a grant in his father's country.[3]

[2] Carew, Cal., ii, No. 627, pp. 442-443 (April 18, 1587); Ulster Journal of Archaeology (1856), iii, 341-342.

[3] He may have been the John Callow entered at Gray's Inn in 1557.

But Rory refused to settle down; he headed a wild band who ran through the towns "like hags and furies of hell with flakes of fire fastened on poles," [4] attacked the Pale, and burned the town of Naas with five hundred people in it, himself sitting on the cross in the market-place, making "great joy and triumphe that he had doone so divelish an act." This is not surprising when we reflect that such men as Alexander Crosby and his son Francis were chief governors of Leix. Francis it was who perpetrated the savage massacre of the chief men of the district at Mullaghmast, and who hung women and children on the spreading tree before his hall-door at Stradbally.[5] Grim legends of death-coaches still cling around this house.

[4] Cal. S.P.I., Eliz. (1808), vi, 395.

[5] Annals of the Four Masters, 1577 (Vol. V, p. 1695); O'Sullevan Beare, Hist. Cath. Iber. Comp., vol. ii, Bk. IV, ch. vi.

When Rory was at last captured by Sir Barnaby FitzPatrick in 1578 his son, Owny, took his place, showing himself as fearless and indefatigable a fighter as his father had been. At one time Sir Henry Harington, a nephew of Sidney, was a prisoner among them; his opinion was that the Irish at home were so kind and hospitable to all newcomers that he would willingly have hazarded to live among them for life. But the terms asked for his ransom were so high that Sidney said he would not have given them "to enlarge Philip my son." [6]

[6] P. O'Sullevan Beare, op. cit., vol. ii, Bk. IV, ch. v; Carew, Cal., ii, No. 501, p. 355 (March 1, 1583).

In 1600 they made an even more important capture. When the Earl of Ormonde was travelling with Carew to suppress the Munster rebellion, and was in command of the forces, he was surrounded while at a conference with Owny, and only got his release by the intervention of Tyrone and on payment of a ransom of £3000. Leix was by no means a waste under the O'Mores and O'Connors. An English army, making its way to revictual the garrison of Philipstown, was amazed to find the rebel's country "exceedingly rich in all the means of life; the ground well tilled, the fields fenced, the towns inhabited, and the highways in good repair"; the reason of this good condition they ascribed to the fact "that the Queen's forces during these wars never till then came amongst them." Lord Mountjoy's campaign in 1600 speedily changed all this. His army brought with them sickles, scythes, and harrows, and as they advanced they mowed down the corn and burned the country, leaving a waste behind them.[7] The common soldiers found the duty so painful that only the example of their officers induced them to obey the command.

[7] Fynes Moryson, Itinerary (1617), ii, 76-77; Annals of the Four Masters, 1600 (vol. vi, pp. 2179, 2187).

By Owny's death in a skirmish near Timahoe in 1600, resistance came to an end. But the O'Mores clung to their own districts, and when an attempt was made in the reign of James I to transplant them to Kerry and Clare they kept drifting back, saying that they preferred to die in their own country rather than to live anywhere else. Much later another of their race was to become one of the chief instigators of the rebellion of 1641, and the right hand of Owen Roe. This Rory was an accomplished man, and his activities and adventures gained for him the title of "the Irish Robin Hood." Numerous ballads in the native tongue celebrate his exploits.[8]

[8] Hinkson, Ireland in the Seventeenth Century, ii, 190; Nelson, Collections, ii, 519.

The plantation of King's and Queen's Counties languished for many years. It only revived during the Stuart period when a number of French Huguenot refugees established themselves in and about Portarlington, where they planted fruit and vegetable gardens, and opened spinning and weaving industries, gradually making of this district one of the most prosperous and well-managed parts of the country.[9] The early attempts to make similar plantations in Ulster had been uniformly unsuccessful. In October 1572 a grant had been made to a Mr Chatterton, of the Fews, Orier, and part of Armagh, but he was killed by the Irish, and the more ambitious project of Sir Thomas Smith and his illegitimate son to colonize the Ardes in Co. Down, after the confiscations consequent on the rebellion and death of Shane O'Neill, was not more prosperous. Smith was Professor of Civil Law and Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, and Secretary of State under Elizabeth; he had been ambassador to France in 1562 and 1572. The idea of a colony had long occupied his mind, and a grant in the very heart of Shane's country and close to his old home beside Newry, which in Shane's day closed the passage to all strangers going north from Dundalk, seemed an excellent opportunity to carry out his views. But he found it impossible to subdue the inhabitants, and the death of his son in an encounter with the Irish in October 1573, brought the settlement to an end. The district later became the property of Sir Henry Bagenal, Marshal of Ireland and father-in-law to Tyrone.

[9] See an interesting series of articles on the French settlements in Ireland in the Ulster Journal of Archaeology (Old Series), vols. i, ii, iii.

The plantation of Walter Devereux, first Earl of Essex, and father of the Viceroy, was of a more extensive character. Though long considered, it was undertaken in a manner that gave it little chance of success, and those who urged it on seem to have looked on it rather as a means of ruining Essex in purse and reputation than as a serious political enterprise. He was bound to raise and support out of his own purse an equal number of horse and foot to those supplied by the Queen, and all fortifications were to be paid for between them. Not having ready money for such an outlay, Essex was induced to borrow £10,000 from the Queen herself, at ten per cent. interest, with forfeiture of his estates in default of punctual payment on stated dates, a bargain by which the thrifty sovereign became possessed of large portions of the Essex estates in England, and her servant became hopelessly involved in debt and embarrassments. Neither did the irregular position in which Essex was placed in Ireland tend to the advancement of his enterprise. Lord Deputy FitzWilliam was extremely jealous of him, and hampered him in every way in his power; in Essex's capacity as part-paymaster he was blamed for every complaint made by the soldiery, while his authority to deal either with them or with the Irish was persistently undermined. His position was an impossible one, and largely accounts for the want of success he met with.

The instructions he received from the Queen before his departure in July 1573, as well as his own intentions, were, if plantations are allowable at all, not unreasonable. On his taking leave, Elizabeth besought him to have consideration of the Irish there, since she believed they had become her disobedient subjects rather because they had not been defended from the Scots than from any other reason, and she held that they would yield themselves good subjects on the coming of Essex, and therefore she desired that they should be well used. She also laid it specially upon him that he should not too hastily seek to change the beliefs of people who had been trained up in another religion. Essex expressed his general agreement with these views, though "for the present he could not say what was best to be done," but he promised "not to imbrue his hands with more blood than the necessity of the cause required." [10] We can hardly feel that he kept his word.

[10] Essex to Burghley, July 20, 1573, Lives of the Devereux, Earls of Essex, 1, 31-32.

Essex opened well. He declared that he had come over to check the tyranny of the Scots; he restrained the extortions of his soldiers and he gave the Scottish harvest to the Irish, guarding them while they reaped their corn. Sir Bryan MacPhelim, who had been ousted from his lands by the Smith settlers, came in and offered his help against the Scots; but only a few days later, news was brought that he had changed his mind and gone out to Turlogh Lynogh, who had newly confederated with the Scots and driven away all his cattle into the opposite camp. This act of infidelity completely changed Essex's opinion of the Irish and his methods of dealing with them; he no longer put faith in their submissions, or promises, "these Northern people being so false of their word." Nor did the new adventurers prove satisfactory. "Not having forgotten the delicacies of England," they soon made for home, and prejudiced intending settlers by news of the hardships of the enterprise. The soldiers revolted when provisions did not come over, and the Deputy "sat in his chair and smiled," encouraging all parties to believe that Essex's adventure was purely a private affair for which the Queen and he took no responsibility. He sent Essex into Munster, when he was badly needed in the North to keep in check Turlogh and the Scots, and he lost no opportunity of undermining his influence with the Queen. In October 1574 Essex made an expedition into Tyrone and as far north as Lough Foyle, accompanied by Magennis and MacMahon, but Turlogh refused to come, and was supported by Conn O'Donnell, who "was as fast to him as his hand to his body."

The O'Donnell and O'Doherty, on the other hand, were quite ready to help against Turlogh, "saying very frankly that it was their duty so to do, and he that would not spend his life and all his goods to conserve her Highness's dignity, could neither be accounted a good subject nor was worthy to have life." Essex took the usual plan of wasting the country by sending out his horsemen to fire the corn, which, he says, he found in great plenty and in large ricks. He estimates that by the time the expedition was over his men had burned five thousand pounds worth of grain. He seized Dunnalong on Lough Foyle from Turlogh and Lifford from Conn, whom he took prisoner, and he cut passes through the woods, wide enough for ten horsemen to ride abreast. He left the country of Clannaboy "all desolate and without people," Turlogh complaining that his rebellious behaviour was solely due to the arbitrary conduct of Essex. Essex at length began to see clearly that his plantation would never be allowed to succeed, and he resigned the government of Ulster, asking only of the Queen that he might have her good licence to live in a corner of the Province, which he would hire for money. The costs of his fruitless Irish adventure had left him in debt for £25,473, besides £10,000 owing to the Queen. He died in Dublin on September 22, 1576. Essex is an example of a type of character which became common during the Tudor period, when men otherwise of taste and culture, and possessed of a certain probity and distinction of mind, yet in their dealings with ' native ' races lost all sense of honour or feelings of natural compassion. In his relations with some of the Irish and Scots alike Essex acted with callous and hideous cruelty. His treatment of the families of Sir Bryan MacPhelim and Sorley Boy have left a deep stain on his memory. We have seen that Sir Bryan had deceived Essex in so treacherous a manner that he had prejudiced Essex against the whole Irish people, but even this is not a sufficient excuse for the revenge taken by the planter. He invited Sir Bryan to a friendly banquet, during which he seized him and his wife and put them to death. His dealings with the Scots were still more ruthless, and the massacre of his wife and family with their dependents on Rathlin Island must have left a deep impression on the mind of Sorley Boy MacDonnell. On a smaller scale it compares with the massacre of Glencoe.

In the summer of 1575 Sorley Boy had information that Essex was marching northward, and he endeavoured to protect his own young family, with the wives of his leading officers, the women, children, and non-combatants, by sending them over to Rathlin Island. They carried with them what they could of their family plate and valuables. Essex ordered Sir John Norris, then in command of three frigates at Carrickfergus, to sail round and raid Rathlin. "And having given this direction," he reports in a letter to the Queen, "I withdrew myself toward the Pale, to make the Scots less suspicious of any such matter pretended." A small garrison of about fifty men had the charge of the fortress known as Bruce's Castle, and into it were crowded a large number of the refugees of the better class. On July 22, Norris landed on the island with a considerable force by means of a flotilla of boats. The commander of the garrison was killed on the first encounter, and the constable, after what was evidently a sharp fight, surrendered, "the lives of all within (save those of the constable, his wife, and child) to stand upon the courtesy of the soldiers." Essex reports: "The soldiers being moved and much stirred with the loss of their fellows that were slain and desirous of revenge, made request, or rather pressed, to have the killing of them, which they did all, saving the persons to whom life was promisedThere were slain that came out of the castle of all sorts 200; and presently there is brought me news out of Tyrone that they be occupied still in killing, and have slain that they have found hidden in caves and in cliffs of the sea, to the number of 300 or 400 more. They had within the island 300 kine, 3000 sheep, and 100 stud mares, and of beer-corn upon the ground there is sufficient to find 200 men for a whole year." Sorley watched the awful scene from a headland on the shore, powerless to save the hapless women and children he had thought to place out of reach of his merciless foes. "He stood upon the mainland of the Glynnes and witnessed the taking of the island, and was like to run mad for sorrow, tearing and tormenting himself and saying that he had lost all that ever he had." So runs the grim postscript in Essex's letter to Walsingham, as in the quiet camp at the Newry out of sight and sound of these horrors, he penned the report of the tragedy on the six hundred victims on Rathlin, caused by his own express command.[11]

[11] Lives of the Devereux, i, 115, 116; Hill, Macdonnells of Antrim, pp. 184-185; Carew, Cal., ii, No. 19 (July 31, 1575), pp. 16-17.

Elizabeth received the news in the midst of "the princely pleasures of Kenilworth," where she was enjoying the magnificent hospitality of the Earl of Leicester. Her woman's heart seems to have felt no throb of pity for the women and children slaughtered on Rathlin. In one of the most cryptic of her princely letters she speaks of the comfort she takes in a subject "so serviceable" as Essex "in a calling whereof we may, in time to come, take so great profit," and of her "thankful acceptation of the same." She shortly afterward promoted Norris, whom she calls "the executioner of your well-devised enterprise," to be Governor of Munster.[12] Though the Queen on many occasions showed clemency and patience toward her Irish subjects, for the Scots, her natural enemies, she knew no compassion. Cecil had often to reflect that "her Majesty is more than a man and (in troth) sometimes less than a woman." Yet at that moment the Queen had cause to feel that her project of sweeping the Scots out of the North of Ireland had come near to being fulfilled.

[12] Carew, Cal., ii, No. 23, p. 21; Lives of the Devereux, i, 119.

END OF CHAPTER XIV

XV.—THE DESMOND REBELLION

The troubles in Munster, which were later to develop into the long Geraldine rebellion, began in the old quarrels and jealousies that no time could heal between the Desmonds and the house of Ormonde. Three members of the Geraldine family, in particular, took an active part in these wars, the Earl of Desmond and his brother Sir John, and their cousin, Sir James FitzMaurice FitzGerald, who was later to become known as "the Arch-traitor." The then Earl, the fifteenth of his line, was Gerald or Garrett, son of the James Fitzjohn FitzGerald who in St Leger's time had done homage to Henry VIII. He was a warlike youth, who had passed his early years in fighting the MacCarthys, and was on one occasion imprisoned by them for six years in his own castle of Askeaton. He had also supported O'Brien, Lord of Inchiquin, against the Earls of Thomond and Clanricarde, inflicting on them a disastrous defeat. He succeeded to his title in 1558, on his father's death, by the English law of primogeniture, and went to England "with a willing mind and intention," attended by a hundred gentlemen, to make his submission to Elizabeth in person. She received him very graciously and confirmed to him all his lands, seignorities, and privileges by letters patent, so that he returned in quiet possession of his estates. But "the worm of ambition and the damnable spark of envy" [1] caused the old wars between him and the Butlers to break out afresh, although Joan, Ormonde's mother, was now Desmond's wife. Thomas Butler, the tenth Earl of Ormonde, known as "the Black Earl" (Tighearna Dubh), was the most powerful representative of the great family of the Ormondes, whose strong Lancastrian leanings had made them special favourites at the Tudor Court, and who in their sympathies had remained more English than the Geraldines. Nevertheless, some members of the family had followed the example of the Kildares, who, though they adopted English ways when they visited the Pale, were in their own country clad in Irish fashion, spoke Irish, and ruled their dependents by native law and custom. The Black Earl of Ormonde had been brought up in England. He had adopted the Protestant religion and had been knighted on the accession of Edward VI. His father it was who, having been suspected of hostility to the Government, had been called to London and poisoned with seventeen of his followers at Ely House at a banquet to which he had been invited by his own retainers.

[1] Thomas Russell, "Relation of the FitzGeralds" (1638), in Unpublished Geraldine Documents, ed. S. Hayman and J. Graves, p. 21.

Edward VI, who ascended the throne in the following year, did what he could to expiate the foul deed and sent the young Ormonde back to his country with honour, where he was received with general rejoicings. He entered into friendly relations with Sussex, the Lord Deputy, and became Lord Treasurer of Ireland. During the wars in the North he had assisted Sussex against Shane O'Neill, but his position became difficult when Desmond came forward as champion of the Irish and Catholic cause, the position being complicated by their close family relationship. So long as the Countess of Desmond lived her efforts to patch up the quarrel between her son and her husband were unremitting and were partially successful. The rash courage of Desmond was no match for the subtle ability of the Black Earl, nor were his large bodies of loose kerne, 5000 strong, or his 750 horse which employed themselves in raiding Ormonde's lands competent to resist the great ordnance which Ormonde was able to put into the field. At Bohermore, between the counties of Limerick and Tipperary, the two armies stood for fourteen days facing each other, but the entreaties of the Countess prevailed to keep them asunder. On her death in the two Earls, "much like thunder," [2] burst out afresh, and at Affane on the Blackwater the Black Earl, in company with the Decies, came upon Desmond when he was ill supported, shot him in the thigh and took him prisoner, slaughtering all his followers. At this moment, when he was being carried, wounded and beaten, off the field, the spirit of his race flared up. "Where is now the great Earl of Desmond?" cried one tauntingly, as he passed. "Where, but on the necks of the Butlers," was the reply. The Queen summoned both Earls to London to answer for their turbulence. She kept Ormonde at Court for five years and paid the handsome Earl much attention; but he complained that Desmond's brother, Sir John, was meanwhile wasting his lands and fighting the English.

[2] Russell, op. cit., p. 22.

From the first appointment of Sir Henry Sidney to office in Ireland he had been called upon by Ormonde to support him in his quarrels with Desmond. It was a task which Sidney disliked, as much because of Ormonde's underhand efforts to bring him into disgrace at Court and his personal disloyalty to his rule as because he believed the case against Desmond to have been "forejudged to Desmond's disadvantage." Nevertheless, in examining the matter closely he adjudged that Desmond owed reparation to Ormonde for the destruction of his lands, on hearing which the Earl made "sundry and several speeches of very hard digestion, falling into some disallowable heats and passions," not, perhaps, surprising in a man who had been mulcted of £20,000. Sidney did not like Desmond, he found him "a man void of judgment to govern or will to be ruled," and his country, from Youghal to the borders of Limerick, "like as I never was in a more pleasant country in my life, so never saw I a more waste and desolate land...There I heard such lamentable cries and doleful complaints made by that small remnant of poor people that yet was left, who hardly escaping from the fury of the sword and fire of their outrageous neighbours, or the famine,...make demonstration of the miserable estate of that country." He speaks of "the horrible and lamentable spectacles he has beheld, the burning of villages, the ruin of churches, the wasting of such as have been good towns and castles; yea, the view of the bones and skulls of the dead subjects who, partly by murder, partly by famine, have died in the fields, as in troth, hardly any Christian with dry eyes could behold." [3] All reports of the time confirm Sidney's observations. The rebels forced the peaceable inhabitants either to join them or to starve by famine. They also "sent naked to the city the men, not sparing (a shameful thing to be reported) to use the honest housewives of the country in like manner, and torment them with more cruel pains than either Phalaris or any of the old tyrants could invent." In this destructive warfare James FitzMaurice lent a hand. Among his feats was the taking of Kilmallock by a night surprise attack. The town was so wealthy that they were engaged for the space of three days and nights in carrying away its riches on their horses to the woods of Atherlow, and dispersing them among their friends and companions. They tore down and demolished the houses and set fire to the town "so that Kilmallock became the receptacle and abode of wolves in addition to all the other misfortunes up to that time." [4] These descriptions, which are hardly exceeded in horror by the account given by Spenser of the condition of Munster after the long Desmond rebellion, show the result of the fifteen years' misrule which had passed since Cusack had visited the province in 1553.

[3] Sidney's report to the Queen, April 20, 1567, in Collins's Letters and Memorials of State, i, 24 , Cal. S.P.I., Eliz., vol. xx No., 66 at same date.

[4] Annals of the Four Masters, 1571 (vol. v, pp. 1633-1655).

Sidney kept Desmond in his company as a prisoner, and placed the charge of his dominions in the hands of his brother, Sir John of Desmond, in whom he had much greater confidence. Sir John seems to have governed well and kept the country quiet. But this plan was suddenly brought to an end by the enemies of both. In 1567, while Sidney was in England, leaving Sir William FitzWilliam as Deputy, the two Desmond brothers were sent for as though for a conference in Dublin; they were captured and sent over to the Tower of London without Sidney's knowledge. "And truly," he wrote in after days, "this hard dealing was the origin of James FitzMore's [FitzMaurice's] rebellion and consequently of all the evil and mischief of Munster, which since hath cost the Crown of England and that country £100,000." This imprisonment was largely owing to Ormonde's representations, for he was high in the Queen's favour. In spite of the Queen's assurance to Desmond's Countess that the slight restraint to the Earl "would do him no harm," the two brothers remained in London for seven long years, part of the time occupying one small room and suffering often from cold and hardships. The accusations against the Earl were that he was still oppressing his tenants with "coyne and livery", that he was encouraging and siding with the Queen's enemies, and that he had committed against Lord Roche, the Lord Barry, and other chief nobles of the South such extreme disorders that Sussex was ashamed to go into them more closely, he having wasted the country "with as much cruelty as any foreign enemy, French or other, could use." Against Sir John there was no definite accusation. In their own country, meanwhile, their absence was taken advantage of by an elder brother, Thomas Roe FitzGerald, who had been set aside as illegitimate, to endeavour to establish his claim to the earldom, Ormonde helping him to carry on a civil war and devastate the country.

This attempt to unseat the imprisoned earl brought more actively into the field James FitzMaurice FitzGerald, the Earl's cousin, who stoutly supported the Earl's rights, and for the whole seven years fought on his behalf partly against the usurper, but more often against the Government, with forces strengthened by an intermixture of Scottish mercenaries. This James was a restless but brave and gallant man, quick-spirited and witty, of an adventurous and politic mind. He became the chief centre of Irish hopes and English fears in his day. His powers of organization were pitted not only against the astute policy of Ormonde and the ruthless severity of Fitton, but against the stern and untiring vigilance of Perrot. The latter was appointed President of Munster in 1568, but did not actually take up office till 1571. It had been one of Sidney's methods of governing the country to appoint Presidents in Connacht and Munster, these provinces being too distant from Dublin to be kept under the immediate eye of the Lord Deputy, and in constant need of a governor on the spot. The idea was a sound one, but the choice of governors was not always equally wise, and they were sufficiently removed from the central authority to be able to act almost independently. They governed in concert with the military authorities on the spot. Soon after Perrot's appointment Ormonde, who had returned to Ireland in 1569, was made General for Munster, Lord Deputy FitzWilliam having declared in a letter to Burghley that the South was always the "ticklish" part of Ireland and that Ormonde alone could manage it. Ormonde was given a free hand in his enemy's country, even at a moment when his own brothers were in open rebellion. He was authorized to "banish and vanquish those cankered Desmonds," and Pelham, the Lord Justice, who had been sent down to Munster only to find "the burden of this service too hard" for him, approved the appointment, Ormonde being thought "a hard match for Desmond" even in his private dealings, and without the aid of the Queen's forces.[5] Complaints were later laid against Ormonde that he had not prosecuted the war against Desmond as vigorously as was expected of him,[6] but his own reports of his second campaign in 1580 was that he had executed and put to the sword forty-six captains and leaders under Desmond, with eight hundred notorious traitors and malefactors and above four thousand of their men, a record of services rendered that might have satisfied even a Tudor Government.[7] The result of it all is summed up in the Queen's complaint of Ormonde. She "found it strange" that after two years Ormonde, who had promised with only three hundred soldiers to reduce Desmond, yet having more than fifteen hundred had done nothing. "There were now a thousand more traitors than at his coming."[8]

[5] Carew, Cal., ii, No. 227, pp. 189-190 (December 26 1579).

[6] "Observations of the Earl of Ormonde's Government, as Lord General of Munster," Carew, Cal., ii, No. 494, pp. 325-327 (March 1582).

[7] Ibid., ii, No. 593, p. 415.

[8] Cal. S.P.I., Eliz., lxxx, Nos. 82, 87, pp. 289, 290 (1581).

Sir John Perrot, the blustering, choleric, energetic man who arrived in Ireland in 1571, was commonly reported to be a son of Henry VIII, whom he resembled both in appearance and character. "God's death," he exclaimed, when, on his return from Ireland he was tried on a charge of high treason at Westminster," will the Queen suffer her brother to be offered up a sacrifice to the envy of his frisking adversary?" A German lord who was present at his Parliament in Dublin declared that "he did never see any man comparable to Sir John Perrot for his porte and majesty of personage," while among his English associates he left a memory of hard usage and haughty demeanour such as none of his predecessors had done. He would have no chief come to his Parliament but in English attire, and provided cloaks of velvet and satin for those that had them not. It vexed him that they thought their native garb fitter for comfort and quite as rich. The Irish liked the bluff, hard-swearing, active Deputy, who never objected to lodge in a half-burned house when campaigning, and when the enemy took refuge beyond the bogs would "rip off his boots and plunge into the bog, driving them before him and his light horse with staves instead of pikes." He took his revenge on James FitzMaurice for burning the town of Kilmallock and hanging the chief townsmen at the market-cross, by putting the heads of fifty of James's followers in their place. He never forgave FitzMaurice for breaking his engagement, offered by the rebel himself and accepted by Perrot, to end the war by a hand to hand fight with sword and target, both clad in Irish trews. On the day appointed Perrot was at the place of meeting, resplendent in new trousers of scarlet and attended by the lords of the province to see the fight; but FitzMaurice did not come. The President was furious and swore "that he would hunt the fox out of his hole without delay." When FitzMaurice came in at Kilmallock and asked for pardon Perrot made him lie prostrate on the ground and placed the point of his sword next his heart. When, in January 1584, Perrot returned to Ireland as Lord Deputy, and found his old enemy planning to rise again and Turlogh inciting him to come out, he was told that FitzMaurice said "that since the Deputy had arrived he could do nothing." He put down the incipient rebellion without any delay, and he wrote to the Earl of Warwick after FitzMaurice's submission saying that the province was so quiet that "the idle sort fall as fast unto the plough as they were wont to run into mischief." Though Perrot's word was generally respected he did not scruple to take extreme means to attain his ends. He excused his capture of O'Donnell by saying that it saved blood-money; and he tried to suspend Poynings' Act when it suited his policy. It was to his suggestion that the Queen gave ear when, in 1573, she debased the Irish coinage and nearly ruined the country. He made many enemies, who slipped over to London to undermine his influence and finally succeeded in turning the Queen against him, and he only escaped execution by dying in the Tower before the sentence on him was carried out.

Toward the close of 1572 it had been decided to send Desmond with his brother home to his own country in the hope that his return would quiet the distracted land. He had long been only a nominal prisoner, having been released from the Tower in midwinter 1570, on account of the state of Sir John's health, and they had since been living with 'old' Sir Wareham St Leger at his house at Southwark and "ranging abroad in London" among their friends, restrained only from wandering outside the radius of twenty miles from the metropolis. Sir Wareham, who had always been friendly to Desmond, had been President of Munster before the appointment of Perrot, and was to return there in 1579 as Provost Marshal, a new post created during the rebellion. He was the pronounced foe of Ormonde, whom he accused on one occasion of treason, and there is no doubt that the Earl, placed between his rebellious brothers the Butlers on the one hand, and Desmond on the other, frequently played a doubtful part. His dealings in the field were clear enough but his private policy was less certain. In January 1573 Desmond and Sir John were received by her Majesty, and she made an earnest appeal to them to be loyal and to establish their possessions in peace. Desmond was fully restored and an Act of Oblivion passed, the two brothers being accompanied to Dublin by Fitton, who was sent to restore order in Connacht. Fitton detained Desmond in Dublin for a further period of five months, and though he was only under an "easy restraint" the time was wearisome to a man who had already suffered long confinement, who was now pardoned and restored, and whose enemies were all the time, as he complains, "taking up his rents and revenues of which he had great need." An appeal to the Earl of Leicester in May failed to bring him his release, and at length, at daybreak one morning, he succeeded in making his escape from Dublin, and mounting a fleet horse he arrived safely, five days later, in the wild fastnesses of Kerry. Once among his own people, he flung off English dress and instantly set about arranging a new combination with Turlogh O'Neill, the sons of Clanricarde, and "all the gentlemen of Thomond."

His cousin, James FitzMaurice, who had so faithfully upheld his claims during his long imprisonment, now naturally looked for some reward of his fidelity. He asked that some lands should be assigned to him from the wide Desmond territories on which he might settle down. But the Countess, Dame Eleanor Butler,[9] desired to preserve the earldom intact for her only son, and vehemently opposed any division of the property. Disgusted by his cousin's ingratitude, James flung himself into rebellion, "studying nothing day nor night, but how to procure to stir both heaven, earth and hell to do the Earl mischief." He entered into alliance with Edmond FitzGibbon, "the White Knight," the Seneschal of Imokilly, and others, and gradually their ideas enlarged and gave birth to wider schemes. The rumours of plans for planting Munster with English, the severe rule of Perrot, the religious disquiet, combined with the danger in which England stood from the machinations of France, Spain, and Rome, and the general unrest, suggested to their minds an armed resistance to England under the title and appeal of the Catholic League, and with the aid of foreign powers. James was advised to apply to France and Spain and lay before them his case. He was to complain how hardly the English used the Irish, "taking away from some their lands, from others their lives, and from all their religion." This service James FitzMaurice undertook. He fled to France and laid his case before the French king, Henry II, who was willing enough to assist him but was dissuaded by his counsellors. Failing here, he went on to Spain, but Philip had then newly made peace with the English Queen and sent on James to Rome, where he found Pope Gregory XIII quite ready to lend his aid against the heretic queen. He had even cherished ideas of conquering Ireland for his nephew the Marquis Diergnoles, surnamed Bon Compagnion. He introduced FitzMaurice to the English adventurer, Stukeley, whom the Pope created Marquis of Leinster, giving him eight hundred soldiers who were to serve under him in Ireland; other troops subsequently added were, O'Sullevan Beare says, mostly Italian desperadoes whom the Pope wished to get rid of out of Italy; all these were to be paid out of the Papal exchequer.

[9] Desmond's first wife, Joan, had died in 1565. It was singular that he should again marry into the family of the Butlers.

It would seem that James was acting independently of Desmond. There had been "hot wars" between them, and they seem never to have been on good terms; on James's return Desmond refused to join him and declared his intention of marching against him. In February 1576, when Sidney was touring the South, Desmond "very honourably attended on" him, offering fealty and service to the Queen. FitzMaurice was then at St Malo, "keeping great port, himself and his family well apparelled and full of money; having oft intelligence from Rome and out of Spain; not much relief from the French king, that I [Sidney] can perceive, yet oft visited by men of good countenance." Sidney believed that if James landed while he was in the North, he might take and do what he would with Kinsale, Cork, Youghal, Kilmallock, and even Limerick, so great was his credit among the people. He urgently pleaded for the coming of Sir William Drury, as being the only man able to deal with the situation.[10] James, meanwhile, was getting more promises than performances from abroad, and, impatient to return to Ireland, he left Stukeley to bring over the troops and himself travelled back by way of France, where the new king, Henry III, received him graciously, promising everything he asked; thence he went to Spain and Portugal, finally landing on the coast of Kerry with three ships, some money, and a few soldiers, and bearing the consecrated banner blessed by the Pope. With him came the afterward well-known Dr Saunders as his confessor.

[10] Carew, Cal., ii, No. 36, p. 42.

The news of FitzMaurice's intended invasion accompanied by French troops kept Ireland in a ferment during the years 1577-78; munitions and money were hastily sent over, and men were ordered to Ireland from Wales and the southern counties, while the coasts were patrolled by three ships set apart for that duty.[11] The Earl was becoming impotent; so weak of body as "neither can he get up on horseback...but that he is holpen and lift up, neither when he is on horseback can he of himself alight down without help." Sidney thought there was less danger to be apprehended from him than from any other member of his kindred.[12] The conspiracy was spreading into Connacht, however, and Malbie was kept busy trying to check it and to prevent a union with Munster, but Sir John of Desmond was contemplating an alliance with Mary Burke, Clanricarde's daughter, as a means to further the project of union between the provinces, "though he have another wife living, and she another husband." [13]

[11] Carew, Cal., ii, No. 59, pp. 84-85.

[12] Ibid., ii, No. 83, p. 127.

[13] Ibid., ii, No. 70, p. 110.

A chief organizer was the Dr Saunders whom FitzMaurice had brought over, and who was more sought for and more dreaded by the government than any of the heads of the rising. Large rewards were offered for his capture, but he seemed to carry his life securely in his hands. It was largely through his wider views of the European situation that what was at first a family feud developed into a formidable combination against England of which Spain and Rome were to reap the advantage. He succeeded in drawing the brothers Earl Gerald and Sir John of Desmond into the plot, and he was "made more accompt of " than twenty men; "yea! John of Desmond made more accompt of him than of his own life." He was the accredited envoy of the Pope, who gave him money for the enterprise. He was less successful in Lisbon, however, the King having requested him to depart on learning that he was fitting out ships for Ireland; while in Spain they doubted that any Geraldine was left alive in Ireland. When James FitzMaurice asked Saunders as to the progress he was making in fitting out ships in Portugal, and heard that the King refused to allow him any ships or soldiers, he is said to have answered, "I care for no soldiers at all; you and I are enough; therefore let us go, for I know the minds of the noblemen in Ireland." [14] James's proclamation ran as follows: "This war is undertaken for the defence of the Catholic religion against the heretics. Pope Gregory XIII hath chosen us for general captain in this same war,...which thing he did so much rather because his predecessor Pope Pius V had before deprived Elizabeth, the patroness of the aforesaid heresies, of all royal power and dominion, as is plainly declared by his declaratory sentence, the authentic copy whereof we also have to show. Therefore now we fight not against the lawful sceptre and honourable throne of England, but against a tyrant which refuseth to hear Christ speaking by His vicar." [15]

[14] "Examination of James O'Hale, Friar," Carew, Cal., ii, No. 474 (xii), p. 308, and cf. No. 307, p. 217.

[15] Ibid., i, No. 268, p. 400.

It is remarkable that, in announcing his war as a war of religion, the most formidable of all the Desmond leaders should emphasize the fact that he regarded the sceptre of England as a lawful one, against whose claims he would not contend, though he lifted up the banner of religion against the present Queen Elizabeth, who was held to be illegitimate on account of Henry VIII's marriage to Anna Boleyn during the lifetime of his previous Queen. James considered her as a usurper or "pretensed queen" as well as a heretic. It was only under such a banner that all the nation could rally. It had shocked the conscience of a Catholic people that a woman and a Protestant should hold herself as head of the Church. This view is quaintly expressed by Viscount Baltinglas in a letter to the Earl of Ormonde in 1580, when efforts were being made to bring him into the rebellion. He says: "The highest power on earth commands us to take the sword...Questionless it is great want of knowledge and more of grace, to think and believe, that a woman, uncapax [incapable] of all holy orders, should be the supreme governor of Christ's Church; a thing that Christ did not grant unto his own Mother. If the Queen's pleasure is, as you allege, to minister justice, it were time to begin; for in this twenty years past of her reign we have seen more damnable doctrine maintained, more oppressing of poor subjects, under pretence of justice, within this land, than ever we heard or read...done by Christian princes." [16]

[16] Carew, Cal., ii, No. 443, p. 289.

The news of the landing of James FitzMaurice and Saunders at Dingle on July 1, 1579, spread rapidly through Ireland. They had brought only three vessels and a few men, but were backed by unlimited promises from the King of Spain, who was said to be sending thirty thousand men, well appointed, with plentiful supplies of money and munitions, on whose landing it was confidently expected that the country would rise. Desmond and the Earl of Clancar swore a solemn oath to unite their forces, the oath being administered by Dr Saunders in the most solemn manner.[17] The Pope's banner was displayed, and the people were taught by Saunders that a new Government would settle them in their religion. Combinations were in progress in the North between Turlogh O'Neill and O'Donnell, the Baron of Dungannon and even Sorley Boy being drawn into the conspiracy, and there were rumours of great numbers of Scots assembling in Ulster under the direction of O'Neill.[18] The country was in a state of eager expectation and unrest. In Pelham's sarcastic words; "Since the advertisements of the foreign invasion every man here looketh about him, for howsoever the world may delight in change upon promise of golden mountains, I suppose it is now considered that what foreign prince soever come, he will not allow to any freeholder more acres than he hath already, nor more free manner of life than they have under our sovereign. And further, I am told that some of the traitors themselves begin to consider that the invader will put no great trust in those that do betray their natural prince and country ." [19]

[17] Ibid., ii, No. 304, p. 215.

[18] Ibid., ii, No. 172, p. 172.

[19] Pelham to the Earl of Leicester, Ibid., ii, No 316, p. 221.

The landing was ill-fated from the first. FitzMaurice was joined by Sir John of Desmond, a man little inclined to rebellion, but soured by his long and unjustifiable imprisonment in London. He was disappointed too because the birth of his brother's son had destroyed all his hopes of succession to the family estates.[20] The rebellion opened with an act of treachery on the part of Sir John. He was marching into Kerry with the aged Sir Henry Davells, High Sheriff of Cork, who was his foster-brother and had been his close friend. Davells had on more than one occasion used his money and influence on behalf of Sir John when he was in difficulties. But Sir John now turned upon him in the middle of the night in Tralee Castle, where they had lain down together to rest. There he slew him in his shirt, three of his companions being slain with him. FitzMaurice professed the greatest horror of the deed; "to murder a man naked in bed when he might have had advantage of him on the highways" was wholly against his code of honour, and he refused to have any further dealings with Sir John during his lifetime, though the murderer defended his action by saying that the clergy had told him that it was meritorious to kill a heretic. Neither was the wild licence permitted by Sir John to his soldiery pleasing to his cousin. No news came of Stukeley or his reinforcements, and it was only later that it was learned that on his arrival with his troops in Portugal, the king of that country, who had always been opposed to the Irish enterprise, had bought over him and his men and had induced them to join a force he was raising to fight the Moors in Barbary. Shortly afterward the tidings leaked through that all of them had been cut to pieces by the Moors. Thus the hopes of foreign aid came for the moment to naught.

[20] This poor child, later to be known as "the Tower Earl," was born in the house of Sir Wareham St Leger, in London, of Desmond's second wife.

FitzMaurice himself fell in the same year (1579). His near kinsman, Theobald Burke, on whose assistance he had counted, took the field against him, and at Bohereen, five miles from Limerick, FitzMaurice found him stationed to impede his passage. He had left the main body of his troops behind him, not anticipating danger, but both parties fought furiously until a lad discharged his fowling-piece full at FitzMaurice, who was distinguished by a yellow doublet, and mortally wounded him. For a time he managed to conceal his injury and fell only after having slain both the Burkes and driven off their men. Then, exhorting the bystanders never to make peace with the English, the chief instigator and leader of the insurrection passed away. The widow of Theobald Burke, his kinsman, received head-money for his death, and his cousin, Maurice Fitzjohn, cut off his head. The body, wrapped in a caddowe, was buried by a huntsman under an old oak, but it was found, brought to Kilmallock, and hanged on a gibbet, where it was used as a target by soldiers "who in his lifetime durst not look him in the face." [21] The conduct of the war fell into the hands of Sir John, of whom the authorities said that he "slept not," the Earl declaring to the Lord Deputy that he was in no way implicated in the rebellion. Desmond seems to have suffered from the extremest pangs of indecision, natural enough in a weak man who had already felt the pains of long imprisonment and knew the certain end of a man accounted to be a traitor. The writer of the story of the Geraldines thought him "not well established in his wits." At one time we find him praying the Queen "for one drop of grace to assuage the flame of my tormented mind," while at another he throws himself wholly into the rebellion and "plainly puts on a rebel's mind." Elizabeth received his letters with promises of forgiveness and terms for his acceptance which the authorities in Dublin thought too liberal to be shown to him, and Pelham, then newly gone into Munster, in vain tried to induce him again to put himself into the power of the authorities.

[21] Russell, "Relation of the FitzGeralds," op. cit., p. 31.

The double game of dissimulation could not be kept up for ever. On November 2, 1579, Desmond was proclaimed a traitor.[22] That he had ever since his escape from Dublin been entering into combinations against the Government [23] and that he was now deeply involved in the new enterprise cannot be denied; but the terms of submission proposed to him by Pelham and Ormonde were such as he could hardly be expected in any circumstances to accept. They included the delivery of Dr Saunders and the strangers who had come over with him; the possession of his chief castles of Askeaton and Carrigofoill, and the prosecution of the rebellious members of his own family.[24] The curt and irritating letters of Pelham to the Earl also show a settled intention of allowing him no chance of escape.[25] Pelham's actions were swift and his method of policy clear. He sums it up in his report to the Queen on August 12, 1580: "I give the rebels no breath to relieve themselves, but by one of your garrisons or other they be continually hunted. I keep them from their harvest, and have taken great preys of cattle from them, by which it seemeth the poor people...are so distressed, as they,...offer themselves with their wives and children rather to be slain by the army than to suffer the famine that now in extremity beginneth to pinch them." [26] In the admiring records of his contemporaries Pelham was "a painful gentleman." It was in his period of service that the detestable system of warfare which would accept no submission except the suppliant came "with bloody hands," i.e., hands that were stained with the blood of some near relation who sided with the rebels, took firm root in English policy in Ireland. To do "some acceptable service" was Pelham's constant admonition to the chiefs of the insurrection when they wanted to come in; and it was by this means that the heads of the rebellion were cut off one after another.[27] The policy was carried on by Sir George Carew and his associates. Even Sidney, in the case of Shane O'Neill, had been known to adopt it. It was successful in quelling the rebellion, but at the cost of spreading throughout the country a universal mistrust even of a man's nearest friends and allies, who might, in an underhand fashion, be selling him to the Government.[28]

[22] The proclamation is given in Carew, Cal., ii, No. 146, pp. 162-163.

[23] Ibid., ii, No. 96, p. 135.

[24] Carew, Cal., ii, No. 140, p. 160.

[25] Ibid., ii, Nos. 142, 145, pp. 161, 162. The Lord Justice went down to Munster on the death of Sir William Drury (ibid., ii, No. 130, p. 157).

[26] Ibid., ii, No. 452, p. 293.

[27] Ibid., ii, No. 453, p. 293; No. 441, p. 287; No. 449, pp. 291-292; etc.

[28] Even so early as January 1568 the then Countess of Desmond writes that the country "is in such disorder that few men can trust a father, son, or brother" (Cal. S.P.I., Eliz., vol. xxiii, No. 16.11).

In 1579 Pelham has to confess that neither his predecessor nor he, even with the aid of the Earls of Kildare and Ormonde, "could get any espial for reward against the rebels," an avowal most honourable to the whole country, for the temptations both in money and personal safety were purposely made high. By the end of the war, however, the country was swarming with spies of all sorts—English, Irish, and foreign, working for the Government on the one hand and for the Irish confederates on the other. No man dared to trust the servant in his house, the tutor of his children, or the sworn confederate of his counsels. It produced also a contempt mingled with dread of the double-dealing of the English Government which has never been entirely dissipated. This is expressed in many of the finest poems of the period, which from this time onward become channels of protest against the dissimulation and terrors practised by the ruling powers.[29] All countries of Western Europe were at this period working by the same system of political corruption; the question appeared to their Governments, not one of morality, but one of high politics. And it has to be remembered that at the moment when the rebellion in Kerry and Cork was in progress, England was in a state of peril in which she has seldom stood before or since, and that the rebellion of the Desmonds was closely linked up with the expected descent of Spain upon her shores. Ireland was the weak spot, the place selected by the Spanish admirals for the landing of the men of the great Armada which was being prepared in Spanish harbours, and of which the handful of troops entrusted to FitzMaurice had been designed as the forerunners. It is little wonder that from the English point of view it did not appear a time for quiet talks with men in league with the enemy, when the expectation of foreign forces was making the whole country "stand upon their tiptoes." [30]

[29] Cf. Tadhg Dall O'Higgin's address to Brian O'Rorke in O'Grady's Catalogue of Manuscripts in the British Museum, p. 418, and Hull, Poem-book of the Gael, pp. 169-171; E. Knott, Poems of Tadhg Dall, ii, 72-79.

[30] Malbie to Leicester, Carew, Cal., ii, No. 460, p. 298.

There was no doubt that by the middle of 1580 the rebel organization was breaking up. Desmond's first act after his proclamation as a traitor had been to sack and burn the town of Youghal, which was betrayed into his hands by the Mayor and townsmen. The Earl of Clancar, at first his adversary but now his confederate, committed a similar outrage at Kinsale.[31] Ormonde, who followed Desmond to Youghal and was refused admission for his English garrison, took his revenge by hanging the recalcitrant Mayor before his own door, after which he entered the town and fortified it. Youghal had been one of the favourite seats of the Desmond family, and we may well believe the report of Pelham a few weeks later that Desmond was either dead or benumbed of his limbs by an extreme palsy.[32] Pelham got no commendation from the Queen for the severity of his actions. She was deeply displeased that Desmond had been proclaimed; and Pelham, "being utterly unable to bear her Majesty's indignation," besought to be relieved of his charge.[33] His wish was acceded to in the following year, 1580, when Lord Grey de Wilton was sent over to replace him. Meanwhile, Sir John and his brother played a slowly losing game. Pelham was as indefatigable as he was merciless. He and Captain Zouche ploughed through the bogs of Slieve Lougher in wet and stormy weather by a march of twenty-one miles to intercept Desmond, and it was only by chance that they were seen in time for the Earl with his Countess and Saunders to escape.[34] The terrible execution done at Carrigofoill Castle on March 25 struck terror into the countryside. The house was "circuited by the sea" and was held by sixteen Spaniards and fifty others, commanded by one Captain Julian, who said he kept it for the King of Spain. They fortified it by every device that occurred to them, but Captain Mackworth entered the outer walls after a fierce fight and drove the Spaniards up to a turret on the barbican wall; some of them sprang down from this height into the water to endeavour to escape by swimming, but were shot as they passed by. Others took refuge in the vaults. The Spaniards in the turret were seized as they came down and executed.[35]

[31] Ibid., ii, No. 184, p. 176.

[32] Ibid., ii, No. 214, p. 186.

[33] Ibid., ii, No. 224, p. 188; No. 226, p. 189.

[34] Pelham's report, in Carew, Cal., ii, No. 410, p. 267.

[35] Pelham's report, in Carew, Cal., ii, No. 349, pp. 237-238.

On the report of the fate of Carrigofoill, Askeaton Castle surrendered at once ard Ballylogh, Desmond's other castle, was vacated by its garrison, who tried to fire it as they left. The loss of the Earl's chief seats drove him back into the woods and secret recesses of Atherlow or the fastnesses of Kerry. From time to time he wrote long letters to the Lord Justice, who "pleasantly jested at these things" while his victim fled before him. He had many narrow escapes. On one occasion he was so nearly captured that his pursuers "found the aqua-vitae, wine, and meat provided for their dinner" and thankfully possessed themselves of the provision. Of the two, the English troops seem to have been often the worse off for food; supplies did not arrive and money was short, they were constantly ill and were always ready to mutiny in consequence. When Grey came down he reported that there was nothing wrong with the captains except that there were more sick than whole, Pelham himself was "touched with the disease of this country" and complained that the toil of the war was unfit for one of his years. The young military captains of companies that were now sent over were generally able officers, trained in that great school of warfare, "the wars of Flanders." Names like Mackworth, Zouche, Raleigh, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, are familiar in other connexions than the Munster wars. From a distance it seemed a lighter task to repress a rebellion in Munster or Connacht than to stand up against the trained armies of Spain or France in the Low Countries, under commanders of world-wide fame. But one after another learned by experience that "it was easier to talk at home in London of Irish wars" than to be in them, and one officer after another, distinguished in service abroad, lost his reputation in Ireland and appealed pathetically to be relieved of the thankless and interminable guerilla warfare that they met with in that country.

At length, toward the close of 1580, the confidence which had "so bewitched" the Irish of the coming of foreign aid met its reward. It was reported, and with truth, that a mixed force of from six to eight hundred Spaniards, Italians, and Basques had landed at Smerwick in Kerry, where the Earl still lay concealed when Sir John and Saunders, weary of Pelham's close pursuit and not too well agreeing with Desmond, went off to join the rising of Baltinglas in Leinster. An interesting letter from Captain Richard Bingham to Leicester written on October 18, 1580, from Smerwick Harbour, gives an account of the course of events. He had been sent round by sea and entered the harbour of Ventry shortly after the Spaniards, to find them fortifying themselves in that old fort of Smerwick which Pelham had carefully examined a few months before and had pronounced to be "a vain toy and of little importance;" they were now restoring it into a fort of passable strength. Since their time it has been known as the Fort d'Ore, or Golden Fort, from the exaggerated tales of the fabulous wealth brought over by the foreigners. Bingham learned from some French fishermen who had been captured by the Spaniards, but who had stolen away in the hope of escaping, of the disasters that had befallen the foreign fleet on the English coast. One of their largest vessels and one smaller ship had been lost sight of in the storm they had met on their way over, and only two ships and a galley remained. Of these the larger, a baskeyne of 400 tons, carried on board the Pope's nuncio and their colonel, both Italians; an Irish bishop; two preachers, Jesuits and friars, all Italians; with 400 men, some munitions, and 12,000 ducats in money. The expedition would appear to have been rather an Italian religious crusade than a Spanish army for the relief of Desmond.

The report of the mariners was that the vessels had on board "a thousand poor simple Bysswynes, very ragged, and a great part of them boys." Not an Armada, certainly, or likely to stand a siege by the trained troops of Mackworth and Grey. More than two hundred of the eight hundred men they brought with them had to be shipped back to Spain in the great baskeyne,[36]"sick and malcontent with the country and their evil and hard entertainment." Of the others "very many do die daily"; these Southerners being quite unable to endure the damp and storms of the Dingle in this winter season. No doubt it was some of these "wild Basques and straggling Italians" whom the State Papers report Ormonde to be busy chasing shortly afterward in the mountains about Tralee. Most of them seem to have been Italian brigands to whom Pope Gregory XIII had promised pardon for their misdeeds if they would join the Irish expedition. Bingham thought that only five hundred at most had survived of the original body. Already, by October 18, Ormonde had arrived before the fort of Smerwick with "divers English Captains" of whom Raleigh, Zouche, and Mackworth, were the chief, and had begun to skirmish about the fortress. There was little fighting. The Italian commander, San Joseph, was a coward, or else he probably could see at once that his ragged Basques, "most of them boys," could make no sort of stand against the disciplined troops outside. The black and white ensigns which they had hung out beside the Pope's banner had to be hauled down. Instead, the white flag was hoisted alone, and a parley called for.[37] Their camp-master and one Plunkett, an Englishman born near Drogheda, who seems to have acted as interpreter and guide, met Captains Mackworth and Zouche, who demanded their commander and, according to the official report, would agree to nothing but unconditional surrender.[38] "After they had remained some while in consultation, the Colonel and Captains came forth, trailing their ensigns rolled up and yielded to my Lord's demands and left pledges to yield up the fort the next morning." The Earl and Sir John, who had promised to relieve the fort with four thousand men, never showed themselves. The report continues: "The morrow after, being the ninth of this month [November], the forts were yielded, all the Irishmen and women hanged, and upward of four hundred Italians, Spaniards, Byskins [Basques] and others put to the sword. The Colonel, Captain, Secretary.

[36] Carew, Cal., ii, No. 482, pp. 314-316.

[37] W. Camden, Ann. Rerum Angl. et Hib. (ed. Hearne, 1717), ii, 342-343.

[38] Grey to Walsingham, S.P.I., Eliz., vol. lxxviii, No. 27 (November 11, 1580).

Camp-Master, and others of the best sort [were] saved to the number of twenty persons. Dr Saund[ers],...an Englishman Plunkett, a friar and others [were] kept in store to be executed after examination had of them..." At the end of this letter is added: "This day was executed an Englishman who served Dr Saunders, one Plunkett, of whom before is written, and an Irish priest; their arms and legs were broken and hanged upon a gallows upon the wall of the fort." Grey's own report to the Queen adds some details: "I sent straight some gentlemen in to see their weapons and armures laid down and to guard the munition and victual there left for spoil. Then put I in certain bands, who straight fell to execution. There were 600 slain...whereof 400 were as gallant and goodly personages as I ever beheld. So hath it pleased the Lord of hosts to deliver the enemy into your Highness' hands." [39] We learn from another report that Captains Raleigh and Mackworth,[40] who held the ward for that day, were those who led the slaughter in the castle, "many or most part of them being put to the sword." The tradition of the country, well known to Russell and believed by him,[41] though he was a royalist, was that Grey put the garrison to the sword in cold blood after having, on promise of their life, made them stack their arms and surrender the place, "for which breach of promise and bloody act her Majesty gave him small thanks." Tradition is often right, especially in Ireland, and "the faith of Grey" became a synonym for an atrocious perjury. In regard to the Queen's displeasure, however, her own letters show no sign of such grace in her. The only regret she expresses is that the principal head of the expedition had not been reserved for her own judgment, "either justice or mercy as to us should have been found best." It seemed to her reasonable that the principals should receive punishment before the accessories, which "would have served for a terror to such as may hereafter be driven to so wicked an enterprise." [42] They would apparently have received justice without mercy at her hands. It must be said for Elizabeth that when she was dealing with a rising of her own subjects only, such as Shane or Hugh O'Neill or Desmond, she was always disposed to employ means of pacification. The Queen's instructions to Grey on his departure show her anxiety for the good treatment of her Irish subjects. The soldiers are to be restrained and severely punished if they misconduct themselves; she confesses that "in truth, we being interested alike in our subjects of both regions, do carry a like affection to them," and that it is through "ill-disposed persons" that a contrary impression has been given. She excepts none but those who have been in open rebellion.[43] But an insurrection made in concert with her deadliest enemies, either in Scotland, France, or Spain, met with no mercy, as it seemed to her to have no justification; the dangers involved were too great, and no means were too severe to check or punish the fomenters or actors in such an enterprise. Any other sovereign in Europe would have thought the same. She appointed Zouche Governor of Munster, and Grey was promised that he should have no cause to "forthink [regret] his serviceable act."

[39] S.P.I., Eliz., vol. lxxviii, No. 29 (November 12, 1580); see also Hooker, in supplement to Holinshed's Chronicles, at date 1580. Grey's report does not agree with that made to Captain Bingham, in which it is stated that the best of the troops were reserved.

[40] Captain Mackworth was later murdered by the O'Connors. See Carew, Cal., ii, No. 495, p. 328 (March 1582).

[41] Russell, "Relation of the FitzGeralds," op. cit. (1638).

[42] The Queen to Lord Deputy Grey, December 12, 1580; Pope-Hennesey, Raleigh in Ireland, Appendix ii, pp. 212-214.

[43] Carew, Cal., ii, No. 422, p. 277 (July 15, 1580).

Zouche's first concern in taking over office was to lay hold of Sir John of Desmond, with whom were the MacSweeneys, and Dermot O'Sullevan, Lord of Dunboy, father of Philip O'Sullevan Beare the historian. Sir John was a far abler commander than his brother, and at the battle of Gort-na-Tibrid (now Springfield), in Co. Limerick, his vigorous onslaught had broken the English line and driven the troops to retreat with the loss of three hundred men. At this battle Dr Saunders, the unwavering supporter of the Geraldines, stood praying on the hill above the battlefield during the whole course of the conflict. In spite of official reports of his death at Smerwick, he is said to have died of hunger under a tree in Kerry shortly after this battle. He was a distinguished man, who lectured at Oxford and afterward at Louvain and wrote several controversial works.

Several times Sir John snatched victory from the troops sent to find him, and it was only by an ambush set for him by Zouche that he fell at last. Zouche was informed that Sir John had arranged to meet the son of Viscount Barry at Castle O'Lehan (now Castle Lyons) for discussion of their plans. Setting an ambush on the path, he awaited the coming of Desmond's small party, and surrounded them, but before they could capture Sir John he was shot full in the throat by one Thomas Fleming, who had formerly been his servant. His body was brought to Cork and hanged in chains over the city gate, where it remained as a spectacle to all beholders for three or four years, until a great storm of wind blew it off. The head was then sent to Dublin and spiked on the castle wall. Zouche sent to the Queen Desmond's "fair turquoise ring, set in gold," and it was suggested that her Majesty might do well to bestow on him the traitor's lands. The proclamation had promised £500 for the taking of Sir John; "but where," ask the official dispatches, "is the money?" [44]

[44] S.P.I., Eliz., lxxxviii, Nos. 14, 15 (January 12, 13, 1582).

The suppression of the rebellion was now practically accomplished. For two years more the feeble old Earl held out with his cousin Maurice FitzGerald, a gallant leader who subsequently rose high in the Spanish navy, until the Queen, wearied by the awful accounts that were continually reaching her of the condition of the country, offered a general pardon and Act of Oblivion to all who would come in, hoping thereby to detach the minor lords from Desmond's party and force him to surrender. A considerable number submitted, among them David Barry, son to Lord Barrymore, Patrick Condor, and the Seneschal of Imokilly.[45] Barry was most graciously received and was restored to all his honours and dignities on his father's death. The Earl, who was still in hiding in the woods of Aghadoe, but harassed by the untiring watchfulness of Zouche's troops, at last "growing feeble, and extremely falling sick," was betrayed by his own foster-brother, one Owen Moriarty, in whom the Earl reposed so much confidence that he was privy to all his secrets. He informed the garrison at Castlemaine that the Earl was to be found in a miserable hovel; here he was surrounded by the soldiers, who took him out and beheaded him on the night of November II, 1583.[46] One Daniel O'Kelly was rewarded for the act, but was later executed for highway robbery. Fifteen years later, Moriarty was hanged on a gibbet at his own door by the Lord of Lixnaw. All the Desmond lands were declared forfeited to the Crown.

[45] The Earl of Ormonde received 2109 gentlemen into protection in 1583 (ibid., cii, No. 123).

[46] Russell, "Relation of the FitzGeralds," op. cit., p. 39.

To the poor, Desmond's rebellion brought unrelieved misery, and when they met the Earl "they cursed him bitterly for the war." When, in 1580, Viscount Baltinglas endeavoured to stir him up to fresh efforts for the Catholic faith "his people came and cried with one voice that they were starved and undone, and therefore would forsake him in it, as not able to endure the war any longer." [47] They flocked over to Wales in such numbers to escape the miseries at home that West Wales was practically recolonized by them, Richard Griffiths, writing to Wolsey, speaks of twenty thousand as settling in Pembroke and Tenby, "most part rascals out of the King's rebellion, the Earl of Desmond, and very few out of the English Pale." They were "so powdered among the inhabitants" that in some villages "all are Irish except the parson." [48] Desmond's subordinate Lords, MacCarthy Reagh, Sir Dermot MacCarthy, and "other very great possessioners" in Cork complained that they were so exacted upon by the Earl that they were become in effect his thralls and slaves. Munster was becoming a veritable waste. The accounts given by Spenser show the horrors of the time, the inhabitants dying by the roadsides of hunger or endeavouring to subsist on herbs and cresses. It was left to the new planters to restore some show of prosperity and cultivation to the devastated regions.[49]

[47] Carew, Cal., ii, No. 457, p. 296.

[48] Ellis, Original Letters (1824), i, 191-194; Harl. MSS., No. 6250, fol. 20-24 (1603).

[49] Spenser, View of the State of Ireland (ed. Morley, 1890), pp. 143, 163.

END OF CHAPTER XV

XVI.—HUGH O'NEILL, EARL OF TYRONE

It is curious to reflect that the two men who are accounted the greatest representatives of the race of the O'Neills—Hugh, Earl of Tyrone, and Owen Roe O'Neill—may neither of them have been members of the O'Neill family, but were possibly the offspring of some otherwise unknown clansman of another name and ancestry. As we have seen, Hugh's father, Ferdoragh, called by the English "Matthew," and created by them at Conn's request Baron of Dungannon, was not acknowledged as an O'Neill by his own people or by Shane.

The popular suffrage would never allow that he was even Conn's illegitimate son, and the sept steadily supported Shane against him till Shane cleared his own path to the chieftainship by putting him out of the way early in his career. Hugh was this Matthew's second son, his elder brother having been put to death by Turlogh Lynogh O'Neill as a possible rival. Hugh was thus either Conn's bastard grandson, which by Irish usage might have been no impediment to his taking a position in the family or clan; or he was, with still greater probability, no relation at all.[1] Similarly, Owen Roe O'Neill was a son of Art, a natural son of Matthew, and thus again of doubtful paternity. But, whether legitimate descendants of the race of The O'Neill or not, these two bearers of the title worthily sustained the honour of the name and added lustre to it. Hugh, like his father, had been accepted by the English, and was supported by them against Turlogh, as they had supported Matthew against Shane. "He is the hope of all," wrote an Anglican bishop at a later date.

[1] His genealogy is given in Fynes Moryson, A History of Ireland from 1599 to 1603 (1735), i, 12-16.

Born about 1545, he was brought up with other royal wards at the English Court, among the young nobles and officers who were later, like himself, to play their part on the Irish stage. Like them, he served in the English army, and commanded a troop of horse in the Munster wars against Desmond. Gainsford says that in his youth Hugh "trooped in the streets of London with sufficient equipage and orderly respect." [2] In his home life in later days he encouraged the cultivated atmosphere of a refined gentleman, and he brought up his boys in the manner of young courtiers. There is a description of a visit of state paid to the Earl in 1599 by Sir William Warren, accompanied by Sir John Harington, the loquacious and witty translator of Ariosto, a vain, good-natured, and inquiring man, who has left us several interesting items of information about the experiences of himself and his cousins in Ireland. While Warren was engaged with Tyrone in discussing the purpose of his visit, Sir John took the opportunity of amusing himself with the Earl's two boys and a young scholar who was studying with them under their tutor, the Franciscan Friar Nangle, and examining them in their learning. He found the two lads "of good towardly spirit," their ages between thirteen and fifteen, dressed in English clothes like a nobleman's sons, with velvet jerkins and gold lace; of a good cheerful aspect, and both of them learning the English tongue.[3] Sir John presented the lads with a copy of his Ariosto, which their instructor took very thankfully, and afterward showed to the Earl, who must needs hear some part of it read, and seemed to like it so well that he solemnly swore that his boys should read all the book over to him. When the business of the meeting—the signing of a cessation of hostilities, "which he would never have agreed to, but in confidence of my Lord's [Essex's] honourable dealing with him"—was over, the ambassadors dined with Tyrone. "At his meat he was very merry, drank to my Lord's [Essex's] health, and bade me tell him he loved him, and acknowledged that this cessation had been very honourably kept." He praised the valour of Sir John's cousin, Sir Henry, and discoursed like a courteous and cultivated man of the world. Sir John also describes an al fresco feast "spread on a table of fern under the stately canopy of heaven." O'Neill's guard, for the most part, were beardless boys without shirts: who, in the frost, waded as familiarly through rivers as water-spaniels. Sir John adds: "With what charm such a master makes them love him I know not, but if he bid come, they come; if go, they do go; if he say do this, they do it." This charming picture of O'Neill's home life at Dungannon, near the waters of Lough Neagh, gives us, as it gave Harington, a new view of the Ulster "arch-rebel," and one that it is useful to bear in mind when we read of his wars and misfortunes. O'Neill, like Florence MacCarthy in Munster, was never a willing rebel; he knew the power of England, and he liked many of the men among whom he had grown up, and was liked by them in return. His protest "that he was not ambitious, but sought only safety for his life and freedom of his conscience, without which he would not live though the Queen should give him Ireland," may have been perfectly true at this time; but his ambition grew with altered circumstances, and in later days he definitely aimed at being ruler of a united Catholic Ireland.

[2] Thomas Gainsford, The True, Exemplary, and Remarkable History of Hugh, Earl of Tyrone (1619).

[3] Sir John Hanngton, Nugae Antiquae (1792), 11, 3-4, 6.

Hugh was the most English of all the O'Neills, and his desire to marry an English wife, however it may have been dictated as an act of policy, shows his intention to keep in touch with English life. His courtship of Mabel, sister to the Marshal Sir Henry Bagenal, was a romantic one, and only a man of determination would have ventured to carry it through. Mabel met O'Neill at Newry, soon after the death of his first wife, the sister of Red Hugh O'Donnell. He grew to have for her "a wonderful affection," and by every kind of entreaty sought leave to make her his wife. The Marshal saw many difficulties, and sent her away to the house of her sister, Lady Barnewall, near Dublin, in order to get her out of the way. But Tyrone, through trusted friends, was allowed to see her, and they plighted their troth with due solemnity, being married shortly afterward "very honourably according to her Majesty's laws" at a friend's house by the Bishop of Meath. Hugh carried his young bride of twenty off with him to his own country, "using her very kindly and faithfully, and promising to have an honourable regard of her to the contentment of her friends and allies hereafter." [4] But Bagenal, when he heard of the marriage, was overcome with "unspeakable grief." He considered that a stain had been cast on his family by his sister's marriage with a "rebellious race, which he and his father had spilled their blood in repressing," and he feared that his own loyalty and consequently his position were endangered by such an alliance. He never forgave it, and henceforth pursued Tyrone with unrelenting hatred, never losing an opportunity to do him ill. He refused also to give him the dower due to him as his sister's husband: a matter which was the cause of much dissension between them. It cannot be said that the marriage was a happy one. Fidelity was a thing unknown in Ulster, and when Mabel found that her husband "did affect other gentlewomen" she grew to dislike him and went to her brother to complain of his treatment of her. She died a year or two later; mercifully she did not live to see her brother slain by her husband's hand.

[4] C. P. Meehan, Fate and Fortunes of the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnel (1868), pp. 414-420, where the correspondence on this subject is collected ; and cf. Trevelyan Papers, ii, 101.

Much of Hugh's life after his return from England was taken up by disputes with Turlogh O'Neill for precedence. Turlogh had, as we have seen, been accepted by the sept as 'O'Neill,' and regularly inaugurated, and the Queen's offers to Hugh of the titles of Baron of Dungannon or Earl of Tyrone by no means compensated him for his inferior position in the view of the native population. There could only be one 'O'Neill.' It is true that neither Hugh nor Turlogh could lay any strong claim to the headship of the clan, which by English usage belonged to Shane, as eldest true son of Conn, and to his sons, Hugh Gavelock and his two younger brothers, held as hostages for the loyalty of their family in Dublin Castle. Hugh Gavelock "of the Fetters," who was born while his mother was being carried about by Shane in chains, hated Hugh his cousin, whom he looked upon as a usurper. In 1588 he denounced him to the Council, but before the day arrived the Earl had caused him to be seized and strangled. His enemies later said that the deed was done by his own hand, but Tyrone denied this, though it is certain that there was much difficulty in finding anyone who would lay his hand on the sacred person of an O'Neill. With the death of Shane's eldest son and the imprisonment of the younger boys Hugh's path seemed clearer, but "old Turlogh," as Hugh O'Neill's rival came to be called, showed no inclination to die, and continued to play an uncertain game sometimes for, and sometimes against, the Government. He lived till 1595, and during his lifetime it was impossible for Hugh to attain the coveted leadership of his sept, by the free suffrages of his people, though the recognition was of great importance to his projects. At last the clan began to see in Hugh a stronger leader and to transfer their allegiance to him, and he was elected tanist or next in succession in the same year in which Turlogh died.

The actions of Hugh O'Neill were being watched with curious interest by the Government. In person he is described as having a strong frame, though not tall, "able to endure labours, watching, and hard fare; he was industrious, active, valiant, affable, and apt to manage great affairs; of a high, dissembling, subtle, and profound wit. Many deemed him born either for the great good or ill of his country." This was the testimony of Mountjoy's secretary, who met O'Neill when he accompanied the Deputy on his expedition to the North. His subtlety was partly learned in the English Court, where intrigue was rife; it carried him through many pitfalls which would have wrecked a weaker or simpler man, and his power of "dissembling" often threw the authorities off the scent. The Government played off Turlogh and Hugh against each other, and at the battle of Carricklea royalist troops were found fighting on both sides. But on the whole the English supported Hugh, who now and for some time later was the open partisan of the Government. In the Irish Parliament of 1585 he presented his claims to the place and title of Earl of Tyrone, and they were not only admitted., but a recommendation was made to Elizabeth that he should receive back the broad lands forfeited to the Queen after the rebellion of Shane O'Neill.

With Perrot's letters of commendation he passed over to England, and in 1587 he obtained the Queen's letters patent for the Earldom of Tyrone, without even the reservation of "the great rent for the Crown," for which Perrot had stipulated. He agreed, however, to offer no opposition to the erection of forts on the Blackwater for English garrisons, though this was in the heart of his country, and close to his own castle of Dungannon. For the next seven years the Earl was, at first perhaps sincerely, and later nominally, on the side of the Government and in friendly relations with the Queen. But events were happening in the country that could not but profoundly affect his mind. In Ulster he saw the beginnings of plantations in the eastern province carried out in a high-handed manner and gradually, as they progressed, threatening to narrow his own dominions. In the South the second Munster rising was seething, ready to burst out on the first hope of outside succour, and tidings of great Spanish armadas once more filled the country. The need of a leader whom the people would accept as their head and as representative of the Catholic cause and who had the influence necessary to unite the interests of the North and South grew urgent, and Tyrone felt that he alone could be such a leader. But the steps that led up to this fateful decision were gradual, and must now be studied.

The year 1588 witnessed the wreck of the Armada on the Irish shores. The storm that brought destruction on the mighty galleons of Spain cast them far and wide around the Irish coast, on the rocks and islands of Mayo, Sligo, and Donegal. According to the Government returns twenty-three Spanish ships were wrecked off Ulster and Connacht and upward of seven thousand men perished there. The new Lord Deputy, FitzWilliam, a covetous man, made a hasty move across Ireland to Connacht to try to secure for himself the treasure said to have been cast ashore from the wrecked vessels. On the way he is said to have captured nearly a thousand Spaniards, but he captured little else, for most of the spoils had fallen into the hands of the natives. All he could do was to wreak his disappointment on the Irish chiefs who had shown humanity to the miserable Spaniards who had been thrown up on the coast in such dire distress, and to order the execution of all Spaniards taken alive, an order which was accomplished without any discrimination of the quality or rank of the prisoners. Bingham, reporting the losses in his province of Connacht, says that twelve ships were cast on his shores alone, besides others on the Out Isles, "the men of which ships did perish all in the sea, save the number of 1100 or upward, which we put to the sword; amongst which there were divers gentlemen of quality and service." It was, perhaps, hardly to be expected that any mercy should be shown to the men the expectation of whose descent on the coasts had been the terror of England for the last five years, and whose destruction was the removal of a national nightmare; but the seizure of Sir John O'Doherty and Sir Owen MacTooley, two lords well affected to the English, on the suspicion that they had taken treasure from the Spaniards, has no excuse. Old Sir Owen was released when Sir William Russell succeeded FitzWilliam as Deputy, but he died shortly after; O'Doherty, a peaceable and cultivated gentleman, was held for two years in confinement, and only received his release on payment of a fine. Treatment of this sort did not tend to strengthen the loyalty of the Northern lords at a moment when such loyalty was most to be desired.

An interesting account remains of the experiences of a Spanish captain, Don Francisco de Cuellar, on the north-west coast of Connacht, one of the most lonely and wildest parts of the country. His ship of twenty-four guns, the Don Pedro, was completely wrecked on a rock ever since known as the Spaniards Rock (Carraig-na-Spanaigh), on the north of Co. Sligo. The Deputy, riding along the strand on his way from Sligo to Ballyshannon, saw strewn upon the shore "as great a store of timber of wrecked ships, as would have built four of the greatest ships he ever saw...and such masts, for bigness and length, as in his knowledge, he never saw any two that could make the like," and the people of the country told him of twelve or thirteen thousand dead bodies that had been cast up from the wrecked galleons on that coast alone.[5] Captain de Cuellar, who escaped from the wreck on a piece of boarding and was flung with a few followers, "wounded, half naked, and starving," on the beach, made his way with difficulty to the castle of Rossclogher, a strong fortress built on a foundation of heavy stones laid in the bed of Lough Melvin and belonging to the chief of Dartry, MacClancy, a "savage gentleman, a very brave soldier, and a great enemy of the Queen of England." His ' town ' was formed of a cluster of primitive huts, which lay on the edge of the lake opposite his castle and surrounded by mountains; here his followers, large-limbed, handsome, active men, clad in rough frieze jackets and tight trousers under the broad shawl or mantle, and eating oat-bread and buttermilk, lived under the eye of their chief, ready at any moment to obey the call to arms, especially against the English garrison planted just outside their territory. The Spaniards finally made their way "by mountainous and desolate places" round the wild northern coast to Dunluce, everywhere hearing tidings of the losses of their country's ships. At Dunluce two great vessels had perished, one being the Rata, which carried the young nobles of the highest rank who had volunteered to serve in the Armada. The terrible hurricanes raging round the coast drove back on the rocks all who attempted to make a fresh start, and of the whole of the army only a body of six hundred men, wandering about on the North Donegal coast, who surrendered to Captains Richard and Henry Hovenden, when exhausted by want and lack of food, seem to have been saved. Captain de Cuellar and his small band were sent by Sir James MacDonnell of Dunluce to solicit the help of James VI in Scotland.[6]

[5] Cannon-balls and bones of the Spaniards are still from time to time turned up in the locality.

[6] A translation of Captain F. de Cuellar's letter to Philip II, recounting his Irish adventures, will be found in Armada Tracts, No. I, ed. Henry D. Sedgwick (1895).

This wreck of the Spanish vessels on the northern coast was one of the immediate causes of the rebellion of O'Neill. He was brought into direct contact for the first time with representatives of that power on which the Irish were beginning to depend to deliver them from the English yoke, a nation at open war with England. His natural sympathy for the unfortunate young nobles thus cast ashore was strengthened by the fact that they were his co-religionists, in arms against the "heretic queen." His enemies in his own family seized on his intercourse with the Spanish strangers to undermine his position with the Government, Hugh Gavelock being especially industrious in spreading about rumours of his disaffection. It was for this reason that O'Neill put him out of the way by strangling him. But for many years O'Neill was to play a waiting game, not daring, and probably not desiring, to come to an open breach with the Government. He fought beside FitzWilliam against O'Rorke and Maguire, and he made frequent submissions, "craving the Queen's mercy on the knees of his heart." He had allowed his country to be shired, but it was only with the greatest reluctance that he admitted sheriffs into Tyrone to execute English law. He had seen too much of their overbearing conduct in his near neighbourhood to desire their interference in his own country. It was largely on account of the exactions and cruelties of the sheriffs that Maguire had been driven to rise. He so much disliked their presence in Fermanagh that he had given three hundred cows to free himself from their presence. Nevertheless, Captain Willis was made Sheriff of Fermanagh, and he moved about the country attended by a hundred men and a host of mixed followers who robbed and spoiled the land.[7] Maguire drove them all into a church and would have put them to the sword but for Tyrone's interference. He made a composition for their lives and sent them out of the country. Whereupon the Lord Deputy sent an army into Fermanagh, proclaimed Maguire a traitor, and captured his castle of Enniskillen. This massive castle still stands, as it stood in Hugh Maguire's day, on an island at the junction of the Upper and Lower Loughs Erne, and it was fortified by a double ditch.

[7] Fynes Moryson, History of Ireland, i, 28 ; Lee, "Brief Declaration of the Government of Ireland," in Desiderata Curiosa Hibernia, i, 106 (1772). There is an unpublished tract by the same author entitled "The Discoverye and Recoverye of Ireland," written in 1599-1600, in the British Museum (Add. MS. 33743).

A contemporary poet describes in lively language a day spent within its walls; he speaks of the crowded courtyard of gentlemen, the minstrels and poets in the great hall, the artisans and craftsmen rimming beakers, forging weapons, dyeing rugs, riveting spear-heads; the women in their apartments embroidering rare tissues. Fighting men are everywhere, wounded men are tended by the leech, hostages come in, and prisoners are released; the sounds of the chase and the barking of hounds is heard without. They lie down to sleep knowing that long before dawn they will be up and away to raid a neighbouring town, to drive away its cattle, "to leave many a wife husband-less," and burning wastes behind their path.[8] Together Bagenal and Tyrone besieged this stronghold, Tyrone, who commanded the royalist cavalry, receiving a severe wound in the thigh while forcing the ford and pursuing the flying followers of Maguire up the bank. In the end the castle was captured only by the treachery of one of the defenders, who was bought over to throw open the gates and admit the English troops. The English entered, put all the defenders to the sword, and flung into the river the old people and children who had fled there for refuge. Bagenal and Bingham then retreated, the latter having brought up his Connacht troops during the course of the siege; but they left a garrison in Enniskillen to defend the castle against the army of O'Donnell, which was gathering for its attack. Tyrone, angry at the report to the Government sent by his old foe Bagenal, who took to himself the whole credit of the capture of the Castle and completely ignored Tyrone's large share in it, departed, wounded as he was, to his house at Dungannon, to brood over yet another cause of discontent.

[8] Poem by Blind Tadhg O'Higgin, who sang the praises of the Maguires and O'Rorkes at the end of the sixteenth century. He was murdered by the O'Hara family about 1617. See O'Grady, Catalogue of Manuscripts in the British Museum, pp. 430-432, and E. Knott, ii, 49-53.

O'Donnell, meanwhile, had brought up his army, and as soon as he heard that Tyrone was safely out of the way he laid siege to Enniskillen and reduced it to a state of famine. The English, hearing of the distress of the garrison, hastily got together a contingent of 2500 English and Irish fighting men, and sent up large supplies of meat, cheese, and biscuits.

O'Donnell appealed to Tyrone for help, thus placing him in a difficult position, for he was already suspected by the English; yet if he refused O'Donnell's request he would be accounted an enemy to the Catholic cause. He knew that O'Donnell was in correspondence with Spain, but that there was little immediate hope of fresh assistance from that quarter; and he thought O'Donnell's hosting to Enniskillen hasty and unwise. It was perhaps by his intervention that his brother, Cormac, came up to O'Donnell with a body of well-armed troops just as the English forces arrived, and as evening fell they poured into them a close and heavy fire of leaden bullets which continued all through the night. The next morning, as the English troops were endeavouring to get their provisions for the castle across the ford of Farney, they were resisted in a series of well-planned and brilliantly executed attacks, and completely routed; the troops, with their commanders, fled terror-stricken before the Irish, leaving behind their horses, arms, and baggage. Numbers sank in the river, and others stuck fast in the marshy ground on its banks. So great was the quantity of biscuits scattered in the ford that it became known as the Ford of the Biscuits (Beal atha na m-brisghi). The castle surrendered, and Maguire was restored. Then O'Donnell marched into Connacht, and slew every English settler he could find between the ages of fifteen and sixty who could not speak Irish, in revenge for the barbarities shown to the old people at Enniskillen. He left not an Englishman behind him outside the towns, for those that escaped his sword fled the country, railing with bitter curses against those who had brought them over into Ireland.[9]

[9] O'Sullevan Beare, Hist. Cath. Iber, Comp., vol. iii, Bk. II, chs. vii, viii, xi.

An incident which made a deep impression on Tyrone's mind, and which was undoubtedly one of the contributory causes of his rebellion, was the seizure of a brother of MacMahon, chief of Monaghan, who had surrendered his lands to the Queen and received them back by letters patent entitling him to hold under English law. He died without direct heirs, and his brother came up to Dublin to advocate his claims to the inheritance. He found that a bribe of six hundred cows was required of him before he could even get admittance to the authorities, and he was soon after clapped into prison. When he was released the Lord Deputy FitzWilliam promised to go himself and reinstate him in his property in Monaghan. They travelled north together, but hardly had they arrived when the unfortunate claimant was put into bolts, indicted, tried, and executed at his own house within two days, the jury being composed partly of soldiers and partly of his Irish tenants, who were kept close and starved until they brought in a verdict of guilty. The country he claimed was divided between the Marshal, Sir Henry Bagenal, and Captain Henslow, who was made seneschal of the country and got Mac-Mahon's house and home-lands; "and the Irish spared not to say that these men were all the contrivers of his death, and that every one paid something for his share." The Irish were no doubt right; and it was such high-handed acts of treachery as these that lay at the root of the rebellions of Tyrone's day and more remotely, but not less certainly, of the great outbreak of 1641.[10]

[10] The full account of this nefarious transaction will be found in Fynes Moryson's History of Ireland, i, 24-26. FitzWilliam denied that a bribe was accepted, but in such a matter FitzWilliam's word can hardly be trusted.

There was slowly forming in Tyrone's mind the project which was to occupy the whole of his future life—that of uniting the country in a Catholic League for the defence of their religion and lands, of which league he was to be the head and leader. He may already have consciously seen himself as the future king of a united Catholic Ireland, yet for the moment his "profound dissembling heart" managed to elude the suspicions that were rising in the minds of the officials both in Dublin and London. In London his address and courtierlike bearing so won their way that he always returned with fresh assurances of the royal favour; in Dublin he attended the Protestant service at St Patrick's with the Deputy, though the nobles of the Pale, when they had accompanied the Deputy to the church doors as they were in duty bound to do, were in the habit of "departing as if they were wild cats." [11] But actions of Tyrone that did not bear out these good signs of submission were constantly heard of. It was known that he was drilling soldiers on a plan of his own and that his whole population was rapidly being transformed into a disciplined army. By an arrangement with the State he had obtained the services of six experienced captains, ostensibly to train the six hundred men he was permitted to support to keep old Turlogh O'Neill in order. By constantly changing the men in these companies and putting in raw recruits as fast as the men were trained, he rapidly succeeded in making the whole male population into drilled men-at-arms. Another of Tyrone's activities that aroused suspicion was the erection of his new house at Dungannon.

[11] Lee, "Brief Declaration," op. cit., i, III. This memorial was drawn up for Elizabeth during FitzWilliam's Viceroyalty.

The Government, fully approving of such an advance in "civility," gave him permission to transport to Dungannon a great quantity of lead ostensibly to roof in the battlements; but ere long the rumour reached their ears that this lead was being used for making bullets. Bagenal seized the opportunity of representing the matter in the worst light to the Government, but Tyrone's explanations seemed so satisfactory that his offer to go into England to clear himself was not taken advantage of, and a sharp rebuke was administered from London to the Deputy and the Marshal for having used the Earl "against law and equity." It was during this period of uncertainty, when Tyrone seemed to the officials at one time the most loyal of subjects and at another the author of all the disturbances in the North "however he dissembled to the contrary," that Sir William FitzWilliam was recalled, and Sir William Russell took his place. Things had been moving rapidly, and by 1593 Hugh had made himself master of all Tyrone. He had drilled and armed large bodies of troops, and he was in communication both with the rebels in the South and with enemy powers abroad. With the close of the year 1594 friendly relations between Tyrone and the Government were broken off, and though attempts at agreement were renewed the tidings of the Earl's dealings with Spain, and the reports of his alliances and warlike preparations, were too well substantiated to be ignored. Shortly afterward he was proclaimed traitor in his own country. Coupled with him in this inclusive accusation were the names of O'Donnell, O'Rorke, Maguire, MacMahon, Sir Arthur and Henry Oge O'Neill, with several other of Tyrone's near relations. The accusations of treason were untried and unproven, and in many particulars the wrong done had been entirely on the Government side. But rumours of sympathetic risings in Leinster by the O'Byrnes and O'Kavanaghs and by the O'Connors of Offaly began to be heard of.

To be ready for all occasions three thousand troops were sent over, many of them seasoned men who had served under General Norris in the desolating wars in Brittany, and garrisons were planned for Ballyshannon and Lough Erne, to hold the interior of the country. Norris himself, an able commander who had made his name famous in the wars in France and the Low Countries, was sent at the Deputy's urgent request to lead his old troops and was given the title of Lord General, a title which excited some jealousy in the Lord Deputy as giving Norris a higher position than himself in the organization of the war. But Norris was most unwilling to come to grips with Tyrone, alleging that he had been too sharply dealt with; and it was clear that Tyrone himself was going into rebellion with the greatest reluctance. It was the intentional intercepting of letters which he had written to the Lord Deputy and Sir John Norris offering submission and appealing for milder treatment, "so that he might not be forced to a headlong breach of his loyalty," that finally decided him to take up arms. This fatal act was the work of his old foe, Bagenal, who was bent upon his utter destruction and held back the letters which might have brought about a fresh reconciliation with the Government.

The winter campaign of 1595 proved the efficiency of the training given to Tyrone's troops. The army at his command, though small in numbers and armed with inferior ordnance, inflicted on the seasoned soldiers of Norris and Mountjoy a series of severe defeats. Troops which had met and defeated the best armies of France and Spain on the plains of Flanders under the most renowned commanders of the day found themselves beaten in Ulster by troops that they had been taught to despise. Essex "unwillingly confesses" that the rebels have better bodies and more perfect use of their arms than the men sent over by her Majesty and regrets that their reduction is so costly in time, industry, and money. The conditions under which the English troops fought were different from those to which they had been accustomed in Flanders. Instead of trench warfare, mining and countermining "like moles," and long sieges, they now fought their way through a difficult country of wood and bog, every inch of which was known to their enemies, who blocked the gaps and passes, and barricaded the ways with solid barriers of timber, rushing down upon them from the heights and woods while they were entangled in the plains below. For whole days the Irish forces would skirmish on the borders of the dense forests, not marching or fighting in order, as Essex complains, but "only by the benefit of their footmanship coming on and going off at their pleasure."

With an army increased to four thousand men Norris marched north to relieve Monaghan, which the MacMahons were endeavouring to recover from the English garrison which held it. He first came in sight of O'Neill's army at Clontibret, holding the ford which Norris must pass in order to reach Monaghan. A sharp skirmish followed, in which the Queen's musketeers were twice worsted by the Irish, and Norris, who was leading them, had his horse shot under him. In Norris's army was a Meathman of great size and strength, who begged for a small body of cavalry that he might attack O'Neill hand to hand. They gripped each other with such force that both were dragged out of the saddle, but O'Neill slew Sedgreve as they fell, captured the royalist colours, and forced the troops to retreat. Monaghan had to surrender, and the fort of Port-more on the Blackwater was captured. Thus inauspiciously opened for Norris his first campaign in the North; he himself and his brother were both severely wounded in these wars.

The spring of 1596 saw a fresh attempt to patch up a peace. Once more Tyrone submitted at Dundalk, "craving the Queen's mercy on the knees of his heart," and he was followed by all the leaders in the North. He promised to renounce the title of O'Neill, to dismiss his forces, and to give aid to the English garrison on the Blackwater. In addition all his dealings with Spain were to be made known to the Government. But his prayer for full liberty of religion became more insistent, and he required the withdrawal of the English garrisons and sheriffs, which would have set his country free from English interference; these petitions were persistently evaded. Much desultory fighting went on during the following year, especially around Armagh and Portmore, the two positions that lay on the main path of entry into the province. Norris did not meet Tyrone again in the field. He carried his still strong and well-equipped army into Connacht to fight O'Donnell and his confederates, but with no more success than he had met with in his Ulster campaign. Though Norris was reckoned first in military skill as well as in valour of all the English commanders of his day, he was singularly unsuccessful in Ireland, and he is said to have railed terribly against the fate "which condemned him to lose in Ireland, the smallest speck of the wide world, that fame which his great valour and military skill had earned for him in France and Belgium." He did full justice both to the excellence of the leadership and to the valour and steadiness of the rank and file of the Irish armies he met in battle. Norris died in Ireland, a man admired and beloved even by his Irish enemies, who have ever shown a sincere appreciation of an honourable adversary.

In 1597 Lord Brough was sent over as Viceroy, and on his arrival he won over some of the Leinstermen and others by his courtesy and graciousness. He advanced against O'Neill, and occupied Armagh and Portmore, from which O'Neill had withdrawn his troops, but when he tried to advance farther north he found his way blocked by two camps, one of them held by MacMahon and Cormac, O'Neill's brother, the other by O'Neill himself and James MacDonnell of the Glens with his Scottish forces. They had intercepted him a short distance south of Benburb. Throwing a garrison of three hundred men into Portmore under Captain Williams, a capable officer, the Viceroy under the continual fire of the enemy attempted to construct a new fort called after the late general Fort Norris, but O'Donnell having effected a junction with O'Neill the Irish made a combined attack on the Queen's troops and defeated them. Rumour said that the Viceroy was mortally wounded, and it is certain that he had to withdraw from the conflict, dying a few days later. The command fell on the Earl of Kildare, who, flushed with his position of authority, endeavoured to push forward, only to meet his death, while his army, having lost several of their officers and a large body of their men, had to retreat completely routed. For about four months the royal army had faced the Irish of the North, but the only result of the campaign, which had been elaborately planned from Dublin, was that Portmore and Armagh were fortified anew. Furious fighting went on around these important forts, which had to be revictualled from the Pale. On one occasion Bagenal surprised Tyrone's camp at night, and nearly succeeded in capturing him; on another O'Donnell and O'Neill made a persistent attack on Portmore, endeavouring to starve out the garrison, but Captain Williams was a dauntless antagonist, and they were obliged to give up the attempt.

By August 1598 the sufferings of Captain Williams and his garrison in Portmore had become so acute that Marshal Bagenal determined on a strong demonstration to relieve the fort. The garrison would have been driven to surrender at an earlier moment had not a successful raid enabled them to capture some horses belonging to O'Neill on which they were subsisting with the help of every blade of grass which they could find in the enclosure. Bagenal, of whom O'Sullevan Beare speaks highly as "equally pre-eminent in council and in courage, cautious in prosperity, courageous in adversity," drew together an army of 4500 foot, under forty captains and officers of inferior rank, and 500 horse.[12] As usual there was a slight majority of Irish mercenaries, excellent marksmen and sharpshooters, and among the officers were some of illustrious Irish family. But all were veteran troops, either survivors of the picked forces of Norris who had endured with him the long wars in Flanders, or men who had fought in Ireland under experienced commanders and had become inured to the military tactics practised in Irish warfare. All were equipped with the best arms and armour known in their day. "Foot and horse were sheathed in mail; the musketeers were equipped with heavy and light guns, swords, daggers, and helmets. The whole army gleamed with crested plumes and silken sashes. Brass cannon mounted on wheels were drawn by horse, and they carried a large supply of gunpowder and ball of lead and iron. An immense train of pack-horses and oxen followed, both to feed the army and revictual Portmore."

[12] These are O'Sullevan Beare's figures ; the numbers differ somewhat in the different accounts, but all give the Irish an advantage. Hist. Cath. Iber. Comp., vol. iii, Bk. IV, ch. v.

On the other side the combined armies of O'Neill and O'Donnell, with their Connacht mercenaries under MacWilliam Burke, numbered about the same body of foot, though they had a slight advantage in the number of their horse. They were very inferior in equipment, all being light-armed except a few musketeers, who had heavy guns. On hearing of the advance of the Marshal, O'Neill moved his camp farther south, within two miles of Armagh, leaving a few men to prevent a sally from Portmore. He was in doubt whether to stand the chances of a battle or to retire into those wilder parts of his province where the English armies had always found it difficult and disastrous to pursue him; but a fortunate reminder by one of the family of the O'Clerys, the official chroniclers of Ulster, that St Ultan had foretold a Catholic victory on this spot, encouraged him to put the valour of his troops to the test, and in a spirited harangue he called on them to "defend Christianity, fatherland, children, and wives." "Victory," he declared, "lay not in senseless armour, but in living and courageous souls." O'Neill left nothing to chance. He posted his men advantageously on a part of the plain bounded on both sides by a marsh, between which he had dug a trench a quarter of a mile long to impede the progress of the enemy. Beyond lay an open stretch of plain that had to be crossed, led up to on the English side by a narrow roadway lying between low trees and shrubs. Into this shrubby ground O'Neill had sent a body of five hundred skirmishers, mere lads, but expert sharpshooters, who harassed the advancing troops and cut off many of them before they could extricate themselves from the lane and reach the open country beyond.

The English army was divided into six regiments, which were to unite into three bodies as need required, Colonel Percy and the Marshal, as commander-in-chief, leading the first division, Colonel Cosby and Sir Thomas Wingfield commanding the main body, with a third division under Colonels Cunie and Billing. They marched with a space between each of some hundreds of paces. Sir Calisthenes Brooke led the cavalry. After passing through the wooded country, the first bodies emerged on the open plain, and immediately turned and charged the skirmishers with cavalry. But O'Neill had dug numerous pits and trenches about the plain, covered with hay and brambles. Into these the heavily armed cavalry stumbled, breaking the legs of the horses and riders, and causing confusion in the rear. Nevertheless, they charged forward across the open, sorely distressed all the while by O'Neill's light cavalry, who wheeled round again and again, though each time they were steadily pushed back. The English mail-clad troops fought at close quarters with lances nearly nine feet long resting on the right thigh. The Irish light-armed men had still longer lances, which they grasped in the middle and held above the right shoulder, striking hard and with sure aim. They also hurled darts tipped with iron. One who was engaged in the fight thus describes the next incident in the battle from the English side: "After a mile's marching thus, we approached the enemy's trench, being a ditch cast in front of our passage, a mile long, some five feet deep, and four feet over, with a thorny hedge on the top. In the middle of the bog, some forty score paces over, our regiment passed the trench. The battle stood for the bringing up of the saker [a small piece of artillery] which stuck fast in a ford, and also for our rear, which, being hard set to, retired foully to Armagh." The vanguard, meanwhile, having succeeded in passing the ford and ditch through which oozed the dark water flowing from the bog, which gave this battle the name of 'the battle of the Yellow Ford,' were so distressed by the enemy that they were on the point of giving way.

Bagenal pushed up his troops to support them, and, having got them over the trench, he raised the visor of his helmet the better to survey the battlefield. Before he had time to close it again, a bullet had found him out; he was struck in the forehead, and fell lifeless to the ground. His own division fell into confusion, but the rear division, coming up ignorant of what had occurred, stoutly pressed on, only to find themselves surrounded by the main host of the enemy, who, at Tyrone's command, charged them so hotly that, their captains being nearly all slain, they had no choice but to turn and try to extricate themselves as best they could. But the dyke and ditch were even greater obstacles in their flight than they had been in the advance; and falling over one another the men filled the dyke and were trodden down where they fell. Young O'Reilley, called the Fair, who led a body of young Irishmen on the English side, tried to rally the flying troops. "He was to be seen everywhere amongst the combatants helping those most sorely pressed and in greatest danger." He was slain, fighting most valiantly. The flying troops were cut down as they fled back to Armagh to take refuge in the cathedral and churches, which were held by royalist garrisons, leaving behind them guns, arms, colours, and their entire commissariat. Armagh and Portmore surrendered to O'Neill.

This disaster to the English was largely owing to a fatal error in tactics on the part of Marshal Bagenal in allowing so large a space between the divisions that those in the rear did not know what was going on in front and were unable to be brought up at the critical moment. The divisions of foot were not only separated by distance, but hidden by the cavalry which occupied the gaps between them. The sticking of the artillery in the bog further embarrassed them, and gave the enemy an opportunity of which they took full advantage while they were held up without cover trying to pull out the guns. Undoubtedly O'Neill's dispositions were much superior, and he took full advantage of every point in the ground at his disposal. All the English authorities of the period agree that at the battle of the Blackwater, as they generally name it, the English met the most severe defeat that their arms had ever received in Ireland. O'Neill was left with a reputation which none of his countrymen could hope to rival, and while the remnants of the English drew off, by his permission, to Newry and Dundalk, all Ulster rose in arms, all Connacht revolted, and the insurgents of Leinster swarmed into the English Pale. Ormonde, when called upon to account for the defeat, gives the military reasons, but adds, in case these were not enough, "Sure the devil bewitched them." The Queen wrote angrily that in spite of great armies and excessive charges she "received naught else but news of fresh losses and calamities." She was angry that Ormonde, who was General of the army, had not been present in person, and still more angry with the Lords Justices that they had, after the retreat, "framed such a letter to the traitor as never were read the like either in form or in substance for baseness." Her maids of honour had to bear the brunt of the Queen's displeasure; "she doth not bear with such composed spirit as she was wont;...since the Irish affairs she often chides for small neglects, in such wise as to make these fair maids often cry and bewail in piteous sort." [13] But no anger could conceal the fact that this year was so disastrous to the English and successful in action to the Irish "as they shaked the English Government in this kingdom, till it tottered and wanted little of fatal ruin."

[13] Sir John Harington, Nugae Antiquae (1792), ii, 235.

END OF CHAPTER XVI

XVII.—ESSEX IN IRELAND AND THE ULSTER CAMPAIGN

It was at this moment of depression that the Queen, after long hesitation, decided to send over to Ireland the most brilliant and unstable of her courtiers, Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, son to the planter of Eastern Ulster. Though Essex was the darling of the English people and had long been the most distinguished man at Court and the Queen's favourite, he had not proved himself an officer worthy of confidence. His expeditions to Calais and Cadiz had ended in failure, and he had retired from Court in partial disgrace. When the proposal that he should go to Ireland was made he does not seem to have welcomed it with any warmth. He knew the army was disorganized, and he had probably no wish to risk another failure; it is quite likely that the talk of the courtiers was true and that Essex "went not forth to serve the Queen, but to humour his own revenge." Essex had enemies as well as friends; the Court was full of intrigues for place and favour, and he along with the rest intrigued for his own hand. He did his best to prevent the appointment of his rivals in the Queen's favour, and when he received definite news of his preferment he dashed off a letter to John Harington, who was to accompany him: "I have beaten Knollys and Mountjoy in the Council, and by G-d, I will beat Tyrone in the field; for nothing worthy of her Majesty's honour hath yet been achieved." [1] A scoffing courtier said that the Earl and Mr Secretary (Cecil) have so good leisure "that they ply the tables in the Presence Chamber, and play as much game as if Ireland were to be recovered at Irish bowls."

[1] Harington, Nugae Antiquae, ii, 30 ; Chamberlayn, Letters, December 20, 1598.

The preparations for Essex's departure were made on a scale of great magnificence. He was given powers never before entrusted to a Viceroy, with an establishment of 16,000 foot and 1300 horse. Troops were sent over before him, landed direct from the Low Countries. It was altogether the greatest army ever sent into Ireland; and he brought with him the flower of the English gentry in various positions of command. His instructions were explicit. He was to march direct to the North and bend all his strength against Tyrone, who was only to be admitted to mercy on making a simple submission without conditions. The planting of garrisons at Lough Foyle and Ballyshannon was to be his immediate object. He departed from London amid the plaudits of the populace, but men thought it ominous that before he got past Islington the sky became suddenly overcast, and a thunder storm broke. After a tempestuous voyage he landed in Dublin on April 15, 1599. On his arrival he was besieged with tidings of risings all over the country. Phelim MacFeagh with his sept of the O'Byrnes was up in Wicklow; in Kildare, James FitzPierce; in Carlow, the Kavanaghs. The O'Mores had resumed power in Meath and Kilkenny; Sir William Nugent and Viscount Baltinglas were assisting the insurgents. In the North only the garrison towns on the borders and Carrickfergus held for the English; the Irish and Scots alike were in arms, nearly 9000 men; Munster was in the throes of a fresh rebellion, and Connacht, after Bingham's period of chastisement, was seething with discontent. Altogether it was estimated that the total number of the 'rebel' forces in the country amounted to 20,600 men, of whom about 2400 were cavalry. Essex reports "that he durst boldly say that the plaister would do no more than cover the wound."

Induced by advisers on the spot he proceeded to disobey all his instructions. Undoubtedly the orders that he had received on accepting the post were dictated by a right view of the situation. O'Neill was the centre of the whole organization; to him Munster and Leinster looked for direction and leadership. The only sure strategy was to proceed against Ulster without delay while the army was fresh; for a defeat of the Northern forces would have disorganized the whole confederacy. Instead of this, the new Viceroy made a disastrous and ineffective raid into Munster and Leinster. His main object was the reduction of the castles, especially the strong castle of Cahir in Tipperary, held for Desmond by Thomas Butler. He also wished to effect a junction with Sir Thomas Norris, brother of the late general, Sir John Norris, who was President of Munster and was vainly endeavouring to stem the rising tide of rebellion which had been stirred up by the efforts of Owny O'More, who had been preaching with great success a war upon the English, and especially upon the newly established settlers in the south of Ireland. Sharp fighting was going on all over the country, and Norris himself had been severely wounded in the head. Essex set out from Dublin at the head of 7000 foot and goo horse. He was obliged to pass through Owny O'More's country, and he found that able and rebellious chief posted with 500 men on the sides of a narrow pass near Maryborough to prevent his passage. Allowing part of the army of Essex to pass in safety, Owny's men fell like an avalanche upon his rear, and cut them to pieces. The scattered plumes from the helmets of Essex's gallant followers so strewed the ground after they had pushed their way through that the place became known as "the Pass of the Plumes." Owny retired with the spoils to his fastness, and Essex, fuming with rage, wrote to the Council that on his return he intended to take revenge on the rogues who had the killing "of our base, cowardly, and ill-guided clowns." But as he progressed into Munster Essex began to find that fighting a country in arms was not a royal progress; though he does not doubt that the kingdom will be reduced, he has to admit that it will ask, besides cost, a great deal of care, industry, and time.[2]

[2] Lives of the Devereux, Earls of Essex, ii, 34-41.

The methods of Irish warfare embarrassed the new recruits; the Irish hung round the troops and never gave them an hour's rest. Essex's trust lay in sudden charges of his cavalry, which the Irish were unable to resist, but it tried him to send his picked men and young gallants into this kind of warfare. The only result of this expedition was the capture of Cahir Castle after a siege of ten days, and the strengthening of the garrison at Askeaton. By the end of July Essex had returned to Dublin, "his soldiers being weary, sick and incredibly diminished in number." In a letter to Southampton he complains that "without an enemy the disease of the country consumes our armies," and he is obliged, before entering on the main object of his coming to Ireland, the war against Tyrone, to appeal for a fresh body of troops to be sent over.

The Queen's wrath at Essex's ill-success, which was sedulously used by the Earl's enemies in London to prejudice his position at Court, was not likely to have been mollified by the news of two other disasters in Ireland which reached her almost at the same time. One was Sir Henry Harington's defeat by the clans of Wicklow on May 29. He had with him 500 foot and 60 horse, but was routed and cut to pieces through the cowardice of his troops, general panic having overtaken the whole body. Essex, on his return, decided to make an example of the survivors so that others might know "that the justice of a Marshal's court is no less terrible than the fury of all the rebels." The whole regiment was condemned to die, and one in ten was actually executed. The second disaster was the destruction of Sir Conyers Clifford's fine army on the Curlew Mountains in Connacht. O'Conor Sligo, who stood by the Government, and seems also to have been a personal friend to Essex, had for a considerable time been besieged by O'Donnell in the strong castle of Colooney, an apparently impregnable stronghold surrounded by a river and a wood, near Ballysadare in Sligo. It was the only fort in that country now holding for the English interest. Essex, hearing that O'Conor Sligo was closely hemmed in, and unable to get supplies, sent for Sir Conyers Clifford, who had replaced Bingham as Governor of Connacht, and consulted with him what could be done to relieve the fort. It was decided to send round Theobald Burke "of the ships" by sea from Galway to Sligo provided with supplies of food, and implements to erect a strong border fortress on the Ulster side, while Clifford himself was instructed to proceed from Athlone across the Curlew Mountains with all the troops he could collect, supported by some fresh men sent back with him by Essex.

There was no difficulty in raising a large force. Part of the family of the Clanricardes, Theobald Dillon, the O'Conor Don, some of the O'Flahertys, and MacSweeney "of the Territories," with their bands, Irish and English, flocked to the Governor's standard. They mustered twenty-eight standards, and marched away from Roscommon to Boyle, where they encamped in good order, certain that they were more than a match for any forces that O'Donnell could bring against them. The troop of horse named after the Earl of Southampton,[3] Shakespeare's friend and patron, accompanied them. O'Donnell, on hearing of the advance, left part of his troops under MacSweeney Fanad to invest Sligo, and ordered O'Boyle to continue the siege of Colooney Castle with two hundred men. He himself with O'Rorke and O'Doherty went forward and posted the troops at the head of the two passes across the mountains, one of which Clifford was bound to take. He barricaded the path with wood, and, as it was the vigil of the Feast of the Assumption, his soldiers confessed, and heard Mass early in the morning. They were about to sit down to breakfast when word was brought in that the standards of Clifford's army were visible toward the south, and that they were manoeuvring to find a way across the pass. This was unexpected, for the night had been so wet and foul that it was not thought that Clifford would venture to cross the boggy mountain; nevertheless, he had succeeded in reaching the open top of the pass and, dragging up his guns, had brought them into action, when, on a sudden, about eleven o'clock, the sun came out in splendour. A sharp encounter followed. The Irish were on the point of breaking when the whole situation was changed by the appearance of O'Rorke, who, with his men, had been lying in his camp among the woods and bogs on the east of the mountain waiting for O'Donnell's signal to take part in the battle. Clifford's men, wearied by their long march and toil in dragging up the guns, turned and broke. Clifford fell, mortally wounded, and his captain, Henry Ratcliffe, perished with him. The Irish pursued the flying soldiers as far as Boyle, slaying all they met; and only the men of the countryside, who knew the paths, made their way back to their homes.[4] Sir Conyers was as much bewailed by the Irish of Connacht as by his own compatriots; after their treatment by Bingham it was a new experience to be under a governor "who never told them a lie and was a bestower of treasures and wealth among them." O'Conor Sligo was incredulous when tidings reached him of his death, and there was nothing left for him but to make a full submission to O'Donnell. The latter restored him to all his lands, and thus prudently made him his friend for life.

[3] Southampton had come over to Ireland in 1599 with Essex, who had given him a command, but in July the Queen ordered his immediate recall, apparently for no other reason than to annoy Essex. Sir Griffith Markham Southampton's horse at the Curlews. He returned to Ireland in July 1600.

[4] Fynes Moryson, History of Ireland, i, 87-88 ; O'Sullevan Beare, Hist. Cath. Iber. Comp., vol. iii, Bk. V, ch. x ; O'Clery, Life of Red Hugh O'Donnell, ed. D. Murphy (1893), pp. 201-223 ; Harington, Nugae Antiquae, ii, 8-12.

It was a depressed Council that met round the table of Dublin Castle when the news of the defeat of the Curlews was reported. The army was reduced by the loss of a large part of its old companies and several of its most experienced captains, while the remaining regiments were secretly running away into England, revolting to the rebels, or feigning themselves sick. They would do anything rather than face the dreaded Tyrone in his own fastnesses. Essex himself speaks of the difficulty of a war "where the rebel hath been ever victorious," and his most competent generals advised that it was a course full of danger to begin a campaign in the North near the close of the summer season. Moreover, Essex was well aware that during his absence his position in the Queen's favour was being steadily undermined; and his fears were not allayed by a letter received from the Queen on the eve of his departure for the North. Elizabeth was a past master in the art of wounding with the pen, and she did not spare her Lieutenant. "How often," she wrote, "had Essex not told her that those who preceded him in Ireland had no judgment to end the war?" Yet he had failed as no other had failed, either to keep his promises or to obey her distinct commands. "You had your asking, you had choice of times, you had power and authority more ample than ever any had, or ever shall have; it may well be judged with how little contentment we seek this and other errors, but how should that be hid which is so palpable?"

In face of this letter, there was plainly only one course to take; and on August 28 the Lord-Lieutenant left Dublin for the North, his army being replenished by the two thousand fresh troops just arrived from England. He heard that Tyrone was already on the move "and hath sent for all that he can make in the world, bragging that he will do wonders." About September 4 they came within sight of Tyrone's army on the distant hills; and on the next day Tyrone's trusted counsellor, O'Hagan, came into the camp to demand a parley. Essex refused, saying that if Tyrone would speak with him he would find him at the head of his troops. The next day Essex marshalled his army on the top of a hill opposite Tyrone's forces, and some slight skirmishing occurred, but Tyrone again sent a message saying that he would not fight, but desired an interview with the Viceroy. Next morning the army dislodged and marched towards Drumconragh, but before they had gone a mile O'Hagan again met them, and in the presence of the Earl of Southampton, Sir Wareham St Leger, and others declared that Tyrone sought her Majesty's mercy, and he proposed a meeting at the ford of Ballaclinth, on the river Lurgan, which lay right in the way that his lordship was taking. Essex sent on two gentlemen to see the ford,[5] but they found the water so far out that they told Tyrone, who was there before them, that it was no fit place for the interview. He exclaimed, "Then I shall despair ever to speak with him"; but, knowing the fords, he found a spot higher up, where, plunging into the water, he stood with the stream up to his horse's belly, that he might be heard by the Lord-Lieutenant, who stopped his horse on the farther bank, where he stood alone, his troop having withdrawn to the hill behind the ford. For half an hour they talked, Tyrone "saluting his lordship with a great deal of reverence" and holding his hat in his hand. Later a second and more formal meeting was held, also at the ford, between six of Tyrone's chief supporters and six from the English side, and an informal truce of six weeks was arranged, to be continued for successive periods of six weeks till May Day, and only to be broken by fourteen days' warning on either side. Among those present at this parley was Sir Henry Wotton, the poet, who was afterward ambassador to the republic of Venice and Provost of Eton. He was acting as Essex's secretary, and must have been an interested spectator of the picturesque scene. Essex having given his word and Tyrone his oath, the Irish chief retired into his own country, while Essex "went to take physic at Drogheda," before he had to meet his sovereign's wrath at what she looked upon as a humiliating end to the greatest expedition ever sent into Ireland. When Essex a few months later stood his trial for his life his accusers made it one strong point for his condemnation that he had conversed for some space of time alone with the arch-enemy, the "traitor Tyrone."

[5] This meeting at the ford is an interesting survival of the old combats or debates at fords which formed the borders of territories.

When Essex fell the Queen said that she would have none other than Mountjoy to finish the Irish wars, for she believed that he alone "would cut the thread of that fatal rebellion and bring her in peace to her grave." Years previously, when Charles Blount was still a young student in the Inner Temple, the tall figure and sweet face of the lad had caught the Queen's eye as he stood, according to the manners of the time, watching the Court at dinner. "Fail not to come to Court, and I will bethink myself how to do you good," was the encouraging message she sent to him. But Blount was too shy to be a successful courtier. He would slip away to the wars in Flanders or the fighting in Brittany with Sir John Norris to escape from the weary intrigues of the Court or the jealousy of Essex, who was set on the ruin of both men. Refined by nature, loving a good pipe and a good table, beautiful houses and gardens, study and country life, Blount looked upon wars as things to be "hotly embraced" in the hope of more quickly returning to a quieter life. Essex thought him "too bookish" to succeed in Ireland, and, indeed, he carried the little peculiarities of a bookish man into his Irish campaigns, going out on his long marches with two, "yea, sometimes three pairs of silk stockings, three waistcoats, and a ruff, besides a russet scarf about his neck, thrice folded under it," into which was tucked away "the single lock of hair under his left ear" which bespoke the dandy. In his severest campaigns he would insist on a long sleep in the afternoon, and Tyrone used to say of him that "all occasions of doing service would be passed ere he could be ready to have his breakfast." Nevertheless, Mountjoy showed himself a man of great ability and the most formidable opponent that the Ulster prince had yet encountered. Unlike former generals, who fought only during the summer months, he was out all the winter long, allowing the enemy neither time to sow his seed nor to reap his harvest, and "breaking their hearts" by keeping them on the run when the woods would yield no shelter to their lightly clad bodies. Though he pursued the detestable policy, of which Carew was the supreme example, of admitting none to mercy but such as had "drawn blood upon" or betrayed their fellows, he gained the trust of the Irish by keeping his promise inviolably to those who submitted; his public word, once given, could always be relied upon. When Mountjoy landed in Ireland on February 26, 1600, he found himself surrounded by difficulties. The Munster rebellion was at its height, and Carew, who had crossed over with him, was dispatched to quell the disturbance in that province. Leix was 'out' under the irrepressible Owny O'More, and the power of Tyrone extended southward to the borders of the Pale. The encouraging advice that Mountjoy received on landing was "to credit no intelligence, which was commonly false, and to expect, besides the known enemy and a confused war, to find a broken state, a dangerous council, and false-hearted subjects."[6] He soon learned that the Queen had few subjects of any sort who had not some kind of intelligence with Tyrone, even Ormonde being distrusted. The old army was so depleted that out of one company only three men could be found, and the Government was calling for reductions in expenses at the same moment that the English of the Pale were refusing supplies.

[6] Fynes Moryson, History of Ireland, 1, 126.

Never had British power and British prestige sunk so low in Ireland. By a series of brilliant victories O'Neill had made himself master in the North and virtual King of Ireland. Both at home and abroad he was looked upon as the head of a Catholic League recognized by the Pope, who sent him in 1599 a crown of peacock's feathers and the title of "the Magnanimous Prince O'Neill." [7] The promises of Spanish help once more grew loud, and the dreams of Elizabeth and Cecil were disturbed by the important problem as to where the Spaniards were likely to land. Tyrone's armies were acknowledged to be better trained and more efficient than any that could be sent over. Mountjoy expected to find hosts of "naked people" in Tyrone's armies; but in fact he discovered that they were, in general, "better armed than we, knew better the use of their weapons than our men, and even exceeded us in discipline." "I received the charge on February 28," he writes hotly to the Council in London, "at which time I found the rebels in number and arms grown to the very height of pride and confidence by a continual line of their successes and our misfortunesthe army much discouraged in themselves and (believe rne, my Lords, for you will hardly believe) much contemned by the rebels." The moment was a critical one. In January 1600 a month before Mountjoy's arrival, Tyrone had carried out, almost without the cognizance of the Government, his rapid march into Munster to effect a junction with Desmond and incidentally "to set as great combustion as he could" in that province. His avowed object was to visit the Church of the Holy Cross in Tipperary, but the force of nearly three thousand foot and horse with which he arrived in Munster hardly supported the idea of a purely religious pilgrimage. He had come, in fact, to discuss with Desmond and the Southern insurgents a plan of united action for a general attempt to throw off the British yoke. He was joined at Cashel by James FitzThomas FitzGerald, the sougaun ('Straw-rope') Earl of Desmond, whose claims he had decided to support. He agreed to the election of Fineen (Florence) MacCarthy as the MacCarthy Mór, and the recognition by these two of O'Neill's paramount position had the result of gathering to him every man of note in the new national party which was now formed under his leadership For a few months, from March to December 1600, the dream of a united Ireland seemed to be realized, with O'Neill at its head.

[7] A crown of peacock's feathers had been granted by a former Pope to Prince John when he went over to Ireland in 1185. Moryson says "phoenix feathers," whatever these may have been.

Once before, at the date of the battle of Down, had such a combination been brought about, also by the genius of an O'Neill, but, on that occasion, the hopes raised were destined to be shattered by the results of one fatal battle. Hugh O'Neill's struggle was a longer one. His objects accomplished and the South brought into close correspondence with the North, he retraced his steps to Ulster by one of those rapid marches which only Irish troops could accomplish. He completely baffled the watchfulness of the English, and reached his own country in eight days, having conducted a considerable part of his army all through Ireland from Munster to Tyrone. One incident during this short stay in Munster made a deep impression alike on the English and the Irish. Young Hugh Maguire, Lord of Fermanagh, had accompanied Tyrone to the South with his band of followers. He was a great favourite with his people, and during his absence his family bard O'Hosey, at Enniskillen, was composing in his honour an exceptionally beautiful lay, lamenting that in the icy cold of winter the young chief should be exposed to the impetuous fury of the heavens in some wet and grass-clad ditch in a stranger's land. The poet comforts himself by reflecting that Maguire surely will, according to his custom, warm his fingers by setting the whole country ablaze before his return home.[8] But Maguire was destined to no more such feats of war. While in the South, he was riding out one morning close to the gates of Cork to exercise himself and his troop when, either by accident or design, Sir Wareham St Leger and Sir Henry Power, also with a guard of horse, passed across their path. They were acting as commissioners for the province until Carew's arrival. St Leger and Maguire stopped short and fell into dispute. Sir Wareham raised his pistol and took aim at Maguire, while the latter, in order to ward off the shot, struck out at St Leger with his staff. Both fell, Maguire being killed on the spot and the commissioner dying shortly afterward from the wound in his head.

[8] O'Grady, Catalogue of Manuscripts in the British Museum, p. 451. O'Hosey's, or O'Hussey's, poem is familiar in Mangan's free rendering, beginning, "Where is my chief, my master, this black night, movrone?" O'Hosey was the last bard of the Maguires.

News of O'Neill's movements having been brought to the new Viceroy, he determined, without a moment's delay, to cut off his adversary's retreat. He sent hasty messages to the Earls of Thomond and Clanricarde and to the Mayors of Galway and Limerick to hinder his passage. There were only two ways by which the army of Tyrone could return, either eastward by the borders of the Pale or west over the Shannon, and the Earl of Ormonde advised Mountjoy that the latter route would certainly be chosen. But it soon transpired that Tyrone had broken up his forces, leaving a thousand men to assist Desmond and eight hundred with Richard Butler, under Captain Tyrrell, whom he appointed to command in Leinster. With his remaining forces Tyrone had, by what Mountjoy, when he heard of it, thought "an unreasonable day's march," slipped back into Ulster, only a few of his men being picked off by the Viceroy's half-prepared scouts. The intelligence of this extraordinary forced march only reached Mountjoy when he had arrived to begin his campaign in Ulster, and the annoyance was increased by the news which he received at the same time of Sir Wareham St Leger's death. Nor was he likely to have been cheered by the tidings of Ormonde's capture by the the O'Mores and of Carew's narrow escape on their journey into Munster. On May 5 the Lord Deputy with a large army started for the North. At Drogheda, or "Tredagh" as the English called it, he was joined by the troops returning from victualling Philipstown, and on Whitsunday morning he passed Moira and occupied Newry. He had with him some of the most experienced officers of his day: among others Sir Richard Wingfield, Sir Oliver Lambert, Sir Richard Moryson, Captains Williams and Blany, etc. Mountjoy's instructions were much the same as those given to Essex, but disobeyed by him; forts were to be built on Lough Foyle and at Ballyshannon to control Tyrone and O'Donnell from behind, and considerable garrisons were to be permanently placed in them. It was held that these could be victualled and reinforced by sea, and that they could keep in touch with Carrickfergus, the only fort in Ulster farther north than Drogheda, Newry, and Trim, held by the English. The considerable number of gentlemen's houses existing in the counties of Meath and Westmeath capable of entertaining large parties of officers such as Mountjoy brought with him made progress easy. In the midst of the terrors of the time it is curious to read such an account as that of Captain Josiah Bodley, brother of the founder of the Bodleian Library at Oxford, who arrived on Christmas Day 1602, after a cold ride over the mountains, at Sir Richard Moryson's house at Lecale. There, having consumed "plenty of tobacco in nice pipes, and Spanish wine flavoured with burnt sugar, nutmeg, and ginger," they sat over a large fire and "conversed profoundly about things political, economical, philosophical, and much else" after the manner of the much travelled and widely read courtier-soldiers of the day.[9]

[9] C. L. Falkiner, Illustrations of Irish History, pp. 336-337.

On a later journey from Trim to Athlone Mountjoy slept every night at some large house, probably many of them fortified, for the insurgents occupied most of the open country. He mentions the Baron of Tremblestown's house near the town of Mullingar, Sir Francis Shane's house at Ballymore, Sir Tibbot Dillon's and the Lord of Delvin's houses, and Bryan MacGeoghegan's castle at Danoar, all about ten or twelve miles apart from each other. We also hear of a ruined house of Sir Edward Herbert in a pleasant valley of Westmeath, of Sir Edward FitzGerald's house in a pleasant and fruitful district in Meath, of Sir James Dillon's "very pleasant house" at Moymeere, besides Ardbraccan, the dwelling of the Bishops of Meath. The most gracious and charming of all the gentlemen's mansions must have been Sir Garrett Moore's spacious dwelling at Drogheda, formed out of the ruins of the Cistercian abbey of Mellifont on the Boyne. He was a man of taste and culture, and his gardens were famous for their beauty. Sir Garrett, though an English planter, was a friend to Tyrone, and his hospitable house was always open when there was a chance of reconciliation between the 'rebel,' who had at times to remind his English foes that he was also a nobleman, and the Government.

Mountjoy's march to the Blackwater was designed to attract the attention of Tyrone and draw him southward while the main project he had in view was being carried out. This was the expedition fitted out under Sir Henry Docwra, who was meanwhile sent round by sea with 4000 foot and 200 horse to land at Lough Foyle and begin the erection of the fort of Culmore. Sir Henry, who had seen service in Connacht and was familiar with Irish conditions, succeeded in landing his men not far from Derry, then in an abandoned condition, containing the ruins of the old abbey and bishop's house, and of two churches and a castle.[10] They decided to make this the site of their settlement "as being somewhat high and therefore dry," and they built two forts, one near the castle and one beside the cathedral, for which they used the old stones along with those they dug out of a new quarry close at hand. They cut down trees in O'Kane's country, "but not a stick of it but was first well fought for," and they managed to establish themselves sufficiently to resist the attacks that were constantly made upon their fort. As soon as he heard of their success Mountjoy prepared to return to Dublin, but not until he had re-established a fort on the Blackwater, close to Tyrone's late home, which he had burned down with his own hands when he first got news of the English advance into his country. This fort Mountjoy looked upon as opening a permanent way into the interior of Ulster. He had had a sharp brush with Tyrone near Four Mile Water, and constant skirmishing went on, but he carried his point, and kept Tyrone engaged till the purpose for which he had come north was accomplished. He named his Blackwater fort after Sir John Norris, who had first projected such a fort at this spot. During the following year Chichester, the governor of Carrickfergus, erected two other forts, Mountjoy Fort and Charlemont on the Blackwater, a few miles farther north. By that time it was believed that the neck of the rebellion was as good as thoroughly broken.

[10] Docwra, " Narration," in the Miscellany of the Celtic Society, 1849, pp. 235-286, gives an account of his experiences.

Before his return to Dublin Mountjoy made a demonstration as far north as Carrickfergus. On his return journey he found the Irish forces posted strongly on the narrow passage at the foot of the Mourne Mountains which lies along Carlingford Lough. The thick woods which clothe the slopes of the hills down to the water were filled with Tyrone's men, fighting with all the advantage of the ground, and to get the guns through was a matter of great difficulty. Fynes Moryson, walking in his brother's garden six miles distant, "sensibly heard by reverberation of the wall the sound of the volleys of shot." The man next to Tyrone was killed, and, on the English side, many of the officers were sorely hurt. The Lord Deputy's secretary was killed, which brought Moryson, whose memoirs are our chief guide to these events, into Mountjoy's service. Captain Trevor, endeavouring to bring up the guns, fell, and the spot has ever since borne his name, as Rosstrevor.[11]

[11] Fynes Moryson, History of Ireland, i, 190-194. 'Ross' (ros) means a wood.

The building of the fort at Ballyshannon on Donegal Bay did not progress so well. It was in the heart of O'Donnell's country, and Sir Henry Docwra, a capable officer and honest man, well thought of by both sides, had his hands already full in retaining his hold on his two forts near Derry, with the O'Kanes (O'Cahain) on one side and the MacSweeneys on the other. He was sorely wounded by the slash of a forked javelin or staff in the head, and Chamberlayn, his second in command, had been killed in a skirmish. Food came irregularly, and his small companies were melting away.

It was the policy of the English, in such circumstances, to try to win over some member of the leading families by promise of reward. They offered Sir Arthur O'Neill, Turlogh's son, the title of Earl of Tyrone instead of Hugh "if the other that maintained the rebellion could be dispossessed of the country"; to Hugh Garbh or "the Rough" O'Donnell they offered the title of Earl of Tyrconnel instead of Hugh Roe, his cousin Both came in, and brought acceptable accessions of strength, as well as provisions, to Docwra. Hugh Garbh, though he possessed the full confidence of Hugh Roe, had long coveted his place and power, and the seizure of his castle of Lifford by his cousin decided him to go over to the English. He was not a very stable acquisition and gave both sides plenty of trouble. Docwra found him "like a quince requiring great cost ere it be good to eat; proud, valiant, tyrannous, un-measurably covetous, without any knowledge of God or almost any civility." [12] Unmeasurably covetous he undoubtedly was, claiming not only Tyrconnel, but Tyrone, Fermanagh, and all parts of Connacht over which the O'Donnells had ever had authority. "And he would have the people swear allegiance to him and not to the Queen." The English used him and then threw him aside, and even his own people did not regret his fate. O'Donnell found him a thorn in his side, "prying about to see whether they might get a chance of a prey for the English."

[12] O'Clery, Life of Red Hugh O'Donnell, p. clvi.

A great blow was given to O'Donnell's hopes when, instead of the Spanish armada he expected, a single vessel with quite inadequate supplies arrived in Donegal Bay, under the command of a Franciscan who came as joint envoy of Pope Clement VIII and of Philip III of Spain, but who brought little except the usual ample promises of support. His correspondence shows that the Viceroy was making great efforts for peace, "to all which they reply most honourably that they will hold out so long as they have one soldier or there remains one cow to eat," [13] It was on one of Niall Garbh's raids that Donegal monastery was destroyed by an explosion of gunpowder on August 10, 1601; hundreds of the besieged were blown to pieces, and others, including Niall's brother, were crushed under the falling masonry.[14] Later the few remaining friars crept back and rebuilt their cells; and it was within these ruinous walls that between January 1632 and August 1636 Friar Michael O'Clery and his fellow-workers compiled the Annals of Donegal, better known as the Annals of the Four Masters, bringing them down to their own date. The news that the Spaniards had landed in Kinsale caused O'Donnell to break up his camp and march south. On the day that this news reached Docwra, the English commander set out for Donegal and captured Ballyshannon. Thus the main purpose of his journey to Ulster was at last accomplished.

[13] Ibid., p. cxvii

[14] Ibid., pp. 289-291.

END OF CHAPTER XVII

XVIII.—THE MUNSTER PLANTERS

While Mountjoy was dealing with the Tyrone rebellion in the North, Sir George Carew was making his preparations to take up the Presidency of Munster in the place of Sir Thomas Norris, and to carry out the war against Fineen, or Florence, MacCarthy and the new claimant to the title of Earl of Desmond, James FitzThomas FitzGerald. This man, though he was known in his day as the sougaun (or 'Straw-rope') Earl, had as fair a claim to the title as many other Irish chiefs had to theirs. His father, Sir Thomas Roe FitzGerald, was eldest son of the fourteenth Earl, but had been disinherited by his father as being base-born. Nevertheless, he had been knighted by Sir Henry Sidney and had married a daughter of Lord Roche. Carew arrived in Munster shortly after the hurried descent of Hugh O'Neill from Ulster to form his combination with Fineen MacCarthy and Desmond. Hugh O'Neill had returned as the acknowledged head of the Catholic League, and the leader in the coming rebellion which was to combine North and South and to have the support of Spain, whose fleet was again daily expected on Irish shores. To the former cause of rebellion—the religious discontent—was now added the arrival in the province of a number of early 'planters,' who were establishing themselves securely on Desmond's properties even as far west as Kerry and were pushing out the old owners. Large schemes for the extension of these plantations were under discussion, and the old possessors saw themselves in danger of being gradually ousted from their lands.

The eight years that had intervened since the suppression of the first Munster rebellion had witnessed many changes in the occupation of the province. Long before the great confiscations which followed on the conclusion of the Desmond wars, isolated planters had been coming over. When Carew set out on his campaign he had in view as well the protection of the English settlers scattered up and down the country as the suppression of the rebellion. Men on the look-out for fortunes ready-made had been prospecting over the whole country before the end of the Desmond rebellion. They cared little whether the existing proprietors were of Irish or English race. Sir Peter Carew the Elder went back as far as the first Norman invaders to set up a claim, founded upon the marriage of a daughter of Robert FitzStephen to a Thomas Carew. His claim was so doubtful that, in spite of the industrious investigations of Hooker,[1] uncle of the author of the Ecclesiastical Polity, whom he engaged to make a pedigree, he was advised by the Deputy not to pursue it. Having made up his mind, however, "that there was not in Europe a more pleasant, fruitfuller or sweeter land than Idrone," he relentlessly pursued his claim and finally forced the then owner, Sir Christopher Chyvers, to acknowledge it. By Christmas 1568 he was extending a sumptuous hospitality from the old Carew Castle on the banks of the Barrow with Chyvers and the Kavanaghs alike holding of him their old properties. An old woman in the streets of Dublin pointed him out as "the man risen from the dead, to stir those out of their nests who thought to lie at peace." Carew's pretensions were one direct cause of the Butler wars of 1579-80, part of the property of Sir Edmond Butler, younger brother of the Earl of Ormonde, coming within his claims. Though the Butlers had possessed themselves originally of lands belonging to the Kavanaghs they "could not brook Sir Peter nor digest his manners, nor allow of his offers," which they looked upon as part of a widespread scheme to get rid of the present proprietors in favour of upstarts who had no real right to the lands they acquired. Sir Edmond flung off English apparel and "became not only like a meere Irishman but an Irish kerne," ranging and spoiling whole districts of the most English province in Ireland with fire and sword. The Butlers' wars and the Baltinglas rebellion added much to the difficulty of dealing with the Desmond rising, a considerable body of troops under Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Nicholas Malbie being drawn off to deal with it.

[1] For the career of Sir Peter Carew see Hooker, or Vowell, in Carew Cal., i, Introduction. This life has been repubhshed by J. Maclean (1857).

Lord Butler complained that he was attacked on one side by "the traitors James Fitzmaurice and MacCarthy Mór," and on the other by the Queen's troops and Carew, though he protested that he never was or should be false to the Queen or her Crown, and only sought to preserve his own. "This is the order nowadays," wrote Ormonde to Sir William Cecil; "I hope the Queen's Majesty, of her gracious goodness, will think of this manner of dealing with her subjects." Carew did not live to pursue his doubtful claims on Munster; he died suddenly in 1575, just as he was preparing to occupy the two fine houses he had built for himself in Cork and Kinsale, and left it to his kinsman, Sir George Carew, to revive the claim.

The real plantation began with the vast confiscations which followed on the Act of Attainder at the close of the Desmond rebellion in 1586, when over 574,000 acres of land in Munster were forfeited and vested in the Crown. Each "undertaker," as the purchasers of these properties were called, who took up 12,000 acres was required to place eighty-six English families on his estate. Great inducements were held out to suitable planters to take up land. Letters were written to every county in England to encourage younger brothers to become undertakers. Estates were to be held in fee at twopence per acre in the counties of Cork and Waterford, and to be rent free till March 1590, and then to pay but half-rent for the following three years. Their produce was to be transported duty free to any country in friendship with England, and they might import necessaries free of customs. The plan proposed was that each village or district in England should send a certain number of families complete with all the trades and kinds of husbandry that would be required in the new country; for it was intended that no Irish should be permitted to reside on these lands. But this idea was soon given up. Not only was it difficult to get the right sort of handy and industrious workmen among the hosts of idle men who flocked over, but the planters found it more profitable to retain the Irish on their estates. These were ready to give them the same services in labour that they had hitherto rendered to their chiefs, besides the fourth sheaf of all their corn, and sixteenpence yearly for a beast's grass, so that many "cared not although they never placed any Englishmen on their estates." The foolish and cruel law which would have displaced the natural inhabitants from their holdings fell into desuetude, as did many laws with a similar intent, through their own inherent folly. We find the people living on in their old homes, kindly to the English who had come among them, and perhaps glad of a change of proprietors which, under English law, made them the possessors of their own holdings.

A planter in Co. Cork named Robert Payne has written an interesting account of the experiences he met with on his estate.[2] He was one of those more benevolent settlers that we find here and there who, though they took advantage of the opportunity offered to acquire tracts of land in the fertile forfeited estates, had no ill-feeling toward the people among whom they came, and lived with them on terms of amity and mutual advantage. He took up land for himself and twenty-five partners, each of whom had 400 acres. He brought over with him one chief farmer and four smaller farmers, thus carrying out the intention of the Government proclamation; fourteen freeholders, forty copyholders, and twenty-six cottagers and labourers also accompanied him. His own family possessed 1600 acres, and he appears to have acted as manager for the estates of absent proprietors. He was an experienced planter, and he gives free advice to hesitating buyers, couched in a sarcastic vein. He bids intending settlers not to be discouraged by tales of the dangers of life in Ireland. Three of the worst dangers at least they will be free from. First, they cannot meet in all the land any worse than themselves; secondly, they need not fear robbery, for they have not anything to lose; lastly, they are not likely to run into debt, for that there is none will trust them. "The greatest matter which troubleth them is that they cannot get anything there but by honest labour, which they are altogether ignorant of." He has a high opinion of the Irish among whom he lives. He finds them quick-witted and of good constitution, keeping their promises faithfully, and more desirous of peace than Englishmen, "for that in time of war they are more charged." They are obedient to the laws, so that you may travel through all the land without any danger or injury offered by the very worst Irish and be greatly relieved of the best. He finds it difficult to tell what good fruits England hath that Ireland wanteth; while Ireland is situated more conveniently for the putting forth of all commodities than England is. This tract, written in 1589, gives us a new view of the general conditions in the South of Ireland after the close of the Munster wars. Though he tells us that most of the kerne or young fighting-men had been killed in the late wars, the better sort of the people are very civil and honestly given, and most of them greatly inclined to husbandry, though as yet inexpert. Some of them are so rich in cattle, through their great travail, that one man will milk a hundred kine and two or three hundred goats and ewes. This, after the devastations of the fifteen years' war, is surprising, and leads us to hope that parts of the country had suffered much less than others. He speaks of two very rich districts within the county of Limerick which had belonged to the Knight of the Valley, who had been executed for high treason, as "the gardens of the land" for the variety of their plants, grain, and fruits and the great store of venison, fish, and fowl they produce, though these are everywhere in plenty. The idle men going about the country after the wars he finds "not unlike our English beggars, only that they are not obliged to give any account of themselves, which should be remedied." Lastly he gives an account of their schools. He speaks of a grammar school he had visited in Limerick of 150 scholars, most of whom "spoke good and perfect English, for that they have been used to construe the Latin into English." Most of the people about him, he says, spoke good English and brought up their children to learning. Their hospitality was the proverbial Irish welcome, "more plentiful, perhaps, than cleanly or handsome; but though they never did see you before, they will make you the best cheer their country yieldeth for two or three days, and take not anything for it." Payne is of the same opinion as Thomas Stafford, Carew's secretary, that "her Majesty has a great number of loyal and dutiful subjects in this so great and fruitful country"; and that though in the Desmond wars he cannot deny there were many Irish traitors, "yet herein," he writes, "judge charitably, for such was the misery of the time that many were driven to this bad choice, whether they would be spoiled as well by the enemy as the worser sort of soldiers at home, or go out to the rebels and be hanged, which is the fairest end of a traitor. But as touching their government in their corporations where they bear rule, it is done with such wisdom, equity, and justice as demerits worthy commendations." He tells us that if a case is tried between an Irishman and Englishman the jury is formed half of each nation, and that at the assizes he has frequently seen well near twenty cases decided at one sitting, "with such indifference that for the most part both plaintiff and defendant depart contented; yet many that make show of peace and desireth to live by blood do utterly mislike this or any good thing the poor Irishman doth."

[2] A Briefe Description of Ireland (1589) in "Irish Archaeological Tracts," ed. by Aquilla Smith (1841).

Moryson complains [3] that the men of best quality who purchased estates never came over, and that of the two thousand able men who according to agreement ought to have been in the province he could not find two hundred. Most of them resold at enhanced rates in London; of those who did go, few carried out their compact to take over English families or build castles. When the new rebellion broke out most of them fled into the towns, and after the rebellion it was difficult to induce them to return to their estates. Those who remained made demands for horsemen to protect them. One of the largest of the planters, Sir William Herbert, whose Kerry properties amounted to 13,270 acres, and whose relations with his Irish tenants were of a most kindly nature, complains that in the surrounding undertakers he is associated with such lewd, indiscreet, and insufficient men as disgrace an honourable action, and that it is high time these frauds were met withal. Fineen MacCarthy too finds in the "outrageous words and violent deeds" of the settlers and soldiers alike a "ready way to make the Irish weary of their loyalty and of their lives." According to a list drawn up by Sir Edward Fitton and Sir John Popham, Attorney-General, the largest planters in the South were the two Herberts with over 17,000 acres, Denny and Brown with 6000 each in Kerry, at eight-pence an acre; Trenchard, Courtney, and Barkley, etc., 12,000 acres each, at fourpence an acre. Sir Edward Fitton, Lord Treasurer, one of the most avaricious men of his day, got 16,000 acres in Cork and Waterford. The generals and officials, such as Sir Wareham St Leger, Sir Thomas Norris, Sir Richard Grenfell, Sir Walter Raleigh, each received a large share. The latter got the enormous grant of 42,000 acres [4] in Cork and Waterford, most of which were later, by the influence of Carew and Cecil, sold to Boyle, "they being altogether waste and desolate, untenanted and of no value to him." Boyle does not say what he paid Raleigh for his property, but estates in Cork were selling for a penny an acre, in Tipperary and Waterford for 1 1/4d., and in Limerick for 2 1/2d., an acre.

[3] History of Ireland, i, 62.

[4] The grant was made in 1586. It is otherwise said to have been of 574,268 acres. As no one was allowed legally to possess more than 12,000 acres two other names were associated with Raleigh's in the list.

Besides his immense grants of lands Raleigh received the patronage of the Wardenship of the College of Our Lady at Youghal, with the exclusive rights to the valuable salmon fishery in the tidal waters of the Blackwater. The rich soil that stretched along both banks of the river was waste and neglected, and Raleigh was not the man to improve it. His restless nature and vain disposition looked for more rapid means of raising his fortunes than the laborious cultivation of the lands that had fallen, by Court favour, into his hands. Brilliant, stirring, and extravagant, even judged by the standards of Elizabeth's day, the man who sunned himself in Court smiles, and clad himself in cloaks and shoes heavy with pearls or diamonds, must have found the quiet of the beautiful little town of Youghal, with its memories of collegiate and monastic retirement, irksome to his nature. Raleigh's residence at Youghal was not his first visit to Ireland. He had come over in his youth as a needy Munster captain in that small band of horse which was commanded by his half-brother and fellow-adventurer Sir Humphrey Gilbert. That band, fresh from the ruthless wars of Languedoc, where Raleigh had seen the unfortunate peasants smoked out of the caverns in the mountains where they had taken refuge, only to fall upon the swords of the soldiery, brought to Ireland the same brutal instincts of warfare. Let loose upon Munster these young Captains did mischief altogether out of proportion to their numbers. Raleigh's first act had been in connexion with the execution at Cork in August 1580 of James FitzGerald, younger brother to the Earl of Desmond, and his next was the slaughter of the Spaniards and Irish at Smerwick, when he and Mack-worth were sent in "to do execution" on the inmates.

Raleigh held firmly the common belief of the day that all means were justifiable in dealing with rebels and that pity to the Spaniards who aided them was treachery to the State. But his harsh methods often defeated their ends; his capture of Barry's Court turned the wavering Lord Barry into an open enemy, and even for that age Sir Humphrey Gilbert's methods "had a little too much warmth and presumption," so that he had been replaced in the Presidency of Munster by Sir John Perrot. Their company was paid off and disbanded in December 1581, and Raleigh returned home. When he went back again in 1590-91 he was no longer captain of a troop of horse, but a Court favourite with large English properties, estates forfeited after the Babington conspiracies. He was Lord Warden of the Stannaries, and Captain of the Queen's Band; to these emoluments he added his great acquisitions in Cork. It was now that he found his friend Edmund Spenser at Kilcolman Castle, "under the foote of Mole, that mountaine hore," sitting, "alwaies idle," beside the restless waters of his loved Mulla stream, looking out on the distant Cork and Kerry ranges, and writing his immortal poem, while events like the Armada passed him by unheeded. Spenser came over to Ireland in 1580 as private secretary to Lord Grey de Wilton, and from that time forward most of his life was passed in that country. He held several appointments, being in 1581 made Clerk of Degrees and Recognizances in the Irish Court of Chancery, and, seven years later, Clerk to the Council of Munster. He had a great admiration for Lord Grey, whom all, he says, knew to be "most gentle, affable, loving and temperate, but that the necessity of that present state of things enforced him to violence, and almost changed his natural disposition," and he warmly resented the charge that Grey broke his word at Smerwick. But he fully approved of Grey's short and sharp methods of conquest and resettlement, and blamed the changes of policy and the weakness and corruption of governors "who thought more of their own ease and advancement than of the good of the State and country."[5] In the fifth book of The Faerie Queene Lord Grey de Wilton appears as Artegall, "the Champion of true Justice," whose "wreakfull hand" none could abide. He is attended by Talus,

made of yron mould,
Immovable, resistlesse, without end;
Who in his hand an yron flail did hould,
With which he thresht out falshood, and did truth unfould.

[5] Spenser, View of the State of Ireland (ed. Morley, 1890), p. 146.

The Faerie Queene was written at Kilcolman, a castle belonging to the Desmond family, which seems to have passed into his hands, with a grant of 3028 acres in Co. Cork, sometime after 1586. Kilcolman, now a ruin, was placed in a plain which commanded a wide view, shut in by the Ballyhowra Mountains to the north and by the Kerry Hills to the west. Here,

Under the foote of Mole, that mountaine hore,
Keeping my sheepe amongst the cooly shade
Of the greene alders by the Mullaes shore,[6]

[6] Colin Clout's Come Home Againe.

he wandered and sang in a solitude which at times was cheered by the visits of the "Shepherd of the Ocean," Sir Walter Raleigh. To an Irish reader Spenser's poems take a largely added interest from the fact that the incidents and the scenes he depicts reflect the conditions and scenery of Munster at a critical moment of its history. The startling pictures of wild life encountered by his knights are probably not greatly exaggerated reflections of actual stories brought to his ears. They approached all too nearly to the facts of life around him. On the outbreak of the second Desmond rebellion in the autumn of 1598 the insurgents wreaked their vengeance on him for his occupation of Kilcolman Castle by plundering and burning it to the ground. It is said by Ben Jonson that one of his babes perished in the flames. In poverty and deep distress Spenser returned to London, where he died shortly afterward.[7]

[7] Spenser's wife, Elizabeth, is said by a writer in the Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society (Second Series, i, 131-133) to have been a daughter of Sir Richard Boyle.

A figure very familiar in the neighbourhood of Youghal in the time of Spenser and Raleigh was that of the aged Dowager Countess of Desmond, about whom strange traditions floated. Widow of a man who, in 1529, had become Earl of Desmond at the age of seventy-five, and having survived him for seventy years, it is not strange that the 'Old Countess' became one of the wonders of her age. Rumour said that she was born in 1464, that she had been maid of honour at the Court of Edward IV (d. 1483), and that she had danced with Richard III when Duke of Gloucester, of whom she retained memories much more favourable than those which have come down to us. Her husband, Sir Thomas the Bald of Desmond, must have been sixty years of age when she married him. He was the third son of the eighth Earl, beheaded at Drogheda in 1468, and in spite of the efforts at reparation made by Edward IV, he and his brothers were in a constant state of suppressed rebellion; "with banners displayed they sought revenge." The Earl, who seems to have been an eccentric, had divorced his first wife, Sheela MacCarthy of Muskerry, to marry Katherine, who was eldest daughter of Sir John FitzGerald, Lord of Decies, and his cousin; he had on his hands the blood both of his late father-in-law and his first wife's brother. The castle of Inchiquin, where he and Katherine lived, must have seen wild deeds. He was so distrustful of strangers that, instead of bed and board, he provided a halter for them outside his walls "as though all visitors were spies and wizards." He took full advantage of the system of coign and livery instituted by his ancestor, the first Earl of Desmond, for he lived half the year upon his tenants; and he refused to pay one groat of yearly revenue to the Crown, in spite of his immense possessions in Waterford, Limerick, Cork, and Kerry, or to obey any of the King's laws. Henry VIII ordered the Earl of Ossory in 1534 to curb this fierce and grasping man, but he died in the same year at the age of eighty, leaving a grandson by the son of his first wife, who was brought up at the English Court and educated in the royal household. Disloyal Geraldines dubbed him "the Court Page" Earl, and he was subsequently murdered by Sir Maurice Dubh, or Duff, "the Black Geraldine," "a man without faith or truth, cruel, severe, merciless," whose murder of the "Court Page" Earl was the first step "to the overthrow of this honourable house of Desmond, God in revenge thereof not leaving one of the race of Sir John or Sir Maurice alive upon the face of the earth." Sir Maurice's son was the James FitzMaurice who aided Earl Garrett's rising.

After the death of her turbulent spouse the Countess lived on at Inchiquin Castle near Youghal, which had long been looked upon as a dower house for widows of the Earls of Desmond. She made over the property to Garrett, Earl of Desmond, then out in rebellion, but after his attainder it was granted to Raleigh, who recognized her prior claim in two leases drawn up by him. He knew personally the aged lady, who lived not many miles from his house at Youghal. When Boyle obtained Raleigh's lands the old Countess of Desmond, whose jointure came to an end at the age of the 'trust term' of ninety-nine years, leaving her reduced to penury, was obliged to revisit the Court to lay her case before Queen Elizabeth and prove her identity. She was accompanied by her daughter. Landing at Bristol, tradition says that the old lady "came on foot to London, as she was wont to walk weekly at home to Youghal on market-days. But her daughter being decrepit, was brought in a little cart, their poverty not allowing better means." Her appearance at Court created a sensation, and is mentioned in many of the memoirs of the day. Bacon says that tradition gave her sevenscore years, and Raleigh in his History of the World says, that she was alive in 1589 and "many years afterwards, as all the noblemen and gentlemen in Munster can testify." [8] She lived on till 1604, thus outliving at least three—tradition would make it six—of the Queen's ancestors and Elizabeth herself. She witnessed the great power and the downfall of the house of Desmond, caused partly through the misdoings of Englishmen, but largely also by the disregard of all laws, human and divine, by her husband and his kindred. She is said to have died from a fall while picking cherries from a tree in Raleigh's garden.

[8] The above details are taken from the Kerry Magazine, August and September, 1855; the Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, Second Series, ii, 145 seq. (1896) , the Dictionary of National Biography, and references there given. We give a remarkable portrait of the Countess from Knole. The portrait formerly at Muckross has recently been presented to the National Portrait Gallery, London.,/p>

Raleigh himself, in later life, after making experiments in plantations in other lands than Ireland, was condemned to spend twelve mournful years in the Tower of London, during some part of which another apartment in the same gloomy pile was occupied by the last of the Desmonds, the spoiler and spoiled being thus brought to one fate together. Like Florence MacCarthy, Raleigh endeavoured to while away the tedium of imprisonment by planning a history, and he carried out the compilation of his History of the World Florence's tract is a mere fragment, addressed to the Earl of Thomond, and mainly intended to prove that the Irish came from Greece.[9] At Youghal Raleigh made attempts to grow the potato and tobacco. His long imprisonment ended in his death on the scaffold—a fate that seemed to fall, like the judgment of God, on all those who held in their hands the weal and woe of Ireland, and who betrayed their trust. Among the 'adventurers' who built up the largest fortunes out of the escheated lands were Sir Valentine Brown, who bought up large slices of the MacCarthy estates from the spendthrift Earl of Clancar, and Sir Richard Boyle, first Earl of Cork, a man who arrived in Dublin in 1588 with £27 in his pocket, and who died leaving his family possessed of immense wealth, his daughters intermarried with the highest nobility, and three of his sons ennobled. The rapid acquisition of wealth by the clever and unscrupulous Boyle was so surprising that the Queen believed that he was in receipt of foreign supplies; but the easier method of ' finding lands by concealments ' provided all the means that Boyle required. He was imprisoned in 1594, and in the Munster rebellion he lost all his possessions, but such was his plausibility that he won over the Queen and was sent back as Clerk of the Council of Munster under Sir George Carew, and from this time his talents and energy ensured his rapid rise. To him it fell to convey to London the news of the victory of Kinsale, and it is characteristic of his enterprise that, leaving Shannon Castle about two o'clock on Monday morning, he delivered his packet to Sir Robert Cecil at supper on the following day, and before seven the next morning was explaining the details of the siege to the Queen in her bedchamber. His marriage with Sir Geoffrey Fenton's daughter was another step in his advance, and on the same day he was knighted by the then Deputy. Cecil writes to Carew: [10] "Boyle is accused by Crosby for I know not what; of cosining and concealing; one barrell little better hearing than th' other. Let me know therefore, whether you would have him favoured or no; truly the fellow seems witty." And Ormonde in December 1601 complains to Cecil: "One Crosby and Boyle have been the only means of overthrowing many of her Majesty's good subjects by finding false titles to their lands, and turning them out...By that means they got much lands for themselves, which manner of dealing brought much discontentment and sedition amongst the subjects." [11] From a material point of view, Boyle, soon to be created Earl of Cork, set about the improvement of his estates with vigour and success, building castles, bridges, schools, almshouses, and towns, and making such great improvements that Cromwell, when he visited the South, wished there had been an Earl of Cork in every province. He had, in fact, transformed great portions of the South from a desert into flourishing modern cities.

[9] There is a copy in the British Museum. (Add. MS. 4793, ff. 21, 22).

[10] Letters of Sir Robert Cecil to Carew, ed. J. Maclean (Camden Society, 1864), p. 146 and note.

[11] Ormonde contended that Crosby was of the family of the MacCossanes, hereditary bards to the O'Mores, but he himself denied this. His mother, however, was one of the O'Mores. He was in possession of property in the O'Mores' country.

END OF CHAPTER XVIII

XIX.—FINEEN (FLORENCE) MACCARTHY REAGH

At the time of the Munster rebellion three courses were open to an Irishman of position. He might renounce his comrades and fellow-countrymen, declare openly for the Queen, and aid the English army to repress rebellion in his part of the country. Such a course seemed to open a path of safety and self-preservation, and it was definitely adopted by several of the Munster gentlemen, such as Sir Cormac MacCarthy, Lord of Muskerry, and Sir Donogh MacCarthy Reagh, Lord of Carbery, whom Sir Henry Sidney called "especial and rare men," though a closer study of their character and motives will hardly endorse his verdict. Or he might become an open rebel and throw off his allegiance. Or, again, he might adopt the position of a neutral, and try to pursue his way undisturbed amid the warring forces around him—a difficult course in a country where intermarriage had linked the families closely together, and where the non-combatant was looked on with equal suspicion by both parties.

The history of Fineen, or Florence, MacCarthy [1] illustrates the career of a young chief who deliberately chose and faithfully endeavoured to carry through the rôle of a neutral. While abstaining from any betrayal of the cause of his countrymen, or from active participation with the Queen's forces, he yet professed, apparently with sincerity, loyalty and devotion to the Queen. His father, Sir Donogh, had proved his fidelity to the Crown during the course of a long life, and his services had been gratefully acknowledged by the authorities. Fineen, in the troubles of his later life, could always appeal to the allegiance of his father as a pledge of his own sincerity when his more dubious ways brought upon him the suspicion of the Government. Fineen had been brought up among English associations. At the age of twelve his father had sent him to serve in the English army, where he made many friends among the young officers, who continued to believe in his fidelity long after the authorities had begun to doubt it. His boyhood had been happily spent in open-air pursuits, breasting the waves that beat up to the walls of Kilbrittain Castle, or hawking in the mountains and woods of Carbery. His people were wealthy and lived luxuriously. One branch of the MacCarthys, represented by the Earl of Clancarty, was said to be worth £150,000 to £200,000 in King James II's reign. Long before any Geraldine had begun to carve out estates for his family the Clan Carty held all the province in subjection, "the continual memory whereof they yet use to nourish among them," as Sir Thomas Norris remarked in 1588. They felt all the old jealousy of their sup-planters, the FitzGeralds, so that it is not altogether surprising that two of the principal lords are found fighting against Desmond, the Ingens rebellibus exemplar, out of whose forfeited estates they looked to recover their lost status, and who was, moreover, only a usurper in his own family. The massive castles of Blarney and Kilbrittain, the headquarters, of the two chiefs, were only two out of the twenty-six strongholds built by this family in Co. Cork.

[1] Much information about Fineen (Florence) is collected in Daniel MacCarthy's Life and Letters of Florence MacCarthy Reagh (1867).

When in 1575 Sidney made his progress through the South he had been "very honourably attended by them and their ladies," and found them both good subjects, especially Sir Cormac, "who truly was a special man." Fineen, brought up amid these courtly surroundings and taught to look upon the Queen as his lawful sovereign, had more chances than most Irish youths to grow up "in civility," and though, when Viceroys were not by, he and his relations relapsed into the habits of the country, taking meat and drink by force from the freeholders of Carbery, besides special tributes in money exacted from his poor tenants, Fineen did not intend to sacrifice the special advantages gained from his position and training. He determined from his early youth to steer his way in the perplexities of the time between the rival claims of the English Government and the Irish gentry, to try to preserve his name and inheritance by an open profession of loyalty to the Crown, while keeping his hands unstained from participation in acts of hostility against his neighbours. In ordinary times Fineen might have succeeded in his aim. He might have kept close within the fastnesses of Carbery, and there lived the life of a powerful lord whose princely revenue would have enabled him to keep up large bodies of kerne and galloglas, always ready at his call. The MacCarthy family could put into the field 4400 foot and over 600 horse. But when Sir Donogh died in the third year of the Desmond rebellion, and his brother succeeded him by the law of tanistry, all Munster was aflame, and every man of position was called upon to take part for or against the insurgents. Fineen, as a minor, fell under the guardianship of Sir William Drury, President of Munster; but, unlike most wards, he was allowed to remain in his own country to assist in the pursuit of the unfortunate Desmond, instead of being sent to Dublin or London to be educated under the eye of the Government. From the outset of the rebellion he had served with the royal forces. At its close, at the age of twenty, he repaired to Court, was presented by Burghley to the Queen, and received, besides a gift of a thousand marks, an annuity of two hundred marks.

Taller by a head and shoulders than most men, winning in address, and the heir to great estates, Fineen made friends everywhere, from Cecil to old Lord de Courcy of Kinsale, who added to the young heir's personal possessions a gift of land including the Old Head of Kinsale, which Fineen had long coveted. The reckless follies of the head of his house, the Earl of Clancar, had given the young man the opportunity of enlarging his position by the purchase by mortgage of several of the principal fortresses in the Earl's country, especially of Castle Lough, one of the three great mansions "the owner of which might always look to be MacCarthy More." Before he was come to man's estate, Fineen was already taking steps to attain that coveted position, the end and aim of all his ambitions. The time came when his spendthrift and worthless uncle had little left to sell except his daughter Ellen, now, through the death in France of her dissolute and mean-spirited brother, become by English law heir to her father's estates. In 1587 it was rumoured that the scapegrace Earl intended "to prefer his daughter in marriage." All sorts of claimants appeared. Sir Wareham St Leger suggested to Sir Thomas Norris that it would be a good match for him. But Sir Valentine Brown, who had been buying up his lands, had the old man, as well as his castle of Molahiff, in his grip. He also had a son; and it was noised abroad that, for money, the Earl was ready to sell his only daughter to this son of an adventurer.

While all this was public talk Munster was startled by the quite unexpected announcement that Fineen MacCarthy had outwitted them all, and had, with the connivance of Ellen's mother, the Countess of Clancar, secretly married his cousin in "an old broken church." St Leger verily believed that, if it were duly examined, he was married with a Mass, being "very fervant in the old religion." All Munster was in a ferment at the news; even the native chiefs saw the danger of this alliance between the heirs of the MacCarthy Reagh and the MacCarthy More. It led to combinations between Sir Owen O'Sullevan and Donal na Pipy, the wild baseborn son of old Clancar and "the only man in these two countries that leadeth a loose disloyal life." Even greater was the excitement in government circles. Fineen's recent acquisition of the Old Head of Kinsale, his fluent command of the Spanish tongue, and his mother's relationship to James FitzMaurice, "the Arch-traitor," were called to mind, and it is no wonder that they thought it "greatly to be regarded to what end the same may grow." By way of precaution Norris apprehended all the chief actors in the drama, even the Countess, who was "the wife, sister, and daughter of an Earl, ever of very modest and good demeanour, though matched with one most disorderly and dissolute," awaiting the Queen's pleasure for further instructions.

The only undisturbed member of the group was Fineen, the author of all the turmoil. His wonderful address and power of making out a case for himself so impressed Norris that we find him writing to Burghley that, having become better acquainted with Fineen, he found that the lad had erred "in simplicity, not knowing her Highness's pleasure." His "good demeanour and carriage of himself " had completely won over Norris. Nevertheless, the lovers were divided, Ellen being retained in Cork "at large" and Fineen being sent for to London and imprisoned in the Tower, "the cause best known to your honours," as a bill sent by the Constable for his maintenance to the Treasury after eight months' internment puts it. A few weeks later Lady Ellen stole out of Cork in disguise, and for two years her whereabouts were unknown. When, at the end of two years all but twenty days, Fineen was set free on Ormonde's surety, and allowed to go about in London, his wife joined him, until their first son was born, when its mother took the babe back to Ireland, where he was carried about like a young prince, with a small body of horsemen in attendance.

It did not console Fineen to hear that Donal na Pipy, who became known as the "Munster Robin Hood," was preying his country, as well as making himself the terror of all planters, spoiling and killing them wherever he could, and taking meat and drink where he could get it. He threatened "all men who wore hose after the English fashion." Nor was it easy to sit still in London and know that his properties were passing into other hands, and that he was contracting heavy debts. Burghley would have let him go home, but the undertakers who were making a harvest in his absence were up in arms, and petitions poured in to pray for his retention in London. But in 1593 a change came about in Fineen's condition. The Queen had always believed in him, and now he was much with her, trying to induce her to agree that he was the only man who could deal with Donal. In later days Fineen "could call to mind none but benefits received from the Queen." There were even doubts in high quarters as to the legality of his seizure "against the Queen's word and bond." Cecil feared that the clapping up of the man without trial might prove scandalous. Fineen, in a letter written thirty years later said that his confinement had been contrary to the pleasure of the Queen, "who knew me well and whom I served long." He landed in Ireland early in November, carrying orders from Elizabeth to Viscount Barry, ordering him to pay over to Fineen a fine due to herself, and putting him into possession of one-third of his lands. She was steady in her support of his rights against officials and undertakers alike. "The poor English gentlemen," Brown, Sir Edward Denny, and Herbert, were more than annoyed that difficulties were put in the way of their pouncing down upon the estates of the man of whom, once he was safe in the Tower, they hoped to hear no more.

Old Clancar had ended his discreditable career, and Herbert thought it a good opportunity to add another 6000 acres to those he had already possessed himself of. It was no pleasure to have Fineen back, determined to fight tooth and nail for every inch of his lands. A great part of his life from this time forward was absorbed in litigation, while at the same time he was persistent in his attempts to be recognized as the MacCarthy More. All around him were persons eagerly awaiting his fall, that they might make their own profit out of his disgrace, and only his extreme wariness and knowledge of the men with whom he had to deal kept him for so long a time out of their clutches. He had with him the support of all who, like himself, were fighting the undertakers; but he kept clear of rebellion and was officially recognized in Munster as engaged in recovering the country of Desmond for the Queen and dispersing the mercenaries of O'Neill who were assisting Desmond in that province, while keeping his own sept out of action and chasing the "Munster Robin Hood," his own chief enemy, out of his ill-gotten gains.

But the action of the undertakers was gradually driving the chiefs who had stood by the Queen during the earlier Desmond rebellions to the side of the Queen's enemies. The rapacity of these men seemed limitless. Fineen refused to meet the Commissioners again, withdrew from Cork, and shut himself up in Kerry, gathering round him all Donal's adversaries and hiring what Barry called "cabbage soldiers" from Connacht. His action gave rise to fresh suspicions, especially when it was noised about that he had had a secret meeting with the sougaun Earl, and that they had passed a night together in the forest, sleeping in one bed, a sure token of amity. The actual object of the meeting was to get the Earl to swoop down on Barry, who had made his harvest out of Fineen's lands; but there is little doubt that he had begun to play a double game, and Fineen's enemies made the most in Dublin and London of this friendly meeting with the rebel Desmond, and did not spare to assert that they were acting in concert. When summoned to meet Carew, Fineen was prolific in excuses. He had begun to feel that it was unsafe to venture into the presence of Carew without an absolute and unconditional pardon for all possible offences and a safe conduct to go and return. What to make of him the President knew not. He confesses himself "fairly perplexed." He remembers him "a wise and civil gentleman generally beloved, and particularly esteemed by divers of extraordinary place and credit." If Fineen prove false "then he will conclude that there is no faith in Israel." The Queen, Fineen heard, still laughed at the folly of any who cast suspicion on him, and would rather have a piece of service from him than from others whom she valued not; but in Munster the youth hung over Carew's head "like a dark cloud." When other means failed Carew had a short way with rebels. He hired a ruffian to poison Fineen and when that was unsuccessful, he determined to get him into his power by any means, even by perjuring himself and falsifying the solemn oath of pardon and protection which he had recently made to him.[2]

[2] Magrath, the apostate Bishop of Cashel, appears to have been concerned in the plot to poison Fineen. Carew states darkly that he "is busily working ; within a few days the stratagem will either take effect or fail." Cecil professes horror at the idea, but he did not hesitate shortly afterward to approve the poisoning of Tyrone in the wine of the Sacrament—"through some poisoned hosts," as the official report runs—by a man who passed as a Franciscan belonging to the same infamous bishop's diocese. See Cecil to Carew, Letters, p. 49 (October 15, 1600) and p. 51 (November 8, 1600). Cecil is suspiciously anxious to have Anmies, his agent, hanged before he can accuse his masters of complicity.

In the autumn of 1600 the last Munster rebellion was drawing to a close. James FitzThomas was reported to be "no better than a wood-kerne," with only about four to five hundred followers left, lurking in the dense woods of Tipperary, and constantly on the move to avoid the agents of the government who were on the watch for him. A new effort was made by the authorities in London to bring the tragedy to a close. There was in the Tower of London a child, the son of the old Earl and Countess of Desmond, who had been held as a hostage since his infancy. By English law he, and not James FitzThomas, the sougaun Earl, was the rightful heir to the title, and it was now proposed, apparently on the advice of Cecil and Raleigh, to divide the Desmond interest in Ireland by sending over this lad, James, known by the mournful title of "the Tower Earl." The Queen was uncertain as to the wisdom of this policy, and especially of the advisability of creating him earl before he went over to Ireland, which was pressed upon her by Cecil. Again and again she took the pen in her hand to sign the patent of his nobility, and threw it down again. Suppose that, instead of dividing the province, the two Desmonds were to unite? Finally the patent was sent over, but not mentioned to James; it might be used or not as circumstances dictated.[3] Meanwhile, the youth in the Tower, about whom all the Court and all Munster were filled with rumours, was partially released from his long confinement and allowed to walk about London during the day, returning to lie in the Tower every night; further than that the Queen would not move. Cecil finds the young gentleman's disposition "tied to honest grounds, but spendful above measure," so that it will be necessary to have a wary eye over him. He suggests that it would facilitate the setting of Munster by the ears if some portions of Fineen's lands were assigned to this new Earl instead of those belonging of right to his own family; but Cecil does not expect that the "tender and sickly" lad, who had been reared without light or liberty, will ever like an Irish life; already, before he leaves London, he is begging to be permitted soon to return to the only life he has known within the gloomy Tower walls. It is darkly hinted to Carew that no blame will attach to him "for any caution (how curious soever) in the managing this young puer male cinctus," who is proud, and whose mouth may water to get back the undertaker's lands.[4] When, on October 14, 1600, the young Desmond landed it was already felt that the need of his coming over was past.

[3] Cecil to Carew, Letters, pp. 11, 15, 18, 25, etc.

[4] Cecil to Carew, Letters, p. 45. The correspondence between Cecil and Carew about this poor lad should be read by any who wish to understand the tortuous windings of the minds of those who guided the destinies of England in Elizabethan days.

Captain Richard Greame had fallen upon the sougaun Earl as he was marching into the forests of Atherlow, had slain his son and sixty of his men, captured his cattle, munitions, and all his baggage, and driven him and his army before them into Leix, killing them as they ran. It was a complete overthrow of the Earl and of the hopes of the Munster people, which were centred in him. He was forced to take refuge in an obscure cave "many fathoms underground," in the mountain of Slewgrott. There, hidden under bushes, he was run to earth on May 29, 1601, by his mortal enemy, the White Knight, Edmond FitzGibbon, brother-in-law to the Earl, of whom Carew had once written that "a more faithless man never lived upon earth."[5] He was now so fearful of losing the £400 reward offered for the Earl's apprehension that "he could not sleep at night for dread that some other would anticipate him." There is an Irish saying that expresses the feelings of the South on hearing of the arrest of the sougaun Earl: "There is no anger but abates, except the anger of Christ with ClanGibbon." [6] Fineen MacCarthy's opinion of the White Knight is expressed in a characteristic manner in a letter written to him in Irish which fell into the President's hands. As translated to Carew it opened as follows: "Damnation, I cannot but commend me heartily to you, as bad as thou art...I would be very glad to speak to you for your good," etc. The sougaun Earl, whatever the justice of his claims to the title, was, according to Carew, "a man the most generally beloved by all sorts that in my life I have known," and the most potent of all the Geraldines; he considered that it would be dangerous to keep him prisoner in Ireland, and preparations were made to send him to London.

[5] Sir Thomas Stafford, Pacata Hibernia (ed. S. J. O'Grady, 1896), i. 199.

[6] Carew calls the search for him "the hunting, rousing and fall of a great stag." It is only fair to the White Knight to add that he was sharply threatened both by the President and Sir G. Thornton if he let FitzThomas escape him, as he was believed to have done before. He well knew what his fate would be if this happened, and he decided to save himself, like others, by doing "acceptable service."

In the meanwhile, another event of great importance had occurred. Early in March Fineen, whose dealings with the Spaniards [7] were bringing him continually into suspicion, and whose own letters prove that he was deep in Tyrone's confidence and aiding him in every way in his power, had yet consented to come to Carew and bring in his son as a pledge. He took the precaution to obtain from Carew a renewal of his pardon and protection, though his last protection was not expired. But the temptation of having in his hands at once the two greatest sources of danger in Munster, the two around whom not only the hopes of the South were centred, but those of the Spaniards whose landing was again daily expected, proved too much for Carew. By an act of treachery he detained Fineen prisoner, awaiting an opportunity to send both his captives into England. Once, during the first rebellion of the Earl of Desmond, Burghley had proposed to Ormonde "to put protected persons into sure hold." Enemy to the Desmonds as he was, Ormonde had replied: "My Lord, I will never use treachery to any, for it will both touch her Highness' honour and mine own credit...Saving my duty to her Majesty, I would I were to have revenge by my sword of any man that thus persuadeth the Queen to write to me." Cecil and Carew had no such scruples, even as to keeping faith with a man to whom the Queen's word had been "solemnly and advisedly given."

[7] Cecil himself was accused by Essex at his trial of having dealings with Spain. He was certainly in receipt of a pension from the King of Spain, at least from the accession of James I to his death, and may have had it earlier. See Gardiner, History, i, 215.

The sougaun Earl was sentenced to death, but prudence prevailed, though "the fingers of the Lords were tingling to hang him"; he dragged out a long existence in the Tower, forgotten by his friends, while the great Desmond estates went to enrich needy courtiers and adventurers. Fineen lived on till after 1637, and must have been little short of eighty when he died. He was tossed backward and forward between the Tower, the Marshalsea, and the Fleet, with intervals of freedom during which he was allowed at large in London, mixing again with men of rank about the Court. To the end he retained his. power of making those who came into contact with him believe in his sincerity. His family sorrows were great. His wife, Lady Ellen, forsook him and worked against him even before his committal, and he ascribed his taking by Carew to her evil machinations. She seems to have been as shallow and selfish as her father, and her husband refused to have her with him in the Tower, where he believed she acted as a spy upon his actions. His eldest son, brought up in the debasing surroundings of a prison, was a degenerate, but his other children remained with him. His confinement, usually a light one, seems to have become stricter as time went on, and at the age of seventy he writes that he is kept in a little close room, without sight of the air, and contrary to the Queen's pleasure, whereby his life is much endangered. He had the added sorrow of knowing that Donal, the scapegrace, had taken the title of MacCarthy More, and in course of time he learned that Donal had been restored by the Government to his father's lands. Great numbers of Fineen's letters remain, mostly concerned with his efforts to regain his properties and the constant litigation in which these efforts involved him. Helpless in the Tower, he fought the Government and the adventurers alike in a costly but fruitless struggle to assert his rights. He was never tried, though he never relaxed his efforts to be brought to trial. The adventurers who were enjoying his lands were strong enough to prevent this and thus to stave off the inquiry into the justice of their claims that would needs have ensued. In happier times Fineen might have shone as the centre of a brilliant circle; it was only his great position that consigned him to a living tomb. He lived on into the reign of Charles I and witnessed the flight of the Earls, the plantation of Ulster, the execution of Raleigh, and the tyranny of Strafford.

The young "Tower Earl" soon rejoined his compatriots in the Tower. His stay in Ireland had been brief and unsuccessful. When he arrived in Cork no preparation seems to have been made for his reception; he was forced to bid himself to the Mayor's house "else had he gone supperless to bed." "If this lawyer mayor" (one Meagh or Meade), he remarks, "have no better insight into Littleton than in other observances of this place, he may be well called Lacklaw, for it was with much ado that we got anything for money; most of my people lay without lodging, and Captain Price had the hogs for his neighbours." It was intended that Castlemaine should be the young Earl's place of residence, with a pension of £500 a year from the frugal Queen, Castlemaine being then closely besieged by Sir Charles Wilmott. It did surrender on the summons of the Earl, and this was the only service done by sending the lad to Ireland. His progress into Limerick ended in a fiasco. In Kilmallock, where he arrived on a Saturday evening, a mighty concourse of people turned out to see him, "all the streets, doors, and windows, yea, the very gutters and tops of houses being filled with them"; they welcomed him with signs of joy, every one throwing upon him wheat and salt as a prediction of future peace and plenty. It was with difficulty that they made their way to Sir George Thornton's house. But, the next day being Sunday, the lad, who, like all wards and hostages, had been brought up in the reformed doctrines, attended the Protestant service, the crowds all the way endeavouring to turn him from his purpose. On his return the temper of the people had entirely changed. He was railed at and spat upon; the strangers in the town melted away, and no more notice was taken of him than of any private gentleman. His visit to Ireland proving to be a failure, he was soon afterward sent back to London. The undertakers dreaded his presence in Ireland, fearing it portended the restoration to him of some of his father's lands, of which they were in possession, and Cecil also was uneasy, for rumours reached him that the lad was proposing to marry the widow of Sir Thomas Norris, late President of Munster, who had been killed by the rebels in 1599. "I do profess unto you that I do never shut mine eyes but with fear at my waking to hear some ill news of him," Cecil writes to Carew on December 15, 1606.[8] Altogether it was decided that he was safer in the Tower, since the main object of his release was at an end, none of the chiefs in arms in the South, except Thomas Oge FitzGerald of Kerry, having submitted on his account, and the rebellion being practically over. The Queen was offering pardons to all who would come in, save the chief organizers, James FitzThomas and his brother John, with conditions to the other leaders, so that in less than two months over four thousand persons by name had been recommended by Carew to the Lord Deputy for pardons.

[8] Letters, p. 60.

The young Earl himself, whose mind had evidently been weakened by his long residence in the Tower, "not well agreeing with the manners and customs of Ireland," seems to have shown no reluctance to return, and henceforth, for the short three months during which he lingered after the sougaun Earl joined him in that gloomy abode, we have few records of him except the bills of his apothecary, of which several remain to prove the feeble state of his health. In Ireland the people had looked on the pale, weakly lad as a 'changeling,' and the effect of the Irish experiment is summed up by the Earl himself in a letter written to Cecil from that country: "I find my honourable good Lord kind to me; but I am contemptible unto the country." So ended in degeneracy and alienation from his country the last scion of the Anglo-Norman house of Desmond.

END OF CHAPTER XIX

XX.—THE BATTLE OF KINSALE

Sir George Carew (b. 1564), later Earl of Totnes, who had been selected to 'pacify' Munster, was one of the most capable officers ever sent into Ireland. We may dislike his methods and condemn his principles, but of his competency there is no doubt. A Devonshire man, like so many of the leading figures of the Elizabethan period, he had come over to Ireland fresh from Oxford, to take service under his cousin, Sir Peter Carew the Elder. A younger Sir Peter, Sir George Carew's brother, had been killed in the unfortunate advance of Lord Grey's forces into Glenmalure, and George never forgave this loss. The first act that brought him into public notice was a sudden attack made by him on a passer-by in the streets of Dublin whom he believed to have been concerned in the death of this young man, for which act he was sent to England in disgrace. He made a voyage abroad with Sir Humphrey Gilbert, rose to be captain in the navy, and became later Master of the Ordnance in Ireland, Privy Councillor, and Treasurer at War. By the time he was appointed President of Munster in 1600 he had passed many years in Ireland and knew the country well.[1]

[1] For Carew's literary services to future historians of Ireland see Appendix VIII.

Vigorous, able, and ruthless, he carried through his task with determination. The accounts of his attacks on the Munster castles prove his energy and skill. When a cannon was clogged, or could not be got into position, it was Carew who took it successfully in hand; when the Irish believed Dunboy to be unassailable his quick eye noted in passing a green spot on the mainland where some troops could land and a cove on a small island which would take two falcons of brass, "as if it had been fashioned for the purpose." His reputation for an uncanny knowledge was so great that the Irish believed that he had a familiar spirit, "for they say he knows all things and that nothing can be hidden from him." [2] Men were so attached to him that Brian MacMahon was content to betray Tyrone's plans before the critical battle of Kinsale, because his son had, many years before, acted as Carew's page in England; and a Spanish captain so admired him that he wondered that Cecil could allow Carew to spend his time among a barbarous nation "for which, he verily believed, Christ had never died." [3]

[2] Pac. Hib., 11, 131.

[3] Ibid., ii, 132.

Carew's ambitions grew as time went on. He remembered that Robert FitzStephen, whom he claimed as an ancestor, had had half of the county of Cork given to him by Henry II, the castle of Carew, close to Bantry, bearing witness to his claim. The O'Dalys of Moynterbary were still his family bards; and the time came when the President put in immense claims to the O'Sullevan and MacCarthy estates. Carew had imbibed to the full the doctrines of his time. He held no faith with rebels, and worked by underground means when fair means failed. He deliberately adopted and carried out the policy of "setting one rogue to ruin another," and would admit no man to pardon until he had "done service" on some member of his own family. In the seizure of Fineen MacCarthy when under the Queen's safeguard he stooped to the basest act of perfidy. But he accomplished the work on which he was sent, and it is only fair to remember that in carrying it through he had the support of a large body of the local lords, Catholic and Protestant, Anglo-Irish and native Irish alike.

Throughout the whole of the Desmond wars the Irish gentlemen were divided into two great and powerful factions—one siding with the English, the other with the Irish party. Mixed motives, in some cases fear, in others interest or avarice, or personal hatreds, or desire for reward, influenced many powerful Irish Catholic lords to fight on the side of the Queen's armies. In Munster not only several of the lords of Anglo-Norman descent (such as Ormonde, Barrymore, Viscount Buttevant, Dunboyne, and Castleconnell) stood, at least outwardly, on the Queen's side, but several of pure Irish blood. The Baron of Upper Ossory, the Earl of Thomond, chief of the O'Briens, MacCarthy Reagh, Lord of Carbery, Sir Cormac MacCarthy, Lord of Muskerry, and Morrogh O'Brien, Lord of Inchiquin, were open supporters of the Crown. In the North there was a 'Queen's' Maguire and an independent Maguire; a 'Queen's' O'Rorke opposed Brien and his son; Hugh O'Neill was confronted by Turlogh O'Neill and the sons of Shane; and O'Donnell had to fight Neill Garbh O'Donnell, who was lying in wait for his territories. In the South Owen O'Sullevan was out against his cousin O'Sullevan Beare, and Fineen MacCarthy spent a large part of his career struggling with his cousins for the title of Earl of Clancar.

The theory of a solid Irish party fighting against a solid English party was never true at any time in Ireland. It was least of all true during the Ulster and Munster rebellions, even in what was professedly a war of religion. The contrary view ignores one of the main elements in the problem of Elizabethan Ireland. Had such a state of things existed, the wars would have been quickly decided one way or the other; but the fact that Catholic Ireland was at war not only with England, but with a large section of Catholic Ireland, many of whose leaders had their own interests to serve, made it a long and painful and difficult contest. The country was honeycombed with men halfhearted in the Irish cause or false to it, and from this condition of things English Governments reaped the full benefit. They avowedly and industriously fomented these family dissensions and jealousies, scattering promises lavishly to the ambitious and offering rewards to those who would turn the arms of their followers against those members of their house who were in rebellion, or who would by force or guile bring in their heads. Never were the vices and weaknesses of human nature more skilfully and persistently played upon, or with greater effect. Desmond and Tyrone, in all their efforts, were hampered by the knowledge that they were surrounded by spies and by allies who would not hesitate to betray them if it were to their own advantage.

During the progress of the war there were many changes of side. All did not confederate at the same time; and men who lost their estates deserted the English, while others, who had come out with Desmond, fell oft as the hope of success grew weaker and the expectation of French or Spanish assistance grew faint. The Pope offered indulgences equal to those bestowed for the crusade in defence of the Holy Sepulchre to those who joined the armies of O'Neill, but even this did not suffice to weld the Catholics into a solid body fighting for the faith.[4] During the fifteen years' war between 1588 and 1603 the towns of Ireland stood solid for the Crown. Though a large part of the inhabitants continued Catholic in religion, they were largely of English descent, and retained their old traditional loyalty unimpaired. From the shelter of their walls they looked in disapproval at the disturbed state of the outlying districts, and to them, quite as much as to the English, the armies of Desmond or the O'Byrnes were hosts of rebels. All they desired was to be left in quiet to carry on their now flourishing trade with France and Spain, or to attend to their municipal duties.

[4] O'Sullevan Beare, Hist. Cath. Iber. Comp., vol. iii, Bk. I, ch. iv-vi.

Numbers of Spaniards had settled in the towns of Cork, Waterford, and Limerick, while Galway had all the appearance of a Spanish town, with its solid lofty houses of hewn stone, bearing over the doors the arms of the wealthy merchants who inhabited them. Numbers of young Irishmen in the South were so 'Spaniolized' that they spoke Spanish as easily as their mother-tongue. Though the chances of the civil wars threw fresh trade into their hands, and they could not be prevented from supplying the rebel forces with the munitions of war, got through in spite of all the watchfulness of the English garrisons, their sympathies were limited to their business relations, and they on every occasion were ready to pour forth professions of loyalty to the Crown. In the towns the priests, too, for the most part preached and instructed the children in principles of loyalty, even during the wars of Munster. Many of them, both priests and friars, "gave an opinion that it was not only lawful to assist the Queen, but even to resist the Irish party and to draw the sword upon it." This is the report of O'Sullevan Beare, who was intimately acquainted with the South of Ireland, and in constant communication with it, even after he went to Spain.[5] These priests were indeed placed in a position of great difficulty; they were faced with the Papal excommunication if they did not support a war which had a distinctly religious character, and which had received the approval and blessing of the new Pope. They became sharply divided into two parties, most of the old Irish throwing themselves heartily on the side of the Catholic war, while the priests of the 'new Irish,' many of them men of great influence, remained staunch to their allegiance.

[5] O'Sullevan Beare, op. cit., vol. iii, Bk. I, ch. iii.

A question that aroused much attention was the position of the Irish Catholic soldiers fighting in the Queen's armies against the adherents of a cause which had the express sanction and blessing of the head of their Church.[6] The matter was considered so difficult that a special ecclesiastical council was held at Salamanca in May 1602 to consider it, but their decision was hardly clear enough to enable the individual soldier to decide on his course of action in the special circumstances of this war. They recognize the right of the Queen to command the obedience of the Irish soldiers in fighting the Queen's rebels, but the troops are exhorted not to use their obedience against the spread of the Catholic faith, a distinction that, however real in theory, was a perplexing one for the Irish soldier to translate into practice.[7] In the same year a party of thirteen Jesuit missioners coming to labour in Ireland assured her Majesty of their allegiance and their intention to defend their prince and country, "in spite of any excommunication, Papal or otherwise, denounced against her Majesty, upon any conspiracies, invasions, or foreign attempts."[8] This is a remarkable expression of opinion to be made in the year following upon the descent of the Spaniards on the coast of Cork. O'Sullevan Beare, the Catholic historian of Elizabeth's reign, gives it as his opinion that one reason that the Catholic priests "were far from exhorting their people to war" was that "at this time there was no persecution of priests." [9]

[6] The question was discussed by several leading Catholic writers of the day ; cf. Cardinal Allen, Defence of Sir William Stanley's Surrender of Daventer, for an opinion contrary to that of the Council of Salamanca.

[7] Pac. Hib., ii, 142-146, and for the original, see Ibernia Ignatiana, ed. E. Hogan (1880), pp. 106-107.

[8] Curry, Civil Wars (1810), Appendix XV, p. 649.

[9] O'Sullevan Beare, op. cit., vol. iii, Bk. I, ch. iii.

This agrees with the petition offered by the Catholic party in 1613 on the occasion of the second Parliament of James I, stating that in Queen Elizabeth's reign ecclesiastical disabilities had been very sparingly and mildly pressed. Even the Catholic colleges abroad were not all anti-English. We find a complaint made by O'Donnell and Father Conry to Philip III of Spain in 1602, when the rebellion was at its height, that in the Irish College of Salamanca, supported by the King and bishops of Spain, the Irish pupils were being reared "on such bad milk as obedience to the Queen and an affectionate love for her interests and for persons outside the pale of the Church" by the President, Thomas White, S. J., who even refused to receive pupils from Ulster and Connacht, because they were in arms against the throne. The memorialists pray that the Irish President may be removed, and that a Spanish rector may be appointed "who will punctually obey the orders he shall receive," because White's students, on their return to Ireland, teach that it is permissible to obey the Queen and to take arms against the King of Spain.[10] So difficult was it even in the very centre of Catholic Spain, and in purely Irish quarters, to secure a satisfactory disloyalty to the Crown. Even after the promulgation of the Bull of Pope Pius V absolving Elizabeth's subjects from their allegiance large numbers of her Catholic people felt that they could justly fight on her side, or if they joined the insurgents could fight for their faith and properties without incurring the stigma of disaffection to their sovereign. O'Sullevan Beare says that their opinion was not officially condemned by their own side till long afterward, in the year 1603, "when the war had been nearly finished." [11]

[10] The memorial is printed in C. P. Meehan, Fate and Fortunes of Tyrone and Tyrconnel (1868), Appendix, p. 491.

[11] O'Sullevan Beare, op. cit., vol. iii, Bk. I, ch. iii.

On September 20, 1601, Sir Charles Wilmott received in Cork the long-expected news that a fleet of forty-five Spanish ships had been sighted from the Old Head of Kinsale, bearing toward Cork Harbour. Shortly afterward this was followed by a further message that the wind had fallen, and the ships had tacked about and entered Kinsale Harbour. The small force of English retired on Cork, and the Spaniards proceeded to disembark and take possession of the town. Men remembered, when they heard the news, how anxious Fineen MacCarthy had been during the two past years to get possession of the Old Head of Kinsale, which abutted into the sea south of that harbour. Kinsale Town, containing not more than two hundred houses, lay beside the river, environed by hills and quite without defence. Don Juan del Aguila, the commander of the fleet, sent out urgent messages to O'Neill and O'Donnell, who were in Ulster seventy-five leagues distant; for nine days he got no reply. Instead of a general rising, such as the Spaniards had been led to expect, the country remained quiet, only a few followers of Fineen MacCarthy repairing to the foreigners. On the other hand, a large body of Irish under Sir Cormac MacCarthy, Lord of Muskerry, joined Carew's forces and were ordered by him to parade under the Spanish defences. Food was beginning to run short, the English troops having destroyed the country, and the country-people were wary of selling to the Spaniards, in spite of the good money offered for their goods, seeing they were so few in number. The wisdom of Tyrone's advice, that the Spanish troops should land at Carlingford, was amply proved; as it was, a march through the whole length of Ireland was required before the Irish and they could effect a junction.

Instead of the overwhelming force that Tyrone had warned the King of Spain would be necessary to effect anything in the South of Ireland, Don Juan's army consisted of 3400 men, many of whom began to fall sick as soon as they landed. But the most depressing tidings that reached Don Juan were that James FitzThomas, Earl of Desmond, and Fineen MacCarthy, the two chief supporters on whom he relied for the success of his expedition, were both of them prisoners in the hands of the English, having been taken over on the first sure tidings of the coming of the Spanish fleet and placed in the Tower. This loss of his expected allies deranged all the plans of the Spanish command. Instead of a strong combination waiting ready for their support, the forces of the South were dispersed and leaderless, and those of the North far away. They were left to meet the English alone, in terribly foul weather, and with their munitions soaked in getting them out of the vessels, and a great part of them rendered useless. On the English side Carew's longsightedness had got everything ready. In a hasty meeting with Mountjoy at Kilkenny it was decided that the Lord Deputy should accompany the army into Munster, Carew assuring him that if he came with only his page with him it would have a better effect in gathering together the troops than any service he could do in Dublin. With his usual vigour Carew set out, marched straight to Rincorran Castle, near Kinsale, which was occupied by the Spaniards, and captured it after some weeks' fighting. On November 2 the ordnance was withdrawn to the camp, and on the fifth certain news arrived that O'Donnell was approaching with a great part of the Northern army and that Tyrone would follow a few days later. He had sent into Scotland for fresh forces.

The President believed that he had O'Donnell in his grasp. He heard that he had arrived safe at Holy Cross in Co. Tipperary, and he immediately organized a large expedition, under his personal command, assisted by Sir Charles Wilmott and Sir Christopher St Lawrence, to intercept him. By a forced march he brought his army to within four miles of O'Donnell's camp, right across his way. O'Donnell was perplexed and knew not what move to make. Beside him lay the mountain of Slieve Felim, now impassable by reason of the heavy rains, no carriage or horse being able to cross the boggy ground. But on that night, while the English army was resting in camp, "there happened a great frost the like of which hath been seldom seen in Ireland," which so hardened the ground that during the night O'Donnell with all his forces, having first lighted camp-fires to deceive the enemy, slipped silently away and across the mountain. When morning came Carew found the camp deserted. Hastily he pursued them to the abbey of Owney, eight miles east of Limerick, expecting to find the army encamped there to rest; but O'Donnell was already gone on twelve miles farther to Croom, a march of thirty-two Irish miles without any rest, "the greatest march with carriage that hath been heard of," admitted the baffled but admiring Carew. For two days more the two armies kept near each other, and then Carew thought it prudent to return to Kinsale lest the enemy, who was taking a circuitous path, should nevertheless arrive there before him. As they came toward the camp they met the Earl of Clanricarde bringing in his regiment to the assistance of the English, while the Earl of Thomond was endeavouring to bring up supplies and men by sea, but in the furious storms these had been driven westward to Castlehaven. Shortly after he succeeded in making Kinsale Harbour Don Juan also received the supplies of ammunition and food for which he had been waiting; they arrived in seven transports, which had been long detained in the harbour of Corunna by the wild weather. They found the English on the point of landing, but a hurried message to O'Sullevan, chief of Beare, for the first time brought this hitherto neutral chief to their assistance with five hundred foot and a small body of picked horsemen; and the English, shut in between the town and the transports, were heavily bombarded and suffered severely in losses both of men and ships.

The English main army also was not well placed. Their great camp lay north of Kinsale Town, which they were investing, and they captured and held Castle ny Parke, a strong fort on an island in the harbour; but as the forces of O'Donnell began to arrive they found themselves hemmed in between his army and the town, unable to get out to forage for food, or to obtain the supplies which the country-people were trying to get through to them. They only ventured out at night and later not at all, so that they began to suffer badly from want of provisions. Pestilence broke out, and O'Sullevan Beare, whose father was acting with the Spaniards, heard that, out of fifteen thousand men with the English at the beginning of the siege, eight thousand perished of want, cold, and hunger, or by the sword.

Carew was seriously contemplating raising the siege and retreating to Cork.[12] There were other causes of anxiety. O'Donnell and O'Neill, who was now approaching, were both accompanied by a large number of the Northern chiefs and their followers, and Carew had reason to know that a considerable proportion of the pardoned and protected Munster lords, lately come in, were intending to join their forces and make one last cast for the deliverance of their country from the English. Nor was he sure of his Irish troops; it was unlikely that they would stand steady if all their own chiefs were fighting on the other side. Even a man like Sir Fineen O'Driscoll, "who never in his whole life had been tainted with the least spot of disloyalty," was 'out' on this occasion and gave up his castle of Baltimore to the Spaniards, who thus now commanded the three harbours of Kinsale, Baltimore, and Bearehaven, Donal O'Sullevan Beare having surrendered his castle of Dunboy into their hands. At the moment when O'Neill's great army was reported in sight there seemed to be nothing to prevent the complete annihilation of the whole of the English forces. Don Juan declared in a letter to O'Neill that there were not sufficient of them left to man a third part of their trenches; and when O'Neill sat down between them and Cork their only possible way of retreat seemed closed.

[12] O'Sullevan Beare may be thought a partisan writer, but he was in a position to know. He is usually fair, and on this occasion, considering the result of the battle of Kinsale, it would have been more likely that he would tend to exaggerate the numbers of the English troops.

But the great blow that was to have been decisive for Ireland was never struck. A division of opinion arose among the leaders. O'Neill, seeing the English so weakened, advised that no attack should be made, but that they should be hemmed in until want of food brought about their surrender. Don Juan, on the other hand, was urging him in letter after letter to strike at once and hard, promising that he would sally out of Kinsale and form a junction with him. Most of these communications were delivered to Carew and not to O'Neill; still, he was well aware what the Spaniards wished, and to meet their views he arranged a rendezvous for a certain day. Carew, possessed of full information of all that was going on, arrived at the place before him and set his troops to work on a sham fight with much beating of drums and firing of musketry. By nightfall O'Neill and O'Sullevan, thinking that the Spaniards were already engaged, had hurried to the spot, but Don Juan, better informed, kept safe within Kinsale. A series of curious errors occurred. O'Donnell, who was to follow, lost his way in the darkness and wandered far from the scene of action. Don Juan lay quiet, and O'Neill, examining the English trenches from a hillock in the early morning, saw that they were strongly fortified and filled with a fine body of soldiers, sleeping under arms with their horses bridled beside them. In these circumstances he thought a retreat was the path of prudence, and he was retiring to his camp when O'Donnell's cavalry, led by himself, came up with him Meanwhile, the Lord Deputy and President, expecting the decisive battle to take place that day (December 24, 1601), were consulting in the early morning about the disposition of their forces and had sent out orders that they were to post themselves strongly between the town and the enemy camp. The Spaniards were so confident of victory that they were disputing among themselves whose prisoner the Lord Deputy should be, and whose the President. While this was going on news was brought in that O'Neill was retiring, and some of the Viceroy's cavalry, following him, were impatient to charge. O'Donnell's army lay beyond a ford, and, Mountjoy having given permission to his Marshal to use his own discretion, the English horse charged across the ford. They were driven back by O'Donnell's cavalry, but turned and charged again, this time throwing O'Donnell's horse into confusion.

Meanwhile, the main bodies of the two armies became engaged, and for a short time O'Sullevan, Tyrrell, and the Spaniards stood firm on the crest of a little hill, with a bog on their right. But a general panic had seized the troops of O'Neill and O'Donnell; they scattered right and left, and no persuasions would recall them, though even some of the Irish gentlemen in the English army, ashamed of their countrymen's conduct, tried to hearten them, promising that they would not attack them. For an hour and a half the Queen's soldiers followed the flying army, cutting them down till they were tired with killing. On the battlefield the Earl of Clanricarde was dubbed a knight for valour, he having been shot through his garments, for "no man did bloody his sword more than his lordship did that day." The Spaniards, hearing the volleys of shot discharged for joy, thought it was the Irish troops approaching, and made a sally out of the town; but seeing the Spanish colours being carried by an Englishman they made a speedy retreat. The great religious and national crusade had come to an end. O'Neill's disheartened clansmen refused to fight any longer; O'Rorke slipped away home to fight his own brother, who had proclaimed himself chief in his absence, and the Scots departed to their homes. O'Donnell, Redmond Burke, and Hugh Mostian, with their followers, took ship in the Spanish transports in the bay and sailed away to Spain. They were followed by a large number of chiefs' sons and men who had taken part in the fighting. Moryson says that the peace enabled them to fly their devastated land and seek refuge in England and France, where multitudes of them lived for some years after the peace was made.[13]

[13] History of Ireland, 11, 284.

Tyrone had a disastrous journey back to the north, being himself wounded and carried on a litter, his army broken up and many men perishing in the swollen streams or at the hands of the country people. Don Juan del Aguila, seeing his allies "broken with a handful of men, blown asunder into divers parts of the world," surrendered Kinsale, with the other castles possessed by the Spaniards, into the hands of the Viceroy, and over three thousand men—Spaniards and Irish, soldiers, priests, and religious orders—re-embarked for Spain. Fierce anger seized upon the Irish when they heard that Don Juan had agreed with the Viceroy to hand over to him the castles of Baltimore and Dunboy. All the wrath that they had hitherto felt against the English was now turned against their late allies. At Castlehaven the O'Driscolls managed by a ruse to get back their ancestral home, and when Captain Harvey entered the harbour he found the Spaniards assaulting it, in an endeavour to recover it from its owners. At Baltimore, where the Spaniards were still in possession, the castles of Donneshed and Donelong, on either side of the harbour, were "with Spanish gravity" rendered to her Majesty's use, and the garrisons set sail for Spain.

Dunboy was a harder problem. Its remote situation, great strength, and the wild seas which swept the entrance to Bantry Bay, on the north side of which it lay on a point of the mainland close to Beare Island, made it a difficult place to capture, and on Harvey's first attempt to make the entrance of the bay he was driven back by storms with a loss of fifty of his men and nearly all his crew. Meanwhile, Donal O'Sullevan, chief of Beare, the owner of the castle, determined to make an attempt to get it back into his own hands. He knew that having been in arms against the Queen he had little hope of pardon. He had heard that Hugh Roe had been well received in Spain, and that King Philip had promised further substantial succours in men and money. One ship had already been seen hovering outside Kinsale, but on hearing that Don Juan had surrendered, it had sailed hurriedly away again, taking back the bad news of the defeat of Kinsale to Spain, and effectually putting an end to the preparations which the Spanish King was pushing forward. At dead of night O'Sullevan surprised the castle and effected an entrance through a breach in the wall, so that when the Spanish captain awoke in the morning he found himself prisoner and the fort in the possession of its original owners. O'Sullevan disarmed them all and sent the larger number of the Spaniards to Baltimore to be embarked for Spain, holding the captain and a few of the best men as prisoners, with all the stores and guns. This was in February 1602, and in April the President, turning a deaf ear to all who tried to persuade him of the uselessness of such an enterprise, determined on a land attempt to reduce the castle. "Neither bogs nor rocks," he said, "should forbid the passage of his cannon," when he was warned that there were places in the mountains at the head of Bantry Bay impassable for horse and carriages, and passes where men could only walk in single file. He was himself ill, both he and the Viceroy having been seized with sudden illness on the day after they had separated, Mountjoy to go to Dublin and Carew to Cork.

The Viceroy had to be carried on a horse-litter, and Carew was at the point of death. It looked suspiciously like a renewal of the attempt made before the battle of Kinsale to poison the President. But neither illness nor difficulties would turn him from his purpose. On April 23 he drew out of Cork, having been able to get together only fifteen hundred men out of the three thousand on the lists, sickness during the long winter's siege of Kinsale having taken its usual heavy toll. They marched along the sea-coast as far as Baltimore, and then struck northward, effecting a junction with Captain Flower's garrison at Carew Castle, the home of the President's ancestors, near Bantry Abbey. Here, while the President awaited the arrival of his provisions by sea, Sir Charles Wilmott was scouring North Kerry, capturing the castles, receiving submission from a number of the chiefs, and clearing all the district, so that the President should have no enemy at his back when marching on Bantry. On the same day that the transport vessels sailed into Bantry Bay he joined his forces to those of Carew, and it was decided that the way round the head of the Bay having proved impassable, as had been predicted, the attempt should be made by sea, and the Earl of Thomond was sent across to tow up the vessel under Beare Island (called the Great Island) opposite Dunboy, from which it was intended to make the attack.

Meanwhile, O'Sullevan had been fully employed in strengthening the defences of the castle, and building a new bastion on the side of attack; he also fortified the small island of the Durses near the mouth of the harbour, to which, in case of the castle falling, he proposed to retire. The bastion, however, turned out to be a disadvantage to the besieged, for, being battered by the enemy's cannon, the rubbish fell between it and the main wall, and the English were able to get access across it into the upper part of the fortifications. O'Sullevan had placed the defence in the hands of Richard MacGeoghegan, the Constable, and Thomas Taylor, an Englishman, who believed they had made not only the castle itself but also the approaches impregnable. All around, at every possible landing as was thought, the shore had been trenched and gabioned, so that anyone putting his foot on the island would meet a certain death. But Carew was out betimes in the morning, and his experienced eye, as he passed in his pinnace close to the shore, discerned a small island close to the mainland where a strip of ground, hidden from the castle by a cleft rock or gully, afforded space for two small pieces of brass. By a ruse he succeeded in distracting the attention of the defenders until he got his cannon landed and fixed, while his regiments, creeping up on the farther side of the small island, succeeded in landing on the mainland under cover of the guns.

On the same day a Spanish ship entered the bay, with £1200 and large promises, bringing also the energetic Owen MacEggan, Papal Bishop of Rosse, who was a constant intermediary between the Irish and the Spanish Court. The Jesuit, James Archer, another active supporter of the insurgents, was at Dunboy. Now began the famous siege of Dunboy, in which the small garrison of less than a hundred and fifty men challenged the host of the besiegers battering on the walls with their guns from the opposite shore. On one occasion the President, the Earl of Thomond, and Sir Charles Wilmott, riding together on the shore, were nearly carried off by a cannon-shot from the walls. The fall of the new turret, which buried in its ruins many of the besieged, brought down part of the tower, and a message was sent to the President offering to yield the castle. Carew hanged the messenger and ordered an assault. Led by Lieutenant Kirton, the breach was entered and the turret gained; the President's colours flew out from its top, and a captured piece of cannon was turned on the defenders. The Spaniards were forced back into a narrow passage, where they stood pouring stones on their pursuers, who were slowly but surely fighting their way to the top of the vault. At length Captain Slingsby succeeded in reaching the top, and on clearing away the rubbish he found a spike or window commanding the part of the barbican where the inhabitants were still defending themselves. Pushed on both sides and in desperate case, some forty of the defenders made a sally out of the castle on the sea side, where, being met by a waiting party under Captain Blundell, "we had the execution of them all," as Carew reports. Eight desperate men leapt into the sea to save themselves by swimming, but they were cut down by men in boats. One man, who leaped from the top of the vault, proved to be that follower of Owny O'More who in 1600 had dragged Ormonde from his horse and taken him captive.

The English flag now flew from the top of the castle, but the rest of the ward, over seventy men, took refuge in the cellars, where, the sun being set, they remained all night under a strong guard placed at the top of the narrow stone steps which led below. The next morning twenty-three of them gave themselves up. The Constable was mortally wounded, and the command of the dark chamber was given to Taylor, whose father was "the dearest and inwardest man" with Tyrrell, one of the most intractable of the Munster rebels. He took a desperate resolve. In the cellar were nine barrels of gunpowder, and beside an opened case Taylor sat down, with a lighted match in his hand, swearing to set the powder alight and blow up all that was left of the castle and all that were within it, unless the President gave them promise of their lives. This was refused, and a new battery was begun with the intention of burying them in the ruins. Some of the bullets entered the cellar, and his companions besought Taylor to submit; by ten in the morning he was forced by them to give way, and they prepared themselves to come forth. Sir George Thornton and Captains Harvey and Power entered the vault to receive their submission, when MacGeoghegan, who was stretched dying on the floor, seeing Taylor and the rest about to yield, suddenly raised himself from the ground, snatched a lighted candle, and staggering toward the open barrel of powder was on the point of flinging it into the cask when Captain Power caught him in his arms, and he fell to earth under the swords of the soldiers, dead. The rest were taken and executed. Taylor, having been proved to have had a chief hand in the murder of Sir George Bingham at Sligo, was hanged in chains at Cork. The same fate befell a friar named Collins at Youghal. The garrison is said by Carew to have consisted of "the best choice of their forces," and "so obstinate and resolved a defence had not been seen within this kingdom." Dunboy was emptied of its still large stores of provision, and then the old castle was blown up with the nine barrels of powder, as it was found impracticable to defend the ruins in so isolated a situation.[14]

[14] This account is taken from that of the eyewitnesses in Pacata Hibernia (ii, 190-205), but the report given in O'Sullevan's history (vol. iii, Bk, VII, ch. iii) differs very little, save that it adds some painful details of the cruelties practised by the soldiers at Dursey Island. Collins had served in his youth as an officer under Henry IV of France. O'Sullevan says, too, that a treaty had been entered into with the besieged before they capitulated, which was kept with "English faithfulness," the men and women being hanged.

The rebellion was practically over. Even the Wicklow clans had been reduced by a rapid march into the mountains in the depth of winter when the country was covered with snow. Mountjoy's rapidity of movement was so great that Sir Phelim MacFeagh, O'Donnell's friend, found his house surrounded with troops when he was preparing for his Christmas festivities. His wife and son were taken, and he himself with difficulty escaped from a back window. He spent a cold Christmas in the wood, writes Moryson, "while my Lord lived plentifully in his house, consuming such provisions as were prepared for him and his 'bonnaghs' and kerne to keep a merry Christmas."

Submissions began to come in from all parts of the country. In the North the lesser chiefs of the Ferney, the Fews, and the Brenny submitted, while some of the chiefs of O'Doherty's country and of the O'Hanlons gave in their submissions to Sir Henry Docwra on Lough Foyle, and pardons were granted to the chiefs of the O'Byrnes and O'Tooles of Wicklow and to the heads of the septs of the MacMahons and Magenneses. On April 23 the Deputy kept St George's Feast at Dublin with solemn pomp, the captains bringing up his meat and the colonels attending on his person at table. The newly received protected Lords were all present—Turlogh MacHenry, Ever MacCooley, Phelim MacFeagh, chief of the O'Byrnes, and Donal Spaniagh, chief of the Kavanaghs. These were entertained "with plenty of wine and all kindness," the Deputy assuring them that as he had been a scourge to them in rebellion, so he would now be mediator for them to her Majesty in their state of subjects, if they would stand firm and constant to their obedience.[15]

[15] Fynes Moryson, History of Ireland, i, 227-228.

More important still were the Munster submissions. From the end of March to the beginning of May the following lords came in with their followers: MacCarthy Reagh, chief of Carbery, O'Sullevan Beare, and O'Sullevan Bantry, FitzJames FitzGerald, and several minor chiefs. O'Sullevan More came in a few days later with one of the O'Mulrians of Co. Cork. Mountjoy was able to write on May 2 to the English Government that Munster was not only well reduced, but "began to taste the sweetness of peace," [16] that the like might be said of Leinster, except the O'Mores and O'Connors, who were scattered and had sought but could not obtain of him the Queen's mercy; that the northern borders of Ulster were assured; that garrisons were planted in the Brenny, and the Queen's Maguire settled in Fermanagh; that Sir Henry Docwra at Lough Foyle and Sir Arthur Chichester at Carrickfergus had made their neighbours sure to the State and both had done excellent service. He reports further the unusual information that "we have a constant and of late extraordinary conceived confidence in this people." After the fall of Dunboy it was expected that the Munster chiefs would all come in, but they did so very slowly. Hugh Roe in Spain grew sick at heart as he waited in vain for promised succours, and Cecil's view that except at the time of the Armada the object of the King of Spain was rather to "consume the Queen with charges in Ireland and to divert her troops from the Spanish wars in Flanders" was probably true. The smallness of the help sent and the uncertainty with which it came hardly looks like a determined effort to support religion or to aid the Irish, and this view is borne out by the cynical conversation between Pedro Lopez de Soto, who came over with Don Juan, and Captain Harvey. The former refused to believe that Harvey could seriously think that the Spaniards wished to assist the Irish.[17] But the King of Spain offered an asylum to O'Donnell, and he was on his way to visit the King at Valladolid about August 9, 1602, when he was suddenly taken ill and died on September 10, supported by the affection of Father Conry and a friar from his own monastery of Donegal. We now know from the State Papers that he was poisoned, or, in the euphemistic language of the day, "practised against," by one James Blake, with the approval of Carew and Mountjoy.[18] "O'Donnell is certainly dead," wrote Carew; "I know they dare not deliver untruths to me." He left the charge of his sept to his brother Rory.

[16] Ibid., i, 228-229, 250.

[17] Pac. Hib., ii, 130-132.

[18] Carew, Cal., iv, No. 241, p. 239 (May 28, 1602) ; ibid., iv, No. 321, p. 349 (October 9, 1602) ; O'Clery, Life of Red Hugh O'Donnell, cxlix, cl, cliii.

After the treaty between Don Juan and the President, O'Sullevan found himself homeless His almost impregnable castle of Dunboy, placed on a spacious haven, the haunt during the fishing season of fisherfolk of all nations, from whose dues O'Sullevan gained £500 yearly, was handed over by his allies the Spaniards to his enemies. Secure in his isolation, he had taken little part in the wars of the province, but his relations were found fighting on both sides. For a time he held out with the lords of the country who were still in arms and two thousand picked young men who drove the Queen's forces into the towns. Losing heart after the news of O'Donnell's death, and having the choice to submit or to quit the country, O'Sullevan took the desperate resolve to march with the remnants of his people, and in the depth of a stormy winter, from Glengariff to O'Donnell's country in Donegal—a hundred leagues of wild mountain travelling, with the crossing of the Shannon, every ford of which was watched, on the way. The history of their sufferings is vividly told by Don Philip O'Sullevan Beare, who had taken refuge in Spain. The nearest help on which they could rely was O'Rorke of Leitrim, and when they came knocking at his fort, after crossing the Curlew Mountains, only thirty-five of the thousand persons who had set out from Kerry were alive, one of them a woman, another the historian's father, an old man of nearly seventy years of age.[19] This famous retreat of the O'Sullevan from Glengariff has become celebrated in the pipe-march which bears his name.

[19] O'Sullevan Beare, Hist, Cath. Iber. Comp., vol. iii, Bk. VII, ch. viii-xii.

The pacification of Munster was over, but Munster was ruined. Edmund Spenser, from his castle at Kilcolman, tells us what, even in the better-inhabited parts of Munster, his own eyes had seen. He says, speaking of the comparative speed with which the country was subdued, that owing to the system of winter campaigns it was impossible for them to continue long in arms. "The trees are bare and naked, which use both to clothe and house the kerne; the ground is cold and wet which useth to be his bedding; the air is sharp and bitter to blow through his naked sides and legs; the kine are barren and without milk which useth to be his food;...besides, being all with calf for the most part, they will, only through much driving and chasing, cast all their calves and lose their milk which should relieve him the next summer." Starvation quickly finished the work that the sword began, and "notwithstanding that Munster was a most rich and plentiful country, full of corn and cattle, that you would have thought they would have been able to stand long, yet ere one year and a half they were brought to such wretchedness as any stony heart would have rued the same. Out of every corner of the woods and glens they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs would not bear them; they looked like anatomies of death; they spake like ghosts crying out of their graves. They did eat dead carrions, happy where they could find them, yea and one another soon after, insomuch as the very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of their graves; and if they found a plot of water-cresses or shamrocks, there they flocked as to a feast...; in a short space there was none almost left, and a most populous and plentiful country suddenly left void of man and beast. Yet, sure, in all that war there perished not many by the sword, but by the extremity of famine which they themselves had wrought." [20]

[20] Spenser, View of the State of Ireland (Morley's ed., 1890), pp. 140, 143.

END OF CHAPTER XX

XXI.—THE FLIGHT OF THE EARLS AND THE END OF MEDIAEVAL IRELAND

After a desperate and successful struggle with the 'English Maguire,' who held the islands of Lough Erne and all the fords, O'Sullevan arrived in Glenconkeine. only to find that O'Neill was on his way to Dublin, about to make his submission and accept terms of peace. Hugh had decided that the moment had arrived when he could hold out no longer. The fatal news of the death of O'Donnell had broken his hopes, and, ever since, his most trusted officers had been falling away from him, seeing no hope left of success. The sons of Shane O'Neill, whom the English had induced him to release from imprisonment on his last submission, were now guiding the Deputy's army into Ulster. The fort of Portmore was being rebuilt and had been renamed Charlemont. It was situated close to Tyrone's old home of Dungannon and commanded the entrance into the North. But, most decisive reason of all, Ulster was swept by famine, and to sustain human life in the country had become an impossibility.

The terrible policy of the year before had had its full result, and Ulster, whose fields had formerly been thick with corn, was reduced to a desert. Mountjoy and his party as they moved along saw everywhere the results of their own deliberate action. "We have seen no one man in all Tyrone of late," he writes, "but dead carcases merely hunger-starved, of which we found divers as we passed. Between Tullaghoge and Toome [a distance of seventeen miles] I believe there lay unburied a thousand dead, and since our first drawing this year to Blackwater there were about three thousand starved in Tyrone...To-morrow, by the grace of God, I am going into the field, as near as I can to utterly waste the County Tyrone." The wolves, coming down to the plains from the woods and mountains, attacked and tore to pieces men weak from want. A terrible plague ran through the country. Tyrone felt that it was time to make an end, and when Sir Garrett Moore, the one man he trusted, came to him with Mountjoy's message he at once signified his intention to go with him and prepared for the journey. On March 29 he surrendered himself to the two commissioners at Tougher, five miles from Dungannon, and on the following evening he made his formal submission to the Deputy at Mellifont, agreeing without demur to all the conditions imposed.

Two days before the arrival of Tyrone a messenger to the Deputy had arrived at Mellifont from London bringing important news. Queen Elizabeth, the woman whom some of those who had seen service in Ireland "feared more than the rebel Tyrone," had passed away. Her last days had been haunted by the thought of her great adversary, whom "the cost of £100,000 and the best army in Europe had not been able to subdue." Shortly before her death, when she was feeling "creeping time at her gate," Sir John Harington was called to her presence; he found her in most pitiable state, but her first question was to ask whether he had seen Tyrone. Now she was gone without knowing of the submission he had made to her shade, for it was deliberately decided by Mountjoy that O'Neill should not be told till his submission was complete. To James, if he succeeded, no submission would need to have been made, for James had a grateful recollection of help received from O'Neill during his Scottish wars. It was only when he was about to repeat his oath in Dublin that Tyrone was informed that it was to be taken to the new monarch. All men observed his face when the disclosure was made to him. His astonishment was plain, but he burst into passionate weeping. A few days later he was on his way to England, accompanied or followed by Rory O'Donnell, O'Sullevan, Niall Garbh, and other Irish chiefs anxious to pay their respects to the new king. Only O'Rorke and Maguire declined any accommodation, and departed to their own country.

O'Sullevan could obtain no pardon, and fled to Spain with others of his family, being warmly received and decorated by the Catholic King; Rory was restored to his country with the title of Earl of Tyrconnel; but Niall Garbh, Rory's old rival and enemy, who had been so long supported by Elizabeth's Government, found himself looked upon by James I as a usurper, and reduced to his old position with the title of Baron. He had long filled a place to which he had no claim. O'Sullevan finds him "rough [garbh] by name and rough by nature," and his loud complaints moved none to sympathy. In days to come, his wife's mother, Ineen Dubh, mother to Hugh Roe and Rory, accused Sir Niall of taking part in O'Doherty's revolt, and in 1608 he, his son, and his two brothers were committed to the Tower. His two brothers were released; but Sir Niall and his son ended their lives in confinement, the former after an imprisonment of eighteen years.

King James received Hugh with respect and friendliness, and made him welcome at the Court. This sudden change in O'Neill's fortunes brought consternation in more quarters than one. "I have lived," cries Sir John Harington, "to see that damnable rebel Tyrone brought to England, courteously favoured, honoured, and well liked...How did I labour after that knave's destruction ! I was called from my home by her Majesty's command, adventured perils by sea and land, endured toil, was near starving, ate horseflesh in Munster, and all to quell that man, who now smileth in peace at those that did hazard their lives to destroy him...Now doth Tyrone dare us old commanders with his presence and protection." [1]

[1] Nugae Antiquae, 11, 149, 151.

In Ireland the embarrassment was hardly less. Docwra, still holding his post at Lough Foyle, was particularly disturbed by the news. He had recently persuaded O'Kane (O'Cahan), one of O'Neill's under-chiefs and his son-in-law to come in, on the agreement that he should hold directly of the Crown, and no more pay rents or hold his lands under his lord O'Neill. He should, in fact, be an independent chief. Docwra, a blunt soldier who had endeavoured to deal honestly with the chiefs, with whom he was on good terms, was in the act of effecting these arrangements when sharp reminders came down from Dublin that "my Lord of Tyrone is taken in to be restored to all his honours and dignities" and that O'Kane's country is his and must be obedient to his command. When Docwra expostulates that "this is strange and beyond all expectation," and declares "I know not how I shall look this man in the face when I shall know myself guilty directly to have falsified my word to him," he is told that O'Kane is "but a base and drunken fellow...and able to do neither good nor harm," while the public good demanded that my Lord of Tyrone "should be contented, upon which depends the peace and security of the whole kingdom." Truly times were changed when Mountjoy could write thus of his old foe.[2] Docwra, in spite of his own vigorous dislike of the whole matter, had to pass on the unwelcome orders to O'Kane, who was highly offended, burst into a passion, and shaking hands with Hugh, Tyrone's son, who was present, bade the devil take all Englishmen and as many as put their trust in them. He asked, "Would the English claim him hereafter "if he followed Tyrone's counsel, though it were against the king? The relations between him and Tyrone were no better, and at the council table in Dublin Tyrone seized the papers he had given to O'Kane granting him his land at a fixed rent out of his hand again, and tore them in pieces before his eyes. A similar treatment of O'Doherty, whose lands were sold away without his consent, was the cause of that chief's hasty plunge into rebellion and subsequent downfall. Nor was Docwra himself better treated. The fishing of Lough Foyle promised to him as part of his reward was restored to Tyrone, and Docwra returned to England a disappointed man, seeing all his work undone, and he himself suspect and glad if by silence he and his might save their necks. When he presented his case in London he was told that "it was all for the public good—the old song," as he says.[3]

[2] Blount, Lord Mountjoy, died on April 3, 1606. His title of Earl of Devonshire became extinct on his death.

[3] Docwra's "Relation," in Miscellany of the Celtic Society (1849).

It is in the doings of Sir John Davies, Attorney-General for Ireland, and of Sir Arthur Chichester, the new Deputy, during their visitation of Ulster in the autumn of 1606, that we may find the real causes of the last scene in the drama of Tyrone's life in Ireland, which led him to take the resolution of departing from the country. His life had been rendered well-nigh intolerable by the constant espionage kept upon his every word and movement, and the sense that his nearest kin were being constantly tempted to report his actions. Long ago he had said that so many eyes were watching him that he could not drink a full bumper of sack but the State was advertised thereof within a few hours after. These men were greedy for the forfeit of his lands, out of which they hoped to reap a share. Added to this was the proclamation of the new king against the Catholics, far more severe and less easy to evade than any that had preceded it. Hugh saw that it was the determination of James and of his agents to Anglicize the North, and to pass the lands to new planters, in spite of all promises and pledges to the contrary.

For Tyrone and the old chiefs there was no more a place in Ireland, and means were certain to be found to oblige the surrender of their ancestral lands to strangers. He saw this being taken in hand all over Ulster, and even if hints that he was personally unsafe were erroneous this was sufficient to decide him to take flight to countries where he was sure that a welcome would await him. Quietly he made his plans, and, though a large party sailed with him, the Government was quite in the dark as to his determination.[4] His final movements were hastened by the arrival of one John Bath, a Drogheda merchant and ship's captain, who had been sent by Cuconnacht Maguire, now in the Low Countries or Brittany, to tell him that they had brought a ship round to Rathmelton, on Lough Swilly, and were taking in food and drink preparatory to their return; Bath urged the importance of not losing this opportunity of leaving the country.

[4] The correspondence relating to Tyrone's flight and the preceding days is collected by Meehan, in Fate and Fortunes of the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnel, pp. 115-120.

Tyrone was at Slane with Chichester, trying to settle the bounds of the lands about Dungannon and Charlemont which he had consented to surrender. He had just heard rumours that Chichester was to be appointed President of Ulster, and it did not seem likely that the relations between him and the new President would be cordial. The rumour was unfounded, for Sir Arthur retained the post of Deputy, but it may have influenced O'Neill's decision. He determined to go, and sent Bath on to Ballyshannon to acquaint Rory O'Donnell with his resolution. On September 8, 1607, he took leave of the Deputy, who returned to Dublin, and then went to spend his two last nights in Ireland at Mellifont at the house of his friend Sir Garrett Moore, the fosterer of his son John. It was observed that on his departure he wept abundantly, taking farewell of every child and servant in the house in turn. In the hurry of the flight one of Tyrone's children and one of Caffar O'Donnell's babes were left behind, being away in the charge of their foster-parents; but a company of ninety-nine persons embarked, of whom the more important were—besides O'Neill and his countess, and three of their children—Rory O'Donnell, Earl of Tyrconnel, his brother Caffar, and his sister Nuala, with the attendants belonging to each. Among Tyrone's household was his English secretary, Henry Ovington, in whom he put such confidence that he had been included in all Tyrone's conferences with Essex. He seems to have had no warning of what was on foot, and he later prayed the Government for permission to return. Among the others went Tadhg O'Keenan, from whose interesting account of the adventures of which he was an eyewitness we learn the future events in the lives of the distinguished party.[5]

[5] This tract of O'Keenan has been edited by the Rev. Paul Walsh in the Catholic Record Society's Publications (1916).

After a stormy voyage which drove them up the Channel, and made a landing on the coast of Spain impossible, they reached the little town of Quilleboeuf, at the mouth of the Seine, and proceeded by boats up the river to Rouen, whence by a leisurely route they found their way into Flanders, being everywhere treated with the greatest kindness and every mark of respect. Before arriving at Brussels they were met by O'Neill's eldest son, Colonel Henry O'Neill, at the head of his troop of Irish soldiers in the service of Spain, and on the following Saturday the Spanish commander-in-chief in Flanders, the Marquis Spinola, one of the most brilliant soldiers of his age, came to welcome them with a splendid retinue of nobles, and invited them to a banquet on the following day. They were equally courteously received and entertained by the Archduke and Archduchess, the latter being the daughter of the King of Spain, and they met many notables, including the Duc d'Aumale, Cardinal Bentivoglio, the author of the History of the Wars in Flanders, and others. They spent the winter in the Low countries, visiting Douai, Mechlin, Louvain, Antwerp, and other cities, and in the spring continued their journey into Italy. From Louvain the two Earls had drawn up and forwarded to King James a full and dignified statement of the grievances for which they were obliged to leave their native land; these fully explain the causes of their flight.

They left behind them in Brussels the young boys John and Brian, who became pages to the Archduke, and the other children, one of whom was in the future to become the famous Owen Roe O'Neill, Tyrone's half-nephew. Nuala, who had been Niall Garbh's wife, but had been forced to leave him, also remained behind. The rest of the party arrived in Rome in the beginning of May 1608. But the summer heat and malarial fever laid their hand upon Tyrconnel. He and his brother Caffar sank within a few weeks of each other, and were buried in a tomb which is still a resort of Irish visitors in the Church of S. Pietro Montario, on the Janiculum. The thoughts of their sister Nuala on hearing of their death are given voice to in Mangan's well-known verses, "O woman of the piercing wail," founded upon a fine poem by Owen Roe-Mac an Bhaird (or Ward), the family bard.[6] Hugh O'Neill lived on for many years, but he had sorrow upon sorrow. His anxiety for his scattered family must have been great. His son Hugh, Baron of Dungannon, was stricken down soon after the O'Donnells and followed them to the tomb. Tyrone happily did not live to hear the fate of his young son Brian, who was mysteriously and foully murdered in Brussels in 1617; but the babe left behind in his flight had fallen into Chichester's hands, and anxiety for its safety must often have weighed heavily upon him.[7]

[6] O'Grady, Catalogue of Manuscripts in the British Museum, pp. 371-373.

[7] This child was for some time under the charge of Sir Tobias Caulfeild at Charlemont Fort. He was then sent to Eton. Finally he was confined in the Tower, where he appears to have died.

Hugh passed away in 1616, aged, blind, and bowed with griefs. There were qualities of real greatness in O'Neill; wise, patient, and acute, in the difficult days in which he lived he played his part with skill and dignity, worthy of dealings with better men. We feel that he had a right to ask that the term 'rebel' should not be applied to him more often than was convenient, and that his persecutors should remember that he was a nobleman born. Captain Lee, who knew Tyrone well, had a high opinion of his probity and his desire to act straightforwardly. He writes to the Queen in 1594 deploring the mismanagement by the Lord Deputy in his dealings with him and the other Northern men of position. He declares that "there was never man bred in these parts who hath done your Majesty greater service than he, with often loss of his blood upon the Queen's enemies." He ascribes the quiet of the North of Ireland during many years not to the Crown forces or to their officers, but only to the honest disposition and carriage of the Earl, who had made the country obedient to her Majesty. "And what pity it is that a man of his worth and worthiness shall be thus dealt withal by his adversaries...I humbly leave to your Majesty." [8]

[8] Captain Thomas Lee's "Brief Declaration of the Government of Ireland," in J. Lodge's Desiderata Curiosa Hibernica (1772), 1, 113.

With the flight of the Earls mediaeval Ireland may be said to have come to an end, and with it the old clan system. Henceforth, for good and ill, the plantations over the larger portions of the country introduced an element of English life and thought too large to admit of any extended revival of the sept and clan conditions. We need not regret them, picturesque as they may appear from the outside. What was good in the clan life, its loyalty to the chieftain, its sense of interdependence, was more than overshadowed by its inherent disadvantages. The uncertainty as to the succession to the chiefship led to incessant wars within the sept itself, out of which the neighbouring chiefs made their own profit; murders of pretenders to the office were continual even in the Tudor period, and mutilations intended to prevent designs upon the leadership of the sept. In every chief's house sat hostages, who spent in captivity the better part of their lives, liable at all times to be blinded or put to death for faults not their own. The number of the chiefs' wives, and the open acknowledgement of numerous base-born sons, who could succeed to the chieftainship, show the state of feeling on social matters, while the cruelties of chiefs like Shane O'Neill or the long drinking bouts of Turlogh do not give us an impression of high culture among the general run of the leaders of the people.[9]

[9] On one occasion Turlogh was so long unconscious as the result of a drinking bout that it was reported to the Government that he was dead ; consternation spread when at the end of three days a report came in that he had revived.

War, raiding, and the devastation of neighbouring lands was the daily life of the clans and their natural delight; they were trained to be warriors, and as warriors they lived and died. In Elizabethan times few pages of the Annals are without such reports as the following: "Shane O'Neill and Hugh O'Donnell left neither house neither corn in all my [Maguire's] country upon the main land unwasted, neither church neither sanctuary unrobbed; but there is certain islands in my country in the which islands standeth all my goods, but your lordship shall understand that Hugh O'Donnell has prepared twelve boats for to rob and waste all those islands." Or again, when O'Rorke is contemplating a raid into Meath his family bard exhorts him to reap down the growing corn, and fell the orchards, and to leave misery behind him on the smooth pastures of the Boyne, so that a woman from Meath's pasture-land must satisfy her hunger with the flesh of her first-born child.[10] There was little to choose between the methods of the Irish chief and the English officer so far as terrorism and bloodshed were concerned, though the destruction caused by the passage of English armies was more widespread. Nor was there anything to distinguish the Irish soldier from his English comrade in the matter of pity for the sufferers in war. Neither English or Irish troops spared those who fell under their hand. War, in spite of the attempts or affected attempts to gloss over its horrors, is never anything but barbarous and terrible—a monster raised by one nation to torture and destroy another. In Elizabethan days palliation was not even dreamed of; and the troops of both countries showed an equal readiness to execute the ruthless orders of their commanders. O'Sullevan Beare laments that the Irish troops did not hold their hand even from the desecration of Armagh Cathedral, Catholics though they were, tearing down the images and polluting the precincts with the same fury as the heretics with whom they were associated.[11]

[10] See O'Grady, op. cit., pp. 412-417 ; E. Knott, Poems of Tadhg Dall Higgin, ii, 74.

[11] O'Sullevan Beare, op. cit., vol. iii, Bk. III., ch. vi.

But, though Irish soldiers never failed to be forthcoming for the Irish armies fighting on the side of the Government under English commanders, and there is no distinction visible between their conduct and that of their fellows, there is a real difference in the humanity shown by their leaders toward the vanquished, or the captives that the fortunes of war threw into their hands. When Enniskillen Castle surrendered to Maguire and O'Donnell in 1594 the defenders were dismissed as agreed upon, and after the battle of the Yellow Ford the surrendered garrisons were permitted to withdraw to Newry and Dundalk. No treachery, such as seems to have occurred at Smerwick and Dunboy, was attempted upon them. The men of note who fell into their hands, though held to ransom, were well treated, and in some cases, such as that of Sir Henry Harington, they were so happy with their captors that they "ever afterwards spoke well of the Irish." There were no massacres of surrendered garrisons or of helpless women and children. Here the behaviour of the Irish chiefs showed a sense of honour and courtesy of which we have lamentably few examples on the part of the English officers in their dealings with them. The principles laid down by Machiavelli in The Prince for the guidance of the Italian princes of his day were equally accepted and acted upon by France, Spain, and England, but the harshness and perfidy practised in Ireland by the men in power in the Tudor period were not only disapproved in many cases by the sovereigns, they also aroused horror in the bulk of the English people. Lord Arthur Grey was assailed on all sides on his return as "a bloody man, who regarded not the life of the Queen's subjects no more than dogs, but had wasted and consumed all so as now she had nothing almost left but to reign in their ashes." The heads of one Deputy and officer after another fell on the block on their retirement from their Irish offices, even the near kin of the reigning sovereigns not escaping the penalty of their misdeeds. Perhaps the most remarkable expression of opinion is that of Lord Burghley, who, writing to Sir Henry Wallop at a time when English sympathy was strongly stirred on behalf of the suffering peoples of the Low Countries, declares that "the Flemings had not such cause to rebel against the oppression of the Spaniards as the Irish against the tyranny of England."

At the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries, in order to provide a refuge and place of study for Catholic youths shut out from the means of education at home, a number of Irish colleges sprang up on the Continent, founded sometimes by sovereigns, like that of Toulouse, which owes its origin to Anne of Austria, or of Salamanca and Compostella, founded by Philip II; others, such as Bordeaux,[12] were established by Irish merchants settled abroad or by Irish officers in foreign service. During the earlier half of the seventeenth century colleges were founded in France, Spain, Belgium and Rome. Lisbon was one of the first to open its doors to Irish students, who were maintained by a confraternity in that city. Salamanca had added an Irish college even sooner, Stephen White having presented to the King of Spain at Valladolid some Irish students and prayed him to found for these "poor exiles from Ireland" a college in Salamanca. This college became, along with that of Louvain, the favourite resort of Irish pupils; Colonel Henry O'Neill, Tyrone's son, Owen Roe O'Neill, Ward, and Wadding were among the students who resorted thither. Other colleges were started in Spain by the exertions of Thomas Stapleton, and Madrid, Alcala, Seville, and Santiago added Irish foundations to their list of colleges. Irish lads became a familiar sight in the streets of Spanish towns. At Salamanca they were so well known that in Gil Blas there is an allusion to the figures Hibernoises in the public promenade of the city; and it is there remarked that these young Irish intellectuals were "always ready to discuss the most abstruse questions of metaphysics with any comer." Paris gave a welcome to Irish students from about 1578, when John Lee with six Irish students entered the College. In 1677 Lombard College was transferred to the Irish students and became the centre of the Irish colony in Paris; when King James arrived there after the defeat of the Boyne he held a levee at this college. The existing Irish College in Paris was opened in 1769 by Laurence Kelly, who built a college for clerics in what is now the rue des Irlandais, but the Lombard College went on as before; it had attracted many of the military men who entered the Irish Brigade in the eighteenth century.

[12] Dr. Geoffrey Keating was the seventeenth student admitted to Bordeaux College ; it was founded in or about 1603 by Father Dermott MacCarthy.

Irish students flocked abroad in such numbers that Ware estimated that as many as thirty foreign establishments existed, ranging from Douai and Rheims on the west to Prague and Vienna on the east. Irish was taught and spoken in some of the colleges, and the rules of Lille, founded for Leinster boys, required all pupils to use the language on two days of the week; when, in 1764, a President was chosen who could speak no Irish the authorities refused to accept him. It was contended that in Leinster the native tongue was not necessary for clerical students, as all the priests in that province spoke English. At Louvain there were three Irish colleges, and up to recent times the name "Collegium Hibernum" could be read over the large gateway of carved stone which led to the Irish Pastoral College. But the centre of Irish interests in Belgium was the Franciscan College of the Recollects, named after St Anthony of Padua and built through the intercession of Father Florence Conry by Philip III of Spain. It was founded in 1616. Here worked that great group of Irish scholars, Luke Wadding, John Colgan, Stephen White, Patrick Fleming, Hugh Ward, and Thomas O'Sheerin, and to it came Michael O'Clery when engaged in collecting materials for the lives of the Irish Saints and also for the Annals of the Four Masters. Peter Lombard and Hugh MacCaghwell often passed periods within its walls, and there Hugh O'Neill was reunited with his eldest son, a colonel in the Spanish forces of the Netherlands. These boys did not go abroad wholly unprepared. The old schools of the bards seem to have been in full activity, and the early lists of pupils at Salamanca, which give not only the names and parents of the students, but the places where they had received their earlier education, show that many of those who went abroad between the years 1600 and 1616 had been instructed by poets whose poems are still extant, such as Blind Tadhg O'Higgin and others. The learned Hugh Ward, a Donegal man, himself studied in the schools of Connacht "under diverse masters, of whom the most learned was Master Oliver Hussey, under whom he studied two years; under others, as Henry Hart, Tadhg Higgin, Aenea Conmy, for four years." [13]

[13] See the lists of students at Salamanca published in Archivium Hib. 11, 29.

Besides the bardic schools there were several excellent 'Latin schools' in all the important towns, Kilkenny, Ross, Drogheda, Galway, Cork, Armagh, and Waterford, such as those of Peter White at Kilkenny and Alexander Lynch of Galway. Peter White had been educated at Oxford, which was then a regular resort for men of studious habits, and became a Fellow of Oriel College. He caught the fervour of the Oxford revival of classical studies, and his school inspired in its pupils a passion for Greece and Grecian studies. Richard Stanihurst, Peter Lombard the Primate, Luke Wadding, and Comerford were students at this school.[14] When these schools were closed priests and Jesuits entered private families as teachers to the young. The "six religious houses of the Pale," which were spared by special petition because of the excellent education they provided, were entirely for English-born children.

[14] O'Shea, Life of Luke Wadding (Dublin, 1892).

The larger number of these Oxford students were descendants of the settlers and came from the towns; it was naturally less common to find members of the country Irish families taking an English education, though from this rule there were many exceptions. The religious differences here, as elsewhere, determined their choice. If an Irish Catholic desired a more advanced standard of instruction than was obtainable within the country he went abroad to obtain it. Even Protestants seem to have followed this fashion. In the statute of Elizabeth setting forth the reasons for the foundation of a college in Dublin it is stated that the purpose in view was that "knowledge and civility might be increased by the instruction of our people (in a College for learning), whereof many have usually heretofore used to travaile into France, Italy, and Spain to get learning in such foreigne Universities, whereby they have been infected with Popery and other ill qualities."

In Elizabeth's reign, however, there seems to have been a great tendency among the Irish gentlemen of position to send their boys into England or in some way to secure that they learned the English tongue. It was, in fact, necessary for those who took the English side either for a time or permanently to know the language of their allies. For instance, Bryan MacGeoghegan in a petition to the Queen states that he had been compelled by poverty to draw home two children whom he "was bringing up in England in good civility and literature." In 1593 it is stated that "MacMahon's brothers and children know English and are civilly brought up." [15] O'Donnell, we are told, "knows English and can sign and date in that language." Nevertheless, he spoke it with difficulty, so that Sidney had to get the aid of an interpreter, though O'Donnell understood what was said to him. It seems as if it had become a matter of reproach among the Irish chiefs if any one of them did not know the English tongue. Donal O'Sullevan,[16] replying to what he considered the false accusations of Sir Owen O'Sullevan, protests that "the country was not so barbarous, but that the heirs thereof were always brought up in learning and civility, and could speak the English and Latin tongues; but to excuse his own ignorance and want of bringing up, being not able to speak the English language, he (Sir Owen) would gladly discredit the country and all his ancestors, who were ever better disposed people to good government, learning, and civility than the said Sir Owen, as hereunder shall appear."

[15] Cal. S.P.I., Eliz., clxviii. No. 2, p. 70 (January 5, 1593).

[16] Ibid., cxxix. No. 74, p. 342 (May 10, 1587).

Latin was the universal medium and was used in a free conversational way, perhaps without a strict regard for grammar, but in a manner to make it useful for all the common wants of life. "Without any precepts or observation of congruity they speak Latin like a vulgar language," writes Campian somewhat scornfully, about 1574, "learned in their common schools of Leachcraft [Medicine] and Law, whereat they begin children and hold on sixteen or twenty years, conning by rote aphorisms of Hippocrates and the Pandects of Justinian, and a few other parings of these two faculties." The State correspondence of the time shows that Shane O'Neill could write Latin letters to both laymen and ecclesiastics; while Cuconnacht Maguire is said to have been "a learned and studious adept in Latin and in Irish." [17] Shane seems to have understood English very well also; he writes to Sussex in 1562, in the curious spelling which he shared with many born Englishmen of the day. "Bechetching you to wrytte me no more letters in Latyn, because that I would nott that no other clerke nor non other man of this contrey shuld knowe your mynd; wherfor doo you wryte all your mynd in Englys." [18]

[17] Annals of the Four Masters, 1589 (vol. vi, p. 1875).

[18] British Museum MS. Vesp., F. xii, fol. 47.

It was a much less usual accomplishment to speak and write English than to use Latin in the same way. The poor shoeless lads on the Galway mountains could often converse in Latin, and every young man educated for the priesthood had of necessity to learn it. But English was, as we have seen, also acquired where necessity demanded it; and occasionally we find a learned lady, like Calvagh O'Donnell's Scottish wife, who could speak in three languages.[19]

[19] Carew, Cal. 11, No. 501, p. 350 (March 1583).

END OF CHAPTER XXI

APPENDIX I.—POPE ADRIAN'S BULL "LAUDABILITER" AND NOTE UPON IT

"Adrian, bishop, servant of the servants of God, to his most dearly beloved son in Christ, the illustrious king of the English, greeting and apostolical blessing.[1]

[1] The original text of this Bull will be found in Dimock's edition of the works of Giraldus Cambrensis, vol. v, pp. 317-319 (1867).

"Laudably and profitably doth your Majesty consider how you may best extend the glory of your name on earth and lay up for yourself an eternal reward in heaven, when, as becomes a Catholic prince, you labour to extend the borders of the Church, to teach the truths of the Christian faith to a rude and unlettered people, and to root out the weeds of vice from the field of the Lord; and to accomplish your design more effectually you crave the advice and assistance of the Apostolic See, and in so doing we are persuaded that the higher are your aims, and the more discreet your proceedings, the greater, under God, will be your success; because, whatever has its origin in ardent faith and in love of religion, always has a prosperous end and issue. Certainly it is beyond a doubt, as your Highness acknowledgeth, that Ireland and all the other islands, on which the Gospel of Christ hath dawned and which have received the knowledge of the Christian faith, belong of right to St Peter and the holy Roman Church. Wherefore we are the more desirous to sow in them the acceptable seed of God's word, because we know that it will be strictly required of us hereafter. You have signified to us, our well-beloved son in Christ, that you propose to enter the island of Ireland in order to subdue the people and make them obedient to laws, and to root out from among them the weeds of sin; and that you are willing to yield and pay yearly from every house the pension of one penny to St Peter, and to keep and preserve the rights of the churches in that land whole and inviolate.

"We, therefore, regarding your pious and laudable design with due favour, and graciously assenting to your petition, do hereby declare our will and pleasure, that, for the purpose of enlarging the borders of the Church, setting bounds to the progress of wickedness, reforming evil manners, planting virtue, and increasing the Christian religion, you do enter and take possession of that island, and execute therein whatsoever shall be for God's honour and the welfare of the same.

"And, further, we do also strictly charge and require that the people of that land shall accept you with all honour, and dutifully obey you, as their liege lord, saving only the rights of the churches, which we will have inviolably preserved; and reserving to St Peter and the holy Roman Church the yearly pension of one penny from each house. If, therefore, you bring your purpose to good effect, let it be your study to improve the habits of that people, and take such orders by yourself, or by others whom you shall think fitting, for their lives, manners and conversation, that the Church there may be adorned by them, the Christian faith be planted and increased, and all that concerns the honour of God and the salvation of souls be ordered by you in like manner; so that you may receive at God's hands the blessed reward of everlasting life, and may obtain on earth a glorious name in ages to come."

PRIVILEGE OF POPE ALEXANDER III TO HENRY II, CONFIRMING THE BULL OF ADRIAN, 1172[2]

[2] For the original see ibid., pp. 318-319; and Ussher's Sylloge, No. 47.

"Alexander, bishop, servant of the servants of God, to our well-beloved son in Christ, the illustrious king of the English, health and apostolic benediction.

"Forasmuch as these grants of our predecessors which are known to have been made on reasonable grounds, are worthy to be confirmed by a permanent sanction; We, therefore, following in the footsteps of the late venerable Pope Adrian, and in expectation also of seeing the fruits of our own earnest wishes on this head, ratify and confirm the permission of the said Pope granted you in reference to the dominion of the kingdom of Ireland; (reserving to Blessed Peter and the holy Roman Church, as in England, so also in Ireland, the annual payment of one penny for every house;) to the end that the filthy practices of that land may be abolished, and the barbarous nation which is called by the Christian name, may through your clemency attain unto some decency of manners; and that when the Church of that country which has been hitherto in a disordered state, shall have been reduced to better order, that people may by your means possess for the future the reality as well as the name of the Christian profession."

NOTE.—In recent years the authenticity of Adrian's so-called "Bull" has been disputed by authorities like Cardinal Moran and Cardinal Gasquet. The latter has, in his Monastic Life in the Middle Ages (1922), republished an essay originally printed forty years ago in the Dublin Review for July 1883, without any alterations, although a number of its dates and statements have been challenged by later writers (cf. Miss Kate Norgate's paper in the English Historical Review, vol. viii, pp. 18-52[3]). But none of these writers notices the important fact that through the whole of the Middle Ages and up to late times the Bull was accepted without question as genuine both by the Irish nation and by the Vatican. The Privilege of Pope Alexander III, Adrian's successor, confirmed the Bull, and his letters to the King, to the clergy and bishops of Ireland, and to the nobles, enforced obedience to it. A copy existing in the Book of Leinster, on a fly-leaf (p. 342 of the facsimile), shows that in the thirteenth century, to which date this copy is ascribed, it was looked upon as part of the historical material belonging to that province.

[3] See also G. H. Orpen, Ireland under the Normans (1911), i, 287-318.

It is most singular that Cardinal Gasquet should state that Pope John XXII was ignorant of the Bull of Adrian. In the Appeal sent by Donal O'Neill and the Irish princes to this Pope, at the time of the invasion of Edward Bruce, they distinctly appeal to this Bull as a reason for the Pope's interference on their behalf. They say: "Adrian IV, your predecessor, an Englishman, more even by affection and prejudice than by birth, blinded by that affection and by the false suggestions of Henry II, King of England,...gave the dominion of this our island, by a certain form of words, to that same Henry II, whom he ought better to have stripped of his own, on account of the above crime" (i.e., the murder of St Thomas á Becket). In his reply, consequent on this Irish appeal, the Pope, writing from Avignon to King Edward II, in the second year of his pontificate, to recommend to him the advisability of dealing more leniently with his Irish subjects, himself refers to Adrian's Bull as follows: [4] "Know then, Son, that we have received a certain letter directed in the first instance from the Irish nobles and people to our sons Anselm, presbyter, of the title SS. Marcellinus and Peter, and Luke, deacon of St Mary's in the Broadway, Cardinal Nuncios of the apostolic see, and by them enclosed to us in a letter of their own.[5] In which we see it stated, among other things, that whereas our predecessor Pope Adrian of happy memory, did, in a certain mode and form of grant, which was distinctly specified in his apostolic letters drawn up in that behalf, convey to your progenitor, Henry, King of England, of illustrious memory, the supreme dominion over Ireland, that king himself and the kings of England his successors, even to the present time failing to observe the mode and form so set forth, have in direct violation of them, for a long period past kept down that people in a state of intolerable bondage, accompanied with unheard-of hardships and grievances. Nor was there found during all that time, any person to redress the grievances they endured or be moved with a pitiful compassion for their distress; although recourse was had to you...and the loud cry of the oppressed fell, at times at least, upon your own ear. In consequence whereof, unable to support such a state of things any longer, they have been compelled to withdraw themselves from your jurisdiction and to invite another to come and be ruler over them," etc.

[4] For the original see Theiner, Vet. Mon. Hib. et Scot., No. ccccxxii, p. 201.

[5] The two cardinals arrived in England in the summer of 1317, more than two years after the landing of Edward Bruce in Ireland.

It is clear that in the early fourteenth century both the Irish and the Popes believed the grant of Adrian to have been genuine. The appeal of O'Neill founds its complaint on the fact that the English kings had not fulfilled the conditions on which the grant was made: it does not dispute the grant. Moreover this epistle of the Pope, as also the Bull, are quoted in full by two of the greatest of Irish ecclesiastical authorities, David Rothe, Bishop of Ossory, in his Analecta Sacra (1616), when he was secretary at Rome to the Primate, Peter Lombard, and by the Primate himself in his book De Regno Hiberniae (1632).[6] He was long resident in Rome and in close touch with the Papal Court, and his book is dedicated to Pope Urban VIII. Neither of these men had any doubt of the genuineness of the document. A later example of the Papal recognition of the Bull is found in the letter of instructions given by Pope Innocent X to the nuncio Rinuccini, when he was sent from Rome to Ireland during the Confederate Wars in 1645. It contains a brief summary of English dealings with Ireland in the past. In it occur the words: "Henry, desiring to strengthen his empire,...wished to subdue the island of Ireland; and to compass this design, had recourse to Adrian, who, himself an Englishman, with a liberal hand granted all he coveted. The zeal manifested by Henry to convert all Ireland to the faith moved the soul of Adrian to invest him with the sovereignty of the island," etc. [7] It is clear that later Popes did not disavow Adrian's act. Nor is the distinction attempted to be drawn by some modern writers between the "Donation" and the "Bull" visible in the writings of these authorities. The so-called Bull was an expression of approval and benediction of Henry's action similar to that bestowed by an earlier Pope on Duke William when he proposed to add the crown of England to his dukedom of Normandy, or to the approval by another Pope of John's visit to Ireland, symbolized by the gift of a crown of peacock's feathers. Pope Alexander's three epistles in 1172 declare that when he heard that Henry, "instigated by divine inspiration," had subjected the Irish people to his dominion he had "returned thanks to Him who had conferred so great a victory." He "has learned with joy" that the Irish kings have taken Henry as their sovereign and he exhorts them to fidelity.[8] His legate, Vivianus, at the synod of Dublin immediately afterward "made a public declaration of the right of the king of England to Ireland" and threatened excommunication against all "who presumed to forfeit their allegiance," an attitude persevered in by the Papal See up to the reign of Elizabeth, when the Reformation introduced new considerations.

[6] Pp. 245-260.

[7] Rinuccini, Embassy in Ireland, xxviii-xxix.

[8] Sweetman, Calendar, i, No. 38, pp. 6, 7; Black Book of the Exchequer, Q-R., fol. 8b, 9, 9b.

The gift of Adrian was partly a consequence of the fatherly concern felt by the Pope for the spiritual welfare of the Irish people, of the moral and spiritual condition of whom St Malachy and St Bernard had recently given a desponding report, and it was partly a move in that Weltpolitik which was gradually extending the power of the Roman curia over every part of Europe. At a far later date Pope Alexander VI put forth a similar claim in his division of the entire Western world between Spain and Portugal. These gifts, while extending the Papal support to the recipients in their ambitious projects, at the same time gave expression to the assumption of an authority which claimed to stand above kings and made them suppliants at the hands of the spiritual power.

END OF APPENDIX I

APPENDIX II.—LETTER FROM CATHAL "CROVDEARG" O'CONOR, KING OF CONNACHT, TO HENRY III, circa 1224

"To his dear Lord Henry,[1] by the grace of God King of England, Lord of Ireland, Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, Count of Anjou, from his faithful K,[2] King of Connacht, greeting, and bond of sincere affection with faithful obedience.

[1] From Royal Letters of Henry III, ed. Shirley, Rolls Series (1862), vol. i, p. 223, No. 198. Chapter House Miscellanea. Date, May or June, 1224. Reply (dated June 14) in Rot. Claus., I, p. 604 b.

[2] I.e., Cathal

"We feel sure that you have heard, through the trusty men and counsellors of your father and your own, how that we did not fail to give faithful and devoted service to the Lord John, your father of happy memory ; and since his death, as your trusty servants stationed in Ireland know and have learned, we are not failing to give devoted obedience to you, nor do we wish ever as long as we live to fail you. Wherefore, although we possess a charter for the land of Connacht from the Lord your father given to ourselves and our heirs, and by name to Od [3] our son and heir, nevertheless none the less we desire, and earnestly entreat from your royal Majesty, that in view of our faithful service aforesaid you will be pleased to grant to Od our son and heir, for himself by name and for his heirs, a charter for the land of Connacht : you will in this matter of ours, if it please you, secure that we and our son and our whole nation will be made for the future, and with good reason, all the more devoted and eager in obedience and service to you against all your enemies. Moreover we earnestly entreat your dignity that in return for the faithful homage which he desires to pay to you, you will grant to our son aforesaid that part of Connacht, viz., Ubriun and Conmacin and Caled, which is occupied by your enemy and the brother of your enemy, William de Lascy. And we ask you to give as for our part credence to the bearers of these presents, S. and F. our faithful messengers, and to signify your reply to us by the same. Farewell."

[3] I.e., his son Aedh.

END OF APPENDIX II

APPENDIX III.—EXTRACT FROM A LETTER WRITTEN BY RICHARD II TO HIS UNCLE, THE DUKE OF YORK ON HIS ARRIVAL IN DUBLIN, FEBRUARY 1, 1395

"...En nostre terre d'irland sont trois maners des gentz, cestassauoir Irrois Sauages noz enemis, Irroix rebelx, et engleis obeissantz ; semble a nous et a nostre counseil esteant entour nous que considerez que les ditz Irroix rebelx se sount par cas rebellez pour griefs et tortz a eux faites d'une part et par defaute que remedie ne lour ad estez fet d'autre part et qu'ensement sils ne feussent sagement tretez et mis en bone espoir de grace il se verroient verisemblablement ioindre a noz enemis quoi nous ne verroms en nostre defaute pardoun lour serroit ottroie en general et ce par fin et fee de nostre seal a ent estre paiez par chescun qauera la paredun suisdite dount semble a nous et nostre dit counseil que par plusours voies graund bien auendreit a nous et nostre dite terre ; mes par taunt que nous ne pensoms fere nulle tiele ne si chargeaunte chose saunz voz counseil at assent; nous auoms pris generalment toutz les ditz Irroix rebelx en nostre proteccioun especiale a durer tanqa la quinzeine de pasques prochein avenir au fin qentreci et adunque ils purront venir ceux de eulx qui vorront monstrer les causes de lour rebellion et par especial qen le mesne temps nous pourrons auoir voz plein counseil et auis si la dite pardoun soit a estre grauntez ou noun..."

[1] The letter is given in full from the original manuscript in the British Museum in Sir John Gilbert's Facsimiles of National Manuscripts, vol. iii, No. xxii.

END OF APPENDIX III

APPENDIX IV.—"INFORMACION DE CREDENCE PUR LE MESSAGE ENVOIEZ A ENGLETERRE" ADDRESSED TO THE NEWLY CROWNED KING HENRY IV BY ALEXANDER DE BALSCOT, GUARDIAN OF IRELAND AND THE COUNCIL IN THE YEAR 1399

Item. McMurghe [MacMorrogh of Leinster] is at open war, and is now gone to aid the Earl of Dessemond [Desmond] to destroy the Earl of Ormond if they can; and afterwards to return with all the power they can gather from Munster to destroy the Pale. O'Nelle [O'Neill] has assembled a great host to make war unless he have delivered to him his son, his cousins, and other hostages now in the castle of Dublin.

Item. There are no soldiers for the defence of the land and no money to pay them.

Item. The Irish enemies are strong and arrogant and of great power; the English marchers are unwilling to ride against them.

Item. The English families who are in rebellion, as the Butyllers [Butlers], Powers, Geraldines, Berminghames, Daltons, Barretts, Dillons, and others, oppress and spoil the liege people; and will needs be called gentlemen of blood, whereas they are sturdy robbers and not amenable to the law.

Item. These said English rebels are accomplices of the Irish enemies, and will not displease them, and thereby the loyal English are destroyed and injured.

Item. The King hath no profit of the revenues of the land, because no officer dare put the law into execution.

Item. Many counties obedient to the law are not in the King's hand, except Dublin and part of Kildare; for Uriel with its sheriff and escheator, the fee-farm of Drogheda, and all other profits, forfeitures, fees, wards, marriages, fee-farms, custom, coket, and all other sources of revenue are given to other persons. From County Midhe [Meath], the Liberty of an Earl Palatine; Ulster, a Liberty given to others; County Wexford, a Liberty of Lord de Grey; County Cork the Liberty of an Earl Palatine; County Tipperary, the Liberty of the Earl of Ormond—the King gets nothing. Also from the Counties of Carlow, Kilkenny, Waterford, Kerry, Limerick, Connaght, Roscoman, through default of obedience and execution of law, and by rebellion of enemies—the King has nothing.

Item. The coket and custom and fee-farm of Waterford is given for twenty years to the Mayor and Bailiffs to enclose the town, and little is done.

Item. All the profits of the land, as well manors as lands, rents, etc. are given to others, so that no profit comes to the Exchequer.

Item. Many fees and annuities are given both to Irish and English to the great and insupportable charge of the Exchequer.

Item. As regards the officers of the Exchequer, no Baron there is learned in the Law, as great need should be.

Item. The customs and cokets used to be a great part of the revenue, and now little comes to the King, because sundry of them are due to others, and the Customer has the office of Collector for the term of his life and takes yearly fifty pounds.

END OF APPENDIX IV

APPENDIX V.—LIST OF BOOKS BELONGING TO THE LIBRARY OF GERALD, NINTH EARL OF KILDARE, 1526

BOKS REMAYNING IN THE LYBERARY OF GERALD FITZGERALDE, ERLE OF KYLDARE, THE XV DAY OF FFEBRUARIJ, ANNO HENRICI VIII, XVII

Hugo de Vienna super iiii euangelistas
Tria volumina Cronice Anthonini
Tria volumina operis Sancti Anthonii cum glosa
Quatuor partes Nicholai de Lyra
Hugo de Vienna super spalterium
Jacobi locher opera poete laureati
Opus Cornelii vitelli poete
Virgilius cum iiii commentis
Tabula vtilissima super lyra
Juuenalis cum glosa
Theodulus cum commento
Dialagus sancti Grigorii
Boecius de consolacione philosophie, etc.

ffrench Boks
The cronicles of England in frenche
A frenche boke in parchment
The trye of battails
Parte of the Bible in french
The cronicles of ffraunce in french
Maundvile in ffrench
Lalas d'amour de viegne [divine]
Le Brevier dez nobles
Le quatre choses toutz cestz au vn lyuer
Le tryumph de damez
A boke of ffarsses [farces] in ffrench

Yet Boks, Englysh boks
The polycronicon
Bocaas, The Fall of Princes
Arthur
The siedge of Thebes
The cronicles of England
The feettis [feats] of armes of chyualry made by Christian de pyce [Pisa]
Cambrensis

Irish
Saltir Casshill
Saint Beraghans boke
Another boke wherein is the begynnyng of the cronicles of Irland
The birth of Criste
Saint Kateryn's lif
Saint Jacob [h]is passion
Saint George [h]is passion
The speech of Oyncheaghis
Saint ffeghyn [h]is lif [St Fechin]
Saint ffynyan [h]is lif [St Finnian]
Brislech my Moregh [Magh Murthemne]
Concullyn's actes, Irishe
The monkes of Egypte's lif
ffoilfylmey [ ? ]. The vii Sages
The declaration of Gospellis
Saint Bernardes passion
The history of clane lyre [Clan Lir]
The leeching of Kene [Cian] [h]is legg.

There is in the British Museum a second copy of this catalogue, which adds the names of a considerable number of other books, such as in the Latin section the Book of Alexander the Great, Caesar's Commentaries, the Summa Angelica, the works of Terence, Juvenal, Virgil with four commentaries, parts of Livy, the dialogues of St Gregory, The City of God of St Augustine, Josephus, etc.

In the French section are included Froissart's Chronicles in four volumes, Of the Holy Land, Illustrations of Gaul and Singularities of Troy, Lancelot du Lac, Ogier the Dane, The Garden of Plaisance, the Romance of the Rose, etc.

In the English library are to be added. The Siege of Thebes, The Destruction of Troy, The Siege of Jerusalem, Charlemagne, The Shepherd's Calendar, Gesta Romanorum, Troillus, The Order of the Garter, The King of England [Henry VIII] his answer to Luther, Sir Thomas More his book against the new opinions that hold against pilgrimages, An Old Book of the Chronicles of England, etc.

END OF APPENDIX V

APPENDIX VI.—LETTER OF CONN O'NEILL DURING HIS IMPRISONMENT IN DUBLIN CASTLE, 1552

[Dated from Dublin, April 10, 1552.]

"My duty remembered to your Honours. It is not to you unknown, noble magistrates, that like as the ground is well tilled, so doth it bring forth fruit accordingly. And so as I, a man from the beginning of rude education, in anywise could not temper myself after such sort but that some spark of the old leaven must remain...And as, before the time of my submission, for lack of knowledge, I used a certain kind of discipline with those under my jurisdiction, as when they disobeyed me in things reasonable, I tock away their kine and cattle; so after, upon occasion, I omitted not the like. And this was because, after my submission, no Deputy repaired into the confines of my said territory either to prescribe any order to those of my jurisdiction to do their duty towards me, or to limit to me how I should use them.

"Nevertheless, now of late I am so scourged by means of my Lord Chancellor here [Cusack] that as a captive or prisoner I am kept in Dublin, not once able to go and see my country, to my great impoverishment, wonderful discredit and utter undoing of my tenants...

"After my submission, no man can prove that I misbehaved myself against my prince in any point, but to the uttermost of my power served at the Deputy's commandment from time to time; yet have I the Baron of Dungannon so maintained against me; I am detained, as is afore declared, to my undoing; my country in the meantime spoiled and made desolate, my tenants and followers killed, robbed and spoiled; and this in respect of rewards given by the same baron."

He then makes the curious suggestion that "it might please his Majesty to appoint a Chancellor, born within the realm of England to supply the room here; for, albeit I am Irish, I take mine own countrymen to be neither of like estimation or indifferency to rule here, as I see in Englishmen"—a rare tribute to the comparative justice of English officials in remote parts of Ireland. He concludes by desiring his freedom, that he may return to his country and be serviceable to the King in his old age "and that the lady my wife may have licence to go see his Majesty and confer with your Honours of weighty matters." He complains of the official pilfering of a nest of hawks he had sent to the King (Edward VI), "which contained three goshawks and a tarssell, whereof one of the best came into the Chancellor's hand, whereby it may be known who was the stealer of them...And besides, four years past, having three hawks to send to his Excellency, I was persuaded by the now Chancellor, in respect of the King's lack of years, not to send them; by which shift one of the best of them was given to him and the rest to others." [1]

[1] Cal. of Carew MSS. (1575-88), Introduction, pp. xcix.-ci, n.

He says there was a suspicion of four hundred kine having been given as a bribe to the Chancellor and others to agree to the Calough (Calvagh) O'Donnell "evulsing the castle of Neffynne out of his father's hand," which is a piteous case.

END OF APPENDIX VI

APPENDIX VII.—Letter of Shane O'Neill to the Earl of Sussex, Viceroy of Ireland, 1561

"In the name of God, Amen."

"A blessing from O'Neill to the Justiciary, as in duty bound; and to the rest of the Council. And I am asking of them, what have I done that would go [tend] to the dishonour or to the injury of the Queen? Or to you, on account of which you have, since your arrival in Ireland, violated your engagements to me without reason or cause and for which you have offered to invade me without sending me a messenger or a letter, inasmuch as we were obedient to the Justiciary whom you left in your place in Ireland; and inasmuch as it was not malice that prevented me from appearing in my own proper person in the presence of her gracious Majesty the Queen, but that I asked the Queen for a small sum of money, because the money of Ireland does not pass current in England; and I offered to give up my own hostages for this money-loan until I myself should return from England; and these hostages would be the best son I have, my foster-brother, and also my foster-father, my foster-mother, and my brother; after giving these in pledge for the small sum of money, to show that I would not break my promise, which indeed I would not do if I had delivered up no pledge at all; and when I sent my own people and the people of the Justiciary to request this again of the Queen for a pledge, and when we thought that it would be sent to us at your coming into Ireland, it was not thus you acted, but you did what we never anticipated would have been done by you; and, in good sooth, we also sent ten or twelve letters to the Justiciary who was appointed in Ireland after your departure, and now let these letters be produced in witness for me; and I also appeal to such of the Council as wish to hear conscientious evidence that it was not malice or negligence that prevented me from going hitherto in [to] the presence of the Queen's gracious Majesty, but the want of that loan-money which we expected to reach us.

"And the intention which we had of visiting the Queen we would have still, but for the amount of obstruction which you have seemingly thrown in my way, by sending a force of occupation into my territory without a cause. For as long as there shall be one son of a Saxon in my territory against my will, from that time forth I will not send you either settlement or message, but will send my complaint through some other medium to the Queen, to inform her how you have baffled me in my said intention, and I will exercise my utmost against this force [of your soldiers] and against every one who will place them there, until they are removed.

"And if it be your determination not to prevent me any more, take your people away with you, if it so please your Honour, and I will appoint a day with you as soon as ever you take your people with you, to fulfil every promise and every offer which I made to the Queen ; and be assured that it was not from fear of war that I promised to go and visit her before, but on account of her honour and her graciousness to preserve everything that each party possesses, and to exalt me from this time forth, in order that I might bring the wild countries which are under me to civilization and to prosperity and that I myself and those who should come after me, might spend our time to the honour and service of the Queen and of the official sent by her to Ireland. And all Ireland would be the better of my going to visit the Queen (by the permission of God) for there would not be in Ireland one man who would give trouble, small nor great, to her Deputy, as these troubles would be stayed by the power of God and the Queen's clemency and the service that I would render to the Deputy. That is enough ; but I pray you to send me every secret and every answer which you have touching this matter without malice, and not to do anything more against me until you bring me news, and show my letters to the chief men of the Council. I am, O'Neill [Misi Onell]."

[Written in Irish, July 4, 1561.]

Note:—Gilbert, in his Facsimiles, vol. iv, Part I, No. 4, prints the original from the document in the Public Record Office, London.

END OF APPENDIX VII

APPENDIX VIII.—HISTORICAL WORK DONE BY SIR GEORGE CAREW RELATING TO IRELAND

It is owing to Carew's vigilance and care that we are so well informed as to the course of the Munster wars. He instructed Thomas Stafford, his nephew, a young officer in his army, to record what he saw during the campaign and himself supplied him with valuable correspondence. The result was his remarkable book Pacata Hibernia. It takes us behind the scenes and reveals the motives of the chief actors in an amazing way, containing besides masterly pieces of description. Carew also contributed to Speed's Chronicle and to Harris's Hibernica. But a greater service was the care and accuracy with which he preserved and annotated all papers of State and all letters which came in his way. To this care we owe the forty-two volumes of manuscripts which bear his name relating to Irish affairs, most of which he bequeathed to Stafford. They were sold by him to Archbishop Laud, and are now in the Archiepiscopal Library at Lambeth. He seems to have had a special curiosity about Irish pedigrees, probably in connexion with the re-grants of land. The maps relating to the Ulster Plantation are also preserved among his papers. He was the friend of learned men, such as Sir Thomas Bodley, Camden, and Sir Robert Cotton. He lived into the reign of Charles I, and died in 1629.

END OF APPENDIX VIII

END OF VOLUME I

A HISTORY OF IRELAND AND HER PEOPLE

VOLUME II

I.—JAMES I AND IRELAND

James I came to the throne under what seemed favourable auspices for Ireland. The descent of the Stuarts from Fergus Mór, the Irish prince who had founded the Scottish colony of Dalriada in Argyllshire in the sixth century, gave the Irish a feeling of personal attachment to the Stuart kings—an attachment shown in acts of enthusiastic loyalty on more than one occasion during the struggle of Charles I with his Parliament. It was proved, too, by the fidelity with which the Irish clung to the Old Pretender through all the years of his retirement at St Germain and to the hope with which they looked forward to the return of "the fresh young branch," the young Pretender.[1] Another cause of their satisfaction at the accession of James sprang from the general belief that, as the son of Mary Queen of Scots, he would be favourable to the open practice of the Catholic religion, even if he were not, as many supposed, at heart a Catholic. This belief found expression in the sudden re-opening of the Catholic churches in the South of Ireland and in processions of priests and friars parading the streets with banners "with as much pomp as in Rome itself."

[1] See John Lynch, Cambrensis Eversus (ed. M. Kelly, 1848) iii, 53-69.

Mountjoy, as Deputy, made a hasty descent on Waterford to suppress this rising Catholic spirit, reinforcing his orders alike by quotations from St Augustine, a copy of which he always had in his tent, and by the more material argument of placing small garrisons in the recalcitrant towns. At Cork he feared trouble; the Recorder, William Meagh, urged Thomas Sarsfield, the Mayor, not to submit; but Mountjoy's appearance with a thousand men reduced the city to obedience, and Meagh took refuge abroad. This was Mountjoy's last act in Ireland. He sailed from the country on June 2, 1604, and never returned, though as Earl of Devonshire his advice was often sought in Irish affairs. He left Sir George Carey to administer the country with Davies as his adviser, but Carey was soon replaced by Sir Arthur Chichester, who was sworn in on February 3, 1605, and remained at the head of the Government until the close of 1615.

Chichester is the leading figure in the events that followed the flight of the Earls. He was a Devonshire man, like Raleigh, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Sir George Boucher, Sir George Carew, and many others who played their part in the Ireland of the Tudor and Stuart periods. They were men who had seen hard service and cruel deeds in many parts of the world before they came to repair ruined fortunes in Ireland. It is remarkable that many of the principal planters and officers who came to Ireland were from the county that gave to England "the sea-dogs" whose daring recklessness was carrying the flag of Britain from Cadiz to the Spanish Indies and round the Straits of Magellan into the Pacific. Their sensibilities were blunted and their greed and ambition aroused by the lives they led. Their creed resolved itself into killing Spaniards and glorifying England and the Maiden Queen; their business was the selling of negroes and the capture of gold-ships. Their puritanism was fired by the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition, which had dragged their fellow-seamen to rot in the dungeons of Spain, and their passion for revenge was stirred by deeds like the assassination of the Prince of Orange, or by threats of fanatics like Somerville "to shoot the Queen with his dagg [pistol]," or of officers of distinction like Sir William Stanley who said that he would "pull Elizabeth down, yea, even from her throne." Chichester had served under Lord Sheffield against the Spanish Armada in 1588, and had commanded one of the Queen's ships in Drake's last expedition in 1595. He was with Essex at Cadiz in 1596; and at Ostend he was picked out by Cecil for service in Ireland, in which country he had passed some years of his turbulent youth in hiding, having, while a student at Oxford, "robbed one of Queen Elizabeth's purveyors." In the execution of his offices in Ireland he was said to be "swift of dispatch and easy of access." In the matter of legal fees he was "found to be upright"; but this did not prevent him from enriching himself with some of the best lands in Ulster.

The laws against the public profession of the Catholic faith had been fitfully enforced. The close of Elizabeth's reign had seen a great revival of the Catholic religion in Ireland. The laws against priests had been relaxed with the passing away of the dread of Spanish invasion, and they were flocking back in large numbers into the country; everywhere the exercise of the religion of the people was being carried on with apparent connivance by the authorities. During the whole of the Stuart period the enforcement of recusancy fines, a constant source of irritation to the rich and of oppression to the poor, depended largely on the position of affairs in England. The alarm caused by the Gunpowder Plot, universally believed to have been the work of disaffected Catholics, led to their rigorous enforcement, while the negotiations for the Spanish marriage of the King's eldest son Charles caused their relaxation for a long interval, during which Spanish and Italian clergy and friars came over freely and opened churches and schools with little interference from the Government. A Scottish bishop in 1611 says that these foreign clergy seemed to be the chief burden of the ships coming to Ireland, and the commission sent over to inquire into the Parliamentary election in 1613-14 was struck with the number not only of Popish priests, friars and Jesuits, but also of Catholic schoolmasters.[2] Jesuits, Dominicans, Franciscans, and Carmelites were busy repairing and roofing their monasteries and abbeys, and Lady Kildare was building a beautiful church in Dublin.

[2] Cal. S. P. I., James I (1613), p.446; and see Ibid. (July 2, 1603), No. 82, pp. 66-68.

In 1628 Sir John Bingley reports that "there are at present in that city fourteen houses for the exercise of the Mass and one more remarkable than the rest for the Jesuits"; and the Bishop of Ossory gave the names of thirty priests working in his diocese. The general relaxation of the penal laws could not be better shown than by the multitude of English priests and Jesuits who took flight to Ireland for safety from the severe enactments that were the result of the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, two years after James's accession to the throne, and by the advice given by Davies that priests and Jesuits, when captured in Ireland, should be sent over to England, where the penal laws could deal with them. The same thing happened in the North. Catholics from Scotland came flocking into Ulster to escape the severe penal laws "which gave them no rest" in their own country. They settled on the estates of the Earl of Abercorn and of Sirs William and Richard Hamilton, and of other Scottish nobles who welcomed them on their properties in accordance with the planters' desire to encourage English and Scottish tenants. It looked as if the efforts of James to make Ulster Protestant as a part of his "civilizing" policy were destined to failure, and that Ulster would speedily become as Catholic as the South; the Bishop of Derry complained to Claude, Master of Abercorn, that his diocese had become "a sink for all the corrupt humours purged out of Scotland." It is probable that many families of the present population of the North, looked down upon by the Protestant interest as Irish Catholics, are descendants of this immigration of Catholic Scots.

It cannot be said that James gave his approval to this relaxation of the penal laws. His declaration on his accession repudiated the idea that he intended "to give liberty of conscience or toleration of religion to his Irish subjects contrary to the express laws and statutes enacted" in that country. He was constantly being warned that the foreign priests were devoting themselves to undermining the allegiance of the people, and it was rather the political than the religious aspect of their mission, and the ever-lurking dread of interference from Rome, from which centre the priests officially took their orders, that weighed with James in his enforcement of the oaths of supremacy and allegiance from the foreign as well as the native clergy. His view was tersely expressed when he wrote in 1616, "I confess I am loth to hang a priest only for religion's sake and saying Mass; but if he refuse to take the oath of allegiance...those that so refuse the oath and are holy pragmatic recusants, I leave them to the law. It is no persecution but good justice." The idea that the spread of the Roman faith meant the extension of Roman political power, anti-English in its sentiment, was an article of belief strongly grounded in the mind of every Englishman. To James, his Catholic subjects were "but half-subjects," and entitled only to "half-privileges." In his shrewd, sardonic way he reminded the Irish peers in his Parliament of 1613 that the Pope was their father in spiritualibus and he in temporalibus only, "and so you have your bodies turned one way and your souls drawn another way, you that send your children to the seminaries of treason. Strive henceforth to become good subjects, that you may have cor unum et viam unam, and then I shall respect you all alike." [3] It was this underlying sense of a double allegiance, which could, in fact, hardly be denied, that made the whole question of religious tolerance so difficult. A different religion implied, at least, a different orientation of the mind and an uncertain acceptance of the authority of the Crown. James, therefore, felt no hesitation in levying the recusancy fines for non-attendance at the Protestant service. In 1623 these fines were regularly collected even from the poorest Catholics, £500 a year being raised in Co. Monaghan alone. In Co. Cavan the sum thus raised is said to have amounted to no less than £8000 in the year 1615, though this seems hardly credible. The money was supposed to be spent on the repair of churches, but by far the larger part went into the pockets of the collectors. To them it was a profitable business. In Co. Cork an English observer says that five thousand people were prosecuted at one assize; "and without question," he remarks, "the clerks, sheriffs, and their like do make an extraordinary hand this way." [4]

[3] J. Lodge, Desiderata Curiosa Hibernica (1772), i, 309-310 and Carew Cal. (1614), No. 15, pp. 15-16.

[4] Advertisements for Ireland, ed. George O'Brien (1923), pp. 15-16

Later on Charles used the threat of recusancy fines as a means of raising revenue, and when Wentworth went over to Ireland and found the revenue in a depleted condition the Roman Catholics offered £20,000 on condition of escaping the hated tax for another year. Nevertheless, Catholics met with little hindrance in the exercise of their vocations; barristers trained at the English Inns of Court practised their professions in Ireland, and it was a long step toward toleration when one of the 'Graces' proposed that they should be admitted on taking a simple oath of allegiance, without abjuration of the Papal authority. They became Justices of the Peace, sheriffs, Privy Councillors, and were admitted to many offices of trust, both civil and military, where Protestants were discountenanced. A Catholic Justice of the King's Bench, Sir John Everard, universally respected for his learning and honourable life, contested the Speakership of the House in James's Parliament of 1613, the first Parliament held in Ireland since Perrot's Parliament of 1585. It was a Parliament largely composed of Catholics both in the Upper and Lower Houses. James freely created new boroughs to redress what he considered an unfortunate balance of power; thirty-nine new boroughs, many of them in the freshly planted and growing towns of Ulster, but others made out of wretched villages, were enabled to send members to this Parliament. The Catholic Lords refused to attend an assembly so irregularly constituted, and the Commons protested against their liberties, which were to be under consideration, being entrusted to the goodwill of ignorant and prejudiced representatives of country villages, sent up entirely for the purpose of voting against them.[5] The Parliament was not a success. An unseemly struggle took place between the supporters of Sir John Everard and those who had elected Sir John Davies to the Speakership; it ended in the withdrawal of the Catholic party in a body and the drawing up of a formal protest to the King, which, with Chichester's full permission, was sent over by Lords Gormanston and Dunboyne, with Sir Christopher Plunket, Sir James Gough, Edward FitzHarris, and Sir William Talbot. The last named acted as legal adviser to the opposition, and was the father of the afterwards famous Dick Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnel, who played his part in the wars against William of Orange in Ireland. The petition they carried over was the model of many subsequent petitions to the Crown during the Confederate Wars.

[5] Cal. S. P. I. (1613), No. 668, p. 342; J. Lodge, op. cit., i, 220-5

It is well, therefore, to see what the Catholic gentry of Ireland, most of whom remained during the whole Stuart period unswervingly loyal to the Crown, put forward as their considered grievances. In the first place the Bill of Attainder against Tyrone was passed by the Catholic representatives without a single dissentient voice. Sir John Everard spoke in favour of it. "No man," he strangely said, "ought to arise against the Prince for religion or justice," and he regarded the many favours bestowed on Tyrone by the late Queen and present King as greatly aggravating his offence. In their letter to the King they speak of themselves as those "by the effusion of whose ancestors' blood the foundation of that empire which we acknowledge your Highness by the laws of God and man to have over this kingdom and people, was first laid and in many succeeding ages preserved." After setting forth the main cause of their complaint, the packing of the Parliament then sitting with ignorant men, absentees, officers, and clerks under the control of a few great men, and others from new corporations "never before heard of by us," they go on to complain of the extortions of the soldiers ranging through the country and impoverishing the people on a number of pretences; the deciding of cases in the Council Chamber that ought to be brought before the civil courts; the threats held over jurors who refused to give a perjured verdict that they would be brought before the Star Chamber, and fined, tortured or imprisoned; the inquiry into old rights in land with a view to its transfer to new applicants; the shilling fine for non-attendance at church, and the greed and heavy charges of the lawyers. Their complaints were well founded. For example, the army was often two years in arrear, and is said to have been composed of men with "tottered carcases, lean cheeks, and broken hearts."[6] If they sometimes mutinied or provided themselves with what they could get in the country it is hardly to be wondered at.

[6] Cal. S. P. I. (1621), No. 786, p. 337; (1622), No. 837, p. 349.

The King, whom Chichester had taken care to influence by sending over a counter-deputation, received the petitioners in a characteristic manner. At his first interview he was cordial, receiving the Irish lords with all respect, and discoursing with them at large about conditions in Ireland. But he suddenly posed them with the question, "Whether they thought the Pope had the right to depose princes, or deprive them of their lives on religious grounds?" Some of them answered doubtfully that they thought he might; whereupon two, Talbot and Luttrell, were committed prisoners, one to the Tower and the other to the Fleet, while Sir Patrick Barnewell was closely examined and forced to make submission, stating that such a doctrine "is most profane, impious, wicked, and detestable." The others were kept in London from May 1613 to April 1614 awaiting a reply. It could not have encouraged them to hope for a favourable answer to find Chichester standing beside the King at their final audience, high in favour and fully acquitted of any hard dealing or maladministration. The King treated the Irish Lords to a long disquisition, flavoured with that canny Scotch wit and those frequent Latin quotations which caused Henry IV of France to call his royal brother "the wisest fool in Christendom." He had heard, he said, of Church recusants, but Parliament recusants were new to him; and of the complaints presented to him of the Irish Government he had discovered nothing faulty, "except you would have the kingdom of Ireland like the kingdom of heaven." "As to the newly created boroughs, what is it to you whether I make many or few boroughs?...The more the merrier, the fewer the better cheer...God is my judge, I find the new boroughs, except one or two, to be as good as many of the old boroughs, comparing Irish boroughs new with Irish boroughs old"; wherein the jocular monarch probably spoke the truth.[7] Thus, rated like naughty children by their monarch, the disappointed noblemen of the Pale, Norman or Englishmen all by descent, and loyal by habit and tradition, returned to Ireland. The immediate result of their petition was that during the year all counsellors-at-law in Ireland who would not take the oath of supremacy were forbidden to plead, and pensioners in similar circumstances were deprived of their pensions. In Dublin a young man, more pliant than his seniors, took the oath and was elected Mayor of Dublin, while around him were "many grave and grey-haired men, whose turn was to have been mayors before him," but who would not take an oath which practically shut them out of their own communion. The Parliament was prorogued and finally dissolved on October 24, 1615, after passing an abortive Bill for abolishing the Brehon law, and some minor measures. No other was called till Wentworth's Parliament of 1634.

[7] The whole of this controversy will be found in J. Lodge, op cit., i, pp. 151 seq.; 302-312; Carew, Cal. (1613), No. 146, p. 270; No. 151, p. 288.

Much of the reign of James was taken up in additional projects of plantation in Wexford, Wicklow, Monaghan, Fermanagh, and Leitrim. Settlements were also projected in Connacht, but these were postponed for a time. Had these settlements been carried out as originally planned by James and Chichester, they would have been accepted without much difficulty by a people weary of war and of the uncertainty of land tenure. The Wexford commissioners reported in 1613 that a tract of land containing 66,800 acres, chiefly belonging to the sept of the Kavanaghs, was claimed by the King as having passed to the Crown on the submission of Art MacMorrogh Kavanagh in the reign of Richard II; a claim more respectable for its antiquity than for its justice. Certain lands held by patent were first confirmed to Sir Laurence Esmonde, Sir Edward Fisher, Sir Richard Cook, and others, after which the surrender of one-fourth of their land was called for from the original inhabitants, to be placed in the hands of new settlers, on condition of retaining the remaining three-fourths on a firm title as freeholders. Little objection was made to this, and had the arrangement been honourably carried out the people might have felt themselves not unfairly treated. But in practice quite half instead of one-fourth of the country was made over to new settlers, and to nearly fifteen thousand of the population no grants whatever were made. About fifty-seven freeholders of Irish and English descent were created out of the old inhabitants, but only about one in ten got any lands at all; others were, if not turned out of their holdings, yet shifted about and pressed steadily out of the better into the worse districts.[8] Of these unfortunate people a contemporary writer observes: "They have no wealth but flocks and herds, they know no trade but agriculture or pasture, they are unlearned men, without human help or protection. Yet, though unarmed, they are so active in mind and body that it is dangerous to drive them from their ancestral seats, to forbid them fire and water...Necessity gives the greatest strength and courage, nor is there any sharper spur than that of despair." [9] Bishop Rothe spoke truly. These outlaws joined bodies of desperate men from Ulster and the other plantations; they took to the mountains or swarmed down upon the towns. In 1622 the Lords Justices reported that they were coming up to Dublin in multitudes, seeking for sustenance. The country was pestered, too, with the smaller gentry, whose easy, thriftless life spent in living upon their tenants and fighting their neighbours had passed away with the clan system which made these things possible. St John reported in 1619 that the country was full of the younger sons of gentlemen "who have no means of living and will not work."[10] They were elements of danger to the community and ready for all sorts of misdeeds and reprisals. This was the fuel which the spark of rebellion in 1641 was to set on fire. As Carew had long ago foretold, "events were marching towards an explosion."

>[8] Carew, Cal. (1611), No. 122, p. 211; (1614), No. 153, p. 299; (1616), No. 164, p. 321; William F. T. Butler, Confiscation in Irish History (1917), 60-74.

[9] Rothe, Analecta Sacra (1617), vol. iii, Art. 19.

[10] Lord Deputy to the Privy Council, Sept. 29, 1619, Cal. S. P. I., No. 582, p. 262.

END OF CHAPTER I

II.—THE PLANTATION OF ULSTER

Two projected changes in Ulster had, in 1607, determined Hugh O'Neill that nothing was left for him but flight from his native land. The first was the intention, often discussed but hitherto abandoned, to place a President over Ulster. Long ago Sussex had made the wise suggestion that O'Neill himself should be made President, and thus made responsible for the quiet and good government of the country on the Queen's behalf, but this plan was rejected, and for many years no step was taken. When, during Sir George Carey's[1] short term of office as Deputy, the dreaded sheriffs appeared in the North as a preliminary to the appointment of Chichester (then governor of Carrickfergus) as President, Tyrone openly refused obedience to any save to her Majesty and her Deputy, and the scheme fell through; though the military districts into which the country was divided up did not differ from it in principle. "Rather than live under the like yoke and considering the misery he saw endured by others under the like government," he exclaimed, "he would sooner pass all to himself than abide it."

[1] He was appointed on the departure of Mountjoy, June 2, 1604.

The second immediate cause of O'Neill's flight was the oft-mooted plantation of Ulster with Scotch and English settlers. The idea of plantations had been much in the air. The settlements of English in Virginia overseas, the writings of Bacon, the experiments of Sir Thomas Smith and Essex in the North, and of the Munster planters in the South, had turned men's minds toward the project during Elizabeth's reign; but the attempts hitherto made in Ireland had not proved very encouraging. Essex's plantation was a failure, and in the South of Ireland many of the estates had reverted to representatives of the original owners. The settlers either did not come or were driven out by the old proprietors, who made continual onslaughts upon them; or they were frightened away by the disturbances in the province. But the idea was not dead, and when James I came to the throne he looked to a new plantation in Ulster as a means of rewarding his Scottish adherents and of increasing his own revenues. On the one hand, his counsellors were representing the plantation as a work of God, put by extraordinary fortune into his hands to carry out; on the other, the officers and soldiers who had fought in the wars of Ulster were pressing for the lands that had been promised as their reward. The departure of the Earls afforded the opportunity for which all were impatiently waiting, and no time was lost in taking the work in hand.[2]

[2] See Bacon's treatise, Considerations touching the Plantation in Ireland in Spedding, Bacon's Life and Letters, iv, pp. 116-126.

Ever since the days of de Courcy parts of the North had been settled by Anglo-Norman families, and Lecale, the present Co. Down, was studded with castles and castellated towers dating from their occupation. The old planters--the Savages, Russells, FitzSimons, Awdleys, Jordans, and Bensons--remained on their lands, in close proximity to the family of Magennis and the O'Neills of Clannaboy. Sir Arthur Magennis was the most Anglicized; he had become so 'civil' that he gave up bonaght, paid rent to the Queen, and wore English clothes every festival-day; he could still, in 1586, put sixty horse and eighty foot into the field. Clannaboy was owned by Sir Con MacNeill Oge, a warlike chieftain, who so annoyed the citizens of Carrickfergus by his raids and depredations that they offered to pay Sorley Boy MacDonnell £20 in wine, silk, and saffron to defend them from him. He was kept quiet in the castle at Dublin, where he was sent as prisoner, and most of North Clannaboy had been given to Sir Bryan MacPhelim.

The Scots had a strong hold in Antrim, and the Queen's reinstatement of the MacConnells or MacDonnells on the old Byset estates had established their claim to the Glynnes or Glens of Antrim. Parts of Clannaboy were held by the Clan-Donell, while the MacGills, Macaulays, and Clan-Alister occupied the coasts on the north-east. The Route, claimed by the MacQuillans, contained the ruins of forts and monasteries built by the Normans, but they had been driven into a corner near the Bann. In the main, the province east of the Bann remained Irish until the plantation, with a large admixture of Scots, though certain portions, such as the Newry and the Mourne district, had been handed over to Sir Nicholas Bagenal and other Englishmen. The only English fort east of the Bann was Carrickfergus (then usually called Knockfergus); they held also Carlingford Lough. West of the Bann the country was in 1586 purely Irish. Except the forts of Dungannon and Charlemont west of Lough Neagh, with a portion of land round them, and the distant and isolated forts of Culmore and Derry on Lough Foyle and of Ballyshannon on Donegal Bay, no part of the vast stretch of country lying between Lough Neagh and the Atlantic, including the present counties of Londonderry, Tyrone, Fermanagh, and Donegal, was in the possession of the English.[3]

[3]"Description and Present State of Ulster in 1586," in Carew, Cal., ii, No. 623, p. 435, and Cal. S. P. I., James I, Introd., viii-xiv. (1608-10)

There is no doubt that the departure of Tyrone and Tyrconnel gave the Government the opportunity for which it had been waiting.Chichester, who had become Lord Deputy in 1605, writes joyfully to the King that "all will now be his Majesty's," and follows this up with the proposal of driving out all the inhabitants of Tyrone, Tyrconnel, and Fermanagh with their goods and cattle to inhabit waste lands across the Bann, the Blackwater, and Lough Erne, which he holds to be "an honest and laudable act, void of iniquity and cruelty." It is difficult to realize what sort of act would have seemed wrong or cruel to Chichester. Nor is it clear why flight from their country should involve forfeiture of the Earls' lands. But the vast confiscation had been long contemplated, and Tyrone was hardly reported out of the country when Sir Thomas Phillips, an old 'servitor ' who had seen service both on the Continent and in Ireland, and who had been rewarded with an early grant of land east of the Bann, put in a claim for "a good share of Tyrone's land" near Coleraine to plant with English. He became one of the most active and successful of the planters. The King, who shortly before had received Tyrone with honour, now approved of the forfeiture of his estates, adding the instruction that Scottish planters were to be admitted with the English; that he preferred English who had been 'servitors,' i.e., who had served with the armies of the Crown in Ireland, rather than new men from England; that plots of land were not to be too large or bestowed on needy persons; and that the Irish of good note and desert were to have plots and were to be treated with respect and favour--excellent suggestions, some of which were grounded on experience gained through the failure of the Munster plantation, with its vast, ill-defined grants.

The lands for disposal included not only the districts under the direct sway of the two exiled Earls, but the large portions of Fermanagh vacated by Cuconnacht Maguire, who accompanied the Earls in their flight, the property of O'Kane (O'Cahain), and the property of Inishowen west of Lough Foyle. This belonged to the brave but unfortunate Sir Cahir O'Doherty, whose lands were forfeited after his brief revolt arising out of an altercation between him and the deputy-governor of Derry, one Pawlett, whose arrogance and inexperience wholly unfitted him for the post. Sir Cahir was slain in a skirmish in July 1608, just as the first commissioners were setting out for the North, one of the matters with which they were charged being to determine whether he had died in actual rebellion, thus securing his attainder and the immediate resumption of his lands by the Crown. Chichester himself was an early applicant for Sir Cahir O'Doherty's property, with its valuable fishings on the island of Inch, on which he had long set his mind. It is difficult to acquit him of having purposely delayed to read the letter written by the King just before Sir Cahir's outbreak into revolt, ordering the restoration of his estates, some part of which had been granted away to Sir Ralph Bingley. Chichester's own application for the property was received in London, and the rights passed to him, before this important letter was opened, and by this ruse Chichester secured to himself, in addition to the lands he got from 'defective titles,' a revenue of £10,000, and Inishowen, besides an extensive tract of land about the present city of Belfast. There had been a castle on this spot since Norman days; but the modern city dates from Chichester's occupation. The castle and lands were granted to him in 1612, when he brought over immigrants from Devon to people the district; in 1613 it received its charter of incorporation with the right to send two members to Parliament.[4] It was O'Doherty's country that brought him his large income; otherwise he purchased his estates and "never asked for advancement, though he grumbled like a right Western man."

[4] G. Benn, History of the Town of Belfast, pp. 12-13.

O'Kane's country of Cianachta stretched from the eastern side of Lough Foyle along the coast to the Bann, and inland across the great forests of Glenconkeine and Killitragh, which yielded as fine timber as could be found in any part of the British dominions. On this valuable property cattle were raised in large numbers, and from old days a trade had been carried on in the skins of red deer, sheep, squirrels, martens, and rabbits, which were shipped to Brabant, then the centre of trade for the North of Europe.[5] The fisheries both on the Bann and along the coast were of great excellence, and attracted the industrious Dutch fishermen and the Spaniards, Philip II having made a treaty with O'Kane for fishing on his coast. The quantities of herrings taken after Michaelmas "brought yearly above seven or eight score sail of his Majesty's subjects and strangers for lading, besides an infinite number of boats for fishing and killing."[6] Such was the report of the agents of the London Companies sent over to inspect the country in 1609. There were, besides pearl-fisheries in Lough Foyle, multitudes of wild fowl of all kinds, and materials for house and ship building in plenty. All over the North corn, rye, peas, and beans were grown; the report says that they were raised in such quantities that they could not only supply their own neighbourhood, "but also furnish the city of London yearly with manifold provision, for their fleets especially." Hemp and flax grew there more freely than elsewhere, and the linen yarn spun was finer and more plentiful than in the rest of the kingdom. The O'Kanes had been a powerful clan, and it was the duty of the chief of the house to cast the gold sandal over the head of the O'Neill on his election at Tullahogue; his three castles and richly endowed monasteries testified to the wealth as well as to the piety of the family.

[5] Guicciardini, Desc. de Paesi Bassi, 15.

[6] Cal. S. P. I. (1609), No. 372, p. 209.

Among those whose lands were now declared forfeited were several who had been found on the English side during the recent rebellions, and it was no doubt of these chiefs that the King was thinking when he gave directions that Irish of good note and desert were to be treated with respect and favour. But, in the scramble for land that followed, the claims of these men were forgotten, or they had to be content with plots which must have seemed small indeed beside their former rich possessions. Young Maolmora O'Reilly, whose father was slain at the battle of the Yellow Ford, fighting on the English side, received only a small portion of his own lands in County Cavan, though his mother was a niece of the Duke of Ormonde; and Conor Roe Maguire, who had taken the Government side and had been given three baronies of the Maguire lands in Fermanagh, also had to be content with a fragment of the estate shortly before bestowed upon him. Such men became, in fact, merely undertakers, like any other applicants, and took such portions as they received under the same conditions. A like fate befell the septs of the MacSweeneys, or MacSwynes, on Lough Swilly, and the O'Boyles and O'Gallaghers, both Donegal clans. The MacSwynes had been so warlike a race that it was commonly said that the chief with whom they sided was certain to carry off victory, though all Ireland were ranged against him. Sidney found the clan "grown to such credit and force that, though they were no lords of lands themselves, they would make the greatest lords of the province both fear them and be glad of their friendship." [7] Maolmora of the Club, or Staff, claimed to be descended from "Swaine, King of Norway," and he kept up the ferocious habits suitable to this ancestry. He and his men were freebooters with a strong dash of the pirate. For a refractory tribesman to be brained by the club of his chief was in his eyes an honour; the lesser criminals were hung out over the parapets of the castle in "gads" by their fellow-clansmen.[8] Others of the race believed themselves to be descended from Suibhne (Sweeney) Menn, monarch of Ireland 622-635. They were linked in kinship with the O'Neills, but in the sixteenth century they usually fought on the side of the O'Donnells, and they fell with their ruin. The blind bard Tadhg O'Higgin describes with much warmth the hospitalities of Maolmora MacSweeney's house, the great concourse of poets gathered round him, who stood up and pledged him in ale quaffed "from golden goblets and beakers of horn" till they retired to rest a while before dawn.[9]

[7] Carew, Cal., ii, No. 36, pp. 39-40 (February 27, 1576).

[8] C. P. Meehan, Fate and Fortunes of the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnel (1868), Appendix, pp. 501-504.

[9] S. H. O'Grady, Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in the British Museum , pp. 420-424; E. Knott, Bardic Poems of Tadhg Dall O Huiginn, ii, 120.

The MacSweeneys were looked to as holding the balance of power in the North between the two predominant clans, but the quarrels between different branches of their own house, the MacSweeney Fanad and MacSweeney Doe (i.e., na dtuadh, "of the axes"), occupied too much of their attention to allow of any such clear policy, and they fought on all sides indiscriminately--as often against their own kin as against outsiders. Though Sidney believed they possessed no lands, these septs claimed to be freeholders by letters patent; and Chichester says that any settlers sent to replace them must be very powerful to suppress them; "to displant them is very difficult." In the end they too were admitted to some portions as undertakers, under similar terms with the strangers. Among others who claimed indisputable rights in the land were merchants of the Pale to whom Tyrconnel had, in the time of his distress, mortgaged "great scopes of land for small sums of money," and the widows and mothers of the great chiefs, among whom were the Ineen Dubh MacDonnell, mother of Hugh Roe, the widows of Maguire and O'Boyle, and the mother of O'Reilly. Davies found it convenient, on various grounds, to find all these titles "void or voidable in English law" so that the pretenders "are left entirely to his Majesty's grace and bounty."[10] There was little chance that justice would be done to these claimants. By Irish law women did not inherit; by English law the merchant conveyances became void because they had received them from O'Donnell. If, in any case their legal rights seemed clear, it was always possible to point to the sweeping act of confiscation passed on the downfall of Shane O'Neill (11th Elizabeth), "the dead case," as the Attorney-General Davies called it, as a cause through which they had been forfeited. With so many loopholes for legal casuistry to exercise its gifts upon, it would be difficult for any desirable property to escape forfeiture, or for any rights to be upheld. In the final distribution, however, their jointures were continued to these ladies of rank for their lives, with reversion to the Irish or to the Crown, though several of them were removed from their own homes and settled in other districts.[11] Some of them appear to have sunk into great poverty, for they were without protection, and most of them were aged. Their position and power were gone, and their Irish tenants, even more than the undertakers, seem to have taken advantage of their loneliness and their defenceless position.

[10] Letter to Salisbury, September 12, 1609.

[11] For a list of these distressed ladies and nobles see George Hill, Plantation of Ulster, p. 131, note 20.

There are letters from Sir Donal O'Kane about his wife and from Sir Niall Garbh O'Donnell about his sister, which show the straits into which these women were driven. Both letters were written from the Tower of London in 1613, where O'Donnell and O'Kane were incarcerated. The Council in London writes to Chichester that "after long attendance here" the ladies are returning to Ireland, and they have asked for some means to carry them over, since their tenants, to whom under the Irish system they have granted out cattle, have refused to make any repayment or to supply them with any means. Lists of the tenants' names and the number of cows placed with them are enclosed. These lists are of great interest, for they show that the old Irish method of loaning out cattle to the tenants was still in common use at the beginning of the seventeenth century. In the later days of the plantation it is a frequent source of complaint that those tenants who still held by this old system of 'commins' from the reduced chiefs, who were now unable to enforce their rights, took advantage of their freedom to decline to pay their dues. They drove the cattle they had received from these Irish lords into 'creaghts' or lonely places, and would neither give them up nor pay for them in kind, as they had been accustomed to do. Their masters, who had plots of land allotted to them by the Government, but no cattle to place on them, were left without any means of subsistence, and often had to take to the wild life of the wood-kerne and robber, as so many of the swordsmen had done, simply from helplessness to enforce their authority over their own tenants. They were far worse off than the tenants themselves. In the case of the two ladies belonging to the captives in the Tower, Chichester appears to have exerted himself to recover their dues, for the letters preserved are written to thank him for his intervention on their behalf.[12] Nevertheless, when, some time afterward, the Duchess of Buckingham, being in the neighbourhood of Limavady, visited Sir Donal's widow, her husband having died in the Tower in 1628, she found her "sitting on her bent hams before a fire of branches, wrapped in a blanket, in a half-ruined edifice of which the windows were stuffed with straw." If the men found it hard to exact their dues under the new conditions, it is little wonder that a lonely widow, without friends, should have fallen into utter poverty.

[12] Cal S. P. I. (1613), Nos. 726-731, pp. 390-392. Niall Garbh's letter says: "It is not unknown to your Lordships that the Irish gentry did ever make their followers' purses their only exchequer." (p. 235).

Another lady, wife of Sir Cormac MacBaron O'Neill, was in hardly better condition. During a tour in the North, Sir Humphrey Winche, Chief Justice, "little Winch of Lincoln's Inn," as Chamberlayn calls him, was forced owing to ill-health to halt a night at her house. Her husband, too, was prisoner in the Tower. "His lady gave them house-room, but had neither bread, drink, meat, nor linen to welcome them, yet kindly helped them to two or three muttons from her tenants." Sir Cormac had proposed, on the flight of his half-brother Tyrone, that he should be made custodian of his lands, apparently for the purpose of preserving the rents in case of Tyrone's return, but the Government distrusted his intentions and placed him in custody. Another of the same family, Sir Art MacBaron O'Neill, elder half-brother to Tyrone, was removed from his own estate in Armagh, in the district called after him Oneilan, to a proportion of two thousand acres in Orier. In the wars in which his family were involved he had taken the English side. He and his wife were now very aged, and he begged that the new grant should be made out in the joint names of himself and his wife, so that if she survived him she might not be left in poverty, a request that was readily granted, as it induced the old couple to remove at once.[13] How such people managed to live, cut off from all their old associations, without any dwelling ready to receive them or retainers to work for them, it is difficult to imagine. Even to the Commissioners in London the whole problem seemed to require "the greatest and most serious consideration." When it came to the point it was indeed found incapable of realization. The old inhabitants were first reprieved, because it was found that the new settlers did not come over by any means so promptly as was expected; and when they began slowly to filter into the country, often without the workmen they had stipulated to bring with them, they found that they would die of starvation if the country-people left and drove away their cattle. They needed them for building and for service, and they found that they were willing to pay high rents in order to be left in their old districts. A mutual sense of need induced a mutual sense of protection; being on the spot, they saved the cost of bringing over English and Scottish labourers. They were contented and at home, while the newcomers felt entirely at a loss in the new conditions. In consequence, numbers of them never removed, but settled down, after the great upheaval, as tenants to the new settlers. Their descendants remain to this day all over the country.

[13] George Hill, op. cit., p. 218; Cal. S. P. I, Dec. 9, 1610, No. 925, p. 529

It fell to Sir Arthur Chichester to carry out the proposals for the Plantation of Ulster. He brought to his Irish administration the ability, avarice, and ruthlessness which were combined in so many of the leading figures of the age. His recipe for the ills of Ireland was one common in his day: "famine to consume them; English manners to reform them." "I wish the rebels and their countries in all parts of Ireland were like these; they starve miserably and eat dogs, mares, and garrons where they can get them. When they are down, it must be good laws, severe punishments, abolishing their ceremonies and customs in religion, etc., that must bridle them."[14] Elsewhere he writes: "I have often said and written that it is famine that must consume them; our swords and other endeavours work not that speedy effect which is expected." Chichester had as his right-hand man the Solicitor-General for Ireland, Sir John Davies, who accompanied him when, as Deputy, to which post he was raised in 1605, he made those tours of the northern province which determined the course of action to be followed in regard to the plantation. Davies was a man of active, inquiring mind, and to him we owe. a considered study of The True Causes why Ireland was never entirely subdued, a masterly sketch of English dealings in the country up to his own time.[15] His ready pen and aptitude of description were employed in reports and letters describing his own and the Deputy's tours in various parts of the country. He was a voluminous poet of a didactic kind, vain of his classical attainments, and shrewd in his judgments. But he did not hesitate to fit the law to his proceedings if he thought the King, of whom he was a most loyal sycophant, could be served thereby; and his legal judgments varied as circumstances required to serve the purposes in view. He was more deeply engaged in making the most of present opportunities than influenced by abstract ideas of right or justice.

[14] Letter of March 14, 1602; Cal. S. P. I, Eliz., p. 334.

[15] Some of his deductions have to be discounted owing to the fact that he makes no distinction between the disaffected and loyal Irish.

In the original plan of the settlement, before the flight of the Earls, the chief aim in view seems to have been the sweeping away of tanistry with a regrant of lands to tenants holding directly from the Crown. The native titles of MacMahon, Maguire, and O'Reilly were to be extinguished and a repartition of the counties of Monaghan, Cavan, and Fermanagh made. We may give Chichester the credit of believing that he honestly conceived that his scheme of settling the surviving peasants upon the land as freeholders, when the awful famine had done its work, would be the beginning of a new prosperity for the North. He determined to set them free from the authority and exactions of their chiefs and to give them lands of their own, to be held for a fixed rent directly from the Crown. A tour was undertaken by Davies before the flight of the Earls, probably in 1606, to inquire into the present conditions on which the chief lords and inferior gentry and inhabitants of these counties held their lands under the native system, but he finds himself uncertain whether the smaller holders were tenants-at-will or not; a certain number of such as were fit to serve on juries were, however, created freeholders, and of these in Monaghan alone there were found to be over two hundred.[16] The condition of the Church is described as deplorable, the churches lying in ruins and their lands waste, many of the new Protestant parsons and vicars "poor, ragged, ignorant creatures, whom ten parishes united would not maintain in decency," and the Bishop of Kilmore with the best parsonage in the kingdom holding neither service nor sermon in either of his dioceses, "but diligent in visiting his barbarous clergy to make benefit out of their insufficiency, according to the proverb that an Irish priest is better than a milch cow."[17]

[16] Letter touching the state of Monaghan, etc., Works, iii, 123. This letter is sometimes erroneously dated 1607; its date is probably 1606.

[17] Ibid., p. 158-159.

But these preliminary steps, which have some show of justice and equity, were but the first warnings of the gigantic confiscations of Tyrone, Derry, and Donegal which followed on the flight. We have seen that during his visit to the North Davies was unable to determine whether the inhabitants were freeholders or tenants-at-will. In Fermanagh "the greatest part of the inhabitants did claim to be freeholders, who, surviving the late rebellion, had never been attainted, but, having received his Majesty's pardon stood upright in the law, so that we could not clearly entitle the Crown to their lands." Thus the project of plantation was hampered by the quietude of the inhabitants, whom there seemed no excuse to evict from their holdings. But reflection opened to Davies's mind a way out of the difficulty. Later in the year, while travelling in Munster, he writes to Salisbury that he has to make to him "an overture of a matter of good advantage which I confess I understood not before my last journey into Ulster." He then makes the iniquitous suggestion that by the Act of the nth Elizabeth, on the conclusion of the wars with Shane O'Neill, all lands were vested in the Crown, and consequently O'Kane's country and all the old freeholders' possessions in Tyrone "are actually and really in his Majesty's hands and the tenants are for the most part intruders upon his Majesty's possession."[18] Davies proposes to include them all in the sweeping Act of confiscation, which was to transfer their properties to English or Scottish settlers.

[18] Works, iii, 201-22; Cal. S. P. I., Nov. 12, 1606.

In 1608-09 took place commissions ordered by James I for the purpose of (a) a survey of the escheated lands, (b) assizes for the trial of men detained in gaol since the last rebellions, and (c) to find that O'Doherty had died in actual rebellion, which would make his lands forfeit to the Crown. All three went on together, the second being simplified by the refusal of the jurors to convict and by the previous clearance from the gaols of large numbers of persons who had been committed, on account of the difficulty of guarding them. Chichester and Davies were accompanied by Sir Thomas Ridgeway, Treasurer, and "they took time by the forelock," Davies having undertaken before Michaelmas "to present a perfect survey of six several counties which the King has now in demesne and actual possession in this province; which is a greater extent of land than any prince of Europe has to dispose of." Chichester's intimate acquaintance with the province supplied the necessary notes and instructions, and Davies sent in from time to time reports of their progress, which supply much valuable information as to the state of the North at that time. The appearance of the stately cavalcade among the wild mountains to the west of the Carntogher range filled the inhabitants with astonishment. "They wondered as much to see the King's Deputy as the ghosts in Virgil wondered to see Aeneas alive in hell." They wondered still more when they were called together to be told, in long legal discourses, that his Majesty "may and ought to dispose of these lands, as he is about to do, in law, in conscience, and in honour." The owners retained a lawyer of the Pale to plead their rights and to claim the benefit of the proclamation made only five years before, whereby the persons, lands, and goods of all his Majesty's subjects were taken into his royal protection; but against the arguments set forth by the Attorney-General such pleas were powerless. The arguments were, indeed, only excuses to give a show of justice to a fixed resolve. The total of the escheated lands amounted to nearly 3,798,000 acres, of which about 55,000 acres were reserved for Irish of different ranks. An attempt was made to avoid the loose grants which had proved a failure in Munster by parcelling the lands out in quantities of 2000, 1500, and 1000 acres with a proportionate quantity of wood; though one applicant, old Lord Audley, made an application for 100,000 acres in Tyrone, "the fairest and goodliest country in Ireland universal," as Sir T. Cusack had called it in 1553, which was more than the estimated total quantity to be divided in that county. "He is an ancient nobleman ready to undertake much," is Chichester's cynical remark on this offer; but like many others made by the undertakers it was soon to be shown that his proposals far exceeded his power to pay or to plant.

The applicants for lands were of three kinds: English and Scottish undertakers; servitors, or officials and soldiers who had served in Ireland; and Irish. The King favoured the Scots, of whom Chichester had the worst opinion, counting them "worse than Irishmen"; but applications from the Lowlands came pouring in from needy Scots, who thought to build up new fortunes in the sister-isle. It was decided that towns were to be built in Derry and Coleraine on the choice lands with excellent fishing in sea and river already appropriated to their own use by Chichester, Phillips, and Sir Randal MacDonnell, who most unwillingly exchanged them for larger grants elsewhere. A formidable difficulty was the great extent of the lands claimed by the Church. Though Davies had correctly shown that the 'termon,' or Church and monastic lands, were not the private property of the bishop, any more than the tribe lands were the property of the chief, but were held from time immemorial for the Church by lay administrators, the redoubtable Bishop Montgomery of Derry claimed all the Church lands as his own property, and the newcomers had to fight him step by step. He wrestled so well that out of 6343 acres he secured three-fourths for his personal use, and invited over several other members of his family. The Dean claimed 373 acres, but the commission had to insist on provision being made for the poor incumbents, the bishops moving a petition for compensation for the loss. Chichester, in reference to the bishops, speaks of the "insatiable humours of craving men." These church lands became a chief refuge for the Irish people who had always lived on them and who were preferred to strangers; so that, though by their covenants the bishops were bound to plant one-third with British, in practice these lands remained largely Irish districts. The total of Church properties in Ulster amounted to over 68,000 acres.

Meanwhile, in London, large properties had been put up for sale and, largely through the King's personal influence, the problems of a special "London Company" plantation in Ulster were discussed, and a party of three gentlemen representing the City Companies went over to prospect. Their report, intended to tempt buyers, was so encouraging that the lands were taken up at once on the London market. They found good lands, very fair woods, and rivers. The natural resources included skins of animals, salmon, eels, yarn, pipe-staves, tallow, and hides, besides "ore from which a smith can make iron before one's face and turn that in less than one hour into steel." A lottery was held in London, and the City Companies formed themselves into twelve groups, which were to divide out the allotted lands between them. Thus came into existence, on January 28, 1609-10, what became known as "The Irish Society," for the management of the Irish estates incorporated by charter in 1613; and the ancient city of Derry took the name of Londonderry, by which it has been known ever since.[19] The lands were to be held by the three classes to whom they were granted by different tenures; English and Scottish undertakers must plant with English and lowland Scots only; their grants were of 2000 and 1500 acres respectively, holding by knight's service in capite, or of 1,000 acres, holding by the same service, but of Dublin Castle and not of the King, like the larger holders. They were to be free from rent for two years, but were bound to build a castle, a house of brick or stone, or a court or bawn according to their rank, and to see that their followers also built themselves houses. The second body of planters were the servitors, army officers and officials who might plant either with British or Irish, and who held in fee-farm; they also must build and settle within two years. The third body were the old inhabitants, who were to be freeholders and were to build a strong court or bawn. Timber was given free, and for five years all planters could import, duty free, all personal necessaries, and for seven years they might transport their own produce free of custom. The terms to the Irish inhabitants, though hedged about with stipulations against alienating property once it was taken up, were far from unjust. They were, considering the ideas of the day, even generous. It would really seem to have been Chichester's design to settle a contented peasantry on the soil. Serfdom was abolished, and though the Irish must reside on the plains, under the eye of the servitors, to keep a watch on their movements, this resulted in practice in planting them on some of the best lands. The Ulster plantation was probably the only attempt made in that day of plantations to provide for the original inhabitants at all; having wiped out the chiefs, the peasants were thought to be harmless. Davies is probably right in saying that, among a series of plantations of which he knew, none other had taken the poorer classes into consideration.[20] Whatever might be the after difficulties arising from the mixture of races in the North, there is no doubt that the retention of the old inhabitants was one main cause of the final success of the plantation.

[19] The original maps showing the distribution of lands between the Companies are among the Carew Manuscripts in Lambeth Palace Library. The grants are very irregular in shape and proportion. See also copies in Gilbert, Facsimiles of National Manuscripts.

[20] Davies to Salisbury, on "The Plantation of Ulster," 1610.

But the immediate prospect of moving the Irish in possession from their old homes, and parcelling them out into new districts among the servitors, few of whom had as yet appeared in the North, was one before which even Chichester quailed as the time drew near, and it is no wonder that several members of the party who were to have accompanied him to carry out this business suddenly bethought them of their age and impotence of body, of the foulness of the ways and the ill-lodging they would find in Ulster, when they were called upon to start. Chichester had just received this report from Sir Toby Caulfeild: "Touching the natives, it will shortly be many of their cases to be wood-kerne out of necessity, no other means being left them to keep a being in this world...They hope that the summer being spent, so great cruelty will not be offered as to remove them from their houses upon the edge of the winter and in the very season when they are to supply themselves in making their harvest." [21] Large numbers did indeed become outlaws, especially the swordsmen and larger holders, who would not consent to hold their lands under the newcomers; they took to the woods and they and their sons became ready material for the rebellion of revenge of 1641. Others went with Colonel Stewart, who was enrolling bands of mercenaries to take part in the wars of Sweden; but of the thousand who volunteered, or were sent away, the larger number were driven back by storms into English harbours, and made their escape. Besides the few greater chiefs who received grants of land for life in different parts of the country, there remained of the peasant population large numbers who preferred to stay in their old districts and pay good rents to the new landlords or to settle on the Church lands as tenants, the commissioners finding that the words 'transplanting' or 'removing' were "as welcome as the sentence of death." The undertakers were slow in coming over, and this gave the Irish a reprieve, as it was perceived by the authorities that there would be no sowing for the next harvest if they were ordered off their lands. When the new owners did begin to dribble in, many of them were quite unable from want of capital, or the difficulty of persuading workmen to come over, to fulfil the conditions of the plantation. Few of them were men adapted to the work of building up a new country, "much defect being observed, even by the Irish themselves, in their proceedings."

[21] Sir Tobias Caulfeild to Chichester, June, 1610.

A large number of them had taken up lands purely as a speculation, to sell again if they were allowed to do so; others, like the City Companies, sent over agents ill provided with money to pay workmen, or without men to build the stipulated houses and bawns. There was little to induce labourers to volunteer, for though the Government had fixed the conditions and rents for the planters they made no terms for the working immigrants, and the large undertakers took full advantage of this oversight.[22] Numbers who came soon became disheartened and took the first opportunity to go home again; the more determined who struggled on found themselves dependent, in a large number of cases, on the help and experience of the Irish who were living on the lands when they arrived. Their markets supplied provisions, and their cattle provided milk; their labour was needed not only for the next harvest, but for carrying out the preliminary work of the plantation as builders and labourers. In order to remain, they were ready to pay higher rents than the English and Scots, who, like their masters, had come over in the hope of making their fortunes, and were often equally impecunious. Thus, as time passed on, mutual necessity brought about mutual accommodation; and one report after another complains of the retention of the inhabitants on their old holdings long after the time arranged for in the Plantation leases.[23] In fact the plans proposed in London could not be carried out, and at the beginning of the reign of Charles I the Ulster landlords generally were found to have systematically violated the law enjoining the removal of the inhabitants, and a later Act was required in 1626, which stipulated that only a fourth part of the undertaker's properties should be let to Irish, and that they should be gathered into villages and not allowed as heretofore to live scattered over the estates; but in 1629 it was found that this order had been likewise ignored, for the people remained in their old districts, though they were called upon to build better dwellings and as far as was possible to adhere to such rules as those of wearing English dress, learning English, and sending their children to school. Those who took to 'creaghting,' or wandering about with their cattle, disappeared into the woods and mountains, and multiplied in a reckless and improvident fashion, having nothing to hold them in restraint; they held their own markets and they supplied the 'wood-kerne' with food and often with shelter.

[22] This point is well brought out in George Sigerson, History of Land Tenures and Land Classes in Ireland (1871).

[23] George Hill, Plantation of Ulster, pp. 408, 420-421, 447-448 (note 2).

Pynnar's survey in 1618-19 shows that numbers still remained on the estates. The condition of the plantation hardly looked promising. A Presbyterian minister writing in 1645 or later describes the first-comers as "in general, the scum of both nations (Scottish and English);...all void of godliness, who seemed rather to flee from God in this enterprise than to follow their own mercy; made up of different names, nations, dialects, temper, breeding": not the sort of people under whom a plantation could prosper.[24] Reporting to Salisbury about the close of 1610, Chichester writes: "The undertakers from England are, for the most part, plain country gentlemen, who may promise much, but give small assurance or hope of performing what appertains to a work of such moment...The Scottishmen come with greater port and better accompanied and attended, but it may be with less money in their purses; for some of the principal of them...were forthwith in hand with the natives to supply their wants; and in recompense thereof promise to get licence from his Majesty that these may remain upon their lands as tenants unto them, which is so pleasing to that people, that they will strain themselves to the uttermost to gratify them, for they are content to become tenants to any man rather than to be removed from the place of their birth and education, hoping [as he conceives] at one time or other, to find an opportunity to cut their landlords' throats; for they hate the Scotch deadly, and out of their malice towards them they begin to affect the English better than they were accustomed...He [Chichester] will do his best to prevent their revolt, but greatly doubts it, for they are infinitely discontented." [25]

[24] Quoted George Hill, op. cit., p. 447.

[25] Cal. S. P. I. (1610), No. 915, pp. 525-527.

The Scots came in greater numbers than the English, as the King had desired. They offered to take up 75,000 acres, but later their demands rose to 137,000 acres. A revenue officer who visited the London Companies' estates in 1637 found the English but weak and few in number, "there being not forty houses in Londonderry of English of any note, who for the most part barely live," The Scots he finds are twenty to one of the English; having privy trade in the town and country they thrive and grow rich. The Irish for the most part beg, "the reward of their idleness."[26] There is no doubt that, of the two races, the Scots made the best planters. Not only were they nearer geographically to headquarters, and able to bring across their tenants and send back their produce with greater facility than the Londoners, but the conditions were similar to those in their own country, and they were more hardy, persevering, and inured to discomfort. The Londoners came reluctantly; they felt no interest in the work of plantation, and only looked on the enterprise from the purely commercial point of view. They were more ready to collect their rents than to expend money on improvements, and were dissatisfied if they did not receive an immediate return for their outlay, forgetting Chichester's maxim that they must needs "abide some storms before coming to a profitable harvest." Sir Thomas Phillips, himself an experienced and energetic planter who had done much to prepare his lands at Coleraine before he was obliged to hand them over to the City Companies, sent in a severe report, which amply confirms the results of Pynnar's survey made between December 1618 and March 1619. In many cases the English had merely sent over agents and took no personal interest in the plantation. Others, on the other hand, were doing well; houses and schools were springing up, roads were being made, and villages of the tenants were in process of construction, the Merchant Taylors' settlement being particularly commended in this respect.

[26] Quoted J. W. Kernohan, The County of Londonderry in Three Centuries, p. 33.

An interesting account of the conditions in Ulster in the early days of the plantation is given by one of the planters, Thomas Blennerhassett, in an address to Prince Henry. The picture he draws is sombre: "Despoiled she [Ulster] presents herself, as it were, in a ragged sad sabled robe, ragged, indeed, [for] there remaineth nothing but ruins and desolation, with very little show of any humanity. Of herself she aboundeth with the very best blessings of God; amongst the other provinces belonging to Great Britain's Imperial crown, not much inferior to any." Again, he says that "only the Majesty of her naked personage remains to Ulster, which even in that plight is such that whosoever shall seek and search all Europe's best bowers, shall not find many that may make with her comparison." His object in addressing the Prince is, he says, "in order that the never-satisfied desires of the few should not quite disgrace and utterly overthrow the good, exceeding good purposes of many." He speaks of the 60,000 acres of escheated lands in the North of Ireland, and of the difficulty of getting English to come over, while all the time the Irish "do increase ten to one more than the English, nay, I might say twenty to one." He appeals to men of all ranks to come over to this free land where all sorts of attractions await them, and the dangers are "nothing so much as amongst good fellows it is to be beastly drunk at home." Yet he admits that there are dangers as well from the cruel wood-kerne and other suspicious Irish as from the devouring wolf, and that even at Sir Toby Caulfeild's fort of Charlemont "of many others the best, well furnished with men and munitions," his people, even now "in this fair time of quiet," are obliged every night to lay up all his cattle in ward, "for, do what they can, the wolf and the wood-kerne have oft-times a share; nay, Sir John King and Sir Henry Harington, dwelling within half a mile of Dublin, do also the like." [27]

[27] A Direction for the Plantation of Ulster (1610).

There gradually grew up a loose system of contract between proprietors and their cottiers which became known as the "Ulster Custom," which protected the rent-payer from those impositions that were so common in other parts of Ireland. Though it was not legalized until the passing of Gladstone's Land Bill of 1870, it was generally observed, and it made the condition of the peasant of the North much less grievous than it was in many parts of the country. It will be necessary to speak of this unwritten agreement at a later date. In 1632 the plantation of Derry was nearly brought to an end by Charles I, chiefly through the machinations of the Protestant Bishop of Derry, Bramhall, who represented that the original articles had not been carried out, and of Phillips, who urged that the London Charter should be revoked. In 1637 Charles, hungry for fresh sources of income, actually cancelled the Charter and seized the properties into his own hands, installing Bramhall as receiver. The enormous sum of £70,000 was extorted from the owners, and in spite of the efforts of the City of London the judgment remained uncancelled at the time of the outbreak of the 1641 rebellion and was not reversed until the Restoration.

The Ulster settlers, too, were constantly harassed on religious grounds The Presbyterians suffered severely during Wentworth's government. He and his close friend Laud worked together to enforce on the Irish Episcopalians a rigid High Church system of theology to which the country was averse; and it was their endeavour to oblige Catholic and Presbyterian alike to attend the Episcopal Church or to use in their service the forms laid down in the Book of Common Prayer. In Ireland this Church had been seeking a middle way to meet on friendly terms both the Puritan settlers from the City Companies about Derry and Coleraine and the Presbyterian Scottish of Antrim and Down. Trinity College, Dublin, under such men as Ussher and Bedell, who, however widely they differed in character and temperament, were at one in the almost Puritan simplicity of their religious views, was educating men whose creed had little in common with the high clerical pretensions of Laud and Wentworth. Ussher, a man of profound learning, who bequeathed his large library to the college over which he presided as Vice-Chancellor, and who afterward became successively Bishop of Meath and Primate of Ireland, was the author of a form of confession which aimed at retaining the Puritan body within the Church. Its pronounced Calvinistic views, and its recognition of the validity of ordination by presbyters, approximated it to the teaching of both the Presbyterians and Puritans. Old Bishop Knox of Raphoe assisted at the ordination of Presbyterian ministers along with presbyters, and the Primate approved the omission of such parts of the Prayer Book services as were objected to by the Presbyterians. All met and prayed in common. When the Presbyterian Mr. Blair came from Glasgow to Co. Down, having become weary, as Regent of the college, "of so long trafficking with Aristotle," he found a true friend in Ussher, who supported him against the menaces of Wentworth and the deposition of his bishops.[28] Blair and Livingston, the latter a noted Puritan, having visited Ussher at his house at Tredath (Drogheda) to protest against his use of the Book of Common Prayer in his family devotions, came away with the conviction that the Primate was not only a learned but a godly man, "though a bishop."

[28] J. S. Reid, History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, i, 135-6.

One Protestant bishop was beloved by the people. This was the saintly Bishop Bedell, a fellow of Oxford and past Provost of Trinity College, thrown by fate, some years before the outbreak of the rebellion, into the lonely and neglected diocese of Kilmore (Co. Cavan). Unlike Ussher, who was so violent a controversialist that on one occasion, after a fiery attack on Romanism from the pulpit of St. Patrick's, he was officially advised to go down and attend to the business of his diocese in Meath, Bedell was the friend of 'Puritan' and 'Papist' alike. He found the cathedral and his own house level with the ground and the parish churches all ruined, unroofed, and unrepaired. His clergy were poor and trying to eke out a living by holding two or more vicarages apiece, while the Catholic clergy were in great strength, and in the full exercise of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. It was one main purpose of Bedell's life to introduce the use of the Irish language into the services and preaching of the clergy of the Episcopal Church, and he declined to appoint any ministers who were not well-versed in the Irish tongue and of exemplary life. "On examining him, I found him a very raw divine and unable to read Irish, and therefore excused myself for not admitting him," he wrote of a clergyman who had come to him with a recommendation from Parsons. The applicant must have been astonished to find the despised tongue of the country demanded as a qualification for a Protestant living. Bedell himself learned the language in middle life, while he was Provost of Trinity College, as an example to the students whom he urged to join Irish classes. So thoroughly did he master it, that he drew up an Irish catechism and forms of prayer for his diocese, and carried out, mainly with his own hand, a translation of the Bible which was long the only complete translation in Irish existing. He printed it at his own expense in 1649.

On the quiet and conciliatory work of such men, Episcopalians and Presbyterians alike, scattered sparsely about the north, the Erastian doctrines and practices of Laud and Wentworth had fallen like a blow. They sent down men of quite a different type, who were instructed to enforce conformity on the northern churches or to close them and silence their ministers. A number of the leading preachers were deposed, and finding themselves prohibited from carrying on their ministry a body of a hundred and forty Presbyterians, clerical and lay, determined to leave Ireland and seek liberty of opinion and worship in America. On September 9, 1636, they loosed from Lough Foyle and after a tempestuous passage reached the coasts of Newfoundland. But the storms were so furious that they were unable to land, and they had finally to return home, a disappointed and tempest-tossed crew. They found their people flying in great numbers to Scotland to escape the fines and punishments inflicted upon them in Ulster, and the coasts of Ayr and Wigtown became peopled with refugees, whom most of the returned emigrants speedily joined. They found the Presbyterians of Scotland in an equal state of excitement against the introduction of the canons and liturgy which the English Church was endeavouring to force upon them, as upon Ulster. The National Covenant in support of their religious rights was being eagerly renewed, and in the spring of 1638 it was subscribed to by thousands of persons of all ranks throughout the kingdom. Wentworth was not to be warned. He met the fresh appeals for liberty of worship with the Black Oath and the Black Band, The former, to be taken on their knees, and imposed on every man and woman of the Scottish inhabitants of Ulster above sixteen years of age, bound them hand and foot to whatever Charles, who seems to have himself devised the terms, might impose upon them. They might not even "protest against any of his royal commands, but submit in all due obedience thereto," and they bound themselves not to enter into any covenant or swear any oath except by his consent.

The Black Oath was directed against the extension of the Covenant to Ireland, and in effect would have cut the Irish Presbyterians off from their Scottish brethren. The Black Band was a body of 8000 foot and 1000 horse which Wentworth quartered on the North to carry out his decrees. But among the Presbyterians of Ulster Wentworth met a spirit as unflinching as his own. Thousands refused to sign and fled the country. Those who remained were brought before the Council Chamber, bound with chains, and flung into prison, where many of them remained without redress for years, or they were fined exorbitant sums. The carrying in of the harvest could not be completed for lack of labourers, and the woods were full of refugees flying from their persecutors. It seemed as though the Northern plantation was doomed to extinction by the severities of the party in power, and the Remonstrance addressed to Parliament on its reassembling in October 1640 speaks of the plantation of Londonderry as almost destroyed the inhabitants reduced to great poverty, and many of them forced to forsake the country. By a rare combination, both Presbyterian and Papist signed this document, each having equally suffered under the harshness of Wentworth's administration, and a joint committee of Puritans and Catholics repaired privately to London to lay it before Parliament. It was the first instance of a petition from Ireland presented directly to the Parliament of England, and it was followed by others. It arrived at the moment when Strafford was impeached for high treason, and weighed heavily against him at his trial.

The effect of these persecutions of the Presbyterians was that the Scottish Presbyterian and Irish Catholic tenants were brought together by a sense of common wrongs. Few of the Scottish ministers suffered in the rebellion of 1641. The first and worst sufferers were the clergy of the Established Church and their families. Yet so much improved was the general feeling in Ulster that an observer just before the outbreak believed that "the ancient animosities and hatred which the Irish had ever been observed to bear towards the English nation had now been buried in a firm conglutination of their affections and national obligations passed between them." They intermarried freely, and the Irish were noticed to be fast adopting English customs and ways of life and learning to use the English language.[29]

[29] A History of the Beginnings of the Irish Rebellion of 1641 (pamphlet); George Sigerson, Land Tenures and Land Classes of Ireland (1871).

END OF CHAPTER II

III.—WENTWORTH IN IRELAND

The reign of James I had been passed in one long and constant effort to make the King's authority over his English kingdom absolute. The great struggle began when James erased from the Journals of the House of Commons the page that reasserted the liberties of Parliament, with the exclamation, "I will govern according to the commonweal but not according to the common will." Though the climax of the sovereign's struggle for autocratic power was not reached till the reign of Charles I, all the elements of future conflict were to be found in James's defiance of the Remonstrance addressed to him by the Commons on his illegal taxation and his assumption of ecclesiastical prerogatives. Charles's doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings was only an expansion of the same principle. A brief period of arbitrary government was to end in England in the execution of the monarch; in Ireland it brought about the rebellion of 1641.

Already in Mountjoy's time the royal claim had been boldly laid down. "My Master," he declared at Waterford, "is by right of descent an absolute King, subject to no prince or power upon the earth." Wentworth, in the following reign, echoed these sentiments. He silenced all objections to his proposals by "a direct and round answer," and warned his Irish Council that in consulting what might please the people they "began at the wrong end, when it better became a Privy Councillor to consider what might please the King." The same man who in England, as Governor of the North, had drawn up the Petition of Right--the charter of the English people's liberties,--and who, in words of fire, had called upon his countrymen to "vindicate their ancient liberties," in later life gave his Irish Parliament to understand that even discussion was beyond their rights. There is no more singular change of front in history than that which transformed Wentworth from the patriot leader into the willing agent of despotism. But the change had been accomplished before he crossed to Ireland. He came over as the avowed instrument of the King. His system of government was communicated in various letters to his friend Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury. "Let us, therefore, in the name of God, go cheerfully and boldly; if others do not their parts, I am confident the honour shall be ours and the shame theirs; and thus you have my Thorough and Thorough." This phrase became a watchword with Wentworth. "But let it go as it shall please God with me, believe me, my Lord, I shall be still Thorough and Thoroughout, one and the same." [1]

[1] Strafford, Letters and Dispatches (ed. Knowler, 1739), i, III, 298, 329.

"That star of exceeding brightness but sinister influence," as Hallam calls Sir Thomas Wentworth, was appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland in the year 1632. He became in the year before his execution the Earl of Strafford. In this man the absolute monarch found an absolute servant, an instrument exactly fitted to his will. Yet though their aims were the same the notion of Wentworth as to how arbitrary power was to be attained was not precisely that of Charles I. The lifelong struggle of the King was to get rid of Parliaments and to free himself from the goad and check of all constitutional forms. But Wentworth clung to the figment of constituted authority. He would preserve the body when the soul was extinct. The ideal of the Deputy was a Parliament existing indeed, but existing solely to register and enforce the will of his master, thus giving a semblance of popular support to measures which there was no choice but to accept. His main purpose, openly proclaimed, was to rule Ireland well in order to supply men and money to the King. He would make the country prosperous in order to wring from it abundant taxes for his sovereign; but he aimed at its entire submission and the transference of what remained of Irish soil to English owners. And so well did he succeed that he was able to boast at the end of his term of office that he had left the country prospering, its debts paid, its revenues increased, the army paid and disciplined, the poor relieved, the rich awed, and justice done to all alike.[2] Wentworth did not arrive in Ireland until the summer of 1633, more than a year after his appointment. It shows the condition of the high seas at this time that pirates on the watch swooped down on the ship bringing over his household goods and belongings, and carried them all off. The Deputy had his revenge. He put down piracy with a strong hand, and in 1637 he was able to report that "there was not so much as a rumour of Turk, St. Sebastian's man, or Dunkirker" along the coast and that merchants might at last pursue their commerce in peace.

[2] Strafford's defence at his trial, 1656.

Wentworth's predecessor, Cary, Lord Falkland, had been dismissed from office on account of his disgraceful treatment of the O'Byrnes of Wicklow. The unsuspecting Deputy was engaged in what he believed to be the worthy and acceptable task of ousting the O'Byrnes and O'Tooles from their picturesque estates in the loveliest part of Co.Wicklow, and planting them with English settlers. The wild and inaccessible country possessed by these septs, which extended through Glendalough, Castle Kevin, and Glenmalure to Castledermot on the land side and as far south as Wexford down the coast, had hitherto made it difficult to penetrate, and the Deputy was not likely to have forgotten the fate that overtook Lord Deputy Grey and his picked body of officers and men when they had pursued Lord Baltinglas and Fiach MacHugh O'Byrne into the steep and wooded recesses of Glenmalure in 1580, and few had returned alive. In the lifetime of Fiach the farmers of the Pale led an unquiet life, ever expecting a sudden descent upon themselves or their flocks from the most redoubtable man in Leinster after the death of Rory Oge. On him "all the rebels of Leinster might depend"; but they must "use what religion he listed." If a prisoner was to be set free from Dublin Castle, Fiach was always ingenious enough to secure his escape, and his fort in Glenmalure was a safe refuge; here it was that Hugh O'Donnell had lain in hiding before he escaped to his own country across the borders of Ulster.

It was with the two sons of this independent chieftain, Phelim and Redmond, that Falkland came into contact. They had joined Tyrone's rebellion and in May 1599 Phelim had routed a strong force under Sir Henry Harington. He was pursued by Mountjoy, who surrounded his dwelling and found him at supper with his family; and he barely escaped by jumping out of the window and concealing himself in the forest, leaving Mountjoy and his men to consume his supper. But in May 1601 he was pardoned, and in 1613 he represented Co. Wicklow in Parliament. Fifteen years later, in 1628, Lord Falkland set on foot his scheme of planting the O'Byrne lands and he twice tried to involve Phelim in a charge of conspiracy. But the Commissioners of Irish affairs stepped in, and when Falkland shut up Phelim in Dublin Castle a demand came over from England that a full enquiry should be made by a committee of the Irish Privy Council. Phelim was declared innocent and set at liberty, and the verdict was followed by the astonishing sequel of the dismissal of the Lord Deputy, who had certainly never contemplated the possibility of the King taking the part of the 'rebels' against his Deputy. Was he not merely "reducing Phelim's country to the conformity of other civil parts"? "Was the Court of England to become the resort and sanctuary of the traitors of Ireland?" he wrote angrily.[3] But his querulous letters were of no avail; the King ignored them, and Falkland had to go. Phelim was said to be "of such extraordinary obedience that discreet men would be respondents for him."

[3] Cal. S. P. I., Charles I, Vol. ccxlvii, No. 1192 (October 20, 1628), and No. 1269 (December, 1628).

When in 1626 a loyal Address was presented to Charles soon after his accession by the Irish peers and gentry protesting their devotion to his person and repudiating the pretensions of any foreign prince, prelate, or potentate, Phelim, "the prime man in the County of Wicklow for command and dependency of men," signed the Address. Along with him were Donnell "Spaniogh" Kavanagh and Morgan Kavanagh, who, as representing the old Leinster kings, possessed the seal of the kingdom of Leinster, and Florence FitzPatrick, grandson to the Lord of Upper Ossory, "of whose lands a great part had lately been planted"; all men with great power over the Irish in those counties.[4]

[4] Cal. S. P. I., Charles I, Vol. ccxliii, No. 528 (March 29, 1626).

The difficulties with which Wentworth had to contend in his attempt to bring some sort of order into the diseased commonwealth over which he was sent to preside are set forth in a vivid way in a pamphlet written in or about 1623 by an Anglo-Irishman who, though he wrote in England, seems to have studied economic affairs on the spot.[5] He may have been a member of a commission appointed in 1622 to inquire into the condition of Ireland with special reference to the recent plantations. The state of things he reveals is that of an almost universal corruption in all departments of government. The State was preyed upon by a host of insatiable "sharks" of obscure birth, who sacrificed alike the revenue of the King and the public good, by "ingressing" most of the wealth of the realm to themselves, many of them having raised their estates from nothing to an incredible value "in a trice of time."

[5] Advertisements for Ireland, written in the Reign of James I, ed. George O'Brien (1923), pp. 5, 10, 11, 14.

The fees exacted for compositions of lands often amounted to half the purchase money, and frauds of all sorts were committed both upon the owners and upon the Crown in the passing of estates by the Commission upon Defective Titles. The writer insists that it had not been the sovereign's intention to pass these lands to new owners, but to settle the old owners on their estates by a more secure title at an enhanced rent. But in the general unsettlement of land tenures the way was left open for all kinds of fraudulent dealing, and this was fully taken advantage of by the corrupt officials by whose means the business was transacted. In every department of the public service corruption prevailed, and the central administration was too weak to check it. Like other observers, he imputes the comparative failure of the new plantations to the difficulty of getting the purchasers to go over and undertake the development of their own properties. "Gentlemen in England give away their lands to footmen and others who now live in the houses of the principal natives and overtop them with more sway and authority than their lord and master would do were he there in person." Nearly all the plantations in "Low Leinster," i.e., Leitrim and Longford, are still "under natives," but they have been removed from their own rich lands in the plains to the barren mountains, and not a fourth part of their old holdings is left to them. Those that prove to be gentry among them, "of whom there be a great number though they have not sixpence to live upon, disdain to follow any trade;...they live in other men's houses and spend their days in idleness." These gentlemen outlaws were to form the inflammable soil in which the seeds of rebellion were to spread with terrible rapidity in 1641, and the dissatisfied transplanted cottiers were to form their bands of followers.

Wentworth's opinion of the Council with which he was to work was tersely expressed in his first letter from Dublin. "I find them in this place," he writes, "a company of men the most intent upon their own ends that ever I met with."[6] "They had no edge at all for the public" and were leagued to keep the Deputy in the dark about everything. Sir William Parsons, the chief mover in the Wexford plantation, he found "from first to last the driest of all the company," and with Lord Cork he was on the worst terms. There was a certain incorruptibility as to personal gain in Wentworth which was incomprehensible to these men, all intent on their own advancement. "Old Richard," as he calls Lord Cork, had his opportunity later when, as Lord Strafford, he stood arraigned for treason to the master whose cause it had been his one wish to serve, and he did not fail to take it. "Old Richard," he writes from the Tower, "hath sworn against me gallantly, and, thus battered and blown upon on all sides, I go on the way contentedly, and gently tread those steps which, I trust, lead me to quietness at last."[7] Richard Boyle, first Earl of Cork, had substantial reason for his hatred, for Strafford fleeced him unmercifully for the public good. He said in 1640 that he was the worse for him by £40,000 in his personal estate and £1200 a year in his income.[8] No doubt the Deputy felt that the money would be much more advantageously employed in the King's service. A hardly less irritating cause of complaint was Wentworth's insistence on the removal to one side of the pompous monument erected by Cork to his wife's virtues in front of the altar in St. Patrick's Cathedral. --a snub that the Earl was not likely to forget.[9]

[6] Strafford's Letters (1739), i, 97.

[7] Strafford to Loftus from the Tower, February 4, 1640.

[8] Lismore Papers, iv, p. 186; and see Ibid., iii, pp. 246-247; 248-259.

[9] Ibid., iv, pp. 39, 223.

Wentworth found much to remedy in the outward appearance of things; the Castle he found falling to pieces, and the Deputy's horses were without a stable since the ecclesiastical commissioners had reclaimed St Andrew's Church, which had been used for that purpose. The vaults under Christ Church Cathedral, which the Deputy and Council attended every Sunday, were let for "tippling houses for beer, wine, and tobacco," of which the fumes could be perceived in the church above. An old diary by Sir Edward Denny, a planter in the south-west of Ireland, gives in one pregnant sentence, the general impression produced by Wentworth's advent. On July 23, 1633, is found this entry; "The Lord Viscount Wentworth came to Ireland to governe the kingdom. Manie men feare."

It is from the remarkable series of Wentworth's own letters that we learn best his aims and character. From his first appearance among his Council the gauntlet was thrown down. He made no attempt to be conciliatory, and he prepared for the great struggle against the 'Graces' by an attempt to make both the Council and the Parliament subservient to his will. His first demand was that a "voluntary contribution," made in 1628, early in Charles's reign, should be continued for another year, to meet the urgent costs of the army and the government. The earlier contribution had been made by the Catholics, but he warns the gentry that on this occasion the appeal would be to Protestants, and he advised them to save themselves by offering the contribution with a request for a Parliament in return. He made them "so horribly afraid that the money should be assessed on their properties that it was something strange to see how instantly they gave consent with all the cheerfulness possible." The history of this contribution and of the 'Graces' with which it was connected leads us back into the previous reign. Even before the time of James I the experiments in plantations had resulted in a general sense of uncertainty and unrest all over the kingdom. No owner of land, whether he were an Irishman holding by immemorial custom and in complete ignorance of English land laws, or the old settler who now saw his property included in the vast tracts claimed on one excuse or another by the Crown, could any longer feel security for his possessions. In the universal fear of losing all they owned Englishman and Irishman suffered alike.

In Connacht a confiscation had long been threatened and as far back as 1585, when Sir John Perrot was Deputy, the gentlemen of the province had safeguarded their rights by entering into a pact known as the Composition of Connacht, which secured them in their properties. By far the largest landowner was the Lord St Albans and Clanricarde, whose vast estates about Portumna made him practically Lord Palatine over the larger part of Co. Galway. By some oversight, which it is impossible in the conditions of the time to ascribe simply to forgetfulness, the legal formalities required to make these arrangements binding in law were never carried out. The enrolments were not correctly entered, and though in James's reign a sum of £3,000 had been paid by the landlords to the King for the completion of their patents, it was found that there were legal flaws in them which permitted the Courts to regard them as a dead letter. It was now proposed to take advantage of these flaws to carry out the general confiscation and replantation of the province.

The new plantations in Ulster, Wexford, and Longford gave urgency to the claims of the Connacht gentlemen to have their rights made clear; and early in Charles's reign they approached him with a petition embodying their desires. Charles received the representatives graciously. He was intent on making himself independent of his English Parliament, and for this purpose he was anxiously looking elsewhere for the necessary funds to carry on his government. The result of the agreement made between him and the Irish gentry was the confirmation of certain privileges to the Connacht landlords, called 'Graces,' in return for a voluntary contribution from them of another sum of money, this time £120,000, to be paid in quarterly instalments spread over three years. The Graces originally contained fifty-one articles dealing with a number of matters relating to the better government of Ireland, such as the regulation of trade, the excesses of the soldiery and their support, the oppressions of the Court of Wards, the non-residence of landlords, and the maladministration of justice in the courts of law. But the two Graces [10] most eagerly sought after were those clauses concerning the surrender of titles in Connacht and Clare or Thomond, and for the recognition of a sixty years' title to property, as settled by the Act, 21 Jacobi, but since brought seriously into question. The first of these Graces demanded the legal enrolment in Chancery of the surrenders of property made under James on the faith of his promise of confirmation of their titles, for which they had so long waited; the second made illegal the ancient and half-imaginary titles of the Crown to lands, such as had been made the excuse for the Wexford and other plantations, and confirmed the present owners in their rights.

[10] I.e., Nos. 24, 25, in the official document.

A civil oath was substituted for the Oath of Supremacy, which would enable Catholic lawyers again to practise, and in the earlier drafts the fines for non-attendance at Protestant worship were to be withdrawn. It is to be said for Wentworth that he never was in favour of these recusancy fines, willing as he was to lay heavy taxes on the wealthy, whatever their religion; he thought them irritating and not satisfactory in their results. Even in their amended form the Graces might well have been looked upon as an Irish Petition of Rights which would have satisfied the real needs of the country, and placed all parties on a footing of security. They would have given a moderated but real toleration in religion, fixed ownership in property, and a prospect of justice in the Courts of Law. As such their confirmation was anxiously awaited by the parliament and people. A Parliament had been promised for November (1628) to confirm these Graces, but by a legal flaw in the writs of summons, which had not obtained the official sanction of the King, as stipulated for by Poynings' Act, they were declared to be void. In the light of what afterwards occurred it is difficult to believe the omission to have been accidental; it was, in any case, one that could easily have been remedied.

Time drifted on, the Church party taking full advantage of the interim to stir up opposition to the relaxation of the recusancy laws; then came Falkland's recall and, in 1633, the arrival of Wentworth to succeed him. The new Viceroy had come over with fixed views. He intended to encourage trade and commerce, especially the linen trade, in order by natural means and through the prosperity of the country to raise large funds to make Ireland pay its own way, instead of being a constant source of expense to England; and he intended to proceed with the plantation of Connacht.[11] For the expediting of the second project he proposed to re-establish the Commission upon Defective Titles, or, in other words, to give full rein to the discovery of flaws in titles to ownership of lands, which had proved so lucrative a means of ousting landowners out of their properties in all parts of the kingdom. In the carrying out of this second project two obstacles stood in the Viceroy's way; first, the Graces, designed to put a stop to this very evil which Wentworth now proposed to revive; secondly, the promise of a Parliament, which could hardly be longer ignored, and which was urgently required for the passing of money bills.

[11] See Wentworth's letter to the King from Chester, written when he was on his way to Ireland, July 16, 1633.

Wentworth's Parliament of 1634 was a study in tactics. It was divided into two parts, the first session for the voting of supplies, the second, which was to be deferred till the autumn, for the consideration of the Graces. As the Deputy put it succinctly to the King: "The former session for yourself; the latter for the enacting of all such profitable and wholesome laws as a moderate and good people may expect from a wise and gracious King." His next step was to balance the parties by the free use of his power as Deputy to name proxies for absentees, and thus to secure a majority of subservient members whom he could sway any way he pleased. In view of the expected passing of the Graces the parliament met in a conciliatory spirit, and scarcely needed the Deputy's threat, made in his opening speech, that they must either submit to his Majesty's demand or "he would find a just occasion of breach, either of which would content the King." Charles, who had lately expressed his opinion of Parliaments as "that hydra...cunning as well as malicious," would have undoubtedly preferred the latter event. Parliament took the hint and passed the grant of six subsidies by a voluntary and unanimous vote.

In the next session the question of the Graces could no longer be deferred. The Commons pointed to the immense gifts and loans amounting to £310,000, raised in the last two years, exclusive of the last large grant, and they pressed in return for the carrying out of the royal promises, and especially the confirmation of their titles. Even the King feared they had "some ground to demand more than it was fit for him to give." But the Graces, as transmitted by Wentworth to the King, were accompanied by his recommendations, dividing them into three parts--those not at all to be granted, which he did not even transmit (an exercise of prerogative clearly illegal), those which might well be granted, and those which might be accepted by way of instruction but not passed into law. Among those "not at all to be transmitted" were the two Graces (Nos. 24 and 25) so anxiously coveted by the gentry of Ireland. The act of perfidy was complete, and the plantation of Connacht ready to proceed. A Commission was sent down to the West, mock courts were set up to secure obedience, and by intimidating juries, inflicting heavy fines on recalcitrant jurors, and the brow-beating of the Deputy himself, who presided at these mock Courts, verdicts were found for the King over the larger part of Connacht.

So successfully did Wentworth cajole the jurors and so patiently did Serjeant Calelin "wipe away" all objections, that in Roscommon, Sligo, and Mayo his Majesty's title was found "with great freedom and forwardness of affection." But in Galway, on Lord Clanricarde's property, in spite of the example of the other counties and the absence of the Earl in London, men "with great want of understanding" were found who "most obstinately and positively" refused to find for the King. Only a packed jury and fines to the amount of £1000 imposed on the sheriff and of £4000 on each of the jurors, with the still more effective threat of the Star Chamber, brought them to a more pliable state of mind. The old Earl died suddenly a short time afterwards, and "it was boldly said that the Deputy's hard usage broke his heart." Wentworth, who complains that there were none but Irish tenants on the Clanricarde estates, considered that the opportunity ought to be taken to people them with English. But in fact the plans of Wentworth came to naught, and Connacht remained unplanted until the great 'trek' into that province of English and Irish together in the days of Cromwell, twenty years later. In 1640 the Deputy, who was created earl of Strafford in this year, was recalled to England.

END OF CHAPTER III

IV.—THE REBELLION OF 1641-42

On May 12, 1641, the head of Strafford fell on the scaffold. Among the twenty-eight articles of accusation against him seventeen related to his administration of affairs in Ireland. Among the particular charges were included his high-handed treatment of Cork, Kildare, Mountnorris, and other nobles; among the general charges was his statement that Ireland was a conquered nation with which the King might do as he pleased, charters not being binding on the sovereign; a doctrine repudiated as roundly by the Puritan Long Parliament as it had ever been in Ireland itself. Some of the accusations, however, redounded greatly to Strafford's credit. Largely at his own expense he had introduced improvements in the growing of flax. He had enforced discipline in the army and the regular payment of the troops. Landlords had been restrained from living in England while drawing money out of Ireland; he had, moreover, persisted in his determination not to levy fines against recusants. But the main contention--that the ex-Deputy had laboured to override the liberties of the subject in the exercise of a despotic rule--could not be gainsaid, and held true alike in England and Ireland; and when Strafford, "putting off his doublet as cheerfully as ever he did when he went to bed," walked through vast crowds of rejoicing people to Tower Hill, the city bells clashed forth and bonfires blazed, as at a victory gained.

In Ireland there were no outward signs of joy; indeed, an aspect of unwonted prosperity was seen in many parts of the country. Strafford had crushed the manufactured woollen trade, because it interfered with the trade of England, and because he found a new means of profit by the double customs arising from the export of raw wool into England and its return as manufactured goods into the country that supplied the wool. But he had helped to extend and improve the growth of linen, which had been an old article of trade in Ireland. Already in 1336 we find Irish linen cloth and 'sindon' or lawn mentioned in a charter of Edward III to Dublin, and the export grew large enough to excite the jealousy of English merchants and to move Tudor princes to pass legislation to restrain its increase. New looms had been set up in Dublin in Elizabeth's reign, and settlers in Ulster like Lady Hugh Montgomery of Grey Abbey encouraged both linen and woollen manufactures, "which soon brought down the prices of the breakens (tartans) and narrow cloths of both sorts." When Strafford came over he found "the women all naturally bred to spinning," and there is no greater mistake than to attribute to him the foundation of the linen trade in Ireland. The spinning of linen yarn both for home consumption and export was one of the oldest industries of the country, but Strafford did much to encourage both the growth and spinning of flax and to bring in skilled artizans. It was not until the great influx of skilled operatives from France and the Low Countries under William III that the industry became one of the staples of Irish commerce and a mam source of the prosperity and wealth of Ulster.

Even before Wentworth came to Ireland the Earl of Cork, who had himself done much to encourage industry, remarks on the marvellous improvement in the country, both in Ulster and Munster. There were great advances in both building and farming, "each man striving to excel the other in fair buildings and good furniture, and in husbanding, enclosing, and improving their lands." [1] The towns were loyal, desiring only peace and quiet to carry on their trade. Wentworth's tenure of office increased the customs and secured regular supplies by lawful means, over and above the special subsidies raised by promises or pressure for the King. Pirates were suppressed, and foreign trade revived. This was carried almost entirely in Dutch bottoms, "there being no home-built ships and no merchants among the natives," though both native and foreign fishing-boats fished the waters round the coasts.[2] But the loss of the foreign wool trade was a great blow to the prosperity of the country, both to the country people who grew and sold the wool, and to the ports, Waterford and Limerick especially, where it was shipped. Among the list of exports at this time for Spain and Portugal are mentioned butter, pipe-staves, tallow, pilchards, salmon, skins and meat, cod and hake, beans, iron, linen-cloth, friezes, and stockings. Nevertheless, the lack of suitable employment "to keep the well-born Irish youths busy" and of trades for the youths of the lower class is deplored by Lord Cork. Industrial employment was, in fact, confined to the towns and was in the hands of the old English families who had created it. The youths turned loose from the plantation lands, though not so numerous as of old, still haunted the mountains when they did not betake themselves abroad; and though no kerne and horsemen were now to be seen, they formed a nucleus of discontent on which turbulent spirits like Phelim O'Neill or Rory O'More could easily work when their plans for a rising were ripe. They were only too glad to return to their old way of life, and take the risks with the excitement of an insurrection. They were watching their opportunity of ousting the planters and recovering the clan lands, and even before Strafford's advent rumours of intended risings had been going through the North and had been gradually taking shape in the minds of the leaders.

[1] Cork to Lord Dorchester, Cal. S. P. I., Charles I, Vol. ccli, No. 1859.

[2] Lord Deputy to Coke; Strafford, Letters and Dispatches, i, 106.

It is probable that, had the discontent touched one class only, the rebellion might have been confined to Ulster, and have been more easily checked. But the methods of Wentworth and those of Lord Justice Parsons resulted in an almost universal sense of irritation and insecurity. The "discovery" of false titles to land touched the new planters far more than the Irish. The researches of these busybodies were made in the Tower records or among the Patent Rolls, where no Irish titles could have been found belonging to holders under the clan system; it was the pioneer English who had built up often vast estates on very insecure legal foundations who suffered most. Lord Cork, with his 42,000 acres of land and his manors in Cork and Waterford (the latter bought for a comparatively small sum from Sir Walter Raleigh) found his possessions claimed by the King. The Earl of Clanricarde was another victim, as we have seen; the King hoped to be the gainer of £50,000 by his forfeitures. Smaller owners were threatened in proportion. Though they remained persistently attached to the King's interest the sense of unsettlement affected large numbers of the gentry, especially those Catholic lords who were also harassed from time to time in their religious observances, and who had found their complaints treated with levity or indifference by two Stuart kings. So long as jurors were intimidated, Parliaments overawed, and all promises of redress of grievances broken or ignored, they felt little hope of relief by ordinary means, and the general dissatisfaction led them to sympathize with and finally to take part in a rising with which, as loyalist landlords of the Pale and Munster, they would naturally have had little in common, their outlook on life being essentially different from that of the native Irish, even when they professed the same religious faith. It was this unusual combination of two distinct interests, usually found on opposite sides, that made the insurrection of 1641 formidable, and that expanded a local rising into a general movement.

By almost imperceptible steps the Ulster rebellion merged itself into the Wars of the Confederation, which kept Ireland in a state of turbulence from one end to the other during the eight years that preceded the coming of Cromwell to Ireland in 1649. The rebellion which broke out in the North in October 1641 came near to uprooting the Ulster plantation, then beginning to take effect in the improved conditions of the country, in the increase of trade and industry, the more extensive and regular cultivation of crops, and in the erection of houses, schools, and churches. It was but the first of a series of moves which made Ireland the chessboard of different parties during the crowded and confused events of the Confederate Wars; the activities of the Ormonde party, the O'Neill party, the Confederate party, the Puritan party, the Presbyterian party, sometimes overlap, sometimes separate.

The armies of Ormonde, of Owen Roe O'Neill, of Preston, of the Nuncio, march and countermarch over the land, sometimes acting in concert, more often apart, all profoundly jealous of each other. The conflicting parties of the English wars of Royalist against Parliamentarian are found transferred to Irish soil with internal conflicts and questions added still further to confuse them; the King's side and Parliament's side alike made bids to one Irish party after another for money and support. From the outside, these years are, as Carlyle says, "a huge blot, an indiscriminate blackness," but their main lines are not so vague as Carlyle would have us believe. The chief difficulty arises from the plain fact that many of the leaders were playing a double game. The King's transactions throughout the conflict were a web of duplicity, so that Puritans, Catholic gentry, Ormonde's party, and rebels alternately claimed him as approving their policy and showed documents said to be executed with his own hand for their support. The question put to Sir Patrick Barnewell on his examination, "Whether the King was privy to or had encouraged the rebellion," has never been satisfactorily answered, and the commission from the King declared to have been sent to Phelim O'Neill, though denied on the scaffold by Sir Phelim himself, remains a mystery.[3]

[3] See Appendix I.

The secret commission to Glamorgan, which was contrary to his open instructions and was intended to undermine the authority of Ormonde, can scarcely now be doubted; indeed, the whole conduct of the King, as we read it closely, is so involved in deceit and inspired by momentary expedients that his service must have been a difficult path to tread. The fidelity with which he was served is only surpassed by the faithlessness of his conduct toward his supporters. "I wonder," said Queen Henrietta Maria to him shortly before the General Assembly at Kilkenny, "that the Irish do not give themselves to some foreign king; you will force them to it in the end, when they see themselves offered as a sacrifice." No less perverted was the management of affairs by the two Lords Justices into whose hands the conduct of the Irish government fell in this disturbed time. Though officially representing the sovereign, both of them were Puritans, who played secretly into the hands of the English Parliament. Borlase was a nonentity; but Parsons, a coward who was perpetually sending cringing appeals to the English Government for help against the rebels, was at the same time universally believed to be fomenting the rebellion in the hope of profiting by fresh forfeitures. The instructions of these officials to Clanricarde at the height of the rebellion were that no submission was to be accepted, but that the rebels were to be persecuted with fire and sword. They were reported to have been heard to say "that the more were in rebellion, the more lands would be forfeit."[4]

[4] Memoirs and Letters of Ulick, Marquis of Clanricarde (1757), pp. 61, 62-63, 167-168; Lodge, Des. Cur. Hib. ii, 132-133.

When a general pardon came from the King to all who would come in within a convenient time, it was withheld by the Lords Justices until only ten days remained for the appellants to take advantage of it, and, even so, it was limited to four counties only. Castlehaven and Clanricarde, two of the principal nobles in the kingdom, complain that the proceedings of Parsons seemed designed to force them into rebellion; and it was only by a hazardous escape from the prison into which he had been entrapped that the former gentleman saved his neck, having, as he said, no wish "to tamely die butchered." With such persons at the head of affairs the rising assumed a character of seriousness which it would not otherwise have had. No one could be trusted, the men who were in power least of all. The firm hand to check the rising at the outset was wanting.

It was on November 1, 1641, the day set apart in the English House of Commons for the consideration of a Remonstrance brought over by Irish gentlemen appointed by their peers, that the news reached London that the outbreak had begun. Rumours of stealthy movements of Sir Phelim O'Neill and Lord Maguire in the North had reached the Lords Justices, but the first serious intimation was given late in the evening of October 22, when a terrified and half-drunken Irishman named Owen Connally, who had been servant to Sir John Clotworthy, was found loitering about the Lower Castle yard in a suspicious manner, and on urging the necessity of imparting private information, he was admitted into the presence of the Lord Justice, and informed him of a plot to seize the Castle and other strong forts throughout the country on the following night, October 23. Dublin at this time consisted of twenty thousand inhabitants still mostly clustered about the castle rise with the two cathedrals close beside it. Chichester House, where Borlase lived, Kildare House, now the headquarters of the Dail, and Trinity College were still described in official records as "near Dublin." A hasty visit to Borlase and a night meeting of the Council decided Parsons to take the information given by Connally seriously, and steps were set on foot to forestall the conspirators. Hugh Oge MacMahon was apprehended, as a chief centre of the Dublin plot, and later Lord Maguire, next to Sir Phelim O'Neill one of the prime leaders, was taken, though he had been forced into the project against his will. The latter was a young man overburdened with debt, the son of the 'Queen's Maguire' of Elizabeth's reign, who had been officially recognized as head of his sept. Lord Maguire had been educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, as a king's ward, and had entered the Irish House of Lords in 1634. When asked what he thought of the rising he replied that he could not tell what to think of it, "such matters being altogether out of his element"; but the large promises of Sir Phelim, who offered to make him leader of the Ulster troops, persuaded him against his better judgment and led him on to his ruin. Later, in 1644-45, both these men were tried in London for high treason and executed at Tyburn.

In the North the outbreak had taken place on the appointed day. Within a fortnight Sir Phelim had made himself master of Tyrone and Armagh, had captured Dungannon and the fort of Charlemont, and had made his headquarters at Newry. He captured Dundalk and sat down before Drogheda. But here his successes came to a halt. Though troops hastily sent from Dublin were cut off on their way to relieve Drogheda by Roger Moore, Hugh Byrne, and Philip O'Reilly, the last two of whom had been trained in the Spanish wars, no decisive result followed; months passed with O'Neill still hovering in the neighbourhood, his large irregular hosts having devoured the district and committed excesses which were soon to shock Owen Roe, who had been accustomed to the rigorous discipline of the Spanish wars. They then either dispersed to their homes or formed themselves into guerilla bands who terrorized the country.

Sir Phelim O'Neill of Kinnaird, eldest son of Turlogh, was brought to the front rather by his name and the traditions of his house than by any personal fitness for leadership. He was no general, nor had he even a good reputation among his own people, for he had ruthlessly evicted his Irish tenants, leaving many of them to starve on the mountains, while he took in Englishmen who were able to pay more certain rents. He had inherited his property from Sir Henry O'Neill, who had been killed in action against Sir Cahir O'Doherty in June 1608. Sir Arthur Chichester had suggested that a division of the property should be made among all the heirs, legitimate and illegitimate, but in 1629 Sir Phelim succeeded in securing a patent vesting it all in himself. Even this, however, did not suffice to meet his spendthrift habits, possibly acquired while he was a student at Lincoln's Inn, and his estate became greatly encumbered. Rumours of his intention to rise had got about long before, his house at Kinnaird having become the meeting-place of the conspirators. But the actual plans were kept with great secrecy, and the first reports were rather of isolated attacks on gentlemen's houses in different parts of the North than of any organized revolt. The first sufferers were the clergy of the Established Church, many of whom with their families were turned out of their homes during the first days of the rebellion and cruelly treated or murdered. Reid gives the names of twenty-seven clergymen killed, many of whom were hanged at their own hall or church doors, with their relations; others are mentioned by name in the depositions of Temple and Borlase; many others died of starvation and pestilential fever.[5]

[5] Reid, History of the Irish Presbyterians, i, 328-331; M. A. Hickson, Ireland in the Seventeenth Century, i, 192-193.

It is necessary in speaking of the rebellion of 1641-42 to exercise great caution in accepting extreme reports on either side. An immense mass of material exists dealing with this subject, partly histories and memoirs written by contemporaries, partly depositions taken at a later period. It is undoubted that the numbers said to have been massacred were intentionally exaggerated by those who hoped to gain lands for themselves through the future forfeitures of rebel properties. The large figures given by Sir William Petty, who made what is known as the "Down Survey" of escheated lands for the Cromwellian settlement, lie under the same suspicion. He thinks that out of a total population, which he puts down at 1,466,000 before the rising, about a third was wiped out. The facts, as known, do not support these sweeping calculations. On the other hand, the present reaction, which leads writers to minimise the results of the rebellion, almost to the point of believing that there were no murders at all, is equally to be distrusted. We may probably admit that no general massacre was planned or occurred, but with Phelim's undisciplined army of thirty thousand men, armed with pitchforks, scythes, and knives, moving in bodies about the North, out for anything they could get, and with the isolated houses of the English settlers as their objective, it was impossible that terrible instances of cruelty should not occur. As the insurrection spread to the centre and south of Ireland the area of disorder grew wider and fresh excesses occurred.

At the most moderate computation many thousands were murdered or destroyed during the first two years of the war, and multitudes were stripped of all they possessed, even of their clothes, and driven out to die of misery, cold, and hunger on the roadside. They came pouring down to Dublin for refuge, and Sir John Temple, Master of the Rolls, who was in Dublin at the time, describes the condition in which they arrived. "They came up in troops, stripped and miserably despoiled, out of the North. Many persons of good quality and rank, covered over with old rags, and some without any other covering than a little twisted straw to hide their nakedness. Some reverend ministers and others that had escaped with their lives, sorely wounded. Wives came, bitterly lamenting the murder of their husbands, mothers of their children barbarously destroyed before their faces...some over-wearied with long travel, and so "subated," as they came creeping on their knees, others frozen up with cold, ready to give up the ghost in the streets; others overwhelmed with grief and distracted with their losses, lost also their senses."[6] The churches, barns, and houses were filled with refugees, yet many lay in the open streets, too exhausted even to take food or clothe themselves, and miserably died. The poorer sort stood in throngs, begging; the better sort "wasted silently away and so perished." The women and children died fast, and two new burial-grounds had to be taken in, one on each side of the R. Liffey, for the old ones were speedily filled. The pestilence, which soon after spread through the land, was already feared in Dublin. The city was, indeed, in a miserable condition, encircled by rebels on both sides from Wicklow and the North, the terrified inhabitants of the suburbs rushing in to complete the congestion. The Council even took the extreme step of commanding all such persons to depart on pain of death. Thousands were shipped off to England as soon as they arrived.

[6] Temple, History of the Rebellion, pp 56-57.

In the North the conditions were terrible. The wretched fugitives dropped all along the roadsides, multitudes of them dying from exposure and cold, for the season was more than ordinarily wet and stormy, and many had been stripped of their last garments by the men who drove them on. At times horrible incidents occurred, such as the Portadown Bridge murders, when over a hundred persons, who had passes from Sir Phelim to be conveyed in safety to their friends in England, were driven by Captain Manus O'Kane to the bridge at Portadown, "like sheep to the market," and forced into the water. Those who could swim and got to the bank were knocked on the head; others were shot in the river.[7] Cruel tortures were used to extort promises of money, and in one place where prisoners were confined in a small room without food it is related that their pangs of hunger forced them to burst open the window of the chamber, and to scrape weeds and moss from the walls to eat. Every threat that might torture helpless men and women was used to cow them, and as is often the case in times of turmoil, the women are said to have been worse than the men. To add to the misery of the Protestants the rebels killed few outright, but left them in ditches and other places, mortally wounded and stripped of their clothes, where they languished and pined to death, "the rebels affirming that their priests commanded them so to do."[8]

[7] Hickson, op. cit., i, 177-178.

[8] Hickson, Ireland in the Seventeenth Century, i, 172.

The High Court of Justice in March 1653 acquitted Sir Phelim of the murder of Lord Caulfeild, but it is difficult to believe that he did not connive at a deed done by his foster-brother at his own gate, and for which no punishment was inflicted on the murderer. Charlemont fort was surprised and captured by his troops, who made it their principal stronghold during the rebellion. He was chosen commander-in-chief at Monaghan. The old English settlers—the Russells, FitzSimons and Savages of Ardes and Lecale—took part in the dreadful work, considering themselves rather part of the native than of the new population; and the Scottish MacDonnells had nothing to learn from others in deceit and cruelty. The massacre of an English company under colour of a flag of truce at Portnaw and the massacre in January, 1642, of the peaceful Irish inhabitants of Island Magee were the work of Scottish soldiers. They sallied out and ruthlessly, without provocation or warning, fell upon this group of farmers and killed them all. Carte says that near three thousand harmless Irish men, women, and children, were said to have been killed, but this is a large exaggeration; the depositions give about fifty persons murdered.[9] Nor did it tend to ameliorate conditions in the country when partly in order to relieve the congestion in Dublin and to find employment for the refugees, Sir Charles Coote, then governor of the city, was authorised by the Lords Justices to raise an army of defence from the most able-bodied of the men who had arrived from the North. Burning with indignation at the loss of all that they had built up with years of labour and by the outlay of large sums of money, with the memory of having seen their wives and children in many cases murdered or starved before their eyes, and knowing that it was often their own dependants who had turned against them, it is little wonder that among merciless troops then terrorizing the country, the bands under Coote were reckoned the most ruthless.

In Wicklow, where they were sent against the O'Tooles and O'Byrnes, the old foes of Parsons, who seems to have been watching for an opportunity of revenge, they took a cruel vengeance, falling upon them furiously, stripping and murdering, and driving them out of their territories. Yet these people had been in no way concerned in the rebellion. It was largely through Coote's cruelties and those of St Leger, Governor of Munster, that the south, quiet up to this time, rose in arms, and joined the insurgents. But the rising in the south was never so formidable as that in the north. The Irish gentlemen of Munster went into it unwillingly, having little to gain and much to lose by fresh disturbances; they had only recently been confirmed in possession of their lands. The Lord of Muskerry, Donogh MacCarthy, who became leader of the Munster rebels, was son of Cormac Oge, who had been created Baron of Blarney and Viscount Muskerry in 1628. In 1642 the rental of his estate was £7,000, and his parsimonious father had saved for him £30,000 in ready money. It required all the efforts of the family bards, reciting the glories of past MacCarthys, to induce him to risk these solid benefits for the perils of insurrection. Other lords, deep in debt, such as the O'Keeffes, O'Callaghans, MacDonoghs, and Lord Roche, were more easily stirred. Muskerry thus found himself the reluctant head of a rabble army wandering about the country, intent only on plunder, and not unkindly disposed toward the English planters among whom they lived, and from whom they had at all times got much money for work, timber, corn, and cloth, out of which their rents were paid. These settlers were as a whole a "disindustrious" lot of people, as was said by one of themselves. Many of them had been soldiers and cared for no other occupation; they were "impatient of labour and much addicted to jollity and good fellowship; the epidemical disease of all the English plantations in this kingdom." But those who applied themselves to labour throve well and the country had begun to wear a smiling aspect of prosperity, with home-steads and farms scattered among the ancient castles of the great lords. The settlers were, as a whole, treated kindly by the rebel leaders, though many of them lost all they had and were plunged from prosperity into misery.

The rebel host, on their part, fared well and recklessly. During the single week they spent at Buttevant, Lord Roche's house, and in the towtn of Moyalloe near it, they are said to have slaughtered forty thousand English sheep and probably three to four thousand cows and oxen "only for their skins," which they sold for 1 1/4d. apiece to skinners of Kilmallock. On a report that St Leger was coming they melted away, leaving the place "stinking noisomely" behind them, "their bedding and meat so nasty and sordid that a right-bred English dog would have scouted either." Under a good leader they could put up a stout fight, as they showed when MacFineen, whom they called Captain Suggane, was at their head; but disputes between the authorized heads were so frequent that it was decided to give the command to an almost unknown man who had served in Spain, one Garrott Barry, who proved by his incapacity that he had profited little by his foreign training. Lord Mountgarret, whom he displaced, would probably have succeeded better.[10]

[9] Ibid., i, 145-151; 255 seq.; and see R. Bagwell, Ireland under the Stuarts, i, 335. Leland first pointed out that this massacre occurred in January, 1642, not in November, 1641, as stated by Carte.

[10] The above account is largely taken from articles on "The Rise and Progress of the Munster Rebellion," edited by H. Webb Gillman from a manuscript in the British Museum (Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, Second Series, vols. i, ii).

Among the host of inferior leaders who took part in the war some two or three names stand out of men who became local or popular heroes, being distinguished both for skill in generalship and for the humanity of their acts and the purity of their aims. Chief of these during the early months was Roger Moore, or Rory O'More, one of the unfortunate family which had lost lands in Leix when the plantation of Queen's County was in progress. He saw in the rising a chance for the recovery of his tribal lands. His feats of bravery and brilliant leadership made his name a talisman among his countrymen, and they went into battle with the cry on their lips, "God and our Lady and Rory O'More." But the scenes of horror which he witnessed, partly caused, as he felt, by his own words of instigation, revolted him. He risked his life to put a stop to these acts and finally stood aside rather than take part in deeds of blood. Carte calls Rory "one of the most handsome, comely, and proper persons of his time, of excellent parts, good judgment, and great cunning, affable and courteous."[11]

[11] Carte, Ormond, i, 315-316 (1851).

In his own county of Kerry, Pierce Ferriter of Tralee held a scarcely less prominent place. He was a gentleman of old Norman stock, sincerely devoted to the Throne, who believed that the rising would bring about the full establishment of the Catholic religion. An accomplished man and brave soldier, he has left a number of love-songs, elegies, and verses on current events to prove his poetical talent and the warmth of his heart. For over ten years he held out in the mountains of Kerry, defending his people from the Cromwellian spoilers, the last Irish chief to go down before Cromwell, whom he looked upon as a fanatic and a rebel warring against Charles, the rightful King of Ireland. In 1642 he besieged and took Tralee Castle; and he was only caught at last, after the fall of Ross, by treachery, having been induced to come to Killarney to arrange terms of peace. The terms were not agreed upon, and on his way back he was seized and hanged in Killarney, in company with a priest and a bishop, about the year 1653.[12]

[12] Pierce Ferriter's poems have been edited by the Rev. P. S. Dinneen (1903)

If the insurgents, like all parties in the conflict, committed acts of barbarity, there are also cases of humanity and kindness recorded to their credit. In many instances the priests preached vehemently against murder, and several protected the English about them from the rage of their pursuers. Mr. Higgins at the Naas acted in this Christian way, and the Catholic clergy of Cashel exposed themselves in the streets in order to rescue the English inhabitants. Later Cromwell exempted from death two Franciscan friars who hid some flying Englishmen under the altar in their chapel. Some Protestant clergy, like the Rev. Denis Sheridan and Bishop Bedell, were so much respected by their neighbours that during a great part of the rebellion they were left unharmed, and gave shelter to their Protestant neighbours in Kilmore and Cavan; but Bedell, who for a time was shut up for protection in Cloghoughter Castle, suffered hardships from which he died. He spent his time in prayer and in continuing his translation of the Bible into Irish, with his family around him, and at his death Catholics, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians alike attended his funeral. In some parts of the country the English planters threw in their lot with the rebels or remained neutral. Near Tralee the colonists were on the best terms with the Irish (especially on the Crosbie, Denny, and FitzGerald estates) and sided with them in the rising. Robert Blennerhassett of Ballyseedy went even further. He said "the Irish had helped him to plough and till his lands, and that those lands were the worse for every English foot that trod on them." He declined to assist some besieged English shut up in Sir Edward Denny's castle at Tralee.

There were accusations of breaches of trust and of quarter betrayed on both sides; but in some cases, as in that of Alexander Hovenden, half-brother to Sir Phelim, or of Colonel Richard Plunket, the captured were treated with great kindness; the former personally conducted thirty-five English out of Armagh to Drogheda and twenty to Newry in safety. Sir Phelim, whom Owen Roe's secretary calls "a light desperate young gentleman," seems to have been one of the worst offenders, and his example must have been often infectious. When Owen Roe came over to take the command he was horrified at the wild acts and the arsons which gained for his cousin the title of "Phelim of the Burnings." He rescued the few prisoners left in the leader's hands, and burned down the houses of the murderers at Kinnaird, "saying with a warmth unusual with him that he would join with the English rather than not burn the rest." Nevertheless, even the misdeeds of Phelim pale before those of the Scottish officers, both in the North of Ireland and in Scotland. The "Covenant shambles" were depopulating the West of Scotland, and in Ireland the dour troops of Alexander Leslie and later the "burn-corn rogues" of Monroe emulated their cruelties. Leslie was engaged "in hunting out the Irish like deers or savage beasts," and if the Irish retaliated on them as well as on Coote and St Leger, it is little to be wondered at. Captain Chichester and Sir Arthur Tyringham in Antrim, Sir James Montgomery in Co. Down, Sirs William and Robert Stewart with their Lagan forces in Derry and Donegal, and Sir William Cole at Enniskillen, all held commissions from the King, and raised troops to hold the country. Monroe soon had under him twenty thousand men who ravaged in the north without check.

END OF CHAPTER IV

V.—THE CONFEDERATE WARS IN IRELAND

Hitherto the rebellion had found no sympathizers among the Leinster gentry. From its outbreak the Lords of the Pale, Catholics and Protestants alike, had avowed their devotion to the King and offered their services to help in suppressing the rebels. Lord Dillon of Costelogh, a Protestant, united with the Catholics Lord Gormanston and Sir Robert Talbot in the petition presented to the King at Westminster in the spring of 1641. The traditions of the gentry of the Pale had allied them with England and the English Crown, and they had no sympathy with rebellion; on the contrary, they offered their lives and fortunes for the suppression of the revolt. In a series of remarkable petitions during the progress of the rebellion they declared their unalterable attachment to the sovereign, their expressions increasing in warmth as the misfortunes of the King became more serious and perplexing. They give a call to "all the inhabitants of Ireland and to each of them" to be "most faithful to our Sovereign Lord and King, and to his heirs and lawful successors," and to "maintain to the uttermost of their power his royal prerogatives" against his enemies, and also to support the laws of England, so far as they do not extinguish the Catholic religion or the liberty of the subject.

At the meeting of the Confederate gentry at Trim on March 17, 1642, after taking their decision to resist, they protest that they had been necessitated to take up arms only to "prevent the extirpation of their nation and religion...and to maintain the rights and prerogatives of his Majesty's crown and dignity and the interests of his royal issue, and for no other reason whalever." They style themselves "Your Majesty's most dutiful and loyal subjects." Similar expressions of devotion came from the gentry of all parts of the kingdom. Their own demands were for the freedom of Parliament, liberty of religion, and the right to educate their sons at home instead of sending them abroad for education, with the opening of paths of employment and trust in Church and State to their families. They complained of the "immortal hatred of some of the ministers of state, and especially of Sir William Parsons, to any welfare or happiness of this nation, and of the ambition of these men to make themselves still richer and greater by the total ruin and extirpation of this people"; and of Parsons' "underhand working" in procuring false inquisitions upon feigned titles of their estates after many hundred years possession, "one hundred and fifty letters patent being avoided by him in one morning, under the King's great seal, being the public faith of the kingdom." The whole land, they complained, was filled with swarms of escheators and pursuivants, carrying on illegal practices under the protection of the Lords Justices and the oppressive Court of Wards.[1] We feel that it required all the sinister practices of such men as Parsons to drive these gentlemen, most of them English by descent and all of them enthusiastically loyal to the sovereign, into the arms of the rebels of the North; yet even this feat the double-dealing of the Irish Government accomplished. But the union was an uneasy one. Southern Ireland was, in fact, throughout the years of the rising, a Catholic Royalist stronghold, upheld by the belief that they were warring for the King against the Puritan Parliament and that his cause was identical with their own.

[1] Curry, Civil Wars, Appendix V, p. 614; Gilbert, History of the Irish Confederation, vol. ii, No. LX, pp. 226-242; see also "Apologie of the Irish for Rising in Arms," in J. Lodge, Des. Cur. Hib. (1772), ii, 78; 82, 102, 113.

For the King's support they poured out subsidy after subsidy, and to his help they sent the Irish troops that turned the defeats of Montrose in Scotland into victories; they proffered the army for England which roused such violent anger against Charles I that it was made a main accusation against him at his trial. In their loyalty they had the sympathy of the more considerable Catholic corporations throughout the country. None of the towns stirred until the residents found themselves in the midst of an armed population, while they, through the mistrust or malice of Parsons, were forced to go about unarmed. Worse things were happening. Sir Charles Coote, commonly known as "the Raven," had been let loose upon Leinster, where no rising was contemplated or massacre had been committed. His orders were "to kill and destroy all rebels, and waste, consume, and demolish all places where they had been harboured, with all who were capable of bearing arms." Soon afterward they heard that Colonel Reade and other gentlemen of position and honour who had been chosen as their envoys to the King had been seized by the Lords Justices and put upon the rack, in the hope of forcing them to inculpate the King in the rising. It was such acts as these which caused the gentry of the south to unite with the malcontents in the north. Another urgent cause thrust this union upon them.

In London, Parliament was busily engaged in forcing through all its stages the nefarious Adventurers Bill as a means of raising a loan to pay the English garrison in Ireland. By this Bill, passed through in a week, lands in Ireland to the extent of 10,000,000 acres, "to be confiscated" in consequence of the rebellion, were offered for sale, of which 2,500,000 acres were to be allotted to subscribers to the loan. On March 19, 1642, only five months after the outbreak of the rebellion, the Act was signed by the King, who, though he had recently declared himself ready to "pawn his head" for Ireland, passed every proposition without taking time to examine its results. Money for the lands "to be forfeited" poured in, though little of it was used for the purpose for which it was subscribed. The confiscations under Cromwell were largely founded on the Adventurers Act. Henceforth rebellion was encouraged on the one hand with a view to forfeitures and cruelly put down on the other; it took on a specially savage aspect. To the gentry the Adventurers Bill resolved the war into a struggle for existence, and to secure their estates they threw in their lot with the rebels, having with them but one aim in common--religious liberty. On December 15, the Lords Gormanston, Fingall, Slane, and Dunsany met Rory O'More, Philip O'Reilly, and Colonel MacMahon at the Hill of Crofty, and, O'More having sworn that he had no personal motive in the rebellion but had taken up arms for the King and for religion, they consented to join hands, and their union was confirmed at Tara some weeks later. This act made the Anglo-Irish lords rebels in the eyes of the Dublin Government, and they refused any further dealings with them. Lord Dunsany and others were flung into prison, and measures taken to indict them of high treason.

The outbreak of the rebellion brought Ormonde into power. On November 10, 1641, the King appointed him Commander-in-Chief, and from that time forward till his death in the year of the Revolution (1688) he took an active part in the changing fortunes of his country, endeavouring to pursue amid the violences of faction an even path of moderation. Ormonde's loyalty was the basis of his character. "Yonder comes Ormonde," once said Charles II. "I have done all in my power to disoblige that man, and to make him as discontented as others; but he will be loyal in spite of my teeth, and I must even take him in again." James, twelfth Earl and first Duke of Ormonde, was not a strong man, and some of his acts, especially his delivery of Dublin to the Parliament and his retirement from the country at a critical moment, are open to question; but of his conscientious efforts to do the best he could for the country there seems no doubt. The difficulties of his position were immense. As a royal ward he had been brought up a Protestant, though heir to a great Catholic house, and he had to supply, by his natural abilities, a complete lack of education. His father, Lord Thurles, had been drowned at sea, and his grandfather, "Walter of the beads and rosary," had spent much of his life in the Fleet Prison, with a debt of £100,000 round his neck, only saved from starvation by the affection of a retainer. Though there were English policies to which, as Catholics, the house of Butler could give no adherence, the allegiance of the Earls had remained untainted through all the troubled days of Elizabeth and James I. When, as Lord Thurles, James returned to Ireland determined "to lie well in the chronicle of his house," it was with 'some such ideals in his mind'; and in the difficult days before him he seldom belied either the humanity or the loyalty of his ancestors. From the outset his way was beset with perils. Though holding a high commission from the King, he was hampered at every step by the jealousy of Parsons, whose barbarous orders he refused to obey; and he was embarrassed by the defection of his brother, Richard Butler of Kilcash, who joined Muskerry, their brother-in-law, and became, with Lord Mountgarret, one of the three chief leaders of the Munster rebels.

Ormonde's capacity as a commander was shown as soon as he took the field. Tredath (Drogheda) having been relieved, largely through the efforts of the garrison and of Lord Moore of Mellifont, he cleared the country south of Dublin and defeated the rebel forces at the battle of Kilrush, about twenty miles from Dublin. But matters were approaching a crisis. In July 1642 the news arrived that the brave Owen Roe O'Neill had landed in Donegal, and he was soon afterward followed by Colonel Preston, uncle to Lord Gormanston, who brought with him five hundred officers and men to the coast of Wexford. On October 24 of the same year the Confederate Catholics met at Kilkenny, formed themselves into a General Assembly by an Oath of Association, in which each of them swore "that all and every person or persons within this kingdom shall bear faith and true allegiance unto our Sovereign Lord, King Charles,...and to his heirs and lawful successors; and that I shall during my life defend, uphold, maintain, all his and their just prerogatives, estates, and rights, etc." They swore to uphold the Parliament and the fundamental laws of Ireland, and the free exercise of the Roman Catholic faith and religion, and to obey the Supreme Council which they proceeded to elect, consisting of twenty-four members, six from each province. This important meeting included eleven bishops, fourteen lay lords, and two hundred and twenty-six commoners. They proceeded to settle the government of the country, appoint sheriffs, coin money, and regulate trade. The Supreme Council had absolute control over military and civil officials, and the direction of negotiations with foreign states, and heard and decided all capital and civil causes except titles to land. They showed their loyalty in the design of the seal of the Confederation. It bore the cross in the centre and the crown and harp beneath its arms, a dove above and a flaming heart below, with the legend Pro Deo pro Rege et Patria Hibernia unanimis.[2]

[2] Gilbert, History of the Irish Confederation, 1641-1643 (1882), ii, 84. He gives an illustration of the Seal.

The Oath of Association was signed by the Catholic gentry of the country, Irish and old English alike. It contains, along with the signature of the Earl of Castlehaven and Lord Gormanston, those of "Phelemy" O'Neill, O'Rorke, O'Sullivan More, Mac Carthy, O'Shaughnessy, O'Callaghan, etc., none of whom seem to have had any hesitation in swearing allegiance to the King. Indeed, though accused by the Dublin officials of being 'rebels,' they felt they were supporting Charles and his royal house against his puritan enemies as much as did any English royalist cavalier. Their next step was to appoint Owen Roe O'Neill general in Ulster, and Preston general of the forces at their disposal in Leinster. But here trouble began. Sir Phelim was furiously jealous of the interference of his cousin, who took him to task for his incompetence and cruelty, and whose fame he could not but recognize to be far above his own. Nor were the relations more friendly between Owen Roe and Preston, who were quite unable to work in concert and had many old causes of friction in their remembrance. To understand the position we must look back to their past history.

Both Preston and O'Neill had served with distinction in the Spanish wars of the Low Countries. They had entered the Irish regiment of Colonel Henry O'Neill, Tyrone's second son, and had risen to be captains shortly before the visit of Tyrone and Tyrconnel to Brussels in 1608. They probably were among those who welcomed the Earls on their entry to the capital in the suite of the Archduke Albert. But they belonged to different parties at home, and even abroad Preston found it impossible to forget that he was a Palesman on both sides, of old English descent and nobility, who except in the matter of religion had no common ground with the native Irish of the north. He did not join the regiment of Owen Roe even when that born leader of men rose to fame in the Spanish service. He married a Flemish lady of rank and had gained both wealth and influence, but his jealousy was aroused when he found the Irish recruits which, with Strafford's approval, he had spent money and trouble in raising in Ireland deserting wholesale to the regiment of his rival. He kept himself apart, as "captain of a separate company," while O'Neill had serving under him, besides several of his own family, officers both of English and Irish extraction of the O'Mores, Kavanaghs, Lalors, Dillons, de la Hoydes, Daltons, Owens, Browns, FitzGeralds, and O'Donnells. There were said to be ten or twelve thousand Irish infantry and five hundred horse in the Spanish army, with more constantly coming over. Many of the uprooted young men of Ulster must have been among them, glad to exchange into regular service from the wild life on the mountains at home. Preston was not a successful commander, and in Ireland he is best known by two dismal defeats; the battle of New Ross, in March 1643, soon after his arrival in Ireland, and the battle of Dangan Hill in August 1647, In the former he was defeated by Ormonde solely on account of the bad disposition of his forces, having, as Castle-haven says, "put himself under as great disadvantage as his enemy could wish"; in the latter, fought near the close of the Confederate Wars, his huge army of eight thousand men was annihilated by Michael Jones, the leader of the Parliamentary forces. He earned for himself from his countrymen the title of "the Drum," because "he was only heard of when he was beaten." Yet he came over with a good record, the courage of his Irish company and his own pluck having largely contributed to the saving of Louvain when it was besieged by the combined armies of France and Holland in 1635.[3]Immediately on his arrival in Wexford he was appointed general of the southern army by the Confederate Council.

[3] See Preston's report to Strafford, Letters, i, 440; Piot, History of Louvain, pp. 308-309; and Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio, History of the Wars in Flanders. Nicholas French, Bishop of Ferns, was an eye-witness of the siege, which is described in the Introduction to his Works.

The record of Owen Roe, known in the Spanish army as Colonel Don Eugenio O'Neill, had been more brilliant. He was the commander of Arras during that memorable siege "on which the eyes of all Europe were fixed" between June and August of the year 1640, when the town had to resist an army of Richelieu's best troops, thirty-two thousand strong, under the command of Chatillon, one of the foremost French generals, whose siege constructions were universally recognized as "extraordinarily fine." When at last Arras surrendered, on the threat of being blown into the air by well-laid mines, an escort of two hundred horse was appointed by the conquerors to watch over the personal safety of the commander, and the French army presented arms. Marshal de la Meilleraie, accosting O'Neill as he marched out with drums playing and standard waving, made a notable speech. "Your bravery, Colonel O'Neill, has added to the lustre of our achievement. You surpassed us in all things, except in fortune." Two years later Owen was in Ireland, pitted with his two hundred veterans "old war-beaten soldiers" against Monroe and his Scottish troops. His correspondence with Luke Wadding shows that even during the anxieties of the siege of Arras he was watching affairs at home, but Monroe and Leslie refused to believe that the illustrious general would come over to lead a paltry rebellion in Ireland. Owen Roe declared, however, that it was the duty of every man to come to the help of his suffering country, taking thought of nothing else. He appealed to Chichester and Leslie not to join the enemies of Charles, in whose defence he was fighting, and "therein we shall continue and die to the last man," and he assures Sir Robert Stewart that he is holding out in the same cause. Hearing that he was actually arriving, Leslie, now Earl of Leven, thought it prudent to slip away into Scotland, having first warned Monroe to be on his guard; "for if O'Neill can once succeed in getting an army together, he will most surely worst you." In time to come, at the battle of Benburb, Monroe was to realize the truth of the assertion.

Even at the outset of the campaign O'Neill drove back Monroe's troops near Charlemont, which he made his headquarters, the Scottish general running about wildly exclaiming, "Fy, fy, fy, run awa frae awheen rebels!" [4] as his defeated men retired. But Owen's troops, taken over from Sir Phelim, were a mere rabble, and were sharply punished for their want of discipline when Sir Robert Stewart and his brother crossed their path at Clones and fell on them with the cry, "Whar's MacArt?" [5] Owen was obliged to retire into the mountains and by the exercise of an iron discipline to shape his followers into an army. He was hampered on all sides. Sir Phelim could not forgive his superior fame or powers and did all he could to distress a relative who had, he believed, come over only to dispute with him the right to the chief command of the army, if not to the crown of Ireland. The Supreme Council, occupied in state progresses through the south, "with representations of comedies and state-plays, feasts and banquets," were pleased when they knew that O'Neill was hemmed up in Ulster, and "wished him no nearer than Grand Cairo." Ormonde, whom he was anxious to follow, distrusted him; and from Oxford, where the King was surrounded by Irish agents from all parties undermining his authority, Sir Brian O'Neill wrote, "There is none but rogues here, as false as the devil, and they intend nothing but the destruction of you all." The salvation of Ireland was a difficult task.

[4] Journal of Colonel Henry O'Neill, in J. Lodge, op. cit., ii, 490-491.

[5] Owen was son of Art MacBaron and nephew to Tyrone. He was probably born about 1582. His father led the Irish troops at the Blackwater in 1595. He kept his lands because "he has two sons captains in the Archduke's army, and a lusty blade at home."

Early in 1643 the King, pressed by necessity, empowered Ormonde to negotiate a truce or 'Cessation' with the Confederates for a year, and as soon as this was done he was to bring over the Irish army to Chester. The Cessation, which was not signed till September 15, brought about a change in the position of affairs. Technically, it ended the rebellion, and future Acts of Settlement differentiated between acts of war before and after its signature, all land possessed at this date being left undisturbed in the hands of their then owners. It was the first of a series of truces ending in the Ormonde Peace of 1649. Its immediate result was to send over troops and money to the aid of the King, in return for rather illusory promises of concessions. The Cessation was greeted in England by a howl of execration from the Puritans and a very modified welcome from the Cavaliers, who did not feel their cause strengthened by the assistance of men whom they looked upon as the authors of the "massacre" of 1641. The Irish army failed to take Nantwich, and the fury of the Roundheads refused them quarter. But the army sent over under Lord Antrim to Scotland by the Confederates reinstated, by a series of victories, the broken fortunes of the royalist Montrose, though few of them survived to return home.

The Parliament and the King intrigued with every party in turn, and the pulpits were ' tuned ' with political harangues to corrupt the allegiance of the army. In Ireland the treaty put Ormonde, now a marquis, later to be created duke, into authority as Lord-Lieutenant. He was appointed in January 1644, and henceforth assumed an unapproachable aspect, receiving no one personally, but transacting all business in short written notes.[6] He was in a difficult position, for he knew that those around him were plotting for their own ends and that no one was to be trusted. The Confederates offered him the chief command if he would make war on Monroe, whose already large army had been augmented by 10,000 new Scots; but Ormonde, a Protestant, became increasingly suspicious of the designs of the Confederates, who were falling more and more into the hands of the clerical party. The King, outwardly his friend, was secretly undermining his authority, and in 1645 the talented but unscrupulous Edward Somerset, Lord Herbert, Lieutenant-General for Charles in South Wales, was offered the title of Earl of Glamorgan if he would go over and on the King's behalf secure 10,000 Irish infantry in return for certain terms which could not be proposed through Ormonde, "as not fit for Us at present publicldy to own."

[6] "The Aphorismical Discoverie of Treasonable Faction," in Gilbert, A Contemporary History of Affairs in Ireland from 1641 to 1652, i, 92. This tract deals chiefly with affairs in Ulster, while that of Bellings is concerned with the dealings of the Confederates in the south of Ireland.

Glamorgan was, in fact, given two commissions; one was to Ormonde, who received him warmly and quite in ignorance that his own post as Viceroy was to be transferred to the envoy if he should succeed in his embassy; the second was to the Confederates, full of vague promises in return for the troops. This extraordinary warrant, which was signed with the King's privy seal, was to be used "as effectually as if your authority from Us had been under the Great Seal of England." It gave free permission to Glamorgan to make what terms he pleased, and the promise was added that "whatever you shall perform as warranted under our sign manual...or even by word of mouth, without further ceremony We do in the word of a King and Christian promise to make good to all intents and purposes."[7] This document and its contents were to be kept secret from Ormonde, his part in the transaction being confined to taking upon himself the odium if the negotiations failed, in which case it was to be given out that they had originated with himself, and so the King would be exculpated. "I fear," writes Clarendon, "there is very much in that transaction of Ireland, both before and since, that you and I were never thought wise enough to be advised withal."[8] The affairs of Charles were in a desperate condition after the battle of Naseby in June 1645, and in the hope of getting fresh troops he was willing to barter his honour and sacrifice his most loyal adherents.

[7] Birch, An Enquiry into the Share which Charles I had in the Transaction of the Earl of Glamorgan (1756), p. 19.

[8] Clarendon to Nicholas, February 12, 1646-47, in Clarendon State Papers, ii, 337.

The treaty entered into with Glamorgan at the General Assembly of Kilkenny was signed on August 25 with Ormonde's consent, though he disliked some of its terms. At the same time Glamorgan signed a second secret treaty, giving the widest powers to the Catholics if in return they sent off 10,000 troops to the King's assistance. But he was so uncertain of his powers to sign such promises that the following day he added a "defeasance," to protect himself if the King disapproved.

By the time that Glamorgan arrived in Ireland the affairs of the Confederates at Kilkenny, which had long been their headquarters, had fallen almost entirely into clerical hands. This was due partly to the lethargy of the lay members, and partly to the increasing energy and interest of Popes Urban VIII and Innocent X, whose attention was kept constantly turned to affairs in Ireland by the watchfulness of the indefatigable Luke Wadding, President of the Irish College of St Isidore at Rome, one of the most learned and able men of his day, attractive alike by the vigour of his intellect and the simplicity and warmth of his heart. His correspondence on political and religious matters shows how widely his influence reached, and he was everywhere received with enthusiasm when he made a tour in Italy to collect money for the Irish wars and to induce officers to return home to take part in them. The Confederation drew up a petition to the Pontiff praying him to bestow a Cardinal's hat upon Wadding, but with characteristic modesty he managed to intercept the letter, which never reached Rome.[9]

[9] Luke Wadding was born in Waterford in 1588. He founded St. Isidore's College in Rome in 1625, and governed it till his death on October 18, 1657.

Into the midst of the contending parties with which Ireland was distracted the Pope now launched two emissaries, Scarampi, a Neapolitan, who arrived in 1643, and later the Bishop of Fermo, John Baptist Rinuccini, who came over as Papal Nuncio in October, 1645. Rinuccini had aspired to a higher post. He had hoped to be nominated Nuncio to France, in consequence of his friendship for Cardinal Mazarin, and it came as a blow to find himself dismissed from France and given the meagre sum of 1500 pistoles to buy a frigate to carry him "to a poor island far remote from Italy." He brought with him only a small supply of money and arms, for the Continental nations, though profuse in promises, were too much absorbed in wars of their own to contribute largely to wars in Ireland. Richard Bellings, secretary to the Confederate Council, who had been sent abroad on an official embassy to collect money, returned, as he himself says, "with no other fruit of his voyage but experience"; and "the Council's magazine of hopes was found empty."

Rinuccini's reception in Ireland was all that he could wish. He landed in the west of Co. Kerry, having, however, narrowly escaped being taken at sea by the puritan Plunket; and the inhabitants received him with extraordinary demonstrations of joy. He entered Kilkenny under a canopy of state, attended by a troop of horses, and received an address of welcome from the Council.[10] He declared that he had come to propagate the Catholic religion, to keep the Catholics in union among themselves, and to cherish in them the allegiance due to their lawful sovereign. The speech was warmly applauded, especially the last item, which they took to signify his approval of the Peace offered through Ormonde by the King, and for which the country longed. But Rinuccini had quite other ideas. He steadily opposed every effort for peace or truce, though it was solemnly approved by the Assembly of Kilkenny as the voice of the nation; he found himself out of sympathy with the strong loyalist sentiments of the Confederation, and he set himself to build up a clerical rule, above the law and outside the national Confederacy, looking to Rome as its head, and gradually ousting all lay influence from its councils. He and his party insisted on the restitution of confiscated church and abbey lands, as part of a general abrogation of all changes by which the freedom and position of the Roman Church had suffered in recent years; but on this point the gentry were firm in their resistance. Good Catholics as they were, they had no intention of resigning the lands upon which they lived and on which their fortunes and rank depended. Nor did the Nuncio's demand that the promotion of Catholics should be numerical and not in order of merit win approval; it was peremptorily refused by Ormonde and the King, who substituted for this proposal the juster offer of toleration, with educational and professional equality of opportunity.

[10] Bellings, who accompanied the Nuncio, gives a full account of the proceedings. See Gilbert, Contemporary History of Affairs in Ireland, 1641-52, i, p. 9; J. Lodge, op. cit., ii, 269, 273-5. The address is given in Borlase, History of the Rebellion (1680), p. 154.

The Ulster insurgents, who were becoming discontented that the lands to recover which they had gone into rebellion had not yet fallen to their lot, welcomed him as the minister of God, and thronged his house, but there were other Catholic gentry besides Castlehaven who looked on his landing as being "to the great misfortune of the Confederate Catholics and other good wits." The coming of the Nuncio had fortified Glamorgan in his plans. He became immediately the confidant and obsequious servant of Rinuccini and signed with him a new secret treaty, besides revealing to him a letter written by the King to the Pope, so carefully worded that it could be disowned if occasion required. But the Confederates as a whole, as Rinuccini complains, regarded him rather as "a treasurer of pontifical funds" than as a spiritual guide, and firmly refused the "absolute authority" claimed by the Nuncio. Becoming more and more aware of their inability either to quiet the kingdom or to conduct the war, they thought of nothing but how to conclude the Peace proposed by Ormonde. They felt that this peace was more possible to negotiate than a counter peace proposed by the Nuncio, for his proposals required the delivery of all the royal towns, Dublin included, into the hands of the Catholics, the placing of every position, including the Viceroyalty, in Catholic hands, and the restoration of all ecclesiastical property and of the archbishops and hierarchy as in pre-Reformation days.[11] The time was not ripe for such terms, and the confederates were well content with such religious freedom as they now enjoyed, and the relaxation of all penal legislation. The Nuncio's treaty was directed against the power and influence of the Protestant Ormonde, and it was this treaty that he endeavoured to carry through privately in conjunction with Glamorgan, whose large and vague commission from the King to the Nuncio, of which Ormonde was unaware, was exactly what the Nuncio desired.[12]

[11] Second speech delivered by the Nuncio, in Rinuccini, Embassy in Ireland (ed. A. Hutton, 1873), pp. 122-123; and see Articles sent from Rome to be treated for in Ireland, ibid., Appendix, pp. 573-574, and Memoranda, p. lxiii.

[12] Ibid., pp. 103-105; 117-118; 570-571.

But Rinuccini had failed to calculate on the devotion with which Ormonde was regarded even by those who differed from him in religious belief, or on the immense influence exercised by him over the members of the Confederation. Nor had he realized the supineness of the majority about matters which to him seemed vital. Still less did he or anyone toresee that the royal instructions on which Glamorgan's first secret treaty had been formed would after a long delay become public, a copy having been found in the pocket of Malachias Quaelly, Archbishop of Tuam, who had fallen in battle. The news of this disclosure spread consternation. In England it raised a storm of anger against the King, who did not hesitate to take advantage of what he called "the starting-hole" which he had purposely left in the treaty in order to be able to deny it if circumstances made its disavowal expedient.[13] Ormonde, who refused to believe in the authenticity of the document, clapped Glamorgan into prison, accusing him of high treason for involving the sovereign in a scheme so detrimental to his interests, but it is remarkable that the envoy was shortly afterward liberated and continued to plot with the clerical party to overcome the resistance of Ormonde and the Confederates. In the tangled web of duplicity that surrounds all the actions of Charles I the story of his relations with Glamorgan has never been fully unravelled. The monarch seems to have been quite ready to sell his faithful servant Ormonde for the chances of a new cast on the moving table of his fortunes.

[13] Clarendon State Papers, ii, 202. This letter is decisive as to the Commission of Glamorgan (then Marquis of Worcester) to deal with the Irish Catholics and through them with the Pope and foreign princes, from whom the King hoped to raise £30,000 a month. It describes also how the King's privy seal was obtained.

END OF CHAPTER V

VI.—THE ORMONDE PEACE

The battle of Naseby, fought in June, 1645, had completely changed the generalcourse of events The King having become a prisoner in the hands of the Scots, Ormonde assumed responsibility and offered his Peace. It was too late for the Irish soldiers to be of any use to Charles, and the fact that he had asked for them had only hardened the feeling of his English subjects against him. The offered Peace of Ormonde was eagerly welcomed by the Confederates, who saw their funds depleted, the soldiery dispersed over the country to find sustenance as best they could, the towns refusing obedience, and, after years of alternate wars and cessations, no progress whatever made. The French approved the Peace, the country needed it, and it was the only hope for the King. All these patriotic arguments were laid by the representatives of the people before the Nuncio, but on him they had no effect whatever. He summoned a meeting of prelates, clergy, and heads of religious orders to Waterford and solemnly denounced the Peace, backing up his condemnation by threats of excommunication against all who adhered to it. Such tactics had been already tried. When Ormonde had visited his own city of Kilkenny he found all the churches closed by the interdict of the Bishop of Ossory. He said he found it strange that the Irish, having fought so long for the exercise of their religion openly in the churches, should now, when they had gained leave to have them open, shut themselves out of them. But the Nuncio's threat was not without effect, as Preston was to find at a later date, when he had to obey the Nuncio's commands because "his army was not excommunication proof." [1]

[1] Bellings, History of the Confederate Wars, in J. Lodge, op. cit., ii, 422.

During the past three years the country had been in a continual state of turmoil, from which even the truces gave only a partial relief. Loose men, as well as armies, were marching up and down, living on the inhabitants, and committing acts of destruction. It was the sight of his house burning as he passed it that decided Lord Castlehaven, whom the Lords Justices would have hung out of hand as a Catholic royalist, to throw in his lot with the Confederates, in the hope of regaining order in the country. He was appointed general of horse under Preston, and served with him at Birr and Ross But he was no general; nor would he serve loyally either with Preston in the south or with Antrim in the north. The jealousy of the Confederates led them into the fatal error of appointing Castlehaven, instead of Owen Roe, as general in Ulster at a council at which Owen Roe was present;[2] and though O'Neill made shift to congratulate Castlehaven on his appointment it is little wonder that he failed to co-operate with an officer whose "pigmaeian body" was oftenest seen "galloping away on his horse at the moment of advance, though pursued by none," while his followers, imitating their general, "made the best use they could of their spurs."

[2] Castlehaven, Memoirs (1815), pp. 46, seq. Castlehaven, Lord Audley, became the third earl. As a boy he was obliged to appeal to the King for protection against his father, who was eventually executed for cruelty to his own family and for his vicious life.

From his Ulster haunts, where his own troops were out among the 'creaghts,' Owen impatiently watched Castlehaven and Inchiquin "going up and down the country, without acting any the least service," but eating up the provisions and money that would have enabled him to hold together his army for a sudden blow. But the blow fell at last, when in June, 1646, he smashed the Scottish forces under Monroe at the battle of Benburb, and prevented the intended junction of the Scottish army marching south into Leinster from Carrickfergus with that of the forces under Monroe's brother coming up to join it from Coleraine. Crossing the Blackwater, O'Neill slipped in between the two armies and awaited them at Benburb. All day long he skirmished, and it was only at sundown that, calling his staff around him and pointing to the enemy's centre, which he had manoeuvred into a closed position on the opposite hill, he said, "Gentlemen, in a few minutes we shall be there. Pass the word along the line, Sancta Maria; and in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, charge." The men rushed forward, armed only with pikes; they "could not contain themselves like peaceable men," but swept through the ranks and captured the guns. The patient training of Owen Roe had its reward. Monroe's troops fought hard; his cavalry charged the Irish foot, but they advanced steadily "in most excellent order," and fell upon the Scots, annihilating their fine army. Over three thousand were left dead on the field, and all the baggage fell into O'Neill's hands. Twenty-one officers were made prisoners, and Monroe escaped, leaving his cloak, sword, and wig behind him. Monroe, in his report, could only ruefully conjecture that "the Lord of Hosts had a controversy with us to rub shame on our faces."[3]

[3] Gilbert has published five contemporary accounts of the battle of Benburb, Contemporary History, i, 110-116; 676-686. See also Carte, Ormond, iii, 249-251 ; Reid, History of the Presbyterians, ii, 26-30.

Until the arrival of Cromwell the Scots made little fresh effort; they were practically crushed by the rout of their army, ten regiments of infantry and fifteen companies of horse having been wiped out by Owen's men. Forty flags and the great standard were captured and carried in triumph by the victorious general to Kilkenny, whence they were transmitted to Rome by the Nuncio, the Pope acknowledging the trophies by sending to O'Neill the sword of Tyrone, which many of his followers took as a sign that Owen aspired not only to be the acknowledged representative of his family, but to the crown of Ireland. There is little reason to think that this was more than a rumour; he knew his world too well. But even this victory, worthy of the general's training in "that Vulcanian forge" the wars of Flanders, brought no termination to the strife. Owen had no means of following up his success; he was forced to turn his army adrift in the central counties to find sustenance as best they could, and they marched southward, ravaging as they went. Even the Nuncio declared that "the Ulstermen, though good Catholics, were barbarous enough by nature" and that "no Tartars ever committed worse ravages than those of O'Neill's men." But the Nuncio depended solely on O'Neill to carry out his designs and at this moment of crisis he applied all his efforts to patching up a truce between O'Neill and Preston, as he had successfully brought about the alliance between Owen and Sir Phelim which had resulted in the victory of Benburb.

In one thing Owen agreed heartily with the Nuncio; neither of them approved of the Cessation or of the Peace. Though he had rigorously observed the truce when it was proclaimed, it disturbed his plans and robbed him of the fruits of victory. "It were better for us to have absolute wars than this corrupted Cessation" he had exclaimed when he heard of the Ormonde Peace in April 1646, and he was quite ready to fall in with Rinuccini's project of laying siege to Dublin, even though it involved a temporary alliance with Preston, his hated rival. People said that the two captains could never come together without something untoward occurring. But on the other hand there was the fear of exasperating Preston if O'Neill were called upon to take his place as leader in Leinster, and of his defection to the opposite party; and defections, of which that of Inchiquin was the most surprising, had become too common recently to be ignored. Preston was in Connacht, carrying on a campaign against Coote and the Scots, in conjunction with the Marquis of Clanricarde, and though he had proclaimed the Peace with salvos of artillery and sworn to Clanricarde to support it, he now went over to the clerical party, carried his forces to Kilkenny and joined O'Neill. But Preston was playing his game with all parties. Probably it was with his connivance that Ormonde slipped past the army and regained Dublin, and the old irreconcilable differences between the rival generals were in constant danger of breaking out with renewed fury, each army believing that it was being betrayed by the other. From Lucan, not far from Dublin, they sent terms to Ormonde demanding the surrender of the chief towns of Leinster, including Dublin and Drogheda, into their hands to hold for the King. Ormonde gained time by asking in whose name they spoke, a question so perplexing that they could find no answer to it.

Meanwhile, the Nuncio felt in a position to govern the country; he elected a council, retired to a manor house in Kildare then in possession of a Father Nugent, Provincial of the Jesuits, who appointed himself master of the commissariat to the army, and projected the capture of Dublin. He then appeared before the General Assembly, and having adjured them to act in concert and entirely reject the "unhappy Peace" he retired to his palace, having "concluded his dictatorship in the Roman manner, leaving the house to gnaw the bone he had cast among them."[4] He called on all civil and military officers to withdraw from "the late Supreme Council," whose longing for peace he was unable to understand. Rinuccini's objects were, in fact, different from those of the people among whom he had come as a saviour. A man of rigid and narrow views, pure in life and a scholar rather than a politician, his one aim was the advancement of the Church he served. He looked on his mission to Ireland as a crusade to rescue from their bonds a people whom he believed to be persecuted, and to restore to them the outward pomps of processions and ceremonies which had been denied to them since the Reformation. The full restitution of the Catholic ceremonial, as it was carried out in Spain and Italy, he looked upon as a first step to the recovery of England for Catholicism; for to Rinuccini, as to Continental politicians in all ages, Ireland was but the gateway to the greater prize.[5] To support the Catholic cause and to stem the inroads of Puritan and Presbyterian power were his main aims, with the restoration of discipline in the Church and among the clergy and regulars. Of any sympathy with national aims, such as was felt by Owen Roe, he knew nothing; the church and not the nation was the object which he had always in mind.

[4] Bellings, History of the Confederate Wars, in J. Lodge, op. cit., ii, 429.

[5] Rinuccini, Embassy, p. 362.

The actual condition of things which he found on his arrival in the country was totally different from that which he had expected.[6] Desire for a reformation in the Church was non-existent, even among the clergy and bishops. The old bishops, long accustomed to celebrate in secret "without trouble or interference," officiating as ordinary priests in the houses of the people, "made little account of the splendour and grandeur of religion," dreading rather than welcoming it on the ground of expense and quite willing to save the substance of the faith without drawing down any difficulties upon themselves by what they had come to look upon as unnecessary publicity. Still less were the Regulars, as men accustomed to live in the houses of the gentry and to take an interest in public affairs, disposed to don again the habit of their Orders and to return to the strict rules of monastic life. "To enjoy with full liberty all their privileges while not restricted to their convents and to formal obedience," appeared to many of them infinitely preferable to seclusion from all the affairs of their country. A few of the younger men were of a different opinion, but the laity, as a rule, were content with the free exercise of the Catholic rites at home, and "considered it superfluous and unjust to ask for more."[7] Against this lethargy, which he found alike in industry and religion, Rinuccini found it hard to contend.

[6] Ibid., pp. 253-256, 492-494.

[7] "Report on the State of Ireland, March 1, 1646," ibid., pp. 134, 141-144.

In Dublin, the inhabitants were terror-stricken by the approach of the Ulster and Leinster armies, and there was no food and little ammunition in the city. Nevertheless, they pledged themselves to stand by Ormonde, and the Catholic clergy bound themselves to hold for the King in spite of any excommunication that might be launched against them by the Nuncio. Outside, there were now only two parties with any power, that of the Nuncio, or purely Church party, supported for the moment by the combined armies, and that of the Puritans, which had for some time back been making rapid strides in various parts of the country. Inchiquin, piqued that the Presidency of Munster had been bestowed on Lord Portland, had declared himself on the side of the Parliament, and gained from them the title denied him by the King. Descended from a pure Irish regal stock, this representative of the O'Briens now became known as Murrough of the Burnings (Murchadh na d-toithean) on account of his terrible depredations in the south. He stormed and sacked Cashel, killing priests and laity, even those who had taken refuge under the altar of the Cathedral. On his revolt in 1644 he had ordered all the Irish out of Cork, Youghal, and Kinsale. At the Abbey of Adare, held by the rebels, four friars were burned. He soon got the chief cities and castles of the south into his hands, and the country was tormented by the troops of Inchiquin and Castlehaven wasting and burning on the one side and those of Lord Broghill on the other. It became a question with Ormonde to which of these parties he should deliver up the authority he was no longer able to support.

The Confederates were helpless, and were preparing missions to France, Spain, and Rome not only to beg for help, but to offer a Protectorate to whoever would take it; while in the West, Galway was carrying on a lengthy correspondence with the Duke of Lorraine for the same purpose.[8] The Council of State in Dublin, long accustomed to intrigue on the side of the English Parliament, now urged an accommodation with it; the King was a prisoner in its hands and unable to send any assistance, and at this juncture he sent a message to Ormonde, possibly extracted by force, to advise him, if he had to leave the country, to place Dublin in the hands of the English Parliament rather than in the hands of the Irish clerical party. Ormonde's own inclinations led him in the same direction; he had always been ready to treat with the Confederates, but his Protestantism forbade him to hand the country over to the Nuncio's now weakened authority. Even still he and O'Neill were ready to treat, but the Confederates refused any agreement and on June 17, 1647, Ormonde delivered up Dublin and the garrisons of the royal towns to Commissioners of the Parliament, and crossed to London, where he had an interview with Charles I at Hampton Court. The King approved his action, hoping still against hope that he would once more return to power and recover his control of the army. But at the end of six months, on the committal of the King to Carisbrooke Castle, Ormonde realized the peril of his position and slipped quietly away to France, where he joined the Queen and her son at St Germain, and took his part in the intrigues always being carried on by the agents of Henrietta Maria on behalf of her husband and of her son, the future Charles II.

[8] See their letters in Borlase, History of the Rebellion, pp. 174-177. Their Protector was to hold for "our Queen and Prince." The Lorraine correspondence is given at length in the Clanricarde Memoirs (1757). Appendix.

Meanwhile, in Dublin, Colonel Michael Jones, the Parliamentary governor of the city, in trying to drive off Preston, had received a severe check outside Dublin by the enemy forces, and had to call out the garrisons of Dundalk and Drogheda to his assistance. On August 8, 1647, the united army fell upon Preston's forces at Dangan Hill, and completely routed them. Four months later Inchiquin defeated Taaffe's Irish army after a fierce fight at Knocknanuss, near Mallow. Muskerry laid down his arms and was succeeded by Taaffe, who carried on the guerilla war in Munster; and the Nuncio, leaving behind him a trail of interdicted towns, retired to Galway.

The following months saw rapid changes. The restless Inchiquin in April 1648 suddenly changed sides again and declared for the King. Preston and the Scots showed a disposition to do the same; and the long negotiations to induce the Prince of Wales to come over from Paris having broken down, Inchiquin took the lead in inviting Ormonde to return in order to bring about another Peace. In October Ormonde landed in Cork, and the final Peace of January 1648-49 was carried through.[9] The Nuncio felt that "Hell was working with all its powers," some of the bishops and many monks, as also especially the Jesuits, having declared against him and defied his spiritual censures. The Nuncio's political career in Ireland was at an end, and he himself recognized that his authority was gone. He felt that he "had dug in the sand," lor all orders of persons considered the free communication with heretics, which he had laboured to prevent, as perfectly allowable. They willingly obeyed a Protestant Viceroy and they longed for the arrival of a Protestant Prince. Their devotion to the King he could not comprehend. "Nothing is treated of, nothing concluded, without introducing this question of fealty to the King," he complains, and on this point the Ulstermen of Owen Roe did not differ from the rest.[10] Rinuccini had from the first felt himself to be "the unbidden guest," whose aims and methods were alike opposed to those of the country to which he had come. When Scarampi had announced his appointment the Council had bluntly replied that "it was not a Nuncio they had asked for, but for money," and that they cared nothing for the one, but a great deal for the other. The working tolerance with each other at which Irishmen of all creeds, at least in the south, have managed to arrive when left to themselves was beyond the comprehension of the Latin mind, trained in a fixed line of conduct and rigorous adhesion to its own form of belief. "Nephew," Owen Roe had said, "I hold him to be no better than a devil who will make these distinctions, but call all Irish alike." The Nuncio had not been a success; and he returned to Rome only to face a rebuke from the Pope he had served. Ireland saw the Nuncio depart from Galway just as "the thunderbolt of Ormonde's arrival" fell upon the coast of Cork.[11]

[9] The Articles of the 1648 Peace are printed in Borlase, History of the Rebellion, pp. 205-206.

[10] Rinuccini, Embassy, pp. 259-260; 543.

[11] Rinuccini, Embassy, p. 540; and see the Nuncio's report of his mission to Ireland, ibid., pp. 485-545.

Hardly had the Ormonde Peace been proclaimed in Dublin on January 17, 1648-49, than the news of the King's execution on January 30 reached Ireland; on the same day the Viceroy proclaimed the accession of Charles II from his house at Carrick. In the south there was a general agreement between the Viceroy, Inchiquin, and the Supreme Council; but in the north Owen Roe stood out against the Peace, though Nicholas French, Bishop of Ferns, warned Ormonde that if it were not speedily made ten thousand souls would be starved before the end of June. Plague was raging in the south, and O'Neill when invited to Munster had replied that he had "come to fight against men, not against God." The Supreme Council proposed to deprive Owen of his title of General, and gradually he found himself standing alone. He was forced to the humiliating expedient of treating with Sir Charles Coote, the Raven's son, "a bad crow from a bad egg," as John Lynch calls him,[12] and finally with Monk, for supplies and arms to be used against his own countrymen. Ormonde, who was besieging Dublin, sent Daniel O'Neill, his nephew, to offer him terms, but these he refused. His army was still formidable, but his influence, except among the old Irish and clerical party, was on the wane, and his chief support failed with the departure of the Nuncio.

[12] Lynch, Cambrensis Eversus, iii, 93-97, where the horrible cruelties of this brutal officer are detailed ; also Gilbert, History of the Irish Confederation, vol. i pp. xxxii-xxxiv.

"The eternal enmity between Leath Cuinn and Leath Mogha," i.e., between Ulster and Munster, broke out with fresh violence, the Southerners protesting that "they wanted no Ulster men in Munster."[13] They proclaimed Owen Roe O'Neill a traitor, and Preston did all that lay in his power to harass him. Amid a feeling of intense anxiety throughout the kingdom, Owen cooped up the forces of Clanricarde and Inchiquin on the Shannon, and all looked to see the extermination of the army he seemed to hold within his grasp. But he let slip the chance. Inchiquin marched out without loss, O'Neill refusing to fight him, and henceforth his policy, if policy it can be called, was a Fabian system of waiting tactics which led to no result. Clanricarde declared that "it was easy to see that the Deity was not on the side of O'Neill."[14] It is probable that the real explanation of what looked like supineness was O'Neill's fast-failing health. Accustomed to the military discipline of the Spanish armies and the comparative well-being of an officer of rank, he, like numbers of English and foreign military men, felt the climate and the hardships of life in Ireland tell heavily on his strength. So long before as 1644, he had had to get out of bed to lead his army at a critical moment, and he had long been spoken of as "the old soldier O'Neill." Those desertions and jealousies which had broken Lord Gormanston's heart must have deeply affected him, and the sense that he was warring against his own countrymen, and not against any foreign foe, must have neutralized his efforts. To find himself, as the champion of the Catholic and old Irish cause, with only Coote and Monk, an English Puritan and a Scottish Presbyterian, for allies, and to know himself denounced as a traitor by his own countrymen, must have been a deep humiliation, and he probably felt little heart to attack Irish Catholic armies, whether under a Catholic like Clanricarde or a Protestant like Ormonde, both of them monarchists like himself.

[13] Rinucinni, Embassy, p. 532 and cf. 352-353.

[14] Rinuccini, Embassy, p. 538.

It was at this moment of general depression that the news came that Ormonde's large army of seven thousand foot and four thousand horse had sustained an irreparable defeat before Dublin, where he had drawn up his forces to try and dislodge Colonel Michael Jones, the Parliamentarian governor into whose hands he had delivered up the city on his flight from Ireland, or to starve him out. This latter attempt had been rendered impossible by the arrival of a strong contingent of troops and officers with provisions, who landed in the bay from England just as Ormonde's army encamped at Rathmines, outside Dublin. The newcomers wore the red coats of the New Model army, and were commanded by Colonels Venables, Moore, and Huncks. Ormonde was in good spirits, for Inchiquin, who had now rejoined him, had taken Drogheda and forced Monk to surrender Dundalk, besides capturing the supplies of ammunition and food going north to Owen Roe's army. He was persuaded by his officers that the old castle of Baggotrath, which overlooked a meadow between Trinity College and Ringsend on which the Parliamentarian horse grazed, could be repaired and utilized, and he detached a party under Major-General Purcell to carry out the necessary works. Whether by treachery or carelessness, the party was misled and the work was not done. Early in the dawn Ormonde, who had passed the night writing dispatches and had just lain down to rest, received tidings in his camp at Rathmines that his force left at Baggotrath had been beaten off and the castle captured. The distance between the two portions of his army made juncture difficult; his men refused to stand, and a rout ensued, leaving Jones completely master of the field. The rout was complete; over two thousand were taken prisoners and four thousand slain on that fatal August 2,1649.[15]

[15] Carte, Ormond, iii, 466-471.

Owen Roe, shamed at last into action, ordered part of his army to hasten to the help of the beaten Sou herners. But his own day was done. Grievously ill, the old officer had to descend from his horse and be carried in a litter as far as Ballyhags in County Cavan. Growing worse, he was forced to turn aside at Cloghoughter, where he lingered till November 6, long enough to hear of the sack of Drogheda and he torming of Wexford by Cromwell, and to see his native land bowing like a rush beneath the tread of Puritan armies. He was buried at the old abbey at Cavan, the last of the Irish chiefs to distinguish himself in the Irish cause. In his last letter to Ormonde he writes--and the accents of truth are in the words--"My resolution, ways, and intention in these unhappy wars tended to no particular ambition or private interest of my own...but truly and sincerely to the preservation of my religion, the advancement of his Majesty's service, and the just liberties of this nation."[16] Owen Roe had long been marked for death, and it is not necessary to take too seriously the brag of an English officer that the old general had been put out of the world by a pair of poisoned russet boots sent him by one of the Plunketts of County Louth.[17] All public men carried their lives in their hands, and threats and stories of assassination were common. Ormonde had several times been threatened. O'Neill could not long have survived, in any case, for the disappointments and anxieties of his later life had worn him down. He was spared the news of the final overthrow of the Irish army at Letterkenny, where Coote took a savage revenge on the remaining leaders of the old Irish party. Owen Roe was esteemed a good leader of men even by his opponents; but to comrades and foes alike he was something of an enigma.

[16] Gilbert, Contemporary History, vol. ii. Appendix, p. 315.

[17] Another story was put out that he had been poisoned by Sir Charles Coote.

Even to his nephew, Daniel O'Neill, Owen Roe was "a subtle man, beyond my sounding," "a man of few words," "a great adept at concealing his feelings, and phlegmatic in his operations." He was as unlike the rash, boastful, easily-angered Preston as was possible.

Of all the strange figures who played their part in the confused history of the period this Daniel, nephew of Owen Roe, was one of the most interesting. Though he was of the old Irish by birth and descent, he was a devoted loyalist and Lieutenant-General of the Horse to Prince Rupert. He was the friend of Ormonde and confidant of the Queen, and he went on many embassies for the Royal Family. He was educated under Archbishop Laud in Church of England tenets, and he declined the post of General of the Ulster forces on his uncle's death, because he refused to change his religion. He moved among all the Courts of the day as the companion of notable personages, marking out for himself an independent and erratic path. At home and abroad this active, earnest man is found trying to make peace between contending parties, now at Oxford with the King, again at Paris with the Queen, or at home in Ireland posting with terms of settlement between Ormonde and O'Neill. Well liked by all, trusted by every one, a man of the world, "a great discerner and observer of men's nature and humours," as Clarendon says of him, Daniel was known among the Royalists as "Infallible Subtle." His refusal to take his uncle's post brought the old Irish party to an end; politically the party maybe said to have ceased to exist.

Ormonde escaped from the stricken field of Rathmines by putting spurs to his horse and riding hard to Kilkenny to try to reorganize the army. The disposition of his troops in Dublin, scattered, as they were, over different parts of the town and suburbs, and without means of communication, shows the worst generalship on Ormonde's part. Taken together with his refusal to send aid to Drogheda when Cromwell attacked that city a month later, although his troops lay idle in the near neighbourhood, it is difficult to acquit him of deliberately playing into the hands of the Puritan party.

To another than the victor the news brought relief. Oliver Cromwell received the tidings at Milford Haven, where he had arrived on his way to Ireland. He writes: "This is an astounding mercy, so great and seasonable that indeed we are like them that dreamed." The defeat of Ormonde cleared the way for Cromwell.

END OF CHAPTER VI

VII.—CROMWELL IN IRELAND

"A powerfull majestie to comaunde and an awfull countenaunce to execute."
--Aphorismical Discoverie, Bk. IV, ch. xii.

On July 12, 1649, the day of the surrender of Drogheda to Inchiquin, Cromwell had taken over the Irish command, and on July 26 the first of his twenty-eight regiments had disembarked in Dublin. Inchiquin was detached to meet him in Munster, where it was believed he might land, but Cromwell, who paid little attention to the expectations of his enemies, arrived in Dublin Bay on August 15, a fortnight after the rout of Ormonde's forces at Rathmines, "being received with all possible demonstrations of joy, the great guns echoing forth their welcome."

The passage of Cromwell through Ireland was like the swift stroke of a sword that spared not. His main object was to reduce the Royalist towns which still held for the King, and to confirm the now rapidly increasing authority of the English Parliament party in Ireland. Having taken over the command of the city of Dublin from Jones and organized his forces, Cromwell appeared on September 3 before Drogheda, summoned it to yield on terms, and, on the refusal of the Governor, stormed the town. The garrison of Drogheda was composed of Ormonde's picked troops, whom he had thrown into this town and Trim, where he himself lay watching the event. It was well provisioned, and its walls had been repaired as far as time permitted, so that it was confidently believed that it could stand a long siege. A regiment of horse and two thousand foot occupied the town under the experienced command of Sir Arthur Aston, a Catholic officer of good Cheshire family and strong Royalist principles. He had with him a number of English as well as Irish officers, as Sir Edmund Varney, Colonel Warren, Colonel Wall; their troops were Munstermen and Englishmen. Drogheda held for the King against the Parliament. The resistance was stout, and the Cromwellians twice entered the town and were twice driven out again. The third time, led by Cromwell himself, the attacking party crossed the Boyne Bridge, capturing first the entrenchments, next the 'tenalia' or defensive outworks, and finally the Churches of St Mary and St Peter, and the Towers, in all of which the soldiers made successive stands.

Cromwell's report gives a vivid picture of what occurred after the outworks were taken and the town entered by his troops: "The enemy, divers of them, retreated into the Mill Mount; a place very strong and of difficult access; being exceedingly high, having a good graft and strongly palisaded. The Governor, Sir Arthur Aston, and divers considerable officers being there, our men getting up to them, were ordered by me to put them all to the sword. And indeed, being in the heat of action, I forbade them to spare any that were in arms in the town; and, as I think, that night they put to the sword about 2000 men; divers of the officers and soldiers being fled over the Bridge into the other part of the town, where about 100 of them possessed St Peter's Church steeple, some the west gate, and others a strong Round Tower next the gate called St. Sunday's." [1] Being summoned to yield to mercy, the gallant defenders of these last refuges still refused. The steeple of St Peter's was fired by Cromwell's orders, and many perished in the flames, and the Towers were reduced by hunger, the attackers, grown savage by massacre, mounting the steps holding up each a child before him as a protection from the defenders, who brained them as they appeared at the top of the winding stairs.

[1] Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, ed. C. H. Firth (1904), vol. i, No. CV, pp. 468-469.

Thomas à Wood, who served in Cromwell's army, says that three thousand at least, besides women and children, were put to the sword. Sir Arthur Aston had his brains beaten out and his body hacked to pieces, and the women of high and low rank who took refuge in the vaults were slain without pity.[2] Hear Cromwell again: "From one of the Towers, notwithstanding their condition, they killed and wounded some of our men. When they submitted, their officers were knocked on the head; and every tenth man of the soldiers killed, and the rest shipped for Barbadoes. The soldiers in the other Tower were all spared, as to their lives only, and shipped likewise for the Barbadoes...The officers and soldiers of this garrison were the flower of all their army." [3] The sack of Drogheda, even in a day when the sack of towns was the universal accompaniment of war,[4] sent a thrill of terror through the country. Ormonde, watching the fate of his fine troops from the distance of only a few miles, writes to Lord Byron: "On this occasion Cromwell exceeded himself more than anything I ever heard of in breaking faith and bloody inhumanity; the cruelties exercised there for five days after the town was taken would make as many several pictures of inhumanity as are to be found in the Book of Martyrs or in the relation of Amboyna."[5] Even Ludlow comments on the "extraordinary severity" of the action at Drogheda, and the soldiers themselves protested against the order to kill their prisoners, who had surrendered on quarter promised.[6] But to Cromwell the horror of Drogheda appeared in another aspect. In his report he writes: "It was set upon some of our hearts, that a great thing should be done, not by power or might, but by the spirit of God...and therefore it is good that God alone have all the glory." [7] In this manner did Oliver the Puritan reflect upon the deed.

[2] "Life and Times of Anthony à Wood," in Athenae Oxoniensis (1815), pp. xix-xx.

[3] Letters of Cromwell, vol. i, No. CV, p. 469.

[4] Owen Roe had witnessed the awful sack of Tirlemont before he closed the gates of Arras ; he had himself threatened to sack Kilkenny.

[5] Carte, Ormond, iii, 477.

[6] Ludlow, Memoirs, ed. C. H. Firth (1894), i, 234.

[7] Letters of Cromwell, vol. i, No. CV, p. 470.

On the taking of Drogheda we may make the following remarks: First, Cromwell felt that in the destruction of these picked forces he had at one blow broken the back of the defence of the Irish Royalists, and that all that remained thereafter was to follow up his success. Secondly, he came over, filled with that detestation of the "unheard of, unprovoked, and most barbarous massacre (without respect of age or sex) that ever the sun beheld," which, rightly or wrongly, every Englishman of his day believed had been recently practised "at a time when Ireland was in perfect peace" upon their countrymen newly settled in Ireland. The "horrible massacre" was always on Cromwell's lips, and there is no doubt that all his actions in Ireland were considered by him as an act of just and deserved retribution.[8] But his orders withdrawing the quarter given to the garrison, "most English" as Clarendon and Ludlow believed, "both as to men and officers," can find no excuse; nor yet the massacre of the civilians, which his men, drunk with blood, carried out. The sentencing of the soldiers taken prisoners to Barbadoes, after the execution of one in ten of them, was more in the manner of the times and was not confined to Ireland. Scotland was being cleared forcibly of paupers and prisoners, who were being shipped off in gangs to the newly-discovered West Indian plantations.[9] In October, 1648, the Secretary of State writes to Ormonde: "It is a wonderful thing and God's just judgment, that those that sold their king not two years ago for £200,000 should now be sold for two shillings apiece, to be carried to the new plantations." John Morley says that Cromwell's theory of the divine operations at Drogheda "must be counted one of the most wonderful of all the recorded utterances of Puritan theology,"[10] but it is perhaps surpassed by his declaration when the Governor of Ross demanded liberty of conscience as a condition in surrendering that town. "Concerning liberty of conscience," was the reply, "I meddle not with any man's conscience. But if by liberty of conscience you mean a liberty to exercise the mass, I judge it best to use plain dealing, and to let you know, where the Parliament of England have power that will not be allowed of."[11]

[8] Letters of Cromwell, ii, p. 8.

[9] Thurloe Papers, iii, p. 497.

[10] John Morley, Oliver Cromwell (1904), pp. 311-312.

[11] Letters of Cromwell, vol. i, No. CX, p. 493.

Cromwell's own explanation of his conduct at Drogheda was that it would prevent the effusion of blood in the future. At Drogheda, as at every town besieged by him, terms were offered on condition that the garrison laid down its arms and surrendered the town to the Parliament. The terms included safety for the inhabitants free from injury, and the right to the common soldiers to march out, with or without arms, and in some cases permission to their officers to accompany them. Where they were refused he pointed to Drogheda as an example of what fate might overtake them. The terrible example was, in fact, not without effect. In a few days Newry, Carlingford, Wicklow, Arklow, Enniscorthy, and several castles had surrendered and were garrisoned with Parliamentary troops, no harm having been done to their occupants, civil or military, and certainly much "effusion of blood" having been saved. At Wexford Sinnott, the youthful Governor, stood out for high terms; his thriving town "pleasantly situated and strong" within a fifteen-foot wall and ramparts of earth, with its good houses and excellent trade and fisheries, might, he thought, be saved. But treachery threw the castle into Cromwell's hands, and from its walls he turned his guns upon the town. The governor had gained from Cromwell the safety of the citizens and leave for the soldiers to depart to their homes, with the lives of his officers, who were to be made prisoners. At this very moment, however, the inhabitants, suddenly stricken with terror, fled out of the town and attempted to escape in boats so heavily laden that most of them capsized, and the soldiery, entering without resistance, put all they found in arms to the sword. The priests were a special object of their hatred, but neither sex nor age was spared. Cromwell thinks that two thousand "became a prey to the soldier" at Wexford. New Ross, commanded by Lucas Taaffe, surrendered on good terms, his men marching away with their arms, bag and baggage, drums and colours; five hundred of them, Englishmen, went over to Cromwell's army.[12]

[12] Letter written from Ross, October 25, 1649, Letters of Cromwell, vol. i, No. CXII, pp. 495-496.

The effect of Cromwell's conquering march was being felt all over the country. Ormonde in vain tried to add to the remnants of his army; everywhere men were passing over to the enemy in large numbers, partly through fear, partly for the sake of peace, which they could find nowhere else. Ormonde's own army was forsaking him, and the towns refused obedience to any commands. Each set up independently for itself, with the results that we have seen at Wexford and shall see later at Limerick and Galway. Ormonde writes of "the speedy decline of the King's business, beyond any reason that can be given for it. Towns have declared against us fifty miles from any enemy, but those within them; most remarkable is it that the Roman Catholics that stood so rigidly with the king upon religion...are with much ado withheld from sending commissioners to entreat Cromwell to make stables and hospitals of their churches." With all his industry the Lord-Lieutenant could not keep together his army, though superior in numbers to the enemy. Owen Roe, still alive, though slowly sinking to his grave, alone sent help. Long ago, in May, he had written to Rinuccini: "We are almost reduced to despair. On the one hand, Ormonde entreats us to join him; on the other, the Parliamentary party seeks our friendship. God knows, we hate and detest both alike";[13] but his last act was to make peace with Ormonde and send him a body of men. Even Cromwell dreaded this new alliance. But almost at the same moment there came the news that all Munster had revolted to Cromwell. Kilkenny, Youghal, Cork and Kinsale declared for him, partly by treachery, but chiefly by the services of Roger Boyle of Broghill, later Lord Orrery, son of the Earl of Cork. Broghill now professed for Cromwell the affection which, at the Restoration, he instantly transferred to the King, and he exerted his great influence to bring over the south to the Parliamentary side. This was the most severe blow that had as yet fallen, and though Cromwell did not trust Broghill he found him very useful in the south, where Inchiquin's army came over to him.

[13] Letter to Lord Jermyn from Clonmel, November 30, 1649.

The country people, too, Irish and Catholic though they were, everywhere helped the Puritan army. Cromwell allowed no pillage; he hanged any soldier that plundered. Till money grew scarce, all was paid for and no free quarters were taken. An army that paid for everything and did them no wrong was a new experience to the poor inhabitants, who were accustomed to be pillaged indiscriminately by all parties, and they came in freely with market produce and kept the army well victualled. Everything seemed to be working for Cromwell. Ormonde was playing an uncertain and losing game, unable to move without the sanction of the vacillating Confederates at Kilkenny, and deeply suspected of treachery; he seems to have been waiting in the vain hope that Charles II would come over and take command; it was assuredly the only possible chance of rallying parties in Ireland. At Clonmacnois a large body of prelates were engaged in trying to make "a kind of union" among themselves and patch up the old quarrel between the Nuncio's party and that of the independent bishops; "sitting there," as the author of the Aphorismical Discoverie says, "canvassing many needless questions on either side."[14] Their chief act, besides issuing proclamations, was to appoint the vigorous and warlike Ever MacMahon, Bishop of Clogher, general of the Northern army in the place of Owen Roe O'Neill, with fatal results; for in July of the following year (1650) Coote's army encountered him near Letterkenny and completely crushed the Irish forces, reducing them to a rabble. The Bishop, who escaped from the Woody field where three thousand of his men lay dead, was taken and hanged; he was a man regretted even by Ormonde, who deplored "the fatal itch the clergy have to govern people and command armies"; the ruthless Coote added to his severities the death of Colonel Henry O'Neill after quarter given.[15]

[14] Gilbert, Contemporary History, ii, 64.

[15] Colonel Henry O'Neill was a son of Owen Roe. For his treatment by Coote. See Gilbert, Contemporary History, ii, pp. 88-89 ; iii. p. 214.

In the south Cromwell's luck seemed to have turned. His army was held up at Waterford, and the gallantry of Colonel Hugh O'Neill thwarted all his efforts to take Clonmel. But an enemy stronger and more pitiless than the Irish army was fighting against Cromwell. The plague had broken out and was spreading rapidly through the south of Ireland; it had been introduced, rumour said, by some Spaniards into the house in Galway from which Rinuccini had fled abroad, as though to show the Divine disapproval of the Nuncio's treatment in Ireland. Cromwell's soldiers had, like all English regiments, been perpetually sick of the "country's disease," and hundreds of them were in hospital in Dublin. He himself had been "crazy in his health," and he writes in his quaint fashion from before Ross: "To the praise of God I speak it, I scarce know an officer of forty amongst us that hath not been sick, and how many considerable ones we have lost, is no little thought of heart to us."[16] Among this weakened army the plague took its heavy toll. Jones, the late Governor of Dublin, died of it, and Ireton, who was appointed to the command of the Parliamentary armies on Cromwell's abrupt recall on May 29, 1650, while still besieging Clonmel, ended his period of office by catching the plague after the siege of Limerick and dying of it on November 26th, 1651. The siege of Clonmel had been the great triumph of the campaign for the Irish troops. Writing to Broghill, Cromwell had to confess himself twice beaten.[17] Two thousand of his army died at Clonmel in a siege lasting from Christmas to May, and more than once Cromwell threatened to raise the siege and withdraw his army.

[16] Letters of Cromwell, vol. i, No. CXIII, p. 498. and No. LXV, p. 506.

[17] State Letters of Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery (1742), p. 12.

An English writer says that at Clonmel "he found the stoutest enemy his army had ever met with in Ireland, and never was seen so hot a storm of so long continuance or so gallantly defended, neither in England nor in Ireland."[18] The garrison fought on till their ammunition failed, and then they slipped silently away in the night to Waterford, so that the enemy on its surrender on May 10, 1650, entered a city from which their prey had departed. Cromwell had to report before his return to England that though a tract of land along the shore was in his hands, yet it had little depth into the country, while the escape of O'Neill's army had added 7,000 effective horse and foot to Ormonde and his allies.[19] Hugh O'Neill had fallen back on Limerick, which held out for three months and then was lost by treachery. When Ireton's troops entered the pestilence-stricken city, which surrendered on October 27, they found it in a state of horror; "the living seemed like walking skeletons," too few and weak to bury the dead.

[18] Whitelock, Memorials of English Affairs (1732), p. 457, col. I.

[19] Cromwell's Report to Lenthal, 19th December, 1649, in Gilbert, Contemporary History, ii, 341-342 ; 467-468.

Conditions in Galway were equally terrible. Lady Fanshawe, whose husband was working for the return of Charles II to Ireland, reaching Galway from Youghal, found it almost depopulated by plague. In the "very clean dwelling" where she found lodging, nine persons had died during the previous six months, but the host prudently kept back this discouraging piece of information until they bade him farewell.[20] John Lynch, who was living in Galway, his native town, during the Confederate Wars, says that at Drogheda, Dublin, and Cork the burial-grounds could not contain the victims of the pestilence, and they had to be interred in pits. Of the sixty thousand English and Scottish soldiers sent to Ireland the great majority died of plague and distemper; in a few months Cromwell's army of twelve thousand was reduced to less than half.

[20] Lady Fanshawe, Memoir, pp, 92 seq. In London the plague reached its climax in 1665, about fifteen years later.

Events moved fast after Cromwell's departure. A month later the astonishing news arrived in Ireland that Charles II had gone to Scotland, accepted the Scottish Covenant, declared the Peace of Ormonde with the Irish null and void, and rejected all compromise with the Irish Catholics. This astounding act of treachery on the part of the King, who had up to this moment been contemplating throwing himself on the support of the Irish, and was daily expected over to raise his standard and attempt the recovery of England from Ireland, threw the whole kingdom into a ferment. Ormonde at first thought it was a forgery. The clergy, on the other hand, accused him of being a party to the transaction, and insisted on a conference at Galway with the Commissioners of Trust, who supported Ormonde, but it led to no result, and Ormonde determined to leave the country and find out for himself what the King's intentions were. At the request of the Assembly he appointed the Earl of Clanricarde Viceroy in his absence, hoping that a Catholic Deputy might smooth the present difficulties, and on December 11 he sailed for France, to which safe shelter Charles had now returned.

He was followed by Colonels Vaughan, Wogan, Warren, and many other Royalists, and by "that treacherous panther" Inchiquin, who, like so many in his day, changed his religion and his loyalties to suit the whim of the moment or the chances of being on the winning side. Though reiterating their professions of fidelity to the Crown, the unrest of the country found expression in the expeditions of Viscount Taaffe, Sir Nicholas Plunket, and Jeffrey Brown to the Duke of Lorraine, who had long been considering a descent on Ireland in aid of Charles II, urged on by the intriguing Queen Mother from Paris. The arrangements for his coming were nearly completed, and at first the Viceroy seems to have thought well of the proposal; but a letter falling into his hands in which the Duke was styled "Protector of Ireland," and an agreement proposed by which all the chief towns and forts of the south and west of Ireland were to be held by him in trust for the repayment of moneys disbursed, decided Clanricarde to put a peremptory end to the whole proceeding. The Duke's demands had risen as the correspondence proceeded, and it was evident that he intended to impose his authority upon the kingdom. But the towns were falling one after another into the hands of the Parliament. Ludlow had been made Commander-in-Chief on Ireton's death, and even Clanricarde's efforts were unavailing to stay the break-up of the Royalist party. The Viceroy was universally trusted and respected; it is said of him that no man ever loved his country more or his friend better, but the surrender of Galway, his native town, which he had believed to be impregnable, to Sir Charles Coote and the Parliament on May 12, was followed by that of the other garrisons in Connacht. Finding his efforts to rally his party unavailing, he retired to England in March 1652 and there died soon afterward.

Galway was the last town to enter the conflict of 1641 and the last to surrender. The country had been undermined by treachery constantly fomented by the Puritan party, and no one could trust his neighbour. In July 1652 Fleetwood, Cromwell's son-in-law, was sent over as Commander-in-Chief, and in the following year Cromwell was proclaimed Lord Protector, and the new military despotism of the Protectorate replaced the old military despotism of the Crown. The Protector turned his attention to the business of "settling" the countries of Scotland and Ireland, now definitely in his power. Charles II had suffered the humiliations imposed on him by the Scottish Covenanters for nothing. The Covenanters, under Leslie, had been routed at Dunbar on September 3, 1650, and Charles had again taken flight to the Continent after his defeat at Worcester on the anniversary of Dunbar in the following year. The risings in the King's favour were crushed with merciless rigour; the leaders suffered for their indiscretion on the scaffold; and the Royalists were forced to pay a tenth of their income to support the tyranny that was crushing them. In 1652 the "Settlement" of Ireland was taken vigorously in hand.

The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland was a vast measure of confiscation, under the excuse of punishment for the "massacre" of 1641, by which to satisfy the legal claims of two classes; on the one hand, the English who had in March 1642 subscribed to the costs of the Irish war, on the promise of receiving compensation in Irish land; and on the other hand, the soldiers and officers who had fought in Ireland and whose pay was long in arrears, who also were to be paid off in Irish settlement lands. The former were called 'Adventurers' and were in the main citizens of London, Puritan shopkeepers and tradesmen, who looked to advance the cause of Protestantism and to secure a good return for their money at the end of the war by this investment in rebel lands, thus forfeited beforehand. Some of the claimants had become entitled to extra lands by the 'doubling ordinance' by which they had been induced to pay up part of their loans at an earlier date in consideration of receiving larger properties in return. In practice it was found impossible to fulfil these special claims; there was not enough land to go round.[21] Besides the Londoners there were a considerable number of applicants from the western counties of England, which had always been closely associated with Ireland by trade, and whose sympathies had been aroused by the arrival of numbers of refugees who had fled from Ireland in the early days of the 1641 rebellion to take shelter among them. It was only by adopting some sweeping plan such as that suggested by the Earl of Cork during his Munster sessions in 1642, some months after the outbreak of the rebellion, that these extensive claims could be satisfied. He had indicted, in one comprehensive charge, all the leading Catholic gentry of the South of Ireland. "Lords Viscount Roche, Mountgarret, Ikerrin and Muskerry, Barons Dunboyne and Castleconnell, Richard Butler, brother of the Earl of Ormonde...with all other baronets, knights, esquires, gentlemen, freeholders, and Popish priests, in number above 1100, that either dwell or have entered or done any rebellious act in those two counties." He adds that "this course of proceedings was not by them suspected and doth much startle and terrify them; for now they begin to take notice, though too late, that they are in a good forwardness to be attainted and all their estates confiscated to the corruption of their blood and extirpation of them and their families."[22]

[21] "Doubling ordinances" were the fashion of the day, and were ready means of raising money by speculation. In the Restoration Settlement these "Doubling ordinances" were struck out. Cal. S. P. I., 1660-62, Intro., p. xv.

[22] The Earl of Cork to the Speaker of the House of Commons in England, August 25, 1642. State Letters of Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery (1742), p. 5. Lismore Papers, 2 series, vol. v, pp. 98-107.

These sessions were held in Waterford and Cork, when the South had only recently shown signs of disturbance or sympathy with the insurgents in the North. The Act of August 1652 carried into execution the designs outlined by Lord Cork ten years before. It was a deliberate proposal by the Puritan Parliament to destroy the monarchical principle in Ireland by uprooting the whole of the Catholic and some of the Protestant gentry of Ireland, most of whom had fought for the King long after the loyalists of England had given up his cause. By the intolerable conditions imposed by the Bill they were to be forced to fly the country or submit to impoverishment, while the bulk of their properties were to be transferred to a new body of Puritan owners [23] drawn from a different class, for the most part strangers to the country and strongly prejudiced against its inhabitants. Wholesale confiscations of loyalist and Church properties were also going on in England, enlarging as the bills for the wars of the Parliament against the Sovereign came in, but nothing so sweeping as the practical resale of the whole country was contemplated elsewhere. The much-advertised massacre made it possible in Ireland.

[23] Lynch, who lived through this period and who dedicates his book in fulsome language to Charles II, distinguishes between the Puritans and Protestants or Anglicans. He says: "The Puritans had no regard to laws of humanity or respect of treaties; the Protestants had some regard for mercy and plighted faith." (Cambrensis Eversus (ed. M. Kelly, 1848), iii, 201).

Some years later, in September, 1658, a Commission was appointed to try those directly involved in the rebellion and accused of acts of murder. It seems to have been fairly conducted, numberless witnesses being called on both sides; and though much of the evidence given was coloured by the exaggerations which stories of terror necessarily acquire when repeated after years of embellishment, there was an evident desire to get at the truth and to act with justice. Sir Phelim O'Neill had been executed, chiefly on the ground of complicity in the murder of Lord Caulfeild. He atoned for a reckless life by the courage of his death. On the scaffold he refused to buy his life by accusing Charles I of having instigated the rebellion. There had been other executions, chief among them that of Lord Maguire. Now the Commissioners made a number of acquittals, far too many being declared innocent to please planters who were hungry for the lands of the accused. Lord Muskerry, who was acquitted, gave a remarkable testimony to the justice of the Commission. He had suffered so many miseries and humiliations during his sojourn in Spain and Portugal, in raising troops for the Peninsula, that he had returned and thrown himself on the mercy of the Parliament. On his acquittal he exclaimed: "I met many crosses in Spain and Portugal. I could get no rest till I came hither...When I consider that in this court I came clear out of that blackness of blood by being so sifted, it is more to me than my estate. I can live without my estate but not without my credit." He regained most of his property after the Restoration.

The debt claimed by the Adventurers amounted to £336,000, to be paid in lands the position of which was to be determined by lot. Ten counties of the richest part of Ireland--Limerick, Tipperary, King's and Queen's Counties, Meath and Westmeath, Down, Antrim, Armagh, and Waterford--some of them planted with English and Scottish during the last century, were now to be handed over to the newcomers, halved between the army and the Adventurers. Louth was reserved as additional security to the purchasers, and several counties, mostly in the North and in Leinster, with Kerry, were put aside as additional security to the soldiers for arrears of pay due to them. The counties of Dublin, Kildare, Carlow, and Cork, with all Church lands, were held back for bestowal on notable regicides and other favoured persons. It was eventually found that even these vast forfeitures, which included the whole of Ireland except Connacht and Clare, the two districts reserved for the uprooted inhabitants, were not sufficient to pay off the long-standing arrears of pay, and portions of Sligo and Mayo, intended for the dispossessed landowners, were eventually added to them. This great confiscation of a whole country is usually spoken of as a transplanting of the Irish to make way for English. It affected all the Catholic Irish gentry, especially those who had been in arms between October, 1641, and September, 1643. But it was land that was wanted, and in their effort to find lands to go round the hundreds of creditors who were pressing their claims, it suited those in authority to sweep together Irish, old English and Scottish, those who had resisted the rebellion as well as those who had taken part in it. The Settlement was largely an act of vengeance on those who had been loyal to the King.

Protestants and Presbyterians as well as Catholics were evicted, but it was the Catholic gentry of English descent who suffered most. Among the list of persons excluded by name from pardon both as to life and estate were the noblest families in the country, beginning with the Earl of Ormonde, the only Protestant of his family, Lords Clanricarde, Mayo, Castlehaven, Fingall, Roscommon, and Westmeath--Royalists who had throughout declared their abhorrence of the rebellion; Viscounts Iveagh and Montgomery of the Ardes, of Scottish blood; the Barons of Slane, of Louth, of Athenry, belonging to the old English families of the Flemings, Plunketts, and Berminghams; Richard Bellings, who had resisted the old Irish party, and drawn up many declarations of loyalty to the King; and Bramhall, Protestant Bishop of Derry. Of old Irish descent were Sir Phelim O'Neill, Muskerry, Inchiquin, the O'Conor Don, Moores, Byrnes, O'Tooles, and O'Flahertys, some only of whom were actively engaged in the rebellion, even if they were sympathetic to the insurgents.[24] Lord Antrim, who had raised the Irish army which fought for the King under Montrose and retrieved his waning fortunes, had his whole estate taken from him, but he was later allowed a small subsidy for services at Ross, where he appears to have advised surrender to the Parliamentary forces. It was only after years of struggle that he was restored in 1663 as an "innocent papist," one of four so favoured in the North of Ireland; two of the others being Sir Henry Magennis and Sir Henry O'Neill.[25]

[24] The Acts relating to the Settlement will be found in Scobell, Acts and Ordinances, ii, 197 (cap. 13), 210 (cap. 23 seq.), 235, 240, 252.

[25] Prendergast, Ireland from the Restoration to the Revolution (1887), p 98, n.

Next to those who were held to have forfeited the right to life and property came various grades of supposed guilt, ranging from those who had been in command or actively engaged against the Puritan forces to those whose homes happened to have been anywhere within the quarters occupied by the rebels, even if they had taken no part whatever in the fighting but had merely lived quietly at home. None could entirely escape who had not shown "constant good affection" to the Parliamentary cause throughout the entire period, and few indeed there were who could pretend to have been thoroughly consistent in their attachment to Puritanism. All others forfeited from one-third to two-thirds of their properties, receiving an equivalent to the remainder, on paper, in Connacht or Clare. But it was soon found that these districts did not provide enough land for all claimants, especially as the claims of the soldiers cut off large slices even of these lands, pushing the new settlers out of the few habitable districts into the waste and mountainous lands beyond them. There were noblemen like Lord Trimleston, who had the rich fattening grounds of Co. Meath; Lord Ikerrin, with farms and ripening cornfields in Tipperary; the Talbots of Malahide; the Cheevers, with a fine estate at Monkstown, near Dublin. These found themselves, at the beginning of harvest, ordered to transplant to the west, and though an attempt was made to give them better lands than their less fortunate neighbours, as coming from the richest pasture and agricultural portions of Ireland, this arrangement could only be very imperfectly carried out.

The time given to transplant was too short for niceties, and the claims and complaints far too many to receive adequate attention. The Act was passed in August 1652, after which a hasty survey was made and the lands balloted for in London in September 1653. By May 1, 1654, all removals had to be accomplished by the inhabitants in possession, to make way for the incoming owners. By carriage, by cart, or on foot they must, under pain of death if found after that date on the east of the Shannon, transport to Connacht and make their settlements there. A few terrible examples warned others that the threats of punishment for lingering beyond the allotted date were no empty ones. Nevertheless, like all schemes contrary to humanity and reason, the plan broke down. Already when Fleetwood came over in September 1652 he saw that the task of removing the proprietors and their families and tenants from the three most fertile provinces of Ireland to one province of which a large part was uninhabitable was beyond the power of any Government to accomplish. The removals had to be made during the winter, and there were hundreds of delicate women, young children, and invalids to whom this would mean death; many of the cattle were not in condition to travel; the harvest was in the fields, waiting to be cut; and there would be no one to sow for the next year, for the evicted gentry were not likely to plant for the men who were evicting them. Delays had to be granted for all these reasons, and in order to permit the heads of families to go first and build some sort of shelters for their households. They were not permitted to take refuge in the towns, which were expressly reserved, with three miles round each. No transplanted person, were he the highest in the land, might enter these areas.

Aged great ladies, like Lady Thurles, Ormonde's mother, and Lady Dunsany, were particularly hard to move. Though agents and Adventurers were clamouring at their doors they declined to stir. Lady Dunsany boldly said that if her lands were wanted they would have to carry her out of them. Lady Thurles had rescued and supported the English during the rebellion, numbers of whom found refuge in her house. She had subscribed two heavy loans to the English army and when pillaged by the insurgents she had welcomed an English army to Thurles. Even the Commissioners found her "a very deserving person." But her home was "in enemy quarters," and she had four thousand fertile acres; she was a Catholic in religion, and with so many damning qualities against her it was only her personal friendship with Cromwell that secured for her, as a special act of grace, one reprieve after another from transplanting. Lady Ormonde was in much the same position. It could not be forgotten that she "had commanded her own servants out of their beds" during the rebellion to accommodate the distressed English with whom she filled the rooms of Kilkenny Castle; she was given Dunmore House and a pension, of which she only received a fraction, on condition of giving nothing to her husband. But these were exceptional cases. More fortunate were the poorer Irish. If they had no real or personal estate to the value of £10 they might, by submitting to the Commonwealth and living peacefully and obediently, obtain pardon. Husbandmen, ploughmen, artificers and labourers had more chance than those in a higher position. As had happened in Ulster,[26] they were needed by the new proprietors, who were many of them ignorant of a farmer's life and knew little of conditions in Ireland. It happened fortunately for them that the order for removal covered the harvest and sowing seasons. Their old masters left them behind to reap the harvest for them, and the newcomers, finding them on the properties, and seeking in vain for servants, were only too glad to keep them on to sow in the spring. But large numbers clung to their old masters, and we have lists of retainers transplanting with the families with whom they had lived. They preferred the hard work of turning Connacht into ploughland to coming under the rule of strangers.

[26] Sir Vincent Gookin, The Case of Transplanting the Irish Vindicated (1655).

The actual facts of the re-settlement were different from what had been contemplated. When the time came for the soldiers to settle it was found that large numbers of them had, for a little badly-needed ready money, sold their holdings to their officers, often for far less than the actual value of the land, and had gone out of the country. Some of the officers had in this way built up large properties at the expense of their disbanded men. Of the original Adventurers, too, few cared to leave their businesses in London to risk a totally different kind of life in Ireland. They also were ready to sell. The Commissioners found the claims most complicated, some properties having changed hands already several times since their original sale in 1653. In spite of Fleetwood, who was a doctrinaire Puritan of the dour kind, there were still unremoved proprietors "playing loath to depart" in the spring of 1654, and frequent letters complain to the Government that the work was moving slowly, and that many were breaking out as 'Tories' or brigands rather than settle on their plots. In many cases these plots existed only in the imagination of the Commissioners, the allotted lands not being sufficient for the purchasers. It was only by the most threatening orders and wholesale arrests that numbers of owners could be got to move. The prisons were choked, "such batches being brought in that there was not gaol room to contain them." The young men passed in hundreds out of the country to take service in Spain and France, many who should have been exempted being forced to go by the inflexible Fleetwood. Lord Muskerry had leave to transport five thousand of his old followers out of Ireland to any country in amity with the Commonwealth, and he chose to take them to the King of Poland; others went under their old officers to serve the Prince of Conde or the King of Spain.

Petty [27] calculates that thirty-four thousand men went abroad between 1651 and 1654; elsewhere he gives forty thousand, including boys, women, and priests, the last being all expatriated by law. An evil fate overtook the women and boys who, to the number of six thousand, were sent into slavery to the plantations of America and the West Indies. Thither were sent the wives of the men who had gone abroad, or the widows left after the recent wars, besides the destitute people wandering with their families about the country or turned out of the gaols. While the agents of the King of Spain were treating with the Government for the swordsmen and taking away the best blood of the kingdom to fight in foreign wars, Bristol agents were contracting with kidnappers and governors of prisons for boys, women, and girls to be sent to the sugar-plantations. It was only when the ruffians engaged in this work began to lay their hands on English children that this shocking traffic was stopped.[28]

[27] "Political Anatomy of Ireland," a work written in 1672, in Collection of Tracts (1861), ii. 18.

[28] Prendergast, Cromwellian Settlement (1865), Appendix VI, pp. 237 seq.

The results of all this horror were not quite what was intended. The country swarmed with 'Tories,' who hovered in the woods and mountains near their old homes and made the lives of the planters a misery by their depredations and raids. They seemed to increase with the same rapidity as the wolves, which now once more infested the country. Many of the men who had followed their officers abroad returned home to swell the parties of brigands that roamed about under chosen leaders, and the exploits of captains of outlaws like Redmond O'Hanlon, "the Tory of the Fews," became famous far beyond their native land. The hunting of Tories became part of a settler's normal life, and the rewards for captures were as great as for the killing of wolves.[29] An unforeseen result of the new conditions of life was the speedy fraternization between the Cromwellian soldier-planters and the Irish among whom they settled. Unlike the Adventurers, many of the soldiers had been for some years in Ireland, with the inevitable result that they felt on friendly terms with the young people of the country, and marriages became frequent. However distasteful it might be theoretically for a Cromwellian Puritan to marry a Catholic Irish girl, human nature proved stronger than theological prejudice, and in spite of proclamations and punishments these marriages still went on. When rebuked, the soldiers averred that their wives had turned Protestant; thereupon courts presided over by army veterans were set up to examine the proficiency of the converts in the tenets of their new faith. How many of the young Irish wives outwitted Cromwell's godly veterans history does not say. Their children were soon all talking Irish and living as the Irish lived. Forty years after the settlement and seven after the battle of the Boyne a writer remarks that many of Oliver's soldiers could not speak a word of English. "And," he adds, "what is more strange, the same may be said of some of the children of King William's soldiers, who came but t'other day into the country."[30] The descendants of this mixed soldier race were in after days to become the turbulent populations of Tipperary and Westmeath.

[29] Prendergast, Ireland from the Restoration to the Revolution (1887); Thurloe Papers, iv, pp. 23-24; 41 ; 46.

[30] True Way to render Ireland Happy and Secure, addressed to the Hon. Robert Molesworth (Dublin, 1697).

Thus was Ireland 'settled' by the Die-hards of Cromwell's day by the oft-desired expedient of extirpating the inhabitants and replanting with English. Orrery declared that the tremendous scheme "had so broken and shattered that nation that they could never make head afterwards."[31] Yet so far was the nation from being settled by Cromwell's policy that Ormonde, on his return as Viceroy in 1662, said that he found Ireland "as divided and unsettled a country as is or ever was in Christendom." The memory of "the curse of Cromwell" has outlived any later troubles, and is not yet extinct after the lapse of over two and a half centuries.

[31] Memoirs of Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery (1742), p. 20.

END OF CHAPTER VII

VIII.—THE RESTORATION

The return of Charles II restored to both nations the ideal of kingship for which both alike yearned, but it restored little else. The selfish, heartless libertine, shrewd, clever, and witty, but utterly unprincipled, had already disillusioned even so devoted a Royalist as Ormonde, whose belief that the King "would do great things" received a shock when he met him at the Hague so great that in his uncertainty "he could hardly carry on." But his followers had yet to learn that a King might sell his friends to reward his enemies if the purchase of his adversaries' support became of consequence to him. His accession was hailed with universal joy; and the Irish believed that they had the best cause for rejoicing, for they hoped to reap the long-deferred rewards of a steadfast loyalty. Two classes especially acclaimed his return—the transplanted Irish in Connacht, many of whom came flocking back to their estates, ousting the new proprietors, and settling down in their old homes; and the 'ensign-men' or soldiers who had followed the King into exile and who had faithfully served him abroad wherever their services were required. Many of these had passed a deplorable time after they left the country. Those who went to Spain had been miserably ill-treated, and the twenty thousand men who served in France under Muskerry, Dillon, Colonel O'Farrell, and others, had at the new King's desire given up the French service, at great loss and inconvenience to themselves, and repaired to their sovereign in Holland, where some of them formed bodies of lifeguards to the King and his brothers, the Duke of York (afterward James II) and the Duke of Gloucester.

If any persons deserved restitution to their estates it was these devoted men. They were specially mentioned in the King's Proclamation and in his speech of November 30, 1660, as deserving of the highest gratitude. These proclamations seemed decisive, and the soldiers crowded round Whitehall while the Acts of Settlement and Explanation were being drawn up, submitting their claims to the restoration of their old lands. But the men in possession were not to be so easily ousted, and the Act of Explanation was "to turn many hopes into despair." To their astonishment they found that it was the men who had been foremost in the. Puritan cause who were to be ennobled and enriched. Charles was short of money, and "that crew," as they were justly called, were ready to purchase Court favour by the expenditure of heavy sums and a suspicious readiness to welcome the King back. The old loyalists saw with stupefaction Lord Boyle of Broghill, recently become the owner of Blarney Castle, the home of Lord Muskerry, created Earl of Orrery; Sir Charles Coote, "proud, dull, and avaricious," as Clarendon calls him, enriched with portions of Lord Gormanston's and Lord Clanricarde's estates and made Earl of Mountrath; and Sir John Clotworthy created Viscount Massereene. Two out of these three speculators had purchased the King's pardon for a sum of between £20,000 and £30,000, and they spared no pains to prejudice Charles against the original owners of their estates.[1]

[1] Most of these properties were later restored to the original owners.

The King may well have been bewildered. He was surrounded by representatives of the Cromwellian planters and soldiers, by ' '49 ' men (or those who had served him at home up to the coming of Cromwell), by 'ensignmen' (or those who had served him abroad), and by the transplanted Catholics, who now hoped to get home to their old estates. Stuart-like, Charles promised to every one what each desired; the planters were not to be disturbed, the loyalists were to be rewarded. Broghill gave him the assurance that after all the claims of the Adventurers were satisfied he would still own £80,000 by forfeitures and lands not disposed of. How the arrangements were to be made the King left to his advisers, several of whom washed their hands of the business at an early stage.

Clarendon, the Lord Chancellor, begged that no part of the imbroglio might ever be referred to him, and Ormonde "failed to see any light in so much darkness." But Coote and Broghill and Clotworthy and their assistants had no fears or hesitations. The Cromwellian settlement by which they had profited was to be upheld at all costs, and the planters left undisturbed in their possessions, regicides only excepted, and Church lands, which were to be restored. Protestant Royalists were to receive back their lawful estates, as also '' innocent Papists" whose claims were to be tried before a court set up for the purpose, while the present tenants were to be "reprised" elsewhere. The King reserved to himself the right to make large grants to special persons, and in this way several of the loyalist nobles, both Catholic and Protestant, received back their estates. Among these were Taaffe, Lord Carlingford, and Viscount Dillon, the Irish transportees who had recently settled on their lands being promised "reprisal" lands elsewhere; but the royal commands to restore Sir Henry O'Neill and Terence Dempsey, Lord Clanmailer, were evaded.

The great estates of Clanricarde in Galway and Ormonde in Tipperary had been appropriated by the family of Cromwell to their own use; a goodly heritage out of the spoils. These were now restored to their owners. Ormonde came back laden with lands and honours and with the title of Duke. It is impossible not to sympathize with the feelings of the bereaved gentry, forcibly expressed in a tract written by Nicholas French, Bishop of Ferns, accusing Ormonde of having sold their interests for the sake of great rewards, and of having deserted them in their distress.[2] He undoubtedly did not exert his powerful influence as he might have done in favour of the Irish landowners, though he intervened in special cases; nor can he be acquitted of having played into the hands of the Parliament before he had left Ireland. Ormonde left Ireland a poor man, and one who had endeavoured in difficult times to steer a steady and honest course, just alike to Catholic and Protestant, but his return as the recipient of enormous wealth, part of it taken from his less fortunate countrymen, raised natural jealousies and suspicions that the Duke had been bought over to support the schemes of the Commissioners. Among the largest recipients of the King's bounty in Ireland was his brother the Duke of York, afterward James II, who received 120,000 acres of regicides' property.

[2] French's tract is called "The Unkind Deserter," in Works (1846), vol. ii.

The court which tried the claims of "innocent papists" sat only for six months. Clotworthy and his companions, who drew up the eleven qualifications which any applicant who desired to prove "innocency" must fulfil, "did verily believe there could not be found a man in all Ireland that should pass untouched through so many pikes";[3] but the point on which they specially relied for wholesale condemnations, namely, that an applicant, however innocent he might be of any participation in the rebellion, was yet to be found ''nocent" or guilty if his home had been "within rebel's quarters," was suddenly cut from beneath their feet by the Parliament of England, which absolutely refused to sanction so scandalous a perversion of justice.[4] In spite of the rigour of the carefully drawn up "points," out of the first six hundred claimants seven-eighths were restored as "innocents," and the colonists began to complain that the fund for reprisals would be insufficient. Indeed, it became speedily apparent that to carry out all the promises made there must, as Ormonde wrote, "be new discoveries made of a new Ireland, for the old will not serve to satisfy these engagements." The Irish Court of Claims, which still had to hear over five thousand cases of "innocency," having been prorogued for a time was, by a shameful perversion of right and honour, never reopened, the difficulty of reinstating these old proprietors having been found to be great, and the probability that the larger number would be found innocent having become apparent from the first trials. They were either left to their Connacht holdings or thrown on the world to fare as they could. Thus was fulfilled their sovereign's appeal to the House of Lords in the year of his Restoration: "I hope I need say nothing of Ireland and that they alone shall not want the benefit of my mercy; they have shown much affection to me abroad, and you will have a care of my honour and what I have promised them."[5]

[3] French, "The Settlement and the Sale of Ireland," in Works (1846), i, 85; and Cal. S. P. I. (1666-69), pp. 543-559. The Editor speaks of this paper as one of the most important State Papers of the period, but he seems unaware who was its author.

[4] Coote declared that if this Article were omitted "the number of innocents would be so great that it would endanger the interests of the Adventurers and soldiers, and would give the Irish a majority in Parliament"—a strong testimony to the innocence of those who claimed.

[5] Declaration touching the Act of Indemnity, July 27, 1660.

Equally unfortunate were the officers who had followed Charles to Flanders. For three years they waited hoping for a recognition of their claims to their long-deferred payments, some of them, even men in good position, like Lord Castleconnell or the Earl of Clancarthy, being in a deplorable condition of poverty and forced to hide for lack of clothes. They sent up a touching appeal to the King, showing "that most of the officers who served under the Royal Ensigns beyond sea have perished with famine since your Majesty's happy restoration," and "the estates and numbers of them that remain being but small," they pray restoration. But their prayer was never heeded, and the fate they expected—"to perish by the plague"—must have overtaken many of them. Even Orrery had to confess to Ormonde that he found "many particulars in the Bill of Settlement which are diametrically opposite to the Declaration of November 30, 1660,"[6] and Sir Maurice Eustace declared that the King had "given the estates of those who had fought for him to those that had fought against him." Petty's tract, written in 1672, sums up the final disposal of the lands and condition of the country. He had been commissioned to carry out a general survey for the purposes of the Settlement and his details are still of great interest, for the settlement of 1660-63 remained for centuries the foundation of land ownership over large parts of the country. According to his estimates, the amount of land in acres restored to the Catholics was, in spite of every difficulty, considerable. He says they recovered about 2,340,000 acres, while the newcomers and churches had 2,400,000 acres; but of the good lands, amounting to 7,500,000 acres in all, the English, Scottish, and Church lands occupied 5,140,000 acres, whereas the Irish had only about half as much. Yet he believes that the restored persons had actually gained land by more than one-fifth over what they possessed at the outbreak of the rebellion, and by forged feoffments at least one-third more; for he adds, with the ready scepticism of the planter, "of those adjudged innocents, not one in twenty was really so." This estimate, which is probably near the mark, would give to the restored Irish nearly an equal portion of the total effective soil of Ireland, not including the waste lands, but a much smaller proportion was of the best quality, owing to the large tracts in Connacht now occupied by them. The Adventurers, officers, and soldiers obtained in all slightly over 2,000,000 acres. The chief change was, for the moment, in the sea-port towns, which were reserved wholly for Protestants.[7] When Inchiquin went over to the side of the Parliament he had driven all the Irish out of the southern cities, and in June 1647, Waterford, a very Catholic city, was said to have no natural Irish in it.

[6] State Letters of Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery (1742), p. 56.

[7] Petty, "The Political Anatomy of Ireland," in Tracts relating to Ireland (1801), pp. 16-11. Petty calculates in the whole country, in 1672, 800,000 Irish to 400,000 English and Scots combined (ibid., p. 19).

In 1663 Orrery was busy "purging" the city of Cork "of fanatics and needless Papists"; it then still contained three Papists to one Protestant. The towns of Galway and Limerick had been sold by Cromwell to Gloucester and Liverpool in return for funds to carry on his wars. Gloucester also received Abbeyleix in Queen's Co. in part payment. The attempt wholly to Anglicize the towns, partly as a measure of favouritism and partly, no doubt, as a precaution against foreign invasion, had the effect of depriving the Catholics of all civil and political power in their own country. The corporations became entirely English and Protestant, and the passing of local authority into other hands was visible in the Parliament of Charles II, to which only one Catholic was elected. We should add that only one Independent sat in the same Parliament, which shows the weakening of Cromwellian and Puritan influences.

END OF CHAPTER VIII

IX.—JAMES II IN IRELAND

The outstanding event of European history during the second half of the seventeenth century was the gradual decline of the power of Spain and the growth of French ascendency. French wealth and French supremacy, of which the foundations had been laid by Richelieu, increased rapidly under the rule of his successor Mazarin and during the long rule of Louis XIV, whose reign of seventy-two years began when Charles I was King of England and lasted until the accession of George I. The great armies of France were constantly engaged in civil and foreign wars, while her growing navy and her aggressive diplomacy made her the most formidable state in Europe. The downfall of Spanish supremacy was sealed by the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659, and the only other Continental nation that could challenge the paramount position of France was that of the Dutch, whose fleets had shown themselves the equal of those of England on the seas and whose rapidly expanding trade threatened that of her great rival. This new balance of power which had been taking place during the Protectorate and the reigns of the later Stuarts profoundly affected affairs both in England and Ireland.

A contemporary author speaks contemptuously of the battle of the Boyne as "but a skirmish between nine regiments without cannon or entrenchment and an army of thirty-six thousand choice men, for the defending and gaining of a few passes upon a shallow river";[1] but posterity has more justly judged it as one of the decisive battles of history. It was a European battle fought, almost by chance, on Irish soil, and on the decision there arrived at depended not only the fate of James and William as rivals for the throne in England and Ireland, but the question whether the influence of France was to be paramount in English politics, and whether England was to become again a Catholic power resting upon the alliance with France. Its European character is shown by the varied bodies of troops that fought on both sides. William's troops were a mixture of Dutch, Swedes, Germans, and Danes, along with his English and Scottish army. Their commander was Marshal Schomberg, a stout old Huguenot soldier still in arms at the age of eighty-two.[2] The forces of James, largely composed of French troops, were also officered by French commanders. De Rosen, De Lauzun, and St Ruth were at different times in command of bodies of the foreign forces that fought with James's army, and even of his Irish troops. It was clearly a battle between Catholic France and Protestant Holland as much as a battle between rival kings for an English throne. It is necessary to grasp the position clearly if we would understand the importance of the campaign of James and William in Ireland, and we must therefore look back to the causes which brought William over in 1690 to fight in Ireland for the crown of England.

[1] J. T. Gilbert, A Jacobite Narrative of the War in Ireland, 1688-1691, called "A Light to the Blind" (1892), p. 102.

[2] The Duke of Schomberg, though he had risen to be Marshal of France, had been obliged to leave that country after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. He entered the service of William of Orange in 1687.

During the whole of the Stuart period the ties between the Stuart princes and France had been growing closer. From the time of Mary of Guise, the French wife of James V of Scotland, the Stuarts were half French by birth and temperament, as well as more than half Catholic in religion. Their daughter, Mary Queen of Scots, was far more French than Scottish; her grace and brilliance and the voluptuous passions which brought about her ruin drew little from her father's side. In her girlhood she had been married to the Dauphin of France, and French designs in England centred round her fortunes. Charles I had for his wife the clever and intriguing Queen Henrietta Maria, whose Court during her exile at Saint Germain was the gathering place for refugees from England. She endeavoured to direct their affairs in her own and her husband's interest, often to the confusion and despair of statesmen at home, whose plans did not always coincide with hers. She openly professed the Catholic faith, and she brought up her children with a strong leaning in that direction. Though Charles II postponed the avowal of his faith until his deathbed, he was only withheld from an earlier confession by the invincible distaste of his English subjects and the fear of losing his newly regained crown.

James was always a Catholic at heart. His life in England had been a continuous struggle for the confirmation of his right to the succession against a Parliament and people bent on his exclusion. At times the feeling against him was so strong that he had to withdraw from Court and live privately in Scotland or abroad. Even his marriage to a Protestant wife, Anne Hyde, daughter of that uncompromising churchman the Earl of Clarendon, and the marriage of one of his daughters, Mary, to William of Orange, did not suffice to allay the prejudice against the prospect of the reversion of the crown to a Catholic successor. But the Duchess of York, in spite of her Protestant upbringing, became a Catholic before she died, and the popular scare rose to a panic when, in 1673, James took as his second wife a niece of Cardinal Mazarin, Mary of Modena. Though James had not at this time openly acknowledged himself to be a Catholic it was evident that English Protestant kings were continuing the Stuart practice of marrying Catholic wives, whose sons would have a tendency to adhere to the faith of their mothers; and when his wife presented him with a son shortly before his flight from England in 1688 it seemed that the fears of the country would be realized. It was this final event which forced upon James the practical sacrifice of his crown. No effort was spared to spread the belief that the infant was not the son of James but a counterfeit boy palmed off as his child; but time proved the falsity of these ideas, and the babe survived to be known in later days as "the Old Pretender," the centre of Jacobite and Irish affections until they were transferred to his more attractive son, Charles Edward, the "fresh young branch" of Irish tradition.

There is no reason to doubt that James II came to the throne with a sincere desire for a general toleration in religious matters. His first act on his accession in February 1685 was a pledge to preserve the laws inviolate and to protect the Church. He had experienced in his own life the miseries inflicted by religious intolerance and suspicion, and he had no wish to lay the same burdens upon his subjects. Catholic at heart though he was, and determined that Catholics should in his time receive equal treatment with others, he showed no desire to force men's minds. " 'Tis by gentleness, instruction, and good example people are to be gained and not frightened into" the Catholic Church, "Our blessed Saviour whipt people out of the Temple, but I never heard He commanded any should be forced into it," are the sentiments he endeavoured to impress upon his son in 1692.[3] On one notable occasion he appealed to William Penn, the Quaker, who appears to have exercised a strong and wholesome influence over the King's mind, for a recognition of his views. Penn was returning thanks for the Quakers after the Declaration of Indulgence, which relieved them from sufferings which "would have moved stones to compassion." The King replied: "Some of you know (1 am sure you do, Mr. Penn) that it was always my principle that consciences ought not to be forced and that all men ought to have liberty of their consciences."[4] His firm adhesion to the tenets of his own Church made his desire to extend toleration to those of other ways of thought respected. In his own person the Sovereign was showing his disbelief in the maxim so long accepted that "it was impossible for a Dissenter not to be a rebel."[5]

[3] J. S. Clarke, Life of James II (1816), ii, 621 ; and see ibid., ii, 109 seq.

[4] Somers' Tracts (1813) (James 11), ix, 34.

[5] Ibid., ix, 57 ; i.e., all, including Catholics, who dissented from the doctrines of the Established Church.

But if James was before his day in his views on religious toleration he was not always wise in his methods of giving them effect. His attitude was that of a Catholic prince tolerating other bodies rather than of a nominally Protestant prince freeing Catholics from disabilities. In England the rapid admission of Catholics into offices of state and into the army, the swearing-in of four Catholic peers as members of the Privy Council, the large increase of troops, and even the gorgeous religious ceremonies at St James's Chapel might have been forgiven, but the public reception of a Papal Nuncio, the attempt to dictate to the authorities of the Universities whom they should elect as their Provost and Fellows, the King's tyrannical interference in Church matters, and, above all, his appointment of Tyrconnel, a strict and over-zealous Catholic, as Commander of the forces in Ireland, were too sudden and marked to be borne. A storm of opposition arose, which culminated in a renewal of the correspondence with William of Orange, who had long been watching from the Hague the career of his father-in-law and the course of events in England. It had not helped to lighten the difficulties of James that in the very year of his accession (1685) the policy of toleration in France had been abandoned, and the dragonnades or butchery of the Protestants by dragoons let loose upon the province of Languedoc were at their height; nor that in the same year the Edict of Nantes, which afforded protection to the Huguenots, was revoked. In six weeks eighty thousand Protestants were "whipped back" into the Church of Rome, and Englishmen saw over four hundred thousand Huguenots, many of them peaceful and industrious citizens, driven to take refuge on her shores by French tyranny.[6]

[6] Saint-Simon says about those who adjured: "From torture to adjuration and from that to communion there was often only twenty-four hours' distance, and executioners were the conductors and witnesses of the converts." E. Pilastre, La Religion au temps du duc de Saint-Simon (1909), pp. 291-292.

Neither Charles II nor James II could be called bigots. Charles II had endeavoured to follow a path of reconciliation by publishing in 1672 his Declaration of Indulgence, ordering that "all manner of penal laws on matters ecclesiastical against whatever sort of Nonconformists or recusants" should be suspended. Though the desire of Charles may have been to effect the relief of the Catholics, the Declaration permitted to them only the private exercise of their religion, while it permitted public worship to be held by Nonconformists. Among the multitudes of persons who profited by this measure the Quakers were specially numerous. These quiet, peaceful, determined people, who refused to take oaths or bear arms, were a source of constant irritation to their rulers; they went to prison without a murmur, and held immovably to their tenets alike in times of toleration and of persecution.[7] In Ireland a Quaker was held to be "worse than a Papist." Now they came back in thousands with the other Nonconformists from the gaols where they had lain since the Act of Uniformity was re-imposed in 1661. But the liberal views of King Charles were not shared by his Commons. They suspected a new "Popish plot" and refused supplies until the Declaration of Indulgence was withdrawn. Not content with this, they forced the King to sign the Test Act of 1673, requiring the oaths of allegiance and supremacy from every one holding office, civil or military, with a declaration against transubstantiation and the reception of the Sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England. The results were startling. James, the King's brother, then Duke of York, resigned his post as Admiral of the Fleet, and the resignations of hundreds of others in high civil and military offices followed. The people took this as a confirmation of their fears. They saw their King and Queen, and their future king and queen, all open or secret members of the Church which they were determined should not rule in England and, moreover, in close alliance with Catholic France, from which source Charles was not ashamed to draw a pension to strengthen him in independence of his own Parliament. During the ten years that followed the country gave itself up to one of those fits of uncontrollable panic that occasionally seize upon the populace of England. The panic was carefully engineered. Several supposed Popish plots, of which that of Oates in 1678 was the first, were invented to keep up the public terror. "The aversion to Popery had become in the English mind a sort of mania,"[8] and it was easy to impose upon it with the most absurd inventions. One wild tale succeeded another, with the result of making the religion of the Duke of York execrated and the determination to exclude him from the throne more than ever fixed. But in the end the desire to preserve the dynasty so lately restored prevailed over even these panic fears, and when Charles died his brother succeeded to the throne without opposition.

[7] Somers' Tracts (1813), ix, p. 28, seq.

[8] J. R. Seeley, Growth of British Policy (1895), ii, 181.

The moment at which James II became King was eminently one for prudent and conciliatory action. But James was neither prudent nor conciliatory, and the risings in Scotland under Argyll and in the west of England under Monmouth were symptoms of the growing discontent. James would make no concessions in what he believed to be matters of conscience, and on the day of the acquittal of the Seven Bishops from the Tower a formal invitation to come over and take the crown was sent to the Prince of Orange, James's Protestant son-in-law. The flight of James to France and the defection of his English supporters, even among the members of his own family, threw the King once more upon the hospitality of the French monarch, and the long exile at Saint Germain, though broken by attempts to regain his crown, began with the arrival of the flying King in December 1688. To the English the flight of James brought his power to an end; but to the Irish Saint Germain became, for the next fifty years, the centre of their interests and the cradle of their hopes. To James, on the other hand, Ireland was the one possible gateway through which he might return to England and recover his English throne. When the day of effort came he did not fail to utilize it. A Jacobean onlooker of the day remarks of James: "The King feared the Deity so much that he sacrificed his crown, life, and all that he had in the world at the altar of that holy fear."[9] The cynical remark contains the secret of the revolution of 1688. He had so "forced some wheels that he found the whole machine stop."[10]

[9] Tract called "A Light to the Blind," in Gilbert, A Jacobite Narrative of the War in Ireland, 1688-91 (1892). The tract has also been printed in the Royal Historical Manuscripts Commission's Tenth Report, Pt. v. (1885).

[10] J. S. Clarke, James II, ii, 156-157.

It has been the great misfortune of English rule over Ireland that changes of dynasty and changes of government which have grown out of some necessity of state in England and are acceptable to the people of that country have been at times totally opposed to the needs and wishes of the people of the sister country. In England, where the Catholic population was a small minority of the entire nation, the accession of a Protestant monarch seemed to the bulk of the nation a matter of paramount importance; the choice of William of Orange was, in fact, that of the people at large, however determined they were to put limits to his sovereign power. In Ireland no such need was felt. In spite of confiscations and plantations the Catholics were still in a large majority. Out of a total population of about 1,100,000 at the Restoration, some 800,000 were Catholics, the remainder being Protestants of all denominations, including members of the Established Church, Presbyterians, and Nonconformists. All had suffered in turn under the various Acts for the regulation of religion which the reign of Charles had seen passed in England, the Catholics perhaps least of all, for Ormonde's government had been, under Charles's direction, a lenient one. But during what may be called the years of the "Popish panic" in England, from 1678 to 1683, when imaginary plots were ascribed to the Papists of both countries, and wild, unfounded rumours were industriously spread and readily believed, measures of extraordinary severity were passed in quick succession. The most distinguished victim was Dr. Oliver Plunket, the revered Primate of Armagh, whose exemplary life and scholarly character made him as respected among Protestants as Bishop Bedell had been among Catholics forty years before. He was accused of being implicated in the invented plot of Titus Oates, and was brought to London and executed at Tyburn in 1681.[11] Some renegade friars whom he had reprimanded were suborned to swear away his life, when no witness, Protestant or Catholic, would appear against him from his own diocese.

[11] Moran, Memoirs of the Most Rev. Oliver Plunket; W. P. Burke, Irish Priests in the Penal Times, 1660-1760 (1914), p. 78, seq.

In the seventeenth century, Irish Catholicism stood with the bulk of the people for conservatism to the Throne, while England had passed rapidly from monarchy to republicanism, then through a military despotism and back to monarchy, only to overthrow the Stuart dynasty a second time in favour of a foreign king—all this in the course of less than half a century. A foreign observer remarked of the English of this period that they were a nation "dont la légèreté est connue; ils changent souvent d'idées."[12] The remark was equally true of the internal and external policies of the nation. But Ireland, through all these changes, stood unwaveringly behind the Stuarts, supplying money and troops as they were called for, following them into exile, suffering at their hands one disillusion and disappointment after another, but ready to welcome back James II when he fled forsaken by his friends and his nearest relatives on the arrival of William III. They welcomed him, indeed, with enthusiasm as the first of the kings that, as they believed, had visited their shores since Henry II; the brief visits of John and Richard II having faded in the course of centuries from the popular recollection.

[12] Torci, quoted in Seeley, Growth of British Policy, ii, 274, and see ibid., ii, 169.

On March 12, 1689, James landed at Kinsale, attended by a French fleet of over thirty warships, with thirteen attendant vessels of 2,223 guns and 13,000 seamen, and provided with 500,000 crowns in money. He was met at Cork by his Viceroy, Tyrconnel, and they reached Dublin on March 24, where they were received with expressions of joy. During the events that led up to and succeeded the visit of James, Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnel, was the most conspicuous figure in Irish affairs. He had been appointed Viceroy in 1686 in succession to Lord Clarendon, son of the Chancellor and historian of the Rebellion, and thus a kinsman to the King.

Clarendon was a Protestant, and when the King became possessed with the design to make Ireland his place of refuge if the English should deprive him of his throne, he recalled Clarendon and appointed Tyrconnel, who had long really held the reins as Commander-in-Chief in Ireland, in his place. The new Viceroy was of good Anglo-Irish family, son of Sir William Talbot, who had been a representative lawyer of the Confederate party during the reign of James I. The Duke of Berwick says of him that he was a man of experience of the world, and, as the Duke of York's retainer, accustomed to good company.[13] " He was a man of very good sense, very obliging, but immoderately vain and full of cunning." Hamilton [14] describes him as "one of the largest and most powerful-looking men in England...with a brilliant and handsome appearance and something of nobility, not to say haughtiness, in his manners." He had had an extraordinary history. He was in Drogheda when Cromwell sacked the city, and was wounded and left for dead, but managed to escape in a woman's clothes, and made his way to Spain and Flanders, where he attached himself to the fortunes of the Duke of York; on whose return to England he became a gentleman of James's bedchamber.

[13] Memoirs of the Duke of Berwick (1779), i, 94-95.

[14] A. Hamilton, Memoirs of Grammont, ed. Sir W. Scott (1905), pp. 243-249; 295-298.

Handsome, reckless, and intriguing, "fighting Dick Talbot" or "lying Dick Talbot," as he was styled by his friends and enemies, became the talk of the town. His amours with the Court beauties, Lady Shrewsbury, Miss Hamilton (Lady Grammont), whom he married as his second wife, and Fanny Jennings, were varied by fighting in wars or in duels. On one occasion he called out Ormonde, and was clapped, not for the first time, into the Tower. But on Ormonde's recall from Ireland his regiment was given to Talbot, who soon afterwards was placed at the head of the Irish army. He lost no time in endeavouring to bring to pass his own prophecy that the Catholics would soon be in power and would pay off old scores. When he took leave of the Irish Privy Councillors on going to wait on King James at Chester to have his appointment confirmed, he characteristically told them that he had put the sword into their hands, and he prayed God to damn them all if they ever parted from it![15] He disbanded the Protestant militia and drove thousands of Protestant soldiers and officers out of the army, Ormonde's regiment among the rest. They fled, many of them, to Holland, and came back with William to fight the battle of the Boyne. The corporations and the army were made predominantly Catholic, and Catholic sheriffs, judges, and magistrates were appointed all over the country, Protestants being removed to make room for them. Tyrconnel followed the example of James in trying to force a Catholic Provost on Trinity College, Dublin. Finding themselves in the hands of men who showed every sign of making life in Ireland impossible, many Protestants left the country.

[15] King, State of the Protestants in Ireland, (1692), p. 39.

Rumours of intended massacres filled the land, memories of "the 1641" were revived, and a forged letter to Lord Mount-Alexander, warning him of a general rising, confirmed the fears of the Protestants. The result of the flight of the Protestant industrial classes is shown in a letter written from Dublin in 1689 which said that in eighteen months Tyrconnel had reduced Ireland from a place of briskest trade and the best-paid rents in Christendom to ruin and desolation.[16] He kept constantly in touch with France, and the French generals with whom he fought were friendly to him and never failed to speak well of him. D'Avaux said that "Tyrconnel was as zealous for King Louis as any French Viceroy could be." This was the condition of things when James arrived to win back his English crown by way of Ireland. His Jacobite chronicler insists that the eyes of the King were constantly fixed on this one point. He had not come to Ireland for any Irish purpose, but solely to regain his English crown. His affection for England breaks out at inconvenient moments. When d'Avaux hastened to James with the cheering news, as he conceived it to be, that the French fleet had beaten the English fleet, James burst out, "C'est bien la première fois, donc." No ingratitude or provocation, he often declared, should ever induce him to take the least step contrary to the interest of the English nation, which he ever did and must look upon as his own. In his Parliament in Dublin, the so-called "Patriot Parliament" of 1689, he could hardly be induced to abrogate the laws against his co-religionists,[17] "lest it might alienate from him the hearts of his Protestant subjects in England, whom he always courted"; and the huge Act of Attainder against the Protestant landowners, which was designed to repair his brother's unjust Act of Settlement, was wrung from him against his will. It is not, however, beside the mark to recall that James himself, as Duke of York, had been one of the largest profiteers by the Act, for under it he became possessed of over 120,000 acres of the best land in the country, recovered from Cromwell's regicides. This was not, however, the plea he put forward for the retention of the Settlement; he felt that the Act would drive from him his Protestant subjects without satisfying his Catholic adherents.[18] "Alas!" he exclaimed, as he signed this Bill, which went contrary to all his declarations of tolerance, "I am fallen into the hands of a people who ram that and many other things down my throat."[19]

[16] Chief Justice Keating's letter to King James.

[17] Charles O'Kelly, Macariae Excidium, ed. J. C. O'Callaghan, pp. 34, 36. This curious tract is written in the form of an allegory, the places and character's mentioned in it being introduced under feigned names. The writer was a colonel in James's Army and an eyewitness of the events he relates. A cheap edition, with the actual names, has been published by Count Plunkett and Rev. Edmund Hogan, under the title The Jacobite War in Ireland (1894).

[18] His reasons are given in Clarke, James II, ii, 355-361.

[19] C. Leslie, Answer to a Book entitled The State of the Protestants in Ireland, (1692), pp. 100, 125.

As an Act condemning to death and confiscation the persons and properties of over two thousand human beings, in and out of the country, this Bill of Attainder is probably one of the most extraordinary documents ever drafted. It seems more like an indiscriminate act of vengeance than a legal memorandum. It is full of errors in personal and place names, and the same names occur in different parts as subject to different penalties. It includes men of all ranks, from the Duke of Ormonde and the Earls of Cork, Roscommon, Meath, Drogheda, Leinster, Inchiquin, etc., down to merchants, yeomen, clerks, tailors, hosiers, brewers, and others of the trading classes, all, in fact, who were known or suspected of being in sympathy with or actively helping the party of the Prince of Orange.[20] Even the names of some of the supporters of James occur in it by mistake. Religion is not mentioned in it, but its general intention was to restore to the families of the old Catholic holders the lands taken from them by the Cromwellian settlement, for the recovery of which they had in vain looked to Charles II. It was preceded by a reversal of the Act of Settlement; it swept away 12,000,000 acres from the Protestants and from those Catholics who had in many cases purchased lands from them, and drove away in terror a multitude of owners, who now followed the fifteen hundred families who had already taken refuge in Scotland under Tyrconnel's administration So far as this Bill related to the restoration of properties to the original owners it cannot be said to be wholly unjust, but it was accompanied by a general condemnation to death, and it was as indiscriminate as any previous Act passed by the dictators of the country's fortunes. James himself said that the great improvement made in many of the estates under their new owners had so enhanced their value that the old possessors could have obtained an equal profit to that lost by their ancestors even if a competent income had been left to the new purchasers from the results of their own labours.[21] But the party uppermost at the moment was determined to take every advantage of the opportunity afforded to them to recover "not only their fathers' estates, but whatever else they had it in their power to enrich themselves by." "Reckoning themselves sure of their game...they thought of nothing but settling themselves in riches and plenty by breaking the Act of Settlement."[22] These are the comments of their own prince, who found himself embarrassed by the importunity of his Irish subjects and forced by them into acts certain to alienate his English supporters, thus risking the defeat of his main ambition to recover his English throne.

[20] Of the copies of these lists in existence, all differ from each other in numbers as well as in details. Harris, Life of William III, Appendix, pp. xliv-lvi gives 2461 names, but in this list some names are repeated twice; the London Gazette of July 1, 1689, records 2209 names. King, State of the Protestants in Ireland, gives a smaller number. For the terms of the Act see a tract entitled An Account of the Transactions of the late K. James in Ireland, (1690).

[21] J. S. Clarke, James II, ii, 358.

[22] Ibid., ii, 354.

The Bill, which was directed against those "notoriously joined in the rebellion and invasion of the Prince of Orange or who had been slain in the rebellion, and all those absenting themselves in England," as being implicated in his attempt, only gave the accused seven weeks in which to appear and stand their trial for treason. The delays in printing the Bill shortened even this brief period, and many of the accused must have seen it first in the London Gazette. A point which infuriated King James was that the Bill deprived him of his right, as sovereign, to pardon any of the accused, thus taking from him one of the main privileges and undoubted rights of the Crown. The flight of the King after the battle of the Boyne brought to an end the designs of his Irish supporters. Had he been victor he would undoubtedly have been called upon to put these Bills into effect, and Ireland would have seen another transference of property on a wholesale scale. Whether the death sentences would have been carried out it is impossible to know; in any case, there would have been an era of Catholic instead of Protestant ascendency. The Irish Parliament of James II met on May 7, 1689, while the siege of Derry was proceeding, and sat till July 18. Twenty-eight seats were vacant, because the occupants were on the fighting front. The 224 members who were returned represented every party in Ireland, except Ulster, which was in rebellion against James and fighting for the Prince of Orange.

Protestants and Catholics, English, Anglo-Irish, and old Irish for the first time since Henry VIII sat together in an Irish Parliament in Dublin. Members of the families of the O'Neills, O'Reillys, Maguires, and MacCarthys, the O'Tooles and O'Byrnes of Leinster, and the Kirwins, Blakes, and Martins of Connacht, sat with the Plunkets, Barnewells, and Butlers of the Pale. In the Upper House fifty-four members sat,[23] of whom four were dignitaries of the Protestant Church. Their leader was the notorious Anthony Dopping, Bishop of Meath, who led the opposition; Tyrconnel, recently created a Duke, being the leader of the temporal Peers. The new creations were the Lord Chancellor Fitton, who now became Lord Gosworth; Colonel MacCarthy, created Lord Mountcashel, soon to be known as the colonel of the famous "Mountcashel's Brigade"; Browne, who became Lord Kenmare; and Bourke, son of Lord Clanricarde, who was created Lord Bofin. Another afterwards famous name was that of Sir Daniel O'Brien, Lord Clare, who led "Clare's Brigade" in many a fight in the service of France. The Protestants in the Lower House were few, but this is not surprising when we remember that most of them were in sympathy with or in arms for William against James. Two of them were returned for Trinity College, Dublin. To the Irish nation, James was still rightful King of England and Ireland, come over to regain his crown, and the followers of William were regarded as rebels fighting against their lawful sovereign. Compared with the Dublin Parliaments of the past it might well be accounted the first really representative Irish assembly. It sat, too, under the personal authority of the Sovereign and in his presence. Among the thirty-five Acts passed by this Parliament were the Act of Recognition of James as Sovereign of England and Ireland, an Act for liberty of conscience, an Act repealing the Acts of Settlement and Explanation, an Act removing "all disabilities from the natives of this kingdom," and Acts to restrain counterfeit coinage, to raise money, to regulate tithes and rent, and to encourage industries.

[23] This is the calculation made by Thomas Davis in his The Patriot Parliament of 1689, but he seems to have included some who were absent. No Catholic Bishop was called to attend. The Acts of this Parliament were expunged by the Parliament of 1695 and ordered to be burned.

The Acts concerning tithes and rent were particularly calculated to relieve injustices in the past, and were far more considerate than those passed by later Irish Parliaments. Tithe was to be levied as hitherto, but was to be paid by Catholics and Protestants each to their own clergy. The levies made for the King's war expenses were to be paid by the occupier, but, where the land was let at half its value or less, the tenant was to pay only half the tax, "owing to the difficulty found by the tenants to pay their rents in these distracted times." But by far the most important Act of this assembly was that declaring anew the independence of the Irish Parliament, and repudiating the binding clause of Poynings' Act. The preamble runs as follows: "Whereas his Majesty's realm of Ireland is, and hath always been, a distinct kingdom from that of his Majesty's realm of England...it is hereby declared that no Act of Parliament passed or to be passed in the Parliament of England, though Ireland should be therein mentioned, can be or shall be in any way binding in Irelaand, excepting such Acts passed or to be passed in England as are or shall be made into law by the Parliament of Ireland." No writs of appeal were to be allowed from the Irish courts to England, the High Court of Parliament in Ireland being the supreme tribunal in Irish cases. Here we have clearly laid down that independence of the Irish Parliament for the recognition of which so strenuous a contest was to be fought out during the following century. It supplied the text on which Molyneux, Swift, and Grattan were to preach the sermon.

END OF CHAPTER IX

X.—JAMES II's IRISH CAMPAIGN

A a military adventure the stay of James in Ireland was not creditable to a man who had served in three campaigns with the great Turenne, fought against Conde and Spain, and been Admiral of the Fleet in England. In watching his Irish campaign we are gripped by the same sense of unreality which pervades much of the course of the Confederate Wars. The irresolution of the King and of Tyrconnel, the treacheries of the French generals, the jealousies of the leaders, and the blunders or faithlessness of many of the officers are severely criticized by the Jacobite Colonel, Charles O'Kelly, who describes the campaigns through which he fought on the side of the King in Ireland. The conclusion to which he comes is that the errors of James proceeded "from a wrong maxim of State" which many believed he took, namely, "that the only way to recover England was to lose Ireland."[1] He was persuaded that England, being chiefly afraid of Ireland as a Catholic stronghold, would immediately recall him when his French and Irish armies were well beaten. "This grand design," however, not being of a nature to commend itself to "le Grand Monarque," who had poured out money on behalf of his ally, James took a less conspicuous way; he determined that as soon as possible the French minister, Count d'Avaux, who had been sent with him to report to Louis XIV the progress of events,[2] and also the French general, de Rosen, should be removed out of Ireland.

[1] Macariae Excidium, pp. 42-45; and see J. T. Gilbert, A Jacobite Narrative of the War in Ireland, 1688-1691 (1892), p. 63; C. Leslie, Answer to a book entitled, The State of the Protestants in Ireland, (1692), pp. 7, 8.

[2] Negotiations de M. le Comte d'Avaux en Irlande, 1689-90 (1860). This correspondence gives an almost daily report of events in Ireland from the French point of view. It was privately printed by the English Foreign Office; and cf. Macarice Excidium, p. 45.

A campaign in which the main object of the commanders was to lose the war, and in which the prime purpose of the King was to cashier his generals, becomes uninteresting. James had everything in his favour when he landed. William had not expected this move and was caught unprepared; it was more than a year before he could be ready to cross to Ireland. The whole of the country owned the authority of James except the towns of Enniskillen and Derry, which were practically English Protestant strongholds, but James firmly believed that he had only to show himself before their walls to recall these Englishmen to their obedience, and "to protect them from the ill-treatment which he apprehended they might receive from the Irish." He therefore posted straight to Derry, which was surrounded by an army chiefly composed of Rapparees with a thousand regulars under General Hamilton, and summoned the garrison to surrender. It seemed likely that they might consent, for the city was in a state of confusion and without a leader; but the appointment of Major Baker and of the vigorous and war-like George Walker, Rector of Donaghmore, to be Governors, decided the citizens on resistance, and the appearance of King James was greeted with fierce cries of "No surrender," while a chance volley fired from a bastion struck down the officer riding beside him. The whole place became a hive of industry, every citizen taking his part in the defence of the town, which, weak as it was and crowded with refugees, made a gallant defence and for nearly four months sustained all the horrors of a close siege.[3]

[3] Rev. George Walker, The Siege of Londonderry, ed. P. Dwyer (1893).

The actual siege began on April 19, 1689, and it was not until July 31 that the besieging army, foiled at last, marched away towards Strabane. The city had been invested for 103 days, and had refused every offer of King James, though they had lost from disease, hunger, and wounds 10,361 persons, and had been reduced to the utmost extremities of want. On the other side, the investing army had lost before the walls a hundred officers and over eight thousand men. The incidents of the siege are well known. The weakness of Lundy, the Commander-in-Chief, and his attempt to betray the city to James, the erecting of the boom across the Foyle to prevent relief by sea, and the sailing away of the ships that were bringing food to the famished inhabitants almost reduced them to despair. The sturdy patience with which all sufferings were endured well merit the encomium of Berwick, the natural son of James and one of his youngest commanders, who remarked of his opponents: "The most desperate expedients of the Irish commanders were defeated by a heroism which has not been surpassed in ancient or modern days." The brutal conduct of de Rosen, who proposed to drive in all the Protestant inhabitants of the surrounding districts, that they might die of starvation under the walls within sight of the hungry people within, excited the King's anger and caused him to press for his recall. "Having done what he did at Londonderry," James found him incapable henceforth of serving him usefully. De Rosen was equally disliked by Tyrconnel, as being a better general than himself, and he was shortly afterward replaced by the Count de Lauzun, who brought over an army of veteran troops for which Tyrconnel exchanged six thousand half-trained Irish soldiers; these he proposed to send out under the command of Justin MacCarthy, Lord Mountcashel, of whose popularity and skill as an officer the Viceroy had shown himself jealous.

Misfortune followed James from the first. An attempt to capture Enniskillen was followed by the rout of his troops at Newtown-Butler, owing, it was said, to a mistake in the word of command, which was understood to order a retreat. Mountcashel was captured, and Sarsfield, who here first comes upon the scene, and who had raised by his credit two thousand men in Connacht, was forced to retire to Athlone, leaving the province exposed to the enemy. Sarsfield was already becoming known as a young captain trusted and beloved by his soldiers, but this was no recommendation to his superiors, who seem to have resolutely held him from any post of honour or responsibility. Mountcashel escaped from his confinement, but only to find that he was to be sent abroad with the Irish troops. Thus, very early in the war, James lost a capable officer, who was forced by the jealousy of a fellow-countryman to seek in foreign service those laurels for his famous "Mountcashel's Brigade" which they might have gained at home. James still had in his army the splendid fighting nucleus of Clare's dragoons and Dillon's horse, besides Berwick's guards and five thousand French foot. But under the irresolute and blundering command of the King and Tyrconnel they proved ineffectual and useless. The summer passed without any striking military event. But signs that active preparations were being made for the final struggle were visible when, on August 13, 1689, an army of fifteen thousand men landed at Bangor, Co. Down, under the command of the Duke of Schomberg. This veteran of eighty-two years of age had been driven out of France, in which country he had risen to be a Marshal in the army, by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, after which he took service under William of Orange, now become King of England. He brought over an army composed of many nationalities, which captured Carrickfergus and Charlemont, but during that miserable winter it had no further successes. Set down in camp in Dundalk, the bad food, the moistness of the climate, and the lazy carelessness of the English, who would not build for themselves the necessary shelters, wrought havoc with Schomberg's fine army. It was fast melting away with disease, lice, and scurvy.[4] The ships and the great hospital in Belfast were crowded with sick men, and between November and the following May over 3,760 were buried from this hospital alone.

[4] G. Story, Impartial History of the Wars in Ireland (1693), pp. 27-31, 35-39.

Now was the chance for James to strike, but though his army lay not far off the winter passed away, and no move was made. "Our general would not risk anything," writes the French Dumont, "nor King James venture anything." James was occupied in Dublin with his Irish Parliament, where his young officers were amusing themselves, "the ladies having expected them with great impatience."[5] Tyrconnel was disbanding the troops that should have saved his master's cause, he having "no great inclination" for the fighting men [6] of which they were composed. Thus the chance was allowed to slip by and on June 14, 1690, William III landed at Carrickfergus and was immediately joined by Schomberg. Two days later James set out to meet him, resolved, as he had said fully a year before, "not to be tamely walked out of Ireland, but to have one blow for it at least."[7] He marched north to the passes which divided Ulster from the south, but instead of awaiting William's advance in this favourable position, he retreated again across the Boyne, drawing up his forces at the Leinster side of the river, apparently with the object of escaping more easily back to Dublin in case of defeat. Every act of the King showed a painful indecision. He posted a body of foot at the ford of Oldbridge, "not," as he says in his Memoirs, "that it was to be maintained," and he sent away his battering engines by night to Dublin, ordering his men to pull down their tents and prepare for a march before the battle began. These orders, followed by counter-orders, were not calculated to encourage inexperienced troops already dismayed by a retreat and whose only chance lay in the excitement of a vigorous onset. They look suspiciously like a confirmation of O'Kelly's view that James was not anxious to win the battle. He was at a disadvantage as regards numbers; though the accounts differ. Story and the Jacobite tract "A Light to the Blind" agree in giving the numbers of the Orange troops as 36,000 men, belonging to ten different nationalities, while James had about 20,000 or 23,000, including the French troops, but he had a marked inferiority in arms and guns.

[5] Macariae Excidium, p. 40-41.

[6] Ibid. p. 47.

[7] J. S. Clarke, Life of James II, edited from the King's own Memoirs, ii, 373.

Though the battle of the Boyne is popularly regarded as a struggle between English and Irish, few of William's English troops took part in the fight; he was doubtful whether their steadiness could be depended upon when they were face to face with their lawful king. And though it is considered as a contest between Protestant and Catholic forces, and is annually celebrated in the North as a Protestant victory, William's splendid regiment of Blue Guards, which so largely contributed to his success, was chiefly made up of Dutch Catholic soldiers. When James asked them how they could serve on an expedition designed to destroy their own religion one of them replied that "his soul was God's but his sword belonged to the Prince of Orange." As though to complete the contrariness which meets us here, as at every point in Irish history, William's army marched with sprigs of green in their caps, while the Jacobites wore strips of white paper. The battle, fought on July 1, 1690, (July 12, New Style) centred in the contest for the ford of Oldbridge, which was gallantly maintained by the troops of James. The enemy had the advantage of the high ground on the north of the Boyne and their line stretched from the fordable shallows of the river toward Slane on their right and in the direction of Drogheda on the left. In the early morning William narrowly escaped being cut off. He was seated on a grassy slope above the river watching his men as they marched in. His officers, Schomberg, Ormonde, Count Solmes, and others, were around him. On the opposite bank were the Jacobite officers, on horseback, riding by to watch the muster of the Williamite forces. They included Tyrconnel, Sarsfield, Parker, and Lauzun, besides the Duke of Berwick, who, before his twentieth year, had fought in more than one European campaign, and whose bravery was said to be always conspicuous as his conduct was always deficient. They were followed by some dragoons, who, planting two small field-pieces near the river, suddenly let fly a couple of shots, one of which grazed William's shoulder just as he was mounting his horse. The rumour spread, even to Paris, that he was killed; but, making light of the wound, he remained in the saddle till nightfall.

The main encounter was on the following day. A portion of the Williamite army was sent round to the right to capture the fords near Slane, with the intention, if the crossing at Oldbridge could be carried and the army of James forced back, of cutting off his retreat. If this had been done the rout of his army must have been complete. When the fords of Slane had been secured, in spite of a vigorous defence by Sir Neal O'Neill's dragoons, the main action was fought out at Oldbridge. Schomberg, in command of the centre, saw his Danes and Huguenots wavering under the fierce attack of the Irish led by Colonel Hamilton. Plunging into the river, the old General cried aloud to his Huguenot followers: "Allons, messieurs, voila vos persecuteurs." In the confused mêlée that succeeded these inflammatory words, a band of Irish horse pushed its way through the main body of the enemy, and the old Marshal fell, with two sabre-cuts in his head and a shot through his body. Dr. Walker, of Derry, fell not far from his commander. But William, riding up and down between his regiments, succeeded in crossing lower down and attacked the Irish on the flank. They only gave way in the late evening after furious fighting. The news was brought to James in a church at the summit of the Hill of Donore, from which place of safety he had watched the action of his left wing. He ordered a general charge before the ill news should reach the troops beneath him, but Lauzun advised him to take his own regiment of horse and some dragoons and make the best of his way to Dublin, leaving to him the conduct of the retreat. The King, though he had often complained that all that the French seemed to care for was to get him out of the country, was at last persuaded to take Lauzun's advice. He arrived in Dublin that night. Lady Tyrconnel, as she received James at the Castle gate and conducted him up the staircase, asked what his Majesty would take for supper. He replied by explaining what a breakfast he had got, which made him have but little stomach for his supper. Next morning, sending for the Mayor and sheriffs, he told them that in England he had an army which durst have fought, but they proved false and deserted him; and that here he had an army which was loyal enough, but would not stand by him.[8]

[8] Story op. cit., p. 88; Harris, History of William of Orange (1749), p. 271; C. Leslie, op. cit., Appendix No. 21, p. 71.

Lauzun followed the King's leisurely retreat along the Irish coast and hurried him out of the country. James himself was the first to announce to the French Court the news of his defeat. Berwick says that the French officers, in coming to Ireland, "had but three objects in view: to get there, to fight, and to return." They undoubtedly felt that the quickest way to accomplish their third object was to send the King off before them.

So far as James's prospects of regaining his crown were concerned, his Irish career closed with the battle of the Boyne. He never returned, and in spite of a regular correspondence with his friends in Ireland, his future designs seemed more likely to prosper if conducted through Scotland or directly with England. But the Irish fought on under better leadership, and they emulated at Limerick the feats accomplished by their opponents at Derry. After the Boyne, where cavalry support had been withheld from the hard-pressed foot until too late, the main body of the French foot made an orderly retreat, covered by the Irish dragoons, who fought a rearward action till they reached the Pass of Duleek, where they turned and offered battle. But William "thought it more prudent to halt and suffer them to march away," being probably as anxious to assist his father-in-law's escape from Ireland as he had been to aid his flight from London. To have had James on his hands as a prisoner would have created an embarrassing position, considering the nearness of their relationship. He permitted the King to "be his own messenger as to what had happened to him at the Boyne."[9]

[9] J. T. Gilbert, A Jacobite Narrative of the War in Ireland, 1688-1691 p. 105.

The rapid surrender of the Southern towns contrasts strangely with their resistance when, just forty years before, Cromwell had stood at their gates. They may have remembered their fate when they defied the Protector. Drogheda, Wexford, Kilkenny and Carrick, Clonmel, Duncannon, and Waterford surrendered one after another or were abandoned. Dublin, which in March had given a royal welcome to King James, now, on July 6, received King William.

The wonderful rally made at Limerick after the disheartenment that followed the retreat from the Boyne proves the truth of Sarsfield's exclamation: "Low as we now are, change Kings with us and we will fight it over again." By an almost simultaneous movement the army converged on Limerick, and Tyrconnel and Lauzun, who were playing a double game, and doing all they could to induce the leaders to submit to William, were no less chagrined than William himself at the sight of the great concentration of troops before the city. Having no confidence that a treaty with the English would be carried out, the Irish were resolved to "put their backs to the walls of Limerick and there engage in a regular fight for the whole kingdom," and gentlemen, burgesses, and farmers gathered from all parts "to share in the glory of that day."[10] The city was weak and ill fortified, without ramparts save "some miserable little towers without ditches," but though the men who defended it were poorly clad and without money they were fighting for all that they were and all that they had. The siege of Limerick and battle of Aughrim were the final important contests of Irish Ireland.

[10] J. T. Gilbert, op. cit., p. 109.

Tyrconnel, who had been left in charge when James abandoned Ireland, "sank prodigiously," as Berwick tells us, "after the battle of the Boyne, being as irresolute in his mind as he was unwieldy in person."[11] But it was not only that Tyrconnel was past his prime; he had made up his mind not to oppose the Prince of Orange in his conquest of Ireland. He shipped away his wife with all his own wealth and the King's treasure to France, there to spread untrue news of the defeat of the Irish army, and to discourage Louis from sending reinforcements. "Lying Dick Talbot," as he might now be well called, had made his terms with William, "leaving to Providence the restoration of their King." When the officers unanimously rejected his advice he appointed a Frenchman, M. Boisseleau, as Governor of Limerick, with the Duke of Berwick, Dorington, Sarsfield, Luttrell, Wauchop, and Maxwell as commanders, and sent off the rest of the forces to Connacht. He himself withdrew to Galway, thirty miles off, to arrange for the shipping of the French brigade to France, they having declared that they would stay no longer now that the King was gone. On August 9, the city of Limerick, having refused to surrender on William's summons, was invested and the siege began.

[11] Memoirs of the Duke of Berwick (1779), i, 95.

The great exploit of the early part of the siege was Sarsfield's capture of William's convoy of guns which was being drawn up towards his camp for use in battering the walls. News was brought that they had arrived within seven miles of the camp and Sarsfield, who had held the passes of the Shannon the whole winter against William's army, and knew every fordable spot, determined that they should go no further. With five hundred dragoons he passed the Shannon at dead of night and, following up its course, recrossed at an undefended ford near Killaloe, some miles above William's camp. Quietly and noiselessly, guided by Rapparees, they pursued their way, till they came where the convoy of great cannon was stationed. Overpowering the guard, they piled carriages and wagons, ammunition and provisions, into one heap, filling the guns with powder and digging their mouths into the ground. Then, after fixing a train to the powder, they vanished into the darkness. A few minutes later, when a party of Orange soldiers sent out by William was drawing near to the spot, a terrific explosion was heard, the guns being actually blown into the air and the whole heap destroyed. Some of the guard who had slept that night "awoke in another world." Sarsfield is the hero of the siege of Limerick. Tyrconnel would readily have omitted him altogether from his list of officers, but for the fury of the soldiers, of whom he was the idol. As it was, his name was placed last. Sarsfield laid the plans and inspired the besieged. Berwick tells us that he was a gentleman by birth with an estate of nearly £2,000 a year, a man of amazing stature, "utterly void of sense, very good-natured, and very brave."[12] He had served in France, and as a lieutenant of lifeguards in England. He was to his countrymen the ideal of the fearless and dashing officer, and the exploit of the guns so much raised his reputation that scheming men like Luttrell, by constant flatteries, came near to turn his head, making him believe "that he was the greatest general in the world." Tyrconnel, on returning from France, brought him the title of Earl of Lucan from the King. But, as in Derry, the valour of the townspeople was undermined by the treachery of their commanders. The chief traitor was Colonel Luttrell, a capable but utterly unscrupulous officer, who bent his energies to aiding William and overthrowing Tyrconnel. Though a personal friend to Luttrell, Sarsfield was not so "void of sense" as to be ignorant of what was going on, and he gave a short answer, threatening to expose the cabals of these dangerous incendiaries if they did not mend their ways.[13]

[12] Ibid., i, pp. 95-96.

[13] After the capitulation of Limerick, Luttrell received 2,000 crowns from the Prince of Orange, with his elder brother's estate; but he met his reward in 1717, when he was assassinated by some unknown hand in the streets of Dublin.

"Never," says Colonel O'Kelly, "was a town better attacked and better defended than the city of Limerick. William left nothing unattempted that the art of war, the skill of a good captain, and the valour of veteran soldiers could put in execution to gain the place; and the Irish omitted nothing that courage and constancy could practise to defend it."[14] The siege ended in a terrific assault on August 27. A large breach having been made in the wall, the foreign troops, composed of men of ten nationalities, forced their way within the walls, fighting for every inch of ground they gained, and under a storm of fire pouring on them from all sides at once. They were obliged to retire, leaving nearly two thousand of their men wounded or dead behind them. William called a council of war and ordered another attack next morning, but his men refused to move, even though he offered to lead them in person. "Highly incensed," he broke up the camp, ordered the troops into winter-quarters, and with Prince George of Denmark and the Duke of Ormonde departed to England, hastened by reports of an intended landing by James on English shores. William, like James, took ship at Duncannon. His losses had been very severe. The Danes, a force of nearly seven thousand men, lost forty-five officers. It was probably the worst repulse that William had experienced in the course of his wars. His retreating army carried away between four and five thousand sick and wounded, besides over four hundred men burned accidentally to death in hospital. When this dreadful accident occurred, the Irish troops, who were in hot pursuit, stopped short, and "rushing into the flames, saved the lives of their enemies at the hazard of their own."[15] The French also suffered severely, in one French regiment only six officers remaining in condition to do duty, seventy-one having been put out of action; the cost of the war to France had been over £18,000,000 sterling, besides the arrears due to the army.

[14] Macariae Excidium, p. 69; Contemporary Diary of the Siege of Limerick, by Colonel Richard, 1691, in Gilbert, op. cit., Appendix No. XV, pp. 282-298.

[15] J. Dalrymple, Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland, iii, p. 42.

The French official report of the fighting says of the Irish: "The Irish soldiers have not only fought, but endured with extraordinary patience all the hardships of the siege, which have been very great; they have been almost constantly under arms and they were in want of the greater part of the necessaries of life as well as of medicines for the sick and wounded." Their officers, also, are said to have "signalized themselves extremely."[16] No one was so disappointed at the result of the siege as the two Jacobite conspirators, Tyrconnel and Lauzun, who from the safe shelter of the walls of Galway were watching for the fall of the city they were bound to defend; on hearing of the raising of the siege, these inseparable friends took ship to France, each anxious to be first in throwing the blame of the disaster on the other; but Tyrconnel, by a "bountiful distribution of the King's gold," succeeded in outwitting the French general, who barely escaped a second internment in the Bastille, while the Viceroy secretly allied himself with the English interest at the French Court, though outwardly still holding to James.

[16] French official account from a Government Journal of October 17th, 1690, edited by J. C. O'Callaghan. For a similar expression of opinion by the French generals, see J. Bramhill, The Rawdon Papers (1819), p. 347.

Meanwhile, things had not been going well in Ireland. Berwick had made an abortive attack on Birr with an immense army, and Churchill, the future Duke of Marlborough, and renegade follower of James, had landed on the south coast, reducing Cork and Kinsale in a few hours. There was no regular government, for the ill-defined authority put by Tyrconnel into the hands of the young Duke of Berwick, who showed himself little fitted for responsibility and only intent on amusing himself, was not recognized by the Irish gentry, who tried to set up a senate in his place. But treachery was working everywhere; even in the senate a large party of Tyrconnel's adherents was secretly working for William, though many of them were Irish Catholics. These men of the "New Interest," as they were called, had purchased lands on James's accession from the Puritan owners, and they thought they had a better chance of retaining their acquisitions by submitting to the new Government. They dreaded the restoration of the old Irish race as much as the Puritans had done, fearing that the re-establishment of James's authority might lead to the sacrifice of their newly-acquired estates. Sarsfield, who was himself free from sordid motives, tried to mediate between the factions, but he was a soldier by trade and character and unfitted for delicate tasks of government. He signed every paper that was brought to him, believed everything that was told him, and hastened gladly back to his military camp at Athlone, delighted to find the people who had been represented to him as all at loggerheads apparently pliable and accommodating. Connacht and the West of Munster still adhered outwardly to James, and the proposed arrival of St Ruth, an officer of great experience, from France with fresh assistance from Louis gave new spirit to the Irish Army. Tyrconnel, now returned, was enjoying the bonfires, balls, and banquets organised by Galway while he waited for hunger to "constrain the obstinate Irish to hearken to the treaty with William so often proposed." On May 9, 1691, St. Ruth and the French fleet appeared off Limerick, accompanied by the Chevaliers de Tesse and d'Usson, to the joy of the old Irish and the chagrin of Tyrconnel and the New Interest.

Two military events divide the first siege of Limerick from the second. One was the capture of Athlone, a strongly fortified town lying on both sides of the Shannon, and the main pass into Connacht from Leinster. The other was the battle of Aughrim.

General Ginkel had been left by the Prince of Orange in command of his army in Ireland when he left hurriedly for England. After slight successes in various parts of Leinster, Ginkel gathered his scattered forces and on June 19, 1691, he appeared before the town of Athlone with eighteen thousand men. The citadel had been vigorously defended the year before by the Governor, Colonel Richard Grace, one of the Confederates of half a century ago; when he found that the English town, which lay on the Leinster side of the river, could not be defended he had burned it and broken down the bridge. Being summoned to surrender, he had fired a pistol over the head of the messenger, and told him that those were the terms he was out for.[17] The besieging army had finally marched away. On its return under Ginkel, the ruined English town was entered, after a fierce resistance, on the day after his arrival (June 20), the news bringing up St. Ruth to Ballinasloe, about twelve miles away. St Ruth had, since his landing, been struggling with great difficulties. He had brought very little money, and the clothes sent were so poor in quality that Tyrconnel had to don a suit himself in order to get the officers to put them on. The common soldiers were nearly naked, having had neither pay nor clothing given to them. Provisions, however, had arrived with St Ruth, in spite of the Viceroy's assurances to the French King that "an Irish army can live upon bread and water";[18] but as no boats had been provided, St Ruth was at a loss how to get them up the Shannon to Athlone.

[17] George Story, Impartial History of the Wars in Ireland (1693), p. 103; for the general history of these wars see, besides the references given, J. S. Clarke's James II, vol. ii; J. Bramhill, Rawdon Papers (1819); Sir John Dalrymple, Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland (1790), vols. ii, iii; Harris, History of William of Orange (1749).

[18] C. O'Kelly, Macariae Excidium, p. 111.

While Ginkel was organizing his army, St Ruth was galloping over the country looking for horses to carry up his provisions, one supply of which was eaten up before he could get up the next. He began to learn that "he had been more credulous than wary in his transactions with James." Tyrconnel, though his authority was supposed to be confined to civil affairs, interfered with all the French general's plans, and had the effrontery to appear at the head of the army which it was his object to betray. Neglect and divided counsels brought about the loss of the town. Ginkel, after bombarding it from the Leinster bank with terrible newly-invented engines, several times attempted to cross the river to the almost ruined town that still held out against him, but the bravery of the defenders defeated all his efforts. As fast as his men threw planks and beams across the broken arches of the bridge, they were pulled down by a soldier named Custume with eight or ten determined companions, working under fire from the enemy.[19] He was on the point of raising the siege when he received a message from the Irish side informing him that the watch that night would be held by raw recruits. Ginkel took the hint. At the tolling of the Angelus his men, in companies of sixty at a time, took the river with amazing resolution, the stream being very rapid and deep, and the Irish showering down shot upon them as they swam. They repaired the bridge, and two thousand men penetrated into the town, capturing it with much slaughter. Valiant Richard Grace lay dead with other officers among the ruins. General Mackey, praising his victorious army, said that "they were brave men, and the best of men if they would swear less." Athlone fell by treachery and carelessness combined. It is said by O'Kelly that the chief traitor was Colonel Maxwell, a Scottish officer, whom Sarsfield had a few days before publicly accused of dealings with the enemy; yet Tyrconnel insisted on giving him a command. This opening of a way into Connacht produced consternation throughout the country. St Ruth, against the advice of Sarsfield and most of the Irish leaders, drew his army to Aughrim, and there awaited battle, determined to avenge the loss of Athlone or to die.

[19] J. S. Clarke, Life of James II (1816), edited from the King's own memoirs, ii, p. 454.

The battle of Aughrim is the last pitched battle fought by Irishmen on Irish ground. Aughrim was twenty miles from Athlone, west of the Shannon, in Co. Galway. St Ruth selected an excellent position along the ridge of Kilcommedan Hill, with a morass in front and an old broken causeway on the left only wide enough for two horsemen to ride abreast. Beyond the causeway was the castle of Aughrim, which Colonel Walter Bourke was sent to occupy with two hundred men. The Irish cavalry reserve was marshalled in two lines, with Sarsfield and d'Usson commanding. The foot, who rapidly entrenched their position, were about ten thousand strong, under Dorington and Hamilton, and they fought that day with stubborn valour, to the surprise and delight of St Ruth, who had heard in France a bad account of the Irish infantry. On July 12 Ginkel's army appeared in sight, and he quickly appreciated the sternness of the task that lay before him. As often as they advanced, the English were beaten back, and at sunset the Irish foot still maintained the ground; even the advance of the cavalry, who pushed their way among the infantry holding the bog, did not cause them to flinch. The communicating trenches between their lines enabled the Irish to throw the weight of their defence on whichever side it was needed, and Colonel Earl, whose men were struggling uphill knee-deep through mud and water, was taken prisoner, and the infantry driven back almost level with their guns. The English cavalry then endeavoured to pass the narrow causeway close under the castle; this made even St Ruth exclaim "They are brave fellows; it is a pity they should be so exposed,"[20] but they managed to make good the pass and get in among the Irish on the flank. But the centre was firmly pushing back Ginkel's foot, and St. Ruth, watching the steady advance of his men from the slopes of the hill, exclaimed that he would beat the enemy back to the gates of Dublin.[21] Then, giving an order to the gunners where to direct their fire, he put himself at the head of the cavalry and turned to relieve the right flank, which was struggling with the English horse. But as he rode down the hill a cannon-shot picked him out, and he fell, throwing the cavalry into momentary confusion. The sudden halt made the ill tidings known, and as St. Ruth had kept the command entirely in his own hands there was no one prepared to take up his authority, for Sarsfield, the only officer who could have retrieved the situation, had been left, through jealousy, with his regiment far in the rear and out of sight of the action. St Ruth's French guards withdrew from the field, followed by some of the Irish horse, and though the foot still stubbornly maintained their ground they were unsupported and un-officered. Slowly they were pushed back again up the hill toward their camp, dropping in numbers as they struggled upwards. The fall of night and a heavy rain alone put an end to the slaughter and, finding themselves leaderless and under a torrent of fire on the open hillside, they gradually melted away.

[20] G. Story, Continuation of the Impartial History of the Wars in Ireland (1690), p. 132.

[21] G. Story, op. cit., p. 133.

The battle of Aughrim was followed by the surrender of Galway and Sligo, and their garrisons marched out with favourable terms to take part in the last scene of the great drama behind the walls of Limerick. With the fall of St. Ruth at Aughrim, says Colonel O'Kelly, "died the hope and good fortune of Ireland."

The short second siege of Limerick, to be ended by the treaty, was carried out amid a succession of disasters, which could not all have been accidental. The drawing off of the cavalry by Sheldon before the siege began removed the only impediment to the completion of the bridge which Ginkel was building across the Shannon; and Colonel Clifford, who was in command at the pass where the bridge was being constructed, persistently looked the other way. The schemes of Tyrconnel, who hastened to write to James that all was lost and that submission to William was the only means to save Ireland, came to a sudden end by his death from apoplexy after dining with d'Usson, the French commander, with whom, in spite of the desperate condition of Irish affairs, "he was very merry and jocose."[22] Luttrell was carrying on a secret correspondence with Ginkel, and d'Usson was eager to get home to France. Within the city Sarsfield was in vain trying to hold the townsmen in check, being as usual placed in the position where he could be of least avail, while his cavalry, who might have relieved the place, were being marched off towards Sligo by Sheldon.

[22] Tyrconnel believed that he died of poison. G. Story, op. cit., p. 187.

The condition of affairs in the besieged city is described by a native poet, David O'Bruadair, a devoted admirer of Sarsfield, to whom several of his poems refer. He was shut up in Limerick during the wars and sieges of this period. He was an adherent of the Stuarts, bitterly sarcastic against men who secured their way of retreat by going over to William's side, and lamenting the miseries of the people who were crowding into the town for shelter and safety. Later his laments were addressed to the Irish troops "sent o'er the ocean in cheerless ships" and to the clergy, many of whom were enduring cold and exposure. But he shows that the city was broken into factions and seamed with treachery. A considerable party, to which he seems to have belonged, were in favour of accepting the Articles of Capitulation, which he calls "these relief-bringing Articles"; and in this view he seems to have been of one mind with Sarsfield, who, to the astonishment and consternation of all Ireland "appeared now most active to forward the treaty and took most pains to persuade the colonels and captains to a compliance." This "sudden, unexpected, and prodigious change in Sarsfield," as brave Colonel O'Kelly calls it, had such influence that the terms were accepted with little difficulty, few like himself being determined that there should be no agreement.

Many followed Sarsfield as they would have followed him anywhere, though with reluctance and regret. He may have considered that continued resistance was useless, that the terms offered were good, and that the people were weary of war. Money, too, was being freely expended to buy over the goodwill of the officers. Yet O'Kelly feels that there was some mystery in this rapid change of feeling. O'Bruadair boldly lays the blame of the capitulation on the dissensions within the town and the universal anarchy without. The highwaymen, largely recruited from the broken regiments of James's army, were a terror to the country. They had grown from small bodies of marauders into formidable armies of irregulars, who would obey no orders save those given by their own chosen leaders, of whom the most noted at the time was Baldearg O'Donnell, a descendant of the old princely house of Ulster, who had served in Spain until the landing of William of Orange in Ireland. Then he had slipped off to his own country, and was given some troops by Tyrconnel with an indefinite commission. But O'Donnell, around whom a popular superstition grew up, on account of a prophecy that one of his name should free Ireland from the English yoke, began to form a party of his own, and Tyrconnel, who feared a combination of the Ulster Irish under one of their own race, did all he could to thwart him and render him powerless.

King James says that he had raised eight regiments of over seven thousand men "besides a rabble of irregulars that destroyed the country." Baldearg played fast and loose with all parties. He took £2,000 from Ginkel and joined his irregulars to the Williamite army, forcing old Sir Teague O'Regan to surrender Sligo, which was strongly holding for James, on September 14, 1691. He then took to the life of a Rapparee, at the head of a large band of followers. We hear of bodies of these freebooters in Connacht and the Bog of Allen numbering several hundreds at a time, who lived in the hills or islands and terrorized the country. They would meet at appointed signals, but when searched for they seemed to disappear in the long grass, dropping their arms, so that "they looked like the poorest humblest slaves in the world, and the soldiers might search till they were weary before they would find one gun." All parties united to try and put down these outlaws; even O'Bruadair says that the earth had not before known "a litter of such a kind," whose conduct had been the disgraceful cause of gallows erected like shop-signs in every town. "How that gang, who spared not man or woman, could hope to find mercy is more than the wisest know."[23] Added to these pests of society were the storekeepers and subalterns, who seized upon goods and food of all kinds under guise of the King's orders and often holding papers signed by Sarsfield, but little of whose ill-gotten gains reached the King's army. "These caterpillars," as O'Kelly calls them, came out in swarms, escorted by parties of soldiers, "searching all places both above and under ground." [24]

[23] Poems of David O'Bruadair, in a poem popularly known as "The Shipwreck" (Irish Texts Society, vol. xviii), iii, 165-181. For Baldearg and his Rapparees, see Charles O'Kelly, Macariae Excidium (1850), pp. 125 seq.; 141-143; Story, Impartial History of the Wars in Ireland (1693), pp. 152-153. Baldearg was ambitious to revive the title of Earl of Tyrconnel in his own person, which may explain the Viceroy's jealousy of him, as the actual holder of the title.

[24] C. O'Kelly, op. cit., pp. 96-97.

The country was in such a distracted state that the very thought of peace was sufficient to secure the signing of the Articles. The Articles of Capitulation, which we consider in a separate chapter, consisted of two parts, Military and Civil—the Military Clauses being signed first. Yet at the time of their presentation Limerick was not subdued, and there was news of a French fleet at sea coming to its relief. But Ginkel was anxious to close the war and get his troops back to England before the winter. On October 3, 1691, after long discussion, the Military Articles proposed by Ginkel were signed by Sarsfield, Gallmoy, Purcell, Dillon and Brown, and by the Lords Justices recently appointed to succeed Tyrconnel, on the Irish side, and by Ginkel on the other. The French generals also signed. A day or two later the French fleet sailed into Dingle Bay.

END OF CHAPTER X

XI.—AFTER LIMERICK

The Articles of Capitulation at Limerick were fair and just; James considered them even generous. But the Irish and French generals had it in their power to make almost any terms they pleased. William's army, though it had taken Thomond Bridge over the Shannon and the fort which guarded it, was as far as ever from entering the city.[1] Besides the rumours of the near approach of the French fleet to relieve the town, William's troops, which had met in Ireland with a resolute resistance such as they had not expected, were sorely needed in Flanders to check the rapid advance of the armies of Louis XIV.

[1] G. Story, Continuation of the Impartial History of the Wars in Ireland (1691), p. 276.

Berwick says that the generals of the Prince of Orange would have agreed to almost anything to put an end to the war. By the Military Articles liberty was given to any officers and soldiers to pass overseas to France or any other place they wished, with their families and goods; ships and money being provided for their embarkation. Prisoners of war were to be set free and the sick allowed to embark at a later date. In consideration of the surrender of the town the garrison was to march out with military honours, retaining their horses and a portion of their guns; the garrisons of the counties of Clare, Cork, and Kerry were to have the same terms as Limerick in every respect. But once embarked for foreign countries there was to be no return. Ginkel made it clear that any man or officer who entered the armies of France, or any other forces of King William's enemies, could never re-enter the country on pain of death; the choice to be made was final.

The men were called upon to choose whether they would go into permanent exile or enter the army of William. Both sides did their best to persuade the disbanding army to declare for their respective masters. Ginkel, who regretted the loss of hundreds of well-seasoned troops and their absorption into the ranks of the new King's enemies, to be later used against him, did all that he could in the way of persuasion to induce them to stay at home. The French officers, on the other hand, promised them good positions in France and high pay "equal to what they would receive in England," if they would adhere to the French interest. They were desirous of transporting as many full companies as they could in order to secure for themselves a good reception in France. The clergy supported them, preaching that they would best serve their own cause and that of religion by entering the armies of Louis and following King James to France, "and then a good quantity of brandy to wash it down."[2] With these contrary admonitions ringing in their ears the men were drawn out in divisions, fourteen thousand men by poll, on the Clare side of the Shannon, and ordered to march forward; those inclining to go to France were to march straight on, while those who had decided to stay at home or enter the army of William were to file off at a given point.

[2] Ibid., p. 260.

To Ginkel's disappointment the Royal Regiment, which contained fourteen hundred of the pick of the army, marched steadily forward under their officers, while of the remaining foot part went one way and part the other. But of the large body of men who, under the influence of their comrades' examples, had volunteered for France dozens ran away before they reached the port of embarkation at Cork; of the fourteen hundred who had promised to go one week before not five hundred arrived at the port in time for the departure of the transports. The ships sailed but half-full. The Ulster Irish, sooner than go abroad or remain in the south, moved home to the north in throngs, driving their cattle and blocking the roads with their goods, preferring, says Story, to make the long journey into Ulster, "rather than to settle in Kerry, Clare, and Limerick, where land was plenty and cheap, among the Irish of Munster."[3]

[3] G. Story, op. cit., 270-271.

According to James's account thirty thousand men passed into France to join the Scottish Jacobite troops already assembled there after the defeat at Dunbar. In most cases the wives and children of the soldiers seem to have gone with them, and Sarsfield superintended their embarkation at Cork, he himself crossing over with the last boat. A certain number of the troops were also carried from Kerry to Brest, and here an unfortunate accident occurred, which embittered the feelings of the departing soldiers. The men were embarked first according to list, the boats returning for the officers and the families of the men. Whether the boats or the ships were overfull, or from the haste of the French officers to get the men off, some women, fearing to be left behind, clung to the boats and were dragged out to sea. Many were drowned, and the fingers of those who held tight were barbarously chopped off, so that they fell into the water. O'Kelly states that the women and families were left behind, contrary to the Articles, but it is clear that many crossed over with their husbands and fathers.

At Cork Sarsfield had room to spare, and both the English and French gazettes of the day speak of the arrival of the main body of troops in France with their wives and children.[4] James was said to be very pleased at their arrival, and he took an early opportunity of reviewing the newly landed troops; but among the French "the Irish did not find themselves so very welcome as they expected to have been."[5] In spite of the promises made, the rank of every officer was reduced to what it had been before the war, the temporary war rank not being taken into account, and with it the rate of pay. No proper quarters were provided for the men, who had to encamp in the open fields outside Brest, and they as well as the officers had to be content with the low pay of the country. James had good reason to feel touched that they acquiesced in an arrangement so disadvantageous to themselves "merely to please their own King and in hopes that the overplus of their just pay, amounting to 50,000 livres a month, retrenched from them, might abate the obligations of their Master to the French Court."[6] These men compare most favourably with the multitude of self-seeking gentry in England who, the moment they saw James in difficulties, hastened to make terms with the other side. A Williamite writer of the day speaks of them as "those unhappy gentlemen who by the loss of plentiful fortunes at home had nothing left but their swords."[7] He comments on their "inflexible steadiness to the interest of an unfortunate and declining king, whom they looked upon as their lawful sovereign" and for whom they exposed themselves "to inexpressible hardships and perpetual dangers" rather than accept the terms offered to them by William, whom they regarded as a usurper.

[4] Macariae Excidium, p. 157, and notes, pp. 493-495. There had been some discussion on this subject between Sarsfield and Ginkel, however, difficulties having been raised by the French about the embarkation of the women ; see Sarsfield's letter in Gilbert, Jacobite Narrative of the War in Ireland, 1688-91 (1892), Appendix No. XVII (2), pp. 308-9.

[5] G. Story op. cit., pp. 288-290, and see the letter of complaint from an Irish Officer, p. 291.

[6] Ibid., p. 289; J. S. Clarke, Life of James II, from his own memoirs, ii, and Jacobite tract, quoted J. C. O'Callaghan, History of the Irish Brigades in the Service of France, pp. 30-31.

[7] Forman, quoted J. C. O'Callaghan, op. cit., p. 31.

They were formed into a bodyguard for James, and became part of the famous Irish Brigade, which made its valour felt on every battlefield of Europe during the next hundred years. The nucleus of this fine fighting force had been formed by the troops that had been exchanged by James for the French regiments sent over early in the war by Louis XIV, and who had gone abroad in 1689 under Viscount Mountcashel. The commanders of the other regiments, as now reformed, were the Hon. Colonel Daniel O'Brien, soon to become Viscount Clare, the colonel of the famous "Clare's Dragoons," and young Arthur Dillon, son of Viscount Dillon, a dashing soldier without whose leadership the troops absolutely refused to leave Ireland. The new contingent brought the Brigade up to 24,430 men. They wore the grey tunics and the hats turned up with the white cockade which gave rise to many a Jacobite song. There is a touch of humour in the displeasure they showed at the grey uniform; they wanted the scarlet coats of the British infantry ! Nor would they be satisfied until on the review of the regiments by James at Brest he brought them the promise of the King of France that they should have red coats instead of the tunics in which they had fought at Limerick. It was only when, at Fontenoy, they were mistaken for British regiments by their own allies that they consented to a change. Many of them were flung into the wars of Flanders and Savoy, and the watchfulness, resource, and steadfastness of the Irish Brigade at Cremona under Mahony placed it in the highest rank of valour. They had, as the French commander reported, "accomplished marvels" in the difficult campaign in Savoy and Piedmont.

Yet when Mahony was sent to Paris to report, he said nothing of the Irish troops. King Louis noticed the omission. "You have said nothing," he observed, "of my brave Irish." "Sire, we emulated the martial ardour of the other troops," was their captain's simple reply.[8] Such were the men, brave, modest, loyal, who in an evil day for their country went as exiles out of Ireland. They were to be joined, during the succeeding years, by numbers of their fellow-countrymen who fled from the rigour of the penal laws in the reigns of William and Anne. They won abroad the fame and position that should have been theirs by right at home, but they left the country of their birth leaderless, bereft of the wisdom and moderation which might have guided popular causes in the future into sound channels of reform, instead of running into dangerous courses and underground methods. It is hard to know whether England or Ireland suffered the greater loss through the defection of these Catholic gentlemen, the natural leaders of their people. "Cursed be the laws that deprived me of such soldiers!" exclaimed George II, when, in 1745, his regiments faced the charge of the Irish Brigade on the field of Fontenoy.

[8] "Vous ne me parlez que des Francois hê! qu'auront done fait mes braves Irlandois?" "Sire, nous avons suivi leur rapidité guerrièrê." J. C. O'Callaghan, op. cit., 215-216.

It was in Flanders, in the battle of Landen in 1693, that Sarsfield was fated to die. The village had been taken and retaken several times, and Sarsfield, Lord Lucan, had distinguished himself by his courage and intrepidity. He commanded the left wing of the French army, and just as they were pushing their way into the place their leader fell, pierced by a bullet in the breast. It was the fiercest stand-up fight, men said, until the battle of Malplaquet. "At Landen the Irish guards avenged the affront of the Boyne," but the loss of Sarsfield made it a sad day for Ireland. To his countrymen he was, and has remained ever since, the idol and the darling of their dreams. On one side of Anglo-Norman descent, on the other the son of Anne O'More, daughter of "Rory of the Hills," he seemed in some mysterious way to embody the hopes and sorrows of his people. His portrait shows him to have been a dreamer, a man of ideals. Whether he was a great general or whether, as James unkindly said, "he had no head," to Irishmen he was a very perfect, gentle knight, and he died as became a gentleman.

We have hitherto considered only the Military Articles of the Capitulation of Limerick; it is necessary also to speak of the Civil Articles, of which the King remarks with justice in his Life, "Had the English kept them as religiously as such engagements ought to be observed, the world had not seen so many crying examples of ancient and noble families reduced to the last degree of indigence, only for adhering to their Prince in just defence of his right."[9] The inhabitants of Limerick had at first proposed their own terms of surrender. They had sent Sarsfield and Wauchop to Ginkel with seven articles, which included free liberty of worship to Catholics and one priest to each parish; civil rights as citizens, with the power to enter all employments civil and military; and the restoration of such estates as had been held by Catholics before the Revolution. They also prayed for an Act of Indemnity for all past offences. These proposals Ginkel peremptorily refused, saying that though he was a stranger to the laws of England yet he understood that what they insisted on was so far contradictory to them and dishonourable to himself that he would not grant any such terms.

[9] J. S. Clarke, James II, ii, 466-467.

As finally agreed, the Civil Articles restored "to the Roman Catholics such privileges in the exercise of their religion as are consistent with the laws of Ireland, or as they did enjoy them in the reign of Charles II"; with the promise that "as soon as their affairs will permit them to summon a Parliament in this kingdom, their Majesties will endeavour to procure the said Roman Catholics such further security in that particular as may preserve them from any disturbance upon the account of their said religion." Full liberty to enjoy their estates, rights, titles, and privileges was granted to all the inhabitants of Limerick or any other garrison town in possession of the Irish, and to all officers and soldiers of King James now in arms in his service over all the southern counties, and "all such as are under their protection in the said counties," on taking the oath of allegiance to William and Mary. This included the inhabitants of Limerick, Cork, Kerry, Clare, Sligo, and Mayo, which are specified by name. Moreover, the right to exercise their callings, trades, and professions, whatsoever they might be, was to be recovered and held "as freely as they did use, exercise, and enjoy the same in the reign of King James II," on taking the oath of allegiance to their present Majesties. A special mention is made of merchants and traders beyond seas who were also to be received and restored if they returned home and submitted within eight months. All persons included in the above wide classes were to receive a general pardon on submission. The oath demanded was a simple declaration of allegiance to the new King and Queen, unaccompanied by those Oaths of Supremacy and Abjuration, which every Catholic held to be incompatible with his religion. This important concession was made more definite by a special clause in the treaty, which said: "The oath to be administered to such Roman Catholics as submit to their Majesties' Government shall be the oath above-said, and no other."

In reading the Articles it is difficult to see how they could have been made wider or more liberal in the era in which they were penned. They were, indeed, to use O'Bruadair's word, "life giving" to the persons they concerned. The men who signed the Articles had a right to expect from them liberty in the quiet exercise of their religion, with the peaceable pursuit of their callings and professions and the possession of their properties; those common human rights to preserve which for their subjects Governments exist. It gave them somewhat more enlarged terms than those which had been given to Galway on its capitulation a short time before. These included only the "private exercise of their religion to the Roman Catholic clergy, without prosecution by the penal laws, with protection of their persons and goods," and the right to lawyers to practise their profession in peace. Though the Lords Justices who signed the Articles of Limerick were not officially authorized to agree to these precise terms, they Lad been directed by William III to offer "any reasonable terms." Moreover, they undertook "that their Majesties will ratify these Articles within the space of eight months, or sooner, and will use their utmost endeavours that the same shall be ratified and confirmed in Parliament." With these modifications the Articles were agreed to by the still unconquered city.[10] O'Kelly says that "the Articles of Capitulation were not so warily drawn but room was left for captious exceptions," and in fact the clause printed on p. 172 in italics, which gave equal privileges to all protected persons in the counties as to the garrison towns, was, either through inadvertence or purposety, left out in the engrossed copy, thus excluding from the treaty all the civil inhabitants originally included in the terms, and limiting the pardon to the garrisons under arms. But it was reinserted at the demand of the signatories, who now had the additional weight of the French fleet behind them, and it was solemnly assented to in the copy signed by the King and Queen, who ratified the treaty in London three months later.

[10] The Articles of Limerick will be found in Harris, Life of William III (1749), pp. 349-350; see also Sir John Gilbert, Jacobite Narrative of the War in Ireland, 1688-91 (1892), pp. 298-308.

The only step left to make the treaty into law was its passage into an Act of Parliament. There is no doubt that William intended to carry out his pledge. To the Dublin Parliament of 1695 he urged that the treaty should be ratified as it stood. He desired peace, and had long ago offered the Irish much more favourable conditions than those of Limerick, in the hope of bringing the war to an early conclusion. But this proclamation had been 'smothered' by the Lords Justices, who, hearing that Limerick was about to capitulate, had hurried off to the camp "that they might hold the Irish to as hard terms as the King's affairs would admit." It was with these views in their minds that they drew up and signed the terms.[11] Almost immediately a party sprang up in Ireland who determined that the Articles should never be ratified. They had hoped to reap large fortunes out of forfeitures, and the newly made Williamites, whose adhesion was probably hastened by the hope of substantial benefits accruing to the winning side, "thought that no terms at all should have been made with the Irish, but that they should have been destroyed root and branch." A large body of moderate Protestants were of a wholly different opinion, feeling "that it was for his Majesty's honour and interest both abroad and at home that the Articles should be strictly observed."[12] Story, the Williamite historian, considered that it was "fully as unreasonable to destroy other people purely because they cannot think as we do as it is for one man to ruin another because the outward figure and shape of his body is not the same with his own."[13] But these moderate opinions had little weight against the extreme party led by Dopping, Bishop of Meath, who preached a furious sermon against the treaty from the pulpit of Christ Church Cathedral on the return of the Lords Justices, arguing that no faith should be kept with the Irish. He was replied to the following Sunday by Dr Moreton, Bishop of Kildare, and the King showed his approval by removing Dopping and appointing Moreton in his place. William had little power, however, and during the whole of his reign he was engaged in struggles with his English Parliament, who desired to reduce their foreign King to a figurehead in English politics. Nevertheless he cannot be absolved from having abandoned his Irish subjects to the "New Colonial Interest" then paramount in Ireland.

[11] Harris, Life of William III, p. 350.

[12] Harris, op. cit., p. 372.

[13] G. Story, Continuation of the Impartial History of the Wars in Ireland (1691), p. 275.

The Articles were altogether omitted from the consideration of the Irish Parliament of 1692-93, and by the time the Parliament of April 1695 was called together the "New Interest" had so got the upper hand that the main object in calling the Parliament was declared to be the "great work of a firm settlement of Ireland upon a Protestant interest." In such an atmosphere there was little chance of fair treatment for Catholics. The chances of a just fulfilment of the Articles were still further imperilled by the discussion in the same Parliament of the Acts of James's Irish Parliament of 1689, with its Bill of Attainder against the Protestant landowners. These Acts were all declared void, and erased from the Roll, and it was in an angry spirit that the House passed on to the consideration of the Limerick treaty. They rode roughshod over its terms, altogether omitting the first clause, which contained the charter of the people's liberties, and declared that "so much of them as may consist with the safety and welfare of your Majesty's subjects in this kingdom" only should be confirmed. The disputed clause in the first draft was again omitted, though solemnly sworn to by the King, and the clauses giving the Catholics the right of exercising callings and professions were annulled. Thus in point of social standing the Catholics were flung back again into the position of inferiors, barred from any hope of rising into positions of trust or influence; and in regard to religious belief they were less free than at any time under either the Tudors or the Stuarts. An Act of the Parliament of 1692 had already made void the simple oath of allegiance which Catholics were to be called upon to take, and had substituted a new oath, including a declaration against transubstantiation, for all members of either House of the Irish Parliament, thus effectually excluding Catholic members from both Houses.

These Clauses were speedily followed by two others, one for "disarming all Papists," except the officers covered by the Articles, and the other to restrain Catholics from sending their children abroad for education. Thus began "the dark night," as it has well been called, of the penal laws which marked the period of Protestant ascendency, and continued for a century and a quarter, gradually spreading its corrupting and debasing influence over the whole life of the Irish people, gentry and peasants alike.

The Acts of William and Mary were succeeded in Anne's reign by the Act of 1704 to "prevent the further growth of Popery," the first of those two Acts which Burke has termed the "ferocious" Acts of Anne. The effect of these Acts entered into the home by taking from a Catholic father the guardianship of his own children, and tempting a son to turn Protestant by rewarding him with his father's lands. Properties held by Catholics were broken up by a clause which forbade their descent to the eldest son if he were of his father's religion; in that case the property was to be equally divided among all the children; but if the eldest son was or became a Protestant, even in name, he inherited the whole property. The object of such provisions was clearly to degrade the status of the Catholic owner and to pass lands into Protestant hands. Intermarriage with Protestants was prohibited. Catholics could neither purchase, sell, bequeath, or inherit landed property, or take land on a longer lease than thirty-one years; and all inducement to improve land was taken away by a provision that if a farm produced a profit greater than one-third of the rent, it should pass to any Protestant who should discover the rate of profit. Such a provision led directly to the revival of the hideous trade of the "informer," who reaped profit from his interference with his neighbour's concerns.

By the penal laws a Catholic could neither rise in the army nor act as a solicitor, a profession hitherto open to him; the amount of land he might possess was limited both in size and in the duration of his lease; he could not vote on vestries, serve on grand juries, act as constable, sheriff, or magistrate, vote at elections, or sit in Parliament. In every honourable walk in life he was restrained by the knowledge that there was nothing to which he could rise, nor any post of responsibility or trust open to him. He dared not send his sons abroad for education, and he had difficulty in educating them at home, for by the Act of 8th Anne, no Popish schoolmaster might teach either publicly in school or privately in the home, while all priests had to be registered, and were strictly limited in number. There had been several good Catholic schools in Ireland, and in the reign of James I a Commission was set up to enquire into their system of teaching. One, that of Alexander Lynch of Galway, was specially commended for the intelligence and answering of its students. It was a large school, numbering one thousand two hundred pupils. Lynch was admonished to change his religion and teaching, if he would keep his school open. But he continued 1,1 his old way and his school was closed by order of the Commissioners. It shows the strength of religious prejudice at the period, that the president of this Commission was Ussher, Vice-Chancellor of Trinity College, a man famous for learning and deeply interested in education; sympathetic, too, to Irish studies and one of the first to collect valuable manuscripts for his college. Yet he could approve of the closing of such a school as Lynch's. But it is just to remember that Protestant schools in France or Spain would, at this period, have met with a like fate.

Politically the main body of the Irish nation ceased to exist for over a century, and socially they were held down to the grade of small farmers unable, like their Protestant neighbours, either to appear in public with a sword at their side in the manner of a gentleman, or to possess a horse of the value of more than £5. No occupations but the linen trade, which it was desired to encourage and for which they might take apprentices, were open to them, save in a small way, the number of their apprentices in all other trades being confined to two. These cruel and degrading laws arose out of no political necessity and were the outcome of no rebellion; they originated, not in England, but in Ireland itself, and they were inspired by the grasping selfishness of the party in power there. They were confirmed in England largely in consequence of the petitions which reached the English from the Irish Parliament. Their sole object was to support "the English and Protestant interest," which was the paramount theme in the Irish official correspondence of the day. The worst penal Act of Anne's reign was drawn up in England in 1704 in response to an appeal of the Irish Parliament of November 19, 1703, which outlined the heads of the Bill it was desired to have passed.[14] The Catholics were not the only sufferers; the Sacramental Test disfranchised at the same moment the whole body of Dissenters, Independents, Presbyterians, Huguenots, and Quakers, excluding them equally from the army, the civil service, the corporations, and the magistracy. Such wholesale disabilities, affecting all but a small minority of the nation, could obviously not be fully enforced, but their existence served as a perpetual sore, opening the way to continual friction and petty revenges and insults exercised by the stronger party upon the weaker. They tended to depress industry, impoverish the nation and plunge it into ignorance and servitude.

[14] Journals of the Irish House of Commons, iii, 129-135.

The immediate result of the penal laws was to throw a large part of the population out of employment. "We are apt to charge the Irish with laziness," wrote Swift a few years later, "because we seldom find them employed, but then we do not consider that they have nothing to do."[15] He was speaking of the Protestants, who lived by industry, but the same could be said in an even greater degree of the Catholics, who lived largely by the land. The youths of the country, finding all paths closed to them, left Ireland in large numbers, to take service in foreign countries. A hundred years later this exodus was still going on. Lord Charlemont, writing about 1780, laments the deplorable situation of the Catholic gentry in his day. "Their sons were destitute of professions; the only occupation left them was foreign service, and of this they availed themselves; but in the French service, in which a national brigade had been formed for their reception...they often found themselves compelled to fight against their King and country and to exercise their native valour to the destruction of that soil from whence it was derived...When abroad I had been intimately acquainted with many of my countrymen in foreign service and never knew one who did not regret the horrid necessity of bearing arms against his country. My most particular friend, the brave and truly amiable General O'Donnell, when speaking on this subject, often wept."[16] On the sufferers the Penal Laws had a double result. They not only degraded them, but they made them lawless. Legislation that is unjust will be defied; when it cannot be defied it will be evaded, and the origin of that defiance of law which we freely blame in the Irish people may be found to a large extent in the sense that for a hundred years they were living under laws that they knew to be unjust and felt to be humiliating.

[15] Letter to Walpole, quoted by R. Ashe King, in Swift in Ireland (1895), p. 89.

[16] F. Hardy, Life of Lord Charlemont from the Private Letters of his Lordship (1812), i, 128-132.

The object of the Penal Laws has been summed up as being designed "to make the Catholics poor and to keep them poor." But they were even more directly aimed at making and keeping them impotent both in political and social life. The possession of unlimited power by a small order is always attended by the worst results, and in Ireland it ended in the creation of a class familiarly known as "the Protestant Bashaws" of the South and West. These men strenuously and consistently opposed any attempts to alleviate the condition of their tenants,whom they regarded practically as serfs, or of their Catholic neighbours, whom they considered to belong to an inferior race. The Penal Code ended in the complete separation of the two classes; and Hardy, in the years preceding emancipation, considers that this was the cause of the "hereditary scowl and mien of disgust and alienation which so long deformed the faces of Irishmen."[17]

[17] Ibid., i, 133.

There were, as was inevitable, a certain number of real or pretended conversions, and a good deal of outward conformity either with the object of retaining property and position or of gaining it. These so-called conversions were naturally distrusted; and Boulter expressed alarm at the large number of these pseudo-Protestants who were practising the profession of the law, the practice of which, he says, "from the top to the bottom is almost wholly in the hands of these converts."[18] A more agreeable side of the matter was the friendly relations entered into between some of the Catholic landowners and their Protestant neighbours, who nominally became, by private arrangement, the temporary holders of the lands, with the intention of restoring them when the rigour of the Penal Laws should be relaxed. In most cases these compacts were scrupulously observed, and the forfeited properties were handed back to the descendants of the original owners without loss or deduction. The O'Connell properties at Derrynane, which were considerably enlarged by the business habits of the Liberator's grandfather, even before the passing of the Relief Bill by the Irish Parliament in 1782, were retained in the family by the good offices of Hugh Falvey, of Faha, who had conformed to the Protestant faith in order to become a barrister-at-law, and who, until a short time before his death, acted as trustee to the O'Connell estate.[19] On the other hand, Dr. O'Conor tells us that his uncle, Denis O'Conor of Belanagare, who forfeited one-fourth of his property for adherence to the cause of James II, was obliged to plough his own land after the defeat of the Jacobite armies. He was wont to say to his children, "Boys, you must not be impudent to the poor: I am the son of a gentleman, but ye are the children of a ploughman." Many others must have been circumstanced in a similar way.

[18] Archbishop Boulter to the Bishop of London, March, 7, 1727, in Hugh Boulter's Letters (1769), i, 230-231, and see ibid., 226-227.

[19] Michael MacDonagh, Life of Daniel O'Connell (1929), pp. 2-3.

The Penal Laws were the more unjust because the Catholics had not by any overt act given reason to the new dynasty to fear their disloyalty. Nor did they later take any part in the risings in favour of either the Old or the Young Pretender, their love for the young Charles Stuart being purely a sentimental one, which had no open consequences. Many of their bishops and priests, in spite of the disabilities and actual penalties under which they were suffering continued to charge their flocks, both in public and private, to co-operate with their Protestant brethren to preserve order and tranquillity. From time to time they sent to the Government addresses couched in the most loyal terms, while exhorting their people "to be just in their dealings, sober in their conduct, religious in their practice, to avoid riots, quarrels, and tumult and thus to approve themselves good citizens, peaceable subjects, and pious Christians." In a remarkable declaration made in 1775, in the reign of George III when the Penal Laws were as yet unrevoked, they express their unfeigned loyalty to the Crown, and they explicitly abjure all those doctrines current at an earlier time—that it is lawful to murder, destroy, or injure any person whatever under excuse that he is a heretic, or to break an oath made to a heretic. They abjure the power of the Pope to loose them from their allegiance to King George, and they declare "that neither the Pope of Rome or any other prince, prelate, state, or potentate hath or ought to have any temporal or civil jurisdiction, power, superiority, or preeminence, directly or indirectly, within this realm." Nothing could be more explicit than this protest, which was signed by a number of clergy and laity of rank and sent to Rome as the act and deed of the Irish Catholics. It was formed on the model of several earlier protests, but it adds the remarkable promise that when they are restored to the franchise of their country they will uphold, and see that their representatives uphold, the arrangements made by Act of Parliament, as established by the different Acts of Attainder and Settlement; a most unexpected statement as coming from those who had most severely suffered by those Acts.

END OF CHAPTER XI

XII.—COMMERCIAL DISABILITIES

If anything could have been added to complete the ruin of the country it was by the imposition of heavy and disabling trade regulations at the moment when the industries of the towns were being crippled by the loss of the industrial midde-classes of their inhabitants. The Penal Laws were the work of the ascendancy party in the Dublin Parliament, inspired, not so much by actual questions of religion as by the jealous determination to retain all authority and all property in Protestant hands, for which the difference of religion formed a convenient excuse; but the Trade Laws were the action of the English Parliament, urged on by the constant appeals of English merchants, who thought they saw in the growing prosperity of Irish trade and industries a challenge to their own supremacy in the mercantile world.

In consequence of the constantly increasing concentration of all manufactures and trade in Protestant hands, owing to the Penal restrictions imposed at their own request, it was on this new industrial class that the Trade Laws fell most hardly. It shows into what a position of helplessness the Dublin Parliament had drifted, that though it was the close borough of a small Protestant minority, even this favoured minority was unable to influence the operation of English laws directed to the limitation or destruction of those industries by the preservation of which in their own hands against Catholic competition they had hoped to grow rich. Up to the time of Henry VIII, and even of the Stuarts, Irish trade had been encouraged; all trade regulations passed in the English Parliament applying equally to Ireland. Incidentally this shows that from an early date Irish industries were of sufficient importance to demand the attention of the English legislature. Several commercial statutes were passed in the reign of Edward III regulating the importation of woollen cloth and permitting Irish merchants to bring their merchandise to the staple of England without paying any but Irish customs In the same reign all clothworkers of whatever country were invited equally into all parts of the British Isles, including Ireland, and such prohibitions as were imposed in the sixteenth century aimed at the encouragement of the home woollen manufacture by limiting the export of the raw material, though in the end this tended to the decline of the industry.

During this period there was a considerable volume of merchandise even with the independent parts of the country. The roads were good, and produce was brought to market in numberless centres all over the country, either by carts or by the river waterways. Provisions, vegetables, fish, and woollens were freely distributed to town-dwellers by the country people of the surrounding districts. Corn, barley, and oats were in plenty, and flax was grown for the linen industry. The people were well and solidly clad in the excellent friezes and mantles made by their own kindred, and the new staples founded in several important centres during the years 1616-17 gave employment to many workers and attracted English capital into the country. Wealthy landowners, like the Earl of Cork in the South, the Duke of Ormonde in Kilkenny and Clonmel, and Sir T. Roper near Dublin encouraged spinning and weaving on their estates and opened works that gave employment to their tenantry.

During the Stuart period the settlement of numbers of French Huguenot weavers in the country gave a great stimulus to weaving, especially of silks and hosiery, while others of these refugees set up factories for the woollen manufacture or founded banking businesses. But these industries underwent many vicissitudes. Wentworth, during his Viceroyalty, saw in the discouragement of the woollen and clothing trades a means to hold the Irish dependent on the Crown by forcing them to resort to English markets to supply the needs that had hitherto been met at home. He feared that if the Irish continued to manufacture their own wool they would beat their English rivals out of the trade by underselling them, "which," he says, "they were well able to do."[1] But he encouraged the exportation of raw wool, which not only aided the English clothiers, but brought in double customs to the Crown, the wool exported being returned in the form of manufactured goods; "a reason of State" which commended itself to the Viceroy, whose main desire was to increase the King's revenue.

[1] Letters and despatches of the Earl of Stafford, William Knowler (1739), ii, 19.

During the long anarchy of the Rebellion of 1641 and the ensuing years the woollen industry, as also the linen industry so carefully fostered by Wentworth to take its place, were almost extinguished. Had the former had a fair start after the Restoration, it would probably have revived. But the exportation of woollen cloth to England was still prohibited by the high duties imposed, and the colonial markets were closed by the Navigation Acts. High duties were placed even upon the exportation of raw wool into England and the hardship of these regulations was further increased by the passing in 1663 and 1666 of the Cattle Acts, which prohibited the exportation of Irish cattle into England under pressure of the English breeders, who complained that Irish competition was bringing down the prices of live-stock in England. In the second Bill sheep and swine were included, the importation of either fat or lean stock being voted "a public nuisance," destructive of the welfare of the kingdom. This disabling Act was followed by others extending the prohibition to the provision trade, thus prohibiting the introduction of Irish mutton, lamb, butter, and cheese. At this time the Irish cattle and provision trades amounted to three-quarters of the whole trade of the country.

In three years after the Restoration an average of 61,000 head of cattle had been annually brought over from Ireland to England, and a considerable part of the landlords and farmers devoted themselves to cattle-breeding on a large scale. The whole country was suddenly plunged into poverty and discontent. Ormonde, who was one of the worst sufferers, opposed the Bills at every stage, pointing out that Ireland was only just recovering from a long period of war and that the prohibition on the export of cattle meant practically a universal cessation of industry. But Ormonde's great estates were regarded with jealousy by English land-owners, and in spite of the resistance of the King to the measure, it passed into law. The immediate effect of the Cattle Acts upon the woollen industry was to keep in the country large flocks of sheep which had formerly been sheared and then sold for food. How to get rid of the accumulating stocks of wool became a problem for the Irish farmer and he only partially solved it by a number of devices, such as a clandestine trade with foreign countries, and the revival of the home clothing trade. A certain quantity of wool was still sent into England in spite of the high licensing duties.

But all false laws affecting commerce, whether the result of wrong theories or of provincial and trade jealousies, must in the end defeat their object. Even in the present day, Governments are still debating what are the soundest principles of world trade, and a great variety of opinions is held regarding them; in the seventeenth century theories on the subject had hardly begun to be considered at all. The whole colonial system was new. Hitherto commerce had been a matter of private adventure rather than the concern of the State. The farmer's idea that open competition will capture his markets is natural enough, even if it is erroneous; "protection" is still daily being debated on both sides of the Irish Channel. England in the seventeenth century was neither before nor behind the rest of Europe in her belief that in protecting her own farmers from competition, she was carrying out an obvious duty. But while for the moment it seemed that these laws would ruin Ireland, they had an immediate adverse effect in England.

The impoverished Irish farmers could not pay their rents and, in consequence, landlords could not meet their taxes. The King's revenue at once went down, and the effort to make Ireland self-supporting by customs and excise came to an end. The Irish began to turn their attention to foreign avenues of export, and a flourishing trade with Holland in fat cattle and butter sprang up, which threatened to rival the English exports in value and pushed the produce of the English farmer out of the market. A revival of Irish shipping followed and Irish ships were seen at Dunkirk, Ostend, La Rochelle, and Nantes, laden with provisions, while Irish ports were busy with trade and ship-building. France took clandestinely all the wool with which Ireland could supply her, and in 1679 it was said that this trade had almost ruined the English industry. The English were purchasing back through France and Spain at an advanced rate the Irish goods that they would not allow into the country direct. A new trade of some importance sprang up between Ireland and the West Indian Plantations, which deprived England of much of her provision trade with her own colonists. This fresh opening helped to tide the country over its period of distress; and had no further impediment been placed in the way there was every sign that the initiative of the Irish farmers and merchants would have secured permanent markets abroad. But again the jealousy of English traders stepped in and the rising volume of Irish commerce was crushed by the Navigation Acts of 1670-71, which prohibited a large number of commodities, comprising practically the whole available produce of the Plantations, from being imported direct into Ireland. They had to be first landed in England and so pay double dues and charges at the ports; this checked the entry of goods from abroad, and in consequence the profits on goods sent out from home. As, after the Revolution, these Navigation Laws were reinforced in a still more prohibitive form, they eventually shut Ireland off from her best foreign markets and proved disastrous to her chances of commercial progress.

The Navigation Laws were not passed with any direct intention of applying them to Ireland. They were consequent upon the immense expansion of the known world in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by the discovery of the West Indies and of North and South America. The formation of the East India Company to open up the vast resources of India at the beginning of the seventeenth century brought about new commercial relations in every direction and called upon the Governments of the day to pass legislation to regulate the conduct of navigation and commerce in every part of the world. England had emerged from the position of an island-state into a world power; and as the enterprises of Spain and France over-seas began to decrease, those of England and Holland took their place. It was against Holland that the first Navigation Laws were framed, these two powers being in a position to dispute with each other the carrying trade and the mastery of the seas. At the same time a colonial policy was gradually formed, by which, in return for protection by the navy of England, the colonies were bound only to encourage such industries as ministered to the needs of the mother country and did not interfere with her home industries.

As England defended these colonies, which had no navies of their own, by revenue from her home industries, it was urged that it was only just that nothing should be done by them to diminish those industries. The over-seas possessions were to exist simply as feeders to the motherland; all trade with other countries being strictly forbidden.[2] Hitherto, Ireland had usually been treated as part of the British Isles in regard to trade regulations, but with the new conception of a colonial policy accepted as part of the considered policy of the country, it began to be argued that as Ireland was, like the colonies, defended by the British navy without any charge to herself (for Ireland had never been taxed for naval defence) she stood towards England in the position of a colony and should come under the same laws as regards navigation. Like America and the West Indies, she must accept a subordinate position in all industries likely to be adverse in their results upon English manufactures. It seemed but just to the great mercantile interests of Britain that they should so regulate the trade of their dependencies that these should not interfere with their own existing home industries.

[2] George Louis Beer, British Colonial Policy, 1754-65 (1907); The Origins of the British Colonial System, 1578-1660 (1908) ; J. R. Seeley, The Growth of British Policy (1895).

Such was the theory, and it was on this theory that on June 9, 1698, the Lords, and on June 30 the Commons of England presented addresses to King William III, praying him "in the most public and effectual way that may be, to declare to all his subjects of Ireland that the growth and increase of the woollen manufacture there hath long and will ever be looked upon with great jealousy by all his subjects of this kingdom," and the King, against his own wishes and judgment, made the reply: "Gentlemen, I will do all that in me lies to discourage the woollen manufacture in Ireland."[3] By the Act of 1698, passed for the carrying out of this policy, an additional duty of 20 per cent, was imposed on broadcloth and of 10 per cent, on all draperies except friezes.[4] Even this did not satisfy the English traders, and the practical monopoly obtained by subsequent regulations would have entirely crushed the Irish chief manufacture, but for an extensive smuggling trade henceforth carried on with France, Germany and Spain.

[3] Quoted George O'Brien, The Economic History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (1918), p. 182.

[4] Swift writes in one of his letters, "We cannot send an inch of wrought woollen to any foreign place without a penalty of £500 and forfeiture of the stuff, and the British sea-publicans (i.e., the customs officers) grumble if we carry our own night-gowns, unless they be old." Letters of Swift ed. Howard Williams (1886), p. 220. Hely Hutchinson says that 30,000 woollen workers emigrated as a result of this Act.

The promise of William to discourage Irish woollens was accompanied by an engagement that in place of this industry the weaving of linens should receive every encouragement. This manufacture, one of the oldest in the country (for linen cloth was exported into England at least as early as 1430), had always been looked upon with favour, for it in no way interfered with English prosperity.[5] Wentworth's Dutch instructors had so much improved weaving, and the private funds he had poured into the industry had so well supported it, that he had expected to be able to undersell France and Holland. Manchester was buying Irish yarn in large quantities. After the Confederate Wars, Ormonde brought in five hundred families from Brabant and workmen from La Rochelle and Jersey and with the support of the Irish Parliament a great advance was made both as to quantity and quality. The industry was at first not confined to Ulster but distributed over the country. But the better land laws of Ulster and the greater sense of stability combined with the perseverance of the people to make it flourish there. Yet, even in the North, when Crommelin arrived in the country in 1705, he found the linen business still in a primitive condition and much ignorance prevailing about the growing of flax and its preparation. Encouraged by William, he imported a thousand looms of better construction and founded the Lisburn works. He gave a premium for every loom at work, and his energy and the better methods employed led to a great increase in the spinning and weaving of improved linens. Lurgan followed Lisburn, and in 1735 the Belfast Linen Hall was opened. In spite of certain restrictions and Scottish and English competition, linen took its place as the leading textile industry of Ireland, and by 1773 Irish linens imported into Great Britain amounted to the annual value of £17,876,617. Cotton-spinning formed a minor branch of the textile trade which at one time employed a fair number of hands, and glass for household use was a manufacture which started with considerable success after the Revolution; but like other industries it suffered under the trade prohibitions. After the withdrawal of the trade restrictions in 1780 it revived and progressed rapidly. The glass was excellent, and various special kinds of fine glass and pottery began to be developed in different parts of the country, of which the now rare and beautiful Waterford glass is the most famous.

[5] George O'Brien, op. cit., p. 189.

Nevertheless, the first thirty years of the eighteenth century was a period of acute distress all over the country, especially in the North. Large voluntary emigrations began to take place from Ulster where, in addition to the hampering restrictions on their trade, the inhabitants were shut out from all civil and municipal offices as Dissenters, and had no legal freedom of worship. There had been bad harvests between 1725 and 1728, and these years saw some 4,200 men, women and children shipped off to the West Indies alone. The tide of emigration had already begun in 1718, when many hundreds of families left the kingdom, and it continued up to the middle of the century. These were chiefly Presbyterians, the Catholics having at this period a great dislike to emigration other than to take service on the Continent. Large numbers of these Presbyterians settled in the New England states, and were, in time to come, to wring from England the independence of America. Their brethren in the North of Ireland, who stayed at home, and went under the harrow of restrictive laws alike in religion and commerce, were to be the leaders in the struggle for free trade and political independence at the close of the century. From them were formed the bulk of the Irish Volunteers, who demanded from England Parliamentary freedom.[6]

[6] There was a fresh outburst of emigration in 1772-73, owing to a decline in the linen manufacture.

Nor was the population of the country districts more prosperous. The growing of corn practically ceased, and the land was increasingly turned into great cattle and dairy farms for the export of beef and mutton or dairy produce. The towns profited by the increase in trade and the large landowners and middlemen grew rich, but the mass of the peasants fell to the status of cottiers, unable to subsist by agricultural labour; in some districts they were turned out wholesale to be "miserably starved, or obliged to pay greater rents for worse lands than it is possible to pay."[7] These wholesale evictions were the immediate cause of the Whiteboy risings in 1761, for the landlords were everywhere forbidding their tenants to plough, as they needed the lands for grazing purposes. Tillage, which had never been in an advanced state in Ireland, decreased, and the poor cultivation of the country struck every traveller.[8] Even the old system of ploughing by the tail still continued, in spite of the efforts of Wentworth to put an end to it. The land yielded poor crops and in 1776 or later Arthur Young thought the Irish farmers, in general, still five centuries behind the English in knowledge and skill. Many of the large farmers, especially about Dublin, were Catholics.

[7] Archbishop King to Mr. Nicholson, December 20, 1712 ; Hugh Boulter, Letters (1769), 222-223 ; 225-226.

[8] George O'Brien, op. cit., pp. 127-130.

The foundation of the Dublin Society in 1731 did a good deal to encourage agriculture by introducing improved machinery and offering premiums for better methods of farming, and bounties were also granted by the Dublin Parliament; but no real revival took place until Foster's Corn Laws were passed in 1784. These stimulated the exportation of corn and did much to turn Ireland again from a pastoral into an arable country. This great extension of tillage brought about an increase in labour, a rise in wages, and an advance in the value of land; and the repeal of the most severe Penal Laws in 1778 encouraged the Catholic tenants to make fresh efforts. But high rents and short leases militated against the proper cultivation of the soil, and even in 1788 Grattan describes the condition of agriculture as "miserable and experimental," and speaks of slovenly methods, mouldering fences, weeds, and scanty crops; only the natural richness of the soil gave crops where such lack of industry prevailed. Horses and oxen still were yoked together at the plough, the rotation of crops was not understood, and the constant subdivision of property did not tend to self-reliance and foresight. The Irish peasant has always been backward in adopting new methods and using improved machinery; and this, combined with uncertainty of tenure, lack of payment for improvements, and the constant possibility of eviction, retarded progress and left him far behind the agriculturists of competing countries.

It was in the year 1776 that Arthur Young, a trained and intelligent agriculturist, began his celebrated tour in Ireland for the purpose of enquiring into the condition of farming in the country. He travelled throughout the provinces with introductions to all the principal gentlemen residing on their properties, and he has left a detailed and valuable record of his observations. He shows that the "baleful monopolizing spirit of commerce" still governed the commercial relations between England and her Dependencies, whether in the East or in Ireland. It required the War of American Independence (which was raging when Young wrote) to awaken England to the results of her narrow trading policy towards her colonies, and under which America, the Indies, and Ireland were equally suffering. "Trade is an admirable thing, but a trading government a most pernicious one." Young speaks much of the grinding poverty of the cottiers struggling under heavy rents, and of the system of "rundale" or sub-division of farms; of the oppressive custom of "conacre," by which a scrap of land was rented for a season by a cottier to raise potatoes and paid for in labour, only the balance being settled in money, if settled at all. The poor population was content to feed on potatoes and sour milk, with now and then a herring, meat being eaten only twice a year, at Christmas and Easter. Where all transactions were paid for in labour there was little money to purchase food or necessaries. The cottages were of the most wretched description, filthy, crowded and unhealthy. A series of famines showed the low level at which the people were existing; they culminated in the "hunger-fever" of 1741, in which 400,000 persons perished.

The scathing pamphlets poured out by Swift, and the incisive questions suggested by Bishop Berkeley in The Querist indicate the feeling of the more humane observers at the condition of the country; but little was attempted by way of relief. The peasant began to eke out his scanty means of livelihood by crossing to England to take part in harvesting or to Newfoundland to take part in the fisheries, often walking great distances to and from the ports. The Devon Commission of 1843-45 gives the most harrowing accounts of the extreme poverty and extreme patience of the Irish agricultural labourer in the years immediately preceding the great famine, and this verdict is echoed by every independent traveller in Ireland during that and the preceding century. The lack of any stimulus to exertion and the want of employment were, no doubt, one cause of the universal indolence and slovenliness in work and habits which is noticed and commented upon by every traveller passing through Ireland during the eighteenth century. The numerous holidays and the love of sport also contributed to foster this tendency. Drunkenness and beggary abounded, and the quantity of spirits consumed rose steadily towards the close of the century. "Every seventh house in the City of Dublin and its suburbs is occupied in the sale of spirituous liquors," writes an observer signing himself "Agricola" in 1791; and another tract of the same period would place the drinking houses even higher. " One-third of the shops of Dublin are vendors of spirits," it declares in 1780.[9] Another writer in 1795 speaks of the "vast number of public houses in the suburbs, which perpetually resounded with the noise of riot and intemperance." Attempts were made to suppress some of them, but the magistrates were too corrupt to refuse licences.[10] The average annual manufacture of spirits for the four years ending March, 1780, was 1,768,042 gallons; but in the year ending January, 1808, it had risen to 5,704,158 gallons, illicit stills being greatly on the increase.[11] Arthur Young is one of the few visitors who give a more encouraging report. He thinks that drunkenness ought no longer to be a reproach to the poor, and that "though drinking and duelling have long been alleged against the gentlemen of Ireland," things had changed for the better.

[9] Quoted by George O'Brien, The Economic History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (1918), pp. 39-43.

[10] J. Mullalla, A View of Irish Affairs, 1688-1795 (1795), i, p. 270.

[11] Thomas Newenham, Natural and Political Circumstances of Ireland (1809), p. 222-223.

The result of all this misery was the outbreak of a series of outrages, organised by secret associations, which spread terror in the country districts, especially in the North, where these associations were most active. The Oak Boy movement of 1761 and the following years was formed to protest against forced work on the roads, which every householder was bound to give, and was succeeded by similar organizations of discontented labourers, known as Oak Boys and Steel Boys, the latter directed against the oppressive exactions of some of the landlords, who demanded exorbitant fines for the renewal of leases. But the most formidable of these bands of roving peasants were composed of men known as Whiteboys, because they disguised themselves at night in a white shirt when they paid their nocturnal visits. In addition to the general causes of discontent which they shared with the other bodies, their special province was to give resistance to the collection of tithes taken up by proctors for the clergy of the Established Church. In many cases a tithe-farmer rented the tithe from the incumbent, who seldom cared to collect his own tithe, and these men mercilessly oppressed the peasants. Both Catholics and Presbyterians had to pay tithe, and it fell heaviest on the very poor, being levied on corn, potatoes, flax, and meadow-land, while the wealthy graziers contributed nothing; yet the incumbent often got not more than one-third or one-fifth of the tithe due to him, so large a part was usually absorbed by the proctor or tithe-farmer for his own share. The outbursts of fury on the part of the peasants frequently ended in a regular siege or warfare. The whole country was in a disturbed condition and evictions were followed either by emigration or by the crowding of the dispossessed labourers into the towns.

At the same time there were in many parts of the country enterprising and patriotic landlords who were making extensive experiments in husbandry or in establishing spinning and weaving industries for the benefit of their tenants. Large sums of money were being laid out by such men as Robert French near Tuam, in reclaiming bog-land and erecting spinning mills, or by S. J. Jeffreys, whose mills at Blarney were giving employment to large numbers of hands, or in Armagh, where the town had been rebuilt in the course of a few years by the Protestant Primate Robinson. These are only examples of the improvements which were being undertaken by spirited landowners all over the country. At Cullen House, County Meath, Chief Baron Foster had turned a waste of furze land into soil capable of cultivation; at Westport, Lord Altramont had built houses and introduced looms, setting on foot an extensive linen manufacture and breeding improved types of cattle by introducing the best breeds from England; on Lough Swilly, Robert Alexander had enlarged the fisheries in a few years to an almost incredible extent. Wherever an enlightened landlord lived on his property the condition of the cottiers improved rapidly and the general opinion of their probity and honesty seems to have been high.

An interesting experiment made by Sir William Osborne near Clonmel, who settled some begging Whiteboys on his land and had no reason to regret his act,[12] shows that many of the youths who were "out" in the risings could, with a little encouragement, have been reclaimed. There have always been in Ireland good proprietors spending their lives among their own people and laying out money in improvements whose beneficial work has been often overlooked in the condemnation passed on men of another type. Arthur Young was struck by the number of these improving properties that he met with in his journeys through the country. Unfortunately, there were also a considerable number of absentee landlords who not only drew wealth out of the country to be spent in England and abroad, but whose absence threw the whole management of estates into the hands of agents and stewards, who had little interest in the condition of the tenants beyond the extraction of as large a rent as was possible for the owner. Absenteeism had developed to a surprising extent, and many of the highest offices in the land were occupied by men who lived always out of the country.[13]

[12] Arthur Young, Tour in Ireland (1792), 1, 43, 167, 261-272, 312, 313, 397-399.

[13] Thomas Newenham, Natural and Political Circumstances of Ireland (1809), p. 110, note; Swift, Drapier's Letters, IV; Lecky, Ireland in the Eighteenth Century i, 197-199.

At the beginning of the reign of George II in 1727, the list of absentees included not only landed gentry, but many of the chief officers of the Crown, who drew large salaries but devolved their duties on others. Among these were the Lord Treasurer and two Vice-Treasurers, the Commissioners of Revenue, the Master of the Rolls, the Master of Ordnance, the Chief Remembrancer, the Secretary of State, the Comptroller of the Port of Dublin and many governors of cities. Some of them "would not be at so much trouble as to pay one visit to Ireland" to take over their appointments; those who did made a hasty passage over, took the oath and were seen no more, except as names in the civil lists. In one case a newly appointed Crown official landed in Dublin on Saturday evening, received the test Sacrament on Sunday, took the oaths in the courts on Monday morning, and returned to England the same afternoon, never more to set foot in Ireland. In such circumstances good government was impossible.

The absentee proprietors not only drew from £600,000 to £700,000 annually out of the country, but they escaped the Irish taxes; and though Acts restraining Irish gentry from living out of Ireland had been passed from the time of Richard II, and large estates had been forfeited to the Crown in punishment of delinquents, nothing availed to check the tendency. It decreased to a certain extent during the years of independence, when many of the nobility and gentry who were in the habit of spending their winters in London took houses in Dublin; but after the Union, these officials relapsed into their old ways. In 1804 it was estimated that nearly £2,000,000 was being annually drawn out of Ireland in gold with no return made towards defraying the national expenses. The Irish pension list had always been a scandal. From the time of Charles II pensions to favourites, male and female, often too disgraceful to place on the English pension list, had been paid out of Irish resources. In 1761 these pensions amounted to over £64,000; in 1779 they had increased to over £84,000 per annum.[14]

[14] An Enquiry into the Legality of Pensions on the Irish Establishment, by Alexander McAuley, 1763.

The scandal of "Wood's halfpence" was only the worst of a series of gross jobs which depleted the Irish Treasury while they deeply humiliated the country. Nevertheless, at the end of the reign of Queen Anne (1713), the charge and debt of Ireland amounted to £1,318,263, while its credit was £1,576,686; there was thus a surplus of over £200,000, which was voted for public works, such as internal navigation, bridges, piers, hospitals, schools, etc.[15] Money was lavished on undertakings that often proved useless. Among the most ambitious of these schemes was the construction of the Grand Canal to unite by water Dublin and the Shannon, and the Royal Canal between Dublin and Lough Alien. The former of these schemes cost the country over £1,281,000, its only use being to carry turf and small quantities of coal. It connected no towns and fed no industries. It was generally believed, like some other schemes of the period, to be a job, and the joke ran in Dublin that "it was not to be considered as a canal for trade but as a canal for public money." The fourteen miles which Young found completed, with locks, quays, and bridges were, he says, "only for the benefit of eels and skaters," and a large part of the money expended was never accounted for.

[15] J. Mullalla, A View of Irish Affairs, 1688-1795, i, 325-326.

All writers of the day speak of the prevailing spirit of public fraud, "that endless and diversified multitude of jobs for which Ireland has ever been notorious."[16] Young says that in his time "a history of public works in Ireland would be a history of jobs."[17] The Grand Canal was not finished until 1800, the year of the Union. Large bounties were also granted to industries of various kinds, and the Dublin Society, which had been founded in 1731, chiefly through the exertions of Dr. Samuel Madden, offered premiums for the development of manufactures and agriculture. Yet these did not compensate for the rapid improvements in machinery and methods which in England had doubled the wealth of the nation in the course of a century. Division of labour in Ireland was hardly yet known; the peasant worked his field of potatoes at one part of the year and his loom during another, but it was not till the last twenty years of the century, under free trade and legislative independence that any marked change for the better was witnessed in the general prosperity of the country.

[16] T. Newenham, op. cit., 33, 202, 206.

[17] Arthur Young, Tour in Ireland, ii, 129-130.

END OF CHAPTER XII

XIII.—THE STRUGGLE FOR LEGISLATIVE INDEPENDENCE

The Government of the country after the Revolution became daily more obsequious to the Parliament of England. Two successive Protestant Primates of pronounced English sympathies were sent over "to manage" the country in the English interest. Hugh Boulter was translated from Bristol in 1724, and he made it his business during his period of office to put a stop to any appointments being given to men of Irish birth, whether in the church or in the law. He is horrified to find that "there is a majority of (Protestant) bishops here who are natives," and esteems it wise "gradually to get as many English on the episcopal bench as can decently be sent over." "It is absolutely necessary to His Majesty's service that the Archbishop of Dublin's place be filled by an Englishman." Equally is he anxious to purify the law courts. "The Mastership of the Rolls has been sold to a native," he complains; "and there is talk that the Attorney-General is to be made Lord Chancellor." He entreats that in filling up such places "a strict regard may be had to the English interest.[1] In the eighteenth century the Irish Parliament was "managed" by a set of magnates who were in close touch with the English Ministry and who were known in the country as "Undertakers;" their chief business being to pass supply, to prevent any interference with English trade, and to keep in check any signs of independence in the Irish Parliament.

[1] Hugh Boulter, Letters (1769), i, 15, 21-22, 157, 173-175, 196-197.

The great borough proprietors made their bargain with the Primate on condition of being allowed to monopolise all the lucrative offices of state. On these terms they left government to pursue its policy unopposed. Boulter came over when the excitement about the scandal of Wood's halfpence was at its height. The copper coinage was debased and insufficient, and silver being scarce, a patent had been secured for one William Wood by the Duchess of Kendal for the coinage of a large quantity of halfpence and farthings, out of which a very considerable profit was to be reaped by the interested persons. The clamour aroused by this extravagant job had the unexpected result that it united all classes in a common grievance. All alike refused to take the new coins, and in the view of the new Primate "it had a very unhappy influence on the state of the nation by bringing on intimacies between the Papists and Jacobites with the Whigs, who before had no correspondence with them." A still more alarming symptom to Boulter was that "some foolish and ill-meaning people" had "taken the opportunity of propagating a notion of the independency of this kingdom from that of England," though, he hastens to add, "those of best sense and estate here repudiate this idea, and esteem their security to lie in their dependency on England."[2] The disastrous effect that the new coinage would have on the already impoverished country was, in Boulter's eyes, a lesser evil than the birth of such sentiments; he was undoubtedly right in thinking that it would have less permanent effect on the course of Irish political life. The imposition of Wood's halfpence without the consent of the people was only one out of a number of causes of irritation which stirred even the subservient Irish Parliament to awake to its own interests; it brought the powerful advocacy of Swift to the people's aid; and the clamour gradually widened, as Boulter foresaw it would, into a demand for legislative independence.

[2] Hugh Boulter, Letters (1769), i, 4, 8-10.

Subservient, and English in its views, and purely Protestant as the Dublin Parliament had become, it had never explicitly parted with its rights as an independent legislature, and from time to time it roused itself to declare them afresh as the encroachments of the English Parliament became more apparent. It became a question whether the old constitution by which the sovereign reigned as King of Ireland, as distinct from his kingdom of England, with the assistance of the independent Irish Houses of Parliament, was to be maintained, or whether Ireland was to sink into a mere dependency of England, to be ruled entirely by its king and ministers. Ever since the date of Poynings' Law, passed in 1495, a claim had been made by England to the right to make laws for Ireland, and from time to time there had been voices raised in Ireland to repudiate the claim. The demand for legislative independence was rather an appeal for the restoration of lapsed rights than a demand for a new concession. During the ninety-three years that had elapsed between the enunciation in the Parliament of James II of the right of Ireland to govern itself by its own laws, made by its own Parliament, and the enactment of legislative independence in 1782, a series of fearless Anglo-Irishmen took up the cause, and it was not abandoned until the energy of Grattan carried the demand to its logical conclusion. The Catholics had little share in the struggle; without votes, representation, or power of assembly, they could take only a passive part in the contest; but the Catholic Remonstrance of 1642 had laid down this principle as clearly as did the Parliament of 1689.

The gradual growth of trade restrictions added urgency to the problem, and in 1698, only nine years after the date of James's Parliament, both countries were startled by the publication of a treatise entitled The Case of Ireland being bound by Acts of Parliament made in England, by William Molyneux, Member of Parliament for Dublin University, and a man of eminence in scientific pursuits. His chief object was to expose the hampering limitations under which Irish trade was labouring, and he showed that these restrictions were the result of laws made in England against Irish interests and without the consent of the Irish Parliament. In the course of his dissertation, he traced the history of the commercial and legislative dealings between the two countries; and he maintained the entire independence of the Irish Parliament and its right to make its own laws. The separate and distinct jurisdictions of the two legislatures were, as he showed, part of the original settlement between the two kingdoms, any claim of superiority on the part of the English Parliament having been "a great while ago strenuously opposed and absolutely denied by the Parliament of Ireland." Before the passing of Poynings' Law, he added, "we have not one single instance of an English Act of Parliament expressly claiming this right of binding us; but we have several Irish Acts expressly denying this subordination."[3] Neither Molyneux nor those after him who sought to re-establish the undoubted right of Ireland to legislative independence had any thought of repudiating the claims of the Crown. "It has ever been acknowledged," he says, "that the Kingdom of Ireland is inseparably annexed to the Imperial Crown of England...and we must ever own it our happiness to be so annexed. But though so annexed to the Crown of England, Ireland has always been looked upon as a kingdom complete within itself, and to have all jurisdiction belonging to an absolute kingdom, subordinate to no legislative authority on earth."[4] Such views, coming from such a quarter, aroused surprise and animosity; the reply of the English Parliament was to order the book to be burned by the common hangman. It was in this year that the most destructive of all the enactments against Irish trade was passed; it brought the weaving of Irish woollens to an end, closed the mills, threw out of work forty thousand industrious weavers, and seriously hampered the fishing and other forms of industry.

[3] Edition of 1725, p. 46.

[4] Ibid., p. 87.

It was the depressed state of the manufactures and the wretched condition of the poor that brought into the arena another advocate of independence, Jonathan Swift, Dean of St Patrick's. He refused to allow that he was Irish, even in his sympathies, though he had been born in Dublin in 1667 and educated in Trinity College. "I happened to be dropped here, and was a year old before I left it," he writes; "and to nay sorrow did not die before I came back to it again." "I am in a cursed, factious, oppressed, miserable country," he writes again; "not made so by Nature, but by the slavish, hellish principles of an execrable, prevailing faction in it."[5]

[5] Letters of Swift, ed. by Howard Williams (1886), pp. 265-266.

Though Ireland owes him a deep debt of gratitude for arousing her out of the slough of political servitude into which she was falling, and though in his latter years, as he writes to Pope, "a thousand hats and blessings upon old scores as I walk the streets of Dublin" showed him that his efforts were not forgotten, he disclaimed the name of patriot "as one he did not deserve." He declared that he was forced into action "owing to perfect rage and resentment, and the mortifying sight of slavery, folly, and baseness about me and among which I was forced to live." Unlike those of Molyneux, the writings of Swift were no measured dissertation on the historical grounds for the claim of an independent legislature. From his pen poured forth tract after tract, white-hot, scathing, bitter, attacking the corruption of the Government of his day and exposing the misery and servility that this corruption engendered among the people. To flout the imposition of the degrading and costly pension list imposed upon Ireland, he seized upon the occasion of Wood's halfpence and attacked the use of the coins in an exaggerated tirade. To rouse the nation to consider the disabilities on trade he wrote a pamphlet calling on the Irish to wear nothing but articles of home manufacture. To show that England had put a veto on every scheme for the benefit of the country he penned the terrible satire called A Modest Proposal. The condition of things that drew forth this shocking indictment is summed up in his scathing tract, Maxims controlled in Ireland, where he says: "At least five children in six who are born lie a dead weight upon us for want of employment...I confess myself to be touched with very sensible pleasure when I hear of a mortality in any country parish or village, where the wretches are forced to pay for a filthy cabin and two ridges of potatoes, treble their worth; brought up to steal or beg for want of work; to whom death would be the best thing to be wished for on account both of themselves and of the public."

The compassionate death that Swift's satirical pen "wished for" came in the years of famine that decimated the country during the eighteenth century, culminating in the great famine of 1845 and the following years. But even the least provocative of Swift's Drapier's Letters was, like the tract of Molyneux, found by the authorities to be a "seditious, factious and virulent libel," and his printer was imprisoned. The English answer to all such suggestions of thoughtful and far-seeing men, living amid the miseries of a degraded country, had been short and sharp. It was conveyed in the Act known as the sixth of George I (1719) which clearly asserted that the English King "by and with the consent of the Lords spiritual and temporal and Commons of Great Britain in Parliament assembled, had, hath, and of right ought to have full power and authority to make laws...to bind the people and kingdom of Ireland." The same Bill deprived the Irish House of Lords of the right to hear appeals, about which a test case had just been fought out regarding the property of Maurice Annesley. This Act was the deathblow to Irish independence; it made the Irish Parliament in law what it was slowly becoming in fact, a mere mouthpiece to register English decrees. It aroused a spirit of opposition which was later to take form in a definite demand for independence, and of which the most vigorous champion was at this moment the Dean of St Patrick's. Ringing phrases burst from him. "Were not the people of Ireland born as free as those of England?" he writes. "How have they forfeited their freedom?...Am I a freeman in England and do I become a slave in six hours in crossing the Channel?" Or again: "Those who come over hither from England, and some weak people among ourselves, whenever we make mention of liberty and property, shake their heads, and tell us that Ireland is a depending kingdom...I have looked over all English and Irish statutes without finding any law that makes Ireland depend upon England, any more than England does upon Ireland...I declare next under God, I depend only upon the king, my sovereign, and on the laws of my own country." In words that have become classic, he declared: "For, in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery; but, in fact, eleven men well armed will certainly subdue one single man in his shirt."

Swift lived in an age when rank materialism was the dominant note in English politics. The most shameless political corruption ran through the whole system of government in the age of Walpole. Backstairs influences and male and female favourites ruled even in military affairs and the promotion of officers. The sale of places and commissions was a public scandal and Parliament was "managed" by borough-mongers, some of whom commanded an immense number of votes. All this political, social, and moral corruption was to be reflected in its worst forms in the government of Ireland during the eighteenth century; the more so because none but Englishmen sent over for the purpose were allowed to have any effective voice in the government of the country. During the rule of Primates Boulter and Stone, from 1723 to 1764, the English ascendancy in Ireland was perfected in every particular. Offices, whether secular or religious, were alike filled by men sent over from the other side. To have the misfortune to have been born in Ireland rendered a man incapable of holding "any employment whatever above the degree of constable." This was equally true whether the applicant could or could not boast English ancestry or blood. Even Viscount Castlereagh was considered disqualified for the Chief Secretaryship because he was born in the country; but Cornwallis contended that an exception might well be made in his favour, because he was "so very unlike an Irishman."

Nevertheless, it proved difficult to persuade decent men to come over to fill Irish offices. Swift speaks of the "persons of second-rate merit in their own country, who, like birds of passage thrive and fatten here, and fly off when their credit and employments are at an end." His parable of the divines who, on their way to take up their posts in Ireland, were robbed and murdered by highwaymen on Hounslow Heath, who seized on their robes and patents and came over to be made bishops in their stead, was hardly too severe at a time when bishoprics were knocked down to the highest bidder and an Irish Protestant bishop dared not, in an Irish House of Lords, endeavour to promote the interests of his own country without losing all hope of future preferment. Dr. Theophilus Boulton, Bishop of Clonfert and afterwards of Elphin, to whom Swift appealed on various occasions to further the well-being of his country, excused himself on the ground that he could not afford to sacrifice all hope of advancement. But when he became an archbishop, he declared himself ready to "zealously henceforth promote the good of his country" as, being an Irishman, he could never hope to be promoted to the Primacy!

From the death of Swift in 1745 until the rise of the Volunteer movement in 1778, the question of Irish Parliamentary independence languished. Internally the country was deeply disturbed and the prevailing depression showed itself in outbreaks all over the land and in the formation of secret societies which terrorized the inhabitants. Exorbitant rents, low wages, and the exactions of middlemen had reduced the peasantry to a condition of grinding misery. The absenteeism of the owners, who looked upon their Irish estates simply in the light of income collected for them on the spot by agents, and for which they had no responsibility, added to the helplessness of the tenants, who seldom or never came into personal contact with their landlords. Even to give the wretched cottier a permanent interest in his mud-built habitation was held to be an infringement of the Penal Code and was believed to be fraught with danger to Church and State.[6] Any man who attempted to take the part of the unfortunate cottager was esteemed "little better than a Papist." "Misery is ever restless," as Lord Charlemont, a Protestant landlord who was witness of these evils, said, "and the man who is destitute both of enjoyment and hope can never be a good and quiet subject." "A rebellion of slaves is always more bloody than an insurrection of freemen."[7] But the formation of the Catholic Committee in 1760 by Dr. Curry, author of the Civil Wars in Ireland, with the help of Charles O'Conor of Belanagare and Thomas Wyse of Waterford, inspired some hope in the Catholics of future relief. It was, in fact, the nucleus from which later movements in favour of emancipation took their rise. It showed that, though not formally withdrawn, the Popery laws were in practice relaxing and better relations growing up between people of differing religious opinions, which was later to bear fruit in the efforts made by the Episcopalians in Parliament to pass measures of Catholic relief. Other great questions, such as Parliamentary Reform, freedom of the Press, and the right of the people to formulate their opinions through their representatives, were also in the air, and were being fought out simultaneously on both sides of the Irish Channel. In England Parliamentary Reform was not carried until 1832, though it had been agitated since 1760; the freedom of the Press was gained during the Wilkes agitation in 1769-71, and Catholic Emancipation passed the Commons in 1812, though it was rejected by the Lords. The Bill admitting Catholics to Parliament was finally passed under the Wellington administration in 1829. In Ireland these questions were to become of absorbing interest, and their discussion brought into the Parliamentary arena a number of men of exceptional ability, many of them well fitted to deal with constitutional affairs of importance.

[6] F. Hardy, Life of Lord Charlemont (1812) i, 372.

[7] Ibid., i, 173, 187.

It might cause surprise that any stirring of dead bones could take place in the Irish Parliament as then constituted. The Irish House of Lords, since its deprivation of the right of appeal in the reign of George I, had sunk into a condition so deplorable that men of independent mind refused to sit; some, like Lord Charlemont, even preferring a place in the Lower House. Lord Chesterfield had termed the Upper House in England "a hospital for incurables"; the records of the Upper House in Ireland at this period might well have gained for it the title of an asylum for imbeciles. Civil and obsequious whatever the occasion, its members seemed to have abandoned the right of private judgment. It was of little avail for the country to look for aid from any assembly whose records on many a critical question were summed up in the words: "Prayers. Ordered, that the judges be covered. Adjourned."[8] Lord Charlemont remarks that the Irish leaders were justly styled "undertakers," for, from education and habit, "they were well fitted to preside at the funeral of the commonweal."[9]

[8] F. Hardy, Life of Lord Charlemont (1812), i, 372.

[9] Ibid., i, 217.

Even the presence of patriotic and independent noblemen like the Duke of Leinster, Lord Moira and Lord Powerscourt could have little effect in an assembly that believed itself to exist merely to register the acts of ministers. But in the Lower House life was not yet extinct, and in the struggle for its own independence, on which it was now embarking, men arose who were yet to prove by their conduct that "it was not for slavery they contended at the Boyne." The first to brave the anger of his government for having asserted the independence of the Irish Parliament was Dr. Lucas, a skilled Dublin physician who, after a violent struggle with the Castle authorities, was returned as member for Dublin. But he was more effective in his efforts to check the mismanagement of the Dublin Corporation than as a debater in Parliament. He had the boldness of Swift without his genius, and he attacked not only abuses but individuals. But he took a leading part in the struggle for the shortening of the duration of the Irish Parliaments. These had become accustomed to sit without prorogation until the death of a king; by the Octennial Bill of 1768 their duration was limited to eight years. Lucas's Pamphlets and public letters also helped to push forward the freedom of the Press in Ireland before the cry of "Wilkes and Liberty" had been heard in England. He established the Citizen's Journal to support his views.

Two questions of the day gave an opportunity to the House to assert its constitutional rights. These were a Money Bill and the Mutiny Bill. Submissive as it had become, the House of Commons still clung to its claim to be the sole originator of Money Bills, and the guardian of the public funds. But when, in 1753, there was a surplus in the Treasury of nearly £200,000, a precedent was set which was held to bind Ireland. This occurred under the dictatorship of Primate George Stone, known as "the Wolsey of Ireland," who was appointed in 1747, and whose determination to govern independently of the "undertakers" led him into violent conflict with Boyle, soon to be created Earl of Shannon, whom he tried to oust from the Speakership of the House. The question of the disposal of the surplus was to these individuals merely an incident in their struggle for personal power, but it involved a question of vital importance to the country. Stone supported the claim of the Crown to have the disposal of the surplus, while Boyle headed a popular or Whig party which upheld the right of the Irish Commons to allocate the money to Irish uses as they thought fit. In 1749, the English Parliament had held that the Irish Parliament had not even the right to entertain such a question. They asserted that it lay in the Crown to dispose of all surplus revenues, and that nothing could be done without the King's consent; thus the Commons of Ireland saw the last remnant of their independence slipping from them into English hands. For the moment the matter was settled by the money being handed over by the King to the reduction of the national debt, Boyle being bought over by a peerage, with a pension of £3,000 a year for thirty-one years; his supporter, Malone, was made Chancellor of the Exchequer. Servants of the Crown who opposed the King's claim were dismissed from their posts. But the main crux of the matter remained in doubt, and so great was the interest aroused in the Commons in this important constitutional question that a borough sold in 1754 for three times as much as was given for it in 1750. Lord Hartington, son to the Duke of Devonshire, who had been sent over by Fox as Viceroy to negotiate this business, brought about a momentary harmony; but Lord Charlemont, who was employed as negotiator between the parties, remarks that this was only the first instance out of thousands that he lived to witness in which men like Boyle and Malone, popularly known as "the Patriots," assumed "the mask of patriotism to disguise self-interest and ambition," the path of opposition being used as the surest road to office.[10]

[10] F. Hardy, Life of Lord Charlemont, i, 94.

The purchase of these "Patriots" by the gift of high offices of State aroused public attention to the whole question, and efforts were made to reduce the pension list, then amounting to an annual expenditure of £28,103; though only partially successful, the agitation served the purpose of laying bare the rottenness of the Irish Government. It also brought into the arena new advocates, of whom Flood was one of the ablest. He was active, ardent, and persevering, and, though at times formal and laboured in his manner of speaking, his speeches were replete with just argument, and he was unrivalled in driving home his point. Flood and Lord Charlemont, both of them young men, now formed a junction to oppose the tyranny of administration. Lord Townshend, who had been sent over as Viceroy in 1767, had not dared to question the right of the Irish Parliament to originate its own Money Bills, and on this point alone bribery failed to secure him a following. When, in October 1769, a Money Bill was sent over by the English Privy Council it was rejected "because it had not its origin in that House." Great excitement prevailed. The Commons were summoned to the bar by the Viceroy, who blamed their proceedings in the strongest terms and hastily prorogued Parliament, which did not meet again until March, 1771, when Lord Townshend carried a majority, though with great difficulty, in the House of Commons. But a series of protests, "breathing a language most earnest and constitutional," were signed by some sixteen or eighteen peers, led by the Duke of Leinster; and while peerages and pensions were being poured forth to buy the people through their representatives, the people themselves were awakening to their responsibilities.

One Member, the Speaker of the House, John Ponsonby, refused to present an obsequious address to the King in 1771 to thank him for continuing Townshend in office. He preferred to resign. He was succeeded by Edmond Sexton Pery, afterwards Lord Pery, who, though he had hitherto acted with the Government, showed himself henceforth the friend of all good movements for Ireland, such as the Corn Laws, the Tenantry Bill, the Tithe Regulations, and Free Trade. Pery was a man of exceptional stability and strength of purpose, and his advice was resorted to by both parties. In a corrupt circle he was incorruptible, and his gravity and foresight were of great service in the House. Some years before Grattan came into public view, he had the courage to announce boldly that" the Parliament of Great Britain had no right to make laws for Ireland."[11] Signs of independent judgment such as this were not welcomed in England. But they were not easily put down. An article in the Public Advertiser calling on the authorities to suppress "the spirit of seditious obstinacy" shown in Ireland was ordered to be publicly burned in Dublin, and Townshend was lampooned in a series of papers by Sir Hercules Langrish called Baratariana. He was recalled in 1772, and Lord Harcourt replaced him, but this brought no cleaner system into politics; his ministry was one of sinister influence, and that of his successor, Lord Buckinghamshire, of acknowledged incapacity. But in Lord Harcourt's time the movement for freedom of trade was begun by a speech of the Speaker in 1773 at the bar of the House of Lords; on this speech all the subsequent proceedings in favour of the extended commerce of Ireland were founded.

[11] F. Hardy, Life of Lord Charlemont, i, 157-161 ; Life of Grattan, by his son i, 104-112.

In 1775 Grattan entered Parliament for the borough of Charlemont. Unfortunately, at a moment when it was urgent that all enlightened men should unite to bring to an end a vicious system of government, Flood allowed himself to be bought over by the devices of Lord Harcourt's secretary, Sir John Blaquiere, who courted and flattered him and at length induced him to take office. He became Vice-Treasurer with a salary of £3,500 a year. We may believe, with the friends of Flood, that he accepted office from a conviction that he could thus better influence those in power in favour of reforms; but if this were so he was speedily undeceived. In later life, when a Member of the English Parliament, he complained that every one to whom he had entrusted a Parliamentary motion or plan of conduct for the session had almost uniformly betrayed him.[12]

[12] F. Hardy, Life of Lord Charlemont, i. 359.

When Grattan first entered the House of Commons the great struggle of America with England, which was to end in the Declaration of American Independence less than one year later (July 4, 1776), was at its height. "A voice from America shouted to liberty," said Flood in 1782. The struggle was watched with intense interest in Ireland, especially in Ulster, a large number of whose exiled sons were fighting and dying on the side of America against England. The war had its effect both on the question of Irish independence and on that of Catholic freedom. The strong opposition in Ireland to the action of England in America was increased by a vote under the Harcourt administration for four thousand Irishmen to be raised as an addition to the English army in America. Flood termed them "armed negotiators." But it was the carrying through of this measure that gave birth to the Irish Volunteers, a body of armed citizens, self-paid and self-disciplined, which was destined to be a chief agent in the advance of liberty, prosperity and security at home.

Belfast had not forgotten that in 1760 a small detachment of French troops had succeeded in entering Carrickfergus Bay under the command of Thurot, and that it was only the dissensions between the leaders of the expedition which had prevented their march on Belfast. The town now applied for protection to the Government, which was gradually denuding the country of troops at a time when French privateers swarmed in the Channel. The reply of Sir Richard Heron, the Irish Secretary, was that no troops could be spared. Belfast, which had previously raised a small body of men to resist the French invasion, now set about organising itself for the purpose of the defence of the country. With extraordinary rapidity the movement spread, and in little more than a year the numbers amounted to forty-two thousand men. No landlord dare meet his tenants, no member of Parliament his constituents, who was not willing to serve with his armed countrymen. The Duke of Leinster, the Earl of Clanricarde, and in the north Lord Charlemont, became their leaders and commanded in their own parts of the country. The Volunteer army was at first wholly Protestant, but their aims were applauded and supported by their Catholic fellow-countrymen, who liberally contributed to the expenses of a body which the laws forbade them to join. The organisation gave force to the appeals for Free Trade, Catholic Emancipation, and the independence of Parliament. But it did more than this, for it made the nation as a whole feel their unity as they had never before felt it, and it was with a united people that Britain had now to deal. No charges of insubordination were made against the Volunteers; their discipline was perfect and their obedience complete; they became the pride of their commanders and the hope of the poor.

The question of relief for the Catholics was making slow but sure progress. From the death of Primate Boulter in 1742 the Penal Code was somewhat relaxed. Boulter had himself put the finishing touches to that infamous code of disabilities by getting passed the Irish Acts depriving Catholics of the franchise and by excluding them from the legal profession.[13] But the feeling of the majority of the Protestants in the country was slowly changing towards their Catholic fellow-subjects. Many of these were making for themselves positions of wealth in the only avenues of activity left open to them, as merchants and agriculturists, and the Protestants began to realise the injustice of keeping them out of all posts of communal and political activity. The friendly interest taken by the Catholics in the welfare of the Volunteers, from whose ranks the laws prohibiting their possession of arms excluded them, also had weight, and from 1772 onward, by slow steps, relief began to be conceded. In that year a Bill was passed securing to them the repayment of money lent to Protestants on mortgage, though it was only carried by a majority of two; in 1774, they were permitted to take mortgages on land, and in the same session a Bill proposed by Mr. (afterwards Sir Hercules) Langrishe, a brilliant and witty debater and a broadminded man, was passed, permitting Catholics to take leases not exceeding fifty square perches in any city or market-town, and in the country of under fifty acres. The Catholic owner, however, must still "gavel" or subdivide his property among his successors at his death, and any member of his family who conformed as a Protestant was to receive the largest share. This Bill, curiously styled "a Bill for the better encouragement of persons professing the Popish religion to become Protestants," was held at the time to be a great act of liberality; it was not till 1778 that a real property Act was passed in the Popish Relief Bill, which allowed land to be taken by Catholics for a term of 999 years or five lives, and did not oblige them to "gavel" or divide it at death. This was soon followed by an Act permitting them to possess and inherit land absolutely, the conforming clauses, in many ways the worst feature of these laws, being at the same time repealed. Between 1702 and 1773 the number of those who had conformed was shown to be 4,055 persons; some of these, no doubt, were tempted by the prospect of becoming possessed of their fathers' lands, thus making the father a tenant only for life. The chief speakers on behalf of these measures were Sir Hercules Langrishe, Flood and Walter Hussey Burgh, who later became Chief Baron of the Exchequer, and whose support of enlightened measures gained him the affection of friends and the hatred of the Irish Government. On one occasion, after speaking in the House on the Parliamentary rights of Ireland, he remarked to Grattan: "I have now, nor do I repent it, sealed the door against my own preferment and made the fortune of the man opposite to me." A Relief Bill for Presbyterians followed, repealing the Test Act, which was carried by large majorities in both Houses.

[13] 1 George II, ch. ix (1727); and 1 George II, ch. xx; 7 George II, ch. v. (1733).

Matters were approaching a crisis when, in 1775, Grattan first entered Parliament. His mind had only slowly turned to the idea of a public career. Born on July 3, 1746, in Dublin, where his father was Recorder for the city, Henry Grattan was educated at Mr. Young's school in Abbey Street, and entered Trinity College, Dublin, where he came into contact with many of his future political associates. John Foster, who became Speaker of the Irish House of Commons and a warm defender of the principle of Free Trade, was one of them. Another was Fitzgibbon, then carrying all before him, who was later, as Lord Clare, to exert his immense influence in carrying the Union. From Dublin University Grattan passed on to the Middle Temple in London, and was entered in the autumn of 1767 as student of law. But he was not enamoured of the profession, and a disposition to despondency which marked his youth found its best relief in the solitudes of Windsor Forest or the debates in the British Parliament, where the power and eloquence of Chatham's speeches delighted and impressed him. In the glades of Virginia Water he practised aloud a similar oratory. He was called to the Irish Bar in Hilary Term, 1772, but he returned to Dublin with regret. "Here," he writes, "there is nothing new, nothing interesting; a noisy Four Courts, a lazy metropolis, and a childish public spirit." "I am tired of Dublin," he writes later, "with all its hospitality and all its claret. Upon our arrival it seemed a town hung in mourning, swarming with poverty and idleness. We feel relaxation growing upon us as soon as we arrive, as we watch the epidemic sloth of the luxurious capital." The "contagious laziness" of Dublin was, however, stirred by the presence of many men of energy and talent. The Club known as the Society of Granby Row, contained among its members a group of men of wit and education, the friends and associates of Lord Charlemont, around whom all that was best in Anglo-Irish society gathered, and whose fine house was a centre for literary and artistic people.

But young Grattan found the debates in the House insipid, "everyone speaking, nobody eloquent," and "the Four Courts of all places the most disagreeable"; while "the sociable disposition of the Irish will," he complains, "follow you wherever you fly, and in every barren spot of this kingdom you must submit to a state of dissipation or hostility." It was on the death of Lord Charlemont's brother that Grattan entered public life as Member for the borough which Francis Caulfeild had hitherto represented in Co. Tyrone. He immediately flung himself into the debates, and his long studies in oratory and his admiration for Chatham's Parliamentary style bore fruit in his new career. His first speeches were attacks on the lucrative sinecures often given to absentees; on the unconstitutional attempts of the Crown to suspend the law, and on the embargo laid upon free trade. He took the opportunity thus afforded him to condemn the policy of Great Britain with regard to America. Fox, who, when in Dublin, heard one of Grattan's early speeches, was struck by his facility of style and soundness of argument, and an introduction to him resulted in a sincere friendship. The town was in a miserable state of poverty, in spite of the outward luxury of the rich; the unemployed paraded the streets; the Treasury, formerly possessed of an annual balance, was at this moment empty ; and the "desperate political gamblers" who had squandered the revenues of the State had to apply to La Touche's private Bank for £20,000 to prevent collapse. Soon afterwards the Government had to borrow £50,000 from the Bank of England to pay the army.[14]

[14] The Bank of Ireland was established in 1783 ; hitherto La Touche's had been the only bank of importance in the country.

It was the low condition of commerce that gave Grattan his first real opening in Parliament and proved to be the beginning of his career. In a debate on an address to the Sovereign at the opening of the session on October 12, 1779, he succeeded in securing the approval of members of the Government to an amendment pressing for an immediate consideration of the state of the country, with a view to assisting its trade and manufactures. Hussey Burgh, who was then Prime Serjeant, proposed "Free export and import," and Grattan adopted the words. "Say simply Free Trade," whispered Flood, and the House, struck by the unaccustomed sight of an agreement between members of the Government and the independents, passed the amendment with only one dissentient vote. The words "Free Trade" spread like a watchword through the country. When the address was brought up to the Castle by the entire House the Volunteers, commanded by the Duke of Leinster, lined the streets and presented arms to the Speaker. The next day, Thomas Conolly, brother-in-law to the Viceroy, moved a vote of thanks to the Volunteers, which was carried unanimously. Thus, for the first time in their history, a large body of the people was brought into direct and sympathetic touch with their Parliament. The Government was alarmed, and the King answered evasively; but the Volunteers determined that the country should not be duped; they stopped the carriages of their representatives and tendered to them the oath that they would vote for Free Trade and a short Money Bill. On November 4, they paraded round the statue of William III on College Green, and a placard affixed to two field-pieces was inscribed: "A Free Trade—or this." "The glorious Revolution" became a party watchword; but at this moment Williamite and Jacobite were in complete accord, and the cheers of Protestant and Catholic mingled in the streets. The military were called out, but the people refused to disperse; some rioting occurred, until the lawyers' volunteer corps, mingling with the people, induced them to return to their homes.

The effect of the national awakening was seen in the Irish House of Commons. Resolutions "that this time it would be inexpedient to grant new taxes," and "that the appropriated duties should be granted for six months only," were carried in spite of the exertions of the Castle party. It was in this latter debate that Hussey Burgh electrified the House by his brilliant speech, concluding with the famous words: "Talk not to me of peace; Ireland is not in a state of peace; it is smothered war. England has sown her laws like dragons' teeth, and they have sprung up in armed men." The House rose as one man and cheered him repeatedly, but the Government cleared the galleries, and the Prime Serjeant lost his office. But on December 13, Lord North submitted to the British Parliament three propositions admitting Ireland to the colonial trade on terms of equality of dues and customs, and allowing the free exportation of Irish wool and woollen manufactured goods and of Irish glass. Within a few months, and with little opposition, these measures were passed in England, and they were received in Ireland with the greatest enthusiasm. At the close of 1779, Buckinghamshire, the Viceroy, wrote: "The satisfaction of Ireland seems final and complete," and, indeed, the effect upon the trade and industries of the country was at once seen. But the very fact that it lay in the power of England either to restrict or to relieve the trade of Ireland, proved beyond doubt that the liberties of the Irish Parliament, long shackled, had now in practice, ceased to exist. Measures bestowed by the British Parliament as acts of concession were dependent only on goodwill and were at any time liable to be repealed by the same power; a free Parliament was needed in order to ensure the permanence of free trade. Thus the conferring of trade liberties upon Ireland led directly to the demand for an independent Parliament to regulate and control that trade.

The years from 1777 to 1781 were among the most disastrous in English history. The declaration of American Independence in 1776, had been followed by the surrender of the English army on the heights of Saratoga, and France and Spain had joined America against England. Chatham was dead and with him all hope of a federal union with the revolting colony.

The weakness of the Ministry and the dogged obstinacy of the King left the country helpless in the face of a disturbed Europe and with her proudest dominion rent from her. In 1781 the series of disasters was completed by the capture of the army of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown. "It is all over," Lord North exclaimed wildly, as he paced up and down his room, and he sent in his resignation. As Britain grew weaker Ireland increased in strength. On April 19, 1780, Grattan had made in Parliament his "Declaration of Irish Rights," inspired directly by the action of America. He moved "That the King's most excellent Majesty and the Lords and Commons of Ireland, are the only power competent to make laws to bind Ireland." The debate lasted for fifteen hours, and the Lord-Lieutenant was obliged to report with the utmost concern "that the sense of the House against the obligation of any statutes of the Parliament of Great Britain within this kingdom is represented to me to have been almost unanimous." The strength of this feeling was tested by the question of the Mutiny Bill which it was proposed to make perpetual. It was declared that the English Mutiny Act was not binding in Ireland, and magistrates in the country refused to put it in force. Buckinghamshire resigned and was succeeded by Lord Carlisle.

Meanwhile, the Volunteer organization was gathering fresh strength, fully thirty thousand men having been enrolled in 1780, and it became a definitely political force in the country.

The reviews of 1781 and 1782 showed its discipline, and when threats of a French landing were made the Ulster corps instantly placed themselves at the disposal of the Viceroy, in conjunction with the regular army, to march to the South and meet it. But, on the other hand, some of the warmest supporters of the Volunteer movement began to feel alarm at its growing influence in politics. The Duke of Leinster, hitherto the colonel of the Dublin corps, suddenly withdrew. He said that he "had been long enough a slave to popularity; he had no idea of constitutional questions being forced by the bayonet." Lord Charlemont succeeded to the general command, but he was too strong a supporter of the British connection to be more than a timid advocate of independence, while he was directly opposed to Catholic relief. The time was not far off when he and Grattan, who had for so long worked in concert, were to become estranged from want of sympathy on these points. There was, indeed, some danger at this moment that the delegates of the Volunteers would form themselves into a body to overawe Parliament, and so place themselves in an unconstitutional position; but the wisdom of their leaders averted this possibility. In their Convention which met on February 15, 1782, in the parish Church at Dungannon, 145 representatives of the Ulster corps assembled, and a number of resolutions were passed, calling for the modification of Poynings' Law, condemning the unlimited Mutiny Bill, and demanding the independence of the judges. They subscribed to a resolution "that the claim of any other body of men other than the King, Lords, and Commons of Ireland to make laws to bind this kingdom is unconstitutional, illegal, and a grievance." Lastly, they accepted a motion proposed by Grattan that the right of private judgment in matters of religion was held by them to be equally sacred in others as in themselves, and that they conceived the relaxation of the Penal Laws against their Catholic fellow-subjects to be fraught with the happiest consequences to the union and prosperity of Ireland. Thus was the cause of the Catholics taken up by their Episcopal and Presbyterian countrymen, and the various bodies brought together for the coming struggle. The resolutions were sent through the country and everywhere adopted by the Volunteers, by the grand juries, and by meetings of freeholders.

On February 22, 1782, Grattan, in a stirring speech, brought forward the question of the rights of Ireland. He moved, in the form of an address to the Crown, a series of propositions, assuring the Sovereign of the sincere and unfeigned attachment of the Irish people to his Majesty's person and Government; but he contended that the people of Ireland was a free people, and that the crown of Ireland was an Imperial crown. The kingdom of Ireland, he further asserted, was a distinct kingdom with a Parliament of its own, the sole legislature thereof; so that the subjects of this kingdom, by the fundamental laws and franchises, cannot be bound or affected by any other legislature, "a privilege treasured by them as their lives and the very essence of their liberty."[15] There was, at this time, no idea of separation from England; rather, the address assured the King that, "next to our liberties we value our connection with Great Britain, on which we conceive...the happiness of both kingdoms intimately depends," a sentiment the reality of which had recently been proved in a remarkable manner by the spontaneous offer of the Volunteers to fight in the British army if there was a French invasion. "The Volunteer," said Grattan, "had no objection to die by the side of England, but he must be found dead with her charter in his hand." The subject was taken up by Flood in a different form on February 26, and adjourned on both occasions. But it was at this critical moment, after the fall of the Ministry of Lord North, that the Irish Secretary, William Eden, later Lord Auckland, who hastily crossed over to London to tender the resignation of Lord Carlisle, found to his surprise that a new Ministry was in process of formation under Lord Rockingham, and that the Viceroy's resignation had been forestalled.

[15] Speeches of the Right Hon. Henry Grattan, ed. D. O. Madden (1854), pp. 54-69.

Eden gave an alarmist account of affairs in Ireland; he urged the House to agree to all the measures proposed by the Volunteers, with a partial repeal of the 6th Act of George I, declaring that if he did not return the next day with the promise of these measures all would be too late. On April 14 Lord Portland arrived in Dublin, and two days later Grattan, in a great speech, brought forward his motion for a Declaration of Rights. The excitement was at its height; the city was full of Volunteers and the galleries of the House were crowded Grattan was ill, but determined. He lived opposite to the Castle, and his doorsteps had been crowded all day with anxious Members. The House was breathless as he rose, looking worn and harassed, to utter the memorable words:—"I am now to address a free people...I found Ireland upon her knees, I watched over her with a paternal solicitude; I have traced her progress from injuries to arms and from arms to liberty. Spirit of Swift! Spirit of Molyneux! your genius has prevailed. Ireland is now a nation!...Bowing in her august presence, I say Esto perpetua."[16] The House then adjourned to give the new Government time to decide on the exact measures to be proposed, while addresses of support flowed in from all sides. In England, Fox agreed to all the propositions. "Unwilling subjects," he said, "are little better than enemies." He had no objection so to word the Act Repeal of the 6th of George I as to contain an explicit renunciation of England's rights, which Burke also approved.

[16] Speeches of Grattan, p. 70.

The Act of Repeal received the Royal Assent on June 21, and with it the restoration of the appellant jurisdiction. Flood was not yet satisfied; he considered that simple repeal not sufficient, and that the British Parliament should make a positive renunciation of all right to bind Ireland. The English Government brought in a Bill to meet this objection and the Act of Renunciation of 23 George III, ch. xxviii expressly resigned all right of the English over the Irish Parliament. Thus was this great question settled, as was then supposed, finally. A vote of £100,000 to the Government and twenty thousand men to the navy testified to the gratitude of the Irish nation to Britain; and a similar grant of money of which he accepted half, showed the admiration felt for the exertions of Grattan. Volunteer bodies proffered their services to Great Britain across the Channel. They declared that now they were free "they would stand or fall with England."

END OF CHAPTER XIII

XIV.—GRATTAN'S PARLIAMENT

The grant of independence did not suffice to check the corruption of Parliament. It was still formed of a purely Protestant oligarchy, whose boroughs were regarded as private property, generally of considerable money value, and who sold their interest, when it suited their convenience, to the Government. There was no real or open election; seats were purchased from their owners for large sums of money. In 1790, eight years after the grant of independence, Grattan, speaking in the Commons, had still to confess that "above two-thirds of the returns to the House are private property; of those returns, many actually are sold to the minister; the number of placemen and pensioners sitting here equals near one-half of the whole efficient body, the increase of that number within the last twenty years is greater than all the counties in Ireland. The country is placed in a sort of interval between the cessation of a system of oppression and the formation of a system of corruption."[1]

[1] Speeches of Grattan, p. 154.

If English dominance over Parliament had ceased with the passing of Grattan's Bill, ministerial influence was as active as ever in corrupting Members. During 1783 a number of meetings of delegates of the Volunteers held in Cork, Lurgan and Belfast, formulated plans for the prosecution of Parliamentary reform, the shortening of the duration of Parliaments, a tax on absenteeism, the exclusion of pensioners, and the limiting of the number of placemen. All these were useful proposals but so varied that, as Lord Charlemont feared, the principal measure was likely to be lost sight of in the multitude of subjects to be attacked. At his suggestion the secondary measures were dropped, and at a meeting at Dungannon which was called to organise a Convention in Dublin, a resolution was taken to call Members from the provinces to digest and publish a plan for Parliamentary reform. A proposal to demand the concession to Catholics of the elective franchise was brought forward and, though it was postponed, it was a plain indication of the unifying influences of the late measures that such a proposition should have been discussed at a representative meeting almost entirely composed of Ulster Presbyterians. But for Lord Charlemont's opposition it might have gone further, but on this point he held the strong prejudices of his day. A number of influential delegates were chosen as representative of different opinions, and on November 10, 1783, the Convention met in Dublin. The Royal Exchange proving to be too small for the number of delegates, they marched across to the Rotunda with Lord Charlemont, as their Chairman, leading the way, while the streets were lined by Volunteers. The city presented a splendid and stirring aspect, the detachments of county corps which accompanied their respective delegates having new accoutrements and ensigns of great variety, and the streets being full of well-mounted cavalry officers.

The most remarkable figure was that of Frederick, Bishop of Derry and Earl of Bristol, son of Lord Harvey, one of a family equally noted for talents and for eccentricity. He had applied at different times for the diverse posts of the Bishopric of Durham and the Lord-Lieutenancy of Ireland; he was now chagrined that he had not been elected president of the Convention. It was said of him that "he preferred the Church Militant to any other form of church," and his progress from his diocese was made at every stage with warlike honours. He rode up to the Rotunda in a coach and six, dressed in purple, and escorted by a troop of dragoons on magnificent horses. Trumpets announced his coining, and the Bishop passed along the streets bowing like a potentate on every hand. He entered the Rotunda just as the members of the Convention were proceeding to business, saluted them with dignity, took his seat, and then retired in the same majestic style, leaving the house breathless at the apparition. But on the ensuing days he acted with the zealous and earnest attention of a man of business. Anxious to make his influence felt in opposition to Charlemont and Grattan, he put forward Flood, whose eloquence soon gained for him a paramount influence in the assembly. The chairman was besieged by plans of reform from "every speculatist, great clerks or no clerks at all" throughout the country, but eventually Flood's proposals were adopted and a number of delegates who were possessed of borough properties declared, from a variety of motives, that they were ready to relinquish them for the benefit of the nation. The Bishop of Derry wished the Catholics to be included, but was resisted by Flood and the friends of Lord Charlemont.

Before the Convention began, the Irish Parliament had assembled and was then actually sitting. Flood, impatient of delay, rose in the Convention to propose that he and the other members should at once present their plan of reform in the shape of a Bill, adding to this proposition the suggestion "that the Convention should not adjourn till the fate of his motion was ascertained." It was to be a demand made as from one equal authority to another, backed by a display of armed force. As such, the Chairman strongly resisted it; he felt that it would put the Volunteers in the wrong; nevertheless, Flood gained his point and on the night of November 29 he carried his motion down to the House. A scene of tremendous agitation followed. Flood led the attack with fire and fearlessness, and was replied to by the Attorney-General, Barry Yelverton, later to become Viscount Avonmore, who had been a zealous Volunteer, and who now, at the close of a speech of great argumentative power, appealed to that body to rest on the honours they had gained and the good work they had done. Sir Hercules Langrishe argued in the same strain, and even Grattan, though he prayed that leave might be given to Flood to bring in his Bill, did not speak with his wonted assurance. The Convention, through Flood's hasty action, had succeeded in placing itself in antagonism to its own Parliament, and this the Members were determined to resist. The motion "that the House will maintain its just rights and privileges against all encroachments whatsoever" was proof of this feeling, and the refusal to bring in the Bill was carried by a two-thirds majority, the numbers being 159 to 77. Lord Charlemont, torn by indecision and timidity, two days later determined to dissolve the Convention, after passing a hasty address of loyalty to the King. That the questions which had proved so agitating within the walls of Parliament and of the Rotunda found little echo in the country was shown in the elections which had preceded the Convention by only three months, when members of the party which had so recently won independence had great difficulty in finding seats. Even Flood could hardly secure election, and Grattan was returned as before for the private borough of Charlemont. The great moment of the Volunteers was passed, though it was long before they were dissolved. But the Parliament that they had helped to render more free passed a number of useful measures, of which the independence of the judges, the limiting of the Mutiny Act to two years, the repeal of Poynings' Law, and the passing of the Habeas Corpus Act were among the most important.

In the following years, 1784-85, Parliament discussed the important commercial propositions in a spirit of liberty which had long been absent from the debates of the House, and they showed considerable mastery of the subject and dexterity in dealing with it. But on the point of greatest importance no advance was made. It proved impossible to induce the Houses of Parliament, even under the new conditions, to reform themselves. Strong as was the desire for reform in every part of the country, the vested interests were too powerful to be overcome. In vain Flood introduced his Reform Bill and the counties presented petitions pointing out that the existing Parliament in no way represented the people but was for the most part "illegally returned" by a few large borough-holders, who sold seats for prices "as well ascertained as those of the cattle in the fields." Neither the great body of the Catholics or of the Presbyterian yeomanry of the North, who formed the bulk of the Volunteers, were represented within the walls of the Parliament they had helped to liberate. Flood had to withdraw his motion. His Reform Bill of March, 1785, though supported by petitions from twenty-six counties and defended with moderation and good sense, was rejected almost with contempt by a majority of seventy-four. It began to be felt that reform could only be attained by means of revolution.

Even more than Parliamentary Reform the subject of the commercial relations between England and Ireland and trade protection agitated the country. Though Irish manufactures were reviving consequent on the liberty of colonial trade recently granted, there had still been severe distress in 1783-84, and a proclamation that oats, oatmeal, and barley were not to be exported led to riots and unemployment owing to the rise in food prices. Resolutions in favour of protecting duties were now introduced, supported by Sir Edward Newenham and argued with great ability. There was no sign of hostility to England, the promoters stating that their interest arose from commiseration for the condition of the poor inhabitants and not from any party spirit or factious motive whatsoever. "There was, in the eyes of the Irish merchants, a radical error in their commercial system, which it was necessary for their legislature to remove. If England and all Europe adopted protective duties it was essential for Ireland, if she were to hold her place in the world's markets to adopt the same policy." Foster, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, opposed the motion, but he was the author in the same year of an Act which, by granting large bounties on the exportation of corn and imposing heavy duties on its importation, had a most beneficial effect on agriculture in Ireland, and turned it in large part from a pastoral into an arable country, thus increasing employment and stimulating trade. Newenham describes Foster's Corn Law of 1784 as incomparably the most beneficent Irish measure of the eighteenth century, especially to small farmers and labourers. To it was chiefly ascribed the increasing prosperity of the country districts and the cessation of acute distress.[2]

[2] Newenham, View of the Natural, Political, and Commercial Circumstances of Ireland (1809), pp. 215-216; Lecky, History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (1892), ii, 384-390.

The whole question of the commercial relations between Great Britain and Ireland, however, awaited fuller consideration, especially in reference to the new relations subsisting between the two Parliaments. The increasing extravagance with which the expenditure of the country was conducted, particularly during the term of office of the Duke of Rutland as Viceroy, made the matter more than ever urgent. Pitt had come into office in 1783, when the coalition of Fox with North came to an end, and Rutland was sent to Ireland with Thomas Orde as Chief Secretary. In spite of the changed position of the Irish Parliament ministers were, as before, appointed by the English Government to express their views and were entirely devoted to the interests of their superiors; Irish officials and Members of Parliament looked to them as much as ever for favour and preferment, and the long hand of English authority stretched over every department of the State. The change had, at best, been only the triumph of a party; it could in no way pretend to be a national gain. The country at large was still unrepresented and the habit of "supporting the King's Government" was common enough among the Members to ensure on all ordinary occasions a large Government majority. Sinecures and jobbing were increasing to a frightful extent. Fitzgibbon, who believed that there was no other method of government for Ireland, openly confessed that on one occasion half a million had been expended to secure an address to Lord Townshend. The pension for life bestowed on "single-speech Hamilton" of £2,500 on the Irish funds, in return for his resignation of the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer, which he had treated purely as a sinecure, was only one of the worst examples of scandals that were constantly occurring. The pension list now amounted to £94,000 a year; considerably more than that of England. In spite of the increasing prosperity of the country the expenditure largely exceeded the revenue. The magnificent establishment set up in Dublin by the new Viceroy, an amiable and convivial but incompetent man, increased the extravagance of the courtiers, and was reflected in the habits of the general body of the citizens; the splendour of the city and the profuse indulgence of the gentry in pleasure ill accorded with the pecuniary condition of the inhabitants.

With the change in the ministry the question of the commercial relations came prominently to the front. Thomas Orde, the new Chief Secretary, had brought over with him the basis of a commercial treaty, the result of a previous correspondence with Pitt, which was laid before the Irish Parliament on February 7, 1785, in the form of eleven articles. It was Pitt's view that a perpetual free trade between the two countries was the only certain way of avoiding constant wars of hostile tariffs. His proposals led in this direction; they included the abolition of prohibitions and the equalization of duties, with the discontinuance of bounties on goods intended for either country, except foodstuffs. In return for these benefits the final article of the treaty provided that, whenever during times of peace the revenue produced more than the sum of £656,000, the surplus should go toward the support of the Navy, in whose protection Ireland participated without any liability for its cost. Grattan amended this article in accordance with his principle that this contribution should only be made when income exceeded expenditure. In this sense he added the clause: "After the expense of the nation is paid, to contribute to the general expenses of the Empire." But the treaty was accepted with little opposition, the Irish having in commercial dealings with the neighbouring country shown themselves consistently fair and reasonable. Foster at the same time moved for a reduction in expenditure, and additional taxes were voted to enable Ireland to carry out its part in the transaction.

The country had suffered so much from restrictions that a considerable party welcomed the idea of free trade with England. But in England the proposals, which were introduced by Pitt on February 22, encountered the most formidable opposition from the party of Fox and North, who denounced them as the ruin of English commerce, and from the manufacturing cities and Chambers of Commerce all over the kingdom. Petitions, led by Lord Liverpool, poured in, and amendments were made which increased the original propositions from eleven to twenty. These additions debarred Ireland from trading directly with any part of the world beyond the Cape of Good Hope and the Straits of Magellan, and from importing any goods from India except through Great Britain. All Navigation Laws, of the past or future, in force in England, were to be accepted in Ireland without modification. Such proposals were clearly incompatible with the independence of the Irish Parliament and were very far from giving her equal trade rights, for the conditions in the two countries were so different that the operation of the laws would be most unequal. Sheridan and Fox denounced Pitt's proposals on the double ground of their danger to British commerce and to Irish liberty. "I will not," exclaimed Fox, "barter English commerce for Irish slavery; that is not the price I would pay, nor is this the thing I would purchase." The propositions were returned to Dublin in their amended form only to meet with a fiery resentment. Grattan, Flood, and Curran, the latter a young barrister soon to be better known, denounced a measure which in Grattan's words involved "a surrender of trade in the East and of freedom in the West." The Bill had to be withdrawn amid public illuminations which testified to the public anxiety. Ireland continued to make her own trading regulations; and Lord Westmoreland, who became Lord-Lieutenant in 1790, testified that since the failure of Pitt's propositions "no restraint or duty has been laid upon British produce or manufacture to prejudice their sale in this country or to grasp at any advantage to articles of Irish manufacture...The utmost harmony subsisted in the commerce of the two kingdoms." [3]

[3] Westmoreland to W. Grenville (private) November 10, 1790.

A question even more important to Ireland than the commercial one stimulated the determination to reject the propositions. From time to time the ominous word "Union" had been heard in the discussions of statesmen and mentioned in their correspondence; even in letters of ministers like Rockingham which dealt with legislative independence, words of ambiguous meaning had been dropped, and some passages in Pitt's commercial speeches could hardly have any other interpretation. Phrases like "the fundamental principle and the only one on which the plan can be justified...in that for the future the two countries will be to the most essential purposes united," were watched and repeated with a natural apprehension. Another matter forced the question to the front. In the autumn of 1788 the King's mind gave way, and the question of the regency came under discussion in both Parliaments. In England it was disputed whether or not the Prince of Wales should be appointed Regent or had an inherent right to the position. The question became a party matter between Pitt and Fox, and their dissensions were transferred to Dublin, accompanied by liberal offers of place and payment to those who would sell their influence.

The Irish Members seem to have thought it a fair opportunity to assert their right to an independent opinion, and without waiting for the English Parliament to act they moved an address to the Prince in both Houses, praying him to accept the Regency of Ireland "during the continuation of his Majesty's present indisposition and no longer...under the style and title of Prince Regent of Ireland." The Viceroy having refused to transmit their petition, they appointed a deputation to wait on the Prince and present the address. The speedy restoration of the King to health and the good sense of the Prince averted further difficulties; the Members returned with a feeling that the Irish legislature had been premature but that their reception had been kindly. Into the numerous subtle questions of constitutional practice involved by the regency question it is unnecessary to enter here; party leaders wished to snatch from the position advantages each for his own side. That the Irish Members exceeded their constitutional powers seems clear; they used the occasion as an opportunity to enforce their claim to act independently of any decision come to in England, and fought out this claim with excited feeling. The fact that to the Irish the person of the Sovereign was the sole acknowledged link between the two kingdoms made the matter of the regency one of special importance to Ireland, and the traditional loyalty of the Irish gentry was shocked at the proposals that were being made in England to limit the powers of the Regent or to assert that any other but the Prince of Wales was eligible to occupy that office.

In this discussion a leading part on the Government side was taken by Fitzgibbon, who had in 1783 been appointed Attorney-General,[4] and who later, as Lord Clare, was to become the leading figure in Ireland in the carrying of the Union. Fitzgibbon was the second son of a merchant in Dublin who had been educated as a priest, but who "verted" and became a barrister and made a large fortune in that profession. The son had been educated as a Dublin University man at the same time as Grattan, Foster, and Robert Day. Grattan at this time liked him and spoke of him as "good-humoured and sensible, improving much upon intimacy."

[4] Largely through the personal influence of Grattan, who had cause afterwards to regret his advocacy of Fitzgibbon. Life and Times of Henry Grattan, by his son, iii, 202, and n.

It is perhaps the best point in a strange character that Fitzgibbon seems to have formed a high opinion of Grattan, "whom," he says, in a speech in 1785, "I am proud to call my most worthy and honourable friend; the man to whom this country owes more than, perhaps, any state ever owed to any individual; the man whose wisdom and virtue directed the happy circumstances of these times and the spirit of Irishmen to make us a nation." The fact that he could appreciate Grattan's honesty of purpose might predispose us to think Fitzgibbon honest; but his acts show him to have been willing to barter his principles and ruthlessly to crush his friends when the incitements of promotion and place allured him to oppose them. Thus the man who did most to force the Union upon the people he called his nation, had exclaimed in 1785 when the Union was mentioned: "Who will talk of Union now? If such a thing were proposed to me, I would fling my office in the man's face." Though coming of a Catholic family, he spoke and acted like the incarnation of the Protestant ascendancy party, and until 1793, when he argued against but voted for the franchise for Catholics, he opposed every measure brought forward for their relief. It was chiefly his obstruction that brought to an end Pitt's intention to carry Catholic emancipation concurrently with the Union. As a young Parliamentarian, Fitzgibbon had supported Grattan's independence policy and he had declared in 1782 that "he had always been of opinion that the claim of the British Parliament to make laws for this country is a daring usurpation of the rights of a free people." "That little man that talked so big would vote for a Union, aye, to-morrow," was the remark of a prescient friend who listened to his protest against the measure. Dr. Hill, Regius Professor of Medicine in Trinity College, Dublin, says of him: "I watched Fitzgibbon's conduct for years, in court and out of it, to friends and foes, to sycophants and expectants; and I came to a clear conclusion that he hated and strove to hurt any man who had any pretensions to honesty and ability." Sir Jonah Barrington thought him "the greatest enemy Ireland ever had."[5] This was the man whose influence was to be almost supreme in Ireland during the years of the rebellion and the Union. That he was a man of ability there is no doubt. Frequently, his judgments of contemporary events and persons were more far-seeing and just than those of his companions in the Ministry, and his speeches, in particular his speech on the passing of the Union, are worthy of careful consideration; but he held in an extreme form the corrupt political notions of his day, and he viewed the prevalent system of governing for the exclusive benefit of "the Protestant garrison" as the only sound method of rule in Ireland. He was the main cause of the withdrawal of Fitzwilliam in 1795, and of the rebellion which followed his recall.[6]

[5] Sir Jonah Barrington, Personal Sketches of his own times, 3rd Ed. (1869), i, p. 183n.

[6] Clare was not liked in England. His support of torture and his arrogant bearing were not approved of. Pitt, on one occasion, after hearing him speak, exclaimed to a friend beside him "Did you ever hear such a rascal!"

Meanwhile, opinion was advancing in various parts of the country, and with particular rapidity in Ulster, on the question of Catholic relief. It was powerful enough to distract attention from the urgency of reform. Recent events had worked in favour of the Catholic claims. "Their uniform peaceable behaviour during a long series of years" had been the acknowledged cause of the removal of disabilities in 1778, and their interest in Irish independence and in the Volunteers had aroused a general feeling that it was unjust that the largest part of the population should be excluded from all participation in the affairs of their own country. The fact that they formed the great majority of the population, which should have been felt to be a reason for special consideration, had been made the pretext for their exclusion from political influence. Fear and jealousy on the part of the ruling class had brought about this perversion of justice. Even Sir Hercules Langrishe, who was in favour of full religious and educational equality, of throwing open the profession of the law, of removing the limits placed on the number of their apprentices in order to allow them to undertake large industrial businesses, and of permitting intermarriage between Catholics and Protestants, and full and equal land-ownership, hesitated to admit them to the franchise or to seats in Parliament; and, though all other measures of relief were granted by Luke Gardiner's [7] Bill in 1782 and by Langrishe's own Bill in 1792, the question of the franchise was still fiercely contested. The leaders of the patriotic party themselves were deeply divided on the point. Charlemont maintained a conservative attitude of the most unbending character; but led by Grattan and Curran, and supported by an increasing part of the best intellect of the country, the feeling of the Protestants made rapid strides toward a solution of the problem. The leading part taken by the Presbyterians of Belfast should never be forgotten. They had stood at the head of the demand for legislative independence in 1782 and had won it for Ireland; they now showed themselves equally enlightened and broad-minded in regard to their Catholic fellow-subjects.

[7] Afterwards Lord Mountjoy.

In 1792 John O'Neal presented a petition signed by six hundred men of position in Belfast praying for the repeal of all penal and restrictive laws against the Catholics, and asked that Catholics should be placed on the same footing as their Protestant fellow-countrymen. Co. Antrim sent up a similar petition signed by 350 Protestant gentlemen and clergy. Help came from unexpected quarters. The eccentric Bishop of Derry, who had made himself conspicuous in volunteering and in the struggle for independence, came forward as a vigorous partisan of Catholic relief, He would have admitted Catholics to all offices, including Parliament. He spoke of himself as an example of "the rare consistency of a Protestant bishop, who feels it his duty and has made it his practice to venerate in others that inalienable exercise of private judgment which he and his ancestors claimed for themselves." His views, energetically announced, made themselves felt in Derry among all classes, and the Presbytery in 1784 had expressed "their perfect approbation of the liberality of his Lordship's religious sentiments." The Protestant Bishop of Killala, Dr. Law, was of the same opinion and denounced the Popery Laws. The powerful advocacy of Burke, which had from his early years been always raised against the monstrosity of the Penal Laws, had found expression in 1782 in his Letter to a Peer in Ireland; in 1792, when the matter was again attracting public attention, he wrote his celebrated Letter to Sir Hercules Langrish. Nor was Dublin University behindhand. When Grattan, in 1792, discussed in Parliament the admission of Catholics into Trinity College and their right to become professors of non-controversial subjects the motion was supported by the Hon. Denis Browne and other officials of the College, and the question was debated with moderation and good feeling The Provost, John Hely Hutchinson, went even farther, and supported John Egan's motion for giving them the franchise.

But, in the towns especially, there was a violent party whose resistance had to be overcome. When Grattan took up the matter he was met by protests from the Dublin Corporation. They said they would have "a Protestant king of Ireland, a Protestant Parliament, a Protestant hierarchy, Protestant electors, and a Protestant Government; the benches of justice, the army and revenue through all their branches and details Protestant; and this system supported by a connexion with the Protestant realm of England."

Against such a blank wall of public opinion progress had necessarily to be slow. In 1792 resolutions were passed all over the country against giving the elective franchise to Catholics. Petitions went up from the grand juries of Mayo, Sligo, Meath, Cork, and many other counties, largely through the efforts of the boroughmongers. "To give the franchise was to give everything, for everything follows the franchise," was the general sentiment. Yet it was to the Protestants, especially of the North, that emancipation was eventually due. The remarkable fact is that the Catholics of the upper classes at this time, both clergy and laity, stood absolutely aloof. They seemed to dislike any sort of agitation and to distrust any appeal. During the Whiteboy riots of 1779 the Catholic Church had supported all efforts of the Government to put down the rioters; the bishops had sharply denounced the disturbers of the peace and admonished them to return to their homes. A sentence of excommunication was pronounced in the churches of Ossory against "those deluded offenders, scandalous and rotten members of our Holy Church," by Dr. Troy, then Catholic Bishop of the diocese, and others of the bishops adopted the same attitude. He used the same threat in 1784.[8] In the early agitation for their own liberties the Catholics remained absolutely quiescent. There was, in fact, no cohesion between the different classes of the Catholic population. The Catholic lords were high Tories, aristocratic and almost obsequiously loyal, hating the middle classes, and resisting all attempts made to induce them to coalesce with them for public purposes.

[8] Plowden, Historical Review of the State of Ireland, vol. ii, Pt. II, Appendix lxxiv.

Charles O'Conor of Belanagare, Co. Roscommon, complains bitterly of the "more than Protestant severity" of the Catholic landowners. He despaired of getting them or the hierarchy to help the Catholic Association to struggle for the rights of their people. "Despair or indifference or unmeaning motives have arrested their hands," he writes despondingly to Dr. Curry in February 1761. As to the clergy, "Will it be overlooked," he complains, "that our ecclesiastics to a man have been entirely passive in the prosecution of this measure?"[9] In the meantime, the Catholics were pouring out addresses of loyalty expressive of their gratitude for the relaxation of the laws already given, and disclaiming, evidently with perfect sincerity, any wish to press further measures other than "the circumstances of the time and the general welfare of the Empire shall render prudent and expedient." Lord Fingall, the leading Catholic nobleman of Ireland and one who was respected by all classes, writes in 1803: "The Catholic is ready at this moment to sacrifice his life, his property, everything dear to him, in support of the present constitution...He wishes no other family on the throne; no other constitution; but certainly he wishes to be admitted, whenever it may be deemed expedient, to a full share in the benefits and blessings of that happy constitution under which we live..."[10] This was the farthest that he would go.

[9] Thomas Wyse, Historical Sketch of the late Catholic Association of Ireland (1829), 72, note, 59-60.

[10] Correspondence between Lord Redesdale and the Earl of Fingall on the Catholic question (1804). John F. Mitford, Lord Redesdale, became Lord Chancellor of Ireland on the death of Lord Clare. He was severely and justly criticized in the House of Commons by Canning and Fox for the tone of his letters to Lord Fingall.

To us to-day, Catholic devotion to a Constitution from the benefits of which they were rigidly excluded seems a piece of cynicism, particularly when we recall the view taken by George III. on Catholic Emancipation; but it undoubtedly expressed the opinion of the leading Catholic gentry of that day. They had no wish to see the franchise given to the ignorant and easily misled peasantry. Already in 1784 a number of men of low type were entering the Volunteer Corps, with the immediate effect of loosening its hitherto strict discipline, and causing the rank and file to fall out of control. The "Liberty Corps" enlisted from Lord Meath's "Liberties," a district which was a centre of the woollen manufacture, admitted about two hundred of these low-class recruits, with the result that several other corps refused to join with them.

Nevertheless, a remarkable unanimity prevailed among large sections of the people during the early years of the short life of the Irish independent Parliament. For a brief period, Ireland showed that the conception of an Irish nation was one not incapable of being realized. Grattan's question "whether Ireland shall be an English settlement or an Irish nation" was, indeed, only half answered, for the reins of authority were still held by English hands; but among the bulk of the inhabitants, old Irish and new Irish, there arose a feeling of unity which might well be hailed as the birth of a true national sense hitherto unknown in the country.

Where Grattan led, the people were ready to follow, North and South alike. Catholics and Protestants were interested in the extension of freedom to Catholics. The appointment in August, 1790, of Edmund Burke's son as secretary of the Catholic Committee greatly strengthened their hands, not on account of any energy or talent he showed in carrying through its plans but for the influence which his father's high moral position in England brought to bear on its interests. In that country Burke's strong Protestant sympathies and his conservatism of mind, combined with his frequently expressed horror of the lines of development now being taken by the French Revolution, made his espousal of the cause of the Catholics all the more effective, for it accentuated the expressions of devotion to the English Constitution so frequently put forth by the Catholic party. The debate in the House in 1792, though it did not result in a favourable vote, had led a large number of the Protestant gentry to examine the subject more gravely than they had ever done before, and many who had previously opposed now supported the Catholic cause.

The Catholic Committee, taking advantage of this modification of public opinion, now sent in a number of documents stating their views. They had produced a report in February, 1791, couched in moderate terms and praying "in all humility, that the justice, liberality, and wisdom of Parliament, and the benignity of our most gracious sovereign would relieve them from their degraded position and no longer suffer them to continue like strangers in their native land."[11] They published also a general exposition of their tenets, repudiating the notion, so commonly believed at the time, that they held that "no faith was to be kept with heretics" or that princes excommunicated by the Pope or by any ecclesiastical authority whatsoever might be deposed by their subjects. They also declared that they upheld the Acts of Settlement and made no claim to lands now possessed by Protestants, and that before any Catholic was admitted to the franchise he should be obliged to take an oath to uphold and defend the property of the country as now established.[12] Their dignified and constitutional action was not without effect. Lord Kenmare, Lord Fingall, Lord Gormanston and Lord ffrench, who had withdrawn from the Association, fearing that it was likely to adopt a disloyal attitude, rejoined the Committee, which was reorganized in 1793. Unfortunately, they seldom appeared at its meetings. It fell into the hands of the steadily growing wealthy middle-class of merchants, with John Keogh as their leader. It was estimated that the Association represented a million of money; one member alone paid £100,000 a year to the revenue.

[11] F. Hardy, Life of Charlemont, ii, 261.

[12] Ibid., ii, 288.

The Presbyterians of Ulster steadily supported their proposals, and, despairing of any response from the Government in Dublin, it was decided to appeal direct to the King and his English advisers. When the deputation passed through Belfast on their way to London the Protestant populace drew their carriages through the streets, and the chief inhabitants offered them hospitality. It was an inspiring moment and the country at large felt it to be so. Their reception in London, where Grattan and Lord Moira were working in their behalf, was gracious, and when the Irish Parliament met in January 1793 the members were electrified to hear the Viceroy read out a command from the King recommending them to give serious attention to the condition of his Catholic subjects.[13] The debate was opened by an address of loyalty to the King, after which Grattan made a strong speech attacking the corruption of the Government. While thanking his Majesty for having come forward at a critical moment "to heal the political dissensions of his people on account of religion," he held that reform in Parliament must accompany the concession of the Catholic claims. The Chief Secretary reported after the debate that "concessions to the Catholics will certainly be acceded to by all parties to an extent which last year nothing could have effected," and he ascribed this startling change in opinion to the passing of similar laws of relief in England, to the fears inspired by the advance of revolutionary ideas in France, and to the success of French arms and the probability of war. In Ireland the time was propitious.

[13] Parliamentary Register, xiii, 3, 94.

The country at large now supported emancipation and felt that the perils which they had always associated with the idea of Popery were to all intents and purposes extinct; that, on the contrary, the Catholics as a whole were shewing themselves to be a conservative body, strongly averse to the new and, as they believed, dangerous teachings that were heralding the birth of the French Revolution across the Channel. Such sentiments as those expressed by Colonel Hutchinson: "The Catholics will forget to be bigots as soon as the Protestants cease to be persecutors," found an echo among large sections of the population. On February 4 Chief Secretary Hobart brought in a Bill proposing to give an equal franchise to the Catholics as to the Protestants both in town and country; to admit them to grand and petty juries; to give them the right to sit as civic magistrates and of voting at their election; to give them authority to endow schools and colleges and to take degrees at Dublin University; to allow them to carry arms and to hold all posts and offices, military and civil, with a few specified exceptions. For more than five weeks this important measure was debated in the House. Its most violent opponent was Dr. Duigenan, who belonged to a Catholic family, but now held the post of Professor of law in Dublin University, a coarse but able man who all his life through viciously attacked the religion of his birth. George Ogle and David La Touche also opposed; and Speaker Foster took the same side, though rather as a question of expediency than from any ill-feeling toward his fellow-countrymen. He thought the time not ripe, and declared that "the race for the Catholics" between the English and Irish Parliaments was merely a political move, in which the Irish Parliament had been outrun.

Sir George Ponsonby's contention that the Catholics would not rest content with half measures, but if relieved at all must receive full equality, even if it were resisted by the Catholic aristocracy themselves, carried weight in the House. His appeal that the Government measure should be put aside and a full measure of equality be introduced ended with the words: "They are Irish and I am Irish, and with the prosperity or adversity of our common country will I rise or fall." This determined attitude from a man of great influence in the House aroused the indignation of the Ministerial party, whose hands had been forced by the declaration in the King's speech, but who had nevertheless been busily occupied before Parliament met in sowing seeds of suspicion toward the Catholics in the counties and corporations in order to induce resistance to the efforts for their relief. But the question had passed out of the hands of the oligarchy who had controlled it for so long. "Give the Catholics the pride of privilege," cried Sir Hercules Langrishe, "and you will give them the principle of attachment; admit them within the walls of the constitution, and they will defend them."[14] Among those who in the Upper House were in favour of the bestowal of full rights were Lord Abercorn and the Duke of Leinster. The question became inseparably mingled with the struggle for reform, no reform of the House of Commons being complete, as was felt by an increasing section of the party, without the admission of representatives of the bulk of the population. Though this final step was to be reserved for a future day the Catholic gentry received at this time, along with the franchise, very substantial relief which affected all parts of their lives and opened to them avenues of education, influence, and position to which they had long been strangers. But the measures were conceded only with what Langrishe called an "acrimonious unanimity"; and moderate men lamented that so great an Act of liberty should have been accompanied by every expression of distrust toward the people whom it was designed to relieve.[15] It was impossible that such an attitude should not rankle in the minds of the emancipated Catholics.

[14] These debates are fully reported in the Parliamentary Register, vol. xiii. For the general history of Catholic Emancipation in England and Ireland, the works of Monsignor Bernard Ward are of the first importance. A smaller book by Denis Gwynn deals more definitely with the Irish side of the question.

[15] F. Hardy, Life of Lord Charlemont, ii, 299. He was probably referring to the speech of the Chancellor, Lord Fitzgibbon.

The effect of giving the vote to every forty-shilling freeholder, without bestowing at the same time the power of Parliamentary representation on the Catholic gentry was in the first instance to increase enormously the elective influence of the Protestant landlords, whose whole tenantry became voters without the possibility of returning one of their own faith to Parliament. The dangers of so low a franchise had been pointed out in the course of the debates. It practically gave the vote to every cottier and most of these were Catholics. In three provinces out of four they numbered nearly six times the Protestant inhabitants, thus giving them an overwhelming majority and the power of turning the scale in elections in a large number of the constituencies. The Act was said with some justice "to court the Catholic rabble and insult the Catholic gentry."[16] The measure, however, was hailed with joy by the Catholic population, by their bishops, and by the Catholic Committee. The latter voted £2,000 for a statue of the King and £1,500 to Wolfe Tone, who had acted as their Secretary; after which the Committee dissolved itself. The members, however, recommended their followers to "co-operate by all loyal and constitutional means to obtain Parliamentary reform." Had it been possible to add the much-needed purification of the Houses of Parliament to the Acts already obtained, and to incorporate with it the right of representation to Catholics in both Houses, they might have become, under their new status, and with their then prevailing sentiments, a source of strength to the Empire; but the influence of vested rights and traditional fears sedulously nourished by the party in office brought the era of reconciliation to an end. A short-lived harmony was brought about by the tidings that the all-powerful junto at the Castle was to be displaced, and that Lord Fitzwilliam, then President of the Council in London, was to be sent over as Lord-Lieutenant.

[16] Speech of Sir Lawrence Parsons, Parliamentary Register, xiii, 203-219.

The recent passing of the Place Bill and the Pensions Bill led to the hope that a new rêgime might be established and that the Augean Stable of Government might be cleaned out. It was universally believed, and with good grounds, that there was to be an entire change of system. This belief was strengthened by Pitt's inclusion of the Duke of Portland, Lord Spencer, and Wyndham in his remodelled ministry. Portland was appointed to the Home Department which comprised the Irish Secretaryship, but the Viceroyalty was refused by the Duke of Devonshire and Lord Spencer, and was only accepted with reluctance by Fitzwilliam on the understanding that there was to be a change in the method of Government. Both Portland and Fitzwilliam were advocates of larger measures for the Catholics, and the policy of admitting them to political power was the professed aim of Pitt. It had been thwarted, not in England, but by the Dublin politicians. "I have the best grounds for believing," wrote Fitzwilliam, "that on the day of the Duke of Portland's kissing hands it was determined to bring (the measure) forward this session." The new Viceroy was a well-meaning man, personally much liked in Ireland, where he had property, but hasty and wanting in judgment. Even before his appointment was confirmed he began offering posts and making promises in Ireland. He certainly outran his instructions. But he did well in endeavouring to secure the promise of support from Grattan, who, with the two Ponsonbys and Sir John Parnell, the Irish Chancellor of the Exchequer, had conferences with Pitt and Portland in London, though Grattan adhered to his original resolution to accept no office under Government, but to keep his hands free.

"The New System," so much talked of, seemed to mean quite different things to several of the most influential of Pitt's ministers; and Pitt himself refused to remove Chancellor Fitzgibbon on any terms, though the latter had shown himself the most violent and unsparing opponent of every measure of advance and the determined enemy of the Catholic claims. He supported quite openly Government by corruption and the retention of all power in English and Protestant hands, and his growing arrogance was seen in the withering and cynical contempt that he poured on all who differed from him. To retain him in his high post was to secure beforehand the destruction of all measures of reform. Yet he retained his office and, to the great anger of the friends of Grattan and the Irish Whigs, Pitt gave away other Irish posts of emolument as though he were dealing with a party change in England. People began to ask which of the two, Fitzwilliam or Fitzgibbon, was to govern Ireland.

To Burke, who, in his old age, watched the Irish situation with the same steady interest that he had shown when he was young, it seemed that there were in the country "a set of men who...by their innumerable corruptions, frauds, oppressions, and follies were opening a backdoor for Jacobinism to rush in." This was exactly what was happening, and Pitt's unfortunate indecision added the last spark that was wanting to set the country aflame. It is not difficult to suggest causes for his indecision. The flood of warnings and threats of danger which flowed over to him from Ireland might in itself have been sufficient to make him hesitate in committing himself to the course he had marked out; but he undoubtedly felt that in the middle of a war with France, in which the English had just been driven out of Toulon and were being thrown back in Holland by the triumphant troops of the new Republic, it was not a time for experiments at home. All measures of reform in England were brought to a stand from the same causes; and in the rising terror of the methods of revolution that England saw proceeding in France the most harmless efforts for social or political reform were put down with a heavy hand. Moreover, there was always at the back of Pitt's mind the still obscure vision of a Union which should draw the fangs of Irish discontent and make her part of and subservient to English policy. For this, Fitzgibbon was indispensable, and to let Fitzgibbon go was to kill the plan untried. If the party of the Chancellor and that of the Viceroy could not agree it must be Fitzwilliam, and not Fitzgibbon, who must give way.

In the meantime Fitzwilliam had arrived in Dublin on January 4, 1795. He had been welcomed as a harbinger of good and had met Parliament on January 22. From the moment of his arrival the Catholic question had forced itself on his attention with the greatest urgency. The whole country was expectant. For the first time the Catholic gentry took a leading part in the negotiations, while from all parts of the country petitions poured in. No corporate and few private objections were made by the Protestants; such expressions of opinion as came from them were in favour of a full repeal of all disqualifying laws, a sentiment which was in agreement with the Viceroy's own strongly expressed wishes. Local controversies and quarrels had little echo in the House, and only the old stalwarts put up any opposition. Meanwhile, the Commons heard the King's serious speech on the dangers of the war with their accustomed loyalty and a vote of £200,000 for the British navy, moved by Grattan, was carried, the army and militia being at the same time raised to over forty thousand men. They desired no harassing stipulations, "all subjects of bargain between the countries being kept out of sight." The progress in industry, which had been marked, and the flourishing state of the revenue were commented upon. Some useful bills were passed, especially one abolishing the oppressive hearth-tax, and the Police Act was remodelled.

But as time passed the Viceroy became more and more uneasy at receiving no instructions from London on the pressing subject of the Catholic claims. The letters arriving from Portland ignored the Viceroy's urgent requests for instructions; and Pitt, immersed in the conduct of the war, only turned "from the many important considerations of a different nature to which all our minds ought to be directed" to upbraid Fitzwilliam for his dismissal of Beresford, whose family had monopolized posts and pensions to such a degree that it seemed to Fitzwilliam to make them a danger to the State. He had found Beresford "filling a situation greater than that of the Lord-Lieutenant" and he refused to be associated with a person under "universal heavy suspicions" of maladministration. This dismissal of a powerful servant seems to have occupied Pitt's mind almost to the exclusion of any other Irish question, and the Viceroy attributed his own recall not to the Catholic Bill but to the pensioning off of Beresford, whom Pitt wished to retain.[17] It was, in fact, a struggle to the death between the upholders of the old system of corruption against the introduction of a better order; and, for the moment, the old corrupt order prevailed. Behind this lesser question lay the yet more urgent one of the satisfaction of the Catholic hopes.

[17] Letters from Lord Fitzwilliam to the Earl of Carlisle, published in 1795.

Pitt's mind was slowly working towards the project of a possible Union between the two countries as a solution of all difficulties; and his growing inclination for Union undoubtedly was accompanied by the feeling that it was only after that step was accomplished that the admission of Catholics to Parliament could be safely given. But he was either ignorant of the urgency of the feeling in Ireland or he refused to be influenced by it. Fitzwilliam in vain warned the English Ministers that they must face the practical certainty of driving that country into rebellion. Portland, now ready to sacrifice the policy which some time ago he had concurred in without any sign of dissent, wrote urging the postponement of the Catholic question "as a means of doing a greater service to the British Empire than it has been capable of receiving since the Revolution, or at least since the Union (with Scotland),"[18] to which Lord Fitzwilliam had replied, with a quick perception of the drift of Portland's remark, as intended to encourage confusion with the aim of a Union with Ireland: "It will be union, not with Great Britain, but with France." The recall of the Viceroy, in little more than two months after his landing, confirmed the belief of the expectant people that their hopes were useless and that the country had been deceived. Fox remarked that "Common sense seemed to be totally lost out of the councils of this devoted country," and Dr. Hussey, one of the Catholic bishops, wrote that with the disastrous news of Fitzwilliam's recall Ireland stood on the brink of civil war.

[18] The Act of Union with Scotland was passed in 1707.

END OF CHAPTER XIV

XV.—REVOLUTION AND REBELLION

The Revolution in France was profoundly stirring the whole of Europe. With hope and anxiety, and finally with terror, the neighbouring countries were watching the progress of events, as they rapidly passed from the attempted restoration of the States-General and the fall of the Bastille to the foundation of the National Assembly, the execution of Louis XVI, and the violence and convulsions of the Revolution. Ireland, so lately stirred by the assertion of American Independence, was again to be wrought up to a pitch of ardour by the explosion occurring in France, which, in the words of Wolfe Tone, "had blown into the elements a despotism rooted in fourteen centuries"; the attitude of every man toward the French Revolution became the test of his political creed. On the questions of Parliamentary Reform and Catholic liberties the Dissenters of the north, especially those of Belfast, had stood in the forefront as leaders; they now proclaimed themselves convinced republicans.

They read Tom Paine's Rights of Man with avidity, and they celebrated the fall of the Bastille in 1789 with enthusiasm. While aristocratic political clubs in London were sending addresses of congratulation to the Jacobin Club in Paris and to the French Convention, asserting that "revolutions will now become easy," the Society of United Irishmen was being formed in Belfast with similar principles. Tone in Belfast in October, 1791, and Napper Tandy in Dublin a month later, both republicans, organised the first branches; but not all the members looked on the French Revolution, as Tone did, as "the morning star of liberty to Ireland." The Committee had no official alliance with the French till the August of 1796, though communications had been in progress long before; it was the exasperation caused by the passing of the Insurrection Act of that year that attracted them toward the more violent methods in progress in France. Their original programme was more modest. "All we wanted," said Arthur O'Connor, when he was examined before a Special Commission in the spring of 1798 as to the origin of the Association, "was to create a House of Commons which should represent the whole people of Ireland, for which purpose we strove to dispel all religious distinction from our political union; after we had destroyed your usurpation of our national representation and had set up a real representation of the whole people of Ireland we were convinced there was no evil which such a House of Commons could not reach."[1]

[1] Pieces of Irish History (1807), p. 196, and Madden, United Irishmen (1842), ii, 245 ; the examination of McNevin took place on August 7, 1798.

Later on, the aims of the Society widened. When the Chancellor put to McNevin, another member of the Society examined by the Commission, the question "Was not your object a separation from England?" his reply was: "Certainly it became our object, when we became convinced that liberty was not otherwise obtainable...; it is a measure we were forced into; inasmuch as I am now, and always have been, of opinion that if we were an independent republic and England ceased to be formidable to us, our interest would require an intimate connection with her." The articles of Association and Tests taken by the members were of the same character. They aimed at an "impartial and adequate representation of the Irish nation in Parliament" and the establishment of a "brotherhood of affection and communion of rights" among Irishmen of all religious persuasions. They called on the Government to concede their appeal for reform and not to "drive the people into republicanism."[2] Up to 1794 the chief object of the body was to break the oligarchy of Fitzgibbon and the Beresfords and to restore the government of the country to the constitutional sovereign and the representatives of the people.

[2] The Constitution of the United Irishmen in 1791, in Plowden, History, ii, Appendix lxxxv, p. 171.

The horrors of the Parisian massacres of September, 1792, the reforms granted in 1793, and the dangers of a war with France, for a time disquieted a people whose views of the changes going on abroad were as yet unformed and whose Government, led by Grattan and his party, was warmly in favour of giving every support to England in the prosecution of hostilities with France. But from 1795 or 1796 onward, a change of feeling turned the Society from a small body in favour of reform into a formidable military organisation demanding separation. The growing sympathy with France, encouraged by the teachings of Tone, Hamilton Rowan, Emmet, McNevin, Arthur O'Connor, and others, took root, especially in the North, and the Society of United Irishmen spread with extraordinary rapidity. In 1796 the organisation was reformed. The disbanded Volunteers poured into the branches, and in a few weeks there were eighty societies in Belfast alone. A military organisation was grafted on to the civil, the civil officers receiving military titles; and a Directory was formed after the French pattern to direct their movements. There were soon 72,200 men in the Ulster division and large numbers were signing the Test in Leinster. The Belfast body rose from 2,000 to 99,411 men; and arms, including pikes, cannon, bayonets and guns were rapidly collected. By the outbreak of the rebellion in 1798 the total number of members amounted to 500,000 men, of whom 279,896 were armed.[3]

[3] Madden, United Irishmen (1842), i, 170.

Among the leaders was the younger brother of the Duke of Leinster, a youth beloved by all for his frank and open nature, unselfishness of purpose, and beauty of person, but whose rash confidence and impetuosity unfitted him for the part he proposed to himself as the director of a rising against the Government.[4] The Society began seriously to look to France to support a rising with troops, and regulations were set on foot. Already in 1794 William Jackson had been arrested for bringing over proposals from the French Directory, and Hamilton Rowan, Wolfe Tone, and Lord Edward FitzGerald were in constant secret communication with the French Government. All that was taking place was well known to the authorities, for the association was riddled through and through with informers, many even of the prominent members of the committee being in receipt of regular sums of money for giving information to the Government at the very time that they were directing the affairs of the Society. Thomas Reynolds, a silk manufacturer in Dublin, on whose information several of the Leinster leaders were taken in March, 1798, and who subsequently gave evidence against them, was one of the most trusted of their leaders. He was an intimate associate with Tone and others up to the very outbreak of the rebellion. On his information the members of the provincial committee at Oliver Bond's house, of whom he was one, were arrested, and soon afterward, Thomas Addis Emmet, Dr. W. J. McNevin, and Lord Edward FitzGerald. Even men who were employed as professional advocates of the United Irishmen at their trials, and who were thus admitted into the inner workings of the Society, were at the same time receiving sums of money from the Government for the betrayal of these secrets, and were playing a double part throughout. Counsellor Leonard McNally, at whose house the meetings were held, and M'Gucken, engaged as solicitor to the United Irishmen, were among those paid and pensioned for their services. It is one of the worst features in Irish secret societies that informers have never been wanting for rewards and pay.[5]

[4] See the memorandum of a conversation with Lord Edward FitzGerald, ibid., i, 171-177.

[5] Madden, op. cit., 205-214, 225-228; Memoirs of Theobald Wolfe Tone, by his son (1827), i, 158-59; Lecky, Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, iii, 466-472.

A variety of causes, among which the rise of the Orange Society was one of the most important, led to the rapid expansion of the United Irishmen, and brought the idea of armed intervention, assisted by France, into repute. On September 21, 1795, the first Orange Lodge was formed in the obscure village of Loughall. This association arose out of the earlier societies known as "Protestant Boys," "Peep o' Day Boys," and "Wreckers," whose activities in Armagh, Tyrone, and Down had kept the country in a state of disturbance since 1784. Their object had been the purely sectarian one of ejecting the Catholic peasantry in the North from their lands and tenements, visiting them at night, breaking up their furniture and insulting their persons.[6] They proposed to plant colonies of Protestants on the farms of the ejected Catholics. They had been resisted by the adherents of a Catholic Association called "the Defenders," and the members of both organisations being drawn at first from the lowest orders of the peasantry, fought and harassed each other with impunity. The Catholics settled in the north had in many cases passed into Ulster from other districts of Ireland to supply the place of the Ulster tenants who had emigrated to America at the commencement of the Civil War, either owing to penal laws against the Presbyterians, and to lack of work, or on account of the clearances by their landlords of lands that had hitherto been put down in tillage, now transformed into pasture and grazing fields. The original owners who remained looked on these immigrants from the south as interlopers and did their best to force them to return to their own counties; by 1796 it was generally believed that seven thousand Catholics had been burned or driven out of Armagh. The ejected people wandered about committing outrages and indulging in faction fights, or temporarily made their way to other parts of the country, only to return in the periods of quiet.

[6] Sir Richard Musgrave, History of the Rebellion, p. 54.

During 1793-95 the North had seemed to be settling down, the good feeling engendered by the united efforts of both religious parties for reform and emancipation having had a healing effect on local feuds. But the disappointment felt at the withdrawal of Lord Fitzwilliam and with him of all immediate hopes of the bestowal of full Catholic rights led to a fresh outburst of inflamed religious antipathies. The result on the Protestant side was the revival of nearly extinct organisations under the new name of Orangemen. They acted as a counterblast to the United Irishmen and to the Republicans. Lord Gosford, who was appointed co-Governor of Armagh by the ascendency party in order to spite Lord Charlemont, who had hitherto held the post, reported, in an address to the magistrates of the county:—"It is no secret that a persecution, accompanied by all the circumstances of ferocious cruelty which have, in all ages, distinguished that dreadful calamity, is now raging in this country...The only crime which the wretched objects of this merciless persecution are charged with is a crime of easy proof—it is simply a profession of the Roman Catholic faith. A lawless banditti have constituted themselves judges of this species of delinquency, and the sentence they pronounce is equally concise and terrible; nothing less than a confiscation of all property and immediate banishment."[7]

[7] F. Hardy, Life of Lord Charlemont, ii, 35-36 ; and see the "Report of the Committee on Orange Institutions," Edinburgh Review, January, 1836.

The Orange Society was formed to support the Protestant ascendancy; their oath of allegiance made this even a condition of their defence of the King and his heirs; and it seems well established that they were encouraged by the Irish Government, who provided them with considerable sums of money.[8] The effect of their treatment of the peasantry and of the shelter afforded to their acts by the junto at the Castle stimulated the opposing societies into greater activity; and where one Orange Lodge sprang up, ten branches of the United Irishmen would immediately be established. A universal fear spread through the country among the Catholics that they were to be exterminated, and it was diligently whispered in the poorer districts that an oath to this effect was to be administered to every member of the Orange Society. Though Lord Castlereagh, during the examination of Arthur O'Connor, denied that the Government had anything to do with the Orange Society or with "the oath of extermination," he did not deny its existence. It was, however, solemnly denied by the heads of the Orange Lodges. Whether such an oath was taken or not, the effect of these two societies, formed to oppose each other, was to throw the North into two opposite and violently antagonistic camps, in which they have remained ever since. But it was only gradually that the two parties adopted their later religious and political distinctions.

[8] Examination of Arthur O'Connor, 1798, in Madden, United Irishmen(1858), ii, 319.

The Society of United Irishmen had originally been formed by Presbyterians, and it was the Presbyterians who at first most readily accepted the idea of a republic in Ireland. They had watched with sympathy the founding of the American Republic overseas, and they were ready to welcome similar efforts in France. Wolfe Tone believed that Ulster would rise if a French force were landed at Carrickfergus or in Carlingford Bay. The first conflict between the two bodies, called from the spot near which it was fought, the Battle of the Diamond (September 21, 1795), had little to do with politics; it was a local attempt on the part of the Catholics to drive out some new Protestant settlers who had taken their tenancies, and was the climax to a series of outrages on both sides arising out of similar causes. But the identification of the Orangemen with the ascendency party and with William of Orange, the source to which the Catholics traced the infliction of the Penal Code, gradually gave the Society a violently partisan aspect, and their processions and celebrations, symbols and songs, which are full of memories of terror to the Catholics, have served to accentuate the political differences between the "Orange" and the "Green" ever since. They came later to symbolise the distinction between loyalty to the Crown and disaffection; they have certainly done much to increase a disloyalty that was, at the time of the foundation of the first Orange Lodge, practically non-existent among the Catholic population. Though, in our own days, the celebrations are chiefly regarded as a popular demonstration and have lost much of their acrimonious character, the narrowness of the views they represent and the danger of inflaming partisan passion, should make the continuance of such party demonstrations on either side impossible. They should be discouraged by every right-thinking person.

The effect of this new cleavage, now fast being forced into lines of religious animosity, is testified to by a letter from a speaker who had addressed a meeting of nearly two thousand Presbyterians at Omagh on the necessity of forming volunteer corps to resist the French. He says that the strongest spirit of loyalty prevailed and hatred of the Roman Catholics was very great; should one of them join any of the corps, they would never unite with them. "This violent change," he continues, "has been wrought within a year." He considered the change as being fraught with the best consequences to the King and constitution. As a matter of fact, in proportion as the United Irishmen allied themselves with France, in the hope of establishing in Ireland an independent republic, the main body of the Protestant Ulstermen was thrown on the opposite side. An independent republic was one thing, but a republic gained by French arms and under French auspices was quite another. France was then the most powerful and dreaded enemy of Britain; her fleets were watching the English shores and an opportunity was being anxiously awaited when a naval descent might be attempted. The Orange party, making their choice between adherence to England and adherence to France, chose the former, and they have ever since maintained their position as convinced supporters of English rule, while the opposite party became, on the whole, violently anti-British and looked to France as the deliverers of Ireland.

This anti-British attitude was best represented in the character and writings of Theobald Wolfe Tone I ike many of the insurrectionary leaders he was a Protestant. He was born in Dublin on June 20, 1763, and educated at an English school and at Dublin University, for which he had ever a sincere affection. He then passed on to the Middle Temple as a student of law, of which, after keeping eight terms, he says he knew "exactly as much as he did of necromancy." He had, in fact, no taste for the law, his earliest ambition being for a military life; but he threw himself into politics, having "speedily made the great discovery" that "the influence of England was the radical vice of our government, and that Ireland would never be either free, prosperous, or happy, until she was independent."[9] These views, to which he adhered through life, he advanced in a pamphlet which attracted some public notice, Sir Henry Cavendish remarking that "if the author of the work were serious he ought to be hanged."

[9] Memoirs of Theobald Wolfe Tone, by his son (1827), i, 34, 64.

A political club established by Tone in Dublin numbered among its members Dr. William Drennan, Joseph Pollock, Thomas Addis Emmet, Peter Burrowes, John Stack, and Whitley Stokes, both the last-named being Fellows of Trinity College and all of them, as well as Tone's close friend Russell, men of cultivation and true lovers of their country. The Hon. George Knox, afterwards Member of Parliament for Dungannon, though he differed from Tone in politics, was also reckoned among his friends; and it is a testimony to the worth of Tone's personal character that men of rectitude and high attainments like these preserved for him a real esteem even when his political activities and views far outran their own. Of Stokes, one of the most erudite of a great family of scholars, Tone says that he was "the very best man that he had ever known." The opinions of Tone were on a different plane from those of the Whigs, with whom he hoped at first to unite. He held the connexion with England to be in itself the root of the evil, while they believed the connexion to be salutary, though the mode of its exercise was often pernicious. Tone's first exertions were made on behalf of the Catholics, who were, as a body, very slow to move on their own behalf. His pamphlets were welcomed by a few of their leaders and by the great body of the Belfast Protestant Volunteers, who were at this time making considerable exertions on behalf of Catholic liberty, and who elected him a member of their corps. He was shortly afterwards appointed to succeed Richard Burke as agent and assistant secretary to the Catholic Association on the suggestion of his friend John Keogh, and in that capacity he accompanied the deputation to London in 1792; and he set himself resolutely to effect the union between the leaders of the two religious parties which resulted in the Acts of Relief of that and the following years.

Meanwhile, Ministers in Dublin were watching with anxiety the rapid growth of the revolutionary spirit and the dissensions that were disturbing the Northern counties. Measures to meet the emergency were brought forward in swift succession. An Insurrection Act of a very stringent kind was passed and it was followed by an Indemnity Bill to absolve magistrates from the consequences of their acts if, in suppressing any disorder, they exceeded their powers under the law. Such measures had been carried on other occasions of a similar kind. They placed in the hands of the local authorities almost unlimited powers without any check on their misuse, and the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act soon afterwards left the whole population at the mercy of the officials. All suspected persons could be incarcerated without trial for lengthened periods; and even men of position like the Hon. Valentine Lawless, afterwards Lord Cloncurry, passed some years in the Tower without trial or any explanation given as to the reasons for his imprisonment. On the other hand, under the law dealing with "disorderly characters," which included all found out of doors after prohibited hours and gave the magistrates summary powers to send them to the fleet, hundreds of men were drafted off to the Navy without warning or excuse.

The English Navy was manned very largely by Irishmen, many of whom had been captured by these violent means; [10] and it was proved to be the spread of revolutionary doctrines among the seamen which brought about the mutiny of the Nore in 1797, thus rendering the fleet helpless at a critical moment. Considering the hardships of their position and the neglect and miseries to which such sailors were exposed at all times, the wonder is that the men of the Navy so seldom showed signs of rebellion or disloyalty. Even the English Government shrank from the almost unlimited powers over a whole population now placed in the hands of the magistrates. Only the existence of a widespread and dangerous rebellion could justify such powers and in 1796, when these Acts were passed, there was no such rebellion in the country, the disorders being purely local and confined to the North. Grattan, who had approved the earlier measures, grew alarmed. "I know not," he cried, "where you are leading me—from one strong Bill to another—until I see a gulf before me at whose abyss I recoil." Everything depended on the prudence and humanity with which the new ordinances were used, but prudence and humanity were hardly to be found in the system of repression now being resorted to. Despairing of being of future use to his country, and deeply disapproving of the appointment of General Lake to the Northern command, Grattan decided to withdraw from Parliament, and he also threw up his post in a corps of yeomanry which he had recently joined. In the terrible days that were to follow, Grattan's great influence played no part.

[10] Tone believed that two-thirds of the Navy was composed of Irishmen, but he probably overstates the number.

The current of popular feeling had, indeed, passed beyond the range of the constitutional reforms advocated by Grattan and his party. In 1792 Lord Edward FitzGerald had met Paine in Paris and had become his devoted admirer. "We breakfast, dine, and sup together," he writes; "the more I see of his interior the more I like and respect him." The ingenious and stirring mind of Paine attracted FitzGerald, though it never attracted Tone; his Rights of Man, published in the previous year as a reply to Burke's French Revolution, exactly harmonised with FitzGerald's views. It became the accepted political manifesto of the revolutionary party, and some of its phrases, such as, "Lay the axe to the root, and teach Governments humanity: it is their sanguinary punishments which corrupt mankind"; "Political liberty consists in the power of doing whatever does not injure another...the law ought to prohibit only actions hurtful to Society," were as applicable to Ireland as they were in France.[11]

[11] Letter to his mother, October 30, 1792, in Moore's Memoirs of Lord Edward FitzGerald (1897), p. 128.

In Paris Lord Edward met Pamela, known as the adopted daughter of Madame le Genlis, and popularly believed to be the child of the Duke of Orleans, whom he married, returning to Ireland in 1793 with his young bride.[12] On his arrival, he realised how far his now avowed republican principles separated him from Grattan and his friends of the constitutional party, though he did not become a United Irishman until 1796, when he joined about the same time as Arthur O'Connor, Thomas Addis Emmet, and McNevin, who subsequently directed the movements of the Society. The growth of republican sentiments, the unrest in the North, and the recurrence of frightful scenes of outrage and increase of assassinations had alarmed the Government, but though they were closely watching developments, it cannot be said that they acted hastily. On April 24, 1794, Rev. William Jackson, the intermediary who had brought over proposals from the French authorities with plans of an invasion, was arrested, but he was not tried until the following year, when he died in the dock of poison administered by his own hand. Tone, Hamilton Rowan and Napper Tandy were deeply implicated in his actions; and they fled to France or America accompanied by Reynolds, the informer.

[12] The true parentage of Pamela has been much disputed. Her name is entered in the marriage register as Stephanie Caroline Simms, daughter of William Berkley and Mary Simms. She is said to be of Fago in the Island of Newfoundland. See Dict. Nat. Biography; Moore's Memoirs of Lord Edward FitzGerald (1897), 139, 389.

Tone sailed to Philadelphia, with the full knowledge of the Government, taking his wife and children with him. He landed on August 1, 1795; but finding the Americans, to a far larger extent than he had dreamed, "high-flying aristocrats," devoted to order and authority, he speedily wearied of them and began to regard his Philadelphian fellow-townsmen with "unqualified dislike." Hoping to find more sympathy in France, he took leave of his old friends Napper Tandy and Rowan—the latter a man of good position and high principles—and sailed for Havre, arriving in Paris on January 1, 1796. He found the French Ministers busied with plans for an invasion of England by way of Ireland, and by means of letters of introduction he got into communication with the French Executive. The account of Tone's long-delayed hopes and of the heart-sickness that came over him as he kicked his heels in Paris, waiting from month to month for the French authorities to come to some decision, are graphically told in his Memoirs; in spite of their garrulity and bombast and the sharp comments he makes both upon his own and his countrymen's weaknesses, we feel that in practical details, Tone was able to offer sound military advice to the French Government. He insisted on the folly of sending small and ill-equipped expeditions, or giving the command to men who were unknown, even by name, in Ireland; he pointed out the best places to effect a landing, strongly advising some place near Dublin or Belfast, and not, as actually occurred, in the south-west of Ireland; he urged the strongest reasons for seizing the moment to effect the crossing when the English fleet was unfit to sail, being held up by the mutiny at the Nore; and he contested some French military opinions founded upon ignorance of the country, in spite of his very imperfect mastery of the French language, with good sense and skill. For himself he asked nothing but to be associated with the expedition in some military or official capacity. In case of success this would place him in a position of some authority, and in the event of discomfiture he believed the French uniform would secure him a military trial.

General Hoche recognised his ability and became his fast friend, consulting him in all details relating to the expedition. Naval jealousies and the incapacity of some of the officers employed delayed the embarkation, and when the vessels at last set sail, wind and storm, the old allies of England, separated the ships so that only a part of them reached the shelter of Bantry Bay, where, in the absence of General Humbert, who arrived too late, his second-in-command, General Grouchy, refused to land. Tone proposed a wild scheme of advancing with the 6,500 men they had with them. "It is altogether an enterprise truly unique," he comments; "we have not one guinea; we have not a tent; we have not a horse to draw our four pieces of artillery. The General-in-Chief marches on foot; we leave all our baggage behind us."[13] But the landing could not be made; and no sign of interest appeared on the shore, where the southern Irish peasants, then popularly supposed to be in a state of rebellion against the English Government, were engaged in boiling potatoes for the English regiments as they hurried down to repel the French invasion.[14] After six days in Bantry Bay, within five hundred yards of the shore, the disheartened commanders ordered the return to Brest in the face of a furious gale. "I do not wonder," writes Tone, "at Xerxes whipping the sea; for I find myself to-night pretty much in the mood to commit some such rational action!"[15]

[13] Memoirs of Theobald Wolfe Tone, ii, 143.

[14] General Smith to Pelham, December 30, 1796; Camden to Portland, January 3, 1797.

[15] Memoirs, ii, 145.

Though fresh French expeditions were planned from time to time and the Irish Government was kept in a continued state of watchfulness, the descent on Bantry proved to be the only attempt of importance; the premature death of Hoche, and the attraction which Egypt and the East exercised over the mind of Buonaparte, who was now fighting his way to power, diverted the fleets prepared for Ireland to other projects, and Tone, watching events impatiently from Paris, saw one hopeful plan after another come to nothing. The ignorance of conditions and views in Ireland shown by the French authorities is curiously illustrated by their enquiring of Tone whether Chancellor Fitzgibbon would not join them if their soldiery effected a landing. Tone's prophecy of a hundred thousand men ready to rise in the south on the arrival of the French had vanished into thin air. Lord Camden's dispatch on the dispersion of Hoche's fleet reported that "the general good disposition throughout the South and West was so prevalent that, had the army landed, their hope of assistance from the inhabitants would have been disappointed." Dr. Hussey declared to Burke that "there were not five Catholics in the kingdom worth £10 who would not spill their blood to resist a French invasion." In the South, among the Catholic population, revolutionary ideas had taken practically no root, the gentry being fervent monarchists and the peasants taking no interest in affairs that had for them no meaning.

The clergy, who dreaded the introduction of religious free-thought or atheistic teaching such as they saw spreading in France, exhorted to loyalty, and Dr. Moylan, the Catholic Bishop of Cork, issued an appeal to his diocese to resist—an appeal that would undoubtedly have cost him his head had the invasion succeeded. From the Counties of Kerry, Galway and Mayo came reports of the readiness of the people to support their landlords in opposition to the enemy, and the cities of Cork, Galway, and Limerick vied with each other in proofs of their loyalty to the Government. The yeomanry declared their readiness to march anywhere with General Hutchinson, even without their arms. Only in and near Belfast was any spirit of disaffection shown. Lord Camden, who had succeeded Lord Fitzwilliam as Viceroy, wrote that the North was "ripe for revolt." It was said that "loyalty was apparent everywhere, except in the North."[16] Yet even in the North republicanism had not gone very deep and was confined almost entirely to the Presbyterian youth of the towns. In the country districts there was so little stir among the peasants that Neilson, the editor of the Northern Star, had shortly before complained that the great mass of the Catholics were "bigots to monarchy."[17]

[16] Beresford Correspondence, ii, 142, 145.

[17] Information given to the Government by Edward Smith (alias Bird).

In November, 1797, Lord Carhampton having resigned the command of the army, Sir Ralph Abercromby was appointed to succeed him. He was a humane man and a capable commander, a person, who, in Lord Camden's words, "thought deeply and wisely" on the matters that came under his observation. As that of a Scotsman with much foreign service behind him who came to Ireland with an unprejudiced eye, his frequently repeated testimony to the disposition to peace and quiet among the inhabitants is particularly valuable. What he did find gravely amiss was the bad position of the troops. He found them scattered all over the country in small parties guarding the houses of the gentry and performing duties that of right belonged to the magistrates and resident landlords. The want of control to which this dispersion led had resulted in a military licence which the proprietors used for their own purposes to harass and oppress the tenants.[18] Of all this a capable officer would necessarily disapprove and Abercromby exerted himself to the utmost to correct abuses, restore discipline, and concentrate the loose bodies of soldiery in centres where they could be kept under observation and control.

[18] Lord Dunfermline, Memoir of Sir Ralph Abercromby (1861), pp. 74-77.

But he found his efforts thwarted by the gentry and magistracy, and but feebly supported by the central Government. Shortly before, General Lake, who had the Northern Command, had issued a proclamation under the authority of the Lord Lieutenant, superseding the ordinary law, and placing unlimited powers in the hands of the military. Though acknowledged to be illegal, the proclamation was held to be justified on the ground of necessity. Addresses against the misuse made of the military authority and against the excesses of the troops were sent up by the Northern counties and by the city of Dublin, but were met by fresh proclamations making any assemblies unlawful; and the instructions sent out by Abercromby were undermined by the "unrelenting hostility to the people and ardent desire for the most severe measures" which he found to be the prevailing tone of Dublin Court conversation. Lord Camden was not the man to take a firm stand. Personally amiable and with good intentions, which might have sufficed in ordinary times to carry on the Government, he was too weak and wavering to resist the influences around him and he was always ready to agree with the last adviser. He had allowed himself to fall completely under the power of the Court oligarchy, from whom Sir Ralph could expect no support, and who seemed bent on stirring up, rather than quieting, any disaffection that was abroad in the country.

In the South, the General could find few signs of any widespread disturbance. After making a tour of inspection he wrote to the Duke of York that while he admitted that dissatisfaction did exist, he ascribed it to the usual causes, "the old grievances of tithes and oppressive rents."[19] There were, in fact, no purely political movements in the South such as were stirring in the North, though the local causes of unrest were always present. "I have the satisfaction to assure your Excellency," he writes to Lord Camden from Cork, "that the country through which I have passed is in a state of tranquillity. Of this I have had the fullest assurance from every gentleman with whom I have conversed."[20] It is necessary to emphasize this point, because it is commonly supposed that the rising of "the '98" was the outcome of the disloyalty of the Catholics of the South of Ireland. Exactly the reverse of this appears to have been the case; the Catholics of the South were at the moment giving reiterated expressions by word and act of their support of the Government and desire to preserve the quiet of the country. But a few months later, one part of the South was in a flame. Even then it was in Leinster, not in Munster or Connacht, that the rebellion broke out; chiefly, indeed, among the descendants of the old Norse and Norman settlers of the loyal town and district of Wexford, where insurrections in the past had been rare.

[19] Memoir of Sir Ralph Abercromby, p. 84, December 28, 1797.

[20] Ibid., p. 85.

It is therefore our duty to ask what it was that brought about this sudden change of feeling, and by what means the peaceful inhabitants were goaded into rebellion. The first cause was undoubtedly that pointed out by the Commander-in-Chief, the dispersal of the troops all over the country without proper command, the constant use of them by the country gentlemen to execute the law, and the alarming relaxation of discipline to which this state of things gave rise. "The best regiments in Europe," as Abercromby said, "could not long stand such usage."[21] He speaks of "the very disgraceful frequency of courts-martial and the many complaints of irregularities in the conduct of the troops;...the licentiousness of the army being such as to render it formidable to everyone but the enemy."[22] Lord Moira, in the Irish House of Lords, supported Sir Ralph's report of the excesses committed by the troops and the distracted state of the country. Eventually Abercromby, conscious of the insubordination of the army and the lack of support he was meeting with in stemming it, saw no course open but to resign. Men who "for more than twelve months had employed the army in measures which they durst not avow or sanction," were not the sort of authorities under which it was possible for an honest officer to work, and he sent in his resignation on March 24. "The late ridiculous farce," he writes, "acted by Lord Camden and his Cabinet must strike everyone. They have declared the kingdom in rebellion, when the orders of his Excellency might be carried over the whole kingdom by an orderly dragoon, or a writ executed without any difficulty, a few places in the mountains excepted."[23]

[21] Ibid., p. 86, Abercromby to Pelham, January 23, 1798.

[22] Ibid., p. 93 (order issued February 26, 1798).

[23] Ibid., p. 110, dated from Dublin Castle, April 23, 1798.

On Sir Ralph's retirement General Lake was appointed to his post. His taking over of the command was followed by an immediate change of military policy. Troops were placed at free-quarters over large districts in the South "for the restoration of tranquillity," as Sir James Stuart cynically remarked, and were guided in their actions by commands directed to irritate and infuriate the people upon whom they lived; they were, in fact, let loose upon a peaceful population and were encouraged to exercise uncontrolled military violence toward them.[24] In three weeks from the date of Lake's appointment and the issuing of the new orders the population was in rebellion. The people who the year before had welcomed the British troops and aided them to resist invasion were now driven by the behaviour of the soldiery and yeomen, regulars and militia alike, composed of English, Irish, and Hessians, into a fury of revenge. Lord Cornwallis, who was sent over to succeed Lord Camden as Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland in June, 1798, found the worst spirit prevailing. He came unwillingly, for he considered that the post he was to occupy "came up to his idea of perfect misery." "The principal persons of this country," he writes soon after his arrival, "and the members of both Houses of Parliament, are in general averse to all acts of clemency...and would pursue measures that could only terminate in the extirpation of the greater number of the inhabitants and the utter destruction of the country. The words 'Papist' and 'Priest' are ever in their mouths and by their unaccountable policy they would drive four-fifths of the community into irreconcilable rebellion."[25] Again, on July 13, he writes: "The importance (of the rebels' acts) is purposely exaggerated by those who wish to urge Government to a continuance of violent measures, or, according to a fashionable phrase of some men of great consequence here, to keep Government up to their traces. I apprehend that I am suspected of not being disposed to set my neck stoutly to the collar."[26] "Even at my table," he adds, "where you will suppose I do all I can to prevent it, (the conversation) always turns on hanging, shooting, burning, etc., and if a priest has been put to death the greatest joy is expressed by the whole company...There is no law in town or country but martial law and you know enough of that to see all the horrors of it."[27]

[24] The military order was issued at Cork on May 7, 1798, by Sir James Stuart, ibid., pp. 122-123.

[25] Cornwallis to Portland, July 8, 1798, in Cornwallis Correspondence, ii, 358, 360.

[26] Cornwallis to Major-General Ross, ibid., ii, 363.

[27] Cornwallis to the same, July 24, 1798, ibid., ii, 371.

It was this state of things that sent men by the thousand into the society of the United Irishmen, in the hope of self-preservation. In four months Dr. McNevin was able to organize 70,000 men in Leinster alone, and the number of those who had subscribed to the Test was brought up to nearly 500,000 able-bodied men, of whom some 300,000 were regularly organized. It was only the lack of competent military leaders and discipline that prevented them from making themselves masters of the kingdom. Most of the original leaders were now in the hands of the Government. In 1796-97 the republican journals in Belfast were suppressed, and the editors and chief contributors, Tom Russell, Neilson, and Arthur O'Connor, were arrested. The arrest of the Dublin Committee soon followed. Yet there was little sign of undue harshness in their treatment; O'Connor was released but he immediately went over to Paris to concert fresh plans in company with a priest of the name of O'Coigley, or Quigley, who was captured on his return and executed. Later, T. A. Emmet, McNevin, and O'Connor were reprieved on their engagement to make statements before a secret committee, in which they were not to be called upon to implicate any friends; and they, with a large number of suspects and members of the Dublin Committee were, after imprisonment in Dublin, sent to Fort George, near Inverness, where they remained till 1801, when peace was proclaimed. Oliver Bond, a wealthy Dublin merchant, who was regarded as the mainspring of the movement and acted as its secretary, was arrested with fourteen members of the Leinster Directory at his own house, where a meeting was being held, through the treachery of Thomas Reynolds. Many efforts were made to save him, but he was condemned to death for high treason. He died suddenly in prison. The two Sheares, Henry and John, were captured a fortnight before the rising on the information of their supposed friend, Armstrong. In spite of the splendid advocacy of Curran,[28] supported by Plunket, in a trial that lasted through the night, both brothers suffered death, with one or two others of lesser note.

[28] Curran's speech on this occasion is preserved in W. H. Curran, Life of John Philpot Curran (1819) ii, 69-113; many of his speeches in defence of State prisoners were suppressed.

Lord Edward FitzGerald was still going about in Dublin and there seems to have been a general desire to spare one so highly placed and so warmly beloved. For a month he lay hidden in a house near the canal and even Chancellor Fitzgibbon, now become Lord Clare, was anxious for his escape. "For God's sake get this young man out of the country," he had said to one of Lord Edward's nearest relatives a few days before the arrests of March 12; "the ports shall be thrown open to you and no hindrance whatever offered." Unfortunately, the young conspirator remained in Dublin. On the evening before his arrest, on May 18, 1798, he took refuge in the house of a man named Murphy in Thomas Street, though a reward of £1,000 had been then offered for his person. The next day he was followed to this house and his room was entered by Major Swan and Major Sirr, as he was resting after dinner. Lord Edward surrendered after a short struggle in which he, as well as his assailant, were wounded, his host being also taken away to Newgate. On June 3 he succumbed to his injuries, one of his captors, Captain Ryan, also dying of his wounds. Murphy, who was confined for a long time in prison, describes Lord Edward as one of the bravest of men; in height he was about five feet seven inches and with a very interesting countenance—arched eyebrows, fine grey eyes and high forehead, with thick brown hair, inclining to black.[29] Aristocrat and Protestant as he was, he won an abiding place in the affections of his countrymen. His friend, Lord Cloncurry, speaks of him as "brave to a fault" and possessed of a strong religious belief which, combined with his love of country and desire to relieve the sufferings of his fellow-countrymen, impressed upon his patriotism a character of solemn enthusiasm that supplied the place of commanding talent and well fitted him to influence men.[30]

[29] Murphy's narrative is given by Madden, United Irishmen (1842), i, 254-367.

[30] Personal Recollections of Lord Cloncurry (1849), pp. 153-154.

The capture of the leaders and the death of Lord Edward FitzGerald left the insurgents without a recognised centre. In many cases they persuaded or forced the gentry of their own neighbourhoods to act as their leaders; and some respected and influential landlords, who had no love for rebellion, but hoped by their influence to control their tenants, thus became involved in the rising and suffered the dreadful consequences. In this way Protestant gentlemen like Cornelius Grogan of Johnstown, an infirm old man, who was forced on his horse with threats that he would be shot if he refused to lead the tumultuous host that surrounded him; John Henry Colclough, who had sat in four successive Parliaments as Member for Wexford and Enniscorthy; and Beauchamp Bagenal Harvey, a liberal and patriotic Protestant gentleman, became technically 'rebels' and were hanged together after a mere form of trial on Wexford Bridge, their heads being spiked by order of General Lake. Acts of barbarity were committed on both sides, and terrible deeds of murder and revenge defaced the rising; in many cases, no quarter was received or given; but it is well attested that in numerous instances the insurgents behaved with great humanity, shielding and helping those that were in their power and endeavouring to allay the spirit of cruelty and plunder. Protestant clergymen testified to the respect with which the young girls who were in their power were treated.[31] Similar humanity cannot be found in the annals of the other side: the executions were merciless, two hundred persons being executed at Carlow alone, including Sir Edward Crosbie, against whom no charge whatever was proved. Any disposition to accept terms of surrender from the rebels on promise of their lives by the county magistrates was met by sharp reproval from Lord Castlereagh, who was acting as Chief Secretary in the absence of Pelham, and who was at a later date to act with Cornwallis in carrying the Union.

[31] Gordon, Rector of Killegny, History of Ireland (1803), 259-260.

The rebels had at first some successes; they took Wexford and burned Enniscorthy after a desperate conflict. At New Ross, where Harvey had been the nominal leader, the battle lasted ten hours, the main assault having been led by a Wexford boy at the head of from two to three thousand pikemen; but the town caught fire and the insurgents, who had been drinking, were killed as they slept. At Vinegar Hill, where the longest resistance was made, over ten thousand Irish were encamped under their chosen leader, a priest named Father John Murphy of Boulavogue. The burning of their churches and the cruelties inflicted on their people incited the priests to join in the rising. General Lake attacked with about thirteen thousand men in four separate columns, but the accidental delay of one of these bodies under General Needham—Needham's Gap, as it came to be called—enabled parties of those insurgents who survived the heavy fire of grape-shot and musketry to escape; they wandered about the country in straggling bands, and were abandoned to the tender mercies of the yeomanry. Among the appalling deeds committed during two years of terror the worst was perhaps the massacre of the loyalist prisoners at Scullabogue House after the battle of New Ross. Some fugitive rebels from the town broke into the house where the prisoners, mostly Protestants, were confined, and, pretending that they had orders from Harvey, they murdered thirty-seven of them in cold blood, setting fire to the barn in which over a hundred others were locked up. This deed, which was wholly unauthorised by the leaders and committed by a set of irresponsible runaway men, naturally aroused the bitterest feeling, and partly explains the savage retaliation of the Government troops.

It was only a matter of time for the regular army to crush the rebellion. Ulster, where the United Irishmen had pressed for a peaceful solution and the adoption of Ponsonby's Reform Bill, in 1797, had since that date been dragooned into preparations for a rising; and a less formidable outbreak in Antrim and Down was suppressed by the military. Too late to be of use, after the rebellion was crushed, the last French attempt to effect a landing on Irish shores was made by a small force under General Humbert, who, impatient of the delays of his Government and spurred on by Wolfe Tone's unceasing efforts, had collected a sum of money on his own account, raised a small force and sailed without the sanction of his superiors for the bay of Killala in Mayo, with two Irishmen, of whom one was Tone's brother, as his guides. It was a foolhardy experiment, made more foolhardy by the conduct of the General, who lost time drilling the countryfolk and enjoying the hospitality of the Catholic Bishop of Killala instead of making an immediate advance. Lake crossed the Shannon with considerable forces, but these were routed at Castlebar by the French. Their flight was so precipitate that the event became known as the Castlebar Races. Hundreds of them joined the French, until the arrival of superior forces under Lord Cornwallis brought the skirmishing of Humbert's army to an end. He surrendered, on September 8, at Ballinamuck, and the French returned home. Matthew Tone and Teeling were carried to Dublin in irons and executed. Hearing of Humbert's adventure, the Directory had hurried off reinforcements to support their General, and a small fast-sailing boat, the Anacreon, under General Hardy, and with Napper Tandy and a body of United Irishmen on board, reached the island of Raghlin off the coast of Antrim on September 16, where they heard of Humbert's surrender. Re-embarking in great haste, they stood out for Norway. Napper Tandy, who had been boasting that thirty thousand men would rise on his appearance [32] was delivered up to the Government and sentenced to death, but through the intervention of the French Government he was released.

[32] Memoirs of Theobald Wolfe Tone, ii, 339, and cf., ii, 272-275.

Wolfe Tone was a man of a different fibre. He had followed with the main body of the French squadron in the Hoche with eight frigates carrying some three thousand men and seventy-four guns. On October 11 they entered Lough Swilly but they were closely followed by a squadron under Sir John Borlase Warren, who engaged them; after a well-matched fight of some hours the French tricolour went down. Thus ended the series of attempts made by the French to land on Irish shores. It is to be remembered that these incursions were not merely isolated efforts organized by Irishmen on behalf of their own country; they were part of a deliberate effort of France to invade England by way of Ireland, one incident in a desperate war in which the whole of Europe was involved. It was in this light that they were regarded both by France and England, and it was to this that they owed their importance in the history of the time. Wolfe Tone, who fought with intrepidity and desperation, "as if he were courting death" was the only Irishman on board the Hoche. Being recognised by a former friend, he was taken to Dublin and tried by court-martial. He appeared in court in the French uniform of a Chef de Brigade and pleaded his French commission as entitling him to the death of a soldier. Curran exerted himself to the utmost on his behalf, and Lord Kilwarden, the Chief Justice, made a vigorous attempt to take Tone out of the hands of the military and have him tried by the Court of King's Bench, which was then sitting; but Tone in spite of these efforts, was condemned to be hanged.[33] He anticipated his fate by opening a vein in his neck, and, after lingering in prison for some days in agony he expired. His own account of his main aims was stated to have been "to subvert the tyranny of our execrable Government, to break the connexion with England, the never-failing source of our political evils, and to assert the independence of my country."[34]

[33] Memoirs of Theobald Wolfe Tone, ii, 362-365.

[34] Ibid., i, 64.

An aftermath of the rebellion of '98, and the only overt sign of disaffection which followed the Union, was the brief rising of Robert Emmet, the son of a Dublin Court physician and brother of Thomas Addis Emmet, who had quitted a good position at the Irish Bar to follow the projects of the insurgents. Brought up in the atmosphere of disaffection, young Robert Emmet early showed similar tendencies. For his inflammatory speeches he was expelled, with eighteen other young malcontents, from Trinity College, and he had to take refuge abroad, where he carried on his schemes for the separation of his country from England. His youthfulness—for he was only twenty-four when he was executed—his love-story with Sarah Curran,[35] his idealism and promise of talent, and the dignity of his final speech from the dock have inscribed his name on the hearts of his nation, and his portrait may still be found in many cottages side by side with that of the Virgin. Though he aimed at complete separation and intrigued with the Directory of Paris, his patriotism revolted from the idea of seeing Ireland reduced to a dependency of France, and he hastened his own plans to prevent the accomplishment of those which were being matured abroad. The carelessness with which the Castle in Dublin was guarded nearly placed it in his hands, and for two hours Dublin was at the mercy of the insurgents. A victim of the rising was old Lord Kilwarden, the humane judge who had tried to save Wolfe Tone; he was pulled out of his carriage and murdered as he was entering the city from his house at Rathfarnham to try to stop the rising. A man whose life Emmet had spared betrayed his hiding-place and he was taken with several of his associates, most of them leaders in the '98 rising; but the lives of most of the subordinates were spared on their making a full confession. Robert Emmet suffered death.[36]

[35] Idealised in Thomas Moore's beautiful and pathetic song "She is far from the land where her young hero sleeps." Sarah married two years after her lover's death.

[36] For Emmet's Life see Madden, United Irishmen, and O'Donoghue's Life ; W. H. Curran's Life of P. J. Curran. A romance on the subject by Stephen L. Gwynn embodies the historical material.

END OF CHAPTER XV

XVI.—THE UNION

It was while Ireland was distracted by these events that the project of Union with Great Britain began seriously to be discussed. Forty thousand British troops held the country, the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended and all right of assembly and discussion denied; trials by courts martial were in progress and the loyalists were fatigued and worn by the exertions they had made to put down rebellion. This was the moment chosen for proposing a radical change in the constitution of the country. While the rebellion was still running its course hints of a proposed union between the two countries had been industriously spread abroad. Pamphlets for and against it had occasionally appeared during the preceding years [1] and it runs like an undertone through the official correspondence between London and Dublin from 1793 onward. Valentine Lawless, afterwards Lord Cloncurry, when a young student in the Middle Temple, heard it mentioned at a dinner at which Pitt was present in 1795 and hastened to publish a pamphlet against the project.[2]

[1] Pamphlets appeared in 1787 by de Lolme and Williams recommending a Union, and by Edward Cooke in 1798 against it. The latter ran through nine editions in as many months.

[2] Personal Recollections of Lord Cloncurry (1849), p. 38.

But Pitt had made up his mind, and Cornwallis had been sent over to carry through the policy that had been resolved upon. He was warned that the time was one of too much danger to agitate such a contentious question, but Cornwallis found "the principal people so frightened" that he believed they would consent to a Union, provided that it were a Protestant Union. Even Plunket, who hated the idea and held that it was beyond the competence of the Irish Parliament to extinguish its own existence, thought that if it were brought forward at once the Act would be carried; "animosity and want of time to consider coolly its consequences and forty thousand British troops in Ireland" would suffice to carry the measure. "But in a little time," he added, "the people will wake as from a dream, and what consequences will follow I tremble to think." His convinced view was that it would accelerate a total separation between the two countries.

There had been times when the idea of a Union with Britain had been looked upon with favour. Molyneux, in his pamphlet on the Union, thought that for Ireland to have representatives in the Parliament of England "would be a state of things to be willingly embraced; but this," he adds, "is a happiness we can hardly hope for." But with the hard-won fight for the independence of the Irish Parliament, partial and limited as that independence was, another spirit had arisen, and there was no disposition to part with newly acquired rights and privileges. In regard to the country at large, it cannot be said that the Irish Parliament had fulfilled the hopes with which it was established. It had neither been able to avert rebellion or to mitigate the cruelty with which it was being put down. Yet neither Cornwallis nor Plunket was prepared for the strength of the opposition shown towards the proposed measure. Elliot, a Member of the Lower House, felt that no part of it could be carried "without the enforcement of severe Parliamentary discipline."[3] But Lord Castlereagh, to whom the business of securing its adoption was confided, took the cynical view that there was no man, whether in the House of Lords or Commons, who had not his price, and in the most systematic manner he undertook to sound each Member as to what his price would be. Men of position, like the Speaker Foster, or the Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer, Sir John Parnell, or Lord Ely, were to be purchased or cajoled, or, if they proved obstinate, removed from office and disgraced;[4] men who supported were to receive due rewards.

[3] Castlereagh Correspondence, ii, 30.

[4] Castlereagh Correspondence, ii, 91, 92 ; Cornwallis Correspondence, iii, 35-36, 37-38.

It is clear, from Castlereagh's correspondence on the subject, that many members made very cool bargains before promising their votes. The motives that moved them were, in the large majority of instances, purely personal: borough proprietors feared a loss of their influence and authority; officials dreaded a change that might bring to an end the corrupt system to which they were accustomed and out of which they reaped large profits; and every individual was calculating what personal advantage he could derive from the change.[5] The effect of the Act on the country was, as Cornwallis contemptuously observes, the last thing that seemed to be in their thoughts. For Parnell, who "disliked the measure, but if it could be made palatable to him personally" would give it his support, Pitt thought an English peerage and a provision for life might suffice. To Lord Ely, who considered the Union "a mad scheme" and who "had not heard a single argument in its favour," but who intimated that he "kept his mind free," it was explained that "he would not be allowed to shuffle" but that "his objects would be attended to." There were, however, a considerable number of men, like Foster, La Touche, Bushe, Jebb, and Ponsonby, in the Lower House and the Duke of Leinster and Lords Moira, Downshire, and Powerscourt in the Upper House who preserved their integrity and refused to be bought, though large offers were made for their acquiescence. Yet the corruption in the Upper House was far more pronounced than in the Lower, £128,000 being expended in the purchase of four peers only, besides other douceurs.

[5] Cornwallis Correspondence, iii, 36.

The twenty-five Members bought over by Castlereagh between the first and second discussion of the Bill secured him fifty additional votes and sufficed to carry the measure. Some of the Members made their public recantation in the course of the debate. Such was the patriotism of the private Members.[6] In the country opinion was divided. The most determined opponents to the idea of Union were the city of Dublin and the Irish Bar. The Dublin bankers and merchants offered a serious opposition. They believed that the existing prosperity of the city would be sacrificed, that absenteeism would increase and their manufactures be ruined. The Corporation was reported to be furious; and the bankers and merchants, headed by William Digges La Touche, and supported by J. C. Beresford, drew up, at a meeting at the Mansion House, a series of strong resolutions against the measure. They attested that since the establishment of an independent Parliament "the commerce and prosperity of this kingdom have eminently increased," which they ascribed to the wisdom of the Irish Parliament.[7] Next to the city the lawyers took up an attitude of resistance. They assembled in a body, as a yeomanry corps, and threatened to set an example to the yeomanry of the country to revolt or to lay down their arms. This danger was averted by the exertions of Cornwallis, but at a full meeting of their body led by Saurun, who, like La Touche, was of Huguenot descent, a resolution was passed by a majority of 134 stating "that a Legislative Union of this kingdom and Great Britain was an innovation which would be highly dangerous at the present juncture to this country." It was little wonder that the discussions on the subject had put new life into the "almost annihilated" body of the United Irishmen and that the Association began "to rise like a phoenix from its ashes."[8] But lawyers, like senators, had their price, and the list of their rewards shows that thirty-four of their body accepted compensation in money, positions, or titles, rather than risk dismissal by offending the Government.[9]

[6] The lists of purchased votes and of those who voted against the Bill, called the Black and White Lists, will be found in Sir Jonah Barrington, Rise and Fall of the Irish Nation (1853), pp. 394, 389.

[7] Castlereagh Correspondence, ii, 43, 46, 48, 51.

[8] Castlereagh Correspondence, ii, 51, 194.

[9] Ibid., ii, 151 ; Barrington, op. cit., p. 232. Wolfe Tone thought the Irish Bar "the most scandalously corrupt and unprincipled body, politically speaking, that he ever knew." Memoirs, ii, 201. But some of these men had paid as much as £4,000 for a seat and they naturally expected compensation.

The North was, in general, friendly. The Orangemen decided to adopt, as a body, no fixed attitude, but to leave their members free to vote as they wished, "it being not the habit of that part of the kingdom to take a very lively interest in any measure proposed by Government."[10] The Catholics were in a more difficult position. The admission of Catholics into Parliament was represented as dependent on the passing of this measure, and Pitt, while not actually pledging himself, held out what appeared to be distinct hopes of their complete emancipation in bringing in the Bill.[11] Fitzwilliam had been instructed "to give it a handsome support on the part of the Government" if the Catholics seemed determined on it. Cornwallis had declared his unqualified approval of the admission of Catholics into Parliament. On September 30 he wrote that he would never consent to the insertion of any clause (in the Act) that shall make the exclusion of the Catholics a fundamental part of the Union, "as I am fully convinced that until the Catholics are admitted into a general participation of rights...there will be no peace or safety in Ireland."[12] "I certainly wish," he wrote again, "that England could now make a Union with the Irish nation, instead of making it with a party in Ireland." When he begins to doubt of his views being accepted he feels "great doubts of the efficacy" of the measure, and "does not believe that it would have been much more difficult to have included the Catholics." But, as on previous critical occasions, the Catholics themselves failed to speak with any decided voice, and showed a fatal complacency with any arrangements that Ministers chose to make. They seem to have regarded the question with a supine lethargy and to have left all efforts to the Protestants.[13]

[10] Castlereagh Correspondence, ii, 368, and cf. 369, 373, 374.

[11] Ibid., ii, 140-141, 147-148, 155-156, etc.

[12] Cornwallis Correspondence, ii, 417.

[13] See Tone's opinion on this point, Memoirs, i, 279, 283.

A representative meeting held at Lord Fingall's at an early stage in the negotiations came to no decision. Lord Kenmare and Lord Fingall were decidedly in favour of Union. Dr. Troy, Archbishop of Dublin, was of the same opinion; all that was wished for was some provision for their clergy,[14] to render them less dependent on the lower orders. The letter of Dr. Moylan, Bishop of Cork, on September 14, 1799, to Sir J. Hippisley is most remarkable. He praised "the present humane and enlightened administration" whose measures had contributed to the tranquillity of the country; "except where the Orange influence prevails, peace and good order appear," he says, "to be re-established." He believes that nothing will more effectually tend to lay disgraceful party feuds and restore peace and harmony "than the great measure in contemplation of the legislative Union and incorporation of this kingdom with Great Britain," which he was happy to say was working its way daily and daily gaining ground in public opinion. He adds: "The Roman Catholics in general are avowedly for the measure."[15]

[14] For the Catholic position, see Cornwallis Correspondence, iii, 22, 121, etc.; Castlereagh Correspondence, ii, 35-36, 46, 50, 78, 147-148, etc.

[15] For Dr. Moylan's letter, see ibid., ii, 399-400.

From Pitt's point of view the urgent necessity of some change in the relations between the two countries was daily becoming clearer. The war with France and the growing power of Buonaparte filled the nation with a dread that had been unknown in England since the days of the Armada. In 1797, at the same time that Napoleon was planning the conquest of Syria and Egypt, the Directory had sent to the coast of Wales two thousand desperadoes taken from the gaols, "the greatest reprobates in the French army," known as the Legion Noire. "Sad blackguards they are," says Tone, who saw them reviewed at Brest.[16] Their purpose was to burn Bristol to the ground and to buccaneer in England. Even Tone pitied the probable fate of Bristol. This was at the same moment that revolutionary doctrines were running through Ireland, and Tone was urging the Directory for fleets and money to invade the country and obtain separation from England. Pitt was uncertain what the views of the Irish Parliament might prove to be if a critical moment arose. Subservient as it had usually shown itself, it had on rare occasions asserted itself and taken a course not approved in England.

[16] Memoirs, ii, 85, 99, 108, 111. A similar project was proposed for Munster, ibid., i, 325.

The Members had not always acted in harmony or with good judgment. In one instance, the question of the Regency, they might fairly be accused of hasty action and want of discretion. The Regency matter was constantly in Pitt's mind and takes a large place in his speech introducing his measure in the English Parliament. Might they not, he urged, on some critical occasion in which the defence and safety of Great Britain was involved again take an independent attitude? Pitt's view came simply to this: a Parliament in Ireland was safe only so long as it was subservient. As soon as it became effectual it became dangerous. This was the main line of argument advanced by him in his speech on the message of His Majesty on the question of the Union on January 23, 1799, which was moved by Dundas and replied to by Sheridan, who fought the measure step by step in the English Parliament. Pitt said: "We have all in our mouths a sentence, that every good Englishman and every good Irishman feels—we must stand and fall together—we should live and die together; and yet without such a measure as that which is about to be proposed to you, there can be no security for the continuance of that sentiment;...as it now stands it is liable to a thousand accidents...What security is there that they (the two Parliaments) will agree on all questions hereafter, in which the general interest of the British Empire is involved?...Is it a difficult thing to suppose a case in which the two Parliaments may clash and become perhaps as hostile to one another as any two independent bodies politic in Europe?"[17] Had the Parliament of Ireland in any way really represented the proletariat, such arguments would have had great weight. The examination of the leaders of the United Irishmen had revealed to the Government the existence of a widespread conspiracy to sever the connexion with Britain with the armed aid of France, Britain's bitterest enemy.

[17] Pitt's Speeches (1806), iii, 356-357.

The spread of republican sentiments in the North and the rebellion in the South proved the unrest and disaffection felt through large parts of the country. To the English public Pitt's arguments presented an unanswerable position. His speech was pronounced "the most impressive and one of the most judicious the Under-Secretary had ever heard." But even supposing that the rebellion had been a real expression of popular opinion instead of a movement largely worked up for political purposes, as in fact it was, neither republicanism or rebellion found any sympathisers in the Irish House of Commons. Any efforts made by the House in the direction of independence, reform, or Catholic freedom had been accompanied with assurances of the most devoted support of the Throne and of England in her prosecution of the war. So far as the Parliament was concerned, Pitt could not bring any accusation against it; he could only presuppose a possible change of sentiment if ever the Parliament should really express the sentiments of the people it was supposed to represent. Yet, at last, even the venal oligarchy who constituted the majority of the House was proving restive. On January 26, three days after this speech, Pitt was writing to the Lord Lieutenant that he "was certainly much disappointed and grieved to find that a measure so essential is frustrated for the time by the effect of prejudice and cabal," and he takes practical steps to guard against a repetition of inconvenient conduct by recommending it "as very desirable, if the Government is strong enough to do it without too much immediate hazard, to mark by dismissal the sense entertained of the conduct of those persons in office who opposed."

The way being thus prepared, Pitt, on January 31, brought in his resolutions affirming the principles of the Union in a long and closely reasoned speech, in which he calls upon the Parliaments of both kingdoms "to provide in the manner which they shall judge most expedient for settling such a complete and final adjustment as may best tend to improve and perpetuate a connection essential for their common security, and to augment and consolidate the strength, power, and resources of the British Empire."[18] In this speech Pitt, while he fully admitted the entire competence of the Parliament of Ireland to accept or reject a proposition of this nature and had no hope of its immediate adoption by the Irish legislature, challenged the finality of the settlement of 1782 and pointed to the fresh dangers of total separation arising from the separation of the legislatures. He argued that the commercial regulations of 1785 led directly to legislative union; and that only by making the countries one could commercial jealousies be obviated and commercial compacts kept. He then passed on to consider the special dangers arising from the present war with France and the efforts she was making to effect a landing in England through Ireland; and he argued that only by making the interests of the two countries identical could the safety of both be attained. Pitt, with an all-absorbing and critical war upon his hands, may well be excused if he saw the question only from the Imperial point of view. He had always been of the same opinion and had never condescended to play a double game, as Portland was accused of having done. He also honestly thought that certain measures, Catholic emancipation in particular, which he believed to be fraught with peril in the present circumstances, might be carried with safety in a United Parliament.

[18] Pitt's Speeches (1806), iii, 361-403.

The Catholics, now a large majority in a separated Ireland, would be a minority under a union of the two countries, and thus unable to carry the revolutionary measures they were constantly supposed to have in view. A re-arrangement with regard to tithes and a provision for the Catholic clergy were also held out as inducements to accept the Bill. Pitt, after enumerating the advantages that he believed would accrue to Ireland in trade, defence, and prosperity, by the acceptance of his proposals, ended with a vigorous challenge to the new doctrines of Jacobinism which placed the final sovereignty in the people themselves, a principle which he characterised as "striking at the foundation of all Governments and obviously incompatible with all civil society; one of the favourite impostures to mislead the understanding and to flatter and inflame the passions of mankind."[19] Sheridan and Grey opposed the arguments with great eloquence, but Pitt carried the resolutions, Sheridan's amendment being lost by 140 to 25. When transmitted to the Upper House the Bill was agreed to without a division, Lord Lansdowne and Lord Moira speaking against the measure and Grenville and Auckland in support.

[19] Pitt's Speeches, iii, 392, 394.

Meanwhile, the passage of the Bill was not going smoothly in Ireland. In spite of the persistent efforts of Castlereagh and the lavish promises of high rewards, in spite of the dismissal of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir John Parnell, and of the Prime Serjeant, James FitzGerald, and the resignations of George Knox, Colonel Foster, son of the Speaker, and J. C. Beresford, Castlereagh was very uncertain of the issue of the debate.[20] The Speaker, Foster, was organizing the opposition and his dismissal was also under consideration. Lord Pery, Sir Lawrence Parsons, Sir John Parnell, the Ponsonbys and Plunket, made a formidable and able body of opponents, whose position and staunch honesty of purpose carried great weight; still, from 160 to 170 votes were calculated upon if all attended. The debate took place on January 22, 1799, when the Lord-Lieutenant delivered a speech from the throne in the Upper House, and was followed by Lord Glandore, recommending the subject of a legislative union with Great Britain to the consideration of the House. Lord Powerscourt vigorously opposed the measure, declaring that the House was incompetent to entertain the principle of a legislative union, and that therefore the subject ought not to be discussed at all. He moved an amendment that, while they desired to strengthen the connexion between the two countries by every possible means, this measure was not within the limits of their power. He conceived that it would be highly impolitic to adopt such a measure, even supposing they had power to do so, and would tend, more than any other cause, to an ultimate separation from Great Britain.[21] Lord Enniskillen seconded him, and Lord Bellamont introduced a second amendment to insert the words "so far as may be consistent with the permanent enjoyment, exercise, and tutelary vigilance of our resident and independent Parliament, as established, acknowledged and recognized."

[20] Cornwallis Correspondence, iii, 34, 35, 38; Castlereagh Correspondence, ii. 126, 127, 131.

[21] Cornwallis Correspondence, iii, 40-41.

The aged Lord Charlemont returned to register his vote against the extinction of the liberties he had done so much to win; but the wavering Lord Ely, who was ultimately to be bought with a marquessate and a British peerage, went behind the throne and declined to vote. So little was he to be depended upon that Cornwallis thought it would be highly imprudent to give him his reward till the Union was passed; but in March he declared for the Act he had abhorred, and brought with him two members, though his adhesion was "clogged with some awkwardness."[22] At twelve o'clock the house divided; fifty-two were in favour of Union, the Bishops of Down and Limerick and seventeen lay peers against. "Never," exclaims Sir Jonah Barrington, "did a body of hereditary nobles, many of ancient family and several of splendid fortune, so disgrace their ancestry. After an ineffectual resistance...the Irish Lords recorded their own humiliation. They perpetrated the most extraordinary act of legislative suicide which ever stained the records of a nation." "In the hands of the Chancellor, Lord Clare," he adds, "the House was powerless, his mere automaton or puppet which he coerced or humoured according to his ambition or caprice...The Irish Lords lay prostrate before the Government."[23] Clare's speech on this occasion was undoubtedly a great forensic triumph, and presented the case for the Union with a masterly lucidity. But such a speech came strangely from one who, a few years before, had declared that he would fling his office in the face of anyone who spoke to him of Union.

[22] Beresford Correspondence, Camden to Castlereagh, January 15.

[23] J. Barrington, Rise and Fall of the Irish Nation (1853), p. 348.

In the Commons the debate was long and brilliant. The son of the Marquess of Waterford moved the address on Lord Cornwallis's speech and for a day and a night the motion was opposed by the few incorruptibles who dared to challenge the Government, in spite of certain loss of place and favour. Lord Castlereagh replied, stating the case for the Union with the cynical arguments and in the cold, hard style which enforced unpleasant truths with what Lord Plunket's grandson called "abrupt, inevitable force." "Incorporate with Great Britain," he said, "and you will have a common interest and common means. If Great Britain calls for your subjection, resist it; but if she wishes to unite with you on terms of equality 'tis madness not to accept the offer." To this specious address Lord Plunket rose to reply in the uncertain light of a wintry daybreak. His broad and massive face was marked by the intensity of his feeling, and his strong, metallic voice rang over a House hushed into silence. "This is a subject," he began, "which must arouse the slumbering, and might almost reanimate the dead. It is a question whether Ireland shall cease to be free. It is a question involving our dearest interests and for ever." In scathing words he lashed the "black corruption" that had been carried on within the walls of the Castle by men "who could not endure any reflection on their untainted and virgin integrity." He denied the competency of Parliament to do this act. "You have not been elected for this purpose," he cried. "You are appointed to make laws and not legislatures. You are appointed to act under the Constitution, not to alter it. You are appointed to exercise the functions of legislators, not to transfer them. If you do so, your act is a dissolution of Government...no man in the land is bound to obey you."[24]

[24] The speech is reported at length in The Life and Letters of Lord Plunket by the Hon David Plunket, i, 137-150.

It seemed as though another Grattan had been born into the assembly. This great speech was not without effect. The numbers announced at the division showed that the Government had a majority of only one, two Members having been bought over openly in the House when the result seemed doubtful, during the progress of the debate.[25] Thus a slight majority was secured for the Government. Two days later, on January 24, the debate was renewed, when a still more excited discussion took place, George Ponsonby avowing that the measure was revolutionary; that it would endanger the compact between the Crown and the subject and the connexion between the two countries. Such a speech from a discreet and loyal man and constitutional lawyer of high position in the country produced an immense effect in the House. He assailed Lord Castlereagh with cool and deliberate irony, which affected even the youthful Minister, who endeavoured to reply to this new attack and to Plunket's philippic of the previous occasion at one and the same time. The galleries were filled, and the excitement was immense when a majority of five against the Government was announced. The city was illuminated; joy-bells were rung in Dublin and Cork; and the populace drew home the Speaker's coach in triumph. Unionists and anti-Unionists established duelling clubs, where the political animosities of the day could be fought out in a practical manner.[26]

[25] J. Barrington, op. cit., pp. 343-345.

[26] See the extraordinary account of these duelling clubs in Life and Letters of Lord Plunket, i, 152.

But the question of the Union was only postponed. Castlereagh wrote to the Duke of Portland the day after the debate that "considering the temper of Parliament and the country he did not see the possibility of re-agitating the question this session with any advantage." But the time was advantageously spent in "composing more fortunately" the leading interests toward the measure, and convincing the misguided of their errors, as Portland had recommended in his reply. The last discussion of the session bearing on the Union took place on May 15, and the question was not again brought forward till January 15 of the following year (1800) when, after one of the most stirring debates ever heard in the Irish Parliament, the Members signed their own death-warrant in the division that followed. Meanwhile Ministers had not been idle. Castlereagh was coolly calculating the money price to be paid for the success of the measure. He put the total at a million and a half, to be levied on Ireland itself for the purchase of its own political extinction. Every nobleman who returned Members to Parliament was to receive £15,000 in compensation for each of such Members; as few returned less than two Members the price paid was a large one. Every Member who had paid for a seat in Parliament was to have his money returned to him, and all Members who were losers by the Union were to be compensated for their losses. The borough interest, the Dublin interest, the barristers, all had their price; and places and honours were lavishly scattered to accommodate the waverers. Those officials who dissented were dismissed.[27]

[27] Castlereagh Correspondence, ii, 149-153.

All these arrangements were, with a cynical contempt for human cupidity, openly stated in the House. The public lack of any sense of morality may be judged by Portland's remark on these arrangements that "the whole of Lord Castlereagh's conduct throughout the course of the proceeding has been so judicious and correct that it is the decided opinion of the King's Servants that the line he has hitherto observed cannot be too strictly adhered to."[28] The proceedings had their effect. During the recess Lord Cornwallis made a tour through the country to obtain signatures to petitions for a Union. During this tour the warmest supporters of the Government project proved to be the Catholic bishops and clergy, who were now almost unanimous in its favour. They were followed by a large number of the laity of their own faith, both nobles and commoners. It is, indeed, safe to say that but for the strong support of the Catholics all over the country the Union could not have been passed except by pure force and bribery. Plowden, the Catholic historian, tells us that "it may be said that a very great preponderancy in favour of the Union existed in the Catholic body, particularly in their nobility, gentry, and clergy."[29]

[28] Castlereagh Correspondence, ii, 155; for list of official dismissals, see Cornwallis.

[29] Plowden, Review of the State of Ireland, vol. ii, Pt. II, p. 979.

The truth of this statement was proved by the petitions in its favour which were sent up, alike from the Catholics of the towns and country districts, with their bishops at the head. Cornwallis might well report on his return that "he found a general good disposition towards the Government and cordial approbation of the measure." The Catholics believed that all their chances of freedom lay in union with England. The Protestant gentry, for that very reason, resisted a union which they felt would mean, in large measure, the eclipse of their prestige and power. It is to be remembered, as some explanation of the Government payments, that the sums paid in ordinary times for seats were very large. The election of Caulfeild, Lord Charlemont's brother, had recently cost £7,000; that of Viscount Castlereagh had cost in election expenses £60,000 for the Hillsborough interest, money that had been saved by his father for the completion of the Mount Stewart estates. It was intended to send one hundred Members to Westminster, the gross pecuniary compensation for the remaining boroughs being calculated at £563,000. But no excuse can be made for the lavish scale on which money payments were distributed and places given away with a view to corrupt the Houses. The demands continued to rise as fast as they were acceded to. "There were times," says Sir Jonah Barrington, "when Mr. Pitt would have lost his head for a tithe of his government of Ireland." And while all this was going on in the official circle, a reign of terror which made it dangerous to petition, especially for Catholics, was in force in the country. Executions for the late rebellion were proceeding in various parts, "the same wretched business of courts-martial, hanging, transporting, etc...going on as usual," as Cornwallis, the person most responsible, reports on September 26 to Castlereagh.[30]

[30] Cornwallis Correspondence, iii, 135.

On January 15, 1800, the last session of the Irish Parliament met, being surrounded with military and under the threat of Lord Castlereagh that the sitting would be removed to Cork if its proceedings were interrupted. Many able speeches were made on the motion of Sir Lawrence Parsons by members of the Opposition, those of Bushe and Plunket making the deepest impression. In the early morning Patrick Egan had risen to speak, when a whisper ran through the House that Grattan, by the almost superhuman efforts of his friends, had been elected in time for the close of the debate for Henry Tighe's close borough of Wicklow, and that he was on the road to Dublin to take his seat. At this moment the doors of the House were thrown open and Grattan, supported by George Ponsonby and Arthur Moore, entered the House. "The effect was electrical. Mr. Grattan's illness and deep chagrin had reduced a form, never symmetrical, and a visage at all times thin, nearly to the appearance of a spectre. As he feebly tottered into the House, every Member simultaneously rose from his seat."[31] Even Castlereagh stood uncovered at the head of the Treasury Bench while the venerable patriot took the oath. "Never was there a scene more solemn," writes a reporter of the day; "an indescribable emotion seized the House and Gallery, and every heart heaved in pulsation to the name, the virtues, and the return to Parliament of the founder of the Constitution of 1782, the existence of which was now the subject of debate."[32] For two hours Grattan reviewed the situation since the establishment of the Parliament, but the result was determined before he came and the Government majority numbered forty-two. Though the debates went on, the fate of Ireland was then decided. Some months later, when the Bill was again before the House, Grattan uttered the famous words: "Identification is a solid and imperial maxim, necessary for the preservation of freedom, necessary for that of empire; but without a union of hearts...identification is extinction, is dishonour, is conquest, not identification...Yet I do not give up the country; I see her swoon, but she is not dead; though in her tomb she lies helpless and motionless, still there is on her lips a spirit of life, and on her cheek a glow of beauty...I remain here anchored to the fortunes of my country, faithful to her freedom, faithful to her fall."[33]

[31] Barrington, op. cit., p. 372.

[32] Life and Letters of Lord Plunket, i, 194, and note.

[33] Grattan's Speech on May 26, 1800, D. O. Madden, Grattan's Speeches, p. 286.

On June 7, the third reading of the Articles was taken; and on July 2 the English Bill received the Royal Assent. The Union was accomplished.

END OF CHAPTER XVI

XVII.—O'CONNELL AND EMANCIPATION

It is deplorable to reflect that it was the Members of Grattan's "independent Parliament" who thus allowed themselves to be bought and sold. Had the Parliamentary reforms that had been so urgently pressed for by the more enlightened among the Members been carried, such abuses could not have occurred, but the representatives showed a disposition to reform everything but themselves. The English Government became ashamed of their part in the bargain and showed a disposition to withdraw from their engagements. Sixteen new peerages looked badly, even if by this means Lord Cornwallis had, in Castlereagh's words, been able to "buy out and secure to the Crown for ever the fee-simple of Irish corruption"; in their new-found contrition the main movers were preparing to sacrifice their principal agent, Cornwallis. The cool, cynical voice of Castlereagh is heard commenting on the business. He, at least, has no illusions and makes no pretences. "It appears," he writes to Cooke, Under-Secretary, on June 21, 1800, "that the Cabinet, after having carried the measure by force of influence, of which they were apprised in every dispatch sent from hence for the last eighteen months, wish to forget all this; they turn short round and say it would be a pity to tarnish all that has been so well done, by giving any such shock to the public sentiment...The only effect of such a proceeding will be to add the weight of their testimony to that of the anti-Unionists, in proclaiming the profligacy of the means by which the measure has been accomplished."[1]

[1] Castlereagh Correspondence, iii, 330-339.

Of the two high officials chiefly responsible for the methods employed in carrying the Union there is no doubt that Castlereagh was by far the abler man. Clear-sighted, unbending, and imperturbable, he was hated in Ireland as being "so very unlike an Irishman," and he allowed no scruples of conscience to stand in the way when carrying out the policy of his superiors, even while despising it and them. His political abilities were to be shown on other fields of European diplomacy; but it is remarkable, as a testimony to a certain rectitude of personal character, that old political foes, like Grattan and Plunket, bore him no resentment in after life. Grattan made it a last personal request to Plunket that he would cultivate friendly relations with his former opponent. Cornwallis was of a different temperament. Well-meaning but weak, he allowed measures to be carried and put in force of which he heartly disapproved, though he made little effort to check them. If the life of an Irish Viceroy was to him "his ideal of perfect misery "[2] he yet did nothing to make it respected. "Hating the whole dirty business," he yet saw it through, just as, during the rebellion, he had permitted the excesses of the military over which he groaned. His sentiments were excellent and he sought no personal ends, but he had not the strength of character to resist the stream of violent tendencies with which he found himself surrounded; in the end it was Castlereagh who protested against the intention of the Ministry to make him their scapegoat.[3]

[2] Cornwallis Correspondence, ii, 358.

[3] Castlereagh Correspondence, iii, 326-327; 330. The proposal to make Castlereagh's father, Lord Londonderry, a British peer, was deferred with his express consent, ibid., 345, 351-52.

The only true test of the Union was in its results. The first result universally expected was the declaration of Catholic relief. That Pitt had intended this to be the immediate outcome of his measure is clear. It is plain, too, that the Viceroy and Castlereagh had been authorized unofficially to hold out hopes of concessions to the Catholic bishops as an inducement to them to support the Union—a support which they had loyally given. This is shown by a remarkable letter addressed by Castlereagh to Pitt, and by a paper giving Pitt's reasons for resigning rather than to be the means of disappointing the hopes he had raised.[4]

[4] Castlereagh Correspondence, iv, 8-12, 34-38.

The obstacle that intervened was the violent opposition of the King. George III. had been persuaded to believe that in signing a bill for Catholic relief he would be breaking his coronation oath. This had been the position long taken up by Lord Clare and pressed by him upon the Sovereign. "What is it this young Lord (Castlereagh) has brought over and is going to throw at my head?" exclaimed the King on January 28 to Dundas. "The most Jacobinical thing I ever heard of." He ordered the coronation oath to be read aloud to him. "Where," he burst out, "is the power on earth to absolve me from the due observance of every sentence of that oath?" Pitt was in a dilemma. The King was in an excitable state of mind and on the borders of one of his recurrent fits of madness. He openly blamed Pitt and the Catholic cause for having been the cause of this. A crisis now occurred; Pitt resigned, as he had threatened to do, and Cornwallis also sent in his resignation. Lord Clare rejoiced that the question was, as he believed, closed for ever, though Pitt considered it only deferred. But for himself personally he determined never again to embroil himself with the Sovereign by bringing forward the Catholic question, and when in the spring of 1805 a Catholic deputation led by Lord Fingall waited on Pitt, now again Prime Minister, the members were bluntly told that they must apply elsewhere, for he intended to oppose their petition. Pitt died in the following year.[5]

[5] On January 22, 1806.

The two pivots on which the Government of Ireland turned during the years after the Union were described by Bright in 1849 as "force and alms." The first Acts of the United Parliament were those for the suppression of the rebellion in Ireland and the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, and from that time till 1829, as Peel stated in the House in that year, Ireland was governed scarcely one year by ordinary law. The Habeas Corpus Act had been suspended in the country in 1800, from 1802 till 1805, from 1807 till 1810, in 1814, and from 1822 till 1824. Commissions and select Committees sat upon Irish questions almost every year, distress was rampant and disturbances frequent. The miseries of the country were to culminate in the great famine of 1846-48. This was, however, only the climax to successive seasons of famine, arising immediately out of the shortage of potatoes, but ultimately out of the pressing poverty of large sections of the population owing to bad social conditions. Doles and relief works were applied with a generous hand, but they could not set right ailments which arose out of a system of things that needed radical reform. The great struggles during the coming years were to be for better land laws, freedom from the burden of tithe, disestablishment of the Protestant Church of Ireland, education, and repeal of the Union. The last was eventually to transform itself into the demand for Home Rule. Behind all these lay the as yet unsettled question of emancipation. It is to be remembered that a legacy of unrest had been left for the new United Parliament to face. The country was only slowly righting itself after the rebellion, which had been put down not so much by trained or half-trained troops as by the exertions of the country gentlemen, who had devoted their whole time and properties to keeping their neighbourhoods in order, as Lord de Clifford stated in a letter to Townshend in July, 1799. They were heartily seconded in their efforts by the Catholic prelates, who denounced rebellion from their altars, and in many districts which were preparing to rise held back their flocks by their earnest persuasions and warnings. The admonitions of leading members of the hierarchy, like Dr. Troy, Archbishop of Dublin, Dr. Moylan, and others prevented a wider spread of the rebellion of 1798, and quieted the people after the Union, imploring them to restrain themselves from hasty action, and themselves accepting without complaint the rather lame explanations made to them by the Government through Lord Cornwallis.

Dr. Moylan, Bishop of Cork, who cordially approved the Union, spoke of the recent civil and religious disorder, as having "shamefully disgraced the nation"; and Dr. Troy ordered a pastoral against treasonable practices to be read from every altar in his diocese during the course of the insurrection. Even the patriotic Bishop Doyle, in 1824, checked the progress of disaffection in his diocese by a ringing condemnation of the secret societies of the Defenders and Ribbonmen which were permeating every part of his parishes. He spoke of them as "a vile and wicked conspiracy," and of their members as "dupes"; and he admonished his astonished and terrified hearers to desist from illegal associations "which have always augmented the evils of our country, and tend to bring disgrace upon our holy religion."[6] Lalor Sheil pointed out as an unquestionable fact that it was the exertions of this Bishop, living in one of the most disturbed parts of the country, which tamed many an insurgent congregation into submission. The fact that the Ribbonmen aimed at the restoration of the Catholic Church as one of their tenets did not reconcile Dr. Doyle to the association of these aims with agrarian crime; it rather stimulated the horror he felt at any such alliance between the Church and brutal lawlessness. His address was printed in Irish and English and 300,000 copies of it were circulated throughout the country; but the persona visits of the Bishop to the various parishes and the stern admonitions which fell from his lips had a still greater effect. The Marquis Wellesley, late Governor General of India, on coming to Ireland as Viceroy in 1821,[7] gave a just commendation of the support afforded to the Government during a troublous time by the prelates; he accepted their congratulations "with the cordiality and respect due to their character, conduct, and sacred functions"; of "the propriety of their past behaviour" he speaks with admiration.

[6] W. J. Fitzpatrick, Life and Times of Bishop Doyle (1861), i, 108, 193; M. MacDonagh, Bishop Doyle, pp. 76-84. Dr. Doyle published a series of trenchant letters on his times under the pseudonym of "J. K. L."

[7] Elder brother to the Duke of Wellington. He had been offered the post in 1812 but declined.

The Act of Union brought a new personality into the field. In January, 1800, the voice of the man who was to exercise a power never before wielded in Ireland by any Irishman was heard for the first time in public, speaking in the Royal Exchange, Dublin, against the Union. In after life Daniel O'Connell was wont to say that all his later political principles were contained in this speech. To a Catholic audience he declared that they had resolved to meet no more as Catholics for political discussion, but as Irishmen. "If emancipation," he exclaimed, "be offered for our consent to the measure (of the Union)—even if emancipation after the Union were a gain—we would reject it with prompt indignation." In 1810 he declared the same opinion in yet more explicit terms: "If the Premier were to offer me to-morrow the repeal of the Union upon the terms of re-enacting the entire Penal Code, I declare from my heart and in the presence of my God that I would most cheerfully embrace his offer."[8] Thus the Emancipator announced a programme which was to combine Catholics with Protestants in one national effort, as Irishmen, in the task of regaining for Ireland its national position. But for the attainment of the chief object he had at heart, the repeal of the Union, O'Connell felt that the liberation of the Catholics was a first step. The Protestant gentry had allowed themselves to be bought over; he believed that only by a union between the general body of the Catholics of the middle and lower classes with their aristocracy could the position be retrieved. Later, when he found his unaided efforts were not sufficient, he called in the assistance of the priests and populace, and for the first time made them a power in Irish politics. Hitherto the people had engaged in politics only as electors bound to return their own Protestant landlords to Parliament; they had neither will nor thought in the matter. But O'Connell saw in the mass of the small tenants a potential source of power, and he set about to draw upon it for the accomplishment of his aims. To unite them under their natural leaders, the Catholic gentry, and later under the Catholic bishops and clergy, and to inspire in them a sense of their own dormant political force, was his first object. More than any man before his time O'Connell saw his country as one nation, possessed of a national life and aims.

[8] Correspondence, i, 17; John O'Connell, O'Connell's Life and Speeches, (1854), i, 9, 24.

Though his ends were just, the project was a bold one. Daniel O'Connell had been born in West Kerry in the year 1775, of a good Catholic family, and was sent to be educated in Cork and afterward at St. Omer and Douay. He was a devoted son of his Church, and in politics, like most of the Catholic gentry, he was "almost a Tory." From his earliest days he was averse to violent methods such as those of the United Irishmen, for gaining political ends; he "learned from their example that in order to succeed for Ireland it was strictly necessary to work within the limits of the law and constitution." "I saw that a fraternity banded illegally never could be safe; that invariably some person without principle would be sure to gain admission and either for bribes or else...for their own preservation would betray their associates. The United Irishmen taught me that all work for Ireland must be done openly and above-board."[9] "The man who violates the law strengthens the enemy" was his favourite saying. This principle O'Connell adhered to throughout his life, but it resulted in a confusion of mind among his followers if not in himself. He was constantly stirring up vast multitudes of people by speeches of the most inflammatory character, which became more unbridled as time went on, yet when it came to action they found to their surprise that O'Connell refused to lead them.

[9] William J. O'Neill Daunt, Personal Recollections of Daniel O'Connell (1848), i, 205.

The day when the "Liberator" would "speak the word" came not, and the gigantic Repeal meetings of his later life, composed at times of nearly a million people, and held at places of exciting memories such as Tara or Mullaghmast—memories which he used in his addresses with their full effect—were forced to disperse quietly without any attempt at a rising. It is a striking testimony to the personal influence of O'Connell that with a large part of the adult Catholic population of the three provinces of Ireland assembled at these demonstrations, and roused to the highest pitch of enthusiasm by his orations, no scenes of violence ever occurred. Largely through the efforts of Father Mathew, the temperance reformer, neither drunkenness or disorder appeared in them. "My disposition," O'Connell said, "is from natural bias averse to deeds of violence...Not for all the Universe contains would I, in the struggle for what I conceive to be my country's cause, consent to the effusion of a single drop of human blood except my own. Any other man's blood I dare not spill."[10] He looked askance at the landing of Wolfe Tone and the French fleet, and during Emmet's rising he assisted the police to preserve quiet in Dublin. "The liberty that I look for," he said when he heard of the former event, "is that which would increase the happiness of mankind." "Agitate, agitate, agitate," he cried on every occasion; but farther than this he would not go. He believed that with time and perseverance all reforms could be won by constitutional means.

[10] Corporation Address of 1843 ; and see M. MacDonagh, Daniel O'Connell (1929), pp. 257, 296-297.

When the young O'Connell returned from France on the completion of his education he was entered at Lincoln's Inn on January 30, 1794, as a law student, and he was called to the Irish Bar on May 19, 1798, when the rebellion was at its height, being one of the first Irish Catholics to reap the benefit of the Catholic Relief Act. He rose in his profession with astonishing rapidity and soon became known as an unrivalled cross-examiner and a practising lawyer who was plainly destined for the highest positions in his profession. His industry and capacity for work, his gifts of speaking and conducting a case, his wit and subtlety, his dexterity in drawing a witness into a confusion of mind which led to a confession of the truth, his humour, and his intuitive understanding of Irish character, combined to make him a formidable opponent and a most successful advocate. By 1812 he was making an income which he boasted to be as large, probably larger, "than any man in a stuff gown ever had at the Irish Bar." Yet under the existing laws he, as a Catholic, could never hope to attain to the most conspicuous posts. Whatever his abilities, he must always remain beneath the professional rank of his Protestant rivals, even if they were his inferiors in ability. When O'Connell came on the political scene Grattan had retired and Keogh, whose exertions had done much to press forward the Catholic Relief Bill, was old and infirm. The Catholics had been advised by the latter to maintain "a dignified silence," but the energy of O'Connell quickly infused new life into the struggle. He joined the Catholic Committee and speedily rose to be its most commanding figure. Full Catholic equality became the dominant object of his efforts.

The main question of emancipation was complicated by that of the payment of priests by the Government and by the demand, as a set-off for this, of a certain control, known as the "Veto," in the appointment of Bishops. The Government also desired to exercise a power of inspection over correspondence between the Irish bishops and the Roman See, in order to stop any political intriguing which, as of old, was constantly suspected. Any Bill brought in by Pitt would have included these features, which later became known as "the wings," as part of his policy. Grattan was ready to concede the veto and the bishops in his time were prepared to accept it. They had formally consented to it in 1799, and it was approved by the English Catholics, the Irish Catholic aristocracy, and leading men among the mercantile classes. At Rome, Monsignor Quarantotti, acting for the Pontiff, advised the Catholics "to accept and embrace with satisfaction and gratitude" the Bill of 1813, which contained this clause.[11] He did not even object to the restrictions put on correspondence with Rome, as these related only to civil policy and not to ecclesiastical and spiritual matters.

[11] Bernard Ward, The Eve of Catholic Emancipation (1911), i, chs. iv., v., ii, ch. xx.

But in Ireland, in spite of approval in high quarters, opinion was beginning to harden against giving the power of the veto to the Government. The arrest of Lord Fingall and others under an old Penal measure of Lord Clare's, known as the Convention Act of 1793, and the dispersal of the Catholic Association, brought O'Connell eagerly into the dispute. He incited the bishops to refuse the veto and endeavoured to arouse the priests to opposition; and resolutions were passed by the Irish hierarchy expressive of their determination to resist such interference in their appointments "in every canonical and constitutional way." The project was dropped and was not revived when Sir Robert Peel passed his Act of Emancipation in 1829. The division of opinion created by O'Connell's action was strongly disapproved by Grattan, who condemned his action; and O'Connell's avowal that he used this cry of dissatisfaction in order to push on his "ulterior object," repeal of the Union, does not explain it. But the satisfaction of the Catholics was shown by the presentation to him of a piece of plate, and henceforth he became the recognized leader of the Catholic party.

The independent outlook of the Catholics in this controversy is remarkable and was voiced by O'Connell himself. "I am sincerely a Catholic, but not a Papist," he said when there was an appearance of papal influence used in the controversy; and a resolution was passed that "decrees, mandates, or doctrines of any foreign power or authority, religious or civil, cannot of right assume any dominion or control over the political concerns of the Catholics of Ireland," a view which was endorsed by the clergy and bishops in a synod held at Maynooth in 1815. "It was not," said O'Connell, "for the slaves of Rome to instruct the Irish Catholics as to the mode of their emancipation."[12] For eight years the question was postponed in spite of "the desperate fidelity" of the aged Grattan, who year after year brought forward the cause in some shape or other in the English Parliament. In his bill of 1813 he asked for rights which were to be fully granted sixteen years afterwards, including admission to Parliament, to corporations, and to civil and military offices, with the exception of the Viceroyalty of Ireland and the Chancellorship of England.

[12] M. MacDonagh, Daniel O'Connell (1929), pp. 91, 93. The same independent Spirit, in an even more marked degree was found in the discussions on Catholic emancipation among the English Catholics of the period. See Bernard Ward, The Dawn of the Catholic Revival in England (1909), i. ch. v, pp. 87, seq.

The bill was supported by Castlereagh, Canning, and Palmerston, but opposed by Peel, who became the lifelong antagonist of O'Connell and his aims. Grattan died in 1820 at the age of seventy, having served for twenty years in the Irish and fifteen in the United Parliament. "Keep knocking at the Union" was one of his last admonitions when a deputation headed by Lord Cloncurry waited upon him. Yet he held that the Union of the two Parliaments having taken place, it was the duty of every politician to render it as fruitful as possible.[13] He had intended to be buried in Moyenna, but in accordance with a generally expressed desire, he consented to be laid in Westminster Abbey. The Duke of Norfolk and the Duke of Wellington were his pall-bearers, and every honour that England could bestow was accorded to his remains. When in feeble health, he had at the risk of his life come over to London to bring the claims of the Catholics once more before the House; when his daughter prayed him not to make the dangerous effort to appear in Parliament he replied, "God gave me talents to be of use to my country and if I lose my life in her service it is a good death," repeating with emphasis, "it is a good death." But nature failed, and he no longer had strength to carry out his intention. He asked for a paper prepared by him on the question which lay so near his heart. Holding it in his hand, he said: "Add to it these words—I die with a love of liberty in my heart, and this declaration in favour of my country in my hand." He expired on June 4, the anniversary of the day on which, forty years before, the Irish Volunteers had presented him with an address for asserting the liberties of Ireland.

[13] This was also the opinion of Grattan's friend, Lord Plunket, Life and Letters, ii, 104-105.

The defeat of Grattan's Catholic Bill in 1813 had proved a total and calamitous set back to the cause, and a complete apathy as regarded their claims settled down on the English people. Nevertheless, the long effort had borne fruit. The almost annual bills brought in by Grattan were defeated by ever decreasing majorities, and the unanswerable arguments advanced in their support, combined with the moderation of the hierarchy and the Catholic upper classes and the lessening of the vague fears of their adverse influence which followed the conclusion of the European peace, were not without effect. Plunket, on Grattan's death, became the chief supporter of the Catholic claims within the House. The weight of his authority, the respect accorded to his rectitude and high character, and the solid reasoning of his speeches caused all that he said to be received with attention. But on the veto question, which both Grattan and Plunket were willing to concede, O'Connell raised a violent opposition; and when Plunket introduced his broadly conceived Relief Bill of 1821, O'Connell even went the length of wishing "that the present rascally Catholic Bill might be thrown out" because it contained the veto clause.

Plunket's Bill was supported by a petition signed by 8,000 English Catholics, whose claims he united to those of Ireland. It was ushered in by an oration which even his adversary, Sir Robert Peel, characterised as "nearly the highest in point of ability of any ever heard in the House," and the motion was carried by a majority of six in a House of 448; but in the Upper House it was thrown out by a majority of thirty-nine.[14] This adverse result was largely owing to the position taken up by the Duke of York, who made a declaration of unconquerable hostility to any further relief of the Catholics and whose opposition had great weight with the Lords; but the adverse attitude of O'Connell's party was also to blame for the unsatisfactory vote. While Bishop Doyle hailed the bill with delight, and Sheil, addressing a large meeting of Catholics in Dublin, declared the passing of the Bill through its first reading was "an epoch in the history of Ireland," and "the day of her political regeneration," the "Anti-vetoists" under O'Connell's leadership denounced it in the most violent language in meetings held all over Ireland and presided over by the priests.

[14] The speech is given in full in his Life and Letters, ii, 20-67. Lord Dudley said of it: "I have not for many years heard such an astonishing display of talent. His style is quite peculiar for its gravity and severity."

The political position of O'Connell was peculiar. He was a loyalist of the most pronounced description and when George IV visited Dublin in 1821, and was received with extraordinary signs of popular devotion by all classes, O'Connell outstripped all others in his professions of homage to the King. He expressed equally strong loyalist sentiments toward the youthful Queen Victoria; and his belief in the advantages to Ireland of the connexion with the Crown never wavered. "There lived not a man," as he delighted to repeat, "less desirous of separation or more desirous of independence."[15] The marked courtesy with which the Irish prelates and laity were treated during the King's visit raised hopes that were destined to be disappointed, even though it was followed in the same year by the appointment as Viceroy of Lord Wellesley, an Irishman who was known to be favourable to the Catholic claims. Saurin, the obstinate opponent of all measures of relief, was removed and Plunket replaced him as Attorney-General; but Henry Goulburn, who came over as Chief Secretary, was known to be averse to emancipation. Goulburn was besieged by Orangemen from the North, demanding the suppression of the "Papists," and Plunket, on the other hand, became the butt of O'Connell's followers, who were determined to make an attack on Parliament in the session of 1822. Vigorous and virulent as he was in speech, O'Connell was generally ready to enter into a compromise when he thought it advantageous, and he now attempted a modified form of settlement which, however, was rejected by the Government.

[15] Speech of January 29, 1813.

The new Viceroy wisely determined to put down exhibitions of Orange sentiment which, in the heated condition of public opinion, had become dangerous, and he prohibited the dressing of the statue of William III. on College Green on July 12, then regarded as an annual demonstration. This was followed by a riot, afterwards known as "the bottle riot," when an organized body of Orangemen packed the pit and gallery of the Dublin theatre when the Marquess was present and with cries of, "Down with the Popish Lord-Lieutenent" they flung missiles, one of which was a large whiskey-bottle, at the royal box. At the trial, the jury refused to find a verdict and great excitement prevailed in the city. The Viceroy wrote that he was frustrated, baffled, and betrayed even by his own agents, "the whole machinery of my own Government working for my destruction, and no sign of a disposition on the part of England to give me support or credit."

From the year 1829 onward, Repeal of the Union came more prominently to the front, but the Orangemen of Ulster were solid against repeal, and their determined hostility to the South dates from their opposition to the repeal agitation. Anglesey, who came a second time to Ireland as Viceroy in 1830, at the opening of O'Connell's campaign, though he had supported him in his projects for emancipation, was firmly against him now. O'Connell's fight seemed likely to be waged with only the Catholic democracy and clergy on his side. It was believed that O'Connell was aiming at autocracy and even men like Sheil and Moore, his old comrades, shrank from fresh agitation. They feared that repeal would lead to separation and that it might end in rebellion, though O'Connell held the people back from violent acts and consistently denounced separation throughout his career.[16] The rapid spread of the agitation and the formidable organization formed by O'Connell in 1840 to support it, gave him hopes of fulfilment, but the restraint that he exacted from his followers ended in a loosened hold upon them.

[16] See his letter to Bishop MacHale of October, 1838, in W. J. Fitzpatrick, Correspondence of Daniel O'Connell, ii, pp. 149-150.

The "Young Ireland" movement arose to take the place of an agitation that seemed destined to prove abortive and the methods of which the populace failed to understand. The open talk in the columns of the Nation newspaper of armed intervention was more comprehensible among a multitude who had for years waited in vain for their great leader to "give the word" for a rising. O'Connell, though himself no separatist, had created a nation ripe for separation, and though he was personally averse to force, he had trained the youth of Ireland to expect rebellion. A collision could not be long averted. "O'Connell and the priests," wrote the Chancellor, "have arrayed the lower orders against the intelligence and property of the country. You can hardly overrate the gravity of the present moment...I think a short time will decide...Repeal now means separation and hatred of the British connexion."[17] O'Connell had turned the priests into agitators and the people into separatists; it was with this inflammable material prepared to their hand that the Young Irelanders came into the field to complete the work that O'Connell had begun.

[17] Peel's Correspondence, iii, 48-49.

In 1823 O'Connell, with Sheil's help, had founded a new Catholic Association. Its aim was to bring the priests into politics and to use them as a force to urge on emancipation. Up to this time, under the influence of their bishops, the parish clergy had taken little part in politics and the instances in which curates acted in rebellious risings, as in the fighting at New Ross and Wexford, had received the express and energetic condemnation of the hierarchy. But the "Liberator," as O'Connell was beginning to be called, saw in the clergy of his own Church an immense unused source of political influence, and from the moment that this idea occurred to him he was carried forward on an ever-rising tide of popularity, and fought with practically the whole Catholic population at his back. He had already made use of clerical influence in elections. In 1807, Sir Arthur Wellesley, describing an election in Tipperary, declared that there never was anything equal to the violence of the priests and of the whole of their followers in that county in preventing the freeholders from going to the poll to vote for their Protestant landlords. The re-establishment of the Catholic Association gave a new impetus to their action. By February, 1825, the Association numbered three thousand members; and O'Connell's "Catholic rent" began to be collected in every parish for its support. In 1824 it brought in from £600 to £1,000 a week, besides large investments in the funds. Gentry, priests and peasants alike contributed regularly to it. Catholic relief, education, the question of the "forty-shilling freeholders" and the "veto," were some of the matters taken up by the members.

Catholics and Protestants again drew together and by addresses all over the country the hitherto inert body of electors were made to feel their strength. The Government looked with dread on the growing power of O'Connell. "He is complete master of the Roman Catholic clergy; the clergy are complete masters of the people; and upon him and them it depends whether the country shall or shall not be quiet during the winter," was the general feeling. The country was quiet; no rioting occurred, and the twenty thousand soldiers stationed in Ireland were not called upon. But the result of his teaching was seen in the Waterford election of 1826, where, for the first time, a Beresford was rejected by his own tenants. On the day before the nomination a vast procession, miles in length, streamed into the town. Total abstinence was vowed by the people themselves as long as the election lasted, and was rigorously kept. The soldiers stood by unneeded and were cheered by the populace, while for two hours O'Connell harangued the crowd. Louth, Monaghan, and other counties followed suit. The battle of emancipation was practically won; but the doom of the now independent "forty-shilling" freeholders was sealed.[18]

[18] Two Centuries of Irish History, 1691-1870 (1888), pp. 302-303.

In January, 1828, the Duke of Wellington became Prime Minister, with Peel as Leader of the House. The Marquess of Anglesey, who had fought with Moore at Corunna and commanded the cavalry at Waterloo, was sent to Ireland. "God bless you, Anglesey," had been the King's last words; "I know you are a true Protestant." "Sir," was Anglesey's reply, "I will not be considered either Protestant or Catholic; I go to Ireland determined to act impartially between them."[19] He refused to suppress the Catholic Association or to interfere with meetings and processions, but he thought the moment unpropitious for conciliation. With the change of Ministry came the decisive Clare election, where Vesey Fitzgerald, a popular Member and old supporter of emancipation, who had been appointed President of the Board of Trade, had to stand for re-election. Within a week of the election O'Connell announced his intention to stand in opposition. The Liberator's election addresses, couched in telling phrases and promising innumerable benefits if he were elected, carried all before him; at the close of the contest O'Connell was borne in triumph through the streets of Ennis as the first Catholic returned to the Imperial Parliament by the free suffrages of the electors. He had polled 2,057 votes to 982 given to Fitzgerald. A vast cavalcade accompanied the new Member into Limerick, and "the cheer of fifty-thousand voices rang through the air" as they passed round the "stone of the violated treaty."

[19] Greville Memoirs (1888), i, 157.

A profound impression was created in England by the Clare election. The King desired that Anglesey should be recalled, but Wellington represented that the moment for action had arrived, and that emancipation must be conceded. In Ireland the excitement was intense, and in a single day two thousand meetings were computed to have been held. Everywhere the power of the gentry seemed to be giving way before the new democratic flood. The recall of Anglesey, amid the loudly expressed grief of the people, and an attempt by Wellington to delay the introduction of the Bill, increased the popular agitation, and, two days after the departure of the Viceroy, at a mass meeting in the Rotunda, a society was formed in which Protestants and Catholics were associated on equal terms. On February 6 a Relief Bill was announced from the throne, the determined resistance of the Sovereign, which was the real obstacle in the way, having been broken down by Wellington's representations. The oath required from Members of Parliament was to be so altered that Catholics could take it, but the "forty-shilling" freeholders were to be punished for their momentary independence by disfranchisement. The third reading of the Bill, embodying Peel's resolution, was taken for the first time on March 10, and passed in less than a month in the Commons and on April 10 in the Lords. On May 15 O'Connell presented himself in the House, but, having refused to take the original oath, under which he was elected, he had to submit to the irritating delay of re-election. The difficulties had been very many. "The King was hostile, the Church was hostile, a majority, probably, of the people of Great Britain was hostile to concession." It was only on the tendering of their resignations to the King by his Ministers that he at last gave way. As it was, the Catholic Association was suppressed.

"Had O'Connell ceased agitating when emancipation was carried, he would have been as great a man in his way as Washington," Lord Clarendon once wrote. There is no doubt that much in his later life detracted from the dignity of his earlier days. At this time he was at the head of his profession, an admirable lawyer, and a man of property. He was one of the hardest of workers, rising at 3 A.M. and going to bed at 8 P.M. This is Lecky's estimate of him at this date. He showed his generosity both in giving professional aid to the poor gratuitously and in large gifts of money in the famine times. He disliked Government relief for poverty, which he believed to be ruinous and demoralizing to the country, and he withstood the Poor Laws and the proposed workhouse system, preferring State-aided emigration as a cure for the poverty of the people. He was accused of too great a love of money, and certainly the immense sums poured into his lap and for which no account was rendered might have been a temptation even to a stronger man.

At one time "the tribute" rendered amounted to over £15,000 a year, and the subscription raised for O'Connell after emancipation was won reached no less a sum than £50,000. But it is to be remembered that he sacrificed the emoluments of a lucrative profession, in which he had reached the highest place. He fell in later years into the tricks of the mob orator, and swayed vast multitudes by all the arts of the demagogue.[20] He abused men scandalously, and often mendaciously, as he was abused by others. What was of more permanent importance was that, in the English House of Commons, he inaugurated the system of obstruction which "by debating every word and sentence of a Bill and dividing upon every debate" could delay the passage of any Bill through a whole session. It was the system which was later adopted and perfected by the followers of Parnell and Redmond. The public time was consumed in listening to speeches of two or three hours each, made solely for the purposes of delay. Peel looked upon the plan as one designed intentionally to disgust the Members into giving a repeal of the Union, because it would relieve the House of the burden of their presence in it.[21]

[20] Gladstone considered O'Connell the greatest popular leader whom the world has ever seen.

[21] Peel, Memoirs, ii, 290-291.

The larger part of O'Connell's after life was given to the question of repeal. On the night when emancipation was carried one of his friends had clapped him on the shoulder, exclaiming, "Othello's occupation's gone!" "Gone!" cried the Liberator; "isn't there a repeal of the Union?" He announced this as his intention even before emancipation was won, and hoped to unite all classes and sects in Ireland in its favour. But as a matter of fact the attitude of the gentry who had fought most vigorously for Irish independence had undergone a change, and they were now foremost in their opposition to repeal. It would perhaps be truer to say that circumstances had changed, and that the men who resisted a union which defrauded them of ascendancy and power, were little disposed to welcome a repeal which would now leave them in the minority, while the enfranchised Catholic electors sent a Catholic democracy into Parliament and put a large Catholic majority into power.

END OF CHAPTER XVII

XVIII.—THE FAMINE

The seventeen years during which Ireland had possessed its own Parliament had undoubtedly been a time of advance in trade and industry. Rents rose, the value of property doubled or even trebled in some parts of the country; and the population increased sixty per cent, in the twenty years between 1780 and 1800. The increase of tillage which followed upon Foster's Act is calculated by Newenham in 1805 at over six times the amount raised in 1785. There was a revival in the woollen and cotton manufactures and that of linen was making steady progress. The provision trade expanded, and brewing and distilling were re-established. The old glass industry took new developments. The removal of several disabilities in 1781 gave Catholics power to deal with land, and a pamphleteer writing in 1799 remarks that "our agriculture begins to improve from the moment that an intermission in the frenzy of our religious prejudice allowed us to follow our own interests by taking off those restraints which clogged the industry and damped the spirit of the nation."[1] Even Castlereagh, the chief mover in the project of the Union, declared that "no power in Europe has made more rapid strides in wealth and general happiness in the last fifteen years than Ireland."[2] On all hands, by the foes as well as by the friends of Irish independence, it was admitted that activity and energy had followed a period of great depression, and that there were signs of growing prosperity among the mercantile and industrial classes. But the poorer classes benefited little, for rents and the price of provisions rose out of all proportion to the rise in wages. Both in Dublin and in the agricultural districts the same wretched poverty existed, and in 1789 Arthur O'Connor thought the poor worse housed, worse clothed, and worse fed than the people of any nation in Europe.

[1] Quoted in George O'Brian, Economic History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, (1918), p. 37.

[2] Parliamentary History, xxxvi, 1709; Castlereagh Correspondence, iii, 204.

Dublin itself had a short period of splendour, the relics of which still remain in the handsome and highly adorned Georgian houses which surprise the visitor in various parts of the city.[3] There had always been fine mansions in or close to the metropolis, such as Leinster House and Charlemont House,[4] but now that the gentry came up to Dublin regularly to attend the sittings of Parliament the whole city took on a new aspect of dignity. From 1783 onward each year saw some new public building in course of construction. A National Bank was opened in 1783 and the fine Custom House built. The Order of St. Patrick was instituted in 1783. New squares added to the convenience of the citizens. Fine pictures and statuary adorned the houses of the aristocracy and their beautiful seats were scattered about the provinces. Carriages and entertainments made Dublin life an imitation of that of London. On a Sunday the North Circular Road, now so changed, was a parade for sumptuous equipages, and the populace turned out to watch the line of carriages which drove by with their postillions, that of the Chancellor, Lord Clare, being the most conspicuous. The Royal Irish Academy, founded to encourage Irish and scientific studies, awakened a fresh interest in the antiquities and history of the country and formed a centre where men of intelligence could meet. The Dublin Society pursued steadily its encouragement given to agriculture and the breeding of horses and cattle, and bestowed bounties and rewards for improvements. But speculation was rife, and favouritism made away with vast sums of money; in 1784 Irish finance had changed from a substantial credit account into a public debt of £2,000,000.

[3] See the publications of the Georgian Society of Dublin.

[4] Leinster House is now the meeting-place of the Dail and Senate. Charlemont House is being converted into a municipal picture gallery.

This was within two years of the establishment of legislative independence.

But after this plunge into extravagance the country seemed to be recovering itself. On July 20, 1799, Cornwallis wrote to the Duke of Portland, commenting on the decrease of rebellion: "Since I last addressed your Grace the tranquillity of the country has been uninterrupted, and there is every appearance at present of its continuing so. The late seasonable rains afford a prospect of an abundant crop, and the people are universally industrious. There is the greatest activity in all money transactions, and every species of business is carried on with energy. The accounts I receive from the North, in respect of the linen trade, are particularly flattering...The revenue continues to rise and promises to exceed the produce of 1798 in the same proportion as the produce of 1798 did that of 1797."[5] This favourable condition of things did not long survive the Union. The transference of the hundred Members who went to sit in the English House of Commons did far more to disintegrate the life of the Irish metropolis than the actual numbers would show. The centre of attraction changed from Dublin to London, and with the intellectual, political, and social activities removed to a distance, and the leading gentry drawn away during the larger part of the year, Dublin ceased to hold its natural place as the capital of the country.

[5] Castlereagh Correspondence, ii, 352; and cf. the letter of James Dawson to the same effect, ibid., 375.

The fine houses were vacated and fell into decay; many whole streets of what were the fashionable quarters of the city slowly degenerated into tenements of the lowest class, and money which might have been spent in Dublin was expended in London. The attention of the upper classes was no longer concentrated on their own country, and education, culture, and wealth alike tended to become thoroughly English in outlook and ambition. It became increasingly difficult to find men of position to take posts in their own country. Even in 1880 Bright, speaking in the House of Commons, quoted the complaint of a magistrate in one of the central towns in Ireland as to the difficulty of getting suitable men to put on the Bench. He said: "If a man has a few thousands a year he resides in London; if he has a thousand a year, he lives in Dublin."[6] Absenteeism was one of the oldest ills of Ireland, but the Union did more than any other single event to stimulate it. The general unrest, the land and tithe wars, the want of social and intellectual intercourse, and the gap in ordinary life between the interests of the different classes, all helped to increase the numbers who made England their home for a considerable part of each year.

[6] Daily Telegraph, August 17, 1880, quoted by R. Barry O'Brien, The Parliamentary History of the Irish Land Question (1880), p. 13n.

The main trouble of this period was the long and bitter land war, arising out of conditions of old standing between owners and tenants. The system of land tenure was so different over the larger part of the country from that in force in England that it was found difficult to make it understood in the House of Commons. In England the landlords were accustomed to erect buildings on their properties, to fence and drain, and generally to help the farmer to improve his land, besides giving some compensation for the farmer's improvements at the end of a lease. There was also a disposition, if a farmer had been successful in his farm, to renew the lease to him if he required it, in preference to seeking a new tenant elsewhere.

In Ulster, also, under the "Ulster custom" introduced by the Scottish settlers, reasonable arrangements prevailed; a tenant who had paid his rent could not be put out of his farm without due cause, nor could the rent be raised on account of the tenant's own improvements. It gave permissive fixity of tenure and it enabled the tenant to sell the goodwill of his farm, if he desired to do so, provided that he obtained the approbation of his landlord. The arrangement between the two was of mutual advantage, and as a rule it worked well, land troubles being infrequent in Ulster. Over the rest of the country, however, no such reasonable terms of land-tenure prevailed. A most irritating and unsatisfactory system left the tenant at the mercy of his landlord, discouraged industry in the holder of land, and prevented any sense of security such as would encourage the improvement of the farm by the tenant. "The landlords never erect buildings on their property or expend anything in repairs."[7] The landlord was not a partner in the production of his land; he was simply a receiver of rent. Six months' credit was usually given for rent in arrears, after which, if the rent was not paid, the cattle were distrained and driven off to the pound, to be sold after a certain number of day's confinement. The peasants called this "the hanging gale." The agent was often the real master and the tenants were powerless in his hands. Wakefield tells us that he had often seen distraint made after the tenant had paid his rent to the middleman, who had failed to pay it over to the head-landlord; he ascribes to this "illegal severity, which anyone who has resided any time in Ireland must have witnessed," the frequent risings of the people and the atrocities, "shocking to humanity and disgraceful to the Empire," committed.

[7] Edward Wakefield, An Account of Ireland, statistical and political (1812), i, 244-245.

The tenant was required to give bodily service free to his landlord at certain seasons of the year and the rent was often far out of proportion to that which would have been demanded for similar land in England. An agent writes: "the tenants are too frightened to make an offer for land, and they agree to any terms imposed by the middlemen; they will accede to any conditions rather than quit the land." The length of the leases differed on different estates and the tenants subdivided the holding among "an indefinite number of holders," which Wakefield says is "an old established practice, handed down from father to son"; each taking "a man's share" of that which originally belonged to one name in the lease; that is, they "gavelled" out the land after the manner of their forefathers, the pasture land being held in common. It seems clear that the owners simply carried on a system which they found in existence when they settled in the country and which was much to their advantage.

The loose and indefinite tie between owner and cottier, the part-payment in kind or labour, the impounding of cattle, the subdivision or "gavelling" of the farms into small holdings, were all parts of the old native system which in earlier times subsisted between the Irish chief and his people. It was a thoroughly bad system, placing in the hands of the owner indefinite powers of oppression, of which, in frequent cases, he was all too ready to take advantage. When a man improved his farm at his own expense, so far was he from receiving compensation or encouragement, that his rent was often raised because of his own improvements. When his lease came to an end he had no claim to its renewal. "Many landed proprietors," Mr. Townsend tells us, "advertise to let to the highest bidder, without any consideration for the claim of the occupying tenant."[8] The tenant's sole means of livelihood being usually his plot of land, rather than be turned out he would submit to terms which in many cases he was unable to meet, and thus he lived in hourly terror of eviction. He settled on a small holding and, having no inducement to improve it, or any animating hope of its renewal upon reasonable terms, he would usually, as the time for the expiry of his lease drew near, "rack and impoverish the land he had so little chance of retaining."[9] It was a condition of things equally disastrous to the country, to the landlord, and to the cottier; the latter was, in fact, little better than a serf, disposable at the will of his owner; it was only the middlemen who reaped a certain profit. Wakefield shows that the agent frequently had a far larger income than the proprietor. The owner of Muckross in Wakefield's day gained £7,000 a year from his estate, but his agent possessed himself of £17,000.[10]

[8] Townsend, Statistical Survey of Cork, p. 583.

[9] E. Wakefield, op cit., i, 244.

[10] Ibid., i, 261-262.

The landlords were by no means all rackrenters nor were the absentee owners always the worst. The conditions varied greatly on different estates. Some of the Galway estates were miserably grazed, while those of Lord Fitzwilliam in Wicklow were far better managed "preference being always given to the old tenants if they were desirous of renewal." Some of the largest southern properties, again, were badly managed and cultivated, but on others, like those belonging to Lord Shannon and Colonel FitzGerald, the tenants were living in a state of comparative affluence. But, at the worst, as one of the witnesses before the Select Committee of 1825 stated in his evidence, there was "no check on the landlord's power;...under cover of law, he may convert that power to any purposes he pleases. The consequence is that when he wishes he can extract from the peasant every shilling, beyond bare existence, which can be produced from the land."[11]

[11] Select Committee of the House of Lords, 1825, minutes of evidence, pp. 165, 179; and cf. Report of Select Committee on the Irish Poor Laws, 1823.

The evil system percolated downward from class to class. As the owner or large farmer ground down his tenants so the tenants imposed upon the cottiers beneath them. In some cases, they charged such high rents to the wretched cottier that they themselves escaped almost scot-free. "It is not too much to say," a farmer in Tanderagee reported, "that for one tenant in a state of misery there are twenty cottiers in destitution." Besides the heavy rent, the tenant had power to exact a certain number of days' labour, without pay, usually at the time of year when it was most needful that the labourer should be at work on his own holding. On one property in the North of Ireland, where the tenants only paid on an average £1 2s. 2d. per acre, the cottiers paid £4 16s. 5d. per acre to the tenants. In other townlands the difference was as much as £1 6s. 6d. against the labourer's £12 8s. an acre. The cottier was necessarily always in arrears and had to take advances at an exorbitant rate of interest. He was completely at the mercy of the man above him and practically his slave.[12] Thus it was not, in a large number of cases, the large proprietor who exacted these high rents; he let on long leases, usually at a moderate rental. It was the class beneath him, the poor but extravagant gentry and the wealthy farmers, who oppressed the labourers and reaped the profit. As many as six or seven middlemen often stood between the owner and the small holder or occupier, all deriving their profit from the soil, of which the price had been forced up far beyond its genuine value. If the owner were also an absentee, the hardship became heavier, for the small holder had no protector, and the money provided by so much hardship was spent out of the country.

[12] Evidence given before the Devon Commission, Digest, pp. 552-554; 556-557.

The general result of the bad system practised was the absolute demoralization and degradation of the peasantry. The cottier lived from hand to mouth, having no property in his holding and therefore no interest in improving it. The pig, if he had one, was usually sold "to pay the rint," not to feed the family; the cow, or bed, or potatoes might be seized and disposed of if the rent were in arrears. A witness before the Select Committee of 1825, Mr. Nimmo, adds: "I conceive the peasantry of Ireland to be, in general, in the lowest possible state of existence. Their cabins are in a most miserable condition and their food potatoes, with water, without even salt." Even the potatoes were of the worst sort. The good potato was being replaced over a large part of the country by an inferior tuber, used elsewhere only to feed cattle and pigs. The Select Committees sitting at the time give pitiable accounts of the usual conditions; they amply explain the terrible toll of human life taken among the underfed people by the recurrent famines of the nineteenth century, culminating in the Great Famine of 1846. If the Irish peasant is improvident, idle, and thriftless, it is to be remembered that the bad customs of centuries into which he was born and which he had no power to remedy, have helped to make him so. Yet the man (and there were thousands of these) who lived upon a miserable plot of often barren ground at home with his family and who walked annually to the nearest port for Liverpool, often right across Ireland, in order to lay by sufficient out of an English or Scottish season's harvesting to pay his landlord's rent and keep his cottage, can hardly be accused of idleness. He was worthy of some better chance of existence and of more nourishing food than he ever got. If he were a man of spirit and tried to improve his holding, the landlord and the tithe-proctor were both at hand to come down upon him at the end of the quarter for increased rent; under such circumstances, industry was not a quality to be encouraged.

The tithe was an ever-present and natural source of discontent: the final pressure which forbade the poor man to rise. When his landlord, his tithe, and his own church dues were all paid, there was little enough left to support his family. The tithe-proctor was even more dreaded than the agent, for his demands were less well defined and his methods more exacting. Very bad cases sometimes occurred, and with the gradual rise in the status of the Catholic population, impatience grew more pronounced, while the years of famine aggravated the evil. Grattan began to debate the matter in 1787, but for nearly forty years nothing was done to deal satisfactorily with the problem. Some relief was rendered urgent by the outbreak of the tithe war, which arose partly from an attempt to force the Catholic priests to pay tithe as well as the people. Terrible scenes were enacted and sanguinary contests took place between the military sent down to enforce the law and the populace; nor did the attempt of the Government to collect the tithe themselves tend to ameliorate the situation.

During the year 1832 nearly nine thousand agrarian crimes were committed in Ireland, many of them in Leinster, the chief centre of the tithe war. Of these two hundred were murders. The improvement in these frightful conditions will ever be associated with the name of Thomas Drummond, a Scotsman who came over as Under-Secretary to Lord Morpeth in 1835, and set himself resolutely to enforce the law impartially on behalf of all classes alike.[13] The firmness, wisdom, and moderation of the administration for which he was mainly responsible brought about a short period of quiet in Ireland without resort to any coercive measures. Drummond put down lawlessness with a firm hand; he did not hesitate to rebuke the extravagances of O'Connell on the one side or the violence of the Orangemen on the other. The creation of the metropolitan police in 1829 and the improvements introduced in the discipline of the Irish constabulary in Drummond's day did much to enforce order, but agents of secret societies continued to foster agrarian crime and to terrorize the country. A chronic state of lawlessness seemed to have taken hold on the people, and secret societies were joined by thousands of young men. Whiteboyism revived and Blackfeet, Whitefeet, Terry Alts, Rockites, and Ribbonmen, all had their troops of followers, many of whom joined in self-defence. Though ultimately it was misery that stirred them to violent courses it was not the poorest that usually took part in them. "There is no danger in poverty," said O'Connell; "it is the smug, saucy, and venturous youth of the farmer class that plot and perpetrate all the predial mischief." "Whiteboy acts," we hear again, "are for the most part perpetrated by sturdy, lazy fellows who are unwilling to work."[14] But it must be allowed that O'Connell's continual agitation and appeal to popular passions played their part in the work, heartily as he disapproved of the exhibitions of discontent he had done so much to stir up.

[13] R. Barry O'Brien, Life and Letters of Thomas Drummond (1889).

[14] MacCullagh Torrens, Twenty Years in Parliament (1893), p. 299; Cusack, Life of O'Connell, i, 456; and cf. Lewis, Irish Disturbances (1831), pp. 89-92.

The condition of the country was such as to alarm the most optimistic mind. The Irish Poor Law enquiry of 1837 had witnessed to "the painful certainty that there is in all parts of Ireland much and deep-seated distress." The lack of industries threw the large majority of the population on the land for support but with wages averaging about 8 1/2d. a day or, for all the year round, 2s. or 2s. 6d. a week, it was impossible to support a decent existence or to attempt to save for sickness or old age. In bad harvests there was no choice but to starve, for the people had no money in their hands and no means of livelihood to turn to. During thirty weeks of each year, it was computed that not less than 585,000 labourers, not reckoning their families, were out of work, for the planting and cultivation of potatoes in no way filled a man's time and there was nothing else to do. The Government attempt to introduce the workhouse system into Ireland, though undoubtedly it proved a palliative during the famine years, was disliked even more in Ireland than in England and was denounced especially by O'Connell. The Report says that "the able-bodied out-of-works would endure any misery rather than live in a workhouse," and adds that "we see the labouring class eager for work."[15] The Commissioners recommended State-aided emigration, drainage, the destruction of unwholesome cabins, and improvements on the farms, with the founding of agricultural schools, all which expedients were resorted to on a large scale during the famine with both good and evil results. One direct benefit from the establishment of the Poor Law, which was laid on the landlords for part payment, was an increased interest shown by them in the condition of their estates. It was better for them to keep their tenants in decency than that they should go on the rates and have to be maintained largely out of the landlords' pockets. In many cases they pulled down the insanitary cabins and assisted the cottiers to emigrate, introducing a better system on their properties. The one thousand properties held under the Courts of Chancery and Exchequer were noted for neglect, no attempt to improve them ever being made. The severity of the famine was the direct result of the mismanagement of the estates.

[15] Abstract of the Final Report of the Commissioner's of Irish Poor Law Inquiry, 1837.

Famines were becoming chronic, but those of the years 1846-47 were the worst ever experienced. The potato disease passed over westwards from the Continent and was felt in a lesser degree in parts of England and Scotland. It spread with appalling rapidity. In one week in August the apparently abundant crop was stricken. Captain Mann of Clare writes: "In July, I had passed over thirty-two miles thickly studded with potato-fields in full bloom. The next time the face of the whole country was changed; the stalk remained a bright green but the leaves were all scorched black. It was the work of a night. Distress and fear were pictured on every countenance, and there was a general rush to dig or sell."[16] The accounts by eye-witnesses of the horrors of the famine are too terrible to repeat. "It is as if a destroying angel had swept over the country," exclaimed a Member in the House of Commons; "the whole population struck down; the air a pestilence; the fields a solitude; the chapel deserted; the priest and the pauper famishing together; no inquest, no rites, no record even of the dead:...death, desolation, despair, reigning through the land."[17] Before such a calamity the ordinary methods of relief were helpless. In similar extremities the usual trade regulations had been occasionally suspended and special means taken to preserve the food grown in the country for the famishing inhabitants.[18]

[16] Quoted in Sir George Nicholls, History of the Irish Poor Law (1856), p. 310.

[17] Hansard, 3rd series, cv., p. 609, May 17, 1849; quoted in Bryce, Two Centuries of Irish History (1888), p. 403.

[18] Sir Robert Peel, Memoirs, ii, 188-89.

The wheat crop in Ireland was hardly up to the average,[19] and the barley and oats were deficient; yet it is undoubted that if the corn had been kept in the country a multitude of lives might have been saved. The English Parliament was at the moment immersed in the struggle for the repeal of the Corn Laws, and Peel was driven from power to make room for the party of Lord John Russell just when what Russell truly described as a thirteenth century famine in a nineteenth century population was at its height. The case of Ireland was used in debate as an example of the necessity of a free ingress of corn; but in this instance the prevention of corn leaving the country would have been a more effective means of preserving life. But a host of objections from merchants and ship-owners put a stop to all hope of such direct measures of relief and the removal of impediments to import took their place. For the moment this made the provision of outside supplies cheaper and easier, but its permanent effect was to encourage competition which brought down prices and ruined Ireland as a corn-producing country with a sure market close at hand. It encouraged the tendency to turn arable land into pasture, producing cattle for meat instead of wheat and barley.

[19] Sir George Nicholls, History of the Irish Poor Law (1856), p. 311.

This was one main cause of the wholesale evictions for which the famine years furnished a plausible excuse, the reversion to pasture requiring fewer labourers and bringing milling and its kindred trades to an end. The repeal of the Corn Laws was largely responsible for the very slow recovery of the country after the famine years. Conditions were changed; labour was not wanted; and though the population had been reduced through death and emigration by nearly two million persons between the census of 1841 and 1851, there were still too many inhabitants for the means of livelihood.

The tide of emigration, once set in, has never come to an end. The population, which numbered in 1841 some 8,196,597 persons had been reduced, by the time the census was taken in 1911, to 4,390,219, hardly more than half the number. The 1926 Census gives 4,229,124 as the total population, the decrease being entirely in the Free State. Though Peel's repeal of the Corn Laws was an indirect cause of this great decrease, at the moment of carrying the measure he relied on it to bring corn into the harbours of Ireland to relieve distress. The slow methods of Parliamentary debate were, however, not suited to such an emergency; on the heels of the famine typhus and dysentery were treading and immediate aid was called for; even from the consideration of self-preservation succour was needed, for the people were pouring over to Lancashire, Lanarkshire, and other places to seek work, bringing with them the seeds of pestilence and death. The emigrant vessels to the United States were becoming plague-ships, in which the victims, closely packed and already weakened by hunger, succumbed long before they reached the shores of the New World. The efforts to meet the emergency, inadequate as they proved to be, were on a liberal scale. Private charity found its way to the sufferers through thousands of channels, "of the aggregate result of which no estimate can be formed." England, the States, and Ireland itself formed innumerable associations for relief, and did voluntary work for the suffering which has perhaps only been equalled in the recent Great War. The Government suspended the duties on foreign corn, ordered Indian meal from the United States to the amount of £100,000, and established all over the country depots for its distribution on a large scale. But the lack of money to purchase food among the sufferers showed the necessity for other measures; and public works were set on foot which employed at one time as many as 97,000 persons.

Unfortunately, like most hurried or panic legislation, these extensive relief works were planned on no system of permanent benefit to the country. It was made a stipulation that no private landowner should benefit by them, a rule which excluded reclamation, drainage, and many other much-needed plans for the permanent advantage of the country. The £50,000 voted by Parliament, which was to be supplemented on the spot, was mostly wasted in entirely unproductive labour. The Knight of Glyn found large numbers of people engaged in filling up the cutting in a hill with the stuff they had taken out of it. Thousands were set to dig up good macadamized coach-roads with spades and turf-cutters.[20]

[20] Mitchel, History of Ireland, ii, 408-409.

An army of twelve thousand overseers superintended these useless works, absorbing a large proportion of the relief money into their own pockets. The fisheries were deserted, the fields untilled, shoes and boots went without mending, because from all over the country men crowded in to get "the Queen's pay."[21] Universal demoralization set in. The landlords, already sore beset with the increased poor rates and cess, were none too well off, as was later to be proved by their efforts to sell their properties under the Encumbered Estates Act of 1849. Lord Clarendon wrote to Peel when the Bill was mooted: "The condition of the landlords generally is deplorable. As a body they are insolvent. Many of them lack the first necessaries of life."[22] In these circumstances it is not altogether surprising that many of them took little interest in relief works which were quite useless to the country or themselves, or that the labourers did the smallest amount of work compatible with drawing the wages given. The average number employed was in October 1846 some 114,000 persons, but early in the following year it had risen to 570,000; more than two million persons altogether were employed on relief works. The old, the young, and the disabled died; their corpses lay along the roads or were cast into hasty pits without coffins. Those who had saved money and could afford the passage fled to America or took low-grade employment in London, Manchester, and Glasgow, or other towns. The emigration returns show an increase of from 28,000 in 1840 to 105,955 in 1846. It was the best and most thrifty of the young people who emigrated to the States and Canada, many of them respectable agriculturalists and artisans whose loss to the country was a severe one.

[21] Nicholls, op. cit., p. 315, and see Trevelyan, The Irish Crisis.

[22] See G. O'Brien, The Economic History of Ireland from the Union to the Famine, p. 136; and the opinion of Sir Samuel Ferguson stated in his speech at the Protestant Repeal Meeting, May, 1848, in his Life by his wife (1896), i, 246-254.

The landlords in many cases took full advantage of the inability of their people to pay their rents to eject them in large numbers and to burn down their cabins. The obligation to become responsible for the support or part-support of the famine-stricken of their own townlands led to a general adoption by needy proprietors of this cheap but heartless method of relieving themselves of their responsibilities; and the clause introduced into the Poor Law Act of 1847 which forbade relief to all who occupied more than a quarter of an acre of land, though intended to limit relief to the most necessitous, had the effect of inducing large numbers of distressed people to give up their holdings in order to claim relief. Admission to a workhouse was only allowed to those who held no land. The universal impoverishment caused by this clause, coming to reinforce the temptation which the Corn Law Repeal gave to owners to turn their properties into pasture and get rid of their tenants greatly changed the face of the country. A Tipperary priest in 1852 wrote: "Two-thirds of my congregation have departed to the workhouse or gone to America. I was, God help me, very proud of my flock seven or eight years ago...I used to point to them as the decentest and best conducted people in the country. My chapel always overflowed. There is hardly a third of it occupied at present...There is squalor and rags, tottering old age and no children."[23] The people were "clad like beggars, housed like beggars, and fed like beggars."

[23] Quoted in C. Gavan Duffy, League of the North and South (1886), p. 184.

Famine had become a recurrent phenomenon and in 1850 it was computed that a hundred persons a week still died of hunger or of the diseases begotten of hunger. Two-thirds of the farms of from one to five acres which had existed in 1841 had disappeared. The landlords became known as "Exterminators," and when a farm was put up for sale it was a common question whether it had been "cleared" of small holders. In one small barony (Kilrush) the dwellings of fifteen thousand persons had been destroyed. In revenge, all sorts of evasions of rent and of the law became usual among the distressed occupants. Captain Larcom's Report gives the total number of evictions in the years 1848-49 as 177,178, which, taking an average of five in a family, would make 585,890 poor people turned out of their homes into the roads in two years. It was manifest that no Poor Law provision could meet the needs of such a mass of misery, crowded and insanitary as the workhouses were. The sufferings of the emigrants were even worse, and on their arrival in America thousands of them, thrown out upon the streets without money, and ignorant of any trade or calling, sank into the purlieus of the great cities and fed the taverns and the gaols. The Catholic Bishop of Toronto revealed a condition of things that was truly appalling. In that city in 1863, out of a total prison population of 1,901, the Irish numbered 1,168, of whom 703 were women. Other nationalities came over, the Bishop says, with the means of establishing themselves on farms or as mechanics, but a large majority of the Irish were penniless. The parish priest of Montreal gave an even worse account of what had happened in his city, to which bands of young Irish women were sent out from the degrading workhouses at home.[24]

[24] See Kirkham's articles in the Irish People, 1863-65; and John O'Leary, Recollections of Fenians and Fenianism (1896), vol. ii.

Emigration is a benefit only when carefully superintended, and when the emigrants are chosen with discretion and placed in positions for which they are fitted, with sufficient means to tide them over the period of removal and settlement. To cast on American shores multitudes of poverty-stricken, diseased, and famished people, absolutely ignorant of any trade or of the knowledge even of reading and writing, was to provoke the utmost misery and to make the emigrants themselves a source of evil wherever they settled.

The Devon Commission, appointed on February 14, 1845, to inquire into the land conditions in Ireland had disclosed a condition of things which pointed to the need for immediate legislation. It was presided over by the Earl of Devon and was composed entirely of landowners; while out of the 303 witnesses called 47 were landlords, 47 agents, and 128 farmers. Yet, though the Commission might be considered one-sided, it made useful suggestions, recommending that encouragement should be given to tenants by letting to them on longer leases and that fair compensation should be offered for improvements. In June of the same year Lord Stanley introduced a Bill based on the findings of this Commission. He rejected emigration, the fashionable remedy for all Irish ills, contending that the question was to be solved by rooting the occupier "not out of, but on the soil"; and he argued for a system which should induce the tenant to invest his labour and capital in his land. Stanley's Land Bill and Sharman Crawford's Tenant Right Bill, a measure formed on similar lines, were fought with perseverance but again and again rejected. Horseman's saying that "Ireland has been truly described as one adjourned debate" was as true of the Land Act as it was to prove later on the question of Home Rule. Seven years after the Devon Commission had reported, the only Act passed regarding Irish land was the Encumbered Estates Act, which relieved the landlords, but did not improve the status of the tenant. Rather it deprived him of any ownership in his holding and allowed the head landlord to sell outright over his head. Six months after the passing of this Act, in 1849, over thirteen million pounds worth of property had come under the operation of the new law; but none of it was sold to tenants, nor was any regard paid to claims made by the tenants for improvements. Meanwhile, suspensions of the Habeas Corpus Act took the place of remedial measures, and in the fourth year of the famine, with sixty per cent. of the population receiving relief, nothing permanent had been done.

But the agitation was spreading through Ireland and once more Ulster held out a hand of resolute assistance to the South. The ruin that had desolated other provinces was beginning its work of destruction in the North. William Sharman Crawford, a County Down man, again introduced his Bill, which from his persistence became known as "Crawford's Craze," and on its accustomed defeat the Irish Attorney-General, Joseph Napier, of Belfast, presented to the House a Government Bill which contained a clause protecting tenant's improvements and in favour of compensation. It was not passed, though John Bright, who had been studying the Report of the Devon Commission, now threw the weight of his powerful advocacy into the cause of the tenants and Lord Dufferin and Charles Gavan Duffy ably supported the relief bills. But all efforts up to and including the elaborate but abortive Bills of 1860 and 1867, failed to effect any real improvement in the condition of land tenure; [25] they were of so complicated and unsatisfactory a nature that their abandonment was not to be regretted, and it was not until Gladstone brought in his Land Bill of February 15, 1870, twenty-five years after the sitting of the Devon Commission, that a real attempt was made to settle the question. But, in the meantime, the great annual wave of emigration continued and evictions for non-payment of rent "fell like snow-flakes" on the unprotected tenants. It was some time yet before the peasant was to be "rooted in the soil."

[25] R. Barry O'Brien, The Parliamentary History of the Irish Land Question (1880), ch. v.

END OF CHAPTER XVIII

XIX.—YOUNG IRELAND AND THE FENIANS

Before O'Connell died a party with new political aims had come into existence in Ireland. The movement of the Young Irelanders, as the intellectual leaders of this party loved to style themselves, may be said to date from the founding of the Nation newspaper by three ardent young men, two of them barristers, who under the elm-trees of the Phoenix Park planned the establishment of a journal which would, in the words of Stephen Woulfe, "create and foster public opinion in Ireland and make it racy of the soil." This was in the spring of 1842. These young men were Charles Gavan Duffy, John Blake Dillon, and Thomas Davis.[1]

[1] C. Gavan Duffy, Young Ireland (1896), pp. 29, 31.

They belonged to different provinces, and Davis, who was looked upon by Duffy as their "true leader" was a Protestant, the descendant of a Cromwellian family on one side and of Anglo-Welshmen on the other. Davis did not aspire to popular leadership. Timid and dreamy as a boy, disciplined by thought and study as a youth, he became, not the idol of the populace, but an inspirer of earnest men. His passion was to restore to the country its true possessions, its language, history, and literature; to instil culture of the mind and independent reflection, founded upon, but not bound by, the material necessities of her national life. "Educate that you may be free" was the keynote of the new journal,[2] which was destined to find its way within a year of its existence into nearly every household in Ireland. It poured out articles of a higher type of thought and style of writing than had been known in the country or were then common anywhere. It preached temperance, patience, energy, and resolution; it denounced crime, pointed out defects in character, industry, agriculture, and art; and it held up the spirit of the people while it taught them tolerance and union.

[2] Ibid., p. 53.

In its pages appeared for the first time the ballads and essays of Mangan, Thomas D'Arcy McGee, Denis Florence MacCarthy, Duffy, and Davis. Their poems appealed to the people at large, as Moore's settings of old Irish airs had stirred the more cultured audiences of the concert platform and the drawing-room. They succeeded beyond expectation. A feeling of true nationality spread among all classes, uniting the most discordant elements. The idea of a country "going forward as a brotherhood towards the attainment of a national object" appealed to men of widely different standpoints, and kept the people sober and peaceful under all the excitement of O'Connell's monster meetings. It brought into the ranks of the Repealers many of the Protestant gentry and representatives of the landlord class led by William Smith O'Brien, and it induced men of legal standing, like the future Judge O'Hagan, to join the National movement; men of position and influence and as averse to extreme measures as O'Connell was himself.

At the date of the founding of the Nation, repeal seemed to be dead. In the election of 1841 not a single recruit had been made to the party, except among O'Connell's own relations. The boroughs obediently returned Whigs and Government officials to power as in the old bad days of landlord control. O'Connell himself lost his seat for Dublin, in spite of the fifty repeal meetings that had been held in that city, and he had to seek election elsewhere. The Government believed that the repeal scare was over. But the next year municipal reform was conceded, and O'Connell was chosen as the first Catholic Lord Mayor of Dublin. He discharged the duties with an efficiency and care which earned him the thanks of the Corporation; and he left to his successors the honourable compromise that a Catholic and Protestant should alternate in the office. In the same broad spirit he desired to win the Protestant and Presbyterian population to the repeal cause and to give them places on the committee of management.

From 1843 the Repeal Association, which had now had three years of existence, began to show visible results. The meetings grew larger and the tone of the speeches more menacing; repeal reading-rooms were established all over the country, and no less than nine thousand copies of the Nation were regularly printed and were read in these centres. Lord John Russell, in the House of Commons (July 28, 1843), predicted that O'Connell would successfully evade the Convention Act and that "the Lord Lieutenant would sit powerless in the Castle while the country was ruled from O'Connell's Conciliation Hall." The monster meetings at Mullaghmast and at Tara attracted attention far beyond the British Isles. Peel announced that though he deprecated war, and especially civil war, yet there was no alternative which he did not think preferable to the dismemberment of the Empire. The stringent Arms Act which followed and the threats of interference which caused O'Connell to call off the Clontarf meeting of October 8, 1843, were only preliminaries to the final blow of the Government.

On October 14, O'Connell was arrested on charges of conspiracy and sedition, and with him Gavan Duffy, editor of the Nation, John Gray of the Freeman, and others, but they were at once released on bail. The trial did not come on till early in 1844, when the printed indictment handed to the court was nearly a hundred yards long, containing forty-three overt acts, including speeches, attendance at monster meetings, and articles in the Nation. The most momentous fact was the entire exclusion of Catholics from a jury that was to try the foremost Catholic in the country, all those whose names were called being objected to by the Government prosecutor. It was this which caused Lord Denman afterwards to describe trial by jury in Ireland as "a mockery, a delusion, and a snare." The packing of juries in Crown prosecutions against Catholics was notorious, but in O'Connell's case it attracted more than usual attention No act of rebellion or "wicked and foul conspiracy," such as had been predicted by the Attorney-General, was disclosed in the trial. It was admitted that the Association was legal and that the meetings had been orderly, but it was argued that they were held for the unlawful purpose of intimidating the English people and legislature. Conviction followed on February 12, but sentence was not pronounced until the next term.

O'Connell spent the interval in London, where he was a centre for party intrigues. He was accorded a respectful hearing in the House of Commons, but on May 30 he was condemned to a year's imprisonment and a fine of £2,000, with security for good behaviour. His detention in Richmond gaol was only nominal, for he was allowed to see and entertain his friends, and to continue journalistic work. In September the judgment was reversed in the House of Lords, and O'Connell was released amid scenes of great excitement. But his mental powers were fast failing, and his temporary attachment to the idea of the alternative scheme of federation, then becoming a favourite doctrine with many who despaired of achieving repeal, was probably only one symptom of enfeebled powers. It confused his adherents and alienated his friends and, later, he himself discarded it. His policy of "taking an instalment when he could not get the whole" did not please the more ardent spirits of his party and led to a fresh breach with the Young Irelanders, several of whom, John Mitchel in particular, were gradually tending toward more violent means of attaining their political ends, especially after the early death in 1845 of Thomas Davis. O'Connell, on the other hand, allied himself with the Whig administration, under which several of his followers took office. He died in Genoa on May 15, 1847, in the midst of the awful famine whose dark shadow had been slowly creeping over his native land during the final years of his sojourn there. His last words in Parliament, spoken in broken tones hardly audible to the House, were a warning of what was happening in Ireland. "Ireland is in your hands, in your power. If you do not save her she cannot save herself...I predict that a quarter of her population will perish unless you come to her relief."[3]

[3] Disraeli's account of O'Connell's last appearance in the House; Cusack, Life of O'Connell, ii, 212.

To the Young Irelanders it seemed that O'Connell, in forsaking repeal and uniting with the English Government, had sacrificed the cause. The breach between them and "Old Ireland," as O'Connell styled his party, was complete. With a man like John O'Connell, the Liberator's son, who posed as the "Young Liberator" and without any of his father's talents aspired to succeed to his father's place in the popular favour, they could have nothing to do. Early in 1846 Duffy had put Mitchel in temporary control of the Nation while he took a rest for literary purposes, but he was recalled to office by the recklessness with which Mitchel dealt alike with financial and public affairs. The tone of the paper became violent and threatening, and the more stable spirits were alarmed at its new departure when it began to publish articles which spoke of a blow that was to be struck at the British Empire, and forewarned the Government of the purposes to which railways might be put if a hostile use were made of them.[4] This was Mitchel's answer to the threat of the Government to dispatch troops to suppress public opinion and declare the repeal movement high treason.

[4] C. Gavan Duffy, My Life in Two Hemispheres, i, 136, 138, 140-141.

The ethics of rebellion are difficult to formulate; but what is certain is that for years every constitutional effort had been made, backed by the opinion of a multitude of people expressed in meetings of enormous size and supported by that of a large number of the educated classes of all forms of religious thought, to bring about repeal. They had spoken alike through the Press and in Parliament. In all cases these constitutionally formulated utterances had been met by forcible suppression, by the imprisonment of the leaders, and by the open contempt of Ministers. Coercion Acts rained upon the country, the Habeas Corpus Act had been suspended almost continuously, and juries were packed and threatened with punishment if they did not bring in the required verdict.

In order to enforce this system, every department of local and general administration, from that of the Lord-Lieutenant, Chief Secretary, and Lord Chancellor, down to the Customs' Office and Constabulary, had at their head Englishmen or Scotchmen who had no interest in the country save to further their own advancement by carrying out the behests of the Government of the day. Session after session measures had been forced upon Ireland against the will of her representatives; and those that were supported by a majority of the Irish members were contemptuously rejected. Meanwhile the country was going from bad to worse; outrages were increasing, famine and disease were spreading and the relations of the classes toward each other were becoming rapidly more embittered. It was such causes as these that led Sir Samuel Ferguson, a poet and antiquarian and a strong constitutionalist, to found the Protestant Repeal Association; and such causes which induced William Smith O'Brien, a Protestant landowner of ancient Irish lineage, to join the movement, with which up to 1843 he had declined to identify himself. Eventually, O'Brien became the leader of the ill-planned and abortive insurrection of 1848. Yet "he was persuaded that not one man in a thousand among the Repealers desired either separation from England or a change of sovereign. The demand for repeal was not the voice of treason, but the language of despair."[5] At the time that O'Brien made this speech he was not a member of the Repeal Association. He spoke as a country gentleman anxious to live a quiet life in his own country and to see the Union made effective for the liberty and happiness of his people. But three months later he was forced forward by his position and changing views to join the Association, and his standing and character speedily made him the second leader in the movement. He vowed not to taste wine or any intoxicant until the Union was repealed.

[5] Speech in Parliament, July 4, 1843, quoted in Gavan Duffy, Young Ireland, i, 157-158.

Meanwhile the Young Ireland party was becoming broken into sections by differences of opinion. Mitchel had adopted the "physical force policy" announced by James Fintan Lalor; a policy, as one of his associates named it, of insurrection, without its courage or resources.[6] Other members of the association, such as Dillon, O'Hagan, McGee, Gavan Duffy, and Meagher disapproved of these views, but their persuasions could not turn him from his purpose and he retired from the staff of the Nation and founded the United Irishman to voice his opinions. Duffy, on the contrary, advocated the formation of a Parliamentary party independent of any English party and refusing all alliance with them or any places or favours offered by the Government. Such a party, he believed, if of adequate capacity and character, could rule the House of Commons.[7] In after years Parnell confessed that it was Sir Charles Gavan Duffy's plan of an independent Opposition that had suggested to him the formation of such a party; but in his opinion this only became possible after the passing of the Ballot Act of 1872.[8]

[6] C. Gavan Duffy, My Life in Two Hemispheres (1898), i, 246.

[7] Ibid., i, 249.

[8] Official Report of the Parnell Commission, vol. vii.

But once more, as in Tone's day, affairs in France precipitated action at home. Louis Philippe had fled to England and a republic had been proclaimed. Even Gavan Duffy thought the time had come for a union of Old and Young Irelanders and a "peaceful revolution." He believed it might be won without a shot being fired,[9] and that the Catholic Church would move with them. Dillon and Smith O'Brien advocated moderation and an appeal to the gentry to declare for self-government. Mitchel spoke extravagantly about a republic and a peasant war, though he had disavowed these doctrines a short time before.[10] He attracted to his banner the hotheaded young men of the student class, but beyond vitriolic articles in his weekly paper, he made no preparations. The people were unorganized, unprepared, and unarmed, while the Government was ready at all points and the hasty passing of an Act, called the Treason Felony Act, which made written or spoken sedition punishable by penal servitude for life, put it into the power of the authorities to take immediate steps. Mitchel was arrested on May 13 and Duffy on July 9, 1848, with several of his confederates. The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended and their journals suppressed. Pushed on by circumstances, Smith O'Brien rashly attempted a rising in Munster, but in a short time he was arrested at Thurles, and all was over. O'Brien, Meagher, and their comrades were sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted; Duffy, after five commissions set to try him, walked out a free man, though in all these cases the jurors were as carefully packed as in the days before emancipation, and only one single juror of the Catholic faith was allowed to sit at any of the five separate trials for life.[11] Mitchel and his companions were sent to Tasmania as convicts, but they were allowed freedom of action on parole and were, as John O'Leary says "treated like gentlemen." Some of them were pardoned in 1854 and returned home; others escaped in a vessel sent by sympathizers to take them off; but Smith O'Brien, from a high sense of honour, refused to take advantage of the chance of escape by which the others were set free. Eventually he was pardoned by Queen Victoria and returned to his old home at Cahirmoyle.

[9] Cahirmoyle Correspondence, Duffy to O'Brien, quoted in Duffy, op. cit., i, 259n.

[10] Duffy, op. cit., i, 261-262 and note.

[11] See the account of Mitchel's trial in Duffy, Four Years of Irish History, and of Duffy's own trial in My Life in Two Hemispheres, i, 301-335.

The first work taken in hand by Mitchel on his release was to denounce and attempt to destroy the excellent work of the Tenant League in Ireland, and to preach the doctrine that neither land legislation nor Home Rule should be sought for through Parliament. In the American Civil War he fought on the side of the Southern slave-owners. Thomas D'Arcy McGee, the poet, took a nobler line. He was the beneficent protector of the Irish immigrants into Canada, improving their conditions and urging on them agricultural settlements and avoidance of the cities. He rose to be Canadian Minister of Agriculture and Emigration and helped to frame the Federal Union of the Dominion. His experience of the corruption and tyranny of mob-rule in the United States led him to reconsider his opinion that democracy is the highest form of government; consequently, he was accused of forsaking the National cause, and a Fenian fanatic put an end to McGee's useful career by assassination. Sir Charles Gavan Duffy spent several years of a full life in establishing the Tenant League, to arrest the universal demoralization and endeavour to check evictions. He succeeded in uniting Ulster with the South in an effort to push forward urgent reforms; and his Association supported the Tenant-right Bills of Sharman Crawford and Napier to which reference has already been made.[12]

[12] Duffy, League of the North and South (1886), pp. 387-388.

At the election of 1852, after the resignation of Lord John Russell, a substantial majority was sent from Ireland pledged to the support of the Bill, which passed its second reading, but was disavowed by Lord Derby, the new Prime Minister. The fall of his Ministry quickly followed, to make way for a Ministry with Lord Aberdeen at its head and Russell as Leader of the House. But at the moment when all seemed to be going well a profligate desertion of their own cause by several of the Irish members most loudly pledged to Tenant Right ended the struggle and shattered the League. Three leading Members long suspected of insincerity by their compatriots, went over to the Government they had hitherto denounced, and accepted office, their example being followed by others. One of them, John Sadlier, who became a lord of the treasury, was later found to be a forger and swindler on a gigantic scale, and he ended his life by committing suicide on Hampstead Heath. Another, Judge Keogh, was made Solicitor-General for Ireland; later, he presided at the trials of the Fenian prisoners and pronounced their sentences; he closed a career in which he had made himself despised and hated by all parties by a miserable death. "It was one of the most dramatic and disgraceful desertions in political history."[13] Crawford withdrew his Bill after twenty years of contest, and Dr. McKnight, the strongest supporter of Tenant-right in Ulster, fell off. The League was denounced by Mitchel in the American journals and by a considerable body of the Catholic Bishops and leading clergy, led by the new Primate, Dr. (afterward Cardinal) Cullen, at home. Twenty-five deserters had gone over to the Whigs. What was more ominous was that in the by-elections the country showed its preference for the discredited Members and returned them and their friends to Parliament. In this universal demoralization it is no wonder that Gavan Duffy despaired of the people and declared that "you can do little for a class that will do nothing for themselves." One of the few bishops who remained independent wrote: "There is no room for an honest politician in Ireland. All hope with me in Irish affairs is dead and buried."[14] Gavan Duffy himself served the Irish cause honourably in another land and rose to a position of responsibility as Prime Minister of Victoria, Australia.

[13] G. P. MacDonell, in Bryce, Two Centuries of Irish History, p. 448.

[14] Dr. Croke in Duffy's League of the North and South (1886), p. 363.

It would certainly seem that the Irish electors used their newly won privileges at this time little for the advantage of their country. They were, in fact, too ignorant and dependent to take any initiative. They were accustomed to implicit obedience to their landlords' behests, and when a powerful personality such as O'Connell presented himself, they obeyed him also with unquestioning fidelity. The appeal of the Young Irelanders, which was to their reason rather than to their passions, failed to evoke any warm response; the masses would neither rise with them nor vote for them. They still clung with a blind devotion to the time-serving representatives that O'Connell had left behind him. Inclined by tradition to adhere implicitly to persons rather than to judge of causes, they were helpless in the hands of plausible agitators. The minds of the Catholic electors were still further confused by the division of opinion in the ranks of the clergy brought about by Dr. Cullen's uncompromising hostility to all national movements and his close association with the Whigs.

It had recently been proved that no Irish election could be won without the aid of the local clergy, and they had become the active directors of their flocks in regard to the way they should cast their vote. But the Primate, who came over with the added dignity of Papal legate, and who was ultramontane in his views, desired to exclude priests altogether from politics and to substitute for this the supreme authority of a few ecclesiastics. A Nationalist paper declared that his policy was: "No priests in politics, except bishops. No bishops in politics, except archbishops. No archbishops, except the Apostolic Delegate."[15] His action broke up the National party and played into the hands of English politicians; it caused the delay of substantial efforts for reform. "Till all this be changed," writes Gavan Duffy, in words constantly mis-quoted and mis-applied, "there seems to be no more hope for the Irish cause than for the corpse on the dissecting table...The Irish party is reduced to a handful, the popular organization is deserted by those who created it, prelates of the Irish Church throng the ranks of our opponents, priest is arrayed against priest and parish against parish. A shameless political profligacy is openly defended and applauded...and the ultimate aim for which I laboured—to give back to Ireland her National existence—is forgotten or disdained."[16]

[15] Ibid., pp. 376-377.

[16] Ibid., p. 364 n.

From the decay of the Young Ireland movement sprang the far more formidable Fenian movement. The former had been largely a literary and educational impulse, appealing to young people who desired to reform their country from within. "Educate that you may be free." "Liberty does not reside in institutions, but in habits of thought and action," had been its watchwords. But the Fenian leaders had other views and other modes of action. Meagher and Mitchel were agitating in America among the Irish emigrants, who had almost universally become American citizens, believing that in the institutions of the new country they had found the personal and political liberty they had in vain sought in their own country. At home, they had been sensible of no social influence and no political position; but in the States, where they were rapidly rising in numbers, they found themselves looked upon as a power, their vote courted and conciliated by rival political bodies, and their interest on behalf of the old land appealed to by agitators, who passed mysteriously backward and forward over the Atlantic.

The miserable conditions still existing in Ireland aided these efforts. Fresh bodies of emigrants, constantly arriving, brought tidings of renewed famine conditions and of wholesale evictions suffered by friends and neighbours of former days. Though many of the evictions were owing to the impecunious state of the landlords, this can hardly be said of the clearances on the larger estates. In some districts a state of civil war prevailed, and cruel revenges were practised on both sides. Murders became frequent, and the murderers were concealed by their neighbours. The conditions under which the tenants were forced to live on many of the Irish estates gave the landlord and agent powers over them which were often used mercilessly against them or their children, and which made existence terrible to the helpless peasants in some parts of the country. All these things were watched by the American settlers who had fled from similar conditions across the ocean and they formed the soil in which revenges flourish. Even such papers as the Times showed signs of discerning the underlying causes of the horrors which were now to befall in Ireland. In an article commenting on the murder of a Mr. Mauleverer, a land agent in Co. Londonderry, who was shot on May 23, 1850, the writer asks: "If the proprietors of the soil...recklessly inflict misery, without stint, upon the helpless and unfortunate peasantry,...if they are to convert the country into a battlefield for the landlords and process-servers and sheriff's officers on the one side, and for the furious peasantry and banded assassins on the other, then we say it is the bounden duty of the Legislature to interfere, and either to enforce upon the present landlords the duties while it maintains the rights of property, or to create a new landed proprietary, whose intelligence and wealth will enable them to secure the peace of society and thus lay the foundation of national prosperity...In Ireland, murder is too often a proof of some great social disease...It is the hideous result of some fearful wrong."[17] This was, in fact, the case, and the Fenian conspiracy was one outcome of this state of wrong, under which the country had suffered helplessly and which it had waited in vain for any English or Irish Government to step in and remedy.

[17] Times, May 30, 1850, quoted in R. Barry O'Brien, Fifty Years of Concessions to Ireland, ii, 262-264.

The Fenian movement differed from most similar Irish conspiracies in that it arose without the aid of any single leader of importance to give it form or direction. It seemed to spring out of the soil, without orators or writers or men of proved ability to take the guidance of the forces it aroused. The prosecutions for seditious writing and speaking in and after "the '48" rising had driven agitation underground and led to the formation of secret societies in Ireland and America, which worked in concert. In 1854 a group of men was formed in New York, of whom the leading spirits were John O'Mahony, the "head-centre" of the association in America, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, and described by John O'Leary as "the manliest and handsomest man" he had ever seen, and "the soul of truth and honour"; James Stephens, a man of great energy and resource; and Jeremiah O'Donovan, soon to be known by the dreaded name of O'Donovan "Rossa," the ruthless advocate of secret and violent conspiracy, who had been sentenced to penal servitude for life by Judge Keogh, but was amnestied, and who now acted as editor of the United Irishman. Outside of these were men of a different type, John O'Leary, who had become a Young Irelander through reading the poems of Thomas Davis; Charles Joseph Kickham, and Thomas Clarke Luby, the latter a supporter of Smith O'Brien. Together they edited their organ The Irish People. At the beginning O'Leary says that "a certain element of the ridiculous seemed to pierce through the whole business,"[18] but the movement soon became formidable.

[18] J. O'Leary, Recollections of Fenians and Fenianism (1896), i, 101.

On November 23, 1863, at a meeting in Chicago, it was announced as the policy of the organization known as the Fenian or Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, that open war should be made on Great Britain for the establishment of Irish national freedom, "no enslaved people having ever regained their independence" unless by efforts deemed "in the enslaver's sense rebellious and illegal."[19] They drew up a form of oath and began the work of propaganda in the States and at home. Other associations of even more pronounced views, such as the Phoenix and the Ancient Order of Hibernians, were purely American and largely agrarian. Behind all lay the dark and dread forces of assassination and crime, banded together under the name of "The Invincibles," to whose initiative the terrible tragedy of Phoenix Park and many another deed of homicidal frenzy were afterwards to be traced.

[19] Proceedings of the first National Convention of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, Chicago, 1863, quoted in R. Barry O'Brien, op. cit., ii, 210-211.

This infamous association was founded while Forster was Chief Secretary. Its purpose, according to James Carey the informer, once the chief leader, was to "make history" by killing all the English officials in Ireland. The earlier associations had been suppressed in Ireland but the Fenians took their place. The name appealed to old tradition and speedily became popular. "This is a serious business now," said an English literary man; "the Irish have got hold of a good name this time; the Fenians will last." The power of the organization lay largely in the fact that the management proceeded from only one or two heads, who alone knew toward what ends it was being directed. Those below knew only what was told them, and each man had to obey implicitly the member immediately above him. Thus the whole society was secret, not only to outside authorities, but to the members themselves.[20] They were not consulted and knew only vaguely what was going on. But the people were steadily prepared for insurrection. Irishmen who had fought in the American War began to arrive in considerable numbers in Ireland and manufactories of arms were discovered in Dublin.

[20] Justin MacCarthy, A History of our own Times (1880), vol. iv, ch. liii. pp. 122 seq.; Tynan, History of the Invincibles.

The disbandment of several thousand Irishmen who had been trained to arms in the Civil War and who had nothing to turn to for a livelihood gave a great stimulus to the movement. Stephens proclaimed that the flag of the Irish Republic would be raised in Ireland in the year 1865. With large numbers of Americans on their side and sympathy shown by the United States Government, the project seemed not altogether a fantastic one. But the supporters in New York failed to fulfil their promises and the English authorities stepped in.

In 1865 Luby and O'Leary were seized and tried,[21] but Stephens escaped to France. Fresh repressive legislation was launched, the prominent Catholic clergy as a whole supporting the Government and vigorously denouncing secret societies and rebellious associations. This practically brought the efforts in Ireland to an end. An attempt to capture Chester Castle in February, 1867, came to nothing, and an organized general rising in March of the same year was a total failure. Considerable interest was shown in England in the fate of the men brought to trial, and public opinion, voiced by Bright and John Stuart Mill was enlisted on the side of mercy, with the result that several sentences were commuted. But the attempt to rescue the Fenian prisoners Kelly and Deasy from the prison-van in Manchester, in the course of which a policeman was shot, as it appears accidentally, and the blowing up of a part of the wall of Clerkenwell Gaol shortly afterwards in the attempt to rescue other Fenian prisoners, excited an outburst of feeling in both countries. Three of the five men tried for complicity in the rescue were executed. They became known as the "Manchester Martyrs."[22] These attempts directed fresh attention to Irish affairs and hastened the passing of the Irish Church Act of 1869 and probably the later legislation relating to land.[23] In 1868 Lord Stanley had declared that "Ireland was the question of the hour."

[21] Luby, though sentenced to twenty years penal servitude, was released in 1871 and went to New York; O'Leary returned in 1885. He died in Dublin in 1907, respected by all parties.

[22] It was in commemoration of these men that T. D. Sullivan wrote the verses "God Save Ireland." Four passers-by were killed and a hundred and twenty were wounded in the Clerkenwell explosion.

[23] See Gladstone's speech in the House of Commons, March 30, 1868, and that of May 31, 1869.

END OF CHAPTER XIX

XX.—REMEDIAL LEGISLATION

It is not to be supposed that Ireland as a whole had shown itself permanently averse to the Union, or that there was a general desire for fresh changes. The educated classes had, with few exceptions, accepted it as a settlement which they had no wish to see upset. Many of them, both Catholics and Protestants, honestly held that the Union with England was the best solution of the country's difficulties and that, in particular, it kept peace between the North and the South as no other system of government could do. In general, they looked on the malcontents as troublesome agitators. Held quiet by the influence of the priests, the South had refused to rise on the appeal of Smith O'Brien and the Young Irelanders; and when, in 1849, Queen Victoria paid a belated visit to Ireland she received an enthusiastic welcome.

Dublin from about 1830 onward was a pleasant place to live in. The upper classes had been stirred by the patriotic ardour of Davis and his companions, without always attaching themselves to their advanced political views; and Irish history, antiquities, legend and poetry were studied with interest even in strongly unionist circles. Members of the two faiths met in a sympathy born of love of country, which led them to forget differences of religion; and the efforts made to stem the tide of famine suffering drew all parties together. Between 1855-1860, O'Curry was lecturing to delighted audiences on the resources of Irish literature at the new Catholic University, O'Donovan was seeing the Annals of the Four Masters through the press, and, following in the steps of McGee, Davis, and Mangan, Ferguson and others were pouring forth ballads and lectures expressive of the sentiments and longings of the Irish race. Even at an earlier date the Government had been showing its desire to support these peaceable efforts for the good of the country in a variety of ways. In 1824 Griffith's land valuation survey had given for the first time secure ground for estimates as to the actual value of properties and fair rents. In 1826 the Ordnance Survey under Captain Larcom obtained the expert help of John O'Donovan, Petrie, and O'Curry in making a survey of the country on the six-inch scale, accompanied with notes on place-names and traditions of which full use has not yet been made.[1] In 1852 the Ancient Laws and Institutes of Ireland or "Brehon Laws" were published by a special Royal Commission, and grants were made to the Royal Irish Academy for the purchase and preservation of Irish manuscripts and of objects found about the country as treasure-trove.

[1] A large part of O'Donovan's notes have not yet been published; but they are now being issued in sections by rototype process by private enterprize.

Ameliorative measures on a wider scale had been carried through under Peel's administration. The question of education in Ireland, in all its grades, was one urgently demanding attention. The poorer classes were, so far as any adequate provision went, totally neglected. The old and excellent grammar schools seem to have dwindled out of existence, owing to the refusal of the Government to give any encouragement to Catholic teaching; and the children of the poor picked up what scanty scraps of knowledge they could gather from wandering bards or poor curates or schoolmasters under hedges or in disused cabins or chapels. The "hedge schools" became an institution, each child bringing his sod of turf or coin for the scanty support of his teacher and getting in return a smattering of Latin, grammar and poetry, for which the teacher's fees ranged from 1s. 7d. to 2s 2d. per quarter. But in their efforts to prevent the population from remaining Catholic the Government had forced it to become illiterate. The class of books most in favour for school reading shows the sort of education these poor children were receiving.

Among the titles of a list of school books found in County Clare at the beginning of the nineteenth century were the following: Irish Rogues and Rapparees; The Seven Champions of Christendom; Francis, a Notorious Robber, and the Most Dexterous Way of Thieving; History of the Most Celebrated Pirates; Fair Rosamond and Jane Shore; Ovid's Art of Love; Dame Rozina, a Spanish Courtesan; History of Witches and Apparitions; nor was there anything of a more elevating character to correct the pernicious influences of such reading.[2] The few State-aided schools, such as the Charter Schools and the Schools of the Association for Discountenancing Vice, were, like the Irish Foundling Hospital, abodes of death, disease, and misery. The Board of Education recognized that the system pursued in them was chiefly a proselytizing one at a vast expenditure of public money.[3]

[2] Dutton, Survey of Clare; E. Wakefield, An Account of Ireland, Statistical and Political (1812) gives a similar list found in Wicklow. See also C. Gavan Duffy, Young Ireland (1896), p. 45.

[3] E. Wakefield, op. cit., pp. 413, 425-440; Thomas Newenham, Natural and Political Circumstances of Ireland (1809). Both these writers give a terrible account of the neglect and cruelty practised in these institutions.

The question of national education was taken up in 1812. A Commission reported that schools should be established in which no attempt should be made to propagate the religious tenets of any denomination of Christians. This was a step in advance, but the body into whose hands the charge of the instruction of the poor was now placed was not well adapted to carry out this proviso. The Kildare Place schools, though they gave an excellent education, gradually fell into the hands of persons more bent on sectarian objects than on general knowledge. The principle that the Bible should be read without note or comment was objected to by the Catholic clergy and certainly left openings for abuse; and though in 1824 the society had 15,000 schools, with over 100,000 pupils, the agitation organized against them led to a rapid fall in numbers. Probably the schools by themselves might not have been attacked, but they synchronized with the rise of other societies having purely proselytizing purposes in view and gave aid to them, thus departing from their original object.[4] The question was taken up again by a Commission in 1825 and embodied in the Education Act inaugurated by Stanley in 1831.

[4] In recent years excellent work has been done by the Kildare Place schools which are now used as the Training College for teachers of the Protestant Church of Ireland.

From 1832 to 1852 the Catholic and Protestant Archbishops of Dublin, Doctors Daniel Murray and Richard Whately, worked side by side to frame a scheme of general instruction that should be acceptable to all parties, and to draw up a course of Scriptural extracts, partly from the Douay and partly from the Authorized Versions, for the use of schools. Where these versions differed a new translation was made by the two divines, after a comparison with the original. The plan adopted was to leave all definite religious teaching to the different bodies, but to give general education to all the children together, including the reading of the selected passages of the Bible. Undoubtedly the leading spirit on the Board was Archbishop Whately, who bent the whole force of his intellect to the framing of the school syllabus and supervised every detail even down to the writing of the headline mottos in the copy-books. Dr. Murray, a gentle and accommodating man, though he fought for the retention of explanatory notes in the Scriptural courses, does not seem to have objected to the general scheme or even to the inclusion of "several essays on religious subjects by Archbishop Whately and other eminent divines." According to English standards of the day, the curriculum was excellently calculated "to furnish instruction of a moral and intellectual kind." But all references to the past history of their own country were rigorously excluded and all patriotic songs, including even some of Moore's Melodies, were taken out of the reading books.

That the range of knowledge imparted was wide, a study of the courses obliges us to admit. That it did not include any instruction in the Irish language or history was only to be expected from the circumstances under which the time-tables were drawn up. One practical result, however, was that over considerable parts of the country districts Irish speaking children received instruction in a language almost unknown to them, and a fresh blow was given to the survival of the old tongue among the peasants. For this, and for his efforts to meet the other members of the Board in the compilation of the school courses, Dr. Murray was fiercely attacked by Dr. MacHale, archbishop of Tuam, a native speaker, whom O'Connell styled "The Lion of St. Jarlath's," but he was almost alone in his views, preaching in Irish having been practically given up by the Catholic clergy. But the syllabus was disputed on all sides, the more angrily of the two by the Evangelical party, who considered Dr. Whately latitudinarian in his views; while a fire of pastorals was discharged by his fellow bishops at the head of Dr. Murray.[5] In 1840 the work of the Board was on the point of being condemned at Rome, but an enquiry into the teaching being given in the schools by a Legate sent over to report was considered satisfactory and the objections were withdrawn. Meanwhile the schools had been carrying out their work and the annual reports testified to the appreciation of their teaching. The first report appeared in December, 1833, and gave the number of schools in actual operation as 789, and the number of children on the rolls was stated to be 107,042. The reports in the succeeding years showed that there was a continuous increase. In 1845 there were 3,426 schools with 432,844 scholars; and in 1860 the number had risen to 5,632 schools in operation, with 804,000 pupils attending them.

[5] Sir Robert Peel declared that Dr. Murray in his person and manner completely realized his ideal of a Christian Bishop. He was a man of great simplicity of heart and an earnest and eloquent preacher.

The system, though supposed to be undenominational and carefully arranged for that purpose became in fact rigidly denominational. Education was paid for partly out of the rates and partly by the Treasury. The local contributions involved representation and a share of control by those who paid the rates. The managers were in most parts of the country clerical, the laity being chiefly concerned to keep down the rates. Thus the education of the people fell into the hands of the clergy and, in spite of regulations, the schools became denominational in character. In County Clare the National Schools dotted the country, but no Protestant attended them, though the Inspector was a Protestant and on good terms with the Catholic clergy; the Catholic emblems and pictures in the schools resulted in the exclusion of all children of other forms of belief.[6] The schools were ill-equipped, the teachers ill-paid and without any pension system or security of tenure. The instruction given was unsuited to the needs of the pupils and was in consequence half-heartedly given and inefficient; little interest was shown by the parents in the work of their children, who emerged worse prepared for life than the scholars of any other part of the British Isles.

[6] W. J. Fitzpatrick, Memoirs of Richard Whately, Archbishop of Dublin (1864).

So far as the Catholics were concerned, an effort was made by them to introduce a voluntary system more in accord with the views of the church in the Christian Brothers' Schools, which provided a good secondary education at a cheap rate, and had its own curriculum. These schools have been well spoken of even by authorities in the opposite camp.

A cognate question was that of the endowments of Maynooth College. It first came before the House of Commons in 1845, by a motion of the Duke of Wellington, and was fiercely debated. This College had been set up by the Irish Parliament in the days of its independence and was intended to give instruction to laymen as well as to priests, some of the governors being chosen from the laity. The importance of having a college in Ireland for higher education was increased by the closing, under the French Revolution, of the French Colleges to which Irish students were accustomed to resort; St. Omer, at which O'Connell had received his education, had been disestablished since his time. But the endowment of Maynooth was quite inadequate to its needs. The original grant made in 1795 was £6,000 a year, raised in 1813 to £9000 a year, annually voted. In 1844, Peel proposed to raise it to £26,000 a year, three times the original amount, and to make the grant permanent. He also offered £30,000 for buildings. But the institution quickly dropped its general character, such as was contemplated in the original grant and became a purely ecclesiastical seminary for the education of priests, and as such it was disendowed in 1869. The founding of Maynooth may be said to have changed the whole character of the Irish Catholic clergy, whose foreign education had hitherto given them a wide European outlook, and induced in them a political convervatism which on many occasions had made them the supporters of order in times of rebellion and the strength of the established government. Henceforth they partook of the strong insular outlook of their people and they became avowedly nationalist and anti-English. As priests in their parishes and managers of the national schools they exercised an immense influence, political and educational.

In 1845 Peel pushed his educational schemes another stage forward by the foundation of the Queen's Colleges of Belfast, Cork, and Galway, and later by the establishment of the Queen's University, with which they were affiliated. From the English point of view the proposal was of the most tolerant and large-minded nature. The Colleges were to be open to students of all denominations, and in all secular subjects the professors were to be chosen for their qualifications only, without regard to their religious faith. No religious teaching was to be imparted in the classes for general instruction and no theological chairs were to be founded by the State, but encouragement was given to the establishment of such professorships by private means and the foundation of denominational residential halls was proposed. Catholic bishops were invited to serve on the Board and Senate and though the appointment of professorships was kept in the hands of the Government the selection recommendations were to be made by the Board. No interference of any kind with religious belief was to be allowed. A Catholic priest was appointed President in Galway and a Catholic layman in Cork; a Presbyterian held the same post in Belfast. It was an honest attempt to come to some fair solution of the problem of higher education in Ireland. The plan was strongly supported by the Nation newspaper; the enlightened men whose opinion it represented, Davis in particular, taking up the matter with enthusiasm, and several of the Catholic bishops, including Archbishop Murray, Dr. Crolly of Armagh, and also Cardinal Wiseman, did all they could in its favour. But the times were hardly ripe for those principles of united education by which alone toleration and mutual respect can be attained and a sense of common nationhood instilled into the minds of the young.

The principle of the Bill was violently attacked by the English Conservatives, and Sir Robert Inglis's description of the new institutions as "godless colleges" was eagerly caught up and repeated as a slogan by O'Connell and the old Catholic party. The discussion was long and acrimonious. Archbishop MacHale denounced the plan as "a penal and revolting measure," and in 1847-48 he brought back from Rome a rescript declaring the colleges to be "dangerous to faith and morals." Dr. Derry of Clonfert went so far as to refuse the Sacrament to the parents of boys who attended them, and in 1850 the Synod of Thurles condemned them. The Colleges entered upon their chequered career in adverse circumstances, with Dr. Cullen, Archbishop of Armagh, who was translated to Dublin on Dr. Murray's death in 1852, throwing the whole weight of his powerful influence against them. The feud shook the Catholic Association to its foundations, O'Connell declaring that he saw in Davis's advocacy of mixed education the cloven hoof of secularism and the French Revolution.

Equally adverse was Dr. Cullen to the Model District Schools which were opened in 1849, the year in which the Queen's Colleges began their work. He took in hand the revision of the National school curriculum and prohibited the use of Dr. Whately's lessons; and he had a large part in founding the Catholic University in St. Stephen's Green, of which Newman was appointed the first Rector. This college, which came under the control of the Jesuits, was ultimately absorbed into the National University of Ireland, founded by Royal Charter in 1908, and became one of its constituent colleges, along with Cork and Galway. But as a University it had no power to grant degrees; and it was not until the foundation of the Royal University by Lord Beaconsfield that Catholics could obtain degrees without entering either the Queen's Colleges or Trinity. The Royal University was only an examining board and did not give teaching to students, who had to seek their instruction elsewhere; and attempts to fill the gap, such as the foundation of the Intermediate Board system in 1878, were not satisfactory from the educational point of view. They tended to degenerate into cramming and prize-winning institutions for the pupils and into a rush for result fees on the part of the teachers. Nevertheless, in spite of clerical opposition, the Queen's Colleges turned out many distinguished men in various walks of life. Belfast naturally remained a college chiefly attended by Northern Presbyterians; and it was raised by Birrell's Bill in 1908 to the status of a University, endowed with moderate funds for its support. At the same time the National University was founded, with the Colleges of Cork and Galway as autonomous institutions, having their own curriculum and their own teachers, but obtaining degrees by examinations arranged by a common Senate.

A number of excellent secondary schools, such as Clongowes, Blackrock and Milltown, have been established by the Catholic orders to feed the Universities; and on the Protestant side, schools such as St. Columba's on the Dublin mountains for boys and the Alexandra School and College in Dublin for girls, provide sound education for large numbers of students. The tendency to keep young people apart in separate teaching institutions is becoming less rigid in recent years; similar courses of study, with increasing competition and mutual interest in games are tending to draw the students together into a natural and healthful association.

The foundation of the National University in 1908 brought the long series of experiments in University education to a satisfactory conclusion. The colleges at Cork, Galway, and Dublin remained under separate governing bodies, with Maynooth as an affiliated college. No religious tests are permitted; though they are, in fact, predominantly Catholic in their atmosphere, owing to the number of Catholics on the Governing bodies and Senate. Several of the professorships are held by Protestants and the statutes, as originally framed, showed a marked freedom from any sectarian bias. The introduction of Gaelic as a compulsory subject for entrance has served to give the University a definite complexion, as was to be expected, and its tone is strongly nationalist. At first most of its students followed the constitutional leading of Redmond and they readily responded to his call for recruits for the war. But the growing tendency of the young men towards republicanism was accentuated when Mr. de Valera, a teacher of mathematics in the University, became first "President of the Republic" and Chancellor of the University in which he had held a chair, and when Professor MacNeill organized the Irish Volunteers. Its Senate consists of thirty-five members, mostly elected from the Professors of the different colleges, but four are nominated by the Crown and one, at least, must be a woman. Women are equally eligible with men for all offices; there is an excellent medical school well equipped with apparatus; and the University is undoubtedly exercising a very considerable cultural influence over the younger generation and bringing University teaching into its natural relation with home and social life.

At various times proposals had been thrown out to add a Catholic College to Dublin University, but the project met with violent opposition and had to be abandoned. Catholics have been admitted to Trinity College from 1793 onward, but they could receive no scholarship without submitting to a sacramental test, until Mr. Fawcett's Act of 1879 abolished all tests for fellowships or scholarships, except for Lecturers in Theology. Though it was established as a definitely Protestant place of education, and has always kept a preponderating Protestant influence, Catholic students have entered its courses ever since they were thrown open to them.

The question of education was only the first of a series of measures of a remedial character which occupied the attention of the House of Commons during the second half of the nineteenth century. The Irish Church question was one of the most important of these. Since the passing of the Tithe Commutation Act of 1838, which had shifted the responsibility of the support of the Protestant clergy from the peasants to the landowners, this matter had been quiescent. But the relief was only indirect, for rents had in many cases been raised to meet the additional charge upon the landlords. Sheil had warned them that in accepting the position of intermediaries they were digging their own graves; and, in fact, as the tithe war dwindled the struggle between owner and tenant became more fierce and embittered. The condition of things in some districts was commented on in a speech delivered in 1849 by George Henry Moore, an Irish Catholic landowner. He said that he paid tithes in eight parishes, in not one of which was there a Protestant church, service, or clergyman, nor a single member of the Church to require them; and he mentioned a hundred and ninty-nine parishes in similar conditions.

From 1865 onward the question of the Established Church was annually mooted in the House, especially by Sir John Gray, Member for Kilkenny and proprietor of the Freeman's Journal. But the Ministry firmly opposed any discussion of a question which they declared had been finally closed by the provisions of the Act of Union. It is remarkable that Gladstone's first Irish speeches were directed against the motions of Dillwyn and Sir John Gray; he did not think that the time for Parliamentary action had arrived. But on March 16, 1868, he launched the declaration that the time had come for the alliance between the State and the Protestant Church to cease; and a week later he gave notice of three resolutions to the same effect. The controversy aroused by his action led to a dissolution on November 11, but Gladstone's election for Greenwich showed that there was a popular feeling in favour of his views. The Church had nearly sixteen millions worth of property to be dealt with, and the struggle, especially in the Lords, was long and acrid. Their amendments, in the fullest House in living memory, would have reduced 'disendowment' to a shadow, but the decisive and conciliatory intervention of Lord Cairns brought about an agreement. About £10,840,000 was restored to the Church of Ireland, and was administered by lay commissioners, who have carried out their trust with great ability.

The claims of the Presbyterian church and of Maynooth were first considered and were met by the allocation to them of certain sums; but the Lords were steadily opposed to what was known as "concurrent endowment," or the application of the surplus to religious purposes only. Finally it was agreed that the residue should be applied "mainly for the relief of unavoidable calamity and suffering" not touched by the Poor Law. Such was the compromise arrived at. The Bill received the Royal Assent on July 26, 1869, and thus a great measure of justice was placed on the Statute Book. So far from having had the disastrous results foretold by its opponents, the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland has had the effect of bringing the clergy into closer touch with their congregations, putting an end to clerical absenteeism, and reviving spiritual and national life in the Church at large. It also gave the laity a position of responsibility with regard to the affairs of their Church which had the best results in attaching them to its welfare, while it removed a long-standing and well-founded grievance from the Irish Catholic people, clergy and laity alike.

The next struggle was to be the still more crucial effort to remove the existing anomalies in the relations between landlord and tenant. Before the Church Disestablishment Bill was out of the way Bright was already prophesying that North and South alike would combine in a demand for "something on the land question much broader than anything hitherto offered in compensation Bills." He had in mind the gradual transformation of the tenants into owners, such as has come about in our own day. Once more the North and the South are found banded together, to exact a reduction of rents, security of tenure, and right of sale. These demands became popularly known as "The Three F's," viz., Fair Rent, Fixity of Tenure, and Free Sale. But remedial legislation moved slowly. The chief stumbling-block to the landlords was the question of compensation for retrospective improvements; and it was on this ground that several attempts made during Lord Palmerston's Ministry failed to pass the House.

The solitary Bill passed in 1860 was dead against compensation, yet till 1870 it was held by English legislators to have settled the matter. It was followed by a period of "murders, homicides, beatings, and outrages" more appalling than at any time for thirty or forty years. Catholic landlords were no better off than Protestant, or Irishmen than Englishmen; they suffered impartially. A good Bill introduced by the Tories in 1867 was rejected, but on Gladstone's return to office the Irish Church Bill was followed up by a Land Bill which became law on August 9, 1870. It legalized the "Ulster Custom," rendered the landlord liable to pay compensation for improvements to an evicted tenant, and facilitated the creation of a peasant proprietary. But the Act did not prevent rack-renting, which became worse in view of possible compensation demands, nor did it check evictions. Many landlords set themselves to circumvent the working of the Act in every way in their power, and Isaac Butt, who proposed an amending Bill in 1876, spoke of the failure of the landowners to carry out the intentions of the legislature. His Bill was introduced again and again, but always rejected, and the same fate met Forster's excellent Compensation for Disturbance Bill of 1880, which passed the Commons, but was thrown out by the Lords.

END OF CHAPTER XX

XXI.—PARNELL AND THE LAND LEAGUE

During the land agitation another question came to the front. The Home Rule struggle began. Isaac Butt, the son of a Protestant clergyman in the North of Ireland, a Trinity College man and a rising barrister, who had already attained to the distinction of Queen's Counsel when he had been only six years at the Bar, had warned the farmers that if they depended solely on Gladstone and English parties in the House for the attainment of their hopes they were doomed to disappointment. Considering Butt's antecedents, his career had been a remarkable one. He had taken a prominent part in the defence of the Fenian prisoners, and had thus been drawn to inquire into the causes which led to the evolution of such desperate undertakings as those in which his clients had been involved; and into the amnesty movement, which followed immediately, he had thrown himself with all his energies. It was a curious spectacle to see a Protestant clergyman's son defending leaders of revolution against the jibes and severities of an Irish Catholic Solicitor-General, Judge Keogh's management of the cases before him being hardly less offensive in its way, than that of the notorious 'hanging' Judge Norbury after the rebellion of '98.

Butt had become convinced that no assurance of intelligent attention to Irish needs was to be depended upon from the English Parliament. The ignorance of, and consequent indifference to, Irish conditions was too dense, and the vested interests were too strong. Irish grievances, Irish famines, and Irish outrages had become a chronic condition, and they wearied, without interesting, the House. It was difficult for an assembly placed, as the English Parliament was, at a distance, and largely dependent for its information on Members who had private interests to serve, to become aware of the real facts. And members of the Irish Parliamentary party, who, after O'Connell's withdrawal, had shown themselves only too willing to be bought over by the Whigs, had lamentably failed to convince the House of the sincerity of their complaints.

A new party was required, and this party, with Home Rule or the restoration of Irish Parliamentary independence as its final aim, Butt set himself to form. Several of the Protestant gentry, who had not forgotten the days of the independent Parliament, joined him, and even the moderate Catholic gentlemen felt they need not stand aside from so innocuous a form of Home Rule. Certain of the old agitators, who still hoped to work through constitutional means, came forward. It was, however, the Conservatives who took the lead at the inaugural meeting in the Bilton Hotel, Dublin, held on May 10, 1870, which agreed to Butt's motion "That it is the opinion of this meeting that the true remedy for the evils of Ireland is the establishment of an Irish Parliament with full control over our domestic affairs." The new association was called "the Home Government Association of Ireland." Thus was the campaign for Home Rule launched.[1]

[1] T. P. O'Connor, The Parnell Movement, pp. 224-225.

The Ballot Act of 1870, passed by Gladstone's first Government, came to their aid, for Ireland had for the first time the opportunity of making her voice heard without fear or favour. The result was remarkable. Four by-elections sent to Parliament John Martin, an old Nationalist of transparent honesty, for Meath, Mitchel Henry for Galway, P. J. Smyth for Westmeath, and Butt himself for Limerick City, all pledged to support Home Rule. At the next General Election of 1874 sixty Home Rulers were returned, out of 103 Members, though in some cases the Catholic clergy actively opposed them.[2] Butt, their leader, was a man of simplicity, kindliness, and very considerable ability. As a Parliamentarian he stood, in his day, next to Gladstone. He sacrificed his profession to his Parliamentary career, and this sacrifice, combined with a temper too easy and benevolent, and a disposition too pleasure-loving, caused the embarrassments which pursued him through life and led him constantly into debt. He had to lead a mixed party. There were young patriots and place-hunters, some old Nationalists like A. M. Sullivan and J. J. O'Kelly, and Conservatives like Colonel King-Harman, who voted for Home Rule with his Irish comrades, but on all English party divisions sided with the Ministry.

[2] See especially the case of John Martin, ibid., p. 226.

It was a heterogeneous party, which could hardly be held together even with Butt's easy handling, and it awaited the coming of a more rigorous leader to weld it into the compact and formidable body which in the time of Parnell and Redmond was to make the Irish party on many occasions the arbiter of the destinies of English parties and the dictators of Irish demands. But it was in Butt's time that the great weapon of obstruction, suggested long before by Gavan Duffy, which was to be wielded with frequent and resistless force by the later Irish party, was formed. On April 22, 1875, when the House was engaged on its accustomed task of passing a Coercion Bill for Ireland, Butt put up Joseph Biggar to speak.[3] "How long do you wish me to speak?" asked Biggar. "A pretty good while," said Butt, who wished to delay the House. Biggar rose; it was five o'clock, and he sat down at nine. By the expedient of reading passages from Blue Books and Acts of Parliament he had managed to occupy four hours of the time of the debate.

[3] Born in Belfast in 1828, and a merchant of that city, he was returned as Member for Cavan in 1874. In 1877 he became a Roman Catholic.

The success of the plan led to its adoption by the Irish party as a regular means of Parliamentary warfare. Parnell first used it effectively in the debate on the new Coercion Bill of 1881, when motion upon motion was made by the Irish Members for the adjournment of the House, one Member succeeding the other through the day and night, without the slightest indication of wearinesss or surrender, in an uninterrupted sitting of forty-one hours, until their campaign was defeated by the introduction of the closure by the Speaker. A memorable contest followed on the reassembling of the House, which ended in the suspension of a large number of the Irish Members for having been guilty of "wilful and deliberate obstruction." Thus the contest for the time was finished, but such scenes were not unusual. They probably tended to make many English Members less averse than they might otherwise have been to the idea of Home Rule as promising to relieve the House of the presence of these obstructionists.

It was while the land agitation was at its height and Home Rule was becoming a question of the first importance that a new and striking figure appeared on the Irish side in the House of Commons. On April 22, 1875, Charles Stewart Parnell took his seat as Member for Co. Meath, in the place of John Martin, who had suddenly died. The slim and quiet young man who unobtrusively entered the House on the day made memorable by Biggar's formidable harangue gave no sign of the power either over Parliament or his own party that he was destined to attain. His own maiden speech was brief and nervous, uttered in a thin, unaggressive voice and with a marked English accent, but it contained the keynote of the position he was about to take up. "Why," he asked, "should Ireland be treated as a geographical fragment of England...? Ireland is not a geographical fragment. She is a nation." Parnell was a Protestant landlord, living on his property at Avondale in Co. Wicklow. Nothing, either in appearance or temperament, could be further removed from the popular ideal of the Irishman as it was embodied in the person of the last "uncrowned king of Ireland," O'Connell. The new claimant for that title was outwardly cold, impassive, and chilling, even to his followers; the outside world he confronted with a careless nonchalance which resented familiarity and seemed to ask for nothing. He was ignorant of public affairs and read few books. Such information as he needed in debate he picked up from others, or got others to look up for him. He quickly mastered the rules of debate, but he had no ambition to become a practised public speaker, and to make an oration was always painful to him. At times it seemed that he went out of his way to show his contempt of popularity, amounting almost to a contempt of humanity. When, in December 1883, it was decided to present him with the magnificent tribute of £40,000 collected among his admirers and friends his only remark was: "Is it made payable to order and crossed?" No words of thanks or sign of gratitude.[4]

[4] R. Barry O'Brien, Life of Charles Stewart Parnell, 11, 28.

While mass meetings which he was to address were waiting in Ireland for his appearance he might be found watching for the arrival of Mrs. O'Shea at some railway station in London or reading quietly in her room at Eltham. "I found out early in political life," he would say, "that they think I'm much more wonderful when I do nothing than when I'm working hard."[5] When the first of the forged incriminating letters in The Times was shown to him long after the rest of the London world had read it and come to the hasty conclusion that Home Rule had received its deathblow, all he remarked after looking at it carefully was: "I did not make an s like that since 1878." No wonder that his friends thought that if he were going to treat the letter in that way in the House there was not an Englishman but would believe that he had written it. On all critical occasions in his life this same impassive attitude distressed his supporters and baulked his enemies.

[5] Katherine O'Shea (Mrs. C. S. Parnell), Charles Stewart Parnell, i, 199.

It is no doubt true that Parnell looked even on the men of his own party rather as counters in the political game he had sat down to play than as friends and confidants. In response to a plea from Mrs. O'Shea that "after all they were human beings" he would answer characteristically, "In politics, as in war, there are no men, only weapons."[6] When his will was thwarted he would fling out of the party even a man who had been useful to him in former days, saying, "While I am leader they are my tools, or they go."[7] A man so autocratic made few personal friends and had, among his party, no confidants. He held himself aloof, and his very aloofness surrounded him with that attraction which an impenetrable mystery always provokes. But the world was not wrong in believing that there were fires smouldering beneath the impassive exterior, and that he was a man of strong feeling. Parnell was in truth a man of two passions, which absorbed, controlled, and dominated his life. For the attainment of both of these aims he was ready to employ all means, lawful and unlawful; to go through any suffering; and to sacrifice ruthlessly both himself and others.

[6] Ibid,, ii., 240.

[7] Ibid., 243-244.

The passion which controlled his private life was his love for Mrs. O'Shea, who shortly before his death became his wife; the passion of his public life was the desire to lift Ireland out of the rut of hopeless postponements of relief and to see her set on the paths of national progress and prosperity. His concern for his country began, as it would appear, from the epoch of the executions of Allen, Larkin, and O'Brien, "the Manchester Martyrs," but it was more probably instilled into the boy at an earlier date by his mother, who was a strong Nationalist, and by his sisters, Anna and Fanny Parnell, the founders of the Ladies' Land League, which he suppressed in 1882, denouncing its criminality and wild extravagance and saying that it had taken the country out of his hands. He had in his early days no intention of taking up a political career. He was interested in his property in Wicklow, busied in investigating its mineral resources, and preparing to take a course in geology at the Royal College of Science in Dublin, when his life as an Irish squireen was changed by a halfhearted effort to secure a seat in Parliament.

The bent of Parnell's mind was scientific, and all through his life he fell back on engineering and chemistry as his absorbing hobbies. His interest in his crucibles was so great that even on the morning of The Times attack he put off reading the paper for two hours while he completed some chemical work and jotted down results. It was a chance remark dropped at the dinner-table of his sister, Mrs Dickenson, that led Parnell to think of entering Parliament, but to his intimates he appeared likely to prove a hopeless failure in a political career. He struck them as wanting both in political knowledge and capacity. When Parnell entered Parliament Butt was the undisputed leader of the Irish party; Bill after Bill in reference to Ireland was introduced, but none of them got through. To Parnell it appeared a terrible waste of time; he despised all the talking which ended in nothing. Slowly he set himself to form a party, strictly disciplined, entirely dependent on himself, and answering to his every call. His policy outside the House and within it was practically the same; in the House he obstructed, not special Bills, but all Bills and every detail of business.

The lesson he had learned from Biggar on the day when he entered the House he perfected into a fine art. The House would not carry Irish Bills; he therefore determined that his lieutenants should talk out every Bill presented; his object being to throw the whole machinery of Parliament out of gear. By 1877 he had organized the party, and Butt, who disapproved of such treatment of the Parliamentary institutions which he reverenced, withdrew and was formally deposed from the leadership of the Home Rule party, William Shaw being elected in his place in 1879. But the feeling that in Parliament the government of England was being challenged and thwarted had a great effect in Ireland, where Davitt was lecturing on a peasant proprietary. The "sheer tenacity" of Parnell, who carried war into the very citadel of the "enemy," struck them as a new departure. He was busy organizing the Land League, and he was in touch with the Fenians, though he never became one of that body.

There was no organization that he would not have used if he thought it would have promoted the ends he had in view, and the New Fenian movement was demanding separation from England and the establishment of peasant proprietorship. In the latter proposal Parnell agreed, and at a Land League meeting at Westport in 1879 he called on the farmers and peasants to "show the landlords that you intend to hold a firm grip of your homesteads and land." Those landlords that resisted were to be boycotted mercilessly. This was Parnell's land policy. He stood in a peculiar position, leaning on the one hand on the Fenians and the Clan-na-Gael, their American associates, but on the other hand still determined to employ Parliamentary methods. He won the hearts of the rank and file of these revolutionary bodies, whose earnestness and fearlessness he admired, by "walking on the verge of treason-felony,"[8] though he held the violent spirits back until he had once more given constitutional opposition a trial. Two new advances in position had been more clearly formulated since Parnell took up the reins—Irish peasant-ownership and separation from England.

[8] R. Barry O'Brien, Life of Charles Stewart Parnell, ii, 29.

In April 1880 came the general election which placed Gladstone in power, with Forster as Chief Secretary and Lord Cowper as Viceroy of Ireland. Parnell was returned for three constituencies and chose to sit for Cork City. He was also elected leader of the Nationalist party, and, in Gladstone's words, there rushed upon him like a flood a social revolution with the Land League for its organ in Ireland and Parnell's party as its organ in Parliament. Agrarian agitation and Parliamentary obstruction were to inarch hand in hand. Gladstone explained to the Queen that the state of Ireland was menacing, and Forster, whom Gladstone was later to describe as "a very impracticable man placed in a position of great responsibility," introduced a Coercion Bill which practically enabled the Viceroy to lock up anyone he pleased and for as long as he pleased. The Land League was increasing in power every day, and the country was in a state of violent agitation. Forster professed to believe that if the "village tyrants" who were committing outrages were arrested the disorder would stop, while Parnell called on the Government to cure wrongs and stop convictions, if they wished crime to disappear.

With the League behind him he was ready to defy the House. After a continuous obstruction of several days the closure was applied by the Speaker, and the Bill passed. The Coercion Bill was followed by the Land Bill of 1881, of which we have already spoken. It had as its basis the long-debated "Three F's." It was a good Bill, and it passed by a majority of two to one. But Parnell continued the agitation, and used all his authority to keep the tenants from seeking to have their rents fixed by the Land Commission. "He desired," Gladstone said, "to spread the plague, not to stop it." He made defiant speeches at Maryborough and Wexford, and on October 12 the Cabinet decided on his arrest. The step was taken largely to prevent his interference with the working of the Act and to give it a fair chance of quieting the country, and, as such, it seems to have been justified. The Land League had to advance or retire, and Parnell was determined to keep it alive for further efforts. He was detained with other political prisoners for six months in a light confinement at Kilmainham, and Ireland became once more a prey to violence and disorder. Agrarian outrages increased, and 'moonlighting,' raids terrified peaceable inhabitants. The "No-Rent" campaign was actively at work, and Parnell's own tenants were "acting strictly up to it."[9]

[9] Ibid., i, 335.

A new turn was now given to events. It was decided to release Parnell and the "suspects," to recall Forster, and to send in his place Lord Frederick Cavendish, a high-minded man and good friend to Ireland. Parnell expressed his readiness to advise the tenants to settle with the landlords, to withdraw the "No-Rent" manifesto, and to discourage outrages, if the Government would make a favourable settlement of the question of arrears. In Forster's words he offered "that the conspiracy that had been used to get up boycotting and outrages should be put down by the same means," and a union made with the Liberal party on certain conditions respecting an arrears settlement. "If all England," he added, "cannot govern the Hon. Member for Cork, then let us acknowledge that he is the greatest power in all Ireland to-day." Gladstone found Parnell's letter with these proposals "the most extraordinary he had ever read," and felt highly gratified. The Viceroy saw matters in another light, and resigned; on May 2, 1882, Parnell, O'Kelly, and Dillon walked out of prison, and a few days later, while Forster was speaking against the policy of his release, Parnell, amid deafening cheers, resumed his place in the House. It seemed for the moment that what came to be called "the Kilmainham Treaty" between Gladstone and Parnell might be the beginning of better things, when one of those thunderclaps occurred which have so often darkened the skies of Ireland on critical occasions. The news was flashed round the world that on the very day when the new Lord-Lieutenant, Earl Spencer, had made his state entry into Dublin the new Chief Secretary and his Under-Secretary, Thomas Henry Burke, walking out to the Viceregal Lodge in Phoenix Park, were set on by a band of assassins from the "Invincibles" and stabbed to death.

The horror that fell on the whole community on that day will never be forgotten in this generation. The assassins, as it turned out afterwards, did not even recognize Lord Frederick Cavendish; they aimed at killing Burke. Parnell, for once, was shaken out of his self-command; he was prostrated alike by the crime and by the effect it must have on his campaign. The forces of evil with which he had dallied had risen against him to destroy the work on which his heart was set. He offered to resign, and made a straightforward speech in the House condemning the murders, while the Government reverted to their Crimes legislation. But Ministers kept their word about the Arrears Bill; Parnell, too, kept his, and slowed down agitation. Henceforth he wished solely to advance Home Rule, for which purpose he established the National League, though keeping in the background the ultimate aim of a peasant proprietary of land. He became more moderate, and more in horror of anarchy, though he felt the result of moderation in the loss of the more violent of his supporters; Davitt and Dillon disapproved his course, and Brennan and Egan denounced his "moderation." Parnell's inexorable will and dauntless courage were sorely tried, but he held his party together by his commanding personality and at moments by an irresistible charm. He refused, however, to take any active part in the "Plan of Campaign" launched by William O'Brien for the purpose of keeping alive agitation and forcing the landlords to accept what the tenants considered a fair rent, and for a time he practically retired from public life.

He was ill and disheartened, and while at Kilmainham he had come to the conclusion that "everything connected with the Land League movement was hollow and wanting in solidity."[10] Lord Spencer had a hard task to face when he reached Dublin, and his régime was fiercely attacked. Random arrests, trials for sedition, and packed juries gave plenty of fuel for the Land League campaign; it was gravely questioned whether several of the executed men were the real culprits. Meanwhile, dynamite plots, boldly supported by the Irish World and financed from America, spread from Ireland to England, where arms and dynamite factories were discovered and attempts made to blow up public buildings in the Metropolis. There was an epidemic of outrages, and the social fabric in Ireland seemed to rock. The country appeared to be a society on the eve of dissolution. Landlords and sheriffs alike were intimidated. Gladstone believed that Parnell was the one restraining influence which kept down outrage, and his Cabinet was convinced that he "was sincerely anxious for the pacification of Ireland."[11] Parnell was engaged in welding into a compact body his adherents in the Commons, with the intention of making the independent Nationalist party the arbiter of the fate of the two opposed English parties and forcing from them the reforms he demanded. The 1885 election was to be fought on new lines, for Gladstone's Reform Act of 1884 had added some 500,000 electors, largely Home Rulers, to the poll.

[10] Katherine O'Shea, Charles Stewart Parnell, i, 235-236.

[11] Morley, Life of Gladstone, iii, 70.

Ever since his release from Kilmainham the Irish leader had been coquetting with various members of the Tory party.

Lord Randolph Churchill repudiated the policy of coercion and foreshadowed a change of policy. Chamberlain was strongly in favour of a large measure of local government for Ireland, with a central council in Dublin. Above all, Lord Carnarvon, the Viceroy, appeared sincerely attached to the plan of Home Rule, but feared that he would find difficulties with his colleagues in the Cabinet. Negotiations were set on foot, and were carried on, when not directly with the Irish leader, by means of intermediaries, among them being Captain O'Shea with Chamberlain and Mrs. O'Shea with Gladstone, Parnell took the field and raised the banner of Home Rule, declaring that he had only one plank, Legislative Independence. But his speeches met with a united note of hostility from the Tory Press, and the party wavered under the threat of a strong adverse vote at the coming election. As they cooled, Gladstone became more propitious, and Parnell's promise that "Whigs and Tories would be seen vying with each other to settle the Irish question" was actually becoming true. The Liberals came in by a majority of eighty-two, and Parnell had behind him a solid party of eighty-six Home Rulers, which he could use to force the situation on either side.[12]

[12] The Elections sent 333 Liberals, 251 Tories, and 86 Parnellites to Parliament.

English parties were reduced to a state of impotence, and Parnell proposed to keep them so till the question of Home Rule was settled. He was at this moment one of the most powerful and most unpopular men in England. But he remained convinced that no Government would do more for Ireland than it was forced to do. In 1885 Lord Salisbury accepted office with reluctance, not only because of serious differences within his own party, but because of the uncertainty of the Irish vote. His fears were realized; a Coercion Bill was introduced and within a month the Government was defeated on an amendment of Jesse Collings on an Agricultural Bill, and Gladstone again took office. But the diversity of views in the Cabinet on the Irish question at once came to the front, and Chamberlain, who remained firm to his plan for local government, withdrew, carrying with him Trevelyan and Sir Charles Dilke. The first business was to draft a Government of Ireland Bill. A year before, when Lord Hartington expressed his dissent from Gladstone's then half-formed plans, the elder man had prophesied that in the end there would have to be given "at least what they [Chamberlain and Dilke] recommend."

But the success of the Home Rule party at the polls had led the Nationalists "to raise their terms," and any measure of local government, however extended, had now no chance of being accepted. Gladstone's present policy shaped itself into two measures, a Home Rule Bill establishing a domestic legislature to deal with Irish affairs, and a Land Purchase Bill for buying out the landlords and creating a peasant proprietary, but the latter Bill was quickly dropped. Parnell fought for good financial terms, and by his close, tenacious mastery of details won the approval of the greatest financier of his time. "He never slurred over difficulties, nor tried to pretend that rough was smooth...Of constructive faculty he never showed a trace...But he knew what he wanted."[13] The chief point of antagonism was the question of the retention or exclusion of Irish Members from Westminster, the limits of their interference, and what branches of legislation were to be excluded from the purview of the Irish Parliament; but the Bill was hammered into shape, and introduced in a crowded House on April 8, 1886. The debate was long, serious, and brilliant. Lord Hartington and Chamberlain opposed the Bill along with John Bright, who had many times in the past spoken in favour of Irish claims. Lord Salisbury made an alarmist speech, and Chamberlain discussed federation.

[13] Morley, Life of Gladstone, iii, 304-305.

Every individual in the three kingdoms seemed to feel himself effected by the Bill, and fought for or against it. Some accepted the principle of the Bill, but demurred upon detail, but, on the whole, it was discovered that a widespread desire existed throughout the country to give the Irish people greater control over their own affairs. Parnell's speeches were masterly, grave, and responsible, and were said by a competent judge "to make even able disputants on either side look little better than amateurs."[14] He hesitated over the exclusion of customs and excise from the control of the Irish Parliament and at the contribution of £3,344,000 to the Imperial Exchequer, but on May 10, he said that he believed the Irish people would accept the measure as a final settlement. Gladstone, then seventy-six years of age, pleaded with passion and oratory for his Bill. Yet when the division was taken the Bill was lost by thirty votes, and Gladstone dissolved Parliament. A Unionist majority of no was declared at the polls, and Gladstone resigned.

[14] Ibid., iii, 337. For a summary of the Bill, see ibid., iii, 559, Appendix.

On March 7, 1887, the first of the letters on "Parnellism and Crime" appeared in The Times. Into that sordid attempt to incriminate Parnell by the use of forged letters, it is unnecessary to go. Pigott, who had been paid to write them shot himself after the trial. The case dragged on for months before a Special Commission, but though it threw much light on the working of secret societies in Ireland it failed to convict Parnell of complicity.[15] On his acquittal he was received in the House with a great ovation, every member of the assembly rising and cheering himself hoarse. But the moment of triumph was brief. On December 24, 1889, the long-expected blow fell, and Captain O'Shea filed a petition for divorce on the ground of Parnell's adultery with his wife. A divorce was granted, and Parnell married Mrs. O'Shea, but the matter was taken up strenuously by different sections of the public, and Gladstone wrote a letter saying that he would retire from the leadership of the Liberal party if Parnell did not retire. Parnell had just been re-elected leader of the Nationalist party, but Gladstone's letter split the party, and he was called upon to resign. A short time later Parnell was no more. He died at Brighton on October 6, 1891.

[15] Although the Special Commission which tried Parnell failed to convict him of complicity in crime or responsibility for overt illegal acts, the remarkable book published by Patrick P. Tynan, who was known as "Number One," called The Irish National Invincibles and their Times (1894), shows that he considered such illegal organizations as a necessary part of the Land League policy, and was quite prepared to use them as occasion arose. "Number One" was the commanding officer of the military Invincibles in Dublin City. The organization sprang into existence immediately after the suppression of the Land League and was "the creation of the Parnellite Irish Government." "It must be distinctly understood that the creation of this new and important Irish organization, or rather the transferring of the braver and more determined members of the Land League into the National Invincibles, was not the work of subordinates in the Parnellite ranks. It was the action of those who governed the movement...In a word, the Invincibles sprang into existence by order of the Parnellite Government of Ireland, elected by the Irish nation" (p. 428). Again (on p. 439) he says: "This history cannot be too emphatic in stating that the Parnellism of that epoch and the Invincibles were one and the same in actual fact, and the policy of this active movement, its authority, its armament (such as it was) sprang from the organised ranks of 'legal agitation.'" Parnell himself, speaking in America in 1880, had asserted the necessity of having both a constitutional and an illegal arm in any revolutionary movement in Ireland; it should use the constitutional weapon for its own purposes, but take advantage of its secret organization when occasion offered (p. 137). It seems clear, therefore, that Parnell cannot be acquitted of having organized and permitted criminal acts when it suited the purpose of his policy. [End of Note 15.]

It is difficult to define the secret of Parnell's influence over his followers. He had none of the arts of popularity, neither oratory, wit, or subservience to the demands of his audience. Often, when they expected to be roused, his manner and words chilled them; he met his admirers with frigidity when they looked for cordiality, and, in later life, in proportion as the veteran statesman who fought his battles glowed with enthusiasm, Parnell displayed an unsympathetic and almost cynical manner. English society bored him, and he showed the contempt he felt for it. Yet he was capable of rousing large Irish audiences to a pitch of excitement which only O'Connell had been able to equal, and the ablest men of the day felt and acknowledged his power. Gladstone admired his business-like way of approaching great questions and his clear head for finance. He ascribed much of his influence to the fact that Parnell always said exactly what he meant and no more, and Parnell, in return, recognized alone in Gladstone a force of will and a Parliamentary resource equal to and even surpassing his own. His great and rare gift of dominating men and controlling them Gavan Duffy ascribes to his intense individuality, and Chamberlain to his tenacity of purpose, which made him indifferent to anything which stood in the way of the aim he had in view. Ireland, which is quick to recognize sincere devotion to her interests, saw in him a man solely bent on serving her cause; and she repaid him by an unquestioning obedience. Men understood his purpose who disapproved his methods, and they learned by experience that his judgment in tactics seldom failed. Mrs. O'Shea, seeing him from another angle, compared him to a volcano under a sheet of snow.

END OF CHAPTER XXI

XXII.—JOHN REDMOND AND HOME RULE

Into the wild hurricane of passions which were let loose both in Ireland and in England by the downfall of Parnell it is unnecessary to enter. The negotiations before his death between himself and the other members of the Parliamentary party in "Room 15" at Westminster and at Boulogne had forced on Parnell the necessity of retirement from the leadership of the party. Sexton and Healy on one side and Redmond on Parnell's side argued with much gravity the position of the Home Rule cause in the new circumstances. "When it becomes a question of selling our leader to buy an alliance," said John Redmond, "it would be well to see what we are getting for the price." "It is true that I have a feeling of personal loyalty," he added, addressing Parnell, "but it is not a personal motive that animates me; it is because I believe that your maintenance is necessary to the success of our cause."[1]

[1] L. G. Redmond-Howard, John Redmond, p. 58. The story of the negotiations is told in much detail by William O'Brien, in An Olive Branch in Ireland.

In Ireland there had been at first a disposition to overlook the private delinquencies of the leader and to reaffirm confidence in his statesmanship. To a large number of his followers Parnell had, in Mr. Healy's words, become "not so much a man as an institution." A mass meeting in Dublin, addressed by Redmond, declared that his continuance as leader was essential to the Home Rule cause. But three influences worked to render his return impossible. The first was Parnell's own manifesto, which was couched in a fighting tone, and was disapproved by several members of his party, who declared themselves unable to support it; the second was the vehement attack made on him by the Irish bishops, on the ground that his private life unfitted him to hold the post of political leader; the final cause was the declaration of Gladstone that he would not enter into negotiations with the party while Parnell remained as its chief. It was this decision of Gladstone's, forced on him by the Nonconformist supporters of the Liberal party, which split the Parnellite group and ended in the withdrawal of forty-four members, led by Justin McCarthy, William O'Brien, Davitt, Sexton, and Healy. Parnell's last days were spent in rushing backward and forward between Ireland and Brighton, fighting the bishops and priests, and vainly endeavouring to rally his scattered adherents. The fierce struggle hastened his end, and all parties were struck with horror as the news of his death went abroad. One of those vast funeral assemblies in which it was becoming the custom for Irish sentiment to manifest itself [2] accompanied the remains of Parnell to his grave at Glasnevin Cemetery, and in New York all flags were flown at half-mast. A message from that city expressed one of the opinions dominant at the moment: "There can never be union between the two factions until the priests of Ireland are driven from the platform back to their pulpits."[3]

[2] The first of these mass funeral processions was in honour of Terence Bellew McManus, one of the '48 leaders, whose body was brought over from San Francisco in 1861 to be buried in Dublin ; the second was for "the Manchester Martyrs," the Fenians executed in 1867 ; Parnell's was the third.

[3] L. G. Redmond-Howard, op. cit., p. 71.

The question who was to succeed Parnell was one of great importance. Whoever was chosen had a hard task before him. He had to face violent opposition from the public in England and a doubtful support from the hitherto friendly Liberal party. Behind were the divided forces of the Parnellites and anti-Parnellites, hurling fierce epithets at each other across the fresh grave of the chief, and contesting seats against each other at the polls. John Redmond was beaten at "rebel Cork," Parnell's old constituency, but was elected for Waterford against Davitt. He had been closely connected with the last days of the leader and had organized Parnell's funeral, but he was, to a large extent, an untried man; even Parnell had recognized in him no outstanding capacity for leadership. Redmond came to the front chiefly because of his fidelity to the dead chief, but with little prestige or promise of support.

The elections of 1892 left him with only ten followers at Westminster, after a squalid faction fight, and of the eighty-five Home Rulers of all parties who were returned to Parliament, one of them says that the "one-man power" of Parnell was replaced by "eighty-man powerlessness under, not one leader, but a dozen." It was not an encouraging prospect for an inexperienced man. But Redmond, in spite of the forebodings of his enemies, quickly showed that he had unsuspected powers. He had reason to fear that Gladstone, in the new circumstances, would take up a mild policy with regard to Home Rule, in order to disarm his followers, but Redmond demanded a thorough and final settlement which would prove satisfactory to the Irish people. His speech on Gladstone's second Home Rule Bill, introduced on February 13, 1893, which only differed from his first Bill of 1886 in retaining the Irish Members in the Imperial Parliament, was, says Sir Henry Lucy, the Parliamentary chronicler, "a revelation...To-day he strode into the front rank of Parliamentary debaters Mr. Redmond's oratorical style, as the House discovered, is based on a substratum of solid knowledge, sound commonsense, and a statesmanlike capacity to review a complicated situation." To the position which Redmond took up on that occasion he remained true throughout his career. He did not stand on the same platform as that of his old chief.

Redmond was never a separatist, as Parnell was at heart, but he believed that the measure of Home Rule to be given to Ireland should be full and free. "I challenge anyone in this House," he exclaimed in one of his speeches, "to quote a statement of mine...that so long as we remain partners in the Empire at all, and so long as the Act of Union remains unrepealed, the supremacy of the Imperial Parliament is to be or can be abrogated. We have maintained that the concession of free institutions in Ireland means that you have put trust in the Irish people, and that the interference of this Parliament in the working of those institutions would be absolutely inconsistent...The issue is," he said earlier in the debate, "whether this Parliament will confer on Ireland the management of her own affairs."[4] As a Nationalist, he did not regard with favour the idea of the exclusion of Ireland's voice from the councils of an Empire "which the genius and valour of her sons have done so much to build up, and of which she is to remain a part." At a later date he used even more forcible words with regard to separation. "To talk about Ireland separating from the Empire," he declared, "is the most utter nonsense. We are not asking for separation." "Separation," he said again, "is impossible; if it were not impossible, it is undesirable." In these utterances we find a new note, very unlike the rigid insularity of Parnell's views.

[4] R. B. O'Brien, Home Rule Speeches of John Redmond, pp. 42-45.

In Redmond's outlook there was something of the Imperialist, of the travelled man, who saw Ireland in relation to the larger world, not with the narrower vision of the home-reared politician. A free and self-governing Ireland, with full control of its own affairs, but in which Imperial interests would be safeguarded, was the ideal which filled his mind, and which at times, as at the moment when he offered the aid of Ireland in the Great War, startled even England with the note of sincerity which rang through its utterance. The Canadian position was always present to his mind, and he looked forward to an autonomous and prosperous Ireland on similar lines, bound by ties of mutual benefit to the neighbouring country. The circumstances of Redmond's early life partly explain this attitude. He was the descendant of an old Norman house, the Raymonds of Strongbow's invasion, and his father, William Archer Redmond, a man of polished manners and natural capacity, was a Wexford landlord who had represented his constituency as a Home Ruler in the Parliament of 1872. His mother was a daughter of General Hoey. John Redmond, who was born in 1857, and his father had both entered Trinity College, Dublin, after receiving their school education, the father at Stonyhurst, the son at Clongowes College. The family had many connexions with the Army and the elder Redmond lived, as did many others, an ordinary country gentleman's life, proud of his country and fond of farming, fishing, and literature. When young Redmond threw in his lot with the Land League it was something of a shock to his relations, who kept aloof from the extremists of the popular party. The family belonged to that very considerable body of Irish Catholic country gentlemen and proprietors whose allegiance to the Crown was never disputed and who, with the merchants and professional men of the middle classes, kept the country quiet in the midst of many attempts to disturb it. The existence of this conservative body of Catholic opinion has too often been ignored by writers on Irish affairs, but it has been an important factor in the history of the country.[5]

[5] It is remarkable that the representatives of the three old Gaelic provincial reigning houses, the O'Conors Don of Connacht, the O'Briens of Munster, and the Kavanaghs of Leinster, have for many centuries, with the single exception of William Smith O'Brien, had no connexion with any rebellious rising. The family of the O'Conor Don have been leading loyalists; and Arthur McMurrough Kavanagh sat for many years as a Unionist Member in the House of Commons. His son became a Home Ruler.

John Redmond's early Parliamentary experiences were of a stirring description. He entered the House of Commons for the first time as Member for New Ross on that eventful night when, after a sitting of forty-one hours, the closure was first applied. Parnell was on his legs "with pale cheeks and drawn face, his hands clenched behind his back, facing without flinching a continuous roar of interruptions." It was between seven and eight o'clock on a dark and cold winter's morning. No one knew what was going to happen. But at eight o'clock the Speaker ordered the debate to end; and the Irish Members, after protests, left the Chamber in a body. The following day Redmond had an experience absolutely unique in Parliamentary history. He took his oath and seat, made his maiden speech, and was suspended and expelled from the House all on the same evening, along with thirty-seven other Irish Members.[6] Hardly less disturbing was his reception in Australia, to which country he was sent by Parnell on a Nationalist organizing tour with his brother, William Redmond, while Parnell was imprisoned in Kilmainham. They arrived at the moment when the examiners of the informer, Carey, after the Phoenix Park murders, had endeavoured to establish a connexion between these crimes and certain prominent Land Leaguers. So strong was the feeling excited in the Dominion that all halls were closed to the emissaries, and Redmond was threatened with expulsion from the colonies. It was only the Irish working men and the Fenians that made the mission a success.

[6] Redmond, Speeches, pp. 77-79.

In Australia John Redmond and his brother met their future wives, and it is to these experiences that we may very possibly ascribe the future Irish leader's widened views. We find, from his speeches, that the position of Australia and Canada had made a great impression on his mind, and led him to look to a similar agreement as the best solution of the Irish question. But he had a difficult team to drive. An adherent of Parnell, closely associated with his Parliamentary career, says of Parnell's party in the House that he had as active a band of supporters as it had ever been the fortune of any Irish political leader to command. "They are always on the spot, whenever their presence is required and often when it is not. They never lose an opportunity of striking a blow for 'the cause.' They are independent, persistent, courageous. They have no respect for persons or for things. Genius has no charms for them and rank no allurement...The study of political history they consider a waste of time...They talk frequently and often well. They denounce freely and abuse without stint. In all they say and do they keep one object ever in sight,...the 'smashing' of the House of Commons as the sole means of securing the legislative independence of Ireland."[7] Parnell's solid destructive party was now to be broken into three, each with its own organization and its own Press, Dillon controlling the Freeman, Healy the Daily Nation, and Redmond the Independent, while behind and somewhat apart from all three was William O'Brien's "United Irish League," established in Westport in 1898, which was destined to become a power in the constituencies. The latter was a democratic movement directed to making the people of each constituency self-governing within their own bounds, and as such it attracted the approval of Davitt, who saw in it a means of lay control of the polls and of restoring the demoralized Parliamentary party to new life and vigour.[8]

[7] R. B. O'Brien, Fifty Years of Concessions to Ireland, ii, p. 338.

[8] William O'Brien, An Olive Branch in Ireland, pp. 89, 104, 106.

The three still outstanding questions relating to Ireland which Redmond had to face were the Land, Education, and Home Rule. The second Home Rule Bill of Gladstone had been rejected by the Lords and Gladstone had retired from public life. He was succeeded by Lord Rosebery, who 'hung up' the question and who was shortly to be replaced by a Unionist administration, under which Gerald Balfour went to the Irish Office with a policy of internal reform which came to be humorously described as "killing Home Rule with kindness." Henceforth it was not to be contended that reforms were to be obtained for Ireland only by agitation and turbulence, for Ireland was comparatively peaceful. It was, moreover, determined that instead of imposing measures for the benefit of Ireland from outside, Irish leaders of opinion should themselves advise as to the best means of advancing local government and land legislation. Some beginnings had already been made in this direction.

From the year 1889 a few Irishmen had set themselves to arouse the rural population and direct it along new lines of self-help and industrial effort. To bring their produce up to a high standard of quality and to secure its rapid distribution, above all, to reduce the takings of the distributors or middlemen within reasonable dimensions and so secure more remunerative returns to the farmer, was the beneficial programme taken up by a number of gentlemen, among whom the names of Lord Monteagle, Sir Horace Plunkett, Mr. R. A. Anderson, and Mr. George Russell, better known as "A. E.," will always be honourably remembered. Their long and arduous labours, founded upon a study of agricultural conditions in such largely agricultural countries as Denmark and Sweden, and the introduction of improved machinery and implements, promised a revival of agriculture under more remunerative conditions. Above all, the system adopted by them from abroad of co-operative banks and creameries, established on a considerable scale, promised relief from the 'gombeen man' who, by his loans and exactions, held a large part of the peasant population in a ruinous sort of slavery. By the year 1894 the movement had gathered volume to such an extent that the Irish Agricultural Organization Society was formed, of which Sir Horace Plunkett was elected first President, with the assistance of Lord Monteagle and the Rev.T. A. Finlay, S.J., to propagate economic principles and assist the agricultural population with advice and practical help.

The movement, in spite of denunciations by enemies of all sorts, 'caught on,' and by 1903 over eight hundred societies had been formed all over the country, and the trade turnover had been reached of nearly £2,000,000 a year. The lessons of self-help and business independence learned by the small farmers through the co-operative system, which was conducted by themselves, cannot be reckoned in any terms of actual money profit; it was incalculable. On another side, women of all classes associated themselves to teach thrift, cooking, and the care of the home and children to the poorer classes in the country, while the Gaelic League, which had been founded in 1893 and which was now beginning to be heard of, not only interested the people in the revival of their own language, but made rural life happier by the restoration of the native music and dances and by encouraging libraries and lectures in the scattered villages. An immense interest in the betterment of both urban and rural life began to unite all classes in a common sense of nationality.

One result of the new movement was to bring the much and often unjustly abused landlords again into touch with actual life. The moment the way of definite usefulness was opened to them a number of these educated and experienced Irishmen sprang into the gap. Most of them lived on their properties and knew the actual conditions of life. They showed themselves just, moderate, and sagacious in the matters now to be brought before them. Under Gerald Balfour a number of important committees were formed to deal with the development of Irish agricultural and industrial resources. The most important in its results was the Recess Committee, so-called because it met during the Parliamentary recess; it was summoned by a letter from Sir Horace Plunkett setting out the general scope and purpose of the scheme. It was to consist of men of all political parties, and was to include alike representatives of the landlord class and of the farmers and merchants, practical men of business. Unfortunately the invitation suggested that if the effort to make the people happy and successful should prove effective the desire and demand for Home Rule would probably cease.

Plunkett belonged by birth and tradition to the Unionist party, and at that time held that Home Rule, far from solving the country's problems, would only increase them. This view, though it was the one adopted at the moment by the Government, was not likely to commend itself to the Home Rule party. The Dillonites were suspicious, and Justin McCarthy refused to take any part in the conference. On the other hand, Colonel Saunderson, the leader of the Ulster Unionists, declared that he would not sit on a committee with Redmond. It looked like a deadlock. But John Redmond, who acted throughout, as Sir Horace says, "in a manner that was broad, statesmanlike, conciliatory, and as generous as it was courageous," wrote that he was unwilling to take the responsibility of declining to aid in any effort to promote useful legislation for Ireland; he joined the committee with his small following, along with Unionists like The O'Conor Don and Lord Mayo, and he supported its recommendations in Parliament.[9] The committee, when formed, included men of the most diverse shades of political and religious opinion, who probably would never in other circumstances have met on any platform. The material outcome of their deliberations was the formation of the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction, under whose auspices a number of existing agricultural, artistic, and scientific departments were re-grouped, and to which special branches for the protection of fisheries and other industries were added. In the more far-reaching domain of social life, it united in a common effort for the benefit of their country Irishmen drawn from different ranks of life and of very various political views.

[9] Sir Horace Plunkett, Ireland in the New Century, pp. 214-217.

They learned to appreciate and understand each other and many crude hereditary prejudices were modified; and it proved that the sense of a national life was not confined to any one party, but was the common heritage of all as Irishmen.

The Department set vigorously to work, instructing, advising, and assisting the small farmer, and introducing better methods to those working on a larger scale; it endeavoured to stimulate co-operation instead of competition, and led, by its co-operative banks, to greater thrift and economy in working. It worked in connexion with the Congested Districts Board, which had been established during Arthur Balfour's short term of office as Chief Secretary with the object of securing plots of good land or waste pasturage for tenants with very small holdings and removing them, where necessary, from economically hopeless positions to better lands. The title of the Board was ludicrously inappropriate; there were and are plenty of congested areas in towns like Dublin or Belfast; there certainly were none in the sparsely populated wilds of Connacht. The population of Connacht was decreasing with terrible rapidity; and miles of empty country that might have sustained existence were lying waste. But the intention of the scheme, to watch over the conditions of industry and assist the peasants in the most forlorn districts in the west of Ireland, was excellent; and long after Lord Balfour's severe coercion laws are forgotten men will remember his efforts to open up the poverty-stricken districts on the western seaboards by the creation of light railways; to encourage fisheries; and to ameliorate the lot of the worst-housed cottiers by more sanitary and better-built habitations. The fault of the system, as it was worked, was that it made the people too dependent on outside help; but this was a fault in the local administration, not in the design. After a long experience of industrial reorganization it was the belief of the man who has been well described as "the brain of the movement" for the rebuilding of rural Ireland from within, that not only is self-help a necessity, but "that the poorer a community is, the more essential is it to throw it as much as possible on its own resources, in order to develop self-reliance."[10]

[10] Sir Horace Plunkett, op. cit., pp. 245, 290-291.

A very important movement was initiated in 1894, largely through Redmond's energy, to inquire into the financial relations between Great Britain and Ireland, the Report of the Commission showing, according to the calculations then made, that the smaller country was being overtaxed to the extent of 2 3/4 millions per annum. A still more forward step was taken by the passing of Gerald Balfour's Local Government Bill of 1898, which, in Redmond's words, "made the Irish people masters of all the finance and local affairs of Ireland," and which he warmly welcomed as a step in the direction of Home Rule. In 1900 Redmond's hands were strengthened by the reunion of a large number of the party under his leadership, Dillon having announced his resignation of the chairmanship of the anti-Parnellites. The 'party pledge' by which these Members bound themselves, undertaking to sit and vote only with their party, and to accept no office under Government, thus giving up for the benefit of their cause all hope of promotion, welded them into a compact body and bound them to their leader in a remarkable way; it was a severe test of their devotion to the principles they represented in the House. But in the country Healy, Davitt, or William O'Brien was more popular, especially during the period of the Boer War, which Ireland strongly disapproved, and to which some of the extremists sent a brigade to fight against the English troops—an act which excited much anger in England and threatened to postpone indefinitely the further consideration of Home Rule.

The Imperialist wing of the Liberal party refused all connexion with men who had provided a contingent to fight on the side of the enemies of their country; and Redmond found his position increasingly difficult. His speech on the Boer War was admirable; it put the Irish point of view with great skill and temperance of language; men of weight were learning to listen to his arguments with respect and to rely with confidence on his judgment. His acceptance of the leadership of the reunited party had thrown him out of the ranks of the extremists, and he held his party together as much by the personal regard that he inspired as by his consummate tact in leading them. The strong Unionist party that was returned to power on the conclusion of the Boer War seemed likely to postpone Irish affairs indefinitely. But a number of incidents showed that events were becoming more favourable to their consideration. Chief of these was the appointment of George Wyndham, who was pledged to a policy of Land Reform, as Chief Secretary; early in his term of office he brought in the Land Purchase Bill of 1903, which was supported by Redmond and by William O'Brien, with the weight of the United Irish League behind him.

Associated with Wyndham was another administrator who was sent over with the express purpose of seeking a settlement. This was Sir Antony (later Lord) MacDonnell, who had during a period of service in India, where he had been offered the Governorship of Bombay, been largely responsible for a scheme of land settlement in that country. That he was a Catholic and a Home Ruler made his appointment by a Unionist Government all the more remarkable, and showed a desire for the success of the project. Sir Antony gave up a seat on the Indian Council and accepted the post of Under-Secretary in Ireland, in order to lend his aid in settling outstanding problems.

Meanwhile, the experiment of treating distinctively Irish questions on Irish lines had taken a new and startling leap forward by the assembling at the Mansion House in Dublin in December 1902 of the Land Conference, with the expressed intention of ending the land questions which had disturbed the relations between owners and tenants since the days of the plantations, by a mutual compromise beneficial to both the parties concerned. The first suggestion of this memorable conference was made in a letter published from the pen of a Galway landlord, Captain Shawe-Taylor, who wrote to suggest a meeting of a number of leading gentlemen, both landowners and members of the Parliamentary party, whom he named, to try and put an end to the land war and with it "the paralysis of commercial business and enterprise, and the hatred and bitterness between the various sections and classes of the community." Little attention might have been paid to this olive-branch offered by an unknown hand had it not been followed up two days later by a communication from Wyndham, announcing in unambiguous terms: "No Government can settle the land question. It must be settled by the parties interested...Any conference is a step in the right direction if it brings the prospect of a settlement between the parties near."

The recognition of the Irish national standpoint, with the implied invitation to Irishmen to show their capacity for the home government they demanded, carried with it the implication that legislative effect would be given to their decisions. It may have aided the ultimate plans of the Conference that the proposal, which was denounced by Dillon as a landlord plot, was rejected also by the Daily Express, the chief organ of the landlords, and that some members of the Landowners' Convention, such as the Duke of Abercorn, The O'Conor Don, and Lord Barrymore, refused to attend. But leading country gentlemen like the Earl of Dunraven, the Earl of Mayo, Colonel Nugent Everard, and Colonel Hutcheson-Poe, stepped forward to prevent the proposal being dropped, and Redmond, "Tim" Harrington, William O'Brien, and Mr. T. W. Russell, a shrewd Ulster Presbyterian farmer, declared themselves ready to meet them. They had to face the fiercest opposition not only from members of the unbending Landowners' Convention, but from a considerable body of Nationalists, led by Dillon and Sexton, who had taken over the editorial command of the Freeman's Journal. No effort was spared to misrepresent their conclusions or to wreck their work; but in spite of all prophecies to the contrary a scheme of sound and rational land purchase was drawn up, on more liberal financial lines than the earlier scheme or even than the Ashbourne Act. To induce the landlords to sell, the Government provided a State bonus of four years' purchase; this facilitated transfers of land where the landlords would have been otherwise impoverished by a compulsory sale. The immediate conversion of all tenants under £50 valuation into tenant-proprietors was contemplated—that is, some 445,000 out of the 480,000 agricultural tenants in Ireland—while to the remainder their rights to the judicial revised rents were to be preserved unimpaired pending the completion of land purchase in their own cases. Thus was substituted an occupying proprietary in lieu of the existing dual ownership.

The Report presented on January 4, 1903, was unanimous, and legislation on the lines recommended followed immediately, though the significance of this great advance, which pointed to the restoration of Butt's fundamental policy that self-government should include the whole nation and not only a majority of the nation, was lost for the moment in a storm of obloquy cast upon all who were concerned in the transaction. Even Davitt "launched a determined campaign" against conclusions that seemed to convert his own theories into actualities. But the conclusions of the Land Conference were accepted by the National Convention, and though in some directions Wyndham's Act did not do all that the Conference hoped, amendments were made during the passage of the Bill through the House which materially improved it in other respects. This was especially the case with regard to Mr. Duke's amendment enabling tenants to make direct bargains for their land in order to obviate what were known as 'zone' prices. The usefulness of the Act, which became law in 1903, was later extended by the passing of two smaller measures in favour of evicted tenants and for the better housing of labourers. The latter Act provided £5,000,000 (raised afterward to £8,000,000) for the building of dwellings for agricultural labourers; to its operation are to be ascribed many of the cottages that now dot the landscape in the South, often prettier than the farmers' own homes, with their plots of ground and gardens, their pig and poultry, their jasmine branches climbing over the porch—healthy and pleasant places of abode for the families of the labouring man.

In 1909 the Land Act was to receive further extensions by the Birrell Act, intended to hasten and complete compulsory sale. In the course of some years, nearly a quarter of a million occupying tenants had purchased their holdings, and some £77,000,000 worth of property had changed hands on terms considered fair to both parties and accepted by the whole Irish nation through their representatives. Wyndham, the chief author of this beneficent advance, had to retire in face of violent attacks from all parties, but chiefly from the Orange party of the North, and his further plans of reform were dropped, his sympathy with some form of devolution to Ireland or of a measure of self-government being denounced by them as playing into the hands of the extremists. He was succeeded by Walter Long, afterward Lord Long. But projects of modified Home Rule were in the air, especially among the members of the Land Conference, who felt encouraged by its success to plan further efforts for the good of the country. They resolved themselves into a new association called the Irish Reform Association, to advance a policy of goodwill and reform, and a union of all moderate and progressive opinion irrespective of class or creed. The idea had originated between Wyndham, Lord Dunraven, and Sir Antony MacDonnell, and in the House of Lords on February 17, 1905, the Earl of Dunraven announced his scheme of "the devolution to Ireland of a large measure of self-government" without disturbing the Parliamentary union between Great Britain and Ireland.

When the plan was first brought forward in the previous August, Redmond, who was in America, cabled: "The announcement is of the utmost importance. It is simply a declaration for Home Rule and is quite a wonderful thing. With these men with us Home Rule may come at any moment."[11] The proposal was discussed, apparently with favour, by the then Lord-Lieutenant, Lord Dudley, and also, it would seem, by the Marquess of Lansdowne. It certainly contained the elements of Home Rule, in the devolution to Ireland of her own internal concerns, thus, incidentally, relieving the overburdened Imperial Parliament and giving it more time for matters of Imperial concern. But the Times denounced the proposal as "worse than Gladstone's Home Rule"; it was violently attacked by the Unionists, among whom Sir Edward Carson, Solicitor-General for England, was becoming conspicuous, and it was ridiculed by a section of the Nationalists as "the devolution dementia." It was not till the appointment of Birrell as Chief Secretary that any form of Home Rule was again taken up. It took the shape of an Irish Councils Bill introduced in May 1907, but it was found to suggest merely a co-ordination of the chief Castle Boards, with a central popular council, similar to the original idea of Lord Dunraven's scheme. It was rejected by the National Convention; and Redmond, though unwilling to refuse any proposal that made in the direction of future self-government, saw in it only a makeshift which might damage or indefinitely postpone a final settlement of the question. He believed that by rejecting it as unsatisfactory a larger measure would have to come before the country as the policy of the Liberal party before the next general election. Many of Redmond's friends disapproved his action; Lord Dunraven maintained that the rejection of the Bill would give Ireland a heavier blow than her worst enemies could have devised, and William O'Brien definitely broke off from Redmond's leadership and formed the All-for-Ireland group.

[11] Warre B. Wells, John Redmond, a Biography (1919).

In 1909 began the final phase of the struggle with the House of Lords which ended in the extinction of their power of veto. It began with the introduction of Mr. Lloyd George's Budget, and Redmond believed that it was only on the favourable issue of this great constitutional struggle that Home Rule could have a chance of being carried into law. All his tactics were therefore directed to making good use of the opportunity, but meanwhile he stood aloof, watching the course of events. On December 10, 1909, Asquith, who had succeeded Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman as Liberal Prime Minister, declared that the breaking of the Lords' power of veto would remove the greatest obstacle to Home Rule, and he announced a full measure of Irish self-government as the policy of his Cabinet and party. But at this critical moment in Irish affairs the party of Redmond was violently attacked by the versatile and brilliant Mr. Timothy Healy,[12] and weakened by the defection of William O'Brien, who carried with him a body of eight Independents. But Redmond still had a sufficient following to threaten Asquith (who now proposed to substitute reform of the House of Lords for limitation of the veto—a very different thing from the Home Rule point of view) that if the change was made, his party would refuse to pass the Budget. "No veto, no Budget," became the slogan. Finally the Government capitulated. The Parliament Bill was carried through the Commons, but the Lords showed no sign of yielding, and Parliament was dissolved. The Government came in again with a slightly increased majority, and again Redmond held the balance of power.

[12] Appointed first Governor-General of the Free State.

On April 11, 1912, the third Home Rule Bill was introduced by Asquith. Redmond, who was able to point to a great change in public feeling toward Home Rule, many former Unionists having declared in favour of Irish self-government, took his stand on the precedent of Canada, and also on the later experiment of the large measure of self-government bestowed on South Africa after the Boer War. He considered that the Bill of 1912 would prove a measure adequate to carry out the objects of its promoters. "It is a great measure," he declared, "and we welcome it...If I may say so reverently, I personally thank God that I have lived to see this day. I believe (this Bill) will result in the greater unity and strength of the Empire...I believe it will put an end to the wretched ill-will, suspicion, and dissatisfaction that have existed in Ireland...I believe that it will have the effect of turning Ireland in time into a happy and prosperous country, with a united and contented people." In words that were prophetic he showed that for England the reconcilement of the four millions of Irish who had gone to the States and to the self-governing Dominions, was a source of potential strength to the Empire. "The goodwill of the Irish race is worth having," he exclaimed, quoting the words of Sir Edward Grey: "it counts for something in every part of the world that you most care for."

The Bill was read for the third time in January, 1913. In addressing an assembly of over a hundred thousand people in Dublin some months before, Redmond had prophesied that a Parliament would be sitting in College Green sooner than the most sanguine men in the crowd believed. But unforeseen events were long to postpone that looked-for day.

END OF CHAPTER XXII

XXIII.—SINN FEIN AND THE RISING OF EASTER WEEK, 1916

Three causes conspired to delay the bringing of the Home Rule Bill into operation. They were Ulster, Sinn Fein, and the Great War. Already, when Redmond addressed the mass meeting in O'Connell Street, Dublin, on March 31, 1912, Ulster and the adherents of Sinn Fein were both actively engaged in propaganda work. Lord Randolph Churchill, many years before, had provided Ulster with a watchword with which to challenge Home Rule. "Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right," he declared, and the Tory party pledged themselves to support Ulster in her resistance. Bonar Law declared that "with the help of the Almighty, we intend to keep that pledge."[1]

[1] Speech at Bristol, reported in The Times, January 16, 1914.

From September, 1911, the North had begun to arm, and by 1913 a very considerable body of men had been raised, who were being trained on the lines of the regular army. They were drilling in every Protestant parish in Ulster, under old army officers, and were organized into three army corps. "The figure of Ulster, grim, determined, menacing, dominates the scene," said the Archbishop of York in a debate in the House of Lords. When at the close of 1913 a Royal Proclamation against the importation of arms into Ulster was issued it was announced in reply that Ulster was already armed. It had received over thirty thousand rifles and twenty thousand revolvers from Birmingham alone. At the head of the formidable organization stood a Southern Unionist, Sir Edward Carson, wielding a power which he himself said was such "as in the life of any one of us has never fallen to any other man."

The extraordinary spectacle was witnessed of loyalists holding or to hold the highest legal positions in the land, declaring openly that they intended to defy the law. F. E. Smith, later Lord Birkenhead, proclaimed on September 22, 1913, that when the unhappy moment for war arrived, "we hold ourselves absolved from all allegiance to this Government...From that moment we shall stand side by side with you, refusing to recognise any law."[2] Sir Edward Carson declared that "Ulster would march from Belfast to Cork and take the consequences, even if not one of them ever returned." Bonar Law, addressing a meeting at Blenheim on July 12, said that on a previous occasion, speaking as a private Member, he had counselled action outside constitutional limits; he now, as leader of the Unionist party, took the same attitude. "I can imagine," he said, "no length of resistance to which Ulster will go in which I shall not be ready to support them, and in which they will not be supported by the overwhelming majority of the British people." A Provisional Government had been formed in Ulster, and on "Ulster Day," September 28, 1912, the Covenant was signed by 218,000 persons, after a solemn religious service held in the Ulster Hall. Sir Edward Carson declared that he felt it to be the "supreme moment of his life." It pledged the signatories to stand together "in defending our cherished position of equal citizenship in the United Kingdom, and using all means to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland." F. E. Smith had declared that "for solemnity and for binding force "the like of the Covenant could not have been witnessed since the first Solemn League and Covenant.[3]

[2] Speech at Ballyclare.

[3] Speech at Whitby, September, 1912.

The position was a difficult one. On April 24, 1914, 50,000 rifles and a million cartridges were landed at Larne and Bangor under the eyes of the police and officials, bearing the impress of the Deutsche Munitionen und Waffenfabrik; men were drilling all over the province and women were forming themselves into corps for field signalling and red cross work or were actually practising the use of arms.[4] To deal with a conspiracy against the authority of England the law had never failed in resources, but to deal with a people in armed rebellion to support their connexion with England was a more complicated problem. Redmond's reiterated assurance that no separation was contemplated by the Home Rule party fell on deaf ears; the Unionists were bent on getting rid of Asquith's Government, and Sir Edward Carson declared that Ulster was occupied in setting up its own Government, whose members would sit in their own Parliament from September onward. "It may be, probably it will be, an illegal procedure. Well, if it is, we give a challenge to the Government to interfere with it, if they dare." What made the situation more threatening was the attitude of the Regular Army. Over a hundred officers in the British Army had signed the Covenant, and Sir Edward Carson believed that no officer in the Army would obey orders to march against Ulster. The matter was soon to be put to the test, and the "Curragh Mutiny" took place. On March 20, 1914, Brigadier-General Gough and 57 officers, stationed at the Curragh, reported that they preferred to accept dismissal if they were ordered north, and General Gough was relieved of his command.[5] The action of the officers appears to have arisen out of a misapprehension, there being no intention of employing them in active measures against Ulster, though certain troops were to be moved north to protect depots of arms and other Government property.

[4] By the end of September, 1913, the Ulster Volunteer Force had reached a strength of 56,000 men commanded by Major-General Sir George Richardson, a retired officer. By the end of March, 1914, it numbered about 84,000, of whom 25,000 were armed with rifles. General the Right Hon. Sir Nevil Macready, Annals of an Active Life, i, 173-174.

[5] Major-General the Right Hon. J. E. B. Seely, Adventure, pp. 162-171; General the Right Hon. Sir Nevil Macready, Annals of an Active Life, vol. i, p. 176 seq. Though the Government maintained that the whole trouble had arisen owing to Sir Arthur Paget having exceeded his instructions in putting the alternative to General Gough and other officers of "active operations against Ulster" or "dismissal with loss of pension," it seems clear that the coercion of Ulster had been seriously discussed by members of the Cabinet. See Major-General Sir C. E. Callwell, Field-Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, his Life and Diaries, i, 138-142.

General Gough was reinstated, but the Secretary of State for War, Colonel Seely, who had issued the orders, and Sir John French resigned. Meanwhile a new aspect had been given to the question by proposals made by Asquith in introducing the Home Rule Bill for its passage in the third consecutive session, as was required by the recent Parliament Act. These proposals for the first time outlined partition; the exclusion of the six counties was to be, however, optional by areas and limited in time. Carson refused, demanding that the exclusion should apply to the whole of Ulster and should be permanent. The time-limit was destined to become a crucial point.

During all this time events in Ulster were being watched with impatience and anxiety in the South of Ireland. Side by side with the preparations for open rebellion in Ulster a movement equally menacing was appearing in Nationalist Ireland. It was brought to a head when a large number of Catholic workmen were dismissed from the Belfast shipyards on the complaints of their comrades that they were disloyal. At first there was a disposition in Southern Ireland to admire the determined attitude of Ulster, but the approval given to military preparations made in the North while similar preparations made by Nationalists in the South were met by prompt and heavy punishment soon changed this feeling into one of bitter hostility. Gun-running for Sir Edward Carson at Larne was regarded in Parliament and by the public as a piece of harmless bravado, and an easy tolerance was extended to what some regarded as a huge game of bluff and others as a sign of spirit and resolution. But the landing of arms at Howth for the Irish Volunteers who had determined "to take a leaf out of Carson's book," led to military interference, followed by bloodshed and an angry outcry.[6] This occurred on July 26, 1914, less than a month before the outbreak of war with Germany.

[6] The arms had been purchased by Darrell Figgis at Liege and were transhipped into a yacht brought out by Erskine Childers for the purpose of landing them.

To understand the condition in the South we must go back some ten years and consider the rise of Sinn Fein. This new movement grew out of the impulse given to the sense of nationality by the work of the Gaelic League, but it was distinct from it in conception and aim. The Gaelic League, which was established in 1893, chiefly through the energy and enthusiasm of Dr. Douglas Hyde, the son of a clergyman in Co. Roscommon, who had spoken the native language since his childhood, had as its chief aim the directing of young Irish people back to a knowledge and understanding of the native Gaelic tongue and literature. It proposed to place before them literary ideals different from those that they obtained second-hand from England; in the words of the founder, to "de-Anglicize" Ireland. Many things had conspired to obliterate the use of the native tongue; the system of National Education discouraged it, the priests had ceased to preach in it, and the population, as a whole, had become ashamed to speak it. Even in Irish-speaking districts, the teaching of the schools was given in English. O'Connell's refusal to speak the language of his birth, even when addressing vast Irish audiences, gave a deadly blow to its prestige. The tendency to look to England for all literary and social ideals was strengthened by the presence of the Irish Parliamentary Party at Westminster, with the inevitable consequence that the mental attitude of the main body of Irishmen was directed across the water to what was going on in London.

All interest in the beautiful folk-songs, folk-traditions, and culture of their native land was dying out with the language, and when the Gaelic League was modestly launched by a few young scholars led by Dr. Hyde, it was opposed by the politicians. But the idea appealed to the people and branches of the Gaelic League sprang up wherever Irish folk were to be found, inside and outside of Ireland. It not only set hundreds of young men and women learning their mother tongue but it had a stimulating effect on their minds far beyond their immediate studies. It touched some underlying strain of native intelligence. Irish dances and Irish folk-singing were revived; societies were formed to edit and publish Irish texts, and reading-books and grammars were forthcoming. The classes gave a new and vital interest to life and wrought a social and spiritual revolution. By its fundamental rules, the Gaelic League was strictly non-political, and it knew no distinction of creeds. Hundreds of persons who all their lives had been held apart by these divisions now met with a common sympathy and common interests, and learned to know and appreciate each other. To such established agencies as the Irish Agricultural Organization Society and the Congested Districts Board it added the stimulus of personal endeavour, and out of it sprang new spheres of effort for the material well-being of the poorer classes. On the other hand, it purified and invigorated Anglo-Irish literature by opening to it fresh and unspoiled methods of expression, which bore fruit in the early poems, plays, and folk-legends of a group of young writers who have many of them become known all over the English-speaking world. Discarding questions of practical utility, the leaders of the Gaelic League taught that the language was in itself a national inheritance which it was the duty of the nation to preserve.

Irish social and political movements have at all times swung backwards and forwards between peaceful methods of propaganda, and the adoption of physical force. The Young Ireland movement was succeeded by the Fenians, and the Gaelic League was followed by Sinn Fein. To many of its members the moment seemed a disastrous one when the Gaelic League abandoned its original programme and split upon the point of active political propaganda. But there was growing up beside it a body of men who were determined to drive the new impulse out of its original literary mould into the paths of pure politics, and to use what Padraic Pearse called "the most revolutionary influence that ever came into Ireland" for distinctively revolutionary purposes. The sense of a common nationality among all men and women of Irish birth, which the Gaelic League had instilled, was now to be used to enforce a public recognition of Ireland as a distinct and independent nation. Sinn Fein came into the field to replace the older organization, often under different names, such as the "Irish Self-determination League"; it eventually split the ranks of the older society, the President, Dr. Hyde, after stormy scenes, deciding to withdraw from the position he had held since the inception of the movement.

The name adopted by the new organization, Sinn Fein, "Ourselves," has been misunderstood. It can perhaps best be expressed in the words of a poem written by John O'Hagan before the Society which called itself by the name was ever heard of—

"The work that should to-day be wrought, defer not till to-morrow,
The help that should within be sought, scorn from without to borrow.
Old maxims these—yet stout and true—they speak in trumpet tone,
To do at once what is to do, and trust Ourselves Alone."

But the men who adopted this motto of self-help came in the end to apply it chiefly in the political sphere, with all the implications that an avowal of a separate nationality involved. Mr. O'Hegarty, who was for many years a member of the Supreme Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, traces the uprise of all these associations—Sinn Fein, the Gaelic Athletic Association, the Fianna, and finally the Irish Volunteers—to one and the same source, the Irish Republican Brotherhood.

"It helped and guided the others, it co-ordinated and organized, and at the supreme moment it acted...It had members everywhere, its tentacles went into everything, it maintained a footing in every organization and movement in Ireland which could be supported without doing violence to separatist principles. Everywhere it pushed separatist principles...Strange and transient Committees and Societies were constantly cropping up, doing this and that specific national work. The I. R. B. formed them. The I.R.B. ran them. The I.R.B. provided the money. The I. R. B. dissolved them when their work was done."

And at the back of the I. R. B. stood the Clan-na-Gael of America "to which no appeal for money for an object even remotely separatist was ever made in vain."[7]

[7] P. S. O'Hegarty, The Victory of Sinn Fein, pp. 13, 14.

As a political organization Sinn Fein did not come into being till 1905. Its way was prepared and its spirit was infused into the movement chiefly by the work of two men, Arthur Griffith and P. H. Pearse (Pádraic Mac Piarais). Though one in their ends, the methods they used were different. In his weekly paper, the United Irishman, first established in 1899, Arthur Griffith, while preaching the doctrine of absolute independence, discussed in a series of admirable articles the revival of Irish industries, the condition and prospects of agriculture, and the development of industrial ideals. Material prosperity he set before his readers as a thing to be aimed at, and the methods by which it might be attained were worthy of the most serious consideration. He preached the renewal of a fraternal spirit between Irishmen of all classes and mutual co-operation for the benefit of the country. He boldly declared war on the Parliamentary party, and proposed to substitute for it a policy formed on that of the Hungarian Franz Déak, a main point in which was abstention from the Austrian Parliament. The constitutional work of Redmond and his party he declared to be "useless, demoralizing, and degrading," and he endeavoured to turn the eyes of his readers from the Parliament at Westminster, and to bring about independence by the promotion of the country's interests from within. Griffith's book, The Resurrection of Hungary, had a wide sale, but it led to exaggerated views, not found in the book, such as that the language of Hungary, which threatened to become extinct, had been revived by the efforts of a few persons gathered in a drawingroom, and that the same result might be expected in the case of Irish. But this was true only of the upper classes, who had ceased to speak Hungarian; the language had never died out among the people at large.

Sinn Fein took its stand on the dictum that "The Constitution of 1782 is still the Constitution of Ireland;" it announced non-recognition of British authority. Griffith stood for educational methods in preference to physical force; but he demanded "a sovereign independence" which was not in the programme of the Parliamentary party, and he dropped that party as being a party of compromise. Though Sinn Fein grew in time into a formidable opposition which set itself to undermine Redmond's power and to send its own candidates to the polls, the country at the moment saw no advantage in returning men to Parliament who were pledged not to sit; and long afterward, when Irish soldiers returning invalided from the battlefields of France found the faces of their own relatives turned from them, it was to wonder "what those fellows in Ireland were up to now?" So little real progress did Sinn Fein make in its early days.

If it was Arthur Griffith who formulated the policy of Sinn Fein on the side on which it touched the practical patriotic work of Sir Horace Plunkett and George Russell ("A. E."), it was P. H. Pearse who supplied the spiritual impetus which lay behind it. The attitude of Pearse and his words remind us of the speeches of Robert Emmet, though he was a man of more practical power than Emmet had been. Pearse took as his models the "physical force men" of Fenian days. In his oration over the grave of the Fenian, O'Donovan "Rossa," Pearse declared that the new generation had been "rebaptised in the Fenian faith" and had "accepted the responsibility of carrying out the Fenian programme." He adds: "We, the Irish Volunteers, know only one definition of freedom. It is Tone's definition; it is Mitchel's definition; it is Rossa's definition."[8] Again he writes:—

[8] Published in Poblacht na h-Eireann (The Republic of Ireland), January 3, 1922. See Appendix, II. p. 460.

"Irish Nationality is an ancient spiritual tradition, one of the oldest and most august traditions in the world. Politically, Ireland's claim has been for freedom in order to attain to the full and perpetual life of that tradition. The generations of Ireland have gone into battle for no other thing. To the Irish mind for more than a thousand years freedom has had but one definition. It has meant not a limited freedom...a freedom compatible with the suzerain authority of a foreign Parliament, but absolute freedom, the sovereign control of Irish destinies."[9]

[9] P. H. Pearse, Ghosts ("Tracts for the Times," No. 10, 1916).

And again:

"Freedom is so splendid a thing that one cannot worthily state it in the terms of a definition; one has to write it in some flaming symbol or sing it in music riotous with the uproar of heaven."[10]

[10] The Separatist Idea ("Tracts for the Times," No 11, 1916).

These words, written just before the rising of 1916, are characteristic of the attitude of Pearse. But though he wrote like a rhapsodist, he was a quiet but determined man. He was strongly imbued with the idea, not uncommon among the young men of his day, that Ireland needed a blood-sacrifice, which he and they could make on her behalf; and at his boys' school at St. Enda's he set himself to train up a generation of youths in the Gaelic tradition and to imbue them with the ideas that possessed his own soul. In the Easter week rebellion he and his comrades ungrudgingly made the sacrifice he preached; but it was dangerous doctrine, and, directly or indirectly, it led hundreds of young men to death, and the whole country into anarchy.

Sinn Fein took outward form in the Volunteer movement. They recognised among the determined Ulstermen a real "Sinn Fein" movement under another name, protesting also against Parliamentary methods, decrying the right of England to determine their action, and preaching reliance on "themselves alone." The arming of Ulster pleased them. "Personally," said Pearse, "I think the Orangeman with a rifle a much less ridiculous figure than the Nationalist without a rifle; and the Orangeman who can fire a gun will certainly count for more in the end than the Nationalist who can do nothing cleverer than make a pun."[11] He says he wrote "with the deliberate intention...of goading those who shared my political views to commit themselves definitely to an armed movement."[12] The armed movement was that of the Irish Volunteers. "Ulster," wrote Irish Freedom, "has done one thing which commands the respect of all genuine Nationalists—she has stood up for what she believes to be right and will be cajoled neither by English threats nor English bayonets...We are willing to fight Ulster or to negotiate with her;...but we will not fight her because she tells England to go to Hell."[13]

[11] Quoted in R M Henry, The Evolution of Sinn Fein, p. 125.

[12] Ibid., p 127.

[13] Ibid., p. 132.

At the end of October 1913 Professor Eoin MacNeill published an article calling on Nationalist Ireland to drill and arm. A huge meeting held at the Rotunda ended in the enrolment of 4,000 men. By December there were 10,000. Pearse, speaking at Limerick, said that by the Volunteers they were going to give Redmond a weapon to enforce the demand for Home Rule. Redmond at first took little heed of the movement, which he thought negligible. But when a pause in the slow business of the House of Commons was brought about by Sir Edward Carson's acceptance of exclusion "until a federal scheme had been considered, when the whole matter would be reviewed in the light of the action of the Irish Parliament and how they got on" he threw himself into the movement. On July 15 there were 80,000 Volunteers in the South as against 84,000 in the Ulster force, but they were increasing at the rate of 15,000 a week. Very soon they were reckoned at 132,000, besides a reserve force. Redmond determined to capture the whole body for the Parliamentary party, but this led to the resignation of Pearse and some other of the more extreme men. Later the Volunteer army was to split into two on the question of the War; and besides all this a third "Citizen Army" began to grow up in Dublin to carry out the designs of the Labour party.

Into the midst of a discussion in the House of Commons of the occurrences during the gunrunning at Howth a graver question obtruded itself. On August 4 the tocsin of war sounded through the world. The Amending Bill from the Lords which was to have been taken in the Home Rule debate in the Commons on July 28 was postponed by Asquith till Thursday, to ensure a calmer atmosphere; but when Thursday came the imminence of war caused it to be postponed indefinitely. At the climax of a struggle which in some form or other had occupied the entire lifetime of John Redmond the cup of fulfilment was dashed from his lips. But the Leader of the Opposition laid it down that this postponement should not "in any way prejudice the interests of any of the parties to the controversy." He spoke not only for the Unionist party, but for Ulster.[14] On the following Tuesday the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, made his fateful speech announcing the outbreak of war and the outrage committed on Belgian neutrality. At the close of a great speech, which carried with it the main body of the members and brought "Willie" Redmond, the brother of the Irish leader, to his feet, the Foreign Secretary, with a sudden lift of his voice, said: "One thing I would say: the one bright spot in the very dreadful situation is Ireland. The position of Ireland, and this I should like to be clearly understood abroad—is not a consideration among the things we have to take into account now." Redmond's reply was one of the noblest that stand upon the records of the House. Brief as it was, it was, as Mr. Stephen Gwynn, who was present, says, "less a speech than a supreme action. It was the utterance of a man who has a vision and who, acting in the light of it, seeks to embody the vision in a living reality."[15]

[14] Stephen Gwynn, John Redmond's Last Years (1919), p. 126.

[15] Ibid., pp. 132-134.

In a few simple words Redmond reminded the House that at the end of the disastrous American War in 1778 a hundred thousand Irish Volunteers sprang into existence for the purpose of defending Irish shores. Again to-day two large bodies of Volunteers existed in Ireland. "I say to the Government," he exclaimed, "that they may to-morrow withdraw every one of their troops from Ireland. Ireland will be defended by her armed sons from invasion, and for that purpose the armed Catholics in the South will be only too glad to join arms with the armed Protestant Ulstermen. Is it too much to hope that out of this situation a result may spring which will be good, not merely for the Empire, but for the future welfare and integrity of the Irish nation?"

The proposal was an act of faith, for Redmond had not consulted his party or the Volunteers, but he was justified by the event. On the basis of the freedom pledged to her by the Home Rule Bill Ireland was willing to give, at that moment of danger, a loyal friendship to England. To all who heard him it was clear that the acceptance of Redmond's offer meant the acceptance of the principle of Home Rule, and with it of the sealing of amity between the two countries. Sir Edward Carson did not respond, but his position as the champion of Ulster against Home Rule made acquiescence almost impossible. Ulster was not ready for unity with the South. It is true that all difficulties had not been surmounted. The Amendment Bill, which had received considerable alteration in the House of Lords, referred to the area in Ulster which was to be excluded from the Government of Ireland Bill, as the Home Rule Bill was called. Were Tyrone and Fermanagh to be among the excluded counties, and for what length of time was exclusion to last? These were important details, and by the King's command a special conference had been called at Buckingham Palace in July to consider them, but no conclusion had been reached. But the main principle of Home Rule for all Ireland except Ulster had been accepted and passed by the House, and all future relations between the two countries ought to have been conducted in the spirit of that agreement. Redmond kept his part of the bargain, and Nationalist Ireland endorsed his action. The Volunteers of the South were willing to carry out Redmond's original proposal to defend their own country against attack from Germany; and out of 170,000 Southern Volunteers only 12,000 followed Professor Eoin MacNeill's secession when, later on, they were asked to serve overseas.

By the end of the year 16,500 had joined the Army. The best spirit prevailed. The Regulars were cheered as they embarked for the Front, and committees were formed in which men and women of both creeds worked heartily together to push on recruiting, to work banners for the troops, to aid in hospital preparations, and to assist the Belgian refugees. "The wonderful spectacle was seen of a willing Ireland leagued together to aid Great Britain in her necessity." Redmond assured the House that from every part of Ireland he had received assurances from the Irish Volunteers that they would fulfil their part; and the tidings that began to come through from the Front of the charge of the Irish Guards with the words "God save Ireland" on their lips, aroused in both countries a new enthusiasm. On September 18 the Home Rule Bill received the Royal Assent.

On the lines of its newly gained Parliamentary independence Ireland was ready to respond to Asquith's appeal "to give the free-will offering of a free people."[16] But his announcement that "as soon as possible arrangements by which this offer can be made use of to the fullest possible extent" failed to materialize. On the contrary, every sort of discouragement was placed in the way of individual Irish action of any kind. The Volunteer corps as a body was neither recognized nor armed. The regimental colours worked by the ladies' association under Lady Fingall were' refused. The suggestion, warmly supported by Lord Meath, of an Irish corps bearing the old inspiring title of the "Irish Brigade" and consisting entirely of Irish officers and men, was ignored. The National University was not allowed an O.T.C., and it proved difficult for Catholics to get commissions in the army. Everything possible seemed to be done to damp down the ardour of the Irish people, who were responding to the promised gift of Home Rule in a spirit of gratitude and new friendship. They were made to feel that, in practice, no change in their status was recognized and that they in no way differed from the Englishman except that they had not his advantages. On the other hand they saw a quite different treatment being meted out to Ulster, whose leaders were still repeating to its Volunteers the old cry "We are not going to abate one jot or title of our opposition to Home Rule, and when you (Ulstermen) come back from serving your country you will be just as determined as you will find us at home."[17]

[16] Speech in Dublin, quoted in Stephen Gwynn, op. cit., pp. 156-157.

[17] Sir Edward Carson's speech at Coleraine.

Every effort was made to applaud the deeds of the Ulster Division in the field, while those of the Southern Irish leaked out as though by accident, and the advice of Redmond was consistently ignored. Birrell, writing after Redmond's death, said that the Irish leader "felt to the very end bitterly and intensely the stupidity of the War Office," and Mr. Lloyd George, looking back on those months, spoke of "the stupidities which sometimes look almost like malignancy, perpetrated at the beginning of recruiting in Ireland" as almost past belief.[18] There is no doubt that Lord Kitchener deeply distrusted the Volunteers as such, and preferred to have the Irish directly under the War Office, drafted into different regiments and treated as ordinary recruits rather than as a distinctive corps. Any appeal to nationality and patriotism was deprecated by him and others of his staff; and he preferred the Ulster Division, which considered itself politically English, to a Southern Division, which would hold itself to be freely offering its services as from one free state to an allied state. Though some remedies were afterwards applied, the process of awakening friction between two peoples only newly brought into political sympathy had a disastrous effect; and though on the field of battle Irishmen met and fought together as brothers from whatever quarter or class in the home-land they were drawn, a fresh gap of sentiment was created between Ulster and the South, and a marked difference of opinion began to appear in Ireland as to the duty of Irishmen toward the War. A section of the Volunteers now declared the War "a foreign quarrel" and disclaimed the right of Redmond to "offer up the lives and blood of Irishmen...while no National Government which could speak and act for the people of Ireland is allowed to exist."[19]

[18] Speech of October 28, 1916. But in view of what afterwards happened, Kitchener's hesitation seems to have been justified.

[19] Manifesto from twenty members of the original committee of the Volunteers, quoted in Stephen Gwynn, op. cit., p. 155.

A split was made in the ranks, and Redmond and his policy were disowned, his nominees being expelled from the committee. Recruiting went down, and Sinn Fein doctrines were assiduously instilled by a thousand channels among the people. But in April 1915, recruits were still coming in at the rate of fifteen hundred a week. Then came the formation of a Coalition Government. Redmond was offered a seat, but not for an Irish office. He refused, knowing that it would be said that he had been rewarded for sending young Irishmen to their death; but Sir Edward Carson became Attorney-General. The effect of the coalition was that Irishmen believed that Home Rule was to be shelved, and recruiting dropped from six thousand to three thousand in the two following months; and though a new recruiting campaign gave it fresh impetus, the ardour of the first months was gone.

While Irish regiments were winning their honours in France and at Gallipoli and coalescing as brothers in the trenches, a fresh and startling development occurred at home. In Easter week 1916, there was an outbreak of rebellion in Dublin. Mr. P. S. O'Hegarty tells us that as far back as August 1914, at the opening of the Great War, the Supreme Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood had decided that an insurrection must be made before the end of the war, and bent all their energies to bring it about.[20] Six out of the seven young men who signed the Proclamation for the Irish Republic belonged to the Brotherhood, and Connolly, though he acted independently, shared this view. Of the leaders of the Rebellion Pearse was, as we have seen, a mystic with a belief in the needed purification of Ireland's lethargy by a sacrifice of blood, and of the same mind were the young poets Thomas MacDonagh and Joseph Plunkett; Sean MacDermott and Edmund Kent, The O'Rahilly, and others of the group, were also men of a fine and high intelligence, possessed of the purest and most unselfish motives, who were prepared to accept failure and death as the passport into the company of the heroic dead who in the past had perished for their country. Associated with them were men of a different type, Labour men of advanced opinions, like Tom Clarke and James Connolly, who were leaders in the Citizen Army and who had been influenced in adopting communistic doctrines by the wretched social conditions and low wages existing among the poor of Dublin and the workers in the docks and mills of Belfast and other towns of Ireland. Associated with Connolly was James Larkin, the organizer of the great industrial struggle of 1913, whose headquarters at Liberty Hall formed the centre from which the strikes of that year were planned. It became the headquarters of the Transport Workers Union and of the Citizen Army.[21] There were all shades of opinion among the leaders who rose.

[20] P. S. O'Hegarty, The Victory of Sinn Fein, pp. 2, 15.

[21] In September, 1924, after a long sojourn in the United States, first undertaken to incite American opinion against England in the war, Larkin returned to Dublin as Chef de bataillon in Trotsky's "Foreign Legion," and as "one of the twenty-five men appointed [by Moscow] to govern the world."

On April 26, 1916, being Easter Monday, the Republic was proclaimed, and the country called to arms in its defence. The General Post Office was seized and turned into military headquarters and there was fighting in the streets, but the back of the rebellion had been broken before the rising, not by the authorities, who were unprepared for the outbreak, but by the calling off of the mobilization through the country by Professor Eoin MacNeill, who was acting as Chief of Staff of the Irish Volunteers. The countermanding orders reached the various stations early on Sunday morning and threw the whole scheme into confusion. The reason for this sudden change of plan, which probably saved the country from being deluged in blood, appears to have been the failure of Sir Roger Casement's attempt to land arms and munitions on the Southwest coast of Ireland, the tidings of which came to hand just before the mobilization. Casement's biographer speaks of him as "the central figure and in a certain sense the figurehead and original prime mover in the rebellion." While the rising was being organized at home, he was moving about freely in Germany endeavouring, by various promises, to seduce Irish prisoners in the camp at Limburg from their allegiance, and to persuade them to join an Irish Brigade "to fight solely for Ireland under the Irish flag alone and in Irish uniform...and to be of moral and material assistance to the German Government."[22] He met with little success, the Munster Fusiliers being particularly resentful that such attempts should be made upon their regimental honour, accompanied by threats of punishment if they did not consent. Their reply: "We must beseech his Imperial Majesty to withdraw these concessions unless they are shared by the remainder of the prisoners, as, in addition to being Irish Catholics we have the honour to be British soldiers," is too fine to be forgotten.[23]

[22] His proclamation was published in The Ulster Guardian of August 21, 1915, copied from the Daily Chronicle.

[23] The story of Casement's attempt to seduce the imprisoned men was told at his trial by Corporal Robinson, who was present on the occasion, and also by Herr Liebnecht, the Socialist member of the Reichstag, who protested against it.

There is no doubt that both Pearse and Casement expected financial and material help from Germany, and the Volunteers had long been hoping that he would succeed in inducing German officers to come to Ireland to train their men and to bring arms and ammunition. It was this attempt of an old servant of the Crown to land equipment from Germany on the shores of Ireland to assist a rebellion against England in the midst of the war with Germany, that gave the most sinister complexion to the rising.[24] The attempt failed. Casement was landed in a collapsible boat on the southern coast, and was recognised and arrested on Good Friday morning, while a German ship carrying twenty thousand rifles and a million rounds of ammunition was scuttled by her commander in Tralee Bay to escape capture by the British. The whole arrangements for the rising were deranged and the country insurgents outside Dublin were called off by hasty dispatches.

[24] Casement was born in Co. Dublin in 1864, but of an Ulster family. He entered the Niger Coast Protectorate service in 1892, and was later employed in the Consular service in West Africa and Rio de Janeiro. From 1909-1912 he was engaged in making enquiries as to the Congo rubber atrocities and reporting on them. In 1905 he had been made a Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George. He was knighted in 1911. He retired on a pension in 1913. Casement's own statement was that he had come over to call off the rebellion, which he considered as hopeless. See letter by Miss Eva Gore Booth in The Socialist Review of September, 1916.

From Easter Monday to the following Friday the flag of the Irish Republic waved from the General Post Office, the headquarters of the rebel forces. During those eventful days Stephen's Green was occupied by the Volunteers, and some of the chief buildings in the city, the Four Courts, Jacob's biscuit factory, the City Hall, and the bridge at Lower Mount Street were strongly held by them. Liberty Hall and Bolands' bread factory were also Volunteer centres. The men showed their training by the accuracy of their fire and the excellence of their marching. Their arms were formidable, the officers carrying swords and the newest German pattern of automatic pistol. But a military cordon was gradually drawn round the occupied parts of the city and after some days of desperate fighting, General Lowe received a message at noon on April 29 from "Commandant-General" Pearse, carried by a woman-nurse, stating that he wished to negotiate.[25] He was informed that only unconditional surrender would be agreed to, and that evening 500 of the leaders and men surrendered. Connolly, who had been twice badly wounded and who directed the operations of his men from his bed, which he had caused to be taken into the firing line, was removed to hospital.

[25] Pearse's order of Surrender runs as follows:—"In order to prevent the further slaughter of Dublin citizens, and in the hope of saving the lives of our followers now surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered, the members of the Provisional Government present at Headquarters have agreed to unconditional surrender, and the Commandants of the various districts in the City and Country will order their commands to lay down arms." These conditions were also agreed to and signed by James Connolly and Thomas MacDonagh for their respective commands.

The Countess Markievicz, dressed in the uniform of an Irish Volunteer, who with Michael Mallin, had been holding the College of Surgeons in Stephen's Green with 109 men and ten women followers, made a dramatic exit by kissing her revolver as she surrendered her arms to the officer in command, and marching out at the head of the troop. By Saturday evening the last band of the insurgents had surrendered and quiet reigned. But the finest street in the city lay in ruins, and from many of the buildings flames and smoke still ascended. The shops had been looted by the populace early in the struggle.[26]

[26] A Record of the Irish Rebellion of 1916. Contemporary notes published by "Irish Life."

The general feeling had at first been against the rising and it was denounced not only by Redmond, who emphasized the "additional horror" caused by the fact that the news arrived from Dublin on the same day on which the report had been received of the magnificent dash forward of the Irish troops to retake the trenches won by the Germans at Hulluch, but by District Councils and Boards of Guardians all over the country.[27] Mr. O'Hegarty is probably right in thinking that "if the English Government had laughed at it, tried the promoters before a magistrate and ridiculed the whole thing, with no general arrests and no long vindictive sentences, they could have done what they liked with Ireland."[28]

[27] The Voice of Ireland, pamphlet (1916).

[28] P. S. O'Hegarty, The Victory of Sinn Fein, p. 4.

This is an Irish point of view. But in the urgency of the war with Germany such sanity and coolness was hardly to be expected. The English were kept excellently posted up by their Intelligence Department as to all that was going on in Ireland and the preparations that had been made long before the actual rising; their information about the communications that had been made with America and Germany was equally complete. But O'Hegarty is right in saying that the volleys of rifle fire which one by one picked off the chief signatories of the Proclamation on the May mornings succeeding the Rising blotted out the old Ireland, and that in a few weeks the whole temper of the people toward it was changed. The men who had been condemned as disturbers of the peace became popular heroes and martyrs, and "men who had never heard of Sinn Fein began to ask about its ideas...the rebels were forgiven everything, for they had meant, in their wild, mad way, to help Ireland, and the Government that punished them only meant to humble her." The Government seemed, indeed, to be acting in a panic. Three thousand arrests with imprisonment and deportation followed the executions, and in the revulsion of feeling, heightened by house-searchings and raids by the military, and some very bad cases of unauthorized executions by certain officers, of which the shooting of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington was the worst example, Sinn Fein received a new life.

The Republican ideal once more caught hold of masses of the population; and though the rising had cost between four and five hundred lives and destroyed nearly £2,000,000 worth of property, all this was forgotten in a wave of Separatist fervour.[29] Organizations that had formerly stood aloof from each other decided to accept the name, and a compact comprehensive party was formed, with a similar Republic to that of 1916 as its object.[30] In New York the men who had been shot in Dublin were accorded a public funeral. On the other hand, Asquith talked of at once setting up an Irish Parliament, with an executive responsible to it, and Partition, temporary or permanent, as part of its policy. It seemed that an Act for the practical operation of which Redmond had for years struggled in vain was to be given to Sinn Fein for a week's rebellion. Irish Members were to be retained at Westminster in full strength, but the whole arrangement was to be temporary until after the war. "Partition," as the exclusion of the six counties of Ulster came to be called, though most unpopular in Ireland and pronounced by Redmond to be "unworkable," was reluctantly accepted by him on the understanding that it was to be only a temporary measure; he believed that the force of circumstances and the dictates of patriotic feeling and of common sense would bring Ulster in and that the North would find that partition from their own country was, even from an administrative and financial point of view, distasteful and unpractical. But in a secret Cabinet, at which Redmond was not present, this temporary measure became hardened into the permanent exclusion of the six counties, and modifications were also agreed to in the provision for retaining Irish Members in their old numbers at Westminster. Lloyd George, who was in charge of the negotiations, was accused on both sides of having made false promises, and resentment, deep and bitter, arose in Ireland.

[29] The casualties are given in the official report as 450 killed, 9 missing, and 2,614 wounded, total 3,073. Payments in respect of property destroyed were made after the rising of £1,742,926, paid out of the pockets of the British taxpayer, but this does not represent the full amount of the losses sustained. See The Administration of Ireland (1920), "I.O."

[30] A. de Blacam, What Sinn Fein stands for, p. 89.

The whole situation was changed. The Ulster party had won, but at the cost of enforcing the lesson that no British Minister's word could be accepted as binding. It gave the deathblow to the position and influence of Redmond, who was looked upon as having, in his desire to arrive at a solution by compromise, sacrificed his followers and his country. It seemed to prove that any Irish statesman who endeavoured to combine loyalty to his country with loyalty to the Empire would be abandoned, not only by Irishmen but by the British Government. The Bill was withdrawn, Dublin Castle again became a Tory stronghold and, as Sir Horace Plunkett had prophesied, an opposition was aroused which drove thousands of moderate men into the Sinn Fein camp. The first election, that of North Roscommon, resulted in the return of a Sinn Fein candidate, and in June, 1917, Mr. de Valera, whose name began now for the first time to be heard of outside his immediate circle, was returned by a sweeping majority of nearly three thousand for East Clare, the constituency for which Major William Redmond, the brave and distinguished brother of the Parliamentary leader, who had fallen in the attack on Wytscheate Wood, had sat.

END OF CHAPTER XXIII

XXIV.—WAR AND CONCILIATION

A short period of hope had intervened when, in May, 1917, it was proposed that a Convention should be held in Dublin lor the purpose of drafting a Constitution for the country. "We propose," said Mr. Lloyd George, "that Ireland should try her own hand at hammering out an instrument of government for her people." The Convention, in which Sinn Fein took no part, met for the first time on July 25 and Sir Horace Plunkett was unanimously elected Chairman. It sat through the autumn and winter but failed to come to any unanimous conclusion, Ulster refusing to make any further concessions. Great good sense and good feeling were manifested throughout the discussions, Lord Midleton especially, speaking for the Southern Unionists, being earnest in his endeavours to find a compromise, but difficulties arose over finance and in regard to a fiscal policy for Ireland, and the effort to mediate between Ulster and the Home Rulers broke down. The Ulstermen argued that they only wanted to be let alone with their rights safeguarded. In the division on the question of Customs, in which the Nationalists of Redmond's party voted with the Southern Unionists and several Labour delegates against the combination of the Ulstermen and a section led by Mr. Devlin, a majority of 38 to 34 was declared, and it became a question whether the Government would consider that this result gave the "substantial agreement" stipulated for when the Convention began. In the General Report, 66 out of 87 concurred on the broad lines of debate, the minority being largely composed of the group which refused to accept any form of Home Rule.

This was a very considerable measure of agreement. But, on March 6, 1918, John Redmond, worn out by anxieties, died; and in the press of the great offensive of the German troops and the push back of the Allies, Home Rule was dropped; instead of bringing in a measure immediately on the presentation of the Report, conscription for Ireland was declared. Though it was never enforced, the threat at this moment served to let loose anarchy in Ireland.

In the meantime Sinn Fein had been active elsewhere. In prospect of the Convention the Government had proclaimed a general amnesty and most of the interned or imprisoned men had returned home. Their leaders now called a Convention or Ard-Fheis of their own, attended by 1,700 delegates from the four Provinces of Ireland, which elected Mr. De Valera President, a post held during the previous years by Arthur Griffith.[1] Mr. De Valera had been one of the last to hold out in the rebellion of Easter Week and he had been condemned to death, but his sentence was commuted to penal servitude. He had recently been released from Lewis Gaol, having been nominated for Clare while he was still in prison, and he now became the rallying-point for the new movement.

[1] D. T. Dwane, Life of Eamonn de Valera (1922), p 63.

The leaders met in Conference at the Mansion House with Mr. John Dillon and other members of the old Irish party, but they found little common ground, while on the other hand, Sinn Fein absorbed into itself the various associations which had been sympathetic to republicanism in any form. Clubs were founded, funds seemed always to be forthcoming, and the military organization grew daily stronger; the young men who had resisted conscription for foreign service flocked by hundreds into the Republican army, attracted by the hope of pay and the love of adventure, as well as by more patriotic motives. They had few trained officers, but they picked up their military knowledge from the official books supplied to British troops, and from the exigences of insurgent warfare. From the moment of the announcement of conscription, many of the priests took the side of the Republicans.

In 1918 it was said that 80 per cent.[2] of the inhabitants of Galway were Sinn Feiners and in the election of that year, out of 105 members returned for the whole of Ireland, 73 were for Sinn Fein. Of these elected members, 36 were in prison, and four deported; only thirty appeared at the sitting. But the claim now made was that of complete independence, with the recognition of Ireland as a separate nationality. On the 21st January, 1919, the newly elected members met at the Mansion House and set up an Irish ministry. They reaffirmed the claim of Ireland to independence and proclaimed the establishment of an Irish Republic; at the same time sending a message to the nations announcing their re-entry into separate nationality. It was the first meeting of Dail Eireann, and it proceeded to make its position effective by capturing local Councils, and setting up Arbitration Courts, which in the terror of the next two years continued to administer justice through the country with general approval, while English law went unheeded; it established an economic commission to enquire into Irish agricultural and mineral resources, and discussed alterations in the educational system.

[2] The Administration of Ireland (1920), "I.O.", p. 57.

In two important efforts the Dail failed to secure attention. One was the presentation of Ireland's case before the Peace Conference, which in spite of persistent Irish propaganda on the Continent and in America, was turned down; the other was an appeal to President Wilson for recognition, but this also was refused. The leaders claimed, with great justice, that Ireland was one of the "small nations" about which the Liberal party were flinging phrases broadcast, and on behalf of whom the war was said to have been fought. The English Government's reply was to proclaim all their acts illegal, and to endeavour to suppress them by force. There were for a period two Governments in Ireland, one acting from outside and upheld by force, the other illegal and often "on the run" but upheld by popular sympathy and implicitly obeyed over large parts of the country.

The Volunteers, now re-christened as the Irish Republican Army, though not formidable as to numbers, were well disciplined, and as their raids on police barracks and private houses increased they became sufficiently armed with excellent weapons. They were recruited from a good class among the population, farmers' sons, schoolmasters, and peasants, who permitted no indulgence or drunkenness in their ranks, and who obeyed orders without questioning from their commanders. They increased rapidly, over 500 men joining their ranks on the day young Kevin Barry was hanged. Early in the struggle, their future Commander-in-Chief, Michael Collins, whose escapes and adventures made him almost a legendary figure, became prominent for his marvellous powers of organization and his incessant activity. When the chief leaders of Sinn Fein were arrested and deported on suspicion of a German plot, Michael Collins occupied himself with forming the loosely knit remnant of the Volunteers into a solid and serviceable body. Though he had only returned to Dublin in January, 1916, after spending the early part of his life in London, he speedily gathered up the strings of the movement into his own hands, and became its acknowledged centre. "The movement as a whole became aware of him, sensed his personality and his leadership, began to love him and to have that trust in him which hitherto they had had in Griffith and de Valera...They found Collins doing everything and leading everything and trusted by everybody. He had won his place."[3] He laid his plans in a systematic manner. His first aim was to outwit and terrorise the members of the Government Secret Service, and to establish a counter-organization which controlled the post office and obtained regular information of the official Castle plans. Spies within the ranks of his own army were tracked and warned, and every man in its ranks was thoroughly tested. By means of "a steady cleaning-up" it was "made unhealthy for Irishmen to betray their fellows and deadly for Englishmen to exploit them."[4] Next the "G" division of the English Secret Service was undermined, and terrible examples were made, the murder of fourteen British officers, believed to be in the Secret Service, on Sunday morning, November 21, 1920, being one of the most dreadful of these acts of vengeance. Reprisals took place on the same afternoon, when the military fired on and killed a number of innocent persons attending a football match at Croke Park.

[3] P. S. O'Hegarty, The Victory of Sinn Fein, p. 26.

[4] Hayden Talbot, Michael Collins' Own Story, pp. 80-81.

Having perfected his intelligence system, Collins next set himself to establish centres, of which Cork, the headquarters of General Strickland, was the chief, from which he could spread his flying columns throughout the country. The effectiveness of these flying columns was testified to during the discussions on the Treaty by Mr. Lloyd George, when the question of Ireland's right to possess submarines came up. "Submarines," said the Prime Minister "are the flying columns of the seas...and I am sure there is no need to tell you, Mr. Collins, how much damage can be inflicted by flying columns! We have had experience with your flying columns on land." Gradually the police and Royal Irish Constabulary were forced to concentrate in specially armoured barracks, often at considerable distances from each other, and upon these attacks were constantly made; while raids and ambushes became of daily occurrence. Ambushes were resorted to both for the purpose of entrapping military or constabulary and in order to capture arms and explosives, the first important take being that at Soloheadbeg Quarry where a quantity of gelignite, intended for quarrying purposes, was captured in January, 1919, by a party of youths who wished to force more active warfare on their comrades, and in which adventure two policemen were killed. The life of Lord French, who came over in May, 1918, as Viceroy, was attempted near the Ashtown gate of Phoenix Park by the same band of irresponsible men on December 19 of the following year, but he escaped by travelling in his car in a different order from that which he usually took.

The murder policy was not popular in the country and was disapproved even by the military leaders of the Republican party Dan Breen, the organizer of many of these outrages, says that neither General Headquarters nor Dail Eireann sanctioned it or accepted responsibility.[5] But as the "war" went on, it became more merciless and the larger part even of the more moderate men were drawn into it, until such terrible deeds as the shooting to pieces of seven lorry-loads of Auxiliaries at Macroom passed without exciting surprise. The country people sheltered and helped the insurgent forces, concealing the hunted men and supplying them with food, money and munitions. In no other way could the struggle have lasted so long. Attacks on police barracks were frequent and between January, 1920, and the beginning of the following year, there were 23 occupied barracks destroyed and 49 damaged. Many more vacated barracks were burnt down. During the same period, 165 members of the police force were killed and 225 wounded, besides civilians murdered, kidnapped or terrorized.[6] Funds were seized or called for under threats of punishment and raids for arms were frequent. One of the worst cases of kidnapping with murder was that of a lady and her manservant who were carried off at night from near Macroom and never again heard of. They were accused of having warned the police of an intended ambush. The sensational rescue of Sean Hogan from the train at Knocklong in May, 1919, was eclipsed by the still more startling rescue of Mr. de Valera from Lincoln Gaol three months before, and his subsequent public appearance in Ireland and America in defiance of the police.

[5] Dan Breen, My Fight for Irish Freedom, p. 34, sq., 119, sq., 83, sq.

[6] Report of the Labour Commission to Ireland.

It will always be a question whether the campaign of murder and arson which made life terrible in Ireland during the late years of the Great War was begun by the advocates of Irish rebellion or those of English repression. Lloyd George asserted that no "reprisals" had taken place on the part of the police or military until a hundred policemen had been assassinated. But Irishmen contended that before any crime had been committed on their part after the date of the Rebellion in 1916, existence had been rendered intolerable by the raids, arrests, and deportations without trial by the military authorities. A certain amount of caution has to be exercised in accepting reports made by interested parties on both sides, often for propaganda purposes. It seems certain however that in 1918, over 1,100 political arrests had been made, 77 deportations, and 260 raids on private houses for the purpose of search for persons or for incriminating documents. Besides these, there had been cases of murder of civilians for which no punishment had been inflicted.[7]

[7] Louis Paul-Dubois, Le Drame Irlandais et I'lrlande Nouvelle, third edition, pp. 78-79.

The arrival of Lord French in May, 1918, as Viceroy, with Mr. Shortt as Chief Secretary was the signal for a policy of ever-increasing repression. From January, 1919, to March, 1920, raids on houses had risen to 22,279, while political arrests numbered 2,332. Newspapers were suppressed, as were all organizations believed to have a republican tendency. The murders of the Lord Mayor of Cork, Thomas MacCurtain, and of the Mayor of Limerick, Michael O'Callaghan, excited great and just indignation. Attempts were made to suppress markets and fairs such as those held at Cashel, Nenagh, Clonmel and Thurles, and to dismantle creameries, on the plea that they were meeting-places for malcontents. Even the landlords protested that such acts did not diminish the number of murders but that they ruined and exasperated the country. Later on, towns and villages were "shot up" either as reprisals for murders of policemen or as the act of drunken and undisciplined soldiers, a number of the principal buildings in Cork,[8] and the towns of Fermoy, Lismore, Balbriggan, Tuam and many others being partly or entirely destroyed in this savage manner. Some of these "reprisals" were admitted by the Government and they aroused much anger in England. The military advisers spoke of "authorised" and "unauthorized" reprisals, and the Government left it to the military to decide which were to be carried out. In October, 1920, Mr. Winston Churchill said that the army in Ireland was costing £210,000 a week [9] and at the moment when conscription was proposed there were nearly 60,000 troops in the country, besides the Dublin Metropolitan Police and the 10,000 men of the Royal Irish Constabulary, who were an armed body recruited from a good class of the population and stationed in small barracks in the country districts. But these were beginning to fall off, partly through sympathy with the insurgents, many of whom were their intimate friends and relations, and partly through the misery to which they were subjected by constant ambushes and unforeseen attacks. In June, 1920, resignations at the rate of nearly a hundred in that one month were being handed in, and Sir Hamar Greenwood stated in the House that, between January 1 and July 16, 250 men had resigned.[10]

[8] The burning of Cork City by the Auxiliaries took place on December 11, 1920.

[9] Sylvain Briollay, Ireland in Rebellion (I'Irlande Insurgée), p. 83.

[10] Ibid., pp. 48, 90 ; General The Right Hon. Sir Nevil Macready, Annals of an Active Life, ii, 481.

It was partly to make up for this depletion in the ranks that after the arrival in April, 1920, of Sir Hamar Greenwood as Chief Secretary, it was decided to augment the forces by sending over some 15,000 new recruits, men largely chosen from the ex-officers of the war, often young cadets glad of fresh occupation and looking on the free life they expected to find in Ireland and the work they were called upon to do much as a sportsman might enjoy the thought of "good sport." Along with these men, known as the Auxiliary Police Force, came a number of men, many of them of low class, who have left behind them a bitter memory in Ireland. These men were styled by the people with ready wit the "Black and Tans," from the strange medley of dark green police uniform and khaki in which they were hastily fitted out from the deficient military stores; they reminded the populace of a famous pack of hounds belonging to the district in South Tipperary to which they were sent. Ill-disciplined and without competent officers, these men speedily established a reign of terror even in districts that hitherto had been quiet. All semblance of military discipline vanished and henceforth it became impossible to distinguish by which side or for what purpose acts of violence and cruelty were committed.

Law and order disappeared and a reign of terror took its place. The Government talked of an atmosphere of conciliation in one breath and of reprisals and coercion in the next, while Sir Nevil Macready and Sir Henry Wilson demanded that over the whole of Southern Ireland martial law should be proclaimed and loudly deprecated any half measures. As the war lengthened it became on both sides "more brutal and more savage and more unrelievedly black," its worst effect being on the women, who forgot their normal role in life and became the hysterical advocates of war. Ireland was given up to the gunman and the gunwoman.[11] The country suffered a moral collapse.

[11] See P. S. O'Hegarty, The Victory of Sinn Fein, pp. 54-58.

Among the embarrassing incidents of the position was the use of the hunger-strike, adopted in the gaols by the interned and arrested men as a protest against the arrest and imprisonment of untried persons, or their trial by courts-martial. Hunger-strikes went on for lengthened periods at several prisons, especially at Wormwood Scrubs, and excited much public sympathy. It was an unconscious return to the ancient habit of "fasting upon" a creditor so much in vogue in early Ireland, that is, forcing him out of pity to grant demands otherwise unheeded. The suffragettes had set an example of this return to ancient methods and it was adopted by many of the prisoners. Thomas Ashe, during a hunger-strike at Mountjoy, had died as the result of forcible feeding. In the autumn of 1920, in Brixton Gaol, the long drawn out agony of Terence MacSwiney, who had been elected Lord Mayor of Cork on the death of Thomas MacCurtain, riveted on the dying man the attention of the whole civilised world. On both sides it was regarded as a test case. MacSwiney had been more than once interned or imprisoned for Sinn Fein activities as Commandant of the First Cork Brigade of the Republican Army; but apart from his hatred of all things British, he was held to have been personally a just man, respected for his character and abilities.[12] It was this personal attraction that made his long suffering and the courage with which he bore it a cause of sympathy even to people who differed from him fundamentally in opinion.

[12] Yet it was this generally respected man who in May, 1920, shortly before his imprisonment, had ordered some operation of so dastardly a character, that his Headquarters would not sanction it. O'Hegarty calls it "fiendish and indefensible and inadvisable from any point of view," though he does not tell us what it was. It was called off through O'Hegarty's intervention with Arthur Griffith. No doubt the English Government were well informed of the plot.—P. S. O'Hegarty, op. cit., pp. 46-47. In MacSwiney's possession was found an order to construct a bomb factory, and a key to the police cypher code.

The Government had again and again released Irish prisoners who had adopted the hunger-strike and MacSwiney had himself been released on this ground in 1917 without serving his sentence. It was becoming an accepted doctrine that it was only necessary to go on hunger-strike to secure release from gaol. It was evident that this must be brought to an end, and while everything was done to prolong the life of MacSwiney—food, nurses, doctors and all possible alleviations being provided for him—he was not released. His own friends were equally determined; and Terence MacSwiney was permitted to die. He was accorded a public funeral through the streets of London with the full consent of the authorities. From that date hunger-striking ceased. The strike going on at the same time in Cork Prison was called off, Arthur Griffith having written that "as these men were prepared to die for Ireland, they should now again prepare to live for her." Two of them had died, after a still longer abstinence than that of MacSwiney.

On May 25, 1921, Dublin was startled by the setting on fire by the I.R.A. of one of the finest buildings in the city, the Custom House. Men carrying petrol cans invaded the building in full daylight, placed the staff at work in the rooms under a guard, and deliberately fired the building at various points. For weeks the Custom House continued to smoulder, and in it were burned the documents connected with Inland Revenue and Customs, the Local Government Board and other public departments. About the same date, papers were discovered containing plans for incendiarism on the largest scale in England, including the destruction of all shipping in the Liverpool docks, and the entire electric plant of Manchester city—plans which were to have been carried out in a few days.[13]

[13] Piaras Beaslai, Michael Collins and the making of a New Ireland, ii, 214.

Meanwhile the "Government of Ireland" Bill, which was to replace the Home Rule Bill passed before the War but never put into operation, had been fully discussed and was finally passed into law on December 23, 1920. In the circumstances under which it came into existence, it seemed to the majority of Irishmen a mere ruse de guerre, ineffectual and unreal. Yet, except in its recognition of partition, the Act had some good features. The two governments set up, one for the twenty-six Southern counties, the other for the six counties which called themselves Ulster, were given large powers, though with the reservation of some essential services. The provision for a Central Council seemed designed to open a path for future union, which the Bill looked forward to as the eventual wish of all Irishmen, both in the North and South. It did not aim at finality but at a future natural development of opinion. That this was the intention and wish of the British Government is made quite clear by the letter of Mr. Lloyd George to Sir James Craig, when the question was again under discussion. He says, on November 14, 1921, "all experience proves, that so complete a partition of Ireland as you propose must militate with increasing force against that ultimate unity which you yourself hope will one day be possible...Your proposal would stereotype a frontier based neither upon natural features nor broad geographical considerations by giving it the character of an international boundary. Partition on these lines the majority of the Irish people will never accept, nor could we conscientiously attempt to enforce it. It would be fatal to that purpose of a lasting settlement on which these negotiations from the very outset have been steadily directed." And he proceeded to point out the disastrous effect which the creation of new frontiers "cutting the natural circuits of commercial activity" had had in Central and South-Eastern Europe; and the danger that, once established, they tend to harden into permanence. But to all such considerations Sir James Craig,[14] as spokesman for the North, turned a deaf ear, flatly refusing to take any further part in the negotiations. In this resolve he is unlikely to change his mind. "If any person could be found in Ulster to lead the people into the Free State, it will not be by me," he is reported to have said in the Northern Parliament on April 4, 1922.

[14] Now Lord Craigavon.

The position of Ulster took a large place in the discussions on the Treaty in December of the following year (1921). It will be convenient to forestall a little and deal with them here.

The Treaty presented to Northern Ireland a choice between two courses: either to remain in the Irish Free State, retaining all the powers and the whole area conferred on her by the Act of 1920, with her own Government and Parliament functioning and her individuality maintained, in which case there would be no need for a boundary revision; or to exclude herself from the Free State, in which case a revision of her boundary was to take place. Liberal safeguards were offered by the Free State in matters of religion and trade, and the full right was given to Ulster to negotiate on all questions effecting her under a unified system; in the words of Mr. Lloyd George in his final letter of December 5, 1921, she would enter the Free State retaining all her existing powers, with such additional guarantees as may be arranged at the Conference. But "Ulster" remained unmoved and hostile.

It is fair to the North of Ireland to remember that when these proposals were made, the South was in the throes of an internal strife which had convulsed the whole country; the newly created Free State might make the most favourable proposals and be perfectly sincere in its intention to carry them out, but it was far from certain that its leaders would be in a position to do so. The chances that the Free State itself might be unable to function, and that a Republican party might grasp the reins of office, were by no means a remote possibility, and the events that immediately followed the signing of the Treaty in Ireland were not of a kind to induce a change of opinion. A new civil war plunged Ireland again into chaos, and the Free State came into existence under circumstances the most disadvantageous that could be imagined. She had to fight for her existence and for recognition even among her own people.

Ulster claimed that by the Act of 1920, the six Northern counties, which would give her a definite Unionist majority, and which alone she felt in a position to claim, were definitely and finally committed to her government. On this her Government took and has always taken its stand. In Clause 1 (sub-section 2) of the Government of Ireland Act, it is laid down that "Northern Ireland shall consist of the Parliamentary counties of Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry and Tyrone, and the parliamentary boroughs of Belfast and Londonderry. This seemed explicit, but the Free State contended that a new aspect had been given to the matter by Art. 12 of the Treaty which provided for the appointment of a Commission of three representatives for the Free State, the Governments of Northern Ireland and of Great Britain respectively, "to determine in accordance with the wishes of the inhabitants, so far as may be compatible with economic and geographic conditions, the boundaries between Northern Ireland and the rest of Ireland."[15] It might be upheld that the original distribution of territory is safeguarded by the preceding clause, which declares that the provisions of the Act of 1920 "shall, so far as they relate to Northern Ireland, continue of full force and effect" but this clause came to be disregarded and a claim was made for the restitution of two of the largest counties, Fermanagh and Tyrone, to the Free State, on the ground that they had Nationalist majorities.

[15] For Art. 12, see Appendix VI., p. 466.

The problem of majorities in the North is very complicated; in the whole province the Unionist majority was at the time probably about 14 to 11; but the divisions are by no means evenly distributed. In the two disputed counties the Nationalist majority is small, possibly about 15,000 out of a population of 142,665; in Fermanagh, about 7,000 out of a population of 61,836, as given in the Census of 1911. But there have been considerable fluctuations of population since that date and the Nationalist majority has probably decreased. Sir James Craig asserted that he had received a definite promise from the British Government that the six counties were "a clean cut" and final settlement, and that he had never been a partner to any later modification of the agreement. The Free State declared that this agreement did not affect the new d vision demanded by Southern Ireland on the lines of Article 12 of the Treaty. The phrasing of Article 12 is undoubtedly vague, perhaps purposely so, and there has been much difference of opinion as to what was intended by it; whether, that is, it referred merely to slight adjustments of the frontier or to the transference of large districts.

One of the most important statements on the subject was made by Lord Long, on the eve of his death, in which he stated that on one condition, and one alone, could a plan be arranged with the Northern leaders, "and that was, they should receive a definite pledge from me, on behalf of the Cabinet, to the effect that, if they agreed to accept the Bill (of 1920) and to try to work it when passed, it would be on the clear understanding that the six counties, as settled after the negotiations, should be theirs for good and all, and there should be no interference with the boundaries or anything else, except such slight adjustments as might be necessary to get rid of projecting bits, etc."[16] Lord (then Mr. Walter) Long was in charge of the Bill in the House of Commons. The statement is therefore authoritative. The matter having been brought by him before the Cabinet, they unanimously agreed to give the definite promise to Carson and Craig, who then reluctantly agreed to accept the Bill. It was not welcomed by any Party. "The Liberals boycotted it...the Conservative party took no interest in it...the Ulster people stood coldly aloof." Sinn Fein took no notice of it.

[16] The Times, September 30, 1924.

The Boundary Commission met in the year 1925. Ulster refused to send a representative on the ground that no change in the boundaries could be contemplated. Judge Feetham, appointed by the British Government, presided, and Professor Eoin MacNeill represented the Free State. The chairman took the view that only minor adjustments could come under consideration, and Mr. MacNeill resigned. In consultation in London in December it was agreed to ignore the whole boundary provisions of the Treaty, and leave the original boundaries unaltered; but in return the Free State was released from her agreed obligations to share the National Debt.

Belfast has a large stake in the country, and her relations with the Free State are a factor of importance in her trade. In 1919 Belfast exported ships to the value of £10,000,000, linen yarn and goods to the value of £35,000,000, machinery valued at £2,000,000 and manufactured tobacco to the value of £2,000,000 apart from excise duty. In that year the total value of Irish exports was £176,000,000, and the total value of her imports was £159,000,000. In 1920 the figures rose to £61,000,000 for Belfast imported goods, out of a total of £204,000,000 for the whole country. The export trade has also increased. Of this trade, a fair proportion, some £30,000,000 in 1919, and some £40,000,000 in 1920, is with the Free State.[17] Since that date, the state of the country and the general commercial depression have adversely affected trade, not only with the south but with Britain and with foreign countries. When the commercial interests of the two States are considered, and the volume of trade that depends on their close proximity, the paramount importance of friendly relations between them becomes evident. Large numbers of persons in the North are depending directly on the industries and trade taken by the Free State.

[17] Handbook of the Ulster Question, issued by the N. E. Boundary Bureau (1923), pp. 126-127.

The present situation is costly as well as unsatisfactory. These practical considerations re-enforce the more abstract ones of love of country and fellow-feeling among its people as a whole. Only the growth of mutual confidence and respect between North and South can bring about the much to be desired re-union between the two sections of the Irish people, at present dis-united. But with the growing sense that the Free State has settled down to govern, and intends to govern on practical and tolerant lines confidence will, we may hope, be restored and the more comprehensive handling of national problems take the place of local interests. The inhabitants of the North as well as of the South are proud of the name of Irishman, and we believe there is a larger proportion of Ulstermen who would welcome re-union than is commonly supposed. Ulster was the cradle of Irish romance, the dwelling-place of Cuchulain, greatest of heroes, and of the champions of the Red Branch; of Deirdre of the sorrows, and Emer, and Fand; the cradle, too, of Irish Christianity, it boasts the primacy of Patrick and the birthplace of Columcille. Later, it gave some of the most famous names to Irish history, such as Shane and Hugh and Owen Roe O'Neill, Hugh Roe and Rory O'Donnell. With such names, household words among their countrymen the world over, it is not surprising that a break between the North and the South seems unthinkable. But only mutual confidence can unite the disjointed provinces. A speech of Mr. Blythe, Minister for Finance in the present Dail, though couched in homely language, expresses a truth that the North will understand. "The way to remove this division is not to bother with the people who are outside the State, not to find fault with them or revile them, but to get on with our own tasks." If this had been the policy of the last ten years, there might have been no trouble about the boundary question. But the murder and boycott of Catholics in the North, and the official boycott of Ulster by the South have both left bitter memories, and broken down all hopes of union for this generation. Both crimes made partition actual in thought and inevitable in policy.[18]

[18] In two years 447 Catholics were killed and over 9,000 driven from employment. A still larger number were driven from their homes. In the reprisals that took place, Protestants and Catholics suffered indiscriminately, though the Catholics suffered most.

END OF CHAPTER XXIV

XXV.—THE TREATY

Meanwhile, Ulster politically was consolidating her position, and on June 22, 1921, the first Parliament of Northern Ireland was opened by the King in person. His speech on the occasion rose high above the local interests of the Northern province and was an appeal to the people of Ireland as a whole to compose their differences and work for the general good of the country.

"The eyes of the whole Empire," he said with evident emotion, "are on Ireland to-day...I speak from a full heart when I pray that my coming to Ireland to-day may prove to be the first step towards an end of strife amongst her people, whatever their race and creed.

"In that hope I appeal to all Irishmen to pause, to stretch out the hand of forbearance and conciliation, to forgive and to forget, and to join in making for the land which they love a new era of peace, contentment and goodwill... May this historic gathering be the prelude of a day in which the Irish people, North and South, under one Parliament or two, as those Parliaments may themselves decide, shall work together in common love for Ireland upon the sure foundation of mutual justice and respect."

The King's speech, on such an historic occasion, could not be ignored. It expressed the intention of the Government to take fresh steps to ease the situation. On both sides the struggle was approaching a climax. The Sinn Feiners were gradually being driven out of their hiding-places and pressed back and their supplies of money and arms were becoming exhausted. On the other hand, Sir Nevil Macready was reporting that a change must be taken in hand before October, or he would need enormous supplies of new troops. The Government must "crush the rebels with iron and unstinted force or try to give them what they want." A sudden and startling change of policy was the result of these consultations.

In May the whole power of the State was engaged to "hunt down the murder gang"; but in June it was resolved to leave no stone unturned to "make a lasting reconciliation with the Irish people."[1] In May, 1921, Lord FitzAlan succeeded Lord French as Viceroy and three days later Sir James Craig, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, taking his life in his hand, was conveyed by rebel drivers to meet Mr. de Valera in his unknown hiding place, to arrange terms of truce. Nothing came of the interview, but the speech of the King on June 22 gave a new opening and on June 24 an invitation from Mr. Lloyd George was received by Mr. de Valera and a similar one by Sir James Craig to a conference in London. On July 11, the invitation was accepted and Mr. de Valera met the Prime Minister in Downing Street. There was to be a cessation of hostilities as from July 11 during the continuance of the negotiations, with the release of all the Deputies of Dail Eireann then in prison.

[1] The Right Hon. Winston Churchill, The World Crisis: The Aftermath, p. 290.

On July 20, proposals were handed to Mr. de Valera giving Ireland complete Dominion Home Rule, autonomous control of finance and taxation and of the police and military. Six conditions were attached, four of which dealt with naval and military aspects; one prohibited protective duties between the two islands, and one imposed on Ireland a share of the jointly contracted national debt. Mr. De Valera showed himself impracticable, and the negotiations were more than once on the point of breaking down. On August 17 he concluded his speech in the Dail with the words "We cannot, and we will not on behalf of the Nation, accept these terms." The Dail to whom these words were addressed in no way represented the Irish people. It was almost entirely composed of Sinn Fein nominees, elected without a contest and almost exclusively from men who had taken an active part in the war or were in prison.

During the guerilla war no regular election had been possible and from this purely Sinn Fein parliament, sworn to allegiance to the Irish Republic, only one answer to the proposals of the English Government was to be expected. They almost unanimously confirmed the view of the President, who notified to the Prime Minister that the British proposals were rejected. The famous letter delivered to the Prime Minister at Inverness, in which Mr. de Valera stated that "Our Nation has formally declared its independence, and recognises itself as a Sovereign State" was followed by hurried conferences and correspondence, which were ended on September 30 by the acceptance by Mr. de Valera of a renewed invitation to a conference in London. It is significant that when the time to accept the invitation came, Mr. de Valera refused to go, as feeling it "beneath his dignity, as President of the Irish Republic, to leave his country," and Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith became the leading figures in the delegation, with Messrs. Gavan Duffy, Duggan, Barton, and Erskine Childers in various capacities accompanying them.

Childers, who acted as Secretary to the delegation, brought with him the famous Document No. 2, with which Mr. de Valera wished to replace the actual Treaty. Collins says that it was drawn up by Childers, as he believed, purposely to defeat the objects of the delegation; in any case, it wasted days of precious time and was three times turned down by the Government and three times presented by Collins acting on instructions from the President, though sorely against his own will and judgment.[2] The one thing that had been made plain to Mr. de Valera was that an Irish Republic would not be considered. The terms of the invitation were "to discuss terms of peace; to ascertain how the association of Ireland with the community of nations known as the British Empire may best be reconciled with Irish national aspirations." Mr. de Valera's Document No. 2, puts the preamble in a different form. "That, for purposes of common concern, Ireland shall be associated with the States of the British Commonwealth, viz.: the Kingdom of Great Britain, the Dominion of Canada, the Commonwealth of Australia, the Dominion of New Zealand, and the Union of South Africa." The matters of common concern were to include Defence, Peace and War, Political Treaties, and "all matters now treated as of common concern among the States of the British Commonwealth, and that in these matters there shall be between Ireland and the States of the British Commonwealth such concerted action founded on consultation as the several Governments may determine."

[2] Hayden Talbot, Michael Collins' Own Story, pp. 148-149.

"That for purposes of the Association, Ireland shall recognise his Britannic Majesty as head of the Association."[3]

[3] This Document in its original form will be found in P. S. O'Hegarty's The Victory of Sinn Fein, Appendix iii, pp. 210-218.

In matters of defence, public debt, and compensation, the terms offered by Document No. 2 in its original form are even more liberal than those proposed by His Majesty's Government. It is true that it underwent several amendments, and talk of "external association" entered into the proposals, but it was impossible that Mr. de Valera could have had any illusion about the chances of getting a Republic, nor does the Document itself suggest anything about a Republic, for it recognizes the King as head of the Association of States of which Ireland was to form a part. Yet in days to come, the Plenipotentiaries whom Mr. de Valera had entrusted to represent him at the Conference to which he would not go himself were to be accused in the bitterest terms for not upholding the "existing Republic," for the maintenance of which this leader of the people declared himself ready to "wade through Irish Blood," and to incite the Volunteers to "march over the bodies of their own brothers."

When Michael Collins walked into the Council Chamber at Downing Street there was in Dublin Castle a reward of £10,000 on his head for capture, dead or alive. It was a tense moment for all concerned, and Mr. Churchill says that the vast room seemed electric with suppressed emotion when this youthful negotiator appeared. On the opposite side of the table sat men whose reputation and careers likewise hung in the balance, Sir Austin Chamberlain, the Earl of Birkenhead, the Prime Minister and Mr. Winston Churchill himself, many of them strong supporters or leaders of the Unionist party, friends and helpers of Carson, now braving the furious outcry of betrayal sent up by the Southern Unionists and Ulster, and the taunts of their own supporters. The strictest formalities were observed for the first weeks, but asperities softened as the cumbrous mass of detail was considered day by day and the Irish deputies, especially the two leaders, showed themselves, though inexperienced in diplomatic methods, men of probity and sound judgment and capable of attacking the difficult questions before them with fairness and understanding. Collins says that "from beginning to end the English Plenipotentiaries dealt candidly, fairly, sympathetically."[4] Mr. Churchill's opinion of Griffith and Collins had better be given in his own dramatic words.

[4] Hayden Talbot, op. cit., p. 146.

"Mr. Griffith was a writer who had studied deeply European history and the polity of States. He was a man of great firmness of character and of high integrity. He was that unusual figure—a silent Irishman; he hardly ever said a word. But no word that ever issued from his lips did he ever unsay. Michael Collins had not enjoyed the same advantages in education as his elder colleague. But he had elemental qualities and mother wit which were in many ways remarkable. He stood far nearer to the terrible incidents of the conflict than his leader. His prestige and influence with the extreme parties in Ireland for that reason were far higher, his difficulties in his own heart and with his associates were far greater." And again:—"He was an Irish patriot, true and fearless. His narrow upbringing and his whole early life had filled him with hatred of England. His hands had touched directly the springs of terrible deeds. But now he had no hatred of England. Love of Ireland still possessed his soul, but to it was added a wider comprehension...When in future times the Irish Free State is not only the home of culture and of virtue, not only prosperous and happy, but an active, powerful, and annealing force in the British Commonwealth of Nations, regard will be paid by widening circles to his life and to his death."[5]

[5] The Right Hon. Winston Churchill, The Crisis: The Aftermath, pp. 305, 336-337. (By kind permission).

Two months passed in what Mr. Churchill calls "futilities and rigmarole" before the final ultimatum was delivered on December 5.[6] The Treaty must be signed, and at once, in the form in which it had been hammered out between the Delegates, or there must be a resumption of whatever warfare they could wage with each other. "As the Delegates left the room for their last consultation, Mr. Griffith promised that the answer should be given that night, adding that whatever decision might be taken by the others, he would personally sign the Agreement and recommend it to his countrymen. 'Do I understand, Mr. Griffith,' said Mr. Lloyd George, 'that though everyone else refuses you will nevertheless agree to sign?' 'Yes, that is so, Mr. Prime Minister,' replied this quiet little man of great heart and of great purpose. Michael Collins rose looking as if he was going to shoot someone, preferably himself. 'In all my life,' says Mr. Churchill, `I have never seen so much passion and suffering in restraint.' It was long past midnight when the Delegates returned with the Agreement ready for signature and nearly three o'clock when they separated. But the Agreement was signed by all, and for the first time since the long negotiations began, the British Ministers upon a strong impulse walked round and clasped hands with the Irish Plenipotentiaries...This was the moment, not soon to be forgotten, when the waters were parted and the streams of destiny began to flow down new valleys towards new seas."[7]

[6] These "futilities," of which Mr. Churchill complains, were largely owing to Document No. 2, which Mr. de Vaiera had forced upon his representatives, and to discussions on the Naval clauses, in which Erskine Childers seems to have showed himself frivolous and absurd. (See Hayden Talbot, Michael Collins' Own Story, pp. 71, 72.)

[7] Quoted, with kind permission, from The Right Hon. Winston Churchill, The Crisis: The Aftermath, p. 307.

It has been repeatedly said by the Republican party that the Treaty was signed "under duress." Barton, especially, was obsessed by the idea that it was obtained "under the threat of immediate and terrible war." It is evident that in all agreements between two parties there must be some element of pressure, some realization of the consequences if the agreement is rejected. But Collins was emphatic in contradicting the idea that threats were held over the heads of the Delegates, though he knew and did not hesitate to say that the Republican belief that the "Terror" had secured the passing of the Treaty, was an exaggeration of the facts.[8] But though England had not been "frightened into submission," England as well as Ireland was weary of the existing condition of things; on both sides it was an instinct of self-preservation that brought about the compact.

[8] Michael Collins, The Path to Freedom, pp 34, 35. Hayden Talbot, op. cit., pp. 141, 142.

Many factors contributed to the offer of Dominion Home Rule to Ireland. Since the days of Joseph Chamberlain, a new conception had arisen with regard to the position of England towards the great overseas States that were bound together, under the King, in the British Empire. It was beginning to be realized, slowly but surely, by the British people that these expanding and powerful States could not be permanently regarded as Dependencies held by superior power; they must become Self-governing Dominions, bound together in a friendly union and held by ties of mutual advantage to each other and to the old country. Their help, voluntarily offered in the Great War, stimulated this feeling; their appearance as separate entities appointed by their own countries at the Peace Conference consolidated it. The old name, Colonies of the Empire, gradually dropped, and the idea and title of Self-governing Dominions took its place. Ireland was among the first to benefit by this change of political outlook, and it was with this liberal policy in view that the Treaty came into existence. A no less definite deciding cause was the pressure that was being brought to bear upon British statesmen for a settlement of the Irish question by America and by the Dominions. The Allies, too, showed sympathy with the cause of Irish self-government; all alike desired to see the existing unsatisfactory state of affairs put an end to. In all parts of the world, a persistent and extensive propaganda was being carried on, and in America, especially, feeling ran strongly in favour of a speedy settlement. This was an important factor in the situation. England had to put herself right with the world at large.

The Treaty, signed late on the night of December 6, 1921, made Ireland, in the opinion of Collins, a fully constituted State. "It gave us the freedom we fought to win, freedom from British interference and domination. We have the constitutional status of Canada, and the status being one of freedom and equality, we are free to take advantage of that status. In fact, England has renounced all right to govern Ireland, and the withdrawal of her forces is the proof of this. With the evacuation, secured by the Treaty, has come the end of British rule in Ireland."

"Under the Treaty," he argued, "Ireland is about to become a fully constituted nation...Our Government will have complete control of our army, our schools, and our trade. Our soldiers, our judges, our ministers, will be the soldiers, judges and ministers of the Irish Free State. We have complete freedom for all our purposes. We shall be rid completely of British interference and British rule. We can establish in its place our own rule and exactly what kind of rule we like. We can restore our Gaelic life in exactly what form we like. We can keep what we have gained and make it secure and strong. The little we have not gained we can go ahead and gain." [9] "It is now only fratricidal strife which can prevent us from making the Gaelic Ireland which is our goal."[10]

[9] Michael Collins, The Path to Freedom, pp. 37-39.

[10] Hayden Talbot, op. cit., p. 143.

This was the message which Collins and his fellow Delegates brought to Ireland when they landed with the signed Treaty on a grey, chill December morning, with a sense prophetic of what was to follow through the bitter recriminations during the coming sessions of the Dail. They had been sent off from London with the jubilant cheers of the Gaels in the metropolis, made happy by the satisfactory termination to the anxious weeks of discussion in Downing Street. But in Dublin there were no scenes of jubilation. No one hurried to the station to greet the returning envoys. Suddenly it appeared that the people with whom they had worked as colleagues in the fight for Irish freedom had become their relentless enemies. Cries of "traitor" and "betrayal "were freely bandied about, and though a Republic had never received the country's sanction, "the maintenance of the existing Republic" became the Sinn Fein watchword.

In the Dail, of which Mr. de Valera was President, the Delegates were faced with the open hostility of a large part of the members. Out of the 121 members, 112 were old fighters in the war, and most of them had spent a term in English prisons, some of them having been arrested three or even five times. Many of them were in prison when they were elected and they had been liberated in order to attend. Most of them had taken an oath of allegiance to the "Republic," and it naturally went hard with them to disavow it. After an adjourned debate, the Treaty was brought into being by a narrow majority of seven; Mr. de Valera and his Cabinet resigned; Mr. Arthur Griffith was elected President, and a Provisional Government was formed. The election which followed in June, 1922, returned 128 Deputies, 94 of whom supported the Treaty, while Mr. de Valera had 34 Anti-Treaty followers.[11]

[11] For this election, see page 436.

END OF CHAPTER XXV

EPILOGUE.—(1922-1930)

The Free State began to function under circumstances of extraordinary difficulty. The country was seething with unrest, and bands of young men were wandering about the country in arms against the Free State. It is easier to put lethal weapons into the hands of young men and teach the use of them than to get them to lay them down again. Even during the Truce and while the discussions on the Treaty were going on at Downing Street, raids for arms were being carried out so near to the scene of the discussions as Windsor. The men who a year before had been engaged in a life and death struggle with the British forces now turned their arms against each other. A body of men, small in number, former friends and comrades in arms, often brothers in one family, but now divided as Treatyites and anti-Treatyites, went about their country ambushing, and terrorizing. All the horrors of the Black and Tan régime were resuscitated, but now by Irishmen against Irishmen.

As early as January, 1922, less than a month after the Treaty was signed by which it was hoped to bring peace to Ireland, the irregulars were organizing to resist the Provisional Government, and from that time forward until July 1, 1923, when Mr. de Valera announced that "the war was over" the country was given up to unrest. When the new Government took office, it was to be faced with a bill of over three millions as compensation for damage done to property, and for the wanton destruction of railways, roads, and bridges. Mr. T. M. Healy, the first Governor-General of the Free State and intimate with the conditions, puts the total losses as not less than thirty millions' worth of property.[1] It seemed to be the object of the men who now over-ran the country to dislocate the whole of its economic life. Transport was made difficult by the destruction of railroads; and a boycott of Belfast goods and armed bands along her borders did more to ensure the permanence of partition than any previous laws had accomplished. The country gentry who had their houses burned over their heads naturally fled the country and with them went money and credit.

[1] T. M. Healy, Letters and Leaders of my Day, ii, p. 658.

The men who had contributed most in recent years to the benefit of the people and who had served her faithfully appeared to be the special objects of hatred. Sir Horace Plunkett's beautiful house, the creation of his mind, the home of his treasures and the seat of his agricultural experiments, was twice burned down. The same fate befell the dwellings of the members of the Provisional Government and the life of every Minister was threatened. The Executive Council of the third Dail had to function from the underground cellars with barbed-wire windows in the building in Merrion Place [2] in which they took up their temporary offices, and some of them never dared to appear outside; they worked and slept in the same building. Kevin O'Higgins tells how one day, longing for a breath of fresh air, he mounted to the roof of the building; hardly was he seated than the cigarette between his fingers was split by a sharp-shooter stooping beneath the parapet of the roof at the opposite side of the street. Early in 1922 there were a million acres of land unfilled and 20,000 agricultural labourers out of employ. Over 130,000 other workmen were idle.

[2] A fine building just approaching completion and intended by the outgoing Government as the new Science and Art Department.

In January, 1922, a secret triumvirate [3] was formed to organize opposition and collect arms, and Rory O'Connor, their chief, seized the Four Courts and made it the headquarters of the new irregular army. In June, O'Connor captured General O'Connell, of the National Army, and this act determined Collins to resist. After a feeble stand "Rory" ran up the white flag and his resistance collapsed without the loss of a single man. But before he left, he laid landmines timed to go off two hours later. By the explosion of these mines, twenty Free State soldiers were maimed, many of them for life, and the Four Courts were shattered. The precious historical papers preserved in the Record Office were consumed in the blaze, and the family records of centuries were destroyed. Mr. de Valera betook himself to the Gresham and Hammam Hotels, from which he made his escape by a backway when these too went alight from gunfire. His comrade, Cathal Brugha, fought to the end, and fell, firing his last round.

[3] The other two were Ernie O'Malley and Oscar Traynor. In a letter of 30 June alluding to the blowing up of the Four Courts, the latter wrote: "Congratulations on your bomb. If you have any more of these, let me know."

At this critical moment, it can hardly be said that Griffith and Collins acted with the decision that the circumstances called for. Encompassed with difficulties and with a large section of Republicans still in the Dail, Griffith, on the resignation of Mr. de Valera, had agreed, by implication, that he was succeeding him as President of the Republic, thus confusing the issues and playing into the hands of Mr. de Valera's party. Collins, too, delayed to strike at the irregular forces and allowed them time to muster their army and commit several acts of open warfare without intervening. The English military authorities were withdrawing their regiments and disbanding the police with great rapidity and Collins had no organized army to replace them and no civil force. On Monday, January 16, Lord FitzAlan, the Viceroy, handed over Dublin Castle to Michael Collins who received it in the name of the Provisional Government.[4] Then, for the sake of peace, Collins concluded a Pact with Mr. de Valera, agreeing that the numbers in the Dail should remain as at the present moment and that elections were to be held with this arrangement in view.[5] The news of this "pact" was received with anger in England as a breach of the Treaty, and Collins was called over to explain. Fortunately this panel election, which would have been no election at all, resulted in the return of a more representative body than had been anticipated, owing to the appearance of 17 Labour men and 17 Farmers and Independents. Mr. de Valera had 34 followers and Griffith 58. It was a declaration in favour of the Treaty; for all parties accepted the Treaty except the followers of Mr. de Valera. But the "pact" did not bring peace to the country and unrest continued to increase to alarming proportions. Disturbances on the Ulster border added to the difficulties of the Provisional Government, culminating in the invasion of Pettigo and shelling of Belleek by English troops.

[4] Mr. T. M. Healy remarks that when the history of the relations of the Castle to the Irish people for 700 years are remembered, it is curious to find that Michael Collins forgot his engagement with the Viceroy to take it over, and when he was rung up by telephone it was found that he had gone elsewhere. Through the courtesy of Lord FitzAlan another day was appointed.

[5] Griffith never agreed to this panel election.

The main responsibility for all this destruction of life and property, from the results of which the country has hardly yet ceased to suffer, and for the spiritual demoralization which accompanied it, must be laid at the door of Mr. de Valera, under whose control the army was nominally acting and at whose command they finally laid down their arms. He had been one of the signatories to the Proclamation of Easter Week, 1916, and had been sentenced to death, but his sentence had been commuted to penal servitude for life; he was, however, released the following year in the General Amnesty. Since then he had been twice imprisoned for his activities in connection with the insurgent army. The resounding feat of his escape from Lincoln Gaol in 1919 had been carried out by the skill and courage of Michael Collins, who afterwards became the object of his attacks in the Dail. While he was interned he was chosen by his fellow-prisoners as President of the Sinn Fein organization, and in the first session of the Dail, held from January 21 to October 27, 1919, he was elected President, an office which he held till January 9, 1922, when, after the approval of the Treaty by a majority of the representatives, he resigned in favour of Arthur Griffith, and the pro-Treatyites. He then set himself to wreck the Treaty, in and out of the Dail. He represented himself and the country as having been deceived by the delegates they sent to London to negotiate a Treaty, and as "President of the Irish Republic," he did all in his power to make the Treaty unworkable.

Yet what his opinions really were is not clear from his public utterances. "I am not a Republican Doctrinaire," he said shortly before the Treaty was signed. "I interpret my oath to the Republic merely as a pledge to the Irish people to do the best for them in any circumstances that may arise";[6] and later in the year, while he was negotiating with Lloyd George with a clear understanding that a Republic would not be considered, he is said to have expressed a desire to be got "out of the straight-jacket of the Irish Republic. I cannot get it."[7] But Mr. de Valera was in the hands of young men and women more extreme than himself. That the sober elements in the country wanted the Treaty is shown not only by votes in the Dail, but in the honest efforts that have been made to work the Treaty ever since. "Many a man spoke in the Dail against the Treaty, and yet prayed God nightly that it would be carried."[8] But by his rhetorical utterances Mr. de Valera succeeded in carrying with him an opposition sufficiently formidable to make the business of settling the country almost impossible. To make any sort of Government unworkable was their avowed intention.[9] As an American Republican Journal said: "On the side of the Republic stood de Valera, the divisions of the Irish Republican Army, the most able of the women, and the Idealists. On the opposite side were the Unionists, the Bishops, even men like Dr. Fogarty who were practically 'on the run,' the Nationalists of property and position, the big farmers, the manufacturers, and the professional men."[10]

[6] Speech in August, 1921.

[7] Speech in October, 1921.

[8] P. S. O'Hegarty, The Victory of Sinn Fein, p. 84.

[9] "If they could make Government impossible in the South, they could make it impossible in the North." Speech in April, 1922.

[10] The Leader, San Francisco, March 18, 1922.

If we read "most noisy" in place of "most able" of the women, this is practically the division of opinion as it actually existed. On the one side de Valera, women and idealists, with the Army at their back; on the other, all the sound elements in the country, and any who had anything to lose by disorder. As time went on, Mr. de Valera's pronouncements became more threatening. "If the Treaty were not rejected, perhaps it was over the bodies of the young men he saw around him that day that the fight for Irish freedom may be fought," he announced to a body of 700 men of the third Tipperary Brigade, in March, 1922; and in the same month at Thurles, he declared that "if they accepted the Treaty, and if the Volunteers of the future tried to complete the work the Volunteers of the last four years had been attempting, they would have to complete it, not over the bodies of foreign soldiers, but over the dead bodies of their own countrymen. They would have to wade through Irish blood, through the blood of the soldiers of the Irish Government and through the blood of some of the members of the Government in order to get freedom."[11] Incitements to murder of this kind, addressed to men with weapons in their hands and trained to their use, were not without effect. On August 22, 1922, Michael Collins was ambushed and shot at Bealnablath, Bandon, Co. Cork by a party of the irregulars.

[11] Speech at Thurles, in March, 1922 ; he repeated the same words next day at a meeting at Kilkenny.

On August 13, Arthur Griffith, President of the Provisional Government, worn out with work and anxieties, fell dying at his own hall-door. Thus, at a critical moment, the country was left without its two chief leaders, the man of action and the man of thought, patriots and master-minds and prudent statesmen both.

But in this extremity, a number of men of very considerable ability and complete disinterestedness were found to carry on the arduous work of building up the young Free State and placing it on firm foundations. The new President of Dail Eireann, Mr. William Thomas Cosgrave, had for long been preparing for the administrative side of his present position by his connection with the Dublin Corporation, on which he acted as Chairman of the Finance Committee, and by his activities as Minister for Local Government under the earlier sittings of the Dail. His independence of mind and sagacity have carried the country steadily forward, and his quiet and practical administration and firmness of character have kept the debates in the Dail increasingly free from the verbiage which irresponsible members had introduced into the earlier debates. Able administrators were found in Kevin O'Higgins, Minister for Home Affairs, and later Minister of Justice, Mr. Patrick Hogan, Minister for Agriculture, Mr. Ernest Blythe, Minister for Local Government, and General Mulcahy, Minister for Defence, while Professor Eoin MacNeill became Minister for Education in the third Dail and Mr. Michael Hayes was elected Speaker.

All these Ministers retain portfolios in the present Dail, except Professor MacNeill, and the lamented Kevin O'Higgins, whose assassination in 1927 deprived the country of a man of brilliant parts. His representation of the Free State outside his own country, when he became Minister for External Affairs, did much to raise its prestige, and convince the world that counsels of wisdom and statesmanship were not outside the reach of an Irish Government. Like his Chief, the President, he had known what it was to be "on the run" in the days of the Black and Tans, and had been imprisoned for anti-conscription speeches in 1918; but when a fortunate fate brought him into power, his clear vision and sane judgment made him conspicuous among the delegates to the League of Nations Conferences at Geneva, as a man of special mark. His death by a bullet one Sunday when he was on his way to Mass near his home at Booterstown, Co. Dublin, was an irreparable loss to his country. Mr. Winston Churchill aptly describes him as "a figure out of antiquity, cast in bronze."[12]

[12] Kevin O'Higgins, in his capacity as Minister of Justice, had been obliged to give the orders for the execution of Rory O'Connor and others of the insurgents, who had formerly been his friends. The father of Kevin O'Higgins had been murdered by the Insurgents in the presence of his wife, in February, 1923, and thus shared the fate of his son. One of his brothers had been killed in France and another was in the Navy.

The third Dail, which met on September 9, 1922, was a meeting of great importance. To it fell the duty of drawing up the Constitution for the Free State for the purpose of implementing the Treaty between Great Britain and Ireland. This Bill was introduced on September 18, 1922, and was finally passed on October 25 of that year. It laid down in its first Article that "The Irish Free State is a co-equal member of the community of Nations forming the British Commonwealth of nations"; and that "All powers of government and all authority legislative, executive, and judicial in Ireland, are derived from the people of Ireland." It decreed that all persons who are citizens of the Free State and over the age of 21, irrespective of sex, should have the vote for the Dail and all persons of the age of 30 and over should have the right to vote for Members of the Seanad or Senate; the Senate to consist of sixty members, thirty to be elected by Dail Eireann voting on principles of Proportional Representation, and thirty to be nominated by the President of the Executive Council, with the special aim of providing representation for parties or groups not adequately represented in the Dail.

The Statute thus passed by Dail Eireann sitting as a constituent assembly in the Provisional Parliament becomes the legal authority for the Constitution of the Irish Free State. That Statute contains the text of the Treaty of 1921, which is set out in the second schedule thereof. It gave the force of law to the Treaty of 1921 in the Irish Free State; while the Irish Free State (Agreement) Act, 1922, passed in the British Parliament, gave to the Treaty of 1921 the force of law in Great Britain. The Acts of the two Parliaments constitute their ratification of the instrument signed in December 1921 by the plenipotentiaries of the two countries. The Constitution of the Free State differs from that of the other self-governing Dominions in that it was established by resort to an international method, namely, by a Treaty concluded between representatives with plenipotentiary powers and ratified by Acts of Parliament. The other States of the Commonwealth were established as "Dominions" by Acts of the British Parliament only. And it would appear that in law the Canadian Parliament has not the power to amend the British North America Act, 1867, which contains the Constitution of Canada. The Oireachtas, on the other hand, could repeal the entire Free State Constitution, and the juridical and political relationships between Great Britain and the Irish Free State would still rest upon the mutual obligations of the Treaty of 1921, which is an international instrument and has been registered at Geneva as such at the instance of the Government of the Irish Free State. This international position of the Irish Free State is the mainspring, lever and support of the constitutional developments which have recently taken place in the British Commonwealth of Nations.

It would appear, therefore, that the Irish Free State stands in a privileged position among the Dominions of the British Empire both as to origin and constitution. It did not arise in a British Act of Parliament but by the Irish enactment of the Dail, though the British Act was necessary to give it the force of law in Great Britain. Thus the Irish view that all power resides in the citizen and that the political sovereignty of the people is also the legal sovereignty, gains a sanction from the terms of the Constitution. The Constitutional assembly had a free hand in drawing up the machinery of Government within the terms of the Treaty, and the admission of representatives of the Free State to the League of Nations,[13] and of her independent representatives at Washington, Paris, Berlin, and the Vatican, countries which also have sent their Ministers to Dublin, are a recognition of the equal status that she enjoys.

It is well to recall the words of Arthur Griffith, the man who more than any other made the Treaty acceptable to his nation. In moving the approval of the Treaty in the public session of Dail Eireann, on December 19, 1921, he said: "I signed the Treaty, not as an ideal thing, but fully believing what I believe now, as a Treaty honourable to Ireland and safeguarding the interests of Ireland. Now by that Treaty I am going to stand and every man with a scrap of honour who signed it will do the same. It is for the Irish people, who are our masters, not our servants, as some think, it is for the Irish people to say whether it is good enough: I hold that it is, and I hold that the Irish people, that 95 per cent. of them, believe it to be good enough...It is the first Treaty that admits the equality of Ireland. It is a Treaty of equality. We have come back from London with that Treaty, which recognised the Free State of Ireland. We have brought back the flag. We have brought back the evacuation of Ireland after 700 years by British troops, and the formation of an Irish army. We have brought back to Ireland her full rights and powers of fiscal control. We have brought back to Ireland equality with England, equality with all nations which form the Commonwealth, and an equal voice in the direction of foreign affairs in peace and war." And again: "This is what we brought back, peace with England, alliance with England, but Ireland developing her own life, carrying out her own way of existence, and rebuilding her own Gaelic civilization."[14] Griffith did not believe in finality: "this is no more a final settlement than this is the final generation," was one of his favourite sayings, but he believed in accepting the greatest measure of freedom that had come within the reach of Ireland for generations, and he believed in keeping his word.[15]

[13] The Dominions who are Members of the League of Nations are Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the Irish Free State India also is a member.

[14] For further quotations from this important speech, see Appendix vii, p. 467.

[15] Two of the signatories to the Treaty disowned their signatures on returning to Dublin.

The discussions on the Treaty in the Dail concentrated themselves chiefly, as was natural to a body that had lately been sworn to a Republic, on the question of the Oath of Allegiance, and much precious time in the earlier sessions was wasted in violent debates on this subject. Griffith believed that an oath of allegiance to the Free State of Ireland and of faithfulness to King George V in his capacity as head, and in virtue of the common citizenship of Ireland with Great Britain and the other nations comprising the British Commonwealth, was one which any Irishman could take with honour. The position of Mr. de Valera, who led the opposition, was an equivocal one. More than once he is reported to have said "We have no conditions to impose and no claim to advance but one, that we be free from aggression," and it is certain that when he commissioned the plenipotentiaries to go to London to discuss terms with the English Government, it was with the clear understanding that a Republic would not even be considered. Mr. Lloyd George had made this abundantly plain in one letter after another before the conference. Mr. de Valera's own Document No. 2 had contained an oath of allegiance no less full and binding than the oath incorporated in the Treaty; he had even gone farther by making an offer of an annual gift towards His Majesty's personal expenses.[16]

[16] For the two oaths see Appendix v, p. 463.

The question has a larger scope than the personal one, but it may be remarked in passing that the discussion was hardly gracious in consideration of the stimulus given to the proposals for the Treaty by the words of the King himself in his speech at the opening of the Ulster Parliament and his earlier offer of Buckingham Palace as the place of conference in the hope of bringing about a union between the North and South, a consummation desired by all Southerners, Republicans and Free Staters alike. The question has, however, been a subject of discussion since the acceptance of the Treaty and in April 1927, Mr. Dan Breen, one of the chief independent leaders in the civil war, introduced a Bill to secure the removal of the Oath by amending the Constitution by the repeal of Article 17. But Mr. Cosgrave stood firm and personally moved its rejection without even the formality of a first reading. "It proposes," he said, "to take out of the Constitution the Oath prescribed by the Treaty...The Government opposes this Bill. We oppose its First Reading because we believe in honouring our bond, we believe in the sanctity of international agreements. We oppose its First Reading because our honour as the representatives of a nation which has approved of that Treaty is bound to the carrying out of our part of the transaction."[17] During the earlier sessions of Dail Eireann, the Republicans, as objectors to the oath, honourably refrained from entering the house of representatives, but in the year 1927, they decided to take their seats in the fifth Dail as an alternative to being obliterated as a party, but with the reservation that they regarded the oath as an "empty formula."

[17] Speech quoted in Denis Gwynn, The Irish Free State, 1922-1927.

On July 26, the first of these Deputies entered the house and subscribed the roll, and on August 12 the Fianna Fail party, as they now styled themselves, complied with Article 17 and took their seats. They had secured 44 seats as against the 46 seats of the Treatyites (who adopted the name of Cumann na nGaedheal), Labour 22, Independents 14, and Farmers 11: the total membership being 153. The numbers have changed somewhat in the sixth or present Dail, the Government now numbering 61 supporters as against 57 of the Fianna Fail, 13 Labour and 12 Independents, but the farmers party has sunk to 6. It was the first occasion since the passing of the Constitution on which all the Deputies elected took the Oath and subscribed the roll.[18] It is to be remarked that there has been practically no discussion about the national Flag, such as has played a large part in the debates in South Africa. The flag now adopted by the Free State, a tricolour of Green, White and Orange, has superseded the old green flag bearing the harp, with or without the crown; but no one seems clear as to when or by whom it was brought into use. It stands as a symbol of a hoped for future union between the North and the South, bound together by the white bond of amity.

[18] For details as to the composition of the different meetings of the Dail, and other information regarding the departments of State, etc., see The Oireachtas Companion and Saorstat Guide, 1930.

A cognate question to that of the oath of allegiance was that of the right of appeal from the Irish Supreme Court to His Majesty in Council. Such an appeal to the English Privy Council seems to be a possibility contemplated in the Treaty and advantage has been taken of it to bring the final authority of the Irish Supreme Court into question. But any such position has been strenuously, and it would seem with justice, opposed by the Government of the Irish Free State, who hold that the continuance of the Judicial Committee is a menace to the judicial sovereignty of the Irish Free State, and that executive acts performed by His Majesty on the advice of that body are an infringement of the executive sovereignty of the Irish Free State. The application for leave to appeal to His Majesty has, in practice, not been a success. It has resulted in a series of bad legal advices to His Majesty and the Judicial Committee is regarded by the Government of the Irish Free State as an institution which is effete, undemocratic, and harmful. The Government take the view that the Judicial Committee is not a judicial tribunal or court in the strict sense; and that their decision given to His Majesty the King in a given case is an advice given by a number of Privy Councillors, and not the judgment of a Court of Law; yet such advice enables His Majesty to perform an executive act by making an Order in Council directing certain courses of action in uniformity with the advice tendered. The Government hold that the only authority competent to advise His Majesty to perform an executive act relating to the Irish Free State is the Executive Council of the Irish Free State.

All such questions relating to the several Self-Governing Dominions which arise in actual practice have to be examined one by one, for as Lord Haldane has said in giving an opinion on an Irish petition for leave to appeal which came up in 1923, "the status of the new Irish Dominion is one which, although it has been likened to a number of the Dominions in the Treaty Act and in the Treaty, is not strictly analogous to any one of them." There are certain wide differences of circumstance and outlook in the different Dominions which might lead some of them to regard as a precious privilege the very thing which another might regard as an infringement of a right. The experience and wishes of each Dominion have, in fact, to be taken into account in determining such cases, and the Imperial Conferences form a natural occasion for thrashing out questions which are of importance to all the Dominions in greater or less measure.[19] The Irish Free State entered the Commonwealth at a time when all the relations between the Self-Governing Dominions and the home Government were receiving a wide expansion in accordance with the growing power and independence of these Dominions, and sweeping changes and new adjustments were necessitated to meet the new conditions. The mutual interests of the group of States called for mutual adjustments because of the close economic and other relations actually existing between them. Mr. Fitzgerald, as Minister for External Affairs, in presenting a Report of the Conference of 1926, declared that "the attitude of the Government is, and will remain, that those mutual arrangements should be dictated by that mutual interest and by that only."[20]

[19] At the time of writing, this question is under the consideration of the Imperial Conference sitting in London.

[20] Denis Gwynn, The Irish Free State, where a large part of Mr. Fitzgerald's speech is quoted.

The composition of the Seanad (Senate), thirty members of which are nominated by the President of the Executive Council, proves on what wide lines of public policy Mr. Cosgrave bases his actions. The fears of the Southern Unionists that they would have no place in the government of the country proved to be without foundation. Its first Chairman was Lord Glenavy, who, as Mr. J. H. Campbell, K.C., took par with Lord Carson in the Unionist campaign against the Home Rule Bill; and such well-known Peers as Lord Mayo and Lord Dunraven and the Marquess of Lansdowne were among the nominations to the first Seanad. Business men of position, such as Mr. Andrew Jameson, and distinguished soldiers, such as Lieut.-General Sir Bryan Mahon and Major-General Hickie have sat in it. The Southern Unionists have, in return, shown their confidence in the survival of the Free State and their interest in its welfare, not only by their services in the Seanad but by subscribing largely to the loans floated from time to time by the Government; these loans having been more than once over-subscribed within a few days of their opening.

The first duty of the Government when it came into power was to raise an army competent to restore order. Ireland was in a peculiarly favoured position as regards man-power after the European war. In spite of the loss of 50,000 of her sons on the bloody plains of France and Flanders, the fact that Ireland had escaped conscription, together with the stoppage of emigration, had left the country with unusually large numbers of young men, thousands of them without regular employment. Ireland, too, was wealthy as it had seldom been before, owing to the high prices that had been paid for food stuffs and cereals through the years of the great struggle, as well as to extra employment given in munition work either at home or in England. The inevitable slump quickly followed the conclusion of peace and the farmers and fishermen were left with considerable debts to meet for fishing boats and tackle, or for agricultural implements, which had been purchased on credit when prices were high and were in many cases only partially paid for. The disbandment of the Royal Irish Constabulary after the establishment of the Free State, added to the numbers of the unemployed. The Constabulary had been a semi-military force, but the Government, in spite of the disordered state of the country, decided that the new Civic Guard should be unarmed. It was believed that the people at large would support the police, and so make armed men unnecessary; and the belief has been justified in the long run, though the men at first suffered attacks from the armed bands still going about the country. For the new regular army men were recruited rapidly, the conditions in the city and outlying districts alike demanding a force to withstand the continued activities of the irregulars. Over 50,000 men were raised, but the difficulty of securing efficient officers to train and command them was very great, for General Mulcahy, who was engaged in forming the National Army, refused to employ retired Irish officers who had served in the British Army.

With the gradual quieting down of the disturbed districts and the disbandment of the irregular forces the army has been much reduced. The army estimates had risen to over £10,000,000 in 1924, owing to the civil war; but by 1926, expenses had been reduced owing to the demobilization of troops, to little over £1,600,000. It is not proposed at present to increase the army, which is designed solely for home-defence and the maintenance of order; for it is believed that the necessity to maintain a considerable body of men under arms has now passed away. But during the earlier years of the new Government there was a constant fear of fresh outbreaks. A mutiny among the troops was suppressed and revolutionary propaganda heavily punished. Arms had been dumped but not surrendered, and efforts were being made to stir up the irregulars to fresh outbreaks. There still existed a head-quarters staff to direct operations and preparations were going on for revolutionary risings. Large quantities of arms and treasonable documents were found from time to time, even up to the year 1925, when the revolutionary forces seem to have cut themselves apart from the control of Mr. de Valera.

In the early years of its existence the Free State Government put down the insurgents with a strong hand and many of the most notable of the insurgent leaders, such as Rory O'Connor, Liam Mellowes, and Erskine Childers, who were their prisoners, were called upon to face the firing squad. In spite of the doctrinaire pronouncements of pacifists and well-meaning men, no Government has, as yet, found a method of suppressing anarchy without the use of force. In 1926 and again in 1927, in order to meet these revolutionary activities the Government passed two strong Coercion Acts. The second of these two Acts, entitled the Public Safety Act, was introduced immediately after the assassination of Kevin O'Higgins and in consequence of the anger of the Ministry at being deprived by the bullet of one of their most able members. It was pushed rapidly through, and though the period of its operation was to cease in 1929, it gave in the meantime drastic powers of suppression and punishment to the Government. But the powers given by these Acts were sparingly used; and by the entry into the Dail of Mr. de Valera and his Republican followers it was believed that danger from this source had ceased.

Another matter in which the Government took the high hand with excellent results was the clearing out of the corrupt Corporations of Dublin and Cork and replacing them by young and active Commissioners, who put in hand a number of improvements in housing, sanitation and the cleansing of these cities. Their example was speedily followed by other municipalities to the great advantage of the inhabitants. Hardly less important is the reorganization in the Poor Law and Workhouse system and the reduction, by badly-needed economies, of the excessive rates. More important still is the calling into being of a new Judiciary, the necessity for which had become apparent during the years of "the Terror," when all the courts of law had been disorganized and justice was administered over the country by simple means which had won the confidence of the people. A similar decentralization of the courts has been carried out under the new system for local disputes, many of which have been settled satisfactorily and with the minimum of expense. In the appointment of Judges, Mr. Cosgrave has shown the same impartiality and freedom from prejudice that he has manifested throughout his career. A number of the senior judges having retired on pensions under the terms of the Treaty, their places were filled by the Government with a complete disregard to party considerations or to differences in religious belief. The assistance of Lord Glenavy, former Lord Chancellor of Ireland, as Chairman of the Senate, has been of much value and has given confidence to Unionists and Protestants that their claims would not be overlooked. As a matter of fact, they have received a consideration which has been more than once gratefully acknowledged.

Efforts to effect greater efficiency have led to a reorganization of the old Government Boards, such as the Congested Districts Board, which was established under Lord Balfour's administration in 1891 and received Government grants for the development of agriculture and industries in the most neglected districts round the western sea-boards; the Fisheries Board, and the Department of Agriculture. Similar efforts to introduce greater economies in working have been applied to the railways and transport and to the improvement of roads. The work of the Land Purchase Act of 1923, completed the establishment of peasant ownership which was initiated by George Wyndham's Act of 1903, and the Department of Agriculture turned its attention to questions of marketing, grading of eggs and butter, and in general to the better management of farm produce. The participation of Irish Free State produce in the Empire Marketing Scheme may open new avenues for trade with the other self-governing Dominions and lead to a closer community of interest between them. At present the main trade of the South of Ireland is, as it has always been, with Great Britain and Northern Ireland. As a purchaser of British produce and manufactures, the Irish Free State ranks fifth, while it ranks tenth as a supplier of goods to Great Britain and Northern Ireland. In examining the statistics of other countries it is shown that there is no live stock trade between any two countries in the world which approaches the dimensions of that between the Irish Free State and Great Britain and Northern Ireland. In the group Cattle and Beef, it was second only to Argentina, and in the group Sheep and Mutton, the Irish Free State ranked fourth. Imports increased from £59,852,000 in 1928, to £61,302,000 in 1929, an increase of £1,450,000; and in the same year, exports increased from £45,591,000 to £46,803,000, an increase of £1,212,000. There has thus been a slight increase on both sides of the balance sheet. Nevertheless, there has only been a partial recovery of trade, for there was a steady decrease from 1924 to 1926 in both exports and imports, and neither have yet attained the total of the former year.[21]

[21] See Trade and Shipping Statistics, 1929, Department of Industry and Commerce, pp. iii, vi, xviii.

Every economic sign shows the necessity, if the Irish Free State is to hold its own in the world markets, of closer intercourse with Britain and Northern Ireland, and of the extension of its trade with other countries. The theory that Mr. de Valera has recently been developing in the Dail, of closing Ireland to outside trade and making her entirely self-supporting within her own borders, seems, in view of these figures, to be one of those picturesque but impossible ideals derived from the early years of the Gaelic League, when it was even held to be a highly patriotic act to discourage visitors, especially English visitors, from touring in Ireland, because Ireland was meant only for Irishmen, with its consequent impoverishment of the hotels and railways. The sound common sense of the present Ministers is opposed to all such doctrinaire theories, but much time that might be more profitably spent in the Dail is lost in discussing them.

The census returns of population cannot be considered satisfactory. In the fifteen years between April 2, 1911, to April 18, 1926, the population of the Irish Free State decreased from 3,139,688 to 2,972,802 or 5.3 per cent., while Northern Ireland showed a slight increase of 5,791, or 0.5 per cent.[22]

[22] Census of Population of Irish Free State on April 18, 1926 ; preliminary Report (1926).

There has been a rapid loss of population in the country districts and smaller towns while Dublin and its four urban districts have considerably gained in numbers. In other words, the trend of movements in Ireland, as elsewhere, has been from the country into the town. Emigration received recently a severe check in the United States, the numbers admitted from Ireland being drastically reduced, and the present tendency is to emigrate to Great Britain with the hope of getting work. The average net loss to Ireland during the period above mentioned was 33,468, but some part must be ascribed to unusual circumstances, such as the 50,000 soldiers killed in the war and those withdrawn with the British army after the Treaty along with the 8,000 men of the Royal Irish Constabulary. But there is no doubt that the conditions of life in Ireland were from 1916 to 1923 so terrible to young farmers and labourers that many fled the country along with those of another class who suffered the loss of their homes.[23] The great and crying need is for the establishment of industries sufficient to provide work for the youth of the population.

[23] The emigration returns sprang up from 2,975 in 1919, to 15,531 in 1920. and in the first quarter of 1921, 4,770 people emigrated. A Proclamation of Dail Eireann, then a Republican assembly, forbade emigration.

In spite of the great main manufactures, distilleries and breweries, biscuit manufacturies, and in the North shipbuilding and linen, there is not sufficient work of an industrial kind to keep the young people at home. It is for this reason that the bold effort of the Government to provide an ample supply of power for industry by the completion of the Shannon Scheme is to be warmly welcomed. This, the most ambitious undertaking hitherto set on foot by the Free State Government, owes its inception to the ability of a young graduate of the National University who was studying engineering in the firm of Siemens-Schuckert in Germany, and who single-handed worked out the details of the scheme. The Directors of the firm having conducted investigations at their own expense and proved its feasibility, the work was confided to this firm; they have now carried it through to completion. The capital cost has been about five million pounds, but for this outlay, it is believed that a sufficient electric current can be supplied both for domestic and for industrial purposes over the south of Ireland; it will in all probability be used also for the railways. All the superior electrical work of this vast scheme has been done by German experts, Irish labourers being only employed for the rougher work; but now that it is accomplished, it opens up wide new possibilities for industry in the Free State. The Ford factory in the city of Cork was at the end of last year (November, 1929) turning out large quantities of tractors, going to all parts of the world, and was paying a fortnightly wages bill of over £35,000 to its employees.

The other main industries of Southern Ireland, other than animal and dairy products, such as spirits, porter, biscuits, hosiery and woollen goods show—with the exception of porter, which is on the increase—a decline during the year 1929; it is possible that the new electrical power now at their disposal may help to reinstate them. In the North, linen and the shipbuilding trades are also suffering from the universal trade depression and its consequent unemployment; fresh impetus and more modern appliances and wider advertising are to be desired all over the country. The pressing problem is to find occupation for the population. So long as the old idea that Ireland is only fitted to be an agricultural and not an industrial country continues, there will always be a large surplus population, unable to find sufficient work by which to live. Yet to a traveller in the south of Ireland there is much to encourage hope for the future. In Dublin there are signs of increasing confidence in the cleaner streets, the rebuilding going on in parts of the city and the activity of the shops. In the country the acquisition of their own holdings has led to great improvements in the cottages and their surroundings, and the housing problem has been one of the first attacked by the Government, though, as yet, without very marked results. Ireland is gradually emerging from the period of disillusionment which followed upon the civil war and the five years of terror that preceded it. This mood of despondent self-criticism has left its mark upon the literature of the country in plays like those of Sean Casey or novels like those of Liam O'Flaherty, which hold up to the public a terrible side of Irish life, sordid and hopelessly corrupt. It will no doubt pass with the circumstances that gave rise to it.

One of the early clauses of the Constitution laid it down that "the national language of the Irish Free State is the Irish language but the English language may be equally recognised as an official language." Since then great efforts have been made to put this expression of opinion into practice. In January, 1925, a Commission was appointed to enquire into the preservation of the Gaeltacht or Irish-speaking districts of the South and West. It was found that these Irish-speaking districts corresponded to a large extent with the areas formally dealt with by the Congested Districts Board, in other words to the poorest and most isolated portions of the counties under consideration, and the report dealt in consequence almost equally with the question of employment and that of the language. The census of the Gaeltacht, or Irish-speaking districts in whole or in part, for the seven counties of Donegal, Mayo, Galway, Clare, Kerry, Cork and Waterford, showed that while there was an apparent increase in the number of Irish speakers in these districts between the years 1871 and 1881, this was owing largely to the inaccurate returns made for the earlier date. Again in 1901, some counties, particularly counties Kerry, Cork, Waterford, and Clare, showed a slight rise in the number of Irish-speakers, but the Commissioners attributed this rise chiefly to the activities of the Gaelic League, which was beginning to be felt as an impetus to the preservation of the language from its foundation in 1892, rather than to a natural increase in the number of native speakers. From this onward the downward tend has been continuous and marked, especially in the partially Irish speaking areas; those districts where the Irish speakers formed over 70 per cent. of the population, having shown, on the contrary, a tendency to rise between 1911 and 1925.[24]

[24] Report of Coimisiún na Gaeltachta, 1925, pp. 10,106-108.

There are at the present time few or no areas where the English language has not to some degree penetrated, and of the three-quarters of a million persons who spoke Irish as their native tongue in the early eighties a large proportion have disappeared through emigration caused by agricultural, distress, in spite of the efforts of the Congested Districts Board, the Fisheries Board and other agencies, to ameliorate the conditions of life at home.[25] Professor Eoin MacNeill, as first Minister of Education, set himself to push forward the revival of the language by every possible means. It was made compulsory in the National University, and was ordered to be taught as a medium of instruction for not less than one full hour in every school in which there was a teacher found capable of giving such instruction. Summer classes and other means of acquiring the necessary knowledge of Irish were started and the teachers were required to attend them; gradually, in an increasing number of elementary schools, Irish is not only being taught as a part, of the curriculum but is being used, especially in the more Irish speaking districts, as a means of teaching other subjects on the programme. The secondary schools have been left free to arrange their own curriculum, but the necessity of qualifying in Irish for the entrance examination in the National University, is having its effect in an increasing number of schools of this type.

[25] In 1891 there were 690,000 Gaelic speakers, but in 1911 the number had fallen to 580,000. See Stephen Gwynn, Ireland (1924), p. 148.

In the debates in the Dail, both languages are used, but the necessity of translating speeches made first in Irish into English is becoming irksome as a waste of valuable time and the practice may fall into disuse. But the tendency to make a knowledge of Irish an essential qualification for all posts under the Government and in the civil service, is growing, even for membership of the civic guard. It is no doubt honestly believed by many enthusiasts that the existence of nationality is dependent on the survival of the nation's language. Cathal Brugha (Charles Burgess), the fighting right arm of the Irregular forces, is reported to have said that "if the language died, there would be an end to the ancient Irish nation." Yet Switzerland, though intensely national, has never evolved a language of its own; its individuality survives with the help of three foreign tongues. The same may be said of the United States of America. The prevalent idea that Ireland is sharply divided into a pure Gaelic race, naturally Irish speaking, and a race of English descent, speaking English, cannot in this day be seriously held. Cathal Brugha, though he conceals his descent under an assumed Irish name, must presumably be of English origin; and so were several of the leading signatories to the Proclamation of Easter week, beginning with Pearse himself.[26] The same remark applies to many of the leading figures in the Gaelic League.

[26] It is significant that all the three leaders in the 1916 rebellion were of "foreign" descent, if we are to judge by their names. Pearse was proud of his English father, Griffith must have been of Welsh descent and de Valera had a Spanish father. MacSwiney's mother was English. It is dangerous however, to judge entirely by proper names; for there is a constant tendency observable throughout Irish history to substitute English for Irish and Irish for English names.

Yet, though the two races are now so inextricably mixed that the English settlers or descendants of settlers often rank as the best Gaels, the instinct that led the Government to lay stress on the revival of the language was a sound one. A language enshrines as nothing else can do the thought and sentiments of a people. It is self-created, the outcome of a natural need for self-expression, and it cannot be lost without a corresponding loss of individuality. The acquisition of two languages is in itself a culture and it is right and natural that one of these languages should be the native tongue. It cannot now replace English but it can take its place beside it. The very geographical names call for its retention, for in them are enshrined the legends and traditions of the past, the imagination and affections of the race. As Laveleye, the Belgian economist has said, "As the culture of a people advances, race exercises less power over all people and historic memories more." To be united by common sympathies leading to co-operation between themselves more fully and more readily than with any other people, is that which constitutes a nation, and the outward expression of that nationhood is Government by themselves. "The Treaty," in the words of Arthur Griffith [27] "is a recognition of the Irish nation. It gave to Ireland such powers as she had not possessed for centuries, it gave to Ireland the power to root her own people and give them a foothold in their own country—a thing they never had for a century past; it gave them power to build up a Gaelic State, to de-anglicise the land and make it what it ought to be—a distinctive speaking nation, with a distinctive culture; it gave them the power to banish from their midst the miserable poverty they knew to exist in the country; it gave them the power to deal with all the social problems that to-day could not be dealt with by them but were dealt with by an external and non-understanding country." His dying message to his countrymen was this: "People of Ireland, stand by your Treaty. It is an economic necessity; it is for you political safety."

[27] Speech of February 21, 1922.

We end on the cheering words of Kevin O'Higgins, written to the French people shortly before his death, and when the Free State was still very young: "The impression that I would leave with you above all is of a nation that has no longer before it problems of the importance of those which she has resolved with success, of a nation which, having recognised its social and economic weaknesses, has set herself to surmount them, of a nation that views the future with tranquil confidence, persuaded that that future will be the best justification of her long struggle for independence."[28]

[28] Kevin O'Higgins, L'Irlande d'ajourd'hui (1925).

END OF EPILOGUE

APPENDIX I.—PHELIM O'NEILL'S COMMISSION FROM KING CHARLES I

The commission said to have been given by King Charles I. to Sir Phelim O'Neill, and issued by him and Sir Con Magennis on November 4, 1641, at Newry, to incite the population to rise in rebellion, is given in Miss M. A. Hickson's "Ireland in the Seventeenth Century," Vol. I., p. 144, with a discussion of the subject and references to the chief authorities (see pp. 113-120). She omits to mention, however, a very interesting story found in the Memoir of Roger Boyle, First Earl of Orrery, which prefaces his "State Letters" (1742), p. 35, and seems to settle the question of the forgery. Some time after the conclusion of the war, we are told, "the Duke of Ormonde was desirous of a conference with my Lord of Orrery about the affairs ot the kingdom. And this was the more necessary, as the Parliament was soon after to be convened. The Earl waited upon his Grace at Kilkenny and staid there a week; during which time my Lord Muskerry, who had been, as we heretofore mentioned, in the rebellion of Munster in the year forty-one, came there also. Lord Orrery took an opportunity one day, when alone with Muskerry, who happened to be in a pleasant open humour, to ask him how the rebels obtained that commission which they showed to the then Lord President St. Leger under the king's great seal. Lord Muskerry answered, 'I will be free and unreserved with you. It was a forged commission, drawn up by Walsh and others, who, having a writing to which the great seal was fixed, one of the company very dexterously took off the sealed wax from the label of that writing and fixed it to the label of the forged commission. Whilst this was doing, an odd accident happened which startled all present and had almost entirely disconcerted the scheme. The forged commission having been finished, while the parchment was handling and turning in order to put on the seal, a tame wolf, which lay asleep by the fire, awakened at the crackling of the parchment and running to it, seized it and tore it to pieces, notwithstanding all haste and struggle to prevent him; so that, after their pains, they were obliged to begin anew and write it all over again.' Lord Orrrey, struck with the wickedness of this transaction, could not refrain from expressing himself to that purpose to Lord Muskerry, who laughingly replied: 'It would have been impossible to have held the people together without this device.'"

The Peter Walsh named in this extract was the Franciscan priest who opposed the mission of Rinuccini, and the author of the "Remonstrance," an address of loyalty to Charles II. He was a friend of Ormonde and frequently in his pay. His actions, designed to support the Catholic interest during the Settlement, were intended to "stay the persecution of the Roman Catholics set on foot by the Lord Chancellor [Sir Maurice Eustace] and the Earls of Orrery and Mountrath," as stated in his "Letter to the Catholics of England, Ireland, and Scotland, and all other dominions under His Gracious Majesty, Charles II," printed in 1674. This document and the "History and Vindication of the Loyal Formulary or Irish Remonstrance," printed in the same year, and to which the "Letter" formed a preamble, set forth his views, and gave a history of his efforts. He only succeeded in getting the signatures of seventy clergy and a hundred and sixty-four laity to the Remonstrance, and some of these afterwards withdrew in consequence of the violent denunciations with which it was received by the ultramontane party both in Ireland and abroad. Through the exertions of Rinuccini's adherents, it was censured at Louvain, where Walsh had been educated, and he narrowly missed being confined in the prisons of the Inquisition. "So dangerous a thing," he comments, "is it reputed at Rome for the subjects to give their natural Prince any pledge of their faith which the Pope cannot undo." A violent reply from another point of view was made to the "Remonstrance" by Orrery, and Walsh continued the controversy in a tract called "Irish Colours Folded." But the terms of the Act of Explanation made any accommodation impossible, and such men as Orrery, who were out to make profit for themselves by all possible means, were never-failing in their endeavours to exhibit the acts of the Catholics in the worst possible light. Walsh's attempt to show them as loyalists met with no support from his party. Walsh had been a member of the Supreme Council, and he received a considerable measure of support from David Rothe and other theologians in his dealings with the Nuncio; but his advanced views brought him into violent opposition to Archbishop Talbot as well as to other supporters of the Nuncio's mission, and he had to leave Ireland and take refuge in Oxford. He died in 1688. Many of his tracts were issued under the name of "Valesius."

END OF APPENDIX I

APPENDIX II.—ORATION OF P. H. PEARSE OVER THE GRAVE OF O'DONOVAN "ROSSA"

"It has seemed right, before we turn away from this place in which we have laid the mortal remains of O'Donovan Rossa, that one amongst us should, in the name of all, speak the praise of that valiant man, and endeavour to formulate the thought and the hope that are in us as we stand around his grave. And if there is anything that makes it fitting that I rather than some other--I, rather than one of the grey-haired men who were young with him, and shared in his labour and in his suffering, should speak here, it is, perhaps, that I may be taken as speaking on behalf of a new generation that has been re-baptised in the Fenian faith, and that has accepted the responsibility of carrying out the Fenian programme. I propose to you, then, that here by the grave of this unrepentant Fenian, we renew our baptismal vows; that here by the grave of this unconquered and unconquerable man, we ask of God, each one for himself, such unshakeable purpose, such high and gallant courage, such unbreakable strength of soul as belonged to O'Donovan Rossa.

"Deliberately here we avow ourselves, as he avowed himself in the dock, Irishmen of one allegiance only. We, of the Irish Volunteers, and you others who are associated with us in to-day's task and duty, are bound together, and must stand together henceforth in brotherly union for the achievement of the freedom of Ireland. And we know only one definition of freedom: It is Tone's definition; it is Mitchel's definition; it is Rossa's definition. Let no one blaspheme the cause that the dead generations of Ireland served by giving it any other name and definition than their name and definition.

"We stand at Rossa's grave, not in sadness, but rather in exaltation of spirit that it has been given us to come thus into so close a communion with that brave and splendid Gael. Splendid and holy causes are served by men who are themselves splendid and holy. O'Donovan Rossa was splendid in the proud manhood of him--splendid in the heroic grace of him, splendid in the Gaelic strength and clarity and truth of him. And all that splendour, and pride, and strength was compatible with a humility and a simplicity of devotion to Ireland, to all that was olden and beautiful and Gaelic in Ireland; the holiness and simplicity of patriotism of a Michael O'Clery or of an Eoghan O'Growney. The clear true eyes of this man almost alone in his day visioned Ireland as we to-day would surely have her--not free merely but Gaelic as well; not Gaelic merely, but free as well.

"In a closer spiritual communion with him now than ever before, or perhaps ever again, in spiritual communion with those of his day living and dead, who suffered with him in English prisons, in communion of spirit too with our own dear comrades who suffer in English prisons to-day, and speaking on their behalf as well as our own, we pledge to Ireland our love, and we pledge to English rule in Ireland our hate. This is a place of peace, sacred to the dead, where men should speak with all charity and with all restraint; but I hold it a Christian thing, as O'Donovan Rossa held it, to hate evil, to hate untruth, to hate oppression, and hating them, to strive to overthrow them. Our foes are strong, and wise, and wary; but strong and wise and wary as they are, they cannot undo the miracles of God, Who ripens in the hearts of young men the seeds sown by the young men of a former generation. And the seeds sown by the young men of '65 and '67 are coming to their miraculous ripening to-day. Rulers and Defenders of Realms had need to be wary it they would guard against such processes. Life springs from death, and from the graves of patriot men and women spring live nations. The defenders of this realm have worked well in secret and in the open. They think that they have pacified Ireland. They think that they have purchased half of us, and intimidated the other half. They think that they have foreseen everything. They think that they have provided against everything; but the fools, the fools, the fools! they have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace." [1]

[1] Reprinted in THE REPUBLIC OF IRELAND (Poblacht na h-Eireann) on January 3, 1922. Jeremiah O'Donovan, who adopted the title of "Rossa," was born in Skibbereen in 1831, He was arrested with O'Leary, Kickham and others, and sentenced by Judge Keogh to penal servitude for life, but was amnestied, and went to America where he edited THE UNITED IRISHMEN. He died in New York in 1915, and was buried in Glasnevin.

END OF APPENDIX II

APPENDIX III.—PROCLAMATION OF THE IRISH REPUBLIC, APRIL 24TH, 1916

THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF THE IRISH REPUBLIC.

To the People of Ireland.

Irishmen and Irishwomen! In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives the old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag, and strikes for her freedom.

Having organised and trained her manhood through her secret revolutionary organisation, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and through her open military organisations, the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army, having patiently perfected her discipline, having resolutely waited for the right moment to reveal itself, now seizes that moment, and supported by her exiled children in America and by gallant allies in Europe, but relying in the first on her own strength, she strikes with full confidence of victory. We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible. The long usurpation of that right by a foreign power and government has not extinguished that right, nor can it ever be extinguished except by the destruction of the people. In every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to National freedom and sovereignty; six times during the past three hundred years they have asserted it in arms. Standing on that fundamental right and again asserting it in arms in the face of the world, we hereby proclaim the Irish Republic as a Sovereign Independent State, and we pledge our lives and the lives of our comrades in arms to the cause of freedom, of its welfare, and of its exaltation among the nations.

The Irish Republic is entitled to, and hereby claims, the allegiance of every Irishman and Irishwoman. The Republic guarantees civil and religious liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all the children of the nation equally, and oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past.

We place the cause of the Irish Republic under the protection of the Most High God, whose blessing we invoke upon our arms, and we pray that no one who serves that cause will dishonour it by cowardice, inhumanity, or rapine. In this supreme hour the Irish nation must, by its valour and discipline, and by the readiness of its children to sacrifice themselves for the common good, prove itself worthy of the august destiny to which it is called.

Signed on behalf of the Provisional Government:

THOMAS J. CLARKE.
SEAN MACDEARMADA.
P. H. PEARSE.
JAMES CONNOLLY.
THOMAS MACDONAGH.
EAMON CEANT.
JOSEPH PLUNKETT.
EAMON DE VALERA.

(followed by 56 other names).

END OF APPENDIX III

APPENDIX IV.—ENVOYS PLENIPOTENTIARY FROM THE REPUBLIC OF IRELAND

To all to Whom These Presents Come, Greeting:

In virtue of the authority vested in me by Dail Eireann, I hereby appoint

ARTHUR GRIFFITH, T.D., Minister of Foreign Affairs, Chairman;
MICHAEL COLLINS, T.D., Minister of Finance;
ROBERT C. BARTON, T.D., Minister for Economic Affairs;
EDMUND J. DUGGAN, T.D.
GEORGE GAVAN DUFFY, T.D.

as Envoys Plenipotentiary from the Elected Government of the Republic of Ireland to negotiate and conclude on behalf of Ireland with the representatives of His Britannic Majesty, George V, a Treaty or Treaties of Settlement, Association and Accommodation between Ireland and the community of nations known as the British Commonwealth.

In Witness Whereof I hereunto subscribe my name as President.

EAMON DE VALERA.

Done in the City of Dublin this 7th day of October in the year of our Lord, 1921, in five identical originals. [1]

[1] Copy of the credentials handed to each of the five envoys sent to London by President de Valera. Printed in THE REPUBLIC OF IRELAND (Poblacht na h-Eireann) on Wednesday April 12, 1922.

END OF APPENDIX IV

APPENDIX V.—THE THREE OATHS

(a) OATH TO THE IRISH REPUBLIC AT THE DAIL MEETING, AUGUST 16, 1921.

"I —— do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I do not and shall not yield a voluntary support to any pretended Government, Authority, or Power within Ireland hostile and inimical thereto; and I do further swear (or affirm) that to the best of my knowledge and ability I will support and defend the Irish Republic, which is Dail Eireann, against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, so help me God."

(b) OATH PROPOSED BY MR. DE VALERA IN CONNEXION WITH DOCUMENT No. 2.

"I —— do swear to bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of Ireland, and the Treaty of Association of Ireland with the British Commonwealth of Nations, and to recognise the King of Great Britain as Head of the Associated States."

(c) FORM OF OATH PRESCRIBED BY THE TREATY (IN ARTICLE 17).

"I —— do solemnly swear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of the Irish Free State as by law established, and that I will be faithful to H.M. King George V, his heirs and successors by law in virtue of the common citizenship of Ireland with Great Britain and her adherence to and membership of the group of nations forming the British Commonwealth of Nations."

END OF APPENDIX V

APPENDIX VI.—THE BOUNDARY QUESTION

ARTICLES OF AGREEMENT FOR A TREATY BETWEEN GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND.

Article 11. Until the expiration of one month from the passing of the Act of Parliament for the ratification of this instrument, the powers of the Parliament and the Government of the Irish Free State shall not be exercisible as respects Northern Ireland and the provisions of the Government of Ireland Act, 1920, shall, so far as they relate to Northern Ireland, remain of full force and effect, and no election shall be held for the return of members to serve in the Parliament of the Irish Free State for constituencies in Northern Ireland, unless a resolution is passed by both Houses of the Parliament of Northern Ireland in favour of the holding of such elections before the end of the said month.

Article 12. If before the expiration of the said month, an address is presented to His Majesty by both Houses of the Parliament of Northern Ireland to that effect, the powers of the Parliament and Government of the Irish Free State shall no longer extend to Northern Ireland, and the provisions of the Government of Ireland Act, 1920 (including those relating to the Council of Ireland) shall so far as they relate to Northern Ireland, continue to be of full force and effect, and this instrument shall have effect subject to the necessary modifications.

Provided that if such an address is so presented a Commission consisting of three persons, one to be appointed by the Government of the Irish Free State, one to be appointed by the Government of Northern Ireland, and one who shall be Chairman to be appointed by the British Government shall determine in accordance with the wishes of the inhabitants, so far as may be compatible with economic and geographic conditions, the boundaries between Northern Ireland and the rest of Ireland, and for the purposes of the Government of Ireland Act, 1920, and of this instrument, the boundary of Northern Ireland shall be such as may be determined by such Commission.

END OF APPENDIX VI

APPENDIX VII.—SPEECH OF ARTHUR GRIFFITH IN DAIL EIREANN ON DECEMBER 19, 1921, IN MOVING THE APPROVAL OF THE TREATY

"Nearly three months ago Dáil Eireann appointed Plenipotentiaries to go to London to treat with the British people and to make a bargain. We have made a bargain. We have brought it back. We were to go there to reconcile our aspirations, with the association of Ireland with the community of nations known as the British Empire. That task which was given to us was as hard as was ever placed on the shoulders of men. We faced that task.

We knew whatever happened we would have our critics, and we made up our minds to do whatever was right and disregard whatever criticism might occur. We could have shirked the responsibility.

We did not seek to go as Plenipotentiaries. Other men were asked and other men refused. We went. The responsibility is on our shoulders. We took the responsibility in London and we take the responsibility in Dublin.

I signed the Treaty, not as an ideal thing, but fully believing what I believe now, as a Treaty honourable to Ireland, and safe-guarding the interests of Ireland. Now by that Treaty I am going to stand, and every man with a scrap of honour who signed it will do the same. It is for the Irish people, who are our masters, not our servants, as some think, it is for the Irish people to say whether it is good enough. I hold that it is, and I hold that the Irish people, that 95 per cent. of them, believe it to be good enough.

We are here, not as the dictators of the Irish people, but as the representatives of the Irish people, and if we misrepresent the Irish people, then the moral authority of Dáil Eireann, the strength behind it, and the fact that Dáil Eireann spoke the voice of the Irish people is gone and gone for ever.

An effort has been made to represent that a certain number of men stood uncompromisingly on the rock of the Republic; the Republic and nothing but the Republic. It has been stated also here that the man who made this division, the man who won the war--Michael Collins--compromised Ireland's rights. In the letters that preceded the negotiations not once was a demand made for recognition of the Irish Republic--not once. If it had been made we knew it would have been refused. We went there to see how to reconcile the two positions, and I hold we have done it.

What we shall have to say is this, that the differences in this Cabinet and in this House are between half-recognising the British King and the British Empire and marching in, as one of the speakers said, with our heads up. The gentlemen on the other side are prepared to recognise the King of England as the head of the British Commonwealth. They are prepared to go half in the Empire and half out. They are prepared to use the Empire for war and peace and treaties, and that is what the Irish people have got to know is the difference. Does all this quibble of words--because it is merely a quibble of words--mean that Ireland is asked to throw away this Treaty and to go back to war?

So far as my power or voice extends, not one single Irish life shall be lost in that quibble. I feel my responsibility to the Irish people, and the Irish people must know, and know in every detail, the difference that exists between us, and the Irish people must be our judges. When the Plenipotentiaries came back they were sought to be put in the dock. Well, if I am going to be tried I am going to be tried by the people of Ireland.

Now this Treaty has been attacked. It has been examined with a microscope to find defects, and this little thing and that little thing has been picked out and the people are told--one of the gentlemen here said it was less even than the proposals of July. It is the first Treaty signed between the representatives of the Irish Government and the representatives of the English Government since 1172, signed on an equal footing.

It is the first Treaty that admits the equality of Ireland. It is a Treaty of equality, and because of that, I am standing by it. We have come back from London with that Treaty, which recognised the Free State of Ireland. We have brought back the flag. We have brought back the evacuation of Ireland after 700 years by British troops, and the formation of an Irish army.

We have brought back to Ireland her full rights and powers of fiscal control. We have brought back to Ireland equality with England, equality with all nations which form the Commonwealth, an equal voice in the direction of foreign affairs in peace and war.

Well, we are told that it is a Treaty not to be accepted; that it is a poor thing, and that the Irish people ought to go back and fight for something more, and that something more is what I describe as a quibble of words.

At all events the Irish people are a people of great common sense. They would know that they had their flag, and their Free State, and their army, and control of their purse. They would know that the Treaty that gave these things was not a sham Treaty, and the sophists and the men of words would not mislead them...

[Here Mr. Griffith read a letter from Mr. Lloyd George, explaining some points on which criticism of the terms of the Treaty had been made.]

...That was what they brought back, peace with England, alliance with England, but Ireland developing her own life, carrying out her own way of existence and rebuilding their Gaelic civilisation.

I say we have brought this back. I ask the Dáil to pass this resolution, and I ask the people of Ireland and the Irish people everywhere to ratify this Treaty, and to end this bitter conflict of centuries, to end it for ever, to take away that poison that has been rankling in the two countries, and ruining their relationship and good neighbourhood.

Let us stand as free partners equal with England and make after 700 years the greatest revolution that has ever been made in the history of the world, in the history of Europe - a revolution which sees the two countries standing, not apart as enemies, but standing together as equals.

I ask you, therefore, to pass this resolution."

END OF APPENDIX VII

APPENDIX VIII.—RENUNCIATION

RENUNCIATION. By P. H. Pearse

Naked I saw thee,
O beauty of beauty,
And I blinded my eyes
For fear I should fail.

I heard thy music,
O melody of melody,
And I closed my ears
For fear I should falter.

I tasted thy mouth,
O sweetness of sweetness,
And I hardened my heart
For fear of my slaying.

I blinded my eyes,
And I closed my ears,
I hardened my heart
And I smothered my desire.

I turned my back
On the vision I had shaped,
And to this road before me
I turned my face.

I have turned my face
To this road before me,
To the deed that I see
And the death I shall die.

END OF APPENDIX VIII

APPENDIX IX.—MORAL FORCE

"A man of moral force is he, who, seeing a thing to be right and essential, and claiming his allegiance, stands for it as for the truth, unheeding any consequence. It is not that he is a wild person, utterly reckless of all mad possibilities, filled with a madder hope, and indifferent to any havoc that may ensue. No, but it is a first principle of his, that a true thing is a good thing, and from a good thing rightly pursued can follow no bad consequence. And he faces every possible development with conscience at rest--it may be with trepidation for his own courage in some great ordeal, but for the nobility of the cause and the beauty of the result that must ensue, always with serene faith. And soon the trepidation for himself passes, for a great cause always makes great men, and many who set out in hesitation die heroes. This it is that explains the strange and wonderful buoyancy of men, standing for great ideals, so little understood of others of weaker mould. The soldier of freedom knows he is forward in the battle of Truth, he knows his victory will make for a world beautiful, that if he must inflict or endure pain, it is for the regeneration of those who suffer, the emancipation of those in chains, the exaltation of those who die, and the security and happiness of generations yet unborn. For the strength that will support a man through every phase of this struggle a strong and courageous mind is the primary need--in a word, Moral Force. A man who will be brave only if tramping with a legion will fail in courage if called to stand in the breach alone. And it must be clear to all that till Ireland ran again summon her banded armies there will be abundant need for men who will stand the single test. 'Tis the bravest test, the noblest test, and 'tis the test that offers the surest and greatest victory. For one armed man cannot resist a multitude, nor one army conquer countless legions; but not all the armies of all the Empires of earth can crush the spirit of one true man. And that one man will prevail."

(Principles of Freedom)--TERENCE MACSWINEY.

"The freedom of a nation carries with it the responsibility that it be no menace to the freedom of another nation. The freedom of all makes for the security of all. If there are tyrannies on earth one nation cannot set things right, but it is still bound so to order its own affairs as to be consistent with universal freedom and friendship. Strange as it may seem, separation from England will alone make for final friendship with England. No one is so foolish as to wish to be for ever at war with England. It is unthinkable. Now the most beautiful motive for freedom is vindicated. Our liberty stands to benefit the enemy instead of injuring him. If we want to injure him, we should remain as we are--a menace to him. The opportunity will come but it would hardly make us happy. This but makes clear the need of the human race. Freedom rightly considered is not a mere setting up of a number of independent units. It makes for harmony among nations and good fellowship on earth. Our enemies are brothers from whom we are estranged."

(Principles of Freedom)--TERENCE MACSWINEY.

END OF APPENDIX IX

END OF VOLUME II

THE END

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