was one of the causes that led to the invasion of the foreigner. For
the dynastic war was really the struggle of the provinces for the
hegemony. The O’Neills of Meath and Ulster, the O’Conors of Connacht
and the O’Briens of Munster contended together in the names of their
provinces; and the Mac Murchadhas of Leinster, having no part in the
war, were driven into a false isolation. This was only possible because
the provinces had interposed an authority between the executive of
the State and the stateships that had no real function. They could
materially hinder, and could not materially help, the smooth working
of the State. Had the provincial or territorial courts not existed
the result would have been as deft a balance between a centralised
and decentralised State as can well be imagined. The interposition
of the provincial courts reduced the central authority almost to a
futility except when a masterful personality held the monarchy. They
broke the balance between the centre and parts of the whole, and in
the result snapped the connection that existed between them. The only
real link they needed they possessed in the Councils that met under the
presidency of the Monarch in national assembly to adjust and continue
the government of the country: the Council of Brehons, the Council of
Rulers, the Council of Historians, and so forth. Each Council decided
its own affairs, and the Monarch and his higher officials held the
whole in co-ordination. That was a real and a vital connection. No
other was needed. The provincial courts could only--possessing as they
did, for the most part, powers almost equal to the monarchy--break that
connection, and so disturb the balance of the whole. They did so in
the outcome of things, occupying the place that they did; and they did
so deliberately, creating local loyalties in order to increase their
power. They were, and could not help but be, a disruptive element in
the State.
Undoubtedly the dynastic war of the eleventh century, pressed to its
logical consummation, would have ended this false value. The dynastic
war of the first centuries between Connacht and Ulster had ended in the
elimination of Ulster as a rival; and, however the later war would have
ended, a strong central authority must eventually have emerged and the
provincial kingships have been reduced to a merely nominal position in
the economy of the State, without possessing the power to dispute the
monarchy or its executive hold on the Nation. This in its turn would
have required a national army; and would have answered another defect.
For when in the fifth century Ireland disbanded her national militia,
the Fianna Eireann, she lay a prey to any invader at a time when armies
had become national necessities.
Such criticisms are, it is true, speculative. Even as such, however,
an attempt has been made to keep them close to the development that
the events themselves suggest--to the development that, as history
proves, all nations must finally obey. In the eleventh century, it
must be remembered, Ireland was almost the only country in Europe with
a national State. Other nations were not to achieve their States for
centuries; and even then many of them now famous did not create States
so careful in its parts and so concerted as a whole. It is not at
all likely that Ireland, had she been left alone to work out her own
destiny, would have continued with a broken State without correcting
the causes of its disruption. She would have proved a startling
exception to the course of history had she done so. Yet the main value
of such criticisms is that they permit an examination of the Irish
State at a moment when its inherent weaknesses had worked themselves
out to the surface. At the height of Brian’s power those weaknesses
existed, but they were held in submission by his personal strength.
After his death they at once rose to the surface, just because of the
strength with which he had held them in submission and the manner by
which he had risen to power. They then demanded a remedy contained in
the State itself, and not dependent on the strength of a master mind.
And in looking to the old Irish State for instruction it is important
to note its weaknesses once they revealed themselves, and to perceive
the development by which they would have been corrected.
Yet, while criticism is good, it is proper to look on the other side of
the coin. In the light of its own day the Irish State was a remarkable
achievement, but in the light of any other day it would be hard to find
a statecraft so complete, so wise and so soundly based on a people’s
will while compact in itself. It was at once both aristocratic and
democratic: in fact, it makes these modern expressions to seem, what
they are, false entities, for it shows them to be parts of one whole,
obverse and reverse of the same thing. The Normans when they came
commented on the familiarity that existed between the members of a
stateship and its king. The king, in fact, was generally required to
foster his children with some freeman’s family. Yet to be a king a man
had to be pure of birth, perfect of body, without physical blemish,
and of considerable training in the laws and arts; while the oath he
took, even though it were not always kept, is sufficient to show the
moral qualities expected of his office. The arts did not exist at the
whim of a lordly patron, but were maintained at the people’s charges.
Each stateship conceived it an honour that Poetry, Music and History
should be accorded the highest rank in its economy. Their professors
were furnished land for their maintenance, and sat as equals at the
king’s table. The same was true of the Doctors of Medicine. These
were all public servants, serving the public and maintained at the
public charge. Those that came overseas to learn in the schools were,
apparently, not charged for their tuition, but had only to conform to
the legal responsibility laid on such schools, for they came in such
numbers that the Council of Brehons had to make special regulations for
them. And the _Baile Biatach_, as we have seen, had land apportioned
him for the maintenance of public hospitality. These things were not
then, any more than they are now, precisely familiar virtues among the
nations.
So for the State itself, as an organisation. Its faults we have seen;
but, even so, it found as wise a balance as any nation has yet found
between a centralised and a decentralised system. Authority, to be
sure, depended a good deal from the personality of whoever exercised
it; but then history has shewn that this was not an attribute
exclusively monopolised by the Irish State. In the last resort, not
only in the theory but in the practice and working of the State, that
authority was based on a free people. The State’s only property,
and the final source of all its wealth, the land, was owned by the
people in corporate stateships; and those corporate stateships had its
assemblies of freemen which discussed and adjudicated its affairs. The
national life was one of high ideals--of Art; of physical and mental
aristocracy; it held in high esteem its intellectual leaders; it prized
its scholarship--but these ideals were rooted in the possession and
husbandry of the soil. The student will need to search well before he
betters the Irish State; and the more truly he search the more deeply
he will wonder at the strange tragedy that it should have been hindered
at a critical hour of its development.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] A parallel instance may serve to show how the working of the State,
taken at a moment of indecision, was turned against itself. In the
fifteenth century England was plunged into a dynastic war. Those who
have read the documents of the time will know with what perfidy that
war was marked. The English barons openly sold their swords to the
highest bidder as a natural thing. Treachery and insecurity were rife
on every hand. Now, if an enemy had invaded England at that moment,
and had been willing to pay the extra prices that would have been
demanded of a foreigner, and, where this was not possible, had turned
passion and party strength against passion and party strength, taking
care to balance the contending forces evenly, such an enemy could have
entrenched himself in the country, and in the course of time have
defied ejectment. England was spared this misfortune; Ireland was not.
V. THE BROKEN STATE.
Henry of Anjou and England when he came to Ireland, with a somewhat
munificent gesture made grants of large tracts of territory to his
underlings. It was nobly done; to make gifts of other people’s property
to one’s own friends requires a noble mind. Therefore the lordly
underlings settled along the waterways of the territory allotted to
them, built castles, and from these castles raided the economic life
of the country around them. At first the stateships received the
newcomers as strangers coming into the country, who would in time
become part of its life. They did not conceive of such a thing as an
attempted national conquest. Then when they rose to resist, they were
handicapped. They had no national army; and, though the freemen could
be called upon for military service, they could not be called for
more than six weeks at a time, and then not during Spring or Harvest,
whereas the Normans lived only by the sword in the close militarist
organisation known as feudalism. The eleventh century in Ireland had
seen a long dynastic war, but it had also seen a full scholarly and
artistic activity. With the coming of the Normans all this activity was
stilled and hushed for two centuries. And that was the sign-manual of
the new era that had dawned.
After a while, preoccupied as they necessarily were with their economic
life, the people invited their Hebridean cousins to come over as a
paid militia. They came, at first into the north, and were quartered
on the stateships; and from the time of their coming the Normans began
to be pressed back toward Dublin, and the annals record the taking
one by one of the Norman castles. That was the first attempt to throw
off the national danger that was now appreciated. The second was to
restore the executive authority. O’Neill, O’Brien and O’Conor had
contended in rivalry, but the Ui Niall dynasty held the more ancient
claim; therefore in 1258 Aodh O’Conor and Tadhg O’Brien made a hosting
together to Brian O’Neill to offer their submission to him if he would
lead them against the foreigner. He did so, but was overthrown and
slain. Therefore an offer of the monarchy was sent to Hakon of Norway
five years later. He was on his way over when he died at sea. Finally
an invitation was sent to Edward Bruce by Domhnaill O’Neill in the
name of Ireland. Bruce came in 1315, was crowned Monarch of Ireland,
and carried a war throughout the country that wasted the land. When he
fell three years later at the battle of Faughert, the country was in a
desperate condition; but the invader was thrown back to a small tract
of country around Dublin that became known as the Pale.
Such were the attempts, made too late, to restore the State and eject
the invader. One was dependent on the other. It was clearly impossible
to restore the State until the invader had first been cast out. His
presence in the country necessarily acted like an obstruction in the
blood, and made it impossible for the body of the State to resume its
health and perfect its functions until the poison had been expelled.
This was so in the natural law of things; but, in addition to this
natural and inevitable result, the invaders, in order to maintain
their position in the country, set to work to create division between
the scattered portions of the broken State. That was easy to do.
The leaders in the different parts of the country have been blamed
(by none more than by their nation) for serving their own sectional
interests instead of the national unity. But how were they to discover
the national unity, and how were they to distinguish, as we now can
distinguish, between sectional and national interests? The history of
mankind proves that in a broken State it is a simple task to create
discord, and a giant’s task to create unity. The invaders acted at
first from a common centre; and the nature of the case robbed the Irish
Nation of any common centre from which to act. That was the first
difficulty. Secondly, there are always men in every Nation who are
willing to sell their honour. So long as Nations can repel invasion
that fact does not become an active danger within the security of its
State; but directly an invader enters a country, with gold and honours
in his gift, it becomes almost impossible to overtake the poison that
runs in every direction. Men grow suspicious of the most honest purpose
if that purpose is not at once apparent; and if it is at once apparent
it is thereby at once revealed to the enemy. Finally, most men are
near-sighted; they judge of large issues by their immediate effects,
and so mistake those immediate effects for the large issues, making it
easy for an enemy to drive divisions in between sectional interests.
These things are so, not necessarily because men are corrupt, but by
the nature of things; and their combined result was the broken State of
Ireland.
A further difficulty was the fact that the Nation had new elements cast
into it that it had to digest; and in some places it had those new
elements cast into it in large numbers. The Normans were mostly driven
out of the north; but others had settled and made their positions
secure in other parts, the De Burgos in the west, for instance, and
the FitzGeralds and Butlers in the south. The old State was broken
by their forcible seizure of land; but then we find it automatically
setting to work to mend the broken fabric, to restore the stateships,
and to include the stranger within its ancient constitution. In that it
was successful. The De Burgos and FitzGeralds became, as the English
declared, more Irish than the Irish themselves. The former publicly
repudiated their very names, and took Irish names, as Mac William
Uachtar and Mac William Iachtar. They simply displaced, or depressed,
the kingly households of earlier territories. The same was true of
the FitzGeralds, though with them, as far as we can judge, there were
certain changes introduced, not into the stateships, but into the
larger territories in which these were comprised. The chief of these
changes seems to have been that the FitzGeralds held their kingships by
right of primogeniture and not by election. Yet in the main the changes
were not many or fundamental. Irish was spoken as the native language;
Irish courts were kept, of brehons, poets and historians, exactly as
the older Irish kingships had maintained them; and by force of marriage
in a few generations the intermixture of the new blood was hardly to be
discovered beside the permanence of the old. Only the Butlers in the
south-east kept their connection with England. The others broke away
from the common centre of the invader, and became included in the elder
national continuity.
Nevertheless the State was scattered. The stateships continued their
life; the parts, that is to say, were complete, except for a portion
of country around Dublin and another about Waterford; but they were
only parts, for the whole was in disrepair. And now a definite war
between State and State was declared, the end of which has not yet
been seen. By the Statutes of Kilkenny in 1367 every sign of national
life in Ireland was penalised by English law. It was forbidden to hear
an Irish poet, to take judgment from a brehon, to foster children in
the Irish way, to speak the Irish language, and even to wear a beard
as the Irish did, or ride a horse barebacked. It is true these things
were only forbidden within the Pale, because only within the Pale
had the invader any authority; but they were in fact, and afterwards
became, a declaration in Ireland of a war between an English State and
an Irish State. They were an intimation that the old Irish culture and
State were marked for extinction. It is interesting to remember that
at the moment this declaration was made England had little culture,
no literature, only the beginnings of law, and a very rudimentary
State. The Statutes of Kilkenny were very like a young vulgarian raging
against an elder’s manners that made his own lack of courtesy apparent.
Fortunately at this time England herself was plunged into a bitter
dynastic war. The immediate result on Ireland was that, relieved from
the pressure of her neighbour, a great period of prosperity began.
The beginnings were slow, for the land was wasted after the Bruce
campaign; but the progress quickened with each decade. It began with
the integration of the Normans in the middle of the fourteenth century;
and it continued till the end of the English Wars of the Roses. The
poet took up his song again; the historian his pen; and the scholar
his books. Great convocations of learned men were held; and new law
tracts were written, drafted for changed conditions. The stateships
became the centres of new activity. Corn was exported in considerable
quantities. The guilds of artisans became busy again, to judge from
the exports of woollen, linen, leather and metal wares. The literary
activity--or at least such of it as escaped the soldiers’ burning--has
remained to us. The other activity can only be discovered by the trade
books of other countries; for Ireland, having no organised State of her
own, could keep no record of her commerce. But these books reveal the
considerable trade Ireland conducted with the continent of Europe. The
Irish ports, chiefly on the western and southern coasts, with their own
corporate stateships, became the avenue through which the industry of
the internal stateships supplied the demand of Europe. And since there
was no Irish State to create a medium of exchange, at least one of the
territories, that of the O’Reillys, had to mint its own coinage for the
conduct of its trade.
It seemed as though once again the Irish State was about to complete
itself. But once again an invading soldiery brought ruin. This time
it was the final ruin. England had settled her dynastic war, and
turned her attention to Ireland. The old methods were renewed with a
new perfection of craft. The Statutes of Kilkenny became an active
weapon of offence; and with each new monarch of the Tudor dynasty the
war between State and State was carried to a closer issue. The Irish
language was interdicted; the Irish manner of dress was forbidden;
and finally every attempt was made to blot out every memory of the
Irish stateships and to create English counties in their stead. Kings
of territories were offered pompous English titles if they pledged
to abstain from the use of their simple Irish titles. To help them
to a decision they were offered the land over which they ruled, to
be held by feudal knight’s service and to descend by feudal right
of primogeniture. Those who accepted this offer at once found the
stateships in rebellion against them, for that land did not lie in
the gift of any man but belonged only to the freemen. They rose in
protection of their rights since time immemorial; and they rose to
repudiate their elected officer; with the result that a soldiery was
sent against them that burned their crops and left their land a waste.
Such was the last phase of the war by which the State was to be broken,
not only as a whole, but in its several parts. The country far and wide
became acquainted with a soldiery whose business it was to tear out
all memory of the National State. At the end of that war there arose
a figure who saw clearly all that was involved. That was Hugh, the
descendant by Irish election of the O’Neill monarchy. He had worked
long to link all parts of the country together under his leadership;
and, knowing the power against which he was opposed, he had entered
into treaty with the Spanish Crown to assist him. Feeling that these
Spanish promises were not sincerely given, so often had they been made
and as often broken, he thought to save what he could from the wreckage.
When in 1598 the Earl of Essex was sent against him he met him in
parley and made him an offer to bear to Elizabeth. Whether that offer
was sincerely made, or only put out to save time, does not matter here;
but it contained one article that is very significant. It runs thus:
“That all nations in Ireland shall enjoy their living as they did two
hundred years ago.” Now it is clear that he uses the word “nations”
in some special sense--that he is, in fact, rendering some word from
Irish. Nor is it difficult to discover what that word is. He can only
be referring to the _tuatha_, or stateships, on which the State was
based that was now threatened with extinction; and his demand was that
they should remain intact and unmolested as they had been “two hundred
years ago,” when England was busy with civil war. The demand was
rejected. He could hardly have expected anything else. And when he was
finally defeated five years afterwards, those “nations,” or stateships,
were doomed to a final and terrible ruin.
VI. THE RESURRECTION FROM THE DEAD.
The horror of the Plantations and Confiscations was not due simply to
the land-avarice of a conqueror. In some measure they sprang from that
simple and immediate lust, but really they arose from a much remoter
necessity. They were logically inevitable from the invader’s point of
view. The war of State against State, from that point of view, was
always finally helpless because the Irish State, dismembered though
it was, took strangers coming into the country and enveloped them in
its own polity. And it was indestructible so long as it was based on
the free ownership of land. Therefore to destroy the State it was
necessary to root it out of the land; and as the State was composed of
the people, and could not be composed otherwise, it was necessary to
root them out of the land. What happened to them afterwards was but
an incident in the campaign. They were to be replaced by a new set
of proprietors who would come with the intuitions and desires of the
foreign State, and who would be provided with very good reasons to see
that the new shire-land with themselves as lords thereof did not revert
to stateships in the possession of the people.
Cromwell’s gentle watchword “To Hell or to Connacht,” therefore,
was the logical consummation of that policy. It was the full peal
of bells of which the Statutes of Kilkenny were the first brazen
intimation. And when he had finished his righteous labours for the
Lord God of Hosts the wildest dreamer in the world in his wildest of
dreams would not have thought that his work could be undone. But a
strange thing happened. Official documents indicate that his work was
completely done. The Nation was first decimated--“nits will be lice”
was the playful phrase of his soldiers as they caught babes on their
pike-heads. Then it was swept west of the Shannon; and thoroughly
swept, to judge by the procedure adopted. But within thirty years it
is found back upon the land--O’Neills where O’Neill stateships had
been, Maguires where Maguire stateships had been, and so forth. The
Roll of the Parliament of 1689 as clearly indicates the countries from
which the members came from the names they wore as those names would
have indicated two centuries before. Historians have therefore thought
that, in spite of the effectiveness of Cromwell’s procedure, his work
had not been very completely done. But what is more likely is that,
with hopes raised by the Restoration, the people began steadily to
stream back across the country to the places they knew, where their
fathers had lived in free stateships, in order to be ready for any
change that might come. There is no record of their journey. There is
no place where such a journey could have been recorded. All that is
sure is that, whereas Cromwell intended to sweep the Nation west of
the Shannon, and adopted a procedure well-drafted to achieve his end,
at the end of the century the Nation is found back upon its lands
in the very groupings in which it had held them in old times in free
possession.