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IRISH HISTORY AND THE IRISH QUESTION
BY GOLDWIN SMITH
AUTHOR OF "THE UNITED KINGDOM"
"THE UNITED STATES"
NEW YORK
McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.
1905
COPYRIGHT BY
GOLDWIN SMITH,
1905.
Published, November, 1905, n.
PREFACE
A long summer was spent by me in that loveliest of all parks, the
Phoenix, as the guest of Edward Cardwell, then Chief Secretary and real
head of the Irish government. Under Cardwell's roof the Irish Question was
fully discussed by able men, Robert Lowe among the number. But I had a
still greater advantage in constant and lasting intercourse with such
friends as Lord Chancellor O'Hagan, Sir Alexander Macdonald, the head of
the Education Department, and other leading Irish Liberals of the moderate
school, ardent patriots and thoroughgoing reformers though opposed to
violence and disruption. To the teachings of these men in dealing with the
Irish Question, I have always looked back for my best guidance. I did what
I could generally to acquaint myself with the country and its people. I
had the opportunity of seeing something of Maynooth as the guest of its
excellent principal in that day. At that time there was rather a lull in
the agrarian war, but religious antagonism was still marked. The fruit of
my studies was a little book entitled "Irish History and Irish
Character," in which I tried to show that the sources of Ireland's sorrows
were to be found in natural circumstance and historical accident as much
as in the crimes or follies of man in recent times. Upon that text I
preached in favour of charity and reconciliation. I am told that a chord
was touched at the time. But my essay has long been superseded and buried
out of sight by the important works, historical and political, which the
controversy has since produced, as well as by the forty eventful years
which have elapsed since its publication. The subject, however, has
retained all its interest, and my confidence in the wisdom of my Irish
friends and instructors has remained the same, or rather has been
strengthened by the course of events.
I was in Ireland again a good many years afterwards in connection with the
meeting of the Social Science Association, and was the guest of Lord
O'Hagan. The Parnellite Movement was then in full activity; American
Fenianism was at work; and the soil heaved with insurrection. My friend W.
E. Forster was the Secretary, and, much against his own inclination, was
administering measures of repression, the only alternative to which
appeared to be the abdication of the government. On this occasion I was
unlucky enough to draw upon myself a thunderbolt hurled through the
_Times_, but evidently from the skies, by hinting in a public speech that
the Phoenix Park was as worthy to be the occasional residence of royalty
as Osborne or Balmoral. A happy change, attended apparently with the best
effects, has now come in that august quarter.
It is needless to say that this essay does not pretend to be a history of
Ireland. It is an attempt to trace the general course of the history as it
leads up to the present situation.
The works published in recent years to which I have been chiefly indebted
are: Joyce's "Social History of Ancient Ireland," Richie's "Short History
of the Irish People," Bagwell's "Ireland under the Tudors," Froude's "The
English in Ireland," Lecky's "Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland,"
together with the special chapters on Ireland in his general history,
Ingram's "Two Chapters of Irish History" and "History of the Irish Union,"
Ball's "Irish Legislative Systems," T. P. O'Connor's "The Parnell
Movement," and Sir Horace Plunkett's "Ireland in the Twentieth Century,"
with the comments on it by Father O'Riordan.
To Mr. Bagwell's "Ireland under the Tudors" I am specially indebted for
his narrative of the Tudor wars. To Mr. T. P. O'Connor I am specially
indebted for the most vivid accounts of the famine and of the evictions,
as well as for an improved insight into the Parnell Movement and of the
doings which preceded it. Of part of those doings I was myself in some
measure a witness, through my social connections with a circle of English
politicians who were inclining to an Irish alliance.
The annals of the Tudor wars are horrible and heartrending. But history
cannot drop the veil over them. They long left their evil traces on Irish
character and sentiment, explaining and extenuating some terrible things
which ensued. Nor, in truth, have they become obsolete as warnings to us
in general of the acts into which civilized nations may be betrayed when
they make wars of conquest on those whom they deem barbarians.
It seemed that a brief account of the recent land legislation for Ireland
might be useful to readers of an essay of this kind. I append one which
has been prepared for me by my friend, Mr. Hugh J. McCann, B.L., of the
Dublin Bar. Its author is in no way committed to any opinion expressed in
the other part of the work.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I FROM EARLY TIMES TO EDWARD I (1272) 1
II EDWARD I TO HENRY VII (1272-1509) 19
III HENRY VIII TO MARY (1509-1558) 28
IV ELIZABETH TO JAMES I (1558-1603) 37
V JAMES I (1603-1625) 55
VI CHARLES I TO THE PROTECTORATE (1625-1660) 61
VII THE RESTORATION (1660) 80
VIII THE REVOLUTION (1688) 86
IX THE PENAL CODE (1695-1727) 91
X ANNE TO THE REVOLUTION OF 1782 (1702-1782) 105
XI THE REVOLUTION OF 1782 AND THE REBELLION OF 1798 121
XII UNION (1801) 148
XIII DANIEL O'CONNELL (1823-1847) 164
XIV GLADSTONE (1868-1893) 191
XV THE PRESENT STATE OF THE QUESTION 204
ACCOUNT OF THE IRISH LAND CODE 227
By HUGH J. MCCANN, B.L., of the Irish Bar.
IRISH HISTORY AND THE IRISH QUESTION
I
Of all histories the history of Ireland is the saddest. For nearly seven
centuries it was a course of strife between races, bloodshed, massacre,
misgovernment, civil war, oppression, and misery. Hardly even now have the
troubles of Ireland come to a close, either for herself or for her
partner. Unrest still reigns in her and, embodied in her Parliamentary
delegation, harasses the Parliament and distracts the councils of Great
Britain.
The theatre of this tragedy is a large island lying beside one nearly
three times larger, which cuts it off from the continent of Europe, while
on the other side it fronts the wide ocean. The climate is for the most
part too wet for wheat. The pasture is very rich. Ireland seems by nature
to be a grazing country, and a country of large farms; tillage and small
farms have been enforced by the redundance of rural population consequent
on the destruction of urban industries. In coal and minerals Ireland is
poor, while the sister island abounds in them, and in its swarming
factories and mines furnishes a first-rate market for the produce of Irish
pastures; so that the two islands are commercial supplements of each
other. The progress of pastoral countries, political and general, as they
have little city life, is slow. With beauty Ireland is well endowed. The
interior is flat, with large peat bogs and brimming rivers. But the coast
is mountainous and romantic. The western coast especially, where the
Atlantic rolls into deep inlets, has a pensive charm which, when troubles
end and settled peace reigns, may attract the villa as they do the
wanderer now. In early times the island was densely clothed with woods,
which, with the broad and bridgeless rivers, operated like the mountain
barriers of the Scottish Highlands in perpetuating the division of clans,
with their patriarchal system, their rivalries, and their feuds, thus
precluding the growth of a nation. In Ireland there was no natural centre
of dominion. Interest of every kind seems to enjoin the union of the
islands. But in the age of conquest the weaker island was pretty sure to
be marked as a prey of the stronger, while the difficulties of access, the
Channel, broad in the days of primitive navigation, and the Welsh
mountains, combined with the internal barriers of forest and river and
with the naturally wild habits of the people, portended that the conquest
would be difficult and that the agony would be long. Such was the mould of
Destiny.
The people of Ireland when history opens were Celts, kinsmen of the
primitive races of Gaul and Britain, remnants of which are left in Wales
and in the Highlands of Scotland. Their language was of that family, while
cognate words connect it with the general Aryan stock. There are traces of
a succession of immigrations. Too much, no doubt, has been made of the
influence of race. Yet the Teuton is a Teuton and the Celt is a Celt. The
Celt in his native state has everywhere shown himself lively, social,
communicative, impulsive, prone to laughter and to tears, wanting,
compared with the Teuton, in depth of character, in steadiness and
perseverance. He is inclined rather to personal rule or leadership than to
a constitutional polity. His poet is not Shakespeare or Milton, but Tom
Moore, a light minstrel of laughter and tears. His political leader is
O'Connell, a Boanerges of passionate declamation. In war he is impetuous,
as was the Gaul who charged at Allia and the Highlander who charged at
Killiecrankie and Prestonpans. His taste as well as his manual skill in
decoration is shown by the brilliant collection of gold ornaments in the
Celtic Museum at Dublin, as well as in stone carvings and such a paragon
of illuminated missals as the Book of Kells. But it is greater than his
aptitude for high art, that art which treats the human form, in which he
has not shone. His religious tendency, the outcome of his general
character, is either to Catholicism with its fervid faith, its mysteries,
and its ceremonial, as in Ireland; or to the enthusiastic forms of
Protestantism, as in the Highlands and in Wales. Anglicanism, a sober cult
with a balanced creed, suits him not. It was a cruel decree of destiny
that the larger island from which the conqueror would come was peopled by
the Teuton, so that to the usual evils of conquest was added that of a
difference of character inherent in race.
The primitive organization of the Irish Celts was tribal, the underlying
idea being kinship, real or reputed. The ruler with paternal authority was
the chief of the tribe. To avert strife his tanist, or successor, was
elected in his lifetime. In a community of reputed kinsmen there could be
no aristocracy of birth; but there seems to have been a plutocracy, whose
riches in that pastoral country consisted of cattle, which formed the
measure of wealth and command of which made poorer clansmen their
retainers. Under these were the freemen of the tribe. Under the freemen
again were the unfree, wanderers or captives taken in war or slaves from
the English slave-market. The unfree appear to have been the only tillers
of the soil. Thus tillage was marked with a bar sinister from its birth.
The tribal law was a mystical and largely fanciful craft or tradition in
the keeping of the Brehons, or judges, a hereditary order who, though
revered as arbiters, were without power of enforcing their judgments. Like
primitive law in general, it lacked the idea of public wrong. It treated
crime as a private injury, to be compounded by fine. The land was the
common property of the tribe, to which it nominally reverted on the demise
of the holder, though it may be assumed that the chiefs at all events had
practically land of their own and that the tendency in this, as in other
cases, was to private ownership.
What the religion was is not certainly known. Probably it was the same as
that of the Celts of Great Britain and Gaul, Druidism, wild, orgiastic,
and perhaps sanguinary. But there seem to be no remains clearly Druidic in
Ireland.
Life was pastoral, roving, probably bellicose. It appears that women
required to be restrained from taking part in war. The characteristic garb
of the tribesman was a loose saffron mantle, which served as his dress by
day, his coverlet by night. His favourite weapons, often used, were an axe
and a dart. He drew, it seems, a bow weak compared with the long-bow of
England. The gentler side of his character was shown in his passionate
love of the harp and the reverence in which he held the harper, and which
was extended to the bard, whose rude lays saluted the intellectual dawn
and whom we find in later times feared as an author of lampoons. Among his
favourite amusements was chess.
Knowledge of the peculiar system of the Irish, political and legal, is of
more consequence because the opposite system, that of constitutional
government and feudal ownership, having presented itself to him as that of
alien masters and oppressors, tribal peculiarities and sentiments lingered
long. The idea of tribal ownership perhaps was a few generations ago still
faintly present in agrarian agitation. Nor has the general character of
the tribesman long been, if it yet is, extinct. Tribal feuds were until
lately represented in the strange faction fights of the Caravats and
Shanavests, the Two-Year-Olds and Three-Year-Olds, the annual fight of
factions for a legendary stone, and the encounters between bodies of the
peasantry at Irish fairs. Perhaps another feature of character traceable
to tribalism may be the gregarious habit of Irishmen contrasted with the
Englishman's isolation and love of his private home.
Connected apparently with the tribal sentiment were the strange customs of
fosterage and gossipred. Fosterage consisted in putting out the child to
be reared by a tribesman who became its foster-father. Gossipred, a
Christian addition, was a spiritual kinship formed at the font. Both
relations had extraordinary force.
There were, of course, tribal wars. There were leagues or dominations of
powerful tribes which left their traces in the division of the island into
four or five provinces, once petty kingships. There was a supreme
kingship, the seat of which, sacred in Irish tradition and legend, was the
Hill of Tara; but it was probably only when common danger compelled a
union of forces that this kingship became a real power. The features of
the country, combined with the character of the tribal organization based
on kinship, not on citizenship, would prolong the tribal divisions and
prevent union. Nor had nature anywhere fixed a central seat of command.
Only when opposed to an invader and struggling against him for the land
did Celtic Ireland form for the time a united people; even then it could
hardly be called a nation.
The Roman conqueror looked, but came not. It might have been better for
Ireland if he had come. Yet, when he retired, he would probably have left
the Romanized provincial, here as in Britain, too unwarlike to hold his
own against the next invader.
A conqueror of a different kind came. He came in the person, not of a
Roman general, but, if the tradition is true, of a slave. By the preaching
of St. Patrick, according to the common belief, Ireland was added to the
Kingdom of Christ. The conversion was rapid and probably superficial, the
chief of the tribe carrying the tribe over with him, as Ethelbert of Kent
and other English kinglets carried over their people, rather to a new
religious allegiance than to a new faith.
Within the Roman Empire the centres of the Church had been the cities.
Cities were the seats of its bishoprics. The models of its organization
were urban. But in Ireland there were no cities. The episcopate was
irregular and weak, denoting rank rather than authority or jurisdiction.
The life of the Church was monastic and missionary. The weird Round
Towers, believed to have been places of refuge for its ministers and their
sacred vessels, as well as bell-towers, speak of a life surrounded by
barbarism and rapine as well as threatened by the heathen and devastating
Northmen. Partly perhaps owing to its comparative isolation and detachment
at home, the Irish clergy was fired with a marvellous and almost
preternatural zeal for the propagation of the Gospel abroad. It crossed
the sea to Iona, the sacred isle, still to religious memory sacred, from
which the light of the Gospel shone to the wild islesmen and to the rovers
of the Northern Sea. Irish missionaries preached to heathen Germany,
colliding there, it seems, with a more regular episcopate. They played a
part in the conversion of Britain not less important than that of the
missionaries of Rome, before whose authority, however, the Irish Church in
the person of Aidan was at last compelled to retire, the decisive struggle
taking place on the mode of celebrating Easter.
In Ireland itself there arose in connection with the Church a precocious
and romantic passion for learning which founded primitive universities.
Its memory lingers in the melancholy ruins of Clonmacnoise. This was the
delusive brightness of a brief day, to be followed by the darkness of a
long night.
The Church of Ireland seems in its origin to have been national and
neither child nor vassal of Rome. Its theology must have been independent
if Scotus Erigena was its son. But Rome gradually cast her spell, in time
she extended her authority, over it. Its heads looked to her as the
central support of the interests of their order and as their protectress
against the rude encroachments of the native chiefs. Norman Archbishops of
Canterbury served as transmitters of the influence. Still, the Irish
Church was not in Roman eyes perfectly regular. Tithes were not paid, nor
was the rule of consanguinity observed, or the rite of baptism
administered in strict accordance with the ordinances of Rome.
Christianity did not kill the brood of a lively superstition, the fairy,
the banshee, the spectre, charms, amulets, prophecies, wild legends, which
in the times of gloom that followed strengthened their hold upon Irish
imagination.
Hostile invasion came first in the form of the Northmen, whose piracy and
rapine extended to Ireland as well as to Gaul and Britain. Piracy and
rapine we call them now, but to the Northmen they seemed no more criminal
than to us seems hunting or fishing. The chief objects of the invader's
attack were the monasteries, at once treasuries of Church wealth and
hateful to the people of Odin. Ruthlessly the Northman slew and burned.
His fleet made him ubiquitous and baffled defence, union for which there
was not at first among the tribes. Common danger at last enforced it. A
national leader arose in the person of Brian Boru, who was for Ireland the
military, though not the political, saviour that Alfred was for England.
At the great battle of Clontarf, the host over which the Danish Raven flew
was totally overthrown, and Ireland was redeemed from its ravages. The
Dane, however, did not wholly depart. Exchanging the rover for the trader,
he founded a set of little maritime commonwealths at Dublin, Wexford,
Waterford, and Limerick, germs on a small scale and in a rude way of
municipal as well as commercial life.
But a conqueror, more fell and more tenacious than the Dane, was at hand.
In 1169 a little fleet of Welsh vessels ran into the Bay of Bannow. From
it landed a band of mail-clad soldiery, men trained to war, with a corps
of archers. They were Normans from Wales under the leadership of the
Anglo-Norman rover Fitzstephen, and were the precursors of a larger body
which presently followed, under Richard Strigul, Earl of Pembroke, from
the strength of his arm surnamed Strongbow. Dermot, an Irish chief,
expelled for his tyranny, had brought these invaders on his country as the
instruments of his revenge. Henry II. had, by giving letters of marque,
sanctioned the enterprise, the fruits of which he intended to reap. Early
in his reign the king had obtained from Pope Adrian IV., an Englishman by
birth, a bull authorizing him to take possession of Ireland, which with
other islands the bull declared of right to be an appanage of the Holy
See. Here, as in the case of William's invasion of England, the Papacy
used Norman conquest as the instrument of its own aggrandizement. The
authenticity of the bull is disputed by Irish patriotism, but in vain. No
one questions the share of the Papacy in the Norman conquest of England.
With the aid of his Norman allies, to whom the Irishman with his naked
valour was as the Mexican to the Spaniard, Dermot prevailed and glutted
his revenge by plucking from the triumphal pyramid of hostile heads that
of his chief enemy and tearing it with his teeth. But in this case, as in
that of the alliance of Cortez with the Tlascalans, the ally had
conquered for himself. Declining to be dislodged, he proceeded to
establish himself and to organize a Norman principality.
Now the jealousy of the English king was aroused. He saw an independent
Anglo-Norman kingdom on the point of being founded by Strongbow in
Ireland. He published the papal bull, came over to Ireland in his power,
and held his court at Dublin in a palace of wickerwork run up in native
style for the occasion, where the Irish chiefs bowed their heads, but not
their hearts, before him. He organized a feudal principality with himself
as lord, but having the Pope as its suzerain, and tributary to the Papacy.
He formally introduced the organization of a feudal kingdom. He held at
Cashel a synod like that held by William the Conqueror at Winchester for
the purpose of reforming, that is thoroughly Romanizing, the Church of
Ireland. Irregularities respecting infant baptism and the matrimonial
table of consanguinity were set right. The payment of tithes, that
paramount duty of piety, was enjoined. Rome was installed in full
authority, thus in Ireland, as in England, receiving from her Norman
liegemen her share of their prize. With this pious offering to the Papacy
in his hand, Henry departed to meet his responsibility for the slaying of
Becket. He was presently succeeded for a short time in Ireland by his
hopeful boy, John, whose personal behaviour was an earnest of the future
tenour of his reign. Afterward, as king, John paid Ireland another flying
visit in which, besides pouncing on an enemy, he seems to have made a
fleeting attempt to regulate the government.
Henry, had he not been called away by the storm following the death of
Becket, might have left things in better shape, but nothing could make up
for the permanent absence of the king. Two antagonistic systems henceforth
confronted each other. On one side was the feudal system, with its
hierarchy of land-owners, from lord-paramount to tenant-paravail; its
individual ownership of land; its hereditary succession and primogeniture;
its feudal perquisites, relief, wardship, and marriage; its tribute of
military service; the loyalty to the grantor of the fief which was its
pervading and sustaining spirit; its knighthood and its chivalry; its
Great Council of barons and baronial bishops; its feudal courts of justice
and officers of state; all however highly rude and imperfect. On the other
side was tribalism, with its tie of original kinship instead of
territorial subordination; its tanistry; its Brehon law. But the feudal
system in Ireland lacked the keystone of its arch. It was destitute of
its regulating and controlling power, the king. A royal justiciar could
not fill the part. From the outset the bane of the principality was
delegated rule.
Ireland was a separate realm, though attached to the Crown of England. It
had a Parliament of its own, which followed that of England in its
development, being at first a unicameral council of magnates, lay and
clerical; but after the legislation of Edward I. a bicameral assembly with
a Lower House formed of representatives of counties and boroughs, whose
consent would be formally necessary to taxation. Representatives of
Ireland were at first called to Edward's Parliament at Westminster, but
the inconvenience seems to have been found too great. Weak, however, was
the Parliament of the colony compared with that of the imperial country.
If the Lords ever showed force, the making of a House of Commons was not
there. The representation, as well as the proceedings and the records,
appears to have been very irregular. Nothing worthy of the name of
Parliamentary government seems ever to have prevailed. Among those who
signed the Great Charter was the Archbishop of Dublin; but of chartered
rights Ireland was not the scene. There is no appearance of a separate
grant of subsidies by the clerical estate. The clergy, it seems, were
represented by their proctors in the Lower House, as by the bishops and
abbots in the Upper House. The Parliament appears to have been generally a
tool in the hands of the deputy. The irregularity of its composition seems
to have extended to its meetings.
From the first the relation between the feudal realm and that of the
tribes was border war. They were alien to each other in race, language,
and social habits, as well as in political institutions. The Norman could
not subdue the Celt, the Celt could not oust the Norman. The conquest of
England by William of Normandy had been complete, and had given birth to a
national aristocracy, which in time blended with the conquered race and
united with it in extorting the Great Charter. The Norman colony in
Ireland was left to its feeble resources, and to a divided command, while
the monarchy was far away over sea, was squandering its forces in French
fields, and could not even project a complete conquest. Besides, there
were the difficulties which the country, with its broad rivers, its bogs,
its mountains and forests, opposed to the heavy cavalry of the
Anglo-Norman. There was the mobility of a pastoral people, presenting no
cities or centres of any kind for attack, driving its cattle to the woods
on the approach of the invader, and eluding his pursuit like birds of the
air. Thus the Anglo-Norman colony failed to become a dominion and
presently dwindled to a pale. Between the Pale and the Celt incessant war
was waged with the usual atrocity of struggles between the half-civilized
and the savage. Fusion there could be none. There was not the bond of
human brotherhood or that of a common tongue. On neither side was the
murder of the other race a crime. Never was there a more inauspicious
baptism of a nation.
Anglo-Norman and Celt, feudalist and tribesman, alike were Catholics. A
common religion might have been a bond, a common clergy might have been a
mediating power. But race and language prevailed over religion. The
Churches, though outwardly of the same faith, remained inwardly separate,
and not only separate but hostile to each other, the clergy on both sides
sharing the spirit and the atrocities of race enmity and frontier war. The
Church of the tribes was still very rough and irregular. The Norman on his
part was devout. He was a founder of monasteries, thereby discharging his
conscience of a load not seldom heavy. Whatever of religious life and
activity there was in the Pale seems to have been monastic. Our glimpses
of the secular clergy show that they were secular indeed. Among them not
neglect of duty only but criminality appears to have been rife.
In the little commercial towns of Danish foundation on the coast which had
been taken over by the Norman, life was probably rather more civilized;
but they were too diminutive to exert any influence beyond their gates.
Galway in time became the port of an active trade with Spain which is
supposed to have left a Spanish trace on its architecture and a Spanish
strain in the blood of its people.
II
It was not likely that the colony, in the state in which it was, would
gain by emigration from England. It was probably losing by depletion.
English kings drew soldiers from it for their wars. There being no
university or means of education, youths who wanted to study went to
Oxford, where, though they were not native Irish, they seem to have played
in academical brawls the part which native Irish might have played. Thus
the colony was emptied of its intellect. Fiefs by feudal rule of descent
passed to absentees and to women, weakening its military force. In every
way the life-blood of the English and feudal settlement was being
continually withdrawn. Of the kings of England, Richard I. was away on
crusade, John and Henry III. were wrestling with rebellion at home. The
thoughts of Edward I. were turned to Ireland; but his energies were
absorbed by Scotland, Wales, and Gascony. He too drew soldiers from
Ireland.
The Anglo-Norman element, however, was united, while inveterate disunion
reigned among the native tribes. It was occupying the posts of vantage
with the castles characteristic of its military rule. It seems to have
been rather gaining ground when the island was invaded by Edward Bruce,
the brother of Robert, who, emulous of his brother's success in Scotland,
came over on the invitation of Irish tribes to carve out a kingdom for
himself. Bruce gained successes and committed great ravages, but was at
length met at Dundalk by the Anglo-Norman army under John de Bermingham,
overthrown, and slain. He had estranged his Irish allies. According to one
of their chroniclers, the day on which he was slain was the happiest of
days for the Irish people. The Irish appeal to the Pope against English
misrule on this occasion is in form a national manifesto, but was probably
less than national in its source.
Still Bruce's invasion seems to have dealt the Norman colony a heavy blow
and thrown back into the hands of the native tribes districts which it had
conquered and over which its settlements had spread. Degeneration set in
amongst its people. They took to the strange native custom of fosterage,
to the Irishman's saffron mantle and his long moustache, to his weapons,
to his mode of riding, even to his language, and countenanced license by
confusing the Brehon with the feudal law.
A strange compound of feudalism with tribalism ensued, in the shape of
mongrel chieftaincies, henceforth the predominant powers. English barons
doffed their baronial character, donned that of the tribal chief, and made
themselves independent lords of wide domains peopled by native Irish. It
seems that they retained the Norman instinct of command. Many of them
changed their Anglo-Norman for Irish names; Bourke, O'Neill, O'Brien,
O'Connor. They kept in their pay troops of bravos, gallowglasses and
kernes. Their rule seems to have combined the extortions of the feudal
lord with those of the native chiefs. Bonaught was a tax imposed by a
chief for the support of his mercenaries. Sorohen was an obligation on
lands to support the chief with his train one day in a quarter or one in a
fortnight. Coshery was a chief's right to sponge upon his vassals with as
many followers as he pleased. Cuddies, or night suppers, were due by lands
upon which the chief might quarter himself and his train for four days
four times a year. Shragh and mart were yearly exactions in money and
kine, apparently imposed at will. But worst of all was coyne and livery,
horse-meat and man-meat taken at will. This, it seems, was not an Irish
but an Anglo-Norman invention introduced at first as the means of coping
with Edward Bruce, but, like the income tax, perpetuated when the special
need was past. The chiefs deemed themselves independent princes,
renouncing openly or practically allegiance to the English Crown. It is
with these potentates and the forces which their restless and rebellious
ambition could command that the Crown henceforth in its struggle with the
Irish difficulty has to deal. Had they been united, they might have
prevailed; but they were always at feud with each other, while policy,
though not loyalty, led some of them to side with the Crown. Of the septs,
the three most powerful were the Geraldines of the north, close to Dublin,
the head of which became afterward Earl of Kildare; the Geraldines of the
south in Munster, the head of which became Earl of Desmond; and the
Butlers, also in the south, whose head became the Earl of Ormonde. The
O'Neills in Ulster were another powerful sept. The Butlers, less
Hibernized than their rivals, were almost always on the side of the Crown.
To put a stop to degeneration and restore order in the Pale by the
talismanic influence of royalty, Edward III. sent over his son Lionel,
Duke of Clarence. Under the duke's influence the Irish Parliament passed
the statute of Kilkenny, drawing a sharp line of division between the two
races; declaring marriage, fosterage, gossipred, and even concubinage with
the Irish high treason; pronouncing the same penalties against supplying
horses and armour to Irishmen or furnishing them with provisions in time
of war; commanding Englishmen to speak English, to bear English names
only, and to ride and dress in the English fashion; providing for the
arming of the colony against Irish enemies; separating in every way the
native Irishman from the Englishman and even forbidding the admission of
Irish priests to livings in the English Church or to the English
monasteries. There are severe regulations against the entertainment of
Irish story-tellers and bards. An article declaring the English born in
Ireland and in England to be equal and forbidding them to call each other
English Hobbe or Irish Dog on pain of a year's imprisonment and a fine at
the king's pleasure shows that there was a social division in the colony
on that line. The statute betrays despair of a fusion of races or of a
subjection of the whole island to English rule and law. At the same time
it seems to restrain English aggression and decree peace between the
races.
Piqued, we are told, by a taunt of his impotence as lord of Ireland which
stung his pride, Richard II. twice came over to Ireland with a large army.
His armies were wrecked by the difficulties of the country and the
passionate weakness of their commander. From his second visit Richard was
recalled by the knell of his own doom.
The Pale was drawn into the troubles of the Roses. Before the outbreak the
Duke of York had come over to Ireland as vicegerent, won the heart of the
people, asserted the independence of the Irish Parliament, and seemed
disposed to make himself king. He had been recalled by the Civil War, but
he had left behind him a Yorkist party which adhered to the White Rose
after Bosworth, recognized the two pretenders, Lambert Simnel and Perkin
Warbeck, and fought for the lost cause by the side of Martin Schwartz and
his German hackbut-men at Stoke.
The Anglo-Norman colony or "Pale" was now at its nadir. Much of its
manhood had been drawn away by the kings to their Scottish and French
wars. It was reduced to a circle of two counties and a half round Dublin,
defended by a ditch. Had the chiefs of tribes been unanimous, it would
almost certainly have been destroyed. But the chiefs of tribes were very
far from being unanimous, and thanks to their dissensions Strongbow in his
tomb at Christ Church still slept undisturbed on the field of his victory.
In the Pale itself reigned corruption, disorder, and misrule. "There is no
land in all this world that has more liberty in vices than Ireland and
less liberty in virtue." Such, as reported to Henry VIII., was the
internal condition of the colony; and the description extended in its full
force to the Church.
The hostility of the Pale to the Red Rose probably combined with
distractions at home in leading Henry VII. to try the policy of winning
the great Irish chiefs to allegiance by marks of confidence and honour and
of governing Ireland through them. He tried it with the Earl of Kildare,
the head of the great Geraldine clan, saying, as the story went, when he
was told that all Ireland could not govern that man, "then that man shall
govern all Ireland." Kildare, deported to England as a suspected traitor,
but there winning favour and confidence by the artful address in which his
kind were seldom wanting, was sent back to Ireland as lord deputy. The
policy had a show of success. Kildare as deputy harried the lands of his
own enemies and reported execution done on the enemies of the Crown. He
gained one signal victory of that kind. But the attempt to employ restless
and lawless ambition as the regular mainstay of orderly government could
not be a permanent success. The sept of Butler alone was true to the
Crown. The next reign saw Kildare's son and successor as deputy in the
Tower, and his grandson, Silken Thomas, raising a madcap rebellion which
was made impious by the murder of an archbishop. The execution of Silken
Thomas and his five uncles closed the experiment of governing Ireland
through that house. There was left one boy whom faithful guardians carried
abroad and to whom the heart of the sept still turned.
To make an end of the aspirations to independent nationality which had
budded under the Duke of York, and bring Irish legislation completely
under the control of the Crown, the Lord Deputy Poynings caused to be
carried through the Parliament of the Pale the pair of acts which bore his
name, subjecting Irish legislation to the control of the English Council.
The first act ordained that in future no Parliament should be held in
Ireland "but at such season as the King's Lieutenant-in-Council there
first do certify the King under the great seal of that land the causes and
considerations, and all such acts as then seemeth should pass in the said
Parliament." Should the king in council approve, the Irish Parliament was
to be summoned under the great seal of England and not otherwise. The
second act provided that all public statutes "late made within the realm
of England" should be in force in Ireland. This it was decided applied to
all English acts prior to the tenth year of Henry VII. Ireland was thus
practically turned from a separate principality into a political
dependency of England. The work of Poynings was long afterwards completed
by the act of George I. affirming the right of the British Parliament to
legislate for Ireland.
III
During the early part of the reign of Henry VIII. the policy of the
English government was a continuation of that of Henry VII. It was a
policy of conciliation and of ruling through the great Irish chiefs, the
heads of the Butlers, the Geraldines, and the O'Neills, who were gratified
by the bestowal of English titles of nobility, with flattering marks of
confidence, and by a change in the tenure of their land from tribal to
feudal, which invested them with full ownership. The Irish chief and the
feudal baron of the Pale now sat in Parliament together for the first and
last time. There appears to have been an inclination on the part of the
Crown to favour the native Irish, it being still remembered perhaps that
the Anglo-Irish had supported the Yorkist pretenders. The king himself
penned a sage and benevolent manifesto, in the shape of a despatch to the
Lord Deputy Surrey, on the blessings of civilization. The policy of
conciliation was in fact necessary as well as laudable; for the king,
plunged by his diplomacy into continental embroilments and lavishing his
father's hoard on a Field of the Cloth of Gold, had not the means of
subduing Ireland. It would have been vain to look in those days for the
philosophy which could make allowance for a diversity of national ideas
and habits. The O'Neill, upon his elevation to the earldom of Tyrone, is
required with his heirs to forsake the name of O'Neill, to use English
habits and the English language. The age, however, was one of growing
light. Education was a passion of the hour. A decree in favour of the
establishment of a system of free schools in Ireland went forth. Unhappily
it remained a decree. No homilies, no peerages, no flatteries or marks of
confidence could permanently avail to quiet the intractable ambition of
the great chiefs. They took the titles, which tickled their vanity; but
they preferred the state of a chieftain with his gallowglasses and with
his despotic power over the sept to that of a baron under royal rule, with
feudal restraints and obligations. They were always at feud with each
other, waging private war and ravaging each others' territories with the
ruthlessness of the most cruel invader. Murders among them were frequent.
Conspiracies were always on foot. Thus the catastrophe of the house of
Kildare ended what may be called the early Tudor policy of native
government and conciliation. The policy of conquest with colonization in
its train prevailed once more.
The instrument of that policy was to be a line of English deputies; able
men on the whole and zealous in the public service, but generally
incapable of understanding any national character or any institutions but
their own. A deputy had also to contend with desperate difficulties, utter
insufficiency of military force, an empty exchequer, a service full of
jobbery and corruption, hostile intrigue both at Dublin and in the court
at home.
The line was opened by Skeffington, a good though somewhat decrepit
soldier, before whose artillery fell the redoubtable native fortress of
Maynooth. The Crown had now a new and formidable force upon its side in
the cannon, which it alone could afford to maintain. In Ireland as
elsewhere the end of the feudal fortress had come.
At the same time there were forfeited to the Crown great tracts of land
held by absentees, the feudal principle still prevailing and military
service being still a condition of the ownership of land. The Crown
thereby became a landowner on a vast scale, with the means of planting
settlements in all the districts under its power. Thus a wide field was
opened for Crown colonization.
But now comes an event most momentous in itself and fraught with future
woe to Ireland. Henry VIII., enraged at the refusal of the Pope to let him
put away his wife and marry another woman, breaks with the Papacy, carries
his kingdom out of its dominion, declares himself supreme head of a
national Church, dissolves the monasteries, seizes their estates, and half
reforms the church in a Protestant sense, breaking the worshipped images,
closing the shrines, expurgating the liturgy, and licensing the
translation of the Bible. He seizes into his own hands under the mask of a
_conge d'elire_ the appointments to the bishoprics. Wavering to the last
in opinion between Catholicism and Protestantism according as the party of
the old or that of the new aristocracy prevailed in his councils, he in
the upshot practically ranges his kingdom on the Protestant side in the
grand struggle that was to come between the Catholic and the Protestant
powers.
In Ireland there was one religion but there were two Churches: that of the
Pale and that of the native Irish; divided from each other, not by
doctrine or ritual, but by race and language, practically treating each
other as not within the pale of Christendom, hardly within the pale of
humanity. No Irishman could be admitted to church preferment or to a
monastery in the Pale. Nor did the churches ever act together as one
Church. Both were in a most miserable condition. The edifices were in
ruins, the services were unperformed. Monasteries however abounded. They
were the refuge of the peaceful in that world of strife and blood. That
some of them were on a large scale stately ruins prove. It is surmised
that they may have been wealthy, if not in lands, in orchards, fish-ponds,
mills, or the labour which seems to have been sheltered within their ample
walls. Like the English monasteries, they impropriated the tithes of
parishes, thus helping to kill the parochial system. The character of the
clergy was still scandalously low, not seldom criminal. Among the people
religion was almost dead; the remnant of it, as well as the remnant of
education, was kept alive by the poor Franciscan friars. In neither Church
was there the making of martyrs.
In the little maritime towns there was more religion, as well as something
more like civilization. But in this as in other respects their influence
was confined to their own gates.
There was no opposition in the Irish Parliament to the change of the
king's title from _Dominus_ to _Rex_, whereby the sovereignty of the Pope
was cancelled, to any article in the king's assumption of autocratic power
over the Church, or to his taking to himself the appointment of bishops. A
show of resistance made by the proctors of the clergy in the House of
Commons was promptly met by their extrusion. Nor was there the slightest
unwillingness on the part of any lord or chief to take his share of the
plunder of the monasteries, which, as in England, were suppressed, with
confiscation of revenue and goods, including the impropriated tithes of
parishes which they had served. A plea put in by the deputy on behalf of
six friaries in consideration of their special services to education and
their hospitality was not heard.
The iconoclastic part of the revolution, attacking the material objects of
popular worship, relics, wonder-working images, and venerated shrines,
seems to have encountered some natural resistance, and it appears that the
government failed to put an end to pilgrimages, which were the religious
pleasure-trips of the people.
The leader of the Reform movement, and specially of iconoclasm, in
Ireland, under Henry VIII., was Archbishop Browne, a fervid but
apparently not discreet man. He had a rather restive coadjutor in Bishop
Staples. No counterpart of Cranmer, Latimer, or Ridley appeared.
The members of the council of Edward VI., being men of the new official
aristocracy, opposed to the old houses, attached themselves to the party
of movement in religion. In England they completed the work of
confiscation, carried iconoclasm a step farther, and made Protestant
reforms in the religious system, the last in conjunction with foreign
reformers. Their policy in Ireland was the same. They sent over the
prayer-book of Edward. But the effect appears to have been small. The way
had not been prepared by the advent of Lutheranism or by the use of
translations of the Bible. Besides, there was no religious feeling on
which it could act. The Deputy St. Leger was a shrewd man of the world,
who, while he was ready to put the law in force, disliked all religious
agitation. "Tut, tut," he said to the earnest reformer, "your religious
matters will spoil all." The way of the new liturgy was effectually
blocked by the Erse language, and no missionary effort appears to have
been made.
The military policy of Edward's government had a very able though rather
grim representative in Bellingham, if he had only been backed by a
sufficient force. But the foreign complications of England being what they
were, no sufficient force could ever be sent. The system of regular
hostings against the natives is now on foot. Bellingham having stormed a
position, there ensues a butchery of wood kerne, the equal of which
Bellingham supposed there had never been. "Such," the deputy says, "was
the great goodness of God to deliver them into our hands." Puritanism with
its ruthlessness is making its appearance in the lists, on one side, while
on the other side enters its mortal foe the Jesuit.
The government incurred deserved hatred in Ireland as in England by
carrying to further lengths the debasement of the coin which had been the
disgraceful shift of the spendthrift Henry VIII. A petition sent to the
king upon the subject, in setting forth the folly of debasement, stated
with an accuracy remarkable for the time the function of the precious
metals as a medium of exchange. Wholesale fraud on the part of government
was not likely to help the cause of the Reformation.
Beyond the English Pale the change of religion never reached the people.
Antagonism of religion was henceforth added to estrangement of race.
Protestantism was to be the religion of the conqueror; Catholicism was to
be the religion of the conquered. The Pope became a rival in sovereignty
to the king of England, claiming the allegiance at once of piety and
patriotism. Instead of the torpid clergy of the old native Church, now
came upon the scene active emissaries of Rome with the Jesuit, master of
intrigue, at their head, to do the joint work of propagandism and
rebellion. Presently will appear the crusading soldiery of Catholic Spain.