to the Pope. Grantees of abbey lands in Ireland, as in England, Catholics
though they might be, held fast their prey. But the old ritual was for a
time legally revived, and the hand of iconoclasm was stayed. Protestantism
was rabbled; but Smithfield fires, the martyr's spirit being absent, there
were none.
A story is told of an envoy sent by Mary to Ireland with a warrant of
persecution, whose commission a clever Protestant woman, in whose house he
put up by the way, stole and replaced by a pack of cards, so that when the
deputy opened the wallet at the council board nothing came forth but the
pack of cards with the knave of clubs uppermost.
IV
Thus the day of the Elizabethan era which dawned so brightly upon England
came on in heavy clouds for the unhappy dependency. The religious
compromise which it brought to England was adapted by the English
statesmen who framed it to the religious condition and temperament of
their own people. To the condition and temperament of the Irish people
there was no such adaptation. To the Catholic lords of the Pale the
Elizabethan religion was alien; to the native Celts it was not only alien,
but utterly abhorrent. It presented itself, not as the religion of
Ireland, but as the religion of the conqueror.
The ecclesiastical polity comprised in the Act of Uniformity and the
Thirty-nine Articles was, however, formally extended to Ireland, and the
Crown resumed the powers which it had assumed in the time of Henry VIII.
or his son, including the appointment of bishops, in this case without the
veil, retained in England, of the _conge d'elire_. In the dependency as
in England, the State assumed supreme power of religious legislation,
overriding and almost treating as null the authority of the ecclesiastical
Convocation. Propagation of the Anglican liturgy beyond the Pale continued
to be blocked by the language.
Burleigh and the other statesmen of Elizabeth's Council could not fail to
turn their minds to the Irish problem, enhanced as its gravity had been by
the progress of religious revolution in Europe and the danger of a
conflict with the Catholic powers. Trinity College is a noble monument of
their policy. In Ireland, as in England, they restored the coin, though
the benefits of that wise measure were offset by protectionist enactments
carried in the Parliament of the Pale, which bore the usual fruits. They
sent commissioners of inquiry to give them more trustworthy information
than they could get from the despatches of the deputies or the tattling
intriguers of the Pale. They formed a plan for the institution of
provincial presidencies to lengthen the arm of government and form local
centres of civilization, which, had it taken effect, might have been the
best solution of the problem. But the necessary means of giving effect to
any policy failed them. Churches and schools, which were named by a
reformer at the time as the indispensable instruments of civilization,
could in the case of Ireland be named only in mockery. An ordinance for
the general establishment of schools more than once went forth, but an
ordinance still it remained. The Pale, reduced as it was in extent and
weakly defended, was in itself a nest of misrule, jobbery, and corruption.
Nothing could have been done without a military force in the hands of the
central government sufficient to enforce law and order. Such a force the
counsellors of Elizabeth had no means of maintaining. Continental war drew
heavily on the exchequer. The queen was unwisely parsimonious. She was
seized with spasms of frugality. Militia on the spot of any value there
was none. The service was very unpopular in England, and the men enlisted
or pressed for it as soldiers were apt to be of the Falstaffian kind,
better at preying on the people for whose protection they were sent and at
indulging in the general license of the camp than at facing the perils and
hardships of "hostings" in the Irish wilds. Their pay was almost always in
arrears.
The service was not inviting. "The deputy, according to his commission,
marched into the north. But, alas, he neither found France to travel in
nor Frenchmen to fight withal. There were no glorious towns to load the
soldiers home with spoils, nor pleasant vineyards to refresh them with
wine. Here were no plentiful markets to supply the salary of the army if
they wanted, or stood in need; here were no cities of refuge, nor places
of garrison to retire into, in the times of danger and extremity of
weather; here were no musters ordered, no lieutenants of shires to raise
new armies; here was no supplement of men or provisions, especially of
Irish against Irish; nor any one promise kept according to his
expectation; here were, in plain terms, bogs and woods to be in, fogs and
mists to trouble you, grass and fern to welcome your horses and corrupt
and putrefy your bodies; here was killing of kine and eating fresh beef,
to breed diseases; here was oats without bread, and fire without food;
here were smoky cabins and nasty holes; here were bogs on the tops of
mountains, and few passages, but over marshes, or through strange places;
here was retiring into fastnesses, glens, and no fighting, but when they
pleased themselves; here was ground enough to bury your people in being
dead, but no place to please them while alive; here you might spend what
you brought with you, but be assured there was no hopes of relief; here
was room for all your losses, but scarce a castle to receive your spoil
and treasure. To conclude: here was all glory and virtue buried in
obscurity and oblivion, and not so much as a glimmering hope that how
valiantly soever a man demeaned himself it should be registered or
remembered."
The deputies sent in command might do their best according to their
lights. They generally did. But the lights of all of them were not the
same, and the web of Penelope woven by one was always in danger of being
unwoven by his successor. One of them only, Sussex, was large-minded
enough to think of acknowledging the Brehon law, reducing it to a system,
and making it a bridge across which the Irish might pass to legal
civilization. All the deputies had to contend more or less with local
opposition and intrigue.
The consequences to Ireland of this policy of government by deputies were
disastrous. The presence of royalty might have had some effect on the
Irish heart. It could hardly have failed, at all events, to reveal the
real state of things. But it was never tried.
Elizabeth, Protestant by circumstance and profession, Catholic in her real
leanings, hating nothing so much as a Puritan, unless it were a
clergyman's wife, and an autocrat to the core, had no desire of breaking
with the Papacy or with Spain. But when a Pope excommunicated and deposed
her, the die was cast. Ireland was drawn into the European war between
Catholicism and Protestantism which was also that between despotism and
freedom; she became a point of military danger in a national and religious
struggle for life or death. There is now an end of the policy of
conciliation or of colonization with a civilizing object. The policy
henceforth is that of conquest, and when resistance is obstinate, of
extermination.
The reign was filled with successive wars between the English and the
natives, the first slightly, the last two more deeply, identified on the
side of the natives with papal suzerainty and the Catholic cause. The
first was that with Shane O'Neill, elective head of the great Ulster sept
of O'Neill and pretender to the royal earldom of Tyrone. The tribal
headship was unquestionably elective; to the earldom Shane's claim was
doubtful, the question being partly one between the English and the Brehon
law. It was presently settled by the murder of Shane's rival. Shane was,
in fact admitted himself to be, a barbarian, brutal, drunken, and cruel,
all in a high degree. He made his prisoners wear an iron collar fastened
by a short chain to gyves on their ankles so that they could neither stand
nor lie. At the same time he was able, crafty, and daring. He made himself
supreme in Ulster, baffled the English in war, and was so formidable that
the Lord Deputy Sussex, once at least, if not more than once, attempted to
get rid of him by assassination. He intrigued with Philip of Spain. At
another time he coquetted with the Queen's government and paid a visit to
the court, where he and his gallowglasses, with their axes, their Irish
heads of hair and moustaches, their wide-sleeved saffron shirts, short
tunics, and shaggy cloaks of fur or frieze, produced a sensation among the
courtiers. Master of dissimulation, Shane fell on his knees before the
Queen and confessed his rebellion in the Irish language "with howling."
Returning to Ulster, he recommenced the game there, plundering and
burning, slaying man, woman, and child. He was at last stabbed in a brawl
with the Scottish raiders with whom he had intrigued. These marauding
immigrants from the Scottish Highlands and isles were now a formidable
addition to the elements in the cauldron of Irish anarchy and ruin.
Shane was an Irish leader of the thoroughly Celtic type. Perhaps the
next, though in a widely different guise and sphere, may be said to have
been Daniel O'Connell.
As a mover of disturbance on a large scale there succeeded James
Fitzmaurice, kinsman of the Earl of Desmond, the head of the southern sept
of Geraldines. Fitzmaurice, whether from conviction or policy, gave
rebellion a more religious character and connected it with Rome and
Madrid, which he visited on missions of intrigue. In this work he had a
compeer in Stukely, an adventurer of the kind then common, who also
intrigued with the Catholic powers. If their aim was an Irish crown on a
Catholic head, it came to nothing. But Fitzmaurice brought with him to
Ireland a regular proclamation from the Pope, and had made formidable
headway in his appeal to the forces of disorder when he was killed. The
leadership of the movement passed to the Earl of Desmond, who with a
little aid from Spain raised in Munster a rebellion on a large scale. He
was a feeble though respectable leader, and his rising in the end bore no
fruits but a renewal of slaughter and devastation.
The aid of Rome and Spain promised to the Irish Catholics was long in
coming. Ever tardy and vacillating was the mind of the Spanish king. But
at the time of Desmond's rebellion the aid came. In concert with the
insurgent Irish a force of Italians and Spaniards landed and established
itself in a fortalice at Smerwick. The deputy at that time was Lord Grey,
a Puritan most pronounced and militant, the Artegal, the Knight of
Justice, in Spenser's "Faerie Queene," bent on the overthrow of the false
Duessa and the extermination of her brood. He invested Smerwick. The Irish
allies of the invader failed to relieve the place, and the garrison was
compelled to surrender at discretion. Grey then butchered the whole of
them in cold blood. Raleigh, as the officer in command, it is to be feared
directed the slaughter. Alva or Parma would have done the same, and
Elizabeth in approving incurred no special infamy.
The poor Irish in this rebellion showed that fidelity to a chief which was
one of their small stock of political virtues. They afterwards showed
their love of legend, of melancholy legend especially, by telling that
Desmond's ghost, mounted on a phantom steed with silver shoes, rose at
night from the water on the bank of which he had been slain, and fancying
that in the moaning of the wind they heard the Desmond howl.
The attainder of the Earl of Desmond was followed by the sweeping
confiscation of a vast tract of land to the Crown, on the assumption that
as the domain of an earl it had been a fief and the property of its lord;
whereas under native law and according to native ideas it was the property
of the tribe. Spenser was one of the grantees of the Crown and settlers on
the conquered land. He had been the secretary of Lord Grey. The author of
the "Faerie Queene" thus encountered the religion of the false Duessa, his
hatred of which was not likely to be diminished when he was afterwards by
a great outbreak of insurrection ejected from his grant.
Now along the dangerous western coast of Ireland were driven in dire
distress a number of great ships of war, with the troops and much of the
power and chivalry of a mighty kingdom on board. These were the miserable
remnants of the Invincible Armada. About a score of the ships were cast
ashore or wrecked. The crews for the most part perished. On one strand of
less than five miles in length were counted above eleven hundred corpses
cast up by the sea. On two miles of strand in Sligo there lay wrecked
timber enough to build five first-rate ships, besides mighty great boats,
cables and other cordage, and masts of extraordinary size. Of those who
struggled to land, many were killed by the English, not a few by the
native Irish, who stripped and robbed those whom they did not kill,
skipping and capering at the sight of such glorious plunder. The Armada
had come to liberate the native Irish from the heretical yoke; but love of
plunder overcame in their simple souls regard for a political and
ecclesiastical alliance, their appreciation of which, perhaps, had never
been very clear.
One Spaniard, Cuellar, after being stripped and narrowly escaping with his
life, spent some time in an Irish cabin, and has left his notes on native
Irish life and character, valuable as those of a neutral.
"The habit of those savages," he says, "is to live like brutes in the
mountains, which are very rugged in the part of Ireland where we were
lost. They dwell in thatched cabins. The men are well made, with good
features, and as active as deer. They eat but one meal, and that late at
night, oatcake and butter being their usual food. They drink sour milk
because they have nothing else, for they use no water, though they have
the best in the world. At feasts it is their custom to eat half-cooked
meat without bread or salt. Their dress matches themselves--tight
breeches, and short hose jackets of very coarse texture; over all they
wear blankets, and their hair comes over their eyes. They are great
walkers and stand much work, and by continually fighting they keep the
queen's English soldiers out of their country, which is nothing but bogs
for forty miles either way. Their great delight is robbing one another, so
that no day passes without fighting, for whenever the people of one hamlet
know that those of another possess cattle or other goods, they immediately
make a night attack and kill each other. When the English garrisons find
out who has lifted the most cattle, they come down on them, and they have
but to retire to the mountains with their wives and herds, having no
houses or furniture to lose. They sleep on the ground upon rushes full of
water and ice. Most of the women are very pretty, but badly got up, for
they wear only a shift and a mantle, and a great linen cloth on the head,
rolled over the brow. They are great workers and housewives in their way.
These people call themselves Christians, and say Mass. They follow the
rule of the Roman Church, but most of their churches, monasteries, and
hermitages are dismantled by the English soldiers, and by their local
partisans, who are as bad as themselves. In short there is no order nor
justice in the country, and every one does that which is right in his own
eyes."
"Savages" Cuellar calls the natives; what but savages could they be when
not only had all the means of civilization been withheld from them, but
they were hunted like beasts of prey? That the women are "great workers
and housewives in their way" is a redeeming feature in the picture. The
whole land, English and Irish alike, was a wreck. The secretary of a lord
deputy reports that the people had no conscience, but committed crimes
freely; that they even changed wives among themselves; that bridges were
falling down, churches roofless; there were no charities, no schools; law
was jobbery, and the judicial bench was filled with ignorance; every lord
hated the restraints of law and made himself an Irish chief; and disorders
were as great among English soldiers as among Irish kernes.
The third rebellion, and the most formidable of all, was that of the Earl
of Tyrone, head of the O'Neills of Ulster. It stirred the general forces
of revolt, national and religious, beyond Ulster, in Connaught and
elsewhere. Tyrone gave his movement distinctly the character of a holy
war, and received aid from Spain. Unlike Desmond, he was an able leader.
He gained a victory over the English at the Yellow Ford which filled
Dublin with panic. To put him down, Elizabeth sent her favourite Essex,
with forces greater than her parsimony allowed to an ordinary deputy.
Essex went forth with great pomp and amidst high expectations. But he
totally lacked steadiness of character and policy. He failed and went home
to run mad courses and die on the scaffold, faintly recalling the Irish
history of Richard II.
Essex was succeeded by Mountjoy, able, iron-willed, and ruthless, who made
it a war of extermination and devastation. The Spaniards brought tardy aid
to their Irish allies. They landed in force at Kinsale, and for a moment
the fortune of war seemed to waver, but it soon inclined again to the side
of the deputy and England. The force of the rebellion was broken, and
Tyrone was compelled to surrender.
Of all the wars waged by a half-civilized on a barbarous and despised
race, these wars waged by the English on the Irish seem to have been about
the most hideous. No quarter was given by the invader to man, woman, or
child. The butchering of women and children is repeatedly and brutally
avowed. Nothing can be more horrible than the cool satisfaction with which
commanders report their massacres. "I was never," said Captain Woodhouse,
"so weary with killing of men, for I protest to God for as fast as I
could I did but hough and paunch them." "The number of their fighting men
slain and drowned that day," says another commander, "were estimated and
numbered to be fourteen hundred or fifteen hundred, besides boys, women,
churls, and children, which could not be so few as many more and upwards."
Over and over again massacres of people of both sexes and all ages are
reported with similar coolness. Another ruffian seems to have put to death
children who were held as hostages.
Mountjoy especially used famine deliberately as his instrument of war, and
with signal effect. After his work, multitudes lay dead in the ditches of
towns and other waste places, with their mouths coloured green by eating
docks and nettles. Children were seen eating their mother's corpse. Old
women, we are told, lit fires in the woods and ate the children who came
to warm themselves. Not only were horses killed and eaten, but cats and
dogs, hawks and kites. The wolves, driven by hunger from the woods, killed
the enfeebled people. The dead lay unburied or half-buried, the survivors
not having strength to dig graves, and dogs ate the remains.
It must be said that the native Irish not only retaliated these cruelties
on the English whenever they could, but committed them on each other.
Edward Butler, for example, invades Arra, the district of another clan,
harries the country far and wide, breaks open the churches to which the
frightened women had fled in the vain hope of sanctuary, and gives the
region up for forty-eight hours to plunder and rape, sparing neither age
nor condition. The lately gathered corn is destroyed, and famine stares
the whole population in the face. The raid is presently repeated, the
cattle are driven off, and a house full of women and children is given to
the flames. In the English settlement of Munster, overrun by the native
Irish, English children are taken from their nurses' breasts and dashed
against walls; an Englishman's heart is plucked out in his wife's
presence, and she is forced to lend an apron to wipe the murderer's
fingers. Of the English fugitives who flocked into Youghal some had lost
their tongues and noses. Irish tenants and servants that yesterday fed in
the settlers' houses were conspicuous by their cruelty.
What was called law was almost as murderous as war. Men were hanged at
assizes by scores, and these massacres were reported by the deputy with
satisfaction as gratifying proof of the increased influence of public
justice. A bishop witnesses them with complacency. Respect for human life
must have perished. Such was the training which in the formative period of
national character the Celtic Irish received, and which must be borne in
mind when we come to atrocities committed by them at a not very much later
period.
At the same time we do not see the back of destiny's cards. The
subjugation of barbarous clans by a foreign conqueror, himself
half-civilized, was horrible. Would a series of tribal wars among the
clans themselves have been less horrible? When Strongbow landed there had
been hardly any sign of permanent union or of the foundation of a settled
polity. Nor afterwards does there appear to have been any attempt or
tendency of the kind.
Tyrone, on his submission, had been restored to rank and great part of his
estate. But he, as well as his confederate, the O'Donnell, created Earl of
Tyrconnell, afterwards finding themselves objects of aversion and
suspicion, fled the country. Their flight and the suppression of a futile
outbreak of tribal insurrection under another O'Donnell finished the work.
The whole island was now conquered, but the heart of the people, as
presently appeared, was very far from being won. The hold of the Papacy
and the Catholic Church upon their liegemen had been growing stronger
under the long struggle and was not impaired by its close. It formed
henceforth a religious substitute for nationality.
V
Ireland, conquered, now became shire land, at least in contemplation of
law. The law of England, in the eyes of its professors the consummation of
human wisdom, ousted the Brehon law. The feudal system of land tenure
supplanted the tribal system. Freehold and leasehold, primogeniture and
entail, took the place of tribal ownership and tanistry. Justice was
henceforth to be administered in English courts, and judges were to go
circuit as in England. The change at first seemed to be well received.
Perhaps novelty itself impressed. An English chief justice, going circuit
through the newly Anglicized districts, could complacently report that
multitudes had flocked to his court; whence he drew the cheerful inference
that the Irish after all, like other men, loved justice. So they did, and
do; but it was not the justice of the king's bench and Coke. Nor did they
love its administration by an alien conqueror. It was probably curiosity
as much as confidence that drew them to the court of Chief Justice Davies;
so the event proved.
The whole machinery of government, as well as the law and the judiciary,
was at the same time assimilated, formally at least, to the English model.
The corporate towns received new charters. The place of the military
deputy was taken by the head of a civil government with his officials.
Unhappily the ecclesiastical polity of England, with its tests and its
recusancy law, compelling attendance at the services of the State Church,
was at the same time thrust upon people to whom it was in itself and in
its associations abhorrent. Under Elizabeth there had been a politic
laxity. Now fines for recusancy are exacted. Intolerance of Catholic
dissent from the royal religion could not fail to be increased by the
Gunpowder Plot.