breeches, was not without something of the largeness of mind which culture
generally imparts. He could understand Bacon. His Irish policy, evidently
inspired by Bacon, was colonization, plantation as it then was called. For
this there was ample room on the forfeited lands of Tyrone and other
attainted chiefs, so far as legal ownership in the contemplation of
English law was concerned. But the attainders of the chiefs had not
cleared the lands of the members of their septs, in whose minds tribal
ownership was rooted. This was the weak point of the transplantation
policy, as in the sequel tragically appeared. Extensive grants, however,
were made to a colony formed by English and Scottish settlers, undertakers
as they were called. Of Scottish settlers there had before been not a few.
The city of London invested largely in the enterprise. Thus was formed in
Ulster, and in Ulster has continued to exist to the present time, a sort
of Protestant pale. Bacon's philosophic eye ranges complacently over the
prospect of a people of barbarous manners "brought to give over and
discontinue their customs of revenge and blood and of dissolute life and
of theft and rapine, and to give ear to the wisdom of laws and
governments; whereupon immediately followeth the cutting of stones for
building and habitation, and of trees for the seats of houses, orchards,
enclosures, and the like." Beyond doubt this settlement was an improvement
in material respects. Nor, though the new settlers might domineer, was
their domination likely to be more oppressive and insolent than that of
the native chief, with his gallowglasses and his coyne and livery. The
tribal ownership of land had probably become almost a fiction, the chief
treating the land as his own. Little, therefore, was actually lost in
that way by the tribesman, while there was an end of coyne and livery and
the other extortions of the chiefs. On the other hand the chief, however
oppressive, was nominally one of the tribe and a kinsman, and the land was
still tribal in the fancy of the sept. The tribesman was not liable to
eviction. Nor was improvement in agriculture or even in advancement of law
and order likely to be so fascinating to the native Irish, especially to
gallowglasses and kernes, as to Bacon. The adventurers were apt to be of a
sordid class, ravenous, close-fisted, little likely to make themselves
beloved. The eagles of enterprise spread their wings for the Spanish main;
the vultures swooped upon Ireland. The medley of Brehon law and English
law, with the variety of titles, some by forfeiture for treason, others by
ancient grants from the Crown, formed an element in which the art of the
predatory pettifogger had full play. By legal chicane, the chicane of an
alien law, many an Irish Naboth may have been dispossessed. There was,
moreover, the antagonism of religion, greatly intensified by the long
struggle in which the natives, fighting for independence, had looked up to
Rome for support and been fired at heart by the active zeal of her
missionaries.
The government meant well. It sent over an able lord deputy in the person
of Chichester, who did his best for healing and improvement. In
improvement he was somewhat hasty and procrustean. He might have done
better had he only imbibed Bacon's spirit of philosophic toleration, and
not fancied that for Irish barbarism Protestantism of the Anglican type
was the sovereign cure. Bacon, as one of his three specifics for the
recovery of the hearts of the people, had recommended a toleration,
partial and temporary at least, of the Catholic religion, which was to be
combined "with the sending over of some good preachers, especially of that
sort which are vehement and zealous persuaders and not scholastical, to be
resident in principal towns." The government issued a politic manifesto,
promising to all native Irish of the poorer class equal protection and
complete immunity from any oppressive claims of chiefs. But let the
government charm as wisely as it might, it could not charm away the
difference of race, language, and character, the antagonism of religion,
the memories of the long and murderous struggle, the ravenous cupidity and
overbearing attitude of the alien adventurer, the anguish of the native
who saw the stranger in possession of his land.
James called a Parliament for all Ireland, Catholic as well as Protestant.
It was packed for the Crown, which created boroughs for that purpose.
Still, it was something more like a national assembly than Ireland had
ever seen or in fact was destined again to see. The elections to it were
fiercely contested between the races and religions. Its first sitting was
characteristic. There was a division on the election of a speaker. One
party went out into the lobby. In its absence the other party seated its
man in the chair. The party which had gone out, returning and finding what
had been done, seated their man in the other man's lap. The importance of
this Parliament, however, is extolled by Sir John Davies, and one act, at
all events, stands to its credit. It repealed the statute of Kilkenny and
all other laws recognizing and perpetuating distinctions of race,
declaring that their cause had ceased, since the inhabitants of the
kingdom without distinction were henceforth under the protection of the
Crown, and the best way of settling peace was to allow their intercourse
and intermarriage so that they might grow into one nation. There was a
transient ray of sunlight on the dark scene. Efforts were made to improve
Trinity College, and learning shone forth in the person of Usher.
VI
There was still in Ireland a mine charged with the wrath of the
dispossessed added to the hatred of race and religion, the religious
hatred being the more deadly because, the Protestants of Ireland being
Calvinist, the antagonism was extreme. The match was applied to the mine
by the outbreak of revolution in England under Charles I. Strafford,
having passed from the ranks of patriotism to the place left vacant by the
death of Buckingham in the councils of the king, came with his dark look
of command as viceroy to play the part of beneficent despot in Ireland,
and at the same time to raise an army there for his master. The part of
despot he played to perfection, making the Irish Parliament the tool of
his will, applying to it and to the government in general his own and
Laud's high royalist policy of Thorough. The part of beneficent despot he
played to a considerable extent. He set his heel on the rapacity of the
adventurers, compelling the chief of them, the Earl of Cork, to disgorge.
He enforced order and put down piracy, which in the general disorder had
become rife. He fostered the cultivation of flax and the linen trade,
though he paid blackmail to English protectionism by prohibiting the
woollen manufacture. He did his best to reform the State Church, which he
found sunk in torpor, sinecurism, and simony, while its edifices were
ruins and piggeries. Unluckily he was a strict Anglican, whereas the only
Protestantism in Ireland which had life in it was the Calvinistic
Protestantism represented by Usher. He made a mortal enemy by turning the
sumptuous monument of Lady Cork off the place of the high altar. But to
find means of raising an army for his king he had to resort to violent
measures. He dragooned the Parliament into granting extraordinary
supplies. The king had pledged himself in the form of "graces" to respect
and quiet titles to large tracts of land. These graces Strafford thrust
aside. By legal chicane and intimidation of juries he, in defiance of the
king's plighted word, confiscated a great part of the land of Connaught. A
legal raid of the Crown on the estates which the city of London had
purchased in Ulster made the lord deputy another formidable enemy. He
added to the number by trampling on the pride of men of rank and
influence. Strafford had formed his army. That he intended it as a
support to the arbitrary government of Charles is beyond question; his
betrayal of that intention by some loose words uttered in council formed
the most damaging piece of evidence against him; and though the army broke
up on his departure, fears of it continued to haunt the English mind and
to intensify English feeling against the Irish. The Irish Parliament
joined in the impeachment of the man who had trampled on it, and when
Strafford pleaded in defence of his arbitrary measures, that Ireland was a
conquered country, Pym's retort was, "They were a conquered nation! There
cannot be a word more pregnant or fruitful in treason than that word is.
There are few nations in the world that have not been conquered, and no
doubt but the conqueror may give what law he pleases to those that are
conquered; but if the succeeding pacts and agreements do not limit and
restrain that right, what people can be secure? England hath been
conquered, and Wales hath been conquered, and by this reason will be in no
better case than Ireland. If the king by the right of a conqueror gives
laws to his people, shall not the people by the same reason be restored to
the right of the conquered to recover their liberty if they can?"
Revolution was in the air. It stirred the heart of the Catholic cowering
under the penal law, who saw the foot of his arch-enemy the Puritan on the
steps of power. It stirred still more the heart of the disinherited
native, especially on the forfeited domain of Tyrone. One of those great
popular conspiracies of which the Irish have the gift was formed under the
leadership of Phelim O'Neill, who ranked among his countrymen as head of
the great sept of O'Neill, and cherished ancestral traditions of vast
domains and princely power. With Phelim O'Neill was a better man, Roger
Moore, one of the disinherited, a deadly enemy of England. The rebellion
posed as royalist, declaring for the king against the Puritan and
revolutionary Parliament; its aims were Ireland for the Irish, and
Catholicism as the Irish religion. Phelim O'Neill was not a man to
restrain from crime. But the people, once launched in insurrection, were
probably beyond control. They rose upon the English settlers in Ulster,
drove them from their homes, and massacred some thousands with the usual
cruelty, women and children taking part in the fiendish work. Many were
stripped naked and exposed to perish in the cold. Dublin was full of
shivering and famished fugitives. The capital itself narrowly escaped
through fortunate betrayal of the plot, such as in an Irish conspiracy
seldom fails. It was natural that panic should exaggerate the number
murdered, as it was that panic and superstition together should see the
spectres of the English who had been drowned by the rebels at Portadown.
The effect upon the English, above all upon the Puritan mind, was like
that of the Sepoy mutiny and the massacre of Cawnpore. Ruthless
retaliation followed. Where the Protestants got the upper hand, Irish men,
women, and children were butchered without mercy. Thenceforth the Irishman
was to the Puritan a wild beast or worse. All Irishmen who landed in
England to fight for the king, with the women who followed their camps,
were put to the sword. An Irishwoman left behind by a Munster regiment at
the siege of Lyme was torn to pieces by the women of the place.
The English Parliament at once, being short of money, passed, to provide
for the Irish war, an act confiscating in advance two and a half millions
of acres of rebel land as security for a loan; a measure, to say the
least, extreme and sure to make the conflict internecine. The act passed
without a dissentient voice, and was one of the last that received the
assent of Charles.
In Ireland against the dark clouds of the storm one rainbow appeared. The
Protestant Bishop Bedel, though a proselytizer, had by his beneficence won
the love of his Catholic neighbours. He and his family were not only
spared by the rebels, but treated with loving-kindness, and when he died a
farewell salute was fired over his grave.
Thus commenced a course of mutual slaughter which lasted eleven years,
and, according to Sir William Petty, cost, by sword, plague, and famine,
the lives of a third part of the population. A great pasture country was
reduced to the importation of foreign meat. A traveller could ride twenty
or thirty miles without seeing a trace of human life, and wolves, fed on
human flesh, multiplied and prowled in packs within a few miles of Dublin.
Numbers abandoned the country and enlisted in foreign services. Slave
dealers plied their trade and shipped boys and girls to Barbados.
Strafford's place as deputy not having been filled, the government
remained in the hands of the Puritan Lords Justices Parsons and Borlase,
the first an intriguer and jobber, the second a worn-out soldier and a
cipher. They had prorogued the Parliament by which they might have been
restrained. The commander of the army on the king's side and the
representative of the king's interest was Ormonde, the head of the
loyalist house or sept of Butler, a man thoroughly honourable as well as
able and wise, whose character stands out nobly amidst the dark carnival
of evil.
It is difficult to say to which of the contending parties the palm of
atrocity is to be awarded. Probably to that of the government, which knew
no measure in the extermination of Catholics and rebels. Where Ormonde
commanded there was sure to have been comparative mercy. Mercy there
certainly was on the side of the insurgents when they were commanded by
Owen O'Neill, a genuine soldier trained in foreign service and observant
of the rules of civilized war. But a papal legate who was in the Catholic
camp gleefully reports that after a battle won by the confederates no
prisoners had been taken. By the soldiery of the government at least
children were butchered, the saying being that "nits make lice."
The anti-Catholic policy of the Puritan government and the castle had
driven into the arms of insurrection the Catholic lords of the Pale,
English in blood, normally hostile to the tribes though they were. The
Confederation formed at Kilkenny a provisional government with an assembly
of priests and laity combined, which elected a council of war. The
assembly was presently joined by a papal nuncio, Rinuccini, who brought
money from Rome and it seems at the same time encouragement of the
rebellion from Richelieu. The nuncio sought to control everything in the
paramount interest of the Papacy, which thus once more appears as a power
of temporal ambition. The assembly was not unanimous. Of the clergy and
the nuncio the chief aims were the ascendency of the Catholic Church and
the recovery of the confiscated Church lands. The chief aims of the lay
lords were lay; they wanted relief from political disabilities and
recovery of their political power. Restoration to the Church of the abbey
lands, of the grantees of which they were the heirs, was by no means to
their mind.
Of the origin of the rebellion in Ulster King Charles was perfectly
innocent, though he drew suspicion on himself by some careless words.
Nothing worse for his cause could have happened. But when in his wrestle
with the Puritan he was thrown, he began to cast a longing eye on the
forces in Ireland which, though rebel and Catholic, were at all events
hostile to the Puritan. There ensued a series of tangled intrigues with
the Confederates, in the course of which Charles showed his usual
weakness and duplicity, while he was fatally committed by the mingled
rashness and tergiversation of his envoy, Glamorgan, the result being a
disclosure very injurious to the poor king's character and cause. The
Confederacy was divided between a party which was for treating and a party
which was for war to the knife. For war to the knife was the nuncio, an
ecclesiastical termagant of the Becket stamp, inflated with notions of his
own spiritual power and reckless in the pursuit of his own end, which was
to lay Ireland at the feet of the Pope. In all this the high-minded
Ormonde sadly stooped to take a part for his royal master's sake. When the
cause of his royal master was finally lost, he surrendered his command to
the Parliament and left Ireland.
After the execution of Charles the scene shifted again. Abhorrence of
regicide brought about a junction of the more moderate Protestants with
the more moderate Confederates, uniting different parties and sections
under a common profession of loyalty. Ormonde then returned to lead a
mixed and not very harmonious force against Michael Jones, the Republican
commander. He advanced to the attack of Dublin, but was totally defeated
by Jones.
Now on the wings of victory came Cromwell with ten thousand of the New
Model. His proclamation on landing promised to all who would keep the
peace, peace and protection for themselves. That proclamation, the first
utterance of law and order heard in those parts for ten years, was
strictly carried into effect. A soldier was hanged for robbing a native of
a fowl. No disorder, rapine, or outrage upon women is laid to the charge
of the Puritan army in Ireland. Cromwell sat down before Drogheda, which
was held by a large royalist garrison, partly English. The garrison having
refused to surrender on summons, he stormed. Two attacks failed; a third,
led by himself, took the town. He put the garrison to the sword. That a
garrison refusing to surrender on summons and standing a storm might be
put to the sword was the rule of war in those days; it was the law, though
not the rule, of war even in the days of Wellington. Nevertheless, this
was a fell act for a commander who was generally humane in war, and at
Worcester risked his life in persuading Royalists to take quarter. Of this
Cromwell was himself sensible, and he spoke of it with compunction. "I am
persuaded," he said in his despatch to the Parliament, "that this is a
righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches who have imbrued
their hands in so much innocent blood; and that it will tend to prevent
the effusion of blood for the future; which are the satisfactory grounds
to such actions, which otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret." Were
remorse and regret ever breathed by Alva, Parma, or Tilly? What did the
soldiery of those Catholic commanders do when it stormed a Protestant
town? What did the British soldiery, maddened by the recollection of a
massacre far less than that of 1641 do, not only to the Sepoy mutineer,
but to the insurgent people of Oude? When Rupert stormed Leicester, the
town was sacked, and women and children were found among the dead. The
Royalist Carte, in his life of Ormonde, commenting on the slaughter of the
garrison of Drogheda, says, "This was certainly an execrable policy in
that regicide. But it had the effect he proposed. It spread abroad the
terror of his name; it cut off the best body of the Irish troops and
disheartened the rest to such a degree that it was a greater loss in
itself and much more fatal in its consequences than the rout at
Rathmines." This is not a defence, nor much of an excuse. But it testifies
to a motive other than mere thirst of blood and shows that Cromwell spoke
the truth.
There was cruel slaughter again at the storming of Wexford, but it does
not appear that it was ordered by Cromwell. The defences having been
carried, the combat was renewed within the town by the townspeople, who,
it is stated, had provoked wrath by their piracy and by drowning a number
of Protestants in a hulk. The city had been summoned to surrender on fair
terms.
Cromwell was at once called away to the war with Scotland. He left the war
in Ireland to be finished by Ireton and Ludlow, who gradually extinguished
organized resistance, leaving only something between guerilla warfare and
brigandage called "Toryism," a name presently transmitted to a great
political party in England which bore it as a name of honour, in
opposition to that of Whig, on every hypothesis equally humble in its
source.
The two races and religions had fought for the land, and the Saxon and
Protestant had won. It is surely simple to suggest that the winner ought
to have invited the loser to take the prize, especially after such a
display of that loser's sentiments and intentions as the massacre of 1641.
Had it not been made fearfully clear that the two races and religions
could not dwell together in peace? The victorious Puritan drove the
Catholic into Connaught. The Catholic, if he could, would have driven the
Puritan into the sea. The original decree of "To Hell or Connaught," the
hateful sound of which still rings in Irish ears, seems to have been
somewhat mitigated as the wrath of the victor cooled. At all events the
sentence extended to landowners only, not to artisans and labourers, who
were to remain where they were and to be disciplined and civilized by
English masters. A great number of those who had fought on the losing side
were sent away to foreign service, ridding Ireland of a manifest danger
and forming the first instalment of the grand Irish element in the armies
of Catholic Europe. There was also a large deportation to Barbados,
including probably families left behind by the military emigration. This
was cruel work, the more so as there was terrible suffering in the
passage. The whole business was horrible and deplorable. But in passing
sentence on the winner we must remember what the loser, had he been the
winner, would have done. The shadow of an evil destiny was over all.
Deportation was not to slavery for life, but to terminable bondage, one
degree less cruel.
To cast all on Cromwell is most unfair. He had nothing specially to do
with Ireland till he came to put an end to the war. He left it forever
when he had struck his decisive blow. He could no more have given back the
contested land to the Catholics than he could have turned the Shannon to
its source. The act under which the land had been forfeited in advance and
a loan on it raised had been passed by the unanimous vote of Parliament
and had received the assent of the king. The soldiers who held land-scrip
for their pay presented their claims. As little would it have been
possible for Cromwell, even if he had desired it, to license the
celebration of the Mass, which in Puritan eyes was a sign, not only of
idolatry, but of allegiance to a foreign power, that power the mortal
enemy, not of the Protestant religion only, but of the Protestant State.
With liberty of conscience Cromwell declared that he would not interfere.
This was something in an age when the rack and the stake of the
Inquisition were still at work and when Irish troopers in the service of a
Catholic power were butchering the Protestant peasantry of Savoy. If the
Nuncio Rinuccini had got the upper hand in Ireland, a retirement of heresy
into the sanctuary of conscience would scarcely have saved it from the
stake. Cromwell does not appear to have persecuted in Ireland or to have
given the word for persecution.
The Protector united Ireland as well as Scotland to England, thus bringing
the factions under the control of a strong government, Ireland's only hope
of peace. Union assured her free trade with Great Britain and the
dependencies, an inestimable boon, not in the way of material wealth only,
but in that of commercial civilization, as its withdrawal afterwards
fatally proved. Her shipping was at the same time assured of exemption
from the disabilities of the Navigation Laws. The Protector sent her a
good governor in the person of his son Henry, who seems to have identified
himself with the welfare of her people. He sent her a liberal law reformer
in the person of Chief Justice Coke, proposing to himself to treat her as
a blank paper, whereon he could write reforms such as professional bigotry
debarred him from effecting in England. His mortal enemy Clarendon, after
dilating on the iniquities of the settlement, says, "And, which is more
wonderful, all this was done and settled within little more than two years
to that degree of perfection that there were many buildings raised for
beauty as well as use, orderly and regular plantations of trees, and
fences and enclosures raised throughout the kingdom, purchases made by
one from the other at very valuable rates, and jointures made upon
marriages, and all other conveyances and settlements executed, as in a
kingdom at peace within itself, and where no doubt could be made of the
validity of titles." If these material improvements were at first limited
to the domain and race of the victor, they would in time have spread.