IRELAND FROM THE TIME OF HENRY II TO THE TIME OF HENRY VIII.
In the last chapter I dealt with the long period during which the
Celtic tribes of Ireland were free from foreign influence except for
the comparatively brief time when a small part of the country was
under the rule of the Danes; and I endeavoured to show that according
to the evidence of their own annalists and in the opinion of modern
writers of various political sentiments, the whole island throughout
that period remained in a chronic state of anarchy, without any
advance towards a higher civilization.
As Dr. Richey, when describing the condition of Ireland about the year
1170, says, "The state of the Celtic people was beyond all hope of
self-amendment. The want of law, order and justice, the absence of
self-knowledge and self-control, paralysed their national action and
reduced the power of their chief king to insignificance."
I come now to what has been absurdly called the conquest of Ireland
under Henry II.
That the English king was instigated in his efforts by the Pope is
perfectly clear. The Bull of Pope Adrian, issued in 1155, is still
extant:--
"... There is indeed no doubt but that Ireland, and all the
islands on which Christ, the Sun of Righteousness, hath shone,
and which have received the doctrine of the Christian faith,
do belong to the jurisdiction of St. Peter and the Holy Roman
Church ... therefore we are the more solicitous to propagate
the righteous plantation of faith in this land, and the
branch acceptable to God, as we have the secret conviction of
conscience that this is more especially our bounden duty. You
then, our dear son in Christ, have signified to us your desire
to enter into the island of Ireland, in order to reduce the
people to obedience under the laws, and to extirpate the
plants of vice, and that you are willing to pay from each
house a yearly pension of one penny to St. Peter, and that you
will preserve the rights of the churches whole and inviolate.
We, therefore, do hold it good and acceptable that ... you
enter this island and execute therein whatever shall pertain
to the honour of God and welfare of the land; and that the
people of the land receive you honourably and reverence you as
their lord."
And in 1172 Pope Alexander III ratified the action of his predecessor.
"Forasmuch as these things which have been on good reasons
granted by our predecessors, deserve to be confirmed ...
and considering the grant of the dominion of the land by the
venerable Pope Adrian, we ... do ratify and confirm the same
(reserving to St. Peter and to the Holy Roman Church, as well
in England as in Ireland the yearly pension of one penny from
every house) provided that, the abominations of the land being
removed, the barbarous people, Christians only in name, may
by your means, be reformed, and their lives and conversations
mended, so that their disordered Church being thus reduced
to regular discipline, that nation may, with the name of
Christians, be so in act and deed."
Whether the description here given was literally correct, or whether
the Pope's views were coloured by the fact that the Celtic Church did
not acknowledge the supremacy of Rome and was heretical on certain
points of doctrine, is a question outside the present subject. The
Bulls are only quoted here as showing the part taken by Rome. And it
must be admitted that in the succeeding century the power of the Pope
became strong enough to enable him to levy taxes in Ireland for the
purpose of carrying on his wars against the Emperor and the King of
Aragon.
But Henry did not conquer Ireland. He did not even pretend to do so.
Previous to his arrival there had been some little fighting done by a
few adventurous Norman knights who had been invited by a native chief
to assist him in a domestic war; but Henry II fought no battle in
Ireland; he displaced no ancient national government; the Irish had
no national flag, no capital city as the metropolis of the country, no
common administration of the law. The English, coming in the name of
the Pope, with the aid of the Irish bishops, with a superior national
organization which the Irish easily recognised, were accepted by the
Irish. The king landed at Waterford; his journey to Dublin was rather
a royal progress than a hostile invasion. He came as feudal sovereign
to receive the homage of the Irish tribes; the chiefs flocked to his
court, readily became his vassals, and undertook to hold the lands
they already occupied as fiefs of the Crown. But Henry did not take
the title, or assume the position of King of Ireland. He merely sought
to establish a suzerainty in which he would be the overlord. And in
fact a conquest of Ireland in the modern sense of the term would have
been impossible. England possessed no standing army; the feudal levies
of mediæval times were difficult and expensive. It might of course
have been possible to have organized a wholesale immigration and an
enslavement of the natives, something like that which the Normans had
accomplished in England, and the Saxons had done centuries before; but
nothing of the kind was attempted. Whether Henry's original intention
was simply to leave the Irish chiefs in possession or not, it is
useless now to enquire. But if it was, he appears to have changed his
views; for not long afterwards he granted large fiefs with palatinate
jurisdiction to various Normans who had made their way over to Ireland
independently.
It may be that Henry--knowing that the Conqueror, whilst taking
care that no powerful seignories should grow up in the heart of his
kingdom, as rivals to the throne, yet made exceptions in cases
where the lands verged on hostile territory, such as Durham or
Chester--thought that he could best follow the spirit of that policy
by establishing what were practically semi-independent principalities
in an island already inhabited by another race. But the result was
disastrous.
That the Normans were savage and brutal, dealing out no justice or
mercy to their victims, is proved by the account of their conquest of
England. Yet they possessed certain great qualities, which eminently
fitted them to become rulers in those wild, unsettled times; as their
successes, not merely in Britain, but also in Southern Italy and
Syria, show. They had the idea of a strong, centralized Government;
and more than that they had a marvellous capacity for receptivity.
Thus we see that in England, after a period of rough tyranny, they
blended the existing Anglo-Saxon Government--the strength of which lay
in its local organization--with their own; and from the union of
the two has come the British Constitution. So too in the Lowlands
of Scotland it was the Norman knight Robert Bruce who, accepting the
already existing Saxon and Roman civilization, raised Scotland into a
powerful kingdom. But in Ireland all was different. The only state
of society which the Normans found was Celtic barbarism. Political
institutions did not exist. As the Normans in England had become
Anglified, and in Scotland Scottified, so in Ireland they became
Ersefied. It is true that they built stone castles which at any rate
were better than the hovels of the Irish Chiefs, and (like the
Danes before them) founded a few towns, such as Kilkenny, Galway and
Athenry; but there their efforts ended. Scattered amongst the tribes,
they learnt their ways. They sank to the position of the Celtic
Chiefs around them; local wars went on the same as before; the only
difference being that they were waged sometimes by Normans against
Normans or against Celts, but more frequently by one body of Celts
against another, each side being aided by Norman allies.
One class of Nationalist writers has inveighed against the English
kings for not having forcibly introduced English law and put an end to
the barbarous Celtic customs. The simple answer is, How could they do
so? Whilst England was being weakened by long continental wars or
by struggles between rival Houses, what strength had she left to
undertake the real conquest of Ireland? The English kings had turned
to the only people who could have helped them--the Normans settled in
Ireland; and they failed them. Other Nationalist writers have on
the other hand declaimed with equal vehemence against the tyranny of
England in forcing an alien system of law on an unwilling people. To
this the answer is that nothing of the kind occurred. It is true that
petitions were sent from Ireland to the King urging him to introduce
English law; but these petitions came mainly from the poorer classes
of English settlers who found that instead of attaining greater
liberty in their new home they were being ground down to the miserable
position of the native Irish. The King issued proclamations directing
the English barons to permit the Irish to be governed by the law of
England; but his orders were totally disregarded; many of the unhappy
English settlers fled from the country and returned to England;
the barons supplied their places with native retainers. Thus the
Ersefication of the degenerate Normans became complete; they
"donned the saffron"--that is, they adopted the yellow dress of the
Celts--abandoned their original language, and gave themselves up to a
life of constant plunder and rapine.
Early in the fourteenth century the Irish septs united so far as to
form a joint effort to expel the English. The incident is specially
interesting, in the light of later history. Robert Bruce, a Norman
knight, had recently consolidated the Scottish tribes into a kingdom
and succeeded in shaking off the English yoke. The Irish Celts
resolved to imitate his example. King Robert was shrewd enough to see
that by aiding them he could attack his enemy at the most vulnerable
point; consequently, when the chiefs offered the Crown of Ireland to
his brother Edward if he would come and help them, he gladly accepted
the invitation. For three years a devastating war raged over a large
part of Ireland; the Scotch went from the North of Ulster almost to
Limerick, burning, slaying, plundering, sacking towns, castles and
churches; and a terrible famine ensued. But the Irish chiefs were no
more energetic in supporting Edward Bruce than their ancestors had
been in supporting Brian; he and his chief officers fell in a battle
against the English near Dundalk, and the rest of his followers
escaped to Scotland. The coalition fell to pieces; and the only result
of the Scotch invasion was to increase the misery of the people,
especially of the unhappy English settlers, who continued to flock
back to England in greater numbers than before.
As soon as the rebellion was put down, the great legislator Edward
III made another effort at introducing order into the distracted land.
Acts were passed by the English Parliament providing that the same
law should be applicable to both English and Irish, and forbidding
landowners to keep larger bands of armed men than were necessary for
self-defence. But the Ersefied barons on whom he relied refused to
obey the new laws; they renounced their allegiance and joined the
rebellious Celtic tribes. Then the king, seeing the impossibility
of carrying out his scheme for pacifying the whole of Ireland, was
reduced to the expedient of dividing the country into two; leaving the
larger part of it for the natives and degenerate English to misgovern
as they pleased according to their own customs, and preserving only
a mere fraction (the "English Pale") in allegiance to the Crown of
England. This was the real meaning of the "Statutes of Kilkenny,"
which have been so often misrepresented by modern writers.
The next king, Richard II, attempted to imitate the policy of his
ancestor Henry II. He went to Ireland with great pomp. Again the
Celtic chiefs flocked to Dublin to swear allegiance to their lord;
and as soon as his back was turned commenced not only fighting amongst
themselves but even attacking the English Pale. The result of all his
efforts was that the limits of the Pale were still further contracted;
the English power was confined to a small area in the neighbourhood of
Dublin.
But even within that narrow boundary the power of the king was far
from being secure. When England was torn by the Wars of the Roses, the
so-called Parliament (which was really an irregular assembly at best
representing a territory about the size of a modern county) seized
the opportunity of declaring itself independent. It is interesting, in
view of present-day questions, to observe that Dr. Richey, writing
in 1869, seems to consider their action as not only justifiable but
inevitable. He says:--
"The Irish Parliament declared the complete independence
of the Irish Legislature, and boldly affirmed those
constitutional rights which, though involved in the existence
of separate parliament, had not hitherto been categorically
expressed. They asserted their rights to a distinct coinage,
and their absolute freedom from all laws and statutes except
such as were by the Lords spiritual and temporal and Commons
of Ireland freely admitted and accepted in their Parliament.
They declared that no Irish subject was bound to answer
any writs except those under the great seal of Ireland, and
enacted heavy penalties against any officer who should attempt
to put English decrees in force in Ireland. They, in fact,
took the same position and laid down the same principles as
the celebrated Parliament of 1782."
Whether they imagined that they could form a separate kingdom of
Dublin, or dreamt of making an alliance with the tribes outside the
Pale, it is useless now to conjecture; but we can see that though they
had no chance of benefiting themselves they might have caused serious
injury to England. Nor was it long before a difficulty arose. The
inhabitants of the Pale remained attached to the House of York even
after the Battle of Bosworth, and readily accepted Lambert Simnel as
King of Ireland. He was crowned in the Cathedral of Dublin, and held
a Parliament. After the defeat of this Pretender, the able and astute
Henry VII saw that it was necessary without further delay to make the
shadowy suzerainty of England over Ireland a reality. He accordingly
persuaded the Irish Parliament to pass an Act which from the name of
the Lord Deputy was known as "Poyning's Act." By this Act, all English
statutes then existing in England were made of force in Ireland; the
chief fortresses were secured to the Crown of England; and the Irish
Parliament was relegated to the position of a subordinate legislature;
for it was enacted that no Parliament should be held in Ireland unless
the King's Lieutenant and Council should first certify the King, under
the Great Seal of Ireland, the Acts which they considered should pass;
then the King and his Council should approve the proposed Acts,
and issue a licence under the Great Seal of England, summoning the
Parliament.
Though some writers have spoken of this as the most disgraceful Act
ever passed by an independent legislature, the people in Ireland at
the time considered it a boon and a favour; for it shielded them from
the unauthorized power of a Lord Deputy supported by a Parliament of
his own creatures.
And so, with the close of the mediæval period, ended the second
chapter of Irish history. It will be observed that there had been no
religious persecution, unless indeed the conduct of the Norman--that
is, the Roman--Church towards the ancient Celtic Church, or the
burning of some heretics in the fourteenth century, could be so
described; a view which the Nationalists of to-day will hardly care to
put forward. Nor can the English Government be fairly blamed for the
condition of affairs; for responsibility depends on power, and English
power in Ireland hardly existed. The suzerainty of England, feeble at
best, had gradually been limited to a mere fraction of the country.
The Celtic tribes had long since thrown off even a nominal submission
to the English Crown; the Anglo-Norman lords had become either
avowedly or practically independent. But the inhabitants of Ireland
did not constitute a nation or possess any common interest or bond of
union. There was no trace of an organization by which the Irish tribes
could be united into one people. The ceaseless civil wars had indeed
supplanted the original tribesmen by the mercenary followers of
another set of rival chiefs; but there had been no union; and the mass
of the people, still under the influence of their native customs, were
probably in a more wretched condition than they had ever been before.