"War was the ruling passion of this people," says MacGeoghegan,
meaning the Milesians who were the latest of the peoples that overran
ancient Ireland up to the coming of Christ. How many races had
preceded them remains an enigma of history not profitable to examine
here, but whoever they were, or in what succession they arrived, they
must, like all migrating people, have been prepared to establish
themselves at the point of the spear and the edge of the sword. Two
races certainly were mingled in the ancient Irish, the fair or auburn
haired with blue eyes, and the dark haired with eyes of gray or
brown. The Milesians appear to have reached Ireland through Spain.
They came swiftly to power, more than a thousand years before our
Lord, and divided the country into four provinces or kingdoms, with
an _ard-ri_, or high-king, ruling all in a loose way as to service,
taxes, and allegiance. The economic life was almost entirely
pastoral. Riches were counted in herds of cattle. "Robustness of
frame, vehemence of passion, elevated imagination," Dr. Leland says,
signalized this people. Robust, they became athletic and vigorous and
excelled in the use of deadly weapons; passionate, they easily went
from litigation to blows; imaginative, they leaned toward poetry and
song and were strong for whatever religion they practised. The latter
was a polytheism brought close to the people through the Druids. Some
stone weapons were doubtless still used; they had also brazen or
bronze swords, and spears, axes, and maces of various alloys of
copper and tin. Socially they remained tribal. Heads of tribes were
petty kings, each with his stronghold of a primitive character, each
with his tribal warriors, bards, harpers, and druids, and the whole
male population more or less ready to take part in war.
The great heroes whose names have come down to us, such as Finn, son
of Cumhal, and Cuchulainn, were reared in a school of arms. Bravery
was the sign of true manhood. A law of chivalry moderated the excess
of combat. A trained militia, the Fianna, gave character to an era;
the Knights of the Red Branch were the distinguishing order of
chevaliers. The songs of the bards were songs of battle; the great
Irish epic of antiquity was the_ Táin Bó Cúalnge_, or Cooley
Cattle-raid, and it is full of combats and feats of strength and
prowess. High character meant high pride, always ready to give
account of itself and strike for its ideals: "Irritable and bold", as
one historian has it. They were jealous and quick to anger, but
light-hearted laughter came easily to the lips of the ancient Irish.
They worked cheerfully, prayed fervently to their gods, loved their
women and children devotedly, clung passionately to their clan, and
fought at the call with alacrity.
Nothing, it will be seen, could be further from the minds of such a
people than submission to what they deemed injustice. The habit of a
proud freedom was ingrained. Their little island of 32,000 square
miles in the Atlantic Ocean, the outpost of Europe, lay isolated save
for occasional forays to and from the coasts of Scotland and England.
The Roman invasions of western Europe never reached it. England the
Romans overran, but never Scotland or Ireland. Self-contained,
Ireland developed a civilization peculiarly its own, the product of
an intense, imaginative, fighting race. War was not constant among
them by any means, and occupied only small portions of the island at
a time, but, since the bards' best work was war songs and war
histories, with much braggadocio doubtless intermixed, a different
impression might prevail. Half of their kings may have been killed in
broil or battle, and yet great wars were few. If is undoubted that
Scotic, that is, Irish, invasion and immigration peopled the western
shores of Scotland and gave a name to the country. In the first
centuries of the Christian era they were the men who with the Picts
fought the Romans at the wall of Severus. The Britons, it will be
remembered, enervated by Roman dominance, had failed to defend their
"border" when Rome first withdrew her legions.
At this time, too, began the first appearance of Ireland as a power
on the sea. In the fourth century the high-king, Niall of the
Hostages, commanding a large fleet of war galleys, invaded Scotland,
ravaged the English coasts, and conquered Armorica (Brittany),
penetrating as far as the banks of the Loire, where, according to the
legend, he was slain by an arrow shot by one of his own men. One of
the captives he brought from abroad on one of his early expeditions
was a youth named Patrick, afterwards to be the Apostle of Ireland.
Niall's nephew, Dathi, also ard-ri, was a great sea king. He invaded
England, crossed to Gaul, and marched as far as the Alps, where he
was killed by lightning. He was the last pagan king of Ireland. In
perhaps a score of years after the death of Dathi, all Ireland had
been converted to Christianity, and its old religion of a thousand
years buried so deep that scholars find the greatest difficulty in
recovering anything about it. This conservative, obstinate, jealous
people overturned its pagan altars in a night, and, ever since, has
never put into anything else the devotion, soul and body, of its
sacrifices for religion. Christianity profoundly modified Irish life,
softened manners, and stimulated learning. Not that the fighting
propensities were obliterated. There were indeed many long and
peaceful reigns, but the historians record neat little wars,
seductive forays and "hostings", to use the new-old word, to the
heart's content. The Irish character remained fixed in its
essentials, but, under the influence of religious enthusiasm, Ireland
progressed and prospered in the arts of peace. It would undoubtedly
have shared the full progress of western Europe from this time on,
but for its insularity. Hitherto its protection, it was now to be its
downfall. A hostile power was growing of which it knew nothing.
The Norsemen--the hardy vikings of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark--had
become a nation of pirates. Undaunted fighters and able mariners,
they built their shapely long ships and galleys of the northern pine
and oak, and swept hardily down on the coasts of England, Ireland,
France, Spain, and Italy, and the lands of the Levant, surprising,
massacring, plundering. In France (Normandy), in England, and lastly
in Ireland they planted colonies. Their greatest success was in
England, which they conquered, Canute becoming king. Their greatest
battles and final defeat were in Ireland. From the end of the eighth
century to the beginning of the eleventh the four shores of Erin were
attacked in turn, and sometimes all together, by successive fleets of
the Norsemen. The waters that had been Ireland's protection now
became the high roads of the invaders. By the river Shannon they
pushed their conquests into the heart of the country. Dublin Bay,
Waterford Harbor, Belfast Lough, and the Cove of Cork offered shelter
to their vessels. They established themselves in Dublin and raided
the country around. Churches and monasteries were sacked and burned.
To the end these Norsemen were robbers rather than settlers. To these
onslaughts by the myriad wasps of the northern seas, again and again
renewed, the Irish responded manfully. In 812 they drove off the
invaders with great slaughter, only to find fresh hordes descending a
year or two later. In the tenth century, Turgesius, the Danish
leader, called himself monarch of Ireland, but he was driven out by
the Irish king, Malachi. The great effort which really broke the
Danish power forever in Ireland was at the battle of Clontarf, on
Dublin Bay, Good Friday, 1014, when King Brian Boru, at the head of
30,000 men, utterly defeated the Danes of Dublin and the Danes of
oversea. Fragments of the Northmen remained all over Ireland, but
henceforth they gradually merged with the Irish people, adding a
notable element to it's blood. One of the most grievous chapters of
Irish history, the period of Norse invasion, literally shines with
Irish valor and tenacity, undimmed through six fighting generations.
As Plowden says:
"Ireland stands conspicuous among the nations of the universe, a
solitary instance in which neither the destructive hand of time, nor
the devastating arm of oppression, nor the widest variety of changes
in the political system of government could alter or subdue, much
less wholly extinguish, the national genius, spirit, and character of
its inhabitants." This is true not only of the Danish wars which
ended nine hundred years ago, but of many a dreadful century since
and to this very day.
Now followed a troubled period, Ireland weakened by loss of blood and
treasure, its government failing of authority through the defects of
its virtues. It was inevitable, sooner or later, that England, as it
became consolidated after its conquest by William the Norman, should
turn greedy eyes on the fair land across the Irish sea. It was in
1169 that "Strongbow"--Richard, earl of Pembroke--came from England
at the invitation of a discontented Irish chieftain and began the
conquest of Ireland. Three years later came Henry II. with more
troops and a Papal bull. After a campaign in Leinster, he set himself
up as overlord of Ireland, and then returned to London. It was the
beginning only. An English Lord Deputy ruled the "Pale", or portion
of Ireland that England held more or less securely, and from that
vantage ground made spasmodic war upon the rest of Ireland, and was
forever warred on, in large attacks and small, by Irish chieftains.
The Irish were the fighting race now if ever. Without hope of outside
assistance, facing a foe ever reinforced from a stronger, richer,
more fully organized country, nothing but their stubborn character
and their fighting genius kept them in the field. And century out and
century in, they stayed, holding back the foreign foe four hundred
years. It is worthy of note that it was the Norman English, racial
cousins, as it were, of the Norsemen, who first wrought at the
English conquest of Ireland. When some of these were seated in Irish
places of pride, when a Butler was made Earl of Ormond and a
Fitzgerald, Earl of Kildare, it was soon seen that they were merging
rapidly in the Irish mass, becoming, as it was said, "more Irish than
the Irish themselves." Many were the individual heroic efforts to
strike down the English power. Here and there small Irish chiefs
accepted the English rule, offsetting the Norman Irish families who
at times were "loyal" and at times "rebel." The state of war became
continuous and internecine, but three-fourths of Ireland remained
unconquered. The idea of a united Ireland against England had,
however, been lost except in a few exalted and a few desperate
breasts. A gleam of hope came in 1316, when, two years after the
great defeat of England by the Scotch under Robert the Bruce at
Bannockburn, Edward, the victor-king's brother, came at the
invitation of the northern Irish to Ireland with 6,000 Scots, landing
near Carrickfergus. He was proclaimed king of Ireland by the Irish
who joined him. Battle after battle was won by the allies. Edward was
a brilliant soldier, lacking, however, the prudence of his great
brother, Robert. The story of his two years of fighting, ravaging,
and slaying, is hard at this distance to reconcile with intelligible
strategy. In the end, in 1318, the gallant Scot fell in battle near
Dundalk, losing at the same time two-thirds of his army. For two
years Scot and Irish had fought victoriously side by side. That is
the fact of moment that comes out of this dark period.
The following century, like that which had gone before, was full of
fighting. In 1399, on Richard II.'s second visit to Ireland, he met
fierce opposition from the Irish septs. MacMorrough, fighting,
harassing the king's army from the shelter of the Wicklow woods,
fairly drove the king to Dublin. The sanguinary "Wars of the
Roses"--that thirty years' struggle for the crown of England between
the royal houses of York and Lancaster, 1455 to 1485--gave Ireland a
long opportunity, which, however, she was too weak to turn to
advantage; but fighting between Irish and English went on just the
same, now in one province, now in another.
In the reign of Henry VIII. a revolt against England started within
the Pale itself, when Lord Thomas Fitzgerald, known as Silken Thomas,
went before the Council in Dublin and publicly renounced his
allegiance. He took the field--a brave, striking figure--in protest
against the king's bad faith in dealing with his father, the Earl of
Kildare. At one time it looked as if the rebellion (it was the first
real Irish rebellion) would prosper. Lord Thomas made combinations
with Irish chieftains in the north and west, and was victor in
several engagements. He finally surrendered with assurances of
pardon, but, as in many similar cases, was treacherously sent a
prisoner to London, where he was executed.
Queen Mary's reign was one of comparative quiet in Ireland. Her
policy towards the Catholics was held to be of good augury for
Ireland. The English garrison was reduced with impunity to 500 foot
and a few horse: but another and darker day came with Elizabeth. Her
coming to the throne, together with her fanatic devotion to the
Reformation and an equal hatred of the old religion and all who clung
to it, ushered in for Ireland two and a half centuries of almost
unbroken misfortune. You cannot make people over. Some may take their
opinions with their interest; others prefer to die rather than
surrender theirs, and glory in the sacrifice. The proclamations of
Elizabeth had no persuasion in them for the Irish. Her proscriptions
were only another English sword at Ireland's throat. The disdain of
the Irish maddened her. During her long reign one campaign after
another was launched against them. Always fresh soldier hordes came
pouring in under able commanders and marched forth from the Pale,
generally to return shattered and worn down by constant harrying,
sometimes utterly defeated with great slaughter. So of Henry Sidney's
campaign, and so of the ill-fated Essex. Ulster, the stronghold of
the O'Neills and the O'Donnells, remained unconquered down to the
last years of Elizabeth's reign, although most of the greater battles
were fought there. In Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, and "Red" Hugh
O'Donnell, prince of Tyrconnell, Ireland had two really great
soldiers on her side. The bravery, generalship, prudence, and
strategy of O'Neill were worthy of all praise, and Red Hugh fell
little short of his great compatriot. In battle after battle for
twenty years they defeated the English with slaughter. Ireland, if
more and more devastated by campaigns and forays, became the grave of
tens of thousands of English soldiers and scores of high reputations.
Writing from Cork, the Earl of Essex, after a disastrous march
through Leinster and Munster, says:
"I am confined in Cork ... but still I have been unsuccessful; my
undertakings have been attended with misfortune.... The Irish are
stronger and handle their arms with more skill than our people; they
differ from us also in point of discipline. They likewise avoid
pitched battles where order must be observed, and prefer skirmishes
and petty warfare ... and are obstinately opposed to the English
government."
They did not like attacking or defending fortified places, he also
believed. It was only his experience. The campaigns of Shane O'Neill,
a bold but ill-balanced warrior, were full of such attacks, but one
potent cause for Irish reluctance to make sieges a strong point of
their strategy was that the strongest fortresses were on the sea. An
inexhaustible, powerful enemy who held the sea was not in the end to
be denied on sea or land, but the Irish in stubborn despair or
supreme indifference to fate fought on. Religious rancor was added to
racial hate. Most of the English settlers, or "garrison," as they
came to be called, had become Protestants at the royal order. Ruin
perched upon Ireland's hills and made a wilderness of her fertile
valleys. The Irish chieftains with their faithful followers moved
from place to place in woods and hollows of the hills. English
colonists were settled on confiscated lands, and were harried by
those who had been driven from their homes. It was war among graves.
At last O'Neill made composition with the government when all was
lost in the field, but the passionate Irish resolve never to submit
still stalked like a ghost, as if it could not perish.
When Elizabeth died it was thought that better things were coming to
Ireland with James I., the son of Mary, Queen of Scots. Nothing of
the kind. That curiously minded creature at once made an ingenuous
proclamation:
"Whereas his Majesty was informed that his subjects of Ireland had
been deceived by _a false report that his Majesty was disposed to
allow them liberty of conscience_ and the free choice of religion,
now, etc." Fresh "transplanting" of English and Scotch settlers on
the lands of the Irish was the gist of his answer to the "false
reports." So again the war of surprise, ambush, raid, and foray went
on in a hundred places at once, but the result was that the English
power was even more firmly seated than before.
In the time of Charles I. there were terrible slaughters both of
Protestants and Catholics. Patriotism and loyalty as moving causes
had disappeared, but religion fiercely took their place. With
Cromwell, the religious persecution took on an apocalyptic note of
massacre, but the Irish were still showing that they were there with
arms in their hands. The names of Owen Roe O'Neill and his splendid
victory, in 1646, at Benburb over the English and Scotch, where he
slew more than 3,000 men, and of another Hugh O'Neill, who made such
a brilliant defense at Clonmel against Cromwell, shine brightly out
of the darkness. But Ireland, parcelled out among the victors, was
always the weaker after every campaign. Waves of war swept over her.
She became mixed up in the rivalries of the English royal families,
religion playing the most important part in the differences. It had
armed Henry and Elizabeth, James and Charles against her. It gave
edge to Cromwell's sword, and it led her into a great effort on
behalf of James II. When William of Orange crossed the Boyne, all
that followed for a century was symbolized. Athlone, Aughrim,
Limerick, all places of great and fierce contests, were decided
against her. French support of a kind had James, but not enough.
Bravery and enthusiasm may win battles, but they do not carry through
great campaigns. Once again God marched with the heaviest, best-fed,
best-armed battalions. The great Tyrone dying in exile at Rome, Red
Hugh O'Donnell perishing in Spain in the early days of the
seventeenth century, were to prefigure the fighting and dying of half
a million Irish warriors on continental soil for a hundred years
after the fall of Limerick as the seventeenth century neared its
close.
During that period the scattered bands of the Rapparees, half
patriots, half robbers, hiding in mountain fastnesses, dispersing,
reassembling, descending on the English estates for rapine or the
killing of "objectionables," represented the only armed resistance of
the Irish. It was generally futile although picturesque.
After the close of the Revolutionary War in America, Ireland received
a new stimulation. The success of the patriots of the Irish
parliament under Grattan, backed as they were by 100,000 volunteers
and 130 pieces of cannon, in freeing Irish industry and commerce from
their trammels, evoked the utmost malignity in England. Ireland
almost at once sprang to prosperity, but it was destined to be short
lived. A great conspiracy, which did not at first show above the
surface, was set on foot to destroy the Irish parliament. This is not
the place to follow the sinister machinations of the English, save to
note that they forced both the Presbyterians and the Catholics of the
north into preparations for revolt. The Society of United Irishmen
was formed, and drew many of the brightest and most cultivated men in
Ireland into its councils. It numbered over 70,000 adherents in
Ulster alone. The government was alarmed, and began a systematic
persecution of the peasantry all over Ireland. English regiments were
put at "free quarters," that is, they forced themselves under order
into the houses and cabins of the people with demands for bed and
board. The hapless people were driven to fury. Brutal murders and
barbarous tortures of men and women by the soldiers, savage revenges
by the peasantry, and every form of violent crime all at once
prevailed in the lately peaceful valleys. Prosecutions of United
Irishmen and executions were many. It was all done deliberately to
provoke revolt. In 1798 the revolt came. In the greater part of
Ulster and Munster the uprising failed, but a great insurrection of
the peasantry of Wexford shocked the country. Poorly armed, utterly
undisciplined, without munitions of war, but 40,000 strong, they
literally flung themselves pike in hand on the English regiments,
sweeping everything before them for a time. Father John Murphy, a
priest and patriot, was one of their leaders, but Beauchamp Bagenal
Harvey was soon their commander-in-chief. At one time the "rebels"
dominated the entire county save for a fort in the harbor and a small
town or two, but it was natural that the commissariat should soon be
in difficulties and their ammunition give out. The British general,
Lake, with an army of 20,000 men and a moving column of 13,000,
attacked the rebels on Vinegar Hill, and although the fight was
heroic and bloody while it lasted, it was soon over and the British
army was victorious. The rest was retreat, dispersal, and widespread
cruelties and burnings and a long succession of murders. The "Boys of
Wexford" funder great difficulties had given a great account of
themselves. Dark as was that page of history, it has been a glowing
lamp to Irish disaffection ever since. It is the soul of the effort
that counts, and the disasters do not discredit '98 in Irish eyes.
Voltaire, in his _Century of Louis XIV._, made his reflection on the
Irish soldier out of his limited knowledge of the Williamite war in
Ireland. He says, "The Irish, whom we have seen such good soldiers in
France and Spain, have always fought poorly at home"! They had not
fought poorly at home. It took four hundred years of English effort
to complete, merely on its face, the conquest of Ireland, and all of
that long sweep of the sword of Time was a time of battle. The Irish
were fought with every appliance of war, backed by the riches of a
prospering, strongly organized country, and impelled persistently by
the greed of land and love of mastery; but there was not a mountain
pass in Ireland, not a square mile of plain, not a river-ford, scarce
a hill that had not been piled high with English dead in that four
hundred years at the hands of the Irish wielders of sword and spear
and pike.
The Irish had not made their environment or their natures, and no
power on earth could change them. Over greater England had swept the
Romans, the Jutes, the Saxons, the Angles, the Norsemen, and the
Normans. All found lodgment and all went to the making of England.
Well, one might say, it had been for Ireland if she had developed
that assimilating power which made her successive conquerors in
process of time the feeders of her greatness, but the Irish would not
and could not. Instead, they developed the pride of race that no
momentary defeat could down. They became inured to battle and dreamt
of battle when the peace of an hour was given them. When the four
kings of Ireland were feasted in Dublin by King Richard II. of
England, an English chronicler remarked, "Never were men of ruder
manners"; but neither the silken array and golden glitter of
Richard's peripatetic court nor the brave display of his thousand
knights and thirty thousand archers filled them with longing for the
one or fear of the other. They went back to their Irish hills and
plains and fastnesses as obstinately Irish as ever.
They fought well at home, if unfortunately, the wonder being that
they continued to fight. The heavens and the earth seemed combined
against them.