THE SECOND IRISH REVIVAL
1200-1520
The first Irish revival after the Danish wars showed the strength of
the ancient Gaelic civilisation. The second victory which the genius
of the people won over the minds of the new invaders was a more
astonishing proof of the vitality of the Irish culture, the firm
structure of their law, and the cohesion of the people.
Henry II in 1171 had led an army for "the conquest" of Ireland. Three
hundred years later, when Henry VII in 1487 turned his thoughts to
Ireland he found no conquered land. An earthen ditch with a palisade
on the top had been raised to protect all that was left of English
Ireland, called the "Pale" from its encircling fence. Outside was a
country of Irish language, dress, and customs. Thirty miles west of
Dublin was "by west of English law." Norman lords had married
daughters of Irish chiefs all over the country, and made combinations
and treaties with every province. Their children went to be fostered
in kindly houses of the Irish. Into their own palisaded forts, lifted
on great mounds of earth, with three-fold entrenchments, came Irish
poets singing the traditions, the love-songs, the prayers and hymns of
the Gaels. A Norman shrine of gold for St. Patrick's tooth shows how
the Norman lord of Athenry had adopted the national saint. Many
settlers changed their names to an Irish form, and taking up the clan
system melted into the Irish population. Irish speech was so universal
that a proclamation of Henry VIII in a Dublin parliament had to be
translated into Irish by the earl of Ormond.
Irish manners had entered also into the town houses of the merchants.
Foreign traders welcomed "natives" to the seaports, employed them,
bought their wares, took them into partnership, married with them,
allowed them to plead Irish law in their courts--and not only that,
but they themselves wore the forbidden Irish dress, talked Irish with
the other townsfolk, and joined in their national festivities and
ceremonies and songs. Almost to the very gates of Dublin, in the
centre of what should have been pure English land, the merchants went
riding Irish fashion, in Irish dress, and making merry with their
forbidden Irish clients.
This Irish revival has been attributed to a number of causes--to an
invasion of Edward Bruce in 1315, to the "degeneracy" of the Normans,
to the vice of the Irish, to the Wars of the Roses, to the want of
energy of Dublin Castle, to the over-education of Irish people in
Oxford, to agitation and lawyers. The cause lay far deeper. It lay in
the rich national civilisation which the Irish genius had built up,
strong in its courageous democracy, in its broad sympathies, in its
widespread culture, in its freedom, and in its humanities. So long as
the Irish language preserved to the people their old culture they
never failed to absorb into their life every people that came among
them. It was only when they lost hold of the tradition of their
fathers and their old social order that this great influence fell
from them, and strangers no longer yielded to their power.
The social fusion of Normans and Irish was the starting-point of a
lively civilisation to which each race brought its share. Together
they took a brilliant part in the commerce which was broadening over
the world. The Irish were great travellers; they sailed the Adriatic,
journeyed in the Levant, visited the factories of Egypt, explored
China, with all the old love of knowledge and infinite curiosity. They
were as active and ingenious in business as the Normans themselves.
Besides exporting raw materials, Irish-made linen and cloth and cloaks
and leather were carried as far as Russia and Naples; Norman lords and
Irish chieftains alike took in exchange velvets, silks and satins,
cloth of gold and embroideries, wines and spices. Irish goldsmiths
made the rich vessels that adorned the tables both of Normans and
Irish. Irish masons built the new churches of continental design,
carving at every turn their own traditional Irish ornaments. Irish
scribes illuminated manuscripts which were as much praised in a Norman
castle as in an Irish fort. Both peoples used translations into Irish
made by Gaelic scholars from the fashionable Latin books of the
Continent. Both races sent students and professors to every university
in Europe--men recognised of deep knowledge among the most learned men
of Italy and France. A kind of national education was being worked
out. Not one of the Irish chiefdoms allowed its schools to perish, and
to these ancient schools the settlers in the towns added others of
their own, to which the Irish also in time flocked, so that youths of
the two races learned together. As Irish was the common language, so
Latin was the second tongue for cultivated people and for all men of
business in their continental trade. The English policy made English
the language of traitors to their people, but of no use either for
trade or literature.
The uplifting of the national ideal was shown in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries by a revival of learning like that which followed
the Danish wars. Not one of the hereditary houses of historians,
lawyers, poets, physicians, seems to have failed: we find them at work
in the mountains of Donegal, along the Shannon, in lake islands,
among the bare rocks of Clare, in the plains of Meath, in the valleys
of Munster. In astronomy Irishmen were still first in Europe. In
medicine they had all the science of their age. Nearly all our
knowledge of Irish literature comes from copies of older works made by
hundreds of industrious scribes of this period. From time to time
Assemblies of all the learned men were called together by patriotic
chiefs, or by kings rising into high leadership--"coming to Tara," as
the people said. The old order was maintained in these national
festivals. Spacious avenues of white houses were made ready for poets,
streets of peaked hostels for musicians, straight roads of smooth
conical-roofed houses for chroniclers, another avenue for bards and
jugglers, and so on; and on the bright surface of the pleasant hills
sleeping-booths of woven branches for the companies. From sea to sea
scholars and artists gathered to show their skill to the men of
Ireland; and in these glorious assemblies the people learned anew the
wealth of their civilisation, and celebrated with fresh ardour the
unity of the Irish nation.
It was no wonder that in this high fervour of the country the
Anglo-Normans, like the Danes and the Northumbrians before them, were
won to a civilisation so vital and impassioned, so human and gay. But
the mixed civilisation found no favour with the government; the "wild
Irish" and the "degenerate English" were no better than "brute
beasts," the English said, abandoned to "filthy customs" and to "a
damnable law that was no law, hateful to God and man." Every measure
was taken to destroy the growing amity of the peoples, not only by
embroiling them in war, but by making union of Ireland impossible in
religion or in education, and by destroying public confidence. The new
central organisation of the Irish church made it a powerful weapon in
English hands. An Englishman was at once put in every archbishopric
and every principal see, a prelate who was often a Castle official as
well, deputy, chancellor, justice, treasurer, or the like, or a good
soldier--in any case hostile to every Irish affection. A national
church in the old Irish sense disappeared; in the English idea the
church was to destroy the nation. Higher education was also denied to
both races. No Irish university could live under the eye of an English
primate of Armagh, and every attempt of Anglo-Normans to set up a
university for Ireland at Dublin or Drogheda was instantly crushed. To
avert general confidence and mutual understanding, an alien class was
maintained in the country, who for considerations of wealth, power, a
privileged position, betrayed the peace of Ireland to the profit of
England. No pains, for example, were spared by the kings to conciliate
and use so important a house as that of the earls of Ormond. For
nearly two hundred years, as it happened, the heirs of this house were
always minors, held in wardship by the king. English training at his
court, visits to London, knighthoods and honours there, high posts in
Ireland, prospects of new conquests of Irish land, a winking of
government officials at independent privileges used on their estates
by Ormond lords--such influences tied each heir in turn to England,
and separated them from Irish interests--a "loyal" house, said the
English--"fair and false as Ormond," said the people of Ireland.
Both races suffered under this foreign misrule. Both were brayed in
the same mortar. Both were driven to the demand for home rule. The
national movement never flagged for a single generation. Never for a
moment did the Irish cease from the struggle; in the swell and tumult
of that tossing sea commanders emerged now in one province, now in
another, each to fall back into the darkness while the next pressed on
to take his place. An Anglo-Norman parliament claimed (1459) that
Ireland was by its constitution separate from the laws and statutes of
England, and prayed to have a separate coinage for their land as in
the kingdom of England. Confederacies of Irish and Anglo-Normans were
formed, one following another in endless and hopeless succession.
Through all civil strife we may plainly see the steady drift of the
peoples to a common patriotism. There was panic in England at these
ceaseless efforts to restore an Irish nation, for "Ireland," English
statesmen said, "was as good as gone if a wild Irish wyrlinge should
be chosen there as king."
For a time it seemed as if the house of the Fitzgeralds, the most
powerful house in Ireland, might mediate between the peoples whose
blood, English and Irish, they shared. Earl Gerald of Desmond led a
demand for home rule in 1341, and that Ireland should not be governed
by "needy men sent from England, without knowledge of Ireland or its
circumstances." Earl Gerald the Rhymer of the same house (1359) was a
patriot leader too--a witty and ingenious composer of Irish poetry,
who excelled all the English and many of the Irish in the knowledge of
the Irish language, poetry, and history, and of other learning. A
later Earl Gerald (1416), foster-son of O'Brien and cousin of Henry
VI, was complimented by the Republic of Florence, in a letter
recalling the Florentine origin of the Fitzgeralds, for the glory he
brought to that city, since its citizens had possessions as far as
Hungary and Greece, and now "through you and yours bear sway even in
Ibernia, the most remote island of the world." In Earl Thomas (1467)
the Irish saw the first "foreigner" to be the martyr of their cause.
He had furthered trade of European peoples with Irishmen; he had
urgently pressed union of the races; he had planned a university for
Ireland at Drogheda (Armagh having been long destroyed by the
English). As his reward he was beheaded without trial by the earl of
Worcester famed as "the Butcher," who had come over with a claim to
some of the Desmond lands in Cork. His people saw in his death "the
ruin of Ireland"; they laid his body with bitter lamentations by the
Atlantic at Tralee, where the ocean wind moaning in the caverns still
sounds to the peasants as "the Desmond's keen."
Other Fitzgeralds, earls of Kildare, who had married into every
leading Irish house, took up in their turn the national cause. Garrett
Mor "the great" (1477-1513), married to the cousin of Henry VII, made
close alliances with every Irish chief, steadily spread his power over
the land, and kept up the family relations with Florence; and by his
wit, his daring, the gaiety of his battle with slander, fraud, and
violence, won great authority. His son Garrett inherited and enlarged
his great territory. Maynooth under him was one of the richest earls'
houses of that time. When he rode out in his scarlet cloak he was
followed by four hundred Irish spearmen. His library was half of Irish
books; he made his English wife read, write, and speak perfectly the
Irish tongue; he had for his chief poet an Irishman, "full of the
grace of God and of learning"; his secretary was employed to write for
his library "divers chronicles" of Ireland. The Irish loved him for
his justice, for his piety, and that he put on them no arbitrary tax.
By a singular charm of nature he won the hearts of all, wife, son,
jailor in London Tower, and English lords.
His whole policy was union in his country, and Ireland for the Irish.
The lasting argument for self-government as against rule from over-sea
was heard in his cry to Wolsey and the lords at Westminster--"You hear
of a case as it were in a dream, and feel not the smart that vexeth
us." He attempted to check English interference with private subjects
in Ireland. He refused to admit that a commission to Cardinal Wolsey
as legate for England gave him authority in Ireland. The mark of his
genius lay above all in his resolve to close dissensions and to put
an end to civil wars. When as deputy he rode out to war against
disturbed tribes, his first business was not to fight, but to call an
assembly in the Irish manner which should decide the quarrel by
arbitration according to law. He "made peace," his enemies said, and
the nightmare of forced dissension gave way before this new
statesmanship of national union.
Never were the Irish "so corrupted by affection" for a lord deputy,
never were they so obedient, both from fear and from love, so Henry
VIII was warned. In spite of official intrigues, through all eddying
accidents, the steady pressure of the country itself was towards
union.
The great opportunity had come to weld together the two races in
Ireland, and to establish a common civilisation by a leader to whom
both peoples were perfectly known, whose sympathies were engaged in
both, and who as deputy of the English king had won the devoted
confidence of the Irish people.
There was one faction alone which no reason could convert--the alien
minority that held interests and possessions in both islands, and
openly used England to advance their power and Ireland to increase
their wealth. They had no country, for neither England nor Ireland
could be counted such. They knew how to darken ignorance and inflame
prejudice in London against their fellow-countrymen in Ireland--"the
strange savage nature of the people," "savage vile poor persons which
never did know or feel wealth or civility," "having no knowledge of
the laws of God or of the king," nor any way to know them save through
the good offices of these slanderers, apostles of their own virtue.
The anti-national minority would have had no strength if left alone to
face the growing toleration in Ireland. In support from England it
found its sole security--and through its aid Ireland was flung back
into disorder.