THE NATIONAL FAITH OF THE IRISH
_c._ 1600--_c._ 1660
We have seen already two revivals of Irish life, when after the Danish
settlement, and after the Norman, the native civilisation triumphed.
Even now, after confiscations and plantations, the national tradition
was still maintained with unswerving fidelity. Amid contempt,
persecution, proscription, death, the outcast Irish cherished their
language and poetry, their history and law, with the old pride and
devotion. In that supreme and unselfish loyalty to their race they
found dignity in humiliation and patience in disaster, and have left,
out of the depths of their poverty and sorrow, one of the noblest
examples in history.
Their difficulties were almost inconceivable. The great dispersion had
begun of Irish deported, exiled, or cast out by emigration. Twenty
thousand Irish were reported in a single island of the West Indies in
1643; thirty thousand were said to be wandering about Europe; in 1653
four thousand soldiers were transported to Flanders for the war of the
king of Spain. Numbers went to seek the education forbidden at home in
a multitude of Irish colleges founded abroad. They became chancellors
of universities, professors, high officials in every European state--a
Kerry man physician to the king of Poland; another Kerry man confessor
to the queen of Portugal and sent by the king on an embassy to Louis
XIV; a Donegal man, O'Glacan, physician and privy councillor to the
king of France, and a very famed professor of medicine in the
universities of Toulouse and Bologna (1646-1655); and so on. We may
ask whether in the history of the world there was cast out of any
country such genius, learning, and industry, as the English flung, as
it were, into the sea. With every year the number of exiles grew. "The
same to me," wrote one, "are the mountain or ocean, Ireland or the
west of Spain; I have shut and made fast the gates of sorrow over my
heart."
As for the Irish at home, every vestige of their tradition was
doomed--their religion was forbidden, and the Staff of Patrick and
Cross of Columcille destroyed, with every other national relic; their
schools were scattered, their learned men hunted down, their books
burned; native industries were abolished; the inauguration chairs of
their chiefs were broken in pieces, and the law of the race torn up,
codes of inheritance, of land tenure, of contract between neighbours
or between lord and man. The very image of Justice which the race had
fashioned for itself was shattered. Love of country and every
attachment of race and history became a crime, and even Irish language
and dress were forbidden under penalty of outlawry or excommunication.
"No more shall any laugh there," wrote the poet, "or children gambol;
music is choked, the Irish language chained." The people were wasted
by thousands in life and in death. The invaders supposed the
degradation of the Irish race to be at last completed. "Their youth
and gentry are destroyed in the rebellion or gone to France," wrote
one: "those that are left are destitute of horses, arms and money,
capacity and courage. Five in six of the Irish are poor, insignificant
slaves, fit for nothing but to hew wood and draw water." Such were the
ignorant judgments of the new people, an ignorance shameful and
criminal.
The Irish, meanwhile, at home and in the dispersion, were seeking to
save out of the wreck their national traditions. Three centres were
formed of this new patriotic movement--in Rome, in Louvain, and in
Ireland itself.
An Irish College of Franciscans was established in Rome (1625) by the
efforts of Luke Wadding, a Waterford man, divine of the Spanish
embassy at Rome. The Pope granted to the Irish the church of St.
Isidore, patron of Madrid, which had been occupied by Spanish
Franciscans. Luke Wadding, founder and head of the college, was one of
the most extraordinary men of his time for his prodigious erudition,
the greatest school-man of that age, and an unchanging and impassioned
patriot. He prepared the first full edition of the works of the great
Irish scholastic philosopher Duns Scotus, with the help of his
fellow-countrymen, Thomas Strange, Anthony Hickey, John Ponce of Cork,
Hugh MacCawell of Tyrone; and projected a general history of Ireland
for which materials were being collected in 1628 by Thomas Walsh,
archbishop of Cashel. The College was for the service of "the whole
nation," for all Irishmen, no matter from what province, "so long as
they be Irish." They were bound by rule to speak Irish, and an Irish
book was read during meals.
No spot should be more memorable to Irishmen than the site of the
Franciscan College of St. Antony of Padua at Louvain. A small
monastery of the Freres de Charite contains the few pathetic relics
that are left of the noble company of Irish exiles who gathered there
from 1609 for mutual comfort and support, and of the patriots and
soldiers laid to rest among them--O'Neills, O'Dohertys, O'Donnells,
Lynches, Murphys, and the rest, from every corner of Ireland. "Here I
break off till morning," wrote one who laboured on a collection of
Irish poems from 1030 to 1630, "and I in gloom and grief; and during
my life's length unless only that I might have one look at Ireland."
The fathers had mostly come of the old Irish literary clans, and were
trained in the traditional learning of their race; such as Father
O'Mulloy, distinguished in his deep knowledge of the later poetic
metres, of which he wrote in his Latin and Irish Grammar; or
Bonaventura O'h'Eoghasa, trained among the poets of Ireland, who left
"her holy hills of beauty" with lamentation to "try another trade"
with the Louvain brotherhood. Steeped in Irish lore the Franciscans
carried on the splendid record of the Irish clergy as the
twice-beloved guardians of the inheritance of their race. "Those
fathers," an Irish scholar of that day wrote, "stood forward when she
(Ireland) was reduced to the greatest distress, nay, threatened with
certain destruction, and vowed that the memory of the glorious deeds
of their ancestors should not be consigned to the same earth that
covered the bodies of her children ... that the ancient glory of
Ireland should not be entombed by the same convulsion which deprived
the Irish of the lands of their fathers and of all their property."
More fortunate than scholars in Ireland they had a printing-press; and
used it to send out Irish grammars, glossaries, catechisms, poems.
Hugh Mac an-Bhaird of Donegal undertook to compile the _Acta
Sanctorum_, for which a lay-brother, Michael O'Clery, collected
materials in Ireland for ten years, and Patrick Fleming of Louth
gathered records in Europe. At Hugh's death, in 1635, the task was
taken up by Colgan, born at Culdaff on the shore of Inishowen (+1658).
The work of the fathers was in darkness and sorrow. "I am wasting and
perishing with grief," wrote Hugh Bourke to Luke Wadding, "to see how
insensibly nigher and nigher draws the catastrophe which must inflict
mortal wounds upon our country."
Ireland herself, however, remained the chief home of historical
learning in the broad national sense. Finghin Mac Carthy Riabhach, a
Munster chief, skilled in old and modern Irish, Latin, English, and
Spanish, wrote a history of Ireland to the Norman invasion in the
beautiful hand taught him by Irish scribes; it was written while he
lay imprisoned in London from 1589 to 1626, mad at times through
despair. One of a neighbouring race of seafaring chiefs, O'Sullivan
Beare, an emigrant and captain in the Spanish navy, published in 1621
his indignant recital of the Elizabethan wars in Ireland. It was in
hiding from the president of Munster, in the wood of Aharlo, that
Father Geoffrey Keating made (before 1633) his Irish history down to
the Norman settlement--written for the masses in clear and winning
style, the most popular book perhaps ever written in Irish, and copied
throughout the country by hundreds of eager hands. In the north
meanwhile Michael O'Clery and his companions, two O'Clerys of Donegal,
two O'Maelchonaires of Roscommon, and O'Duibhgeanain of Leitrim, were
writing the _Annals of the Four Masters_ (1632-6); all of them
belonging to hereditary houses of chroniclers. In that time of sorrow,
fearing the destruction of every record of his people, O'Clery
travelled through all Ireland to gather up what could be saved,
"though it was difficult to collect them to one place." There is still
preserved a manuscript by Caimhin, abbot of Iniscaltra about 650,
which was given to O'Clery by the neighbouring Mac Brodys who had kept
it safe for a thousand years. The books were carried to the huts and
cottages where the friars of Donegal lived round their ruined
monastery; from them the workers had food and attendance, while Fergal
O'Gara, a petty chieftain of Sligo descended from Olioll, king of
Munster in 260, gave them a reward for their labours. Another O'Clery
wrote the story of Aedh Ruadh O'Donnell, his prisons and his battles,
and the calamity to Ireland of his defeat. "Then were lost besides
nobility and honour, generosity and great deeds, hospitality and
goodness, courtesy and noble birth, polish and bravery, strength and
courage, valour and constancy, the authority and the sovereignty of
the Irish of Erin to the end of time."
In Galway a group of scholars laid, in Lynch's words, "a secure
anchorage" for Irish history. Dr. John Lynch, the famous apologist of
the Irish, wrote there his historical defence of his people. To spread
abroad their history he translated into Latin Keating's book. For the
same purpose his friend, Tuileagna O'Maelchonaire, a distinguished
Irish scholar, translated the _Annals of Ulster_ into English.
O'Flaherty of Moycullen in Galway, a man of great learning, wrote on
Irish antiquities "with exactness, diligence and judgment." "I live,"
he said, "a banished man within the bounds of my native soil, a
spectator of others enriched by my birthright, an object of condoling
to my relations and friends, and a condoler of their miseries." His
land confiscated (1641), stripped at last of his manuscripts as well
as of his other goods, he died in miserable poverty in extreme old age
(1709). To Galway came also Dualtach Mac Firbis (1585-1670), of a
family that had been time out of mind hereditary historians in north
Connacht. He learned in one of the old Irish schools of law in
Tipperary Latin, English, and Greek. Amid the horrors of Cromwell's
wars he carried out a prodigious work on the genealogies of the clans,
the greatest, perhaps, that exists in any country; and wrote on their
saints, their kings, their writers, on the chronicles and on the laws;
in moderate prosperity and in extreme adversity constantly devoted to
the preservation of Irish history. In his old age he lived, like other
Irish scholars, a landless sojourner on the estates that had once
belonged to his family and race; the last of the hereditary sennachies
of Ireland he wandered on foot from house to house, every Irish door
opened to him for his learning after their undying custom, till at the
age of eighty-five he was murdered by a Crofton when he was resting in
a house on his way to Dublin. In Connacht, too, lived Tadhg O'Roddy of
Leitrim, a diligent collector of Irish manuscripts, who gathered
thirty books of law, and many others of philosophy, poetry, physic,
genealogies, mathematics, romances, and history; and defended against
the English the character of the old law and civilisation of Ireland.
It would be long to tell of the workers in all the Irish
provinces--the lawyers hiding in their bosoms the genealogies and
tenures of their clans--the scribes writing annals and genealogies,
to be carried, perhaps, when Irishmen gathered as for a hurling-match
and went out to one of their old places of assembly, there to settle
their own matters by their ancient law. No printing-press could be set
up among the Irish; they were driven back on oral tradition and
laborious copying by the pen. Thus for about a hundred years Keating's
_History_ was passed from hand to hand after the old manner in copies
made by devoted Irish hands (one of them a "farmer"), in Leitrim,
Tipperary, Kildare, Clare, Limerick, Kilkenny, all over the country;
it was only in 1723 that Dermot O'Conor translated it into English and
printed it in Dublin. It is amazing how amid the dangers of the time
scribes should be found to re-write and re-edit the mass of
manuscripts, those that were lost and those that have escaped.
The poets were still the leaders of national patriotism. The great
"Contention of the Poets"--"Iomarbhagh na bhfiledh"--a battle that
lasted for years between the bards of the O'Briens and the O'Donnells,
in which the bards of every part of Ireland joined--served to rouse
the pride of the Irish in their history amid their calamities under
James I. The leader of the argument, Tadhg Mac Daire, lord of an
estate with a castle as chief poet of Thomond, was hurled over a cliff
in his old age by a Cromwellian soldier with the shout, "Say your rann
now, little man!" Tadhg O'h'Uiginn of Sligo (+1617), Eochaidh
O'h'Eoghasa of Fermanagh, were the greatest among very many. Bards
whose names have often been forgotten spread the poems of the Ossianic
cycle, and wrote verses of several kinds into which a new gloom and
despair entered--
"Though yesterday seemed to me long and ill,
Yet longer still was this dreary day."
The bards were still for a time trained in "the schools"--low thatched
buildings shut away by a sheltering wood, where students came for six
months of the year. None were admitted who could not read and write,
and use a good memory; none but those who had come of a bardic tribe,
and of a far district, lest they should be distracted by friends and
relations. The Scottish Gaels and the Irish were united as of old in
the new literature; Irish bards and harpers were as much at home in
the Highlands and in the Isles as in Ireland, and the poems of the
Irish bards were as popular there as in Munster. Thus the unity of
feeling of the whole race was preserved and the bards still remained
men who belonged to their country rather than to a clan or territory.
But with the exile of the Irish chiefs, with the steady ruin of "the
schools," poets began to throw aside the old intricate metres and the
old words no longer understood, and turned to the people, putting away
"dark difficult language" to bring literature to the common folk:
there were even translations made for those who were setting their
children to learn the English instead of their native tongue. Born of
an untold suffering, a burst of melody swept over Ireland, scores and
scores of new and brilliant metres, perhaps the richest attempt to
convey music in words ever made by man. In that unfathomed experience,
they tell how seeking after Erin over all obstacles, they found her
fettered and weeping, and for their loyalty she gave them the last
gift left to her, the light of poetry.
In Leinster of the English, "the cemetery of the valorous Gael," Irish
learning had a different story. There it seemed for a moment that it
might form a meeting-point between the new race and the old, joining
together, as the Catholics put it, "our commonwealth men," a people
compounded of many nations, some Irish by birth and descent, others by
descent only, others neither by descent nor by birth but by
inhabitation of one soil; but all parts of one body politic,
acknowledging one God, conjoined together in allegiance to one and the
same sovereign, united in the fruition of the selfsame air, and tied
in subsistence upon this our natural soil whereupon we live together.
A tiny group of scholars in Dublin had begun to study Irish history.
Sir James Ware (1594-1666), born there of an English family,
"conceived a great love for his native country and could not bear to
see it aspersed by some authors, which put him upon doing it all the
justice he could in his writings." He spared no cost in buying
valuable manuscripts, kept an Irish secretary to translate, and
employed for eleven years the great scholar O'Flaherty whose help gave
to his work its chief value. Ussher, archbishop of Armagh, also born
in Dublin, devoted himself to the study of Irish antiquities. Baron
d'Aungier, Master of the Rolls, put into writing every point which he
could find in original documents "which for antiquity or singularity
might interest this country." The enthusiasm of learning drew together
Protestant and Catholic, Anglo-Irish and Irish. All these men were in
communication with Luke Wadding in Rome through Thomas Strange the
Franciscan, his intimate friend; they sent their own collections of
records to help him in his Catholic history of Irish saints, "being
desirous that Wadding's book should see the light," wishing "to help
him in his work for Ireland," begging to see "the veriest trifle" that
he wrote. The noblest English scholar was Bishop Bedell, who while
provost established an Irish lecture in Trinity College, had the
chapter during commons read in Irish, and employed a Sheridan of Cavan
to translate the Old Testament into Irish. As bishop he braved the
anger of the government by declaring the hardships of the Catholic
Irish, and by circulating a catechism in English and Irish. Bitterly
did Ussher reproach him for such a scandal at which the professors of
the gospel did all take offence, and for daring to adventure that
which his brethren had been "so long abuilding," the destruction of
the Irish language. The Irish alone poured out their love and
gratitude to Bedell; they protected him in the war of 1641; the
insurgent chieftains fired volleys over his grave paying homage to his
piety; "sit anima mea cum Bedello!" cried a priest. He showed what one
just man, caring for the people and speaking to them in their own
tongue, could do in a few years to abolish the divisions of race and
religion.
The light, however, that had risen in Dublin was extinguished.
Sympathies for the spirit of Irishmen in their long history were
quenched by the greed for land, the passion of commerce, and the
fanaticism of ascendancy and dominion.