THE RISE OF A NEW IRELAND
1691-1750
It might have seemed impossible amid such complicated tyrannies to
build up a united country. But the most ferocious laws could not
wholly destroy the kindly influences of Ireland, the essential needs
of men, nor the charities of human nature. There grew up too the union
of common suffering. Once more the people of Ireland were being
"brayed together in a mortar" to compact them into a single
commonwealth.
The Irish had never lost their power of absorbing new settlers in
their country. The Cromwellians complained that thousands of the
English who came over under Elizabeth had "become one with the Irish
as well in affinity as in idolatry." Forty years later these
Cromwellians planted on Irish farms suffered themselves the same
change; their children could not speak a word of English and became
wholly Irish in religion and feeling. Seven years after the battle of
the Boyne the same influence began to turn Irish the very soldiers of
William. The civilisation, the piety, the charm of Irish life told as
of old. In the country places, far from the government, kindly
friendships grew up between neighbours, and Protestants by some device
of goodwill would hide a Catholic from some atrocious penalty, would
save his arms from being confiscated, or his children from being
brought up as Protestants. The gentry in general spoke Irish with the
people, and common interests grew up in the land where they lived
together.
The Irish had seen the fires of destruction pass over them, consuming
the humanities of their law, the honour of their country, and the
relics of their fathers: the cry of their lamentation, said an Italian
in 1641, was more expressive than any music he had heard of the great
masters of the continent. The penal days have left their traces. We
may still see in hidden places of the woods some cave or rock where
the people gathered in secret to celebrate mass. There remain
memorials of Irishmen, cast out of their lands, who to mark their
final degradation had been driven to the livelihood which the new
English held in the utmost contempt--the work of their hands; their
dead bodies were carried to the ruined abbeys, and proudly laid in the
roofless naves and chancels, under great sculptured slabs bearing the
names of once noble families, and deeply carved with the instruments
of the dead man's trade, a plough, the tools of a shoemaker or a
carpenter or a mason. In a far church in Connemara by the Atlantic, a
Burke raised in 1722 a sculptured tomb to the first of his race who
had come to Connacht, the figure in coat of mail and conical helmet
finely carved in limestone. Monuments lie heaped in Burris, looking
out on the great ocean; and in all the sacred places of the Irish. By
their industry and skill in the despised business of handicrafts and
commerce the outlaws were fast winning most of the ready money of the
country into their hands.
It would be a noble achievement, said Swift, to abolish the Irish
language, which prevented "the Irish from being tamed." But Swift's
popularity with the native Irish was remarkable, and when he visited
Cavan he was interested by verses of its poets and wrote an English
ballad founded on the Plearaca Ui Ruairc; he helped the rector of Anna
(Belturbet) in his endeavours to have prayers read in Irish in the
established churches in remote places. The Protestant bishops and
clergy in general, holding that their first duty was not to minister
to the souls of Irishmen, but rather as agents of the government to
bring Irish speech "into entire disuse," refused to learn the only
language understood by the people. Clergy and officials alike knew
nothing whatever of the true life of Ireland. Now and then there was a
rare exception, and the respect which Philip Skelton showed for the
religious convictions of a country-bred maidservant should be
remembered. But in general the clergy and all other political agents
opposed kindly intercourse of the two races. The fiction of complete
Irish barbarism was necessary to maintain the Protestant ascendency,
and in later days to defend it. The whole literature of the Irish was
therefore cast aside as waste refuse. Their race is never mentioned in
histories of the eighteenth century save as an indistinct and obscure
mass of wretchedness, lawlessness, and ignorance, lying in
impenetrable darkness, whence no voice ever arose even of protest or
complaint, unless the pains of starvation now and again woke the most
miserable from their torpor to some wild outrage, to be repressed by
even more savage severity. So fixed and convenient did this lying
doctrine prove that it became a truism never challenged. To this day
all manuscripts of the later Irish times have been rejected from
purchase by public funds, to the irrevocable loss of a vast mass of
Irish material. By steadily neglecting everything written in the
native tongue of the country, the Protestant planters, one-fourth of
the inhabitants, secured to themselves the sole place in the later
history of Ireland. A false history engendered a false policy, which
in the long run held no profit for the Empire, England, or Ireland.
Unsuspected by English settlers, the Irish tradition was carried
across the years of captivity by these exiles in their own land.
Descendants of literary clans, historians and poets and scribes were
to be found in farmhouses, working at the plough and spade. Some wrote
prose accounts of the late wars, the history of their tribe, the
antiquities of their province, annals of Ireland, and geography. The
greatest of the poets was Daibhi O'Bruadair of Limerick, a man knowing
some English and learned in Irish lore, whose poems (1650-1694)
stirred men of the cabins with lessons of their time, the laying down
of arms by the Irish in 1652, Sarsfield and Limerick, the breaking of
the treaty, the grandsons of kings working with the spade, the poor
man perfected in learning, steadfast, well proved in good sense, the
chaffering insolence of the new traders, the fashion of men fettering
their tongues to speak the mere ghost of rough English, or turning
Protestant for ease. Learned men showed the love of their language in
the making of dictionaries and grammars to preserve, now that the
great schools were broken up, the learning of the great masters of
Irish. Thus the poet Tadhg O'Neachtain worked from 1734 to 1749 at a
dictionary. Another learned poet and lexicographer, Aodh Buidh
MacCurtin, published with Conor O'Begly in Paris a grammar (1728) and
a dictionary (1732); in his last edition of the grammar he prayed
pardon for "confounding an example of the imperative with the
potential mood," which he was caused to do "by the great bother of the
brawling company that is round about me in this prison." There were
still well-qualified scribes who copied the old heroic stories and
circulated them freely all over Ireland. There were some who
translated religious books from French and Latin into Irish. "I wish
to save," said Charles O'Conor, "as many as I can of the ancient
manuscripts of Ireland from the wreck which has overwhelmed everything
that once belonged to us." O'Conor was of Sligo county. His father,
like other gentlemen, had been so reduced by confiscation that he had
to plough with his own hands. A Franciscan sheltered in a peasant's
cottage, who knew no English, taught him Latin. He attended mass held
secretly in a cave. Amid such difficulties he gained the best
learning of his unhappy time. Much of the materials that O'Clery had
used for his _Annals_ had perished in the great troubles, and O'Conor
began again that endless labour of Irish scholars, the saving of the
relics of his people's story from final oblivion. It was the passion
of his life. He formed an Irish library, and copied with his own hand
large volumes of extracts from books he could not possess. Having
obtained O'Clery's own manuscript of the _Annals_, he had this immense
work copied by his own scribe; and another copy made in 1734 by Hugh
O'Mulloy, an excellent writer, for his friend Dr. O'Fergus of Dublin.
He wrote for the learned, and delighted the peasants round him with
the stories of their national history. It is interesting to recall
that Goldsmith probably knew O'Conor, so that the best English of an
Irishman, and the best learning of an Irishman at that time, were thus
connected.
It was the Irish antiquarians and historians who in 1759 drew Irishmen
together into "the Catholic Committee"--Charles O'Conor, Dr. Curry,
and Wyse of Waterford. O'Conor by his learning preserved for them the
history of their fathers. Dr. Curry, of a Cavan family whose estates
had been swept from them in 1641 and 1691, had studied as a physician
in France, and was eminent in Dublin though shut out from every post;
he was the first to use his research and literary powers to bring
truth out of falsehood in the later Irish history, and to justify the
Irish against the lying accusations concerning the rising of 1641.
These learned patriots combined in a movement to win for the Irish
some recognition before the law and some rights of citizens in their
own land.
Countless poets, meanwhile, poured out in verse the infinite sorrow of
the Gaels, recalling the days when their land was filled with
poet-schools and festivals, and the high hospitality of great
Irishmen. If a song of hope arose that the race should come to their
own again, the voice of Irish charity was not wanting--"Having the
fear of God, be ye full of alms-giving and friendliness, and
forgetting nothing do ye according to the commandments, shun ye
drunkenness and oaths and cursing, and do not say till death 'God
damn' from your mouths." Riotous laughter broke out in some; they
were all, in fact, professional wits--chief among them Eoghan Ruadh
O'Sullivan from Kerry, who died in 1784; a working man who had
laboured with plough and spade, and first came into note for helping
his employer's son, fresh from a French college, with an explanation
of a Greek passage. Jacobite poems told of the Lady Erin as a
beautiful woman flying from the insults of foreign suitors in search
of her real mate--poems of fancy, for the Stuarts had lost all hold on
Ireland. The spirit of the north rang out in a multitude of bards,
whose works perished in a century of persecution and destruction.
Among exiles in Connacht manuscripts perished, but old tradition lived
on the lips of the peasants, who recited in their cabins the
love-songs and religious poems of long centuries past. The people in
the bareness of their poverty were nourished with a literature full of
wit, imagination, feeling, and dignity. In the poorest hovels there
were men skilled in a fine recitation. Their common language showed
the literary influence, and Irish peasants even in our own day have
used a vocabulary of some five thousand words, as against about eight
hundred words used by peasants in England. Even the village dancing at
the cross-roads preserved a fine and skilled tradition.
Families, too, still tried to have "a scholar" in their house, for the
old learning's sake. Children shut out from all means of education
might be seen learning their letters by copying with chalk the
inscriptions on their fathers' tombstones. There were few candles, and
the scholar read his books by a cabin fire in the light given by
throwing upon it twigs and dried furze. Manuscripts were carefully
treasured, and in days when it was death or ruin to be found with an
Irish book they were buried in the ground or hidden in the walls. In
remote places schools were maintained out of the destitution of the
poor; like that one which was kept up for over a hundred years in
county Waterford, where the people of the surrounding districts
supported "poor scholars" free of charge. There were some in Kerry,
some in Clare, where a very remarkable group of poets sprang up. From
all parts of Ireland students begged their way to "the schools of
Munster." Thus Greek and Latin still found their way into the
labourer's cottage. In county Cork, John Clairech O'Donnell, in
remembrance of the ancient assemblies of the bards of all Ireland,
gathered to his house poets and learned men to recite and contend as
in the old days. Famous as a poet, he wrote part of a history of
Ireland, and projected a translation of Homer into Irish. But he
worked in peril, flying for his life more than once before the
bard-hunters; in his denunciations the English oppressor stands before
us--plentiful his costly living in the high-gabled lighted-up mansion
of the Irish Brian, but tight-closed his door, and his churlishness
shut up inside with him, there in an opening between two mountains,
until famine clove to the people and bowed them to his will; his gate
he never opened to the moan of the starving, "and oh! may heaven of
the saints be a red wilderness for James Dawson!"
The enthusiasm of the Irish touched some of the planters. A hereditary
chronicler of the O'Briens who published in 1717 a vindication of the
Antiquities of Ireland got two hundred and thirty-eight subscribers,
divided about equally between English and Gaelic names. Wandering
poets sang, as Irish poets had done nine hundred years before, even in
the houses of the strangers, and found in some of them a kindly
friend. O'Carolan, the harper and singer, was beloved by both races. A
slight inequality in a village field in Meath still after a hundred
and fifty years recalls to Irish peasants the site of the house where
he was born, and at his death English and Irish, Protestant and
Catholic, gathered in an encampment of tents to do honour to his name.
The magic of Irish music seems even to have stirred in the landlords'
parliament some dim sense of a national boast. An English nobleman
coming to the parliament with a Welsh harper claimed that in all
Ireland no such music could be heard. Mr. Jones of Leitrim took up the
challenge for an Irishman of his county who "had never worn linen or
woollen." The Commons begged to have the trial in their House before
business began, and all assembled to greet the Leitrim champion.
O'Duibhgeanain was of an old literary clan: one of them had shared in
making the _Annals of the Four Masters_; he himself was not only a
fine harper, but an excellent Greek and Latin scholar. He came, tall
and handsome, looking very noble in his ancient garb made of beaten
rushes, with a cloak or plaid of the same stuff, and a high conical
cap of the same adorned with many tassels. And the House of Commons
gave him their verdict.
James Murphy, a poor bricklayer of Cork, who became an architect and
studied Arabian antiquities in Portugal and Spain, gives the lament of
Irish scholars. "You accuse their pastors with illiterature, whilst
you adopt the most cruel means of making them ignorant; and their
peasantry with untractableness, whilst you deprive them of the means
of civilisation. But that is not all; you have deprived them at once
of their religion, their liberty, their oak, and their harp, and left
them to deplore their fate, not in the strains of their ancestors, but
in the sighs of oppression." To the great landlords the Act of 1691
which had given them wealth was the dawn of Irish civilisation.
Oblivion might cover all the rest, all that was not theirs. They
lived in a land some few years old, not more than a man's age might
cover.
By degrees, however, dwellers in Ireland were forced into some concern
for its fortunes. Swift showed to the Protestants the wrongs they
endured and the liberties which should be theirs, and flung his scorn
on the shameful system of their slavery and their tyranny (1724). Lord
Molesworth urged (1723) freedom of religion, schools of husbandry,
relief of the poor from their intolerable burdens, the making
parliament into a really representative body. Bishop Berkeley wrote
his famous _Querist_--the most searching study of the people's grief
and its remedies.
Gradually the people of Ireland were being drawn together. All classes
suffered under the laws to abolish Irish trade and industry. Human
charities were strong in men of both sides, and in the country there
was a growing movement to unite the more liberal of the landowners,
the Dissenters of the north, and the Catholics, in a common
citizenship. It had proved impossible to carry out fully the penal
code. No life could have gone on under its monstrous terms. There were
not Protestants enough to carry on all the business of the country
and some "Papists" had to be taken at least into the humbler forms of
official work. Friendly acts between neighbours diminished
persecution.
"Let the legislature befriend us now, and we are theirs forever," was
the cry of the Munster peasantry, organised under O'Driscoll, to the
Protestant parliament in 1786.
Such a movement alarmed the government extremely. If, they said,
religious distinctions were abolished, the Protestants would find
themselves secure of their position without British protection, and
might they not then form a government more to the taste and wishes of
the people--in fact, might not a nation begin again to live in
Ireland.
The whole energy of the government was therefore called out to avert
the rise of a united Irish People.