ABSENTEEISM.

“Les absens ont toujours tort.”

_La Rochefaucault._

The phrase “Absentee,” says Dr. Johnson, is one “used _with regard to

Irishmen_ living out of their country;” and as its origin is Irish, so

its use and application are strictly confined to the history of that

unfortunate people. The inference to be drawn from this fact is plain:

that there is something in the circumstances of the Irish, peculiar to

themselves,--something which forces upon them a line of conduct contrary

to the ordinary instincts of humanity, and compels them to fly from that

land which all other nations regard with more or less of favour and

affection,--from that land which youth quits with regret, and to which

age clings with passion, when all other passions fade,--the land of

their nativity.

In every history of Irish grievances, this cabalistical term “absentee”

appears in the front of the array, and, like the terrible “_Il

Bondocani_” of the Calif of Bagdat, strikes down all before it,--the

apology for every abuse, the obstacle to every plan of amelioration, the

bugbear of the timid, the stalking-horse of the designing.

“Absenteeism,” observes the Secretary for the Home Department, “is an

operative cause of tumult, but it is without a remedy;” and thus

dismissing all ministerial responsibility with a laconic aphorism, he

launches an integral portion of the empire committed to his management,

to revolve for ever in the turbulent whirlpool of a vicious circle of

cause and effect. Tumult expels the rich landholders, the absence of the

rich landholders perpetuates tumult: this is a law of nature, which

admits of “no remedy;” and the executive have nothing to do but to

procure the passing of penal statutes according to the necessities of

the moment, and to find the means of extorting four millions a year from

English industry, to pay the expense of Irish misrule.

In political philosophy there are no evils without a remedy, save those

which arise out of the common condition of humanity;--and the minister

who confesses a political evil which he cannot remove, should remove

himself: for he is himself the greatest evil with which the people have

to contend. Sully, who administered the affairs of France under the most

adverse circumstances, when it was still harassed with civil contentions

and torn with religious factions, saw no political impossibilities,

though many political difficulties, with which he courageously and

successfully grappled: but, alas! the Secretary for the Home Department

is not Sully.

To what physiological peculiarity of constitution this irremediable

tendency to wander, inherited from their progenitors by the restless

sons of the great Milesius, is to be attributed, the learned Secretary

has not informed us; and it is certain that Spurzheim, on his visit to

the Irish capital, discovered no migratory inequality upon the surface

of the Irish cranium, to account for the disposition. But in whatever

particular of temperament or exuberance of cerebral developement the

cause of this “effect defective” lies latent, it is matter of historic

fact, that though the ancient Irish were restless enough at home,

(“never,” says Campion, “wanting drift to drive a tumult,”) yet this

activity, which induced them “to pick a quarrel, fall in love, or any

other diverting accident of that kind,” never found vent in absenteeism.

Where, indeed, could Irishmen go to better their condition, when all in

Ireland, who were not saints, were kings; and many were both, while none

were martyrs.[1] “_Il est certain negoce_,” says the French proverb,

“_où l’on perd beaucoup en quittant boutique_;” and this proverb, at all

times applicable to Irish absentees, was particularly so in that golden

age, so often referred to by antiquaries, when Ireland, “lying aloof in

the Western Ocean, was a nest of kingdoms,” when superb and wealthy

monasteries and royal palaces occupied every foot of the territory, and

when swallows built their nests in old men’s beards for want of worse

habitations. In those true church and state times of Ireland’s

prosperity, of which the Orangeman’s Utopia is but a type, it is little

wonderful that the people gave into no wanderings, but those “_du cœur

et de l’esprit_;” and that a pilgrimage to St. Patrick’s purgatory, a

royal progress of some Toparck of the South to a Dynast in the North, or

a morning visit from King Mac Turtell to his close neighbour King

Gillemohalmoghe,[2] (which occasionally ended in the broken heads of

both parties,) should include the recorded absenteeism of two thousand

years.

It was reserved, however, for one of these royal heroes first to commit

the patricidal crime: and the first Irish absentee of note, though a

great king, was but a _mauvais sujet_, having pillaged his people,

wasted his revenue, ran away with his neighbour’s wife, and sold his

country for a mess of pottage. It is almost unnecessary to add that this

royal founder of absenteeism is condemned to the contempt of posterity

by the title of Dermot Mac Murrogh O’Kavenagh, King of Leinster; and

that the result of his absenteeship was the successful invasion of

Ireland by Henry II. the crusading grants of Pope Adrian IV. and, above

all, the fearful forfeitures followed by rebellion on one part, and on

the other by an effort at extermination, which have multiplied from age

to age those possessors and deserters of the soil, who have drawn over

“the profits raised out of Ireland, and refunded nothing.”[3]

It appears very probable that one of the motives by which the lords of

Ireland (as the English kings were long styled) were actuated in giving

such large tracts of land to great English proprietors, was to get rid

of the troublesome and rebellious Barons, by tempting them to reside in

that “most beautiful and sweet country as any is under heaven,” where so

much was given up to their power and pillage, and where the services

demanded in return, “the raising of forts and castles and fencing

themselves with garrisons, as captains, keepers, and constables,” might

forward the royal interests by protecting its power against the inroads

of the natives. “For, except Leinster,” says Campion, “all other parts

retayned still their ancient kind of government, and were always ready

to start at every corner, _ag and rag_, to expell the English.” But the

framers of Magna Charta, the guardians of all that was then known of

liberty in England, were not by the bribe of principalities to be kept

from the great scene of action; and some of the most considerable,

having accepted, or seized upon the fairest portions of the land, made

them over to sons-in-law or other kinsmen; and having thus, by the

scratch of their rude pen,[4] conveyed to others the fee simple of an

Irish province, hastened back to England to dispute the power of the

barbarous despots, who reigned by their sufferance, or were deposed by

their caprice.

In process of time, the mischief of this species of transfer was not

only felt as an additional grievance by the Irish, but as an annoyance

by the English sovereign.[5] The injury done to their power by the

absence of those whom they had deputed to watch over it, at a time when

that power was held by a precarious tenure, was deemed so great, that a

law against absentees was passed so early as the time of Richard II. The

divisions of the houses of York and Lancaster, however, abrogated all

laws; “at which time,” says Spenser, “all English lords and gentlemen

which had great possessions in Ireland, repaired over hither into

England, some to succour their friends here, and to strengthen their

partie, others for to defend their lands and possessions here against

such as hovered after the same, upon hope of the alteration of the

kingdom, and success of that side which they favoured and affected.”[6]

The result of this absenteeism of the great landholders of Ireland was

natural and inevitable. “The Irish, whom before they had banished into

the mountains, where they lived only upon white meates,[7] as it is

recorded, seeing now their lands so dispeopled and weakened, came down

into all the plains adjoining, and thence expelling those few English

that remayned, re-possessed them again.” But these re-possessions were

only temporary. New conquests and new forfeitures ensued. New

possessors, unaffected to the soil, and disdainful of its children,

afforded fresh causes of absenteeism, which, in whatever way it

operated, was injurious to the country; till at length the forfeiture of

Leix and Offaly (the King and Queen’s Counties) under Edward VI. threw

the whole of those spacious and fertile districts into the hands of new

proprietors; who having established themselves by “fire and sword,”

transferred the ownership “to _foreigners by connexion, and resided

themselves in England_.”

But if the first barbarous English legislators for Ireland (and when has

the epithet been inapplicable?) were, at an early period of their

unfixed power, sensible of the injury which the state and the country

suffered from absenteeism--if the Plantagenets took cognizance of the

evil, and endeavoured to provide against it by statute, the Tudors

(those sanguinary but sagacious despots) considered the absence of the

Irish from their homes and country as a state engine; and wielded it

with a policy which always advanced their own interests, and confirmed

their power over that unhappy land. Sometimes they allured the Irish

nobility to their splendid court for the purpose of dazzling their

imagination, and corrupting their patriotism. Sometimes, on shallow

pretexts, they cited them as accused or criminals, to awe them by their

array of power, or to intimidate them by their display of cruelty. Yet,

frequently forced to feel that the prosperity of the country and the

English interests were both best served by the permanent residence of

the gentry of the pale, they did not the less frame laws which made it

penal for the proprietors of the soil to spend its profits elsewhere

than at home.[8] The love which the Irish had borne to the house of

York, had rendered it a point of courteous policy to appoint the second

sons of the king to the Lieutenancy of Ireland, with a deputy for the

execution of the high office: and Henry VIII. as Duke of York, while yet

a boy, and during the life-time of his elder brother, began his career

of power under this character, conjointly with his deputy, Gerald

Fitzgerald, Earl of Kildare, “a mighty made man,” says his chronicler,

“full of honour and courage.” (1501) This grand conservator of the

peace, however, had the old Irish fashion of being occasionally disposed

to break it; and his fierce feuds with the Butlers, Earls of Ormond,

(“nothing inferior to Kildare in stomache, and in reach of policy farre

beyond him,”) were the causes “of much ruffle and unquietness to the

realm.” These served his enemies for a pretext to draw down upon him the

displeasure of the English government, and finally induced Henry VII. to

summon the old deputy over to the English court, and to seek to break

down that haughty and turbulent spirit in a region rarely favourable to

powerful energies and independence of mind. A bon-mot saved the earl

from the danger which awaited him, and limited his absenteeism to a few

months residence in the court of Henry, from which he returned to

Ireland more powerful than he left it.

Gerald Fitzgerald, son of the aforesaid earl, “a gentleman valiant and

well spoken,” succeeded his father in all his dignities; but though

appointed lord deputy of Ireland, his influence, power, and spirit, soon

awakened the jealousy of Henry VIII. Being “overtaken with vehement

suspicion of sundry treasons, it was deemed politic to draw him away

from Ireland; and, by secret _heavers_ and enviers of his fortunes,

nourishers of the old grudge, the king was urged to call upon him to

attend the English court.” The illustrious but involuntary absentee,

was, on his first arrival in England, treated with a severity vainly

intended to intimidate a spirit which was afterwards to be subdued by

other and more seducing means. Among many frivolous charges, “_he was

opposed with divers interrogatories touching the Earl of Desmond, his

cousin, a notorious traytor_.” His trial, however, was but a mockery,

and as the object was to sink the popular chief of a nation into a

pliant courtier, to bind him more firmly to the English interests, and

to weaken his feelings of patriotism, the union of the turbulent Gerald

was proposed with the Lady Elizabeth Grey, the king’s own kinswoman and

daughter of the Duke of Suffolk. This marriage, celebrated with royal

splendour, with all the festivities of a boisterous but splendid court,

was deemed a preliminary step to permanent subjection, and to frequent

and long visits to the English court.

Scarcely, however, had Kildare returned home, and resumed the deputyship

of Ireland, when the domestic tumults of the great lords of the pale

involved him in new accusations on the part of the crown, “intimations

of new treasons passing to and fro, with complaynts and replyes;” and as

Cardinal Wolsey “_did hate the Kildare bloud_,” and had resolved on

breaking down their power, the earl was again called from his stronghold

in Ireland, and accused of having “wilfully winked at the Earl of

Desmond (whose large possessions were his crimes in the eye of the

minister), and with having curried acquaintance and friendship with mere

Irish.” While lying under the imputation of a crime, always heinous in

the Irish,--natural affection to the land and its suffering

children,--the brave Kildare (like an eagle taken from its eirie in the

mountain-cliffs of its native region, and chained to the earth in a

golden cage) was suffered to loiter away his existence, in listless

indolence and life-wearing anxiety, in the purlieus of a court that

resembled the seraglio of an Asiatic satrap, alternately favoured and

persecuted, as the caprice of the sovereign or the aversion of the

minister ruled the hour. It was at this period, when his mind was borne

down by his humiliating position, that he was prevailed on to consent to

his daughter the Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald’s permanent residence at

court; and it was by this concession that the loveliest of all Irish

absentees, “_the more than celestial Geraldine_,” has become an object

of interest and admiration to posterity, as the poetical idol of the

gallant and unfortunate Surrey.[9]

Although educated at the rural palace of Hunsdon with her kinswomen the

Princesses Mary and Elizabeth, and though afterwards maid of honour to

the Queen, it is probable that this lady was rather an hostage than a

guest, and was detained more by force than by inclination:--as the

sequel of her story goes to prove. “All this while,” says Campion,

“abode the Earl of Kildare at the court, and with much ado found shifte

to be called before the Lords to answer solemnly.” When, at last, every

excuse for delay was exhausted, and every hope of subduing his

invincible spirit faded, he was “called before the lords to answer

solemnly,” who “sat upon him diversly affectioned; and especially the

Cardinal Lord Chancellor (Wolsey) who disliked his cause, comforted his

accusers, and enforced the articles objected.”

The whole scene of this mock trial is so graphic, and the speeches of

the Cardinal and of the Irish Lord Deputy so curious and descriptive of

the state and manners of the time, that the introduction may be pardoned

of an episode which goes to prove, by a striking instance, that Irish

absenteeism under any form, voluntarily or involuntary, graced by royal

favour, or marked by ministerial persecution, is derogatory to the

dignity, and injurious to the interests of the Irish nobility. The Earl

of Kildare, alone, unfriended, without the aid of counsel to plead, or

witness to depose in his behalf, appeared in the midst of the Lords,

every one of whom was the slave of the King or the parasite of the

minister,--“for what,” (says Walpole, one of their own caste,)--“what

twelve tradesmen could be found more servile than every court of peers

during the whole of this reign?”--Wolsey was the first to speak, and he

began with these words:--“I wot well, my Lord, that I am not the meetest

man at this board to charge you with these treasons, because it hath

pleased some of your pew-fellows to report that I am a professed enemie

to all nobilitie, and namely to the Geraldines: but seeing every curst

boy can say as much when he is controled, and seeing these points are so

weightie that they should not be dissembled of us, and so apparent that

they cannot be denyed of you, I must have leave, notwithstanding your

state slaunder, to be the mouth of these honorable persons at this time,

and to trumpe your reasons in your way, howsoever you take me. First,

you remember how the lewde Earle your kinsman, who passeth not whom he

serve, might he change his master, sent his confederates with letters of

credence to Frauncis the French king, and, having but cold comfort

there, to Charles the Emperour, proffering the helpe of Mounster and

Connaght towards the conquest of Ireland, if either of them would helpe

to win it from our King. How many letters? what precepts? what messages?

what threats have been sent you to apprehend him? and yet not done! why

so? forsooth, I could not catch him: nay, nay, Earle, forsooth you would

not nightly watch him. If he be justly suspected, why are you partiall

in so great a cause? if not, why are you fearfull to have him tryed? Yea

sir, it will be sworn and deposed to your face, that for feare of

meeting him, you have winked, wilfully shunned his sight, altered your

course, warned his friends, stopped both eyes and eares against his

detectors, and, when soever you tooke upon you to hunt him out, then was

he sure before hand to bee out of your walke: surely this juggling and

false play little became either an honest man, called to such honour, or

a nobleman put in such trust. Had you lost but a cow or a garron of your

owne, two hundred Kyrneghes would have come at your whistle, to rescue

the prey from the uttermost edge of Ulster: all the Irish in Ireland

must have given you the way. But in pursuing so weightie a matter as

this, mercifull God! how nice, how dangerous, how wayward have you bin!

One while he is from home, sometimes fled, sometimes in the borders

where you dare not venture: I wist, my Lord, there be shrewd Bugges in

the borders for the Earl of Kildare to feare. The Earle, nay the King of

Kildare, for, when you are disposed, you reigne more like than rule the

land:--where you are malicious, the truest subjects stand for Irish

enemies: where you are pleased the Irish enemie stands for a dutifull

subject: hearts and hands, lives and lands, are all at your courtesie:

who fawneth not thereon, hee cannot rest within your smell, and your

smell is so ranke that you tracke them out at pleasure.”

Whilst the Cardinal was speaking, the Earle chafed and changed colour,

and sundry proffers made to answer every sentence as it came; at last he

broke out, and interrupted them thus. “My Lord Chancellour, I beseech

you pardon me; I am short-witted, and you, I perceive, intend a long

tale. If you proceede in this order, halfe my purgation will be lost for

lacke of carryage: I have no schoole tricks, nor art of memory; excepte

you heare me while I remember your words, your second processe will

hammer out the former.” The Lords associate, who for the most part

tenderly loved him, and knew the Cardinal’s manner of termes so

lothsome, as wherewith they were tyred many years agoe, humbly besought

his Grace to charge him directly with particulars and to dwell in some

one matter till it were examined through. That granted, “It is good

reason (quoth the Earle) that your Grace beare the mouth of this

chamber. But, my Lord, those mouthes that put this tale into your mouth,

are very wide mouths, such indeed as have gaped long for my wreck, and

now at length, for want of better stuff, are fain to fill their mouths

with smoak. What my cousin Desmond hath compassed, as I know not, so I

beshrew his naked heart for holding out so long. If hee can bee taken by

my agents that presently wayte for him, then have my adversaryes

betrayed their malice, and this heape of haynous wordes shall resemble a

man of strawe, that seemeth at a blush to carry some proportion, but

when it is felt and poysed, discovereth a vanity, serving only to fraye

crowes; and I trust your honours will see the proofe hereof and mine

innocencie testified in this behalfe by the thing itselfe within these

few dayes. But goe to, suppose hee never bee had, what is Kildare to

blame for it, more than my good brother of Ossory? notwithstanding his

high promises, having also the king’s power, he is glad to take egges

for his money, and bring him in at leysure. Cannot the Earle of Desmond

shift, but I must bee of counsell? cannot hee bee hid, except I winke?

If hee bee close, am I his mate? If hee bee friended, am I a traitour?

This is a doughty kinde of accusation, which they urge against mee,

wherein they are stabled and myred at my first denyall. You would not

see him, say they; who made them so familiar with mine eye sight? or

when was the Earle within my _Equinas_? or who stood by when I let him

slip? or where are the tokens of my willfull hood-winking? Oh, but you

sent him word to beware of you: who was the messenger? where are the

letters? convince my negative. See how loosely this idle reason hangeth:

Desmond is not taken, well, we are in fault: why? because you are. Who

proves it? nobody. What conjectures? so it seemeth. To whom? to your

enemies. Who told it them? What other grounds? none. Will they sweare

it? they will sweare it. My Lords, then belike they know it: if they

know it, either they have my hand to show, or can bring forth the

messenger, or were present at a conference, or privy to Desmond, or

somebody betrayed it to them, or themselves were my carryers or

vice-gerents therein. Which of these parts will they choose? I know them

too well to reckon myself convict by their bare wordes, or headlesse

hearsayes, or frantick oathes: my letters were soone read, were any such

writing extant; my servaunts and friends are ready to bee sifted. Of my

cousin Desmond they may lye lewdly, since no man can heere will tell the

contrary. Touching my selfe, I never noted in them either so much wit,

or so much faith, that I could have gaged upon their silence the life of

a good hound, much lesse mine owne. I doubt not, may it please your

honours to oppose them, how they came to knowledge of these matters

which they are so ready to depose, but you shall finde their tongues

chayned to another man’s trencher, and as it were knights of the post,

suborned to say, sweare, and stare the uttermost they can, as those that

passe not what they say, nor with what face they say it, so they say no

truths. But of another thing, it grieveth me that your good grace, whom

I take to be wise and sharpe, and who of your own blessed disposition

wish me well, should be so farre gone in crediting those corrupt

informers, that abuse the ignorance of their state and country to my

perill. Little know you, my lord, how necessary it is, not onely for the

governour, but also for every nobleman in Ireland, to hamper his

vincible neighbours at discretion, wherein, if they wayted for processe

of law, and had not these lives and lands you speake of within their

reach, they might pass to loose their own lives and lands without law.

You heare of a case, as it were in a dreame, and feell not the smart

that vexeth us. In England there is not a meane subject that dare extend

this hand to fillip a peere of the realme;--in Ireland, except the lord

have cunning to his strength, and strength to save his owne, and

sufficient authoritie to racke thieves and varletts when they stirre,

hee shall finde them swarme so fast that it will bee too late to call

for justice. If you will have our service take effect, you must not tye

us always to the judicial proceedings, wherewith your realme, thank-bee

God, is inured. As touching my kingdome, my Lord, I would you and I had

exchanged kingdomes but for one moneth, I would trust to gather up more

crummes in that space, than twice the revenues of my poore

earledome;--but you are well and warme, and so hold you, and upbraide

not me with such an odious storme. I sleepe on a dablin, when you lye

soft in your bed of downe; I serve under the cope of heaven, when you

are served under a canopy; I drinke water out of a skull, when you

drinke out of golden cuppes; my courser is trained to the field, when

your jennet is taught to amble; when you are begraced, and belorded, and

crowched and kneeled unto, then I finde small grace with our Irish

borderers, except I cut them off by the knees.” At these girds the

councell would have smiled if they durst; but each man bitt his lippe,

and held his countenance. The Cardinall perceived that Kildare was no

cake, and rose in a fume from the councell-table, committed the Earle,

and deferred the matter till more direct probations came out of

Ireland.--It is unnecessary to add, that these “_probations_” were

readily procured. “For of this treason,” continues the quaint

chronicler, “he (Kildare) was found guilty, and imprisoned in the Tower

a long time. The gentleman betook himself to God and the King, was

heartily loved of the lieutenant, pittied in all the court, and standing

in so hard case, altered little his accustomed hue, comforted other

noblemen prisoners with him dissembling his own sorrow.

“One night, when the lieutenant and he, for disport, were playing at

_slide-groat_, suddenly commeth from the Cardinall a mandat to execute

Kildare on the _morrow_. The Earl marking the Lieutenant’s deep sigh on

reading the bill, ‘By Sant Bride,’ quoth he, ‘there is some mad game in

that scralle, but, fall how it will, this throw is for a huddle.’ When

the worst was told him: ‘Now I pray thee,’ quoth he, ‘doe no more but

learn assuredly from the King’s owne mouthe whether his Grace be witting

thereto or not.’ Sore doubted the Lieutenant to displease the Cardinall;

yet of very pure devotion to his friend, he posteth to the King at

midnight, and said his errand (for all houres of the day or night, the

lieutenant hath accesse to the prince upon occasions.) King Henry,

controwling the sawcyness of the priest--those were his tearmes--gave

him his signet in token of countermand; which, when the Cardinall had

seene, he began to breake into unseasonable words with the lieutenant,

which he was loath to heare, and so he left him fretting. Thus broke up

the storme for a time, and the next yeare Wolsey was cast out of favour;

and within few yeares Sir William Skevington was sent over deputy, who

brought with him the Earle pardoned, and rid from all his troubles.”

But this “riddance” was only of short duration. New causes of complaint,

and new reasons, were soon found or invented for once more drawing the

Earl from the strong hold of his interest and power--his native country:

and he was again “commanded by sharp letters to repair to England.” His

arrival there was followed by a report of his execution,[10] which soon

reached his family in Ireland. His son, whom he had left Lord Justice in

his place, the gallant but impetuous Lord Thomas, on hearing of this

supposed act of treachery against his father, threw down the sword of

office, and flew into open rebellion, followed by his five uncles the

Lords Fitzgerald. The insurrection was soon quelled; and the unfortunate

Geraldines having surrendered, set out for England on the parole of the

Lord Marshal Dorset, where, shortly after their arrival, they were all

executed in one day. The death of the old Earl himself in the Tower,

where he is said to have died “for thought and paine,” ends the tragic

story of the enforced absenteeism of the Geraldines.[11]

This murder of the Lady Geraldine’s uncles, father, brother, and that of

her unfortunate and highly endowed lover, (“who,” says Lodge, “reflected

splendour even on the name of Howard,” and who was put to death by Henry

VIII. for quartering the arms of Edward the Confessor,) must have

rendered the English Court a dreary residence to her. Still, however,

she remained there, most probably under the influence of the same major

force which first drew her from her domestic home. But while Henry thus

continued to retain the most beautiful woman of Ireland near his person,

he began to see, as it appears, the policy of keeping the men at home;

and he passed his famous bill against “_absencie_,” the preamble of

which is curious, as portraying the evils against which it was

framed--at least that portion of the evils by which the English

government, for a long series of years, was alone touched. Like a good

many more modern acts, be it remarked _en passant_, it commences by the

formal averment of a self-evident falsehood: “That, for as much as it

was notorious and manifest, that this land of Ireland being heretofore

inhabited and _in obedience_ to the said king’s most noble progenitors,

who in those days in the righte of the Crown of England had great

possessions, rentes, and profits, within the same land,” &c. It then

goes on to state “the ruine, rebellion, and decay,” which ensued by the

absence of the great landholders: who, “after abiding within the said

land, nobly and valiantly defended the same against all the king’s

enemies, and also _kept the same in such tranquillity and good order_,

as the King of England had due obedience of the inhabitance there, the

laws obeyed, and the revenues and regalitie were duely answered;” but

that afterwards “they and their heires absented themselves out of the

said land of Ireland, _denjorning_ within the realm of England, not

pondering, ne regarding the preservation thereof,--the townes, castels,

and garrisons appertaining to them fell in ruin and decay, and the

English inhabitants therein, in default of defence and _justice_, and by

compulsion of those of the Irish, were exiled, whereby the king’s said

progenitors lost as well their said dominion and subjection there, as

also their revenues and profites; and their said enemies by redopting or

retaining the said lands, dominions, and possessions, were elevated into

great pride,” &c. &c.

Hitherto, with a few exceptions, _absencie_, as touching a residence in

England, had been confined to the great Irish lords of the pale, who,

although of English descent, and bearing Norman names, had in the course

of successive generations run through all those shades of

naturalization, which left them in manners, habits, and affections, but

little distinguishable from the aboriginal Irishman, who proudly traced

his origin to the Lady Scota, the daughter or grand-daughter of King

Pharaoh.[12]

But it was reserved for the reign of the Virgin Queen to drive the

genuine nobility of Ireland from their native land at any loss or risk

into distant regions[13] and unknown countries, or to allure them to her

own formal and fantastic court, by a show of feminine sympathy; which,

though in direct contradiction to her whole policy and conduct, was well

calculated to win the unwary, and to soothe the unfortunate.[14]

The Queen, in her quality both of woman and sovereign, was fond of

making speeches; and she probably found it prettier to be pathetic than

just, as she certainly found it easier to chide than to call in the pack

of bloodhounds she had let loose upon the devoted country of her

delegated sway. While the Fitzwilliams, the Binghams, the Drurys, the

Bagnals, and others of her Irish ministers, were carrying destruction

through the land by “fire, sword, and pestilence,”[15] the fair and

royal rhetorician was exclaiming in her closet against their conduct, by

classical allusions to parallel facts, which showed at once her learning

and her sympathy. “I fear,” she said, apostrophizing her ministers in

Ireland, “that the same reproach will be made to me as was formerly made

by Bato to Tiberius. It is you who are to blame for these things, who

have committed your flocks not to shepherds but to wolves.” The Irish,

“who love learning to a fault,” says Spenser, (and women too, God

forgive them,) were bewitched by similar declarations of pity, breathed

in the language of the learned from the lips of the royal and the fair.

The O’Rourkes, the O’Neils, the O’Connors, forgot the wiles and the

treachery of which their fathers had been the dupes or the victims; and

each in his turn expiated his credulity in its fatal results.[16]

The English were accustomed to the presence of the Geraldines, the

Butlers, the De Courceys, De Burgos, and other great Anglo-Irish lords

of the pale, who, though by “gossipry and alliance” they occasionally

fell into Irish habits, and sported a glib or a mantle at home, were

still sure to resume the English costume when at the English court. But

the true aboriginal Irish gentlemen, the brave O’s and Macs, who, driven

to their woods and morasses with no other weapon of defence than their

skein, their hatchet, or their pike, had for centuries resisted the

well-armed force of England,--they were creatures of almost fabulous

interest and existence; and the “anthropophagi and men whose heads do

grow beneath their shoulders,” were not more monstrous to English

apprehensions than the “flying Irish,” whose wings were supposed to grow

beneath their heads. To the higher castes, however, they were known by

the reputation of their prowess and their comeliness; and were noted by

some of the poets of the day, alike for their invincible spirits and

their lofty stature.[17] This romantic interest thrown round a race at

once so brave and so unfortunate, so wild, and yet so gallant in their

bearing, might not have been without its effect in influencing the

policy of the coquettish queen, and drawing to her court those (as yet

unseen) Thanists, the known admirers of her sex and contemners of her

power.

The restlessness of suffering, the enterprise of romantic valour, the

partiality of the House of Tudor to the O’Neil’s, and other inducements

which Elizabeth herself held out, determined the famous Shane O’Neil (by

the prescriptive right of ages Thanist of his powerful sept, and by the

patent of Henry VIII. to his father, Earl of Tyrone) to visit the court

of England in the most perilous moment of his life. The sudden

appearance of the representative of the ancient kings of Ulster in the

ante-chambers of Whitehall excited a sensation in which the “lion-ported

queen” is said to have deeply and obviously participated. He burst upon

the guarded presence of her, whose acts against his religion and his

rights “resembled the bloody mandates of a Turkish divan rather than the

mild ordinance of a Christian queen,” in all the fearless hardihood of

one who “bore a charmed life,” fresh from the lines of revolt, with the

excitement of the fierce contest between the oppressor and the oppressed

fluttering at his bold heart and fevering his manly brow. He is

described as entering the presence-chamber at the head of a rude but

imposing train, composed of his guard of honour, the Irish

gallowglasses, who,--armed with battle-axes, their heads bare, their

long hair flowing in locks on their broad shoulders, their yellow

surplices with open sleeves trailing to the earth and surmounted by a

military harness--formed a strange contrast to the groupings and

_tournure_ of the ribboned and tagged chivalry through which they

passed. Even the “Londoners,” says Spenser, “marvelled at this strange

sight.”

O’Neil had come to plead his own cause at one of the court historians,

“received him with an affectation of tenderness; and after he had

resided some time at court, the flattery of his address, which appeared

artless and unstudied, and the speciousness of his allegations, so

wrought upon her, that, at his departure, she dismissed him with favour

and presents.”

This absenteeism of O’Neil, though favourable to his pride, and

flattering to his vanity while abroad, was injurious to his interests at

home. His base-born brother, Matthew, availing himself of his absence,

had usurped his rights, and assumed the chieftainship of his sept. The

question was debated (as if it were debateable) by the Irish government,

who, in defiance of all law, “ruled the point in favour of the bastard;

practising (says Parnell[18]) a policy that has governed them (the

English) to the latest times in India, where it has been the custom to

raise to the throne, in violation of the customary mode of succession, a

person who depended for his station on their power, who was strictly a

dependent, and _who might be set aside whenever a favourable opportunity

occurred_.” The _Sic jubeo_ of the Virgin Queen was, of course,

decisive. The bastard was declared the lawful heir; and the consequence

was a rebellion on the part of Shane. In this rebellion the chieftain

was unfortunate, and the whole possessions, both of Shane and Matthew,

were confiscated. “In order,” says Parnell, “to divert Shane, the

territory was reputed Matthew’s; and in order to get rid of Matthew’s

claim, the territory was confiscated as Shane’s.”[19] Meanwhile,

however, the Queen had won golden opinions in Ireland for her reception

of the most popular of Irish chiefs. The gates of absenteeism were now

thrown most seducingly open. The track was already beaten down which led

from the desolated banks of the Shannon to the pavilioned shores of the

Thames. Men, whose national failing was a sanguine credulity not

untouched with personal vanity, whose infirmity of temperament was a

reckless impetuosity, and whose weariness of suffering caught at every

change as a relief, now first began to find new hopes for their country

and themselves springing up in the “primrose path of dalliance” which

conducted them to the British court, and placed them in personal contact

with a woman and a queen--with one who, unlike her savage delegates in

Ireland, received them “with tenderness, and dismissed them with

favour.” The baubles given by a royal hand, and displayed at Shane’s

Castle, were pledges to the followers of O’Neil that the heart of the

Queen was of another policy from the counsels of her ministers. This

characteristic credulity is not even yet abated by experience. A

flattering reception of the Roman Catholic bishops, and a ribbon

bestowed on a Roman Catholic peer, led the sanguine Irish to draw a

similar conclusion respecting the politics of George IV. A mandate,

therefore got up in the form of a slight accusation, but considered by

the accused as an invitation, brought the O’Rourke chief or prince of

Brefny promptly and inconsiderately to the feet of the fair sovereign

who had issued it.

This gallant Irishman, as renowned for his personal beauty as for his

turbulence, had long been a favourite theme of complaint in the

despatches of the Irish deputies. Even his personal influence, and the

splendid endowments out of which it arose, were brought as damning

proofs against him. These also may have induced the Queen to judge for

herself; for the handsome absentee was received like O’Neil with a show

of tenderness, though not, alas! like him, “dismissed with favour.”

While history has briefly thrown off the facts of his summons, to court

his detention, and his unexpected execution, tradition has woven his

story in the many-coloured web of her own romantic loom; and though the

catastrophe of the tale, which still circulates in the neighbourhood of

his ruined castle, attests the ignorance or the love of the marvellous

of those who invented and circulated it; still there is a dovetailing of

the old Irish _Shanaos_ with historic record, which shows that _si cela

n’étoit pas vrai, c’étoit bien vraisemblable_.

“A wild story concerning O’Rourke,” says the author of the History of

the Irish Bards, “wanders about the County of Leitrim. O’Rourke was a

powerful and turbulent chieftain of this country in the reign of

Elizabeth. The Queen invited him to London, making him, at the same

time, warm professions of honours and service, though she only intended,

by this invitation, to lead him into a kind of exile, in order to secure

his obedience. The ingenuous O’Rourke, duped by the Queen’s arts,

promised to comply. Before his departure, he assembled his vassals and

neighbours in the great hall of his castle, and entertained them with

all the splendour of the times.[20] This is the feast so humorously

described by Mac Gauran.

“On O’Rourke’s arrival at Whitehall, the Queen was ready to receive him.

The elegant symmetry of his person, and his noble aspect, struck her

Majesty, and she secretly determined to rank him with her choicest

favourites. A sumptuous apartment was allotted him in the palace, and a

train of domestics were ordered to attend him. One night, a female

tapped at his door, and was readily admitted; but she retired before the

morning broke. The lady continued her visits for several nights, always

retiring about the same hour. O’Rourke’s curiosity was awakened and he

often urged her, but in vain, to disclose her name. At length he

discovered, by the light of the moon, a ring on one of her fingers,

which he observed with strict care, in the hope that it would lead to a

discovery. Next day espying the identical ring on her Majesty’s finger,

he unfortunately insinuated to her that he had discovered his fair

visitor. The following night an assassin was employed to punish him for

his idle curiosity.” The public execution of O’Rourke is however on

historical record.[21]

The fate of O’Neil, O’Rourke, and of O’Connor, who, to his own eternal

disgrace,[22] had been lured over to the English court, was not

calculated to encourage others, or to bring absenteeship into fashion.

Even those, who from long sufferings, harassed spirits, and subdued

energies, were desirous of peace and forgiveness at the expense of

independence, were still afraid, from experienced treachery, “to come

in,” as the phrase was; and were unwilling to absent themselves from the

fearful security of their woods and mountains, to which they were

romantically attached.

Lord Deputy Mountjoy, in a curious letter to the English council,

observes that “all the Irish that are now obstinate, are so only out of

their diffidence to be safe in forgiveness. They have the ancient

swelling of liberty of their countrymen to work on, and they fear to be

rooted out, and have their old faults punished upon particular

discontents.”

The plunder of Shane O’Neil, who, attainted, and driven beyond the pale

of law and of humanity, died a miserable death, did not satisfy those

who had benefited by his ruin. There was something too terrible to be

endured in the name of these fierce toparchs of the North, who were

still crowned in their stone chair, “with heaven for their canopy and

earth for their footstool;” and when the young and gallant Hugh O’Neil,

the last of his race, worthy of their illustrious descent, started up to

claim his inheritance, his death or his absenteeship (a political

decease) were the alternatives proposed to themselves by those who had

so largely profited by the confiscation of the immense property of his

family. “In an Irish parliament,” says Morrison, “O’Neil put up his

petition, that by virtue of letters patent granted to his grandfather,

his father, and their heirs, he might there (in parliament) have the

place of Earl of Tyrone, and be admitted to his inheritance. The title

and place were granted him:” but the inheritance was “reserved for the

Queen’s pleasure;” for the obtaining whereof, Sir John Perrot, (Lord

Deputy,) upon O’Neil’s promise of a great rent to be reserved to the

crown, gave him letters of recommendation into England. There he well

knew how to humour the court; for in the year 1587 he got the queen’s

letters patent for the earldom of Tyrone without any reservation of the

rent he had promised.

Whatever was O’Neil’s secret for “humouring the court,” great efforts

were made to fix him there as a permanent absentee; and the queen (who

at the same time had the young and unfortunate Earl of Desmond shut up

in the Tower[23]) gave O’Neil a troop of horse, a pension of a thousand

marks, and such proofs of her personal favour, as might have subdued a

less energetic mind, and abated a less deep-seated feeling of patriotism

and independence. But the young Irish Hercules soon became weary of the

court of his middle-aged Omphale. He sought “_to do her Majesty

service_” in Ireland by his influence over his countrymen, rather than

to submit to the bondage which he foresaw awaited his protracted

residence in England. “He lived,” says Morrison, “sometimes in Ireland

and much at the court of England:” yet by degrees he abandoned the

English court altogether; and, resuming his natural position in Ireland

as Earl of Tyrone, he contrived to preserve the good opinion of his

countrymen even while acting for the queen, “with all the alacrity of a

faithful subject.”

The reappearance of O’Neil in Ireland, his loyalty, and the queen’s

favour, threw the Irish government into utter consternation; and the

Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam, upon the execution of M‘Mahon (who was put to

death for an offence committed before the law which declared it capital

had been enacted) let fall some speeches against the Earl of Tyrone

(says Morrison) notwithstanding his late services,[24] “which speeches

coming to the Earl’s ears, were, as he afterwards said, the first causes

which _moved him to misdoubt his safety_, and to stand upon his defence,

now first combining with O’Donnel and other lords of the north, to

defend their honour, estates, and liberties.” The horrors which ensued

during a civil war of ten years’ duration, and which laid waste what

Lord Verulam calls “the most miserable and desolate nation on the face

of the earth,” produced the most effectual species of absenteeship; for

it sent out of the world, those that were not driven by any other means

out of the country; exterminating more than a third of the native

population!

The queen, however, says Bacon, “sought not an extirpation, but a

reduction;” but such was the _reduction_, that at the end of the war,

when Lord Mountjoy received the submission of a few “well-disposed

chiefs,” he _disposed_ of the others in a very summary way, “and by

fire, famine, or sword, weakened or ruined most of those who still

continued obstinate.” Still, however, the master-blow of this deputy

(who was after all one of the best Irish viceroys who served under the

Tudors) was the ruin of the once magnanimous and invincible O’Neil.

Having “taken the most of his fortresses, and what perhaps was more

mortifying to him, having broken in pieces the chair of stone, wherein

for many centuries the O’Neils of his family had been invested with more

than kingly authority, he obliged the unfortunate chief “to tender his

submission on his knees before the Lord Deputy and the council, and in

the presence of a great assembly; whereupon the Lord Deputy, in the

Queen’s name, promised the Earl for himself and his followers her

majesty’s gracious pardon.” Is it wonderful that in the ensuing reign

the O’Neils and the O’Donnels fled for ever from the scene of their

sufferings and humiliation; or that having chosen Spain as the goal of

their permanent absenteeship, they should have arrived there, only to

die of broken hearts?

Remote as are the times, the events of which are here so slightly

touched,--unfixed, capricious and despotic as were the government and

the laws,--rude, wild, weak and disorganized as was the state of

society,--yet, through the obscurity and confusion which hung over the

neglected annals of the day, it is evident that absenteeism, sometimes

encouraged or enforced by the English policy, was foreign to the

national habits and natural temperament of the Irish; and that the

aristocracy of the country were more than any other wedded to their

native land by natural affection, by family pride, by power, by

religion, and by every feeling and every prejudice which brightens or

shadows the mixed and imperfect condition of humanity. Hitherto

emigration had been the result of necessity or of despair; but it was

reserved for the Stuarts, Ireland’s direst foes, the flatterers of her

foible, and the enemies of her rights, to give a spell to absenteeism,

which even the policy and the despotism of the Tudors could not lend to

it. When the rude home of the Irish had by the sanguinary crusades of

Elizabeth been rendered no longer endurable, the Stuarts held out a lure

and presented a blandishment which suffering humanity could not resist;

and under an impulse, consecrated by a mistaken sense of loyalty and

chivalrous devotion, the long-enduring Irish rushed from the dreariness

of their desolate abodes, and thronged to a court where they fancied

they saw the representative of their native kings, seated on the throne

of their foreign tyrants.

The drivelling and despotic pedant, James, with the true family instinct

towards power, sought to win over that portion of his subjects whose

religion preached “passive obedience and the divine right of kings,” and

with whom he had so deeply tampered in the reign of his predecessor. On

his coming to the throne, he loaded the Irish with favours, while he

withheld rights; but with a disingenuous and stupid policy, secretly

counteracting the intentions of his own council, he privately led the

Irish to an open assumption of religious privileges, which he permitted

his ministers in Ireland to oppose, not only by remonstrance and

proclamation, but by “fire and sword.” To ingratiate himself still

further with the Irish gentry, and to break down whatever yet remained

of devotion to their country, or of “the old swelling of liberty,”

inherited from their fathers, he invited the most distinguished among

them to his court; where, “graciously received by the king,” and

incontinently ridiculed by the courtiers, they obtained the honour of

being made the heroes of a court masque, in which the sarcastic

laureate, Jonson, has handed down to posterity their devotion to “_the

king’s sweet faish_,” and the melancholy fact that they danced “_a

fadan_” for the amusement of “_King Yamish_;” who, as the arch-patron of

all buffoonery, doubtless chuckled over the degrading exhibition. How

many Irish _absentees_ have since danced “_the fadan_,” for the

amusement of mystifying royalty![25]

Thus prepared, by being “brayed as in a mortar” at home, and at once

degraded and flattered abroad, the Irish nobility but too willingly lent

themselves to the allurements held out by Charles the Second; (the

falsest of all their royal friends;) and from the epoch of the

Restoration absenteeship became a voluntary habit. It was then that what

has been called the characteristic virtue of the Irish, became the

source of one of their peculiar vices; and that the feeling of loyalty

which had led them to follow the king in his misfortunes, and to embrace

his almost hopeless cause in many a distant land, now once more lured

them from their own, to “share the triumph and partake the gale” of his

prosperity. The habits of a great capital and a gay court confirmed

their taste for emigration, and excited a disgust for their native land,

which became, in the end, as fatal to their interests as it was

destructive of their patriotism. Then absenteeism became a species of

national malady, a disease, infinitely more grievous in its effects than

that terrible pestilence, which, a little before, in ravaging the

population of Ireland, confined its mortal epidemia to a season and a

generation.[26]

Absenteeism was no longer limited to the harassed Catholic gentlemen or

loyal cavaliers, who came to seek the price of their sacrifice and their

fidelity at the exchequer of royal gratitude, and found it, like that of

the nation, closed by a fraudulent bankruptcy. The wealthy and the

noble, the Protestant and the Papist, the English by blood, and the

Scotch patentees; in a word, all who could afford to fly, now hastened

to a court, where for a time an Irish mistress and an Irish minister

held the ascendant; and where the Ormondes, the Ossorys, and the

Villars, exchanged the honourable retreat of their own beautiful

residences in Ireland, for the entresol of a royal villa at Newmarket,

or “a lodging” in the harem of Whitehall.[27] Titles, and places, and

pensions, and privileges, were then scattered among the Irish nobility,

and became the premium of absenteeism; paying the sacrifice of

patriotism in one sex, and of honour in the other. The talent, beauty,

and virtue, which, if concentrated at home, might have redeemed and

adorned the country from whence they were drawn, now served but to

increase the sum of elegant profligacy in that region, whose very

atmosphere was as fatal to manly independence, as it was to female

purity. Ireland, thus abandoned by the heads of her noble families,

deserted by her rank, her talent, her beauty, and her education, pouring

out the “_profits of the land to those who refunded nothing_,”--unhappy

Ireland, during the whole of the reign of Charles II. exhibited the most

deplorable picture of a country left a prey to strangers, to

undertakers, to patentees, to delegated powers, and official despotism;

and of a society which, false in its position, and divested of all those

ties and combinations which bind man to man, was totally destitute of

every element that confers the strength of political cohesion, and

disseminates the advantages of moral civilization.

In the midst of this anti-social chaos, every act of the legislature

served to render the atoms of the system more jarring and discordant,

until finally “the _Act of Settlement_,” by unsettling every thing and

rendering “confusion worse confounded,” added insult to injury, and

multiplied both the causes and the effects of absenteeism to the opulent

of all sects. The country was now more than ever given up to a

particular faction, which made its powerful stand on the heights of

ascendancy, under the sanction of a king who, in a great degree, owed

his life and throne to those whom that ascendancy was to reduce to

slavery and ruin.[30] It was at this period, more than any other, that

the stale devices of Catholic conspiracies and Popish plots were

resorted to, as a means of startling a distant ignorant legislature into

new acts of rigour, which, by crushing all that remained to be crushed,

by forfeitures and penalties, was to elevate a factious minority of the

nation to the supremacy of power and wealth.

The English Parliament, frightened, or pretending to be so, by the state

of things in Ireland, published a proclamation “for the apprehension and

prosecution of all Irish rebels,” at a moment when Ireland had sealed by

her best blood her devotion to the reigning dynasty; and the King, in

the face of his pledged honour and royal promise, excluded from the act

of indemnity (which was shortly after passed) more than two thirds of

his Irish subjects, who had alone been faithful to him, when all else

were false. While calumny and misrepresentation were thus working the

destruction of Ireland abroad, there were none at home to “remonstrate,”

as in the time of Elizabeth and James; none to protect or vindicate the

national character, or to raise the dark veil, which the cupidity of

domestic and predatory enemies had dropped over the injuries, the worth,

and the misfortunes of the country. It is still more lamentable to add,

that some of the most illustrious of the absentees, who haunted the

Court as dependants, or influenced the Cabinet as counsellors, found it

their account to sanction the misrepresentations, and to perpetuate a

state of things by which the noble renegadoes were to be themselves the

ultimate gainers. It is the effect of absenteeship to harden the heart

against all the precious sympathies of patriotism, and it has ever been

the practice of absentees to magnify and circulate the rumour of those

national disorders which arise in part out of their own desertion of

their native land, and which they suppose might offer a reason, if not

an excuse, for their abandonment of the soil and its interests.[31]

The times, however, changed with the men, and the short reign of the

unfortunate bigot James II. was pregnant with new and important events

for Ireland. At the first temporary turn of the scale in Irish politics,

absenteeism, which could scarcely increase, certainly did not diminish.

By this change, the nation at large gained little; and the mean ambition

of the nobility, who accepted power and place without one feeling of

patriotism or sympathy for the country, was soon nipped in the bud, and

for ever blasted with the fortunes of the monarch, on whose favour it

was founded.[32] The Irish gentry supported the cause of despotism and

bigotry in vain; and the impetuous imbecility of James served only to

hasten that ruin, which public opinion had so deservedly prepared for

him and his family. The mistaken adherence of the people to so bad a

cause, was, in some measure redeemed by the disinterested fidelity with

which they continued to serve that family in its adversity, which in

prosperity had always repaid their services with ingratitude. It was the

Irish (the ultra-royalists of all times) who, during the dark fortunes

of the worthless _protégé_ of the Bourbons, clung to him, when all else

deserted him. They manned his navy, recruited his army, replenished his

coffers, and took their stand around his person on their native soil;

and when they saw him the first to fly,[33] they still erected his torn

standard, and rallied in his cause,[34] paying the penalty of their

generous but misapplied devotion to a bigot and a tyrant, by utter ruin,

and eternal exile. The outlawry and confiscations of 1688 drove near

four thousand Irishmen of family into a dreary and perpetual

absenteeism, and sent them to dole out for a pitiful hire, in the cause

of oppression in other countries, the same valour, and the same spirit,

which their fathers had displayed in support of the liberty of their

own.

The sale of the estates of these unfortunate and involuntary

absentees,[35] under the authority of the English parliament, changed a

large portion of the Irish population, and introduced a new race of

landed proprietors, whose interest it was _to stay at home_. The tide of

absenteeship received a powerful check from the necessity of

circumstances. Those Irish Catholics, who had escaped detection, or were

exempt from suspicion, retired to their remote patrimonial domains, and

sought safety in obscurity; hoping, by remaining peaceably at home, to

escape the notice of a government which had sprung out of a revolution

they had so lately opposed. The Protestants likewise found it their

interest to remain the vigilant guardians of the new possessions they

had recently acquired, and of the old, which they had so bravely

protected. All parties were either impoverished or unsettled; and few

had the means, if they had the desire, to remove from a scene of ferment

and desolation, to one of security and enjoyment. For the Irish of any

sect or race, there was then no resting-place.

While England gained every thing by a revolution, which she owed to the

moral and political education acquired during a century of struggle for

civil rights and religious freedom, Ireland lost nearly all she had left

to lose through her deficiency in these endowments, resulting from many

centuries of anarchy and misrule. The picture, sketched by a

master-hand, of the condition of affairs at this singular epoch, is full

of a fearful and melancholy interest. “By the total reduction of the

kingdom of Ireland in 1691,” says Burke, “the ruin of the native Irish,

and in a great measure of the first race of the English, was completely

accomplished. The new interest was settled with as solid a stability as

any thing in human affairs can look for. All the penal laws of that

unparalleled code of oppression which were made after the last event,

were manifestly the effects of national hatred and scorn towards a

conquered people, whom the victors delighted to trample upon, and were

not at all afraid to provoke. They were not the effects of their fears,

but of their security. They who carried on this system looked to the

irresistible force of Great Britain for their support in their acts of

power. They were quite certain that no complaints of the natives would

be heard on this side of the water, with any other sentiments than those

of contempt and indignation. Their cries served only to augment their

torture. Machines which could answer their purposes so well must be of

an excellent contrivance. Indeed, at that time, in England, the double

name of the complainants, Irish and Papists, (it would be hard to say

singly which was the most odious,) shut up the hearts of every one

against them. Whilst that temper prevailed in all its force to a time

within our memory, every measure was pleasing and popular, just in

proportion as it tended to harass and ruin a set of people who were

looked upon as enemies to God and man; and, indeed, as a race of bigoted

savages, who were a disgrace to human nature itself.”[36]

In spite, however, of religious intolerance[37] and civil

disqualification--of statutes which render commerce a crime, and laws

which made industry penal[38]; of abuses of power numerous under

William, and quadrupled under the last of the Stuarts and the first of

the Brunswicks, still something like a counterpoise was found to balance

these political evils in the _home residence of the educated gentry_,

and in the political bustle and activity of an Irish Parliament. As soon

as the positive calamities of war and confiscation ceased, as soon as an

approach was made to European habits and policy, and industry was

permitted to find a scope and a reward for its exertions, the nation

made a sudden and a rapid progress in civilization and comfort, simply

through the efficiency of its own resources, and the demands of its own

market. It was in vain that the talismanic words “Irishman” and “Papist”

were employed to arm passion and prejudice against the country; it was

in vain that commercial jealousy threw shackles round its infant

manufactures. In spite of these and many other obstacles, the moral

strength of a country always distinguished for the natural endowments of

its population,[39] rose superior to the cruel pressure of its political

inflictions; and the domestic activity and intellectual improvement of

the people--slow and limited as they appear, when compared with the

advances of the sister kingdom--proceeded with a rapidity little short

of miraculous, under so stultifying a system of legislation and

government. It was then that the light of national genius concentrated

its long-scattered rays to a point, and shining steadily from its proper

focus, threw out those inextinguishable sparks of moral lustre,

“----Which are wont to give

Light to a world and make a nation live.”

It was then that the powerful collision of active, ardent, and energetic

minds produced that brilliant burst of talent which, for something more

than a century, flung over the political darkness of the land a

splendour to which her struggles and her misfortunes served only to give

a stronger relief and more brilliant effect. It was then that, after

ages of mental depression, which the song of the Irish bard but deepened

into a more poetical sadness,[40] the Irish intellect broke out, like

the Irish rebellion, “threescore thousand strong,” when none expected or

were prepared for the startling and splendid irruption. The old mart of

learning was re-opened to the erudite of Europe, as in those times, when

if a sage was missing, it was said “_emandatus est ad disciplinam in

Hibernia_;” and the rich stream of native humour which, like a caverned

river, had hitherto kept the “noiseless tenor of its way,” darkened by

impending shadows, now rushed forth with the rapidity of a torrent,

pure, sparkling, and abundant, at the first vent afforded to its

progress. Science and philosophy now first raised their altars amidst

the monkish monuments of an antiquated institution, and benefited the

world by theories and by experiments originated in a land where public

opinion and private faith were still struggling under the ban of legal

proscription.[41] England then opened a running account with Ireland for

dramatic contributions when her own resources had, by being too largely

drawn upon, nearly become bankrupt;[42] and literary Europe stood

indebted to Irish wit, fancy, and humour, for the richest treats, which

render the leisure of the learned delectable, and the amusement of the

idle instructive.[43]

Even the arts, in these stirring times of social concentration, awakened

from their long and deadly slumbers; and the slowly reviving school of

painting in England received some of its most noted disciples from

Ireland, a country so little adapted, by its miseries and its

commotions, to the cultivation of the most tranquil and meditative of

intellectual pursuits.[44] At this time, too, the Irish muse found a

willing and a worthy priestess in one of the fair daughters of the

land,[45] where her temples had so long been closed; and “the mother of

sweet singers,” awakened by the genius of national melody, beheld her

sons

“Thronging round her magic cell,”

as in the days of the Mayos[46] and the O’Connors.[47]

The triumphs of Carolan, the last of the Firsgealaighthes or Irish

Troubadours, were followed by those of Handel and Piccini;[48] and

though the wild sweet tones of the Irish harp were still occasionally

heard in the pauses of the Messiah and of the elegant Armida, still,

taste, improving with the developement of the art, soon rendered the

Italian and German schools of music the exclusive study in Ireland; and

they excited an enthusiasm which well belonged to a people who, in all

their wretchedness and degradation, had found in music a vehicle for

their feelings and their passions, for their deep-seated indignation,

and their long-meditated revenge. St. Bridget now hid her diminished

head in her “cell of the oak;[50] while St. Cecilia saw more tapers

lighted at her shrine in the Irish capital than ever illumined her dusky

chapel in the Trastevere at Rome. Music halls were built for public

concerts; and musical societies, assuming the importance and dignities

of corporate bodies, were formed out of the amateur[51] and professional

talent of the country; while the conciliating genius of harmony,

refusing that “to a party which was meant for mankind,” devoted its

divine powers to smoothing political austerities, reknitting the social

affections, and promoting the first of all human virtues--charity.[52]

Oh! surely this was the true purpose for which the Divinity breathed

into the soul of man that fine susceptibility to the mystic charm of

harmony, which lulls the harsher passions, and substitutes the

excitement of delicious sensations for the bitter feelings and harassing

emotions which the cross purposes of life call hourly into existence.

Who now in Ireland but may look back with regret to the philharmonic

societies “of other times,” from the magic of whose strains a shelter

rose for the wretched, and in whose bands men of all parties blended the

“concord of sweet sounds.” Who that in the present day has witnessed in

the capital of Ireland, the different and dark purposes to which music

and musical society have been perverted, but must lament that the

sweetest of the arts should have been pressed into the service of civil

dissension--should have fulfilled the purposes of party intrigue, and

gratified the malice of a narrow-souled faction. Who but must shudder to

perceive its influence directed to rousing the irritable fibre, and

stirring up the bile of political malady; to exciting by its “musical

cheers” the passions of the powerful few against the suffering many, and

fomenting by its choicest harmonies the discord of social disunion and

the dissonance of party hatred. Spirits of Handel and of Arne, of

Calcott and of Mozart, how little did ye dream in your philosophy that

your heaven-inspired strains should serve as the war-whoop of faction,

the death-song of domestic peace, and national confraternity!!

While music excited in Ireland the same enthusiasm, and was cultivated

with more science, than when “in early Greece she sung,” the drama

partook of the triumph. Two royal theatres and an Italian

opera-house[53] could scarcely supply the cravings of the public taste;

and an audience, noted for its critical acumen, gave to the Irish stage

a classical character, and developed a competition which drew forth

candidates for dramatic fame even from the higher classes of society,

conferring that respectability upon the members of the stage, which

ought at all times to belong to a profession which holds so decided an

influence over the morals and the manners of a nation.[54]

But though the circumstances of the times rendered the home residence of

the Irish gentry more permanent than it has since ever been, or perhaps

ever was before, the fashion universally prevailed of sending the youth

of good family to make the grand tour; and the young and travelled

aristocracy, the Fitzgeralds, the Caulfields, the Kirwans, the O’Neils,

the Blakes, came back, no less to improve the tastes of their country,

than to defend her cause, and to enlarge the sphere of her energies. A

variety of refined amusements and elegant enjoyments, hitherto unknown

in Ireland, came in their suite; which while they gave employment and

food to the lowly and the industrious, tended to disseminate that taste

for factitious pleasures, and that craving for refined gratifications,

which though not in themselves the efficient causes of civilization, are

in no small degree favourable to its developement.[55] Pleasure, lured

to the Irish shores from distant regions, planted her gay standard, and

raised her brilliant pavilions in the capital, at that time crowded with

the wealthy and the educated. The ridottos of the music hall, with their

fantastic arrangements and sylvan scenery,[56] recalled the similar

festivities of the Italian carnival. Palaces succeeded to the cumbrous

mansions of the seventeenth century; and Charlemont house, with its

beautiful architecture, its splendid library, and invaluable

collections, still preserved in all their integrity by the present noble

owner, stands a singular monument not only of the pure taste and

magnificent spirit of an Irish nobleman, who had even higher claims to

the admiration and respect of his country, but of the genius of the

times, and the prosperity--the short-lived prosperity--of the land in

which such a private edifice was raised. The villas of Tuscany and

Lombardy were repeated along the shores of a bay that wanted only a

Vesuvius to rival that of Naples; and the names which these pretty

villas still bear, recal the travelled tastes of their elegant

founders.[57] Private theatricals (the dramatis personæ taken from the

red book) were got up in the castles of the O’Neils and the halls of the

Butlers; and the public assemblies, held under the newly-raised dome of

the Rotunda, were types of the _casino nobile_ of Florence and

Bologna;[58] while the Sunday evening promenades in its illuminated

gardens contributed to the funds of a blessed charity, and bestowed that

health and those spirits, without which the kindlier feelings are too

frequently blighted, and the generous propensities absorbed in a

querulous and fretful egoism.[59]

The Irish press!--and who that now knows the capital of Ireland, and

beholds its utter incompetency to support the publication of even _one_

trifling periodical work, will believe that Ireland once _had a

press_!--the Irish press then teemed with native literary productions;

which if as mere “_pieces de circonstance_,” thrown off at a heat, they

might sometimes want the higher finish of more elaborated composition,

were still stamped with the ardour of the national spirit, and “faithful

to its fires.” The frequent and “keen encounter of the wits” upon great

questions, produced an animated competition, which even the

statesman-like sobriety of English viceroys could not always resist. The

Draper’s letter of Lord Chesterfield, (an imitation of Swift,) and the

political caricatures of Lord Townshend, written at a later period, were

proofs that Ireland was not always governed by the dull and the dogged,

and that her metropolis once boasted of a society which _obliged_ the

representatives of majesty as well as the representatives of the people

to cultivate the suffrages of the public, by means never addressed to an

uncivilized or an illiterate community. Politics and polemics then alike

fell to the discussion of humour and talent. The public journals, though

few, were fair; their editors were responsible both by their property

and their personal consideration; and their contributors were frequently

the most brilliant members of Irish society, the most learned sons of

the Irish alma mater. Swift, Dr. Sheridan, Lucas, Flood, Burgh,

Yelverton, Courtenay, Jephson, Bishop Marley, Grattan, Curran, and

others equally notable, if not equally noted, contributed successively a

portion of their luminous intellects to illustrate the pages of that

mighty engine of public feeling--the PERIODICAL PRESS. Whatever side was

advocated,--the country or the court, patriotism or power,--it does not

appear that any journal was set up on a merely sordid principle, or an

utter disregard of all truth and decency. There was then no waylaying

with indiscriminate ruffianism the feelings of private individuals, no

exhibition of the sacred details of the domestic life of political

characters, as a means of existence to some outcast of society, who

wanted the courage to seek a less dishonourable bread on the public

highway. For when the genuine and educated gentry of Ireland, her

hereditary senators and native legislators, made up the larger portion

of the reading public of her capital, a journal edited by the nefarious

and the base, by the hired assassin of reputation or the paid pander of

ribald passions, would have been hunted down with one common feeling of

national indignation and manly contempt. Where is the land, so lost in

its degradation, so insensible to all its higher interests, as to endure

that such a “damning witness” should go forth to the world and bear

testimony to its moral, social, and literary depravity? Alas that there

should be one! Alas that the land of wit and feeling should furnish

forth readers, even from its high and official classes, to reward and

encourage the instruments of its own disgrace! Alas for the country,

where the hired servants of the government club their quota to propagate

the rancorous overflowings of the vilest and most antisocial passions;

where the ordained ministers of religion, subscribe for the

dissemination of the grossest and most mischievous falsehoods; where the

magistrate chuckles privately over the libel he is publicly bound to

punish; and where to be pre-eminent in villainy and matchless in

audacity, is the short road to command sympathy and ensure subsistence.

But if a reduction of absenteeism, if the permanent residence of the

major part, of the wealth, the nobility, and above all, and more

precious than all, of the EDUCATION of the country, produced these

blessed effects, the greater good, the “last best gift,” which

congregated interests and intellects could bestow on a community, Public

Spirit, fell like dew in the desert upon the renovating nation. Men who

had long learned to feel and to think, now, in the consciousness and

confidence of their associated strength, first ventured to speak and to

act: at once inspiring and inspired, they spoke as prophets and acted as

patriots. The talent of the free suddenly burst into existence, as if by

a divine miracle in the land of the enslaved; and eloquence, the

inherent characteristic of the nation, which had occasionally broken

forth in the rude but exciting harangues of the O’Donnels and the

O’Neils, now shone out brilliantly, with a lustre which Athens in her

best, and Rome in her greatest days, scarcely surpassed. Political

oratory and political knowledge, proceeding from the same cause and

bearing on the same point exhibited Ireland in a new aspect to the

wondering world; and the names of Molyneux,[60] Ponsonby,[61] Prior,[62]

Boyle,[63] Connolly,[64] Tottenham,[65] Lucas, Charlemont, Burke,

Grattan, Curran--names which are now but sounds--will retain to the

latest posterity their mystical and magic influence, as the signs of

times and events, the glory of a nation’s history, and as the evoquing

spells of that genius, which awakens liberty and watches over a nation’s

happiness. Oh! these were times to live in and men to live among--when

the capital of the kingdom was something better than a garrison or an

assize town! when its fashionable assemblies were not thrown upon the

eleemosinary contributions of barracks and boarding-schools, of military

exquisites who “_never dance_,” and harmless young gentlemen who do

nothing else! These were times, when the men were all at home, and their

spirits all abroad! when the rush from the senate was sure to fill the

drawing-room; and they who boldly fought in the one for the liberties of

their country, came to lay their own liberty at the feet of beauty in

the other. These were times, when even love and law went forth arm in

arm together from the inns of court, to _that_ court, where the special

pleading of counsel rarely failed to win the cause, where even losses

were victories, and where the inconsiderate heart of the young legal

aspirant selected its client for life without reference to politics,

place, pension, or promotion. Then Leinster-house, and Charlemont-house,

and Powerscourt-house, and Waterford-house, and Moira-house, and an

hundred other splendid “_houses_” of the resident nobility, were open to

the wit, the talent, the literature, and the gallantry of the country.

Then, the cells of the University, silent as the tomb during the

studious day, echoed at night to the song, the laugh, the epigram, or

the jest of gay and brilliant spirits destined to come forth and enchant

society by their social and colloquial powers; while they defended the

independence of their country by their eloquence and patriotism. These

were times when the charms of the lovely Gunnings, the more lovely

Munroes,[66] and an hundred others of their lovely successors, were

embalmed for posterity in the verses of contemporary poets; and when the

amatory sonnets of one of the first orators of the age were not deemed

inferior to his speeches at the bar, or his orations in the senate.[67]

These were times when the young ladies of the capital did not wait for

the _marching in_ of the divisions of a regiment, as their only chance

of _marching out_ of the ranks of celibacy; for absenteeship was then

but temporary: the young nobility and gentry, if they travelled and

flirted abroad, came back to love and to marry at home; since, “where’er

they roamed, whatever climes” they saw, they still saw nothing fairer

than the fair they left behind them. These were times, which, when

recalled, like Ossian’s Song of Sorrow, are both “pleasing and mournful

to the soul.”

But to return. When penal statutes and all that is intended by the false

policy of shallow and self-interested legislators to disqualify man for

the knowledge and assertion of his political rights, still continued to

check the progress of civil liberty in Ireland, the combined effects of

a portion of the liberal and educated resident gentry were found

sufficient to make head against a government which the sternest upholder

of English power, and he too an Irish chancellor,[68] declared “was

enough to crush any nation upon earth;” and which one of the wisest and

best philanthropists of that or any age[69] has defined to have been

“such a combination of rapine, treachery, and violence as would have

disgraced the name of government in the most arbitrary country in the

world.” Other events, bearing upon the same point, tended at this epoch

to soften, if not to remedy the evils of that terrific code, which

disgraced England even more than it degraded Ireland.[70] While the

church militant in Ireland usurped a power in the persons of its

Protestant popes, the primates and archbishops, which smelt of the times

of the Beckets and the Wolseys,--while Boulter and Stone preserved their

own supremacy by their well-sustained system of dividing Ireland within

herself, and adding to her restrictions by fomenting her

discontents,--it _did_ happen that the necessity of circumstances

occasionally procured for the country a chief governor, whose personal

interests in the land from which he drew his maintenance and support,

awakened “some bowels for a poor relation,” or whose higher order of

genius and generalized views raised him above the level of the miserable

local politics, the petty cabals, and factious intrigues of that remote

and wretched spot which is, in position as in politics, the _cul de sac_

of civilized Europe. These happy incidents indeed were rare, and make

but a poor set-off in the balance, of vice-regal virtue and talent,

against the dulness, bigotry, and ostentatious pretension, which have so

often covered their Midas’ ears under the coronet of delegated sway.

It was under a Devonshire that the susceptible Irish, always led by

personal feelings, first began to rally with confidence and hope round a

government that seemed to abate in the execution, if not in the spirit

of the law, something of that sanguinary reign which had hitherto

chilled loyalty into despair; and the personal qualities of this great

Irish proprietor were productive of the most felicitous effects, at the

most fearful epoch in the reign of the house of Hanover. The Stuarts,

the abdicated, the Catholic Stuarts, had planted their standard on the

English and Scottish shores, and the English and the Scotch, to a

dangerous amount, rushed from all parts to support the principles of

Toryism, in the person of him who was the “brief abstract” of all

Toryism. Where then in this moment of frightful exigency, when empire,

liberty, and life were at stake, where then were those “_enfans de la

revolution_,” the Protestant princes of Brunswick, the defenders of the

faith of Luther, to look for the rally of defence, for the protection of

loyalty against Catholic oppression? It was to the native Irish, the

Catholic Irish! that England, in the face of her own savage laws,[71]

turned for aid against British rebellion; and while the Irish gentry of

all sects remained immutably true to their legitimate (or according to

modern doctrines their _illegitimate_) sovereign, the flower of the

Catholic population rushed forth to man the navy and recruit the army,

which was to make a stand against successful rebellion,--successful at

least for a time, in every part of the British islands save alone in

Ireland.

Still, however, in this moment of fearful exigency, when the old idols

of Irish devotion were again presenting themselves to a susceptible

people in all the charm of struggle and misfortune, something more than

the mild wisdom which the gentle blood of Cavendish has always produced,

was deemed necessary to watch over Catholic Ireland; and one was chosen

suited to meet the difficulties of the day, and to carry on that system

of conciliation begun by the Duke of Devonshire. This one was Philip

Stanhope Earl of Chesterfield, who, as the “Mirror of (Irish)

Magistrates,” in which succeeding chief governors of Ireland should

“dress themselves,” merits a particular notice.

This nobleman, who had been for ten years in opposition, was selected

more in necessity than in liking: and he with difficulty obtained an

audience of leave from reluctant Majesty, on his departure for his

viceroyalty. When he demanded in the closet, “his Majesty’s commands,”

he was coolly told that he had already received his instructions, and

was dismissed without any token of confidence or of courtesy. While the

ministry put him forward as an instrument of conciliation, and loaded

him with the responsibility of a difficult government, they wished to

retain in their own hands the substance of power, and to shackle him

with some creature of their own, in the character of secretary; but he

laughed at the intrigue, and in their despite chose for himself one,

whom he describes to his son as “a very pretty young fellow, who knew

nothing of business;” for he was determined to rule by himself, to see

with his own eyes, and to encounter no subaltern interference with the

system he chose to adopt. Such was the spirit in which Lord Chesterfield

entered on his arduous mission, and ascended the vice-regal throne of

Ireland, on which he was placed by that influence to which even kings

and ministers must sometimes submit,--the influence of circumstances!

Docile mediocrity, the ordinary qualification of an Irish Lord

Lieutenant, was now no longer adequate to meet the exigencies of the

hour, as in those times of comparative tranquillity, when any

stalking-horse of diplomacy might be led over the beaten course by some

self-sufficient political jockey with the name of chief secretary; who,

without the pageantry of the higher office, monopolized all its

patronage and exercised more than its powers. At this moment dangers

both internal and external called for qualities of a different order,

and the English government was driven to the desperate resource of

accepting the aid of great abilities, at the expense of abiding by the

decisions of untrammelled independence. Such was the moment at which

George the Second disdainfully appointed one of the cleverest men of his

empire to the government of Ireland; and to this involuntary election he

probably owed that he was not himself sent back “to give his little

senate laws” in his patrimonial estate of Hanover.

It was in vain that “Popery and the Pretender”[72] was the cry _mille

fois repeté_ in the ears of this new and singular Lord Lieutenant,--that

the old measures of the Boulters and the Stones were proposed as the

golden rules of vice-regal conduct,--that preachers from the pulpit

aroused the crusading spirit of intolerance against a sect beaten down

to the earth,--that the domineering party of a haughty ascendancy

assailed the audience-room of the Viceroy, and “stopped the chariot or

boarded the barge,” to teach him how to rule, to force him to recur to a

system beyond the rigour of the law, which enabled them to reign by

dividing, while it placed him on the list of mannikin lord lieutenants,

the wire-worked puppet of a bigoted faction. The acute, the elegant

Chesterfield, soon fathomed the depths of their ferocious feebleness,

and he played with the virulence he did not deign to wrestle with. When

the advocates of intolerance preached persecution, he answered their

counsels by an apotheghm and a _bon-mot_,--he quoted Cicero when they

cited Nassau,--he gave them parties for their politics,--suppers for

their sophistry, he forced them to swallow his measures with his

claret,--and he stopped the mouths of many with good dinners on whom

good arguments would have been thrown away. In a word, he knew them all,

he defied them all; and in despite of that party in the ministry which

supported an anti-national faction, he saved the wretched country they

were driving into a rebellion, which at that peculiar moment might have

separated Ireland for ever from the mother country.

By this personal combination of wisdom, humanity, and impartiality, Lord

Chesterfield preserved a Catholic population in the most perfect peace

and obedience, during the whole of that rebellion, which in Protestant

England and Presbyterian Scotland had nearly restored the Stuarts to the

throne they had forfeited by their blind and bigoted attachment to papal

institutions--a memorable example of the value of an enlarged philosophy

in governors, and of the disposition of the people to be grateful for

kindness in their rulers, of their proneness to yield a willing

obedience to authority, if encouraged by the slightest show of justice

and fair dealing in those whom chance has placed over them.

But narrow hearts and narrow intellects, impervious to the more generous

impulses of nature, and placing the whole force of government in the

scaffold and the bayonet--oppressing those they fear, and fearing those

they oppress--have too long exerted their baleful influence in

brutalizing and debasing the Irish nation into permanent anarchy,

creating those abuses, which they now plead in justification of their

own unpitying rigour: and if in rare and distant intervals the

patriotism and the kindly feelings of a Chesterfield have again found

themselves under the canopy of the viceregal throne, the oppressor and

the oppressed have alike been opposed to their beneficent activity. The

good which Chesterfield effected in times of difficulty and danger, can

now scarcely be hoped for even in the halcyon hour of peace: and should

the British empire be again involved in foreign conflict, Ireland,

unemancipated Ireland, might be urged to seek new destinies for herself

in an alliance from which she _might_ have something to hope, but from

which she could have nothing to fear more terrible than she has already

encountered during the ceaseless miseries of nearly six centuries. Of

this truth, harsh and repulsive as it may seem, no one who has studied

the subject can entertain a rational doubt. The example of America is

before the eyes of the people, and the hope delayed and the promise and

the pledge unredeemed lie deep in their hearts: restrictive and penal

laws, too severe even for occasional application, have become also

permanent on the statute book; famine and pestilence have grown almost

periodical in their visitations. From such premises what other

conclusion can be drawn? An influence behind the throne, and greater

than the throne, has chilled the sympathies and arrested the

outstretched hand of royalty; even the collective wisdom of the empire

has cowered before a party, and truckled to a faction; the cup of

reconciliation, though pledged by a sovereign, has been drugged with

poison; and a divided cabinet has distracted the country and paralyzed

the exertions of the only public functionary, who for years has

administered the laws of the country with any thing approaching to the

spirit of mercy and of fairness.

From the period of Lord Chesterfield’s administration, the effects

produced by the permanent residence of the Irish gentry, were felt in

that most blessed consequence, the developement of a public spirit. The

English in Ireland, says Burke, began to feel that they were

domiciliated, and had a country; and the Irish found that what was

technically called “the English interest,” was gradually fading before

one common and independent national will! It was in vain that one of the

belligerent chiefs of the church (always the fomentors of Irish discord)

still struggled to uphold a system which was ruin to the many and power

to the few. The proud churchman and servile courtier, the arrogant and

despotic primate of the day, was taught to feel that he had other times

and other men to deal with than those living when the country sunk under

the weight of Boulter’s iron crosier. It was in vain that he affected to

“_do the king’s business_,” (as he termed it) as other Protestant

Wolseys had done it; and openly avowed his intention of carrying every

government measure, _à coup de main_, and in spite of all constitutional

opposition; for he lived to see the Irish gentry arrayed against the

undue influence of despotic churchmen under the standard of an Irish

speaker! The Irish patriots, led on by the chief of the Irish

aristocracy,[73] and united with the middle and the mercantile classes,

formed but one caste in feeling and in effort to array public opinion,

against unconstitutional measures,[74] and to put down for ever the

direct and ruinous interference of ecclesiastical statesmen! The

government was now awakened to the danger of employing the zealous and

intemperate, by the resistance which the primate had roused into

activity; and Stone, struck off the list of privy counsellors, the

object of national hatred and party contempt, exhibited one more example

of the vanity of unfounded ambition, and the weakness of that policy

which is opposed to public virtue, and the plain rule of right.

The rapid progress which at this period public opinion and political

science were making, through the agency of a resident and educated

gentry, was so highly estimated, that an English Lord Lieutenant, (Lord

Harcourt,) as the most popular measure he could bring forward to

counteract the distasteful effect of other less gracious and salutary

acts, proposed on the part of government (1773) a tax on absentees!

Never was such a tax less called for; for the absentees were not in that

day in the proportion of one to an hundred, compared with those of the

present times. Yet the draining of the resources of Ireland in the

smallest proportion, the pouring forth of any modicum of native treasure

into foreign coffers, was considered as nothing less than high treason

to the country. The great English landholders of Ireland made a powerful

resistance to a tax which principally affected themselves; but the

majority by which the measure was rejected was so small[75] as to leave

no doubt of its popularity, and of the feelings of the public on the

subject.

Those feelings, whether founded or erroneous, were by no means

unnatural; and the government, on its part, has never been slow to

encourage and strengthen them. The greater portion of the absentee

property had fallen to the lot of its English possessors, by fraud or

violence, by legal quibbling or by open proscriptions; and under the

most favourable circumstances, the cultivators of that soil, which on

the general principles of right and justice they imagined still to be

their own property, must naturally have regarded with a jealous eye the

foreign intruders. But in a country so poor as Ireland, so divested of

all other means of making money beyond the cultivation of the soil, this

annual exportation of excessive and burthensome rents could not fail to

be viewed with great discontent.[76] In England at the present day, if

all the landed proprietors were to export themselves to the Continent,

and to spend their rents in its various capitals, their absence would

scarcely be felt, amidst the multiplied resources of commercial

activity. Wherever the lord of the soil abandoned his dwelling, an East

India Nabob, a money-broker, or a merchant, would stand forth ready to

occupy his station, and rule over his domains; and the sums expended

abroad, would rapidly find their way home, in increased demands for the

products of English industry. On the other hand, the _nouveaux riches_,

divested of hereditary pretensions and feudal prejudices, and more

deeply instructed in the true principles of political economy, would

afford less opposition to the reception and diffusion of the lessons of

experience; and would therefore be the more acceptable to the labouring

classes, than those who, trammelled in the prejudices of hereditary

consequence, obstinately stand still in knowledge, while all around them

is moving in advance. In Ireland, however, it has always been otherwise.

Land has been ever the only instrument of industry, and rent the only

source of accumulated capital. The landed proprietors, together with

their immediate dependants, the members of the learned professions, have

long formed exclusively the educated classes; and their expenditure has

produced the only stimulus which existed, to excite the petty commerce

and circumscribed industry, which in the country towns of Ireland

support half-a-dozen shopkeepers; who, dignified with the name of

merchants, fill the municipal offices and send representatives to

Parliament. When, therefore, these favourites of fortune, the landed

proprietors, expatriate themselves, their mansions are left silent and

desolate; and none remains behind to employ the tenantry, to spread

illumination, or to distribute justice, but agents, middle men, and the

clergy, whose _ex parte_ notions of right and wrong, whose different

creed and opposed pecuniary interests wholly unfit them for the civil

duties which are thus devolved upon them.

With such reasons for the unpopularity of absenteeism, the interests of

government in the prevalence of such a prejudice strongly conspire. When

the wretched condition of the country is made matter of general

declamation, the minister calls for specific abuses; and when a specific

abuse is dragged to daylight, and remedies are loudly demanded,

absenteeism is made a ready skreen to conceal the incapacity or

unwillingness to redress of the governing faction. Tithe abuses are met

by the charge of excessive rents and absentee consumption; corruption of

the magistracy is defended by the absence of independent justices of the

peace; and whatever is the evil to be averted, whatever the malpractice

to be reformed, the Absentees are the ready scapegoats for every

delinquent, and the plausible pretext for every forbearance.

Absenteeship, however, always founded in bad government, becomes ruinous

only as it co-operates with other and mightier evils proceeding from the

same cause. In a well-ordered community the number and influence of

those who eat the bread of idleness and enjoy the means of expatriation,

can never bear an overwhelming proportion to that of the industrious

citizens chained down to a spot by the habits and the necessities of

their laborious lives. Wherever this relative proportion is materially

deranged, there will be found much to alter in existing institutions. In

such a condition of things, a restraining tax is as futile as it is

unjust. Government exists but to protect property; and any law which

restrains the owner’s right of spending his money where he pleases,

operates a violence, which the most urgent necessity alone could

justify. On the other hand, to expect that a pecuniary mulct, of any

amount short of an absolute seizure of the entire rental, would keep

those at home, whom a sense of injustice, of insecurity, and of the

absence of educated and liberal intercourse (of all that makes life

endurable and wealth enjoyable) drives into exile, is to be utterly

ignorant of human nature, and of the habits and feelings of the

aristocratical part of the community.

To the pause which followed the commotions of 1745, succeeded an event

which belonged not to _one_ country or _one_ age, but to the great

history of mankind and to ages yet unborn! an event, which though it has

produced the most extraordinary and wide-spreading consequences on the

social condition, has not yet half worked out its mighty and

incalculable effects. The American Revolution,--the greatest explosion

that ever shook the complicated fabric of political abuses, the boldest

step which civilization has yet made _en avant_,--was felt in its

reverberations throughout all Europe; and even Ireland, remote,

isolated, and oppressed Ireland, returned some vibration to the shock!

England, amidst the host of ills which assailed her at this, the most

awful crisis of her history, already beheld the children of the land she

had so long oppressed, bursting their bonds and hailing with their

wonted “ten thousand welcomes,”[77] the hope of emancipation, which came

to them from the greatest and freest region of the earth. It was then

that a British minister, worked upon by his fears, or driven by his

necessities, granted a reluctant boon, for the purpose of winning back

the affections of an alienated people, whose co-operation he wanted, and

whose desertion he had but too just a cause to apprehend. It was then

that he admitted the Irish to rights for which during past ages they had

sued in vain; and flattered those with eulogies to whom he had hitherto

denied justice. It was not, therefore, wonderful, though it was new,

that when an Irish member in the British senate ventured to observe,

that “Ireland was the chief dependence of the British crown, and that it

behoved England to admit the Irish nation to the privileges of British

citizens,” there was not one dissentient voice to deny the fact, or

oppose the proposition;[78] and the bills which then passed the

Parliament for the relief of the Catholics, and for the opening of the

Irish trade, produced the usual effects of kindness on the human heart.

From that moment America promised, and Franklin wrote in vain. “If,”

says that patriotic philosopher,--the patriot of humanity, and the

philosopher of common sense!--in his celebrated letter to the people of

Ireland, “If the government whom you at home acknowledge, does not, in

conformity to its own interests, take off and remove every restraint on

your trade, commerce, and manufacture, I am charged to assure you that

means will be found to establish your freedom in the fullest and freest

manner; and as it is the ardent wish of America to promote, as far as

her other engagements will permit, a reciprocal commercial intercourse

with you, I can assure you that they will seek every means to establish

and maintain it.”

But Ireland had not recourse to a foreign power to reclaim her rights.

She placed her cause in the hands of her resident gentry: she committed

it in the senate to a Grattan, and in the field to a Charlemont! The

restrictions on trade, which America offered to break, were removed by

the exertions of Irish patriotism, supported by that force, which is

alone constitutional, a national militia! It was at this eventful epoch

of Irish regeneration, that the combined exercise of those native

energies to which, in a moment of exigency, a brave and unhappy people

never fail to resort, produced that bulwark of national independence,

the IRISH VOLUNTEERS; and a whole people, with arms in their hands, and

liberty in their hearts, stood forth the protectors of their native

land, which an unnatural government had thus exposed to danger and

seduction. Even England looked on with respect and gratitude at the

efforts of the devoted and loyal Irish, who, forgetful of all past

injuries, came forward no less in her cause than their own;[79] and when

the Irish volunteers presented themselves to the admiration of the

empire, organised into a compact and disciplined body, under their

illustrious chief the Earl of Charlemont, (whose name ever falls like

light upon the page it illustrates,) it was declared in the British

senate, by one whose words were then deemed as _prophet’s breathings_,

“that this great event resembled, intrinsically and substantially, the

glorious Revolution of England in 1688!”

This event, however, so glorious for the fame, and so profitable to the

interests and independence of Ireland, never could have occurred, if the

majority of the gentry, with their spirit, their wealth, their

influence, and their education, had not been a resident gentry! and if

there is one illuminated page in the dark story of Ireland’s misery! one

pause in her sufferings! it belongs to this proud and blessed moment,

when her people and their chiefs were armed, morally and physically, in

her defence; when her senate resounded to an eloquence as pure and

patriotic as the Forum ever echoed; when the private society of the

capital became proverbial for its wit and festivity; and when all tended

to, if it did not reach, the term of national prosperity and national

glory.

But alas! this moment of promise and splendour was transient as a dream,

and the bright effulgence of Irish patriotism, brilliant as the midnight

meteor, was as suddenly succeeded by a midnight darkness. Causes on

which it is now beside the purpose to dwell, paralysed the virtues, and

marred the hopes of the honest and the brave. Engines were put into

play, and agents into activity, to destroy or to sap the foundations of

national independence. Corruption and injustice recommenced their

suicidal career; the rebellion and the Union were got up, and succeeded

beyond the hopes of their authors; and from that epoch every evil which

can afflict humanity and degrade a nation has gathered to a foul and

purulent head; every sad succeeding year has been marked by some new

step towards social disorganization and national extinction.

“Scarcely had the law passed ratifying that great mischief--the

Union--(says one of the ablest, and what is yet more, one of the

honestest and most uncompromising writers on Irish affairs, of the

present or of any age) when Absenteeism, the predominant calamity of

Ireland, was fearfully accelerated. The chief proprietors fled from the

metropolis, as from an invading army; and the country affording neither

interest nor expectation, they expatriated themselves in shame, in

disgust, in anguish, in despair. A category of evils beset the

land.--Those who had entertained fair hopes soon found their prospects

darken, and a long night close the transient day. To infatuation

succeeded self-torment. A chief Judge died of a broken heart because he

had participated in that signal treachery--another Judge asked pardon of

God and his country, for sanctioning it with his vote. Pitt, the

machinist, perished amidst the misfortunes of the Empire--and

Castlereagh, in his pride and power, became his own executioner. The

noble delinquents and their race perish together. Twenty-four Irish

peerages have become extinct since the Union in January, 1801, exclusive

of Peerages under a superior title, but continued in an inferior

honour--and while I write, another of the noble order which stands

between the prerogative and the people, as hounds between the huntsman

and the hare, is extinguished. Thus nature takes vengeance on the

exalted traitors to their country. The Union cannot subsist--Sin and

Death have fixed their peremptory seal of doom upon it. Not all the

vices of Ferdinand to his parentage and family and country--not all the

deeds of the magnanimous Allies and the Holy Alliance to Spain, Germany,

and Italy--no, not the repeated partitions of Poland by the Royal

Robbers, the Austrian, and Frederic, and Catherine, equalled altogether

the dreadful sum of sinning by the English Ministry, in preparing,

prosecuting, and accomplishing that sad catastrophe--the Incorporate

Union of Ireland with Great Britain.”--_Ensor’s Address to the People of

Ireland._

Previously to the Act of Union, Absenteeism, though encouraged by the

geographical position of the country, and promoted by some inveterate

habits derived from ancient abuse, was principally confined, among the

native Irish, to a few individuals whose ill understood vanity tempted

them to seek for a consequence abroad, which is ever denied to the

unconnected stranger, a consequence which no extravagant expense can

purchase. With a few exceptions, therefore, the malady was confined to

the great English proprietors of forfeited estates, whose numbers must

in the progress of events have been diminished, by the dissipations

inseparable from unbounded wealth, and the growth of commercial and

manufactural fortunes. It might, in some cases, indeed, be both a vice,

and a ridicule, in the absent; but had the nation in other respects been

well used and well governed, it would have been of no serious evil to

those who remained at home. But the Act of Union, whatever may be its

other operations, meritorious or vicious, at once converted a local

disease into a national pestilence. The centre of business and of

pleasure, the mart of promotion, and the fountain of favour, were by

this one fatal act at once removed into a foreign land; ambition,

avarice, dissipation and refinement, all combined to seduce the upper

classes into a desertion of their homes and country: and as each

succeeding ornament of the Irish capital abandoned his hotel, as each

influential landlord quitted his castle in the country, or his house in

the city, a new race of vulgar upstarts, of uneducated and capricious

despots, usurped their place, spreading a barbarous _morgue_ over the

once elegant society of the metropolis, and banishing peace and security

from the mountain and the plain.

Many whom temptation could not hitherto seduce from home, were now

forced by fear to fly; and every passion, every motive combined to drive

from the happy land, all those who were possessed of the means of

flight. It is in vain that patriotism struggles and conscience arrests

the departing step of those who yet linger behind in painful

vacillation. Self-preservation must and will in the end prevail.

Whatever is educated, whatever is tasteful, whatever is liberal, will

too probably fly a land, where the insolence of official rank supplies

the amenity of an admitted aristocracy, and where vulgar wealth,

acquired by political subserviency, and too frequently unaccompanied by

knowledge, holds talent at arms’ length, and rejects wit from its

coteries as dangerous to its own dull supremacy and hostile to the

repose of its own “_fat contented ignorance_.” Philanthropists,

disgusted with the perpetual spectacle of hopeless wretchedness and

irredeemable despair, will seek relief by flying the misery they cannot

mitigate; the enlightened and the liberal will turn with horror from the

country where laws of exception have been adopted into the permanent

code, and where necessitated violence is only met by judicial severity

and legal murder. The landholder, wearied by his contests with the

clergy, and intimidated by the armed and masked opposition of his

tenantry, will be contented to purchase repose by abandoning at once the

soil and its produce, to the proctors, the police-men and their chiefs.

The _sbirri_ of Ireland will alone find in a land, thus every way

accursed, the elements congenial to their existence, as the reptiles and

insects subsist in that putrefaction, which spreads disease and death

among the nobler animals.

In the present political prospect of Ireland, the eye of philosophy and

philanthrophy turns on every side in search of a principle of

regeneration, and turns in vain. On every side a circle of recurrent

cause and effect, like the mystic emblem of the Egyptians, points to an

eternity of woe, and to endless cycles of misgovernment and resistance.

As long as the actual system continues, (as long as every cause is

forced to concur in rendering Ireland uninhabitable,) so long will it be

impossible to organize any plan for civilizing, tranquillizing, and

enriching the country. It is an empty and an idle boast in the British

House of Commons, that it devotes its successive nights to the debating

Irish affairs, so long as the religious division of the people and the

proconsular government founded upon that division are to be recognized

as sound policy or Christian charity. The half measures which have

hitherto been adopted, far from proving beneficial, and composing the

contentions of hostile factions, have served only to increase discontent

and disarm inquiry.[80] Nor can the ministers be entitled to any praise

for generosity who dare not, in the first place, be just. In spite,

therefore, of all their professions of zeal and compassion for the

national distress; in spite of all their parliamentary tamperings with

the national abuses, they must still remain answerable for the greater

part of the absenteeship which they strenuously hold up as the giant

ill, over which they have no controul, and for the existence of which

they imagine themselves not responsible.

The grand principle of “_divide et impera_” has produced both the

religious question and the question between landlords and tenants, which

are the hinges on which all the misfortunes of Ireland turn. To commence

the work of regeneration in earnest, that principle must be fairly and

honestly abandoned: when this is done, and not before, absenteeship,

with every other evil which has grown out of the monstrous anarchical

system, that has so long subsisted, will gradually disappear; and

proprietors in Ireland, as in other countries, will inhabit their

country, when their country becomes inhabitable.--“_Ubi bene, ibi

patria_” is a maxim not altogether unreasonable; and, surely, if in any

circumstances it is entitled to toleration, it is in that land where the

greater the patriotism and virtue, the less chance is there of social

comfort and rational happiness. To the absentees themselves we would

willingly appeal with every invocation that can bind the conscience or

awaken the heart. But the appeal were worse than idle, it would in fact

be injurious, by pointing to effects and disengaging the attention from

causes. In the present condition of affairs, absenteeism is a

necessitated evil!! In the absentees it is less a crime than a

misfortune; and with respect to the government it is so far from being a

justification of its acts, that it has become a pregnant and a pointed

conclusion of its ignorance of all sound principle, or its heartless

indifference to all those interests which the unhappy destiny of “_the

most unhappy country under heaven_,” has committed to its charge.