changes. The position of an Irish chieftain--with his practically
limitless powers of life and death, his wild retinue of retainers whose
only law was the will of their chief--offered an irresistible temptation
to men of their type, and had many more charms than the narrow and
uninteresting _rôle_ of liegeman to a king whom they never saw, and the
obeying of whose behests brought them harm rather than good. England had
shown only too plainly that she had no power to protect her Irish
colonists, of what use therefore, it was asked, for them to call
themselves any longer English? The great majority from that moment
ceased to do so. Save within the "five obedient shires" which came to be
known as the English Pale, "the king's writ no longer ran." The native
Irish swarmed back from the mountains and forests, and repossessed
themselves of the lands from which they had been driven. No serious
attempts were made to re-establish the authority of the law over
three-fourths of the island. Within a century and a half of the
so-called conquest, save within one small and continually narrowing
area, Ireland had ceased even nominally to belong to England.
[Illustration: TRIM CASTLE ON THE BOYNE.]
XVI.
THE STATUTE OF KILKENNY,
It was not to be expected, however, that the larger country would for
very shame let her possessions thus slip from her grasp without an
effort to retain them, certainly not when a ruler of the calibre of an
Edward III. came to the helm. Had his energies been able to concentrate
themselves upon Ireland the stream which was setting dead against
loyalty might even then have been turned back. The royal interest would
have risen to the top of faction, as it did in England, and would have
curbed the growing and dangerous power of the barons. That magic which
surrounds the word king might--who can say that it would not?--have
awakened a sentiment at once of patriotism and loyalty.
Chimerical as it may sound even to suppose such a thing, there seems no
valid reason why it might not have been. No people admittedly are more
intensely loyal by nature than the native Irish. By their failings no
less than their virtues they are extraordinarily susceptible to a
personal influence, and that devotion which they so often showed towards
their own chiefs might with very little trouble have been awakened in
favour of a king. It is one of the most deplorable of the many
deplorable facts which stud the history of Ireland that no opening for
the growth of such sentiment was ever once presented--certainly not in
such a form that it would have been humanly possible for it to
be embraced.
Edward III. had now his chance. Unfortunately he was too busy to avail
himself of it. He had too many irons in the fire to trouble himself much
about Ireland. If it furnished him with a supply of fighting
men--clean-limbed, sinewy fellows who could run all day without a sign
of fatigue, live on a handful of meal, and for a lodging feel luxurious
with an armful of hay and the sheltered side of a stone--it was pretty
much all he wanted. The light-armed Irish troop did great things at
Crecy, but they were never used at home. That Half-hold, which was the
ruin of Ireland, and which was to go on being its ruin for many and many
a century, was never more conspicuous than during the nominal rule of
the strongest and ablest of all the Angevin kings.
Something, however, for very shame he did do. In 1361 all absentee
landowners, already amounting to no less than sixty-three, including the
heads of several of the great abbeys, were summoned to Westminster and
ordered to provide an army to accompany Lionel, Duke of Clarence, whom
he had decided upon sending over to Ireland as viceroy.
Clarence was the king's third son, and had married the only daughter and
heiress of William de Burgh (mentioned a little way back as a baby
heiress), and through his wife had become Earl of Ulster and the nominal
lord of an enormous tract of the country stretching from the Bay of
Galway nearly up to the coast of Donegal. Most of this had, however,
already, as we have seen, been lost. The two rebel Burkes had got
possession of the Galway portion, the O'Neills, O'Connors, and other
chiefs had repossessed themselves of the North. So completely indeed was
the latter lost that Ulster--nominally the patrimony of the Duchess of
Clarence--is not even alluded to by her husband as part of the country
over which his government could attempt to lay claim.
The chief event of this visit was the summoning of a Parliament at
Kilkenny, a Parliament made memorable ever after by the passing of what
is still known as the Statute of Kilkenny[5]. This Statute, although it
produced little effect at the time, is an extremely important one to
understand, as it enables us to realize the state to which the country
had then got, and explains, moreover, a good deal that would otherwise
be obscure or confusing in the after history of Ireland.
[5] 40 Edward III., Irish Statutes.
Two distinct and separate set of rules are here drawn up for two
distinct and separate Irelands. One is for the English Ireland, which
then included about the area of ten counties, though it afterwards
shrank to four and a few towns; the other is for the Ireland of the
Irish and rebellious English, which included the rest of the island; the
object being, not as might be supposed at first sight, to unite these
two closer together, but to keep them as far apart as possible; to
prevent them, in fact, if possible, from ever uniting.
A great many provisions are laid down by this Act, all bearing the same
aim. Marriage and fosterage between the English and Irish are forbidden,
and declared to be high treason. So, too, is the supply of all horses,
weapons, or goods of any sort to the Irish; monks of Irish birth are not
to be admitted into any English monastery, nor yet Irish priests into
any English preferment. The Irish dress and the Irish mode of riding are
both punishable. War with the natives is inculcated as a duty binding
upon all good colonists. None of the Irish, except a certain number of
families known as the "Five Bloods" (_Quinque sanquines_), are to be
allowed to plead at any English court, and the killing of an Irishman is
not to be reckoned as a crime. In addition to this, speaking the
language of the country is made penal. Any one mixing with the English,
and known to be guilty of this offence, is to lose his lands (if he has
any), and his body to be lodged in one of the strong places of the king
until he learns to repent and amend.
The original words of this part of the Act are worth quoting. They run
as follows: "Si nul Engleys ou Irroies entre eux memes encontre c'est
ordinance et de cei soit atteint soint sez terrez e tenez s'il eit
seizez en les maines son Seignours immediate, tanque q'il vèigne a un
des places nostre Seignour le Roy, et trove sufficient seurtee de
prendre et user le lang Englais."
One would like--merely as a matter of curiosity--to know what appliances
for the study of that not easiest of languages were provided, and before
what tribunal the student had to prove his proficiency in it. When, too,
we remember that English was still, to a great degree, tabooed in
England itself; that the official and familiar language of the Normans
was French, that French of which the Statutes of Kilkenny are themselves
a specimen, the difficulty of keeping within the law at this point must,
it will be owned, have been considerable.
"In all this it is manifest," says Sir John Davis, "that such as had the
government of Ireland did indeed intend to make a perpetual enmity
between the English and the Irish, pretending that the English should in
the end root out the Irish; which, the English not being able to do,
caused a perpetual war between the two nations, which continued four
hundred and odd years, and would have lasted unto the world's end, if in
Queen Elizabeth's reign the Irish had not been broken and conquered by
the sword."
It is easy to see that the very ferocity--as it seems to us the utter
and inconceivable ferocity--of these enactments is in the main a proof
of the pitiable and deplorable weakness of those who passed them, and to
this weakness we must look for their excuse, so far as they admitted of
excuse at all. Weakness, especially weakness in high places, is apt to
fall back upon cruelty to supply false strength, and a government that
found itself face to face with an entire country in arms, absolutely
antagonistic to and defiant of its authority, may easily have felt
itself driven by sheer despair into some such false and futile
exhibitions of power. The chief sufferers by these statutes were not the
inhabitants of the wilder districts, who, for the most part, escaped out
of reach of its provisions, beyond that narrow area where the Dublin
judges travelled their little rounds, and who were governed still--when
governed at all--by the Brehon laws and Brehon judges, much as in the
days of Brian Boru. The real victims were the unhappy settlers of the
Pale and such natives as had thrown in their lot with them, and who were
robbed and harassed alike by those without and those within. The feudal
system was one that always bore hardly upon the poor, and in Ireland the
feudal system was at its very worst. There was no central authority; no
one to interpose between the baronage and the tillers of the soil; and
that state of things which in England only existed during comparatively
short periods, and under exceptionally weak rulers, in Ireland was
continuous and chronic. The consequence was that men escaped more and
more out of this intolerable tyranny into the comparative freedom which
lay beyond; forgot that they had ever been English; allowed their
beards, in defiance of regulations, to grow; pulled their hair down into
a "gibbes" upon their foreheads; adopted fosterage, gossipage, and all
the other pleasant contraband Irish customs; married Irish wives, and
became, to all intents and purposes, Irishmen. The English power had no
more dangerous enemies in the days that were to come than these men of
English descent, whose fathers had come over to found a new kingdom for
her upon the western side of St. George's Channel.
XVII.
RICHARD II. IN IRELAND.
Richard the Second's reign is a more definite epoch for the Irish
historian than many more striking ones, for the simple reason of two
visits having been paid by him to Ireland. The first of these was in
1394, when he landed at Waterford with 30,000 archers and 40,000 men at
arms, an immense army for that age, and for Ireland it was held an
irresistible one.
It was certainly high time for some steps to be taken. In all directions
the interests of the colonists were going to the wall. Not only in
Ulster, Minister, and Connaught, but even in the East of Ireland, the
natives were fast repossessing themselves of all the lands from which
they had been driven. A great chieftain, Art McMurrough, had made
himself master of the greater part of Leinster, and only by a
humiliating use of "Black Rent," could he be kept at bay. The towns were
in a miserable state; Limerick, Cork, Waterford had all again and again
been attacked, and could with difficulty defend themselves. The Wicklow
tribes swarmed down to the very walls of Dublin, and carried the cattle
off from under the noses of the citizens. The judges' rounds were
getting yearly shorter and shorter. The very deputy could hardly ride
half-a-dozen miles from the castle gates without danger of being set
upon, captured, and carried off for ransom.
Richard flattered himself that he had only to appear to conquer. He was
keen to achieve some military glory, and Ireland seemed an easy field to
win it upon. Like many another before and after him, he found the task
harder than it seemed. The great chiefs came in readily enough;
O'Connors, O'Briens, O'Neills, even the turbulent McMurrough himself,
some seventy-five of them in all. The king entertained them sumptuously,
as Henry II. had entertained their ancestors two centuries before. They
engaged to be loyal, and to answer for the loyalty of their
dependants--with some mental reservations we must conclude. In return
for this submission the king knighted the four chiefs just named, a
somewhat incongruous piece of courtesy it must be owned. Shortly after
his knighthood, Art McMurrough, "Sir Art," was thrown into prison on
suspicion. He was released before long, but the release failed to wipe
out the affront, and the angry chief retired, nursing fierce vengeance,
to his forests.
Richard remained in Ireland nine months, during which he achieved
nothing, and departed leaving the government in the hands of his
heir-presumptive, Roger Mortimer, Earl of March, the grandson of Lionel,
Duke of Clarence, and, therefore, in right of his mother, Earl of
Ulster, and the nominal owner of an immense territory, covering nearly a
third of the island, barely one acre of which, however, remained in
his hands.
The king had not been gone long before Art McMurrough rose again. The
young deputy was in Wicklow, endeavouring to carry out a projected
colony. Hearing of this outbreak, he hastened into Meath. An encounter
took place near Kells. Art McMurrough, at the head of his own men, aided
by some wild levies of O'Tooles and O'Nolans, completely defeated the
royal army, and after the battle the heir of the English Crown was found
amongst the slain.
This Art McMurrough, or Art Kavangh, as he is sometimes called, was a
man of very much more formidable stamp than most of the nameless
freebooters, native or Norman, who filled the country. His fashion of
making his onset seems to have been tremendous. Under him the wild
horsemen and "naked knaves," armed only with skeans and darts, sent
terror into the breast of their armour-clad antagonists. One of the few
early illustrations of Irish history extant represents him as charging
at breakneck pace down a hill. We are told that "he rode a horse without
a saddle or housing, which was so fine and good that it cost him four
hundred cows. In coming down the hill it galloped so hard that in my
opinion," says a contemporary writer, "I never in all my life saw hare,
deer, sheep, or other animal, I declare to you for a certainty, run with
such speed. In his right hand he bore a great dart, which he cast with
much skill[6]." No wonder that such a rider, upon such a horse, should
have struck terror into the very souls of the colonists, and induced
them to comply with any demands, however rapacious and humiliating,
rather than have to meet him face to face in the field.
[6] "Metrical History of the Deposition of Richard II."
The news of McMurrough's victory and of the death of his heir brought
Richard back again to Ireland. He returned in hot wrath resolved this
time to crush the delinquents. At home everything seemed safe. John of
Gaunt was recently dead; Henry of Lancaster still in exile; the Percys
had been driven over the border into Scotland. All his enemies seemed to
be crushed or extinguished. With an army nearly as large as before, and
with vast supplies of stores and arms, he landed at Waterford in 1399.
This time Art McMurrough quietly awaited his coming in a wood not far
from the landing-place. He had only 3,000 men about him, so prudently
declined to be drawn from that safe retreat of the assailed. The king
and his army sat down on the outskirts of the wood. It was July, but the
weather was desperately wet. The ground was in a swamp, the rain
incessant; there was nothing but green oats for the horses. The whole
army suffered from damp and exposure. Some labourers were hastily
collected, and an attempt made to cut down the wood. This, too, as might
be expected, proved a failure, and Richard, in disgust and vexation,
broke up his camp, and with great difficulty, dragging his unwieldy army
after him, fell back upon Dublin.
The Leinster chief was not slow to avail himself of the situation. He
now took a high hand, and demanded to be put in possession of certain
lands he claimed through his wife, as well as to retain his chieftaincy.
A treaty was set on foot, varied by the despatch of a flying column to
scour his country. In the middle of the negotiation startling news
arrived. Henry of Lancaster had landed at Ravenspur, and all England was
in arms. The king set off to return, but bad weather and misleading
counsel kept him another sixteen days on Irish soil. It was a fatal
sixteen days. When he reached Milford Haven it was to find the roads
blocked, and to be met by the news that all was lost. The army of
Welshmen, gathered by Salisbury, had dispersed, finding that the king
did not arrive. His own army of 30,000 men caught the panic, and melted
equally rapidly. He tried to negotiate with his cousin, but too late. At
Chester he fell into the hands of the victor, and, within a few weeks
after leaving Ireland, had passed to a prison, and from there to a
grave. He was the last English king to set foot upon its soil until
nearly exactly three centuries later, when two rivals met to try
conclusions upon the same blood-stained arena.
From this out matters grew from bad to worse. Little or no attempt was
made to enforce the law save within the ever-narrowing boundary of what
about this time came to be known as the Pale. Outside, Ireland grew to
be more and more the Ireland of the natives. Art McMurrough ruled over
his own country triumphantly till his death, and levied tribute right
and left with even-handed impartiality upon his neighbours. "Black
Rent," indeed, began to take the form of a regularly recognized tribute;
O'Neill receiving £40 a year from the county of Louth, O'Connor of
Offaly, _£60_ from the county of Meath, and others in like proportion.
In despair of any assistance from England some of the colonists formed
themselves into a fraternity which they called the "Brotherhood of St.
George," consisting of some thirteen gentlemen of the Pale with a
hundred archers and a handful of horsemen under them.
The Irish Government continued to pass Act after Act, each more and more
ferocious as it became more and more ineffective. Colonists were now
empowered to take and behead any natives whom they found marauding, or
whom they even suspected of any such intention. All friendly dealing
with natives was to be punished as felony. All who failed to shave their
upper lip at least once a fortnight were to be imprisoned and their
goods seized. Englishmen who married Irish women were to be accounted
guilty of high treason, and hung, drawn, and quartered at the
convenience of the viceroy. Such feeble ferocity tells its own tale.
Like some angry shrew the unhappy executive was getting louder and
shriller the less its denunciations were attended to.
XVIII.
THE DEEPEST DEPTHS.
The most salient fact in Irish history is perhaps its monotony. If that
statement is a bull it is one that must be forgiven for the sake of the
truth it conveys. Year after year, decade after decade, century after
century, we seem to go swimming slowly and wearily on through a vague
sea of confusion and disorder; of brutal deeds and yet more brutal
retaliations; of misgovernment and anarchy; of a confusion so
penetrating and all-persuasive that the mind fairly refuses to grapple
with it. Even killing--exciting as an incident--becomes monotonous when
it is continued _ad infinitum_, and no other occurrence ever comes to
vary its tediousness. Campion the Elizabethan historian, whose few pages
are a perfect magazine of verbal quaintness, apologizes in the preface
to his "lovyng reader, for that from the time of Cambrensis to that of
Henry VIII." he is obliged to make short work of his intermediate
periods; "because that nothing is therein orderly written, and that the
same is time beyond any man's memory, wherefore I scramble forward with
such records as could be sought up, and am enforced to be the briefer."
"Scrambling forward" is, indeed, exactly what describes the process. We,
too, must be content "to be the briefer," and to "scramble forward"
across these intermediate and comparatively eventless periods in order
to reach what lies beyond. The age of the Wars of the Roses is one of
great gloom and confusion in England; in Ireland it is an all but
complete blank. What intermittent interest in its affairs had been
awakened on the other side of the channel had all but wholly died away
in that protracted struggle. That its condition was miserable, almost
beyond conception, is all that we know for certain. In England, although
civil war was raging, and the baronage were energetically slaughtering
one another, the mass of the people seem for the most part to have gone
unscathed. The townsfolk were undisturbed; the law was protected; the
law officers went their rounds; there seems even to have been little
general rapine and pillage. The Church, still at its full strength,
watched jealously over its own rights and over the rights of those whom
it protected. In Ireland, although there was nothing that approached to
the dignity of civil war, the condition of the country seems to have
been one of uninterrupted and almost universal carnage, pillage, and
rapine. The baronage of the Pale raided upon the rest of the country,
and the rest of the country raided upon the Pale. Even amongst churchmen
it was much the same. Although there was no religious dissension, and
heresy was unknown, the jealousy between the churchmen of the two rival
races, seems to have been as deep as between the laymen, and their
hatred of one another probably even greater. As has been seen in a
former chapter, no priest or monk of Irish blood was ever admitted into
an English living or monastery, and the rule appears to have been quite
equally applicable the other way.
The means, too, for keeping these discordant elements in check were
ludicrously inefficient. The whole military establishment during the
greater part of this century consisted of some 80 archers, and about 40
"spears;" the whole revenue amounted to a few hundred pounds per annum.
The Parliament was a small and irregular body of barons and knights of
the shires, with a few burgesses, unwillingly summoned from the towns,
and a certain number of bishops and abbots, the latter, owing to the
disturbed state of the country, being generally represented by their
proctors. It was summoned at long intervals, and met sometimes in
Dublin, sometimes in Drogheda, at other times in Kilkenny, as occasion
suggested. Even when it did meet legislation was rarely attempted, and
its office was confined mainly to the voting of subsidies. The country
simply drifted at its own pleasure down the road to ruin, and by the
time the battle of Bosworth was fought, the deepest depths of anarchy
had probably been sounded.
The seaport towns alone kept up some little semblance of order and
self-government, and seem to have shown some slight capacity for
self-defence. In 1412, Waterford distinguished itself by the spirited
defence of its walls against the O'Driscolls, a piratical clan of West
Cork, and the following year sent a ship into the enemy's stronghold of
Baltimore, whose crew seized upon the chief himself, his three brothers,
his son, his uncle, and his wife, and carried them off in triumph to
Waterford, a feat which the annals of the town commemorate with laudable
pride. Dublin, too, showed a similar spirit, and fitted out some small
vessels which it sent on a marauding expedition to Scotland, in reward
for which its chief magistrate, who had up to that time been a Provost,
was invested with the title of Mayor. "The king granted them license,"
says Camden, "to choose every year a Mayor and two baliffs." Also that
its Mayor "should have a gilt sword carried before him for ever."
Several eminent figures appear amongst the "ruck of empty names" which
fill up the list of fifteenth-century Irish viceroys. Most of
these were mere birds of passage, who made a few experiments at
government--conciliatory or the reverse, as the case might be--and so
departed again. Sir John Talbot, the scourge of France, and antagonist
of the Maid of Orleans, was one of these. From all accounts he seems to
have quite kept up his character in Ireland. The native writers speak of
him as a second Herod. The colonist detested him for his exactions,
while his soldiery were a scourge to every district they were quartered
upon. He rebuilt the bridge of Athy, however, and fortified it so as to
defend that portion of the Pale, and succeeded in keeping the O'Moores,
O'Byrnes, and the rest of the native marauders to some degree at bay.