honorary exile. He took the opposite tack of conciliation. Although
Ormond was a prominent member of the Lancastrian party, he at once made
gracious overtures to him. Desmond, too, he won over by his courtesy,
and upon the birth of his son George--afterwards the luckless Duke of
Clarence--the rival earls acted as joint sponsors, and when, in 1451, he
left Ireland, he appointed Ormond his deputy and representative.
Nine years later he came back, this time as a fugitive. The popularity
which he had already won stood him then in good stead. Seizing upon the
government, he held it in the teeth of the king and Parliament for more
than a year. The news of the battle of Northampton tempted him to
England. His son, the Earl of March, had been victorious, and Henry VI,
was a prisoner. He was not destined, however, to profit by the success
of his own side. In a temporary Lancastrian triumph he was outnumbered,
and killed by the troops of Queen Margaret at Wakefield.
His Irish popularity descended to his son. A considerable number of
Irish Yorkist partisans, led by the Earl of Kildare, fought beside the
latter at the decisive and sanguinary battle of Towton, at which battle
the rival Earl of Ormond, leader of the Irish Lancastrians, was taken
prisoner, beheaded by the victors, and all his property attained, a blow
from which the Butlers were long in recovering.
No other great Irish house suffered seriously. In England the older
baronage were all but utterly swept away by the Wars of the Roses, only
a few here and there surviving its carnage. In Ireland it was not so. A
certain number of Anglo-Norman names disappear at this point from its
annals, but the greater number of those with which the reader has become
familiar continue to be found in their now long established homes. The
Desmonds and De Burghs still reigned undisputed and unchallenged over
their several remote lordships. Ulster, indeed, had long since become
wholly Irish, but within the Pale the minor barons of Norman
descent--Fingals, Gormanstons, Dunsanys, Trimbelstons and
others--remained where their Norman fathers had established themselves,
and where their descendants for the most part may be found still. The
house of Kildare had grown in strength during the temporary collapse of
its rival, and from this out for nearly a century towers high over every
other Irish house. The Duke of York was the last royal viceroy who
actually held the sword. Others, though nominated, never came over, and
in their absence the Kildares remained omnipotent, generally as
deputies, and even when that office was for a while confided to other
hands, their power was hardly diminished. Only the barren title of
Lord-Lieutenant was withheld, and was as a rule bestowed upon some royal
personage, several times upon children, once in the case of Edward IV.'s
son upon an actual infant in arms.
In 1480, Gerald, eighth Earl of Kildare, called by his own following,
Geroit Mor, or Gerald the Great, became deputy, and, from that time
forward under five successive kings, and during a period of 33 years, he
"reigned" with hardly an interval until his death in 1513.
Geroit Mor is perhaps the most important chief governor who ruled
Ireland upon thorough-going Irish principles. "A mighty man of stature,
full of honour and courage." Stanihurst describes him as being "A knight
in valour;" and "princely and religious in his words and judgments" is
the flattering report of the "Annals of the Four Masters." "His name
awed his enemies more than his army," says Camden. "The olde earle being
soone hotte and soone cold was of the Englishe well beloved," is another
report. "In hys warres hee used a retchlesse (reckless) kynde of
diligence, or headye carelessnesse," is a less strong commendation, but
probably not less true.
He was a gallant man unquestionably, and as far as can be seen an honest
and a well-intentioned one, but his policy was a purely personal, or at
most a provincial, one. As for the interests of the country at large
they seem hardly to have come within his ken. That fashion of looking at
the matter had now so long been the established rule that it had
probably ceased indeed to be regarded as a failing.
[Illustration: FIGURES ON KILCARN FONT, MEATH.]
XIX.
THE KILDARES IN THE ASCENDANT,
When the Battle of Bosworth brought the adherents of the Red Rose back
to triumph, Gerald Mor was still Lord-deputy. He was not deposed,
however, on that account, although the Butlers were at once reinstated
in their own property, and Sir Thomas Butler was created Earl of Ormond.
According to a precedent now prevailing for several reigns, the
Lord-Lieutenancy was conferred upon the Duke of Bedford, the king's
uncle, Kildare continuing, however, practically to exercise all the
functions of government as his deputy.
A dangerous plot, started by the discomfited Yorkist faction, broke out
in Ireland in 1487. An impostor, named Lambert Simnel, was sent by the
Duchess of Burgundy, and trained to simulate the son of Clarence who, it
will be remembered, had been born in Ireland, and whose son was
therefore supposed to have a special claim on that country. Two thousand
German mercenaries were sent with him to support his pretensions.
[Illustration: Ireland In the Reign of Henry VII.]
This Lambert Simnel seems to have been a youth of some talent, and to
have filled his ugly imposter's _rôle_ with as much grace as it admitted
of Bacon, in his history of the reign, tells us that "he was a comely
youth, not without some extraordinary dignity of grace and aspect." The
fashion in which he retailed his sufferings, pleaded his youth, and
appealed to the proverbial generosity of the Irish people, to protect a
hapless prince, robbed of his throne and his birthright, seems to have
produced an immense effect. Kildare, there is reason to suspect, was
privy to the plot, but of others there is no reason to think this, and
with a single exception--that of the Earl of Howth--all the lords of the
Pale and many of the bishops, including the Archbishop of Dublin, seem
to have welcomed the lad--he was only fifteen--with the utmost
enthusiasm, an enthusiasm which Henry's production of the real son of
Clarence had no effect at all in diminishing.
Lambert Simnel was conducted in high state to Dublin, and there crowned
in the presence of the Earl of Kildare, the chancellor, and other State
officers. The crown used for the purpose was taken off the head of a
statue of The Virgin in St. Mary's Abbey, and--a quainter piece of
ceremonial still--the youthful monarch was, after the ceremony, hoisted
upon the shoulders of the tallest man in Ireland, "Great Darcy of
Flatten," and, in this position, promenaded through the streets of
Dublin so as to be seen by the people, after which he was taken back in
triumph to the castle.
His triumph was not, however, long-lived. Emboldened by this preliminary
success, his partizans took him across the sea and landed with a
considerable force at Fondray, in Lancashire, the principal leaders on
this occasion being the Earl of Lincoln, Thomas Fitzgerald, brother to
the Earl of Kildare, Lord Lovell, and Martin Schwartz, the commander of
the German forces.
The enthusiasm that was expected to break out on their arrival failed
however to come off. "Their snowballs," as Bacon puts it, "did not
gather as they went." A battle was fought at Stoke, at which 4,000 of
the rebels fell, including Thomas Fitzgerald, the Earl of Lincoln, and
the German general Martin Schwartz, while Lambert Simnel with his tutor,
Simon the priest, fell into the king's hands, who spared their lives,
and appointed the former to the office of turnspit, an office which he
held for a number of years, being eventually promoted to that of
falconer, and as guardian of the king's hawks he lived and died.
He was not the only culprit whom Henry was willing to pardon. Clemency
indeed was his strong point, and he extended it without stint again and
again to his Irish rebels. He despatched Sir Richard Edgecombe, a member
of the royal household, shortly afterwards upon a mission of
conciliation to Ireland. The royal pardon was to be extended to Kildare
and the rest of the insurgents on condition of their submission.
Kildare's pride stood out for a while against submission on any
conditions, but the Royal Commissioner was firm, and the terms, easy
ones it must be owned, were at last accepted, and an oath of allegiance
sworn to. Kildare, thereupon, was confirmed in his deputyship, and Sir
Richard Edgecombe having first partaken of "much excellent good cheere"
at the earl's castle at Maynooth, returned peaceably to England.
The Irish primate, one of the few ecclesiastics who had refused to
support the impostor, was then, as it happened, in London, and placed
strongly before the king the impolicy of continuing Kildare in office.
Apparently his remonstrance had its effect, for Henry issued a summons
to the deputy and all the Irish nobility to attend at Court, one which
was obeyed with hardly an exception. A dramatic turn is given to this
visit by the fact that Lambert Simnel, the recently crowned king, was
promoted for the occasion to serve wine at dinner to his late Irish
subjects. The poor scullion did his office with what grace he might, but
no one, it is said, would touch the wine until it came to the turn of
the Earl of Howth, the one Irish peer, as we have seen, who had declined
to accept the impostor in his heyday of success. "Nay, but bring me the
cup if the wine be good," quoth he, being a merry gentleman, "and I
shall drink it both for its sake and mine own, and for thee also as thou
art, so I leave thee, a poor innocent!"
Howth, whose speech is recorded by his own family chronicler, received
three hundred pounds as a reward for his loyalty, the rest returned as
they came, lucky, they must have felt under the circumstances, in
returning at all.
Simnel was not the last Yorkist impostor who found credit and an asylum
in Ireland. Peterkin, or Perkin Warbeck was the next whom the
indefatigable Duchess of Burgundy started on the same stage and upon the
same errand. This time the prince supposed to be personated was the
youngest son of Edward IV., one of the two princes murdered in the
tower. He is also occasionally spoken of as a son of Clarence, and
sometimes as an illegitimate son of Richard III.--any royal personage,
in fact, whose age happened to suit. In spite of the slight ambiguity
which overhung his princely origin, he was received with high honour in
Cork, and having appealed to the Earls of Desmond and Kildare, was
accepted by the former with open arms. "You Irish would crown apes!"
Henry afterwards said, not indeed unwarrantably. This time Kildare was
more cautious, though his brother, Sir James Fitzgerald, warmly espoused
the cause of the impostor. Perkin Warbeck remained in Ireland about a
year, when he was invited to France and, for a while, became the centre
of the disaffected Yorkists there. He was a very poor specimen of the
genus impostor, and seems even to have been destitute of the commonplace
quality of courage.
In spite of the unusual prudence displayed by him on this occasion,
Kildare was, in 1497, removed from the deputyship, which was for a time
vested in Walter Fitzsimons, Archbishop of Dublin, a declared enemy of
the Geraldines. Sir James Ormond who represented his brother, the earl,
was appointed Lord Treasurer in place of the Baron of Portlester,
Kildare's uncle, who had held the office for thirty-eight years. Fresh
quarrels thereupon broke out between the Butlers and the rival house,
and each harassed the lands of the other in the usual approved style. A
meeting was at last arranged to take place in St. Patrick's Cathedral
between the two leaders, but a riot breaking out Sir James barred
himself up in alarm in the Chapter House. Kildare arriving at the door
with offers of peace, a hole had to be cut to enable the two to
communicate. Sir James fearing treachery declined to put out his hand,
whereupon Kildare boldly thrust in his, and the rivals shook hands. The
door was then opened; they embraced, and for a while peace was patched
up. The door, with the hole still in it, was extant up to the other day.
The quarrels between these two great houses were interminable, and kept
the whole Pale and the greater part of Ireland in eternal hot water.
Their war-cries of "Crom-a-Boo" and "Butler-a-Boo" filled the very air,
and had to be solemnly prohibited a few years later by special Act of
Parliament. By 1494 the complaints against Kildare had grown so loud and
so long that the king resolved upon a new experiment, that of sending
over an Englishman to fill the post, and Sir Edward Poynings was pitched
upon as the most suitable for the purpose.
He arrived accompanied by a force of a thousand men-at-arms, and five or
six English lawyers, who were appointed to fill the places of
chancellor, treasurer, and other offices from which the present
occupiers, most of whom had been concerned either in the Warbeck or
Simnel rising, were to be ejected.
It was at a parliament summoned at Drogheda, whither this new deputy had
gone to quell a northern rising, that the famous statute known as
Poynings' Act was passed, long a rock of offence, and even still a
prominent feature in Irish political controversy.
Many of the statutes passed by this Parliament--such as the one just
mentioned forbidding war cries, others forbidding the levying of private
forces, forbidding the "country's curse" Coyne and livery, and other
habitual exactions were undoubtedly necessary and called for by the
circumstances of the case. The only ones now remembered however are the
following. First, that no parliament should be summoned by the deputy's
authority without the king's special license for that purpose. Secondly,
that all English statutes should henceforward be regarded as binding
upon Ireland; and thirdly, that all Acts referring to Ireland must be
submitted first to the king and Privy Council, and that, when returned
by them, the Irish Parliament should have no power to modify them
further. This, as will be seen, practically reduced the latter to a mere
court for registering laws already passed elsewhere, passed too often
without the smallest regard to the special requirements of the country.
A condition of subserviency from which it only escaped again for a short
time during the palmy days of the eighteenth century.
By this same parliament Kildare was attained--rather late in the day--on
the ground of conspiracy, and sent prisoner to London. He lay a year in
prison, and was then brought to trial, and allowed to plead his own
cause in the king's presence. The audacity, frank humour, and ready
repartee of his great Irish subject seems to have made a favourable
impression upon Henry, who must himself have had more sense of humour
than English historians give us any impression of. One of the principal
charges against the earl was that he had burned the church at Cashel.
According to the account given in the Book of Howth he readily admitted
the charge, but declared positively that he would never have thought of
doing so had he not been solemnly assured that the archbishop was at the
time inside it. The audacity of this defence is not a little heightened
by the fact that the archbishop in question was at the moment sitting in
court and listening to it.
Advised by the king to provide himself with a good counsel, "By St.
Bride"--his favourite oath--said he, "I know well the fellow I would
have, yea, and the best in England, too!" Asked who that might be.
"Marry, the king himself." The note of comedy struck at the beginning of
the trial lasted to the end. The earl's ready wit seems to have
dumbfounded his accusers, who were not unnaturally indignant at so
unlocked for a result. "All Ireland," they swore, solemnly, "could not
govern the Earl of Kildare." "So it appears," said Henry. "Then let the
Earl of Kildare govern all Ireland."
Whether the account given by Irish historians of this famous trial is to
be accepted literally or not, the result, at any rate, was conclusive.
The king seems to have felt, that Kildare was less dangerous as
sheep-dog--even though a head-strong one--than as wolf, even a wolf in a
cage. He released him and restored him to his command. Prince Henry,
according to custom, becoming nominally Lord-Lieutenant, with Kildare as
deputy under him. The earl's wife had lately died, and before leaving
England he strengthened himself against troubles to come by marrying
Elizabeth St. John, the king's cousin, and having left his son Gerald
behind as hostage for his good behaviour, sailed merrily home
to Ireland.
Perkin Warbeck meanwhile had made another foray upon Munster, where he
was supported by Desmond, and repulsed with no little ignominy by the
townsfolk of Waterford; after which he again departed and was seen no
more upon that stage. Kildare--whose own attainder was not reversed
until after his arrival in Ireland--presided over a parliament, one of
whose first acts was to attaint Lord Barrymore and the other Munster
gentlemen for their share in this rising. He also visited Cork and
Kinsale, leaving a garrison behind him; rebuilt several towns in
Leinster which had been ruined in a succession of raids; garrisoned the
borders of the Pale with new castles, and for the first time in its
history brought ordnance into Ireland, which he employed in the siege of
Belrath Castle. A factor destined to work a revolution upon Irish
traditional modes of warfare, and upon none with more fatal effect than
upon the house of Fitzgerald itself.
That Kildare's authority, even during this latter period of his
government was wholly exercised in the cause of tranquility it would be
certainly rash to assert. At the same time it may be doubted whether any
better choice was open to the king--short of some very drastic policy
indeed. That he used his great authority to overthrow his own enemies
and to aggrandize his own house goes almost without saying. The titular
sovereignty of the king could hope to count for little beside the real
sovereignty of the earl, and the house of Kildare naturally loomed far
larger and more imposingly in Ireland than the house of Tudor. Despotism
in some form was the only practical and possible government, and Earl
Gerald was all but despotic within the Pale, and even outside it was at
any rate stronger than any other single individual. The Desmond
Geraldines lived remote, the Butlers, who came next to the Geraldines in
importance, held Kilkenny, Carlow, and Tipperary, but were cut off from
Dublin by the wild mountains of Wicklow, and the wilder tribes of
O'Tooles, and O'Byrnes who held them. They were only able to approach it
through Kildare, and Kildare was the head-quarters of the Geraldines.
One of Earl Gerald's last, and, upon the whole, his most remarkable
achievement was that famous expedition which ended in the battle of
Knocktow already alluded to in an earlier chapter, in which a large
number of the lords of the Pale, aided by the native allies of the
deputy, took part. In this case there was hardly a pretence that the
expedition was undertaken in the king's service. It was a family quarrel
pure and simple, between the deputy and his son-in-law McWilliam, of
Clanricarde. The native account tells us that the latter's wife "was not
so used as the earl (her father) could be pleased with," whereupon "he
swore to be revenged upon this Irishman and all his partakers," The
notion of a Fitzgerald stigmatizing a De Burgh as an Irishman is
delightful, and eminently characteristic of the sort of wild confusion
prevailing on the subject. The whole story indeed is so excellent, and
is told by the narrator with so much spirit, that it were pity to
curtail it, and as it stands it would be too long for these pages. The
result was that Clanricarde and his Irish allies were defeated with
frightful slaughter, between seven and eight thousand men, according to
the victors, having been left dead upon the field! Galway, previously
held by Clanricarde, was re-occupied, and the deputy and his allies
returned in triumph to Dublin, whence the archbishop was despatched in
hot haste to explain matters to the king.
A slight incident which took place at the end of this battle is too
characteristic to omit. "We have done one good work," observed Lord
Gormanston, one of the Lords of the Pale, confidentially to the
Lord-deputy. "And if we now do the other we shall do well," Asked by the
latter what he meant, he replied, "We have for the most part killed our
enemies, if we do the like with all the Irishmen that we have with us it
were a good deed[7]." Happily for his good fame Kildare seems to have
been able to resist the tempting suggestion, and the allies parted on
this occasion to all appearances on friendly terms.
[7] Book of Howth.
XX.
FALL OF THE HOUSE OF KILDARE.
The battle of Knocktow was fought five years before the death of Henry
VII. Of those five years and of the earlier ones of the new reign little
of any vital importance remains to be recorded in Ireland. With the rise
of Wolsey to power however a new era set in. The great cardinal was the
sworn enemy of the Geraldines. He saw in them the most formidable
obstacle to the royal power in that country. The theory that the
Kildares were the only people who could carry on the government had by
this time become firmly established. No one in Ireland could stand
against the earl, and when the earl was out of Ireland the whole island
was in an uproar. The confusion too between Kildare in his proper
person, and Kildare as the king's Viceroy was, it must be owned, a
perennial one, and upon more than one occasion had all but brought the
government to an absolute standstill.
Geroit Mor had died in 1513 of a wound received in a campaign with the
O'Carrolls close to his own castle of Kilkea, but almost as a matter of
course his son Gerald had succeeded him as Viceroy and carried on the
government in much the same fashion; had made raids on the O'Moores and
O'Reillys and others of the "king's Irish enemies," and been rewarded
with grants upon the lands which he had captured from the rebels. The
state of the Pale was terrible. "Coyne and livery," it was declared, had
eaten up the people. The sea, too, swarmed with pirates, who descended
all but unchecked upon the coast and carried off men and women to
slavery. Many complaints were made of the deputy, and by 1520 these had
grown so loud and long that Henry resolved upon a change, and like his
predecessor determined to send an English governor, one upon whom he
could himself rely.
The choice fell upon the Earl of Surrey, son of the conqueror of
Flodden. Surrey's survey of the field soon convinced him to his own
satisfaction that no half measures was likely to be of any avail. The
plan proposed by him had certainly the merit of being sufficiently
sweeping. Ireland was to be entirely reconquered. District was to be
taken after district, and fortresses to be built to hold them according
as they were conquered. The occupation was thus to be pushed steadily on
until the whole country submitted, after which it was to be largely
repopulated by English colonists. The idea was a large one, and would
have taken a large permanent army to carry out. The loss too of life
would have been appalling, though not, it was represented to the king,
greater than was annually squandered in an interminable succession of
petty wars. Probably the expense was the real hindrance. At any rate
Surrey's plan was put aside for the time being, and not long afterwards
at his own urgent prayer he was allowed to lay down his uneasy honours
and return to England.
Meanwhile Earl Gerald the younger had been rapidly gaining favour at
Court, had accompanied Henry to France, and like his father before him,
had wooed and won an English bride. Like his father, too, he possessed
that winning charm which had for generations characterized his house.
Quick-witted and genial, with the bright manner and courteous ease of
high-bred gentlemen, such--even on the showing of those who had no love
for them--was the habitual bearing of these Leinster Geraldines. The end
was that Kildare after a while was allowed to return to Ireland, and
upon Surrey's departure, and after a brief and very unsuccessful tenure
of office by Sir Pierce Butler, the deputyship was restored to him.