Dundalk and Trim were abandoned in haste. O'Neil swore a great oath that
as Cromwell had stormed Drogheda, if he should storm hell he should take
it. One fort after another yielded; and in a fortnight from the taking
of Drogheda Cromwell was master of the country north of Dublin. Marching
from Dublin south, on September 23d, his army took forts in Wicklow,
Arklow, and Enniscorthy; and on October 1st the general encamped before
Wexford, an important seaport at the southeastern corner of the island.
The town was strong, with a rampart fifteen feet thick, a garrison of
over two thousand men, one hundred cannon, and in the harbor two ships
armed with fifty-four guns.
Cromwell summoned the governor to surrender, not obscurely threatening
him with the fate of Drogheda. "It will clearly appear," he said, "where
the guilt will lie if innocent persons should come to suffer with the
nocent." His terms were quarter and prison to the officers, quarter and
freedom to the soldiers, protection from plunder to the town. These
terms were refused, and both sides continued the fight. Suddenly, some
breaches being made in the castle, the captain surrendered it, and by a
surprise the whole army of the Commonwealth poured into the town. The
townsmen took part in the defence; and townsmen and garrison together
were forced into the market-place.
There, as at Drogheda, a promiscuous massacre ensued. Upward of two
thousand were slain, and with them not a few of the citizens; and the
town was delivered over to pillage. It is asserted by the Catholic
writers that a body of women, who had taken refuge round the cross, were
deliberately slaughtered, and that a general massacre took place without
regard to sex or age. Priests were killed at once, and in the sack and
pillage undoubtedly some noncombatants, it may be some women and
children. But these things were incidents of such a storm, and were not
done by design or order of the general. This is his own story:
"While I was preparing of it; studying to preserve the Town from
plunder, that it might be of the more use to you and your Army--the
Captain, who was one of the Commissioners, being fairly treated, yielded
up the Castle to us. Upon the top of which our men no sooner appeared,
but the Enemy quitted the Walls of the Town; which our men perceiving,
ran violently upon the Town with their ladders, and stormed it. And when
they were come into the market-place, the Enemy making a stiff
resistance, our forces brake them; and then put all to the sword that
came in their way. Two boatfuls of the Enemy attempting to escape, being
overprest with numbers, sank; whereby were drowned near three hundred of
them. I believe, in all, there was lost of the Enemy not many less than
Two-thousand; and I believe not Twenty of yours from first to last of
the Siege. And indeed it hath, not without cause, been deeply set upon
our hearts, That, we intending better to this place than so great a
ruin, hoping the Town might be of more use to you and your Army, yet
God would not have it so; but by an unexpected providence, in His
righteous justice, brought a just judgment upon them; causing them to
become a prey to the Soldier--who in their piracies had made preys of so
many families, and now with their bloods to answer the cruelties which
they have exercised upon the lives of divers poor Protestants!
"This Town is now so in your power, that of the former inhabitants, I
believe scarce one in twenty can challenge any property in their houses.
Most of them are run away, and many of them killed in this service. And
it were to be wished that an honest people would come and plant here."
The blow that had desolated Drogheda and Wexford did not need to be
repeated. Ross was taken; the Munster garrisons--Cork, Kinsale, and
others--joined the Commonwealth. And within three months of Cromwell's
march from Dublin, the whole of the towns on the eastern and southern
sides of Ireland, except Waterford and some others, were reduced to the
Parliament. Waterford resisted them; a wet winter set in; and with the
wet, dysentery and fever. Cromwell fell ill; many officers sickened;
General Jones died. "What England lost hereby is above me to speak,"
wrote the general. "I am sure I lost a noble friend and companion in
labors. You see how God mingles out the cup to us. Indeed we are at this
time a crazy company: yet we live in His sight; and shall work the time
that is appointed us, and shall rest after that in peace."
After a short rest, on January 29th Cromwell was again in the field. He
passed into the heart of the island--into Kilkenny and Tipperary;
Clogheen, Castletown, Fethard, Callan, Cashel, Cahir, Kilkenny, Carrick,
were taken after a short defence; and Clonmel at last surrendered after
a desperate attempt at storm, which cost Cromwell, it is said, two
thousand men. This was his last great fight in Ireland. He had now
crushed opposition in the whole east and south of the island; the north
had returned to the Protestant cause; Waterford fell soon after; and
except Limerick, Galway, and a few fortresses, the Parliament's forces
were masters of the island. Cromwell had been nine months in Ireland,
and at no time possessed an army of more than fifteen thousand men.
Within that time he had taken a score of strong places, and in a series
of bloody encounters had dispersed or annihilated armies of far greater
number than his own. An official summons to England had been sent in
January; and it was not till the end of May that he actually obeyed it.
As Cromwell's practice in warfare in Ireland differed somewhat from what
he observed elsewhere, and as from that day to this it has been the
subject of furious invective, a few words thereon are plainly needed.
Cromwell had gone to Ireland, at imminent risk to his cause, to recover
it to the Parliament in the shortest possible time, and with a
relatively small army. He had gone there first to punish, as was
believed, a wholesale massacre and a social revolution, to restore the
Irish soil to England, and to replace the Protestant ascendency. In the
view of the Commonwealth government, the mass was by law a crime,
Catholic priests were legally outlaws, and all who resisted the
Parliament were constructively guilty of murder and rebellion. Such were
the accepted axioms of the whole Puritan party, and of Cromwell as much
as any man.
In such a war he held that where a place was stormed after summons, all
in arms might justly be put to the sword, though no longer capable of
resistance, and though they amounted to thousands. "They," he writes,
"refusing conditions seasonably offered, were all put to the sword."
Repeatedly he shot all officers who surrendered at discretion. Officers
who had once served the Parliament he hanged. Priests, taken alive, were
hanged. "As for your clergymen, as you call them," wrote Oliver to the
governor of Kilkenny, "in case you agree for a surrender, they shall
march away safely; but if they fall otherwise into my hands, I believe
they know what to expect from me." At Gowran the castle surrendered.
"The next day the colonel, the major, and the rest of the commission
officers were shot to death. In the same castle also he took a popish
priest, who was chaplain to the Catholics in this regiment; who was
caused to be hanged."
The Bishop of Ross, marching to save Clonmel with five thousand men, was
defeated by Broghill, captured, and hanged in sight of his own men. The
Bishop of Clogher was routed by Coote and Venables and shared the same
fate. "All their friars were knocked on the head promiscuously,"
Cromwell wrote at Drogheda--as the Catholic martyrologies assert, with
torture. Peaceable inhabitants were not to be molested. But all who had
taken part in or supported the rebellion of 1641 were liable to justice.
For soldiers he found a new career. By a stroke of profound policy he
encouraged foreign embassies to enlist Irish volunteers, giving them a
free pass abroad. And thus it is said some forty thousand Irishmen
ultimately passed into the service of foreign sovereigns. With great
energy and skill the Lord-Lieutenant set about the reorganization of
government in Ireland. A leading feature of this was the Cromwellian
settlement afterward carried out under the Protectorate, by which
immense tracts of land in the provinces of Ulster, Leinster, and Munster
were allotted to English settlers, and the landowners of Irish birth
removed into Connaught.
Cromwell has left on record his own principles of action in the famous
declaration which he issued in January in reply to the Irish bishops:
"Ireland," he says, "was once united to England. Englishmen had
inheritances and leases which they had purchased: and they lived
peaceably. You broke this Union. You, unprovoked, put the English to the
most unheard-of and most barbarous massacre (without respect of sex or
age) that ever the sun beheld. It is a fig-leaf of pretence that they
fight for their king: really it is for men guilty of blood--_helium
prelaticum et religiosum_--as you say. You are a part of Anti-Christ,
whose kingdom the Scripture so expressly speaks should be laid in blood,
yea, in the blood of the saints.
"You quote my own words at Ross," he says, "that where the Parliament of
England have power, the exercise of the mass will not be allowed of; and
you say that this is a design to extirpate the Catholic religion. I
cannot extirpate what has never been rooted. These are my intentions. I
shall not, where I have power, suffer the exercise of the mass. Nor
shall I suffer any Papists, where I find them seducing the people, or by
overt act violating the laws. As for the people, what thoughts they have
in matters of religion in their own breasts I cannot reach."
But as to the charge of massacre, destruction, or banishment he says:
"Give us an instance of one man since my coming into Ireland, not in
arms, massacred, destroyed or banished; concerning the massacre or the
destruction of whom justice hath not been done, or endeavored to be
done."
This very pointed and daring challenge could hardly have been publicly
made by such a man as Cromwell, if, to his knowledge, a slaughter of
women and unarmed men had occurred. On the other hand, it is certain
that priests and others had been killed in cold blood; and a general who
delivers over a city to pillage, and forbids quarter, can hardly say
where outrage and massacre will cease. As to banishment, the
"Cromwellian settlement" was necessarily based on the banishment of
those whom the settlers displaced.
With regard to the policy of confiscation and resettlement, Cromwell
warmly justifies it. It is the just way of meeting rebellion, he says.
You have forfeited your estates, and it is just to raise money by
escheating your lands. But apart from the land forfeited, which is but a
part of the account, if ever men were engaged in a just and righteous
cause it was this, he asserts:
"We are come to ask an account of the innocent blood that hath been
shed; and to endeavor to bring to an account--by the presence and
blessing of the Almighty, in whom alone is our hope and strength--all
who, by appearing in arms, seek to justify the same. We come to break
the power of lawless Rebels, who having cast off the Authority of
England, live as enemies to Human Society; whose principles, the world
hath experience, are, To destroy and subjugate all men not complying
with them. We come, by the assistance of God, to hold forth and maintain
the lustre and glory of English Liberty in a Nation where we have an
undoubted right to do it;--wherein the people of Ireland (if they listen
not to such seducers as you are) may equally participate in all
benefits; to use liberty and fortune equally with Englishmen, if they
keep out of arms."
Such was the basis of the famous "Cromwellian settlement"--by far the
most thorough act in the long history of the conquest of Ireland; by far
the most wholesale effort to impose on Ireland the Protestant faith and
English ascendency. Wholesale and thorough, but not enough for its
purpose. It failed like all the others; did more, perhaps, than any
other to bind Ireland to the Catholic Church, and to alienate Irishmen
from the English rule. On the Irish race it has left undying memories
and a legend of tyranny which is summed up in the peasants' saying of
the "Curse of Cromwell."
Cromwell, not worse than the Puritans and English of his age, but nobler
and more just, must yet for generations to come bear the weight of the
legendary "curse." He was the incarnation of Puritan passion, the
instrument of English ambition; the official authority by whom the whole
work was carried out, the one man ultimately responsible for the rest;
and it is thus that on him lies chiefly the weight of this secular
national quarrel.
FOOTNOTES:
[41] James Butler, first Duke of Ormonde, was now head of the Irish
Royalists.--ED.
MOLIÈRE CREATES MODERN COMEDY
A.D. 1659
HENRI VAN LAUN
The seventeenth century was the period of a very remarkable
literary outburst in France, an outburst which has done much to
mould French genius of more recent times. The latter part of
the century, which has been called the Augustan age of France,
the age of Louis XIV, has certainly been but seldom equalled in
the number and variety of the writers who adorned it. Yet it
owes much of its brilliancy, much of its rapid development, to
the training of the decades previous to 1650, and especially to
the enthusiastic patronage of that great statesman Richelieu.
Were a Frenchman seeking for a single event, a single date to
mark the most striking moment of this literary era, he would
probably select the foundation of the French Academy by
Richelieu, in 1635. Or perhaps he might turn to the production
of Corneille's most famous tragedy, _Le Cid_, in 1633. Neither
of these events, however, has quite what we would recognize as
a world-wide significance. The Academy has done much for
France, but it has always remained a French academy, and the
forty "immortal" Frenchmen who constitute its membership have
not always owed their election solely to literary eminence.
Neither have Corneille's tragedies been accepted as models by
the world at large.
But under Corneille's influence the French stage developed from
a state of buffoonery and wooden imitation of the ancients to a
state where a greater artist than Corneille gave it really
world-wide prominence. Molière is not only the most celebrated
of French actor-managers; he is the greatest of all
character-comedy writers, the teacher of all future
generations, and the satiric scourge of his own. When in 1659
his comedy _Les précieuses Ridicules_ took Paris by storm, it
did more than make a reformation of the manners of its own. It
taught the world what true comedy should be, and it sent
ringing through the universe forever a mighty trumpet-note
against hypocrisy and folly.
The drama attained its highest excellence and repute in the age of Louis
XIV, and we should not be making a very hazardous assertion if we were
to say that the literature of that epoch in France attained its height
of glory in the drama. No French dramatist has excelled Molière,
Corneille, and Racine; no group of authors in the seventeenth century
were more brilliant, more powerful, more originative. When we turn our
eyes upon the stage for which these three wrote, we find ourselves in
the full splendor of the Augustan age, in all its refinement and
culture, its luxury and elegance, its strength of wit and justness of
expression, its social polish and gorgeous display.
Great as was the advance made by the audience of Jodelle upon the
audience of the "moralities" and "sotties," the advance of the court and
society under the Valois was equally great. The Grand Monarque,
listening to a masterpiece of Corneille, Molière, or Racine, surrounded
by his brilliant circle of lords and ladies, represented an almost
incalculable development of ceremonious culture, in idea, in apparel,
and in general surroundings, since the day when, about a hundred years
before, while the blossom of the Renaissance was barely expanded, the
popinjay King Henry II looked on at the first crude sketch of a French
classical play. Stage, scenery, appointments, audience, critic, music,
actors, and authors, all now bore witness to and adorned, as they were
in fact the most elaborate product of, an Augustan age.
Paris up to this time had had little opportunity of knowing what true
comedy was. It had had farces in abundance, not only of home growth, but
imported, and from Italy in particular. When Molière came before the
public with his homogeneous and well-trained company, and his repertory
of excellent character-sketches and comic situations, the prevailing
sentiment was expressed by a member of the audience which listened to
the first production of his _Précieuses Ridicules_: "Courage, Molière;
this is genuine comedy!"
France had long been waiting for genuine comedy; waiting rather by an
instinctive requirement of the national genius, and with an aptitude to
appreciate the highest comic art as soon as it might be manifested, than
with any definite conception of the exact thing that was lacking on the
stage. The French nature was precisely fitted to produce and to enjoy
the loftiest style of character-comedy, but no modern literature had
hitherto exhibited that which Molière was to provide. The author of the
_Précieuses Ridicules_ and _Tartuffe_ was essentially the outcome of his
age, the dramatist of drawing-room life, whose genius enabled him to web
the foibles of the salon with elegant phraseology, and scenic effect
with admirable poetic expression; and the contrast between his lofty and
conscientious work and the puerilities and license of the Spanish and
Italian models was as marked as it was readily recognized.
Yet it was no easy matter to acclimatize in France even the high style
of comedy introduced by Molière, and he had to inter-mix it with a good
many farces to make it go down. For twelve long years, leading the life
of a strolling player, Molière observed and studied character; and when
at last he thought himself safe from opposition, under the powerful
patronage of Louis XIV, the Church, the University, the Sorbonne, and
the bigotry of the statesmen--once more united as in the age of Francis
I--conspired to cast stumbling-blocks in the way of literary freedom. It
was the authorities of the Church which, shocked and jealous at the
enthusiasm which greeted the appearance of _Tartuffe_, brought the veto
of the King to bear against the company of the Palais Royal; and though
Molière believed that his private intercession had obtained the removal
of this veto, his enemies were bold and powerful enough during the
absence of Louis, on the further representation of the play, to prevent
its production a second time. Molière was able to cope with his
adversaries; yet it is a noteworthy fact that the decree of
excommunication passed against comedians in France was not absolutely
rescinded until the present century.
We do not forget that Corneille wrote comedies before Molière; and
indeed there is no doubt that the younger of the two dramatists owed
something, even in comedy, to the older. Molière began by adapting from
and imitating the Italian and Spanish comedy-writers, upon whom many of
his first farces were founded, and it is not at all unlikely that he
even remodelled some of the earlier sotties. It was perhaps due to
Corneille's influence as much as to anything else that his genius at
last discovered its true level. He confessed to Boileau his great
indebtedness to _Le Menteur_. "When it was first performed," he says, "I
had already a wish to write, but was in doubt as to what it should be.
My ideas were still confused, but this piece determined them. In short,
but for the appearance of _Le Menteur_, though I should no doubt have
written comedies of intrigue, like _L'Etourdi_, or _Le Dépit Amoureux_,
I should perhaps never have written the _Misanthrope_." Eliminate the
generosity from this confession, and no doubt the truth remains that
Molière did form his best style of comedy upon the master of French
tragedy.
Jean Baptiste Poquelin, who subsequently assumed the name of Molière,
was born in the year that François de Sales died, one year after the
birth of La Fontaine, four years before the birth of his friend Chapelle
and of Madame de Sévigné. When _Le Cid_ was first performed he was
fourteen years old, and twenty-two at the time of the first
representation of _Le Menteur_. The son of a _valet-de-chambre
tapissier_ of Louis XIII, he succeeded in due course to the emoluments
and honors, such as they were, of his father; but he had early conceived
a passion for the stage, and in 1643 he attached himself to the Illustre
Théâtre of Madeleine Béjart, a woman four years his senior. With her
were already associated her brother Joseph, her sister Geneviève, about
two years younger than Molière, and eight others, most of whom had
dropped out of the company before its final settlement in Paris.
For a year or two the Illustre Théâtre tempted fortune in the capital
without success, and in 1646 they commenced a tour through the provinces
which was destined to continue for twelve years. The debts which they
had incurred weighed upon them during the whole of this time, and
principally upon Molière, who was once imprisoned and several times
arrested at the suit of the company's creditors. No doubt these latter
had discovered that the young actor had friends who would rescue him
from durance, which was done on several occasions, but as late as 1660
we read of Molière's discharging probably the last of the debts for
which at this period he made himself responsible.
The plays first acted by Molière and his friends were, of course, the
farces then most in vogue; among others the comedies of Scarron and the
yet inferior productions of Denis Beys and Desfontaines. The former had
written a ridiculous piece called _L'Hôpital des Fous_. The latter was
the author of _Eurymédon ou l'Illustre Pirate, l'Illustre Comédien ou le
Martyre de Saint-Genes_, and of several other inflated pieces. It would
be difficult to fix the exact date at which Molière's earliest plays
were produced, but it is probable that he began to write for his company
as soon as he had enlisted in it. He seems, like Shakespeare, to have,
in part at least, adapted the plays of others; but in 1653, if not
earlier, he had produced _L'Etourdi_, and in 1656 _Le Dépit Amoureux_.
The Illustre Théâtre is heard of at Nantes, Limoges, Bordeaux, Toulouse,
Narbonne, and Lyons, where Molière produced his first serious attempt at
high comedy in verse, _L'Etourdi_. In 1653 they played by invitation at
the country seat of the Prince de Conti, the schoolfellow of Molière.
Three years later they played the _Dépit Amoureux_ at Béziers during the
meeting in that town of the Parliament of Languedoc. At Grenoble, in
1658, the painter Mignard, with other of his admirers, persuaded him to
take his company--for he was joint manager with Madeleine Béjart--to
Paris; and this he did, after a concluding trip to Rouen. In Paris they
began by playing before Philippe, Duke of Anjou, the brother of Louis
XIV, who took them under his protection and introduced them to the
court.
At this time the company was considerably stronger, as well as richer,
than when it left Paris. There were now four ladies, Madeleine Béjart,
Geneviève Béjart, Duparc, and Debrie; the two brothers Béjart--the
youngest, Louis, had joined at Lyons--Duparc, Debrie, Dufresne, and
Croisac making, with Molière himself, eleven persons. It may be
concluded that their tour, or, at all events, that part of it which
dated from Lyons, had been very successful; for we find that Joseph
Béjart, who died early in 1659, left behind him a fortune of twenty-four
thousand golden crowns. So at least we are told by the physician
Guy-Patin in a letter dated May 27, 1659; and he adds, "Is it not enough
to make one believe that Peru is no longer in America, but in Paris?"