THE DUTY OF CHRISTENDOM
It is only the truth that wounds. An Irishman to-day in dealing with
Englishmen is forced, if he speak truly, to wound. That is why so
many Irishmen do not speak the truth. The Irishman, whether he be a
peasant, a farm labourer, however low in the scale of Anglicization
he may have sunk, is still in imagination, if not always in manner,
a gentleman. The Englishman is a gentleman by chance, by force of
circumstances, by luck of birth, or some rare opportunity of early
fellowship. The Irishman is a gentleman by instinct and shrinks from
wounding the feelings of another man and particularly of the man who
has wounded him. He scorns to take it out of him that way. That is
why the task of misgoverning him has been so easy and has come so
naturally to the Englishman. One of the chief grievances of the
Irishman in the middle ages was that the man who robbed him was such
a boor. Insult was added to injury in that the oppressor was no knight
in shining armour, but a very churl of men; to the courteous and
cultured Irishman a "bodach Sassenach," a man of low blood, of low
cunning, caring only for the things of the body, with no veneration
for the things of the spirit--with, in fine, no music in his soul.
The things that the Irishman loved he could not conceive of. Without
tradition or history himself he could not comprehend the passionate
attachment of the Irishman to both, and he proceeded to wipe both out,
so far as in him lay, from off the map of Ireland and from out the
Irishman's consciousness.
Having, as he believed, with some difficulty accomplished his task,
he stands to-day amazed at the result. The Irishman has still a
grievance--nay more, Ireland talks of "wrongs." But has she not got
him? What more can she want except his purse? And, that too, she
is now taking. In the indulgence of an agreeable self-conceit which
supplies for him the want of imagination he sees Ireland to-day as a
species of "sturdy beggar," half mendicant, half pickpocket--making
off with the proceeds of his hard day's work. The past slips from
him as a dream. Has he not for years now, well, for thirty years
certainly, a generation, a life time, done all in his power to meet
the demands of this incessant country that more in sorrow than in
anger he will grant you, was misgoverned in the past. That was its
misfortune, never his fault. This is a steadily recurring phase of the
fixed hallucination in his blood. Ireland never _is_, but only always
has been cursed by English rule. He himself, the Englishman of the
day, is always a simple, bluff, good-hearted fellow. His father if you
like, his grandfather very probably, misgoverned Ireland, but never he
himself. Why, just look at him now, his hand never out of his pocket
relieving the shrill cries of Irish distress. There she stands, a
poverty-stricken virago at his door, shaking her bony fist at him,
Celtic porter in her eye, the most fearful apparition in history, his
charwoman, shaming him before the neighbours and demanding payment for
long past spring cleanings that he, good soul, has forgotten all about
or is quite certain were settled at the time. Yes, there she stands,
the Irish charwoman, the old broom in her hand and preparing for
one last sweep that shall make the house sweet and fit for her own
children. And John Bull, honest, sturdy John Bull, believing the house
to be his, thinks that the only thing between him and the woman is
the matter of wages; that all she wants is an extra shilling. Ireland
wants but one thing in the world. She wants her house to herself, and
the stranger out of her house.
While he is, in his heart, perfectly aware of this, John Bull (for the
reasons given by Richard Cox), is quite determined that nothing shall
get him out of the house. "Separation is unthinkable," say English
Ministers. The task of Ireland is to-day what it always has been--to
get the stranger out of the house. It is no shame to Ireland or her
sons, that up to this they have failed in each attempt. Those attempts
are pillars of fire in her history, beacons of light in the desert of
sin, where the Irish Israel still wanders in search of the promised
land. Few of the peoples in Europe who to-day make up the concert of
powers, have, unaided, expelled the invader who held them down, and
none has been in the situation of Ireland.
As Mr. Gladstone wrote in 1890, "can anyone say we should have treated
Ireland as we have done had she lain not between us and the ocean, but
between us and Europe?"
In introducing the scheme of mild Home Rule termed the Councils Bill
in 1907, Mr. Birrell prefaced it with the remark that "separation was
unthinkable--save in the event of some great world cataclysm." World
cataclysms up to this have not reached Ireland--England intervened too
well. She has maintained her hold by sea power. The lonely Andromeda
saw afar off the rescuing Perseus, a nude figure on the coast of Spain
or France, but long ere his flight reached her rock-bound feet she
beheld him fall, bruised and mangled, and devoured by the watching sea
monster.
Had Italy been placed as Ireland is, cut off from all external succour
save across a sea held by a relentless jailor, would she have been
to-day a free people, ally of Austria on terms of high equality?
The blood shed by the founders of modern Italy would all have been
shed in vain--that blood that sanctified the sword of Garibaldi--had
it not been for the selfish policy of Louis Napoleon and the invading
armies of France. Italy, no more than Ireland, could have shaken
herself free had it not been for aid from abroad. The late Queen
Victoria saw clearly the parallel, and as hereditary custodian of
Ireland, Her Majesty protested against the effort then being made to
release Italy from an Austrian prison, when she herself was so hard
put to it to keep Ireland in an English jail. Writing to her Prime
Minister on July 25th, 1848, Her Majesty said:--
"The Queen must tell Lord John (Russell) what she has repeatedly told
Lord Palmerston, but without apparent effect, that the establishment
of an entente cordiale with the French Republic, for the purpose
of driving the Austrians out of their dominions in Italy would be a
disgrace to this country. That the French would attach the greatest
importance to it and gain the greatest advantage from it, there can
be no doubt of. But how will England appear before the world at the
moment she is struggling for her supremacy in Ireland?..." and on Oct.
10th following Her Majesty wrote to her uncle, the first King of
the Belgians (who owed his new minted crown to the Belgian people
depriving the Dutch Sovereign of his "lawful possessions") in the
following memorable words:
"Really it is quite immoral, with Ireland quivering in our grasp,
and ready to throw off her allegiance at any moment, for us to force
Austria to give up her lawful possessions. What shall we say if
Canada, Malta, etc., begin to trouble us? It hurts me terribly." (Page
237, Queen Victoria's letters, published by order of His Majesty, King
Edward VII.)
It hurt Ireland much more terribly, that failure to throw off the
hand that held her "quivering in our grasp," so soon to stretch her
"a corpse upon the dissecting table."
Ireland has failed to win her freedom, not so much because she has
failed to shed her blood, but because her situation in the world
is just that unique situation I have sought to depict. Belonging to
Europe, she has not been of Europe; and England with a persistency
that would be admirable were it not so criminal in intention and
effect, has bent all her efforts, all her vigour, an unswerving
policy, and a pitiless sword to extend the limits of exclusion. To
approach Ireland at all since the first English Sovereign laid hands
upon it was "quite immoral." When Frederick of Hohenstaufen (so long
ago as that!) sent his secretary (an Irishman) to Ireland we read that
Henry III of England declared "it hurt him terribly," and ordered all
the goings out and comings in of the returned Irish-German statesman
to be closely watched.
The dire offence of Hugh O'Neill to Elizabeth was far less his
rebellion than his "practises" with Spain. At every cessation of
arms during the Nine Years War he waged with England, she sought to
obtain from him an abjuration of "foreign aid," chiefly "that of the
Spaniard." "Nothing will become the traitor (O'Neill) more than his
public confession of any Spanish practices, and his abjuration of any
manner of harkening or combining with any foreigners."
Could O'Neill be brought to publicly repudiate help from abroad it
would have, the Queen thought, the effect that "in Spain... the hopes
of such attempts might be extinguished."
As long as the sea was open to Spain there was grave danger. If
Spaniard and Irishman came close together O'Neill's offence was
indeed "fit to be made vulgar"--all men would see the strength of
combination, the weakness of isolation.
"Send me all the news you receive from Spain for Tyrone doth fill all
these parts with strange lies, although some part be true, that there
came some munition." It was because O'Neill was a statesman and knew
the imperative need to Ireland of keeping in touch with Europe that
for Elizabeth he became "the chief traitor of Ireland--a reprobate
from God, reserved for the sword."
Spain was to Elizabethan Englishmen what Germany is to-day.
"I would venture to say one word here to my Irish fellow countrymen of
all political persuasions. If they imagine they can stand politically
or economically while Britain falls they are woefully mistaken. The
British fleet is their one shield. It if be broken Ireland will go
down. They may well throw themselves heartily into the common defence,
for no sword can transfix England without the point reaching behind
her." (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in the _Fortnightly Review_, Feb.,
1913, "Great Britain and the Next War.")
The voice is a very old one, and the bogey has done duty for a long
time in Ireland. When, to-day, it is from Germany that freedom may
be feared, Ireland is warned against the German. When, three hundred
years ago the beacon of hope shone on the coast of Spain, it was the
Spaniards who were the bad people of history.
Fray Mattheo de Oviedo, who had been sent to Ireland as Archbishop,
wrote to King Philip III from O'Neill's stronghold, Dungannon, on
June 24, 1600. We might be listening to the voice of the _Fortnightly
Review_ of yesterday. "The English are making great efforts to bring
about a peace, offering excellent terms, and for this purpose the
Viceroy sent messengers twice to O'Neill, saying among other things,
that Your Majesty is making peace with the Queen, and that his
condition will be hopeless. At other times he says that no greater
misfortune could happen to the country than to bring Spaniards into
it, because they are haughty and vicious and they would destroy and
ruin the country." The Irish princes were no fools. "To all this they
reply most honourably that they will hold out as long as they have one
soldier or there remains a cow to eat."
Hugh O'Neill saw clearly that all compromise between Ireland and
England was futile, and that the way of escape was by complete
separation and lay only through Europe. He again and again begged
the Spanish King to sever Ireland and erect it into an allied State.
He offered the crown of Ireland to a Spanish prince, just as three
centuries earlier another and a great O'Neill offered the crown of
Ireland to Edward Bruce in 1315.
The coming of the Bruce saved Gaelic Ireland for three centuries. Had
Philip of Spain sent his son as King to Ireland, her fate had been
settled then instead of remaining three centuries later to still
confront European statesmanship with an unsolved problem.
In many letters addressed by the Irish leaders to Philip II and Philip
III we find the constantly recurring note of warning that to leave
England in possession of Ireland meant the downfall of Spain. The
Irish princes knew that in fighting England they were in truth
fighting the battle of European civilization.
Writing to Philip II from Lifford, on May 16th, 1596, O'Neill and
O'Donnell drew the King's attention to the cause of Ireland as the
cause of Europe, and in the name of Ireland offered the crown to
a Spanish prince. "But inasmuch as we have felt to our great and
indescribably harm the evil doings and crimes of those whom the Queen
of England is in the habit of sending amongst us, we beg and beseech
Your Majesty to send someone well known to you and perfectly fit to
be the King of this island, for his own welfare, ours, and that of the
Christian State (Christendom)."
They asked for a prince "who will not be unwilling to rule over and
live amongst us and to direct and guide our nation, well and wisely."
They pointed out how "he will obtain much advantage and glory by so
doing," and finally they begged "would that Your Majesty would appoint
the Archduke of Austria, now Governor of Flanders, a famous man and
worthy of all praise, than whom none would be more acceptable." (The
original is in Latin and in the archives of Simancas.)
No more statesmanlike appeal was ever made from Ireland; and had
the Archduke of Austria assumed the crown of Ireland in 1596, "now
or never" would indeed have become "now and forever." Had Philip II
carried out his often repeated promises of sending aid to that country
the fate of his own kingdom must have been a very different one.
"I wish it were possible for me, by word of mouth, to show the
importance of this undertaking and the great service that would be
rendered thereby to God and His Church, and _the great advantage it
would be to the service of Your Majesty and the peace of Your States
to attack the enemy here_."
So wrote in 1600 to Philip II, the Archbishop of Dublin, already
quoted, Mattheo de Oviedo.
This prelate had been specially sent to Ireland "to see and understand
the state of the country misrepresented by English emissaries at
foreign courts."
The wrath of Elizabeth against O'Neill was largely due to his keeping
in touch with the continent, whereby the lies of her agents abroad
were turned to her own ridicule. To Essex, her Viceroy, she wrote:
"Tyrone hath blazed in foreign parts the defeat of regiments, the
death of captains, and loss of men of quality in every quarter."
O'Neill not only for years beat her generals in the field, her beat
herself and her councillors at their own game. To Essex, in an ecstacy
of rage at the loss of the last great army sent, she wrote (September
17th, 1599): "To trust this traitor upon oath is to trust the devil
upon his religion. Only this we are sure (for we see it in effect),
that you have prospered so ill for us by your warfare, as we cannot
but be very jealous lest we should be as well overtaken by the
treaty."
(Essex wished to bring O'Neill in by a treaty which, while ostensibly
conceding the terms of the Irish prince was to allow the Queen time to
carry out her purpose.)
The Irish princes knew Elizabeth and her Ministers, as well as she
read Essex. "Believe no news from Ireland of any agreement in this
country," they had written to Philip II in 1597, "great offers have
been made by the Queen of England, but we will not break our word and
promise to your." In a letter written a year earlier (Oct. 18, 1596),
replying to the special envoy sent by the king, they said: "Since
the former envoys left us we have used every means in our power, as
we promised we should do, to gain time and procrastination from one
day to another. But how could we impose on so clever an enemy so
skilled in every kind of cunning and cheating if we did not use much
dissimulation, and especially if we did not pretend we were anxious
for peace? We will keep firm and unshaken the promises which we made
to Your Majesty with our last breath; if we do not we shall incur at
once the wrath of God and the contempt of men."
How faithfully they kept those promises and how the Spanish King
failed in his, their fate and the bitter ruin of their country shows.
That men fighting for Ireland had to meet Elizabeth and her statesmen
with something of her own cunning is made very clear to anyone reading
the State papers in Ireland.
Essex, in one of his "answers" wrote: "I advise Her Majesty to allow
me, at my return to Dublin, to conclude this treaty, yielding some
of their grants in the present; and when Her Majesty has made secret
preparations to enable me to prosecute, I will find quarrels enough to
break and give them a deadly blow."
The Irish, however, failed in this contest. They were not sufficiently
good liars, and lacked the higher flights of villainy necessary to
sustain the encounter. The essential English way in Tudor days, and
much later, for administering a deadly blow to an Irish patriot was
"assassination." Poison frequently took the place of the knife, and
was often administered wrapped in a leaf of the British Bible. A
certain Atkinson, knowing the religious nature of Cecil, the Queen's
Prime Minister, the founder of a long line of statesmen, foremost as
champions of Church and Book, suggested the getting rid of O'Neill by
some "poisoned Hosts." This proposal to use the Blessed Sacrament as
a veritable Last Supper for the last great Irish chief remains on
record, was endorsed by Cecil.
Another Briton, named Annyas, was charged to poison "the most
dangerous and open rebel in Munster," Florence MacCarthy More, the
great MacCarthy. Elizabeth's Prime Minister piously endorsed the
deed--"though his soul never had the thought to consent to the
poisoning of a dog, much less a Christian ."
To Carew, the President of Munster, Cecil wrote enjoining the
assassination of the young Earl of Desmond, then "in the keeping
of Carew": "Whatever you do to abridge him out of Providence shall
never be imputed to you for a fault, but exceedingly commended
by the Queen." After this, we are not surprised to learn that in
her instructions to Mountjoy, the successor of Essex, the Queen
recommended "to his special care to preserve the true exercise of
religion among her loving subjects." As O'Neill was still in the field
with a large army, she prudently pointed out, however, that the time
"did not permit that he should intermeddle by any severity or violence
in matters of religion until her power was better established there
to countenance his action." That the character of their adversary was
faithfully appreciated by contemporary Irish opinion stands plain in
a letter written by James Fitzthomas, nephew of the great Earl Gerald
of Desmond, to Philip II. "The government of the English is such as
Pharaoh himself never used the like; for they content not themselves
with all temporal prosperity, but by cruelty desire our blood and
perpetual destruction to blot out the whole remembrance of our
posterity--for that Nero, in his time, was far inferior to that Queen
in cruelty."
The Irish chiefs well sustained their part in meeting this combination
of power and perfidy, and merited, on the highest grounds of policy
the help so often promised by the King of Spain. They showed him not
only by their valour on the field but by their sagacious council how
great a part was reserved for Ireland in the affairs of Europe if he
would but profit from it and do his part.
In this the Spanish King failed. Philip II had died in 1598, too
immersed in religious trials to see that the centre of his griefs was
pivoted on the possession of Ireland by the female Nero. With his son
and successor communication was maintained and in a letter of Philip
III to O'Neill, dated from Madrid, Dec. 24th, 1599, we read: "Noble
and well beloved I have already written a joint letter to you and your
relative O'Donnell, in which I replied to a letter of both of you. By
this, which I now write to you personally I wish to let you know my
good will towards you, and I mean to prove it, not only by word, but
by deed." That promise was not fulfilled, or so inadequately fulfilled
that the help, when it came, was insufficient to meet the needs of the
case.
History tells us what the sad consequences were to the cause of
civilisation in Ireland, from the failure of the Spanish King to
realize the greatness of his responsibilities. But the evil struck
deeper than to Ireland alone. Europe lost more than her historians
have yet realised from the weakness of purpose that let Ireland go
down transfixed by the sword of Elizabeth.
Had the fate of Europe been then controlled by a Hohenzollern, instead
of by a Spanish Hapsburg, how different might have been the future of
the world!
Although Europe had forgotten Ireland, Ireland had never forgotten
Europe. Natural outpost and sentinel of that continent in the West for
three-hundred years now gagged and bound, since the flight to Rome of
her last native Princes, she stands to-day as in the days of Philip
III, if an outcast from European civilization non the less rejecting
the insular tradition of England, as she has rejected her insular
Church. And now once more in her career she turns to the greatest of
European Sovereigns, to win his eyes to the oldest, and certainly the
most faithful of European peoples. Ireland already has given and owes
much to Germany.
In the dark ages intercourse between the Celtic people of the
West and the Rhinelands and Bavaria was close and long sustained.
Irish monasteries flourished in the heart of Germany, and German
architecture gave its note possibly to some of the fairest cathedral
churches in Ireland.
Clonfert and Cashel are, perhaps amongst the most conspicuous examples
of the influence of that old-time intercourse with Germany. To-day,
when little of her past remains to venerate, her ancient language on
what seemed its bed of death owes much of its present day revival
to German scholarship and culture. Probably the foremost Gaelic
scholar of the day is the occupant of the Chair of Celtic at Berlin
University, and Ireland recognises with a gratitude she is not easily
able to express, all that her ancient literature owes to the genius
and loving intellect of Dr. Kuno Meyer.
The name of Ireland may be known on the Bourses or in the
Chancelleries of Europe; it is not without interest, even fame, in the
centres of German academical culture. But that the German State may
also be interested in the political fate of Ireland is believed by the
present writer.
Maurice Fitzgerald, the outlawed claimant to the Earldom of Desmond,
wrote to Philip II, from Lisbon on September 4th, 1593:
"We have thought it right to implore your Majesty to send the aid
you will think fit and with it to send us (the Irish refugees in the
Peninsula) to defend and uphold the same undertaking; for we hope,
with God's help Your Majesty will be victorious and conquer and hold
as your own the kingdom of Ireland.--We trust in God that Your Majesty
and the Council will weigh well the advantages that will ensue to
Christendom from this enterprise--since the opportunity is so good
and the cause so just and weighty, and the undertaking so easily
completed."
The history of human freedom is written in letters of blood. It is the
law of God. No people who clutch to safety, who shun death are worthy
of freedom.
The dead who die for Ireland are the only live men in a free Ireland.
The rest are cattle. Freedom is kept alive in man's blood only by
shedding of that blood. It was not an act of a foreign Parliament they
were seeking, those splendid "scorners of death," the lads and young
men of Mayo, who awaited with a fearless joy the advance of the
English army fresh from the defeat of Humbert in 1798. Then, if ever,
Irishmen might have run from a victorious and pitiless enemy who,
having captured the French General and murdered in cold blood the
seven hundred Killala peasants who were with his colours, were now
come to Killala itself to wreak vengeance on the last stronghold of
Irish rebellion.
The ill-led and half armed peasants, the last Irishmen in Ireland
to stand the pitched fight for their country's freedom, went to
meet the army of England, as the Protestant Bishop, who saw them,
says:--"running upon death with as little appearance of reflection
or concern as if they were hastening to a show."
The late Queen Victoria, in one of her letters to her uncle, the King
of the Belgians, wrote thus of the abortive rising of fifty years
later in 1848:
"There are ample means of crushing the rebellion in Ireland, and I
think it is very likely to go off without any contest, which people
(and I think rightly) rather regret. The Irish should receive _a
good lesson or they will begin again_." (Page 223, Vol. II, Queen
Victoria's letters.) Her Majesty was profoundly right. Ireland needed
that lesson in 1848, as she needs it still more to-day. Had Irishmen
died in 1848 as they did in 1798 Ireland would be to-day fifty years
nearer to freedom. It is because a century has passed since Europe
saw Ireland willing to die that to-day Europe has forgotten that she
lives.
As I began this essay with a remark of Charles Lever on Germany so
shall end it here with a remark of Lever on his own country, Ireland.
In a letter to a friend in Dublin, he thus put the epitaph of Europe
on the grave of a generation who believed that "no human cause was
worth the shedding one drop of human blood."
"As to Ireland all foreign sympathy is over owing to the late
cowardice and poltroonery of the patriots. _Even Italians can fight_"
(Letter of C. Lever from Florence, August 19th, 1848).
It is only the truth that wounds. It is that reproach that has cursed
Ireland for a century.
Sedition, the natural garment for an Irishman to wear, has been for a
hundred years a bloodless sedition. It is this fiery shirt of Nessus
that has driven our strong men mad. How to shed our blood with honour,
how to give our lives for Ireland--that has been, that is the problem
of Irish nationality.