Irish History and the Irish Question

“Savages” Cuellar calls the natives; what but savages could they be when not only had all the means of civilization been withheld from them, but they were hunted like beasts of prey? That the women are “great workers and housewives in their way” is a redeeming feature in the picture. The whole land, English and Irish alike, was a wreck. The secretary of a lord deputy reports that the people had no conscience, but committed crimes freely; that they even changed wives among themselves; that bridges were falling down, churches roofless; there were no charities, no schools; law was jobbery, and the judicial bench was filled with ignorance; every lord hated the restraints of law and made himself an Irish chief; and disorders were as great among English soldiers as among Irish kernes.

The third rebellion, and the most formidable of all, was that of the Earl of Tyrone, head of the O’Neills of Ulster. It stirred the general forces of revolt, national and religious, beyond Ulster, in Connaught and elsewhere. Tyrone gave his movement distinctly the character of a holy war, and received aid from Spain. Unlike Desmond, he was an able leader. He gained a victory over the English at the Yellow Ford which filled Dublin with panic. To put him down, Elizabeth sent her favourite Essex, with forces greater than her parsimony allowed to an ordinary deputy. Essex went forth with great pomp and amidst high expectations. But he totally lacked steadiness of character and policy. He failed and went home to run mad courses and die on the scaffold, faintly recalling the Irish history of Richard II.

Essex was succeeded by Mountjoy, able, iron-willed, and ruthless, who made it a war of extermination and devastation. The Spaniards brought tardy aid to their Irish allies. They landed in force at Kinsale, and for a moment the fortune of war seemed to waver, but it soon inclined again to the side of the deputy and England. The force of the rebellion was broken, and Tyrone was compelled to surrender.

Of all the wars waged by a half-civilized on a barbarous and despised race, these wars waged by the English on the Irish seem to have been about the most hideous. No quarter was given by the invader to man, woman, or child. The butchering of women and children is repeatedly and brutally avowed. Nothing can be more horrible than the cool satisfaction with which commanders report their massacres. “I was never,” said Captain Woodhouse, “so weary with killing of men, for I protest to God for as fast as I could I did but hough and paunch them.” “The number of their fighting men slain and drowned that day,” says another commander, “were estimated and numbered to be fourteen hundred or fifteen hundred, besides boys, women, churls, and children, which could not be so few as many more and upwards.” Over and over again massacres of people of both sexes and all ages are reported with similar coolness. Another ruffian seems to have put to death children who were held as hostages.

Mountjoy especially used famine deliberately as his instrument of war, and with signal effect. After his work, multitudes lay dead in the ditches of towns and other waste places, with their mouths coloured green by eating docks and nettles. Children were seen eating their mother’s corpse. Old women, we are told, lit fires in the woods and ate the children who came to warm themselves. Not only were horses killed and eaten, but cats and dogs, hawks and kites. The wolves, driven by hunger from the woods, killed the enfeebled people. The dead lay unburied or half-buried, the survivors not having strength to dig graves, and dogs ate the remains.

It must be said that the native Irish not only retaliated these cruelties on the English whenever they could, but committed them on each other. Edward Butler, for example, invades Arra, the district of another clan, harries the country far and wide, breaks open the churches to which the frightened women had fled in the vain hope of sanctuary, and gives the region up for forty-eight hours to plunder and rape, sparing neither age nor condition. The lately gathered corn is destroyed, and famine stares the whole population in the face. The raid is presently repeated, the cattle are driven off, and a house full of women and children is given to the flames. In the English settlement of Munster, overrun by the native Irish, English children are taken from their nurses’ breasts and dashed against walls; an Englishman’s heart is plucked out in his wife’s presence, and she is forced to lend an apron to wipe the murderer’s fingers. Of the English fugitives who flocked into Youghal some had lost their tongues and noses. Irish tenants and servants that yesterday fed in the settlers’ houses were conspicuous by their cruelty.

What was called law was almost as murderous as war. Men were hanged at assizes by scores, and these massacres were reported by the deputy with satisfaction as gratifying proof of the increased influence of public justice. A bishop witnesses them with complacency. Respect for human life must have perished. Such was the training which in the formative period of national character the Celtic Irish received, and which must be borne in mind when we come to atrocities committed by them at a not very much later period.

At the same time we do not see the back of destiny’s cards. The subjugation of barbarous clans by a foreign conqueror, himself half-civilized, was horrible. Would a series of tribal wars among the clans themselves have been less horrible? When Strongbow landed there had been hardly any sign of permanent union or of the foundation of a settled polity. Nor afterwards does there appear to have been any attempt or tendency of the kind.

Tyrone, on his submission, had been restored to rank and great part of his estate. But he, as well as his confederate, the O’Donnell, created Earl of Tyrconnell, afterwards finding themselves objects of aversion and suspicion, fled the country. Their flight and the suppression of a futile outbreak of tribal insurrection under another O’Donnell finished the work. The whole island was now conquered, but the heart of the people, as presently appeared, was very far from being won. The hold of the Papacy and the Catholic Church upon their liegemen had been growing stronger under the long struggle and was not impaired by its close. It formed henceforth a religious substitute for nationality.

V

The whole machinery of government, as well as the law and the judiciary, was at the same time assimilated, formally at least, to the English model. The corporate towns received new charters. The place of the military deputy was taken by the head of a civil government with his officials.

Unhappily the ecclesiastical polity of England, with its tests and its recusancy law, compelling attendance at the services of the State Church, was at the same time thrust upon people to whom it was in itself and in its associations abhorrent. Under Elizabeth there had been a politic laxity. Now fines for recusancy are exacted. Intolerance of Catholic dissent from the royal religion could not fail to be increased by the Gunpowder Plot.

James I., with all his pedantry, his absurdities, and his stuffed breeches, was not without something of the largeness of mind which culture generally imparts. He could understand Bacon. His Irish policy, evidently inspired by Bacon, was colonization, plantation as it then was called. For this there was ample room on the forfeited lands of Tyrone and other attainted chiefs, so far as legal ownership in the contemplation of English law was concerned. But the attainders of the chiefs had not cleared the lands of the members of their septs, in whose minds tribal ownership was rooted. This was the weak point of the transplantation policy, as in the sequel tragically appeared. Extensive grants, however, were made to a colony formed by English and Scottish settlers, undertakers as they were called. Of Scottish settlers there had before been not a few. The city of London invested largely in the enterprise. Thus was formed in Ulster, and in Ulster has continued to exist to the present time, a sort of Protestant pale. Bacon’s philosophic eye ranges complacently over the prospect of a people of barbarous manners “brought to give over and discontinue their customs of revenge and blood and of dissolute life and of theft and rapine, and to give ear to the wisdom of laws and governments; whereupon immediately followeth the cutting of stones for building and habitation, and of trees for the seats of houses, orchards, enclosures, and the like.” Beyond doubt this settlement was an improvement in material respects. Nor, though the new settlers might domineer, was their domination likely to be more oppressive and insolent than that of the native chief, with his gallowglasses and his coyne and livery. The tribal ownership of land had probably become almost a fiction, the chief treating the land as his own. Little, therefore, was actually lost in that way by the tribesman, while there was an end of coyne and livery and the other extortions of the chiefs. On the other hand the chief, however oppressive, was nominally one of the tribe and a kinsman, and the land was still tribal in the fancy of the sept. The tribesman was not liable to eviction. Nor was improvement in agriculture or even in advancement of law and order likely to be so fascinating to the native Irish, especially to gallowglasses and kernes, as to Bacon. The adventurers were apt to be of a sordid class, ravenous, close-fisted, little likely to make themselves beloved. The eagles of enterprise spread their wings for the Spanish main; the vultures swooped upon Ireland. The medley of Brehon law and English law, with the variety of titles, some by forfeiture for treason, others by ancient grants from the Crown, formed an element in which the art of the predatory pettifogger had full play. By legal chicane, the chicane of an alien law, many an Irish Naboth may have been dispossessed. There was, moreover, the antagonism of religion, greatly intensified by the long struggle in which the natives, fighting for independence, had looked up to Rome for support and been fired at heart by the active zeal of her missionaries.

The government meant well. It sent over an able lord deputy in the person of Chichester, who did his best for healing and improvement. In improvement he was somewhat hasty and procrustean. He might have done better had he only imbibed Bacon’s spirit of philosophic toleration, and not fancied that for Irish barbarism Protestantism of the Anglican type was the sovereign cure. Bacon, as one of his three specifics for the recovery of the hearts of the people, had recommended a toleration, partial and temporary at least, of the Catholic religion, which was to be combined “with the sending over of some good preachers, especially of that sort which are vehement and zealous persuaders and not scholastical, to be resident in principal towns.” The government issued a politic manifesto, promising to all native Irish of the poorer class equal protection and complete immunity from any oppressive claims of chiefs. But let the government charm as wisely as it might, it could not charm away the difference of race, language, and character, the antagonism of religion, the memories of the long and murderous struggle, the ravenous cupidity and overbearing attitude of the alien adventurer, the anguish of the native who saw the stranger in possession of his land.

James called a Parliament for all Ireland, Catholic as well as Protestant. It was packed for the Crown, which created boroughs for that purpose. Still, it was something more like a national assembly than Ireland had ever seen or in fact was destined again to see. The elections to it were fiercely contested between the races and religions. Its first sitting was characteristic. There was a division on the election of a speaker. One party went out into the lobby. In its absence the other party seated its man in the chair. The party which had gone out, returning and finding what had been done, seated their man in the other man’s lap. The importance of this Parliament, however, is extolled by Sir John Davies, and one act, at all events, stands to its credit. It repealed the statute of Kilkenny and all other laws recognizing and perpetuating distinctions of race, declaring that their cause had ceased, since the inhabitants of the kingdom without distinction were henceforth under the protection of the Crown, and the best way of settling peace was to allow their intercourse and intermarriage so that they might grow into one nation. There was a transient ray of sunlight on the dark scene. Efforts were made to improve Trinity College, and learning shone forth in the person of Usher.

VI

There was still in Ireland a mine charged with the wrath of the dispossessed added to the hatred of race and religion, the religious hatred being the more deadly because, the Protestants of Ireland being Calvinist, the antagonism was extreme. The match was applied to the mine by the outbreak of revolution in England under Charles I. Strafford, having passed from the ranks of patriotism to the place left vacant by the death of Buckingham in the councils of the king, came with his dark look of command as viceroy to play the part of beneficent despot in Ireland, and at the same time to raise an army there for his master. The part of despot he played to perfection, making the Irish Parliament the tool of his will, applying to it and to the government in general his own and Laud’s high royalist policy of Thorough. The part of beneficent despot he played to a considerable extent. He set his heel on the rapacity of the adventurers, compelling the chief of them, the Earl of Cork, to disgorge. He enforced order and put down piracy, which in the general disorder had become rife. He fostered the cultivation of flax and the linen trade, though he paid blackmail to English protectionism by prohibiting the woollen manufacture. He did his best to reform the State Church, which he found sunk in torpor, sinecurism, and simony, while its edifices were ruins and piggeries. Unluckily he was a strict Anglican, whereas the only Protestantism in Ireland which had life in it was the Calvinistic Protestantism represented by Usher. He made a mortal enemy by turning the sumptuous monument of Lady Cork off the place of the high altar. But to find means of raising an army for his king he had to resort to violent measures. He dragooned the Parliament into granting extraordinary supplies. The king had pledged himself in the form of “graces” to respect and quiet titles to large tracts of land. These graces Strafford thrust aside. By legal chicane and intimidation of juries he, in defiance of the king’s plighted word, confiscated a great part of the land of Connaught. A legal raid of the Crown on the estates which the city of London had purchased in Ulster made the lord deputy another formidable enemy. He added to the number by trampling on the pride of men of rank and influence. Strafford had formed his army. That he intended it as a support to the arbitrary government of Charles is beyond question; his betrayal of that intention by some loose words uttered in council formed the most damaging piece of evidence against him; and though the army broke up on his departure, fears of it continued to haunt the English mind and to intensify English feeling against the Irish. The Irish Parliament joined in the impeachment of the man who had trampled on it, and when Strafford pleaded in defence of his arbitrary measures, that Ireland was a conquered country, Pym’s retort was, “They were a conquered nation! There cannot be a word more pregnant or fruitful in treason than that word is. There are few nations in the world that have not been conquered, and no doubt but the conqueror may give what law he pleases to those that are conquered; but if the succeeding pacts and agreements do not limit and restrain that right, what people can be secure? England hath been conquered, and Wales hath been conquered, and by this reason will be in no better case than Ireland. If the king by the right of a conqueror gives laws to his people, shall not the people by the same reason be restored to the right of the conquered to recover their liberty if they can?”

Revolution was in the air. It stirred the heart of the Catholic cowering under the penal law, who saw the foot of his arch-enemy the Puritan on the steps of power. It stirred still more the heart of the disinherited native, especially on the forfeited domain of Tyrone. One of those great popular conspiracies of which the Irish have the gift was formed under the leadership of Phelim O’Neill, who ranked among his countrymen as head of the great sept of O’Neill, and cherished ancestral traditions of vast domains and princely power. With Phelim O’Neill was a better man, Roger Moore, one of the disinherited, a deadly enemy of England. The rebellion posed as royalist, declaring for the king against the Puritan and revolutionary Parliament; its aims were Ireland for the Irish, and Catholicism as the Irish religion. Phelim O’Neill was not a man to restrain from crime. But the people, once launched in insurrection, were probably beyond control. They rose upon the English settlers in Ulster, drove them from their homes, and massacred some thousands with the usual cruelty, women and children taking part in the fiendish work. Many were stripped naked and exposed to perish in the cold. Dublin was full of shivering and famished fugitives. The capital itself narrowly escaped through fortunate betrayal of the plot, such as in an Irish conspiracy seldom fails. It was natural that panic should exaggerate the number murdered, as it was that panic and superstition together should see the spectres of the English who had been drowned by the rebels at Portadown. The effect upon the English, above all upon the Puritan mind, was like that of the Sepoy mutiny and the massacre of Cawnpore. Ruthless retaliation followed. Where the Protestants got the upper hand, Irish men, women, and children were butchered without mercy. Thenceforth the Irishman was to the Puritan a wild beast or worse. All Irishmen who landed in England to fight for the king, with the women who followed their camps, were put to the sword. An Irishwoman left behind by a Munster regiment at the siege of Lyme was torn to pieces by the women of the place.

The English Parliament at once, being short of money, passed, to provide for the Irish war, an act confiscating in advance two and a half millions of acres of rebel land as security for a loan; a measure, to say the least, extreme and sure to make the conflict internecine. The act passed without a dissentient voice, and was one of the last that received the assent of Charles.

In Ireland against the dark clouds of the storm one rainbow appeared. The Protestant Bishop Bedel, though a proselytizer, had by his beneficence won the love of his Catholic neighbours. He and his family were not only spared by the rebels, but treated with loving-kindness, and when he died a farewell salute was fired over his grave.

Thus commenced a course of mutual slaughter which lasted eleven years, and, according to Sir William Petty, cost, by sword, plague, and famine, the lives of a third part of the population. A great pasture country was reduced to the importation of foreign meat. A traveller could ride twenty or thirty miles without seeing a trace of human life, and wolves, fed on human flesh, multiplied and prowled in packs within a few miles of Dublin. Numbers abandoned the country and enlisted in foreign services. Slave dealers plied their trade and shipped boys and girls to Barbados.

Strafford’s place as deputy not having been filled, the government remained in the hands of the Puritan Lords Justices Parsons and Borlase, the first an intriguer and jobber, the second a worn-out soldier and a cipher. They had prorogued the Parliament by which they might have been restrained. The commander of the army on the king’s side and the representative of the king’s interest was Ormonde, the head of the loyalist house or sept of Butler, a man thoroughly honourable as well as able and wise, whose character stands out nobly amidst the dark carnival of evil.

It is difficult to say to which of the contending parties the palm of atrocity is to be awarded. Probably to that of the government, which knew no measure in the extermination of Catholics and rebels. Where Ormonde commanded there was sure to have been comparative mercy. Mercy there certainly was on the side of the insurgents when they were commanded by Owen O’Neill, a genuine soldier trained in foreign service and observant of the rules of civilized war. But a papal legate who was in the Catholic camp gleefully reports that after a battle won by the confederates no prisoners had been taken. By the soldiery of the government at least children were butchered, the saying being that “nits make lice.”

The anti-Catholic policy of the Puritan government and the castle had driven into the arms of insurrection the Catholic lords of the Pale, English in blood, normally hostile to the tribes though they were. The Confederation formed at Kilkenny a provisional government with an assembly of priests and laity combined, which elected a council of war. The assembly was presently joined by a papal nuncio, Rinuccini, who brought money from Rome and it seems at the same time encouragement of the rebellion from Richelieu. The nuncio sought to control everything in the paramount interest of the Papacy, which thus once more appears as a power of temporal ambition. The assembly was not unanimous. Of the clergy and the nuncio the chief aims were the ascendency of the Catholic Church and the recovery of the confiscated Church lands. The chief aims of the lay lords were lay; they wanted relief from political disabilities and recovery of their political power. Restoration to the Church of the abbey lands, of the grantees of which they were the heirs, was by no means to their mind.

Of the origin of the rebellion in Ulster King Charles was perfectly innocent, though he drew suspicion on himself by some careless words. Nothing worse for his cause could have happened. But when in his wrestle with the Puritan he was thrown, he began to cast a longing eye on the forces in Ireland which, though rebel and Catholic, were at all events hostile to the Puritan. There ensued a series of tangled intrigues with the Confederates, in the course of which Charles showed his usual weakness and duplicity, while he was fatally committed by the mingled rashness and tergiversation of his envoy, Glamorgan, the result being a disclosure very injurious to the poor king’s character and cause. The Confederacy was divided between a party which was for treating and a party which was for war to the knife. For war to the knife was the nuncio, an ecclesiastical termagant of the Becket stamp, inflated with notions of his own spiritual power and reckless in the pursuit of his own end, which was to lay Ireland at the feet of the Pope. In all this the high-minded Ormonde sadly stooped to take a part for his royal master’s sake. When the cause of his royal master was finally lost, he surrendered his command to the Parliament and left Ireland.

After the execution of Charles the scene shifted again. Abhorrence of regicide brought about a junction of the more moderate Protestants with the more moderate Confederates, uniting different parties and sections under a common profession of loyalty. Ormonde then returned to lead a mixed and not very harmonious force against Michael Jones, the Republican commander. He advanced to the attack of Dublin, but was totally defeated by Jones.

Now on the wings of victory came Cromwell with ten thousand of the New Model. His proclamation on landing promised to all who would keep the peace, peace and protection for themselves. That proclamation, the first utterance of law and order heard in those parts for ten years, was strictly carried into effect. A soldier was hanged for robbing a native of a fowl. No disorder, rapine, or outrage upon women is laid to the charge of the Puritan army in Ireland. Cromwell sat down before Drogheda, which was held by a large royalist garrison, partly English. The garrison having refused to surrender on summons, he stormed. Two attacks failed; a third, led by himself, took the town. He put the garrison to the sword. That a garrison refusing to surrender on summons and standing a storm might be put to the sword was the rule of war in those days; it was the law, though not the rule, of war even in the days of Wellington. Nevertheless, this was a fell act for a commander who was generally humane in war, and at Worcester risked his life in persuading Royalists to take quarter. Of this Cromwell was himself sensible, and he spoke of it with compunction. “I am persuaded,” he said in his despatch to the Parliament, “that this is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood; and that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future; which are the satisfactory grounds to such actions, which otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret.” Were remorse and regret ever breathed by Alva, Parma, or Tilly? What did the soldiery of those Catholic commanders do when it stormed a Protestant town? What did the British soldiery, maddened by the recollection of a massacre far less than that of 1641 do, not only to the Sepoy mutineer, but to the insurgent people of Oude? When Rupert stormed Leicester, the town was sacked, and women and children were found among the dead. The Royalist Carte, in his life of Ormonde, commenting on the slaughter of the garrison of Drogheda, says, “This was certainly an execrable policy in that regicide. But it had the effect he proposed. It spread abroad the terror of his name; it cut off the best body of the Irish troops and disheartened the rest to such a degree that it was a greater loss in itself and much more fatal in its consequences than the rout at Rathmines.” This is not a defence, nor much of an excuse. But it testifies to a motive other than mere thirst of blood and shows that Cromwell spoke the truth.

There was cruel slaughter again at the storming of Wexford, but it does not appear that it was ordered by Cromwell. The defences having been carried, the combat was renewed within the town by the townspeople, who, it is stated, had provoked wrath by their piracy and by drowning a number of Protestants in a hulk. The city had been summoned to surrender on fair terms.

Cromwell was at once called away to the war with Scotland. He left the war in Ireland to be finished by Ireton and Ludlow, who gradually extinguished organized resistance, leaving only something between guerilla warfare and brigandage called “Toryism,” a name presently transmitted to a great political party in England which bore it as a name of honour, in opposition to that of Whig, on every hypothesis equally humble in its source.

The two races and religions had fought for the land, and the Saxon and Protestant had won. It is surely simple to suggest that the winner ought to have invited the loser to take the prize, especially after such a display of that loser’s sentiments and intentions as the massacre of 1641. Had it not been made fearfully clear that the two races and religions could not dwell together in peace? The victorious Puritan drove the Catholic into Connaught. The Catholic, if he could, would have driven the Puritan into the sea. The original decree of “To Hell or Connaught,” the hateful sound of which still rings in Irish ears, seems to have been somewhat mitigated as the wrath of the victor cooled. At all events the sentence extended to landowners only, not to artisans and labourers, who were to remain where they were and to be disciplined and civilized by English masters. A great number of those who had fought on the losing side were sent away to foreign service, ridding Ireland of a manifest danger and forming the first instalment of the grand Irish element in the armies of Catholic Europe. There was also a large deportation to Barbados, including probably families left behind by the military emigration. This was cruel work, the more so as there was terrible suffering in the passage. The whole business was horrible and deplorable. But in passing sentence on the winner we must remember what the loser, had he been the winner, would have done. The shadow of an evil destiny was over all. Deportation was not to slavery for life, but to terminable bondage, one degree less cruel.

To cast all on Cromwell is most unfair. He had nothing specially to do with Ireland till he came to put an end to the war. He left it forever when he had struck his decisive blow. He could no more have given back the contested land to the Catholics than he could have turned the Shannon to its source. The act under which the land had been forfeited in advance and a loan on it raised had been passed by the unanimous vote of Parliament and had received the assent of the king. The soldiers who held land-scrip for their pay presented their claims. As little would it have been possible for Cromwell, even if he had desired it, to license the celebration of the Mass, which in Puritan eyes was a sign, not only of idolatry, but of allegiance to a foreign power, that power the mortal enemy, not of the Protestant religion only, but of the Protestant State. With liberty of conscience Cromwell declared that he would not interfere. This was something in an age when the rack and the stake of the Inquisition were still at work and when Irish troopers in the service of a Catholic power were butchering the Protestant peasantry of Savoy. If the Nuncio Rinuccini had got the upper hand in Ireland, a retirement of heresy into the sanctuary of conscience would scarcely have saved it from the stake. Cromwell does not appear to have persecuted in Ireland or to have given the word for persecution.

The Protector united Ireland as well as Scotland to England, thus bringing the factions under the control of a strong government, Ireland’s only hope of peace. Union assured her free trade with Great Britain and the dependencies, an inestimable boon, not in the way of material wealth only, but in that of commercial civilization, as its withdrawal afterwards fatally proved. Her shipping was at the same time assured of exemption from the disabilities of the Navigation Laws. The Protector sent her a good governor in the person of his son Henry, who seems to have identified himself with the welfare of her people. He sent her a liberal law reformer in the person of Chief Justice Coke, proposing to himself to treat her as a blank paper, whereon he could write reforms such as professional bigotry debarred him from effecting in England. His mortal enemy Clarendon, after dilating on the iniquities of the settlement, says, “And, which is more wonderful, all this was done and settled within little more than two years to that degree of perfection that there were many buildings raised for beauty as well as use, orderly and regular plantations of trees, and fences and enclosures raised throughout the kingdom, purchases made by one from the other at very valuable rates, and jointures made upon marriages, and all other conveyances and settlements executed, as in a kingdom at peace within itself, and where no doubt could be made of the validity of titles.” If these material improvements were at first limited to the domain and race of the victor, they would in time have spread.

Cromwell’s own letter to Sadler on the administration of justice in Ireland breathes anything but the ferocity ascribed to him. About religion he speaks in his unctuous Puritan way, but in a tone far from savage. “First let me tell you, in divers places where we come, we find the people very greedy after the Word, and flocking to Christian meetings; much of that prejudice that lies upon poor people in England being a stranger to their minds. And truly we have hoped much of it is done in simplicity; and I mind you the rather of this because it is a sweet symptom, if not an earnest of the good we expect.”[1]

His words on the social question in the same letter show tenderness of feeling. “Sir, it seems to me we have a great opportunity to set up until the Parliament shall otherwise determine, a way of doing justice among these poor people, which for the uprightness and cheapness of it may exceedingly gain upon them who have been accustomed to as much injustice, tyranny, and oppression from their landlords the great men, and those that should have done them right as (I believe) any people in that which we call Christendom.... Sir, if justice were freely and impartially administered here, the foregoing darkness and corruption would make it look so much the more glorious and beautiful and draw more hearts after it.” This is not the language of hatred, much less of extermination.

Critics of Cromwell fail to notice that his mind opened as he rose, notably in the way of religious toleration. The Ironside had now become a great statesman. “Savage” the writer of his domestic letters surely can never have been.

The representatives of Ireland in the Parliament of the Protectorate, it is true, were nominees. A popular election on the morrow of the Civil War, and with its embers still glowing, would have been out of the question. The union of the Parliaments effected, and representation granted, popular election would have come in time. Meantime, there was the sheltering and controlling authority of the Protector and the Council of State.

To charge Cromwell with having misunderstood the genius of the Irish nation and wronged it by his policy seems absurd. There was, in reality, no Irish nation. There was an island inhabited partly by the wreck of Celtic tribes, partly by conquerors and colonists of another race, the two races differing widely in character, speaking different languages, having antagonistic religions, not alien only, but desperately hostile to each other. Deadly experience had shown that, left to themselves, they could not live at peace. There was no political union, no attachment to a native dynasty, no tradition or sentiment truly national among the wreckage of the septs. The religious bond, it is true, had been greatly strengthened among them by the conflict, and formed something like a national tie. But adaptation of his policy to Catholic character and sentiment could hardly be expected of a Puritan chief in the age of the Spanish Inquisition.

The European war between Catholicism and Protestantism, and the consequent mingling of religious with political strife, were everywhere a fatal stumbling-block to statesmanship in that day. It does not seem that Cromwell dealt with the difficulty in England or Ireland less wisely and liberally than did statesmanship elsewhere. Perhaps the greater share of liberality was his. The signs of his personal inclination were certainly on the liberal side.

VII

The death of the Protector before his hour, and the military anarchy which ensued, brought on the Restoration. The Restoration brought claims on the part of dispossessed Royalism for restitution in both countries. The occupants of confiscated lands in Ireland, seeing what must come, had under the leadership of opportunist politicians, such as Broghill and Cork, worshipped with politic rapture the return of the Royal Sun. The disinherited on the other hand clamorously pressed their claim to restitution. To that claim honour bade and sympathy inclined Charles II. to give ear. But the adventurers were a formidable body, and while their professions were fervently loyal their hands were on their swords. Nor did Protestant England, even in its hot fit of loyalty, love the Irish Catholic or forget the massacre of 1641. There ensued a vast controversy, desperately embarrassing to Clarendon, Charles’s chief adviser, to Charles himself no doubt an insufferable bore. Intrigue and corruption, in which the possessors were strong, contended with argument in the fray. The government at last took refuge in the appointment of a commission instructed to decide claims to restitution on the principle of complicity or non-complicity in the rebellion of 1641; a criterion rather difficult of application, since Charles I. had on the one hand assented to the Act of Forfeiture, and on the other hand by treating with the Confederates had practically recognized their loyalty to the crown. The upshot was an Act of Settlement with a supplementary Act of Explanation, under which the possessors retained about two-thirds of the lands, the disinherited getting the other one-third, eked out with scraps, which by escheat or forfeiture for regicide were at the disposal of the crown. The Act of Settlement was thenceforth in the eyes of the Protestant possessor the great charter of proprietary right, to be upheld at whatever cost; in the eyes of the dispossessed Catholic, the hateful muniment of proprietary wrong, to be cancelled whenever he had the power. The net result of the Act of Settlement and Explanation was that Ulster was left, as it remains, a Protestant pale.

The Anglican State Church recovered all its possessions and privileges, and was once more planted on the neck of a Catholic people. It is sad to learn that Jeremy Taylor, who, when under persecution, had eloquently defended liberty of prophesying, as a bishop of the restored Irish establishment defended that liberty no more. But how could a hierarch of the State Church of Ireland fail to don its spirit with his mitre?

The whole of the Protector’s work was undone. The union of Scotland and Ireland with England was broken. Ireland was again reduced to the state of a dependency, and of a dependency unloved and unrespected, whose interests were to be always sacrificed to those of the country which was the seat of power. Of this she was soon made fatally sensible. Protectionism was the creed of that dark age. Ireland as a fine grazing country had been doing a profitable export trade with England in cattle, pork, bacon, and dairy produce. The English grazier demanded of his Parliament protection against the free importation of food, denounced by him as a “nuisance.” On his demand an act was passed prohibiting the trade. Good sense and the public interest struggled hard. The debate was unusually fierce. Ominous expressions of contempt for the Irish were heard, and led to a challenge. The king had the good sense to disapprove the measure, but gave way, as he was sure to do. The patriotic policy of the grazier triumphed. Irish fish narrowly escaped prohibition at the same time. This was the first of a line of prohibitive acts fatal to the commerce of Ireland and to her commercial civilization. At the same time she came under the Navigation Laws, which were fatal to her shipping trade.

Ireland, however, had the good fortune to be during the greater part of the reign of Charles II. under the government of that Duke of Ormonde who had commanded for the king in the Civil War. The duke was a statesman, like Clarendon and Southampton, of the old and honourable cavalier school, untainted by the political profligacy or the social dissoluteness of the men of the Cabal. He governed as impartially as the anti-Catholic laws and his own strict Anglicanism would let him; did his best to keep the peace between the factions, political and religious; promoted manufactures and trade, encouraged and endowed education, founded a college of medicine, organized a national militia. He heartily identified himself with Irish interests, and opposed the Cattle Act with an energy and a force of argument which entitle his memory to the respect of free traders. It is the sad truth that of Irish history between the Conquest and the Union the one bright period is the viceroyalty of Ormonde.

Ireland unhappily, though her interests were out of the pale of English care, was not out of the pale of English faction and revolution. The Stuart brothers, plotting with their French patron the subversion of English religion and liberty, looked to Catholic Ireland for help in their plot. They cultivated the Catholic interest there, and against the law promoted Catholics to office and command. Richard Talbot, lying Dick, afterwards Duke of Tyrconnel, one of the lowest of their wonderfully low agents, as well as about the most violent, appeared upon the scene. It was probably by thwarting or refusing to promote this conspiracy that Ormonde, a strict Protestant though of the Anglican school, and constitutional though a monarchist, incurred temporary dismissal from his viceroyalty. Possibly in the same quarter may be sought the explanation of the mysterious attempt at murdering him by Blood, of the criminal connection of the court with whom there can be little doubt. On the other hand, the cruel anti-Catholic panic, created in England by the well-founded suspicion of danger to Protestantism from Stuart intrigue with France which gave birth to the Popish plot, extended its rage to Ireland. The last and most pitiable of the innocent victims of that frenzy was the Catholic Archbishop Plunket.

VIII

Signs of preparation for the Stuart attack on Protestantism and liberty were visible in Ireland as well as in England in the last years of Charles II. But the blow was suspended during the life of the Merry Monarch, who preferred the calm of the seraglio to the stir of a great enterprise, and did not want to go again upon his travels. With the accession of Charles’s fanatical and blundering brother, the crisis came. The Viceroy Clarendon, a Tory of Tories, but an Anglican, was deposed from the viceroyalty, and quitted Ireland with a stream of Protestant refugees in his train. Into his place vaulted Dick Talbot, now Duke of Tyrconnel, drunk with the fury of Romanizing and despotic reaction. A Catholic reign of terror set in. Protestants were disarmed; driven from places of authority, political, judicial, or municipal; practically outlawed, plundered, outraged, compelled to fly for their lives. The country seethed with a general orgie of insurrection and revenge. The people swarmed to the standard of Catholic and agrarian revolution, rather than to that of the English king, for whom they cared little and who cared little for them. Presently came James, ejected from England, with the power of his French patron at his back. Under him a packed Parliament repealed the Act of Settlement by which the Protestants held their lands, proclaiming reconfiscation and expulsion on a vast scale. Not satisfied with this, the Parliament passed a monstrous Act of Attainder against a large portion of the Protestant proprietary. Nor can it be assumed that the frantic hatred which inspired this act would have confined itself to spoliation, for which the repeal of the Act of Settlement might have pretty well sufficed. A long lifetime had not yet passed since 1641. James, who was not an Irish patriot but an English king out of possession, would have vetoed the Act of Attainder had he dared. But he dared not. He even suffered himself in this case to be divested of the royal prerogative of pardon. Another prerogative, that of regulating the coin, he exercised by sanctioning a base issue on a large scale, which, being made legal tender, completed the ruin of the Protestant trader.

But Protestantism, the stern Protestantism of the Calvinist, rallied on its own ground, and behind the mouldering walls of Derry made against a Catholic host one of the heroic defences of history, a worthy theme in an after time for the most brilliant of historians. In the battle of Newtown Butler, Protestantism again triumphed over odds. Succour at length came from England. It came first in the person of the renowned Schomberg, whose army, however, made up of raw recruits, ill supplied by fraudulent contractors, and filled with disease by the moisture of the climate, miserably rotted. At last the bonfires of jubilant Protestantism announced that William of Orange had landed. On the Boyne he gained a small battle but a great victory, which decided that the Protestant Saxon, not the Catholic Celt, should be master of Ireland. James fled to the luxurious asylum of his French master, and with him fled the last hope of the Catholic cause.

Once more, however, at Aghrim, the Catholic, under the command of the French General St. Ruth, accepted the wager of battle in open field. He fought well, and the fortune of the day wavered, when a cannon shot took off St. Ruth’s head. Protestantism owed its victory largely to a regiment of French Huguenots exiled by the bigoted tyranny of their own king.

All was over in the field. The irresistible Marlborough reduced Cork and Kinsale. But in Limerick, by soldiers pronounced untenable, Catholicism had its Derry. Its hero Sarsfield, by a daring march, cut off William’s siege artillery, and, after a fierce assault, gallantly repulsed, William was fain to raise the siege. After his departure Ginkell again invested the place, and Sarsfield, finding that the last hour of the last Catholic stronghold had come, capitulated on terms. The military terms of the surrender were strictly observed. The political terms, securing a measure of religious liberty to Catholics, though endorsed by William in his wise Dutch love of toleration, were repudiated by Parliament. The “violated treaty of Limerick” was an ugly business, though there seems to have been no protest at the time. But James had fled. The garrison of Limerick had no status but a military one, to which surrender put an end. Politically they were merely insurgents. Could any political terms made with them have bound the sovereign authority of the Irish and British Parliaments in dealing with their own citizens forever? Can Sarsfield have thought that they did?

A crowd of Irish women and children lined the shore at Limerick, watching with tearful eyes the receding sails of the fleet which bore away their husbands and fathers, the garrison of the last Catholic stronghold, to service in foreign lands. The defenders of Limerick were thus exchanged for the Huguenot exiles who had charged and conquered at Aghrim. Those men, with many an exile from Catholic Ireland who followed in their track, went to form the Irish brigade and to redeem on foreign fields battles lost in their own land.

IX

In that mortal struggle, had the Catholic won, he would have deprived the Protestant certainly of his land, perhaps of his life. The Protestant, having won, proceeded at once to avenge and secure himself by binding down his vanquished foe with chains of iron. Chains of iron indeed they were. By the series of enactments called the Penal Code, passed by the Irish Parliament with some assistance from that of England, the Irish Catholic was reduced to helotage political and social, while measures were taken for the extirpation of his religion. To crush him politically he was excluded from Parliament, from the franchise, from municipal office, from the magistracy, from the jury box, as well as from public appointments of all kinds, and even from the police force. To crush him socially he was excluded from all the higher callings but that of medicine, from the bench, from the bar, and from the army. He was denied the armorial bearings which denoted a gentleman. To divorce him from the land, he was forbidden to acquire freehold or a lease beneficial beyond a certain rate; he was debarred from bequeathing his estate; and his estate was broken up by making it heritable in gavelkind. The gate of knowledge was closed against him. He was shut out of the university; forbidden to open a school; forbidden to send his children abroad for education. That he might never rise against oppression, he was disarmed and prohibited from keeping a horse of more than five pounds’ value. He might not even be a gamekeeper or a watchman.

The law, without actually prohibiting the Catholic religion, provided, as was hoped, for its extirpation. All priests were required to be registered, and were forbidden to perform service out of their own parish. All Catholic archbishops and bishops were banished, and were made punishable with death if they returned, so that in future there could be no ordinations. Monks and friars also were banished. Catholic chapels might not have bells or steeples. There were to be no pilgrimages or wayside crosses. Rewards were offered to informers against Catholic bishops, priests, and schoolmasters, and their trade was lauded as honourable service to the state. Marriage of a Catholic with a Protestant was prohibited; to perform it was a capital offence; so was conversion of a Protestant to Catholicism. Religious hatred outraged domestic affection by enacting that if the son of a Catholic turned Protestant the inheritance should at once vest in him, his father being reduced to a life interest; that the wife of a Catholic turning Protestant should be set free from her husband’s control and entitled to a settlement; that a Catholic could not be a guardian, so that, dying, he had to leave his children to the guardianship of an enemy of their faith.

Representatives of the government designated the Catholics officially as “our enemies.” The Irish Parliament was exhorted to put an end to all distinctions except that between Protestant and Papist. To such a relation between races under the same government history can scarcely show a parallel, unless it be the case of the Moriscos in Spain.

“It was,” says Burke, “a complete system full of coherence and consistency; well digested and well composed in all its parts. It was a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance and was as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people and the debasement in them of human nature itself as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man.” It was the panic rage of a garrison which had narrowly escaped extermination, and less cruel than the treatment of the Huguenots by the Catholic king at the instigation of the Jesuit and with the approbation of the Catholic Church in France. The fires of the Inquisition were still burning, and continued for some time to burn. If the British Parliament shares the guilt of the Penal Code, twice had an army of Irish Catholics been raised for the destruction of English liberties. When last those liberties were in the extremity of peril, a force of Irish Catholics had been encamped at Hounslow. Nor was Catholicism merely a religion. It was allegiance to a power which claimed the suzerainty of Ireland, which had launched the decree of deposition against Elizabeth, which, after the rising of 1641, had sent its nuncio to the rebel council of Kilkenny. These memories on both sides ought long ago to have been consigned to a common grave.

At the same time it was deplorable that the settlement of the Catholic provinces after their reconquest should have been left to the Protestants of Ireland, transported with rage and fear. The true course, had it been possible, was the union of Ireland with England. Representatives of the loyal districts of Ireland might have been called at once to the Parliament at Westminster. The rest of the island might have been placed under a strong government of pacification and settlement, till peace and the reign of law had been thoroughly restored. It is needless to say that such a solution could not even suggest itself to the mind of any statesman at that time.

In extirpating the Catholic religion the policy of the Penal Code failed. To the faith which was their only comfort and sole redemption from utter degradation the people more than ever clung. The priests braved the law, celebrated mass in hiding-places, furtively ordained, several hands being laid on at once that the man ordained might be able to swear that he did not know who had ordained him. They taught in hedge schools, and, though but coarsely educated themselves, preserved the scantling there was of knowledge and civilization among the people. In their celibacy they had a great advantage for such work. Interested conversions among Catholics of the higher class, especially as passports to the bar, seem not to have been uncommon. An old lady of an ancient line is said to have embraced Protestantism avowedly against her conscience, saying that it was better that one old woman should burn than that the estates of the house of Tomond should go out of the family. But disinterested conversions there were none. On the other hand Protestants in isolated settlements were turned Catholic by social contagion.

Other parts of the code took deadly effect. The Catholics generally ceased to own land. Of their landed gentry, some went into exile. The people, bereft of their natural leaders, sank into apathetic helotage and mute despair. Neither in 1715 nor in 1745, when a pretender again unfurled the banner of the House of Stuart, was there the slightest political movement among them. Socially, the iron had entered their souls and they cowered under the yoke of the ascendancy. Once, an informer having tendered a Catholic the legal ten pounds for his pair of fine horses, the Catholic drew his pistol and shot the pair. But this was a rare spark of self-respect on the part of the helot.

The cup of woe was not yet full. In England, with revolution principles, the mercantile party had mounted to power, and commerce in those days was everywhere ridden by the fallacy of protectionism, which killed the only good articles in the Treaty of Utrecht, those opening free trade with France. Ireland, the English protectionist regarded as a foreign country, and a particularly dangerous enemy to his interest. The cattle trade having been killed by the act of Charles II., the Irish had taken to the export trade in wool and to woollen manufactures. The wool grown on Irish sheepwalks was of the finest, and was eagerly purchased by France and Spain. This industry also English monopoly killed by prohibiting the exportation of wool to foreign countries and the importation of Irish woollen goods into England. The same jealous rapacity seems to have successively killed or crippled the cotton industry, the glove-making industry, the glass industry, the brewing industry, to each of which Ireland successively turned; English greed being bent, not only on excluding the Irish competitor from its own market, but on keeping the Irish market to itself. Ireland had been promised free enjoyment of the linen trade, which Strafford had encouraged by promoting the growing of flax while he discouraged the wool trade; yet even this promise Irish financiers could accuse England of eluding by tricks of the tariff. England needing more bar iron than she could produce, the importation of bar iron from Ireland was allowed; but the consequence was a consumption of timber for smelting which denuded Ireland of her forests.

Cromwell’s union would have secured to Ireland exemption from the disabilities of the Navigation Laws. The Restoration imposed them. They killed her trade with the colonies and killed her shipping interest at the same time. “The conveniency of ports and harbours,” said Swift, “which nature has bestowed so liberally upon this kingdom, is of no more use to us than a beautiful prospect to a man shut up in a dungeon.”

In all this Ireland was treated as a colony, meant only to be a feeder to the imperial country. But her position was worse than that of the colonies, in which commercial restrictions generally were loosely enforced, and which, when strict enforcement was attempted by Grenville, rose in arms. The colonies, moreover, were regarded with pride and affection. Popish Ireland was regarded with contempt and hatred.

The lawful trade in wool with foreign countries England had suppressed. Its place was partly taken by a smuggling trade, for which the inlets of the Irish coast afforded the best of havens, and which had the people everywhere for confederates. Thus, in every line, religious, social, educational, and commercial, the Irishman found the law his inveterate enemy. Could he fail to be an inveterate enemy of the law?

Cut off from manufactures and from trade, the people were thrown for subsistence wholly on the land, and land for the most part better suited for pasture than for tillage. For the land they competed with the eagerness of despair, undertaking to pay for their little lots rents which left them and their families less than a bare subsistence. On such a scene of misery as the abodes of the Irish cotters the sun has rarely looked down. Their homes were the most miserable hovels, chimneyless, filthy. Of decent clothing they were destitute. Their food was the potato; sometimes they bled their cattle and mixed the blood with sorrel. The old and sick were everywhere dying by cold and hunger, and rotting amidst filth and vermin. When the potato failed, as it often did, came famine, with disease in its train. Want and misery were in every face; the roads were spread with dead and dying; there were sometimes none to bear the dead to the grave and they were buried in the fields and ditches where they perished. Fluxes and malignant fevers followed, laying whole villages waste. “I have seen,” says a witness, “the labourer endeavouring to work at his spade, but fainting for want of food, and forced to omit it. I have seen the helpless orphan exposed on the dunghill, and none to take him in for fear of infection. And I have seen the hungry infant sucking at the breast of the already expired parent.”[2] There was an enormous amount of vagrancy and mendicity, as there was in Scotland before the union. This was under the government of the first of free nations, and in the era of Newton, Addison, and Pope.

Reduced to living like beasts, the people multiplied their kind with animal recklessness. The result was fatal overpopulation, the pressure of which, aggravated by occasional failures of the treacherous potato, could be relieved only by the tragic remedy of emigration on an immense scale.

Of the landowners, who might have had compassion on their serfs, many were absentees; residence in Ireland, especially when agrarian war began, being hardly pleasant. Their place was taken by the middleman, through whose ruthless agency they extorted their rents and who frequently sublet, sometimes even three or four deep, so that the cotter groaned under a hierarchy of extortion. From the ranks of the middlemen were partly drawn the upstart gentry, or squireens, a roistering, debauched, drinking, and duelling crew, whose tyrannical insolence scandalized Arthur Young, ruling with the horse-whip a peasantry cowering under the lash and hopeless of redress by the law. The peasantry still largely spoke Erse, another badge of their social inferiority, and a further barrier between them and the ruling class.

To the extortion of the middleman was added that, even more hated, of the tithe proctor. The Protectorate had at all events relieved Ireland of the Anglican State Church. That incubus the monarchy reimposed, and the peasant was compelled out of the miserable produce of his potato field or patch of oats, besides the exorbitant rent, not only to provide for his own priest, but to pay tithe to a clergy whose mission was to extirpate the peasant’s religion. The Anglican bishoprics were rich. The rectories for the most part were miserably poor, so that pluralism might be necessary to make an income. But pluralism of the most scandalous kind also prevailed, and we have a dean holding two groups of livings, fourteen livings in all, one group twelve miles away from the other. Some of the clergy, on the plea that there were no glebe houses for them, were drawing their tithes in the pump room and at the card tables of Bath. Bishops were sometimes non-resident as well as scandalously secular and inert. Most of them were English, and appointed to keep up the English interest. There were bright exceptions, such as Bolter, King, above all Berkeley, but they were few. Swift could say of Irish bishops that government no doubt appointed good men, but they were always murdered on Hounslow Heath by the highwaymen, who took their credentials, personated them, and were installed in their place. There have been worse institutions than the State Church of Ireland; there was never a greater scandal. Even if Anglicanism had been less alien to the Irish heart, what chance would such missionaries as these have had against the devoted emissaries of Rome? What must have been the feelings of the Irish peasant when of his crop of potatoes, all too scanty for him and his children, the tithe proctor came to claim a tenth part in the name of a Christian minister?

There were prelates of a better stamp who sought to do well by the people. Under their auspices were set up the chartered schools, to give poor Irish children an industrial education. But the work of charity was marred by bigotry. The children were taken from their Catholic parents and forcibly brought up as Protestants, whereby the heart of the Catholic parent was filled with anguish, and more bitter offence, it seems, was given than by any other kind of repression. The schools at last became a sink of abuse, inhumanity, and corruption.

Rural Ireland was a recruiting ground for the armies of the Continent. On some lonely hillside the recruiting agent reviewed the youth of the neighbourhood, picked out the strong, the flower of the population, and turned back the feeble to their miserable homes.

If anything was to be done for the extension of Protestantism, union among the Protestant minority was indispensable, and the enthusiasm of the Calvinist, sombre as it was, might have had its attractions for the Celt, as it had for the Celts of the Scottish Highlands, among whom it gave birth to the hill preachers, and for those of Wales with whom Calvinistic Methodism prevailed. But the bishops of the State Church hated the Presbyterian even more bitterly than they hated the Catholic. After their brief and hollow alliance with the Nonconformists, when their own interest was threatened, they had speedily relapsed into High Anglicanism, and under the not unsuitable leadership of the infidel Bolingbroke had taken to persecuting Nonconformity in England. They extended the persecution to Ireland, excluding by the Sacramental Test the defenders of Derry from municipal office and military service. They imported the Schism Act, forbidding Nonconformists to open schools. They threatened interference with Presbyterian worship, Ireland having no Toleration Act. They disputed the validity of Presbyterian marriage. They thus set flowing a stream of Presbyterian emigration from the north of Ireland to the American colonies. The stream was afterwards swelled by the rapacity of Lord Donegal and other landed proprietors of Ulster, who, being owners of great estates, when the leases of their tenants ran out, instead of renewing them to the tenant, put them up to the highest bidder. Starving Catholics, in the desperate competition for land, outbidding the Protestants, a number of Protestant families were driven from their homes. The consequence was, first, aggressive insurrection under the names of the Heart of Oak Boys and the Steel Boys, ultimately emigration to America. Thus the Church and the landlord between them were charging the mine of American revolution.