No. 62 25 Cts. Copyright, 1885, by Harper & Brothers March 12, 1886 Subscription Pric« per Year, 52 Numbers, |1S Extra Entered at the Post-Office at New York, as Second-class Mail Matter IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE CLOSE OF THE TEAR 1885 By WM. STEPHENSON GRE Books you may hold readily in your hand are the most use/id, after all Dr. Johnson qX NEW YORK HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS 1886 HARPER'S HANDY SERIES. Latest Issues. NO. CENTS. 27. Self-Doomed. A Novel. By B. L. Farjeon 25 28. Malthus and His Work. By James Bonar, M. A . . . . . 25 29. The Dark House. A Novel " By G. Manville Fenn 25 30. The Ghost's Touch, and Other Stories. By Wilkie Collins 25 31. The Royal Mail. By James Wilson Hyde. Illustrated 25 32. The Ltacred Nugget, A Novel. By B. L. Farjeon 25 33. Primus in Indis. A Romance. By M. J. Colquhoun ......... 25 34. Musical History. By G. A. Macfarren 25 35. In Quarters with the 25th Dragoons. By J. S. Winter 25 36. Goblin Gold. A Novel. By May Crommelin 25 37. The Wanderings op Ulysses. By Prof. C. Witt. Translated by Frances Younghusband „ 25 38. A Barren Title. A Novel. By T. W. Speight 25 39. Us: An Old-fashioned Story. By Mrs. Molesworth. Ill'd.... 25 40. Ounces of Prevention. By Titus Munson Coan, A.M., M.D. ... 25 41. Half- Way. An Anglo-French Romance 25 42. Christmas Angel. A Novel. By B. L. Farjeon. Illustrated... 25 43. Mrs. Dymond. A Novel. By Miss Thackeray . . . . 25 44. The Bachelor Vicar of Newforth. A Novel. By Mrs. J. Har- court-Roe . . . „ . 25 45. In the Middle Watch. A Novel. By W. Clark Russell. „ . . „ . 25 46. Tiresias, and Other Poems. By Alfred, Lord Tennyson 25 47. Last Days at Apswich. A Novel . .' 25 48. Cabin and Gondola. By Charlotte Dunning 30 49. Lester's Secret. A Novel. By Mary Cecil Hay „ 30 50. A Man of Honor. A Novel. By J. S. Winter. Illustrated ... 25 51. Stories of Provence. From the French of Alphonse Daudet. By S. L. Lee 25 52. 'Twixt Love and Duty. A Novel. By Tighe Hopkins 25 53. A Plea for the Constitution, &c. By George Bancroft 25 54. Fortune's Wheel. A Novel. By Alex. Innes Shand , 25 55. Lord Beaconsfield's Correspondence with his Sister — 1832-1852 25 56. Mauleverer's Millions. A Yorkshire Romance. By T. Wemyss Reid 25 57. What Does History Teach? Two Edinburgh Lectures. By John Stuart Blackie 25 58. The Last of the Mac Allisters. A Novel. By Mrs. Amelia E. Barr. 25 59. Cavalry Life. Sketches and Stories. By J. S. Winter ....... 25 60. Movements of Religious Thol ~rifT in Britain during the Nine- teenth Century. By John Tulloch, D.D., LL.D „ 25 61. Hurrish : A Study. By the Hon. Emily Lawless 25 62. Irish History for English Readers. By Wm. Stephenson Gregg. 25 Other volumes in preparation. % 4GF Harper & Brothers will send any of the above works by mail, postage pre- paid, to any part of the United Stales or Canada, on receipt of the price, CONTENTS. CHAP. PAGE I. — The Age of Legends, 3 II. — St. Patrick and his Times, - 8 III. — The Rise and Fall of Holiness and Learning, 12 IV.— The Invasion. 17 V. — Three Centuries of Norman Rule, - - 21 VI.— The Geraldines, ...... 25 VII. — How Shane O'Neill held Ulster, - - 32 frlJL — The Desmond Rebellion, .... 40 I '. — Elizabeth's War with Hugh O'Neill, - 46 X. — The Plantation of Ulster, - - 52 XL— The Cvtl War of 1641, .... 57 XII. — The Plantation of Cromwell, 65 XIII. — The Restoration, ------ 69 XIV.— The Revolution, 77 XV. — The Treaty of Limerick, .... 83 XVI.— The Penal Code, % - 86 XVII. — The Commercial Restraints, - 91 XVIII. — The Land Difficulties, - - - 94 XIX.— Woods Halfpence, 99 XX. — The Patriot Party, 101 XXL— The Volunteers, 107 XXIL— Grattan's Parliament, Ill XXIII. — The United Irishmen. .... 115 CONTENTS. ii. CHA?. PAGE XXIV.— "Ninety-eight," 119 XXV.— The Prospect of Union, 122 XXVI.— The Act of Union, .... 12s XXVIL— The Peace of 1815, - 138 XXVIII.— Emancipation, 138 XXIX.— The Repeal Year, 144 XXX.— The Famine, - - - - - - 147 XXXI.— Young Ireland, ...... 156 XXXII.— The Land, 160 XXXIII.— Fentanism, 166 XXXIV.— Lopping the Upas Tree, - - • - 172 XXXV.— The Home Rule Movement, 178 XXXVI.— The Land League, - 182 XXXVII.— The Land Act, 191 XXXVIII.— Ireland Under the Crimes Act, 195 XXXIX.— The Elections of 1885, 201 Table of Dates, 208 List of Authorities, .... 215 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. CHAPTER I. THE AGE OF LEGENDS. It is perhaps because there is so little that is pleasant in their modern history that the* Irish cherish the traditions of olden times so deeply. "We profess to know but little of the history of Britain before the Roman conquest, but Irish legends and mythology go back to two thousand three hundred and seventy nine-years before the Christian era: or thirty years before the flood, and two hundred years earlier than the supposed date of the building of Memphis. Such early dates are naturally of no historic value, and refer to legendary events and legendary personages, but the fact that the gods and heroes of those bygone days are remembered proves that Ireland had reached a degree of civilization very rarely attained so early in the world's history. The legends tell us that Queen Keasair and her followers came to Ireland from the east of Europe about 2,380 years before Christ, and that the Keasaireans were driven from the island by Partolan three hundred years later; but the monks, taking advantage of the intermediate deluge, say that the Keasaireans were destroyed by the flood. Be this as it may, only one of the Keasaireans has left any impress on Irish history — that one is Fintan, the salmon god, the patron of poets and historians, who duly reap- peared from time to time as long as any belief in fairies continued. When the Keasaireans were drowned in the deluge, 4 HUSH HISTORY FOIt ENGLISH READERS. Fintan escaped by taking the form of a salmon, until the receding waters left him high and dry on Tara Hill, when he resumed his humanity. It was he who related the history of Ireland to St. Patrick, and some legends tell us that it is to Fintan that we owe our knowledge of these early times, he having visibly appeared to the bards for their enlightenment. Others say that Amergin, the Druid, collected the materials for this early history, but as he did not live till a thousand years after the Keasaireans, be may have been very glad of a little help from Fintan in his re- searches. After the destruction of the Keasaireans, Partolan and his followers came to the island. These invaders came from some civilized country, and brought with them a knowledge of sowing and reaping and other, agricultural arts, and be- gan cultivating the island. But this was already owned by a savage race of giants called the Formorians, who, though they themselves cared nothing for the land, grudged the use of it to others, and exterminated the unlucky race of Partolan. The fate of those unhappy invaders seems to have remained unknown in the distant country whence they came, for Partolan was followed by his cousin Nemed, who, with his five sons, headed a large party of invaders, and landed on the coast of Leinster. The Nemedians fared no better than their forerunners; the Formorians gave them battle and conquered them, with such terrible slaughter that only three of their chiefs escaped. These were Briotan, who settled in Britain and became the an- cestor of the British gods, Semeon Brae and Ibath, who escaped to the east of Europe. The descendants of both these latter were destined to return to Ireland; the child- ren of Semeon Brae as the Firbolgs, and those of Ibath as the Tuatha-de Danan (people of the fairies), the last and greatest race of Irish gods. The Firbolgs were not deities; still, in the time of their last king, Eocha-Mac-Erc, Ire- land was in a position almost without parallel in her history, for, say the bards, ''Good were the days of the sovereignty of Mac-Erc, there was no wet or tempestuous weather in Erin, neither was there any unfruitful year." This happy state of things was, however, brought to a THE AGE OF LEGENDS. 5 close by the Tuatha-de Danan, the descendants of Ibath, and therefore, like the Firbolgs, of Nemedian descent. These heroes landed on Wexford coast, and then, hav- ing burnt their fleet to cut off their retreat, they wrapped themselves in the black cloud of invisibility, and drifted like a mighty mist to the Iron Mountains on the borders of Leitrim. The Firbolgs were assembled on the neigh- boring plains of Sligo, and there, for six days, waged the uneven fight between gods and men. At last the brave Mac-Erc fell on the coast near Ballysadare, where a mound of earth still marks the grave of the last of the Firbolg kings. His people were reduced to the condition of a subject race, and the Tuatha-de Danan believed them- selves masters of the soil. But the Formorians, though absentees, were still in possession, and yearly, after harvest- time, sent agents to sweep away the produce of the land, and the Tuatha-de Danan in their turn became a crushed and broken people, till they were freed from their bondage by Lu-Lam-Finn, a prince of mixed Formorian and de Danan descent, and from that time till the Scoto- Milesian invasion the de Danan people owned the land. Nor, say the legends, did they then utterly abandon it; but, draw- ing around them that cloak of misty darkness which had helped them to victory at their invasion, they retired to the mountains, whence from time to time they appear in the guise of Ban-Shees, for the Shees and Tuatha-de Danan are alike the people of the fairies. The story of Ireland before the Milesian invasion is purely mythological, but it is probable that an invasion from the Spanish peninsula really took place about 1,000 years before Christ, when Solomon was king of Israel, and about 300 years before the foundation of Rome. Milesius, or Miles, though a native of Spain was prob- ably of Phoenecian descent, and from him and his wife, Scotia, all the royal and noble families in Ireland claim to be descended. A peaceable colonization of Ireland was attempted during the lifetime of Milesius by his brother Ith, who was slain by the Tuatha-de Danan, and in revenge for this deed the eight sons of Milesius set out to conquer the country. G IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. Many and terrible were the adventures of that invasion, in which five out of the eight sons of Milesius lost their lives, but at length Heber, Heremon, and Amergin landed on different parts of the coast, and, attacking the Tuatha- de Danan from all sides, managed to subdue them. Amergin, being a Druid, could not reign, so Heber and Heremon arranged to divide the country between them, but being unable to come to any agreement, they met for a decisive battle at Gaeshill, in King's County, where Heber and many of his followers were killed, and from then till the date of the Norman invasion the descendants of Here- mon ruled the island in an unbroken line of 197 Scoto- Milesian kings. The first of these with whom we need concern ourselves is Ollav Fohla, the founder of that famous code known as the Brehon laws. These were administered by the Bre- hons or judges, and, having been revised by St. Patrick, were obeyed by Christian Ireland; it was decreed by Edward III. that no English subject should be tried by Brehon law, but its authority was recognized by the native Irish until the middle of the seventeenth century. Ollav Fohla was succeeded by a line of five or six and twenty kings, and then a ruling queen — Macha, The date of her accession (299 B. c.) is important, for Tiherna, the great Irish historian of the eleventh century, held it to be the earliest authentic date in Irish history, and Macha is also noteworthy as the founder of the city of Armagh, the capital of Ulster throughout the heroic ages. In these early days Ireland was divided into four or five provinces, each governed by its own Ard-Eigh, or head king, who had many petty kings or chieftains reigning under him. The latest and best known division of Ireland was into the five provinces of Ulster, Leinster, Minister, Connaught, and Meath, and the kings of these provinces were perpetually contending for the supremacy. In very early times the king of Ulster usually was victorious, but about the year seventy of our era the king of Meath became Ard-Righ of all Erin, and held his court at Tara. The 'eldest son of the reigning king was usually elected Tanist, or heir, but any member of the five royal families of Ireland THE AGE OF LEGENDS. 7 might be chosen during the lifetime of the king. But Meath did not gain or maintain the supremacy without a struggle, and the petty chieftains were in a state of perpet- ual warfare with one another. The island, thus weakened by internal dissensions, would doubtless have fallen an easy prey to invaders from Rome, Gaul, Britain, and Caledonia, had not a volunteer army been raised from among the nobles of the whole of Ireland for the defence of the country from foreign foes. These Fianna-Erin, or Fenians, were in many respects the equivalent to King Arthur's knights: chivalrous, courageous, pure. The "heroes of Erin" were the idols of the people upon whom they were quartered during the six winter months. In the summer they lived by hunting and fishing, and after a time they exacted as a right the whole of the wild game and large fish of the coun- try. In return for their privileges, they performed both in times of peace and war all the duties of police, and in in- ternal warfare they espoused the cause of the chieftain by whose people they were maintained. Thus Munster Fe- nians fought against the Fenians of Meath in the early days of their society, but as the organization grew in power and extent, they banded themselves together and held all Ireland in a state of subjection or fear. The need for such an organization, too, was passing away; Ireland was yearly growing more united, and the supremacy of the Tara king was more and more generally acknowledged. The power of Rome, and the consequent fear of Roman invasion, was waning, and the Fenians, abusing their power, had become an oppressive burden to the country, till, in the year 281, the king of Tara headed the populace in a revolt against the Fianna, who from that time gradually faded away. The supremacy of Tara now became undisputed, and the power of Ireland grew in extent till, in the time of Niall Mor, the invasions of the Scotic marauders were a terror to the neighboring coasts of Britain, Gaul, and Caledonia. IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. CHAPTER II. ST. PATRICK AND HIS TIMES. After many successful raids in Gaul and Britain, Mall Mor, in the tenth year of his reign (388) invaded Gaul, and at the close of a successful campaign in Brittany returned to Erin, bringing with him "thousands of Christian captives/' among whom was a lad of sixteen named Succoth, who from his noble birth was called Patricius. The young Patrick was sold into slavery, and was employed as a shepherd, till after seven years of cap- tivity a prophetic dream inspired him to escape. But in the happy Breton home, which he reached after many perils, the vision of heathen Erin distressed his soul, and a second prophetic dream bade him prepare himself for the evangelization of Erin. Breaking free from all earthly ties, he took the monastic habit of Tours, and seven years later he went to Rome; but he eventually joined the bare- footed Augustines, and was in their monastery at Auxeure when the news of the death of St. Paladius reached him. He then went to Rome and offered to succeed Paladius as missionary to Erin, and having been consecrated arch- bishop he, with a company of twenty priests, set out on his mission in 432. There were already a few Christians in Ireland; five unsuccessful missions had prepared the ground for St. Patrick's success, but the mass of the people still adhered to some form of heathenism of which Tittle trace remains. There is proof that the fire and sun were worshipped, but, curiously enough, the race which after the introduction of Christianity became the most devout in Europe seems to have been singularly irreligious in pagan times. We find no trace of intense devotion to the gods or of ascetic qualities, and the influence of the Druids seems to have been moral rather than spiritual. The legends, too, are devoid of religious feeling, and the ST. PAT1UCK AND HIS TIMES. 9 virtues of the people — uprightness, truth, courage, justice, chivalry, and hospitality — are purely moral. In the age of St. Patrick the Irish or Scotti had attained to a con- siderable degree of civilization: the laws were just and were justly administered; death was the punishment for murder, theft, and rape, but the families of the injured person might accept in atonement a fine or eric, whose amount was fixed by the Brehons. The law of inheritance was that known as gavelkind. All the sons inherited in equal shares, but except where there were no sons the daughters did not inherit. The land belonged to the nations or tribes that dwelt upon it, and was divided into three classes — common lands on which the whole clan had the right of pasturage, lands set apart for the benefit of the chief, and lands cultivated by individual members of the tribe, and for which the cultivators paid tribute, and the tenure of such land was hereditary. Seven kinds of grain were grown, but the people were in the main pastoral, and lived chiefly off the flesh and milk of their beasts. The sea-board inhabitants had acquired great skill in ship-building, and in the manufacture of weapons the Scotti nearly equalled the Romans, whose influence in Britain and Gaul was very beneficial to Erin. Among other arts learned from the Romans was that of building with the aid of mortar, and the presence of mortar in their construction proves the Irish round towers to have been built after the Roman colonization of Britain. The purpose of these round towers is not known. Some anti- quarians hold them to be Christian belfries, but they were probably connected with heathen rites of fire worship. There are in Ireland, as in England, many cromlechs and other Druidic remains of early temples and tombs built before the use of mortar was introduced ; among these are funeral piles so vast, and composed of such huge blocks of stone, that they can only be compared to the Egyptian pyramids. Stone and mortar were used only for buildings intended to last for ever; dwelling-houses were of wrought wood, usually oak. and consisted for the most part of one apart- ment with a dome-shaped roof, in the middle of which 10 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. there was a space for the smoke to escape. But long before the days of St. Patrick, the houses of the great nobles contained seven or eight rooms, besides separate halls for feasting and for the various members of the chieftain's family. The under-dress of both sexes and all classes consisted of a tight-fitting garment — stocking, trouser, and vest in one. Over this, men of the upper class wore a long mantle, and women full-plaited skirts reaching below the knee; the dress itself was usually the dark color of the wool of a black sheep, and was trimmed with bands of bright dyed cloth, but color was an indication of rank, and yellow was probably the royal, as it was the favorite color of the early Irish. Shoes were merely a leather sandal tied across with a lacing of ribbon. The head- dress of the men was the pointed Phrygean cap; married women wore a linen coif, and girls their own hair braided in long plaits. Even in early times the goldsmithry of the Irish was very beautiful. The custom of fosterage was universal, and the respect and veneration paid to the foster parents continued through life. Fishing, shooting, riding, and the arts of agriculture and war, formed the basis of every Irishman's education; but the sons of noble houses were well instructed in the history of their country, and in music, singing, and verse- making. They were also taught to read and write the Celtic character, which consisted of an alphabet of seven- teen letters named after the seventeen trses indigenous to Erin. Girls were, of course, taught the domestic arts of spin- ning, weaving, cooking; but this last was a simple matter, for fish, flesh, and bread, all baked in the ashes, butter, milk, honey, and herbs, among which watercress and shamrock were the favorites, formed the diet of the Scotti, and their only strong drink was ale. So long as the summer lasted life was passed chiefly out of doors, but the winter evenings were beguiled with feasting and carousing, with chess and draughts, music, and the recitation of poems. The bards, accompanied by ST. PATRICK AN"D HIS TIMES. 11 their harp-bearers, went from place to place singing the old legends, but also making such free use of their tongues in the invention of scandals and libels that from time to time they were punished by wholesale banishment. Such were the Scotti when Patrick came amongst them — a people in no sense barbarous; warlike, but not cruel, and civilized enough to have framed a code of laws which, in a modified form, sufficed their posterity till the seven- teenth century; a people devoted to the virtues of honesty, justice, and hospitality; a moral, poetic, and imaginative people, who were but loosely bound to the religion he was to bid them cast aside. The years of Patrick's captivity now stood him in good stead; he knew the language and the customs of the people he was to evangelize. During the fifteen years that had passed since his escape he had thought and prayed much over this mission. Harshness he knew must fail with this brave nation, who, easy to lead, were impossible to drive, and he resolved never to wound innocent prejudice or denounce harmless customs. His tact and knowledge, too, led him to address himself first to the chieftains, and at the outset of his mission he won the Leinster princes over to his side. These Leinster converts were made by twos and threes, but as the fame of the new faith spread converts came in by the thousand, and after fifteen years' evangel- ization the saint had to go over to Britain to bring over more clergy. He returned with thirty bishops, and then set to work preparing some of the native Christians for ordination, founding schools for their instruction in church doctrine and history and the Latin tongue. The conversion of Ireland was thus completed in the lifetime of the saint who is said to have died in his monastery at Saul at the age of 120 years (a.d. 253). The church which he founded soon became rich and powerful, and during the fifth and sixth centuries Ireland produced so many holy men and women that it was called "The Isle of Saints," and an old author tells us that "it was enough to be an Irishman, or even to have been in Ireland, to be considered holy." 12 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. CHAPTER III. THE RISE AND FALL OF HOLINESS AND LEARNING. Until the close of the eighth century Christian Ireland was far more peaceful and prosperous than heathen Ireland had ever been. There were, it is true, wars between the different provinces, but not nearly to the same extent as in pagan times when war had been the occupation of the young nobles' courage and physical strength, the qualities they aspired to. But now a new ideal had been raised, and the youth of Ireland imitated no longer the "prowess of their forefathers, but an outcast God who had died a shameful death. The crown of martyrdom was not granted to these Irish saints, for almost alone among nations the conversion of Ireland bad been bloodless. But though they could not die for their Master, the best and noblest in the land de- voted their lives entirely to His service, and the better to accomplish this many of them retired to monasteries, where their time was passed in prayer, contemplation, learning, and good works, and also in the cultivation of the arts of building, sculpture, goldsmithry, and the illumination of manuscripts. Wars, invasions, and rebellions have swept over Ireland since those days, yet much of the art of the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries remains to us. The churches of this early period are small, but very numerous, and near together. Of the date of the round towers anti- quaries are not agreed, but the beautifully sculptured stone crosses of which some few still remain, were undoubtedly the work of the Scotic monks. The ornamentation of these, of the illuminated manuscripts, and of the jewelled shrines and book covers of this period, all have the same characteristics, and are quite unlike the work of any other age and people, excepting the Anglo-Saxons, who were the pupils of these Irish monks. For beauty of design and minuteness of execution the Celtic manuscripts have never THE RISE AND FALL OF HOLINESS AND LEARNING. 13 been excelled, and that they were very highly prized is proved by their having been kept in metal cases exquisitely wrought in gold, silver, and precious stones; but, after the Danish invasion, the cases proved a greater danger than defence, for the Northmen stole the books for the sake of their precious coverings, and in many cases the manu- scripts were wantonly destroyed, though in others they were contemptuously returned to their owners. One of the best known, and finest of these manuscripts, is the Book of Kells, now preserved in Trinity College, Dublin. It is attributed to St. Columba, a prince of the O'Donnell family, born in the year 521, and who, in the course of his life of 77 years, wrote and illuminated nearly 300 volumes, but who is still more widely known and honored as the apostle of the northern Picts. The prosperity of Erin, and its fame as a seat of learning and piety, increased yearly, till it was looked ivpon by the neighboring countries as a school for the education of their young nobles, but at the close of the eighth century an invasion of the Danes put an end to Ireland's prosperity English history tells us who were the Danes, and what the terror occasioned by their invasions. Under this com- prehensive title of Danes we include the Finn Galls or "AVhite Strangers" of Norway, as well as the Duvh or Black Galls of Denmark, with whom they often made common eause. Emigration was a necessity to Scandinavia — the poor, cold land could not support the fast increasing population, and the Northmen were driven for very lack of food at home to seek a livelihood elsewhere. Ireland and England both became the victims of their dauntless, pitiless courage: next they desolated the coasts of France and Spain, and at last carried their enterprise along, the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. No nation seems to have been able to withstand them; their magnificent barbaric strength, their boundless ferocity, and their undaunted courage made them the con- querors of all whom they attacked. In England, in Normandy, and later in Italy, they es- tablished themselves and founded dvnasties and settle- 14 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. ments. With such an enemy Scotia of the eighth century was little fitted to contend. Had the old Fenian warriors still been in existence, and the whole island risen under their command against the invaders, the history of Ireland might have been different; but a country weakened by the clan system, so fatal to any spirit of nationality, and given over to the peaceful rule of monks and priests, was a certain prey to the determined Northmen, whose hosts were no sooner killed off by the despairing natives than they were replaced by fresh armies from the apparently unlimited resources of the Scandina- vian population. Danish warfare was carried on without thought of mercy. The invaders wished the island for their own possession, and were careless as to the fate of the natives; indeed, their ideas of the destiny of subject races seem to have run almost exclusively on the lines of extermination. The Irish made a desperate fight against the invaders, but after much bloodshed on both sides they were van- quished. It had been better for them had they slunk tamely into the bogs and morasses, for the Danes, in revenge for the losses they had received, took every oppor- tunity of degrading the natives. Danish soldiers were quartered on every Irish family, and the cast-off garments of the invaders was the only clothing permitted to Irishmen even of the highest class. This savage supremacy could only be maintained in an ignorant and disunited country, and knowing this the Danes prohibited the teaching of reading, writing, or any military art, and forbade public assemblies of any kind whatever. Church services, of course, came within this prohibition, and the clergy, being the best educated and most influential class, were the special objects of the hatred of the Northmen. For twelve years this miserable state of things endured, then Malachi, king of Meath, succeeded in driving the invaders from the country, but under pretext of peaceable colonization a number of Finn Galls obtained leave to settle on the east coast, where they founded the cities of Strang- ford, Oarlingford, and Wexford, and once possessed of these landing places the Northmen came over in greater THE RISE AND FALL OF HOLINESS A XI) LEARNING. 10 numbers than before their expulsion. The early settlers resented these invasions almost as bitterly as the Scotti with whom they formed alliances, but these naturalized colonists were almost powerless against the hosts that re- peatedly descended like swarms of locusts upon the un- happy island. War followed war, disaster succeeded to disaster, colleges, monasteries, even churches had almost ceased to exist, and under the blighting influences of war and anarchy the country sank into a state of barbarism. The native chieftains finding that resistance led to nothing but outrage, submitted for the most part to the Danish dominion, and paid tribute to the invader. Among those who were in this inglorious position were the petty princes of South Minister, of the Dalcassian and Eoghanite fam- ilies. But when Brian Dal-Oas succeeded his father in 954 he determined never to pay tribute, and for long he carried on a solitary guerilla warfare against the Danes of Limerick and Waterford. He met with some success, and persuaded his brother Mahon to join him in giving battle to the Danes at Sulcoit, in Tipperary. To the surprise of all, the Danes were beaten, and Limerick fell into the hands of Mahon, who was murdered at the instigation of the Danish chieftain of the city. To avenge this wrong, Brian renewed the war, and after some fighting became king of the whole of Minister. He was then joined by Malachi, king of Meath, and Ard-Righ of Erin, and the allied armies routed the Danes from Dublin city. But Brian, like Alfred of England, was something more than a successful general: he was a great ruler. Personally ambitious, he had resolved to die Ard-Righ of Erin, although he did not belong to those families who alone claimed the right to reign. By each of his several marriages he connected himself with the various reigning families in Ireland, and the marriages of his children were all planned with the same view. But he did not let his own gain blind him to the good of the country; he revised the laws and enacted new ones; he forced the Danes to restore the church property they had destroyed, he re-established schools, raised fortresses, built and mended roads, con- structed bridges, and returned those lands which the Danes 16 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. had usurped to their rightful owners. He also decreed that all branches of the Scoto-Milesian race should take as a surname the name of the founder or some illustrious member of their clan, with the prefix 0' or Mac, the son or descendant of. Thus the descendants of Niall became O'Neill, of Concobar or Coner O'Connor, and of Brian himself O'Brien. Brian, having married for his third wife Gormley, sister to Maelmurra, king of Leinster, and having united his daughter to the Danish king of Dublin, felt himself strong enough to dejoose Malachi and declare himself Ard-Righ of Erin, and he then clemauded and obtained tribute from the Ulster kings. His victorious wars with the Danes had been ex- pensive, and to raise revenue he revived the obsolete tribute of cattle, which centuries ago had been levied upon Leinster. This Boromean tribute, deriving its name from "Bo," a cow, had been exacted in revenge for a wrong done by the Leinster king, and even in early times had been very ir- regularly paid, but its re-enactment after a lapse of 322 years was an oppression that neither King Maelmurra nor his sister, Brian's wife, could forgive, and which brought forth more serious results than Brian's nickname of "Boiroimhe" or Boru. For long the fire smoldered, but at length an insulting word from Brian caused it to burst into flame, and determined on revenge the Leinster king allied himself with the Danes, and sent an express to Denmark for an army. Twelve thousand Danes and four thousand Norsemen obeyed the summons, and these, with the Lein- stermen and the Danes of Dublin, made a formidable army. But Brian, though eighty years old, had still strength to organize an army, and between Munster, Connaught, and Meath he raised a force of 30,000 men. He was past fight- ing, and the command was entrusted to his eldest son, but throughout the march the old leader headed his people, and when the armies met at Clontarf he exhorted his troops to remember that their's was the cause of freedom and fatherland, and then in a tent near by he stood watching the conflict. From eight in the morning till five in the afternoon of Good Friday of the year 1014 the battle raged, but after a loss of 10,000 men, including the traitorous THE INVASION". 17 Maelmurra, the Danes and Leinster men were utterly routed. But Brian did not survive that day; he and four of his sons and his young grandson fell with 7000 of their troops, and the Minister tribe that Brian raised from ob- scurity he almost exterminated by his wars, for of all the brave host that left Minister only 850 men returned. Brian's son Donagh, succeeded him as king of Minister, but the Ard-Righ-ship was claimed by Malachi II. , who ruled over Ireland for nine years. But the sacred line of the Ard- Righs had been broken; Brian's success inspired many a petty prince to contend for the supremacy, and after the death of Malachi II. no Irish king ever held undisputed sway. The law that might is right became more and more recognized, and the strength of the country was exhausted by petty wars till, in 1172, the troubled and disunited country fell an easy prey to the ambition of Henry II. of England. CHAPTER IV. THE INVASION. The invasion of Ireland by the Normans was the natural outcome of their conquest of Britain. The Danes, who had already done so much to ruin the prosperity of Erin, were now to make another attempt on her liberty by the circui- tous route of Normandy and Britain. Henry, duke of Anjou and Normandy, and king of England, resolved to add Ireland to the list of his unwieldy possessions, and the island was in a state to tempt the invader. The centuries of strife against the Danes, and the anarchy and self-seeking which had followed Brian's usurpation of the Ard-Righ- ship had destroyed all spirit of nationality, for each chief struggling to be master saw in his neighbors only rivals and possible enemies. The country was in that demoralized and disorganized condition which is the inevitable outcome of prolonged civil war. Learning had declined, and Chris- tianity shared the common moral degradation. The na- tional Church was in schism from the Church of f Rome, both as to the observance of Easter and in permitting the 2 18 IEISH HISTORY POE ENGLISH EEADEES. marriage of the secular clergy — indeed, the marriage bond was of the loosest. Henry II. was too astute a personage to fail to take advantage of this degeneration; dismal accounts of the heretical condition of the Irish Church reached England through the Danish settlers, who, acknowl- edging the supremacy of Eome, received their orders not from the Irish but the English archbishop. So, armed with an account of Irish heresy, Henry sought the papal sanc- tion to invade the island. In those days the Pope was commonly held to be the suzerain of all islands, and acting on this prerogative Adrian IV. issued a bull authorizing Henry to undertake the conquest "to enlarge the bounds of the Church, to restrain the progress of vices, to correct the manners of its people, to plant virtue and to increase the Christian religion, to subject the people to laws, to ex- tirpate vicious customs, and to enforce the payment of Peter's pence.' 5 But the Norman barons were found to be so strongly opposed to the project that the bull was laid aside, and for a time the scheme was abandoned. At the time of Henry's accession, Turlogh O'Connor was Ard-Eigh of Erin, and at his death, in 1166, was suc- ceeded by his son Eoderic O'Connor, the last Milesian king of Ireland. The prince of Leinster was Dermid M'Mur- rough, and Breffny was governed by O'Eourke. Unhap- pily for Ireland, Dermid fell in love with O'Eourke's wife, and persuaded her to elope with him. To avenge this out- rage and recover the woman, O'Eourke declared war on Leinst3r, and the Ard-Eigh took up his quarrel. Dermid tried in vain to raise an army; lax as was the marriage bond in Ireland, the Leinstermen refused to fight for a licentious old man of sixty, who had eloped with a woman already past her fortieth year. Bat Dermid, thus driven to bay, did not hesitate to fly to Henry and ask help of the dreaded Normans, nor to offer to pay for their services by doing homage for his kingdom. Henry was then in Aqui- taine, and was too much engaged in a French war to grant any assistance beyond letters to certain Norman nobles in England, authorizing them to take up Dermid's cause. Thus accredited, the Leinster king went to Britain, and, by bribes and promises, persuaded Eichard Clare, earl of THE INVASION. 19 Pembroke, and a group of Norman-Welsh barons, to espouse his cause. Of these Norman- Welsh noblemen, the most conspicuous were Maurice Fitz Gerald, founder of the family of Fitz Gerald, Robert Fitz Stephen, Raymond le Gros, and Ilervey Montmorres. The fortunes of these gentlemen were of the kind that may be bettered but can- not be made worse, and for various bribes and considerations they agreed to raise armies, and invade Ireland in the fol- lowing spring. In the meantime, Dermid retired to ins monastery at Fells, where in May, the news was brought him that the Norman fleet was on the Wexford coast. The invaders were commanded by Fitz Stephen, who for years had been a state prisoner in Wales, and who had been released only on promise to go to Ireland and never return thence. He and Dermid laid siege to the Danish town of Wexford; they took it, and then began devastat- ing the surrounding country; but by this time O'Connor, who had raised a formidable army, forced the invaders to come to terms, and a treaty was drawn up by which Wex- ford was given to Fitz Stephen, and Leinster restored to Dermid, on condition of his doing homage to O'Connor and promising never again to call the Normans to his aid. But the treaty was no sooner signed than Fitz Stephen's half-brother, Fitz Gerald, landed in Wexford in command of a large force, and Dermid, after very little hesitation, broke the conditions of his treaty by joining the invaders and leading them to Dublin. In August of this same year, Richard Clare (nicknamed Strongbow) also fulfilled his promise of coming to Dermid's aid; he had been bribed to come over by promises of the hand of Dermid's beautiful daughter Eva, and of succession to the throne of Leinster after Dermid's death; but, the Irish kings being elected by their clans from certain families, Dermid had no power to dispose of his crown, which could not be inherited by a foreigner. So long as the Normans confined their devas- tations to the Danish towns and the east coast, O'Connor ignored their ill-conduct, but when they marched toward Meath, he sent a message to Dermid, telling him that if he persisted in violating the treaty, the head of his son Arthur, who was held as hostage, should pay for it. The 20 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. amiable parent replied that he was indifferent to his son's fate, and should act as he pleased. Poor Arthur's end is unknown, but the winter soon terminated the hostilities, and in the spring Dermid died miserably, "as his sins deserved." Strongbow now found how he had been tricked; he asserted his claim to the throne of Leinster, but every Irishman rose up against him, and, after many defeats, of which the most famous is that of Thurles, where 1,700 Normans fell, Strongbow and the remnant of his army were blockaded in Wexford and Waterford. The news that Strongbow was contending for the crown of Leinster awakened Henry to the fact that the earl was making war on his own account, probably with the inten- tion of setting up an independent kingdom in Ireland. He therefore commanded all the Normans to return to England at once, and he severely upbraided Strongbow for the devastation he had caused; but a promise to put all the places he held in Ireland into the king's power ensured the earl's pardon, and Henry now produced the bull of Adrian, set sail for Ireland, and on St. Luke's day in Oc- tober, 1171, this last and greatest Norman force landed at Waterford. The Fitz Geralds, Fitz Stephens, and other Norman- Welsh settlers hastened to do homage to their sovereign, and the southern Irish chiefs, tired of war, divided by petty strifes, alarmed by the strength of the invading force, and overawed by the papal bull, followed their example. M'Carthy, king of Cork, was the first to come in, and then one by one all the surrounding princes made their submission; but Eoderic O'Connor and Henry tacitly agreed to let each other alone, and the O'Neills and O'Donnels of Ulster then, and for many hundred years, refused to bend the knee to a foreign prince. Henry at once set to work on a social reformation; he tried to establish the feudal land system and the Koman method of government, and his papal bull brought the clergy to his side; but this work of organization was brought to an abrupt close by a summons from the papal legate commanding him to render an account of Becket's murder, so in April, 1172, he left Ireland, leaving Strongbow gov- ernor. The greater part of Leinster and Munster he THREE CENTURIES OF NORMAN RULE. 21 divided between about ten Anglo-Norman families, but these grants of land were purely nominal, and in many cases the settlers were unable to dislodge the clans already in possession. This weak and wavering Norman power extended only to the Pale, a district whose boundaries varied with the relative strength of Norman and Celt, but which was supposed to include the counties of Dublin, Kildare, Meath, and Uriel or Louth, and the cities and neighborhoods of Cork, AVaterford, and Limerick; but till the time of James I. the English power w r as seldom great enough to keep all these districts, much less to subdue the outlying country. CHAPTER V. THREE CENTURIES OF NORMAN RULE. The Normans had subdued the "proud Saxon" by a course of rigorous oppression, and they thought to govern the Celts by the same means. The inhabitants of Britain had yielded to their Norman invaders just as their pre- decessors had already submitted to the conquering Roman and Dane. But the invasion of Ireland was carried out in a very different manner, and produced very different results. The Anglo-Saxons had been thoroughly conquered, and had been forced to entire submission. There was no doubt as to which was the victorious race. The dominant Northmen had enforced their legislation on the natives, and were powerful enough to carry out their policy. There had been no intermission in the administration of this iron Norman rule; no moment when rebellion had had a chance of success. There was a resident king and a court, and after a few generations the Normans had grown to consider England their own country; common interests had grown up between the two races, till the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans gradually lost their an- tagonistic and distinct nationality, and formed together the English nation, 22 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. But in Ireland matters were very different; the Norman invasion had only resulted in a partial conquest of the eastern and southern provinces, and for a period of more than four hundred years the western and northern parts of the island failed to make even a nominal submission. The country was in a perpetual state of strife — first the English and then the Irish gaining some advantage, for there were two distinct powers in Ireland, two codes of law, two rival interests, two, and in later times three, hos- tile races. The Norman lords settled down in the Pale with the intention of quickly becoming masters of the whole island. Henry had presented them with vast estates, but to obtain these was quite another matter. In the first place, the Irish did not understand what was expected of them. The feudal system of land tenure was incomprehensible to them. The land of Ireland had always belonged to the people — the territory of Leinster to the Leinstermen, of Minister to the Minister clans. The kings could not give away or sell any part of it, nor did Irish conquerors take the lands of the clans they overcame; the same people went on living on their old estates, only they were ruled over and paid tribute to the conquering chief. Individual property in land was no more dreamed of than property in light or air. The Normans had other ideas; where they could they dispossessed the natives, and took the land for their own. They bought and sold it at pleasure, sometimes allowing the natives to become tenants-at-will, but the Irish naturally resisted the new order of things, and lost no opportunity of harrowing and turning out the new-comers. Then arose the difficulty of laws. The Irish were gov- erned by Brehon laws, which must have seemed ridicu- lously mild to the Normans. But as Irishmen who murdered Englishmen were tried by English law and hanged, and Englishmen who murdered Irishmen were tried by Brehon law and let off with a fine, both races learned that there may be a considerable difference be- tween law and justice. Still, despite the differences of race and law, despite the THKEE CENTURIES OF NORMAN RULE. 23 irritations caused by the forays of the Norman oarons, despite the brutal retaliation of the natives, despite the hatred which the two peoples at first felt for one another, the Normans gradually adopted the manners and customs of the Irish, and that fusion of races which had had so happy an effect in England began to be enacted across the water. But the proportion of colonists was here much smaller, the Irish learned little from the Norman though these swiftly "degenerated" into "mere Irish," and it was clear that if left to themselves, the "Irish enemy" would soon absorb the settlers. This was, indeed, a terrible disaster, for by this degener- ation the "kings of England and lords of Ireland" were in danger of losing what little power they had in Ireland. And it was, therefore, deemed necessary to stimulate the old race hatred in order to keep the two peoples apart. For this end a law was passed in the reign of Edward III. known as the statute of Kilkenny, by which it was made high treason for the colonists to marry with, bring up, foster, or stand sponsor to any of the Irish; and any Eng- lishman using an Irish name, wearing an Irish dress, speaking the Irish language, following the Irish custom of growing his mustache, or of riding without a saddle, had all his possessions sold in atonement for the crime, or, if he were a poor man, was condemned to imprisonment for life; and it was also made criminal for English settlers to be governed by Brehon law. These laws did not increase the love of the two peoples, and their obvious injustice was not calculated to make either natives or settlers a law-abiding people. But the Irish had not even the choice of being ruled by English law, for only the five royal families of the O'Neills, the O'Connors, the O'Briens, the OWIelaghlins, and the M'Murroughs (now Kavanaghs), commonly known as the, "five bloods," were allowed to plead in an English court. Had the Pale been a hard and fast line, the two nations might perhaps have gone on pretty comfortably, the English within the Pale and the Irish without, but the barons of the Pale were a set of lawless marauders and half their subsistence was drawn from forays across the 24 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. borders, which forays were followed by risings of the sur- rounding Irish clans, who sometimes drove the settlers back into the very walls of Dublin. To suppress these incursions, the hateful customs of "Coyne and Livery," or free quarters, was resorted to. Nothing breeds ill-will so quickly as this abuse; from time to time it has been resorted to by the governors of Ireland, and has invariably produced misery, hatred, and rebellion. The custom was originally Irish, for the Fenian heroes of the olden times lived during the six winter months at free quarters on the people: but so unbearable was felt the obligation to maintain even the friend and protector that the nation had risen in revolt and overthrown the Fenian power. But who shall describe the burden, the hateful charge which was now laid upon each family? A soldier to pay and lodge, food to be found for him and his horse; a stranger and an enemy, always in the best seat by the hearth, always watch ing and spying -on the unhappy household. Every one was in the same case, each household had its unwelcome guest to feed and care for. There he was, policeman, sol- dier, master, spy; a being of such superior race that if he married the daughter or stood sponsor to the baby of his unwilling host, he must die for his sin; or if he followed the customs or spoke the language of those who gave him food and shelter, all he had was taken from him or he was thrown into prison for life. He dared not love the people he lived with, dared not speak to them, or live otherwise than an enemy — a hateful life for him and them. In many cases the soldiers proved their superiority by laying waste the little farms, despoiling the gardens, and ill-treating the natives; but in others, despite the threat- ened imprisonment and traitors' death, they greiv mous- tachios, rode without saddles, learned to speak Erse, and were even sufficiently depraved to marry the women. But many of the baser sort of Irish thinking it but lost labor to work to keep the enemy, and caring nothing for a home whose comfort and privacy were destroyed by the presence of an unfriendly stranger, nor for land whose produce was too often ruined by the malice or rough horse play of the soldiers, threw up their homes, left their land THE GERALDOTES. 25 waste, and took to an idle life of begging by the road side. Still, as time went on, the laws became less and less strictly obeyed; saddles which wore out were not replaced, and first one, then another spoke Erse, or forgot to shave his upper lip, till in the time of Henry VI. the statute of Kilkenny had to be re-enforced, and a new law passed actually re- warding any Englishman who beheaded any "mere Irish- man whom he met going to or coining from robbing or stealing." It is probable that the Irishmen did not pub- licly announce when they were on a robbing expedition, so it is difficult to understand how the English could be aware of their intentions, and the Irishman, moreover, had no chance of proving his innocence, as the execution took place on the spot, and it is likely that many private quar- rels were legally revenged in this manner, for, in addition to getting rid of his enemy, the murderer made a comfort- able little sum of money, levied in fines of pence and farthings on the district in which the execution took place. It has often been stated that religious differences are the chief causes of the misunderstanding between English and Irish, yet never was there more oppression, race-hatred, and ill-will than in the centuries before the Reformation, when all professed the same creed; but so great was the mutual dislike that each people built and worshipped in their own churches, erected and retired to their own mon- asteries as exclusively as though some great difference of faith kept them apart, yet though this carefully fostered race-hatred and a constant influx of new settlers, kept most of the colonists from "degenerating,'- certain of the Anglo- Xorman families threw in their lot with the natives, and by the time of Henry YII. had become "more Irish than the Irish." CHAPTER VI. THE GERALDIXES. Never, since the invasion, had the power of England been so weak in Ireland as it became at the time of the accession of Henry VII. The Wars of the Roses, followed 26 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. by the short and turbulent reigns of Edward V. and Rieft- ard III., had, during the last four reigns, given the Eng- lish enough to do without thinking much about Irish affairs. The Pale was now reduced to Dublin, Meath, Louth, and Kildare, and the "Irish enemy" extorted trib- ute from the settlers. Still, at the beginning of his reign, Henry VII. paid little attention to the state of Ireland, though the inhabi- tants were more disunited than ever. There were Yorkists and Lancastrians among both the old Irish and the colon- ists. There were old Irish who cared for neither red rose nor white; old Irish who acknowldged the English king, and old Irish who ignored his very existence; Anglo-Irish, as Ihe original settlers were now called, who hated the old Irish; new settlers, who hated both old and Anglo-Irish, and Anglo-Irish who were more Irish than the Irish. Of these last none had more thoroughly "degenerated" than the great family of Fitzgerald, decendants of that Eitz Gerald who landed at Waterford soon after the treaty be- tween Dermid M'Murrough and Boderic O'Connor. The Fitzgeralds had now two peerages in the family — the earl- dom of Desmond and that of Kildare. They and the But- lers were the most influential of the Anglo-Irish families. The Butlers were Lancastrians, both branches of the Fitz- geralds Yorkists, and at the time of Henry VII, ? s acces- sion Gerald Fitzgerald, earl of Kildare, was governor of Ireland. Henry was far too wise to depose Kildare., he re- stored to Thomas Butler, earl of Ormonde, those lands of which he had been deprived under Edward IV., but other- wise took little notice of the Butlers; of their support he was pretty sure, but the Yorkist Fitzgeralds needed concil- iation. Henry felt that their favor would greatly strength- en his power in Ireland, yet he had so little faith in Kil- dare's loyalty that in 148(3 he invited him to pay a visit to London. This honor Kildare prudently declined; he knew that such visits were apt to end in free lodgings in the Tower of London, and moreover he had designs of his own. The mysterious fate of the child- 'king, Edward V., and his brother, the duke of York, left the people uncertain as THE GEEALDLXES. 27 to what had become. of them. Many refused to believe they had been murdered in the Tower, and were willing to receive any prince who should declare that he was the true king. There was, also, Prince Edward, earl of Warwick, who was the Yorkist heir to the throne. Edward was re- ported to be kept a close prisoner in the Tower, but no one had seen him there who could say whether he really were there or no. It was easy to persuade a people as remote from London as the Irish that the prince was not a prisoner, and for this purpose Lambert Simnel, the son of an Oxford bootmaker, a boy about the young prince's age, was trained to act the part of earl of Warwick, and was then taken to Ireland in that character. The people were delighted with him. The young prince was so regal, so gracious, and so charm- ing that the masses received him without a wavering or doubt, but it is difficult to believe that Kildare and the other nobles of the Pale were equally convinced; they may have been deceived by the urbanity of the cobbler's son, but if so they cannot have made very searching inquiries into his past. In vain Henry exhibited the real Edward in London; the English who saw him believed, but the Irish rebels thought the unseen English prisoner the impostor, not the courteous youth whose manners were so regally convincing. Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, sister of Edward IV., and aunt to the real earl of Warwick, was the chief promoter of the plot, and sent over 2,000 German veterans to assist the rebels. Their aid was little needed in Irelend, for the Yorkist nobles and all the people of the Pale were wild about the little prince, who was solemnly crowned king in the presence of Kildare and other nobles, lay and ecclesi- astical. The crown, an iron one, was taken from the head of the statue of the Blessed Virgin, near Dame's Gate, and when the ceremony was over the new king was placed on the shoulders of a gigantic Anglo-Irishman, named D'Arcy, and carried in triumph to Dublin Castle. Henry treated this rebellion, usurpation, and coronation with wise con- tempt; the whole thing was a bubble that must quickly 28 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. burst: but Simnel's adherents, not satisfied with his Irish success, now determined to win for him the English crown. We must, in justice to them, remember that most of his adherents firmly believed him to be the earl of Warwick, and also that within the last tweuty years the English crown had been won live times by violence, and that Ed- ward Plantagenet, earl of Warwick, really had a sort of claim to the throne. Simnei, with his German and Anglo- Irish army, embarked for Lancashire, where they were met by the English and utterly defeated, with the loss of half their number, and Ireland's king, with humiliating len- iency, was made the royal scullion. Kildare and the other rebels wrote to crave the king's pardon, which was immed- iately granted; he even retained Kildare as lord deputy; and, indeed, throughout the whole affair Henry's good sense was admirable. Those of the rebels who had been killed in battle were gone beyond punishment, and the best penalty that could be inflicted on the survivors was to make them see what contemptible fools they had been. He did not even permit them the dignity of suffering. The exposure of this plot, and the ridiculous part the rebels had been made to play should have sickened the Anglo-Irish of imprisoned princes, but when five years later the duchess of Burgundy sent over a supposed duke of York, he also was welcomed as the rightful heir. It must be conceded that this new claimant for the throne was more mysterious than the son of the Oxford shoe- maker. He is supposed to have been a native of Tourney, in Flanders, named Peter Osbeck, but is better known as Perkin Warbeck, and he really resembled Edward IV. so greatly that many persons believed him to have been a nat- ural son of that monarch. In the meantime, Kildare had been deposed from the deputyship, and Fitzsimons, arch- bishop of Dublin, reigned in his stead. It could never be proved against Kildare that he took part in the Warbeck rebellion^ but many members of the Fitzgerald family, in- cluding the earl of Desmond, openly declared for the pre- tender, who with the aid of Desmond laid siege to Water- ford. Henry was now really alarmed at the state of Ireland, THE GERALDIXES. 29 for he himself was not sure whether or no Warbeck weru the duke of York — so he sent over Sir Edward Poyning with a force to quell the rebellion. This was soon done, and Poyning then assembled a Parliament, wherein the odious statute of Kilkenny was re-enforced, save only that part relating to the use of the Irish language and the cus- tom of riding without a saddle, both of which were now so general that it was hopeless to try to prevent them. Here, too, was passed the famous act called after the deputy, "Poyning's Law," and which was not repealed till 1782. Poyning' s act provided that henceforward no parliament should "be held in Ireland "until the chief governor and council had certified to the king, under the great seal, as well the causes and considerations as the acts they designed to pass, and till the same should be approved by the king and council. " An act passed by the Irish parliament could not in future become law till it had been sent to and ap- proved by the English privy council, whose members might revise and alter it as they thought fit; it was then returned to the Irish house, and here it might receive no further al- teration. The bills often returned altered beyond all recog- nition, yet they must be passed exactly as they came from England, or altogether rejected. Thus was the Irish par- liament reduced to a nullity. Bills of attainder were also passed at this time against the earl of Kildare, his brother James, and others suspected of sympathy with Warbeck, Desmond had already made his submission, and had left his son in London as a hostage for good behavior, but Kil- dare was sent to an English prison, and his wife, over- whelmed with grief and horror at the ghastly fate she feared for her husband, died. Her fears were groundless, for when Kildare was at length alloived to plead before the king, the simplicity and straight-forwardness of his manner won for him the friendship of Henry, who saw at once that such a man would be as useful as a friend as he had been dan- gerous as an enemy. A long string of indictments were brought against the Geraldine, and many witnesses were called to prove his ini- quities. One of the most serious charges was that, to re- venge himself on the archbishop of Cashel, who was a sup- 30 IRISH HISTORY FOR EKGLISH READERS. porter of the Butlers, he had set fire to the cathedral. Kil- dare disarmed his enemies by naively pleading that "he would never have done it had he not thought the archbishop was within. " There was a general laugh at this novel plea, and Henry, saying the earl needed time to prepare his de- fence, gave him leave to choose his own counsel. "I doubt if I will be allowed to choose the good fellow I wish to se- lect/ 7 said Kildare, thoughtfully. The king, nothing suspecting, gave him his hand in token of good faith. "Marry," cried the irrepressible rebel, "I can see no better man in England than your highness, and I will choose no other." Like many reserved persons, Henry was more shy than proud, and, to the surprise of the assembled court, was delighted with the shameless earl of Kildare. It was easy to see which way the tide was setting. . The Butlers, earl Ormonde, and the aggrieved archbishop whose cathe- dral had been burned in the hope that he was within, were desperate. Was this traitor to escape through sheer impu- dence ? ' ; All Ireland could not govern the earl of Kildare, ' ' they cried. "Then," said the king, "the earl of Kildare shall govern all Ireland;" and true to his word, Henry sent him back as lord deputy, with increased power and the new title of lord lieutenant, and with Elizabeth St. John, Henry's cousin, for a wife. This policy answered well; the authority of the crown was maintained within the Pale as it had not been for two generations, and Kildare lost no op- portunity of repressing the native chiefs and Irish rebels. He had become more English than the English. Among the many petty wars carried on under him was one which, though it began in a private quarrel between the Fitzgeralds and Ulick Mac AVilliam (Bourke), developed into a terrible struggle between the tribes of the northeast and those of the southwest. The battle of Knocktow turned the scale in favor of the Fitzgeralds, and sho.ved the Irish that henceforward the side of England would be the side of vic- tory. In 1509 Henry VII. died, and was succeeded by his son Henry VIII. The young king, satisfied with the manage- ment of the Pale, left it in the hands of Kildare, and when, four years later, the deputy died, his son Gerald was ap- THE GEEALDI2TES. Si pointed in his stead. The young earl did not profit by his father's experience; his conduct was so extraordinary that three times lie was deposed and sent to London, the last time in 1534. when his rivals, the Butlers, accused him with apparent truth of such arbitrary and senseless acts of injustice and cruelty that they can only be accounted for by madness. When the earl left Dublin, his son Thomas was chosen to continue the government. A less suitable appointment could hardly have been made; Thomas was only twenty years of age, inexperienced, brave, headstrong, passionately attached to his father, whose deposition he re- sented hotly. The earl, well aware of his son's character, implored him to be prudent, but he might as well have pleaded with the raging sea, for soon after he reached Eng- land his son was deceived by a false report that the earl had been beheaded. Without waiting to inquire into the truth of the rumor, Thomas, mad with grief and rage, presented himself, at the head of a hundred and forty followers, before the council. Striding up to the council table he threw down his sword of office, and in a loud voice declared war against Henry VIII., king of England. The lad, for he was nothing more, was thoroughly in earnest — the entreaties of his friends that he would beg pardon for his rashness were of no avail; in his anger he feared neither the death he must bring upon himself, or the ruin he had called down on his relations. He and his hotheaded followers laid waste the district of Fingal, and besieged Dublin Castle, whither archbishop Allen, his father's great enemy, had fled. The prelate soon escaped, and embarked on a vessel which unfortunately stranded at Clontarf, where the archbishop fell into the hands of the insurgents and was slajn, and for this sacrilege Thomas was excommunicated. The earl, hearing of his son's miseries, died in London of a broken heart, and young Fitzgerald, hunted by the royal army into the fastnesses of Munster, surrendered himself on condition that his life should be spared. He now heard how he had been deceived, and willingly went to London to crave the king's pardon — a sadder and a wiser man. To celebrate his forgiveness and the close of the insur- rection, the English general, Gray, who had married Kil- 32 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. dare's sister, invited Thomas's five uncles to a banquet, and while they were feasting they were all treacherously seized, taken to London, and thrown into the Tower, where, to their dismay, they found their pardoned nephew a pris- oner like themselves. They were kept prisoners till the fol- lowing year, when all six were hanged as traitors at Tyburn, and the Kildare estates declared forfeited. But a younger brother of Thomas was saved by his aunt from the venge- ance of Henry VIII., and in the time of Queen Mary, lie recovered the title and part of the estates of the earl of Kil- dare. CHAPTER VII. HOW SHANE O'NEILL HELD ULSTER. The power of England greatly increased in Ireland dur- ing the reigns of Henry VII. and Henry VIII. The Pale was enlarged, and its inhabitants no longer paid tribute to the native kings. Round the Border the Celtic chiefs were resigning their lands, and getting them back under letters patent with new titles, and the outlying leaders began to in- quire what was gained by this. They learned in reply, that if they held the land by English law their "title" would be recognized by the English king, who would not give it to others, as he would do in the event of conquest if they held it by Brehon law; and also that by English law the land would belong to the chief himself, that his children would inherit it, that he could sell it, and evict his clansmen, or force their obedience by threats of eviction — in fact, that tribute would be rent, and the land, instead of belonging to the people, would become the property of the chieftain. Property has such great attractions that we cannot wonder that the idea of owning the land was pleasant to the Irish chiefs. They persuaded themselves that it was quite un- necessary to explain the change to the clansmen, who need know nothing about their new position till it was too old a tale to quarrel over. The O'Neills had never yet submitted to the English power, but in the time of Henry VIII. Lame Con, who was then "The O'Neill," resigned his people's HOW SHANK O'NEILL HELD ULSTER. 33 lauds, and received them back with the title of earl of Tir- o-wen or Tyrone, while his eldest, though base-born, son Matthew was declared his heir, and. created baron of Dun- gannon. Con did not explain to his clansmen how he had wronged them, but his eldest legitimate son Shane, or John, took the matter into his own hands. He was indignant that Matthew was made heir, though illegitimacy did not affect the Irish law of inheritance, but there was some doubt as to his being Con's son at all. But beyond this sense of wrong and thwarted ambition, young O'Neill had a genuine hatred of the new order of things, and scorned the brand new letters patent title of earl of Tyrone. It was enough for him to be The O'Neill, king of Ulster, as his an- cestors had been well nigh 2,000 years. So long had the O'Neill's held the land for the people by right of the sword, and while he had a voice in the matter so they should keep it. Shane was not the man to keep his views to himself; he told the clansmen how they were being cheated, and by sheer force of will he brought round his lather to his side, so that Matthew, trembling for his in- heritance, had the old man imprisoned in Dublin. But the clansmen, fearing to lose their lands, had the offensive Matthew murdered with Shane's connivance, and when soon afterwards Con died, Shane was elected "The O'Neill." The territory of the O'Connors and the O'Moores — the counties of Leix and Oifaly, now Queen's County and King's County — were at this time confiscated by Henry VIII. 'Moore and O'Connor were seized and sent prisoners to England, their tribes ejected, and English settlers "planted" on their land. This was the first attempt at forfeiture that had been made for centuries; but from this time confiscation became the ruling passion of the English sovereigns, and in succession nearly all Ireland has been planted several times. "When either soldiers or nobles or illegitimate children had a claim on an English ruler which it was impossible to satisfy at home, a piece of Irish land wai taken and liberally bestowed on the claimant, on condition of his planting it vrith English subjects. No one cared what became of the outcasts, who made desperate resistance to the injustice. 3 34 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. The plantation of Leix and Offaly was but the thin end of the wedge, and O'Neill was wise enough to perceive that it was the beginning of the end, but he determined that while he lived Ulster should not be planted. He saw, too, that the weakness of the Irish was chiefly owing to their divisions, and he resolved to subdue all the Ulster chiefs to his power and reduce them to their former tribu- tary condition. His correspondence with them on this subject was short and to the point. "Send me the tribute you owe me, or else " he wrote to The O'Donnell, who, nothing daunted, replied in the same style, "I owe you no tribute, and if I did " The chiefs carried out their unspoken threat, and after much bloodshed Shane was the victor. But O'Neill was not the only person who knew that in their divisions lay the weakness of the Irish. The English of the Pale knew it too, and efforts were made to disunite the northern chiefs and make them rivals of proud John. For this purpose O'Reilly was made earl of Breffny and "baron of Oavan; and Oalvagh O'Donnell was offered the earldom of Tyrconnel, and letters sent by Sus- sex telling the countess that Elizabeth was about to send her costly presents. O'Neill saw the turn affairs were taking, and cut the rivalry short by first invading Breffny and then taking the earl and countess of Tyrconnel prison- ers. This affair is the darkest stain on O'Neill's by no means spotless character. His wife was Oalvagh O'Donnell's daughter by a former marriage. Her mother being dead, O'Donnell had married the countess of Argyll, who probably betrayed her husband to O'Neill, for she Immediately became his mistress. O'Neill's wife died of shame and grief at the treatment of herself and her imprisoned father. The other Ulster chiefs were now terrified into submis- sion, and O'Neill fancied that, with a little help, he could free all Ireland from the English yoke. Accordingly, he sent word to the king of France that with five or six thousand men he could free the country from the English. The French made no response; but, on the other hand, Sussex returned from England with the intention of wasting and plundering Tyrone. His troops, however, HOW SHANE N T EILL HELD ULSTER. 60 were defeated by O'Neill, and fresh supplies of men had to be sent from England; but meanwhile, to maintain the war, the Anglo-Norman earls of Kildare, Desmond, Ormonde, Thomond, and Clanrickarde enlisted in the English service. Even against this force O'Neill was a powerful adversary; he could muster 7,000 men in the field, and Elizabeth began to fear that she would lose Ireland as her sister ln\d lust Calais, for Sussex was no match for his adversary in military tactics. He had, how- ever, the advantage in treachery, and when he found that his arms made no impression on the Ulster troops, he wrote to inform Elizabeth that he had arranged with one Neil Gray to assassinate O'Neill. Elizabeth made no remonstrance, neither did she recall the deputy, but at the last moment Gray drew back; thus the plot failed. Still treachery was the cheapest and easiest way of getting rid of the obnoxious Ulsterman, and Sussex was unwilling to abandon so brilliant a scheme. His next effort took the form of a present. Through the agency of one John Smith, he sent O'Neill a present of poisoned wine, but either the drug- was less potent or the O'Neill household less heavy drinkers than Sussex fancied, for though every one was made ill by the harmful stuff, not one person died. But John Smith was never discovered or brought to justcie, O'Neill being easily persuaded to "forget the matter." Still peace was not made between Elizabeth and O'Neill till the earl of Kildare, who, through family connections, had great influence with his kinsman, persuaded him to make his submission; and Elizabeth, acting on her own discretion, invited him to visit her at the English Court. Sussex raised all sorts of obstacles to the visit, but the chief had set his heart on the plan, and was not to be balked. He had resolved to go in regal state, and show the English what an Irish king was like; he knew very well how an English deputy looked, and felt much contempt for the court costume of the period. His suite of forty gallow- glasses were dressed in no provincial imitation of the London mode, but wore their native saffron shirts, made of many yards of yellow linen, furry short coats, and sandalled shoes or brogues. Their hair they wore long 36 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. behind and curled on to the shoulders, and cut in front to cover the forehead with a fringe or "glib." None of them — not even Shane himself — spoke English, so all negotiations had to be carried on through an interpreter. But the natural grace of the chief's manner and his shrewd- ness gained him the queen's good graces; so that, though she kept him in London longer than he wished, when at length, in May, 1562, he was allowed to return to Dublin, he expressed himself well pleased with the visit. Ulster was still in an unsettled state; the chiefs were jealous of O'Neill's influence, and the English of the Pale did their utmost to foster the feeling; Shane punished all insubor- dination by laying waste the land of the offenders, and the English government having broken their pledges to him, he considered himself freed from his share in the bargain, so Ulster drifted once more into a state of war. Elizabeth again invited the "rebel" to London, but he, remembering the difficulty he had had in persuading her to let him leave, courteously but firmly declined, saving that the state of his country was such that he could not leave it, but that he would be pleased to receive the English ambassador at his house at Benburb. Here the English were hospitably received, and O'Neill signed articles of peace. He was now the unrivalled in Tyrone, and governed the country with justice and vigor; he encouraged all kinds of husbandry and wheat growing; and if a robbery were com- mitted he forced restitution, or if this were impossible, reimbursed the loser from his own resources. But at last, by an act of treachery, he brought about his own ruin. The Scottish settlers had always been his firm adherents and the enemies of the English, but now to please his new friends he turned against his old allies, made war on them and defeated them with great slaughter. Thus he al ienated his truest friends, and his interests and those of England were too opposite for there to be any lasting peace between them, for both Elizabeth and O'Neill wanted Ireland. In 1564, Sussex was recalled and when shortly afterward Sir Henry Sidney was sent in his place he found the Pale invaded and Ulster at war with the English settlers. Sid- ney played upon O'Neill's unpopularity, and induced the HOW SHAXE O'NEILL HELD ULSTER. 37 Ulster chiefs to join his army. Even Shane's old friend, Hugh O'Donnell, who by the death of Calvagh, had become earl of Tyrconnel, turned against him, and the united army marched through and wasted Tyrone. Shane in extremity, with the English on one side and the injured Scotch on the other, knew not which way to turn. He thought of throwing himself on the mercy of the English, but his retainers, mindful of the repeated attempts to assassinate him, and remembering the fate of the Fitzger- ald s, advised him rather to trust the Scottish settlers. They willingly consented to receive him and his retainers, and taking this opportunity to revenge O'Neill's treachery, prepared a great banquet for the fugitives, and then barring the doors of the dining hall they fell upon the Ulstermen and slew them to a man. Such was the end of Shane O'Neill. He had connived at the murder of his half-brother, and stolen the wife of the man who was at once his father-in-law and his friend, and he turned against his truest allies when he believed it would serve his purpose. But in judging him we must compare him with others of his time, with Henry VIII., with Mary, with Elizabeth, and we shall see he was no worse, if no bet- ter than his age. On the other hand, poor, ignorant, and badly armed, he kept his country for his own people against the forces of a great power, and his sword held the roof- tree over many families in defiance of the fire-arms of England. At his death, Elizabeth thought the time had come for the colonization or plantation of Ulster. Sidney had been recalled, but he now returned to Ireland and called a parliament in Dublin. To this assembly Englishmen who had never seen their counties and bor- oughs were "returned" without election, and mayors and sheriffs elected themselves. This was one of the first acts of the Protestant ascendancy, for until this time the Re- formation had been little more than a name in Ireland, for though during the reign of Mary English Protestants had fled in great numbers to Papist Ireland, where religious persecution was unknown, these refugees had had no in- fluence on the natives. Protestant services had to be per- formed in Latin, as the ministers spoke no Irish and the 38 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. people understood no English. Protestantism and reform- ation meant to the Irish England and oppression, and the new creed had for them but few attractions. But now new means of enlightening the idolatrous Papists were to be tried — life, temporal and eternal, were to be offered to the convert, and a violent and eternal death dealt out to the unregenerate. Seldom, indeed, has religion held out such double advantages; henceforth, in Ireland, straight was the gate and narrow the way that led to eternal damna- tion, yet many there were who entered in thereat; indeed, up to the time of James I., not sixty Irish accepted the Protestant salvation offered on such advantageous terms. Sidney's scandalous parliament had been got together for the special purpose of confiscating Tyrone, and only such men were sent to it as were supposed to favor the project. An act was accordingly passed attainting of high treason the late Shane O'Neill, suppressing the name 0' Neill, and annexing the territory of Tyrone to the royal pos- sessions. Protestant settlers were to be imported and Protestant schools established by law, and an old and feeble member of the O'Neill family, named Tirlough Lynnogh, was appointed to the earldom of Tyrone. By this same parliament Sidney now carried measures for his favorite scheme of local government. Sir Edward Fit- ton was created president of (Jonnaught, and to Sir John Perrot was entrusted the government of Minister. Elizabeth felt it would be useless to attempt to plant the whole island at once, but she hoped little by little to com- pass its colonization, and a scheme was proposed for send- ing over one able-bodied emigrant from every two English villages. But at first the queen began in a small way by giving Ards and Down in the territory of Tyrone to the natural son of her secretary, Sir Thomas Smith. At this news the whole country was in an uproar. Young Smith began in a high-handed manner, turning out the clansmen, who made desperate resistance, and the young man was killed in an eviction fray. Elizabeth now thought that plantation would answer better if carried out on a larger scale, and the earl of Essex had Olannaboy and Ferney presented to him if he could clear them of the rebels. HOW SHAK"E XE1LL HELD ULSTEE. 39 Brian, Hugh, and old Tirlough O'Neill all rose against him, and Essex sought the help of Con O'Donnell, whom he afterward betrayed. At last Brian O'Neill made peace with Essex, who treacherously murdered him, his wife, and his two hundred retainers at a banquet. Frightened by this treachery the other chieftains could not for some time be induced to make their submission, and their resist- ance had been so desperate, and the English losses so great, that for that time the plantation of Ulster was abandoned. In the meantime Fitton was committing all kinds of atroc- ities in Connaught. Men were hanged and beheaded, stripped naked and buried alive in the bogs for no other crime than that they were Papists. The practice of coign and livery, so rightly condemned by the English when re- sorted to by the natives, was revived, but it had the im- mediate effect of producing rebellion, and the government were obliged to recall Fitton. In Minister, things were better under Sir John Perrot, who, though cruelly severe, was perfectly impartial, and governed English and Irish with the same degree of rigor, and gained thereby the lasting gratitude of the subject race. While he was governor of Minister, Elizabeth made her most serious attempt to plant. A company of English gentlemen was formed to colonize the counties of Cork, Limerick, and Kerry. They tried to turn out the owners, and a desperate and bloody war ensued. Of these plant- ers, Sir Peter Oarew has immortalized his name by his fiendish cruelty; among other barbarities, he slew the whole family of the Butlers, not even sparing the child of three years old. The Geraldiues, the M'Carthys, and Or- monde's brothers now united for self -;h 'fence. The stand- ard of revolt was raised by Sir James Fitzmaurice Fitzger- ald, cousin to the earl of Desmond, who, with his brother John, was at that time a prisoner in the Tower of London. Sidney marched his forces through Tipperary, Water- ford, and Limerick, burning villages, blowing up castles, and hanging garrisons. The Irish, on their side, fought with such savage fierceness that government, exhausted by the struggle, disavowed any intention of planting, and once more the confiscation scheme was abandoned. 40 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. CHAPTER VIII. THE DESMOND REBELLION. When, after two years of hiding in the Kerry hills, James Fitzmanrice Fitzgerald was pardoned, he prudently retired to the Continent, and the rebellion being quelled, the earl of Desmond and his brother Sir John Ceraldine were released from the Tower, wherein they had been im- prisoned six years. But even now Elizabeth did not intend the earl to escape; she could not prove any acts of disloy- alty against him, but she distrusted him, and this feeling was no doubt fostered by his hereditary rival the earl of Ormonde, head of the Butler family, who lived in London, and was a favorite of the queen. Elizabeth therefore or- dered that when the earl disembarked in Dublin he should be seized and imprisoned in the Castle. But somehow Desmond got wind of this plot, and fled from Dublin on a swift horse, and after five days and nights of peril he arrived at his castle in Munster a less loyal man than he set out from London. By nature Desmond was frank, courageous, and honorable — and had he been well treated, would probably have proved a loyal subject. Six years before this time he and Ormonde had had a disjDute about some property, and the queen had graciously granted him permission to explain his case in London. On his arrival both he and his brother John, who accompanied him, had been imprisoned in the Tower, where they were kept for six years, and it was during this time that the unsuccessful attempt to plant Munster had been made, and that James Fitzmaurice had rebelled. It is strange that the earl made no rebellious effort on his return to Munster, but he was of a vacillating nature, and could not determine to ally himself with either party; moreover, the Fitzgerald exchequer was nearly exhausted by the late war, so Mun- ster and the west were quiet. Not so the east. The plan- THE DESMOND REBELLION. 41 tation of King's County and Queen's County had not suc- ceeded. Some of the O'Connors and O'Mores had escaped extermination, and their decendants, led by the famous outlaw, Rory Oge O'More, perpetually harassed the new settlers till, after eighteen years of petty warfare, he was slain in 1577. O'More being dead, a convention of the heads of the neighboring Irish families was called together in the queen's name. Four hundred obeyed, the summons, and assembled on the hill of Mullaghmast. As soon as they were gathered together they were surrounded by a triple line of English soldiers and butchered in cold blood. A baser, more cruel, or more treacherous deed it is impos- sible to conceive. The lowest savage might well be ashamed of such a transaction . and it now seemed clear that no reliance could be placed on English promises, and that the queen's name was no protection to her Irish subjects. The island was filled with horror at the hateful deed, and with disgust when it was known that Sir Henry Sidney, who organized it, was to keep the office of lord-deputy, and Crosbie, who had commanded the butchery, to retain his position in the army. In the meantime James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald was trying to raise forces on the Continent, and to help him in this he tried to give to his rebellion the color of relig- ious warfare. In vain he applied for help to the kings of France and Spain, but he persuaded Pope Gregory XIII. to issue a bull encouraging the Irish to fight for their re- ligion, and also to fit out a small expedition, which was placed under command of an English adventurer named Stukely. But on his way to Ireland Stukely encountered the Portuguese fleet bound for Morocco, and this affair being more to his mind he joined it, carried off the whole expedition, and was never heard of more. Fitzmaurice knew nothing of Stukely's desertion till, with about fourscore Spaniards, he landed at Dingle, in July, 1579, when he found that nothing had been heard of the expedition. He now found himself in the unenvi- able position of a man who commands a foreign invasion of eighty men, but on hearing of his arrival John and James of Desmond, with 3,000 tenants of the Geraldines, 42 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. joined the rebellion at once, bnt the earl still wavered; he feared to ally himself with this forlorn hope, while his sympathy with the insurgents was evident enough to make him distrusted by the English. He probably hoped to keep friends with both parties till he could make sure whether or no the expected Spsnish force would arrive. But before the little band of invaders had been a month in the island Fitzmaurice was killed by his kinsmen, Ulick and William Bourke. John of Desmond was now the leader of the rebels, and for some time he held the field successfully against Sir William Drury, but Elizabeth was raising sufficient force to crush a much greater rising, and a proclamation was also issued declaring Desmond a traitor unless he came into the English camp within twenty days. Forced to make up his mind, Desmond remembered his own imprisonment, the fate of the Kildare branch of his family, of Brian O'Neill's six hundred men, and of the O'Mores and O'Connors at Mullaghmast, and so unwilling to draw the sword against his own brothers, he openly de- clared for the rebels. Ma] by and the infamous Crosbie were committing atrocities that surpass description; still the advantage was with the rebels, and Elizabeth now sent over the earl of Ormonde, whose lo} r al zeal was strength- ened by private enmity to the Geraldines. He and the new deputy, Sir William Pelham, marched across the island in two columns, wasting the country, destroying the houses, and murdering every living creature, man, woman, and child, that they encountered. To resist such an army was impossible to the half-naked rebels, who were armed only with knives and swords. Wherever the army passed, it left behind it ruin and desolation. Desmond and his fol- lowers were soon reduced to the condition of hunted fugi- tives, nor were the men at arms the only sufferers in those days of savage warfare. Sir Nicholas Malby, the com- mander of the English army, has left us a graphic account of his proceedings in Connaught during the winter of 1576. "At Christmas," he writes, "I entered their terri- tory, and finding that courteous dealing with them had like to have cut my throat, I thought good to take another course, and so with determination to consume them with THE DESMOND REBELLION. 43 fire and sword, sparing neither old nor young, I entered their mountains. I burnt all their corn and houses, and committed to the sword all that could be found. . . . This was Shane Burke's country; then I burnt Ullick Burke's in like manner. I assaulted a castle, where the garrison surrendered. I put them to the misericordia of my soldiers. They were all slain. Then I went on, spar ing none that came in my way, which cruelty did so amaze their followers that thev could not tell where to bestow themselves. Shane Burke made means to me to pardon him and forbear killing of his people. I would not heark- en, but went on my way. The gentlemen of Olanrickarcle came to me. I found it was but dallying to win time, so I left Ullick as little corn as I had left his brother, and what people was found had as little favor as the other had. It was all done in rain and frost and storm, journeys in such weather bringing them sooner to submission. They are humble enough now, and will yield to any terms we like to offer them." Ormonde, counting up his services, boasts that he has slain "88 captains, 2 leaders, with 1,5-17 notorious traitors and malefactors, and above 4,000 others." That many of these others ivere old men, women, and chil- dren does not seem to have detracted from the honor of having been the slayer of nearly six thousand persons. Pel- ham. with fiendish cruelty, refused pardon to any rebels who did not bring with them the heads of some of their comrades, "for this," he said, "sows dissension among them, as they will not forgive blood." At last, too late to help the rebels, the Spaniards, com- manded by Sebastian San Jose, arrived, and occupied the Fort del Ore. Lord Grey, who was now deputy, was march- ing southward, and at the same time Winter and Bingham prepared to attack the place by sea. The garrison were in a desperate case, and San Jose determined to make his submission. Such of the Irish who were there entreated him to hold the town to the end, but in vain: without striking a single blow, the cowardly Spaniard threw himself on the mercy of Grey. He trusted in what had no exist- ence; and by order of Grey, and under command of Si! 1 Walter Raleigh, the whole garrison was either shot or 44 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. hanged. The victory of the English being now assured. Grey organized small bands of soldiers to hunt down the rebels in the mountains. So insatiable was this man's thirst for blood that it was said of him that he left Elizabeth nothing but ashes and corpses to rule over in Ireland; and the officers who served under him seem to have been equal- ly devoid from human feeling. Achin, when he seized the castle of Kildimo, slew 150 women and children. Ormonde caught and hanged Lady Fitzgerald, of Imokeily, and ex- ecuted 134 other persons; Morris massacred 600 women, children, and sick persons at Bathlin; and in Dublin the less important men were hanged in batches, the blue blood being reserved for the more distinguished adjuncts of drawing and quartering. The history at this time has a sickening smell of blood. At length the news came that John of Desmond had been caught and mortally wounded; lie died at once, and his body, thrown across his horse, was taken to Cork. His head was sent to Dublin to be spiked in front of the castle, and his body was hanged by the legs in chains on the gates of Cork. Here it remained a loath- some sight for three years, till one stormy night the wind took pity on the ghastly frame that had held so brave a soul and blew it into the sea, The earl, surrounded by a few tried friends, was chased from mountain to mountain , watching by night and hardly venturing to sleep by day. At last, in 1583, he was caught and killed, and his head sent to Elizabeth, to be impaled on London Bridge. All authorities are agreed that the state of Minister was now truly horrible. The fertile province had become an arid waste; year after year the harvest had been burned, so that plague and famine had completed the destruction be- gan by the sword. Such poor wretches as survived looked, says Spencer, "more like anatomies than human beings. They did eat dead carcasses, yea, one another, soon after, in as much as the very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of the graves." Sir William Pelham, too, says that the people "otter themselves with their wives and children, rather to be slain by the army than to suffer the famine that now beginneth to pinch them." The province being ripe for plantation, Elizabeth resolved THE DESMOND REBELLION. 45 to re-people this desert with English subjects, so a parlia- ment was called, and the Desmond estates, amounting to more than 574,028 acres of profitable land, were confiscated and offered to English undertakers on the easiest possible terms. The land was divided into tracts varying from 4,000 to 12,000 acres. No rent was to be paid for the first three years, and after that only half rent for three years. The full rent, therefore, would not be paid for six years after oc- cupation, and this rent itself was so low as to be almost nominal; two-pence per acre in Limerick and Kerry coun- ties and three-pence in Waterford and Cork. For ten years the undertakers were to transport their produce free of duty — no slight advantage in those days. Large tracts were granted to soldiers who had been engaged in the war, and younger sons and brothers were invited to plant. There was, however, a dark side to this dazzling prospect. Eliz- abeth's object was not merely to enrich her soldiers and adventurers, but also to get rid of the native Irish. None of these were to be taken as tenants, nor were they to be employed as carpenters, builders, wheelwrights, black- smiths, or indeed in any skilled trade. Everything except "hewing of wood and drawing of wa- ter" was to be done by English colonists. But here arose a difficulty; the English farmers and artisans could hardly be persuaded to go to so barbarous a country, and when they got there the natives made things so unpleasant for them that many returned at once. The hungry, starving Irish desperately resisted this attempt to root them from their soil; they formed secret societies to destroy the settlers, and were known by the name of "Kobin Hoods. " What the English would not concede them because it was just thcv gave in to for fear of violence, and gradually the Irish were taken as tenants, and some of the undertakers, sick of the job, gave the land back to its old owners. Thus the scheme failed; the natives were not exterminated, but exasperated by so much cruelty looked out for a chance of revenge. 40 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. CHAPTER IX. ELIZABETH'S WAR WITH HUGH O'NEILL. One of the officers who had led the English cavalry dur- ing the Minister rebellion was Aodh or Hugh O'Neill the son of Matthew, baron of Dungannon, who had been killed to make way for his brother kShane. Matthew had left a little son Hugh, who had been brought up partly in Ireland and partly in London at the court of Elizabeth. There was, in appearance and manner, nothing of the wild Ulster chieftain about young Hugh. He was a courtly and well educated personage, wearing English dress, capable of speaking English, and quite willing to bear the title of earl of Tyrone. The attainted and forbidden name of O'Neill he kept in the background as long as he was on English soil. In Ulster, however, he was the Irish chieftain, and was worshipped by the clansmen, who elected him The O'Neill, and refused to acknowledge the authority of old Tirlough. The blood-thirsty lord Grey had been recalled, and Sir John Perrot appointed deputy, to the immense pacification of Ireland, for the severity of Perrot fell equally on Saxon and Celt, and despite his hasty temper he gained the respect of the natives. In one instance only did he try to enforce order by gross injustice. He suspected The O'Donnell of treasonable designs, and seeing no fair means of getting hostages for good behavior, he had recourse to treachery, and sent a supposititious Spanish trading vessel, laden with real Spanish wine, round to the coasts of Donegal, bidding the captain invite young Ulster chiefs on board to taste the wines. O'Donnell's son, Red Hugh, a boy only fifteen years, of age, two sons of Shane O'Neill, and some others, accepted the offer; they went on board and drank deeply of the Span- ish wine. When they were half tipsy they were disarmed Elizabeth's wai: wttb eugh o'neill. 47 unci fastened under the hatches; the anchor was weighed, and the ship set sail for Dublin Bay, and for four years and a half the unhappy boys were kept prisoners in Dublin Cas- tle. This outrage, however, called forth no rebuke from the government of the Pale, or from the queen, and it does not seem to have made Perrot really unpopular with the Irish. Under his rule the country was quieter than it had been for years, but at length Elizabeth heard that the dep- uty had refused to punish O'Kourke for making an effigy of herself, and dragging it at the cart's tail. For this of- fence Perrot was recalled and beheaded, and to the misfor- tune of Ireland Sir William Fitz William was appointed to succeed him. In the meantime, Hugh O'Neill had set- tled in Ulster and had married a daughter of The O'Don- nell. He had sent his son to be fostered by his former enemy, O'Cahen, and at the death of old Tirlough, openly assumed the forbidden title of "The O'Neill." Elizabeth was uneasy at Hugh's "degeneration. " As yet, nothing was known to his discredit, but rumors and vague whispers filled the air. It was reported that he constantly changed the men in his army, so that all the men in Tyrone should by turns get a military education. It was darkly hinted, too, that the lead ostensibly imported for the roof of his house at Dungannon was really intended to take the form of bullets. Probably neither rumor was true; or, if O'Neill did train the clansmen of Tyrone, he had at first no rebellious intention. His Minister experi- ences had made him too well aware of the power of Eng- land for him to wish to plunge Ulster into what must be a state of misery. But he was half unconsciously drifting into rebellion. Under the rule of Sir William Fitz Will- iam the Irish saw they need look neither for justice or mercy. The first act of the new deputy was to imprison, on false charges, Sir Owen 0' Toole and Sir John Dogherty, both loyal gentlemen. His next, to affirm that Mac- Mahon had, some years ago, levied rents with military force, and for this imaginary offence MacMahon was hanged, and his lands, being forfeited to the crown, were graciously bestowed upon the deputy, Sir Henry Bagnal, and other accomplices in the murder. Bagnal was now 48 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. created marshal of the British army in Ireland. He be- came O'Neill's personal and implacable enemy, for, O'Neill's first wife being dead — or, as some say, divorced from him — O'Neill and Miss Bagnal met, and notwith- standing differences of race and religion, they resolved to marry. Bagnal got wind of the affair and sent his sister to Dublin, under the care of friends, with strict injunc- tions that she was not to see her lover. So when O'Neill called at the house, the lady was not admitted to the room where he was received. Hugh made himself most fascina- ting to the rest of the family, and quite won their good graces. The poor, solitary woman was for the time for- gotten, but at length Tyrone took his leave, and Miss BagnaFs friends rushed to her room to tell her how charm- ing they thought her rebel — but the bird was flown ! While O'Neill had engrossed the household, she had, by a previous arrangement, ran off with a confidential friend of her lover, who took her to an appointed place of meeting. The poor woman must have had many a heartache, for there was no meanness Bagnal would not stoop to, to injure his brother-in-law. He trumped up all manner of false charges against him, and care was taken that O'Neill's letters disproving these calumnies should not reach their destination. O'Neill's continued friendship with the fami- ly of his first wife is the best proof of the falseness of some of these slanders. Tyrone now found himself driven into precisely that course of action he most wished to avoid. The continued barbarity of Fitz William maddened the people of Ulster, and they turned to O'Neill as their leader, urging him to take up arms. Bagnal 's enmity goaded him to the same course, for any letters or explanations he wrote to the queen were stopped, and he found himself entrapped in a network of misrepresentations. At this time Hugh of the Fetters — an illegitimate son of Shane — gave information against O'Neill to the government, and for this offence Hugh in a high-handed manner strangled the rebel. This act made no small sensation, and the earl found it necessary to go to London to make his peace with the queen. Free from false dealing and treachery, he had no difficulty in con- ELIZABETHS WAR WITH HFGH XEILL, 4!) vincing Elizabeth of his loyalty, and entered willingly into articles with her, the more so as he had not the slightest intention of keeping them longer than suited his conven- ience. About this time Red Hugh O'Donnell and the sons of Shane O'Neill succeeded in escaping from their prison in Dublin. Their flight was in winter time, and so intense was the cold, that Art O'Neill was frozen to death, and Red Hugh's feet were so frostbitten that his toes had to be amputated, and it was many months before he recovered the use of his legs, but at length, after much suffering, lie reached his home in Tyreonnel. He was still only nine- teen years of age, and his four years of captivity coming at a time when he was young and impressionable had embit- tered his mind toward the English. He never forgot or forgave the injury he had received, and his life was spent in attempts at vengeance. His youth, his sorrows, his perils, and his sufferings all endeared him to the clansmen. and at his return his father resigned the title in his favor. Reports of Fitz William's cruelty were now becoming too frequent to be disregarded, and Elizabeth recalled him and sent out Sir William Russell, son of the earl of Bedford. Young Tyreonnel had now risen in arms against the Eng- lish, and O'Neill, sick of the treachery, crooked ways, and barbarity of the administration, threw in his lot with the rebels. O'Donnell was not restrained by any sentimen- tal gentleness toward his late gaolers, and began the war with vigor, defeating the English at Enniskillen with great slaughter, and at Blackwater they received a yet more terrible blow. Half the British army was destroyed, Sir Henry Bagnal being among the slain. All Ireland was now in arms — Ulster, Connaught, and Minister, under O'Neill's earl of Desmond, "the Sugane earl" or earl of Straw, as the new earl was called, he being an earl of Hugh's making, for the true Desmond was a prisoner in London. Even loyal Leinster turned against the English, and for the time it seemed as though Ireland was to regain her independence. Elizabeth was sick of the Irish difficulty, so she sent over an overwhelming force to stamp out the rebellion, and as far as possible exterminate the rebels. 20,000 foot soldiers and 4 50 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. 2,000 horse were landed under the command of the earl of Essex. The Irish harassed this army in skirmishing match- es, and greatly reduced them, but were too wily to en- counter such a superior force in the open field, and Essex marched his troops through Leinster and back to Dublin without producing any effect. At length, on the banks of the Blackwater, he and O'Neill met; they held a deep and earnest conversation, at which no third person was present. What passed can never be known, but O'Neill stated his grievances to Essex, and having proposed terms, an amnesty for six weeks was agreed to. Essex was after- ward accused of a traitorous understanding with Tyrone, and it was rumored that he had agreed to leave O'Neill unmolested on a promise of his assisting Essex to the English crown. The clamor was so great that Essex thought it necessary to return to England, where the fickle queen caused her whilom favorite to be beheaded. . Blunt, lord Mount joy, was now sent to Ireland, and in him O'Neill found a very different sort of adversary — Mount- joy was too wise to allow himself to be entrapped into woods and morasses where he knew the Irish would have the ad- vantage. The terrible weapon he wielded against his enemies was devastation, burning the corn and destroying the dwellings. Thus the Minister and Connaught Irish were reduced and many of the chiefs taken prisoners. All this while Spanish succor was expected, but some of the chiefs, unable to make longer resistance, came in. "But what if the Spaniards should arrive?" inquired the presi- dent of one of these. "In that case," answered the Irish- man, "let not your lordship rely upon me, nor on any of those lords who seem most attached to your service." At length a very battered and dilapidated Spanish fleet arrived at Kinsale, under command of Don Juan d'Aquila. Why in Kinsale no one knew. Don Juan had been sent to help the rebels of Ulster, and lie seemed to have pitched on the fort furthest from his allies. Most of O'Neill's men were militia, and would not bear arms out of Ulster; but, in spite of difficulties, he collected 5,000 men and marched the length of the island. A second Spanish contingent now arrived, and the O'Sullivans and O'Driscols, who had Elizabeth's war with huge o'xeill. 51 hitherto remained passive, threw in their lot with the rebels. The besieging army was now besieged — on one hand were the Spaniards in Kinsale, on the other the Irish marching from the north, and the advanced season afflicted the English, who were willing to raise the siege when Don Juan pressed O'Neill to attack them. Tyrone resisted this persuasion. He knew by experience of what stuff an English army is made, and could not believe the Spaniard's account of the distress and demoralization of the British force, but at length he let himself be overruled and the attack was made by night; but Don Juan had revealed the plan of action to the English, and the Irish were completely defeated. The war was now practically over. . O'Donnell went to Spain, where he died of a broken heart. The Sngane earl was betrayed and killed, and O'Xeill made his submission to Mount joy just at the time when Elizabeth was breathing her last. When Tyrone heard that the queen was dead he bitterly lamented his submission — a few hours more resistance would have enabled him to make peace with the new king- on a very different footing, but the die was cast, and Hugh had resigned forever the name of The O'Neill before he knew that his enemy was dead. Elizabeth's death was the cause of much rejoicing in Ireland, for James Stuart was supposed to be sympathetic to the Catholics, and was de- scended from the Scoto-Milesian kings. His Celtic blood brought little advantage to his Irish subjects, nor did they derive much benefit from his leanings towards Catholicism. He enforced the penal code which under Elizabeth had remained more or less a dead letter, and he assured his Romish subjects they need look for no toleration. To break the power of the O'Neill's the lands were subdivided among the smaller chieftains of the clan, and the ordinary clansmen reduced to the condition of tenants. But it was soon found that though nominally crushed Hugh of Tyrone, backed by Rory O'Donnell, earl of Tyrconnel, was a very powerful adversary, and also there was grave dis- content in England that a war which had cost so much blood and such unheard of sums of money should bring no 52 IRISH HISTOEY FOR ENGLISH READER". advantage at all to the conquerors. It was, therefore, decided that O'Neill must be got rid of, and his estates which had already been bestowed among his clansmen be made to revert to the English crown, and for this purpose a sham plot was had recourse to. An anonymous letter was dropped in the council chamber of Dublin mentioning a design to murder the lord deputy. This paper named no names in connection with the supposed plot, but the government stated that they had evidence proving Tyrone and Tyrconnel to be implicated and called upon them to appear. They, seeing the impossibility of disproving such charges, fled with their families to Europe, and ultimately died in Rome. At the time, their flight was held conclusive proof of guilt, they were declared traitors and their estates forfeited. In 1604, when it had so suited James, he had pronounced that Tyrone and Tyrconnel had no right over the lands of petty chieftains, but now, six years later, the law was found to have another meaning; not only the estates' which had been left to O'Neill and O'Donnell were confiscated, but also those which had been declared the property of the lesser lords. The counties of Tyrone, Deny, Donegal, Armagh, Fermanagh, and Cavan, in all 2,830,873 Irish acres thus came to the crown, and were parcelled out to undertakers as Minister had been in the time of Elizabeth. CHAPTER X. THE PLANTATION OF ULSTER. James profited by Elizabeth's Minister experience; he made smaller grants of land, and passed stringent laws against absenteeism, and he had the wit to perceive how fit were the industrious and thrifty Scots for the work of col- onization. Differences of religion, as well as of race, divided these new-comers from the natives, and there was in consequence less degeneration; indeed, to this day the descendants of these Scotch Presbyterian settlers differ in character from the Irish of the other provinces. Still, the THE PLANTATION OF CTL8TER. 53 plantation system was never throughly carried out; the Scotch settlers, seduced by offers of exorbitant rent, admit- ted the Irish as tenants, and thus the natives retained a foothold on the soil they loved so well, After a time many of the Scotch and English planters, tiring of their exile, returned to their own country, first selling their interest in their holdings and the value of the improvements they had made. From this arose the practice of buying and sell • ing the tenant right, a custom still peculiar to Ulster, and familiar to us as the Ulster Tenant-Right. Compared with any of Elizabeth's efforts, the plantation of Ulster was a marked success. The people, starved, poor, plague-stricken, and broken-spirited, crept meekly into the bogs and mor- asses, and only in Cavan made any stand against the new- comers, or protest against the cruelties of Sir Arthur Chichester, the Ulster deputy. Perhaps a feeble rebellion would not have been wholly unwelcome to the rapacious Stuart, who could have used it as an excuse for confiscating Leinster and Connaught, but the Ulstermen at that moment were less vindictive than the worm. AVherefore James bethought himself of a new pretext for appropriating Leinster and Connaught. He first turned his attention to Leinster, and discovered that the titles by which the estates were held being many of them defective, a commission of inquiry must be held at once. Courts were assembled and juries empanelled, and as those jurors who did not find for the king were impris- oned, pilloried, and branded half-a-million of the Leinster acres were declared crown property. Connaught was now the only province free from confiscation. James had re- solved to turn that also to account, but he thought it well to pause for a season, for the Leinster men had not borne their wholesale eviction with the meekness of their Ulster compatriots. Too broken-spirited to rebel, they had sought to intimidate the planters by agrarian outrage, thus depreciating the value of land without entailing the penalty of treason. The king next turned his attention toward the construc- tion of the Irish House of Commons. The proportion of Roman Catholics to Anglicans in Ireland being then ;) 54 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. hundred to one, there was naturally a large Catholic majority in the House of Commons. The Upper House being mainly filled with bishops of the Established Church and Elizabethan peers, had an Anglican majority, but in the Commons the Papists had it all their own way. The welfare of the native and Catholic Irish was, of course, the interest of this body, who were therefore opposed to the policy of James; and he, to obtain a Protestant majority, created seventeen new counties and forty boroughs, towns as yet unbuilt, but belonging to the new Protestant under- takers of Ulster. The first business of the reconstructed parliament was the election of a speaker. The Protestant candidate was Sir John Davis, and the recusant Sir John Everard. On a division being taken it was found that the Protestants had a majority of twenty votes, but in the meanwhile the recusants seated their candidate in the chair. The Protes- tants thrust Davis into his lap, and then dragged Everard from under his successful rival amid a disgraceful uproar, and after this undignified scene the Catholic party left the house in a body, thus giving the Protestants a clear field for making any laws they pleased against recusancy or non-attendance at an Anglican place of worship. Believed from all fear of opposition, the parliament now passed laws prohibiting Catholic worship, and imposing a fine of one shilling, payable each Sunday for recusance; ordering all Romish priests to quit the kingdom within forty days, and subjecting any priests found after that date to the penalties of treason, and making any person harboring a priest liable to a fine of forty pounds for the first offence, to imprison- ment for the second, and to death for the third. Many other restrictions were put upon Irish Catholics, who were now made subject to the laws which already oppressed their English brethren. But in England Papists were few and far between, whereas in Ireland ninety-nine out of every hundred persons were Catholic; this oppression of the many by the few was of course the greater persecution, but in reality their great number relieved the recusants from the penalties of the law, for it was found impossible to enforce them. From time to time priests and prelates THE PLANTATION OF ULSTER. 55 were seized and killed, with every conceivable torture, and recusants were sometimes forced to pay the weekly fine: but the only result of this fitful and ineffectual persecution was to foster a spirit of religious intolerance, and awaken a desire for revenge. The Leinster titles had been defective through the care- lessness of the landowners who, having possessed their estates for centuries, had imagined themselves perfectly secure, but the Oonnaught titles were found to be equally defective, for though the landowners had Surrendered their estates to Elizabeth, and received them back with new titles, either through negligence or by design the patents for these had never been made out, and this omission made the titles invalid. James was, of course, in honor bound to make good the defect. The titles were paid for, and their defectiveness was the fault of the crown, not of the Connaught landowners; but honor was an obligation which never bound a Stuart, and the titles were declared defective. At this juncture the Oonnaught men, astutely perceiving the king's weak point, offered to buy new titles. The temptation made James swerve in his purpose of confisca- tion; he could not determine whether he preferred the greater or the more immediate gain. He never made up his mind, for while he still vacillated he died, and was succeeded by his son Charles. At the time of the accession of Charles, Falkland was deputy of Ireland, but being a man of inconveniently high principle he was recalled, and viscount Wentworth, better known by his later title of lord Strafford, was sent to replace him. Wentworth was sent to wring money out of the Irish nation, and this task he faithfully fulfilled. Under his rule the inspection of the Connaught titles proceeded brisk- ly, and the recusancy fines were strictly enforced. The Irish perceived that both this reforming zeal and the in- quiry into the titles sprang from the Stuart love of money, and accordingly offered to pay £120,000 in exchange for 5 1 privileges or "graces," by which, in addition to the removal of many minor grievances, it was provided that the Con- naught landlords should be permitted to make a new en- rolment of their estates; that the undisputed possession of 50 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. land for 60 years should constitute title; that recusants should be allowed to practice in the courts of law on taking an oath of civil allegiance to the king, and that a parlia- ment should be held to confirm these graces. The money was to be paid in three equal annual instalments. The conditions were agreed to, the first £-40,000 were cheerfully paid, and then parliament was called. The deputy, faith- ful to his master, now announced that two sessions would be held — the first for the king, the second for the people. The object of the king's session was, of course, money; and the Commons, elated at the prospect of the confirmation of the graces, readily voted the large sums asked for by the deputy. The people's session was next held, but, to the d ismay of the people, AVentworth announced that though some of the requests would be complied with, the king could not agree with others, and among those parts of his promise which Charles found himself unable to keep was that relat mj: to the confiscation of Connaught. This bus- iness was at once taken in hand. In Roscommon, Clare, Siigo. Mayo, and Limerick the juries were frightened in- to finding verdicts for the king, but in Galway they refused Id consider his claim legal, and for this offence they were each fined £4,000 and their possessions confiscated till the money was paid. Never had rapacious sovereign a truer servant than Charles found in Wentworth; never was de- voted service so ungratefully repaid; in all quarters the dep- uty was active in raising money for his worthless master. Among other sums he extorted £17,000 from the O'Byrnes of Wicklow, on pretence of a defect of title, and from the Corporation of the City of London, who were the great un- dertakers of Ulster, he wrung £70,000, but in this last step Wentworth had over-reached himself. The English un- dertakers would not submit to such oppression, and this act of tyranny contributed largely to his final overthrow. J lis cruelty and oppression in Ireland bore forth abun- dant fruit, but his administration though evil was intelli- gent. He founded and promoted the linen trade, which, though it never flourished in his day, became at a later period almost the only manufacture permitted to the Irish, bv.t on the other hand he did all in his power to crush the THE CIVIL WAK OF 1641. 57 fast increasing wool trade, which he dreaded as a rival to that of England. CHAPTER XI. THE CIVIL WAR OF 1041. Few events in modern history are enveloped in more mys- tery than are the rebellion and civil war of 1641. Much has been written on these subjects by Catholics and Pro- testants — English and Irish — but the writers who lived at or near the time of the rising Avere so swayed by party feel- ing, terror, and indignation that their evidence is most contradictory, and of little use in helping us to arrive at a just conclusion. That both parties were guilty of barbarous cruelty there is but little doubt; historians of every shade of opinion concede as much, only they have not agreed as to which side began the atrocities which make this episode so dark a blot on the history of England and Ireland. To which ever party commenced the indiscriminate murderings, drown- ings, hangings, strippings, and other horrors, belongs the greater guilt, but we can never know certainly whether the massacre of the Papists by the Scotch and English at Is- land Magee, or the atrocities of the Ulstermen under Sir Phelim O'Neill, were earlier in date; but indeed the mur- der of women and children with nameless cruelties, because other men have done the same by other innocent and de- fenceless creatures, is so barbarous a retaliation that it is sur- prising that two civilized peoples have been eager to claim this mean excuse. The causes of the rebellion were many and complicated: the murderings, torturings, burnings, and destroyings of the Elizabethan troops; the confiscation of large tracts of land under that queen and James I. ; the fitful and appar- ently meaningless persecution of the Catholics; the tyranny of Wentworth, and the weak despotism of Charles, all con- spired to make the Irish disaffected and disloyal. Within the last forty years Minister, part of Leinster, and Ulster 58 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. had been planted, and the Connaught landlords were per- petually threatened with the same fate. These and many minor grievances had rendered the country as inflammable as a tar barrel, and all that was needed was the match to set the whole country in a flame. After the Elizabethan wars, great numbers of Irishmen had fled abroad and served in foreign armies. Thus an army of soldiers, hostile to the English rule, had been train- ed and these exiles resolved to free their country from the English yoke. Among the foremost of these were young Hugh O'Neill, son of the great earl of Tyrone, and Rory O'More, whom the English call "Roger Moore.'' Hugh and Rory served together in the Spanish army; a mutual sense of wrong, a mutual love of Ireland, and still more a mutual hatred of England, made them great friends. Between them they hatched a scheme for rebellion, and having obtained promises of help from their comrades they set off for Ireland to see what could be done with the old Irish families there. Rory went straight to Ireland, but Hugh travelled by way of Brussels, to recruit the Irish there. In Brussels he w T as assassinated, and his cousin Phelim stepped into his place. Meanwhile, Rory was or- ganizing rebellion in Dublin with quite unexpected suc- cess. All the old Irish were willing to rise, and Rory was just the man to make such an enterprise succeed. Hand- some, brave, honest, and of winning address, the Irish were all his devoted slaves, and trusted to him so implicitly that it became a saying that the Irish put their faith in "God, the Virgin Mary, and in Roger Moore." O'More under- took to manage the Dublin rising, and Phelim went to arrange an outbreak in Ulster, where his name and lineage carried a weight that his personal character did not war- rant. Brought up in England, a member of the Estab- lished Church, Phelim O'Neill had lost his fortune by dis- sipation and extravagance, and he now, by turning Ro- manist and rebel, sought to better his condition. The 23d of October was the night fixed for the rising in Dublin and in the provinces. O'More organized his part without much secrecy — the apathy of the government was so great that he believed he had nothing to fear. THE CIVIL WAR OF 1641. 59 Since the recall of Wentworth, the government had been entrusted to two chief justices, Sir William Parsons and Sir John Borlase, who, taking their ease, left the Pale to care for itself, and it is to be feared they rather wished for a provincial rising. "The more rebellions the more con- fiscation," they were often heard to say, alluding to the custom of bestowing the confiscated lands of rebels on the officers of government who, in many cases, tolerated rebel- lion for the sake of the goods it brought them — and in more than one instance trumped up false charges of trea- son to secure the property of their victims for themselves. On the 22d of October a member of the conspiracy in- formed the justices of what was about to take place, and several persons were arrested, though O'More and the other leaders escaped. So far as Dublin was concerned the plot was now a failure, but all the Ulster risings came off, and the Irish took most of the towns, expelling the new settlers from them and from the country houses. Barbar- ous acts of cruelty are related against Phelim and his men — a rabble of about 30,000 untrained laborers — those "hew- ers of wood and drawers of water'' who had been permitted to remain in Ulster at the time of the confiscation. This was the hour of revenge, and egged on by Plielim they committed hideous cruelties. The season was exception- ally severe; the ground was hard and white with frost and snow. The pitiless Phelim turned the settlers from their homes, stripping even the women and children of their clothes, and driving them naked into the woods, to perish there or find their way as best they might to Dublin. Many died of cold and hunger o:i the grim journey. Many, too, were hanged, ripped up, or driven into the river by Phelim's baroarous rabble, whom he was pleased to call "The Catholic Army of Ireland." Here and there the Romish priests or some kind-hearted Catholic sheltered and eared for the wretched fugitives, but in the main the English of Tyrone had a bitter time of it. In other parts, and under better leaders, matters were different. In Cav- an, under Philip O'Reilly, the revolution was bloodless, and the settlers were safely escorted to Dublin by the rebel soldiers. GO IRISH HISTORY FOB ENGLISH READERS. The state of that city can well be imagined. Men, women, and children were pouring in naked, starving, wounded, and ruined; all they possessed had been taken from them, and their relatives had died or been murdered on the road. Many a ghastly tale of horror was told. Some of these tales were true, many were exaggerated by fear, horror, and the natural instinct that prevents tales from losing in the telling, others were false. So great was the exaggeration of horrors, that though the total English population of Ulster was not more than 20,000, it was stated that 145,000 had perished. Yet, with these tales of agony coming daily to their ears, with naked, wounded, starving fugitives trooping into Dublin, the infamous lords justices did absolutely nothing to quell the rebellion. Dublin they strongly fortified, and then not only refused to attack the rebels themselves but rejected the numerous offers of help that were made them by the loyal Anglo-Irish families. Parliament was prorogued, and the sitting of the law courts adjourned, on the ground that for the safety of Dublin all who had no business there must leave the city, those who had left their country seats and fled to Dublin for safety were now turned out and forced to return to their homes, which were by this time mostly in the hands of the rebels. The loyal Catholics were now on the horns of a dilemma; fate was driving them, as it had driven Desmond and Hugh O'Neill, into courses of rebellion, for the government not only did nothing to quell the rising, but had absolutely refused protection to loyalists from the province. The atrocities of Phelim, which had seemed unparalleled in loyal Dublin, sank into insignificance com- pared with the accounts given by the rebels of the barbar- ity of Munroe and of Coote, who, in quelling the Flstcr rising, ordered that no Papist should be spared, "if it were but the child a hand high, for nits will be lice;" and a bill which was then passed in the English parliament for the extirpation of the Romish religion led the Catholics to believe that this policy of extermination would shortly be applied to the whole Romish population. Driven undefended into the rebel quarters, and with THE CIVIL WAR OF 1641. 61 England preparing a death-blow for their creed, it is small wonder that the loyalty of the Anglo-Irish lords gave way, and that in December both they and the Munstermen threw in their lot with the rebels. A pardon was now pro- claimed, but with limitations which made it worse than useless. Longford, Cavan, Meath, and Westmeath (in two of which comities there had been no rebellion), were the only places to which the amnesty was offered, and even there no freeholders were included, so the O'Reillys and others who had restrained the mob were to be hanged, and their lands confiscated, and any ruffians Avere to be par- doned, provided they had no property. The Roman Catholic archbishop of Armagh had con- vened a provincial synod, at which the war or rebellion of the Catholics was pronounced lawful and pious, and where- at arrangements were made for a national synod to be held at Kilkenny during the following year. In May, 1642. the synod assembled, and formed a provisional government for the control of the country until such time as a parlia- ment could be called. It was arranged that this provi- sional government should consist of twenty four members, six for each province, to be elected by a general assembly of fourteen Roman Catholic peers,- the Roman Catholic bishops and clergy, and 226 Roman Catholic deputies from the counties and towns. Arrangements were made for the settlement of legal and provincial matters, and the follow- ing October was fixed for the meeting of the first conven- tion, which was to be held at Kilkenny. The May synod also issued a manifesto explaining their conduct, and de- nouncing the murders and outrages which had disgraced the Catholic cause. But Phelim did not find this pacific denunciation binding to his conscience, and continued his barbarities till, in August, his cousin. Colonel Owen Roe (Red Owen) O'Neill came over from Flanders in response to an appeal for help from the old Irish rebels, and at about the same time a similar call from the Anglo-Irish was answered by the appearance of Colonel Preston in AVexford harbor, both leaders bringing with them about a hundred officers and a large supply of arms. Owen Roe O'Neill was disgusted at the undisciplined condition of 62 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. the Catholic army, and he announced that if another out- rage were committed he would quit the country or fight for the enemy. Plielim now resigned the command, and eventually both he and O'More retired from the movement. Against the character of Owen Roe O'Neill not even the bitterest antagonist has ever breathed a word : as a general he was perhaps too cautious to suceeed in such an enter- prise as he was now engaged in, but he was courageous, truthful, high-minded, and merciful — and the very type of chivalry. His influence on the Ulstermen was magical; under his command the barbarous rabble soon became a respectable army. In the meantime Irish exiles were re- turning iii shoals, bringing with them arms and a knowl- edge of warfare acquired im foreign armies. In October the convention of Kilkenny assembled, and passed a number of useful measures; it excommunicated all persons guilty of outrage, and placed the command of the army in the hands of four generals. To Owen Roe O'Neill was consigned Ulster; Minister to Gerald Barry; Leinster to Preston ; and Sir John Bourke w r as made dep- uty commander of Oonnaught, the supreme command being reserved for the loyal and gallant earl of Clanrick- arde, Charles, most faithful subject. By this time the movement had lost its character of rebellion, and had de- veloped into a civil war, to which there were now four distinct parties. First, there were the old Irish who had began the rebellion, and who aimed not only at religious equality but national independence; to this party belonged the Ulstermen, headed by Ow r en Roe O'Neill. Then there was the Anglo-Irish party, to which Colonel Preston be- longed, and who only desired religious liberty, security for their property, the repeal of the Poyning's Law, and a general confirmation of the graces. This party were rebels against the government only — not rebels against the king — their interest was very different to that of the old Irish, but ties of religion, and in many cases of blood, held them together. The third was a small but very important party, and called itself the king's party; it was composed of Catholics and Anglicans, whose attachment to the king was great enough to overcome differences of race and creed. THE CIVIL WAR OF 1641. 03 The leader was the powerful earl of Ormonde, who after- ward became lord deputy; other prominent members of it were the earl of Clanrickarde and the infamous lord Inch- iquin, ''bloody Murrough O'Brien." The fourth party, at first insignificant, but destined to crush the other three, was Parliamentary and Presbyterian. The Confederation of Kilkenny had been so ably conducted and managed with so rare a spirit of justice and toleration, that the convic- tion was forced upon Charles that his Irish subjects were quite capable of governing themselves. The royal army, too, was in a wretched state, and in every battle the "Confederates," as the Irish anti-government party was called, had been victorious. Charles now began to nego- tiate for a truce, and in September, 1643, the Confederates agreed to a cessation of hostilities for one year. This ces- sation was the ruin of the rebels, who, during the years of enforced peace, found time to foster those dissensions which always have been the ruin of national movements in Ireland, and Charles meanwhile was collecting soldiers and making plans of what he would do when the year ex- pired. He now appointed Ormonde lord lieutenant, and applied to him for advice. "Let them alone, and my countrymen will be sure to ruin themselves," replied the earl, with cynical wisdom, and in August the king, already perceiving the wisdom of this policy, proposed a further truce of six months. To this the Confederates agreed; they were by this time hopelessly disunited. The Pope had sent over his nuncio Eenunc'ni, and the Confederates had split into moderates and ultramontanes; they hoped to settle their difficulties in the prolonged truce, and, more- over, neither English nor Irish wished to fight in the win- ter, but when spring came a further truce was agreed upon, and hostilities did not begin again until June, 1646. Owen Eoe then marched against the Scottish general, Munroe, and, after crossing the Blackwater, gained a signal victory at Benburb. In O'Neill lay the only hope of the Confed- erates, now terribly weakened by internal disunion, and one party was trying to make terms with the Protestant and anti-Irish Ormonde, though he had declared that, rather than make terms with the Papists, he would deliver 64 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. Ireland to those Puritans who were in arms against his king. Charles had long since commanded Ormonde to make peace on any terms, "and," said he "if the Confederates stipulate for liberty of conscience and the repeal of Poyn- ing's Law, I shall not consider it a hard bargain." For long Ormonde disregarded the king's command, but, at the close of 1648, he saw that the royal cause was too weak to make a longer resistance, so he agreed to make terms, and the Confederates, too weary of war to be deterred even by the threat of excommunication, signed a peace on the 17th of January, 1049; but seventeen days later this was invalidated by the execution of Charles. In August of the same year, Cromwell, attended by his son Henry, Ireton, Ludlow, and others, went to Ireland to preach the gospel and quell rebellion. To attain these ends he took with him an admirably organized force of soldiers, a number of scythes and bullets, and a large supply of Bibles. The scythes and bullets hit their mark, but the Bibles were a dead failure. In the first place, few of the natives could read; in the second, English was an unknown tongue; in the third, the conduct of the Cromwellian troops was not calculated to ensure their reception as messengers of the Word or preachers of the gospel of peace. True, "Jesus and no quarter" was their battle-cry, but the association of that name with butchery savored to the Papists rather of blasphemy than holiness. Cromwell's first act was to lay siege to Drogheda, and after a time the garrison surrendered on promise of quar- ter, but no sooner had they laid down their arms than Cromwell took back his word and slaughtered every man, woman, and child in the city, so that five days are said to have been spent in this ghastly massacre. At Wexford, the same miserable scenes of treachery and butchery were enacted, and all over the country Sir Phelim's atrocities (which had already been paid off in the earlier part of the war) were revenged on innocent people who had had noth- ing to do with them. By the death of Owen Koe. in December, 1049, the Irish had been deprived of the man whose influence and talent THE PLANTATION OP CROMWELL. G5 were the sole support of their falling cause. The loss of their leader and the ferocity of the Puritans broke the neck of the rebellion, and in the spring- of 1650 Cromwell left Ireland, making his son Henry lord-lieutenant, and his son-in-law, lreton, commander of the army. Ireton's measures were even more rigorous than those of the Pro- tector himself had been, and his death fifteen months later was a relief to his own party as well as to the enemy. Ludlow now 7 took the command, and marched to help Coote who was encamped before (lalway. Sore pressed and famine-stricken, and moreover terrified at the bloodthirsty reputation of Coote, in whom love of slaughter amounted to madness, (lalway surrendered in May, 1652. The ten years' war was at an end. How to make the wasted,, depopulated, famine-stricken country pay the debt incurred by the war was Cromwell's next consideration. CHAPTER XII THE PLANTATION OF CROMWELL. Desolate though Minister had been after the Desmond rebellion, the whole island was now in a worse condition. During the ten years' war, the country had been neglected, and the practice of burning the harvest had so greatly discouraged the few who were able to till the land that ag- riculture had been abandoned. All the live stock had been eaten up by the armies, and though after Cromwell had taken the command the soldiers had paid for all they had, the country was in so miserable a condition that many of the wretched natives were driven not only to eat the flesh of the many wolves that attacked them, but even the corpses of their neighbors. Cromwell felt that a people so reduced, so starved and plague-stricken, must of necessity submit to any measures he proposed , and his first idea was to utterly exerminate the Irish race; but this scheme he abandoned as being at once too difficult and too brutal, and he devoted himself to 06 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. measures which, if more humane, were infinitely less effica- cious. An Act of Settlement was passed by the English parlia- ment in August, 1G52, decreeing that a full pardon should be extended to all whose possessions were worth less than £10. It was perhaps less mercy than self-interest that led to this step; for, had the laborers been removed, the new settlers would have had even to do the very roughest work for themselves, whereas these natives could now become hewers of wood and drawers of water for their new masters; but the clergy, as well as the landed proprietors, were ex- empted from this Act of Grace, both as to life and estates. If caught they would be hanged and their goods confiscat- ed; but several other classes profited by it in a greater or less degree. Officers of the royal army were to be banished, but were to retain the rcilue of one-third of their property, which was to be assigned for the support of their wives and children. Those also who had taken so small a share in the rebellion as to be considered entitled to mercy were, after forfeiting their estates, to receive land in Connaught to the value of one-third, but the most fortunate were naturally those who were held perfectly innocent — a very small class, as the payment of even a forced subscription to the rebel army was proof of guilt. These few innocent persons were also obliged to give up their lands, but they received territory in Connaught to the value of two-thirds; but to obtain these benefits from the Act of Grace, all landed proprietors had to give up their title deeds and re- sign all claim to their old possessions. Some defied Crom- well and kept their titles, but their lands were taken from them and they had to fly for their lives into the bogs and forests. Destitute and deprived of all they ever had, they took to a wild life of robbery, and were called Tories, from an Irish word meaning a plunderer. Of the Irish soldiers 45,000 were trans}3orted and took service in foreign armies, but of these the greater number were unable to take their families with them. These families should have been provided for out of that third of their property which was to be returned to them, but justice is a patroness of the powerful, and between six and seven THE PLANTATION OF CROMWELL. 67 thousand women and children were kidnapped and sent to the West Indies, where the boys were sold for slaves to the sugar planters, and the girls and women reserved for a more dishonorable fate. All this time military tribunals were sitting to try such rebels as were, for various reasons, excluded from the Act of Grace, and from their blood-thirsty verdicts these courts were called "Cromwell's shambles.''' In the meantime, the government survey of the three provinces, Ulster, Leinster and Munster, was proceeded with; the acreage was noted and the land valued — the best at four shillings an acre and some as low as one penny; bog and unprofit- able land was thrown in and not counted. And now in the harvest time of 1653 the drums were beaten and the trumpets blown throughout the land to assemble the people to hear the news, that by the first of May next they must cross over the Shannon and go into exile in the rainy waste lands of Connaught. Oonnaught was from henceforth the Ireland of the Irish; fertile Ulster, green Leinster, and lovely Munster were for the Cromwellian settlers, who, by an Act of Grace, gave Oonnaught to the native Irish. This province was chosen for the Irish not only because it was the least fertile, but also, because, encircled by the ocean and the Shannon, it was most easily converted into a natural prison. The flight was to be in the winter, for after the first of May, 1654, any Irishman found within the three provinces, in England, or on the high seas, w r as liable to be put to death. Not only the old Irish families, but the Anglo-Norman settlers came under this proscription. The Fitzgeralds, Butlers, Bourkes, Plunkets, Dillons, Barnewells, Cheevers, Cusacks, who 500 years earlier had driven the Scoto-Miles- ians from their inheritance, were now to share the misfor- tune of their old enemies, and by a common misery to be united with those from whom they had held aloof. The men were to go first, to wrest the land allotted to them from its rightful owners, and to build shelters for the women, who were speedily to follow. Without servants, without money, without cattle, these Irish gentlemen — 68 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. many of them with no knowledge of farming — went to earn their living in Connanght. Death was the penalty if they returned; death if they entered the gates of Galway, the one city of this penal settlement; death if they ventured within four miles of the sea or two miles of the Shannon; arid to enforce this regulation soldiers were planted round the river-side and the sea-coast. It seems as though a choice of deaths were offered to these unhappy creatures — the swift sword of the soldier or the slow starvation of hunger and cold in Connanght; and, to make matters worse, Cromwell's officers refused to stir in the matter of the allotment till they had been bribed by money or promises of a share of the land. Then arose a new diffi- culty, for the lands were found to be too small for the exiles; but many of them solved the question by quietly dying of cold and exposure. And now the women began to follow. The winter was wet, and the roads (neglected during the late war) nearly impassable. The country was famine-stricken, and the women, weakened by want and burdened with the sick, the aged, and the children, could not get away by the dreaded 1st of May. Very slowly the squalid procession dragged along the heavy, slushy roads, and many were still east of the Shannon when their time was up. So indifferent, so listless were they, that it was found necessary to hang some and imprison others to stimulate the nagging energy of the remainder. The walled towns which had been peopled with English settlers were cleared like the country, but the merchants, not being- entitled to the benefits of the graces, carried their enterprise to foreign cities. Thus the three provinces were cleared, and the lands so acquired were devoted to the payment of the adventurers who had advanced money to Cromwell, and the soldiers whose wages were hopelessly in arrears. The claims of the adventurers were first satisfied, and then lists were made out of the claims of each regiment. The regi- ments next drew lots for the various localities, and in the same way each man received by lot his own plot of ground. Company after company they were marched to their new homes, disbanded, and put in possession, but all this took time, and it was not till the end of ; 55 — three years before THE RESTOEATION. 60 DromwelPs death — that the last regiments were disbanded. Many of the soldiers sold their plots at once to their com- rades and officers, but others settled into farmers, and numbers, sick of bloodshed, turned Quaker. But in their agriculture they were balked by the Tories, in their pastoral enterprises by the wolves, and their souls were distressed by the ubiquitous priests, who, by no fear of death, could be induced to leave the country. "We have now three bur- densome beasts to destroy," said Morgan, then mem- ber for Wexford. "The first is a wolf, the second a priest, and the third a Tory." A price was put on the head of each of these objectionable animals — a wolf and a priest had the same market value, £5 per head, and the wolves were gradually exterminated, but the priests seemed rather to increase than diminish. The price for a Tory's head was, for a public Tory, £20, but only 40s. for a private Tory. They, like the priests, were very difficult to catch, for the peasants who had been allowed to stay on the lands to work for the new settlers respected them as their old chieftains, and sympathized with their robberies. But in spite of extermination, exile, and kidnapping the old tale of degeneration was to be enacted. Many of Crom- well's soldiers married the daughters of their Irish laborers, and forty years later numbers of the children of these Puri- tan settlers were unable to speak a word of English. But long ere that time Cromwell had ceased to be troubled by questions of policy, for on September 3d, 1658, he died, and in 1660 the prince of Wales was proclaimed Charles II. CHAPTER XIII. THE RESTORATION. When the king came to his own again, the Irish royalists supposed that they also would be restored to those posses- sions they had lost through their devotion to his cause, and a few of them, acting with more zeal than discretion, proceeded at once to turn out the settlers by force. But though the number of these fanatics was small, they were 70 IEISH HISTORY EOR ENGLISH READERS. enough to revive the old cry tliat the Irish Papists were rebelling again, and to serve the government with an illustration of the dangers of Catholic landlordism in Ireland. The Papists, in truth, had no idea of rebelling. They knew that if Charles had not been actually received into the Church of Rome all his sympathies were Catholic, and they expected to have their lands returned and their re- ligion respected. They petitioned for an immediate restoration of property, and proposed to pay a third of their income for two years to the Cromwellian soldiers and adventurers, and for five years to those who had bought lands during the protectorate. The soldiers and adven- turers were naturally furious at this proposal. The estates had been granted them in place of money advanced or owed as wage. The fortune of war, which had seemed just enough when they were the victors, now appeared barbarous and uncivilized. By the sword they had won the fertile lands of Ireland, and by the sword, ii need be, they would retain them. Charles was now in a difficult position, for Coote, Broghill, and others of his father's enemies, seeing the turn of the tide, had been foremost of those who had helped him. to the throne. Friends such as these needed buying, for their principles went with their interest. Their estates were therefore extended, and their titles confirmed. "Make much of your enemies, for your friends will do you no harm," was Clarendon's cynical advice, and in it Charles saw the only solution of the Irish land question. By every tie of honor the king was bound to reinstate those who had suffered for his father and himself, and at first he did not mean to desert them. He was told that there would be land enough to meet all claims, and he tried to believe the flattering tale. But the settlers resented being evicted, with the doubtful prospect of fresh lands somewhere, to be given some time; and Charles, remem- bering that these Oromwellians were powerful enough and resolute enough to raise a rebellion, acted on Clarendon's advice, and resolved to confirm their tenure. Jiis hold on THE EESTORATIOJST. 71 the English throne was of the weakest; he feared to estrange any class, and he simply dared not favor the Catholics; whereas, no wrong, however great, inflicted on Irish Papists was likely to call forth resentment in Eng- land. Things being thus, and Charles being a Stuart, there could be no doubt which cause he would espouse. In May, 1661, the Irish parliament, after a lapse of nearly twenty years, was once more assembled. The business they were "to discuss was a bill of settlement con- firming the claims of the "new interest." In the Lower House, consisting almost entirely of Cromwellians, the bijl was easily passed, but in the Lords there was a hard fight; though by the influence of Ormonde it was pushed through. But lest this bill might provoke too much indignation among the Catholics, a Court of Claims was instituted, wherein certain of the Irish might have their case tried, and, if proved innocent, get their lands restored. None who had joined the rebels before '48, or who, in the final split of the Confederates, had adhered to the nuncio's party, or had accepted lands in Connaught, were allowed to plead; and with a view of cutting down the number of claimants, it was held proof of rebellion to have lived peaceably in the rebels' quartets even without taking any part in the war; therefore not only all Catholics who had taken arms when the English parliament had passed a bill for the extirpation of their religion were excluded, but also those who had dwelt quietly with the defenders of their faith. The gates of Dublin had been closed against all who had no business in the city, and as nearly the whole of the rest of Ireland had been in the hands of the rebels, it must have been difficult to find a home out of their quarters. The Protestant ascendancy thought it had little to fear from a Court of Claims bound by such restrictions; still, to make assurance doubly sure, no pains were spared to secure "friendly commissioners." Yet with all these precautions the court was crammed with applicants, and at the end of three months, out of about two hundred cases tried, only nineteen applicants were declared nocent, the vast majority being judged innocent, and in consequence, en- titled to the restoration of their estates. The Cromwellians, 72 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. wild with anger and dismay, talked loudly of an appeal to arms, and Charles, seeing he must now definitely sacrifice one party, decided that the weakest must go to the wall. Houses, lands, wealth, children, liberty, and life these men had given up for him, and for the faith both he and they professed, yet when he had to choose between them and his father's executioners he did not hesitate which should he honored and which despised. The action of the Court of Claims was accordingly restricted to one year — four thousand claims had been entered, but only seven hundred heard when the court rose, and the hopes of more than three thousand unheard claimants were at an end forever. An "Explanatory Bill" was next passed, which provided that the soldiers and adventurers should give up one-third of their grant to increase the fund for reprisals, but in spite of this surrender hardly a sixth of the profitable land of Ireland remained to the Catholics, for in all cases of com- petition between Papist and Protestant all ambiguity was to be decided in favor of the Protestant. By special favor twenty persons were restored, but all other claims which had not been heard for want of time were held disqualified by the "Black Act," as the bill for closing the Court of Claims was called in Ireland. The land question was now settled, and after twenty-one years of fighting, confiscating, and restoring, the Irish Catholics held just half as much land as they had done when they sought to reinstate themselves by the rebellion of 1641. The tenure by which the new landlords held their estates had been so insecure, the fear of war and harvest burning so great, and the chance of eviction so considerable, that few cared to sow corn which their enemies might reap or destroy, and as a consequence the greater part of the country had been laid down in grass. The profits of agriculture Mere greater than of pasturage but the return was slower, and the mischief done by an in- vading army far greater. Moreover, larger capital is needed to work an agricultural than a grazing farm, for with ploughing, harrowing, sowing, weeding, cleaning, reaping, and threshing much more labor is required than on pasture THE RESTORATION. ?:> land. It is just for this reason that an agricultural country is more thickly and more intelligently populated than a pastoral one. Already, in Elizabeth's time, Spencer deplored the pastoral tendency of the Irish, bewailing the few and idle hinds needed on a pastoral farm compared to the many intelligent, industrious laborers on an agricul- tural one. Indeed, modern economists tell us that other conditions being equal, there is twenty times more pauperism in grazing districts. But the Cromwellian settlers could hardly be expected to enter into these con- siderations, and the population had been so thinned by war, plague, exile, and transportation, that the pastoral tendency of Ireland Avas not then so disastrous as it became at a later period. The sole wealth of the country at this time was cattle; rent, taxes, and subsidies were paid in this inconvenient coin, and the only trade of the country was the exportation of beasts to England and Scotland. The civil wars and confiscations that had ruined Ireland had also lowered the rents of England; but the politicians of the day, failing to realize that the unsettled state of the country was the cause of its poverty, assigned various reasons for the dis- aster, and at last the duke of Buckingham declared he believed the importation of Irish cattle the root of the evil. The idea was eagerly received. The Irish, good for nothing else, were a most convenient scapegoat. The importation was declared a "nuisance," and prohibited, and for the time Ireland was ruined. Subsidies and taxes could no longer be paid; the country was in the direst distress; but happily all classes and both nationalities were affected by this calamity, and Ormonde and other nobles set to work to help themselves and their country. They could not get the embargo taken off the exportation of cattle, but they persuaded Charles to allow Ireland free trade with foreign countries, ''whether at peace or war with his majesty" — a truly astonishing measure for that time, and one of hitherto unheard-of liberality. Ormonde also introduced skilled weavers both of woolen and linen to come over from Flanders and teach their art to the Irish, who, in retaliation for the Scotch embargo on cattle, refused to admit Scottish woolen goods. All classes com- 74 LK15H HISTORY FOR ENGLISH KEADERS. bined to encourage Irish manufacture, and Ireland now seemed in a fair way to prosperity. The iniquitous sham Popish Plot caused some misery to the Catholics, but a reaction soon set in, and they enjoyed more liberty than they had done since the reign of Mary, when, in 1685, Charles died, and his brother James, duke of York, ascended the throne. James was an avowed Eoman Catholic, and was moreover the most unpopular man in England. He would probably never have been crowned, but that he w T as already fifty-two years of age, and had no legitimate son. His daughter Mary, wife of William of Orange, was next heir to the throne, and the English people preferred waiting till James's death for her ac- cession to a violent and unnatural usurpation. The accession of a Catholic king was naturally a great joy to Catholic Ireland, though James personally was disliked by, and disliked, his Irish subjects. On the other hand Protestant Ireland was much distressed at the ascend- ancy of a Papist, and the new interest quaked for their rights, but their fears were somewhat calmed by the appointment of the Protestant lord Clarendon to the office of lord lieutenant, though at the same time, Sir Richard Talbot, a most bigoted Papist, was created earl of Tyrconnel and given the command of the army. But James had the audacity to announce that he intended to establish religious equality, a joyful proclama- tion to Papist and Presbyterian, but greatly distrusted by the Episcopalians who saw in it the first step towards Catholic ascendancy. Probably they were right; James was not wise enough, or liberal enough, to care about religious equality for its OAvn sake, nor were the Catholics sufficiently ahead of the age to be content with simple justice. An illustrious Irish- man of our own day has summed up the relations between England and Ireland as "a course of brutal repression on the one side met by savage retaliation on the other," and the Episcopalians of James's time were well aware that their oppression had been brutal enough to call down a fearful retribution, should the Catholics ever be capable of revenge. Encouraged by James's favor the Irish rovalists THE RESTORATION. 75 again petitioned for a reversal of the Act of Settlement, and a restoration of their estates, and it seemed likely that their request would be granted; for Clarendon was merely a tool in the hands of Talbot, who pushed forward the Roman Catholic interest. The army was first opened to Catholics, then Episcopalians were excluded, and the Monmouth rebellion was made the excuse for disarming the Protestants. After this injustice the Tories, embold- ened by the defenceless condition of the settlers and shielded by the peasantry, made raids on the Cromwellian farms and carried oif the cattle, and thousands of beasts were slaughtered out of pure mischief and hatred for their owners. The old proprietors now urged the tenants to refuse rents to the new interest on the plea that they had no right to the land; and as the disarmed Protestants dared not evict them, the laborers defied their masters openly. Murders and outrages were committed and a foundless rumor got abroad that the Papists intended to massacre the whole Protestant population, who fled to the towns or barricaded themselves in their houses in abject terror. At this juncture (Feb., 1689) Clarendon resigned, and Talbot was appointed lord lieutenant. This step confirmed the fears of the settlers; they were now convinced that the savage retaliation was to begin. Five hundred families left Dublin with Clarendon, and all the sea-ports were thronged with refugees. Still the ex- pected massacre did not come off, though the cattle- lifting and theft by the Tories continued. Talbot's administration was really alarming; every Protestant was turned out of office, all the privy councillors, judges, and mayors were Irishmen and Romanists. The English ascendancy was for the moment overthrown, and the lives and fortunes of the settlers were at the mercy of the natives, but in June, 1688, the birth of a prince of Wales brought matters to a crisis. By the birth of a Catholic heir to the throne tho Papists felt secure; but the same event drove the English to action and brought about the revolution, for a number of English nobles invited the prince of Orange to come over and take possession of the country. These gentlemen were patriots, but most undoubtedly they were also traitors 76 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. and rebels. They risked their life, their honor, and their possessions for their country and their faith, and their cause succeeded. The Irish, who remained staunch to James, risked as much in the same holy cause, and they lost; still, though both were patriots, it was the Williamites, not the Jacobites, who were the traitors. Ireland took no part in the invitation to William. War, massacre, and confiscation were associated in the Irish mind with Protest- ant ascendancy, and the majority knew nothing of the in- vitation to William till the news reached them that, on the fifth of November, "The Deliverer" had landed in Torbay, and that James had absconded to France. For a moment the Catholics were paralyzed by the blow, and the flight of James by no means added to the dignity of the situation. But Talbot immediately resolved to fight, and quickly raised 30,000 irregular troops of volunteers, or "rapparees," as they were called from the Irish name of the short pike or spear which in most cases was their only weapon. The news of the muster of these troops increased the terror of the Ulster Protestants. The youthhood of Derry and En- niskillen determined to protect themselves against the bloodthirsty Papists, and thus, from a courage born of des- peration, began those famous feats of long-sustained valor, the sieges of Derry and Enniskillen. Meanwhile, in the early months of '89, the conventions of England and Scot- land declared that James had abdicated, and offered the crown to William and Mary. James, either from cowardice or policy, resolved to make his stand on Irish ground. Neither the English nor the Scotch were unanimous in their wish for William of Orange, and James hoped his adherents in Great Britain would keep the Williamites busy till he could convert the Irish irregulars into an army serviceable for the invasion of the larger island. Personally he disliked the Irish; he cared nothing for their land difficulties, and certainly had he succeeded in regaining his throne he would not have granted them an independent parliament. The Irish lead- ers, on the other hand, had no taste for a policy which, even should it succeed, would reduce their country once more to a state of dependence — their aim was to regain THE REVOLUTION. 1 i their country for their own people. Thus the king, and the men who were to fight for him, had entirely different aims, and when, on the 12th of March, 1689, James landed at Kinsale he found that the old war of races had begun, and that half of Talbot's army was engaged before the walls of Deny, whose weak defences were bravely held by a force of seven thousand English settlers. CHAPTER XIV. THE REVOLUTION. On the twelfth of March, 1689, James landed at Kinsale, attended by his natural sons, the duke of Berwick and the grand prior Fitz James, and a few Irish and French officers, among them Generals d'Avaux and de Rosen, and about 1,200 troops. James's misfortunes had wiped out from the memory of the Irish people the remembrance of his unpop- ularity and his cowardly flight from England. Blinded by their sympathies, they saw in James the noble upholder of their faith, persecuted for righteousness sake, deserted by his English subjects, and dethroned by his own daughter because of his steadfastness to his religion. The obstinate, weak-minded old coward was for them a saint. They for- got that they, like every one else, disliked and despised him, and they refused to see how intensely indifferent he was to their national aims and ambition. Irish hospitality and sympathy had prepared a warm welcome for their king, who enjoyed an ovation from Kinsale to Dublin, and a perfect triumph in the capital, where ten days and nights were spent in festivities, levees, and receptions. But there was more serious business to attend to, and parliament was called. James and the Irish entirely differed as to the US3S of parliament — to James it was a machine for wring- ing money out of his subjects; to them it was a means for wringing a constitution out of James. A long experience of the Stuart character made them well aware that when once James had got their money his interest in the Irish parliament would vanish, so they refused to make any ar- IS IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. rangement with regard to subsidies, till certain acts were passed. Their first care was for the repeal of Poyning's Act, by which, since the time of Richard II. , no act passed by the Irish parliament could become law, till it had been approved by the English privy council, by whom it might be altered and amended to any extent, but on its return to Ireland it might receive no further alteration, but must either be re- jected altogether or passed just as it was returned. Having disposed of this hated law, acts were passed to secure re- ligious equality. Since the reformation, Papist and Pro- testant alike had had to pay tithe to the clergy of the Estab- lished Church. The Irish Catholics now practically dis- established the Irish Church by decreeing that all persons should pay tithe to the clergy of their own denomination. Measures for the security of trade were also passed; but the great business of the session, from the Irish point of view, was the reversal of the Bill of Settlement, and it was decreed that all Catholics who had held land before Octo- ber, 1641, were to be reinstated. By the subsequent de- feat of James, these acts were rendered waste paper, but they are important historically as showing the views of Irishmen of that day with regard to the needs of their country. Parliament now voted to the king the subsidies of £20, QUO a month, but, James being dissatisfied with this sum, they consented to double the amount. It had been well for the reputation of the Irish parliament had it now risen, for their next measure was one of simple retal- iation—they attainted 2,000 persons of treason,and declared them subject to the penalties of that crime. The lists were drawn up with extreme carelessness — some names were inserted twice or even three times, many were put in from private spite, and a few of the most prominent Will- iamites were forgotten. All this time the war was going on, and the gallant Perry 'prentice boys — the descendants of the planters sent over by the city of London in the time of Charles I. — were valiantly holding the town. James marched from Dublin to the devoted city, and the Derry governor prepared to capitulate, but the mob followed up his negotiations with a storm of bullets, and elected a THE REVOLUTION. 79 clergyman named Walter for their leader: and, despite the most terrible sufferings from starvation and disease, held the town till the end of July, when they were relieved by the English fleet. Long before then, James, discomforted by their warm reception, had returned to Dublin, leaving Hamilton in command. The Irish troops — raw, untried levies — were discouraged at the absence of their king, and they did not get on well with the French generals. More- over, they were extremely badly armed, having only a thousand really serviceable arms among thirty times as many men. They were, also, in want of money, and in every way the war went against them throughout the sum- mer, so that when in August William's general, Schom- berg, arrived with 4,000 men he hoped soon to close the campaign. But through the winter it was Schomberg's troops that suffered, and though the timorous James re- fused to allow his soldiers to attack the enemy in tlieii damp encampment, fever and disease fought for the Irish, and swept off half of Schomberg's forces before they could retire to winter quarters. William was becoming seriously alarmed about the Irish war, and his ill success there told against him in England. By losing Ireland he would lose England also; indeed, dis- content was so openly expressed that he thought of resign- ing the crown and returning to Holland. He had also an- other reason for wishing to settle the Irish question, for his troops were wanted for his war with France, the issue of which was terribly imperilled by the enormous force he was obliged to pour into Ireland. On the other hand, it was to the interest of Louis to prolong the Irish war. He could easily have spared men enough to place victory with- in reach of James, but, delighted at having the Williamites so plentifully occupied, he sent over only just enough arms and money to keep the Irish from the necessity of surren- der, and employed his own troops in pushing his own vic- tories in France. In the spring of 1690, the French gen- erals, d'Avaux and de Eosen, obtained their recall, but not before de Rosen had so far forgotten himself as to tell James that "if he had ten kingdoms he would lose them all." But Louis, who contemplated the annexation of 80 LLUSJl HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. Ireland to France, felt that by this recall he had left the Irish too much their own masters, so he sunt over General de Lauzan, with 5,000 men; but this was rather a loss than a gain to the Jacobites as the same number of Irish, with Colonel Justin McCarthy, Lord Montcashel at their head, were, in exchange, sent over to France. The French did little good in Ireland. They did not know the country and they suffered much from hardship and the damp cli- mate, to which the Irish were quite indifferent. Through- out the spring Schomberg's troops were engaged in reduc- ing Charlemont, which was gallantly held by 0' Regan and a very small garrison. But though neither party made much jn'ogress in the war, the "English," as the medley of Dutch, Danes, English, and French Huguenots were called, were becoming so discouraged and demoral- ized, that William, hoping his presence would have some effect on them, landed at Carriekfergus on June 14, and found himself at the head of 40,000 men. The arrival of William in Ireland reduced James to the same helpless condition that his appearance in Torbay had done eighteen months earlier, but he made a desperate effort not to run away, and insisted on a battle being fought on the banks of the Boyne. Still he felt a depressing pre- sentiment of defeat, sent his heavy luggage on to Dublin, and chartered a ship to wait for him in Waterford harbor in anticipation of disaster. But notwithstanding these overwise precautious James was bent on proving his valor before William, and on the 20th of June the armies met. The Jacobites had the best position, the Williamites the larger force, and the inestimable advantage of being head- ed by a prince who knew no fear. Brave to recklessness, William, though wounded and in pain, was always in the front of the battle, leading his men and encouraging them at the post of danger. James watched his army from a safe distance, anxiously regarding the ever-changing tide of fortune, as now the Irish, now the English, got the best of the desperate encounter. At last, when the Jacobites, after seven hours' fighting, began to retreat in good order, James, wild with tenor, spurred his horse, and never stopped till, with a scanty retinue of contemptuous gentle- THE REVOLUTION. 81 men, he arrived, blown and breathless, in Dublin city — the bearer of the news of his own defeat. The king thus flying, his »horse spent and heated, turned the defeat into a rout in the mind of the country. "Change kings with us," cried the sorrowful troops, "and we will fight you again;" but James was determined there should be no changing kings — he had had enough of this terrible war- fare. Next morning he fled, though no man pursued him, and never rested till the ship his foresight had pro- vided bore him in safety to France. Glad though he was to leave Ireland, his troops were still better pleased to be rid of him. But he had ruined his cause. Drogheda surrendered on hearing of the de- feat at the Boyne, and William marched into Dublin. The Irish now retreated to the south and west, and con- gregated at Athlone and Limerick, and round the latter city about 10,000 foot had gathered as if by instinct. De Lauzan looked with contempt on the antiquated fortifica- tions, and refused to try to hold the place. "Are those your ramparts?" he sneered to ISarsfield "Then the English will need no cannon; they can take them with roasted apples.-' Sarsfield had a higher opinion of the stronghold. But he allowed De Lauzan and his troops to go to France by way of Gralway and held Limerick alone. On the 9th of August, William appeared before the de- spised fortifications, but could not begin operations, as his siege train had not arrived from Dublin; nor did it ever reach the camp, for Patrick Sarsfield, by a daring and skillful maneuver, intercepted it, dispersed the escort, burst the guns, and burned the carriages and ammunition. More guns were sent from Waterford, and by the end of the month the damage was in a measure repaired; but the success of the adventure had restored the Irish confidence, and when, after a long bombardment, the English effected a breach and stormed the town, they met with a resistance so desperate and determined that they were forced to re- tire, and eventually the autumn floods compelled them to abandon the siege for that year. William's presence was urgently needed in discontented England, and having restored the courage and striven to 6 82 IKISH HISTOEY FOR ENGLISH READERS. correct the morals of his troops, he now left Ireland, send- ing Edward Churchill, Captain Marlborough, with 8,000 fresh troops, against Cork and Kinsale. Fortune favored the young commander, for both towns capitulated to him, and after a six week's campaign, he went back loaded with honor. Throughout the winter hostilities were continued, in which both armies suffered, though neither gained. The French help, so often looked for, was slow in coming. Old Talbot had gone in the summer to collect arms and money, but he still tarried, and the Irish were becoming a ragged, hungry, and penniless set of troops, when in February Talbot returned, bringing with him 14,000 louis d'or, and the news that he had left almost as much in Brest to be expended in oatmeal. The old tale of dissension was once more ruining the Irish cause. The French and Irish officers disagreed on every subject, and entertained for each other a most pro- found contempt, and matters were only made worse when in May Saint Ruth was sent over, and made first in com- mand. "William, pressed for money and soldiers, and "touched by the fate of the gallant nation that had made itself the victim of French promises," was anxious to close the war, and offered very fair terms to the Jacobites, but they, still hopeful of a complete victory, made no response. Through the early summer the war dragged on, the last engagement being on July 12, at Aughrim. Saint Ruth was in com- mand, and, jealous of his brother officers, had confided to none his plan of battle. Under him the Jacobites were gaining the day, and Saint Ruth cried out that they would drive the English back on Dublin; but as he spoke an English ball took off his head, and- the Irish, deprived of a commander, were utterly defeated. Only Oalway and Limerick now remained, and Gal way, having no ammuni- tion, was forced to surrender. The garrison asked and re- ceived good terms. They were to march out with all the parade of war and join the rest of the army at Limerick. That ancient city was now the only hope of the Jacobites, but it seemed to both parties that it would hold for ever, for the western side being uninvested by the enemy, food THE TREATY OF LIMERICK. 83 and ammunition could be brought in from Connaught. The French fleet were expected daily, and the Irish knew that when winter set in floods and fever would compel the enemy once more to raise the siege. Still the prospect was a dreary one, and both sides were weary of the strug- gle. The Irish and French hated each other more cor- dially every day, and the former began to suspect that France intended to annex their country instead of helping them to win their independence. Next the Williamites gained the island part of the town, and though this was so separated from the rest of the city as in no way to affect its safety, it nevertheless depressed the troops, so that the commanders thought it would be better to close the war while their position was strong enough to ensure favorable terms. Accordingly, a truce of four days was proposed on the 24th September, and three days later the Jacobites offered to conclude a peace on condition of a general par- don for all past oifences, religious, civil, and military; of municipal liberty being granted to the Catholics; and sol- diers, if they wished, being received into their majesties' armies. The Williamites, delighted at the prospect of peace, assented to these terms, which were amended, drawn up into thirty-two articles, thirteen civil and nine- teen military, and on the 3d of October, 1691, the gener- als of both armies signed the famous Treaty of Limerick. CHAPTER XV. THE TREATY OF LIMERICK. The signing of the Treaty of Limerick was an event of enormous importance in Ireland, and its ruthless and dishonorable violation perhaps did more than all the cruel confiscations to ruin the country and foster that race-hatred which plays so prominent a part in the relations of England and Ireland. The treaty was a compromise, and, as such, not quite satisfactory to either party, for the Catholics had been fighting for land and liberty of conscience, and the Protestants for land and Protestant ascendancv, and the 84 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. treaty, wliile it insured religious equality, conferred the land on the Cromwellian settlers. The civil articles were of the greatest general importance, as they affected the wel- fare of the entire country and should have secured it from religious persecution for ever. The first article provided that "the Roman Catholics of this kingdom shall enjoy such privileges in the exercise of religion as are consistent with the laws of Ireland, or as they did enjoy in the reign of Charles II., and their majesties, as soon as their affairs will permit them to summon a parliament in this kingdom, will endeavor to procure the Roman Catholics such further security in that particular as may preserve them from any disturbance upon the account of their said religion." This was the whole of the first and most important article: we shall see later how it was kept. The second granted pardon and protection to all who had served King James, on their taking the following oath of allegiance: — "I, , do solemnly promise and swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to their majesties King William and Queen Mary: so help me, God." The old oath of supremacy, which declared the English sovereign to be the supreme head of the church, had been the cause of much oppression to the Papists, for they, being unable to take any such oath, had, by its means, been excluded from honorable and valuable appoint- ments. To prevent a renewal of this tryanny, the ninth article provided that "the oath to be administered to such Roman Catholics as submit to their majesties' government shall be the oath aforesaid (of allegiance), and no other;" and this article was kept as faithfully as the rest of the treaty. Articles III., IV., V., and VI. extend the priv- ileges of the first two articles to merchants and other classes of men; the seventh permits Roman Catholic noble- men and gentlemen to carry arms and keep a gun in their house, and the eighth gives the right of removing goods and chattels without search. The tenth article guarantees that no person who hereafter breaks any of these articles shall cause any other person to lose the benefit of them; the two next stipulate for the rati- THE TREATY OF LIMERICK. 85 fication of the articles within eight months. The thirteenth and last provides for the debts of Colonel John Brown, commissary of the Irish army. The nineteen military articles provided for the honorable exile of all who wish to leave the country and to serve in foreign armies, for the reception into William's army of any who wished to remain, and for the cessation of hostili- ties. The stone on which the famous treaty was signed in Ginkle's camp is still to be seen at the north end of Thomond bridge — a silent testimony to Irish misery and English perfidy. After the treaty had been signed, it was discovered that. in the fair draft, two lines had, either by accident or design, been omitted, and the Irish refused to evacuate the town till they had been inserted; but, scarcely was the ink of this second writing dry when the long-promised help from France sailed up the Shannon, with men, money, and ten thousand stand of arms — too late! Great was the grief in Limerick, and some of the officers were now for breaking the treaty and going on with the war, but Sarsfield indignantly refused to soil his country's name with so foul a stain of treachery. Sad and silently the Irish troops marched from the beloved city, most of them to take ship for France, and never again to see their native land. Some few took service under William, and many, warned that if once they enlisted in foreign service they must never more return, went quietly to their homes. Still the greater part — in all some twenty thousand men — enlisted in foreign armies, chiefly in that of France, where, under Montcashel, Clare, and Dillon, they laid the foundation of that Irish brigade to whose valor England owed many a defeat. For many years the supply of Irish soldiers in the French army was kept up by constant recruiting, and the number thus taken from the country must have been very great, since in the succeeding fifty-four years four hundred and fifty thousand Irishmen died in the service of France alone. Besides the tremendous loss of life, the war had cost England ten millions of money, and as an effort to recoup 86 IRISH HISTORY FOB ENGLISH READEBS. some portion of this, 4,000 Irish were outlawed, and L,060,792 Irish acres, equal to 1,918,307 English acres, were confiscated — so heavy was the penalty for having been worsted in a fair stand-up fight. Since the accession of James J. the extent of the whole island, with an excess of 276,14*3 acres, had been confis- cated, for though some very few Anglo-Irish noblemen still retained their property, a good part of the country had been declared forfeit tAvice within eighty years. I have been able to find no account of the amount of land which changed hands during the confiscations of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, nor of the lauds taken from the Connaught landlords by order of Cromwell for the Irish of the other three provinces, but lord Clare's table of the confiscations of dames I., of Cromwell, and of William, makes a lilting (dose to the unhappy history of the Stuart dynasty in Ireland. The acreage is given in Irish acres, which are to Eng- lish acres about the proportion of eight to thirteen. Ireland is estimated at 11,420,682 acres, and the confis- cations of the eighty years ending L6J91 amounted to 11,697,629 acres, or an excess of 276,147 of the entire acreage of I re hind. After the flight of Hugh O'Neill, James L had confiscated the whole of Ulster, amounting to — 2,836,839 acres. At the Restoration there were set out by the Court of (Maims — — — ' 7,800,000 » And William's confiscations amounted to — — — — — 1,060,000 " Total, — — — 11,697,629 CHAPTKK XVI. T II E P E NAI, CO D E. The ink of the Treaty of Limerick was hardly dry before the ninth article was broken, for at the meeting of parliament Roman Catholic peers and commons were re- THE PENAL CODE. 8? quired to take an oath which denied the doctrine of transubstantiation, and pronounced the sacrifice of the mass "damnable and idolatrous." No sincere Catholic would take such an oath, and by it Papists were for eve! excluded from the Irish parliament. The remaining civil articles of the treaty were soon dis regarded as ruthlessly as the ninth had been, and the Irish parliament began to build up a penal code against Koman Catholicism. Laws were made forbidding any Papist to send his child to be educated abroad, and at the same time Catholics were prohibited from keeping schools in Ireland. Statutes were passed authorizing a search for arms in the houses of Papists, either by night or by day. and forbidding makers of arms and weapons from receiving Catholic ap- prentices. The regular Romish clergy were commanded to leave the kingdom before the 1st of May, 1698, and bishops and priests of that creed were forbidden to enter the coun* try on pain of imprisonment and banishment for the first offence, and death for the second. The Irish parliament of those days was elected for an unlimited number of years, and was usually dissolved only by the death of the sovereign, and the parliament elected after the death of William, in 1702, sat throughout the fourteen years of the reign of Anne. At the time of Anne's accession the Protestants in Ire- land were only about a sixth part of the population. They were a small dominant class, holding nearly all the land, and alone eligible as members of either house of parliament. Planted amid a very naturally discontented population, they lived in a perpetual state of terror, and, with a ferocity born of fear, passed a crushing penal code against Catholicism. That the Papists would once more get the upper hand was the nightmare of the "Protestant garrison," for the Stuart cause was still far from hopeless — Presbyterian Scotland and Papist Ireland alike favored the pretender, whose claim was also supported by the powerful king of France — and until the suppression of the rebellion of 1745 there was al- ways the possibility, and the greater or less probability of the return of the Stuarts, with all iis attendant evils. Ireland was felt to be the weak point of the Orange party. 88 IRISH HISTORY FOR EXGLISH READERS. the stronghold of rebellion, and this ill-conditioned state of mind was deemed to be due to the influence of the Cath- olic religion. It was easy for a staunch Protestant to per- suade himself that by oppressing Papists and degrading their social standing, he was furthering the cause of the true religion, and when his zeal enlarged his property, he fell that a blessing was upon him and that he had come in for the promised inheritance of the meek. So in Ireland the Protestants, and in Switzerland the Catholics, persecuted their neighbors in the interests of true religion. The oppressions of William faded into insignificance before the sterner penal code which was framed during the reign of Anne. To pervert a Protestant to the Roman religion was declared premunire, and punishable with imprisonment for life. Education was further prohibited to Catholics, for it now became criminal for a Catholic to employ or to act as a private tutor. Papists were forbidden to buy land, and were forced to leave their estates in gavelkind (that is in equal portions to all their sons) unless the eldest son con- formed, in which case he inherited the whole property, and could force his father to allow him a third of his income during his lifetime. No Papist could take a lease of mure than thirty-one years, nor could he raise money on his estates. The civil services, municipal offices, the army, the navy, the learned professions, save medicine, and all positions of public trust were now closed against the Catholics, who in addition to the oath of allegiance were required to take an oath of abjuration, declaring that "no foreign prince, person, prelate, state, or potentate, hath or ought to have any power, jurisdiction, superiority, pre-em- inence, or authority, ecclesiastical or .spiritual within this realm." The bill which thus aimed a blow at the Catho- lics and all supporters of the house of Stuart, was sent over to England in this form, where a clause was added, provid- ing that "any person entering the courts, the civil service, or any place of trust, shall, in addition to this oath. receive the sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England/' The insertion of this clause raised a clamor among the dissenters, for by Poyning's Law the bill could THE PENAL CODE. 89 receive no further alteration on its return from England, but must be received or rejected entirely; but rather than lose so glorious an opportunity of spiting the Catholics, the Irish parliament accepted it, and thus all Protestant dissenters were excluded from every public office, from that of lord lieutenant to that of common postman. Papists were next forbidden to employ more than two apprentices in any business except the linen trade, and were nominally excluded from the cities of Limerick and Galway. Catholic gentlemen were prohibited from carry- ing and from keeping arms in their houses, nor might they go more than five miles from home without a pass- port. Under these circumstances a horse, except for farm purposes, was a superfluity to a Papist, and he was not al- lowed to keep one over the value of £5. If a farm held by a Catholic yielded one third more than the yearly rent, any Protestant might, by simply swearing to the fact, evict the tenant and take possession; and any Protestant suspect- ing another of holding an estate in trust for a Catholic, might file a bill against him and take the estate from him. No Papist might, under a penalty of £500, become guard- ian to any child, and any child who conformed could de- mand of his Catholic father an allowance of one-third of his income. Any Protestant marrying a Catholic became subject to all the disabilities, and any woman who con- formed was freed from her Papist husband's control, and could demand an independent allowance. These regula- tions with regard to private life caused much heart-burn- ing and misery. The unloving wife, the dissolute and un dutiful son. had but to add the hypocrisy of a pretended conversion to their sins to reap a rich reward, and the last- hours of the dying Catholic were darkened by the thought that his children must be brought up in a creed which was to him heretical. But it was against the priests that the law was most severe. There were to be 3,000 priests registered for the whole country, and any unregistered priest was liable to be put to death. No bishops Avere allowed in Ireland, and when the priests died the irregisters died with them, so that had the Irish been a law-abiding people, Catholicism 90 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. must soon have become extinct. Under this law a race of priest-hunters grew up, who were rewarded for their discoveries according to the standing of their victims. £50 was the reward for a bishop, £20 for an unregistered priest or begging friar, and £10 for a schoolmaster. But, besides these professional "discoverers," any Catholic over 16 years of age could be seized and, on pain of imprison- ment, be made to swear when and where he had heard mass, and who was the officiating clergyman, and he, if he were not registered, was liable to lose his life. Still, though the registered priests died, Catholicism did not: bishops, priests, and schoolmasters continued to fulfill their duties though by so doing they became members of the criminal classes. They lived hidden in the mountains or in the wretched cabins of the peasantry. Sometimes they were caught, imprisoned, and banished, but the people were gen- era] ly very faithful to them; and the chief result of the code respecting the clergy was to create a hatred of law and foster a sympathy with crime; nor could the clergy preach obedi- ence to law, when by their very existence they themselves broke the law every day of their lives. It was impossible for a Catholic to obey the laws of his church and his country, and as his conscience forced him to break some part of the law of the land, it soon permitted him to disregard others, and if he were unlucky enough to be found out and ■ sent to gaol, there was no moral stigma attached to the name of criminal, since his religion was itself a crime. But the cup of Catholic degradation was not yet full; ignorant, poor, and criminal as were the Papists in the days of Anne, they still might, when otherwise qualified, vote at the election of members of parliament, and of civil corporations. But at the accession of George II. these last remnants of civil liberty were taken from them, and thenceforward they had no vote in the elections of members either of parliament or of civil corporations. Indeed so numerous were the restrictions on Papists that a judge de- clared that "the law did not suppose the existence of any such person as an Irish Roman Catholic, nor could they even breathe without the connivance of the government," THE COMMERCIAL RESTRAINTS. 91 CHAPTER XVII. THE COMMERCIAL RESTRAINTS. The penal code affected only five-sixths of the people of Ireland, but there were restrictions which fell on Catholic, Anglican, and Dissenter alike. England looked on Ire- land, not as a sister country but as a dangerous rival, whose prosperity must be checked for fear it should endanger her own. In the time of Charles II. cattle, meat, pork; ham, cheese, and butter had been excluded from the English market. In consequence of this embargo the Irish farmers converted their pasture into sheep walks, and soon produced the best wool in Europe. Quantities of it were exported raw both to France and Spain, but there was also a large and growing industry in the north, where woolen goods were manufactured both for home consumption and for exporta- tion. But this industry excited the fear and envy of Eng- land, and early in the eighteenth century the exportation of wool, either manufactured or in a natural state, to any foreign country or to any colony, was forbidden under penalty of £500, together with the loss of the ship and cargo. England thus secured to herself the monopoly of the best wool in Europe at her own price; the Irish, deprived of all other bidders, had to accept anything that she chose to offer, till at the time that French fleece wool was fetching 2s. Gd. per pound, Irish was selling at fivepence. The farmers suffered greatly, but they repaired their loss as much as possible by smuggling wool to France, and a huge illicit trade sprang up between the two countries, till there was not a cave on the Kerry coast that was not stocked with wool. Every one — magistrates, landlords, priests, farmers, and peasantry — knew of and connived at the illicit trade. The coastguard was powerless to cope with the numbers of smuggling cutters which brought 92 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. French wines and brandy, priests and prelates, to Ireland, and carried away wool, or a still more valuable commodity, entered on the ships' books and spoken of as "wild geese," but in reality soldiers recruited for the service of France. There was, however, a class that suffered much more deeply than the farmers — the weavers. These were chiefly Protestants, the descendants of English and Scotch settlers. From a condition of comfort, earned by honest industry, forty thousand of these poor creatures were in a day reduced to poverty and enforced idleness. There was no other trade for them to take up, so they had no alternative but emigra- tion. By the restrictions on the Catholics, England and the Protestant ascendancy between them had driven hun- dreds of thousands of men into the armies of France and Spain and Austria, to fight against, to kill, and be killed by Englishmen; and now, by a like short-sighted policy, the friendly northern Protestants were changed into enemies, who paid off old scores in the war of American Independence. The only great industries now left to Ireland were the linen and shipbuilding trades. In early times, Ireland had been a densely wooded country. Since then, much wood had been consumed in the working of mines, and successive generations of colonists, holding their land on insecure tenure, had hastened to realize what money they could by felling whole forests of timbers. Still in the early part of the eighteenth century there was plenty of good oak, much esteemed for shipbuilding. But England, too, was a ship- building country, and the fiat went forth that henceforward Ireland was to use none but English-built trading vessels, and was to trade directly with no country save England. By this law the sea-port towns were ruined, and their in- habitants, along with the shipbuilders and merchant sail- ors, were forced to emigrate, or try to live by agriculture. Her position and magnificent natural harbors seems to have destined Ireland to be a great shipping center, where English and American exports could be exchanged, but the shipping trade was to be henceforward an English mon- opoly, and Ireland was prohibited from sending or receiving THE COMMERCIAL RESTRAINTS. 93 any article to or from any colony or foreign state. Calicoes and other cotton goods were already beginning to have a baneful influence on the linen industry, which was now further crippled by heavy duties on sail-cloth, and checked, striped, and colored linens. The mischief done to Ireland by these restrictions which deprived her of «W export trade, were of a deeper and more lasting nature than appears at first sight. For a country to succeed in manufacture, cap- ital, skilled labor and industrial habits are needed — habits of diligence, order, and thrift, which it takes generations to acquire. The principal industries of England were founded in the time of the Tudors. and have an almost unbroken history since those days. The Irish of the seventeenth cen- tury had made a heroic effort to create a national trade, but so soon as any branch succeeded it was stifled by the selfish and shortsighted policy of England. The Irish did what little they could for their ruined trade; they resolved "to burn everything that came from England but her peojjle and her coals;" and Swift, in his famous letters to the Irish people, wrote that, "even a stay- lace of English manufacture should be considered scandal- ous. ' ' But trade cannot flourish under such conditions; the home consumption was not great enough, especially as the whole nation Avas miserably poor; home manufactures made under so many disadvantages were dearer and less good than foreign ones; and goods were often sold as Irish, at Irish prices, that were made abroad. 80 trade, though bolstered up for a time, dwindled and sank. The peojjle who had once been employed in the factories were driven back on the country, and the competition for land was something unheard of. The little farms were let by auc- tion, and fetched more than they produced, so that the nom- inal rent could never, by any possibility, be paid. Evic- tions for nonpayment of rent became very frequent, and, as the century rolled on, great tracts of country were laid downMn grass. The Irish parliament now stepped in and passed a bill providing that at least five out of every hun- dred acres must be tilled, but England, having been in the habit of exporting wheat to Ireland, threw the meas- ure out. There was now no work to be got in the towns or in the 94 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. country, and emigration was too expensive a luxury for the really destitute, Thousands who were willing to work were forced to beg, and, from a necessity, idleness grew into a habit. Fellow feeling made the poor wonderfully charitable to one another, and none who had a crust or po- tato grudged his neighbor half. One fatal consolation was left to this poor, starving nation; hunger could be sti- fled, cold be driven out, misery, want, and nakedness for- gotten at a very small expenditure, for, with all the com- mercial restraints that bound down Ireland, rum might be imported duty free. CHAPTEE XVIII. THE LAND DIFFICULTIES. Paralyzed by the penal code and the heavy commer- cial restraints, Ireland, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, was in truth a "most distressful country." The towns afforded little occupation for any one; but the army, navy, law, all civil offices, and wholesale trade being Pro- testant monopolies, the Catholics had to content them- selves with such small businesses as could be carried on with the help of two apprentices, or take to the over- stocked business of farming. The class of Catholic land- lords was rapidly dying out. Many eldest sons secured their inheritance by conforming to the English Church, and those who did not change their faith sank in a few generations to the class of farmers, for few Catholics had held estates large enough to bear even the first sub-division, and when the process had been gone through two or three times the owners sank to the condition of cottiers, or sold their little properties. Papists might neither buy land nor hold it on a long lease, so all that came into the market was of necessity bought by Protestants. In many cases land was acquired simply as a speculation; it was cheap because as five-sixths of the population were forbidden to purchase, the market was restricted; it could be let at a high rent because five-sixths of the people being by law THE LAND DIFFICULTIES. 95 prohibited from almost every occupation but farming, there was immense competition, and people were willing to offer exorbitant rents. But many a man who had bought large tracts of land disliked the thought of living on his new possession, the trouble of collecting rents from small tenants, so estates were often let on long leases to middlemen at a very moderate rental. These middlemen sub-let the land to tenants or to other middlemen at a higher rental, till on many properties there were five or even six middlemen between the landlord and the actual tiller of the soil, who, to enable all these deputies of deputies of deputies to make a living, was charged an extortionate rent, often a rack rent — that is, a rent higher than the val- ue of the total production of the land. Such a rent could not be paid in full, even in a good season. The middle- man got as much as he could out of the tenant, and the tenant paid as little as he could induce the middleman to accept. Even with a good will the wretched middleman could not afford to be merciful, as his living depended on the difference of the rental paid him by the tenants and that which he paid the middleman over him. In good seasons the tenants managed to rub along somehow, but in bad years they were reduced to a fearful state of misery, often culminating in eviction and starvation, and there were several actual famines. The most terrible was that of 1746, when mothers devoured their children, and chil- dren their dead mothers. Docks, nettles, and shamrocks were the staple food of many thousands, and when at length fever, dysentery, and exhaustion put an end to the sufferings of these poor creatures, the thin corpses were as green as the unwholsome food on which they had. pro- longed their miserable existence. Extortionate rent, whose payment was enforced by threats of eviction, was not by any means the only trouble of the Irsih farmer and cottier; short leases, or still worse, yearly tenancy hampered him, and there was the great grievance of the tithe which every one was forced to pay to the An- glican vicar or rector of his parish. Many of these clergy held several livings, and, having no congregations, lived entirely in England; it was therefore inconvenient for 90 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. them to collect the tithes themselves, and they usually employed a "tithe proctor" who paid a certain sum to the clergyman, and whose profit depended on the degree of rigor with which lie collected his tithe. That this tithe was a fruitful source of ill-feeling can well be imagined; the small farmer barely able to find his children bread, and bound to maintain his own priest, bit- terly resented this tax to the absentee heretic whose face he never saw. Moreover, the tithe was levied with great in- equality and injustice. Munster, as a whole, paid one-third more tithe than any other province, and some parts of Minister were more severely rated than others. The great tithes of wheat and corn which were general throughout the country were usually paid with a fairly good grace. It was the potato tithe, a tax almost peculiar to Minister, that was so desperately resisted, as being a weight which fell most heavily on the poorest. Pasturage was most unjustly exempted by a law made in 1785, so from that time the graz- ier had a clear advantage of ten per cent, over the agricultur- al ist. This naturally pronrpted men to lay down their land in grass, and another inducement to Catholic farmers was the law which prohibited them from making a profit of more than one-third of the rent. The gains of pastur- age are less easy to ascertain than those of agriculture, so the Papist farmer, who by luck, skill, or the lenieucy of his landlord, cleared a large profit, laid down his land in grass that he might run less chance of being discovered and evicted — a fate from which, in this case, his landlord was powerless to save him. The tithes and the penal code were slowly turning Ire- land into a grazing country, but when, in the middle of the century, the restriction on the importation of cattle, meat, butter, and cheese into England was removed, in consequence of murrain which had destroyed English beasts, a perfect grazing fever set in. While the land was being turfed and prepared, the effect of this change was not apparent, but the process once completed tenant after tenant was evicted, homestead after homestead destroyed, common and waste lands, whereon hitherto many a poor man had kept his goat or cow, were enclosed, and thou- THE LAND DIFFICULTIES. 9*] Bands of families, through no fault of their own, were turned out on the roadside, without even such funds and shelter as have, of late years, been provided for their suc- cessors by a disloyal and illegal organization. Estates that had supported twenty or thirty laborers could now be tended by two or three herdsmen, so nine out of every ten men on the transformed estates were dis- charged, and, with their families, turned out of their homes. Emigration was then far more costly than now, and therefore impossible to the greater part of the tenantry, who nocked into the towms, hoping for work. But trade was so shackled and bound down that there was no work even for skilled artisans, and for these evicted tenants no hope or chance of work. Starvation was very near, and fever soon laid her burning hand upon the little children. The Irish cottiers of the eighteenth century were well used to hardship; the poorest food, the scantiest dress, the rough- est shelter, were all they had known; but the wail of the dying children, lying shelterless and starving in the ditch, was more than they could bear. The old cabin had been pulled down to prevent the return of its tenants, and on its site stood the new cow-house and the sheep-pen. These men were very ignorant — in that, at least, they obeyed the law which forbade education to Papists. They knew nothing of economic principles, or of the law of demand and supply; they had never even heard that the the object of farming was to produce the most with the least possible amount of labor. As Catholics, they were forbid- den the right of public meeting or of framing petitions, but in any case they would all have been dead long before any petition could reach that tender mother of the poor — the State. They had no hope but in themselves, no friend but the priest, a man as poor, as hungry, often nearly as ignorant as themselves. As for the enemy, the cause of all their misery, did not the new cow-house and the sheep-pen tell them who he was? The landlord, the middleman, the tithe proctor, the parson, and the priest, all these they had managed somehow to pay, and had still kept a roof 7 98 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. above their heads; but this gentle, silent, innocent sup- planter had deprived them of all they ever had. Moreover, this enemy was food himself, food in abundance was com- fortably housed around them, while they, their wives, and little ones, were dying in agonies of hunger and of cold. Si- lently, by the cold light of the winter moon, the men arose and killed the cattle in hundreds and in thousands. The Munster hillsides rang with the cries of the dying beasts, whose owners, paralyzed with fear, lay quaking in their beds. 80 began the famous Whiteboy outrages; and then arose that spirit of desperation and revenge, which led not only to a wholesale slaughter of cattle but to crimes of a far worse nature. Murders, maiming, and mutilations were dealt out with horrible barbarity, as punishment to men who laid down their land in the grass, to tithe proc- tors, and to several extortionate clergymen and priests. The law at first was powerless, for most of the peasantry sympathized with the Whiteboys, and such as had the will had not the courage to give them up, for Whiteboy revenge was far more certain and more terrible than legal penalty. Stringent laws were passed against Whiteboyism, and many offenders were hanged or shot; still it was years before the organization was suppressed. At the time that the Whiteboy outrages were terrifying the Munster graziers, two organizations were made by the Protestant tenantry of Ulster. The roads were in those days repaired by public unpaid labor, every man being forced to give six days' work yearly. At sowing time, at hay time, or at harvest he might be required to give his week's labor. The rich were, by custom, not by law, ex- empted, and the cottiers naturally contended that the rich, who used the roads, should be forced to pay a substitute to do their share of the work for them, and not leave the bur- den entirely on the poor. To right this grievance a great number of tenants pledged themselves to resist the law till all classes were made subject to it. Members of this organ- ization wore an oak branch in their hats, and thus obtained the name of "Oakboys." The "Steelboys" were more like the Whiteboys of the south. They were tenants of Lord Donegal who, when his wood's halfpence. 99 leases expired, instead of raising the rent, demanded a very high premium for their renewal. This the tenants could not pay, though they would willingly have acceded to an increase of rent. They were evicted, and their farms taken by capitalists and laid down in grass. The wretched ten- ants resisted as desperately and as vainly as the Whiteboys of the south, and, like them, gained nothing by their law- lessness but the gallows and the gaol. CHAPTER XIX. wood's halfpence. The Whiteboy movement brings us clown almost to the time of the declaration of Irish independence, but we must now see what was passing in Dublin and the great cities in the early part of the century. The ever-increasing disabilities of the Catholics, their consequent poverty, ignorance, and social stigma, drove them more and more from the towns into the country and into the armies of foreign powers. In the country, the bet- ter class of Catholics often contracted friendships for, and even intermarried with their Protestant neighbors, till in many places the greater part of the penal code was a dead letter. But in the towns the "Protestant garrison'' had society enough among themselves without admitting the "common enemy," and the contempt in which Catholics and Jacobites were held was such that "no Papist may pre- sume to shew himself even in the galleries of the houses of parliament." The political history of Ireland in the eighteenth cen- tury is therefore entirely the history of the Protestant as- cendancy and of Englishmen who were sent over to fill the best offices, for to be born — even of English parents — in Ire- land was to begin life heavily, handicapped. Throughout the century the lord lieutenant and the primate were always English, and the only Irishmen who held office as chief secretary and lord chancellor were Clare and Castlereagh ; the bishop, justices, and other high officials were also most- 100 luisil IUSTOKY FOB ENGLISH READERS. I\ English, bo the greal and natural discontenl of bhe coa- forming Irish. At the end of bhe seventeenth and bhe beginning of bhe eighteenth century, bhe hatred and fear of Popery was so strong among bhe Anglicans bhat all other distinctions were forgotten; hut as years rolled on common nationality, common though unequal oppression, ami common poverty softened party feeling, and the unbroken loyalty <>f the Catholic killed the tear and hatred of the Protestant. Common interest also grew up between the two creeds. There was Ha 1 vast smuggling trade to which all classes were party, and in L722 the nation laid aside its animosi- ties, to wage a common war againsl "Wood's Halfpence." For many years no copper had been coined in Ireland, and one William Wood, an English hardwareman alleging the scarcity <>\' copper coin, procured a patent for coining £108,000 sterling of halfpence and farthings to puss as current money. The whole patent was an infamous job, and Wood must have hoped to make an extortionate profii since he thought it worth while to pay £30,000 for the patent, a profit which, if it was to he made oil' the coinage (»! poor penniless Ireland, ought certainly to haw gone to her revenue and not io the pocket of Mr. William Wood of London. Moreover Ireland did not need a tenth part of the copper which Wood was to supply. In England, the whole of the copper never exceeded a hundred! h part Of the currency, and exclusive of the brass already in use, ci os. ooo was more than the quarter of the currency of [re- land. Jonathan Swift, then dean of St. Patrick's, had already taken a lively interest in Irish politics, and had exhorted the people to use and wear oiil\ ^ un ^ of Irish manufacture, lie threw the whole of his energies into a war againsl Wood's halfpence, which he argued would ruin the already poverty-stricken country. Writing in the char- acter of a draper, Swift drew a lively, hut not a \ery scrup- ulous, picture of the ruin the copper would bring with it. and exhorted every one to refuse to take the money, for by I he provisions of t he patent no one was bound to receive it . The whole nation responded loyally to Swift's appeal; and for a time political animosities and distinctions of race Mil and creed were alike forgotten in the bond oi common nationality. Wood's copper was entirely "boycotted/' and had to I"' withdrawn; and, though Wood was compen- sated oul of the Irish revenue, [reland felt that she had achieved a nationa] victory. Bui the matter did not. end here, for it created aclasE of men and founded a new party in politics. The "English garrison" had realized that [reland after all, their country, and that her interesl was theirs, and from the copper war arose the "Patriot Party," which from t hat t ime hi d to be a power and influ- m [reland. Th< of I he agitation had all o l< d men to believe thai in agitation and pa i tance lay the redri for Irish grievances. A long string of confis- cations and disabilities was all [reland had got by armed ance, but by agitation Irishmen had al lasl gained a victory; a aew way had been discovered, a new era in [rii h hi tory began. The English and Prote tanl dean Swift had created a new class of politicians the [rii b .<; OHAPTEB XX. 'til!. PATRIOT PARTY. The national spirii created by the agitation against Wood's halfpence never again forsook the Protestanl rison." Their hatred of 1 he Papist softened into contempt- nous indifference among the worldly, and among the r ious into a de tire to "compi i I hem to come in" to the pale of the Establishment. The gentler spirii the Anglicans, the good, high-mindi d bishop Berkeley, primate Boulter, and others, felt thai it was not by penal codi •iit ions thai i be made, and in the hope of mouldi z in the ways of the estab- ■nt, charl . founded a after t b< ar. tally free daj where children of ev< ry creed could I 102 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. ed in the orthodox Anglican faith, but in this form thej did not answer. Many of the Catholic poor preferred ig- norance to even a risk of heresy, and among such children as frequented the schools, home influence was far stronger than any that could be gained at a day school. Accord- ingly the institutions were changed to boarding schools, where only Papists were received, and that they might be utterly cut off from the pernicious influence of home, the children were sent to distant parts of the country. The effect of this may easily be imagined: the charter schools became more dreaded than the gaol. Only in time of famine could the parents be induced to send their children to the institutions, and when once the hour of starvation was passed they rescued their little ones from the wiles of the heretic. Perhaps had the schools been well managed, and the wan little children returned home fat and rosy, a different feeling would have grown up; but the sad old tale of funds misappropriated, officials growing fat and children thin, haunted the charter schools, and Howard, who visited them toward the end of the century, de- scribes a scandalous state of dirt, hunger, misery, and squalor. A more successful, because less bigoted, effort of patriot- ism was the Dublin Society, which was founded about the same time as the schools, and which had for its object the increase of industrial knowledge and the encouragemnt of agriculture and manufacture in Ireland. Each member on his admission chose some branch of natural history, husbandry, manufacture, agriculture, or gardening, about which he learned all he could, and then drew up a report which was read to the society, and published in the public prints. For many years hardly a newspaper appeared that had not some hint for the struggling manufacturer, some recipe for the farmer, some bit of knowledge about manure, or the rotation of crops. Farming lectures were delivered throughout the country, and though want of capital pre- vented many of the farmers applying what they learned, much useful knowledge was diffused. Prizes were given for Irish lace, homespun, and silks, and thus a little zest was thrown into the languishing manufactures, and it is THE PATRIOT PARTY. 103 probably largely owing to the efforts of the Dublin Society that Irish industry did not utterly collapse. The patriotism of this was much purer and wider than that which inspired many politicians of the patriot party, for not a few of these used their patriotism merely as a stepping stone to office, for the corrupt government was willing to buy at a high price the silence of malcontents who exposed the abuses of the pension lists and kindred waste of public money. The patriotism of Swift himself, though sincere, was not of an exalted nature. For the Anglicans only he reserved his sympathy; and though all the severe laws against the Catholics were passed during his lifetime, he never wrote a word for the defence of his oppressed countrymen. After his death, his place as leader was filled by a man as honest, more bigoted, and infinitely less able than the old dean — Charles Lucas, a Dublin apothecary, now chiefly remembered as the founder of the Freeman's Journal. Lncas entered the Irish parliament in 1745, four years before the death of Swift. His career was stormy, and at one time he had to leave the country for some years. On his return he was the idol of the people, and again headed his party in parliament; still, the patriots were a small minority, never throughout the thirty-two years of George II. 's reign able to count on more than eight-and-twenty votes in a parliament composed of three hundred members. The poAvers of the Irish parliament, already stunted by Poyning's Law, were further curtailed .by an English bill, passed in the time of George I., by which the English parliament was enabled to make laws to bind the Irish people, and the Irish House of Lords was at the same time deprived of its right to judge, or affirm, or reverse any judgment, so that the Irish parliament became nothing more than a provincial assembly, whose decision was always liable to be overruled by the superior powers of the English legislature. Its construction was also extremely corrupt; not even the Protestant minority was fairly represented. Of the three hundred members, two hundred were elected by a hundred individuals, and nearly fifty by ten. Two L04 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. hundred and sixteen members were returned for closed boroughs and manors, mostly owned by members of the House of Lords. The earl of Shannon commanded sixteen seats, lord Hillsborough nine, the Ponsonbys fourteen, and so forth. The House of Commons, instead of representing the nation, represented a few favored peers, who made large sums of money by the sale of their seats. Both houses were intensely anti-Catholic, and many of the most oppressive clauses of the penal code originated in the Irish, not the English parliament; and the policy of grinding down and degrading the Papists was usually advocated and supported by the viceroy, the court, and the primate. But in seasons of political crises conciliation was had recourse to. and this was notably so during the rebellion of 1745. Encouraged by the news of the defeat of the English at Fontenoy, the Scotch and English Jacobites look up arms, ami a rising was daily expected in Ireland. Chesterfield was accordingly sent over as viceroy, with orders to conciliate the Catholics. No rising took place in Ireland; by a little kindness and humanity the danger was staved oif; but while England was torn by rebellion, Catholic chapels were opened in Ireland, mass was said publicly, and priests and friars walked about in their habits. But Prestonpans sealed the fate of the loyal Irish, as well as of the Scotch rebels; Chesterfield was recalled, and the old penal system set up on its feet again. Meanwhile the little band of patroits continued w T hat seemed a hopeless agitation for the control of the national revenue and the reform of the pension list. But hopeless though the struggle seemed, the party was gaining ground and was joined by several of the powerful nobles, among them the earl of Kildare, eldest son of the duke of Leinster, who was head of the historic house of Fitzgerald. Englana now felt how dangerous was the almost unlimited power of the aristocracy to return members of the House of Commons. A combination of some half- dozen peers might entirely change the character of the lower house, and to meet this # possible difficulty a legisla- tive union was proposed, but the idea w T as received in Ireland with such evident hatred that it was abandoned, THE PATEIOT PARTY. 105 and in the following year (1760) the death of George II. dissolved the parliament, which had sat every alternate year throughout the 32 years of his reign. In the parlia- ment elected at the accession of George III., the patriots, for the first time, became a formidable minority. Most members of that party who had sat in the last parliament were returned again, and several able men were now elected for the first time: among these new politicians were Denis Daly. Hussy Burgh, and Henry Flood, a young man of seven-and-twenty. It was very clear to the patriots that little reform could be hoped for so long as parliaments were elected for the lifetime of the king. .Members after a time became lukewarm, their zeal not being renewed by the prospect of a general election; constituents had no chance of freeing themselves from an unsatisfactory repre- sentative, and the opposition, once the opposition, was always the opposition. Lucas brought in a bill for limiting the duration of the Irish, like the English, parliament to seven years. Each session the measure passed through the Irish houses, but was three times thrown out by the English privy council. The fourth time it was sent up it passed, merely altered from a septennial to an octennial bill, and parliament, having now been elected eight years, was dissolved and the first limited parliament elected. The patriots were returned in greater force than before. The septennial bill had been a popular measure, but the great cause of the popularity of the party was their agita- tion for the reduction of the Irish pension list. By a curious irony of fate, Ireland was forced to provide for the poor relations, cast-off mistresses, and natural children of the monarchs of that dynasty whose accession she had so desperately resisted, and the Irish nation was made year by year to increase the pension list, which now stood at £72,000 per annum, whereas the king's private revenue for Ireland — whereon alone it could be charged with decency— amounted only to £7,000, so that £65,000 of the public revenue was yearly devoted to this purpose — "exclu- sive of French and military pensions. The reduction of this list, and the reform of the army which, by mis- management, cost nearly double what it ought to have 106 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. done, were benefits easily understood, and the agitation of the patriots, though utterly ineffectual, made the party very popular throughout the country. After the elections, they continued the pension list agitation, and this new parliament began a repeal of the penal laws. The first concession to the Catholics was a small one; it only allowed them to take long leases of bog, provided the bog were at least four feet deep and a mile outside a town, but it paved the way for other boons, and accustomed peojDle to the idea of the gradual repeal of the code. In 1775 a new and very important figure made his first appearance in politics. In that year Henry Grattan was nominated by lord Chariemont to represent the borough of Charlemont. The young politician, though only twenty- five years of age, at once took a prominent place in the patriot party, and among the orators of his day. He soon succeeded Flood as the idol of the people, for Flood had lost much of his popularity by taking office under govern- ment. When Grattan entered parliament, England was already in serious difficulties with the American colonies, and in the following year the war of American Independence broke out. Ireland had now to decide whether she, struggling for her own independence, should raise her hand against a colony where precisely the same struggle was going on, or whether she should look on in silent sympathy. The gov- ernment proposed sending four thousand Irish troops against the insurgents, and on this question Flood and Grattan disagreed with a violence that rendered impossible the continuance of the friendly relations that had hitherto subsisted between them. Flood and the government triumphed; the troops went, and Ireland, being now involved in the war, was prohibited from exporting salt meat to the colonies. Trade had been bad enough before the war, but it was now at a deadlock — there was no money, public or private, and the Irish government was forced to borrow both of England and of a private Dublin bank to carry on at all. In the autumn of '77 came the news of the loss of Saratoga, and also that despotic France had joined the insurgents THE VOLUNTEERS. 107 in their war for liberty. The news caused a still deeper depression both in England and Ireland. In Dublin alone twenty thousand persons were thrown out of work, and the government had to raise money by increasing the national debt, but throughout all this time of distress, the pension list was not reduced by a halfpenny. With France and America allied against her, England was in extremity; her palmy days of power seemed over, and victory favored the insurgent cause. Thousands of Irishmen strengthened the armies of the enemy, and England, fearful of an alli- ance between Ireland and France, sought to conciliate the Catholics by a gradual repeal of the penal code. While England was dreading an alliance, Ireland was in terror of a French invasion, and also feared the attacks of the noted pirate, Paul Jones. French ships were seen off Belfast, and the mayor sent to Dublin for a force to defend the town. Sixty able-bodied troopers were all that could be spared to hold Belfast against the armies of France, for of fifteen thousand soldiers that Ireland was supporting, not one quarter were in the country. This being so, the island must fall a prey to the first enemy who became aware of her unprotected condition, or else she must undertake her own defence. CHAPTER XXI. THE VOLUNTEERS. The French are off Belfast, and 60 troopers nold the city! More men cannot be spared — the army is abroad fighting England's battle, and England cannot spare a man to save the sister island! What will the Ulstermen of Belfast do? Why, like their forefathers at Derry, rise and defend themselves. But this is no civil war, no strife of creeds and .races; it is a struggle of ail Irishmen, whether of Cel- tic, Norman, or English blood, to keep their country from a foreign foe. The grandson of the Derry 'prentice boy, and the grandson of the Jacobite of Limerick stand side by side in the great army of the Irish volunteers. In every town, in almost every village, sprang up a corps 108 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. of volunteer defenders., clothed and equipped at their own expense. The French ships did not land in Belfast; but the danger was not over — for any day a fleet might sail in to any port of Ireland — and the volunteer army grew quick- ly in strength and discipline. Soon it became an ample defence for the country. The highest in the land were its officers. The duke of Leinster, the earl of Claremont, Henry Flood, and Henry Grattan were among its leaders, and few ivere the half-hearted Protestants who were not members of their local corps. Each regiment elected its own officers and chose its own color — blue, white, scarlet, orange, or more often the beloved green, and all the uni- forms were made by Irish tailors, of cloth woven in Irish looms, of wool sheared by Irish peasants from the backs of Irish sheep, and thus an impetus was given to Irish trade-. The Papists had little share in all this patriotism; the drillings and the marchings, the brilliant uniforms and the reviews were still a Protestant monopoly. The Catholics begged to be allowed to join the ranks, but, mainly owing to the prejudice of Flood and Claremont, were refused, and had at first to content themselves with helping on the cause with money. Still, they had powerful friends among the leaders. Hervey, earl of Bristol and Anglican bishop of Derry, and Henry Grattan were their staunch supporters, and at a later period many Catholics were enlisted. The government looked with no cordial eye on this growing army, which soon amounted to 100,000 armed men and over 200 cannon. Still, while discouraging the volunteers, the government was bound to sanction them, and give them a cold support, for nothing but the fame of these unpaid soldiers kept the French war-ships outside the Irish ports. Government was alive to the danger of such a corps — the wishes of a na- tion are more potent when supported by 100,000 men at arms — and the Irish felt that this truly was their hour and this the moment to demand free trade, so Grattan and 11 ussy Burgh, brought forward a motion for colonial free trade in the Irish House of Commons, and, in obedience to the threats of the volunteers, Ireland was at length per- mitted to trade freely with the colon its. THE VOLUNTEERS. 109 The next move was a bolder and an infinitely more impor- tant one. Grattan brought in a bill declaring that the king, the lords, and the commons are the only powers competent to enact the laws of Ireland. The bill was first brought forward in the session of 1780, which was already illustri- ous as having carried the free trade measure, but it was withdrawn till the next session, and in the interval the whole force of the volunteers was brought to bear upon the question, so that government was made clearly to under- stand that it was a national demand. In April, 1782, Grat- tan again brought in the bill, which passed without a divi- sion, and England, in repealing the statute of George I., resigned her claim for making laws for the Irish peojrie. Ireland was now, in some measure, a free country, but this boasted freedom left five-sixths of her people without polit- ical rights, and even the Protestant minority could hardly be said to elect its own representatives to a house of which considerably more than half the members were nominees of peers and government officials. The volunteers having so far succeeded in forcing legislation at the point of the bayonet, resolved by the same means to carry parliamentary reforms, and had it not been for the difficulties of the Cath- olic question, and the divisions of the Irish leaders, they could have gained their end. But Flood and Grattan were now in oj^en enmity, and differed on every subject. The final rupture had come di- rectly after the declaration of independence. The first act of the free parliament had been to break her own chains by repealing Poyning's Law, and then Grattan had moved an address of gratitude to England for sanctioning her lib- erty, and repealing the law of George I. The generosity of England did not appeal to Flood's less gentle nature. He argued that England had freed Ireland merely because she was too weak to hold her, and that should she ever re- cover her power she would once more reduce Ireland to the condition of a province. He therefore considered that the repeal of the law of George I. was an insufficient guarantee for Ireland's liberty, and that England must be made to de- clare that she would never again meddle in Irish affairs. Grattan held that such a course would be ungenerous in the 110 IEISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. extreme; that England was not a foe, but a trusted friend in whom confidence could be placed, and who must not even be asked to make so humiliating a confession of past error and injustice. Grattan's view appealed to the chivalry of the house, and his address was carried with only two dis- sentient voices, but during the debate he and Flood had heaped on each other much abuse, and established an enmity, embittered on the part of Flood by jealousy of his rival and the humiliation of defeat. On every point these two great men differed. Flood was at once more radical and less liberal than the conserva- tive Grattan, who considered that the mission of the vol- unteers was now fulfilled, that the legislature of armed politicians was defensible only in extreme necessity, and that Ireland being now free to make her own laws, should legislate only in a constitutional manner. Flood was the upholder of the volunteers, and advised them to agitate for complete parliamentary reform, for he believed the in- terest of the borough owners would prevent it being effected except by intimidation or force. Charlemont, the president of the volunteers, was inclined to agree with Grattan, but held with Flood that Catholic emancipation must be resisted, as it would inevitably lead to the disestablishment of the Irish church. The bishop of Deny, whose influecne in the volunteers almost equalled that of Charlemont, agreed with Flood on the necessity of volunteer intervention to secure parliamentary reform, but held with Grattan that this must be accompanied by Cath- olic emancipation. Thus there were four parties among the patriots, and Grattan's popularity waned daily, while Flood was fast recovering lost ground. The volunteers re- solved that, as 1782 had been the year of independence, '83 should be the reform year. A hundred and sixty delegates of the volunteers met in the Rotunda, on the 10th of No- vember, to draw up the resolutions for reform, and to de- cide whether the Catholics should or should not be in- cluded. Flood and Charlemont prevailed, and the former presented the bill to the commons in its mutilated form. A long and fierce debate ensued on the motion for leave to bring in the bill, but at length this was refused — not on grattan\s parliament. Ill the merits of the bill, but as an attempt to intimidate the house. With some who voted against the measure the al- leged was the real reason for casting out the bill, but the placeholders, borough owners, and pensioners grasped eagerly at so good an excuse for maintaining their power. Grattan, to his honor, voted for his rival's bill. All night the wordy battle raged, while the delegates, cold, depressed, and tired, sat in the Kotunda waiting the result of the debate. In the morning came the news of their defeat, and the warlike bishop exhorted them to an appeal to arms. But the power of the volunteers was already on the wane; by excluding the Catholics from the Reform Bill they had ruined their own cause, and in the gray light of the November morning the delegates, realizing that their hour was past, wisely followed Charlemont's prudent ad- vice and dispersed, never again to regain their old power and might. The defeat of the Reform Bill was followed by riots both in Dublin and the provinces, and though the volunteers were in no way responsible for the disorder, it detracted from the dignity of the organization. The moderate and anti-Catholic parties resigned and formed the Whig club, while the democratic party, taking up the cause of reform and Catholic emancipation formed for these ends, and these ends only, a perfectly open and loyal society, called ''The United Irishmen." CHAPTER XXII. grattan's pakliament. The concession of free trade with the colonies, and the declaration of parliamentary independence, had an almost magical effect on the prosperity of the capital and the larger provincial towns. Once more the warehouses were filled, the looms at work, the harbors gay with ships, and the streets noisy with traffic. During the fifteen years that followed, many fine houses were built and decorated in Dublin, and the quays, the bridges, the law courts, and the 112 IRISH EISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. custom house all date from this short time of Irish prosper- ity. But the well-being of the towns did not extend to the country, where feud and faction still raged between the peasantry of the two creeds. In the north, the "Orange- men," or "Protestant boys," turned thousands of their Catholic neighbors out of house and home, and these or- ganized for self-defence the society of "Defenders." In Minister, AYhiteboyism had revived, and the peasantry once more tried to obtain redress for their grievances by outrage and intimidation. The condition of the peasantry was most pitiable; the little plots of potato ground were let at a rental of £6 per acre; but this was not paid in coin, being worked out in labor at the rate of sixpence a day, so that for one acre of potato ground a man gave the work of '240 days. He had, therefore, only his one acre of ground and the toil of To working days for the support of himself and his family. Beyond this, he had to pay tithe to the Anglican clergyman and contribute to the support of his priest. The unhappy creatures, starving and desperate, ruined their cause by barbarous outrages, and to meet the needs of the case government brought in a stringent Coercion Bill. This was opposed by G-rattan, on the plea that the outrages were the result of mad despair, and would best be checked by a mitigation of the miseries of the people. Ac- cordingly, he brought in a measure for the consideration of the tithe question, but Fitzgibbon (lord Clare)* while admitting that the condition of the Munster peasantry was more wretched than human beings could be expected to en- dure, maintained that coercion must go before conciliation. The majority were of his opinion. The Coercion Act be- came law, and the Tithe Bill w T as thrown out. The new nation was only three years old when she had her first difficulty with England. Although colonial free trade had been granted, the commercial relations of Eng- land and Ireland still remained unaltered , but in 1 785 the Irish House passed a bill for removing some of the trade restrictions between the two countries. Such a bill was, of course, useless unless approved by both countries, and g rattan's parliament. 113 was therefore sent to England, where a number of restraints on Irish colonial trade were suggested as the price of free trade with England. These not only deprived the measure of its usefulness, but were resisted by the Irish as an attempt upon their newly-acquired liberty, and accordingly the bill was thrown out. to the great annoyance of Pitt, who probably intended it as a step towards a union. Three years later another difficulty arose. The king's mind gave way, and it became necessary to appoint a regent. With regard to the person of the regent there was no dispute, both countries appointed the prince of Wales, but the question was, whether the regent should have limited or unlimited powers. Pitt and the English Tory majority voted for limited powers; Fox and the Whig minority for unlimited powers. Ireland, unfortunately, wont with the Whigs, and, anxious to prove her independ- ence, hastily offered the prince unlimited regal powers in Ireland. The Whig party was just then in the ascendant. Many of the Tory placemen deserted and swelled the majority. Suddenly there was an unexpected denouement. The king got well; the Whigs were out, and all placemen and officials who had voted with that party were turned out of office, and the pension list was augmented by £13,040 per annum for the reward of the faithful placemen. Seven commoners were ennobled for their good offices, and nine peers were raised a step in the peerage. The regency difficulty had resolved Pitt to carry a union, and to further this scheme he stooped to a course of bribery and corruption unparalleled in history. An eighth part of the revenue of Ireland was now divided among members of her parliament, and besides the nominees of the House of Lords, the English government held 110 commoners in her pay. Whatever the merits of the union, there can be no doubt as to the baseness of the means by which that important measure was carried. In 1792 both branches of the legal prof ession were opened to Catholics in Ireland, and in the following year a bill was passed granting them the right to vote at elections, but they were still prohibited from sitting in either house of parliament. In this year. too. the pension list, which 8 114 IEISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. then amounted to over £110,000 yearly, was revised, and it was enacted that in future no pension of more than £1,200 a year should be granted except to persons of royal blood. The concession of the elective franchise had raised the hopes of the Catholics, who thought that the right to sit in parliament could not be withheld from them much longer, and the national demand for Catholic emanci- pation and parliamentary reform grew stronger every day. Pitt, who had always supported a repressive policy and was the arch corrupter of the parliament, suddenly turned round and at th3 close of '94 announced himself a convert to the cause of conciliation and emancipation. The reason of this change of front we can never know; it may have been sincere or it may have been merely an attempt to induce Ireland to vote large sums of money toward the expenses of the French war, but its immediate result was that Fitzgibbon, lord Clare, was deposed from the vice- royalty, and lord Fitzwilliam, an ardent advocate of emancipation, sent to replace him, with power to act as he thought lit. The new lord lieutenant at once dismissed the ministers and replaced them by patriots, and emancipa- tion and reform were a foregone conclusion. The delighted nation, in an excess of prospective gratitude, voted £1,800,000 for the French war, and raised 20,000 men for the navy. Early in the February of '95, Grattan brought in a bill for Catholic emancipation, but the king now unexpectedly stepped in: his mind had taken four months to grasp the situation, but he now told Pitt that he would never consent to such a measure. Pitt was accordingly forced to make his choice between resignation and the reversal of his new policy. He decided to sacrifice his policy rather than his office; so Fitzwilliam was hastily recalled and all his appointments reversed. Clare was made lord chancellor, and lord Camden appointed viceroy. The rejection of the Emancipation Bill was now beyond doubt, the 110 members paid by the government and most of the 123 nominees of the House of Lords turned round, and Grattan's bill was supported only by a minority of 48. That was the death-blow of the Irish parliament; the THE IN IT ED IRISHMEN. 115 nation, cheated and angry, could not fail to grasp the situation. The independent parliament was but the tool of an English statesman; not one quarter of its members were chosen of the people, the remainder were a venal crew of placemen paid to pass measures dictated to them by the English government. Reform was hopeless, and independence but a name. Heart-sick and weary were the patriots, and many of them failed to attend the parlia- ment of '96. In '97, G rattan made one last hopeless effort to bring in a Reform Bill. The division was merely a farce; and, with a feeling that for the time at least further parliamentary effort was lost labor, most of the patriots resigned — Grattan, Cumin, and the milder spirits to watch from a distance the struggle of their country, Fitzgerald and O'Connor to attempt by an appeal to arms to right those wrongs which peaceful agitation proved powerless to redress. CHAPTER XXIII. THE UNITED IRISHMEN. Nothing could be less sinister than the original aims and methods of the Society of United Irishmen, which was conceived in the idea of uniting Catholics and Protes- tants "in pursuit of the same object — a repeal of the penal laws, and a (parliamentary) reform including in itself an extension of the right of suffrage." This union was founded at Belfast, in 1791, by Theobald Wolfe Tone, a young barrister of English descent, and, like the majority of the United Irishmen, a Protestant. Some months later a Dublin branch was founded, the chairman being the Hon. Simon Butler, a Protestant gentleman of high char- acter, and the secretary a tradesman named James Napper Tandy. The society grew rapidly, and branches were formed throughout Ulster and Leinster. The religious strife of the Orange boys and Defenders was a great trouble to the United men, who felt that these creed animosities 116 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. among Irishmen were more ruinous to the national cause than any corruption of parliament or coercion of govern- ment could possibly be. Ireland, united, would be quite capable of fighting her own battles, but these party fac- tions rendered her contemptible and weak. The society accordingly set itself the impossible task of drawing to- gether the Defenders and the Orangemen. Catholic eman- cipation — one of the great objects of the union — naturally appealed very differently to the rival parties: it was the great wish of the Defenders, the chief dread of the Orange- men. Both factions were composed of the poorest and most ignorant peasantry in Ireland, men whose political views did not soar above the idea that "something should be done for old Ireland." The United Irishmen devoted themselves to the regeneration of both parties, but the Orangemen would have none of them, and the Protestant United men found themselves drifting into partnership with the Catholic Defenders. To gain influence with this party, Tandy took the Defenders' oath. He was informed against; and, as to take an illegal oath was then a capital offence in Ireland, he had to fly for his life to America. This adventure made Tandy the hero of the Defenders, who now joined the union in great numbers; but the whole business brought the society into disrepute, and connected it with the Defenders, who, like the Orange boys, were merely a party of outrage. That a prominent United man had been a sworn member of the Defenders, and that many Defenders had joined the union was considered proof that it also was an organization for crime, and, accordingly, one night in the May of '94 a government raid was made upon the premises of the union. The officers of the society were arrested, their papers seized, the type of their news- paper destroyed, and the United Irish Society was pro- claimed as an illegal organization. Toward the close of this year all need for a reform society seemed to have passed. Fitzwilliam was made viceroy, and emancipation and reform seemed assured. His sudden rceall, the revers- al of his appointments, the rejection of Grattan's Reform Bill, and the renewal of the old coercive system convinced the United men of the powerlessness of peaceful agitation THE UNITED IRISHMEN. ll? to check the growth of the system of government by cor ruption. They accordingly reorganized the union, but as a secret society, and with the avowed aim of separating Ireland from the British empire. The Fitzwilliam affair had greatly strengthened the union, which was joined by many men of high birth and position, among them lord Edward Fitzgerald, brother of the duke of Leinster, and Arthur O'Connor, nephew to lord Longueville, both of whom had been members of the House of Commons. Fitzgerald had held a commission in the English army, and had served against the Americans in the war of Independence: his military knowledge caused him to be chosen military leader of the- United Irishmen, but the ablest man of the party was Thomas Addis Emmet, a barrister, and the elder brother of Robert Emmet. The society gradually swelled to the number of five thousand members, bat throughout its existence it was perfectly riddled with spies and inform- ers, by whom government was supplied- with a thorough knowledge of its doings. It became known to Pitt that the French government had sent an English clergyman, named Jackson, as an emissary to Ireland. Jackson was convicted of treason, and hanged, and Wolfe Tone was sufficiently implicated in his guilt as to find it prudent to fly to America. But before leaving Ireland he arranged with the directors of the union to go from America to France, and to try to persuade the French government to assist Ireland in a struggle for separation. While Tone was taking his circuitous route to Paris, government, to meet the military development of the so- ciety, placed Ulster and Leinster under a stringent Insur- rection Act; torture was employed to wring confession from suspected persons, and the Protestant militia and yeomanry were drafted at free quarters on the wretched Catholic peasantry. The barbarity of the soldiers lashed the people of the northern provinces into a state of fury: the torture did indeed extort some confessions, but for every man whose scalp was torn off by a pitch cap, or whose ribs were laid bare by flogging, there were a hundred recruits to the union, and these new recruits were animated. 118 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. not by love of country., but by hatred of their persecutors and thirst for revenge. In the meantime the indomitable Tone — unknown, without credentials, without influence, and ignorant of the French language — had persuaded the French government to lend him a fleet, ten thousand men, and forty thousand stand of arms, which armament left Brest for Bantry Bav on the 16th December, 1796. Ireland was now in the same position as England had been when William of Orange bad appeared outside Tor- bay. Injustice, corruption, and oppression had in both cases goaded the people into rebellion. A calm sea and a fierce gale made the difference between the English patriot of 1688 and the Irish traitor of 1796. Had the sea been calm in the Christmas week of '96, nothing could have stopped the French from marching on to Dublin, but just as the ships put in to Bantry Bay, so wild a wind sprang up that they were driven out to sea, and blown and buffet- ted about. For a month they tossed about within sight of land, but the storm did not subside, and all chance of landing seeming as far off as ever, they put back into the French port. This was a fearful blow to the United Irshmen, but Tone was undaunted, and persuaded the Dutch Republic to give him an expedition. This expedition sailed in the following July, but fortune still favored England, and the second fleet met with a worse fate than the first. The government now had recourse to strong measures. The Insurrection Act had failed to pacify the country, for the people, instead of being cowed by the barbarities of the soldiers, were half mad with desperation, and to quiet them martial law was proclaimed in Ulster, where the army, consisting of half-trained Irish, Welsh, and Eng- lish yeomanry and militia, was in a scandalous state of in- subordination. Sir Ralph Abercrombie was now appoint- ed to the command. The gallant and humane old Scotch- man was aghast at the condition of the army, which, he said, "rendered it formidable to every one but the enemy," and he refused to sanction the use of torture, or to counte- nance the free quarter system. But finding himself power- "NINETY-EIGHT." 119 less to control these abuses he threw up his command, in which he was succeeded by General Lake, to whom these practices were not repugnant. Meanwhile though spies and informers kept the govern- ment supplied with the details of every movement of the society, no arrests were made in Dublin till the March of '98. Nineteen of the leaders were then taken on one day, and their places in the society were filled by men of more extreme views, who, with Fitzgerald, preferred to risk an immediate rising to the more prudent policy of awaiting help from France, and it was resolved that Dublin and five counties should rise simultaneously on the 24th of May. On the 19th, Fitzgerald was arrested after a severe struggle, and two days later Byrne and the brothers Sheares, who were members of the new directory , were also taken and eventually hanged. On the 23d, martial law was pro- claimed in Dublin. CHAPTEE XXIV. * 'ninety-eight." Notwithstanding the imprisonment of Fitzgerald and the Sheares, five counties rose on the 24th of May, and twelve days later the Kildare and Wexford rebels held near- ly the whole of their respective counties, but the leaders were all in gaol, and their places filled by men destitute of military knowledge, with no united plan of action, no commissariat, and who were unable to follow up a victory, or to maintain discipline among their followers. Victory was followed by drunkenness, insubordination, and brutal acts of ferocity; and the army, well officered and well pro- visioned, soon overcame the disorganized mob. Then a very reign of terror set in. Matters were worst in Wexford, where there had been no branch of the United Irish Society, and where the struggle assumed the aspect of a war of creeds. But even there the abortive rising was utterly crushed in less than two months, while in Ulster the re- bellion was quelled in a week. 120 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. This swift suppression was not effected without much bloodshed; there was no law but martial law, and in very many cases men were shot and hanged without even the scanty justice of a military trial. The streets of Wexford ran down in blood, and the bridge was a stage whereon many ghastly tragedies were enacted, the rebels first, and then the soldiers choosing it as the scene of their most horrible atrocities. Dublin, dispirited by the imprisonment of the leaders, had not risked a rising. The rebels of the capital were well aware that such an attempt, without the support of French help or military guidance, could only result in dis- graceful rioting and bloodshed ; moreover, they were over- awed by the crushing power of the government. Day and night the cries of the tortured resounding from the Riding House, in Marlborough Street, from the barracks, from the Royal Exchange, from the very entrance to the castle- yard, for floggings, which tore the flesh and laid the bones bare, were believed to be the only means of extorting con- fession. As a further warning to traitors, the scaffolding of the new Carlisle (now O'Connell) Bridge was decor- ated with the suspended bodies of suspected rebels. In June Edward Fitzgerald died in gaol, from the effects of the wounds he received in the struggle at his capture; but the Dublin gaols still held between eighty and ninety prisoners awaiting their trail for high treason. At this time Camden, the indolent viceroy, and Lake, the barbar- ous commander of the forces, were recalled, and lord Corn- wallis was sent out to fill both offices. Cornwallis accepted the viceroyalty with great reluctance; indeed he had only been induced to do so by the desire of having his name associated with the measure of legislative union which Pitt was resolved to carry, and which Corn- wallis believed essential to the maintenance of the British Empire. Fitzgibbon, lord Clare, retained the office of lord chan- cellor, and Robert Stewart, lord Castlereagh, was appointed chief secretary. Clare was a stern, fanatical supporter of coercion, and had the effrontery openly to defend the use of torture in the Eng- "ninety-eight." 121 lish House of Peers. He was an ardent Unionist, and prob- ably one of the few whose opinion was based on conviction more than self-interest. Castlereagh was a man of a very different stamp; suave, corrupt, and wily, he proved his utter absence of moral sens"e by his boast that the government to which he belonged had taken measures to secure a premature explosion of the rebellion, and by his open and unblushing advocacy of a policy of bribery and corruption. He entered parliament as a patriot, but soon abandoned his party, and by his tal- ents and self-seeking rose to be marquis of Londonderry and prime minister of England. The viceroy was superior to either of his colleagues. Naturally humane and just, if he stooped to dishonorable actions he hated himself for the moral degradation. He would have nothing to do with torture, and saw the im- mense evils arising from martial law. His first act was to promise protection to all insurgents guilty of rebellion only who should surrender their arms, and soon afterward an Amnesty Bill was passed, but the leaders were excluded from its benefits. Both in Dublin and the provinces num- bers of the less prominent men had been hanged by order of martial law while the State trials of the leaders were proceeding. But while Byrne and Oliver Bond were con- victed and lay under sentence of death, the remaining eighty-four State prisoners volunteered to give general in- formation as to the designs of the society, on condition of being allowed to go into banishment, and of Byrne and Bond being spared. The negotiations with the govern- ment occupied some days, and while they were in j^rogress Byrne was hanged; still the negotiations were concluded. Emmet, O'Connor, M'Nevin, and Xeilson, were now ex- amined before a secret committee of the House of Lords, but as they gave only general information, and refused to implicate any of their associates, they disclosed nothing oi which the govornment was not already made aware through the information of spies. Either the government thought the conditions of the treaty had not been fully carried out by the four leaders, or believed that, notwithstanding their word, the rebels would seek the aid of hostile France, for 122 IKISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. the State prisoners, and fourteen others, were sent to Fort George in Scotland, and kept in custody until the peace of 1802. It had been believed that when the State prisoners volunteered information the rebellion was over, but Tone was still bus) 7 in France. He could not induce the French government to give him an efficient force, but on the 2 2d of August a small fleet entered Killala Bay, and marched triumphantly to Ballinamuck, in Longford. There they were overpowered by the troops under Cornwallis, and forced to surrender at discretion. Tone was good general enough to disapprove of these small expeditions, but was forced to accept what he could get, and in October another small French fleet sailed under command of General Hardi. The frigate Hoche, with Tone on board, arrived outside Loch Swilly, and for some hours gallantly defended herself against four English ships as large as herself, but at last she struck, and was brought into port. For a while Tone passed for a French officer, but he was recognized by an old friend, betrayed, and taken in irons to Dublin. Here he was convicted and sentenced to be hanged; but having resolved never to endure the ignominy of a public execution he cut his throat in gaol, and died after a week of agony. With him perished the last hope of the United Irishmen. All that now remained was to try the prisoners, and dur- ing the three months following Tone's death one hundred and thirty-four were sentenced to death, and ninety exe- cuted, but in the beginning of the year '99 civil law came in force, and the remain ing prisoners were handed over to its juster administration. The country now being quiet, the government took in hand the great measure of the Leg- islative Union. CHAPTER XXV. THE PROSPECT OF UNION. Although Ireland had obtained a nominal independence in 1782, her position since that time had been one that could not have contented any nation. A Catholic country THE PROSPECT OF UNION. 123 ruled by a Protestant minority; an independent kingdom governed by alien officials, in whose selection she had no voice; a national parliament filled with nominees of those officials and of the House of Lords; an equal of England with no voice in the management of imperial affairs. A position so anomalous could be maintained in no country under heaven; a constitution so rotten and corrupt must inevitably be changed by reform or revolution or be entirely swept away. For long years the patriots had labored for reform, but wi bh the recall of Fitzwilliam that hope had died. The bold- er spirits had then tried the desperate remedy of revolution, and the crushing failure of the premature rising of '98 sealed the doom of Irish independence. This was the moment for which Pitt had striven so long and so unswerv- ingly, for which he had corrupted and bought up both houses of the Irish legislature; but even now, .though the parliament was well nigh filled with placemen, though honest Irishmen of all parties were heartsick of the struggle, though resistance seemed hopeless, and any show of national feeling considered proof of sympathy with outrage and with crime, this poor, battered, weary island had to be bought by means of a system of unparalleled bribery. The project of union was fearfully unpopular in Ireland. Apart from the very natural dislike Irishmen felt to having their country reduced from a nation to a province, union was against the interest of almost every class. The- peers disliked it, because they were to be degraded from hereditary to representative legislators, only 28 being elected by their body to represent the Irish peers jn the Imperial House; the borough-owners, because, as two-thirds of the Irish seats were to be annihilated, they would be deprived of the considerable income they had made by the sale of seats. To the professional men and traders of Dublin the project of removing the parliament to London meant little short of ruin. London, not Dublin, would thenceforward be the capital of Ireland; thither the Irish political world must repair, and, conse- quently, thither would be drawn all the rank and wealth and talent of the country. To the owners of houses and 12-i IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. land in Dublin the prospect was no more cheerful; so the capital was unanimous in its hatred of the scheme. Still, from the English point of view, there were great and weighty arguments in favor of the measure. First and foremost there was the French scare; for had Napoleon taken his fleet to Ireland instead of Egypt the power of England had been annihilated. In after years Napoleon saw how fatal had been his error; but Pitt and the other English statesmen saw the danger at the time, and, know- ing the wide-spread disaffection in Ireland, they perceived, as Napoleon did not, that, invaded by an efficient French force, Ireland of '1)8 might have become a province of France, to the inevitable ruin of the British empire. This was the main reason for a union. The other argu- ments were comparatively trivial, and were mainly advanced to convince those who did not think the measure would lessen the chance of a French invasion. There was the suggestion that one country might wish to go to war and the other refuse to share the expense. The regency difficulty also was revived, and England suddenly became awake to Ireland's wrongs in having no voice in imperial legislation. Catholic emancipation, too, Pitt argued, could never be conceded while Ireland had a separate parliament; whereas, the introduction of a few Papist members into the imperial assembly could place the State in no peril, and, consequently, emancipation would probably be granted directly the union was passed. Then there was a class of argument whose validity could only be proved after the experiment had been tried. The union would cause an increase of Irish commerce; English capital would flow into Irish trade, English skill improve Irish agriculture. The two races, joined in a brotherly bond of union, could learn to love each other and outdo each other in a generous struggle to legislate for the benefit of the sister country. Kebellion and oppression would alike be past — the healing qualities of union would cause differences of race, creed, custom, interest, climate, and sentiment to be forgotten, and in a few years all that would remain to distinguish AVest from Great Britain would be the passage from Dunleary to Holyhead. THE PROSPECT OF UNION". 125 The anti-unionists argued that union, so far from being a security against foreign invasion, would increase that danger; for the measure, thrust on an unwilling nation, would cause such disaffection and discontent as might bring about this very disaster, and even eventually prove fatal to the British connection, for Irishmen would in future regard rebellion, not as treason, but as a patriotic effort to regain an independence stolen from them without their consent. The anti-unionists considered that the war difficulty was practically non-existent. No such dispute had as yet arisen, and was not more to be dreaded than a disagreement between the House of Commons and the House of Peers; moreover, as the king had power to declare war without consent of parliament, he could over- rule any parliametary differences should they arise. As for the regency question, the anti-unioinsts point- ed out that there was at that moment a Eegency Bill under discussion which would settle that dispute for ever. Then they asked of what use would the promised emancipation be to the Catholics in an assembly in which they would be an utterly insignificant minority? Indeed, the whole question of parliamentary representation was just tlien a very sore subject in Ireland. The 100 Irish members might all vote for some local Irish bill and still find themselves in a minority of one to five, so that, practi- cally, Ireland would be, for home legislation, disfranchised; and England had never behaved with sufficient liberality to Ireland to be justified in entrusting her with the management of her affairs; moreover, England was unfitted by ignorance and dissimilarity of temper and situation to legislate successfully for the sister country. Then, too, they urged there would be great difficulty in finding suitable representatives for so distant a parliament; professional men could not leave their practice for five or six months of each year, and, in point of time, London was then nearly as far from Dublin as New York is now. Ruin must inevitably fall on the capital if the parliament were removed, and as numbers of men of position, having their interests removed to London, would become perma- 126 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. nent absentees, the condition of the country must become more deplorable than ever. At least, urged the anti-unionists, let us wait a while; from delay no danger can arise; before we pass this irrevo- cable measure, let Ireland have time to recover the effects of the late rebellion, and let the sense of the country be arrived at by a general election, for, even if the measure be a good one, it will be unwise to press it against the public will, and to carry it by such odious means as whole- sale bribery and corruption. But if it be a bad one, the consequences will be dreadful. It required no general election to prove that the union was repugnant to the vast majority of Irishmen; both parties sought to test the sense of the country by means of petitions, and, for every signature obtained by the unionists, the oppositiosn party got a hundred; but in this matter the will of the Irish people was to count for nothing. Pitt was convinced of the necessity of union, and resolved to carry it at all hazards. The measure was first proposed in the viceregal speech at the opening of the parliament of 1799, but, after a very long and stormy debate, the paragraph hinting at union was rejected by a majority of five, and the subject dropped for that session. But the government did not accept their defect as final, and the autumn recess was devoted to a diligent canvas for votes. Cornwallis, believing union to be absolutely necessary for the maintenance of the British empire, stooped to a course of bribery which ren- dered his life unbearable to him. "How I long to kick those whom my public duties oblige me to court," he writes of the bought supporters of the union; and again, "I hate and despise myself hourly for engaging in such dirty work, and am supported only by the reflection that, without the union, the British empire must be dissolved." A hundred such passages from the viceroy's letters might be quoted, showing what he thought of the means by which the union was passed. But. degraded as Cornwallis felt himself by acting as the instrument of corruption, his hands were clean compared with those of Castlereagh. The chief secre- tary was without political conscience, and cared little for the purity of the means by which he gained his end. At THE PROSPECT OF UNION. 127 his suggestion, the objections of the borough owners were removed by the exorbitant ''compensation" of £15,000 for each seat. In this way a million and a-quarter of money was expended and charged into the Irish national debt, and the discontent of members who had paid for their seats was annulled by the promise that the money so ex- pended should be returned to them. Those who were above the reach of direct bribery were seduced by promises of titles and honors, and after the passing of the union, 22 Irish peers were created; five re- ceived English peerages, and 20 w r ere raised a step in the peerage; places, pensions, judgeships, posts of profit and of honor, were showered so lavishly that there were not a dozen unbribed supporters of the union. Nor were the anti-unionists free from the charge of corruption; both parties seem to' have used equally unscrupulous means to get signatures for their petitions, and tried to outbid each oher for such seats in the House of Commons as came into the market. Grattan ' had for long been seriously ill, and when, on the 13th of January, parliament assembled, he was still too weak to leave his bed. But the patriots felt that the father of Irish independence would be her best champion, and by an expenditure of £5,000 they secured the seat for Wicklow, which happened to become vacant. The writ was issued on the 15th of January, and by great exertion, and an over-straining of the law, the election was held on the same day, and by midnight Grattan was returned. That night was passed in the Commons in hot union debate, and the thickest of the fight was over when, at seven in the morning, Grattan entered the house. Tale as death, and as thin, worn by sickness to a very shadow of himself, the father of the Irish parliament tottered into the house supported by two friends. Instinctively the whole assem- bly rose, and after the oath had been administered there was a silence. Grattan rose feebly from his seat, but find- ing himself unable to stand, asked leave to address the house sitting. As he spoke his weakness disappeared; for two hours his eloquence held the house, but it was power- less to move men whose minds were already made up, and 128 IRISH HISTOEY FOR ENGLISH READERS. when, after a debate of eighteen hours, the house divided, the unionists obtained a majority of forty-two. It was now a mere question of time, but through every stage the bill was debated on both sides with magnificent eloquence; on June 7th the final passage of the bill was effected in Ire- land, and on the 2d of August, 1800, the Act of Union re- ceived the royal assent. CHAPTER XXVI. THE ACT OF UNION". The acquiescence of the Catholics to the measure of union had been gained by promises of emancipation, and the assurances that on this subject the ministers were unanimous; but the more powerful adherence of the Protes- tants was bought with something more substantial than words, and the passing of the union added an enormous sum to the national debt of Ireland. The borough owners received £15,000 compensation for each borough, and this alone cost £1,275,000, of which lord Shannon and the marquess of Ely received each £45,000, and lord Clanmorres £23,000 and a peerage. The price of a union vote was £8,000 down, or in instances where ready money would not be accepted, an honorable or profit- able office. Indeed, the list of the supporters of the union shows us that, of the 140 members who voted for the meas- ure, only 11 were neither place-holders nor received rewards for their votes, and of these 11, one was General Lake, the commander of the forces through the rebellion of '98. The rebellion and the union had cost Ireland dear, for her na- tional debt, which in '97 had amounted only to £4,000,000, had during four years increased more than seven fold, and at the beginning of 180? stood at £28,545,134, or nearly one-sixteenth that of England, which then amounted to £450,504,984. Ireland sought to protect herself from the charges of the English pre-union debt by the seventh article of the union, which prescribes that the sinking fund for the reduction of the principal of the debt incurred in either Tin: ACT OF UNION. 129 kingdom shall be defrayed by separate taxation; but this article has not been complied with, and the two kingdoms now bear conjointly the charges of the pre-nnion expenses. It was arranged that for the ensuing 20 years the expendi- ture of the United Kingdom should be defrayed in the pro- portions of fifteen parts to Great Britain to two of Ireland, and that after that time a fresh arrangement should be made, and the proportions from time to time revised until such time as the national debt of Ireland should bear the proportions of two to fifteen parts of the debt of Great Britain. This consummation was arrived at in 1817, for whereas during the 16 years of union the British debt had not doubled, the Irish had increased fourfold, and already exceeded the proportion of two to fifteen. Nor was this all that Ireland had to complain of, for in defiance of the seventh article of the union, which provided that the sur- plus revenue should be expended for the benefit of each country in the proportion of their contributions, the surplus due to Ireland, and amounting in some years to three or four millions, was not so expended. The sixth article places the two kingdoms on equal com- mercial footing, and prescribes that neither shall impose a duty on the imports or exports of the other; but this com- mercial equality was no benefit to Ireland; the English in- dustries were in possession of the market, the commercial current flowed in her direction, and want of capital and the complicated system of rings, exclusive and reciprocal trading, placed insuperable barriers in the way of Irish commerce. That the union did not improve Irish trade is easily seen by a glance at the returns of her imports and exports, which, though they increased with her increasing population, rose much less rapidly than they had done in the years before the union, and became of a less satisfactory character — for the imports consisted yearly more of manu- factured goods, the exports of raw material. The other important articles of the union were the fourth, regulating the parliamentary representation of Ireland, and the fifth, providing for the eternal duration of the Estab- lished Church. By the fourth article it was provided that four lords 130 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. spiritual of Ireland, by rotation of sessions, and twenty- eight lords temporal, elected for life by the peers of Ire- land, shall sit and vote in the House of Lords; that the non-representative peers shall be eligible to sit for any con- stituency of the United Kingdom in the House of Com- mons; and that not more than one Irish peerage shall be created for every three that become extinct. This article also fixes the representation of Ireland in the House of Commons at one hundred members, at which figure it has practically remained throughout the eighty-five years of union, though the principles of proportional representation would have allowed Ireland over two hundred representa- tives in 1845, and now entitle her to not more than ninety- one. The fifth article enjoins ''that the churches of Eng* land and Ireland, as by law established, be united into one Protestant Episcopal Church, to be called The U7iited Church of England and Ireland, and that the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government of the United Church shall remain in full force for ever, as the same are now by law established for the Church of England, and that the continuance and preservation of the United Church as the Established Church of England and Ireland shall be deemed, and taken to be an essential and fundamental part of the union." This clause formed the great, and, indeed, the sole argument in favor of retaining the Estab- lishment in Ireland. The remaining articles provide for the succession of the sovereign and the maintenance of the laws. On New- Year's-day, 1801, the union practically commenced, and at the assembling of the first united parliament on January 22d the Catholics looked for speedy measures of relief. But the Catholic claims were not so much as mentioned in the king's speech, and his majesty having declared that he would abdicate rather than consent to Catholic emancipa- tion, Pitt resigned into the hands of the anti-Catholic Ab- ingdon. The hopes of the Catholics were dashed; five of the ministers reported to be in favor of the measure proved to be against it, and Pitt, though he professedly resigned on this question, resigned into the hands of a man whom he knew to be against emancipation, and resigned at a moment when THE ACT OF UNIOtf. 131 the failure of his continental policy rendered his position as prime minister a painful one. He was probably glad to leave to others the task of making and breaking the Treaty of Amiens, and at least his resignation cannot be put down to devotion to the Catholics, for, when he resumed office in 1804, he gave a pledge to the king never again to trouble him with the subject. In 1801 things were going ill with England; the allied armies had been victorious everywhere, and the French scare, which had led to the union, induced the ministers to pass, as the first measure of the united parliament for Ireland, an act for the suspension of the habeas corpus, and empowering the viceroy to proclaim martial law. Yet there was at that time no rebellion in Ireland; bad trade, bad harvest, and the abandonment of the Catholic claims rendered the union even more unpopular in reality than it had been in anticipation; there was some little agitation for repeal, but there was no shadow of rebellion. When the claims of the Catholics were thrown over, Cornwallis gladly resigned the viceroyalty, and betook him- self to the more congenial task of negotiating the Peace of Amiens. At its conclusion in June, 1802, the State prisoners were released from Fort George, and a new council of United Irishmen was established in Brussels. Unable themselves to return to Ireland, the United Irish- men sent over as an emissary young Robert Emmet, who was then in his three-and-twentieth year. The young man arrived in Dublin in the October of 1802, and spent the winter in organizing and preparing for rebellion. The moment was almost as unfavorable as any that could have been chosen; the memory of '98 was still green, and Eng- land on the alert; the best of the Separatists were all out of the country, and the revolutionary party were without funds. But for these errors of judgment, not Emmet, but those who sent him are to blame, and if we concede that any man has the right to involve his country in the terrible misery and risks of rebellion and civil war, we must admit that the nobility of Emmet's character, and the purity of his aims, entitle him to the hero-worship that Ireland has so lavishlv showered on his memorv. 132 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. His rebellion was worse than a failure, it was a collapse; but his plan of securing the capital and holding it as a rebel fortress is the only one which could have even the remotest chance of success in a country whose center is one vast plain. But after eight months' diligent organization Emmet was followed into the streets by an army of only eighty persons, and his attempt ended in nothing nobler than the brutal murder of lord Kil warden, one of the best judges that ever sat upon the Irish bench, and his nephew, a clergyman. An hour later the streets of Dublin had re- turned to their usual quiet, and Emmet, heart-sick, disil- lusionized, and convinced of the utter hopelessness of the struggle, hurried to the Wieklow hills to prevent a country rising. He might even yet have escaped, but he had' re- solved to see one person before leaving the country. He could not go without a word to Sarah Curran, the youngest daughter of the advocate, who, at all risks to his life and professional reputation, had undertaken the defence of the rebels of '98. But the meeting between Miss Curran and Emmet never took place; while he was still waiting, he was seized and taken to Dublin. The story of the clandestine engagement then came to Ourran's ears, and he, unable to forgive the secrecy and the injury that this connection was to his reputation as a loyal man, refused to defend his daughter's lover. Emmet lost nothing by this refusal; the result of the trial was a foregone conclusion; hundreds of blunderbusses and thou sands of pikes had been discovered in Emmet's arsenal, and with them were some thousand printed placards to be issued by the republican government to the people of Ire land. The evidence against Emmet was complete, and if anything could have saved him, his youth, the manly gentle - ness of his countenance, and his own marvellous eloquence, would have been his best advocates. On the nineteenth of September he was led in irons to the dock; by midnight the verdict was obtained, and in the afternoon of the next day he was hanged in Thomas Street, within view of his arsenal. "All that I crave of the w r orld," said dying Em- met, "is the charity of its silence; let no man write my epitaph," but by friend and foe alike that request has been THE PEACE OF 1815. 133 denied, and the nameless stone in St. Michan's churchyard alone is faithful to the wish of the dead rebel. CHAPTER XXVII. THE PEACE OF 1815. The utter collapse of a rebellion organized by a leader of such exceptional enthusiasm and personal charm was proof that in 1803 there was wonderful little tendency to rebellion in Ireland, but the renewal of the continental war increased the dread of a French invasion, and the mis- erable rising of eighty persons was punished by the impris- onment of three hundred, and the death of nineteen. Martial law was proclaimed, the Hal^eas Corpus Act sus- pended, and the whole yeomanry of Ireland put on per- manent duty, at a cost of one hundred thousand pounds monthly. The rising, abortive as it had been, threw back the anti- union party; in the horror and terror of the time Home Rule and Separation were deemed equally disloyal, and any demand for repeal raised a cry of disintegration of the empire. "Do not unite with us, sir," said Samuel John* son to an Irish friend; "we would unite with you only to rob you;" and in the early years of the century there was a very general impression in Ireland that the union had indeed been, as Byron called it, "The union of the shark with its prey." The continental war gave artificial stim- ulus to agriculture both in England and Ireland, but by the end of 1804 the Irish national debt had risen to fifty three millions — a rise of twenty-six millions in four years, while in the same time the net produce of the revenue had actually decreased, despite the increasing population. The prosperity of the towns began to flag at once. Theremov* al of the parliament ruined Dublin, which, from a metrop- olis, sank in a few years to the condition of a second-rate provincial city. The common dislike to the union drew all parties to- gether; Protestant, Catholic, Whig, and Tory united in 134 IEISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. the wish for repeal, but while the French scare continued agitation seemed hopeless, and the Catholics set themselves to gain first the lesser, but more attainable, boon of eman- cipation. The}' could not tell that the tendency of the century would be towards religious equality and centraliza- tion of government; that emancipation must come, even without any effort on the part of the Catholics, while every year would render English statesmen more attached to the union, and would raise fresh difficulties in the way of repeal. In 1804 Pitt resumed office, and the Catholics, ignorant of his pledge to the king, asked him to present their peti- tion for emancipation. lie was, of course, unable to do this, and on March 25th of the following year the petition was presented by Fox in the Commons and Grenville in the Lords. During the debate that ensued, it was proposed to place the Roman Church on the same footing as the Galilean, by allowing the sovereign a right of veto on the prelates appointed by the Pope, and thus arose the famous question of veto, which was destined to be so bitterly de- bated before the emancipation question was settled. It was during this debate that Grattan made his first speech in the united parliament, and to this cause he devoted the remainder of his life. The bill was thrown out by a ma- jority of nearly three to one, and when, after the death of Pitt in the following January, the Grenville-Fox ministry was formed, Fox advised the Catholics to let their claims stand over till the next session. So far as Fox was con- cerned, that next session was never held, for on the 13th of September he died. At his accession to office the hopes of the Catholics uad anti-unionists had been high; the act for the suspension of the habeas corpus was allowed to ex- pire, and for a time Ireland was governed by ordinary leg- islation. The death of the minister dashed these high hopes; and in the next session it was not even proposed to bring forward an Emancipation Bill, though, as a soothing measure, an act to enable Catholics to hold commissions in the army and navy was introduced; but so invincible was the king's opposition to this concession that the ministers were forced to resign, and the "No Popery" cabinet was THE PEACE OF 1815. 135 formed. The duke of Bedford was now recalled, and the duke of Richmond succeeded him as viceroy, with Sir Ar- thur Wellesley, afterward duke of Wellington, as chief secretary. In this year, for the first time since the union, there was a renewal of Whiteboyism, the objects of the Whiteboys being the usual ones of reduction of rents, se- curity of tenure, increase of laborers' wages, and resistance to tithe. The organization was confined to a small part of the country, and was quickly suppressed by ordinary law, but so great was the dread of a French party that the whole country was placed under an Insurrection Act and an Arms Act. Notwithstanding the known views of the cabinet, the Catholics continued to urge their claims, and in 1808 Grat- tan presented a petition for emancipation accompanied by veto. The measure was thrown out, to the content of most parties, for the Catholic prelates unanimously declared that they preferred the existing state of affairs to emancipation with veto. Two years later the measure was again brought foward, and, as a set-off to the veto, the state payment of the Catholic clergy was proposed, but despite the tempta- tion that this must have offered to so poor a body of men, the clergy declared against the measure, and the body of the Irish Catholic laity went with them. The English Cath- olics, some few of the Irish Catholic nobility and upper class, and the Irish Protestant advocates of emancipation favored the scheme, but the vast majority were against it. In this year Daniel O'Connell was elected chairman of the Catholic committee, and from this time he became the ac- knowledged leader of the Catholics. O'Connell was now thirty-five years of age, and had already attained consider- able reputation at the Irish bar. He had joined the Cath- olic committee in 1806, and at an earlier date had made speeches in favor of repeal. In 1810 a Repeal Asssociation was formed, and had O'Connell thrown his energies into that channel it might possibly have fallen to the lot of the Irish, not the united, parliament to emancipate the Cath- olics. But O'Connell believed that in the House of Com- mons the Irish Catholics would best plead the cause of re- peal; and, being himself a Catholic, he felt the political deg- 136 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. redation of the mass of his countrymen very keenly. The veto agitation broke up the Catholics into two parties, and the movement seemed doomed to collapse till 1823, when O'Connell, taking advantage of some revival of interest, founded the Catholic Association. The history of Ireland in the years between 1810 and 1823 is mainly agrarian; the Catholic agitation was con- tinued, and various Emancipation Bills were brought in and rejected — Grattan making his last effort in 1813, six years before his death; but until 1823 the cry for emanci- pation did not amount to a national demand. After holding the chief secretaryship for a few months only, Arthur Wellesley resigned it to his brother, Sir Wel- lesley Pole, who was succeeded by Sir Robert Peel on the formation of the Liverpool-Castlereagh ministry in 1812. Peel's Irish politics are briefly summed up in his nick- name, "Orange Peel;" he was intensely unpopular, being too temporizing for his own party and too exacting for the emancipationists. During his tenure of office the long con- tinental war came to an end, and with the peace came a rapid fall in the price of agricultural produce. In Eng- land there were two interests — what the land interest lost the trade interest gained by the cheap prices; but in Ire- land, where there was no trade, the fall in prices was an un- mixed evil. To bolster up the agricultural interest in both countries, Corn Laws were passed prohibiting the importa- tion of wheat till home-grown grain should have reached the price of 80s per quarter. This act remained in force till 1828, when "the sliding scale" was introduced, allowing the importation of wheat on payment of a sliding scale of duty, which varied from £1 5s. 8d. per quarter when the average English price was under 62s., to Is. per quarter when home-grown grain was above 73s. But notwithstand- ing this protective duty the peace brought great distress to Ireland, and distress was followed by agrarian outrage. An Insurrection Act was immediately passed and martial law proclaimed, but this measure had no effect on the starv- ing peasantry, and the southern provinces remained prac- tically in revolt against the landlords and tithe proctors. The reduction of prices had been followed by no reduction THE PEACE OF 1815. 137 of rent, and in 1819 the failure of the potatoe crop changed pinching distress to absolute famine. The Coercion Act was renewed, but was ineffectual, and the operation of an act which had been passed two years earlier lessening the cost of evictions had no better result. In 1822 the potato crop again failed, and to a more dis- astrous extent. There was grain in abundance, but the peasantry could not afford to buy it. Thousands of quarters of grain were exported weekly to England; while so great was the scarcity in Connomara that half-starved wretches walked fifty miles into Galway in the wild hope of food, but when they arrived in the city they were often so ex- hausted that they fainted, and the means taken to restore them failed in effect. In the month of June there were 99,639 souls in the County Clare alone living on daily charity, and in Cork there were 122,000; while in some of the remoter villages the whole population died of sheer starvation. Through all this distress the middleman or landlord and the tithe proctor had to be paid, and to the unreasonableness of their claims and their severity in ex- torting them, those living on the spot, and best competent to judge, attributed the agrarian outrages. Writing in this very year of 1822, Mr. Wiggins, agent to the marqness of Hertford, says in his "Hints to Landlords" that, "goaded by the distreses of laws; irritated also by rents too high even for war prices, by the fallen prices of produce without corresponding reduction of rents and tithes, and by sever- ities which have increased with the difficulties of their col- lection, the peasantry of Munster yielded to the influence of these, and probably of other less apparent causes, and in the winter of 1822 insurrection and outrage became so extended as to require a large army to check its progress; but," he adds, "it is not by the terrors of the bayonet or the law that a brave and hardy people like the Irish can or ought to be permanently controlled; it is not only entirely in your power, but also greatly to your interests, nay, your bounden duty as lords of the soil, to alleviate these miseries, and to remove this poverty." 138 HUSH HIST0KY FOB ENGLISH REAPERS. CHAPTER XXVIII. EMANCIPATION. The year lS:lo marks an era in the history of Catholic emancipation, for in it O'Connell, aided by Shiel, formed the Catholic Association for the furtherance of the cause of emancipation by means of petitions, public discussions, meetings, and the return of members of parliament, who were pledged to support the cause. The association, like its numerous successors, consisted of members paying an annual subscription of £1 Is., and associates who paid one shilling. A standing committee formed the government; meetings were held weekly, and the business consisted of organization, discussion, correspondence, and petitions. At first it was difficult to keep the infant association alive, and at one of the early meetings O'Connell had to entreat two Maynooth students, who were passing the committee rooms, to come in and form a quorum. It was a fortunate accident; from that hour the clergy gave the association their support. The association, once rooted, spread like a lire, and in the next year the "Catholic rent," consisting of one penny monthly, averaged £500 a week, representing nearly half a million associates. The cry for emancipation had become a national demand, and there was a strong feeling in England that it ought not to be resisted, though George IV. regarded the project almost as unfavorably as his father had done. In March, 1825, the association was dissolved by act of parliament, but O'Connell, who boasted that he "could drive a coach and six through any act of parliament," circumvented the act, and reorganized the association under the name of the New Catholic Associa- tion, and the government took no further means to suppress the society, for at that moment they were constructing a Catholic Relief Bill granting emancipation, but weighting EMANCIPATIONS 139 the measure by the disfranchisement of the forty-shilling freeholders, and the State payment of the Catholic clergy. In this form the bill was unpopular in Ireland, and the news that it had been thrown out by the lords was received with pleasure rather than disappointment. The proposal for the State payment of the clergy was held both by priest- hood and laity to be nothing better than a bribe, and the forty-shilling freeholders, who were the great bulk of the rural voters, hotly resented the prospect of disfranchise- ment. During the next three years the vigorous and ever- increasing efforts of the Catholics were unavailing; in 1827 Canning died, and early in the ensuing year the duke of Wellington became premier, and Peel home secretary. Yet this anti-Catholic administration was destined to carry the Catholic Eelief Bill, not from any conversion to the principles of religious equality, but. as the premier himself stated, "to prevent civil war." While the Emancipation Bill was being framed, Mr. Vesey Fitzgerald, member for Clare, accepted the office of president of the board of trade, and had to present himself for re-election. To the surprise of every one O'Connell announced his intention of contest- ing the seat, for though the nature of the oath of alleg- iance was such that no Catholic could swear it, there was no law to prevent the election of a Papist. The contest was a hot one, and O'Connell was successful, but as the Emancipation Bill was in progress he did not attempt to take his seat till it had been through the house. In the next session it passed, but at the same time the county franchise in Ireland was raised from forty shillings to ten pounds — five times that of England, where the franchise remained unchanged. As the disfranchisement of the forty-shilling freeholders was for many years a standing grievance, it will be well to briefly state the facts of the case. In 1795 a bill had been passed giving the elective fran- chise to all lease holders of property to the annual value of 40s. This bill had made Irish landlords very willing to grant small leases, and a whole race of peasant farmers had sprung up. The population had increased rapidly, and in 1821 amounted to nearly 7,000,000, At the fall "in prices 140 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. at the peace of 1815, the cry of over-population of Ireland had first been raised, and the famine of '17 and '22 had confirmed English statesmen in their theory; and it was professedly as a check to the too rapid increase of popula- tion that the franchise was raised from two to ten pounds. But, whether for good or evil, the deed was done; the population was there, and the disfranchisement brought an infinity of misery. Such landlords as cared for political power, and looked on their tenants only as voters, refused to renew small leases, and at their expiration ejected the small tenants to bring the value of the leaseholds of such as remained up to the county qualification. The cheap Ejectment Acts that had been passed after the peace of 1815 greatly simplified the process of eviction, and in Ire- land a tenant could be evicted in two months and at a cost of £2, while in England the process took at least 12 months and cost £18. The Irish landlord, too, could distrain the young crops of the tenant, keep them till they were ripe, gather and sell them, charging the tenant with the ac- cumulation of the expense. After the disfranchisement these acts were largely used, and many landlords who did not evict refused to renew small leases, and so the system of annual tenancy increased. It is difficult to conceive what can be said in favor of this system of tenure so ruinous to the cultivator and the soil. The tenant, dreading eviction, fearing that his rent may be raised on the value of the improvements he has made, and unwilling to risk his capital, stints his manure and contents himself with scratching over the surface of the soil, growing potatoes and oats, oats and potatoes, till the impoverished land refuses to yield enough to support life, much less pay the rent; then follows the familiar, miserable story of eviction, starvation, and crime. By the raising of the franchise, the electors of Ireland were reduced from 200,000 to 2G,000, that is to say, nearly seven out of every eight electors were disqualified. Twenty-one years later a Reform Act was passed establish- ing a £5 freehold and £12 rating occupation franchise for the counties, and an £8 rating occupation franchise for the boroughs, and in 1808 the borough franchise was EMANCIPATION. 141 lowered to £1 and a lodger £10 franchise introduced; but the Fenian movement being then at its height, it was not deemed expedient to lower the county franchise in Ireland. In this same year a Lowered franchise added 400,000 voters to the English county constituencies, and household suffrage was granted to the Scotch and English boroughs. This act was superseded in 1885 by a Eeform Bill, which practically granted household suffrage to both Great Britain and Ire- land. The parliament which disfranchised the 40s. freeholders and granted Catholic emancipation, was dissolved in 1830 by the death of George IV., and at the ensuing election O'Connell and many other Roman Catholics were returned. From this time "the Liberator" devoted himself to the cause of repeal; this had been his first political aspiration, and now 'he returned to the old path. But the old allies were gone; the Protestant repealers were no more; religious bigotry had conquered self-interest and national sentiment: dread of O'Connell and the Pope had converted the Irish Protestants into unionists. They could not realize that the days of religious disability were passed for Papist and Protestant, that a renewed Irish parliament could never pay off old scores, no matter how great a majority of its members might be Catholics. They dreaded papal supre- macy even more than they hated English ascendancy, and they preferred the ill they knew to the ill they knew not. Moreover, repeal had become a much more complicated question; laws had been made, taxes levied, debts con- tracted that placed practical difficulties in the way of simple repeal; it was impossible after a lapse of 30 years to go back to the old order of things, and O'Connell had no project of an Irish parliament for Irish affairs, and an Imperial parliament for the settlement of the affairs of the empire. Home Rule, too, was easily confounded with Separation, or was mistrusted as a step towards the sever- ance of the connection of the two countries. Throughout the reign of William IV. the Irish masses remained indifferent to the repeal question; emancipation had brought them nothing but disfranchisement, and they were mainly occupied with the struggle for existence, 142 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. with the emigration question, and above all with the tithe war. In vain the rector claimed every tenth sheep; in vain an army as large as that which dragooned India tried to collect the tithe. A purely spontaneous resistance had arisen among the peasantry who, of their own accord, and without leaders or agitators, carried on war by means of outrage and what is now known as "boycotting." It was useless to try to sell the cattle that had been seized for tithe, for though thousands of persons attended the auctions not one bid would be made for cattle seized under the tithe decree. The state of the country was fearful. War, prosecuted on both sides with barbarous cruelty, raged between the peasantry and the tithe proctors, and a stringent Coercion Act did nothing for the pacification of the country. In the meantime Mr. Stanley, afterward lord Derby, who was then chief secretary, brought in a bill for primary education in Ireland. ]\ T o religious instruction was to be given in the schools founded under this act; yet, notwith- standing the national objection to mixed education and the denunciations of priests and parsons, the schools prospered. Twenty years later Ireland contained 5,000 national schools, attended by 511,020 pupils, and in 1880 there were 7,590 schools with 1,083,020 pupils. Another much needed reform was accomplished in this reign by the passing of the Church Temporalities Act, whereby ten bishoprics were abolished and the Establishment was made to bear some proportion to the people for whose benefit it was maintained at the cost of so much bloodshed and injustice. The reign was but a short one; for in June 1837 the king died, and was succeeded by his niece, Victoria. It was impossible that so young* a woman as the new queen could have more than a nominal voice in the govern- ment of a vast empire, and thus with the reign of Victoria began the era of constitutional government in England. One of the first acts of the queen's ministers was to pass the much-debated measure of poor law for Ireland, and soon afterward the Tithe Commutation Act abolished for ever the scandalous method of collecting tithe. No more EMANCIPATION. 143 were corn and cattle to be seized by force of arms, for in the future the landlord — not the tenant — was to pay a sum of money as tithe. By raising the rents the landlords generally transferred the obligation to the tenant, and by consenting thus to play the part of tithe collector, they attracted toward themselves all the ill-will that had been hitherto bestowed on the tithe proctor. This same year (1838) made memorable by the Poor Law and Tithe Reform Acts, also witnessed the establishment of two great national movements in Ireland — the repeal agitation and the teetotal movement. It was an era of conciliation, and O'Oonnell had agreed to accept "Justice to Ireland" as an alternative to repeal, and for the promotion of this somewhat indefinite cause he founded the Precursor Society, which soon numbered two million members, and which on the formation of the Tory ministry in 1841 merged into a full-grown and avowed repeal association. The teetotal movement had been founded some years earlier by the Quakers of Cork, but it took no hold on the people till Theobald Mathew, a young Capuchin friar, joined it in 1838. His unfailing kindness and devotion to the poor had already endeared Father Mathew to the lowest classes of the community, and, through his influ- ence, 156,000 persons took the pledge in the first nine months of his mission, and by 1842 he had made a successful crusade in every part of his native land. Without any special gifts or influence beyond that of goodness, this simple friar wrought a moral reformation almost beyond belief. The curse of drink seemed banished from Ireland, and millions took the pledge. With a rapidly-increasing population, crime rapidly decreased; in '39, when the movement was beginning, there were twelve thousand committals and sixty-four capital sentences, while six years later, when the movement was at its height, there were but seven thousand committals and fourteen death sen- tences. But these statistics give only a very faint picture of the extent of the reform. In five years, public opinion changed utterly, no man was any longer ashamed to be temperate, and many who felt no need to bind themselves 144: IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. by a pledge abstained from strong drink. The friar wisely, and in true Christian spirit, refused to make his mission a question of politics or creed, and administered the pledge with equal kindliness to Leinster Repealer and Ulster Orangeman, and thus a common bond of interest was established between creeds and parties. CHAPTER XXIX. THE REPEAL YEAR. The formation of the Peel ministry, in 1841, shattered O'ConnelPs hopes of justice to Ireland, and the Precursor Society, by a change of name, became the Repeal Associa- tion. The movement gained ground rapidly; there was abundant oppression and distress, and all the Catholic or "lower" nation cried loudly for a change. In the early days of the Association the Repealers were almost exclu- sively Catholics of the middle or lower class: indeed, the peasantry of the three southern provinces became Repealers almost to a man. The Anglicans were held back from the movement by the conviction that the first act of an Irish parliament would be the disestablishment of the English Church, and, moreover, O'ConnelPs attitude towards Pro- testants was not such as to encourage their national aspira- tions. The "Saxon" in any form was abhorrent to O'Con- nell, and for purely political purposes he revived the race- hatred which had become almost extinct. But the masses were blind to the faults of the Liberator, and his eloquence, his ready sympathy, his wit, his pathos, his rich and ten- der voice, gave him complete mastery over his audience. But looking back to a distance of forty years, we can see that O'Connell had the faults common to his temperament; like most persons of quick sympathies and many moods, he was only tolerably truthful and moderately sincere, and, like many public orators, he allowed himself to win the support and gain the confidence of his public by a species of moral bribery, by flattery of his supporters, and whole- sale abuse of his antagonists. The personal abuse which THE REPEAL YEAH. 145 he showered upon his opponents can be condoned on the score that it was but retaliation in kind for the coarse in- vectives and insults they heaped upon himself, but nothing can justify or even palliate his deliberate revival of the memory of long-forgotten wrongs. For the purpose of arousing latent passion, j ie r] re w moving pictures of the treachery of Elizabeth at Mullaghmast, the barbarity of Cromwell's troops at Wexford and Drogheda, and he even asserted that, given the power. England would reproduce those acts of treachery and blood. These speeches had a twofold result; they made the Irish hate the English, and they made the English despise and detest the Irish, for had an English orator striven to arouse race-hatred by a description of the atrocities of Phelim O'Neill, the only sentiment he would have evoked would have been one of disgust against himself, and a reaction in favor of the Irish, against whom no more modern offences could be brought up. But in Ireland it was different; a chain of injustice and oppression linked the present with the past, and had O'Connell contented himself with anything less dramatic than wholesale massacre under a flag of truce, he might have made out a very good case without going back to the protectorate. But though O'Connell's method of agitation pleased the peasantry, such young men of the more cultured classes as joined the Repealers disapproved strongly of his practice of appealing to passions of race and creed. To these young men it seemed more to the point that the English govern- ment of 1842 was countenancing wholesale eviction than that the government of Elizabeth had connived at treach- ery. They felt no need to awaken the memory of bygone wrongs; it was enough for them that almost one-fourth of the cultivable land of a country which was held to be over- populated was lying w r aste; that in Mayo, alone, there were 500,000 acres of improvable waste land; that Catholic peas- ants paid tithe for Protestant rectors; that no tenant had security for his tenure or compensation for his improve- ments; that the rack-rented peasantry had no redress; that juries were packed, and the poor law badly administered. To air these and other grievances, to give the public a fair 10 146 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. view of contemporary history, three young Repealers — Thomas Osbourne Davis, John Blake Dillon, and Charles Gavan Duffy — founded the Nation newspaper. Such a journal was much needed; O'Connell's organ, The Pilot, was conducted on the most bigoted principle conceivable, and it was the ambition of the founders of the Nation to establish a journal worthy of the cause of nationality and free from religious bigotry. Like the vast majority of Irish leaders, Thomas Davis was a Protestant; Dillon and Duffy were staunch Catholics, but absolutely free from prejudice or fanaticism, and all were men of exceptional talent and purity of motive. Davis was possessed of poetic gifts akin to genius. Under the guidance of these young men the Nation at once took a high position; indeed, even now, after a lapse of more than 40 years, the early num- bers are still fresh and interesting, while it is impossible to read without emotion some of the patriotic ballads which appeared in its pages. Many of the historical articles are excellent, but the contemporary articles convey the most useful information, and from them we learn that in the year 1843, 42,000,000 lbs. of grain, almost 1,000,000 bead of live stock, besides great quantities of butter, eggs, and bacon, were exported to England alone, while in this same year a surplus population of 100,000 souls were forced to emigrate, so that had Ireland exported neither food nor people those who under existing circumstances were forced to emigrate might each have eaten 10 beasts and 420 lbs. of grain. O'Connell had declared that 1843 should be the repeal year, and all through the summer the most intense excite- ment prevailed. Enormous multitudes attended the repeal meetings, and between forty-eight and forty-nine thousand pounds were subscribed for the association. Larger and larger grew the meetings; Tara and Mullaghmast had each been the scene of a peaceful triumph, and a monster meet- ing was announced to take place at Clontarf on Sunday, the 8th of October. The English government now took alarm, and though O'Connell maintained that "'no political re- form is worth the spilling of one drop of human blood," the attitude of the country was considered dangerous, and THE FAMINE. 147 on Saturday, Sept. 7th, the meeting was proclaimed. Many thousands had come up from the country, and it was no easy matter to prevent the gathering; but O'Connell decreed that the proclamation must be obeyed, and by stren- uous exertions the meeting was prevented. But that was the real end of O'Conneirs influence. The people began to feel that that agitation which repudiates action is pow- erless, and that an army pledged not to fight is no defence. The proclamation of the Clontarf meeting was followed by the arrest of O'Connell and eight other prominent Repeal- ers for conspiracy and kindred offences, and in November the State trials began. At the conclusion of the trials in May, the traversers were all found guilty. O'Connell w r as sentenced to a year's imprisonment, and the others to shorter terms. The jury had been shamefully and notori- ously packed, and the traversers appealed against the judg- ment, which was reversed by the House of Lords. The released traversers received a triumph; but the repeal movement never regained its strength, the repeal year had passed, and the union was as firmly established as ever. The faith of the masses in the agitation was shaken, and there were divided councils in Conciliation Hall, where the "Young Ireland Party," as the staff of the Nation were called, often found themselves unable to subscribe to the ruling of their leader. Throughout '44 the disunion increased, and in the autumn of '45 Ireland fell a prey to that long agony of famine through which all her energies were absorbed in the struggle for dear life. CHAPTER XXX. THE FAMINE. The autumn of '45 was cold and wet; chill and persistent rains fell over the north of Europe, bringing scarcity and disease in their train. The bad weather set in too late to affect the wheat crops, but the potatoes were seriously damaged, and by the failure of that crop hundreds of thous- ands were deprived of their usual food. In Germany, 148 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. France, Denmark, and Holland, the poor, suffered; but the Irish, being more dependent on the potatoes suffered more. The whole energy of the people was needed to cope with the emergency; all their savings were expended in keeping body and soul together, and in buying seed for next year's sowing. The winter was one of terrible priva- tion; those who had savings lived off them, but among the really poor there was widespread destitution. The loss of the potato crop was valued at £10,000,000, and to replace this with grain would cost £20,000,000, but compared to the extent of the calamity the efforts to cope with it were lamentably inefficient. The starving peasantry — forced to sell their clothes for food — resisted the payment of their rent, and where the uttermost farthing was extorted, bar- barous outrages were committed. To meet the difficulty, a Coercion Bill was passed, but in the early part of winter government fearing to overrate the extent of the calamity, refused to take further steps; in the beginning of '46, however, £50,000 were voted to be expended on public works. The amount shows how utterly the government failed to realize what the loss of the potato crop meant; it was only a two-hundredth part of what was needed to replace the loss, and only one quarter of the sum expended in the same year on Battersea Park. But the great measure of the session was the repeal of the Corn Laws which, it was hoped, would prevent a recurrence of such terrible scarcity of food. The English manufacturing towns had long clamored for their repeal, and in England this had become an absolute necessity. Bread was at starvation price, and w r as actually scarce; British islands were incapable of raising food for their increasing popula- tion; and had it not been for the strength of the landed interest in parliament, the Corn Laws must have gone much earlier. It was as a measure of relief for Ireland that these laws were now repealed. The protectionist party argued that far from giving food to the people of Ireland, the repeal of the Corn Laws would ruin them by destroying the profits of their only manufacture, and taking away from them the very means of procuring subsistence. Time has THE FAMINE. 149 proved that the protectionists were right. The population of Ireland was rural, the population of England urban; thus the interests of the two islands were diametrically opposed. Ireland was the producer, England the consumer. For years the producer had enjoyed an artificial and most unjust advantage, but the destruction of this advantage could hardly be considered a measure for his relief. Ire- land was unable to produce food enough for both countries, but she was capable of raising abundant food for her own population. The famine of '46-'47 was an artificial famine, for in this very year that hunger deprived Ireland of a quarter of her people, she was the largest export country in the world. "The exports of Ireland," says lord George Bentinck, "are greater than those of any country in the world; not merely more in proportion to its people, or to its area, but absolutely more. Its exports of food are greater than those of the United States, greater than those of Russia;" and throughout the famine year an average of 20 steamships laden with food left Ireland daily. In the Times, of March 12th, 1849, we find a list of Irish pro- duce which on one single day entered the port of London — we have, unfortunately, no record of the imports to Liver- pool, Bristol, and the smaller ports. "No less than 16 ships arrived in the river, laden almost exclusively with food of various kinds, the produce of Ireland, having collectively 14,960 packages of butter; 224 packages of pork; 1,047 hampers and bales of bacon; several of hams; 140 sacks, 22.026 barrels, and 7,889 quarters of oats; 434 packages of lard; 75 of general provisions; 40 of oatmeal; 44 of porter; 259 boxes of eggs; and a variety of articles of lesser im- portance." The magnificent wheat harvest, the finest that ever ripened on Irish soil, had been swept away earlier in the season. Let us take a nearer look at this fertile country, the greatest food exporter in the world; this island which feeds 8,000,000 of the English people, and whos^ agricultural produce is valued at £45.000,000. All throng i the spring and summer of ? 46 the people woiked on in hope; the season was fine, and the potatoes looked well, till the magnificent grain crop was whitening for the harvest. Then, in July," a blight swept over the 150 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. land, and in one fortnight the potatoes were totally, utterly destroyed; nothing remained, not even enough for send. The people endured their loss with an apathy incompre- hensible in England. Their food was gone, their savings were spent, the blackened, blighted potato tops were a sentence of death that the most illiterate could read. Weakened by a year of privation, the people met their fate with the indifference of ill health and the patience of despair. Quietly, without murmur or complaint, they went into their cabins, closing the the doors, because the close air made them feel less hungry, and so, without remonstrance or effort, they watched the departure of the heavy carts of golden grain. Potatoes were the exclusive diet of three million persons, the staple diet of two million more; — rive million persons were without money and without food. It was useless to sell food even at a moderate price. Potatoes are the very cheapest form of human food, and "to a people subsisting on them, no retrenchment is possible. They have," said John Stuart Mill, "already reached the lowest point of the descending scale, and there is nothing beyond but beggary and starvation." The problem of how to cope with this famine of the thirteenth century with a population of the nineteenth was no easy one to solve; and many and various were the plans suggested. "Close the exports," cried some; "let us eat our own food." "Open the imports," cried others; "import cheap grain;" and this indeed was done, but with very limited success. Fifty thousand pounds were again voted for relief works, and, in accordance with the laws of political economy, these were strictly unproductive. Roads were broken up, and works were set on foot, which, the inspector reported, "would answer no other purpose than that of obstructing the public conveyances." Further grants of money were made, and at a cost of seven or eight thousand pounds weekly, good roads were broken up and re-made. The Irish party urged that the money would be. better expended in draining some of the five million acres of improvable waste land; and lord George Bentinck proposed a scheme for laying railroads on a large scale, but both projects THE FAMINE. 151 were held to be inimical to private enterprise, and the unproductive works were continued. As the winter wore on the distress increased. The men, weakened by starva- tion, were unable to work, and many reached the spot only to faint or die. Some had to walk five or ten miles to their work, and were too exhausted to perform the task exacted of them; indeed, so reduced were they that in some districts attendance was obliged to be considered qualification for wage; and one of the superintendents reports that "as an employer he was ashamed of allotting so little work for a day's wage, while as a man he was ashamed of extorting so much" The people crowded into the works, and in March 734,000 heads of families, repre- senting 3,000,000 persons were thus employed. "A nation," said Disraeli, "equal to the population of Holland, breaking stones on the road." But government was not left to cope with the difficulty alone. All over the world hearts were touched by the appalling misery of the unhappy nation. So dire was the distress that the Quaker commissioners state it would be impossible to exaggerate it. Whole families existed on a daily ration of a few ounces of oatmeal till death ended their sufferings. Typhus of a most malignant and infec- tious type raged among them, and the dread of contagion overwhelmed even the boundless charity of the poor to- ward one another. Save in the case of those stricken with fever, there was no limit to the charity of these starving people. Mr. W. E. Forster, who was among the most zealous of the Quaker commissioners, tells us of more than one instance where destitute strangers were housed and fed by families who could rely only on a few ounces of thin gruel for food. "Never," writes another authority," have I witnessed so much good feeling, patience, and cheerful- ness under privation. I hardly remember an instance of their murmuring or begging." On the public works the same good feeling prevailed; those whose claims w T ere re- jected in favor of a still more distressed applicant submit- ting with a cheerful patience for which any praise would be insulting. The suffering from cold was only second to that from hunger. During the scarcity of the preceding 152 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. year no new clothes had been bought, and many old ones sold, so that the poorer peasantry were almost naked. The children suffered least, for the parents stripped and starved that their little one should have food and covering. Indeed, in all accounts of this fearful misery, the one bright spot is the touching and unparalleled unselfishness of the people. Perhaps the most horrible of all the horrors of this time was the fearful condition of the workhouses. The Irish hatred of the poorhouse gave way before the pangs of hunger, and the unions were filled to overflowing. In these loathsome lazar-houses typhus, starvation, filth, and death reigned supreme. Dead and dying lay in one bed or side by side on the floor, and the poorhouse was known to be the gateway to the tomb. The condition of the towns was no better than that of the country; the people below the middle class were re- duced literally to skeletons, and the whole of the poorer class were starving. An appalling picture of the state of Cork is given by the late Mr. A. M. Sullivan in his sketches of "New Ireland." "Daily in the street and on the foot- way some poor creature lay down as if to sleep, and pres- ently was still and stark. In our district it was a common occurrence to find, on opening the front door in the early morning, leaning against it the corpse of some victim who in the night had 'rested' in its shelter. We raised a public subscription, and employed two meu with horse and cart to go round each day to gather up the dead. One by one they were taken to Ardnabrahair Abbey, and dropped through the hinged bottom of a 'trap coffin' into a com- mon grave below. In the rural districts even this rude sepulcher Avas impossible In the fields and by the ditches the victims lay as they fell, till some charitable hand was found to cover them with the adjacent soil." In the at- tempt to assuage this awful misery, devoted men and women were daily laying down their lives. The resident landlords, for the most part, did their duty well — estab- lishing soup coppers and distributing cooked food. Many remitted their rent or half their rents, and if others were exacting and extorted their full legal dues, w T e must remem- ber that their estates were often so deeply mortgaged that THE FAMINE. 153 they were only less destitute than the tenantry, and, in some cases, were thankful to accept a daily ration of cooked food. Several of their body fell victims to their devotion, and a large number of doctors and of the clergy died of fever, caught in the performance of their duty. At last the sowing time came round again, and it waa found that sickness, death, the poorhouse, the emigrant ship, and the public works, had absorbed the male popula- tion. It was clear that political economy was ruining the country, and government now adopted the cooked food system which they had rejected as pauperizing, but which had been employed by private charity throughout. The cooked food relief proved much more efficacious and less expensive than the public works. The rations, including all expenses, cost only 2d. each, and the total expenditure in meal was only a million and a-half out of the millions which were advanced out of the Imperial exchequer, half as a loan to be repaid, and half as a free grant to meet the expenses of the famine. But public works, free food, poor-law, and charity, were insufficient to cope with this vast distress, and east to England and west to America fled the stricken multitude, carrying everywhere the seeds of deadly disease, till England, to protect herself, subjected ships with steerage passengers to quarantine, and several companies raised the rate of steer- age passage. Westward now was the only escape from fam- ine, and the poor wretches flooded the emigrant ships to Canada and the United States. The ships were terribly overcrowded, carrying double the legal number of passengers, and here, as in the work- houses, filth and mismanagement had it all their own way: the death-rate on the passage rose to twelve times its usual extent, and many were landed in such a diseased condition that the deaths in quarantine increased from one and one third to forty per thousand. In Montreal alone eight hundred emigrants died in nine weeks, and in six months the deaths amounted to three thousand. Of the hundred thousand Irish who fled to Canada in the black '47 one out of every five died on the voyage or on their arrival; one out of every three was received into a hospital, and the 15.4 IRISH HISTORY FOR ENGLISH READERS. remainder dispersed among the population, carrying death everywhere, and shunned and dreaded for the contagion they brought with them. Too weak to work, too poor to live without work, the condition of the Irish emigrant was pitiable. The labor market in the towns was over- stocked, and these half -starved people were little fitted for backwoods settlers. Such settlers must have means of support from twelve to fifteen months after their arrival, and this cannot be accomplished for less than sixty pounds per family at the lowest estimate, whereas these emigrants had nothing — not even health. The subject of emigration has been discussed with much heat by its advocates and opponents, and in the case of Ireland the subject has been approached with peculiar bitterness. England argues that the miseries of Ireland are due to over-population, and Ireland maintains that a country capable in a year of fam- ine of producing food for sixteen million persons, and con- taining five million acres of waste but improvable land cannot be said to be too thickly peopled. The falseness of the over-population theory receives some support from the fact that, when Swift wrote his "modest proposal," Ireland, with two million inhabitants, was worse off than she was in '41 with more than four times that population, and in 1886, now that the population has been reduced to between four and five millions, she is little better off than when she fed double as many at home and was a larger exporter of food. An extract from the able paper on the em- igration question by Sir Charles Trevelyan, and published in the Edinhuvgh Review of 1848, makes a fitting close to the sad chapter of the famine of '47. "There is no subject of which a merely one-sided view is more commonly taken than that of emigration. The evils arising from the crowded state of the population, and the facility with which large numbers of persons may be transferred to other countries, are naturally uppermost in the minds of landlords and ratepayers; but her majesty's government, to which the well-being of the British popu- lation in every quarter of the globe is confided, must have an equal regard to the interests of the emigrant and of the colonial community of which he may become a member. THE FAMINE. 155 It is a great mistake to suppose that even Canada and the United States have an unlimited capacity of absorbing a new population. The labor market in the settled district is always so nearly full that a small addition to the persons in search of employment makes a sensible difference; while the clearing of land requires the possession of resources and a power of sustained exertion not ordinarily belonging to the newly arrived Irish emigrant. In this, as well as in the other operations by which society is formed and sus- tained, there is a natural process which cannot be with impunity departed from. A movement is continually go- ing on toward the backwoods on the part of the young and enterprising portion of the settled population, and of such of the former emigrants as have acquired means and ex- perience; and the room thus made is occupied by persons recently arrived from Europe who have only their labor to depend on. The conquest of the wilderness requires more than the ordinary share of energy and perseverance, and every attempt that has yet been made to turn paupers into backwoodsmen has ended in signal failure. As long as they were rationed, they held together in a feeble, helpless state; and when the issue of the rations ceased they gen- erally returned to the settled parts of the country. Our re- cent experience of the effects of a similar state of depend- ence in Ireland offers no encouragement to renew the ex- periment in a distant country where the difficulties are so much greater, and a disastrous result would be so much less capable of being retrieved. . . . Those who have inherited or purchased estates in which a redundant pop- ulation has been allowed to grow up may with propriety assist some of their people to emigrate, provided they take care to prevent their being left destitute on their arrival in their new country. The expense of assisting emigration under such circumstances properly falls on the proprietor. A surplus population, whether it be owing to the fault or the misfortune of the proprietor or his predecessors, must be regarded as one of the disadvantages contingent on the possession of the estate; and he who enjoys the profit and advantage of the estate must also submit to the less desir- able conditions connected with it. So lonnd and John Fitzgerald and sends them to the Tower. 1568. Rising of Sir James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald. 1569. Elizabeth confiscates the territory of the O'Neills. 1570. Sir Thomas Smith murdered while attempting to plant County Down. 1572. Sir James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald surrenders. 1574. Escape of the Earl of Desmond. 1576. Drury and Malby appointed Presidents of Munster and Con- naught. 1577. Massacre of Mullaghmast. 1579. The Desmond Rebellion — Death of Sir James Fitzmaurice— The Earl of Desmond joins the rebels. 1582. Death of Sir John and Sir James Geraldine — Suppression of the rebellion. 1583. Death of the Earl of Desmond. 1586. The Plantation of Munster — Perrot seizes Red Hugh O'Don nell. 1589. Confiscation of Monaghan. 1592. Escape of Red Hugh O'Donnell. 1595. Hugh, Earl of Tyrone, elected The O'Neill. 1599. Campaign of Essex in Munster. 1600. Mount joy commands the English forces. 1603. Surrender of Hugh— Death of Elizabeth. 1607. Flight of Tyrone and Tyrconnel. 1608. Confiscation of six Ulster Counties. 1611. Plantation of Ulster 1612. Plantation of Wexford. 1619. Plantation of Longford and Westmeath. 1622. Plantation of Leitrim and part of Leix and Off ally, 1625. Accession of Charles. 1626. The "graces" promised. 1633. Wentworth appointed Lord Deputy. 1635. Commission of Defective Titles in Connaught. 1640. Wentworth becomes Lord Strafford and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. 1641. Outbreak of the Rebellion. 1642. Owen Roe O'Neill and Colonel Preston land in Ireland — Con- federation of Kilkenny 1646. Battle of Benburb. 1649. Peace signed between the King and the Confederates — The Execution of Charles — Cromwell arrives in Ireland — Death of Owen Roe. 1652. End of the Civil War. 1653. Cromwell begins his Plantation. 1658. Death of Cromwell. 1660. Charles II. declared King. 14 210 TABLE OF DATES. A.D. 1662. The Act of Settlement. 1663. The Court of Claims opens in Dublin. 1685. Accession of James II. 1688. William III. lands in Torbay. 1689. Talbot raises Rapparees for James — Siege of Derry and En- niskillen — James lands at Cork — Convenes Parliament in Dublin — Derry is delivered. 1690. Arrival of William — Battle of the Boyne — Flight of James- First Siege of Limerick — Marlborough captures Cork and Kinsale. 1691. Battle of Aughrim — Siege and Treaty of Limerick. 1692. Emigration of Catholics — Catholics excluded from the Irish Parliament. 1696. Act for disarming Catholics and rendering foreign education penal. 1698. Penal Acts against mixed marriages — Banishment of the Romish Clergy. 1699. Prohibitive tariff on the export of Irish wool. 1701. Roman Catholic Solicitors disqualified. 1702. Accession of Anne. 1704. Penal Acts against Catholics. 1706. Further Acts against Solicitors. 1710. Penal Act against Catholics. 1711. Persecution of Presbyterians. 1713. Swift becomes Dean of St. Patrick's. 1714. Accession of George I. 1719. The English Parliament empowered to make Laws to bind the Irish people — The Irish House of Lords deprived of right to affirm or reverse judgment. 1723. Wood's Patent granted — Cancelled two years later — Potato Famine. 1727. Accession of George II. — Roman Catholics Disfranchised. 1734. Stringent Act against Catholic Solicitors — Berkeley conse- crated Bishop of Cloyne. 1744. Chesterfield made Viceroy. 1745. Lucas enters Parliament— Battles of Fontenoy and Prestonpans. 1746. Terrible Potato Famine— Battle of Culloden. 1759. Riots in Dublin on the Rumor of Union. 1760. Accession of George III. — Denis Daly, Hussy Burgh, and Henry Flood enter Parliament. 1761. Whiteboy Insurrection. 1762. Oakboy Insurrection. 1767. Octennial Act. 1768. Rising of the Steelboys. 1773. Irish National Debt reaches the figure of £1,000,000. 1775. Outbreak of the War of American Independence — Grattan enters Parliament — Troops sent from Ireland against the Colonists — Flood becomes Vice- Treasurer. TABLE OF DATES. 211 A.D. 1776. Embargo on Exports to America. 1778. First Roman Catholic Relief Bill. 1779. Formation of the Irish Volunteers. 1780. Freedom of Trade with the Colonies granted to Ireland. 1782. Grattan's Parliaments. 1783. The Volunteer Convention — Rejection of Flood's Reform Bill. 1784. Agrarian feuds of Orangemen and Defenders. 1786. Anti-Tithe disturbances in Munster. 1789. The Regency difficulty — Outbreak of the French Revolu- tion. 1791. Agitation for Catholic Emancipation — Formation of the So- ciety of United Irishmen. 1792. The Legal Prof ession opened to Catholics — Restrictions on Catholic Education removed — The House of Commons destroyed by fire. 1793. Catholics allowed to vote at Elections — Enfranchisement of 40s. Freeholders — Execution of Louis XVI.— War de- clared by France against England — The Pension List re- vised—Public Debt of Ireland £2,400,000. 1794. Suppression of the Society of United Irishman — Lord Fitz- william appointed Viceroy. 1795. Maynooth College founded and endowed by Parliament — Viceroyalty of Lord Fitzwilliam— Recall of Fitzwilliam Rejection of Reform Bill — Reconstruction of United Irish Society — Tone goes to America. 1796. The Insurrection Act— Extension of United Irish Society — French Fleet appears in Bantry Bay. 1797. Martial Law in Ulster — Reform Bill rejected — Execution of William Orr— National Debt of Ireland £4,000,000. 1798. Abercrombie commands the English Forces — Is succeeded by Lake — Arrest of the Directory of the United Irish Society — The Rebellion — French Expedition to Killala and Lough Swilly — Death of Tone — Execution of Rebels — Proposal of Union. 1799. Resistance to Union. 1800. The Union is passed. 1801. Jan. 1., the Union comes into operation — Irish National Debt, £26,841,219— Act for suspending the Habeas Corpus and empowering the Viceroy to proclaim Martial Law. *1802. Peace of Amiens — United Irishmen released from Fort George — Robert Emmet arrives in Dublin. *1803. The French War resumed — Emmet's rebellion. 1804. Pitt resumes office — Napoleon crowned Emperor — National Debt of Ireland, £43,000,000. The years, since the Union, during which Ireland has been gov- erned by ordinary law are marked with a star (*). 212 TABLE OF DATES. A D. *1805. Catholic Petition presented by Grenville and Fox— The Veto is first hinted at— National Debt of Ireland, £52,000,000. *1806. Death of Pitt— Grenville- Fox ministry— Death of Fox. 1807. No Popery ministry — Wellesley becomes Chief Secretary — Revival of Whiteboyism — Insurrection Act. 1808. Catholic Petition, with Veto, presented by Grattan — The Roman Catholic Prelates protest against the Veto. 1809. Continuation of Catholic agitation— Growth of Orangeism. 1810. Veto and payment of Catholic clergy proposed— Rejected by Irish Catholics — O'Connell becomes Chairman of the Catholic Association — Agitation for Repeal. *1811. Peel becomes Chief Secretary — Insurrection Act expires. -1813. Grattan moves for Catholic Emancipation with Veto. 1814. The Catholic Board is suppressed — Insurrection Act. 1815. Peace of Waterloo— The population of Ireland, 6,000,000— Act passed facilitating Evictions. 1817. Famine and disturbance— Martial law — Military force in Ire- land, 120,000— The Irish National Debt, amounting to £112,704,773, incorporated with that of Great Britain. *1818. Insurrection Act expires. *1819. The six Acts. *1820. Accession of George IV. —Death of Grattan. *1821. Plunket brings in Emancipation Bill — The King visits Ire- land—Population, 6,801,827. 1822. Famine — Insurrection Act— Habeas Corpus suspended. 1823. The Catholic Association formed by O'Connell and Shiel. 1824. The "Catholic rent" represents half -a-million associates. 1825. The Association is suppressed and reconstructed — Govern- ment brings in a Bill for Emancipation with "wings" — Bill rejected by Lords 1826. Exports of grain and Cattle to England worth nearly £8,000,000. 1827. Death of Canning. 1828. Wellington-Peel ministry — Repeal of Test Act and Corpora- tion Act — O'Connell elected for Clare. 1829. Catholic Emancipation — Disfranchisement of the-40s. free- holders. *1830. Accession of William IV. 1831. Stanley's Bill for National Education— Tithe War— Arms Act— Population of Ireland, 7,734,365 ; of England and Wales, 13,894,574 ; of Scotland, 2,365,807. 1832. Tithe War. 1833. Grey's Coercion Act — Church Temporalities Act. • 1834. O'Connell takes up the Repeal Question seriously. 1835. Lord Lieutenant empowered to issue Special Commissions to try off enders— Thomas Drummond becomes Chief Secretary. 1836. Municipal Reform Bill. 1837. Accession of Queen Victoria. TABLE OF DATES. 213 A.D. 1838. Pour Law — Tithe Commutation Act — Father Mathew joins the teetotal movement. 1839. The Precursor Society. 1841. The Peel Ministry — The Repeal Association — Population of Ireland, 8,175,124 ; of England and Wales, 15,906,741 : of Scotland, 2,G20,184. *1842. Foundation of the Young Ireland Party. 1843. The Repeal Year — Arrest of O'Connell and others — The State Trials begin — Value of export provisions to England, £16,000,000— Arms Act. 1844. The Traversers are convicted — Judgment reversed by the House of Lords — The Devon Commission. 1845. The Government Grant to Maynooth increased — Foundation of the Queen's Colleges— Death of Davis— Patato blight. *1846. Commencement of the Famine — Repeal of Corn Laws — £100,000 voted for relief of distress — The embargo on the importation of Indian corn is raised — Smith O'Brien im- prisoned in the Clock Tower — The Young Irelanders se- cede from the Repeal Association — 300,000 persons perish from want and typhus. 1847. Famine — Crime and Outrage Act — Deaths by famine and fever, 500,000 ; Emigration, 200,000 ; Value of Agricul- tural produce, £44,958,120. 1848. The French Revolution— The Abortive Rising. 1849. Encumbered Estates Act. 1850. The Irish Tenant League— Electoral Reform Bill. 1851. Population of Ireland, 6,552,385 , of England and Wales, 17,927,609; of Scotland, 2,888,724; Emigration from Ire - 257,372. 1852. General Election — Many Tenant Leaguers returned — Emi- gration, 368,764. 1854. Foundation of the Catholic University. 1855. Formation of the Palmerston Ministry. 1860. The Land Bill. 1861. Population of Ireland, 5,764,543 ; of England and Wales, 20,061,725 ; of Scotland, 3,061,329. 1862. The M'Manus funeral. 1863. The Irish People newspaper founded. *1864. 1865. Close of the American War — Arrest of the Fenian Leaders — Escape of Stephens — Peace Preservation (Continuance) Act. 1866. Formation of the Derby Ministry. 1867. Fenian Risings— The Manchester Rescue— The Clerkenwell Explosion. 1868. Disraeli becomes Prime Minister — The Reform Bill — Mr. Gladstone declares for Disestablishment of the Irish Church— Dissolution of Parliament. 214 TABLE OF DATES. A.D. 1869. The Liberal Government— The Disestablishment Bill passes. 1870. The Land Act— The Home Rule League. 1871. The Disestablishment Bill comes into operation — Number of Anglicans in Ireland, 600,000 ;— Population, 5,412,407 ; of England and Wales, 22,704,108 ; of Scotland, 3,358,613. 1872. 1873. The Government defeated on the Catholic University Bill — All Tests in Trinity College abolished. 1874. The General Election— Ireland returns 60 Home Rule mem- bers. 1875. Lord Hartington succeeds Mr. Gladstone as Leader of the Opposition — Mr. Parnell enters Parliament. 1877. Failure of the Potato Crop— Mr. Parnell leads the Advanced Home Rulers. 1878. Failure of the potato crop — Agrarian disturbances. 1879. Death of Mr. Butt— Mr. Shaw leads the Home Rulers— Dis- astrous tfailure of crops — Famine — The Land League is founded. 1880. General Election— 62 Home Rulers returned to new Parlia- ment — The Peace Preservation Act lapses — Terrible distress and increase of agrarian disturbances — State Trial of the officers of the Land League. 1881. Mr. Forster's Coercion Act — Imprisonment of Messrs. Davitt and Dillon— The Land Bill— Imprisonment of 918 Sus- pects without trial — The Land League declared illegal — Population of Ireland, 5,159,849 ; of England and Wales, 24,608,391 ; of Scotland, 3,734,370. 1882. Agrarian disturbances— Release of the Leaders— Murder of Lord F. Cavendish and Mr. Burke— The Crimes Act— The Arrears Act — Imprisonment of Mr. Gray — Continued dis- turbances — The National League founded. 1883. Arrest of the Invincibles — Imprisonment of Messrs. Davitt, Healy and Quin — Dynamite outrages — The Parnell Testi- monial. 1884. Parliamentary Reform Bill— Mr. Trevelyan resigns— Redis- tribution Bill. 1885. Resignation of Liberal Ministry — Lord Carnarvon succeeds Lord Spencer — Crimes Act expires in July — General Elec- tion: 86 Nationalists and 18 Conservatives returned to Par- liament — Agricultural Depression. LIST OF AUTHORITIES Alison, Life of Castlereagh. Annual Register, various vol- umes. Barrington, Personal Recollec- tions. Barry, (Stephen), A Plan of Ten- ure Reform for Ireland. Baldwin Brown, Historical Ac- count of the Laws against the Catholics. Butler, Hist. Memoirs of the Eng- lish, Scotch, and Irish Catho- lics. Cairnes Political Essays. Castlereagh, Correspondence. Cloncurry, Personal Recollec- tions. Chronicum Scotorum. Coote, History of the Union. Cornwallis, Correspondence. Curran, Memoirs of Curran. Curry, Review of the Civil Wars. Curry, The State of the Catholics in the 18th Century. Cusack, Miss M. F., History of Ireland. Cusack, Miss M. F., Student's Manual of Irish History. Daunt, J. O'Neill, Ireland and her Agitators. Daunt, J. O'Neill, The Financial Grievances of Ireland. Daunt, J O'Neill, Personal Re- collections of O'Connell. Davis, Life of Curran. Davis, Articles in the Nation. Dillon, J. B. , Articles in the Na- tion. Dillon, William. The Dismal Science. Disraeli, Life of Lord George Bentinck. Duffy' Sir C. G. Young Ireland. Duffy, Sir C. G., Four Years of Irish History. Emerson, Life of Gladstone. Forman, Courage of the Irish Nation. Froude, History of England. Froude, The English in Ireland. Ferguson, The Irish before the Conquest. Gardiner, The first two Stuarts and the Puritan Revolution. George, the Irish Land Question. Godkin, The Irish Land War. Gordon, History of the Irish Re- bellion. Grattan, Life and Times of Henry Grattan. Green, History of the English People. Hansard, Debates. Haverty, History of Ireland. Hitchman, Life of Beaconsfield. Ireland's case briefly stated by a true lover of his King and Country. Irish Poor Laws, past and pres- ent. 216 LIST OF AUTHORITIES. Joyce, Old Celtic Romances. Keating, History of Ireland. Landor, Imaginary Conversa- tions. Lecky, The History of England in the 18th Century. Lecky, Leaders of Public Opin- ion in Ireland. Lingard, History of England. Macauley, History of England. M'Carthy, History of our own Times. M'Carthy, The Four Georges, Vol. I. M'Carthy, J. H., An Outline of Irish History. M'Carthy, J. H., England under Gladstone. M'Gee, James, Sketches of Irish Soldiers in every land. M'Gee, James, the Men of '48. M'Gee, T. D'A., Popular History of Ireland. M'Gee, T. D'A., History of the Irish Settlers in North America. -M'Geoghegan, History of Ireland. M'Nevin, Confiscation of Ulster. M'Nevin, The Irish Volunteers. Madden, History of the Penal Laws. Madden, Lives and Times of the United Irishmen. Maddyn, Ireland and her Rulers Maddyn, Leaders of Parties. Maguire, Life of Father Mathew Meehan, Life of the Geraldines. Meehan, Life of Hugh O'Neill. Memoirs of Ireland, by the author of the Secret History of Eu- rope. Mill, J. S., The Irish Land Ques- tion. Mitchel, Life and Times of Hugh O'Neill. Mitchel, Jail Journal. Mitchel, History of Ireland. Mitchel, Last Conquest of Ire- land (perhaps). Moore, Life of Lord Edward Fitzgerald. Mountmorres, Impartial Reflec- tions upon the present Crisis. Musgrave, Select Passages from the History of the Irish Rebel- lion. Narrative of Visits in '46 and '47 by Members of the Society of Friends. O'Brien, Barry, Fifty Years of Concessions to Ireland. O'Brien, W. Smith, Principles of Government. O'Brien, W. Smith, On the Causes of Diseontent. O'Callaghan, History of the Irish Brigade. O'CaUaghan, The Green Book. O'Connell, John, Life of D. O'Connell O'Connell, John, Commercial In- justices. O' Conor, Militar} r History of the Irish Nation. O'Curry, The Manners and Cus toms of the Ancient Irish. O'Curry, Lectures on Irish His- tory. O' Donovan, Annals of the Four Masters. O'Driscoll, History to the Treaty of Limerick. O' Grady, History of Ireland- Scientific and Philosophical. O' Grady, History of the Heroic Period. Parliamentary Register. Phillips, Life of Curran. Plowden, History of Ireland Plowden, From the Union to the year 1810. LIST OF AUTHORITIES. 217 Real wants of the Irish People. Report of the Commissioners for administering the Poor Law. Spencer, View of the state of Ireland. Stephen, Leslie, Life of Swift. Sullivan, New Ireland. Swift, Tracts and Pamphlets on Ireland. Temple, The Irish Rebellion. Times, Reprinted Articles on the Irish Famine. Tone, Life and Adventures of Wolfe Tone. Trevelyan, The Irish Crisis — be- ing an account of the remedial measures for the Relief of the Famine of '46, ; 47. Walpole, A Short History of the Kingdom of Ireland. Warner, The Rebellion in Ire- land. Warner, History of Ireland. Wright, History of Ireland. Young, Tour in Ireland. Sundry Articles in the Quarterly; Nineteenth Century; Fortnightly Dublin and Saturday Reviews ; and in the daily papers. WHAT SOCIAL CLASSES OWE TO EACH OTHER. By William Graham Sumner, Professor of Political and Social Science in Yale College. 16mo, Cloth, 60 cents. There is no page of the book that is not weighty with meaning. The argument that runs through it is like a chain, strongly weld- ed, link on to link. * * * Prof. Sumner gives clear, pointed, and powerful utterance to much social and political wisdom. The teaching of the hook is just of that sort which is most needed hy the young America of to-day. — Boston Commonwealth. The conclusions he reaches are substantially unanswerable. * * * No more important doctrine than this can well be proclaimed, and our country owes a debt of gratitude to whoever will proclaim it in the sturdy style of this book. We need not despair of the Republic while our young men are fed upon such meat as this. Whether they adopt his conclusions or not, they cannot fail to be stimulated by his reasoning. — The Nation, N. Y. Prof. Sumner has selected a subject of great interest and impor- tance, and has treated it with ingenuity, penetration, and original- ity, and in a plain, homely, pungent, and effective style. — Brooklyn Union. His little book is full of excellent maxims of conduct formed on the manly principle of doing hard work and letting everybody have a fair chance. * * * These eleven short chapters are undoubt- edly the ablest of recent contributions to matters on which much unprofitable ink is spent. — iV. Y. Times. 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By Albert Stickney. 12mo, Cloth, $1 00. Mr. Stickney writes well and forcibly, and some of his propositions are undeniably true His elegantly made and interesting book will be classed with the Utopia of Sir Thomas More and the Republic of Plato. — N. Y. Evening Mail. Mr. Stickney's book will be found very suggestive. He sketches the different kinds of government people have lived under, and reviews our own. Every thinking American should read it. — N. Y. Commercial Ad- vertiser. Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. »;$P The above works sent by mail, postage prepaid, to any part of the United State* or Canada, on receipt of the price. VALUABLE WORKS ON POLITICAL SCIENCE. FISH'S PARLIAMENTARY LAW. American Manual of Parliamentary Law ; or, The Common Law of Deliberative Assemblies. Systematically Arranged for the Use of the Parliamentarian and the Novice. By George T. Fish. 16mo, Cloth, 50 cents; Leather Tucks, $1 00. NEWCOMB'S A B C OF FINANCE. 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Robinson Cru- soe's Money ; or, The Remarkable Financial Fortunes and Misfortunes of a Remote Island Community. Fiction Founded upon Fact. By David A. Wells. Illustrated by Thomas Nast. 8vo, Paper, 50 cents. OLD-WORLD QUESTIONS AND NEW -WORLD AN- SWERS. By Daniel Pidgeon, F.G.S., Assoc. Inst. C. E. 12mo, Paper, 25 cents. ATKINSON'S LABOR AND CAPITAL. Labor and Capi- tal Allies, not Enemies. By Edward Atkinson. 32mo, Paper, 20 cents. Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. jg®- Any of the above works sent by mail, postage prepaid, to any part of the United States or Canada, on receipt of the price, It surpasses all its predecessors. — N. Y. Tribune. A Dictionary of the English Language, Pronouncing, Etymological, and Explanatory, Embracing Scientific and Other Terms, Numer- ous Familiar Terms, and a Copious Selection of Old English Words. By the Rev. James Stormontii. The Pronunciation Carefully Revised by the Rev. P. H. Phelp, M.A. pp. 1248. 4to, Cloth, $6 00; Half Roan, $7 00; Sheep, $7 50. Also in Harper's Franklin Square Library, in Twenty- three Parts. 4to, Paper, 25 cents each Part. Muslin covers for binding supplied by the publishers on receipt of 50 cents. As regards thoroughness of etymological research and breadth of modern inclusion, Stormonth's new dictionary surpasses all its predecessors. * * * In fact. Stormonth's Dictionary possesses merits so many and conspicuous that it can hardly fail to estab- lish itself as a standard and a favorite. —N. Y. Tribune. This may serve in great measure the purposes of an English cyclopaedia. It gives lucid and succinct definitions of the technical terms in science and art, in law and medicine. We have the explanation of words and phrases tbat puzzle most people, showing wonderfully comprehensive and out-of-the-way research. We need only add that the Dictionary appears in all its departments to have been brought down to meet the latest demands of the day, and that it is admirably printed.— Times, London. A most valuable addition to the library of the scholar and of the general reader. It can have for the present no possible rival.— Boston Post. It has the bones and sinews of the grand dictionary of the future. * * * An invalu- able library book. — Ecclesiastical Gazette, London. A work which is certainly without a rival, all things considered, among the dic- tionaries of our language. The peculiarity of the work is that it is equally well adapt- ed to the uses of the man of business, who demands compactness and ease of reference, and to those of the most exigent scholar. — N. Y. Commercial Advertiser. As compared with our standard dictionaries, it is better in type, richer in its vocab- ulary, and happier in arrangement. Its system of grouping is admirable. * * * He who possesses this dictionary will enjoy and use it. and its bulk is not so great as to make use of it a terror.— Christian Advocate, N. Y. A well-planned and carefully executed work, which has decided merits of its own, and for which there is a place not filled by any of its rivals. — N. Y. Sun. A work of sterling value. It has received from all quarters the highest commenda- tion. — Lutheran Observer, Philadelphia. A trustworthy, truly scholarly dictionary of our English language. — Christian Intel' ligencer, N. Y. The issue of Stormonth's great English dictionary is meeting with a hearty wel- come everywhere.— Boston Transcript. A critical and accurate dictionary, the embodiment of good scholarship and the result of modern researches. Compression and clearness are its external evidences, and it offers a favorable comparison with the best dictionaries in use, while it holds an unrivalled place in bringing forth the result of modern philological criticism. — Boston Journal. Full, complete, and accurate, including all the latest words, and giving all their derivatives and correlatives. The definitions are short, but plain, the method of mak- ing pronunciation very simple, and the arrangement such as to give the best results in the smallest space.— Philadelphia Inquirer. Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. ,^= Hakper & Brothers will send the above ivork by mail, postage prepaid, to any part of the United States or Canada, on receipt of the price. HARPER'S BAZAR FOR 1886, The new volume of Harper's Bazar offers a host of brilliant attractions designed to interest every member of the family circle. It will continue to combine the choicest literature and the finest illustrations with the latest fashions, the most useful house- hold knowledge, the best methods of household decoration, the newest usages of social etiquette, and all the arts that make home attractive. Its weekly plates of the latest Paris and New York styles, with its well-fitting patterns, and its descriptions of the materials and styles in vogue, instruct its readers how to save many times the cost of subscription by being their own dressmakers, and making over their wardrobes to suit the mode of the day. It spreads the changes of fashion throughout the length and breadth of the land, and enables ladies in the remotest country towns to dress as taste- fully as those dwelling in the metropolis. Its papers on house-keeping, cooking, the management of servants, and all household matters, are from the best sources, and are eminently practical. 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