"T! I'll iiimwwwH IHOMB UNFVBRSrrY LIBRARy WPPf ■J -V&«K- '<'<-^' '. \^ iOI^^^^^B 5T-'---i?«Pijr ■, :r-' 7Jir^'f*v;f,!|^ THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS UBRARY From the library of Marian E. Sparks »95 Purchased, 1929 941.5 Cop.Z REMOTE ■\ ^ ff^rf-' VK^-i- Ir'- ■i:. V Return this book oft or before the Latest Date stamped below. University of Illinois Library nno 1 Q IOC? L161— H41 .'V 2 1* f 1> %,. HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE ^ No. 6 - . BJiton: HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A. Prop. GILBERT MURRAY, LiTT.D., LL.D., F.B.A. Prof. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A. Prov. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A. V :m ■" THE HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE VOLUMES NOW READY HIBTOKY or WAB Aim FEA.CB . G. H. Pibbib POLAS EXFLOBAHON Db.W.8.Bbuok,IXi.D.^.B.S^ THB rBSKCH BBYOLUTION . . . Hilaebb Bhlloo, M.P. THE 8TO0K EXCHAKGE : A Shobt Study ovlKTBSTHBBTAiiDSnoviJkTioK F. W. Hmsr ntlSH NATIONAIiTTT AiJOB Stoftobd Obxbk THE SOCIAL MOYEMENT .... J. Bambat Macdovald, H.P. PABUAMENT : Its Histobt, Cohbtitu- TIOB, ABD PBAOnOB SiB COITBTBAT ILBBBT, E.C.B., E.C.8.I. MODEBN OEOGBAPHT Habioh L KawBraor, D.S.C. (Lond.) WTTiTiTAM SHAKESPEABE .... Johh Mabbfiblo. THE EVOLUTION OF PLANTS . . D.H.8oott,M.A.,LL.D.,F.B.S. VOLUMES READY IN JULY THE OPENXNCkUP OF AFBICA . . Sot H. H. Jobbbtoh, O.C.H.O., K.C.B., D.So., F.Z.S. HEBLfiYAL EUBOPE H. W. oA>ATig, VLJl. MOHAMTifWPASISM D. S. Haboouovtb, M.A., D.LlTT. THE BCIEirCE OF WEALTH . . . J. A. Hobson, M.A. HEALTH AMD DISEASE W. Lbbub Hacbbbzib, M.D. IKTBODUCTION TO MATHEMATICS A. K. Whitbhbad, So.D. F.B.S. THE ANIMAL WOBLD . . . . ^ . F. W. Oaxblb, D.So., F.BS. EVOLUTION . J. Abteub Thokbon, M.A., and Patbick Gbddbs, M.A. TJBKBALTSM L. T. Hoehousb, M.A. CBDIE AND mSANITT Db. C. A. Mbbqibb, F.B.O.P., F.B.C.8. %* Other TolnineB In acUve prepantion IRISH NATIONALITY BY ALICE STOPFORD GREEN ^ AUTHOR OF **TOWN LIFE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY " *< HENRY II,*' <*THE MAKING OF IRELAND," ETC. NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY LONDON WILLIAMS AND NORGATE C Copyright, 1911, HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY THB UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. 5v™;"rs?'P.~^7rT'^'; ■ REMOTE STORACe CONTENTS CHAF. FAGB I The Gaels in Ireland 7 II Ireland and Europe ....... 29 III The Irish Mission . 40 IV Scandinavians in Ireland 57 V The First Irish Revival 77 VI The Norman Invasion 96 VII The Second Irish Revival » . . . Ill VIII The Taking of jhe Land . . . , . 135 IX The National Faith of the Irish . . 141 X Rule of the Enoush Paruament . . 158 XI The Rise of a New Ireland .... 182 XII An^ Irish Paruament 198 XIII Ireland under the Union 219 Some Irish Writers on Irish History 255 677094 ▼ .vp. -■^■^^;;-..-' ' lvi«ri?v '"■ ;i.- >[■;■ [- IN MEMORY OF THE IRISH DEAD { lEISH NATIONALITY i CHAPTER I THE GAELS IN IRELAND Ireland lies the last outpost of Europe against the vast flood of the Atlantic Ocean; unlike all other islands it is circled round with mountains, whose precipitous cliffs ris- ing sheer above the water stand as bulwarks throwii up against the immeasurable sea. It is commonly supposed that the fortunes of the island and its civilisation must by nature hang on those of England. Neither history nor geography allows this theory. The life of the two countries was widely separated. Great Britain lay turned to the east; her harbours opened to the sunrising, and her first traffic was across the narrow waters of the Channel and the German Sea. But Ireland had another aspect; her natural 7 -■,..--:f. 8 IRISH NATIONALITY harbours swelled with the waves of the Atlantic, her outlook was over the ocean, and long before history begins her sailors braved the perils of the Gaulish sea. The peoples of Britain, Celts and English, came to her from the opposite lowland coasts; the people of Ireland crossed a wider ocean-track, from northern France to the shores of the Bay of Biscay. The two islands had a different history; their trade-routes were not the same; they lived apart, and developed apart their civilisations. We do not know when the Gaels first entered Ireland, commg according to ancient Irish legends across the Gaulish sea. One invasion followed another, and an old Irish tract gives the definite Gaelic monarchy as beginning in the fourth century B.C. They drove the earlier peoples, the Iberians, from the stupendous stone forts and earthen en- trenchments that guarded cliffs and moun- tain passes.* The name of Erin recalls the ancient inhabitants, who lived on under the new rulers, more in number than their con- querors. The Gaels gave their language and their organisation to the coimtry, while THE GAELS IN IRELAND 9 many customs and traditions of the older race lingered on and penetrated the new people. Over a thousand years of undisturbed life lay before the Gaels, from about 300 B.C. to 800 A.D. The Roman Empire which overran Great Britain left Ireland outside it. The barbarians who swept over the provinces of the empire and reached to the great Roman Wall never crossed the Irish Sea. Out of the grouping of the tribes there emerged a division of the island into districts made up of many peoples. Each of the prov- inces later known as Ulster, Leinster, Mun- ster and Connacht had its stretch of seaboard and harbours, its lakes and rivers for fishing, its mountain strongholds, its hill pastures, and its share of the rich central plain, where the cattle from the mountains "used to go in their running crowds to the smooth plains of the province, towards their sheds and their full cattle-fields." All met in the middle of the island, at the Hill of Usnech, where the Stone of Division still stands. There the high-king held his court, as the chief lord in the confederation of the many states. The V ■ 1 10 miSH NATIONALITY rich lands of Meath were the high-king's domain. Heroic tales celebrate the prehistoric con- flicts as of giants by which the peoples fixed the boundaries of their power. They tell of Conor Mac Nessa who began to reign in the year that Mark Antony and Cleopatra died, and' of his sister's son Cuchulain, the champion of the north, who went out to battle from the vast entrenchments still seen in Emain Macha near Armagh. Against him Queen Maeve gathered at her majestic fort of Rathcroghan in Roscommon fifteen hun- dred royal mercenaries and Gaulish scJdiers — a woman comely and white-faced, with gold yellow hair, her crimson cloak fastened at the breast with a gold pin, and a spear flaming in her hand, as she led her troops across the Boyne. The battles of the heroes on the Boyne and the fields of Louth, the thronged entrenchments that thicken round the Gap of the North and the mountain pass from Dundalk and Newry into the plains of Armagh and Tyrone, show how the soldiers' line of march was the same from the days of Cuchulain to those of William of Orange. THE GAELS IN IRELAND II The story tells how the whole island shared in the great conflict, to the^ extreme point of Munster, where a rival of Cuchulain, Curoi son of Dare, had sent his knights and war- riors through all Ireland to seek out the greatest stones for his fortress, on a shelf of rock over two thousand feet above the sea near Tralee. The Dublin Museum preserves relics of that heroic time, the trappings of war-chariots and horses, arms and ornaments. Amid such conflicts the Connacht kings pressed eastward from tJsnech to Tara, and fixed there the centre of Irish life. The Gaelic conquerors had entered on a wealthy land. Irish chroniclers told of a vast antiquity, with a shadowy line of mon- archs reaching back, as they boasted, for some two thousand years before Christ: they had legends of lakes springing forth in due order; of lowlands cleared of wood, the appearance of rivers, the making of roads and causeways, the first digging of wells: of the making of forts; of invasions and battles and plagues. They told of the smelt- ing of gold near the Liffey about 1500 B.C. and of the Wicklow artificer who made cups 12 IRISH NATIONALITY and brooches of gold and silver, and sflver shields, and golden chains for the necks of kings; and of the discovery of dyes, purple and blue and green, and how the ranks of men were distinguished hencefor^ by the colour of their raiment. They had; traditions of foreign trade — of an artificer drowned while bringing golden ore from Spain, and of torques of gold from oversea, and of a lady's hair all ablaze with Alpine gold. Later researches have in fact shown that Irish commerce went back some fifteen him- dred years before our era, that it was the most famous gold-producing country of the west, that mines of copper and silver were worked, and that a race of goldsmiths prob- ably carried on the manufacture of bronze and gold on what is now the bog of Cullen. Some five hundred golden ornaments of old times have been gathered together in the Dublin Museum in the last eighty years, a scanty remnant of what have been lost or melted down; their weight is five hundred and seventy ounces against a weight of tewnty ounces in the British Museum from England, Scotland, and Wales. THE GAELS IN IRELAND IS The earth too was fruitful. The new settlers, who used iron tools instead of bronze, could clear forests and open plains for tillage. Agriculture was their pride, and their legends told of stretches of com so great that deer could shelter in them from the hounds, and nobles and queens drove chariots along their far-reaching lines, while multitudes of reapers were at work cutting the heads of the grain with the little sickles which we may still see in the Dublin Museum. But to the Irish the main interest of the Gaels lies in their conception of how to create an enduring state or nation. r The tribal system has been much derided as the mark of a savage people, or at least of a race unable to advance beyond poUtical infancy into a real national existence. This was not true of the Gaels. Their essential idea of a state, and the mod^ of its govern- ment and preservation, was . different from that of mediaeval Europe, but it was not uncivilised. The Roman Empire stamped on the minds of its subject peoples, and on the Teutonic barbarians who became its heirs, the notion 14 IRISH NATIONALITY of a state as an organisation held together, defended, governed and policed, by a central ruler; while the sovereign was supreme in the domain of force and maintenance of order, whatever lay outside that domain^— art, learning, history and the like — were second- ary matters which might be left to the people. The essential life of the nation came to be expressed in the will and power of its master. The Gaehc idea was a wholly different one. The law with them was the law of the people. They never lost their trust in it. Hence they never exalted a central authority, for their law needed no such sanction. While the code was one for the whole race, the adminis- tration on the other hand was divided ipto the widest possible range of self-governing communities, which were bound together in a wiUing federation. The forces of union were not material but spiritual, and the life of the people consisted not in its military cohesion but in its joint spiritual inheritance — in the union of those who shared the same tradition, the same glorious memory of heroes, the same unquestioned law, and the same pride of Uterature. Such an instinct THE GAELS IN IRELAND 15 of national life was neither rude nor con- temptible, nor need we despise it because it was opposed to the theory of the middle ages in Europe. At the least the Irish tribal scheme of government contained as much promise 'of human virtue and happiness as the feudal scheme which became later the political creed of England, biit which was never accepted in Ireland. Irish history can only be understood by realising this intense national Ufe with its sure basis on the broad self-government of the people. Each tribe was supreme within its own borders; it elected its own chief, and could depose him if he acted against law. The land belonged to the whole community, which kept exact pedigrees of the families who had a right to share in the ground for tillage or in the mountain pasturage; and the chief had no power over the soil save as the elected trustee of Uie people. The privileges of the various chiefs, judges, captains, historians, poets, and so on, were handed down from generation to generation. In all these matters no external power could interfere. The tribe owed to the greater tribe above it nothing 16 IRISH NATIONALITY but certain fixed dues, such as aid in road- making, in war, in ransom of prisoners and the like. The same right of self-government extended through the whole hierarchy of states up to the Ardri or high-king at the head. The "hearth of Tara" was the centre of all the Gaelic states, and the demesne of the Ardri. "This^ then is my fostermother," said the ancient sage, " the island in which ye are, even Ireland, and the familiar knee of this island is the hill on which ye are, namely, Tara." There the Ardri was crowned at the pillar-post. At Tara, "the fort of poets and learned men," the people of all Ireland gailiered at the beginning of each high-king's reign, and were entertained for seven days and nights — kings and ollaves together round the high-king, warriors and reavers, to- gether, the youths and maidens and the proud foolish folk in the chambers round the doors, while outside was for young men and maidens because their mirth used to entertain them. Huge earthen banks still mark the site of the great Hall, seven hundred and sixty feet long and ninety feet wide, with seven doors •:;?^»«?*^r?'»^~ >?-,*?- ■**•<''■*;*:>, ^'' ' ■ j ' v*v '-"■' ,^ - v" .■», ■ ?■■■ ■'?.■ ^■: THE GAELS IN IREiLAND 17 to east and as many more to west; where kings and chiefs sat each under his own shield, in crimson cloaks with gold brooches, with girdles and shoes of gold, and spears with golden sockets and rivets of red bronze. The Ardri, supreme lord and arbitrator among them, was surrounded by his coun- cillors — the law-men or brehons, the bards and chroniclers, and the druids, teachers and men of science. He was the representative of the whole national life. But his power rested on the tradition of the people and on the consent of the tribes. He could impose no new law; he could demand no service outside the law. The political bond of union, which seemed so loose, drew all its strength from a body of national tradition, and a universal code of law, which represented as it were the common mind of the people, the spontaneous creation of the race. Separate and independent as the tribes were, all accepted the one code which had been fashioned in the course of ages by the genius of the people. The same law was recited in every tribal assembly. The same traditions and genealogies bound the tribes 18 IRISH NATIONALITY together as having, a single heritage of heroic descent and fame. The preservation of their common history was the concern of the whole people. One of the tales pictm«s their gathering at Tara, when before the men of Ireland the ancients related their history, and Ireland's chief scholars heard and corrected them by the best tradition. "Victory and blessings attend you, noble sirs," the men of Erin said; "for such in- struction it was meet that we should gather ourselves together." And at the recit- ing of the historic glories of their past, the whole congregation arose up together **for in their eyes it was an augmenting of the spirit and an enlargement of the mind." To preserve this national tradition a learned class was carefully trained. There were schools of lawyers to expound the law; schools of historians to preserve the genealo- giesV the boundaries of lands, and the rights of classes and families; and schools of poets to recite the traditions of the race. The learned men were paid at first by the gifts of the people, but the chief among them were later endowed with a settled share of the ^^JSt*' " ''?* """*"" "■:-^ ■ '~ :' ' ' ■•■ • "•' ■ •'■ ^;*^'i•^•?^'* '.■■:' .'.. THE GAELS IN IRELAND 19 tribe land in perpetuity. So long as the fam- ily held the land, they were bound to train up in each generation that one of the house- hold who was most fit to carry on learning, and thus for centuries long lines of distin- guished men added fame to their coimtry and drew to its schools students from far and wide. Through their work the spirit of the Irish found national expression in a code of law which showed not only extraordinarily acute and trained intelligence but a true sense of equity, in a literary language of great richness and of the utmost musical beauty, and in a system of meterical rules for poets shaped with infinite skill. The Irish nation had a pride in its language beyond any people in Europe outside of the Greeks and Romans. While each tribe had its schools, these were linked together in a national system. Pro- fessors of every school were free of the island; it was the warrior's duty to protect them as they moved from court to court. An ancient tale tells how the chiefs of Emain near Armagh placed sentinels along the Gap of the North to tiu-n back every poet who sought to "■:}■. m IRISH NATIONALITY leave the country and to bring on their way with honour every one who sought to enter in. There was no stagnation where compe- tition extended over the whole island. The greatest of the teachers were given the dignity of "Professors of all the Gaels." Learned men in their degrees ranked with kings and chiefs, and high-professors sat by the high- king and shared his honours. The king, said the laws, "could by his mere word decide against every class of persons except those of the two orders of religion and learning, who are of equal value with himself.** It is in this exaltation of learning in the national life that we must look for the real significance of Irish history — the idea of a society loosely held in a political sense', but bound together in a spiritual union. The assemblies which took place in every province and every petty state were the guarantees of the* national civilization. They were periodical exhibitions of everything the peo- ple esteemed — democracy, aristocracy, king- craft, literature, tradition, art, commerce, law, sport, religion, display, even rustic buflPoonery. The years between one festival w- ji THE GAELS IN IRELAND 21 *and another were spent in serious preparation for the next; a multitude of maxims were drawn up to direct the conduct of the people. So deeply was their importance felt that the Irish kept the tradition diligently, and even in the darkest times of their history, down to the seventeenth century, still gathered to "meetings on hiUs" to exercise their law and hear their learned men. - In the time of the Roman Empire, there- fore, the Irish looked on themselves as one race, obedient to one law, imited in one culture and belonging to one country. Their unity is symbolised by the great genealogical compilations in which all the Gaels are traced to one ancestry, and in the collections of topographical legends dealing with hundreds of places, where every nook and comer of the island is supposed to be of interest to the whole of Ireland. The tribal boundaries were limits to the material power of a chief and to that only: they were no barriers to the national thought or union. The learned man of the clan was the learned man of the Gaelic •race. By all the higher matters of language and learning, of equity and history, the people '■-'.'•'cr; 22 IRISH NATIONALITY of Ireland were one. A noble figure told the unity of their land within the circuit of the ocean. The Three Waves of Erin, they said, smote upon the shore with a foreboding roar when danger threatened the island; Cleena's wave called to Munster at an inlet near Cork, while Tonn Rury at Dundrum and Tonn Tuaithe at the mouth of the Bann sounded to the men of Ulster. The weaknesses of the Irish system are apparent. The numerous small territories were tempted, like larger European states, to raid borders, to snatch land or booty, and to suffer some expense of trained soldiers. Candidates for the chief dom had to show their fitness, and "a young lord's first spoil'* was a necessary exploit. There were wild plundering raids in the summer nights; dis- orders were multiplied. A country divided in government was weakened for purposes of offence, or for joint action in military matters. These evils were genuine, but they have been exaggerated. Common action was hindered, not mainly by human contentions, but by the forests and marshes, lakes and rivers in flood that lay over a country heavy '•.'n?«^??i.r'™^wiifr5^ THE GAELS IN IRELAND 2S with Atlantic clouds. Riots and forays there were, among a martial race and strong men of hot passions, but Ireland was in fact no promi- nent example of mediaeval anarchy or dis- order. Local feuds were no greater than those which afflicted England down to the Nor- man Conquest and long after it; and which marked the life of European states and cities through the middle ages. The professional war bands of Fiana that hired themselves out from time to time were controlled and recog- nised by law, and had their special organi- sation and rites and rules of war. It has been supposed that in the passion of tribal disputes men mostly perished by murder and battle- slaughter, and the life of every generation was by violence shortened to less than the common average of thirty years. Irish gen- ealogies prove on the contrary that the gener- ations must be counted at from thirty-three to thirty-six years: the tale of kings, judges, poets, and householders who died peace- fully in an honoured old age, or from some natural accident, outruns the list of sudden murders or deaths in battle. Historical evidence moreover shows us a country oiE '\ Tv^r^W"Y^ :i . ">■' i'?''i*f t 24 miSH NATIONALITY widening cornfields, or growing commerce, where wealth was gathered, where art and learning swept like a passion over the people, and schools covered the land. Such indus- tries and virtues do not flourish in regions given over to savage strife. And it is signifi- cant that Irish chiefs who made great wars hired professional soldiers from oversea. If the disorders of the Irish system have been magnified its benefits have been for- gotten. All Irish history proved that the division of the land into separate military districts, where the fighting men knew every foot of ground, and had an intense local patriotism, gave them a power of defence which made conquest by the foreigner im- possible; he had first to exterminate the entire people. The same division into ad- ministrative districts gave also a singular authority to law. In mediseval states, how- ever excellent were the central codes, they were only put in force just so far as the king had power to compel men to obey, and that power often fell very far short of the nominal boundaries of his kingdom. But in Ireland every community and every individual was ,-io->^,^ • '^^ -yr' •*• , ^*^f-" ,'' rf . ■ V'-"^:^,;.- Y- ■■ '^1^,^-'^^rKf^'fr^^^^ ' •'■ 7: f-fcP.TW'-TV"??!'^^??!*/ THE GAELS IN IRELAND 25 interested in maintaining the law of the peo- ple, the protection of the common folk; nor were its landmarks ever submerged or de- stroyed. Irish land laws, for example, in spite of the changes that gradually covered the land with fenced estates, did actually pre- serve through all the centuries popular rights — fixity of rates for the land, fixity of tenure, security of improvement, refusal to allow great men to seize forests for their chase: under this people's law no Peasant Rev(dt ever arose, nor any rising of the poor against their lords. Rights of inheritance, due solemnities of election, were accurately pre- served. The authority and continuity of Irish law was recognised by wondering Englishmen — "They observe and keep such laws and statutes which they make upon hills in their country firm and stable, without breaking them for any favour or reward,'* said an English judge. "The Irish are more fear- ful to offend the law than the English or any other nation whatsoever." The tribal system had another benefit for Irishmen — the diffusion of a high intelli- gence among the whole people. A varied 7"»)pin^iT»5f^»!!v* 26 miSH NATIONALITY education, spread over many centres, fer- tilized the general life. Every countryside that administered its own affairs must of needs possess a society rich in all the activities that go to make up a full community — chiefs, doctors, soldiers, judges, historians, poets, artists and craftsmen, skilled herds, tillers of the ground, raisers and trainers of horses, innkeepers, huntsmen, merchants, dyers and weavers and tknners. In some sequestered places in Ireland we can still trace the settle^ ments made by Irish communities. They^ built no towns nor needed any in the modem sense. But entrenchments of earth, or **raths," thickly gathered together, mark a site where men lived in close association. Roads and paths great and small were maintained according to law, and boats carried travellers along rivers and lakes. So frequent were the journeys of scholars, traders, messengers from tribe to tribe, men gathering to public assemblies, craftsmen, dealers in hides and wool, poets, men and women making their circuit, that there was made in early time a "road-book "or itinerary, perhaps some early form of map, of Ireland. 1 rTlvrr^''^ '■ ^ '' ^ '/.. 'Y '.*'"'" '■■ :;-'C>''. .;■.'■ t.'tT;' r^.jn-WW^JI0Tp|^^ SO miSH NATIONALITY It is important to observe what it was that tribal Ireland chose, and what it rejected. There was frequent trade, for from the first century Irish ports were well known to merchants of the Empire, sailing across the Gaulish sea in wooden ships built to confront Atlantic gales, with high poops standing from the water like castles, and great leathern sails — stout hulls steered by the bom sailors of the Breton coasts or the lands of the Loire and Garonne. The Irish themselves served as sailors and pilots in the ocean traffic, and travelled as merchants, tourists, scholars and pilgrims. Trading-ships carried the wine of Italy and later of Provence, in great tuns in which three men could stand upright, to the eastern and the western coasts, to the Shan- non and the harbours of Down; and prob- ably brought tin to mix with Irish copper. Ireland sent out great dogs trained for war, wool, hides, all kinds of skins and furs, and perhaps gold and copper. But this material trade was mainly important to the Irish for the other wealth that Gaul had to give — art, learning, and religion. Of art the Irish craftsmen took all that Gaul IRELAND AND EUROPE U p^ossessed — the great decorated trumpets of bronze used in the Loire country, the fine enamelling in coloiu's, the late-Celtic designs for ornaments of bronze and gold. Gold- smiths travelled oversea to bring back brace- lets, rings, draughtboards — "one half of its figures are yellow gold, the others are white bronze; its woof is of pearl; it is the wonder of smiths how it was wrought." They bor- rowed afterwards interlaced ornament for metal work and illuminated manuscripts. In such arts they outdid their teachers; their gold and enamel work has never been sur- passed, 4nd in writing and illumination they went beyond the imperial artists of Con- stantinople. Their schools throughout the country handed on a great traditional art, not transitory or local, but permanent and national. Learning was as freely imported. The Latin alphabet came over at a very early time, and knowledge of Greek as a living tongue from Marseilles and the schools oi Nar- bonne. By the same road from Marseilles Christianity must have come a hundred yeara or so before the mission of St. Patrick — a ■ ., - . ■ 1 82 miSH NATIONALITY Chpistiamty carrying the traditions and rites and apocalypses of the East. It was frpm Gaul that St. Patrick afterwards sailed for^his mission to Ireland. He came to a land whiere there were already Imen of erudition and "rhetoricians" who scofiFed at his lack of education. The tribes of Ireland, free from barbarian invasions as they had been free from Roman armies, developed a culture which was not surpassed in the West or even in Italy. And this culture, like the art, was national, spread over the whole land. But while the Irish drew to themselves from the Empire art, learning, religion, they never adopted anything of Roman methods of government in church or state. The Ro- man centralized authority was opposed to their whole habit of thought and genius. They made, therefore, no change in their tri- bal administration. As early as the second century Irishmen had learned from Gaulish landowners to divide land into estates marked out with pillar-stones which could be bought and sold, and by 700 a.d. the country was scored with fences, and farms were freely bequeathed by will. But these estates seem iy-5S'": - IRELAND AND EUROPE 88 still to have been administered according to the common law of the tribe, and not to have followed the methods of Roman proprietors throughout the Empire. In the same way the foreign learning brought into Ireland was taught through the tribal system of schools. Lay schools formed by the Druids in old time went on as before, where students of law and history and poetry grouped their huts round the dwelling of a famous teacher, and the poor among them begged their bread in the neighbourhood. The monasteries in like manner gathered their scholars within the "rath" or earthem entrenchment, and taught them Latin, canon law, and divinity. Mon- astic and lay schools went on side by side, as heirs together of the national tradition and language. The most venerable saints, the highest ecclesiastics, were revered also as guardians of Irish history and law, who wrote in Irish the national tales as competent scribes and not mere copyists — men who knew all the traditions, used various sources, and shaped their story with the independence of learning. :^o parallel can be found in any other country to the writing down of national epics in their I 84 IRISH NATIONALITY pagan form many centuries after the country had become Christian. In the same way European culture was hot allowed to suppress the national language; clerics as well as lay- men preserved the native tongue in worship and in hymns, as at Clonmacnois where the praises of St. Columcille were sung, "some in Latin, which was beguiling, some in Irish, fair the tale"; and in its famous cemetery, where kings and scholars and pilgrims of all Ireland came to lie, there is but one Latin inscription among over two hundred inscribed grave slabs that have been saved from the many lost. Like the learning and the art, the new worship was adapted to tribal custom. Round the little monastic church gathered a group of huts with a common refectory, the whole protected by a great rampart of earth. The plan was familiar to all th6 Irish; every chief's house had such a fence, and every bardic school had its circle of thatched cells where the scholars spent years in study and meditation. Monastic "families" which branched off from the first house were grouped under the name of the originkl founder, in free federal union like that of 'Y!5f^5HB3«71V'r>^''.'7^?l'"^''^;?'''V : ■ .".•:'■•''.-.' P*-, '•" _?;■'■■ W-.-'P'.-; IRELAND AND EUROPE 35 the clans. As no land could be wholly alien- ated from the tribe, territory given to the monastery was not exempted from the com- mon law; it was ruled by abbots elected, like kings and judges of the tribe, out of the house which under tribal law had the right of succession; and the monks in some cases had to pay the tribal dues for the land and send out fighting men for the hosting. Never was a church so truly national. The words used by the common people were steeped in its imagery. In their dedications the Irish took no names of foreign saints, but of their own holy men. St. Bridgit became the "Mary of the Gael." There was scarcely a boundary felt between the divine country and the earthly, so entirely was the spiritual life commingled with the national. A legend told that St. Colman one day saw his monks reaping the wheat sorrowfully; it was the day of the celebration of Telltown fair, the yearly assembly of all Ireland before the high- king: he prayed, and angels came to him at once from heaven and performed three races for the toiling monks after the manner of the national feast. '." .'/■ f ■ "^ ",■ V7\^' 36 IRISH NATIONALITY The religion which thus sprang out of the heart of a people and penetrated every part of their national life, shone with a radiant spiritual fervour. The prayers and hymns that survive from the early church are in- spired by an exalted devotion, a profound and original piety, which won the veneration of every people who came into touch with the people of Ireland. On mountain cliffs, in valleys, by the water-side, on secluded islands, lie ruins of their churches and ora- tories, small in size though made by masons who could fit and dovetail into one another" great stones from ten to seventeen feet in length; the little buildings preserved for cen- turies some ancient tradition of apostolic measurements, and in their narrow and austere dimensions, and their intimate solem- nity, were fitted to the tribal communities and to their unworldly and spiritual worship. An old song tells of a saint building, with a wet cloak about him — "Hand on a stone, hand lifted up, •> Knee bent to set a rock. Eyes shedding tears, other lamentation. And mouth praying." IRELAND AND EUROPE 37 Piety did not always vanquish the pas- sions of a turbulent age. There were local quarrels and battles. In some hot temporal controversy, in some passionate religious rivalry, a monastic "rath" may have fallen back to its original use as a fort. Plunderers fell on a trading centre like Clonmacnois, where goods landed from the Shannon for transport across country offered a prize. Such things have been known in other lands. But it is evident that disturbances were not universal or continuous. The extraordinary work of learning carried out in the monastic lands, the sanctuary given in them for hundreds of years to innumerable scholars not of Ireland alone, shows the large peace that must have prevailed on their territories. The national tradition of monastic and lay schools preserved to Erin what was lost in the rest of Europe, a learned class of laymen. Cultiu'e was as frequent and honourable in the Irish chief or warrior as in the cleric. Gaiety and wit were prized. Oral tradition told for many centuries of a certain merry- man long ago, and yet he was a Christian, who could make all men he ever saw laugh !ir i: •^'d-^^fr T 88 IRISH NATIONALITY however sad they were, so that even his skull on a high stone in the churchyard brought mirth to sorrowful souls. We must remember, too, that by the Irish system Certain forms of hostility were absolutely shut out. There is not a single instance in Irish history of the conflicts between a monastery and its lay dependents which were so frequent on the continent and in England — as, for example, at St. Albans, where the monks paved their church with the querns of the townsfolk to compel them to bring their com to the abbey mill. Again, the broad tolerance of the church in Ireland never allowed any persecution for reUgion's sake, and thus shut the door on the worst form of human cruelty. At the invasion of the Normans a Norman bishop mocked to the archbishop of Cashel at the imperfec- tion of a church like the Irish which could boast of no martyr. "The Irish," answered the archbishop," have never been accustomed to stretch forth their hands against the saints of God, but now a people is come into this country that is accustomed and knows how to make martyrs. Now Ireland too - ■ / .- IRELAND AND EUROPE 39 will have martyrs." Finally, the Irish church never became, as in other lands, the servant, the ally, or the master of the state. It was the companion of the people, the heart of the nation. To its honour it never served as the instrument of political dominion, and it never was degraded from first to last by a war of religion. The free tribes of Ireland had therefore by some native instinct of democratic life re- jected for their country the organisation of the Roman state, and had only taken the highest forms of its art, learning, and reli- gion, to enrich their ancient law and tradi- tion: and through their own forms of social life they had made this culture universal among the people, and national. Such was the spectacle of Uberty which the imperial Agricola had feared. ^, CHAPTER m THE miSH MISSION c. 560-c. 1000 The fall of the Roman Empire brought to the Irish people new dangers and new opportunities. Goths and Vandals, Burgund- ians and Franks, poured west over Europe to the Atlantic shore, and south across the Mediterranean to Africa; while the English were pressing northward over Great Britain, driving back the Celts and creating a pagan and Teutonic England. Once more Ireland lay the last unconquered land of the West. The peoples that lay in a circle round the shores of the German Ocean were in the thick of human affairs, nations to right and left of them, all Europe to expand in. From the time when their warriors fell on the Roman Empire they rejoiced in a thousand years of uninterrupted war and conquest; and for the 40 V'- THE miSH MISSION 41 thousand years that followed traders, now from this shore of the German sea and now from that, have fought and trafficked over the whole earth. In Ireland, on the other hand, we see a race .of the bravest warriors that ever fought, who had pushed on over the Gaulish sea to the very marge and limit of the world. Close ji at their back now lay the German invaders * of Britain — a new wave of the human tide always flowing westward. Before them stretched the Atlantic, darkness and chaos; no boundary known to that sea. Even now as we stand to the far westward on the gloomy heights of Donegal, where the very grass and trees have a blacker hue, we seem to have entered into a vast antiquity, where it would be little wonder to see in the sombre solitude some strange shape of the primeval world, some huge form of primitive man's imagination. So closely did Infinity com- pass these people roimd that when the Irish sailor — St. Brendan or another — ^launched his coracle on the illimitable waves, in face of the everlasting storm, he might seem to pass * over the edge of the earth into the vast Eter- i " 4» IRISH NATIONALITY nity where space and time were not. We s6e the awful fascination of the immeasurable flood in the story of the three Irishmen that were washed on the shores of Cornwall and carried to "King :^lfred. "They came," Alfred tells us in his chronicle, "in a boat without oars from Hibemia, whence they had stolen away because for the love of God they would be on pilgrimage — they recked not where. The boat in which they fared was wrought of three hides and a half, and they took with them enoughmeat forsevennights." Ultimately withdrawn from the material business of the continent nothing again drew back the Irish to any share in the affairs of Europe save a spiritual call — a call of religion, of learning, or of liberty. The story of the Irish mission shows how they answered to such a call. The Teutonic invaders stopped at the Irish Sea. At the fall of the Empire, therefore, Ireland did not share in the ruin of its civili- sation. And while all continental roads were interupted, traffic from Irish ports still passed safely to Gaul over the ocean routes. Ireland therefore not only preserved her THE IRISH MISSION 48 culture unharmed, but the way lay open for her missionaries to carry back to Europe the knowledge which she had received from it. In that mission we may see the strength and the spirit of the tribal civilisation. Two great leaders of the Irish mission were Coliimcille in Great Britain and Columbanus in Europe. In all Irish history there is no greater figure than St. Columcille — states- man and patriot, poet, scholar, and saint. After founding thirty-seven monasteries in Ireland, from Derry on the northern coast to Durrow near the Munster border, he crossed the sea in 563 to set up on the bare island of Hii or lona a group of reed-thatched huts peopled with Irish monks. In that wild debatable land, swept by heathen raids, amid the ruins of Christian settlements, b^an a work equally astonishing from the religious and the political point of view. The heathen Ficts had marched westward to the sea, de- stroying the Celtic churches. The pagan English had set up in 547 a monarchy in Northumbria and the Lowlands, threatening alike the Picts, the Irish or "Scot*' settle- ments along the coast, and the Celts of 44 IRISH NATIONALITY Strathdyde. Against this world of war Columcille opposed the idea of a peaceful federation of peoples in the bond of Christian piety. He converted the king of the Picts at Inverness in 565, and spread Irish monasteries from Strathspey to the Dee, and from the Dee to the Tay. On the western shores about Can- tyre he restored the Scot settlement from Ire- land which was later to give its name to Scotland, and consecrated as king the Irish Aidan, ancestor of the kings of Scotland and England. He established friendship with the Britons of Strathclyde. From his cell at lona he dominated the new federation of Picts and Britons and Irish on both sides of the sea — the greatest missionary that Ireland ever sent out to proclaim the gathering of peoples in free association through the power bi human brotherhood, learning, and rehgion. For thirty-four years Columcille ruled as abbot in lona, the high leader of the Celtic world. He watched the wooden ships with great sails that crossed from shore to shore; he talked with mariners sailing south from the Orkneys, and others coming north from the Loire with their tuns of wine, who told THE IRISH MISSION 45 him European tidings, and how a town in Istria had been wrecked by earthquake. His large statesmanship, his lofty genius, the passionate and poetic temperament that filled men with awe and reverence, the splendid voice and stately Jfigure that seemed almost miraculous gifts, the power of inspiring love that brought dying men to see his face once ^ "^more before they fell at his feet in death, give a surpassing dignity and beauty to his life. "He could never spend the space of even one hour without study or prayer or writing, or some other holy occupation . . . and still in all these he was beloved by all." "Seasons and storms he perceived, he harmonised the moon's race with the branching sun, he was skilful in the course of the sea, he would count the stars of heaven." He desired, one of his poems tells us, "to search all the books that would be good for any soul*'; and with his own hand he copied, it is sai■: T'^^vw^^:'^- vr^) "':^_ 50 IRISH NATIONALITY St. John's wort, had for them peculiar virtues, and from it came, it was said, the saffron hue as the national colour for their dress. It was a national pride that their date for celebrating Easter, and their Eastern tonsiu*e from ear to ear, had come to them from St. John. Peter loved Jesus, they said, but it was John that Jesus loved — "the youth John, the foster- son of his own bosom" — "John of the Breast." It was with a very passion of loyalty that they clung to a national church which linked them to the beloved apostle, and which was the close bond of their whole race, dear to them as the supreme expression of their temporal and spiritual freedom, now illustrious beyond all others in Europe for the roll of its saints and of its scholars, and ennobled by the company of its patriots and the glory of Columcille. The tonsure and the Easter of Columbanus, however, shocked foreign ecclesiastics as contrary to the disci- pline of Rome, and he was required to re- nounce them. He vehemently protested his loyalty to St. John, to St. Columcille, and to the church of his fathers. It was an unequal argument. Ireland, he was answered, was a THE miSH MISSION 51 small island in a far comer of the earth: what was its people that they should fight against the whole world. The Europe of imperial tradition had lost comprehension of the passion of national loyalty: all that lay out- side that tradition was "barbarous," the Irish like the Saxons or the Huns. The battle that was thus opened was the beginning of a new epoch in Irish history. St. Augustine, first archbishop of Canterbury (597), was ordered (603) to demand obedience to himself from the Celtic churches and the setting aside of their customs. The Welsh and the Irish refused to submit. Augustine had come to them from among the English, who were still pagan, and still fighting for the extermination of the Celts, and on his lips were threats of slaughter by their armies to the disobedient. The demand was renewed sixty years later, in a synod at Whitby in 664. By that time Christianity had been carried over England by the Irish mission; on the other hand, the EngUsh were filled with imperial dreams of conquest and supremacy. English kings settled on the Roman province began to imitate the glories of Rome, to have M IRISH NATIONALITY the Boman banner of purple and gold car- ried before them, to hear the name of "Em- peror of the whole of Britam," and to project the final subjugation to that "empire" of the Celt and Pictish peoples. The Roman organisation fell in with their habits of government and their ambitions. In the synod the tone of imperial contempt made itself heard against those marked out (pr conquest — Celts "rude and barbarous" — " Picts and Britons, accomplices in obstinacy in those two remote islands of the world." **Your father Columba," "of rustic sim- plicity," said the English leader, had "that Columba of yours," like Peter, tJie keeping of the keys of heaven? With these first bitter words, with the condemnation of the Irish customs, and the sailing away of the Irish monks from Lindisfame, discord began to enter in. Slowly and with sorrow the Irish in the course of sixty years abandoned their traditional customs and adopted the Roman Easter. But the work of Columcille was undone, and the spiritual bond by which the peoples had been ulnited was for ever loosened. English armies marched ravaging .'-.■w- THE IRISH MISSION 5S over the north, one of them into Ireland (684), "wasting that harmless nation which had always been most friendly to the English, not sparing even churches or monasteries." The gracious peace which had bound the races for a himdred and twenty years was broken, and constant wars again divided Picts, Scots, Britons, and Angles. Ireland, however, for four hundred years to come still poured out missionaries to Europe. They passed through England to northern France and the Netherlands; across the Gaulish sea and by the Loire to middle France; by the Rhine and the way of Luxeuil they entered Switzerland; and westward they reached out to the Elbe and the Danube, send- ing missionaries to Old Saxony, Thuringia, Bavaria, Salzburg and Carinthia; southwards they crossed the Alps into Italy, to Lucca, Fiesole, Rome, the hills of Naples, and Tarentum. Their monasteries formed rest- houses for travellers through France and Germany. Europe itself was too narrow for their ardour, and they journeyed to Jerusa- lem, settled in Carthage, and sailed to the discovery of Iceland. No church of any land ■r 54 IRISH NATIONALITY has so noble a record in the astonishing work of its teachers, as they wandered over the ruined provinces of the empire among the pagan tribes of the invaders. In the High- lands they taught the Picts to compose hymns in their own tongue; in a monastery founded by them in Yorkshire was trained the first English poet in the new England; at St. Gall they drew up a Latin-German dictionary for the Germans of the Upper Rhine and Switzer- land, and even devised new German words to express the new ideas of Christian civilisation; near Florence one of their saints taught the natives how to turn the course of a river. Probably in the seventh and eighth centuries no one in western Europe spoke Greek who was not Irish or taught by an Irishman. No land ever sent out such impassioned teachers of learning, and Charles the Great and his successors set them at the head of the chief schools throughout Europe. We can only measure the originality of the Irish mission by comparing with it the work of other races. Roman civilisation had not inured its people to hardship, nor given them any interest in barbarians. When Augustine THE IRISH MISSION 55 in 595 was sent on the English mission he . turned back with loathing, and finally took vl a year for his journey. In 664 no one could be found in Rome to send to Canterbury, till in 668 Theodore was fetched from Syria; he also took a year on his way. But the Irish missionaries feaifed nothing, neither hunger nor weariness nor the outlaws of the woods. Their succession never ceased. The death of one apostle was but the coming of another. The English missions again could not compare with the Irish. Every English missionary from the seventh to the ninth century had been trained under Irish teachers or had been for years in Ireland, enveloped by the ardour of their fiery enthusiasm; when this powerful influence was set aside English mission work died down for a thousand years or so. The Irish missionaries continued with- out a break for over six hundred years. Instead of the Irish zeal for the welfare of all peoples whatsoever, the English felt a special call to preach among those "from whom the English race had its origin," and their chief mission was to their own stock in Frisia. Finally, among Teutonic peoples politics 56 miSH NATIONALITY went hand in hand with Christianity. The Teutons were out to conquer, and in the lust of dominion a conqueror might make religion the sign of obedience, and enforce it by fire and water, viper and sword. But the Irish had no theory of dominion to push. A score of generations of missionaries were bred up in the tribal communities of Ireland, where men believed in voluntary union of men in a high tradition. Their method was one of persuasion for spiritual ends alone. The conception of human life that lay behind the tribal government and the tribal church of Ireland gave to the Irish mission in Europe a singular and lofty character. In the broad humanity that was the great dis- tinction of their people persecution had no part. No war of religion stained their faith, and no barbarities to man. > CHAPTER IV f SCANDINAyiANS IN IRELAND 800-1014 Fob a thousand years no foreign host had settled m Erin. But the times of peace were ended. About 800 a.d. the Irish suffered their first invasion. The Teutonic peoples, triumphant con- querors of the land, had carried their victories over the Roman Empire to the edge of the seas that guarded Ireland. But fresh hordes of warriors were gathering in the north, conquerors of the ocean. Hie Scandinavians had sailed out on "the gulf^s enormous abyss, where before their eyes the vanishing bounds of the earth were hidden in gloom." An old English riddle likened the shattering iceberg swinging down from Arctic waters to the terror of the pirate's war-ship — ^tlie leader on the prow as it plunged through the sea, calling to the land, shouting as he goes, 67 58 IRISH NATIONALITY with laughter terrible to the earth, swinging his sharp-edged sword, grim in hate, eager for slaughter, bitter in the battle-work. They came, "great scourers of the seas — a nati(|>n desperate in attempting the conquest of other realms.** The Scandinavian campaigns of the ocean affected Ireland as no continental wars for the creation or the destruction of the Roman Empire had done. During two hundred years their national life, their learning, their civilisa- tion, were threatened by strangers. The social order they had built up was confronted with two new tests — violence from without, and an alien population within the island. We may ask how Irish civilisation met the trial. The Danes fell on all the shores of Eng- land from the Forth to the Channel, the land of the Picts northward, lona and the country of the Scots to the west, and Bret- land of the Britons from the Clyde to the Land*s End: in Ireland they sailed up every creek, and shouldering their boats marched from river to river and lake to lake into every tribeland, covering the country with their forts, plundering the rich men*s raths of their ''•v T ;?T? " ™^^'" SCANDINAVIANS IN IRELAND 69 cups and vessels and ornaments of gold, sack- ing the schools and monasteries and churches, and entering every great king's grave for buried treasure. Their heavy iron swords, their armour, their discipline of war, gave them an overwhelming advantage against the Irish with, as they said, bodies and necks and gentle heads defended only by fine linen. Monks and scholars gathered up their manu- scripts and holy ornaments, and fled away for refuge to Europe. These wars brought a very different fate to the English and the Irish. In England, when the Danes had planted a colony on every inlet of the sea (c. 800), they took horse and rode conquering over the inland plains. They slew every English king and wiped out every English royal house save that of Wessex; and in their place set up their own kings in Northumbria and East Anglia, and made of all middle England a vast "Dane- law," a land ruled by Danish law, and by confederations of Danish towns. At the last Wessex itself was conquered, and a Danish king ruled over all England (1013). In Ireland, on the other hand, the invincible 60 IRISH NATIONALITY power of the tribal system for defence barred the way of invaders. Every foot of land was defended; every tribe fought for its own soil. There could be no subjection of the Irish clans except by their extermination. A Nor-' wegian leader, Thorgils, made one supreme effort at conquest. He fixed his capital at Armagh and set up at its shrine the worship of Thor, while his wife gave her oracles from the high altar of Clonmacnois on the Shannon, in the prophetess's cloak set with stones to the hem, the necklace of glass beads, the staff, and the great skin pouch of charms. But in the end Thorgils was taken by the king of Meath and executed, being cast into Loch Nair. The Danes, who held long and secure possession of England, great part of Scotland, and Normandy, were never able to occupy permanently any part of Ireland more than a day's march from the chief stations of their fleets. Through two hun- dred years of war no Irish royal house was destroyed, no kingdom was extinguished, and no national supremacy of the Danes replaced the national supremacy of the Irish. The long war was one of "confused noise >:f' SCANDINAVIANS IN IRELAND 61 and garments rolled in blood." Ireland, whether they could conquer it or not, was of vast importance to the Scandinavians as a land of refuge for their fleets. Voyagers guided their way by the flights of birds from her shores ; the harbours of " the great island ** sheltered them; her fields of com, her cattle driven to the shore for the "strand-hewing,** provisioned their crews; her woods gave timber for shipbuilding. Norwegians and Danes fought furiously for possession of the sea-ports, now against the Irish, now against each other. No victory or defeat counted beyond the day among the shifting and multi- plying fleets of new marauders that for ever swarmed round the coasts — emigrants who had flung themselves on the sea for freedom's sake to save their old laws and liberties, buccaneers seeking "the spoils of the sea,** sea-kings roaming the ocean or gathering for a raid on Scotland or on France, stray com- panies out of work or putting in for a winter's shelter, boats of whale-fishers and walrus- killers, Danish hosts driven out of England or of Normandy. As "the sea vomited up floods of foreigners into Erin so that there was not a ' ■ :,■'■, ;Y^*T5 62 IRISH NATIONALITY point without a fleet," battle swung back- wards and forwards between old settlers and new pirates, between Norsemen and Danes, between both and the Irish. L But the Scandinavians were not only sea- rovers, they were the greatest merchapts that northern Europe had yet seen. From the time of Charles the Great to William the Conqueror, the whole commerce of the seas was in their hands. Eastward they pushed across Russia to the Black Sea, and carried back the wares of Asia to the Baltic; west- ward they poured along the coasts of Gaul by the narrow seas, or sailed the Atlantic from the Orkneys and Hebrides round the Irish coast to the Bay of Biscay. The new-made empire of Charles the Great was opening Europe once more to a settled life and the possibilities of traffic, and the Danish mer- chants seized the beginnings of the new trade. Ireland lay in the very centre of their seaways, with its harbours, its wealth, and its traditional commerce with France. Mer- chants made settlements along the coasts, and planted colonies over the inland country to supply the trade of the ports. They had SCANDINAVIANS IN IRELAND 63 come to Ireland for business, and they wanted peace and not war. They intermarried with the Irish, fostered their children, brought their goods, welcomed Irish poets into their forts, listening to Irish stories and taking new models for their own literature, and in war they joined with their Irish neighbours. A race of "Gall-Gaels," or "foreign Irish," grew up, accepted by the Irish as of their community. Between the two peoples there was respect and good-will. The enterprise of the sea-rovers and the merchant settlers created on Irish shores two Scandinavian "kingdoms"— kingdoms rather of the sea than of the land. The Norsemen set up their moot on the Mound over the river Liffey (near where the Irish Parliament House rose in later days), and there created a naval power which reached along the coast from Waterford to Dundalk. The Dublin kingdom was closely connected with the Danish*' kingdom of Northumbria, which had its capital at York, and formed the common meeting-ground, the link which united the Northmen of Scandinavia and the Northmen of Ireland. A mighty confedera- 64 IRISH NATIONALITY tion grew up. Members of the same house were kings in Dublin, in Man, and in York. The Irish Channel swarmed with their fleets. The sea was the common highway whicl^ linked the powers together, and the sea was held by fleets of swift long-ships with from ninety to a hundred and fifty rowers or fight- ing men on board. Dublin, the rallying-point of roving marauders, became the centre of a wide-flung war. Its harbour, looking east, was the mart of the merchant princes of the Baltic trade: there men of Iceland and of Norway landed with their merchandise or their plunder. "Limerick of the swift ships," "Limerick of the riveted stones," the kingdom lying on the Atlantic was a rival even to Dublin; kings of the same house ruled in Limerick and the Hebrides, and their fleets took the way of the wide ocean; while Norse settlements scattered over Limerick, Kerry and Tip- perary, organised as Irish dans and giving an Irish form to their names, maintained the inland trade. Other Munster harbours were held, some by the Danes, some by the Irish. The Irish were on good terms with the SCANDINAVIANS IN IRELAND 65 traders. They learned to build the new ships invented by the Scandinavians where both oars and sails were used, and traded in their own ports for treasures from oversea, silken raiment and abundance of wine. We read in 900 of Irishmen along the Cork shores "high in beauty, whose resolve is quiet prosperity," and in 950 of "Munster of the great riches,*' "Mimster of the swift ships.*' On the other hand, the Irish neverxjeased from war with the sea-kings. From the time of Thorgils, high-kings of Tara one after another led the perpetual contest to hold Ireland and to possess Dublin. They sum- moned assemblies in north and south of the confederated chiefs. The Irish copied not only the Scandinavian building of war-ships, but their method of raising a navy by dividing the coast into districts, each of which had to equip and man ten ships, to assemble at the summons for the united war-fleet. Every province seems to have had its fleet. The Irish, in f acit, learned their lesson so well that they were able to undertake the re-conquest of their country, and become leaders of Danish and Norse troops in war. The spirit "-Kg" 66 IRISH NATIONALITY of the people rose high. From 900 their victories increased even amid disaster. Strong kings arose among them, good organisers and good fighters, and for a hmidred years one leader followed hard on another. In 916, Niall, king of Tara, celebrated once more the assembly of Telltown, and led southern and northern O'Neills to the aid of Mmister against the Gentiles, directing the men of Leinster in the campaign — a gallant war. Murtagh, king of Ailech or Tirconnell, smote the Danes at Carlingford and Louth in 926, a year of great danger, and so came victorious to the assembly at Telltown. Again, in 933, he defeated the "foreigners" in the north, and they left two hundred and forty heads, 9,nd all their wealth of spoils. In 941 he won his famous name, "Murtagh of the Leather Cloaks," from the first midwinter campaign ever known in Ireland, "the hosting of the frost," when he led his army from Donegal, under shelter of leather cloaks, over lakes and rivers frozen by the mighty frost, round the entire circuit of Ireland. Some ten years later, Cellachan, king of Cashel, took up the fight; with his linen-coated soldiers against SCANDINAVIANS EST IRELAND 67 the mail-clad foreigners, he swept the whole of Munster, capturing Limerick, Cork, Cashel and Waterford, and joining their Danish armies to his own troops; till he closed his campaign by calling out the Munster fleet from Kinsale to Galway bay, six or seven score of them, to meet the Danish ships at Dundalk. The Norseman used armour, and rough chains of blue iron to grapple the ene- mies' ships, but the Irish sailors, with their "strong enclosures of linen cloth," and tough .■ ropes of hemp to fling over the enemies' prows, ^ came oflf victorious. According to the saga ' of his triumph, Cellachan called the whole of Ireland to share in the struggle for Irish freedom, and a fleet from Ailech carried off plunder and booty from the Hebrides. He was followed by Brian Boru. "HI luck was it for the Danes when Brian was bom," says the old saga, "when he inflicted not evil on the foreigners in the day time he did it in the next night." From beyond the Shannon he led a fierce guerrilla war. Left with but fifteen followers alive, sleeping on "hard knotty wet roots," he still refused to yield. "It is not hereditary to us," he said, "to -^■^ . s-. 68 IRISH NATIONALITY submit." He became king of Munster in 974, drove out the Danish king from Dublin in 998, and ruled at last in 1000 as Ardri of Ireland, an old man of sixty or seventy years. In 1005 he called out all the fleets of the Norsemen of Dublin, Waterford, Wexford, and of the men of Munster, and of almost all of the men of Erin, such of them as were fit to go to sea, and they levied tribute from Sax- ons and Britons as far as the Clyde and Argyle. A greater struggle still lay before the Irish. Powerful kings of Denmark, in the glory of success, began to think of their imperial destiny; and, to round off their states, pro- posed to create a Scandinavian empire from the Slavic shores of the Baltic across Den- mark, Norway, England and Ireland, to the rim of the Atlantic, with London as the capital. King Sweyn Forkbeard, conqueror of all England, was acknowledged in 1013 its king. But the imperial plan was not yet complete. A free Irish nation of men who lived, as they said, "on the ridge of the world** — a land of unconquered peoples of the open plains and the mountains and the f-JiJfu'T'i'iS SCANDINAVIANS IN IRELAND 69 sea, left the Scandinavian empire with a ragged edge out on the line of the Atlantic commerce. Eang Cnut sent out his men for the last conquest. A vast host gathered in Dublin bay "from all the west of Europe," from Norway, the Baltic islands, the Orkneys, Iceland, for the landing at Clontarf. From sunrise to sunset the battle raged, the hair of the warriors flying in the wind as thick as the sheaves floating in a field of oats. The Scan- dinavian scheme of a northern empire was shattered on that day, when with the evening floodtide the remnant of the broken Danish host put to sea. Brian Boru, his son, and his grandson lay dead. But for a hundred and filty years to come Ireland kept its independ- ence. England was once again, as in the time of the Roman dominion, made part of a con- tinental empire. Ireland, as in the days of Rome, still lay outside the new imperial system. At the end, therefore, of two hundred years of war, the Irish emerged with their national life imbroken. Irish kingdoms had lived on side by side with Danish kingdoms; in spite of the strength of the Danish forces, the con- .TV.';: ■'4 70 miSH NATIONALITY slant irruptions of new Danes, and the busi- ness capacity of these fighters and traffickers, it was the Irish who were steadily coming again to the top. Through all perils they had kept their old order. The high-kings had ruled without a break, and, except in a few years of special calamity, had held the national assemblies of the country at Tell- town, not far from Tara. The tribesmen of the sub-kingdoms, if their ancient place of assembly had been turned into a Danish fort, held their meeting in a hidden marsh or wood. Thus when Cashel was held by the Norsemen, the assembly met on a moimd that rose in the marshy glen now c^led Glanworth. There Cellachan, the rightful heir, in the best of arms and dress, demanded jthat the nobles should remember justice, while his mother declared his title and recited a poem. And when the champions of Mim- ster heard these great words and the speech of the woman, the tribes arose right readily to make Cellachan king. They set up his shout of king, and gave thanks to the true magnificent God for having found him. The nobles then came to Cellachan and put 'y:-i!rrw.: SCANDINAVIANS IN IRELAND 71 their hands in his hand, and placed the rpyal diadem round his head, and their spirits were raised at the grand sight of him. Throughout the wars, too, the tribes had not lost the tradition of learning. King Al- fred has recorded the state of England after the Danish wars; he could not bethink him of a single one south of the Thames who could understand his ritual in English, or J translate aught out of Latin, and he could hear of very few north of the Thames to the Humber, and beyond the Humber scarce any, **so clean was learning decayed among the English folk." But the Irish had never ceased to carry on schools, and train men of distinguished learning. Clonmacnois on the Shannon, for example, preserved a truly Irish culture, and between its sackings trained great scholars whose fame could reach to King -Alfred in Wessex, and to Charles the Great in Aachen. The Irish clergy still remained unequalled in culture, even in Italy. One of them in 868 was the most learned of the Latinists of all Europe. Anothef; Cor- mae, king and bishop (f 905), was skQled in Oldtlrish literature, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, '•ItHaiAi^firtji^i: W miSH NATIONALITY Welsh, Anglo-Saxon and Norse — ^he might be compared with that other great Irishman of his time, John Scotus, whom Charles the Bald had made head of his school. Irish teachers had a higher skill than any others in Europe in astronomy, geography and phil- osophy. Side by side with monastic schools the lay schools had continued without a break. By 900 the lawyers had produced at least eighteen law-books whose names ai^e known, and a glossary. A lay scholar, prob- ably of the ninth century, compiled the instructions of a king to his son — "Learning every art, knowledge of every language, skill in variegated work, pleading with established maxims" — ^these are the sciences he recom- mends. The Triads, compiled about the same time, count among the ornaments of wisdom, "abundance of knowledge, a number of precedents." Irish poets, men and women, were the first in Europe to sing of Nature — of summer and winter, of the cuckoo with the grey mantle, the blackbird's lay, the red bracken and the long hair of the heather, the talk of the rushes, the green-barked yew-tree which supports the sky, the large green of an SCANDINAVIANS IN IRELAND 73 oaJc fronting the storm. TTiey sang of the Creation and the Crucifixion, when "dear God's elements were afraid"; and of pil- grimage to Rome — "the King whom thou seekest here, unless thou bring Him with thee thou dost not find"; of the hermit's "shining candles above the pure white scriptures . . . and I to be sitting for a while praying God in every place"; of the great fidelities of love — "the flagstone upon which he was wont to pray, she was upon it until she died. Her soul went to heaven. And that flagstone was put over her face." They chanted the terror of the time, the fierce riders of the sea in death-conflict with the mounting waves: "Bitter is the conflict with the tremendous tempest" — "Bitter is the wind to-night. It tosses the ocean's white hair; I do not fear the fierce warriors of Norway coursing on the Irish sea to-night." And in their own war of deliverance they sang of Finn and his Fiana on the battle- field, heroes of the Irish race. Even the craftsmen's schools were still gathered in their raths, preserving from century ta century the forms and rules of \^ ■ ' ■ 1? W*'Z!?^W^ 74 miSH NATIONALITY their art; soon after the battle of Clontarf we read of "the chief artificer of Ireland.** The perfection of their art in enamel and gold work has been the wonder of the old and of the modem world. Many influences had come in — Oriental, Byzantine, Scandina- vian, French — and the Irish took and used them all, but their art still remained Gaelic, of their native aoil. No jeweller's work was ever more perfect than the Ardagh chalice of the ninth or tenth century, of pure Celtic art with no trace of Danish influence. The metal-workers of Munster must have been famous, from the title of "king Cellachan of the lovely cups**; and the golden case that enclosed the Gospel of Columcille in 1000 was for its splendour "the chief relic from the western world.*' The stone-workers, too, carried on their art. There were schools of carvers eminent for skill, such as that of Holy Island on Lough Derg. One of the churches of Clonmacnois may date from the ninth century, five others from the tenth; finely sculptured gravestones commemorated saints and scholars; and the high-cross, a monolith ten feet high set up as a memorial SCANDINAVIANS IN IRELAND 75 to king Flann about 914, was carved by an Irish artist who was one of the greatest sculptors of northern Europe. The temper of the people was shown in their hero-king Brian Boru, warrior and scholar. His government was with patience, mercy and justice. "King Brian thrice for- gave all his outlaws the same fault," says a Scandinavian saga, "but if they misbehaved themselves oftener, then he let them be judged by the law; and from this one may mark what a king he must have been." "He sent professors and masters to teach wisdom and knowledge, and to buy books beyond the sea and the great ocean, because the writings and books in every church and sanctuary had been destroyed by the plun- derers; and Brian himself gave the price of learning and the price of books to every one separately who went on this service. Many chur(^hes were built and repaired by him, bridges and roads were made, the fortresses of Munster were strengthened." Such was the astonishing vitality of learn- ing and art among the Irish. By their social system the intellectual treasures of the race .Mjl^..\:. -'.l. -'"r-if^j^p 76 IRISH NATIONALITY i had been distributed among the whole people, and committed to their care. And the Irish tribes had proved worthy guardians of the national faith. They had known how to prpfit by the material skill and knowledge of the Danes. Irishmen were willing to absorb the foreigners, to marry with them, and even at times to share their wars. They learned from them to build ships> organise naval forces, advance in trade, and live in towns; they used the northern words for the partsrof a ship, and the streets of a town. In outward and material civilisation they ac- cepted the latest Scandinavian methods, just as in our days the Japanese accepted the latest Western inventions. But in what the Germans call culture— in the ordering of society and law, of life and thought, the Irish never abandoned their national loyalty. During two centuries of Danish invasions and occupations the Gaelic civilisation had not given way an inch to the strangers. CHAPTER V THE FmST IRISH BEVIVAL 1014-1169 After the battle of Clontarf in 1014 the Irish had a hundred and fifty years of com- parative quiet. "A Kvely, stirring, ancient and victorious people," they turned to repair their hurts and to bmld up their national life. Throughout the Danish wars there had been a growth of industry and riches. No people ever made a successful national rally unless they were on the rising wave of pros- perity. It is not misery and degradation that bring success. Already Ireland was known in France as "that very wealthy country in which there were twelve cities, and wide bishoprics, and a king, and that had its own language, and Latin letters." But the position of the Gaels was no longer what it had been before the invasions. The "Foreigners" called constantly for armed .77 r I 78 IRISH NATIONALITY help from their people without, and by politi- cal alliances and combinations fostered war among the Irish states themselves. Nearly a hmidred years after Clontarf king Magnus of Norway(1103) led the greatest army that ever marched conquering over Ireland. In a dark fen the young giant flamed out a mark for all, with his shining helmet, his golden hair falling long over his red silken coat, his red shield, and laid thereon a golden lion. There he fell by an Irish axe. The glory and terror of "Magnus of the swift ships," "Mag- nus of the terrible battles," was simg in Irelsuid for half-a-dozen centuries after that last flaring-up of ancient fires. The national life, moreover, was now threatened by the settlement of an alien race, strangers to the Irish traditi(Hi, strangers to the Irish idea of a state, and to their feeling of a church. The sea-kings had created in Dublin an open gateway into Ireland, a gateway like Quebec in Canada, that com- manded the country and that the country could never again close from within. They had filled the city with Scandinavian settlers from the English and Welsh coasts — pioneers ■.;.'.■ ■j''?rt<5'i:s THE FIRST naSH REVIVAL 79 of English invasion. A wealthy and compact community living on the seaboard, trading with all Enrope, inclined to the views of their business clients in England and the Empire, their influence doubled the strength of the European pressure on Ireland as against the Gaelic civilisation. To the division of peoples within the Iri^ state the Danes added also the first division in the Irish church. Olaf Cuaran, overlord of northmen of Dublin and York, had been baptized (943) in Northumberland by the archbishop of Canterbury, in presence of the English king. He formed the first converted Danes into a part of the English Church, so that their bishops were sent to be ordained at Canterbury. Since the Irish in 603 had refused to deal with an archbishop of the English, this was the first foothold Canter- bury had got in Ireland. It was the rending in two of the Irish tradition, the degrading of the primacy of Armagh, the admission of a foreign power, and the triumph of the English over the Gaelic church. In church and state, therefore, the Danes had brought the first anti-national element f-. 80 miSH NATIONALITY into Irish life. The change is marked by a change of name. The Danes coined the name "Ire-land," a form of Eriu suited to their own speech; the people they called "Ir- ish," leaving the name of "Scots" only to the Gaels who had crossed the sea into Alban. Their trading ships carried the words far and wide, and the old name of Eriu only remained in the speech of the Gaels themselves, i Clontarf, too, had marked ominously tibe passing of an old age, the beginning of a new. Already the peoples round the North Sea — Normans, Germans, English — were sending out traders to take the place of the Scandi- navians; and the peoples of the south — Italians and Gauls — were resuming their ancient commerce. We may see the advent of the new men in the names of adventurers that landed with the Danes on that low shore "- at Clontarf — the first great drops of the storm — lords from Normandy, a Frenchman from Gaul, and somewhere about that time Walter the Englishman, a leader of merce- naries from England. In such names we see the heralds of the coming change. The Irish were therefore face to face with / - THE FIRST IRISH REVIVAL 81 questions of a new order — how to fuse two wholly different peoples into one community; how to make a united church within a united nation; and how to use foreign influences pouring in on all sides so as to enrich without destroying the national life. Here was the work of the next hundred and fifty years. Such problems have been solved in other lands by powerful kings at the heads of armies; in Ireland it was the work of the whole com- munity of tribes. It is in this effort that we see the immense vitality of the Gaelic system the power of its tradition, and the spidt of its people. After Brian's death two learned men were set over the government of Ireland; a lay- man, the Chief Poet, and a devout man, the Anchorite of all Ireland. "The land was governed like a free state and not like a mon- archy by them." The victory of Clontarf was celebrated by a renascence of learning. Eye- witnesses of that great battle, poets and his- torians, wrote the chronicle of the Danish wars from first to last, and sang the glories of Cellachan and of Brian Boru in the great- ness of his life and the majesty of his death. A ■'1,.' r i£^uij,'M.ijjeatai\& 82 miSH NATIONALITY sdiolar put into Irish from Latin the "Tale of Troy," where the exploits and battle rage of the ancient heroes matched the martial ardour of Irish champions, and the same words are used for the fights and armour and ships of the Trojan as of the Danish wars. Another translated from Latin a history of the Britons, the neighbouring Celtic races across the Chan- nel. In schools three or four hund)red poetic metres were taught. The glories of ancient Erin were revived. Poets wrote of TJsnech, of Tara, of Ailech, of the O'Neills on Lough S willy in the far north, of Brian Boru's palace Kincora on the Shannon, of Rath Cruachan of Connacht. Tales of heroes, triumphs of ancient kings, were written in the form in which we now know them, genealogies of the tribes and old hymns of Irish saints. Clerics and laymen rivalled one another in zeal. In kings' courts, in monasteries, in schools, an- nals of Ireland from the earliest to the latest time were composed. Men laboured to sat- isfy the desire of the Irish to possess a com- plete and brilliant picture of Ireland from all antiquity. The most famous among the many writers, one of the most learned men in all THE FIRST miSH REVIVAL 83 Europe in wisdom, literature, history, poetry, and science, was Flann the layman, teacher of the school of Monasterboice, who died in 1056 — "slow the bright eyes of his fine head," ran the old song. He made for his pupils syn- chronisms of the kings of Asia and of Roman emperors with Irish kings, and of the Irish high-kings and provincial chiefs and kings <^ Scotland. Writings of that time which have escaped destruction, such as the Book of Lein- ster, remain the most important relics of Celtic literature in the world. There was already the beginning of a uni- versity in the ancient school of Armagh lying on the famous hill where for long ages the royal tombs of the O'Neills had been pre- served. "The strong burh of Tara has died," they said, "while Armagh lives filled with learned champions." It now rose to a great position. With its three thousand scholars, famous for its teachers, under its high-ollave Gorman who spent twenty-one years of study, from 1133 to 1154, in England and France, it became in fact the national university for the Irish race in Ireland and Scotland. It was appointed that every lector in any chiux^h in ■ ■'!^iT^!!t^^l>m^f'-T''^T!'!fWSW>l' 84 IRISH NATIONALITY Ireland must take there a degree; and in 1169 the high-king Ruaidhri O 'Conor gave the first annual grant to maintain a professor at Armagh "for all the Irish and the Scots." A succession of great bishops of Armagh laboured to bring about also the organisation of a national church under the government of Armagh. From 1068 they began to make visitations of the whole country, and take tribute and offerings in sign ol the Armagh leadership. They j'oumeyed in the old Irish fashion on foot, one of them followed by a cow on whose milk he lived, all poor, without servants, without money, wandering among hills and remote hamlets, stopping men on the roadside to talk, praying for them all night by the force only of their piety and the fervour of thieir spirit drawing all the communities under obedience to the see of Patrick, the national saint. In a series of synods from 1100 Jter 1157 a fixed number of bishops* sees was marked out, and four archbishoprics representing the four provinces. The Danish sees, moreover, were brought into this union, and made part of the Irish organisation. Thus the power of Canterbury in Ireland was THE FIRST IRISH REVIVAL 85 ended, and a national church set up of Irish and Danes. Dublin, the old Scandinavian kingdom, whose prelates for over a hundred years had been consecrated in England (1036- 1161), was the last to hold out against the , union of churches, till this strife was healed by St. Lorcdn ua Tuathail, the first Irish bishop consecrated in Dublin. He carried to that battleground of the peoples all the charity, piety, and asceticism of the Irish saint: feed- ing the poor daily, never himself tasting meat, rising at midnight to pray till dawn, and ever before he slept going out into the graveyard to pray there for the dead; from time to time withdrawing among the Wicklow hills to St. Kevin's Cave at Glendalough, a hole in the cliff overhanging the dark lake swept with storm from Uie mountain-pass, where twice a week bread and water were brought him by a boat and a ladder up the rock. His life was spent in the effort for national peace and imion, nor had Ireland a truer patriot or wiser statesman. "Kings and chiefs sat with the clergy in the Irish synods, and in the state too there were signs of a true union of the peoples. The ■ ■■■■ ' ^-'i ■ ' ■"■ 86 IRISH NATIONALITY Danes, gradually absorbed into the Irish pop- ulation, lost the sense of separate nationality. The growing union of the peoples was seen in the increasing power of the Ardri. Brian's line maintained at Cachel the title of "kings of Ireland," strengthening their house with Danish marriages; they led Danish forces and were elected kings of the Danes in Dublin. But in the twelfth century it was the Con- nacht kings who came to the front, the same race that a thousand years before had spread their power across the Shannon to Usnech and to Tara. Turlough O'Conor (1118-1156) was known to Henry I of England as "king of Ireland"; on a metal cross made for him he is styled "king of Erin," and a missal of his time (1150) contains the only prayer yet known for "the king of the Irish and his army" — the sign, as we may see, of foreign influences on the Irish mind. His son, Ruai- dhri or Rory, was proclaimed (1166) Ardri in Dublin with greater pomp than any king be- fore him, and held at Athboy in Meath an assembly of the "men of Ireland," arch- bishops and clergy, princes and nobles, eigh- teen thousand horsemen from the tribes and THE FIRST IRISH REVIVAL 87 provinces, and a thousand Danes from Dub- lin — ^there laws were made for the honour of churches and clergy, the restoring of prey un- justly taken, and the control of tribes and territories, so that a woman might traverse the land in safety; and the vast gathering broke up "in peace and amity, without battle or controversy, or any one complaining of an- other at that meeting." It is said that Rory O'Conor's procession when he held the last of the national festivals at Telltown was several miles in length. The whole of Ireland is covered with the traces of this great national revival. We may stUl see on islands, along river-valleys, in lonely fields, innumerable ruins of churches built of stone chiselled as finely as man's hai^ can cut it; and of the lofty round towers and sculptured high crosses that were multiplied over the land after the day of Clontarf . The number of the churches has not been counted. It must be astonishing. At first they were built in the "Romanesque" style brought from the continent, with plain round arches, as Brian Boru made them about a.d. 1000; presently chancels were added, and doors and . • ' ■■'¥J**^ *fc|!M'r^' 88 IRISH NATIONALITY windows and arches richly carved. Tliese churches were still small, intimate, suited to the worship of the tribal communities; as time went on they were larger and more richly decorated, but always marked with the re- membrance of Irish tradition and ornament, and signed by Irish masons on the stonies. There was a wealth of metal work of great splendour, decorated with freedom and bold- ness of design, with inlaid work and fihgree, and settings of stones and enamels and crys- tal; as we may see in book-shrines, in the crosiers of Lismore and Cachel and Clonmac- nois and many others, in the matchless pro- cessional cross of Cong, in the great shrine of St. Manchan with twenty-four figures highly raised on each side in a variety of postures remarkable for the time. It was covered with an embroidery of gold in as good style, say the Annals, as a reliquary was ever covered in Ireland. Irish skill was known abroad. A French hero of romance wore a fine belt of Irish leather-work, and a knight of Bavaria had from Ireland ribbon of gold-lace em- broidered with animals in red gold. The vigour of Irish life overflowed, indeed. ■*r^^i;i'":,i^i)iy\'6^;';^-'.*i:^^v/' "^ : ■-•' : ■( f^. *-,,•-'■ ■ .- ■^"•-fJ^.-[^i1'%~ "^•C'r} THE FIRST miSH REVIVAL 89 the bounds of the country. Cloth from Ireland was already sold in England and it was soon to spread over all Europe. It is probable that export of com and provisions had already begun, and of timber, besides hides and wool. And the frequent mention of costly gifts and tributes, and of surprisingly large sums of gold and silver show a country of steadily expanding wealth. From the time of Brian Boru learned men poured over the continent. Pilgrims journeyed to Compos- tella, to Rome, or through Greece to Jordan and Jerusalem — composing poems on the way, making discourses in Latin, showing their fine art of writing. John, bishop of Mecklenburg, preached to the Vandals be- tween the Elbe and the Vistula; Marianus **the Scot" on his pilgrimage to Rome stopped at Regensburg on the Danube, and founded there a monastery of north Irishmen in 1068, to which was soon added a second house for south Irishmen. Out of these grew the twelve Irish convents of Germany and Aus- tria. An Irish abbot was head of a monastery in Bulgaria. From time to time the Irish came home to collect money for thdr founda- 90 j IRISH NATIONALITY tions and went back laden with gold from the kings at home. Pope Adrian IV (1154) re- membered with esteem the Irish professor under whom he had studied in Paris Univer- sity. Irishmen were chaplains of the emperor Conrad HI (tll52) and of his successor Frederick Barbarossa. Strangers "moved by the love of study" still set out "in imitation of their ancestors to visit the land of the Irish so wonderfully celebrated for its learning." While the spirit of Ireland manifested itself in the shaping of a national university, and of a national church, in the revival of the glories of the Ardri, and in vigour of art and learn- ing, there was an outburst too among the common folk of jubilant patriotism. We can hear the passionate voice of the people in the songs and legends, the prophecies of the en- during life of Irishmen on Irish land, the popular tales that began at this time to run from mouth to mouth. They took to them- selves two heroes to be centres of the national hope — ^Finn the champion, leader of the "Fiana," the war-bands of old time; and Patrick the saint. A multitude of tales sud- denly sprang up of the adventures of Finn — ■:: : -^, THE FIRST IRISH REVIVAL 91 the warrior worthy of a king, the son of wis- dom, the mighty hmiter of every momitain and forest in Ireland, whose death nominstrel cared to sing. Every poet was expected to recite the fame in life of Finn and his com- panions. Pedigrees were invented to link him with every great house in Ireland, for their greater glory and authority. Side by side with Finn the people set St. Patrick — ^keeper of Ireland against all strangers, guardian of their nation and tradition. It was Patrick, they told, who by invincible prayer and fast- ing at last compelled Heaven to grant that, outlanders should not for ever inhabit Erin; "that the Saxons should not dwell in Ireland, by consent or perforce, so long as I abide in heaven:" "Thou shalt have this," said the outwearied angel. "Around thee," was the triumphant Irish hope, "on the Day of Judgment the men of Erin shall come to judgment"; for after the twelve thrones of the apostles were set in Judsea to judge the tribes of Israel, Patrick himself should at the end arise and call the people of Ireland to be judged by him on a mountain in their own land. m miSH NATIONALITY As in the old Gaelic tradition, so now the people fused in a single emotion the nation and the church. They brought from dusky woods the last gaimt reUcs of Finn's company, sad and dispirited at the falling of the evening clouds, and set them face to face with Patrick as he chanted mass on one of their old raths — ^men twice as tall as the modem folk, with their huge wolf-dogs, men "who were not of our epoch or of one time with the clergy." When Patrick hesitated to hear their pagan memories of Ireland and its graves, of its men who died for honour, of its war and hunting, its silver bridles and cups of yellow gold, its music and great f eastings, lest such recreation of spirit and mind should be to him a destruc- tion of devotion and dereliction of prayer, angels were sent to direct him to give ear to the ancient stories of Ireland, and write them down for the joy of companies and nobles of the latter time. "Victory and blessing wait on thee, Caeilte," said Patrick, thus called to the national service; "for the future thy stories and thyself are dear to me"; "grand lore and knowledge is this thou hast uttered to us." "Hiou too, Patrick, hast taught us THE FIRST IRISH REVIVAL 98 good tilings," the warriors responded with courteous dignity. So at all the holy places of Ireland, the pillar-stone of ancient Usnech, the ruined mounds of Tara, great Rath-Crua- chan of Connacht, the graves of mighty dbampions. Pagan hero and Christian saint sat together to* make interchange of history and religion, the teaching of the past and the promise of the future. St. Patrick gave his blessing to minstrels and story-tellers and to all craftsmen of Ireland — " and to them that profess it be it all happiness." He mounted to the high glen to see the Fiana raise their warning signal of heroic chase and hunting. He saw the heavy tears of the last of the heroes till his very breast, his chest was wet. He laid in his bosom the head of the pagan hunter and warrior: "By me to thee," said Patrick, "and whatsoever be the place in which God shall lay hand on thee. Heaven is assigned." "For thy sake," said the saint, "be thy lord Finn mac Cumhall taken out of torment, if it be good in the sight of (^qd." In no other country did such a fate befall a missionary coming from strangers — ^to be y.._ovvv"■■;y.fl.W^..'^';^■■:"■«>>^^Tft■■.;r-|;»^T55^f 94 IRISH NATIONALITY taken and clothed upon with the national passion of a people, shaped after the pattern of their spirit, made the keeper of the nation's soul, the guardian of its whole tradition. Such legends show how enthusiasm for the common country ran through every hamlet in the land, and touched the poorest as it did the most learned. They show that the social order in Ireland after the Danish settlements was the triumph of an Irish and not a Danish civilisation. The national life of the Irish, free, democratic, embracing every emotion of the whole people, gentle or simple, was powerful enough to gather into it the strong and freedom-loving rovers of the sea. On all sides, therefore, we see the growth of a people compacted of Irish and Danes, bound together under the old Irish law and social order, with Dublin as a centre of the united races, Armagh a national imiversity, a single and independent church under an Irish primate of Armagh and an Irish arch- bishop of Dublin, a high-king calling the people together in a succession of national assemblies for the common good of the country. The new union of Ireland was being 't^lTTtrr^^^^^lf^ THE FIRST miSH REVIVAL 95 slowly worked out by her political council- lors, her great ecclesiastics, her scholars and philosophers, and by the faith of the common people in the glory of their national inherit- ance. "The bodies and minds of the people were endued with extraordinary abilities of nature,'* so that art, learning and commerce prospered in their hands. On this fair hope of rising civilisation there fell a new and tremendous trial. , ". :>"■' r -'• ■■•v'lB'™ CHAPTER VI THE NORMAN INVASION 1169-1520 After the fall of the Danes the Normans, conquerors of England, entered on the domin- ion of the sea — "dtizens of the world," they carried then- arms and their cunning from the Tweed to the Mediterraiiiean, from the Seine to the Euphrates. The spirit of con- quest was in the air. Every landless man was looking to make his fortune. Every baron desired, like his viking forefathers, a land where he could live out of reach of the king's long arm. They had marked out Ireland as their natural prey — "a land very rich in plunder, and famed for the good temperature of the air, the fruitfulness of the soil, the pleasant and commodious seats for habitation, and safe and large ports and havens lying open for traffic." Norman 96 , ^ .»ujLl,:^tUi'.! .• .( « THE NORMAN INVASION 97 barons were among the enemy at the battle of Clontarf in 1014. The same year that Ireland saw the last of the Scandinavian sea kings (1103) she saw the first of the Norman invaders prying out the country for a kingdom. WilHam Rufus (1087-1100) had fetched from Ireland great oaks to roof his Hall at Westminster, and planned the conquest of an island so desirable. A greater empire-maker, Henry 11, lord of a vast sea- coast from the Forth to the Pyrenees, hold- ing both sides of the Channel, needed Ireland to round off his dominions and give him conmiand of the traffic from his English ports across the Irish Sea, from his ports of the Loire and the Garonne over the Gaulish sea. The trade was well worth the venture. Norman and French barons, with Welsh fol- lowers, and Flemings from Pembroke, led the invasion that began in 1169. They were men trained to war, with armour and weapons im- known to the Irish. But they owed no small part of their military successes in Ireland to a policy of craft. If the Irish fought hard to defend the lands they held in civil tenure, the churches had no great strength, and the 'Y--'-/'^'- ■ ■[ ..'i -'T-W^! 98 IRISH NATIONALITY seizing of a church estate led to no immediate rising out of the country. The settled plan of the Normans, therefore, was to descend on defenceless church lands, and turn them into Norman strongholds; in reply to com- plaints, they pleaded that the churches were used by the hostile Irish as storing places for their goods. Their occupation gave the Normans a great military advantage, for once the churches were fortified and gar- risoned with Norman skill the reduction of the surrounding country became much easier. The Irish during this period sometimes plundered church lands, but did not occupy, annex, or fortify them. The invaders mean- while spread over the country. French and Welsh and Flemings have left their mark in every part of Ireland, by Christian names, by names of places and famihes, and by loan- words taken into Irish from the French. The English who came over went chiefly to the towns, many of them to Dublin through the Bristol trade. Henry 11 himself crossed in 1171 with a great fleet and army to over- awe his too-independent barons as well as the Irish, and from the wooden palace set }pr,'j^}ri^y wrijvF^'f^',;^^".'-*- • THE NORMAN INVASION 99 up for him in Dublin demanded a general oath of allegiance. The Normans took the oath, with some churchmen and half-a-dozen Irish chiefs. In Henry's view this oath was a confession that the Irish knew themselves conquered; and that the chief renounced the tribal system, and handed over the land to the king, so that he as supreme lord of all the soil could allot it to his barons, and demand in return the feudal services common in Normandy br in England. No Irish chief, however, could have even imderstood these ideas. He knew nothing of the feudal system, nor of a landlord in the English sense. He had no power to hand the land of the tribe over to any one. He could admit no "con- quest," for the seizing of a few towns and forts could not carry the subjection of all the independent chiefdoms. Whatever Henry's theory might be, the taking of Dublin was not the taking of an Irish capital: the people had seen its founding as the centre of a foreign kingdom, and their own free life had continued as ol old. Henry's presence there gave him no lordship: and the independent ; 100 IRISH NATIONALITY temper of the Irish people was not likely, after their Danish experience, to be cowed by two years of war. Some cmining explana- tion of the oath was given to the Irish chiefs by the subtle Angevin king and his crafty Norman counsellors — ^that war was to cease, that they were to rule as fully and freely as before, and in recognition of the peace to give to Henry a formal tribute which im- plied no dominion. The false display at Dublin was a deception both to the king and to the Irish. The empty words on either side did not check for a month the lust of conquest nor the passion of defence. One royal object, however, was made good. The oath, claimed under false pretences, yielded under misunderstanding, impossible of fulfilment, was used to confer on the king a technical legal right to Ireland; this legal fiction became the basis of the royal claims, and the justification of every later act of violence. Another fraud was added by the proclama- tion of papal bulls, which according to modern research seem to have been mere forgeries. ■ ■^TJ'vs'^'^ps THE NORMAN INVASION 101 They gave the lordship of the country to Henry, and were readily accepted by the invaders and their successors. But they were held of no account among Irish annalists and writers, who make no mention of the bulls during the next three hundred years. Thus the grounds of the English title to Ireland were laid down, and it only remained to make good by the sword the fictions of law and the falsehoods of forgers. According to these Ireland had been by the act of the natives and by the will of God conferred on a higher race. Kings carved out estates for their nobles. The nobles had to conquer the territories granted them. Each con- quered tract was to be made into a little England, enclosed within itself, and sharply fenced off from the supposed sea of savagery around it. There was to be no trade with the Irish, no intercourse, no relationship, no use of their dress, speech, or laws, no dealings save those of conquest and slaughter. The colonists were to form an English parliament to enact English law. A lieutenant-governor, or his deputy^, was set in Dublin Castle to superintend the conquest and the adminis- 102 IRISH NATIONALITY tration. The fighting garrison was rein- forced by the planting of a militant church — ^bishops and clergy of foreign blood, stout men of war, ready to aid by prayers, excom- munications, and the sword. A bishop of Waterford being once sent by the Lord Justice to account to Edward I for a battle of the Irish in which the king of Connacht and two thousand of his men lay dead, ex- plained that "in policy he thought it ex- pedient to wink at one knave cutting off another, and that would save the king's coffers and purchase peace to the land"; whereat the kin^ smiled and bade him return to Ireland. The Irish were now therefore aliens in their own country. Officially they did not exist. Their land had been parted out by kings among their barons "till in title they were owners and lords of all, so as nothing was left to be granted to the natives." Dur- ing centuries of English occupation not a single law was enacted for their relief or benefit. They were refused the protection of English law, shut out from the king's courts and from the king's peace. The people I ■ THE NORMAN INVASION 103 who had carried the peaceful mission of a spiritual religion over England and Europe now saw that other mission planted among themselves — ^a poUtical church bearing the sword of the conqueror, and dealing out anathemas and death in the service of a state which rewarded it with temporal wealth and dominion. The English attack was thus wholly differ- ent from that of the Danes: it was guided by a fixed purpose, and directed by kings who had a more absolute power, a more compact body of soldiers, and a better filled treasury than any other rulers in Eiu*ope. Dublin, no mere centre now of roving sea- kings, was turned into an impregnable for- tress, fed from the sea, and held by a garrison which was supported by the whole strength of England — a fortress unconquerable by any power within Ireland — a. passage through which the strangers could enter at their ease. The settlers were no longer left to lapse as isolated groups into Irish life, but were linked together as a compact garrison under the Castle government. The vigilance of West- minster never ceased, nor the supply of its '■.^' -is; T",p' ■: ' 1\ f i5Tr'^)f''^I?!s"r» 104 IRISH NATIONALITY treasure, its favoured colenists, and its ablest generals. From Henry II to Elizabeth, the aim of the English government was the same. The ground of Ireland was to be an immediate holding, "a royal inheritance," of the king. On an issue so sharp and definite no com- promise was possible. So long as the Irish claimed to hold a foot of their own land the war must continue. It lasted, in fact, for five hundred years, and at no moment was any peace possible to the Irish except by entire renunciation of their right to the actual soil of their country. If at times dealings were opened by the English with an Irish chief, or a heavy sum taken to allow him to stay on his land, this was no more than a temporary stratagem or a local expedient, and in no way affected tiie fixed intention to gain the ownership of the soil. Out of the first tumult and anarchy of war an Ireland emerged which was roughly divided between the two peoples. In Ulster, O'Neills and O'Donnells and other tribes remained, with only a fringe of Normans on the coast. O'Conors and other Irish clans divided Con- nacht, and absorbed into the Gaelic life THE NORMAN INVASION 105 the incoming Norman de Burghs. The Anglo- Normans, on the other hand, established themselves powerfully in Munster and Lein- ster. But even here — side by side with the great lords of the invasion, earls of Ormond, and Desmond, and Kildare — there remained Irish kingdoms and the renmants of old chief- doms, unconquered, resolute and wealthy — such as the O'Briens in the west, MacCarthys and O'SuUivans in the south, O'Conors and O'Mores in the middle country, MacMur- roughs and O'Tooles in Leinster, and many more. It has been held that all later misfortunes would have been averted if the EngUsh without faltering had carried out a complete conquest, and ended the dispute once for all. English kings had, indeed, every temptation to this direct course. The wealth of the country lay spread before them. It was a land abounding in com and cattle, in fish, in timber; its manufactures were famed over all Europe; gold-mines were reported; foreign merchants flocked to its ports, and bankers and money-lenders from the Rhine- land and Lucca, with speculators from J^^t.T^ '^W^'TS ^i'^KT^'J'.Sr'f'-'^'J^^p.* 106 miSH NATIONALITY Provence, were carrying over foreign coin, settling in the towns, and taking land in the country. Sovereigns at Westminster — harassed with turbulent barons at home and wars abroad — ^looked to a conquered Ireland to supply money for their treasury, soldiers for their armies, provisions for their wars, and estates for their favourites. In haste to reap their full gains they demanded nothing better mkn a conquest rapid and complete. They certainly cannot be charged with dimness of intention, slackness in effort, or want of resource in dilemmas. It would be hard to imagine any method of domination which was not used — among the varied re- sources of the army, the church, the lawyers, the money-lenders, the schoolmasters, the Castle intriguers and the landlords. The official class in Dublin, recruited every few years with uncorrupted blood from England, urged on the war with the dogged persistence of their race. But the conquest of the Irish nation was not so simple as it had seemed to Anglo- Norman speculators. The proposal to take the land out of the hands of an Irish people THE NORMAN INVASION 107 and give it to a foreign king, could only have been carried out by the slaughter of the entire population. No lesser effort could have turned a free tribal Ireland into a dependent feudal England. The English kings had made a further mistake. They proposed, like later kings of Spain in South America, to exploit Ireland for the benefit of the crown and the metropo- lis, not for the welfare of any class whatever of the inhabitants; the colonists were to be a mere garrison to conquer and hold the land for the king. But the Anglo-Norman ad- venturers had gone out to find profit for them- selves, not to collect Irish wealth for London. Their "loyalty** failed under that test. The kings, therefore, found themselves en- gaged in a double conflict, against the Irish * and against their own colonistsj and were every year more entangled in the difficulties of a policy false from the outset. Yet another difficulty disclosed itself. Among the colonists a little experience destroyed the English theory of Irish "bar- barism.** The invaders were drawn to their new home not only by its wealth but by its 108 IRISH NATIONALITY beauty, the variety and gaiety of its social life, the inteUigence of its inhabitants, and the attraction of its learning and art. Settlers, moreover, could neither live nor till the lands they had seized, nor trade in the seaports, nor find soldiers for their defence, without coming to terms with their Irish neighbours. To them the way of wealth lay not in slaugh- ter but in traffic, not in destroying riches but in sharing them. The colonists compromised with "the Irish enemy." They took to Irish dress and language; they recognised Irish land tenure, as alone suited to the country and people, one also that gave them peace with their farmers and cattle-drivers, and kept out of their estates the king's sheriffs and tax-gatherers; they levied troops from their tenants in the Irish manner; they em- ployed Irishmen in offices of trust; they paid neighbouring tribes for military service — such as to keep roads and passes open for their traders and messengers. "English born in Ireland," "degenerate English," were as much feared by the king as the "mere Irish." They were not counted "of English birth"; lands were resumed from them, office forbid- "";: I /c? V #■-■('. ■^ . ■v^-fyirT'^.'VTr^'T'J'l*"'^ THE NORMAN INVASION 109 den them. In every successive generation new men of pure English blood were to be sent over to serve the king's purpose and keep in check the Ireland-born. The Irish wars, therefore, became exceed- ingly confused — ^kings, barons, tribes, all entangled in interminable strife. Every chief, surrounded by dangers, was bound to turn his court into a place of arms thronged by men ready to drive back the next attack or start on the next foray. Whatever was the bur- den of military taxation no tribe dared to disarm any more than one of the European countries to-day. The Dublin officials, mean- while, eked out their military force by craft; they created and encouraged civil wars; they called on the Danes who had become mingled with the Irish to come out from them and resume their Danish nationality, as the only means of being allowed protection of law and freedom to trade. To avert the dangers of friendship and peace between races in Ireland they became missionaries of disorder, apostles of contention. Civil wars within any country exhaust themselves and come to a natural end. But civil wars maintained by a foreign 110 IRISH NATIONALITY power from without have no conclusion. If any strong leader arose, Anglo-Norman or Irish, the whole force of England was called in, and the ablest conmianders fetched over from the French wars, great men of battle and plunder, to fling the province back into weakness and disorder. In England the feudal system had been brought to great perfection — a powerful king, a state organised for common action, with a great military force, a highly organ- ised treasury, a powerful nobihty, and a dependent people. The Irish tribal system, on the other hand, rested on a people en- dowed with a wide freedom, guided by an ancient tradition, and themselves the guar- dians of their law and of their land. They had still to show what strength lay in their spiritual ideal of a nation's life to subdue the minds of their invaders, and to make a stand against their organised force. ^^'Tf'W^^j'^"??^ r ■■''■^^ ''^'^W^ly^ff^f^^ ' CHAPTER Vn ^ THE SECOND IRISH REVIVAL 1200-1520 The first Irish revival after the Danish wars showed the strength of the ancient Gaelic civilisation. The second victory which the genius of the people won over the minds of the new invaders was a more astonishing proof of the vitaUty of the Irish culture, the firm structure of their law, and the cohesion of the people. Henry H in 1171 had led an army for "the conquest *' of Ireland. Three hundred years later, when Henry VH in 1487 turned his tlioughts to Ireland he found no conquered land. An earthen ditch with a palisade on the top liad been raised to protect all that was left of ^English Ireland, called the "Pale" from its encircling fence. Outside was a country of Irish language, dress, and customs. Thirty 111 112 miSH NATIONALITY miles west of Dublin was "by west of English law.'* Norman lords had married daughters of Irish chiefs all over the country, and made combinations and treaties with every province. Their children went to be fostered in kindly houses of the Irish. Into their own palisaded forts, lifted on great mounds of earth, with three-fold entrenchments, came Irish poets singings the traditions, the love-songs, the prayers and hymns of the Gaels. A Norman shrine of gold for St. Patrick's tooth showg how the Norman lord of Athenry had adopted the national saint. Many settlers changed their names to an Irish form, and taking up the clan system melted into the Irish popu- lation. Irish speech was so universal that a proclamation of Henry VIII in a Dublin parhament had to be translated into Irish by the earl of Ormond. Irish manners had entered also into the town houses of the merchants. Foreign traders welcomed "natives" to the seapjorts, employed them, bought their wares, took them into partnership, married with them, allowed them to plead Irish law in their courts — and not only that, but they themselves \'^'.rf-?W»^WWTiP"'f?V) " THE SECOND IRISH REVIVAL US wore the forbidden Irish dress, talked Irish with the other townsfolk, and joined in their national festivities and ceremonies and songs. Almost to the very gates of Dublin, in the centre of what should have been pure English land, the merchants went riding Irish fashion, in Irish dress, and making merry with their forbidden Irish clients. This Irish revival has been attributed to a number of causes — ^to an invasion of Edward Bruce in 1315, to the "degeneracy" of the Normans, to the vice of the Irish, to the Wars of the Roses, to the want of energy of Dub- lin Castle, to the over-education of Irish people in Oxford, to agitation and lawyers. The cause lay far deeper. It lay in the rich national civilisation which thelrishgeniushad built up, strong in its courageous democracy, in its broad sympathies, in its widespread culture, in its freedom, and in its humanities. So long as the Irish language preserved to the people their old culture they never failed to absorb into their life every people that came among them. It was only when they lost hold of the tradition of their fathers and their old social order that thk great influence fell 114 miSH NATIONALITY from them, and strangers no longer yielded to their power. The social fusion of Normans and Irish was the starting-point of a lively civilisation to which each race brought its share. To- gether they took a brilliant part in the com- inerce which was broadening over the world. The Irish were great travellers; they sailed the Adriatic, journeyed in the Levant, visited the factories of Egypt, explored China, with all the old love of knowledge and infinite curiosity. They were as active and ^enious in business as the Normans themselves. Besides exporting raw materials, Irish-made linen and cloth and cloaks and leather were carried as far as Russia and Naples; Norman lords and Irish chieftains alike took in ex- change velvets, silks and satins, doth of gold and embroideries, winesandspices. Irish gold- smiths made the rich vessels that adorned the tables both of Normans and Irish. Irish masons built the new dhurches of continental des^, carving at every turn their own tradi- tional Irish ornaments. Irish scribes illumi- ated manuscripts which were as much praised in a Norman castle as in an Irish fort. Both THE SECOND IRISH REVIVAL 115 peoples used translations into Irish made by Gaelic scholars from the fashionable Latin books of the Continent. Both races sent students and professors to every university in Europe — men recognised of deep knowl- edge among the most learned men of Italy and France. A kind of national education was being wwked out. Not one ^5^'"'V!™'^" " • ■■ : THE SECOND IRISH REVIVAL 117 It was no wonder that in this high fervour of the country the Anglo-Normans, like the Danes and the Northumbrians before them, were won to a civiKsation so vital and im- passioned, so human and gay. But the mixed civiUsation found na^ favour with the government; the "wild Irish" and the "degenerate English" were no better than ** brute beasts," the English said, abandoned to "filthy customs" amd to "a damnable law that was no law, hateful to God and man." Every measure was taken to destroy the growing amity of the peoples, not only by embroihng them in war, but by making union of Ireland impossible in reUgion or in education, and by destroying pubUc confi- dence. The new central organisation of the Irish church made it a powerful weapon in English hands. An Enghshman was at. once put in every archbishopric and every,' prin- cipal see, a prelate who was often a Castle official as well, deputy, chancellor, justice, treasurer, or the like, or a good soldier — ^in any case hostile to every Irish affection. A.^ national church in the old Irish sense dis- appeared; in the English idea the church was ^^79«.r ■■- 118 IRISH NATIONALITY to destroy the nation. Higher education was also denied to both races. No Irish univer- sity could live under the eye of an English primate of Armagh, and every attempt of Anglo-Normans to set up a university for Ireland at Dublin or Drogheda was instantly crushed. To avert general confidence and mutual understanding, an alien class was maintained in the country, who for consider- ations of wealth, power, a privil^ed posi- tion, betrayed the peace of Ireland to the profit of England. No pains, for example, were spared by the kings to conciliate and use so important a house as that of the earls oi Ormond. For nearly two hundred years, as it hs^pened, the heirs of this house were always minors, held in wardship by the king.. English training at his court, visits to Lon- don, knighthoods and honours there, high posts in Ireland, prospects of new omquests of Irish land, a winking of government o£S- cials at independent privileges used on their estates by Ormond Iwds — such influences tied each heir in turn to England, and separated them from Irish interests — a "loyal" house, said the English — "fair and THE SECOND IRISH REVIVAL 119 false as Ormond," said the pe(q)le of Ireland. Both races suffered under this foreign mis- rule. Both were brayed in the same mortar. Both were driven to the demand for home rule. The national movement never flagged for a single generation. Never for a moment did the Irish cease from the struggle; in the swell and tumult of that tossing sea com- manders emerged now in one province, now in another, each to fall back into the darkness while the next pressed on to take his place. An Anglo-Norman parliament claimed (1459) that Ireland was by its constitution separate from the laws and statutes of England, and prayed to have a separate coinage for their land as in the kingdom of England. Con- federacies of Irish and Anglo-Normans were formed, one following another in endless and hopeless succession. Through aU civil strife we may plainly see the steady drift of the peoples to a common patriotism. There was panic in England at these ceaseless efforts to restore an Irish nation, for *' Ireland,'* English statesmen said,/* was as good as gone if a wild Irish wyrlinge should be chosen there as king." 120 IRISH NATIONALITY For a time it seemed as if the house of the Fitzgeralds, the most powerful house in Ire- land, might mediate between the peoples whose blood, English and Irish, they shared. Earl Gerald of Desmond led a demand for home rule in 1341, and that Ireland should not be governed by "needy men sent from England, without knowledge of Ireland or its circumstances." Earl Gerald the Rhymer of the same house (1359) was a patriot leader too — a. witty and ingenious composer of Irish poetry, who excelled all the EngUsh and many of the Irish in the knowledge of the Irish, language, poetry, and history, and of other learning. A later Earl Gerald (1416), foster-son of O'Brien and cousin of Henry VI, was complimented by the RepubUc of Flor- ence, in a letter recaUing the Florentine origin of the Fitzgeralds, for the glory he brought to that city, since its citizens had possessions as far as Hungary and Greece, and now "through you and yours bear sway even in Ibemia, the most remote island of the world." In Earl Thomas (1467) the Irish saw the first "foreigner" to be the martyr of their cause. He had furthered trade of •W'^^f^''Vf7''fr^jigy^MW^^^ p'j^^Sf^"";"^,'--'-^"'.: \ ■■•;-■-. , "V;?r;:-7.?*--:--r;E^'v;r.ja^ THE SECOND IRISH REVIVAL 121 European peoples with Irishmen; he had urgently pressed union of the races; he had pkuined a university for Ireland at Drogheda (Armagh having been long destroyed by the English). As his reward he was beheaded without trial by the earl of Worcester famed as "the Butcher," who had come over with a claim to some of the Desmond lands in Cork. His people saw in his death "the ruin of Ireland"; they laid his body with bitter lamentations by the Atlantic at Tralee, where the ocean wind moaning in the caverns still sounds to the peasants as "the Desmond's keen." Other Fitzgeralds, earls of Kildare, who had married into every leading Irish house, took up in their turn the national cause. Garrett Mot "the great" (14717-1513), married to the cousin of Henry VII, made close alliances with every Irish chief, steadily spread his power over the land, and kept up the family relations with Florence; and by his wit, his daring, the gaiety of his battle with slander, fraud, and violence, won great authority. His son Garrett inherited and enlarged his great territory. Maynooth under him was I I .. ■ I .-, 1 122 IRISH NATIONALITY j one of the richest earls' houses of that time. When he rode out in his scarlet cloak he was followed by four hundred Irish spearmen. His library was half of Irish books; he made his English wife read, write, and speak per- fectly the Irish tongue; he had for his chief poet an Irishman, "full of the grace of God and of learning"; his secretary was employed to write for his library "divers chronicles" of Ireland. The Irish loved him for his justice, for his piety, and that he put on them no arbitrary tax. By a singular charm of nature he won the hearts of all, wife, son, jailor in London Tower, and English lords. His whole poKcy was union in his country, and Ireland for the Irish. The lasting argu- ment for self-government as against rule from over-sea was heard in his cry to Wolsey and the lords at Westminster — "You hear of a case as it were in a dream, and feel not the smart that vexeth us.** He attempted to check English interference with private sub- jects in Ireland. He refused to admit that a commission to Cardinal Wolsey as legate for England gave him authority in Ireland. The mark of his genius lay above all in his • -" "-i *.V ^T"!*'''."' ''?''■■'■ ■^^ '. .'. ■ ■. . ' --.■■'.'... J. 9» ;.',■---; ■■.^"..^."'> -^_-f. ■■ ■* ' ■"..■-■• , -. -. ■_ :' , _ [: ■'■■ ' .-/' .V. \ THE SECOND IRISH REVIVAL 128 ' resolve to close disseimons and to put an end to civil wars. When as deputy he rode out to war against disturbed tribes, his first business was not to fight, but to call an assembly in the Irish manner which should decide the quarrel by arbitration according to law. He "made peace," his enemies said, and the nightmare of forced dissension gave way before this new statesmanship of national f, . union. ^ Never were the Irish "so corrupted by affection" for a lord deputy, never were they so obedient^ both from fear and from love, so Henry Vlll was warned. In spite of official intrigues, through all eddying acci- dents, the steady pressure of the country itself was towards union. The great opportunity had come to weld together the two races in Ireland, and to establish a common civilisation by a leader to whom both peoples were perfectly known, whose sympathies were engaged in both, and who as deputy of the EngHsh king had won the devoted confidence of the Irish people. There was one faction alone which no reason could convert — ^the alien minority i:ajLk^iM..Hi.Jt'ti* 124 IRISH NATIONALITY that held interests and possessions in both islands, and openly used England to advance their power and Ireland to increase their wealth. They had no country, for neither England nor Ireland could be counted such. They knew how to darken ignorance and inflame prejudice in London against their fellow-countrymen in Ireland — "the strange savage nature of the people," "savage vile poor persons which never did know or feel wealth or civility," "having no knowledge of the laws of God or of the king," nor any way to know them save through the good oflSces of these slanderers, apostles of their own virtue. The anti-national minority would have had no strength if left alone to face the growing toleration in Ireland. In support from England it found its sole security — and through its aid Ireland was flung back into disorder. ^^.^•:>K::^r: f'-^in'n CHAPTER Vm THE TAKING OF THE LAND 1520-1625 Henry Vlll, like Henry 11, was not concerned to give "civilisation" to Ireland. He was concerned to take the land. His reasons were the same. If he possessed the soil in his own right, apart from the EngUsh parliament, and commanded its fighting-men and its wealth, he could beat down rebellion in England, smite Scotland into obedience, conquer France, and create an empire of boimds imknown — and in time of danger where so sure a shelter for a flying sovereign? Claims were again revived to " our rightful inheritance"; quibbles of law once more served for the king's "title to the land"; there was another great day of deception in Dublin. Henry asked the title of King of Ireland instead of Lord, and offered to the chiefs in return full security for their lands. .125 'ts^K^rrrTi.x^-'^ ■ ■ ■ .v. > -" ' ■ ;^ _■ •■■ ^wr'V7---T"jj|^7:' ■<»^T.'S^. 126 IRISH NATIONALITY For months of subtle preparation his promises were explicit. All cause of offence was care- fully taken away. Finally a parliament was simunoned (1541) of lords carefully bribed and commons carefully packed — ^the very pattern, in fact, of that which was later called to vote the Union. And while they were by order voting the title, the king and council were making arrangements together to render void boiJi sides of the bargain. First the wording of the title was so altered as to take away any value in the "common con- sent" of parliament, since the king asserted his title to Ireland by inheritance and con- quest, b^ore and beyond all mandate ,-,' THE TAKING OF THE LAND 129 unknown in England; then "the king might say Ireland was clearly won, and after that he would be at little cost and receive great profits, and men and money at pleasure." There would be no such difficulty, Henry's advisers said as those of Henry 11 had said before, to "subdue or exile them as hath been thought," for from the settled lands plantation could be spread into the surround- ing territories, and the Irishry steadily pushed back into the sea. Henceforth it became a fixed policy to "extermmate and exile the country people of the Irishry." Whether they submitted or not, the king was to "in- habit their country" with English blood. But again as in the twelfth century it was the king and the metropolis that were to profit, not any class of inhabitants of Ireland. A series of great Confiscations put through an enslaved Pale parliament made smooth the way of conquest. An Act of 1536 for the attainder of the earl of Kildare confis- cated his estates to the king, that is, the main part of Leinster. In 1570 the bulk of Ulster, as territory of the "traitor " Shane O'Neill, was declared forfeited in the same way. AncL 7r'fWfP!f'' [.: «/T?f;;5~ J5HB5?'" 180 IRISH NATIONALITY in 1586 the chief part of Munster, the lordship of the "traitor" earl of Desmond. Another Act of 1536 forfeited to the crown all ancient claims of English lords to lands which had been granted to them, and afterwards re- covered by the original Irish owners. An- other in 1537 vested in the king all the lands of the dissolved monasteries. By these various titles given to the crown, it was hard for any acres to slip through unawares, English or Irish. An Act of 1569 moreover reduced all Ireland to shire land; in other words, all Irish chiefs who had made indentures with the crown were deprived of all the benefits which were included in such indentures, and the brehon or Irish law, with all its protection to the poor, was abolished. These laws and confiscations gave to the new sovereigns of the Irish the particular advantage that if their subjects should resist the taking of the land, they were legally "rebels,** and as such outside the laws of war. It was this new fiction of law that gave the Tudor wars their unsurpassed horror. Thus began what Bacon called the "wild chase on the wild Irishmen.*' The forfeiture ?'!™^^?J?5!.Vf-; j* i'Tf ' '■■ ■ THE TAKING OF THE LAND 131 of land of the tribe for the crime of a chief was inconceivable in Irish law; the claim of the commonalty to unalterable possession of their soil was deeply engraven in the hearts of the people, who stood together to hold their land, believing justice and law to be on their side, and the right of near two thousand years of ordered possession. At a prodigious price, at inconceivable cost of human woe, the purging of the soil from the Irish race was begun. Such mitigations as the horrors of war allow were forbidden to these "rebels" by legal fiction. Torturers and hangmen went out with the soldiers. There was no protection for any soul; the old, the sick, infants, women, scholars; any one of them might be a landholder, or a carrier on of the tradition of the tribal owners, and was in any case a rebel appointed to death. No quarter was allowed, no faith kept, and no truce given. Chiefs were made to "draw and carry," to abase them before the tribes. Poets and historians were slaught^ed and their books and genealogies burned* so that no man "might know his own grandfather" and all Irishmen be confounded in the same r'f, --r' •■■:•: -;: v.y^^^^^^ff^: 132 IRISH NATIONALITY ignorance and abasement, all glories gone, and all rights lost. The great object of the government was to destroy the whole tradi- tion, wipe out the Gaehc memories, and begin a new English life. But even with all legal aids to extermina- tion the land war proved more difficult than the English had expected. It lasted for some seventy years. The Irish were inexhaus- tible in defence, prodigious in courage, and endured hardships that Enghshmen could not survive. The most powerful governors that England could supply were sent over, and furnished with English armies and stores. Fleets held the harbours, and across all the seas from Newfoundland to Dantzic gathered in provisions for the soldiers. Armies fed from the sea-ports chased the Irish through the winter months, when the trees were bare and naked and the kine without milk, kilHng every living thing and burning every granary of com, so that famine should slay what the sword had lost. Out of the woods' the famishing Irish came creeping on their hands, for their legs would not bear them, speaking like ghosts crying out of their graves, if they -■>) -'(?,^i;ii.» ':¥(-««i^»'-. •:''-^:i.i>- THE TAKING OF THE LAND 133 found a few water-cresses flocking as to a feast; so that in short space there were none ahnost left and a most populous and plentiful country suddenly left void of man and beast — ^a place where no voice was heard in ears save woe and fear and grief, a place where there was no pause for consolation nor ap- pearance of joy on face. Thus according to the English king's forecast was "the strength of the Irish diminished and their captains taken from them." One great house after another was swept out of Irish life. In 1529 the great earl of Kildare died of a broken heart in the Tower at the news that his son had been betrayed by a forged letter into a rising. His five brothers and his son, young Silken Thomas, captured by a false pledge of safety, were clapped all six of them into the Tower and hanged in London. The six outraged corpses at Tyburn marked the close of the first and last experiment in which a great ruler, sharing the blood of the two races, practised in the customs of both countries, wmild have led Ireland in a way of peace, and brought about through equal prosperity 134 IRISH NATIONALITY and order a lasting harmony between the English and Irish people. Three hundred years later an old blackened pedigree kept in the Tower showed against the names of half the Fitzgeralds up to that time the words "Beheaded" or "Attainted"— so terrible were the long efforts to extinguish the talent and subdue the patriotism of that great family. Ormond, too, was "to be bridled." It was said his house was in no mood to hand over the "rule and obedience" of south Ireland to the king. At a feast at Ely House in Holborn (1547) the earl and seventeen of his followers lay dead out of thirty-five who had been poisoned. No inquiry was made into that crime. "Go4 called him to His mercy," the Irish said of this patriot Ormond, "before he could see that day after which doubtless he longed and looked — the restitution of the house of Kildare." His son was held fast in London to be brought up, as far as education could do it, an Englishman. The third line of the Anglo-Norman leaders was laid low. The earl of Desmond, after twenty-five years of alternate prison and war, ^saw the chief leaders of his house hanged or ■■-Tfa^^sF™'™' THE TAKING OF THE LAND 135 slain, before he himself was killed in 1583: and his wretched son, bom in the Tower, was brought from that prison to be shown to his heart-broken people — stunted in body, en- feebled in mind, half an idiot, a protestant — "the Tower Earl," "the Queen's Earl," cried the people. The Irish chiefs were also broken by guile and assassination. O'Brien was separated from his people by a peerage (1543), an Eng- lish inauguration without the ancient rites as head of his lands, and an English guard of soldiers (1558) . That house played no further part in the Irish struggle. The chief warrior of the north and terror of Elizabeth's generals was Shane O'Neill. The deputy Sidney devised many plots to poison or kill the man he could not conquer, and at last brought over from Scotland hired assassins who accomplished the murder (1567) . A map made in the reign of Elizabeth marked the place of the crime that relieved England of her greatest fear — "Here Shane O'Neill was slain." After him the struggle of the north to keep their land and independence was maintained by negotiation and by war 136 miSH NATIONALITY for forty years, under the leading of the greatest of Irish statesmen and generals Hugh O'NeiQ earl of Tyrone, and the soldier- patriot Aedh Ruadh O'Donnell earl of Tirconnell. English intrigue triumphed when Red Hugh was poisoned by a secret agent (1602) and when by a crafty charge of con- spiracy his brother Rory O'Donnell and Hugh O'Neill were driven from their country (1607). The flight of the earls marked the destruction by violence of the old Gaelic polity — ^that federation of tribes which had made of their conmion country the storehouse of Europe for learning, the centre of the noblest mission- work that the continent ever knew, the home of arts and industries, the land of a true democracy where men held the faith of a people owning their soU, in- structed in their traditions, and themselves guardians of their national life. Henry Viil had found Ireland a land of Irish civilisation and law, with a people living by tribal tenure, and two races drawing together to form a new self-governing nation. A hundred years later, when Elizabeth and James I had completed his work, all the great THE TAKING OF THE LAND 137 leaders, Anglo-Irish and Irish, had disap- peared, the people had been half exterminated, alien and hostile planters set in their place, tribal tenure obliterated, every trace of Irish law swept clean from the Irish statute-book, and an English form of state government effectively established. Was this triumph due to the weakness of tribal government and the superior value of the feudal land tenure? How far, in fact, did the Irish civilisation invite and lend itself to this destruction? It has been said that it was by Irish soldiers that Irish liberties were destroyed. The Tudors and their councillors were imder no such illusions. Their fear was that the Irish, if they suspected the real intention of the English, would all combine in one war; and in fact when the purpose of the govern- ment became clear in Ireland an English army of conquest had to be created. "Have no dread nor fear," cried Red Hugh to his Irish- men, ** of the great numbers of the soldiers of London, nor of the strangeness of their weapons and arms." Order after order went out to "weed the bands of Irish," to purge t ■?•••-;-■•-•;- ,-f^;;yw^v^ 138 IRISH NATIONALITY »♦ the army of all "such dangerous people. Soldiers from England and from Berwick were brought over at double the pay of the Irish. For warmth and comfort tJbey were clothed in Irish dress, only distinguished by red crosses on back and breast; and so the sight was seen of English soldiers in Irish clothing tearing from Irish men and women their Irish garments as the forbidden dress of traitors and rebels. Some official of Elizabeth's time made a list to please the English of a few names of Irishmen trait- orously slain by other Irishmen. There were murderers who had been brought up from childhood in an English house, detached from their own people; others were sent out to save their lives by bringing the head of a "rebel." The temper of the Irish people is better seen in the constant fidelity with which the whole people of Ulster and of Munster sheltered and protected for years O'Neill and Desmond and many another leader with a heavy price on his head. Not the poorest herdsman of the mountains touched the English gold. The military difficulties of the Irish, how- THE TAKING OP THE LAND 139 ever, were such as to bafBe skill and courage. England had been drilled by the kings that conquered her, and by the foreign wars she waged, into a powerful military nation by land and sea. Newly discovered gunpowder gave Henry VII the force of artillery. Henry Vin had formed the first powerful fleet. The new-found gold of Brazil, the wealth of the Spanish main, had made England immensely rich. In this moment of growing strength the whole might of Great Britain was thrown on Ireland, the smaller island. The war, too, had a peculiar animosity; the fury of Protestant fanaticism was the cloak for the king's ambition, the resolve of English traders to crush Irish competition, the greed of prospective planters. No motive was lacking to increase its violence. Ireland, on the other hand, never conquered, and con- templating no conquest on her part, was not organised as an aggressive and military nation. Her national spirit was of another type. But whatever had been her organisa- tion it is doubtful whether any device could have saved her from the force of the English invasion. Dublin could never be closed from •• t". 140 IRISH NATIONALITY within against enemies coming across the sea. The island was too small to give any means of escape to defeated armies while they were preparing for a new defence. They could not disappear, for example, like the Dutch of the Cape Colony into vast desert regions which gave them shelter while they built up a new state. Every fugitive within the circuit of Ireland could be presently found and hunted down. The tribal system, too, which the Tudor sovereigns found, was no longer in full possession of Ireland; the de- fence was now carried on not by a tribal Gaelic people but by a mixed race, half feudal and half tribal by tradition. But it was the old Irish inheritance of national freedom which gave to Ireland ^her desperate power of defence, so that it was only after such pro- digious efforts of war and plantation that the bodies of her people were subdued, while their minds still remained free and unenslaved. . If, moreover, the Irish system had dis- appeared so had the English. As we shall see the battle between the feudal tradition and the tribal tradition in Ireland had ended in the violent death of both. CHAPTER IX THE NATIONAL FAITH OF THE IRISH c. 1600-c. 1660 We have seen already two revivals of Irish life, when after the Danish settlement, and after the Norman, the native civilisa- tion triumphed. Even now, after confisca- tions and plantations, the national tradition was still maintained with unswerving fidelity. Amid contempt, persecution, proscription, death, the outcast Irish cherished their language and poetry, their history and law, with the old pride and devotion. In that supreme and unselfish loyalty to their race they found dignity in humiliation and pa- tience in disaster, and have left, out of the depths of their poverty and sorrow, one of the noblest examples in history. Their difficulties were almost inconceiv- able. The great dispersion had begun of 141 -.,.,i.J, , . ■,— . 142 IRISH NATIONALITY Irish deported, exiled, or cast out by emigra- tion. Twenty thousand Irish were reported in a single island of the West Indies in 1643; thirty thousand were said to be wandering about Europe; in 1653 four thousand soldiers were transported to Flanders for the war of the king of Spain. Numbers went to seek the education forbidden at home in a multi- tude of Irish colleges founded abroad. They became chancellors of universities, profes- sors, high officials in every European state — a Kerry man physician to the king of Poland; another Kerry man confessor to the queen of Portugal and sent by the king on an embassy to Louis XIV; a Donegal man, O'Glacan, physician and privy councillor to the king of France, and a very famed pro- fessor of medicine in the universities of Tou- louse and Bologna (1646-1655); and so on. We may ask whether in the history of the world there was cast out of any country such genius, learning, and industry, as the Eng- lish flung, as it were, into the sea. With every year the number of exiles grew. "The same to me," wrote one, "are the mountain or ocean, Ireland or the west of Spain; I have NATIONAL FAITH OF IRISH 14S ^ut and made fast the gates of sorrow over my heart.'* As for the Irish at home, every vestige of their tradition was doomed — their religion was forbidden, and the Staff of Patrick and Cross of Columcille destroyed, with every other national relic; their schools were scat- tered, their learned men hunted down, their books burned; native industries were abol- ished; the inauguration chairs of their chiefs were broken in pieces, and the law of the race torn up, codes of inheritance, of land tenure, of contract between neighbours or between lord and man. The very image of Justice wl^ch the race had fashioned for itself was shattered. Love of country and every attachment of race ^nd history became a crime, and even Irish language and dress were forbidden under penalty of outlawry or excommunication. "No more shall any laugh there," wrote the poet, "or children gambol; music is choked, the Irish language chained." The people were wasted by thou- sands in life and in death. The invaders supposed the degradation of the Irish race to be at last completed. "Their youth and 144 miSH NATIONALITY gentry are destroyed in the rebellion or gone to France," wrote one: "those that are' left are desititute of horses, arm^ and money, capacity and courage. Five in six of the Irish are poor, insignificant slaves, fit for nothing but to hew wood and draw water.** Such were the ignorant judgments of the new people, an ignorance shameful and criminal. . The Irish, meanwhile, at home and in the dispersion, were seeking to save out of the wreck their national traditions. Three centres were formed of this new patriotic movement — in Rome, in Louvain, and in Ireland itself. An Irish College of Franciscans was es- tablished in Rome (1625) by the efiForts of Luke Wadding, a Waterford man, divine of the Spanish embassy at Rome. The Pope granted to the Irish the church of St. Isidore, patron of Madrid, which had been occupied by Spanish Franciscans. Luke Wadding, founder and head of the college, was one of the most extraordinary men of his time for his prodigious erudition, the greatest school- man of that age, and an unchanging and impassioned patriot. He prepared the first NATIONAL FAITH OF IRISH 145 full edition of the works of the great Irish scholastic philosopher Duns Scotus, with the help of his fellow-countrymen, Thomas Strange, Anthony Hickey, John Ponce of Cork, Hugh MacCawell of Tyrone; and projected a general history of Ireland for which materials were being collected in 1628 by Thomas Walsh, archbishop of Cashel. The College was for the service of "the whole nation," for all Irishmen, no matter from what province, "so long as they be Irish." They were bound by rule to speak Irish, and an Irish book was read during meals. No spot should be more memorable to Irishmen than the site of the Franciscan College of St. Antony of Padua at Louvain. A small monastery of the Freres de Charite contains the few pathetic relics that are left of the noble company of Irish exiles who gathered there from 1609 for mutual comfort and support, and of the patriots and sdldiers laid to rest among them — O'Neills, O'Do- hertys, O'Donnells, Lynches, Murphys, and the r^t, from every comer of Ireland. "Here I break off till morning," wrote one 146 IRISH NATIONALITY who laboured on a collection of Irish poems from 1030 to 1630, "and I in gloom and grief; and during my life's length unless only that I might have one look at Ireland.** The fathers had mostly come of the old Irish literary clans, and were trained in the traditional learning of their race; such as Father O'Mulloy, distinguished in his deep knowledge of the later poetic metres, of which he wrote in his Latin and Irish Gram- mar; or Bonaventura O'h'Eoghasa, trained among the poets of Ireland, who left "her holy hills of beauty" with lamentation to "try another trade" with the Louvain brotherhood. Steeped in Irish lore the Franciscans carried on the splendid record of the Irish clergy as the twice-beloved guardians of the inheritance of their race. "Those fathers," an Irish scholar of that day wrote, "stood forward when she (Ire- land) was reduced to the greatest distress, nay, threatened with certain destruction, and vowed that the memory of the glorious deeds of their ancestors should not be con- signed to the same earth that covered the bodies of her children . . . that the ancient '??!»SW«-- NATIONAL FAITH OF lEISH 147 glory of Ireland should not be entombed by the same convulsion which deprived the Irish of the lands of their fathers and of all their property.'* More fortunate than scholars in Ireland thay had a printing' press; and used it to send out Irish gram- mars, glossaries, catechisms, poems. Hugh Mac an-Bhaird of Donegal undertook to compile the Acta Sanctorum^ for which a lay- brother, Michael O'Clery, collected materials in Ireland for ten years, and Patrick Fleming of Louth gathered records in Europe. At Hugh's death, in 1635, the task was taken up by Colgan, born at Culdaflf on the shore of Inishowen (t 1658). The work of the fathers was in darkness and sorrow. "I am wasting and perishing with grief," wrote Hugh Bourke to Luke Wadding, "to see how insensibly nigher and nigher draws the catas^ophe which must inflict mortal wounds upon our country." Ireland hersdf, however, remained the chief home of historical learning in the broad national sense. Finghin Mac Carthy Riab- hach, a Munster chief, skilled in old and modem Irish, Latin, English, and Spanish, 148 IRISH NATIONALITY wrote a history of Ireland to the Norman invasion in the beautiful hand taught him by Irish scribes; it was written while he lay imprisoned in London from 1589 to 1626, mad at times through despair. One of a neighbouring race of seafaring chiefs, O'Sulli- van Beare, an emigrant and captain in the Spanish navy, published in 1621 his indignant recital of the Elizabethan wars in Ireland. It was in hiding from the president of Mun- ster, in the wood of Aharlo, that Father Geoffrey Keating made (before 1633) his Irish history down to the Norman settlement — written for the masses in clear and winning style, the most po|)ular book perhaps ever written in Irish, and copied throughout the country by hundreds of eager hands. In the north meanwhile Michael O'Clery and his companions, two O'Clerys of Donegal, two O'Maelchonaires of Roscommon, and O'DuibhgeanaiD of Leitrim, were writing the Annals of the Four Masters (1632-6) ; all of them belonging to hereditary houses of chron- iclers. In that time of sorrow, fearing the destruction of every record of his people, O'Clery travelled through all Ireland to NATIONAL FAITH OF IRISH 149 gather up what could be saved, **though it was difficult to collect them to one place.** There is still preserved a manuscript by Caimhin, abbot of Iniscaltra about 650, which was given to 0*Clery by the neighbouring Mac Brodys who had kept it safe for a thou- sand years. The books were carried to the huts and cottages where the friars of Donegal lived round their ruined monastery; from them the workers had food and attendance, while Fergal O'Gara, a petty chieftain of Sligo descended from Olioll, king of Munster in 260, gave them a reward for their laboiu*s. Another O'Clery wrote the story of Aedh Ruadh O'Donnell, his prisons and his battles, and the calamity to Ireland of his defeat. "Then were lost besides nobility and honour, generosity and great deeds, hospitality and goodness, courtesy and noble birth, polish and bravery, strength and courage, valour and constancy, the authority and the sov- ereignty of the Irish of Erin to the end of time." In Gal way a group of scholars laid, in Lynch*s words, "a secure anchorage" for Irish history. Dr. John Lynch, the famous ', »■* >s.>-' ■;■> ftvi: ■ '^^, r^f 150 IRISH NATIONALITY apologist of the Irish, wrote there his his- torical defence of his people. To spread abroad their history he translated into Latin Keating's book. For the same purpose his friend, Tuileagna O'Maelchonaire, a distin- guished Irish scholar, translated the Annals of Ulster into English. O'Flaherty of Moy- cullen in Galway, a man of great learning, wrote on Irish antiquities "with exactness, diligence and judgment." "I live," he said, "a banished man within the bounds of my native soil, a spectator of others enriched by my birthright, an object of condoling to my relations and friends, and a condoler of their miseries." His land confiscated (1641), stripped at last of his manuscripts as well as of his other goods, he died in miserable poverty in extreme old age (1709). To Gal- way came also Dualtach Mac Firbis (1585- 1670), of a family that had been time out of mind hereditary historians in north Con- nacht. He learned in one of the old Irish schools of law in Tipperary Latin, Fnglish, and Greek. Amid the horrors of Gromwell*s wars he carried out a prodigious work on the genealogies of the clans, the greatest, perhaps. NATIONAL FAITH OF IRISH 151 that exists in any country; '^ and wrote on their saints, their kings, their writers, on the chronicles and on the laws; in moderate prosperity and in extreme adversity con- stantly devoted to the preservation of Irish history. In his old age he Uved, like other Irish scholars, a landless sojourner on the estates that had once belonged to his family and race; the last of the hereditary senna- chies of Ireland he wandered on foot from house to house, every Irish door opened to him for his learning after their undying custom, till at the age of ei^ty-five he was murdered by a Crofton when he was resting in a house on his way to Dublin. In Con- nacht, too, lived Tadhg O'Roddy of Leitrim, j a diligent collector o£ Irish manuscripts, ' who gathered thirty books of law, and many others of philosophy, poetry, physic, gene- alogies, mathematics, romances, and history; and defended against the English the char- acter of the old law and civilisation of, Ireland. It would be long to tell of the workers in all the Irish provinces — the lawyers hiding in their bosoms the genealogies and tenures 152 miSH NATIONALITY of their clans — the scribes writing annals and genealogies, to be carried, perhaps, when Irishmen gathered as for a hurling-match and went out to one of their old places of assembly, there to settle their own matters by their ancient law. No printing-press could be set up among the Irish; they were driven back on oral tradition and laborious copying by the pen. Thus for about a hundred years Keating's History was passed from hand to hand after the old manner in copies made by devoted Irish hands (one of them a "farmer"), in Leitrim, Tipperary, Ejldare, Clare, Limerick, Kilkenny, all over the country; it was only in 1723 that Dermot O'Conor translated it into English and printed it in Dublin. It is amazing how amid the dangers of the time scribes should be found to re-write and re-edit the mass of manu- scripts, those that were lost and those that have escaped. The poets were stiU the leaders of national patriotism. The great "Contention of the Poets'* — "lomarbhagh na bhfiledh" — a bat- tle that lasted for years between the bards of the O'Briens and the O'Donnells, in which NATIONAL FAITH OF IRISH 153 the bards of every part of Ireland joined — served to rouse the pride of the Irish in their history amid their calamities under James I. The leader of the argument, Tadhg Mac Daire, lord of an estate with a castle as chief poet of Thomond, was hurled over a cliflf in his old age by a Cromwellian soldier with the shout, "Say your rann now, little man!" Tadhg O'h'Uiginn of Sligo (tl617), Eochaidh O'h'Eoghasa of Fermanagh, were the greatest among very many. Bards whose names have often been forgotten spread the poems of the Ossianic cycle, and wrote verses of several kinds into which a new gloom and despair entered— " Though yesterday seemed to me long and 31, Yet longer still was this dreary day." The bards were still for a time trained in "the schools" — ^low thatched buildings shut away by a sheltering wood, where students came for six months of the year. None were admitted who could not read and write, and use a good memory; none but those who had come of a bardic tribe, and of a far district, lest they should be distracted by friends and 154 IRISH NATIONALITY relations. The Scottish Gaels and the Irish were united as of old in the new literature; Irish bards and harpers were as much at home in the Highlands and in the Isles as in Ireland, and the poems of the Irish bards were as popular there as in Munster. Thus the imity of feeling of the whole race was preserved and the bards still remained men who be- longed to their country rather than to a clan or territory. But with the exile of the Irish chiefs, withr the steady ruin of "the schools/* poets began to throw aside the old intricate metres and the old words no longer understood, and turned to the people, put- ting away "dark difficult language*' to bring literature to the common folk: there were even translations made for those who were setting their children to learn the English instead of their native tongue. Bom pf an untold suffering, a burst of melody swept over Ireland, scores and scores of new and brilliant metres, perhaps the richest attempt to convey music in words ever made by man. In that unfathomed experience, they tell how seeking after Erin over all obstacles, they found her fettered and weeping, and NATIONAL FAITH OF IRISH 155 for their loyalty she gave them the last ^ left to her, the light of poetry. In Leinster of the English, "the cemetery of the valorous Gael," Irish learning had a different story. There it seemed for a moment that it might form a meeting-point between the new race and the old, joining together,' as the Catholics put it, "our conmionwealth men,'' a people compounded of many nations, some Irish by birth and descent, others by descent only, others neither by descent nor by birth but by inhabitation of one soil; but all parts of one body politic, acknowl- edging one God, conjoined together in alle- giance to one and the same sovereign, united in the fruition of the selfsame air, and tied in subsistence upon this our natural soil whereupon we live together. A tiny group of scholars in Dublin had begun to study Irish history. Sir James Ware (1594-1666), bom there of an English family, ** conceived a great love for his native country and could not b^ to see it aspersed by some authors, which put him upon doing it all the justice he could in his writings." He spared no cost in buying valuable manu- tiiLtiib»^^:i-£ .: ..^-. 156 IRISH NATIONALITY scripts, kept an Irish secretary to translate, and employed for eleven years the great scholar O'Flaherty whose help gave to his work its chief value. Ussher, archbishop of Armagh, also bom in Dublin, devoted him- self to the study of Irish antiquities. Baron d^'Aungier, Master of the Rolls, put into writ- ing every point which he could find in original documents "which for antiquity or singularity might interest this country." The enthusi- asm of learning drew together Protestant and Catholic, Anglo-Irish and Irish. All these men were in communication with Luke Wadding in Rome through Thomas Strange the Franciscan, his intimate friend; they sent their own collections of records to help him in his Catholic history of Irish saints, "being desirous that Wadding's book shoiild see the light," wishing "to help him in his work for Ireland," begging to see "the veriest trifle" that he wrote. The noblest English scholar was Bishop Bedell, who while pro- vost established an Irish lecture in Trinity College, had the chapter during commons read in Irish, and employed a Sheridan of Cavan to translate the Old Testament into i..i6mii,ii^^'^ f- "^».>Mi'^»;r,;t^i- 3—; -w r" VijftvfriTf-'" f^ -?WT'l^^S5^^?^!^^T7iX-™'™ i~«^T'T..--.ttc , ■■'^.;^.-m:>-^-".- -:i, ,i,'^» --7--«.'Ti*-»-57v"« NATIONAL FAITH OF IRISH 157 Irish. As bishop he braved the anger of the government by declaring the hardships of the CathoHc Irish, and by circulating a cate- chism in English and Irish. Bitteriy did Ussher reproach him for such a scandal at which the professors of the gospel did all take ofiFence, and for daring to adventure that which his brethren had been "so long abuild- ing," the destruction of the Irish language. The Irish alone poured out their love and gratitude to Bedell; they protected him in the war of 1641; the insurgent chieftains fired volleys over his grave paying homage to his piety; "sit anima mea cum Bedello!** cried a priest. He showed what one just man, caring for the people and speaking to them in their own tongue, could do in a few years to abolish the divisions of race and religion. The light, however, that had risen in Dub- lin was extinguished. Sympathies for the spirit of Irishmen in their long history were quenched by the greed for land, the passion of commerce, and the fanaticism of ascend- ancy and dominion. '";■'■ *v *X"^J^- 'j^Jt-*^" y'" ' >"■ ' * - ■~r^>IWi75'i?%^ ry-'V ■ ji-': ^v'-^^r^'^^p^^ CHAPTER X BULE OF THE ENGLISH PARLIAMENT 1640-1750 The aim which English kings had set before th^n for the last four hundred years seemed now fulfilled. The land was theirs, and the dominion. But the victory turned to dust and ashes in their hands. The "royal in- heritance" of so many hopes had practically disappeared; for if the feudal system which was to give the king the land of Ireland had destroyed the tribal system, it was itself dead; decaying and intolerable in England, it could no longer be made to serve in Ireland. Hen- ry's dream of a royal army from Ireland, "a sword and flay" at the king's use against his subjects in Great Britain, perished; Charles I did indeed propose to use the Irish fighting-men to smite into obedience England and Scotland, but no king of England tried that experiment again. James H looked to RULE OF THE PARLIAMENT 159 Lreland, as in Henry's scheme, for a safe place of refuge to fly to in danger; that, again, no king of England tried a second time. As for the king's revenues and profits, the dream of so many centuries, that too vanished: con- fiscations old and new which the English parliament allowed the Crown for L*ish government left the king none the richer, and after 1692 no longer sufficed even for Irish expenses. The title of "King of Ireland" which Henry Vm had proclaimed in his own right with such high hopes, bred out of its original deception other deceptions deeper and blacker than the first. The sovereign saw his absolute tyranny gradually taken out of his hands by the parliament and middle class ior their own benefit; the rule of the king was passing, the rule of the English parliament had begun. Thus past history was as it were wiped out. Everything in Ireland was to be new. The social order was now neither feudal nor tribal, nor anything known before. Other methods had been set up, without custom, tradition, or law behind them. There were two new classes, English planters and Irish toilers^No A 160 IRISH NATIONALITY old ties bound them, and no new charities. "From the Anglo-Irish no man of special sanctity as yet is known to have spmng," observed a Gael of that day. Ancient patri- mony had fallen. The new aristocracy was that of the strong hand and the exploiter's greed. Ordinary restraints of civilised so- cieties were not yet bom in this pushing commercial throng, where the scum of Great Britain, broken men or men flying from the law, hastened^-** hoping to be without fear of man's justice in a land where there was nothing, or but little as yet, of the fear of God." Ireland was left absolutely without guides or representatives. There were no natural leaders of the country among the new men, each fighting for his own hand; the English government permitted none among the Irish. England too was being made new, with much turmoil and confusion — an England where kings were yielding to parliaments, and parliaments were being subdued to the rising commercial classes. The idea of a separate royal power and profit had disappeared and instead of it had come the rule and profit of RULE OF THE PARLIAMENT 161 the parliament of England, and of her noble- men, ecclesiastics, and traders in general. This new rule marked the first revolution in the English government of Lreland which had happened since Henry U sat in his Dublin palace. By the ancient constitution assured by compacts and grants since English laws were first brought into that country, Ireland was united to the Crown of England as a free and distinct kingdom, with the right of hold- ing parUaments subject only to the king and his privy council; statutes of the English parliament hadknot force of law there until they had been re-enacted in Ireland — which indeed was necessary by the very theory of parliaments, for there were no Irish repre- sentatives in the EngUsh Houses. Of its mere will the parliament of England now took to itself authority to make laws for Ireland in as free and uncontrolled a mannfer as if no Irish parliament existed. The new ruling classes had neither experience nor training. Regard- less of any legal technicalities they simply usurped a power unlimited and despotic over a confused and shattered Ireland. Now was seen the full evil of government from over-sea. ■•','v^.™y^y- ♦r;*'^ 162 IRISH NATIONALITY where before a foreign tribunal, sitting at a distance, ignorant and prejudiced, the subject people had no voice; they could dispute no lie, and could affirm no truth. This despotism grew up regardless of any theory of law or constitution. The intention was unchanged — the taking of all Irish land, the rooting out of the old race from the coun- try. Adventurers were tempted by Irish wealth; what had once been widely diffused among tiie Irish tribes was gathered into the hands of a few aliens, who ruthlessly wasted the land for their own great enrichment. Enor- mous profits fell to planters, who could get three times as much gain from an Irish as from an English estate by a fierce exploiting of the natural resources of the island and of its cheap outlawed labour. Forests of oak were hastily destroyed for quick profits; woods were cut down for charcoal to smelt the iron which was carried down the rivers in cunning_j Irish boats, and what had cost £10 in labour and transport sold at £17 in London. The last furnace was put out in Kerry when the last wood had been destroyed. Where the English adventurer passed he left the land as !■ ■ytrTK'^^^W^'"'^' RULE OF THE PARLIAMENT 163 naked as if a forest fire had swept over the country. For the exploiter's rage, for the waster's madness, more land was constantly needed. Three provinces had been largely planted by 1620 — one still remained. By a prodigious fraud James I, and after him Charles I in violation of his solemn promise, proposed to extirpate the Liish from Connacht. The maddened people were driven to arms in 1641. The London parliament which had just opened the quarrel with the king which was to end in his beheading, seized their opportunity in Ireland. Instantly London City, and a House of Commons consisting mainly of Puri- tan adventurers, joined in speculations to buy up "traitors' lands," openly sold in London at £100 for a thousand acres in Ulster or for six hundred in Munster, and so on in every province. It was a cheap bargain, the value of forfeited lands being calculated by parlia- ment later at £2,500 for a thousand acres. The more rebels the more forfeitures, and every device of law and fraud was used to fling the whole people into the war, either in fact or in name, and so destroy the claim of the whole "^fis^-'- 164 IRISH NATIONALITY ■ of them to their lands. "Wild Irishmen," the English said to one another, "had nothing but the human form to show that they were men." Letters were forged and printed in England, purporting to give Irish news; dis- countenanced by parUament, they still mark the first experiment to appeal in this way to London on the Irish question. ParUament did its utmost to make the contest a war of extermination: it ended, in fact, in the death of little less than half the population. The Commons* auction of Irishmen's lands in 1641, their conduct of a war of distinguished ferocity, these were the acts by which the Irish first knew government by an English parliament. The memory of the black curse of Cromwell Kves among the people. He remains in Ireland as the great exemplar of inhuman cruelties, standing amid these scenes of woe with praises to God for such manifest evidence of His inspiration. The speculators got their lands, outcast women and children lay on the wayside devoured by wolves and birds of prey. By order of parliament (1653) over 20,000 destitute men, women, and children from twelve years were sold into the ^'!S^'^fTTln'w'P^''rW'«^B'-" V ""™ " RULE OF THE PARLIAMENT 165 service of English planters in Virginia and the Carolinas. Slave-dealers were let loose over the country, and the Bristol merchants did good business. With what bitter irony an Irishman might contrast the "civilisation" of the English and the "barbarism" of the Irish — ^if we talk, he said, about civility and a civil manner of contract of selling and buying, there is no doubt that the Anglo-Irish bom in cities have had more opportunity to acquire civility than the Old Irish; but if the question be of civility, of good manners, of hberaUty, of hospitality, and charity towards all, these virtues dwelt among the Irish. Kings were restored to carry out the will of parliament. Charles 11 at their bidding ignored the treaty of his father that the Irish who submitted should return to their lands (1661): at the mere appearance of keeping promise to a few hundred Catholic landowners out of thousands, the Protestant planters sent out their threats of insurrection. A deeper misery was reached when William HI led his army across the Boyne and the Shannon (1690). In grave danger and difficulty he was glad to win peace by the Treaty of Limerick, 166 IRISH NATIONALITY in which the Irish were promised the quiet exercise of their religion. The Treaty was immediately broken. The English parliament objected to any such encouragement of Irish Papists, and demanded that no pardons should be given or estates divided save by their advice, and William said no word to uphold the public faith. The pledge of freedom of worship was exchanged for the most infamous set of penal laws ever placed on a Statute- book. The breaking of the Treaty of Limerick, conspicuous among the perfidies to Ireland, inaugurated the century of settled rule by the parliament of England (1691-1782). Its first care was to secure to English Prot- estants their revenues in Ireland; the plant- ers, one-fomth of the people of Ireland, were established as owners of four-fifths of Irish soil; and one-half of their estates, the land confiscated under Cromwell and William, they held by the despotic grant of the English parliament. This body, having outlawed four thousand Irishmen, and seized a milUon and a half of their acres, proceeded to crush the liberties of its own English settlers by RULE OF THE PAELIAMENT 167 simply issuing statutes for Ireland of its sole authority. The acts were as tyrannical in their subject as in theii* origin. One (1691), which ordered that no Catholip should sit in the Irish Houses, deprived three-fourths of the people of representatives, and left to one- fourth alone the right of citizens. Some Euglish judges decided, without and against Irish legal opinion, that the privy councils in Dublin and London had power to alter Irish bills before sending them to the king. "If an angel came from heaven that was a privy councillor I would not trust my liberty with him one moment," said an English member of that time. All liberties were thus rooted out. The planters' rights were overthrown as pitilessly as those of the Irish they had expelled. Molyneux, member for Dublin university, set forth in 1698 the "Case of Ireland.*^ He traced its constitution for five centuries; showed that historically there had never been a "conquest" of Ireland, and that all its civil liberti^ werie grounded on compact and charter; and declared that his native land shared the claims of all mankind to justice. 168 IRISH NATIONALITY "To tax me without consent is little better, if at all, than downright robbing me. I am sure the great patriots of liberty and property, the free people of England, cannot think of such a thing but with abhorrence." "There may be ill consequences," he cried, "if the Irish come to think their rights and hberties were taken away, their parliaments rendered nuga- tory, and their Uves and fortunes left to depend on the will of a le^slature wherein they are not parties." The "ill consequences " were seen seventy years later when Molyneux* book became the text-book of Americans in then- rising against English rule; and when Anglo-Irish defenders of their own liberties were driven to make conmion cause with their Irish compatriots — ^for "no one or more men," said Molyneux, "can by nature chal- lenge any right, liberty, or freedom, or any ease in his property, estate, or conscience which all other men have not an equally just claim to." But that day was far off. For the moment the Irish parliament deserved and received entire contempt from England. The gentry who had accepted land and power by the arbitrary will of the English House of "^v "™ - ~ -';,--^fT''',!^n'rv* " ■ ™ 1." RULE OF THE PARLIAMENT 169 Commons dared not dispute the tyranny that was the warrant of their property: "Ihope,** was the ironic answer, "the honourable mem- ber will not question the validity of his title." With such an argument at hand, the English parHament had no need of circumspection or of soft words. It simply condenmed Moly- neux and his remonstrance, demanded of the king to maintain the subordination of Ireland, and to order the journals of its parliaments to be laid before the Houses at Westminster; and on the same day required of him, since the Irish were "dependent on and protected by England in the enjoyment of all they had," to forbid them to continue their woollen trade, but leave it entire to England. In 1719 it declared its power at all times to make laws which should bind the people of Ireland. Thus an English parliament which had fought for its own liberties established a hierarchy of tyranny for Ireland: the Anglo- Irish tied under servitude to England, and the Irish chained under an equal bondage to the Anglo-Irish. As one of the governors of Ire- land wrote a hundred years later, "I think Great Britain may still easily manage the 170 miSH NATIONALITY Protestants, and the Protestants the Catho- Kcs." Such was the servile position of English planters. They had made their bargain. To pay the price of wealth and ascendency they sold their own freedom and the rights of their new country. The smaller number, said Burke, were placed in power at the expense of the civil liberties and properties of the far greater, and at the expense of the ciyil lib- erties of the whole. [ Ireland was now degraded to a subject colony. The government never proposed that Englishmen in Ireland should be on equal terms with English in England. Strin- gent arrangements were made to keep Ireland low. The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended while the English parliament ruled. Judges were removable at pleasure. Precautions were taken against the growth of "an Irish interest." By a variety of devices the parlia- ment of English Protestants was debased to a corrupt and ignoble servitude. So deep was their subjection that Ireland was held in England to be "no more than a remote part of their dominion, which was not accustomed to figure on the theatre of politics." Govern- RULE OF THE PARLIAMENT 171 ment by Dublin Castle was directed in the sole interest of England; the greatest posts in the Castle, the Law, the Church, were given to Englishmen, "king-fishers," as the nick- name went of the churchmen. "I fear much blame here," said the English premier in 1774, ** ... if I consent to part with the disposal of these oflSces which have been so long and so uniformly bestowed upon members of the British parliament." Castle officials were expected to have a single view to English interests. In speeches from the throne governors of Ireland formally spoke of the Irish people, the majority of their subjects, as "the common enemy"; they were scarcely less suspicious of the English Protestants; "it is worth turning in ydur mind," one wrote to Pitt, "how the violence of both parties might be turned on this occasion to the advancement of England." One tyranny begot another. Irish mem- bers, having no hberties to defend, and no country to protect, devoted themselves to the security of their property— its security and increase. All was quiet. There was no fear in Ireland of a rising for the Pretender. The 178 miSH NATIONALITY Irish, true to their ancient horror of violence for religion, never made a religious war, and never desired that which was ever repugnant to the Irish spirit, temporal ascendency for a spiritual faith. Their only prayer was for freedom in worship — that same prayer which Irish Catholics had presented in the parlia- ment of James I (1613), "indented with sor- row, signed with tears, and delivered in this house of peace and Uberty with our disarmed hands." Protestants had never cause for fear in Ireland on reUgious grounds. In queen Mary's persecution Protestants flying from England had taken shelter in Ireland among Irish Catholics, and not a hand was raised against them there. Bitter as were the poets against the EngUsh exterminators, no Irish curse has been found against the Protestant for his reUgion, even through the black time of the penal laws. The parliament, however, began a series of penal laws against Irish CathoUcs. They were forbidden the use of their religion, almost every means of liveli- hood, every right of a citizen, every family affection. Their possessions were scattered, education was denied them, when a father RULE OF THE PARLIAMENT 17S died his children were handed over to a Prot- estant guardian. "The law," said the leading judges, "does not suppose any such person to exist as an Lrish Roman Catholic." They were only recognised "for repression and punishment." Statutes framed to demoralise and debase the people, so as to make them for ever unfit for self-government, pursued the souls of the victims to the second and third generation. In this ferocious violence the law-makers were not moved by fanaticism. Their rapacity was not concerned with the reUgion of the Irish, but only with their prop- erty and industry. The conversion of a Catholic was not greatly desired; so long as there were Papists the planters could secure their lands, and use them as slaves, "worse than negroes." Laws which would have soimded infamous if directed openly to the seizing of property, took on a sacred character as a religious effort to suppress false doctrine. One-fiftieth part of Ireland was all that was left to Irish Catholics, utterly excluded for ever from the inheritance of their fathers. "One single foot of land there is not left us," rose their lament, "no, not what one may 174 miSH NATIONALITY make his bed upon." "See all that are with- out a bed except the furze of the mountains, the bent of the curragh, and the bog-myrtle beneath their bodies. Under frost, under snow, under rain, under blasts of wind, with- out a morsel to eat but watercress, green grass, sorrel of the mountain, or clover of the hills. Och! my pity to see their nobles forsaken!" And yet, in spite of this success, the Anglo- Irish had made a bad bargain. Cut off from their fellow-countrymen, having renounced the right to have a country, the Protestant land-hunters were no more respected in England than in Ireland. The English parliament did with them as it ghose. Their subjection tempted the commercial classes. To safeguard their own profits of commerce and industry English traders made statutes to annihilate Irish competition. They for- bade carrying of cattle or dairy stuff to Eng- land, they forbade trade in soap or candles; in cloth, in glass, in linen save of the coarsest kind; the increase of com was checked; it was proposed to stop Irish fisheries. The wool which they might not use at home must be exported to England alone. They might ' -iiMi'iif^ iV RULE OF THE PARLIAMENT 175 not build ships. From old time L*eland had traded across the Gaulish sea: her ports had seen the first discoverers of America. But now all her great harbours to the west with its rising American trade were closed: no merchant ship crossing the Atlantic was. allowed to load at an L*ish port or to un* load. The abundance of harbours, once so full of commerce, were now, said Swift, "of no more use to us than a beautiful prospect to a man shut up in a dungeon." Li 1720 all trade was at a stand, the country bare of money, "want and misery in every face." It was unfortunate. Englishmen said, that Ire- land had been by the act of God doomed to poverty — so isolated in geographical position, so lacking in industrial resources, inhabited by a people so indolent in tillage, and unfitted by their religion to work. Meanwhile they suc- cessfully pushed their own business in a coun- try which they allowed to make nothing for itself. Their manufacturers sent over yearly two millions of their goods, more than to any other country save their American colonies, and took the raw material of Ireland, while Irish workers were driven out on the hillsides i^Tir^-^rjr^rWTjr^*^- !-*-r[';- ■-?«■■ -?,-'r---'-..',:i'~ ■;*;,■.. :T^-i*- -..-.^., ,,.^.^,^^,, .^^ _-.,,. ^,.. ,„__,, _...^^^_^,,^^,„,^,,,.^^_^_™ ■ P'KV^SfS^ff^f^' 176 miSH NATIONALITY to starve. The planters* parliament looked on in barren helplessness. Tbey had no nation behind them. They could lead no popular resistance. They had no call to public duty. And the English knew it well. Ministers heaped up humiliations; they quartered on Irish revenues all the pensioners that could not safely be proposed to a free parliament in England — the mistresses of successsive kings and their children, German relations of the Hanoverians, useful politi- cians covered by other names, a queen of Denmark banished for misconduct, a Sar- dinian ambassador under a false title, a trailing host of Englishmen — ^pensions stead- ily increasing from £30,000 to over £89,000. Some £600,000 was at last yearly sent over to England for absentees, pensions, govern- ment annuities, and the like. A parliament servile and tyrannical could not even pre- tend to urge on the government that its measures, as a patriot said, should sometimes "diverge towards public utility." It had abandoned all power save that of increasing the sorrows of the people. A double corruption was thus proceeding. v^sfyr^i^:^-:, RULE OF THE PARLIAMENT 177 The E^nglish parliament desired to make the Irish houses for ever unfit for self-govern- ment. The Irish parliament was seeking to perform the same office for the Irish people under it. The old race meanwhile, three- fourths of the dwellers in Ireland, were brought under consideration of the rulers only as objects of some new rigour or severity. Their cry was unheard by an absent and indiflFerent "conqueror,** and the only reform the country ever knew was an increase in the army that maintained the alien rulers and protected their crimes. In neither parlia- ment had the Irish any voice. In courts where the law was administered by Protestant landlords and their agents, as magistrates, grand juries, bailiffs, lawyers, and the r^t — "full of might and injustice, without a word for the Irish in the law,** as an Irish poem said, who would not even write the Irish names, but scornfully cried after all of them Teig and Diarmuid — ^the ancient tongue -:"i;f.t^?'v 178 . IRISH NATIONALITY of the road were lined with men, women, and children, who, as he passed along, kneeled down and suppHcated Heaven to bless him as their protector and guardian angel/' The people poured from "this sod of misery" across the sea. In the service of France alone 450,000 Irish soldiers were reckoned td have died between 1691 and 1745. Un- counted thousands from nortli and south sailed to America. Irish Catholics went there in a constant stream from 1650 till 1798. The Protestant settlers followed them in the eighteenth century. Like the kings of England, the parliament of the English aristocracy and commercial magnates had failed to exploit Ireland to their advantage. For a hundred years (1691— 1782) they ruled the Irish people with the strictest severity that human ingenuity could devise. A "strong government,** purely English, was given its opportunity — ^pro- longed, undisturbed, uncontrolled — ^to ad- vance "the king's service,'* the dependency of Ireland upon England, and "the comfort or security of any English in it.** A multi- tude of statesmen put their hands to the Ti?^^<^S!^.*-!^rv»'*i??^ RULE OF THE PARLIAMENT 179 work. Commercial men in England inspired the policy. English clergy were sent over to fill all the higher posts of the church, and were the chief leaders of the secular govern- ment. Such a power very rarely falls to the rulers in any country. And in the end there was no advantage to any party. Some astute individuals heaped up an ignoble wealth, but there was no profit to Ireland, to Eng- land, or to the Empire. The Irish people sufifered a long agony unmatched, perhaps, in European history. Few of the Protestant country gentry had established their for- tunes; their subservience which debarred them from public duty, their privilege of calling in English soldiers to protect them from the results of every error or crime, had robbed them of any high intelligence in politics or science in their business of land management, and thus doubly impoverished them. England on her part had thrown into the sea from her dominion a greater wealth of talent, industiy, and bravery than had ever been exiled from any country in the world: there was not a country in Europe, and not an occupation, where Irishmen were 180 nUSH NATIONALITY not in the first rank — as field-marshals, admirals, ambassadors, prime ministers, scholars, physicians, merchants, foimders of mining industries, soldiers, and labourers. In exchange for this an incompetent and inferior landed gentry was established in Ireland. Instead of profit for the govern- ment there was plain bankruptcy — "Eng- land," it was said, "must now either support this kingdom, or allow her the means of supporting herself." As for the Empire, the colonies had been flooded with the men that England had wronged. Even the Prot- estant exiles from Ulster went to America as "Sons of St. Patrick." "To shun per- secution and designed ruin" by the English government, Protestants and Catholics had gone, and their money, their arms, the fury of their wrath, were spent in organising the American War. Irishmen were at every meeting, every council, every battle. Their indignation was a white flame of revolt that consumed every fear and vacillation around it. That long, deep, and bitter experience bore down the temporisers, and sent out men trained in suffering to triumph ?tt?^^4??»;°- RULE OF THE PARLIAMENT 181 over every adversity. Brigadier-General Owen Sullivan, bom at Limerick during the siege, was publicly thanked by Washington and by the congress. Commodore John Barry, a Wexford man, "Father of the American Navy," was Washington's com- mander-in-chief of the naval forces of the States. Charies Thompson of Strabane was secretary of the Continental Congress. Eight Irishmen, passionate organisers of the revolt, signed the Declaration of Lidependence. After the war an Irishman prepared the Declarati(m for publication from JefiFerson's rough draft; an Irishman's son first publicly read it; an Irishman first printed and pub- lished it. . We have seen the uncontrolled rule of English kings and English Parliaments. Such was the end of their story. There was another experiment yet to be tried. CHAPTER XI THE EISE OF A NEW IRELAND 1691-1750 It might have seemed impossible amid such compKcated tyramiies to build up a united country. But the most ferocious laws could not wholly destroy the kindly influences of Ireland, the essential needs of men, nor the charities of human nature. There grew up too the imion of common suffering. Once more the people of Ireland were being "brayed together in a mortar'* to compact them into a single commonwealth. The Irish had never lost their power of absorbing new settlers in their country. The CromweUians complained that thousands of the English who came over under Eliza- beth had "become one with the Irish as well in affinity as in idolatry." Forty years later these CromweUians planted on Irish 182 ^^'y>?s,n:f^^Trpj,';^^jj;^^j»,'i-^- :^.>'^;;c. -r-'^^t^^:',y RISE OF A NEW IRELAND 183 fanns suffered themselves the same change; their children could not speak a word of English and became wholly Irish in religion and feeling. Seven years after the battle of the Boyne the same influence began to turn Irish the very soldiers of William. The civilisation, the piety, the charm of Irish life told its of old. In the country places, far from the government, kindly friendships grew up between neighbours, and Protest- ants by some device of goodwill would hide a Catholic from some atrocious penalty, would save his arms from being confiscated, or his children from being brought up as Protest- ants. The gentry in general spoke Irish with the people, and common interests grew up in the land where they lived together. The Irish had seen the fires of destruction pass over them, consuming the humanities of their law, the honour of their country, and the relics of their fathers: the cry of their lamentation, said an Italian in 1641, was more expressive than any music he had heard of the great masters of the continent. The penal days have left their traces. We may still see in hidden places of the woods ■■//- '7Aif l'-.^ 184 IRISH NATIONALITY some cave or rock where the people gathered in secret to celebrate mass. There remam memorials of Irishmen, cast out of their lands, who to mark their final degradation had been driven to the livelihood which the new English held in the utmost contempt — the work of their hands; their dead bodies were carried to the ruined abbeys, and proudly laid in the roofless naves and chan- cels, under great sculptured slabs bearing the names of once noble families, and deeply carved with the instruments of the dead man's trade, a plough, the tools of a shoemaker or a carpenter or a mason. In a far church in Connemara by the Atlantic, a Burke raised in 1722 a scupltured tomb to the first of his race who had come to Connacht, the figure in coat of mail and conical helmet finely carved in limestone. Monuments lie heaped in Burris, looking out on the great ocean; and in all the sacred places dP the Irish. By their industry and skill in the despised busi- ness of handicrafts and commerce the out- laws were fast winning most of the ready money of the country into their hands. It would be a noble achievement, said RISE OF A NEW IBELAND 185 Swift, to abolish the Irish language, which prevented "the Irish from being tamed." But Swift's popularity with the native Irish was remarkable, and when he visited Cavan he was interested by verses of its poets and wrote an English ballad founded on the Plearaca Ui Ruaire; he helped the rector of Anna (Belturbet) in his endeavours to have prayers read in Irish in the established churches in remote places. The Protestant bishops and clergy in general, holding that their first duty was not to minister to the souls of Irishmen, but rather as agents of the government to bring Irish speech "into entire disuse," refused to learn the only language understood by the people. Clergy and officials alike knew nothing whatever of the true life of Ireland. Now and then there was a rare exception, and the respect which Philip Skelton showed for the religious convictions of a country-bred maidservant should be remembered. But in general the clergy and all other political agents opposed kindly intercourse of the two races. The fiction of complete Irish barbarism was necessary to maintain the Protestant ascend- .(■^ ■■^•'.'-rr-v-^^-^-K^ny.cT^^^^^'i- ■ t^i* 186 miSH NATIONALITY ency, and in later days to d^end it. The whole literature of the Irish was therefore cast aside as waste refuse. Their race is never mentioned in histories of the eighteenth century save as an indistinct and obscure mass of wretchedness, lawlessness, and igno- rance, lying in impenetrable darkness, whence no voice ever arose even of protest or com- plaint, unless the pains of starvation now and again woke the most miserable from their torpor to some wild outrage, to be repressed by even more savage severity. So fixed and convenient did this lying doctrine prove that it became a truism never challenged. To this day all manuscripts of the later Irish times have been rejected from purchase by public funds, to the irrevocable loss of a vast mass of Irish material. By steadily neglect- ing everything written in the native tongue of the country, the Protestant planters, one- fourth of the inhabitants, secured to them- selves the sole place in the later history of Ireland. A false history engendered a false policy, which in the long run held no profit for the Empire, England, or Ireland. Unsuspected by English settlers, the Irish RISE OF A NEW IRELAND 187 tradition was carried across the years of captivity by these exiles in their own land. Descendants of literary clans, historians and poets and scribes were to be found in farm- houses, working at the plough and spade. Some wrote prose accounts of the late wars, the history of their tribe, the antiquities of their province, annals of Ireland, and geog- raphy. The greatest of the poets was Ddibhi O'Bruadair of Limerick, a man knowing some English and learned in Irish lore, whose poems (1650-1694) stirred men of the cabins with lessons of their time, the laying down of arms by the Irish in 1652, Sarsfield and Limerick, the breaking of the treaty, the grandsons of kings working with the spade, the poor man perfected in learning, steadfast, well proved in good sense, the chaffering insolence of the new traders, the fashion of men fettering their tongues to speak the mere ghost of rough English, or turning -Protestant for ease. Learned men showed the love of their language in the making of dictionaries and grammars to preserve, now that the great schools were broken up, the learning of the great masters of Irish. Thus the poet Tadhg 188 IRISH NATIONALITY 0*Neaclitain worked from 1734 to 1749 at a dictionary. Another learned poet and lexicographer, Aodh Buidh MacCurtin, pub- lished with Conor O'Begly in Paris a grammar (1728) and a dictionary (1732); in his last edition of the grammar he prayed pardon for "confounding an example of the impera- tive with the potential mood," which he was caused to do "by the great bother of the brawling company that is round about me in this prison." There were still well-qualified scribes who copied the old heroic stories and circulated them freely all over Ireland. There were some who translated religious books from French and Latin into Irish. "I wish to save," said Charles 0*Conor, "as many as I can of the ancient manuscripts of Ireland from the wreck which has overwhelmed every- thing that once belonged to us." O'Conor was of Sligo county. His father, like other gentlemen, had been so reduced by con- fiscation that he had to plough with his own hands. A Franciscan sheltered in a peasant's cottage, who knew no English, taught him Latin. He attended mass held secretly in a cave. Amid such difiiculties he gained the ^*^^^^*^f*?*^5*^^?^n-^v!7':" 1 /=«:^;r.'^-T''-:^7jT-. 1 .■^. ■■-; - RISE OF A NEW IRELAND 189 best learning of his unhappy time. Much of the materials that 0*Clery had used for his Annals had perished in the great troubles, and O'Conor began again that endless labour of Irish scholars, the saving of the relics of his people's story from final oblivion. It was the passion of his life. He formed an Irish library, and copied with his own hand large volumes of extracts from books he could not possess. Having obtained O'Clery's own manuscript of the Annals, he had this im- mense work copied by his own scribe; and another copy made in 1734 by Hugh 0*Mul- loy, an excellent writer, for his friend Dr. O'Fergus of Dublin. He wrote for the learned, and deHghted the peasants round him with the stories of their national history. It is interesting to recall that Goldsmith probably knew O'Conor, so that the best English of an Irishman, and the best learning of an Irish- man at that time, were thus connected. It was the Irish antiquarians and his- torians who in 1759 drew Irishmen together into "the Catholic Committee" — Charles O'Conor, Dr. Curry, and Wyse of Water- ford. O'Conor by his learning preserved 190 miSH NATIONALITY for them the history of their fathers. Dr. Curry, of a Cavan family whose estates had been swept from them in 1641 and 1691, had studied as a physician in France, and was eminent in Dublin though shut out from every post; he was the first to use his re- search and literary powers to bring truth out of falsehood in the later Irish history, and to justify the Irish against the lying accusations concerning the rising of 1641, These learned patriots combined in a move- ment to win for the Irish some recognition before the law and some rights of citizens in their own land. Countless poets, meanwhile, poured out in verse the infinite sorrow of the Gaels, recalling the days when their land was filled with poet- schools and festivals, and the high hospitality of great Irishmen. If a song of hope arose that the race should come to their own again, the voice of Irish charity was not wanting — ** Having the fear of God, be ye full of alms- giving and friendliness, and forgetting no- thing do ye according to the commandments, shun ye drunkenness and oaths and cursing, and do not say till death 'God damn' from ■ rf-'-ff'^^f*-. '■'".' ''JJ\< RISE OF A NEW IRELAND 191 your mouths." Riotous laughter broke out in some; they were all, in fact, professional wits — chief among them Eoghan Ruadh O'SuUi- van from Kerry, who died in 1784; a working man who had laboured with plough and spade, and first came into note for helping his employer's son, fresh from a French college, with an explanation of a Greek passage. Jacobite poems told of the Lady Erin as a beautiful woman flying from the insults of foreign suitors in search of her real mate — ^poems of fancy, for the Stuarts had lost all hold on Ireland. The spirit of the north rang out in a multitude of bards, whose works perished in a century of per- secution and destruction. Among exiles in Connacht manuscripts perished, but old tradi- tion lived on the hps of the peasants, who recited in their cabins the love-songs and re- ligious poems of long centuries past. The people in the bareness of their poverty were nourished with a Uterature full of wit, imagi- nation, feeling, and dignity. In the poorest hovels there were men skilled in a fine recita- tion. Their common language showed the literary influence, and Irish peasants even in ;„tsK'- 19« IRISH NATIONALITY our own day have used a vocabulary of some five thousand words, as against about ei^t hundred words used by peasants in England. Even the village dancing at the cross-roads preserved a fine and skilled tradition. Families, too, still tried to have "a scholar" in their house, for the old learning's sake. Children shut out from all means of edu- cation might be seen learning their letters by copying with chalk the inscriptions on their fathers' tombstones. There were few candles, and the scholar read his books by a cabin fire in the light given by throwing upon it twigs and dried furze. Manuscripts were carefully treasured, and in days when it was death or ruin to be found with an Irish book they were biuied in the ground or hidden in the walls. In remote places schools were maintained out of the destitution of the poor; like that one which was kept up for over a hundred years in county Waterford, where the people of the surrounding districts sup-s ported "poor scholars" free of charge. There were some in Kerry, some in Clare, where a very remarkable group of poets sprang up. From all potts of Ireland students nw'.*^: ^v»';;:c: RISE OF A NEW IRELAND 193 begged their way to "the schools of Munster." Thus Greek and Latin still found their way into the labourer's cottage. In county Cork, John Clairech O'Donnell, in remembrance of the ancient assemblies of the bards of all Ireland, gathered to his house poets and learned men to recite and contend as in the old days. Famous as a poet, he wrote part of a history of Ireland, and projected a trans- lation of Homer into Irish. But he worked in peril, flying for his life more than once before the bard-himters; inliis denunciations the English oppressor stands before us — plentiful his costly Kving in the high-gabled lighted-up mansion of the Irish Brian, but tight-closed his door, and his churlishness shut up inside with him, there in an opening between two mountains, until famine clove Jto the people and bowed them to his will; his gate he never opened to the moan of the starving, "and oh! may heaven of the saints be a red wilderness for James Dawson!" The enthusiasm of the Irish touched some of the planters. A hereditary chronicler of the O'Briens who published in 1717 a vindi- cation of the Antiquities of Ireland got two 194 IRISH NATIONALITY hundred and thirty-eight subscribers, divided about equally between English and GaeKc names. Wandering poets sang, as Irish poets had done nine hundred years before, even in the houses of the strangers, and found in some of them a kindly friend. O'Carolan, the harper and singer, was beloved by both races. A shght inequality in a village field in Meath still after a hundred and fifty years recalls to Irish peasants the site of the house where he was bom, and at his death English and Irish, Protestant and Catholic, gathered in an encampment of tents to do honour to his name. The magic of Irish music seems even to have stirred in the landlords' parUament some dim sense of a national boast. An English nobleman com- ing to the parUament with a Welsh harper claimed that in all Ireland no such music could be heard. Mr. Jones of Leitrim took up the challenge for an Irishman of his coimty who "had never worn linen or woollen." The Commons begged to have the trial in their House before business began, and all assembled to greet the Leitrim champion. O'Duibhgeanain was of an old literary clan: RISE OP A NEW IRELAND 195 one of them had shared in making the Annals of the Four Masters; he himself was not only a fine harper, but an excellent Greek and Latin scholar. He came, tall and handsome, looking very noble in his ancient garb made of beaten rushes, with a cloak or plaid of the same stuff, and a high conical cap of the same adorned with many tassels. And the House of Commons gave him their verdict. James Murphy, a poor bricklayer of Cork, who became an architect and studied Arabian antiquities in Portugal and Spain, gives the lament of Irish scholars. "You accuse their pastors with ilUterature, whilst you adopt the most cruel means of making them ignorant; and their peasantry with untractableness, whilst you deprive them of the means of civilisation. But that is not all; you have deprived them at once of their religion, their liberty, their oak, and their harp, and left them to deplore their fate, not in the strains of their ancestors, but in the sighs of oppres- sion." To the great landlords the Act of 1691 which had given them wealth was the dawn of Irish civilisation. Oblivion might cover all the rest, all that was not theirs. 196 IRISH NATIONALITY They lived in a land some few years old, not more than a man's age might cover. By degrees, however, dwellers in Ireland were forced into some concern for its fortunes. Swift showed to the Protestants the wrongs they endured and the liberties which should be theirs, and flung his scorn on the shameful system of their slavery and their tyranny (1724). Lord Molesworth urged (1723) free- dom of religion, schools of husbandry, relief of the poor from their intolerable burdens, the making parliament into a really represen- tative body. Bishop Berkeley wrote his famous Querist — ^the most searching study of the people's grief and its remedies. Gradually the people of Ireland were being drawn together. All classes suffered under the laws to abolish Irish trade and industry. Human charities were strong in men of both sides, and in the country there was a grow- ing movement to unite the more liberal of the landowners, the Dissenters of the north, and the Catholics, in a common citizenship. It had proved inpossible to carry out fully the penal code. No life could have gone on under its monstrous terms. There were not : ■^■^^Tf'v*^^^- ■ RISE OF A NEW IRELAND 197 Protestants enough to carry on all the busi- ness of the country and some "Papists" had to be taken at least into the humbler forms of official work. Friendly acts between neighbours diminished persecution. "Let the legislature befriend us now, and we are theirs forever," was the cry of the Munster peasantry, organised under O'Dris- coll, to the Protestant parliament in 1786. Such a movement alarmed the government extremely. If, they said, religious distinc- tions were abolished, the Protestants would find themselves secure of their position without British protection^ and might they not then form a government more to the taste and wishes of the people — in fact, might not a nation begin again to live in Ireland. The whole energy of the government was therefore called out to avert the rise of a united Irish People. CHAPTER Xn AN IBISH PABLIAMENT 1750-1800 The movement of conciliation of its peoples that was shaping a new Ireland, silent and unrecorded as it was, can only be understood by the astonishing history of the next fifty years, when the spirit of a nation rose again triumphant, and lesser passions fell before the love of country. The Protestant gentry, who alone had free entry into public life, were of necessity the chief actors in the recorded story. But in the awakening country they had to reckon with a risingp ower in the Catholic Irish. Dr. Lucas, who in 1741 had begun to stir for reform and freedom, had stirred not only the English settlers but the native Irish. Idolised by the Irish people, he raised in his Citizens' Journal a new national protest. The pamphlet war which followed — where 198 ■ 1...- , ..,.,. AN IRISH PARLIAMENT 199 men argued not only on free trade and govern- ment, but on Ireland itself, on its old and new races, on its Irish barbarism, said some, its Irish civilisation, said others — spread the idea of a common history of Ireland in which all its inhabitants were concerned. In parliament too, though CathoUcs were shut out, yet men of old Irish race were to be found — ^men of Catholic families who had accepted Protestantism as a means of enter- ing"*public life, chiefly by way of the law. They had not, save very rarely, put off their patriotic ardour with their old religion; of the middle class, they were braver in their outlook than the small and disheartened Catholic aristocracy. If their numbers were few their ability was great, and behind them lay that vast mass of their own people whose blood they shared. It was an Irishman who first roused the House of Commons to remember that tliey had a country of their own and an ** Irish interest ' * — ^Antony Malone. This astonishing orator and parliamentarian invented a patriotic op- position (1753). A great sea in a "storm" men said of him. Terror was inmiediately •t™* -5?w:*-'' ' 200 IRISH NATIONALITY excited at his Irish origin and his national feeling. Dublin Castle feared that he might mean emancipation from the English legis- lature, and in truth the constitutional de- pendency upon England was the object upon which Malone's eye was constantly fixed. He raised again the protest of Molyneux for a free parliament and constitution. He stirred "the whole nation'* for "the last struggle for Ireland.'* They and their chil- dren would be slaves, he said, if they yielded to the claim of the government that the English privy council could alter the money bills sent over by the Irish parliament, or that the king had the right to apply at his will the surplus funds in the treasury. Malone was defeated, but the battle had begun which in thirty years was to give to Ireland her first hopes of freedom. A fresh current of thought poured through the House — ^free trade, free religion, a Habeas Corpus Act, fewer pensions for Englishmen, a share in law and government for Irishmen, security for judges, and a parliament elected every seven years. Successors of Malone appeared in the House of Commons in 1761 — more AN IRISH PARLIAMENT 201 lawyers, men said, than any one Kving could remember, or "than appears in any history in this or any other kingdom upon earth." They depended, not on confiscation, but on their own abihties; they owed nothing to government, which gave all the great posts of the bar to Englishmen. Some freedom of soul was theirs, and manhood for the long struggle. In 1765 the issue was clearly set. The English House of Commons which had passed the Stamp Act for the American colonies, argued that it had the right to tax Ireland without her consent; and Enghsh lawyers laid down the absolute power of parliament to bind Ireland by its laws. In Ireland Lord Charlemont and some other peers declared that Ireland was a distinct kingdom, with its own legislature and execu- tive xmder the king. In that same year the patriots demanded that elections should be held every seven years — ^the first step in Ireland towards a true representation, and the first blow to the dominion of an aristocracy. The English government dealt its counter-stroke. The viceroy was ordered to reside in Dublin, and \-..-'i"-^'V^7^',\; ^v ''':'^'::^^w^Yxqr^^^^ ^ 202 IRISH NATIONALITY by making himself the source of all favom^, the giver of all gratifications, to concentrate political influence in the Enghsh Crown. A system of bribery began beyond all previous dreams; peerages were made by the score; and the first national debt of nearly twa miUions created in less than thirty years. The landowners who controlled the seats in the Commons were reminded that "they held by Great Britain everything most dear to them, their religion, their pre-eminence, their property, their poHtical power"; that "con- fiscation is their common title." "The king's business," as the government understood it, lay in "procuring the suppKes which the English minister thought fit to ask, and preventing the parliament from examining into the account of previous years." Meanwhile misery deepened. In 1778 thirty thousand Irishmen were seeking their living on the continent, besides the vast numbers flying to America. "The wretches that remained had scarcely the appearance of human creatures." English exports to Ireland sank by half-a-million, and England instead of receiving money had to send ^'mWi^'^^^^W^'^^^ "'" ■" ' •5^^"-'^^^^*-^^^%^^ -■..ty'i AN miSH PARLIAMENT 20S £50,000 for the payment of troops there. Other dangers had arisen. George Washing- ton was made commander-in-chief of the fotces for the American war in 1775, and in 1778 France recognised American independ- ence. The shores of Ireland lay open to at- tack: the country was drained of troops. Bands of volunteers were formed for its pro- tection, Protestant troops led by landlords and gentry. In a year 40,000 volunteers were enrolled (1779). Ireland was no longer un- armed. What was even more important, she was no longer unrepresented. A packed parhament that had obscured the true desires of the country was silenced before the voice of the people. In the sense of a common duty, landlord and tenant, Protestant and Catholic, were joined; the spirit of tolerance and nationality that had been spreading through the country was openly manifested. In those times of hope and terror men's minds on both sides moved quickly. The collapse of the English system was rapid; the government saw the failure of their army plans with the refusal of the Irish to give any more military grants; the failure of their 204 IRISH NATIONALITY gains from the Irish treasury in the near bank- ruptcy of the Irish state, with the burden of its upkeep thrown on England; the failure of the prodigious corruption and buying of the souls of men before the new spirit that swept through the island, the spirit of a nation. "England has sown her laws in dragons' teeth, and they have sprung up in armed men," cried Hussey Burgh, a worthy Irish successor of Malone in the House of Com- mons. "It is no longer the parliament of Ireland that is to be managed or attended to," wrote the lord-lieutenant. "It is the whole of this country." Above all, the war with the colonies brought home to them Grattan's prophecy — "what you trample on in Europe will sting you in America." The country, through the Volunteers, re- quired four main reforms. They asked for justice in the law-courts, and that the Habeas Corpus Act should be restored, and independ- ent judges no longer hold their places at pleasure. They asked that the English com- mercial laws which had ruined Irish industry and sunk the land in poverty and idleness should be abandoned; taught by a long "li ..... .'.''■''' AN IRISH PARLIAMENT 205 misery, Irishmen agreed to buy no manu- factures but the work of Irish hands, and Dublin men compelled members to swear that they should vote for "the good of Ire- land," a new phrase in politics. A third demand was that the penal laws which divided and broke the strength of Ireland should cease. "The Irish Protestant," cried Grattan, "could never be free till the Irish Catholic had ceased to be a slave." "You are now," said Burke, "beginning to have a country." Finally a great cry for the in- dependence of their parliament rose in every qounty and from every class. The demands for the justice of free men, for free trade, free religion, a free nation, were carried by the popular pa^ssion into the parliaments of Dublin and London. In three years the Dublin parliament had freed Pro- testant dissenters from the Test Act and had repealed the greater part of the penal code; the English commercial code had fallen to the ground; the Habeas Corpus Act was won. In 1780 Grattan proposed His resolutions declaring that while the two nations were inseparably bound together under one Crown, 206 miSH NATIONALITY the King, Lords, and - Commons of Ireland could alone make laws for Ireland. The claim for a free parliament ran through the country — "the epidemic madness," ex- claimed the viceroy. But the Irish had good reason for their madness. At the first stirring of the national movement in 1778 "artful politicians" in England had revived a scheme favourably viewed there — ^the abolition of an Irish parliament and the union of Ireland with England. "Do not make an union with us, sir," said Dr. Johnson to an Irishman in 1779; "we should unite with you only to rob you." The threat of the disappearance of Ireland as a country quickened anxiety to restore its old parliament. The Irish ktiew too how precarious was all that they had gained. Lord North described all past con- cessions as "resumable at pleasure" by the power that granted them. In presence of these dangers the Volunteers called a convention of their body to meet in the church of Dungannon on Feb. 15, 1782 — ^to their mind no unfit place for their lofty work. "We know," they said, "our duty to our sovereign and our loyalty; we know our AN IRISH PARLIAMENT 207 duty to ourselves and axe resolved to be free." *' Aa Irishmen, as Christians, and as Protest- ants," they rejoiced in the relaxation of penal laws and upheld the sacred rights of all to freedom of religion. A week later Grattan moved in the House of Conuuons an address to the king — that the people of this country are a free people; that the crown of Ireland is an imperial crown; and the kingdom of Ireland a distinct kingdom with a parUa- ment of her own, the sole legislature thereof. The battle opened by Molyneux a hundred years before was won. The Act of 1719, by which the English parliament had justified its usurpation of powers, was repealed (1782). "To set aside all doubts" another Act (1783) declared that the right of Ireland to be governed solely by the king and the parlia- ment of Ireland was now estabhshed and as- certained, and should never again be ques- tioned or questionable. On April 16, 1782, Grattan passed through the long ranks of Volunteers drawn up before the old Parliament House of Ireland, to proclaim the victory of his country. "I am now to address a free people. Ages have •'■\.'\ ■._it»?;r-i»-'r.'^iv,->«i'.;;'-i_^"''-.r' ' /r-^ifi- \-, [.", 208 IRISH NATIONALITY passed away, and this is the first moment in which you could be distinguished by that appellation. . . . Ireland is now a nation. In that character I hail her, and bowing in her august presence, I say esto perpetual** The first act of the emancipated parliament was to vote a grant for twenty thousand sailors for the English navy. That day of a nation's exultation and thanksgiving was brief. The restored parlia- ment entered into a gloomy inheritance — an authority which had been polluted and de- stroyed — an almost ruined country. The heritage of a tyranny prolonged through centuries was not to be got rid of rapidly. England gave to Ireland half a generation for the task. Since the days of Henry Vlll the Irish parliaments had been shaped and compacted to give to England complete control. The system in this country, wrote the viceroy, did not bear the smallest resemblance to represen- tation. All bills had to go through the privy council, whose secret and overwhelming influ- ence was backed by the privy council in Eng- land, the English law officers, and finally the '^~'^-vin^l^fY''''-vc ■ ?'■ ■' AN miSH PARLIAMENT 209 English cabinet. Irish proposals were re- jected not in parliament, but in these secret councils. The king had a veto in Ireland, not in England. The English cabinet, changing with English parties, had the last word on every Irish bill. There was no Irish cabinet responsible to \h& Insk Houses: no ministry resigned, whatever the majority by which it was defeated. Nominally elected by about one-fifth of the inhabitants, the Com- mons did not represent even these. A land- lords* assembly, there was no Catholic in it, and no merchant. Even the Irish landlords were subdued to English interests: some hun- dred Englishmen, whose main property was in England but who commanded a number of votes for lands in Ireland, did constantly override the Irish landlords and drag them on in a policy far from serviceable to them. The landlords' men in the Commons were accustomed to vote as the Castle might direct. In the complete degradation of public life no humiliation or lack of public honour offended them. The number of placemen and pen- sioners equalled nearly one-half of the whole efficient body: "the price of a seat of parlia- \ •'■H^, ;!'*' 210 miSH NATIONALITY ment," men said, "is as wdl ascertained as that of the cattle of the field.** All these dangers might with time and pa- < tience be overcome. An Irish body, on Irish soil, no matter what its constitution, could not remain aloof from the needs, and blind to the facts, of Ireland, like strangers in anotherjand. The good-wiU of the people abounded; even the poorer farmers showed in a better dress, in cleanliness, in self-respect, how they had been stirred by the dream of freedom, the hope of a country. The connection with England, the dependence on the king, was fully accepted, and Ireland prepared to tax herself out of all proportion toherwealth for imperial purposes. The gentry were losing the fears that had pos- sessed them for their properties, and a fair hope was opening for an Ireland tolerant, united, educated, and industrious. Volun- teers, disciplined, sober, and law-abiding, had shown the orderly forces of the country. Parliament had awakened to the care of Ireland as well as the benefit of England. In a few years it opened "the gates of opu- lence and knowledge.'* It aboUshed the cruelties of the penal laws, and prepared the ) ym.-'!^-^^^^-' •'■':••> . ; AN miSH PARLIAMENT 211 union of all religions in a common citizenship. It showed admirable knowledge in the method of restoring prosperity to the comitry, awak- ening its industrial life, increasing tillage, and opening inland navigation. Time was needed to close the springs of corruption and to bring reform to the parliament itself. But the very success of parliament woke fears in England, and alarm in the autocratic government of Ireland. Jealous of power, ministers set themselves to restore by cor- ruption an absolute authority, and recover by bribery the prerogative that had been lost. The first danger appeared in 1785, in the commercial negotiations with England. To crush the woollen trade England had put duties of over £2 a yard on a certain cloth carried from Ireland to England, which paid 5^d. if brought from England to Ireland; and so on for other goods. Irish shipping had been reduced to less than a third of that of Liver- pool alone. Pitt's proposal of free trade between the countries was accepted by Ire- land (1785), but a storm of wrath swept over the British world of business; they refused Pitt's explanation that an Ireland where all 212 IRISH NATIONALITY industries had been kUled could not compete against the industrial pre-eminence of Eng- land; and prepared a new scheme which re- estabKshed the ascendency of the British par- liament over Irish navigation and commerce. This was rejected in Ireland as fatal to their Constitution. Twiceagainthelrishparliament attempted a commercial agreement between the two countries: twice the Irish government refused to give it place; a few years later the same ministers urged the Union on the ground that no such commercial arrangement existed. The advantages which England possessed and should maintain were explained by the vice- roy to Pitt in 1792. "Is not the very essence of your imperial policy to prevent the interest of Ireland clashing and interfering with the interest of England? ... Have you not crushed her in every point that would inter- fere with British interest or monopoly by means of her parliament for the last century, till lately? . . . You know the advantages you reap from Ireland,. ... In return does she cost you one farthing (except the linen monopoly)? Do you employ a soldier on her account she does not pay, or a single ship AN IRISH PARLIAMENT 213 more for the protection of the British com- merce than if she was at the bottom of the sea?" The Catholic question also awakened the Castle fears. The penal laws had failed to diminish the "Papists": at the then rate of conversion it would take four thousand years to turn the people into Protestants. A nobler idea had arisen throughout Ireland. "The question is now," Grattan said, "whether we shall be a Protestant settlement or an Irish nation ... for so long as we exclude Catholics from natural liberty and the common rights of man we are not a people." Nothing could be more unwelcome to the government. A real union between religious bodies in Ireland, they said, would induce Irish statesmen to regulate their policy mainly by the pubUc opinion of their own country. To avert this danger they put forth all their strength. "The present frame of Irish government is particularly well calculated for our purpose. That frame is a Protestant garrison in p>ossession of the land, magistracy, and power of the country; holding that property under the 214 IRISH NATIONALITY tenure of British power and supremacy, and ready at every instant to crush the rising of the conquered.'* Finally the pressing question of reform, passionately demanded by Protestant and CathoKc for fifteen years, was resisted by the whole might of the Castle. **If," wrote the lord-lieutenant to Pitt, "as her govern- ment becanie more open and more attentive to the feelings of the Irish nation, the diffi- culty of management had increased, is that a reason for opening the government and making the parUament more subservient to the feelings of the nation at large?" To the misfortune both of Ireland and of England the Irish government through these years was led by one of the darkest influences known in the evil counsels of its history — ^the chancellor Fitzgibbon, rewarded by England with the title Earl of Clare. Unchecked by criticism, secret in machinations, brutal in speech, and violent in authority, he had known the use of every evil power that still remained as a legacy from the past. By working on the ignorance of the cabinet in London and on the alarms and corruptions AN IRISH PARLIAMENT 215 of Ireland, by using all the secret powers left in his hands through the privy council, by a system of unexampled bribery, he succeeded in paralysing the constitution which it was his business to maintain, and destroying the parHamentary rights which had been nom- inally conceded. The voice of the nation was silenced by the forbidding of all con- ventions. In the re-established "frame of government" Fitzgibbon was all-powerful. The only English viceroy who resisted him» Lord Fitzwilliam, was recalled amid the acclamations and lamentations of Ireland — all others yielded to his force. Government in his hands was the enemy of the people, parliament a mockery, constitutional move- ments mere Vanity. Law appeared only as an instrument of oppression; the Catholic Irish were put out of its protection, the government agents out of its control. The country gentry were ahenated and demoral- ised — ^left to waste with "their inert property and their inert talents." Every reform was refused which might have allayed the fears of the people. Religious war was secretly stirred up by the agents of the government and in its interest, setting one part of the coun- 216 IRISH NATIONALITY try to exterminate the other. Distrust and suspicion, arrogance and fear, with their train of calamities for the next hundred years distracted the island. A system of absolute power, maintained by coercion, woke the deep passion of the country. Despair of the constitution made men turn to republicanism and agitation in arms. The violent repression of freedom was used at a time when the progress of the human mind had been prodigious, when on all sides men were drinking in the lessons of popular liberties from the republics of Amer- ica and France. The system of rule inaugu- rated by Fitzgibbon could have only one end — ^the revolt of a maddened people. Warnings and entreaties poured in to the Castle. To the very last the gentry pleaded for reform to reassure men drifting in their despair into plots of armed republicanism. Every meas- ure to relieve their fears was denied, every measure to heighten them was pursued. Violent statesmen in the Castle, and oflScers of their troops, did not fear to express their sense that a rebellion would enable them to make an end of the discontented once for all, and of the Irish Constitution. The rising AN IRISH PARLIAMENT 217 was, in fact, at last forced by the horrors which were openly encouraged by the govern- ment in 1796-7. "Every crime, every cruelty, that could be committed by Cos- sacks or Calmucks has been transacted here,'* said General Abercromby, sent in 1797 as commander-in-chief. He refused the bar- barities of martial rule when, as he said, the government's orders might be carried over the whole kingdom by an orderiy dragoon, or a writ executed without any difficulty, a few places in the mountains excepted; and demanded the maintenance of law. "The abuses of all kinds I found here can scarcely be believed or enumerated." "He must have lost his senses," wrote Clare of the great soldier, and "this Scotch beast," as he called him, was forced out of the country as Lord Fitzwilliam had been. Abercromby was succeeded by General Lake, who had already shown the ferocity of his temper in his com- mand in Ulster, and in a month the rebellion broke out. That appalling tale of terror, despair, and cruelty cannot be told in all its horror. The people, scared into scattered risings, refused 218 miSH NATIONALITY protection when their arms were given up, or terms if they surrendered, were without hope; the "pacification" of the government set no limits to atrocities, and the cry of the tortured rose unceasingly day and night. The suppression of the rebellion burned into the Irish heart the belief that the Eng- lish government was their implacable enemy, that the law was their oppressor, and Eng- lishmen the haters of their race. The treat- ment of later years has not yet wiped out of memory that horror. The dark fear that during the rebellion stood over the Irish peasant in his cabin has been used to illus- trate his credulity and his brutishness. The government cannot be excused by that same plea of fear. Clare> no doubt held the doc- trine of many English governors before him, that Ireland could only be kept bound to England by the ruin of its parliament and the corruption of its gentry, the perpetual animosity of its races, and the enslavement of its people. But even in his own day there were men who believed in a nobler states- manship — ^in a union of the nations in equal honour and liberties. CHAPTER Xm IRELAND UNDER THE UNION 1800-1900 The horror of death lay over Ireland; cruelty and terror raised to a frenzy; govern- ment by martial law; a huge army occupy- ing the country. In that dark time the plan for the Union with England, secretly pre- pared in London, was annoimced to the Irish parliament. It seemed that England had everything to gain by a union. There was one objection. Chatham had feared that a hundred Irishmen would strengthen the democratic side of the English parliament; others that their elo- quence would lengthen and perhaps confuse debates. But it was held that a hundred members would be lost in the British parUa- ment, and that Irish doctrines would be sunk in the sea of British common sense. 219 220 IRISH NATIONALITY In Ireland a union was detested as a con- spiracy against its liberties. The parliament at once rejected it; no parliament, it was urged, had a right to pass an act destroying the constitution of Ireland, and handing over the dominion to another country, without asking consent of the nation. Pitt refused to have anything to say td this Jacobin doctrine of the sovereignty of the people — a doctrine he would oppose wherever he encountered it. The Union, Pitt said, was no proposal to subject Ireland to a foreign yoke, but a volutnary association of two great countries seeking their common benefit in one empire. There were progresses of the viceroy, visits of political agents, military warnings, threats of eviction, to induce petitions in its favour; all reforms were refused — the outrageous system of collecting tithes, the disabilities of Catholics — so as to keep something to bargain with; 137,000 armed men were assembled in Ireland. But amid the univer- sal detestation and execration of a Union the government dared not risk an election, and proceeded to pack the parliament privately. IRELAND UNDER THE UNION 221 By oflScial means the Conimons were purged of sixty-three opponents, and safe men put in, some Englishmen, some staff -officers, men without a foot of land in Ireland. There were, contrary to one of the new laws, seventy-two place-holders and pensioners in the House. Fifty-four peerages were given to buy consciences. The borough-holders were offered li millions to console them for loss in sale of seats. There was a host of minor pensions. Threats and disgrace were used to others. Large sums were sent from London to bribe the Press, and corrupt the wavering with ready money. Pitt pledged himself to emancipation. Thus in 1800, at the point of the sword, and amid many adjurations to speed from England, the Act of Union was forced through the most corrupt parliament ever created by a government: it was said that only seven of the majority were unbribed. An Act "formed in the British cabinet, unsolicited by the Irish nation," "passed in the middle of war, in the centre of a tremendous mili- tary force, under the influence of immediate personal danger,'* was followed, as wise men 222 IRISH NATIONALITY had warned, by generations of strife. A hundred years of ceaseless agitation, from the first tragedy of Robert Emmet's abortive rising in 1803, proclaimed the midying oppo- sition of Irishmen to a Union that from the first lacked all moral sanction. An English parliament, all intermediate power being destroyed, was now confronted with the Irish people. Of that people it knew nothing, of its national spirit, its conception of government or social life. The history and Hterature which might reveal the mind of the nation is so neglected that to this day there is no means for its study in the Imperial University, nor the capital of Empire. The Tiines perceived in "the Celtic twilight" a "slovenly old barbarism." Peel in his ignorance thought Irishmen had good qualities except for "a general con- federacy in crime ... a settled and uni- form system of guilt, accompanied by horrible and monstrous perjuries such as could not be found in any civilised country." Promises were lavished to commend the Union. Ministers assured Ireland of less expenditure and lighter taxation: with vast ^•^riff/.^-f'^i'^r- i ■■ •-::'- r-.ti-j: ■ ^-/i7i,:.!'r;;^::r>'-'jH'«'.'?:«3!».-T^T»?«T'^^"'^"^ ■ HffWi r-W ■"^'l-WIJUWJCWW^gpBIJI IRELAND UNDER THE UNION 22S commerce and manufactures, a rise in the value of land, and a stream of English capital and industry. All contests being referred from the island to Great Britain — ^to a body not like the Irish influenced by prejudices and passions — ^Ireland would for the first time arrive at national union. The passing over to London of the chief part of Irish intelligence and wealth would give to Ire- land "a power over the executive and general policy of the Empire which would far more than compensate her"; and would, in fact, lead to such a union of hearts that presently it would not matter, Pitt hoped, whether members for Ireland were elected in Ireland or in England. Ireland would also be placed in "a natural situation," for by union with the Empire she would have four- teen to three in favour of her Protestant establishment, instead of three to one against it as happened in the coimtry itself; so that Protestant ascendency would be for ever assured. The Catholics, however, would find in the pure and serene air of the English legislature impartial kindness, and the poor might hope for relief from tithes and the need 224 IRISH NATIONALITY of supporting their clergy. All Insh finan- ciers and patriots contended that the fair words were deceptive, and that the Union must bring to Ireland immeasurable disaster. Any discussion of the Union in its effect on Ireland lies apart from a discussion of the motives of men who administered the system in the last centmy. The system itself, wrongly conceived and wrongly enforced, contained the principles of ruin, and no good motives could make it work for the benefit of Ireland, or, in the long run, of England. Oppressive financial burdens were laid on the Irish. Each country was for the next twenty years to provide for its own expendi- ture and debt, and to contribute a sum to the general expenses of the United Kingdom, fixed in the proportion of seven and a half parts for Great Britain and one part for Ireland. The debt of Ireland had formerly been small; in 1793 it was 23^ millions; it had risen to nearly 28 millions by 1801, in great measure through the charges of Clare's policy of martial law and bribery. In the next years heavy loans were required for the Napoleonic war. When Ireland, exhausted IRELAND UNDER THE UNION 225 by calamity, was unable to pay, loans were raised in England at heavy war-rates and charged to the public debt of Ireland. In 1817 the Irish debt had increased more than fourfold, to nearly 113 milUons. No record was made in the books of the Exchequer as to what portion of the vast sums raised should in fairness be allotted to Ireland; there is no proof that there was any accuracy in the apportionment. The promised lighter taxa- tion ended in a near bankruptcy, and the approach of an appalling famine in 1817. Bankruptcy was avoided by uniting the two treasuries to form one national debt — ^but the burden of Ireland remained as oppressive as b^ore. Meanwhile the efiFect of the Union had, been to depress all Irish industries and resources, and in these sixteen years the comparative wealth of Ireland had fallen, and the taxes had risen far beyond the rise in England. The people sank yet deeper under their heavy load. The result of their incapac- ity to pay the amount fixed at the Union was, that of all the taxes collected from them for the next fifty-three years, one-third was spent in Ireland, and two-thirds were absorbed '•"•■■i.'^pfii^f 226 miSH NATIONALITY by England; from 1817 to 1870 tlie cost of government in Ireland was mider 100 millions^ while the contributions to the in^>erial exche- quer were 210 millions, so that Ireland sent to England more than twice as much as was spent on her. The tribute from Ireland to England in the last ninety-three years, over and above the cost of Irish administration, has been over 325 millions — a sum which would probably be much increased by a more exact method both of recording the revenue collected from Ireland and the ** local*' and "imperial" charges, so as to give the full Irish revenue, and to prevent the debiting to Ire- land of charges for which she was not really liable. While this heavy ransom was exacted Ireland was represented as a beggar, never satisfied, at the gates of England. Later, in 1852, Gladstone began to carry out the second part of the Union scheme, the indiscriminate taxation of the two coun- tries. In a few years he added two and a half millions to Irish taxation, at a moment when the country, devastated by famine, was sinking under the loss oi its com trade through the English law, and wasting away IRELAND UNDER /niE UNION 227 by emigration to half its fonner population. In 1896 a Financial Commission reported that the Act of Union had laid on Ireland a burden she was unable to bear; and that, in spite of the Union pledge that the ability of Ireland to pay should always be taken into account, she was paying one-eleventh of the tax revenue of the United Kingdom while her taxable capacity was one-twentieth or less. While Great Britain paid less than two shillings in every pound of her taxable surplus, Ireland paid about ten shillings in every pound of hers. No relief was given. Under this drain of her wealth the poverty or Ireland was intensified, material progress was impossible, and one bad season was enough to produce wide distress, and two a state of famine. Meanwhile, the cost of administration was wasteful and lavi^, fixed on the high prices of the English scale, and vastly more e^>ensive than the cost of a government founded on domestic support and acceptable to the people. The doom of an exhausting poverty was laid on Ireland by a rich and extravagant partner, who fixed -"fTw^lfT^ 228 IRISH NATIONALITY the expenses for English purposes, called for the money, and kept the books. The Union intensified the alien temper of Irish government. We may remember the scandal caused lately by the phrase of a great Irish administrator that Ireland should be governed according to Irish ideas. Dublin Castle, no longer controlled by an Irish parliament, entrenched itself more firmly against the people. Some well-mean- ing governors went over to Ireland, but the omnipotent Castle machine broke their e£Forts for impartial rule or regard for the opinion of the country. The Protestant Ascendancy openly reminded the Castle that its very existence hung on the Orange associations. Arms were supplied free from Dublin to the Orangemen while all Catholics were disarmed. The jobbing of the grand juries to enrich themselves out of the poor — the traffic of magistrates who violated their duties and their oaths — these were unchanged. Justice was so far forgotten that the presiding judge at the trial of O'Connell spoke of the coimsel for the accused as "the gentleman on the other side." Juries were packed by V 5** "v"""^ IRELAND UNDER THE UNION . 229 the sheriffs with Protestants, by whom all Orangemen were acquitted, all Catholics condemned, and the credit gi the law lowered for both by a system which made the jury- man a tool and the prisoner a victim. It is strange that no honest man should have protested against such a use of his person and his creed. In the case of O'Connell the Chief Justice of England stated that the practice if not remedied must render trial by jury "a mockery, a delusion, and a snare"; but jury-packing with safe men remained the invariable custom till 1906. Nothing but evil to Ireland followed from carrying her affairs to an English parliament. The government refused the promised eman- cipation, refused tithe reform. Englishmen could not understand Irish conditions. The poHtical economy they advocated for their own country had no relation to Ireland. The Irish members found themselves, as English officials had foretold in advocating the Union, a minority wholly without influence. Session after session, one complained, measures sup- ported by Irish members, which would have been hailed with enthusiasm by an Irish 230 IRISH NATIONALITY parliament, were rejected by tlie English. Session after sessicm measures vehemently resisted by the Irish members were forced on a reluctant nation by English majorities. When Ireland asked to be governed by the same laws as England, she was told the two countries were different and required different treatment. When she asked for any deviation from the English system, she was told that she must bow to the established laws and customs of Great Britain. The reports of royal commissions fell dead — ^such as that which in 1845 reported that the sufferings of the Irish, borne with exemplary patience, were greater than the people of any other country in Europe had to sustain. Nothing was done. Instead of the impartial calm promised at the Union, Ireland was made the battle-cry of English parties; and questions that con- cerned her life or death were important at Westminster as they served the exigencies of the government or the opposition. All the dangers of the Union w^e increased by its effect in drawing Irish landlords ta London. Their rents followed them, and the wealth spent by absentees founded no indus* IRELAND UNDER THE UNION 2S1 tries at home. A land system brought about by confiscation, and developed by absentees, meant unreclaimed wastes, lands half culti- vated, and n^lected people. Landlords, said an indignant judge of wide experience in a charge to a jury in 1814, should build their tenants houses, and give them at least what they had not as yet, "the comforts of an English sow." To pay rent and taxes in England the toilers raised stores of com and cattle for export there, from the value of ^ht million pounds in 1826 to seventeen million pounds of food stuffs in 1848, and so on. They grew potatoes to feed themselves. If the prke of ccmh fell prodigiously — as at the end of the Napoleonic war, or at the passing of the com laws in England — ^the cheaper bread was no help to the peasants, most of whom could never afford to eat it; it only doubled their labour to send out greater ship- loads of {MTOvisions for the charges due in England. On the other hand, if potatoes rotted, famine swept over the country among its fields of com and cattle. And when rent failed, summary pow^s of eviction were given at Westminster under English theories for use 232 IRISH NATIONALITY in Ireland alone; " and if anyone would defend his farm it is here denominated rebellion." Families were flung on the bogs and mountain sides to live on wild turnips and nettles, to gather chickweed, sorrel, and seaweed, and to sink under the fevers that followed vagrancy, starvation, cold, and above all the broken hearts of men hunted from their homes. In famine time the people to save themselves from death were occasionally compelled to use blood taken from live bul- locks, boiled up with a little oatmeal; and the appalling sight was seen of feeble women gliding across the country with their pitchers, actually trampling upon fertility and fatness, to collect in the comer of a grazier's farm for their little portion of blood. Five times between 1822 and 1837 there were famines of lesser degree: but two others, 1817 and 1847, were noted as among the half-dozen most terrible recorded in Europe and Asia during the century. From 1846 to 1848 over a miUion lay dead of hunger, while in a year food-stuffs for seventeen million pounds were sent to England. English soldiers guarded from the starving the fields of com and the IRELAND UNDER THE UNION 233 waggons that carried it to the ports; herds of cattle were shipped, and skins of asses which had served the famishing for food. New evictions on an enormous scale followed the famine, the glearance of what was then called in the phrase of current English economics "the surplus population," "the overstock tenantry." They died, or fled in hosts to America — ^Ireland pouring out on the one side her great stores or "suiplus food," on the other her "surplus people," for whom there was nothing to eat. In the twenty years that followed the men and women who had fled to America sent back some thirteen millions to keep a roof over the heads of the old and the children they had left behind. It was a tribute for the landlords' pockets — ^a rent which could never have been paid from the land they leased. The loans raised for expenditure on the Irish famine were charged by England on the Irish taxes for repayment. No Irish parliament, no matter what its constitution, could have allowed the country to drift into such irretrievable ruin. O'Con- nell constantly protested that rather than the «34 IRISH NATIONALITY UnioD he would have the old Protestant parliament. "Any body would serve if only it is in Ireland," cried a leading Catholic nationalist in Pamell*s time; "the Protestant synod would do." In the dpspair of Ireland, the way was flung open to public agitation, and to private law which could only wield the weapons of the outlaw. All methods were tried to reach the distant inattention of England. There were savage outbursts of men often starving and homeless, always on the edge of famine — ^Levellers, Threshers, and the like; or Whiteboys who were in fact a vast trades union for the protection of the Irish peasantry, to bring some order and equity into relations of landlord and tenant. Peaceful CH*ganisation was tried; the Cathc^c Associ- ation for Emancipation founded by O'Connell in 1823, an open society into which Protest- ants and Catholics alike were welcomed, kept the peace in Ireland for five years; outrage ceased with its establishment and revived with its destruction. His Association for Repeal (1832-1844) again lifted the people from law- less insurrection to the disciplined enthusiasm of citizens for justice. A Young Ireland move- ■-•?fv.3! IRELAND UNDER THE UNION iSS ment (1842-1848) under honoured names such as Thomas Davis and John Mitchel and Ga- van Duffy and Smith O'Brien and others with them, sought to destroy sectarian divisions, to spread a new literature, to recover Irish history, and to win self-government, land reform, and education for a united people of Irish and English, Protestant and Catholic. The suppression of 0*Connell's peaceful movement by the government forced on vio- lent counsels; and ended in the rising of Smith O'Brien as the only means left him of calling attention to the state of the country. The disturbances that followed have left their mark in the loop-holed police barracks that covered Ireland. There was a Tenant League (1852) and a North and South League. All else failing, a national physical force party was formed; for its name this organization went back to the dawn of Irish historic life — ^to the Fiana, those Fenian national militia vowed to guard the shores of Ireland. The Fenians (1865) resisted outrage, checked agrarian crime, and sought to win self-government by preparing for open war. A great constitu- ticmalist and sincere Protestant, Isaac Butt, 236 IRISH NATIONALITY •led a peaceful parliamentary movement for Home Rule (1870-1877); after him Charles Stewart Pamell fought in the same cause for fourteen years (1877-1891) and died with victory almost in sight. Michael Davitt, fol- lowing the advice of Lalor thirty years be- fore, founded a Land League (1879) to be inevitably merged in the wider national issue. Wave after wave of agitation passed over the island. The manner of the national struggle changed, peaceful or violent, led by Protestant or Catholic, by men of English blood or of Gaelic, but behind all change lay the fixed purpose of Irish self-government. For thirty- five years after the Union Ireland was ruled for three years out of every four by laws giv- ing extraordinary powers to the government; and in the next fifty years (1835-1885) there were only three without coercion acts and crime acts. By such contrasts of law in the two countries the Union made a deep sever- ance between the islands. In these conflicts there was not now, as there had never been in their history, a reU- gious war on the part of Irishmen. The oppressed people were of one creed, and the IRELAND UNDER THE UNION 237 administration of the other. Protestant and Catholic had come to mean ejector and ejected, the armed Orangeman and the dis- armed peasant, the agent- or clergy-magis- trate and the broken tenant before his too partial judgment-seat. In all cases where conflicting classes are divided into two creeds, religious incidents will crop up, or wiU be forced up, to embitter the situation; but the Irish struggle was never a religious war. Another distinction must be noted. Though Ireland was driven to the "worst form of civil convulsion, a war for the means of sub- sistence," there was more Irish than the battle for food. Those who have seen the piled up graves round the earth where the first Irish saints were laid, will know that the Irishman, steeped in his national history, had in his heart not his potato plot alone, but the thought of the home of his fathers, and in the phrase of Irish saints, "the place of his resurrection." If we consider the state of the poor, and the position of the millions of Irishmen who had been long shut out from any share in public affairs, and forbidden to form popular 238 miSH NATIONALITY conventions, we must watch with amazement the upspringing under 0*Connell of the old idea of national self-government. Deep in their hearts lay the memory carried down by bards and historians of a nation whose law had been maintained in assemblies of a willing people. In O'Connell the Irish found a leader who had like themselves inherited the sense of the old Irish tradition. To escape English laws against gatherings and conven- tions of the Irish, 0*Connell's associations had to be almost formless, and perpetually shifting in manner and in name. His methods would have been wholly impossible without a rare inteUigence in the peasantry. Local gather- ings conducted by voluntary groups over the country; conciliation courts where justice was carried out apart from the ordinary courts as a protest against their corruption; monster meetings organised without the slightest dis- order; voluntary suppression of crime and outrage — in these we may see not merely an astonishing popular intelligence, but the presence of an ancient tradition. At the first election in which the people resisted the right of landlords to dictate their vote (1826), a IRELAND UNDER THE UNION 239 procession miles in length streamed into Waterford in military array and unbroken tranquillity. They allowed no rioting, and kept their voW of total abstinence from whisky during the election. A like public virtue was shown in the Clare election two years later (1828) when 30,000 men camped in Ennis for a week, with milk and potatoes dis- tributed to them by their priests, all spirits renounced, and the peace not broken once throughout the week. As 0*Connell drew towards Limerick and reached the Stone where the broken Treaty had been signed, 50,000 men sent up their shout of victory at this peaceful redeeming of the violated pledges of 1690. In the Repeal meetings two to four hundred thousand men assembled, at Tara and other places whose fame was in the heart of every Irishman there, and the spirit of the nation was shown by a gravity and order which allowed not a single outrage. National hope and duty stirred the two millions who in the crusade of Father Mathew took the vow of temperance. In the whole of Irish history no time brought such calamity to Ireland as the ■J- -^ 240 IRISH NATIONALITY Victorian age. "I leave Ireland," said one, " like a corpse on the dissecting table." ** The Celts are gone," said Englishmen, seeing the endless and disastrous emigration. "The Irish are gone, and gone with a vengeance." That such people should carry their intermi- nable discontent to some far place seemed to end the trouble. "Now for the first time these six hundred years," said The Times, "England has Ireland at her mercy, and can deal with her as she pleases." But from this death Ireland rose again. Thirty years after 0*Connell Pamell took up his work. He used the whole force of the Land League founded by Davitt to relieve distress and fight for the tenants* rights; but he used the land agitation to strengthen the National move- ment. He made his meaning clear. What did it matter, he said, who had possession of a few acres, if there was no National spirit to save the country; he would never have taken off his coat for anything less than to make a nation. In his fight he held the people as no other man had done, not even O'Connell. The conflict was steeped in passion. In 1881 the government asked for an act giving them IRELAND UNDER THE UNION 241 power to arrest without trial all Irishm^i suspected of illegal projects — a power beyond all coercion hitherto. 0*Cofmell had opposed a coercion act in 1833 for nineteen nights; Pamell in 1881 fought for thirty-two nights. Parliament had become the keeper of Irish tyrannies, not of her liberties, and its con- ventional forms were less dear to Irishmen than the freedom of which it should be the guardian. He was suspended, with thirty- four Irish members, and 303 votes against 46 carried a bill by which over a thousand Irishmen were imprisoned at the mere will of the Castle, among them Panlell himself. The passion of rage reached its extreme height with the publication in The Times (1888) of a facsimile letter from PameU, to prove his consent to a paid system of murder and out- rage. A special commission found it to be a forgery. With the rejection of Gladstone's Home Rule bills in 1886 and 1893, and with the death of Pamell (1891), Irish nationalists were thrown into different camps as to the means to pursue, but they never faltered in the main purpose. That remains as firm as 242 IRISH NATIONALITY in the times of O'Connell, Thomas Davis, John O'Leary, and Pamell, and rises once more to-day as the fixed imchanging demai^d, while the whole Irish people, laying aside agitations and controversies, stand waiting to hear the end. The national movement had another side, the bringing back of the people to the land. The English parliament took up the question under pressure of violent agitation in Ireland. By a series of Acts the people were assured of fair rents and security from eviction. Ver- dicts of judicial bodies tended to prove that peasants were paying 60 per cent, above the actual value of the land. But the great Act of 1903 — a work inspired by an Irishman's intellect and heart — ^brought the final solu- tion, enabling the great mass of the tenants to buy their land by instalments. Thus the land war of seven hundred years, the war of kings and parliaments- and planters, was brought to a dramatic close, and the soil of Ireland begins again to belong to her people. There was yet another stirring of the na- tional idea. In its darkest days the country had remained true to the old Irish spirit of IRELAND UNDER THE UNION 248 learning, that foiintam of the nation's life. In 0'C*x^^-?/'r^P'.7'*;':-"'!^73.'r?"^-"*'.'. " ; ■:-■.. ■ \:^sy-iw-r^^*-":-'- '^*^*"^?^^- -^-•rfvTET?' SOME IRISH WRITERS ON IRISH HISTORY JoTCB, P. W. — Social History of Andent Ireland. 2 vols. 1903. This book gives a general survey of the old Irish civilisation, pagan and Christian, apart from political history. Fbbgtxson, Sm Sahuxl. — ^Hibernian Nights' Entertainments. 1906. These small volumes of stories are interesting as the effort of Sir S. Ferguson to give to the youth of his time an impression of the heroic character of their histcMry. Gbbbn, a. S. — ^The Making of Ireland and its Undoing (1200- 1600) . 1909. An attempt is here made to Ining together evidence, some of it unused before, of the activity of commerce and manufactures, and of learning, that pre- vtuled in mediaeval Ireland, until the destruction of the Tudor wars. MrrcHBUi, John. — ^Life and Times of Aodh O'Neill. 1868. A small book which gives a vivid picture of a great Irish hero, and of the later Elizabethan wars. Taylob, J. F.— Owen Roe O'Neill. 1904. This small book is the best account of a very great Irishman; and gives th6 causes of the Irish insurrection in 1641, and the war to 1650. Davis, TnostAS. — ^The Patriot Parliament of 1689. 1893. A brief but important study of this Parliament. It illus- trates the Irish spirit of tolerance in 1689, 1843, and 1893. Baowbll, Richabd. — Ireland under the Tudors and the Stuarts. 5 vols. 1885, 1910. A detailed account is given of the English policy from 1509 to 1660, from the point of view of the English settlement, among a people regarded as inferior, devoid of organisation or civilisation. 255 256 IMSH WRITERS MuBBAT, A. E. — Commercial Relations between England and Ireland. 1003. A useful study' is made here of the economic condition of Ireland from 1641,[under the legisla- tion of the English Parliament, the Irish Parliament, and . the Union Parliament. IdDOKT, W. E. H. — ^History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century. 5 vols. 1892. The study of the independent Parliament in Ireland is the most original work of this historian, and a contribution of the utmost importance to Irish history. Mr. Lecky did not make any special study of the Catholic peasantry. Two Centuries of Irish History (1691-1870). Introduction by Jambs Bbtcb. 1907. These essays, mostiy by Irishmen, give in a convenient form the outlines of the history of the time. There is a brief account of O'Connell. O'Bbden, R. Babbt. — Life of Charles Stewart PameU. 1898. 2 vols. This gives the best account of the struggle for Home Rule and the land agitation in the last half of the nineteenth century. D'AiiTON.'E. A.— History of Ireland (1905-1910). 3 vols. This is the latest complete history of Ireland. ;/i^' v•■^~^^■■-|i'f^^:^•^_>;^^^..•;'■R■*.■j^_^.;^7«.■. .;,-> _. ■ _^