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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Irish Nationality, by Alice Stopford Green
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Irish Nationality
+
+Author: Alice Stopford Green
+
+Release Date: January 9, 2011 [EBook #34900]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IRISH NATIONALITY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Brian Foley, Jeannie Howse and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    +------------------------------------------------------------+
+    | Transcriber's Note:                                        |
+    |                                                            |
+    | Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has      |
+    | been preserved.                                            |
+    |                                                            |
+    | The cross symbol meaning 'died' is represented with a +    |
+    | in this etext. For example: Cormac, king and bishop (+905) |
+    |                                                            |
+    | Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. For a    |
+    | complete list, please see the end of this document.        |
+    |                                                            |
+    +------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
+OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE
+
+No. 6
+
+_Editors_:
+
+HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A.
+PROF. GILBERT MURRAY, LITT.D., LL.D., F.B.A.
+PROF. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A.
+PROF. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A.
+
+
+
+
+THE HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE
+
+
+_VOLUMES NOW READY_
+
+  HISTORY OF WAR AND PEACE                                 G.H. PERRIS
+
+  POLAR EXPLORATION                    DR. W.S. BRUCE, LL.D., F.R.S.E.
+
+  THE FRENCH REVOLUTION                           HILAIRE BELLOC, M.P.
+
+  THE STOCK EXCHANGE: A SHORT STUDY OF INVESTMENT AND SPECULATION
+                                                            F.W. HIRST
+
+  IRISH NATIONALITY                               ALICE STOPFORD GREEN
+
+  THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT                        J. RAMSAY MACDONALD, M.P.
+
+  PARLIAMENT: ITS HISTORY, CONSTITUTION, AND PRACTICE
+                                 SIR COURTNAY ILBERT, K.C.B., K.C.S.I.
+
+  MODERN GEOGRAPHY                  MARION I. NEWBIGIN, D.S.C. (Lond.)
+
+  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE                                   JOHN MASEFIELD
+
+  THE EVOLUTION OF PLANTS              D.H. SCOTT, M.A., LL.D., F.R.S.
+
+
+_VOLUMES READY IN JULY_
+
+  THE OPENING-UP OF AFRICA
+                    SIR H.H. JOHNSTON, G.C.M.G., K.C.B., D.SC., F.Z.S.
+
+  MEDIÆVAL EUROPE                                   H.W.C. DAVIS, M.A.
+
+  MOHAMMEDANISM                        D.S. MARGOLIOUTH, M.A., D.LITT.
+
+  THE SCIENCE OF WEALTH                              J.A. HOBSON, M.A.
+
+  HEALTH AND DISEASE                         W. LESLIE MACKENZIE, M.D.
+
+  INTRODUCTION TO MATHEMATICS            A.N. WHITEHEAD, SC.D., F.R.S.
+
+  THE ANIMAL WORLD                          F.W. GAMBLE, D.SC., F.R.S.
+
+  EVOLUTION                               J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A., and
+                                                  PATRICK GEDDES, M.A.
+
+  LIBERALISM                                       L.T. HOBHOUSE, M.A.
+
+  CRIME AND INSANITY              DR. C.A. MERCIER, F.R.C.P., F.R.C.S.
+
+*** Other volumes in active preparation
+
+
+
+
+IRISH
+NATIONALITY
+
+BY
+ALICE STOPFORD GREEN
+
+AUTHOR OF "TOWN LIFE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY"
+"HENRY II," "THE MAKING OF IRELAND," ETC.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+NEW YORK
+HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
+
+LONDON
+WILLIAMS AND NORGATE
+
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1911,
+BY
+HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
+
+
+THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAP.                                                      PAGE
+
+     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                               111
+
+  VIII THE TAKING OF THE LAND                                 125
+
+    IX THE NATIONAL FAITH OF THE IRISH                        141
+
+     X RULE OF THE ENGLISH PARLIAMENT                         158
+
+    XI THE RISE OF A NEW IRELAND                              182
+
+   XII AN IRISH PARLIAMENT                                    198
+
+  XIII IRELAND UNDER THE UNION                                219
+
+       SOME IRISH WRITERS ON IRISH HISTORY                    255
+
+
+
+
+IN MEMORY
+OF
+THE IRISH DEAD
+
+
+
+
+IRISH NATIONALITY
+
+
+
+
+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 rising sheer above the water stand
+as bulwarks thrown 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 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, coming 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 entrenchments
+that guarded cliffs and mountain passes. The name of Erin recalls the
+ancient inhabitants, who lived on under the new rulers, more in number
+than their conquerors. The Gaels gave their language and their
+organisation to the country, while 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 provinces
+later known as Ulster, Leinster, Munster 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 rich lands of Meath were the
+high-king's domain.
+
+Heroic tales celebrate the prehistoric conflicts 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 hundred royal
+mercenaries and Gaulish soldiers--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 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 warriors 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 Usnech 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 monarchs 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 smelting of gold near the Liffey
+about 1500 B.C. and of the Wicklow artificer who made cups and
+brooches of gold and silver, and silver 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 henceforth 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 hundred 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 probably 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 twenty ounces in the British Museum from
+England, Scotland, and Wales.
+
+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
+corn 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.
+
+The tribal system has been much derided as the mark of a savage
+people, or at least of a race unable to advance beyond political
+infancy into a real national existence. This was not true of the
+Gaels. Their essential idea of a state, and the mode of its government
+and preservation, was different from that of mediæval 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 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 secondary 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 Gaelic 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 administration on the
+other hand was divided into the widest possible range of
+self-governing communities, which were bound together in a willing
+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 literature. Such an instinct
+of national life was neither rude nor contemptible, 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, but which was never
+accepted in Ireland. Irish history can only be understood by realising
+this intense national life 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 the 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 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 gathered 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, together, 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 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
+councillors--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 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 pictures 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 instruction it was meet that we should gather
+ourselves together." And at the reciting 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 genealogies, 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 tribe land in perpetuity. So long as the
+family held the land, they were bound to train up in each generation
+that one of the household who was most fit to carry on learning, and
+thus for centuries long lines of distinguished men added fame to their
+country 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
+metrical 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. Professors 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 turn back every poet
+who sought to leave the country and to bring on their way with honour
+every one who sought to enter in. There was no stagnation where
+competition 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 people esteemed--democracy,
+aristocracy, king-craft, literature, tradition, art, commerce, law,
+sport, religion, display, even rustic buffoonery. The years between one
+festival 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 hills" to exercise
+their law and hear their learned men.
+
+In the time of the Roman Empire, therefore, the Irish looked on
+themselves as one race, obedient to one law, united 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 corner 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 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 chiefdom 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; disorders 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 with Atlantic
+clouds. Riots and forays there were, among a martial race and strong
+men of hot passions, but Ireland was in fact no prominent example of
+mediæval anarchy or disorder. Local feuds were no greater than those
+which afflicted England down to the Norman 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 recognised by law, and had
+their special organisation 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 genealogies prove on the contrary that the generations must be
+counted at from thirty-three to thirty-six years: the tale of kings,
+judges, poets, and householders who died peacefully 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
+of 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 industries and virtues do not
+flourish in regions given over to savage strife. And it is significant
+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 forgotten. 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 impossible; he
+had first to exterminate the entire people. The same division into
+administrative districts gave also a singular authority to law. In
+mediæval states, however 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 interested in maintaining the law of the people, the
+protection of the common folk; nor were its landmarks ever submerged
+or destroyed. Irish land laws, for example, in spite of the changes
+that gradually covered the land with fenced estates, did actually
+preserve 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 Revolt ever arose, nor any rising of the poor against their
+lords. Rights of inheritance, due solemnities of election, were
+accurately preserved. 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 fearful 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 intelligence among the whole people. A varied education, spread
+over many centres, fertilized 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 tanners. In
+some sequestered places in Ireland we can still trace the settlements
+made by Irish communities. They built no towns nor needed any in the
+modern 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.
+
+This life of opportunity in thickly congregated country societies gave
+to Ireland its wide culture, and the incredible number of scholars and
+artificers that it poured out over Europe with generous ardour. The
+multitudinous centres of discussion scattered over the island, and the
+rapid intercourse of all these centres one with another, explain how
+learning broadened, and how Christianity spread over the land like a
+flood. It was to these country settlements that the Irish owed the
+richness of their civilisation, the generosity of their learning, and
+the passion of their patriotism.
+
+Ireland was a land then as now of intense contrasts, where equilibrium
+was maintained by opposites, not by a perpetual tending towards the
+middle course. In things political and social the Irish showed a
+conservatism that no intercourse could shake, side by side with eager
+readiness and great success in grasping the latest progress in arts or
+commerce. In their literature strikingly modern thoughts jostle
+against the most primitive crudeness; "Vested interests are shameless"
+was one of their old observations. In Ireland the old survived beside
+the new, and as the new came by free assimilation old and new did not
+conflict. The balance of opposites gave colour and force to their
+civilisation, and Ireland until the thirteenth century and very
+largely until the seventeenth century, escaped or survived the
+successive steam rollings that reduced Europe to nearly one common
+level.
+
+In the Irish system we may see the shaping of a true democracy--a
+society in which ever-broadening masses of the people are made
+intelligent sharers in the national life, and conscious guardians of
+its tradition. Their history is throughout a record of the nobility of
+that experiment. It would be a mechanical theory of human life which
+denied to the people of Ireland the praise of a true patriotism or the
+essential spirit of a nation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+IRELAND AND EUROPE
+
+_c._ 100--_c._ 600
+
+
+The Roman Agricola had proposed the conquest of Ireland on the ground
+that it would have a good effect on Britain by removing the spectacle
+of liberty. But there was no Roman conquest. The Irish remained
+outside the Empire, as free as the men of Norway and Sweden. They
+showed that to share in the trade, the culture, and the civilisation
+of an empire, it is not necessary to be subject to its armies or lie
+under its police control. While the neighbouring peoples received a
+civilisation imposed by violence and maintained by compulsion, the
+Irish were free themselves to choose those things which were suited to
+their circumstances and character, and thus to shape for their people
+a liberal culture, democratic and national.
+
+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 born 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 Shannon and the
+harbours of Down; and probably 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 possessed--the great
+decorated trumpets of bronze used in the Loire country, the fine
+enamelling in colours, the late-Celtic designs for ornaments of bronze
+and gold. Goldsmiths travelled oversea to bring back bracelets, 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 borrowed afterwards interlaced ornament for
+metal work and illuminated manuscripts. In such arts they outdid their
+teachers; their gold and enamel work has never been surpassed, and in
+writing and illumination they went beyond the imperial artists of
+Constantinople. 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 of Narbonne. By the same road from
+Marseilles Christianity must have come a hundred years or so before
+the mission of St. Patrick--a Christianity carrying the traditions
+and rites and apocalypses of the East. It was from Gaul that St.
+Patrick afterwards sailed for his mission to Ireland. He came to a
+land where there were already men of erudition and "rhetoricians" who
+scoffed 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 Roman centralized authority was opposed to their
+whole habit of thought and genius. They made, therefore, no change in
+their tribal 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 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 earthen entrenchment, and
+taught them Latin, canon law, and divinity. Monastic 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. No parallel can be found in any
+other country to the writing down of national epics in their pagan
+form many centuries after the country had become Christian. In the same
+way European culture was not allowed to suppress the national language;
+clerics as well as laymen 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 the 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 original founder, in free federal union like that of the clans.
+As no land could be wholly alienated from the tribe, territory given
+to the monastery was not exempted from the common 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.
+
+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 inspired 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
+oratories, 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 centuries some ancient
+tradition of apostolic measurements, and in their narrow and austere
+dimensions, and their intimate solemnity, 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."
+
+Piety did not always vanquish the passions 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.
+Culture 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 merryman long ago, and yet he was a
+Christian, who could make all men he ever saw laugh 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 corn to the
+abbey mill. Again, the broad tolerance of the church in Ireland never
+allowed any persecution for religion'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 imperfection
+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 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 rejected for their country the organisation of the
+Roman state, and had only taken the highest forms of its art,
+learning, and religion, to enrich their ancient law and tradition: and
+through their own forms of social life they had made this culture
+universal among the people, and national. Such was the spectacle of
+liberty which the imperial Agricola had feared.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE IRISH MISSION
+
+_c._ 560--_c._ 1000
+
+
+The fall of the Roman Empire brought to the Irish people new dangers
+and new opportunities. Goths and Vandals, Burgundians 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 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 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 compass these people round 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 Eternity where space
+and time were not. We see 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 Ælfred. "They came," Ælfred
+tells us in his chronicle, "in a boat without oars from Hibernia,
+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 enough meat
+for seven nights."
+
+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
+civilisation. And while all continental roads were interrupted,
+traffic from Irish ports still passed safely to Gaul over the ocean
+routes. Ireland therefore not only preserved her 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 Columcille in Great
+Britain and Columbanus in Europe. In all Irish history there is no
+greater figure than St. Columcille--statesman 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 Iona 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, began a work equally astonishing from the
+religious and the political point of view. The heathen Picts had
+marched westward to the sea, destroying 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" settlements along the
+coast, and the Celts of Strathclyde. 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 Cantyre
+he restored the Scot settlement from Ireland 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 Iona 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 of human brotherhood, learning, and religion.
+
+For thirty-four years Columcille ruled as abbot in Iona, 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 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
+figure 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
+said, three hundred books, sitting with open cell door, where the
+brethren, one with his butcher's knife, one with his milk pail,
+stopped to ask a blessing as they passed.
+
+After his death the Irish monks carried his work over the whole of
+England. A heathen land lay before them, for the Roman missionaries
+established in 597 by Augustine in Canterbury, speaking no English and
+hating "barbarism," made little progress, and after some reverses were
+practically confined to Kent. The first cross of the English
+borderland was set up in 635 by men from Iona on a heather moorland
+called the Heaven-field, by the ramparts of the Roman Wall. Columban
+monks made a second Iona at Lindisfarne, with its church of hewn oak
+thatched with reeds after Irish tradition in sign of poverty and
+lowliness, and with its famous school of art and learning. They taught
+the English writing, and gave them the letters which were used among
+them till the Norman Conquest. Labour and learning went hand in hand.
+From the king's court nobles came, rejoicing to change the brutalities
+of war for the plough, the forge-hammer, the winnowing fan: waste
+places were reclaimed, the ports were crowded with boats, and
+monasteries gave shelter to travellers. For a hundred years wherever
+the monks of Iona passed men ran to be signed by their hand and
+blessed by their voice. Their missionaries wandered on foot over
+middle England and along the eastern coast and even touched the
+Channel in Sussex. In 662 there was only one bishop in the whole of
+England who was not of Irish consecration, and this bishop, Agilberct
+of Wessex, was a Frenchman who had been trained for years in Ireland.
+The great school of Malmesbury in Wessex was founded by an Irishman,
+as that of Lindisfarne had been in the north.
+
+For the first time also Ireland became known to Englishmen. Fleets of
+ships bore students and pilgrims, who forsook their native land for
+the sake of divine studies. The Irish most willingly received them
+all, supplying to them without charge food and books and teaching,
+welcoming them in every school from Derry to Lismore, making for them
+a "Saxon Quarter" in the old university of Armagh. Under the influence
+of the Irish teachers the spirit of racial bitterness was checked, and
+a new intercourse sprang up between English, Picts, Britons, and
+Irish. For a moment it seemed as though the British islands were to be
+drawn into one peaceful confederation and communion and a common
+worship bounded only by the ocean. The peace of Columcille, the
+fellowship of learning and of piety, rested on the peoples.
+
+Columcille had been some dozen years in Iona when Columbanus (_c._
+575) left Bangor on the Belfast Lough, leading twelve Irish monks clad
+in white homespun, with long hair falling on their shoulders, and
+books hanging from their waists in leathern satchels. They probably
+sailed in one of the merchant ships trading from the Loire. Crossing
+Gaul to the Vosges Columbanus founded his monastery of Luxeuil among
+the ruined heaps of a Roman city, once the meeting-place of great
+highways from Italy and France, now left by the barbarians a
+wilderness for wild beasts. Other houses branched out into France and
+Switzerland. Finally he founded his monastery of Bobio in the
+Apennines, where he died in 615.
+
+A stern ascetic, aflame with religious passion, a finished scholar
+bringing from Ireland a knowledge of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, of
+rhetoric, geometry, and poetry, and a fine taste, Columbanus battled
+for twenty years with the vice and ignorance of a half-pagan
+Burgundy. Scornful of ease, indifferent to danger, astonished at the
+apathy of Italy as compared with the zeal of Ireland in teaching, he
+argued and denounced with "the freedom of speech which accords with
+the custom of my country." The passion of his piety so awed the
+peoples, that for a time it seemed as if the rule of Columbanus might
+outdo that of St. Benedict. It was told that in Rome Gregory the Great
+received him, and as Columbanus lay prostrate in the church the Pope
+praised God in his heart for having given such great power to so small
+a man. Instantly the fiery saint, detecting the secret thought, rose
+from his prayer to repudiate the slight: "Brother, he who depreciates
+the work depreciates the Author."
+
+For a hundred years before Columbanus there had been Irish pilgrims
+and bishops in Gaul and Italy. But it was his mission that first
+brought the national patriotism of Ireland into conflict with the
+organisation of Rome in Europe. Christianity had come to Ireland from
+the East--tradition said from St. John, who was then, and is still,
+held in special veneration by the Irish; his flower, 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
+tonsure 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 discipline of Rome, and he was required to renounce
+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 small island in a far
+corner 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 outside
+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
+English 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 the Roman banner of purple and gold carried
+before them, to hear the name of "Emperor of the whole of Britain,"
+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 for
+conquest--Celts "rude and barbarous"--"Picts and Britons, accomplices
+in obstinacy in those two remote islands of the world." "Your father
+Columba," "of rustic simplicity" said the English leader, had "that
+Columba of yours," like Peter, the 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 Lindisfarne, 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 united was for ever loosened. English
+armies marched ravaging 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 hundred 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, sending
+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
+Jerusalem, settled in Carthage, and sailed to the discovery of
+Iceland. No church of any land 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
+Highlands 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
+Switzerland, 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 in 595 was sent on the English mission he turned back with
+loathing, and finally took 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 feared 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 without 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 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 distinction of their people
+persecution had no part. No war of religion stained their faith, and
+no barbarities to man.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+SCANDINAVIANS IN IRELAND
+
+800-1014
+
+
+For a thousand years no foreign host had settled in Erin. But the times
+of peace were ended. About 800 A.D. the Irish suffered their first
+invasion.
+
+The Teutonic peoples, triumphant conquerors 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. The 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--the leader on the prow as it plunged
+through the sea, calling to the land, shouting as he goes, 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 nation 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 civilisation, 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 England from the Forth to the
+Channel, the land of the Picts northward, Iona and the country of the
+Scots to the west, and Bretland 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 cups and vessels and ornaments of gold, sacking
+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 manuscripts 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
+"Danelaw" 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 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 Norwegian 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 hundred 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 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 corn, 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 multiplying 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
+companies 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 point without a fleet," battle swung
+backwards and forwards between old settlers and new pirates, between
+Norsemen and Danes, between both and the Irish.
+
+But the Scandinavians were not only sea-rovers, they were the greatest
+merchants 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; westward 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 merchants 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. Merchants made settlements
+along the coasts, and planted colonies over the inland country to
+supply the trade of the ports. They had 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
+confederation 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 which 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 fighting 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 Tipperary, organised as Irish clans 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 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," "Munster of the swift
+ships."
+
+On the other hand, the Irish never ceased 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
+summoned 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 fact, 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 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
+hundred 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 Munster 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,
+and 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 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 Norsemen used armour, and rough chains of
+blue iron to grapple the enemies' ships, but the Irish sailors, with
+their "strong enclosures of linen cloth," and tough ropes of hemp to
+fling over the enemies' prows, came off 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.
+"Ill luck was it for the Danes when Brian was born," 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 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 Saxons 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, proposed to create a
+Scandinavian empire from the Slavic shores of the Baltic across
+Denmark, 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 1018 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 sea, left the Scandinavian empire with a
+ragged edge out on the line of the Atlantic commerce. King 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 Scandinavian 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 fifty
+years to come Ireland kept its independence. England was once again,
+as in the time of the Roman dominion, made part of a continental
+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 unbroken. Irish kingdoms had lived on side by
+side with Danish kingdoms; in spite of the strength of the Danish
+forces, the constant irruptions of new Danes, and the business
+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 Telltown, 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 mound that rose
+in the marshy glen now called Glanworth. There Cellachan, the rightful
+heir, in the best of arms and dress, demanded that the nobles should
+remember justice, while his mother declared his title and recited a
+poem. And when the champions of Munster 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 their hands in his hand, and placed the royal
+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 Ælfred 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 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 Ælfred 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.
+Another, Cormac, king and bishop (+905), was skilled in Old-Irish
+literature, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, 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 philosophy. 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 are known, and a glossary. A
+lay scholar, probably 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 recommends. 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
+oak fronting the storm. They sang of the Creation and the Crucifixion,
+when "dear God's elements were afraid"; and of pilgrimage 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 battlefield, heroes
+of the Irish race.
+
+Even the craftsmen's schools were still gathered in their raths,
+preserving from century to century the forms and rules of 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 modern world. Many influences had
+come in--Oriental, Byzantine, Scandinavian, French--and the Irish took
+and used them all, but their art still remained Gaelic, of their
+native soil. 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 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 forgave 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 plunderers; and Brian himself gave the price
+of learning and the price of books to every one separately who went on
+this service. Many churches were built and repaired by him, bridges
+and roads were made, the fortresses of Munster were strengthened."
+
+Such was the astonishing vitality of learning and art among the Irish.
+By their social system the intellectual treasures of the race 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 profit 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
+parts of a ship, and the streets of a town. In outward and material
+civilisation they accepted 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 FIRST IRISH REVIVAL
+
+1014-1169
+
+
+After the battle of Clontarf in 1014 the Irish had a hundred and fifty
+years of comparative quiet. "A lively, stirring, ancient and
+victorious people," they turned to repair their hurts and to build 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 prosperity. 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 help from
+their people without, and by political alliances and combinations
+fostered war among the Irish states themselves. Nearly a hundred 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," "Magnus of the terrible
+battles," was sung in Ireland 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 tradition, 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 commanded 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 of
+English invasion. A wealthy and compact community living on the
+seaboard, trading with all Europe, 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 Irish 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 Canterbury 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 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 "Irish," 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 Erin only remained in the speech of the Gaels themselves.
+
+Clontarf, too, had marked ominously the 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
+Scandinavians; 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 mercenaries from England. In such names we
+see the heralds of the coming change.
+
+The Irish were therefore face to face with 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 community of tribes. It is in this effort that we see the
+immense vitality of the Gaelic system the power of its tradition, and
+the spirit of its people.
+
+After Brian's death two learned men were set over the government of
+Ireland; a layman, the Chief Poet, and a devout man, the Anchorite of
+all Ireland. "The land was governed like a free state and not like a
+monarchy by them." The victory of Clontarf was celebrated by a
+renascence of learning. Eye-witnesses of that great battle, poets and
+historians, wrote the chronicle of the Danish wars from first to last,
+and sang the glories of Cellachan and of Brian Boru in the greatness
+of his life and the majesty of his death. A scholar 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 Channel. In
+schools three or four hundred poetic metres were taught. The glories
+of ancient Erin were revived. Poets wrote of Usnech, of Tara, of
+Ailech, of the O'Neills on Lough Swilly 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, annals of Ireland from the
+earliest to the latest time were composed. Men laboured to satisfy the
+desire of the Irish to possess a complete and brilliant picture of
+Ireland from all antiquity. The most famous among the many writers,
+one of the most learned men in all 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 synchronisms
+of the kings of Asia and of Roman emperors with Irish kings, and of
+the Irish high-kings and provincial chiefs and kings of Scotland.
+Writings of that time which have escaped destruction, such as the
+_Book of Leinster_, remain the most important relics of Celtic
+literature in the world.
+
+There was already the beginning of a university in the ancient school
+of Armagh lying on the famous hill where for long ages the royal tombs
+of the O'Neills had been preserved. "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 church
+in 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 of the Armagh leadership. They
+journeyed 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 their spirit drawing all the communities under
+obedience to the see of Patrick, the national saint. In a series of
+synods from 1100 to 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
+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.
+Lorcán 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: feeding 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 the 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 union, 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 Danes,
+gradually absorbed into the Irish population, 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 Connacht 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, Ruaidhri or Rory, was
+proclaimed (1166) Ardri in Dublin with greater pomp than any king
+before him, and held at Athboy in Meath an assembly of the "men of
+Ireland," archbishops and clergy, princes and nobles, eighteen
+thousand horsemen from the tribes and provinces, and a thousand Danes
+from Dublin--there laws were made for the honour of churches and
+clergy, the restoring of prey unjustly 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 another 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 still see on islands, along river-valleys, in lonely
+fields, innumerable ruins of churches built of stone chiselled as
+finely as man's hand 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
+windows and arches richly carved. These 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 remembrance of Irish tradition and ornament, and signed by Irish
+masons on the stones. There was a wealth of metal work of great
+splendour, decorated with freedom and boldness of design, with inlaid
+work and filigree, and settings of stones and enamels and crystal; as
+we may see in book-shrines, in the crosiers of Lismore and Cachel and
+Clonmacnois and many others, in the matchless processional 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 embroidered with animals in red gold.
+
+The vigour of Irish life overflowed, indeed, 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 corn 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 Compostella, 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 between 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
+Austria. An Irish abbot was head of a monastery in Bulgaria. From time
+to time the Irish came home to collect money for their foundations
+and went back laden with gold from the kings at home. Pope Adrian IV
+(1154) remembered with esteem the Irish professor under whom he had
+studied in Paris University. Irishmen were chaplains of the emperor
+Conrad III (+1152) 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 learning, 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 enduring life of Irishmen on Irish land, the popular
+tales that began at this time to run from mouth to mouth. They took to
+themselves 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 suddenly sprang up of the
+adventures of Finn--the warrior worthy of a king, the son of wisdom,
+the mighty hunter of every mountain and forest in Ireland, whose death
+no minstrel cared to sing. Every poet was expected to recite the fame
+in life of Finn and his companions. 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
+fasting 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 Judæa 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.
+
+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 gaunt relics 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
+modern 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 feastings, lest such recreation of spirit
+and mind should be to him a destruction 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." "Thou too, Patrick, hast
+taught us good things," 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-Cruachan of
+Connacht, the graves of mighty champions, 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 God."
+
+In no other country did such a fate befall a missionary coming from
+strangers--to be 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
+university, a single and independent church under an Irish primate of
+Armagh and an Irish archbishop 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 slowly worked
+out by her political councillors, her great ecclesiastics, her
+scholars and philosophers, and by the faith of the common people in
+the glory of their national inheritance. "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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE NORMAN INVASION
+
+1169-1520
+
+
+After the fall of the Danes the Normans, conquerors of England,
+entered on the dominion of the sea--"citizens of the world," they
+carried their arms and their cunning from the Tweed to the
+Mediterranean, from the Seine to the Euphrates. The spirit of conquest
+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 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. William
+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 II, lord of a vast seacoast from the Forth
+to the Pyrenees, holding both sides of the Channel, needed Ireland to
+round off his dominions and give him command 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 followers, and Flemings from
+Pembroke, led the invasion that began in 1169. They were men trained
+to war, with armour and weapons unknown 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 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
+complaints, 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 garrisoned 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 meanwhile 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 families, 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 II 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 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 or in England. No Irish chief,
+however, could have even understood 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
+"conquest," 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 of old. Henry's
+presence there gave him no lordship: and the independent temper of
+the Irish people was not likely, after their Danish experience, to be
+cowed by two years of war. Some cunning explanation 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 implied 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 proclamation of papal bulls, which
+according to modern research seem to have been mere forgeries. 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 conquered 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 administration. The fighting
+garrison was reinforced by the planting of a militant church--bishops
+and clergy of foreign blood, stout men of war, ready to aid by
+prayers, excommunications, 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, explained that "in policy he thought it expedient to wink at
+one knave cutting off another, and that would save the king's coffers
+and purchase peace to the land"; whereat the king 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." During 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 who had
+carried the peaceful mission of a spiritual religion over England and
+Europe now saw that other mission planted among themselves--a
+political 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 different 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 Europe. Dublin, no mere centre now
+of roving sea-kings, was turned into an impregnable fortress, 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 Westminster never ceased, nor
+the supply of its treasure, its favoured colonists, 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 compromise 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 the 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 Connacht, and
+absorbed into the Gaelic life the incoming Norman de Burghs. The
+Anglo-Normans, on the other hand, established themselves powerfully in
+Munster and Leinster. 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 remnants of old chiefdoms,
+unconquered, resolute and wealthy--such as the O'Briens in the west,
+MacCarthys and O'Sullivans in the south, O'Conors and O'Mores in the
+middle country, MacMurroughs and O'Tooles in Leinster, and many more.
+
+It has been held that all later misfortunes would have been averted if
+the English 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 corn 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 Rhineland and Lucca, with speculators from
+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 than 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 resources 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 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 metropolis, 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 adventurers had gone out to find profit for themselves,
+not to collect Irish wealth for London. Their "loyalty" failed under
+that test. The kings, therefore, found themselves engaged in a double
+conflict, against the Irish and against their own colonists, 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 "barbarism." The
+invaders were drawn to their new home not only by its wealth but by
+its beauty, the variety and gaiety of its social life, the
+intelligence 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 slaughter 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 employed 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 forbidden 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 exceedingly 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 burden of military taxation no tribe dared to disarm
+any more than one of the European countries to-day. The Dublin
+officials, meanwhile, 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 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 commanders 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 organised treasury, a powerful nobility, and
+a dependent people. The Irish tribal system, on the other hand, rested
+on a people endowed with a wide freedom, guided by an ancient
+tradition, and themselves the guardians 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+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 vitality of the Irish culture, the firm
+structure of their law, and the cohesion of the people.
+
+Henry II in 1171 had led an army for "the conquest" of Ireland. Three
+hundred years later, when Henry VII in 1487 turned his thoughts to
+Ireland he found no conquered land. An earthen ditch with a palisade
+on the top had 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 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 singing the traditions, the love-songs, the prayers and hymns of
+the Gaels. A Norman shrine of gold for St. Patrick's tooth shows 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 population. Irish speech was so universal
+that a proclamation of Henry VIII in a Dublin parliament 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 seaports, 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 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 Dublin 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 the Irish genius had 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 this great influence fell
+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. Together
+they took a brilliant part in the commerce 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 ingenious 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 exchange velvets, silks and satins,
+cloth of gold and embroideries, wines and spices. Irish goldsmiths
+made the rich vessels that adorned the tables both of Normans and
+Irish. Irish masons built the new churches of continental design,
+carving at every turn their own traditional Irish ornaments. Irish
+scribes illuminated manuscripts which were as much praised in a Norman
+castle as in an Irish fort. Both 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 knowledge among the most learned men
+of Italy and France. A kind of national education was being worked
+out. Not one of the Irish chiefdoms allowed its schools to perish, and
+to these ancient schools the settlers in the towns added others of
+their own, to which the Irish also in time flocked, so that youths of
+the two races learned together. As Irish was the common language, so
+Latin was the second tongue for cultivated people and for all men of
+business in their continental trade. The English policy made English
+the language of traitors to their people, but of no use either for
+trade or literature.
+
+The uplifting of the national ideal was shown in the fourteenth and
+fifteenth centuries by a revival of learning like that which followed
+the Danish wars. Not one of the hereditary houses of historians,
+lawyers, poets, physicians, seems to have failed: we find them at work
+in the mountains of Donegal, along the Shannon, in lake islands,
+among the bare rocks of Clare, in the plains of Meath, in the valleys
+of Munster. In astronomy Irishmen were still first in Europe. In
+medicine they had all the science of their age. Nearly all our
+knowledge of Irish literature comes from copies of older works made by
+hundreds of industrious scribes of this period. From time to time
+Assemblies of all the learned men were called together by patriotic
+chiefs, or by kings rising into high leadership--"coming to Tara," as
+the people said. The old order was maintained in these national
+festivals. Spacious avenues of white houses were made ready for poets,
+streets of peaked hostels for musicians, straight roads of smooth
+conical-roofed houses for chroniclers, another avenue for bards and
+jugglers, and so on; and on the bright surface of the pleasant hills
+sleeping-booths of woven branches for the companies. From sea to sea
+scholars and artists gathered to show their skill to the men of
+Ireland; and in these glorious assemblies the people learned anew the
+wealth of their civilisation, and celebrated with fresh ardour the
+unity of the Irish nation.
+
+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 civilisation so vital and impassioned, so human and gay. But
+the mixed civilisation found no favour with the government; the "wild
+Irish" and the "degenerate English" were no better than "brute
+beasts," the English said, abandoned to "filthy customs" and 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
+embroiling them in war, but by making union of Ireland impossible in
+religion or in education, and by destroying public confidence. The new
+central organisation of the Irish church made it a powerful weapon in
+English hands. An Englishman was at once put in every archbishopric
+and every principal 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 disappeared; in the English idea the
+church was to destroy the nation. Higher education was also denied to
+both races. No Irish university 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 considerations of wealth, power, a
+privileged position, 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 of Ormond. For
+nearly two hundred years, as it happened, the heirs of this house were
+always minors, held in wardship by the king. English training at his
+court, visits to London, knighthoods and honours there, high posts in
+Ireland, prospects of new conquests of Irish land, a winking of
+government officials at independent privileges used on their estates
+by Ormond lords--such influences tied each heir in turn to England,
+and separated them from Irish interests--a "loyal" house, said the
+English--"fair and false as Ormond," said the people of Ireland.
+
+Both races suffered under this foreign misrule. 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 commanders 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. Confederacies of Irish and Anglo-Normans were
+formed, one following another in endless and hopeless succession.
+Through all 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."
+
+For a time it seemed as if the house of the Fitzgeralds, the most
+powerful house in Ireland, 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 English 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 Republic of Florence, in a letter
+recalling 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
+Ibernia, 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 European peoples with Irishmen; he had
+urgently pressed union of the races; he had planned 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
+Mor "the great" (1477-1513), 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 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 perfectly 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 policy was union in his country, and Ireland for the Irish.
+The lasting argument 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 subjects
+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 resolve to close dissensions 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 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
+VIII was warned. In spite of official intrigues, through all eddying
+accidents, 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 English king had won the devoted
+confidence of the Irish people.
+
+There was one faction alone which no reason could convert--the alien
+minority 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 offices 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE TAKING OF THE LAND
+
+1520-1625
+
+
+Henry VIII, like Henry II, 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 English
+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 bounds unknown--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. For months of subtle preparation his promises were
+explicit. All cause of offence was carefully taken away. Finally a
+parliament was summoned (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 both sides of the bargain. First the wording of the title
+was so altered as to take away any value in the "common consent" of
+parliament, since the king asserted his title to Ireland by
+inheritance and conquest, before and beyond all mandate of the popular
+will. And secondly it was arranged that Henry was under no obligation
+by negotiations or promises as to the land. For since, by the
+council's assurance to the king on the day the title was passed, there
+was no land occupied by any "disobedient" people which was not really
+the king's property by ancient inheritance or by confiscation, Henry
+might do as he would with his own. Royal concessions too must depend
+on how much revenue could be extracted from them to keep up suitably
+the title of king--on whether it was judicious to give Irishmen titles
+which they might afterwards plead to be valid--on whether Henry would
+find the promised grants convenient in case he chose later to proceed
+to "conquest and extermination."
+
+Parliament was dismissed for thirteen years, Henry, in fact, had
+exactly fulfilled the project of mystification he proposed twenty
+years before--"to be politically and secretly handled." Every trace of
+Irish law and land tenure must finally be abolished so that the soil
+should lie at the king's will alone, but this was to be done at first
+by secret and politic measures, here a little and there a little, so
+that, as he said, the Irish lords should as yet conceive no suspicion
+that they were to be "constrained to live under our law or put from
+all the lands by them now detained." "Politic practices," said Henry,
+would serve till such time as the strength of the Irish should be
+diminished, their leaders taken from them, and division put among
+themselves so that they join not together. If there had been any truth
+or consideration for Ireland in the royal compact some hope of
+compromise and conciliation might have opened. But the whole scheme
+was rooted and grounded in falsehood, and Ireland had yet to learn how
+far sufferings by the quibbles and devices of law might exceed the
+disasters of open war. Chiefs could be ensnared one by one in
+misleading contracts, practically void. A false claimant could be put
+on a territory and supported by English soldiers in a civil war, till
+the actual chief was exiled or yielded the land to the king's
+ownership. No chief, true or false, had power to give away the
+people's land, and the king was face to face with an indignant people,
+who refused to admit an illegal bargain. Then came a march of soldiers
+over the district, hanging, burning, shooting "the rebels," casting
+the peasants out on the hillsides. There was also the way of
+"conquest." The whole of the inhabitants were to be exiled, and the
+countries made vacant and waste for English peopling: the sovereign's
+rule would be immediate and peremptory over those whom he had thus
+planted by his sole will, and Ireland would be kept subject in a way
+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 II had said before, to "subdue
+or exile them as hath been thought," for from the settled lands
+plantation could be spread into the surrounding territories, and the
+Irishry steadily pushed back into the sea. Henceforth it became a
+fixed policy to "exterminate and exile the country people of the
+Irishry." Whether they submitted or not, the king was to "inhabit
+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 confiscated 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. And 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 recovered by the original Irish
+owners. Another 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 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
+slaughtered and their books and genealogies burned, so that no man
+"might know his own grandfather" and all Irishmen be confounded in the
+same ignorance and abasement, all glories gone, and all rights lost.
+The great object of the government was to destroy the whole tradition,
+wipe out the Gaelic memories, and begin a new English life.
+
+But even with all legal aids to extermination the land war proved more
+difficult than the English had expected. It lasted for some seventy
+years. The Irish were inexhaustible in defence, prodigious in courage,
+and endured hardships that Englishmen 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, killing every living thing and burning
+every granary of corn, 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 found a few water-cresses flocking as to
+a feast; so that in short space there were none almost 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 appearance 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, would have
+led Ireland in a way of peace, and brought about through equal
+prosperity 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. "God 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 slain, before he himself was
+killed in 1583: and his wretched son, born in the Tower, was brought
+from that prison to be shown to his heart-broken people--stunted in
+body, enfeebled 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 English
+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 for forty years, under the
+leading of the greatest of Irish statesmen and generals Hugh O'Neill
+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 conspiracy 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 common 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 soil, instructed in their traditions,
+and themselves guardians of their national life.
+
+Henry VIII 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 leaders,
+Anglo-Irish and Irish, had disappeared, 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 under 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 government became clear in Ireland an English
+army of conquest had to be created. "Have no dread nor fear," cried
+Red Hugh to his Irishmen, "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 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
+they 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 traitorously 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, however, were such as to
+baffle 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 VIII 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 contemplating 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
+organisation it is doubtful whether any device could have saved her
+from the force of the English invasion. Dublin could never be closed
+from 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 defence 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 prodigious 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 disappeared 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 civilisation triumphed.
+Even now, after confiscations 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 patience 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 inconceivable. The great dispersion had
+begun of Irish deported, exiled, or cast out by emigration. 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 multitude of Irish colleges founded abroad. They became chancellors
+of universities, professors, 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 professor of medicine in the
+universities of Toulouse 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 English 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 shut 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 scattered, their learned men hunted down, their books
+burned; native industries were abolished; 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 which the race had
+fashioned for itself was shattered. Love of country and every
+attachment of race and 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 thousands in life and in death. The invaders supposed the
+degradation of the Irish race to be at last completed. "Their youth
+and gentry are destroyed in the rebellion or gone to France," wrote
+one: "those that are left are destitute of horses, arms 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 established in Rome (1625) by the
+efforts 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 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 Frères de Charité 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
+soldiers laid to rest among them--O'Neills, O'Dohertys, O'Donnells,
+Lynches, Murphys, and the rest, from every corner of Ireland. "Here I
+break off till morning," wrote one 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 Grammar; 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
+(Ireland) 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 consigned to the same earth that
+covered the bodies of her children ... that the ancient 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 they had a printing-press; and
+used it to send out Irish grammars, 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 Culdaff on the shore of Inishowen (+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 catastrophe which must inflict
+mortal wounds upon our country."
+
+Ireland herself, however, remained the chief home of historical
+learning in the broad national sense. Finghin Mac Carthy Riabhach, a
+Munster chief, skilled in old and modern Irish, Latin, English, and
+Spanish, 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'Sullivan
+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 Munster, 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 popular 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'Duibhgeanain of Leitrim, were
+writing the _Annals of the Four Masters_ (1632-6); all of them
+belonging to hereditary houses of chroniclers. In that time of sorrow,
+fearing the destruction of every record of his people, O'Clery
+travelled through all Ireland to 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 O'Clery by the neighbouring Mac Brodys who had kept
+it safe for a thousand 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 labours. 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 sovereignty of
+the Irish of Erin to the end of time."
+
+In Galway a group of scholars laid, in Lynch's words, "a secure
+anchorage" for Irish history. Dr. John Lynch, the famous apologist of
+the Irish, wrote there his historical 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 distinguished
+Irish scholar, translated the _Annals of Ulster_ into English.
+O'Flaherty of Moycullen 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 Galway came also Dualtach Mac Firbis (1585-1670), of a
+family that had been time out of mind hereditary historians in north
+Connacht. He learned in one of the old Irish schools of law in
+Tipperary Latin, English, and Greek. Amid the horrors of Cromwell's
+wars he carried out a prodigious work on the genealogies of the clans,
+the greatest, perhaps, 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 constantly devoted to
+the preservation of Irish history. In his old age he lived, like other
+Irish scholars, a landless sojourner on the estates that had once
+belonged to his family and race; the last of the hereditary sennachies
+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 eighty-five he was murdered by a Crofton when he was resting in
+a house on his way to Dublin. In Connacht, too, lived Tadhg O'Roddy of
+Leitrim, a diligent collector of Irish manuscripts, who gathered
+thirty books of law, and many others of philosophy, poetry, physic,
+genealogies, mathematics, romances, and history; and defended against
+the English the character 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 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, Kildare, 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
+manuscripts, those that were lost and those that have escaped.
+
+The poets were still the leaders of national patriotism. The great
+"Contention of the Poets"--"Iomarbhagh na bhfiledh"--a battle that
+lasted for years between the bards of the O'Briens and the O'Donnells,
+in which 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 cliff
+in his old age by a Cromwellian soldier with the shout, "Say your rann
+now, little man!" Tadhg O'h'Uiginn of Sligo (+1617), 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 ill,
+    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
+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 unity of
+feeling of the whole race was preserved and the bards still remained
+men who belonged to their country rather than to a clan or territory.
+But with the exile of the Irish chiefs, with 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, putting 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. Born of
+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 for their loyalty she gave them the last
+gift 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 commonwealth 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,
+acknowledging one God, conjoined together in allegiance 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), born there of an English family,
+"conceived a great love for his native country and could not bear 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 manuscripts, 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 born
+in Dublin, devoted himself to the study of Irish antiquities. Baron
+d'Aungier, Master of the Rolls, put into writing every point which he
+could find in original documents "which for antiquity or singularity
+might interest this country." The enthusiasm 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 should 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
+provost 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 Irish. As bishop he braved the
+anger of the government by declaring the hardships of the Catholic
+Irish, and by circulating a catechism in English and Irish. Bitterly
+did Ussher reproach him for such a scandal at which the professors of
+the gospel did all take offence, and for daring to adventure that
+which his brethren had been "so long abuilding," 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 Dublin 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 ascendancy and dominion.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+RULE OF THE ENGLISH PARLIAMENT
+
+1640-1750
+
+
+The aim which English kings had set before them 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 inheritance" 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. Henry'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 II looked to Ireland, 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: confiscations old and new which the English parliament
+allowed the Crown for Irish 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 VIII 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 for 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 old ties bound them, and no new
+charities. "From the Anglo-Irish no man of special sanctity as yet is
+known to have sprung," observed a Gael of that day. Ancient patrimony
+had fallen. The new aristocracy was that of the strong hand and the
+exploiter's greed. Ordinary restraints of civilised societies were not
+yet born 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 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
+Ireland which had happened since Henry II 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
+holding parliaments subject only to the king and his privy council;
+statutes of the English parliament had not 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 representatives in
+the English 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 manner as if no Irish parliament existed. The new
+ruling classes had neither experience nor training. Regardless 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, 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 country. Adventurers
+were tempted by Irish wealth; what had once been widely diffused among
+the Irish tribes was gathered into the hands of a few aliens, who
+ruthlessly wasted the land for their own great enrichment. Enormous
+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 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 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 Irish 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 Puritan 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 parliament 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 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; discountenanced by parliament,
+they still mark the first experiment to appeal in this way to London
+on the Irish question. Parliament 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 lives 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 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 born in cities have had more
+opportunity to acquire civility than the Old Irish; but if the
+question be of civility, of good manners, of liberality, of
+hospitality, and charity towards all, these virtues dwelt among the
+Irish.
+
+Kings were restored to carry out the will of parliament. Charles II 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 III 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, 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 Protestants their revenues in Ireland; the planters,
+one-fourth 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 million and a half of their acres,
+proceeded to crush the liberties of its own English settlers by
+simply issuing statutes for Ireland of its sole authority. The acts
+were as tyrannical in their subject as in their origin. One (1691),
+which ordered that no Catholic 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 English 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 liberties were grounded on compact and charter; and
+declared that his native land shared the claims of all mankind to
+justice. "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 liberties were taken away, their
+parliaments rendered nugatory, and their lives and fortunes left to
+depend on the will of a legislature wherein they are not parties." The
+"ill consequences" were seen seventy years later when Molyneux' book
+became the text-book of Americans in their rising against English
+rule; and when Anglo-Irish defenders of their own liberties were
+driven to make common cause with their Irish compatriots--for "no one
+or more men," said Molyneux, "can by nature challenge 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 Commons
+dared not dispute the tyranny that was the warrant of their property:
+"I hope," was the ironic answer, "the honourable member will not
+question the validity of his title." With such an argument at hand,
+the English parliament had no need of circumspection or of soft words.
+It simply condemned Molyneux 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 Ireland wrote a
+hundred years later, "I think Great Britain may still easily manage
+the Protestants, and the Protestants the Catholics." 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 civil liberties 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. Stringent 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
+parliament 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." Government 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 nickname 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 offices 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 your 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 members, having no liberties 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 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 parliament of James I (1613), "indented with sorrow,
+signed with tears, and delivered in this house of peace and liberty
+with our disarmed hands." Protestants had never cause for fear in
+Ireland on religious 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 English exterminators, no Irish curse has
+been found against the Protestant for his religion, even through the
+black time of the penal laws. The parliament, however, began a series
+of penal laws against Irish Catholics. They were forbidden the use of
+their religion, almost every means of livelihood, every right of a
+citizen, every family affection. Their possessions were scattered,
+education was denied them, when a father died his children were
+handed over to a Protestant guardian. "The law," said the leading
+judges, "does not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish 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 religion of the Irish, but only with their property
+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
+sounded 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 make his bed upon." "See all that are
+without 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, without 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 chose. Their subjection tempted the commercial classes. To
+safeguard their own profits of commerce and industry English traders
+made statutes to annihilate Irish competition. They forbade carrying
+of cattle or dairy stuff to England, they forbade trade in soap or
+candles; in cloth, in glass, in linen save of the coarsest kind; the
+increase of corn 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 not build ships. From old time Ireland 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 Irish port or to unload. 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." In
+1720 all trade was at a stand, the country bare of money, "want and
+misery in every face." It was unfortunate, Englishmen said, that
+Ireland 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 successfully pushed their own business in a
+country 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 to starve. The planters' parliament looked on in barren
+helplessness. They 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 successive kings and
+their children, German relations of the Hanoverians, useful
+politicians covered by other names, a queen of Denmark banished for
+misconduct, a Sardinian ambassador under a false title, a trailing
+host of Englishmen--pensions steadily increasing from £30,000 to over
+£89,000. Some £600,000 was at last yearly sent over to England for
+absentees, pensions, government annuities, and the like. A parliament
+servile and tyrannical could not even pretend 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. The English parliament
+desired to make the Irish houses for ever unfit for self-government.
+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 indifferent "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 parliament 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 rest--"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 of the people and their despised
+birth left them helpless. Once a chief justice in Tipperary conducted
+trials with fairness and humanity: "for about ten miles from Clonmel
+both sides of the road were lined with men, women, and children, who,
+as he passed along, kneeled down and supplicated 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 to have died between 1691 and 1745.
+Uncounted thousands from north 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--prolonged,
+undisturbed, uncontrolled--to advance "the king's service," the
+dependency of Ireland upon England, and "the comfort or security of any
+English in it." A multitude of statesmen put their hands to the 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 government. 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 England, or to the Empire. The Irish
+people suffered a long agony unmatched, perhaps, in European history.
+Few of the Protestant country gentry had established their fortunes;
+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,
+industry, 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 not in the first rank--as field-marshals, admirals,
+ambassadors, prime ministers, scholars, physicians, merchants, founders
+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 government there was plain bankruptcy--"England,"
+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 Protestant
+exiles from Ulster went to America as "Sons of St. Patrick." "To shun
+persecution 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 over every adversity.
+Brigadier-General Owen Sullivan, born 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
+commander-in-chief of the naval forces of the States. Charles Thompson
+of Strabane was secretary of the Continental Congress. Eight Irishmen,
+passionate organisers of the revolt, signed the Declaration of
+Independence. After the war an Irishman prepared the Declaration for
+publication from Jefferson's rough draft; an Irishman's son first
+publicly read it; an Irishman first printed and published 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 RISE OF A NEW IRELAND
+
+1691-1750
+
+
+It might have seemed impossible amid such complicated tyrannies 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 union
+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 Cromwellians complained that thousands of the
+English who came over under Elizabeth had "become one with the Irish
+as well in affinity as in idolatry." Forty years later these
+Cromwellians planted on Irish farms 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 as
+of old. In the country places, far from the government, kindly
+friendships grew up between neighbours, and Protestants 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 Protestants. 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 some cave or rock where
+the people gathered in secret to celebrate mass. There remain
+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 chancels, 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 sculptured 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 of the Irish. By
+their industry and skill in the despised business of handicrafts and
+commerce the outlaws were fast winning most of the ready money of the
+country into their hands.
+
+It would be a noble achievement, said 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 Plearáca Ui Ruairc; 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 ascendency,
+and in later days to defend 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 ignorance, lying in
+impenetrable darkness, whence no voice ever arose even of protest or
+complaint, 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 neglecting everything written in the
+native tongue of the country, the Protestant planters, one-fourth of
+the inhabitants, secured to themselves 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 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 farmhouses, 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 geography. The
+greatest of the poets was Dáibhí 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 O'Neachtain worked from 1734 to 1749 at a
+dictionary. Another learned poet and lexicographer, Aodh Buidh
+MacCurtin, published 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 imperative 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 O'Conor, "as many as I can of the ancient
+manuscripts of Ireland from the wreck which has overwhelmed everything
+that once belonged to us." O'Conor was of Sligo county. His father,
+like other gentlemen, had been so reduced by confiscation 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 difficulties he gained the best
+learning of his unhappy time. Much of the materials that O'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 immense
+work copied by his own scribe; and another copy made in 1734 by Hugh
+O'Mulloy, an excellent writer, for his friend Dr. O'Fergus of Dublin.
+He wrote for the learned, and delighted 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 Irishman at that time, were thus
+connected.
+
+It was the Irish antiquarians and historians who in 1759 drew Irishmen
+together into "the Catholic Committee"--Charles O'Conor, Dr. Curry,
+and Wyse of Waterford. O'Conor by his learning preserved 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 research 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 movement 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 nothing do ye according to the commandments, shun ye
+drunkenness and oaths and cursing, and do not say till death 'God
+damn' from your mouths." Riotous laughter broke out in some; they
+were all, in fact, professional wits--chief among them Eoghan Ruadh
+O'Sullivan 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 persecution and destruction.
+Among exiles in Connacht manuscripts perished, but old tradition lived
+on the lips of the peasants, who recited in their cabins the
+love-songs and religious poems of long centuries past. The people in
+the bareness of their poverty were nourished with a literature full of
+wit, imagination, feeling, and dignity. In the poorest hovels there
+were men skilled in a fine recitation. Their common language showed
+the literary influence, and Irish peasants even in our own day have
+used a vocabulary of some five thousand words, as against about eight
+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 education
+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 buried 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
+supported "poor scholars" free of charge. There were some in Kerry,
+some in Clare, where a very remarkable group of poets sprang up. From
+all parts of Ireland students 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 translation of Homer into Irish. But he
+worked in peril, flying for his life more than once before the
+bard-hunters; in his denunciations the English oppressor stands before
+us--plentiful his costly living 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 to 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 vindication of the
+Antiquities of Ireland got two hundred and thirty-eight subscribers,
+divided about equally between English and Gaelic 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
+slight 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 born, 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'
+parliament some dim sense of a national boast. An English nobleman
+coming to the parliament 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 county 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: 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 illiterature, 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 oppression." 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. 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) freedom of religion, schools of husbandry,
+relief of the poor from their intolerable burdens, the making
+parliament into a really representative 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 growing movement to unite the more liberal of the landowners,
+the Dissenters of the north, and the Catholics, in a common
+citizenship. It had proved impossible to carry out fully the penal
+code. No life could have gone on under its monstrous terms. There were
+not Protestants enough to carry on all the business 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'Driscoll, to the
+Protestant parliament in 1786.
+
+Such a movement alarmed the government extremely. If, they said,
+religious distinctions 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 XII
+
+AN IRISH PARLIAMENT
+
+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 rising power 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 men argued not only on free trade and government, 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 Catholics 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 entering 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 they had a country of their own and an "Irish interest"--Antony
+Malone. This astonishing orator and parliamentarian invented a
+patriotic opposition (1753). A great sea in a "storm" men said of him.
+Terror was immediately excited at his Irish origin and his national
+feeling. Dublin Castle feared that he might mean emancipation from the
+English legislature, and in truth the constitutional dependency 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 children 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 lawyers, men said, than any one living 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
+abilities; 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 English 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 executive under 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 by making himself the source of all
+favours, the giver of all gratifications, to concentrate political
+influence in the English Crown. A system of bribery began beyond all
+previous dreams; peerages were made by the score; and the first
+national debt of nearly two millions 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
+political power"; that "confiscation is their common title." "The
+king's business," as the government understood it, lay in "procuring
+the supplies 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 £50,000 for the
+payment of troops there. Other dangers had arisen. George Washington
+was made commander-in-chief of the forces for the American war in
+1775, and in 1778 France recognised American independence. The shores
+of Ireland lay open to attack: the country was drained of troops.
+Bands of volunteers were formed for its protection, Protestant troops
+led by landlords and gentry. In a year 40,000 volunteers were enrolled
+(1779). Ireland was no longer unarmed. What was even more important,
+she was no longer unrepresented. A packed parliament 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 gains from the
+Irish treasury in the near bankruptcy 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
+Commons. "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, required four main reforms. They
+asked for justice in the law-courts, and that the Habeas Corpus Act
+should be restored, and independent judges no longer hold their places
+at pleasure. They asked that the English commercial laws which had
+ruined Irish industry and sunk the land in poverty and idleness should
+be abandoned; taught by a long misery, Irishmen agreed to buy no
+manufactures but the work of Irish hands, and Dublin men compelled
+members to swear that they should vote for "the good of Ireland," 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
+independence of their parliament rose in every county 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 passion into the
+parliaments of Dublin and London. In three years the Dublin parliament
+had freed Protestant 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, 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," exclaimed 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 knew too how precarious was
+all that they had gained. Lord North described all past concessions 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 duty to ourselves and are resolved to be free." "As
+Irishmen, as Christians, and as Protestants" 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
+Commons 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 parliament 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 parliament of
+Ireland was now established and ascertained, and should never again be
+questioned 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
+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
+perpetua!_" 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 parliament entered into a gloomy inheritance--an authority
+which had been polluted and destroyed--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 VIII 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
+representation. All bills had to go through the privy council, whose
+secret and overwhelming influence was backed by the privy council in
+England, the English law officers, and finally the English cabinet.
+Irish proposals were rejected 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 the Irish
+Houses: no ministry resigned, whatever the majority by which it was
+defeated. Nominally elected by about one-fifth of the inhabitants, the
+Commons did not represent even these. A landlords' assembly, there was
+no Catholic in it, and no merchant. Even the Irish landlords were
+subdued to English interests: some hundred 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 pensioners equalled
+nearly one-half of the whole efficient body: "the price of a seat of
+parliament," men said, "is as well ascertained as that of the cattle
+of the field."
+
+All these dangers might with time and patience 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 another land. The good-will 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 to her wealth for imperial purposes. The gentry were
+losing the fears that had possessed them for their properties, and a
+fair hope was opening for an Ireland tolerant, united, educated, and
+industrious. Volunteers, 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 opulence and knowledge." It abolished the
+cruelties of the penal laws, and prepared the union of all religions
+in a common citizenship. It showed admirable knowledge in the method
+of restoring prosperity to the country, awakening 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 corruption 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
+5-½d. 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
+Liverpool alone. Pitt's proposal of free trade between the countries
+was accepted by Ireland (1785), but a storm of wrath swept over the
+British world of business; they refused Pitt's explanation that an
+Ireland where all industries had been killed could not compete
+against the industrial pre-eminence of England; and prepared a new
+scheme which re-established the ascendency of the British parliament
+over Irish navigation and commerce. This was rejected in Ireland as
+fatal to their Constitution. Twice again the Irish parliament
+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 viceroy 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 interfere 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 more for the protection of the British commerce 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 public 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 possession of the
+land, magistracy, and power of the country; holding that property
+under the 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 Catholic for fifteen years, was resisted by the whole
+might of the Castle. "If," wrote the lord-lieutenant to Pitt, "as her
+government became more open and more attentive to the feelings of the
+Irish nation, the difficulty of management had increased, is that a
+reason for opening the government and making the parliament 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 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 parliamentary
+rights which had been nominally conceded. The voice of the nation was
+silenced by the forbidding of all conventions. 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 movements 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 alienated and demoralised--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 country 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 America and France. The system
+of rule inaugurated 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
+measure to relieve their fears was denied, every measure to heighten
+them was pursued. Violent statesmen in the Castle, and officers 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 was, in fact, at last forced by
+the horrors which were openly encouraged by the government in 1796-7.
+"Every crime, every cruelty, that could be committed by Cossacks or
+Calmucks has been transacted here," said General Abercromby, sent in
+1797 as commander-in-chief. He refused the barbarities of martial rule
+when, as he said, the government's orders might be carried over the
+whole kingdom by an orderly 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 command 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
+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 English government was their implacable enemy, that
+the law was their oppressor, and Englishmen the haters of their race.
+The treatment 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 illustrate his credulity and his
+brutishness. The government cannot be excused by that same plea of
+fear. Clare no doubt held the doctrine 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 statesmanship--in
+a union of the nations in equal honour and liberties.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+IRELAND UNDER THE UNION
+
+1800-1900
+
+
+The horror of death lay over Ireland; cruelty and terror raised to a
+frenzy; government by martial law; a huge army occupying the country.
+In that dark time the plan for the Union with England, secretly
+prepared in London, was announced 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 eloquence would lengthen and perhaps confuse debates. But it was
+held that a hundred members would be lost in the British parliament,
+and that Irish doctrines would be sunk in the sea of British common
+sense.
+
+In Ireland a union was detested as a conspiracy 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 to 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 voluntary 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 universal detestation and
+execration of a Union the government dared not risk an election, and
+proceeded to pack the parliament privately. By official means the
+Commons 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 1-¼
+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 military force, under the influence
+of immediate personal danger," was followed, as wise men 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 undying opposition 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 literature 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 _Times_ perceived
+in "the Celtic twilight" a "slovenly old barbarism." Peel in his
+ignorance thought Irishmen had good qualities except for "a general
+confederacy in crime ... a settled and uniform 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 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 Ireland "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 fourteen to three in favour of her Protestant
+establishment, instead of three to one against it as happened in the
+country 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 of supporting their clergy. All
+Irish financiers 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 century. 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 expenditure 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 2-¼ 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 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 millions. 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
+taxation 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 before. Meanwhile the effect 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 incapacity 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 by England; from 1817 to 1870 the cost of government in
+Ireland was under 100 millions, while the contributions to the
+imperial exchequer 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 Ireland 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 countries. 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 of its corn trade through the English law, and wasting away by
+emigration to half its former 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 lavish, fixed on the high prices of
+the English scale, and vastly more expensive 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 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-meaning
+governors went over to Ireland, but the omnipotent Castle machine
+broke their efforts 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 counsel for the
+accused as "the gentleman on the other side." Juries were packed by
+the sheriffs with Protestants, by whom all Orangemen were acquitted,
+all Catholics condemned, and the credit of the law lowered for both by
+a system which made the juryman 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 emancipation,
+refused tithe reform. Englishmen could not understand Irish
+conditions. The political 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 supported by Irish members, which would have been hailed with
+enthusiasm by an Irish parliament, were rejected by the English.
+Session after session 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 concerned 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 were increased by its effect in drawing
+Irish landlords to London. Their rents followed them, and the wealth
+spent by absentees founded no industries at home. A land system
+brought about by confiscation, and developed by absentees, meant
+unreclaimed wastes, lands half cultivated, and neglected 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 corn and
+cattle for export there, from the value of eight million pounds in
+1826 to seventeen million pounds of food stuffs in 1848, and so on.
+They grew potatoes to feed themselves. If the price of corn fell
+prodigiously--as at the end of the Napoleonic war, or at the passing
+of the corn 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 shiploads of provisions for the
+charges due in England. On the other hand, if potatoes rotted, famine
+swept over the country among its fields of corn and cattle. And when
+rent failed, summary powers of eviction were given at Westminster
+under English theories for use 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 bullocks, 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 corner 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 million 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 corn and the
+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 clearance 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 "surplus 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'Connell
+constantly protested that rather than the Union he would have the old
+Protestant parliament. "Any body would serve if only it is in
+Ireland," cried a leading Catholic nationalist in Parnell's time; "the
+Protestant synod would do." In the despair 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
+organisation was tried; the Catholic Association for Emancipation
+founded by O'Connell in 1823, an open society into which Protestants
+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 lawless insurrection to the disciplined enthusiasm of
+citizens for justice. A Young Ireland movement (1842-1848) under
+honoured names such as Thomas Davis and John Mitchel and Gavan 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
+O'Connell's peaceful movement by the government forced on violent
+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 constitutionalist
+and sincere Protestant, Isaac Butt, led a peaceful parliamentary
+movement for Home Rule (1870-1877); after him Charles Stewart Parnell
+fought in the same cause for fourteen years (1877-1891) and died with
+victory almost in sight. Michael Davitt, following the advice of Lalor
+thirty years before, 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 giving
+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 severance between the islands.
+
+In these conflicts there was not now, as there had never been in their
+history, a religious war on the part of Irishmen. The oppressed people
+were of one creed, and the administration of the other. Protestant
+and Catholic had come to mean ejector and ejected, the armed Orangeman
+and the disarmed peasant, the agent-or clergy-magistrate 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 will 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 subsistence,"
+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 conventions, we must watch
+with amazement the upspringing under O'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 conventions
+of the Irish, O'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 intelligence in the peasantry.
+Local gatherings 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 disorder; 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 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 distributed to them
+by their priests, all spirits renounced, and the peace not broken once
+throughout the week. As O'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 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 interminable
+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 O'Connell Parnell
+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 movement. 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 power to arrest without
+trial all Irishmen suspected of illegal projects--a power beyond all
+coercion hitherto. O'Connell had opposed a coercion act in 1833 for
+nineteen nights; Parnell in 1881 fought for thirty-two nights.
+Parliament had become the keeper of Irish tyrannies, not of her
+liberties, and its conventional 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 Parnell himself. The passion of rage reached its
+extreme height with the publication in _The Times_ (1888) of a
+facsimile letter from Parnell, to prove his consent to a paid system
+of murder and outrage. 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 Parnell (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 in the times of
+O'Connell, Thomas Davis, John O'Leary, and Parnell, and rises once
+more to-day as the fixed unchanging demand, 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. Verdicts
+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
+solution, 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 national idea. In its darkest
+days the country had remained true to the old Irish spirit of
+learning, that fountain of the nation's life. In O'Connell's time the
+"poor scholar" who took his journey to "the Munster schools" was sent
+out with offerings laid on the parish altars by Protestants and
+Catholics alike; as he trudged with his bag of books and the fees for
+the master sewn in the cuff of his coat, he was welcomed in every
+farm, and given of the best in the famishing hovels: "The Lord prosper
+him, and every one that has the heart set upon the learning." Bards
+and harpers and dancers wandered among the cottages. A famous bard
+Raftery, playing at a dance heard one ask, "Who is the musician?" and
+the blind fiddler answered him:
+
+    "I am Raftery the poet,
+    Full of hope and love,
+    With eyes that have no light,
+    With gentleness that has no misery.
+
+    Going west upon my pilgrimage,
+    Guided by the light of my heart,
+    Feeble and tired,
+    To the end of my road.
+
+    Behold me now,
+    With my face to a wall,
+    A-playing music
+    To empty pockets."
+
+Unknown scribes still copied piously the national records. A Louth
+schoolmaster could tell all the stars and constellations of heaven
+under the old Irish forms and names. A vision is given to us through a
+government Ordnance Survey of the fire of zeal, the hunger of
+knowledge, among the tillers and the tenants. In 1817 a dying farmer
+in Kilkenny repeated several times to his sons his descent back to the
+wars of 1641 and behind that to a king of Munster in 210
+A.D.--directing the eldest never to forget it. This son took his
+brother, John O'Donovan, (1809-1861) to study in Dublin; in Kilkenny
+farmhouses he learned the old language and history of his race. At the
+same time another Irish boy, Eugene O'Curry (1796-1862), of the same
+old Munster stock, working on his father's farm in great poverty,
+learned from him much knowledge of Irish literature and music. The
+Ordnance Survey, the first peripatetic university Ireland had seen
+since the wanderings of her ancient scholars, gave to O'Donovan and
+O'Curry their opportunity, where they could meet learned men, and use
+their hereditary knowledge. A mass of material was laid up by their
+help. Passionate interest was shown by the people in the memorials of
+their ancient life--giants' rings, cairns, and mighty graves, the
+twenty-nine thousand mounds or moats that have been counted, the raths
+of their saints and scholars--each with its story living on the lips
+of the people till the great famine and the death or emigration of the
+people broke that long tradition of the race. The cry arose that the
+survey was pandering to the national spirit. It was suddenly closed
+(1837), the men dismissed, no materials published, the documents
+locked up in government offices. But for O'Donovan and O'Curry what
+prodigies of work remained. Once more the death of hope seemed to call
+out the pieties of the Irish scholar for his race, the fury of his
+intellectual zeal, the passion of his inheritance of learning. In the
+blackest days perhaps of all Irish history O'Donovan took up Michael
+O'Clery's work of two hundred years before, the Annals of the Four
+Masters, added to his manuscript the mass of his own learning, and
+gave to his people this priceless record of their country (1856).
+Among a number of works that cannot be counted here, he made a
+Dictionary which recalls the old pride of Irishmen in their language.
+O'Curry brought from his humble training an incredible industry,
+great stores of ancient lore, and an amazing and delicate skill as a
+scribe. All modern historians have dug in the mine of these men's
+work. They open to Anglo-Irish scholars such as Dr. Reeves and Dr.
+Todd, a new world of Irish history. Sir Samuel Ferguson began in 1833
+to give to readers of English the stories of Ireland. George Petrie
+collected Irish music through all the west, over a thousand airs, and
+worked at Irish inscriptions and crosses and round towers. Lord
+Dunraven studied architecture, and is said to have visited every
+barony in Ireland and nearly every island on the coast.
+
+These men were nearly all Protestants; they were all patriots. Potent
+Irish influences could have stirred a resident gentry and resident
+parliament with a just pride in the great memorials of an Ireland not
+dead but still living in the people's heart. The failure of the hope
+was not the least of the evils of the Union. The drift of landlords to
+London had broken a national sympathy between them and the people,
+which had been steadily growing through the eighteenth century. Their
+sons no longer learned Irish, nor heard the songs and stories of the
+past. The brief tale of the ordnance survey has given us a measure of
+the intelligence that had been wasted or destroyed by neglect in
+Ireland. Archbishop Whately proposed to use the new national schools
+so as to make this destruction systematic, and to put an end to
+national traditions. The child who knew only Irish was given a teacher
+who knew nothing but English; his history book mentioned Ireland
+_twice_ only--a place conquered by Henry II., and made into an English
+province by the Union. The quotation "This is my own, my native land,"
+was struck out of the reading-book as pernicious, and the Irish boy
+was taught to thank God for being "a happy English child." A Connacht
+peasant lately summed up the story: "I suppose the Famine and the
+National Schools took the heart out of the people." In fact famine and
+emigration made the first great break in the Irish tradition that had
+been the dignity and consolation of the peasantry; the schools
+completed the ruin. In these, under English influence, the map of
+Ireland has been rolled up, and silence has fallen on her heroes.
+
+Even out of this deep there came a revival. Whitley Stokes published
+his first Irish work the year after O'Curry's death; and has been
+followed by a succession of laborious students. Through a School of
+Irish Learning Dublin is becoming a national centre of true Irish
+scholarship, and may hope to be the leader of the world in this great
+branch of study. The popular Irish movement manifested itself in the
+Gaelic League, whose branches now cover all Ireland, and which has
+been the greatest educator of the people since the time of Thomas
+Davis. Voluntary colleges have sprung up in every province, where
+earnest students learn the language, history, and music of their
+country; and on a fine day teacher and scholars gathered in the open
+air under a hedge recall the ancient Irish schools where brehon or
+chronicler led his pupils under a tree. A new spirit of self-respect,
+intelligence, and public duty has followed the work of the Gaelic
+League; it has united Catholic and Protestant, landlord and peasant.
+And through all creeds and classes a desire has quickened men to
+serve their country in its social and industrial life; and by
+Agricultural Societies, and Industrial Development Societies, to
+awaken again her trade and manufactures.
+
+The story is unfinished. Once again we stand at the close of another
+experiment of England in the government of Ireland. Each of them has
+been founded on the idea of English interests; each has lasted about a
+hundred years--"Tudor conquest," Plantations, an English parliament, a
+Union parliament. All alike have ended in a disordered finance and a
+flight of the people from the land.
+
+Grattan foretold the failure of the Union and its cause. "As Ireland,"
+he said, "is necessary to Great Britain, so is complete and perfect
+liberty necessary to Ireland, and both islands must be drawn much
+closer to a free constitution, that they may be drawn closer to one
+another." In England we have seen the advance to that freer
+constitution. The democracy has entered into larger liberties, and has
+brought new ideals. The growth of that popular life has been greatly
+advanced by the faith of Ireland. Ever since Irish members helped to
+carry the Reform Acts they have been on the side of liberty, humanity,
+peace, and justice. They have been the most steadfast believers in
+constitutional law against privilege, and its most unswerving
+defenders. At Westminster they have always stood for human rights, as
+nobler even than rights of property. What Chatham foresaw has come
+true: the Irish in the English parliament have been powerful
+missionaries of democracy. A freedom-loving Ireland has been
+conquering her conquerors in the best sense.
+
+The changes of the last century have deeply affected men's minds. The
+broadening liberties of England as a free country, the democratic
+movements that have brought new classes into government, the wider
+experience of imperial methods, the growing influence of men of
+good-will, have tended to change her outlook to Ireland. In the last
+generation she has been forced to think more gravely of Irish
+problems. She has pledged her credit to close the land question and
+create a peasant proprietary. With any knowledge of Irish history the
+religious alarm, the last cry of prejudice, must inevitably disappear.
+The old notion of Ireland as the "property" of England, and of its
+exploitation for the advantage of England, is falling into the past.
+
+A mighty spirit of freedom too has passed over the great Colonies and
+Dominions. They since their beginning have given shelter to outlawed
+Irishmen flying from despair at home. They have won their own pride of
+freedom, and have all formally proclaimed their judgment that Ireland
+should be allowed the right to shape her own government. The United
+States, who owe so much to Irishmen in their battle for independence,
+and in the labours of their rising prosperity, have supported the
+cause of Ireland for the last hundred years; ever since the first
+important meeting in New York to express American sympathy with
+Ireland was held in 1825, when President Jackson, of Irish origin, a
+Protestant, is said to have promised the first thousand dollars to the
+Irish emancipation fund.
+
+In Ireland itself we see a people that has now been given some first
+opportunities of self-dependence and discipline under the new
+conditions of land ownership and of county government. We see too the
+breaking up of the old solid Unionist phalanx, the dying down of
+ancient fears, the decaying of old habits of dependence on military
+help from England, and a promise of revival of the large statesmanship
+that adorned the days of Kildare and of Grattan. It is singular to
+reflect that on the side of foreign domination, through seven hundred
+years of invasion and occupation, not a single man, Norman or English,
+warrior or statesman, has stood out as a hero to leave his name, even
+in England, on the lips or in the hearts of men. The people who were
+defending their homes and liberties had their heroes, men of every
+creed and of every blood, Gaelic, Norman, English, Anglican, Catholic,
+and Presbyterian. Against the stormy back-ground of those prodigious
+conflicts, those immeasurable sorrows, those thousand sites
+consecrated by great deeds, lofty figures emerge whom the people have
+exalted with the poetry of their souls, and crowned with love and
+gratitude--the first martyr for Ireland of "the foreigners" Earl
+Thomas of Desmond, the soul of another Desmond wailing in the Atlantic
+winds, Kildare riding from his tomb on the horse with the silver
+shoes, Bishop Bedell, Owen Roe and Hugh O'Neill, Red Hugh O'Donnell,
+Sarsfield, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Robert Emmett, O'Connell, Davis,
+Parnell--men of peace and men of war, but all lovers of a free nation.
+
+In memory of the long, the hospitable roll of their patriots, in
+memory of their long fidelities, in memory of their national faith,
+and of their story of honour and of suffering, the people of Ireland
+once more claim a government of their own in their native land, that
+shall bind together the whole nation of all that live on Irish soil,
+and create for all a common obligation and a common prosperity. An
+Irish nation of a double race will not fear to look back on Irish
+history. The tradition of that soil, so steeped in human passion, in
+joy and sorrow, still rises from the earth. It lives in the hearts of
+men who see in Ireland a ground made sacred by the rare intensity of
+human life over every inch of it, one of the richest possessions that
+has ever been bequeathed by the people of any land whatever to the
+successors and inheritors of their name. The tradition of national
+life created by the Irish has ever been a link of fellowship between
+classes, races, and religions. The natural union approaches of the
+Irish Nation--the union of all her children that are born under the
+breadth of her skies, fed by the fatness of her fields, and nourished
+by the civilisation of her dead.
+
+
+
+
+SOME IRISH WRITERS ON IRISH HISTORY
+
+
+  JOYCE, P.W.--Social History of Ancient Ireland. 2 vols. 1903.
+     This book gives a general survey of the old Irish
+     civilisation, pagan and Christian, apart from political
+     history.
+
+  FERGUSON, SIR SAMUEL.--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 history.
+
+  GREEN, A.S.--The Making of Ireland and its Undoing (1200-1600).
+     1909. An attempt is here made to bring together evidence, some
+     of it unused before, of the activity of commerce and
+     manufactures, and of learning, that prevailed in mediaeval
+     Ireland, until the destruction of the Tudor wars.
+
+  MITCHELL, 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.
+
+  TAYLOR, J.F.--Owen Roe O'Neill. 1904. This small book is the best
+     account of a very great Irishman; and gives the causes of the
+     Irish insurrection in 1641, and the war to 1650.
+
+  DAVIS, THOMAS.--The Patriot Parliament of 1689. 1893. A brief but
+     important study of this Parliament. It illustrates the Irish
+     spirit of tolerance in 1689, 1843, and 1893.
+
+  BAGWELL, RICHARD.--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.
+
+  MURRAY, A.E.--Commercial Relations between England and Ireland.
+     1903. A useful study is made here of the economic condition of
+     Ireland from 1641, under the legislation of the English
+     Parliament, the Irish Parliament, and the Union Parliament.
+
+  LECKY, 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 JAMES
+     BRYCE. 1907. These essays, mostly by Irishmen, give in a
+     convenient form the outlines of the history of the time. There
+     is a brief account of O'Connell.
+
+  O'BRIEN, R. BARRY.--Life of Charles Stewart Parnell. 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'ALTON, E.A.--History of Ireland (1903-1910). 3 vols. This is the
+     latest complete history of Ireland.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    +-----------------------------------------------------------+
+    | Typographical errors corrected in text:                   |
+    |                                                           |
+    | Page  12: tewnty replaced with twenty                     |
+    | Page  19: meterical rules replaced with metrical rules    |
+    | Page  33: "earthern entrenchment" replaced with           |
+    |           "earthen entrenchment"                          |
+    | Page  42: interupted replaced with interrupted            |
+    | Page 176: successsive replaced with successive            |
+    | Page 184: scupltured replaced with sculptured             |
+    | Page 198: "risingp ower" replaced with "rising power"     |
+    |                                                           |
+    +-----------------------------------------------------------+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Irish Nationality, by Alice Stopford Green
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+    .tdl      {text-align: left;}  /* left align cell */
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+
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+
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+                            font-variant: normal;} /* page numbers in poems */
+
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+    </style>
+   </head>
+<body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Irish Nationality, by Alice Stopford Green
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Irish Nationality
+
+Author: Alice Stopford Green
+
+Release Date: January 9, 2011 [EBook #34900]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IRISH NATIONALITY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Brian Foley, Jeannie Howse and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+
+<div class="tr">
+<p class="cen" style="font-weight: bold;">Transcriber's Note:</p>
+<br />
+<p class="noin">Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has been preserved.</p>
+<p class="noin" style="text-align: left;">Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
+For a complete list, please see the <span style="white-space: nowrap;"><a href="#TN">end of this document</a>.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<h2>HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY<br />
+OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE</h2>
+
+<h4>No. 6</h4>
+
+<div class="block2">
+<p class="noin"><i>Editors</i>:</p>
+
+<p class="noin">HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A.<br />
+<span class="sc">Prof. GILBERT MURRAY, Litt.D., LL.D., F.B.A.</span><br />
+<span class="sc">Prof. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A.</span><br />
+<span class="sc">Prof. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+
+<h2>THE HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE</h2>
+<br />
+
+<h4><i>VOLUMES NOW READY</i></h4>
+
+<div class="centered">
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" width="80%" summary="Book List">
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlh" width="60%">HISTORY OF WAR AND PEACE</td>
+  <td class="tdrsc" width="40%">G.H. Perris</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlh">POLAR EXPLORATION</td>
+  <td class="tdrsc">Dr. W.S. Bruce, LL.D., F.R.S.E.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlh">THE FRENCH REVOLUTION</td>
+  <td class="tdrsc">Hilaire Belloc, M.P.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlh">THE STOCK EXCHANGE: <span class="sc">A Short Study of Investment and Speculation</span></td>
+  <td class="tdrsc">F.W. Hirst</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlh">IRISH NATIONALITY</td>
+  <td class="tdrsc">Alice Stopford Green</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlh">THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT</td>
+  <td class="tdrsc">J. Ramsay Macdonald, M.P.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlh">PARLIAMENT: <span class="sc">Its History, Constitution, and Practice</span></td>
+  <td class="tdrsc">Sir Courtnay Ilbert, K.C.B., K.C.S.I.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlh">MODERN GEOGRAPHY</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><span class="sc">Marion I. Newbigin, D.S.C.</span> (Lond.)</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlh">WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE</td>
+  <td class="tdrsc">John Masefield</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlh">THE EVOLUTION OF PLANTS</td>
+  <td class="tdrsc">D.H. Scott, M.A., LL.D., F.R.S.</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+
+<br />
+
+<h4><i>VOLUMES READY IN JULY</i></h4>
+
+<div class="centered">
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" width="80%" summary="Book List">
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlh" width="60%">THE OPENING-UP OF AFRICA</td>
+  <td class="tdrsc" width="40%">Sir H.H. Johnston, G.C.M.G., K.C.B., D.Sc., F.Z.S.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlh">MEDI&AElig;VAL EUROPE</td>
+  <td class="tdrsc">H.W.C. Davis, M.A.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlh">MOHAMMEDANISM</td>
+  <td class="tdrsc">D.S. Margoliouth, M.A., D.Litt.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlh">THE SCIENCE OF WEALTH</td>
+  <td class="tdrsc">J.A. Hobson, M.A.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlh">HEALTH AND DISEASE</td>
+  <td class="tdrsc">W. Leslie Mackenzie, M.D.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlh">INTRODUCTION TO MATHEMATICS</td>
+  <td class="tdrsc">A.N. Whitehead, Sc.D., F.R.S.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlh">THE ANIMAL WORLD</td>
+  <td class="tdrsc">F.W. Gamble, D.Sc., F.R.S.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlh">EVOLUTION</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><span class="sc">J. Arthur Thomson, M.A.</span>, and<br />
+                         <span class="sc">Patrick Geddes, M.A.</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlh">LIBERALISM</td>
+  <td class="tdrsc">L.T. Hobhouse, M.A.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdlh">CRIME AND INSANITY</td>
+  <td class="tdrsc">Dr. C.A. Mercier, F.R.C.P., F.R.C.S.</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+
+<h4>* Other volumes in active preparation</h4>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+
+<h1>IRISH<br />
+NATIONALITY</h1>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<h4>BY</h4>
+<h2>ALICE STOPFORD GREEN</h2>
+
+<h4>AUTHOR OF "TOWN LIFE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY"<br />
+"HENRY II," "THE MAKING OF IRELAND," ETC.</h4>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<div class="img">
+<img border="0" src="images/deco.png" width="10%" alt="Publisher's Mark" />
+</div>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<h5>NEW YORK<br />
+HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY</h5>
+
+<h5>LONDON<br />
+WILLIAMS AND NORGATE</h5>
+
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+
+<h4><span class="sc">Copyright</span>, 1911,<br />
+BY<br />
+HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY</h4>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<h4>THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.</h4>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="toc" id="toc"></a><hr />
+<br />
+
+<h3>CONTENTS</h3>
+<br />
+
+<div class="centered">
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" width="70%" summary="Table of Contents">
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdr" width="10%" style="font-size: 80%;">CHAP.</td>
+  <td class="tdl" width="70%">&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdr" width="20%" style="font-size: 80%;">PAGE</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdr">I</td>
+  <td class="tdlsc"><a href="#CHAPTER_I">The Gaels in Ireland</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">7</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdr">II</td>
+  <td class="tdlsc"><a href="#CHAPTER_II">Ireland and Europe</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">29</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdr">III</td>
+  <td class="tdlsc"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">The Irish Mission</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">40</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdr">IV</td>
+  <td class="tdlsc"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">Scandinavians in Ireland</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">57</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdr">V</td>
+  <td class="tdlsc"><a href="#CHAPTER_V">The First Irish Revival</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">77</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdr">VI</td>
+  <td class="tdlsc"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">The Norman Invasion</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">96</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdr">VII</td>
+  <td class="tdlsc"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">The Second Irish Revival</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">111</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdr">VIII</td>
+  <td class="tdlsc"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">The Taking of the Land</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">125</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdr">IX</td>
+  <td class="tdlsc"><a href="#CHAPTER_IX">The National Faith of the Irish</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">141</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdr">X</td>
+  <td class="tdlsc"><a href="#CHAPTER_X">Rule of the English Parliament</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">158</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdr">XI</td>
+  <td class="tdlsc"><a href="#CHAPTER_XI">The Rise of a New Ireland</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">182</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdr">XII</td>
+  <td class="tdlsc"><a href="#CHAPTER_XII">An Irish Parliament</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">198</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdr">XIII</td>
+  <td class="tdlsc"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIII">Ireland under the Union</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">219</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+  <td class="tdr">&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdlsc"><a href="#BIBLIO">Some Irish Writers on Irish History</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr">255</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<h4 style="margin-bottom: -1px;">IN MEMORY<br />
+OF</h4>
+<h3 style="margin-top: -1px;">THE IRISH DEAD</h3>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</a></span><br />
+
+<h2><a name="IRISH_NATIONALITY" id="IRISH_NATIONALITY"></a>IRISH NATIONALITY</h2>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+
+<h3>CHAPTER I</h3>
+
+<h4>THE GAELS IN IRELAND</h4>
+<br />
+
+<p>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 rising sheer above the water stand
+as bulwarks thrown up against the immeasurable sea.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>We do not know when the Gaels first entered Ireland, coming 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 <span class="fakesc">B.C.</span> They drove the earlier
+peoples, the Iberians, from the stupendous stone forts and earthen
+entrenchments that guarded cliffs and mountain passes. The name of
+Erin recalls the ancient inhabitants, who lived on under the new
+rulers, more in number than their conquerors. The Gaels gave their
+language and their organisation to the country, while <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></span>many customs
+and traditions of the older race lingered on and penetrated the new
+people.</p>
+
+<p>Over a thousand years of undisturbed life lay before the Gaels, from
+about 300 <span class="fakesc">B.C.</span> to 800 <span class="fakesc">A.D.</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Out of the grouping of the tribes there emerged a division of the
+island into districts made up of many peoples. Each of the provinces
+later known as Ulster, Leinster, Munster 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></span>rich lands of Meath were the
+high-king's domain.</p>
+
+<p>Heroic tales celebrate the prehistoric conflicts 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 hundred royal
+mercenaries and Gaulish soldiers&mdash;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. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span>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 warriors 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.</p>
+
+<p>Amid such conflicts the Connacht kings pressed eastward from Usnech to
+Tara, and fixed there the centre of Irish life.</p>
+
+<p>The Gaelic conquerors had entered on a wealthy land. Irish chroniclers
+told of a vast antiquity, with a shadowy line of monarchs 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 smelting of gold near the Liffey
+about 1500 <span class="fakesc">B.C.</span> and of the Wicklow artificer who made cups
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span>and brooches of gold and silver, and silver 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 henceforth by
+the colour of their raiment. They had traditions of foreign trade&mdash;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 hundred 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 probably 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 twenty ounces in
+the British Museum from England, Scotland, and Wales.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span>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
+corn 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.</p>
+
+<p>But to the Irish the main interest of the Gaels lies in their
+conception of how to create an enduring state or nation.</p>
+
+<p>The tribal system has been much derided as the mark of a savage
+people, or at least of a race unable to advance beyond political
+infancy into a real national existence. This was not true of the
+Gaels. Their essential idea of a state, and the mode of its government
+and preservation, was different from that of medi&aelig;val Europe, but it
+was not uncivilised.</p>
+
+<p>The Roman Empire stamped on the minds of its subject peoples, and on
+the Teutonic barbarians who became its heirs, the notion <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span>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&mdash;art,
+learning, history and the like&mdash;were secondary 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.</p>
+
+<p>The Gaelic 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 administration on the
+other hand was divided into the widest possible range of
+self-governing communities, which were bound together in a willing
+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&mdash;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 literature. Such an instinct
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span>of national life was neither rude nor contemptible, 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, but which was never
+accepted in Ireland. Irish history can only be understood by realising
+this intense national life with its sure basis on the broad
+self-government of the people.</p>
+
+<p>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 the 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span>but
+certain fixed dues, such as aid in road-making, in war, in ransom of
+prisoners and the like.</p>
+
+<p>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 gathered at the beginning of each
+high-king's reign, and were entertained for seven days and
+nights&mdash;kings and ollaves together round the high-king, warriors and
+reavers, together, 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span>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
+councillors&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span>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 pictures 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 instruction it was meet that we should gather
+ourselves together." And at the reciting 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."</p>
+
+<p>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 genealogies, 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span>tribe land in perpetuity. So long as the
+family held the land, they were bound to train up in each generation
+that one of the household who was most fit to carry on learning, and
+thus for centuries long lines of distinguished men added fame to their
+country 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
+metrical 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.</p>
+
+<p>While each tribe had its schools, these were linked together in a
+national system. Professors 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 turn back every poet
+who sought to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span>leave the country and to bring on their way with honour
+every one who sought to enter in. There was no stagnation where
+competition 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."</p>
+
+<p>It is in this exaltation of learning in the national life that we must
+look for the real significance of Irish history&mdash;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 people esteemed&mdash;democracy,
+aristocracy, king-craft, literature, tradition, art, commerce, law,
+sport, religion, display, even rustic buffoonery. The years between one
+festival <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span>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 hills" to exercise
+their law and hear their learned men.</p>
+
+<p>In the time of the Roman Empire, therefore, the Irish looked on
+themselves as one race, obedient to one law, united 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 corner 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 chiefdom 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; disorders 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span>with Atlantic
+clouds. Riots and forays there were, among a martial race and strong
+men of hot passions, but Ireland was in fact no prominent example of
+medi&aelig;val anarchy or disorder. Local feuds were no greater than those
+which afflicted England down to the Norman 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 recognised by law, and had
+their special organisation 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 genealogies prove on the contrary that the generations must be
+counted at from thirty-three to thirty-six years: the tale of kings,
+judges, poets, and householders who died peacefully 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
+of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span>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 industries and virtues do not
+flourish in regions given over to savage strife. And it is significant
+that Irish chiefs who made great wars hired professional soldiers from
+oversea.</p>
+
+<p>If the disorders of the Irish system have been magnified its benefits
+have been forgotten. 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 impossible; he
+had first to exterminate the entire people. The same division into
+administrative districts gave also a singular authority to law. In
+medi&aelig;val states, however 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span>interested in maintaining the law of the people, the
+protection of the common folk; nor were its landmarks ever submerged
+or destroyed. Irish land laws, for example, in spite of the changes
+that gradually covered the land with fenced estates, did actually
+preserve through all the centuries popular rights&mdash;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 Revolt ever arose, nor any rising of the poor against their
+lords. Rights of inheritance, due solemnities of election, were
+accurately preserved. The authority and continuity of Irish law was
+recognised by wondering Englishmen&mdash;"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 fearful to offend the law than the
+English or any other nation whatsoever."</p>
+
+<p>The tribal system had another benefit for Irishmen&mdash;the diffusion of a
+high intelligence among the whole people. A varied <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span>education, spread
+over many centres, fertilized 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&mdash;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 tanners. In
+some sequestered places in Ireland we can still trace the settlements
+made by Irish communities. They built no towns nor needed any in the
+modern 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.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span>This life of opportunity in thickly congregated country societies gave
+to Ireland its wide culture, and the incredible number of scholars and
+artificers that it poured out over Europe with generous ardour. The
+multitudinous centres of discussion scattered over the island, and the
+rapid intercourse of all these centres one with another, explain how
+learning broadened, and how Christianity spread over the land like a
+flood. It was to these country settlements that the Irish owed the
+richness of their civilisation, the generosity of their learning, and
+the passion of their patriotism.</p>
+
+<p>Ireland was a land then as now of intense contrasts, where equilibrium
+was maintained by opposites, not by a perpetual tending towards the
+middle course. In things political and social the Irish showed a
+conservatism that no intercourse could shake, side by side with eager
+readiness and great success in grasping the latest progress in arts or
+commerce. In their literature strikingly modern thoughts jostle
+against the most primitive crudeness; "Vested interests are shameless"
+was one of their old observations. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span>In Ireland the old survived beside
+the new, and as the new came by free assimilation old and new did not
+conflict. The balance of opposites gave colour and force to their
+civilisation, and Ireland until the thirteenth century and very
+largely until the seventeenth century, escaped or survived the
+successive steam rollings that reduced Europe to nearly one common
+level.</p>
+
+<p>In the Irish system we may see the shaping of a true democracy&mdash;a
+society in which ever-broadening masses of the people are made
+intelligent sharers in the national life, and conscious guardians of
+its tradition. Their history is throughout a record of the nobility of
+that experiment. It would be a mechanical theory of human life which
+denied to the people of Ireland the praise of a true patriotism or the
+essential spirit of a nation.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span><br />
+
+<h3>CHAPTER II<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h3>
+
+<h4>IRELAND AND EUROPE</h4>
+
+<h4><i>c.</i> 100&mdash;<i>c.</i> 600</h4>
+<br />
+
+<p>The Roman Agricola had proposed the conquest of Ireland on the ground
+that it would have a good effect on Britain by removing the spectacle
+of liberty. But there was no Roman conquest. The Irish remained
+outside the Empire, as free as the men of Norway and Sweden. They
+showed that to share in the trade, the culture, and the civilisation
+of an empire, it is not necessary to be subject to its armies or lie
+under its police control. While the neighbouring peoples received a
+civilisation imposed by violence and maintained by compulsion, the
+Irish were free themselves to choose those things which were suited to
+their circumstances and character, and thus to shape for their people
+a liberal culture, democratic and national.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span>It is important to observe what it was that tribal Ireland chose, and
+what it rejected.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;stout
+hulls steered by the born 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 Shannon and the
+harbours of Down; and probably 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&mdash;art, learning, and religion.</p>
+
+<p>Of art the Irish craftsmen took all that Gaul <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span>possessed&mdash;the great
+decorated trumpets of bronze used in the Loire country, the fine
+enamelling in colours, the late-Celtic designs for ornaments of bronze
+and gold. Goldsmiths travelled oversea to bring back bracelets, rings,
+draughtboards&mdash;"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 borrowed afterwards interlaced ornament for
+metal work and illuminated manuscripts. In such arts they outdid their
+teachers; their gold and enamel work has never been surpassed, and in
+writing and illumination they went beyond the imperial artists of
+Constantinople. Their schools throughout the country handed on a great
+traditional art, not transitory or local, but permanent and national.</p>
+
+<p>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 of Narbonne. By the same road from
+Marseilles Christianity must have come a hundred years or so before
+the mission of St. Patrick&mdash;a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span>Christianity carrying the traditions
+and rites and apocalypses of the East. It was from Gaul that St.
+Patrick afterwards sailed for his mission to Ireland. He came to a
+land where there were already men of erudition and "rhetoricians" who
+scoffed 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 Roman centralized authority was opposed to
+their whole habit of thought and genius. They made, therefore, no
+change in their tribal 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 <span class="fakesc">A.D.</span> the country was scored with fences, and farms
+were freely bequeathed by will. But these estates seem <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span>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 earthen entrenchment, and taught them Latin, canon law, and
+divinity. Monastic 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&mdash;men who knew all the
+traditions, used various sources, and shaped their story with the
+independence of learning. No parallel can be found in any other
+country to the writing down of national epics in their <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span>pagan form
+many centuries after the country had become Christian. In the same way
+European culture was not allowed to suppress the national language;
+clerics as well as laymen 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 the 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 original founder, in free federal union like that of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span>the clans.
+As no land could be wholly alienated from the tribe, territory given
+to the monastery was not exempted from the common 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span>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 inspired 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
+oratories, 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 centuries some ancient
+tradition of apostolic measurements, and in their narrow and austere
+dimensions, and their intimate solemnity, 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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Hand on a stone, hand lifted up,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Knee bent to set a rock,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Eyes shedding tears, other lamentation,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And mouth praying."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span>Piety did not always vanquish the passions 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.</p>
+
+<p>The national tradition of monastic and lay schools preserved to Erin
+what was lost in the rest of Europe, a learned class of laymen.
+Culture 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 merryman long ago, and yet he was a
+Christian, who could make all men he ever saw laugh <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span>however sad they
+were, so that even his skull on a high stone in the churchyard brought
+mirth to sorrowful souls.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;as,
+for example, at St. Albans, where the monks paved their church with
+the querns of the townsfolk to compel them to bring their corn to the
+abbey mill. Again, the broad tolerance of the church in Ireland never
+allowed any persecution for religion'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 imperfection
+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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>The free tribes of Ireland had therefore by some native instinct of
+democratic life rejected for their country the organisation of the
+Roman state, and had only taken the highest forms of its art,
+learning, and religion, to enrich their ancient law and tradition: and
+through their own forms of social life they had made this culture
+universal among the people, and national. Such was the spectacle of
+liberty which the imperial Agricola had feared.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span><br />
+
+<h3>CHAPTER III<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h3>
+
+<h4>THE IRISH MISSION</h4>
+
+<h4><i>c.</i> 560&mdash;<i>c.</i> 1000</h4>
+<br />
+
+<p>The fall of the Roman Empire brought to the Irish people new dangers
+and new opportunities. Goths and Vandals, Burgundians 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 at their back now lay the German
+invaders of Britain&mdash;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 compass these people round that
+when the Irish sailor&mdash;St. Brendan or another&mdash;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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span>Eternity where space
+and time were not. We see 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 &AElig;lfred. "They came," &AElig;lfred
+tells us in his chronicle, "in a boat without oars from Hibernia,
+whence they had stolen away because for the love of God they would be
+on pilgrimage&mdash;they recked not where. The boat in which they fared was
+wrought of three hides and a half, and they took with them enough meat
+for seven nights."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;a call of religion, of learning, or of
+liberty. The story of the Irish mission shows how they answered to
+such a call.</p>
+
+<p>The Teutonic invaders stopped at the Irish Sea. At the fall of the
+Empire, therefore, Ireland did not share in the ruin of its
+civilisation. And while all continental roads were interrupted,
+traffic from Irish ports still passed safely to Gaul over the ocean
+routes. Ireland therefore not only preserved her <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>Two great leaders of the Irish mission were Columcille in Great
+Britain and Columbanus in Europe. In all Irish history there is no
+greater figure than St. Columcille&mdash;statesman 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 Iona 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, began a work equally astonishing from the
+religious and the political point of view. The heathen Picts had
+marched westward to the sea, destroying 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" settlements along the
+coast, and the Celts of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span>Strathclyde. 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 Cantyre
+he restored the Scot settlement from Ireland 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 Iona he
+dominated the new federation of Picts and Britons and Irish on both
+sides of the sea&mdash;the greatest missionary that Ireland ever sent out
+to proclaim the gathering of peoples in free association through the
+power of human brotherhood, learning, and religion.</p>
+
+<p>For thirty-four years Columcille ruled as abbot in Iona, 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span>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
+figure 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
+said, three hundred books, sitting with open cell door, where the
+brethren, one with his butcher's knife, one with his milk pail,
+stopped to ask a blessing as they passed.</p>
+
+<p>After his death the Irish monks carried his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span>work over the whole of
+England. A heathen land lay before them, for the Roman missionaries
+established in 597 by Augustine in Canterbury, speaking no English and
+hating "barbarism," made little progress, and after some reverses were
+practically confined to Kent. The first cross of the English
+borderland was set up in 635 by men from Iona on a heather moorland
+called the Heaven-field, by the ramparts of the Roman Wall. Columban
+monks made a second Iona at Lindisfarne, with its church of hewn oak
+thatched with reeds after Irish tradition in sign of poverty and
+lowliness, and with its famous school of art and learning. They taught
+the English writing, and gave them the letters which were used among
+them till the Norman Conquest. Labour and learning went hand in hand.
+From the king's court nobles came, rejoicing to change the brutalities
+of war for the plough, the forge-hammer, the winnowing fan: waste
+places were reclaimed, the ports were crowded with boats, and
+monasteries gave shelter to travellers. For a hundred years wherever
+the monks of Iona passed men ran to be signed by their hand and
+blessed by their voice. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span>Their missionaries wandered on foot over
+middle England and along the eastern coast and even touched the
+Channel in Sussex. In 662 there was only one bishop in the whole of
+England who was not of Irish consecration, and this bishop, Agilberct
+of Wessex, was a Frenchman who had been trained for years in Ireland.
+The great school of Malmesbury in Wessex was founded by an Irishman,
+as that of Lindisfarne had been in the north.</p>
+
+<p>For the first time also Ireland became known to Englishmen. Fleets of
+ships bore students and pilgrims, who forsook their native land for
+the sake of divine studies. The Irish most willingly received them
+all, supplying to them without charge food and books and teaching,
+welcoming them in every school from Derry to Lismore, making for them
+a "Saxon Quarter" in the old university of Armagh. Under the influence
+of the Irish teachers the spirit of racial bitterness was checked, and
+a new intercourse sprang up between English, Picts, Britons, and
+Irish. For a moment it seemed as though the British islands were to be
+drawn into one peaceful confederation and communion and a common
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span>worship bounded only by the ocean. The peace of Columcille, the
+fellowship of learning and of piety, rested on the peoples.</p>
+
+<p>Columcille had been some dozen years in Iona when Columbanus (<i>c.</i>
+575) left Bangor on the Belfast Lough, leading twelve Irish monks clad
+in white homespun, with long hair falling on their shoulders, and
+books hanging from their waists in leathern satchels. They probably
+sailed in one of the merchant ships trading from the Loire. Crossing
+Gaul to the Vosges Columbanus founded his monastery of Luxeuil among
+the ruined heaps of a Roman city, once the meeting-place of great
+highways from Italy and France, now left by the barbarians a
+wilderness for wild beasts. Other houses branched out into France and
+Switzerland. Finally he founded his monastery of Bobio in the
+Apennines, where he died in 615.</p>
+
+<p>A stern ascetic, aflame with religious passion, a finished scholar
+bringing from Ireland a knowledge of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, of
+rhetoric, geometry, and poetry, and a fine taste, Columbanus battled
+for twenty years with the vice and ignorance of a half-pagan
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span>Burgundy. Scornful of ease, indifferent to danger, astonished at the
+apathy of Italy as compared with the zeal of Ireland in teaching, he
+argued and denounced with "the freedom of speech which accords with
+the custom of my country." The passion of his piety so awed the
+peoples, that for a time it seemed as if the rule of Columbanus might
+outdo that of St. Benedict. It was told that in Rome Gregory the Great
+received him, and as Columbanus lay prostrate in the church the Pope
+praised God in his heart for having given such great power to so small
+a man. Instantly the fiery saint, detecting the secret thought, rose
+from his prayer to repudiate the slight: "Brother, he who depreciates
+the work depreciates the Author."</p>
+
+<p>For a hundred years before Columbanus there had been Irish pilgrims
+and bishops in Gaul and Italy. But it was his mission that first
+brought the national patriotism of Ireland into conflict with the
+organisation of Rome in Europe. Christianity had come to Ireland from
+the East&mdash;tradition said from St. John, who was then, and is still,
+held in special veneration by the Irish; his flower, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span>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
+tonsure from ear to ear, had come to them from St. John. Peter loved
+Jesus, they said, but it was John that Jesus loved&mdash;"the youth John,
+the foster-son of his own bosom"&mdash;"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 discipline of Rome, and he was required to renounce
+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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span>small island in a far
+corner 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 outside
+that tradition was "barbarous," the Irish like the Saxons or the Huns.</p>
+
+<p>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
+English 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span>the Roman banner of purple and gold carried
+before them, to hear the name of "Emperor of the whole of Britain,"
+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 for
+conquest&mdash;Celts "rude and barbarous"&mdash;"Picts and Britons, accomplices
+in obstinacy in those two remote islands of the world." "Your father
+Columba," "of rustic simplicity" said the English leader, had "that
+Columba of yours," like Peter, the 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 Lindisfarne, 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 united was for ever loosened. English
+armies marched ravaging <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span>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 hundred and twenty
+years was broken, and constant wars again divided Picts, Scots,
+Britons, and Angles.</p>
+
+<p>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, sending
+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
+Jerusalem, settled in Carthage, and sailed to the discovery of
+Iceland. No church of any land <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span>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
+Highlands 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
+Switzerland, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span>in 595 was sent on the English mission he turned back with
+loathing, and finally took 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 feared 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 without 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span>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 distinction of their people
+persecution had no part. No war of religion stained their faith, and
+no barbarities to man.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span><br />
+
+<h3>CHAPTER IV<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h3>
+
+<h4>SCANDINAVIANS IN IRELAND</h4>
+
+<h4>800-1014</h4>
+<br />
+
+<p>For a thousand years no foreign host had settled in Erin. But the
+times of peace were ended. About 800 <span class="fakesc">A.D.</span> the Irish suffered
+their first invasion.</p>
+
+<p>The Teutonic peoples, triumphant conquerors 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. The 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&mdash;the leader on the prow as it plunged
+through the sea, calling to the land, shouting as he goes, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span>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&mdash;a nation desperate in attempting the
+conquest of other realms."</p>
+
+<p>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 civilisation, were threatened by strangers. The social
+order they had built up was confronted with two new tests&mdash;violence
+from without, and an alien population within the island. We may ask
+how Irish civilisation met the trial.</p>
+
+<p>The Danes fell on all the shores of England from the Forth to the
+Channel, the land of the Picts northward, Iona and the country of the
+Scots to the west, and Bretland 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span>cups and vessels and ornaments of gold, sacking
+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 manuscripts and holy ornaments, and fled away for refuge to
+Europe.</p>
+
+<p>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 (<i>c.</i> 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
+"Danelaw" 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span>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 Norwegian 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 hundred 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.</p>
+
+<p>The long war was one of "confused noise <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span>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 corn, 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 multiplying fleets of new marauders that
+for ever swarmed round the coasts&mdash;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
+companies 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span>point without a fleet," battle swung
+backwards and forwards between old settlers and new pirates, between
+Norsemen and Danes, between both and the Irish.</p>
+
+<p>But the Scandinavians were not only sea-rovers, they were the greatest
+merchants 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; westward 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 merchants 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. Merchants made settlements
+along the coasts, and planted colonies over the inland country to
+supply the trade of the ports. They had <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>The enterprise of the sea-rovers and the merchant settlers created on
+Irish shores two Scandinavian "kingdoms"&mdash;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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></span>confederation 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 which 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 fighting 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.</p>
+
+<p>"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 Tipperary, organised as Irish clans 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.</p>
+
+<p>The Irish were on good terms with the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></span>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," "Munster of the swift
+ships."</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, the Irish never ceased 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
+summoned 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 fact, 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span>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
+hundred 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 Munster against the
+Gentiles, directing the men of Leinster in the campaign&mdash;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,
+and 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></span>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 Norsemen used armour, and rough chains of
+blue iron to grapple the enemies' ships, but the Irish sailors, with
+their "strong enclosures of linen cloth," and tough ropes of hemp to
+fling over the enemies' prows, came off 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.
+"Ill luck was it for the Danes when Brian was born," 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></span>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 Saxons and Britons as far as the Clyde and Argyle.</p>
+
+<p>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, proposed to create a
+Scandinavian empire from the Slavic shores of the Baltic across
+Denmark, 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 1018 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"&mdash;a land of unconquered peoples of the open plains
+and the mountains and the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span>sea, left the Scandinavian empire with a
+ragged edge out on the line of the Atlantic commerce. King 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 Scandinavian 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 fifty
+years to come Ireland kept its independence. England was once again,
+as in the time of the Roman dominion, made part of a continental
+empire. Ireland, as in the days of Rome, still lay outside the new
+imperial system.</p>
+
+<p>At the end, therefore, of two hundred years of war, the Irish emerged
+with their national life unbroken. Irish kingdoms had lived on side by
+side with Danish kingdoms; in spite of the strength of the Danish
+forces, the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></span>constant irruptions of new Danes, and the business
+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 Telltown, 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 mound that rose
+in the marshy glen now called Glanworth. There Cellachan, the rightful
+heir, in the best of arms and dress, demanded that the nobles should
+remember justice, while his mother declared his title and recited a
+poem. And when the champions of Munster 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span>their hands in his hand, and placed the royal
+diadem round his head, and their spirits were raised at the grand
+sight of him.</p>
+
+<p>Throughout the wars, too, the tribes had not lost the tradition of
+learning. King &AElig;lfred 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 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 &AElig;lfred 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.
+Another, Cormac, king and bishop (&dagger;905), was skilled in Old-Irish
+literature, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></span>Welsh, Anglo-Saxon and Norse&mdash;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 philosophy. 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 are known, and a glossary. A
+lay scholar, probably of the ninth century, compiled the instructions
+of a king to his son&mdash;"Learning every art, knowledge of every
+language, skill in variegated work, pleading with established
+maxims"&mdash;these are the sciences he recommends. 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&mdash;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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</a></span>oak fronting the storm. They sang of the Creation and the Crucifixion,
+when "dear God's elements were afraid"; and of pilgrimage to
+Rome&mdash;"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&mdash;"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"&mdash;"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 battlefield, heroes
+of the Irish race.</p>
+
+<p>Even the craftsmen's schools were still gathered in their raths,
+preserving from century to century the forms and rules of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</a></span>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 modern world. Many influences had
+come in&mdash;Oriental, Byzantine, Scandinavian, French&mdash;and the Irish took
+and used them all, but their art still remained Gaelic, of their
+native soil. 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span>to
+king Flann about 914, was carved by an Irish artist who was one of the
+greatest sculptors of northern Europe.</p>
+
+<p>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 forgave 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 plunderers; and Brian himself gave the price
+of learning and the price of books to every one separately who went on
+this service. Many churches were built and repaired by him, bridges
+and roads were made, the fortresses of Munster were strengthened."</p>
+
+<p>Such was the astonishing vitality of learning and art among the Irish.
+By their social system the intellectual treasures of the race <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</a></span>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 profit 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
+parts of a ship, and the streets of a town. In outward and material
+civilisation they accepted the latest Scandinavian methods, just as in
+our days the Japanese accepted the latest Western inventions. But in
+what the Germans call culture&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</a></span><br />
+
+<h3>CHAPTER V<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h3>
+
+<h4>THE FIRST IRISH REVIVAL</h4>
+
+<h4>1014-1169</h4>
+<br />
+
+<p>After the battle of Clontarf in 1014 the Irish had a hundred and fifty
+years of comparative quiet. "A lively, stirring, ancient and
+victorious people," they turned to repair their hurts and to build up
+their national life.</p>
+
+<p>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 prosperity. 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."</p>
+
+<p>But the position of the Gaels was no longer what it had been before
+the invasions. The "Foreigners" called constantly for armed <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</a></span>help from
+their people without, and by political alliances and combinations
+fostered war among the Irish states themselves. Nearly a hundred 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," "Magnus of the terrible
+battles," was sung in Ireland for half-a-dozen centuries after that
+last flaring-up of ancient fires.</p>
+
+<p>The national life, moreover, was now threatened by the settlement of
+an alien race, strangers to the Irish tradition, 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 commanded 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&mdash;pioneers <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</a></span>of
+English invasion. A wealthy and compact community living on the
+seaboard, trading with all Europe, 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.</p>
+
+<p>To the division of peoples within the Irish 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 Canterbury 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.</p>
+
+<p>In church and state, therefore, the Danes had brought the first
+anti-national element <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</a></span>into Irish life. The change is marked by a
+change of name. The Danes coined the name "<i>Ire</i>-land," a form of Eriu
+suited to their own speech; the people they called "Irish," 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 Erin only remained in the speech of the Gaels themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Clontarf, too, had marked ominously the passing of an old age, the
+beginning of a new. Already the peoples round the North Sea&mdash;Normans,
+Germans, English&mdash;were sending out traders to take the place of the
+Scandinavians; and the peoples of the south&mdash;Italians and Gauls&mdash;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&mdash;the first great drops of the storm&mdash;lords from
+Normandy, a Frenchman from Gaul, and somewhere about that time Walter
+the Englishman, a leader of mercenaries from England. In such names we
+see the heralds of the coming change.</p>
+
+<p>The Irish were therefore face to face with <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</a></span>questions of a new
+order&mdash;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 community of tribes. It is in this effort that we see the
+immense vitality of the Gaelic system the power of its tradition, and
+the spirit of its people.</p>
+
+<p>After Brian's death two learned men were set over the government of
+Ireland; a layman, the Chief Poet, and a devout man, the Anchorite of
+all Ireland. "The land was governed like a free state and not like a
+monarchy by them." The victory of Clontarf was celebrated by a
+renascence of learning. Eye-witnesses of that great battle, poets and
+historians, wrote the chronicle of the Danish wars from first to last,
+and sang the glories of Cellachan and of Brian Boru in the greatness
+of his life and the majesty of his death. A <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</a></span>scholar 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 Channel. In
+schools three or four hundred poetic metres were taught. The glories
+of ancient Erin were revived. Poets wrote of Usnech, of Tara, of
+Ailech, of the O'Neills on Lough Swilly 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, annals of Ireland from the
+earliest to the latest time were composed. Men laboured to satisfy the
+desire of the Irish to possess a complete and brilliant picture of
+Ireland from all antiquity. The most famous among the many writers,
+one of the most learned men in all <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</a></span>Europe in wisdom, literature,
+history, poetry, and science, was Flann the layman, teacher of the
+school of Monasterboice, who died in 1056&mdash;"slow the bright eyes of
+his fine head," ran the old song. He made for his pupils synchronisms
+of the kings of Asia and of Roman emperors with Irish kings, and of
+the Irish high-kings and provincial chiefs and kings of Scotland.
+Writings of that time which have escaped destruction, such as the
+<i>Book of Leinster</i>, remain the most important relics of Celtic
+literature in the world.</p>
+
+<p>There was already the beginning of a university in the ancient school
+of Armagh lying on the famous hill where for long ages the royal tombs
+of the O'Neills had been preserved. "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 church
+in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</a></span>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."</p>
+
+<p>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 of the Armagh leadership. They
+journeyed 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 their spirit drawing all the communities under
+obedience to the see of Patrick, the national saint. In a series of
+synods from 1100 to 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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</a></span>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.
+Lorc&aacute;n 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: feeding 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 the 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 union, nor had
+Ireland a truer patriot or wiser statesman.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[86]</a></span>Danes,
+gradually absorbed into the Irish population, 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 Connacht 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"&mdash;the sign, as we may see, of
+foreign influences on the Irish mind. His son, Ruaidhri or Rory, was
+proclaimed (1166) Ardri in Dublin with greater pomp than any king
+before him, and held at Athboy in Meath an assembly of the "men of
+Ireland," archbishops and clergy, princes and nobles, eighteen
+thousand horsemen from the tribes and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[87]</a></span>provinces, and a thousand Danes
+from Dublin&mdash;there laws were made for the honour of churches and
+clergy, the restoring of prey unjustly 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 another 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.</p>
+
+<p>The whole of Ireland is covered with the traces of this great national
+revival. We may still see on islands, along river-valleys, in lonely
+fields, innumerable ruins of churches built of stone chiselled as
+finely as man's hand 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 <span class="fakesc">A.D.</span> 1000; presently chancels were
+added, and doors and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[88]</a></span>windows and arches richly carved. These 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 remembrance of Irish tradition
+and ornament, and signed by Irish masons on the stones. There was a
+wealth of metal work of great splendour, decorated with freedom and
+boldness of design, with inlaid work and filigree, and settings of
+stones and enamels and crystal; as we may see in book-shrines, in the
+crosiers of Lismore and Cachel and Clonmacnois and many others, in the
+matchless processional 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 embroidered with
+animals in red gold.</p>
+
+<p>The vigour of Irish life overflowed, indeed, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[89]</a></span>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 corn 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 Compostella, to Rome, or through
+Greece to Jordan and Jerusalem&mdash;composing poems on the way, making
+discourses in Latin, showing their fine art of writing. John, bishop
+of Mecklenburg, preached to the Vandals between 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
+Austria. An Irish abbot was head of a monastery in Bulgaria. From time
+to time the Irish came home to collect money for their <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[90]</a></span>foundations
+and went back laden with gold from the kings at home. Pope Adrian IV
+(1154) remembered with esteem the Irish professor under whom he had
+studied in Paris University. Irishmen were chaplains of the emperor
+Conrad III (&dagger;1152) 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."</p>
+
+<p>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 learning, 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 enduring life of Irishmen on Irish land, the popular
+tales that began at this time to run from mouth to mouth. They took to
+themselves two heroes to be centres of the national hope&mdash;Finn the
+champion, leader of the "Fiana," the war-bands of old time; and
+Patrick the saint. A multitude of tales suddenly sprang up of the
+adventures of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</a></span>Finn&mdash;the warrior worthy of a king, the son of wisdom,
+the mighty hunter of every mountain and forest in Ireland, whose death
+no minstrel cared to sing. Every poet was expected to recite the fame
+in life of Finn and his companions. 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&mdash;keeper
+of Ireland against all strangers, guardian of their nation and
+tradition. It was Patrick, they told, who by invincible prayer and
+fasting 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 Jud&aelig;a 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.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</a></span>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 gaunt relics 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&mdash;men twice as tall as the
+modern 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 feastings, lest such recreation of spirit
+and mind should be to him a destruction 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." "Thou too, Patrick, hast
+taught us <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[93]</a></span>good things," 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-Cruachan of
+Connacht, the graves of mighty champions, 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&mdash;"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 God."</p>
+
+<p>In no other country did such a fate befall a missionary coming from
+strangers&mdash;to be <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[94]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+university, a single and independent church under an Irish primate of
+Armagh and an Irish archbishop 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</a></span>slowly worked
+out by her political councillors, her great ecclesiastics, her
+scholars and philosophers, and by the faith of the common people in
+the glory of their national inheritance. "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.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</a></span><br />
+
+<h3>CHAPTER VI<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h3>
+
+<h4>THE NORMAN INVASION</h4>
+
+<h4>1169-1520</h4>
+<br />
+
+<p>After the fall of the Danes the Normans, conquerors of England,
+entered on the dominion of the sea&mdash;"citizens of the world," they
+carried their arms and their cunning from the Tweed to the
+Mediterranean, from the Seine to the Euphrates. The spirit of conquest
+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&mdash;"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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[97]</a></span>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. William
+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 II, lord of a vast seacoast from the Forth
+to the Pyrenees, holding both sides of the Channel, needed Ireland to
+round off his dominions and give him command 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.</p>
+
+<p>Norman and French barons, with Welsh followers, and Flemings from
+Pembroke, led the invasion that began in 1169. They were men trained
+to war, with armour and weapons unknown 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[98]</a></span>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
+complaints, 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 garrisoned 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 meanwhile 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 families, 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 II 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[99]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 or in England. No Irish chief,
+however, could have even understood 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
+"conquest," 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 of old. Henry's
+presence there gave him no lordship: and the independent <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[100]</a></span>temper of
+the Irish people was not likely, after their Danish experience, to be
+cowed by two years of war. Some cunning explanation of the oath was
+given to the Irish chiefs by the subtle Angevin king and his crafty
+Norman counsellors&mdash;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 implied no dominion.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Another fraud was added by the proclamation of papal bulls, which
+according to modern research seem to have been mere forgeries. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[101]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 conquered 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[102]</a></span>administration. The fighting
+garrison was reinforced by the planting of a militant church&mdash;bishops
+and clergy of foreign blood, stout men of war, ready to aid by
+prayers, excommunications, 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, explained that "in policy he thought it expedient to wink at
+one knave cutting off another, and that would save the king's coffers
+and purchase peace to the land"; whereat the king smiled and bade him
+return to Ireland.</p>
+
+<p>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." During 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[103]</a></span>who had
+carried the peaceful mission of a spiritual religion over England and
+Europe now saw that other mission planted among themselves&mdash;a
+political 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.</p>
+
+<p>The English attack was thus wholly different 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 Europe. Dublin, no mere centre now
+of roving sea-kings, was turned into an impregnable fortress, fed from
+the sea, and held by a garrison which was supported by the whole
+strength of England&mdash;a fortress unconquerable by any power within
+Ireland&mdash;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 Westminster never ceased, nor
+the supply of its <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[104]</a></span>treasure, its favoured colonists, 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 compromise 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 the fixed intention to gain the
+ownership of the soil.</p>
+
+<p>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 Connacht, and
+absorbed into the Gaelic life <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[105]</a></span>the incoming Norman de Burghs. The
+Anglo-Normans, on the other hand, established themselves powerfully in
+Munster and Leinster. But even here&mdash;side by side with the great lords
+of the invasion, earls of Ormond, and Desmond, and Kildare&mdash;there
+remained Irish kingdoms and the remnants of old chiefdoms,
+unconquered, resolute and wealthy&mdash;such as the O'Briens in the west,
+MacCarthys and O'Sullivans in the south, O'Conors and O'Mores in the
+middle country, MacMurroughs and O'Tooles in Leinster, and many more.</p>
+
+<p>It has been held that all later misfortunes would have been averted if
+the English 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 corn 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 Rhineland and Lucca, with speculators from
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[106]</a></span>Provence, were carrying over foreign coin, settling in the towns, and
+taking land in the country. Sovereigns at Westminster&mdash;harassed with
+turbulent barons at home and wars abroad&mdash;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 than 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&mdash;among the varied resources 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[107]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 metropolis, 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 adventurers had gone out to find profit for themselves,
+not to collect Irish wealth for London. Their "loyalty" failed under
+that test. The kings, therefore, found themselves engaged in a double
+conflict, against the Irish and against their own colonists, and were
+every year more entangled in the difficulties of a policy false from
+the outset.</p>
+
+<p>Yet another difficulty disclosed itself. Among the colonists a little
+experience destroyed the English theory of Irish "barbarism." The
+invaders were drawn to their new home not only by its wealth but by
+its <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[108]</a></span>beauty, the variety and gaiety of its social life, the
+intelligence 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 slaughter 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 employed Irishmen in offices of trust; they paid
+neighbouring tribes for military service&mdash;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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[109]</a></span>forbidden 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.</p>
+
+<p>The Irish wars, therefore, became exceedingly confused&mdash;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 burden of military taxation no tribe dared to disarm
+any more than one of the European countries to-day. The Dublin
+officials, meanwhile, 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[110]</a></span>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 commanders fetched over from the French wars, great
+men of battle and plunder, to fling the province back into weakness
+and disorder.</p>
+
+<p>In England the feudal system had been brought to great perfection&mdash;a
+powerful king, a state organised for common action, with a great
+military force, a highly organised treasury, a powerful nobility, and
+a dependent people. The Irish tribal system, on the other hand, rested
+on a people endowed with a wide freedom, guided by an ancient
+tradition, and themselves the guardians 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.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[111]</a></span><br />
+
+<h3>CHAPTER VII<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h3>
+
+<h4>THE SECOND IRISH REVIVAL</h4>
+
+<h4>1200-1520</h4>
+<br />
+
+<p>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 vitality of the Irish culture, the firm
+structure of their law, and the cohesion of the people.</p>
+
+<p>Henry II in 1171 had led an army for "the conquest" of Ireland. Three
+hundred years later, when Henry VII in 1487 turned his thoughts to
+Ireland he found no conquered land. An earthen ditch with a palisade
+on the top had 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[112]</a></span>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 singing the traditions, the love-songs, the prayers and hymns of
+the Gaels. A Norman shrine of gold for St. Patrick's tooth shows 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 population. Irish speech was so universal
+that a proclamation of Henry VIII in a Dublin parliament had to be
+translated into Irish by the earl of Ormond.</p>
+
+<p>Irish manners had entered also into the town houses of the merchants.
+Foreign traders welcomed "natives" to the seaports, employed them,
+bought their wares, took them into partnership, married with them,
+allowed them to plead Irish law in their courts&mdash;and not only that,
+but they themselves <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[113]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>This Irish revival has been attributed to a number of causes&mdash;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 Dublin 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 the Irish genius had 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 this great influence fell
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[114]</a></span>from them, and strangers no longer yielded to their power.</p>
+
+<p>The social fusion of Normans and Irish was the starting-point of a
+lively civilisation to which each race brought its share. Together
+they took a brilliant part in the commerce 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 ingenious 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 exchange velvets, silks and satins,
+cloth of gold and embroideries, wines and spices. Irish goldsmiths
+made the rich vessels that adorned the tables both of Normans and
+Irish. Irish masons built the new churches of continental design,
+carving at every turn their own traditional Irish ornaments. Irish
+scribes illuminated manuscripts which were as much praised in a Norman
+castle as in an Irish fort. Both <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[115]</a></span>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&mdash;men recognised of deep knowledge among the most learned men
+of Italy and France. A kind of national education was being worked
+out. Not one of the Irish chiefdoms allowed its schools to perish, and
+to these ancient schools the settlers in the towns added others of
+their own, to which the Irish also in time flocked, so that youths of
+the two races learned together. As Irish was the common language, so
+Latin was the second tongue for cultivated people and for all men of
+business in their continental trade. The English policy made English
+the language of traitors to their people, but of no use either for
+trade or literature.</p>
+
+<p>The uplifting of the national ideal was shown in the fourteenth and
+fifteenth centuries by a revival of learning like that which followed
+the Danish wars. Not one of the hereditary houses of historians,
+lawyers, poets, physicians, seems to have failed: we find them at work
+in the mountains of Donegal, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[116]</a></span>along the Shannon, in lake islands,
+among the bare rocks of Clare, in the plains of Meath, in the valleys
+of Munster. In astronomy Irishmen were still first in Europe. In
+medicine they had all the science of their age. Nearly all our
+knowledge of Irish literature comes from copies of older works made by
+hundreds of industrious scribes of this period. From time to time
+Assemblies of all the learned men were called together by patriotic
+chiefs, or by kings rising into high leadership&mdash;"coming to Tara," as
+the people said. The old order was maintained in these national
+festivals. Spacious avenues of white houses were made ready for poets,
+streets of peaked hostels for musicians, straight roads of smooth
+conical-roofed houses for chroniclers, another avenue for bards and
+jugglers, and so on; and on the bright surface of the pleasant hills
+sleeping-booths of woven branches for the companies. From sea to sea
+scholars and artists gathered to show their skill to the men of
+Ireland; and in these glorious assemblies the people learned anew the
+wealth of their civilisation, and celebrated with fresh ardour the
+unity of the Irish nation.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[117]</a></span>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 civilisation so vital and impassioned, so human and gay. But
+the mixed civilisation found no favour with the government; the "wild
+Irish" and the "degenerate English" were no better than "brute
+beasts," the English said, abandoned to "filthy customs" and 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
+embroiling them in war, but by making union of Ireland impossible in
+religion or in education, and by destroying public confidence. The new
+central organisation of the Irish church made it a powerful weapon in
+English hands. An Englishman was at once put in every archbishopric
+and every principal see, a prelate who was often a Castle official as
+well, deputy, chancellor, justice, treasurer, or the like, or a good
+soldier&mdash;in any case hostile to every Irish affection. A national
+church in the old Irish sense disappeared; in the English idea the
+church was <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[118]</a></span>to destroy the nation. Higher education was also denied to
+both races. No Irish university 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 considerations of wealth, power, a
+privileged position, 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 of Ormond. For
+nearly two hundred years, as it happened, the heirs of this house were
+always minors, held in wardship by the king. English training at his
+court, visits to London, knighthoods and honours there, high posts in
+Ireland, prospects of new conquests of Irish land, a winking of
+government officials at independent privileges used on their estates
+by Ormond lords&mdash;such influences tied each heir in turn to England,
+and separated them from Irish interests&mdash;a "loyal" house, said the
+English&mdash;"fair and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[119]</a></span>false as Ormond," said the people of Ireland.</p>
+
+<p>Both races suffered under this foreign misrule. 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 commanders 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. Confederacies of Irish and Anglo-Normans were
+formed, one following another in endless and hopeless succession.
+Through all 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."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[120]</a></span>For a time it seemed as if the house of the Fitzgeralds, the most
+powerful house in Ireland, 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&mdash;a witty and ingenious composer of Irish poetry,
+who excelled all the English 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 Republic of Florence, in a letter
+recalling 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
+Ibernia, 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[121]</a></span>European peoples with Irishmen; he had
+urgently pressed union of the races; he had planned 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."</p>
+
+<p>Other Fitzgeralds, earls of Kildare, who had married into every
+leading Irish house, took up in their turn the national cause. Garrett
+Mor "the great" (1477-1513), 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[122]</a></span>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 perfectly 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.</p>
+
+<p>His whole policy was union in his country, and Ireland for the Irish.
+The lasting argument for self-government as against rule from over-sea
+was heard in his cry to Wolsey and the lords at Westminster&mdash;"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 subjects
+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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[123]</a></span>resolve to close dissensions 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 union.</p>
+
+<p>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
+VIII was warned. In spite of official intrigues, through all eddying
+accidents, the steady pressure of the country itself was towards
+union.</p>
+
+<p>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 English king had won the devoted
+confidence of the Irish people.</p>
+
+<p>There was one faction alone which no reason could convert&mdash;the alien
+minority <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[124]</a></span>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&mdash;"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 offices 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&mdash;and through its aid Ireland was flung back
+into disorder.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[125]</a></span><br />
+
+<h3>CHAPTER VIII<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h3>
+
+<h4>THE TAKING OF THE LAND</h4>
+
+<h4>1520-1625</h4>
+<br />
+
+<p>Henry VIII, like Henry II, 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 English
+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 bounds unknown&mdash;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. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[126]</a></span>For months of subtle preparation his promises were
+explicit. All cause of offence was carefully taken away. Finally a
+parliament was summoned (1541) of lords carefully bribed and commons
+carefully packed&mdash;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 both sides of the bargain. First the wording of the title
+was so altered as to take away any value in the "common consent" of
+parliament, since the king asserted his title to Ireland by
+inheritance and conquest, before and beyond all mandate of the popular
+will. And secondly it was arranged that Henry was under no obligation
+by negotiations or promises as to the land. For since, by the
+council's assurance to the king on the day the title was passed, there
+was no land occupied by any "disobedient" people which was not really
+the king's property by ancient inheritance or by confiscation, Henry
+might do as he would with his own. Royal concessions too must depend
+on how much revenue could be extracted <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[127]</a></span>from them to keep up suitably
+the title of king&mdash;on whether it was judicious to give Irishmen titles
+which they might afterwards plead to be valid&mdash;on whether Henry would
+find the promised grants convenient in case he chose later to proceed
+to "conquest and extermination."</p>
+
+<p>Parliament was dismissed for thirteen years, Henry, in fact, had
+exactly fulfilled the project of mystification he proposed twenty
+years before&mdash;"to be politically and secretly handled." Every trace of
+Irish law and land tenure must finally be abolished so that the soil
+should lie at the king's will alone, but this was to be done at first
+by secret and politic measures, here a little and there a little, so
+that, as he said, the Irish lords should as yet conceive no suspicion
+that they were to be "constrained to live under our law or put from
+all the lands by them now detained." "Politic practices," said Henry,
+would serve till such time as the strength of the Irish should be
+diminished, their leaders taken from them, and division put among
+themselves so that they join not together. If there had been any truth
+or consideration for Ireland <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[128]</a></span>in the royal compact some hope of
+compromise and conciliation might have opened. But the whole scheme
+was rooted and grounded in falsehood, and Ireland had yet to learn how
+far sufferings by the quibbles and devices of law might exceed the
+disasters of open war. Chiefs could be ensnared one by one in
+misleading contracts, practically void. A false claimant could be put
+on a territory and supported by English soldiers in a civil war, till
+the actual chief was exiled or yielded the land to the king's
+ownership. No chief, true or false, had power to give away the
+people's land, and the king was face to face with an indignant people,
+who refused to admit an illegal bargain. Then came a march of soldiers
+over the district, hanging, burning, shooting "the rebels," casting
+the peasants out on the hillsides. There was also the way of
+"conquest." The whole of the inhabitants were to be exiled, and the
+countries made vacant and waste for English peopling: the sovereign's
+rule would be immediate and peremptory over those whom he had thus
+planted by his sole will, and Ireland would be kept subject in a way
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[129]</a></span>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 II had said before, to "subdue
+or exile them as hath been thought," for from the settled lands
+plantation could be spread into the surrounding territories, and the
+Irishry steadily pushed back into the sea. Henceforth it became a
+fixed policy to "exterminate and exile the country people of the
+Irishry." Whether they submitted or not, the king was to "inhabit
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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 confiscated 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. And <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[130]</a></span>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 recovered by the original Irish
+owners. Another 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[131]</a></span>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
+slaughtered and their books and genealogies burned, so that no man
+"might know his own grandfather" and all Irishmen be confounded in the
+same <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[132]</a></span>ignorance and abasement, all glories gone, and all rights lost.
+The great object of the government was to destroy the whole tradition,
+wipe out the Gaelic memories, and begin a new English life.</p>
+
+<p>But even with all legal aids to extermination the land war proved more
+difficult than the English had expected. It lasted for some seventy
+years. The Irish were inexhaustible in defence, prodigious in courage,
+and endured hardships that Englishmen 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, killing every living thing and burning
+every granary of corn, 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[133]</a></span>found a few water-cresses flocking as to
+a feast; so that in short space there were none almost left and a most
+populous and plentiful country suddenly left void of man and beast&mdash;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 appearance of joy
+on face.</p>
+
+<p>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, would have
+led Ireland in a way of peace, and brought about through equal
+prosperity <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[134]</a></span>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"&mdash;so terrible were the long
+efforts to extinguish the talent and subdue the patriotism of that
+great family.</p>
+
+<p>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. "God 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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[135]</a></span>slain, before he himself was
+killed in 1583: and his wretched son, born in the Tower, was brought
+from that prison to be shown to his heart-broken people&mdash;stunted in
+body, enfeebled in mind, half an idiot, a protestant&mdash;"the Tower
+Earl," "the Queen's Earl," cried the people.</p>
+
+<p>The Irish chiefs were also broken by guile and assassination. O'Brien
+was separated from his people by a peerage (1543), an English
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;"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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[136]</a></span>for forty years, under the
+leading of the greatest of Irish statesmen and generals Hugh O'Neill
+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 conspiracy 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&mdash;that federation of tribes which had made of
+their common 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 soil, instructed in their traditions,
+and themselves guardians of their national life.</p>
+
+<p>Henry VIII 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[137]</a></span>leaders,
+Anglo-Irish and Irish, had disappeared, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>It has been said that it was by Irish soldiers that Irish liberties
+were destroyed. The Tudors and their councillors were under 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 government became clear in Ireland an English
+army of conquest had to be created. "Have no dread nor fear," cried
+Red Hugh to his Irishmen, "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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[138]</a></span>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
+they 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 traitorously 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.</p>
+
+<p>The military difficulties of the Irish, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[139]</a></span>however, were such as to
+baffle 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 VIII 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 contemplating 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
+organisation it is doubtful whether any device could have saved her
+from the force of the English invasion. Dublin could never be closed
+from <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[140]</a></span>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 defence 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 prodigious efforts of war and plantation that the
+bodies of her people were subdued, while their minds still remained
+free and unenslaved.</p>
+
+<p>If, moreover, the Irish system had disappeared 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.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[141]</a></span><br />
+
+<h3>CHAPTER IX<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h3>
+
+<h4>THE NATIONAL FAITH OF THE IRISH</h4>
+
+<h4><i>c.</i> 1600&mdash;<i>c.</i> 1660</h4>
+<br />
+
+<p>We have seen already two revivals of Irish life, when after the Danish
+settlement, and after the Norman, the native civilisation triumphed.
+Even now, after confiscations 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 patience in disaster, and have left,
+out of the depths of their poverty and sorrow, one of the noblest
+examples in history.</p>
+
+<p>Their difficulties were almost inconceivable. The great dispersion had
+begun of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[142]</a></span>Irish deported, exiled, or cast out by emigration. 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 multitude of Irish colleges founded abroad. They became chancellors
+of universities, professors, high officials in every European state&mdash;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 professor of medicine in the
+universities of Toulouse 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 English 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[143]</a></span>shut and made fast the gates of sorrow over my
+heart."</p>
+
+<p>As for the Irish at home, every vestige of their tradition was
+doomed&mdash;their religion was forbidden, and the Staff of Patrick and
+Cross of Columcille destroyed, with every other national relic; their
+schools were scattered, their learned men hunted down, their books
+burned; native industries were abolished; 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 which the race had
+fashioned for itself was shattered. Love of country and every
+attachment of race and 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 thousands in life and in death. The invaders supposed the
+degradation of the Irish race to be at last completed. "Their youth
+and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[144]</a></span>gentry are destroyed in the rebellion or gone to France," wrote
+one: "those that are left are destitute of horses, arms 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;in Rome, in Louvain, and in
+Ireland itself.</p>
+
+<p>An Irish College of Franciscans was established in Rome (1625) by the
+efforts 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[145]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 Fr&egrave;res de Charit&eacute; 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
+soldiers laid to rest among them&mdash;O'Neills, O'Dohertys, O'Donnells,
+Lynches, Murphys, and the rest, from every corner of Ireland. "Here I
+break off till morning," wrote one <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[146]</a></span>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 Grammar; 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
+(Ireland) 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 consigned to the same earth that
+covered the bodies of her children ... that the ancient <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[147]</a></span>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 they had a printing-press; and
+used it to send out Irish grammars, glossaries, catechisms, poems.
+Hugh Mac an-Bhaird of Donegal undertook to compile the <i>Acta
+Sanctorum</i>, 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 Culdaff on the shore of Inishowen (&dagger;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 catastrophe which must inflict
+mortal wounds upon our country."</p>
+
+<p>Ireland herself, however, remained the chief home of historical
+learning in the broad national sense. Finghin Mac Carthy Riabhach, a
+Munster chief, skilled in old and modern Irish, Latin, English, and
+Spanish, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[148]</a></span>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'Sullivan
+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 Munster, in the wood of Aharlo, that
+Father Geoffrey Keating made (before 1633) his Irish history down to
+the Norman settlement&mdash;written for the masses in clear and winning
+style, the most popular 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'Duibhgeanain of Leitrim, were
+writing the <i>Annals of the Four Masters</i> (1632-6); all of them
+belonging to hereditary houses of chroniclers. In that time of sorrow,
+fearing the destruction of every record of his people, O'Clery
+travelled through all Ireland to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[149]</a></span>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 O'Clery by the neighbouring Mac Brodys who had kept
+it safe for a thousand 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 labours. 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 sovereignty of
+the Irish of Erin to the end of time."</p>
+
+<p>In Galway a group of scholars laid, in Lynch's words, "a secure
+anchorage" for Irish history. Dr. John Lynch, the famous <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[150]</a></span>apologist of
+the Irish, wrote there his historical 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 distinguished
+Irish scholar, translated the <i>Annals of Ulster</i> into English.
+O'Flaherty of Moycullen 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 Galway came also Dualtach Mac Firbis (1585-1670), of a
+family that had been time out of mind hereditary historians in north
+Connacht. He learned in one of the old Irish schools of law in
+Tipperary Latin, English, and Greek. Amid the horrors of Cromwell's
+wars he carried out a prodigious work on the genealogies of the clans,
+the greatest, perhaps, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[151]</a></span>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 constantly devoted to
+the preservation of Irish history. In his old age he lived, like other
+Irish scholars, a landless sojourner on the estates that had once
+belonged to his family and race; the last of the hereditary sennachies
+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 eighty-five he was murdered by a Crofton when he was resting in
+a house on his way to Dublin. In Connacht, too, lived Tadhg O'Roddy of
+Leitrim, a diligent collector of Irish manuscripts, who gathered
+thirty books of law, and many others of philosophy, poetry, physic,
+genealogies, mathematics, romances, and history; and defended against
+the English the character of the old law and civilisation of Ireland.</p>
+
+<p>It would be long to tell of the workers in all the Irish
+provinces&mdash;the lawyers hiding in their bosoms the genealogies and
+tenures <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[152]</a></span>of their clans&mdash;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
+<i>History</i> 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, Kildare, 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
+manuscripts, those that were lost and those that have escaped.</p>
+
+<p>The poets were still the leaders of national patriotism. The great
+"Contention of the Poets"&mdash;"Iomarbhagh na bhfiledh"&mdash;a battle that
+lasted for years between the bards of the O'Briens and the O'Donnells,
+in which <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[153]</a></span>the bards of every part of Ireland joined&mdash;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 cliff
+in his old age by a Cromwellian soldier with the shout, "Say your rann
+now, little man!" Tadhg O'h'Uiginn of Sligo (&dagger;1617), 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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Though yesterday seemed to me long and ill,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yet longer still was this dreary day."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The bards were still for a time trained in "the schools"&mdash;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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[154]</a></span>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 unity of
+feeling of the whole race was preserved and the bards still remained
+men who belonged to their country rather than to a clan or territory.
+But with the exile of the Irish chiefs, with 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, putting 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. Born of
+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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[155]</a></span>for their loyalty she gave them the last
+gift left to her, the light of poetry.</p>
+
+<p>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 commonwealth 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,
+acknowledging one God, conjoined together in allegiance 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.</p>
+
+<p>A tiny group of scholars in Dublin had begun to study Irish history.
+Sir James Ware (1594-1666), born there of an English family,
+"conceived a great love for his native country and could not bear 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[156]</a></span>manuscripts, 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 born
+in Dublin, devoted himself to the study of Irish antiquities. Baron
+d'Aungier, Master of the Rolls, put into writing every point which he
+could find in original documents "which for antiquity or singularity
+might interest this country." The enthusiasm 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 should 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
+provost 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[157]</a></span>Irish. As bishop he braved the
+anger of the government by declaring the hardships of the Catholic
+Irish, and by circulating a catechism in English and Irish. Bitterly
+did Ussher reproach him for such a scandal at which the professors of
+the gospel did all take offence, and for daring to adventure that
+which his brethren had been "so long abuilding," 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.</p>
+
+<p>The light, however, that had risen in Dublin 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 ascendancy and dominion.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[158]</a></span><br />
+
+<h3>CHAPTER X<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h3>
+
+<h4>RULE OF THE ENGLISH PARLIAMENT</h4>
+
+<h4>1640-1750</h4>
+<br />
+
+<p>The aim which English kings had set before them 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 inheritance" 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. Henry'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 II looked to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[159]</a></span>Ireland, 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: confiscations old and new which the English parliament
+allowed the Crown for Irish 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 VIII 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 for their own benefit; the rule of the king was
+passing, the rule of the English parliament had begun.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[160]</a></span>old ties bound them, and no new
+charities. "From the Anglo-Irish no man of special sanctity as yet is
+known to have sprung," observed a Gael of that day. Ancient patrimony
+had fallen. The new aristocracy was that of the strong hand and the
+exploiter's greed. Ordinary restraints of civilised societies were not
+yet born in this pushing commercial throng, where the scum of Great
+Britain, broken men or men flying from the law, hastened&mdash;"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.</p>
+
+<p>England too was being made new, with much turmoil and confusion&mdash;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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[161]</a></span>the parliament of England, and of her noble-men,
+ecclesiastics, and traders in general.</p>
+
+<p>This new rule marked the first revolution in the English government of
+Ireland which had happened since Henry II 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
+holding parliaments subject only to the king and his privy council;
+statutes of the English parliament had not force of law there until
+they had been re-enacted in Ireland&mdash;which indeed was necessary by the
+very theory of parliaments, for there were no Irish representatives in
+the English 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 manner as if no Irish parliament existed. The new
+ruling classes had neither experience nor training. Regardless 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, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[162]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>This despotism grew up regardless of any theory of law or
+constitution. The intention was unchanged&mdash;the taking of all Irish
+land, the rooting out of the old race from the country. Adventurers
+were tempted by Irish wealth; what had once been widely diffused among
+the Irish tribes was gathered into the hands of a few aliens, who
+ruthlessly wasted the land for their own great enrichment. Enormous
+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 Irish boats, and what had cost &pound;10 in labour and
+transport sold at &pound;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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[163]</a></span>naked as if a forest fire had swept over
+the country.</p>
+
+<p>For the exploiter's rage, for the waster's madness, more land was
+constantly needed. Three provinces had been largely planted by
+1620&mdash;one still remained. By a prodigious fraud James I, and after him
+Charles I in violation of his solemn promise, proposed to extirpate
+the Irish 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 Puritan adventurers, joined in speculations to buy up
+"traitors' lands," openly sold in London at &pound;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 parliament later at &pound;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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[164]</a></span>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; discountenanced by parliament,
+they still mark the first experiment to appeal in this way to London
+on the Irish question. Parliament 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 lives 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[165]</a></span>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&mdash;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 born in cities have had more
+opportunity to acquire civility than the Old Irish; but if the
+question be of civility, of good manners, of liberality, of
+hospitality, and charity towards all, these virtues dwelt among the
+Irish.</p>
+
+<p>Kings were restored to carry out the will of parliament. Charles II 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 III 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, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[166]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 Protestants their revenues in Ireland; the planters,
+one-fourth 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 million and a half of their acres,
+proceeded to crush the liberties of its own English settlers by
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[167]</a></span>simply issuing statutes for Ireland of its sole authority. The acts
+were as tyrannical in their subject as in their origin. One (1691),
+which ordered that no Catholic 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 English 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 liberties were grounded on compact and charter; and
+declared that his native land shared the claims of all mankind to
+justice. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[168]</a></span>"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 liberties were taken away, their
+parliaments rendered nugatory, and their lives and fortunes left to
+depend on the will of a legislature wherein they are not parties." The
+"ill consequences" were seen seventy years later when Molyneux' book
+became the text-book of Americans in their rising against English
+rule; and when Anglo-Irish defenders of their own liberties were
+driven to make common cause with their Irish compatriots&mdash;for "no one
+or more men," said Molyneux, "can by nature challenge 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[169]</a></span>Commons
+dared not dispute the tyranny that was the warrant of their property:
+"I hope," was the ironic answer, "the honourable member will not
+question the validity of his title." With such an argument at hand,
+the English parliament had no need of circumspection or of soft words.
+It simply condemned Molyneux 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 Ireland wrote a
+hundred years later, "I think Great Britain may still easily manage
+the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[170]</a></span>Protestants, and the Protestants the Catholics." 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 civil liberties of the
+whole.</p>
+
+<p>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. Stringent 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
+parliament 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." <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[171]</a></span>Government 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 nickname 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 offices 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 your mind," one wrote to Pitt,
+"how the violence of both parties might be turned on this occasion to
+the advancement of England."</p>
+
+<p>One tyranny begot another. Irish members, having no liberties to
+defend, and no country to protect, devoted themselves to the security
+of their property&mdash;its security and increase. All was quiet. There was
+no fear in Ireland of a rising for the Pretender. The <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[172]</a></span>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&mdash;that same prayer which Irish Catholics had
+presented in the parliament of James I (1613), "indented with sorrow,
+signed with tears, and delivered in this house of peace and liberty
+with our disarmed hands." Protestants had never cause for fear in
+Ireland on religious 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 English exterminators, no Irish curse has
+been found against the Protestant for his religion, even through the
+black time of the penal laws. The parliament, however, began a series
+of penal laws against Irish Catholics. They were forbidden the use of
+their religion, almost every means of livelihood, every right of a
+citizen, every family affection. Their possessions were scattered,
+education was denied them, when a father <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[173]</a></span>died his children were
+handed over to a Protestant guardian. "The law," said the leading
+judges, "does not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish 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 religion of the Irish, but only with their property
+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
+sounded 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[174]</a></span>make his bed upon." "See all that are
+without 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, without 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!"</p>
+
+<p>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 chose. Their subjection tempted the commercial classes. To
+safeguard their own profits of commerce and industry English traders
+made statutes to annihilate Irish competition. They forbade carrying
+of cattle or dairy stuff to England, they forbade trade in soap or
+candles; in cloth, in glass, in linen save of the coarsest kind; the
+increase of corn 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[175]</a></span>not build ships. From old time Ireland 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 Irish port or to unload. 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." In
+1720 all trade was at a stand, the country bare of money, "want and
+misery in every face." It was unfortunate, Englishmen said, that
+Ireland had been by the act of God doomed to poverty&mdash;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 successfully pushed their own business in a
+country 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[176]</a></span>to starve. The planters' parliament looked on in barren
+helplessness. They 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&mdash;the mistresses of successive kings and
+their children, German relations of the Hanoverians, useful
+politicians covered by other names, a queen of Denmark banished for
+misconduct, a Sardinian ambassador under a false title, a trailing
+host of Englishmen&mdash;pensions steadily increasing from &pound;30,000 to over
+&pound;89,000. Some &pound;600,000 was at last yearly sent over to England for
+absentees, pensions, government annuities, and the like. A parliament
+servile and tyrannical could not even pretend 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.</p>
+
+<p>A double corruption was thus proceeding. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[177]</a></span>The English parliament
+desired to make the Irish houses for ever unfit for self-government.
+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 indifferent "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 parliament 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 rest&mdash;"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&mdash;the ancient tongue of the people and their despised
+birth left them helpless. Once a chief justice in Tipperary conducted
+trials with fairness and humanity: "for about ten miles from Clonmel
+both sides <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[178]</a></span>of the road were lined with men, women, and children, who,
+as he passed along, kneeled down and supplicated 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 to have died between 1691 and 1745.
+Uncounted thousands from north 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;prolonged,
+undisturbed, uncontrolled&mdash;to advance "the king's service," the
+dependency of Ireland upon England, and "the comfort or security of any
+English in it." A multitude of statesmen put their hands to the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[179]</a></span>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 government. 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 England, or to the Empire. The Irish
+people suffered a long agony unmatched, perhaps, in European history.
+Few of the Protestant country gentry had established their fortunes;
+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,
+industry, 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[180]</a></span>not in the first rank&mdash;as field-marshals, admirals,
+ambassadors, prime ministers, scholars, physicians, merchants, founders
+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 government there was plain bankruptcy&mdash;"England,"
+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 Protestant
+exiles from Ulster went to America as "Sons of St. Patrick." "To shun
+persecution 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[181]</a></span>over every adversity.
+Brigadier-General Owen Sullivan, born 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
+commander-in-chief of the naval forces of the States. Charles Thompson
+of Strabane was secretary of the Continental Congress. Eight Irishmen,
+passionate organisers of the revolt, signed the Declaration of
+Independence. After the war an Irishman prepared the Declaration for
+publication from Jefferson's rough draft; an Irishman's son first
+publicly read it; an Irishman first printed and published it.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[182]</a></span><br />
+
+<h3>CHAPTER XI<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h3>
+
+<h4>THE RISE OF A NEW IRELAND</h4>
+
+<h4>1691-1750</h4>
+<br />
+
+<p>It might have seemed impossible amid such complicated tyrannies 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 union
+of common suffering. Once more the people of Ireland were being
+"brayed together in a mortar" to compact them into a single
+commonwealth.</p>
+
+<p>The Irish had never lost their power of absorbing new settlers in
+their country. The Cromwellians complained that thousands of the
+English who came over under Elizabeth had "become one with the Irish
+as well in affinity as in idolatry." Forty years later these
+Cromwellians planted on Irish <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[183]</a></span>farms 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 as
+of old. In the country places, far from the government, kindly
+friendships grew up between neighbours, and Protestants 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 Protestants. The gentry in general spoke Irish with the
+people, and common interests grew up in the land where they lived
+together.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[184]</a></span>some cave or rock where
+the people gathered in secret to celebrate mass. There remain
+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&mdash;the work of their hands; their
+dead bodies were carried to the ruined abbeys, and proudly laid in the
+roofless naves and chancels, 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 sculptured 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 of the Irish. By
+their industry and skill in the despised business of handicrafts and
+commerce the outlaws were fast winning most of the ready money of the
+country into their hands.</p>
+
+<p>It would be a noble achievement, said <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[185]</a></span>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 Plear&aacute;ca Ui Ruairc; 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[186]</a></span>ascendency,
+and in later days to defend 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 ignorance, lying in
+impenetrable darkness, whence no voice ever arose even of protest or
+complaint, 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 neglecting everything written in the
+native tongue of the country, the Protestant planters, one-fourth of
+the inhabitants, secured to themselves 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.</p>
+
+<p>Unsuspected by English settlers, the Irish <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[187]</a></span>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 farmhouses, 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 geography. The
+greatest of the poets was D&aacute;ibh&iacute; 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[188]</a></span>O'Neachtain worked from 1734 to 1749 at a
+dictionary. Another learned poet and lexicographer, Aodh Buidh
+MacCurtin, published 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 imperative 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 O'Conor, "as many as I can of the ancient
+manuscripts of Ireland from the wreck which has overwhelmed everything
+that once belonged to us." O'Conor was of Sligo county. His father,
+like other gentlemen, had been so reduced by confiscation 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 difficulties he gained the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[189]</a></span>best
+learning of his unhappy time. Much of the materials that O'Clery had
+used for his <i>Annals</i> 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 <i>Annals</i>, he had this immense
+work copied by his own scribe; and another copy made in 1734 by Hugh
+O'Mulloy, an excellent writer, for his friend Dr. O'Fergus of Dublin.
+He wrote for the learned, and delighted 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 Irishman at that time, were thus
+connected.</p>
+
+<p>It was the Irish antiquarians and historians who in 1759 drew Irishmen
+together into "the Catholic Committee"&mdash;Charles O'Conor, Dr. Curry,
+and Wyse of Waterford. O'Conor by his learning preserved <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[190]</a></span>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 research 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 movement to win for the Irish
+some recognition before the law and some rights of citizens in their
+own land.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;"Having the
+fear of God, be ye full of alms-giving and friendliness, and
+forgetting nothing do ye according to the commandments, shun ye
+drunkenness and oaths and cursing, and do not say till death 'God
+damn' from <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[191]</a></span>your mouths." Riotous laughter broke out in some; they
+were all, in fact, professional wits&mdash;chief among them Eoghan Ruadh
+O'Sullivan 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&mdash;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 persecution and destruction.
+Among exiles in Connacht manuscripts perished, but old tradition lived
+on the lips of the peasants, who recited in their cabins the
+love-songs and religious poems of long centuries past. The people in
+the bareness of their poverty were nourished with a literature full of
+wit, imagination, feeling, and dignity. In the poorest hovels there
+were men skilled in a fine recitation. Their common language showed
+the literary influence, and Irish peasants even in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[192]</a></span>our own day have
+used a vocabulary of some five thousand words, as against about eight
+hundred words used by peasants in England. Even the village dancing at
+the cross-roads preserved a fine and skilled tradition.</p>
+
+<p>Families, too, still tried to have "a scholar" in their house, for the
+old learning's sake. Children shut out from all means of education
+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 buried 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
+supported "poor scholars" free of charge. There were some in Kerry,
+some in Clare, where a very remarkable group of poets sprang up. From
+all parts of Ireland students <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[193]</a></span>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 translation of Homer into Irish. But he
+worked in peril, flying for his life more than once before the
+bard-hunters; in his denunciations the English oppressor stands before
+us&mdash;plentiful his costly living 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 to 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!"</p>
+
+<p>The enthusiasm of the Irish touched some of the planters. A hereditary
+chronicler of the O'Briens who published in 1717 a vindication of the
+Antiquities of Ireland got two <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[194]</a></span>hundred and thirty-eight subscribers,
+divided about equally between English and Gaelic 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
+slight 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 born, 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'
+parliament some dim sense of a national boast. An English nobleman
+coming to the parliament 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 county 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: <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[195]</a></span>one of them had shared in
+making the <i>Annals of the Four Masters</i>; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 illiterature, 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 oppression." 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. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[196]</a></span>They
+lived in a land some few years old, not more than a man's age might
+cover.</p>
+
+<p>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) freedom of religion, schools of husbandry,
+relief of the poor from their intolerable burdens, the making
+parliament into a really representative body. Bishop Berkeley wrote
+his famous <i>Querist</i>&mdash;the most searching study of the people's grief
+and its remedies.</p>
+
+<p>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 growing movement to unite the more liberal of the landowners,
+the Dissenters of the north, and the Catholics, in a common
+citizenship. It had proved impossible to carry out fully the penal
+code. No life could have gone on under its monstrous terms. There were
+not <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[197]</a></span>Protestants enough to carry on all the business 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.</p>
+
+<p>"Let the legislature befriend us now, and we are theirs forever," was
+the cry of the Munster peasantry, organised under O'Driscoll, to the
+Protestant parliament in 1786.</p>
+
+<p>Such a movement alarmed the government extremely. If, they said,
+religious distinctions 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&mdash;in fact, might not a nation begin again to live in
+Ireland.</p>
+
+<p>The whole energy of the government was therefore called out to avert
+the rise of a united Irish People.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="CHAPTER_XII" id="CHAPTER_XII"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[198]</a></span><br />
+
+<h3>CHAPTER XII<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h3>
+
+<h4>AN IRISH PARLIAMENT</h4>
+
+<h4>1750-1800</h4>
+<br />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 rising power 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 <i>Citizens'
+Journal</i> a new national protest. The pamphlet war which
+followed&mdash;where <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[199]</a></span>men argued not only on free trade and government, but
+on Ireland itself, on its old and new races, on its Irish barbarism,
+said some, its Irish civilisation, said others&mdash;spread the idea of a
+common history of Ireland in which all its inhabitants were concerned.
+In parliament too, though Catholics were shut out, yet men of old
+Irish race were to be found&mdash;men of Catholic families who had accepted
+Protestantism as a means of entering 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.</p>
+
+<p>It was an Irishman who first roused the House of Commons to remember
+that they had a country of their own and an "Irish interest"&mdash;Antony
+Malone. This astonishing orator and parliamentarian invented a
+patriotic opposition (1753). A great sea in a "storm" men said of him.
+Terror was immediately <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[200]</a></span>excited at his Irish origin and his national
+feeling. Dublin Castle feared that he might mean emancipation from the
+English legislature, and in truth the constitutional dependency 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 children 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;more <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[201]</a></span>lawyers, men said, than any one living 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
+abilities; 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 English 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 executive under the king.</p>
+
+<p>In that same year the patriots demanded that elections should be held
+every seven years&mdash;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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[202]</a></span>by making himself the source of all
+favours, the giver of all gratifications, to concentrate political
+influence in the English Crown. A system of bribery began beyond all
+previous dreams; peerages were made by the score; and the first
+national debt of nearly two millions 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
+political power"; that "confiscation is their common title." "The
+king's business," as the government understood it, lay in "procuring
+the supplies which the English minister thought fit to ask, and
+preventing the parliament from examining into the account of previous
+years."</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[203]</a></span>&pound;50,000 for the
+payment of troops there. Other dangers had arisen. George Washington
+was made commander-in-chief of the forces for the American war in
+1775, and in 1778 France recognised American independence. The shores
+of Ireland lay open to attack: the country was drained of troops.
+Bands of volunteers were formed for its protection, Protestant troops
+led by landlords and gentry. In a year 40,000 volunteers were enrolled
+(1779). Ireland was no longer unarmed. What was even more important,
+she was no longer unrepresented. A packed parliament 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[204]</a></span>gains from the
+Irish treasury in the near bankruptcy 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
+Commons. "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&mdash;"what you trample on in Europe will sting you
+in America."</p>
+
+<p>The country, through the Volunteers, required four main reforms. They
+asked for justice in the law-courts, and that the Habeas Corpus Act
+should be restored, and independent judges no longer hold their places
+at pleasure. They asked that the English commercial laws which had
+ruined Irish industry and sunk the land in poverty and idleness should
+be abandoned; taught by a long <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[205]</a></span>misery, Irishmen agreed to buy no
+manufactures but the work of Irish hands, and Dublin men compelled
+members to swear that they should vote for "the good of Ireland," 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
+independence of their parliament rose in every county and from every
+class.</p>
+
+<p>The demands for the justice of free men, for free trade, free
+religion, a free nation, were carried by the popular passion into the
+parliaments of Dublin and London. In three years the Dublin parliament
+had freed Protestant 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, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[206]</a></span>the King, Lords, and Commons of
+Ireland could alone make laws for Ireland.</p>
+
+<p>The claim for a free parliament ran through the country&mdash;"the epidemic
+madness," exclaimed 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&mdash;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 knew too how precarious was
+all that they had gained. Lord North described all past concessions as
+"resumable at pleasure" by the power that granted them.</p>
+
+<p>In presence of these dangers the Volunteers called a convention of
+their body to meet in the church of Dungannon on Feb. 15, 1782&mdash;to
+their mind no unfit place for their lofty work.</p>
+
+<p>"We know," they said, "our duty to our sovereign and our loyalty; we
+know our <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[207]</a></span>duty to ourselves and are resolved to be free." "As
+Irishmen, as Christians, and as Protestants" 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
+Commons an address to the king&mdash;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 parliament 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 parliament of
+Ireland was now established and ascertained, and should never again be
+questioned or questionable.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[208]</a></span>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 <i>esto
+perpetua!</i>" The first act of the emancipated parliament was to vote a
+grant for twenty thousand sailors for the English navy.</p>
+
+<p>That day of a nation's exultation and thanksgiving was brief. The
+restored parliament entered into a gloomy inheritance&mdash;an authority
+which had been polluted and destroyed&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Since the days of Henry VIII 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
+representation. All bills had to go through the privy council, whose
+secret and overwhelming influence was backed by the privy council in
+England, the English law officers, and finally the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[209]</a></span>English cabinet.
+Irish proposals were rejected 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 the Irish
+Houses: no ministry resigned, whatever the majority by which it was
+defeated. Nominally elected by about one-fifth of the inhabitants, the
+Commons did not represent even these. A landlords' assembly, there was
+no Catholic in it, and no merchant. Even the Irish landlords were
+subdued to English interests: some hundred 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 pensioners equalled
+nearly one-half of the whole efficient body: "the price of a seat of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[210]</a></span>parliament," men said, "is as well ascertained as that of the cattle
+of the field."</p>
+
+<p>All these dangers might with time and patience 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 another land. The good-will 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 to her wealth for imperial purposes. The gentry were
+losing the fears that had possessed them for their properties, and a
+fair hope was opening for an Ireland tolerant, united, educated, and
+industrious. Volunteers, 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 opulence and knowledge." It abolished the
+cruelties of the penal laws, and prepared the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[211]</a></span>union of all religions
+in a common citizenship. It showed admirable knowledge in the method
+of restoring prosperity to the country, awakening 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 corruption an absolute authority, and recover
+by bribery the prerogative that had been lost.</p>
+
+<p>The first danger appeared in 1785, in the commercial negotiations with
+England. To crush the woollen trade England had put duties of over &pound;2
+a yard on a certain cloth carried from Ireland to England, which paid
+5-&frac12;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
+Liverpool alone. Pitt's proposal of free trade between the countries
+was accepted by Ireland (1785), but a storm of wrath swept over the
+British world of business; they refused Pitt's explanation that an
+Ireland where all <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[212]</a></span>industries had been killed could not compete
+against the industrial pre-eminence of England; and prepared a new
+scheme which re-established the ascendency of the British parliament
+over Irish navigation and commerce. This was rejected in Ireland as
+fatal to their Constitution. Twice again the Irish parliament
+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 viceroy 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 interfere 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[213]</a></span>more for the protection of the British commerce than if she was
+at the bottom of the sea?"</p>
+
+<p>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 public 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 possession of the
+land, magistracy, and power of the country; holding that property
+under the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[214]</a></span>tenure of British power and supremacy, and ready at every
+instant to crush the rising of the conquered."</p>
+
+<p>Finally the pressing question of reform, passionately demanded by
+Protestant and Catholic for fifteen years, was resisted by the whole
+might of the Castle. "If," wrote the lord-lieutenant to Pitt, "as her
+government became more open and more attentive to the feelings of the
+Irish nation, the difficulty of management had increased, is that a
+reason for opening the government and making the parliament more
+subservient to the feelings of the nation at large?"</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[215]</a></span>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 parliamentary
+rights which had been nominally conceded. The voice of the nation was
+silenced by the forbidding of all conventions. 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&mdash;all others yielded to his
+force. Government in his hands was the enemy of the people, parliament
+a mockery, constitutional movements 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 alienated and demoralised&mdash;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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[216]</a></span>country to exterminate the other. Distrust
+and suspicion, arrogance and fear, with their train of calamities for
+the next hundred years distracted the island.</p>
+
+<p>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 America and France. The system
+of rule inaugurated by Fitzgibbon could have only one end&mdash;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
+measure to relieve their fears was denied, every measure to heighten
+them was pursued. Violent statesmen in the Castle, and officers 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[217]</a></span>was, in fact, at last forced by
+the horrors which were openly encouraged by the government in 1796-7.
+"Every crime, every cruelty, that could be committed by Cossacks or
+Calmucks has been transacted here," said General Abercromby, sent in
+1797 as commander-in-chief. He refused the barbarities of martial rule
+when, as he said, the government's orders might be carried over the
+whole kingdom by an orderly 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 command in Ulster, and in a month the rebellion
+broke out.</p>
+
+<p>That appalling tale of terror, despair, and cruelty cannot be told in
+all its horror. The people, scared into scattered risings, refused
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[218]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>The suppression of the rebellion burned into the Irish heart the
+belief that the English government was their implacable enemy, that
+the law was their oppressor, and Englishmen the haters of their race.
+The treatment 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 illustrate his credulity and his
+brutishness. The government cannot be excused by that same plea of
+fear. Clare no doubt held the doctrine 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 statesmanship&mdash;in
+a union of the nations in equal honour and liberties.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="CHAPTER_XIII" id="CHAPTER_XIII"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[219]</a></span><br />
+
+<h3>CHAPTER XIII<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h3>
+
+<h4>IRELAND UNDER THE UNION</h4>
+
+<h4>1800-1900</h4>
+<br />
+
+<p>The horror of death lay over Ireland; cruelty and terror raised to a
+frenzy; government by martial law; a huge army occupying the country.
+In that dark time the plan for the Union with England, secretly
+prepared in London, was announced to the Irish parliament.</p>
+
+<p>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 eloquence would lengthen and perhaps confuse debates. But it was
+held that a hundred members would be lost in the British parliament,
+and that Irish doctrines would be sunk in the sea of British common
+sense.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[220]</a></span>In Ireland a union was detested as a conspiracy 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 to this Jacobin
+doctrine of the sovereignty of the people&mdash;a doctrine he would oppose
+wherever he encountered it.</p>
+
+<p>The Union, Pitt said, was no proposal to subject Ireland to a foreign
+yoke, but a voluntary 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&mdash;the
+outrageous system of collecting tithes, the disabilities of
+Catholics&mdash;so as to keep something to bargain with; 137,000 armed men
+were assembled in Ireland. But amid the universal detestation and
+execration of a Union the government dared not risk an election, and
+proceeded to pack the parliament privately. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[221]</a></span>By official means the
+Commons 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 1-&frac14;
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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 military force, under the influence
+of immediate personal danger," was followed, as wise men <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[222]</a></span>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 undying opposition of Irishmen to a Union that from the
+first lacked all moral sanction.</p>
+
+<p>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 literature 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 <i>Times</i> perceived
+in "the Celtic twilight" a "slovenly old barbarism." Peel in his
+ignorance thought Irishmen had good qualities except for "a general
+confederacy in crime ... a settled and uniform system of guilt,
+accompanied by horrible and monstrous perjuries such as could not be
+found in any civilised country."</p>
+
+<p>Promises were lavished to commend the Union. Ministers assured Ireland
+of less expenditure and lighter taxation: with vast <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[223]</a></span>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&mdash;to a body not like the Irish influenced by prejudices
+and passions&mdash;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 Ireland "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 fourteen to three in favour of her Protestant
+establishment, instead of three to one against it as happened in the
+country 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[224]</a></span>of supporting their clergy. All
+Irish financiers and patriots contended that the fair words were
+deceptive, and that the Union must bring to Ireland immeasurable
+disaster.</p>
+
+<p>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 century. 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.</p>
+
+<p>Oppressive financial burdens were laid on the Irish. Each country was
+for the next twenty years to provide for its own expenditure 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 2-&frac14; 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[225]</a></span>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 millions. 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
+taxation 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&mdash;but the burden of Ireland remained as
+oppressive as before. Meanwhile the effect 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 incapacity 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[226]</a></span>by England; from 1817 to 1870 the cost of government in
+Ireland was under 100 millions, while the contributions to the
+imperial exchequer 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&mdash;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 Ireland 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.</p>
+
+<p>Later, in 1852, Gladstone began to carry out the second part of the
+Union scheme, the indiscriminate taxation of the two countries. 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 of its corn trade through the English law, and wasting away <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[227]</a></span>by
+emigration to half its former 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 lavish, fixed on the high prices of
+the English scale, and vastly more expensive 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[228]</a></span>the expenses for English purposes,
+called for the money, and kept the books.</p>
+
+<p>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-meaning
+governors went over to Ireland, but the omnipotent Castle machine
+broke their efforts 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&mdash;the traffic of magistrates who violated their duties and their
+oaths&mdash;these were unchanged. Justice was so far forgotten that the
+presiding judge at the trial of O'Connell spoke of the counsel for the
+accused as "the gentleman on the other side." Juries were packed by
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[229]</a></span>the sheriffs with Protestants, by whom all Orangemen were acquitted,
+all Catholics condemned, and the credit of the law lowered for both by
+a system which made the juryman 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.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing but evil to Ireland followed from carrying her affairs to an
+English parliament. The government refused the promised emancipation,
+refused tithe reform. Englishmen could not understand Irish
+conditions. The political 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 supported by Irish members, which would have been hailed with
+enthusiasm by an Irish <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[230]</a></span>parliament, were rejected by the English.
+Session after session 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&mdash;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 concerned her life or death were important
+at Westminster as they served the exigencies of the government or the
+opposition.</p>
+
+<p>All the dangers of the Union were increased by its effect in drawing
+Irish landlords to London. Their rents followed them, and the wealth
+spent by absentees founded no <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[231]</a></span>industries at home. A land system
+brought about by confiscation, and developed by absentees, meant
+unreclaimed wastes, lands half cultivated, and neglected 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 corn and
+cattle for export there, from the value of eight million pounds in
+1826 to seventeen million pounds of food stuffs in 1848, and so on.
+They grew potatoes to feed themselves. If the price of corn fell
+prodigiously&mdash;as at the end of the Napoleonic war, or at the passing
+of the corn laws in England&mdash;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 shiploads of provisions for the
+charges due in England. On the other hand, if potatoes rotted, famine
+swept over the country among its fields of corn and cattle. And when
+rent failed, summary powers of eviction were given at Westminster
+under English theories for use <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[232]</a></span>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 bullocks, 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 corner 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 million 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 corn and the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[233]</a></span>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 clearance 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&mdash;Ireland pouring out on the one side her great stores
+or "surplus 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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>No Irish parliament, no matter what its constitution, could have
+allowed the country to drift into such irretrievable ruin. O'Connell
+constantly protested that rather than the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[234]</a></span>Union he would have the old
+Protestant parliament. "Any body would serve if only it is in
+Ireland," cried a leading Catholic nationalist in Parnell's time; "the
+Protestant synod would do." In the despair 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&mdash;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
+organisation was tried; the Catholic Association for Emancipation
+founded by O'Connell in 1823, an open society into which Protestants
+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 lawless insurrection to the disciplined enthusiasm of
+citizens for justice. A Young Ireland <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[235]</a></span>movement (1842-1848) under
+honoured names such as Thomas Davis and John Mitchel and Gavan 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
+O'Connell's peaceful movement by the government forced on violent
+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&mdash;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 constitutionalist
+and sincere Protestant, Isaac Butt, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[236]</a></span>led a peaceful parliamentary
+movement for Home Rule (1870-1877); after him Charles Stewart Parnell
+fought in the same cause for fourteen years (1877-1891) and died with
+victory almost in sight. Michael Davitt, following the advice of Lalor
+thirty years before, 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 giving
+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 severance between the islands.</p>
+
+<p>In these conflicts there was not now, as there had never been in their
+history, a religious war on the part of Irishmen. The oppressed people
+were of one creed, and the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[237]</a></span>administration of the other. Protestant
+and Catholic had come to mean ejector and ejected, the armed Orangeman
+and the disarmed peasant, the agent-or clergy-magistrate 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 will be forced up, to embitter the situation; but the
+Irish struggle was never a religious war.</p>
+
+<p>Another distinction must be noted. Though Ireland was driven to the
+"worst form of civil convulsion, a war for the means of subsistence,"
+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."</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[238]</a></span>conventions, we must watch
+with amazement the upspringing under O'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 conventions
+of the Irish, O'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 intelligence in the peasantry.
+Local gatherings 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 disorder; voluntary
+suppression of crime and outrage&mdash;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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[239]</a></span>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 distributed to them
+by their priests, all spirits renounced, and the peace not broken once
+throughout the week. As O'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.</p>
+
+<p>In the whole of Irish history no time brought such calamity to Ireland
+as the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[240]</a></span>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 interminable
+discontent to some far place seemed to end the trouble. "Now for the
+first time these six hundred years," said <i>The Times</i>, "England has
+Ireland at her mercy, and can deal with her as she pleases." But from
+this death Ireland rose again. Thirty years after O'Connell Parnell
+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 movement. 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[241]</a></span>power to arrest without
+trial all Irishmen suspected of illegal projects&mdash;a power beyond all
+coercion hitherto. O'Connell had opposed a coercion act in 1833 for
+nineteen nights; Parnell in 1881 fought for thirty-two nights.
+Parliament had become the keeper of Irish tyrannies, not of her
+liberties, and its conventional 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 Parnell himself. The passion of rage reached its
+extreme height with the publication in <i>The Times</i> (1888) of a
+facsimile letter from Parnell, to prove his consent to a paid system
+of murder and outrage. A special commission found it to be a forgery.</p>
+
+<p>With the rejection of Gladstone's Home Rule bills in 1886 and 1893,
+and with the death of Parnell (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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[242]</a></span>in the times of
+O'Connell, Thomas Davis, John O'Leary, and Parnell, and rises once
+more to-day as the fixed unchanging demand, while the whole Irish
+people, laying aside agitations and controversies, stand waiting to
+hear the end.</p>
+
+<p>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. Verdicts
+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&mdash;a
+work inspired by an Irishman's intellect and heart&mdash;brought the final
+solution, 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.</p>
+
+<p>There was yet another stirring of the national idea. In its darkest
+days the country had remained true to the old Irish spirit of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[243]</a></span>learning, that fountain of the nation's life. In O'Connell's time the
+"poor scholar" who took his journey to "the Munster schools" was sent
+out with offerings laid on the parish altars by Protestants and
+Catholics alike; as he trudged with his bag of books and the fees for
+the master sewn in the cuff of his coat, he was welcomed in every
+farm, and given of the best in the famishing hovels: "The Lord prosper
+him, and every one that has the heart set upon the learning." Bards
+and harpers and dancers wandered among the cottages. A famous bard
+Raftery, playing at a dance heard one ask, "Who is the musician?" and
+the blind fiddler answered him:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I am Raftery the poet,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Full of hope and love,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With eyes that have no light,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With gentleness that has no misery.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Going west upon my pilgrimage,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Guided by the light of my heart,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Feeble and tired,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To the end of my road.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Behold me now,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With my face to a wall,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A-playing music<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To empty pockets."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Unknown scribes still copied piously the national records. A Louth
+schoolmaster <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[244]</a></span>could tell all the stars and constellations of heaven
+under the old Irish forms and names. A vision is given to us through a
+government Ordnance Survey of the fire of zeal, the hunger of
+knowledge, among the tillers and the tenants. In 1817 a dying farmer
+in Kilkenny repeated several times to his sons his descent back to the
+wars of 1641 and behind that to a king of Munster in 210
+A.D.&mdash;directing the eldest never to forget it. This son took his
+brother, John O'Donovan, (1809-1861) to study in Dublin; in Kilkenny
+farmhouses he learned the old language and history of his race. At the
+same time another Irish boy, Eugene O'Curry (1796-1862), of the same
+old Munster stock, working on his father's farm in great poverty,
+learned from him much knowledge of Irish literature and music. The
+Ordnance Survey, the first peripatetic university Ireland had seen
+since the wanderings of her ancient scholars, gave to O'Donovan and
+O'Curry their opportunity, where they could meet learned men, and use
+their hereditary knowledge. A mass of material was laid up by their
+help. Passionate interest was shown by the people in the memorials of
+their ancient life&mdash;giants' rings, cairns, and mighty <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[245]</a></span>graves, the
+twenty-nine thousand mounds or moats that have been counted, the raths
+of their saints and scholars&mdash;each with its story living on the lips
+of the people till the great famine and the death or emigration of the
+people broke that long tradition of the race. The cry arose that the
+survey was pandering to the national spirit. It was suddenly closed
+(1837), the men dismissed, no materials published, the documents
+locked up in government offices. But for O'Donovan and O'Curry what
+prodigies of work remained. Once more the death of hope seemed to call
+out the pieties of the Irish scholar for his race, the fury of his
+intellectual zeal, the passion of his inheritance of learning. In the
+blackest days perhaps of all Irish history O'Donovan took up Michael
+O'Clery's work of two hundred years before, the Annals of the Four
+Masters, added to his manuscript the mass of his own learning, and
+gave to his people this priceless record of their country (1856).
+Among a number of works that cannot be counted here, he made a
+Dictionary which recalls the old pride of Irishmen in their language.
+O'Curry brought from his humble <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[246]</a></span>training an incredible industry,
+great stores of ancient lore, and an amazing and delicate skill as a
+scribe. All modern historians have dug in the mine of these men's
+work. They open to Anglo-Irish scholars such as Dr. Reeves and Dr.
+Todd, a new world of Irish history. Sir Samuel Ferguson began in 1833
+to give to readers of English the stories of Ireland. George Petrie
+collected Irish music through all the west, over a thousand airs, and
+worked at Irish inscriptions and crosses and round towers. Lord
+Dunraven studied architecture, and is said to have visited every
+barony in Ireland and nearly every island on the coast.</p>
+
+<p>These men were nearly all Protestants; they were all patriots. Potent
+Irish influences could have stirred a resident gentry and resident
+parliament with a just pride in the great memorials of an Ireland not
+dead but still living in the people's heart. The failure of the hope
+was not the least of the evils of the Union. The drift of landlords to
+London had broken a national sympathy between them and the people,
+which had been steadily growing through the eighteenth century. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[247]</a></span>Their
+sons no longer learned Irish, nor heard the songs and stories of the
+past. The brief tale of the ordnance survey has given us a measure of
+the intelligence that had been wasted or destroyed by neglect in
+Ireland. Archbishop Whately proposed to use the new national schools
+so as to make this destruction systematic, and to put an end to
+national traditions. The child who knew only Irish was given a teacher
+who knew nothing but English; his history book mentioned Ireland
+<i>twice</i> only&mdash;a place conquered by Henry II., and made into an English
+province by the Union. The quotation "This is my own, my native land,"
+was struck out of the reading-book as pernicious, and the Irish boy
+was taught to thank God for being "a happy English child." A Connacht
+peasant lately summed up the story: "I suppose the Famine and the
+National Schools took the heart out of the people." In fact famine and
+emigration made the first great break in the Irish tradition that had
+been the dignity and consolation of the peasantry; the schools
+completed the ruin. In these, under English influence, the map of
+Ireland has been <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[248]</a></span>rolled up, and silence has fallen on her heroes.</p>
+
+<p>Even out of this deep there came a revival. Whitley Stokes published
+his first Irish work the year after O'Curry's death; and has been
+followed by a succession of laborious students. Through a School of
+Irish Learning Dublin is becoming a national centre of true Irish
+scholarship, and may hope to be the leader of the world in this great
+branch of study. The popular Irish movement manifested itself in the
+Gaelic League, whose branches now cover all Ireland, and which has
+been the greatest educator of the people since the time of Thomas
+Davis. Voluntary colleges have sprung up in every province, where
+earnest students learn the language, history, and music of their
+country; and on a fine day teacher and scholars gathered in the open
+air under a hedge recall the ancient Irish schools where brehon or
+chronicler led his pupils under a tree. A new spirit of self-respect,
+intelligence, and public duty has followed the work of the Gaelic
+League; it has united Catholic and Protestant, landlord and peasant.
+And through all creeds and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[249]</a></span>classes a desire has quickened men to
+serve their country in its social and industrial life; and by
+Agricultural Societies, and Industrial Development Societies, to
+awaken again her trade and manufactures.</p>
+
+<p>The story is unfinished. Once again we stand at the close of another
+experiment of England in the government of Ireland. Each of them has
+been founded on the idea of English interests; each has lasted about a
+hundred years&mdash;"Tudor conquest," Plantations, an English parliament, a
+Union parliament. All alike have ended in a disordered finance and a
+flight of the people from the land.</p>
+
+<p>Grattan foretold the failure of the Union and its cause. "As Ireland,"
+he said, "is necessary to Great Britain, so is complete and perfect
+liberty necessary to Ireland, and both islands must be drawn much
+closer to a free constitution, that they may be drawn closer to one
+another." In England we have seen the advance to that freer
+constitution. The democracy has entered into larger liberties, and has
+brought new ideals. The growth of that popular life has been greatly
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[250]</a></span>advanced by the faith of Ireland. Ever since Irish members helped to
+carry the Reform Acts they have been on the side of liberty, humanity,
+peace, and justice. They have been the most steadfast believers in
+constitutional law against privilege, and its most unswerving
+defenders. At Westminster they have always stood for human rights, as
+nobler even than rights of property. What Chatham foresaw has come
+true: the Irish in the English parliament have been powerful
+missionaries of democracy. A freedom-loving Ireland has been
+conquering her conquerors in the best sense.</p>
+
+<p>The changes of the last century have deeply affected men's minds. The
+broadening liberties of England as a free country, the democratic
+movements that have brought new classes into government, the wider
+experience of imperial methods, the growing influence of men of
+good-will, have tended to change her outlook to Ireland. In the last
+generation she has been forced to think more gravely of Irish
+problems. She has pledged her credit to close the land question and
+create a peasant proprietary. With any knowledge of Irish <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[251]</a></span>history the
+religious alarm, the last cry of prejudice, must inevitably disappear.
+The old notion of Ireland as the "property" of England, and of its
+exploitation for the advantage of England, is falling into the past.</p>
+
+<p>A mighty spirit of freedom too has passed over the great Colonies and
+Dominions. They since their beginning have given shelter to outlawed
+Irishmen flying from despair at home. They have won their own pride of
+freedom, and have all formally proclaimed their judgment that Ireland
+should be allowed the right to shape her own government. The United
+States, who owe so much to Irishmen in their battle for independence,
+and in the labours of their rising prosperity, have supported the
+cause of Ireland for the last hundred years; ever since the first
+important meeting in New York to express American sympathy with
+Ireland was held in 1825, when President Jackson, of Irish origin, a
+Protestant, is said to have promised the first thousand dollars to the
+Irish emancipation fund.</p>
+
+<p>In Ireland itself we see a people that has now been given some first
+opportunities of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[252]</a></span>self-dependence and discipline under the new
+conditions of land ownership and of county government. We see too the
+breaking up of the old solid Unionist phalanx, the dying down of
+ancient fears, the decaying of old habits of dependence on military
+help from England, and a promise of revival of the large statesmanship
+that adorned the days of Kildare and of Grattan. It is singular to
+reflect that on the side of foreign domination, through seven hundred
+years of invasion and occupation, not a single man, Norman or English,
+warrior or statesman, has stood out as a hero to leave his name, even
+in England, on the lips or in the hearts of men. The people who were
+defending their homes and liberties had their heroes, men of every
+creed and of every blood, Gaelic, Norman, English, Anglican, Catholic,
+and Presbyterian. Against the stormy back-ground of those prodigious
+conflicts, those immeasurable sorrows, those thousand sites
+consecrated by great deeds, lofty figures emerge whom the people have
+exalted with the poetry of their souls, and crowned with love and
+gratitude&mdash;the first martyr for Ireland of "the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[253]</a></span>foreigners" Earl
+Thomas of Desmond, the soul of another Desmond wailing in the Atlantic
+winds, Kildare riding from his tomb on the horse with the silver
+shoes, Bishop Bedell, Owen Roe and Hugh O'Neill, Red Hugh O'Donnell,
+Sarsfield, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Robert Emmett, O'Connell, Davis,
+Parnell&mdash;men of peace and men of war, but all lovers of a free nation.</p>
+
+<p>In memory of the long, the hospitable roll of their patriots, in
+memory of their long fidelities, in memory of their national faith,
+and of their story of honour and of suffering, the people of Ireland
+once more claim a government of their own in their native land, that
+shall bind together the whole nation of all that live on Irish soil,
+and create for all a common obligation and a common prosperity. An
+Irish nation of a double race will not fear to look back on Irish
+history. The tradition of that soil, so steeped in human passion, in
+joy and sorrow, still rises from the earth. It lives in the hearts of
+men who see in Ireland a ground made sacred by the rare intensity of
+human life over every inch of it, one of the richest <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[254]</a></span>possessions that
+has ever been bequeathed by the people of any land whatever to the
+successors and inheritors of their name. The tradition of national
+life created by the Irish has ever been a link of fellowship between
+classes, races, and religions. The natural union approaches of the
+Irish Nation&mdash;the union of all her children that are born under the
+breadth of her skies, fed by the fatness of her fields, and nourished
+by the civilisation of her dead.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<a name="BIBLIO" id="BIBLIO"></a><hr />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[255]</a></span><br />
+
+<h3>SOME IRISH WRITERS ON IRISH HISTORY<span class="totoc"><a href="#toc">ToC</a></span></h3>
+<br />
+
+<div class="block"><p class="hang"><span class="sc">Joyce, P.W.</span>&mdash;Social History of Ancient Ireland. 2 vols.
+1903. This book gives a general survey of the old Irish
+civilisation, pagan and Christian, apart from political
+history.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><span class="sc">Ferguson, Sir Samuel.</span>&mdash;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 history.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><span class="sc">Green, A.S.</span>&mdash;The Making of Ireland and its Undoing
+(1200-1600). 1909. An attempt is here made to bring together
+evidence, some of it unused before, of the activity of commerce
+and manufactures, and of learning, that prevailed in mediaeval
+Ireland, until the destruction of the Tudor wars.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><span class="sc">Mitchell, John.</span>&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><span class="sc">Taylor, J.F.</span>&mdash;Owen Roe O'Neill. 1904. This small book is
+the best account of a very great Irishman; and gives the causes
+of the Irish insurrection in 1641, and the war to 1650.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><span class="sc">Davis, Thomas.</span>&mdash;The Patriot Parliament of 1689. 1893. A
+brief but important study of this Parliament. It illustrates the
+Irish spirit of tolerance in 1689, 1843, and 1893.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><span class="sc">Bagwell, Richard.</span>&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[256]</a></span><span class="sc">Murray, A.E.</span>&mdash;Commercial Relations between England and
+Ireland. 1903. A useful study is made here of the economic
+condition of Ireland from 1641, under the legislation of the
+English Parliament, the Irish Parliament, and the Union
+Parliament.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><span class="sc">Lecky, W.E.H.</span>&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Two Centuries of Irish History (1691-1870). Introduction by
+<span class="sc">James Bryce.</span> 1907. These essays, mostly by Irishmen,
+give in a convenient form the outlines of the history of the
+time. There is a brief account of O'Connell.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><span class="sc">O'Brien, R. Barry.</span>&mdash;Life of Charles Stewart Parnell.
+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.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><span class="sc">D'Alton, E.A.</span>&mdash;History of Ireland (1903-1910). 3 vols.
+This is the latest complete history of Ireland.</p></div>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+
+<div class="tr">
+<p class="cen"><a name="TN" id="TN"></a>Typographical errors corrected in text:</p>
+<br />
+Page &nbsp;&nbsp;12: &nbsp;tewnty replaced with twenty<br />
+Page &nbsp;&nbsp;19: &nbsp;meterical rules replaced with metrical rules<br />
+Page &nbsp;&nbsp;33: &nbsp;"earthern entrenchment" replaced with "earthen entrenchment"<br />
+Page &nbsp;&nbsp;42: &nbsp;interupted replaced with interrupted<br />
+Page 176: &nbsp;successsive replaced with successive<br />
+Page 184: &nbsp;scupltured replaced with sculptured<br />
+Page 198: &nbsp;"risingp ower" replaced with "rising power"<br />
+</div>
+
+
+<br />
+<hr />
+<br />
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Irish Nationality, by Alice Stopford Green
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IRISH NATIONALITY ***
+
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+</pre>
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+</body>
+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Irish Nationality, by Alice Stopford Green
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Irish Nationality
+
+Author: Alice Stopford Green
+
+Release Date: January 9, 2011 [EBook #34900]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IRISH NATIONALITY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Brian Foley, Jeannie Howse and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    +------------------------------------------------------------+
+    | Transcriber's Note:                                        |
+    |                                                            |
+    | Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has      |
+    | been preserved.                                            |
+    |                                                            |
+    | The cross symbol meaning 'died' is represented with a +    |
+    | in this etext. For example: Cormac, king and bishop (+905) |
+    |                                                            |
+    | Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. For a    |
+    | complete list, please see the end of this document.        |
+    |                                                            |
+    +------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
+OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE
+
+No. 6
+
+_Editors_:
+
+HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A.
+PROF. GILBERT MURRAY, LITT.D., LL.D., F.B.A.
+PROF. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A.
+PROF. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A.
+
+
+
+
+THE HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE
+
+
+_VOLUMES NOW READY_
+
+  HISTORY OF WAR AND PEACE                                 G.H. PERRIS
+
+  POLAR EXPLORATION                    DR. W.S. BRUCE, LL.D., F.R.S.E.
+
+  THE FRENCH REVOLUTION                           HILAIRE BELLOC, M.P.
+
+  THE STOCK EXCHANGE: A SHORT STUDY OF INVESTMENT AND SPECULATION
+                                                            F.W. HIRST
+
+  IRISH NATIONALITY                               ALICE STOPFORD GREEN
+
+  THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT                        J. RAMSAY MACDONALD, M.P.
+
+  PARLIAMENT: ITS HISTORY, CONSTITUTION, AND PRACTICE
+                                 SIR COURTNAY ILBERT, K.C.B., K.C.S.I.
+
+  MODERN GEOGRAPHY                  MARION I. NEWBIGIN, D.S.C. (Lond.)
+
+  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE                                   JOHN MASEFIELD
+
+  THE EVOLUTION OF PLANTS              D.H. SCOTT, M.A., LL.D., F.R.S.
+
+
+_VOLUMES READY IN JULY_
+
+  THE OPENING-UP OF AFRICA
+                    SIR H.H. JOHNSTON, G.C.M.G., K.C.B., D.SC., F.Z.S.
+
+  MEDIAEVAL EUROPE                                   H.W.C. DAVIS, M.A.
+
+  MOHAMMEDANISM                        D.S. MARGOLIOUTH, M.A., D.LITT.
+
+  THE SCIENCE OF WEALTH                              J.A. HOBSON, M.A.
+
+  HEALTH AND DISEASE                         W. LESLIE MACKENZIE, M.D.
+
+  INTRODUCTION TO MATHEMATICS            A.N. WHITEHEAD, SC.D., F.R.S.
+
+  THE ANIMAL WORLD                          F.W. GAMBLE, D.SC., F.R.S.
+
+  EVOLUTION                               J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A., and
+                                                  PATRICK GEDDES, M.A.
+
+  LIBERALISM                                       L.T. HOBHOUSE, M.A.
+
+  CRIME AND INSANITY              DR. C.A. MERCIER, F.R.C.P., F.R.C.S.
+
+*** Other volumes in active preparation
+
+
+
+
+IRISH
+NATIONALITY
+
+BY
+ALICE STOPFORD GREEN
+
+AUTHOR OF "TOWN LIFE IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY"
+"HENRY II," "THE MAKING OF IRELAND," ETC.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+NEW YORK
+HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
+
+LONDON
+WILLIAMS AND NORGATE
+
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1911,
+BY
+HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
+
+
+THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAP.                                                      PAGE
+
+     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                               111
+
+  VIII THE TAKING OF THE LAND                                 125
+
+    IX THE NATIONAL FAITH OF THE IRISH                        141
+
+     X RULE OF THE ENGLISH PARLIAMENT                         158
+
+    XI THE RISE OF A NEW IRELAND                              182
+
+   XII AN IRISH PARLIAMENT                                    198
+
+  XIII IRELAND UNDER THE UNION                                219
+
+       SOME IRISH WRITERS ON IRISH HISTORY                    255
+
+
+
+
+IN MEMORY
+OF
+THE IRISH DEAD
+
+
+
+
+IRISH NATIONALITY
+
+
+
+
+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 rising sheer above the water stand
+as bulwarks thrown 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 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, coming 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 entrenchments
+that guarded cliffs and mountain passes. The name of Erin recalls the
+ancient inhabitants, who lived on under the new rulers, more in number
+than their conquerors. The Gaels gave their language and their
+organisation to the country, while 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 provinces
+later known as Ulster, Leinster, Munster 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 rich lands of Meath were the
+high-king's domain.
+
+Heroic tales celebrate the prehistoric conflicts 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 hundred royal
+mercenaries and Gaulish soldiers--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 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 warriors 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 Usnech 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 monarchs 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 smelting of gold near the Liffey
+about 1500 B.C. and of the Wicklow artificer who made cups and
+brooches of gold and silver, and silver 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 henceforth 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 hundred 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 probably 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 twenty ounces in the British Museum from
+England, Scotland, and Wales.
+
+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
+corn 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.
+
+The tribal system has been much derided as the mark of a savage
+people, or at least of a race unable to advance beyond political
+infancy into a real national existence. This was not true of the
+Gaels. Their essential idea of a state, and the mode of its government
+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 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 secondary 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 Gaelic 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 administration on the
+other hand was divided into the widest possible range of
+self-governing communities, which were bound together in a willing
+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 literature. Such an instinct
+of national life was neither rude nor contemptible, 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, but which was never
+accepted in Ireland. Irish history can only be understood by realising
+this intense national life 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 the 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 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 gathered 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, together, 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 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
+councillors--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 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 pictures 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 instruction it was meet that we should gather
+ourselves together." And at the reciting 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 genealogies, 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 tribe land in perpetuity. So long as the
+family held the land, they were bound to train up in each generation
+that one of the household who was most fit to carry on learning, and
+thus for centuries long lines of distinguished men added fame to their
+country 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
+metrical 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. Professors 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 turn back every poet
+who sought to leave the country and to bring on their way with honour
+every one who sought to enter in. There was no stagnation where
+competition 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 people esteemed--democracy,
+aristocracy, king-craft, literature, tradition, art, commerce, law,
+sport, religion, display, even rustic buffoonery. The years between one
+festival 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 hills" to exercise
+their law and hear their learned men.
+
+In the time of the Roman Empire, therefore, the Irish looked on
+themselves as one race, obedient to one law, united 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 corner 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 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 chiefdom 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; disorders 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 with Atlantic
+clouds. Riots and forays there were, among a martial race and strong
+men of hot passions, but Ireland was in fact no prominent example of
+mediaeval anarchy or disorder. Local feuds were no greater than those
+which afflicted England down to the Norman 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 recognised by law, and had
+their special organisation 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 genealogies prove on the contrary that the generations must be
+counted at from thirty-three to thirty-six years: the tale of kings,
+judges, poets, and householders who died peacefully 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
+of 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 industries and virtues do not
+flourish in regions given over to savage strife. And it is significant
+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 forgotten. 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 impossible; he
+had first to exterminate the entire people. The same division into
+administrative districts gave also a singular authority to law. In
+mediaeval states, however 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 interested in maintaining the law of the people, the
+protection of the common folk; nor were its landmarks ever submerged
+or destroyed. Irish land laws, for example, in spite of the changes
+that gradually covered the land with fenced estates, did actually
+preserve 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 Revolt ever arose, nor any rising of the poor against their
+lords. Rights of inheritance, due solemnities of election, were
+accurately preserved. 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 fearful 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 intelligence among the whole people. A varied education, spread
+over many centres, fertilized 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 tanners. In
+some sequestered places in Ireland we can still trace the settlements
+made by Irish communities. They built no towns nor needed any in the
+modern 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.
+
+This life of opportunity in thickly congregated country societies gave
+to Ireland its wide culture, and the incredible number of scholars and
+artificers that it poured out over Europe with generous ardour. The
+multitudinous centres of discussion scattered over the island, and the
+rapid intercourse of all these centres one with another, explain how
+learning broadened, and how Christianity spread over the land like a
+flood. It was to these country settlements that the Irish owed the
+richness of their civilisation, the generosity of their learning, and
+the passion of their patriotism.
+
+Ireland was a land then as now of intense contrasts, where equilibrium
+was maintained by opposites, not by a perpetual tending towards the
+middle course. In things political and social the Irish showed a
+conservatism that no intercourse could shake, side by side with eager
+readiness and great success in grasping the latest progress in arts or
+commerce. In their literature strikingly modern thoughts jostle
+against the most primitive crudeness; "Vested interests are shameless"
+was one of their old observations. In Ireland the old survived beside
+the new, and as the new came by free assimilation old and new did not
+conflict. The balance of opposites gave colour and force to their
+civilisation, and Ireland until the thirteenth century and very
+largely until the seventeenth century, escaped or survived the
+successive steam rollings that reduced Europe to nearly one common
+level.
+
+In the Irish system we may see the shaping of a true democracy--a
+society in which ever-broadening masses of the people are made
+intelligent sharers in the national life, and conscious guardians of
+its tradition. Their history is throughout a record of the nobility of
+that experiment. It would be a mechanical theory of human life which
+denied to the people of Ireland the praise of a true patriotism or the
+essential spirit of a nation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+IRELAND AND EUROPE
+
+_c._ 100--_c._ 600
+
+
+The Roman Agricola had proposed the conquest of Ireland on the ground
+that it would have a good effect on Britain by removing the spectacle
+of liberty. But there was no Roman conquest. The Irish remained
+outside the Empire, as free as the men of Norway and Sweden. They
+showed that to share in the trade, the culture, and the civilisation
+of an empire, it is not necessary to be subject to its armies or lie
+under its police control. While the neighbouring peoples received a
+civilisation imposed by violence and maintained by compulsion, the
+Irish were free themselves to choose those things which were suited to
+their circumstances and character, and thus to shape for their people
+a liberal culture, democratic and national.
+
+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 born 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 Shannon and the
+harbours of Down; and probably 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 possessed--the great
+decorated trumpets of bronze used in the Loire country, the fine
+enamelling in colours, the late-Celtic designs for ornaments of bronze
+and gold. Goldsmiths travelled oversea to bring back bracelets, 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 borrowed afterwards interlaced ornament for
+metal work and illuminated manuscripts. In such arts they outdid their
+teachers; their gold and enamel work has never been surpassed, and in
+writing and illumination they went beyond the imperial artists of
+Constantinople. 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 of Narbonne. By the same road from
+Marseilles Christianity must have come a hundred years or so before
+the mission of St. Patrick--a Christianity carrying the traditions
+and rites and apocalypses of the East. It was from Gaul that St.
+Patrick afterwards sailed for his mission to Ireland. He came to a
+land where there were already men of erudition and "rhetoricians" who
+scoffed 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 Roman centralized authority was opposed to their
+whole habit of thought and genius. They made, therefore, no change in
+their tribal 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 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 earthen entrenchment, and
+taught them Latin, canon law, and divinity. Monastic 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. No parallel can be found in any
+other country to the writing down of national epics in their pagan
+form many centuries after the country had become Christian. In the same
+way European culture was not allowed to suppress the national language;
+clerics as well as laymen 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 the 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 original founder, in free federal union like that of the clans.
+As no land could be wholly alienated from the tribe, territory given
+to the monastery was not exempted from the common 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.
+
+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 inspired 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
+oratories, 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 centuries some ancient
+tradition of apostolic measurements, and in their narrow and austere
+dimensions, and their intimate solemnity, 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."
+
+Piety did not always vanquish the passions 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.
+Culture 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 merryman long ago, and yet he was a
+Christian, who could make all men he ever saw laugh 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 corn to the
+abbey mill. Again, the broad tolerance of the church in Ireland never
+allowed any persecution for religion'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 imperfection
+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 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 rejected for their country the organisation of the
+Roman state, and had only taken the highest forms of its art,
+learning, and religion, to enrich their ancient law and tradition: and
+through their own forms of social life they had made this culture
+universal among the people, and national. Such was the spectacle of
+liberty which the imperial Agricola had feared.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE IRISH MISSION
+
+_c._ 560--_c._ 1000
+
+
+The fall of the Roman Empire brought to the Irish people new dangers
+and new opportunities. Goths and Vandals, Burgundians 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 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 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 compass these people round 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 Eternity where space
+and time were not. We see 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 AElfred. "They came," AElfred
+tells us in his chronicle, "in a boat without oars from Hibernia,
+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 enough meat
+for seven nights."
+
+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
+civilisation. And while all continental roads were interrupted,
+traffic from Irish ports still passed safely to Gaul over the ocean
+routes. Ireland therefore not only preserved her 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 Columcille in Great
+Britain and Columbanus in Europe. In all Irish history there is no
+greater figure than St. Columcille--statesman 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 Iona 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, began a work equally astonishing from the
+religious and the political point of view. The heathen Picts had
+marched westward to the sea, destroying 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" settlements along the
+coast, and the Celts of Strathclyde. 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 Cantyre
+he restored the Scot settlement from Ireland 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 Iona 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 of human brotherhood, learning, and religion.
+
+For thirty-four years Columcille ruled as abbot in Iona, 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 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
+figure 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
+said, three hundred books, sitting with open cell door, where the
+brethren, one with his butcher's knife, one with his milk pail,
+stopped to ask a blessing as they passed.
+
+After his death the Irish monks carried his work over the whole of
+England. A heathen land lay before them, for the Roman missionaries
+established in 597 by Augustine in Canterbury, speaking no English and
+hating "barbarism," made little progress, and after some reverses were
+practically confined to Kent. The first cross of the English
+borderland was set up in 635 by men from Iona on a heather moorland
+called the Heaven-field, by the ramparts of the Roman Wall. Columban
+monks made a second Iona at Lindisfarne, with its church of hewn oak
+thatched with reeds after Irish tradition in sign of poverty and
+lowliness, and with its famous school of art and learning. They taught
+the English writing, and gave them the letters which were used among
+them till the Norman Conquest. Labour and learning went hand in hand.
+From the king's court nobles came, rejoicing to change the brutalities
+of war for the plough, the forge-hammer, the winnowing fan: waste
+places were reclaimed, the ports were crowded with boats, and
+monasteries gave shelter to travellers. For a hundred years wherever
+the monks of Iona passed men ran to be signed by their hand and
+blessed by their voice. Their missionaries wandered on foot over
+middle England and along the eastern coast and even touched the
+Channel in Sussex. In 662 there was only one bishop in the whole of
+England who was not of Irish consecration, and this bishop, Agilberct
+of Wessex, was a Frenchman who had been trained for years in Ireland.
+The great school of Malmesbury in Wessex was founded by an Irishman,
+as that of Lindisfarne had been in the north.
+
+For the first time also Ireland became known to Englishmen. Fleets of
+ships bore students and pilgrims, who forsook their native land for
+the sake of divine studies. The Irish most willingly received them
+all, supplying to them without charge food and books and teaching,
+welcoming them in every school from Derry to Lismore, making for them
+a "Saxon Quarter" in the old university of Armagh. Under the influence
+of the Irish teachers the spirit of racial bitterness was checked, and
+a new intercourse sprang up between English, Picts, Britons, and
+Irish. For a moment it seemed as though the British islands were to be
+drawn into one peaceful confederation and communion and a common
+worship bounded only by the ocean. The peace of Columcille, the
+fellowship of learning and of piety, rested on the peoples.
+
+Columcille had been some dozen years in Iona when Columbanus (_c._
+575) left Bangor on the Belfast Lough, leading twelve Irish monks clad
+in white homespun, with long hair falling on their shoulders, and
+books hanging from their waists in leathern satchels. They probably
+sailed in one of the merchant ships trading from the Loire. Crossing
+Gaul to the Vosges Columbanus founded his monastery of Luxeuil among
+the ruined heaps of a Roman city, once the meeting-place of great
+highways from Italy and France, now left by the barbarians a
+wilderness for wild beasts. Other houses branched out into France and
+Switzerland. Finally he founded his monastery of Bobio in the
+Apennines, where he died in 615.
+
+A stern ascetic, aflame with religious passion, a finished scholar
+bringing from Ireland a knowledge of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, of
+rhetoric, geometry, and poetry, and a fine taste, Columbanus battled
+for twenty years with the vice and ignorance of a half-pagan
+Burgundy. Scornful of ease, indifferent to danger, astonished at the
+apathy of Italy as compared with the zeal of Ireland in teaching, he
+argued and denounced with "the freedom of speech which accords with
+the custom of my country." The passion of his piety so awed the
+peoples, that for a time it seemed as if the rule of Columbanus might
+outdo that of St. Benedict. It was told that in Rome Gregory the Great
+received him, and as Columbanus lay prostrate in the church the Pope
+praised God in his heart for having given such great power to so small
+a man. Instantly the fiery saint, detecting the secret thought, rose
+from his prayer to repudiate the slight: "Brother, he who depreciates
+the work depreciates the Author."
+
+For a hundred years before Columbanus there had been Irish pilgrims
+and bishops in Gaul and Italy. But it was his mission that first
+brought the national patriotism of Ireland into conflict with the
+organisation of Rome in Europe. Christianity had come to Ireland from
+the East--tradition said from St. John, who was then, and is still,
+held in special veneration by the Irish; his flower, 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
+tonsure 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 discipline of Rome, and he was required to renounce
+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 small island in a far
+corner 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 outside
+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
+English 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 the Roman banner of purple and gold carried
+before them, to hear the name of "Emperor of the whole of Britain,"
+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 for
+conquest--Celts "rude and barbarous"--"Picts and Britons, accomplices
+in obstinacy in those two remote islands of the world." "Your father
+Columba," "of rustic simplicity" said the English leader, had "that
+Columba of yours," like Peter, the 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 Lindisfarne, 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 united was for ever loosened. English
+armies marched ravaging 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 hundred 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, sending
+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
+Jerusalem, settled in Carthage, and sailed to the discovery of
+Iceland. No church of any land 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
+Highlands 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
+Switzerland, 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 in 595 was sent on the English mission he turned back with
+loathing, and finally took 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 feared 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 without 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 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 distinction of their people
+persecution had no part. No war of religion stained their faith, and
+no barbarities to man.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+SCANDINAVIANS IN IRELAND
+
+800-1014
+
+
+For a thousand years no foreign host had settled in Erin. But the times
+of peace were ended. About 800 A.D. the Irish suffered their first
+invasion.
+
+The Teutonic peoples, triumphant conquerors 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. The 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--the leader on the prow as it plunged
+through the sea, calling to the land, shouting as he goes, 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 nation 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 civilisation, 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 England from the Forth to the
+Channel, the land of the Picts northward, Iona and the country of the
+Scots to the west, and Bretland 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 cups and vessels and ornaments of gold, sacking
+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 manuscripts 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
+"Danelaw" 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 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 Norwegian 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 hundred 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 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 corn, 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 multiplying 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
+companies 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 point without a fleet," battle swung
+backwards and forwards between old settlers and new pirates, between
+Norsemen and Danes, between both and the Irish.
+
+But the Scandinavians were not only sea-rovers, they were the greatest
+merchants 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; westward 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 merchants 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. Merchants made settlements
+along the coasts, and planted colonies over the inland country to
+supply the trade of the ports. They had 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
+confederation 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 which 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 fighting 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 Tipperary, organised as Irish clans 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 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," "Munster of the swift
+ships."
+
+On the other hand, the Irish never ceased 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
+summoned 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 fact, 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 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
+hundred 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 Munster 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,
+and 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 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 Norsemen used armour, and rough chains of
+blue iron to grapple the enemies' ships, but the Irish sailors, with
+their "strong enclosures of linen cloth," and tough ropes of hemp to
+fling over the enemies' prows, came off 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.
+"Ill luck was it for the Danes when Brian was born," 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 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 Saxons 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, proposed to create a
+Scandinavian empire from the Slavic shores of the Baltic across
+Denmark, 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 1018 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 sea, left the Scandinavian empire with a
+ragged edge out on the line of the Atlantic commerce. King 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 Scandinavian 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 fifty
+years to come Ireland kept its independence. England was once again,
+as in the time of the Roman dominion, made part of a continental
+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 unbroken. Irish kingdoms had lived on side by
+side with Danish kingdoms; in spite of the strength of the Danish
+forces, the constant irruptions of new Danes, and the business
+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 Telltown, 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 mound that rose
+in the marshy glen now called Glanworth. There Cellachan, the rightful
+heir, in the best of arms and dress, demanded that the nobles should
+remember justice, while his mother declared his title and recited a
+poem. And when the champions of Munster 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 their hands in his hand, and placed the royal
+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 AElfred 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 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 AElfred 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.
+Another, Cormac, king and bishop (+905), was skilled in Old-Irish
+literature, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, 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 philosophy. 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 are known, and a glossary. A
+lay scholar, probably 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 recommends. 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
+oak fronting the storm. They sang of the Creation and the Crucifixion,
+when "dear God's elements were afraid"; and of pilgrimage 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 battlefield, heroes
+of the Irish race.
+
+Even the craftsmen's schools were still gathered in their raths,
+preserving from century to century the forms and rules of 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 modern world. Many influences had
+come in--Oriental, Byzantine, Scandinavian, French--and the Irish took
+and used them all, but their art still remained Gaelic, of their
+native soil. 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 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 forgave 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 plunderers; and Brian himself gave the price
+of learning and the price of books to every one separately who went on
+this service. Many churches were built and repaired by him, bridges
+and roads were made, the fortresses of Munster were strengthened."
+
+Such was the astonishing vitality of learning and art among the Irish.
+By their social system the intellectual treasures of the race 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 profit 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
+parts of a ship, and the streets of a town. In outward and material
+civilisation they accepted 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 FIRST IRISH REVIVAL
+
+1014-1169
+
+
+After the battle of Clontarf in 1014 the Irish had a hundred and fifty
+years of comparative quiet. "A lively, stirring, ancient and
+victorious people," they turned to repair their hurts and to build 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 prosperity. 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 help from
+their people without, and by political alliances and combinations
+fostered war among the Irish states themselves. Nearly a hundred 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," "Magnus of the terrible
+battles," was sung in Ireland 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 tradition, 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 commanded 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 of
+English invasion. A wealthy and compact community living on the
+seaboard, trading with all Europe, 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 Irish 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 Canterbury 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 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 "Irish," 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 Erin only remained in the speech of the Gaels themselves.
+
+Clontarf, too, had marked ominously the 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
+Scandinavians; 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 mercenaries from England. In such names we
+see the heralds of the coming change.
+
+The Irish were therefore face to face with 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 community of tribes. It is in this effort that we see the
+immense vitality of the Gaelic system the power of its tradition, and
+the spirit of its people.
+
+After Brian's death two learned men were set over the government of
+Ireland; a layman, the Chief Poet, and a devout man, the Anchorite of
+all Ireland. "The land was governed like a free state and not like a
+monarchy by them." The victory of Clontarf was celebrated by a
+renascence of learning. Eye-witnesses of that great battle, poets and
+historians, wrote the chronicle of the Danish wars from first to last,
+and sang the glories of Cellachan and of Brian Boru in the greatness
+of his life and the majesty of his death. A scholar 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 Channel. In
+schools three or four hundred poetic metres were taught. The glories
+of ancient Erin were revived. Poets wrote of Usnech, of Tara, of
+Ailech, of the O'Neills on Lough Swilly 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, annals of Ireland from the
+earliest to the latest time were composed. Men laboured to satisfy the
+desire of the Irish to possess a complete and brilliant picture of
+Ireland from all antiquity. The most famous among the many writers,
+one of the most learned men in all 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 synchronisms
+of the kings of Asia and of Roman emperors with Irish kings, and of
+the Irish high-kings and provincial chiefs and kings of Scotland.
+Writings of that time which have escaped destruction, such as the
+_Book of Leinster_, remain the most important relics of Celtic
+literature in the world.
+
+There was already the beginning of a university in the ancient school
+of Armagh lying on the famous hill where for long ages the royal tombs
+of the O'Neills had been preserved. "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 church
+in 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 of the Armagh leadership. They
+journeyed 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 their spirit drawing all the communities under
+obedience to the see of Patrick, the national saint. In a series of
+synods from 1100 to 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
+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.
+Lorcan 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: feeding 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 the 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 union, 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 Danes,
+gradually absorbed into the Irish population, 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 Connacht 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, Ruaidhri or Rory, was
+proclaimed (1166) Ardri in Dublin with greater pomp than any king
+before him, and held at Athboy in Meath an assembly of the "men of
+Ireland," archbishops and clergy, princes and nobles, eighteen
+thousand horsemen from the tribes and provinces, and a thousand Danes
+from Dublin--there laws were made for the honour of churches and
+clergy, the restoring of prey unjustly 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 another 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 still see on islands, along river-valleys, in lonely
+fields, innumerable ruins of churches built of stone chiselled as
+finely as man's hand 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
+windows and arches richly carved. These 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 remembrance of Irish tradition and ornament, and signed by Irish
+masons on the stones. There was a wealth of metal work of great
+splendour, decorated with freedom and boldness of design, with inlaid
+work and filigree, and settings of stones and enamels and crystal; as
+we may see in book-shrines, in the crosiers of Lismore and Cachel and
+Clonmacnois and many others, in the matchless processional 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 embroidered with animals in red gold.
+
+The vigour of Irish life overflowed, indeed, 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 corn 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 Compostella, 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 between 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
+Austria. An Irish abbot was head of a monastery in Bulgaria. From time
+to time the Irish came home to collect money for their foundations
+and went back laden with gold from the kings at home. Pope Adrian IV
+(1154) remembered with esteem the Irish professor under whom he had
+studied in Paris University. Irishmen were chaplains of the emperor
+Conrad III (+1152) 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 learning, 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 enduring life of Irishmen on Irish land, the popular
+tales that began at this time to run from mouth to mouth. They took to
+themselves 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 suddenly sprang up of the
+adventures of Finn--the warrior worthy of a king, the son of wisdom,
+the mighty hunter of every mountain and forest in Ireland, whose death
+no minstrel cared to sing. Every poet was expected to recite the fame
+in life of Finn and his companions. 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
+fasting 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 Judaea 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.
+
+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 gaunt relics 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
+modern 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 feastings, lest such recreation of spirit
+and mind should be to him a destruction 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." "Thou too, Patrick, hast
+taught us good things," 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-Cruachan of
+Connacht, the graves of mighty champions, 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 God."
+
+In no other country did such a fate befall a missionary coming from
+strangers--to be 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
+university, a single and independent church under an Irish primate of
+Armagh and an Irish archbishop 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 slowly worked
+out by her political councillors, her great ecclesiastics, her
+scholars and philosophers, and by the faith of the common people in
+the glory of their national inheritance. "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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE NORMAN INVASION
+
+1169-1520
+
+
+After the fall of the Danes the Normans, conquerors of England,
+entered on the dominion of the sea--"citizens of the world," they
+carried their arms and their cunning from the Tweed to the
+Mediterranean, from the Seine to the Euphrates. The spirit of conquest
+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 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. William
+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 II, lord of a vast seacoast from the Forth
+to the Pyrenees, holding both sides of the Channel, needed Ireland to
+round off his dominions and give him command 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 followers, and Flemings from
+Pembroke, led the invasion that began in 1169. They were men trained
+to war, with armour and weapons unknown 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 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
+complaints, 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 garrisoned 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 meanwhile 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 families, 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 II 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 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 or in England. No Irish chief,
+however, could have even understood 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
+"conquest," 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 of old. Henry's
+presence there gave him no lordship: and the independent temper of
+the Irish people was not likely, after their Danish experience, to be
+cowed by two years of war. Some cunning explanation 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 implied 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 proclamation of papal bulls, which
+according to modern research seem to have been mere forgeries. 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 conquered 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 administration. The fighting
+garrison was reinforced by the planting of a militant church--bishops
+and clergy of foreign blood, stout men of war, ready to aid by
+prayers, excommunications, 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, explained that "in policy he thought it expedient to wink at
+one knave cutting off another, and that would save the king's coffers
+and purchase peace to the land"; whereat the king 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." During 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 who had
+carried the peaceful mission of a spiritual religion over England and
+Europe now saw that other mission planted among themselves--a
+political 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 different 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 Europe. Dublin, no mere centre now
+of roving sea-kings, was turned into an impregnable fortress, 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 Westminster never ceased, nor
+the supply of its treasure, its favoured colonists, 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 compromise 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 the 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 Connacht, and
+absorbed into the Gaelic life the incoming Norman de Burghs. The
+Anglo-Normans, on the other hand, established themselves powerfully in
+Munster and Leinster. 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 remnants of old chiefdoms,
+unconquered, resolute and wealthy--such as the O'Briens in the west,
+MacCarthys and O'Sullivans in the south, O'Conors and O'Mores in the
+middle country, MacMurroughs and O'Tooles in Leinster, and many more.
+
+It has been held that all later misfortunes would have been averted if
+the English 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 corn 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 Rhineland and Lucca, with speculators from
+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 than 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 resources 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 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 metropolis, 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 adventurers had gone out to find profit for themselves,
+not to collect Irish wealth for London. Their "loyalty" failed under
+that test. The kings, therefore, found themselves engaged in a double
+conflict, against the Irish and against their own colonists, 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 "barbarism." The
+invaders were drawn to their new home not only by its wealth but by
+its beauty, the variety and gaiety of its social life, the
+intelligence 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 slaughter 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 employed 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 forbidden 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 exceedingly 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 burden of military taxation no tribe dared to disarm
+any more than one of the European countries to-day. The Dublin
+officials, meanwhile, 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 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 commanders 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 organised treasury, a powerful nobility, and
+a dependent people. The Irish tribal system, on the other hand, rested
+on a people endowed with a wide freedom, guided by an ancient
+tradition, and themselves the guardians 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+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 vitality of the Irish culture, the firm
+structure of their law, and the cohesion of the people.
+
+Henry II in 1171 had led an army for "the conquest" of Ireland. Three
+hundred years later, when Henry VII in 1487 turned his thoughts to
+Ireland he found no conquered land. An earthen ditch with a palisade
+on the top had 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 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 singing the traditions, the love-songs, the prayers and hymns of
+the Gaels. A Norman shrine of gold for St. Patrick's tooth shows 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 population. Irish speech was so universal
+that a proclamation of Henry VIII in a Dublin parliament 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 seaports, 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 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 Dublin 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 the Irish genius had 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 this great influence fell
+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. Together
+they took a brilliant part in the commerce 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 ingenious 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 exchange velvets, silks and satins,
+cloth of gold and embroideries, wines and spices. Irish goldsmiths
+made the rich vessels that adorned the tables both of Normans and
+Irish. Irish masons built the new churches of continental design,
+carving at every turn their own traditional Irish ornaments. Irish
+scribes illuminated manuscripts which were as much praised in a Norman
+castle as in an Irish fort. Both 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 knowledge among the most learned men
+of Italy and France. A kind of national education was being worked
+out. Not one of the Irish chiefdoms allowed its schools to perish, and
+to these ancient schools the settlers in the towns added others of
+their own, to which the Irish also in time flocked, so that youths of
+the two races learned together. As Irish was the common language, so
+Latin was the second tongue for cultivated people and for all men of
+business in their continental trade. The English policy made English
+the language of traitors to their people, but of no use either for
+trade or literature.
+
+The uplifting of the national ideal was shown in the fourteenth and
+fifteenth centuries by a revival of learning like that which followed
+the Danish wars. Not one of the hereditary houses of historians,
+lawyers, poets, physicians, seems to have failed: we find them at work
+in the mountains of Donegal, along the Shannon, in lake islands,
+among the bare rocks of Clare, in the plains of Meath, in the valleys
+of Munster. In astronomy Irishmen were still first in Europe. In
+medicine they had all the science of their age. Nearly all our
+knowledge of Irish literature comes from copies of older works made by
+hundreds of industrious scribes of this period. From time to time
+Assemblies of all the learned men were called together by patriotic
+chiefs, or by kings rising into high leadership--"coming to Tara," as
+the people said. The old order was maintained in these national
+festivals. Spacious avenues of white houses were made ready for poets,
+streets of peaked hostels for musicians, straight roads of smooth
+conical-roofed houses for chroniclers, another avenue for bards and
+jugglers, and so on; and on the bright surface of the pleasant hills
+sleeping-booths of woven branches for the companies. From sea to sea
+scholars and artists gathered to show their skill to the men of
+Ireland; and in these glorious assemblies the people learned anew the
+wealth of their civilisation, and celebrated with fresh ardour the
+unity of the Irish nation.
+
+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 civilisation so vital and impassioned, so human and gay. But
+the mixed civilisation found no favour with the government; the "wild
+Irish" and the "degenerate English" were no better than "brute
+beasts," the English said, abandoned to "filthy customs" and 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
+embroiling them in war, but by making union of Ireland impossible in
+religion or in education, and by destroying public confidence. The new
+central organisation of the Irish church made it a powerful weapon in
+English hands. An Englishman was at once put in every archbishopric
+and every principal 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 disappeared; in the English idea the
+church was to destroy the nation. Higher education was also denied to
+both races. No Irish university 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 considerations of wealth, power, a
+privileged position, 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 of Ormond. For
+nearly two hundred years, as it happened, the heirs of this house were
+always minors, held in wardship by the king. English training at his
+court, visits to London, knighthoods and honours there, high posts in
+Ireland, prospects of new conquests of Irish land, a winking of
+government officials at independent privileges used on their estates
+by Ormond lords--such influences tied each heir in turn to England,
+and separated them from Irish interests--a "loyal" house, said the
+English--"fair and false as Ormond," said the people of Ireland.
+
+Both races suffered under this foreign misrule. 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 commanders 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. Confederacies of Irish and Anglo-Normans were
+formed, one following another in endless and hopeless succession.
+Through all 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."
+
+For a time it seemed as if the house of the Fitzgeralds, the most
+powerful house in Ireland, 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 English 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 Republic of Florence, in a letter
+recalling 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
+Ibernia, 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 European peoples with Irishmen; he had
+urgently pressed union of the races; he had planned 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
+Mor "the great" (1477-1513), 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 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 perfectly 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 policy was union in his country, and Ireland for the Irish.
+The lasting argument 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 subjects
+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 resolve to close dissensions 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 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
+VIII was warned. In spite of official intrigues, through all eddying
+accidents, 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 English king had won the devoted
+confidence of the Irish people.
+
+There was one faction alone which no reason could convert--the alien
+minority 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 offices 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE TAKING OF THE LAND
+
+1520-1625
+
+
+Henry VIII, like Henry II, 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 English
+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 bounds unknown--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. For months of subtle preparation his promises were
+explicit. All cause of offence was carefully taken away. Finally a
+parliament was summoned (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 both sides of the bargain. First the wording of the title
+was so altered as to take away any value in the "common consent" of
+parliament, since the king asserted his title to Ireland by
+inheritance and conquest, before and beyond all mandate of the popular
+will. And secondly it was arranged that Henry was under no obligation
+by negotiations or promises as to the land. For since, by the
+council's assurance to the king on the day the title was passed, there
+was no land occupied by any "disobedient" people which was not really
+the king's property by ancient inheritance or by confiscation, Henry
+might do as he would with his own. Royal concessions too must depend
+on how much revenue could be extracted from them to keep up suitably
+the title of king--on whether it was judicious to give Irishmen titles
+which they might afterwards plead to be valid--on whether Henry would
+find the promised grants convenient in case he chose later to proceed
+to "conquest and extermination."
+
+Parliament was dismissed for thirteen years, Henry, in fact, had
+exactly fulfilled the project of mystification he proposed twenty
+years before--"to be politically and secretly handled." Every trace of
+Irish law and land tenure must finally be abolished so that the soil
+should lie at the king's will alone, but this was to be done at first
+by secret and politic measures, here a little and there a little, so
+that, as he said, the Irish lords should as yet conceive no suspicion
+that they were to be "constrained to live under our law or put from
+all the lands by them now detained." "Politic practices," said Henry,
+would serve till such time as the strength of the Irish should be
+diminished, their leaders taken from them, and division put among
+themselves so that they join not together. If there had been any truth
+or consideration for Ireland in the royal compact some hope of
+compromise and conciliation might have opened. But the whole scheme
+was rooted and grounded in falsehood, and Ireland had yet to learn how
+far sufferings by the quibbles and devices of law might exceed the
+disasters of open war. Chiefs could be ensnared one by one in
+misleading contracts, practically void. A false claimant could be put
+on a territory and supported by English soldiers in a civil war, till
+the actual chief was exiled or yielded the land to the king's
+ownership. No chief, true or false, had power to give away the
+people's land, and the king was face to face with an indignant people,
+who refused to admit an illegal bargain. Then came a march of soldiers
+over the district, hanging, burning, shooting "the rebels," casting
+the peasants out on the hillsides. There was also the way of
+"conquest." The whole of the inhabitants were to be exiled, and the
+countries made vacant and waste for English peopling: the sovereign's
+rule would be immediate and peremptory over those whom he had thus
+planted by his sole will, and Ireland would be kept subject in a way
+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 II had said before, to "subdue
+or exile them as hath been thought," for from the settled lands
+plantation could be spread into the surrounding territories, and the
+Irishry steadily pushed back into the sea. Henceforth it became a
+fixed policy to "exterminate and exile the country people of the
+Irishry." Whether they submitted or not, the king was to "inhabit
+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 confiscated 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. And 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 recovered by the original Irish
+owners. Another 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 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
+slaughtered and their books and genealogies burned, so that no man
+"might know his own grandfather" and all Irishmen be confounded in the
+same ignorance and abasement, all glories gone, and all rights lost.
+The great object of the government was to destroy the whole tradition,
+wipe out the Gaelic memories, and begin a new English life.
+
+But even with all legal aids to extermination the land war proved more
+difficult than the English had expected. It lasted for some seventy
+years. The Irish were inexhaustible in defence, prodigious in courage,
+and endured hardships that Englishmen 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, killing every living thing and burning
+every granary of corn, 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 found a few water-cresses flocking as to
+a feast; so that in short space there were none almost 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 appearance 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, would have
+led Ireland in a way of peace, and brought about through equal
+prosperity 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. "God 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 slain, before he himself was
+killed in 1583: and his wretched son, born in the Tower, was brought
+from that prison to be shown to his heart-broken people--stunted in
+body, enfeebled 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 English
+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 for forty years, under the
+leading of the greatest of Irish statesmen and generals Hugh O'Neill
+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 conspiracy 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 common 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 soil, instructed in their traditions,
+and themselves guardians of their national life.
+
+Henry VIII 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 leaders,
+Anglo-Irish and Irish, had disappeared, 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 under 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 government became clear in Ireland an English
+army of conquest had to be created. "Have no dread nor fear," cried
+Red Hugh to his Irishmen, "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 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
+they 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 traitorously 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, however, were such as to
+baffle 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 VIII 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 contemplating 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
+organisation it is doubtful whether any device could have saved her
+from the force of the English invasion. Dublin could never be closed
+from 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 defence 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 prodigious 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 disappeared 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 civilisation triumphed.
+Even now, after confiscations 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 patience 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 inconceivable. The great dispersion had
+begun of Irish deported, exiled, or cast out by emigration. 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 multitude of Irish colleges founded abroad. They became chancellors
+of universities, professors, 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 professor of medicine in the
+universities of Toulouse 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 English 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 shut 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 scattered, their learned men hunted down, their books
+burned; native industries were abolished; 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 which the race had
+fashioned for itself was shattered. Love of country and every
+attachment of race and 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 thousands in life and in death. The invaders supposed the
+degradation of the Irish race to be at last completed. "Their youth
+and gentry are destroyed in the rebellion or gone to France," wrote
+one: "those that are left are destitute of horses, arms 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 established in Rome (1625) by the
+efforts 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 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
+soldiers laid to rest among them--O'Neills, O'Dohertys, O'Donnells,
+Lynches, Murphys, and the rest, from every corner of Ireland. "Here I
+break off till morning," wrote one 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 Grammar; 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
+(Ireland) 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 consigned to the same earth that
+covered the bodies of her children ... that the ancient 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 they had a printing-press; and
+used it to send out Irish grammars, 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 Culdaff on the shore of Inishowen (+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 catastrophe which must inflict
+mortal wounds upon our country."
+
+Ireland herself, however, remained the chief home of historical
+learning in the broad national sense. Finghin Mac Carthy Riabhach, a
+Munster chief, skilled in old and modern Irish, Latin, English, and
+Spanish, 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'Sullivan
+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 Munster, 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 popular 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'Duibhgeanain of Leitrim, were
+writing the _Annals of the Four Masters_ (1632-6); all of them
+belonging to hereditary houses of chroniclers. In that time of sorrow,
+fearing the destruction of every record of his people, O'Clery
+travelled through all Ireland to 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 O'Clery by the neighbouring Mac Brodys who had kept
+it safe for a thousand 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 labours. 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 sovereignty of
+the Irish of Erin to the end of time."
+
+In Galway a group of scholars laid, in Lynch's words, "a secure
+anchorage" for Irish history. Dr. John Lynch, the famous apologist of
+the Irish, wrote there his historical 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 distinguished
+Irish scholar, translated the _Annals of Ulster_ into English.
+O'Flaherty of Moycullen 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 Galway came also Dualtach Mac Firbis (1585-1670), of a
+family that had been time out of mind hereditary historians in north
+Connacht. He learned in one of the old Irish schools of law in
+Tipperary Latin, English, and Greek. Amid the horrors of Cromwell's
+wars he carried out a prodigious work on the genealogies of the clans,
+the greatest, perhaps, 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 constantly devoted to
+the preservation of Irish history. In his old age he lived, like other
+Irish scholars, a landless sojourner on the estates that had once
+belonged to his family and race; the last of the hereditary sennachies
+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 eighty-five he was murdered by a Crofton when he was resting in
+a house on his way to Dublin. In Connacht, too, lived Tadhg O'Roddy of
+Leitrim, a diligent collector of Irish manuscripts, who gathered
+thirty books of law, and many others of philosophy, poetry, physic,
+genealogies, mathematics, romances, and history; and defended against
+the English the character 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 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, Kildare, 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
+manuscripts, those that were lost and those that have escaped.
+
+The poets were still the leaders of national patriotism. The great
+"Contention of the Poets"--"Iomarbhagh na bhfiledh"--a battle that
+lasted for years between the bards of the O'Briens and the O'Donnells,
+in which 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 cliff
+in his old age by a Cromwellian soldier with the shout, "Say your rann
+now, little man!" Tadhg O'h'Uiginn of Sligo (+1617), 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 ill,
+    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
+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 unity of
+feeling of the whole race was preserved and the bards still remained
+men who belonged to their country rather than to a clan or territory.
+But with the exile of the Irish chiefs, with 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, putting 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. Born of
+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 for their loyalty she gave them the last
+gift 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 commonwealth 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,
+acknowledging one God, conjoined together in allegiance 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), born there of an English family,
+"conceived a great love for his native country and could not bear 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 manuscripts, 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 born
+in Dublin, devoted himself to the study of Irish antiquities. Baron
+d'Aungier, Master of the Rolls, put into writing every point which he
+could find in original documents "which for antiquity or singularity
+might interest this country." The enthusiasm 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 should 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
+provost 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 Irish. As bishop he braved the
+anger of the government by declaring the hardships of the Catholic
+Irish, and by circulating a catechism in English and Irish. Bitterly
+did Ussher reproach him for such a scandal at which the professors of
+the gospel did all take offence, and for daring to adventure that
+which his brethren had been "so long abuilding," 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 Dublin 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 ascendancy and dominion.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+RULE OF THE ENGLISH PARLIAMENT
+
+1640-1750
+
+
+The aim which English kings had set before them 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 inheritance" 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. Henry'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 II looked to Ireland, 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: confiscations old and new which the English parliament
+allowed the Crown for Irish 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 VIII 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 for 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 old ties bound them, and no new
+charities. "From the Anglo-Irish no man of special sanctity as yet is
+known to have sprung," observed a Gael of that day. Ancient patrimony
+had fallen. The new aristocracy was that of the strong hand and the
+exploiter's greed. Ordinary restraints of civilised societies were not
+yet born 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 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
+Ireland which had happened since Henry II 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
+holding parliaments subject only to the king and his privy council;
+statutes of the English parliament had not 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 representatives in
+the English 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 manner as if no Irish parliament existed. The new
+ruling classes had neither experience nor training. Regardless 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, 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 country. Adventurers
+were tempted by Irish wealth; what had once been widely diffused among
+the Irish tribes was gathered into the hands of a few aliens, who
+ruthlessly wasted the land for their own great enrichment. Enormous
+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 Irish boats, and what had cost L10 in labour and
+transport sold at L17 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 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 Irish 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 Puritan adventurers, joined in speculations to buy up
+"traitors' lands," openly sold in London at L100 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 parliament later at L2,500 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 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; discountenanced by parliament,
+they still mark the first experiment to appeal in this way to London
+on the Irish question. Parliament 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 lives 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 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 born in cities have had more
+opportunity to acquire civility than the Old Irish; but if the
+question be of civility, of good manners, of liberality, of
+hospitality, and charity towards all, these virtues dwelt among the
+Irish.
+
+Kings were restored to carry out the will of parliament. Charles II 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 III 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, 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 Protestants their revenues in Ireland; the planters,
+one-fourth 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 million and a half of their acres,
+proceeded to crush the liberties of its own English settlers by
+simply issuing statutes for Ireland of its sole authority. The acts
+were as tyrannical in their subject as in their origin. One (1691),
+which ordered that no Catholic 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 English 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 liberties were grounded on compact and charter; and
+declared that his native land shared the claims of all mankind to
+justice. "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 liberties were taken away, their
+parliaments rendered nugatory, and their lives and fortunes left to
+depend on the will of a legislature wherein they are not parties." The
+"ill consequences" were seen seventy years later when Molyneux' book
+became the text-book of Americans in their rising against English
+rule; and when Anglo-Irish defenders of their own liberties were
+driven to make common cause with their Irish compatriots--for "no one
+or more men," said Molyneux, "can by nature challenge 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 Commons
+dared not dispute the tyranny that was the warrant of their property:
+"I hope," was the ironic answer, "the honourable member will not
+question the validity of his title." With such an argument at hand,
+the English parliament had no need of circumspection or of soft words.
+It simply condemned Molyneux 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 Ireland wrote a
+hundred years later, "I think Great Britain may still easily manage
+the Protestants, and the Protestants the Catholics." 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 civil liberties 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. Stringent 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
+parliament 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." Government 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 nickname 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 offices 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 your 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 members, having no liberties 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 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 parliament of James I (1613), "indented with sorrow,
+signed with tears, and delivered in this house of peace and liberty
+with our disarmed hands." Protestants had never cause for fear in
+Ireland on religious 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 English exterminators, no Irish curse has
+been found against the Protestant for his religion, even through the
+black time of the penal laws. The parliament, however, began a series
+of penal laws against Irish Catholics. They were forbidden the use of
+their religion, almost every means of livelihood, every right of a
+citizen, every family affection. Their possessions were scattered,
+education was denied them, when a father died his children were
+handed over to a Protestant guardian. "The law," said the leading
+judges, "does not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish 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 religion of the Irish, but only with their property
+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
+sounded 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 make his bed upon." "See all that are
+without 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, without 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 chose. Their subjection tempted the commercial classes. To
+safeguard their own profits of commerce and industry English traders
+made statutes to annihilate Irish competition. They forbade carrying
+of cattle or dairy stuff to England, they forbade trade in soap or
+candles; in cloth, in glass, in linen save of the coarsest kind; the
+increase of corn 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 not build ships. From old time Ireland 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 Irish port or to unload. 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." In
+1720 all trade was at a stand, the country bare of money, "want and
+misery in every face." It was unfortunate, Englishmen said, that
+Ireland 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 successfully pushed their own business in a
+country 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 to starve. The planters' parliament looked on in barren
+helplessness. They 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 successive kings and
+their children, German relations of the Hanoverians, useful
+politicians covered by other names, a queen of Denmark banished for
+misconduct, a Sardinian ambassador under a false title, a trailing
+host of Englishmen--pensions steadily increasing from L30,000 to over
+L89,000. Some L600,000 was at last yearly sent over to England for
+absentees, pensions, government annuities, and the like. A parliament
+servile and tyrannical could not even pretend 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. The English parliament
+desired to make the Irish houses for ever unfit for self-government.
+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 indifferent "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 parliament 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 rest--"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 of the people and their despised
+birth left them helpless. Once a chief justice in Tipperary conducted
+trials with fairness and humanity: "for about ten miles from Clonmel
+both sides of the road were lined with men, women, and children, who,
+as he passed along, kneeled down and supplicated 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 to have died between 1691 and 1745.
+Uncounted thousands from north 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--prolonged,
+undisturbed, uncontrolled--to advance "the king's service," the
+dependency of Ireland upon England, and "the comfort or security of any
+English in it." A multitude of statesmen put their hands to the 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 government. 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 England, or to the Empire. The Irish
+people suffered a long agony unmatched, perhaps, in European history.
+Few of the Protestant country gentry had established their fortunes;
+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,
+industry, 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 not in the first rank--as field-marshals, admirals,
+ambassadors, prime ministers, scholars, physicians, merchants, founders
+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 government there was plain bankruptcy--"England,"
+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 Protestant
+exiles from Ulster went to America as "Sons of St. Patrick." "To shun
+persecution 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 over every adversity.
+Brigadier-General Owen Sullivan, born 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
+commander-in-chief of the naval forces of the States. Charles Thompson
+of Strabane was secretary of the Continental Congress. Eight Irishmen,
+passionate organisers of the revolt, signed the Declaration of
+Independence. After the war an Irishman prepared the Declaration for
+publication from Jefferson's rough draft; an Irishman's son first
+publicly read it; an Irishman first printed and published 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 RISE OF A NEW IRELAND
+
+1691-1750
+
+
+It might have seemed impossible amid such complicated tyrannies 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 union
+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 Cromwellians complained that thousands of the
+English who came over under Elizabeth had "become one with the Irish
+as well in affinity as in idolatry." Forty years later these
+Cromwellians planted on Irish farms 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 as
+of old. In the country places, far from the government, kindly
+friendships grew up between neighbours, and Protestants 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 Protestants. 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 some cave or rock where
+the people gathered in secret to celebrate mass. There remain
+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 chancels, 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 sculptured 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 of the Irish. By
+their industry and skill in the despised business of handicrafts and
+commerce the outlaws were fast winning most of the ready money of the
+country into their hands.
+
+It would be a noble achievement, said 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 Ruairc; 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 ascendency,
+and in later days to defend 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 ignorance, lying in
+impenetrable darkness, whence no voice ever arose even of protest or
+complaint, 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 neglecting everything written in the
+native tongue of the country, the Protestant planters, one-fourth of
+the inhabitants, secured to themselves 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 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 farmhouses, 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 geography. The
+greatest of the poets was Daibhi 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 O'Neachtain worked from 1734 to 1749 at a
+dictionary. Another learned poet and lexicographer, Aodh Buidh
+MacCurtin, published 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 imperative 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 O'Conor, "as many as I can of the ancient
+manuscripts of Ireland from the wreck which has overwhelmed everything
+that once belonged to us." O'Conor was of Sligo county. His father,
+like other gentlemen, had been so reduced by confiscation 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 difficulties he gained the best
+learning of his unhappy time. Much of the materials that O'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 immense
+work copied by his own scribe; and another copy made in 1734 by Hugh
+O'Mulloy, an excellent writer, for his friend Dr. O'Fergus of Dublin.
+He wrote for the learned, and delighted 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 Irishman at that time, were thus
+connected.
+
+It was the Irish antiquarians and historians who in 1759 drew Irishmen
+together into "the Catholic Committee"--Charles O'Conor, Dr. Curry,
+and Wyse of Waterford. O'Conor by his learning preserved 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 research 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 movement 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 nothing do ye according to the commandments, shun ye
+drunkenness and oaths and cursing, and do not say till death 'God
+damn' from your mouths." Riotous laughter broke out in some; they
+were all, in fact, professional wits--chief among them Eoghan Ruadh
+O'Sullivan 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 persecution and destruction.
+Among exiles in Connacht manuscripts perished, but old tradition lived
+on the lips of the peasants, who recited in their cabins the
+love-songs and religious poems of long centuries past. The people in
+the bareness of their poverty were nourished with a literature full of
+wit, imagination, feeling, and dignity. In the poorest hovels there
+were men skilled in a fine recitation. Their common language showed
+the literary influence, and Irish peasants even in our own day have
+used a vocabulary of some five thousand words, as against about eight
+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 education
+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 buried 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
+supported "poor scholars" free of charge. There were some in Kerry,
+some in Clare, where a very remarkable group of poets sprang up. From
+all parts of Ireland students 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 translation of Homer into Irish. But he
+worked in peril, flying for his life more than once before the
+bard-hunters; in his denunciations the English oppressor stands before
+us--plentiful his costly living 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 to 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 vindication of the
+Antiquities of Ireland got two hundred and thirty-eight subscribers,
+divided about equally between English and Gaelic 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
+slight 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 born, 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'
+parliament some dim sense of a national boast. An English nobleman
+coming to the parliament 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 county 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: 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 illiterature, 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 oppression." 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. 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) freedom of religion, schools of husbandry,
+relief of the poor from their intolerable burdens, the making
+parliament into a really representative 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 growing movement to unite the more liberal of the landowners,
+the Dissenters of the north, and the Catholics, in a common
+citizenship. It had proved impossible to carry out fully the penal
+code. No life could have gone on under its monstrous terms. There were
+not Protestants enough to carry on all the business 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'Driscoll, to the
+Protestant parliament in 1786.
+
+Such a movement alarmed the government extremely. If, they said,
+religious distinctions 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 XII
+
+AN IRISH PARLIAMENT
+
+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 rising power 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 men argued not only on free trade and government, 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 Catholics 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 entering 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 they had a country of their own and an "Irish interest"--Antony
+Malone. This astonishing orator and parliamentarian invented a
+patriotic opposition (1753). A great sea in a "storm" men said of him.
+Terror was immediately excited at his Irish origin and his national
+feeling. Dublin Castle feared that he might mean emancipation from the
+English legislature, and in truth the constitutional dependency 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 children 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 lawyers, men said, than any one living 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
+abilities; 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 English 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 executive under 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 by making himself the source of all
+favours, the giver of all gratifications, to concentrate political
+influence in the English Crown. A system of bribery began beyond all
+previous dreams; peerages were made by the score; and the first
+national debt of nearly two millions 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
+political power"; that "confiscation is their common title." "The
+king's business," as the government understood it, lay in "procuring
+the supplies 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 L50,000 for the
+payment of troops there. Other dangers had arisen. George Washington
+was made commander-in-chief of the forces for the American war in
+1775, and in 1778 France recognised American independence. The shores
+of Ireland lay open to attack: the country was drained of troops.
+Bands of volunteers were formed for its protection, Protestant troops
+led by landlords and gentry. In a year 40,000 volunteers were enrolled
+(1779). Ireland was no longer unarmed. What was even more important,
+she was no longer unrepresented. A packed parliament 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 gains from the
+Irish treasury in the near bankruptcy 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
+Commons. "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, required four main reforms. They
+asked for justice in the law-courts, and that the Habeas Corpus Act
+should be restored, and independent judges no longer hold their places
+at pleasure. They asked that the English commercial laws which had
+ruined Irish industry and sunk the land in poverty and idleness should
+be abandoned; taught by a long misery, Irishmen agreed to buy no
+manufactures but the work of Irish hands, and Dublin men compelled
+members to swear that they should vote for "the good of Ireland," 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
+independence of their parliament rose in every county 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 passion into the
+parliaments of Dublin and London. In three years the Dublin parliament
+had freed Protestant 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, 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," exclaimed 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 knew too how precarious was
+all that they had gained. Lord North described all past concessions 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 duty to ourselves and are resolved to be free." "As
+Irishmen, as Christians, and as Protestants" 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
+Commons 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 parliament 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 parliament of
+Ireland was now established and ascertained, and should never again be
+questioned 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
+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
+perpetua!_" 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 parliament entered into a gloomy inheritance--an authority
+which had been polluted and destroyed--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 VIII 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
+representation. All bills had to go through the privy council, whose
+secret and overwhelming influence was backed by the privy council in
+England, the English law officers, and finally the English cabinet.
+Irish proposals were rejected 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 the Irish
+Houses: no ministry resigned, whatever the majority by which it was
+defeated. Nominally elected by about one-fifth of the inhabitants, the
+Commons did not represent even these. A landlords' assembly, there was
+no Catholic in it, and no merchant. Even the Irish landlords were
+subdued to English interests: some hundred 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 pensioners equalled
+nearly one-half of the whole efficient body: "the price of a seat of
+parliament," men said, "is as well ascertained as that of the cattle
+of the field."
+
+All these dangers might with time and patience 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 another land. The good-will 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 to her wealth for imperial purposes. The gentry were
+losing the fears that had possessed them for their properties, and a
+fair hope was opening for an Ireland tolerant, united, educated, and
+industrious. Volunteers, 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 opulence and knowledge." It abolished the
+cruelties of the penal laws, and prepared the union of all religions
+in a common citizenship. It showed admirable knowledge in the method
+of restoring prosperity to the country, awakening 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 corruption 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 L2
+a yard on a certain cloth carried from Ireland to England, which paid
+5-1/2d. 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
+Liverpool alone. Pitt's proposal of free trade between the countries
+was accepted by Ireland (1785), but a storm of wrath swept over the
+British world of business; they refused Pitt's explanation that an
+Ireland where all industries had been killed could not compete
+against the industrial pre-eminence of England; and prepared a new
+scheme which re-established the ascendency of the British parliament
+over Irish navigation and commerce. This was rejected in Ireland as
+fatal to their Constitution. Twice again the Irish parliament
+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 viceroy 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 interfere 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 more for the protection of the British commerce 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 public 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 possession of the
+land, magistracy, and power of the country; holding that property
+under the 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 Catholic for fifteen years, was resisted by the whole
+might of the Castle. "If," wrote the lord-lieutenant to Pitt, "as her
+government became more open and more attentive to the feelings of the
+Irish nation, the difficulty of management had increased, is that a
+reason for opening the government and making the parliament 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 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 parliamentary
+rights which had been nominally conceded. The voice of the nation was
+silenced by the forbidding of all conventions. 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 movements 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 alienated and demoralised--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 country 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 America and France. The system
+of rule inaugurated 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
+measure to relieve their fears was denied, every measure to heighten
+them was pursued. Violent statesmen in the Castle, and officers 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 was, in fact, at last forced by
+the horrors which were openly encouraged by the government in 1796-7.
+"Every crime, every cruelty, that could be committed by Cossacks or
+Calmucks has been transacted here," said General Abercromby, sent in
+1797 as commander-in-chief. He refused the barbarities of martial rule
+when, as he said, the government's orders might be carried over the
+whole kingdom by an orderly 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 command 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
+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 English government was their implacable enemy, that
+the law was their oppressor, and Englishmen the haters of their race.
+The treatment 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 illustrate his credulity and his
+brutishness. The government cannot be excused by that same plea of
+fear. Clare no doubt held the doctrine 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 statesmanship--in
+a union of the nations in equal honour and liberties.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+IRELAND UNDER THE UNION
+
+1800-1900
+
+
+The horror of death lay over Ireland; cruelty and terror raised to a
+frenzy; government by martial law; a huge army occupying the country.
+In that dark time the plan for the Union with England, secretly
+prepared in London, was announced 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 eloquence would lengthen and perhaps confuse debates. But it was
+held that a hundred members would be lost in the British parliament,
+and that Irish doctrines would be sunk in the sea of British common
+sense.
+
+In Ireland a union was detested as a conspiracy 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 to 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 voluntary 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 universal detestation and
+execration of a Union the government dared not risk an election, and
+proceeded to pack the parliament privately. By official means the
+Commons 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 1-1/4
+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 military force, under the influence
+of immediate personal danger," was followed, as wise men 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 undying opposition 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 literature 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 _Times_ perceived
+in "the Celtic twilight" a "slovenly old barbarism." Peel in his
+ignorance thought Irishmen had good qualities except for "a general
+confederacy in crime ... a settled and uniform 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 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 Ireland "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 fourteen to three in favour of her Protestant
+establishment, instead of three to one against it as happened in the
+country 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 of supporting their clergy. All
+Irish financiers 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 century. 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 expenditure 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 2-1/4 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 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 millions. 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
+taxation 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 before. Meanwhile the effect 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 incapacity 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 by England; from 1817 to 1870 the cost of government in
+Ireland was under 100 millions, while the contributions to the
+imperial exchequer 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 Ireland 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 countries. 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 of its corn trade through the English law, and wasting away by
+emigration to half its former 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 lavish, fixed on the high prices of
+the English scale, and vastly more expensive 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 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-meaning
+governors went over to Ireland, but the omnipotent Castle machine
+broke their efforts 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 counsel for the
+accused as "the gentleman on the other side." Juries were packed by
+the sheriffs with Protestants, by whom all Orangemen were acquitted,
+all Catholics condemned, and the credit of the law lowered for both by
+a system which made the juryman 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 emancipation,
+refused tithe reform. Englishmen could not understand Irish
+conditions. The political 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 supported by Irish members, which would have been hailed with
+enthusiasm by an Irish parliament, were rejected by the English.
+Session after session 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 concerned 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 were increased by its effect in drawing
+Irish landlords to London. Their rents followed them, and the wealth
+spent by absentees founded no industries at home. A land system
+brought about by confiscation, and developed by absentees, meant
+unreclaimed wastes, lands half cultivated, and neglected 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 corn and
+cattle for export there, from the value of eight million pounds in
+1826 to seventeen million pounds of food stuffs in 1848, and so on.
+They grew potatoes to feed themselves. If the price of corn fell
+prodigiously--as at the end of the Napoleonic war, or at the passing
+of the corn 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 shiploads of provisions for the
+charges due in England. On the other hand, if potatoes rotted, famine
+swept over the country among its fields of corn and cattle. And when
+rent failed, summary powers of eviction were given at Westminster
+under English theories for use 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 bullocks, 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 corner 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 million 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 corn and the
+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 clearance 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 "surplus 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'Connell
+constantly protested that rather than the Union he would have the old
+Protestant parliament. "Any body would serve if only it is in
+Ireland," cried a leading Catholic nationalist in Parnell's time; "the
+Protestant synod would do." In the despair 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
+organisation was tried; the Catholic Association for Emancipation
+founded by O'Connell in 1823, an open society into which Protestants
+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 lawless insurrection to the disciplined enthusiasm of
+citizens for justice. A Young Ireland movement (1842-1848) under
+honoured names such as Thomas Davis and John Mitchel and Gavan 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
+O'Connell's peaceful movement by the government forced on violent
+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 constitutionalist
+and sincere Protestant, Isaac Butt, led a peaceful parliamentary
+movement for Home Rule (1870-1877); after him Charles Stewart Parnell
+fought in the same cause for fourteen years (1877-1891) and died with
+victory almost in sight. Michael Davitt, following the advice of Lalor
+thirty years before, 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 giving
+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 severance between the islands.
+
+In these conflicts there was not now, as there had never been in their
+history, a religious war on the part of Irishmen. The oppressed people
+were of one creed, and the administration of the other. Protestant
+and Catholic had come to mean ejector and ejected, the armed Orangeman
+and the disarmed peasant, the agent-or clergy-magistrate 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 will 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 subsistence,"
+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 conventions, we must watch
+with amazement the upspringing under O'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 conventions
+of the Irish, O'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 intelligence in the peasantry.
+Local gatherings 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 disorder; 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 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 distributed to them
+by their priests, all spirits renounced, and the peace not broken once
+throughout the week. As O'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 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 interminable
+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 O'Connell Parnell
+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 movement. 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 power to arrest without
+trial all Irishmen suspected of illegal projects--a power beyond all
+coercion hitherto. O'Connell had opposed a coercion act in 1833 for
+nineteen nights; Parnell in 1881 fought for thirty-two nights.
+Parliament had become the keeper of Irish tyrannies, not of her
+liberties, and its conventional 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 Parnell himself. The passion of rage reached its
+extreme height with the publication in _The Times_ (1888) of a
+facsimile letter from Parnell, to prove his consent to a paid system
+of murder and outrage. 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 Parnell (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 in the times of
+O'Connell, Thomas Davis, John O'Leary, and Parnell, and rises once
+more to-day as the fixed unchanging demand, 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. Verdicts
+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
+solution, 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 national idea. In its darkest
+days the country had remained true to the old Irish spirit of
+learning, that fountain of the nation's life. In O'Connell's time the
+"poor scholar" who took his journey to "the Munster schools" was sent
+out with offerings laid on the parish altars by Protestants and
+Catholics alike; as he trudged with his bag of books and the fees for
+the master sewn in the cuff of his coat, he was welcomed in every
+farm, and given of the best in the famishing hovels: "The Lord prosper
+him, and every one that has the heart set upon the learning." Bards
+and harpers and dancers wandered among the cottages. A famous bard
+Raftery, playing at a dance heard one ask, "Who is the musician?" and
+the blind fiddler answered him:
+
+    "I am Raftery the poet,
+    Full of hope and love,
+    With eyes that have no light,
+    With gentleness that has no misery.
+
+    Going west upon my pilgrimage,
+    Guided by the light of my heart,
+    Feeble and tired,
+    To the end of my road.
+
+    Behold me now,
+    With my face to a wall,
+    A-playing music
+    To empty pockets."
+
+Unknown scribes still copied piously the national records. A Louth
+schoolmaster could tell all the stars and constellations of heaven
+under the old Irish forms and names. A vision is given to us through a
+government Ordnance Survey of the fire of zeal, the hunger of
+knowledge, among the tillers and the tenants. In 1817 a dying farmer
+in Kilkenny repeated several times to his sons his descent back to the
+wars of 1641 and behind that to a king of Munster in 210
+A.D.--directing the eldest never to forget it. This son took his
+brother, John O'Donovan, (1809-1861) to study in Dublin; in Kilkenny
+farmhouses he learned the old language and history of his race. At the
+same time another Irish boy, Eugene O'Curry (1796-1862), of the same
+old Munster stock, working on his father's farm in great poverty,
+learned from him much knowledge of Irish literature and music. The
+Ordnance Survey, the first peripatetic university Ireland had seen
+since the wanderings of her ancient scholars, gave to O'Donovan and
+O'Curry their opportunity, where they could meet learned men, and use
+their hereditary knowledge. A mass of material was laid up by their
+help. Passionate interest was shown by the people in the memorials of
+their ancient life--giants' rings, cairns, and mighty graves, the
+twenty-nine thousand mounds or moats that have been counted, the raths
+of their saints and scholars--each with its story living on the lips
+of the people till the great famine and the death or emigration of the
+people broke that long tradition of the race. The cry arose that the
+survey was pandering to the national spirit. It was suddenly closed
+(1837), the men dismissed, no materials published, the documents
+locked up in government offices. But for O'Donovan and O'Curry what
+prodigies of work remained. Once more the death of hope seemed to call
+out the pieties of the Irish scholar for his race, the fury of his
+intellectual zeal, the passion of his inheritance of learning. In the
+blackest days perhaps of all Irish history O'Donovan took up Michael
+O'Clery's work of two hundred years before, the Annals of the Four
+Masters, added to his manuscript the mass of his own learning, and
+gave to his people this priceless record of their country (1856).
+Among a number of works that cannot be counted here, he made a
+Dictionary which recalls the old pride of Irishmen in their language.
+O'Curry brought from his humble training an incredible industry,
+great stores of ancient lore, and an amazing and delicate skill as a
+scribe. All modern historians have dug in the mine of these men's
+work. They open to Anglo-Irish scholars such as Dr. Reeves and Dr.
+Todd, a new world of Irish history. Sir Samuel Ferguson began in 1833
+to give to readers of English the stories of Ireland. George Petrie
+collected Irish music through all the west, over a thousand airs, and
+worked at Irish inscriptions and crosses and round towers. Lord
+Dunraven studied architecture, and is said to have visited every
+barony in Ireland and nearly every island on the coast.
+
+These men were nearly all Protestants; they were all patriots. Potent
+Irish influences could have stirred a resident gentry and resident
+parliament with a just pride in the great memorials of an Ireland not
+dead but still living in the people's heart. The failure of the hope
+was not the least of the evils of the Union. The drift of landlords to
+London had broken a national sympathy between them and the people,
+which had been steadily growing through the eighteenth century. Their
+sons no longer learned Irish, nor heard the songs and stories of the
+past. The brief tale of the ordnance survey has given us a measure of
+the intelligence that had been wasted or destroyed by neglect in
+Ireland. Archbishop Whately proposed to use the new national schools
+so as to make this destruction systematic, and to put an end to
+national traditions. The child who knew only Irish was given a teacher
+who knew nothing but English; his history book mentioned Ireland
+_twice_ only--a place conquered by Henry II., and made into an English
+province by the Union. The quotation "This is my own, my native land,"
+was struck out of the reading-book as pernicious, and the Irish boy
+was taught to thank God for being "a happy English child." A Connacht
+peasant lately summed up the story: "I suppose the Famine and the
+National Schools took the heart out of the people." In fact famine and
+emigration made the first great break in the Irish tradition that had
+been the dignity and consolation of the peasantry; the schools
+completed the ruin. In these, under English influence, the map of
+Ireland has been rolled up, and silence has fallen on her heroes.
+
+Even out of this deep there came a revival. Whitley Stokes published
+his first Irish work the year after O'Curry's death; and has been
+followed by a succession of laborious students. Through a School of
+Irish Learning Dublin is becoming a national centre of true Irish
+scholarship, and may hope to be the leader of the world in this great
+branch of study. The popular Irish movement manifested itself in the
+Gaelic League, whose branches now cover all Ireland, and which has
+been the greatest educator of the people since the time of Thomas
+Davis. Voluntary colleges have sprung up in every province, where
+earnest students learn the language, history, and music of their
+country; and on a fine day teacher and scholars gathered in the open
+air under a hedge recall the ancient Irish schools where brehon or
+chronicler led his pupils under a tree. A new spirit of self-respect,
+intelligence, and public duty has followed the work of the Gaelic
+League; it has united Catholic and Protestant, landlord and peasant.
+And through all creeds and classes a desire has quickened men to
+serve their country in its social and industrial life; and by
+Agricultural Societies, and Industrial Development Societies, to
+awaken again her trade and manufactures.
+
+The story is unfinished. Once again we stand at the close of another
+experiment of England in the government of Ireland. Each of them has
+been founded on the idea of English interests; each has lasted about a
+hundred years--"Tudor conquest," Plantations, an English parliament, a
+Union parliament. All alike have ended in a disordered finance and a
+flight of the people from the land.
+
+Grattan foretold the failure of the Union and its cause. "As Ireland,"
+he said, "is necessary to Great Britain, so is complete and perfect
+liberty necessary to Ireland, and both islands must be drawn much
+closer to a free constitution, that they may be drawn closer to one
+another." In England we have seen the advance to that freer
+constitution. The democracy has entered into larger liberties, and has
+brought new ideals. The growth of that popular life has been greatly
+advanced by the faith of Ireland. Ever since Irish members helped to
+carry the Reform Acts they have been on the side of liberty, humanity,
+peace, and justice. They have been the most steadfast believers in
+constitutional law against privilege, and its most unswerving
+defenders. At Westminster they have always stood for human rights, as
+nobler even than rights of property. What Chatham foresaw has come
+true: the Irish in the English parliament have been powerful
+missionaries of democracy. A freedom-loving Ireland has been
+conquering her conquerors in the best sense.
+
+The changes of the last century have deeply affected men's minds. The
+broadening liberties of England as a free country, the democratic
+movements that have brought new classes into government, the wider
+experience of imperial methods, the growing influence of men of
+good-will, have tended to change her outlook to Ireland. In the last
+generation she has been forced to think more gravely of Irish
+problems. She has pledged her credit to close the land question and
+create a peasant proprietary. With any knowledge of Irish history the
+religious alarm, the last cry of prejudice, must inevitably disappear.
+The old notion of Ireland as the "property" of England, and of its
+exploitation for the advantage of England, is falling into the past.
+
+A mighty spirit of freedom too has passed over the great Colonies and
+Dominions. They since their beginning have given shelter to outlawed
+Irishmen flying from despair at home. They have won their own pride of
+freedom, and have all formally proclaimed their judgment that Ireland
+should be allowed the right to shape her own government. The United
+States, who owe so much to Irishmen in their battle for independence,
+and in the labours of their rising prosperity, have supported the
+cause of Ireland for the last hundred years; ever since the first
+important meeting in New York to express American sympathy with
+Ireland was held in 1825, when President Jackson, of Irish origin, a
+Protestant, is said to have promised the first thousand dollars to the
+Irish emancipation fund.
+
+In Ireland itself we see a people that has now been given some first
+opportunities of self-dependence and discipline under the new
+conditions of land ownership and of county government. We see too the
+breaking up of the old solid Unionist phalanx, the dying down of
+ancient fears, the decaying of old habits of dependence on military
+help from England, and a promise of revival of the large statesmanship
+that adorned the days of Kildare and of Grattan. It is singular to
+reflect that on the side of foreign domination, through seven hundred
+years of invasion and occupation, not a single man, Norman or English,
+warrior or statesman, has stood out as a hero to leave his name, even
+in England, on the lips or in the hearts of men. The people who were
+defending their homes and liberties had their heroes, men of every
+creed and of every blood, Gaelic, Norman, English, Anglican, Catholic,
+and Presbyterian. Against the stormy back-ground of those prodigious
+conflicts, those immeasurable sorrows, those thousand sites
+consecrated by great deeds, lofty figures emerge whom the people have
+exalted with the poetry of their souls, and crowned with love and
+gratitude--the first martyr for Ireland of "the foreigners" Earl
+Thomas of Desmond, the soul of another Desmond wailing in the Atlantic
+winds, Kildare riding from his tomb on the horse with the silver
+shoes, Bishop Bedell, Owen Roe and Hugh O'Neill, Red Hugh O'Donnell,
+Sarsfield, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Robert Emmett, O'Connell, Davis,
+Parnell--men of peace and men of war, but all lovers of a free nation.
+
+In memory of the long, the hospitable roll of their patriots, in
+memory of their long fidelities, in memory of their national faith,
+and of their story of honour and of suffering, the people of Ireland
+once more claim a government of their own in their native land, that
+shall bind together the whole nation of all that live on Irish soil,
+and create for all a common obligation and a common prosperity. An
+Irish nation of a double race will not fear to look back on Irish
+history. The tradition of that soil, so steeped in human passion, in
+joy and sorrow, still rises from the earth. It lives in the hearts of
+men who see in Ireland a ground made sacred by the rare intensity of
+human life over every inch of it, one of the richest possessions that
+has ever been bequeathed by the people of any land whatever to the
+successors and inheritors of their name. The tradition of national
+life created by the Irish has ever been a link of fellowship between
+classes, races, and religions. The natural union approaches of the
+Irish Nation--the union of all her children that are born under the
+breadth of her skies, fed by the fatness of her fields, and nourished
+by the civilisation of her dead.
+
+
+
+
+SOME IRISH WRITERS ON IRISH HISTORY
+
+
+  JOYCE, P.W.--Social History of Ancient Ireland. 2 vols. 1903.
+     This book gives a general survey of the old Irish
+     civilisation, pagan and Christian, apart from political
+     history.
+
+  FERGUSON, SIR SAMUEL.--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 history.
+
+  GREEN, A.S.--The Making of Ireland and its Undoing (1200-1600).
+     1909. An attempt is here made to bring together evidence, some
+     of it unused before, of the activity of commerce and
+     manufactures, and of learning, that prevailed in mediaeval
+     Ireland, until the destruction of the Tudor wars.
+
+  MITCHELL, 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.
+
+  TAYLOR, J.F.--Owen Roe O'Neill. 1904. This small book is the best
+     account of a very great Irishman; and gives the causes of the
+     Irish insurrection in 1641, and the war to 1650.
+
+  DAVIS, THOMAS.--The Patriot Parliament of 1689. 1893. A brief but
+     important study of this Parliament. It illustrates the Irish
+     spirit of tolerance in 1689, 1843, and 1893.
+
+  BAGWELL, RICHARD.--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.
+
+  MURRAY, A.E.--Commercial Relations between England and Ireland.
+     1903. A useful study is made here of the economic condition of
+     Ireland from 1641, under the legislation of the English
+     Parliament, the Irish Parliament, and the Union Parliament.
+
+  LECKY, 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 JAMES
+     BRYCE. 1907. These essays, mostly by Irishmen, give in a
+     convenient form the outlines of the history of the time. There
+     is a brief account of O'Connell.
+
+  O'BRIEN, R. BARRY.--Life of Charles Stewart Parnell. 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'ALTON, E.A.--History of Ireland (1903-1910). 3 vols. This is the
+     latest complete history of Ireland.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    +-----------------------------------------------------------+
+    | Typographical errors corrected in text:                   |
+    |                                                           |
+    | Page  12: tewnty replaced with twenty                     |
+    | Page  19: meterical rules replaced with metrical rules    |
+    | Page  33: "earthern entrenchment" replaced with           |
+    |           "earthen entrenchment"                          |
+    | Page  42: interupted replaced with interrupted            |
+    | Page 176: successsive replaced with successive            |
+    | Page 184: scupltured replaced with sculptured             |
+    | Page 198: "risingp ower" replaced with "rising power"     |
+    |                                                           |
+    +-----------------------------------------------------------+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Irish Nationality, by Alice Stopford Green
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