The Irish Race in the Past and the Present Part 35

In like manner, Murrough O'Brien, the Baron of Inchiquin, the descendant of so many Catholic kings and saints, whose name was a glory in itself, and so closely linked to the Catholic glories of the island, was converted, by the education which he had received, into a most cruel oppressor of the Church of his baptism. His expeditions, through the same country which his ancestors had ruled, were characterized by all the barbarities practised at the time by Munro, Coote, and all the parliamentary leaders of the Scotch Puritans, and would have fitted him as a worthy compeer of Cromwell and Ireton, who were soon to follow.

The name of Cashel and its cathedral, where he murdered so many priests, women, and children, around the altar adorned by the great and good Cormac McCullinan, would alone suffice to hand his name down to the execration of posterity.

Ormond and Murrough being the two chiefs of the "peace party,"

what wonder that the prelates, who had so earnestly labored at the formation of the Kilkenny Confederation, and the Nuncio at their head, refused to have aught to do with projects in which such men were concerned, when it is borne in mind also that several provisions of that "peace treaty" were directly opposed to the oath taken by the Confederates? But, unfortunately, Ormond was a skilful diplomat, had been dispatched by the king, and was supposed to be carrying out the ideas suggested to him by the unhappy monarch. His representations, therefore, could not fail to carry weight, princ.i.p.ally with the Anglo-Irish lords of the Pale, many of whom, influenced by his courtly manners and address, declared openly for the proposed peace.

Thus did the peace sow the germs of division and even war among the Irish. The unity among the Catholics, so full of promise, was soon broken up; and those who had met each other in such a brotherly spirit in the day when the native chiefs and Anglo- Irish lords a.s.sembled together at Tara, who swore then that the division of centuries should exist no longer, began to look upon each other again as enemies. Without going at length into the vicissitudes of those various contentions, it is enough to say that in the end war broke out between those who had so recently taken the oath of confederation together. Owen Roe O'Neill, the victor of Benburb, and the only man who could direct the Irish armies, was attacked by Preston and other lords of the Pale, and died, as some historians allege, of poison administered to him by one of them.

This was the result of the intrigues of Ormond; nevertheless, Charles continued to place confidence in him, and though he had been twice obliged to resign his lieutenancy, and once to fly the country, the infatuated sovereign sent him back once more.

If was only at the end of the struggle, when the ill-fated king was at length in the hands of his enemies, that Ormond could be brought to consent to conditions acceptable to the national party. But then it was too late; the parliamentary forces had carried every thing before them in England; England was already republican to the core; and the armies which had been employed against the Cavaliers, once the efforts of the latter had ceased with the death of the king, were at liberty to leave the country, now submissive to parliamentary rule, and cross over to Ireland, with Cromwell at their head, to crush out the nation almost, and concentrate on that fated soil, within the short s.p.a.ce of nine months, all the horrors of past centuries.

By the death of Owen Roe O'Neill just at that time, Ireland was left without a leader fit to cope with the great republican general. The country had already been devastated by Coote, Munro, St. Leger, and other Scotch and English Puritans; but the ma.s.sacres which, until the coming of Cromwell, had been, at least, only local and checked by the troops of Owen Roe, soon extended throughout the island, unarrested by any forces in the field. The Cromwellian soldiers, not content with the character of warriors, came as "avengers of the Lord," to destroy an "idolatrous people."

That their real design was to exterminate the nation, and use the opportunity which then presented itself for that purpose, there can by no doubt. It was only after a fair trial that the project was found to be impossible, and that other expedients were devised. Coote had previously acted with this design in view, as is now an ascertained fact, and had been encouraged in the course he pursued by the Dublin government. 1 (1 See Matthew O'Connor's "Irish Catholics.") The same might be shown of St.

Leger, in Munster, toward the beginning of the insurrection. At all events, all doubt in the matter, if any existed, ceased with the landing of Cromwell in 1649, when the real object of the war at once showed itself everywhere.

The result of this man's policy has been painted by Villemain, in his "Histoire de Cromwell," in a sentence: "Ireland became a desert which the few remaining inhabitants described by the mournful saying, 'There was not water enough to drown a man, not wood enough to hang him, not earth enough to bury him.'"

The French writer attributes to the whole island what was said of only a part of it. To this day, the name of Cromwell is justly execrated in Ireland, and "the curse of Cromwell " is one of the bitterest which can be invoked upon a person's head. But, at present, the fidelity of the Irish to the Stuarts concerns us, and a few reflections will put it in a strong but true light before us.

Ever since the restoration of Charles II., many Englishmen have professed great reverence for the memory of the "martyr-king."

Even the subsequent Revolution of 1658 left the monument erected to him untouched. Many British families continued steady in their devotion to the Scotch line, and the name of Jacobite was for them a t.i.tle of honor. Yet what were their sufferings for the cause of the king during his struggle with the Parliament, and after his execution? A few n.o.blemen lost their lives and estates; some went into exile and followed the fortunes of the Pretenders who tried to gain possession of the throne. But the bulk of the nation--England--may be said to have suffered nothing by the great revolution which led to the Commonwealth.

On the contrary, it is acknowledged that the administration of Cromwell at least brought peace to the country, and raised the power of Great Britain to a higher eminence in Europe than it had ever known before. As usual, the English made great profession of loyalty, but, as a rule, were particularly careful that no great inconvenience should come to them from it.

Treated with contempt and distrust by Charles and his advisers, so insulted in every thing that was dear to her that it is still a question for historians if, in many instances, the king and the royalists did not betray her, Ireland alone, after having taken her stand for a whole decade of years for G.o.d and the king, resolved to face destruction unflinchingly in support of what she imagined to be a n.o.ble cause.

After the landing of Cromwell, when to any sensible man there no longer remained hope of serving the cause of the king, when the desire which is natural to every human heart, of saving what can be saved, might, not only without dishonor, but with justice and right, have dictated the necessity of coming to terms with the parliamentarians, and of abandoning a cause which was hopeless, "on the 4th of December, 1649, Eber McMahon, Bishop of Clogher, a mere Irishman by name, by descent, by enthusiastic attachment to his country, exerted his great abilities to rouse his countrymen to a persevering resistance to Cromwell, and to unite all hearts and hands in the support of Ormond's administration. .

. . All the bishops concurred in his views, and subscribed a solemn declaration that they would, to the utmost of their power, forward his Majesty's rights, and the good of the nation. . . .

Ormond, at last, either sensible that no reliance could be placed on them, or that the treachery of Inchiquin's troops was, at least, on the part of the Irish, a fair ground of distrust and suspicion of the remainder, consented to their removal."-- ("Irish Catholics.")

"At last!" will be the reader's exclamation, while he wonders if another people could be found forbearing enough to wait eight years for the adoption of such a necessary measure.

And the only reward for their fidelity to King Charles I. could under the circ.u.mstances be destruction. They waited with resignation for the impending gloom to overshadow them. Terrible moment for a nation, when despair itself fails to nerve it for further resistance and possible success! Such was the position of the Irish at the death of Charles.

Who shall describe that loyalty? After Ormond had met with the defeat he deserved in the field; after the cities had fallen one after another into the hands of the destroyer, who seldom thought himself bound to observe the conditions of surrender; after the chiefs, who might have protracted the struggle, had disappeared either by death or exile, the doom of the nation was sealed; yet it shrank not from the consequences.

The barbarities of Cromwell and his soldiers had depopulated large tracts of territory to such an extent that the troops marching through them were compelled to carry provisions as through a desert. The cattle, the only resource of an agricultural country, had been all consumed in a ten years' war.

It was reported that, after every successful engagement, the republican general ordered all the men from the age of sixteen to sixty to be slaughtered without mercy, all the boys from six to sixteen to be deprived of sight, and the women to have a red- hot iron thrust through their b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Rumors such as these, exaggerated though they may be, testify at least to the terror which Cromwell inspired. As for the captured cities, there can be no doubt of the wholesale ma.s.sacres carried out therein by his orders. Of the entire population of Tredagh only thirty persons survived, and they were condemned to the labor of slaves.

Hugh Peters, the chaplain of Fairfax, wrote after this barbarous execution: "We are masters of Tredagh; no enemy was spared; I just come from the church where I had gone to thank the Lord."

The same fate awaited Wexford, and, later on, Drogheda. Cromwell, when narrating those b.l.o.o.d.y ma.s.sacres, concluded by saying, "People blame me, but it was the will of G.o.d."

The Bible, the holy word of G.o.d, misread and misunderstood by those fanatics, persuaded them that it would be a crime not to exterminate the Irish, as the Lord punished Saul for having spared Agag and the chief of the Amalekites. Whoever wishes for further details of these sickening atrocities, committed in the name of G.o.d, may find them in a mult.i.tude of histories of the time, but chiefly in the "Threnodia" of Friar Morrison.

Certain modern Irish historians would seem not to understand the heroism of their own countrymen. "Bitterly," says A. M.

O'Sullivan, "did the Irish people pay for their loyalty to an English sovereign. Unhappily for their worldly fortunes, if not for their fame, they were high-spirited and unfearing, where pusillanimity would certainly have been safety, and might have been only prudence."

But the verdict of posterity, always a just one, calls such a high-spirited and unfearing att.i.tude true heroism, and spurns pusillanimity even when it insures safety and may be called prudence, if its result is the surrender of holy faith and Christian truth. Safety and prudence characterized the conduct of the English nation under the iron rule of Cromwell, as under the tyranny of the Tudors. Can the reader of history admire the nation on that account? Who shall affirm that the result of the craven spirit of the English was the prosperity which ensued, and that of Irish heroism destruction and gloom? The history of either nation is far from ended yet; and bold would be the man who dare a.s.sert that the prosperity of England is everlasting, and the humiliation of Ireland never to know an end.

However that may be, this at least is undeniable: the opinion current of the Irish character is demonstrated to be altogether an erroneous one by the incontrovertible facts cursorily narrated above. Determination of purpose, adherence to conscience and principle, consistency of conduct, are terms all too weak to convey an idea of the magnanimity displayed by the people, and of their heroic bearing throughout those stirring events.

At last, after a b.l.o.o.d.y struggle with Cromwell and Ireton, on May 12, 1652, "the Leinster army of the Irish surrendered at Kilkenny on terms which were successively adopted by the other princ.i.p.al bodies of troops, between that time and the September following, when the Ulster forces came to composition." Then began the real woes of Ireland. Never was the ingenuity of man so taxed to destroy a whole nation as in the measures adopted by the Protector for that purpose. It is necessary to present a brief sketch of them, since all that the Irish suffered was designed to punish them for their attachment to their religion, and, be it borne in mind, their devotion to the lawful dynasty of the Stuarts.

First, then, to render easy of execution the stern and cruel resolve of the new government, the defenders of the nation were not only to be disarmed, but put out of the way. Hence Cromwell was gracious enough to consent that they be permitted to leave the country and take service in the armies of the foreign powers then at peace with the Commonwealth. Forty thousand men, officers and soldiers, adopted this desperate resolution.

"Soon agents from the King of Spain, the King of Poland, and the Prince de Conde, were contending for the service of the Irish troops. Don Ricardo White, in May, 1672, s.h.i.+pped seven thousand in batches from Waterford, Kinsale, Galway, Limerick, and Bantry, for the King of Spain. Colonel Christopher Mayo got liberty in September to beat his drums, to raise three thousand more for the same destination. Lord Muskerry took with him five thousand to the King of Poland. In July, 1654, three thousand five hundred went to serve the Prince de Conde. Sir Walter Dungan and others got liberty to beat their drums in different garrisons for various destinations."--(Prendergast.)

To prove that the desperate resolution of leaving their country did not originate with the Irish, notwithstanding what some have written to the contrary, it is enough to remark that their expatriation was made a necessary condition of their surrender by the new government. For instance, Lord Clanrickard, according to Matthew O'Connor, "deserted and surrounded, could obtain no terms for the nation, nor indeed for himself and his troops, except with the sad liberty of transportation to any other country in amity with the Commonwealth."

To prove, if necessary, still further that the expatriation of the Irish troops was part of a scheme already resolved upon, it is enough to remember the indisputable fact that from the surrender at Kilkenny in 1652, until the open announcement in the September of 1653, that the Parliament had a.s.signed Connaught for the dwelling-place of the Irish nation, whither they were to be "transplanted" before the 1st of May, 1654, the various garrisons and small armies which had fought so gallantly for Ireland and the Stuarts were successively urged (and urged by Cromwell meant compelled) to leave the country; and it was only when the last of the Irish regiments had departed that the doom of the nation was boldly and clearly announced.

But these forced exiles were not restricted to the warrior cla.s.s.

"The Lord Protector," says Prendergast, "applied to the Lord Henry Cromwell, then major-general of the forces of Ireland, to engage soldiers . . . . and to secure a thousand young Irish girls to be s.h.i.+pped to Jamaica. Henry Cromwell answered that there would be no difficulty, only that force must be used in taking them; and he suggested the addition of fifteen hundred or two thousand boys of from twelve to fourteen years of age. . . .

The numbers finally fixed were one thousand boys and one thousand girls."

The total number of children disposed of in the same way, from 1652 to 1655, has been variously estimated at from twenty thousand to one hundred thousand. The British Government at last was compelled to interfere and put a stop to the infamous traffic, when, the mere Irish proving too scarce, the agents were not sufficiently discriminating in their choice, but s.h.i.+pped off English children also to the Tobacco Islands.

At last the island was left utterly without defenders, and sufficiently depopulated. It is calculated that, when the last great measure was announced and put into execution, only half a million of Irish people remained in the country, the rest of the resident population being composed of the Scotch and English, introduced by James I., and the soldiers and adventurers let in by Cromwell.

The main features of the celebrated "act of settlement" are known to all. It was an act intended to dispose quietly of half a million human beings, destined certainly in the minds of its projectors to disappear in due time, without any great violence-- to die off --and leave the whole island in the possession of the "G.o.dly."

Connaught is famed as being the wildest and most barren province of Ireland. At the best, it can support but a scanty population.

At this time it had been completely devastated by a ten years'

war and by the excesses of the parliamentary forces. This province then was mercifully granted to the unhappy Irish race; it was set apart as a paradise for the wretched remnant to dwell in all Connaught, except a strip four miles wide along the sea, and a like strip along the right bank of the Shannon. This latter judicious provision was undoubtedly intended to prevent them from dwelling by the ocean, whence they might derive subsistence or a.s.sistance, or means of escape in the event of their ever rising again; and, on the other hand, from crossing the Shannon, on the east side of which their homes might still be seen. This cordon of four miles' width was drawn all around what was the Irish nation, and filled with the fiercest zealots of the "army of the Lord" to keep guard over the devoted victims.

Surely the doom of the race was at last sealed!

But let all justice be done to the Protector. The act was to the effect that, on the first day of May, 1654, all who, throughout the war, had not displayed a constant good affection to the Parliament of England in opposition to Charles I., were to be removed with their families and servants to the wilds of a poor and desolated province, where certain lands were to be given them in return for their own estates. But, who of the Irish could prove that they had displayed a "constant good affection"

to the English Parliament during a ten years' war? The act was nothing less than a proscription of the whole nation. The English of the Pale were included among the old natives, and even a few Protestant royalists, who had taken of the cause of the fallen Stuarts. The only exception made was in favor of "husbandmen, ploughmen, laborers, artificers, and others of the inferior sort." The English and Scotch--const.i.tuted by this act of settlement lords and masters of the three richest provinces of Ireland-- could not condescend to till the soil with their own hands and attend to the mechanical arts required in civil society. Those duties were reserved for the Irish poor. It was hoped that, deprived of their n.o.bility and clergy, they might be turned to any account by their new masters, and either become good Protestants or perish as slaves. Herein ment.i.ta est iniquitas sibi.

The heart-rending details of this outrage on humanity may be seen in Mr. Prendergast's "Cromwellian Settlement." There all who read may form some idea of the extent of Ireland's misfortunes.

It is a wonder which cannot fail to strike the reader, how, after so many precautions had been taken, not only against the further increase of the race, but for its speedy demolition, how, reduced to a bare half million, penned off on a barren tract of land, left utterly at the mercy of its persecutors, without priests, without organization of any kind, it not only failed to perish, but, from that time, has gone on, steadily increasing, until to-day it spreads out wide and far, not only on the island of its birth, but on the broad face of two vast continents.

In the s.p.a.ce at our disposal, it is impossible to satisfy the curiosity of the reader on this very curious and interesting topic. A few remarks, however, may serve to broadly indicate the chief causes of this astonis.h.i.+ng fact, taken apart from the miraculous intervention of G.o.d in their favor.

First, then, Connaught became more Irish than ever, and a powerful instrument, later on, to a.s.sist in the resurrection of the nation. In fact, as will soon be seen, it preserved life to it. Again, the outcasts, who were allowed to remain in the other three provinces as servants, or slaves, rather, were not found manageable on the score of religion; and, although new acts of Parliament forbade any bishop or priest to remain in the island, many did remain, some of them coming back from the Continent, whither they had been exported, to aid their unfortunate countrymen in this their direst calamity.

As Matthew O'Connor rightly says : "The ardent zeal, the fort.i.tude and calm resignation of the Catholic clergy during this direful persecution, might stand a comparison with the constancy of Christians during the first ages of the Church. In the season of prosperity they may have pushed their pretensions too far"--this is M. O'Connor's private opinion of the Confederation of Kilkenny-- "but, in the hour of trial, they rose superior to human infirmities. . . . Sooner than abandon their flocks altogether, they fled from the communion of men, concealed themselves in woods and caverns, from whence they issued, whenever the pursuit of their enemies abated, to preach to the people, to comfort them in their afflictions, to encourage them in their trials;. . . their haunts were objects of indefatigable search; bloodhounds, the last device of human cruelty, were employed for the purpose, and the same price was set on the head of a priest as on that of a wolf."--(Irish Catholics.)

But, the expectation that the Irish of the lower cla.s.ses, bereft of their pastors as well as of the guidance of their chieftains, would fall a prey to proselytizing ministers, and lose at once their nationality and their religion, was doomed to meet with disappointment.

Perhaps the cause more effective than all others in preserving the Irish nation from disappearing totally, came from a quarter least expected, or rather the most improbable and wonderful.

No device seemed better calculated to succeed in Protestantizing Ireland than the decree of Parliament which set forth that not only the officers, but even the common soldiers of the parliamentary army should be paid for their services, not in money, but in land; and that the estates of the old owners should be parcelled out and distributed among them in payment, as well as among those who, in England, had furnished funds for the prosecution of the war. Although many soldiers objected to this mode of compensation, some selling for a trifle the land allotted to them and returning to their own country, the great majority was compelled to rest satisfied with the government offer, and so resolved to settle down in Ireland and turn farmers. But a serious difficulty met them: women could not be induced to abandon their own country and go to dwell in the sister isle, while the Irish girls, being all Catholics, a decree of Parliament forbade the soldiers to marry them, unless they first succeeded in converting them to Protestantism. After many vain attempts, doubtless, the Cromwellian soldiers soon found the impossibility of bringing the "refractory" daughters of Erin to their way of thinking, and could find only one mode of bridging over the difficulty--to marry them first, without requiring then to apostatize; and secure their prize after by swearing that their wives were the most excellent of Protestants.

Thus while perjury became an every-day occurrence, the victorious army began to be itself vanquished by a powerful enemy which it had scarcely calculated upon, and was utterly unprepared to meet, and finally resting from its labors, enjoyed the sweets of peace and the fat of the land.

But woman, once she feels her power, is exacting, and in course of time the Cromwellian soldiers found that further sacrifices still were required of them, which they had never counted upon.