Irish Nationality Part 3

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 t.i.tle 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 pa.s.sage 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 owners.h.i.+p 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--hara.s.sed 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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 pa.s.ses 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 n.o.bility, 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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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 partners.h.i.+p, 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 fas.h.i.+on, 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 fas.h.i.+onable 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 a.s.semblies of all the learned men were called together by patriotic chiefs, or by kings rising into high leaders.h.i.+p--"coming to Tara," as the people said. The old order was maintained in these national festivals. s.p.a.cious 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 a.s.semblies 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 impa.s.sioned, 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 d.a.m.nable law that was no law, hateful to G.o.d 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 princ.i.p.al 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 cla.s.s 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 wards.h.i.+p 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 const.i.tution 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 circ.u.mstances." 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 G.o.d 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 a.s.sembly 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 statesmans.h.i.+p 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 G.o.d 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 "t.i.tle to the land"; there was another great day of deception in Dublin. Henry asked the t.i.tle 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 t.i.tle, the king and council were making arrangements together to render void both sides of the bargain. First the wording of the t.i.tle was so altered as to take away any value in the "common consent" of parliament, since the king a.s.serted his t.i.tle 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 a.s.surance to the king on the day the t.i.tle was pa.s.sed, 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 t.i.tle of king--on whether it was judicious to give Irishmen t.i.tles 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 owners.h.i.+p. 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 cla.s.s 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 lords.h.i.+p 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 t.i.tles 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 s.h.i.+re 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 unsurpa.s.sed 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 abas.e.m.e.nt, 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 hards.h.i.+ps 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 famis.h.i.+ng 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 s.p.a.ce 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. "G.o.d 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 rest.i.tution 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 a.s.sa.s.sination. 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 a.s.sa.s.sins 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 n.o.blest 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.