History of England from the fall of Wolsey to the death of Elizabeth Volume II Part 27

And now, at length, on the same 14th of October, the English anchors were finally raised, and the deputy, with Sir William Brereton and Sir John Salisbury, several hundred Northumberland horse trained in the Border wars, and a number not specified, but probably from two to three thousand archers and men-at-arms,[350] were under way. Whether the blame of the delay lay with the incompetency of Skeffington, or the contempt of the English, which would not allow them to make haste into the presence of an enemy who never dared to encounter them in the field, but carried on war by perjury, and pillage, and midnight murder--whatever the cause was, they were at length on their way, and, through the devotion of Ormond, not too late to be of use.

[Sidenote: They cross in a single night.]

[Sidenote: Council of war at Lambay Island.]

The fleet crossed the Channel in a single night, and the next morning were under Lambay Island,[351] where they had run in for shelter. Here news was brought them that Dublin Castle was taken. They did not believe it; but a council of war was held, and Skeffington resolved that for himself he might not risk the attempt to land; Brereton and Salisbury might try it, if they could do so "without casting themselves away"; the deputy would go on to Waterford with the body of the army, and join Sir John St. Loo, who had crossed to that port in the week preceding, from Bristol.

[Sidenote: Sir William Brereton with 500 men enters the Liffey.]

Accordingly, on the morning of the 17th of October, Sir William Brereton, with five hundred men, sailed into the mouth of the Liffey; and running up the river, instead of an enemy drawn up to oppose his landing, he found the mayor and corporation waiting at the quay, with drums, and flags, and trumpets to welcome him as a deliverer.[352]

[Sidenote: An English detachment cut off through Skeffington's imprudence.]

Skeffington was less successful; he remained under Lambay waiting for a wind for Waterford, and in the meantime Fitzgerald, hearing of the arrival of the fleet, was in force upon the hills overlooking the anchorage. The English commander, though aware that the insurgents were in the neighbourhood, allowed himself, with extreme imprudence, to land a detachment of troops, with directions to march to Dublin. He himself went with the fleet to the Skerries,[353] where he conceived, under false information, that a party of the rebels were lying. He found nothing there but a few fis.h.i.+ng-boats; and while he was engaged in burning these, Fitzgerald attacked the division which had been sent on sh.o.r.e, and cut them off to a man. Nor was this the only misfortune. The pirate s.h.i.+ps which had been watching Dublin Bay hovered round the fleet, cutting off straggling transports; and although one of them was chased and driven on sh.o.r.e, the small success poorly counterbalanced the injury which had been inflicted.[354]

[Sidenote: October 21. Skeffington lands in Dublin,]

[Sidenote: November. And resolves, the season being late, to do nothing.]

After a week of this trifling, Skeffington consented to resign his intention of going to Waterford, and followed Brereton into Dublin. Why he had delayed a day after discovering that the river and the city were open to him, it is impossible to conjecture. But his presence was of little benefit, and only paralysed his abler subordinates. As soon as he had brought his army into the city, he conceived that he had done as much as the lateness of the season would allow. The November weather having set in wild and wet, he gave up all thought of active measures till the return of spring; and he wrote to inform the king, with much self-approbation, that he was busy writing letters to the Irish chiefs, and making arrangements for a better government; that Lord Thomas Fitzgerald had been proclaimed traitor at the market-cross; and that he hoped, as soon as the chancellor and the vicar-general could come to an understanding, the said traitor might be p.r.o.nounced excommunicated.[355]

All this was very well, and we learn to our comfort that in due time the excommunication was p.r.o.nounced; but it was not putting down the rebellion--it was not the work for which he was sent to Ireland with three thousand English soldiers.

[Sidenote: Fitzgerald burns Trim and Dunboyne, within six miles of Dublin.]

[Sidenote: He again writes to the emperor.]

Fitzgerald, as soon as the army was landed, retired into the interior; but finding that the deputy lay idle within the walls, he recovered heart, and at the head of a party of light horse reappeared within six miles of Dublin. Trim and Dunboyne, two populous villages, were sacked and burnt, and the blazing ruins must have been seen from the battlements of the Castle. Yet neither the insults of the rebels nor the entreaty of the inhabitants could move the imperturbable Skeffington. He lay still within the city walls;[356] and Fitzgerald, still further encouraged, despatched a fresh party of ecclesiastics to the pope and the emperor, with offers of allegiance and promises of tribute,[357]

giving out meanwhile in Ireland that he would be supported in the spring or summer by the long talked-of Spanish army. Promises costing Charles V. nothing, he was probably liberal of them, and waited for the issue to decide how far they should be observed.

[Sidenote: Skeffington ventures an expedition to Drogheda, and brings back the army in safety.]

If this was so, the English deputy seemed to be determined to give the rebellion every chance of issuing as the emperor desired. The soldiers were eager for employment, but Skeffington refused to give his officers an opportunity for distinction in which he did not share,[358] and a few ineffectual skirmishes in the neighbourhood were the sole exploits which for five months they were allowed to achieve. One expedition, as far as Drogheda, the deputy indeed ventured, towards the end of November; and in the account of it which he sent to England, he wrote as if it were matter of congratulation that he had brought his army back in safety.

Nor were his congratulations, at least to himself, without reason, for he owed that safety to G.o.d and to fortune. He had allowed the archers to neglect the old precaution of taking cases for their bows. They were overtaken by a storm, which wetted the strings and loosened the feathers of the arrows; and thus, at disadvantage, they were intercepted in a narrow defile,[359] and escaped only because the Irish were weak in numbers.

[Sidenote: He excuses himself on the ground of bad health.]

[Sidenote: Consequence of the deputy's inaction.]

He excused himself for his shortcomings on the plea that he was in bad health--an adequate apology for his own inaction, but none for his appointment on a service so dangerous. Yet perhaps his failure is explained by the scene of it. Elsewhere, Sir William Skeffington may have been a gallant soldier and a reasonable man; but the fatal atmosphere of Ireland seems at all times to have had a power of prostrating English intellect. The Protector Cromwell alone was cased in armour which could defy its enchantments. An active officer might have kept the field without difficulty. The Master of the Rolls, to prove that the country, even in mid-winter, was practicable without danger, rode to Waterford in November with only three hundred horse, through the heart of the disturbed districts, and returned unmolested.[360] The Earl of Ossory, with Sir John St. Loo, made an appointment to meet Skeffington at Kilcaa,[361] where, if he brought cannon, they might recover the castles of the government which were held by the Geraldines.

He promised to go, and he might have done so without danger or difficulty; but he neither went nor sent; only a rumour came that the deputy was ill;[362] and in these delays and with this ostentation of imbecility, the winter pa.s.sed away, as if to convince every wavering Irishman that, strong as the English might be in their own land, the sword dropped from their nerveless hands when their feet were on Irish soil. Nor was this the only or the worst consequence. The army, lying idle in Dublin, grew disorganized; many of the soldiers deserted; and an impression spread abroad that Henry, after all, intended to return to the old policy, to pardon Fitzgerald, and to restore him to power.[363]

[Sidenote: February 16.]

The clear pen of the indefatigable Allen lays the state of affairs before us with the most painful distinctness. "My lord deputy," he wrote to Cromwell on the 16th of February, "now by the s.p.a.ce of twelve or thirteen weeks hath continued in sickness, never once going out of his house; he as yet is not recovered. In the meantime the rebel hath burnt much of the country, trusting, if he may be suffered, to waste and desolate the Inglishry, [and thus] to enforce this army to depart. Sirs, as I heretofore advertised you, this rebel had been banished out of all these parts or now, if all men had done their duties. But, to be plain with you, except there be a marshal appointed, which must do strait correction, and the army prohibited from resorting to Dublin (but ordered to keep the field), the king shall never be well served, but his purpose shall long be delayed."[364]

[Sidenote: The wages are ill-paid. The army is mutinous.]

[Sidenote: The military stores worthless.]

The wages, also, were ill-paid, though money in abundance had been provided. The men were mutinous, and indemnified themselves at the expense of the wretched citizens, whose houses they pillaged at will under pretence that the owners were in league with the rebels.[365] The arms, also, which had been supplied to the troops, were of the worst kind: they had been furnished out of ordnance which had been long on hand, and were worthless.[366]

[Sidenote: The Irish council desire the recal of Skeffington. The king refuses.]

[Sidenote: The army leave Dublin, and commence work.]

The conduct of the king, when the representations of Allen were laid before him, was very unlike what the popular conception of his character would have led us to expect. We imagine him impatient and irritable; and supposing him to have been (as he certainly was) most anxious to see the rebellion crushed, we should have looked for some explosion of temper; or, at least, for some imperious or arbitrary message to the unfortunate deputy. He contented himself, however, with calmly sending some one whom he could trust to make inquiries; and even when the result confirmed the language of the Master of the Rolls, and the deputy's recal was in consequence urged upon him, he still refused to pa.s.s an affront upon an old servant. He appointed Lord Leonard Grey, brother-in-law of the Countess of Kildare, chief marshal of the army; but he would not even send Grey over till the summer, and he left Skeffington an opportunity of recovering his reputation in the campaign which was to open with the spring.[367] The army, however, was ordered to leave Dublin without delay; and the first move, which was made early in February, was followed by immediate fruits. Two of the pirates who had been acting with Fitzgerald were taken, and hanged.[368] Several other offenders of note were also caught and thrown into prison; and in two instances, as if the human ministers of justice had not been sufficiently prompt, the higher powers thought fit to inflict the necessary punishment. John Teling, one of the archbishop's murderers, died of a foul disorder at Maynooth;[369] and the Earl of Kildare, the contriver of the whole mischief, closed his evil career in the Tower of London "for thought and pain."[370] He was attainted by the parliament which sat in the autumn, and lay under sentence of death when death came unbidden to spare the executioner his labour.

[Sidenote: Death of the Earl of Kildare.]

[Sidenote: March 14. Skeffington takes the field. Siege of Maynooth Castle.]

Meantime, the spring opened at last, and affairs further improved.

Skeffington's health continued weak; but with the advance of the season he was able to take the field; and on the 14th of March he appeared under the walls of Maynooth. This castle was the strongest in the possession of the Geraldines. Vast labour had been recently expended on its fortifications, for which the king's subjects had been forced to pay. It was defended by the ordnance from Dublin, and held by a small but adequate garrison. It was thought to be impregnable, and in the earlier stages of the science of gunnery it might possibly have defied the ordinary methods of attack. Nay, with a retrospective confidence in the strength of its defences, the Irish historians have been unable to believe that it could have been fairly taken; they insist that it resisted the efforts of the besiegers, and was on the point of being saved by Fitzgerald,[371] when it was delivered to the English commander by treachery. A despatch to the king, which was written from the spot, and signed by the deputy and all the members of the Irish council, leaves but little remaining of this romance.

[Sidenote: The walls are bombarded.]

[Sidenote: March 23. The castle is stormed.]

[Sidenote: Thirty-seven prisoners taken.]

An authentic account of an attack by cannon on a fortified place at that era, will scarcely fail to be interesting. The castle, says this doc.u.ment, was so strongly defended both with men and ordnance, "as the like had not been seen in Ireland since the Conquest." The garrison consisted of a hundred men, of which sixty were gunners. On the third day of the siege the English batteries opened on the north-west side of the donjon, and destroying the battlements, buried the cannon on that part of the wall under the ruins. The siege lines were then moved "to the north side of the base court of the castle, at the north-east end whereof there was a new-made, very strong, and fast bulwark, well garrisoned with men and ordnance." Here a continual fire was sustained for five days, "on that wise that a breach and entry was made there."

Whereupon, continues the despatch, "The twenty-third day, being Tuesday next before Easter day, there was a galiard a.s.sault given before five o'clock in the morning, and the base court entered; at which entry there were slain of the ward of the castle about sixty, and of your Grace's army no more but John Griffin, yeoman of your most honourable guard, and six others which were killed with ordnance of the castle at the entry.

Howbeit, if it had not pleased G.o.d to preserve us, it were to be marvelled that we had no more slain. After the base court was thus won, we a.s.saulted the great castle, which within a while yielded."

Thirty-seven of the remaining garrison were taken prisoners, with two officers, two Irish ecclesiastics who had distinguished themselves in promoting the insurrection, and one of the murderers of the archbishop.

The place was taken by fair fighting, it seems, without need of treachery; and the capture by storm of a fortified castle was a phenomenon altogether new to the Irish, who had yet to learn the effect of well-served cannon upon walls.[372]

The work at length was begun in earnest, and in order to drive the lesson home into the understanding of the people, and to instruct them clearly that rebellion and murder were not any longer to be tolerated, the prisoners were promptly brought up before the provost-marshal, and twenty-six of them there and then, under the ruins of their own den, were hung up for sign to the whole nation.[373]

[Sidenote: The Pardon of Maynooth. The effect of it upon the people.]

[Sidenote: The rebellion vanishes.]

A judicial operation of this kind had never before been witnessed in Ireland within the known cycle of its history, and the effect of it was proportionately startling. In the presence of this "Pardon of Maynooth,"

as it was called, the phantom of rebellion vanished on the spot. It was the first serious blow which was struck in the war, and there was no occasion for a second. In a moment the noise and bravado which had roared from Donegal to Cork was hushed into a supplication for forgiveness. Fitzgerald was hastening out of Th.o.m.ond to the relief of his fortress. When they heard of the execution, his army melted from him like a snowdrift. The confederacy of the chiefs was broken up; first one fell away from it, and then another; and before the summer had come, O'Brien of Inchiquin, O'Connor, who had married Fitzgerald's sister, and the few scattered banditti of the Wicklow mountains, were all who remained of the grand a.s.sociation which was to place the Island of Saints at the feet of the Father of Christendom.

Sadder history in the compa.s.s of the world's great chronicle there is none than the history of the Irish: so courageous, yet so like cowards; so interesting, yet so resolute to forfeit all honourable claims to interest. In thinking of them, we can but shake our heads with Lord Chancellor Audeley, when meditating on this rebellion, and repeat after him, "they be a people of strange nature, and of much inconstancy."[374]

[Sidenote: Fitzgerald retreats into Th.o.m.ond, intending to sail for Spain.]

[Sidenote: O'Brien persuades him to remain.]

Lord Fitzgerald was now a fugitive, with a price upon his head. He retreated into Th.o.m.ond, intending to sail for Spain, and to attempt with his own lips to work persuasion with the emperor.[375] There was an expectation, however, that the Spaniards might be already on their way: and O'Brien persuaded him to remain, to prevent the complete disintegration of his party. Sir James de la Hyde was therefore sent to Charles; and the wretched young n.o.bleman himself wandered from place to place, venturing, while Skeffington still lay at Maynooth, into the neighbourhood of his home, among his own people, yet unable to do more than evade the attempts which were made to capture him. The life of the rebellion was gone from it.

[Sidenote: Fidelity of the people.]

There was no danger that he would be betrayed. The Irish had many faults--we may not refuse them credit for their virtues. However treacherous they were to their enemies, however inconstant in their engagements, uncertain, untrue in ordinary obligations, they were without rivals in the world in their pa.s.sionate attachments among themselves; and of all the chiefs who fell from Fitzgerald's banner, and hastened with submission to the English deputy, there was perhaps not one who, though steeped in the blood of a hundred murders, would not have been torn limb from limb rather than have listened to a temptation to betray him.

[Sidenote: Arrival of Lord Leonard Grey. Fitzgerald writes to him with an offer of surrender.]