Part 64

"To Henry VIII. the policy which had been pursued by his father was utterly hateful. His purpose was to rule in Ireland as thoroughly and effectively as he ruled in England. … The Geraldines, who had been suffered under the preceding reign to govern Ireland in the name of the Crown, were quick to discover that the Crown would no longer stoop to be their tool. They resolved to frighten England again into a conviction of its helplessness; and the rising of Lord Thomas Fitzgerald followed the usual fashion of Irish revolts. A murder of the Archbishop of Dublin, a capture of the city, a repulse before its castle, a harrying of the Pale, ended in a sudden disappearance of the rebels among the bogs and forests of the border on the advance of the English forces. … Unluckily for the Geraldines, Henry had resolved to take Ireland seriously in hand, and he had Cromwell [Sir Thomas] to execute his will. Skeffington, the new Lord Deputy, brought with him a train of artillery, which worked a startling change in the political aspect of the island. The castles which had hitherto sheltered rebellion were battered into ruins. … Not only was the power of the great Norman house which had towered over Ireland utterly broken, but only a single boy was left to preserve its name. With the fall of the Geraldines Ireland felt itself in a master's grasp. … In seven years, partly through the vigour of Skeffington's successor, Lord Leonard Grey, and still more through the resolute will of Henry and Cromwell, the power of the Crown, which had been limited to the walls of Dublin, was acknowledged over the length and breadth of Ireland. … Chieftain after chieftain was won over to the acceptance of the indenture which guaranteed him in the possession of his lands, and left his authority over his tribesmen untouched, on conditions of a pledge of loyalty, of abstinence from illegal wars and exactions on his fellow-subjects, and of rendering a fixed tribute and service in war-time to the Crown. … [This] firm and conciliatory policy must in the end have won, but for the fatal blunder which plunged Ireland into religions strife at the moment when her civil strife seemed about to come to an end. … In Ireland the spirit of the Reformation never existed among the people at all. They accepted the legislative measures passed in the English Parliament without any dream of theological consequences, or of any change in the doctrine or ceremonies of the Church. … The mission of Archbishop Browne 'for the plucking-down of idols and extinguishing of idolatry' was the first step in the long effort of the English Government to force a new faith on a people who to a man clung passionately to their old religion. Browne's attempts at 'tuning the pulpits' were met by a sullen and significant opposition. … Protestantism had failed to wrest a single Irishman from his older convictions, but it succeeded in uniting all Ireland against the Crown. … The population within the Pale and without it became one, 'not as the Irish nation,' it has been acutely said, 'but as Catholics.' A new sense of national identity was found in the identity of religion."

_J. R. Green, Short History of the English People, chapter 7, section 8._

ALSO IN: _R. Bagwell, Ireland Under the Tudors, volume 1, chapters 9-15._

_M. Haverty, History of Ireland, chapter 30._

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IRELAND: A. D. 1559-1603. The wars of Shane O'Neil and Hugh O'Neil, Earls of Tyrone. The League of the Geraldines and the Ulster Confederacy.

"The Reformation begun under Henry VIII. was carried out with pitiless determination under Edward VI., and was met by the Catholics with unflinching opposition. Under Mary there was a period of respite, but the strife was renewed with greater fierceness in the succeeding reign. As authentic Irish history begins with St. Patrick, so with Elizabeth modern Irish history may be said to begin. … At her accession, Elizabeth was too much occupied with foreign complications to pay much heed to Ireland. Trouble first began in a conflict between the feudal laws and the old Irish law of Tanistry. Con O'Neil, Earl of Tyrone, had taken his title from Henry VIII., subject to the English law of succession; but when Con died, the clan O'Neil, disregarding the English principle of hereditary succession, chose Shane O'Neil, an illegitimate son of Con, and the hero of his Sept, to be The O'Neil. Shane O'Neil at once put himself forward as the champion of Irish liberty, the supporter of the Irish right to rule themselves in their own way and pay no heed to England. Under the pretence of governing the country, Elizabeth overran it with a soldiery who, as even Mr. Froude acknowledges, lived almost universally on plunder, and were little better than bandits. The time was an appropriate one for a champion of Irish rights. Shane O'Neil boldly stood out as sovereign of Ulster, and pitted himself against Elizabeth. … Shane fought bravely against his fate, but he was defeated [A. D. 1567], put to flight, and murdered by his enemies, the Scots of Antrim, in whose strongholds he madly sought refuge. His head was struck off, and sent to adorn the walls of Dublin Castle. His lands were declared forfeit, and his vassals, vassals of the Crown. English soldiers of fortune were given grants from Shane's escheated territory, but when they attempted to settle they were killed by the O'Neils. Others came in their place, under Walter Devereux, Earl of Essex, and did their best to simplify the process of colonization by exterminating the O'Neils, men, women, and children, wherever they could be got at. After two years of struggle Essex was compelled to abandon his settlement. But other colonizers were not disheartened. Some West of England gentlemen, under Peter Carew, seized on Cork, Limerick and Kerry, and sought to hold them by extirpating the obnoxious natives. Against these English inroads the great Geraldine League was formed. In the reign of Mary, that boy of twelve whom Henry VIII. had not been able to include in the general doom of his house had been allowed to return to Ireland, and to resume his ancestral honours, Once more the Geraldines were a great and powerful family in Ireland." Defeated in their first rising, "the Geraldines and their companion chiefs got encouragement in Rome and pledges from Spain, and they rose again under the Earl of Desmond and Sir James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald. At first they had some successes, They had many wrongs to avenge. … Sir Francis Cosby, the Queen's representative in Leix and Offaly, had conceived and executed the idea of preventing any further possible rising of the chiefs in those districts by summoning them and their kinsmen to a great banquet in the fort of Mullaghmast, and there massacring them all. Out of 400 guests, only one man, a Lalor, escaped from that feast of blood. … With such memories in their minds, the tribes rose in all directions to the Desmond call. … Elizabeth sent over more troops to Ireland under the new Lord Deputy, Sir William Pelham, who had with him as ally Ormonde, the head of the house of Butler, hereditary foes of the Geraldines, and easily induced to act against them. Pelham and Ormonde cut their way over Munster, reducing the province by unexampled ferocity. Ormonde boasted that he had put to death nearly 6,000 disaffected persons. Just at this moment some of the chiefs of the Pale rose, and rose too late. They gained one victory over Lord Grey de Wilton in the pass of Glenmalure [August, 1580]. … Grey immediately abandoned the Pale to the insurgents, and turned to Smerwick [A. D. 1580], where some 800 Spanish and Italian soldiers had just landed, too late to be of any service to the rebellion, and had occupied the dismantled fort. It was at once blockaded by sea and by land. In Grey's army Sir Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser both held commands. Smerwick surrendered at discretion, and the prisoners were killed by Raleigh and his men in cold blood. Flushed by this success, Grey returned to the Pale and carried all before him. The Geraldines were disheartened, and were defeated wherever they made a stand. … Munster was so vigorously laid waste that Mr. Froude declares that 'the lowing of a cow or the sound of a ploughboy's whistle was not to be heard from Valentia to the Rock of Cashel.' Holinshed declares the traveller would not meet any man, woman, or child, saving in towns or cities, and would not see any beast; and Spenser gives a melancholy picture of the misery of the inhabitants, 'as that any stony heart would rue the same.' … The next step was to confiscate the estates of the rebellious chieftains. … The estates of Desmond and some 140 of his followers came to the Crown. The land was then distributed at the cheapest rate in large tracts to English nobles and gentlemen adventurers, who were pledged to colonize it with English labourers and tradesmen. But of these labourers and tradesmen not many came over, and those who did soon returned, tired of struggling for their foothold with the dispossessed Irish." During all this Geraldine or Desmond rebellion Ulster had remained quiet; but in 1594 it began to show signs of disturbance. "Hugh O'Neil, the grandson of that Con O'Neil whom Henry VIII. had made Earl of Tyrone, had been brought up at the English court, and confirmed in the lordship of Tyrone by the English Government. In the brilliant court of Elizabeth the young Irish chief was distinguished for his gifts of mind and body. When he came of age he was allowed to return to Ireland to his earldom. Once within his own country, he assumed his ancestral title of The O'Neil, and revived all the customs of independent Irish chieftains. For long enough he took no part in any plots or movements against the Crown; but many things, the ties of friendship and of love, combined to drive him into rebellion.

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… Tyrone in the end consented to give the powerful support of his name and his arms to a skilfully planned confederation of the tribes. On all sides the Irish chiefs entered into the insurrection. O'Neil was certainly the most formidable Irish leader the English had yet encountered. … Victory followed victory [that of the Yellow Ford, 1598, being the most important]. In a little while all Ireland, with the exception of Dublin and a few garrison towns, was in the hands of the rebels. Essex, and the largest army ever sent to Ireland, crossed the Channel to cope with him; but Essex made no serious move, and after an interview with Tyrone, in which he promised more than he could perform, he returned to England to his death. His place was taken by Lord Mountjoy, who, for all his love of angling and of Elizabethan 'play-books,' was a stronger man. Tyrone met him, was defeated [at Kinsale, 1601]. From that hour the rebellion was over. … At last Tyrone was compelled to come to terms. He surrendered his estates, renounced all claim to the title of The O'Neil, abjured alliance with all foreign powers, and promised to introduce English laws and customs into Tyrone. In return he received a free pardon and a re-grant of his title and lands by letters patent. Rory O'Donnell, Red Hugh's brother, also submitted, and was allowed to retain the title of Earl of Tyrconnel. Elizabeth was already dead, and the son of Mary Stuart [James I.] was King of England when these terms were made; but they were not destined to do much good."

_J. H. McCarthy, Outline of Irish History, chapter 4._

ALSO IN: _T. D. McGee, Popular History of Ireland, book 8, chapters 3-11 (volumes 1-2)._

_M. Haverty, History of Ireland, chapters 32-35._

_R. Bagwell, Ireland under the Tudors, volume 2._

_T. Leland, History of Ireland, book 4, chapters 1-5 (volume 2)._

IRELAND: A. D. 1607-1611. The flight of the Earls and the Plantation of Ulster.

"With the submission of the Earl of Tyrone terminated the struggle between the Tudor princes and the native Celtic tribes. No chieftain henceforward claimed to rule his district in independence of the Crown of England. The Celtic land tenure, the Brehon laws, the language, customs, and traditions of the defeated race were doomed to gradual yet certain extinction. … Before Elizabeth was laid in the grave, the object for which during so many years she had striven was thus at length accomplished; … but between the wars of the Tudors and the civil government of the Stuarts, still remain (the intermediate link, as it were, between the two) the fall of the able man who had created and so long conducted an almost national resistance, and the colonisation by English settlers of his demesnes and the adjoining parts of Ulster."

_A. G. Richey, Short History of the Irish People, chapter 20._

"Lord Bacon, with whom ideas grew plentifully, had a suggestion at the service of the new king as profitable as the 'princelie policie' which he taught his predecessor. He was of opinion that a great settlement of English husbandmen in Ireland, able to guard as well as to till the land, would help to secure the interest of the Crown. Till this was done Ireland was not effectually reduced, as Sir Edward Coke afterwards declared, 'for there was ever a back-door in the north.' The only question was where to plant them. O'Neill and Tyrconnell had proved dangerous adversaries; they possessed a fertile territory, and as their 'loose order of inheritance' had been duly changed into 'an orderly succession,' they were quite ripe for confiscation. But they had been ostentatiously received into favour at the close of the late war, and some decent pretence for destroying them so soon was indispensable. It was found in a letter conveniently dropped in the precincts of Dublin Castle, disclosing a new conspiracy. Of a conspiracy there was not then, and has not been since discovered, any evidence worth recording. The letter was probably forged, according to the practise of the times; but where so noble a booty was to be distributed by the Crown, one can conceive how ill-timed and disloyal any doubt of their treason would have appeared at the Court of James, or of the Lord Deputy. They were proclaimed traitors, and fled to the Continent to solicit aid from the Catholic Powers. Without delay James and his counsellors set to work. The King applied to the City of London to take up the lands of the wild Irish. They were well watered, he assured them, plentifully supplied with fuel, with good store of all the necessaries for man's sustenance; and moreover yielded timber, hides, tallow, canvas, and cordage for the purposes of commerce. The Companies of Skinners, Fishmongers, Haberdashers, Vintners and the like thereupon became Absentee Proprietors, and have guzzled Irish rents in city feasts and holiday excursions to Ireland from that day to this. Six counties in Ulster were confiscated, and not merely the chiefs, but the entire population dispossessed. The fruitful plains of Armagh, the deep pastoral glens that lie between the sheltering hills of Donegal, the undulating meadow lands stretching by the noble lakes and rivers of Fermanagh, passed from the race which had possessed them since before the redemption of mankind. … The alluvial lands were given to English courtiers whom the Scotch king found it necessary to placate, and to Scotch partisans whom he dared not reward in England. The peasants driven out of the tribal lands to burrow in the hills or bogs were not treated according to any law known among civilised men. Under Celtic tenure the treason of the chief, if he committed treason, affected them no more than the offences of a tenant for life affect a remainder man in our modern practice. Under the feudal system they were innocent feudatories who would pass with the forfeited land to the Crown, with all their personal rights undisturbed. The method of settlement is stated with commendable simplicity by the latest historian. The 'plantators' got all the land worth their having; what was not worth their having—the barren mountains and trackless morass, which after two centuries still in many cases yield no human food—were left to those who in the language of an Act of Parliament of the period were 'natives of the realm of Irish blood, being descended from those who did inherit and possess the land.' Lest the frugality of the Celts should enable them to peacefully regain some of their possessions, it was strictly conditioned that no plantator or servitor should alienate his portion, or any part thereof, to the mere Irish. The confiscated territory amounted to two millions of acres. 'Of these a million and a half' says Mr. Froude, 'bog, forest, and mountain were restored to the Irish. The half million acres of fertile land were settled with families of Scottish and English Protestants.' It was in this manner that the famous Plantation of Ulster was founded."

_Sir C. G. Duffy, Bird's-Eye View of Irish History, revised edition, pages 74-78 (or book 1, chapter 4, of "Young Ireland")._

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"The City of London had taken in hand the settlement of Derry, which was now to be rebuilt under the name of Londonderry, and to give its name to the county in which it stood, and which had hitherto been known as the county of Coleraine."

_S. R. Gardiner, History of England, 1603-1642, chapter 10 (volume 1)._

ALSO IN: _T. D'Arcy McGee, Popular History of Ireland, book 9, chapter 1 (volume 2)._

_J. Harrison, The Scot in Ulster, chapter 3._

_C. P. Meehan, Fate and Fortunes of Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, and Rory O'Donel, Earl of Tyrconnel._

IRELAND: A. D. 1625. The Graces of Charles I.

On the accession of Charles I., "one more effort was made by the Irish gentry to persuade, or rather to bribe, the Government to allow them to remain undisturbed in the possession of their property. They offered to raise by voluntary assessment the large sum of £120,000 in three annual instalments of £40,000, on condition of obtaining certain Graces from the King. These Graces, the Irish analogue of the Petition of Rights, were of the most moderate and equitable description. The most important were that undisturbed possession of sixty years should secure a landed proprietor from all older claims on the part of the Crown, that the inhabitants of Connaught should be secured from litigation by the enrolment of their patents, and that Popish recusants should be permitted, without taking the Oath of Supremacy, to sue for livery of their estates in the Court of Arches, and to practise in the courts of law. The terms were accepted. The promise of the King was given. The Graces were transmitted by way of instruction to the Lord Deputy and Council, and the Government also engaged, as a further security to all proprietors, that their estates should be formally confirmed to them and to their heirs by the next Parliament which should be held in Ireland. The sequel forms one of the most shameful passages in the history of English government of Ireland. In distinct violation of the King's solemn promise, after the subsidies that were made on the faith of that promise had been duly obtained, without provocation or pretext or excuse, Wentworth, who now presided with stern despotism over the government of Ireland, announced the withdrawal of the two principal articles of the Graces, the limitation of Crown claims by a possession of sixty years and the legalisation of the Connaught titles."

_W. E. H. Lecky, History of England, 18th Century, chapter 6 (volume 2)._

IRELAND: A. D. 1633-1639. Wentworth's system of "Thorough."