Part 2

Ireland was a separate realm, though attached to the Crown of England. It had a Parliament of its own, which followed that of England in its development, being at first a unicameral council of magnates, lay and clerical; but after the legislation of Edward I. a bicameral assembly with a Lower House formed of representatives of counties and boroughs, whose consent would be formally necessary to taxation. Representatives of Ireland were at first called to Edward's Parliament at Westminster, but the inconvenience seems to have been found too great. Weak, however, was the Parliament of the colony compared with that of the imperial country. If the Lords ever showed force, the making of a House of Commons was not there. The representation, as well as the proceedings and the records, appears to have been very irregular. Nothing worthy of the name of Parliamentary government seems ever to have prevailed. Among those who signed the Great Charter was the Archbishop of Dublin; but of chartered rights Ireland was not the scene. There is no appearance of a separate grant of subsidies by the clerical estate. The clergy, it seems, were represented by their proctors in the Lower House, as by the bishops and abbots in the Upper House. The Parliament appears to have been generally a tool in the hands of the deputy. The irregularity of its composition seems to have extended to its meetings.

From the first the relation between the feudal realm and that of the tribes was border war. They were alien to each other in race, language, and social habits, as well as in political institutions. The Norman could not subdue the Celt, the Celt could not oust the Norman. The conquest of England by William of Normandy had been complete, and had given birth to a national aristocracy, which in time blended with the conquered race and united with it in extorting the Great Charter. The Norman colony in Ireland was left to its feeble resources, and to a divided command, while the monarchy was far away over sea, was squandering its forces in French fields, and could not even project a complete conquest. Besides, there were the difficulties which the country, with its broad rivers, its bogs, its mountains and forests, opposed to the heavy cavalry of the Anglo-Norman. There was the mobility of a pastoral people, presenting no cities or centres of any kind for attack, driving its cattle to the woods on the approach of the invader, and eluding his pursuit like birds of the air. Thus the Anglo-Norman colony failed to become a dominion and presently dwindled to a pale. Between the Pale and the Celt incessant war was waged with the usual atrocity of struggles between the half-civilized and the savage. Fusion there could be none. There was not the bond of human brotherhood or that of a common tongue. On neither side was the murder of the other race a crime. Never was there a more inauspicious baptism of a nation.

Anglo-Norman and Celt, feudalist and tribesman, alike were Catholics. A common religion might have been a bond, a common clergy might have been a mediating power. But race and language prevailed over religion. The Churches, though outwardly of the same faith, remained inwardly separate, and not only separate but hostile to each other, the clergy on both sides sharing the spirit and the atrocities of race enmity and frontier war. The Church of the tribes was still very rough and irregular. The Norman on his part was devout. He was a founder of monasteries, thereby discharging his conscience of a load not seldom heavy. Whatever of religious life and activity there was in the Pale seems to have been monastic. Our glimpses of the secular clergy show that they were secular indeed. Among them not neglect of duty only but criminality appears to have been rife.

In the little commercial towns of Danish foundation on the coast which had been taken over by the Norman, life was probably rather more civilized; but they were too diminutive to exert any influence beyond their gates. Galway in time became the port of an active trade with Spain which is supposed to have left a Spanish trace on its architecture and a Spanish strain in the blood of its people.

II

It was not likely that the colony, in the state in which it was, would gain by emigration from England. It was probably losing by depletion. English kings drew soldiers from it for their wars. There being no university or means of education, youths who wanted to study went to Oxford, where, though they were not native Irish, they seem to have played in academical brawls the part which native Irish might have played. Thus the colony was emptied of its intellect. Fiefs by feudal rule of descent passed to absentees and to women, weakening its military force. In every way the life-blood of the English and feudal settlement was being continually withdrawn. Of the kings of England, Richard I. was away on crusade, John and Henry III. were wrestling with rebellion at home. The thoughts of Edward I. were turned to Ireland; but his energies were absorbed by Scotland, Wales, and Gascony. He too drew soldiers from Ireland.

The Anglo-Norman element, however, was united, while inveterate disunion reigned among the native tribes. It was occupying the posts of vantage with the castles characteristic of its military rule. It seems to have been rather gaining ground when the island was invaded by Edward Bruce, the brother of Robert, who, emulous of his brother's success in Scotland, came over on the invitation of Irish tribes to carve out a kingdom for himself. Bruce gained successes and committed great ravages, but was at length met at Dundalk by the Anglo-Norman army under John de Bermingham, overthrown, and slain. He had estranged his Irish allies. According to one of their chroniclers, the day on which he was slain was the happiest of days for the Irish people. The Irish appeal to the Pope against English misrule on this occasion is in form a national manifesto, but was probably less than national in its source.

Still Bruce's invasion seems to have dealt the Norman colony a heavy blow and thrown back into the hands of the native tribes districts which it had conquered and over which its settlements had spread. Degeneration set in amongst its people. They took to the strange native custom of fosterage, to the Irishman's saffron mantle and his long moustache, to his weapons, to his mode of riding, even to his language, and countenanced license by confusing the Brehon with the feudal law.

A strange compound of feudalism with tribalism ensued, in the shape of mongrel chieftaincies, henceforth the predominant powers. English barons doffed their baronial character, donned that of the tribal chief, and made themselves independent lords of wide domains peopled by native Irish. It seems that they retained the Norman instinct of command. Many of them changed their Anglo-Norman for Irish names; Bourke, O'Neill, O'Brien, O'Connor. They kept in their pay troops of bravos, gallowglasses and kernes. Their rule seems to have combined the extortions of the feudal lord with those of the native chiefs. Bonaught was a tax imposed by a chief for the support of his mercenaries. Sorohen was an obligation on lands to support the chief with his train one day in a quarter or one in a fortnight. Coshery was a chief's right to sponge upon his vassals with as many followers as he pleased. Cuddies, or night suppers, were due by lands upon which the chief might quarter himself and his train for four days four times a year. Shragh and mart were yearly exactions in money and kine, apparently imposed at will. But worst of all was coyne and livery, horse-meat and man-meat taken at will. This, it seems, was not an Irish but an Anglo-Norman invention introduced at first as the means of coping with Edward Bruce, but, like the income tax, perpetuated when the special need was past. The chiefs deemed themselves independent princes, renouncing openly or practically allegiance to the English Crown. It is with these potentates and the forces which their restless and rebellious ambition could command that the Crown henceforth in its struggle with the Irish difficulty has to deal. Had they been united, they might have prevailed; but they were always at feud with each other, while policy, though not loyalty, led some of them to side with the Crown. Of the septs, the three most powerful were the Geraldines of the north, close to Dublin, the head of which became afterward Earl of Kildare; the Geraldines of the south in Munster, the head of which became Earl of Desmond; and the Butlers, also in the south, whose head became the Earl of Ormonde. The O'Neills in Ulster were another powerful sept. The Butlers, less Hibernized than their rivals, were almost always on the side of the Crown.

To put a stop to degeneration and restore order in the Pale by the talismanic influence of royalty, Edward III. sent over his son Lionel, Duke of Clarence. Under the duke's influence the Irish Parliament passed the statute of Kilkenny, drawing a sharp line of division between the two races; declaring marriage, fosterage, gossipred, and even concubinage with the Irish high treason; pronouncing the same penalties against supplying horses and armour to Irishmen or furnishing them with provisions in time of war; commanding Englishmen to speak English, to bear English names only, and to ride and dress in the English fashion; providing for the arming of the colony against Irish enemies; separating in every way the native Irishman from the Englishman and even forbidding the admission of Irish priests to livings in the English Church or to the English monasteries. There are severe regulations against the entertainment of Irish story-tellers and bards. An article declaring the English born in Ireland and in England to be equal and forbidding them to call each other English Hobbe or Irish Dog on pain of a year's imprisonment and a fine at the king's pleasure shows that there was a social division in the colony on that line. The statute betrays despair of a fusion of races or of a subjection of the whole island to English rule and law. At the same time it seems to restrain English aggression and decree peace between the races.

Piqued, we are told, by a taunt of his impotence as lord of Ireland which stung his pride, Richard II. twice came over to Ireland with a large army. His armies were wrecked by the difficulties of the country and the passionate weakness of their commander. From his second visit Richard was recalled by the knell of his own doom.

The Pale was drawn into the troubles of the Roses. Before the outbreak the Duke of York had come over to Ireland as vicegerent, won the heart of the people, asserted the independence of the Irish Parliament, and seemed disposed to make himself king. He had been recalled by the Civil War, but he had left behind him a Yorkist party which adhered to the White Rose after Bosworth, recognized the two pretenders, Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, and fought for the lost cause by the side of Martin Schwartz and his German hackbut-men at Stoke.

The Anglo-Norman colony or "Pale" was now at its nadir. Much of its manhood had been drawn away by the kings to their Scottish and French wars. It was reduced to a circle of two counties and a half round Dublin, defended by a ditch. Had the chiefs of tribes been unanimous, it would almost certainly have been destroyed. But the chiefs of tribes were very far from being unanimous, and thanks to their dissensions Strongbow in his tomb at Christ Church still slept undisturbed on the field of his victory. In the Pale itself reigned corruption, disorder, and misrule. "There is no land in all this world that has more liberty in vices than Ireland and less liberty in virtue." Such, as reported to Henry VIII., was the internal condition of the colony; and the description extended in its full force to the Church.

The hostility of the Pale to the Red Rose probably combined with distractions at home in leading Henry VII. to try the policy of winning the great Irish chiefs to allegiance by marks of confidence and honour and of governing Ireland through them. He tried it with the Earl of Kildare, the head of the great Geraldine clan, saying, as the story went, when he was told that all Ireland could not govern that man, "then that man shall govern all Ireland." Kildare, deported to England as a suspected traitor, but there winning favour and confidence by the artful address in which his kind were seldom wanting, was sent back to Ireland as lord deputy. The policy had a show of success. Kildare as deputy harried the lands of his own enemies and reported execution done on the enemies of the Crown. He gained one signal victory of that kind. But the attempt to employ restless and lawless ambition as the regular mainstay of orderly government could not be a permanent success. The sept of Butler alone was true to the Crown. The next reign saw Kildare's son and successor as deputy in the Tower, and his grandson, Silken Thomas, raising a madcap rebellion which was made impious by the murder of an archbishop. The execution of Silken Thomas and his five uncles closed the experiment of governing Ireland through that house. There was left one boy whom faithful guardians carried abroad and to whom the heart of the sept still turned.

To make an end of the aspirations to independent nationality which had budded under the Duke of York, and bring Irish legislation completely under the control of the Crown, the Lord Deputy Poynings caused to be carried through the Parliament of the Pale the pair of acts which bore his name, subjecting Irish legislation to the control of the English Council. The first act ordained that in future no Parliament should be held in Ireland "but at such season as the King's Lieutenant-in-Council there first do certify the King under the great seal of that land the causes and considerations, and all such acts as then seemeth should pass in the said Parliament." Should the king in council approve, the Irish Parliament was to be summoned under the great seal of England and not otherwise. The second act provided that all public statutes "late made within the realm of England" should be in force in Ireland. This it was decided applied to all English acts prior to the tenth year of Henry VII. Ireland was thus practically turned from a separate principality into a political dependency of England. The work of Poynings was long afterwards completed by the act of George I. affirming the right of the British Parliament to legislate for Ireland.

III

During the early part of the reign of Henry VIII. the policy of the English government was a continuation of that of Henry VII. It was a policy of conciliation and of ruling through the great Irish chiefs, the heads of the Butlers, the Geraldines, and the O'Neills, who were gratified by the bestowal of English titles of nobility, with flattering marks of confidence, and by a change in the tenure of their land from tribal to feudal, which invested them with full ownership. The Irish chief and the feudal baron of the Pale now sat in Parliament together for the first and last time. There appears to have been an inclination on the part of the Crown to favour the native Irish, it being still remembered perhaps that the Anglo-Irish had supported the Yorkist pretenders. The king himself penned a sage and benevolent manifesto, in the shape of a despatch to the Lord Deputy Surrey, on the blessings of civilization. The policy of conciliation was in fact necessary as well as laudable; for the king, plunged by his diplomacy into continental embroilments and lavishing his father's hoard on a Field of the Cloth of Gold, had not the means of subduing Ireland. It would have been vain to look in those days for the philosophy which could make allowance for a diversity of national ideas and habits. The O'Neill, upon his elevation to the earldom of Tyrone, is required with his heirs to forsake the name of O'Neill, to use English habits and the English language. The age, however, was one of growing light. Education was a passion of the hour. A decree in favour of the establishment of a system of free schools in Ireland went forth. Unhappily it remained a decree. No homilies, no peerages, no flatteries or marks of confidence could permanently avail to quiet the intractable ambition of the great chiefs. They took the titles, which tickled their vanity; but they preferred the state of a chieftain with his gallowglasses and with his despotic power over the sept to that of a baron under royal rule, with feudal restraints and obligations. They were always at feud with each other, waging private war and ravaging each others' territories with the ruthlessness of the most cruel invader. Murders among them were frequent. Conspiracies were always on foot. Thus the catastrophe of the house of Kildare ended what may be called the early Tudor policy of native government and conciliation. The policy of conquest with colonization in its train prevailed once more.

The instrument of that policy was to be a line of English deputies; able men on the whole and zealous in the public service, but generally incapable of understanding any national character or any institutions but their own. A deputy had also to contend with desperate difficulties, utter insufficiency of military force, an empty exchequer, a service full of jobbery and corruption, hostile intrigue both at Dublin and in the court at home.

The line was opened by Skeffington, a good though somewhat decrepit soldier, before whose artillery fell the redoubtable native fortress of Maynooth. The Crown had now a new and formidable force upon its side in the cannon, which it alone could afford to maintain. In Ireland as elsewhere the end of the feudal fortress had come.

At the same time there were forfeited to the Crown great tracts of land held by absentees, the feudal principle still prevailing and military service being still a condition of the ownership of land. The Crown thereby became a landowner on a vast scale, with the means of planting settlements in all the districts under its power. Thus a wide field was opened for Crown colonization.

But now comes an event most momentous in itself and fraught with future woe to Ireland. Henry VIII., enraged at the refusal of the Pope to let him put away his wife and marry another woman, breaks with the Papacy, carries his kingdom out of its dominion, declares himself supreme head of a national Church, dissolves the monasteries, seizes their estates, and half reforms the church in a Protestant sense, breaking the worshipped images, closing the shrines, expurgating the liturgy, and licensing the translation of the Bible. He seizes into his own hands under the mask of a _conge d'elire_ the appointments to the bishoprics. Wavering to the last in opinion between Catholicism and Protestantism according as the party of the old or that of the new aristocracy prevailed in his councils, he in the upshot practically ranges his kingdom on the Protestant side in the grand struggle that was to come between the Catholic and the Protestant powers.

In Ireland there was one religion but there were two Churches: that of the Pale and that of the native Irish; divided from each other, not by doctrine or ritual, but by race and language, practically treating each other as not within the pale of Christendom, hardly within the pale of humanity. No Irishman could be admitted to church preferment or to a monastery in the Pale. Nor did the churches ever act together as one Church. Both were in a most miserable condition. The edifices were in ruins, the services were unperformed. Monasteries however abounded. They were the refuge of the peaceful in that world of strife and blood. That some of them were on a large scale stately ruins prove. It is surmised that they may have been wealthy, if not in lands, in orchards, fish-ponds, mills, or the labour which seems to have been sheltered within their ample walls. Like the English monasteries, they impropriated the tithes of parishes, thus helping to kill the parochial system. The character of the clergy was still scandalously low, not seldom criminal. Among the people religion was almost dead; the remnant of it, as well as the remnant of education, was kept alive by the poor Franciscan friars. In neither Church was there the making of martyrs.

In the little maritime towns there was more religion, as well as something more like civilization. But in this as in other respects their influence was confined to their own gates.

There was no opposition in the Irish Parliament to the change of the king's title from _Dominus_ to _Rex_, whereby the sovereignty of the Pope was cancelled, to any article in the king's assumption of autocratic power over the Church, or to his taking to himself the appointment of bishops. A show of resistance made by the proctors of the clergy in the House of Commons was promptly met by their extrusion. Nor was there the slightest unwillingness on the part of any lord or chief to take his share of the plunder of the monasteries, which, as in England, were suppressed, with confiscation of revenue and goods, including the impropriated tithes of parishes which they had served. A plea put in by the deputy on behalf of six friaries in consideration of their special services to education and their hospitality was not heard.

The iconoclastic part of the revolution, attacking the material objects of popular worship, relics, wonder-working images, and venerated shrines, seems to have encountered some natural resistance, and it appears that the government failed to put an end to pilgrimages, which were the religious pleasure-trips of the people.

The leader of the Reform movement, and specially of iconoclasm, in Ireland, under Henry VIII., was Archbishop Browne, a fervid but apparently not discreet man. He had a rather restive coadjutor in Bishop Staples. No counterpart of Cranmer, Latimer, or Ridley appeared.

The members of the council of Edward VI., being men of the new official aristocracy, opposed to the old houses, attached themselves to the party of movement in religion. In England they completed the work of confiscation, carried iconoclasm a step farther, and made Protestant reforms in the religious system, the last in conjunction with foreign reformers. Their policy in Ireland was the same. They sent over the prayer-book of Edward. But the effect appears to have been small. The way had not been prepared by the advent of Lutheranism or by the use of translations of the Bible. Besides, there was no religious feeling on which it could act. The Deputy St. Leger was a shrewd man of the world, who, while he was ready to put the law in force, disliked all religious agitation. "Tut, tut," he said to the earnest reformer, "your religious matters will spoil all." The way of the new liturgy was effectually blocked by the Erse language, and no missionary effort appears to have been made.

The military policy of Edward's government had a very able though rather grim representative in Bellingham, if he had only been backed by a sufficient force. But the foreign complications of England being what they were, no sufficient force could ever be sent. The system of regular hostings against the natives is now on foot. Bellingham having stormed a position, there ensues a butchery of wood kerne, the equal of which Bellingham supposed there had never been. "Such," the deputy says, "was the great goodness of God to deliver them into our hands." Puritanism with its ruthlessness is making its appearance in the lists, on one side, while on the other side enters its mortal foe the Jesuit.