A SnORT.,f\F>TOR> A'^.i' t»;-^' w '^ a> r-. ^^'^ * A THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY Presented in 1923 By Professor Bvarts Boutell Greene 941-5 Mt25 Cj^*-€*,.<} ■ -*- 7-^ Return this book on or before the Latest Date stamped below. A charge is made on all overdue books. U. of I. Library AUG 6 1938 VL\i Ik I94U 8057-S . A SHORT HISTORY OF IRELAND FKOM THK KAllLIEST TIMKS TO THE TRESENT DAY BY JUSTIN li. McCarthy NEW YORK JOHN B. ALDEN, PUBLISHER 1893. In o- o CONTENTS ■4 CHAPTER. Tlio T . „ PAQB. I. The Legends, - - - ^ II. Christianity, - - - 21 III. The Norman Conquest, - - 29 lY. Elizabeth. . - - 43 V. The Croinweliian Settlement, - 5G VI. The Kestoration.— William of Orange, 69 VII. The Eighteenth Century, - T8 VIII. Emmet.— O'Connell, - - 99 IX. Young Ireland. — Fenianism," - 113 X. The Land Question. - - 127 XI. Home Rule.— The Land League, 140 574tia5 CHAPTER I. THE LEGENDS. As we peer doubtfully into the dim past of Irish history we seem to stand like Odysseus :it the yawning mouth of Hades. The thin shades troop a])Out us, and flit hither and thither titfully in shadowy confusion. Stately kings sweep by in their painted chariots. Yellow- haired heroes rush to battle shaking their spears and shouting their war-cries, while the thick gold torques rattle on arm and throat, and their many-cok)red cloaks streanl on the wind. They sweep by and are lost to siglit, and their places are taken by others in a shifting, splendid, con- fused pageant of monarchs and warriors, and beautiful women for whose love tlie heroes are glad to die and the kings to peril their crowns ; and among them all move the majestic, white- robed bards, striking their golden hai'ps and telling the tales of the days of old, and hand- ing down the names of heroes forever. What may we hope to distinguish of this weltering world of regal figures, whirled by before our eyes as on that infernal wind which seared the eyes of Dante? The traveller in Egypt goes down into the tombs of the kings at ancient Thebes. By the flaring flicker of a candle he discerns dimly on the walls about him endless processions of painted figures — ^the images of kings and beggars, of soldiers and slaves, of 6 A SHORT H J STORY OF IRELAND. the teeming life of ages — portrayed in glowing colors all around. It is but for a moment, while his candle is slowly burning down, that he seems to stand in the thronged centuries of Egyptian dynasties with all their named and nameless figures ; and then he passes out again into the upper air and level sunlight of the The- ban valley, as one who has dreamed u chaotic dream. Groping in the forgotten yesterday of Irish legend is like this grof)ing in an Egyptian tomb. We are in a great sepulchral chamber — a hall of the dead, whose walls are pictured with endless ligures, huddled together in bewildering fantas- tic medley. What can we make out, holding up our thin taper and gazing doubtfully at the storied walls ? Yon fair woman, with the crowd of girls about her, is the Lady Ceasair, who came to Ireland before the deluge, with fifty women and three men, Bith, Ladia, and Fintain. The waters swept away this curiously propor- tioned colony, and their place was taken "in the sixtieth year of the age of Abraham" by the parricide Partholan, of the stock of Japhet. For three hundred years his descendants iniled, until a pestilence destroyed them all. The Ne- medhians, under Xemedh, loomed up from the shores of the Black Sea and swarmed over Ire- land. They were harassed by plagues and by incessant battlings with the Fomorians, a race of savage sea-kings, descendants of Cham, who had settled in the Western Isles. In the end the Fomorians triumphed ; they drove out the remnant of Nemedhians whom plague and sword had spared. This remnant fled, some to the noi-th of Europe to })ecome the ancestors of tlie Firbolgs, some to Greece to give a parentage to THE LEGENDS. \ ' 7 the Tuatha de Danann, and some to Britain, which took its name from the Nemedhian leader y Briotan-Maol. After a time, the first of the Nemedhian ref- ugees, the Firbolgs, came ])ack to Ireland, to ]>e soon dispossessed by another invasion of Nemed- hian descendants, the Tuatha de Danann,- who came from Greece, and who were deeply skilled in all wizardries. Their sorceries stood them in good stead, for the Firbolgs made a fierce re- sistance. A desperate battle was fought, in which the Firbolg king was slain. His grave is still shown on the Sligo strand, and it is fabled that the tide will never cover it. Nuada, the king of the Tuatha de Danann, lost his right hand in this fight, and seems to have gone near losing his kingship in consequence, as his war- like people would have refused to recognize a mutilated monarch. But there were cunning artificers among the Greeks. One of these fash- ioned a silver hand for the king, who was known as Nuada of the Silver Hand ever after. The first of "The Three Sorrowful Tales of Erin" belongs to the rei- 26 A SHORT HISTORY OF IRELAND. of these men — the monasteries famous for their learning, their libraries, and their secure peace. The, island of the Sun-god had become the island of Saints. To Ireland belong St. Colum- ban, the reformer of the Ciauls ; St. Columb- -kill, the " Dove of the Cell," whose name has maide lona holy ground ; St. Foelan ; St. Killian, the apostle of Franconia ; St. Aidan ; St. Gall, the converter of Helvetia ; and St. Boniface. One hundred and fifty-five Irish saints are ven- " erated in the churches of Germany, forty-five iij Gaul, thirty in Belgium, thirteen in Italy, and eight in Scandinavia. For a long time all Christendom looked upon Ireland as the favor- ite home of religion and of wisdom. Mont- alembert, in his great history of " The Monks of the West," has given a glowing account of the civilization and the culture of the Irish monas- teries. There the arts were practised — music, architecture, and the working of metals. There the languages of Greece and Eome were studied with the passionate zeal which afterw^ards dis- tinguished the Humanistic scholars of the re- vival of learning. The Irish monastic scholars carried their love for Greek so far that they even wrote the Latin of the Church books in the beloved Hellenic characters — and as we read we are reminded again of the old tradition of Greek descent — while, curiously enough, one of • the oldest manuscripts of Horace in existence, that in the library of Berne, is written in Celtic characters, with notes and commentaries in the Irish language. It is worthy of remark that Mont- alembert says, that of all nations the Anglo- Saxons derived most profit from the teaching of the Irish schools, and that Alfred of Eng- land received his education in an Irish university. CBBISTIANITY. 27 With the lapse of time, however, and the disorders that came over the country during the struggles with the Danes, the organization of the Church suffered severely. In the twelfth century the irregularities that had crept into the Irish Church were brought before the notice of the Roman court. A synod, held at Kells, A. D. 1152, under the papal legate Paparo, formally incorporated the Irish Church into the ecclesiastical system of Rome. The metropol- itan sees of Armagh, Cashel, Dublin, and Tuam were created, with their suffragan sees, under the primacy of the Archbishop of Armagh. Towards the end of the eighth century the Danes made their first descent upon Ireland, and for a time established themselves in the country, expending their fiercest fury upon the Church of the West, and driving the Irish scholars to carry their culture and their philos- ophy to the great cities of the European con- tinent. The Irish chiefs, divided among them- selves, were unable to oppose a common front to the enemy, and for more than a century the sea-kings held Ireland in subjection. At length a man arose who was more than a match for the sea-kings. Brian Boroihme, brother of the King of Munster, raised an army against the Danes in ,968, thoroughly defeated them, and reduced them to the condition of quiet dwellers in the seaport towns. But the master-spirit that the troublous time had conjured up was not content to remain the conqueror of the Danes alone. He was determined to become the sovereign of all Ireland. It was sheer usurpation, and many of the Irish chiefs op- posed Brian ; but he soon overcame their resis- tance, and in 1001 he was acknowledged as King 28 A SHOUT HISTOR Y OF IRELA ND. of all Ireland. He made a just and wise king, and for twelve years refgned in triumph and in pea^. Then the Danes in Ireland, began to pluck up heart again. They sent for help to their kinsmen over sea, and the Vikings came across the Swan's Bath with a mighty fleet, and made war upon Brian. Brian was an old man now, hut as fierce and In-ave and skilful as ever. He raised up all his power to meet the Danes, and completely defeated them after a bloody struggle, at Clontarf, on Good Friday, 1014. Their bravest chiefs were slain, and their spir- its sent to the Hall of Odin to drink ale with the goddesses of death, while all the hawks of heaven mourned for them. But the victorious Irish had to bewail their king, who, owing to the neijliffence of his jxuards, was killed in his tent towards the end of the fight by the Danish leader. This great defeat of the Danes put an end to anv further dreams of a Danish invasion of Ireland, though it did not by any means de- stroy the influence that the Danes had already acquired in the island. They still held their own in the great seaport towns, and carried on fierce feuds with the native tril)es, and in the slow processes of time became absorbed into and united with them. The death of Brian had a disastrous effect upon the condition of Ire- land. The provinces that he had subjugated reasserted their independence ; but his usurpa- tion had shattered the suj)remacy of the old royal race, and the history of Ireland until the middle of the twelfth centurj' is merely a mel- ancholy succession of ci^ il wars and struggles for the crown, u})on which it would be alike painful and profitless to dwell. The NORMAN CONQ VEST. 29 CHAPTER m. THE NORMAN CONQUEST. Ireland was now divided into four confedera- tions of tribes. The O'Xeils held Ulidia, which is now called Ulster ; the O'Connors Conacia, or Connaught ; the O'Briens and theM'Carthys Mononia, or Munster ; and the Macmurroughs Lagenia, or Leinster — all under the paramount but often-disputed rule of a branch of the Uls- ter O'Neils. The royal demense of Meath, the appanage of the Ulster family, which in- cluded Westmeath, Longford, Und a part of King's County, was sometimes counted a fifth kingdom. In the wild north, O'Neil, O'Donnel, O'Kane, O'Hara, O'Sheel, O'Carroll, were mighty names. On the northernmost peninsula, where the Atlantic runs into Lough Foyle and Lough Swilly, O'Dogherty reigned supreme. In Con- naught, O'Rourke, O'Reilly, O'Kelly, O'Fla- herty, O'Malley, O'Dowd, were lords. In Meath and Leinster, MacGeogeghan, O'Farrell, O'Connor, O' Moore, O'Brennan, Macmurrough ruled. In Munster, by the western shore, Mac- Carthy More held sway. MacCarthy Reagh swayed the south, by the pleasant waters of Cork Bay. O'Sullivan Beare was lord of the fair promontory between Bantry Bay and Ken- mare River. O'Mahony reigned by roaring Water Bay. O'Donoghue was chieftain by the haunted Killarney Lakes. MacMahon ruled north of the Shannon. O'Loglin looked on Gal way Bay. All Ireland, with the exception of a few sea- port towns where the Danes had settled, was in 30 A SltOltT mSTonY OP m^LAND. the hands of Irish chiefs of old descent and famous lineage. They quarrelled among them- selves as readily and as fiercely as if they had been the heads of so many Greek states. The Danes had been their Persians ; their Romans w ere now to come. •' The whole story of Irish subjugation and its seven centuries of successive struffgles begins with the carrying-oft' of Devorgilla, wife of Tieman O'Korke, of Brefny, by a dissolute, brutal giant some sixty years old — Dermot Macmurrou2:h, Kinix of Leinster. We have a curious picture of him preserved in the writings of Giraldus Cambrensis, who knew him, and who was the first historian of the Irish invasion. " Dermot was a man of tall stature and great body ; a valiant and bold warrior in his nation. By constant halloaing and crying out his voice had become hoarse. He chose to be feared rather than loved ; oppressed- his nobility great- ly, but greatly sujjported and advanced the poor and weak. To his own kindred he was I'ough and grievous, and hatefid to strangers ; he would be against all men, and all men were against him." Such was the man who found the fair wife of the Lord of Brefnv a willing victim. Alexander the Great was pleased to fancv that in ravao-in - prudence as the Irish land system was unlike the feudal system now introduced. Henry's stay in Ireland was abruptly cut short by a summons to appear liefore the papal legates in Normandy who were iii(juiring into the mur-' der of Becket. He left the island never to ccmie back to it again. But he had done nnich to Normanize the country by making large and 84 A SHORT HISTOR Y OF IRELAND. wholly illegal grants of septal territory to his followers, leaving it to them to win and keep these gifts as best they could. With the sword the barons advanced their claims, and with the sword the Irish chieftains met them. The story of Ireland from the first to the second Richard is one monotonous record of constant warfare between the Irish and the Nonnans, and of incessant strife between the rival Irish houses. The barons built great castles, and lived in them a life of rough self- reliance, very like that of the robber lords of the Rhine provinces in later centuries. Many of these domains were counties palatinate, that is to say, their lords had the privilege of mak- ing their own laws with very little regard to the jurisdiction of the crown, and with absolute power of life and death. They ruled the tenants accordingly, with a queer mixture of Brehon and Norman law, after their own fashion. In the Norman towns, which were gradually estab- lished in the country under the protection of some one or other of the great barons, the lan- guage for a long time was only Norman- French, and the customs as well. It was as if some town of pleasant Normandy had been taken bodily up and transported to Ireland, with its well- wardered ramparts, on which the citizens' wives and daughters walked of quiet evenings in times of peace, its busy, crowded streets, thronged with citizens of all trades and crafts, marching sometimes gayly in their guilds, and ready at all times to drop awl or hammer, nert or knife, and rush to anus to at- tack or to repel the Irish enemy. For outside the ramparts of these Norman towns on Irish earth, outside the last bastion of the baron's TBS NOHMAN CONQUEST. 35 stronghold, lay the Irish, a separate and a hostile nation, ever attacked, and ever ready to attack. The return of the swallow was not surer in sum- mer than the renewed outbreak of strife between Norman baron and Irish chief when once the winter had faded into spring. The baron took to the road like a last-century highwayman : he swooped down upon the fields of the Irish ; he seized upon the stores that they had placed in their churches and churchyards, as was their custom before they took to building castles themselves. The Irish retaliated whenever and wherever they could. For long there was no sort of alliance between them. Only those who belonged to the "five bloods "*of the O'Neils of Ulster, the O'Connors of Connaught, the O'Briens of Thomond, the O'Melachlins of Meath, and the Macmurroughs of Leinster, could have audience in an English court. The killing of an Irishman or the violation of an Irishwoman by an English colonist was no crime. Yet, with the slow advance of time the Nor- man settlers began to succumb to Irish influences . The hostilities lessened, the hatreds waned. The Norman barons began to find peace better than war, and love fairer than feud. They took to themselves wives from among; the dauijhters of the Irish chiefs. By degrees they aban- doned their knightly trappings, their Norman names, and their foreign speech, to adopt in- stead the Irish dress, names, language, and law. A Burke became a M'William, a FitzMaurice became a M'Morice, and a Bermingham became a M'Yoris. The transformed barons aspired to be independent Irish chieftains like their new allies ; in time they came to be known 36 A SHORT MIS TOM Y OF IRELAND. as "more Irish than the Irish themselves.' The English government ^vitnessed with jeah)us anger this curious process of assimila- tion, and strove at intervals to stay its course. A statute ])assed in 1295 prohibited in vain the adoi)ti()n of the Irish garb by Norman settlers. The English had not the poAver to enforce such restrictive la\\'s ; they had not even the strength to protect such of the settlers as ^vere Avilling to abide by their own Xorman ways and words. These were forced in self-defence into associa- tion and alliance with the Irish chiefs, who were gradually regaining their control over the country. After the English defeat at Bannockburn, the Irish chiefs at once rose in revolt against Eng- land. Edward Bruce, brother of the vic- torious Scottisli king, came over to Ireland in 1315, and was heartily welcomed, not by the native Irish alone, but by many of the Anglo- Irish noljles. Edward Bruce was crowned as king at Dundalk, and for a short time the in- surrection carried all before it, and the Analo- Irish lords who had not joined the rebellion were put to great straits to defend themselves. The English govermnent made a desperate effort, raised a laroe armv under Sir John de Berming- ham, which coin})letely defeated the allied Scotch, Irish, and Anglo-Irish forces in a battle near Dundalk, in which Edward Bruce himself was killed. But the victory was dearly bought. The Ic^yal Anglo-Irish liad learned to their cost that they could not count for safety on the protection of the home government, and that security was more easily attained by amal- gamation with the Irish. The Irishizing pro- cess went on more vigorously than ever. The THE NORMAN CONQUEST. S7 Conversion of Norman l)arons into Irish chiefs with Irish names waxed day by day. The con- dition of the English settlers who remained un- changed in the midst of such changes became desperate indeed. Something had to be done. In 1356 it was proclaimed that no one born in Ireland should hold any of the king's towns or castles. This proved ineffectual, and sterner measures were resorted to eleven years later, at the Parliament held in Kilkenny, in 1367. The Norman Par- liament in Ireland was originally a council of the barons, prelates, and the "faithful;'.' but it had grown with time into greater importance. The Upper House consisted of lay peers, abbots, 'priors, and bishops; the Lower House of the knights of the shires and burgesses. Many of the lay peers claimed and received exemption from attendance, and the abbots, priors, and .; l)ishops generally sent their proctors in their ..-places, till the practice grew up of summoning two proctors from each diocese, who sat with the knights !ind burgesses in the Lower House, and claimed to be memliers of the legislature. Most of the shires were in the hands of the Irish, and returned no mem])ers. Burgesses were summoned from a few towns, many not being elected by the freemen of the city, but re- ceiving the ro^'al writ personally, hj name. It met at irregular intervals, sometimes at Dul)lin, sometimes at Kilkenny, and sometimes at Drogheda, at the summons of the kinix's lieu- tenant, or his deputy. The Parliament of Kilkenny' inflicted heavy penalties on all English who adopted Irish names, speech, or customs. The Norman who dared to marrv an Irish wife was to be half- 38 A SHO R T HIS TOR Y OF IRE LA ND. hanged, shamefully mutilated, disembowelled alive, and forfeit his estate. The fostering of Norman with Irish children, and the main- tenance of Irish bards, were alike sternly pro- hibited. But at the time the English govern- ment had not the power to enforce these statutes, which only served to further exasperate the Irish and the Anglo-Irish. liichard II. was in Ireland with a large army, determined to reduce the country to obedience, when the news of Bolingbroke's landing at Ravens})urgh called him back to his death. The strugoies of the Houses of the White and the Ked Kose occupied Ireland as well as England. Anglo-Irish lords crossed the sea to light for York, and Lancaster by the side of the King- maker or Clifl'ord of Cuml)erland. In Ireland the two greatest houses took opposite sides. The. Butlers of p]ast Munster, the Lords of Ormonde, who swayed Tip})erary and Kilkenny, plucked a sanguine rose with young Somerset; while the Geraldines of both the Desmond and Kildare branches loved no colors, and cropped a pale and angry rose with Plantagenet. The story of the House of Geraldine is one of the most romantic in all Irish history. The (leraldines were descended from the two broth- ers Maurice and William Fitzgerald, who came to Ireland at the heels of Strongbow. Through varying fortunes — at one time the whole house was nearly exterminated by MacCarthy More — they had risen to a proud })osition of rule in Ire- land. They owned all the broad lands from Maynooth to Lixnaw ; their followers swarmed everywhere, bearing a "(i" on their breast in token that they owed their hearts to the Geral- dines. THE NORMAN CONQ VEST. 39 Moore has made famous the story of Thomas, the sixth earl, who, "by the Fial's wave be- nighted, no star in the sky," was liglited l)y love to the door of a retainer's cottage. The poet fancies that as the chieftain crossed the threshold, some ominous voice whispered that there was ruin ])efore him. If lie loved he was lost. Love and ruin did, indeed, await the Geraldine across the threshold. The retainer had a beautiful daughter, and '' love came and '>rouorht sorrow too soon in his train" for Thomas .»f Kildare. He married the peasant girl, and vas outlawed by his stately family, and went to France witli his humble love, and died, a poor lut a happy man, at Rouen, many years later. After Bos worth battle had placed Henry VH. m the throne of Richard of Gloucester, the new ' no heed to England. Under tho pretence of govern- ing the country, Elizabeth over-ran 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 ap- })ropriate one for a champion of Irish rights. Shane O'Xeil boldly stood out as sovereign of Ulster, and pitted himself* against Elizabeth. She tried to have him removed by assassination. When this failed she tried to temporize. Shane was invited to England, where the courth' gentlemen who hovered about Elizal)eth stared over their spreading rulfs in wonder at Shane the Proud and his wild followers in their salfron- stained shirts and roush cloaks, with great bat- tie-axes in their hands. They shar[)ened their wits u});))! his haughty bearing, his scornful speech, and his strange garb. But his size and strength made great impression on the queen, and for the moment an amicable arrangement seemed to be arrived at. For many years there had been a stead v immigration of Scots from Argylesliire into ^Vntrim, \vho had often served Shane O'Xeil as mercenaries. These Scotch settlers seem to have l)een regarded with dis- like by the crown ; at all events, it Avas part of the compact with Shane that he should reduce them, and reduce them he did, with no light or sparing hand. But the fierce King of Ulster was by far too powerful to please Elizabeth long. Mer ajxents induced other tribes to rise ao^ainst hmi. Shane fouoht l)ravelv aaainst his fate, but he was defeated, piit to flight, and murdered by his enemies, the Scots of Antrim, in whose 46 A SHOUT HISTORY OF IRELAND. strongholds he madly sought refuge. His head was struck off, and sent to adorn the walls of Dublin Castle, His lands were declared for- feit, and his vassals vassals of the crown. English soldiers of fortune were given grants from k^hane's escheated territory, but when they attempted to settle they were killed by the O'Neils. Others came in their })lace, 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 otlier 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 Leanrue 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 honors. Once more the Geraldines were a 2:reat and powerful family in Ireland. But their strength had again awakened the alarm of the English government. The Earl of Desmond and his brother had been summoned to England and cast into the Tower. Their cousin, James Fitzmaurice of Desmond, now began to unite the Geraldines against Carew and his compan- ions, and fought them and those sent to help them for two years. They were, of course, defeated ; not, however, so badly but that Elizabeth was willing not only to receive their submission, but to release Desmond and his ELIZABETH. 47 brother from the Tower and send them back to Ireland, James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald went into voluntary exile, wandering from capital to capital of the Catholic continental powers, seeking aid and assistance for his cherished Geraldine League. The Geral dines 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 thev had some successes. They had many wrongs to<-avenge. Sir Nicholas Maltby had just crushed out, with the most pitiless cruelty, a rising of the Bourkes of Connaught. Sir Francis Cosby, the queen's representative in Leix and Offaly, had conceived and executed the idea of preventing any further ])ossible rising of the chiefs in those districts by summon ino- them and their kinsmen to a jjreat banquet in the fort of Mullaghmast, and there massacring them all. Out of four hundred guests, only one man, a Lalor, escaped from that feast of blood. • Of the clan O'AlQore no less than one hundred and eighty chief men were slauo-litered. One of th6 Moores had not come to that fatal banquet. Ruari Oge O'Moore, better known as " Rory O'Moore," devoted himself to aveno-ino; his murdered kins- men, and the cry of " Remember Mullaghmast !" sounded dismally in the ears of the settlers of King's and Queen's Counties for many a long- year after, whenever Rory O'Moore made one of his swoops u})on them with that shout for his battle-cry. With such memories in their minds, the tribes rose in all directions to ^he Desmond call. Earl 3^ in the rising Fitzmaurice was killed in a scuffle. This was a heavy blow to the rebels ; so was a defeat of the Geraldines 48 A SHOUT HIS Ton Y OF Hi EL AND. by Sir Nicholas Maltby at Monaster. 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 Geraldiues, and easily induced to act against them. P(^lh;ini and Ormonde cut their way over jMunstei". reducing the province by un- exampled ferocity. Ormonde boasted that he had put to death nearly six thousand 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, where the troops were com})letely routed ])y the chief of Glen- malure, Feach MacHuii'li, Avhom the English called " the Firebrand of the Mountains." Grey immediately abandoned tlie Pale to the insurgents, and turned to Smerwick, where some eight hinidred Spanish and Italian soldiers had just landed, too late to ])e of any service to the re])ellion, and had occu})Jed the dismantled fort. It Avas at once blockaded by sea and by land. In Grey's army Sir AValter Kaleigh and Edmund Spenser both held commands. Smer- wick surrendered at discretion, and the prison- ers were kiUed by Kaleigh and his men in cold blood. Flushed ])y this success. Grey returned to the Pale and carried all ])efore him. The Geraldiues were disheartened, and were de- feated >vherever they made a stand. Lord Kildare was arrested on suspicion of treason, and sent to London to die in the Tower. Martial law was })roclaimed in Dublin, and every one, gentle or simple, suspected of dis- atfection was promptly hanged. Munster was pacitied by an unstinted use of sword and ELIZABETH. i% gallows. The Desmond held out for a time, but he was caught at last and killed in the Slievemish Mountains, and his head sent to London to adorn the Tower. Munster was so vigorously laid waste that Mr. Froude declares that "the lowino- 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." They were driven by misery to eat dead bodies scraped out of the grave ; and Sir William Pelham proudly tells the queen how he has reduced the inhabitants to prefer being slaughtered to dying of starvation. Be- ing thus pacified, Munster was now divided into seigniories of from four thousand to twelve thousand acres, to be held in fee of the crown at a quit-rent of from '2d. to ?>d. per acre, by such adventurers as cared to struggle with the dispossessed Irish. The next step was to confiscate the estates of the rebellious chieftains. Sir John Perrot suc- ceeded Lord Grey as Deputy. He summoned a Parliament at which many of the Irish chiefs, persuaded, no doubt, by the strength of Eng- land's recent arguments, attended in English dress. The Parliament was perfectly manage- able. It attainted any one whom the Lord De})uty wished attainted. The estates of Des- mond and some hundred and forty of his follow- ers came to the crown. The land was then dis- tributed at the cheapest rate in large tracts to English nobles and gentlemen adventurers, who 50 A SHOBT HISTORY OF IRELAND. were pledged to colonize it with English labor- ers and tradesmen. But of these laborers and tradesmen not many came over, and those who did soon returned, tired of struggling for their foot-hold with the dispossessed Irish. In de- fault of other tenants, the new owners of the soil were practically forced to take on the natives as tenants-at-will, and thus the desired change of population was not effected. Perrot was a stern but not a merciless man, with a fierce temper, which made him many enemies anions: his own colleao:ues. He dis- liked the policy of Bingham in Connaught, and challenged him. He had a difference of opinion with Sir Henry Bagnal, and thought he had set- tled it when he had knocked Bagnal down. Nor was he more popular with the Irish. He treacherously captured Hugh Roe, or Red Hugh O'Donnel, son of Hugh O'Donnel, of Tyrcon- nel, and kept him in Dublin Castle as a hostage for his father's good behavior, and thus made young Red Hugh a bitter and dangerous enemy to the crown. In the end Perrot was recalled and Sir William Fitzwilliam sent in his stead. After six years of an exasperating rule, Fitzwilliam gave place in 1594 to Sir William Russell, who found the country hopelessly dis- organized. Red Hugh had escaped from Dub- lin Castle to his sept in Donegal, and his father had resigned the chieftainship to him. The dragoonings of Sir Richard Bingham had driven Connaught to desperation. The northern tribes were disturbed ; some were in rebellion. Uls- ter, which had kept quiet all through the Desmond rebellion, was stirred by the spirit of se- dition, and its great chief, HughO'Neil of Tyrone, was thought to be discontented and dangerous. ELIZABETH. 51 Hugh O'Xeil, the grandson of that Con O'Ncil wlioni Henry VHI. hud made Earl of Tyrone, had been l)roiight up at the English court and oontirnied in the lordship of Tyrone by the English government. In the brilliant court of Elizabeth the young Irish chief wa8 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'Xeil, and revived all the customs of inde- pendent Irish chieftains. For long enough he took no part in any plots or movements against the crown ; but many things, the ties of friend- ship and of love, coml)ined to drive him into rebellion. He had been deeply angered by the im})risonment of his kinsman, Red Hugh ; and when Red Hugh escaped, burning with a sense of his wrongs and a desire for revenge, he brought all his influence to bear upon O'Neil to draw him into a confederation against the government. Another and more romantic caus^ helped to drive Tyrone into revolt. After the death of his first wife he had fallen in love with the beautiful sister of Sir Henrv Bagnal, the Lord Marshal, and the lady had returned his love. In defiance of the fierce opposition of her brother, she elopod with the Irish chief, and made Bagnal the remorseless ' enemy of Tyrone. Bagnal used all his influence to discredit Ty- rone in the eyes of the English government, and he succeeded. Urired b\' Red Hugh and the rebellious chiefs on the one side, and by the enmitv of Bagnal and the oroAvimr distrust of the English government on the other, Tyrone in th^ end consented to give the powerful sup- 52 A SHORT HISTOR Y OF IRELAND. port of his name and his amis to a skilfully planned confederation of the tribes. On all sides the Irish chiefs entered into the insurrec- tion. O'Neil was certainly the most fonnidable Irish leader the English had yet encountered. He was a brilliant general and a skilled politician, and even Mr. Fronde admits that "his career is unstained with personal crimes." He defeated an English army under Bagnal at the Black- water, after a tierce battle, inflamed by more than mere national animosity. Each leader was animated by a bitter hatred of his opponent, which lends something of an Homeric character to the struairle bv the Blackwater. But Tv- rone was fortunate in war as in love. Bagnal's forces were completely defeated, and Bagnid himself killed. Fortune seemed to smile on Tyrone's arms. Victory followed victorv. In a little while all Ireland, with the excei)tion 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 [)roniised more than he could perform, he returned to England to liis death. His place was taken by Lord Mountjoy, who, for all his loveof angling and of Elizabethan " play-books," was a stronijer man. Tyrone met him ; was defeated. From that hour the rebellion was over. A Spanish army that had come to aid the rebels hurriedly re-embarked; many of the chiefs began to surrender ; wild Eed Hugh O'Donnel, flying to S[)!iin to rouse allies, Avas poisoned and died. The sufl'e rings of the Irish were terrible. Moryson, Mountjoy's soiretary, a great traveller for his time, a Ulysses of tei\ ELIZABETH. 63 ^•o:l^s' wjinderinirs, tells much the same stories of the after-consequences of this revolution wliich were told by Spenser of the former. The carcasses of people lay in ditches, their dead mouths open, green with the docks and nettles on which they had endeavored to sup- port life. Young children were trapped and eaten by the starving women who were hiding in the woods on the Xewry. He and Sir Arthur Chichester witnessed the horrible spectacle of three young children devouring the entrails of their dead mother. At last Tyrone was compelled to come to terms. He surrendered his estates, renounced nil claim to the title of The O'Neil, abjured ;illiance 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, llory O'Donnel, Ked Hugh's In'other, also submitted, and was allowed to retain the title of Earl of Tyrconnel. Elizabeth was al- ready dead, and the son of Mary Stuart was King of England when these terms were made ; but they were not destined to' do much good. Tyrone was brought to London to meet King: James. He stayed at AVanstead as Mountjoy's guest, where, four-and-twenty years before, he had been present at Leicester's entertainment of Queen Elizabeth. Those four-and-twenty years had brought many changes : they had car- ried away many gallant gentlemen and wise statesmen and brave soldiers ; they had changed Tyrone from the brilliant younu' man dream'ngf after liberty into the "new man" of Elizabeth's successor. Tyrone returned to Irelaivi, but not to peace. 64 A SHORT HISTORY OF IRELAND. King James was determined to reform the country after his own fashion, and in King James's mind reform meant supporting the Protestant religion everywhere, enforcing all laws against the Catholics, crushing out'what- ever remains of the old Brehon laws still lin- gered in the country, and definitely estal)Iish- ing the English law, which only the English settlers liked, in its stead. Sir George Carew had been Deputy, and had come back to Eng- land with a store of money, and Chichester was in his place making himself hateful to the Irish by his ingenious methods of wresting their land from its rightful owners, and by his pitiless in- tolerance of the Catholic religion. The Irish Catholics had hoped for toleration from James — James, indeed, promised them on his acces- sion the privilege of exercising their religion in private ; but he soon revoked his promise, and the state of religion in private ; but he soon revoked his promise, and the state of the Irish Catholics was worse than be- fore. Tyrconnel himself was called upon to conform to the England faith. Lest these and era kindred exasperations might arouse once more the dangerous wrath of the chiefs, Chichester enforced a ri2:orous disarmament of the kernes. It is hardly to be wondered at if the reforming spirit of James did not greatly commend itself to two such national leaders as Tyrone and T^^rconnel ; it would not be very surprising if they had thoughts of striving against it. Whether they had such thoughts or not, they were accused of entertaining them. They were seen to be dangerous enemies to the king's policy, whom it would be convenient to have out of the way, and they were proclaimed as ELIZABETH. 55 traitors. They seem to have been convinced of the impossibility of resistance just then ; they saw that it was death to remain, and they tied hito exile. "It is certain," say the Four Mas- ters, "that the sea never carried, and the winds never wafted, from the Irish shores individuals more illustrious or noble in genealogy, or more renowned for deeds of valor, prowess, and high achievements." Tyrone with his wife, Tyr- connel with his sister and friends-:i^nd followers, ninety-nine in all, set sail in one small vessel on the I4th of Septemper, 1607, and tossed for twenty-one days upon the raging waves of the sea, We hear of O'Neil trailing his golden crucifix at the vessel's wake to bring about a ;Cftlra ; of two storm-worn merlins who took shelter in the rigging and were kindly cared for by the Irish ladies. On the 4th of October they landed at Quilleboeuf, on the coast of France, and made their way to Rouen, receiv- ing kind treatment at all hands. James de- manded their surrender, but Henri Quatre re- fused to comply, though he advised the exiles to go into Flanders. Into Flanders they went, their ladies giving the Marshal of Normandy those two storm- worn 'merlins they had cherished as' a token of their gratitude for his kindness. . From Flanders, in time, they made their way to Rome, and there they lived in exile, and died long years after.' Tyrconnel died first, in 1608, and the Four Masters weep over his early eclipse. Clad in the simple robe of a Francis- can friar, he was buried in the Franciscan church of St. Pietro in Montorio, where the Janiculum overlooks the glory of Rome, the yellow Tiber, and the Alban Hills, the death- 56 A SHORT HISTORY OF IJtEL AND. less Coliseum and the stretching Campagna. Raphael had painted the Transfiguration for the grand-altar ; the hand of Sebastiano del Piombo had colored its walls with the scourjiino- of the Redeemer. Close at hand tradition marks the spot where Peter was crucified. In such a spot, made sacred by all that art and religion could lend of sanctity, the spirit of Tr^^connel rested in peace at last. His companion in- arms and m misfortune survived him some eight years. We have a melancholy picture of old Tyrone wandering about in Rome, and wishing in vain to be back in his own land and able to strike a good blow for her. He died at last, on July 20, 1616, in the seventy-sixth year of his age, a brave, sad, blind old man. He was buried in the little church on the Janiculum, by the side of Tyrconnel. CHAPTER V. THE CROMWELLIAN SETTLEMENT. After the flight of the earls, Ireland was entirely in James's hands. The very few who opposed his authority were sternly and sum- marily dealt with. His writ ran in every part of the island ; there was a sheriff for every shire ; the old Irish law was everywhere super- seded ; there was nothing to interfere with James's schemes for confiscating Irish land and planting Irish provinces. The English had al- ready made strong settlements in Leinster, Connaught, and Munster. Ulster had hitherto been practically untouched, but now at last it too was to come under the control of the crown. The alleged treason of the two earls THE CBOMWELLIAN SETTLEMENT. 67 served as an excuse for confiscating tlie counties of Donegal, Deny, Tyrone, Fermanagh, Cavan, and Armagh. A sort of commission sat at Limavaddy to parcel out the lands of men who had committed no other offence than that of serving under the exiled chieftains, Ulster was planted with a thoroughly Protestant and anti-Irish colony of English and Scotch ad- venturers, and the Irish were driven away from the fertile lands like Red Indians, to contracted and miserable reservations, while the fighting men Were shipped off to swell the armies of Gustavus Adolphus. Twelve City of London companies bought great tracts of land in. Deny at very cheap rates. Six of these companies — ^the Mercers, Salters, Skinners, Ironmongers, Fishmongers, and Drapers — still retain much of the property thus acquired. The disinherit- ing process was carried on not by force alone, but by fmud. Men called " discoverers ". made it their business to spy out flaws in titles of land, in order that they might be confiscated by the crown. Conspicuous among the English adventurers, a very mirror of the merits of his kind, is Richard Boyle, who afterwards became the ^rst Earl of Cork. He was. a man of very low ' beginnings. He has been happily described as a forger, a horse-thief, and a conniver at mur- der, who made Providence his inheritance and prospered by it. Boyle landed in Dublin on Midsummer Eve, June 23, 1588, with some twenty-seven pounds in his pocket, a couple of suits of clothes, a diamond ring and a gold bracelet, and, of course, his rapier and dagger. After seven years' stay, the adventurer was lucky enough, aided, perhaps, by the diamond 58 A SHOUT HISTORY OP IRELAND. ring and the gold bracelet, to win the heart and hand of a lady of Limerick with five hundred pounds a year. This was the beginning of his fortunes. From that hour lands and money accumulated about him. As long as he got it he little cared how it came. No man was more ready to lay his hands upon any property of the Church, or otherwise, that he could securely close them over. He swindled Sir Walter Raleigh, then in prison and near his death, out of his Irish land, for a sum shamelessly below its value, and throve u})on the swindle. He is a fair type of the men with whom James planted Ulster and Leinster, and with whom he vrould have planted Connaught, but that he ■died before he was able to carry that scheme 'iifo effect. But (^harles inherited the scheme, ingenious court lawyers investigated and inval- vlated the titles of the Connaught landlords, •uul Charles soon found himself the owner of all Connaught, in the same sense that a burglar js the owner of the watches, the plate, and jewels that are the results of a successful " plant." But land was not enough for Charles ;. he wanted money. He was always wanting money, and he found a means of raising it in Ireland by promising grants of civil and relig- ious liberty to the Catholics in exchange for so much down. The money was soon forthcom- ing, but the promised liberties never came. Charles's great ally in the management of Ire- land was Thomas Wentworth, to whom the government of the country was given. Straf- ford devoted the great abilities, of which Lord Digby truly said " that God had given him the use and the devil the application," to support- ing: Charles's fraudulent schemes for extorting THE CROMWELLiAN SETTLEMENT. 69 money, until his malign inJGluence was removed by the summons to England which ended in his death. But when the revolution began in Eng- land, which ended with the fall of the king's head, many of the Irish thought their time had come. In 1641 the remnant of native Irish in Ulster rose, under Sir Phelim O'N^eil, against the oppression of the Scotch settlers. This rising of 1641 has been written about often . enough by English historians, as if it were an act of unparalleled wickedness and ferocity. It is written of with horror and hatred as the "massacre of 1641." Mr. Froude, in especial, has lent all the weight of his name and his elo- quence to this theory of a gigantic and well- organized massacre ; but Mr. Froude' s state- ments are too curiously in advance of his evi- dence, and his evidence too untrustworthy to claim much historical importance. The busi- ness of 1641 was' bad enough without Mr. Froude doing his best to make it worse. In one part of Ireland a certain body of men for ' a short time rose in successful insurrection, and they killed their oppressors as their oppressors had always killed their kin, wherever they could get at them. Undoubtedly there were a great many people killed. That, of course, no one. attempts, no one desires, to justify ; but it must be remembered that it was no worse than any one of the many massacres of the Irish by the English, which had taken place again and again, any time within the memory of the men then living, to go no further back. Far be it from me, far be it from any one, to defend the cruelties that accompanied the rising of 1641 ; but it is only fair to remember that most nations that have been treated cruelly are cruel in their 60 A SHORT HISTORY OF IRELAND. revenge when they get it, and the followers of Sir Phelim O'Neil believed the}^ had as bitter wrongs to avenge as men can have. They had been taught lessons of massacre by their mas- ters, and this was their tirst essav. The massacre of Mullaghmast, Essex's treacherous massacre of the clan O'Xeil, the dra^oonin": of Connaught by Bingham, the desolation of JNIun- ster, all these atrocities are slurred over in order to lend an uncontrasted horror to Irish crimes. Mr. Prendergast and Mr. John Mitchel have both written to show the terrible exaggera- tions that have attended upon all representa- tions of the rising of 1641. These are Irish historians ; but an English historian, Mr. Goldwin Smith, is fairer than Mr. Froude. To him the earl}" part of the rising presents a "picture of the vengeance which a people, brutalized by oppression, wreaks in the moment of its brief triumph on its oppressor." He considers it "to have been unpremeditated, and o])})osed to the policy of the leaders;" and when the struggle had begun, "the English, and Scotch settlers perhaps exceeded the Irish in atrocity, especially wlien we consider their comparative civilization. The Irish population of Island Magee, though innocent of the re- bellion, were massacred, man, Avoman, and child, by the Scotch garrison of Carrickfergus." The historian Borlase, kinsman to the chief-justice of that name, rejoicing over the exploit of the soldiers against the rebels, mentions as one item how Sir AV. Cole's regiment "starved and fam- ished of the vulgar sort, whose goods were seized on by this regiment, 7000." No cruelties on the one side can ever justify retaliation on the other, but to mention them will at least THE CROMWELLIAN SETTLEMENT,, 61 , serve to dispel the idea which ^r. Froude would willingly foster, that at a sudden point in the history of a blameless and bloodless rule, some wicked Irish rose up and slew some of their just and merciful masters. The masters were neither just nor merciful, bloodless nor blame- less. It wsls hardly to be expected that' a people, treated as they had been, would act very mercifully when their turn came. Yet in many cases they did act mercifully. Th© followers of Sir Phelim spared some lives they might have taken ; pitied some who were in their power. There has been monstrous ex- ao-ge ration about the stories of wholesale massa- ere. Most of the evidence given before the commission sent to inquire into the thing is given on hear-say, and it. is on this evidence that the accounts of the massacre depend. Old women who were ill in bed, and saw nothing of the struggle, gave as evidence the statements of friends, who told them that in many places thousands of persons were massacred. Others, again, were assured of such slauojhterino-s of hundreds and thousands of persons in different parts of the country by the rebels themselves, who display throughout the evidence a most remarkable taste for self-accusation. Equally valuable and veracious evidence testifies that the ghosts of the murdered were seen stalking abroad — ^that in the river near Portadown, where the worst of the killing was said to have been, the body of a man stood erect for three days in the middle of the water, and that corpses floated against the stream several days after they had been drowned, in order to meet one of their murderers who was crossing the bridge ! es A stroiiT msToit y op t:^SLAND. However it began, Sir Phelim O'Neil's rising soon flamed up into a general rebellion. One of the most prominent of its leaders was Roger Moore, the last of a stately, ruined family, one of whose ancestors had died in the Tower under Edward VI. He was a brave and honorable gentleman, whose handsome face and graceful bearing connnended him closely to the men from whom he sought help, whom his eloquence was well calculated to })ersuade, and his states- m:ui-like prudence and foresight to encourage. His darin<»: and irallantry endeared him to his followers, who ^^■ere always ready to fight their best for the war-cry of " For God, our Lady, and Roger Moore." At his instance Colonel Owen O'Xeil — better known as Owen Roe — came over from Spain to consolidate and com- mand the insurrection. He was a nephew of the great Tyrone, M'ho had died in Rome ; he was a brave and irallant oentlenian, of high and honorable position in the Spanish army ; he was the natural leader of the Irish people. Success, at first, was strewn before his feet. A National Convention met at Kilkenny in October, 1G42, to establish the independence of Ireland. It took upon itself all the powers of a provisional government : appointed the ofiicers of its army ; organized provincial councils ; issued proclama- tions ; ordered its own seal to be cut ; established a mint for coming its o^vn money, and in every way showed itself ready to carry out the work of national administration. Frequent help came from abroad. In O'Neil's hands the amiy acquired new strength, and the struggle was carried on with marked humanity. The in- surrection seemed in a fair w;iy to become a successful re^'olutlon. There were altogether THE CBOMWELLIAN SETTLEMENT. 63 four parties in Ireland, three of whom it was to the king's advantage to conciliate. The fourth and least important was that of the Puritans and the English Parliament, headed ])y the Lords- justices Parsons and Borlase, whom Mr. Goldwin Smith describes as a pair of scoundrels who had done their best to foment the rebellion for their own advantage, and Generals Munroe and Coote the cruel. The three otlicr parties were — first, the native Irish, under Owen Roe, guided by the Papal Nuncio Rinuccini, who had come over from Rome to lend his support and councils to the movement ; second, the Anglo- Irish, chiefly composed of Catholic nobles, who supported the king, but stood out for their own rights and religion ; and, thirdly, the kiug's party, with his Lord-deputy, Lord Ormonde, at its head. Lord Ormonde was a Protestant, entirely devoted to his king, and compelled to play a very difficult game in trying to keep together the rebellious Irish who were willmg to support Charles, and yet at the same time avoid giving offence to Charles's English follow- ers, who wished for no terms with the Irish. Like most of the Irish leaders of his time, Ormonde had had a strangelv checkered career. He was the grandson of the eleventh Earl of Ormonde, whose estates had been unjustly filched from him by his son-in-law. Sir Richard Preston, who had obtained the favor of James, and with it the ])atent of the earldom of Des- mond. Young James Butler seemed thus quite cut off from his inheritance, but he was lucky enough to meet and win the affections of Pres- ton's daughter, his cousin. He married her, and so in time came into not only the title of Earl of Ormonde, but into the possession of the 64 A SHORT HISTOR Y OF IRELAND. good broad lands of the family. Ormonde had managed his o>\'n affairs skilfully enough, but he was not the man to till a position of great and responsil)le statesmanship. His mediocre al)ilities and temporizing spirit were quite un- suifed to the desperate circumstances in which he was placed. Charles himself, harassed l)y English revolutionists at home, made many and any pledges to the Irish revolutionists, in the hope of winnmg them to his side. He never had the chance of breakhig these pledges. The execution at AVhitehall left Cromwell free to deal with Ireland. He entered Ireland with 8000 foot and 4000 horse, and marched from victory to victory. Everythmg was in his favor: his own military genius, the laurels of Worcester and Xaseby, the disorganization of the Irish parties ; and tlie contentions that had sj)rung up among them, es}iecially the removal of the only man reall}' capable of doing any- thing asainst the Lord-ueneral in the field. Owen Roe O'Xeil died suddenly, it is said, of course, by poison, though there seems little reason to believe this, and with his death all chance of the indei)endence dreamed of by the Kilkenny Convention was over for that time. Roger ]\Ioore, the gallant and heroic, was al- ready dead ; killed, it was said, by bitter dis- appointment at the gradual failure of the cause he had so much at heart. ISir riielim O'Xeil was captured soon after. HoMcver he had lived, he died like a brave man ; he was offered a pardon if he would only say that he took up arms ])y the king's connnand, but he i)referred to die. One after another the Irish leaders surrendered or were defeated. The king's party was practically nowhere. Qrmonde had THE CEOMWELLIAN SETTLEMENT. 65 fled to France for his life. After CromweTl had captured Drogheda and put all its people to the sword, after he had conquered AN'exford and slaughtered no less pitilessly its inhabitants, the revolution was at an end. Ireland was iit Crom- well's mercy, and, like all his predecessors, he resolved to make a new settlement.' The ojovernment of Ireland av^s now vested in a deputy Commander-in-chief and four com-, missioners, with a High Court of Justice, which dealt out death, exile, and slavery in liberal" measure. The Parliament had soothe'd the claims of its army by giving its officers and men debentures for Irish land ; and similar de- bentures were held by a vast number of ad- venturers, who had speculated . thus in Irish land, while the struggrle was goring on, to the amount of some 2, .500, 000 acres. These elainw had now to be. settled ; but the adventurers were not willing to settle until all. possible danger was removed. Th(^"e were disbanded soldiers in Ireland who might jtiterfere witlj tlie peaceful settlements of Cromwellian would-be landlords ; and these must be got rid of before any serious plantation could be effected. Word was sent throughout P^urope that nations friendly to the Commonwealth would not beat their drums "in vain in the market-places of Irish garrison towns. The valor of Irish sol- diery was well enough known abroad. It had b^en praised by William the Silent and Henri Quatre ; and the redeemer of Holland and the victor of Ivry weregood judges of tall soldiers. So the drums of Spain, Poland, and France were set rattling all over Ireland," and to their tuck the disbanded soldiery marched away to the number of 44,000, between 1651 and 1()54, . 66 A SHORT HISTOR Y OF IRELAND. to die beneath foreign ])anners on foreign fields. Women and girls who were in the way of the adventurers could he got rid of no less profita- bly to West Indian planters weary of maroon and negro women. Into such shameful slavery thousands of unhapi)y Irishwomen were sent, and it was only when, the Irish supply being exhausted, the dealers in human flesh began to seize upon English women to swell their lists, that the practice was prohibited. Sir William Petty states that 6000 boys and girls were sent to the West Indies ; and the total number transported there and to Virginia was estimated at 10,000. Henry Cromwell not only approved of the exportation by force of some thousand "Irish wenches" for the consolation of the sol- diers in the newly acquired colony of Jamaica, but of his own motion suggested the shipment, also, of from 1500 to 2000 boys of from twelve to fourteen years of age. "We could well spare them,'' he says, "and who knows but it might be a means to make them English — I mean Christians?" Now came the turn of the adventurers. The government reserved for itself all the towns. Church land, and tithes, and the counties Kil- dare, Dublin, Carlo w, and Cork, to satisfy friends and favorites who were not army men. The portion of each adventurer in Ulster, Leinster, or Munster was decided by lot, at a lottery held in Grocers' Hall, London, in July, 1653. To make the condition of the advent- urers comfortable, each of the planted counties was divided in half, and the adventurers were quartered, for their greater encouragement and protection, in alternate baronies with soldier settlers. The rest of Ireland, except Connaught, THB CltOMWELLlAN SETTLEMENT. 67 was apportioned to satisfy the arrears of. officers and soldiers. To keep the new settlers free from all Irish influences, Connaught was ap- pointed as a reservation for the Irish, and all English holding lands in Connaught were al- lowed to exchange them for estates of equal value in other parts of Ireland. The Irish were then driven and cooped into Connaught. They were not allowed to appear within two miles of the river or four miles of the sea, and a rigorous passport system was established, to evade which was death without form of trial. Irish noblemen, who were pardoned for being Irish, were compelled to wear a distinctive mark upon their dress, under pain of death ; and persons of inferior rank bore a black spot on the right cheek, under pain of branding or the gallows. It is curious to reflect that all these precautions were not able to secure the Ironsides from the dreaded Irish influence, and that forty years later many of the children of Cromwell's troopers could not speak a word of English. The plantation of the unhappy Irish in Con- naught was slowly and sternly accomplished. Land-owners had the choice of becoraino; the tenants-at-will of the new settlers, or of dying on the road-side. The commissioners were much harassed in the execution of their task by the unreasonable clamor of the dispossessed Irish, who objected to being reserved in Con- naught, and who complained that the whole of the province was waste from famine. There were parts of Connaught where it was truly said that there was not wood enough to hang, water enough to drown, or earth enough to bury a man. The commissioners, anxious, no 66 A SHOit T HISTOB Y OF IRELANTh doubt, that the Irish should know the worst at once, had sent the earliest transplanted to this inhospitable place, and their dismay com- municated itself to the as yet untransplanted. The hunted and harassed Irish nobles would not transplant themselves. It needed some punishments l)y death to quicken the general desire to seek the appointed haven west of the Shannon. But death not proving convenient, as executions Avould have had to be ordered wholesale, it was decided to ship oif the restive Irish, who would not go to Connaught, to the West Indies. But the unhappy wretches who got to Connaught were not at the end of their misery. The officers emi)loyed to settle them in their new homes had to be bribed by money or by portion of the reserved land to carry out the law, and the greedy officers were easily able to force the unhappy transplanters to sell the rest of their reduced lots at miserably small rates. The transplanted, rich and poor, were wretchedly lodged in smoky cabins or under the open air, and lay down and measured out tlieir graves in common confusion and misery, peer with peasant, starved to death. The towns were cleared as well. The in- habitants of Limerick, Galway, Waterford, and AVexford were ejected with scant compeiit^ation and scanter ceremony, to make room for English merchants from Liverpool and Glouces- ter. The disi)ossessed Irish merchants fled across the seas to carry their skill and thrift to other lands, and in the new hands the com- mercial prosperity of the towns dwindled away. Galway, that had been a flourishing seaport, never recovered her resettlement. The Irish who were dis})ossessed, and who would not THE nmTORATlON. Gd transplant or go into exile, took to the woods and mountains, the clefts of the rocks and the caves of the earth, and lived a life of wild brigandage, like the Greek Klephts dispossessed by the Turk. The government put a price upon the heads alike of these Tories, of priests, and of wolves. CHAPTER VI. THE RESTORATIOX. ^AVILLIAM OF ORANGE. When Cromwell and the Cromwellian rule had passed away and the Stuart king came over, to '' enjoy his own again,'' most of the dis- possessed Irish gentlemen, whose loyalty to his cause and creed had cost them their estates, and driven them to exile abroad, or worse than exile in the (^onnaught reservations, thought not un- reasonal)ly tliat they might be allowed to " enjo}' their own ngain," too, as well as their merry monarch. They were grievously disappointed. The Cromwellian landholders were quite pre- ])ared to secure their estates by loyal recognition of the new rule, and their adhesion was far more servicealile to the second Charles than the allefidd, St. Ruth. But the battle of the Boyne ririiie(i alike the Stuart cause and the hojies of its Irish adherents. Ginckel, William's ablest general, took Ath- lone, defeated the French and Irish at Aughrim, where the glorious and vainglorious St. TJuth was slain, and invested Limerick. In Limerick Tyrconnel died, and at Limerick the last struggle was made. The city was held ])y Patrick Sarsfield, a brave Catholic gentleman and a gifted soldier. He defended Limerick so Avell against hopeless odds that he was able to wring from his enemies a treaty providing that the Roman Catholics of Ireland should enjoy the privilege of religious freedom, and giving Kino; James's followers the right of their estates. When the treaty was signed, Sars- field surrendered the city and marched out with all the honors of war. Outside the city the flags of England and France were set up, and the defenders of Limerick were oflered their choice of service under either standard. Ginckel had the mortification of seeing the flower of the army rally beneath the lilies of Gaul, only a few regiments ranging them- selves beneath the English standard. These 74 A SHOU T HtSTOR Y OF IRELAND. Irish soldiers did splendid service in the land to which they gave their snords. Their names became famous in France, in Spain, in Austria, and in Russia, and on manv a field from Fontenoy to Kamilies and Laufeldt the Irish bri":ades fousrht out for an alien cause, and be- neath a foreign flag, the old quarrel of their race. Sarsfield himself died bravely at Landen, three years after the surrender of Limerick. It is said that the dying man looked at his hand, red with his own blood, and said, " Would God. that this were shed for Ireland." All that he had done for his country had been done in vain. The treaty that he had secured by his gallant defence of Limerick, the treaty that had been confirmed and even amplified by William himself, was liroken and set aside. Mr. Froude seems to think that the Irish ought to have been aware that the English could not be expected to keep faith with them over such a treaty. To such sorry justification for such a breach of faith there is nothing t(j say. The treason shows worse when it is remembered that after the treaty was signed an army of reinforcements arrived in the Shannon. Had these come some days earlier, the siege of Limerick must inevitably have been raised. Even as it was, Ginckel greatly feared that Sarsfield might seize the opjjortunity to renew the war. But Sarsfield honorably abided by his word. The treaty was violated ; all the for- feited lands were reconfiscated and sold hy auction as before, for the benefit of the state, to English corporations aj»d Dublin merchants. At William's death the Catholics were the owners of less than one seventh of the whole area of Ireland. William determined to make THE RESTORATION. 76 Ireland Protestant by penal laws. Under these laws Catholics could not sit in the Irish Parliament, or vote members to it. They were excluded from the aniiy and navy, the coipora- tions, the magistracy, the bar, the bench, the grand juries, and the vestries. They could not be sheriffs or soldiers, gamekeepers or constables. They were forbidden to own any arms, and any two justices or sheriffs might at any time issue a search warrant for arms. The discovery of any kind of weapon rendered its Catholic owner liable to fines, imprisonment, whipping, or the pillory. They could not own a horse worth more than five pounds, and any Protestant tendering that sum could compel his Catholic neighbor to sell his steed. No education whatever was allowed to Catholics. A Catholic could not go to the university ; he might not be the guardian of a child ; he might not keep a school, or send his children to l>e educated abroad, or teach himself. No Catholic might buy land, or inherit, or receive it as a gift from Protestants, or hold life annuities or leases for more than thirty-one years, or any lease on such terms as that the profits of the land exceeded one third the value of the land. If a Catholic purchased an estate, the first Protestant who informed against him became its proprietor. The eldest son of a Catholic, upon apostatizing, became heir at law to the whole estate of his father, and reduced his father to the position of a mere life tenant. A wife who apostatized was immediately freed from her husband's control, and assigned a certain proportion of her husband's property. Any child, however young, who professed to be a Protestant, was at once taken from hi? 76 A SHO RT HISTOB Y OF IRELAND. father's care, and a certain proportion of his father's property assigned to him. In fact, the Catholics were excluded, in their o\vn country, from every profession, from every <>overnment office fromi the hio;hest to the lowest, and from almost every duty or privilege of a citizen. It was laid down from the bench by Lord-chancellor Bowes and Chief-justice Robinson that " the law does not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish Roman Catholic," and proclaimed from the pulpit by Dopping, Bishop of Meath, that Protestants were not bound to keep faith with Papists. We are re- minded, as we read, of Judge Taney's famous decision in the American Dred Scott case, that a l)lack man had no riijhts which a white man was l)()und to respect. Ha})pily, humanity and civilization are in the end too nmch for the Doppings and Taneys. It is hard for a more enlightened age to believe that such laws as these were ever })assed, or, being passed, were ever practised. It was well said that the penal code could not have been practised in hell, or it would have overturned the kingdom of Beelzebul). But these laws, by which the child was taught to l)ebave himself proudly against the ancient, and the base against the honorable, were rigorouslv enforced in Ireland. The records of the House of Lords are full of the vain appeals of Catholic gentlemen against their dispossession by some claimant, perhaps an unworthy memlier of their family, perhaps a bitter enemy, and j)erha})s a hitherto unknown "discoverer," who had })ut on the guise of ostentatious Protestantism as a cloak for plunder. In often-quoted, often-to-be-quoted words, Burke, in later years, denounced the THE RESTORATION. 77 penal code for its " vicious perfectioii." " For," isaid he, "I must do it justice : it was a complete system, full of. coherence and consistency, well digested and well composed in all its parts. It was a machine of wise and elalwratc con- trivance, and as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the i)erverted ingenuity of man." It is encouraging to think that even und^er such laws the. spirit of the people was not wholly annihilated. The country ch«ng to its proscribed faith ; the ministers of that faith braved shame and persecution and death in their unswerving allegiance to their scattered flocks. They fought bruvely against the oppression which would have enforced iijnorance and all its attendant evils upon an unhappy people. When no Catholic might open a school, the })riests established what were knowiif-as hedge schools. By the roadside and on thej^iillside, in ditches and l)ehind hedges, the children of the people cowered about their pastors, fearfully and eagerly striving to attain that knowledge which the harsh laws denied them. In one» other instance the penal laws failed. They could take away the Catholic's land, his horse, his life ; they could hang his priests and burn his place of worship ; they could refuse him all education ; they could deny ^ him all rights be- fore the law except the right to be robbed and hanged; but they could not compel him to change his faith,, and thev could not succeed in making cAcry Protestant in Ireland a willing creature of the ncAv code. By the code, aijy marriage between a Catholic and a Protestant 78 A SHORT HISTORY OF IRELAND. was, jy the fact of the husband and wife being of opposite faiths, null and void, without any process of law whatever. A man might leave his wife, or a woman her husband, after twenty years of marriage, in such a case, and bring a legal bastardy on all their offspring. But, for the sake of human honor, it is consolatory to rememl)er that the instances in which this ever occurred were very rare. The law might / sanction the basest treachery, but it was not able to make its subjects treacherous. The evils of the penal code were further sup- plemented by the statutory destruction of Irish trade. Under Charles I., Strafford had done his best to ruin the Irish woollen manufacturers in order to benefit the English clothiers. Under Charles II. the importation of Irish cattle or sheep or swine was prohibited. In 1663 Ire- land was left out of the act for the encouraiije- ment of trade, so that all the carrying trade in Irish-built ships with any pai-t of his majesty's dominions was prevented. But it was left to William to do the worst. In 1696 all direct trade from Ireland with the British colonies was forbidden, and a revival of the woollen trade was crushed out by an act Avhich prohibited the export of Irish wool or woollen goods from any Irish port except Cork, Drogheda, Dublin, Kinsale, Waterford, and Youghal, to any port in the world except Milford, Chester, Liver- pool, and certain ports in the Bristol Channel, under a penalty of £500 and the forfeiture of both ship and cargo. CHAPTER VII. • THE EIGHTEEXTH CENTURY. It has been happily said that Ireland has no THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 79 history during the greater part of the eighteenth tenturj. What Burke called "the ferocious legislation of Queen Anne " had done its work of humiliation to the full. For a hundred years the country was crushed into quiescent misery. Against the tyranny which made war at once upon their creed, their intellect, and' their trade, the Irish had no strength to struggle ; neither in 1715, nor in 1745, did the Irish Catholics raise a hand for the Pretenders. The evidence of Arthur Young shows how terribly the con- dition of the peasantry had sunk when he is able to state that ''Landlords of consequence have assured me that many of their cotters would think themselves honored by having their wives and daughters sent for to the bed of their mas- ters ; a mark of slavery vi^hich proves the op- pression under whiiih such people must live." To add to the wretchedness of the people, a ter- rible famine ravaged the country in 1741, the horrors of which almost rival, in ghastliness, those of the famine of 1847. Great numbers died ; great numbers tied from the seemingly accursed country to recruit the armies of the Continent, and fpund death less dreadful on many well-fought iields than in the shape of plague or famine in their own land. Such ele- ments of degradation and despair naturally begot all sorts of secret societies among the peasantry from north to south. White-boys, Oak-boys, and Hearts of Steel banded against the land tyranny, and held together for lon^ enough in spite of the strenuous ettbrts of the government to put them down. If the military force, said Lord Chesterfield, "had killed half as many landlords as it had AVhite-boys, it would have' contributed more effectually to re- 80 A SHOR T HISTOR Y OP IRELAND. store quiet ; for the poor people in Ireland are worse used than negroes by their masters, and deputies of deputies." Bad as the condition of Ireland was, the English in Ireland proposed to make it worse by depriving it of what poor remains of legis- lative indc})endence it still possessed. So early as 1703, a petition in favor of union with Eng- land, and the abolition of the Irish Parliament, w^as presentetl to Queen Anne ; its prayer was rejected for the time, but the idea was working in the minds of those — and they were many — who wished to see Ireland stripped of all pre- tence at indei)endence .afforded by the existence of a separate Parliament, even though that Par- liament were entirely Protestant. Seventeen years later, in the sixth year of George I., a vigorous l)low was dealt at the independence of the Irish Parliament by an act which not only deprived the Irish House of Lords of any ap- pellate jurisdiction, but declared that the Eng- lish Parliament had the right to make laws to bind the })eoi)le of the kingdom of Ireland. The " heads of a bill "' might indeed be brought in in either House. If agreed to, they were carried to the \ iceroy, who gave them to his Privy Council to alter if they chose, and send to England. They were subject to alteration by the English Attorney-general, and, when approved by the English Privy Council, sent back to Ireland, wheie the Irish Houses could either accept or reject them ia toto, but had no power to change them. The condition of the Irish Parliament all through the eighteenth century is truly pitiable. Its existence as a legislative body is a huge sham, a ghastly simulacrum. It slowly drifted THE EIGHTEENTH GENTVBY. 81 into the custom of siW^ing but once in every two years, to vote the money bills for the next two twelvemonths. The Irish Exchequer derived half its receipts from the Restoration grant of the excise and customs ; and the greater part of . this money" was wasted upon royal mistresses, upon royal bastards, and upon royal nominees. The Parliament was torn b}'^ factions, which the English government ingeniously played off against each other ; it was crowded with the sup- ple placemen of the government, who were well rewarded for their obedient votes ; the bulk of the House was made up. of nominees of the Protestant landlords. The Opposition could never turn out the Administration, for the Administration was composed of the irremov- able and irresponsible Lords-justices of the Privy Council and certain officers of state. The Opposition, such as it was, was composed of Jacobites, who dreamed of a Stuart restora- tion, and of a few men animated by a patriotic belief in their country's rights. These men were imbued with the principles which had set forth in the end of the seventeenth century by William Molyneux, the friend of Locke, who, in his "Case of Ireland," was the tirst to formulate Ireland's constitutional claim to in- dependent' existence. His book was burned by the English Parliament, but the doctrines it set forth were not to be so destroyed. During the reigns of the first two Georges, the Patriot Party had the support of the gloomy genius and the fierce indignation of the man whose name is coupled with that of Molyneux in the opening sentences of Grattan's famous speech on the triumph of Irish independence. Swift, weary of English parties, full of melancholy 82 A SMORl HISTORY OF IRELAND. memories of St. John and Harley and the scattered Tory chiefs, had come back to Ireland to try his fighting soul in the troublous con- fusion of Irish politics. It has been asserted over and over again that Swift had very little real love for the country of his birth. Whether he loved Ireland or not is little to the purpose, for he did her very sterling service. He was the first to exhort Ireland to use her own manufactures, and he was unsuccessfully prosecuted by the state for the pamphlet in which he gave this advice. When Wood received the authority of the English Parlia- ment to deluge Ireland with copper money of his own making, it was Swift's "Drapier's Letters " which made Wood and his friends the laughing-stock of the world, and averted the evil. In Swift's " Modest Proposal " we have the most valuable evidence of the misery of the country. He suggests, with savage earnestness, that the children of the Irish peasant should be reared for food ; and urges that the best of these should be reserved for the landlords, who, as they had already devoured the substance of the people, had the best right to devour the flesh of their children. Even as the most conspicuous supporter of the Irish interest during the first half of the century was the Dean of St. Patrick's, the two most remarkable supporters of the English "interest" in Ireland in the eighteenth century were both Churchmen, the Primate Boulter and the Primate Stone. Compared to Stone, Boulter appears an honest and an honorable man. He was only shallow, arrogant, and capricious, quite incapable of the slightest sympathy with any people or party but his THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUR Y. 83 own— a man of some statesmanship, which was entirely at the service of the government, and which never allowed him to make any considera- tion for the wants, the wishes, or the sufferings of the Irish peo})le. Perhaps the best that can be said of him is, that while belongingto the Eng- lish Church he did not wholly neglect its teach- ings and its duties, or live a life in direct defiance of its conmiands, which is saying a good deal for such a man in such a time. So much cannot be said of his successor in the headship of the Irish ecclesiastical system, Primate Stone. The grandson of a jailer, he might have deserved admiration for his rise if he had not carried with him into the high places of the Church a spirit stained by most of the crimes over which his ancestor was appointed warder. In an age of corrupt politics, he was oonspicuous as a corrupt politician : in a profligate epoch, he was eminent for profligac}'. In the basest days of the Roman Empire he would have been remarkable for the variety of his sins ; and the" grace of his person, which caused him to be styled in savage mockery the " Beauty of Holiness," coupled with his ingenuity, in pan- dering to the passions of his friends, would have made him a serious rival to Petronius at the court of Nero. The vear that Swift died, 1745, was the first year of the vice-royalty of Lord Chesterfield, one of the few l)right spots in the dark account of Ireland in the eighteenth century. If all viceroys had been as calm, as reasonable, and as considerate as the author of the famous " Letters " showed himself to be in his dealings with the people over whom he was placed, the history of the suc(?eeding century and a half 84 A SHOUT HISTORY OF IRELAND. might have been very different. But when ChesteVfieklV viceioyalty passed away, the temperate policy he i)ur8ued passed away as well, and has seldom ])oen resumed by the long succession of viceroys who have governed and misgoverned the country since. In the meanwhile, a new spirit was gradually coming over the country. Lucas, the first Irishman, in the w^ords of the younger Grattan, "who, after Swift, dared to write freedom," had founded the Freeman' s Journal, a journal which ventured in dangerous times to advocate the cause of the Irish ])eople, and to defy the an<>er of the Ensrlish " interest." In the first number, which appeared on Saturday, Sei)tem- ber 10, 1763, and which bore an engraving of Hiliernia with a wreath in her right hand and a rod in her left, Lucas boldly advocated the duty and diijnity of a free press, and denounced un- der tlie guise of "Turkish Tyranny," "The Tyranny of French Despotism," and " The Ten Tyrants of Rome," the ministries and the creature whom his unsparing eloquence assailed. The Patriot Party, too, was ra})idly increasing its following and its infiuence in the country. The patriotic party in Parliament had found a brilliant leader in Henry Flood, a gifted politi- cian, who thought himself a poet, and who was certainly an orator. Flood was the son of the Irish Chief-justice of the King's Bench. He had been educated at Trinity College and at Ox- ford, and nuich of his youth was devoted to the study of oratory and the jnirsuit of poetr3^ He wrote an ode to Fame, which was perhaps as unlucky in reaching its address as that poem to Posterity of which poor Jean Baptiste Rous- seau was so proud. But his oratory was a THE mOHTEENTH CENTURY. 85 jifenuiiie gift, which he carefully cultivated. We hear of his learning speeches of Cicero by heart, and writing out long passages of Demos- thenes and ^Eschines, His character was kindly, sweet-tempered, and truthful. He was ambit- ious because he was a man of geniur<, but his ambition was for his country rather than for himself, and he served her with a daring si)irit, which only the profound statesmanlike qualities of his intellect prevented from becoming reck- less. In 1759, then in his twent^'-seventh year, a married man with a large fortune, he entered public life, never to leave it till the end of his career. He came into Parliament as member fcM" Kilkenny, and almost inmiediately became a prominent member of the Opposition. His n)aiden speech was a vigorous attack upon the corrupt and profligate Primate Stone. In the hands of Flood, al)ly seconded by Cliarles Lucas, the 0})position began to take shai)e, and to become a serious political power, lender his 1)rilliant and skilful chieftainship, the " Patri- ots," as the i)arty who followed him were called in scorn by their enemies, and in admiration by their allies, made rei)eated assaults upon the hated pension list. After they had been de- feated jigain and again. Flood found a more successful means of harassing the Administra- tion by turnino; the attention of his i)artv to parliamentary reform. The time was well chosen. The English government was begin- ning to be troubled by its own greedy placemen, who were always ready to go with light hearts into the Opposition lobby if the}^ could nolt squeeze all they wanted out of the government. By taking adyantage of the discontent of placemen, the Patriots were able to induce the ' 86 A SHO-RT HISTORY OF IRELAND. House to declare that they alone had the right to initiate a money bill, and to refuse to accept a money bill brought in by the English or Irish Privy Council. It is bitterly to be regretted that Flood allowed himself to be led away from the Patriot Party, and to accept a government sinecure. There is no need to doubt that when Flood accepted the office of vice-treasurer he believed that he was acting on the whole in the interests of the cause he represented. He had just made a great political triumph. He had driven out of office a most obnoxious and un- popular lord-lieutenant. Lord Townsend, and Townsend's place had been taken by Lord Harcourt, a reasonable and able man, who seemed likely to be in sympathy with Flood's views as to the independence of Parliament. Flood may well be assumed to have reasoned that a place under government would offer him greater opportunities for urging his cause. But, whatever his reasons, the step was fatally ill-advised ; he lost the confidence of the country, and ruined his position as leader. But this was the less to be regretted that it gave his place as leader of the Patriot Party to a greater orator and a nobler man — ^to Henry Grattan. Grattan was born in 1750, in Dublin. His years of early manhood were passed in Lon- don, studying for the bar. Like Flood, he be- lieved himself destined to be a poet ; but when, in 1775, he was nominated to represent Charle- mont in the Irish Parliament by the owner of the borough. Lord Charlemont, he discovered where his real genius lay. He and Flood had been close friends and political allies until Flood's acceptance of the vice-treasurership. :-^''- THE mQHTEENTH CENTURY. 87 This seemed to Grattan the basest political apostasy. The alliance between the two orators was definitely broken off; the friendship was finally severed in the fierce discussion that took place between them in the House of Commons some years later, when Flood tauntingly de- scribed Grattan as a ""mendicant patriot," and Grattan painted Flood as a traitor in one of the most crushing and pitiless pieces of invective that have ever belonged to oratory. Such a quarrel between such men was the more to be regrette(J because each had" the same end in view, and each had special qualifications for furthering that end which were not possessed by thei other. Grattan w^as now leader of the Patriots. It was his ambition to secure legislative in- dependence for thie Irish Parliament. The war with the American colonies gave him the opportunity of realizing his ambition. A large force of Volunteers had been organized in Ireland to defend the island from the attacks of the terrible Paul Jones, and the Volunteers and their leaders were all in sympathy with the Patriot Party. For the first time since the surrender of Limerick there was an armed force in Ireland able and willing to sustain the national cause. There were 60,000 men under arms, under the leadership of the gifted and patriotic Lord Charlemont. Among their leaders were Flood himself and Henry Grattan. The Volunteers formed themselves into an organized convention for the purpose of agitating the national grievances. Grattan was not, indeed, a member of this convention, but he saw that with the existence of the Volunteers had come, the hour to declare the independence 88 A SHOUT HISTORY OF IRELAND. of the Irish Parliament, and he seized upon the opportunity. lie had an army at his back ; the Eno-lish Government was still striving; Avith "Mr. AVashington" and his rebels, and it had to give way. All that Grattan asked for was granted ; the hateful Act of the 6th George I. was repealed, and Grattan was able to address a free people and wish Ireland as a nation a perpetual existence. But now that the desires of the Patriot Party had been apparently fulfilled, by a curious example of the law of historical reaction the popularity of Grattan began to wane, and that of Flood to wax anew. The English hold over the Irish Parliament had been based first upon Poynings's Act, and then upon a Declara- tory Act asserting the depender.ce of the Irish Parliament. It was this Declaratory Act that Grattan, aided by the Volunteers, had caused to be repealed, and he and his party contended that by this re})eal England resigned her right over the Irish Prrliament. Flood and his friends maintained that the repeal of the Declaratory Act was not enough, and they would not rest until they had obtained a fuller and more formal Renunciation Act. There were other difl'erences between Flood and Grattan. Grattan was all in favor of the dis- bandment and dispersal of the Volunteers. Flood was for still keeping them in armed existence. Grattan had urged that their work had been done, and that their presence was a praBtorian menace to the newly acquired liber- ties. Flood believed that their co-operation was still needful for the further securing of Irish liberty. Yet it is curious to remember that Grattan was the advocate of Catholic THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 89 Emancipation, and that Flood was strenuously opposed to it. Grattan carried his point, and the Volunteers disbanded and dispersed, very much to the disappointment of Flood and the indignation of one of the most curious political figures of the time, and one of the most re- markable of the many remarkable ecclesiastics who played a part in this period of Irish history. This was the Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry, a son of the Lord Hervey whom Pope strove to make eternally infamous by his nickname of Sporus, and who has left such living pictures of the court of the second George in the brilliant malignancy of his un- rivalled memoirs. The bishop was a cultured, desperate dandy, a combination of the typical French abbe of the last century with the con- ventional soldier of fortune. He loved gorgeous dresses ; he loved to be prominent in all things. The Volunteers delio-hted his wild imagination. He fancied himself the leader of a great rebellion, and he ba})bled to every one of his scheme with ostentatious folly. But though he could com- mand popularity among the Volunteers, he could not command the Volunteers themselves. They remained under the guidance of Charle- mont and Flood, and when Flood failed in carrying the Volunteer Reform Bill for en- larging the franchise, the Volunteers peaceably dissolved. The bishop drifted Out of Dublin, drifted into Naples, lived a wild life there for many years, became a lover of Lady Hamilton's, and died in Rome in 1803. While it lasted the free Irish Parliament was worthy of its creator. It gave the Catholics the elective franchise of which they had been so long deprived ; up to this time no 90 A SHORl HISTORY OF IRELAND. Catholic had been able to record a vote in favor of the men who were hil)()ring for the liberty of their country. There is no doubt that it would in time have allowed Catholics to enter Parliament. But the efforts of G rattan after Catholic Emancipation failed, and their failure strengthened the hands of the United Irish- men. The name " United Irishmen" designated a number of men all over the country, who had formed themselves into clubs for the purpose of promoting a union of friendship between Irishmen of every religious persuasion, and of forwarding a full, fair, and adequate representa- tion of all the people in Parliament. It was in the beginning a })erfectly loyal body, with a Protestant gentleman, Mr. Hamilton Rowan, for its president. James Napper Tandy, a Protestant Dublin trader, was secretary. The men who created it Avere well pleased with the success of Grattan's efforts at the independence of the Irish Parliament, but they were deeply discontented at the subsequent disbandment of the Volunteers and Grattan's comparative in- action. The simple repeal of the (ith George I. did not answer iheir aspirations for liberty, which were encouiaged and excited by the out- break of the French Revolution. They found a leader in Theol)ald AVolfe Tone, a young barrister, bra^e, adventurous, and eloquent. Allied with him was Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the chivalrous, the heroic, who had lived long in France and tra\'clled in America, who was devoted to two loves, his countrv and his beautiful wife Pamela, the daughter of Philippe Egalite and ]\Iadanie de Genlis. A third leader was Arthur O'Connor, Lord Longueville's THE maHTEENTIt CENTUny. 91 nephew, and member for Philipstown. They were all young ; they were all Protestants ; they were all dazzled by the successes of the French Revolution, and believed that the House of Hanover might be as easily overturned in Ireland as the House of Capet had been in France. Wolfe Tone went over to Paris and pleaded the cause of Ireland with the heads of the French Directory. His eloquence convinced them, and a formidable fleet was sent over to Ireland under victorious Hoche. But the winds which had" destroyed the Armada dispersed the French squadron, and no landing was ett'ected. The government was aroused and alarmed ; the plans of the United Irishmen were betrayed ; martial law was proclaimed. Arthur O'Connor was at once arrested. Edward Fitzgerald lay in hiding in Dublin for some davs in a house in Thomas Street, but his hiding-place was betrayed. He defended himself desperately against the soldiers who came to take him, was severely wounded, and died of his wounds in prison. The room is still shown in which the "gallant and seditious Geraldine" met his death ; it is very small, ^d the struggle must have been doubly desperate in the narrow space. It is a dismal little theatre for the tragedy that was played in it. Before the rebellion broke out, soldiers and yeomen, who were generally Orangemen of the most bitter kind, were sent to live at free ; quarters among the peasants in every place where any possible disaffection was suspected, and the licentiousness and brutal cruelty of these men did" much to force hundreds of peasants into the rising, and to prompt the tierce retaliation which afterwards characterized 92 A SHORT HISTOIt Y OF IHELAND. ' some episodes of tlie rebellion. The troops and yeomen lloiifged, picketed, and tortured witli pitch-caps the unhai)py men, and violated the unhappy women, who were at their mercy. The Irish .historian would indeed be fortunate who could write that on the Irish side the strujiiile was dissfraced bv no sucli crimes. Un- hji})j)ily this cannot l)e said. Here it cannot be better than to speak in j\Ir. Lecky's words : " Of the atrocities committed by the rebels during the bloody month when the rebellion was at its height, it is difficult to speak too strongly," but he goes on to say — he is criticizing Mr. Fronde — "an impartial historian would not have forgotten that they were perpe- trated by undiscii)lined men, driven to madness by a long course of savage cruelties, and in most Cases without the knowledge or aj)proval of their leaders ; that from the beginning of the struggle the yeoman rarely gave (juarter to the rel)els ; that with the one horrible exception of Scullabogue the rebels in their treatment of women contrasted most favora])ly and most re- markably with the troojjs, and that one of the earliest episodes of the struggre was' the butchery near Kildare of 350 insurgents who had surrendered on the express i)i"oniise that their lives should be s[)ared." It should be borne in mind, in considering the rebellion of 171)8, that the struggle is not to be considered as a struggle of creed against creed. Protestants began and organized the movement, and it is estimated by Madden that among the leaders of tlie United Irishmen Catholics were only in the ])ro})drtion of one to four throughout the relu'llion. On the other hand, a large number of Catholics were strongly THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 93 opposed to the rebellion, and in many cases took active measures against it. In Wexford, unhappily, the efforts of the Orangemen suc- ceeded in o:ivin«: the stru^o-le there much of the character of a religious war, but this the revolution, looked at as a whole, never was. It was a national movement, an uprising against intolerable grievances, and it was sympathized with and supported by Irishmen of all religious denominations, bound together by common injuries and a common desire to redress them. The great insurrection which was to have shattered the power of England was converted into a series of untimely, abortive, local risings, of which the most successful took place in Wexford. The rebels fought bravely, but the cause was now hopeless. The Catholic clergy came fearlessly to the front ; many of the little bands of rebels were led into action by priests of the Church. Father John Mur})hy, Father- Philip Roche, and Father Michael Murphy were among the bravest and ablest of the revolutionary leaders. Father Michael Murphy was long believed by his men to ])e invulneral)le, but he was killed by a cannon-ball in the fight by Arklow. Father Philip Roche also died on the field. Father John Murphy, less happy, was captured and died on the gallows ; so died Bagenal Harvey, of Barry Castle, and Anthony Perry, both Protestant gentlemen of fortune who had been forced into the rebellion, the one by government suspicion, the other by imprison- ment, cruelty, and torture. The revolution was crashed out with pitiless severity, until the deeds of the English soldiers and yeomanry became hateful in the eyes of the viceroy him- self, Lord Cornwallis. "The conversation," U A SnORT IttSTORY OF IRELAND. he writes in a letter to General Ross, "of the principal persons of the country all tends to encourage the system of blood ; and the con- versation, even at my table, where you will suppose I do all I can to prevent it, always turns on hanging, shooting, burning, etc., and if a })riest has been put to death the greatest joy is expressed by the whole company. So much for Ireland and my wretched situation." Cornwallis attcd mercifully. He proclaimed pardon to all insurgents guilty of rebellion only who should surrender their arms and take the oath of allegiance. Of the state prisoners, the two l)r<)tliers Sheares were hanged ; McCann was hanged ; Oliver Bond died in Newgate ; O'Connor, Thomas Addis Emmet and McNevin were banished. The insurrection was not quite over when a small French force, under General lluni])ei"t, landed in Killala Bay and entered Longford. But Humbert was surrounded bv the English under Cornwallis and General Lake at Ballinamuck, and surrendered at discretion. The French were treated as prisoners of Avar, but the insurgent jjcasantry were slaughtered without quarter. There was still one more scene in the drama of '98. A French squadron, under General Hardi, sailed for Ireland, but was attacked by an English squadron, and hopelessly defeated. Wolfe Tone, who was on board the principal vessel, the Hoche, was captured with the rest, and entertained with the French officers at Lord Cavan's house at Lough S willy. Here a treacherous friend recognized him and addressed him by his name. Tone was too proud to afi'ect concealment. He was at once sent in irons THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 95 to Dublin, and tried by court-martial ; he asked in vain for a soldier's death ; he was condemned to be hanged, but he cut his throat in prison. The wound was not mortal, and he would have been hanged, had not Curran moved in the King's Bench for a writ of habeas corpus, on the ground that a court-martial had no juris- diction while the Law Courts were still sitting in Dublin. The writ was granted, and Tone died a lingering death in prison. Wolfe Tone was buried in Bodenstown, not far from the little village of Sallins, some eighteen miles from Dublin. Thomas Davis has devoted one of his finest lyrics to the green grave in I^odenstown churchyard, with the winter wind raving about it and the storm sweeping down on the plains of Kildare. The melancholv nmsic of Davis's verse is well suited to the desolate and deserted «:ra>B- grown graveyard and the little lonely church, ruined and roofless, and thickly grown with ivy, with the grave on the side away from the road. When Davis wrote his poenl there was no stone upon the grave ; now it is railed in with iron rails wrought at the top into the shape of shamrocks, and marked by^-a winter- worn headstone, and a stone slab with an in- scription setting forth the name and deeds of the man who lies beneath, and ending " God save Ireland ! " The leaders of constitutional agitation had taken no part in the rebellion of the United Irishmen. Neither Grattan nor Flood had be- longed to the body, and neither of them had any sympathy with its eflbrts. They stood aside while the struggle was going on, and the • most prominent place in the public mind was 86 A SHO R T HISTOR Y OF IRELAND. taken by a man not less fjifted than either of them, John Curran. Like Grattan and like Flood, Curian l)egan his career by trying to play (m the dou1)le pipes of poetry and oratory, and, lil^ his great compeers, he soon aban- doned verse for prose. He rose from a very humble origin, by the sheer force of his ability, to a commanding position at the bar, and an honorable position in Parliament, and his patriotism was never stained by the slightest political subservience. Before the rebellion of 1798 he had ])een conspicuous for his courage in advocating the causes of men unpopular with the government and the English '' interest," and after the rebellion broke out he rendered himself honorab.ly eminent by the eloquence and the daring which he offered in turn to the cause of all the leading political })ri,'^oners. In his speech for Hamilton Eowan — a defence for- which he was threatened like a new Cicero, but, unlike Cicero, remained undi.smayed — he made that defence of the princi})le of universal emanci])ation which has l)een so often, yet cannot be too often, quoted:"! speak in the spirit of the British law, Avhich makes liberty commensurate with, and inse})arable from, the British soil which i)roclaims even to tlie stranofer and tlie soiourner, the moment he sets his foot on British earth, that the ground on which he treads is liol \', and consecrated })y the genius of universal emancipation. No matter in what language his doom may have been pronounced : no matter what complexion incom})atil)le with freedom an Afric^m or an Indian sun may lune I)urned upon him ; no matter in what disjislrous battle his 111)^17 may have been cloven down ; no matter with what THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. . 97 solemnities he may have been devoted upon the altar of slavery — the first moment lie touches the sacred soil of Britain the altar and the god sink together in the dust ; his soul walks abroad in its own majesty, his body swells beyond the measure of his chains, that burst from around him, and he stands redeemed, regener- ated and disenthralled by the irresistible genius / of universal emancipation." Appeals to the "irresistible genius of uni- versal emancipation" were not likely to have much effect just then. Martial and civil law vied witjjn, each other in severity towards the leaders of the United Irishmen. -But these, at least, had striven for the cause of emancipation with arms in their hands. There was no such excuse to justify the measures now taken by the o-overnment to insure that the " genius of uni- versal emancipation," however " commensurate with, and inseparable from," British soil, should have very little recognition pn Irish earth. . Having destroyed the revolution, the govern- ment now determined to destroy the Parlia- ment. The liberty which Grattan had hoped might be perpetual endured exactly eighteen years. Grattan had traced the career of Ire- laind from injuries to arms, and from arms to liberty. He was now to witness tlie reverse of the process, to w^atch the progress from liberty to arms, and from arms to injuries. The sword crushed out the rebellion, gold destroyed the' Parliament. The ruin of the Irish Parliament is one of the most shameful stories of corrup- tion and treachery of whicli history holds wit- ness. It was necessary to obtain a government majority in the Irish Parliament, and the ma- 98 A SHORT HISTORY OF IBELAND. jority was manufactured by the most unblush- ing bribery. The letters of Comwallie confess the shame of a ])rave soldier at the unworthy means he had to employ in obeying the deter- mination of the government to steal from Ire- land her newly obtained liberties. Place and office were lavishly distributed. Peerages won the highest, and secret service money the low- est, of those who were to be bought. The English ministry had decided that Ireland was to be joined to England in an indissoluble union, and as Ireland was hostile to the scheme the union was effected by force and by fraud. The Bill of Union was introduced and passed by a well-paid majority of sixty, in 1800. The eloquence of Grattan was raised to the last in immortal accents against the unholy pact. But the spieech of angels would have been addressed in vain to the base and venal majority. It is something to remember that a hundred men could be found even in that degraded assembly whom the ministry could not corrupt, who straggled to the last for the constitutional lib- erties of their country, and who did not a])an- don her in her agony. It would not be well to leave this part of the story without a reference to the volumes which Mr. Froude has devoted to the " English in Ire- land in the Eighteenth Century." There is perhaps no instance among the writings of his- tory in which commanding talents have been put to a worse use. The deliberate and well- calculated intention of rousing up all the old animosities of race and religion, the carefully planned exaggeration of everything that tells against Ireland, and subordination or omission of all to be alleged in her favor, are evidence HMMEt-^O'OOMNJSLL. 99 of a purpose to injure which happily defeats it- self. The grotesque malignity with which Mr. Froude regards Ireland and everything Irish is so absurdly overdone, that, as Mr. Lecky says, "his book has no more. claim to impartiality than an election squib." "A writer of English history,"' the words are Mr. Lecky' s again, "who took the 'Newgate Calendar' as the most faithful expression of English ideas, and Eng- lish murderers as the typical representatives of their nation, would not be regarded with un- qualified respect." Yet this is literally what Mr. Froude has done in his determined effort to envenom old wounds and rekindle the embers of old hatreds. CHAPTER Vni. r EMMET.— O'CONNELL. Though the Union was accomplished with the opening of the century, the exchequers of the two countries were not consolidated for a score of years longer, during which Ireland suffered much, and England gained much, by the new contract. England's superior com- mand of capital rendered it impossible for Irish trade and enterprise to compete success- fully with her while both were chained together under the same system, and, as a natural con- sequence, Irish trade and enterprise dwindled, diminished, and practically disappeared^ The Union, like too many compacts that have ever been made with the willing or unwilling Irish people, was immediately followed by a breach of faith. One of the most important factors in the securing of the Union was the pledge en- 100 A SHOMT HISTOBY OF IRELAND. tered into by Pitt, and promulgated all over Ire- land by print, that legislation on Catholic Emancipation and the Tithe Question would be introduced at once. It is not to be questioned that such a promise must have had great efl'ect, if not in wmning actual support to the scheme of Union, at least in preventing in many cases energetic opposition to it. To many the ques- tion of Catholic Emancipation was so immedi- ately important, on many the grievous burden of the Tithe Question pressed so heavily, that they were almost ready to welcome any measure which offered to grant the one and relieve the other. But the pledge which Pitt had made Pitt could not fulfil. The bigoted and incap- able monarch, who had opposed more reforms and brought more misfortune upon his own country than any other of all England's kings, stubbornly refused to give his consent to any measure for the relief of the Roman Catholics. Pitt immediately resigned, just eleven dajs after the Union had beccmie law. The obsti- nate folly of the third George does not excuse the minister, who had done his best to delude Ireland by arousing hopes which he was not certain of gratifying, and making pledges that he was unable to fulfil. While the pledges to the Irish people were thus broken, the principles which had obtained before the Union remained unaltered. The system of corruption which is pei"haps insepar- able from the government of a viceroy and a Castle clique was in nowise diminished, and all the important offices of the Irish executive were filled solely by Englishmen. But the deceived people could do nothing. The country was under martial law ; and the experiences of '98 EMMET— OCONNELL. .101 had left behind them a memorable lesson of what martial law meant. There was no means, as there would have been no use, in brino-ino; forward their claims ^to consideration in any constitutional manner. But the strength of the national feeling of anger and des[)air may be estimated by the fact that, in spite of the hor- rors of the recent revolution, there were dan- gerous riots in several parts of Ireland, and that one actual rising took place, a last act of the rebellion of '98 surviving the Union. A young, brave, and gifted man, Robert Emmet, the youngest Ijrother of Thomas Addis Emmet, ])lanned the seizure of Dublin Castle. The rising failed. Emmet might have escaped, but he was in love with Sarali, Curran's daughter, and he Avas captured while awaiting an oppor- tunity for an interview with her. Curran was bitterly opposed to the love affair ; he refused to defend Emmet, and he has sometimes been accused in c()!ise(pieucc of being indirectly the cause of Emmet's death. But we may safely assume that no counsel and no defence could have saved Emmet then. The trial was hurried tlirough. Emmet was found guilty late at night. He was hani>:ed the next mornin2:, the 20th of September, 1803, in Thomas Street, on the spot where the gloomy church of St. Catherine looks down Bridge foot Street, where his principal stores of arms had been found. Just before his death he wrote a letter to Richard, Curran's son, full of melancholy ten- derness, regret for his lost love, and resignation for his untimelv death : "If there was any one in the world in whose breast my death might be supposed not to stifle every spark of resentment, it might be you ; I 102 SHORT HISTOR Y OF IRELAND. have deeply i,njured you — I have injured the haj)pines,s of a sister that you love, and who was formed to give hap])iness to every one about her, instead of having her own mind a [)rey toatHiction. Oh, Richard ! I have no ex- cuse to otfer, but that 1 meant the reverse ; I intended as much happiness for Sarah as the most ardent love could have given her. I never did tell you how much I idolized her ; it was not with a wild or unfounded passion, but it was an attachment increasing every hour, from an admiration of the purity of her mind and respect for her talents. I did dwell in secret upon the prospect of our union. I did hope that success, while it afforded the opportunity of our union, might be the means of coniirming an attachment which misfortune had called forth. I did not look to honors for myself — praise I would have asked from the lips of no man^-but I would have wished to read in the glow of Sarah's countenance that her husband was respected. My love ! Sarah ! it was not thus that I thought to have requited your affec- tion. I had hoped to be a prop, round which vour affections mi<*:ht have clunt*;, and which would never have been shaken ; but a rude ])last has sna})ped it, and they have fallen over a grave." The government acted against all the persons coneerned in Emmet's rising with a rij^or such as only panic could inspire. The fear of a French invasion was incessantly before the eyes of the' English government, and for several years the IIal)eas .Corpus Act was suspended, and an Insurrection Act in full force. But it took no steps whatever to allay the discontent which alone could inspire and animate such in- EMMET.—aCONNELL. 108 surrections. Pitt returned to office in 1804 on the distinct understanding that he would no longer weary the king with suggestions of re- lief for the Irish Catholics, and the minister kept his word. The helplessness of the Irish Catholics and the obvious indifference of the government to their condition now fostered the formation of a powerful anti-Catholic associa- tion, the Orange Society, a body organized to support the crown so long as it supported Protestant ascendency in Ireland, and which at one time, in later years in England, seems to have gone near to shifting the succession of the crown altogether. For years the government of Ireland drifted along on its old course of corruption and indif- ference. Pitt died, and Fox took his place. But the ofenius of the ofreat statesman, " on whose burning tongue truth, peace, and free- dom hung," was quenched within the year, and with it the only spirit of statesmanship which understood and sympathized with the struggles of the Irish people. These struggles were car- ried on in straggling continuity, in the form of vain jTctitions for redress from the Catholics of the better class, and of frequent disturbances of a more or less desperate kind on the part of 'the peasantry. In 1807 the tithe and land difficulties created two bodies, known as Sha- navests and Caravats, who seem to have agi- tated for a time very fiercely before they disap- peared under the pressure of the law. But once again, after a decade of despair, a new" leader of the Irish people, a new champion of the Catholic demands for freedom and the rights of citizenship, came upon the scene*; Paniel O'Connell was the first Irish leader 104 A SHOB T HISTOR Y OF IRELAND. for many years who was himself a Roman Cath- olic. In 1807 he had made his first political appearance as a member of the committee ap- pointed to present the petitions setting forth the Catholic claims to Parliament. In 1810 his name came more prominently before the public, as a speaker at a meeting called by the Protestant Corporation of Dublin to petition for the repeal of the Union. He at once began to take a prominent part in the Emancipation Movement, which gi*ew in strength and deter- mination year by year. Catholic meetings were held, and were dispersed by the govern- ment time after time, but still the agitation went on. Its chief supporters in Parliament were Henry Grattan, now an old man, and Sir Henry Parnell. In 1820 Grattan died, but the cause to which he devoted his life was rapidly striding towards success. O'Connell and Richard Lalor Shell, an advocate as enthusiastic, an orator only less power- ful, than O'Connell himself, were bring- insr the cause nearer and nearer to its goal. Three bills, embracing emancipation, disfranchisement of the forty-shilling house- holder ' freeholders, and the paj^ment of the Roman Catholic clergy, were introduced and advanced in the House of Commons ; but the House of Lords, urged by the Duke of York's "So help me God" speech against the bills, was resolutely opposed to them . The triumph was only postponed. The agitators discovered that the act which prohibited Roman Catholics from sitting in Parliament said nothing against their being elected, and O'Connell prepared to carry the war into Westminster. In 1828 he was returned to the House of Commons for EMMET.—aCONNELL, 105 Clare County. He refused to take the oath, which was expressly framed to exclude Catholics from the House. His refusal caused s^reat agitation in both countries, and resulted in thfe passing of the bill for Catholic Emancipation in 1829, after which O'Connell took his seat. To O'Connell what may be considered as the parliamentary phase of the Irish Movement is due. He first brought the forces of constitu- tional agitation in England to bear upon the Irish question, and showed what great results might be obtained thereby. The act for the relief of his majesty's Roman Catholic subjects al)olished all oaths and declara- tions against transubstantiation, the invocation of saints, and the sacrifice of the mass ; it allowed all Roman Catholics, except priests, to sit and vote in the House of Commons, and made no such exception for the House of Lords. A special form of oath was devised for Roman Catholic members of Parliament, the chief provision of which called upon them to main- tain the Protestant succession of the House of Hanover, and to make no effort to weaken the Protestant religion. Though O'Connell had been the means of calling the act into existence, he was not yef able to take his seat. The act had been passed since his election for Clare ; its action was not retrospective. When he presented himself to be sworn, the old oath, which it was impossible for him to take, was presented to him. He re^ fused it, and was called upon to withdraw. After some debate he was heard at the bar of the House. There was a division, and his right to take the new oath was negatived by 190 to 116. A new writ was issued for Clare. 106 A SHOUT HTSTOBY OF IRELAND. O'Connell was, of course, re-elected without opposition, and took his seat and the new oath on the 4th of Fobnuuy, 1830. But between O'Connell's first and second' election a change had been made in the composition of the electors. By an act of Henry VIII., which had been confirmed in 1795, freeholders to the value of foiiy shillings over and above all charges were entitled to A^ote, a system which naturally created an immense number of small land-owners, who were ex})ected to vote in obedience to the landlords who created them. O'Connell's election showed that the landlords could not always command the forty-shilling voters. It was clear that they might be wan over to any po})ular movement, and it was decided to abolish them ; which was accordingly done by an act passed on the same day with the Catholic Emancipation Act. The new act raised the county franchise to ten i)ounds, and freeholders of ten pounds, but under twenty pounds, were subjected to a complicated system of registration, well calculated to bewilder the unhappy tenant, and render his chance of voting more difficult. But all these precautiojis did not prevent the triumphant return of O'Connell the second time he ai)pealed to the electors of Clare, nor did it ever prove of much service in repressing the tenants from voting for the leaders of popular movements. The disenfranchisement produced intense discontent throughout the country, and disorder followed close on discontent. O'Connell now began to remind Ireland of his promise tliat Catholic Emancipation was a means towards an end, and that end the Repeal of the LTnion. He started a society called the " Friend of Ire- EMMET.—aCONNELL. 107 land," which the government at once put down. He started another, "The Anti-Union Associa- tion." It was put down too, and O'Connell was arrested for sedition, tried, and found guilty. Judgment was deferred and never pronounced, and O'Connell was released to carry on his agitation more vigorously than ever. With Ireland torn by disorders against which even the Insurrection Acts in force found it hard to cope, with the country aflame with anger at the extinction of the forty-shilling vote, the government judged it wise and prudent to bring in a bill for Ireland in January, 1832, effecting still further disfranchisement. The new bill abolished the foily-shilling vote in boroughs as well as in counties, and the lowest rate for boroughs and counties was ten pounds. But for the next few years all recollection of emancipation on the one hand, and dis- enfranchisement on the other, was to be swallowed up in a struggle which has passed into history as the Irish Tithe War. The English Church was established in Ireland against the will of the enormous majority of the Irish people, and they Avere compelled to pay tithes to maintain the obnoxious, establish- ment. Sydney Smith declared that there was no abuse like this in Timbuctoo, and he estimated that probably a million of lives had been sacrificed in Ireland to the collection of tithes. They had to be wrung from the reluctant people at the point of the bayonet, , and often enough by musket volleys. There were, naturally, incessant riots. Thie clergy- men of the Established Church had to call in the services of an army, and appeal to the strategies and menaces of miniature war to ob- 108 A SHORT HISTORY OF IRELAND. tain their tithes from the harassed followers of another faith. Such a state of thin