Page images
PDF
EPUB

1564

CHAP VII away and endeavoured not to see; the English Government had resolved to stir no sleeping dogs in Ireland till a staff was provided to chastise them if they would bite." Terence Daniel, the Dean of those rough-riding canons of Armagh, was installed as Primate; the Earl of Sussex was recalled to England; and the new ArchThe Irish bishop unable to contain his exultation at the blessed day which had dawned upon his country, wrote to Cecil to say how the millennium had come at last-glory be to God!

millennium.

Inquiry

into the

the Pale.

Meantime Cecil set himself to work at the root of the evil. Relinquishing for the present the hope of extending the English rule in Ireland, he endeavoured to probe the secret of its weakness, and to restore some kind of order and justice in the counties where that rule survived. On the return of Sussex to England Sir Thomas Wroth and Sir Nicholas Arnold were sent over as commissioners to

inquire into the complaints against the army. The scandals which they brought to light, the recrimination, rage, and bitterness which they provoked, fill a large volume of the State Papers.

[ocr errors]

Peculation had grown into a custom; the most baredisorders of faced frauds had been converted by habit into rights; and a captain's' commission was thought ill-handled` if it did not yield, beyond the pay, 500l. a year. The companies appeared in the pay books as having their full complement of a hundred men. The actual number rarely exceeded sixty. The soldiers followed the example of their leaders, and robbed and ground the peasantry. Each and all had commenced their evil ways, when the Government itself was the first and worst offender. A few more years-perhaps months-of such doings

1 Cecil to Sir Nicholas Arnold.-Irish MSS.

1564

would have made an end of English dominion. Sir CHAP VII Thomas Wroth described the Pale on his arrival as a weltering sea of confusion-the captains out of credit,' 'the soldiers' mutinous, the English Government hated; 'every man seeking his own, and none that which was Christ's;' few in all the land reserved from bowing the knee to Baal;' 'the laws for religion mere words."

Arnold.

Something too much of theological anxieties impaired Wroth's usefulness. He wished to begin at the outside with reforming the creed. The thing needful was to reform the heart and to bring back truth and honesty. Wroth therefore was found unequal to the work; and the purification of the Pale was left to Arnold-a hard, Sir Nicholas iron, pitiless man, careful of things and careless of phrases, untroubled with delicacy, and impervious to Irish ‘enchantments.' The account books were dragged to light; where iniquity in high places was registered in inexorable figures. The hands of Sir Henry Ratcliffe, the brother of Sussex, were not found clean. Arnold sent him to the castle with the rest of the offenders. Deep leading drains were cut through the corrupting mass, the shaking ground grew firm; and honest healthy human life was again made possible. With the provinces beyond the Pale Arnold meddled little, save where taking a rough view of the necessities of the case he could help the Irish chiefs to destroy each other. To Cecil he wrote

'I am with all the wild Irish at the same point I am at with bears and bandogs; when I see them fight, so they fight earnestly indeed and tug each other well, I care not who has the worse.'

2

Why not indeed? Better so than to hire assassins!

1 Sir Thomas Wroth to Cecil, April 16.-Irish MSS.

2 Sir Nicholas Arnold to Cecil January 29, 1565.-Irish MSS.

CHAP VII Cecil with the modesty of genius confessed his igno1564 rance of the country and his inability to judge; yet in every opinion which he allowed himself to give there was always a certain nobility of tone and sentiment.

War between Desmond and Ormond.

'You be of that opinion,' he replied, which many wise men are of-from which I do not dissent, being an Englishman; but being as I am a Christian man I am not without some perplexity to enjoy of such cruelties."

Arnold however, though perhaps not personally responsible, saw the Irish rending each other as he desired. The formal division into presidencies could not be completed on the moment; but English authority having ceased to cast its shadow beyond the Pale, the leading chiefs seized or contended for the rule. In the north O'Neil was without a rival. In the west the O'Briens and the Clanrickards shared without disputing for them the glens and moors of Galway, Clare, and Mayo. The richer counties of Munster were a prize to excite a keener competition; and when the English Government was no longer in a position to interfere, the feud between the Butlers and the Geraldines of the south burst like a volcano in fury, and like a volcano in the havoc which it spread. Even now the picture drawn by Sir Henry Sidney and repeated by Spenser can scarcely be contemplated without emotion. The rich limestone pastures were burnt into a wilderness; through Kilkenny, Tipperary, and Cork, a man might ride twenty or thirty miles nor ever find a house. standing;' and the miserable poor were brought to such wretchedness that any stony heart would have rued the same. Out of every corner of the woods and glens they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs

1 Cecil to Sir N. Arnold, February 28.-Irish MSS.

[ocr errors]

1564

State of
Munster.

could not bear them; they looked like anatomies of CHAP VII death; they spoke like ghosts crying out of their graves; they did eat the dead carrions, happy where they could find them; yea, they did eat one another soon after, insomuch as the very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of their graves; and if they found a plot of watercresses or shamrocks, there they flocked as to a feast for a time. Yet were they not all long to continue therewithal, so that in short space there were none almost left, and a most populous and plentiful country was suddenly left void of man and beast; yet surely in all that war there perished not many by the sword, but all by the extremity of famine which they themselves had wrought.'1

[ocr errors][merged small][merged small]

CHAP VIII

1564

The war

with

France.

THE

CHAPTER VIII.

HE policy of Elizabeth towards the French Protestants had not been successful. Had her assistance been moderately disinterested she would have secured their friendship, and at the close of the eight years fixed by the Treaty of Cambray for the restoration of Calais, she would have experienced the effects of their gratitude. By the forcible retention of Havre after the civil war was ended, she had rekindled hereditary animosities; she had thrown additional doubt on her sincerity as a friend of the Reformation; she had sacrificed an English army; while she had provided the French Government with a fair pretext for disowning its obligations, and was left with a war upon her hands from which she could hardly extricate herself with honour. A fortnight before Havre surrendered, the Prince of Condé had offered, if she would withdraw from it, that the clause in the Treaty of Cambray affecting Calais should be reaccepted by the King of France, the Queen-mother, the Council, the noblesse, and the Parliament. She had angrily and contemptuously refused; and now with crippled finances, with trade ruined, with the necessity growing upon her, as it had grown upon her sister, of contracting loans at Antwerp, her utmost hope was to extort the terms which she had then rejected.

« PreviousContinue »