LETTER XXXIII.

Historical ramble continued-First visit of our English ancestors to our Irish ancestors-Beginning of the dispute.

THE first visit or visitation of our English ancestors to our Irish ancestors, came about in this manner; O'Rourke, king of Breffiny, went upon a pilgrimage, better he had staid at home; for Dermod M'Murrogh, king of Leinster, (Oh, these kings!) carried off his wife in his absence; and this was about the year 1166, as near as I can learn. Roderick O'Conner was masterking of all Ireland, and the poor pilgrim applied to Roderick for his protection. The adulterer went with his story to king Henry the second, and the Plantagenet king, who was then in Aquitaine, in France, (God knows what his own wife was about then,) took the part of the adulterer against the pilgrim, and applied to the pope. And the pope, (Adrian,) who was an Englishman, took the part of the English king and the adulterer, against the Irish king and the pilgrim, and so the dispute begun. The English pope, Adrian, gave a Bull to the English king Henry, worse than any Irish bull, and granted him "all Ireland," be the same more or less, in consideration of natural love and affection, the pilgrim and the pilgrim's wife to the contrary in anywise notwithstanding. And he ordered the Irish to receive this English king honourably, and reverence him as their lord. With this Bull, and five hundred men besides, he came and formed, with a little opposition, a settlement, which they called the English pale, having first cantoned out the whole island to ten men, and so began that dispute,

"Never ending, still beginning,

Fighting still, and still destroying."

which has since deluged this unfortunate country in blood with little intermission, for near seven hundred years.

How the Irish reverenced the English king, and what cause they had, appears from a remonstrance to Pope John XXII. in the reign of Edward II. as follows:

Extracts from the Irish remonstrance to Pope John XXII.

"It is extremely painful to us, that the viperous detractions of slanderous Englishmen, and their iniquitous suggestions against the defenders of our rights, should exasperate your holiness against the Irish nation. But alas, you know us only by the misrepresentation of our enemies, and you are exposed to the danger of adopting the infamous falsehoods which they propagate, without hearing anything of the detestable cruelties they have committed against our ancestors, and continue to commit even to this day against ourselves. Heaven forbid that your holiness should be thus misguided; and it is to protect our unfortunate people from such a calamity, that we have resolved here to give you a faithful account of the present state of our kingdom, if, indeed, a kingdom we can call the melancholy remains of a nation, that so long groans under the tyranny of the kings of England and of their barons, some of whom, though born among us, continue to practise the same rapine and cruelties against us, which their ancestors did against ours heretofore. We shall speak nothing but the truth, and we hope that your holiness will not delay to inflict condign punishment on the authors and abettors of such inhuman calamities.

"Know, then, that our forefathers came from Spain, and our chief apostle St. Patrick, sent by your predecessor, Pope Celestin, in the year of our Lord 435, did, by the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, most effectually teach us the truth of the Holy Roman Catholic faith,

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that was preached to them, have, in number sixty-one; without any mixture of foreign blood, reigned in Ireland to the year 1170. And those kings were not Englishmen, nor of any other nation but our own, who with pious liberality bestowed ample endowments in lands, and many immunities on the Irish church, though in modern times our churches are inost barbarously plundered by the English, by whom they are almost despoiled. And though those our kings, so long and so strenuously defended, against the tyrants and kings of different regions, the inheritance given by God, preserving their innate liberty at all times inviolate; yet, Adrian IV. your predecessor, an Englishman, more even by affection and prejudice than by birth, blinded by that affection and the false suggestions of Henry II. king of England, under whom, and, perhaps, by whom St. Thomas of Canterbury was murdered, gave the dominion of this our kingdom, by a certain form of words, to that same Henry II. whom he ought rather to have stript of his own on account of the above crime.

"Thus, omitting all legal and judicial order, and, alas, his national prejudices and predilections blindfolding the discernment of the pontiff, without our being guilty of any crime, without any rational cause whatsoever, he gave us up to be mangled to pieces by the teeth of the most cruel and voracious of all monters. And if sometimes, nearly flayed alive, we escape from the deadly bite of these treacherous and greedy wolves, it is but to descend into the miserable abysses of slavery, and to drag on the doleful remains of a life more terrible than death itself. Ever since those English appeared first upon our coasts in virtue of the above surreptitious donation, they entered our territories under a certain specious pretext of piety and external hypocritical show of religion, endeavouring, in the mean time, by every artifice malice could suggest, to extirpate us root and branch; and without any other right than that of the strongest, they have

so far succeeded by base and fraudulent cunning, that they have forced us to quit our fair and ample habitations and paternal inheritances, and to take refuge, like wild beasts, in the mountains, the woods, and the morasses of the country; nor can even the caverns and dens protect us against their insatiable avarice. They pursue us into these frightful abodes, endeavouring to dispossess us of the wild uncultivated rocks, and arrogating to themselves the property of every place on which we can stamp the figure of our feet; and through an excess of the most profound ignorance, impudence, arrogance, or blind insanity, scarcely conceivable, they dare to assert that not a single part of Ireland is ours, but, by right, entirely their own.

"Hence the implacable animosities and exterminating carnage, which are perpetually carried on between us; hence our continual hostilities, our detestable treacheries, our bloody reprisals, our numberless massacres, in which, since their invasion to this day, more than 50,000 men have perished on both sides; not to speak of those who died by famine, despair, the rigours of captivity, nightly marauding, and a thousand other disorders, which it is impossible to remedy, on account of the anarchy in which we live, an anarchy which, alas, is tremendous not only to the state, but also to the church of Ireland, the ministers of which are daily exposed, not only to the loss of the frail and transitory things of this world, but also to the loss of those solid and substantial blessings, which are eternal and immutable.

"Let those few particulars concerning our origin, and the deplorable state to which we have been reduced by the above donation of Adrian IV., suffice for the present.

"We have now to inform your holiness that Henry, king of England, and the four kings, his successors, have violated the conditions of the pontifical bull, by which they were empowered to invade this kingdom; for the said Henry promised, as appears by the said

bull, to extend the patrimony of the Irish church, and to pay to the apostolical see annually one penny for each house; now this promise both he and his suc cessors abovementioned, and their iniquitous ministers, observed not at all with regard to Ireland. On the contrary, they have entirely and intentionally eluded them, and endeavoured to force the reverse.

"As to the church lands, so far from extending them they have confined them, retrenched them, and invaded them on all sides, insomuch that some cathe dral churches have been by open force notoriously plundered of half their possessions; nor have the persons of our clergy been more respected, for in every part of the country we find bishops and prelates cited, arrested, and imprisoned, without distinction, and they are oppressed with such servile fear by those frequent and unparalleled injuries, that they have not even the courage to represent to your holiness the sufferings they are so wantonly condemned to undergo. But since they are so cowardly and so basely silent in their own cause, they deserve not that we should say a syllable in their favour. The English promised also to introduce a better code of laws, and enforce better morals among the Irish people; but instead of this they have so corrupted our morals, that the holy and dove-like simplicity of our nation is, on account of the flagitious example of those reprobates, changed into the malicious cunning of the serpent.

"We had a written code of laws according to which our nation was governed hitherto; they have deprived us of those laws and of every law except one, which it is impossible to wrest from us; and for the purpose of exterminating us they have established other iniquitous laws, by which injustice and inhumanity are combined for our destruction, some of which we here insert for your inspection, as being so many fundamental rules of English jurisprudence established in this kingdom.

"Every man, not an Irishman, can, on any charge, however frivolous, prosecute an Irishman; but on