4

and,

residue gone elsewhere.' From Dingle to the Rock of Cashel,' said an Irish annalist, 'not the lowing of a cow nor the voice of the ploughman was that year to be heard.' The troops of Sir Richard Percie 'left neither corne, nor horn, nor house unburnt between Kinsale and Ross." The troops of Captain Harvie 'did the like between Ross and Bantry.' The troops of Sir Charles Wilmot entered without resistance an Irish camp, where 'they found nothing but hurt and sick men, whose pains and lives by the soldiers were both determined.'" The Lord President, he himself assures us, having heard that the Munster fugitives were harboured in certain parts of that province, diverted his forces thither, 'burnt all the houses and corn, taking great preys, . . . harassing the country, killed all mankind that were found therein.' From thence he went to other parts, where 'he did the like, not leaving behind him man or beast, corn or cattle, except such as had been conveyed into castles.' Long before the war had terminated, Elizabeth was assured that she had little left to reign over but ashes and carcases." It was boasted that in all the wide territory of Desmond not a town, castle, village, or farmhouse was unburnt; and a high English official, writing in 1582, computed that in six months, more than 30,000 people had been starved to death in Munster, besides those who were hung or who perished by the sword. Archbishop Usher afterwards described how women were accustomed to lie in wait for a passing rider, and to rush out like famished wolves to kill and

8

'Holinshed, vi. 459.

2 Annals of the Four Masters, A.D. 1582.

3 Pacata Hibernia (ed. 1820),

p. 645.

+ Ibid. p. 646.

5 Ibid. p. 659.

6 Ibid. pp. 189, 190.

7 Leland, Hist. of Ireland, ii. 287.

8 Froude's Hist. of England,

x. 603.

1

to devour his horse. The slaughter of women as well as of men, of unresisting peasants as well as of armed rebels, was openly avowed by the English commanders.2 The Irish annalists told, with horrible detail, how the bands of Pelham and Ormond killed blind and feeble men, women, boys and girls, sick persons, idiots, and old people;' how in Desmond's country, even after all resistance had ceased, soldiers forced men and women into old barns which were set on fire, and if any attempted to escape they were shot or stabbed; how soldiers were seen 'to take up infants on the point of their spears, and to whirl them about in their agony; how women were found hanging on trees with their children at their breasts, strangled with their mother's hair.

In Ulster the war was conducted in a similar spirit. An English historian, who was an eye-witness of the subjugation of the province, tells us that 'Lord Mountjoy never received any to mercy but such as had drawn the blood of some of their fellow rebels.' Thus ' McMahon and McArtmoyle offered to submit, but neither could be received without the other's head.' The country was steadily subdued by starvation. No spectacle was more frequent in the ditches of towns, and especially in wasted countries, than to see multitudes of these poor people dead, with their mouths all coloured green by eating nettles, docks, and all things they could rend above ground.' In the single county of Tyrone 3,000 persons

1 Bernard's Life of Usher (1656), p. 67.

2 See a great deal of evidence of this in Froude's Hist. of England, vol. x.

3 Annals of the Four Masters, A.D. 1580.

Peter Lombard, Comment. de Regno Hibern. Lombard was

afterwards appointed Roman Catholic Primate of Ireland. He wrote at Rome from the reports of the Irish priests, who very possibly exaggerated; but the substantial truth of the description is unfortunately only too fully corroborated.

in a few months were starved. On one occasion Sir Arthur Chichester, with some other English officers, saw three small children—the eldest not above ten years old

-feeding off the flesh of their starved mother. In the neighbourhood of Newry, famine produced a new and appalling crime. It was discovered that some old women were accustomed, by lighting fires, to attract children, whom they murdered and devoured. At last, hunger and the sword accomplished their work; Tyrone bowed his head before the storm, and the English ascendency was supreme

It needs, indeed, the widest stretch of historic charity -it needs the fullest realisation of the manner in which, in the sixteenth century, civilised men were accustomed to look upon races they regarded as inferior to judge this history with equity or moderation. A faint gleam of light falls across the dark and lurid picture in the humanity of Sir John Perrot. There were, no doubt, occasional vacillations and occasional pauses in the massacre. A general pardon was proclaimed in Munster after the suppression of the Desmond rebellion, and through the whole island after that of Tyrone. The cruelties were certainly not all on one side,2 and it must

1 Fynes Moryson, Hist. of Ireland, bk. i. c. ii., bk. iii. c. i. Leland has collected some striking statistics of prices showing the severity of the famine which raged through the country. Even in Dublin, in 1602 wheat had risen from 36s. to 97. the quarter; oats from 3s. 4d. to 20s. the barrel; beef from 26s. 8d. to 81. the carcass; mutton from 3s. to 26s. the carcass.-Leland's Hist. of Ireland, ii. 410.

2 In the Carew MSS. there is a letter from Sir Henry Sydney (April 20, 1567), giving a horrible

description of the devastations by Desmond in Munster. Such horrible and lamentable spectacles there are to behold, as the burning of villages, the ruin of churches, the wasting of such as have been good towns and castles; yea, the view of the bones and skulls of your dead subjects, who, partly by murder, partly by famine, have died in the fields, as in troth, hardly any Christian with dry eyes could behold. Not long before my arrival there, it was credibly reported that a principal servant of the Earl of Des

not be forgotten that a large proportion of the soldiers in the service of England were Irish Catholics. But, on the whole, the direction and the power of England were everywhere in the ascendant, and her policy was a policy of extermination. It is easy to imagine what feelings it must have planted in the minds of the survivors, and what a tone of ferocity it must have given to the intercourse of the races. But, although the circumstances of these wars were recorded by a remarkable concurrence of contemporary annalists, it is probable that their memory would have soon perished had they not coincided with the adoption by the English Government of a new line of policy, vitally affecting the permanent interests of the nation. The devastation of Ireland in the closing years of Elizabeth was probably not at all more savage, and was certainly much less protracted, than that which Scotland underwent in the long succession of English invasions which began in 1296 under Edward I. and continued at intervals through the whole of the fourteenth century. But in the first place, in this, as in most other respects, the calamities of Scotland terminated at a much earlier date than those of Ireland; and, in the next place, the English invasions were in the end unsuccessful, and did not permanently affect the internal government of the country. In Ireland the English ascendency brought with it two new and lasting consequences, the proscription of the Irish religion and the confiscation of the Irish soil.

monde, after that he had burnt sundry villages and destroyed a great piece of a country, there were certain poor women sought to have been rescued, but too late; yet so soon after the horrible fact committed, as their children were felt and seen to stir in the bodies of their dead mothers; and yet did the same earl lodge and ban

quet in the house of the same murderer, his servant, after the fact committed.'-Richey's Lectures on Irish History (2nd series), p. 319.

1 See some curious statistics on this point in Curry's Review of the Civil Wars of Ireland, vol. i.

It was a very unfortunate circumstance that the period when the English nation definitively adopted the principles of the Reformation should have nearly coincided with the events I have related; but at the same time religious zeal did not at first contribute at all essentially to the struggle. The Irish chiefs repeatedly showed great indifference to religious distinctions, and the English cared much more for the suppression of the Irish race than for the suppression of its religion. The Bible was not translated into Irish. All persons were ordered, indeed, under penalty of a small fine, to attend the Anglican service; but it was ordered that it should be celebrated only in English, or, if that language was not known, in Latin. The Mass became illegal; the churches and the church. revenues were taken from the priests, but the benefices were filled with adventurers without religious zeal and sometimes without common morality. Very naturally, under such circumstances, the Irish continued in their old faith. None of the causes that had produced Protestantism in England existed among them. The new religion, as represented by a Carew or an Essex, was far from prepossessing to their eyes; and the possibility of Catholic alliances against England began to dawn upon some minds. Some slight attempts were made by Irish chiefs to obtain the assistance of the Spaniards, and by the Spaniards to give the struggle the character of a war of religion; but these attempts had no result. A small expedition of Spaniards, with some English and Irish refugees, landed at Smerwicke in Kerry in 1579 to support the rebellion of Desmond, but they were besieged by the English, and after a hard struggle the survivors,

The reader will find abundant and the third Catholic. De Burevidence of this in the ecclesiastical histories of Killen, Mant, and Brennan. The first is Presbyterian, the second Anglican,

go's Hibernia Dominicana contains evidence on this period from a Catholic point of view. See, too, Leland, ii. 381, 382.