sooner terminated, by the fusion of the two into one people. This is admitted by a late English Protestant historian of Ireland, Dr. Smiles of Leeds. We must present an extract from the preface to this work, as it confirms what we have said, and throws additional light on the period of which we are speaking: "In England and Scotland the conquering and the conquered racesDanes, Normans, Saxons, Britons, &c.-have, in a great measure, fused down into one people; but in Ireland the two races of the conquest are still at war, and after a resistance which has lasted for centuries, the struggle is almost as inveterate now as at the period of its commencement. The blame of this protracted and destructive enmity between race and race rests with the conquering classes themselves, as well as with the English government, which has supported them throughout in their anti-national and inhuman policy. Instead of amalgamating themselves with the nation, the Norman invaders, and afterwards the English and Scotch colonists who settled in Ireland, erected themselves into an ascendency of the most despotic and tyrannical kind. In course of time they possessed themselves of almost the entire soil of Ireland, treating the natives as helots, and slaves, and with a cruelty which has never been exceeded in any age or country. Laws were passed for the express purpose of keeping the natives distinct from the settlers, and thus preventing them from merging into one people. 'Mere Irish' were deprived of the protection of the English law, and might be killed with impunity. Statutes were passed expressly to prevent the English settlers from conforming to Irish language, dress, and manners, on pain of forfeiture of goods, and imprisonment, and being dealt with as Irish enemies.' And thus were the Irish people placed under the ban of proscription and exclusion by their conquerors, and a mark set on them to be shunned and hated by their fellow men.' From the unexceptionable testimony of this candid English historian, we gather that the Irish were branded with infamy by the English, and declared aliens and enemies in the heart of their own country! This term enemies was, we believe, first employed in a statute passed under Henry IV.; and it is the only article of English law, as Moore the poet well remarks, to which the English have remained constantly faithful. More than once had the native Irish petitioned to be admitted to the rights of English citizenship; but their petitions were treated with contempt and scorn. They might be the slaves, they could not hope to become the subjects of England. This would have placed them under the protection of English law, and would have prevented the English lords of the pale from robbing them with impunity! Goaded to desperation by these and similar acts of tyranny, the Irish septs often flew to arms; but each formidable insurrection was put down by an overwhelming royal army, which nearly always followed up the victory by wholesale massacre and spoliation: "At every insurrection came new troops of English adventurers who were in need of lands; and every poor and ruined nobleman sought to repair his fortunes in a country where murder and pillage gave a right to property."" 1 Quoted in a late number of the Irish "Nation." 2 Regnault-"Criminal History of the English Government," p. 18 Outlawed in their own country, and hunted down by their enemies, after having been despoiled of their property, did the native Irish seek to fly from their homes and eke out a subsistence in some more genial abode on the continent? Even this mode of escape was precluded by the inhuman English law, which forbade "the Irish enemies to leave the country." But, more and still worse than all this, a mark was set on these same Irish enemies, that any one, who was base and cruel enough to perpetrate the atrocious crime, might murder them with impunity wherever they might be found! For this unheard of and almost incredible wantonness of cruelty, we have the authority of the English statute book itself, and the express testimony of an unexceptionable Scotch Protestant historian-Sir James Mackintosh. He says: "During the dreadful period of four hundred years, the laws of the English government of Ireland did not punish the murder of one man of Irish blood as a crime." We verily believe that the history of no nation on earth is stained with cruelty more wanton or refined than tl.is; and we subscribe to Mr. Lester's opinion that "none but an English despot has the skill to carry the refinement of tyranny so far.” 3 The leading maxim of English policy in her government of Ireland, as well as the true secret of her success in retaining her hold on that ill-fated country, was divide et impera- divide and rule. By intrigues and bribery, she set chieftain against chieftain, and sept against sept; she carefully kept alive the old feuds which had ever been the bane of Irish prosperity, and she thus brought about "the estrangement of those who should have stood shoulder to shoulder in the strife for common freedom. . . This has been her policy from first to last; and its successful application is all that prevents Ireland from taking her place among the nations of the earth." But sad and mournful as is the epoch of Irish history of which we have hitherto spoken; heart-rending and sickening as are its details, that period at which we must now rapidly glance is yet more afflicting, and is filled with still greater enormities. This might seem impossible, but it is even so. From the reformation, so called, down to the present time, new and more exciting element has been infused into the political hatred which England had ever borne to Ireland. This new and bitter ingredient in the chalice of Irish suffering, was a fierce and relentless religious bigotry. England had crushed the bodies, she now meant to bow down or crush the souls of Irishmen! If English misrule was a bane to Ireland, English Protestant bigotry was a curse a hundred-fold greater and heavier, and more appalling in its consequences. When England was violently severed from Catholic unity by the headlong passions and high-handed tyranny of Henry VIII., she sought to drag Ireland also into her schism and apostasy. The truculent and 1 Regnault" Criminal History of the English Government," p. 13. 4 Ibid. p 81. bloody tyrant, who had made himself head of the Anglican church, spared no efforts to induce Ireland to acknowledge his spiritual supremacy. Bribes and menaces, the sword and the bayonet, the rack and the gibbet, were successively employed for this purpose. But they were all unavailing. The great body of the Irish people still fondly clung to the faith of their forefathers, which had consoled and strengthened them in the midst of sufferings that had rarely, if ever, fallen to the lot of any other nation. They might be despoiled of their property, they might be branded as aliens and outlaws in the heart of their own dear country, they might suffer the death of traitors, or they might be massacred in cold blood; but no indignity or suffering could tear from their hearts the bright jewel of faith, which they so highly prized and so dearly cherished. They might lose all else, but they would still warmly press this treasure to their bosoms! England had never yet offered them one single blessing, which was not more than outweighed by its attending curse; and could they now be induced to receive the reformation as a boon from her treacherous and blood-stained hands? No, no; Ireland would not apostatize. This stern refusal to abandon the Catholic faith, and to subscribe to the new-fangled and ever changing religious notions of England, constituted Ireland's greatest crime. No language can adequately portray the refinements of cruelty, by which this crime has been visited by England for nearly three centuries. In the poignant bitterness of her sufferings during this period, the Irish Catholic almost forgot the many atrocities perpetrated in his country by the English, during the first four centuries of their domination. The annals of no country in the wide world, whether Christian or pagan, can present any thing half so cruel or atrocious, as that which is unfolded in the persecutions of the Irish Catholics by the English government since the period of the reformation. The facts almost stagger belief; and the recital makes our very blood freeze in our veins ! This is admitted by Dr. Smiles, the candid English Protestant, to whose History of Ireland we have already referred. He says: "The records of religious persecutions in all countries have nothing more hideous to offer to our notice, than the Protestant persecutions of the Irish Catholics. On them, all the devices of cruelty were exhausted. Ingenuity was taxed to devise new plans of persecution, till the machinery of penal iniquity might almost be pronounced perfect." What are we to think of a penal code, which forbade Catholics to open schools for the education of their children; which set a price upon the heads of Irish priests, and hunted them down like wild beasts; which double taxed, ground down with unheard of extortions, and openly des poiled the Catholics of their property; which authorized the apostate son to drive his gray-headed father from the paternal roof, if he refused to turn Protestant in his old age; and which relentlessly pursued religious non-conformity with fines and imprisonment, with fire and sword? What are we to think of a policy, which necessarily induced ignorance and pov1 Preface to his History of Ireland. erty, and then sneered at both? What are we to think of a system of legislation, which forbade a Catholic to own a horse worth more than five pounds, and authorized his Protestant neighbor to rob him of it by law, if he could prove before a justice of the peace that he had tendered five pounds for the animal and been refused? What are we, in a word, to think of a government which adopted the systematic policy, of first driving the Irish Catholics into revolt by intolerable exactions and cruelties, and then despoiling them of their property, and butchering them in thousands ! Yet this was precisely the policy which Protestant England pursued towards Catholic Ireland for centuries. And this explains to us the anomalous and otherwise unaccountable fact, that, whereas seven-eighths of the Irish people are still Catholics, more than three-fourths of the entire landed property of the Island is now in the hands of the Protestants. The great Irish Catholic chieftains and landlords were purposely goaded into rebellion, that they might be branded as traitors, and their lands confiscated for the benefit of English adventurers. Such was the course adopted towards Earl Desmond, a powerful chief of Munster; such also was the treatment of O'Neill, another wealthy and valorous Irish chieftain. When Queen Elizabeth heard of the revolt of the latter, she remarked to her courtiers, with a fiendish smile: "It would be better for her servants, as there would be estates enough for them all." "This single expression of Elizabeth," says Mr. Lester, "reveals the entire policy of the English government towards Ireland. That injured country was the great repast, at which every monarch bade his lords sit down and eat. After they had gorged their fill, the remains were left for those who should come after. Tranquillity succeeded these massacres, but it was the tranquillity of the grave-yard. The proud and patriotic Irishmen were folded in the sleep of death, and the silence and repose around the lifeless corpses were called peace: "Often a great chief, possessed of large estates, was purposely driven by the most flagrant injustice and insults into open rebellion, that he might be branded as a traitor, and his rich possessions by confiscation revert to the English vampyres that so infested the land. Every cruelty and outrage that can dishonor our nature, was perpetrated in the unjust wars by English leaders and English soldiers. Cities were sacked, villages burned, women violated, and the helpless and the young slaughtered by thousands. A record of these scenes of crime and blood we can not furnish. It is written, however, on every foot of Irish soil, and in the still living memories of many an Irish heart." " To exhibit the tender mercies of the English armies when they had succeeded in putting down a rebellion, which the persecuting and iniquitous policy of the English government had provoked, we may present the testimony of two cotemporary English writers, Hollingshead and the poet Spenser, concerning the desolation which reigned in the province of Munster after the defeat of Earl Desmond. 1 Vol. ii. pp. 83, 84 2 Ibid. p. 82. "This province," says Hollingshead, "which was heretofore rich, very populous and fertile, covered with green pastures, crops, and herds of cattle, is now deserted and barren; it bears no fruit; there is no grain in the fields, no cattle in the pastures, no birds in the trees, no fish in the rivers; in short, the curse of heaven (!) on this country is so great that you may pass through from one extremity to the other, and you rarely see a man, woman, or child." The poet Spenser, who received three thousand acres of land from the confiscated estates of Desmond, in compensation for his fulsome flattery of royalty, thus describes the scene which he witnessed on going to take possession of his estate in Ireland: "Out of every corner of the woods and glynnes they (the people) came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them. They looked like anatomies of death-they spake like ghosts crying out of their graves—they ate the dead carrion, happy when they could find them; yea, and one another soon after; insomuch as the very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of their graves; and if they found a plat of water-cresses, or shamrocks, to those they flocked as to a feast for the time, yet not able to continue there withal, that in a short space there were none almost left, and a most populous and plentiful country was suddenly left void of man and beast." 2" These are but single pages in the long and sad history of Ireland's wrongs under English oppression. They are, however, pretty fair speci mens of the whole work. England's policy towards Ireland has been very simple, steady, and uniform; and its practical effects on Ireland and the Irish people have been nearly the same for the last seven centuries. For almost two centuries immediately succeeding the reformation, the history of Ireland is a monotonous recital of tragedies and sickening horrors, such as those just described. The same means were employed in each successive reign, and the same dreadful effects followed. After having filled Ireland with desolation and massacre; after having cut off most of its heroes, murdered most of its chiefs, and sent her vampyres to seize on its richest lands, Elizabeth had a medal struck which bore the inscription- · Pacata Hibernia! But Ireland was exhausted, not conquered; trodden in the dust, not pacified. Ireland was destined to become the victim and the prey of each succeeding English dynasty. The Stuarts carried out the fiendish policy of the Tudors. They even added blackhearted ingratitude and treachery to open spoliation. Noble and generous Ireland poured out her blood in torrents for the two Charleses, and they betrayed her with a Judas-like kiss. Ireland fought bravely for the last and best of the Stuarts, James II.; and he, far from sympathizing with her in her devoted love, could only cry out in the memorable battle of the Boyne, when Irish valor was repulsing the English and their Dutch allies: "Spare, oh! spare my English subjects!" From the accession of the house of Stuart to its expulsion from the 1 Quoted by Regnault, pp 15, 16. 2 State of Ireland-quoted by Lester, vol. ii, p. 92 |