LECTURE X.

THE FLIGHT OF THE EARLS, AND THE PLANTATION OF ULSTER.

WITH the submission of the Earl of Tyrone terminated the struggle between the Tudor princes and the native Celtic tribes. No chieftain henceforward claimed to rule his district in independence of the Crown of England. The Celtic land tenure, the Brehon laws, the language, customs, and traditions of the defeated race were doomed tog radual yet certain extinction. The institutions of England were to be transplanted into the sister island, irrespective of the question how far, if at all, they were suitable to the Irish. Henceforth the king's garrisons were to occupy every stronghold; the king's writ was to run in the remotest districts; the king's judges were to hold assizes in every new made county. Before Elizabeth was laid in the grave, the object for which during so many years she had striven was thus at length accomplished; and here, therefore, the history of Ireland under the Tudors might naturally terminate; but between the wars of the Tudors and the civil government of the Stuarts, still remain (the intermediate link, as it were, between the two) the fall of the able man, who had created and so long conducted an almost national resistance, and the colonization by English settlers of his demesnes and the adjoining parts of Ulster.

The epic is not complete without the death of the vanquished, and the division of the spoils.

Tyrone deliberately gave up the the national cause, when resistance was no longer possible; and, submitting to the inevitable, proposed to hold his earldom as an English subject. There can be no doubt that he seriously intended to make the best of altered circumstances; had broken off all connexion with the foreign enemies of England; had abandoned all designs of Celtic nationality, and Catholic restoration; and, if the Government had permitted him, he would himself have lived a loyal subject of the English king. Nor could he have found much difficulty in so doing. He had not been brought up as the hereditary chief of his native tribe. Until his forty-seventh year he had been a pensioner and officer of the English Crown. Until 1596 he had exhibited extreme loyalty to the Government, which had supported his cause. Until the battle of the Yellow Ford (14th August, 1598), he had hesitated as to going into open opposition to the Queen. At the time of his submission, in the sixtysecond year of his age, he may have been perfectly willing to fall back into his old allegiance, and in full possession of the prize, for which, throughout his youth, he had struggled, to enjoy the position of the first noble of the realm. But could he live as a subject? In an age of political conspiracies, English statesmen, who, for years, had lived in constant, but not groundless, alarm of Spanish invasions, Catholic or Jesuit plots, and Irish insurrections, and who, even then, received everyday information from secret agents of projects for the overthrow of the English Government, and the restoration of the Catholic Church, most of it delusive, yet much substantially true, could not but regard the Earl with constant suspicion. A single

word from him, and Ulster would again rise to arms; that he would be tempted, and sorely and often tempted, was certain. Could he be trusted ?-and had his submission been sincere? It was inevitable that every word of his would be noted, every gesture marked, every, the minutest, detail of his conduct reported by spies to a timid and suspicious executive. If he had fallen sword in hand, the English might have felt the sympathy due to a gallant foe; but that six years of warfare, costly and bloody, should have left Hugh O'Neill the Earl of Tyrone, was a very unsatisfactory result. English officers and soldiers, who had toiled through the Irish campaigns, ill paid, ill clothed, and neglected by the Government, and captains who had come back bankrupt from the Ulster wars, had to salute the Earl of Tyrone, when he swept past them into the Council Chamber; "I have lived," says one English gentleman, "to see that damnable rebel, Tyrone, brought to England, honoured and well liked. O what is there that does not prove the inconstancy of worldly matters? How I did labour for all that knave's destruction! I adventured perils by sea and land, was near starving, eat horse flesh in Munster, and all to quell that man, who now smileth in peace at those who did hazard their lives to destroy him; and now doth Tyrone dare us, old commanders, with his presence and protection."*

The officials and adventurers, who had looked forward to an O'Neill forfeiture and a plantation of Ulster, were disgusted at being baulked of their expected prey, and but too anxious to entrap and misrepresent the Earl, and by his fall to obtain the realization of what they had long anticipated.

* Harrington to the Bishop of Bath and Wells.

Such of his vassals, as O'Cahan, who, before the Earl's submission, had made their peace with the English Govern ment, now found themselves, by the terms of the Earl's arrangement, again holding their estates from him, and were ready to lend themselves to any system of annoyance.

The English garrisons within his territories could not be brought to regard the arch rebel and traitor, upon whose head a reward had been set, as a loyal subject, a nobleman entitled by the king's letters patent to exercise high administrative and judicial powers. The new sheriffs of his counties regarded him in the same light.

The English bishops of adjoining dioceses saw in him one against whom they could urge ecclesiastical claims, with the certainty of finding the Council in Dublin favourable to their complaints.

To complicate matters still more, James was determined to enforce uniformity in religion in Ireland as in England; all fear of national resistance being removed, the Catholics in Ireland, as the Puritans in England, were no longer to be allowed the liberty of public worship.

Tyrone, during all his career, attempted nothing so difficult as to live a loyal subject of the English king.

It would be tedious to relate in detail the complications and annoyances in which Tyrone was involved-his lawsuits with O'Cahan and with the Bishop of Derry and Raphoe; the interference in religious matters of the Archbishop of Armagh; the expressions publicly used towards him by the Deputy; the conduct of the English garrisons and sheriffs. Day by day he must have learned, by a continuous course of litigation and insult, that he was a marked man; that every Englishman in Ireland regarded him as an enemy; that at any moment he

might find himself involved in a charge of treason, supported by interested or bigoted witnesses, and that his life and fortune were hourly in peril. Exactly in the same position as the Earl was Rory O'Donnell, who, following the example of Tyrone, had submitted to, and received from, the English Government the title of Earl of Tyrconnell. For some years the two Earls led a most uncomfortable and not very dignified life, until, in 1607, the crisis arrived.

On Monday, the 18th of May, in that year, the celebrated anonymous document, of which Lord Howth was the author, was found at the door of the Council Chamber in Dublin, obscure and unintelligible as that which disclosed (or was supposed to disclose) the Gunpowder Plot. Rambling and absurd as the document was, it was a sufficient ground to excite suspicion and alarm in the Deputy's mind; and these fears were confirmed by the statement of Lord Howth, involving conspiracies, invasions, and immediate perils. Whether they were true or had a basis of truth may be questioned, but they contained nothing touching Tyrone save the vagest surmises.

Tyrone, who was with the Deputy in August, 1607, may not have been aware that there was a correspondence relating to conspiracies, in which he was charged to have been implicated, being then carried on between Dublin and London; and he seems to have proposed a journey to London, to bring his grievances before the King, when he suddenly received the communications from the Continent, which induced him to abandon the country. Cuconnaught Maguire had fled to Flanders in May, 1607, and while there was informed that if Tyrone went to London he would be at once arrested. He was so persuaded of the