vince. These negociations thus divulged, the government of England, and their Irish party, were apprized of their danger, and prepared for defence. Richard, earl of Ulster, lords Edmond Butler and Theobald de Verdun, were summoned to the parliament in England, to treat with the king, his prelates and nobles, about the affairs of Ireland. They returned back next spring, instructed to deliver the result of their deliberations to the principal nobles, prelates, and magistrates. They had even the effrontery to present them to the Irish chieftains, of whose lives and fortunes they made daily havock, by treachery and violence, assassination and massacre, sowing division, and exciting hostilities among a too irritable race.

Among other measures, offensive and defensive, both parties applied to the Pope, whose thunders were as yet formidable. The king of England, with the confidence of an ally, and a firm stickler of popery, whose address derived additional weight, from the annual subsidy paid to St. Peter's successor. The Irish chieftains, being only catholics, divested of such claims to papal partiality, relied on the justice of their cause, and sent the following pathethic statement of their sufferings from unprincipled tyrants, to Popc John XXII.

* See Plowden, Vol. I.-Geoghegan, T. II.-J. Fordun, Scoto-Chron. T. III. &c.

"To the most holy father in Christ, Lord John, by the grace of God, his devoted children, Donald O'Neil, king of Ulster, and by hereditary right true heir of all Ireland, as also the chieftains, and nobles, and the people of Ireland, recommend themselves most humbly, &c. &c.

"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 any thing 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 the 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 Celestine, 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, and that ever since that, our kings, well instructed in the faith 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 most 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 them 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 monsters. 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 shew 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 even into these frightful abodes, endeavouring to dispossess us of the wild uncul tivated 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, arro

VOL. I.

gance, or blind insanity, scarce 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 rigors 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