Thy shaggy hair is wind-tossed, and thy brow seems rough with power; Thy wrathful lips, like sentinels, by foulest treachery stung, Look rage upon the world of wrong, but chain thy fiery tongue. That tongue, whose Ulster accent woke the ghost of Colm Cille, The Scotch marauders whitened when his war-cry met their ears, Just think, O Shane! the same moon shines on Liffey as on Foyle, CHAPTER XLIII ELIZABETH CONTINUES THE CONQUEST THE conquest of Ireland had been going on for four centuries. The rock against which every attempt to complete it had broken was the immemorial laws of Ireland, the Brehon Laws. These bound Irishmen within the four seas to one social and legal rule. All attempts to plant the feudal system in Ireland by England went down before them. Their land system was the chief evil in the eyes of the invaders. The clan owned the land as well as the chief. He had a life interest in the chief's portion; but he could not sell the clan-lands or eject free owners. This was a hindrance to confiscation. Now, the Irish laws were declared barbarous. During four centuries the ambulatory Parliament of the Pale passed laws against it. These laws reached just as far as English swords could carry them. The Parliament had now not to discuss, but to pass, the commands of Her Highness. They were two, to be carried out by all methods. Ireland was to be brought completely under her authority, each chief's territory admitting English law: and the Protestant religion was to be firmly established. These two cardinal commands each Lord Deputy was to enforce upon Ireland. The time had arrived when the two civilisations stood at last fully face to face. The one represented by feudalism-feudalism unshackling itself—and the one represented by the Brehon Laws.1 The first had long denounced the other as barbarous. Irish dress, Irish customs, were the dress and customs of savages. England's 2 1 Dr. Sigerson says of the early Brehon Laws, "I assert, that, speaking_biologically, such laws could not emanate from any race whose brains have not been subject to the quickening influence of education for many generations." 2 In the first century of the Invasion the vehement Norman-Welsh Archdeacon, Giraldus Cambrensis, exclaims, "Verily a wild and inhospitable race! Yet Nature fails not to rear and mould them through infancy and childhood, until in the fulness of time she leads each to man's estate conspicuous for a tall and handsome form, regular features, and a fresh complexion. But though adorned to the full with such natural gifts as these, still the barbarous fashion of their garments, and their ignorance, reveal the utter savage. They apparel themselves in small closely fitting hoods extending over the shouiders and down to the elbow, generally made wish, often expressed in the four hundred years, was to civilise Ireland. If that were impossible, then extermination. The other objective, besides the Irish laws, was now the religion of the people. The Reformation had rolled back from the shores of Ireland. To the devout soul of the race it was blasphemy to call Henry VIII, or Elizabeth, the Head of the Church. Strong measures were now used. Abbeys were suppressed and destroyed; churches seized; Protestant ministers supplanted the priests. But no real headway was made. The Irish-Norman nobles, the Desmonds and others, held to the Catholic Faith; the clans and their chiefs did the same. Fiercer measures followed. The Dublin Parliament enacted that the lives of priests were forfeited. They were to be hanged, cut down when half dead, disembowelled and burnt, and their heads impaled in some public place. Any one sheltering a priest was to be hanged, and his lands confiscated. The Act only ran where England's arm reached. In free Tirconnel, in free Tyrone, in the Desmond country, in the O'Rourke's of Breffiny, in hundreds of places in Ireland it had no effect. Priests ministered to their flocks openly; learned monks wrote in their monasteries. But here and there the hands reached, struck, and captured. It captured the Archbishop of Cashel, played with him for a while, as a cat with a mouse, then finding him inflexible tortured him and put him to death. Other priests were seized and tortured and hanged. The strongest Norman house in Irish history was the Geraldines. They must be suppressed. The Ormonds were Castle men, guardians of English authority. The Black Earl of Ormond seized Gerald, Earl of Desmond, and sent him to London, and Elizabeth sent him to the Tower. A little later his brother was seized and sent there too. Their cousin, James Fitzmaurice, drew his sword to protest against the seizures. "Spirited youths" joined him, and held the Desmond country. They won victories; they routed a queen's army. Then Elizabeth made peace with Fitzmaurice. And she then directed a plot for the treacherous murder of himself, his brothers and cousins-which, by discovering in time, he escaped. of parti-colour scraps sewn together. Under this instead of a coat they wear a gown. Woolen trews complete that attire, being breeches and hose in one, usually dyed some tint. The "barbarians" honoured learning. The Leinster prince who invited the Normans to Ireland could write, and not only write but quote Ovid. Most of the Norman chivalry had to employ clerics to read and write their letters. We read of banquets and tournaments in other countries where young knights showed their prowess in the saddle, their skill with the lance: but we do not read of banquets and tournaments given to learned men where the contest was not steel against steel, but epic against epic, song against song, harp against harp— such as those arranged by Liam O'Kelly and the Lady Mairgret of Offaly. After a time the new Earl had to fly to Spain for safety and succour. He visited Rome, too, got Italian mercenaries, fourscore Spaniards, a promise of more, and returned to Ireland, where he vanished out of life in a skirmish. Spain remembered her promise. Fight hundred Spaniards landed on the coast of Kerry. They fortified themselves on the Golden Island, a rock connected with the land by a narrow neck. The Lord Deputy, Gray, hastened to attack them, and invested the rock by sea and land. But no breech was made; the Golden fort was impregnable; winter was approaching. Gray sent in a flag of truce and offered honourable terms if the Spaniards would surrender. The Spanish commander accepted the terms, and his men laid down their arms. Then Gray sent in his soldiers and massacred seven hundred men. The massacre, note well, was directed by Sir Walter Raleigh and an officer named Wingfield. The Earl and his kinsmen, fighting now for their religion and their homes, joined hands with the MacCarthys, the O'Sullivans and other Munster chiefs. Carew, a Devonshire knight, claimed Desmond territory, and brought an army to seize it and "pacify" the province. The Desmond war lasted three more years, altogether five. When it terminated the "pacification" was continued. The Earl, finally defeated, after wandering through woods and bogs and in the ravines of the mountains, was at last captured and beheaded. At Elizabeth's request his head was sent to London and impaled in an iron cage on the Tower. English adventurers flung themselves on the confiscated lands. Sir Walter Raleigh raided over the thousands of acres assigned to him, and smoked the "Virginia weed" in Youghal after work that would discredit a savage chief. There is a gigantic preternatural Figure in Irish Myth; the Red Swineherd. Where it passes, where it lays its foot, smoke and flames and blood and death and destruction are there. It comes out of some antique past, some dread forgotten ritual. The Figure of the Myth was upon Munster. Beneath it the little figures of men move; the mail-clad gall-oglach, the swift running Kerne, the redcoated, iron-plated soldiers; Irish nobles and chiefs, the marshals of England's forces. Away from all these, from Irish and Norman chiefs, the MacCarthys, the Desmonds, the O'Sullivans, all the princelings, away from the English Deputies, marshals and adventurers thirsting for Munster soil, away from all those that storm across this page of Irish history-glance at the unnamed people. Munster was the fairest province in Ireland. It had fifteen hundred schools. When the Munster wars were ended, when Elizabeth 3 sent her thanks to Sir George Perrin. For the "pacification" of the province, the schools had been wiped out. The storm of battles and skirmishes, of sieges, of intrigues, of massacres is the shifting blood-red veil above the homes of thousands. That was no barbarous land where scholars filled the schools, where science and the classics were taught; where the pride of youth was stimulated, the imagination fired by the Hero-Tales of Ireland. It is a psychological fact that the Elizabethan Englishmen, many of them brave, gallant and chivalrous, became barbarians in their contact with Ireland. The old Greeks explain the reason for the fall. It is Pride and Injustice; these things bring moral death. In their attempt to conquer Ireland the avenging Furies fell upon them. Carew in his Pacata Hibernia writes that English soldiers entered an Irish camp, "found none but hurt and sick men, whose pains and lives they soon determined." And again that he having burnt all the houses and corn and taken great prey diverted his forces into another place, "and harrowing the country, killed all mankind that were found therein for a terror to those who would give relief to runagate traitors." He passed into Arleagh woods "where we did the like, not leaving behind us man or beast, corne or cattle." The slaughter continued after the war had ended. "Those whom the sword could not reach were deliberately given a prey to famine." "The English nation," says Froude, "was shuddering over the atrocities of the Duke of Alva. Yet Alva's bloody sword never touched the young, the defenceless. Sir Peter Carew has been seen murdering women and children and babies that had scarcely left the breast." Spenser, the English poet, to whom Raleigh had given a few acres of the forty thousand he had seized, saw still living creatures "creeping out of every corner of the woods and glens on their hands, for their legs would not bear them. They did eat the dead carrion where they could find them, yea, and one another soon after." He thinks English rule can never be secure till the Irish race is exterminated. The gentle English idyllist suggests a way. The people are not to be allowed to till their land or pasture their cattle next season, then "they will quickly consume themselves and devour one another." English Law had made a breach in Connacht. A Lord President was appointed, and a court held. From Sligo to Limerick 3 Perrin reported that he had "left neither corn, nor horn, nor house unburnt," between the two ends of Munster. |