The latter half of Elizabeth's reign had been disturbed by a series of revolutions in Ireland. The first of these was headed by the Earl of Desmond, in defence of religious liberty; it extended all over Munster, and ended in his death and the confiscation of that province. Shortly after it was revived by Hugh O'Neil, Earl of Tyrone, and assuming national proportions, continued with almost unvaried success to the battle of Kinsale, in 1602, and terminated in a treaty which was wantonly violated after the queen's death. These wars extended through a period of more than twenty years, and left Ireland greatly prostrated on the accession of James I.; but the country was beginning to revive, and, under a fostering hand, it would soon have been content and prosperous. It was hoped, too, that as James, while king of Scotland, had contributed much to foment the uprising of O'Neil, he would be as instrumental in allaying the causes that led to it. The English "Undertakers," however, looked on an Irish war as a prelude to a general confiscation, and felt bitter disappointment at the terms accorded to the Irish rebels by the late queen. The apportionment of one province, which took place after the death of Desmond, did not satisfy them, while Ulster, a wealthy and populous one, was still left in the possession of the natives. The Scotch followers of James could not understand the thing at all, and attributed it to the dotage of the queen. In this state of affairs, the king saw an opportunity of rendering himself acceptable alike to his English and Scotch subjects. It was an age fruitful in plots and expedients, when plunder took the name of civilization, and avarice stalked forth under the cloak of religion. "The artful Cecil," the contriver and discoverer of many plots, was consulted by the king, and a scheme was laid for the violation of the compact of Mellifont, and the confiscation of Ulster. Lord Chichester was then deputy for Ireland;—but the words of Dr. Jones, the king's bishop of Meath, will tell the matter with sufficient brevity:[1] "Anno 1607, there was a providential discovery of another rebellion in Ireland, the Lord Chichester being deputy; the discoverer not being willing to appear, a letter from him, not subscribed, was superscribed to Sir William Usher, clerk of the council, and dropt in the council-chamber, then held in Dublin Castle, in which was mentioned a design for seizing the Castle and murdering the deputy, with a general revolt and dependence on Spanish forces; and this also for religion; for particulars whereof I refer to that letter, dated March the 19th, 1607."—This letter was read, and O'Neil, the late leader of the Irish, was singled out as the head and front of the supposed conspiracy.
O'Neil, who had been educated at the English court with a view to the advancement of the English interest in Ireland, was apprised of the conspiracy designed for his ruin, and at once detected the master-spirit—"The artful Cecil." From this he knew that his doom was sealed should he abide the action of the council, before which he had been summoned. He accordingly notified the chiefs of Ulster of the impending blow, and advised flight as the only means of safety. Most of them followed this advice, and he himself, collecting his household, retired to Rome, where he died in 1616.
The flight of O'Neil accomplished all that the conspirators wished, and with far less trouble than they anticipated. Wholesale confiscation, without resistance, was out of their calculation, even in a country borne down by the protracted strife of nearly twenty years. There still remained an element in Ulster, which, though it could not work the deliverance of the nation, could wreak summary vengeance on many a hungry Undertaker; but this settled all at once, to the great "joyousness" of the king: and he lost no time in proclaiming his satisfaction, in words of which the following is an extract: "Wee doe professe, that it is both known to us and our council here, and to our deputie and state there, and so shall it appeare to the world (as cleare as the sunne) by evident proofes, that the only ground and motive of this high contempt, in these men's departure, hath been the private knowledge and inward terrour of their own guiltinesse," etc. "But," says Mitchell, "no attempt to give these proofs was ever made," and never will be. The very manner of their departure is a proof of innocence. Had there been a conspiracy, they would have abided the result, and sold their lives with their lands at a price dear enough to the English enemy. But they went in the belief that their lives and lands alone were what the king sought, and that by quitting the country, they would save the minor chieftains and their clansmen from the greed of England. They calculated erroneously, for this did not accord with the design of the infamous king, and the whole province soon became the spoil of the "Undertakers." An act of Parliament—the English Parliament—immediately followed the king's proclamation, declaring that "Whereas the divine justice hath lately cast out of the province of Ulster divers wicked and ungratefull traytors, who practised to interrupt those blessed courses begun and continued by your majestie for the general good of this whole realm, by whose defection and attainders great scopes of land in those parts have been reduced to your majestie's hands and possession," etc.—and of course awaited but the royal pleasure to be transferred to his loyal subjects of the realm. Nor was the royal assent long withheld, for the royal coffers were always open, even to smaller windfalls than the revenues arising from a confiscated province.
The work of settlement was soon commenced, under the supervision of the king, privy council, committees of conference, committees of inquiry, contractors, undertakers, speculators, and commissioners names of ominous import in Ireland and so often revived there that her people can rehearse them like a catechism. "In the six counties of Donegal, Tyrone, Derry, Farmanagh, Cavan, and Armagh, a tract of country containing 500,000 acres, was seized upon by the king and parcelled out in lots to Undertakers." [2] The "domains" of the attainted lords were assumed to include all the lands inhabited by their clans, and so far were the king's new arrangements from respecting the rights of the ancient natives, that "the fundamental ground of this plantation was the avoiding of natives and planting only with British."
That this cruel policy was carried out to the letter, would seem scarcely credible. But let the authority already quoted settle that matter. "It is true," says Sir Thomas Phillips, in "Harris's Hibernia," "that after the prescribed number of freeholders and leaseholders were settled on every townland, and the rents therein set down, they might let the remainder to natives, for lives, so as they were conformable in religion, and for the favor to DOUBLE THEIR RENTS!" Even so, to double their rents, if natives, though conformable in religion. A high favor, and all for the love of God!
This is but a very imperfect outline of the plantation of Ulster, and the manner of effecting it; and it is alluded to in these pages, only in so far as it illustrates the subject-matter of them, on which that settlement has a direct bearing. Its immediate and subsequent effects on the Irish race, though the theme of many a commentator, have never been told, and never will be. Even its remoter consequence at the present day can scarcely be alluded to without opening up wounds but imperfectly healed, and memories too bitter for wholesome reflection. It renewed, by one dash of the royal pen, all the wrongs of the preceding centuries, and filled the last stronghold of the Irish race with a people inimical to their interests, and who, with the exception of one short epoch in the country's history, have remained a cancer on the body politic, and, as if by a special providence, though meant to strengthen the dynasty of the Stuarts, were mainly instrumental in causing its extinction.
The reign of Charles I. was an eventful and a bloody one. In 1625 he ascended the throne; in 1649 he ascended the scaffold; and through the intervening period of twenty-four years, it was a continual struggle for the preservation of the royal prerogatives. These prerogatives were yielded, one by one, to the fanatical spirit of the age, and the last royal prerogative, that of life—for it is held a standing apothegm, that the king can do no wrong—terminated in a disastrous civil war which drenched the three kingdoms in blood.
England had been in a state of transition since the reign of Henry VIII. The religion of the country had undergone a change which had left more than one-half of its population—and that the more powerful one—adherents of the new faith. New manners and new morals had kept pace with the change of religion. The lands, too, had undergone as great a change as the people. Most of the old manors were possessed by new lords; and as for the Church, its glebes had passed to the early conformists, and its cash to the royal coffers. Hatred on the one hand, and revenge on the other, the usual concomitants of all violent changes in civil or ecclesiastical bodies, were the order of the day. Among those who had become recipients of the spoils, a feeling of insecurity was predominant. These changes had all been wrought through the will of the sovereigns—the royal prerogative, and it required no prophetic ken to know, that while that prerogative remained unimpaired, some future sovereign might undo all that his predecessors had accomplished; and this continual apprehension was the parent of each successive reform: and self-preservation the object.
The reign of James I. sowed the seed of religious discontent; that of Charles I. reaped the harvest. The old faith had been too closely drawn towards the political arena, and had suffered by the contact; the new one whirled in its vortex, and the result was the worst state of human society—civil and religious anarchy. A church had been established by law, and richly endowed by the spoils of the old one, antecedent to the accession of Charles, and its followers were called the "High Church" people. But outside its communion, innumerable sects overspread the land, known by the general name of "Nonconformists." The highways and by-ways of England and Scotland resounded with their religious disquisitions; every man had become an interpreter and a prophet. The most powerful of those sects were the Puritans of England, and the Covenanters of Scotland, who, though differing in religious principles, closely assimilated in their hatred of all monarchical government, and of the outward ceremonies of divine worship. Practising greater simplicity, they laid claim to greater purity of religion, until they at length believed themselves invested with a divine mission to eradicate "popery," "prelacy," and monarchy. The materials of combustion had been long preparing, and nothing was wanting but some partisan more daring or fanatical than the rest to apply the match, and he was at last found in Oliver Cromwell, a great king-hater, and one of the most daring military spirits of that or of any other age. Putting on "the armor of the Lord," and the "Shield of Righteousness," they seized the "besom of destruction," and went forth under his banner to complete the purgation of the land.
How this war, between the King and Parliament, progressed and terminated, forms a bloody chapter in English history, but it can be noticed in this place no further than its effect on Ireland; there it helped to swell the tide of oppression; it brought another war, another defeat, another confiscation, and another wholesale expatriation of the native race.