The Irish chiefs were also broken by guile and assassination. O'Brien was separated from his people by a peerage (1543), an English inauguration without the ancient rites as head of his lands, and an English guard of soldiers (1558). That house played no further part in the Irish struggle.
The chief warrior of the north and terror of Elizabeth's generals was Shane O'Neill. The deputy Sidney devised many plots to poison or kill the man he could not conquer, and at last brought over from Scotland hired assassins who accomplished the murder (1567). A map made in the reign of Elizabeth marked the place of the crime that relieved England of her greatest fear—"Here Shane O'Neill was slain." After him the struggle of the north to keep their land and independence was maintained by negotiation and by war for forty years, under the leading of the greatest of Irish statesmen and generals Hugh O'Neill earl of Tyrone, and the soldier-patriot Aedh Ruadh O'Donnell earl of Tirconnell. English intrigue triumphed when Red Hugh was poisoned by a secret agent (1602) and when by a crafty charge of conspiracy his brother Rory O'Donnell and Hugh O'Neill were driven from their country (1607). The flight of the earls marked the destruction by violence of the old Gaelic polity—that federation of tribes which had made of their common country the storehouse of Europe for learning, the centre of the noblest mission-work that the continent ever knew, the home of arts and industries, the land of a true democracy where men held the faith of a people owning their soil, instructed in their traditions, and themselves guardians of their national life.
Henry VIII had found Ireland a land of Irish civilisation and law, with a people living by tribal tenure, and two races drawing together to form a new self-governing nation. A hundred years later, when Elizabeth and James I had completed his work, all the great leaders, Anglo-Irish and Irish, had disappeared, the people had been half exterminated, alien and hostile planters set in their place, tribal tenure obliterated, every trace of Irish law swept clean from the Irish statute-book, and an English form of state government effectively established.
Was this triumph due to the weakness of tribal government and the superior value of the feudal land tenure? How far, in fact, did the Irish civilisation invite and lend itself to this destruction?
It has been said that it was by Irish soldiers that Irish liberties were destroyed. The Tudors and their councillors were under no such illusions. Their fear was that the Irish, if they suspected the real intention of the English, would all combine in one war; and in fact when the purpose of the government became clear in Ireland an English army of conquest had to be created. "Have no dread nor fear," cried Red Hugh to his Irishmen, "of the great numbers of the soldiers of London, nor of the strangeness of their weapons and arms." Order after order went out to "weed the bands of Irish," to purge the army of all "such dangerous people." Soldiers from England and from Berwick were brought over at double the pay of the Irish. For warmth and comfort they were clothed in Irish dress, only distinguished by red crosses on back and breast; and so the sight was seen of English soldiers in Irish clothing tearing from Irish men and women their Irish garments as the forbidden dress of traitors and rebels. Some official of Elizabeth's time made a list to please the English of a few names of Irishmen traitorously slain by other Irishmen. There were murderers who had been brought up from childhood in an English house, detached from their own people; others were sent out to save their lives by bringing the head of a "rebel." The temper of the Irish people is better seen in the constant fidelity with which the whole people of Ulster and of Munster sheltered and protected for years O'Neill and Desmond and many another leader with a heavy price on his head. Not the poorest herdsman of the mountains touched the English gold.
The military difficulties of the Irish, however, were such as to baffle skill and courage. England had been drilled by the kings that conquered her, and by the foreign wars she waged, into a powerful military nation by land and sea. Newly discovered gunpowder gave Henry VII the force of artillery. Henry VIII had formed the first powerful fleet. The new-found gold of Brazil, the wealth of the Spanish main, had made England immensely rich. In this moment of growing strength the whole might of Great Britain was thrown on Ireland, the smaller island. The war, too, had a peculiar animosity; the fury of Protestant fanaticism was the cloak for the king's ambition, the resolve of English traders to crush Irish competition, the greed of prospective planters. No motive was lacking to increase its violence. Ireland, on the other hand, never conquered, and contemplating no conquest on her part, was not organised as an aggressive and military nation. Her national spirit was of another type. But whatever had been her organisation it is doubtful whether any device could have saved her from the force of the English invasion. Dublin could never be closed from within against enemies coming across the sea. The island was too small to give any means of escape to defeated armies while they were preparing for a new defence. They could not disappear, for example, like the Dutch of the Cape Colony into vast desert regions which gave them shelter while they built up a new state. Every fugitive within the circuit of Ireland could be presently found and hunted down. The tribal system, too, which the Tudor sovereigns found, was no longer in full possession of Ireland; the defence was now carried on not by a tribal Gaelic people but by a mixed race, half feudal and half tribal by tradition. But it was the old Irish inheritance of national freedom which gave to Ireland her desperate power of defence, so that it was only after such prodigious efforts of war and plantation that the bodies of her people were subdued, while their minds still remained free and unenslaved.
If, moreover, the Irish system had disappeared so had the English. As we shall see the battle between the feudal tradition and the tribal tradition in Ireland had ended in the violent death of both.