Irish Nationality

by Alice Stopford Green

CHAPTER IX[ToC]

THE NATIONAL FAITH OF THE IRISH

c. 1600—c. 1660

We have seen already two revivals of Irish life, when after the Danish settlement, and after the Norman, the native civilisation triumphed. Even now, after confiscations and plantations, the national tradition was still maintained with unswerving fidelity. Amid contempt, persecution, proscription, death, the outcast Irish cherished their language and poetry, their history and law, with the old pride and devotion. In that supreme and unselfish loyalty to their race they found dignity in humiliation and patience in disaster, and have left, out of the depths of their poverty and sorrow, one of the noblest examples in history.

Their difficulties were almost inconceivable. The great dispersion had begun of Irish deported, exiled, or cast out by emigration. Twenty thousand Irish were reported in a single island of the West Indies in 1643; thirty thousand were said to be wandering about Europe; in 1653 four thousand soldiers were transported to Flanders for the war of the king of Spain. Numbers went to seek the education forbidden at home in a multitude of Irish colleges founded abroad. They became chancellors of universities, professors, high officials in every European state—a Kerry man physician to the king of Poland; another Kerry man confessor to the queen of Portugal and sent by the king on an embassy to Louis XIV; a Donegal man, O'Glacan, physician and privy councillor to the king of France, and a very famed professor of medicine in the universities of Toulouse and Bologna (1646-1655); and so on. We may ask whether in the history of the world there was cast out of any country such genius, learning, and industry, as the English flung, as it were, into the sea. With every year the number of exiles grew. "The same to me," wrote one, "are the mountain or ocean, Ireland or the west of Spain; I have shut and made fast the gates of sorrow over my heart."

As for the Irish at home, every vestige of their tradition was doomed—their religion was forbidden, and the Staff of Patrick and Cross of Columcille destroyed, with every other national relic; their schools were scattered, their learned men hunted down, their books burned; native industries were abolished; the inauguration chairs of their chiefs were broken in pieces, and the law of the race torn up, codes of inheritance, of land tenure, of contract between neighbours or between lord and man. The very image of Justice which the race had fashioned for itself was shattered. Love of country and every attachment of race and history became a crime, and even Irish language and dress were forbidden under penalty of outlawry or excommunication. "No more shall any laugh there," wrote the poet, "or children gambol; music is choked, the Irish language chained." The people were wasted by thousands in life and in death. The invaders supposed the degradation of the Irish race to be at last completed. "Their youth and gentry are destroyed in the rebellion or gone to France," wrote one: "those that are left are destitute of horses, arms and money, capacity and courage. Five in six of the Irish are poor, insignificant slaves, fit for nothing but to hew wood and draw water." Such were the ignorant judgments of the new people, an ignorance shameful and criminal.

The Irish, meanwhile, at home and in the dispersion, were seeking to save out of the wreck their national traditions. Three centres were formed of this new patriotic movement—in Rome, in Louvain, and in Ireland itself.

An Irish College of Franciscans was established in Rome (1625) by the efforts of Luke Wadding, a Waterford man, divine of the Spanish embassy at Rome. The Pope granted to the Irish the church of St. Isidore, patron of Madrid, which had been occupied by Spanish Franciscans. Luke Wadding, founder and head of the college, was one of the most extraordinary men of his time for his prodigious erudition, the greatest school-man of that age, and an unchanging and impassioned patriot. He prepared the first full edition of the works of the great Irish scholastic philosopher Duns Scotus, with the help of his fellow-countrymen, Thomas Strange, Anthony Hickey, John Ponce of Cork, Hugh MacCawell of Tyrone; and projected a general history of Ireland for which materials were being collected in 1628 by Thomas Walsh, archbishop of Cashel. The College was for the service of "the whole nation," for all Irishmen, no matter from what province, "so long as they be Irish." They were bound by rule to speak Irish, and an Irish book was read during meals.

No spot should be more memorable to Irishmen than the site of the Franciscan College of St. Antony of Padua at Louvain. A small monastery of the Frères de Charité contains the few pathetic relics that are left of the noble company of Irish exiles who gathered there from 1609 for mutual comfort and support, and of the patriots and soldiers laid to rest among them—O'Neills, O'Dohertys, O'Donnells, Lynches, Murphys, and the rest, from every corner of Ireland. "Here I break off till morning," wrote one who laboured on a collection of Irish poems from 1030 to 1630, "and I in gloom and grief; and during my life's length unless only that I might have one look at Ireland." The fathers had mostly come of the old Irish literary clans, and were trained in the traditional learning of their race; such as Father O'Mulloy, distinguished in his deep knowledge of the later poetic metres, of which he wrote in his Latin and Irish Grammar; or Bonaventura O'h'Eoghasa, trained among the poets of Ireland, who left "her holy hills of beauty" with lamentation to "try another trade" with the Louvain brotherhood. Steeped in Irish lore the Franciscans carried on the splendid record of the Irish clergy as the twice-beloved guardians of the inheritance of their race. "Those fathers," an Irish scholar of that day wrote, "stood forward when she (Ireland) was reduced to the greatest distress, nay, threatened with certain destruction, and vowed that the memory of the glorious deeds of their ancestors should not be consigned to the same earth that covered the bodies of her children ... that the ancient glory of Ireland should not be entombed by the same convulsion which deprived the Irish of the lands of their fathers and of all their property." More fortunate than scholars in Ireland they had a printing-press; and used it to send out Irish grammars, glossaries, catechisms, poems. Hugh Mac an-Bhaird of Donegal undertook to compile the Acta Sanctorum, for which a lay-brother, Michael O'Clery, collected materials in Ireland for ten years, and Patrick Fleming of Louth gathered records in Europe. At Hugh's death, in 1635, the task was taken up by Colgan, born at Culdaff on the shore of Inishowen (†1658). The work of the fathers was in darkness and sorrow. "I am wasting and perishing with grief," wrote Hugh Bourke to Luke Wadding, "to see how insensibly nigher and nigher draws the catastrophe which must inflict mortal wounds upon our country."

Ireland herself, however, remained the chief home of historical learning in the broad national sense. Finghin Mac Carthy Riabhach, a Munster chief, skilled in old and modern Irish, Latin, English, and Spanish, wrote a history of Ireland to the Norman invasion in the beautiful hand taught him by Irish scribes; it was written while he lay imprisoned in London from 1589 to 1626, mad at times through despair. One of a neighbouring race of seafaring chiefs, O'Sullivan Beare, an emigrant and captain in the Spanish navy, published in 1621 his indignant recital of the Elizabethan wars in Ireland. It was in hiding from the president of Munster, in the wood of Aharlo, that Father Geoffrey Keating made (before 1633) his Irish history down to the Norman settlement—written for the masses in clear and winning style, the most popular book perhaps ever written in Irish, and copied throughout the country by hundreds of eager hands. In the north meanwhile Michael O'Clery and his companions, two O'Clerys of Donegal, two O'Maelchonaires of Roscommon, and O'Duibhgeanain of Leitrim, were writing the Annals of the Four Masters (1632-6); all of them belonging to hereditary houses of chroniclers. In that time of sorrow, fearing the destruction of every record of his people, O'Clery travelled through all Ireland to gather up what could be saved, "though it was difficult to collect them to one place." There is still preserved a manuscript by Caimhin, abbot of Iniscaltra about 650, which was given to O'Clery by the neighbouring Mac Brodys who had kept it safe for a thousand years. The books were carried to the huts and cottages where the friars of Donegal lived round their ruined monastery; from them the workers had food and attendance, while Fergal O'Gara, a petty chieftain of Sligo descended from Olioll, king of Munster in 260, gave them a reward for their labours. Another O'Clery wrote the story of Aedh Ruadh O'Donnell, his prisons and his battles, and the calamity to Ireland of his defeat. "Then were lost besides nobility and honour, generosity and great deeds, hospitality and goodness, courtesy and noble birth, polish and bravery, strength and courage, valour and constancy, the authority and the sovereignty of the Irish of Erin to the end of time."