We have seen the uncontrolled rule of English kings and English Parliaments. Such was the end of their story. There was another experiment yet to be tried.
CHAPTER XI[ToC]
THE RISE OF A NEW IRELAND
1691-1750
It might have seemed impossible amid such complicated tyrannies to build up a united country. But the most ferocious laws could not wholly destroy the kindly influences of Ireland, the essential needs of men, nor the charities of human nature. There grew up too the union of common suffering. Once more the people of Ireland were being "brayed together in a mortar" to compact them into a single commonwealth.
The Irish had never lost their power of absorbing new settlers in their country. The Cromwellians complained that thousands of the English who came over under Elizabeth had "become one with the Irish as well in affinity as in idolatry." Forty years later these Cromwellians planted on Irish farms suffered themselves the same change; their children could not speak a word of English and became wholly Irish in religion and feeling. Seven years after the battle of the Boyne the same influence began to turn Irish the very soldiers of William. The civilisation, the piety, the charm of Irish life told as of old. In the country places, far from the government, kindly friendships grew up between neighbours, and Protestants by some device of goodwill would hide a Catholic from some atrocious penalty, would save his arms from being confiscated, or his children from being brought up as Protestants. The gentry in general spoke Irish with the people, and common interests grew up in the land where they lived together.
The Irish had seen the fires of destruction pass over them, consuming the humanities of their law, the honour of their country, and the relics of their fathers: the cry of their lamentation, said an Italian in 1641, was more expressive than any music he had heard of the great masters of the continent. The penal days have left their traces. We may still see in hidden places of the woods some cave or rock where the people gathered in secret to celebrate mass. There remain memorials of Irishmen, cast out of their lands, who to mark their final degradation had been driven to the livelihood which the new English held in the utmost contempt—the work of their hands; their dead bodies were carried to the ruined abbeys, and proudly laid in the roofless naves and chancels, under great sculptured slabs bearing the names of once noble families, and deeply carved with the instruments of the dead man's trade, a plough, the tools of a shoemaker or a carpenter or a mason. In a far church in Connemara by the Atlantic, a Burke raised in 1722 a sculptured tomb to the first of his race who had come to Connacht, the figure in coat of mail and conical helmet finely carved in limestone. Monuments lie heaped in Burris, looking out on the great ocean; and in all the sacred places of the Irish. By their industry and skill in the despised business of handicrafts and commerce the outlaws were fast winning most of the ready money of the country into their hands.