“Hence it is that all Your Majesties Predecessors have kept close to this Fundamental Maxim, of retaining Ireland inseperably united to the Crown of England.”
The house of Hanover ended what the Tudors had begun. Ireland became an island beyond an island. But the great deep still gives to the country an abiding unity. In ancient days the Irish had a noble figure by which they proclaimed the oneness of the land within its Ocean bounds. The three waves of Erin they said, smote upon the shore with a foreboding roar when danger threatened the island. One wave called to Munster at an inlet of Cork; two of them sounded in Ulster, at the mouth of the Bann and in the bay of Dundrum. The Ocean bore the same fate to Munster and to Ulster. And in fact so long as the sea surrounds this island, so long all its peoples must be linked in a common fortune. The deep that encompasses Ireland has made this country one, gathering together into the Irish family all races that have entered within its circuit. By the might of that encircling Ocean the men of Ireland are bound together in one inheritance, unchanging amid ceaseless change.
CHAPTER III
A GREAT IRISH LADY
WE are often told that the civilization of a people is marked by the place of its women: a rule by which the Irish stand high. In the fifteenth century, as at all times, their annals record many noble ladies “distinguished for knowledge, hospitality, good sense and piety”; “humane and charitable”; “a nurse to all guests and strangers, and to all the learned men in Ireland.” Of these Margaret, daughter of O’Carroll lord of Ely, wife of Calvagh O’Connor Faly lord of Offaly (lands which lie across the boundaries of the modern King’s and Queen’s Counties and Kildare), was the most illustrious. She came of a learned race. The O’Carrolls, in the course of little more than a century (1253-1373), held the See of Cashel for sixty years; and O’Carroll had been Archbishop of Tuam; and Margaret’s father, lord of Ely, was “the general patron of all the learned men of Ireland.” “This Teige was deservedly a man of greate accompt and fame with the professors of Poetrye and Musicke of Ireland and Scotland, for his liberality extended towards them, and every of them in generalle.” So highly was he esteemed among the chiefs that he was forbidden by the Irish captains of east Munster to carry out his wish of resigning his lordship of Ely (1396). He made a pilgrimage, however, that year to the threshold of the apostles, with his companions O’Brien, Gerald, and Thomas Calvagh MacMurchadh of the royal race of Leinster; and coming back through England visited Richard ii. at Westminster, who received him graciously, and being then about to cross to Calais for his marriage with Isabella of France, and the conclusion of a treaty of peace with the French king, invited O’Carroll to accompany him in his retinue. Ten years later he was slain by the English, the boy-prince Thomas of Lancaster, son of Henry iv., being then Viceroy in Ireland, and under him the Lord Deputy Scrope. The English army fell on him unawares at Callan; for whose death indeed the sun stood still, said their account, to light the Deputy and the fierce Prior of Kilmainham in the evening surprise and the six miles’ ride of slaughter, where eight hundred, or some said three thousand, of his people fell. Some time after the massacre Margaret married the most successful leader in his day of the Irish, Calvagh O’Connor Faly, son of Murchadh, the “Lord of Offaly, of the cattle-abounding land,” descended from Conchobar of the race of Cathair Mór, King of Leinster. Brought up amid the perils and sorrows of constant war, her fortunes were now transferred to a country where the conflict with the English knew no interlude. To understand her story it is necessary to show very briefly the situation of Offaly.
The land of the O’Connors adjoined that of the O’Carrolls under the Slieve Bloom mountains. The old Offaly, from Sliabh-Bladhma, now Slieve Bloom, to the hill of Alenn, and from Sliabh-Cualann in Wicklow to the Great Heath, is a plain as level as a tranquil sea. On its western side a long low ridge north of Slieve Bloom had given shelter to the two St. Sinchealls; a church had risen by the holy well; and the fair-town of Killeigh on “the field of the long ridge,” profiting by the traffic from the Shannon to the Liffey. There Murchadh O’Connor founded for the Franciscans a monastery (1393) said to be the third in size and importance of the monasteries of Ireland, the burial place of his race. In what was once the Abbey churchyard, tombstones of the O’Doynes, deeply sculptured with their armorial bearings, recall a great family of Offaly. On the eastern side of Offaly Norman settlers had pushed back the boundary from the Dublin hills to Rathangan, where a strong fort and church stood at the head of the plain through which the Barrow and the Slaney flowed south to Waterford and Wexford; and on that important trade route Thomas O’Connor Faly had founded a Franciscan monastery (1302), under the walls of Hugh de Lacy’s fort at Castledermot. To the north lay Meath—“cemetery of the valourous Gael”—whose colonists had incessant war with Offaly. It was a land over which the earliest Norman settlers had swept from de Lacy’s fort of Castledermot to that of Durrow; a land which was again the chief centre of struggle when the Irish attack drove the English power back to the plains of Meath, and which in the renewed wars of the English under the Tudors became the scene of ferocious reprisals and calculated obliteration of its race and name. From Calvagh’s first battle all his fighting was on the plains of Meath. Once he made a raid in the land of the O’Mores; and when his sons grew up they had disputes with Irish neighbours. But the only war of Calvagh from 1385 to 1458 was a war against the English.
Lady Chapel opening from North Side of the
Franciscan Abbey, Castledermot.