If, by any stretch of imagination, we could place ourselves in their position, understand their language when they met each other in their huts, in their morasses and bogs, in their mountain fastnesses and desolate moors, could we only enter into their feelings and see the working of their minds, we might catch a faint conception of the affection which they must have felt for brothers waging the deadly fight against the same enemies, and contending in a seemingly endless and hopeless struggle against the same terrible odds. Union, affection, devotedness, are words too weak to serve here.
For this reason, also, do we find the Irish people stamped with peculiarities which we find in no others. In antiquity, as we have said, the people could never rise to any thing greater than a mob; in modern times such has also often been the case. With the Irish it is not, and could not be so. Their aim has always been too lofty, their struggle of too long duration, their morality too genuine and too pure. For their aim has constantly been to rescue their country; their struggle has lasted nearly three hundred years; their morality has ever been directed by the sweetest religion. Extreme cases of oppression such as theirs may have occasionally given rise to violent outbreaks inevitable in human despair; but, on the whole, it may to their honor be fearlessly said, that they have preserved, almost throughout, a due regard for social hierarchy and all kinds of rights. Many of them have died of hunger, rather than touch the property of a rich and hostile neighbor. Where else can we find such an example?
This union of the people, which was thus brought about by religious persecution, included not only the natives of the old race, but the Anglo-Irish themselves, who were brought by degrees to a unanimity of feeling which they had never known before, although they had previously adopted Irish manners - a unanimity which the Lutheran Archbishop Browne had foreseen and openly denounced beforehand. This was the man who had unwittingly borne testimony to the Irish that "the common people of this isle are more zealous in their blindness than the saints and martyrs were in the truth at the beginning of the Gospel;" the same George Browne, of Dublin, had also been the first to perceive that the religious question was beginning, even under Henry VIII., to unite the native Irish and the descendants of Strongbow's followers, until that time bitterly opposed to each other.
In a letter, dated "Dublin, May, 1538," to the Lord Privy Seal, he said: "It is observed that, ever since his Highness's ancestors had this nation in possession, the old natives have been craving foreign powers to assist and raise them; and now both English race and Irish begin to oppose your lordship's orders" (about supremacy), "and do lay aside their national old quarrels, which, I fear, if any thing will cause a foreigner to invade this nation, that will."
This man, who was altogether worldly and without faith, displayed in this a keen political foresight far above that of the ordinary counsellors of England's king. He openly announced what actually came to pass only toward the middle of Elizabeth's reign, and what the horrors of the Cromwellian wars were to complete - the thorough fusion of Irish and Anglo-Norman Catholics, both transplanted to Connaught, perishing under the sword of the soldier, the rope of the hangman, or dying of starvation in the recesses of their mountains - united forever in the bonds of martyrdom.
The "birth of the Irish people" was to be insured by another measure of the English Government - the suppression of religious houses. We must, in conclusion, turn to this.
In the annals of the Four Masters, under the year 1537, we read: "A heresy and a new error broke out in England, the effect of pride, vainglory, avarice, sensual desire, and the prevalence of a variety of scientific and philosophical speculations, so that the people of England went into opposition to the Pope and to Rome.
"At the same time, they followed a variety of opinions; and, adopting the old law of Moses, after the manner of the Jewish people, they gave the title of Head of the Church of God, during his reign, to the king. They ruined the orders who were permitted to hold worldly possessions, namely, monks, canons regular, nuns, and Brethren of the Cross, etc . . . . They broke into the monasteries, they sold their roofs and bells; so that there was not a monastery from Arran of the Saints to the Iccian Sea that was not broken and scattered, except only a few in Ireland."
And, under 1540, they say: "The English, in every place throughout Ireland, where they established their power, persecuted and banished the nine religious orders, and particularly they destroyed the monastery of Monaghan, and beheaded the guardian and a number of friars."
We may add that, at the restoration of the old faith under Queen
Mary, nothing had to be restored in Ireland save the monasteries.
These establishments had, almost without exception, been
ruthlessly destroyed.