The Irish Race in the Past and the Present

by Augustus J. Thébaud

The "flight" itself and all its details are given by the Rev. C. P. Meehan. The entire number of souls on board the small vessel which bore them away was, according to Teigue O'Keenan, Ollamh of Maguire, "ninety-nine, having little sea-store, and being otherwise miserably accommodated." This was indeed the first emigration of the Irish nobles and gentry, which was to be followed by many another, to their final extinction.

Sir John Davies took an English view of the subject when he wrote, about that time, to Lord Salisbury: "We are glad to see the day wherein the countenance and majesty of the law and civil government hath banished Tyrone out of Ireland, which the best army in Europe, and the expense of two million pounds sterling, did not bring to pass. And we hope his Majesty's government will work a greater miracle in this kingdom than ever St. Patrick did; for St. Patrick did only banish the poisonous worms, but suffered the men full of poison to inhabit the land still; but his Majesty's blessed genius will banish all those generations of vipers out of it, and make it, ere it be long, a right fortunate island."

Davies's prophecy ought to have been accomplished long ago, for it is long since all the Irish nobility, "those generations of vipers," has been destroyed; yet the poor island is still far from being "right fortunate."

The chief means employed at the time to encompass the destruction of the nobles was the infamous revelations of spies and informers. The existence of these agents has long been known to all; but the extent of their workings was not suspected even until the state papers and the correspondence of political men, and holders of offices at the time, came to be examined by writers desirous of investigating the whole truth.

It was then found that every man in the English Government, beginning from the highest, the king's ministers, through the Lords-Lieutenants and Chief-Justices of Ireland, down to the lowest officials, one and all kept in their pay men of all ranks of life, who, at the bidding of their employers, were ready to circumvent the victims of an odious policy, and under the guise of friendship, interest, common acquaintance, to discover, and even, if needed, to invent facts and circumstances which might be turned against them, or against any other persons obnoxious to England, with the view of destroying them. So that, to England in Europe, and to Elizabeth in England, belongs the dubious honor of having invented that great agent of modern governments—the secret police.

But the operations of those informers were not confined to England and Ireland alone, although those two kingdoms may be said to have literally swarmed with them; all foreign countries were made the scenes of their infamous machinations, wherever in fact the Irish nobles or English Catholics fled for refuge from persecution. At the courts of Spain and Rome they were to be found; in Brussels and Louvain, in Paris and Rheims, as well as in the by-lanes of London and the lowest quarters of Dublin. The ecclesiastical establishments particularly, which were founded by the Irish Catholics for the education of their priesthood, were infested with them: they found means to penetrate into their most secluded recesses, and sometimes the vilest and most shameful hypocrisy was resorted to in order to gain admittance into those holy cloisters devoted to science and virtue.

All the great houses and hotels in foreign countries, where the banished nobility of Ireland passed the tedious hours, months, and years, of their exile, were the places easiest of access to those base tools of the English Government.

On the reports furnished by these men the British policy was based, and the nobility and gentry still left in the island fell into the meshes so cautiously spread around them. How many of their number were cast into the Tower of London or the Castle of Dublin, on the mere word of these pests of society! How many, suddenly warned of the treachery intended, had to fly in haste lest they should fall into the hands of their enemies! We know that the first "flight of the earls" was brought about by such means as these, but our readers would be mistaken in imagining that that was an exceptional case, scarcely ever repeated. It was in reality the ordinary way of getting rid of this hated race of Irishmen.

The great misfortune was that, even among the Irish themselves, nay, among friars and priests belonging to the race, the English Government sometimes, though Heaven be thanked! rarely, found ready tools and most useful informers. Mean and sordid souls are to be found everywhere; our Lord himself was betrayed by an apostle, while giving him the kiss of peace; but among the Irish, people this class was confined to a few needy adventurers, sometimes to men who, from some personal grievance, real or imaginary, were blinded by the spirit of revenge to deliver those whose destruction they thirsted for into the hands of their common enemies, to their own eternal shame and perdition. The common people were too noble-hearted ever to join in such infamy, and to those who would have tempted them with gold to betray the men concealed by them, the response was ever ready: "The King of England is not rich enough to buy me!"

Thus, piecemeal, as it were, during the reign of Elizabeth and James I., and a part, at least, of that of Charles I., numbers of the Irish nobles were imprisoned or slain at home, or compelled to go into exile.