A little later, in 1639, Father Stapleton, in his "Doctrina Christiana," published in Irish and Latin—the first Irish book ever printed in Roman characters—throws the blame for the neglect of Irish literature first upon the Irish antiquarians "who have placed it under difficulties and hard words,[20] writing it in mysterious ways, and in dark difficult language," and secondly upon the upper classes "who bring their native natural language (which is powerful, perfect, honourable, learned, and sharply-exact in itself) into contempt and disrespect, and spend their time cultivating and learning other foreign tongues."[21]
Peter Lombard, Archbishop of Armagh, in his book printed at Louvain in 1632, says that Irish is the language of the whole of Hibernia, but there were some differences of pronunciation in the various provinces, and between the learned and the common people, the universal opinion being that the people of Connacht spoke it best, they having both power of expression and propriety of phrase, while the men of Munster had the power of expression without the propriety, and the people of Ulster the propriety without the power of expression. The people of Leinster were considered deficient in both.[22]
O'Molloy in his "Lochrann na gCreidmheach," published in 1675, says that "no language is well understood by the common people of the island except Irish alone."[23] The students of the Irish College at Rome were at this time bound by rule to speak Irish, and an Irish book was to be read in the refectory during dinner and supper,[24] and all candidates for the priesthood were directed by the Synod of Tuam, in 1660, to learn to read and write Irish well.
Sir William Petty, writing in 1672, has an interesting passage on the people of Wexford and of Fingal: "The language of Ireland is like that of the North of Scotland, in many things like the Welsh and Manques, but in Ireland the Fingallians" [the dwellers along the coast some miles north of Dublin] "speak neither English, Irish, nor Welsh, and the people about Wexford, though they speak in a language differing from English, Welsh, and Irish, yet it is not the same with that of the Fingallians near Dublin. Both these sorts of people are honest and laborious members of the kingdom." Petty's strictures upon the Irish language, of which he was utterly ignorant, and which he ludicrously asserts "to have few words," need not here be noticed. He appears to show, however, that the Irish had already begun to borrow some words from English, and expressed many of the "names of artificial things" in "the language of their conquerors by altering the termination and language only."
It need hardly be said that once the English Government got the upper hand in the seventeenth century, and placed bishops and clergy of its own in the sees and dioceses throughout Ireland, they made it a kind of understood bargain with their nominees that they should have no dealings and make no terms with the national Irish language. Bedell, who was an Englishman and had been created an Irish bishop, neglected this unwritten compact far enough to learn Irish himself and to translate, with the help of a couple of Irishmen, the Bible into Irish, and he also circulated a catechism in English and Irish amongst the natives. He reaped his reward in the undying gratitude of the Irish and the equally bitter animosity of his own colleagues. Ussher, then primate, in answer to a pathetic letter of Bedell's asking what were the charges against him, said in his reply, "the course which you took with the Papists was generally cried out against, neither do I remember in all my life that anything was done here by any of us, at which the professors of the gospel did take more offense, or by which the adversaries were more confirmed in their superstitions and idolatry, whereas I wish you had advised with your brethren before you would aventure to pull down that which they have been so long a building,"[25] meaning the discrediting and destruction of the Irish language. The Irish, however, did not forget the efforts Bedell had made in behalf of their tongue, for, having taken him prisoner in the war of 1648, they treated him with every courtesy in their power, and when he died their troops fired a volley over his grave, crying out, Requiescat ultimus Anglorum, while a priest who was present was heard to exclaim with fervour, "Sit anima mea cum Bedelo."
Indeed, the attitude adopted by the Government and the bishops who were its loyal henchmen, placed the defenders of the Established Church in a very awkward and embarrassing position. They wanted to make Protestants of the people, but they could not talk to them nor preach to them. The only possible course for the bishops to pursue, supposing them to have been in earnest, and to have been ecclesiastics and not Government place-men, would have been to appoint Irish-speaking clergy under them, a thing which with scarcely an exception they utterly and obstinately refused to do. So that for a hundred and fifty years the native inhabitants of Ireland were obliged to pay a tenth of their produce to a foreign clergy whom they could not understand and who never troubled themselves to understand them. How gentlemen and scholars like Ussher could take up the position they did, is marvellous. He declares with one breath that "the religion of the Papists is superstitious and idolatrous, their faith and doctrines erroneous and heretical, their church in respect of both apostatical, to give them therefore a toleration, or to consent that they may freely exercise their religion and profess their faith and doctrine is a grievous sin,"[26] and with the next breath he tells Bedell when he circulated books in the Irish language meant to convert these same Papists, that nothing was ever done "at which the professors of the gospel did take more offense." This can only be accounted for, so far as I can see, by strong social prejudice and race hatred. The desire to see the Irish and their language crushed and in extremis was stronger than the desire to make Protestants of them, and this feeling continued for at least a hundred and fifty years.[27] Even so late as the latter half of the eighteenth century we find Dr. Woodward, Protestant bishop of Cloyne, stating that "the difference of language is a very general (and where it obtains an insurmountable) object to any intercourse with the people," on the part of the Protestant clergy, but, he adds coolly, "if it be asked why the clergy do not learn the Irish language, I answer that it should be the object of Government rather to take measures to bring it into entire disuse,"[28] one of the most cynical avowals I can remember on the part of an Irish prelate as to what he was there for—not for the spiritual good of the people who paid him tithes, but as the official tool of the Government to crush their nationality.
Even Dean Swift, so clear-sighted a politician where Ireland's financial wrongs were concerned, was in his policy towards the people's language quite at one with men like Ussher and Woodward. Yet he knew perfectly well that over three-fourths of the island he and his confrères were, so far as polemical arguments or conversion went, powerless either for good or evil. He was, like the other Protestant dignitaries of his day, a declared enemy of the Gaelic speech, which he considered prevented "the Irish from being tamed," and at one time he said he had a scheme by which their language "might easily be abolished and become a dead one in half an age, with little expense and less trouble." In another place he says, "it would be a noble achievement to abolish the Irish language in the kingdom, so far at least as to oblige all the natives to speak only English on every occasion of business, in shops, markets, fairs, and other places of dealing: yet I am wholly deceived if this might not be effectually done in less than half an age and at a very trifling expense; for such I look upon a tax to be, of only six thousand pounds to accomplish so great a work." Whatever the Dean's plan was, he did not further enlighten the public upon it, and the scheme appears to have died with him.
The absorbing power of Irish nationality continued so strong all through the seventeenth century that according to Prendergast many of the children of Oliver Cromwell's soldiers who had settled in Ireland could not speak a word of English.[29] It was the same all over the country. In 1760 Irish was so universally spoken in the regiments of the Irish Brigade that Dick Hennessy, Edmund Burke's cousin, learnt it on foreign service.[30] Still later, during the Peninsular War, the English officers in one of the Highland regiments attempted to abolish the speaking of Gaelic at the mess table, but the Gaelic-speaking officers completely outvoted them. Irish was spoken at this time by all the Milesian families of high rank, except when they wished to deliberately Anglicise themselves. Michael Kelly, the musical composer and vocalist, who was born in Dublin in 1764, tells us in his "Reminiscences:"[31]—