Irish History and the Irish Question

by Goldwin Smith

Revolution was in the air. It stirred the heart of the Catholic cowering under the penal law, who saw the foot of his arch-enemy the Puritan on the steps of power. It stirred still more the heart of the disinherited native, especially on the forfeited domain of Tyrone. One of those great popular conspiracies of which the Irish have the gift was formed under the leadership of Phelim O’Neill, who ranked among his countrymen as head of the great sept of O’Neill, and cherished ancestral traditions of vast domains and princely power. With Phelim O’Neill was a better man, Roger Moore, one of the disinherited, a deadly enemy of England. The rebellion posed as royalist, declaring for the king against the Puritan and revolutionary Parliament; its aims were Ireland for the Irish, and Catholicism as the Irish religion. Phelim O’Neill was not a man to restrain from crime. But the people, once launched in insurrection, were probably beyond control. They rose upon the English settlers in Ulster, drove them from their homes, and massacred some thousands with the usual cruelty, women and children taking part in the fiendish work. Many were stripped naked and exposed to perish in the cold. Dublin was full of shivering and famished fugitives. The capital itself narrowly escaped through fortunate betrayal of the plot, such as in an Irish conspiracy seldom fails. It was natural that panic should exaggerate the number murdered, as it was that panic and superstition together should see the spectres of the English who had been drowned by the rebels at Portadown. The effect upon the English, above all upon the Puritan mind, was like that of the Sepoy mutiny and the massacre of Cawnpore. Ruthless retaliation followed. Where the Protestants got the upper hand, Irish men, women, and children were butchered without mercy. Thenceforth the Irishman was to the Puritan a wild beast or worse. All Irishmen who landed in England to fight for the king, with the women who followed their camps, were put to the sword. An Irishwoman left behind by a Munster regiment at the siege of Lyme was torn to pieces by the women of the place.

The English Parliament at once, being short of money, passed, to provide for the Irish war, an act confiscating in advance two and a half millions of acres of rebel land as security for a loan; a measure, to say the least, extreme and sure to make the conflict internecine. The act passed without a dissentient voice, and was one of the last that received the assent of Charles.

In Ireland against the dark clouds of the storm one rainbow appeared. The Protestant Bishop Bedel, though a proselytizer, had by his beneficence won the love of his Catholic neighbours. He and his family were not only spared by the rebels, but treated with loving-kindness, and when he died a farewell salute was fired over his grave.

Thus commenced a course of mutual slaughter which lasted eleven years, and, according to Sir William Petty, cost, by sword, plague, and famine, the lives of a third part of the population. A great pasture country was reduced to the importation of foreign meat. A traveller could ride twenty or thirty miles without seeing a trace of human life, and wolves, fed on human flesh, multiplied and prowled in packs within a few miles of Dublin. Numbers abandoned the country and enlisted in foreign services. Slave dealers plied their trade and shipped boys and girls to Barbados.

Strafford’s place as deputy not having been filled, the government remained in the hands of the Puritan Lords Justices Parsons and Borlase, the first an intriguer and jobber, the second a worn-out soldier and a cipher. They had prorogued the Parliament by which they might have been restrained. The commander of the army on the king’s side and the representative of the king’s interest was Ormonde, the head of the loyalist house or sept of Butler, a man thoroughly honourable as well as able and wise, whose character stands out nobly amidst the dark carnival of evil.

It is difficult to say to which of the contending parties the palm of atrocity is to be awarded. Probably to that of the government, which knew no measure in the extermination of Catholics and rebels. Where Ormonde commanded there was sure to have been comparative mercy. Mercy there certainly was on the side of the insurgents when they were commanded by Owen O’Neill, a genuine soldier trained in foreign service and observant of the rules of civilized war. But a papal legate who was in the Catholic camp gleefully reports that after a battle won by the confederates no prisoners had been taken. By the soldiery of the government at least children were butchered, the saying being that “nits make lice.”

The anti-Catholic policy of the Puritan government and the castle had driven into the arms of insurrection the Catholic lords of the Pale, English in blood, normally hostile to the tribes though they were. The Confederation formed at Kilkenny a provisional government with an assembly of priests and laity combined, which elected a council of war. The assembly was presently joined by a papal nuncio, Rinuccini, who brought money from Rome and it seems at the same time encouragement of the rebellion from Richelieu. The nuncio sought to control everything in the paramount interest of the Papacy, which thus once more appears as a power of temporal ambition. The assembly was not unanimous. Of the clergy and the nuncio the chief aims were the ascendency of the Catholic Church and the recovery of the confiscated Church lands. The chief aims of the lay lords were lay; they wanted relief from political disabilities and recovery of their political power. Restoration to the Church of the abbey lands, of the grantees of which they were the heirs, was by no means to their mind.

Of the origin of the rebellion in Ulster King Charles was perfectly innocent, though he drew suspicion on himself by some careless words. Nothing worse for his cause could have happened. But when in his wrestle with the Puritan he was thrown, he began to cast a longing eye on the forces in Ireland which, though rebel and Catholic, were at all events hostile to the Puritan. There ensued a series of tangled intrigues with the Confederates, in the course of which Charles showed his usual weakness and duplicity, while he was fatally committed by the mingled rashness and tergiversation of his envoy, Glamorgan, the result being a disclosure very injurious to the poor king’s character and cause. The Confederacy was divided between a party which was for treating and a party which was for war to the knife. For war to the knife was the nuncio, an ecclesiastical termagant of the Becket stamp, inflated with notions of his own spiritual power and reckless in the pursuit of his own end, which was to lay Ireland at the feet of the Pope. In all this the high-minded Ormonde sadly stooped to take a part for his royal master’s sake. When the cause of his royal master was finally lost, he surrendered his command to the Parliament and left Ireland.

After the execution of Charles the scene shifted again. Abhorrence of regicide brought about a junction of the more moderate Protestants with the more moderate Confederates, uniting different parties and sections under a common profession of loyalty. Ormonde then returned to lead a mixed and not very harmonious force against Michael Jones, the Republican commander. He advanced to the attack of Dublin, but was totally defeated by Jones.

Now on the wings of victory came Cromwell with ten thousand of the New Model. His proclamation on landing promised to all who would keep the peace, peace and protection for themselves. That proclamation, the first utterance of law and order heard in those parts for ten years, was strictly carried into effect. A soldier was hanged for robbing a native of a fowl. No disorder, rapine, or outrage upon women is laid to the charge of the Puritan army in Ireland. Cromwell sat down before Drogheda, which was held by a large royalist garrison, partly English. The garrison having refused to surrender on summons, he stormed. Two attacks failed; a third, led by himself, took the town. He put the garrison to the sword. That a garrison refusing to surrender on summons and standing a storm might be put to the sword was the rule of war in those days; it was the law, though not the rule, of war even in the days of Wellington. Nevertheless, this was a fell act for a commander who was generally humane in war, and at Worcester risked his life in persuading Royalists to take quarter. Of this Cromwell was himself sensible, and he spoke of it with compunction. “I am persuaded,” he said in his despatch to the Parliament, “that this is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood; and that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future; which are the satisfactory grounds to such actions, which otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret.” Were remorse and regret ever breathed by Alva, Parma, or Tilly? What did the soldiery of those Catholic commanders do when it stormed a Protestant town? What did the British soldiery, maddened by the recollection of a massacre far less than that of 1641 do, not only to the Sepoy mutineer, but to the insurgent people of Oude? When Rupert stormed Leicester, the town was sacked, and women and children were found among the dead. The Royalist Carte, in his life of Ormonde, commenting on the slaughter of the garrison of Drogheda, says, “This was certainly an execrable policy in that regicide. But it had the effect he proposed. It spread abroad the terror of his name; it cut off the best body of the Irish troops and disheartened the rest to such a degree that it was a greater loss in itself and much more fatal in its consequences than the rout at Rathmines.” This is not a defence, nor much of an excuse. But it testifies to a motive other than mere thirst of blood and shows that Cromwell spoke the truth.