Irish History and the Irish Question

by Goldwin Smith

It was not likely that the colony, in the state in which it was, would gain by emigration from England. It was probably losing by depletion. English kings drew soldiers from it for their wars. There being no university or means of education, youths who wanted to study went to Oxford, where, though they were not native Irish, they seem to have played in academical brawls the part which native Irish might have played. Thus the colony was emptied of its intellect. Fiefs by feudal rule of descent passed to absentees and to women, weakening its military force. In every way the life-blood of the English and feudal settlement was being continually withdrawn. Of the kings of England, Richard I. was away on crusade, John and Henry III. were wrestling with rebellion at home. The thoughts of Edward I. were turned to Ireland; but his energies were absorbed by Scotland, Wales, and Gascony. He too drew soldiers from Ireland.

The Anglo-Norman element, however, was united, while inveterate disunion reigned among the native tribes. It was occupying the posts of vantage with the castles characteristic of its military rule. It seems to have been rather gaining ground when the island was invaded by Edward Bruce, the brother of Robert, who, emulous of his brother’s success in Scotland, came over on the invitation of Irish tribes to carve out a kingdom for himself. Bruce gained successes and committed great ravages, but was at length met at Dundalk by the Anglo-Norman army under John de Bermingham, overthrown, and slain. He had estranged his Irish allies. According to one of their chroniclers, the day on which he was slain was the happiest of days for the Irish people. The Irish appeal to the Pope against English misrule on this occasion is in form a national manifesto, but was probably less than national in its source.

Still Bruce’s invasion seems to have dealt the Norman colony a heavy blow and thrown back into the hands of the native tribes districts which it had conquered and over which its settlements had spread. Degeneration set in amongst its people. They took to the strange native custom of fosterage, to the Irishman’s saffron mantle and his long moustache, to his weapons, to his mode of riding, even to his language, and countenanced license by confusing the Brehon with the feudal law.

A strange compound of feudalism with tribalism ensued, in the shape of mongrel chieftaincies, henceforth the predominant powers. English barons doffed their baronial character, donned that of the tribal chief, and made themselves independent lords of wide domains peopled by native Irish. It seems that they retained the Norman instinct of command. Many of them changed their Anglo-Norman for Irish names; Bourke, O’Neill, O’Brien, O’Connor. They kept in their pay troops of bravos, gallowglasses and kernes. Their rule seems to have combined the extortions of the feudal lord with those of the native chiefs. Bonaught was a tax imposed by a chief for the support of his mercenaries. Sorohen was an obligation on lands to support the chief with his train one day in a quarter or one in a fortnight. Coshery was a chief’s right to sponge upon his vassals with as many followers as he pleased. Cuddies, or night suppers, were due by lands upon which the chief might quarter himself and his train for four days four times a year. Shragh and mart were yearly exactions in money and kine, apparently imposed at will. But worst of all was coyne and livery, horse-meat and man-meat taken at will. This, it seems, was not an Irish but an Anglo-Norman invention introduced at first as the means of coping with Edward Bruce, but, like the income tax, perpetuated when the special need was past. The chiefs deemed themselves independent princes, renouncing openly or practically allegiance to the English Crown. It is with these potentates and the forces which their restless and rebellious ambition could command that the Crown henceforth in its struggle with the Irish difficulty has to deal. Had they been united, they might have prevailed; but they were always at feud with each other, while policy, though not loyalty, led some of them to side with the Crown. Of the septs, the three most powerful were the Geraldines of the north, close to Dublin, the head of which became afterward Earl of Kildare; the Geraldines of the south in Munster, the head of which became Earl of Desmond; and the Butlers, also in the south, whose head became the Earl of Ormonde. The O’Neills in Ulster were another powerful sept. The Butlers, less Hibernized than their rivals, were almost always on the side of the Crown.

To put a stop to degeneration and restore order in the Pale by the talismanic influence of royalty, Edward III. sent over his son Lionel, Duke of Clarence. Under the duke’s influence the Irish Parliament passed the statute of Kilkenny, drawing a sharp line of division between the two races; declaring marriage, fosterage, gossipred, and even concubinage with the Irish high treason; pronouncing the same penalties against supplying horses and armour to Irishmen or furnishing them with provisions in time of war; commanding Englishmen to speak English, to bear English names only, and to ride and dress in the English fashion; providing for the arming of the colony against Irish enemies; separating in every way the native Irishman from the Englishman and even forbidding the admission of Irish priests to livings in the English Church or to the English monasteries. There are severe regulations against the entertainment of Irish story-tellers and bards. An article declaring the English born in Ireland and in England to be equal and forbidding them to call each other English Hobbe or Irish Dog on pain of a year’s imprisonment and a fine at the king’s pleasure shows that there was a social division in the colony on that line. The statute betrays despair of a fusion of races or of a subjection of the whole island to English rule and law. At the same time it seems to restrain English aggression and decree peace between the races.

Piqued, we are told, by a taunt of his impotence as lord of Ireland which stung his pride, Richard II. twice came over to Ireland with a large army. His armies were wrecked by the difficulties of the country and the passionate weakness of their commander. From his second visit Richard was recalled by the knell of his own doom.

The Pale was drawn into the troubles of the Roses. Before the outbreak the Duke of York had come over to Ireland as vicegerent, won the heart of the people, asserted the independence of the Irish Parliament, and seemed disposed to make himself king. He had been recalled by the Civil War, but he had left behind him a Yorkist party which adhered to the White Rose after Bosworth, recognized the two pretenders, Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, and fought for the lost cause by the side of Martin Schwartz and his German hackbut-men at Stoke.

The Anglo-Norman colony or “Pale” was now at its nadir. Much of its manhood had been drawn away by the kings to their Scottish and French wars. It was reduced to a circle of two counties and a half round Dublin, defended by a ditch. Had the chiefs of tribes been unanimous, it would almost certainly have been destroyed. But the chiefs of tribes were very far from being unanimous, and thanks to their dissensions Strongbow in his tomb at Christ Church still slept undisturbed on the field of his victory. In the Pale itself reigned corruption, disorder, and misrule. “There is no land in all this world that has more liberty in vices than Ireland and less liberty in virtue.” Such, as reported to Henry VIII., was the internal condition of the colony; and the description extended in its full force to the Church.

The hostility of the Pale to the Red Rose probably combined with distractions at home in leading Henry VII. to try the policy of winning the great Irish chiefs to allegiance by marks of confidence and honour and of governing Ireland through them. He tried it with the Earl of Kildare, the head of the great Geraldine clan, saying, as the story went, when he was told that all Ireland could not govern that man, “then that man shall govern all Ireland.” Kildare, deported to England as a suspected traitor, but there winning favour and confidence by the artful address in which his kind were seldom wanting, was sent back to Ireland as lord deputy. The policy had a show of success. Kildare as deputy harried the lands of his own enemies and reported execution done on the enemies of the Crown. He gained one signal victory of that kind. But the attempt to employ restless and lawless ambition as the regular mainstay of orderly government could not be a permanent success. The sept of Butler alone was true to the Crown. The next reign saw Kildare’s son and successor as deputy in the Tower, and his grandson, Silken Thomas, raising a madcap rebellion which was made impious by the murder of an archbishop. The execution of Silken Thomas and his five uncles closed the experiment of governing Ireland through that house. There was left one boy whom faithful guardians carried abroad and to whom the heart of the sept still turned.

To make an end of the aspirations to independent nationality which had budded under the Duke of York, and bring Irish legislation completely under the control of the Crown, the Lord Deputy Poynings caused to be carried through the Parliament of the Pale the pair of acts which bore his name, subjecting Irish legislation to the control of the English Council. The first act ordained that in future no Parliament should be held in Ireland “but at such season as the King’s Lieutenant-in-Council there first do certify the King under the great seal of that land the causes and considerations, and all such acts as then seemeth should pass in the said Parliament.” Should the king in council approve, the Irish Parliament was to be summoned under the great seal of England and not otherwise. The second act provided that all public statutes “late made within the realm of England” should be in force in Ireland. This it was decided applied to all English acts prior to the tenth year of Henry VII. Ireland was thus practically turned from a separate principality into a political dependency of England. The work of Poynings was long afterwards completed by the act of George I. affirming the right of the British Parliament to legislate for Ireland.