Irish History and the Irish Question

by Goldwin Smith

IV

Thus the day of the Elizabethan era which dawned so brightly upon England came on in heavy clouds for the unhappy dependency. The religious compromise which it brought to England was adapted by the English statesmen who framed it to the religious condition and temperament of their own people. To the condition and temperament of the Irish people there was no such adaptation. To the Catholic lords of the Pale the Elizabethan religion was alien; to the native Celts it was not only alien, but utterly abhorrent. It presented itself, not as the religion of Ireland, but as the religion of the conqueror.

The ecclesiastical polity comprised in the Act of Uniformity and the Thirty-nine Articles was, however, formally extended to Ireland, and the Crown resumed the powers which it had assumed in the time of Henry VIII. or his son, including the appointment of bishops, in this case without the veil, retained in England, of the congé d’élire. In the dependency as in England, the State assumed supreme power of religious legislation, overriding and almost treating as null the authority of the ecclesiastical Convocation. Propagation of the Anglican liturgy beyond the Pale continued to be blocked by the language.

Burleigh and the other statesmen of Elizabeth’s Council could not fail to turn their minds to the Irish problem, enhanced as its gravity had been by the progress of religious revolution in Europe and the danger of a conflict with the Catholic powers. Trinity College is a noble monument of their policy. In Ireland, as in England, they restored the coin, though the benefits of that wise measure were offset by protectionist enactments carried in the Parliament of the Pale, which bore the usual fruits. They sent commissioners of inquiry to give them more trustworthy information than they could get from the despatches of the deputies or the tattling intriguers of the Pale. They formed a plan for the institution of provincial presidencies to lengthen the arm of government and form local centres of civilization, which, had it taken effect, might have been the best solution of the problem. But the necessary means of giving effect to any policy failed them. Churches and schools, which were named by a reformer at the time as the indispensable instruments of civilization, could in the case of Ireland be named only in mockery. An ordinance for the general establishment of schools more than once went forth, but an ordinance still it remained. The Pale, reduced as it was in extent and weakly defended, was in itself a nest of misrule, jobbery, and corruption. Nothing could have been done without a military force in the hands of the central government sufficient to enforce law and order. Such a force the counsellors of Elizabeth had no means of maintaining. Continental war drew heavily on the exchequer. The queen was unwisely parsimonious. She was seized with spasms of frugality. Militia on the spot of any value there was none. The service was very unpopular in England, and the men enlisted or pressed for it as soldiers were apt to be of the Falstaffian kind, better at preying on the people for whose protection they were sent and at indulging in the general license of the camp than at facing the perils and hardships of “hostings” in the Irish wilds. Their pay was almost always in arrears.

The service was not inviting. “The deputy, according to his commission, marched into the north. But, alas, he neither found France to travel in nor Frenchmen to fight withal. There were no glorious towns to load the soldiers home with spoils, nor pleasant vineyards to refresh them with wine. Here were no plentiful markets to supply the salary of the army if they wanted, or stood in need; here were no cities of refuge, nor places of garrison to retire into, in the times of danger and extremity of weather; here were no musters ordered, no lieutenants of shires to raise new armies; here was no supplement of men or provisions, especially of Irish against Irish; nor any one promise kept according to his expectation; here were, in plain terms, bogs and woods to be in, fogs and mists to trouble you, grass and fern to welcome your horses and corrupt and putrefy your bodies; here was killing of kine and eating fresh beef, to breed diseases; here was oats without bread, and fire without food; here were smoky cabins and nasty holes; here were bogs on the tops of mountains, and few passages, but over marshes, or through strange places; here was retiring into fastnesses, glens, and no fighting, but when they pleased themselves; here was ground enough to bury your people in being dead, but no place to please them while alive; here you might spend what you brought with you, but be assured there was no hopes of relief; here was room for all your losses, but scarce a castle to receive your spoil and treasure. To conclude: here was all glory and virtue buried in obscurity and oblivion, and not so much as a glimmering hope that how valiantly soever a man demeaned himself it should be registered or remembered.”

The deputies sent in command might do their best according to their lights. They generally did. But the lights of all of them were not the same, and the web of Penelope woven by one was always in danger of being unwoven by his successor. One of them only, Sussex, was large-minded enough to think of acknowledging the Brehon law, reducing it to a system, and making it a bridge across which the Irish might pass to legal civilization. All the deputies had to contend more or less with local opposition and intrigue.

The consequences to Ireland of this policy of government by deputies were disastrous. The presence of royalty might have had some effect on the Irish heart. It could hardly have failed, at all events, to reveal the real state of things. But it was never tried.

Elizabeth, Protestant by circumstance and profession, Catholic in her real leanings, hating nothing so much as a Puritan, unless it were a clergyman’s wife, and an autocrat to the core, had no desire of breaking with the Papacy or with Spain. But when a Pope excommunicated and deposed her, the die was cast. Ireland was drawn into the European war between Catholicism and Protestantism which was also that between despotism and freedom; she became a point of military danger in a national and religious struggle for life or death. There is now an end of the policy of conciliation or of colonization with a civilizing object. The policy henceforth is that of conquest, and when resistance is obstinate, of extermination.

The reign was filled with successive wars between the English and the natives, the first slightly, the last two more deeply, identified on the side of the natives with papal suzerainty and the Catholic cause. The first was that with Shane O’Neill, elective head of the great Ulster sept of O’Neill and pretender to the royal earldom of Tyrone. The tribal headship was unquestionably elective; to the earldom Shane’s claim was doubtful, the question being partly one between the English and the Brehon law. It was presently settled by the murder of Shane’s rival. Shane was, in fact admitted himself to be, a barbarian, brutal, drunken, and cruel, all in a high degree. He made his prisoners wear an iron collar fastened by a short chain to gyves on their ankles so that they could neither stand nor lie. At the same time he was able, crafty, and daring. He made himself supreme in Ulster, baffled the English in war, and was so formidable that the Lord Deputy Sussex, once at least, if not more than once, attempted to get rid of him by assassination. He intrigued with Philip of Spain. At another time he coquetted with the Queen’s government and paid a visit to the court, where he and his gallowglasses, with their axes, their Irish heads of hair and moustaches, their wide-sleeved saffron shirts, short tunics, and shaggy cloaks of fur or frieze, produced a sensation among the courtiers. Master of dissimulation, Shane fell on his knees before the Queen and confessed his rebellion in the Irish language “with howling.” Returning to Ulster, he recommenced the game there, plundering and burning, slaying man, woman, and child. He was at last stabbed in a brawl with the Scottish raiders with whom he had intrigued. These marauding immigrants from the Scottish Highlands and isles were now a formidable addition to the elements in the cauldron of Irish anarchy and ruin.