CHAPTER IV
Confiscation of Desmond’s Domains—English Plantation of Munster
THERE had been, of course, a general “confiscation to the Crown”—that is, to the English “carpet-baggers”—of the broad domains of the defeated Desmonds, and their allies, and among the aliens who profited greatly thereby, for a time, at least, were the poetic Edmund Spenser, who obtained the castle and lands of Kilcolman, in Cork, and Sir Walter Raleigh, who fell in for extensive holdings in Youghal, at the mouth of the southern Blackwater, and its neighborhood. In the garden of Myrtle Grove House, Sir Walter’s Youghal residence, potatoes, obtained from Virginia, were first planted in Ireland, and the first pipeful of tobacco was smoked. In connection with the latter event, a story is told that a servant-girl, about to scrub the floors, seeing smoke issuing from Sir Walter’s nose and mouth, conceived him to be on fire, and emptied the contents of her pail over him, in order, as she explained, “to put him out.” Sir Walter, we may be sure, did not relish her method of fighting “the fire fiend.”
The Desmond confiscation was by no means the first case of the kind on record in Ireland. The original Geraldines took the lands by force from the Celtic tribes, but they speedily amalgamated with the natives, and, within a few generations, became full-fledged Irish in every characteristic, except their family name. Neither was this great confiscation the last, or greatest, as will be seen in the progress of this narrative. The queen’s ministers caused letters to be written to the officers of every “shire” in England, “generously” offering Desmond’s plundered lands in fee simple—that is, practically, free of cost—to all younger brothers, of good families, who would undertake the plantation of Munster. Each of these favored colonists was allowed to “plant” a certain number of British, or Anglo-Irish, families, but it was specifically provided that none of the native—that is, the Celtic and Catholic and the Norman-Catholic—Irish were to be admitted to the privilege. The country had been made “a smoking desert” before this plantation of foreigners was begun. Most of the rightful owners had perished by famine and the sword, and those who still survived, “starvation being, in some instances, too slow, crowds of men, women, and children were sometimes driven into buildings, which were then set on fire” (Mitchel’s “Life of Hugh O’Neill,” page 68). “The soldiers were particularly careful to destroy all Irish infants, ‘for, if they were suffered to grow up, they would become Popish rebels.’” (Ibid. pp. 68, 69.) It is related by the historian Lombard that “women were found hanging upon trees, with their children strangled in the mother’s hair.”
And all this was done in the name of the “reformed religion.” In good truth, although Elizabeth herself may have wished to make the Irish people Protestant in order that they might become more obedient to her spiritual and temporal sway, her agents in Ireland wished for nothing of the kind. They wished the Irish masses to remain Catholic. Otherwise, they would have had no good pretext for destroying them and usurping their lands. And this, too, satisfactorily explains why, for a very long period, the Irish national resistance to England was considered and described as a purely Catholic, sectarian movement. Protestantism, in the period of which we write, meant, to the average Irish mind, England’s policy of conquest and spoliation in Ireland. It is hardly wonderful, therefore, that there grew up between the followers of the old and new creeds an animosity doubly bitter—the animosity of race supplemented by that of religion. In our own days, we have seen the same result in the Polish provinces of Russia and the Turkish principalities in the Danubian region of Europe. Well might the poet ask—
“And wherefore can not kings be great,
And rule with man approving?
And why should creeds enkindle hate
And all their precepts loving?”