Over Murkerry’s moors and Ormond’s plain,
His currochs the waves of the Shannon o’erarching
And pathway mile-marked with the slain.”
Even the iron heart of Hugh O’Neill could not maintain its strength against conditions such as those thus described by Moryson, the Englishman, who can not be suspected of intensifying the horrid picture at the expense of his own country’s reputation: “No spectacle,” he says, “was more frequent in the ditches of towns, and especially of wasted countries, than to see multitudes of poor people dead, with their mouths all colored green, by eating nettles, docks, and all things they could rend up above ground.” There were other spectacles still more terrible, as related by the English generals and chroniclers themselves, but we will spare the details. They are too horrible for the average civilized being of this day to contemplate, although the age is by no means lacking in examples of human savagery which go to prove that the wild beast in the nature of man has not yet been entirely bred out.
Baffled by gold, not by steel, by the torch rather than the sword, deprived of all his resources, deserted by his allies, and growing old and worn in ceaseless warfare, it can hardly be wondered at that O’Neill sent to the Lord Deputy, at the end of February, 1603, propositions of surrender. Mountjoy was glad to receive them—for the vision of a possible Spanish expedition, in great force, still disquieted him—and arranged to meet the discomfited Irish hero at Mellifont Abbey, in Louth, where died, centuries before, old, repentant, and despised, that faithless wife of O’Ruarc, Prince of Breffni, whose sin first caused the Normans to set foot in Ireland. So anxious was Mountjoy to conclude a peace, that nearly all of O’Neill’s stipulations were concurred in, even to the free exercise of the Catholic religion in the subjugated country. He and his allies were allowed to retain, under English “letters patent,” their original tribe-lands, with a few exceptions in favor of the traitors who had fought with the English against their own kindred. It was insisted, however, by the Deputy, that all Irish titles, including that of “The O’Neill,” should be dropped, thenceforth and forever, and the English titles of “nobility” substituted. All the Irish territory was converted into “shire-ground.” The ancient Brehon Law was abolished, and, for evermore, the Irish clans were to be governed by English methods. Queen Elizabeth had died during the progress of the negotiations, and a secret knowledge of this fact no doubt influenced Mountjoy in hurrying the treaty to its conclusion, and granting such, comparatively, favorable conditions to Hugh O’Neill and the other “rebellious” Irish chiefs. Therefore, it was to the representative of King James I that Tyrone, at last, yielded his sword—not to the general of Elizabeth. It is said that in the bitter last moments of that sovereign, her almost constant inquiry was: “What news from Ireland and that rascally O’Neill?” The latter’s most elaborate historian estimates that the long war “cost England many millions in treasure, and the blood of tens of thousands of her veteran soldiers, and, from the face of Ireland, it swept nearly one-half of the entire population.” (Mitchel.) And, he continues: “From that day (March 30, 1603, when O’Neill surrendered at Mellifont), the distinction of ‘Pale’ and ‘Irish country’ was at an end; and the authority of the kings of England and their (Anglo) Irish parliaments became, for the first time, paramount over the whole island. The pride of ancient Erin—the haughty struggle of Irish nationhood against foreign institutions and the detested spirit of English imperialism, for that time, sunk in blood and horror, but the Irish nation is an undying essence, and that noble struggle paused for a season, only to recommence in other forms and on wider ground—to be renewed, and again renewed, until—Ah! quousque, Domine, quousque?”
CHAPTER XIV
Treachery of James I to the Irish Chiefs—“The Flight of the Earls”
AT the outset of his reign, James I, of England, and VI of Scotland, collateral descendant of that Edward Bruce who had been crowned King of the Irish in the beginning of the fourteenth century, promised to rule Ireland in a loving and paternal spirit. He had received at his London court, with great urbanity, Hugh O’Neill and Roderick O’Donnell, and had confirmed them in their English titles of Earl of Tyrone and Earl of Tyrconnel, respectively. They had accompanied Mountjoy to England, to make their “submissions” in due form before the king, and, while en route through that country, were grossly insulted at many points by the common people, who could not forget their relatives lying dead in heaps in Irish soil, because of the prowess of the chieftains who were now the guests of England. It is most remarkable that the English people have always honored and hospitably entertained the distinguished “rebels” of all countries but Ireland. Refugees from Poland, from Austria, from Hungary, from France, from Italy—many of them charged with using assassin methods—have been warmly welcomed in London, and even protected by the courts of law, as in the case of the Orsini-infernal-machine conspirators against Napoleon III, in 1859; but no Irish “rebel” has ever been honored, or sheltered, or defended by the English people, or the English courts of law; although individual Englishmen, like Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and a few others of their calibre, have written and spoken in assertion of Ireland’s right to a separate existence. Of course, the reason is that all the other “rebels” fought in “good causes,” and, according to English political ethics, no cause can possibly be just in which the right of England to govern any people whatever against their will is contested. America learned that bitter lesson nearly two centuries after O’Neill and O’Donnell were hooted and stoned by the English populace for having dared to defend the rights and the patrimony of their people.
The Catholic religion continued to be tolerated by James until 1605, when, suddenly, a penal statute of the time of Elizabeth was unearthed and put into operation with full force. Treaty obligations of England with the Irish chiefs were also systematically violated. The lands of Ulster were broad and fair, and the great body of military adventurers who had come into Ireland from England during the long wars of the preceding reign, were greedy for spoil. These and the Irish traitors—Art O’Neill, Niall Garbh O’Donnell, the false McGuire, and the rest—pestered the government and made never-ending charges of plots and “treasons” against “the earls,” as the Irish leaders of the late war now came to be called. The plotters were ably assisted by Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, ancestor of the late Marquis of Salisbury, who was also his namesake. Another able English conspirator against the Irish chiefs was Sir Arthur Chichester, who became one of the chief beneficiaries of the subsequent “confiscations,” and whose descendants still hold, as “titled nobility,” a very comfortable slice of ancient Ulster. Some “Reformed” bishops also took great interest in getting the earls into hot water with the government. Finally an alleged plot on the part of O’Neill and O’Donnell to overthrow the King of England’s government in Ulster—an absurdity on its face, considering their fallen and helpless condition—was made the pretext for summoning them to appear before the English courts established in Ireland, in whose justice they had no confidence, remembering the ghastly fate of MacMahon Roe. A hired perjurer, named O’Cahan—the unworthy scion of a noble house—was to be chief “witness” against O’Neill, and no secret was made of the fact that others would be forthcoming, hired by Chichester, to finish the work begun by the principal informer. Meanwhile the free exercise of the Catholic religion—so solemnly guaranteed by Mountjoy—was strictly prohibited, under the penal enactment of Elizabeth, known as the “Act of Uniformity,” already referred to; and again began those horrid religious persecutions, for politics’ and plunder’s sake, which had no termination in Ireland, except for one brief period, during nearly two centuries. Such Catholics as desired to practice their faith had to betake themselves to the mountain recesses, or the caves of the seacoast, where, before rude altars, Mass was celebrated by priests on whose heads a penal price was set. Sheriffs and judges, attended by large bands of soldiers, made circuit of the new Ulster “counties” and succeeded in completely terrifying the unfortunate Catholic inhabitants. Education, as far as Catholics were concerned, was prohibited, and then began that exodus of Irish ecclesiastical students to the Continent of Europe, which continued down to the reign of William IV, notwithstanding the partial mitigation of the penal laws, in the reign of his father, and the passage of the Catholic Emancipation Bill during his brother’s reign, A.D. 1829.