Stolen! if only it had been stolen once for all!... But to repeat Fitzgibbon’s (Lord Clare) saying, there is not in the whole of Ireland one field that has not been at least three times unjustly taken from its legitimate possessors. And that spoliation was always accompanied by the most aggravating circumstances.
It was indeed with Henry VIII. and Elizabeth that the true efforts of England to achieve the conquest of Erin were made, and from that time, to the antagonism of the two races, to the conflict of interests, was added religious hatred. Between puritanical England and Catholic Ireland began a duel to the death, into which each generation in turn has thrown itself for three centuries. Oppression begets rebellion, and rebellion expires drowned in blood. We have no intention of repeating that history in these pages; its details are to be found everywhere. Let us only recall its essential features.
Towards the year 1565, Queen Elizabeth undertook the “plantation” of Ireland on a large scale, and set about it by the elementary process of dispossessing the owners of the soil in order to present Englishmen with their lands. The whole country rose, under the command of John Desmond, who called the Spaniards to his aid. Upon which England sent to Ireland, together with Sydney, Sussex, and Walter Raleigh, armies whose instructions were “the extermination of the Rebels.”
“At Christmas,” wrote one of the English Generals, Sir Nicolas Malby, in the year 1576, “I entered Connaught, and soon finding that by mercy I should only succeed in having my throat cut, I preferred to adopt a different tactic. I therefore threw myself in the mountains with the settled determination of destroying these people by sword and fire, sparing neither the old nor the children. I burnt down all their harvests and all their houses, and I put to the sword all that fell within my hands.... This occurred in the country of Shane Burke. I did the same thing in that of Ullick Burke.”
The other English Generals vied in ardour with this butcher; so much so that at the end of a few years of indiscriminate hangings, massacres, burnings of house and land, the whole of Munster was laid waste like a desert; a few wretches only were left to wander over it like ghosts, and they came voluntarily to offer their throat to the knife of Queen Elizabeth’s soldiers. The Virgin Queen then resolved to repeople that desert; she made proclamation that all the lands of the Desmonds were confiscated (more than 500,000 acres) and she offered them gratuitously to whosoever would “plant” them with the help of English labour. The grantees were to pay no duty to the Crown until six years had passed, and that duty was always to be of the lightest. In spite of these advantages colonization did not make much progress. The English at last understood that they must either give it up, or resign themselves to having the ground cultivated by the despoiled Irish who had survived the massacres. H ow could those wretched people have done otherwise than nourish the hope of revenge?
That revenge was attempted in Ulster at the death of Elizabeth. It ended in new disasters, new tortures, new confiscations. The counties of Tyrone, Derry, Donegal, Armagh, Fermanagh, and Cavan,—in all about three million acres,—were then seized by the Crown and distributed in lots to Scotch settlers.
In the year 1641, under the reign of Charles I., a few Irishmen having emigrated to the continent, and having been initiated to modern military tactics in the ranks of the French army, attempted to liberate their country. They provoked a rising, succeeded in holding in check during eight years all the British forces, and in 1649 compelled the King of England to grant them by formal treaty the conditions they themselves dictated. But a few days later the head of Charles fell on the scaffold, and Cromwell in person, escorted by his son, by Ireton and Ludlow, made it his business to come and annul the treaty of Kilkenny.
“For Jesus!... No quarter!...” Such was the battle-cry he gave to his Roundheads. Drogheda, then Wexford were taken by storm; men, women, and children were exterminated; Galway fell in 1652. The populations, exhausted by a war and famine of ten years’ duration, surrendered themselves to his mercy, and laid down their arms. Cromwell had only now to reap the fruits of his victory by making Ireland pay for it.