The Age of the Reformation

by Preserved Smith

To the left of the Puritans were the Independents or Brownists as they were called from their leader Robert Browne, the advocate of Reformation without Tarrying for Any. He had been a refugee in the Netherlands, where he may have come under Anabaptist influence. His disciples differed from the followers of Cartwright in separating themselves from the state church, in which they found many "filthy traditions and inventions of men." Beginning to organize hi separate congregations about 1567, they were said by Sir Walter Raleigh to have as many as 20,000 adherents in 1593. Though heartily disliked by re-actionaries and by the beati possidentes in both church {346} and state, they were, nevertheless, the party of the future.

[1] A. O. Meyer: England und die katholische Kirche unter Elizabeth, p. 231.

SECTION 5. IRELAND

If the union of England and Wales has been a marriage—after a courtship of the primitive type; if the union with Scotland has been a successful partnership—following a long period of cut-throat competition; the position of Ireland has been that of a captive and a slave. To her unwilling mind the English domination has always been a foreign one, and this fact makes more difference with her than whether her master has been cruel, as formerly, or kind, as of late.

[Sidenote: English rule]

The saddest period in all Erin's sad life was that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when to the old antagonism of race was added a new hatred of creed and a new commercial competition. The policy of Henry was "to reduce that realm to the knowledge of God and obedience of Us." The policy of Elizabeth was to pray that God might "call them to the knowledge of his truth and to a civil polity," and to assist the Almighty by the most fiendish means to accomplish these ends. The government of the island was a crime, and yet for this crime some considerations must be urged in extenuation. England then regarded the Irish much as the Americans have seemed to regard the Indians, as savages to be killed and driven off to make room for a higher civilization. Had England been able to apply the method of extermination she would doubtless have done so and there would then be no Irish question today. But in 1540 it was recognized that "to enterprise the whole extirpation and total destruction of all the Irishmen in the land would be a marvellous gumptious charge and great difficulty."

Being unable to accomplish this or to put Ireland at {347} the bottom of the sea, where Elizabeth's minister Walsingham often wished that it were, the English had the alternatives of half governing or wholly abandoning their neighbors. The latter course was felt to be too dangerous, but had it been adopted, Ireland might have evolved an adequate government and prosperity of her own. It is true that she was more backward than England, but yet she had a considerable trade and culture. [Sidenote: Irish misery] Certain points, like Dublin and Waterford, had much commerce with the Continent. And yet, as to the nation as a whole, the report of 1515 probably speaks true in saying: "There is no common folk in all this world so little set by, so greatly despised, so feeble, so poor, so greatly trodden under foot, as the king's poor common folk of Ireland." There was no map of the whole of Ireland; the roads were few and poor and the vaguest notions prevailed as to the shape, size and population of the country. The most civilized part was the English Pale around Dublin; the native Irish lived "west of the Barrow and west of the law," and were governed by more than sixty native chiefs. Intermarriage of colonists and natives was forbidden by law. The only way the Tudor government knew of asserting its suzerainty over these septs, correctly described as "the king's Irish enemies," was to raid them at intervals, slaying, robbing and raping as they went. It was after one of these raids in 1580 that the poet Spencer wrote:

The people were brought to such wretchedness that any
strong heart would have rued the same. Out of every
corner of the woods and glens they came, creeping forth
upon their hands, for their legs would not bear them.
They looked like anatomies of death; they spoke like
ghosts crying out of their graves. They did eat the dead
carrions, happy where they could find them; yea and one
{348}
another soon after, inasmuch as the very carcasses they
spared not to scrape out of their graves; and if they
found a plot of watercresses or shamrocks, there they
thronged as to a feast for a time.

The Irish chiefs were not to be tamed by either kindness or force. Henry and Elizabeth scattered titles of "earl" and "lord" among the O's and Macs of her western island, only to find that the coronet made not the slightest difference in either their affections or their manners. They still lived as marauding chiefs, surrounded by wild kerns and gallowglasses fighting each other and preying on their own poor subjects. "Let a thousand of my people die," remarked one of them, Neil Garv, "I pass not a pin. . . . I will punish, exact, cut and hang where and whenever I list." Had they been able to make common cause they might perhaps have shaken the English grasp from their necks, for it was commonly corrupt and feeble. Sir Henry Sidney was the strongest and best governor sent to the island during the century, but he was able to do little. Though the others could be bribed and though one of them, the Earl of Essex, conspired with the chiefs to rebel, and though at the very end of Elizabeth's reign a capable Spanish army landed in Ireland to help the natives, nothing ever enabled them to turn out the hated "Sassenach."

[Sidenote: English colonization]