The new army of which St. Leger had been so proud had become somewhat disorderly when their pay began to be irregular. But the actual disbandment was quietly effected. Pay ceased on May 25, but the Council managed to scrape up 8000l., out of the 18,000l. due. Each soldier was persuaded to take seven shillings as a donative and three shillings on account of pay, while 50l. was assigned to each company for the officers, many of whom got nothing more until the Restoration. The men gave up their arms quietly, and dispersed, having been reminded that they were amenable to the law and not privileged in any way. There were no outrages, and sheriffs of counties were specially charged to keep the peace.[254]
French and Spanish crimps.
English settlers pressed.
The disbanded soldiers in Ireland constituted a grave danger, as every one could see when the rebellion had actually broken out, and which some saw at the time of disbanding. But the other danger from great bodies of Irishmen in the pay of foreign powers seemed to many greater at the time, and was certainly not small. Antrim had failed, but Lord Barrymore had succeeded in raising men for service in England, most of whom must have drifted back to Ireland after the treaty of Ripon. Barrymore complained bitterly of a ‘swarm of interloping French mountebanks who wander on their levies with titles and commissions of their own stamp and coinage, with which they are so prided up, as some of them have dared to contest for pressed men with my employed servants.’ Three hundred volunteers, collected for him by an O’Sullivan were thus enticed away, and he believed that Strafford’s enemy Sir Piers Crosbie was at the bottom of it all. Barrymore landed in Lancashire before the middle of June 1639, but with much less than the thousand men whom he was authorised to raise. He had no money to tempt recruits, and when his agents visited Kinsale the common people ran away as from an enemy. They took bribes from the better sort. These crimps even seized men actually engaged by the Government and employed in the public service, and appear to have taken a malicious pleasure in pouncing on English settlers whenever possible. Strafford observed that this was not the way to encourage English enterprise, nor to make intended plantations a success. If the King wanted Irish soldiers let him send over money to the regular officials, and they would do the work much better and cheaper than these Irish lords, ‘who always either out of too much love to their own, or out of over little knowledge of the customs of England in these cases, express some Irish manner or other, either very unseemly in itself, or pretending their own greatness, further than well consists with the modesty of subjects.’ Barrymore, however, proved a brave and loyal soldier in spite of this bad beginning.[255]
Recruiting for Spain allowed.
Owen Roe O’Neill and Preston.
The French service found better than the Spanish.
The Spaniards were allowed to recruit in Ireland during the whole of Strafford’s reign, though he had his misgivings from the first, and though he warned Charles even before he crossed the channel for the first time. ‘It had been the safer for your Majesty to have given liberty for the raising five times as many here in England; because these could not have been debauched in their faith, where those were not free of suspicion, especially being put under command of O’Neill and O’Donnell, the sons of two infamous and arch-traitors, and so likely not only to be trained up in the discipline of war, but in the art of rebellion also. Secondly, as your Majesty’s deputy I must tell him, if the state of this kingdom were the same as in Queen Elizabeth’s time, I should more apprehend the travel and disturbance which two hundred of these men might give us here, being natives, and experienced in their own faculty as soldiers, being sent to mutiny and discipline their own countrymen against the Crown, than of as many more Spaniards, as they sent in those days to Kinsale for relief of the rebels.’ This opinion he retained to the end. He was allowed to appoint two officers, and he selected men who could be trusted to give him a true account of what went on in the Spanish Netherlands. Owen Roe O’Neill became the favourite leader of the Irish in Belgium, but Wentworth preferred Preston. Nevertheless men who were engaged for the latter’s regiment very often went over to the former. The French also got no small number of Irish recruits, though they were less favoured by the Government of Charles I. Intercepted letters in 1635 showed that Paris was ‘pestered with Irish of all sorts, from all parts,’ while whole companies raised for the Spanish Netherlands ‘suffered themselves to be debauched by the French ambassador, and now serve under the French colours.’ Irish officers deserted the Spanish for the French service to get better and more regular pay, and Secretary Coke was clear-sighted enough to see that the Irish troops of both powers would probably turn against England in the end, ‘and join together to replant themselves at home.’[256]
FOOTNOTES:
[246] Strafford Letters, ii. 184, 211, 266-306. For personal details see Hill’s Macdonnells of Antrim. Lord Deputy and Council to Coke, Melbourne Hall MSS. calendared by Hist. MSS. Comm. under July 1637, but apparently belonging to 1639.