Ridgeway: An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada

by Scian Dubh

As an evidence that Henry had the spiritual welfare only of the people of Ireland at heart, and that the building up of the Church there was his sole object, no sooner did he land in that country, than he parcelled out the entire island among ten Englishmen—Earl Strongbow, Robert Fitzstephens, Miles de Cogan, Philip Bruce, Sir Hugh de Lacy, Sir John de Courcy, William Burk Fitz Andelm, Sir Thomas de Clare, Otho de Grandison and Robert le Poer. At one sweep, in so far as a royal grant could go, he confiscated every foot of land from Cape Clear to the Giant’s Causeway, denied the right of the inhabitants to a single square yard of their native soil, and made the whole country a present to the persons just named. Perhaps history does not record another such outrageous and infamous act, and one so antagonistic to every principle of right and justice. Had there been a preceding series of expensive and bloody wars between both countries, in which Ireland, after years of fruitless resistance, fell at last beneath the yoke of the conqueror, it could be readily understood, that the victor would seek to indemnify himself for his losses, on terms the most exacting and relentless if you will; but in the case under consideration, no animosity existed between the two nations until the ruler of one, without even a shadow of provocation on the part of the inhabitants of the other, made a deliberate descent upon them, and ignoring the benefits conferred gratuitously by them, previously, on his own ungrateful land, subjected them to every barbarity and wrong known to the history of crime.

For upwards of four hundred years of the English occupation—that is, from the landing of Strongbow down to the period of James the First, there was no legal redress for the plunder or murder of an Irishman, by any of the invaders, or for the violation of his wife or daughter. The laws of the Pale, enacted under the sanction of the King and the people of England, subsidized, in effect, a horde of ruthless assassins and robbers, with a view to striking terror to the hearts of the natives, and driving them into a recognition of the right of the usurper to rule over them, and dispose as he saw fit of their property and persons. This right, however, was never conceded in even the most remote degree; for, notwithstanding that the colony of foreign spears and battle-axes waxed stronger daily, the Irish element, disunited though it was, fought it constantly. True, that an occasional lull characterized the tempest as it swept and eddied through each successive generation; but never did Ireland assume the yoke of the oppressor voluntarily, or bow, for even a single moment, in meek submission to his unauthorized sway.

It would require volumes to recount a tithe of the frightful atrocities practiced by the invaders upon the rightful and unoffending owners of the soil during the long period just referred to, and especially towards its close, when that lewd monster, Elizabeth, disgraced her sex and the age. No language can describe adequately the various diabolical modes of extermination practiced against all those who refused to bow the knee and kiss the English rod. No code of laws ever enacted in even the most barbarous age of the world, could compare in fiendish cruelty with the early penal enactments of the Pale—so forcibly supplemented in after years by the perjured “Dutch boor” and the inhuman Georges. The foul fiend himself could not have devised laws more diabolical in their character or destructive in their application. So close were their meshes and sweeping their folds, that the possibility of escape was obviously out of the question; as their victim was met and entangled at every turn, until at last the fatal blow descended, and the unequal contest was ended. But more infamous and unjustifiable still, when “the foul invader” found himself occasionally unable to cope successfully with his brave and chivalrous antagonists, he had recourse to a darker and deeper treachery than even that which characterized the stealthy and unexpected stroke of his midnight dagger. He adopted the guise of friendship; and professing to forget the past, lured into his power with festive blandishments the chiefs of many a noble following, whom he dared not meet in open fight, but who, at a given signal, and while the brimming goblet circled through the feast, were suddenly set upon and foully murdered ere they could draw a dagger or leap to their feet. In corroboration of this assertion, we have only to refer to Mullaghmast, where a deed of this description was perpetrated; and of a character so cruel and dastardly, that the names of those concerned in the inhuman plot are now desecrated by every individual raised above the brute, or inspired with the hope of heaven.

Nor was there any mode of propitiating the satanic spirit which seemed to actuate the English against their opponents, from the first moment that they set their foot upon Irish soil; for, when, in the lapse of years, a portion of the inhabitants in the vicinity of the Pale, professed their readiness to conform to the manners, laws and customs of the invader, their overtures were rejected, and they were still held at the point of the sword, as “the Irish enemy,” and denied the protection of the laws that they were ready to obey. In short, every move of the English, established beyond any possibility of doubt, that their sole object was the utter and complete extirpation of the natives, and the subsequent establishment upon their conquered shores of a dynasty from which every drop of pure, Celtic blood should be excluded forever.

But that day never arrived, and with God’s help never shall. However she might have suffered or failed through an occasional traitor, Ireland, as a whole, fought against English usurpation from the moment that she became aware of its ultimate aims, and felt its growing power within her borders. There was, besides, in the two races, those opposites of character—those natural antagonisms which repelled each other with a force and vehemence not to be neutralized or unified by any process within the reach of even the most humane or astute ruler. They were too different peoples, with habits of thought, moral perceptions, and ideas of chivalry at total variance with each other as entertained by them individually. The great bulk of the English colony was composed of unprincipled freebooters and degraded Saxon serfs; the Conqueror having, a century previously, turned the masses of the English into swine-herds, banished their language from court, and reduced them to a condition of the most abject slavery. Hence their stolid brutality, the low plane of their intelligence, and their systematic murders. But, how different the condition of the Irish in this respect. Far ages previous, both learning, refinement, and the chivalrous use of arms, pervaded their shores. Evidences of the truth of this assertion lie scattered around us in every direction. Girald Barry—the English Cambrensis, William Camden, Archbishop Usher, Vallancey, Lord Lyttleton, and a host of others, all bear witness to the profound learning and noble chivalry of the Irish from the earliest periods; while the various educational institutions throughout the continent, founded shortly after the introduction of Christianity into Ireland, establish, upon a basis the most immovable, the truth of an assertion made by one of the authors just mentioned, namely, that “most of the lights that illumined those times of thick darkness proceeded out of Ireland”. As may be presumed, then, a people so refined and chivalrous—so sensitive to all that was noble and elevated—a people who, as in the case of Alfred, had educated the very kings of the invaders, as well as plucked their subjects from Paganism, were averse to meeting the usurper on his own plane of warfare, and that consequently, the very pride and dignity of their arms walled in, as it were, the tyrant from any of those cold-blooded and dastardly atrocities which so disfigured his own career.

Notwithstanding that, after four hundred and twenty years of outlawry the most cruel and unrelenting, the Irish were, (12th James I. 1614.) at last, admitted within the pale of English law, and recognized nominally as subjects at least, so long had they been subjected to the grinding heel of oppression, and the baneful influences of continuous warfare, and so long, also, had the usurper been accustomed to treat them as enemies, that this recognition of their claims upon humanity availed them but very little. Under the new regime, their freedom was merely technical only; for now the terrible ban of the Reformation, intensified by the cruel spirit evinced throughout the whole of Elizabeth’s infamous reign, was upon them, and their persecution, which had so long been regarded as a matter of course, experienced but little diminution through the attempted toleration of her weak and pedantic successor. Still, frightful and unprecedented as was the ordeal through which they had passed, they preserved their nationality, and clung to their traditions, hoping one day to rid themselves of their oppressors, as they had already done in the case of the Danes; and in this way has the case stood between both parties up to the present hour.

Although long previous to the Reformation, the atrocities practiced upon Catholic Ireland by Catholic England were of a character the most revolting, and although the murderous hand of the invader was never stayed by the knowledge or conviction, that both parties professed a common creed and knelt at a common altar, yet the intensity of the sufferings of the Irish, or what may be termed their studious, refined, and systematic persecution, began with the civilisation of Elizabeth. The new creed of the three preceding reigns had not, up to that period, acquired sufficient strength to exert its deadliest influence against the ancient faith of the people, or to be introduced as a new agency of oppression in the case of Ireland; but now, no sooner had the “Virgin Queen” ascended the throne, than the heart of the tigress leaped within her; and, breaking loose from every restraint, human and divine, she at once pounced upon the unfortunate Irish, and sought to bury her merciless fangs, with one deadly and final crash, in their already bleeding and lacerated vitals. The coarse, cruel fibre of an apostate and libertine father, and the impure blood of a lewd mother, had done their work in her case. From the first to the last moment of her reign, she combined the courtesan with the assassin. She was the murderer of Essex, said to have been her own son and paramour; and was, at the same time, the mistress of more than one noble besides Leicester. According to her own countryman, Cobbett, she spilled more blood during her occupancy of the throne, than any other single agency in the world for a commensurate period; while her treatment of Ireland, under the “humane guidance” and advice of such cruel wretches as Spenser, was neither more nor less than absolutely satanic. For fifteen long years she never ceased to subject that unhappy land to famine, fire and sword. Every device that her hellish nature or that of her agents could concoct for the total extirpation of the people, was put into the most relentless requisition by her. Under the guise of the most sincere friendship, her deputies, times without number, betrayed many of the leaders of the Irish into accepting their hospitality, and then foully set upon them and murdered them while they sat unsuspecting guests at their festive board. And yet, notwithstanding her penal laws, her blood-thirsty soldiery, and all her revolting persecutions, the Irish were more than a match for her in the open field, and ultimately embittered the closing years of her life. From the first moment of the invasion, the O’Neills—Kings and Princes of Aileach, Kings of Ulster and Princes of Tir-Eogain—as well as other chiefs and leaders, fought the Pale incessantly: and now, after a lapse of nearly four hundred years, again evinced to the world, that Ireland was still unconquered, and regarded England as a tyrant and usurper. And yet the opposition of those chiefs and rulers to the hirelings and paid assassins of this infamous woman and her corrupt associates, was of a character the most chivalrous. Unaccustomed to cowardly deeds of blood, these proud warriors preferred to meet the enemy face to face, and decide the issues of the hour in fair, open fight. They could not entertain the Saxon idea of disposing of an adversary by the stealthy knife of the professional murderer; and hence it was that their pride and chivalry had ever been taken advantage of: the invaders being convinced that no reprisals of a character sufficiently dastardly or atrocious to meet their own depredations, would be indulged in by their chivalrous opponents. In evidence of the spirit that actuated both parting individually in this connection, we may refer to the massacre of Mullaghmast, on the one hand, where the English, under professions of the purest friendship, lured many of the Irish chiefs and nobles to a conference or council, and then suddenly pouncing on them, murdered every single soul of them in cold blood; while, on the other hand, we may contrast with this cowardly act—which is but one of a series of the same sort—the noble and generous conduct of Tir-Oen, at the battle of the Yellow Ford, in 1598, where, after defeating the Queen’s troops with terrible slaughter, taking all their artillery and baggage, as well as twelve thousand pieces of gold, the remainder of the shattered army was totally at his mercy, when he might have put every soul that composed it to death. Unlike the cowardly invader, the field once won, he sheathed his sword, and ordered the remnant of the enemy to be spared, as they were unable to fight longer, and commanded that they should be conducted in safety to the Pale. In these two instances we have a thorough insight into the character of the invader and the invaded: so that not another word need be said upon this part of the subject.

And in this manner have the O’Neills and the Irish fought the English up to the present hour. Circumstances have, we know, from time to time, caused a lull in the tempest of arms, but the moment opportunity served the smouldering fires burst forth anew. Not a single day of pure and happy sunshine has ever obtained between England and Ireland, since the flag of the former first flew over the latter. Throughout every single hour of seven hundred long years, Ireland has been secretly plotting or openly fighting against England. Not one solitary reign, from Henry II down to Victoria I, but has been marked with Irish dissatisfaction of English rule. Either in the aggregate or in detail, the Irish people have, throughout that long period, been constantly asserting their right to independence, and their unalterable antipathy to the presence of a foreign power upon their shores. And the same spirit that fought the Henrys, Elizabeth, William and the Georges, is alive still, and lighting their descendants to-day; 1688, 1798, 1848, and 1868 are all episodes of the same history; and the volume now must soon be closed. Humanity and civilisation, common justice and the laws of nations, demand that a people who have battled against tyranny and usurpation for seven successive centuries, and who have still preserved intact their identity, their traditions and their altars, shall be no longer subjected to the brute force and infamous exactions of a freebooter who has so long played false to every principle of honor, and who has been the highwayman of powers and principalities for countless generations.

The record of England in relation to Ireland, is one of the most atrocious known to the history of mankind. It is fraught with the blackest ingratitude, the vilest injustice, and the direst oppression. Notwithstanding that Ireland first gave her an alphabet, and taught her how to spell her name—notwithstanding that Irish missionaries had nurtured her early educational institutions and reclaimed her from Paganism, she misrepresented their religion and their learning in high places, stole in upon them while they slept, and turning upon them like the frozen snake in the fable, robbed them of their independence, and loaded them with chains. Every year of her accursed dominion upon their shores has been marked with some new and overwhelming oppression. She has spit upon their creed, broken their altars, hunted them down with blood-hounds, robbed them of their estates, exiled them penniless to foreign shores, banned their language, murdered their offspring, destroyed their trade and commerce, ruined their manufactures, plundered their exchequer, robbed them of their flag, deprived them of their civil rights, and left them, houseless wanderers, a prey to hunger, cold and rags, upon their own soil. Of all this she stands convicted before the world; and for all this she must alone, so sure as there is a God above her. Ireland still lives, and so do her wrongs. The O’Neills and thousands of brave scions of the past, are still with her, while the rank and file of her sons are as bitterly opposed to English usurpation to-day as they were seven hundred years ago. Besides, at the present hour, the approaches to their final triumph are made luminous with the generous countenance of free America, and the glorious conviction that heaven bends benignly over them; and thus it is that they now stand shoulder to shoulder in eager anticipation of the coming hour, when their banners shall yet once more be flung to the winds, as, with a cry that rends the very earth, they dash down upon their deadly and relentless foe, and smite her hip and thigh as of yore; dealing her the last fatal blow that forever seals her infamous doom.

In the order of Providence, a great corrective, or reactionary principle, attends the misdoings of nations, that, sooner or later, exerts itself in restoring the equilibrium of justice, and avenging the infringement of any of those laws, human or divine, constituted for the welfare and guidance of our race. Whether on the part of governments or individuals, no act of palpable cruelty or barbarity, has ever escaped the censure and reprobation of all good and true peoples since the world became civilized; so that in this connection, the oppressed or injured party has always had the countenance and sympathy of humanity, at least. True, that an effective expression of this sympathy may have often been chilled or embarrassed in individual cases by political considerations or unworthy interests; but then the tendency to illustrate it was there, and in this sense alone, it has often exerted a benign influence. Hungary, Greece, Poland, &c., have all, in turn, had the sympathy of mankind; and so have had the oppressed colonies and people of Great Britain. The cruel treatment, treachery and fraud practiced in the name of justice and religion upon the Sepoys of India, by England, have awakened the deepest commiseration in the bosom of all good and true governments, and aroused, at the same time, the strongest indignation even on the part of nations not over-scrupulous of chains themselves. In like manner, the condition of Ireland has, from time to time, commanded the attention of the world; and, through the cruel expatriation of her children, made itself felt more widely perhaps than that of any other nation. When England perjured herself for the hundredth time, and violated the Treaty of Limerick, she exiled to France a host of our countrymen, who afterwards met her at Fontenoy, as the Irish Brigade, and trailed her bloody and broken in the dust. The wrongs of the past were with them. The cruelties of the Henrys, the murders of Elizabeth, the confiscations of Cromwell, and the perfidy of William, so nerved their arm at the period, that their charge upon the English is mentioned as one of the most memorable and destructive on record. But if they had more than sufficient grounds for dealing a death blow to the power of the tyrant then, how must this debt of vengeance have accumulated since; when, to the wrongs already enumerated are to be added the atrocities of the Georges, as well as those of their worthy descendant—that traitress to humanity, whose hands have been just imbrued in the innocent blood of Allen, O’Brien and Larkin, and who now holds in thrall, within the gloom of her noisome dungeons, some of the noblest spirits that have ever breathed the vital air in this or any age of the world? How, we say, must this debt of vengeance have been heaped up since; and may we not, under its terrible pressure, the next time that we have a fair opportunity of meeting the enemy face to face, anticipate a repetition of that glorious charge in every individual descent we make upon her ranks, until we shall have ground her into pulp, and avenged the blood of our martyrs, which has for ages been crying aloud from the ground, “how long, Oh! Lord?”