The entire North now lay chieftainless. All that was left of its chivalry was represented by the Antrim Scoto-Irishman, Sir Randal MacDonnell. He was the King’s friend and hawk-purveyor, and the story of his persecution must be separately told.
Meanwhile Hugh O’Neill and his fellow-refugees were tracked through Europe by calumniators and assassins. A Proclamation issued by James I. imputed that they were base of birth, so as to lower their credit in the eyes of the Continental grandees who offered them hospitality. Spies dogged their footsteps while they lived, and when they died their heirs were strangled or poisoned wherever they could be trapped. At home their countrymen cowered in helpless humiliation. The native swordsmen were disarmed or deported to Sweden or Poland.
Sheriffs and escheators, who were merely licensed freebooters seeking what they might devour, quartered themselves on the country. The fields of the husbandmen were ravaged; the poor were without bread. Monks were cloisterless; priests churchless; harpers without a hall. The only requiem for the dead was the howl of the wolf. Official prelates and clergy, unmindful of duty to God or man, installed themselves in ancient fanes, and the echo of the stranger’s ritual in a strange tongue disturbed the slumber of the saints.
The upkeep of the discowled apostate or the Lutheran upstart was cast upon the clansmen who spurned their worship. Evil-livers like Miler Magrath, “Archbishop” of Cashel, or his mates from overseas, diverted to their pleasure the incomes which the ancient Church held in trust for the poor. Few of the imported divines could explain to a nation whose speech they scorned their message from on High. The gift of tongues was slow to descend on them.
Ecclesiastics who had escaped captivity or the sword, took to the hills or went into exile. The handful who apostatised were the scorn alike of the invader and the native. The gentry whose lands were forfeited in the cause of “Gospel extension” became “recusants,” for did they not reject the doctrine that they should be rooted out like the Amalekites or Jebusites? Queen Elizabeth had made a gift to the earlier missioners of a fount of Gaelic type, but the fund was embezzled. So Chichester ordered the Book of Common Prayer to be done into Irish; but disbelievers failed to recognise in him another Patrick. Order was taken that the Brehons, who treasured the roll of the mensal dues paid by each chieftain to the priests, should yield up their crumpled parchments at Assizes so that the tribute to the ancient Church might be earmarked as “tithe” for the new “Establishment.”
The Deputy assisted at these soulful inquiries, and blended delicately a spiritual jurisdiction with what was worldly. Who so zealous in the Lord as he, if advancing godliness assisted confiscation? Davies’ account of their progress in the North might serve in part as a model for the diary of Anti-Christ. It notes with wonder that, at this zero-point of national desolation, “all the common people have a whining tone or accent in their speech, as if they did still smart or suffer some oppression.” Other breeds of men, of course, would have waxed merry at the sight of the intruder enriching himself at the expense of their nobles, settling down cosily in their pleasaunces, seizing their churches, defiling their monasteries, corrupting their Courts, and becoming master of the fields, woods, and waters which had come down to them from countless generations.
The ancient code of justice, which the Brehons had administered for over a thousand years, was judicially decided to be “a lewd and barbarous custom.” The fictions of “John Doe” and “Richard Roe,” with all the follies of the feudal law, were set up in its place—to connote the higher civilisation. It was under a Scottish King that the absurdities and cruelties of the English Common Law were forced on Ireland, though the Scottish nation refused to adopt it. The Brehons as judges were in character and training far above the importations who administered the new system. In the native mind the stranger’s zeal for equity ranked with that of the new clergy for the religion to which they were asked to conform.
Spenser’s “View of Ireland” draws this contrast:—
“Wherein it is great wonder to see the odds which is between the zeal of Popish priests and the ministers of the Gospel; for they spare not to come out of Spain, from Rome, and from Rheims, by long toil and dangerous travelling hither, where they know peril of death awaiteth them, and no reward or riches is to be found, only to draw the people into the Church of Rome. Whereas some of our idle ministers, having a way for credit and estimation thereby opened unto them, and having the livings of the country offered unto them without pain and without peril, will neither for the same nor any love of God, nor zeal of religion, nor for all the good they may do by winning souls to God, be drawn forth from their warm nests to look out into God’s harvest, which is even ready for the sickle and all the fields yellow long ago. Doubtless those good old godly Fathers will (I fear me) rise up in the Day of Judgment to condemn them.”
Thirty years later Charles I., in a letter (written with his own hand) to the Irish Protestant Archbishops, complained that “the clergy of Ireland are apt to be careless of God’s service and their own honour.” One of his officials, Sir John Bingley, described them in March, 1629, as “a set of very profane and drunken fellows.” Sogarth aroon!