Gang aft aglee,
And leave them naught but grief and pain
For promised joy.”[[31]]
In 1622 the king sent a charge to enforce the law requiring the natives to leave the planted land. In it he admits that the law has not been at all carefully complied with. He speaks of “the continual unconformity, as well of those natives as of the undertakers, upon whose portions they remain,” and concludes, “In this particular we were always resolved, and yet are, not to spare those undertakers and their tenants, until we have reformed them, but rather if they persist still in their ingratitude and disobedience, to use the advantages which our laws and their own manifold contempt have given us against them, in a more severe manner than hitherto we have done.”[[32]]
The treatment of the aged Eochaidh or Oghie O’Hanlon, the chieftain of Orior in County Armagh, seems to have been unnecessarily harsh, though I can hardly agree with the denunciations of the Rev. Geo. Hill on the meanness of it. This venerable man, who represented a race which had been supreme in Ulster ages before the O’Neills had any prominence, was uniformly loyal to the English connexion. He had a son who was a leading man in Sir Cahir O’Dogherty’s rising, and the aged father was guilty of the crime, if such it could be called, of giving his son shelter for a night in his castle at Tandragee during the revolt. This, of course, was treason, and the father might have been hanged. But he had often borne the standard of the Irish on the English side, so his penalty was commuted to the forfeiture of his estates, and he was offered £80 a year pension as compensation. He did not live to draw one quarter’s payment, for he was a broken-hearted old man, and died, literally of grief, on hearing that his son’s wife, who was a sister of Sir Cahir O’Dogherty, had perished in the woods after having given birth to a child.[[33]] Nowadays £80 is a small sum, but it would seem that three hundred years ago, it was worth about £1,000 of our money. So we can hardly agree with Mr. Hill’s statement that there was meanness in giving O’Hanlon such a pension. O’Hanlon Junior kept up his guerilla warfare as the leader of a number of outlaws of the Robin Hood type, called woodkerne, and the trouble they gave was only brought to an end when they allowed themselves to be transported to Sweden, to fight for Gustavus Adolphus, a service which they hated, and took every opportunity of deserting to his opponent, the King of Spain.
It is only fair, too, to mention that the Lady Mary, Sir Cahir O’Dogherty’s widow, was given an annual pension of £80,[[34]] and that the widow of Sir Cowconnaght Macgwire received compensation for the lands she had to surrender in Fermanagh. I am not sure whether she got £100 or £200 a year. The legal documents first mention a surrender of her lands for an annuity of £100 a year, and then a pension of £100, and I do not know whether the two statements refer to one salary of £100 or two. Also that Tyrconnell’s widow, Bridget, Countess of Tyrconnell, was given a yearly pension of £300. Compared with the posthumous savagery of Government to Pamela, Lord Edward Fitzgerald’s widow, this was generosity indeed.
Now who were the planters in Ulster, and what rules were made about the distribution of the land? The new owners were formally divided into three classes, (i) English and Scottish, who were to plant their proportions with English and Scottish tenants; (2) Servitors in Ireland, who might take English or Irish tenants at their choice; (3) Natives of Ulster, who were to be freeholders. But in reality they included samples of a great many social grades. “Cook’s son, duke’s son,” were to be found among them. English gentlemen of little or no property, Scotch lairds and noblemen with their innumerable clans of relations, soldiers and adventurers, royal grooms and servants. Shurley and Case were footmen when they received grants of land in Longford.[[35]] Wray was a groom when he was appointed to the responsible task of seeing that the natives were cleared off the escheated lands; he was to levy fines on them and to keep the money. Then there were the London Companies. Then there were the true patriots; the men who at home had distinguished themselves by crime, or by debt, and found it desirable to leave their native land; these fulfilled the saying of the famous Irish pickpocket, Barrington, in the prologue that he wrote for a play performed by convicts in Botany Bay:
True patriots we, for be it understood
We’ve left our country for our country’s good.
Among these we should class the Graemes, who had been outlaws, cattle-lifters, and border-robbers on the banks of the Tweed. They had been transplanted in a body to Roscommon in Elizabeth’s reign; but even the residence in the Land of Saints did not reform their ideas of property, so they were dispersed and scattered through Ulster in 1610. All were unanimous in one thing only, that they would make as much as they could out of the property, and then go. But, owing to the force of circumstances, the Scotchmen stuck with more pertinacity to their possessions than did most of the other settlers. The English undertakers were mainly from the Eastern counties, Norfolk and Suffolk. They brought no following with them. So they met with difficulty in getting workers and tenants, being forbidden to accept the natives. There were constant bickerings among the undertakers themselves, and with the Bishops about church rights, real or pretended. None of these things worried the canny North Britons, who looked upon Ulster as a veritable Eldorado. A ferry was established between Donaghadee and the Rynnes of Galloway or Portpatrick.[[36]] Over it there poured such a ragged regiment as the Irish Sea has never witnessed before or since. Not singly they came, but in battalions; the Scotch Bishop of Raphoe (Montgomery, Bishop of Clogher, Derry and Raphoe, grand-uncle of William Montgomery of the Manuscripts) received permission at one grant for the denization of three hundred of his countrymen whom he should bring over. They had candidates for denization among all classes: younger brothers and sons-in-law and cousins to get grants of land, and workmen and farmers ready to settle down on industrial pursuits. As they did not absolutely rely on the offices of the State church for their religion, we find many ministers of the Presbyterian community coming over and being given licence of denization, and in course of time this third religion became a settled thing in the land. Oily and smooth-tongued these were; willing, with some canting expressions, to change over and become clergymen of the English Church if an opportunity of making anything by the change came in their way. The descriptions of the careers of some of these men (in Reid’s Presbyterianism in Ulster) are very amusing. Hamilton was ordained by the Protestant Bishop of Down (Echlin). Robert Blair left Glasgow where he had a professorship, because Dr. Cameron, who had been appointed Principal, with the view of bringing the college to approve of prelacy, had opposed Blair. The latter came to Ireland, and Lord Claneboy proposed he should be rector of Bangor, County Down. But about his opposition to prelacy? The Bishop said, “Will you not receive ordination from Mr. Cunningham and the adjacent brethren, and let me come in among them in no other relation than a presbyter?” So thus, hungering after the flesh-pots of prelacy, he entered into a church whose fundamental tenets he disagreed with.[[37]]