Contemporary Literature.
HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY, AND TRAVELS.
The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland. By J. P. Prendergast, Barrister-at-law. Second Edition. Enlarged. With a Facsimile of a Cromwellian Debenture. Longmans. 1870.
It is the tritest of common places to deplore the persistency with which the Irish will go back to early times, and explain the failure of the well-meant attempts of modern legislation by narrating old persecutions. They will do it; and the practical effect of their doing so is seen, in the agitation for 'home government' among the wilder spirits in Fenianism, among men like Mr. Butt and Mr. J. Martin. But, though we regret the 'over-long memory' of the Irish, we cannot but feel that Englishmen have never paid attention enough to the history of the sister island. To most English readers everything beyond what it suited the purpose of Macaulay and Carlyle and Froude to tell them, is a mere blank. Educated men read with surprise in Mr. Hill-Burton's Scotland, the statement that Ireland was the old Scotia, the Scotia major when it becomes necessary to make a distinction, and that the perfervidum ingenium which carried four Scotia missionaries over the whole continent, is that very temperament which makes the Irish of to-day so impatient of English rule. Mr. Reichel's lectures, again (chiefly known, we fear, only through the appreciative notices of them in the Saturday Review) have been a sort of new revelation of the way in which Popery was forced upon Ireland by the English invaders, and of the general state of the country in Plantagenet times. Even Mr. Froude continually overthrows preconceived opinions—as when he proves that in Elizabeth's time the only part of Ireland where there was anything like peace and security was that which was still ruled by native princes; 'the pale' being ground down by taxation and ravaged by an unpaid soldiery, the successors of those 'paddy persons' who under Leicester had made England despicable in the Netherlands, whilst Ulster, under Shane O'Neil, was quiet and prosperous. What Englishman, again, had anything like a true notion of the disgraceful horrors of '98, till he read Massey's George the Third? Yet Irishmen know and ponder over all these things. A whole library of cheap historical monographs has for many years spread the knowledge of them broadcast; and to this reading, unhappily so one-sided, is due that stubborn 'ingratitude' as we call it, which even the Disestablishment and the Land Bill fail to satisfy.
Mr. Prendergast's book (which we see has reached a second edition) is perhaps the very best that an Englishman could read in order to master the causes of Irish discontent. It is well written in every sense; full of minute research, which the author's office as cataloguer of the Carte papers in the Bodleian enabled him to make; graphic in its descriptions, and abounding in a kind of grim humour which suits the story well. It is the work, in fact, of an educated Irishman.
Its object is to show how the Long Parliament, taking occasion from the massacre of 1641, declared the whole of Ireland forfeited, and, assigning Connaught as a home for the native population, divided the rest into lots, which were given, partly to those who advanced money to raise the Parliamentary army, partly in lieu of pay to the officers and soldiers of that army. Mr. Prendergast does not give many details of Cromwell's conquest—sufficiently known from Carlyle's Letters; but he traces narrowly the history of the deportation, and shows how, after causing incredible misery, it failed in 'thoroughness.'
The only doubtful portion of the book is the preliminary attempt to explain away what our author styles 'the so-called massacre of 1641.' The attempt will hardly satisfy anyone, and in some it may awaken an unfair prejudice against the rest of the work. No doubt as to this 'massacre' there was immense exaggeration. It gave occasion for just the sort of cry which the Parliament wanted to strengthen their hands against Charles. He and Strafford, tolerant for their own ends, had no prejudice against the use of those Irish Papists whom the great majority of the King's party looked on much as Chatham in the American war looked on our Red Indian allies. He therefore encouraged the Irish of the North, smarting under the sense of James's confiscations and Strafford's oppression, to arm with the view of helping him against the Scots. They were to have come over and joined the Highlanders in crushing the army of the Covenant. There is no doubt about it: since Mr. Prendergast wrote, facts cited by Mr. Burton in his recent history, prove that O'Neil's commission was not (as one historian after another has repeated) 'a forgery with an old seal torn off an abbey charter stuck upon it,' it was a bonâ fide document sealed with the Great Seal of Scotland—a bit of that clumsy 'statecraft' which the Stuarts learned from Elizabeth, for the Scotch seal had, of course, no real power in Ireland.
Unfortunately for Charles both Irish and Scotch went to work more quickly than he had expected. The first thought was naturally enough that to recover their own lands was at least as important as to aid Charles; so Sir Phelim O'Neil began his rising by driving out all the English settlers instead of waiting till Ormonde was ready to seize the strong places, and above all to get possession of Dublin. The Scots, again, did not stop till Charles, who knew well enough that he could not trust his English troops, had brought over his Irish forces against them. They crossed the border, and the fight at Newburn and the capture of Newcastle were the results. The actual killing done by the rebels in 1641 has (we have said) been vastly exaggerated; the mischief was that thousands were turned out of house and home and driven off Dublin-wards in very inclement weather. Mr. Prendergast stoutly asserts that it was the English and Scotch who began the killing: their reprisals were certainly fearfully severe. Even Sir J. Turner, seasoned as he had been to cruelty in the thirty years' war, shuddered at the work which he was expected to do in Ireland: his description of the massacre at Newry-bridge, where priests ('popish pedlars'), merchants who had taken no share in the defence of the town, and women were flung into the river and then fired at like drowning-rats, is very shocking (Hill-Burton, vol. vii. 154). The fact is that the report of Irish atrocities, industriously magnified by the Parliament, had maddened the other side; and the Indian Mutiny, and the Jamaica trouble, show what the Anglo-Saxon is capable of when he is excited by garbled reports. Along with this feeling of race was mixed that religious rancour which led the 'new English' to include the 'old English' (mostly Papists) in the same category as the aborigines. Parliament fostered—conscientiously, but still in opposition to all sound toleration principles—this religious hatred, in order to alarm the Cavaliers, who were mostly as anti-Romanist as their opponents, and so to deprive Charles of any advantage from the Irish Romanists. Parliament, moreover, knew that the 'massacre' was exaggerated; else they would not have been content to levy troops for the Irish war, and then to employ them in England instead, quietly leaving Ireland to itself till Cromwell had leisure to conquer it.
Mr. Prendergast's strong points are, first, the silence of all records—a silence which is complete (he says) till the Commission, sent over five years after, begins to get up evidence. Second, the certainty (in his eyes) that the English began the murderings: on this we have the counter-evidence of Sir Charles Coote, in the trial of Maguire; but Coote was emphatically a man of blood even in that bloody age; he had made a great part of Connaught a desert; and as a witness he is worthless. Third, the assertion that nearly all such killing as there was, was in the way of ordinary war, as war then and there was carried on.
But whether the reader is persuaded or not that our author has proved his point as to 1641, there is unfortunately no doubt at all as to what follows. The transplantation was an attempt to exile a whole nation; and it failed as it deserved to fail. No doubt there was plenty of justification for such a deed. The Jesuits and the house of Austria had already done something of the kind on a small scale in several parts of Germany; the St. Bartholomew had shown how impossible it is for Rome to keep politics and religion apart. And the theory of a compact Protestant Saxondom with the Shannon for its western boundary was just what would commend itself to the most earnest minds of the time. When even M. Guizot nowadays doubts whether we can extend to Rome the same measures of toleration to which other sects have an undoubted right, we can well understand how the men of that day, fresh from the smart of Rome's blows, should have felt all pact with her to be impossible. The priest was one of the 'three burdensome beasts'—the others being the wolf (whose numbers had vastly increased during this time of misery) and the 'Tory' i.e., the dispossessed landowner who refused to go into Connaught, and lived as a freebooter till he was shot down or hanged. For all these three, as we have said, rewards were offered, and for the 'sport' of hunting them we refer the reader to our author's pages. The anti-Popish feeling was equally strong in the king's party. Hyde (afterwards Lord Clarendon) writes in 1654, 'Fiennes is made Chancellor of Ireland. And they doubt not to plant that kingdom without opposition. And truly if we can get it again, we shall find difficulties removed which a virtuous prince and more quiet times could never have compassed.' The plan was not original: in Henry VIII.'s time it was regularly systematized (State Papers, vol. i. 177); and Cowley's treatise in the State Papers (i. 323) is in this respect but an anticipation of Spenser's well-known State of Ireland.