From that day to the present time Ireland’s fate has been the saddest of which history has preserved the record. There has been no peace, no liberty, no progress. Opposing races, contrary civilizations, and opposite religions have clashed in such fierce and bloody battles that we could almost fancy the furies of the abyss had been let loose to smite and scourge the doomed land. Mercy, justice, all human feelings have been banished from this struggle, which has been one of brute force and fiendish cunning. Whatever the stronger has been able to do has been done; and there is no good reason for believing that England, in her dealings with Ireland, has ever passed one just law or redressed one wrong from a humane or honorable motive. From the conquest to the
schism of Henry VIII., a period of nearly four centuries, the English colonists, entrenched within the Pale and receiving continually reinforcements from the mother country, formed a nation within a nation, always armed and watching every opportunity to make inroads upon the possessions of the native princes, who were not slow to return blow for blow. There was no security for life or property; the people were left to the mercy of barons and kings, to be robbed and pillaged or butchered in their broils. Nothing could be more inhuman than English legislation in Ireland during these four centuries, unless it be English legislation in Ireland during the three centuries which followed. Henry II. confiscated the whole island, dividing the land among ten of his chief followers; though they were able to hold possession of but a small part of the country. In the legal enactments and official documents of this period the term habitually used to designate the native population is “the Irish enemy.” They were never spoken of except as “the wild Irish,” until, as an English writer affirms, the term “wild Irish” became as familiar in the English language as the term wild beast. They were denied the title of English subjects and the protection of English law. An act, passed in the reign of Edward II., gave to the English landlords the right to dispose of the property of their Irish dependents as they might see fit. All social and commercial intercourse with the “Irish enemy” was interdicted. An Irishman if found talking with an Englishman was to be apprehended as a spy and punished as an enemy of the king; and the violation of an Irishwoman was not a crime
before the law. Even exile was not permitted as a mitigation of this misery; for a law of Henry IV. forbade the “Irish enemy” to emigrate. There is no exaggeration in the address which the people of Ireland sent to Pope John XXII.:
“Most Holy Father,” they say, “we send you some precise and truthful information concerning the state of our nation, and the wrongs which we are suffering, and which our ancestors have suffered from the kings of England, their agents, and the English barons born in Ireland. After having driven us by violence from our dwellings, from our fields and our ancestral possessions—after having forced us to flee to the mountains, the bogs, the woods, and caves to save our lives—they cease not to harass us here even, but strive to expel us altogether from the country, that they may gain possession of it in its entire extent. They have destroyed all the written laws by which we were formerly governed. The better to compass our ruin, they have left us without laws.… It is the opinion of all their laymen, and of many of their ecclesiastics, that there is no more sin in killing an Irishman than in killing a dog. They all maintain that they have the right to take from us our lands and our goods.”
In the second period of English rule in Ireland, to the war of races was added a war of religion, in which the “Irish enemy” became the “Popish idolater.” To kill an Irishman was no sin, and to exterminate idolatrous superstition was a mission imposed by Heaven upon the chosen people to whom the pure faith of Christ had been revealed.
Then began the series of butcheries, devastations, famines, exterminations,
and exiles which have not yet come to an end. The horrors of these three centuries have not been written; they can never be rightly told, or even imagined. Ireland was not only conquered, but confiscated.
Elizabeth confiscated 600,000 acres of land in Munster after the revolt of the Earl of Desmond; her successor, James I., confiscated a million acres in Ulster. Charles I. confiscated 240,000 acres in Connaught, and would have confiscated the whole province had he been able to obtain possession of it. Under the Commonwealth 7,708,237 acres were confiscated. William of Orange confiscated 1,060,000 acres. And in these confiscations we have not included the lands of the church, which were all turned over to the Establishment. The atrocity of England’s Irish wars is without a parallel in the history of Christian nations. Women and children were murdered in cold blood; priests were burned to death; churches were pillaged and set on fire; towns were sacked and the inhabitants put to the sword; men and youths were put on shipboard, carried into mid-ocean, and deliberately thrown into the sea. Others were sold as slaves in the Barbadoes. Whatever could serve as food for man was destroyed, that famine might make way with all who escaped the sword. Spenser, the poet, who visited Ireland after the revolt of the Earl of Desmond, in the reign of Elizabeth, has left us a description of the condition of that province as he saw it: “Out of every corner of the woods and glens they came, creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them; they looked like anatomies of death; they spake like ghosts crying out of
their graves; they did eat the dead carrions, happy where they could find them; yea, and one another soon after, inasmuch as the very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of their graves; and if they found a plot of water-cresses or shamrocks, there they flocked as to a feast for the time, yet not able long to continue therewithal; that in short space there were none almost left; and a most populous and plentiful country suddenly left void of man and beast.”[191]
Lord Gray, one of Elizabeth’s lieutenants, declared towards the end of her life that “little was left in Ireland for her Majesty to reign over but carcasses and ashes.”