My Lords of Strogue. Volume 1 of 3. Wingfield Lewis

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СКАЧАТЬ spite against them which he was but too glad to gratify, for in the absence of a king they had crowned an ape-or rather an impostor, Simnel. In virtuous indignation, he vowed that it was revolting to see noble knights reduced to the serfs' level; to which the chiefs replied with one accord:

      'We are no serfs, but freemen, as ye are yourselves; for Ireland was never conquered, though she did lip-homage.'

      The Tudor did not choose to be so bearded. 'Indeed! You were not conquered?' he said, surprised. 'I will send commissioners who shall straightway solve for me this riddle.' And he sent Sir Edward Poynings, who arrived in state, with special instructions to set the chiefs a-quarrelling.

      The guileless princes received the commissioner cordially, who diligently sowed dissensions, setting race against race, by declaring (in 1494) that none of English blood might wed a Keltic wife, or hold communion with the Irishry, or even learn their tongue. O'Neil was pitted against Geraldine, Desmond against Tyrone, with double-faced advice; and, his dastardly commission done, Sir Edward bowed himself away with smiles, leaving behind the celebrated act which bears his name, and which was as a red rag between the nations ever after, till it was taken in hand by the Volunteers.

      Up to this moment the frequent bickerings which disturbed the fellowship of the two islands were concerning land or race; but with the reign of the eighth Henry, the true demon of discord woke to wave the sword of persecution over the distracted country. The Reformation, which brought so much trouble on the world, was no kinder to the Irish than to other nations. Henry, angry with a people who would not do as they were bid, drove the natives from the holdings which their septs had held for centuries, away to the wild fastness beyond the Shannon. (A sinful scheme, which is often fathered upon Cromwell, who has much besides to answer for.) He ravaged the land with fire and sword, resolved at least that it should have the peace of death if none other was attainable; and these tactics his dutiful child Elizabeth pursued, till her dependency was a waste of blood and ashes. Like her grandfather, she had a private cause for spite. As a nation, the Irish declined to be anything but Catholics; and so, refusing to acknowledge Queen Katherine's divorce, they looked on Anne Boleyn's daughter as a bastard and a usurper. This prompted her to filial piety. Hardly was she seated on the throne at Westminster, than she summoned a parliament in Dublin, and shook her pet prayer-book at the Catholics. The religion of Christ, the meek and lowly, she preached to them in this wise. Every layman who should use any prayer-book but her pet one was to be imprisoned for a year. On each recurring Sunday, every adult of every persuasion was to attend Protestant service, or be heavily mulcted for the benefit of her treasury. Not content with crushing their faith, she let loose a horde of adventurers upon the unhappy Irish. They fought for their fields as well as their religion. One of the characteristics of her reign was a spirit of adventure, which descended in regular gamut from the loftiest heroism to the vilest cupidity. The eagles sought doubloons on the Spanish main; the vultures swept down on Ireland with ravenous beaks. Elizabeth's own deputy wrote thus to her in horror:

      'From every corner of the woods did the people come, creeping on their hands, for their legs would not bear them. They looked like anatomies of death; they spake like ghosts; they did eat carrion, happy when they could find them, yea, and one another; in so much that the very carcases they spared not to scrape out of their graves.'

      Indeed, Queen Bess left her dependency a reeking slaughter-house, in so abject a misery, that when her successor cleared a whole province to plant it with Scotchmen, the natives made no resistance, but plodded listlessly away. Is it surprising that their descendants should have hated England, and its truckling Anglo-Irish Senate?

      In due course followed Charles I., who, with the ingrained perfidy of all the Stuarts, fleeced his Irish subjects, and then cheated them by evading the graces for which they paid their gold. His creature Strafford went too far, and they turned as worms will. There was a grand Protestant massacre in Ulster, an appalling picture of a vengeance such as a brutalised people will wreak on its oppressor; and Cromwell took advantage of this as an excuse for still further grinding down the Catholics. It was a fine opportunity to avenge the sufferings of Protestants in other lands-the affair of Nantes, Bartholomew, and so forth. He made a finished job of it, as he did of most things to which he set his shoulder. It was no felony now to slay an Irishman, whose very name was a reproach. He was well-nigh swept from off the earth. Famine and pestilence reigned together alone. Wolves roamed at will in the dismantled towns. Newly-appointed colonists refused to build the walls of shattered cities, for the stench of the rotting bodies poisoned the breeze.

      It remained for Orange William and good Queen Anne (neither of whom could be expected to feel interest in Ireland) to add a finishing touch, and the Penal Code was a chef d'œuvre. Under its sweet influence no Catholic could dwell in Ireland save under such conditions as no man who stood erect might bear, and so there commenced an exodus of independent spirits, who flocked into the service of France and Germany, and filled the navies of Holland and of Spain. Thus did British rulers educate their dependency to loving obedience, by teaching its children to revile the name of law. Verily it is no wonder that they loathed the English; that they distrusted British amenities, and looked askance at the half-English upper class.

      When the Volunteers determined to regenerate their motherland, there were two great evils with which they had to cope. Two deep plague-spots. It remained to be seen whether they were wise enough and steadfast enough to eradicate the virus. A rotten legislature, an impossible Penal Code. Could Sir Galahad reform so base a parliament? Would the champion dare to free the serfs from thraldom? The first was a Herculean labour, because both Lords and Commons drew much of their revenue from British ministers; the second was even a more Titanic task. Possession is nine points of the law, and the soil was in possession of the small knot of Protestants, who knew that their existence depended on keeping the majority in chains. Like the emigrants of the Mayflower, they said: 'Resolved, that the earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof; that the Lord hath given the earth as an heritage unto His saints; and that we are His saints. Ergo: the earth is ours, to have and to hold by pillage and persecution, and murder, if need be, just as the chosen people of old seized and held Canaan, the land of promise, flowing with milk and honey.'

      Truly the parliament was a plague-spot fit to gangrene a whole body; for it in nowise represented the nation, consisting as it did of three hundred members, seventy-two only of whom were elected by the people. The rest were nominees of large Protestant proprietors who returned members for every squalid hamlet on their estates, and kept their voters in the condition of tame dogs through a constant terror of ejectment. Of three million Catholics not one had a voice in the elections; for by law they existed not at all. Like Milton's devils they occupied no space, while the Protestant angels filled the air with their proportions.

      It was said of the Irish gentry of the last century that they possessed the materials of distinguished men with the propensities of obscure ones, which is a picturesque way of admitting that they were incorrigibly idle. To indolence add poverty and a propensity for drink, and you have a promising hotbed for the growth of every ill. The aristocratic pensioners were, as a rule, lapped in excessive luxury, which could not be kept up without extraneous help; half English by education as well as origin, they naturally leaned for protection towards the English Government.

      The gentry, ignorant and sensual, were given to profuse hospitality, regardless of mortgaged acres and embarrassed lands. Dog-boys and horse-boys hung about their gates; keepers and retainers lolled upon their doorsteps, together with a posse of half-mounted poor relations-all of them too genteel to do anything useful-fishing for the speckled trout by day, drinking huge beakers of claret and quarrelling among themselves by night, till in many cases there was little left, after a few years, for the filling of a hundred mouths beyond a nominal rent-roll and the hereditary curse of idleness. Not a squire but was more or less floundering in debt, and (his sense of honour blunted by necessity) only too anxious for a little cash at any price. Government agents were always conveniently turning up ready and willing to purchase mortgages and notes of hand, which were duly stored in the coffers of the Castle as a means of prospective coercion by-and-by.

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