Ireland under the Tudors, with a Succinct Account of the Earlier History. Vol. 2 (of 3). Bagwell Richard

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      It soon became clear that Wrothe was not exactly the fittest man for the work. He was anxious to do right, but very nervous about exceeding the letter of his commission, and from the first wishing to be recalled. He fell into a fever which he felt certain would be attributed to riotous living, and he assured Cecil that he seldom took more than one meal in twenty-four hours, which was not the way to preserve health. His sense of the general corruption made it hard for him to gain friends, though he was generally praised for his willingness to work hard. The whole rapacious pack of jobbers longed to be rid of him, for he was bent on even-handed justice, a scarce commodity, and not in demand with any party. The Queen was considered fair game for every robber. Arnold, a man cast in a much rougher mould, had little regard for his colleague’s feelings, and a coolness soon sprung up between them. On Sussex obtaining sick leave, the general government was entrusted to Arnold, and the new Lord Justice expected Wrothe to do the business of the Commission single-handed. He was willing enough to take routine work on himself, but declined to be responsible for any matter of moment unless Arnold was joined with him in it. ‘God deal with me,’ he wrote, ‘as I have meant to serve the Queen here. My mind is troubled and my conscience, for God’s sake help me… Our bowls here be so much biassed, and I have no skill but with upright bowls, and therefore unfit for this alley.’77

      After a partial examination of the public accounts, Auditor Dixe estimated that the Queen’s debts were between 30,000l. and 40,000l. The victualler and the officers engaged on fortifications gave in their accounts, but they were full of mistakes. The cessors of the Pale, who were very numerous and often very incompetent, were slow to produce their books. Captains of companies delivered muster-rolls from May 1560, when they had been fully paid off by the Lord-Lieutenant’s warrant, but declined to do so for the previous year on the ground that it was contrary to custom. In many cases the books were not forthcoming, but this was not unnatural in the case of officers who constantly changed their quarters, and who did not expect any further question to arise. The real fault was in the Government. We are accustomed to clock-work regularity, and can scarcely imagine the loose way in which things were done even much later than Elizabeth’s days. When Lord Shelburne joined Colonel Wolfe’s regiment, the future hero of Quebec told him that he must not draw his pay, but let it accumulate for the benefit of deserving officers. But it was not only in money accounts that Wrothe and Arnold found the army in Ireland defective. There was an old order that every captain should find pay for his Irish soldiers if he thought proper to have more than five in his company. As a matter of fact many companies were half Irish, and this had long been winked at. The captains were now told that the Queen wanted no Irish soldiers. Wild Irishmen could not be trusted, and tame Irishmen were necessarily a deduction from the strength of the Pale. It was not for the Queen’s interest that the rebels should know all the secrets of the service and all the art of war. Irish soldiers would take less pay than Englishmen, and it was therefore for the private interest of officers to enlist them. The captains pleaded the Lord-Lieutenant’s orders to make up their strength. Englishmen could not be had, and they threw themselves on the Queen’s mercy; they were ready to serve her while life lasted.78

      But Bermingham, who was Arnold’s principal adviser, understood the duties of the Commission differently. According to his view every officer, from the Lord-Lieutenant downwards, was to be visited with extreme penalties for every technical error. No allowance was to be made for men who were irregularly and not highly paid, and who had too often to make her Majesty’s bricks without straw. It was hard in Queen Elizabeth’s time – it is hard enough in Queen Victoria’s – to apportion the blame between the English Government and its servants in Ireland, but the irregularities themselves were scandalous enough. Even Bermingham had some doubts about the policy of employing anyone living in Ireland to inquire into matters personally affecting the Queen’s representative, but the Commissioners were peremptory, and he had to deliver a book of exceptions to the Lord-Lieutenant’s muster. A roll of his own, accompanying this document, contained 213 names, but of these twenty-five were holders of other offices, thirty were occasionally employed by other captains, and sixty-four were of Irish birth, though by rights all but eight should have been Englishmen. Of the Englishmen born ten were no soldiers, but at best retainers. A soldier’s pay was drawn in the name of the clerk of Christ Church, and still more strangely in the name of Adam Loftus, ‘primate and bishop of Armagh, almost these two years.’ Sussex could muster 155 men, but no more than forty-three were really fit for service, and of these twenty-eight were officers. Thomas Smythe, the apothecary, who probably kept drugs for poisoning as well as for healing, was borne on the strength, and so were butchers, carters, woodcutters, scullions, makers of arras, musicians, a mariner, an old fisherman, a blind man, and a dead man. Brian Fitzwilliam’s company should have mustered 200, exclusive of officers, whereas the rank and file in reality only numbered 128. Captain Fortescue’s followers were found to be nearly all Irish; they were disbanded, and as Fortescue declined to account, he was committed to prison.79

      When the Commission had been at work for a year, Elizabeth found out that it was very slow and very expensive. She recalled Wrothe, much to his own delight, but to the despair of Dixe, who was left single-handed to cope with Arnold and Bermingham. Unrestrained by an English colleague, the Lord Justice now proceeded to extremities, a course in which he was encouraged by the local magnates joined with him in the Commission. The captains were required to enter into recognizances, binding themselves under penalties to give a detailed account of all they had received, and to make good deficiencies. The captains were willing to bind themselves to account for all the money or value which they could be proved to have received, and confessed that they had been negligent about the preservation of books, but refused to admit the evidence of private soldiers instead of documentary proofs. Any one who has had anything to do with paying troops will know that they were amply justified in the refusal. The Commissioners proceeded in the most arbitrary way, refusing to make any allowance for men employed as servants, and proposing to pay all according to the roll, and without the knowledge of the captains. All Irishmen above six in each company were to be peremptorily disallowed, without considering the explanations offered on this head. The Commissioners swore in twelve soldiers from each company, and encouraged them to say all they could against their captains; and having thus collected much hostile evidence, they refused copies to the officers concerned. Captain George Delves having declined to submit to the requirements of the Commissioners, though he offered to give all reasonable security, was sent to prison. Sir Henry Radclyffe, the Lord-Lieutenant’s brother, and Sir George Stanley, the Marshal, ‘seeing their staves to stand next the door,’ as they themselves expressed it, protested strongly against the ‘opening of matters, we do not say the forging of matters,’ to their prejudice. They significantly added that all the Commissioners were blood-relations to each other and to Bermingham. Auditor Dixe, who seems to have been really anxious to do right, heard the Lord Justice talk much of the ‘exactions, impositions, cessings, and cuttings,’ of Sussex and the captains, to the impoverishment of the Pale, and warned him that he would be considered partial if he did not report the same of the native nobility, who extorted twice as much. The auditor reminded Cecil that he was but one man against fourteen. The jobbing of family parties, as they have been called, has indeed been for centuries one of the chief difficulties of ministers who have been successively charged with the government of Ireland.80

      Sir Henry Radclyffe, the most highly placed and best connected officer in Ireland, was summoned before Arnold to give fuller answers to Bermingham’s charges. He refused to go back to a period before the last general payment, but offered to wait on the Commission at any time after one hour’s notice, and begged that his soldiers might not be paid in his absence. Well might Radclyffe exclaim, ‘fiat justitia,’ when this common measure of justice was denied to him. Dixe was ordered to settle with Sir СКАЧАТЬ