.'*. ^ ?' (-■ ■^v;--- ■-- UNIVERSITY OP. CALIFORNIA IRISH NATIONALISM. a IKISH NATIONALISM: AN APPEAL TO HISTOEY. BY THE DUKE OF ARGYLL, K.G., K.T. LONDON: JOHN MUERAY, ALBEMARLE STREET. 1893. lOAN STACK LONDON : PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, 6XAMFOKD STKEET AND CUAUIKG OUOSib. CONTENTS. FAGB CHAPTER I. IRISH HISTORY BEFORE THE EXPEDITION OF HENUT II., IN A.D. 1172. An example — The accusation against England — Alleged con- quest of Ireland — Suzerainty not government — Evidence of Irish writers — The English invited — An erroneous assertion — Early Irish culture — A momentary monarchy — Who destroyed it — Early Irish annals — Deepening barbarism — The Irish Celtic Church — Irish authorities — Pinglish barbarism compared — Ireland's golden age — Cause of Irish anarchy — Irish apologies for Ireland — The Irish made xnemseives ••• •*• ••• %%» ••• ••• CHAPTER II. EFFECTS OF SUZERAINTY OF ENGLAND OVER IRELAND. English Colonists degraded— Contrast with Scotland — Same danger in Scotland — Anglo-Normans in Scotland — Irish dread of government — English government powerless — Daniel O'Connell's speech— O'Connell's erroneous assertion — Irish hatred of law — Tlie English barons Ersefied — Adoption of Irish customs — Irish intertiibal wars^ Ireland made the Anglo-Iiish — The Latin Church ... ... 41 '&' 292 VI CONTENTS. CHAPTER III. EFFECT OP NATIVE IRISH LAWS AND USAGES. PAGB Contradictory charges — Irish tribalism — Septs intensely aristo- cratic — Clans were not tribes — Intensified inequalities- Irish feudalism — Evidence of Professor Sullivan — Irish gradations of rank — Irish form of wealth — Irish property in land — Evidence of ancient books — Alleged communal ownership — Dr. Sullivan on ownership — Irremovability was bondage — Bondage to the soil — Removability was personal freedom — Laws of succession — laterest of poorer classes — Evils of native customs — Irish inconsistency ... ... 70 CHAPTER IV. HISTORY CONTINUED FROM A.D. 1172 TO THE END OP THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. Right of England — Irish analogy in Scotland — Scots' invasion of Ireland — Devastation of Ireland — Lasting ruin — English law in Ireland — Statutes of Kilkenny — English action diverted — Expedition of Richard II. — Supremacy of the Irish — Irish support House of York — ^Poyning's law — Necessity of Poyning's law — Condition of Ireland ... 110 i CHAPTER V. IRELAND UNDER THE TUDORS DOWN TO THE DEATH OP HENRY VIII. The Geraldine rebellion — Results of Irish Home Rule — Testi- mony of native annals — Dr. Richey's confessions — Results of native institutions — Ersefied Englishmen — Irish in- trigues with foreigners — Policy of Henry VIII. — Some law a necessity — Military weakness of England — A demand for England — Religion not yet concerned — Irish not Papal — Barbarism of native clergy ... ... ... ... 139 CONTENTS. VU CHAPTER VI. THE EPOCH OF CONQUEST AND COLONISATION. Irish land rents — Condilion of tenants — Irish confiscations — The PAGE Catholic queen — Queen Mary's plantations — Queen Eliza- beth — Shane O'Neill's rebellion — The Catholic conspiracy — Tyrone's rebellion — England's case stated ... ... 168 CHAPTER VII. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. Inevitable antagonisms — Philosophy in history — Ireland not governed by England — Comparative intolerance — Short period of English rule — Physical condition of Ireland — Instincts of dominion wholesome — England in permanent danger— The penal laws — Reality of danger — Two motives balanced ... ... ... ... ... ... 189 CHAPTER VIII. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY — ECONOMIC CAUSES. Economic effects of penal laws — The commercial system — Irish protectionism — An Irish folly — Ruinous effects — Those effects traced — Continuity of vicious policy — Irish incon- sistency — An Irishman's evidence — Hereditary survivals — Penal effects of an Irish custom — Survival not degradation — The potato — Irish famines — Combination of causes ... 213 CHAPTER IX. CONCLUSIONS, Geographical position — Barbarous agriculture — Irish subletting — Irish education — Rebels of 1798 — Position of government — Dates in the rebellion — Catholic emancipation — Abstract principle not admitted — Irish history re-read — Sentence of Edmund Burke ... ... ... ... ... 245 IRISH ]SrATIO]^ALISM : AN APPEAL TO HISTORY. -•o*- CHAPTER I. IKISH HISTORY BEFORE THE EXPEDITION OF HENRY II., IN A.D. 1172. History has fared ill in many hands. But in no hands has she ever fared worse than in those of party- leaders. When they engage her as their maid-of-all- work, she sinks to the level of a very slattern. Truth in the hands of a casuist ; — morals in the hands of the proverbial Jesuit; — facts in the hands of a special pleader, — all these combined are but a feeble image of the fate of history when it is put to use by professional politicians. And when this position is held by any man who is, or finds it convenient to assume the character of an Ethnogogue, then the corrupting influence is aggravated to an intense degree. No element, or influence, that can vitiate knowledge or pervert judgment is left unemployed. The merely f B 2 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. i. dull and unobservant eye that sees nothing on either side of one narrow line of vision — this is the commonest influence of all. But passions of all kinds come in to play their part, and to convert mere misconception into the most violent misrepresentation. The least disparaging image to which a party politician can be compared, who uses history as one of the tools in his trade, is that of a legal Advocate pushing to its utmost extremes, in favour of his client, the acknow- ledged licence of the Bar. How far that licence may legitimately go has never been settled, and is perhaps incapable of definition. Certain it is that both the suppressio veri and the suggestio falsi are among the legitimate and ordinary weapons of the calling. Lord Brougham once said that an Advocate has nothing whatever to think of except the interests of his client. That there are some vague limits assigned to this doctrine, by professional opinion, may be true. I recollect a famous case in which the Counsel for a murderer went so far as to indicate another person than his client, who, so far as the evidence went, might possibly be the criminal. In this he was held to have gone too far, and his conduct met with general con- demnation. On the whole, however, the licence of the Bar is thoroughly understood ; and it is so understood just because it is reasonably held to be an absolute necessity in the interests of society. But though a jury may be occasionally misled, nobody is really deceived. Nobody is expected to believe that a CH. l] an example. 3 Counsel is really presenting either facts or arguments in their true relation. No such understanding how- ever exists, or ought to exist, in the case of statesmen and politicians. They have no professional duty or right to be unscrupulous, or passionate, or even care- less and one-sided in dealing with history. The interests of society do not demand from them any sacrifice of the strictest regard for truth in any of its forms, and especially for historical truth. On the contrary, the public interest, as regards political questions, is bound up with the most faithful truth- fulness in using the records of the past. That there is a very large element of opinion in the presentation and interpretation of historical facts is undeniable. But this only renders it all the more incumbent on Statesmen to deal as completely and fairly as they can, at least with the facts to be quoted, or referred to, in support of political contentions. Moreover, this duty rises in the scale of obligation in proportion as those contentions may affect the vital interests of any political society with which we may have to do. I make these observations with express reference to the use which Mr. Gladstone, since 1885, has made of history, on the Irish Question. I hold that use to have been little better than one long tissue of passionate misrepresentation. Having expressed this opinion strongly on a late occasion — in referring to his language as " inflated fable " — when addressing an 4 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. i. American audience,* I have been most properly challenged by Mr. Gladstone in his reply to make it good by definite evidence and quotation. My object in these pages is to take up that challenge.f In doing so I will follow Mr. Gladstone's own reference to the materials which he specifies as legitimate for the purpose of testing his contentions. These materials are, first, " A series of utterances which fill a moderate volume," meaning, I presume, the whole body of his speeches and writings since 1885 ; and second, these utterances as specially represented in a particular volume, lately published under the truly descriptive and significant title of " Special Aspects of the Irish Question." t " Special " they are — in a very high degree. This volume, extending over three hundred and seventy pages, contains ten separate papers, all of them interlarded more or less extensively with arguments and assertions purporting to be historical, and one of the ten (No. III.) is expressly entitled " Lessons of Irish History in the Eighteenth Century." Its *' special aspect " is that which represents all the ills that Ireland has suffered as being due entirely to the conduct and government of England. Now, there are two different and almost opposite senses in which this accusation may be made. It may mean that England is responsible for all the ills of * North American Review, August 1892. t Ibid., October, 1892. X J. Murray. 1892. CH. I.] THE ACCUSATION AGAINST ENGLAND. 5 Ireland because site never put forth her full strength to complete the conquest of the island, and to impose, effectually and universally, her own more civilised system of law upon its people : — that she tolerated, as she ought not to have done, the long continuance and the desolating effect of native customs which oppressed and impoverished the people : — and that she was even tempted by dangers arising from time to time, to enter into partial alliances with some one or more of the savage factions which were always tearing at each other's vitals in that country. In this sense the accusa- tion against England does, at least, represent a real, although a very partial " aspect " of the truth. It ascribes the ills of Ireland primarily to causes of native origin, and only secondarily to England as having by negligence failed to apply a remedy which, it is assumed, was easily within her power ; and as having indirectly aggravated those causes by occasional complicity. The other sense in which the accusation against England may be made, rests upon assumptions directly opposite : — upon the assumption, namely, that *' seven centuries " ago, in 1 172, she did conquer Ireland effec- tually ; — that she did establish a foreign law alien to the happier customs of its native people ; — that before this conquest Ireland had been comparatively a happy and prosperous nation ; — that English rule was so effectively established as to be the one great cause and fountain of all their subsequent distress ; and 6 ' IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. t. that the native laws and usages of Ireland cannot be charged with any part, or at least any serious share, in her long centuries of pain. This last is the sense — the "special aspect" — in which the accusation is made by Mr. Gladstone. It is in this sense that he presses it with all the vehe- mence of Counsel holding a brief for the prosecution — and, as I hope to show, with an audacity both in the statement and in the suppression of facts, which exhibit, in their very highest development, at once the utmost dexterity, and the utmost licence, of the Bar. The first step he takes is to lay down the funda- mental assumption needed for his purpose by a bold and confident assertion implying that there was an effectual conquest of Ireland in the twelfth century by Henry II. Without this assumption the accusation against England, in the second of the two senses above defined, cannot, of course, for a moment be sustained. But upon that assumption the accusation may be at least plausible. Accordingly, Mr. Gladstone makes the assertion in perhaps the extremest form in which it has ever been expressed. " Ireland," he says, " for more than seven hundred years hag been part of the British territory, and has been, with slight exceptions, held by English arms, or governed, in the last resort, from this side of the water." * Notwithstanding the characteristic dexterity of the qualifying words, " in Aspects," p. 109. « u CH. I.] ALLEGED CONQUEST OF IRELAND. 7 the last resort " — which may mean anything or nothing, — and are obviously intended as a bolt-hole of escape, — there need be no hesitation in at once pronouncing this sentence to be a broad and palpable perversion of historical facts. Looking at it both in the natural meaning of its words, and in its place in the general context of the whole paper, there can be no doubt that it is intended to assert that Ireland was conquered by Henry 11. in 1172, very much as England had been conquered by the Duke of Nor- mandy a little more than a hundred years before. The whole aim and effect of the sentence is to assert the full responsibility of England for all the domestic government and condition of Ireland from that time forward. My very first contention here is that there is no excuse whatever for this fundamental assertion, — unless it be the very superficial fact that in many histories the transactions of 1172 are often, for short- ness, called, or referred to as, the " Conquest of Ireland." But there is no real dispute whatever about the true nature of those transactions in them- selves. Henry II. did not conquer Ireland. He did not even pretend to do so. He did not fight a single battle on its shores. Any little fighting that took place at all had been accomplished a year and a half before his expedition by a few adventurous knights, who were invited by a native Irish chief or kinglet, to assist him in domestic war. In one single fray 8 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. i. those knights, themselves half Celts from Wales, had " clashed with their fiery few and won." Henry 11. had nothing whatever of this kind to do. He came, indeed, with great military pomp. But he came simply to receive, as a Feudal Sovereign, the homage of a great number of Irish Tribes and Chiefs, all of whom, with one solitary exception, were willing to become his feudal vassals.* The Irish did not dispute his title. It came from an acknowledged authority. The universal consent of Christian Europe, — however absurd it may seem to us now, — had then assigned to the Popes or Bishops of Rome, a large and indefinite power and right to confer the dignity and the prero- gatives of Sovereignty or Feudal suzerainty at their will. For four hundred years at least — ever since the greatest man of the Middle Ages, Charlemagne, had been crowned by the Pope with the Imperial crown, — this power and right of the Roman Pontiffs had grown up as an acknowledged doctrine. Henry II. did not even take the title of King at all. He took the title of Lord of Ireland, which continued to be the legal title of the Kings of England till the reign of Henry Vlll.t And this distinction was by no means in those days a distinction of form only. It is an ignorant notion, indeed, that in the twelfth century the Feudal Sovereigns of any territory made themselves neces- sarily, or even usually, responsible for the domestic * Professor Stokes' "Ireland and the Anglo-Norman Church," p. 134. t Ibid., p. 136. CH. I.] SUZERAINTY NOT GOVERNMENT. 9 government administered within it. That govern- ment was, of necessity, left to those by whose hands its powers had been acquired, and with whom it was an essential part of the Feudal system, that it should remain. Founded entirely upon usages and customs varying more or less in every country — those usages being themselves again absolutely controlled by the universal conditions of a state of society which was from top to bottom military — the domestic rule exer- cised over the mass of the people by vassal and local chiefs, rested everywhere in Europe on the paramount necessity of obedience on one side and of protection on the other. The interference of mere Suzerainty in the affairs of ordinary life, was simply impracticable. It could not possibly arise until, in the course of centuries, the idea of a strong central government and of an Imperial jurisprudence had been developed. To talk of Ireland being " governed," even " in the last resort," by the King of England in the twelfth century, or in several succeeding centuries, is a grotesque anachronism indeed. Fortunately, there is no dispute about the facts which Mr. Gladstone thus perverts. The very spirit of Irish national feeling itself, even when expressed in the most temperate and legitimate forms, has always led Irishmen to emphasise those facts which distinguish between the Conquest of England by the Duke of Normandy in the eleventh century, and the claim of Sovereignty over Ireland which was estab- 10 IRISH NATIONALISM. [CH. i. listed by Henry II. in the twelfth. When it suits their purpose Irish orators have always denied a conquest. Mr. Gladstone has had many opportunities of knowing this ; and one of the most remarkable of these was in 1834, some two years after he entered the House of Commons. On the 22nd of April of that year Daniel O'Connell, — of whom he now speaks effusively in this volume as equal in greatness, as an Irishman, to Burke or Wellington, — made a memorable speech in that House in favour of a repeal of the Union. Its very first passages were devoted to an emphatic argument that Ireland had never been con- quered by England, and that the title to dominion over Ireland had never been acquired by the sword. "No title by conquest or subjugation:" — '*No title of subjection was acquired by battle : " nothing had happened that "jurists would consider as giving any claim to England to say that there had been submission on the part of the Irish people as subjects," or, " above all, recognition of them as being subjects " on the part of England herself, — such were the repeated declara- tions of O'Connell in that elaborate address.* The same language is still almost unanimously held by all Irishmen who treat the question historically, whether they belong to the Eepeal party, or to the number of those who desire to maintain the Legislative Union. Thus, the late Professor Eichey, of Dublin, in his excellent work, " A Short History of the Irish People,"! Mirror of Parliament," vol. ii. p. 1188. f Dublin, 1887. * a CH. I.] EVIDENCE OF IRISH WRITERS. 11 — full as it is of Irish patriotic feeling — says of the common phrase, ** Conquest of Ireland by England," that it is "an expression in every way incorrect."* Still more emphatic testimony is given to this view by a yet living writer, whose spirit is so intensely Irish as to border on what must be considered as extravagance. For Mr. Prendergast, in his chapter f on the earlier Plantations of Ireland, speaks of the native Celts of Ireland as " a people of original sentiments and insti- tutions, the native vigour of whose mind had not been weakened by another mind ; '* t and he goes so far in his patriotic enthusiasm as to exclaim, ** Had the Irish only remained honest pagans, holding, no matter who might tell them to the contrary, that true religion was to hate one's enemies, and to fight for one's country, Ireland perhaps had been unconquered still." Yet this is the Irish writer who — in condemning a later phrase, " the Irish enemy," as applied to the native Irish — gives us the following true and striking account of the reputed " Conquest " of 1172 : — " Now the * Irish enemy ' was no nation in the modern sense of the word, but a race divided into many nations or tribes, separately defending their lands from the English barons in their immediate neighbourhood. There had been no ancient national government dis- placed, no national dynasty overthrown. The Irish * P. 128. t Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland " (1870), pp. 1-48. X Ibid., p. 11. 12 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. i. had no national flag, nor any capital city as the metropolis of their common country, nor any common administration of the law ; nor did they ever give a combined opposition to the English. The English coming in the name of the Pope, with the aid of the vJs, Irish bishops, and with a superior national organisa- /^ tion, which the Irish easily ieGOgmsed,jwere_aecepted hu the Tri sh. Neither King Henry II., nor King John, ^. ever fought a battle in Ireland." * This short and pregnant passage is taken from the work of an enthusiastic Irishman, published twenty- seven years ago, before the smoke of our present con- troversy had arisen to obscure the view. It is, perhaps, the purest bit of truth that is to be found in all the angry literature of Irish history. It shines like a gem " of purest ray serene." With one slight qualification, which the author himself would probably admit, it is not only accurately true in all that it directly says, but in every line and almost in every word, it is full of further suggestions of truths as important as those which it expressly affirms. The English were " accepted " by the Irish : — so it says. Let us ask — in what capacity were they accepted? And the answer must be that they were accepted in two special capacities. First, the English King was " accepted " as Feudal Sovereign of Ireland according to the ideas and usages of that time ; and secondly, English knights and barons were " accepted " as settlers * " Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland" (1870), p. 28. CH. I.] THE ENGLISH INVITED. 13 domesticated and naturalized in Ireland, also accord- ing to the ideas and usages of that age. It was an age of roving adventurers all over Europe. In accord- ance with one of the commonest of all its habits, the English knights were invited as allies, came, and were accepted as settlers in the country, taking by bargain, by feats of arms, and by marriage, their natural place and rank in the pre-existing system of Irish Chiefry. And this last kind of acceptance was chronologically the first. The plantation of Norman soldier-colonists had begun before the coming of Henry II. And it began not only with acquiescence on the part of the Irish, but with active solicitation on the part of some of them. The Chief of one of the many septs, or *' nations," into which Ireland was then divided — divided with a depth of cleavage which it is difficult for us now even to conceive, — had invited the entrance and the aid of the Norman element. Intermarriage had taken place. And with intermarriage had come also the holding and the guaranteed inheritance of territory as the inducement and reward of military service and of military alliance. Thus the Anglo- Normans and Gallo-Normans from Wales, had been firmly planted in Ireland, and had been accepted as husbands and as sons, and as holders and as inheritors of all the power that belonged to Irish Chiefs, before the expedition of Henry II. Hence we see that Mr. Prendergast's phrase — " accepted by the Irish " — is not only accurate, but is true with a fullness of meaning 14 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. i. which it needs much explanation to exhaust. The Norman element had been already not only accepted, but had been specially invited, and that amalgamation and " Ersefication " of the Norman colonists had begun which was one of the most determining features in all that followed. But this is not all. The truthful and significant sentence above quoted from an intensely Irish his- torian, not only thus gives us a true account of the transactions of 1172, and a true indication of all that they involved for the future, but it takes us back into a still older history, and lets in a tlood of light on what had gone before. Why was it that the Norman King was so easily " accepted " as Feudal Sovereign over Ireland? Why had it been that Norman knights were invited, accepted, and adopted as sons and brothers in Ireland ? Because, says Mr. Prendergast, their " superior national organisation '* was " easily recognised by the Irish." But in what did the comparative inferiority of the Irish consist? In what degree, and to what extent did it exist ? How great and how evident must it have been to admit of such a frank confession — such a ready submission to a manifest superiority? How was it that this alleged " conquest " of Ireland came about so noiselessly — so naturally — with so little sound of arms, — with only one short clash of battle ? What was the previous condition of things which made such events possible ? It is when we ask these questions that Mr. Glad- CH. I.] AN ERRONEOUS ASSERTION. 15 stone's perversion of history comes out in all its breadth and depth. In the same year in which he wrote the " Lessons of Irish History," * — on May 12, 1887, — he addressed a Nonconformist party in London at a luncheon, and in pursuance of the argument now before us, he declaimed as follows : — " But who made the Irishman ? The Irish, in very old times indeed, if you go back to the earlier stages of Chris- tianity, were among the leaders of Christendom. But We went in among them : We sent among them numbers of our own race. These were mixed with the Irish, and ever since our blood has been mixed with theirs there has been this endless trouble and difiSculty." t Here we have the key-note of the " Special Aspects " struck at once. And the special methods are as remarkable. There is, in the first place, a complete oblivion, or a clever omission, of the many centuries which intervened between the really creditable age of the Irish Church, and the coming of the Normans. There is, in the second place, a com- plete misconception, and consequent misrepresentation, of the nature of that " leadership in Christendom " which in one sense, and in one great work, had really at one time belonged to Irish Celts ; there is, in the third place, a dexterous confounding of later events which were separated by many hundred years ; there is, in the fourth place, an absolute suppression of all the relevant and notorious facts respecting the condition Aspects," p. 109. t Times, May 12, 1887. « It 16 IRISH NATIONALISM. [cH. i. into which Ireland had fallen between the "leader- ship of Christendom " and the advent of the Norman colonists. Let ns see how some of these matters stand. So far as Ireland was concerned, the " earlier stages of Christianity " must be reckoned as having begun about A.D. 450. It is not true that at any much earlier date than this the Irish Celts were Christian at all. The British Celtic Church began long before the Irish. British bishops were members of some of the great Councils of the middle of the fourth century.* Whatever infiltration of Christianity had percolated into Ireland before the fifth century seems to have come directly from contact with Roman Christians. The claim for Ireland as regards the " earlier stages of Christianity " is at best a loose oratorical exaggeration in keeping with all its context. But from the middle of the fifth century a well-established Celtic Christian Church did exist in Ireland, which took a memorable share in spreading the faith of Christ among heathen races, not only in their own island, but especially in Scotland and elsewhere in Western Europe. This is true, and in itself alone it is an imperishable glory. But unfortunately it does stand quite alone. The Celtic Church carried in its hands, indeed, the precious seed of Christian belief. But it carried that seed in the most earthy of all- earthen vessels. It had about three hundred and fifty * « Ireland and the Celtic Church," by Professor Stokes (1885), p. 11. CH. I.] EARLY IRISH CULTURE. 17 years of at least external peace for the development of all its powers (450-795). It developed a rude art in painting, illumination, and metal work. It had also a peculiar literature of its own. Even as to these there has been much absurd exaggeration. They were remarkable not for the time, but for the locality. T hey pale a feeble and ineffectual ligh t b eside the splendid literature and art ni ihp, o.mn- tempora ry Eoman p poplp^ it^jj^ mrpn nf fho I? omnni nod - natives oF Britain . But as compared with other iribes, whom the Komans justly considered as bar- barians, the Irish Celts had a truly native and a very curious culture. There was a genuine literature of its kind in the native language. But this literature is chiefly valuable for the light it casts upon the utter sterility of the Celtic Church as regards any good influence on the economic condition, or on the social state, or on the political organisation of the people. This is all that we have to do with here. We are not discussing gold filagree work, or the copying and rude illumination of manuscripts. We are discussing the state of Ireland in those social and political conditions which determine the comfort and real welfare of a people. It is literally true that the heathen Danes, who began their invasions of Ireland in the year a.d. 795, and were finally defeated in 1014, did more, during these two hundred and nineteen years, to establish the beginnings of commerce, of wealth, and of the 18 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. i. civilisation which depends on these, than the Celtic Church or people did during all the centuries of their previous, or of their subsequent and separate existence. Even when they first came as heathen rovers they were far in advance of the Celts in the matter of house-building, one of the surest tests of comparative civilisation. There is not, at the present day, one single town of any importance in Ireland which does not owe its origin to the Danes. " The cities," says Professor Kichey, " built by the Danes, altogether differed from the temporary con- structions of the Celtic tribes: thev were at once garrisons and emporia, well fortified, and capable of defence." Trade and commerce began with them, and the Danes continued in possession of the towns which they had created even after they had been driven from possible reclamation of the bogs and woods of the rest of Ireland. Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, Limerick, etc., were all originally, and always continued to be, Danish cities.* During all this time — nearly two hundred years of the domi- nation of a race which was still largely pagan, over, at least, a great part of Ireland — the native Irish hardly ever, — even for a moment — intermitted their own internecine tribal feuds, and never scrupled to ally themselves with the heathen Norsemen whenever it was in the slightest degree convenient to do so. This is the account of a thoroughly * Ridley's " Short History," p. 110. CH. I.] A MOMENTARY MONARCHY. 19 Irish historian, but of one who is faithful to historic truth. "The chiefs," says Professor Stokes, "were murdering and plundering one another, and every one of them ready to sell his country to the northern invader, if only he himself could he thus secure of a temporary triumph." * And not only is this true, but it is also a memorable fact that when one tribal chief, more fortunate thaa others, did really win an important victory over the common enemy in a.d. 968, he was, within six years, treacherously slaia by a conspiracy of his rival compatriot chiefs.| It is a further fact that when his brother, the celebrated Brian, did prosecute, very nearly to success, the same great enterprise of founding a united and a native Irish kingdom, he was again encountered in his last battle near Dublin, in 1014, by a factious and unpatriotic alliance between Danes and native Irish. Nor is it, again, a less characteristic fact that his death, even in victory, was followed by an immediate outburst of native inter- tribal and internecine strife. Within three days of the death of King Brian, his only surviving son was assailed by the remnant of his father's army, and every hope, or prospect, or even the very idea of a united Irish nation under one government, was dissipated for ever in continuous storms of internal war. Of no other people in Christendom could it be said in those days, that a triumph and a victory over heathen invaders was a misfortune to themselves, Celtic Church," p. 268. f " Short History," p. 114. « u 20 IRISH NATIONALISM. [cH. i. because of the very fact that it left them face to face with their own vices. Yet this is the verdict of one of the very best of modern Irish historians. " Such," says Professor Richey, " was the end of the battle of Clontarf, in which, if the foreigners were defeated, a far greater disaster fell upon the Irish people, and the real victory was won by anarchy over order." * It was the truly indigenous constitution of Irish society — unchecked and even stimulated by the similar constitution of the Celtic Church, — that alone seems to have been the curse of Ireland at this memorable epoch. There may be some hyperbole in the lan- guage of the Irish Chronicler who describes the great things done, or undertaken, by the native Celtic King, Brian, in the brief period — some fifteen years — dur- ing which he held ^* the chief sovereignty of Erinn " — the churches and sanctuaries he built, — the teachers and professors he engaged, — the books he brought from beyond the seas, — the bridges and roads he made, — the fortresses he built or strengthened. Monks were easily pleased by any ruler who conferred favours on what was called the Church. But, in spite of possible exaggeration, there seems to be good his- torical evidence that Ireland really had then a fair opportunity of starting on a new path — such as had been entered upon, and followed to glorious results, by many other European nations. And what hindered her ? It certainly was not the " we " of whom Mr. * " Short History," p. 124. CH. I.] WHO DESTEOYED IT. 21 Gladstone spoke with such effusive, but also such cheap, and vicarious, humility. For be it noted that this great opportunity was opened to Ireland more than half a century before the Normans had landed even in England, and more than a whole century and a half before the " we " had crossed the farther channel into Ireland. The question, therefore, may well be asked — What had the Irish been doing all that time? And what was the cause of their not taking that great " occasion by the hand " ? What again says the Irish historian ? He says that it was the very excellence of King Brian's government that made it hateful to his coun- trymen. " A truly national government of this description found its bitterest enemies among the provincial chiefs, who longed to restore anarchy, and were willing to league with the foreigner for that purpose." * And now, when Danish power was broken down, what the Irish Tribes and Chiefs did was to fight with each other in perpetual and ferocious wars. " Upon the Celtic nation fell ruin and disorder." And so, from the date of Brian's death in 1014 to " our " arrival in the person of Strongbow, in 1170 — or for a period of one hundred and fifty-six years — "Ireland was a chaos in which the chiefs of the great separate tribes struggled to secure a temporary supremacy." f ** The Irish Nation was in the condition of social and political dissolution." Few of the kinglets ever * " Short History," p. 116. f Ibid., p. 125. 22 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. i. reached their thrones except by crime. Few died a bloodless death. If such a state of things could continue, "the world would relapse into worse than ancient barbarism." * Now, let it be observed that there is, and can be no dispute about these facts. They are authenticated by a cloud of witnesses — not only by many honest Irish historians of our own day, like Dr. Kichey and Mr. Prendergast, but by a kind of testimony which — in anything like the same authenticity and detail — exists nowhere else in Europe. In the Irish Annals we have evidence which is said to rest on written documents probably as old as the second century of our era, and to embody, at least, good oral traditions of a much earlier date.f One old Irish Annalist, who seems to have been a critic in his own time, very modestly sets aside all records later than B.C. 305, but seems to regard true contemporary history as beginning at that date.J From the year A.D. 664, at all events, the records are verified by minute accuracy in the narrative of solar eclipses ; and there seems to be no reasonable doubt of the perfect genuineness and authority of these remarkable Annals for several hundred years earlier. We have therefore in the Irish Annals a photographic picture taken in the * "Short History/' p. 127. t "Annals of Ireland," " The Four Masters/' vol. I. Introduction, p. liii. X Ibid., p. xlvi. CH. I.] EARLY IRISH ANNALS. 23 light of Irish self-consciousness — giving us an excellent idea of what Irish society was for nearly a thousand years before the Norman invasion. Now it is, to say the least, remarkable that Mr. Gladstone, in his search after an answer to the question, " Who made the Irishman ? " never quotes those very Irishmen who tell us most about their own early national, or rather tribal, education. I do not recollect ever seeing in any of Mr. Gladstone's many speeches or writings, one single quotation from, or even allusion to, the most authentic and detailed account that is possessed by any European people, of their own early life. I am not surprised. The Irish Annals are ugly reading for him, and for all who try to make out that England has ** made the Irish.'* For what is the picture which those Annals present ? Let us take the second entry. " The age of Christ 10. The first year of Carbre the Cat-headed, after he had killed the nobility, except a few who escaped from the massacre in which the nobles were murdered by the Attacotti." Three nobles had escaped from that massacre, and as to these it is added with a genuine touch of true Irish humour, " it was in their mothers' wombs that they escaped." All the nobles were killed except three who escaped, and these were babes unborn ! And who were the Attacotti ? The expla- nation reveals, here too, a much forgotten fact. The native Irish " Scoti " had been themselves invaders, and held Ireland by no other title than conquest. 24 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. i. The "Attacotti" are believed to have been the remnant of the older and conquered race — also Celtic — and we are told in a note that they " were treated as a servile and helot class by the dominant Scoti." * Thus all the elements that "made the Irishman" were even then in full play from the beginning of the Christian era at least, or about twelve centuries before Mr. Gladstone's " we " had anything to do with Ireland. But let us pass on to a later date — after a con- temporary literature had certainly begun, — and take another entry in this sad journal: — "The age of Christ 227. The massacre of the girls at Cleonfearta (in Munster) by Dunlang, King of Leinster. Thirty royal girls was the number, and a hundred maids with each of them." j The progress here indicated is singular. From the earlier entry we should gather that women at least were spared in Irish broils. Two centuries later we find that they were massacred with- out mercy. Much later we find again that they were regularly summoned to serve in war, and were seen tearing each other's breasts with reaping-hooks. And so on — and on — and on — for eight centuries. These Annals contradict absolutely Mr. Gladstone's monstrous misrepresentation that from the "earlier stages of Christianity" the Irish were among the leaders of Christendom, "till We went in among them." In any sense which has the most distant bearing upon the Annals," vol. i. p. 96. f Ibid., p. 115. * a CH. I.] DEEPENING BARBARISM. 25 social condition, the peace, welfare, prosperity, — or any shadow of a hope from the political institutions — of the Irish people, the assertion is not only " inflated fable " destitute of any historical foundation, but it is the direct opposite of the truth. Even after the establishment of Christianity about a.d. 450, for six hundred years, at least, this barbarous condition had been going from bad to worse. Nor must we forget that this steady and continuous decline had gone on notwithstanding long contact, and perfect familiarity with, the high civilisation of Koman Britain. Hundreds and even in some cases, thousands of Eoman coins, have been found in Ireland, — coins of the first and second centuries. For some centuries the Irish were continually attempting to conquer Britain. For ten years in the middle of the fourth century they are said to have at least partially succeeded, till beaten and expelled by Theodosius in 369.* It cannot be said, therefore, that isolation alone, so far as mere knowledge is concerned, was the cause of the long continuance of Irish barbarism. They had seen what civilisation was, and what government meant. And having seen both, the Irish chiefs returned to their own country as chaotic as before, and as incapable of laying even the rudest foundations of civilised con- dition among their own people. But even these facts, striking though they be, are an inadequate exposure of Mr. Gladstone's " inflated fable " * Stokes, "Celtic Church," p. 17. 26 mSH NATIONALISM. [ch. i. that the introduction of a foreign element into Ireland in the twelfth century, was the ending of her time of peace, and the beginning of her time of troubles. Not only is this absolutely contradicted by the evidence of history, but the converse proposition can be clearly established — that the only elements of civilisation which did exist in Ireland when the Normans came to settle, were foreign elements which had already secured an earlier footing in the country. And one of those elements was no less important than that superior organisation of the Christian Church which elsewhere had grown up in Christendom out of the necessities of its position in contact with the heathen world. The Irish Danes were the cousins of the French and Ens:- o lish Normans ; and they had been settled in Ireland for some three hundred and fifty years before the coming of Strongbow. Not only were they the founders of all the commercial cities of Ireland, but they were the main instruments in the reconstitution of her Church. Whatever may have been the achievements of the Missionaries of that Church when removed from the local influences of their own race and country, as at lona and at Lindisfarne, nothing can be clearer than that, in its own country, it can hardly be said to have had any civilising influence at all. Its organisation was unlike anything that existed elsewhere in any part of the Christian world. It had no parochial clergy ; it had no territorial bishops. Its so-called monastic bodies had none of the characteristics we CH. I.] THE IRISH CELTIC CHURCH. 27 are accustoraed to associate with the name. They were tribes like the other purely secular tribes around them — hereditary castes animated with all the passions which raged throughout the land ; and actually taking part in the cruel and ferocious wars to which these passions led. It may well seem incredible, but it stands on the firmest historical evidence that, more than two hundred years after St. Patrick had established the Celtic Church in Ireland, its so-called clergy were regularly bound by the customs of the country to take part in all the wars of the chief or tribe under which they lived. And when we consider what those wars were — that there was not one single aim or object which could be dignified by the name " political," — that they were wars of mere plunder, slaughter, and devastation, — we may conceive what the degradation of Christianity must have been, and how completely, in this form, it was divorced from all the influences which, elsewhere in Europe, made it the precious seed-bed of civilisation. Accordingly, when the Danes of Ireland became largely converted to Christianity in the tenth century, they did not owe their conver- sion to the native Celtic Church. They hated that Church and despised it as not less barbarous than its laity. They were converted by agencies which came not from Ireland but from England, and they established their connection at once, not with the old Irish ecclesiastical centre of Armagh 28 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. i. but with the sees of Canterbury and Eome. It was they who established the first Bishopric of Dublin. And they did this no less than one hundred and thirty years before the invasion of Henry II., and even twenty-two years before the Norman Conquest of England. In like manner it was the Danes again who established the sees of Waterford and Limerick ; and through the ecclesiastical influences which were thus firmly established in Ireland, a conquest was won over her native Church far more real and effective than that which Henry II. even tried to accomplish in her political condition. We must not allow any modern prejudice to hide from us the real significance and true interpretation of the great triumph which had been thus won in Ireland long before the invasion of the Fitzgeralds, by the earlier invasion of the English and Latin Church. Two very different currents of feeling have combined to misrepresent and misconceive this far more real and earlier conquest. One of these currents has been the feeling of Irish patriotism, which has clung to the supposed glories of an indigenous Church. The other has been the desire of some Protestants to see in that Celtic Church an anti-papal, and even a non-episcopal stage of ecclesiastical organisation. Between these two influences and a widespread ignorance of what Irish life really had been under that native Church, the part played by inflated fiction has been riotous indeed. There are, CH. I.] IRISH AUTHORITIES. 29 however, plenty of honest Irish historians who give us all the facts. Besides the irrefragable evidence of the contemporary Annals we have such excellent modern historians as Professor Eichey, Professor Stokes, Professor Sullivan, Professor O'Curry, and Mr. Prendergast. Every one of these writers is animated by the purest spirit of Irish patriotism, and in detail they not only give us the facts, but occa- sionally express themselves strongly on the fright- fulness of the picture which they themselves present. But they shrink most sensitively from any similar language when used by writers who are not Irish, and they enter pleas of mitigation which are generally quite irrelevant. Thus Professor Stokes reminds us quite truly that at least as regards some of the centuries when Irishmen were always fighting with each other. Englishmen were fighting with each other too. He reminds us, further, that Chroniclers and Annalists in early times did not think of recording much else than wars ; and that the omission of other subjects may thus convey an erroneous general im- pression. There is some truth in this plea as regards the general character of early Chroniclers, but it is very little true as regards the Irish Annalists. It is one of their peculiarities that they are full of specimens of poetry and song, which give us very vivid glimpses indeed of the sentiments, pursuits, and opinions of the time. Moreover, even if the Annalists were defective in their account owing to their mere omission of other 30 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. i. aspects of Irish life, we have other sources of infor- mation against which no such supposed deficiency can be charged. Among the treasures of ancient Celtic literature in Ireland there are some,: — and one espe- cially, known as The " Book of Leinster," which is a collection of narratives, tales, and traditions of Irish life, — which go back to its supposed heroic age.* The picture of life and manners which they all present is precisely the same as the picture presented by the later Annalists of the Middle Ages. The longest and most elaborate of the tales is called the " Cattle-Spoil of Cuailuge," a place now called Collon in Louth. It narrates wars of the second century, and by its very title proclaims the immemorial same- ness of those wars with all its desolating successors. But even if it were true that war and war alone is prominent in all those ancient documents, merely because it attracted most prominent attention in a rude age, this consideration has nothing to do with the peculiarities of the Irish case. It is not the fact of wars — even the most savage wars — being waged by Irishmen that is singular. Neither is it the mere fact of the long persistent continuance of those wars — that alone distinguishes her history. It is the utterly useless and worse than useless character of those wars, in which they stand alone. Oat of war all modern nations have been made. Out of the Irish wars no nation did, or ever could, emerge. They * "National ManuscrijDts of Ireland," vol. ii. pp. xxvi.-xxx. CH. I.] ENGLISH BARBARISM COMPARED. 81 were purely destructive. There was not one organic or reconstructive element in them. Englishmen who are enlightened have no objection to being told by others, or to confessing for themselves the fact, that their ancestors passed through a stage af barbarism. The late Professor Freeman was an intense English- man. He was proud of the very name. Speaking of the Angles and Saxons when they landed in Britain in the middle of the fifth century (449), he says, " We may now be thankful for the barbarism and ferocity of our forefathers." * Here we have the statement of a fact, and the expression of a sentiment. The fact is stated because it is the duty and the pleasure of an historian to »peak the truth. The sentiment is justified by this — that the savagery and barbarism of the tribes who made the English people was a barbarism full of noble elements. Their wars were ferocious, but they fought for things worth fighting for. They were re-constructive, not purely destructive. In all their contests, whether with the Celts whom they almost exterminated, or whether among them- selves, they contended for true conquest — dominion — settlement — not for mere plunder, devastation, and ravage. This is the fundamental difference between their barbarism and savagery, and the corresponding barbarism of the Celts in Ireland. We have only to look at the practical results to see all that this * " Norman Conquest," vol. i. p. 20. 32 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. i. contrast involved. Within a hundred and fifty years of their landing in Britain the Anglo-Saxons had con- quered the whole country from the Solent to the Forth, and from the Channel to the Severn. They had founded kingdoms in the full sense of that word — political communities with well-established principles of government, of industry, and of law. Within another period of three centuries and a half they had consolidated these kingdoms into one central monarchy, highly civilised. Christian, and to some degree even Imperial. During all these centuries the Celtic tribes in Ireland had not made one single step towards any such results. On the contrary, they had sunk con- tinually from bad to worse, and their interminable wars were mere savao:e raids on each other's territorv, destructive alike of peaceful industry and of the very beginnings of political organisation. As to the Celtic Church nothing can be more thoughtless than to allow our Protestant feelings against the Eoman See, or our interest in an ancient organisation which was independent of it, to blind us to the real condition of the early Irish Church. Professor Stokes speaks of the "ecclesiastical chaos which reigned in the Celtic Church " * in the early part of the eleventh century before the Anglo- Norman Bishoprics were established. It never had exercised, even in its golden age, the smallest influence in civilising the habits or institutions of * " Celtic Church," p. 324. CH. I.] Ireland's golden age. 33 the Irisli people. That golden age lay in the sixth and seventh centuries. But the annals of those centuries show no pause in the revolting repetition of bloody feuds, with plunder, murder, and devastation. It is indeed recorded, far on in the seventh century, that the Clergy of Ireland procured for themselves an exemption from the obligation of '* hosting,'* that is, of taking a personal part in those interminable and ferocious tribal wars. But as to any influence in preventing them, we hear nothing of it, and we have good reason to know that even personal participation in them, though not compulsory, continued to be frequent if not habitual. The truth is, that the Celtic Church was in all social and political matters identified with the Celtic people. They were con- tinually identified even in actual offices and functions. In the ninth century Phelim, King of Munster, was at once Abbot, Bishop, and King. He ravaged Ulster and murdered its monks and clergy.* The same authority tells us that the Bishops of Armagh were just as bad.j It is most curious to observe how even the most honest Irish historians are swayed either by a local patriotism, or by Protestant feeling on the supremacy of the Koman See, in their language about the native Celtic Church. Thus, even Professor Stokes, liberal and enlightened as he is, in his history of that Church goes out of his way to censure St. * *' Celtic Church," p. 199. f Ibid., p. 200. D 34 IRISH NATIONALISM. [CH. I. Patrick for having in the fifth century accepted the authority of the Pope; an act which the Professor stigmatises as a "betrayal of the liberties of his country." Yet, in his capacity of historian of the Anglo-Norman Church in Ireland, when he has occasion to tell us in what those liberties consisted, and in what they resulted, he is far too honest to suppress the truth. Then indeed — when thus facing another way — he does not mince his words in describ- ing what the Celtic Church had come to be " when," as Mr. Gladstone expresses it, " we went in." He points out that so far as dogma or ritual, or even the nominal supremacy of the Pope, were concerned, there was nothing whatever to distinguish between the two Churches, or to justify any special sympathy with the Celtic rather than with the Anglo-Norman. Yet he tells us that they hated each other with as perfect a hatred as that which has ever divided Pro- testant from Catholic, or Orangeman from Nationalist. Nor does he leave us in any doubt as to the com- parative merits, religious, social, and political, of the indigenous Irish, as compared with the foreign or Anglo-Norman element. He represents the Celtic Church as having become utterly corrupt. "Celtic monasticism," he says, " was played out. It had done its work and was now corrupt." The so-called " Culdees," or God's servants, had " only the name and nothing of the reality ; " and then, summing up, he says, ^^The work of the Church of Kome in the CH. l] cause of IRISH ANARCHY. 35 twelfth century was that of a real reformation : and in no department was that reforming work more needed than in sweeping away, in Scotland and in Ireland alike, that Culdee system which had lost its primitive power, and was good for nothing save for the purposes of ecclesiastical plunder and degrada- tion." * . But this is not all. Professor Stokes is far too honest as an historian to conceal the cause and nature of this corruption any more than he conceals the extent and existence of it as a fact. He identifies it with that one great feature in their character which was purely and characteristically Irish : namely, the close and inseparable connection with the septs, clans, and tribes into which Celtic society had been always divided in Ireland. Bad as the Celtic ecclesiastical communities had become in morals — ** useless, corrupt, lax and easy-going in discipline " f — this was not altogether peculiar to them. But in one matter they stood alone — their full participation in the fierce passions and deeds of violence of the septs against each other. It was they who carried on this spirit from generation to generation, even after the higher organisation of the Anglo-Norman and Catholic Church had extended itself over all the more civilised parts of Ireland. They lived on with a pestilent survival in the north and west, almost down to * " Anglo-Norman Church," p. 355. t Ibid., p. 357. 36 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. i. the period of the Eeformation. Speaking of the thirteenth century, Professor Stokes says, "The monasteries were as completely tribal institutions, bound up with certain septs, and hated by other hostile septs, as they were in the seventh and eighth centuries. There was not the slightest reverence for a monastery as such. The tribes venerated — some- times, but not always — the monasteries belonging to their own patron Saint, or their own tribe. But the monasteries of a hostile tribe, or of a different Saint, were regarded as fair game for murder, plunder, and arson." * The dues which the Celtic Abbots most delighted to gather from the people were arms, battle- dresses, war-horses, and gold. " A fierce, passionate, bloodthirsty spirit was universal.'* The most sacred places in Ireland, connected with the early Chris- tianity of Ireland, such as Clonmacnoise, Ineseleraun, and Derry, were plundered and burnt over and over again, and always by native Irishmen, such as the O'Currys, the O'Donnells, the O'Neills, and the O'Briens. Nor does Professor Stokes fail to note the weird and fateful continuity of this Irish savagery. He relates an example of a bloody fight between Celtic Abbots and Bishops, so late as the middle of the fifteenth century. One Bishop, with his son, two brothers, and two sons of his Archdeacon, were all slain. On this. Professor Stokes exclaims, "How thoroughly Celtic the whole thing !' How it reminds * « Anglo-Norman Church," pp. 363, 364. CH. I.] IRISH APOLOGIES FOR IRELAND. 37 US of what we read, seven or eight hundred years earlier, when the monasteries of Durrow and Clon- macnoise, with their retainers, tenantry, and slaves, used to join in deadly battle! Yet this episcopal warrior died sixty years after AVickcliffe, and but forty years before Luther was born." * This is a retrospect — eight hundred years from 1450 — which takes us back to the so-called " golden age " of the Irish Celtic Church; and Professor Stokes, in another passage, pursues this clue of continuity in the opposite direction down to our own time. Casting his eye — not backward, from the fifteenth century for eight hundred years, but — forward from the ninth cen- tury, for a thousand years, he traces this continuity of character as having had its roots in ages when no foreigner, not even the naughty Danes, had any in- fluence upon it. Referring to the charge, which he does not deny, against the Irish, that they are even in our own time comparatively indifferent to human life — to " their agrarian murders — to their fierce faction fights " — he does not hesitate to ascribe all these to an here- ditary surviv9,l of the taint which was conspicuous in all the centuries of which he wrote.f It is not necessary for any of us to adopt this view either as a full expla- nation, or as any adequate excuse. Other causes may have added their contribution, just as most assuredly other pleas must be used in mitigation of censure, if * " Anglo-Norman Church," p. 369. t " Celtic Church," pp. 200, 201. 38 IRISH NATIONALISM.' [ch. i. Ethics are to hold their ground at all in our judgments of human conduct. It is enough for my purpose here to point out that it is the explanation offered by an Irishman writing in his character as an historian, and yet writing in a spirit of the warmest sympathy with early Celtic institutions. Whatever may be the value of the doctrine of an hereditary taint, either as explanation or as an excuse, it is quite certain that the essential property of matter which physicists call "Inertia," is like- wise a property of mind as we know it in ourselves. It is that property in virtue of which any motion or movement imparted, tends to run. on unchanged for ever — unless, and until, it is changed — checked, accelerated, or diverted — by the intervention of some external force. It is in virtue of this property that early customs and habits of life in any people become so ingrained as to be almost indelible — only to be reformed by new and compelling causes being brought to bear upon them. It is thus that streams of water, in some countries, cut their own channels so deep that nothing can divert them except a complete break up of the physical 'geography of the land through which they run. And so it is that, in the case of Ireland, we have the fact proved by the most unquestionable evidence of history, that her exemption from foreign conquest, at least up to the twelfth century, had left her people to have their character and habits determined by purely indigenous institu- CH. I.] THE IRISH MADE THEMSELVES. 89 tions. Up to that date, at all events, therefore, Mr. Gladstone's passionate question, " Who made the Irishman?" can be answered in no faltering voice. Celtic customs, Celtic ideas, Celtic Institutions, operating unchecked through more than a thousand years, in Mr. Prendergast's words, '* uncontaminated with another mind " — these made the Irishman what the Anglo-Normans found him. And on the evidence of the same historic facts, frankly acknowledged by the same author, we can affirm farther that when the Anglo-Normans did "go in," they effected an easy entrance, because of that "superior national organi- sation " which the Irish themselves could not fail to recognise. Nor is this all. On the accumulated evidence of Irish Annalists and modern historians, we know that this acknowledged superiority of organi- sation extended to everything that makes the difference between barbarism and civilisation, as distinguished from mere learning or an aptitude for some of the decorative Arts. It was an immense superiority in arms, in all the useful arts, in laws, and in religion. To conceal, or to slur over these facts, still more to deny and to contradict them, is a be- trayal of historic truth. And when such denial is made in the spirit of mere political passion, it deserves some much severer name than " inflated fiction." At all events, we now see that Mr. Gladstone starts with all he has to say on the famous " seven centuries " so often thrown in the teeth of England, with a 40 IRISH NATIONALISM. [cH. T. tboroiiglily perverted view of the pre-established forces and coDditions with which England has had to deal, and it will not be difficult to show that the same tone of vicious misrepresentation characterises all he says on later times. ( 41 ) CHAPTER IL EFFECTS OF SUZERAINTY OF ENGLAND OVER IRELAND. So far, then, we have a clear answer to give to the inflated fiction implied in Mr. Gladstone's question, " Who made the Irishman ?" Not for seven hundred years — which is the stereotyped phrase for the sup- posed period of English Government — but for the immense period of 1170 years, from the Christian era to the landing of Henry IL, we have a tolerably clear account of the native Irish Celts. During that long lapse of time, — unlike almost all the other nations of modern Europe, — they were never con- quered. The Romans did not conquer Ireland, as they conquered England and Scotland up to the line of the Forth and Clyde. The Danes did not conquer it, as they did a large part of England and finally the whole. The Danes conquered bits of it — and in return they only did for the Irish Celt what he had never done for himself, — they founded all his im- portant cities. They founded all his commerce. They refounded, also, and effectively reformed his Church. 42 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. ii. Neither were the Irish conquered by the tardy and transitory Norman invasion of the twelfth century. For another long period of time they were left to their own devices, — in all domestic matters practically un- controlled. ** More than four centuries " is the time specified by Professor Richey as the interval which elapsed before anything like a real conquest was effected. JFour hundred and thirty-three years — from 1170 to 1603 — is the time he means. In the last year of Queen Elizabeth's reign the last of the Old Irish Chiefs were subdued, and fled. " The flight of the Earls " is a well-known epoch in Irish history. During all this time we have the light of the native Annals. The continuity is perfect. It is a continuity of horrors — sometimes a little better, sometimes a little worse, but always in its essential character, and in its immediate causes, absolutely unchanged. England had far less power of reforming the domestic laws, usages, and ideas of the people than she now has of changing the habits and manners of Central Africa. The same writer. Professor Eichey, has well explained the impossibility of any effective conquest of Ireland during any of those centuries. The country was covered with impassable bogs and impenetrable forests. English Sovereigns had no standing armies. They had their own troubles to attend to — their wars with France — their own disputed successions. The cost of feudal levies was enormous, and practically CH. II.] ENGLISH COLONISTS DEGRADED. 43 prohibitory. Where there is no effective power there is no real responsibility. But more than this: such indirect responsibility as could alone exist in those centuries was discharged in vain when the action it took, and which alone it could take, was met by insuperable causes of resistance and reaction. And this is precisely what took place. The English Colonists assumed, like fish, the colour of the ground on which they had come to live. The typical boast of the first and most powerful among them — the Geraldines — came to be that they were " more Irish than the Irish." Under such conditions the beneficent influences of conquest, or even of colonisation, by a stronger race, and of that " higher organisation " which Mr. Prendergast tells us was "easily recog- nised " by the Irish, had no chance of working out the effects which they produced all over the rest of Europe. All the weapons of England, even those of the highest kind, were thus broken in her hands. The fine and the famous saying of Kome, that she " took captive her barbarian captors," may be literally applied with a terrible inversion of meaning to the pretended conquest of Ireland in the twelfth century. She took captive with her barbaric customs the rising civilisation of her invaders. That rising civilisation not only ceased to be developed, but became blighted on her soil. It may even be said, perhaps, that it made her own old savagery worse than it had been before. It added an element of persistence and of 44 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. ii. strength which threw off with fierce disdain, as foreign and intrusive, every attempt on the part of England to teach her "purer manners, nobler laws." Those nobler elements in the Celtic character itself, which had always existed, and which we all recognise, did indeed survive as germs — but they were never developed. They were shut up, as before, in the cells of ecclesiastics, and absolutely divorced from all civilising power, or even influence on the social habits or political institutions of the people. Some linger- ing love of learning, a strong natural vein of poetry, and a genuine turn for curious forms of art, apparently indigenous — all these lived on — with no other effect than, perhaps, lending some additional charm to a national sentiment which had no central rally ing-point, and no definite political ambition to give it any con- structive power. We have only to compare the results of the Anglo-Norman colonisation of Ireland with the contemporaneous Anglo-Norman colonisation of Scot- land, to see the true causes of amazing difference. In Scotland — at least in the lowlands of Scotland — the Norman settlers found an ancient Teutonic civilisation well established — one which had been founded, first on Koman conquest, and then on Anglo-Saxon occupa- tion. Professor Freeman insists upon it with emphasis that the suzerainty of the Anglo-Saxon Kings of England over Teutonic Scotland up to the Forth had been long established. There is much debate on this point. But it does not concern us here. What is certain CH. II.] CONTRAST WITH SCOTLAND. 45 is that Teutonic — or, as we now call it, Lowland — Scot- land before the Norman Conquest of England had been at one time simply part of one of the Kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy — the Kingdom of Northum- bria. Freeman's contention that in the succeeding century — the tenth — it had accepted the suzerainty of the consolidated English " Empire " is — to say the least of it — open to much dispute. It is said that for the iirst time in 828, King Ecgbehrt, who had begun as King of " Mercia " alone, appears in the title of a charter as Rex Anglorum, King of all the Angles in Great Britain.* In 924 King Edward, son of the great Alfred, is alleged to have become King and Over- Lord of the whole of Britain, and the enthusiasm of this intensely English writer, Professor Freeman, asserts that " from this time to the fourteenth century the Vassalage of Scotland was an essential part of the public law of the Isle of Britain."! Scottish historians, quite as learned and much less excitable, have shown clearly enough that this is an assertion which cannot be sustained. And "it is well to be thus reminded that the spirit of exaggeration, due to what may be called a provincial patriotism, is to be found in an English, as well as in Irish, historians. The late Mr. Robertson, in his standard work, the " History of the Early Kings of Scotland," J has * Freeman's " Norman Conquest," vol. i. p. 40. t Ibid., p. 61. X Vol. i. p. 69 ; and vol. ii. Appendix. 46 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. ii. effectually disposed of the pretensions put forward by the later Kings of England to a feudal sove- reignty over Scotland, But Kobertson does not deny — on the contrary, he carefully states — that, so far back as the seventh century, both Pictish and Scottish Kings were, for a time at least, tributary to the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Northumberland. Province after province in Scotland was subdued by the Angles, until in 670 the Anglian King took the step of appointing a Pictish Bishopric of the Picts with the seat of the See on the Forth. But a tremen- dous defeat by the Picts and Scots in 684 showed the unbroken vitality of the incipient Scottish Kingdom, and not less the rapid advance which the Angles had made in founding a still more powerful monarchy, as well as in spreading their own Teutonic race and civilisation. All these facts establish the contention here maintained, that mere suzerainty, in the early Middle Ages, was not necessarily, or even usually such 'u, condition of dependence as to prevent the free development of separate and independent political institutions. But political institutions, in order to be developed, must first exist, at least in germ. In Scotland they had long existed not in germ only, but in well- planted growths. In Ireland they did not exist at all. Hence a perfect explanation of the different results in the two countries upon the chameleon nature of the Norman settlers. In Scotland the divided tribes and CH. II.] SAME DANGER IN SCOTLAND. 47 races, long before tlie Norman Conquest of England, had begun to aggregate. The nucleus of a central monarchy had been formed, and formed, too, by a wonderful and still mysterious revolution round the axis, and in the name, of the Scoti — an Irish Celtic tribe. The peculiar receptivity of the Normans was, therefore, in Scotland, brought into immediate contact with something which was really worthy of being so received, — something which, by assimilation with their own strong and manly nature, could strike its roofs downwards, and spread its branches upwards in the light of a glorious day. Yet even in Scotland, we did not altogether escape the Irish danger. Those colonists of Norman blood — and they were many — who pushed forward beyond the central and eastern area in which all the civilisation of Scotland has begun, and from which alone it spread — those Normans who wandered far into the predominantly Celtic area, and who married and settled there — were often tempted to fall, and did sometimes actually fall, under the same in- fluences by which the Anglo-Irish were so fatally seduced. The Scottish Kingdom had a long and a hard fight to maintain in the West Highlands and in the Hebrides against that same Celtic element of tribal faction^ and intertribal anarchy. In that fight some men of Teutonic blood took what may justly be called a rebellious part. But, on the whole, the Anglo- Norman element in Scotland not only accepted the Saxon and Roman civilisation which they found, but 48 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. ii. carried it onwards and upwards as they did in Eno:- land. Out of their number arose all the most powerful champions of Scottish independence, when Edward I. tried to convert the mere antiquarian claim of an ancient and dubious " commendation " into the direct rule of a complete dominion. Sir William Wallace and Eobert Bruce were both Normans, and although Bruce rallied round him powerful contingents of the Scoto-Celtic element from Argyllshire, of the old Gallo-Celtic element from Galloway, and of the ancient Britons from Strathclyde, he was able through a powerful personal character to organise this great work of united action only because the idea of a central monarchy, and the constructive ambitions connected with it, had been long established in Scotland. Professor Richey, in referring to the different fate and effects of Anglo-Normans in Scotland and in Ireland, has been led, by a natural feeling of patriotic exculpation, to dwell upon the mere geo- graphical explanation that in Scotland the Teutonic population had the advantage of a good natural frontier, easily defensible against the Celtic popula- tion of the Highlands. But this is no adequate explanation of one of the most curious facts in history — the growth and establishment of the Scottish Nation and Kingdom. The Clyde in those days was no barrier at all. Down almost to our own time it was a shallow and wandering stream, fordable here and CH. II.] ANGLO-NORMANS IN SCOTLAND. 49 there at low tide as far down as below Dumbarton. The Eomans had not trusted to it as a military- barrier, for they built a wall and garrisoned it with legions. North of the Clyde and Forth, on the long line between the eastern lowlands and the highlands of Scotland, there was no geographical frontier which could be easily defended. The line of the Grampians opened upon the richer country, and upon its early Teutonic settlers, by the ready access of a hundred glens. Through these, if Irish habits had prevailed, raids could always be made, and through these some very serious Celtic invasions did actually take place down to times comparatively late. The causes were far more deeply seated, which can alone explain the early growth of Scotland as a nation under the final leadership of King Robert the Bruce. Those causes may be all traced in the fact that he was a Norman Knight, a born leader of men, inheritinof the traditions of an ancient civilisation, and sharing also in the blood of a Celtic family which had already founded a real monarchy. In Scotland the Norman element was Scottified. In Ireland the Norman element was Ersefied. In Scotland the Norman element became assimilated by a germ of political civilisation which had been growing through stages of much obscurity for at least three hundred years before the Norman Conquest. In Ireland it was still more assimilated with a barbarism which had been getting steadily worse and worse through the history E 50 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. n. of a whole millennium. In Scotland the three cen- turies of this building-up — amidst much obscurity of detail — can in outline be clearly traced through several long steps of constructive work, which are full of his- torical and political interest. They were emphatically centuries of union — effected partly by conquest, partly by marriage, partly by alliance with, and even tribute paid to, English kings, partly by social, partly by ecclesiastical amalgamation. At least three great men and three great events mark corresponding stages through which the Scottish Kingdom rose. So early as 730 the Pictish King, Angus MacFergus, laid its foundation-stone in establishing one rule ov^er Picts and Scots. A little more than one hundred years later, in 843, Kenneth MacAlpine still farther cemented the union of those two Celtic bloods in one dynasty. For two hundred years all Scotland acknow- ledged the Sovereignty of this Celtic House. In 1068 Malcolm Canmore crowned the edifice with an Anglo- Saxon Queen, who gave birth to a family whose descendants still reign in England. In Scotland, therefore, one central monarchy had been consolidated, of which all its subjects were every year more and more learning to be proud. In Ireland, on the con- trary, during the same epoch, there was no such progress towards union — nothing, indeed, but in- creasing and deepening disintegration. And when at last — not till early in the elevtjnth century — one gallant Irishman of purely native race did very CH. Ti.] IRISH DREAD OF GOVERNMENT. 61 nearly accomplish a like work, the monarchy which he for a moment did actually attain, was instantly torn to pieces by his compatriot chiefs and tribes. And Professor Kichey himself tells us that those chiefs and tribes did so tear it to pieces for the very reason that a central and civilised government was, of all other things, that which they dreaded most. We may all render honour to King " Brian Boru '* personally. He might have been another Angus MacFergus, or like another Kenneth MacAlpine — his Scottish kins- man by blood. They and he alike proved by their life that it is not because of anything indelible in their race that the Irish Celt failed so miserably to found a nation. They proved that it was something in the habits and institutions of Ireland that we have to look to for the cause. It was indeed the Danes who actually killed Brian Boru, for he fell in battle with them. But he fell in victory. And who was it that killed not him alone, but also the fruits of that victory, and obliterated from the annals of Ireland everything but the record of a barren triumph ? It was not the " we " of Mr. Gladstone's inflated fiction. For " we " did not enter Ireland for a hundred and sixty years later. It was the native Irish tribes them- selves, and they did this with feelings and intentions thoroughly indigenous, which have never received more vigorous condemnation than in the words of Professor Eichey — one of the very best of their own historians. 52 IRISH NATIONALISM. [cH. n. But here we come upon an extraordinary discrepancy between the facts which these historians relate, and — at least — the occasional language which they hold concerning them. About the facts themselves there is practically no dispute. But as to the light in which they are represented — as to the use made of them — there is the widest difference between the inter- pretation which is obvious to others, and that which even the best of Irish historians are tempted to enforce. There is no dispute, for example, about the perfect continuity of intertribal feuds, fightings, and devastations, before and after the invasion of Norman settlers in the twelfth century. The contemporary Annals are sufiScient to confute any attempt to deny that perfect continuity. Again, there is no dispute about the fact that this continuity depended on, and in itself consisted in, the more or less complete adoption by the Anglo-Norman barons and chiefs, of the habits, and manners, and sentiments of the Celtic chiefs and people amongst whom they settled. With them they established the most intimate relations by marriage, by " fosterage," by complete participation in common enmities, and by common methods of exer- cising the rudest forms of military power over all below them, and towards all around them. Further, there is no dispute that for centuries the English Sovereign and Government had not the physical power to counteract this condition of things. Daniel O'Connell, in his great speech of 1834, reiterated CH. II.] ENGLISH GOVEENMENT POWERLESS. 5S empliatically that not until 1614, in the reign of James I., did Ireland come under one Government with England.* Professor Kichey not only enforces the same view, but gives an excellent and detailed explanation of the fact. He points out that in an age when there were no standing armies, the cost of feudal levies was so enormous that it far exceeded the cost even of modern troops regularly paid. Moreover, feudal levies could not be long kept together. They were thus incapable from many causes of really conquer- ing a country covered with enormous bogs and forests, into which the native population could always re- treat, and where they could not be followed. Neither could feudal levies be used as permanent garrisons. There was but one way, in the Middle Ages, of representing Sovereignty — the way universally adopted — that of the delegation and devolution of government into the hands of strong feudatory vassals. These were armed with all the powers of petty kings and rulers in all things that pertained to domestic government and administration. But this was no novelty in Ireland. This had been the old condition of things for a thousand years at least ; and, practically, during some centuries, a like condition of things obtained over the whole of Europe. The great difference of result which arose in Ireland was due entirely to the fact that the new chiefs sank down to the level of * " Mirror of Parliament," vol. ii. (1834), p. 1189. 54 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch- ir. the old, and did not, as elsewhere, introduce or main- tain more developed institutions. Here, again, there is no dispute as to the facts. Irish historians and even Irish declaimers do not deny that the system of English law, even as it existed in those rude military ages, was immeasurably superior to the old Celtic usages. At least, when it serves the purpose of their charges against England, they blame her vehemently, as O'Connell did, for not having at once established her own higher principles of jurisprudence over the whole of Ireland. It is true that the very same historians and declaimers, when their accusations are best served by an opposite contention, do continually face round the other way, and utter the contradictory complaint that England did cruelly or stupidly force upon Ireland English laws which were entirely un- suited to the people, and subversive of their ancient rights. I shall return to this alternative directly. Meantime, let us get what historic truth we can out of the first of these accusations, as urged on a great occasion by the very best Counsel for the prosecution. With a glaring inconsistency between his vehement denial of any conquest, and consequently of any corresponding power, O'Connell, in the same speech, bitterly inveighed against England because she had not extended to the Irish the protection of her own laws. He admits the fact that "a number of the Irish did in 1246 — only seventy-six years after the so-called conquest — apply for the benefit of British CH. II.] DANIEL o'CONNELL'S SPEECH. 55 law, and to be considered as British subjects." He admits and records the farther fact that Henry III. did accordingly "issue a mandate, under the Great Seal, commanding the English barons, who possessed a portion of Ireland, tliat for the peace and tranquillity of the land they should permit the Irish to be governed by the law of England." And on whom does O'Connell throw the whole blame of the failure of a consummation which he admits was devoutly to be wished? Not upon the English Sovereign, but entirely on the new Anglo-Norman barons who had taken — and because of their taking — the position of Irish chiefs. And he explains the motives of their conduct precisely as Professor Richey explains the parallel conduct of the native Celtic chiefs two hundred and forty years before, when they fiercely tore to pieces the work of King Brian, because they hated above all things the prospect of a well-ordered central government, and of a more civilised monarchy. Just as they had clung to the old Irish usages as the stronghold of their barbarous power, and the great instrument of their arbitrary exactions, so did those Norman barons, who were now associated with them in the same life, dread above all things the intro- duction of English law, and for exactly the same reasons. Nothing can be more emphatic than O'Connell's language in identifying the motives which animated the Ersefied Normans in clinging to the Irish customs. It was because those customs lent 56 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. ii. themselves to a life of constant war and constant plunder.* He goes on to narrate how the same petition came again " from many of the Irish " in the reign of Edward I., in 1278, and again in the reign of Richard II. He narrates how in all those cases the petition was well received in England, and how in the case of Edward I. he expressly made the grant of it dependent on the " general consent of his people in Ireland," or at least of the prelates and nobles who were loyal to their Liege Lord. Now, in all this story there are but three clear and admitted truths — namely, first, the bare historical fact of such appli- cations or petitions coming from Ireland ; secondly, the farther fact that they were well and favourably entertained in England; and, thirdly, that English law and institutions would have been the salvation of Ireland, and that the survival and persistence of the old Irish usages were the real source of its continued miseries. These three things are true, and it is well to have them, not only admitted, but dwelt upon, by such a man as Daniel O'Connell. But the moment we come to the link by which he connects these three truths with his charges against the English Sovereign and the English nation in their whole relation to Ireland, we find that it is a link forged by his own imagination, or by his cunning and sleight of hand. That link consists in the designation given to those from whom came those beggings and petitions for * " Mirror of Parliament," p. 1189. CH. IT.] o'connell's erkoneous assertion. 57 English law. His dexterity in handling this cardinal point is admirable. He begins gently. He first says the petition came from " a number of the Irish." He next advances one step farther, and calls the peti- tioners "many of the Irish." Next he speaks of " the Irish as a whole.'* From this he passes in- sensibly, insidiously, and at last audaciously, to language which identifies the petitioners with the whole Irish people. "Thus," he says, "up to the period of the reign of James I. we find repeated endeavours on the part of Jr eland to be governed by British laws instead of its own." * Here we have the genuine element, not only of in- flated fable, but of gross, yet cunning, misrepresenta- tion. In Professor Kichey's conscientious pages and in numerous other authorities more original and authoritative, we may see the object of the fraud. It was the English settlers of the lower ranks in power and wealth who speedily discovered the intoler- able evils of native Irish customs. The feudal depen- dence on their lords under whom they had lived in England, was a dependence regulated, restrained, and limited, by the precepts and principles of a rising jurisprudence, which tended more and. more to define the rights and consequently to limit obligations of men. They now found that the feudal dependence under which they had to live in Ireland according to the long-established and native customs of that • " Mirror of Parliament," vol. ii. p. 1189. 58 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. tt. country, was a dependence, absolute, servile, ex- hausting, and often ruinous. Nothing they had could be called their own. Under Celtic customs un- limited exactions were levied from them, against which they had no redress. The very idea of law did not exist — at least for the subordinate and the poor. Professor Eichey mentions especially — as indeed all Irish historians do — one desperate Celtic custom which, even if it stood alone, was enough to make life unbearable to civilised men — the custom, namely, by which the chief had always the acknowledged right to quarter himself and his followers upon all those below him who had anything to be devoured or used. Antiquarian historians do, indeed, tell us that this evil custom was, in primitive times, not confined to Celts, but can be traced also in the early tribal usages of the Teutonic races. This may be true, and it may be true also that in certain rude conditions of a fight- ing society, this custom, and many others of a like kind, had their origin in some real necessity of those conditions. But this has nothing to do with the question now in hand. It cannot be too often repeated that what was peculiar to the Celts of Ireland was the continued survival and even the aggravation of this custom and other equally barbarous customs for long centuries, during which all other races had grown out of them and had cast them off. To the poorer English settlers even of the twelfth and thir- teenth centuries, they were intolerable. It was from CH. n.] IRISH HATRED OF LAW. 59 these unfortunate poorer English settlers, and from some native chiefs of the weaker class who felt the need of some protection from Over-Lords, that the petitions came which O'Connell and many other Irish speakers and writers have twisted into a general desire on the part of the Irish people to live under the blessings of the English law, and into a special accusation against the English Chiefs and barons as compared with the rest of the population among whom they came to settle. O'Connell forgot to tell the House of Commons that in any resistance which the English barons and Chiefs may have made to the intro- duction of English law, they were acting in thorough sympathy with at least all the more powerful native Celtic Chiefs, and with all that great body of the Celtic people in the very soil of whose mind these ancient customs were indelibly rooted, and to which they passionately clung. No doubt those of them who were beaten in their interminable wars, were sometimes ready enough to claim the protection of English laws against their stronger rivals, or against their native over-lords. But they never thought of submitting to the restraint of those laws in their dealings with their own people. Those opportunities for plunder which O'Connell said the English barons desired to keep, were precisely the same opportunities of plunder which the Irish Chiefs had enjoyed for centuries, — of which they were continuing at that very time to take full advantage, and which they never 60 IRISH NATIONALISM. [cH. n. ceased to cultivate to their own ruin, and the ruin of their country, until, four hundred years later, it was at last really conquered. Professor Eichey has given a striking and graphic account of the complete Ersefication of the Anglo- Norman Barons in the centuries immediately succeed- ing the pretended Conquest of 1172. In the first place he tells us that the moment Henry II. turned his back on Ireland, and the native chiefs saw that all his imposing array meant nothing but a temporary occupation, " they returned to their former indepen- dence.'* Practically they were remitted to their original position.* We know what this means — what that position was. In the second place he tells us that the Norman Sub -Feudatories were scattered more or less over large portions of the country still largely occupied by, or in contact with, native populations against whom they could not organise any com- bined defence. They did, indeed, build castles, — and this was really new, — for no Irish chief seems ever to have built one stone upon another. But with whom did the Ersefied Normans garrison their castles? With the native Celts. They gathered bands of Irishmen at arms, called " Grallowglasses." These Irish Gallowglasses exhibited towards their new lords, we are told, a more absolute personal devotion than English vassals or tenants have ever shown — just because under the old native system they were * " Short History/' p. 166. CH. n.] THE ENGLISH BARONS ERSEFIED. 61 more absolutely dependent on the lord for all upon which alone they lived. The Norman barons did also bring with them some English dependants and tenants. But how did they treat them ? They treated them with the adoption of the most obnoxious and destructive of all Irish customs — that of " coigne and livery," — that is to say, by free quartering of the Celtic bands upon their unfortunate countrymen. And when those poorer English settlers, in despair of getting the protection of the more civilised laws to which they had been accustomed at home, abandoned their holdings under their Ersefied lords, and fled back to England, how did those barons repeople their estates ? They stocked them with the native Irish, who, if they had long been accustomed to be plundered in the same way, were at least equally accustomed to be repaid out of the plunder of the neighbouring tribes. The capture of cattle by the hundred and sometimes by the thousand — at that time and country the only form of wealth, and almost the only sustenance of life — was the habitual aim and practice in all Irish pre- datory wars. " Great Distributor of Cows " is one of the epithets of glory which we find applied by the contemporary Irish bards in the verses celebrating the dead heroes of their race. But cows did not fall down from heaven, and the cattle so generously *' dis- tributed" in one place had been always rudely abstracted from another. There was therefore always every inducement for the native Irish to settle under 62 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. ii. any chief who could best defend such cattle as they had, and could best add to their store by the robbery of others. Thus there came about in many cases, an almost complete amalgamation between the two races. The English settlers married Irish wives. They fostered their children with Irish mothers — and this, under native usages, constituted one of the very nearest ties of human life. A number of the English went farther. We are told that in their new delight in a life of lawless freedom from all restraint, which was the great charm of native usages, they sometimes threw off even the clothing of their race and country. They " donned the saffron " — that is to say, they habited themselves in the rude native stuffs that were dyed in the browns and yellows which were obtainable from certain lichens encrusting Irish rocks, and certain herbs growing in Irish bogs. They fought with each other of the same English blood, exactly as the native Irish tribes and chiefs had always fought with each other. They had the same feuds — becoming in some cases just as hereditary and continuous — as in the ■well-known case of the Geraldines and the Butlers. I am afraid, too, that we must go farther in our account of this decline from a comparatively high, and certainly a rising, civilisation, to the depths of a barbarism which had been getting deeper and deeper for a thousand years. There is nothing more indicative of this scale among any people than their established usages and rules of war. Giraldus Cambrensis, a con- CH. II.] ADOPTION OF IRISH CUSTOMS. 63 temporary Anglo-Celtic historian, tells us that the Normans in his day habitually gave quarter to the vanquished, and held their prisoners to ransom ; whereas the Celtic Clans gave no quarter, struck off the heads of the vanquished as trophies, and allowed no one to escape. Did the English settlers demean themselves by adopting these Irish habits too ? Ex- cept as regards the utterly savage practice of carry- ing off the heads of the slain as trophies, there is only too much evidence that they did. Indeed, it is obvious that the natural law and necessity of reprisals would compel them to do so. Men cannot fight under totally unequal conditions as to the con- sequences of defeat. Moreover, it is certain that they did adopt that most fatal of all the peculiarities of Irish war — the peculiarity of fighting, not for any worthy aim, or even any definite political object whatever, but for the plunder and devastation of the territory of some hated local enemy. In short, the Ersefication of the English settlers was almost complete. Under those circumstances, it is a gross perversion of historical facts to pretend that Ireland, after the nominal conquest of 1172, was under the Government of England even in the " last resort," and the phrase which assigns for English dominion the period of "seven hundred years," which Mr. Gladstone adopts, is seen to be an inflated fiction indeed. Still more specifically false is the assertion of Daniel O'Connell that Ireland became the prey 64 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. ii. of the English Colonists, who alone, or who principally, clung to Irish usages against the earnest entreaty of the native Irish to be allowed to come under the protection of English law. One rich source of the most authoritative evidence against this fiction is to be found in the contem- porary Irish Annals. If any man will take the trouble, and undergo the really revolting task of reading consecutively through those Annals for the period of nearly a century and a half which elapsed between the Norman invasion of 1170-2, and another invasion which forms a new epoch in the history of Ireland in 1315, he will find that of the interminable wars, predatory incursions, slaughters, plunderings, and treacherous murders there faithfully recorded,* a comparatively very small number belong to any racial hostilities or any contests between the native Irish and the English settlers ; and that the vast majority of these atrocities are specially recorded as yearly incidents in intertribal contests between the native Irish Septs, or clans, or " bloods," amongst, and against, each other. These were continued exactly as they had been continued through the whole range of preceding Irish history. The names given of the conquerors and the conquered, — of the slaughtered and the slaughterers, — of the plunderers and the plundered, — of those cruelly murdered, and of the treacherous murderers, are all, in the immense * " Irish Annals," " Four Masters/' vol. ii. CH. 11.] lEISH INTERTRIBAL WARS. 65 majority of cases, purely Celtic names. It is not prominently a record of any destructive war between the Irish and the English. It is savage fighting between the " Kinel Connell " and the " Kinel Owen ; between the "O'Donnells" and the "O'Rourkes; between the " O'Briens " and the " MacArthys ; " be- tween the "O'Neills" and the " MacLoughlins ; " between the "O'Donnells" and the "Clan Dermot;'* — it is of these pure Irish Celts, and a host of others with unspellable and unpronounceable names, that we read — tearing at each other's throats, ravaging each other's territories, slaughtering each other, men, women, and children, and leaving each other, so far as they survived, to perish with hunger in the bogs and woods of a ravaged land. It is perfectly true that after 1170 we do find the English barons and people also warring and fighting more or less like those among whom they lived, and whose habits and manners they so unfortu- nately adopted. But on this head there are at least three general conclusions established by the Irish Annals, which are remarkable as bearing on the crowning fiction put forward by O'Connell and con- stantly repeated by Irish declaimers. The first is that, as already said, the old intertribal savagery between the native Irish is enormously the pre- ponderating element in the list of horrors per- petrated and endured. The second is that, in almost every case in which the English settlers fought against F 66 IRISH NATIONALISM. Lch. n. native Irish, they did so in close alliance with other Septs of the same race, who were often the instigators in the quarrel, the directors of the attack, and always the fiercest destroyers of the vanquished. The third is that, so far from the English settlers being able to dominate the native Irish as they pleased, or being the only one of the two races who could exercise and profit by the hereditary plundering usages of Irish warfare, it appears on the contrary that in numerous cases they were defeated by the native clans, who routed them often with great slaughter, and sometimes even suc- ceeded in taking and burning their new castles of stone and lime. The truth is that not only during the century and a half succeeding the invasion of which I have been now speaking, but for the whole period of the five hundred and thirty-one years which elapsed between that event and the accession of James I. in 1603, the native Irish, partly by the Ersefication of the Colonists, partly by their own strength of arm and the difficulties of their country, not only held their own as regards the prevalence of their own old usages, but gradually recovered ground which they had lost, and at last succeeded in excluding English law from the whole of Ireland except a very small area near the Capital well known in Irish history as the Pale. All the classes, both native and English, whose rule and habits determined the condition of life for the people of Ireland over nine-tenths of the Island, had thus been combined — partly by passive resistance CH. II.] IRELANP MADE THE ANGLO-IRISH. . 67 partly by conscious effort — in keeping up the deso- lating usages of their country against the continual but vain desire of English Sovereigns, and against their repeated attempts on various points, and at various times, to counteract the worst evils of the native system, and to protect its people from their effects. So far, then, as this period of time and this ground of accusation against England is concerned, we have as clear an answer to give to Mr. Gladstone's question, "Who made the Irishman?" as we had for a like period before the invasion. It was Ireland and its usages that not only " made " the native Irishman, but to a large extent " made " also the Anglo-Irish who were settled in that country, and which reduced both races to a lower .level of civilisation than that which pre- vailed in any other country in Europe. There were, nevertheless, even in such miserable conditions, a few symptoms of that immeasurable superiority in English laws over Irish usages and habits and traditions, which is the only element of truth in O'Connell's representation of the facts. There were at least some Anglo-Normans who did good service to their adopted country. Even in the building of their castles — bad as the use was to which those castles were often turned, — the very worst of them introduced an element of advance qn the squalid houses of mud and clay which alone had sheltered even the native kings. But they did more and better than this. We have already seen how to their Danish cousins, and not to 68 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. it. the native races, Ireland owes to this day all her principal commercial cities ; and we are next told by the same truthful Irish historian that to the first great Anglo-Norman barons Ireland owes, not less, a large number of her existing towns of the second class. Those barons did not confine themselves merely to the creation of sub-feudatories. They also to a very large extent attempted to found municipal towns, and granted numerous charters in the hope of attracting colonists. "Thus Kilkenny and New Eoss received the first charters from the great Earl Marshall. Galway and Clonmel were founded as towns by the De Burgs, Fethard by the Butlers, Athenry by the Berninghams." * This is a fact which implies a great deal. It shows that, in spite of all the demoralising influences under which the Ano^lo-Normans fell, owino: to contact with a form of barbarism which offered to them many charms, because many temptations in the exercise of licentious power, the English settlers did nevertheless sow ia Ireland the seeds of all that in other countries are the recognised indications of at least one of the beginnings of civilisation. To this must be added the important fact that the one thing on which the English Sovereigns did always insist was the right of appointing the Bishops of Irish Sees. In this way they established more and more, from the very first, the Anglo-Norman Church, to the gradual extinction of the semi-barbarous Celtic eccle- * Richey's " Short History," p. 170. CH. il] the latin church. 69 siastical organisation. There are archaBological senti- mentalists, and there are theological parties, who may- think this a matter of regret. I am not Protestant enough to deny, or to doubt the immense part taken by the Latin Church in the growing civilisation of Europe; nor am I sentimentalist enough to fancy in the Celtic or " Culdee " theology any elements of real value in its diflferences with Eome. The balance of advantage as regards all civil or secular affairs cannot be doubted. It is certain that, in that age at least, the English power was in this matter exercised for the best in the interests of the Irish people. 70 IKISH NATIONALISM. [oh. in. CHAPTEK in. EFFECT OF NATIVE IKISH LAWS AND USAGES. But we must not forget that the charge of Mr. Gladstone against England is not the same as the charge which we have dealt with in the mouth of O'Connell. The two charges are the same only in the one fundamental assumption — which is not true — that subsequent to 1172, England governed Ireland in a sense which made her responsible for the domestic and economic condition of the Irish people. But beyond this fundamental assumption, those two Counsel for the prosecution take lines of argument which are not only different, but are diametrically opposite and contradictory. O'Connell's charge is invaluable in the broad assumption which it makes, and on which it entirely rests, that it was the Irish laws and usages which were the bane of Ireland, and that England's sin lay, not in imposing her own law, which was the highest and best, but in even permitting the old Irish customs to continue, and still more in so far as she may have winked at that continuance when clung to CH. III.] CONTRADICTORY CHARGES. 71 by her own colonists. Mr. Gladstone, so far as I know, lias never taken this line of argument. The instincts of the adroit debater, and the necessities of his own new policy, have, indeed, not only held him back from admitting this great truth which underlies O'ConnelFs accusation, but they have led him to adopt the opposite and far more ignorant contention, that the crime of England lay in forcing her own " foreign " law on a people to whose condition it was not adapted, and whose ancient usages ought to have been conformed to and respected. Mr. Gladstone knows that this is by far the more popular idea of the two — the one which best lends itself to passionate declamation, — to the separatist policy, and to inflated fable. It would never do for him to admit that the law and usages of England, if universally established and resolutely enforced, would have been the salvation of Ireland in the twelfth century. It would never do for him to recall, as O'Connell did, the repeated occasions on which portions at least of the Irish people, both natives and settlers, had earnestly appealed for the protection of English law against the miseries to which they were exposed from what may be called the systematic anarchy and oppression of native usages. And so, on repeated occasions, his language has strictly conformed to the exigencies of his immediate position, and has repeatedly dwelt on the alien character of English legislation, and on the consequent woes it has en- tailed. Demonstrably true as the opposite doctrine of 72 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. hi. O'Connell is, and founded as it was on his own know- ledge as a lawyer, it was not the view which at all suited Mr. Gladstone's purpose. Moreover, the oppo- site contention being vague and general in its terms, and harmonising with popular passion and popular ignorance in Ireland, had this great advantage — that even the best and most temperate of Irish historians have used a great deal of wandering language which involves the same notion, and is more or less inspired by it. Fortunately, here again, there can be no dispute about the facts. The only question which can arise is as to the terms and words in which those facts can be most consistently described. In dealing with this it is well to remember what the temptation is to which Irish writers are inevitably exposed. Apart altogether from the natural feelings of a local patriot- ism, there is in our time, perhaps in all time, a sentimental sympathy with primitive conditions of society, and along with this a great liability to mis- take for conditions really primitive, other very dif- ferent conditions which were not primitive at all, but, on the contrary, were the later products of a long development of corruption. And this is exactly what has happened in the case of Ireland. There is a vague almost incoherent notion that the con- ditions of society in Ireland in the twelfth century had continued to be those of what is called the " tribal " system, whereas the Anglo-Norman system CH. iiij tRISH TRIBALISM. 73 is known to have been what is called the "feudal." And upon this supposed distinction an immense super- structure of inflated fable is erected. The sentimental imagination always goes back, on the very mention of the word "tribal," to those conditions of society in which every association of men, having even the semblance of a separate individuality, were brothers or cousins in blood, and all equal in such possessions as might belong to the group. Unfortunately, these are conditions of which we have no authentic record later than the Book of Genesis. And even that information is imperfect. We do not know how long it lasted. The charming pictures of Patriarchal times are vaguely identified with it, and then we think of the old tribes of Israel, or the early tribes of Latium. A hazy notion of universal brotherhood and equality is the attraction here. And no doubt, as compared with this assumed and theoretical past, the regular grades of subordination, and the rude dependence of everybody on some Lord or Chief, which we associate with the Feudal System, offers a very wide, and even an appa- rently violent, contrast. But the moment we begin to inquire into the system prevailing in Ireland in historic times, which has been called "tribal," the whole conception on which this contrast is founded breaks down and vanishes like a dream. The real facts cannot be better stated than in the words of Dr. Kichey: "The Irish tribe, at the earliest date at which we 74 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. iir. possess any distinct information upon the subject, had been altered from its original form : it had then reached the stage at which wealth, represent- ing physical force, had become the acknowledged basis of political power and private right, and the richer members of the community were rapidly reducing the poorer freemen to a condition little better than serfdom; and at the date of its extinc- tion, the tribe had been finally supplanted by the military retainers and tenants, or serfs, of the chiefs." * The condition of things among the Irish during all the centuries which belong to history before the Norman invasion, was a condition of Feudalism of the coarsest and rudest kind. That is to say, it was a condition of things in which every man held every- thing on which his life depended on the condition of absolute subordination to the chief, or lord, under whom he lived. The nobler part of feudalism, indeed, was wanting — the roof of the whole — the cope-stone of the building. Under the perfected feudal system of the Normans, the Chief himself was subordinate to some central Sovereign, to whom his relations, as well as his own relations to those below him, came more and more to be fixed and defined by an advancing system of Jurisprudence and of Law. In Ireland, this golden link of subordination to a central authority, and to common principles of limitation and definition in all rights and obligations — this link was wanting. * '' Short History," p. 42. OH. III.] SEPTS INTENSELY ARISTOCRATIC. 75 Each petty Chief was a law unto himself. His power was practically absolute, and the theoretical ** tribes- men " — really clansmen — were entirely at his mercy — until in extreme cases extraordinary vices may have induced rebellion and civil war. As to the notion of any equality amongst the mass of the Irish people, — such as fancy imagines between brother tribesmen, — such a thing did not exist in Ireland. The whole constitution of society was in- tensely aristocratic — full of men whose condition was abject, of others who were little removed from it, and of others, again, who were graded and ranked below and above each other strictly in proportion to their wealth in the rudest scale of semi-barbarous Possession. Deeply aristocratic in the value set on lineage, and in the power it enjoyed, it was next, and almost equally plutocratic in the privileges which comparative wealth conferred. The one possession in which almost all wealth consisted was that of cows. And such was the miserable poverty of the country, that the possession of even eight of the small cattle then known in Ireland was enough to place a man at once on at least the first rung of the aristocratic ladder. A man rich enough to have twenty-one cows " of his very own," as our children now say, was by comparison a Prince in the Irish Israel — for by virtue of that wealth he was reckoned among the " lords " of Irish society. " Aire " was the Celtic word by which that rank was designated, and as in this, as well as in all other 76 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. m. branches of Aryan speech, the old root of " Bos " or '* Bo " was the name of an ox or cow, so in the Irish terminology the possessor of twenty- one cows was entitled a " Cow-Lord " or a Bo-aire. And so on, up the ladder of power and wealth on which all political privileges depended in Ireland, the " Aires " or Lords were ranked one above another in consideration and importance.* It might be called a Bo-ocracy, under which the great mass of the people were actually serfs, or but little removed above that condition. This is the condition of society which Irish factions, and sometimes English ignorance and declamation, have combined to imagine and represent, and mourn over as a condition of " Tribal " simplicity and equality which was cruelly broken up and oppressed by Anglo- Norman Feudalism. The looseness of thought, the indefiniteness of meaning, with which many men wTite and speak of what they call the "feudal system " is indeed extraordinary. Some politicians now habitually apply the expression to everything in old, or in existing laws, which they themselves disapprove and dislike. The universal and necessary dependence of men upon each other in all the re- lations of life — the dependence of the borrower on the lender in money, or in land, or in anything else which is not our own, but which we may need to hire — the dependence of ignorance upon knowledge — the * Professor O'Curry's "Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish," vol. ii. pp. 34-38. CH. III.] CLAKS WERE NOT TRIBES. 77 dependence of labour upon capital, which is the de- pendence of value upon demand — the dependence of weakness upon strength, — all these forms and kinds of interdependence of some men upon others, are often stigmatised and denounced by anarchists as Feudalism. But, without turning aside to confusions such as these, we have to encounter continually in writings of just repute, a laxity of use as to what is called feudalism, which vitiates the most important practical conclu- sions. Thus, even Dr. Richey says that no two systems of social organisation can be more widely separated than the Feudal and the Tribal. This is quite true, if by "Tribal" we understand the Patriarchal as slightly developed into larger family groups, held together by the bonds of a near blood-relationship, and living together in security and in peace. But it is absolutely untrue, if by " Tribal '* we mean such a condition of society as that which had prevailed in Ireland since before the dawn of history — a system of clans and septs recruited from all quarters, holding, in large numbers, serfs and bondsmen — themselves in vassalage under others — and living in a state of per- petual and internecine wars. That condition of society w^as " feudal " from top to bottom, and as different from the ideal state of primitive tribes as it is possible to conceive. The essence of the feudal system is a very simple matter indeed. It is the necessity of protection on the one hand, and of service and allegiance as 78 . IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. lit. its price upon the other. This relation always is, and always must be, the foundation-stone of all societies which exist under conditions in which every- thing depends upon the sword — ?the sword for the defence of everything that is held, — the sword for the recovery of everything that has been lost, — the sword for establishing protective power, — the sword for destroying enemies, and for repelling aggression. Of course, in every nation that has ever existed, as regards the ultimate necessities of self-defence, this principle has been represented in its military organisa- tion. But in great and powerful states it does not come home to individual men in their social, or even in their political, relations to each other. In all Empires, moreover, properly so called, — that is to say, in great monarchies, with subject and tributary states under them, — the same principle has always received a marked development in directly feudal forms. It was so under the Babylonian and Assyrian Empires. It was so in the Persian, Turkish, and Indian Empires, where it largely survives to the present day. Imperial Eome herself had taken a long step in the same direction when she endowed barbarian soldiers with lands on condition that they would defend the frontiers of the Empire. But in mediaeval Europe its more full and detailed elabora- tion was due to the long absence of any adequate central authority, and the subdivision of power prac- tically supreme among the many chiefs who led the CH. III.] INTENSIFIED INEQUALITIES. - 79 northern nations. This intensified the universal sense of dependence on the sword. It brought it home to every man's door. In Ireland this subdivision was carried to the uttermost limit, and beyond it, of human endurance, for there it was coupled with hereditary enmities between clan and clan, sept and sept, which made the whole Island a constant pandemonium of savagery and destruction. Under such conditions the dependence of every man upon some lord or chief who could alone defend him, became, of necessity, more absolute than in any other country in Europe. To talk of tribal simplicity and equality among men in such a country would be an absurdity, even if we knew nothing of the details which contradict it. The more tribal it was, and the less national — that is to say, the more the depositories of power were not great kings but petty chiefs, each practically independent and unrestrained in his own country — the more intense and helpless must have been the feudal subordination and dependence of the great bulk of the people, — the more unmitigated by any general law, which could define rights or limit obligations. Such, accordingly, we know to have been the fact, and such is the only, as it is the full, explanation of the assumption of O'Connell that the greatest crime to be alleged against England is that she did not sooner enforce her own higher and more regulated feudal organisation on the Irish people, to the complete super- cession and abolition of their own feudalism, which 80 IRISH NATIONALISM. [cH. in. was SO desolating, because so unlimited and unre- strained. Dr. Kichey says, truly enough, that what the English settlers practised in Ireland was not the feudal system at its best, but at its worst — severed from those higher elements of the system, which not only redeemed it from coarseness, but converted it into the greatest agency of civilisation and of law. But when he says, — or rather implies, for he hardly asserts it distinctly, — that the coarser feudalism was introduced into Ireland by the Anglo-Normans, he wanders widely from the fact, as given both by him- self and by a crowd of the most purely native witnesses. What the English barons did was simply to rest more than satisfied with the feudalism which they found to have been long established in Ireland — a feudalism which vested in them a degree of power over their subordinate people which had many legal and cus- tomary restraints in England. The facts on this subject are notorious. They are the whole burden of the song of every Irish writer who undertakes to describe, however superficially, the condition of the people. We have only to look at that single obligation on the one side, and of privilege on the other, which became proverbial as specially Irish, the practice of *'Coigne and Livery." This was the acknowledged right, habitually exercised, of every Irish Lord to quarter himself and his followers to an unlimited extent upon those who occupied land within his territory. It is perpetually referred to as a typical CH. m.] IRISH FEUDALISM. 81 example of many similar usages which depressed the condition and perpetuated the poverty of the people. Bat it is not less a typical illustration of the principle on which all feudalism was founded, and of the rude necessities out of which it came to be. Its historical origin, and the only basis of justification on which it ever rested, was tersely and forcibly expressed in the proverbial motto of the poorer classes in Ireland, "Spend me, but defend me." This means, " All that I have depends on your protection : — I must give you as much of it as you like to take." It would be difficult to put into fewer words the very essence of feudalism — that dependence of every man on some lord for all his possessory rights, which is the central idea of the whole system. Even therefore if it had been true that the words, and terras, and phrases, by which feudal relations were popularly expressed, had been unknown in Ireland, it would be an accountable error on the part of Irish historians to fail in recog- nising the identity of facts, and above all to confound such a system of not only subordination, but subjection, with any supposed primeval equality of men grouped in patriarchal tribes. But when we come to examine the evidence supplied by the best-informed Irish writers, we find that not only are the essential principles and conditions of feudalism the determining elements in all Irish history, but also that even the very root- words which represent those conditions, are of Celtic origin, and were familiarly used in Ireland to designate G 82 IRISH NATIONALISM. [m. m. the corresponding orders of society. The very word "Vassal," embodying, as no other word can do, the fundamental idea of the feudal relation, is a purely Celtic word, and was used to designate the most devoted dependants on Irish Chiefs. It is a word which expressed in English ears, as it still in a measure does, all that was most associated with the abuses of feudalism, — all that was most raw and crude in its beginnings and in its less fortunate developments. I know that I have entered upon a thorny subject in taking a single step into the bypath of Celtic etymology. But at least the one step I have thus ventured upon has been taken under the very safest Irish guidance. Two eminent Irish Professors, in the Catholic University of Dublin, full of Irish patriotism in its best form, have combined their labours to present to us all that can be traced and known by the most laborious and learned investigation on the ancient habits and manners of their country. The "Lectures" of Professor O'Curry, together with an elaborate Introduction bv Professor Sullivan, leave nothing to be desired in the picture they present of mediaeval Irish life. As regards the mere language of feudalism, not only does Professor Sullivan identify, without doubt, the word " vassal " as purely Erse, but even the word " Feud " itself, respecting which there have been so many theories, he has equally little doubt in identifying with an ancient Celtic word, " Fuidirs," which, passing through many stages of CH. til] evidence of PROFESSOR SULLIVAN. 83 meaning, came to designate specially men of native races who had been conquered, and who became, under victorious Chiefs, holders or occupiers of land at the will of their lords.* To a very large extent indeed they became Serfs bound to the soil. Speaking of the name attached to this class of men, "Fuidirs," Professor Sullivan says, "I have no doubt it was the true origin of the word * Feodum,' " f adding that languages foreign to the Celtic adopted the word in forms variously modified *' to describe almost the very same kind of tenure already existing among the people where the word 'Feodum,' and all the other forms of that term, came first into use." But this is not all. No writer has torn asunder more ruthlessly the inflated fictions which represent the system of society under the Irish septs and clans as one which had even the slightest flavour of the supposed simplicity and equality of primeval tribes. He depicts and describes in detail, on the contrary, a condition of things in which division, subdivision, inequality, sub- ordination, and subjection penetrated society through and through. In the first place, the Irish clans in the twelfth century, of whom he speaks conventionally as being the natives, were nothing but a victorious aristocracy, who held an older and a conquered population in bondage. They were not, any more than other races, autochthones. They were not even * O'Curry's " Lectures," Introduction, pp. 224, 225. t Ibid., p. 226, 84 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. ni. indigenous since times that are wholly unknown. The details of the conquest effected by the dominant Irish Clans, anciently called Scoti, are indeed obscure. But traditions, which rest on much historical corrobo- ration, have compelled the substantial agreement and assent of the most learned writers on Irish history, to conclusions which make it certain that the Irish Clans, as we know them in the Middle Ages, had exactly the same title, but no other and no better, to the possession of their country, than the title of any other invading and conquering race in Europe, or than the title of any yet later invaders who might succeed in repeating the same process. Moreover, the same evidence and the invariable results of the like causes have convinced the same writers that the numerical proportion of the subject races to those who ruled over them came to be so large that, in fact, the great bulk of those who would now be called the people of Ireland, were reduced to serfdom — to the condition, that is to say, of holding everything that belonged to them on conditions of tribute, or of service, or of both, together with the usual status of serfs — that of being bound to the soil. But this universal cause and origin of inequality in the social and political condition of every country in Europe, was reinforced in Ireland by the most elabo- rate system of distinctions of rank and wealth between individuals among the dominant race itself, which do not seem to have had any parallel elsewhere. When we CH. III.] IRISH GRADATIONS OF RANK. 85 try to follow Professor Sullivan, for example, through his learned and careful analysis of the good old Irish society before the pretended conquest, we find our- selves lost in a perfect maze of names and designations for the different grades into which men were divided, and subdivided, under and above each other. Those names are not only unpronounceable, and unspellable, — which would be a small matter as the result of the mere linguistic peculiarities of the Celtic tongue, — but, what is much more remarkable, they are almost as untranslatable. The English language and the English mind, labour in vain to follow the number and variety of degrees under which Irish human beings could be separately ranged and ranked in a society w^hich was even nominally one. But wherever a trans- lation of those names can be effected through evident points of comparison and of contact with the other military societies of Mediaeval Europe, we find sub- stantially the same elements out of which the system of Feudalism arose — only with this difference, that they were much less civilised — much less modified by the influence of that splendid jurisprudence of the Koman people, which even its barbarian conquerors had learnt to respect, and the great monuments of which had been largely translated into their own tongue. The Celtic Clans in Ireland, cut off from this great source and fountain of organic power, and a prey to continual feuds and fightings, went on for centuries developing nothing except all those more and more 86 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. hi. savage conditions of society, which are the inevitable result of everything depending, not only on the sword, but on the sword in the hands of nobody more important than petty Chiefs, and Kinglets. And so it comes out, as the net result of Professor Sullivan's account, that those Irishmen, who were in the enjoyment of such political and social rights as then existed at all in a so-called Irish Tribe, were a mere fraction of the people, — all others living in various degrees of subjection down to the lowest serf. Thus Professor Sullivan's account of the " Different Classes of Society in Ancient Ireland " occupies some twenty pages of closely printed matter devoted to explain the position of some nine classes, of which only three " could be said to have political rights, that is, a definite position in the tribe ; " * and all these classes, without any exception, we are expressly told, were equally under the protection, as retainers, of the " Flaths," or Chiefs — the very highest of these classes, who were called ** Aires," holding their lands of their lords in lieu of suit and service rendered, and the payment of certain feudal rents.f It is true that these graded classes were not castes in the Indian sense of that word : — that is to sav, a man might rise from a lower to a higher class. But it was equally true that he might fall from a higher to a lower grade. And it is farther true that * Introduction, p. 129. f It»id. CH. III.] IRISH FORM OF WEALTH. 87 the process of falling was much more easy than the process of rising. The system, besides being intensely aristocratic, was almost as predominantly plutocratic. A man's wealth almost alone determined his position. And as there was, among the ancient Irish, practically but one form of wealth — the primitive one of cattle — the system may be described as a Cow-ocracy, or, as we have seen, it was to some extent even actually called a Bo-ocracy. There is no doubt as to the meanins: of the class of nobles called Bo-aires in the old Irish social classification ; because the very same word, with the same root-meaning, survives to this day in Scot- land, where it is the custom in some counties for one man to hire a whole dairy of cows from another man who owns them as a farmer, and to undertake the marketing of the produce for a stipulated rent per head of the cows. This man is locally called the Bo-er, corrupted into **Booer," and it is possible, perhaps probable, that the common w^ord for a Dutch farmer, Boer, is nothing but another survival of the same word. However this may be, the essential fact as to the ancient Irish is that the social and economic, and even legal condition of every man was mainly determined by his wealth in cattle, and that the pre- datory habits of the clans as against each other must have made the tenure of rank, depending on this pro- fession, a tenure of extreme precariousness. Accord- ingly, Dr. Sullivan explains * that as a necessary * Introduction. 88 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. hi. consequence of continual ravages all over the country, the constant gravitation of all men downwards from comparative wealth as estimated in those days, to the greatest poverty, was a never-ceasing force dragging down all the subordinate classes into more and more abject dependence on the Chiefs, who alone could possibly protect them. Such is the system which many Irish agitators, and some deluded English politicians think, or pretend to think, was a system of charming tribal sympathy and equality, which " we " broke down by the introduction of what they call feudalism into Ireland. Dr. Sullivan and other really learned and honest Irish historians are not responsible, except by occasional and incon- sistent observations, for this gross delusion. He says emphatically, " that the state of things in Ireland was no exception to what conquest has always produced among nations — privileged classes and serfs or slaves, — may be inferred, not only from the number of dis- tinct immigrations which our legendary history records, but also from the complete development of a tribal system, aristocratically organised^* Nor does he fail to show how in Ireland, even in the oldest and most primi- tive days before the succession to chiefry had become hereditary, eligibility to the position of Chief was an eligibility attached to birth. It was only out of a limited number of families, to whom legend attributed a divine origin, that the Chiefs could be elected ; " f * latroductioD, p. 79. t Ibid., p. 100. CH. in.] IRISH PROPERTY IN LAND. 89 and Dr. Sullivan goes the length of saying that, " properly speaking, it was only the noble families that were of the Clan — the tenants and retainers, when not related by blood to the Chief, only helonged to it'' Neither does Dr. Sullivan deny — on the con- trary, he fully admits — that whatever original elements of inequality existed in the very nature of the clan system and organisation, were aggravated in Ireland by its perpetual wars — during the course of which a larger and a larger portion of the whole people did of necessity fall lower and lower, from the enormous losses of property which they entailed, and from the increasing need which all men felt for placing them- selves under complete conditions of service and dependence. But the most inveterate part of all this delusion about the old " tribal " system of the Irish, and the part of it which is most hugged and cherished, is that which is identified with the delusion that private property in land was unknown till " we " introduced it at the supposed conquest along with the rest of the " feudal system.'* Dr. Sullivan and Dr. O'Curry both repudiate and expose this delusion — as well they may. Some of the most patent facts in Irish history are suffi- cient to contradict it absolutely. There is a handsome volume called '* The National Manuscripts of Ireland," in which we find, in regular feudal form, three Charters of land given by Irish Chiefs and Kings, and written in the Erse or Gaelic language. One of these is a 90 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. hi. Charter, — a grant of land — to a family of monks, given ninety-two years before the invasion of Henry II. And we know that in all countries the first granting of land in the form of written Charters was always the mere beginning of formal records, and not at all the beginning of the transactions thus for the first time re- corded. All the first Charters were, and purported to be, a mere recognition, in a new form, of rights and practices of immemorial usage and antiquity. As regards Ireland, it is notorious that Dermot, King of Leinster, who invited the first Anglo- Welsh ad- venturers, granted to them land as part of his treaty- obligations with them for their aid in recovering his own possessions. Irish writers, indeed, pretend to find fault with this grant as having been beyond the right of any Irish King. But in this contention, they found only on theoretical and purely imaginary concep- tions about ancient tribal rights in Ireland, which are without any sound historical evidence, even as regards the earliest times, and are wholly inapplic- able to the usages which, in the twelfth century, had been long established. The grants given by Dermot to the first of the Irish Geraldines, were obviously made in pursuance of those rights of dis- posal over landed estates which had been exercised and recorded, nearly a century before, in favour of the Monks of Kells in Meath. Nothing can be more definite, nothing can bear more clear evidence of CH. in.] EVIDENCE OF ANCIENT BOOKS. 91 the transaction being one of a familiar kind, than the grant by Dermot to Maurice Fitzgerald and Kobert Fitzstefen of the town of Wexford " and two cantreds of land in its neighbourhood." * More- over, we know that these grants by Dermot were afterwards recognised and sanctioned by the titular King of all Ireland, who seems to have still re- tained some shadow of a recognised authority in such matters. Farther, we see incidentally, from these authentic Irish Charters, that land had then commonly become possessed by individuals, and had been bought and sold for definite sums of money. In the Charter of 1080, the title given by it to the grantees proves by the careful record of the fact that it had been the property of an individual, who sold it and had held it "as his own lawful land." f There is, moreover, much older written evidence than this Gaelic Charter of 1080. The " Book of Armagh" is one of the greatest treasures of Irish Archseology. The writing in which we now have it has been pretty clearly identified as belonging to the ninth century, and it is known to have been then only a copy of an older manuscript of the seventh century. In any case, whatever its precise date may have been, it contains much of the very oldest contemporary evidence we possess on the con- dition of Ireland in what has been called its " heroic * " The Earls of Kildare," p. 5. t "National Manuscripts of Ireland," part iv. p. 45, and No. lix. 92 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. m. age." Yet in this Book we have the following entry — " Cummen and Brethan purchased Ochter-n-Achid, with its appurtenances, both wood and plain, and meadow, together with its habitation and its garden." * This is clearly the purchase of an Estate precisely like the transactions recorded in Charters of four hundred years later. But, in truth, such formal evidence is superfluous. The exclusive right of use over certain areas of land vested in groups of men, and within those groups, in the individuals of which the groups are composed, according to the different kinds of use prevalent at the time and place, has been the universal claim and possession of mankind, whether savage or civilised, since the world began. For this right they have always had to pay, often heavily, by some sacrifice or some exertion. Under whatever name this pay- ment passes, and to whatever kind of use it is applied, — whether hunting, pastoral, or agricultural, — the principle is the same in all cases. Some organised defence of this right is a necessity of its enjoyment. The imaginary condition of tribes, patriarchal and pastoral, feeding their flocks upon a vacant land, with **none to make them afraid," is a vision and a dream. It certainly is as wide as the poles asunder from the condition of the Irish Celts from the earliest dawn either of history or tradition. The particular organised system of defence upon which in Ireland * Sullivan's Introduction, p. 89. CH. m.] ALLEGED COMMUNAL OWNERSHIP. 93 every man depended for all he had, and for life itself, was a system which made the heaviest demands upon him. Unlimited exactions were the price of any tolerable security. Constant liability to be " eaten out of house and home" was the permanent and paramount condition. With those who wielded this supreme power, the supreme disposal of land neces- sarily rested. This fact could not fail to be recog- nised in the practical transactions of life. Accord- ingly, those Irish historians who have been really learned in the ancient lore of their country, have felt that in the whole structure of Society as the oldest literature and tradition present that structure to their view, there are to be recognised all the same essential conditions which marked corresponding stages in the barbarism and in the civilisation of the other northern races. It is now thirty years since Dr. Sullivan wrote his elaborate Introduction to the " Lectures " of Pro- fessor O'Curry upon the ancient Irish. Since that time much has been written and much has been clearly ascertained, which is at irreconcilable vari- ance with the prevalent but vague impression about the communal ownership of land among the various barbarian races who overwhelmed the Koman Empire. Yet Dr. Sullivan, from his intimacy with the facts of the earliest Irish history, has anticipated much of the results which have now been well established. In our own Island the researches of Mr. Seebohm, 94 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. in. and more recently the nearly exhaustive investi- gations of Mr. Fustel de Coulanges, in France, — researches which extend over the whole of Europe, — have made it evident that whatever may have been the state of things in ages which are quite beyond the reach of history — ages when all our ancestors were nothing more than nomad families — it is certain that the division of ownership into individual possession had been established, and often highly developed, at the earliest dates of which we have any certain know- ledge. Moreover, the amended doctrine, now generally accepted on this subject, reconciles to a great extent the real facts with the mistaken interpretation which had long been put upon them. That mistake lay in confounding communal occu- pation and communal methods of cultivation, with communal ownership. But these are wholly different things. Communal methods of cultivation, com- munal pasturages, and communal customs, even as to the little ploughing that was practised in the wretched agriculture of the early Middle Ages, were indeed almost universal. The individual property of most men consisted chiefly of cattle, and these grazed of necessity, when there were no enclosures, in common with the cattle of all neighbours in the same township. But this has nothing what- ever to do with the question, whether all these men did not owe their common riglit of pasturage- common as among themselves, but exclusive as re- CH. III.] DR. SULLIVAN ON OWNERSHIP. 95 gards all outsiders — to the grant or leave of some common lord or supreme owner. It is these two ques- tions which have been long confounded. Individual ownership has been denied merely because there was little or no individual pasturing, or even continued individual cultivation. But on close investigation it comes out clearly enough that in all cases every man had to pay for his share in the common rights to some chief, or lord, or king, some dues, or services which were in the nature of rent, and which very often represented a far larger share of the produce than is, or can be paid, by a modern tenant farmer. The pay- ment of these dues and services is a universal fact in the earliest history of Ireland, They are inseparably connected with the idea of that exclusive right of disposal over certain areas of land, whether small or large, in which individual ownership consists. Accordingly, Dr. Sullivan says, " I believe that the right of individuals, among the Irish and so-called Celtic inhabitants of Great Britain, to the absolute pos- session of part of the soil, rests upon as certain, perhaps more certain, evidence, than among the Anglo-Saxon and other Germanic peoples ; and farther, that, as might have been anticipated among so closely allied branches of the Aryans, the general principles of the laws regulating the occupation of land were practically the same among all the early northern nations, whether called Celts or Germans." * " In Ireland," he farther * Introduction, p. 138. 96 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. hi. tells US, " the ownership of land constituted, as it does now, the special characteristic of the *Flath' or lord." That there always was and always must have been a part — and a large part — of the territory of the whole Sept not occupied by the Chief himself, with his more immediate retainers, is true. But Dr. Sullivan tells us that even over this part he held *' dominion," and considering what "dominion "meant in those days, and among a people so dependent on the supreme military power — considering that all that we now think of as the State was then concentrated in the Chief — con- sidering, too, that tribute and rent seem to have been a universal condition of life to all, — we can well understand how little that distinction came to on which antiquarian theorists lay so much stress. But so far as the communal habits of pasturage and of cultivation were concerned, they remained the same in all cases. Under the man, for example, whose lands were bought, and given to the Monastery of Kells, — and of which it is expressly said in the Gaelic Charter of 1080 that they were his " own lawful " lands, — there may have been, and there no doubt were, occupying tenants of the various grades into which Irishmen were then divided, according to their birth or their wealth in cows, and these must have lived under the same communal usages, which were universal in the Middle Ages. But perhaps the most extraordinary delusion about Irish land is that which dwells upon the idea of irre- CH. 111.] IRREMOVABILITY WAS BONDAGE. 97 movability as attaching to such subordinate tenures as were possessed. It is an idea, indeed, largely founded on some very certain and very obvious facts. And yet it is extraordinary because of the equally obvious misinterpretation of those facts. It is true that the poorer classes in Ireland, in the early Middle Ages, were to a large extent stationary, because they were to a corresponding extent in a condition of bondage. They were bound to the soil, and bound not less to render dues and services for the protection which they enjoyed under a bondage which was often voluntarily adopted. This was one great reason and cause for the irremovability which has been made so much of. But there was another reason and another cause equally powerful, and even more wide in its operation. In the military ages men were valued for nothing except their hands and arms as usable in fighting. There was generally no reason in the world why any chief or landowner should prefer one man to another, except for physical strength ; and some average number of weaklings had to be counted on in every population. In those days and under those conditions of society, there was nothing whatever that could induce a chief or great landowner to move his poorer dependants. One man as well as another could employ a serf to herd his 60ws. One man as well as another could employ the same agency to take his turn in such miserable ploughing as was then known among the people. The great aim and object 98 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. m. « of every territorial lord was not to have poor de- pendants whom he could remove, but to have such dependants who could not even remove themselves. On the other hand, those dependants themselves had nowhere to go to except to place themselves, as soon as they could, under the same kind of service and correlative protection under some other chief. Never- theless it is a curious fact that even in ancient Ireland there seems to have been a large class of what we should now call agricultural, or rather pasturing tenants, who were not only theoretically removable, but were actually and systematically removed when- ever, from any cause, it was convenient for the owner or chief to change his tenants. This was the very large and ever-increasing class of men who were too poor to have any cows of their own. They hired the cows as well as the land, and Dr. O'Curry tells us that the term of their tenure was only seven years, at the end of which term they had to give up both the cows and the land — the cows in undiminished number and quality.* In short, he says that within the tribal territory then, just as within all national territory now, " individuals held inclusive property in land, and entered into relations with tenants for the use of the land, and these again with under-tenants, and so on, much as we see it in our own days." t This testimony from one of the most learned writers on the ancient constitution of Irish society, effectually * O'Ourry's « Lectures," vol. ii. p. Si. f Ibid. CH. III.] BONDAGE TO THE SOIL. 99 disposes of the vague declamatory language held by- politicians on this subject. The truth is that in Ireland the mass of the people were not better off, but greatly worse, in all these economic conditions, than any other people in Europe. In Ireland, because of the long endurance of lawless conditions, the steps of development were from a comparative personal free- dom to more and more universal subordination and relative servitude. The wonderful thing about popular Irish oratory upon the subject in modern times, is that the best Irish historians have here also, as in other cases, seen and stated clearly enough the facts which demonstrate the absurdity of transferring the language and ideas of the nineteenth, or even of the seventeenth century, to the conditions of any of the centuries between the Christian era and the Norman invasion. Thus Dr. Sullivan very significantly says that the irremovability of the poorer classes from the home of their birth or of their enlistment, and even of classes far above the poorest, was the inevitable result of the immediate interest which the Chiefs had in keep- ing up their military force. " Adscription to the Glebe," he says, " only gradually grew up in Europe from the difficulty the lords experienced in keeping tenants." * In the rest of Europe, indeed, in proportion as ancient towns and municipalities revived, or were anew created, freemen might be easily tempted to move away from the territory of oppressive lords. In Ireland, there * Introduction, p. 114. 100 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. hi. was no such resource. But on the other hand the universal prevalence of imminent danger to life and to such property as existed, made the condition of removability from the soil as little coveted on the one side, as it would have been thought of on the other. " All freemen," says Dr. Sullivan, " in the olden time in Ireland, not even excepting the privileged crafts, such as goldsmith, blacksmith, and some others, as well as professional classes and Bo-aires (Cow-owners), were retainers of the Chiefs or Lords." * Theoreti- cally, indeed, " freemen " were free : but even they had the conditions of dependence imposed upon them by the circumstances of society in Ireland during all the centuries of its early history. For it cannot be too emphatically repeated that the historical evidence for the perfect continuity of its miserable history from the earliest times, is as overwhelming as it is authentic. If the " Annals of the Four Masters " stood alone, they would be enough to prove the facts. But these Annals do not stand alone. In the "Book of Leinster " — another of the most ancient Gaelic Manu- scripts of Ireland, transcribed from much older docu- ments in the twelfth century, we have a collection of the antique historic tribes of the Irish Celts. They go back to the Christian era. They have been classified under the following heads — the titles of which tell their own tale : — " Destructions," " Cattle- Spoils," " Wooings," " Battles," *' Incidents of Caves," * Introduction, p. 110. CH. III.] REMOVABILITY WAS PERSONAL FREEDOM. 101 " Voyages and Navigations," " Tragedies and Death Feasts," " Sieges," " Adventures," " Elopements," *' Slaughters," " Expeditions," " Progresses," and " Conflagrations." * Such was the whole history of Ireland for twelve centuries and a half before the Normans came, and such it continued to be with little or no mitigation for three or four centuries later — until the country was at last really conquered, and the Irish were admitted to the same external influences to which all other European nations owe their final civilisation. To speak of irremovability from the soil, as it existed in Ireland, as a boon to the people, or as an indication of bappy conditions which were subsequently lost, is one of the strangest misconceptions which has ever arisen, even from that most fertile source of con- fusion — the transfer of words and phrases from modern times to au older world in which they had a very different significance. The more clearly Irish orators can prove the late date down to which the idea and the practice of irremovability attached to the poorer classes in Ireland, the more clearly they will prove the verv late date at which two of the first conditions of civilisation were established in their country. The first of these two conditions is the recognition of personal freedom as regarded military services. The second is the recognition of personal merit as regards the pursuits of industry. In the battles of spears and shields, irremovability was the badge of bondage. In * " National Manuscripts of Ireland," part ii. p. 30. 102 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. hi. agriculture, it was the badge of stagnation and of the absence of all improvement. There is no evidence, however, that in this matter the Norman invasion did either good or harm. In so far as a new element of strength was added to Irish chiefry, it did probably tend to improvement, because each chief in proportion to his strength was better able to defend his own territory, and so to afford some better opportunity to such settlers as may have introduced some elements of knowledge and skill into the archaic agriculture of Ireland. But not much stress can be laid on this — because even in England, in those ages, both pastoral and agricultural industry were in a very rude stage. All that can be said with certainty is that nothing was made worse, and some things must, of necessity, have been made a great deal better. The moment we come to examine any of the specific cases in which the English G-overnment is said to have been the cause of any injury to the condition of the people, as compared with their former state, the accusation breaks down completely. There is one case in which this charge has the support of Dr. Sullivan, which is an excellent example. It is a charge founded on the fact that the English law never recognised the archaic usages of succession to property in Ireland, which were akin to the old usage of Gavel- kind in Kent. Yet Dr. Sullivan himself, as usual, supplies all the facts, and even a good many of the arguments, which prove that the Irish usages, in this CH. III.] LAWS OF SUCCESSION. 103 matter, were in those ages always injurious to the people amongst whom they had become established, and were especially injurious in Ireland. In very rude and prehistoric conditions of society, such as those which prevailed among the northern nations before their great migrations, — wlien no property existed except some cattle, household utensils, and weapons of war, — the subdivision of such property in- discriminately, or with complicated discriminations, which were perhaps worse, might possibly be com- paratively harmless. Yet Dr. Sullivan explains very truly that even then the system could only be worked by a resort to that extensive emigration in quest of new settlements which was the one great relief, in those times, to hunger and poverty at home. He explains how, as regards the Teutonic tribes, upon the Continent, the inconveniences of increasing subdivision were early arrested by the adoption of primogeniture. He quotes the opinion of a distinguished writer on the Anglo- Saxons, who thinks that the long survival of the ruder custom among them, had so weakening an effect that it facilitated their conquest by the Normans.* He confesses that we only know the Irish custom in a much more archaic form than even among the kindred races, and he gives such an account of it in detail as to show at a glance how incompatible it must have been with any progress in wealth. But in his can- dour as an historian he goes farther than this. He * Introduction, p. 179. 104 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. in. frequently admits that " the custom of gavelkind, by the great subdivision of property which it effected, tended to deprive the majority of freemen of all political rights under a constitution where property was an essential element of political power." * Yet in spite of these truthful representations of the historian, the feelings of the Irish sentimentalist prevail again ; and in referring to the fact that English law never did, as indeed it never could, recognise those Irish usages, and, in 1605, did at last expressly repudiate them, — he breaks out into the usual and most illogical declamation — averring that this repudiation "more than any other measure, not excepting the repeated confiscations, injured the country, and gave rise to most of the present evils of the Irish law system." f Wonderful as this sentence is in contrast with what has gone before, it is perhaps even more curious in connection with some additional historical facts which he adds in the same paragraph. One of these is this emphatic testimony to the weakening and impoverishing effect of the Irish gavelkind — that when the Protestant Parliament was inventing weapons of offence against the Roman Catholics, they pulled this most effective of all weapons out of the old Irish armoury, and enacted, as one of the Penal Laws, that the Estates of all Eoman Catholics should be made subject to the old Irish custom of Gavelkind for the very purpose of preventing their acquiring * IntroductioD, p. 183. f Ibid., p. 184. CH. m.] INTEREST OF POORER CLASSES. 105 wealth, or founding families. Another fact Dr. Sullivan records in the same connection, with apparently an equal blindness to its significance — namely this — that in Wales also, as well as in Kent, the custom of Gavelkind was abolished by Statute under Henry VIII. ; and he adds this significant observation : " But the rights of the tenants do not appear to have been injured by the new legisla- tion." Of course not. It was not better, but a great deal worse for the poorer classes, who were only tenants, to be placed under petty landlords rather than under greater landlords. The uncertain exactions, which were the great curse of Ireland, were of neces- sity more oppressive and ruinous to the mass of the population in proportion to the weakness of their landlords — to their poverty — to their inability to defend their dependants against the raids of enemies, and to their own dependence upon, and need of exhausting contributions. We could have no better example than this of the inveterate unreasonableness of even the best Irishmen in ascribing all the evils of their country to external influences and causes, and of their blindness to those which were of purely native origin. Dr. Sullivan is no mere declaimer — no mere mob-orator — no mere unscrupulous or passionate party leader. As an historian he is in the highest degree capable, exact, and honest. He gives us all the facts. He tells us of the custom of inheritance to property — that 106 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. hi. known as Gavelkind — which every other European race abandoned as soon as a settled civilisation began to be established. He shows how it operated in weakening the social and political organisation wherever it was suffered to remain. He tells us how it was deliberately abolished, where it still lingered in England, at the request of those who were most immediately affected by it. He tells us how it was at the same time abolished universally in Wales, and specially notes that the abolition of it had no injurious effects on the condition of the people. Passing to his own country, he shows how disastrous its operation had been there in breaking down all natural barriers against the oppression of arbitrary power, and reducing the people to one dead level of helpless poverty and dependence. He tells us that those effects were so thoroughly recognised and known that the revival of this ruinous custom and its special application to Koman Catholics was one of the sources of the Penal Laws. And yet in the face of all these facts and inevitable inferences, he suddenly turns round in a passing observation to blame England for not having kept up this custom, so penal in its effects against the whole people of Ireland. In comparison with this charge against England, O'Connell's contradictory charge is reasonableness itself, — the charge, namely, that she had not, cen- turies before, applied to Ireland the benefits of her own higher law and civilisation. And although, for CH. III.] EVILS OF NATIVE CUSTOMS. 107 other reasons already stated here, this accusation can be repelled, yet as regards this particular Irish custom of succession it is true that when England did at last, at the close of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century, really conquer, and begin to govern Ireland, on the principles recommended by O'Connell, her statesmen saw and denounced this old native custom as one of the main causes of Irish poverty and of Irish stagnation. Sir John Davies, in his celebrated Keport, declared it to have been a custom which would have been enough to ruin Hell, if it had been established in the kingdom of Beelzebub. And it is a curious fact that all indi- vidual Irishmen whose interests or whose intelligence had led them to look at this, and other closely related customs of the country in respect to property, had long been unanimous in their desire to escape from the whole system. Especially did the Irish eccle- siastics of all divisions of the Church, whether Celtic or Latin, bear unconscious but striking tes- timony to their sense of the ruinous character of all the native customs, and invariably made a point in all the charters of land which they accepted to stipulate expressly that the land was to be held free from all the " evil customs of the Irish " — or as it was tersely described in Latin, "absque omnibus malis consue- tudinibus Hibernicis." If Irishmen in our day have no other accusation to make against England than that she would not 108 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. m. sanction those " evil customs " when she did get the power of government into her own hands, we may well be satisfied with the result, and may turn with good hope to the work of dealing with the extraordinary delusion of men, even so eminent as Dr. Sullivan — that what are called the evils of the Irish " land system " have had any connection whatever with the abolition of customs which have been admitted by Irishmen themselves, in so many forms of action and confession, to have been barbarising and ruinous in their effects. To this subject I shall return — in thorough agreement with O'Connell's opposite contention — merely observing here that Mr. Gladstone has adopted the easy method of all declaimers — that of denouncing England for having introduced " foreign " and alien laws, without any attempt to prove or to trace any rational con- nection between the alleged cause and the effects. In the mean time, and before returning to this subject, I claim to have established the fact that, so far as concerns the domestic government and social condition of the Irish people, the great operative causes con- tinued to be, after the pretended conquest seven hundred years ago, precisely what they had been for twelve centuries before that date — causes deeply seated in the customs, manners, and political divisions of the Celtic Clans, and that, so far as these causes are con- cerned, they have nobody to blame but themselves, and these outward circumstances of geographical posi- CH. III.] IRISH INCONSISTENCY. 109 « tion whicli isolated them from tlie main stream of European civilisation, of race-mixtures, and of con- quest. That every people should be governed ac- cording to its own ancient usages and customs is a general proposition which may be plausible. That all old usages and customs are good for the people amongst whom they have come to be established, considering the corruption of mankind, and the way in which man has tortured himself all over the world, is a proposition that is, on the face of it, absurd. That the very same Irishmen who admit the disastrous effects of the old customs of their country, should nevertheless ascribe all later evils to the conduct of England in not upholding them — this is an exhibition of inconsistency which may be interesting and even pathetic when we trace it to the national influence of a vague patriotic sentiment. But when we find this sentimental nonsense passionately expressed by Eng- lish politicians, who have no similar excuse, it is high time to expose its true character. 110 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. iv. CHAPTEE ly. HISTORY CONTINUED FROM A.D. 1172 TO THE END OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. But now at last we come to a cause of Ireland's later woes which does stand in close connection with the events of 1172. But it is a close connection forged mainly — in one aspect forged entirely — by Irish hands. That connection is simply this — that, from the moment that the King of England became the Feudal "Lord of Ireland," all his enemies were tempted to attack him on his Irish side. If the Irish had been loyal to their Liege, according to the code of honour and obligation admitted in that relation and in those ages, this temptation on the part of the enemies of England would have done no harm to Ireland. The Island was practically inaccessible from the European continent; and Ireland would have remained far more unconquerable by the enemies of the King of England than she was by that King himself. Obviously therefore the danger could only arise out of the complicity of the Irish, or of some CH. rv'.J RIGHT OF ENGLAND. Ill considerable part of them, with the enemies of the Sovereign to whom they owed allegiance. Or if we choose to say that it is absurd to claim as against the Irish any duty of allegiance, even although they had accepted it and sworn to it ; — if we choose to say that — looking to the habits of those military ages — the Irish had a right to throw off their allegiance if and whenever they could, and to lend themselves to the enemies of their acknowledged King, — even thus, the case remains the same. There is much to be said for this view. Those were not the days of Peace Societies, and Courts of Arbitration. Everything, all over the world, hung upon the sword. But if this is the view taken, it must be taken consistently. If the Irish had a right to ally themselves with the enemies of England, at least England had the corresponding right to do her very best to defeat and punish all such alliances. Nor in the light of history and of reason as applied to all the results to civilisa- tion which were involved, can it be doubted for a moment that this was, on the part of England, as much a duty as it was a necessity and a right. She bore in her hands a great future for mankind in government and law. The Irish bore in their hands no interest whatever of this kind — so much so that even their greatest leading advocate in our own time, Daniel O'Connell, could say nothing worse of England than that she had not enforced her own system of jurisprudence at a time when she could not possibly 112 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. iv. effect any such design, I lay stress on this matter here, because, as we shall see, it is the key to the whole history of the relations between England and Ireland from the twelfth century down to the middle of the eighteenth — from 1172 to 1750. It is even the key to the traditions, as well as to the thoughts, and feelings, and anticipations which affect, and legitimately affect us still. The first occasion on which this great cause and source of evil is seen working is an occasion typical of all its worst effects. For nearly a century and a half after Henry II. had received the homage of the Irish Chiefs, the five succeeding Kings of England had no enemy who was in a position to attack them through Ireland. On the contrary, England was in a position to use the Irish for her own aggressive purposes. The Anglo-Norman element, both fresh settlers and old Ersefied settlers, was on the whole gaining ground in Ireland by reason of its inherent superiority in many ways. The native Irish were always ready to lend themselves to any fighting. The English Kings continually called on the Irish Barons for aids and military services in all their foreign wars.* And so it happened that when Edward I. undertook the conquest of Scotland he was able to draw upon Ireland for a very large contingent to his army. No less than ten thousand foot, besides cavalry, was his summons in 1295. Such a force * Richey's " Short History," p. 181. CH. IV.] IRISH ANALOGY IN SCOTLAND. 113 could not be raised out of the English Settlers alone, who must have themselves relied largely on their native Irish retainers. The Irish of both breeds did their very best to rivet the yoke of England on the rising kingdom which had been established in Scotland by the happy union and common allegiance of both the Celtic and Teutonic races there. When, after Edward's death, his feebler son tried to complete his father's enterprise, the same combination defeated him in the signal overthrow of Bannockburn, in 1312. And it is a curious and significant indication of the perfect consciousness of both kingdoms as to the weakest points in their respective armours, that when peace was made on the footing of the independence of Scotland being recognised, both Sovereigns pledged themselves not to assail, or to intrigue against each other through alliance with the Celtic Clans. For England these were represented by Ireland taken as a whole. For Scotland they were represented by the Hebridean Islanders. And so accordingly, the moment quarrels and war broke out again, the English monarchy and nation was at once attacked through Ireland. The Irish themselves were excited by the exhibition of English weakness. The Scots were excited by the possibility of wresting from their old enemy that country which had helped him to subdue them. The Scoto-Norman knights, one of whom had become King of Scotland, were not less excited by the hope of founding a New Kingdom in the I 114 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. iv. West. But there was one fatal flaw in this con- spiracy against England. And it was a flaw due to the ineradicable eflects of the old Irish character. Scotland had won her independence by a thorough and hearty union between the strongest and best of her many races, and by the noble ambition of setting up a central and a civilised government. The Irish proceeded, as they had always done, by falling back upon racial animosities, and a fierce desire to expel the very best of the materials out of which alone they could build up a civilised government. Dr. Kichey tells us that the native Irish chieftains entered into their agreement with King Bobert Bruce for the purpose "of expelling the English;" and in their long letter to the Pope they expressly mentioned the Celtic blood of Edward Bruce as the natural explanation of their choice. They describe King Bobert as "a descendant of some of the most noble of our own ancestors." * If we are to allow ourselves to be irrationally afiected in our readings and judg- ments of history, by either racial, family, or even the lower forms of national sentiment, I should heartily sympathise with the famous attempt of Edward Bruce to do in Ireland a work at least superficially like the great work his brother had done in Scotland. Scotch- men who, like myself, have the same special share that he had in the ancient Celtic blood of the Irish Scoti — who admire as we all do the heroic character * « Short History," p. 195. CH. IV.] SCOTS INVASION OF IRELAND. 115 of " The Bruce '* — who are disposed to remember with resentment the ready help which Irishmen then gave, and often have since given, to the enemies of Scottish liberty, — we might be tempted to cherish a natural sympathy with the invasion of Ireland by the Bruces in 1315. But for those who look in History, above all things, for the steps of human progress, and who desire to know the causes of its arrestment or decline, it is impossible to be guided by such childish sym- pathies. It is, indeed, as idle to blame the Scottish King, as to condemn the Irish chiefs and clans. If indeed we were to carry the judgments of our own time back into the history of the past, it would be impossible not to denounce the war that followed as having been, on the part of the Irish, a war quite as wicked as it was disastrous to themselves. At the same time it must be observed that although it must be so judged as regards the Irish, it is impossible to deny that King Eobert the Bruce had a legitimate cause of war even according to the most civilised rules of modern times. Dr. Richey very fairly says that one object he must have aimed at was to cut off the supplies of men on which England depended for a large part of the forces with which she fought against the Scotch. The real truth, however, is that to blame Irishmen in the fourteenth century for rebelling against their Liege Lord, or for fighting against him with anybody or for anything, would be as absurd as to blame one gamecock for flying at 116 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. iv. another, and inflicting the most bloody injuries upon him. Let us therefore put praise and blame equally out of the question on both sides, and look at the matter simply as one of cause and of effect. Whatever defence or justification may be pleaded for either the Irish or for the Scotch, it is certain that no defence or justification is needed for the English. It cannot be denied that England was not only entitled but bound to fight with every weapon she could employ against the setting up of a new and hostile kingdom on her flanks — a kingdom to be founded on the defeat and expulsion of her own sons, who had been settled in Ireland for a century and a half, and held their possessions by the same title as the Irish themselves : — a kingdom which would be animated by the fiercest hostility against herself, and under the sway of a family which had proved its formidable military genius. The rout of a great English army at Ban- nockburn only three years before had made as deep an impression upon the English as upon the Irish mind. And the reality of the danger as it must have appeared to Edward II. may be measured by the fact that only a few years later King Eobert the Bruce did actually repeat the process, not in Scotland, but in England itself. At Bannockburn it could at least be said that Bruce had the advantage of a posi- tion chosen by himself, and one which hampered the deployment of so great an army as that of Edward. CH. IV.] DEVASTATION OF IRELAND. 117 But a few years later all those advantages were on his own side, when in the heart of a great English province he awaited the attack of King Kobert at Byland, in the heart of Yorkshire. Yet there again he was disastrously defeated by the Scots. Although this event was still future when the in- vasion of Ireland took place, the very possibility of such a military power as the Scotch had already shown, being made the basis of a hostile kingdom in Ireland, must have appeared at that time a very formidable danger. It was therefore a necessity of life for England to put down the Irish insurrection, and the Irish must have known it to be so. The disastrous results must consequently be laid entirely on them. All historians are agreed that the two years of war during which the Scotch and native Irish fought a desperate and devastating war with England on the soil of Ireland, was a great and terrible epoch in the miseries of that country. The war lasted no less than three years and five months — from May 25, 1315, till October 5, 1318, when Edward Bruce was killed in the battle of Dundalk. And as during all this time the contest was waged over a great part of Ireland, as far south as Limerick, with all the ferocity and all the devastating practices of the Irish tribal wars themselves, it may be easily conceived what a terrible effect it must have had upon the country and upon the people. An eminent Irish authority is quoted by Dr. Eichey, with full adoption, as saying, 118 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. iv. that the barbarism and weakness of Ireland during: the rest of that century, and the whole of the succeed- ing century, — that is to say, for one hundred and seventy years, from 1315 to 1499, — were due by con- sequences, direct or indirect, to the Scotch invasion brought about expressly by Irish invitation. And one of the indirect consequences is explained to have been simply that aggravation, or at least continuance of that very old source of Irish woes, the increasingly arbitrary power over all below them which wars always do and always must place in the hands of those who retain any power at all.* Now let us note in passing what the result of these acknowledged facts is upon the inflated fiction, which is so ignorantly but so constantly repeated about the seven hundred years of English Government in Ire- land. We have before seen it to be admitted that there was no real Conquest of Ireland till the begin- ning of the seventeenth century — or the accession of James I. to the English throne in 1603. Bat real responsibility begins only with real power. The whole interval between the date of the nominal Conquest in 1172 and the real subjugation about 1603 is four hundred and thirty-one years. Of this we have now seen that, during the period up to the Scotch invasion, or one hundred and forty-five years, the condition of Ireland was determined by a mere prolongation of her own indigenous customs, against which England * " Short History," pp. 198, 199. CH. IV.] LASTING RUIN. 119 had no means whatever in her hands to struggle with success. Next we have seen it acknowledged by Irish historians that after the Scotch invasion, for another period of one hundred and seventy years — down to the year 1500 — her condition was mainly determined by the effects of that war which the native Irish had entirely brought upon themselves. These two periods make together three hundred and fifteen years out of the whole four hundred and thirty-one years before the real Conquest came — thus leaving only a little over one hundred years to be still accounted for, as regards the internal condition of Ireland, before the real Conquest was effected, and the real responsibility began. This makes a large hole in the clap-trap seven hundred years — reducing it from the "seven centuries " to little more than three hundred years — even if we had not one word more to say upon the subject. But we have a great deal more to say. In the first place, before parting with — to use a very Irish phrase — the long reign of anarchy for three hundred and fifteen years from the nominal Conquest down to the end of the fifteenth century, we must go back upon some instructive incidents which demonstrate the injustice and inconsistency of the chief charges laid against England by many Irishmen, and by the new school of English declaimers. The agents for the prosecution against England must make up their minds as to which of the two opposite and contra- 120 IRISH NATIONALISM. [oh. iv. dictory pleas they intend to urge — that of O'Connell, or that of a host of other Irishmen, now backed by Mr. Gladstone. Have we to defend England against the charge of trying cruelly to force "foreign" and un- suitable laws upon a people who had happier laws and customs of their own ; or, on the contrary, against the accusation which charges her with having refused to Irishmen the protection and advantages which English law would have afforded against their own ruinous and desolating usages ? I have already pointed out that this last form of the attack is by far the nearest to the truth, inasmuch as it at least admits that most im- portant portion of the truth which recognizes the indisputable evidence we possess against the Irish customs. I have also pointed out that, with the true instinct of all declamatory rhetoricians as to dangerous admissions, Mr. Gladstone takes the opposite line of attack. But the really instructive exhibition is to see one and the same writer adopting both charges— the one when he is engaged in responsible narrative, or in deliberate reasoning, and the other when he makes pass- ing comments under the influence of a local sentiment. Such is the exhibition which we have in that ex- cellent Irish historian. Dr. Eichey, in connection with an event which happened fifteen years after the defeat and death of Edward Bruce, when the English King — that great sovereign, Edward III. — had to face the utter disorganisation and ruin into which the Scotch invasion had thrown the whole miserable CH ivj ENGLISH LAW IN IRELAND. 121 framework of Irish society. The Norman colonists — the " degenerate English," as Dr. Richey himself calls them — had been almost reduced and degraded into the condition of the Irish Clans. They were fighting with each other fiercely. The old Irish Septs were recover- ing strength only to use it as before. In 1329 retali- ating massacres and murders were the order of the day. At last England was aroused to the dreadful condition of the country — dreadful to the Irish of all races, and shameful to England, in so far — but only so far — as she had any power to effect a reform. And so she turned to that only remedy, — which Daniel O'Connell blamed her for not having adopted from the beginning, — the remedy of applying the principles of English law at once to the whole of Ireland. The odious distinction of races was, as far as possible, to be abolished. Accordingly, in 1331, Acts were passed in England providing that one and the same law should be applicable to both English and Irish. Such elementary principles as the keeping of good faith in truces between combatants received statutory embodi- ment. No landowner was to keep bands of armed men on his estates other than were needed for mere self-defence. The barons were to reside upon their lands. In short, England tried to do what was obviously needed to lay even the first foundations of a civilised government in Ireland. The righteousness of that policy is not denied. The trueness of aim with which, so far as it went, that policy struck at the 122 IRISH NATIONALISM. [cH. iv. root-evils of Ireland for a thousand years, is not denied. Yet Dr. Richey allows himself to describe the new measures thus : — " The policy of those ordinances may be called Imperialism. They attempted to establish English ideas and laws among a totally dissimilar people — to bring about a unity of the two countries by extending and enforcing in Ire- land, English law and government."* A dissimilar people ! Yes — fortunately for the world. But surely to make them " similar " in the elementary ideas of civilisation was the one great work to be done. Dr. Richey, however, soon recovers himself from this relapse into nonsense. He proceeds to say what is quite true, that this policy could only be successful if founded on, and enforced by effective conquest. Was this physically possible at that time, and with the resources at the disposal of the English sovereign ? Let us look at the event that followed. Within five years of the Statutes which, if obeyed, would have effected a great reform, Edward III. found that Irish disorganisation had gone too far to encourage the faintest hope that the country could be reclaimed by mere authority not enforced by arms. One of the greatest of the Norman Feuda- tories, who had remained loyal to the English Crown, w^as murdered, and his great remains of power were usurped by relatives who ostentatiously renounced the hereditary policy of their House, * " Short History," p. 201. CH. IV.] STATUTES OF KILKENNY. 123 and, as the symbol of new enmity, threw off their English dress, and donned habiliments of the Irish " saffron." Edward sent his son Lionel to Ireland to re-establish, as far as was possible, the authority of the Crown over at least some remnant of the kingdom. Then followed, in 1361, the famous " Statutes of Kil- kenny," passed by an Irish Parliament, under the influence of the Prince, the whole object of which was to leave the native Irish to themselves, and to limit the authority of the English law to that small area of country, which was still inhabited by Anglo- Normans, loyal, in the main, to the English monarchy. No part of Irish history has been more obscured and more grossly misrepresented than this episode. In- flated fable has been riotous and rampant on the subject of the Statutes of Kilkenny. Plowden, one of the most prejudiced and clamorous of Irish writers, breaks out in the most violent language against the policy of "antipathy, hatred, and revenge " which animated the code. There 'seems, indeed, to have been some unusual excuse for this ignorant language in the fact that the text of the Statutes was hidden away and lost, and only recovered so late as 1843. Dr. Kichey analyses the clauses or sections, as now known, with perfect candour, and with this remarkable result — that he not only excuses, but he defends them all, and actually praises some. The new Statutes do, indeed, denounce the old Irish customs as the cause and source 124 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. iv. of the fatal degradation of tlie English settlers ; and in this they did but speak the words of truth and soberness. Bat the prohibitions of the Statutes against Irish customs were confined to those whose duty it was to maintain nobler laws against the invasion of surrounding savagery. " A fair analysis of the Act," says Dr. Eichey, " leads to the conclusion that the English Government, at this time, abandoned the prospect of reducing to obedience the Irish and the degenerate English, and, adopting a policy purely defensive, sought merely to preserve in allegiance to the English Crown the miserable remains of the Irish Kingdom." * As usual, the one only substantial fault, which Dr. Eichey finds with England, is her want of power or energy to enforce her wise and civilising policy. " The policy of the Act, if steadily carried out, might have been advantageous to botli the English and Irish in Ireland, but it required a vigorous execu- tive." This is true ; and it brings us back again to the truth implied in O'ConnelFs reproach to England that she did not conquer Ireland more ejSectually, and give it all the blessings of English law. But now let us see what was the next remarkable step taken in this strange and monotonous history of the effect of savage customs entrenched behind an inaccessible geography. If indeed we could legiti- mately judge of the conduct of men in the fourteenth century by the principles both of duty and of policy, * " Short History," p. 214. CH. IV.] ENGLISH ACTION DIVERTED. 125 which would be acknowledged without difficulty or doubt in the nineteenth, the blame to be cast on English Sovereigns for several generations would be heavy indeed, not specially or alone in respect to Ireland, but quite as much in respect to England and Europe generally. Their long, bloody, and exhausting wars to establish a separate kingdom in France were, in the light of our day, not only useless, but mischievous and even wicked. If they had only spent one-half the energy, thus worse than wasted, in completing the civilisation of their own country, and in effectually establishing their authority over Ireland as an integral part of their dominions, the gain to themselves, and so far as we can see, to us even now, would have been untold. But such judgments and speculations are worse than idle — unless, indeed, we take them as lessons in the mysterious course of human follies since the world began. But it is a curious incident in this connection that it is said to have been due to this very ambition of English Kings to become great continental potentates, that Kichard II. was at last induced to make no less than two considerable efforts to conquer and to civilise Ireland. The first was in 1394 ; the second in 1399, the last of his reign. This may be a bit of gossip from the Middle Ages — but it was believed by Sir John Davies, early in the seven- teenth century, and it is adopted by Dr. Kichey as if it were true, — that Eichard had hoped and intrigued to be elected Emperor, as successor of Charlemagne, 126 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. iv. and of the far-off Emperors of the Western World. His pretensions are said to have been ridiculed, and one of the jibes against him was that he could not even hold his own against the wild tribes of Ireland. This may or may not be true. If it was true, it is the earliest specimen we have got of that element in our controversy with Ireland on which Mr. Griadstone has often dwelt effusively — namely, the vague impressions of foreign spectators. In this case, they seem to have been a great deal more intelligent than Mr. Gladstone's modern friends; because they do not seem to have blamed Kichard or his predecessors for having asserted a sovereignty over Ireland, but, on the contrary, for not having made that sovereignty practical and effective. However this may be, another motive assigned by other Historians is, perhaps, more probable — namely this, that the small tribute of revenue which had ever been reaped from the Irish kingdom had now been stopped. And so followed one of those expeditions to Ireland which prove how really great, if not insuperable, were the difiSculties of a mediaeval sovereign in effecting such a lasting and effectual conquest as could alone be of the least use in Ireland. The expedition of Richard II., in 1394, was almost an exact repetition of the original invasion of Henry II., two hundred and twenty-two years before. He went with great pomp, and a formidable feudal array — four thousand men in armour, and no less than thirty thousand archers. Whereupon the Celtic Chiefs, exactly as CH. IV.] EXPEDITION OF RICHARD II. 127 they had done with Henry II., flocked to Dublin, and, in a " humble and solemn manner," did homage to their Liege Lord, and swore fidelity. The evideiwe appears to be that there was not a chieftain or lord of an Irish Sept but submitted himself in one form or other. But, just as before, the moment Kichard's back was turned they all returned to their old life, and to their inveterate predatory habits— specially directed against the newly established "Pale.'' And so, enraged by this conduct, the unfortunate Kichard again collected his army, and, in the last year of his reign, re-landed in Ireland. In a very short campaign against one of his sworn Anglo-Irish Yassals, he was victorious — of course. But the Irish had only to retreat into their bogs and forests, drive away their cattle, and leave the invading army to be starved. Such, accordingly, seems to have been very nearly the fate of Kichard's arma- ment, which was only saved by the timely arrival of the English transports to take them home. This brings us to the close of the second out of the four centuries — the fourteenth— which elapsed before that complete conquest of Ireland which could alone attach any real responsibility to England. We have seen how false it is that the government of the country was in her hands even in " the last resort." We have seen how false it is that she had intentionally tried to withhold the benefits of English law from Ireland ; we have seen how equally false it is that the Irish, as a people or a nation, were willing to accept it at any / 128 / IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. iv. time. We have seen that the miserable condition of the/country was the natural and inevitable result of Ii^sh habits and Irish conduct in each conjuncture "of those times. Two centuries more, out of the four we have still to account for — the fifteenth and the sixteenth — remain to be considered ; and never has the perfect continuity of great historical causes been more signally displayed. There is no other change whatever than such as was due to the same identical causes — only operating with fresh intensity because of addi- tional circumstances of outward provocation. Human history in this way is often very like a pendulum, which may swing a long time with equal beat ; but if any synchronous movement reaches it from outside, then the swing will rapidly become excessive, and may break all bounds imposed by the mechanism which contains it. During the whole of the fifteenth century England was so situated as to leave her no time to deal seriously with the condition of Ireland. Her foreign wars in France, and her civil wars of the Koses, due to a dis- puted succession to the throne, made it impossible for her to govern Ireland even in " the last resort." We have seen how the pendulum was swinging at the close of the fourteenth century. It was swinging towards the complete reconquest of the whole island by the native chiefs, — by the degenerate English who had been amalgamated with them, — and by the deso- lating usages of Clan feuds and fightings which were CH. IV.] SUPREMACY OF THE IRISH. 129 inseparable from that condition of society. Even the narrow territory of the Pale which Eichard 11. and his Irish Parliament of Kilkenny had tried to define and to keep within the marches of civilisation — even this Pale was being invaded perpetually by incursions and robbery, and still more fatally by the infusion of Irish usages. During the reign of Henry Y., at the very time when the power of English arms was being shown in the historic glories of Agincourt, and an English King became Eegent of France, with the right of succession to that kingdom, the English Colonists in Ireland were reduced to such misery that they were emigrating in crowds back to England ; and England could only endeavour to force them to return again to Ireland. At last, — close to the end of the century, — that last refuge of feebleness was resorted to — the refuge of actually erecting a fortified embankment and ditch against the Irish enemy, round the nucleus of the Pale in the immediate neighbourhood of Dublin.* But even this extreme result of Ireland being left prac- tically to herself is not the most important lesson which the events of this fifteenth century impressed upon the English mind, and which explain and largely vindi- cate her conduct then, and in later times. We have seen the inevitable tendency among the Irish Clans, and among the degenerate colonists, to take part with any external enemy of England who might heave in sight over the troubled waters of those stormy times. * " Short History," p. 229. K 130 IRISH NATIONALISM. [cH. iv. This tendency had been exhibited in a terrible manner in the fearful wars brought upon Ireland by the in- vited invasion of the Scotch in the beginning of the previous century. But now we have to note the same danger in another form. Whenever any faction might arise in England — above all, when there came to be a disputed succession to the throne, — the inevitable temptation of the Irish was to take sides with the claimant — whoever he might be — who did not succeed in England. To set up a separate and a rival kingdom had been their object, so far as Irish Septs ever had any object at all, in inviting Bruce. But obviously the same purpose might be as well or even better attained by choosing a king for themselves, who had failed to establish himself on tbe throne of England. Accordingly, when the Wars of the Roses broke out, the Irish, in so far again as they ever acted together, or on any principle whatever, embraced the cause of the House of York against the great Lancastrian sovereigns who had succeeded Richard II. They had some temporary and personal temptation to do so. In the middle of the century with which we are now concerned, the fifteenth, the Lancas- trian Henry VI. sent over to Ireland, in order to get him out of the way, Richard, Duke of York, as Viceroy. This shows that the new danger was not then foreseen or expected. But it was imme- diately developed. Duke Richard at once set to work in that body which was called a Parliament, CH. IV.] IRISH SUPPORT HOUSE OF YORK. 131 but which represented nothing but the narrow limits and the degenerated occupants of the Pale, in order to establish for himself an independent position. The first step was to get that Rump of a Parliament to declare itself independent of England as represent- ing the whole of Ireland. It asserted what Dr. Richey calls the complete independence of the Irish Legis- lature, and all those constitutional rights, which, — as this excellent Irish writer significantly says, — " are involved in the existence, of a separate Parliament, but had not hitherto been categorically expressed." * It took up the position, in fact, in the middle of the fifteenth century which was afterwards taken up by Grattan's Parliament towards the end of the eighteenth century in 1782. The spirit and intention with which this was done, and its political significance to the English throne and nation, is sufiBciently shown by the fact that the Irish Lords took an active part in the civil war and fought for tlie House of York in several of the battles of the Roses. It is not the least necessary to blame the Irish for this course. It is quite enough to consider it as only natural — in the sense in which a great many things are natural which are nevertheless inseparably connected with causes working to the most ruinous results, even for those who are under their influence and controlling power. But for tliose in later generations who look at those causes in the light of their origin and effects, * " Short History," p. 232. 132 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. iv. it is impossible not to see that Irish independence in the fifteenth century would have given free play to influences which had shown their disastrous action in Ireland for more than a thousand years ; and that as regards England it would have been a serious political danger. We have only to ask ourselves, which of those two communities of men was most freighted with good influences for the world, to have that question answered in favour of England with a shout — as much of reason as of sympathy. At all events, if we are to judge of the conduct of men merely according to that which we see it was both right and natural for them to do in the circumstances of their case as it appeared to them, we must apply the same standard to the conduct of England and her sovereign. Nothing can be more certain than that when the Wars of the Koses had closed on the field of Bosworth in 1484, and the rule of the Tudor Sovereigns began with Henry VII., he was absolutely called upon, by his duty to the great monarchy of England, to put an end to the danger of an independent kingdom in Ireland, founded as it would be on the claim of a small section of the whole people of Ireland to choose its own dynasty, its own sovereign, and to maintain its own half-Ersefied usages and laws. This is the full and adequate explanation and defence of one of the most celebrated and deter- mining episodes in Irish history — the enactment of the Statute known as Poyning's Law, from the name CH IV.] poyning's law. 133 of the Viceroy or Lord Deputy who induced the same Parliament of the Pale to pass it in 1495. This was an Act which acknowledged the Irish Parliament to be a strictly subordinate legislature — not to be summoned and not to act except under the supreme authority of the English Crown. It is needless to say that this was nothing but the full realisation of the duty which O'Connell charged England with having so long neglected. As Dr. Richey says, " English legislation was introduced en hloc." All English statutes then existing in England were by the same statute made of force in Ireland. If only this measure had been made effectual, it is the universal testimony of Irish historians themselves, that it would have been the greatest of all reforms. It is perfectly intelligible that Irish historians, if they can manage to throw off from their minds the bearing and significance of every one of the great facts which they themselves narrate, or are com- pelled to admit, — and if they can imagine them- selves to be citizens of a state, or subjects of a monarchy which had a great past, and might other- wise have had a great future, — should deprecate or even condemn this attempt on the part of England to make her old suzerainty a real and effectual dominion. But it does indeed require a strong effort of imagination to conjure up a vision and a dream so utterly at variance with all the realities of the case. Yet Dr. Eichey, speaking in this sense, says of the 134 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. iv. Poyning's Law, " This, the most disgraceful Act ever passed by an independent Legislature, and wrung from the local Assembly of the Pale, bound future Parliaments for three hundred years." That the body, which he now discovers to be not in any true sense a Parliament of Ireland, but only " a local Assembly of the Pale," was under the supreme influence of the English Lord Deputy is likely enough. But they had been equally under the influence of the Duke of York when, thirty- six years before, in 1459, they had taken the opposite course of constituting themselves an in- dependent Legislature and of supporting the family of a Pretender to the English Crown. It is not rational to speak of this body as representing an Irish nation when it acted in one way, and then to disparage it as a mere "local Assembly" when it acted in another way. In both cases it was the same body — with the same restricted character — with the same disabilities, and liable to the same influences of personal favour or of corruption. Probably, whatever of wisdom and of public spirit it enlisted, it was stronger in the later action which clung to the English law and power, than in the earlier action which asserted its own separate independence. We know how much the Colonists of the Pale suffered from the wild Irish around them, and, in setting up an independence which they could certainly not have maintained alone, they must have been acting from mere impulse, and with great ignorance of the true interests of their country. CH. IV.] NECESSITY OF POYNING's LAW. 135 From an English point of view, — which is the point of view identified with the civilisation of the British Islands, — there can be no doubt whatever of the duty of the Sovereign to act as he did. But even in that point of view which looks solely to the interests of Ireland, it is difficult to conceive how any reasoning man can regard the so-called Parliament of the Pale in the fifteenth century as having been one whose separa- tivenessand independence can now be regarded as even a possible source of good. Such a prospect could only be founded on one or both of two things — either on the fitness of the Anglo-Norman Colonists inside the Pale at that time, to exercise such powers well and wisely not only in its relations with England, but in its relations with Irish tribes all over the Island ; — or else on the possibility at that time of the Irish tribes reinforcing that Parliament with better elements of its own, and so forming gradually a really national Parliament likely to govern the country well and wisely. Neither of these alternative suppositions has one single element of plausibility or even of possibility. And it is only doing Dr. Kichey justice to observe that he supplies us with the most definite and con- clusive information against them both. As regards the first, — the capacity of the English Colonists of the Pale to govern well even the small portion of the country which they precariously held, — the experiment was actually tried. Henry VIII., having no army of his own to enforce his policy, resolved to trust the 136 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. iv. Government of Ireland to the oldest and noblest representative of the first Norman Settlers. He confided his powers to the Geraldines, the Earls of Kildare, who were the lineal descendants of the men who preceded Henry II. three hundred years before. The Pale was thus to be governed under the English Crown through the greatest of its own Magnates — a family which had been so long settled, and had so identified themselves with the Irish people, that it was their boast to be called " More Irish than Irish." And what was the result? Let us hear what Dr. Kichey says. He tells us that the Geraldines had many of the personal characteristics which distinguish men in rude ages. They were brave, enterprising, courteous, and generous. But they were totally devoid of any of the qualities requisite for the character of a states- man. They had no higher views than the maintenance of their position as chiefs of the most powerful Irish Clan. Accordingly, during the time of their supremacy from 1489 down to 1535 the Government was utterly perverted to their private purposes, and the Eoyal banner was carried in a great battle in which sixteen Irish chiefs were defeated by the forces of the Pale in alliance as usual with other Irish Septs from the north. Here we have a perfect and indeed a typical specimen of what Home Eule had always been in Ireland, and what perhaps more than ever it would have been under a "local Assembly of the Pale." We have the head of the Geraldines, representing the CH. IV.] CONDITION OF IKELAND. 137 authority of the English Crown, quarrelling with a member of his own family, his son-in-law, and in alliance with a fighting mixture of De Burghs, the O'Briens, the Macnamaras, the O'Carrolls, and other southern Septs, fighting a desperate battle with the O'Eeillys, Mac Mahons, O'Farrells, O'Donels, and other chiefs of the north.* Such is the spectacle presented by the best specimens of that English Pale which ought — it is suggested — to have been allowed to declare itself independent of the power and civilisa- tion of England. Then let us turn to the condition of the " Irish enemy," as they were called, — the native Septs and Clans occupying all the rest of Ireland. Here, again. Dr. Eichey not only does not deny the facts, but states them most explicitly. He admits that the Celtic Clans were not only as bad, but considerably worse than they had been three hundred years before. "In the twelfth century," he says, "the Irish Celts were in a state of political disorganisation, but they still had a feeling of nationality, and had the form at least of a national monarchy. Justice, criminal and civil, was administered among them according to a definite code of law. At the commencement of the sixteenth century there remained no tradition of national unity — no trace of an organisation by which they could be united into one people. The separate tribes had been disorganised by civil wars, and the * " Short History," pp. 233, 234. 138 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch iv. original tribesmen were suppressed and supplanted by the mercenary followers of the several rivals for the chieftaincies.*' * Such is the description we have of that other portion of the Irish people whose abstract interest in an independent Irish Parliament was to supplement what was wanting in the degenerate English of the Pale ! So closes the fifteenth century — the third of the four centuries for which we have to account before England had effected that real conquest which could alone give power to remedy the desperate evils of the Irish clan system. In describing the once happier condition of the Irish people in the words here quoted, Dr. Eichey can only be criticised for having given an almost purely ideal sketch of the condition of things even in the twelfth century. The native Annals testify against the truth of it. The stages of descent through which the Celtic clans had fallen in Ireland had reached, even in the twelfth century, a lower point than Dr. Eichey in this passage admits; and every farther step in the same descent was confessedly due to the continued operation of the same causes, — all being of purely native origin. England's only blame was the fault which consisted in her want of power, — a want which was due quite as much to insuperable physical obstacles as to ambitions, pursuits, and policies which were the common heritage of all the European races in the military ages. * " Short History," p. 238. ( 139 ) CHAPTER V. IKELAND UNDER THE TUDORS DOWN TO THE DEATH OF HENRY VIII. Let us now pass on. The sixteenth century in England, as we all know, was wholly occupied by the rule of the Tudor sovereigns. No less than eighty-one years out of the hundred were passed under the two single reigns of Henry VIII. and of his daughter, Queen Elizabeth. The intervening short episodes of Edward VI. and the " bloody Mary," lasting together only for eleven years, contributed nothing of lasting importance to that side of British history with which we are concerned here. But in those two reigns England was, to a very large extent, made what she continued to be ; and Ireland was at last brought for the first time within the influences of one supreme dominion. The first nine years of the century, during which Henry VII. con- tinued to reign, brought no change as regards the Irish. Neither did the first twenty-six years of the reign of Henry VIII. Nothing particular happened 140 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. v. except that which was then happening always, and had been happening with a perfect continuity of causation for a thousand years, namely, the deepening of anarchy, the development of corruption from the more complete abandonment of all classes of Irishmen to themselves. At last a crisis occurred, out of which a new life began for Ireland. The Geraldines rebelled. The best and noblest representatives of the early Eng- lish Pale — the very chiefs and heads of those whose rule was carried on in the shape of a local Parlia- ment — broke from their admitted allegiance to their Sovereign, publicly and formally renounced it, and rode out from Dublin shouting the Celtic watchword of their family — now converted into a mere Irish Sept. It marks with poetical fidelity the influences which were supreme with the rebellious Lord-Deputy Fitzgerald, that he was incited to this course by the rhapsodies of a native Irish Minstrel; and that among his own retainers with whose aid he seized the Castle of Dublin, and invaded the Council Chamber, not one of them could speak the English language, or could even understand the speech of the Chan- cellor, who tried to dissuade them from a course so disastrous. This event happened in 1534 — when the second quarter of the century had been well advanced. And it is universally recognised as an epoch in the history of Ireland. Dr. Kichey says it marked the close of the Middle Ages, and the beginning of those condi- CH. v.] THE GERALDINE REBELLION. 141 tions which belong to the modern world. Dr. Riehey accordingly takes this as an opportunity for summing up the condition of Ireland as it was found to be, when England was then compelled to take up the gauntlet thrown down by the same Geraldines who had preceded Henry II., and had been now for a number of years the King's Deputies in Ireland. Here once more we meet with that marked discrepancy between the language of the sentimental Irish patriot, and the language of the Historian. Counting up the years between the pretended conquest of Ireland in 1172 and the year 1534, he finds the interval to be three hundred and sixty-two years — and he proceeds to call this period "three hundred and sixty-two years of English so-called government." In the same strain he says the " English government had collapsed, leaving nothing but the misery it had caused.*' This language from an historian whose account of the facts is, as we have seen, so honest is all the more strange, and all the more pathetic, because at this juncture we find it in juxtaposition with a special exhibition of candour. As an Irishman he puts the question to be answered, and he answers it as an Englishman and a philosopher. " To what condition was Ireland reduced by the first three hundred and sixty-two years of English rule ? " — this is the ques- tion — and it could not have been put in any form involving a more thorough traversing of the facts of history. It is a form worthy of an Irish stump orator, 142 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. v. or of Mr. Gladstone in his more recent phase. But how does the honest Dr. Eichey answer his own question ? He says he will not answer it himself, nor will he take his answer from any native Irish historian. And so he replies in the words of the first of the State Papers addressed to Henry YIII. when the minds of English statesmen were first brought really to bear upon the state of Ireland — now become really urgent, and from external causes likely to be- come alarming. Dr. E-ichey quotes in extenso this Paper, which, from beginning to end, is one long indictment against Irish native usages, and one long demonstration that the miseries of Ireland were due to them alone. Of course the only logical escape for Dr. Richey and for those who speak in the spirit of his question, is to point out that England was to blame for the very reason that Irish usages had been so long allowed to act almost without a check. But no one has explained better, as we have seen, than Dr. Eichey, the insuperable difficulties which had made it practi- cally impossible for England during those centuries to conquer Ireland and enforce her own law by arms. Besides which, even if we set aside this considera- tion, it will be at least a great step gained if we recognise what were the positive, and not merely the negative causes of the desperate condition to which human society had been reduced in Ireland. The State Paper quoted by Dr. Eichey leaves nothing to CH. v.] KESULTS OF IRISH HOME RULE. 143 be desired on this head. It tells us that there were more than sixty distinct divisions of the country, which were in the possession of the native Irish Septs — every one of them ruled by some chief who assumed various titles, from Kings and Dukes, and Archdukes and Princes, down to Chiefs and Lords — and every one of these was independent of the other — exercising the whole powers of government within his territory, and all also exercising constantly the right of peace and war against each other. Those other parts of Ireland, which were nominally English, were similarly divided between thirty more rulers completely Ersefied, and all exercising similar powers and jurisdictions. Nor was this all. Within each chieftainship, the succession was not regulated by any fixed law or even custom, but was practically determined by the power of the strongest to seize upon it. Whence it followed that many parts of Ireland were a prey to intestine factions, and to the constant fighting of still more petty chief- lets. Then as regarded the condition of the poorer and dependent classes we hear once more of the desolating usages, purely native, of "coigne and livery," and of the consequent devastation of the country. They who wished to be peaceful were flying from the island. The Pale was perpetually invaded and ravaged, and few parts of Ireland were more miserable. Such was Ireland — not under the rule of England even in " the last resort " — but under Irish Home Kule, and the operation of the identical 144 IRISH NATIONALISM. [ch. v. causes which we have seen to be in operation with more or less severity for many centuries. Nor is Dr. Richey less honest when he resumes his own narra- tive, and tells us in his own words what was the condition of Ireland, and who had been its rulers, as well in the first as " in the last resort." " The Celtic Tribes," he tells us, "had for above two centuries enjoyed a practical independence/' * But " more than two centuries " before 1534 are words that take us back to some undefined date before 1334 — in fact, to the great Scotch invasion which those tribes had invited and brought upon their country in 1315, in the reign of Edward II. But why stop here in the retrospect of years during which the Irish tribes enjoyed a practical, and for themselves a disastrous, indepen- dence? Was it not with special reference to the preceding period of one hundred and forty-three years between the pretended conquest of Henry II. and the Scotch invasion, that Dr. Richey himself ex- plained the physical impossibility of England effecting any real subjugation of Ireland? And have we not the testimony of the native Celtic Annals as to the perfect continuity of the characteristic habits and usages of the Irish ? But here again we have nothing to say against the perfect honesty of this Irish historian. No sooner has he quoted the graphic account of Ireland in 1534, which is given by the Statesmen of Henry VIII., than he * "Short History," p. 244, CH. v.] TESTIMONY OF NATIVE ANNALS. 145 proceeds to quote, with the same fidelity, the account to be gathered from the native Irish Annals. Casting aside all the pleas which have been advanced by other Irishmen against taking the testimony of those Annals as a fair picture of the state of society in Ireland as it really existed. 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