forces to Meath to support his friend O'Rourke, "on whom he had bestowed a portion of that territory." Strongbow, on the death of Dermot MacMurrough, was abandoned by the Irish following of that prince, and a general rising having taken place, he threw himself into Dublin, but only to find himself surrounded by an army, and blockaded by a Danish fleet. While he was suffering from want of food, and negotiating with a view to capitulate, Donnell Cavanagh, an Irishman of rank, no less a person than the son of the late king of Leinster, stole into the city in disguise, and informed him that Fitzstephen was closely besieged in Wexford. It is then determined to force a passage through the besieging army. "The Irish army," says the Nun of Kenmare, "were totally unprepared for this sudden move; they fled in panic, and Roderic," the King and Commander-inChief, "who was bathing in the Liffey, escaped with difficulty." The Norman, Miles de Cogan, was again left governor of Dublin, and with the exception of an attack on him which he easily repulsed, "the Irish made no attempt against the common enemy, and domestic wars were as frequent as usual."*

Now it is clear that if the Irish Celts at this time were not much behind their foes in civilization, it would be impossible to account for these events. They belonged to the same great Aryan stock as the Normans, and the disunion and incapacity shown by men whose fathers did, and whose descendants have done, such great things, are to be traced to this, that their civilization, as compared with the high organization of the Norman, was in a backward state, they having, in fact, retrograded from the intellectual advancement of the 8th century. The forces which came with Henry II. in 1171, should have been no more than a mouthful for the Irish. What should they not have done with Strongbow and his few followers? In Henry's train came those who were to be the fathers of well-known Irish families; and as we owe to the Danes the + Plunkets, McIvers, Archbolds, Harolds, Stacks, Skiddies, Cruises, McAuliffes, we owe to the Normans the Clanrickards, the Butlers, the Le Poers (Powers), and many others who came afterwards, such as the Talbots and

* Cusack's History, p. 167.

+ McGee.

THE IRISH KINGS SUBMIT TO HENRY II.

21

the Burkes. A white hare, which leaped from a neighbouring hedge, was caught and presented to the king as an omen of victory. "But," says D'Arcy McGee, "the true omen of his success he might read for himself in a constitution which had lost its force, in laws which had ceased to be sacred, and in a chieftain race brave indeed as mortal men could be, but envious, arrogant, revengeful, and insubordinate." The penalty paid through centuries of misery by the noble innocent people who followed them, would be an impassable stumbling-block to faith in a Providence, were we not able to grasp the truth that there is more beneficence in the operation of great general laws than there would be in fitful interference, and to hold by the hope, that all moves to a great justifying event in the future.

The Irish nobles and kings submitted to Henry, who naturally according to the enlightenment of the time, but foolishly and cruelly according to modern ideas, administered the country as a Norman province. As soon as Henry was gone, and the cold steel of Norman rule was felt, there would, of course, be resistance, -but, as might be expected from what we have seen, that resistance would not be systematic or united, and from this time forward the history of Ireland is the weary annals of a half subdued dependency, in which the miseries of rebellion were aggravated by domestic broils. It is doubtful whether, if the Normans had been able to afford men to conquer Ireland as completely as they conquered England, things would have been much better for the Celts than they were. But no hope whatever of happy relations could be built on a system of partial settlement, and constant and indecisive war. It is amusing to find the deeds of the Norman attributed to Englishmen, at a time when the Englishman himself was in the house of bondage. sentences in which Macaulay describes the condition of English

66

The

The battle of Hastings and the events which followed it, not only placed a Duke of Normandy on the English throne, but gave up the whole population of England to the tyranny of the Norman race. The subjugation of a nation by a nation has seldom, even in Asia, been more complete. The country was portioned out among the captains of the invaders. Strong military institutions, closely connected with the institution of property, enabled the foreign conquerors to oppress the children of the soil. A cruel penal code, cruelly enforced, guarded the

men, might, with little alteration, be applied to the state of Ireland. The cruelty on the one hand, and the irregular retaliation on the other, the aggression and resistance, are found in Ireland, with the qualification that the oppression is not so complete, and that the Irish sometimes make a stand.

The statute of Kilkenny, enacted in the fourteenth century, shows that already it had become impossible to tell a man's race by his name, and that the Norman and English settlers were mingling with the Celts. Marriage with the Celt was forbidden, as was the assumption of an Irish name. Early in the fifteenth century, the Irish of English descent began to set forth grievances, and the cities of Cork, Kinsale, and Youghal complained of the desolation consequent on the strife of English noblemen. A like complaint was made by Waterford and Wexford against the Irish chieftain O'Driscoll, who is describd as an "Irish enemy to the King and to all his liege people of Ireland." We find in Henry VIII.'s day, France already interfering in Ireland, but, like the intermeddlings of after times, "it took no effect by reason of Francis, his business in other parts." It hastened, however the "second troubles" of the Earl of Kildare, a salutary omen, if those who looked to France could have seen it. The fact that whenever there was any revolt against England foreign aid was

privileges and even the sports of the alien tyrants. Yet the subject race, though beaten down and trodden under foot, still made its sting felt. Some bold men, the favourite heroes of our oldest ballads, betook themselves to the woods, and there, in defiance of curfew laws and forest laws, waged a predatory war against their oppressors. Assassination was an event of daily occurrence. Many Normans suddenly disappeared, leaving no trace. The corpses of many were found bearing the marks of violence. Death by torture was denounced against the murderers, and strict search was made for them, but generally in vain; for the whole nation was in a conspiracy to screen them. It was at length thought necessary to lay a heavy fine on every Hundred in which a person of French extraction should be found slain; and this regulation was followed up by another regulation, providing that every person who was found slain should be supposed to be a Frenchman, unless he was proved to be a Saxon." Macaulay's History, vol. i., p. 7. In the above paragraph we find the Saxons doing the very thing Saxon writers afterwards inveighed against the Irish Celt for doing.

The History of England under Henry VIII. Edward Lord Herbert, p. 245.

EFFORTS TO INTRODUCE PROTESTANTISM.

23

sought for, should have taught the obvious lesson. The alternative for Ireland, owing to size and geographical situation, was to be an equal in a great empire or a vassal principality to a continental country. When O'Neill revolted in 1597, and defeated the English at Blackwater, he invited over the Spaniards, and settled them in Kinsale. But what was the Spaniard against the sea-king? And what would Ireland be as a vassal of Spain? The history of Spain and her colonies tells us in unmistakeable language. The struggles in Ireland down to, and even after what assumed the character of a religious war, were agrarian, and Norman aggression was succeeded by confiscating plots under the Tudors and Stuarts, plots from which Burkes and Geraldines suffered as much as O'Connors and O'Rourkes.

The efforts made to introduce Protestantism into the island took a form which was doomed to failure, for it added the fervour of patriotism, the instinct of race, the hatred of the weak for the strong, of oppressed for oppressors, to the natural attachment for the creed in which men are born, which is associated in their minds with all the tenderness and charm of childhood and of home. No translation of the Bible was put forth in the Irish language, and the missionaries of the new faith appeared in the guise of plunderers; nor were their lives, as a rule, of a stamp to counteract such formidable stimulants to repulsion. "The government contented itself with setting up a vast Protestant hierarchy of Protestant archbishops, bishops, and rectors, who did nothing, and who, for doing nothing, were paid out of the spoils of the Church loved and revered by the great body of the people."*

The plantation of Ulster followed on the confiscation of the lands of O'Neill and O'Donnell, whose English titles were, respectively, Earl of Tyrone and Earl of Tyrconnel. There can be no doubt there was a conspiracy to fasten on them a charge of treason, and their flight to the continent proves nothing, but that

they were anxious to preserve their lives. The plantation

though destined to result in one of the darkest pages in Irish history, was, economically, a brilliant success. It introduced into the north a large population accustomed to settled modes of life, who were themselves afterwards to experience injustice at the hands of the English parliament, but who, in the face of restrictive legislation, and in the face of enormous and complex difficulties, have made the province of Ulster one of the most flourishing on the globe. Many of them were descendants of men who, at an earlier period, had migrated from Ireland into Scotland; others were of Saxon blood; but all brought with them that stern Presbyterianism, which has been the great factor in moulding the character of the modern Scotchman-a creed which would give a Titan's backbone to a race of mollusks. When received, not as some modern Presbyterian divines receive it, half hesitatingly, but as it was received by Calvin and John Knox, it gives to character all the strength of fatalism, and all the strength of a passionate faith, full of hope, and immortality. Many of the new comers, indeed, were tainted with the vices of adventurers. Many of them fled from debt, and some from justice, but the great majority of them were, what we should call in Canada, good settlers. Sixty thousand acres in Dublin and Waterford, and three hundred and eighty-five thousand acres in Westmeath, Longford, Kings County, Queens County, and Leitrim, were portioned out in a similar manner.

The espousal of the cause of Charles I. brought down on the country the sword of Cromwell, and resulted in further transfers of land,―transfers in which descendants of Saxon and Norman suffered. Spenser's grandson, though pleading his father's name and protesting his own protestantism, was ordered to transplant. When Charles II. came to the throne, the unhappy "loyalists" prayed for the restoration of their property in vain. The remembrance of the miseries entailed on them by adherence to the cause of Charles I., whose iron minister, Wentworth, was the greatest enemy the Irish Celts ever had, did not prevent them falling a victim to the schemes of Tyrconnel; and they espoused the cause of James II., when espousing that cause meant binding themselves to a wheel rolling to the valley. Far more than ever France was relied on,