Ulster and Ireland

Preface

At the climax of the anti-Home Rule campaign in the spring of 19 14, a correspondent of one of the Continental papers, so the story runs in Belfast, had the good luck to be granted an interview with Sir Edward Carson. Having penetrated through the ranks of the Ulster Volunteers, who in those days kept watch and ward over the Ulster leader, the journalist was ushered into the Council Chamber of the Provisional Government. He was received with that courtesy which Sir Edward Carson always extends to the Press ; but the great man gently remarked that, as urgent affairs demanded his attention, he would take it as a favour if questions were made as brief and concise as possible. " Certainly, Sir Edward," said the interviewer. " What 1 particularly want to know is how did this Ulster trouble come about ! " " My dear fellow," replied Sir Edward, with his sweetest smile, " to explain that 1 should have to go back in history for at least three centuries. It would take me about a month to do so, and at the end I suspect you wouldn't understand."

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I difFer from Sir Edward Carson in thinking that if people were given the materials they might be trusted to form a right judgment upon them. As I see it, the existing confusion springs largely from the fact that politicians, as well as newspaper correspondents, are striving to handle consequences in Ulster without any clear understanding of causes. Efforts to deal with the question, which take no account of events and developments that have shaped it to what it is to-day, are as futile as would be an attempt to remodel Europe by statesmen who were ignorant of what happened at Vienna in 1815 and at Versailles in 1871. Yet how many members of the British Cabinet possess even a rudimentary knowledge of Ulster history of the pre-Home Rule era ? I question if Sir Edward Carson himself could state three facts in the political career of Henry Cooke, the greatest of his predecessors.

I do not expect Ulster Unionists to agree with my conclusions, but 1 shall be well satisfied if what I have written induces some of them to investigate on their own account the evidence on which these conclusions are based. In the main I have taken my facts from Unionist writers, and, so far as I am aware, I have set down no historical statement that is not accepted by reputable authorities of all parties. In Irish affairs, to know all may not be to forgive all ; but, I believe, the deeper the knowledge one possesses, the less likely is one to fall into the error, all too common in Irish

PREFACE IX

controversies, of " treating," in Lecky*s words, " differences of national character as innate and inexplicable, and national crimes and virtues as the materials for mere party eulogy or party invective."

While this volume does not profess to be an exhaustive record of Ulster history, such as Sir Edward Carson outlined to his interviewer, I have endeavoured to make it more than a series of detached studies. Whatever faults it may have in execution — T am only too conscious these are legion — I have aimed at a certain unity of plan with the object of linking up present day developments with past happenings.

The opening section is devoted to a survey of Ulster history, in which I endeavour to give due emphasis to the influences — overlooked or suppressed by the majority of chroniclers — that tended towards the unity of settlers and natives. My profound conviction is — and the evidence, I hold, confirms it — that when the Ulster Protestant fights for rights which are in harmony with democratic ideals he instinctively turns to the Ulster Catholic for support.

In the sections on Religion and Orangeism I discuss the forces which have operated, and for that matter still operate, against the unifying power of common economic needs and social grievances.

This is followed by a study of the Carson movement, the supreme example in modern times of the triumph of the influences that make for division in Ireland. 0

X PREFACE

In the concluding chapters I have attempted to analyse some qualities of the Ulster mind, as they present themselves to a native of Munster who spent the best and happiest years of his life in Belfast, and values, as St. Paul valued his Roman citizenship, the right he has acquired by adoption and sentiment, if not by birth, to boast himself an Ulsterman.

J. W. G.

Contents

I. The Verdict of History

Page

ipter I.

Chapter I. Planters And Papists

The tendency of the majority of writers and speakers on the Ulster question is to present the issue as if it were perfectly simple and clear cut. On one side is shown the Unionist ready to die at the stake rather than abandon a jot of his principles or a tittle of his prejudices ; on the other, the Nationalist is revealed, ruthlessly hostile to compromise and insistent that in all things his will shall prevail. Destiny, we are told, may have ordained that these people shall dwell cheek by jowl ; but the gulf between them is wider than that which divided the Jews from the Samaritans, and woe betide well-meaning folk who, armed only with logic and reason, come between the fell and incensed points of such mighty opposites. Fortunately, or unfortunately, no political problem is quite so simple as this. Strong as party discipline and popular prejudices may be in the North of Ireland, they are not strong enough to ensure that everywhere staring Orange shall confront hard and vivid Green. Politicians have this in common with sensational novelists that they prefer to see things in terms of jet black or snow white and rule out vague indeterminate shades, though it is the existence of these shades that makes all the difference. If the hostile colours in Ulster do not blend, I believe it can be shown that they soften a good deal when one exammes th6m with the impartial lens of history instead of viewing them through the distorting medium of popular passion.

Ulster professes to stand four-square to all the winds of Nationalism, yet even inside the province one finds variations and differences of which too little account is taken in current controversies. The Ulster atmosphere, for instance, is almost a negligible quantity in counties on the outer fringe of the province, like Donegal, Cavan, and Monaghan. Here the situation is roughly that common to the rest of rural Ireland, in which the Nationalists are mainly farmers and labourers, and the Unionists a tiny minority of landlords, with a sprinkling of professional men. The opposition is that of a community to a class — a class, moreover, which, since the triumph of land purchase, has accepted defeat. Difficulties may not yet have been wholly composed, and a social gulf divides the parties, but, it is safe to say, Nationalists and Unionists are nearer to an understanding in these three counties than anywhere else in Ulster.

One finds the other extreme on the eastern side of the province, where in agricultural areas scattered groups of Nationalists hold their own in the midst of an overwhelmingly Protestant population. They are settled for the most part on the bad lands to which their ancestors were driven in the days of the Tudors and the Stuarts ; and the Glens of Antrim, the stony slopes of the Mourne and the Sperrin Mountains, and the water-logged plain that borders Lough Neagh are still strong Catholic enclaves. It is a safe rule in the north-eastern counties that to leave the fertile fields for the barren hills is to pass from Unionist into Nationalist territory. Yet so little are prejudices influenced by facts that one of the commonest arguments on Orange platforms is to point to the presence of Nationalists on this unprofitable soil as a final proof of their inferior economic aptitude. In the central districts different conditions prevail. The Nationalist has indeed a monopoly of the bad lands, but he has also a share of the good, and, politically and economically, he fights on something like even terms. Instead of a contest between a community and a class one gets a clash of two democracies, and this clash has given rise to the Ulster question as we know it.

The great achievement of the Ulster Unionist has been to persuade himself, and impose the belief on the outside world, that he is sui generis. Whatever is peculiar to the Northern province was, he claims, created by him, and applies only to him. Thus he makes a political asset of his " dourness " and '' doggedness," and the homely burr of his speech rings all the more sweetly in his ears because it has so little in common with the brogue of the South. He flourishes these things before the world as the final justification of his demand for separate treatment, conveniently ignoring the fact that they are equally characteristic of Ulster Nationalists, who instead of being an inconsiderable minority, as Unionist propaganda would lead one to imagine, are not far short of half the population of the province.

Once it is realised that, leaving politics aside, the special conditions of Ulster life operate in exactly the same fashion on Nationalists as on Unionists, differentiating them from their fellow-countrymen in the South, but welding northern Protestants and Catholics into a homogeneous whole, the Unionist case, as it is usually presented, falls to the ground. Hitherto it has been the Nationalists who have been slowest to admit that if they take their political creed from Dublin the influences that count for most in their everyday life radiate from Belfast. To them such a confession seems a kind of treason to their fellows on the wrong side of the Boyne, and, in pubhc at least, they vehemently proclaim that the only difference between North and South is a difference of political ideals. One can understand this sentiment, but it is a sentiment as far removed from the truth of the situation as it would be to argue that the sole difference between a Yorkshire miner and a Surrey farm-hand is that one votes Labour and the other Conservative. In speech, in temper, in outlook, the Ulsterman of all creeds contrasts more sharply with the natives of the other provinces than the Black Country does with the Home Counties ; and Nationalists who refuse to admit that such a difference exists for them, are simply playing into the hands of their opponents, who insist that the cleavage between North and South is purely along the lines of race and religion. However race and religion may have accentuated divisions in the past, environment in the present is a more potent element than heredity. There may not be complete assimilation, but there has undoubtedly been widespread modification. If Ulster Protestants are, as some of them love to boast, Scots improved by three centuries of residence in Ireland ; Ulster Catholics are Irishmen improved, or at least modified, by three centuries of contact Avith Scots.

The Planters of Scottish and English birth, having driven out the natives, were determined, in a phrase which Parnell made famous in another connection, " to keep a firm grip of their homesteads." To that end they found it good policy to attribute all Irish discontents not to resentment against alien rule and shameless exploitation, but to the incurable defects of the Celtic race and the blighting influence of the Catholic religion. That racial and sectarian differences intensified hostility between Planters and natives in Ulster is axiomatic, but to admit this does not imply, as some modern controversialists insist, that they were the sole factors in producing and perpetuating antagonism. Such an assumption is as stupid as it would be to argue that Lorraine's objection to German rule was due purely to the Catholic prejudices of its people, or to contend that Belgium would speedily have bowed to the inevitable had its invaders been men of its own blood.

Political conditions have changed out of all recognition inside three centuries, but human nature was not so different in the Stuart era that a nation accepted massacre and expropriation not merely with philosophic calm, but with profound gratitude. Yet, according to a certain school of historians, Ireland's refusal to kiss the feet of her conquerors is the final proof of the unfitness of the Celt to be the master in his own house, and stamps him as a political degenerate of the most hopeless kind. Froude's English in Ireland is one long fantasia on this theme, and men infinitely more fair-minded than Froude have upheld the same contention quite as positively if with less vindictiveness and passion.

Dr. Seaton Reid, the able historian of the Presbyterian Church, in his analysis of the events that followed the Ulster Plantation, writes of the '' fancied wrongs " of the Irish, and complains almost tearfully that they regarded the Settlers as " invaders " and " oppressors." It is difficult to imagine in what other light they could possibly have regarded them. Ireland, in the phrase of Sir John Davies, had been " brayed as in a mortar," and the most submissive of peoples does not take kindly to such a process. The Lord Deputy Chichester has left an illuminating description of the methods by which he laid the foundations of Protestant Ulster. " I burned," he reports as if it were a mere matter of routine, " all along the Lough (Neagh) within four miles of Dungannon, and killed 100 people, sparing none, of what quality, age, or sex soever, besides many burned to death. We killed man, woman and child, horse, beast, and whatsoever we could find." Even fire and steel, ruthlessh^ as he plied them, did not satisfy Sir Arthur Chichester. " I have often said and written," he remarks, " it is famine that must consume the Irish, as our swords and other endeavours worked not that speedy effect which is expected. Hunger would be a better, because a speedier, weapon to employ against them than the sword." True Christianity indeed might have lu-ged the Irish to turn the other cheek to the smiter, but this type of Christianity was no more popular in seventeenth century Ireland than it is in Europe to-day.

It is not unamusing, if anything in this blood - boltered tragedy can be amusing, to see how apologists who are amazed that the natives refused to take extirpation kindly, resent the application of the same policy, even in a modified form, to anybody else. What was just, or at least excusable, when ordered bjthe English for the Irish becomes fiendish when ordered by the English for the Settlers. Historians, who have no word of reproof for Chichester, flame with indignation over Went worth's tyranny, though that tyranny in comparison with the heroic Elizabethan methods was as mild as milk. The explanation is exceedingly simple. Went worth substituted for the old division of English and Irish a new classification of Royalists and Puritans, and meted out to the Ulster Scots, who were strongly Puritan, a little of the medicine that had hitherto been reserved for the Catholic Celts. I willingly admit that W^entworth's policy was wholly indefensible ; all I seek to show is that when he struck at the Settlers in the name of the British Government they proved not a whit more tractable than the imruly Irish. They met the

PT.ANTERS AND PAPISTS 7

"Black Oath," as it was called, which demanded absolute obedience to the King's commands and the abjuration of the Solemn League and Covenant, with open defiance, and the Deputy's proposal to transport the colonists back to Scotland set the whole North ablaze. Unionists insist that from the beginning a great gulf divided Protestant and Catholic in Ulster, and declare that the Planters preferred injustice from England to the friendship and favour of the mere Irish. As a matter of fact, the first result of Wentworth's policy was to establish an alliance between Catholics and Presbyterians which proved so strong that it was able to dominate the Irish Parliament, reduce the subsidies previously voted to the King to one-fourth of the original grant, and carry a Remonstrance indicting in fifteen articles the methods of Government adopted by the Deputy. The fact that such co-operation was possible serves to discount many of the popular generalisations about Ulster divisions, and indicates that had politicians laboured for unity half as zealously as they did for separation, differences of race and religion would not have proved insurmountable barriers. The alliance had in it potentialities that might have altered the whole course of Irish history had they been developed along right lines. Unfortunately, it failed, but it is important to note that its failure did not spring either from the refusal of the natives to accept anything less than the restoration in their entirety of the lands of which they had been deprived, or from the aggressive policy of the Catholic Church, the two factors which. Unionists argue, are a sufficient explanation of the tragic misfortunes of Ireland. On the contrary, it was the temptation to make Irish interests a pawn in the game of English parties that now, as in the years to come, destroyed all hope of an understanding.

To the English Puritans Ireland was a useful weapon in their struggle against the King ; and it was the charge that he was willing to use Popish aid to strengthen his claims that served to inflame English popular opinion against Charles. Pym and his fellows looked to the Ulster Scots to supply the necessary evidence, and they did not look in vain. " The humble Petition of some Protestant Inhabitants of the Counties of Antrim, Downe, Derry, Tyrone, etc.," presented to the Long Parliament in 1641, may have been nominally an indictment of Strafford's policy, but it is really a Presbyterian onslaught on Prelatists and Papists. It is an interesting example of the " Ulster " spirit, as we know it in later days, that toleration of Catholicism should figure as the sovereign crime of " the children of Ishmael and Esau," as the Protestant bishops are politely described. " Titular bishops," the petition proclaims, " are by them winked at in the exercise of jurisdiction from foreign power, mass-priests are frequent, and pretend a title to every parish in the kingdom, masses publicly celebrated without controulment, to the great grief of God's people, and the increase of idolatry and superstition." Protestants who had allied themselves with Catholics against Strafford, sought to make the Deputy's supposed Papistical views the crowning proof of his guilt. The Long Parliament, as might be expected, was only too ready to listen to charges of this kind, if indeed it did not directly inspire them. Sir John Clotworthy, an Antrim Presbyterian, who had been returned for an English borough, was the recognised spokesman of the Ulster Scots at Westminster. He was a member of the Commons' Committee which drew up the charges against Strafford, and gave evidence against him at his trial. According to Nalson, Clotworthy declared from his place in the House " that the conversion of the Papists in Ireland was only to be effected by the Bible in one hand and the sword in the other," and though this statement has been denounced as " a Royahst calumny," it was thoroughly in keeping with the sentiments of the Puritans who were anxious to rouse Protestant prejudices against the Monarchy.

The attitude of Parliament in seeking to force anti-Popery measures on the King precipitated the Rebellion of 1641. The Irish believed, and speeches in the Commons warranted the belief, that the popular party in England was bent on extirpating Catholicism as the prelude to a new confiscation. No serious historian now contends that the Rebellion was planned as a massacre. It suited the political passions of the time to present it in this light, and such is the tragedy of Irish affairs that political ends are still believed to be served by using the charge to intensify party and sectarian hatreds. The strongest proof that racial and religious animosity was not the dominant motive of the rebel leaders is the fact that when the outbreak took place, and for the best part of a month afterwards, no attack was made on the Scots who constituted five-sixths of the Protestant population of Ulster. On this point contemporary evidence is final. Colonel Audeley Mervyn, in a report presented to the House of Commons in June, 1642, states that — ■" In the infancy of the Rebellion the rebels made open proclamations, upon pain of death, that no Scotchman should be stirred in body, goods, or lands, and that they should to this purpose write over the lyntels of their doors that they were Scotchmen, and so destruction might pass over their families." The same officer relates that he read a letter, " sent by two of the rebels, titulary colonels. Colonel Nugent and Colonel O' Gallagher . . . which was directed to ' Our honourable friends, the gentlemen of the never conquered Scotch nation.' "

In the actual fighting quarter was freely given by the rebels until the Lords Justices issued orders to refuse it ; and, Lecky adds, " the Irish leaders in most cases did their utmost to restrict the horrors of the war, and it is also certain that in a great measure they were successful." If on the Irish side there were outrages as appalling as disgraced any Jacquerie, atrocities as bad and worse were perpetrated by their opponents, who were supposed to be disciplined soldiers. It was not the Irish Catholics, but English Puritans, who made the struggle a war of religion ; and when in 1643 the King agreed to a truce with the Irish, his action was denounced by Parliament on the ground that Papists " under pretexts of civil contracts would continue their anti-Christian idolatry." The methods adopted by God-fearing English soldiers to uproot belief in this idolatry are recorded in their own words. Sir William Cole thus succinctly describes the work of the troopers under his command in Ulster — " Starved and famished of the vulgar sort, whose goods were seized on by this regiment, 7,000." Sir Henry Tichborne wrought such havoc in the border districts that " there was neither man nor beast to be found in sixteen miles between the two towns of Drogheda and Dundalk ; nor on the other side of Dundalk, in the County of Monaghan, nearer than Carrickmacross — a strong pile twelve miles distant." It was not merely rebels taken with arms in their hands to whom no quarter was given. General Preston describes the soldiers as " destroying by fire and sword men, women, and children without regard to age or sex." Coote declared he liked the " frolic " of one of his soldiers w^ho headed the line of march with a baby spitted on the point of his pike ; and, according to Nalson, " If anyone who had some grains of compassion reprehended the soldiers for this unchristian inhumanity they would scornfully reply ' why nits will make lice ! ' " When the Bishop of Meath in a sermon preached in Dublin in 1642 ventiii-ed to plead for mercy to Irish women and children, an English officer was so outraged that he promptly resigned his commission.

It is the simplest thing in the world to compile lists of outrages committed by both sides, but popular as this method has been, and indeed still is, it leads nowhere. In my opinion it is much more important to realise the fact, overlooked or ignored by most popular commentators, that in the course of the struggle all parties changed sides not once, but, in most cases, several times. If, as Ulster politicians still assert, the Rebellion was a wanton massacre which dug an impassable gulf between natives and settlers, how does it come that in the fighting that followed Ulster Presbyterians were found in alliance with Royalists and Irish against the forces of Parliament ? Forty years before the siege which is still the great event in Ulster history, Derry suffered for five long months a strict blockade which its people, wedded as they are to the commemoration of historic anniversaries, have conspired to forget. On this occasion the town w^as held by Parliamentary republicans under Sir Charles Coote who had abjured the Covenant, and it was besieged by a combination of Royalists, Ulster Presbyterians, and Irish Catholics who, for the time being, had sunk their differences. It would be folly to urge that anything remotely resembling unity of purpose or principle existed amongst these strangely assorted allies. Their co-operation was purely a piece of political tactics, and was designed less with a view to serve Irish interests than to meet the needs of parties in Great Britain.

The Ulster Settlers stood by the Scots in their quarrel with the Long Parliament, and were denounced in consequence by no less a man than John Milton as " a generation of Highland thieves and red-shanks who, being neighbourly admitted ... by the courtesy of England, to hold possessions in our province, a country better than their own, have with worse faith than those heathen, proved ungrateful and treacherous guests to their best friends and entertainers." The prevalent view is that Ulster's action was inspired by detestation of the execution of the King, but it is obvious from the " Representation " drawn up by " these blockish presbyters of Claneboy," as Milton termed them, that they were less troubled by the fact that Cromwell and his fellows had " garred kings ken they had a lith in their necks " than by the opposition of the Independents to Presbyterian Government and, particularly, to the Solemn League and Covenant. The unpardonable sin of the " sectaries," according to the Ulster divines, was that they " endeavour to establish by law an universal toleration of all religions which is an avowed overturning of unity in religion, and so repugnant to the Word of God and the two first articles of the Covenant."

This was the point on which Milton fastened, and this extract from his Observations remains, after the passage of three centuries, perhaps the wisest contribution that has been made to the solution of the religious side of the Ulster controversy. " The Covenant," Milton declares, " enjoins us to endeavour the extirpation first of Popery and Prelacy, then of heresy, schism and profaneness, and whatsoever shall be found contrary to sound doctrine and the power of godliness. And this we cease not to do by all effectual and proper means ; but these divines might know that to extirpate all these things can be no work of the civil sword, but of the spiritual, which is the Word of God. No man well in his wits, endeavouring to root up weeds out of his ground, instead of using the spade, will take a mallet or a beetle.

Nor doth the Covenant anyway engage us to extirpate or prosecute the men, but the heresies and errors in them ; which, we tell these divines and the rest that understand not, belongs chiefly to their own function in the diligent preaching and insisting upon sound doctrine, in the confuting not railing down errors, encountering both in public and private conference, and by the power of truth, not of persecution, subduing those authors of heretical opinions, and, lastly, in the spiritual execution of Church discipline within their own congregations."

The Ulster Scots agreed no better with Puritan saints than they had done with Royalist sinners or Irish heretics. " We are now," they complained in a paper challenging the authority of Parliament, " called by your soldiers ' seditious fellows ' ; our nation is styled ' a base and treacherous nation which you will ere long make a province of ' ; our oaths are no more accounted than ' the bark of a dog.' " Having refused to take the " Engagement," as it was called, which demanded the swearing of allegiance to " the Commonwealth of England as now established, without King or House of Lords," a hue and cry was raised against " all delinquent and scandalous ministers." They were excluded from their pulpits, their stipends were sequestered, and, finally, in March, 1651, an Act of banishment was passed against them. This measure was so rigorously enforced that by the summer of that year only six or seven remained in the province, and these were forced to lie in hiding, " preaching in remote or private places, where the people willingly meet them."

It was arranged that the deportation of the pastors should be followed by the expulsion of the flock. The Rump Parliament had little in common with Strafford, yet, curiously, it was Strafford's methods it favoured in dealing with the Ulster question. Ulstermen to-day, who acclaim Cromwell to the skies as the only statesman whose handling of the Irish problem was logical, coherent, and effective, conveniently forget that the Protector designed that their ancestors should be the first to experience the full rigour of his policy. The germ of the Cromwellian Confiscation was the proposal, put forward in 1653, to remove " all the popular Scots " out of Ulster to districts in Munster where there was no hazard of their insurrection against the Government," and "where," as the official proclamation put it, " they may not be capable of doing that mischief which they give us much cause to believe they only want power and opportunity to practise in the place where they now are." Elaborate conditions were laid down guaranteeing the deportees lands proportionable to the value of the estates held by them in Ulster, appointing surveyors and valuers, and arranging convoys and escorts. To show that the Government were in earnest a list was published of two hundred and sixty persons, " including," according to Reid, " all those who by their known attachment to monarchial and Presbyterian principles, and by their station and influence, were most obnoxious to the reigning faction." These were required within a specified time, and under certain penalties, to accept the terms of the Declaration. Fortunately for the Ulstermen, the Rump Parliament was dissolved before the proclamation was enforced, and the Scots, having professed their readiness to give security for their good behaviour, Cromwell, who had enough trouble on hand, suspended the operation of the scheme, though, as is shown by instructions issued to the Lord Deputy and Council as late as 1656, it was not definitely abandoned. In the closing years of the Protectorate Presbyterianism, as a result of Cromwell's policy of providing a counter-check to the influence of other denominations, increased its power in Ireland. But its leaders, though they made the most of their opportunities to obtain supremacy over Episcopalians and Anabaptists, never forgave the Cromwellian abjuration of the Covenant, and to them, to quote Patrick, Adair, " this Government, though now flourishing and pretending some owning of religion, yet it was iniquity at bottom."