VI. THE IRISH FREE CLANS AND ANGLO-NORMAN FEUDALISM…

VI. THE IRISH FREE CLANS AND ANGLO-NORMAN FEUDALISM

The Danes were subdued, and the Irish at liberty to go on weaving the threads of their history--though, in consequence of the local wars, they had lost the concentrating power of the Ard- Righ--when treachery in their own ranks opened up the way for a far more serious attack from another branch of the great Scandinavian family--the Anglo-Norman.

The manners of the people had been left unchanged; the clan system had not been altered in the least; it had stood the test of previous revolutions; now it was to be confronted by a new system which had just conquered Europe, and spread itself round about the apparently doomed island. Of all places it had taken deep root in England, where it was destined to survive its destruction elsewhere in the convulsions of our modern history. That system, then in full vigor, was feudalism.

In order rightly to understand and form a correct judgment on the question, and its mighty issues, we must state briefly what the chief characteristics of feudalism were in those countries where it flourished.

The feudal system proceeded on the principle that landed property was all derived from the king, as the captain of a conquering army; that it had been distributed by him among his followers on certain conditions, and that it was liable to be forfeited if those conditions were not fulfilled.

The feudal system, moreover, politically considered, supposed the principle that all civil and political rights were derived from the possession of land; that those who possessed no land could possess neither civil nor political rights--were, in fact, not men, but villeins.

Consequently, it reduced nations to a small number of landowners, enjoying all the privileges of citizenship; the masses, deprived of all rights, having no share in the government, no opportunity of rising in the social scale, were forever condemned to villeinage or serfdom.

Feudalism, in our opinion, came first from Scandinavia. The majority of writers derive it from Germany. The question of its origin is too extensive to be included within our present limits, and indeed is unnecessary, as we deal principally with the fact and not with its history.

When the sea-rover had conquered the boat of an enemy, or destroyed a village, he distributed the spoils among his crew. Every thing was handed over to his followers in the form of a gift, and in return these latter were bound to serve him with the greatest ardor and devotedness. In course of time the idea of settling down on some territory which they had devastated and depopulated, presented itself to the minds of the rovers. The sea-kong did by the land what he had been accustomed to do by the plunder: he parcelled it out among his faithful followers-- fideles--giving to each his share of the territory. This was called feoh by the Anglo-Saxons, who were the first to carry out the system on British soil, as Dr. Lingard shows. Thus the word fief was coined, which in due time took its place in all the languages of Europe.

The giver was considered the absolute owner of whatever he gave, as is the commander of a vessel at sea. It was a beneficium conferred by him, to which certain indispensable conditions were attached. Military duty was the first, but not the only one of these. Writers on feudalism mention a great number, the nonfulfilment of which incurred what was called forfeiture.

In countries where the pirates succeeded in establishing themselves, all the native population was either destroyed by them, as Dudo tells us was the case in Normandy, or, as more frequently happened, the sword being unable to carry destruction so far, the inhabitants who survived were reduced to serfdom, and compelled to till the soil for the conquerors; they were thenceforth called villeins or ascripti glebae. It is clear that such only as possessed land could claim civil and political rights in the new states thus called into existence. Hence the owning of land under feudal tenure was the great and only essential characteristic of mediaeval feudalism.

This system, which was first introduced into Britain by the Anglo-Saxons, was brought to a fixed and permanent state by the Normans--followers of William the Conqueror; and, when the time came for treachery to summon the Norman knights to Irish soil, the devoted island found herself face to face with an iron system which at that period crushed and weighed down all Europe.

The Normans had now been settled in England for a hundred years; all the castles in the country were occupied by Norman lords; all bishopries filled by Norman bishops; all monasteries ruled by Norman abbots. At the head of the state stood the king, at that time Henry II. Here, more than in any other country in Europe, was the king the key-stone to the feudal masonry. Not an inch of ground in England was owned save under his authority, as enjoying the supremum dominium. All the land had been granted by his predecessors as fiefs, with the right of reversion to the crown by forfeiture in case of the violation of feudal obligations. Here was no allodial property, no censitive hereditary domain, as in the rest of, otherwise, feudal Europe. All English lawyers were unanimous in the doctrine that the king alone was the true master of the territory; that tenure under him carried with it all the conditions of feudal tenure, and that any deed or grant proceeding from his authority ought to be so understood.

The south-western portion of Wales was occupied by Norman lords, Flemings for the most part. Two of these, Robert Fitzstephens and Maurice Fitzgerald, sailed to the aid of the Irish King of Leinster. They were the first to land, arriving a full year before Strongbow.

Strongbow came at last. The conditions agreed on beforehand between himself and the Leinster king were fulfilled. He was married to the daughter of Dermod McMurrough, chief of Leinster, acknowledged Righ Dahma, that is, successor to the crown, while the Irish, accustomed for ages to admire valor and bow submissively to the law of conquest, admitted the claim. The English adventurer they looked upon as one of themselves by marriage. Election in such a case was unnecessary, or rather, understood, and Strongbow took the place which was his in their eyes by right of his wife, of head under McMurrough of all the clans of Leinster.

When, a little later, came Henry II. to be acknowledged by Strongbow as his suzerain, and to receive the homage of the presumptive heir of Leinster, submission to him was, in the eyes of the Irish, merely a consequence of their own clan system. They understood the homage rendered to him in a very different sense from that attached to it by feudal nations; and had they had an inkling of the real intentions of the new comers, not one of them would have consented to live under and bow the neck to such a yoke.

In fact, on the small territory where those great events were enacted, two worlds, utterly different from each other, stood face to face. Cambrensis tells us that the English were struck with wonder at what they saw. The imperialism of Rome had never touched Ireland. The Danes, opposed so strenuously from the outset, and finally overcome, had never been able to introduce there their restrictive measures of oppression. The English found the natives in exactly the same state as that in which Julius Caesar found the Gauls twelve hundred years before, except as to religion--the race governed patriarchally by chieftains allied to their subordinates by blood relationship; no unity in the government, no common flag, no private and hereditary property, nothing to bind the tribes together except religion. It was not a nation properly, but rather an agglomeration of small nations often at war each with each, yet all strongly attached to Erin-- a mere name, including, nevertherless, the dear idea of country --the chieftains elective, bold, enterprising; the subordinates free, attached to the chief as to a common father, throwing themselves with ardor into all his quarrels, ready to die for him at any moment. Around chief and clansmen circled a large number of brehons, shanachies, poets, bards, and harpers--poetry, music, and war strangely blended together. The religion of Christ spread over all a halo of purity and holiness; large monasteries filled with pious monks, and convents of devout and pure virgins abounded; bishops and priests in the churches chanting psalms, each accompanying himself with a many-stringed harp, gave forth sweet harmony, unheard at the time in any other part of the world.

A most important feature to be considered is their understanding of property. Hereditary right of land with respect to individuals, and the transmission of property of any kind by right of primogeniture, were unknown among them. If a specified amount of territory was assigned to the chieftain, a smaller portion to the bishop, the shanachy, head poet, and other civil officers each in his degree, such property was attached to the office and not to the man who filled it, but passed to his elected successor and not to his own children; while the great bulk of the territory belonged to the clan in common. No one possessed the right to alienate a single rood of it, and, if at times a portion was granted to exiles, to strangers, to a contiguous clan, the whole tribe was consulted on the subject. Over the common land large herds of cattle roamed--the property of individuals who could own nothing, except of a movable nature, beyond their small wooden houses.

This state of things had existed, according to their annals, for several thousand years. Their ancestors had lived happily under such social conditions, which they wished to abide in and hand down to their posterity.

Foreign trade was distasteful to them; in fact, they had no inclination for commerce. Lucre they despised, scarcely knowing the use of money, which had been lately introduced among them. Yet, being refined in their tastes, fond of ornament, of wine at their feasts, loving to adorn the persons of their wives and daughters with silk and gems, they had allowed the Danes to dwell in their seaports, to trade in those commodities, and to import for their use what the land did not produce.

Those seaport towns had been fortified by the Northmen on their first victories when they took possession of them. Throughout the rest of the island, a fortress or a large town was not to be seen. The people, being all agriculturists or graziers, loved to dwell in the country; their houses were built of wattle and clay, yet comfortable and orderly.

The mansions of the chieftains were neither large architectural piles, nor frowning fortresses. They bore the name of raths when used for dwellings; of duns when constructed with a view to resisting an attack. In both cases, they were, in part under ground, in part above; the whole circular in form, built sometimes of large stones, oftener of walls of sodded clay.

Instead of covering their limbs with coats of mail, like the warriors of mediaeval Europe, they wore woollen garments even in war, and for ornaments chains or plates of precious metal. The Norman invaders, clad in heavy mail, were surprised, therefore, to find themselves face to face with men in their estimation unprotected and naked. More astonished were they still at the natural boldness and readiness of the Irish in speaking before their chieftains and princes, not understanding that all were of the same blood and cognizant of the fact.

Still less could they understand the freedom and familiarity existing between the Irish nobility and the poorest of their kinsmen, so different from the haughty bearing of an aristocracy of foreign extraction to the serfs and villeins of a people they had conquered.

The two nations now confronting each other had, therefore, nothing in common, unless, perhaps, an excessive pertinacity of purpose. The new comers belonged to a stern, unyielding, systematic stock, which was destined to give to Europe that great character so superior in our times to that of southern or eastern nations. The natives possessed that strong attachment to their time-honored customs, so peculiar to patriarchal tribes, in whose nature traditions and social habits are so strongly intermingled, that they are ineradicable save by the utter extirpation of the people.

And now the characteristics of both races were to be brought out in strong contrast by the great question of property in the soil, which was at the bottom of the struggle between clanship and feudalism. The Irish, as we have seen, knew nothing of individual property in land, nor of tenure, nor of rent, much less of forfeiture. They were often called upon by their chieftains to contribute to their support in ways not seldom oppressive enough, but the contributions were always in kind.

A new and very different system was to be attempted, to which the Irish at first appeared to consent, because they did not understand it, attaching, as they did, their own ideas to words, which, in the mouths of the invaders, had a very different meaning.

With the Irish "to do homage" meant to acknowledge the superiority of another, either on account of his lawful authority or his success in war; and the consequences of this act were, either the fulfilment of the enactments contained in the "Book of Rights," or submission to temporary conditions guaranteed by hostages. But that the person doing homage became by that act the liegeman of the suzerain for life and hereditarily in his posterity, subject to be deprived of all privileges of citizenship, as well as to the possibility of seeing all his lands forfeited, besides many minor penalties enjoined by the feudal code which often resolved itself into mere might--such a meaning of the word homage could by no possibility enter the mind of an Irishman at that period.

Hence, when, after the atrocities committed by the first invaders, who respected neither treaties nor the dictates of humanity, not even the sanctuary and the sacredness of religious houses, Henry II. came with an army, large and powerful for that time, the Irish people and their chieftains, hoping that he would put an end to the crying tyranny of the Fitzstephens, Fitzgeralds, De Lacys, and others, went to meet him and acknowledge his authority as head chieftain of Leinster through Strongbow, and, perhaps, as the monarch who should restore peace and happiness to the whole island. McCarthy, king of Desmond, was the first Irish prince to pay homage to Henry.

While the king was spending the Christmas festivities in Dublin, many other chieftains arrived; among them O'Carrol of Oriel and O'Rourke of Breffny. Roderic O'Connor of Connaught, till then acknowledged by many as monarch of Ireland, thought at first of fighting, but, as was his custom, he ended by a treaty, wherein, it is said, he acknowledged Henry as his suzerain, and thus placed Ireland at his feet. Ulster alone had not seen the invaders; but, as its inhabitants did not protest with arms in their hands, the Normans pretended that from that moment they were the rightful owners of the island.

Without a moment's delay they began to feudalize the country by dividing the land and building castles. These two operations, which we now turn to, opened the eyes of the Irish to the deception which had been practised upon them, and were the real origin of the momentous struggle which is still being waged today.

Sir John Davies, the English attorney-general of James I., has stated the whole case in a sentence: "All Ireland was by Henry II. cantonized among ten of the English nation; and, though they had not gained possession of one-third of the kingdom, yet in title they were owners and lords of all, so as nothing was left to be granted to the natives."

McCarthy, king of Desmond, had been the first to acknowledge the authority of Henry II., yet McCarthy's lands were among the first, if not the first, bestowed by Henry on his minions. The grant may be seen in Ware, and it is worthy of perusal as a sample of the many grants which followed it, whereby Henry attempted a total revolution in the tenure of land. The charter giving Meath to De Lacy was the only one which by a clause seemed to preserve the old customs of the country as to territory; and yet it was in Meath that the greatest atrocities were committed.

Yet one difficulty presented itself to the invaders: their rights were only on paper, whereas the Irish were still in possession of the greatest part of the island, and once the real purpose of the Normans showed itself, they were no longer disposed to submit to Henry or to any of his appointed lords. The territory had to be wrested from them by force of arms.

The English claimed the whole island as their own. They were, in fact, masters only of the portion occupied by their troops; the remainder was, therefore, to be conquered. And if in Desmond, where the whole strength of the English first fell, they possessed only a little more than one-fourth of the soil, what was the case in the rest of the island, the most of which had not yet seen them?

Long years of war would evidently be required to subdue it, and the systematic mind of the conquerors immediately set about devising the best means for the attainment of their purpose. The lessons gathered from their continental experience suggested these means immediately; they saw that by covering the country with feudal castles they could in the end conquer the most stubborn nation. A thorough revolution was intended. The two systems were so entirely antagonistic to each other that the success of the Norman project involved a change of land tenure, laws, customs, dress--every thing. Even the music of the bards was to be silenced, the poetry of the files to be abolished, the pedigrees of families to be discontinued, the very games of the people to be interrupted and forbidden. A vast number of castles was necessary. The project was a fearful one, cruel, barbarous, worthy of pagan antiquity. It was undertaken with a kind of ferocious alacrity, and in a short time it appeared near realization. But in the long run it failed, and four hundred years later, under the eighth Henry, it was as far from completion as the day on which the second Henry left the island in 1171.

To show the importance which the invaders attached to their system, and the ardor with which they set about putting it in practice, we have only to extract a few passages from the old annals of the islands; they are wonderfully expressive in their simplicity:

"A.D. 1176. The English were driven from Limerick by Donnall O'Brian. An English castle was in process of erection at Kells."- -(Four Masters.)

"A.D. 1178. The English built and fortified a castle at Kenlis, the key of those parts of Meath, against the incursions of the Ulster men."--(Ware's Antiquities.)

"A.D. 1180. Hugh De Lacy planted several colonies in Meath, and fortified the country with many castles, for the defence and security of the English."--(Ibid.)

Such enumerations might be prolonged indefinitely; we conclude with the following entry taken from the Four Masters:

"A.D. 1186. Hugh De Lacy, the profaner and destroyer of many churches, Lord of the English of Meath (the Irish cannot call him their lord), Breffni, and Oirghialla, he who had conquered the greater part of Ireland for the English, and of whose English castles all Meath, from the Shannon to the sea, was full, after having finished the castle of Der Magh, set out accompanied by three Englishmen to visit it . . . . One of the men of Tebtha, a youth named O'Miadhaigh, approached him, and with an axe severed his head from his body."

So wide-reaching and comprehensive was the plan of the invaders from the beginning that they felt confident of holding possession of Ireland forever; and to effect this they must certainly have intended to destroy or drive out the native race, or at best to make slaves of as many of them as they chose to keep. Thus they had prophecies manufactured for the purpose, and Cambrensis, in his second book, chapter xxxiii., says confidently: "Prophecies promise a full victory to the English people. . . . and that the island of Hibernia shall be subjected and fortified with castles--literally incastellated, incastellatam--throughout from sea to sea."

Meanwhile, together with the building of castles, the partition of the territory was being carried out. The ten great lords, among whom, according to Sir John Davies, Henry II. had cantonized Ireland, saw the necessity of giving a part of their large estates to their followers that so they might occupy the whole. McGeohegan compiles from Ware the best view of this very interesting and comparatively unexplored subject. Curious details are found there, showing that, with the exception of Ulster, not only the geography, but even the most minute topography of the country, had been well studied by those feudal chieftains. Their characteristic love for system runs all through these transactions.

But the Irish had now seen enough. The whole country was in a blaze. That kind of guerilla war peculiar to the Celtic clans began. The newly built castles were attacked and often captured and destroyed. Strongbow was shut up and besieged in Water- ford, which fell into the hands of the Danes. The latter sided everywhere with the Irish. Limerick changed hands several times, until Donnall O'Brian, who was left in possession, set fire to it rather than see it fall again into the hands of the invaders.

In Meath, where the numerous castles of De Lacy were situated, a war to the knife was being waged. O'Melachlin first tried persuasion, but in conference with De Lacy he dared inveigh loudly against the King of England, and, as his words must have expressed the feelings of the great majority of the people, we give them:

"Notwithstanding his promise of supporting me in the possession of my wealth and dignities, he has sent robbers to invade my patrimony. Avaricious and sparing of his own possessions, he is lavish of those of others, and thus enriches libertines and profligates who have consumed the patrimony of their fathers in debauchery."

This manly protest was answered by the stroke of a dagger from the hand of Raymond Legros, and, after being beheaded, 0'Melachlin was buried feet upward as a rebel.

The monarch himself, Roderic O'Connor, finally appeared on the scene, beat the English at Thurles, and, marching into Meath, laid the country waste.

Henry at last saw the necessity of adopting a milder policy, and O'Connor dispatching to England Catholicus O'Duffy, Archbishop of Tuam, Lawrence O'Toole, of Dublin, and Concors, Abbot of St. Brendan, the Treaty of Windsor was concluded, which was really a compromise, and yet remained the true law of the land for four hundred years. It may be seen in Rymer's "Foedera."

Sir John Davies justly remarks that by the treaty "the Irish lords only promised to become tributaries to King Henry II.; and such as pay only tribute, though they are placed by Bodin in the first degree of subjection, yet are not properly subjects, but sovereigns; for though they be less and inferior to the princes to whom they pay tribute, yet they hold all other points of sovereignty.

"And, therefore, though King Henry had the title of Sovereign Lord over the Irish, yet did he not put those things in execution, which are the true marks of sovereignty.

"For to give laws unto a people, to institute magistrates and officers over them, to punish or pardon malefactors, to have the sole authority of making war or peace, are the true marks of sovereignty, which King Henry II. had not in Ireland, but the Irish lords did still retain all those prerogatives to themselves. For they governed their people by the Brehon law; they appointed their own magistrates and officers; . . . . they made war and peace one with another, without control; and this they did not only during the reign of Henry II., but afterward in all times, even until the reign of Queen Elizabeth."

By an article of the treaty the Irish were allowed to live in the Pale if they chose; and even there they could enjoy their customs in peace, as far as the letter of the law went. Many acts of Irish parliaments, it is true, were passed for the purpose of depriving them of that right, but without success.

Edmund Spenser, himself living in the Pale in the reign of Elizabeth, speaks as an eye-witness of "having seen their meeton their ancient accustomed hills, where they debated and settled matters according to the Brehon laws, between family and family, township and township, assembling in large numbers, and going, according to their custom, all armed."

Stanihurst also, a contemporary of Spenser, had witnessed the breaking up of those meetings, and seen "the crowds in long lines, coming down the hills in the wake of each chieftain, he the proudest that could bring the largest company home to his evening supper."

Here would be the proper place to speak of the Brehon law, which remained thus in antagonism to feudal customs for several centuries. Up to recently, however, only vague notions could be given of that code. But at this moment antiquarians are revising and studying it preparatory to publishing the "Senchus Mor" in which the Irish law is contained. It is known that it existed previous to the conversion of Ireland to Christianity, and that the laws of tanistry and of gavelkind, the customs of gossipred and of fostering, were of pagan origin. Patrick revised the code and corrected what could not coincide with the Christian religion. He also introduced into the island many principles of the Roman civil and canon law, which, without destroying the peculiarities natural to the Irish character, invested their code with a more modern and Christian aspect.

Edmund Campian, who afterward died a martyr under Elizabeth, says, in his "Account of Ireland," written in May, 1571: "They (the Irish) speak Latin like a vulgar language, learned in their common schools of leechcraft and law, whereat they begin children, and hold on sixteen or twenty years, conning by rote the aphorisms of Hippocrates, and the Civil Institutes, and a few other parings of these two faculties. I have seen them where they kept school, ten in some one chamber, grovelling upon couches of straw, their books at their noses, themselves lying prostrate, and so to chant out their lessons by piecemeal, being the most part lusty fellows of twenty-five years and upward."

It was then after studies of from sixteen to twenty years that the Brehon judge--the great one of a whole sept, or the inferior one of a single noble family--sat at certain appointed times, in the open air, on a hill generally, having for his seat clods of earth, to decide on the various subjects of difference among neighbors.

Sir James Ware remarks that they were not acquainted with the laws of England. He might have better said, they preferred their own, as not coming from cold and pagan Scandinavia, but from the warm south, the greatest of human law-givers, the jurisconsults of Old Rome, and the holy expounders of the laws of Christian Rome.

What were those laws of England of which Ware speaks? There is no question here of the common law which came into use in times posterior to Henry II., and which the English derived chiefly from the Christian civil and canon law; but of those feudal enactments, which the Anglo-Normans endeavored to introduce into Ireland, for the purpose of supplanting the old law and customs of the natives.

There was, first, the law of territory, if we may so call it, by which the supreme ruler became really owner of the integral soil, which he distributed among his great vassals, to be redistributed by them among inferior vassals.

There was the law of primogeniture, which even to this day obtains in England, and has brought about in that country since the days of William the Conqueror, and in Ireland since the English "plantations" of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the state of things now so well known to Europe.

There was also the long list of feudal conditions to be observed, by the fulfilment of which the great barons and their followers held their lands. For their tenure was liable to homage and fealty, as understood in the feudal sense, to wardships and impediments to marriage, to fines for alienations, to what English legists call primer seizins, rents, reliefs, escheats, and, finally, forfeitures; this last was at all times more strictly observed in England than in any other feudal country, and by its enactments so many noble families have, in the course of ages, been reduced to beggary, and their chiefs often brought to the block. English history is filled with such cases.

The law of wardship, by which no minor, heir, or heiress could have other guardian than the suzerain, and could not marry without his consent, was at all times a great source of wealth to the royal exchequer, and a correspondingly heavy tribute laid on the vassal. So profitable did the English kings find this law, that they speedily introduced it into Church affairs, every bishop's see or monastery being considered, at the death of the incumbent, as a minor, a ward, to be taken care of by the sovereign, who enjoyed the revenues without bothering himself particularly with the charges.

There were, finally, the hunting laws, which forbade any man to hunt or hawk even on his own estate.

Such were the laws of England, which Sir James Ware complains the Irish did not know.

In signing the treaty of Windsor, the English king had apparently recognized in the person of Roderic O'Connor, and in the Irish through him, the chief rights of sovereignty over the whole island, except Leinster and, perhaps, Meath. But, at the same time, a passage or two in the treaty concealed a meaning certainly unperceived by the Irish, but fraught with mischief and misfortune to their country.

First, Roderic O'Connor acknowledged himself and his successors as liegemen of the kings of England; in a second place, the privileges conceded to the Irish were to continue only so long as they remained faithful to their oath of allegiance. We see here the same confusion of ideas, which we remarked on the meaning given to the word homage by either party. The natives of the island understood to be liegemen and under oath in a sense conformable to their usual ideas of subordination; the English invested those words with the feudal meaning.

All the calamities of the four following centuries, and, consequently, all the horrors of the times subsequent to the Protestant Reformation, were to be the penalty of that misunderstanding.

Let us picture to ourselves two races of men so different as the Milesian Celts on the one side, and the Scandinavian Norman French on the other, having concluded such a treaty as that of Windsor, each side resolved to push its own interpretation to the bitter end.

The English are in possession of a territory clearly enough defined, but they are ever on the alert to seize any opportunity of a real or pretended violation of it, in order to extend their limits and subjugate the whole island. Yet they are bound to allow the Brehon Irish to live in their midst, governed by their own customs and laws. Moreover, they acknowledge that the former great Irish lords of the very country which they occupy are not mere Irish, but of noble blood; for, from the beginning, the English recognized five families of the country, known as the "five bloods," as pure and noble, in theory at least.

The Irish without the Pale are acknowledged as perfectly independent, completely beyond English control, with their own magistrates and laws, even that of war; subject only to tribute. But, at the same time, this independence is rendered absolutely insecure by the imposition of conditions, whose meaning is well known and perfectly understood in all the countries conquered by the Scandinavians, but utterly beyond the comprehension of the Irish.

The consequence is clear: war began with the conclusion of the treaty--a war which raged for four centuries, until a new and more powerful incentive to slaughter and desolation showed itself in the Reformation, ushered in by Henry VIII.

First came a general rebellion. This is the word used by Ware, when John, a boy of twelve years of age, was dispatched by his father Henry, with the title of Lord of Ireland, to receive the submission of various Irish lords at Waterford, where he landed. "The young English gentlemen," says Cambrensis, who was a witness of the scene, "used the Irish chieftains with scorn, because," as he says, "their demeanor was rude and barbarous." The Irish naturally resented this treatment from a lad, as they would have resented it from his father; and they retired in wrath to take up arms and raise the whole land to "rebellion."

This solemn protest was not without effect in Europe. At the beginning of the reign of Richard I., Clement III., on appointing, by the king's request, William de Longchamps, Bishop of Ely, as his legate in England, Wales, and Ireland, took good care to limit the authority of this prelate to those parts of Ireland which lay under the jurisdiction of the Earl of Moreton-- that is, of John, brother to Richard. He had power to exercise his jurisdiction "in Anglia,, Wallia, et illis Hiberniae partibus in quibus Joannes Moretonii Comes potestatem habet et dominium."--(Matth. Paris.) It would seem, then, that Clement III. knew nothing of the bull of Adrian IV.

The war, as we said, was incessant. England finally so despaired of conquering the country, that some lords of the court of Henry VI. caused him to write letters to some of his "Irish enemies," urging the latter to effect the conquest of the island in the king's name. This was assuredly a last resource, which history has never recorded of any other nation warring on a rival. But even in this England failed. Those lords--the "Irish enemies" of King Henry VI.--sent his letters to the Duke of York, then Lord- Lieutenant, "and published to the world the shame of England."-- (Sir John Davies.)

The result was that, at the end of the reign of Henry VI., the Irish, in the words of the same author, "became victorious over all, without blood or sweat; only that little canton of land, called the English Pale, containing four small shires; maintained yet a bordering war with the Irish, and retained the form of English government."

Feudalism was thus reduced in Ireland to the small territory lying between the Boyne and the Liffey, subject to the constant annoyance of the O'Moores, O'Byrnes, and O'Cavanaghs. And this state of affairs continued until the period of the so-called Reformation in England.

Ireland proved itself then the only spot in Western Europe where feudal laws and feudal customs could take no root. Through all other nations of the Continent those laws spread by degrees, from the countries invaded by the Northmen, into the most distant parts, modified and mitigated in some instances by the innate power of resistance left by former institutions. In this small island alone, where clanship still held its own, feudalism proved a complete failure. We merely record a fact, suggestive, indeed, of thought, which proves, if no more, at least that the Celtic nature is far more persevering and steady of purpose than is generally supposed.

But a more interesting spectacle still awaits us--that of the English themselves morally overcome and won over by the example of their antagonists, renouncing their feudal usages, and adopting manners which they had at first deemed rude and barbarous.

The treaty of Windsor, which was subsequently confirmed by many diplomatic enactments, obliged King Henry III. of England to address O'Brien of Thomond in the following words: "Rex regi Thomond salutem." The same English monarch was compelled to give O'Neill of Ulster the title of Rex, after having used, inadvertently perhaps, that of Regulus.--(Sir John Davies.) Both O'Brien and O'Neill lived in the midst of a thickly populated Irish district, with a few great English lords shut up in their castles on the borders of the respective territory of the clans.

The Norman lords in many parts of the country lived right in the midst of an Irish population, with its Brehon judges, shanachies, harpers, and other officers, attached to their customs of gossipred, fostering, tanistry, gavelkind, and other usages, which the parliaments of Drogheda, Kilkenny, Dublin, Trim, and other places, were soon to declare lewd and barbarous. The question of the moment was: Which of the two systems, clanship or feudalism, brought thus into close contact and antagonism, was to prevail?

Ere long it began to appear that the aversion first felt by the English lords at such strange customs was not entirely invincible, and many of them even went so far as to choose wives from among the native families. In fact, there lay a great example before their eyes from the outset, in the marriage of Strongbow with Eva, the daughter of McMurrough. Intermarriage soon became the prevailing custom; so that the posterity of the first invaders was, after all, to have Celtic blood in its veins.

Hence, a distinction arose between the English by blood and the English by birth. The first had, indeed, an English name; but they were born in the island, and soon came to be known as degenerate English.--That degeneracy was merely the moral effect of constant intercourse with the natives of their neighborhood. - -The others were continually shifting, being always composed of the latest new-comers from England.

It is something well worthy of remark that a residence of a short duration sufficed to blend in unison two natures so opposed as the Irish and the English. The latter, not content with wedding Irish wives, sent their own children to be fostered by their Irish friends; and the children naturally came from the nursery more Irish than their fathers. They objected no longer to becoming gossips for each other at christenings, to adopt the dress of their foster-parents, whose language was in many cases the only one which they brought from their foster-home.

Thus Ireland, even in districts which had been thoroughly devastated by the first invaders, became the old Ireland again; and the song of the bard and the melody of the harper were heard in the English castle as well as in the Irish rath.1 (1 The process of gaining over an Englishman to Irish manners is admirably described in the "Moderate Cavalier," under Cromwell, quoted by Mr. J. P. Prendergast in his second edition of the "Cromwellian Settlement," p. 263. If this process were common with the Protestant officers of Cromwell, how much more so with Catholic Anglo-Normans!)

The nationalization of their kin, which received a powerful impetus from the fact that the English who lived without the Pale escaped feudal exactions and penalties from the impossibility of enforcing the feudal laws on Irish territory, alarmed the Anglo-Normans by birth, in whose hand rested the engine of the government; and, looking around for a remedy, they could discover nothing better than acts of Parliament.

We have not been able to ascertain the precise epoch in which the first Irish Parliament was convened; indeed, to this day, it seems a debated question. The general belief, however, ascribes it to King John. The first mention of it by Ware is under the year 1333, as late as Edward III., more than one hundred and fifty years after the Conquest. But the need of stringent rules to keep the Irish at bay, and prevent the English from "degenerating," became so urgent that, in 1367, the famous Parliament met at Kilkenny, and enacted the bill known as the "Statutes of Kilkenny," in which the matter was fully elaborated, and a new order of things set on foot in Ireland.

The Irish could recognize no other Parliament than their ancient Feis; and, these having been discontinued for several centuries, they showed their appreciation of the new English institution in the manner described by Ware under the year 1413: "On the 11th of the calends of February, the morrow after St. Matthias day, a Parliament began at Dublin, and continued for the space of fifteen days; in which time the Irish burned all that stood in their way, as their usual custom was in times of other Parliaments."

The reader who is acquainted with the enactments which go by the name of the "Statutes of Kilkenny" will scarcely wonder at this mode of proceeding.

Neither at that period, nor later on save once under Henry VIII., was the Irish race represented in those assemblies. In the reign of Edward III. no Irish native nor old English resident assisted at the Parliament of Kilkenny, but only Englishmen newly arrived; for all its acts were directed against the Irish and the degenerate English--against the latter particularly. How the members composing these Parliaments were elected at that time we do not know; but they were not summoned from more than twelve counties, which number, first established by King John, gradually dwindled, until, in the reign of Henry VII., it was reduced to four, so that the Irish Parliament came to be composed of a few men, and those few representatives of purely English interests.

A true history of the times would demand an examination of the various enactments made by these so-called Irish Parliaments, as setting forth more distinctly than any thing else could do the points at variance between the two nations. Our space, however, and indeed our purpose, forbids this. In order to put the reader in possession of at least an idea of the difficulties on either side, we add a few extracts from the very famous "Statutes of Kilkenny."

The preamble sets forth "that already the English in Ireland were mere Irish in their language, names, apparel, and their manner of living, and had rejected the English laws and submitted to the Irish, with whom they had many marriages and alliances, which tended to the utter ruin and destruction of the commonwealth." And then the Statutes go on to enact --we cull from various chapters: "The English cannot any more make peace or war with the Irish without special warrant; it is made penal to the English to permit the Irish to send their cattle to graze upon their land; the Irish could not be presented by the English to any ecclesiastical benefice; they--the Irish--could not be received into any monasteries or religious houses; the English could not entertain any of their bards, or poets, or shanachies, " etc.

This extraordinary legislation proves beyond any amount of facts to what degree the posterity of the first Norman invaders of Ireland had adopted Irish customs, and made themselves one with the natives.

The Irish, therefore, had, in this instance, morally conquered their enemies, and feudalism was defeated. Another example was given of the invariable invasions of the island. The enemy, however successful at the beginning, was compelled finally to give way to the force of resistance in this people; and the time- honored customs of an ancient race survived all attempts at violent foreign innovations. The posterity of those proud nobles, who, with Giraldus Cambrensis, had found nothing but what was contemptible in this nation, so strange to their eyes, who looked upon them as an easy victim to be despoiled of their land, and that land to be occupied by them, that posterity adopted, within, comparatively speaking, a few years, the life and manners of the mere Irish in their entirety. Feudalism they renounced for the clan. Each of the great English families that first landed in the island had formed a new sept, and the clans of the Geraldines, De Courcys, and others, were admitted into full copartnership with the old Milesian septs. This the two great families of the Burkes in Connaught called their chiefs McWilllams Either and McWilliams Oughter. The Berminghams bad become McYoris; the Dixons, McJordans; the Mangles, McCostellos. Other old English families were called McHubbard, McDavid, etc.; one of the Geraldine septs was known as McMorice, another as McGibbon; the chief of Dunboyne's house became McPheris.

Meanwhile, "it was manifest," says Sir John Davies, "that those who had the government of Ireland under the crown of England intended to make a perpetual separation and enmity between the English settled in Ireland and the Irish, in the expectation that the English should in the end root out the Irish."

There is no doubt that, if these laws of Kilkenny could have been enforced and carried out, as they were meant to be, the effect hoped for by these legislators might have been the natural result. Yet even much later on, at a period, too, when the English power was considerably increased, under Henry VIII., a very curious discussion of this possibility, which took place at the time, did not by any means promise an easy realization. The following passage of the "State Papers," under the great Tudor, contains a rather sensible view of the subject, and is not so sanguine of the success of the hopes cherished by the attorney-general of James I.:

"The lande is very large--by estimation as large as Englande--so that, to enhabit the whole with new inhabiters, the number would be so great that there is no prince christened that commodiously might spare so many subjects to depart out of his regions. . . . But to enterprise the whole extirpation and totall destruction of all the Irishmen of the lande, it would be a marvellous and sumptuous charge and great difficulty, considering both the lack of enhabitors, and the great hardness and misery these Irishmen can endure, both of hunger, colde, and thirst, and evill lodging, more than the inhabitants of any other lande."

There were, therefore, evidently difficulties in the way; yet it is certain that the question of the total extirpation of the Irish has been entertained for centuries by a class of English statesmen, and confidently looked for by the English nation. Sir John Davies, as we see, attributes no other object to the Statutes of Kilkenny.

But could those statutes be enforced? were they ever enforced? The same writer pretends that they were for "several years;" but the sequel proves that they were not. The reason which he assigns for their execution--that for a certain time after that Parliament there was peace in the island--leads us to believe the contrary; for if, as he himself justly remarks before, the intention of the legislators was to create a perpetual separation and enmity between the two races, the promulgation and strict execution of those statutes would have immediately enkindled a war which could have ended only with the total extirpation of one race or the other.

And the further fact that it was thought necessary to reenact those odious laws frequently in subsequent Irish Parliaments proves that they were not carried into execution, since new legislation on the subject was demanded.

It is true that events, transmitted to us either through the Irish annals or the English chronicles, show that several attempts were made to enforce those acts of Kilkenny, chiefly against the Fitz-Thomases or Geraldines of Desmond, who pretended, even after their enactment, to be as independent of them as before, and refused to attend the Parliament when convoked, claiming the strange privilege "that the Earls of Desmond should never come to any Parliament or Grand Council, or within any walled town, but at their will or pleasure." And the Desmonds continued in their persistent opposition to the English laws until the reign of Elizabeth.

But it was against Churchmen chiefly that they were carried out in full; for we occasionally meet in the annals of the country with instances where some English prelate in Ireland had been prosecuted for having conferred orders on mere Irishmen, and that some Norman abbots had been deposed for having received mere Irishmen as monks into their monasteries.

With the exception of a few cases of this kind, no proof can be furnished that any material change was brought about in the relations of the old English settlers with their Irish neighbors. In fact, matters progressed so favorably in this friendly direction, that at length the descendants of Strongbow and his followers became, as is well known, "Hibernis Hiberniores," and the judges sent from England could hold their circuit only in the four counties between the Liffey and the Boyne; and the name given to the majority of the old English families was "English rebels," while the natives were called "Irish enemies."

Sir John Davies himself is forced to admit it: "When the civil government grew so weak and so loose that the English lords would not suffer the English laws to be executed within their territories and seigniories, but in place thereof both they and their people embraced the Irish customs, then the state of things, like a game at Irish, was so turned about, that the English, who hoped to make a perfect conquest of the Irish, were by them perfectly and absolutely conquered, because Victi victoribus leges dedere."

The truth could not be expressed in more explicit terms. Yet all has not been said. The same persevering character, making headway against apparently insurmountable obstacles, shows itself conspicuously in the Irish, in the preservation of their land, which, after all, was the great object of contention between the two races.

The first Anglo-Norman invaders, including Henry II himself, had no other object in view than gradually to occupy the whole territory, subject it to the feudal laws, give to Englishmen the position of feudal lords, and reduce the Irish to that of villeins, if they could not succeed in rooting them out.

A few years later, by the Treaty of Windsor, the king seemed to confine his pretensions to Leinster, and perhaps Meath, and expressly allowed the natives to keep their lands in the other districts of the island. Yet none of his former grants, by which "he had cantonned the whole island between ten Englishmen," were recalled; the continued as part of and means to shape the policy of the invaders, and subsequent Parliaments always supposed the validity of those former grants made to Strongbow and his followers.

It is true that those posterior Acts of Parliament did not merely rely for their strength on the first documents, but on the pretence that the Irish chieftains and people outside of Leinster and Meath had justly forfeited their estates by not fulfilling the conditions virtually contained in the Windsor Treaty, in which they had professed homage and submission to the English king. It is clear that, lawfully or unlawfully, the Anglo-Normans were determined to gain possession, sooner or later, of the whole island.

To secure their end, they declared that the natives would not be subject to the English laws, but retain their Brehon laws, which in their eyes were no laws at all, and which the Parliament of Kilkenny had declared to be "lewd customs." Henceforth, then, the natives were out of the pale of the law, could not claim its protection, but became subject to the crown of England, without political, civil, or even human rights.

They were soon, by reason of the constant border wars all around the Pale, declared "alien and enemies." And these expressions became, in the eyes of the English lawyers, identical with the Irish race and the Irish nature; so that at all times, peace or war, even when the Irish fought in the English ranks, aiding the Plantagenets in their furious contests with the Scotch or the French, they were still "Irish enemies;" "aliens" unworthy human rights, villeins in whose veins no noble blood could flow, with the exception of five families.

All the rest were not only ignoble, but not even men; nothing but mere Irish, whom any one might kill, even though serving under the English crown, at a risk of being fined five marks, to be paid to the treasury of the King of England, for having deprived his majesty of a serviceable tool.

This (to modern eyes) astounding social state demands a closer examination in order to see if, at least, it had the merit of finally procuring for the English the possession of the land they coveted.

We find first that Henry II., John, and Henry III., would seem on several occasions to have extended the laws of England all over the island. But all English legists will tell us that those laws were only for the inhabitants of English blood. The mere Irish were always reputed aliens, or, rather, enemies to the crown, so that it was, " by actual fact, often adjudged no felony to kill a mere Irish in time of peace," as Sir John Davies expressly points out.

Five families alone were excepted from the general category and acknowledged to be of noble blood--the O'Neills of Ulster, the O'Melachlins of Meath, the O'Connors of Connaught, the O'Briens of Munster, and the McMurroughs of Leinster.

Those five families, numerous certainly, but forming only as many septs, were, or appeared to be, acknowledged as having a right to their lands, and as able to bring or defend actions at law. We say, appeared to be, because they found themselves on so many occasions ranked as mere Irish, that individuals of those septs, induced by sheer necessity, were often driven, in spite of an almost invincible repugnance, to apply for and accept special charters of naturalization from the English kings. Thus in the reign of Edward IV., O'Neill, on the occasion of his marriage with a daughter of the house of Kildare, was made an English citizen by special act of Parliament.

In reality then, even the most illustrious members of the "five bloods" were scarcely considered as enjoying the full rights of the lowest English vassals, although their ancestors had been acknowledged kings by former Anglo-Norman monarchs in public documents: "Rex Henricus regi O'Neill," etc.

But if there was some shadow of doubt with regard to the political and social rights of those great families, such doubt did not exist for the remainder of the Irish race. They were absolutely without rights. Depriving them of their lands, pillaging their houses, devastating their farms, outraging their wives and daughters, killing them, could not subject the guilty to any civil or criminal action at law. In fact, as we have shown, such acts were in accordance with the spirit, even with the letter of the law, so that the criminal, as we should consider him, had but to plead that the man whom he had robbed or killed was a mere Irishman, and the proceedings were immediately stopped, if this all-important fact were proved; and in case of homicide the murderer escaped by the payment of the fine of five marks to the treasury.

To modern, even to English ears, all this may sound incredible. Many striking examples of the truth of it might be produced. They are to be found in all works which treat of the subject. Sir John Davies, that great Irish hater, evidently takes a genuine delight in depicting several such instances with all their aggravating details, scarcely expecting that every word he wrote would serve to brand forever with shame Anglo-Norman England.

Under such legislation it was clear that life on the borders of the Pale was not only insecure, but that the soil would remain in the grasp of the strongest. Any Anglo-Norman only required the power in order to take possession of the land of his neighbor.

But it is not in man's nature to submit to such galling thraldom as this, without at least an attempt at retaliation. Least of all was it the nature of such a people to submit to such measures--a nation, the most ancient in Europe, dating their ownership of the soil as far back as man's memory could go, civilized before Scandinavia became a nest of pirates, Christianized from the fifth century, and the spreader of literature, civilization, and the holy faith of Christ through England, Scotland, Germany, France, and Northern Italy.

If we have dwelt a little, and only a little, upon the intensity of the contest waged for four hundred years previous to the added atrocities introduced by the Reformation, we have done so advisedly, since it has become a fashion of late to throw a gloss over the past, to ignore it, to let the dead bury their dead--all which would be very well, could it be done, and could writers forget to stamp the Irish as unsociable, barbarous, and bloodthirsty, because with arms in their hands, and a fire ardent and sacred in their souls, they strove again and again to reconquer the territory which had been won from them by fraud, and because they thought it fair to kill in open fight the men who avowed that they could kill them even in peace at a penalty of five marks.

The contest, therefore, never ceased; how could it ? But, in that endless conflict between the two races, the loss of territory leaned rather to the English side. If, with the help of their castles, better discipline, and arms, the English at first gained on the natives and extended their possessions beyond the Pale, a reaction soon set in--the Irish had their day of revenge, and entered again into possession of the land of which they had been robbed. In order to repair their losses, the Anglo-Normans had recourse to acts of Parliament, which could bind not only the English of the Pale, but also those of other districts, who, enjoying the privileges of English law, were likewise bound by its provisions.

In order rightly to understand the need and purposes of those enactments, we must return a moment to the days of the conquest.

The case of Strongbow will illustrate many others. He married Eva, the daughter of McMurrough, and thus allied himself to the best families of Leinster. On the death of his father-in-law, he received the whole kingdom as his inheritance. The greater part of his dominions, which he either would not or could not govern himself, he was compelled to distribute, in the usual style, among his followers. He distributed large estates as fiefs among those who had followed his fortunes, but he could not forget his Irish relatives, to whom he had become strongly attached. He secured, therefore, to many Irish families the territory which was formerly theirs, and many of his English adherents, who, like himself, had married daughters of the soil, did the same in their more limited territories. This explains fully why Irish families remained in Leinster after the settlement of the Anglo-Normans there, who established their Pale in it, as also why they continued to possess their lands in the midst of the English as they had formerly done in the midst of the Danes.

The same thing took place in the kingdom of Cork, on the borders of Connaught, and around the seaports of Ulster, wherever the English had established themselves and erected castles and fortifications.

But, over and above the Irish families, which, by their alliance by marriage and fosterage with the English, retained their lands and gradually increased them, many others, natives of the soil, reentered into possession of their former territory by the withdrawal of the Anglo-Norman holders of fiefs. Constant border wars, the necessary consequence of the English policy, could not but discourage in course of time many Englishmen, who, owning large possessions also in England and Wales, preferred to return to their own country rather than remain with their wives and children in a constant state of alarm, compelled to reside within their castles, in dread of an attack at any moment from their Irish neighbors.

Moreover, the vast majority of the Irish, who did not enjoy the benefit of these special privileges, who, deprived of their lands at the first invasion, had remained really outlaws, and never entered into matrimonial or social alliance with their enemies, these men could not consent to starve and perish on their own soil, in the island which they loved and from which they could not--had they so chosen--escape by emigration. One resource remained to them, and they grasped at it. They had their own mountain fastnesses and bogs to fly to, and from those recesses they could harass the invader, and inch by inch win back their lawful inheritance.

They were often even encouraged in their attacks and depredations by the English of the Pale and out of it, who, unwilling longer to submit to the grinding feudal laws and exactions, could prevent the English judges, sheriffs, escheators, and other king's officers from executing the law against them, and thus they held out in their mountains, bogs, and rocky crags, in the midst of the invaders of their soil.

A necessity arose then, on the part of the English rulers, of adopting measures calculated to prevent a further acquisition of territory by the Irish, if not to extend the English settlements. They saw no other remedy than acts of Parliament, which they thought would at least prevent the subjects of English blood from assisting the Irish to reenter into possession, as was then being done on so extensive a scale.

To effect this they revived the former statutes by which the Irish were placed without the protection of the law, were declared aliens and enemies, and were consequently denied the right of bringing actions in any of the English courts for trespasses on their lands, or for violence done to their persons.

They soon advanced a step beyond this. The Irish were forbidden to purchase land, though the English were at liberty to occupy by force the landed property of the Irish, whenever they were strong enough to do so. An Irishman could acquire neither by gift nor purchase a rood of land which was the property of an Englishman. Thus, in every charter afterward granted to the few Irishmen who applied for them, it was expressly stated that they could purchase land for themselves and their heirs, which, without this special provision, they could not do; while for an Englishman to dispose of his landed property by will, gift, or sale to an Irishman, was equivalent to forfeiting his estate to the crown. The officers of the exchequer were directed by those acts of Parliament to hold inquisitions for the purpose of obtaining returns of such deeds of conveyance, in order to enrich the king's treasury by confiscations and forfeitures; and the statute-rolls, preserved to this day in Dublin and London, show that such prosecutions often took place, with the invariable result of forfeiture.

The decision of the courts was always in favor of the crown, even in cases where the deed of conveyance or will was of no benefit to the person in whose favor it was drawn, but simply a trust for a third person of English race. And the great number of cases in which the inquisitions were set aside, as appears from the Parliament-rolls, for the finding having been malicious and untrue--the parties complained of not being Irish but English-- prove what we allege, namely, that an Irishman could not take land by conveyance from an Englishman.

Yet, as Mr. Prendergast justly says: "Notwithstanding these prohibitions and laws of the Irish Parliament, the Irish grew and increased upon the English, and the Celtic customs overspread the feudal, until at length the administration of the feudal law was confined to little more than the few counties lying within the line of the Liffey and the Boyne."

Let us now glance, in conclusion, at the result of more than four centuries of feudal oppression.

Ireland rejected feudalism from the beginning, and this at a time when Europe had been compelled to adopt it, more or less, throughout.

The distinction between lords and villeins, so marked in all other countries, remained at the end as it was at the beginning of the contest, a thing unknown in the island. Even in the Pale, the presence of the O'Moores, O'Byrnes, O'Kavanaghs, and other septs, protested against and openly denied, from moor and glen and mountain fastness, that outrage on humanity, which bestows on the few every thing meant for all. The Brehon law was in full force all over the island, and if the Irish allowed the English judges to ride on their circuits within the four counties, it was on the full understanding that they would administer their justice only to English subjects, and levy their feudal dues, and pronounce their forfeitures and confiscations on such only as acknowledged the king's right on the premises. The laws enacted in the pretended Irish Parliament were only for such as called themselves English by birth; for even the English by blood, whose ancestors had long resided on the island, frequently refused to submit to the laws of Parliament, where they would not sit themselves, although possessing the right to do so.

In vain was the threat of compulsion held up again and again before the eyes of the great lords of Desmond, Thomond, and Connaught. If they chose, they went; if they chose not, they remained at home; and obeyed or disobeyed at will the laws themselves, according as they were able or unable to set them at defiance.

The castles which had been built all over the country by the first invaders, as a means of awing into subjection the surrounding districts, were at the beginning of the fifteenth century no longer feudal castles. They had either been destroyed and levelled to the ground by the Irish, or they were occupied by Irish chieftains; or, stranger still, if their holders were English lords, they were of those who had been won over to Irish manners. In their halls all the old customs of Erin were preserved. One saw therein groups of shanachies, and harpers, and Brehon lawyers, all conversing with their chieftain in the primitive language of the country. Hence were they called degenerate by the "foreigners" living in Dublin Castle. The mansions of the Desmonds, of the Burgos, of the Ormonds, were the headquarters of their respective clans, not the inaccessible fortresses of steel-clad warriors, who alone were possessed of social and civil rights. If the master of the household held sometimes the title of earl, or count, or baron, he was careful never to use it before his retainers, whom he called his clansmen. When he went to Dublin or to London, he donned it with the dress of a knight or a great feudal lord; on his return home he threw it aside, resumed the cloak of the country, and was Irish again.

The subject of feudal titles in Ireland has not been sufficiently studied and elucidated. A clearer light thrown on this question would, we have no doubt, show more conclusively than long discussions with what stubbornness the Irish refused to submit to the reality of feudalism, even when consenting to admit its presence and phraseology. It is a fact not sufficiently dwelt upon, that the few Irishmen, who subsequently consented to receive English titles from the king, were regarded by their countrymen with greater abhorrence than the English themselves, though in most cases the titles were empty ones, which affected nothing in their mode of life. Yet were they looked upon as apostates to their nation, and after the Reformation such a step was often the first to apostasy of religion, the deepest stain on an Irish name.

Feudalism had also its mode of taxation which failed with the rest in Ireland.

In feudal countries the lord imposed no tax on his villeins; these were mere chattels, ascripti gleboe, who tilled the land for their masters, and, as good serfs, could own nothing but the few utensils of their miserable hovels. They were just allowed what sufficed to support their own life and that of their families, and consequently they could bear no additional tax. But, in the complicated state of society brought about by feudalism, the inferior lord was taxed by his superior, a system that ran down the whole feudal scale, and it would take a lawyer to explain aids, talliages, wardships, fines for alienation, seizins, rents, escheats, and finally forfeiture, the heaviest and most common of all in England.

The Irish fought valiantly against the imposition of those burdens, and aided the English settled among them to repudiate them all in course of time.

It must be said, however, that they did not succeed in preventing their own taxes, according to the Book of Rights, from becoming heavier under the ingenuity of the English who were established among them and admitted to all the rights of clanship. We see by documents which have been better studied of late, that the great Anglo-Irish lords had succeeded in increasing the burdens in the shape of exactions, which were never complained of by the Irish.

On this subject Dr. O'Donovan, in the preface to his edition of the "Book of Rights," is worthy of perusal.

But it is chiefly in the very essence of feudalism that the failure of the Anglo-Normans was most signal. Feudalism really consisted in the status given to the land, the possession of which determined and gave all rights, so that, according to it, man was made for the land rather than the land for man. He was placed on the land with the beasts of the field as far as tillage and production went, until the system should round to perfection and finally bring to the surface the new principles of social economy, according to which the greater the number of cattle and the fewer the number of men, the more prosperous and happy might the country be said to be.

The Irish staked their existence against those principles, and won. So complete was their victory that the feudal barons who first came among them finally yielded to clanship, became the chiefs of new clans, and opened their territories to all who chose to send their horses and kine to graze in the chief's domains. In vain did Irish Parliaments issue writs of forfeiture against the English lords who acted thus, for between the law and its execution the clans intervened, and no sheriff or judge could step beyond the bounds of the four counties of the Pale to enforce those acts.

It is told of one of the Irish chieftains that on receiving intimation from a high English official of a sheriff's visit on the next breach of some new law or ordinance, for the safety of which sheriff he would be held responsible, he replied: "You will do well to let me know at the same time what will be the amount of his eric, in case of his murder, that I may beforehand assess it on the clan."

This story may tend better than any thing else to give a clear reason for the failure of feudalism in Ireland.

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VII. IRELAND SEPARATED FROM EUROPE.-A TRIPLE EPISODE

While the struggle described in the last chapter was raging, Ireland could have little or no intercourse with the rest of Europe. Heaven alone was witness of the heroism displayed by the free clans wrestling with feudal England. It was only during the internecine wars of the Roses that Erin enjoyed a respite, and then we read that Margaret of Offaly summoned to peaceful contest the bards of the island, while the shrines of Rome and Compostella were thronged with pilgrims, chiefs, and princes, "paying their vows of faith from the Western Isle."

In the mean time Christendom had been witness of mighty events in which Ireland could take no part. The enthusiastic impulse which gave birth to the Crusades, the uprising of the communes against feudal thraldom, the mental activity of numerous universities, starting each day into life, form, among other things, the three great progressive waves in the moving ocean of the time:

I. When Europe in phalanx of steel hurled itself upon Asia and saved Christendom from the yoke of Islam, when the Japhetic race by a mighty effort asserted its right not merely to existence, but to a preponderance in the affairs of the world, Ireland, the nation Christian of Christians, had not a name among men. It was supposed to be a dependency of England, and the envoys sent abroad to all parts by the Holy See to preach the Crusades, never touched her shores to deliver the cross to her warriors. The most chivalrous nation of Christendom was altogether forgotten, and in its ecclesiastical annals no mention is made of the Crusades even by name.

The holy wars, moreover, were set on foot and carried on by the feudal chivalry of Europe, and in fact, wherever the Europeans established their power in the East, that power took the shape of feudalism. But Ireland had rejected this system, and consequently her sons could find no place in the ranks of the knights of Flaners, Normandy, Aquitaine, and England. Their chivalry was of another stamp, and was employed at the time in wresting their social state and territory from the grasp of ruthless invaders.

Hence, not even St. Bernard, the ardent friend of St. Malachi, remembered them, when journeying through Europe to distribute the Cross to whole armies of warriors. Not only did he fail to cross the Channel for the purpose of rousing the Christian enthusiasm of a people ever ready to hearken to a call to arms when a noble cause was at stake; he did not think even of writing a single letter to any bishop or abbot in Ireland, asking them to preach the holy war in his name.

Thus Ireland failed to participate in any of the benefits which accrued to the European nations from the Crusades, as she failed likewise to participate in results less beneficial which also accrued from that powerful agitation.

Among such results is one which has not met with all the attention it deserves. Historians speak at length of the many and wide-spread heresies which infected Europe during the middle ages; but their Eastern origin has not been thoroughly investigated, and we have no doubt that, if it had been, many of them would be found to have come with a returning wave of the Crusades.

All these errors bear at the outset a very Oriental appearance. Paulicians, Petrobrusians, Albigensians, and kindred sects, all started from the principle of dualism, and even at the time were openly accused of Manicheistic ideas. They all involved more or less immoral principles, and rejected, or at least strove to weaken, the commonly-received ideas upon which society, civil and religious, is founded. Had they succeeded in spreading their errors through Europe, it is possible that the invasion would have been more fatal in its consequences than that of Islamism itself. And, even in their failure, they left among European societies the germ of secret associations which have existed from that time down, and which in our days have burst forth undisguised to terrify nations, and cause them to dread the coming of the last days.

To an attentive observer it is clear that the heresies of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries resemble more the errors of our days than the Protestantism which intervened. Luther's first principles, if carried to their legitimate conclusion, would have inaugurated the socialism and communism of modern times; but he shrank from the consequences of his own doctrines, and the necessity of his standing well with the German princes caused him, during the War of the Peasants, almost to retract his first utterances and take his stand midway between Catholic principles and the thorough nihilism of later times. It is known that in the after-part of his life he endeavored to repair the ruins of every dogma, social and religious, which he at first had tried to subvert and destroy.

The Manicheism of the middle ages was certainly not of so scientific and elaborate a nature as modern socialism; but it would have been productive of like evil results to society had it not been crushed down by the united power of the Church and the state. If it had been successful, it is impossible to imagine what would have become of Europe.

Of its Eastern origin historians say little. We know, however, that, after a residence in the East, the most pious Christians grew lukewarm and less firm in their opposition to the dangerous errors then prevalent in Asia. Tournefort remarked this in his own time, during the reign of Louis XIV.

It is known also that the posterity of the first crusaders in Palestine formed a hybrid race, which, weakened by the influence of the luxurious habits of Eastern countries, became corrupt, and under the name of Pulani practised a feeble Christianity, unfit to cope with the vigorous fanaticism of the Mussulman. Many Europeans came back from those wars wavering in faith, and no one knows how many with faith entirely lost.

It is not, therefore, too much to suppose that the Oriental errors which suddenly burst forth at this time in Western Europe followed in the wake of the returning pilgrims, and it is highly probable, if not absolutely certain, that, had there been no Crusades, Manicheism and the secret societies born of it would never have been known in Italy and France. Hence, one of the first and greatest champions of the Church in controversy with the Albigenses - Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny - at the very beginning of the heresy, found no better means of opposing the new errors than attacking every thing coming from the East. Thus, he wrote his long treatises against the Talmud and the Koran, so much had the Crusades already contributed to introducing into Western Europe the seeds of Asiatic errors. All historians agree in giving an Eastern origin to the Paulicians, Bulgarians, Albigenses, and others of those times.

Manicheism indeed had infested Europe long before. Some Roman emperors had published severe edicts against it. In the fifth century, the heresy still flourished in Italy and Africa, St. Augustine himself being an adept for several years, and by his writings he has made us acquainted with its strongest supporters in his day. He was followed, in his attacks on it, by a great number of Fathers, both Greek and Latin.

But after the barbarian invasions we hear no more of the Manichees for upward of five hundred years. The West had entirely forgotten them. Arianism and Manicheism had apparently perished together. The tenth century is called a period of darkness and ignorance; it at least possessed the advantage of being free from heresy; the dogmas of the Church were unhesitatingly and universally accepted. Western Europe, though cut up by the new-born feudalism into a thousand fragments, was at least one in faith, until that great and powerful union having, in an outburst of enthusiasm, produced the Crusades, we suddenly find Eastern theories and immoralities invading the countries most faithful to the Church.

Raymond VI., Count of Toulouse, the great champion of the Albigenses, was the near descendant of that great Raymond, one of the chiefs of the first Crusade, who might have aspired to the throne of Jerusalem, had not Godfrey de Bouillon won the suffrages of the soldiers of the Cross by his ardent and pure piety. Raymond VI. dwelt in Languedoc, in all the luxurious splendor of an Eastern emir; and he doubtless found the doctrines of dualistic Manicheism more congenial to his taste for pleasure than the stern tenets of the Christian religion. Ambition, it is true, was one of the chief motives which prompted him to place himself at the head of the heretics; he hoped to enrich himself through them by the spoils of the Church; and thus the same power which later on moved the German princes to embrace Lutheranism was already acting on the aspiring Count of Toulouse at the beginning of the thirteenth century. Thus we find him at the head of his troops, plundering churches, ravaging monasteries, outraging and profaning holy things, for the purpose of filling his coffers.

Yet it is also certain that he, the chief of the sectarians, and a great number of the nobility of Southern France, were led to embrace the Albigensian error by the degrading habits which they had previously contracted.

We do not purpose entering into a lengthened discussion on the subject; we merely wish to contrast, with the wide spread of heresy in Western Europe, the great fact of a total absence of it in Ireland; or rather, we should say, and by so saying we confirm our reflection, that errors of a similar nature did invade the Pale in Erin at this time, without touching in any wise the children of the soil.

For, it is a remarkable fact that, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, the name of heresy is mentioned for the first and last time in Catholic Ireland; the new doctrines bearing a close resemblance to some of the errors of the Albigenses, and their chief propagators being all lords of the Pale.

In November of 1235, Pope Benedict XII. wrote a letter on this subject to Edward III. of England, which may be read in F. Brenan's Ecclesiastical History.

It is clear from many things related by Ware in his "Antiquities" that the Vicar of Christ, unable to follow freely his inclinations with respect to the filling of the sees of Erin, and obliged to appoint to bishoprics, at least in many parts of the island, only men of English birth, selected for that purpose members of the various religious orders then existing. Instead of granting episcopal jurisdiction to the feudal nominees of the court, when unworthy, Rome appointed a Franciscan, or a Dominican, a member of some religious community, who was born in England, but at least more independent of the court, of greater sympathy with the people, less swayed by worldly and selfish motives, and consequently readier to obey the mandates of Rome, which were always on the side of justice and morality. Thus we find that in the whole history of Ireland, as a general rule, the bishops chosen from religious orders were acceptable to the people, and true to their duty.

Such a man certainly was Richard Ledred, a Minorite, born in London, whom the Pope made Bishop of Ossory. But on that very account he incurred the hatred of many English officials, and even of worldly prelates, among whom Alexander Bicknor, Archbishop of Dublin, was the most conspicuous. Bieknor was not only archbishop, but had been appointed Lord Justice of Ireland by the king, and later on Lord Deputy; later still he was dispatched by the English Parliament as ambassador to France.

"It had been well," says F. Brenan, "for the archbishop himself, and for those immediately under his jurisdiction, had he abstained from mixing himself up with the state affairs of those times. Ambition formed no inferior trait in the character of Alexander, even long before he had been exalted to a high dignity in the Church. He advanced rapidly into power, stepping from one office into another, until at length he found himself in the midst of the labyrinth, without being able to make his way, unless by means of guides as inexperienced as they were treacherous. It was by causes such as these that he brought himself into serious difficulties, not only with the Archbishop of Armagh, on account of the primacy, but also with his own suffragans, and particularly with the Bishop of Ossory."

Under these circumstances it was that the prelate last mentioned, on visiting his diocese, found unmistakable signs of the spread of heresy among his flock. His diocese at that time formed a part of the English Pale, and Kilkenny, where he had his cathedral, was often the seat of Parliament.

Among those most active for the propagation of the new doctrines were found, the Seneschal of Kilkenny, the Treasurer of Ireland, and the Chief-Justice of the Common Pleas--all English of the Pale. The zealous bishop, fearless of the consequences, openly denounced them, and publicly excommunicated the Treasurer. At once a terrible storm was raised among their English abettors, and, in order to screen the guilty parties, they recriminated against the prelate, and accused him of being a sharer in the crime of Thomas Fitzgilbert, who had burned the castle of Moy Cahir, and killed its owner, Hugh Le Poer. The temporalities of Ledred having been already sequestrated for his boldness in denouncing heretics, he was compelled finally to leave his diocese and fly to Avignon, where he remained in exile for nine years.

The Archbishop of Dublin had been one of his bitterest enemies, and, although not actually accused of heresy himself, he was certainly the abettor of heretics, and had done all in his power to have Ledred arrested for his supposed crimes.

Ware, in his lives of Bicknor and Ledred, is evidently a partisan of the first and an enemy of the second. He pretends that Ledred tacitly acknowledged his guilt in the affair of Le Poer, since he sued for pardon to the king, as though readers of English history did not constantly meet with instances of innocent men compelled to sue for pardon of crimes which they had never committed.

We have fortunately better judges of the characters of both prelates in the two popes, Benedict XII. and Clement VI.: the first believing in the existence of the heresy denounced by Ledred; the second exempting the Bishop of Ossory from the superior jurisdiction of Bicknor, on account of the unjust animosity displayed toward him by this worldly prelate.

The absence of all historical documents in reference to the case leaves us at a loss to know the effect produced on Edward III. by the letter of the Pontiff. It is highly probable that the king preferred to believe Bicknor rather than the Pope, and disregarded the advice of the latter.

In such an event, how was the heresy put down? Simply by the good sense and spirit of faith of the people, or rather by the deep Christian feeling of the native Irish, who were always opposed to innovation, and who remained firm in the traditional belief inherent in the nation by the grace of God. Schism and heresy seem impossible among the children of Erin. If at any time certain novelties have appeared among them, they have speedily vanished like empty vapor. They heard that, in other parts of the Church, in the East chiefly, heresiarchs had arisen and led away into error large numbers of people forming sometimes formidable sects, which threatened the very existence of the religion of Christ; but the face of a heretic they had never beheld. Soon, indeed, they were to be at the mercy of a whole swarm of them, to see a pretended church leagued with the state to bring about their perversion; but as yet they had had no experience of the kind.

Only a few heretics were pointed out to them by the finger of one of their bishops, and his denunciations were confirmed by the judgment of the Holy See. Hence, according to F. Brenan, "the sensation which pervaded all classes became vehement and frightful. The bishop and his clergy came forward, and by solid argument, by the strength and power of truth, opposed and discomfited the enemies of religion."

The feeling here expressed is a natural one for a true Christian at the very mention of heresy. Yet how few nations have experienced a sensation "vehement and frightful" at the appearance of positive error among them! But, at all periods of their history, such has been the feeling of the Irish people.

Fortunately for them, the number of sectarians was so small as to become insignificant; the English of the Pale were always few in comparison with the natives, and heresy had been, adopted by only a small body.

Error, therefore, could not cause in the island the social and political convulsions which it had produced in France about the same time. There was no need of a second Albigensian war to put it down. There was no need even of the Inquisition, as an ecclesiastical tribunal. The sentence of the bishop, the decree of excommunication pronounced from the foot of the altar, was all that was required.

When we compare this single fact of Irish ecclesiastical history with what was then transpiring in Europe--the most insidious errors spreading throughout; the faith of many becoming unsettled, a general preparation for the social deluge which was impending and so soon to fall--we cannot but conclude that Ireland, in the midst of her misfortunes, was happy in being separated from the rest of the world. The breath of novelty could breathe no contagion on her shores. Happy even was she in not seeing her sons enlist in the army of the Cross, if the result of their victories was, to bring back from the Holy Land the Eastern corruption and the many heresies nestling there and settled, even around the sepulchre of our Lord, during so many ages of separation from the West and open communication with all the wild vagaries of Arabian, Persian, and Indian philosophies.

Even in the midst of such a trial we believe that Ireland would have held steadfast to her faith, as she did later on when heresy came to her with compulsion or death; and this firmness of purpose, which the Irish have always manifested when the question was a change of religion, is worthy our consideration. For the facility with which some nations have, in the course of ages, yielded to the spirit of novelty, and the sturdy resistance opposed to it by others, is a subject that would repay investigation, but which we can only slightly touch upon.

In ancient times the Greek mind, accustomed from the beginning to subtlety of argument, and easily carried away by a rationalism which was innate, offers a striking contrast to the steady traditional spirit of the Latin races in general. Except Pelagiaism and its cognate errors, all the great heresies which afflicted the Church during the first ten centuries, originated in the East; and the various sects catalogued by several of the Greek Fathers, as early as the second and third centuries, astonish the modern reader by the slender web on which their often ridiculous systems are spun, of texture strong enough, however, at the time to form the groundwork for making a disastrous impression on a large number of adherents. The infinity almost of philosophical systems in pagan Greece had prepared the way for the subsequent vagaries of heresy, and we must look to our own times, so prolific of absurd theories, in order to find a parallel to the incredible variety of dogmatic assertions among the Greek heresiarchs of early times.

But, at the outbreak of Protestantism, in the sixteenth century, the world witnessed a still more striking example of diversity in the various branches of the Japhetic family - the nations belonging to the Teutonic and Scandinavian stocks chiefly embracing the error at once with a wonderful spontaneity. The various remnants of the Celtic race and the totality of the Latin nations remained, on the whole, obedient to the guiding voice of the Church of Christ. It is customary with modern writers, when imbued with what are called liberal ideas, to ascribe this difference to the steady, systematic mind of northern nations, and to their innate love of liberty, which could not brook the yoke of spiritual despotism imposed by the Church of Rome. But all this is mere supposition, inadequate to accounting for the fact. The Teutonic and Scandinavian mind is certainly more systematic and apparently more steady than the Celtic; but it is far less so than the Latin. No nation in the whole history of mankind has ever displayed more steadiness and system than the Romans, and the Latin family has inherited those characteristics from Rome. The Spanish race has no equal in steadiness (in the sense here intended of steadfastness), and the French certainly none in system, which it often carried to the verge of absurdity.

As for love of liberty, as distinct from love of license, it had absolutely nothing to do with the great revolution which has been called the Reformation. No nation can relish despotism, and the whole history of Ireland is a living example that her sons are steadily opposed to it to the death. And it is now too late to pretend that the cause of true liberty has been served by the spread of Protestantism over a large portion of Europe. Balmez and others have proved the falsehood of such pretensions. If any modern writers, such as Mr. Bancroft, for instance, men otherwise of sound mind and great ability, continue to assert this, the assertion must proceed from prejudice deeply ingrained, which reflection has not yet succeeded in eradicating, and their opinions on the subject are necessarily confined to bold assertions, of a character which in others they themselves would stigmatize as empty and unfounded.

The reason of the difference lies deeper in the constitution of the human mind, in the Celtic and Latin races on the one side, in the Teutonic and Scandinavian families on the other. Any one who has studied the Irish character in our days--a character which was the same in former ages--will easily see something of that great and happy cause.

The difference lies first in the good sense which enables them to perceive instinctively that the eternal should be preferred to the temporal. If all men kept that distinct perception ever present to their minds, they would not only accept at all times the truths of faith, since faith, according to St. Paul, is "the substance of the things hoped for," but they would remain ever faithful to the moral code given us by God. The Celt indeed will at times lose sight of the eternal in the presence of a temporal temptation; but he is never blind to the knowledge that faith is the groundwork of salvation, and that hope remains as long as that is not surrendered. Therefore he will never surrender it. The need of reviving his faith is rarely called for, when, after a life of sin, the shadow of death reminds him of the duty he owes his own soul. The great truth that, after all, the ETERNAL is every thing, remains always deeply impressed on his mind; and half his labor is spared to the minister of God, when bringing such a man back to a life of virtue. There is scarcely any need of asking an Irishman, "Do you believe?" For, every word that passes his lips, every look and gesture, every expression of feeling, is in fact an act of faith. How easy after this is the work of regeneration!

0 happy race, to whom this life is in truth a shadow that passeth away! to whom the unseen is ever present, or comes back so vividly and so readily!

This supposes, as we have said, a sound, good sense, which is characteristic of the race. We may say that this nation possesses the wisdom of Sir Thomas More, who esteemed it folly to lose eternity for a life of twenty years of ease and honors. Is not this, at bottom, the thought which has sustained the nation in that dread martyrdom of three centuries, whose terrible story we have still to tell? Have they not, as a nation, one after another, generation upon generation, lived and passed their lives in contempt, in want, in frightful misery, to die in torments or hidden sufferings, without a gleam of hope from this world for their race, their families, their children, their very name, because they would not surrender their religion, that is to say, truth, which alone could secure the eternal welfare of their souls?

Speak to us, after this, of a steady and systematic mind! Prate to us of the love of liberty, of self-dignity! Where are such things to be found in their reality, on their trial, if not in the scenes and the nation we have just pictured?

A second reason, no less effective, perhaps, than the first, and certainly as remarkable, is the very composition of the Celtic mind, which naturally tends to firm belief, because it is given exclusively to traditions, past events, narratives of poets, historians, and genealogists. Had the Irish at any time turned themselves to criticise, to doubt, to argue, their very existence, as a people, would have ceased. They must go on believing, or all reality vanishes from their minds, accustomed for so many ages to take in that solid knowledge founded, it is true, on hearsay; but how else can truth reach us save by hearsay? Hence, their simple and artless acquiescence in any thing they hear from trustworthy lips - acquiescence ever refused to a known enemy, never to a well-tried friend, even when the facts ascertained are strange, mysterious, unaccounted for, and incredible to minds differently constituted.

Thus, when we read their "Acta Sanctorum," we at once find ourselves in a world so different from our every-day world - a region of wonders, mysteries, of heavenly and supernatural deeds, unequalled in any story of marvellous travel or fable of imaginative romance. Yet, who will say that the writers doubted a single phrase of what they wrote? Is it not clear, from the very words they use, that they would have held it sacrilege to utter a falsehood, when speaking of the blessed saints? And, can the lives of the saints be like those of common mortals? What is there strange in considering that the earth was mysterious and heavenly, when heavenly beings walked upon it? Read the Litany and Festology of Aengus, and doubt if the holy man did not believe all therein contained. Say, if it can be possible, that it is not all true, though apparently incredible. Who can doubt what is asserted with such vehemence of belief? How can that fail to be true which holy men and women have themselves believed, and given to the world to be believed?

This thoroughly explains the simplicity of faith which still distinguishes the Irish people. It explains why no heretic could be found among them, and their intense horror of heresy as soon as known. Nor is it their mind alone which bears the impress of faith: their very exterior is a witness to it. Go into any large city where dwell a number of Irish inhabitants; walk through the public streets, where they walk among the children of other races, and you will easily distinguish them, not only by the modesty of their women and the simple bearing of their men, but by the look of confidence and contentedness stamped on their features. Whoever has a settled faith, is no longer an inquirer, no longer troubled with the anxiety and restlessness of a man plunged in doubt and uncertainty; all the lineaments of the face, all the gestures and attitudes of the body, speak of quietude and repose.

We might render this discussion more effective by the study of the contrary phenomena, by showing how easily races, differently gifted, endowed with the spirit of criticism and argument, sever from the faith and follow the lead of deceptive teachers. Our object here was to describe the Irish, and not to enter into a study of the physiology of other minds; but a word on Germanic and Scandinavian tribes and peoples may not be amiss.

There is no doubt that these races place their "good sense" in a very different line from the Irish; that they are, also, much more given to criticism, what they call "grumbling," and absence of repose.

With regard to the first point - their "good sense" - it is easy to remark their tendency to prefer the temporal to the eternal. For their "good sense" consists in enjoying the things of this life without troubling themselves over-much about another. And, in this observation, there is nothing which can possibly offend them, for such is their open profession and estimate of true wisdom. Hence result their love of comfort, their thrift, their shrewdness in all material and worldly affairs; hence, their constant boasting about their civilization, understanding, thereby, what is pleasing to the senses; hence, also, their success in a life wherein they set their whole happiness. How could they be expected to remain steadfast to a faith which declares war to pleasure, and speaks only of contempt for this world? It is not matter of surprise, then, that their great argument, to prove that theirs is the better and the right religion, is to compare their physical well-being with the inferiority in that regard of Catholic nations.

With regard to the spirit of criticism and argumentation, nothing is so opposed to the spirit of faith; and it is as clear as day that the northern races possess this in an eminent degree. What question, religious or philosophical, can rest intact when brought under the microscopic vision of a German philosopher or an English rationalist? A few years more of criticism, as now understood and practised by them, would leave absolutely nothing which the mind of man could respect and believe.

An attentive observer will surely conclude, after a serious examination of the subject, that it is from petty causes of this character that these races have so easily surrendered their faith, rather than from their systematic minds and love of liberty.

II. The rising of the communes, one of the greatest features of mediaeval Europe, did not extend to Ireland, separated as it then was from the Continent. But, by reason of this very separation, the island remained forever free from the future political commotions of what is known as "the third estate." A few remarks on this subject are requisite, because of the objection brought against the Irish, that they have never known municipal government, and also on account of the false assertions of some philosophical historians, who allege that the Danes and Anglo-Normans, in turn, wrought a great good to Ireland by bringing with them the boon of citizen rights.

What were the causes of the rising of the communes in the eleventh and following centuries? The universality of the fact argues identity of motives, since, without common understanding among various nations, the risings showed themselves at about the same time in Italy, France, Germany, Spain, and England.

In ancient cities, which existed prior to the Germanic invasions, the population, after the scourge had passed, was composed principally of three elements: 1. Free men of the conquering races, who were poor, and had embraced some mechanical pursuit; 2. The remnants of the Roman population, who followed some trade; 3. Freedmen from the rural districts, who, unable to gain a livelihood in the country, had come to reside in the cities, where they could more easily subsist.

Thus, besides the feudal lords and the class of villeins, there was formed everywhere a third class, that of arts and trades.

The juridical power being restricted to the lords, whose rights extended only to the land and the men attached to it, the class of artisans found themselves destitute of legal rights, without a recognition or place even in the jurisprudence, as then existing, consequently in a practically anarchical state. Hence, they formed among themselves their own associations, elected their own magistrates, enacted their own by-laws.

In the cities we have mentioned, the bishop alone held social relations with the lords, whether the feudal chieftain of the vicinity, or the Count of the city. Thus, the bishop often acted as the mediator between the citizens and the privileged class which surrounded them. The great object of the citizens was to obtain a charter of rights from the suzerain, who alone could act with justice and impartiality toward those disfranchised burghers. To this was owed the immense number of charters granted at that time, many of which, lately published, tend better than any thing else to give us an insight into the origin of municipal life in mediaeval Europe.

New cities, either founded by the invaders or springing up of themselves around feudal castles and monasteries, soon experienced the necessity of similar favors, which, as soon as obtained, invested them with a social status unenjoyed before.

The number of freemen, reduced to poverty, or of recent freedmen - freed by the emancipation everywhere set on foot and encouraged by the Church - extended the spread of communes even to the rural districts. Thus, many villages or small towns grew into corporations, and a social state arose, hitherto totally unknown in Europe.

The question has been much discussed, whether those new municipal corporations owed their origin to the municipal system of the Romans, or were altogether disconnected with it. The opinion commonly now accepted is, that the two systems were utterly distinct. In some few instances, a particular Roman municipal city may have passed into a mediaeval corporate town under a new charter and with extended rights; but this was certainly the exception. In the great majority of cases, the newly-chartered cities had never before enjoyed municipal rights.

These few words suffice to show that the communes, wherever they arose, presupposed the existence of feudalism, and the slavery once so widely extended, passing gradually into serfdom.

But neither feudalism nor slavery, in the old pagan sense of the word, nor even serfdom, properly so called, as the doom of the ascripti glebae, ever existed in Ireland. There was, therefore, no need among the Irish for the rising of communes.

Nevertheless, we do find communes existing in Ireland and charters granted to Irish cities by English kings. But they were merely English institutions for the special benefit of the English of the Pale, which were always refused to "the Irish enemy," and which the "Irish enemy," with the exception of a few individual cases, never demanded. Consequently the fact stands almost universally true that the rising of the communes never extended to Ireland, and that, if the Irish never enjoyed the benefit of them, as little did they share in the evil consequences resulting from them.

All those evil consequences had their root in a feeling of bitter hostility between the higher or noble classes, and not only the villeins, whom they ground between them, but also the middle classes, who were dwelling in the cities, emancipating themselves by slow degrees, and forming in course of time the "third estate."

The workings of that hostility form a great part of the history of Europe from the twelfth century down to the present day, and many social convulsions, recorded in the annals of the six ages preceding our own, may be traced to it. The frightful French Revolution was certainly a result of it, although it must be granted that several secondary causes contributed to render the catastrophe more destructive, the chief among which was the spread of infidel doctrines among the higher and middle classes.

But our days witness a still more awful spectacle, the persistent array of the poor against the rich in all countries once Christian, and this may be traced directly to their mediaeval origin now under our consideration; and, the evils preparing for mankind therefrom, future history alone will be able to tell.

In Ireland, this has never been the danger. In the earlier constitution of the nation, there could be no rivalry, no hostility of class with class, as there never existed any social distinction between them; and if, in our days, the poor there as elsewhere seem arrayed against the rich, it is not as class against class, but as the spoiled against the spoiler, the victim against the robber, against the holders of the soil by right of confiscation--a soil upon which the old owners still live, with all the traditions of their history, which have never been completely effaced, and which in our days are springing into new life under the studies of patriotic antiquarians. This fact cannot be denied.

The case of Ireland is so different in this respect from that of other nations, that in no other country have the people been reduced to such a degrading state of pauperism, yet in no other country is the same submission to the existing order of society found among the lower classes. No communism, no socialism has ever been preached there, and, were it preached, it would only be to deaf ears. Until the last two or three centuries, no seed of animosity between high and low, rich and poor, had been sowed in Ireland. The reason of this we have seen in a previous chapter. And if, since the wholesale confiscations of the seventeenth century, the country has been divided into two hostile camps, the fault has never laid with the poor, the despoiled; they have always been the victims, and never uttered open threats of destruction against their oppressors. If in the future men look to great calamities, Ireland is the only quarter from which nothing of the kind is to be feared, and the impending revolution by which she may profit will look to her for no assistance in the subversion of society.

We now leave the reader to appreciate to its full extent the real value of the opinion of modern writers who would justify the successive invasions of the Danes and Anglo-Normans, and also, we suppose, of the Puritans, as praiseworthy attempts to introduce into Ireland the municipal system, so productive of good elsewhere throughout Europe.

There is no doubt that municipal rights have been of immense advantage to European society, as constituted at the time of their introduction. They formed the germ of a new class, destined to be the ruling class of the world, by whom human rights were first to be understood and proclaimed, and the necessary amount of freedom granted to all and secured by just laws justly administered. Christianity is the true source of all those rights, as Christian morality ought to be their standard.

But what an amount of human misery was first required, in order that such blessed results might follow, merely because religion, which was and ever had been steadily working to the same end, was altogether set aside, and its assistance even despised in the mighty change! And after all--we might say in consequence-- how limited has the boon practically become! How few are the nations, even in our days, which understand impartiality, moderation, justice! How soon will mankind become sufficiently enlightened to settle down peacefully in the enjoyment of those blessings of civil liberty proclaimed and trumpeted to the four winds of heaven, yet in no place rightly understood and equitably shared?

Ireland never knew those municipal rights from which have flowed so many evils, side by side with so few blessings, because their essential elements were never found there. What the future may develop, no man can say. It is time, however, for all to see that the nation is equal to any rights to which men are said to be entitled.

III. The great intellectual movement set on foot in Europe during the middle ages, by the numerous universities which sprang up everywhere, under the fostering care of Popes or Christian monarchs, failed to reach the island, in consequence of its exclusion from the European family; yet even this was not for her an unmitigated evil, though certainly the greatest loss she sustained. While Europe, during the eighth and ninth centuries, was in total darkness, Ireland alone basked in the light of science, whose lustre, shining in her numerous schools, attracted thither by its brightness the youth of all nations, whom she received with a generosity unbounded. Not content with this, she sent forth her learned and holy men to spread the light abroad and dispel the thick darkness, to establish seats of learning as focuses whence should radiate the light of truth on a world buried in barbarism.

And when the warm sunshine, created or kept alive by her, sheds its rays on Italy, on France, on Germany, and England itself, all her own schools are closed, her once great universities destroyed. Clonard, Clonfert, Armagh, Bangor, Clonmacnoise, are desolate, and the wealthy Anglo-Norman prelates find their purses empty when the question arises of restoring or forming a single centre of intellectual development. The natural consequences should have been darkness, barbarism, gross ignorance. Ireland never fell to that depth of spiritual desolation. Her sons, though deprived of all exterior help, would still feed for centuries on their own literary treasures. All the way down to the Stuart dynasty, the nation preserved, not only her clans, her princes, and her brehon laws, but also her shanachies, her books, her ancient literature and traditions. These the feudal barons could not rob her of; and if they would not repay her, in some measure, for what they took away, by flooding her with the new methods of thought, of knowledge, of scientific investigation, at least they could not destroy her old manuscripts, wipe out from her memory the old songs, snatch the immortal harp from the hands of her bards, nor silence the lips of her priests from giving vent to those bursts of impassioned eloquence which are natural to them and must out. Hence there was no tenth century of darkness for her--let us bear this in mind--light never deserted her, but continued to shine on her from within, despite the refusal of her masters to unlock for her the floodgates of knowledge.

For this reason was it not to her an unmitigated loss; but there is another and, perhaps, a stronger still.

We should be careful not to attribute to what is good the abuse made of it by men; yet the good is sometimes the occasion of evil; and so it was with those great, admirable, and much-to-be- regretted universities.

They imparted to the mind of man an impulse which the pride and ambition of man turned to his intellectual ruin. What was intended for the spread of true knowledge and faith became in the end the source of spiritual pride, the natural fosterer of doubt and negation. Modern science, so called, that incarnation of vanity, sophistry, error, and delusion, comes indirectly from those universities of the middle ages; and it was chiefly at the time of what is called the revival of learning, that the great revolution in science came about, which changed the intellectual gold into dross, the once divine ambrosia of knowledge, served to happy mortals in mediaeval times, into poison.

That pretended "revival of learning" can never be mentioned in connection with Ireland; and the "idolatry of art," and corruption of morals, never crossed the channel which God set between Great Britain and the Island of Saints.

Another revival, though of a very different character, was, however, actually taking place in Erin at that very period, when the Wars of the Roses gave her breathing-time, which we relate in the words of a modern Irish writer, as a conclusion to the reflections we have indulged in:

"Within this period lived Margaret of Offaly, the beautiful and accomplished queen of O'Carrol, King of Ely. She and her husband were munificent patrons of literature, art, and, science. On Queen Margaret's special invitation, the literati of Ireland and Scotland, to the number of nearly three thousand, held a "session" for the furtherance of literary and scientific interests at her palace near Killeagh, in Offaly, the entire assemblage being the guests of the king and queen during their stay.

"The nave of the great church of Da Sinchell was converted for the occasion into a banqueting-hall, where Margaret herself inaugurated the proceedings by placing two massive chalices of gold, as offerings, on the high altar, and committing two orphan children to the custody of nurses to be fostered at her charge. Robed in cloth of gold, this illustrious lady, who was as distinguished for her beauty as for her generosity, sat in queenly state m one of the galleries of the church, surrounded by the clergy, the brehons, and her private friends, shedding a lustre on the scene which was passing below, while her husband, who had often encountered England's greatest generals in battle, remained mounted on a charger outside the church, to bid the guests welcome and see that order was preserved. The invitations were issued, and the guests arranged according to a list prepared by 0'Carrol's chief brehon; and the second entertainment, which took place at Rathangan, was a supplemental one, to embrace such men of learning as had not been brought together at the former feast."--(A.M. 0'Sullivan.)

Such was the true "revival of learning" in Ireland--a return to her old traditional teaching. If this peaceful time had been of longer duration, there is no doubt that her old schools would have flourished anew, and men in subsequent ages might have compared the results of the two systems: the one producing with true enlightenment, peace, concord, faith, and piety, though confined to the insignificant compass of one small island; the other resulting in the mental anarchy so rife to-day, and spreading all over the rest of Europe.

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VIII. THE IRISH AND THE TUDORS.--HENRY VIII

By losing the only bond of unity--the power vested in the Ard- Righ--which held the various parts of the island together, Ireland lost all power of exercising any combined action. The nations were as numerous as the clans, and the interests as diverse as the families. They possessed, it is true, the same religion, and in the observance of its precepts and practices they often found a remedy for their social evils; but religion, not encountering any opposition from any quarter, with the exception of the minor differences existing between the native clergy and the English dignitaries, was generally considered as out of the question in their wranglings and contentions. We shall see how the blows struck at it by the English monarchs welded into one that people, were the cause of that union now so remarkable among them, and really constituted the only bond that ever linked them together.

Before dwelling on these considerations, let us glance a moment at the state of the country prior to the attempt of introducing Protestantism there.

The English Pale was reduced at this period to one half of five counties in Leinster and Meath; and even within those boundaries the 0'Kavanaghs, O'Byrnes, O'Moores and others, retained their customs, their brehon laws, their language and traditions, often making raids into the very neighborhood of the capital, and parading their gallowglasses and kerns within twenty miles of Dublin.

The nobility and the people were in precisely the same state which they had known for centuries. The few Englishmen who had long ago settled in the country had become identified with the natives, had adopted their manners, language, and laws, so offensive at first to the supercilious Anglo-Normans.

But a revolution was impending, owing chiefly to the change lately introduced into the religion of England, by Henry Tudor. It is important to study the first attempt of the kind in Ireland; not only because it became the occasion of establishing for a lengthy period a real unanimity among the people--giving birth to the nation as it were--but also for the right understanding of the word "rebellion," which had been so freely used before toward the natives, and which was now about to receive a new interpretation.

The English had once deceived the Irish, exacting their submission in the twelfth century by foisting upon them the word homage: they would deceive Europe by a constant use, or rather misuse, of the words "rebel" and "rebellion." By the enactment of new laws they pronounce the simple attachment to the old religion of the country a denial of sovereign right, and consequently an act of overt treason; and the Irish shall be butchered mercilessly for the sake of the religion of Christ without winning the name, though they do the crown, of martyrdom; for Europe is to be so effectually deceived, that even the Church will hesitate to proclaim those religious heroes, saints of God.

But the great fact of the birth of a nation, in the midst of those throes of anguish, will lessen their atrocity in the mind of the reader, and explain to some extent the wonderful designs of Providence.

From an English state paper, published by M. Haverty, we learn that, in 1515, a few years before the revolt of Luther, the island was divided into more than sixty separate states, or "regions," "some as big as a shire, some more, some less."

Had it not been for this division and the constant feuds it engendered, in the north between the O'Neills and O'Donnells, in the south between the Geraldines (Desmonds and Kildares) and the Butlers (Ormonds), the authority of the English king would have been easily shaken off. The policy so constantly adopted by England in after-times--a policy well expressed by the Latin adage, Divide et impera--preserved the English power in Ireland, and finally brought the island into outward subjection at least, to Great Britain--a subjection which the Irish conscience and the Irish voice and Irish arms yet did not cease to protest against and deny. But the nation was divided, and it required some great and general calamity to unite them together and make of them one people.

That, even spite of those divisions, they were at the time on the point of driving the English out of the island, we need no better proofs than the words of the English themselves. The Archbishop of Dublin, John Allen, the creature of Wolsey, who was employed by the crafty cardinal to begin the work of the spoliation of convents in the island, and oppose the great Earl of Kildare, dispatched his relative, the secretary of the Dublin Council, to England, to report that "the English laws, manners, and language in Ireland were confined within the narrow compass of twenty miles;" and that, unless the laws were duly enforced, "the little place," as the Pale was called, "would be reduced to the same condition as the remainder of the kingdom;" that is to say, the Pale itself, which had been brought to such insignificant limits, would belong exclusively to the Irish.

It was while affairs were at this pass that the revolt of "silken Thomas" excited the wrath of Henry VIII., and brought about the destruction of almost the whole Kildare family.

It was about this time, also, that Wolsey fell, and Cromwell, having replaced him as Chancellor of England, with Cranmer as Archbishop of Canterbury, the Reformation began in England with the divorce of the king, who shortly after assumed supremacy in spirituals as a prerogative of the crown, and made Parliament -- in those days himself--supreme law-giver in Church and state.

Cromwell, known in history as the creature and friend of Cranmer, like his protector a secret pervert to the Protestant doctrines of Germany, and the first arch-plotter for the destruction of Catholicity in the British Isles, undertook to save the English power in Ireland by forcing on that country the supremacy of the king in religious matters, knowing well that such a step would drive the Irish into resistance, but believing that he could easily subdue them and make the island English.

Having been appointed, not only Chancellor of England, but also king's vicar-general in temporals and spirituals, Cromwell inquired of his English agents in Ireland the best means of attaining his object--the subjection of the country. Their report is preserved among the state papers, and some of their suggestions deserve our attentive consideration. If Henry VIII. had consented to follow their advice, he would have himself inaugurated the bloody policy so well carried out long after by another Cromwell, the celebrated "Protector."

The report sets forth that the most efficient mode of proceeding was to exterminate the people; but Henry thought it sufficient to gain the nobility over--the people being beneath his notice.

The agents of the vicar-general were right in their atrocious proposal. They knew the Irish nation well, and that the only way to separate Ireland from the See of Peter was to make the country a desert.

Their means of bringing about the destruction of the people was starvation. The corn was to be destroyed systematically, and the cattle killed or driven away. Their operations, it is true, were limited to the borders of the Pale. The gentle Spenser, at a later period, proposed to extend them to all Munster, and it was a special glory reserved for the "Protector" to carry out this policy through almost the whole of the island.

"The very living of the Irishry," says the report, "doth clearly consist in two things: take away the same from them, and they are passed for ever to recover, or yet to annoy any subject Ireland. Take first from them their corn, and as much as cannot be husbanded, and had into the hands of such as shall dwell and inhabit in their lands, to burn and destroy the same, so as the Irishry shall not live thereupon; and then to have their cattle and beasts, which shall be most hardest to come by, and yet, with guides and policy, they may be oft had and taken."

The report goes on to point out, most elaborately and ingeniously, every artifice and plan for carrying this policy into effect. But here we have, condensed, as it were, in a nutshell, and coolly and carefully set forth, the system which was adopted later on, and almost crowned with a fiendish success. But the moment for the execution of this barbarous scheme had not yet come, and we find no positive results following immediately.

This project, complete as it was, was far from being the only one proposed at that time for "rooting out the Irish" from Ireland. Mr. Prendergast, in his "Introduction to the Cromwellian Settlement," says:

"The Irish were never deceived as to the purport of the English, and, though the Pale had not been extended for two hundred and forty years, their firm persuasion in the reign of Henry VIII. was, that the original design was not abandoned. 'Irishmen are of opinion among themselves,' said Justice Cusack to the king, 'that Englishmen will one day banish them from their lands forever.'"

In fact, project after project was then proposed for clearing Ireland of Irish to the Shannon. Some went so far as already to contemplate their utter extirpation; but "there was no precedent for it found in the chronicles of the conquest. Add to this the difficulty of finding people to reinhabit it if suddenly unpeopled.

"The chiefs and gentlemen of the Irish only were to be driven from their properties," according to some of those projects, "and they only were to be driven into exile, while their lands should be given to Englishmen."

"The king, however, seems to have been satisfied with confiscating the estates of the Earl of Kildare and of his family. Fierce and bloody though he was, there was something lion-like in his nature; notwithstanding all those promptings, he left to the Irish and old English their possessions, and seemed even anxious to secure them, but failed to do so for want of time."

We think Mr. Prendergast's judgment of Henry VIII. too favorable. Generosity did not prompt him to spare the people and the nobles, with the exception of the Kildares. We believe that he never contemplated the extirpation of the people, because such a political element could not enter into his mind. As for the nobles, he wished to gain them over, because of the long wars he foresaw necessary to bring about their utter extinction or exile.

He adopted, accordingly, a plan of his own, holding firm to his design of having his new title of "Head of the Church" acknowledged in Ireland as well as in England.

Cromwell commenced his work by two measures which had met with perfect success in the latter country, but which were destined to fire the sister isle from end to end, and make "the people," in course of time, really one. These measures were acts of Parliament: 1. Establishing 'the king's spiritual supremacy; 2. Suppressing, at once, all the monasteries existing in the country, and giving their property to the nobles who were willing to apostatize.

The necessity of convening Parliament resulted from the failure of the first attempt, already made, to establish the king's supremacy. Browne, the successor of Allen in the See of Dublin, a rank Lutheran at heart, had been commissioned by the king and by Cranmer, his consecrator, to establish the new doctrine at once. His want of success, is thoroughly explained in a letter to Cromwell, which is still preserved, and which remains one of the proudest monuments of the steadfastness of the Irish in their religion.

He complains that not only the clergy, but the "common people," were "more zealous in their blindness than the saints and martyrs in truth, in the beginning of the Gospel," and "such was their hostility against him that his life was in danger."

And all this in Dublin, in the heart of the Pale, where the chief antagonist of the new doctrine, "the leader of the people" against this first attempt at schism, was Cromer, the Archbishop of Armagh, an Englishman himself! So that those prelates of England, who, with the exception of the noble Fisher, had all yielded without a murmur of opposition to the will of Henry, could find no followers, not even of their own nation, in Ireland, so much had their faith been strengthened by contact with that of "the common people."

A Parliament was needed, therefore, and that one which was to be the instrument of introducing the great English measure, met for the first time in Dublin, on the 1st of May, 1536; but, being prorogued, it met again in 1537, and did not complete its work until once more summoned in 1541, when the old Irish element was for the first and last time introduced at its sitting, in order, if possible, to consecrate the new doctrine by having it solemnly accepted by the old race.

This Parliament, which was first convened in Dublin, McGeoghegan says, "adjourned to Kilkenny, thence to Cashel, after ward to Limerick, and lastly to Dublin again." The chief cause of these interruptions was the difficulty of bringing an Irish Parliament, even when composed of Englishmen, as was the case up to 1541, to pass the decrees of supremacy, denial of Roman authority, etc., which had been so readily accepted in England.

The Irish Parliaments, as far back as we can see, were composed not only of lords, spiritual and temporal, and of deputies of the Commons, but each diocese possessed also the right to send there three ecclesiastical proctors, who, by reason of their office, owned neither benefice nor fief, and were therefore at liberty to vote, fearless of attainder and confiscation, in accordance with their conscience and their sense of right.

This feature of the Irish assemblies, even when no representative of the native race sat in them, was a fatal obstacle to the success of the scheme devised by Browne and executed by Cromwell. Accordingly, we are not astonished to find that, by an act of despotism not uncommon during the reign of Henry VIII., the proctors were excluded from Parliament, which thus became an obedient tool in the hands of the government.

Not only, therefore, were several state measures carried in accordance with the wish of the king, but the great object proposed by the meeting of this assembly was finally obtained; and, lowing the lead of the English Parliament, Henry VIII. and his successors were confirmed in the title of "Supreme Head of the Church in Ireland," with power of reforming and correcting errors in religion. All appeals to Rome were prohibited, and the Pope's authority declared a usurpation.

Henry, however, foreseeing that all these favorite measures of his policy, being carried by English votes in a purely English assembly, though on Irish soil, would meet with universal opposition from all the native lords, conceived the idea of summoning the great Irish chieftains to a new meeting of Parliament, from which he expected that a moral revolution would be effected in the island. Sir Anthony St. Leger, created deputy in August, 1540, was thought a likely man to be intrusted with so delicate a mission. He conducted it with political prudence, that is to say, with a judicious mixture of kindness and fraud, which succeeded beyond all expectations.

In order to prepare the way for hoodwinking the Irish chieftains, favors of every kind were showered upon them, to wit, titles and estates, chiefly those of suppressed monasteries; and St. Leger, by an alternate use of force and diplomacy, at length effected that the Irish should consent to accept titles. Con O'Neill, the head of the house of Tyrone, went to England, accompanied by O'Kervellan, Bishop of Ologher, and was admitted to an audience by the king. Henry adopted toward those proud Irishmen a policy utterly different from that he had used with the English lords. These latter were merely threatened with his displeasure, and with the feudal penalties he knew so well how to inflict; the others were received at court as favorites and dear friends; a royal courtesy, kind expressions, a smiling face- -such were the arms he employed against the "barbarous Irish."

Tyrone, O'Donnell, and others, were not proof against his cunning. The first renounced his title of prince and the glorious name of O'Neill, to receive in return that of Earl of Tyrone. Manus O'Donnell was made Earl of Tyrconnel. Both received back the lands which they had offered to the king, and their example was followed by a great number of inferior lords. Among them, two Magenisses were dubbed knights; Murrough O'Brien, of North Munster, was made Earl of Thomond and Baron of Inchiquin; De Burgo, or McWilliams, was created Earl of Clanricard, and a host of others submitted in like manner, and received the new titles which henceforth became conspicuous in Irish history.

This was the beginning of the gradual suppression of the clans. Many of these nobles, unfortunately, not content with receiving back, at the hands of the king, the lands which had come into their possession from a long line of ancestors, and which really belonged not to them personally, but to the clans whose heads they were, greedily snatched at the estates of religious orders, whose suppression was the first consequence of the schism in Ireland, which will soon occupy our attention.

The Irish chieftains had already seen Wolsey, a cardinal in full communion with Rome, suppress forty monasteries in the island. They might therefore imagine that the confiscation of a still greater number on the part of the king was a thing not altogether incompatible with the religion of the monarch, and that the fact of their sharing in the plunder was not entirely opposed to their titles of Catholics and subjects of Rome. Such is human conscience when blinded by self-interest.

The king thought that he had gained over the nobility,--which was all he wished- -and the last session of the previous Parliament of 1536 and the following years might now be held in order to consecrate the unholy work.

"On the 12th of June, 1541," says Mr. Haverty, "a Parliament was held in Dublin, at which the novel sight was witnessed of Irish chieftains sitting for the first time with English lords. O'Brien appeared there by his procurators and attorneys, and Kavanagh, O'More, O'Reilly, McWilliams, and others, took their seats in person, the addresses of the Speaker and of the Lord- Chancellor being interpreted to them in Irish by the Earl of Ormond. An act was unanimously passed, conferring on Henry VIII. and his successors the title of King of Ireland, instead of that of Lord of Ireland, which the English kings, since the days of John, had hitherto borne. This act was hailed with great rejoicings in Dublin, and on the following Sunday, the lords and gentlemen of Parliament went in procession to St. Patrick's Cathedral, where solemn high mass was sung by Archbishop Browne, after which the law was proclaimed and a Te Deum chanted."

It is worthy of remark that in the session of 1541, at which alone the Irish chieftains appeared, not a word was said of the supremacy of the king in spirituals. Sir James Ware, who gives the various decrees with more detail than usual, makes no mention of this pet measure of the king and of the Lutheran Archbishop Browne, but it was only part and parcel of the Parliament of 1536, prorogued successively to Kilkenny, Cashel, Limerick, and finally again to Dublin. At its first sitting the law of supremacy was passed and proclaimed as law of Ireland. Nothing was said of it in the various sessions that followed, including that of 1541; and yet the Irish chieftains were supposed to have sanctioned it, inasmach as it was a measure previously passed in the same Parliament: and the suppression of various abbeys and monasteries having been openly decreed in the final session, as a result of the king's supremacy--Rome not having been consulted, of course--all the signers of the last decree were supposed to have thereby sanctioned and adopted the previous ones. Thus O'Neill, O'Reilly, O'More, and the rest, without being aware of the fact, became schismatics, though many of them, perhaps all, did not see the connection between the various sessions of that long Parliament. Certainly, if, on leaving the Dublin Cathedral, where they had heard the archbishop's mass and assisted at that solemn Te Deum, they had been told that that act was intended to consecrate the surrender of the religion of their ancestors, and the commencement of a frightful revolution, which would end in the destruction of their national existence, almost of their very race, they would have incredulously laughed to scorn the unwelcome prophet.

But even if, as we may well believe, those Irish lords had really been the victims of deception, and had not, as a body, been corrupted by the sacrilegious gift of suppressed monasteries, the people, their clansmen, prompted by the vivid impressions and unerring instincts of religious faith and patriotic nationality, which were ever living in their breasts, resented the weakness of their chieftains as a national defection and a real apostasy, and took immediate steps to bring the lords to their senses, and to prevent the spread of English corruption.

All who had received titles from Henry, and surrendered to him the deeds of their lands, as if those lands belonged to them personally, and not to the clans collectively, all those, particularly, who had enriched themselves by the plunder of religious houses, and who had taken any part in the destruction of the religious orders so dear to the Irish heart, were soon made to feel the indignation which those events had excited among the native clansmen, north and south. And those of the chieftains who had really been deceived, and had preserved in their hearts all through a strong love for their religion and country, were recalled to a sense of their error, and brought back to a sense of their duty by the unmistakable voice of the "people."

While the nobles were still in England, feted by Henry in his royal palace of Greenwich, renouncing their Irish names to become English earls and barons, the Ulster chief, protesting that he would never again take the name of O'Neill, but content himself with the title of Earl of Tyrone; while O'Brien was being created Earl of Thomond; McWilliams, Earl of Clanricard; O'Donnell, Earl of Tyrconnell; Kavanagh, Baron of Ballyann; and Fitzpatrick, Baron of Ossory; the clans at home, hearing in due time of those real treasons, were concerting plans for making their lords repent of their weakness or treachery, and for administering to them due punishment on their return.

O'Neill, "the first of his race who had accepted an English title," on landing in Ireland, learned that, his people had deposed him, and elected in his stead his son John the Proud, better known as Shane O'Neill; O'Donnell, on his arrival, met most, of his clan, headed by his son, up in arms against him; the new Earl of Clanricard had already been deposed by his people and another McWilliams, with a Gaelic name, elected in his place; and so with the rest.

But, unfortunately, the Government of England was strong enough to support its favorite chieftains, and it found some Irish tools ready at hand to form the nucleus of an Irish party in their favor. Thus, unanimity no longer marked the decisions of the clans; two parties were formed in each of them, the one national, comprising the great bulk of the people, the real, true people; the other English, composed of a few apostate Irishmen, backed by the power of England. Thus, henceforth we hear of the O'Reilly, and the king's O'Reilly, etc.

Henry VIII. seemed, therefore, with the help of his minister, St. Leger, to have succeeded in breaking up the clans, after the Irish national government had been broken up long before. Confusion of titles, property, and traditions became worse confounded. How could the shanachies, bards, and brehons, any longer agree in their pedigrees, songs, and legal decisions? England had thus early adopted in Ireland the stern and coldhearted policy which, centuries later, she used to destroy the native and Mohammedan dynasties in Hindostan. It was not yet divide et impera on a large scale, but the division was pushed as far as lay in the power England, to the very last elements of the social system.

From this time forward, then, we must not be surprised to find England welcoming to her bosom unworthy sons of Ireland, whom she wished to make her tools. There was always, either in Dublin or London, a sufficient supply of materials out of which crown's chiefs might be manufactured; the government made it part of its policy to hold in its hands and train to its purposes certain members of each of the ruling families--of the O'Neills, O'Reillys, O'Donnells, O'Connors, and others.

It was no longer, therefore, the rooting out and exterminating policy which prevailed, but one as fatal in its results, which would have utterly destroyed Irish national feeling, to set up in its place, not only English manners, language, and customs, but also English schism, heresy, philosophical speculations --as the Four Masters have it --finally, materialism and nihilism.

But, in real sober fact, the scheme proved almost an utter failure, owing to the far-seeing good sense of the people. The national spirit revived among the upper classes, both native and of English descent--owing to the decided stand taken by the inferior clansmen.

The Desmonds and Kildares, in the south, the O'Donnells, Maguires, and others, in the north, soon showed themselves animated by a new spirit of ardent Catholicism; created, in fact, a new nation, quite apart from, or rather embracing, clanship, well-nigh destroyed the English power, kept Elizabeth, during the whole of her reign, in constant agitation and fear, and would have succeeded in recovering their independence, and securing freedom of worship, had not their good-nature been imposed upon by the hypocrisy and faithlessness of the Stuarts, to whom they always looked for freedom in the practice of their religion, without ever obtaining it.

Thus did the people, the Irish race, thwart the policy of Henry, who sought to gain over the nobility. Their stubborn resistance to the vastly-increased and constantly-increasing English power, grew at last to such proportions, and became so discouraging to their oppressors, that the old policy of utter extermination was resumed by Cromwell and the Orange party of the following age.

The refusal of the people, that is to say, of the bulk of the nation, to submit to the policy of their chieftains, and the determination to repudiate that policy by deposing its supporters and choosing others in their stead, was most happy in its effect on their whole future history.

The leaders, by accepting the new titles bestowed on them by the English kings, by taking their seats in Parliament, and concurring in the various measures there passed, subjected themselves to a foreign rule, surrendered to this rule the tribe- lands, which it was not in their power to surrender of themselves, gave up, in fact, their nationality, and became English subjects. The action of the clansmen reversed all the fatal consequences resulting from those acts. They remained a nation distinct from the English, whose laws they had never either admitted or accepted. And, as the clan spirit declined, under the policy of England, it only made way for a new and a greater spirit--religious feeling, the bond of a common religion assaulted--which, henceforth, lay at the bottom of the whole struggle--which, for the first time in their history, blended into one whole the broken clans, gave them a unity and a consistency never known till then, and thus the real nation was born.

They might boast, therefore, not only of not having lost their autonomy, but of being more firmly than ever knit together; they could conclude treaties of alliance with foreign powers, without committing treason, and they soon began to use that power; they could even declare war against England, and it was not rebellion. The successors of Henry VIII. acted constantly as though the Irish nation had really subjected itself to English kings and English rule, as though the acceptance of a few titles by a few chieftains (who were deposed by their people as soon as the fact was known) signified an acknowledgment on the part of the Irish people of their absorption by the English feudal system; they appeared "horrified" when they saw the successors of those chieftains reject those titles and resume their own names; and they called the Irish "rebels" and "traitors" for going to war with England--a country they had never acknowledged as their ruler--and introducing into their country Spanish, Italian, and French troops as allies.

The explanation of the whole mystery consisted in the simple fact that the people, the nation, had steadily refused to sanction the act of their leaders; and all the pretensions of English kings, statesmen, and lawyers, were valueless. Those Irishmen who subsequently entered into the various Geraldine and Ulster confederacies, and summoned foreign armies to their aid, were neither rebels nor traitors, but citizens of an independent state, possessing their international rights as citizens of any independent country. This we have seen in a previous chapter, and Sir John Davies has been obliged to confess its truth, admitting the difference between a tributary and a subject nation.

A glance shows us the importance of the almost unanimous outcry of the clansmen of Tyrone, Tyrconnell, and of other parts of Ireland. Owing to the patriotic feeling of these, nothing remained for the English but to punish the Irish people for their resolve of holding to their religion, and to declare a religious war against them, though they called them all the time rebels and traitors. This is the view an impartial historian should take of those mighty events.

But, it is well to look more closely at this new element, which then showed itself for the first time in Irish national life, the people, irrespective of clanship; the people, as influencing the leaders, and thus becoming a living--nay, a ruling power in the state. And, lest any of our readers should not be convinced that such really was the case, we mention here a fact, which will come more prominently before us in the next chapter, that, at the end of Elizabeth's reign, the efforts of all her large armies and her tortuous policy for changing the religion of the country, resulted in the grand total of sixty converts to Protestantism from the noble class, not one of the clansmen turning apostate!

Bridget of Kildare would not have been surprised at this, to judge by what we have previously heard from her.

In order to find the explanation of this wonderful fact, we must compare the Irish people with other nationalities, and we may then easily distinguish its peculiar features, so persistent, so enduring, we may say, indestructible. We shall find that what this people was three hundred years ago, it is to this day, with a greater unity of feeling, devotedness to principle, and higher aims than any people of modern times.

In antiquity, the people, in the Christian sense of the word, never appeared in the field of history. In the despotic countries of Asia and Africa, there was and could be no question of such a thing; it was an inert mass used at will by the despot. The Phoenician states, and Carthage in particular, were mere oligarchies, with commerce for their chief object, and slaves for mercantile or warlike purposes. In the republics of Greece and Italy, the aristocracy ruled, and when, after centuries of bloody struggles and revolutions, the subjects of Rome were finally granted the rights of citizenship, the despotism of the empire suddenly appeared, crushing both plebs and patricians.

Whenever in those ancient governments we find the lower classes unable longer to bear the heavy yoke imposed upon them, revolting against a despotism which had grown insupportable, and claiming their natural rights, it was merely a surging of waves raised to mountain-height by the fury of a sudden storm, but soon allayed and subdued beneath the inflexible will of stern rulers. The people was a mere mob, whose violence, when successful, fatally carried destruction with it; and, though it is seemingly full of a terrible power which nothing can resist, its power lasts but for a very short time. Could it only outlast the destruction of all superior rulers, it would end by destroying itself.

If we would meet with the people, such as we conceive it to be in accordance with our Christian ideas, we must come down to that period of time which followed close upon the organization of Christendom, namely, to the much-abused middle ages. Feudalism, it is true, withstood its expansion for a long time, kept alive the remnants of slavery which it had found in Europe at its birth, or at best invented serfdom as a somewhat milder substitute for the former degradation of man. But feudalism itself was not strong enough to prevent the natural consequences of the vigorous Christianity which at that time prevailed; and kings, dukes, and feudal bishops, were compelled to grant charters which insured the freedom of the subject. Then the people appeared, in the cities first, afterward in the country, where, however, the peasants had still to drag on for a weary time the chains of secular serfdom.

Thus the people lived in Spain, where they fought valiantly under their lords for centuries against the Crescent, so that in some provinces all classes were ennobled, and not a single plebeian was to be found, which simply means that the whole mass of the citizens formed the people. Thus the people had an early existence in Italy, where every city almost became a centre of freedom and activity, notwithstanding strife and continual feuds. Thus the people had its life in France, where the learned men of Catholic universities determined with precision the limits of kingly power, and where the outburst of the Crusades brought all classes together to fight for Christ, forming but one body engaged alike throughout in a holy cause. Thus, finally, the people had its life even in Germany and England, where real liberty, though of later birth, afterward remained more deeply rooted in social life.

In all those countries, it was called populus Christianus; it had its associations, its guilds, its Christian customs, its privileges, its rights. Its existence was acknowledged by law, and it possessed everywhere either Christian codes, or at least local customs for its safeguards. It gradually grew into a great power, and took the name of the "Third Estate," ranking directly after the clergy, and nobility. Its members knew and respected the gradations of the social hierarchy as then existing. The monarchs in most countries, in France chiefly, sided with it whenever the nobles sought to oppress it, and its deputies were heard in the Parliaments of the various nations of Christendom.

How many millions of human beings lived happily during several centuries under these great institutions of mediaeval times! And if the members of the people at that time could seldom rise above their order, except through the Church, this unfortunate inability often prevented dangerous and subversive ambitions, and was thus really the source and cause of, happiness to all. Governments at that period lasted for thousands of years; men could rely on the stability of things, and great enterprises could be undertaken and carried to a successful termination.

But throughout all Europe, with the single exception of Ireland, the people had to contend against the feudal power; and it was only very gradually, and step by step, that it could creep up to its rights. In Ireland, as we have seen, feudalism had failed to strike root; so that the clansmen who represented there what the people did elsewhere, never having been subject to slavery or serfdom, possessed all the liberties which the ordinary class of men can claim. They had always borne their share in the affairs of their own territory, at least by the willing help they afforded to their leaders, during the Danish wars chiefly, and afterward throughout the four hundred years of struggle with the Anglo-Normans. The people were the real conquerors under the lead of their chieftains, and the perpetual enjoyment of their beloved customs was the privilege of the least among them as much as of the proudest of their nobles. They themselves were well aware of this, and to their own efforts no less than to the heads of the clans they attributed the advantages which they had gained.

Thus, when the conduct of their chieftain was not in accordance with what the clansmen considered the right, they were ready to express their disapproval of his actions by deposing him, and placing their allegiance at the service of the man of their choice.

But though this course of action is true of the whole period of their history, more especially from the date of their becoming Christian up to the time when the blows of religious persecution welded them into one people, yet they were divided and often at war among themselves. But no sooner did the work of perversion make itself felt among them, than we behold the clansmen exhibiting a unity of feeling on many points which never marked them before. So that thenceforth the separated clans gradually began to merge into Irishmen.

This unity of feeling showed itself, above all, in the deep love for their religion, which at once became universal and all- pervading. This love had undoubtedly existed before, as it could scarcely have originated and swollen to such proportions all at once; but as the stroke of the hammer reveals the spark, so the force of opposition enkindled the flame and caused it to burst forth into view. At the first blow it showed itself throughout the island, and thus the people became once and forever united.

This unity of feeling was displayed likewise in an ardent love for their country in contradistinction to the special locality of the tribe. Thus arose a true fraternal union with all their countrymen of whatever county or city. The old antagonism between family and family only appeared at fitful and unguarded intervals; but in general each one grasped the hand of another only as a Catholic and an Irishman.

This is clearly attributable to their religion. Catholicity knows no place; its very name is opposed to restrictions of this character. Could it carry out its purpose, which is that of its Divine founder, it would make one of all nations; and, to a certain extent, it has achieved this task. Differences of character, which are deeply impressed in the nature of various branches of the human family, are indeed never totally obliterated by it; but such differences disappear when kneeling at the same altar and receiving the same sacraments. The Catholic religion is the only one which is, has ever been, and must ever claim to be, universal; the religions of antiquity were purely local.

Since the coming of our Lord, no heresy, no schism has ever pretended to the reality of a catholic existence, and, if the word is self-applied by certain sects, the world laughs at it as a meaningless thing. The Catholic Church alone has truly claimed and possessed such a character.

But if of all men it makes one family with respect to spiritual matters, what unanimity of feeling must it not create in a single nation truly imbued with its spirit, which is attacked for its sake? Until the reign of Henry VIII., the Irish, in their struggle with England, could summon no religious thought to their aid, since England was Catholic also, and the Norman nobles established among them followed the same calendar, possessed the same churches, the same creed, the same sacraments. But as soon as the English power was stamped with heresy, the opposition to that power assumed a religious aspect, and no longer restricted itself to the clans immediately attacked, but spread throughout the whole nation.

To bring the case down to some particular point, in order to render our meaning more clear, a priest or monk, who was hunted down, was no longer sure of refuge in his own district, and among men of his own sept merely, but he was equally welcomed in the castle of the chieftain or the hut of the peasant through the length and breadth of the land. Any Irishman, subject to fine, imprisonment, or torture, for the sake of his religion, did not find sympathy restricted to his own circle of friends or acquaintances, but, even if tried and prosecuted in a corner of the island, far away from his own home, he could count upon the sympathy of as many friends as there were Irish Catholics to witness his sufferings. This state of things was certainly unknown before.

Religion, when deep, is the strongest feeling of the human heart, and endows the nation steeped in it with an unconquerable strength. To judge of the intensity of religious feeling in the Irish, it should be remembered that it was the only legacy left them after every thing else had been taken away, and, though it was the special object of attack, they were to be stripped one by one of their old customs, their own chieftains, their houses of study and of prayer, their religious and secular teachers, nay, of the chance even of educating their children, of the right to possess not merely their own soil, but even to cultivate a few acres of it, nay, of their very language itself, in a word, of all that makes a country dear to man. For ages were they destined to remain outcasts and strangers on the soil which was their own; abject and ignorant paupers, without the faintest possibility of rising in the social scale.

One thing only did they keep in their hearts, their faith, though stripped of all the exterior circumstances which adorn it, and reduced to its simplest elements. But at least it was their religion, to deprive them of which, all the wealth, resources, armies, laws of a powerful nation, were to be strained to the utmost during long ages. How, then, could they fail to love and cherish it, to cling fast to it, as to an inestimable treasure, the only real one indeed they could possess on earth, where all else passes away?

Here, then, always presupposing the paramount influence of the grace of God, lay the secret of that indestructible strength and unwearied energy manifested by Irishmen, from the middle of the sixteenth century down, and we are enabled thus to appreciate the value of that unity which persecution alone fastened upon them.

To the love of religion, which was the origin of that unity, love of country was soon added, and by love of country we here understand the love of the whole island, not merely of the particular sept to which the individual belonged, or of the particular spot in which he happened to be born. Such had been the divisions among the people and the chieftains hitherto, that England could attack one sept without fearing the revolt of the others, nay, was often assisted by an adverse clan. And so thoroughly had the Anglo-Normans adopted the native manners, that the Kildares were frequently at war with the Desmonds, though both belonged to the same Geraldine family; and the Ormonds kept up a constant feud with both the Geraldine branches. When Henry VIII. almost destroyed the Kildares, we do not find that the Desmonds felt their loss at first; perhaps they even rejoiced at it.

It was the same with the natives, particularly with the 0'Neills and the O'Donnells, in the north. The whole island and its general interests seemed the concern of no one, so taken up were they by the affairs of their own particular locality. And this state of feeling had existed from the beginning, even among holy men. The songs of Columba, of Cormac McCullinan, even of the Fenian heroes of old, all celebrated the victories of one sept over another, or the beauties of some one spot in the island, in preference to all others.

Nay, so prevalent was this clannish spirit, even at the beginning of the religious troubles, that Henry VIII., and Elizabeth after him, gained their successes by directing their attacks against particular places, so certain were they that the other districts would not come to the rescue.

The feeling of nationality, of what we call patriotism, wrestled along time in the throes of birth, before coming forth, and it was only during the latter half of Elizabeth's reign that those confederacies were formed, which included the whole country and called in even foreign aid.

But this feeling began to appear as soon as religion was attacked; and therefore do we call this epoch the true birth of a people.

And as it is with the people chiefly that we are concerned, it is to our purpose to remark here that they gradually lost sight of their petty quarrels and local prejudices in losing their chieftains; they began to look for leaders among themselves, and, understanding at last that the whole island was threatened by the invading policy of England, they were to fight for the whole, and not for any special district.

Then, for the first time, did Ireland become a reality to them, an existing personality, a desolate queen weeping over the fate of her children, calling, with the voice of a stricken mother, those who survived to her aid, and worthy, by her beauty and misfortunes, of their most heroic and disinterested efforts.

Religious feeling, then, first made the Irish a nation, and gave them that unity of thought which they now exhibit everywhere, even in the remotest quarters of the globe, wherever they may choose their place of exile. And if there still exists among them something of that former predilection for the place where they first saw the light, the other parts of Erin are at least included in their deep love, and they would shed their blood for their country, irrespective of prejudice of place.

Thus have they come at last to love each other as men of no other nation ever did. In order to understand this thoroughly, we must remember that for ages they, as a people, have been oppressed and held in bondage by a stern and powerful nation. They had to defend themselves in turn against the most open and the most insidious attacks. Bereft in many cases of all the means of defence, they had nothing left them, save their religion, and the support they could afford each other.

If, by any stretch of imagination, we could place ourselves in their position, understand their language when they met each other in their huts, in their morasses and bogs, in their mountain fastnesses and desolate moors, could we only enter into their feelings and see the working of their minds, we might catch a faint conception of the affection which they must have felt for brothers waging the deadly fight against the same enemies, and contending in a seemingly endless and hopeless struggle against the same terrible odds. Union, affection, devotedness, are words too weak to serve here.

For this reason, also, do we find the Irish people stamped with peculiarities which we find in no others. In antiquity, as we have said, the people could never rise to any thing greater than a mob; in modern times such has also often been the case. With the Irish it is not, and could not be so. Their aim has always been too lofty, their struggle of too long duration, their morality too genuine and too pure. For their aim has constantly been to rescue their country; their struggle has lasted nearly three hundred years; their morality has ever been directed by the sweetest religion. Extreme cases of oppression such as theirs may have occasionally given rise to violent outbreaks inevitable in human despair; but, on the whole, it may to their honor be fearlessly said, that they have preserved, almost throughout, a due regard for social hierarchy and all kinds of rights. Many of them have died of hunger, rather than touch the property of a rich and hostile neighbor. Where else can we find such an example?

This union of the people, which was thus brought about by religious persecution, included not only the natives of the old race, but the Anglo-Irish themselves, who were brought by degrees to a unanimity of feeling which they had never known before, although they had previously adopted Irish manners - a unanimity which the Lutheran Archbishop Browne had foreseen and openly denounced beforehand. This was the man who had unwittingly borne testimony to the Irish that "the common people of this isle are more zealous in their blindness than the saints and martyrs were in the truth at the beginning of the Gospel;" the same George Browne, of Dublin, had also been the first to perceive that the religious question was beginning, even under Henry VIII., to unite the native Irish and the descendants of Strongbow's followers, until that time bitterly opposed to each other.

In a letter, dated "Dublin, May, 1538," to the Lord Privy Seal, he said: "It is observed that, ever since his Highness's ancestors had this nation in possession, the old natives have been craving foreign powers to assist and raise them; and now both English race and Irish begin to oppose your lordship's orders" (about supremacy), "and do lay aside their national old quarrels, which, I fear, if any thing will cause a foreigner to invade this nation, that will."

This man, who was altogether worldly and without faith, displayed in this a keen political foresight far above that of the ordinary counsellors of England's king. He openly announced what actually came to pass only toward the middle of Elizabeth's reign, and what the horrors of the Cromwellian wars were to complete - the thorough fusion of Irish and Anglo-Norman Catholics, both transplanted to Connaught, perishing under the sword of the soldier, the rope of the hangman, or dying of starvation in the recesses of their mountains - united forever in the bonds of martyrdom.

The "birth of the Irish people" was to be insured by another measure of the English Government - the suppression of religious houses. We must, in conclusion, turn to this.

In the annals of the Four Masters, under the year 1537, we read: "A heresy and a new error broke out in England, the effect of pride, vainglory, avarice, sensual desire, and the prevalence of a variety of scientific and philosophical speculations, so that the people of England went into opposition to the Pope and to Rome.

"At the same time, they followed a variety of opinions; and, adopting the old law of Moses, after the manner of the Jewish people, they gave the title of Head of the Church of God, during his reign, to the king. They ruined the orders who were permitted to hold worldly possessions, namely, monks, canons regular, nuns, and Brethren of the Cross, etc . . . . They broke into the monasteries, they sold their roofs and bells; so that there was not a monastery from Arran of the Saints to the Iccian Sea that was not broken and scattered, except only a few in Ireland."

And, under 1540, they say: "The English, in every place throughout Ireland, where they established their power, persecuted and banished the nine religious orders, and particularly they destroyed the monastery of Monaghan, and beheaded the guardian and a number of friars."

We may add that, at the restoration of the old faith under Queen Mary, nothing had to be restored in Ireland save the monasteries. These establishments had, almost without exception, been ruthlessly destroyed.

In our previous considerations, we have spoken of no other religious houses in Ireland, save those of the old Columbian order of monks, as it was called, which was a growth of the country, and bore so many marks of Irish peculiarities. This continued until, communications with Rome becoming more frequent, the various orders established in the West were successively introduced into Ireland. Our purpose is not to write a history of monasticism, and therefore we do not intend entering into details on this point, interesting though they are. But we may add that, gradually, the old monasteries - from the Norman invasion chiefly - as well as the new ones which were established, were placed under the rule of the various congregations, acknowledged by the Holy See. It seems that the monasteries founded by St. Columba himself afterward submitted to the rule of St. Benedict, the others, for the most part, embracing that of the canons regular of St. Augustine; but the precise epoch of these changes is not known. It is certain, however, that the Benedictines, Cistercians, and Bernardines, were introduced into the country at a very early date, together with the four mendicant orders of Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites, and Augustinians.

The pretext for their destruction was, of course, the same in England as in all the other countries of Europe - their need of reformation; but it does not appear that even this pretence was put forward in the case of the Irish monasteries. The fact was, the breath of suspicion could not rest upon those stainless establishments in the Isle of Saints. In the idea of the natives, their very names had ever been synonymous with holiness and all Christian virtues, and so they continued to enjoy the most unbounded popularity. The fact of the English Government selecting them as a special point of attack is in itself sufficient to vindicate their character from any aspersion. Two measures were deemed necessary and sufficient for the purpose of detaching Ireland from its allegiance to the Holy See, and of introducing schism, if not heresy, into the country. One, and certainly the most efficacious of these, was thought to be the destruction of convents for both sexes. This, we affirm, is ample apology for their inmates.

But this general reflection is not enough for our purpose, which is, to delineate and bring out the true character of the nation. It is, therefore, fitting to give an idea of the extent to which the monastic influence prevailed, and of the nature of the people who cherished, loved, and accepted it at all times.

It may be said that the Christian Church, as established in the island by St. Patrick, rested mainly for its support on the religious orders. In many cases the abbots of monasteries were superior to bishops, and, as a general rule, the hierarchy of the Church was, as it were, subordinate to monastic establishments.1 (1 Vide Montalembert's "Monks of the West: Bollandists, Oct.," tome xii., p. 888.) At the time we speak of, indeed, such was no longer the case; but the previously-existing state of reciprocal subordination between abbots and bishops during several centuries, in Ireland,, had left deep traces in the nature of the institutions and of the people itself. It may be said that in the mind of an Irishman the existence of Christianity almost presupposed a numerous array of convents and religious houses. And this idea of theirs can scarcely be called a wrong one, nor did they exaggerate the value of religious orders, since their estimate of them was no higher than that of Christ himself and his Church.

If with justice it was said that the French monarchy was established by bishops, with equal justice may it be said that the Irish people had been educated, nay, created by monks. The monks had taken the place left vacant by the Druids, and thus they became for the Christian what the others had been for the pagan Irish. For a long period the Irish monks formed a very considerable portion of the population. In their body were concentrated the gifts of science, art, holiness, even miracles without number, unless we are to suppose that the hagiography of the island was intrusted to the care of idiots incapable of ascertaining current facts. The vast literature of the island, greater indeed than that of any other Christian country at the time, was either the product of monastic intellect and learning, or at least had been translated and preserved by monks. The gifted Eugene O'Curry could fill numbers of the pages of his great work with the bare titles of the books which are known to have issued from the Irish monasteries, of which but a few fragments remain; and no sensible man who has read his book can affect to despise establishments which could produce so many proofs of fancy, intellect, and erudition. The scattered fragments of that rich literature, which had escaped the fury of the Scandinavian, the ignorance and rapacity of the early Anglo- Norman, the blind fanaticism of the Puritan, could still in the seventeenth century furnish materials enough for the immense compilations of the Four Masters, Ward, Wadding, Lynch, and Colgan.

What we have here stated is the simple, unvarnished truth; yet it is but yesterday that the subject has really begun to be studied.

But what is chiefly worthy our attention is, that the monasteries were not only the seats of learning and literature in Ireland, but they constituted and comprised in themselves every thing of value which the nation possessed. As they were found everywhere, there was not room for much else in the department they filled in the island. Take them away, and the country is a blank. So well were the crafty counsellors of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth satisfied of this, that they insisted on the destruction of the monasteries, and turned all their efforts to carry their purpose into effect.

Feudalism had failed in its endeavor to cover the country with castles; the native royalty and inferior chieftainship being engaged in constant bickerings with each other and with the common foe, had been unable to enrich the country with monuments of art and wealthy palaces; the Church alone had accomplished whatever had been effected in this way, and in the Church the monks rather than the bishops had for a long time exercised the preponderating influence. Hence, it may be truly said that Ireland was essentially a monastic country, more so than any other nation of Christendom.

This fact explains how it happened that the monastic institutions could not be destroyed. The convent-walls might be battered down, the more valuable edifices might be converted into dwellings for the new Protestant aristocracy, their property might go to enrich upstarts, and feed the rapacity of greedy conquerors, but the institution itself could not perish.

It is true that in all Catholic countries this seems also to be the case; but wide is the difference with regard to Ireland. In all places religious establishments have frequently been the object of anti-Christian fury and rage. They have often been destroyed, and seem to have utterly disappeared, when the world has been surprised by their speedy resurrection. The fact is, the Church needs them, and the practice of evangelical counsels must forever be in a state of active operation upon earth, since the grace of God always inspires with it a number of select souls. God is the source; consequently the stream must flow, since the life-spring is eternal and ever-running.

But in other countries besides the one under our consideration religious houses and institutions have sometimes been effectually rooted out, at least for a time. When the French Constituent Assembly, by one of its destructive decrees, closed those establishments all over France, such of them as by their laxity deserved to die, ceased at once to exist, and poured forth their inmates to swell the ranks of a corrupt society, and add religious degradation to the immoral filth of the world. Those religious houses, within whose walls the spirit of God had not ceased to dwell, were indeed closed and emptied; but their inmates endeavored to live their lives of religion in some unknown and obscure spot, until the madness of the Convention, and the Reign of Terror which soon followed, rendered the continuation of the holy exercises of any community absolutely impossible. But mark this well: the holy aims of the monks and nuns found no response in the nation, and, finding themselves almost entirely rejected by a faithless people, with no resting- place in the whole extent of the country, a sudden and total interruption of religious ascetic life in the once most Catholic nation of Europe was the result.

The same may soon come to pass in our days in Italy and Spain, until better times return to those now distracted countries, and the extremities of evil bring them back to something of their primitive faith.

Not so in Ireland: the communities could continue to exist even when turned out-of-doors, because the nation wanted them, and could afford them asylum and peace in the worst periods of persecution. And this great fact of the mutual love between monks, priests, and people, contributed also in no small degree to that union among all, which henceforth became the characteristic feature of a people hitherto split up into hostile clans. Nothing probably tended so much toward effecting the birth of the nation as the deep attachment existing between the Irish and their religious orders. The latter had always preached peace and often reconciled enemies, and brought furious men to the practice of Christian charity and forbearance.

We have seen instances of this when the clans were all powerful and the chieftains thought of nothing but of "preyings," as they called them, compelling their enemies to give "hostages" and devastating the territories of hostile clans. Then the voice of the monk came to be heard in the midst of contending passions, and real miracles were often performed by them in changing into lambs men who resembled roaring lions or devouring wolves; but their action became much more efficacious when nothing was left to the people save their religion and the "friars." These, it is true, could no longer reside within the walls of their convents, but on that very account their life became more truly one with that of the people.

Sometimes they found refuge in the large, hospitable dwellings of the native nobility, where, during the latter part of the reign of Henry VIII. and the whole of that of Elizabeth, the almost independent power of the chieftains could still afford them succor. Sometimes also the humbler dwelling of the farmer or the peasant offered them a sure asylum, wherein they could practise their ministry in almost perfect freedom, owing to the sure and inviolable secrecy of the inmates and neighbors. For a great distance around, the Catholics knew of their abode, were often visited by them, even without mach danger of the fact becoming known to spies and informers. And this brings naturally before us a new feature of the Irish character.

Their nature, which was so expansive and passionate on all other subjects, so that to keep a secret was an impossible feat to them, wore another character when danger to their religion or its ministers required of them to set a seal on their lips. For years frequently, large numbers of priests and religious could not only exist, but move and work among them, without their place of abode becoming known to the swarms of enemies who surrounded them. The nation was trained to prudence and discretion by centuries of oppression and tyranny. Many facts of this nature are known and recorded in the dark annals of those times; but how many more will be known never!

Thus, in the year 1588, during the worst part of Elizabeth's reign, "John O'Malloy, Cornelius Dogherty, and Walfried Ferral, of the order of St. Francis, fell finally victims to the malice of the heretics. They had spent eight years in administering the consolations of religion throughout the mountainous districts of Leinster. Many families of Carlow, Wicklow, and Wexford, had been compelled to take a refuge in the mountains from the fury of the English troops. The good Franciscans shared in all their perils, travelling about from place to place, by night; they visited the sick, consoled the dying, and offered up the sacred mysteries for all. Oftentimes the hard rock was their only bed; but they willingly embraced nakedness, and hunger, and cold, to console their afflicted brethren." - (Moran's Archbishops of Dublin.)

In these few words, we have a picture of the mountain monastery. During those eight years, how many Irish were consoled and comforted by those few laborers, who, driven from their holy home, had chosen to live in the wilderness, and practise their rule among the wandering people of three large counties, receiving in return the substance, the love, and loving secrecy of their flock! We have only to figure to ourselves this scene, or similar, repeated in every corner of the land, and we may then easily understand how the Irish people were brought to the unanimous resolve of standing by each other, and how, from the state of complete division which formerly prevailed, the elements of a compact, solid, and indestructible body, began to form.

We attribute this "birth of a nation" to Henry VIII., because the change which he tried to introduce into the religion of the island constituted the occasion and origin of it; and, although his reign never witnessed that perfect union of the people which came later on, nevertheless, it is true that then it surely began, and its origin was the attempt to establish his spiritual supremacy in Ireland.

This feeling of union and strength in love went on growing, and showed itself more and more, wring the two centuries which followed, when so many scenes similar to the one described were enacted in the remotest parts of the island. God, in his mercy, provided it with many high mountains, difficult of access, whose paths were known only to the natives. In these fastnesses, the holy men, who had been driven from their dwellings and their churches, could rest in peace and attend to the duties of their office. They could even recruit their shattered forces, admit novices, and train them up; and thus their rule continued to be observed, and their existence as a body protracted, long after their enemies imagined that they had perished utterly. As soon as quiet was restored, when persecution abated, and breathing- time was given them, so that they could show themselves, with some safety, more openly, they visited their old abodes, often found some portions of the ruins which admitted of repair, and dwelt again in security where their predecessors had dwelt for centuries.

The peasant's hut would also often afford them shelter; some solitary farm-house on the borders of a lake, or near a deep morass, took the name of their monastery; some cranogue in the lake, or dry spot in the thick of the morass, which they could reach by paths known to themselves only, was their asylum in times of extraordinary danger. In ordinary times, the farm-house, to which they had given the name of their lost monastery, was their convent. It was thus the brothers O'Cleary, and their companions, lived for years, editing the work of the "Four Masters," until, at length, they succeeded in publishing their extraordinary "Annals." The manuscripts which, in spite of the raging persecution, and the "penal laws," they traversed the whole island to collect, were preserved, with a reverend care, in a poor Irish hut. Literary treasures which have since unfortunately perished, but which they saved for a time from the reach of the enemy, and which they perpetuated by having them printed, filled the poor presses and the old furniture of their asylum, and, owing purely to the friendly help of those who had given them shelter, they were enabled to enrich the world with their marvellous compilation.

From the mountain and the hut, on the river-side, the monks were sometimes allowed to move to their former dwellings, at the risk, nevertheless, of their liberty and lives. What their ancestors had done during the Scandinavian invasions, when the monasteries were so often destroyed and rebuilt, that did the monks of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries likewise in many parts of the island.

Thus, Father Mooney, a Franciscan, relates that his monastery - that of Multifarnham - having been totally destroyed by Sir Francis Shean, and many monks having been killed, he, with a few others, after long and extraordinary adventures, came back to the spot, then abandoned by the enemy, and "before the feast of the Nativity of our Lord, we built up a little house on the site of the monastery, and there we dwelt who were left after the flight . . . . . Afterward, Father Nehemias Gregan, the father guardian, began to build a church, and to repair the monastery, and for this purpose caused much wood to be cut in the territory of Deabhna McLochlain; and when they had roofed a chapel and some other buildings, there came the soldiers of another Sir Francis Ringtia, and they burned down the monastery again, and carried off some of the brethren captive to Dublin."

This convent of Multifarnham was raised a third time; and, in fact, remained in possession of the Franciscans throughout the persecution, so that to this day the old church has been restored by them, and the modern house, which now forms their convent, is built on the site of the old monastery.

Such for a long time was the case with many other religious establishments; for the same Father Mooney, writing as late as 1624, says: "When Queen Elizabeth strove to make all Ireland fall away from the Catholic faith, and a law was passed proscribing all the members of the religious orders, and giving their monasteries and possessions to the treasury, while all the others took to flight, or at least quitted their houses, and, for safety's sake, lived privately and singly among their friends, and receiving no novices, the order of St. Francis alone ever remained, as it were, unshaken. For, though they were violently driven out of some convents to the great towns, and the convents were profanely turned into dwellings for seculars, and some of the fathers suffered violence, and even death; yet, in the country and other remote places, they ever remained in the convents, celebrating the divine office according to the custom of religious, their preachers preaching to the people and performing their other functions, training up novices and preserving the conventual buildings, holding it sinful to lay aside, or even hide, their religious habit, though for an hour, through any human fear. And, every three years, they held their regular provincial chapters in the woods of the neighborhood, and observed the rule as it is kept in provinces that are in peace."

Thus, when the Cromwellian persecution began, the religious orders were again flourishing in Ireland. They had obtained from the Stuarts some relaxation in the execution of the laws, and, as all at the time were fighting for Charles I. against the Parliamentarians, it was only natural that the authorities did not carry out the barbarous laws to their full extent in the island.

It is no matter of great surprise, therefore, that, in 1641, more than one hundred years after the decree of Henry VIII., the Franciscan order still possessed sixty-two flourishing houses in Ireland, each with a numerous community, besides ten convents of nuns of the order of St. Clare. The acts of the General Chapter of the Dominicans, held in Rome in 1656, referring to the same persecution of Cromwell, state that, when it began, there were forty-three convents of the order, containing about six hundred inmates, of whom only one-fourth survived the calamity. The Jesuits were eighty in number, in 1641, of whom only seventeen remained when the storm had passed away. From a petition presented to the Sacred Congregation, in 1654, we learn that all the Capuchins had been banished, except a few who remained on the island, where they lived as "shepherds," "herdsmen," or "tillers of the soil."

All the decrees of the Parliaments of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth had not succeeded, in the space of a century, in destroying monasticism; the Cromwellian war alone seemed to have done so, as it left the entire nation almost at the last gasp, on the verge of annihilation. Nevertheless, a few years saw the orders again revive and prepare to start their holy work anew. Henry VIII. then, and his vicar, Cromwell, deceived themselves in thinking that they had put an end to monasticism in the land which had been the cradle of so many families of religious. They succeeded only in intensifying the determination of Irishmen not to allow their nationality to be absorbed in that of England. If any thing was calculated to nourish and keep alive that sentiment in their hearts, it was their daily communing with the holy men who shared their distress, their mountain-retreats, their poverty in the bogs, their wretchedness in the woods and glens. If monasticism had created and nurtured the nation on its first becoming Christian, it gave to the people a second birth holier than the first, because consecrated by martyrdom. Henceforth, divided clans and antagonistic septs were to be unknown among them: only Catholic Irishmen were to remain ranked around the successors of "the saints" of old, all determined to be what they were, or die. But as laws, edicts, and measures of fanatic frenzy cannot destroy a nation, the new people was destined to survive for better and brighter days.

We have anticipated the course of events somewhat, in order to pass in review the chief facts connected with the designs of the English Government upon the religious orders. These few words will suffice to give the reader an idea of the new character which such events impressed upon the Irish nation. Every day saw it more compact; every day the resolve to fight to the death for God's cause, grew stronger; the old occasions of division grew less and less, and that unanimity, which suffering for a noble cause naturally gives rise to in the human heart, showed itself more and more. A nation, in truth, was being born in the throes of a wide-spread and long-continued calamity; but long ages were in store in times to come to reward it for the misfortunes of the past.

It is a remarkable thing that, when England, through fear of civil war, was compelled to grant Catholic emancipation in 1829, when Irish agitators succeeded in wrenching it from the enemy, and obtaining it, not only for themselves, but likewise for their English Catholic brethren, the British statesmen, who finally consented to such a tardy measure of justice, steadily refused, nevertheless, to extend the boon to the religious orders. These remained under the ban, and so they remain still. The "penal laws" were never repealed for them, and, even to this day, they are, according to law, strictly prohibited from "receiving novices" under all the barbarous penalties formerly enacted and never abrogated.

But the nation has constantly considered this exception as not to be taken into account. The religious orders now existing are under the protection of the people, and England has never dared to use even a threat against the open violation of these "laws." Dr. Madden, in his interesting work on "Penal Laws," gives prominence to this fact by warmly taking up the old theme of thorough-going Irish Catholicity, by asserting, with force, that "religious orders are necessary to the Church," and that to deny their right to exist, even though it be only on paper in the statute-book, is none the less an outrage against so thoroughly Catholic a nation as the Irish.

The only fact which appears to clash with our reflections is the one well ascertained and mentioned by us, that some native Irish lords occupied certain monasteries and took their share in the sacrilegious plunder. But a few chieftains cannot be said to constitute the nation, and doubtless many of those who yielded to the temptation, listened later to the reproving voice of their conscience, as in the following case, given by Miles O'Reilly, in his "Irish Martyrs:"

"Gelasius O'Cullenan, born of a noble family in Connaught . . . joined the Cistercian order. Having competed his studies in Paris, the monastery of Boyle was destined as the field of his labors. On his arrival in Ireland, he found that the monastery, with its property, had been seized on by one of the neighboring gentry, who was sheltered in his usurpation by the edict of Elizabeth. The abbot . . . went boldly to the usurping nobleman, admonishing him of the guilt he had incurred; and the malediction of Heaven, which he would assuredly draw down upon his family. Moved by his exhortations, the nobleman restored to him the full possession of the monastery and lands; and, some time after, contemplating the holy life of its inmates, . . . he, too, renounced the world and joined the religious institute."

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