Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 8.djvu/134

 IRELAKD

102

IRELAND

their name to Burke, and Ijecame Irish chiefs; many others followed their example; even the ennobled Butlers and Fitzgeralds used the Irish language, dress, and customs, and were as turbulent as the worst of the native chiefs. To recall these colonists to their alle- giance the Statute of Kilkenny made it penal to use Irish customs, language, or law, forbade intermarriage with the mere Irish, or the conferring of benefices on the native-born. But the barriers of race could not be maintained, and the intermarrying of Irish with Anglo-Irish went on. The long war with France, fol- lowed by the Wars of the Roses, diverted the attention of England from Irish affairs; and the viceroy, feebly supported from England, was too weak to chastise these powerful lords or put penal laws in force. The hostility of native chiefs was bought off by the pay- ment of "black rents". The loyal colonists confined to a small district near Dublin, called "the Pale", shivered behind its encircling rampart ; and when the sixteenth century dawned, English power in Ireland had almost disappeared. Those within the Pale were impoverished by grasping officials and by the payment of "black rents". Outside the Pale the country was held by sixty chiefs of Irish descent and thirty of Eng- lish descent, each making peace or war as he pleased. Lawlessness and irreligion were everywhere. The clergy of Irish quarrelled with those of English descent ; the religious houses were corrupt, their priors and abbots great landholders with seats in Parliament, and more attached to secular than to religious concerns; the great monastic schools had disappeared, the great- est of them all, Clonmacnoise, being in ruins; preach- ing was neglected except by the mendicant orders, and these were utterly unable to cope with the disorders which prevailed.

The Tudor Period. — Occupied with English and Continental affairs, Henry VIII, in the beginning of his reign, bestowed but little attention on Ireland, and not until he was a quarter of a century on the throne were Irish affairs taken seriously in hand. The king was then in middle age, no longer the defender of the Faith against Luther, but, like Luther, a rebel against Rome; no longer generous or attractive in character, but rather a cruel, capricious tyrant, whom it was dangerous to provoke and fatal to disobey. In Eng- land his hands were reddened with the best blood of the land; and in Ireland the fate of the Fitzgeralds, following the rebellion of Silken Thomas, struck Irish and Anglo-Irish alike with such terror that all has- tened to make peace. O'Neill, renouncing the in- heritance of his ancestors, became Earl of Tyrone; Burke became Earl of Clanrickard, O'Brien Earl of Thomond, Fitzpatrick Lord of Ossory; the Earl of Desmond and the other Anglo-Irish nobles were par- doned all their offences, and at a Parliament in Dublin (1541) Anglo-Irish and Irish attended. And Henry, who like his predecessors had been hitherto but Lord of Ireland (Dominus H ibernia;), was now unanimously given the higher title of king. This Parliament also passed the Act of Supremacy by which Henry was in- vested with spiritual jurisdiction, and, in sub.stitution for the pope, proclaimed head of the C'hurch. As the proctors of the clergy refused to agree to this measure, the irate monarch deprived them of the right of voting, and in revenge confiscated church lands and sup- pressed monasteries, in some cases shed the blood of their inmates, in the remaining cases sent them forth homelc.ssand poor. These severities, however, did not win the people from their faith. The apostate friar Browne, whom Henry made Archbisho)) of l)ul)lin, the apostate Sta|>los, Bishop of Mcatli, and Henry himself, ^taini'il with so many adulteries and murders, had but poor credentials as prcach<'rs of reform; what- ever time-serving chiefs might do, the clergy and people were unwilling to make Henry pope, or to sub- scribe lo the varying teiK'ts of his creed. His .succes- sor, an anient Protestant, tried hard to make Ireland

Protestant, but the sickly plant which he sowed was uprooted by the Catholic Mary, and at Elizabeth's accession all Ireland was Catholic.

Like her father Henry, the young queen was a cruel and capricious tyrant, and in her war with Shane O'Neill, the ablest of the Irish chiefs, she did not scruple to employ assassins. She was neither a sin- cere Protestant nor a willing persecutor of the Catho- hcs; and though she re-enacted the Act of Supremacy and passed the Act of Uniformity, making Protestant- ism the state creed, she refused to have these acts rigorously enforced. But when the pope and the Spanish king declared against her, and the Irish Cath- olics were found in alliance with both, she yielded to her ministers and concluded, with them, that a Catho- Uc was necessarily a disloyal subject. Henceforth toleration gave way to persecution. The tortures in- flicted on O'Hurley, Archbishop of Cashel,and O'Hely, Bishop of Mayo, the Spaniards murdered in cold blood at Smerwick, the desolation of Munster during Des- mond's reliellion, showed how cruel her rule could be. Far more formidable than the rebellion of Desmond, or even than that of Shane O'Neill, was the rebellion of Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone. No such able Irish chief had appeared since Brian Boru. Cool, cautious, vigilant, he laid his plans with care and knew how to wait patiently for results. Never impulsive, never boastful, wise in council and wary in speech, from his long residence in London in his youth he learned dis- simulation, and was as crafty as the craftiest English minister. Repeatedly he foiled the queen's diploma- tists in council as he did her generals in the field, and at the Yellow Ford (1598) gained the greatest victory ever won in Ireland over English arms. What he might have done had he been loyally supported it is hard to say. For nearly ten years he continued the war; he continued it after his Spanish allies had brought upon him the disaster of Kinsale; after his chief assistant, O'Donnell, had been struck down by an assassin's hand; after Carew had subdued Munster, and Mountjoy had turned Ulster into a desert; after the Irish chiefs had gone over to the enemy. And when he submitted it was only on condition of being guaranteed his titles and lands; and by that time Elizabeth, who hated him so much and so longed for his destruction, had breathed her last.

Under the Stuarts. — James I (160.3-25) was the first of the Stuart line, and from the son of Mary Stu- art the Irish Catholics expected much. They were doomed, however, to an early disappointment. The cities which rejoiced that "Jezabel was dead", and that now they could practise their religion openly, were warned by Mountjoy that James was a good Protestant and as such would have no toleration of popery. Salisbury, who had poisoned the mind of the queen against the Catholics, was equally successful with her successor, with the result that persecution continued. Proclamations were issued ordering the clergy to quit the kingdom; those who remained were hunted down; O'Devany, Bishop of Down, and others were done to death. 'The Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity were rigorously enforced. The Act of Oblivion, under which participants in the late rebellion were pardoned, was often forgotten or ignored. Eng- lish law, which for the first time was extentled to all Ireland, was used by corrupt officials to oppress rather than to protect the people. The Earl of Tyrone and the Earl of Tyrronnell (liory O'Doiuiell) were so spied Vipon and worried liy false charges cif disloyalty that they fled th<' country, believing that their lives were in danger; and to all their pleas for justice the king's response was to slander their characters and confiscate their lands. It is indeed true that Irish juries found the earls guilty of high treason, and an Irish Parlia- ment, representing all Ireland, attainted them. But these results were obtained by carefully packing the juries, and by the creation of small boroughs which sent