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Page 11
I do not recall these facts in order to show that Elizabethan policy was
a riot of blackguardism. That is obvious, and it is irrelevant. I
mention them in order to show that the blackguardism under review was an
unrelieved failure. At one time, indeed, it seemed to have succeeded.
"Ireland, brayed as in a mortar, to use Sir John Davies' phrase," writes
M. Paul-Dubois, "at last submitted. In the last years of the century
half the population had perished. Elizabeth reigned over corpses and
ashes. _Hibernia Pacata_--Ireland is 'pacified.'"
* * * * *
The blunder discloses itself at a glance. Only half the population had
perished; there were still alive, according to the most probable
estimate, quite two hundred thousand Irishmen. The next generation helps
to illustrate not only the indestructibility of Ireland, but her all but
miraculous power of recuperation. So abundant are the resources of his
own vitality that, as Dr Moritz Bonn declares, an Irish peasant can live
where a continental goat would starve. And not having read Malthus--Mr
Malthus at that time being even less readable than since--the Irish
remnant proceeded to develop anew into a nation. In forty years it was
marching behind that _beau chevalier_ Owen Roe O'Neill to battle and
victory. O'Neill, a general famous through Europe, the one man who might
have measured equal swords with Cromwell, was removed by poison, and
then came the massacres. In eleven years, Sir William Petty assures us,
616,000 out of a total population of 1,466,000 perished by the sword or
by starvation. For the remainder the policy of root and branch
extermination was abandoned in favour of a policy of State-aided
migration and emigration. As an alternative to hell the Irish were
deported to Connaught or the Barbadoes. Henceforth there were to be
three provinces of loyal English, and one of rebelly Irish. This again
was not a radiant success. The transformation of the Cromwellian settler
has been indicated; if you were to search for him to-day you would
probably find him President of the local branch of the United Irish
League. The story repeats itself period after period. The Penal Laws did
not protestantise Ireland. The eighteenth century may be said to mark
the lowest ebb of national life, but the tide was to turn. After Aughrim
and the Boyne, the new device of England was to sacrifice everything to
the "garrison." "Protestant Ireland," as Grattan put it, "knelt to
England on the necks of her countrymen." In one aspect the garrison were
tyrants; in another they were slaves. They were at once oppressors and
oppressed. There was a sort of "deal" between them and the English
Government by which the public welfare was to be sacrificed to the
English Government, the Irish Catholics to the "garrison." A vile
programme, but subtle and adroit, it bore its unnatural fruit of
legislation, passed by the Westminster Parliament and the Dublin
Garrison Parliament alike, for the destruction of every manufacturing
and commercial interest in Ireland that was thought to conflict with a
similar interest in England. But another debacle has to be chronicled.
Out of the very baseness of this regime a new patriotism was begotten.
The garrison, awakening abruptly to the fact that it had no country,
determined to invent one; and there was brought to birth that modern
Ireland, passionate for freedom, which has occupied the stage ever
since. In our own time it has knit, as a fractured limb knits, into one
tissue with the tradition of the Gaelic peasantry. Hanging and burning,
torture and oppression, poison and Penal Laws, bribes and blackguardism
so far from exterminating the Irish people actually hammered them into a
nation, one and indestructible, proud of its past and confident of its
future.
Take instances still more recent and particular--the struggle for
religious freedom or the struggle for the land. Catholic emancipation is
a leading case: obstinacy against obstinacy, the No! of England against
the Yes! of Ireland, and the former sprawling in the ditch at the end of
the tussle. "The Law," ran the dictum of an eighteenth-century Lord
Chancellor, "does not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish
Roman Catholic." At this moment a Catholic holds the seals and purse of
the Chancellorship. Never did ministers swallow their own stubborn words
more incontinently than did Peel and Wellington. So late as 1828 Peel
was loudly declaring that the continuance of these bars, which excluded
the Catholics from the acquisition of political power, was necessary for
the maintenance of the Constitution and the safety of the Church, and
Wellington was echoing his words. A year later, utterly defeated by
O'Connell, Peel was introducing the Catholic Relief Bill in the Commons.
Wellington had it for his task to induce, or rather frighten the king to
assent. Ireland not only emancipated the Catholics, she went on to
emancipate the Dissenters, a service of freedom of conscience which is
too often forgotten.
The Tithe System was similarly declared to be part of the fabric of the
Constitution, to be upheld at the point of the bayonet. Scythe in hand,
the Irish peasant proclaimed that it must go. It went. Still more
fundamental was the existence of the Protestant Established Church. To
touch it was to lay hands on the Ark. Orange orators threatened civil
war; two hundred thousand Ulstermen were to shoulder their Minie
Rifles, and not merely slaughter the Catholics but even depose Queen
Victoria.
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