Chapter XVIII: On the Constitution of Ireland (1)

_Ancient state of Ireland._--The antiquities of Irish history, imperfectly recorded, and rendered more obscure by controversy, seem hardly to belong to our present subject. But the political order or state of society among that people at the period of Henry II.'s invasion must be distinctly apprehended and kept in mind, before we can pass a judgment upon, or even understand, the course of succeeding events, and the policy of the English government in relation to that island.

It can hardly be necessary to mention (the idle traditions of a derivation from Spain having long been exploded) that the Irish are descended from one of those Celtic tribes which occupied Gaul and Britain some centuries before the Christian era. Their language however is so far dissimilar from that spoken in Wales, though evidently of the same root, as to render it probable that the emigration, whether from this island or from Armorica, was in a remote age; while its close resemblance to that of the Scottish Highlanders, which hardly can be called another dialect, as unequivocally demonstrates a nearer affinity of the two nations. It seems to be generally believed, though the antiquaries are far from unanimous, that the Irish are the parent tribe, and planted their colony in Scotland since the commencement of our era.

About the end of the eighth century, some of those swarms of Scandinavian descent which were poured out in such unceasing and irresistible multitudes on France and Britain, began to settle on the coasts of Ireland. These colonists were known by the name of Ostmen, or men from the east, as in France they were called Normans from their northern origin. They occupied the sea-coast from Antrim easterly round to Limerick; and by them the principal cities of Ireland were built. They waged war for some time against the aboriginal Irish in the interior; but, though better acquainted with the arts of civilised life, their inferiority in numbers caused them to fail at length in this contention; and the practical invasions from their brethren in Norway becoming less frequent in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, they had fallen into a state of dependence on the native princes.

The island was divided into five provincial kingdoms, Leinster, Munster, Ulster, Connaught, and Meath; one of whose sovereigns was chosen king of Ireland in some general meeting, probably of the nobility or smaller chieftains, and of the prelates. But there seems to be no clear tradition as to the character of this national assembly, though some maintain it to have been triennially held. The monarch of the island had tributes from the inferior kings, and a certain supremacy, especially in the defence of the country against invasion; but the constitution was of a federal nature, and each was independent in ruling his people, or in making war on his neighbours. Below the kings were the chieftains of different septs or families, perhaps in one or two degrees of subordination, bearing a relation, which may be loosely called feudal, to each other, and to the Crown.[463]

These chieftainships, and perhaps even the kingdoms themselves, though not partible, followed a very different rule of succession than that of primogeniture. They were subject to the law of tanistry, of which the principle is defined to be, that the demesne lands and dignity of chieftainship descended to the eldest and most worthy of the same blood; these epithets not being used, we may suppose, synonymously, but in order to indicate that the preference given to seniority was to be controlled by a due regard to desert. No better mode, it is evident, of providing for a perpetual supply of those civil quarrels, in which the Irish are supposed to place so much of their enjoyment, could have been devised. Yet, as these grew sometimes a little too frequent, it was not unusual to elect a tanist, or reversionary successor, in the lifetime of the reigning chief, as has been the practice of more civilised nations. An infant was never allowed to hold the sceptre of an Irish kingdom, but was necessarily postponed to his uncle or other kinsman of mature age; as was the case also in England, even after the consolidation of the Anglo-Saxon monarchy.[464]

The land-owners, who did not belong to the noble class, bore the same name as their chieftain, and were presumed to be of the same lineage. But they held their estates by a very different and an extraordinary tenure, that of Irish gavel-kind. On the decease of a proprietor, instead of an equal partition among his children, as in the gavel-kind of English law, the chief of the sept, according to the generally received explanation, made, or was entitled to make, a fresh division of all the lands within his district; allotting to the heirs of the deceased a portion of the integral territory along with the other members of the tribe. It seems impossible to conceive that these partitions were renewed on every death of one of the sept. But they are asserted to have at least taken place so frequently as to produce a continual change of possession. The policy of this custom doubtless sprung from too jealous a solicitude as to the excessive inequality of wealth, and from the habit of looking on the tribe as one family of occupants, not wholly divested of its original right by the necessary allotment of lands to particular cultivators. It bore some degree of analogy to the institution of the year of Jubilee in the Mosaic code, and what may be thought more immediate, was almost exactly similar to the rule of succession which is laid down in the ancient laws of Wales.[465]

_Rude state of society._--In the territories of each sept, judges called Brehons, and taken out of certain families, sat with primeval simplicity upon turfen benches in some conspicuous situation, to determine controversies. Their usages are almost wholly unknown; for what have been published as fragments of the Brehon law seem open to great suspicion at least of being interpolated.[466] It is notorious that, according to the custom of many states in the infancy of civilisation, the Irish admitted the composition or fine for murder, instead of capital punishment; and this was divided, as in other countries, between the kindred of the slain and the judge.

In the twelfth century it is evident that the Irish nation had made far less progress in the road of improvement than any other of Europe in circumstance of climate and position so little unfavourable. They had no arts that deserve the name, nor any commerce, their best line of sea-coast being occupied by the Norwegians. They had no fortified towns, nor any houses or castles of stone; the first having been erected at Tuam a very few years before the invasion of Henry.[467] Their conversion to Christianity indeed, and the multitude of cathedral and conventual churches erected throughout the island, had been the cause, and probably the sole cause, of the rise of some cities, or villages with that name, such as Armagh, Cashel, and Trim. But neither the chiefs nor the people loved to be confined within their precincts, and chose rather to dwell in scattered cabins amidst the free solitude of bogs and mountains. As we might expect, their qualities were such as belong to man by his original nature, and which he displays in all parts of the globe where the state of society is inartificial: they were gay, generous, hospitable, ardent in attachment and hate, credulous of falsehood, prone to anger and violence, generally crafty and cruel. With these very general attributes of a barbarous people, the Irish character was distinguished by a peculiar vivacity of imagination, an enthusiasm and impetuosity of passion, and a more than ordinary bias towards a submissive and superstitious spirit in religion.

This spirit may justly be traced in a great measure to the virtues and piety of the early preachers of the gospel in that country. Their influence, though at this remote age, and with our imperfect knowledge, it may hardly be distinguishable amidst the licentiousness and ferocity of a rude people, was necessarily directed to counteract those vices, and cannot have failed to mitigate and compensate their evil. In the seventh and eighth centuries, while a total ignorance seemed to overspread the face of Europe, the monasteries and schools of Ireland preserved, in the best manner they could, such learning as had survived the revolutions of the Roman world. But the learning of monasteries had never much efficacy in dispelling the ignorance of the laity; and indeed, even in them, it had decayed long before the twelfth century. The clergy were respected and numerous, the bishops alone amounting at one time to no less than 300;[468] and it has been maintained by our most learned writers, that they were wholly independent of the see of Rome till, a little before the English invasion, one of their primates thought fit to solicit the pall from thence on his consecration, according to the discipline long practised in other western churches.

It will be readily perceived that the government of Ireland must have been almost entirely aristocratical, and not very unlike that of the feudal confederacies in France during the ninth and tenth centuries. It was perhaps still more oppressive. The ancient condition of the common people of Ireland, says Sir James Ware, was very little different from slavery.[469] Unless we believe this condition to have been greatly deteriorated under the rule of their native chieftains after the English settlement, for which there seems no good reason, we must give little credit to the fanciful pictures of prosperity and happiness in that period of aboriginal independence, which the Irish, in their discontent with later times, have been apt to draw. They had, no doubt, like all other nations, good and wise princes, as well as tyrants and usurpers. But we find by their annals that, out of two hundred ancient kings, of whom some brief memorials are recorded, not more than thirty came to a natural death;[470] while, for the later period, the oppression of the Irish chieftains, and of those degenerate English who trod in their steps, and emulated the vices they should have restrained, is the one constant theme of history. Their exactions kept the peasants in hopeless poverty, their tyranny in perpetual fear. The chief claimed a right of taking from his tenants provisions for his own use at discretion, or of sojourning in their houses. This was called coshery, and is somewhat analogous to the royal prerogative of purveyance. A still more terrible oppression was the quartering of the lords' soldiers on the people, sometimes mitigated by a composition, called by the Irish bonaght.[471] For the perpetual warfare of these petty chieftains had given rise to the employment of mercenary troops, partly natives, partly from Scotland, known by the uncouth names of Kerns and Gallowglasses, who proved the scourge of Ireland down to its final subjugation by Elizabeth.

This unusually backward condition of society furnished but an inauspicious presage for the future. Yet we may be led by the analogy of other countries to think it probable that, if Ireland had not tempted the cupidity of her neighbours, there would have arisen in the course of time some Egbert or Harold Harfager to consolidate the provincial kingdoms into one hereditary monarchy; which, by the adoption of better laws, the increase of commerce, and a frequent intercourse with the chief courts of Europe, might have taken as respectable a station as that of Scotland in the commonwealth of Christendom. If the two islands had afterwards become incorporated through intermarriage of their sovereigns, as would very likely have taken place, it might have been on such conditions of equality as Ireland, till lately, has never known; and certainly without that long tragedy of crime and misfortune which her annals unfold.

_Invasion of Henry II._--The reduction of Ireland, at least in name, under the dominion of Henry II. was not achieved by his own efforts. He had little share in it beyond receiving the homage of Irish princes, and granting charters to his English nobility. Strongbow, Lacy, Fitz-Stephen, were the real conquerors, through whom alone any portion of Irish territory was gained by arms or treaty; and, as they began the enterprise without the king, they carried it on also for themselves, deeming their swords a better security than his charters. This ought to be kept in mind, as revealing the secret of the English government over Ireland, and furnishing a justification for what has the appearance of a negligent abandonment of its authority. The few barons, and other adventurers, who, by dint of forces hired by themselves, and, in some instances, by conventions with the Irish, settled their armed colonies in the island, thought they had done much for Henry II. in causing his name to be acknowledged, his administration to be established in Dublin, and in holding their lands by his grant. They claimed in their turn, according to the practice of all nations and the principles of equity, that those who had borne the heat of the battle, should enjoy the spoil without molestation. Hence, the enormous grants of Henry and his successors, though so often censured for impolicy, were probably what they could scarce avoid; and, though not perhaps absolutely stipulated as the price of titular sovereignty, were something very like it.[472] But what is to be censured, and what at all hazards they were bound to refuse, was the violation of their faith to the Irish princes, in sharing among these insatiable barons their ancient territories; which, setting aside the wrong of the first invasion, were protected by their homage and submission, and sometimes by positive conventions. The whole island, in fact, with the exception of the county of Dublin and the maritime towns, was divided, before the end of the thirteenth century, and most of it in the twelfth, among ten English families: Earl Strongbow, who had some colour of hereditary title, according to our notions of law, by his marriage with the daughter of Dermot, king of Leinster, obtaining a grant of that province; Lacy acquiring Meath, which was not reckoned a part of Leinster, in the same manner; the whole of Ulster being given to De Courcy; the whole of Connaught to De Burgh; and the rest to six others. These, it must be understood, they were to hold in a sort of feudal suzerainty, parcelling them among their tenants of English race, and expelling the natives, or driving them into the worst parts of the country by an incessant warfare.

_Forms of English constitution established._--The Irish chieftains, though compelled to show some exterior signs of submission to Henry, never thought of renouncing their own authority or the customs of their forefathers; nor did he pretend to interfere with the government of their septs, content with their promise of homage and tribute, neither of which were afterwards paid. But in those parts of Ireland which he reckoned his own, it was his aim to establish the English laws, to render the lesser island, as it were, a counterpart in all its civil constitution, and mirror of the greater. The colony from England was already not inconsiderable, and likely to increase; the Ostmen, who inhabited the maritime towns, came very willingly, as all settlers of Teutonic origin have done, into the English customs and language; and upon this basis, leaving the accession of the aboriginal people to future contingencies, he raised the edifice of the Irish constitution. He gave charters of privilege to the chief towns, began a division into counties, appointed sheriffs and judges of assize to administer justice, erected supreme courts at Dublin, and perhaps assembled parliaments.[473] His successors pursued the same course of policy; the great charter of liberties, as soon as granted by John at Runnymede, was sent over to Ireland; and the whole common law, with all its forms of process, and every privilege it was deemed to convey, became the birthright of the Anglo-Irish colonists.[474]

These had now spread over a considerable part of the island. Twelve counties appear to have been established by John, comprehending most of Leinster and Munster; while the two ambitious families of Courcy and De Burgh encroached more and more on the natives in the other provinces.[475] But the same necessity, which gratitude for the services, or sense of the power of the great families had engendered, for rewarding them by excessive grants of territory, led to other concessions that rendered them almost independent of the monarchy.[476] The franchise of a county palatine gave a right of exclusive civil and criminal jurisdiction; so that the king's writ should not run, nor his judges come within it, though judgment in its courts might be reversed by writ of error in the king's bench. The lord might enfeoff tenants to hold by knight's service of himself; he had almost all regalian rights; the lands of those attainted for treason escheated to him; he acted in everything rather as one of the great feudatories of France or Germany than a subject of the English Crown. Such had been Chester, and only Chester, in England; but in Ireland this dangerous independence was permitted to Strongbow in Leinster, to Lacy in Meath, and at a later time to the Butlers and Geraldines in parts of Munster. Strongbow's vast inheritance soon fell to five sisters, who took to their shares, with the same palatine rights, the counties of Carlow, Wexford, Kilkenny, Kildare, and the district of Leix, since called the Queen's County.[477] In all these palatinates, forming by far the greater portion of the English territories, the king's process had its course only within the lands belonging to the church.[478] The English aristocracy of Ireland, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, bears a much closer analogy to that of France in rather an earlier period than anything which the history of this island can show.

Pressed by the inroads of these barons, and despoiled frequently of lands secured to them by grant or treaty, the native chiefs had recourse to the throne for protection, and would in all likelihood have submitted without repining to a sovereign who could have afforded it.[479] But John and Henry III., in whose reigns the independence of the aristocracy was almost complete, though insisting by writs and proclamations on a due observance of the laws, could do little more for their new subjects, who found a better chance of redress in standing on their own defence. The powerful septs of the north enjoyed their liberty. But those of Munster and Leinster, intermixed with the English, and encroached upon from every side, were the victims of constant injustice; and abandoning the open country for bog and mountain pasture, grew more poor and barbarous in the midst of the general advance of Europe. Many remained under the yoke of English lords, and in a worse state than that of villenage, because still less protected by the tribunals of justice. The Irish had originally stipulated with Henry II. for the use of their own laws.[480] They were consequently held beyond the pale of English justice, and regarded as aliens at the best, sometimes as enemies, in our courts. Thus, as by the Brehon customs murder was only punished by a fine, it was not held felony to kill one of Irish race, unless he had conformed to the English law.[481] Five septs, to which the royal families of Ireland belonged, the names of O'Neal, O'Connor, O'Brien, O'Malachlin, and MacMurrough, had the special immunity of being within the protection of our law, and it was felony to kill one of them. I do not know by what means they obtained this privilege; for some of these were certainly as far from the king's obedience as any in Ireland.[482] But besides these a vast number of charters of denization were granted to particular persons of Irish descent from the reign of Henry II. downwards, which gave them and their posterity the full birthrights of English subjects; nor does there seem to have been any difficulty in procuring these.[483] It cannot be said, therefore, that the English government, or those who represented it in Dublin, displayed any reluctance to emancipate the Irish from thraldom. Whatever obstruction might be interposed to this was from that assembly whose concurrence was necessary to every general measure, the Anglo-Irish parliament. Thus, in 1278, we find the first instance of an application from the community of Ireland, as it is termed, but probably from some small number of septs dwelling among the colony, that they might be admitted to live by the English law, and offering 8000 marks for this favour. The letter of Edward I. to the justiciary of Ireland on this is sufficiently characteristic both of his wisdom and his rapaciousness. He is satisfied of the expediency of granting the request, provided it can be done with the general consent of the prelates and nobles of Ireland; and directs the justiciary, if he can obtain that concurrence, to agree with the petitioners for the highest fine he can obtain, and for a body of good and stout soldiers.[484] But this necessary consent of the aristocracy was withheld. Excuses were made to evade the king's desire. It was wholly incompatible with their systematic encroachments on their Irish neighbours to give them the safeguard of the king's writ for their possessions. The Irish renewed their supplication more than once, both to Edward I. and Edward III.; they found the same readiness in the English court; they sunk at home through the same unconquerable oligarchy.[485] It is not to be imagined that the entire Irishry partook in this desire of renouncing their ancient customs. Besides the prejudices of nationality, there was a strong inducement to preserve the Brehon laws of tanistry, which suited better a warlike tribe than the hereditary succession of England. But it was the unequivocal duty of the legislature to avail itself of every token of voluntary submission; which, though beginning only with the subject septs of Leinster, would gradually incorporate the whole nation in a common bond of co-equal privileges with their conquerors.

_Degeneracy of English settlers._--Meanwhile, these conquerors were themselves brought under a moral captivity of the most disgraceful nature; and, not as the rough soldier of Rome is said to have been subdued by the art and learning of Greece, the Anglo-Norman barons, that had wrested Ireland from the native possessors, fell into their barbarous usages, and emulated the vices of the vanquished. This degeneracy of the English settlers began very soon, and continued to increase for several ages. They intermarried with the Irish; then connected themselves with them by the national custom of fostering, which formed an artificial relationship of the strictest nature;[486] they spoke the Irish language; they affected the Irish dress and manner of wearing the hair;[487] they even adopted, in some instances, Irish surnames; they harassed their tenants with every Irish exaction and tyranny; they administered Irish law, if any at all; they became chieftains rather than peers; and neither regarded the king's summons to his parliaments, nor paid any obedience to his judges.[488] Thus the great family of De Burgh or Burke, in Connaught, fell off almost entirely from subjection; nor was that of the Earls of Desmond, a younger branch of the house of Geraldine or Fitzgerald, much less independent of the Crown; though by the title it enjoyed, and the palatine franchises granted to it by Edward III. over the counties of Limerick and Kerry, it seemed to keep up more show of English allegiance.

The regular constitution of Ireland was, as I have said, as nearly as possible a counterpart of that established in this country. The administration was vested in an English justiciary or lord deputy, assisted by a council of judges and principal officers, mixed with some prelates and barons, but subordinate to that of England, wherein sat the immediate advisers of the sovereign. The courts of chancery, king's bench, common pleas, and exchequer, were the same in both countries; but writs of error lay from judgments given in the second of these to the same court in England. For all momentous purposes, as to grant a subsidy, or enact a statute, it was as necessary to summon a parliament in the one island as in the other. An Irish parliament originally, like an English one, was but a more numerous council, to which the more distant as well as the neighbouring barons were summoned, whose consent, though dispensed with in ordinary acts of state, was both the pledge and the condition of their obedience to legislative provisions. In 1295, the sheriff of each county and liberty is directed to return two knights to a parliament held by Wogan, an active and able deputy.[489] The date of the admission of burgesses cannot be fixed with precision; but it was probably not earlier than the reign of Edward III. They appear in 1341; and the Earl of Desmond summoned many deputies from corporations to his rebel convention held at Kilkenny in the next year.[490] The Commons are mentioned as an essential part of parliament in an ordinance of 1359; before which time, in the opinion of Lord Coke, "the conventions in Ireland were not so much parliaments as assemblies of great men."[491] This, as appears, is not strictly correct; but in substance they were perhaps little else long afterwards.

The earliest statutes on record are of the year 1310; and from that year they are lost till 1429, though we know many parliaments to have been held in the meantime, and are acquainted by other means with their provisions. Those of 1310 bear witness to the degeneracy of the English lords, and to the laudable zeal of a feeble government for the reformation of their abuses. They begin with an act to restrain great lords from taking of prises, lodging, and sojourning with the people of the country against their will. "It is agreed and assented," the act proceeds, "that no such prises shall be henceforth made without ready payment and agreement, and that none shall harbour or sojourn at the house of any other by such malice against the consent of him which is owner of the house to destroy his goods; and, if any shall do the same, such prises, and such manner of destruction, shall be holden for open robbery, and the king shall have the suit thereof, if others will not, nor dare not sue. It is agreed also, that none shall keep idle people nor kearn (foot-soldiers) in time of peace to live upon the poor of the country, but that those which will have them, shall keep them at their own charges, so that their free tenants, nor farmers, nor other tenants, be not charged with them." The statute proceeds to restrain great lords or others, except such as have royal franchises, from giving protections, which they used to compel the people to purchase; and directs that there shall be commissions of assize and gaol delivery through all the counties of Ireland.[492]

These regulations exhibit a picture of Irish miseries. The barbarous practices of coshering and bonaght, the latter of which was generally known in later times by the name of coyne and livery, had been borrowed from those native chieftains whom our modern Hibernians sometimes hold forth as the paternal benefactors of their country.[493] It was the crime of the Geraldines and the De Courcys to have retrograded from the comparative humanity and justice of England, not to have deprived the people of freedom and happiness they had never known. These degenerate English, an epithet by which they are always distinguished, paid no regard to the statutes of a parliament which they had disdained to attend, and which could not render itself feared. We find many similar laws in the fifteenth century, after the interval which I have noticed in the printed records. And, in the intervening period, a parliament held by Lionel Duke of Clarence, second son of Edward III., at Kilkenny, in 1367, the most numerous assembly that had ever met in Ireland, was prevailed upon to pass a very severe statute against the insubordinate and degenerate colonists. It recites that the English of the realm of Ireland were become mere Irish in their language, names, apparel, and manner of living, that they had rejected the English laws, and allied themselves by intermarriage with the Irish. It prohibits, under the penalties of high treason, or at least of forfeiture of lands, all these approximations to the native inhabitants, as well as the connections of fostering and gossipred. The English are restrained from permitting the Irish to grace their lands, from presenting them to benefices, or receiving them into religious houses, and from entertaining their bards. On the other hand, they are forbidden to make war upon their Irish neighbours without the authority of the state. And, to enforce better these provisions, the king's sheriffs are empowered to enter all franchises for the apprehension of felons or traitors.[494]

_Disorderly state of the island._--This statute, like all others passed in Ireland, so far from pretending to bind the Irish, regarded them not only as out of the king's allegiance, but as perpetually hostile to his government. They were generally denominated the Irish enemy. This doubtless was not according to the policy of Henry II., nor of the English government a considerable time after his reign. Nor can it be said to be the fact, though from some confusion of times the assertion is often made, that the island was not subject, in a general sense, to that prince and to the three next kings of England. The English were settled in every province; an imperfect division of counties and administration of justice subsisted; and even the Irish chieftains, though ruling their septs by the Brehon law, do not appear in that period to have refused the acknowledgment of the king's sovereignty. But compelled to defend their lands against perpetual aggression, they justly renounced all allegiance to a government which could not redeem the original wrong of its usurpation by the benefits of protection. They became gradually stronger; they regained part of their lost territories; and after the era of 1315, when Edward Bruce invaded the kingdom with a Scots army, and, though ultimately defeated, threw the government into a disorder from which it never recovered, their progress was so rapid, that in the space of thirty or forty years, the northern provinces, and even part of the southern, were entirely lost to the Crown of England.[495]

It is unnecessary in so brief a sketch to follow the unprofitable annals of Ireland in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Amidst the usual variations of war, the English interests were continually losing ground. Once only Richard II. appeared with a very powerful army, and the princes of Ireland crowded round his throne to offer homage.[496] But, upon his leaving the kingdom, they returned of course to their former independence and hostility. The long civil wars of England in the next century consummated the ruin of its power over the sister island. The Irish possessed all Ulster, and shared Connaught with the degenerate Burkes. The sept of O'Brien held their own district of Thomond, now the county of Clare. A considerable part of Leinster was occupied by other independent tribes; while, in the south, the Earls of Desmond, lords either by property or territorial jurisdiction of the counties of Kerry and Limerick, and in some measure of those of Cork and Waterford, united the turbulence of English barons with the savage manners of Irish chieftains; ready to assume either character as best suited their rapacity and ambition; reckless of the king's laws or his commands, but not venturing, nor upon the whole, probably wishing, to cast off the name of his subjects. The elder branch of their house, the Earls of Kildare, and another illustrious family, the Butlers, Earls of Ormond, were apparently more steady in their obedience to the Crown; yet, in the great franchises of the latter, comprising the counties of Kilkenny and Tipperary, the king's writ had no course; nor did he exercise any civil or military authority but by the permission of this mighty peer.[497]

_English Law confined to the pale._--Thus, in the reign of Henry VII., when the English authority over Ireland had reached its lowest point, it was, with the exception of a very few sea-ports, to all intents confined to the four counties of the English pale, a name not older perhaps than the preceding century; those of Dublin, Louth, Kildare, and Meath, the latter of which at that time included West Meath. But even in these there were extensive marches, or frontier districts, the inhabitants of which were hardly distinguishable from the Irish, and paid them a tribute, called black-rent; so that the real supremacy of the English laws was not probably established beyond the two first of these counties, from Dublin to Dundalk on the coast, and for about thirty miles inland.[498] From this time, however, we are to date its gradual recovery. The more steady councils and firmer prerogative of the Tudor kings left little chance of escape from their authority either for rebellious peers of English race, or the barbarous chieftains of Ireland.

I must pause at this place to observe that we shall hardly find in the foregoing sketch of Irish history, during the period of the Plantagenet dynasty (nor am I conscious of having concealed any thing essential), that systematic oppression and misrule which is every day imputed to the English nation and its government. The policy of our kings appears to have generally been wise and beneficent; but it is duly to be remembered that those very limitations of their prerogative which constitute liberty, must occasionally obstruct the execution of the best purposes; and that the co-ordinate powers of parliament, so justly our boast, may readily become the screen of private tyranny and inveterate abuse. This incapacity of doing good as well as harm has produced, comparatively speaking, little mischief in Great Britain; where the aristocratical element of the constitution is neither so predominant, nor so much in opposition to the general interest, as it may be deemed to have been in Ireland. But it is manifestly absurd to charge the Edwards and Henrys, or those to whom their authority was delegated at Dublin, with the crimes they vainly endeavoured to chastise, much more to erect either the wild barbarians of the north, the O'Neals and O'Connors, or the degenerate houses of Burke and Fitzgerald, into patriot assertors of their country's welfare. The laws and liberties of England were the best inheritance to which Ireland could attain; the sovereignty of the English crown her only shield against native or foreign tyranny. It was her calamity that these advantages were long withheld; but the blame can never fall upon the government of this island.

In the contest between the houses of York and Lancaster, most of the English colony in Ireland had attached themselves to the fortunes of the White Rose; they even espoused the two pretenders who put in jeopardy the crown of Henry VII.; and became, of course, obnoxious to his jealousy, though he was politic enough to forgive in appearance their disaffection. But, as Ireland had for a considerable time rather served the purposes of rebellious invaders than of the English monarchy, it was necessary to make her subjection, at least so far as the settlers of the pale were concerned, more than a word. This produced the famous statute of Drogheda in 1495, known by the name of Poyning's law, from the lord deputy through whose vigour and prudence it was enacted. It contains a variety of provisions to restrain the lawlessness of the Anglo-Irish within the pale (for to no others could it immediately extend), and to confirm the royal sovereignty. All private hostilities without the deputy's licence were declared illegal; but to excite the Irish to war was made high treason. Murders were to be prosecuted according to law, and not in the manner of the natives, by pillaging, or exacting a fine from the sept of the slayer. The citizens or freemen of towns were prohibited from receiving wages or becoming retainers of lords and gentlemen; and, to prevent the ascendency of the latter class, none who had not served apprenticeships were to be admitted as aldermen or freemen of corporations. The requisitions of coyne and livery, which had subsisted in spite of the statutes of Kilkenny, were again forbidden, and those statutes were renewed and confirmed. The principal officers of state and the judges were to hold their patents during pleasure, "because of the great inconveniences that had followed from their being for term of life, to the king's grievous displeasure." A still more important provision, in its permanent consequence, was made, by enacting that all statutes lately made in England be deemed good and effectual in Ireland. It has been remarked that the same had been done by an Irish act of Edward IV. Some question might also be made, whether the word "lately" was not intended to limit this acceptation of English law. But in effect this enactment has made an epoch in Irish jurisprudence; all statutes made in England prior to the eighteenth year of Henry VII. being held equally valid in Ireland, while none of later date have any operation, unless specially adopted by its parliament; so that the law of the two countries has begun to diverge from that time, and after three centuries has been in several respects differently modified.

But even these articles of Poyning's law are less momentous than one by which it is peculiarly known. It is enacted that no parliament shall in future be holden in Ireland, till the king's lieutenant shall certify to the king, under the great seal, the causes and considerations, and all such acts as it seems to them ought to be passed thereon, and such be affirmed by the king and his council, and his licence to hold a parliament be obtained. Any parliament holden contrary to this form and provision should be deemed void. Thus, by securing the initiative power to the English council, a bridle was placed in the mouths of every Irish parliament. It is probable also that it was designed as a check on the lord-deputies, sometimes powerful Irish nobles, whom it was dangerous not to employ, but still more dangerous to trust. Whatever might be its motives, it proved in course of time the great means of preserving the subordination of an island, which, from the similarity of constitution, and the high spirit of its inhabitants, was constantly panting for an independence which her more powerful neighbour neither desired nor dared to concede.[499]

_Royal authority revives under Henry VIII._--No subjects of the Crown in Ireland enjoyed such influence at this time as the Earls of Kildare; whose possessions lying chiefly within the pale, they did not affect an ostensible independence, but generally kept in their hands the chief authority of government, though it was the policy of the English court, in its state of weakness, to balance them in some measure by the rival family of Butler. But the self-confidence with which this exaltation inspired the chief of the former house laid him open to the vengeance of Henry VIII.; he affected, while lord-deputy, to be surrounded by Irish lords, to assume their wild manners, and to intermarry his daughters with their race. The counsellors of English birth or origin dreaded this suspicious approximation to their hereditary enemies; and Kildare, on their complaint, was compelled to obey his sovereign's order by repairing to London. He was committed to the Tower; on a premature report that he had suffered death, his son, a young man to whom he had delegated the administration, took up arms under the rash impulse of resentment; the primate was murdered by his wild followers, but the citizens of Dublin and the reinforcements sent from England suppressed this hasty rebellion, and its leader was sent a prisoner to London. Five of his uncles, some of them not concerned in the treason, perished with him on the scaffold; his father had been more fortunate in a natural death; one sole surviving child of twelve years old, who escaped to Flanders, became afterwards the stock from which the great family of the Geraldines was restored.[500]

The chieftains of Ireland were justly attentive to the stern and systematic despotism which began to characterise the English government, displayed, as it thus was, in the destruction of an ancient and loyal house. But their intimidation produced contrary effects; they became more ready to profess allegiance and to put on the exterior badges of submission; but more jealous of the Crown in their hearts, more resolute to preserve their independence, and to withstand any change of laws. Thus, in the latter years of Henry, after the northern Irish had been beaten by an able deputy, Lord Leonard Grey, and the lordship of Ireland, the title hitherto borne by the successors of Henry II., had been raised by act of parliament to the dignity of a kingdom,[501] the native chiefs came in and submitted; the Earl of Desmond, almost as independent as any of the natives, attended parliament, from which his ancestors had for some ages claimed a dispensation; several peerages were conferred, some of them on the old Irish families; fresh laws were about the same time enacted to establish the English dress and language, and to keep the colonists apart from Irish intercourse;[502] and after a disuse of two hundred years, the authority of government was nominally recognised throughout Munster and Connaught.[503] Yet we find that these provinces were still in nearly the same condition as before; the king's judges did not administer justice in them, the old Brehon usages continued to prevail even in the territories of the new peers, though their primogenitary succession was evidently incompatible with Irish tanistry. A rebellion of two septs in Leinster under Edward VI. led to a more complete reduction of their districts, called Leix and O'Fally, which in the next reign were made shireland, by the names of King's and Queen's County.[504] But, at the accession of Elizabeth, it was manifest that an arduous struggle would ensue between law and liberty; the one too nearly allied to cool-blooded oppression, the other to ferocious barbarism.

It may be presumed, as has been already said, from the analogy of other countries, that Ireland, if left to herself, would have settled in time under some one line of kings, and assumed, like Scotland, much of the feudal character, the best transitional state of a monarchy from rudeness and anarchy to civilisation. And, if the right of female succession had been established, it might possibly have been united to the English Crown on a juster footing, and with far less of oppression or bloodshed than actually took place. But it was too late to dream of what might have been: in the middle of the sixteenth century Ireland could have no reasonable prospect of independence; nor could that independence have been any other than the most savage liberty, perhaps another denomination of serviture. It was doubtless for the interest of that people to seek the English constitution, which, at least in theory, was entirely accorded to their country, and to press with spontaneous homage round the throne of Elizabeth. But this was not the interest of their ambitious chieftains, whether of Irish or English descent, of a Slanes O'Neil, an Earl of Tyrone, an Earl of Desmond. Their influence was irresistible among a nation ardently sensible to the attachments of clanship, averse to innovation, and accustomed to dread and hate a government that was chiefly known by its severities. But the unhappy alienation of Ireland from its allegiance in part of the queen's reign would probably not have been so complete, or at least led to such permanent mischiefs, if the ancient national animosities had not been exasperated by the still more invincible prejudices of religion.

_Resistance of Irish to act of supremacy._--Henry VIII. had no sooner prevailed on the Lords and Commons of England to renounce their spiritual obedience to the Roman see, and to acknowledge his own supremacy, than, as a natural consequence, he proceeded to establish it in Ireland. In the former instance, many of his subjects, and even his clergy, were secretly attached to the principles of the reformation; as many others were jealous of ecclesiastical wealth, or eager to possess it. But in Ireland the reformers had made no progress; it had been among the effects of the pernicious separation of the two races, that the Irish priests had little intercourse with their bishops, who were nominated by the king, so that their synods are commonly recited to have been holden _inter Anglicos_; the bishops themselves were sometimes intruded by violence, more often dispossessed by it; a total ignorance and neglect prevailed in the church; and it is even found impossible to recover the succession of names in some sees.[505] In a nation so ill predisposed, it was difficult to bring about a compliance with the king's demand of abjuring their religion; ignorant, but not indifferent, the clergy, with Cromer the primate at their head, and most of the Lords and Commons, in a parliament held at Dublin in 1536, resisted the act of supremacy; which was nevertheless ultimately carried by the force of government. Its enemies continued to withstand the new schemes of reformation, more especially in the next reign, when they went altogether to subvert the ancient faith. As it appeared dangerous to summon a parliament, the English liturgy was ordered by a royal proclamation; but Dowdall, the new primate, as stubborn an adherent of the Romish church as his predecessor, with most of the other bishops and clergy, refused obedience; and the reformation was never legally established in the short reign of Edward. His eldest sister's accession reversed of course, what had been done, and restored tranquillity in ecclesiastical matters; for the protestants were too few to be worth persecution, nor were even those molested who fled to Ireland from the fires of Smithfield.

_Protestant church established by Elizabeth._--Another scene of revolution ensued in a very few years. Elizabeth having fixed the protestant church on a stable basis in England, sent over the Earl of Sussex to hold an Irish parliament in 1560. The disposition of such an assembly might be presumed hostile to the projected reformations; but, contrary to what had occurred on this side of the channel, though the peers were almost uniformly for the old religion, a large majority of the bishops are said to have veered round with the times, and supported, at least by conformity and acquiescence, the creed of the English court. In the House of Commons, pains had been taken to secure a majority; ten only out of twenty counties, which had at that time been formed, received the writ of summons; and the number of seventy-six representatives of the Anglo-Irish people was made up by the towns, many of them under the influence of the Crown, some perhaps containing a mixture of protestant population. The English laws of supremacy and uniformity were enacted in nearly the same words; and thus the common prayer was at once set up instead of the mass, but with a singular reservation, that in those parts of the country where the minister had no knowledge of the English language, he might read the service in Latin. All subjects were bound to attend the public worship of the church, and every other was interdicted.[506]

There were doubtless three arguments in favour of this compulsory establishment of the protestant church, which must have appeared so conclusive to Elizabeth and her council, that no one in that age could have disputed them without incurring, among other hazards, that of being accounted a lover of unreasonable paradoxes. The first was, that the protestant religion being true, it was the queen's duty to take care that her subjects should follow no other; the second, that, being an absolute monarch, or something like it, and a very wise princess, she had a better right to order what doctrine they should believe, than they could have to choose for themselves; the third, that Ireland, being as a handmaid, and a conquered country, must wait, in all important matters, on the pleasure of the greater island, and be accommodated to its revolutions. And, as it was natural that the queen and her advisers should not reject maxims which all the rest of the world entertained, merely because they were advantageous to themselves, we need not perhaps be very acrimonious in censuring the laws whereon the church of Ireland is founded. But it is still equally true that they involve a principle essentially unjust, and that they have enormously aggravated, both in the age of Elizabeth and long afterwards, the calamities and the disaffection of Ireland. An ecclesiastical establishment, that is, the endowment and privileges of a particular religious society, can have no advantages (relatively at least to the community where it exists), but its tendency to promote in that community good order and virtue, religious knowledge and edification. But, to accomplish this end in any satisfactory manner, it must be their church, and not that merely of the government; it should exist for the people, and in the people, and with the people. This indeed is so manifest, that the government of Elizabeth never contemplated the separation of a great majority as licensed dissidents from the ordinances established for their instruction. It was undoubtedly presumed, as it was in England, that the church and commonwealth, according to Hooker's language, were to be two denominations of the same society; and that every man in Ireland who appertained to the one ought to embrace, and in due season would embrace, the communion of the other. There might be ignorance, there might be obstinacy, there might be feebleness of conscience for a time; and perhaps some connivance would be shown to these; but that the prejudices of a majority should ultimately prevail so as to determine the national faith, that it should even obtain a legitimate indulgence for its own mode of worship, was abominable before God, and incompatible with the sovereign authority.

This sort of reasoning, half bigotry, half despotism, was nowhere so preposterously displayed as in Ireland. The numerical majority is not always to be ascertained with certainty; and some regard may fairly, or rather necessarily, be had to rank, to knowledge, to concentration. But in that island, the disciples of the reformation were in the most inconsiderable proportion among the Anglo-Irish colony, as well as among the natives; their church was a government without subjects, a college of shepherds without sheep. I am persuaded that this was not intended nor expected to be a permanent condition; but such were the difficulties which the state of that unhappy nation presented, or such the negligence of its rulers, that scarce any pains were taken in the age of Elizabeth, nor indeed in subsequent ages, to win the people's conviction or to eradicate their superstitions, except by penal statutes and the sword. The Irish language was universally spoken without the pale; it had even made great progress within it; the clergy were principally of that nation; yet no translation of the scriptures, the chief means through which the reformation had been effected in England and Germany, nor even of the regular liturgy, was made into that tongue; nor was it possible, perhaps, that any popular instruction should be carried far in Elizabeth's reign, either by public authority, or by the ministrations of the reformed clergy. Yet neither among the Welsh nor the Scots Highlanders, though Celtic tribes, and not much better in civility of life at that time than the Irish, was the ancient religion long able to withstand the sedulous preachers of reformation.