PREFACE.
Reading edition
The following pages were originally published in the New Monthly Magazine. The continued demand for the numbers in which they appeared, has induced the proprietor to reprint the article, and it is now offered to the public in a substantive form.
Notwithstanding the intense interest which is felt throughout all England concerning Ireland and Irish affairs, notwithstanding the frequent debates in parliament, and more frequent pamphlets and volumes published on points of Irish politics and œconomy, the prevailing ignorance xon these subjects still operates powerfully in maintaining prejudices the most unfounded and the most fatal, and in retarding those measures of wisdom and of justice without which Ireland can never be happy, or the British Empire secure.
It is this ignorance more especially which enables the party opposed to the settlement of Ireland to occupy public attention with minor grievances, behind which the danger and malice of their system are concealed from a nation too generous to tolerate open and avowed oppression. No sooner is the question of Catholic Emancipation proposed in the senate, with some chance of obtaining a favourable consideration, than one or other of these convenient abuses is thrust forward to distract attention and to puzzle the will. The absentees, the deficiency of employment, the potatoe diet, the want of poor laws, or the want of education, are, from time to time put forth as the xiparamount evil, the gushing fountain of every misfortune of Ireland; while the main subject of complaint, the Catholic disability, is studiously represented as affecting only a few briefless barristers, or ambitious landlords. The advantage which is thus obtained in pre-occupying the public mind, and in affording additional ground for a superstructure of sophisms is immense.
The British nation has so many and such vast interests to pursue, its relations with every country in the world are so many and so complicated, that the most instructed of its subjects can find but little time and attention to bestow on any one of them, however important. The public in general is therefore compelled to repose confidence in those who affect a knowledge of each particular subject; and to take for granted the propositions they advance. When the men who should be the guides of public opinion are false to their trust, and instead xiiof presenting truths in a clear and perspicuous form, studiously bury them beneath a mass of plausibilities, or entangle them in a net-work of sophistry, the task of unweaving their web, and detecting their fallacies, must be again and again undertaken, before a credulous and a pre-occupied people can be made aware of the deception, and enabled to judge of the question at issue by its intrinsic merits.
On this account, it cannot but be deemed most unfortunate that the friends of Ireland unwittingly complicated the recent discussion on the Catholic Question, by the two bills with which they clogged their main proposition. It was not sufficient that the public should be dinned and stupified with the mass of untelligible and absurd theology with which that very plain question of policy and common morality is too unfortunately loaded; but it must also be mystified with high sounding phrases of “disfranchisement,” “oppression of the poor,” xiiiand other similar phantoms. To lead the British public to imagine that the disqualification of the forty shilling freeholders would affect the influence either of the catholic or protestant party in Ireland, was, to say the best of it, a strange mistake: but on the other side, to attempt making men believe that the franchise is a benefit to its holder, or that the existing representative system of Ireland, with or without the forty shilling freeholders, has any the remotest practical utility as an instrument of liberty or of self-taxation, is a gross and absolute deception. All the discussion which was raised on this most silly of disputes (and the enemies of emancipation were not slow to profit by the advantage) was de lana caprina, and so much diversion of the public mind from the main point at issue; serving only to inflame enemies, and to divide friends. Though no one will dispute that both the riders were appended to the Catholic Bill in deference to xivthe opponents of that measure, and with an honest intention to conciliate and to compromise, yet in the event, the introduction of extraneous matter has proved eminently unfavourable to the cause, and will, it is to be hoped, never again be attempted.
The futility of the arguments derived from a putting forth of secondary causes of evil in Irish politics, as directed against the entertainment of the Catholic Question, is the greater, in as much as all the various subjects which are advanced as matters of complaint, derive immediately from this one source. Deficient capital, deficient knowledge, deficient civilization, are all the necessary consequences of bad government,—of that bad government for whose sake Catholic has been set against Protestant, and the Irish people divided, in order to prevent the assertion of their political rights. In England people are governed in their opinions on the Catholic Question exclusively by their hopes xvand fears; and none but the clergy have a corrupt interest in withholding justice from any religious sect. But in Ireland power and place, the licence to oppress, and the facility of living on the public purse, are closely entwined with the permanence of a system, which, while it tramples the Catholic in the dust, degrades and impoverishes the whole population, for the exclusive benefit of a few powerful families. It is bad government, and the destraction and turbulence which bad government has engendered, that drives industry and capital from the country, and forces the peasantry to abandon all pretence to luxuries and refinements, whether moral or physical. It is bad government that banishes meat from the cotter’s table, and instruction from his mind. It is bad government that puts a pike in his hand, and hardens his heart against all the charities of life; it is bad government that makes property insecure, and life precarious; it is bad government, therefore, xvithat induces the aristocracy to fly to happier regions, to abandon their duties to their country and to themselves, and to seek for tranquillity and safety even at the expense of half their fortunes; and it is, above all, bad government which renders the absence of a limited aristocracy an evil of magnitude, either morally, politically, or economically.
The geographical position of Ireland, and its political dependence, (the necessary consequence of that position,) must always occasion more absenteeism than usually occurs in other nations. The robbery and spoilation of the native proprietors to endow the pampered favourites of a foreign court, which took place in the preceding centuries, afford another cause for this evil; but by far the greatest number of absentees are banished by the direct operation of the penal code, or by its indirect influence in limiting the pursuit of fortune at home. Ireland has no field for enterprise and industry, it has no xviimarket for merchandize. It has no scope for honest ambition, no promise of pleasure, no resting place for repose; and yet it is expected that those who have the means of quitting the land will inhabit it out of respect for a principle, or regard for an abstraction!
Absenteeism considered in itself is an unnatural ill. There is usually so much of ease, of happiness, and of personal consequence in living at home surrounded by friends, relations, and a respectful tenantry,—there is usually so much mortification and disgust in the condition of a stranger and a foreigner, that nothing but political causes can drive the great proprietors of a country to permanently abandon their estates. Yet so natural is it for men to complain of the evil which strikes the most powerfully on the senses,—so convenient is it for those, who are determined in the denial of justice, to make absenteeism the causa causans of calamities which they want the humanity to xviiirelieve, that all classes of persons, the Protestant and the Catholic, the mere Irish and the lord of the pale, the oppressor and the oppressed, the Irish corporator and the English minister have joined in a common cry against absentees. It is not therefore very surprising that the mere John Bull, wrapped in his own affairs, and buried in his counting-house, should believe what every one repeats, and should shut his eyes against the real causes of that turbulence and that discontent which, though they have given him so much trouble and uneasiness, are yet too far removed from his gaze to allow of the formation of an independent judgment. It is not very wonderful that he should credit the assertion so hardily made, that Catholic Emancipation is not the one thing needful to Ireland, the essential preliminary, without which, no practical relief can be afforded to the economical distresses of the country.
xixIn taking up the subject of absenteeism, the peculiar bent of Lady Morgan’s mind, and the character of her habitual pursuits, have inevitably given a picturesque turn to her ideas, and induced her to view the matter less as an economist than as a poet and a woman. But the great truth has not escaped her, that absenteeism is less a cause than an effect: and while in the romance of her imagination she has delineated what Ireland might be under the fostering protection of an enlightened and liberal aristocracy, she has not forgotten that under existing circumstances it must remain for ever the blighted victim of an oppressive and ignorant bureaucratie.
T. C. MORGAN.
London, June 3, 1825.
1
ABSENTEEISM.
“Les absens ont toujours tort.”
La Rochefaucault.
The phrase “Absentee,” says Dr. Johnson, is one “used with regard to Irishmen living out of their country;” and as its origin is Irish, so its use and application are strictly confined to the history of that unfortunate people. The inference to be drawn from this fact is plain: that there is something in the circumstances of the Irish, peculiar to themselves,—something which forces upon them a line of conduct contrary to the ordinary instincts of humanity, and compels them to fly from that land which all other nations regard with more or less of favour 2and affection,—from that land which youth quits with regret, and to which age clings with passion, when all other passions fade,—the land of their nativity.
In every history of Irish grievances, this cabalistical term “absentee” appears in the front of the array, and, like the terrible “Il Bondocani” of the Calif of Bagdat, strikes down all before it,—the apology for every abuse, the obstacle to every plan of amelioration, the bugbear of the timid, the stalking-horse of the designing.
“Absenteeism,” observes the Secretary for the Home Department, “is an operative cause of tumult, but it is without a remedy;” and thus dismissing all ministerial responsibility with a laconic aphorism, he launches an integral portion of the empire committed to his management, to revolve for ever in the turbulent whirlpool of a vicious circle of cause and effect. Tumult expels the rich landholders, the 3absence of the rich landholders perpetuates tumult: this is a law of nature, which admits of “no remedy;” and the executive have nothing to do but to procure the passing of penal statutes according to the necessities of the moment, and to find the means of extorting four millions a year from English industry, to pay the expense of Irish misrule.
In political philosophy there are no evils without a remedy, save those which arise out of the common condition of humanity;—and the minister who confesses a political evil which he cannot remove, should remove himself: for he is himself the greatest evil with which the people have to contend. Sully, who administered the affairs of France under the most adverse circumstances, when it was still harassed with civil contentions and torn with religious factions, saw no political impossibilities, though many political difficulties, with which he courageously and successfully grappled: but, alas! 4the Secretary for the Home Department is not Sully.
To what physiological peculiarity of constitution this irremediable tendency to wander, inherited from their progenitors by the restless sons of the great Milesius, is to be attributed, the learned Secretary has not informed us; and it is certain that Spurzheim, on his visit to the Irish capital, discovered no migratory inequality upon the surface of the Irish cranium, to account for the disposition. But in whatever particular of temperament or exuberance of cerebral developement the cause of this “effect defective” lies latent, it is matter of historic fact, that though the ancient Irish were restless enough at home, (“never,” says Campion, “wanting drift to drive a tumult,”) yet this activity, which induced them “to pick a quarrel, fall in love, or any other diverting accident of that kind,” never found vent in absenteeism. Where, indeed, could Irishmen go to better their condition, 5when all in Ireland, who were not saints, were kings; and many were both, while none were martyrs.[1] “Il est certain negoce,” says the French proverb, “où l’on perd beaucoup en quittant boutique;” and this proverb, at all 6times applicable to Irish absentees, was particularly so in that golden age, so often referred to by antiquaries, when Ireland, “lying aloof in the Western Ocean, was a nest of kingdoms,” when superb and wealthy monasteries and royal palaces occupied every foot of the territory, and when swallows built their nests in old men’s beards for want of worse habitations. In those true church and state times of Ireland’s prosperity, of which the Orangeman’s Utopia is but a type, it is little wonderful that the people gave into no wanderings, but those “du cœur et de l’esprit;” and that a pilgrimage to St. Patrick’s purgatory, a royal progress of some Toparck of the South to a Dynast in the North, or a morning visit from King Mac Turtell to his close neighbour King Gillemohalmoghe,[2] (which occasionally 7ended in the broken heads of both parties,) should include the recorded absenteeism of two thousand years.
It was reserved, however, for one of these royal heroes first to commit the patricidal crime: and the first Irish absentee of note, though a great king, was but a mauvais sujet, having pillaged his people, wasted his revenue, ran away with his neighbour’s wife, and sold his country for a mess of pottage. It is almost unnecessary to add that this royal founder of absenteeism is condemned to the contempt of posterity by the title of Dermot Mac Murrogh 8O’Kavenagh, King of Leinster; and that the result of his absenteeship was the successful invasion of Ireland by Henry II. the crusading grants of Pope Adrian IV. and, above all, the fearful forfeitures followed by rebellion on one part, and on the other by an effort at extermination, which have multiplied from age to age those possessors and deserters of the soil, who have drawn over “the profits raised out of Ireland, and refunded nothing.”[3]
9It appears very probable that one of the motives by which the lords of Ireland (as the English kings were long styled) were actuated in giving such large tracts of land to great English proprietors, was to get rid of the troublesome and rebellious Barons, by tempting them to reside in that “most beautiful and sweet country as any is under heaven,” where so much was given up to their power and pillage, and where the services demanded in return, “the raising of forts and castles and fencing themselves with garrisons, as captains, keepers, and constables,” might forward the royal interests by protecting its power against the inroads of the natives. “For, except 10Leinster,” says Campion, “all other parts retayned still their ancient kind of government, and were always ready to start at every corner, ag and rag, to expell the English.” But the framers of Magna Charta, the guardians of all that was then known of liberty in England, were not by the bribe of principalities to be kept from the great scene of action; and some of the most considerable, having accepted, or seized upon the fairest portions of the land, made them over to sons-in-law or other kinsmen; and having thus, by the scratch of their rude pen,[4] 11conveyed to others the fee simple of an Irish province, hastened back to England to dispute the power of the barbarous despots, who reigned by their sufferance, or were deposed by their caprice.
In process of time, the mischief of this species of transfer was not only felt as an additional grievance by the Irish, but as an annoyance by the English sovereign.[5] The injury done to their power by the absence of those whom they had deputed to watch over it, at a time when that power was held by a precarious tenure, was deemed so great, that a law against absentees was passed so early as the time of Richard II. The divisions of the houses of 12York and Lancaster, however, abrogated all laws; “at which time,” says Spenser, “all English lords and gentlemen which had great possessions in Ireland, repaired over hither into England, some to succour their friends here, and to strengthen their partie, others for to defend their lands and possessions here against such as hovered after the same, upon hope of the alteration of the kingdom, and success of that side which they favoured and affected.”[6] The result of this absenteeism of 13the great landholders of Ireland was natural and inevitable. “The Irish, whom before they had banished into the mountains, where they lived only upon white meates,[7] as it is recorded, seeing now their lands so dispeopled and weakened, 14came down into all the plains adjoining, and thence expelling those few English that remayned, re-possessed them again.” But these re-possessions were only temporary. New conquests and new forfeitures ensued. New possessors, unaffected to the soil, and disdainful of its children, afforded fresh causes of absenteeism, which, in whatever way it operated, was injurious to the country; till at length the forfeiture of Leix and Offaly (the King and Queen’s Counties) under Edward VI. threw the whole of those spacious and fertile districts into the hands of new proprietors; who having established themselves by “fire and sword,” transferred the ownership “to foreigners by connexion, and resided themselves in England.”
But if the first barbarous English legislators for Ireland (and when has the epithet been inapplicable?) were, at an early period of their unfixed power, sensible of the injury which the state and the country suffered from absenteeism—if 15the Plantagenets took cognizance of the evil, and endeavoured to provide against it by statute, the Tudors (those sanguinary but sagacious despots) considered the absence of the Irish from their homes and country as a state engine; and wielded it with a policy which always advanced their own interests, and confirmed their power over that unhappy land. Sometimes they allured the Irish nobility to their splendid court for the purpose of dazzling their imagination, and corrupting their patriotism. Sometimes, on shallow pretexts, they cited them as accused or criminals, to awe them by their array of power, or to intimidate them by their display of cruelty. Yet, frequently forced to feel that the prosperity of the country and the English interests were both best served by the permanent residence of the gentry of the pale, they did not the less frame laws which made it penal for the proprietors of the soil to spend its profits elsewhere than at 16home.[8] The love which the Irish had borne to the house of York, had rendered it a point 17of courteous policy to appoint the second sons of the king to the Lieutenancy of Ireland, with a deputy for the execution of the high office: and Henry VIII. as Duke of York, while yet a boy, and during the life-time of his elder brother, began his career of power under this character, conjointly with his deputy, Gerald Fitzgerald, Earl of Kildare, “a mighty made man,” says his chronicler, “full of honour and courage.” (1501) This grand conservator of the peace, however, had the old Irish fashion of being occasionally disposed to break it; and his fierce feuds with the Butlers, Earls 18of Ormond, (“nothing inferior to Kildare in stomache, and in reach of policy farre beyond him,”) were the causes “of much ruffle and unquietness to the realm.” These served his enemies for a pretext to draw down upon him the displeasure of the English government, and finally induced Henry VII. to summon the old deputy over to the English court, and to seek to break down that haughty and turbulent spirit in a region rarely favourable to powerful energies and independence of mind. A bon-mot saved the earl from the danger which awaited him, and limited his absenteeism to a few months residence in the court of Henry, from which he returned to Ireland more powerful than he left it.
Gerald Fitzgerald, son of the aforesaid earl, “a gentleman valiant and well spoken,” succeeded his father in all his dignities; but though appointed lord deputy of Ireland, his influence, power, and spirit, soon awakened the 19jealousy of Henry VIII. Being “overtaken with vehement suspicion of sundry treasons, it was deemed politic to draw him away from Ireland; and, by secret heavers and enviers of his fortunes, nourishers of the old grudge, the king was urged to call upon him to attend the English court.” The illustrious but involuntary absentee, was, on his first arrival in England, treated with a severity vainly intended to intimidate a spirit which was afterwards to be subdued by other and more seducing means. Among many frivolous charges, “he was opposed with divers interrogatories touching the Earl of Desmond, his cousin, a notorious traytor.” His trial, however, was but a mockery, and as the object was to sink the popular chief of a nation into a pliant courtier, to bind him more firmly to the English interests, and to weaken his feelings of patriotism, the union of the turbulent Gerald was proposed with the Lady Elizabeth Grey, the king’s own kinswoman and daughter of the Duke of Suffolk. 20This marriage, celebrated with royal splendour, with all the festivities of a boisterous but splendid court, was deemed a preliminary step to permanent subjection, and to frequent and long visits to the English court.
Scarcely, however, had Kildare returned home, and resumed the deputyship of Ireland, when the domestic tumults of the great lords of the pale involved him in new accusations on the part of the crown, “intimations of new treasons passing to and fro, with complaynts and replyes;” and as Cardinal Wolsey “did hate the Kildare bloud,” and had resolved on breaking down their power, the earl was again called from his stronghold in Ireland, and accused of having “wilfully winked at the Earl of Desmond (whose large possessions were his crimes in the eye of the minister), and with having curried acquaintance and friendship with mere Irish.” While lying under the imputation of a crime, always heinous in the Irish,—natural affection to the land and its suffering 21children,—the brave Kildare (like an eagle taken from its eirie in the mountain-cliffs of its native region, and chained to the earth in a golden cage) was suffered to loiter away his existence, in listless indolence and life-wearing anxiety, in the purlieus of a court that resembled the seraglio of an Asiatic satrap, alternately favoured and persecuted, as the caprice of the sovereign or the aversion of the minister ruled the hour. It was at this period, when his mind was borne down by his humiliating position, that he was prevailed on to consent to his daughter the Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald’s permanent residence at court; and it was by this concession that the loveliest of all Irish absentees, “the more than celestial Geraldine,” has become an object of interest and admiration to posterity, as the poetical idol of the gallant and unfortunate Surrey.[9] 22
Although educated at the rural palace of Hunsdon with her kinswomen the Princesses 23Mary and Elizabeth, and though afterwards maid of honour to the Queen, it is probable that 24this lady was rather an hostage than a guest, and was detained more by force than by inclination:—as the sequel of her story goes to prove. “All this while,” says Campion, “abode the Earl of Kildare at the court, and with much ado found shifte to be called before the Lords to answer solemnly.” When, at last, every excuse for delay was exhausted, and every hope of subduing his invincible spirit faded, he was “called before the lords to answer solemnly,” who “sat upon him diversly affectioned; and especially the Cardinal Lord Chancellor (Wolsey) who disliked his cause, comforted his accusers, and enforced the articles objected.”
The whole scene of this mock trial is so graphic, and the speeches of the Cardinal and of the Irish Lord Deputy so curious and descriptive of the state and manners of the time, that the introduction may be pardoned of an episode which goes to prove, by a striking instance, that Irish absenteeism under any form, voluntarily or involuntary, graced by royal 25favour, or marked by ministerial persecution, is derogatory to the dignity, and injurious to the interests of the Irish nobility. The Earl of Kildare, alone, unfriended, without the aid of counsel to plead, or witness to depose in his behalf, appeared in the midst of the Lords, every one of whom was the slave of the King or the parasite of the minister,—“for what,” (says Walpole, one of their own caste,)—“what twelve tradesmen could be found more servile than every court of peers during the whole of this reign?”—Wolsey was the first to speak, and he began with these words:—“I wot well, my Lord, that I am not the meetest man at this board to charge you with these treasons, because it hath pleased some of your pew-fellows to report that I am a professed enemie to all nobilitie, and namely to the Geraldines: but seeing every curst boy can say as much when he is controled, and seeing these points are so weightie that they should not be dissembled of 26us, and so apparent that they cannot be denyed of you, I must have leave, notwithstanding your state slaunder, to be the mouth of these honorable persons at this time, and to trumpe your reasons in your way, howsoever you take me. First, you remember how the lewde Earle your kinsman, who passeth not whom he serve, might he change his master, sent his confederates with letters of credence to Frauncis the French king, and, having but cold comfort there, to Charles the Emperour, proffering the helpe of Mounster and Connaght towards the conquest of Ireland, if either of them would helpe to win it from our King. How many letters? what precepts? what messages? what threats have been sent you to apprehend him? and yet not done! why so? forsooth, I could not catch him: nay, nay, Earle, forsooth you would not nightly watch him. If he be justly suspected, why are you partiall in so great a cause? if not, why are you fearfull to have him 27tryed? Yea sir, it will be sworn and deposed to your face, that for feare of meeting him, you have winked, wilfully shunned his sight, altered your course, warned his friends, stopped both eyes and eares against his detectors, and, when soever you tooke upon you to hunt him out, then was he sure before hand to bee out of your walke: surely this juggling and false play little became either an honest man, called to such honour, or a nobleman put in such trust. Had you lost but a cow or a garron of your owne, two hundred Kyrneghes would have come at your whistle, to rescue the prey from the uttermost edge of Ulster: all the Irish in Ireland must have given you the way. But in pursuing so weightie a matter as this, mercifull God! how nice, how dangerous, how wayward have you bin! One while he is from home, sometimes fled, sometimes in the borders where you dare not venture: I wist, my Lord, there be shrewd Bugges in the borders for the Earl of Kildare to feare. 28The Earle, nay the King of Kildare, for, when you are disposed, you reigne more like than rule the land:—where you are malicious, the truest subjects stand for Irish enemies: where you are pleased the Irish enemie stands for a dutifull subject: hearts and hands, lives and lands, are all at your courtesie: who fawneth not thereon, hee cannot rest within your smell, and your smell is so ranke that you tracke them out at pleasure.”
Whilst the Cardinal was speaking, the Earle chafed and changed colour, and sundry proffers made to answer every sentence as it came; at last he broke out, and interrupted them thus. “My Lord Chancellour, I beseech you pardon me; I am short-witted, and you, I perceive, intend a long tale. If you proceede in this order, halfe my purgation will be lost for lacke of carryage: I have no schoole tricks, nor art of memory; excepte you heare me while I remember your words, your second processe will hammer out the former.” The Lords associate, 29who for the most part tenderly loved him, and knew the Cardinal’s manner of termes so lothsome, as wherewith they were tyred many years agoe, humbly besought his Grace to charge him directly with particulars and to dwell in some one matter till it were examined through. That granted, “It is good reason (quoth the Earle) that your Grace beare the mouth of this chamber. But, my Lord, those mouthes that put this tale into your mouth, are very wide mouths, such indeed as have gaped long for my wreck, and now at length, for want of better stuff, are fain to fill their mouths with smoak. What my cousin Desmond hath compassed, as I know not, so I beshrew his naked heart for holding out so long. If hee can bee taken by my agents that presently wayte for him, then have my adversaryes betrayed their malice, and this heape of haynous wordes shall resemble a man of strawe, that seemeth at a blush to carry some proportion, but when it is felt and poysed, discovereth a vanity, serving only to fraye crowes; 30and I trust your honours will see the proofe hereof and mine innocencie testified in this behalfe by the thing itselfe within these few dayes. But goe to, suppose hee never bee had, what is Kildare to blame for it, more than my good brother of Ossory? notwithstanding his high promises, having also the king’s power, he is glad to take egges for his money, and bring him in at leysure. Cannot the Earle of Desmond shift, but I must bee of counsell? cannot hee bee hid, except I winke? If hee bee close, am I his mate? If hee bee friended, am I a traitour? This is a doughty kinde of accusation, which they urge against mee, wherein they are stabled and myred at my first denyall. You would not see him, say they; who made them so familiar with mine eye sight? or when was the Earle within my Equinas? or who stood by when I let him slip? or where are the tokens of my willfull hood-winking? Oh, but you sent him word to beware of you: who was the messenger? where are the letters? convince my negative. 31See how loosely this idle reason hangeth: Desmond is not taken, well, we are in fault: why? because you are. Who proves it? nobody. What conjectures? so it seemeth. To whom? to your enemies. Who told it them? What other grounds? none. Will they sweare it? they will sweare it. My Lords, then belike they know it: if they know it, either they have my hand to show, or can bring forth the messenger, or were present at a conference, or privy to Desmond, or somebody betrayed it to them, or themselves were my carryers or vice-gerents therein. Which of these parts will they choose? I know them too well to reckon myself convict by their bare wordes, or headlesse hearsayes, or frantick oathes: my letters were soone read, were any such writing extant; my servaunts and friends are ready to bee sifted. Of my cousin Desmond they may lye lewdly, since no man can heere will tell the contrary. Touching my selfe, I never noted in 32them either so much wit, or so much faith, that I could have gaged upon their silence the life of a good hound, much lesse mine owne. I doubt not, may it please your honours to oppose them, how they came to knowledge of these matters which they are so ready to depose, but you shall finde their tongues chayned to another man’s trencher, and as it were knights of the post, suborned to say, sweare, and stare the uttermost they can, as those that passe not what they say, nor with what face they say it, so they say no truths. But of another thing, it grieveth me that your good grace, whom I take to be wise and sharpe, and who of your own blessed disposition wish me well, should be so farre gone in crediting those corrupt informers, that abuse the ignorance of their state and country to my perill. Little know you, my lord, how necessary it is, not onely for the governour, but also for every nobleman in Ireland, to hamper his vincible neighbours at discretion, wherein, if they 33wayted for processe of law, and had not these lives and lands you speake of within their reach, they might pass to loose their own lives and lands without law. You heare of a case, as it were in a dreame, and feell not the smart that vexeth us. In England there is not a meane subject that dare extend this hand to fillip a peere of the realme;—in Ireland, except the lord have cunning to his strength, and strength to save his owne, and sufficient authoritie to racke thieves and varletts when they stirre, hee shall finde them swarme so fast that it will bee too late to call for justice. If you will have our service take effect, you must not tye us always to the judicial proceedings, wherewith your realme, thank-bee God, is inured. As touching my kingdome, my Lord, I would you and I had exchanged kingdomes but for one moneth, I would trust to gather up more crummes in that space, than twice the revenues of my poore earledome;—but you are well and warme, and so hold you, 34and upbraide not me with such an odious storme. I sleepe on a dablin, when you lye soft in your bed of downe; I serve under the cope of heaven, when you are served under a canopy; I drinke water out of a skull, when you drinke out of golden cuppes; my courser is trained to the field, when your jennet is taught to amble; when you are begraced, and belorded, and crowched and kneeled unto, then I finde small grace with our Irish borderers, except I cut them off by the knees.” At these girds the councell would have smiled if they durst; but each man bitt his lippe, and held his countenance. The Cardinall perceived that Kildare was no cake, and rose in a fume from the councell-table, committed the Earle, and deferred the matter till more direct probations came out of Ireland.—It is unnecessary to add, that these “probations” were readily procured. “For of this treason,” continues the quaint chronicler, “he (Kildare) was found guilty, 35and imprisoned in the Tower a long time. The gentleman betook himself to God and the King, was heartily loved of the lieutenant, pittied in all the court, and standing in so hard case, altered little his accustomed hue, comforted other noblemen prisoners with him dissembling his own sorrow.
“One night, when the lieutenant and he, for disport, were playing at slide-groat, suddenly commeth from the Cardinall a mandat to execute Kildare on the morrow. The Earl marking the Lieutenant’s deep sigh on reading the bill, ‘By Sant Bride,’ quoth he, ‘there is some mad game in that scralle, but, fall how it will, this throw is for a huddle.’ When the worst was told him: ‘Now I pray thee,’ quoth he, ‘doe no more but learn assuredly from the King’s owne mouthe whether his Grace be witting thereto or not.’ Sore doubted the Lieutenant to displease the Cardinall; yet of very pure devotion to his friend, he posteth to the King at midnight, and said his errand (for all houres 36of the day or night, the lieutenant hath accesse to the prince upon occasions.) King Henry, controwling the sawcyness of the priest—those were his tearmes—gave him his signet in token of countermand; which, when the Cardinall had seene, he began to breake into unseasonable words with the lieutenant, which he was loath to heare, and so he left him fretting. Thus broke up the storme for a time, and the next yeare Wolsey was cast out of favour; and within few yeares Sir William Skevington was sent over deputy, who brought with him the Earle pardoned, and rid from all his troubles.”
But this “riddance” was only of short duration. New causes of complaint, and new reasons, were soon found or invented for once more drawing the Earl from the strong hold of his interest and power—his native country: and he was again “commanded by sharp letters to repair to England.” His arrival there was followed by 37a report of his execution,[10] which soon reached his family in Ireland. His son, whom he had left Lord Justice in his place, the gallant but impetuous Lord Thomas, on hearing of this supposed act of treachery against his father, threw down the sword of office, and flew into open rebellion, followed by his five uncles the Lords Fitzgerald. The insurrection was soon quelled; and the unfortunate Geraldines having surrendered, set out for England on the parole of the Lord Marshal Dorset, where, shortly after their arrival, they were all executed in one day. The death of the old Earl himself in the Tower, where he is said to have died “for thought and paine,” ends the tragic story of the enforced absenteeism of the Geraldines.[11]
38This murder of the Lady Geraldine’s uncles, father, brother, and that of her unfortunate and highly endowed lover, (“who,” says Lodge, “reflected splendour even on the name of Howard,” and who was put to death by Henry VIII. for quartering the arms of Edward the Confessor,) must have rendered the English Court a dreary residence to her. Still, however, she remained there, most probably under the influence of the same major force which first drew her from her domestic home. But while Henry thus continued to retain the most beautiful 39woman of Ireland near his person, he began to see, as it appears, the policy of keeping the men at home; and he passed his famous bill against “absencie,” the preamble of which is curious, as portraying the evils against which it was framed—at least that portion of the evils by which the English government, for a long series of years, was alone touched. Like a good many more modern acts, be it remarked en passant, it commences by the formal averment of a self-evident falsehood: “That, for as much as it was notorious and manifest, that this land of Ireland being heretofore inhabited and in obedience to the said king’s most noble progenitors, who in those days in the righte of the Crown of England had great possessions, rentes, and profits, within the same land,” &c. It then goes on to state “the ruine, rebellion, and decay,” which ensued by the absence of the great landholders: who, “after abiding within the said land, nobly and valiantly defended the 40same against all the king’s enemies, and also kept the same in such tranquillity and good order, as the King of England had due obedience of the inhabitance there, the laws obeyed, and the revenues and regalitie were duely answered;” but that afterwards “they and their heires absented themselves out of the said land of Ireland, denjorning within the realm of England, not pondering, ne regarding the preservation thereof,—the townes, castels, and garrisons appertaining to them fell in ruin and decay, and the English inhabitants therein, in default of defence and justice, and by compulsion of those of the Irish, were exiled, whereby the king’s said progenitors lost as well their said dominion and subjection there, as also their revenues and profites; and their said enemies by redopting or retaining the said lands, dominions, and possessions, were elevated into great pride,” &c. &c.
Hitherto, with a few exceptions, absencie, as touching a residence in England, had been confined 41to the great Irish lords of the pale, who, although of English descent, and bearing Norman names, had in the course of successive generations run through all those shades of naturalization, which left them in manners, habits, and affections, but little distinguishable from the aboriginal Irishman, who proudly traced his origin to the Lady Scota, the daughter or grand-daughter of King Pharaoh.[12]
But it was reserved for the reign of the Virgin Queen to drive the genuine nobility of Ireland from their native land at any loss or risk into distant regions[13] and unknown countries, or to allure 42them to her own formal and fantastic court, by a show of feminine sympathy; which, though in direct contradiction to her whole policy and conduct, was well calculated to win the unwary, and to soothe the unfortunate.[14]
43The Queen, in her quality both of woman and sovereign, was fond of making speeches; and she probably found it prettier to be pathetic than just, as she certainly found it easier to chide than to call in the pack of bloodhounds she had let loose upon the devoted country of her delegated sway. While the Fitzwilliams, the Binghams, the Drurys, the Bagnals, and others of her Irish ministers, were carrying destruction through the land by “fire, sword, and pestilence,”[15] the fair and royal rhetorician 44was exclaiming in her closet against their conduct, by classical allusions to parallel facts, which showed at once her learning and her sympathy. “I fear,” she said, apostrophizing her ministers in Ireland, “that the same reproach will be made to me as was formerly made by Bato to Tiberius. It is you who are to blame for these things, who have committed your flocks not to shepherds but to wolves.” The Irish, “who love learning to a fault,” says Spenser, (and women too, God forgive them,) were bewitched by similar declarations of pity, breathed in the language of the learned from the lips of the royal and the fair. The O’Rourkes, the O’Neils, the O’Connors, forgot the wiles and the treachery of which their fathers had been the dupes or the victims; and 45each in his turn expiated his credulity in its fatal results.[16]
The English were accustomed to the presence of the Geraldines, the Butlers, the De Courceys, De Burgos, and other great Anglo-Irish lords of the pale, who, though by “gossipry and alliance” they occasionally fell into Irish habits, and sported a glib or a mantle at home, were still sure to resume the English costume when at the English court. But the true aboriginal 46Irish gentlemen, the brave O’s and Macs, who, driven to their woods and morasses with no other weapon of defence than their skein, their hatchet, or their pike, had for centuries resisted the well-armed force of England,—they were creatures of almost fabulous interest and existence; and the “anthropophagi and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders,” were not more monstrous to English apprehensions than the “flying Irish,” whose wings were supposed to grow beneath their heads. To the higher castes, however, they were known by the reputation of their prowess and their comeliness; and were noted by some of the poets of the day, alike for their invincible spirits and their lofty stature.[17] This romantic interest thrown round a race at once so brave and so unfortunate, so wild, and 47yet so gallant in their bearing, might not have been without its effect in influencing the policy of the coquettish queen, and drawing to her court those (as yet unseen) Thanists, the known admirers of her sex and contemners of her power.
The restlessness of suffering, the enterprise of romantic valour, the partiality of the House of Tudor to the O’Neil’s, and other inducements which Elizabeth herself held out, determined the famous Shane O’Neil (by the prescriptive right of ages Thanist of his powerful sept, and by the patent of Henry VIII. to his father, Earl of Tyrone) to visit the court of England in the most perilous moment of his life. The sudden appearance of the representative of the ancient kings of Ulster in the ante-chambers of Whitehall excited a sensation in which the “lion-ported queen” is said to have deeply and obviously participated. He burst upon the guarded presence of her, whose acts 48against his religion and his rights “resembled the bloody mandates of a Turkish divan rather than the mild ordinance of a Christian queen,” in all the fearless hardihood of one who “bore a charmed life,” fresh from the lines of revolt, with the excitement of the fierce contest between the oppressor and the oppressed fluttering at his bold heart and fevering his manly brow. He is described as entering the presence-chamber at the head of a rude but imposing train, composed of his guard of honour, the Irish gallowglasses, who,—armed with battle-axes, their heads bare, their long hair flowing in locks on their broad shoulders, their yellow surplices with open sleeves trailing to the earth and surmounted by a military harness—formed a strange contrast to the groupings and tournure of the ribboned and tagged chivalry through which they passed. Even the “Londoners,” says Spenser, “marvelled at this strange sight.”
O’Neil had come to plead his own cause at 49one of the court historians, “received him with an affectation of tenderness; and after he had resided some time at court, the flattery of his address, which appeared artless and unstudied, and the speciousness of his allegations, so wrought upon her, that, at his departure, she dismissed him with favour and presents.”
This absenteeism of O’Neil, though favourable to his pride, and flattering to his vanity while abroad, was injurious to his interests at home. His base-born brother, Matthew, availing himself of his absence, had usurped his rights, and assumed the chieftainship of his sept. The question was debated (as if it were debateable) by the Irish government, who, in defiance of all law, “ruled the point in favour of the bastard; practising (says Parnell[18]) a policy that has governed them (the English) to the 50latest times in India, where it has been the custom to raise to the throne, in violation of the customary mode of succession, a person who depended for his station on their power, who was strictly a dependent, and who might be set aside whenever a favourable opportunity occurred.” The Sic jubeo of the Virgin Queen was, of course, decisive. The bastard was declared the lawful heir; and the consequence was a rebellion on the part of Shane. In this rebellion the chieftain was unfortunate, and the whole possessions, both of Shane and Matthew, were confiscated. “In order,” says Parnell, “to divert Shane, the territory was reputed Matthew’s; and in order to get rid of Matthew’s claim, the territory was confiscated as Shane’s.”[19] 51Meanwhile, however, the Queen had won golden opinions in Ireland for her reception of the most popular of Irish chiefs. The gates of absenteeism were now thrown most seducingly open. The track was already beaten down which led from the desolated banks of the Shannon to the pavilioned shores of the Thames. 52Men, whose national failing was a sanguine credulity not untouched with personal vanity, whose infirmity of temperament was a reckless impetuosity, and whose weariness of suffering caught at every change as a relief, now first began to find new hopes for their country and themselves springing up in the “primrose path of dalliance” which conducted them to the British court, and placed them in personal contact with a woman and a queen—with one who, unlike her savage delegates in Ireland, received them “with tenderness, and dismissed them with favour.” The baubles given by a royal hand, and displayed at Shane’s Castle, were pledges to the followers of O’Neil that the heart of the Queen was of another policy from the counsels of her ministers. This characteristic credulity is not even yet abated by experience. A flattering reception of the Roman Catholic bishops, and a ribbon bestowed on a Roman Catholic peer, led the sanguine Irish to draw a 53similar conclusion respecting the politics of George IV. A mandate, therefore got up in the form of a slight accusation, but considered by the accused as an invitation, brought the O’Rourke chief or prince of Brefny promptly and inconsiderately to the feet of the fair sovereign who had issued it.
This gallant Irishman, as renowned for his personal beauty as for his turbulence, had long been a favourite theme of complaint in the despatches of the Irish deputies. Even his personal influence, and the splendid endowments out of which it arose, were brought as damning proofs against him. These also may have induced the Queen to judge for herself; for the handsome absentee was received like O’Neil with a show of tenderness, though not, alas! like him, “dismissed with favour.” While history has briefly thrown off the facts of his summons, to court his detention, and his unexpected execution, tradition has woven his 54story in the many-coloured web of her own romantic loom; and though the catastrophe of the tale, which still circulates in the neighbourhood of his ruined castle, attests the ignorance or the love of the marvellous of those who invented and circulated it; still there is a dovetailing of the old Irish Shanaos with historic record, which shows that si cela n’étoit pas vrai, c’étoit bien vraisemblable.
“A wild story concerning O’Rourke,” says the author of the History of the Irish Bards, “wanders about the County of Leitrim. O’Rourke was a powerful and turbulent chieftain of this country in the reign of Elizabeth. The Queen invited him to London, making him, at the same time, warm professions of honours and service, though she only intended, by this invitation, to lead him into a kind of exile, in order to secure his obedience. The ingenuous O’Rourke, duped by the Queen’s arts, promised to comply. Before his departure, he 55assembled his vassals and neighbours in the great hall of his castle, and entertained them with all the splendour of the times.[20] This 56is the feast so humorously described by Mac Gauran.
“On O’Rourke’s arrival at Whitehall, the Queen was ready to receive him. The elegant symmetry of his person, and his noble aspect, struck her Majesty, and she secretly determined to rank him with her choicest favourites. A sumptuous apartment was allotted him in the palace, and a train of domestics were ordered to attend him. One night, a female tapped at his door, and was readily admitted; but she retired before the morning broke. The lady continued her visits for several nights, always retiring about the same hour. O’Rourke’s curiosity was awakened and he often urged her, but in vain, to disclose her name. At length he discovered, by the light of the moon, a ring on one of her fingers, which he observed with strict care, in the hope that it would lead to a discovery. Next day espying the identical ring on her Majesty’s finger, he unfortunately insinuated 57to her that he had discovered his fair visitor. The following night an assassin was employed to punish him for his idle curiosity.” The public execution of O’Rourke is however on historical record.[21]
The fate of O’Neil, O’Rourke, and of O’Connor, who, to his own eternal disgrace,[22] had 58been lured over to the English court, was not calculated to encourage others, or to bring absenteeship into fashion. Even those, who from long sufferings, harassed spirits, and subdued energies, were desirous of peace and forgiveness at the expense of independence, were still afraid, from experienced treachery, “to come in,” as the phrase was; and were unwilling to absent themselves from the fearful security of their woods and mountains, to which they were romantically attached.
Lord Deputy Mountjoy, in a curious letter to the English council, observes that “all the Irish that are now obstinate, are so only out of 59their diffidence to be safe in forgiveness. They have the ancient swelling of liberty of their countrymen to work on, and they fear to be rooted out, and have their old faults punished upon particular discontents.”
The plunder of Shane O’Neil, who, attainted, and driven beyond the pale of law and of humanity, died a miserable death, did not satisfy those who had benefited by his ruin. There was something too terrible to be endured in the name of these fierce toparchs of the North, who were still crowned in their stone chair, “with heaven for their canopy and earth for their footstool;” and when the young and gallant Hugh O’Neil, the last of his race, worthy of their illustrious descent, started up to claim his inheritance, his death or his absenteeship (a political decease) were the alternatives proposed to themselves by those who had so largely profited by the confiscation of the immense 60property of his family. “In an Irish parliament,” says Morrison, “O’Neil put up his petition, that by virtue of letters patent granted to his grandfather, his father, and their heirs, he might there (in parliament) have the place of Earl of Tyrone, and be admitted to his inheritance. The title and place were granted him:” but the inheritance was “reserved for the Queen’s pleasure;” for the obtaining whereof, Sir John Perrot, (Lord Deputy,) upon O’Neil’s promise of a great rent to be reserved to the crown, gave him letters of recommendation into England. There he well knew how to humour the court; for in the year 1587 he got the queen’s letters patent for the earldom of Tyrone without any reservation of the rent he had promised.
Whatever was O’Neil’s secret for “humouring the court,” great efforts were made to fix him there as a permanent absentee; and the queen (who at the same time had the young 61and unfortunate Earl of Desmond shut up in the Tower[23]) gave O’Neil a troop of horse, a pension of a thousand marks, and such proofs of her personal favour, as might have subdued a less energetic mind, and abated a less deep-seated feeling of patriotism and independence. But the young Irish Hercules soon became weary of the court of his middle-aged Omphale. He sought “to do her Majesty service” in Ireland by his influence over his countrymen, rather 62than to submit to the bondage which he foresaw awaited his protracted residence in England. “He lived,” says Morrison, “sometimes in Ireland and much at the court of England:” yet by degrees he abandoned the English court altogether; and, resuming his natural position in Ireland as Earl of Tyrone, he contrived to preserve the good opinion of his countrymen even while acting for the queen, “with all the alacrity of a faithful subject.”
The reappearance of O’Neil in Ireland, his loyalty, and the queen’s favour, threw the Irish government into utter consternation; and the Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam, upon the execution of M‘Mahon (who was put to death for an offence committed before the law which declared it capital had been enacted) let fall some speeches against the Earl of Tyrone (says Morrison) notwithstanding his late services,[24] “which 63speeches coming to the Earl’s ears, were, as he afterwards said, the first causes which moved him to misdoubt his safety, and to stand upon his defence, now first combining with O’Donnel and other lords of the north, to defend their honour, estates, and liberties.” The horrors which ensued during a civil war of ten years’ duration, and which laid waste what Lord Verulam calls “the most miserable and desolate nation on 64the face of the earth,” produced the most effectual species of absenteeship; for it sent out of the world, those that were not driven by any other means out of the country; exterminating more than a third of the native population!
The queen, however, says Bacon, “sought not an extirpation, but a reduction;” but such was the reduction, that at the end of the war, when Lord Mountjoy received the submission of a few “well-disposed chiefs,” he disposed of the others in a very summary way, “and by fire, famine, or sword, weakened or ruined most of those who still continued obstinate.” Still, however, the master-blow of this deputy (who was after all one of the best Irish viceroys who served under the Tudors) was the ruin of the once magnanimous and invincible O’Neil. Having “taken the most of his fortresses, and what perhaps was more mortifying to him, having broken in pieces the chair of stone, wherein for many centuries the O’Neils of his family had 65been invested with more than kingly authority, he obliged the unfortunate chief “to tender his submission on his knees before the Lord Deputy and the council, and in the presence of a great assembly; whereupon the Lord Deputy, in the Queen’s name, promised the Earl for himself and his followers her majesty’s gracious pardon.” Is it wonderful that in the ensuing reign the O’Neils and the O’Donnels fled for ever from the scene of their sufferings and humiliation; or that having chosen Spain as the goal of their permanent absenteeship, they should have arrived there, only to die of broken hearts?
Remote as are the times, the events of which are here so slightly touched,—unfixed, capricious and despotic as were the government and the laws,—rude, wild, weak and disorganized as was the state of society,—yet, through the obscurity and confusion which hung over the neglected annals of the day, it is evident 66that absenteeism, sometimes encouraged or enforced by the English policy, was foreign to the national habits and natural temperament of the Irish; and that the aristocracy of the country were more than any other wedded to their native land by natural affection, by family pride, by power, by religion, and by every feeling and every prejudice which brightens or shadows the mixed and imperfect condition of humanity. Hitherto emigration had been the result of necessity or of despair; but it was reserved for the Stuarts, Ireland’s direst foes, the flatterers of her foible, and the enemies of her rights, to give a spell to absenteeism, which even the policy and the despotism of the Tudors could not lend to it. When the rude home of the Irish had by the sanguinary crusades of Elizabeth been rendered no longer endurable, the Stuarts held out a lure and presented a blandishment which suffering humanity could not resist; and under an impulse, consecrated 67by a mistaken sense of loyalty and chivalrous devotion, the long-enduring Irish rushed from the dreariness of their desolate abodes, and thronged to a court where they fancied they saw the representative of their native kings, seated on the throne of their foreign tyrants.
The drivelling and despotic pedant, James, with the true family instinct towards power, sought to win over that portion of his subjects whose religion preached “passive obedience and the divine right of kings,” and with whom he had so deeply tampered in the reign of his predecessor. On his coming to the throne, he loaded the Irish with favours, while he withheld rights; but with a disingenuous and stupid policy, secretly counteracting the intentions of his own council, he privately led the Irish to an open assumption of religious privileges, which he permitted his ministers in Ireland to oppose, not only by remonstrance and proclamation, but by “fire and sword.” To ingratiate himself still 68further with the Irish gentry, and to break down whatever yet remained of devotion to their country, or of “the old swelling of liberty,” inherited from their fathers, he invited the most distinguished among them to his court; where, “graciously received by the king,” and incontinently ridiculed by the courtiers, they obtained the honour of being made the heroes of a court masque, in which the sarcastic laureate, Jonson, has handed down to posterity their devotion to “the king’s sweet faish,” and the melancholy fact that they danced “a fadan” for the amusement of “King Yamish;” who, as the arch-patron of all buffoonery, doubtless chuckled over the degrading exhibition. How many Irish absentees have since danced “the fadan,” for the amusement of mystifying royalty![25] 69
Thus prepared, by being “brayed as in a mortar” at home, and at once degraded and 70flattered abroad, the Irish nobility but too willingly lent themselves to the allurements held 71out by Charles the Second; (the falsest of all their royal friends;) and from the epoch of the 72Restoration absenteeship became a voluntary habit. It was then that what has been called the characteristic virtue of the Irish, became the source of one of their peculiar vices; and that the feeling of loyalty which had led them to follow the king in his misfortunes, and to embrace his almost hopeless cause in many a distant land, now once more lured them from their own, to “share the triumph and partake the gale” of his prosperity. The habits of a great capital and a gay court confirmed their taste for emigration, and excited a disgust for their native land, which became, in the end, as fatal to their interests as it was destructive of their patriotism. Then absenteeism became a species of national malady, a disease, infinitely 73more grievous in its effects than that terrible pestilence, which, a little before, in ravaging the population of Ireland, confined its mortal epidemia to a season and a generation.[26]
Absenteeism was no longer limited to the harassed Catholic gentlemen or loyal cavaliers, who came to seek the price of their sacrifice and their fidelity at the exchequer of royal gratitude, and found it, like that of the nation, closed by a fraudulent bankruptcy. The wealthy and the noble, the Protestant and the Papist, the English by blood, and the Scotch 74patentees; in a word, all who could afford to fly, now hastened to a court, where for a time an Irish mistress and an Irish minister held the ascendant; and where the Ormondes, the Ossorys, and the Villars, exchanged the honourable retreat of their own beautiful residences in Ireland, for the entresol of a royal villa at Newmarket, or “a lodging” in the harem of Whitehall.[27] Titles, and places, and 75pensions, and privileges, were then scattered among the Irish nobility, and became the premium 76of absenteeism; paying the sacrifice of patriotism in one sex, and of honour in the other. The talent, beauty, and virtue, which, if concentrated at home, might have redeemed and adorned the country from whence they were drawn, now served but to increase the sum of elegant profligacy in that region, whose very atmosphere was as fatal to manly independence, as it was to female purity. Ireland, thus abandoned by the heads of her noble families, deserted by her rank, her talent, her beauty, and her education, pouring out the “profits of the land to those who refunded nothing,”—unhappy 77Ireland, during the whole of the reign of Charles II. exhibited the most deplorable picture of a country left a prey to strangers, to undertakers, to patentees, to delegated powers, and official despotism; and of a society which, false in its position, and divested of all those ties and combinations which bind man to man, was totally destitute of every element that confers the strength of political cohesion, and disseminates the advantages of moral civilization.
In the midst of this anti-social chaos, every act of the legislature served to render the atoms of the system more jarring and discordant, until finally “the Act of Settlement,” by unsettling every thing and rendering “confusion worse confounded,” added insult to injury, and multiplied both the causes and the effects of absenteeism to the opulent of all sects. The country was now more than ever given up to a particular faction, which 78made its powerful stand on the heights of ascendancy, under the sanction of a king who, in a great degree, owed his life and throne to those whom that ascendancy was to reduce to slavery and ruin.[30] It was at this period, more than any other, that the stale devices of Catholic conspiracies and Popish plots were resorted 79to, as a means of startling a distant ignorant legislature into new acts of rigour, which, by crushing all that remained to be crushed, by forfeitures and penalties, was to elevate a factious minority of the nation to the supremacy of power and wealth.
The English Parliament, frightened, or pretending to be so, by the state of things in Ireland, published a proclamation “for the apprehension and prosecution of all Irish rebels,” at a moment when Ireland had sealed by her best blood her devotion to the reigning dynasty; and the King, in the face of his pledged honour and royal promise, excluded from the act of indemnity (which was shortly after passed) more than two thirds of his Irish subjects, who had alone been faithful to him, when all else were false. While calumny and misrepresentation were thus working the destruction of Ireland abroad, there were none at home 80to “remonstrate,” as in the time of Elizabeth and James; none to protect or vindicate the national character, or to raise the dark veil, which the cupidity of domestic and predatory enemies had dropped over the injuries, the worth, and the misfortunes of the country. It is still more lamentable to add, that some of the most illustrious of the absentees, who haunted the Court as dependants, or influenced the Cabinet as counsellors, found it their account to sanction the misrepresentations, and to perpetuate a state of things by which the noble renegadoes were to be themselves the ultimate gainers. It is the effect of absenteeship to harden the heart against all the precious sympathies of patriotism, and it has ever been the practice of absentees to magnify and circulate the rumour of those national disorders which arise in part out of their own desertion of their native land, and which they suppose might 81offer a reason, if not an excuse, for their abandonment of the soil and its interests.[31]
82The times, however, changed with the men, and the short reign of the unfortunate bigot James II. was pregnant with new and important events for Ireland. At the first temporary turn of the scale in Irish politics, absenteeism, which could scarcely increase, certainly did not diminish. By this change, the nation at large gained little; and the mean ambition of the nobility, who accepted power and place without one feeling of patriotism or sympathy for the country, 83was soon nipped in the bud, and for ever blasted with the fortunes of the monarch, on whose favour it was founded.[32] The Irish gentry supported the cause of despotism and 84bigotry in vain; and the impetuous imbecility of James served only to hasten that ruin, which public opinion had so deservedly prepared for him and his family. The mistaken adherence of the people to so bad a cause, was, in some measure redeemed by the disinterested fidelity with which they continued to serve that family in its adversity, which in prosperity had always repaid their services with ingratitude. It was the Irish (the ultra-royalists of all times) who, during the dark fortunes of the worthless protégé of the Bourbons, clung to him, when all else deserted him. They manned his navy, recruited his army, replenished his coffers, and took their stand around his person on their native soil; and when they saw him the first to fly,[33] they still erected his torn standard, and 85rallied in his cause,[34] paying the penalty of their generous but misapplied devotion to a bigot and a tyrant, by utter ruin, and eternal exile. The outlawry and confiscations of 1688 drove near four thousand Irishmen of family into a dreary and perpetual absenteeism, and sent them 86to dole out for a pitiful hire, in the cause of oppression in other countries, the same valour, and the same spirit, which their fathers had displayed in support of the liberty of their own.
The sale of the estates of these unfortunate and involuntary absentees,[35] under the authority of the English parliament, changed a large portion of the Irish population, and introduced a new race of landed proprietors, whose interest it was to stay at home. The tide of absenteeship received a powerful check from the necessity of circumstances. Those Irish Catholics, who had escaped detection, or were exempt from suspicion, retired to their remote patrimonial domains, and sought safety in obscurity; hoping, by remaining peaceably at home, to escape the notice of a government which had sprung out of a revolution they had so lately 87opposed. The Protestants likewise found it their interest to remain the vigilant guardians of the new possessions they had recently acquired, and of the old, which they had so bravely protected. All parties were either impoverished or unsettled; and few had the means, if they had the desire, to remove from a scene of ferment and desolation, to one of security and enjoyment. For the Irish of any sect or race, there was then no resting-place.
While England gained every thing by a revolution, which she owed to the moral and political education acquired during a century of struggle for civil rights and religious freedom, Ireland lost nearly all she had left to lose through her deficiency in these endowments, resulting from many centuries of anarchy and misrule. The picture, sketched by a master-hand, of the condition of affairs at this singular epoch, is full of a fearful and melancholy interest. “By the total reduction of the kingdom of Ireland in 1691,” says Burke, “the 88ruin of the native Irish, and in a great measure of the first race of the English, was completely accomplished. The new interest was settled with as solid a stability as any thing in human affairs can look for. All the penal laws of that unparalleled code of oppression which were made after the last event, were manifestly the effects of national hatred and scorn towards a conquered people, whom the victors delighted to trample upon, and were not at all afraid to provoke. They were not the effects of their fears, but of their security. They who carried on this system looked to the irresistible force of Great Britain for their support in their acts of power. They were quite certain that no complaints of the natives would be heard on this side of the water, with any other sentiments than those of contempt and indignation. Their cries served only to augment their torture. Machines which could answer their purposes so well must be of an excellent contrivance. Indeed, at that time, in 89England, the double name of the complainants, Irish and Papists, (it would be hard to say singly which was the most odious,) shut up the hearts of every one against them. Whilst that temper prevailed in all its force to a time within our memory, every measure was pleasing and popular, just in proportion as it tended to harass and ruin a set of people who were looked upon as enemies to God and man; and, indeed, as a race of bigoted savages, who were a disgrace to human nature itself.”[36]
In spite, however, of religious intolerance[37] 90and civil disqualification—of statutes which render commerce a crime, and laws which made industry penal[38]; of abuses of power numerous 91under William, and quadrupled under the last of the Stuarts and the first of the Brunswicks, still something like a counterpoise was found to balance these political evils in the home residence of the educated gentry, and in the political bustle and activity of an Irish Parliament. As soon as the positive calamities of war and confiscation ceased, as soon as an approach was made to European habits and policy, and industry was permitted to find a scope and a reward for its exertions, the nation made a sudden and a rapid progress in civilization and comfort, simply through the efficiency of its own resources, and the demands of its own market. It was in vain that the talismanic words “Irishman” and “Papist” were employed to arm passion and prejudice against the country; it was in vain that commercial jealousy threw 92shackles round its infant manufactures. In spite of these and many other obstacles, the moral strength of a country always distinguished for the natural endowments of its population,[39] rose superior to the cruel pressure of its political inflictions; and the domestic activity and intellectual improvement of the people—slow and limited as they appear, when compared with the advances of the sister kingdom—proceeded with a rapidity little short of miraculous, under so stultifying a system of legislation and government. It was then that the light of national genius concentrated its long-scattered rays to a 93point, and shining steadily from its proper focus, threw out those inextinguishable sparks of moral lustre,
“⸺Which are wont to give
Light to a world and make a nation live.”
It was then that the powerful collision of active, ardent, and energetic minds produced that brilliant burst of talent which, for something more than a century, flung over the political darkness of the land a splendour to which her struggles and her misfortunes served only to give a stronger relief and more brilliant effect. It was then that, after ages of mental depression, which the song of the Irish bard but deepened into a more poetical sadness,[40] the Irish intellect broke 94out, like the Irish rebellion, “threescore thousand strong,” when none expected or were prepared for the startling and splendid irruption. The old mart of learning was re-opened to the erudite of Europe, as in those times, when if a sage was missing, it was said “emandatus est ad disciplinam in Hibernia;” and the rich stream of native humour which, like a caverned river, had hitherto kept the “noiseless tenor of its way,” darkened by impending shadows, now 95rushed forth with the rapidity of a torrent, pure, sparkling, and abundant, at the first vent afforded to its progress. Science and philosophy now first raised their altars amidst the monkish monuments of an antiquated institution, and benefited the world by theories and by experiments originated in a land where public opinion and private faith were still struggling under the ban of legal proscription.[41] England then opened a running account with Ireland for dramatic contributions when her own resources had, by being too largely drawn upon, nearly become bankrupt;[42] and literary Europe stood indebted 96to Irish wit, fancy, and humour, for the richest treats, which render the leisure of the learned delectable, and the amusement of the idle instructive.[43]
97Even the arts, in these stirring times of social concentration, awakened from their long and deadly slumbers; and the slowly reviving school of painting in England received some of its most noted disciples from Ireland, a country so little adapted, by its miseries and its commotions, to the cultivation of the most tranquil and meditative of intellectual pursuits.[44] At this time, too, the Irish muse found a willing and a worthy priestess in one of the fair daughters of the land,[45] where her temples had so long been closed; and “the mother of sweet singers,” awakened by the genius of national melody, beheld her sons
“Thronging round her magic cell,”
99The triumphs of Carolan, the last of the Firsgealaighthes or Irish Troubadours, were followed by those of Handel and Piccini;[48] and though the wild sweet tones of the Irish harp were still occasionally heard in the pauses of 100the Messiah and of the elegant Armida, still, taste, improving with the developement of the art, soon rendered the Italian and German schools of music the exclusive study in Ireland; and they excited an enthusiasm which well belonged to a people who, in all their wretchedness and degradation, had found in music a vehicle for their feelings and their passions, for their deep-seated indignation, and their long-meditated revenge. St. Bridget now hid her diminished head in her “cell of the oak;[50] while St. Cecilia saw more tapers lighted 101at her shrine in the Irish capital than ever illumined her dusky chapel in the Trastevere at Rome. Music halls were built for public concerts; and musical societies, assuming the importance and dignities of corporate bodies, were formed out of the amateur[51] and professional talent of the country; while the conciliating genius of harmony, refusing that “to a party which was meant for mankind,” devoted its divine powers to smoothing political austerities, reknitting the social affections, and promoting the first of all human virtues—charity.[52] Oh! 102surely this was the true purpose for which the Divinity breathed into the soul of man that fine susceptibility to the mystic charm of harmony, which lulls the harsher passions, and substitutes the excitement of delicious sensations for the bitter feelings and harassing emotions which the cross purposes of life call hourly into existence. Who now in Ireland but may look back with regret to the philharmonic societies “of other times,” from the magic of whose strains a shelter rose for the wretched, and in whose bands men of all parties blended the “concord of sweet sounds.” Who that in the present day has witnessed in the capital of Ireland, the different and dark purposes to which music and musical society have been perverted, but must lament that the sweetest of the arts should have been pressed into the service of civil dissension—should have fulfilled the purposes of party intrigue, and gratified the malice of a narrow-souled faction. Who but must 103shudder to perceive its influence directed to rousing the irritable fibre, and stirring up the bile of political malady; to exciting by its “musical cheers” the passions of the powerful few against the suffering many, and fomenting by its choicest harmonies the discord of social disunion and the dissonance of party hatred. Spirits of Handel and of Arne, of Calcott and of Mozart, how little did ye dream in your philosophy that your heaven-inspired strains should serve as the war-whoop of faction, the death-song of domestic peace, and national confraternity!!
While music excited in Ireland the same enthusiasm, and was cultivated with more science, than when “in early Greece she sung,” the drama partook of the triumph. Two royal theatres and an Italian opera-house[53] could 104scarcely supply the cravings of the public taste; and an audience, noted for its critical acumen, gave to the Irish stage a classical character, and developed a competition which drew forth candidates for dramatic fame even from the higher classes of society, conferring that respectability upon the members of the stage, which ought at all times to belong to a profession which holds so decided an influence over the morals and the manners of a nation.[54]
But though the circumstances of the times rendered the home residence of the Irish gentry more permanent than it has since ever been, or 105perhaps ever was before, the fashion universally prevailed of sending the youth of good family to make the grand tour; and the young and travelled aristocracy, the Fitzgeralds, the Caulfields, the Kirwans, the O’Neils, the Blakes, came back, no less to improve the tastes of their country, than to defend her cause, and to enlarge the sphere of her energies. A variety of refined amusements and elegant enjoyments, hitherto unknown in Ireland, came in their suite; which while they gave employment and food to the lowly and the industrious, tended to disseminate that taste for factitious pleasures, and that craving for refined gratifications, which though not in themselves the efficient causes of civilization, are in no small degree favourable to its developement.[55] Pleasure, lured to the Irish 106shores from distant regions, planted her gay standard, and raised her brilliant pavilions in the capital, at that time crowded with the wealthy and the educated. The ridottos of the music hall, with their fantastic arrangements and sylvan scenery,[56] recalled the similar festivities of the Italian carnival. Palaces succeeded to 107the cumbrous mansions of the seventeenth century; and Charlemont house, with its beautiful architecture, its splendid library, and invaluable collections, still preserved in all their integrity by the present noble owner, stands a singular monument not only of the pure taste and magnificent spirit of an Irish nobleman, who had even higher claims to the admiration and respect of his country, but of the genius of the times, and the prosperity—the short-lived prosperity—of the land in which such a private edifice was raised. The villas of Tuscany and Lombardy were repeated along the shores of a bay that wanted only a Vesuvius to rival that of Naples; and the names which these pretty villas still bear, recal the travelled tastes of their elegant founders.[57] Private theatricals 108(the dramatis personæ taken from the red book) were got up in the castles of the O’Neils and the halls of the Butlers; and the public assemblies, held under the newly-raised dome of the Rotunda, were types of the casino nobile of Florence and Bologna;[58] while the Sunday evening promenades in its illuminated gardens contributed to the funds of a blessed charity, and bestowed that health and those spirits, without which the kindlier feelings are too frequently blighted, and the generous propensities absorbed in a querulous and fretful egoism.[59]
109The Irish press!—and who that now knows the capital of Ireland, and beholds its utter incompetency to support the publication of even one trifling periodical work, will believe that Ireland once had a press!—the Irish press then teemed with native literary productions; which if as mere “pieces de circonstance,” thrown off at a heat, they might sometimes want the higher finish of more elaborated composition, were still stamped with the ardour of the national spirit, and “faithful to its fires.” The frequent and “keen encounter of the wits” upon great questions, produced an animated competition, which even the statesman-like sobriety 110of English viceroys could not always resist. The Draper’s letter of Lord Chesterfield, (an imitation of Swift,) and the political caricatures of Lord Townshend, written at a later period, were proofs that Ireland was not always governed by the dull and the dogged, and that her metropolis once boasted of a society which obliged the representatives of majesty as well as the representatives of the people to cultivate the suffrages of the public, by means never addressed to an uncivilized or an illiterate community. Politics and polemics then alike fell to the discussion of humour and talent. The public journals, though few, were fair; their editors were responsible both by their property and their personal consideration; and their contributors were frequently the most brilliant members of Irish society, the most learned sons of the Irish alma mater. Swift, Dr. Sheridan, Lucas, Flood, Burgh, Yelverton, Courtenay, Jephson, Bishop Marley, Grattan, 111Curran, and others equally notable, if not equally noted, contributed successively a portion of their luminous intellects to illustrate the pages of that mighty engine of public feeling—the Periodical Press. Whatever side was advocated,—the country or the court, patriotism or power,—it does not appear that any journal was set up on a merely sordid principle, or an utter disregard of all truth and decency. There was then no waylaying with indiscriminate ruffianism the feelings of private individuals, no exhibition of the sacred details of the domestic life of political characters, as a means of existence to some outcast of society, who wanted the courage to seek a less dishonourable bread on the public highway. For when the genuine and educated gentry of Ireland, her hereditary senators and native legislators, made up the larger portion of the reading public of her capital, a journal edited by the nefarious and the base, by the hired assassin 112of reputation or the paid pander of ribald passions, would have been hunted down with one common feeling of national indignation and manly contempt. Where is the land, so lost in its degradation, so insensible to all its higher interests, as to endure that such a “damning witness” should go forth to the world and bear testimony to its moral, social, and literary depravity? Alas that there should be one! Alas that the land of wit and feeling should furnish forth readers, even from its high and official classes, to reward and encourage the instruments of its own disgrace! Alas for the country, where the hired servants of the government club their quota to propagate the rancorous overflowings of the vilest and most antisocial passions; where the ordained ministers of religion, subscribe for the dissemination of the grossest and most mischievous falsehoods; where the magistrate chuckles privately over the libel he is publicly bound to punish; and 113where to be pre-eminent in villainy and matchless in audacity, is the short road to command sympathy and ensure subsistence.
But if a reduction of absenteeism, if the permanent residence of the major part, of the wealth, the nobility, and above all, and more precious than all, of the Education of the country, produced these blessed effects, the greater good, the “last best gift,” which congregated interests and intellects could bestow on a community, Public Spirit, fell like dew in the desert upon the renovating nation. Men who had long learned to feel and to think, now, in the consciousness and confidence of their associated strength, first ventured to speak and to act: at once inspiring and inspired, they spoke as prophets and acted as patriots. The talent of the free suddenly burst into existence, as if by a divine miracle in the land of the enslaved; and eloquence, the inherent characteristic of the nation, which had occasionally 114broken forth in the rude but exciting harangues of the O’Donnels and the O’Neils, now shone out brilliantly, with a lustre which Athens in her best, and Rome in her greatest days, scarcely surpassed. Political oratory and political knowledge, proceeding from the same cause and bearing on the same point exhibited Ireland in a new aspect to the wondering world; and the names of Molyneux,[60] Ponsonby,[61] 115Prior,[62] Boyle,[63] Connolly,[64] Tottenham,[65] Lucas, Charlemont, Burke, Grattan, Curran—names 116which are now but sounds—will retain to the latest posterity their mystical and magic influence, as the signs of times and events, the glory of a nation’s history, and as the evoquing spells of that genius, which awakens liberty and watches over a nation’s happiness. Oh! these were times to live in and men to live among—when the capital of the kingdom was something better than a garrison or an assize town! when its fashionable assemblies were not thrown upon the eleemosinary contributions of barracks and boarding-schools, of military exquisites who “never dance,” and harmless young gentlemen who do nothing else! These 117were times, when the men were all at home, and their spirits all abroad! when the rush from the senate was sure to fill the drawing-room; and they who boldly fought in the one for the liberties of their country, came to lay their own liberty at the feet of beauty in the other. These were times, when even love and law went forth arm in arm together from the inns of court, to that court, where the special pleading of counsel rarely failed to win the cause, where even losses were victories, and where the inconsiderate heart of the young legal aspirant selected its client for life without reference to politics, place, pension, or promotion. Then Leinster-house, and Charlemont-house, and Powerscourt-house, and Waterford-house, and Moira-house, and an hundred other splendid “houses” of the resident nobility, were open to the wit, the talent, the literature, and the gallantry of the country. Then, the cells of the University, silent as the tomb during the studious day, echoed at night to the 118song, the laugh, the epigram, or the jest of gay and brilliant spirits destined to come forth and enchant society by their social and colloquial powers; while they defended the independence of their country by their eloquence and patriotism. These were times when the charms of the lovely Gunnings, the more lovely Munroes,[66] and an hundred others of their lovely successors, were embalmed for posterity in the verses of contemporary poets; and when the amatory sonnets of one of the first orators of the age were not deemed inferior to his speeches at the bar, or his orations in the senate.[67] These were times when the young 119ladies of the capital did not wait for the marching in of the divisions of a regiment, as their only chance of marching out of the ranks of celibacy; for absenteeship was then but temporary: the young nobility and gentry, if they travelled and flirted abroad, came back to love and to marry at home; since, “where’er they roamed, whatever climes” they saw, they still saw nothing fairer than the fair they left behind them. These were times, which, when recalled, like Ossian’s Song of Sorrow, are both “pleasing and mournful to the soul.”
But to return. When penal statutes and all that is intended by the false policy of shallow 120and self-interested legislators to disqualify man for the knowledge and assertion of his political rights, still continued to check the progress of civil liberty in Ireland, the combined effects of a portion of the liberal and educated resident gentry were found sufficient to make head against a government which the sternest upholder of English power, and he too an Irish chancellor,[68] declared “was enough to crush any nation upon earth;” and which one of the wisest and best philanthropists of that or any age[69] has defined to have been “such a combination of rapine, treachery, and violence as would have disgraced the name of government in the most arbitrary country in the world.” Other events, bearing upon the same point, tended at this epoch to soften, if not to remedy the evils of that terrific code, which disgraced England even more than it degraded Ireland.[70] 121While the church militant in Ireland usurped a power in the persons of its Protestant popes, the primates and archbishops, which smelt of the times of the Beckets and the Wolseys,—while Boulter and Stone preserved their own supremacy by their well-sustained system of dividing Ireland within herself, and adding to her restrictions by fomenting her discontents,—it did happen that the necessity of circumstances occasionally procured for the country a chief governor, whose personal interests in the land from which he drew his maintenance and support, awakened “some bowels for a poor 122relation,” or whose higher order of genius and generalized views raised him above the level of the miserable local politics, the petty cabals, and factious intrigues of that remote and wretched spot which is, in position as in politics, the cul de sac of civilized Europe. These happy incidents indeed were rare, and make but a poor set-off in the balance, of vice-regal virtue and talent, against the dulness, bigotry, and ostentatious pretension, which have so often covered their Midas’ ears under the coronet of delegated sway.
It was under a Devonshire that the susceptible Irish, always led by personal feelings, first began to rally with confidence and hope round a government that seemed to abate in the execution, if not in the spirit of the law, something of that sanguinary reign which had hitherto chilled loyalty into despair; and the personal qualities of this great Irish proprietor were productive of the most felicitous effects, at the 123most fearful epoch in the reign of the house of Hanover. The Stuarts, the abdicated, the Catholic Stuarts, had planted their standard on the English and Scottish shores, and the English and the Scotch, to a dangerous amount, rushed from all parts to support the principles of Toryism, in the person of him who was the “brief abstract” of all Toryism. Where then in this moment of frightful exigency, when empire, liberty, and life were at stake, where then were those “enfans de la revolution,” the Protestant princes of Brunswick, the defenders of the faith of Luther, to look for the rally of defence, for the protection of loyalty against Catholic oppression? It was to the native Irish, the Catholic Irish! that England, in the face of her own savage laws,[71] turned for aid against British rebellion; and while the Irish gentry of all sects remained immutably true to their legitimate 124(or according to modern doctrines their illegitimate) sovereign, the flower of the Catholic population rushed forth to man the navy and recruit the army, which was to make a stand against successful rebellion,—successful at least for a time, in every part of the British islands save alone in Ireland.
Still, however, in this moment of fearful exigency, when the old idols of Irish devotion were again presenting themselves to a susceptible people in all the charm of struggle and misfortune, something more than the mild wisdom which the gentle blood of Cavendish has always produced, was deemed necessary to watch over Catholic Ireland; and one was chosen suited to meet the difficulties of the day, and to carry on that system of conciliation begun by the Duke of Devonshire. This one was Philip Stanhope Earl of Chesterfield, who, as the “Mirror of (Irish) Magistrates,” in which succeeding chief governors of Ireland should “dress themselves,” merits a particular notice.
125This nobleman, who had been for ten years in opposition, was selected more in necessity than in liking: and he with difficulty obtained an audience of leave from reluctant Majesty, on his departure for his viceroyalty. When he demanded in the closet, “his Majesty’s commands,” he was coolly told that he had already received his instructions, and was dismissed without any token of confidence or of courtesy. While the ministry put him forward as an instrument of conciliation, and loaded him with the responsibility of a difficult government, they wished to retain in their own hands the substance of power, and to shackle him with some creature of their own, in the character of secretary; but he laughed at the intrigue, and in their despite chose for himself one, whom he describes to his son as “a very pretty young fellow, who knew nothing of business;” for he was determined to rule by himself, to see with his own eyes, and to encounter no subaltern interference 126with the system he chose to adopt. Such was the spirit in which Lord Chesterfield entered on his arduous mission, and ascended the vice-regal throne of Ireland, on which he was placed by that influence to which even kings and ministers must sometimes submit,—the influence of circumstances! Docile mediocrity, the ordinary qualification of an Irish Lord Lieutenant, was now no longer adequate to meet the exigencies of the hour, as in those times of comparative tranquillity, when any stalking-horse of diplomacy might be led over the beaten course by some self-sufficient political jockey with the name of chief secretary; who, without the pageantry of the higher office, monopolized all its patronage and exercised more than its powers. At this moment dangers both internal and external called for qualities of a different order, and the English government was driven to the desperate resource of accepting the aid of great abilities, at the expense of abiding by the decisions 127of untrammelled independence. Such was the moment at which George the Second disdainfully appointed one of the cleverest men of his empire to the government of Ireland; and to this involuntary election he probably owed that he was not himself sent back “to give his little senate laws” in his patrimonial estate of Hanover.