III

During the early part of the reign of Henry VIII. the policy of the English government was a continuation of that of Henry VII. It was a policy of conciliation and of ruling through the great Irish chiefs, the heads of the Butlers, the Geraldines, and the O’Neills, who were gratified by the bestowal of English titles of nobility, with flattering marks of confidence, and by a change in the tenure of their land from tribal to feudal, which invested them with full ownership. The Irish chief and the feudal baron of the Pale now sat in Parliament together for the first and last time. There appears to have been an inclination on the part of the Crown to favour the native Irish, it being still remembered perhaps that the Anglo-Irish had supported the Yorkist pretenders. The king himself penned a sage and benevolent manifesto, in the shape of a despatch to the Lord Deputy Surrey, on the blessings of civilization. The policy of conciliation was in fact necessary as well as laudable; for the king, plunged by his diplomacy into continental embroilments and lavishing his father’s hoard on a Field of the Cloth of Gold, had not the means of subduing Ireland. It would have been vain to look in those days for the philosophy which could make allowance for a diversity of national ideas and habits. The O’Neill, upon his elevation to the earldom of Tyrone, is required with his heirs to forsake the name of O’Neill, to use English habits and the English language. The age, however, was one of growing light. Education was a passion of the hour. A decree in favour of the establishment of a system of free schools in Ireland went forth. Unhappily it remained a decree. No homilies, no peerages, no flatteries or marks of confidence could permanently avail to quiet the intractable ambition of the great chiefs. They took the titles, which tickled their vanity; but they preferred the state of a chieftain with his gallowglasses and with his despotic power over the sept to that of a baron under royal rule, with feudal restraints and obligations. They were always at feud with each other, waging private war and ravaging each others’ territories with the ruthlessness of the most cruel invader. Murders among them were frequent. Conspiracies were always on foot. Thus the catastrophe of the house of Kildare ended what may be called the early Tudor policy of native government and conciliation. The policy of conquest with colonization in its train prevailed once more.

The instrument of that policy was to be a line of English deputies; able men on the whole and zealous in the public service, but generally incapable of understanding any national character or any institutions but their own. A deputy had also to contend with desperate difficulties, utter insufficiency of military force, an empty exchequer, a service full of jobbery and corruption, hostile intrigue both at Dublin and in the court at home.

The line was opened by Skeffington, a good though somewhat decrepit soldier, before whose artillery fell the redoubtable native fortress of Maynooth. The Crown had now a new and formidable force upon its side in the cannon, which it alone could afford to maintain. In Ireland as elsewhere the end of the feudal fortress had come.

At the same time there were forfeited to the Crown great tracts of land held by absentees, the feudal principle still prevailing and military service being still a condition of the ownership of land. The Crown thereby became a landowner on a vast scale, with the means of planting settlements in all the districts under its power. Thus a wide field was opened for Crown colonization.

But now comes an event most momentous in itself and fraught with future woe to Ireland. Henry VIII., enraged at the refusal of the Pope to let him put away his wife and marry another woman, breaks with the Papacy, carries his kingdom out of its dominion, declares himself supreme head of a national Church, dissolves the monasteries, seizes their estates, and half reforms the church in a Protestant sense, breaking the worshipped images, closing the shrines, expurgating the liturgy, and licensing the translation of the Bible. He seizes into his own hands under the mask of a congé d’élire the appointments to the bishoprics. Wavering to the last in opinion between Catholicism and Protestantism according as the party of the old or that of the new aristocracy prevailed in his councils, he in the upshot practically ranges his kingdom on the Protestant side in the grand struggle that was to come between the Catholic and the Protestant powers.

In Ireland there was one religion but there were two Churches: that of the Pale and that of the native Irish; divided from each other, not by doctrine or ritual, but by race and language, practically treating each other as not within the pale of Christendom, hardly within the pale of humanity. No Irishman could be admitted to church preferment or to a monastery in the Pale. Nor did the churches ever act together as one Church. Both were in a most miserable condition. The edifices were in ruins, the services were unperformed. Monasteries however abounded. They were the refuge of the peaceful in that world of strife and blood. That some of them were on a large scale stately ruins prove. It is surmised that they may have been wealthy, if not in lands, in orchards, fish-ponds, mills, or the labour which seems to have been sheltered within their ample walls. Like the English monasteries, they impropriated the tithes of parishes, thus helping to kill the parochial system. The character of the clergy was still scandalously low, not seldom criminal. Among the people religion was almost dead; the remnant of it, as well as the remnant of education, was kept alive by the poor Franciscan friars. In neither Church was there the making of martyrs.

In the little maritime towns there was more religion, as well as something more like civilization. But in this as in other respects their influence was confined to their own gates.

There was no opposition in the Irish Parliament to the change of the king’s title from Dominus to Rex, whereby the sovereignty of the Pope was cancelled, to any article in the king’s assumption of autocratic power over the Church, or to his taking to himself the appointment of bishops. A show of resistance made by the proctors of the clergy in the House of Commons was promptly met by their extrusion. Nor was there the slightest unwillingness on the part of any lord or chief to take his share of the plunder of the monasteries, which, as in England, were suppressed, with confiscation of revenue and goods, including the impropriated tithes of parishes which they had served. A plea put in by the deputy on behalf of six friaries in consideration of their special services to education and their hospitality was not heard.

The iconoclastic part of the revolution, attacking the material objects of popular worship, relics, wonder-working images, and venerated shrines, seems to have encountered some natural resistance, and it appears that the government failed to put an end to pilgrimages, which were the religious pleasure-trips of the people.

The leader of the Reform movement, and specially of iconoclasm, in Ireland, under Henry VIII., was Archbishop Browne, a fervid but apparently not discreet man. He had a rather restive coadjutor in Bishop Staples. No counterpart of Cranmer, Latimer, or Ridley appeared.

The members of the council of Edward VI., being men of the new official aristocracy, opposed to the old houses, attached themselves to the party of movement in religion. In England they completed the work of confiscation, carried iconoclasm a step farther, and made Protestant reforms in the religious system, the last in conjunction with foreign reformers. Their policy in Ireland was the same. They sent over the prayer-book of Edward. But the effect appears to have been small. The way had not been prepared by the advent of Lutheranism or by the use of translations of the Bible. Besides, there was no religious feeling on which it could act. The Deputy St. Leger was a shrewd man of the world, who, while he was ready to put the law in force, disliked all religious agitation. “Tut, tut,” he said to the earnest reformer, “your religious matters will spoil all.” The way of the new liturgy was effectually blocked by the Erse language, and no missionary effort appears to have been made.

The military policy of Edward’s government had a very able though rather grim representative in Bellingham, if he had only been backed by a sufficient force. But the foreign complications of England being what they were, no sufficient force could ever be sent. The system of regular hostings against the natives is now on foot. Bellingham having stormed a position, there ensues a butchery of wood kerne, the equal of which Bellingham supposed there had never been. “Such,” the deputy says, “was the great goodness of God to deliver them into our hands.” Puritanism with its ruthlessness is making its appearance in the lists, on one side, while on the other side enters its mortal foe the Jesuit.

The government incurred deserved hatred in Ireland as in England by carrying to further lengths the debasement of the coin which had been the disgraceful shift of the spendthrift Henry VIII. A petition sent to the king upon the subject, in setting forth the folly of debasement, stated with an accuracy remarkable for the time the function of the precious metals as a medium of exchange. Wholesale fraud on the part of government was not likely to help the cause of the Reformation.

Beyond the English Pale the change of religion never reached the people. Antagonism of religion was henceforth added to estrangement of race. Protestantism was to be the religion of the conqueror; Catholicism was to be the religion of the conquered. The Pope became a rival in sovereignty to the king of England, claiming the allegiance at once of piety and patriotism. Instead of the torpid clergy of the old native Church, now came upon the scene active emissaries of Rome with the Jesuit, master of intrigue, at their head, to do the joint work of propagandism and rebellion. Presently will appear the crusading soldiery of Catholic Spain.

With Mary comes an interlude of reaction. The sovereignty was not restored to the Pope. Grantees of abbey lands in Ireland, as in England, Catholics though they might be, held fast their prey. But the old ritual was for a time legally revived, and the hand of iconoclasm was stayed. Protestantism was rabbled; but Smithfield fires, the martyr’s spirit being absent, there were none.

A story is told of an envoy sent by Mary to Ireland with a warrant of persecution, whose commission a clever Protestant woman, in whose house he put up by the way, stole and replaced by a pack of cards, so that when the deputy opened the wallet at the council board nothing came forth but the pack of cards with the knave of clubs uppermost.