V

Ireland, conquered, now became shire land, at least in contemplation of law. The law of England, in the eyes of its professors the consummation of human wisdom, ousted the Brehon law. The feudal system of land tenure supplanted the tribal system. Freehold and leasehold, primogeniture and entail, took the place of tribal ownership and tanistry. Justice was henceforth to be administered in English courts, and judges were to go circuit as in England. The change at first seemed to be well received. Perhaps novelty itself impressed. An English chief justice, going circuit through the newly Anglicized districts, could complacently report that multitudes had flocked to his court; whence he drew the cheerful inference that the Irish after all, like other men, loved justice. So they did, and do; but it was not the justice of the king’s bench and Coke. Nor did they love its administration by an alien conqueror. It was probably curiosity as much as confidence that drew them to the court of Chief Justice Davies; so the event proved.

The whole machinery of government, as well as the law and the judiciary, was at the same time assimilated, formally at least, to the English model. The corporate towns received new charters. The place of the military deputy was taken by the head of a civil government with his officials.

Unhappily the ecclesiastical polity of England, with its tests and its recusancy law, compelling attendance at the services of the State Church, was at the same time thrust upon people to whom it was in itself and in its associations abhorrent. Under Elizabeth there had been a politic laxity. Now fines for recusancy are exacted. Intolerance of Catholic dissent from the royal religion could not fail to be increased by the Gunpowder Plot.

James I., with all his pedantry, his absurdities, and his stuffed breeches, was not without something of the largeness of mind which culture generally imparts. He could understand Bacon. His Irish policy, evidently inspired by Bacon, was colonization, plantation as it then was called. For this there was ample room on the forfeited lands of Tyrone and other attainted chiefs, so far as legal ownership in the contemplation of English law was concerned. But the attainders of the chiefs had not cleared the lands of the members of their septs, in whose minds tribal ownership was rooted. This was the weak point of the transplantation policy, as in the sequel tragically appeared. Extensive grants, however, were made to a colony formed by English and Scottish settlers, undertakers as they were called. Of Scottish settlers there had before been not a few. The city of London invested largely in the enterprise. Thus was formed in Ulster, and in Ulster has continued to exist to the present time, a sort of Protestant pale. Bacon’s philosophic eye ranges complacently over the prospect of a people of barbarous manners “brought to give over and discontinue their customs of revenge and blood and of dissolute life and of theft and rapine, and to give ear to the wisdom of laws and governments; whereupon immediately followeth the cutting of stones for building and habitation, and of trees for the seats of houses, orchards, enclosures, and the like.” Beyond doubt this settlement was an improvement in material respects. Nor, though the new settlers might domineer, was their domination likely to be more oppressive and insolent than that of the native chief, with his gallowglasses and his coyne and livery. The tribal ownership of land had probably become almost a fiction, the chief treating the land as his own. Little, therefore, was actually lost in that way by the tribesman, while there was an end of coyne and livery and the other extortions of the chiefs. On the other hand the chief, however oppressive, was nominally one of the tribe and a kinsman, and the land was still tribal in the fancy of the sept. The tribesman was not liable to eviction. Nor was improvement in agriculture or even in advancement of law and order likely to be so fascinating to the native Irish, especially to gallowglasses and kernes, as to Bacon. The adventurers were apt to be of a sordid class, ravenous, close-fisted, little likely to make themselves beloved. The eagles of enterprise spread their wings for the Spanish main; the vultures swooped upon Ireland. The medley of Brehon law and English law, with the variety of titles, some by forfeiture for treason, others by ancient grants from the Crown, formed an element in which the art of the predatory pettifogger had full play. By legal chicane, the chicane of an alien law, many an Irish Naboth may have been dispossessed. There was, moreover, the antagonism of religion, greatly intensified by the long struggle in which the natives, fighting for independence, had looked up to Rome for support and been fired at heart by the active zeal of her missionaries.

The government meant well. It sent over an able lord deputy in the person of Chichester, who did his best for healing and improvement. In improvement he was somewhat hasty and procrustean. He might have done better had he only imbibed Bacon’s spirit of philosophic toleration, and not fancied that for Irish barbarism Protestantism of the Anglican type was the sovereign cure. Bacon, as one of his three specifics for the recovery of the hearts of the people, had recommended a toleration, partial and temporary at least, of the Catholic religion, which was to be combined “with the sending over of some good preachers, especially of that sort which are vehement and zealous persuaders and not scholastical, to be resident in principal towns.” The government issued a politic manifesto, promising to all native Irish of the poorer class equal protection and complete immunity from any oppressive claims of chiefs. But let the government charm as wisely as it might, it could not charm away the difference of race, language, and character, the antagonism of religion, the memories of the long and murderous struggle, the ravenous cupidity and overbearing attitude of the alien adventurer, the anguish of the native who saw the stranger in possession of his land.

James called a Parliament for all Ireland, Catholic as well as Protestant. It was packed for the Crown, which created boroughs for that purpose. Still, it was something more like a national assembly than Ireland had ever seen or in fact was destined again to see. The elections to it were fiercely contested between the races and religions. Its first sitting was characteristic. There was a division on the election of a speaker. One party went out into the lobby. In its absence the other party seated its man in the chair. The party which had gone out, returning and finding what had been done, seated their man in the other man’s lap. The importance of this Parliament, however, is extolled by Sir John Davies, and one act, at all events, stands to its credit. It repealed the statute of Kilkenny and all other laws recognizing and perpetuating distinctions of race, declaring that their cause had ceased, since the inhabitants of the kingdom without distinction were henceforth under the protection of the Crown, and the best way of settling peace was to allow their intercourse and intermarriage so that they might grow into one nation. There was a transient ray of sunlight on the dark scene. Efforts were made to improve Trinity College, and learning shone forth in the person of Usher.