Green Alice Stopford
Irish Nationality
We have seen the uncontrolled rule of English kings and English Parliaments. Such was the end of their story. There was another experiment yet to be tried.
CHAPTER XI
THE RISE OF A NEW IRELAND
1691-1750
It might have seemed impossible amid such complicated tyrannies to build up a united country. But the most ferocious laws could not wholly destroy the kindly influences of Ireland, the essential needs of men, nor the charities of human nature. There grew up too the union of common suffering. Once more the people of Ireland were being "brayed together in a mortar" to compact them into a single commonwealth.
The Irish had never lost their power of absorbing new settlers in their country. The Cromwellians complained that thousands of the English who came over under Elizabeth had "become one with the Irish as well in affinity as in idolatry." Forty years later these Cromwellians planted on Irish farms suffered themselves the same change; their children could not speak a word of English and became wholly Irish in religion and feeling. Seven years after the battle of the Boyne the same influence began to turn Irish the very soldiers of William. The civilisation, the piety, the charm of Irish life told as of old. In the country places, far from the government, kindly friendships grew up between neighbours, and Protestants by some device of goodwill would hide a Catholic from some atrocious penalty, would save his arms from being confiscated, or his children from being brought up as Protestants. The gentry in general spoke Irish with the people, and common interests grew up in the land where they lived together.
The Irish had seen the fires of destruction pass over them, consuming the humanities of their law, the honour of their country, and the relics of their fathers: the cry of their lamentation, said an Italian in 1641, was more expressive than any music he had heard of the great masters of the continent. The penal days have left their traces. We may still see in hidden places of the woods some cave or rock where the people gathered in secret to celebrate mass. There remain memorials of Irishmen, cast out of their lands, who to mark their final degradation had been driven to the livelihood which the new English held in the utmost contempt – the work of their hands; their dead bodies were carried to the ruined abbeys, and proudly laid in the roofless naves and chancels, under great sculptured slabs bearing the names of once noble families, and deeply carved with the instruments of the dead man's trade, a plough, the tools of a shoemaker or a carpenter or a mason. In a far church in Connemara by the Atlantic, a Burke raised in 1722 a sculptured tomb to the first of his race who had come to Connacht, the figure in coat of mail and conical helmet finely carved in limestone. Monuments lie heaped in Burris, looking out on the great ocean; and in all the sacred places of the Irish. By their industry and skill in the despised business of handicrafts and commerce the outlaws were fast winning most of the ready money of the country into their hands.
It would be a noble achievement, said Swift, to abolish the Irish language, which prevented "the Irish from being tamed." But Swift's popularity with the native Irish was remarkable, and when he visited Cavan he was interested by verses of its poets and wrote an English ballad founded on the Plearáca Ui Ruairc; he helped the rector of Anna (Belturbet) in his endeavours to have prayers read in Irish in the established churches in remote places. The Protestant bishops and clergy in general, holding that their first duty was not to minister to the souls of Irishmen, but rather as agents of the government to bring Irish speech "into entire disuse," refused to learn the only language understood by the people. Clergy and officials alike knew nothing whatever of the true life of Ireland. Now and then there was a rare exception, and the respect which Philip Skelton showed for the religious convictions of a country-bred maidservant should be remembered. But in general the clergy and all other political agents opposed kindly intercourse of the two races. The fiction of complete Irish barbarism was necessary to maintain the Protestant ascendency, and in later days to defend it. The whole literature of the Irish was therefore cast aside as waste refuse. Their race is never mentioned in histories of the eighteenth century save as an indistinct and obscure mass of wretchedness, lawlessness, and ignorance, lying in impenetrable darkness, whence no voice ever arose even of protest or complaint, unless the pains of starvation now and again woke the most miserable from their torpor to some wild outrage, to be repressed by even more savage severity. So fixed and convenient did this lying doctrine prove that it became a truism never challenged. To this day all manuscripts of the later Irish times have been rejected from purchase by public funds, to the irrevocable loss of a vast mass of Irish material. By steadily neglecting everything written in the native tongue of the country, the Protestant planters, one-fourth of the inhabitants, secured to themselves the sole place in the later history of Ireland. A false history engendered a false policy, which in the long run held no profit for the Empire, England, or Ireland.
Unsuspected by English settlers, the Irish tradition was carried across the years of captivity by these exiles in their own land. Descendants of literary clans, historians and poets and scribes were to be found in farmhouses, working at the plough and spade. Some wrote prose accounts of the late wars, the history of their tribe, the antiquities of their province, annals of Ireland, and geography. The greatest of the poets was Dáibhí O'Bruadair of Limerick, a man knowing some English and learned in Irish lore, whose poems (1650-1694) stirred men of the cabins with lessons of their time, the laying down of arms by the Irish in 1652, Sarsfield and Limerick, the breaking of the treaty, the grandsons of kings working with the spade, the poor man perfected in learning, steadfast, well proved in good sense, the chaffering insolence of the new traders, the fashion of men fettering their tongues to speak the mere ghost of rough English, or turning Protestant for ease. Learned men showed the love of their language in the making of dictionaries and grammars to preserve, now that the great schools were broken up, the learning of the great masters of Irish. Thus the poet Tadhg O'Neachtain worked from 1734 to 1749 at a dictionary. Another learned poet and lexicographer, Aodh Buidh MacCurtin, published with Conor O'Begly in Paris a grammar (1728) and a dictionary (1732); in his last edition of the grammar he prayed pardon for "confounding an example of the imperative with the potential mood," which he was caused to do "by the great bother of the brawling company that is round about me in this prison." There were still well-qualified scribes who copied the old heroic stories and circulated them freely all over Ireland. There were some who translated religious books from French and Latin into Irish. "I wish to save," said Charles O'Conor, "as many as I can of the ancient manuscripts of Ireland from the wreck which has overwhelmed everything that once belonged to us." O'Conor was of Sligo county. His father, like other gentlemen, had been so reduced by confiscation that he had to plough with his own hands. A Franciscan sheltered in a peasant's cottage, who knew no English, taught him Latin. He attended mass held secretly in a cave. Amid such difficulties he gained the best learning of his unhappy time. Much of the materials that O'Clery had used for his Annals had perished in the great troubles, and O'Conor began again that endless labour of Irish scholars, the saving of the relics of his people's story from final oblivion. It was the passion of his life. He formed an Irish library, and copied with his own hand large volumes of extracts from books he could not possess. Having obtained O'Clery's own manuscript of the Annals, he had this immense work copied by his own scribe; and another copy made in 1734 by Hugh O'Mulloy, an excellent writer, for his friend Dr. O'Fergus of Dublin. He wrote for the learned, and delighted the peasants round him with the stories of their national history. It is interesting to recall that Goldsmith probably knew O'Conor, so that the best English of an Irishman, and the best learning of an Irishman at that time, were thus connected.
It was the Irish antiquarians and historians who in 1759 drew Irishmen together into "the Catholic Committee" – Charles O'Conor, Dr. Curry, and Wyse of Waterford. O'Conor by his learning preserved for them the history of their fathers. Dr. Curry, of a Cavan family whose estates had been swept from them in 1641 and 1691, had studied as a physician in France, and was eminent in Dublin though shut out from every post; he was the first to use his research and literary powers to bring truth out of falsehood in the later Irish history, and to justify the Irish against the lying accusations concerning the rising of 1641. These learned patriots combined in a movement to win for the Irish some recognition before the law and some rights of citizens in their own land.
Countless poets, meanwhile, poured out in verse the infinite sorrow of the Gaels, recalling the days when their land was filled with poet-schools and festivals, and the high hospitality of great Irishmen. If a song of hope arose that the race should come to their own again, the voice of Irish charity was not wanting – "Having the fear of God, be ye full of alms-giving and friendliness, and forgetting nothing do ye according to the commandments, shun ye drunkenness and oaths and cursing, and do not say till death 'God damn' from your mouths." Riotous laughter broke out in some; they were all, in fact, professional wits – chief among them Eoghan Ruadh O'Sullivan from Kerry, who died in 1784; a working man who had laboured with plough and spade, and first came into note for helping his employer's son, fresh from a French college, with an explanation of a Greek passage. Jacobite poems told of the Lady Erin as a beautiful woman flying from the insults of foreign suitors in search of her real mate – poems of fancy, for the Stuarts had lost all hold on Ireland. The spirit of the north rang out in a multitude of bards, whose works perished in a century of persecution and destruction. Among exiles in Connacht manuscripts perished, but old tradition lived on the lips of the peasants, who recited in their cabins the love-songs and religious poems of long centuries past. The people in the bareness of their poverty were nourished with a literature full of wit, imagination, feeling, and dignity. In the poorest hovels there were men skilled in a fine recitation. Their common language showed the literary influence, and Irish peasants even in our own day have used a vocabulary of some five thousand words, as against about eight hundred words used by peasants in England. Even the village dancing at the cross-roads preserved a fine and skilled tradition.
Families, too, still tried to have "a scholar" in their house, for the old learning's sake. Children shut out from all means of education might be seen learning their letters by copying with chalk the inscriptions on their fathers' tombstones. There were few candles, and the scholar read his books by a cabin fire in the light given by throwing upon it twigs and dried furze. Manuscripts were carefully treasured, and in days when it was death or ruin to be found with an Irish book they were buried in the ground or hidden in the walls. In remote places schools were maintained out of the destitution of the poor; like that one which was kept up for over a hundred years in county Waterford, where the people of the surrounding districts supported "poor scholars" free of charge. There were some in Kerry, some in Clare, where a very remarkable group of poets sprang up. From all parts of Ireland students begged their way to "the schools of Munster." Thus Greek and Latin still found their way into the labourer's cottage. In county Cork, John Clairech O'Donnell, in remembrance of the ancient assemblies of the bards of all Ireland, gathered to his house poets and learned men to recite and contend as in the old days. Famous as a poet, he wrote part of a history of Ireland, and projected a translation of Homer into Irish. But he worked in peril, flying for his life more than once before the bard-hunters; in his denunciations the English oppressor stands before us – plentiful his costly living in the high-gabled lighted-up mansion of the Irish Brian, but tight-closed his door, and his churlishness shut up inside with him, there in an opening between two mountains, until famine clove to the people and bowed them to his will; his gate he never opened to the moan of the starving, "and oh! may heaven of the saints be a red wilderness for James Dawson!"
The enthusiasm of the Irish touched some of the planters. A hereditary chronicler of the O'Briens who published in 1717 a vindication of the Antiquities of Ireland got two hundred and thirty-eight subscribers, divided about equally between English and Gaelic names. Wandering poets sang, as Irish poets had done nine hundred years before, even in the houses of the strangers, and found in some of them a kindly friend. O'Carolan, the harper and singer, was beloved by both races. A slight inequality in a village field in Meath still after a hundred and fifty years recalls to Irish peasants the site of the house where he was born, and at his death English and Irish, Protestant and Catholic, gathered in an encampment of tents to do honour to his name. The magic of Irish music seems even to have stirred in the landlords' parliament some dim sense of a national boast. An English nobleman coming to the parliament with a Welsh harper claimed that in all Ireland no such music could be heard. Mr. Jones of Leitrim took up the challenge for an Irishman of his county who "had never worn linen or woollen." The Commons begged to have the trial in their House before business began, and all assembled to greet the Leitrim champion. O'Duibhgeanain was of an old literary clan: one of them had shared in making the Annals of the Four Masters; he himself was not only a fine harper, but an excellent Greek and Latin scholar. He came, tall and handsome, looking very noble in his ancient garb made of beaten rushes, with a cloak or plaid of the same stuff, and a high conical cap of the same adorned with many tassels. And the House of Commons gave him their verdict.
James Murphy, a poor bricklayer of Cork, who became an architect and studied Arabian antiquities in Portugal and Spain, gives the lament of Irish scholars. "You accuse their pastors with illiterature, whilst you adopt the most cruel means of making them ignorant; and their peasantry with untractableness, whilst you deprive them of the means of civilisation. But that is not all; you have deprived them at once of their religion, their liberty, their oak, and their harp, and left them to deplore their fate, not in the strains of their ancestors, but in the sighs of oppression." To the great landlords the Act of 1691 which had given them wealth was the dawn of Irish civilisation. Oblivion might cover all the rest, all that was not theirs. They lived in a land some few years old, not more than a man's age might cover.
By degrees, however, dwellers in Ireland were forced into some concern for its fortunes. Swift showed to the Protestants the wrongs they endured and the liberties which should be theirs, and flung his scorn on the shameful system of their slavery and their tyranny (1724). Lord Molesworth urged (1723) freedom of religion, schools of husbandry, relief of the poor from their intolerable burdens, the making parliament into a really representative body. Bishop Berkeley wrote his famous Querist– the most searching study of the people's grief and its remedies.
Gradually the people of Ireland were being drawn together. All classes suffered under the laws to abolish Irish trade and industry. Human charities were strong in men of both sides, and in the country there was a growing movement to unite the more liberal of the landowners, the Dissenters of the north, and the Catholics, in a common citizenship. It had proved impossible to carry out fully the penal code. No life could have gone on under its monstrous terms. There were not Protestants enough to carry on all the business of the country and some "Papists" had to be taken at least into the humbler forms of official work. Friendly acts between neighbours diminished persecution.
"Let the legislature befriend us now, and we are theirs forever," was the cry of the Munster peasantry, organised under O'Driscoll, to the Protestant parliament in 1786.
Such a movement alarmed the government extremely. If, they said, religious distinctions were abolished, the Protestants would find themselves secure of their position without British protection, and might they not then form a government more to the taste and wishes of the people – in fact, might not a nation begin again to live in Ireland.
The whole energy of the government was therefore called out to avert the rise of a united Irish People.
CHAPTER XII
AN IRISH PARLIAMENT
1750-1800
The movement of conciliation of its peoples that was shaping a new Ireland, silent and unrecorded as it was, can only be understood by the astonishing history of the next fifty years, when the spirit of a nation rose again triumphant, and lesser passions fell before the love of country.
The Protestant gentry, who alone had free entry into public life, were of necessity the chief actors in the recorded story. But in the awakening country they had to reckon with a rising power in the Catholic Irish. Dr. Lucas, who in 1741 had begun to stir for reform and freedom, had stirred not only the English settlers but the native Irish. Idolised by the Irish people, he raised in his Citizens' Journal a new national protest. The pamphlet war which followed – where men argued not only on free trade and government, but on Ireland itself, on its old and new races, on its Irish barbarism, said some, its Irish civilisation, said others – spread the idea of a common history of Ireland in which all its inhabitants were concerned. In parliament too, though Catholics were shut out, yet men of old Irish race were to be found – men of Catholic families who had accepted Protestantism as a means of entering public life, chiefly by way of the law. They had not, save very rarely, put off their patriotic ardour with their old religion; of the middle class, they were braver in their outlook than the small and disheartened Catholic aristocracy. If their numbers were few their ability was great, and behind them lay that vast mass of their own people whose blood they shared.
It was an Irishman who first roused the House of Commons to remember that they had a country of their own and an "Irish interest" – Antony Malone. This astonishing orator and parliamentarian invented a patriotic opposition (1753). A great sea in a "storm" men said of him. Terror was immediately excited at his Irish origin and his national feeling. Dublin Castle feared that he might mean emancipation from the English legislature, and in truth the constitutional dependency upon England was the object upon which Malone's eye was constantly fixed. He raised again the protest of Molyneux for a free parliament and constitution. He stirred "the whole nation" for "the last struggle for Ireland." They and their children would be slaves, he said, if they yielded to the claim of the government that the English privy council could alter the money bills sent over by the Irish parliament, or that the king had the right to apply at his will the surplus funds in the treasury.
Malone was defeated, but the battle had begun which in thirty years was to give to Ireland her first hopes of freedom. A fresh current of thought poured through the House – free trade, free religion, a Habeas Corpus Act, fewer pensions for Englishmen, a share in law and government for Irishmen, security for judges, and a parliament elected every seven years. Successors of Malone appeared in the House of Commons in 1761 – more lawyers, men said, than any one living could remember, or "than appears in any history in this or any other kingdom upon earth." They depended, not on confiscation, but on their own abilities; they owed nothing to government, which gave all the great posts of the bar to Englishmen. Some freedom of soul was theirs, and manhood for the long struggle. In 1765 the issue was clearly set. The English House of Commons which had passed the Stamp Act for the American colonies, argued that it had the right to tax Ireland without her consent; and English lawyers laid down the absolute power of parliament to bind Ireland by its laws. In Ireland Lord Charlemont and some other peers declared that Ireland was a distinct kingdom, with its own legislature and executive under the king.
In that same year the patriots demanded that elections should be held every seven years – the first step in Ireland towards a true representation, and the first blow to the dominion of an aristocracy. The English government dealt its counter-stroke. The viceroy was ordered to reside in Dublin, and by making himself the source of all favours, the giver of all gratifications, to concentrate political influence in the English Crown. A system of bribery began beyond all previous dreams; peerages were made by the score; and the first national debt of nearly two millions created in less than thirty years. The landowners who controlled the seats in the Commons were reminded that "they held by Great Britain everything most dear to them, their religion, their pre-eminence, their property, their political power"; that "confiscation is their common title." "The king's business," as the government understood it, lay in "procuring the supplies which the English minister thought fit to ask, and preventing the parliament from examining into the account of previous years."
Meanwhile misery deepened. In 1778 thirty thousand Irishmen were seeking their living on the continent, besides the vast numbers flying to America. "The wretches that remained had scarcely the appearance of human creatures." English exports to Ireland sank by half-a-million, and England instead of receiving money had to send £50,000 for the payment of troops there. Other dangers had arisen. George Washington was made commander-in-chief of the forces for the American war in 1775, and in 1778 France recognised American independence. The shores of Ireland lay open to attack: the country was drained of troops. Bands of volunteers were formed for its protection, Protestant troops led by landlords and gentry. In a year 40,000 volunteers were enrolled (1779). Ireland was no longer unarmed. What was even more important, she was no longer unrepresented. A packed parliament that had obscured the true desires of the country was silenced before the voice of the people. In the sense of a common duty, landlord and tenant, Protestant and Catholic, were joined; the spirit of tolerance and nationality that had been spreading through the country was openly manifested.
In those times of hope and terror men's minds on both sides moved quickly. The collapse of the English system was rapid; the government saw the failure of their army plans with the refusal of the Irish to give any more military grants; the failure of their gains from the Irish treasury in the near bankruptcy of the Irish state, with the burden of its upkeep thrown on England; the failure of the prodigious corruption and buying of the souls of men before the new spirit that swept through the island, the spirit of a nation. "England has sown her laws in dragons' teeth, and they have sprung up in armed men," cried Hussey Burgh, a worthy Irish successor of Malone in the House of Commons. "It is no longer the parliament of Ireland that is to be managed or attended to," wrote the lord-lieutenant. "It is the whole of this country." Above all, the war with the colonies brought home to them Grattan's prophecy – "what you trample on in Europe will sting you in America."
The country, through the Volunteers, required four main reforms. They asked for justice in the law-courts, and that the Habeas Corpus Act should be restored, and independent judges no longer hold their places at pleasure. They asked that the English commercial laws which had ruined Irish industry and sunk the land in poverty and idleness should be abandoned; taught by a long misery, Irishmen agreed to buy no manufactures but the work of Irish hands, and Dublin men compelled members to swear that they should vote for "the good of Ireland," a new phrase in politics. A third demand was that the penal laws which divided and broke the strength of Ireland should cease. "The Irish Protestant," cried Grattan, "could never be free till the Irish Catholic had ceased to be a slave." "You are now," said Burke, "beginning to have a country." Finally a great cry for the independence of their parliament rose in every county and from every class.
The demands for the justice of free men, for free trade, free religion, a free nation, were carried by the popular passion into the parliaments of Dublin and London. In three years the Dublin parliament had freed Protestant dissenters from the Test Act and had repealed the greater part of the penal code; the English commercial code had fallen to the ground; the Habeas Corpus Act was won. In 1780 Grattan proposed his resolutions declaring that while the two nations were inseparably bound together under one Crown, the King, Lords, and Commons of Ireland could alone make laws for Ireland.
The claim for a free parliament ran through the country – "the epidemic madness," exclaimed the viceroy. But the Irish had good reason for their madness. At the first stirring of the national movement in 1778 "artful politicians" in England had revived a scheme favourably viewed there – the abolition of an Irish parliament and the union of Ireland with England. "Do not make an union with us, sir," said Dr. Johnson to an Irishman in 1779; "we should unite with you only to rob you." The threat of the disappearance of Ireland as a country quickened anxiety to restore its old parliament. The Irish knew too how precarious was all that they had gained. Lord North described all past concessions as "resumable at pleasure" by the power that granted them.
In presence of these dangers the Volunteers called a convention of their body to meet in the church of Dungannon on Feb. 15, 1782 – to their mind no unfit place for their lofty work.
"We know," they said, "our duty to our sovereign and our loyalty; we know our duty to ourselves and are resolved to be free." "As Irishmen, as Christians, and as Protestants" they rejoiced in the relaxation of penal laws and upheld the sacred rights of all to freedom of religion. A week later Grattan moved in the House of Commons an address to the king – that the people of this country are a free people; that the crown of Ireland is an imperial crown; and the kingdom of Ireland a distinct kingdom with a parliament of her own, the sole legislature thereof. The battle opened by Molyneux a hundred years before was won. The Act of 1719, by which the English parliament had justified its usurpation of powers, was repealed (1782). "To set aside all doubts" another Act (1783) declared that the right of Ireland to be governed solely by the king and the parliament of Ireland was now established and ascertained, and should never again be questioned or questionable.
On April 16, 1782, Grattan passed through the long ranks of Volunteers drawn up before the old Parliament House of Ireland, to proclaim the victory of his country. "I am now to address a free people. Ages have passed away, and this is the first moment in which you could be distinguished by that appellation… Ireland is now a nation. In that character I hail her, and bowing in her august presence, I say esto perpetua!" The first act of the emancipated parliament was to vote a grant for twenty thousand sailors for the English navy.
That day of a nation's exultation and thanksgiving was brief. The restored parliament entered into a gloomy inheritance – an authority which had been polluted and destroyed – an almost ruined country. The heritage of a tyranny prolonged through centuries was not to be got rid of rapidly. England gave to Ireland half a generation for the task.
Since the days of Henry VIII the Irish parliaments had been shaped and compacted to give to England complete control. The system in this country, wrote the viceroy, did not bear the smallest resemblance to representation. All bills had to go through the privy council, whose secret and overwhelming influence was backed by the privy council in England, the English law officers, and finally the English cabinet. Irish proposals were rejected not in parliament, but in these secret councils. The king had a veto in Ireland, not in England. The English cabinet, changing with English parties, had the last word on every Irish bill. There was no Irish cabinet responsible to the Irish Houses: no ministry resigned, whatever the majority by which it was defeated. Nominally elected by about one-fifth of the inhabitants, the Commons did not represent even these. A landlords' assembly, there was no Catholic in it, and no merchant. Even the Irish landlords were subdued to English interests: some hundred Englishmen, whose main property was in England but who commanded a number of votes for lands in Ireland, did constantly override the Irish landlords and drag them on in a policy far from serviceable to them. The landlords' men in the Commons were accustomed to vote as the Castle might direct. In the complete degradation of public life no humiliation or lack of public honour offended them. The number of placemen and pensioners equalled nearly one-half of the whole efficient body: "the price of a seat of parliament," men said, "is as well ascertained as that of the cattle of the field."
