and did not hold the post for long.

There were no less

than ninety-five governors in the course of the fourteenth century, and no less than eighty-five in the course of the fifteenth. The inevitable result of all this was that English influence gradually diminished and Gaelic influence increased. By the end of the fifteenth century the "Pale had been reduced to a narrow strip of territory around Dublin twenty leagues in length and eight in breadth. The great lords were almost independent and treated the government with contempt. They exacted "tribute," or "black rent," from the lesser chiefs, and not infrequently pushed their military expeditions up to the very gates of Dublin itself. Outside the Pale the ancient Gaelic society, organised on the clan system and governed by the Brehon laws, continued to exist with but slight modification. Had the Irish at this time possessed a leader like Brian or Malachy, the English would soon have been shown the door. But the English invasion had had the effect of preventing the bringing about of national unity. It had "fatally arrested the possible evolution of a truly national kingdom and national type of culture." 5 Yet after three centuries and a half the wave of invasion seemed now to have spent its force; the invader seemed on the point of departing from the country for good. All progress had come to a stand-still. The English had neither permitted the country to develop on its own lines, nor been able to develop it themselves, and the solution of what was henceforth to be known as the Irish question appeared to be further off than ever.

III. THE CONQUEST (1495-1603).1

When, with the accession of the Tudors, the power of the nobles was broken and the English throne became a firmly

5 James Bryce, Two Centuries of Irish History, London, 1888, p. 15. I Ŏn this period see especially Ireland under Elizabeth, by Don Philip O'Sullivan Bear (translated from the Latin original, 1621), Dublin, 1903. The State Papers (Times of the Tudors), edited by H. C. Hamilton. Sir John Davies, Discovery of the True Causes why Ireland was never entirely subdued, 1612. Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland and

C

established despotism, there came a change in English policy in regard to Ireland. The King's Government set itself to make the royal power supreme in the Pale, and to effect a real conquest of the whole island. Even under the new conditions, however, the Government acted only when compelled by force of circumstances, and their conduct was characterised at once by so little steadfastness of purpose and such extreme cruelty that the conquest took two centuries to accomplish. It was achieved only as the result of a series of wars, crimes, and massacres, which left the people prostrate, thinned in numbers, and filled for ever after with an undying hatred.

It is to be set down to the credit of the Tudors, that there was at any rate one among them who sought in some respects to govern Ireland well. It is a strange coincidence that this should have been Henry VIII., who was at the very same time sowing the seeds of so much future trouble by introducing the Reformation into Ireland. Under his predecessor, Henry VII., English arms, for the first time for many a long day, had proved victorious in Ireland, under the banner of Gerald, Earl of Kildare, a noble who had come over to the King's side; and the army, profiting by its success, had pushed its way into the most distant parts of Connacht.

Henry VIII., being thus confident of the future, determined to win the sovranty of Ireland by peaceful means. He first set about establishing his authority over the nobles of the Pale. He showed the same harshness towards the great barons of Ireland as towards the great lords of England. He twice cast Gerald, Earl of Kildare, son of the Earl just mentioned, into the Tower of London; and in 1534, after the rebellion of Lord Thomas Fitzgerald (called "Silken Thomas ") he put him to death Ireland, London, 1577. The Carew Papers, edited by J. S. Brewer and William Bullen in the Calendars of State Papers. Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, 1691. Annals of the Four Masters, 1636. Pacata Hibernia, by Sir George Carew, 1633. F. Moryson, History of Ireland, 1599-1603, Dublin, 1735. R. Payne, Brief Description of Ireland, London, 1589. Richard Bagwell, Ireland under the Tudors, London, 1885.

with five of his uncles, although he had promised to spare his life. "The King would never rest until he had had the blood of the Geraldine race," said the Irish. Towards the Gaelic population of Ireland, on the contrary, his conduct was characterised by great mildness; he sought to conciliate them, ordered that their customs should be respected, and hoped to found his power in Ireland on an aristocracy of Celtic race. The great Irish chiefs, Conn O'Neill and Brian O'Connor, had taken up arms to avenge their relatives, the Geraldines, but Henry VIII., once he had suppressed the rising, won them over to his side, received their submission, granted them lands-lands taken from the monasteries-and gave them English in addition to their Celtic titles. Conn O'Neill became Earl of Tyrone; Hugh O'Donnell Earl of Tyrconnell; The O'Brien, Earl of Thomond; The O'Quin, Earl of Dunraven.2 "He thus showed," as Richey tells us, "a moderation, a conciliatory spirit, a respect for the feelings of the Celtic population, a sympathy with the poor, which no subsequent English ruler has ever displayed."3 When in the Parliament of 1542, he assumed the title of King of Ireland, the country seemed to have been brought definitely and permanently under his sway, and as a matter of fact the Irish remained at peace until his death.

But after his death there came a change, and a policy of oppression and massacre took the place of his policy of conciliation. In the "Pale" indeed Elizabeth and the Stuarts continued the levelling policy of Henry VIII., employing for the purpose the strong hand of such governors as Sir John Perrot and the celebrated Strafford. But as regards the native Irish, they no longer followed Henry's counsels. They began by forcibly and pitilessly introducing English law, English law-courts and English

2 Chiefs of Celtic clans bore (and their descendants still bear) the article The (" an ") before their name (that of their clan): The O'Donnell, The MacDermott. When Shane O'Neill took arms in 1560 against Elizabeth he gave up the title of Earl of Tyrone and again took the name of "The O'Neill."

3 Short History of the Irish People, p. 268.

institutions into the Celtic part of the island. Henry VII. had already made English laws applicable to Ireland by Poynings Act, by which he had rendered the Irish Parliament subordinate to the English crown. The Government now decided to drive out Celtic civilisation by main force and replace it by English. They determined also to conquer Ireland by force of arms, and, with this object in view, decided to take a step, which Henry VIII. had always refused to take even on the advice of Grey and Wolsey, namely, to confiscate the soil of Ireland and "plant" it with Englishmen. The era of confiscations and "plantations " was now to be inaugurated.

From the very

Plantations were indeed no novelty. beginning of the English occupation, while the Irish chiefs were being invited to come and do homage and receive back the tribal territories as private property on a feudal tenure, grants of lands were perpetually being made to the invaders. The grants were either of real fiefs, lands which had been confiscated, or of lands which were to be confiscated in the future, fiefs in partibus, as it was put. But it was under Queen Mary Tudor that the operation was for the first time undertaken on a grand scale. In 1556 Deputy Bellingham invaded the districts of Leix and Offally, which belonged to the O'Moores and O'Connors, confiscated them and made them into two counties, King's County and Queen's County. They were then "planted" with English settlers. In Elizabeth's reign the Desmond rebels were attainted in the year 1580, and their lands, which comprised almost the whole province of Munster, distributed among a crowd of greedy "undertakers." A similar transaction was carried out on an even more extensive scale under James I., when, after the flight of the Earls,4 the whole of Ulster was confiscated and planted with from twenty to thirty thousand settlers,

4 Tyrone and Tyrconnell (1607).

mostly Scotchmen. It was in this way that the Ulster of modern times, Scotch in nationality and Presbyterian in religion, first came into being. Worse was to come. Throughout the reigns of the two first Stuarts the work of confiscation under legal forms was pursued, by means of an odious combination of quibbling, swindling and tyranny. Under James I., Gaelic tenures were abolished throughout the island and replaced by the English land system, and when the modus operandi was thus simplified, a swarm of "discoverers" started to dispoil the landowners of Ireland, by breaking the titles under which they held their lands. Nearly half a million acres were seized upon in this fashion. Ravages like those of war, as Edmund Burke put it, took place in a time of perfect peace. On the eve of his downfall, Strafford was making preparations to confiscate Connacht, the only province that had hitherto remained untouched.

What measure of success, it may be asked, did these "plantations," whether effected by methods of violence or under a cloak of legality, attain ? Did they achieve their purpose and secure the subjugation of the country, by filling it with English settlers? It may be answered at once that they did not. The newcomers were, for the most part, the dregs of the English population, "a motley crew of adventurers," as Lord Clare expressed it at a later date.5 Elizabeth and James had imposed conditions upon the settlers, but these were disregarded. Many settlers took the earliest opportunity of selling their allotments to speculators. Others did not even trouble themselves to make the journey to Ireland, and as to diffusing English civilisation, they did so, in the words of Goldwin Smith, "much as an American settler would diffuse it among Red Indians, by improving them, as far as they could, from off the face of the earth."

5" The vultures settled upon Ireland," as Goldwin Smith puts it (Irish History and Irish Character, p. 79). Cf. the saying of Stewart, a contemporary, cited in Lecky (II., 109), Going to Ireland was looked on as a miserable mark of a deplorable person."

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