PREFACE.

THE practice of preserving the records of the lives of great men, which a pagan historian declared no age, however dull, had ever neglected, comes to the Christian recommended by a deeper interest and a more pregnant use. The pagan could recommend the family and friends of the great departed only to' turn from weak regrets to admiring contemplation, and suggest a timid hope that the object of their affection might continue to exist in another sphere.*

Christians are told to remember that "we have a great cloud of witnesses over our head," and are called on, “laying aside every weight of sin which surrounds us, to run by patience to the fight proposed, strengthened by the example of the saints," and are reminded that "the just seem to the eyes of the foolish to die, but indeed are in peace." Hence, from the first ages of Christianity, it was looked upon as a sacred duty to preserve the memory of the lives and deaths of those who had served Christ, and who "had been deemed worthy to suffer for his name❞— the memory of their deaths even more than that of their lives, because, while death to the pagan was the final end, (the limit to the labors and successes of great men,) to the Christian it was the very instrument of victory-the moment of triumph to the former, it was the termination of existence; to the latter, it was the commencement of the real life: for the former, the cause fell with its defender; for the latter, the triumph of the truth was secured by the death of its martyr.

• Tacitus, Agricola.

In no country was this practice of preserving the memorials of the saints more carefully observed than in Ireland. Our earliest and most authentic records since the days of St. Patrick are the lives of our saints; and from Jocelyn to Colgan to record their deeds was a labor of love. It was a remarkable fact that, in all these collections, up to the sixteenth century one class of saints found no representatives. The Church of Ireland had produced a "glorious choir of apostles " who bore the good tidings to many a distant land; the "number of her prophets who uttered praise" was not small; but she numbered in her calendar no representative of "the white-robed army of martyrs." By a singular prerogative her conversion had not cost the life of a single one of her teachers, and it seemed probable that, were she left to herself, no blood of her children, shed for the faith, would ever stain her soil. But the litany of her saints was to be completed, and he who was the "Master of her apostles," the "Teacher of her evangelists," the "Purity of her virgins," was also to be the "Light of her confessors" and the "Strength of her martyrs ;" and the church, whose foundations had been laid in peace, was to see her persecution-shaken walls cemented and rebuilt with the blood of her martyrs.

The sixteenth century saw in Ireland the commencement of a persecution which, gradually increasing in intensity, culminated in the middle of the seventeenth in what was probably the most exterminating attack ever endured by a Christian church. The fanatical followers of Mohammed, in the seventh century, propagated their faith by the sword; but the hordes of Cromwell abandoned the attempt to make the Irish converts, and turned all their energies to blotting out Catholicity in Ireland by the destruction of the Irish race: the Irish were recognized as ineradicably Catholic, and were slain or banished to wildernesses where it was believed they must become extinct. While this persecution was one mainly and essentially of Catholicity, it was embittered. and prolonged by every other element which could exacerbate and increase its ferocity; the differences of race, of conquest, of

• English and Scotch Catholics, settled in the north of Ireland, were as ruthlessly expelled in 1650 as those of Irish descent. See Curry's Memoirs, referred to in note on next page.

government, all added their elements of bitterness to intensify and prolong the strife.

England had conquered Ireland, but never absorbed its identity in her own; and although she nominally ruled it, her rule up to 1600 was far from being consolidated. England became Protestant, while Ireland remained Catholic; and hence the persecution of Catholicity in Ireland was not only the persecution of the believers in one faith by the adherents of another; it was also (as was the case in the Netherlands) the persecution of the conquered by the conquering race, of the old government by the new, of the possessors of the land of the country by those who sought to confiscate it for their own advantage. How infinitely this has tended, for three hundred years, to prevent all impartial and good government in Ireland is patent to all. incidental good, however, resulted from it: the fire of persecution surely but slowly fused into a common nationality all Irish Catholics of the various races which had so long remained separated. Norman and Celt, Palesman and "mere Irish," forgot their differences in their common Catholicity; the laws which had sought to exclude men of Irish descent from certain posts in the church became obsolete when the honors of the church were the passport to martyrdom; and so also the dislike of the Irish outside the pale to seeing bishops of English descent appointed to sees in their country gradually faded away before the heat of a common persecution. Dr. MacMahon, a pure Irishman, became Archbishop of Dublin, a see which had been occupied uninterruptedly by Englishmen since the time of St. Laurence O'Toole; the see of Tuam was filled by Archbishops Bodkin and Skerritt; and the sainted Oliver Plunket, the "Palesman," was welcomed enthusiastically by the Irish of Armagh. Out of the furnace of persecution there arose a new nationality for Ireland, composed of Irish Catholics; whether of Irish, of English, or of Scotch descent,* it has continued to our day, and, we may hope, will endure to the end.

• If my readers will glance down the list of names of those whose memorials are here given, they will see, mingled with such purely Celtic names as O'Neill, O'Conor, O'Reilly, O'Brien, those of Norman and English race, as De Burgo, Nugent, Bathe, Barry; as Archer, English, Russell, Slingsby, Stapleton, Prendergast. Curry (Civil Wars, Appendix, p. 623) gives instances of Catholics of English and Scotch birth, resident in Ireland, slain for their religion.

And it is a nationality of which we may well be proud, and which may console us for the sad deficiencies of our secular history.

The natural development of political society in Ireland was arrested at the end of the twelfth century by the English invasion, ere the country had been consolidated under one govern,ment,* and for some four hundred years the English did not succeed in reducing the whole island under one rule. Thus, since 1200, Ireland, as a whole, has never had a national government † or national life; and, since 1600, even the local Irish governments, or rules of the great chiefs, have disappeared. Thus we may say that, since 1200, we have no great consecutive national political history or national government, to the gradual development. of which we can look back with pride and content; but, on the other hand, we can trace with unalloyed satisfaction the history of our church alike in tempest and in calm-her struggles in the dark and stormy ages of persecution, and her renewed youth and vigor in the serener atmosphere of our own days. Hence it is, I confess, that the history of religion in Ireland has always had peculiar charms for me; and although I have ever felt the deepest interest in the gallant but gradually less and less successful struggles for independence of my race, I have dwelt with still deeper interest on the religious history of the same race-a history of progress and development alike in prosperity and in adversity; a history which links the past with the present and the future: a past to which we can revert with well-grounded pride; a present in which we recognize with gratitude the fruit of the struggles and sufferings of our forefathers, whose example we are called on to imitate; a future to which we may look forward with humble but well-grounded hope.

To others appertains the nobler task of writing the general ecclesiastical history of Ireland; and if we have not yet had a second Lanigan to continue the history of our church from the twelfth century, we are daily receiving valuable additions to our

The political state of Ireland in 1172 was analogous to that of England under the Hep tarchy, and of France before Charlemagne.

† Unless we except the brief rule of the Confederation of Kilkenny, from 1641 to 1647, or from 1788 to 1800, when Ireland was ruled by an oligarchy, while the Catholics, the great majority of the people, were outside the pale of the constitution.

historical knowledge of separate portions of it from the pens of scholars like Dr. Renehan, and his able editor Dr. McCarthy, Dr. Moran, and others. I have undertaken the lesser work of collecting the biographies of those martyrs and confessors the tale of whose sufferings makes up so large a portion of the church history of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. It may, indeed, appear strange that there has not hitherto been any complete collection of this sort. Ireland is a country where the habit of preserving local histories and biographies has flourished since before the Christian era, and from the days of St. Patrick her hagiographers collected the lives of her saints as carefully as her bards and genealogists collected the descents and the battles of her warriors. But it is a singular proof how nearly the devastation of the Cromwellian persecution annihilated the life of the Irish race that for nearly one hundred years hardly an effort was made to preserve a record of the sufferings of her sons. This is not the case with regard to the earlier and less sweeping persecutions under Henry VIII., Elizabeth, and James. Then the custom which had been practised by the early Christians under the pagan emperors of recording the sufferings of the martyrs was imitated by the Irish, and catalogues and biographies were carefully collected by those who escaped in Ireland, or who lived in the Irish colleges abroad. Numbers of these have been lost, but we still have several, such as the Processus Martyrialis of Doctor Roothe, published in 1619; Mooney's treatise, written in 1620; and portions at least of others copied later by Bruodin and O'Heyn. But from 1650 the destruction was so utter, the blow so crushing, the slaughter so immense, that all idea of recording particular incidents seems to have been abandoned in despair for nearly a century; and Bruodin, who published in 1669, O'Heyn in 1706, and De Burgo still later, were the first who resumed the interrupted task. Hence there are immense deficiencies in the collection of the lives of our Irish martyrs; and although I have collected as far as I could all those recorded, they can be regarded only as specimens, not as forming a com

• With the exception of the small tract, Morison's Threnodia, published at Innspruck in 1657