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Title: Absenteeism
Author: Lady Morgan
Release date: June 5, 2026 [eBook #78814]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Henry Colburn, 1825
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78814
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ABSENTEEISM.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
ABSENTEEISM.
BY
LADY MORGAN.
“Les absens ont toujours tort.”
“You heare of a case as it were in a dreame, and feell not the smart
that vexeth us.”--_Speech of the Earl of Kildare to Cardinal Wolsey._
LONDON:
HENRY COLBURN, NEW BURLINGTON STREET.
1825.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
LONDON:
IBOTSON AND PALMER, PRINTERS, SAVOY STREET, STRAND.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TO
CHARLES BROWNLOW, ESQ.
M. P.
Dear Sir,
Your recent speech on the Catholic question, has been hailed as an event
favourable to the best interests of Ireland by all who in sympathising
with her sufferings, have sought for, and ascertained their master
cause.
All Irishmen are brave! it is scarce a national boast to say so! for the
courage of nerve and sinew is, after all, a quality of pretty general
distribution, “from Indus to the Pole.” Man is every where a pugnacious
animal; and _les heros de circonstance_--prompt to fight “for any God or
King”--are always to be had for hire, be the _cavalier pagante_ who he
may. But there is a quality of courage, which has been found rare in all
ages and in all regions, the peculiar endowment of high, free, and above
all, of _honest minds_. This is the courage that sets at nought
“The world’s dread sneer,
Which scarce the stern philosopher can scorn,”
which boldly opposes a startling truth to a received opinion, which
frankly recants the cherished error of early associations, and avows the
change operated by arduous inquiry and clear conviction, at the expense
of all worldly interests, and the sacrifice of all private feelings.
Such, Sir, is the courage which you have displayed upon a subject of
vital importance to Ireland. As an Irishwoman, I beg to offer my mite of
gratitude for the benefit conferred upon our common country--convinced
that whenever the spirit of those sentiments which you have avowed shall
govern the councils of the nation, Absenteeism will cease to be a
national malady.
I have the honor to be,
With every sentiment of respect,
Your obedient Servant,
SYDNEY MORGAN.
London, June 4th, 1825.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PREFACE.
The following pages were originally published in the New Monthly
Magazine. The continued demand for the numbers in which they appeared,
has induced the proprietor to reprint the article, and it is now offered
to the public in a substantive form.
Notwithstanding the intense interest which is felt throughout all
England concerning Ireland and Irish affairs, notwithstanding the
frequent debates in parliament, and more frequent pamphlets and volumes
published on points of Irish politics and œconomy, the prevailing
ignorance on these subjects still operates powerfully in maintaining
prejudices the most unfounded and the most fatal, and in retarding those
measures of wisdom and of justice without which Ireland can never be
happy, or the British Empire secure.
It is this ignorance more especially which enables the party opposed to
the settlement of Ireland to occupy public attention with minor
grievances, behind which the danger and malice of their system are
concealed from a nation too generous to tolerate open and avowed
oppression. No sooner is the question of Catholic Emancipation proposed
in the senate, with some chance of obtaining a favourable consideration,
than one or other of these convenient abuses is thrust forward to
distract attention and to puzzle the will. The absentees, the deficiency
of employment, the potatoe diet, the want of poor laws, or the want of
education, are, from time to time put forth as the paramount evil, the
gushing fountain of every misfortune of Ireland; while the main subject
of complaint, the Catholic disability, is studiously represented as
affecting only a few briefless barristers, or ambitious landlords. The
advantage which is thus obtained in pre-occupying the public mind, and
in affording additional ground for a superstructure of sophisms is
immense.
The British nation has so many and such vast interests to pursue, its
relations with every country in the world are so many and so
complicated, that the most instructed of its subjects can find but
little time and attention to bestow on any one of them, however
important. The public in general is therefore compelled to repose
confidence in those who affect a knowledge of each particular subject;
and to take for granted the propositions they advance. When the men who
should be the guides of public opinion are false to their trust, and
instead of presenting truths in a clear and perspicuous form, studiously
bury them beneath a mass of plausibilities, or entangle them in a
net-work of sophistry, the task of unweaving their web, and detecting
their fallacies, must be again and again undertaken, before a credulous
and a pre-occupied people can be made aware of the deception, and
enabled to judge of the question at issue by its intrinsic merits.
On this account, it cannot but be deemed most unfortunate that the
friends of Ireland unwittingly complicated the recent discussion on the
Catholic Question, by the two bills with which they clogged their main
proposition. It was not sufficient that the public should be dinned and
stupified with the mass of untelligible and absurd theology with which
that very plain question of policy and common morality is too
unfortunately loaded; but it must also be mystified with high sounding
phrases of “disfranchisement,” “oppression of the poor,” and other
similar phantoms. To lead the British public to imagine that the
disqualification of the forty shilling freeholders would affect the
influence either of the catholic or protestant party in Ireland, was, to
say the best of it, a strange mistake: but on the other side, to attempt
making men believe that the franchise is a benefit to its holder, or
that the existing representative system of Ireland, with or without the
forty shilling freeholders, has any the remotest practical utility as an
instrument of liberty or of self-taxation, is a gross and absolute
deception. All the discussion which was raised on this most silly of
disputes (and the enemies of emancipation were not slow to profit by the
advantage) was _de lana caprina_, and so much diversion of the public
mind from the main point at issue; serving only to inflame enemies, and
to divide friends. Though no one will dispute that both the riders were
appended to the Catholic Bill in deference to the opponents of that
measure, and with an honest intention to conciliate and to compromise,
yet in the event, the introduction of extraneous matter has proved
eminently unfavourable to the cause, and will, it is to be hoped, never
again be attempted.
The futility of the arguments derived from a putting forth of secondary
causes of evil in Irish politics, as directed against the entertainment
of the Catholic Question, is the greater, in as much as all the various
subjects which are advanced as matters of complaint, derive immediately
from this one source. Deficient capital, deficient knowledge, deficient
civilization, are all the necessary consequences of bad government,--of
that bad government for whose sake Catholic has been set against
Protestant, and the Irish people divided, in order to prevent the
assertion of their political rights. In England people are governed in
their opinions on the Catholic Question exclusively by their hopes and
fears; and none but the clergy have a corrupt interest in withholding
justice from any religious sect. But in Ireland power and place, the
licence to oppress, and the facility of living on the public purse, are
closely entwined with the permanence of a system, which, while it
tramples the Catholic in the dust, degrades and impoverishes the whole
population, for the exclusive benefit of a few powerful families. It is
bad government, and the destraction and turbulence which bad government
has engendered, that drives industry and capital from the country, and
forces the peasantry to abandon all pretence to luxuries and
refinements, whether moral or physical. It is bad government that
banishes meat from the cotter’s table, and instruction from his mind. It
is bad government that puts a pike in his hand, and hardens his heart
against all the charities of life; it is bad government that makes
property insecure, and life precarious; it is bad government, therefore,
that induces the aristocracy to fly to happier regions, to abandon their
duties to their country and to themselves, and to seek for tranquillity
and safety even at the expense of half their fortunes; and it is, above
all, bad government which renders the absence of a limited aristocracy
an evil of magnitude, either morally, politically, or economically.
The geographical position of Ireland, and its political dependence, (the
necessary consequence of that position,) must always occasion more
absenteeism than usually occurs in other nations. The robbery and
spoilation of the native proprietors to endow the pampered favourites of
a foreign court, which took place in the preceding centuries, afford
another cause for this evil; but by far the greatest number of absentees
are banished by the direct operation of the penal code, or by its
indirect influence in limiting the pursuit of fortune at home. Ireland
has no field for enterprise and industry, it has no market for
merchandize. It has no scope for honest ambition, no promise of
pleasure, no resting place for repose; and yet it is expected that those
who have the means of quitting the land will inhabit it out of respect
for a principle, or regard for an abstraction!
Absenteeism considered in itself is an unnatural ill. There is usually
so much of ease, of happiness, and of personal consequence in living at
home surrounded by friends, relations, and a respectful tenantry,--there
is usually so much mortification and disgust in the condition of a
stranger and a foreigner, that nothing but political causes can drive
the great proprietors of a country to permanently abandon their estates.
Yet so natural is it for men to complain of the evil which strikes the
most powerfully on the senses,--so convenient is it for those, who are
determined in the denial of justice, to make absenteeism the _causa
causans_ of calamities which they want the humanity to relieve, that all
classes of persons, the Protestant and the Catholic, the mere Irish and
the lord of the pale, the oppressor and the oppressed, the Irish
corporator and the English minister have joined in a common cry against
absentees. It is not therefore very surprising that the mere John Bull,
wrapped in his own affairs, and buried in his counting-house, should
believe what every one repeats, and should shut his eyes against the
real causes of that turbulence and that discontent which, though they
have given him so much trouble and uneasiness, are yet too far removed
from his gaze to allow of the formation of an independent judgment. It
is not very wonderful that he should credit the assertion so hardily
made, that Catholic Emancipation is not the one thing needful to
Ireland, the essential preliminary, without which, no practical relief
can be afforded to the economical distresses of the country.
In taking up the subject of absenteeism, the peculiar bent of Lady
Morgan’s mind, and the character of her habitual pursuits, have
inevitably given a picturesque turn to her ideas, and induced her to
view the matter less as an economist than as a poet and a woman. But the
great truth has not escaped her, that absenteeism is less a cause than
an effect: and while in the romance of her imagination she has
delineated what Ireland might be under the fostering protection of an
enlightened and liberal aristocracy, she has not forgotten that under
existing circumstances it must remain for ever the blighted victim of an
oppressive and ignorant _bureaucratie_.
T. C. MORGAN.
London, June 3, 1825.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
ABSENTEEISM.
“Les absens ont toujours tort.”
_La Rochefaucault._
The phrase “Absentee,” says Dr. Johnson, is one “used _with regard to
Irishmen_ living out of their country;” and as its origin is Irish, so
its use and application are strictly confined to the history of that
unfortunate people. The inference to be drawn from this fact is plain:
that there is something in the circumstances of the Irish, peculiar to
themselves,--something which forces upon them a line of conduct contrary
to the ordinary instincts of humanity, and compels them to fly from that
land which all other nations regard with more or less of favour and
affection,--from that land which youth quits with regret, and to which
age clings with passion, when all other passions fade,--the land of
their nativity.
In every history of Irish grievances, this cabalistical term “absentee”
appears in the front of the array, and, like the terrible “_Il
Bondocani_” of the Calif of Bagdat, strikes down all before it,--the
apology for every abuse, the obstacle to every plan of amelioration, the
bugbear of the timid, the stalking-horse of the designing.
“Absenteeism,” observes the Secretary for the Home Department, “is an
operative cause of tumult, but it is without a remedy;” and thus
dismissing all ministerial responsibility with a laconic aphorism, he
launches an integral portion of the empire committed to his management,
to revolve for ever in the turbulent whirlpool of a vicious circle of
cause and effect. Tumult expels the rich landholders, the absence of the
rich landholders perpetuates tumult: this is a law of nature, which
admits of “no remedy;” and the executive have nothing to do but to
procure the passing of penal statutes according to the necessities of
the moment, and to find the means of extorting four millions a year from
English industry, to pay the expense of Irish misrule.
In political philosophy there are no evils without a remedy, save those
which arise out of the common condition of humanity;--and the minister
who confesses a political evil which he cannot remove, should remove
himself: for he is himself the greatest evil with which the people have
to contend. Sully, who administered the affairs of France under the most
adverse circumstances, when it was still harassed with civil contentions
and torn with religious factions, saw no political impossibilities,
though many political difficulties, with which he courageously and
successfully grappled: but, alas! the Secretary for the Home Department
is not Sully.
To what physiological peculiarity of constitution this irremediable
tendency to wander, inherited from their progenitors by the restless
sons of the great Milesius, is to be attributed, the learned Secretary
has not informed us; and it is certain that Spurzheim, on his visit to
the Irish capital, discovered no migratory inequality upon the surface
of the Irish cranium, to account for the disposition. But in whatever
particular of temperament or exuberance of cerebral developement the
cause of this “effect defective” lies latent, it is matter of historic
fact, that though the ancient Irish were restless enough at home,
(“never,” says Campion, “wanting drift to drive a tumult,”) yet this
activity, which induced them “to pick a quarrel, fall in love, or any
other diverting accident of that kind,” never found vent in absenteeism.
Where, indeed, could Irishmen go to better their condition, when all in
Ireland, who were not saints, were kings; and many were both, while none
were martyrs.[1] “_Il est certain negoce_,” says the French proverb,
“_où l’on perd beaucoup en quittant boutique_;” and this proverb, at all
times applicable to Irish absentees, was particularly so in that golden
age, so often referred to by antiquaries, when Ireland, “lying aloof in
the Western Ocean, was a nest of kingdoms,” when superb and wealthy
monasteries and royal palaces occupied every foot of the territory, and
when swallows built their nests in old men’s beards for want of worse
habitations. In those true church and state times of Ireland’s
prosperity, of which the Orangeman’s Utopia is but a type, it is little
wonderful that the people gave into no wanderings, but those “_du cœur
et de l’esprit_;” and that a pilgrimage to St. Patrick’s purgatory, a
royal progress of some Toparck of the South to a Dynast in the North, or
a morning visit from King Mac Turtell to his close neighbour King
Gillemohalmoghe,[2] (which occasionally ended in the broken heads of
both parties,) should include the recorded absenteeism of two thousand
years.
It was reserved, however, for one of these royal heroes first to commit
the patricidal crime: and the first Irish absentee of note, though a
great king, was but a _mauvais sujet_, having pillaged his people,
wasted his revenue, ran away with his neighbour’s wife, and sold his
country for a mess of pottage. It is almost unnecessary to add that this
royal founder of absenteeism is condemned to the contempt of posterity
by the title of Dermot Mac Murrogh O’Kavenagh, King of Leinster; and
that the result of his absenteeship was the successful invasion of
Ireland by Henry II. the crusading grants of Pope Adrian IV. and, above
all, the fearful forfeitures followed by rebellion on one part, and on
the other by an effort at extermination, which have multiplied from age
to age those possessors and deserters of the soil, who have drawn over
“the profits raised out of Ireland, and refunded nothing.”[3]
It appears very probable that one of the motives by which the lords of
Ireland (as the English kings were long styled) were actuated in giving
such large tracts of land to great English proprietors, was to get rid
of the troublesome and rebellious Barons, by tempting them to reside in
that “most beautiful and sweet country as any is under heaven,” where so
much was given up to their power and pillage, and where the services
demanded in return, “the raising of forts and castles and fencing
themselves with garrisons, as captains, keepers, and constables,” might
forward the royal interests by protecting its power against the inroads
of the natives. “For, except Leinster,” says Campion, “all other parts
retayned still their ancient kind of government, and were always ready
to start at every corner, _ag and rag_, to expell the English.” But the
framers of Magna Charta, the guardians of all that was then known of
liberty in England, were not by the bribe of principalities to be kept
from the great scene of action; and some of the most considerable,
having accepted, or seized upon the fairest portions of the land, made
them over to sons-in-law or other kinsmen; and having thus, by the
scratch of their rude pen,[4] conveyed to others the fee simple of an
Irish province, hastened back to England to dispute the power of the
barbarous despots, who reigned by their sufferance, or were deposed by
their caprice.
In process of time, the mischief of this species of transfer was not
only felt as an additional grievance by the Irish, but as an annoyance
by the English sovereign.[5] The injury done to their power by the
absence of those whom they had deputed to watch over it, at a time when
that power was held by a precarious tenure, was deemed so great, that a
law against absentees was passed so early as the time of Richard II. The
divisions of the houses of York and Lancaster, however, abrogated all
laws; “at which time,” says Spenser, “all English lords and gentlemen
which had great possessions in Ireland, repaired over hither into
England, some to succour their friends here, and to strengthen their
partie, others for to defend their lands and possessions here against
such as hovered after the same, upon hope of the alteration of the
kingdom, and success of that side which they favoured and affected.”[6]
The result of this absenteeism of the great landholders of Ireland was
natural and inevitable. “The Irish, whom before they had banished into
the mountains, where they lived only upon white meates,[7] as it is
recorded, seeing now their lands so dispeopled and weakened, came down
into all the plains adjoining, and thence expelling those few English
that remayned, re-possessed them again.” But these re-possessions were
only temporary. New conquests and new forfeitures ensued. New
possessors, unaffected to the soil, and disdainful of its children,
afforded fresh causes of absenteeism, which, in whatever way it
operated, was injurious to the country; till at length the forfeiture of
Leix and Offaly (the King and Queen’s Counties) under Edward VI. threw
the whole of those spacious and fertile districts into the hands of new
proprietors; who having established themselves by “fire and sword,”
transferred the ownership “to _foreigners by connexion, and resided
themselves in England_.”
But if the first barbarous English legislators for Ireland (and when has
the epithet been inapplicable?) were, at an early period of their
unfixed power, sensible of the injury which the state and the country
suffered from absenteeism--if the Plantagenets took cognizance of the
evil, and endeavoured to provide against it by statute, the Tudors
(those sanguinary but sagacious despots) considered the absence of the
Irish from their homes and country as a state engine; and wielded it
with a policy which always advanced their own interests, and confirmed
their power over that unhappy land. Sometimes they allured the Irish
nobility to their splendid court for the purpose of dazzling their
imagination, and corrupting their patriotism. Sometimes, on shallow
pretexts, they cited them as accused or criminals, to awe them by their
array of power, or to intimidate them by their display of cruelty. Yet,
frequently forced to feel that the prosperity of the country and the
English interests were both best served by the permanent residence of
the gentry of the pale, they did not the less frame laws which made it
penal for the proprietors of the soil to spend its profits elsewhere
than at home.[8] The love which the Irish had borne to the house of
York, had rendered it a point of courteous policy to appoint the second
sons of the king to the Lieutenancy of Ireland, with a deputy for the
execution of the high office: and Henry VIII. as Duke of York, while yet
a boy, and during the life-time of his elder brother, began his career
of power under this character, conjointly with his deputy, Gerald
Fitzgerald, Earl of Kildare, “a mighty made man,” says his chronicler,
“full of honour and courage.” (1501) This grand conservator of the
peace, however, had the old Irish fashion of being occasionally disposed
to break it; and his fierce feuds with the Butlers, Earls of Ormond,
(“nothing inferior to Kildare in stomache, and in reach of policy farre
beyond him,”) were the causes “of much ruffle and unquietness to the
realm.” These served his enemies for a pretext to draw down upon him the
displeasure of the English government, and finally induced Henry VII. to
summon the old deputy over to the English court, and to seek to break
down that haughty and turbulent spirit in a region rarely favourable to
powerful energies and independence of mind. A bon-mot saved the earl
from the danger which awaited him, and limited his absenteeism to a few
months residence in the court of Henry, from which he returned to
Ireland more powerful than he left it.
Gerald Fitzgerald, son of the aforesaid earl, “a gentleman valiant and
well spoken,” succeeded his father in all his dignities; but though
appointed lord deputy of Ireland, his influence, power, and spirit, soon
awakened the jealousy of Henry VIII. Being “overtaken with vehement
suspicion of sundry treasons, it was deemed politic to draw him away
from Ireland; and, by secret _heavers_ and enviers of his fortunes,
nourishers of the old grudge, the king was urged to call upon him to
attend the English court.” The illustrious but involuntary absentee,
was, on his first arrival in England, treated with a severity vainly
intended to intimidate a spirit which was afterwards to be subdued by
other and more seducing means. Among many frivolous charges, “_he was
opposed with divers interrogatories touching the Earl of Desmond, his
cousin, a notorious traytor_.” His trial, however, was but a mockery,
and as the object was to sink the popular chief of a nation into a
pliant courtier, to bind him more firmly to the English interests, and
to weaken his feelings of patriotism, the union of the turbulent Gerald
was proposed with the Lady Elizabeth Grey, the king’s own kinswoman and
daughter of the Duke of Suffolk. This marriage, celebrated with royal
splendour, with all the festivities of a boisterous but splendid court,
was deemed a preliminary step to permanent subjection, and to frequent
and long visits to the English court.
Scarcely, however, had Kildare returned home, and resumed the deputyship
of Ireland, when the domestic tumults of the great lords of the pale
involved him in new accusations on the part of the crown, “intimations
of new treasons passing to and fro, with complaynts and replyes;” and as
Cardinal Wolsey “_did hate the Kildare bloud_,” and had resolved on
breaking down their power, the earl was again called from his stronghold
in Ireland, and accused of having “wilfully winked at the Earl of
Desmond (whose large possessions were his crimes in the eye of the
minister), and with having curried acquaintance and friendship with mere
Irish.” While lying under the imputation of a crime, always heinous in
the Irish,--natural affection to the land and its suffering
children,--the brave Kildare (like an eagle taken from its eirie in the
mountain-cliffs of its native region, and chained to the earth in a
golden cage) was suffered to loiter away his existence, in listless
indolence and life-wearing anxiety, in the purlieus of a court that
resembled the seraglio of an Asiatic satrap, alternately favoured and
persecuted, as the caprice of the sovereign or the aversion of the
minister ruled the hour. It was at this period, when his mind was borne
down by his humiliating position, that he was prevailed on to consent to
his daughter the Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald’s permanent residence at
court; and it was by this concession that the loveliest of all Irish
absentees, “_the more than celestial Geraldine_,” has become an object
of interest and admiration to posterity, as the poetical idol of the
gallant and unfortunate Surrey.[9]
Although educated at the rural palace of Hunsdon with her kinswomen the
Princesses Mary and Elizabeth, and though afterwards maid of honour to
the Queen, it is probable that this lady was rather an hostage than a
guest, and was detained more by force than by inclination:--as the
sequel of her story goes to prove. “All this while,” says Campion,
“abode the Earl of Kildare at the court, and with much ado found shifte
to be called before the Lords to answer solemnly.” When, at last, every
excuse for delay was exhausted, and every hope of subduing his
invincible spirit faded, he was “called before the lords to answer
solemnly,” who “sat upon him diversly affectioned; and especially the
Cardinal Lord Chancellor (Wolsey) who disliked his cause, comforted his
accusers, and enforced the articles objected.”
The whole scene of this mock trial is so graphic, and the speeches of
the Cardinal and of the Irish Lord Deputy so curious and descriptive of
the state and manners of the time, that the introduction may be pardoned
of an episode which goes to prove, by a striking instance, that Irish
absenteeism under any form, voluntarily or involuntary, graced by royal
favour, or marked by ministerial persecution, is derogatory to the
dignity, and injurious to the interests of the Irish nobility. The Earl
of Kildare, alone, unfriended, without the aid of counsel to plead, or
witness to depose in his behalf, appeared in the midst of the Lords,
every one of whom was the slave of the King or the parasite of the
minister,--“for what,” (says Walpole, one of their own caste,)--“what
twelve tradesmen could be found more servile than every court of peers
during the whole of this reign?”--Wolsey was the first to speak, and he
began with these words:--“I wot well, my Lord, that I am not the meetest
man at this board to charge you with these treasons, because it hath
pleased some of your pew-fellows to report that I am a professed enemie
to all nobilitie, and namely to the Geraldines: but seeing every curst
boy can say as much when he is controled, and seeing these points are so
weightie that they should not be dissembled of us, and so apparent that
they cannot be denyed of you, I must have leave, notwithstanding your
state slaunder, to be the mouth of these honorable persons at this time,
and to trumpe your reasons in your way, howsoever you take me. First,
you remember how the lewde Earle your kinsman, who passeth not whom he
serve, might he change his master, sent his confederates with letters of
credence to Frauncis the French king, and, having but cold comfort
there, to Charles the Emperour, proffering the helpe of Mounster and
Connaght towards the conquest of Ireland, if either of them would helpe
to win it from our King. How many letters? what precepts? what messages?
what threats have been sent you to apprehend him? and yet not done! why
so? forsooth, I could not catch him: nay, nay, Earle, forsooth you would
not nightly watch him. If he be justly suspected, why are you partiall
in so great a cause? if not, why are you fearfull to have him tryed? Yea
sir, it will be sworn and deposed to your face, that for feare of
meeting him, you have winked, wilfully shunned his sight, altered your
course, warned his friends, stopped both eyes and eares against his
detectors, and, when soever you tooke upon you to hunt him out, then was
he sure before hand to bee out of your walke: surely this juggling and
false play little became either an honest man, called to such honour, or
a nobleman put in such trust. Had you lost but a cow or a garron of your
owne, two hundred Kyrneghes would have come at your whistle, to rescue
the prey from the uttermost edge of Ulster: all the Irish in Ireland
must have given you the way. But in pursuing so weightie a matter as
this, mercifull God! how nice, how dangerous, how wayward have you bin!
One while he is from home, sometimes fled, sometimes in the borders
where you dare not venture: I wist, my Lord, there be shrewd Bugges in
the borders for the Earl of Kildare to feare. The Earle, nay the King of
Kildare, for, when you are disposed, you reigne more like than rule the
land:--where you are malicious, the truest subjects stand for Irish
enemies: where you are pleased the Irish enemie stands for a dutifull
subject: hearts and hands, lives and lands, are all at your courtesie:
who fawneth not thereon, hee cannot rest within your smell, and your
smell is so ranke that you tracke them out at pleasure.”
Whilst the Cardinal was speaking, the Earle chafed and changed colour,
and sundry proffers made to answer every sentence as it came; at last he
broke out, and interrupted them thus. “My Lord Chancellour, I beseech
you pardon me; I am short-witted, and you, I perceive, intend a long
tale. If you proceede in this order, halfe my purgation will be lost for
lacke of carryage: I have no schoole tricks, nor art of memory; excepte
you heare me while I remember your words, your second processe will
hammer out the former.” The Lords associate, who for the most part
tenderly loved him, and knew the Cardinal’s manner of termes so
lothsome, as wherewith they were tyred many years agoe, humbly besought
his Grace to charge him directly with particulars and to dwell in some
one matter till it were examined through. That granted, “It is good
reason (quoth the Earle) that your Grace beare the mouth of this
chamber. But, my Lord, those mouthes that put this tale into your mouth,
are very wide mouths, such indeed as have gaped long for my wreck, and
now at length, for want of better stuff, are fain to fill their mouths
with smoak. What my cousin Desmond hath compassed, as I know not, so I
beshrew his naked heart for holding out so long. If hee can bee taken by
my agents that presently wayte for him, then have my adversaryes
betrayed their malice, and this heape of haynous wordes shall resemble a
man of strawe, that seemeth at a blush to carry some proportion, but
when it is felt and poysed, discovereth a vanity, serving only to fraye
crowes; and I trust your honours will see the proofe hereof and mine
innocencie testified in this behalfe by the thing itselfe within these
few dayes. But goe to, suppose hee never bee had, what is Kildare to
blame for it, more than my good brother of Ossory? notwithstanding his
high promises, having also the king’s power, he is glad to take egges
for his money, and bring him in at leysure. Cannot the Earle of Desmond
shift, but I must bee of counsell? cannot hee bee hid, except I winke?
If hee bee close, am I his mate? If hee bee friended, am I a traitour?
This is a doughty kinde of accusation, which they urge against mee,
wherein they are stabled and myred at my first denyall. You would not
see him, say they; who made them so familiar with mine eye sight? or
when was the Earle within my _Equinas_? or who stood by when I let him
slip? or where are the tokens of my willfull hood-winking? Oh, but you
sent him word to beware of you: who was the messenger? where are the
letters? convince my negative. See how loosely this idle reason hangeth:
Desmond is not taken, well, we are in fault: why? because you are. Who
proves it? nobody. What conjectures? so it seemeth. To whom? to your
enemies. Who told it them? What other grounds? none. Will they sweare
it? they will sweare it. My Lords, then belike they know it: if they
know it, either they have my hand to show, or can bring forth the
messenger, or were present at a conference, or privy to Desmond, or
somebody betrayed it to them, or themselves were my carryers or
vice-gerents therein. Which of these parts will they choose? I know them
too well to reckon myself convict by their bare wordes, or headlesse
hearsayes, or frantick oathes: my letters were soone read, were any such
writing extant; my servaunts and friends are ready to bee sifted. Of my
cousin Desmond they may lye lewdly, since no man can heere will tell the
contrary. Touching my selfe, I never noted in them either so much wit,
or so much faith, that I could have gaged upon their silence the life of
a good hound, much lesse mine owne. I doubt not, may it please your
honours to oppose them, how they came to knowledge of these matters
which they are so ready to depose, but you shall finde their tongues
chayned to another man’s trencher, and as it were knights of the post,
suborned to say, sweare, and stare the uttermost they can, as those that
passe not what they say, nor with what face they say it, so they say no
truths. But of another thing, it grieveth me that your good grace, whom
I take to be wise and sharpe, and who of your own blessed disposition
wish me well, should be so farre gone in crediting those corrupt
informers, that abuse the ignorance of their state and country to my
perill. Little know you, my lord, how necessary it is, not onely for the
governour, but also for every nobleman in Ireland, to hamper his
vincible neighbours at discretion, wherein, if they wayted for processe
of law, and had not these lives and lands you speake of within their
reach, they might pass to loose their own lives and lands without law.
You heare of a case, as it were in a dreame, and feell not the smart
that vexeth us. In England there is not a meane subject that dare extend
this hand to fillip a peere of the realme;--in Ireland, except the lord
have cunning to his strength, and strength to save his owne, and
sufficient authoritie to racke thieves and varletts when they stirre,
hee shall finde them swarme so fast that it will bee too late to call
for justice. If you will have our service take effect, you must not tye
us always to the judicial proceedings, wherewith your realme, thank-bee
God, is inured. As touching my kingdome, my Lord, I would you and I had
exchanged kingdomes but for one moneth, I would trust to gather up more
crummes in that space, than twice the revenues of my poore
earledome;--but you are well and warme, and so hold you, and upbraide
not me with such an odious storme. I sleepe on a dablin, when you lye
soft in your bed of downe; I serve under the cope of heaven, when you
are served under a canopy; I drinke water out of a skull, when you
drinke out of golden cuppes; my courser is trained to the field, when
your jennet is taught to amble; when you are begraced, and belorded, and
crowched and kneeled unto, then I finde small grace with our Irish
borderers, except I cut them off by the knees.” At these girds the
councell would have smiled if they durst; but each man bitt his lippe,
and held his countenance. The Cardinall perceived that Kildare was no
cake, and rose in a fume from the councell-table, committed the Earle,
and deferred the matter till more direct probations came out of
Ireland.--It is unnecessary to add, that these “_probations_” were
readily procured. “For of this treason,” continues the quaint
chronicler, “he (Kildare) was found guilty, and imprisoned in the Tower
a long time. The gentleman betook himself to God and the King, was
heartily loved of the lieutenant, pittied in all the court, and standing
in so hard case, altered little his accustomed hue, comforted other
noblemen prisoners with him dissembling his own sorrow.
“One night, when the lieutenant and he, for disport, were playing at
_slide-groat_, suddenly commeth from the Cardinall a mandat to execute
Kildare on the _morrow_. The Earl marking the Lieutenant’s deep sigh on
reading the bill, ‘By Sant Bride,’ quoth he, ‘there is some mad game in
that scralle, but, fall how it will, this throw is for a huddle.’ When
the worst was told him: ‘Now I pray thee,’ quoth he, ‘doe no more but
learn assuredly from the King’s owne mouthe whether his Grace be witting
thereto or not.’ Sore doubted the Lieutenant to displease the Cardinall;
yet of very pure devotion to his friend, he posteth to the King at
midnight, and said his errand (for all houres of the day or night, the
lieutenant hath accesse to the prince upon occasions.) King Henry,
controwling the sawcyness of the priest--those were his tearmes--gave
him his signet in token of countermand; which, when the Cardinall had
seene, he began to breake into unseasonable words with the lieutenant,
which he was loath to heare, and so he left him fretting. Thus broke up
the storme for a time, and the next yeare Wolsey was cast out of favour;
and within few yeares Sir William Skevington was sent over deputy, who
brought with him the Earle pardoned, and rid from all his troubles.”
But this “riddance” was only of short duration. New causes of complaint,
and new reasons, were soon found or invented for once more drawing the
Earl from the strong hold of his interest and power--his native country:
and he was again “commanded by sharp letters to repair to England.” His
arrival there was followed by a report of his execution,[10] which soon
reached his family in Ireland. His son, whom he had left Lord Justice in
his place, the gallant but impetuous Lord Thomas, on hearing of this
supposed act of treachery against his father, threw down the sword of
office, and flew into open rebellion, followed by his five uncles the
Lords Fitzgerald. The insurrection was soon quelled; and the unfortunate
Geraldines having surrendered, set out for England on the parole of the
Lord Marshal Dorset, where, shortly after their arrival, they were all
executed in one day. The death of the old Earl himself in the Tower,
where he is said to have died “for thought and paine,” ends the tragic
story of the enforced absenteeism of the Geraldines.[11]
This murder of the Lady Geraldine’s uncles, father, brother, and that of
her unfortunate and highly endowed lover, (“who,” says Lodge, “reflected
splendour even on the name of Howard,” and who was put to death by Henry
VIII. for quartering the arms of Edward the Confessor,) must have
rendered the English Court a dreary residence to her. Still, however,
she remained there, most probably under the influence of the same major
force which first drew her from her domestic home. But while Henry thus
continued to retain the most beautiful woman of Ireland near his person,
he began to see, as it appears, the policy of keeping the men at home;
and he passed his famous bill against “_absencie_,” the preamble of
which is curious, as portraying the evils against which it was
framed--at least that portion of the evils by which the English
government, for a long series of years, was alone touched. Like a good
many more modern acts, be it remarked _en passant_, it commences by the
formal averment of a self-evident falsehood: “That, for as much as it
was notorious and manifest, that this land of Ireland being heretofore
inhabited and _in obedience_ to the said king’s most noble progenitors,
who in those days in the righte of the Crown of England had great
possessions, rentes, and profits, within the same land,” &c. It then
goes on to state “the ruine, rebellion, and decay,” which ensued by the
absence of the great landholders: who, “after abiding within the said
land, nobly and valiantly defended the same against all the king’s
enemies, and also _kept the same in such tranquillity and good order_,
as the King of England had due obedience of the inhabitance there, the
laws obeyed, and the revenues and regalitie were duely answered;” but
that afterwards “they and their heires absented themselves out of the
said land of Ireland, _denjorning_ within the realm of England, not
pondering, ne regarding the preservation thereof,--the townes, castels,
and garrisons appertaining to them fell in ruin and decay, and the
English inhabitants therein, in default of defence and _justice_, and by
compulsion of those of the Irish, were exiled, whereby the king’s said
progenitors lost as well their said dominion and subjection there, as
also their revenues and profites; and their said enemies by redopting or
retaining the said lands, dominions, and possessions, were elevated into
great pride,” &c. &c.
Hitherto, with a few exceptions, _absencie_, as touching a residence in
England, had been confined to the great Irish lords of the pale, who,
although of English descent, and bearing Norman names, had in the course
of successive generations run through all those shades of
naturalization, which left them in manners, habits, and affections, but
little distinguishable from the aboriginal Irishman, who proudly traced
his origin to the Lady Scota, the daughter or grand-daughter of King
Pharaoh.[12]
But it was reserved for the reign of the Virgin Queen to drive the
genuine nobility of Ireland from their native land at any loss or risk
into distant regions[13] and unknown countries, or to allure them to her
own formal and fantastic court, by a show of feminine sympathy; which,
though in direct contradiction to her whole policy and conduct, was well
calculated to win the unwary, and to soothe the unfortunate.[14]
The Queen, in her quality both of woman and sovereign, was fond of
making speeches; and she probably found it prettier to be pathetic than
just, as she certainly found it easier to chide than to call in the pack
of bloodhounds she had let loose upon the devoted country of her
delegated sway. While the Fitzwilliams, the Binghams, the Drurys, the
Bagnals, and others of her Irish ministers, were carrying destruction
through the land by “fire, sword, and pestilence,”[15] the fair and
royal rhetorician was exclaiming in her closet against their conduct, by
classical allusions to parallel facts, which showed at once her learning
and her sympathy. “I fear,” she said, apostrophizing her ministers in
Ireland, “that the same reproach will be made to me as was formerly made
by Bato to Tiberius. It is you who are to blame for these things, who
have committed your flocks not to shepherds but to wolves.” The Irish,
“who love learning to a fault,” says Spenser, (and women too, God
forgive them,) were bewitched by similar declarations of pity, breathed
in the language of the learned from the lips of the royal and the fair.
The O’Rourkes, the O’Neils, the O’Connors, forgot the wiles and the
treachery of which their fathers had been the dupes or the victims; and
each in his turn expiated his credulity in its fatal results.[16]
The English were accustomed to the presence of the Geraldines, the
Butlers, the De Courceys, De Burgos, and other great Anglo-Irish lords
of the pale, who, though by “gossipry and alliance” they occasionally
fell into Irish habits, and sported a glib or a mantle at home, were
still sure to resume the English costume when at the English court. But
the true aboriginal Irish gentlemen, the brave O’s and Macs, who, driven
to their woods and morasses with no other weapon of defence than their
skein, their hatchet, or their pike, had for centuries resisted the
well-armed force of England,--they were creatures of almost fabulous
interest and existence; and the “anthropophagi and men whose heads do
grow beneath their shoulders,” were not more monstrous to English
apprehensions than the “flying Irish,” whose wings were supposed to grow
beneath their heads. To the higher castes, however, they were known by
the reputation of their prowess and their comeliness; and were noted by
some of the poets of the day, alike for their invincible spirits and
their lofty stature.[17] This romantic interest thrown round a race at
once so brave and so unfortunate, so wild, and yet so gallant in their
bearing, might not have been without its effect in influencing the
policy of the coquettish queen, and drawing to her court those (as yet
unseen) Thanists, the known admirers of her sex and contemners of her
power.
The restlessness of suffering, the enterprise of romantic valour, the
partiality of the House of Tudor to the O’Neil’s, and other inducements
which Elizabeth herself held out, determined the famous Shane O’Neil (by
the prescriptive right of ages Thanist of his powerful sept, and by the
patent of Henry VIII. to his father, Earl of Tyrone) to visit the court
of England in the most perilous moment of his life. The sudden
appearance of the representative of the ancient kings of Ulster in the
ante-chambers of Whitehall excited a sensation in which the “lion-ported
queen” is said to have deeply and obviously participated. He burst upon
the guarded presence of her, whose acts against his religion and his
rights “resembled the bloody mandates of a Turkish divan rather than the
mild ordinance of a Christian queen,” in all the fearless hardihood of
one who “bore a charmed life,” fresh from the lines of revolt, with the
excitement of the fierce contest between the oppressor and the oppressed
fluttering at his bold heart and fevering his manly brow. He is
described as entering the presence-chamber at the head of a rude but
imposing train, composed of his guard of honour, the Irish
gallowglasses, who,--armed with battle-axes, their heads bare, their
long hair flowing in locks on their broad shoulders, their yellow
surplices with open sleeves trailing to the earth and surmounted by a
military harness--formed a strange contrast to the groupings and
_tournure_ of the ribboned and tagged chivalry through which they
passed. Even the “Londoners,” says Spenser, “marvelled at this strange
sight.”
O’Neil had come to plead his own cause at one of the court historians,
“received him with an affectation of tenderness; and after he had
resided some time at court, the flattery of his address, which appeared
artless and unstudied, and the speciousness of his allegations, so
wrought upon her, that, at his departure, she dismissed him with favour
and presents.”
This absenteeism of O’Neil, though favourable to his pride, and
flattering to his vanity while abroad, was injurious to his interests at
home. His base-born brother, Matthew, availing himself of his absence,
had usurped his rights, and assumed the chieftainship of his sept. The
question was debated (as if it were debateable) by the Irish government,
who, in defiance of all law, “ruled the point in favour of the bastard;
practising (says Parnell[18]) a policy that has governed them (the
English) to the latest times in India, where it has been the custom to
raise to the throne, in violation of the customary mode of succession, a
person who depended for his station on their power, who was strictly a
dependent, and _who might be set aside whenever a favourable opportunity
occurred_.” The _Sic jubeo_ of the Virgin Queen was, of course,
decisive. The bastard was declared the lawful heir; and the consequence
was a rebellion on the part of Shane. In this rebellion the chieftain
was unfortunate, and the whole possessions, both of Shane and Matthew,
were confiscated. “In order,” says Parnell, “to divert Shane, the
territory was reputed Matthew’s; and in order to get rid of Matthew’s
claim, the territory was confiscated as Shane’s.”[19] Meanwhile,
however, the Queen had won golden opinions in Ireland for her reception
of the most popular of Irish chiefs. The gates of absenteeism were now
thrown most seducingly open. The track was already beaten down which led
from the desolated banks of the Shannon to the pavilioned shores of the
Thames. Men, whose national failing was a sanguine credulity not
untouched with personal vanity, whose infirmity of temperament was a
reckless impetuosity, and whose weariness of suffering caught at every
change as a relief, now first began to find new hopes for their country
and themselves springing up in the “primrose path of dalliance” which
conducted them to the British court, and placed them in personal contact
with a woman and a queen--with one who, unlike her savage delegates in
Ireland, received them “with tenderness, and dismissed them with
favour.” The baubles given by a royal hand, and displayed at Shane’s
Castle, were pledges to the followers of O’Neil that the heart of the
Queen was of another policy from the counsels of her ministers. This
characteristic credulity is not even yet abated by experience. A
flattering reception of the Roman Catholic bishops, and a ribbon
bestowed on a Roman Catholic peer, led the sanguine Irish to draw a
similar conclusion respecting the politics of George IV. A mandate,
therefore got up in the form of a slight accusation, but considered by
the accused as an invitation, brought the O’Rourke chief or prince of
Brefny promptly and inconsiderately to the feet of the fair sovereign
who had issued it.
This gallant Irishman, as renowned for his personal beauty as for his
turbulence, had long been a favourite theme of complaint in the
despatches of the Irish deputies. Even his personal influence, and the
splendid endowments out of which it arose, were brought as damning
proofs against him. These also may have induced the Queen to judge for
herself; for the handsome absentee was received like O’Neil with a show
of tenderness, though not, alas! like him, “dismissed with favour.”
While history has briefly thrown off the facts of his summons, to court
his detention, and his unexpected execution, tradition has woven his
story in the many-coloured web of her own romantic loom; and though the
catastrophe of the tale, which still circulates in the neighbourhood of
his ruined castle, attests the ignorance or the love of the marvellous
of those who invented and circulated it; still there is a dovetailing of
the old Irish _Shanaos_ with historic record, which shows that _si cela
n’étoit pas vrai, c’étoit bien vraisemblable_.
“A wild story concerning O’Rourke,” says the author of the History of
the Irish Bards, “wanders about the County of Leitrim. O’Rourke was a
powerful and turbulent chieftain of this country in the reign of
Elizabeth. The Queen invited him to London, making him, at the same
time, warm professions of honours and service, though she only intended,
by this invitation, to lead him into a kind of exile, in order to secure
his obedience. The ingenuous O’Rourke, duped by the Queen’s arts,
promised to comply. Before his departure, he assembled his vassals and
neighbours in the great hall of his castle, and entertained them with
all the splendour of the times.[20] This is the feast so humorously
described by Mac Gauran.
“On O’Rourke’s arrival at Whitehall, the Queen was ready to receive him.
The elegant symmetry of his person, and his noble aspect, struck her
Majesty, and she secretly determined to rank him with her choicest
favourites. A sumptuous apartment was allotted him in the palace, and a
train of domestics were ordered to attend him. One night, a female
tapped at his door, and was readily admitted; but she retired before the
morning broke. The lady continued her visits for several nights, always
retiring about the same hour. O’Rourke’s curiosity was awakened and he
often urged her, but in vain, to disclose her name. At length he
discovered, by the light of the moon, a ring on one of her fingers,
which he observed with strict care, in the hope that it would lead to a
discovery. Next day espying the identical ring on her Majesty’s finger,
he unfortunately insinuated to her that he had discovered his fair
visitor. The following night an assassin was employed to punish him for
his idle curiosity.” The public execution of O’Rourke is however on
historical record.[21]
The fate of O’Neil, O’Rourke, and of O’Connor, who, to his own eternal
disgrace,[22] had been lured over to the English court, was not
calculated to encourage others, or to bring absenteeship into fashion.
Even those, who from long sufferings, harassed spirits, and subdued
energies, were desirous of peace and forgiveness at the expense of
independence, were still afraid, from experienced treachery, “to come
in,” as the phrase was; and were unwilling to absent themselves from the
fearful security of their woods and mountains, to which they were
romantically attached.
Lord Deputy Mountjoy, in a curious letter to the English council,
observes that “all the Irish that are now obstinate, are so only out of
their diffidence to be safe in forgiveness. They have the ancient
swelling of liberty of their countrymen to work on, and they fear to be
rooted out, and have their old faults punished upon particular
discontents.”
The plunder of Shane O’Neil, who, attainted, and driven beyond the pale
of law and of humanity, died a miserable death, did not satisfy those
who had benefited by his ruin. There was something too terrible to be
endured in the name of these fierce toparchs of the North, who were
still crowned in their stone chair, “with heaven for their canopy and
earth for their footstool;” and when the young and gallant Hugh O’Neil,
the last of his race, worthy of their illustrious descent, started up to
claim his inheritance, his death or his absenteeship (a political
decease) were the alternatives proposed to themselves by those who had
so largely profited by the confiscation of the immense property of his
family. “In an Irish parliament,” says Morrison, “O’Neil put up his
petition, that by virtue of letters patent granted to his grandfather,
his father, and their heirs, he might there (in parliament) have the
place of Earl of Tyrone, and be admitted to his inheritance. The title
and place were granted him:” but the inheritance was “reserved for the
Queen’s pleasure;” for the obtaining whereof, Sir John Perrot, (Lord
Deputy,) upon O’Neil’s promise of a great rent to be reserved to the
crown, gave him letters of recommendation into England. There he well
knew how to humour the court; for in the year 1587 he got the queen’s
letters patent for the earldom of Tyrone without any reservation of the
rent he had promised.
Whatever was O’Neil’s secret for “humouring the court,” great efforts
were made to fix him there as a permanent absentee; and the queen (who
at the same time had the young and unfortunate Earl of Desmond shut up
in the Tower[23]) gave O’Neil a troop of horse, a pension of a thousand
marks, and such proofs of her personal favour, as might have subdued a
less energetic mind, and abated a less deep-seated feeling of patriotism
and independence. But the young Irish Hercules soon became weary of the
court of his middle-aged Omphale. He sought “_to do her Majesty
service_” in Ireland by his influence over his countrymen, rather than
to submit to the bondage which he foresaw awaited his protracted
residence in England. “He lived,” says Morrison, “sometimes in Ireland
and much at the court of England:” yet by degrees he abandoned the
English court altogether; and, resuming his natural position in Ireland
as Earl of Tyrone, he contrived to preserve the good opinion of his
countrymen even while acting for the queen, “with all the alacrity of a
faithful subject.”
The reappearance of O’Neil in Ireland, his loyalty, and the queen’s
favour, threw the Irish government into utter consternation; and the
Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam, upon the execution of M‘Mahon (who was put to
death for an offence committed before the law which declared it capital
had been enacted) let fall some speeches against the Earl of Tyrone
(says Morrison) notwithstanding his late services,[24] “which speeches
coming to the Earl’s ears, were, as he afterwards said, the first causes
which _moved him to misdoubt his safety_, and to stand upon his defence,
now first combining with O’Donnel and other lords of the north, to
defend their honour, estates, and liberties.” The horrors which ensued
during a civil war of ten years’ duration, and which laid waste what
Lord Verulam calls “the most miserable and desolate nation on the face
of the earth,” produced the most effectual species of absenteeship; for
it sent out of the world, those that were not driven by any other means
out of the country; exterminating more than a third of the native
population!
The queen, however, says Bacon, “sought not an extirpation, but a
reduction;” but such was the _reduction_, that at the end of the war,
when Lord Mountjoy received the submission of a few “well-disposed
chiefs,” he _disposed_ of the others in a very summary way, “and by
fire, famine, or sword, weakened or ruined most of those who still
continued obstinate.” Still, however, the master-blow of this deputy
(who was after all one of the best Irish viceroys who served under the
Tudors) was the ruin of the once magnanimous and invincible O’Neil.
Having “taken the most of his fortresses, and what perhaps was more
mortifying to him, having broken in pieces the chair of stone, wherein
for many centuries the O’Neils of his family had been invested with more
than kingly authority, he obliged the unfortunate chief “to tender his
submission on his knees before the Lord Deputy and the council, and in
the presence of a great assembly; whereupon the Lord Deputy, in the
Queen’s name, promised the Earl for himself and his followers her
majesty’s gracious pardon.” Is it wonderful that in the ensuing reign
the O’Neils and the O’Donnels fled for ever from the scene of their
sufferings and humiliation; or that having chosen Spain as the goal of
their permanent absenteeship, they should have arrived there, only to
die of broken hearts?
Remote as are the times, the events of which are here so slightly
touched,--unfixed, capricious and despotic as were the government and
the laws,--rude, wild, weak and disorganized as was the state of
society,--yet, through the obscurity and confusion which hung over the
neglected annals of the day, it is evident that absenteeism, sometimes
encouraged or enforced by the English policy, was foreign to the
national habits and natural temperament of the Irish; and that the
aristocracy of the country were more than any other wedded to their
native land by natural affection, by family pride, by power, by
religion, and by every feeling and every prejudice which brightens or
shadows the mixed and imperfect condition of humanity. Hitherto
emigration had been the result of necessity or of despair; but it was
reserved for the Stuarts, Ireland’s direst foes, the flatterers of her
foible, and the enemies of her rights, to give a spell to absenteeism,
which even the policy and the despotism of the Tudors could not lend to
it. When the rude home of the Irish had by the sanguinary crusades of
Elizabeth been rendered no longer endurable, the Stuarts held out a lure
and presented a blandishment which suffering humanity could not resist;
and under an impulse, consecrated by a mistaken sense of loyalty and
chivalrous devotion, the long-enduring Irish rushed from the dreariness
of their desolate abodes, and thronged to a court where they fancied
they saw the representative of their native kings, seated on the throne
of their foreign tyrants.
The drivelling and despotic pedant, James, with the true family instinct
towards power, sought to win over that portion of his subjects whose
religion preached “passive obedience and the divine right of kings,” and
with whom he had so deeply tampered in the reign of his predecessor. On
his coming to the throne, he loaded the Irish with favours, while he
withheld rights; but with a disingenuous and stupid policy, secretly
counteracting the intentions of his own council, he privately led the
Irish to an open assumption of religious privileges, which he permitted
his ministers in Ireland to oppose, not only by remonstrance and
proclamation, but by “fire and sword.” To ingratiate himself still
further with the Irish gentry, and to break down whatever yet remained
of devotion to their country, or of “the old swelling of liberty,”
inherited from their fathers, he invited the most distinguished among
them to his court; where, “graciously received by the king,” and
incontinently ridiculed by the courtiers, they obtained the honour of
being made the heroes of a court masque, in which the sarcastic
laureate, Jonson, has handed down to posterity their devotion to “_the
king’s sweet faish_,” and the melancholy fact that they danced “_a
fadan_” for the amusement of “_King Yamish_;” who, as the arch-patron of
all buffoonery, doubtless chuckled over the degrading exhibition. How
many Irish _absentees_ have since danced “_the fadan_,” for the
amusement of mystifying royalty![25]
Thus prepared, by being “brayed as in a mortar” at home, and at once
degraded and flattered abroad, the Irish nobility but too willingly lent
themselves to the allurements held out by Charles the Second; (the
falsest of all their royal friends;) and from the epoch of the
Restoration absenteeship became a voluntary habit. It was then that what
has been called the characteristic virtue of the Irish, became the
source of one of their peculiar vices; and that the feeling of loyalty
which had led them to follow the king in his misfortunes, and to embrace
his almost hopeless cause in many a distant land, now once more lured
them from their own, to “share the triumph and partake the gale” of his
prosperity. The habits of a great capital and a gay court confirmed
their taste for emigration, and excited a disgust for their native land,
which became, in the end, as fatal to their interests as it was
destructive of their patriotism. Then absenteeism became a species of
national malady, a disease, infinitely more grievous in its effects than
that terrible pestilence, which, a little before, in ravaging the
population of Ireland, confined its mortal epidemia to a season and a
generation.[26]
Absenteeism was no longer limited to the harassed Catholic gentlemen or
loyal cavaliers, who came to seek the price of their sacrifice and their
fidelity at the exchequer of royal gratitude, and found it, like that of
the nation, closed by a fraudulent bankruptcy. The wealthy and the
noble, the Protestant and the Papist, the English by blood, and the
Scotch patentees; in a word, all who could afford to fly, now hastened
to a court, where for a time an Irish mistress and an Irish minister
held the ascendant; and where the Ormondes, the Ossorys, and the
Villars, exchanged the honourable retreat of their own beautiful
residences in Ireland, for the entresol of a royal villa at Newmarket,
or “a lodging” in the harem of Whitehall.[27] Titles, and places, and
pensions, and privileges, were then scattered among the Irish nobility,
and became the premium of absenteeism; paying the sacrifice of
patriotism in one sex, and of honour in the other. The talent, beauty,
and virtue, which, if concentrated at home, might have redeemed and
adorned the country from whence they were drawn, now served but to
increase the sum of elegant profligacy in that region, whose very
atmosphere was as fatal to manly independence, as it was to female
purity. Ireland, thus abandoned by the heads of her noble families,
deserted by her rank, her talent, her beauty, and her education, pouring
out the “_profits of the land to those who refunded nothing_,”--unhappy
Ireland, during the whole of the reign of Charles II. exhibited the most
deplorable picture of a country left a prey to strangers, to
undertakers, to patentees, to delegated powers, and official despotism;
and of a society which, false in its position, and divested of all those
ties and combinations which bind man to man, was totally destitute of
every element that confers the strength of political cohesion, and
disseminates the advantages of moral civilization.
In the midst of this anti-social chaos, every act of the legislature
served to render the atoms of the system more jarring and discordant,
until finally “the _Act of Settlement_,” by unsettling every thing and
rendering “confusion worse confounded,” added insult to injury, and
multiplied both the causes and the effects of absenteeism to the opulent
of all sects. The country was now more than ever given up to a
particular faction, which made its powerful stand on the heights of
ascendancy, under the sanction of a king who, in a great degree, owed
his life and throne to those whom that ascendancy was to reduce to
slavery and ruin.[30] It was at this period, more than any other, that
the stale devices of Catholic conspiracies and Popish plots were
resorted to, as a means of startling a distant ignorant legislature into
new acts of rigour, which, by crushing all that remained to be crushed,
by forfeitures and penalties, was to elevate a factious minority of the
nation to the supremacy of power and wealth.
The English Parliament, frightened, or pretending to be so, by the state
of things in Ireland, published a proclamation “for the apprehension and
prosecution of all Irish rebels,” at a moment when Ireland had sealed by
her best blood her devotion to the reigning dynasty; and the King, in
the face of his pledged honour and royal promise, excluded from the act
of indemnity (which was shortly after passed) more than two thirds of
his Irish subjects, who had alone been faithful to him, when all else
were false. While calumny and misrepresentation were thus working the
destruction of Ireland abroad, there were none at home to “remonstrate,”
as in the time of Elizabeth and James; none to protect or vindicate the
national character, or to raise the dark veil, which the cupidity of
domestic and predatory enemies had dropped over the injuries, the worth,
and the misfortunes of the country. It is still more lamentable to add,
that some of the most illustrious of the absentees, who haunted the
Court as dependants, or influenced the Cabinet as counsellors, found it
their account to sanction the misrepresentations, and to perpetuate a
state of things by which the noble renegadoes were to be themselves the
ultimate gainers. It is the effect of absenteeship to harden the heart
against all the precious sympathies of patriotism, and it has ever been
the practice of absentees to magnify and circulate the rumour of those
national disorders which arise in part out of their own desertion of
their native land, and which they suppose might offer a reason, if not
an excuse, for their abandonment of the soil and its interests.[31]
The times, however, changed with the men, and the short reign of the
unfortunate bigot James II. was pregnant with new and important events
for Ireland. At the first temporary turn of the scale in Irish politics,
absenteeism, which could scarcely increase, certainly did not diminish.
By this change, the nation at large gained little; and the mean ambition
of the nobility, who accepted power and place without one feeling of
patriotism or sympathy for the country, was soon nipped in the bud, and
for ever blasted with the fortunes of the monarch, on whose favour it
was founded.[32] The Irish gentry supported the cause of despotism and
bigotry in vain; and the impetuous imbecility of James served only to
hasten that ruin, which public opinion had so deservedly prepared for
him and his family. The mistaken adherence of the people to so bad a
cause, was, in some measure redeemed by the disinterested fidelity with
which they continued to serve that family in its adversity, which in
prosperity had always repaid their services with ingratitude. It was the
Irish (the ultra-royalists of all times) who, during the dark fortunes
of the worthless _protégé_ of the Bourbons, clung to him, when all else
deserted him. They manned his navy, recruited his army, replenished his
coffers, and took their stand around his person on their native soil;
and when they saw him the first to fly,[33] they still erected his torn
standard, and rallied in his cause,[34] paying the penalty of their
generous but misapplied devotion to a bigot and a tyrant, by utter ruin,
and eternal exile. The outlawry and confiscations of 1688 drove near
four thousand Irishmen of family into a dreary and perpetual
absenteeism, and sent them to dole out for a pitiful hire, in the cause
of oppression in other countries, the same valour, and the same spirit,
which their fathers had displayed in support of the liberty of their
own.
The sale of the estates of these unfortunate and involuntary
absentees,[35] under the authority of the English parliament, changed a
large portion of the Irish population, and introduced a new race of
landed proprietors, whose interest it was _to stay at home_. The tide of
absenteeship received a powerful check from the necessity of
circumstances. Those Irish Catholics, who had escaped detection, or were
exempt from suspicion, retired to their remote patrimonial domains, and
sought safety in obscurity; hoping, by remaining peaceably at home, to
escape the notice of a government which had sprung out of a revolution
they had so lately opposed. The Protestants likewise found it their
interest to remain the vigilant guardians of the new possessions they
had recently acquired, and of the old, which they had so bravely
protected. All parties were either impoverished or unsettled; and few
had the means, if they had the desire, to remove from a scene of ferment
and desolation, to one of security and enjoyment. For the Irish of any
sect or race, there was then no resting-place.
While England gained every thing by a revolution, which she owed to the
moral and political education acquired during a century of struggle for
civil rights and religious freedom, Ireland lost nearly all she had left
to lose through her deficiency in these endowments, resulting from many
centuries of anarchy and misrule. The picture, sketched by a
master-hand, of the condition of affairs at this singular epoch, is full
of a fearful and melancholy interest. “By the total reduction of the
kingdom of Ireland in 1691,” says Burke, “the ruin of the native Irish,
and in a great measure of the first race of the English, was completely
accomplished. The new interest was settled with as solid a stability as
any thing in human affairs can look for. All the penal laws of that
unparalleled code of oppression which were made after the last event,
were manifestly the effects of national hatred and scorn towards a
conquered people, whom the victors delighted to trample upon, and were
not at all afraid to provoke. They were not the effects of their fears,
but of their security. They who carried on this system looked to the
irresistible force of Great Britain for their support in their acts of
power. They were quite certain that no complaints of the natives would
be heard on this side of the water, with any other sentiments than those
of contempt and indignation. Their cries served only to augment their
torture. Machines which could answer their purposes so well must be of
an excellent contrivance. Indeed, at that time, in England, the double
name of the complainants, Irish and Papists, (it would be hard to say
singly which was the most odious,) shut up the hearts of every one
against them. Whilst that temper prevailed in all its force to a time
within our memory, every measure was pleasing and popular, just in
proportion as it tended to harass and ruin a set of people who were
looked upon as enemies to God and man; and, indeed, as a race of bigoted
savages, who were a disgrace to human nature itself.”[36]
In spite, however, of religious intolerance[37] and civil
disqualification--of statutes which render commerce a crime, and laws
which made industry penal[38]; of abuses of power numerous under
William, and quadrupled under the last of the Stuarts and the first of
the Brunswicks, still something like a counterpoise was found to balance
these political evils in the _home residence of the educated gentry_,
and in the political bustle and activity of an Irish Parliament. As soon
as the positive calamities of war and confiscation ceased, as soon as an
approach was made to European habits and policy, and industry was
permitted to find a scope and a reward for its exertions, the nation
made a sudden and a rapid progress in civilization and comfort, simply
through the efficiency of its own resources, and the demands of its own
market. It was in vain that the talismanic words “Irishman” and “Papist”
were employed to arm passion and prejudice against the country; it was
in vain that commercial jealousy threw shackles round its infant
manufactures. In spite of these and many other obstacles, the moral
strength of a country always distinguished for the natural endowments of
its population,[39] rose superior to the cruel pressure of its political
inflictions; and the domestic activity and intellectual improvement of
the people--slow and limited as they appear, when compared with the
advances of the sister kingdom--proceeded with a rapidity little short
of miraculous, under so stultifying a system of legislation and
government. It was then that the light of national genius concentrated
its long-scattered rays to a point, and shining steadily from its proper
focus, threw out those inextinguishable sparks of moral lustre,
“----Which are wont to give
Light to a world and make a nation live.”
It was then that the powerful collision of active, ardent, and energetic
minds produced that brilliant burst of talent which, for something more
than a century, flung over the political darkness of the land a
splendour to which her struggles and her misfortunes served only to give
a stronger relief and more brilliant effect. It was then that, after
ages of mental depression, which the song of the Irish bard but deepened
into a more poetical sadness,[40] the Irish intellect broke out, like
the Irish rebellion, “threescore thousand strong,” when none expected or
were prepared for the startling and splendid irruption. The old mart of
learning was re-opened to the erudite of Europe, as in those times, when
if a sage was missing, it was said “_emandatus est ad disciplinam in
Hibernia_;” and the rich stream of native humour which, like a caverned
river, had hitherto kept the “noiseless tenor of its way,” darkened by
impending shadows, now rushed forth with the rapidity of a torrent,
pure, sparkling, and abundant, at the first vent afforded to its
progress. Science and philosophy now first raised their altars amidst
the monkish monuments of an antiquated institution, and benefited the
world by theories and by experiments originated in a land where public
opinion and private faith were still struggling under the ban of legal
proscription.[41] England then opened a running account with Ireland for
dramatic contributions when her own resources had, by being too largely
drawn upon, nearly become bankrupt;[42] and literary Europe stood
indebted to Irish wit, fancy, and humour, for the richest treats, which
render the leisure of the learned delectable, and the amusement of the
idle instructive.[43]
Even the arts, in these stirring times of social concentration, awakened
from their long and deadly slumbers; and the slowly reviving school of
painting in England received some of its most noted disciples from
Ireland, a country so little adapted, by its miseries and its
commotions, to the cultivation of the most tranquil and meditative of
intellectual pursuits.[44] At this time, too, the Irish muse found a
willing and a worthy priestess in one of the fair daughters of the
land,[45] where her temples had so long been closed; and “the mother of
sweet singers,” awakened by the genius of national melody, beheld her
sons
“Thronging round her magic cell,”
as in the days of the Mayos[46] and the O’Connors.[47]
The triumphs of Carolan, the last of the Firsgealaighthes or Irish
Troubadours, were followed by those of Handel and Piccini;[48] and
though the wild sweet tones of the Irish harp were still occasionally
heard in the pauses of the Messiah and of the elegant Armida, still,
taste, improving with the developement of the art, soon rendered the
Italian and German schools of music the exclusive study in Ireland; and
they excited an enthusiasm which well belonged to a people who, in all
their wretchedness and degradation, had found in music a vehicle for
their feelings and their passions, for their deep-seated indignation,
and their long-meditated revenge. St. Bridget now hid her diminished
head in her “cell of the oak;[50] while St. Cecilia saw more tapers
lighted at her shrine in the Irish capital than ever illumined her dusky
chapel in the Trastevere at Rome. Music halls were built for public
concerts; and musical societies, assuming the importance and dignities
of corporate bodies, were formed out of the amateur[51] and professional
talent of the country; while the conciliating genius of harmony,
refusing that “to a party which was meant for mankind,” devoted its
divine powers to smoothing political austerities, reknitting the social
affections, and promoting the first of all human virtues--charity.[52]
Oh! surely this was the true purpose for which the Divinity breathed
into the soul of man that fine susceptibility to the mystic charm of
harmony, which lulls the harsher passions, and substitutes the
excitement of delicious sensations for the bitter feelings and harassing
emotions which the cross purposes of life call hourly into existence.
Who now in Ireland but may look back with regret to the philharmonic
societies “of other times,” from the magic of whose strains a shelter
rose for the wretched, and in whose bands men of all parties blended the
“concord of sweet sounds.” Who that in the present day has witnessed in
the capital of Ireland, the different and dark purposes to which music
and musical society have been perverted, but must lament that the
sweetest of the arts should have been pressed into the service of civil
dissension--should have fulfilled the purposes of party intrigue, and
gratified the malice of a narrow-souled faction. Who but must shudder to
perceive its influence directed to rousing the irritable fibre, and
stirring up the bile of political malady; to exciting by its “musical
cheers” the passions of the powerful few against the suffering many, and
fomenting by its choicest harmonies the discord of social disunion and
the dissonance of party hatred. Spirits of Handel and of Arne, of
Calcott and of Mozart, how little did ye dream in your philosophy that
your heaven-inspired strains should serve as the war-whoop of faction,
the death-song of domestic peace, and national confraternity!!
While music excited in Ireland the same enthusiasm, and was cultivated
with more science, than when “in early Greece she sung,” the drama
partook of the triumph. Two royal theatres and an Italian
opera-house[53] could scarcely supply the cravings of the public taste;
and an audience, noted for its critical acumen, gave to the Irish stage
a classical character, and developed a competition which drew forth
candidates for dramatic fame even from the higher classes of society,
conferring that respectability upon the members of the stage, which
ought at all times to belong to a profession which holds so decided an
influence over the morals and the manners of a nation.[54]
But though the circumstances of the times rendered the home residence of
the Irish gentry more permanent than it has since ever been, or perhaps
ever was before, the fashion universally prevailed of sending the youth
of good family to make the grand tour; and the young and travelled
aristocracy, the Fitzgeralds, the Caulfields, the Kirwans, the O’Neils,
the Blakes, came back, no less to improve the tastes of their country,
than to defend her cause, and to enlarge the sphere of her energies. A
variety of refined amusements and elegant enjoyments, hitherto unknown
in Ireland, came in their suite; which while they gave employment and
food to the lowly and the industrious, tended to disseminate that taste
for factitious pleasures, and that craving for refined gratifications,
which though not in themselves the efficient causes of civilization, are
in no small degree favourable to its developement.[55] Pleasure, lured
to the Irish shores from distant regions, planted her gay standard, and
raised her brilliant pavilions in the capital, at that time crowded with
the wealthy and the educated. The ridottos of the music hall, with their
fantastic arrangements and sylvan scenery,[56] recalled the similar
festivities of the Italian carnival. Palaces succeeded to the cumbrous
mansions of the seventeenth century; and Charlemont house, with its
beautiful architecture, its splendid library, and invaluable
collections, still preserved in all their integrity by the present noble
owner, stands a singular monument not only of the pure taste and
magnificent spirit of an Irish nobleman, who had even higher claims to
the admiration and respect of his country, but of the genius of the
times, and the prosperity--the short-lived prosperity--of the land in
which such a private edifice was raised. The villas of Tuscany and
Lombardy were repeated along the shores of a bay that wanted only a
Vesuvius to rival that of Naples; and the names which these pretty
villas still bear, recal the travelled tastes of their elegant
founders.[57] Private theatricals (the dramatis personæ taken from the
red book) were got up in the castles of the O’Neils and the halls of the
Butlers; and the public assemblies, held under the newly-raised dome of
the Rotunda, were types of the _casino nobile_ of Florence and
Bologna;[58] while the Sunday evening promenades in its illuminated
gardens contributed to the funds of a blessed charity, and bestowed that
health and those spirits, without which the kindlier feelings are too
frequently blighted, and the generous propensities absorbed in a
querulous and fretful egoism.[59]
The Irish press!--and who that now knows the capital of Ireland, and
beholds its utter incompetency to support the publication of even _one_
trifling periodical work, will believe that Ireland once _had a
press_!--the Irish press then teemed with native literary productions;
which if as mere “_pieces de circonstance_,” thrown off at a heat, they
might sometimes want the higher finish of more elaborated composition,
were still stamped with the ardour of the national spirit, and “faithful
to its fires.” The frequent and “keen encounter of the wits” upon great
questions, produced an animated competition, which even the
statesman-like sobriety of English viceroys could not always resist. The
Draper’s letter of Lord Chesterfield, (an imitation of Swift,) and the
political caricatures of Lord Townshend, written at a later period, were
proofs that Ireland was not always governed by the dull and the dogged,
and that her metropolis once boasted of a society which _obliged_ the
representatives of majesty as well as the representatives of the people
to cultivate the suffrages of the public, by means never addressed to an
uncivilized or an illiterate community. Politics and polemics then alike
fell to the discussion of humour and talent. The public journals, though
few, were fair; their editors were responsible both by their property
and their personal consideration; and their contributors were frequently
the most brilliant members of Irish society, the most learned sons of
the Irish alma mater. Swift, Dr. Sheridan, Lucas, Flood, Burgh,
Yelverton, Courtenay, Jephson, Bishop Marley, Grattan, Curran, and
others equally notable, if not equally noted, contributed successively a
portion of their luminous intellects to illustrate the pages of that
mighty engine of public feeling--the PERIODICAL PRESS. Whatever side was
advocated,--the country or the court, patriotism or power,--it does not
appear that any journal was set up on a merely sordid principle, or an
utter disregard of all truth and decency. There was then no waylaying
with indiscriminate ruffianism the feelings of private individuals, no
exhibition of the sacred details of the domestic life of political
characters, as a means of existence to some outcast of society, who
wanted the courage to seek a less dishonourable bread on the public
highway. For when the genuine and educated gentry of Ireland, her
hereditary senators and native legislators, made up the larger portion
of the reading public of her capital, a journal edited by the nefarious
and the base, by the hired assassin of reputation or the paid pander of
ribald passions, would have been hunted down with one common feeling of
national indignation and manly contempt. Where is the land, so lost in
its degradation, so insensible to all its higher interests, as to endure
that such a “damning witness” should go forth to the world and bear
testimony to its moral, social, and literary depravity? Alas that there
should be one! Alas that the land of wit and feeling should furnish
forth readers, even from its high and official classes, to reward and
encourage the instruments of its own disgrace! Alas for the country,
where the hired servants of the government club their quota to propagate
the rancorous overflowings of the vilest and most antisocial passions;
where the ordained ministers of religion, subscribe for the
dissemination of the grossest and most mischievous falsehoods; where the
magistrate chuckles privately over the libel he is publicly bound to
punish; and where to be pre-eminent in villainy and matchless in
audacity, is the short road to command sympathy and ensure subsistence.
But if a reduction of absenteeism, if the permanent residence of the
major part, of the wealth, the nobility, and above all, and more
precious than all, of the EDUCATION of the country, produced these
blessed effects, the greater good, the “last best gift,” which
congregated interests and intellects could bestow on a community, Public
Spirit, fell like dew in the desert upon the renovating nation. Men who
had long learned to feel and to think, now, in the consciousness and
confidence of their associated strength, first ventured to speak and to
act: at once inspiring and inspired, they spoke as prophets and acted as
patriots. The talent of the free suddenly burst into existence, as if by
a divine miracle in the land of the enslaved; and eloquence, the
inherent characteristic of the nation, which had occasionally broken
forth in the rude but exciting harangues of the O’Donnels and the
O’Neils, now shone out brilliantly, with a lustre which Athens in her
best, and Rome in her greatest days, scarcely surpassed. Political
oratory and political knowledge, proceeding from the same cause and
bearing on the same point exhibited Ireland in a new aspect to the
wondering world; and the names of Molyneux,[60] Ponsonby,[61] Prior,[62]
Boyle,[63] Connolly,[64] Tottenham,[65] Lucas, Charlemont, Burke,
Grattan, Curran--names which are now but sounds--will retain to the
latest posterity their mystical and magic influence, as the signs of
times and events, the glory of a nation’s history, and as the evoquing
spells of that genius, which awakens liberty and watches over a nation’s
happiness. Oh! these were times to live in and men to live among--when
the capital of the kingdom was something better than a garrison or an
assize town! when its fashionable assemblies were not thrown upon the
eleemosinary contributions of barracks and boarding-schools, of military
exquisites who “_never dance_,” and harmless young gentlemen who do
nothing else! These were times, when the men were all at home, and their
spirits all abroad! when the rush from the senate was sure to fill the
drawing-room; and they who boldly fought in the one for the liberties of
their country, came to lay their own liberty at the feet of beauty in
the other. These were times, when even love and law went forth arm in
arm together from the inns of court, to _that_ court, where the special
pleading of counsel rarely failed to win the cause, where even losses
were victories, and where the inconsiderate heart of the young legal
aspirant selected its client for life without reference to politics,
place, pension, or promotion. Then Leinster-house, and Charlemont-house,
and Powerscourt-house, and Waterford-house, and Moira-house, and an
hundred other splendid “_houses_” of the resident nobility, were open to
the wit, the talent, the literature, and the gallantry of the country.
Then, the cells of the University, silent as the tomb during the
studious day, echoed at night to the song, the laugh, the epigram, or
the jest of gay and brilliant spirits destined to come forth and enchant
society by their social and colloquial powers; while they defended the
independence of their country by their eloquence and patriotism. These
were times when the charms of the lovely Gunnings, the more lovely
Munroes,[66] and an hundred others of their lovely successors, were
embalmed for posterity in the verses of contemporary poets; and when the
amatory sonnets of one of the first orators of the age were not deemed
inferior to his speeches at the bar, or his orations in the senate.[67]
These were times when the young ladies of the capital did not wait for
the _marching in_ of the divisions of a regiment, as their only chance
of _marching out_ of the ranks of celibacy; for absenteeship was then
but temporary: the young nobility and gentry, if they travelled and
flirted abroad, came back to love and to marry at home; since, “where’er
they roamed, whatever climes” they saw, they still saw nothing fairer
than the fair they left behind them. These were times, which, when
recalled, like Ossian’s Song of Sorrow, are both “pleasing and mournful
to the soul.”
But to return. When penal statutes and all that is intended by the false
policy of shallow and self-interested legislators to disqualify man for
the knowledge and assertion of his political rights, still continued to
check the progress of civil liberty in Ireland, the combined effects of
a portion of the liberal and educated resident gentry were found
sufficient to make head against a government which the sternest upholder
of English power, and he too an Irish chancellor,[68] declared “was
enough to crush any nation upon earth;” and which one of the wisest and
best philanthropists of that or any age[69] has defined to have been
“such a combination of rapine, treachery, and violence as would have
disgraced the name of government in the most arbitrary country in the
world.” Other events, bearing upon the same point, tended at this epoch
to soften, if not to remedy the evils of that terrific code, which
disgraced England even more than it degraded Ireland.[70] While the
church militant in Ireland usurped a power in the persons of its
Protestant popes, the primates and archbishops, which smelt of the times
of the Beckets and the Wolseys,--while Boulter and Stone preserved their
own supremacy by their well-sustained system of dividing Ireland within
herself, and adding to her restrictions by fomenting her
discontents,--it _did_ happen that the necessity of circumstances
occasionally procured for the country a chief governor, whose personal
interests in the land from which he drew his maintenance and support,
awakened “some bowels for a poor relation,” or whose higher order of
genius and generalized views raised him above the level of the miserable
local politics, the petty cabals, and factious intrigues of that remote
and wretched spot which is, in position as in politics, the _cul de sac_
of civilized Europe. These happy incidents indeed were rare, and make
but a poor set-off in the balance, of vice-regal virtue and talent,
against the dulness, bigotry, and ostentatious pretension, which have so
often covered their Midas’ ears under the coronet of delegated sway.
It was under a Devonshire that the susceptible Irish, always led by
personal feelings, first began to rally with confidence and hope round a
government that seemed to abate in the execution, if not in the spirit
of the law, something of that sanguinary reign which had hitherto
chilled loyalty into despair; and the personal qualities of this great
Irish proprietor were productive of the most felicitous effects, at the
most fearful epoch in the reign of the house of Hanover. The Stuarts,
the abdicated, the Catholic Stuarts, had planted their standard on the
English and Scottish shores, and the English and the Scotch, to a
dangerous amount, rushed from all parts to support the principles of
Toryism, in the person of him who was the “brief abstract” of all
Toryism. Where then in this moment of frightful exigency, when empire,
liberty, and life were at stake, where then were those “_enfans de la
revolution_,” the Protestant princes of Brunswick, the defenders of the
faith of Luther, to look for the rally of defence, for the protection of
loyalty against Catholic oppression? It was to the native Irish, the
Catholic Irish! that England, in the face of her own savage laws,[71]
turned for aid against British rebellion; and while the Irish gentry of
all sects remained immutably true to their legitimate (or according to
modern doctrines their _illegitimate_) sovereign, the flower of the
Catholic population rushed forth to man the navy and recruit the army,
which was to make a stand against successful rebellion,--successful at
least for a time, in every part of the British islands save alone in
Ireland.
Still, however, in this moment of fearful exigency, when the old idols
of Irish devotion were again presenting themselves to a susceptible
people in all the charm of struggle and misfortune, something more than
the mild wisdom which the gentle blood of Cavendish has always produced,
was deemed necessary to watch over Catholic Ireland; and one was chosen
suited to meet the difficulties of the day, and to carry on that system
of conciliation begun by the Duke of Devonshire. This one was Philip
Stanhope Earl of Chesterfield, who, as the “Mirror of (Irish)
Magistrates,” in which succeeding chief governors of Ireland should
“dress themselves,” merits a particular notice.
This nobleman, who had been for ten years in opposition, was selected
more in necessity than in liking: and he with difficulty obtained an
audience of leave from reluctant Majesty, on his departure for his
viceroyalty. When he demanded in the closet, “his Majesty’s commands,”
he was coolly told that he had already received his instructions, and
was dismissed without any token of confidence or of courtesy. While the
ministry put him forward as an instrument of conciliation, and loaded
him with the responsibility of a difficult government, they wished to
retain in their own hands the substance of power, and to shackle him
with some creature of their own, in the character of secretary; but he
laughed at the intrigue, and in their despite chose for himself one,
whom he describes to his son as “a very pretty young fellow, who knew
nothing of business;” for he was determined to rule by himself, to see
with his own eyes, and to encounter no subaltern interference with the
system he chose to adopt. Such was the spirit in which Lord Chesterfield
entered on his arduous mission, and ascended the vice-regal throne of
Ireland, on which he was placed by that influence to which even kings
and ministers must sometimes submit,--the influence of circumstances!
Docile mediocrity, the ordinary qualification of an Irish Lord
Lieutenant, was now no longer adequate to meet the exigencies of the
hour, as in those times of comparative tranquillity, when any
stalking-horse of diplomacy might be led over the beaten course by some
self-sufficient political jockey with the name of chief secretary; who,
without the pageantry of the higher office, monopolized all its
patronage and exercised more than its powers. At this moment dangers
both internal and external called for qualities of a different order,
and the English government was driven to the desperate resource of
accepting the aid of great abilities, at the expense of abiding by the
decisions of untrammelled independence. Such was the moment at which
George the Second disdainfully appointed one of the cleverest men of his
empire to the government of Ireland; and to this involuntary election he
probably owed that he was not himself sent back “to give his little
senate laws” in his patrimonial estate of Hanover.
It was in vain that “Popery and the Pretender”[72] was the cry _mille
fois repeté_ in the ears of this new and singular Lord Lieutenant,--that
the old measures of the Boulters and the Stones were proposed as the
golden rules of vice-regal conduct,--that preachers from the pulpit
aroused the crusading spirit of intolerance against a sect beaten down
to the earth,--that the domineering party of a haughty ascendancy
assailed the audience-room of the Viceroy, and “stopped the chariot or
boarded the barge,” to teach him how to rule, to force him to recur to a
system beyond the rigour of the law, which enabled them to reign by
dividing, while it placed him on the list of mannikin lord lieutenants,
the wire-worked puppet of a bigoted faction. The acute, the elegant
Chesterfield, soon fathomed the depths of their ferocious feebleness,
and he played with the virulence he did not deign to wrestle with. When
the advocates of intolerance preached persecution, he answered their
counsels by an apotheghm and a _bon-mot_,--he quoted Cicero when they
cited Nassau,--he gave them parties for their politics,--suppers for
their sophistry, he forced them to swallow his measures with his
claret,--and he stopped the mouths of many with good dinners on whom
good arguments would have been thrown away. In a word, he knew them all,
he defied them all; and in despite of that party in the ministry which
supported an anti-national faction, he saved the wretched country they
were driving into a rebellion, which at that peculiar moment might have
separated Ireland for ever from the mother country.
By this personal combination of wisdom, humanity, and impartiality, Lord
Chesterfield preserved a Catholic population in the most perfect peace
and obedience, during the whole of that rebellion, which in Protestant
England and Presbyterian Scotland had nearly restored the Stuarts to the
throne they had forfeited by their blind and bigoted attachment to papal
institutions--a memorable example of the value of an enlarged philosophy
in governors, and of the disposition of the people to be grateful for
kindness in their rulers, of their proneness to yield a willing
obedience to authority, if encouraged by the slightest show of justice
and fair dealing in those whom chance has placed over them.
But narrow hearts and narrow intellects, impervious to the more generous
impulses of nature, and placing the whole force of government in the
scaffold and the bayonet--oppressing those they fear, and fearing those
they oppress--have too long exerted their baleful influence in
brutalizing and debasing the Irish nation into permanent anarchy,
creating those abuses, which they now plead in justification of their
own unpitying rigour: and if in rare and distant intervals the
patriotism and the kindly feelings of a Chesterfield have again found
themselves under the canopy of the viceregal throne, the oppressor and
the oppressed have alike been opposed to their beneficent activity. The
good which Chesterfield effected in times of difficulty and danger, can
now scarcely be hoped for even in the halcyon hour of peace: and should
the British empire be again involved in foreign conflict, Ireland,
unemancipated Ireland, might be urged to seek new destinies for herself
in an alliance from which she _might_ have something to hope, but from
which she could have nothing to fear more terrible than she has already
encountered during the ceaseless miseries of nearly six centuries. Of
this truth, harsh and repulsive as it may seem, no one who has studied
the subject can entertain a rational doubt. The example of America is
before the eyes of the people, and the hope delayed and the promise and
the pledge unredeemed lie deep in their hearts: restrictive and penal
laws, too severe even for occasional application, have become also
permanent on the statute book; famine and pestilence have grown almost
periodical in their visitations. From such premises what other
conclusion can be drawn? An influence behind the throne, and greater
than the throne, has chilled the sympathies and arrested the
outstretched hand of royalty; even the collective wisdom of the empire
has cowered before a party, and truckled to a faction; the cup of
reconciliation, though pledged by a sovereign, has been drugged with
poison; and a divided cabinet has distracted the country and paralyzed
the exertions of the only public functionary, who for years has
administered the laws of the country with any thing approaching to the
spirit of mercy and of fairness.
From the period of Lord Chesterfield’s administration, the effects
produced by the permanent residence of the Irish gentry, were felt in
that most blessed consequence, the developement of a public spirit. The
English in Ireland, says Burke, began to feel that they were
domiciliated, and had a country; and the Irish found that what was
technically called “the English interest,” was gradually fading before
one common and independent national will! It was in vain that one of the
belligerent chiefs of the church (always the fomentors of Irish discord)
still struggled to uphold a system which was ruin to the many and power
to the few. The proud churchman and servile courtier, the arrogant and
despotic primate of the day, was taught to feel that he had other times
and other men to deal with than those living when the country sunk under
the weight of Boulter’s iron crosier. It was in vain that he affected to
“_do the king’s business_,” (as he termed it) as other Protestant
Wolseys had done it; and openly avowed his intention of carrying every
government measure, _à coup de main_, and in spite of all constitutional
opposition; for he lived to see the Irish gentry arrayed against the
undue influence of despotic churchmen under the standard of an Irish
speaker! The Irish patriots, led on by the chief of the Irish
aristocracy,[73] and united with the middle and the mercantile classes,
formed but one caste in feeling and in effort to array public opinion,
against unconstitutional measures,[74] and to put down for ever the
direct and ruinous interference of ecclesiastical statesmen! The
government was now awakened to the danger of employing the zealous and
intemperate, by the resistance which the primate had roused into
activity; and Stone, struck off the list of privy counsellors, the
object of national hatred and party contempt, exhibited one more example
of the vanity of unfounded ambition, and the weakness of that policy
which is opposed to public virtue, and the plain rule of right.
The rapid progress which at this period public opinion and political
science were making, through the agency of a resident and educated
gentry, was so highly estimated, that an English Lord Lieutenant, (Lord
Harcourt,) as the most popular measure he could bring forward to
counteract the distasteful effect of other less gracious and salutary
acts, proposed on the part of government (1773) a tax on absentees!
Never was such a tax less called for; for the absentees were not in that
day in the proportion of one to an hundred, compared with those of the
present times. Yet the draining of the resources of Ireland in the
smallest proportion, the pouring forth of any modicum of native treasure
into foreign coffers, was considered as nothing less than high treason
to the country. The great English landholders of Ireland made a powerful
resistance to a tax which principally affected themselves; but the
majority by which the measure was rejected was so small[75] as to leave
no doubt of its popularity, and of the feelings of the public on the
subject.
Those feelings, whether founded or erroneous, were by no means
unnatural; and the government, on its part, has never been slow to
encourage and strengthen them. The greater portion of the absentee
property had fallen to the lot of its English possessors, by fraud or
violence, by legal quibbling or by open proscriptions; and under the
most favourable circumstances, the cultivators of that soil, which on
the general principles of right and justice they imagined still to be
their own property, must naturally have regarded with a jealous eye the
foreign intruders. But in a country so poor as Ireland, so divested of
all other means of making money beyond the cultivation of the soil, this
annual exportation of excessive and burthensome rents could not fail to
be viewed with great discontent.[76] In England at the present day, if
all the landed proprietors were to export themselves to the Continent,
and to spend their rents in its various capitals, their absence would
scarcely be felt, amidst the multiplied resources of commercial
activity. Wherever the lord of the soil abandoned his dwelling, an East
India Nabob, a money-broker, or a merchant, would stand forth ready to
occupy his station, and rule over his domains; and the sums expended
abroad, would rapidly find their way home, in increased demands for the
products of English industry. On the other hand, the _nouveaux riches_,
divested of hereditary pretensions and feudal prejudices, and more
deeply instructed in the true principles of political economy, would
afford less opposition to the reception and diffusion of the lessons of
experience; and would therefore be the more acceptable to the labouring
classes, than those who, trammelled in the prejudices of hereditary
consequence, obstinately stand still in knowledge, while all around them
is moving in advance. In Ireland, however, it has always been otherwise.
Land has been ever the only instrument of industry, and rent the only
source of accumulated capital. The landed proprietors, together with
their immediate dependants, the members of the learned professions, have
long formed exclusively the educated classes; and their expenditure has
produced the only stimulus which existed, to excite the petty commerce
and circumscribed industry, which in the country towns of Ireland
support half-a-dozen shopkeepers; who, dignified with the name of
merchants, fill the municipal offices and send representatives to
Parliament. When, therefore, these favourites of fortune, the landed
proprietors, expatriate themselves, their mansions are left silent and
desolate; and none remains behind to employ the tenantry, to spread
illumination, or to distribute justice, but agents, middle men, and the
clergy, whose _ex parte_ notions of right and wrong, whose different
creed and opposed pecuniary interests wholly unfit them for the civil
duties which are thus devolved upon them.
With such reasons for the unpopularity of absenteeism, the interests of
government in the prevalence of such a prejudice strongly conspire. When
the wretched condition of the country is made matter of general
declamation, the minister calls for specific abuses; and when a specific
abuse is dragged to daylight, and remedies are loudly demanded,
absenteeism is made a ready skreen to conceal the incapacity or
unwillingness to redress of the governing faction. Tithe abuses are met
by the charge of excessive rents and absentee consumption; corruption of
the magistracy is defended by the absence of independent justices of the
peace; and whatever is the evil to be averted, whatever the malpractice
to be reformed, the Absentees are the ready scapegoats for every
delinquent, and the plausible pretext for every forbearance.
Absenteeship, however, always founded in bad government, becomes ruinous
only as it co-operates with other and mightier evils proceeding from the
same cause. In a well-ordered community the number and influence of
those who eat the bread of idleness and enjoy the means of expatriation,
can never bear an overwhelming proportion to that of the industrious
citizens chained down to a spot by the habits and the necessities of
their laborious lives. Wherever this relative proportion is materially
deranged, there will be found much to alter in existing institutions. In
such a condition of things, a restraining tax is as futile as it is
unjust. Government exists but to protect property; and any law which
restrains the owner’s right of spending his money where he pleases,
operates a violence, which the most urgent necessity alone could
justify. On the other hand, to expect that a pecuniary mulct, of any
amount short of an absolute seizure of the entire rental, would keep
those at home, whom a sense of injustice, of insecurity, and of the
absence of educated and liberal intercourse (of all that makes life
endurable and wealth enjoyable) drives into exile, is to be utterly
ignorant of human nature, and of the habits and feelings of the
aristocratical part of the community.
To the pause which followed the commotions of 1745, succeeded an event
which belonged not to _one_ country or _one_ age, but to the great
history of mankind and to ages yet unborn! an event, which though it has
produced the most extraordinary and wide-spreading consequences on the
social condition, has not yet half worked out its mighty and
incalculable effects. The American Revolution,--the greatest explosion
that ever shook the complicated fabric of political abuses, the boldest
step which civilization has yet made _en avant_,--was felt in its
reverberations throughout all Europe; and even Ireland, remote,
isolated, and oppressed Ireland, returned some vibration to the shock!
England, amidst the host of ills which assailed her at this, the most
awful crisis of her history, already beheld the children of the land she
had so long oppressed, bursting their bonds and hailing with their
wonted “ten thousand welcomes,”[77] the hope of emancipation, which came
to them from the greatest and freest region of the earth. It was then
that a British minister, worked upon by his fears, or driven by his
necessities, granted a reluctant boon, for the purpose of winning back
the affections of an alienated people, whose co-operation he wanted, and
whose desertion he had but too just a cause to apprehend. It was then
that he admitted the Irish to rights for which during past ages they had
sued in vain; and flattered those with eulogies to whom he had hitherto
denied justice. It was not, therefore, wonderful, though it was new,
that when an Irish member in the British senate ventured to observe,
that “Ireland was the chief dependence of the British crown, and that it
behoved England to admit the Irish nation to the privileges of British
citizens,” there was not one dissentient voice to deny the fact, or
oppose the proposition;[78] and the bills which then passed the
Parliament for the relief of the Catholics, and for the opening of the
Irish trade, produced the usual effects of kindness on the human heart.
From that moment America promised, and Franklin wrote in vain. “If,”
says that patriotic philosopher,--the patriot of humanity, and the
philosopher of common sense!--in his celebrated letter to the people of
Ireland, “If the government whom you at home acknowledge, does not, in
conformity to its own interests, take off and remove every restraint on
your trade, commerce, and manufacture, I am charged to assure you that
means will be found to establish your freedom in the fullest and freest
manner; and as it is the ardent wish of America to promote, as far as
her other engagements will permit, a reciprocal commercial intercourse
with you, I can assure you that they will seek every means to establish
and maintain it.”
But Ireland had not recourse to a foreign power to reclaim her rights.
She placed her cause in the hands of her resident gentry: she committed
it in the senate to a Grattan, and in the field to a Charlemont! The
restrictions on trade, which America offered to break, were removed by
the exertions of Irish patriotism, supported by that force, which is
alone constitutional, a national militia! It was at this eventful epoch
of Irish regeneration, that the combined exercise of those native
energies to which, in a moment of exigency, a brave and unhappy people
never fail to resort, produced that bulwark of national independence,
the IRISH VOLUNTEERS; and a whole people, with arms in their hands, and
liberty in their hearts, stood forth the protectors of their native
land, which an unnatural government had thus exposed to danger and
seduction. Even England looked on with respect and gratitude at the
efforts of the devoted and loyal Irish, who, forgetful of all past
injuries, came forward no less in her cause than their own;[79] and when
the Irish volunteers presented themselves to the admiration of the
empire, organised into a compact and disciplined body, under their
illustrious chief the Earl of Charlemont, (whose name ever falls like
light upon the page it illustrates,) it was declared in the British
senate, by one whose words were then deemed as _prophet’s breathings_,
“that this great event resembled, intrinsically and substantially, the
glorious Revolution of England in 1688!”
This event, however, so glorious for the fame, and so profitable to the
interests and independence of Ireland, never could have occurred, if the
majority of the gentry, with their spirit, their wealth, their
influence, and their education, had not been a resident gentry! and if
there is one illuminated page in the dark story of Ireland’s misery! one
pause in her sufferings! it belongs to this proud and blessed moment,
when her people and their chiefs were armed, morally and physically, in
her defence; when her senate resounded to an eloquence as pure and
patriotic as the Forum ever echoed; when the private society of the
capital became proverbial for its wit and festivity; and when all tended
to, if it did not reach, the term of national prosperity and national
glory.
But alas! this moment of promise and splendour was transient as a dream,
and the bright effulgence of Irish patriotism, brilliant as the midnight
meteor, was as suddenly succeeded by a midnight darkness. Causes on
which it is now beside the purpose to dwell, paralysed the virtues, and
marred the hopes of the honest and the brave. Engines were put into
play, and agents into activity, to destroy or to sap the foundations of
national independence. Corruption and injustice recommenced their
suicidal career; the rebellion and the Union were got up, and succeeded
beyond the hopes of their authors; and from that epoch every evil which
can afflict humanity and degrade a nation has gathered to a foul and
purulent head; every sad succeeding year has been marked by some new
step towards social disorganization and national extinction.
“Scarcely had the law passed ratifying that great mischief--the
Union--(says one of the ablest, and what is yet more, one of the
honestest and most uncompromising writers on Irish affairs, of the
present or of any age) when Absenteeism, the predominant calamity of
Ireland, was fearfully accelerated. The chief proprietors fled from the
metropolis, as from an invading army; and the country affording neither
interest nor expectation, they expatriated themselves in shame, in
disgust, in anguish, in despair. A category of evils beset the
land.--Those who had entertained fair hopes soon found their prospects
darken, and a long night close the transient day. To infatuation
succeeded self-torment. A chief Judge died of a broken heart because he
had participated in that signal treachery--another Judge asked pardon of
God and his country, for sanctioning it with his vote. Pitt, the
machinist, perished amidst the misfortunes of the Empire--and
Castlereagh, in his pride and power, became his own executioner. The
noble delinquents and their race perish together. Twenty-four Irish
peerages have become extinct since the Union in January, 1801, exclusive
of Peerages under a superior title, but continued in an inferior
honour--and while I write, another of the noble order which stands
between the prerogative and the people, as hounds between the huntsman
and the hare, is extinguished. Thus nature takes vengeance on the
exalted traitors to their country. The Union cannot subsist--Sin and
Death have fixed their peremptory seal of doom upon it. Not all the
vices of Ferdinand to his parentage and family and country--not all the
deeds of the magnanimous Allies and the Holy Alliance to Spain, Germany,
and Italy--no, not the repeated partitions of Poland by the Royal
Robbers, the Austrian, and Frederic, and Catherine, equalled altogether
the dreadful sum of sinning by the English Ministry, in preparing,
prosecuting, and accomplishing that sad catastrophe--the Incorporate
Union of Ireland with Great Britain.”--_Ensor’s Address to the People of
Ireland._
Previously to the Act of Union, Absenteeism, though encouraged by the
geographical position of the country, and promoted by some inveterate
habits derived from ancient abuse, was principally confined, among the
native Irish, to a few individuals whose ill understood vanity tempted
them to seek for a consequence abroad, which is ever denied to the
unconnected stranger, a consequence which no extravagant expense can
purchase. With a few exceptions, therefore, the malady was confined to
the great English proprietors of forfeited estates, whose numbers must
in the progress of events have been diminished, by the dissipations
inseparable from unbounded wealth, and the growth of commercial and
manufactural fortunes. It might, in some cases, indeed, be both a vice,
and a ridicule, in the absent; but had the nation in other respects been
well used and well governed, it would have been of no serious evil to
those who remained at home. But the Act of Union, whatever may be its
other operations, meritorious or vicious, at once converted a local
disease into a national pestilence. The centre of business and of
pleasure, the mart of promotion, and the fountain of favour, were by
this one fatal act at once removed into a foreign land; ambition,
avarice, dissipation and refinement, all combined to seduce the upper
classes into a desertion of their homes and country: and as each
succeeding ornament of the Irish capital abandoned his hotel, as each
influential landlord quitted his castle in the country, or his house in
the city, a new race of vulgar upstarts, of uneducated and capricious
despots, usurped their place, spreading a barbarous _morgue_ over the
once elegant society of the metropolis, and banishing peace and security
from the mountain and the plain.
Many whom temptation could not hitherto seduce from home, were now
forced by fear to fly; and every passion, every motive combined to drive
from the happy land, all those who were possessed of the means of
flight. It is in vain that patriotism struggles and conscience arrests
the departing step of those who yet linger behind in painful
vacillation. Self-preservation must and will in the end prevail.
Whatever is educated, whatever is tasteful, whatever is liberal, will
too probably fly a land, where the insolence of official rank supplies
the amenity of an admitted aristocracy, and where vulgar wealth,
acquired by political subserviency, and too frequently unaccompanied by
knowledge, holds talent at arms’ length, and rejects wit from its
coteries as dangerous to its own dull supremacy and hostile to the
repose of its own “_fat contented ignorance_.” Philanthropists,
disgusted with the perpetual spectacle of hopeless wretchedness and
irredeemable despair, will seek relief by flying the misery they cannot
mitigate; the enlightened and the liberal will turn with horror from the
country where laws of exception have been adopted into the permanent
code, and where necessitated violence is only met by judicial severity
and legal murder. The landholder, wearied by his contests with the
clergy, and intimidated by the armed and masked opposition of his
tenantry, will be contented to purchase repose by abandoning at once the
soil and its produce, to the proctors, the police-men and their chiefs.
The _sbirri_ of Ireland will alone find in a land, thus every way
accursed, the elements congenial to their existence, as the reptiles and
insects subsist in that putrefaction, which spreads disease and death
among the nobler animals.
In the present political prospect of Ireland, the eye of philosophy and
philanthrophy turns on every side in search of a principle of
regeneration, and turns in vain. On every side a circle of recurrent
cause and effect, like the mystic emblem of the Egyptians, points to an
eternity of woe, and to endless cycles of misgovernment and resistance.
As long as the actual system continues, (as long as every cause is
forced to concur in rendering Ireland uninhabitable,) so long will it be
impossible to organize any plan for civilizing, tranquillizing, and
enriching the country. It is an empty and an idle boast in the British
House of Commons, that it devotes its successive nights to the debating
Irish affairs, so long as the religious division of the people and the
proconsular government founded upon that division are to be recognized
as sound policy or Christian charity. The half measures which have
hitherto been adopted, far from proving beneficial, and composing the
contentions of hostile factions, have served only to increase discontent
and disarm inquiry.[80] Nor can the ministers be entitled to any praise
for generosity who dare not, in the first place, be just. In spite,
therefore, of all their professions of zeal and compassion for the
national distress; in spite of all their parliamentary tamperings with
the national abuses, they must still remain answerable for the greater
part of the absenteeship which they strenuously hold up as the giant
ill, over which they have no controul, and for the existence of which
they imagine themselves not responsible.
The grand principle of “_divide et impera_” has produced both the
religious question and the question between landlords and tenants, which
are the hinges on which all the misfortunes of Ireland turn. To commence
the work of regeneration in earnest, that principle must be fairly and
honestly abandoned: when this is done, and not before, absenteeship,
with every other evil which has grown out of the monstrous anarchical
system, that has so long subsisted, will gradually disappear; and
proprietors in Ireland, as in other countries, will inhabit their
country, when their country becomes inhabitable.--“_Ubi bene, ibi
patria_” is a maxim not altogether unreasonable; and, surely, if in any
circumstances it is entitled to toleration, it is in that land where the
greater the patriotism and virtue, the less chance is there of social
comfort and rational happiness. To the absentees themselves we would
willingly appeal with every invocation that can bind the conscience or
awaken the heart. But the appeal were worse than idle, it would in fact
be injurious, by pointing to effects and disengaging the attention from
causes. In the present condition of affairs, absenteeism is a
necessitated evil!! In the absentees it is less a crime than a
misfortune; and with respect to the government it is so far from being a
justification of its acts, that it has become a pregnant and a pointed
conclusion of its ignorance of all sound principle, or its heartless
indifference to all those interests which the unhappy destiny of “_the
most unhappy country under heaven_,” has committed to its charge.
THE END.
LONDON:
IBOTSON AND PALMER, PRINTERS, SAVOY STREET, STRAND.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOOTNOTES:
Footnote 1:
Irish potentates were then as plenty “as Munster potatoes.” “Ils se
coudoyoient,” as in the _salle des rois_ of Napoleon. Irish saints
were equally numerous; but, if the scandalous chronicles of the times
be worthy of credit, the social order of that day was not the better
for the circumstance. While King Mac Murrogh was running away with
Queen O’Rourke, wife of O’Rory, King of Breffny, who was on a
pilgrimage to St. Patrick’s purgatory, his son was undergoing the
operation of having those eyes put out, which had looked too tenderly
on the Queen of Ossory. The gallantries of these Macs and O’s from the
earliest ages to the present day, recall the answer of the French
Silvester Daggerwood to his manager, who asked his line of parts,
“_Chacun s’en tienne au metier de ses pères; je sais que dans notre
famille, nous sommes tous amoureux de père en fils_.”
Footnote 2:
King Mac Turtell was King of Dublin, and held his kingdom by tribute
from the King of Leinster. “Not far from Dublin,” says the admirable
Maurice Regan, historiographer to Mac Murrogh,--“not far from Dublin
there lived an Irish king named Gillemohalmoghe.” Of the territories
of this prince, Michael’s lane in Dublin formed a part. It is called
in the black book of Christchurch, Gillemohalmoghe. As there is some
reason to suppose that the kingdom extended as far as Swords, Sir
Compton Domville may be regarded as the modern representative of the
Gillemohalmoghe dynasty.
Footnote 3:
Child’s Discourse upon Trade.--“No inconsiderable portion of the
entire of Ireland has been confiscated twice, and perhaps thrice, in
the course of a century.”--_Lord Clare’s Speech on the Union._
The causes of absenteeship are, in fact, coeval with the first steps
of English power in this country. “Those that were adventurers,” says
Temple, “in the first conquests, and such others of the English nation
as came over afterwards, took possession by former grants of the whole
kingdom, and _drove the Irish_ in a manner out of all habitable parts
of it, and settled themselves in all the plains and fertile places of
the country, especially in the chief towns, ports, and sea-coasts. It
was no capital offence to kill any of the rest of the Irish; the law
did neither protect their life nor revenge their death.”--_History of
Irish Rebellion._ Here is the starting-post of absenteeism, pointed
out by an English minister and historian.
Footnote 4:
The signatures of Magna Charta evince that the nobility of those
times, like Pierrot in the farce, were “_un peu brouillés avec
l’Alphabet_;” but the spirit which founded that great arch of British
freedom, was well worth all the namby-pamby acquirements of all the
modern nobles who ever presided over archæology, (or, as Walpole calls
it, “old woman’s logic,”) flirted with the muses, and combined to give
tracts to England, or rose-trees to the starving peasantry of
Connaught and Munster.
Footnote 5:
Henry II. obliged the Earl Strongbow to return to Ireland, “being
likely for his own wealth and assurance to procure all possible means
of bridling and annoying the Irish.” In the time of Edward III.
military emigration seems to have been considerable. The Irish robbers
did good service at Cressy.
Footnote 6:
The Irish were always ready for a little commotion at home or abroad;
“Great was the credit of the Geraldines ever when the House of York
prospered, and likewise the Butlers thryved under the bloud of
Lancaster.” It was this disposition towards the House of York, which
caused the temporary success of Perkin Warbeck in Ireland. The
unfortunate Duke of Clarence, who was drowned in a butt of Malmsey,
was born in Ireland during the lieutenancy of his father, the Duke of
York. His godfathers were the Earls of Ormond and Desmond. Whether
this Irish origin will serve to explain the peculiarity of his
destiny, I cannot say; but the residence of a York in Dublin may in
part account for the popularity of the faction in that city.
Shakspeare probably alludes to this personage in Henry VI.
“Please it your grace to be advertised
The Duke of York is newly come from Ireland,
And with a puissant and mighty power
Of Gallowglasses and stout Kernes
Is marching hitherward in proud array.”
Footnote 7:
The English reader is not to suppose that these _blanc-mangers_ of the
poor Irish were such as are to be had at the Verys or Beauvilliers.
The Irish white meates were curds and whey, the only provisions which
men whose lives were “in wandering spent and care” could obtain. The
Irish then lived like Arabs, a prey of cattle being the subject of
their fiercest contests.
Footnote 8:
Had they made the country endurable to live in, they would have done
what all the penal laws that ever have been framed can never
affect--they would have kept the Irish at home. At the time when Henry
VIII. was framing his “act of absencie” for preventing the increase of
the absentees the state of the country in which they _were by law_
obliged to live, is thus described by Spenser;--“Notwithstanding that
the same was a most rich and plentiful country, full of corn and
cattle, (Munster more particularly is here speken of,) yet in one year
and a half (during the war carried on against the Earl of Desmond for
the purpose of forfeiting his estates) the natives were brought to
such wretchedness, as that any stoney heart would rue the same. Out of
every corner of the woods and glyns they came creeping forth upon
their hands, for their legs could not bear them, they looked like
anatomies of death, they shoke like ghosts crying out of their graves,
they did eat the dead carrion, happy when they could find them; yea,
and one another soon after, inasmuch as the very carcasses they spared
not to scrape out of their graves; and if they found a plot of
water-cresses or shamrocks, there they flocked as to a feast for the
time, yet not able to continue them withal, that in short space there
was none almost left; and a most populous and plentiful country
suddenly left void of man and beast.”--_State of Ireland_, 1581.
Footnote 9:
English antiquaries have been much puzzled to determine the identity
of this “more than celestial Geraldine.” “Who she was,” says Walpole,
“we are not directly told.” Surrey himself mentions some particulars
of her, but not her name. The editor of the last edition of Surrey’s
Poems, in some short notes on his life, says, “that she was the
greatest beauty of her time, and maid of honour to Queen Catharine;
but I think I have very nearly discovered who this fair person was,
&c. &c. &c. I am inclined to think her poetical appellation was her
real name, as every one of the circumstances tally.” The elegant
antiquary then devotes three pages to prove the probability that Lady
Elizabeth, daughter of the Earl of Kildare, was the Geraldine of Lord
Surrey. Warton adopts this supposition, and compliments the biographer
on having, with the most happy segacity, solved the difficulties of
“this little enigmatical ode.”--_History of English Poets._ There was,
however, a much shorter way of solving the difficulties, namely, the
consultation of Irish authors for an historical incident respecting
one of the most illustrious Irish families. Campion, who had probably
many a time and oft seen the “fair Geraldine,” with his usual quaint
simplicity says, “The Fitzgerald family is touched in the Sonnet of
Surrey made upon Kildare’s sister, now Lady Clinton;”
From Tuscane came my ladyes worthy race,
Faire Florence was sometime her ancient seate;
The western isle, whose plaisant shore doth face
Wilde Cambre’s cliffes, did give her lively heate.”
The ode goes on as follows;--
Fostered she was with milk of Irish breast,
Her sire an earle, her dame of prince’s blood;
From tender years in Britain she doth rest
With kinges childe, while she tasteth costly food.
Honsdon did first present her to mine yeen,
Bright is her hue, and Geraldine her hight,
&c. &c. &c.
This fair and celebrated Irish absentee, after having sent her
illustrious lover to Italy “to defend her beautie by an open
challenge,” in which he was victorious, married the Earl of
Clinton:--a most unsentimental conclusion to a most romantic story.
Footnote 10:
“A false muttering flew about that his execution was intended.”
Footnote 11:
“Soon after,” says Campion, “was the house of the Geraldines attaynted
by Parliament, and all of the name busily trayned out for feare of new
commotions. But Thomas Leurces, late Bishop of Kildare, schoolemaster
to a younger brother, Gerald Fitzgerald, the Earle that now liveth,
secretly stole away with the childe, first into Scotland, then into
France, and misdoubting the French, into Italy; where Cardinall Pole,
his neare kinsman preserved him till the raigne of Edward the Sixt,
with whom hee entred into high favour, and obtayned of him his olde
inheritance of Meinothe.”
Footnote 12:
The various epithets applied to these retrogradations on the scale of
civilization are very amusing. Between the “mere and uncivil Irish,”
and the “English Lords of the Pale,” were the “English Lords beginning
to wax Irish;” “degenerating,” “becoming mere Irish,” and ending by
being “very wilde Irish,” &c. &c.
Footnote 13:
O’Sullivan Beare, one of the bravest and noblest chiefs of Kerry, and
Lord of part of the paradise of Killarney, in writing to the Spanish
minister an account of his sufferings at this period, urges him “to
the speedy sending of a ship to receive him, his wife, and children,
to save them from the hands of his most merciless enemies: Making
choice (he pathetically adds) rather to forsake my ancient
inheritance, friends, followers, and goods, than any way trust to
their graceless pardon or promise.”--_Pacata Hibernia._ Here was
absenteeship in the sixteenth century!!
Footnote 14:
Elizabeth frequently discovered that her Deputies were carrying the
joke too far. On the occasion of the wanton massacre of Smerwick, “The
queen (says the Bishop of Chichester) was not _pleased_ at the
_manner_ of this execution, and was hardly _after_ drawn to admit any
excuse of the slaughter committed.” The “_manner_” was curious
enough,--“It was concluded that only the leaders should be saved, (the
leaders were Spanish officers,) the rest slain, and _all the Irish_
hanged up: which was presently put into execution, to the great
disliking of the queen, who detested the slaughter of such as yielded
themselves.”--_Baker’s Chronicle._
Footnote 15:
“The Queen was assured,” says Leland, speaking of the inhuman rigour
of Lord Deputy Gray, “that he tyrannized with such barbarity, that
little was left in Ireland for her Majesty to reign over but ashes and
dead carcases.”--_Hist. of Ireland_, v. ii. p. 227.--Here are reasons
for absenteeship quite as cogent as any which can be advanced in the
present day.
Footnote 16:
The credulity of the Irish has ever been their ruin. Some English
officers having assured certain Irish chiefs that, upon surrendering
themselves to the government, they would obtain their pardon; those
chiefs (says Leland) “embraced the counsel, submitted, and consented
to attend the Lord Deputy St. Leger to Ireland. But here the only
favour granted them was, that they were not brought to immediate
execution. They were committed to prison, their lands declared
forfeit, and granted to those on whose counsel they had
surrendered.”--_Hist. of Ireland_, v. ii.
Footnote 17:
“Then came the Irishmen of valiant hearts,
And active limbs, and personages tall.”
_Sir J. Harrington’s Translation of Orlando Furioso._
Footnote 18:
Apology, p. 58.
Footnote 19:
_Si je ne vous mange pas en oiseau, je vous mangerai en souris._
“Other times,” they say, “bring other manners;” and it is not
impossible that men, restrained by the _manners of our own times_, may
avail themselves of the circumstance of their enforced moderation, to
reproach the writer who thus recalls a fact disreputable to the
English government, with _ripping up old sores_. The fact, however, is
“germane to the matter;” for it was such forfeitures that sowed the
first seeds of that permanent absenteeism which modern ministers
affect to deplore: and it was these flagrant violations of common
justice, that first nurtured the lawless disposition in the peasantry,
which is made an excuse for the suspension of all constitutional
rights, and which is most unjustly charged on the Catholic religion.
Besides, as long as the system is continued, which withholds
emancipation, and gives over the land to the tyranny and plunder of
churchmen and their inherents, the “ripping up old sores” is both
useful and justifiable.
Footnote 20:
The only crime of which O’Rourke could be accused, was his having
received some shipwrecked Spaniards under his roof,--men, says
O’Connor, whom the most hardened barbarity could scarcely consider as
enemies. It is remarkable that O’Rourke previously to his execution
was denied a priest of his own persuasion. But Miles Macgrath, the
converted archbishop of Cashel, was sent to prevail on him to conform.
“No,” said O’Rourke firmly, “but do you remember the dignity from
which you have fallen; return to the ancient Church, and learn from my
fortitude the lesson you should have taught me, and which you ought to
have been the last to disavow.”
If there is a shadow of truth in this wild story of Leitrim, and if
Rourke did not betray the lady, he deserves canonization. Essex,
however, who shared the same fate, preserved the same honourable
secrecy; and the purity of the Virgin Queen remains intact.
Footnote 21:
The ruins of O’Rourke’s castle still exist. They are sublimely
situated on a rock that hangs and frowns over a rapid river, near
Manor Hamilton, in the county of Leitrim. A few trees are scattered
immediately about the castle, and around are heathy mountains rising
to the clouds. “O’Rourke’s noble feast” has been rendered immortal by
the translation of Dean Swift.
Footnote 22:
O’Connor Sligo resided some time in the court of Elizabeth, where he
was flattered up to his bent, though not into a permanent
absenteeship. He returned to Ireland in 1596, after obtaining a grant
to secure him in the possession of his own property; in gratitude for
which “he was extremely active in her (the Queen’s) favour, and gained
back, partly by menace and partly by cunning, many of the revolted
clans.” The celebrated O’Donnel of Tirconnel, hearing of O’Connor’s
desertion from the common cause, marched with an army to bring him to
obedience: and, in spite of the assistance of Sir Conyers Clifford and
Lord Mayo, he ravaged and destroyed O’Connor’s country.
Footnote 23:
This youth was the only son of the Earl of Desmond, already mentioned.
He had been detained a prisoner in the Tower from his infancy as a
pledge for his father’s loyalty. He was afterwards sent to Ireland as
a state engine to play off against another Geraldine who had made
claims to the forfeited Palatinate; but after he had fretted his hour
on the bloody stage of his own country, he was brought back to
England, and lingering at court for a few months in hopeless
despondency, he died in the prime of his youth, of a broken
heart.--_See_ _Pacata Hibernia_.
Footnote 24:
Upon two occasions the Earl saved a large party of English from
destruction. Macguire, chief of Fermanagh, had given the Lord Deputy
three hundred cows to free his country from a sheriff; “after which
bargain, the sheriff, one Willis, was let loose upon Fermanagh,
leading about some hundreds of women and boys, with a guard of one
hundred men, all living upon the spoils of the country.” Macguire,
having driven this model of a modern Irish police into a church, was
about to put them to the sword, when the Earl of Tyrone interposed his
authority. This same Willis was again rescued by Tyrone from an
insurrection occasioned by similar circumstances in the O’Donnel’s
country.--_See_ _Memorial to Queen Elizabeth_.
Footnote 25:
The “Irish masque,” got up to compliment the absentees at the English
court, is either a bitter satire, or a disgusting picture of the state
of Irish society at that epoch. “The King being seated (says _the
programme_) in expectation, out ran a fellow attired as a citizen,
after him three or four footmen, Denis, Donnel, Dermoch, and Patrick,”
the object of whose visit to London was not like that of many of the
Denises and Patricks of the present day, to become either _porters_,
or _reporters_, as the chances determined; but simply, as Donnel
observes, ‘to see King Yamish,’ for which purpose ‘they had travelled
a great way miles,’ having got the start of their lords or chiefs who
had come over on the same loyal errand.
_Der._ I’ fayt, tere ish very much phoyt stick here stirring to night.
He takes ush for no shquires I tinke.
_Pat._ No; he tinksh not ve be imbasheters.
_Der._ No, fayt, I tinke sho too. But tish marriage bring over a
doshen of our besht mashters to be merry, perht tee shweet faish, an’t
be; and daunsh a fading at te vedding.
_Den._ But tey vere leeke to daunsh naked, and pleash ty majesty; for
tey villanous vild Irish sheas have casht away all ter fine cloysh, as
many ash cosht a towsand cowes and garrans, I warrant tee.
_Der._ And te prishe of a cashtell or two upon teyr backs.
_Don._ And tey tell ty majesty, tey have ner a great fish now, nor a
shea moynshter to save teyr cloyth alive now.
_Pat._ Nor a devoish vit a clowd to fesh’hem out o’ te bottom o’ te
vayter.
_Der._ But tey musht eene come and daunsh in teyr mantles now; and
show tee how tey can foot te fading and te fadow, and te phip a’
Dunboyne, I trow.
_Don._ I pree dee now, let not ty sweet faysh ladies make a mock on’
him, and scorn to daunsht vit ’hem now, becash tey be poor.
_Pat._ Tey drink no bonny clabber, i’ fayt now.
_Don._ It ish better ten usquebaugh to daunsh vit Patrick.
_Pat._ By my fater’s hand, tey vill daunsh very vell.
_Der._ Ay, by St. Patrick, vill tey; for tey be nimble men.
_Den._ And vill leap ash light, be creesh save me, ash he tat veares
te biggest fethur in ty court, King Yamish.
_Der._ For all tey have no good vindsh to blow tem heter, nor
elementsh to preserve hem.
_Don._ Nor all te four cornersh o’ te world to creep out on.
_Pat._ But tine own kingdomes.
_Don._ Tey be honesht men.
_Pat._ And goot men; tine own shubshects.
_Der._ Tou hast very good shubshects in Ireland.
_Den._ A great goot many, o’ great good shubshects.
_Don._ Tat love ty mayesty heartily.
_Den._ And vill run t’rough fire and vater for tee over te bog and te
bannoke, be te graish o’ Got and graish o’ King.
_Der._ By Got tey will fight for tee, King Yamish, and for my mistiesh
tere.
_Den._ And my little maishter. Paish, paish, now room for our
mayshter.--Then the gentlemen dance forth a dance in their Irish
mantles to a solemn music of harps, which done, the footmen fall to
speak again.”
Footnote 26:
Borlase asserts that in 1650, ten years before the Restoration, 1700
died of the plague in Dublin alone; this horrible infliction was
peculiar to those “picturesque times,” which describe so well, and
which, it is a mark of literary loyalty to admire and eulogize.
“Sir, nothing against antiquity, I pray you,
I must not hear ill of antiquity.”--_B. Jonson._
Footnote 27:
The most noted beauties of the Court of Charles the Second, Lady
Barbara Villars, (Duchess of Cleveland,) the Countess of Chesterfield,
(a Butler,) the Lady Kildare, introduced by St. Evremont into his
pleasant little poem of “The Basset Table,”[28] the Countess de
Grammont, and many others, were Irish women. The delightful author of
“Mémoires de Grammont,” Anthony Hamilton, was himself an Irishman,[29]
and a branch of the illustrious house of Hamilton, which obtained from
James the First such princely possessions in the North of Ireland, and
which is still represented by the Marquis of Abercorn. The
Fitzmaurices, (Muskerry,) the O’Briens, the Butlers, the Talbots, are
names noted in the fasti of Whitehall at this period. With respect to
the Talbots, however, it is but fair to observe that the elder branch
of this ancient and patriotic family always remained permanently
resident in their splendid castle and domain of Malahide, as their
worthy representative the Member for the county of Dublin continues to
do in the present day; though the younger branch, the Lords of Carton
(now the seat of the Duke of Leinster) were prime favourites at
Whitehall, and boon companions of both Charles and James. “The Dick
Talbot” of that day, whom Charles would fain have set at odds with the
Duke of Ormonde, brought no additional rays to the original splendour,
when he added a ducal coronet to its less perishable honours. This
Colonel Richard Talbot (afterwards Duke of Tirconnel) was sent to the
Tower for having challenged the Duke of Ormonde with duplicity of
conduct with respect to the Irish Catholics, whose agent Colonel
Talbot then was. Ormonde, believing the better part of valour to be
discretion, fought shy, instead of fighting Talbot; and when rallied
on this circumstance by the King, petulantly demanded, “Is it then
your Majesty’s pleasure that at this time of day I should put off my
doublet to fight duels with Dick Talbot?”
Footnote 28:
Vous ne me parlez pas de Madame de Kildare,
I never saw personne avoir meilleure air.
Footnote 29:
His mother, the beautiful Lady Maria Butler, was daughter to the Duke
of Ormonde.
Footnote 30:
It is farther particularly notable that James, the friend and
correspondent of Pope Clement VIII. and the special protector of the
Irish Catholics, first established in Ireland a Protestant ascendancy
in parliament, in obedience to the advice of the Lord Deputy
Chichester. With the inconsistency which ever accompanies a want of
principle, he occasionally amused himself at the expense of the very
people he affected to favour. When Chichester made King James a
present of a beautiful horse, his Majesty asked him if it were an
Irish horse: on being answered in the affirmative, the King swore his
favourite oath, “Then it must be a Papist,” for he verily believed
that all things produced in Ireland were Papists, even the very
animals themselves.
Footnote 31:
None benefited more largely by these “plots of rebellion” than the
house of Ormonde. “His Grace (says Lord Anglesey in his letter to the
Earl of Castlehaven) his Grace (the Duke of Ormonde) and his family,
by the forfeiture and punishment of the Irish, were the greatest
gainers in the kingdom, and had added to their inheritance vast scopes
of land, and a revenue three times greater than his paternal estate,
as it was before the Rebellion, and most of his increase was out of
their estates who adhered to the peace of 1648, or served under His
Majesty’s ensigns abroad.” In the anonymous and curious pamphlet “The
Unkind Deserter,” it is asserted that the Ormonde estate was but
7000_l._ per annum before the civil wars in Ireland, and that in 1674
it was close upon 100,000_l._ a year; which increase arose from the
King’s grants to him “of other men’s estates,” &c. &c. &c. The history
of the last Rebellion in 1798, and of the Union, would furnish many
anecdotes of a similar increase of the wealth of Irish families; not
indeed by forfeitures, (for the mode had passed,) but by intriguing
and bullying the government out of every place at its disposal, from a
mitre to a cornetcy of dragoons,--by the wholesale and retail sale of
the country: (a vote upon a single stage of a question has been hired,
like a job-carriage, by the night;) by corrupt dabbling in every
species of public work; in short, by every disgraceful practice of the
fraudulent tradesman, the scheming adventurer, and the sturdy
mendicant. The philosopher Kirwan was wont to quote a calculation he
had made, that the money spent on carrying the Union, would have built
a bridge from Howth to Holyhead.
Footnote 32:
In James the Second’s reign some of the measures were calculated to be
of the greatest service to Ireland, and emanated from a wise and
discreet minister, formerly attached to the Protestant interest, the
second Earl of Clarendon. His instructions announced the intentions of
the legislature, or at least of the King, to introduce Catholics into
the corporations, and invest them with magistracies and judicial
offices; and he gave his opinion in favour of the legality of the
measure, though contrary to an Act of Elizabeth. But the greatest evil
which can occur to a reformation, is to have it undertaken by men of
small capacity; as their best intentions are ever marred by their
petulance and dullness. The folly with which James hurried on a
change, and the injudiciousness of some of the proposed measures,
caused his own ruin, and that of the unhappy country he made the
principal scene of his egregious weakness and incapacity.
Footnote 33:
The Irish army under Tirconnel and Sarsfield made a most vigorous
resistance against a superior and well-disciplined force; and
Limerick, the last hold, was surrendered upon terms from which it
appears that none more esteemed their valour and fidelity than King
William himself.
Footnote 34:
When James, after his flight from the battle of the Boyne, arrived in
Dublin, he had the ingratitude and ungraciousness to reflect upon the
cowardice of the Irish. He reached the Castle late at night, and was
met at its gates by the Lady Lieutenant, the beautiful Duchess of
Tirconnel, “La belle Jennings” of Grammont’s Memoirs. In return for
the sympathizing respect which marked her reception, the King is said
to have sarcastically complimented her upon the “alertness of her
husband’s countrymen.” The high-spirited beauty replied, “In that,
however, your Majesty has had the advantage of them all.” The King, in
fact, was among the first to arrive in the capital with the news of
his own defeat.
Footnote 35:
They were estimated at the annual sum of two hundred and eleven
thousand six hundred pounds.
Footnote 36:
Letter to Sir H. Langrish.
Footnote 37:
Of this intolerance William stands in a great measure acquitted. His
known liberality subjected him to the suspicions of the party who
forged the penal statutes for Ireland, and who accused him of
infidelity, because he was unwilling to become a persecutor. When left
to act for himself, he exhibited a wisdom, wanting in the measures of
those to whom he was occasionally obliged to submit. In his
instructions to the commissioners in Scotland, dated 1689, he says
expressly, “You are to pass an act establishing that church government
which is most agreeable to the inclinations of the people.”
Footnote 38:
To favour the English manufacturer, the exportation of the staple
commodity and manufacture of Ireland (wool) was prohibited on pain of
confiscation, imprisonment, and transportation!! It would be difficult
to say whether the infamy or the absurdity of such legislation is the
greatest; and indignation at the avarice of the lawgivers, is so
largely mixed with contempt for their blind ignorance, that the pen
pauses in its vituperation of measures which were so obviously their
own punishment. Be it however remarked “_en passant_,” that the
framers of these laws were the aristocracy of England, the most
educated and moral people then in existence; a striking proof of the
perfect inadequacy of abstract principles of right and wrong to the
good government of conduct. Force, and force alone, too generally
makes right, in opinion, as well as in fact; and where the power to
abuse exists, the will to injure and the sophistry to justify the
injury, will never long be wanting.
Footnote 39:
“Have they any wit in their compositions? (says Spenser in speaking of
the poetry of the Irish in his day.) Yea, truly, I have caused divers
of them to be translated unto me, that I might understand them; and
surely they savoured of sweet wit and good invention, sprinkled with
some pretty flowers of their natural device, which gave good grace and
comeliness to them.”
Footnote 40:
“Oh wretched condition of our loved compatriots, the remains of a once
happy people, steeped in blood and drenched in slaughter! Vain is your
struggle for liberty, hapless crew of a bark long tempest-tossed, and
now cast away forever. What! are we not wrecked on our own shores, and
prisoners to the Saxons? Is not the sentence passed and our excision
foredoomed? How are ye fallen from the ancient glories of your native
land! Power degraded into weakness, beauty to deformity, freedom into
slavery, and the song of triumph into elegies of despair. Nial, of the
nine hostages, look not down upon us, lest thou blush for thy captive
Gadhelians. Conn, of the hundred battles, sleep in thy grass-grown
tomb, nor upbraid our defeats with thy victories.”--_Oran_ (or song)
_of Ognive, the family bard of the last of the O’Neils._
Footnote 41:
Boyle, Berkeley, King, Dodwell, Leslie, Toland, Clayton, (Bishop of
Clogher,) Molyneux, (the friend of Locke the philosopher and champion
of Irish independence,) Helsham, Robinson, Macbride, Sullivan,
Hutchinson, Abernethy, Harris, Keating, Leland, Kirwan, Young, (Bishop
of Clonfert,) &c. &c.
Footnote 42:
Even so far back as the reign of James the First, Ireland began to
furnish her quota to the English drama. But from the middle of the
seventeenth century to something more than the middle of the
eighteenth, she produced almost all the best dramatic writers on the
British stage: Congreve, Howard, Southerne, Steele, Farquhar,
Phillips, Kelly, Jones, Orrery, (Earl of,) Tate, Concanen, Dobbs,
Bickerstaff, Brook, Centlivre, Griffiths, Jephson, Murphy, Macklin,
O’Hara, West, Goldsmith, Sheridan, &c. &c. And among the actors,
Wilks, Quin, Sheridan, Barry, Mossop, Macklin, Havard, O’Brien, Brown,
Woffington, Clive, Fitzhenry, &c.
Footnote 43:
Denham, Parnell, Swift, Sterne, Burke, Goldsmith, the Sheridans; to
whom may be added Molesworth, Millar, Wood, Webb, Pilkington, Johnson
(Chrysal), &c. &c. Even the women no longer deemed it the exclusive
purpose of their being
“To suckle fools and chronicle small-beer;”
and the elegant and witty productions of Mesdames Millar, Pilkington,
Centlivre, Grierson, Griffiths, Sheridan, Barker, Brook, contributed
to the general stock of national literature.
Footnote 44:
Jervas, (Pope’s Raphael,) Bindon, Roberts the landscape-painter,
Barrett, &c.
Footnote 45:
Miss Brook, the elegant translator and composer of the “Relics of
Ancient Irish Poetry.”
Footnote 46:
The Lord Mayo, of the early part of the eighteenth century, here
alluded to, was a model of the genuine Irish resident nobleman, living
in his rural palace, surrounded by his family, his bards, and
musicians. One of these, “his retainer,” David Murphy, composed an
Irish Ode of some celebrity, called “Tiagherna Mhaigho,” the “Lord of
Mayo,” which another of his retainers, O’Keeneghan, set to music. This
Carolan was wont to play at night in the hall of the Burkes, on his
harp. It happened that during Carolan’s last visit to Lord Mayo,
Geminiani arrived from Italy by special invitation from the amateur
Earl; and his Italian music completely usurped the attention of the
Ladies Susan and Bridget Burke, of whose praise Carolan was especially
jealous, and he frankly complained to his noble host of this neglect.
Lord Mayo, rallying the bard on his feelings, concluded by telling
him, that when he should produce the same music as Geminiani, he would
meet with the same attention. On this Carolan proposed a wager, that
he on his harp would follow the Italian in any piece of his
composition, but that Geminiani should not follow him through an Irish
planxty: the wager was accepted by the Italian, and won by the Irish
bard.
Footnote 47:
The O’Connors of Ballingar, the favourite residence of Carolan.
Footnote 48:
“In the year 1740, the sublime genius of Handel roused our feelings
from the lethargy into which they had fallen.”--_Memoirs of the Irish
Bards._
Banished from London by the intrigues of a party, Handel[49] fled to
Ireland, where, with his friend Dubourg, the violin of his age, he was
received with rapture. His first public exhibition in Dublin was the
Messiah, which he performed for the benefit of the city prisons.
Whoever had the happiness of knowing the late Richard Kirwan, the
Irish philosopher, may judge of the enthusiasm of the travelled Irish
gentlemen for Italian music, and the vogue which Piccini obtained
through their means.
Footnote 49:
Pope alludes to this banishment of Handel in his Dunciad:
“Strong in new arms, lo! Giant Handel stands
Like bold Briareus with his hundred hands,--&c. &c. &c.
Arrest him, Goddess, or you sleep no more:
She heard, and drove him to Hibernia’s shore.”
Footnote 50:
St. Bridget was accustomed to pray under the shade of an oak, a
circumstance which has given its name to an Irish county, Cil doire,
the cell of the oak (Kildare.)
Footnote 51:
“Concerts were the favourite amusement in the houses of the nobility
and gentry, and musical societies were formed in all the great
towns.”--_Memoirs of Irish Bards._
Footnote 52:
The Philharmonic Society gave up its subscriptions towards building
the hospital in Townsend-street, 1753.
Footnote 53:
“Italian singers were invited over, and the fair dames of Ireland
learned to expire at an opera.”--_History of Irish Music._
Footnote 54:
Barry, Sheridan, Mossop, Diggs, Daly, Crawford, and others of a more
modern date, were all gentlemen of family, and members of the Irish
University. They lived with their own class, and some of them went to
court. The intimacy of Sheridan with successive lords lieutenant is
recorded in the life of his celebrated wife, written and recently
published by their accomplished grand-daughter.
Footnote 55:
If a desire for luxuries and refinements is in all classes the natural
check to excessive population, and to the degradation of the species,
that check is wholly wanting in Ireland. Not only the peasant, but the
tradesman sees no attainable object of enjoyment in the possession of
a class just above himself in ease and comfort, which might stimulate
his ambition. The connecting link between the rich and the poor is
wanting; for middlemen are no refiners of manners. As a familiar
illustration, let the reader imagine that, except in towns of the
first class, few vegetables beyond a cabbage or a potatoe are to be
found in the market. There is absolutely no demand for such _luxuries_
to repay the culture.
Footnote 56:
One of these rooms painted in fresco and highly decorated, remains, or
did remain a few years back, in Fishamble-street.
Footnote 57:
Marino, Frescati, Marli, Sanssouci, Tivoli, Bellevue, Maritimo, &c.
are curious monuments of the manners and feelings of the Irish
nobility of the eighteenth century.
Footnote 58:
Concerts were given in this room twice a week, for the benefit of the
Lying-in Hospital, to which it is an appendage. Previously to its
erection, these musical meetings were held for the same purpose in a
long room in Granby-row, where Castruci, the last pupil of Corelli,
performed.--See _Memoirs of Irish Bards_.
Footnote 59:
The refinement not to say dissipation, of this period was perhaps
precocious and disproportionate to the riches of the country; but this
circumstance, always perhaps inherent in a particular stage of
civilization, was in Ireland increased by peculiarities in the
distribution of national wealth, another fatal consequence of the
frequent forfeitures. Time, however, would have cured this evil, if
the tide of absenteeship had not again set in, and swept away all
improvement and prosperity from the land.
Footnote 60:
It has been said with great truth that “the politics of Molyneux long
continued to be no less revered by the Irish than the morality of
Confucius by the Chinese.” The burning of his excellent work, the
“Case of Ireland,” the prosecution of Swift’s “Drapier’s Letters,” and
the imprisonment of his spirited publisher, Faulkner, had the great
merit of bringing the doctrine of libel into public discussion, and of
first awakening the people of Ireland to the value of the liberty of
public speaking and writing, the most important of the many blessed
constitutional rights extorted from power at the Revolution. It is
pleasant to observe, that patriotism becomes an heir-loom, and to note
that the immediate descendant of William Molyneux, who inherits his
principles with his property and name, is a permanently resident Irish
gentleman!
Footnote 61:
John Ponsonby, Speaker of the House of Commons in 1756, under whom the
Irish patriots made a most successful stand on a constitutional
question of vital importance. The energy and firmness of the patriotic
Speaker, and of a majority of the members of the House of Commons, who
then (“Hear this, ye gods, and wonder how ye made them”) attended to
the business of their country, forms a brilliant feature in the
history of the times.
Footnote 62:
The friend of the celebrated Berkeley, a right good Irishman and
author of a “List of Absentees,” a class, to which he showed no
quarter.
Footnote 63:
Henry Boyle, the patriot of the Irish House of Commons in the early
part of the eighteenth century.
Footnote 64:
Connolly died Speaker of the House in 1730, lamented by all who loved
Ireland; Sir R. Walpole gave him the name of “King of the Irish
Commons,” from his astonishing influence over the Lower House.
Footnote 65:
Member for New Ross. On an important political question he rode post
to town sixty miles to be present at the debate, and arrived just in
time to give his vote.
Footnote 66:
Dolly Munroe, the reigning Irish beauty of Goldsmith’s day, to whom he
alludes in his Haunch of Venison:
“’Twas a neck and a breast that might rival Munroe’s.”
Footnote 67:
See some of Right Hon. John Philpot Curran’s Verses preserved in his
Life by his son William Henry Curran--a work full of interest with
respect to matter, and full of beauty with respect to style. The
account given in its pages, of the convivial and intellectual meetings
of “the Monks of the Screw” at the Priory (Mr. Curran’s villa) forms a
brilliant but painful contrast to other orgies now celebrated in
Dublin, which alas! are neither social nor intellectual!
Footnote 68:
Lord Clare.
Footnote 69:
Dr. Franklin.
Footnote 70:
The penal laws had been multiplied and rigorously executed under
George the First. On the accession of George the Second, for the first
time since the Revolution, the unfortunate Catholics, who by a feeble
and foolish fiction of the law of the land, were “not supposed to
exist,” ventured to approach the throne by a public act of their body;
and they presented an address of congratulation at once dignified and
loyal.
Footnote 71:
Forbidding Catholics to bear arms either by sea or land.
Footnote 72:
When Lord Chesterfield arrived in Ireland, all the Catholic places of
worship were closed. A Mr. Fitzgerald saying mass in the obscure
garret of a condemned house, an immense crowd had assembled, and the
floor giving way, the officiating priest with many of his flock were
buried in the ruins, and the greater number were maimed or wounded.
Lord Chesterfield, horror-struck at the event, ordered that all the
chapels in the capital should be opened on St. Patrick’s day, and they
have never since been closed.
A zealous Protestant thinking to pay his court to the Lord Lieutenant,
came to inform him that one of his coachmen was a Roman Catholic, and
went privately to mass. “Does he, indeed?” said his Lordship, “then I
shall take care that he never drives me there.”--_Chesterfield’s
Memoirs._
The Bishop of Waterford relates that the vice-treasurer, Mr. Gardiner,
a man of good character and considerable fortune, waited upon Lord
Chesterfield, one morning, and in a great fright told him that he was
assured upon good authority that the people in the province of
Connaught were actually rising; upon which the Viceroy looked at his
watch, and with great composure answered him, “It is nine o’clock, and
time for them to rise; I believe, therefore that your news is true.”
This system of alarm, be it observed, continues in all its vigour to
the present day; and the actual Viceroy has to withstand the falsehood
of the designing and the credulity of the nervous, full as much as any
of his predecessors.
Footnote 73:
In a contest for constitutional rights (1755), the Earl of Kildare
placed himself at the head of the liberal party, which was then
technically designated “the patriots:” and the agents of the Castle
and the Church faction having represented to the King that the Irish
House of Commons was bent on destroying the royal prerogative, for the
purpose of preparing his Majesty’s expulsion, the Earl, with “the
oulde bloode of the Geraldines” boiling in his veins, denied the
calumny, and composed and with his own hand presented a memorial to
the king, proving historically that the Irish were to a fault the
upholders of the royal prerogative, and lovers of kingly government.
For this spirited conduct, which recalls the opposition of the
Kildares of old to the ministers of Henry the Seventh and Eighth, he
received the glorious appellation of Father of his country.
Footnote 74:
The terrorism of former times having now yielded to a more salutary
system, the expression of public feeling took a variety of forms. It
was at this period that political toasts came into fashion, introduced
into social meetings through the convivial talents of a Mr. Carter,
son to the Master of the Rolls. His toast of “May all secretary
bashaws and lordly high-priests be kept to their proper tackle, the
sword and the bible,” became a charter sentiment at all public and
private dinners. The lordly high-priest was Archbishop Stone, and the
bashaw was Lord G. Sackville, who brought all the pedantry of the
schools to his official diplomacy, and added the superciliousness of
fashion to the hauteur of conscious supremacy.
Footnote 75:
The numbers of those who voted were 102 for, and 122 against the
measure. The tax proposed was two shillings in the pound upon rents
and profits of landed property in the hands of those who did not
reside in Ireland for six months in each year, from 1773 to 1775.
Footnote 76:
It is stated in the public prints that 350,000_l._ are, at this day,
taken annually from the county of Kilkenny alone.
Footnote 77:
Cead mille faltha.
Footnote 78:
It is worth citing, that Sir Cecil Wray, one of the most violent
opponents of the extension of Irish trade, observed at this time to
the House, “that the true grievances of Ireland were the Irish Pension
List, the Sinecure Offices, the Roman Catholic Disabilities, and the
Absentees.”
Footnote 79:
It was to the loyalty of the people of Ireland at this period, that
the Lord Lieutenant of the day alluded, when, in his speech from the
throne, he observed, “That the united and great military preparations
of the House of Bourbon seemed only to have roused the courage and
called forth the exertions of his Majesty’s brave and loyal subjects
of this kingdom of Ireland; and I have only to lament that the
exhausted state of the treasury has hitherto put it out of my power to
give those exertions the most extensive and constitutional operation,
by carrying the militia law into effect.
Footnote 80:
These half measures are, however, in the present state of affairs
almost inevitable.--A divided cabinet founded upon a divided state of
public opinion, opposes an insuperable barrier to a frank and honest
reform: and oscillations of principle and of practice must attend the
effort to manage factions so nicely balanced.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PROSPECTUS
OF
SIR JONAH BARRINGTON’s
HISTORIC ANECDOTES OF IRELAND
DURING HIS OWN TIMES,
WITH SECRET MEMOIRS OF THE UNION;
Illustrated by Delineations of the principal Characters connected with
those Transactions, curious Letters and Papers in fac simile; and
numerous Original Portraits, engraved by the elder HEATH.
To be completed in Ten Numbers, in Royal 4to.
Price 12s. 6d. each.
PRINTED FOR HENRY COLBURN,
NEW BURLINGTON STREET.
Unforeseen circumstances, over which the Author had no influence or
controul, had altogether checked the progress of this Work, suspended
the publication of its latter parts, and left them on the Publisher’s
shelves unadvertised and uncirculated.
This temporary relinquishment had given rise to unfounded and injurious
reports of its suppression; an object which never was for one moment in
the contemplation of the Author, nor sought for, or even suggested, by
the Government of England.
On the contrary--the lamentable and unimproving march of Ireland from
the period of the Union having fully proved the deceptious prospective
given to that fatal measure by its mistaken or corrupt supporters, and
exciting a novel interest and grave reflections of vital importance to
the British Empire, the Author had determined to seize upon the first
available opportunity of fulfilling his engagement to the friends and
patrons of the Work, by its completion.
Those friends were not confined to one party. They were mingled in
all--they comprised several of the highest orders of society--many who
held, and some who still hold important stations in the Government of
both countries;--and the commencing parts of the Work having been
honoured by the approbation and encouragement of His present Majesty and
other Members of His Royal House, it was with deep regret the Author
found himself, from a succession of causes, for several years unable to
fulfil his intentions, and gratify his own laudable ambition, by
compiling into a compact Memoir, the most important Historic events of
Ireland. In many of those he was himself a not unimportant actor. He
possessed also the advantage of individual intimacy or acquaintance with
the most celebrated personages of all parties; without which, and the
fidelity of a contemporary and independent pen, the delineation of their
characters and the record of their conduct, if not lost for ever, would
have descended to posterity with imperfect details and an ambiguous
authenticity;--or have left a wide chasm in a highly interesting epocha
of British History.
The fallacious measure of a Legislative Union,--the progress of which
from commencement to consummation the Author energetically resisted--has
proved by its inoperative or mischievous results, the justness of that
resistance. And he now, in common with many of the most distinguished of
its original supporters, deeply deplores its accomplishment. But
established by lapse of time--confirmed by passive assent--and
complicated with some beneficial, and many political and financial
arrangements, its tranquil reversal seems to have passed feasibility.
Yet--as an hereditary friend to British connexion--the Author hopes, by
the revival and completion of this History, to open wide the eyes of
Great Britain to the present dangers of Ireland--to draw aside the
curtain of ignorance and prejudice by which her history has been so long
obscured--to compare her once rising prosperity with her existing
miseries--to discover the occult causes of their continuance and the
false principles of her misrule--to display her sacrifices for
England--and to unmask her libellers in both countries.
Developments such as these may rouse the Legislature to probe her wounds
to their depth--to employ her labour--to succour--to foster--and to rule
her on the broad principles of a steady and philanthropic policy--and to
relinquish for ever that system of coercive Government, which an
experience of many centuries has proved to be destructive of almost
every thing--except her crimes and her population.
The British people should also learn that the absence of the ancient
Nobles and protecting Aristocracy of Ireland,--drawn away by the Union
from their demesnes and tenantry to the Seat of Legislation, and
replaced only by the griping hands and arbitrary sway of upstart
deputies,--increases in proportion with the miseries and turbulence of
the lower orders; and that the luxuriance of vegetation which clothes
that capable Island, has, through the same causes, become only a
harbinger of want, or the forbidden fruit of a famished peasantry.
It should therefore be the object of every pen and of every tongue, to
render the Union as innoxious as its paralyzing nature can now admit of;
to recall the proprietors of the Irish soil to a sense of their own
security and their country’s welfare; and thereby strengthen the ties
which should bind the two nations together, in equality, prosperity, and
affection--on the firmness and durability of which _species_ of
connexion depends, not only the constitutional security of England
herself, but perhaps the political existence of both countries.
Such is the Author’s view in the completion of this Work. The obstacles
to its progress are surmounted, and its publication is now in the hands
of those who will spare nothing to render it worthy of its object, and
ensure a lasting and beneficial record to the United Empire.
It is fortunate for Ireland, and disastrous to her calumniators, that a
recent and great event has at once exposed the misrepresentations of her
enemies, and displayed a great source of her misfortunes. The visit of a
conciliating King to a distracted people rapidly disclosed their native
character, and produced a burst of unfeigned, unanimous, genuine
loyalty--never before experienced in such profusion by any Monarch from
his subjects. The equivocating language of diplomacy was rejected for
awhile. The King was a Patriot, and the People were loyal. For the first
time they were allowed to approach each other. Both were sincere--and
both were ardent. In a few days, the King became despotic in the
affections of the Nation, and his Ministers descended into a comparative
insignificance. When he arrived, he was respected as a British King--but
when he departed, he was adored as an Irish Monarch. He saw at once that
the existence of faction and discord was incompatible with the peace and
the prosperity of Ireland; and that she hung on Great Britain, as a
withering limb upon a healthful body--essential to its symmetry, but
useless to its functions and injurious to its Constitution.
There was but one remedy--conciliation. His Majesty saw its efficacy and
commanded its adoption.--But his commands were disobeyed by the _Regal
Rebels_[81]--and Ireland is still seen withering and cankering--by the
obstinacy of intolerant faction, the irritation of local tyranny, and
the multiplying mischiefs resulting from disobedience to the benevolent
and wise commands of the only British King who ever yet set foot on the
Irish shore as a friend, and as a patriot.
Footnote 81:
Mr. Grattan’s definition of men, “Who make their loyalism a pretence
to perpetuate their supremacy,--and distract the peace of a Country
under colour of protecting it.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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administration, statistics, art, even literature,--in short, whatever he
touches on,--seems to unfold its most recondite principles to his view,
and to be fully comprehended and appreciated. To the future historian
the value of the “Historical Miscellanies” is incalculable: with regard
to the Memoirs themselves, no history can ever supersede
them.”--EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
“On these sheets are traced events that will never be forgotten,
portraits that will decide the judgment of posterity. It is the book of
life or death to many whose names are recorded in it.”--OPINION OF LAS
CASES IN HIS JOURNAL.
21. JOURNAL of a RESIDENCE in ASHANTEE. By JOSEPH DUPUIS, Esq. late his
Britannic Majesty’s Envoy and Consul for that Kingdom, comprising Notes
and Researches relative to the Gold Coast and the Interior of Western
Africa, chiefly from Arabic MSS. and Information communicated by the
Moslems of Guinea. To which is prefixed an Account of the causes of the
present War. In 1 vol. 4to. with a map and 15 plates, 2l. 12s. 6d.
boards.
22. THE PRIVATE JOURNAL of MADAME CAMPAN’s CONVERSATIONS; comprising
Original Anecdotes of the French Court; also Selections from her
Correspondence, her Thoughts on Education, &c. 8vo. 14s. French, 12s.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Transcriber’s Notes
This file uses _underscores_ to indicate italic text. New original cover
art included with this ebook is granted to the public domain.
The spelling and diacriticals used in non-English words and phrases has
not been modernised or corrected.
This book as printed included multiple complex footnotes, including
footnotes to footnotes. All notes have been converted to endnotes for
this ebook edition. The following changes and corrections have been
made:
• p. 7: Added period after phrase “the recorded absenteeism of two
thousand years.”
• p. 19: Replaced “kings” with “king’s” in phrase “Lady Elizabeth Grey,
the king’s own kinswoman.”
• p. 20: Replaced opening with closing quotation mark after phrase
“having curried acquaintance and friendship with mere Irish.”
• p. 23: Replaced “of of” with “of” in phrase “England, in the face of
her own savage laws.”
• p. 27: Added period after phrase “for the Earl of Kildare to feare.”
• p. 28: Replaced apparent mid-dot with period after phrase “that you
tracke them out at pleasure.”
• p. 35: Added opening double quotation mark to indicate continuation
of quotation before paragraph beginning “One night, when the
lieutenant and he, for disport, were playing at _slide-groat_.”
• p. 35: Added opening single quotation mark before phrase “there is
some mad game in that scralle, but, fall how it will, this throw is
for a huddle.”
• p. 45: Added closing double quotation mark after phrase “gossipry and
alliance.”
• p. 45 note 16: Replaced “to to” with “to” in phrase “and granted to
those on whose counsel they had surrendered.”
• p. 103 note 53: Added period after phrase “the fair dames of Ireland
learned to expire at an opera.”
• p. 133: Replaced closing single quotation mark with closing double
quotation mark after phrase “the English interest.”
• Booklist item 14: Added commas after “Joseph II.” and “Gustavus III.”
in list.
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