in detail, with cold-blooded cruelty. The Spanish garrison, which had gallantly defended itself at Smerwick, was forced to surrender in 1580, and was put to the sword without scruple, having no better right to be there than the English seamen on the Spanish Main. Desmond and Sanders took to the hills, where Sanders perished miserably of disease or starvation, while Desmond was betrayed to the Butlers and stabbed in his bed. The ill-paid soldiers of the queen took out their wages by plundering and maltreating the Irish. All Munster was made a desert, and thousands of homeless peasants perished of the famine and pestilence that came in the train of war. The wretched survivors lived on dead carrion, and the herbs of the fields. 14. More than half a million acres in Munster were now adjudged forfeited to the crown, and redivided into shires. The Plantation A systematic attempt was made to replace the of Munster, 1584. Irish inhabitants by English settlers; and Sir John Perrot, formerly President of Munster, was made Deputy in 1584, to superintend the carrying out of the plantation. The forfeited estates were granted out in great plots to English gentlemen undertakers, who were to reserve some of the land as their own demesne, and parcel out the rest among English farmers. But the Plantation of Munster was never fully carried out, and so far as it was attempted it soon broke down. The undertakers were either adventurers, eager to make money, or English officials who took little trouble about their cheaply won Irish estates. English farmers of the right sort were not forthcoming in sufficient numbers, and those who came found that the undertakers exacted such extortionate rents, that they could hardly make a living, though exposed to ceaseless dangers and hardships. Before long they were crowded out by the Irish who, anxious to get back to their old haunts, offered much higher rents, and were actually preferred as tenants by the greedy adventurers. A few poor English gentlemen strove to make their home in Ireland, as, for example, Spenser the poet, who settled down at Kilcolman, a ruined castle of the Desmonds, where he collected the materials for his famous View of the State of Ireland, which gives such a powerful picture of the unhappy condition of the Ireland of his days, and urges strongly an English conquest more systematic and thoroughgoing than Elizabeth's economy would ever allow. Much suffering would have been spared to Ireland, had Spenser's stern but wise advice been followed. Subsequent rebellion made short work of the scattered English settlers, and almost the only permanent result of the Plantation of Munster was the establishment of a large number of English landlords in the estates once ruled by the Geraldines. 15. Despite the Munster Plantation, Ireland was as unsettled as ever, though something was done to promote the spread of Protestantism, and the establishment of Dublin University in 1591 was evidence that the queen's government was not altogether unmindful of scholarship and learning. Yet such a measure did not touch the native Irish, while the steady and oppressive development of the English power, and the growing enthusiasm of the Irish for the Catholic cause, were beginning to weld together the divided septs and races of Ireland into something resembling a nation. In the last years of Elizabeth's reign, a third series of Irish revolts broke out with more fury than ever. The beginning of them was in Ulster, where, some years after Shane O'Neill's death, his nephew, Hugh O'Neill, younger brother of the Baron of Dungannon murdered in 1562, was, after being educated in England, sent home to build up an English party among the O'Neill clan. For many years Hugh struggled against Hugh O'Neill, Tirlogh Lenogh, chosen The O'Neill after Earl of Tyrone. Shane's death, and, failing to get the better of his rival, was so friendly to the government, that he fought against Desmond in Ulster, and was rewarded by the revival of the earldom of Tyrone in his favour. However after Tirlogh Lenogh's death, Hugh was chosen The O'Neill by the tribe, and soon forgot his English "civility" and put himself at the head of the Irish Celtic party. He was less able, but more far-seeing and cautious, than his uncle Shane. He did not aspire to conquer the rival septs of Ulster, but rather to induce them to follow him against the common enemy. Besides thus building up an Ulster party, he professed himself a staunch Catholic, and soon received promises of help from Philip II. Tyrone's relations with the English now became very threatening. More than once he was at open war with the Deputy, but peace was somehow patched up, The Revolt of and at last, in June 1598, he received a pardon O'Neill, 1598. in return for a submission on terms that would have almost destroyed his power. He took advantage of the lull to attack a fort on the Blackwater, and in August cut to pieces the army sent to its relief, under Sir Henry Bagenal, at the battle of the Yellow Ford. This unexpected victory spread The Munster Re- consternation in Dublin, and delight over all native Ireland. Tyrone now appeared, not simply, like Shane, the would-be conqueror of Ulster, but the representative of the Irish race and of Catholicism, against the foreign and heretic conqueror; but he himself was the last to realise his great position. After a time, however, he sent a force to Munster, and "the very day it set foot within the province, Munster to a man was in arms before noon." James Fitzgerald, nephew of the last Earl of Desmond, put himself at the head of the rebels, and assumed the title of Earl of Desmond, though the queen's friends called him in scorn the Sugan or "straw-rope" earl. Amidst dire atrocities the few remaining relics of the Munster Plantation were destroyed. The planters had not force or courage even to resist, and, as many as could fled in a panic to the towns. Among them was Edmund Spenser, who, luckier than many of his fellows, escaped with his life, though one of his children perished in the flames of his burning house at Kilcolman. "In the course of seventeen days," boasted the Irish annalists, "the Irish left not within the length and breadth of the country of the Geraldines a single son of a Saxon, whom they did not kill or expel." It was the first act in the long war of races and religions, that makes up so much of the modern history of Ireland. In abject fear lest the Spaniards should combine with the rebels, Elizabeth sent, in 1599, her former favourite Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, with whom she had just been reconciled, to put down the Irish revolt. He was given extraordinary powers as lord-lieutenant, and was promised an army of nearly twenty thousand men. But he mismanaged matters very badly, and his troops, who showed Robert Earl of 1599. rank cowardice under his unsteady direction, melted rapidly away. After utterly failing in Munster, Essex rashly went against Tyrone with less than three thousand men, and was compelled to accept a humiliating truce. Without leave to quit his post, he hurried back to England, where he soon met his fate. In 1600 Mountjoy ends the Rebellion, 1600-1603. Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, succeeded Essex in Ireland. He was a strong, shrewd, unscrupulous man, whose private life was notorious from an intrigue with Essex's sister, Penelope Rich, whom he afterwards married. Mountjoy was a good soldier, and, after three years of hard struggle, he completed successfully the work in which his predecessor had so signally failed. He began his task in Munster and soon pressed the rebels hard. In 1601 four thousand Spaniards came to their assistance, but were soon besieged by him in Kinsale. O'Neill marched to the relief of Kinsale with a strong force drawn from all parts of Ireland, but, on 24th December, Mountjoy won a decisive victory over him. Soon after the Spaniards surrendered, and open war in Munster was at an end. The Sugan Earl was captured in 1601, hiding in a cave, and, with unwonted mercy, sent to the Tower of London, where he remained a prisoner until his death. Mountjoy planted forts and garrisons in Munster, which effectively suppressed the embers of the revolt and kept the people down for the future. He then turned against Hugh O'Neill, who still held most of Ulster against the queen, though his former associates Hugh O'Donnell now fled to Spain and Hugh's brother Rory submitted to Mountjoy, and was made Earl of Tyrconnel. The combat was thus narrowed to a struggle between Mountjoy and the O'Neills. Tyrone soon found that he could not match the disciplined troops of the deputy, and on 3rd April 1603 he gave in and made terms, abjuring the title of The O'Neill and all foreign alliances. News had not yet reached Ireland that Elizabeth had died on March 24th. Thus the Irish revolt ended with the queen's life. Ireland was at last conquered, but the cruelty of the long process, the result largely of the queen's overthriftiness and hesitation, left ineffaceable memories behind. Law and order were secured, but they were dearly purchased at the price paid for them. Rule of Chi 16. Mountjoy had facilitated the conquest by the easy terms he had granted to some at least of the vanquished chieftains. His successor, Sir Arthur Chichester, who ruled Ireland from 1604 to 1614, chester, 1604had no policy for keeping Ireland perma- 1614. nently at peace save by wholly destroying the Irish or making them Englishmen by main force. He forced the dependents of the great chieftains to hold their lands directly of the crown, strove to create a class of small freeholders, and attempted to enforce recusancy fines for non-attendance at church, after the English fashion. The pardoned Tyrone bitterly resented these attacks on his tribal independence, and in 1607 fled from Ireland for ever, fearing a plot against him. With him went Rory O'Donnell the new-made Earl of Tyrconnel. Chichester and the king refused to recognise the Irish law and custom, by which the land belonged not to the chief but to the clan, and, though they had been previously trying to get the tribesmen on their side against the chief, they profited by the flight of the chieftains to upset the whole tribal system. The withdrawal of the two earls was deemed evidence of their guilt. The land over which they had ruled in the patriarchal fashion, including a great part of Ulster, was treated as private property and confiscated for their treason. In these districts Chichester (not deterred by Essex's failure in Antrim and Perrot's in Munster) successfully carried out the policy of colonisation recommended by Bacon. The forfeited country was divided between English and Scottish colonists, a few estates being granted as a favour The Plantation to such of the native Irish as had remained of Ulster, 1610. loyal. The dispossessed natives were driven from their homes to the barren west; and the plantation was so energetically carried through, that north-eastern Ireland, the rudest region and the one most hostile to Elizabeth, became a new Protestant and Puritan Ireland, peopled by peaceable English farmers and tradesmen, who turned the wilderness into good farming country, and made it prosperous, but who kept down with stern severity and treated as their inferiors the native Irish, who still lingered as cotters among them. The Ulster plantation brought with it new difficulties, but it ended many of the old ones, and made permanent the English conquest of Ireland, by establishing in it a strong and vigorous colony, whose interests and very lives depended upon the keeping up of the English and Protestant connection. Before their influence the old tribal Ireland slowly melted away. the Irish remained, and with the disappearance of their old anarchic institutions, the old tribal hatreds that had kept them asunder began to die away also. United by its newfound zeal for Catholicism, no less than by the oppression that bound its tribes down in a common servitude, Celtic Ireland sullenly bided its time for revenge. CHAPTER IX. England under the Tudors. But 1. Despite the practical despotism of the Tudor kings, the framework of the medieval constitution continued |
