CHARLES I TO THE PROTECTORATE (1625-1660)

There was still in Ireland a mine charged with the wrath of the dispossessed added to the hatred of race and religion, the religious hatred being the more deadly because, the Protestants of Ireland being Calvinist, the antagonism was extreme. The match was applied to the mine by the outbreak of revolution in England under Charles I. Strafford, having passed from the ranks of patriotism to the place left vacant by the death of Buckingham in the councils of the king, came with his dark look of command as viceroy to play the part of beneficent despot in Ireland, and at the same time to raise an army there for his master. The part of despot he played to perfection, making the Irish Parliament the tool of his will, applying to it and to the government in general his own and Laud’s high royalist policy of Thorough. The part of beneficent despot he played to a considerable extent. He set his heel on the rapacity of the adventurers, compelling the chief of them, the Earl of Cork, to disgorge. He enforced order and put down piracy, which in the general disorder had become rife. He fostered the cultivation of flax and the linen trade, though he paid blackmail to English protectionism by prohibiting the woollen manufacture. He did his best to reform the State Church, which he found sunk in torpor, sinecurism, and simony, while its edifices were ruins and piggeries. Unluckily he was a strict Anglican, whereas the only Protestantism in Ireland which had life in it was the Calvinistic Protestantism represented by Usher. He made a mortal enemy by turning the sumptuous monument of Lady Cork off the place of the high altar. But to find means of raising an army for his king he had to resort to violent measures. He dragooned the Parliament into granting extraordinary supplies. The king had pledged himself in the form of “graces” to respect and quiet titles to large tracts of land. These graces Strafford thrust aside. By legal chicane and intimidation of juries he, in defiance of the king’s plighted word, confiscated a great part of the land of Connaught. A legal raid of the Crown on the estates which the city of London had purchased in Ulster made the lord deputy another formidable enemy. He added to the number by trampling on the pride of men of rank and influence. Strafford had formed his army. That he intended it as a support to the arbitrary government of Charles is beyond question; his betrayal of that intention by some loose words uttered in council formed the most damaging piece of evidence against him; and though the army broke up on his departure, fears of it continued to haunt the English mind and to intensify English feeling against the Irish. The Irish Parliament joined in the impeachment of the man who had trampled on it, and when Strafford pleaded in defence of his arbitrary measures, that Ireland was a conquered country, Pym’s retort was, “They were a conquered nation! There cannot be a word more pregnant or fruitful in treason than that word is. There are few nations in the world that have not been conquered, and no doubt but the conqueror may give what law he pleases to those that are conquered; but if the succeeding pacts and agreements do not limit and restrain that right, what people can be secure? England hath been conquered, and Wales hath been conquered, and by this reason will be in no better case than Ireland. If the king by the right of a conqueror gives laws to his people, shall not the people by the same reason be restored to the right of the conquered to recover their liberty if they can?”

Revolution was in the air. It stirred the heart of the Catholic cowering under the penal law, who saw the foot of his arch-enemy the Puritan on the steps of power. It stirred still more the heart of the disinherited native, especially on the forfeited domain of Tyrone. One of those great popular conspiracies of which the Irish have the gift was formed under the leadership of Phelim O’Neill, who ranked among his countrymen as head of the great sept of O’Neill, and cherished ancestral traditions of vast domains and princely power. With Phelim O’Neill was a better man, Roger Moore, one of the disinherited, a deadly enemy of England. The rebellion posed as royalist, declaring for the king against the Puritan and revolutionary Parliament; its aims were Ireland for the Irish, and Catholicism as the Irish religion. Phelim O’Neill was not a man to restrain from crime. But the people, once launched in insurrection, were probably beyond control. They rose upon the English settlers in Ulster, drove them from their homes, and massacred some thousands with the usual cruelty, women and children taking part in the fiendish work. Many were stripped naked and exposed to perish in the cold. Dublin was full of shivering and famished fugitives. The capital itself narrowly escaped through fortunate betrayal of the plot, such as in an Irish conspiracy seldom fails. It was natural that panic should exaggerate the number murdered, as it was that panic and superstition together should see the spectres of the English who had been drowned by the rebels at Portadown. The effect upon the English, above all upon the Puritan mind, was like that of the Sepoy mutiny and the massacre of Cawnpore. Ruthless retaliation followed. Where the Protestants got the upper hand, Irish men, women, and children were butchered without mercy. Thenceforth the Irishman was to the Puritan a wild beast or worse. All Irishmen who landed in England to fight for the king, with the women who followed their camps, were put to the sword. An Irishwoman left behind by a Munster regiment at the siege of Lyme was torn to pieces by the women of the place.

The English Parliament at once, being short of money, passed, to provide for the Irish war, an act confiscating in advance two and a half millions of acres of rebel land as security for a loan; a measure, to say the least, extreme and sure to make the conflict internecine. The act passed without a dissentient voice, and was one of the last that received the assent of Charles.

In Ireland against the dark clouds of the storm one rainbow appeared. The Protestant Bishop Bedel, though a proselytizer, had by his beneficence won the love of his Catholic neighbours. He and his family were not only spared by the rebels, but treated with loving-kindness, and when he died a farewell salute was fired over his grave.

Thus commenced a course of mutual slaughter which lasted eleven years, and, according to Sir William Petty, cost, by sword, plague, and famine, the lives of a third part of the population. A great pasture country was reduced to the importation of foreign meat. A traveller could ride twenty or thirty miles without seeing a trace of human life, and wolves, fed on human flesh, multiplied and prowled in packs within a few miles of Dublin. Numbers abandoned the country and enlisted in foreign services. Slave dealers plied their trade and shipped boys and girls to Barbados.

Strafford’s place as deputy not having been filled, the government remained in the hands of the Puritan Lords Justices Parsons and Borlase, the first an intriguer and jobber, the second a worn-out soldier and a cipher. They had prorogued the Parliament by which they might have been restrained. The commander of the army on the king’s side and the representative of the king’s interest was Ormonde, the head of the loyalist house or sept of Butler, a man thoroughly honourable as well as able and wise, whose character stands out nobly amidst the dark carnival of evil.

It is difficult to say to which of the contending parties the palm of atrocity is to be awarded. Probably to that of the government, which knew no measure in the extermination of Catholics and rebels. Where Ormonde commanded there was sure to have been comparative mercy. Mercy there certainly was on the side of the insurgents when they were commanded by Owen O’Neill, a genuine soldier trained in foreign service and observant of the rules of civilized war. But a papal legate who was in the Catholic camp gleefully reports that after a battle won by the confederates no prisoners had been taken. By the soldiery of the government at least children were butchered, the saying being that “nits make lice.”

The anti-Catholic policy of the Puritan government and the castle had driven into the arms of insurrection the Catholic lords of the Pale, English in blood, normally hostile to the tribes though they were. The Confederation formed at Kilkenny a provisional government with an assembly of priests and laity combined, which elected a council of war. The assembly was presently joined by a papal nuncio, Rinuccini, who brought money from Rome and it seems at the same time encouragement of the rebellion from Richelieu. The nuncio sought to control everything in the paramount interest of the Papacy, which thus once more appears as a power of temporal ambition. The assembly was not unanimous. Of the clergy and the nuncio the chief aims were the ascendency of the Catholic Church and the recovery of the confiscated Church lands. The chief aims of the lay lords were lay; they wanted relief from political disabilities and recovery of their political power. Restoration to the Church of the abbey lands, of the grantees of which they were the heirs, was by no means to their mind.

Of the origin of the rebellion in Ulster King Charles was perfectly innocent, though he drew suspicion on himself by some careless words. Nothing worse for his cause could have happened. But when in his wrestle with the Puritan he was thrown, he began to cast a longing eye on the forces in Ireland which, though rebel and Catholic, were at all events hostile to the Puritan. There ensued a series of tangled intrigues with the Confederates, in the course of which Charles showed his usual weakness and duplicity, while he was fatally committed by the mingled rashness and tergiversation of his envoy, Glamorgan, the result being a disclosure very injurious to the poor king’s character and cause. The Confederacy was divided between a party which was for treating and a party which was for war to the knife. For war to the knife was the nuncio, an ecclesiastical termagant of the Becket stamp, inflated with notions of his own spiritual power and reckless in the pursuit of his own end, which was to lay Ireland at the feet of the Pope. In all this the high-minded Ormonde sadly stooped to take a part for his royal master’s sake. When the cause of his royal master was finally lost, he surrendered his command to the Parliament and left Ireland.

After the execution of Charles the scene shifted again. Abhorrence of regicide brought about a junction of the more moderate Protestants with the more moderate Confederates, uniting different parties and sections under a common profession of loyalty. Ormonde then returned to lead a mixed and not very harmonious force against Michael Jones, the Republican commander. He advanced to the attack of Dublin, but was totally defeated by Jones.

Now on the wings of victory came Cromwell with ten thousand of the New Model. His proclamation on landing promised to all who would keep the peace, peace and protection for themselves. That proclamation, the first utterance of law and order heard in those parts for ten years, was strictly carried into effect. A soldier was hanged for robbing a native of a fowl. No disorder, rapine, or outrage upon women is laid to the charge of the Puritan army in Ireland. Cromwell sat down before Drogheda, which was held by a large royalist garrison, partly English. The garrison having refused to surrender on summons, he stormed. Two attacks failed; a third, led by himself, took the town. He put the garrison to the sword. That a garrison refusing to surrender on summons and standing a storm might be put to the sword was the rule of war in those days; it was the law, though not the rule, of war even in the days of Wellington. Nevertheless, this was a fell act for a commander who was generally humane in war, and at Worcester risked his life in persuading Royalists to take quarter. Of this Cromwell was himself sensible, and he spoke of it with compunction. “I am persuaded,” he said in his despatch to the Parliament, “that this is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood; and that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future; which are the satisfactory grounds to such actions, which otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret.” Were remorse and regret ever breathed by Alva, Parma, or Tilly? What did the soldiery of those Catholic commanders do when it stormed a Protestant town? What did the British soldiery, maddened by the recollection of a massacre far less than that of 1641 do, not only to the Sepoy mutineer, but to the insurgent people of Oude? When Rupert stormed Leicester, the town was sacked, and women and children were found among the dead. The Royalist Carte, in his life of Ormonde, commenting on the slaughter of the garrison of Drogheda, says, “This was certainly an execrable policy in that regicide. But it had the effect he proposed. It spread abroad the terror of his name; it cut off the best body of the Irish troops and disheartened the rest to such a degree that it was a greater loss in itself and much more fatal in its consequences than the rout at Rathmines.” This is not a defence, nor much of an excuse. But it testifies to a motive other than mere thirst of blood and shows that Cromwell spoke the truth.

There was cruel slaughter again at the storming of Wexford, but it does not appear that it was ordered by Cromwell. The defences having been carried, the combat was renewed within the town by the townspeople, who, it is stated, had provoked wrath by their piracy and by drowning a number of Protestants in a hulk. The city had been summoned to surrender on fair terms.

Cromwell was at once called away to the war with Scotland. He left the war in Ireland to be finished by Ireton and Ludlow, who gradually extinguished organized resistance, leaving only something between guerilla warfare and brigandage called “Toryism,” a name presently transmitted to a great political party in England which bore it as a name of honour, in opposition to that of Whig, on every hypothesis equally humble in its source.

The two races and religions had fought for the land, and the Saxon and Protestant had won. It is surely simple to suggest that the winner ought to have invited the loser to take the prize, especially after such a display of that loser’s sentiments and intentions as the massacre of 1641. Had it not been made fearfully clear that the two races and religions could not dwell together in peace? The victorious Puritan drove the Catholic into Connaught. The Catholic, if he could, would have driven the Puritan into the sea. The original decree of “To Hell or Connaught,” the hateful sound of which still rings in Irish ears, seems to have been somewhat mitigated as the wrath of the victor cooled. At all events the sentence extended to landowners only, not to artisans and labourers, who were to remain where they were and to be disciplined and civilized by English masters. A great number of those who had fought on the losing side were sent away to foreign service, ridding Ireland of a manifest danger and forming the first instalment of the grand Irish element in the armies of Catholic Europe. There was also a large deportation to Barbados, including probably families left behind by the military emigration. This was cruel work, the more so as there was terrible suffering in the passage. The whole business was horrible and deplorable. But in passing sentence on the winner we must remember what the loser, had he been the winner, would have done. The shadow of an evil destiny was over all. Deportation was not to slavery for life, but to terminable bondage, one degree less cruel.

To cast all on Cromwell is most unfair. He had nothing specially to do with Ireland till he came to put an end to the war. He left it forever when he had struck his decisive blow. He could no more have given back the contested land to the Catholics than he could have turned the Shannon to its source. The act under which the land had been forfeited in advance and a loan on it raised had been passed by the unanimous vote of Parliament and had received the assent of the king. The soldiers who held land-scrip for their pay presented their claims. As little would it have been possible for Cromwell, even if he had desired it, to license the celebration of the Mass, which in Puritan eyes was a sign, not only of idolatry, but of allegiance to a foreign power, that power the mortal enemy, not of the Protestant religion only, but of the Protestant State. With liberty of conscience Cromwell declared that he would not interfere. This was something in an age when the rack and the stake of the Inquisition were still at work and when Irish troopers in the service of a Catholic power were butchering the Protestant peasantry of Savoy. If the Nuncio Rinuccini had got the upper hand in Ireland, a retirement of heresy into the sanctuary of conscience would scarcely have saved it from the stake. Cromwell does not appear to have persecuted in Ireland or to have given the word for persecution.

The Protector united Ireland as well as Scotland to England, thus bringing the factions under the control of a strong government, Ireland’s only hope of peace. Union assured her free trade with Great Britain and the dependencies, an inestimable boon, not in the way of material wealth only, but in that of commercial civilization, as its withdrawal afterwards fatally proved. Her shipping was at the same time assured of exemption from the disabilities of the Navigation Laws. The Protector sent her a good governor in the person of his son Henry, who seems to have identified himself with the welfare of her people. He sent her a liberal law reformer in the person of Chief Justice Coke, proposing to himself to treat her as a blank paper, whereon he could write reforms such as professional bigotry debarred him from effecting in England. His mortal enemy Clarendon, after dilating on the iniquities of the settlement, says, “And, which is more wonderful, all this was done and settled within little more than two years to that degree of perfection that there were many buildings raised for beauty as well as use, orderly and regular plantations of trees, and fences and enclosures raised throughout the kingdom, purchases made by one from the other at very valuable rates, and jointures made upon marriages, and all other conveyances and settlements executed, as in a kingdom at peace within itself, and where no doubt could be made of the validity of titles.” If these material improvements were at first limited to the domain and race of the victor, they would in time have spread.

Cromwell’s own letter to Sadler on the administration of justice in Ireland breathes anything but the ferocity ascribed to him. About religion he speaks in his unctuous Puritan way, but in a tone far from savage. “First let me tell you, in divers places where we come, we find the people very greedy after the Word, and flocking to Christian meetings; much of that prejudice that lies upon poor people in England being a stranger to their minds. And truly we have hoped much of it is done in simplicity; and I mind you the rather of this because it is a sweet symptom, if not an earnest of the good we expect."

His words on the social question in the same letter show tenderness of feeling. “Sir, it seems to me we have a great opportunity to set up until the Parliament shall otherwise determine, a way of doing justice among these poor people, which for the uprightness and cheapness of it may exceedingly gain upon them who have been accustomed to as much injustice, tyranny, and oppression from their landlords the great men, and those that should have done them right as (I believe) any people in that which we call Christendom.... Sir, if justice were freely and impartially administered here, the foregoing darkness and corruption would make it look so much the more glorious and beautiful and draw more hearts after it.” This is not the language of hatred, much less of extermination.

Critics of Cromwell fail to notice that his mind opened as he rose, notably in the way of religious toleration. The Ironside had now become a great statesman. “Savage” the writer of his domestic letters surely can never have been.

The representatives of Ireland in the Parliament of the Protectorate, it is true, were nominees. A popular election on the morrow of the Civil War, and with its embers still glowing, would have been out of the question. The union of the Parliaments effected, and representation granted, popular election would have come in time. Meantime, there was the sheltering and controlling authority of the Protector and the Council of State.

To charge Cromwell with having misunderstood the genius of the Irish nation and wronged it by his policy seems absurd. There was, in reality, no Irish nation. There was an island inhabited partly by the wreck of Celtic tribes, partly by conquerors and colonists of another race, the two races differing widely in character, speaking different languages, having antagonistic religions, not alien only, but desperately hostile to each other. Deadly experience had shown that, left to themselves, they could not live at peace. There was no political union, no attachment to a native dynasty, no tradition or sentiment truly national among the wreckage of the septs. The religious bond, it is true, had been greatly strengthened among them by the conflict, and formed something like a national tie. But adaptation of his policy to Catholic character and sentiment could hardly be expected of a Puritan chief in the age of the Spanish Inquisition.

The European war between Catholicism and Protestantism, and the consequent mingling of religious with political strife, were everywhere a fatal stumbling-block to statesmanship in that day. It does not seem that Cromwell dealt with the difficulty in England or Ireland less wisely and liberally than did statesmanship elsewhere. Perhaps the greater share of liberality was his. The signs of his personal inclination were certainly on the liberal side.