profession, had undertaken the task of persuading the Scottish chief to murder his unsuspecting guest. At a given signal, the banquetting room was filled with soldiers, and all the Irish were slain. O'Neill's head was sent to Dublin, and Piers received a thousand marks from the Government as a reward for the murder.' Hooker tells us that the head was carried to the Lord Deputy by Captain Piers, by whose device the stratagem, or rather tragedie, was practised.' Mr. Froude, whilst admitting that O'Neill and his friends in the banquetting hall were murdered, says but little of Captain Piers' conduct. Four days later,' he tells us, 'Piers hacked the head from the body and carried it on a spear's point through Drogheda to Dublin, where, staked upon a pike, it bleached on the battlements of the castle, a symbol to the Irish world of the fate of Celtic heroes.' But Mr. Froude fails to see that it was a symbol to the Irish world of something else too. This Captain Piers, Captain Ralegh, and Sir William Morgan were subsequently joined in the one commission under which they exercised martial law, or rather martial executions without law, in the county of Cork. The lessons which were thus taught to Ralegh, and which he practised without scruple, gained him a great estate and the confidence of Elizabeth, but did not serve him in certain other influential quarters. The Lord Treasurer did not like such work. He had contributed to the true glory of his own country and the future happiness of the Netherlands by denouncing the bloody Duke of Alva and opposing the bigotry and tyranny of the foreign rulers of Holland. He looked askance at Sir Walter Ralegh, and treated many of his importunities with silence. The year after Ralegh had written from Cork complaining that the Earl of Ormond was not severe enough in Munster, and that what was wanted was the fire and sword of Sir Humphrey Gilbert (Ralegh's half brother), who boasted of putting man, woman, and child to death.' Lord Burghley wrote to Sir Henry Wallop, the War Treasurer for Ireland, on the 10th of June, 1582, that the Flemings had not such cause to rebel against the oppression of the Spaniards as the Irish against the tyranny of England.' In repeating this sentence of the greatest statesman of the sixteenth century, Mr. Froude observes with truth that Lord Burghley possessed the rare quality of being able to recognise the faults of his own countrymen. 6 In a still more influential quarter Ralegh's Irish policy was quoted against him in years to come with fatal effect. Ralegh's letter to Sir Francis Walsingham of 1581, in which he secretly denounces the conduct of his general, the Earl of Ormond, shows his anxiety to get an Irish estate. He begins by saying how he wished to occupy the Castle of Barry's Court and the adjoining island, being a great strength and a safety for all passengers between Corke and Youghall,' but the Earl of Ormond, unwillinge any He Inglishman should have anything, stayed the taking thereof.' then says: I pray God her Majesty do not finde that she hathe spent a hundred thousand pounds more; she shall at last be driven by too dere experience to send an Inglishe President to follow these malicious traytors with fier and sword.' The English President he suggests in place of Ormond is his own kinsman, Sir Humphrey Gilbert. He then protests that his sole object is the love of the Queen and her service. I beseiche your Honor to take my bold writing in good part, protesting before Hyme that knoweth the thoughtes of all hartes that I writ nothing but moved thereto for the love I bere to her Highness and for the furtherance of her service. A more substantial motive, however, appears in the closing sentences of the letter: I beseich your Honor that I may by your means enjoy the keping of this Barre Court and the island; or that it will please your Honor to writ to my Lord Deputy that he will confirm it unto mee. Thus humblie I take my leve, reposing myselfe and my estat upon your Honor's favor. From Cork the 25th of February. This estate, which extended from Rostellan Castle to Fota, included one side of Cork harbour, and was coveted by Ralegh for many good reasons. He was a sailor as well as a colonist; and, if he was fated to be the first colonial governor in America, and an administrator of an English colony in Munster, he was destined to be an admiral of the Royal Navy also. Hence his land hunger included not only a strong castle or two, but the idea of a residence near the sea, where he could have easy access to his ships, and where he could indulge his passion for mercantile speculation. Mr. Goldwin Smith, in his Oxford lectures, says: The eagles took wing for the Spanish main; the vultures descended upon Ireland.' Ralegh seems to have united some of the characteristics of both. Four years after he was refused Barre Court, and in little more than a year after his first expedition to America he was a successful suitor to Queen Elizabeth for twelve thousand acres in the province of Munster. A marginal note in her own handwriting on the warrant attests the Queen's anxiety to hasten the completion of the grant. Amidst the foreign undertakers who were devouring the lands of the Earl of Desmond and the plunder of the Church, Ralegh evidently was the favourite, and was allowed to pick and choose. He began at the 'havan roiall' of Youghal, and at both sides of the river he took the best that could be found. Mr. Edwards says Ralegh's broad lands were thickly wooded;' and he surmises that this led him into a commercial speculation, which for many years gave him trouble, and involved him in eventual loss. But there was something on this Blackwater property besides timber. A man of Ralegh's lite 6 rary and historic tastes cannot have been entirely insensible to traditions of intellectual culture, some of them then very recent. From the upper windows of the house he occupied, close to the College of Earl Thomas, he could look across the river to his hills of Ardmore, which hid the Cloig-theach, one of the best preserved round towers of Ireland. On this part of his property stood the Oratory of St. Declan, in which he might have seen the mysterious Ogham stones, that are perhaps the earliest efforts at writing in Western Europe. If any of the English undertakers noticed such antiquities, it should have been Ralegh, for the only Ogham stone found in England was discovered at Fardel in Devonshire, where his father was born. Molana Abbey, where Raymond le Gros is buried, was granted to Ralegh the year after the monastery was dissolved. The Preceptory of the Knights Templars at Rincrew and the confiscated lands of the order were granted to Ralegh by letters patent that are still preserved in the Duke of Devonshire's archives at Lismore. The reputation for learning, which made Lismore known to European scholars before Oxford was founded, may have induced Ralegh to select it as a place for a school; but the school he endowed, like others of later times, was a failure, because it was avowedly established to destroy the faith of the people. He did not, however, trouble himself much with such questions. The more one looks into the details of Ralegh's connection with Ireland, the more the accuracy of Mr. Lecky's statement is seen, that theological animosity did not play as leading a part in the Irish history of that time as either modern Catholic writers or historians of Mr. Froude's school appear to think. Ralegh's letters from Ireland also show the soundness of Mr. Lecky's judgment as to the slight importance attached at that time to nationalist views. The idea of the re-establishment of a government of an essentially national character in Ireland became a practical one eighty years later, as Lord Beaconsfield 3 has pointed out when referring to the Convention of Kilkenny; and it is an idea that has never been lost sight of since then. But the elevating sentiment of nationality, the antidote, as Mr. Justin M'Carthy observes, to much that is unwholesome, vulgar, and debasing, was overshadowed when Ralegh was in Ireland. The land question was the dominating question of that day. It ruled Ralegh from the moment he set foot in Ireland to the last hour in which he was able to affect the fortunes or misfortunes of the country. Without mentioning his name, Mr. Lecky indicates the real Ralegh spirit when he speaks of the taste for adventure, the dislike of routine, the extreme desire to find out new and rapid paths to wealth, that characterised the Elizabethan age-a desire showing itself in the form of discovery, of piracy, of a passion for 3 Speech on the state of Ireland, February 16, 1844. Irish land. The Government policy was, as Mr. Lecky says, to root out the Irish from the soil, to consficate the property of the septs, and plant the country with English tenants. He observes how Edmund Burke, in one of his letters to Sir Hercules Langrishe, gives the real clue to Irish history from the accession of Elizabeth, in asserting that the true genius and policy of the English Government was directed to the total extirpation of the interests of the natives in their own soil; that this was the original scheme, and that it was never deviated from for a single hour during the whole reign of Elizabeth. That Edmund Burke should have thus, in a passing remark, shown so exact an appreciation of the subject, Mr. Lecky attributes to his great intellect as well as to the fact that he studied Irish history with care. But the little boy that was reared at Castletown Rock, and Monaninng on the banks of the Blackwater, where the estates of Ralegh came close to those of Spenser, and in the midst of a peasantry ever whispering of those days, may possibly have picked up something in his uncle Nagle's house and in the school near Kilavullen more useful to him as a student of real history than what he afterwards found in the library of Trinity College. But though in the days of Ralegh the land question thus dwarfed the religious and the purely national ones, it is impossible not to see that whatever influence the Catholic Church and the awakening national sentiment of Ireland could exercise, was a conservative influence in the truest sense of the word—that it was an influence on the side of order, of an ancient civilisation and of property, as opposed to the destructive policy of men like Ralegh. In addition to the women and children, there were other helpless and innocent objects to be rooted out as enemies to Queen Elizabeth; and, as to these, no man cut down and destroyed more than Ralegh. In a letter addressed to Lord Burghley in the year 1588, Mr. George Longe urges the Lord Treasurer to transfer to Ireland thirteen out of the fifteen glass manufactories then existing in England, for the reason that the woods in England will be thereby preserved and the superfluous woods in Ireland wasted, than which in tyme of rebellion her Majestie hath no greater enemy there.' 5 Ralegh, actuated by a better motive, that of simply trying to make money, brought over bands of English woodcutters, and soon made short work of venerable groves of oak and yew trees, wherever the waterway of the Avondue and its tributaries could convey the lumber to his ships at Youghal. He obtained a monopoly for exporting pipe-staves to the continent, and for some years the wines of France, Spain, and even Italy came to England in hogsheads of Irish wood. Ralegh's letters and the Privy Council Records' show that this destructive monopoly reacted upon him in reputation and in purse. It involved him in lawsuits, and in quarrels with the Executive. But, like his political 3 Sir H. Ellis's Original Letters, vol. iii. p. 159. policy, it left its marks on the country. When Spenser first welcomed Ralegh to Kilcolman Castle, he says it was bordered with a wood Of matchless hight, that seem'd the earth to disdaine, In which all trees of honour stately stood. In a few years not a tree was left, and the demesne that was described as 'the woody Kilcoman' became a few naked fields surrounding the bare and burnt walls of the castle. And so throughout Cork, Kerry, Tipperary, and Waterford, Elizabeth's undertakers did their work. The ancient chroniclers who called Ireland Fiodha Inis, the island of the trees, did so not merely because it was well wooded by nature, but because the natives, at a time when little was known elsewhere of the advantages of tree-planting, fostered the art, and especially surrounded the numerous abbeys, the seats of religion and learning, with groves. Even Mr. Froude cannot read the testimony of one of Ralegh's comrades on this subject without drawing the contrast between the Irish 'traitors' and the English undertakers. In Sir R. White's diary (1580) he says: A fairer land the sun did never shine upon; pity to see it lying waste in the hands of traitors;' whereupon Mr. Froude observes: Yet it was by those traitors that the woods, whose beauty they so admired, had been planted and fostered. Irish hands, unaided by English art or English wealth. had built Muckross and Innisfallen and Aghadoe.'" Whether or not Lord Burghley's correspondent was right in saying that the Queen had no greater enemy than the Irish trees, their fate, at all events, showed the possibility of a physical destruction that time has been unable to repair. With the people the result has been different, though they were treated to a similar process by the same men. Mr. Froude has reminded us more than once of what Sir Walter Ralegh's first master, Lord Grey, said, that the only way to deal with Ireland was by a Mahometan conquest.' a Mahometan conquest.' Within the last few months, Mr. Froude has again referred to Lord Grey's suggestion as a cruel but in the long run merciful one,' if Ireland is to be kept in subjection. Indeed, the great historian has never disguised his opinion that a system of unrelenting severity and a bold attempt at extermination was what was wanted. Had Cromwell lived, he has often told us, the experiment would have been worked out. But he has hardly done justice to the great Protector or to the difficulties in his way, nor has he done justice to his own favourite theme, for as regards the latter he has overlooked the fact that his experiment was actually tried, and, as far as it was possible, thoroughly tried. It was tried under circumstances the most favourable for its success, History of England, vol. xi. p. 225. Nineteenth Century, September 1880, p. 349. |