One tyranny begot another. Irish members, having no liberties to defend, and no country to protect, devoted themselves to the security of their property--its security and increase. All was quiet. There was no fear in Ireland of a rising for the Pretender. The Irish, true to their ancient horror of violence for religion, never made a religious war, and never desired that which was ever repugnant to the Irish spirit, temporal ascendency for a spiritual faith. Their only prayer was for freedom in worship--that same prayer which Irish Catholics had presented in the parliament of James I (1613), "indented with sorrow, signed with tears, and delivered in this house of peace and liberty with our disarmed hands." Protestants had never cause for fear in Ireland on religious grounds. In queen Mary"s persecution Protestants flying from England had taken shelter in Ireland among Irish Catholics, and not a hand was raised against them there. Bitter as were the poets against the English exterminators, no Irish curse has been found against the Protestant for his religion, even through the black time of the penal laws. The parliament, however, began a series of penal laws against Irish Catholics. They were forbidden the use of their religion, almost every means of livelihood, every right of a citizen, every family affection. Their possessions were scattered, education was denied them, when a father died his children were handed over to a Protestant guardian. "The law," said the leading judges, "does not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish Roman Catholic." They were only recognised "for repression and punishment."
Statutes framed to demoralise and debase the people, so as to make them for ever unfit for self-government, pursued the souls of the victims to the second and third generation. In this ferocious violence the law-makers were not moved by fanaticism. Their rapacity was not concerned with the religion of the Irish, but only with their property and industry. The conversion of a Catholic was not greatly desired; so long as there were Papists the planters could secure their lands, and use them as slaves, "worse than negroes." Laws which would have sounded infamous if directed openly to the seizing of property, took on a sacred character as a religious effort to suppress false doctrine. One-fiftieth part of Ireland was all that was left to Irish Catholics, utterly excluded for ever from the inheritance of their fathers. "One single foot of land there is not left us," rose their lament, "no, not what one may make his bed upon." "See all that are without a bed except the furze of the mountains, the bent of the curragh, and the bog-myrtle beneath their bodies. Under frost, under snow, under rain, under blasts of wind, without a morsel to eat but watercress, green gra.s.s, sorrel of the mountain, or clover of the hills. Och! my pity to see their n.o.bles forsaken!"
And yet, in spite of this success, the Anglo-Irish had made a bad bargain. Cut off from their fellow-countrymen, having renounced the right to have a country, the Protestant land-hunters were no more respected in England than in Ireland. The English parliament did with them as it chose. Their subjection tempted the commercial cla.s.ses. To safeguard their own profits of commerce and industry English traders made statutes to annihilate Irish compet.i.tion. They forbade carrying of cattle or dairy stuff to England, they forbade trade in soap or candles; in cloth, in gla.s.s, in linen save of the coa.r.s.est kind; the increase of corn was checked; it was proposed to stop Irish fisheries.
The wool which they might not use at home must be exported to England alone. They might not build ships. From old time Ireland had traded across the Gaulish sea: her ports had seen the first discoverers of America. But now all her great harbours to the west with its rising American trade were closed: no merchant ship crossing the Atlantic was allowed to load at an Irish port or to unload. The abundance of harbours, once so full of commerce, were now, said Swift, "of no more use to us than a beautiful prospect to a man shut up in a dungeon." In 1720 all trade was at a stand, the country bare of money, "want and misery in every face." It was unfortunate, Englishmen said, that Ireland had been by the act of G.o.d doomed to poverty--so isolated in geographical position, so lacking in industrial resources, inhabited by a people so indolent in tillage, and unfitted by their religion to work. Meanwhile they successfully pushed their own business in a country which they allowed to make nothing for itself. Their manufacturers sent over yearly two millions of their goods, more than to any other country save their American colonies, and took the raw material of Ireland, while Irish workers were driven out on the hillsides to starve. The planters" parliament looked on in barren helplessness. They had no nation behind them. They could lead no popular resistance. They had no call to public duty. And the English knew it well. Ministers heaped up humiliations; they quartered on Irish revenues all the pensioners that could not safely be proposed to a free parliament in England--the mistresses of successive kings and their children, German relations of the Hanoverians, useful politicians covered by other names, a queen of Denmark banished for misconduct, a Sardinian amba.s.sador under a false t.i.tle, a trailing host of Englishmen--pensions steadily increasing from 30,000 to over 89,000. Some 600,000 was at last yearly sent over to England for absentees, pensions, government annuities, and the like. A parliament servile and tyrannical could not even pretend to urge on the government that its measures, as a patriot said, should sometimes "diverge towards public utility." It had abandoned all power save that of increasing the sorrows of the people.
A double corruption was thus proceeding. The English parliament desired to make the Irish houses for ever unfit for self-government.
The Irish parliament was seeking to perform the same office for the Irish people under it. The old race meanwhile, three-fourths of the dwellers in Ireland, were brought under consideration of the rulers only as objects of some new rigour or severity. Their cry was unheard by an absent and indifferent "conqueror," and the only reform the country ever knew was an increase in the army that maintained the alien rulers and protected their crimes. In neither parliament had the Irish any voice. In courts where the law was administered by Protestant landlords and their agents, as magistrates, grand juries, bailiffs, lawyers, and the rest--"full of might and injustice, without a word for the Irish in the law," as an Irish poem said, who would not even write the Irish names, but scornfully cried after all of them Teig and Diarmuid--the ancient tongue of the people and their despised birth left them helpless. Once a chief justice in Tipperary conducted trials with fairness and humanity: "for about ten miles from Clonmel both sides of the road were lined with men, women, and children, who, as he pa.s.sed along, kneeled down and supplicated Heaven to bless him as their protector and guardian angel." The people poured from "this sod of misery" across the sea. In the service of France alone 450,000 Irish soldiers were reckoned to have died between 1691 and 1745.
Uncounted thousands from north and south sailed to America. Irish Catholics went there in a constant stream from 1650 till 1798. The Protestant settlers followed them in the eighteenth century.
Like the kings of England, the parliament of the English aristocracy and commercial magnates had failed to exploit Ireland to their advantage. For a hundred years (1691-1782) they ruled the Irish people with the strictest severity that human ingenuity could devise. A "strong government," purely English, was given its opportunity--prolonged, undisturbed, uncontrolled--to advance "the king"s service," the dependency of Ireland upon England, and "the comfort or security of any English in it." A mult.i.tude of statesmen put their hands to the work.
Commercial men in England inspired the policy. English clergy were sent over to fill all the higher posts of the church, and were the chief leaders of the secular government. Such a power very rarely falls to the rulers in any country. And in the end there was no advantage to any party. Some astute individuals heaped up an ign.o.ble wealth, but there was no profit to Ireland, to England, or to the Empire. The Irish people suffered a long agony unmatched, perhaps, in European history.
Few of the Protestant country gentry had established their fortunes; their subservience which debarred them from public duty, their privilege of calling in English soldiers to protect them from the results of every error or crime, had robbed them of any high intelligence in politics or science in their business of land management, and thus doubly impoverished them. England on her part had thrown into the sea from her dominion a greater wealth of talent, industry, and bravery than had ever been exiled from any country in the world: there was not a country in Europe, and not an occupation, where Irishmen were not in the first rank--as field-marshals, admirals, amba.s.sadors, prime ministers, scholars, physicians, merchants, founders of mining industries, soldiers, and labourers. In exchange for this an incompetent and inferior landed gentry was established in Ireland.
Instead of profit for the government there was plain bankruptcy--"England,"
it was said, "must now either support this kingdom, or allow her the means of supporting herself." As for the Empire, the colonies had been flooded with the men that England had wronged. Even the Protestant exiles from Ulster went to America as "Sons of St. Patrick." "To shun persecution and designed ruin" by the English government, Protestants and Catholics had gone, and their money, their arms, the fury of their wrath, were spent in organising the American War. Irishmen were at every meeting, every council, every battle. Their indignation was a white flame of revolt that consumed every fear and vacillation around it. That long, deep, and bitter experience bore down the temporisers, and sent out men trained in suffering to triumph over every adversity.
Brigadier-General Owen Sullivan, born at Limerick during the siege, was publicly thanked by Washington and by the congress. Commodore John Barry, a Wexford man, "Father of the American Navy," was Washington"s commander-in-chief of the naval forces of the States. Charles Thompson of Strabane was secretary of the Continental Congress. Eight Irishmen, pa.s.sionate organisers of the revolt, signed the Declaration of Independence. After the war an Irishman prepared the Declaration for publication from Jefferson"s rough draft; an Irishman"s son first publicly read it; an Irishman first printed and published it.
We have seen the uncontrolled rule of English kings and English Parliaments. Such was the end of their story. There was another experiment yet to be tried.
CHAPTER XI
THE RISE OF A NEW IRELAND
1691-1750
It might have seemed impossible amid such complicated tyrannies to build up a united country. But the most ferocious laws could not wholly destroy the kindly influences of Ireland, the essential needs of men, nor the charities of human nature. There grew up too the union of common suffering. Once more the people of Ireland were being "brayed together in a mortar" to compact them into a single commonwealth.
The Irish had never lost their power of absorbing new settlers in their country. The Cromwellians complained that thousands of the English who came over under Elizabeth had "become one with the Irish as well in affinity as in idolatry." Forty years later these Cromwellians planted on Irish farms suffered themselves the same change; their children could not speak a word of English and became wholly Irish in religion and feeling. Seven years after the battle of the Boyne the same influence began to turn Irish the very soldiers of William. The civilisation, the piety, the charm of Irish life told as of old. In the country places, far from the government, kindly friendships grew up between neighbours, and Protestants by some device of goodwill would hide a Catholic from some atrocious penalty, would save his arms from being confiscated, or his children from being brought up as Protestants. The gentry in general spoke Irish with the people, and common interests grew up in the land where they lived together.
The Irish had seen the fires of destruction pa.s.s over them, consuming the humanities of their law, the honour of their country, and the relics of their fathers: the cry of their lamentation, said an Italian in 1641, was more expressive than any music he had heard of the great masters of the continent. The penal days have left their traces. We may still see in hidden places of the woods some cave or rock where the people gathered in secret to celebrate ma.s.s. There remain memorials of Irishmen, cast out of their lands, who to mark their final degradation had been driven to the livelihood which the new English held in the utmost contempt--the work of their hands; their dead bodies were carried to the ruined abbeys, and proudly laid in the roofless naves and chancels, under great sculptured slabs bearing the names of once n.o.ble families, and deeply carved with the instruments of the dead man"s trade, a plough, the tools of a shoemaker or a carpenter or a mason. In a far church in Connemara by the Atlantic, a Burke raised in 1722 a sculptured tomb to the first of his race who had come to Connacht, the figure in coat of mail and conical helmet finely carved in limestone. Monuments lie heaped in Burris, looking out on the great ocean; and in all the sacred places of the Irish. By their industry and skill in the despised business of handicrafts and commerce the outlaws were fast winning most of the ready money of the country into their hands.
It would be a n.o.ble achievement, said Swift, to abolish the Irish language, which prevented "the Irish from being tamed." But Swift"s popularity with the native Irish was remarkable, and when he visited Cavan he was interested by verses of its poets and wrote an English ballad founded on the Plearaca Ui Ruairc; he helped the rector of Anna (Belturbet) in his endeavours to have prayers read in Irish in the established churches in remote places. The Protestant bishops and clergy in general, holding that their first duty was not to minister to the souls of Irishmen, but rather as agents of the government to bring Irish speech "into entire disuse," refused to learn the only language understood by the people. Clergy and officials alike knew nothing whatever of the true life of Ireland. Now and then there was a rare exception, and the respect which Philip Skelton showed for the religious convictions of a country-bred maidservant should be remembered. But in general the clergy and all other political agents opposed kindly intercourse of the two races. The fiction of complete Irish barbarism was necessary to maintain the Protestant ascendency, and in later days to defend it. The whole literature of the Irish was therefore cast aside as waste refuse. Their race is never mentioned in histories of the eighteenth century save as an indistinct and obscure ma.s.s of wretchedness, lawlessness, and ignorance, lying in impenetrable darkness, whence no voice ever arose even of protest or complaint, unless the pains of starvation now and again woke the most miserable from their torpor to some wild outrage, to be repressed by even more savage severity. So fixed and convenient did this lying doctrine prove that it became a truism never challenged. To this day all ma.n.u.scripts of the later Irish times have been rejected from purchase by public funds, to the irrevocable loss of a vast ma.s.s of Irish material. By steadily neglecting everything written in the native tongue of the country, the Protestant planters, one-fourth of the inhabitants, secured to themselves the sole place in the later history of Ireland. A false history engendered a false policy, which in the long run held no profit for the Empire, England, or Ireland.
Unsuspected by English settlers, the Irish tradition was carried across the years of captivity by these exiles in their own land.
Descendants of literary clans, historians and poets and scribes were to be found in farmhouses, working at the plough and spade. Some wrote prose accounts of the late wars, the history of their tribe, the antiquities of their province, annals of Ireland, and geography. The greatest of the poets was Daibhi O"Bruadair of Limerick, a man knowing some English and learned in Irish lore, whose poems (1650-1694) stirred men of the cabins with lessons of their time, the laying down of arms by the Irish in 1652, Sarsfield and Limerick, the breaking of the treaty, the grandsons of kings working with the spade, the poor man perfected in learning, steadfast, well proved in good sense, the chaffering insolence of the new traders, the fashion of men fettering their tongues to speak the mere ghost of rough English, or turning Protestant for ease. Learned men showed the love of their language in the making of dictionaries and grammars to preserve, now that the great schools were broken up, the learning of the great masters of Irish. Thus the poet Tadhg O"Neachtain worked from 1734 to 1749 at a dictionary. Another learned poet and lexicographer, Aodh Buidh MacCurtin, published with Conor O"Begly in Paris a grammar (1728) and a dictionary (1732); in his last edition of the grammar he prayed pardon for "confounding an example of the imperative with the potential mood," which he was caused to do "by the great bother of the brawling company that is round about me in this prison." There were still well-qualified scribes who copied the old heroic stories and circulated them freely all over Ireland. There were some who translated religious books from French and Latin into Irish. "I wish to save," said Charles O"Conor, "as many as I can of the ancient ma.n.u.scripts of Ireland from the wreck which has overwhelmed everything that once belonged to us." O"Conor was of Sligo county. His father, like other gentlemen, had been so reduced by confiscation that he had to plough with his own hands. A Franciscan sheltered in a peasant"s cottage, who knew no English, taught him Latin. He attended ma.s.s held secretly in a cave. Amid such difficulties he gained the best learning of his unhappy time. Much of the materials that O"Clery had used for his _Annals_ had perished in the great troubles, and O"Conor began again that endless labour of Irish scholars, the saving of the relics of his people"s story from final oblivion. It was the pa.s.sion of his life. He formed an Irish library, and copied with his own hand large volumes of extracts from books he could not possess. Having obtained O"Clery"s own ma.n.u.script of the _Annals_, he had this immense work copied by his own scribe; and another copy made in 1734 by Hugh O"Mulloy, an excellent writer, for his friend Dr. O"Fergus of Dublin.
He wrote for the learned, and delighted the peasants round him with the stories of their national history. It is interesting to recall that Goldsmith probably knew O"Conor, so that the best English of an Irishman, and the best learning of an Irishman at that time, were thus connected.
It was the Irish antiquarians and historians who in 1759 drew Irishmen together into "the Catholic Committee"--Charles O"Conor, Dr. Curry, and Wyse of Waterford. O"Conor by his learning preserved for them the history of their fathers. Dr. Curry, of a Cavan family whose estates had been swept from them in 1641 and 1691, had studied as a physician in France, and was eminent in Dublin though shut out from every post; he was the first to use his research and literary powers to bring truth out of falsehood in the later Irish history, and to justify the Irish against the lying accusations concerning the rising of 1641.
These learned patriots combined in a movement to win for the Irish some recognition before the law and some rights of citizens in their own land.
Countless poets, meanwhile, poured out in verse the infinite sorrow of the Gaels, recalling the days when their land was filled with poet-schools and festivals, and the high hospitality of great Irishmen. If a song of hope arose that the race should come to their own again, the voice of Irish charity was not wanting--"Having the fear of G.o.d, be ye full of alms-giving and friendliness, and forgetting nothing do ye according to the commandments, shun ye drunkenness and oaths and cursing, and do not say till death "G.o.d d.a.m.n" from your mouths." Riotous laughter broke out in some; they were all, in fact, professional wits--chief among them Eoghan Ruadh O"Sullivan from Kerry, who died in 1784; a working man who had laboured with plough and spade, and first came into note for helping his employer"s son, fresh from a French college, with an explanation of a Greek pa.s.sage. Jacobite poems told of the Lady Erin as a beautiful woman flying from the insults of foreign suitors in search of her real mate--poems of fancy, for the Stuarts had lost all hold on Ireland. The spirit of the north rang out in a mult.i.tude of bards, whose works perished in a century of persecution and destruction.
Among exiles in Connacht ma.n.u.scripts perished, but old tradition lived on the lips of the peasants, who recited in their cabins the love-songs and religious poems of long centuries past. The people in the bareness of their poverty were nourished with a literature full of wit, imagination, feeling, and dignity. In the poorest hovels there were men skilled in a fine recitation. Their common language showed the literary influence, and Irish peasants even in our own day have used a vocabulary of some five thousand words, as against about eight hundred words used by peasants in England. Even the village dancing at the cross-roads preserved a fine and skilled tradition.
Families, too, still tried to have "a scholar" in their house, for the old learning"s sake. Children shut out from all means of education might be seen learning their letters by copying with chalk the inscriptions on their fathers" tombstones. There were few candles, and the scholar read his books by a cabin fire in the light given by throwing upon it twigs and dried furze. Ma.n.u.scripts were carefully treasured, and in days when it was death or ruin to be found with an Irish book they were buried in the ground or hidden in the walls. In remote places schools were maintained out of the dest.i.tution of the poor; like that one which was kept up for over a hundred years in county Waterford, where the people of the surrounding districts supported "poor scholars" free of charge. There were some in Kerry, some in Clare, where a very remarkable group of poets sprang up. From all parts of Ireland students begged their way to "the schools of Munster." Thus Greek and Latin still found their way into the labourer"s cottage. In county Cork, John Clairech O"Donnell, in remembrance of the ancient a.s.semblies of the bards of all Ireland, gathered to his house poets and learned men to recite and contend as in the old days. Famous as a poet, he wrote part of a history of Ireland, and projected a translation of Homer into Irish. But he worked in peril, flying for his life more than once before the bard-hunters; in his denunciations the English oppressor stands before us--plentiful his costly living in the high-gabled lighted-up mansion of the Irish Brian, but tight-closed his door, and his churlishness shut up inside with him, there in an opening between two mountains, until famine clove to the people and bowed them to his will; his gate he never opened to the moan of the starving, "and oh! may heaven of the saints be a red wilderness for James Dawson!"
The enthusiasm of the Irish touched some of the planters. A hereditary chronicler of the O"Briens who published in 1717 a vindication of the Antiquities of Ireland got two hundred and thirty-eight subscribers, divided about equally between English and Gaelic names. Wandering poets sang, as Irish poets had done nine hundred years before, even in the houses of the strangers, and found in some of them a kindly friend. O"Carolan, the harper and singer, was beloved by both races. A slight inequality in a village field in Meath still after a hundred and fifty years recalls to Irish peasants the site of the house where he was born, and at his death English and Irish, Protestant and Catholic, gathered in an encampment of tents to do honour to his name.
The magic of Irish music seems even to have stirred in the landlords"
parliament some dim sense of a national boast. An English n.o.bleman coming to the parliament with a Welsh harper claimed that in all Ireland no such music could be heard. Mr. Jones of Leitrim took up the challenge for an Irishman of his county who "had never worn linen or woollen." The Commons begged to have the trial in their House before business began, and all a.s.sembled to greet the Leitrim champion.
O"Duibhgeanain was of an old literary clan: one of them had shared in making the _Annals of the Four Masters_; he himself was not only a fine harper, but an excellent Greek and Latin scholar. He came, tall and handsome, looking very n.o.ble in his ancient garb made of beaten rushes, with a cloak or plaid of the same stuff, and a high conical cap of the same adorned with many ta.s.sels. And the House of Commons gave him their verdict.
James Murphy, a poor bricklayer of Cork, who became an architect and studied Arabian antiquities in Portugal and Spain, gives the lament of Irish scholars. "You accuse their pastors with illiterature, whilst you adopt the most cruel means of making them ignorant; and their peasantry with untractableness, whilst you deprive them of the means of civilisation. But that is not all; you have deprived them at once of their religion, their liberty, their oak, and their harp, and left them to deplore their fate, not in the strains of their ancestors, but in the sighs of oppression." To the great landlords the Act of 1691 which had given them wealth was the dawn of Irish civilisation.
Oblivion might cover all the rest, all that was not theirs. They lived in a land some few years old, not more than a man"s age might cover.
By degrees, however, dwellers in Ireland were forced into some concern for its fortunes. Swift showed to the Protestants the wrongs they endured and the liberties which should be theirs, and flung his scorn on the shameful system of their slavery and their tyranny (1724). Lord Molesworth urged (1723) freedom of religion, schools of husbandry, relief of the poor from their intolerable burdens, the making parliament into a really representative body. Bishop Berkeley wrote his famous _Querist_--the most searching study of the people"s grief and its remedies.
Gradually the people of Ireland were being drawn together. All cla.s.ses suffered under the laws to abolish Irish trade and industry. Human charities were strong in men of both sides, and in the country there was a growing movement to unite the more liberal of the landowners, the Dissenters of the north, and the Catholics, in a common citizenship. It had proved impossible to carry out fully the penal code. No life could have gone on under its monstrous terms. There were not Protestants enough to carry on all the business of the country and some "Papists" had to be taken at least into the humbler forms of official work. Friendly acts between neighbours diminished persecution.
"Let the legislature befriend us now, and we are theirs forever," was the cry of the Munster peasantry, organised under O"Driscoll, to the Protestant parliament in 1786.
Such a movement alarmed the government extremely. If, they said, religious distinctions were abolished, the Protestants would find themselves secure of their position without British protection, and might they not then form a government more to the taste and wishes of the people--in fact, might not a nation begin again to live in Ireland.
The whole energy of the government was therefore called out to avert the rise of a united Irish People.
CHAPTER XII
AN IRISH PARLIAMENT
1750-1800
The movement of conciliation of its peoples that was shaping a new Ireland, silent and unrecorded as it was, can only be understood by the astonishing history of the next fifty years, when the spirit of a nation rose again triumphant, and lesser pa.s.sions fell before the love of country.
The Protestant gentry, who alone had free entry into public life, were of necessity the chief actors in the recorded story. But in the awakening country they had to reckon with a rising power in the Catholic Irish. Dr. Lucas, who in 1741 had begun to stir for reform and freedom, had stirred not only the English settlers but the native Irish. Idolised by the Irish people, he raised in his _Citizens"
Journal_ a new national protest. The pamphlet war which followed--where men argued not only on free trade and government, but on Ireland itself, on its old and new races, on its Irish barbarism, said some, its Irish civilisation, said others--spread the idea of a common history of Ireland in which all its inhabitants were concerned.
In parliament too, though Catholics were shut out, yet men of old Irish race were to be found--men of Catholic families who had accepted Protestantism as a means of entering public life, chiefly by way of the law. They had not, save very rarely, put off their patriotic ardour with their old religion; of the middle cla.s.s, they were braver in their outlook than the small and disheartened Catholic aristocracy.
If their numbers were few their ability was great, and behind them lay that vast ma.s.s of their own people whose blood they shared.
It was an Irishman who first roused the House of Commons to remember that they had a country of their own and an "Irish interest"--Antony Malone. This astonishing orator and parliamentarian invented a patriotic opposition (1753). A great sea in a "storm" men said of him.
Terror was immediately excited at his Irish origin and his national feeling. Dublin Castle feared that he might mean emanc.i.p.ation from the English legislature, and in truth the const.i.tutional dependency upon England was the object upon which Malone"s eye was constantly fixed.
He raised again the protest of Molyneux for a free parliament and const.i.tution. He stirred "the whole nation" for "the last struggle for Ireland." They and their children would be slaves, he said, if they yielded to the claim of the government that the English privy council could alter the money bills sent over by the Irish parliament, or that the king had the right to apply at his will the surplus funds in the treasury.
Malone was defeated, but the battle had begun which in thirty years was to give to Ireland her first hopes of freedom. A fresh current of thought poured through the House--free trade, free religion, a Habeas Corpus Act, fewer pensions for Englishmen, a share in law and government for Irishmen, security for judges, and a parliament elected every seven years. Successors of Malone appeared in the House of Commons in 1761--more lawyers, men said, than any one living could remember, or "than appears in any history in this or any other kingdom upon earth." They depended, not on confiscation, but on their own abilities; they owed nothing to government, which gave all the great posts of the bar to Englishmen. Some freedom of soul was theirs, and manhood for the long struggle. In 1765 the issue was clearly set. The English House of Commons which had pa.s.sed the Stamp Act for the American colonies, argued that it had the right to tax Ireland without her consent; and English lawyers laid down the absolute power of parliament to bind Ireland by its laws. In Ireland Lord Charlemont and some other peers declared that Ireland was a distinct kingdom, with its own legislature and executive under the king.
In that same year the patriots demanded that elections should be held every seven years--the first step in Ireland towards a true representation, and the first blow to the dominion of an aristocracy.
The English government dealt its counter-stroke. The viceroy was ordered to reside in Dublin, and by making himself the source of all favours, the giver of all gratifications, to concentrate political influence in the English Crown. A system of bribery began beyond all previous dreams; peerages were made by the score; and the first national debt of nearly two millions created in less than thirty years. The landowners who controlled the seats in the Commons were reminded that "they held by Great Britain everything most dear to them, their religion, their pre-eminence, their property, their political power"; that "confiscation is their common t.i.tle." "The king"s business," as the government understood it, lay in "procuring the supplies which the English minister thought fit to ask, and preventing the parliament from examining into the account of previous years."
Meanwhile misery deepened. In 1778 thirty thousand Irishmen were seeking their living on the continent, besides the vast numbers flying to America. "The wretches that remained had scarcely the appearance of human creatures." English exports to Ireland sank by half-a-million, and England instead of receiving money had to send 50,000 for the payment of troops there. Other dangers had arisen. George Washington was made commander-in-chief of the forces for the American war in 1775, and in 1778 France recognised American independence. The sh.o.r.es of Ireland lay open to attack: the country was drained of troops.
Bands of volunteers were formed for its protection, Protestant troops led by landlords and gentry. In a year 40,000 volunteers were enrolled (1779). Ireland was no longer unarmed. What was even more important, she was no longer unrepresented. A packed parliament that had obscured the true desires of the country was silenced before the voice of the people. In the sense of a common duty, landlord and tenant, Protestant and Catholic, were joined; the spirit of tolerance and nationality that had been spreading through the country was openly manifested.
In those times of hope and terror men"s minds on both sides moved quickly. The collapse of the English system was rapid; the government saw the failure of their army plans with the refusal of the Irish to give any more military grants; the failure of their gains from the Irish treasury in the near bankruptcy of the Irish state, with the burden of its upkeep thrown on England; the failure of the prodigious corruption and buying of the souls of men before the new spirit that swept through the island, the spirit of a nation. "England has sown her laws in dragons" teeth, and they have sprung up in armed men,"
cried Hussey Burgh, a worthy Irish successor of Malone in the House of Commons. "It is no longer the parliament of Ireland that is to be managed or attended to," wrote the lord-lieutenant. "It is the whole of this country." Above all, the war with the colonies brought home to them Grattan"s prophecy--"what you trample on in Europe will sting you in America."