The Old Irish World

After that battle came other triumphs; the fleet of the kings of Ailech that carried off plunder and booty from the Hebrides: Brian Boru’s expedition of the Norsemen of Dublin, Waterford, Wexford, and of the men of Munster, and of almost all of the men of Erin such of them as were fit to go to sea, and they levied tribute from Saxons and Britons as far as the Clyde and Argyle. The spirit of independence rose high, and victorious warriors established again the rule of the Irish in their own land.

But the Danes had no mind to let Ireland and her harbours and her sea routes fall out of their hands. The great conflict of the two peoples came about sixty years after the victory of Cellachan.

The Danes had now held command of the sea for two hundred years. About 1000 a. d., in the glory of success, their kings, like later monarchs in Europe, began to think of their “Imperial Destiny.” It seemed time to perfect the whole business and round off the borders of their State. So Swein Forkbeard of Denmark proposed to create a Scandinavian Empire which should extend from the Slavic shores of the Baltic to the rim of the Atlantic, with the North Sea as a lake of this wide dominion. Swein overran England, and his son Cnut ruled from the Baltic to the Irish Channel, lord of Denmark, Norway, England, and the Danes of Dublin (for he minted coins even there), with London as the chief city of the new Danish Empire. The imperial plan was not yet complete. Danish rule was to extend to the outermost land on the Atlantic. But Ireland blocked the way. The Ireland of King Brian Boru – of men who lived (as they said) “on the ridge of the world,” men bred in the free air of the plains and the mountains and the sea – left the Scandinavian Empire with a ragged edge on the line of the Atlantic commerce. In the spring of 1014 the Danish army gathered in the Bay of Dublin to straighten out the boundaries of the Empire on the western Ocean. There met a mighty host under the “Black Raven” of the pagans, woven with heathen spells; “when the wind blew out the banner it was as though the Raven flapped his wings for flight.” In that Imperial army there were warriors “from all the west of Europe,” from Iceland, the Orkneys, the Baltic Islands, from Norway a thousand men in ringed armour, from Northumbria two thousand pagans, “not a villain of them who had not polished armour of iron or brass encasing their bodies from head to foot.” On the night before the battle Woden himself, the old god of war, rode up through the dusk men said, on a dapple-grey horse, halbert in hand, to take counsel with his champions.

But Woden’s last fight was come. The full tide of the morning carried the pagan host over the level sands to the landing at Clontarf. The army of King Brian Boru lay before them. From sunrise to sunset on Good Friday that desperate battle raged, the hair of the warriors flying in the wind, says the old chronicler, as thick as the sheaves floating in a field of oats. The Scandinavian scheme of a Northern Empire was shattered on that day, when with the evening flood-tide the remnant of the Danish host put out to sea. The work which had been begun by the fleet of Cellachan in Dundalk harbour sixty-four years before, was completed by Brian Boru where the Liffey opens into the Bay of Dublin. For a hundred, and fifty years to come Ireland kept its independence. England was once again, as in the time of the Roman dominion, made part of a continental empire. Ireland, as in the days of Rome, still lay outside the new imperial system.

Clontarf marked the passing of an old age, the beginning of a new. We may see the advent of the new men in the names of adventurers that landed with the Danes on that low shore at Clontarf – the first great drops of the coming storm. There were lords from Normandy, Eoghan Barun or John the Baron, and Richard, with another, perhaps Robert of Melun. There was Goistilin Gall, a Frenchman from Gaul. There was somewhere about that time Walter the Englishman, a leader of mercenaries from England. In such names we see the heralds of the approaching change. A revolution in the fortunes of the world had in fact opened. Scandinavian pre-eminence on the sea was even now passing away, as that of the Frisians had passed away two hundred years before. New lords of commerce seized the traffic of sea and land when the Normans, “citizens of the world,” carried their arms and their cunning from the Moray Firth to the Straits of Messina, from the Seine to the Euphrates. The Teutonic peoples that now girded the North Sea – Normans, Germans of the Hanseatic League, English – were to supersede Danes and Norwegians. Trade moreover had once more spread over the high roads of Europe, as in the days of the Roman Empire, and the peoples of the south, Italians and Gauls, had taken up again their ancient commerce.

In the new commerce as in the old Ireland was to take her full part. The island lay in the moving life that stirred the great seas, washed by that whirlpool of activity. From every shore she saw the sails of busy traffickers bearing the commerce of the known world, and carrying too its thought and art. The people had not lost their wit. They shared in the enterprise and the profit of the new commerce. The great routes were open, from Scandinavia to Gaul, and down the Irish Channel. The Danish traffic across England was not forgotten, and as the trade of the German coasts developed, busier lines of commerce were opened from the Irish harbours of the south eastward to the North Sea and the Baltic.

It is an unfinished tale I tell. But it may remind us of one gift of Nature to Ireland – the freedom of Europe by the sea. We have seen the dim figures of the flint-men, the Bronze-men, the first Gaels, reaching out hands to Scandinavia and to the Mediterranean lands. We have seen Ireland on the borders of the Roman Empire, free and unconquered, busy in trade, busier still in learning, carrying across the Gaulish Sea treasures of classical knowledge. Again Ireland appeared when the barbarians had spread over Europe, still unconquered, sending back across the Ocean the learning she had stored up, the free distributor on the Continent of the classics and science and Christian teaching. We have seen the island again on the fringe of the Scandinavian Empire, even now unconquered, and still in the mid-stream of European traffic. When a new revolution came, and trade swelled under the Normans, every Irish port was full. Irishmen sailed every sea. Their fabrics were sold in every country as far as Russia and Naples. Through the long centuries they never lost the habit of the sea and of Europe. In the middle ages Spanish coin was almost the chief currency in Ireland, so great was the Irish trade with Spain; and in the eighteenth century the country was still full of Spanish, Portuguese, and French money in daily use – the moydore, the doubloon, the pistole, the Louis d’or, the new Portuguese gold coin. So much so that in the Peninsular war Ireland was ransacked for foreign coins to send to the army in Spain and Portugal.

But that story is over. Ireland at last was swept within the orbit of an Empire – not as a free member of a federation, but in full subjection, with every advantage that complete military and police control could afford. Natural geography gave place to political geography, and the way of the Empire ruled out the way of the sea. “I should not presume,” wrote Richard Cox, Esquire, Recorder of Kinsale, in dedicating to their Majesties William and Mary a History of Ireland from the Conquest thereof, which he printed at St. Paul’s Churchyard in 1689. “I should not presume to lay this treatise at your Royal feet, but that it concerns a noble Kingdom, which is one of the most considerable branches of your mighty Empire.

“It is of great Advantage to it, that it is a Subordinate Kingdom of the Crown of England; for it is from that Royal Fountain that the Streams of Justice, Peace, Civility, Riches and all other Improvements have been derived to it; so that the Irish are (as Campion says) beholding to God for being conquered.

“And yet Ireland has been so blind in this Great Point of its true Interest, that the Natives have managed almost a continual war with the English ever since the first Conquest thereof; so that it has cost your Royal Predecessors an unspeakable mass of Blood and Treasure to preserve it in true Obedience.

“But no cost can be too great where the Prize is of such value; and whoever considers the Situation, Ports, Plenty, and other Advantages of Ireland will confess, that it must be retained at what rate soever; because if it should come into an Enemy’s Hands, England would find it impossible to flourish; and perhaps difficult to subsist without it.

“To demonstrate this assertion, it is enough to say that Ireland lies in the Line of Trade, and that all the English vessels that sail to the East, West and South, must, as it were, run the gauntlet between the Harbours of Brest and Baltimore: and I might add that the Irish Wool, being transported, would soon ruine the English clothing Manufacture.

“Hence it is that all Your Majesties Predecessors have kept close to this Fundamental Maxim, of retaining Ireland inseperably united to the Crown of England.”

The house of Hanover ended what the Tudors had begun. Ireland became an island beyond an island. But the great deep still gives to the country an abiding unity. In ancient days the Irish had a noble figure by which they proclaimed the oneness of the land within its Ocean bounds. The three waves of Erin they said, smote upon the shore with a foreboding roar when danger threatened the island. One wave called to Munster at an inlet of Cork; two of them sounded in Ulster, at the mouth of the Bann and in the bay of Dundrum. The Ocean bore the same fate to Munster and to Ulster. And in fact so long as the sea surrounds this island, so long all its peoples must be linked in a common fortune. The deep that encompasses Ireland has made this country one, gathering together into the Irish family all races that have entered within its circuit. By the might of that encircling Ocean the men of Ireland are bound together in one inheritance, unchanging amid ceaseless change.

CHAPTER III

A GREAT IRISH LADY

WE are often told that the civilization of a people is marked by the place of its women: a rule by which the Irish stand high. In the fifteenth century, as at all times, their annals record many noble ladies “distinguished for knowledge, hospitality, good sense and piety”; “humane and charitable”; “a nurse to all guests and strangers, and to all the learned men in Ireland.” Of these Margaret, daughter of O’Carroll lord of Ely, wife of Calvagh O’Connor Faly lord of Offaly (lands which lie across the boundaries of the modern King’s and Queen’s Counties and Kildare), was the most illustrious. She came of a learned race. The O’Carrolls, in the course of little more than a century (1253-1373), held the See of Cashel for sixty years; and O’Carroll had been Archbishop of Tuam; and Margaret’s father, lord of Ely, was “the general patron of all the learned men of Ireland.” “This Teige was deservedly a man of greate accompt and fame with the professors of Poetrye and Musicke of Ireland and Scotland, for his liberality extended towards them, and every of them in generalle.” So highly was he esteemed among the chiefs that he was forbidden by the Irish captains of east Munster to carry out his wish of resigning his lordship of Ely (1396). He made a pilgrimage, however, that year to the threshold of the apostles, with his companions O’Brien, Gerald, and Thomas Calvagh MacMurchadh of the royal race of Leinster; and coming back through England visited Richard ii. at Westminster, who received him graciously, and being then about to cross to Calais for his marriage with Isabella of France, and the conclusion of a treaty of peace with the French king, invited O’Carroll to accompany him in his retinue. Ten years later he was slain by the English, the boy-prince Thomas of Lancaster, son of Henry iv., being then Viceroy in Ireland, and under him the Lord Deputy Scrope. The English army fell on him unawares at Callan; for whose death indeed the sun stood still, said their account, to light the Deputy and the fierce Prior of Kilmainham in the evening surprise and the six miles’ ride of slaughter, where eight hundred, or some said three thousand, of his people fell. Some time after the massacre Margaret married the most successful leader in his day of the Irish, Calvagh O’Connor Faly, son of Murchadh, the “Lord of Offaly, of the cattle-abounding land,” descended from Conchobar of the race of Cathair Mór, King of Leinster. Brought up amid the perils and sorrows of constant war, her fortunes were now transferred to a country where the conflict with the English knew no interlude. To understand her story it is necessary to show very briefly the situation of Offaly.

The land of the O’Connors adjoined that of the O’Carrolls under the Slieve Bloom mountains. The old Offaly, from Sliabh-Bladhma, now Slieve Bloom, to the hill of Alenn, and from Sliabh-Cualann in Wicklow to the Great Heath, is a plain as level as a tranquil sea. On its western side a long low ridge north of Slieve Bloom had given shelter to the two St. Sinchealls; a church had risen by the holy well; and the fair-town of Killeigh on “the field of the long ridge,” profiting by the traffic from the Shannon to the Liffey. There Murchadh O’Connor founded for the Franciscans a monastery (1393) said to be the third in size and importance of the monasteries of Ireland, the burial place of his race. In what was once the Abbey churchyard, tombstones of the O’Doynes, deeply sculptured with their armorial bearings, recall a great family of Offaly. On the eastern side of Offaly Norman settlers had pushed back the boundary from the Dublin hills to Rathangan, where a strong fort and church stood at the head of the plain through which the Barrow and the Slaney flowed south to Waterford and Wexford; and on that important trade route Thomas O’Connor Faly had founded a Franciscan monastery (1302), under the walls of Hugh de Lacy’s fort at Castledermot. To the north lay Meath – “cemetery of the valourous Gael” – whose colonists had incessant war with Offaly. It was a land over which the earliest Norman settlers had swept from de Lacy’s fort of Castledermot to that of Durrow; a land which was again the chief centre of struggle when the Irish attack drove the English power back to the plains of Meath, and which in the renewed wars of the English under the Tudors became the scene of ferocious reprisals and calculated obliteration of its race and name. From Calvagh’s first battle all his fighting was on the plains of Meath. Once he made a raid in the land of the O’Mores; and when his sons grew up they had disputes with Irish neighbours. But the only war of Calvagh from 1385 to 1458 was a war against the English.

The family were bitter Irreconcilables; since the days of an older Calvagh, the “Great Rebel,” who a hundred years before (1307), had been invited with thirty of the Offaly chiefs to dine at Castle-Carberry on Trinity Sunday with “the treacherous baron,” Sir Pierce Bermingham, the “Hunter of the Irish”; and were deceitfully murdered, the Great Rebel and all, as they rose from table. This new Calvagh fought the invaders for over sixty years, from youth to old age, with scarcely a pause – a man of humour as well as courage. Once when the English troops with their Irish followers had ridden to the very borders of Killeigh (1406) – the religious and business centre of Offaly – Calvagh with half a dozen horsemen came upon a body of plundering kerns, one carrying off on his back a great cauldron which Calvagh had lent his friend MacMaoilcorra for brewing beer. “There is your caldron with the kerns,” cried MacMaoilcorra helplessly, “take it and discharge me of my loan.” “I accept of it where it is,” mocked Calvagh, and flung “the shot of a stone” which hit the cauldron straight, at the great noise and report whereof the plunderers cast away their spoil and fled in consternation. In the great rout of the English that day the Irish won back from them the chiefest relic of Connacht, the cap or mitre of S. Patrick stolen from Elphin.

In Calvagh’s days the Irish revival had pushed back the rule of Dublin Castle to a strip of coast land some twenty miles by thirty. There flew a tale of panic (1385) that the Irish “were confederate with Spain,” and that “at this next season, as is likely, there will be made a conquest of the greater part of the land.” Revenue was falling, English colonists were flying across the water, and prayers for help were sent over to the English king. The king’s favourite De Vere, appointed Marquis of Dublin and Duke of Ireland (1386), got no farther than Wales, and English pretentions over the island under a confused series of shifting rulers became the mock of Europe. Stung by the taunt that he who desired to be made head of the Holy Roman Empire could not even subdue Ireland, Richard ii. made his fantastic journey across the Irish Channel (1394), carrying a wardrobe of untold cost in which one jewelled coat alone was worth thirty thousand marks, and with a following of four thousand squires and thirty thousand archers, a greater army, some said, than Edward iii. commanded at Crecy. Thus Calvagh had the rare opportunity of seeing the arrival in Ireland of the only king of England who landed there in the five hundred years between the coming of Henry ii. and John (1171 and 1210), and that of James ii. (1689) – all four driven over by personal necessities, not by any concern whatever for the Irish people or their well-being. The English troops were flung back from the O’Connor land and from Ely of the O’Carrolls, with many men slain and many horses captured, and fresh supplies were sent for from England. But Richard, unlike any other king that visited Ireland, was moved by the spirit of the country. The temper he had shown thirteen years before in the Peasant Revolt – “I am your King and Lord, good people; what will ye?” – manifested itself again amid the troubles of his Irish lordship. To the Irish people he showed the first signs of sympathy and respect. Laying aside the hostile banners of England, he substituted the golden cross and silver birds of his patron saint, Edward the Confessor – the only King of England reported to have any connection with an Irish house, if as some historians say (on what evidence I do not know) his Queen’s sister Driella was wife of O’Brien, king of Munster. “To Us and our Council,” he wrote to England, “it appears that the Irish rebels have rebelled in consequence of the injustice and grievances practised towards them, for which they have been afforded no redress.” Peace was made with “his rebel MacMorrough”; and treaties signed with the chiefs, seventy-five of them, were sent to England in two hampers, while Richard returned to Westminster leaving Roger Mortimer, heir to the throne, as Viceroy. The next year, as we have seen, he received O’Carroll of Ely at his palace with especial honour.

With his disappearance the policy of peace and reform came to an end. The meaning of Mortimer’s rule was clear to the Irish. He claimed by inheritance of Lionel Duke of Clarence, son of Edward III., to be Earl of Ulster, Lord of Connacht, Trim, Leix, and Ossory, thus threatening the Ulster chiefs with a war of conquest, and the lord of Offaly and the middle Irish with the complete encircling of their lands, their isolation and destruction. Edmund Mortimer, son-in-law of Clarence, had already appeared as Viceroy (1380-1381), carrying with him the sword adorned with gold “which had belonged to the good king Edward” the Confessor, and his great bed of black satin embroidered with the arms of de Mortimer and Ulster: he sent much spoil and cattle to England, and died in the midst of his warfare. His son Roger was appointed Viceroy (1382-1383) a boy of ten; and orders were sent to arrest all those who by land or water should send or sell horses, salt, armour, iron, gold, silver, corn, or other provisions, to any of the Irish. Once more this same Roger Mortimer was Viceroy in 1395, riding to war for his inheritance in the dress and arms of an Irish chief. Calvagh captured the earl of Kildare who was held to ransom by his father; and the Carlow men routed and slew the young Mortimer himself (1398). On which Richard sent over his half-brother, the Duke of Surrey (1398), and already forgetful of his Irish compacts of three years before, granted his favourite lands which by treaty belonged to MacMurchadh. When war naturally followed the king proposed to subdue the Irish by a new visit (1399), this time forsaking the tradition of the Confessor for that of Henry ii., and bearing the royal regalia of England and the miraculous consecrated oil of St. Thomas of Canterbury used at coronations. Chanting a last collect with the canons of St. George he set sail for Waterford, bringing with him the Duke of Lancaster (afterwards Henry v.) a boy of twelve years, to take his first lesson in war. The army was set to fell MacMurchadh’s woods; a space was cleared, villages and houses set on fire, and in that scene Richard made the young Henry knight, even while the Duke of Lancaster was landing in Yorkshire to seize the English crown. Before July closed the betrayed king had hurried back to England, there to meet his death of horror.

So ended the royal dream of chivalry in Ireland, as it had closed before in England. Whatever imaginative feeling for the Irish, whatever memories of their old tradition or visions of a reconciliation of the two civilizations, had stirred Richard ii., these disappeared under the Lancastrian kings. Stern conquest was their creed, as soon as their wars in England, Wales, Scotland, and France would allow it.

The comings and goings of English governors in Ireland during the French wars read like the wanderings of the Wiking raiders, now on the Irish side of the sea, now on the French, as the chances of campaign might open the best prospects of adventure, plunder and ransom. Viceroys, deputies, lords justices, of a summer or two, each with his twelve months’ policy of extortion, slaughter, and vain treaties, headed brief marches and skirmishes, campaigned on the plan that there was never a battle to be opened on a Monday or after noonday, hunted or purchased prisoners not for their defeat but for their ransom, and in succession sailed away for the better ventures of the French war. “The most cause of destruction,” the English colonists declared to the king in 1435, arose because “during thirty years past the Lieutenants and other Governors did not come here but for a sudden journey or a hosting.” As their power shrank their salaries and armies were increased. Governors no longer pretended to control the war, but returning to the lawless practice of the first adventurers, ordered any man who could to go out and fight however and wherever he pleased; and the lords about Dublin, freed from all restraints of law, kept troops of horse and foot against “Irish enemies,” “English rebels,” and their own personal foes.

The Lieutenant sent by Henry iv. to rule Ireland (1401) was his son Thomas of Lancaster twelve years old; and the first in a series of changing deputies Sir Stephen Scrope, an old soldier trained in French and Flemish wars, and as ready to serve Henry as Richard. He it was who slew O’Carroll, Richard’s friend; and against him Murchadh and Calvagh O’Connor warred victoriously in Meath (1406, 1408). The prior of Kilmainham being deputy (who had also been on that ride of death when the sun stood still), the O’Connors captured the sheriff of Meath (1411) and took a great price for his ransom. The three months’ rule of Sir John Stanley (1413) first governor of Henry V. was ended by his death after the curse of the chief bard Niall O’Higgin whom he had plundered at Usnach – “the second poetical miracle” of this famous bard. In vain his successor Archbishop Cranley, whose eighty years alone held him back from battle, gathered his clergy at Castledermot to pray for English victory: O’Connor and MacGeoghagan routed the English, and held to ransom prisoners for two thousand six hundred marks besides other fines (1414). Sir John Talbot Lord Furnival followed (1414), hovering between Ireland, England, and France – to the English “an ancient fox and politique captain,” to the French “a very scourge and daily terror,” to the Irish “a son of curses for his venom and a devil for his evil.” He called out the troops to active war, slew many rebels, and gave protection to neither saint nor sanctuary; it was his policy to “oblige one Irish enemy to serve upon the other,” by forcing defeated chiefs to swear that they would fight under him against their countrymen. Still the O’Connors raided Meath for arms, horses, and prisoners (1417). Calvagh was once treacherously captured by a Meath lord, from whom Talbot in hope of a ransom purchased him; but the prisoner escaped that same night. To Talbot succeeded (1420) James the White Earl of Ormond, back from the French wars. Precepts drawn up to guide his conduct declared that as “the Irish are false by kind, it were expedient and a charity to execute upon them wilful and malicious transgressors the king’s laws somewhat sharply.” He too had been at the death of O’Carroll, and once again, it was said, the sun miraculously stood still for three hours, and no pit or bog annoyed horse or man on his part, while he slaughtered the Irish on “the red moor of Athy.” Twice every week the clergy of Dublin went in solemn procession praying for his good success against those disordered persons which now in every quarter of Ireland had degenerated to their old trade of life, and repined at the English. The colonists petitioned Henry v. that he would induce the Pope to proclaim a holy crusade against the Irish, “in perpetual destruction of those enemies.” It was in the bitterness of this exasperated conflict that Murchadh O’Connor Faly won a last victory (1421), before he laid down arms and entered his monastery of Killeigh to die – “Murchadh of the defeats.”