Home rule -- Ireland; Ireland -- Economic conditions; Land tenure -- Ireland
In Elizabeth's time the menace was from Spain; Spanish forces twice
succeeded in effecting a landing on the Irish coast, and were welcomed
by the inhabitants. Spain was then the most powerful enemy of England
and of civil and religious liberty all the world over; Elizabeth was
declared by the Pope to have forfeited the crown of England, and if the
Armada had been successful at sea, the Spanish army in England would
have found enthusiastic supporters in Ireland. Later on it was in
Ireland, and by the aid of subsidies from an Irish Parliament, that
Strafford raised 10,000 men to invade Scotland and England in support of
Charles I. against his Parliament, and, incidentally, to drive the
Scottish settlers out of Ulster. As the Articles of Impeachment put it,
his object in raising the Irish army was "for the ruin and destruction
of England and of his Majesty's subjects, and altering and subverting
the fundamental laws and established Government of this Kingdom."
Strafford fell, but the insurrection and massacre of 1641 were the
natural result of his intrigues with the Irish Parliament and the Irish
chiefs. It was under the impression of this manifest danger that
Cromwell--a century and a half before his time--abolished the Dublin
Parliament and summoned Irish representatives to the first United
Parliament at Westminster.
As the power of Spain declined, France came to be the chief menace to
England and to the peace of Europe. Again Ireland instinctively allied
herself with the enemy. Tyrconnel now played the part of Strafford, and
with the aid of French troops and French subsidies, and a sympathetic
Irish Parliament, endeavoured to destroy the Ulster Plantation, and make
Ireland a jumping-off place for the invasion of England. The Irish
Parliament, in the meantime, did its part by confiscating the estates of
the settlers, driving out the Protestant clergy, and outlawing English
sympathisers by name in "the hugest Bill of Attainder which the world
has seen."[3] It was the successful defence of Derry and Enniskillen by
the Scotch and English colonists that saved Ireland and gave King
William and his troops the foothold that enabled them to save England,
too, in the Irish campaign of the following year.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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