Irish History and the Irish QuestionSmith, Goldwin
History
Irish History and the Irish Question
Smith, Goldwin
Ireland -- Politics and government; Irish question
Unhappily the ecclesiastical polity of England, with its tests and its
recusancy law, compelling attendance at the services of the State Church,
was at the same time thrust upon people to whom it was in itself and in
its associations abhorrent. Under Elizabeth there had been a politic
laxity. Now fines for recusancy are exacted. Intolerance of Catholic
dissent from the royal religion could not fail to be increased by the
Gunpowder Plot.
James I., with all his pedantry, his absurdities, and his stuffed
breeches, was not without something of the largeness of mind which culture
generally imparts. He could understand Bacon. His Irish policy, evidently
inspired by Bacon, was colonization, plantation as it then was called. For
this there was ample room on the forfeited lands of Tyrone and other
attainted chiefs, so far as legal ownership in the contemplation of
English law was concerned. But the attainders of the chiefs had not
cleared the lands of the members of their septs, in whose minds tribal
ownership was rooted. This was the weak point of the transplantation
policy, as in the sequel tragically appeared. Extensive grants, however,
were made to a colony formed by English and Scottish settlers, undertakers
as they were called. Of Scottish settlers there had before been not a few.
The city of London invested largely in the enterprise. Thus was formed in
Ulster, and in Ulster has continued to exist to the present time, a sort
of Protestant pale. Bacon's philosophic eye ranges complacently over the
prospect of a people of barbarous manners "brought to give over and
discontinue their customs of revenge and blood and of dissolute life and
of theft and rapine, and to give ear to the wisdom of laws and
governments; whereupon immediately followeth the cutting of stones for
building and habitation, and of trees for the seats of houses, orchards,
enclosures, and the like." Beyond doubt this settlement was an improvement
in material respects. Nor, though the new settlers might domineer, was
their domination likely to be more oppressive and insolent than that of
the native chief, with his gallowglasses and his coyne and livery. The
tribal ownership of land had probably become almost a fiction, the chief
treating the land as his own. Little, therefore, was actually lost in
that way by the tribesman, while there was an end of coyne and livery and
the other extortions of the chiefs. On the other hand the chief, however
oppressive, was nominally one of the tribe and a kinsman, and the land was
still tribal in the fancy of the sept. The tribesman was not liable to
eviction. Nor was improvement in agriculture or even in advancement of law
and order likely to be so fascinating to the native Irish, especially to
gallowglasses and kernes, as to Bacon. The adventurers were apt to be of a
sordid class, ravenous, close-fisted, little likely to make themselves
beloved. The eagles of enterprise spread their wings for the Spanish main;
the vultures swooped upon Ireland.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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