IRELAND IN THE TIME OF ELIZABETH.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3200, 30 September 1881, Page 4

IRELAND IN THE TIME OF ELIZABETH.

The Ireland which Elizabeth had received as one of the inheritances of the Crown, was the most miserable of oountries. The island was literally inhabited by savages. The Irish led a nomad life, tending a fow cattle, sowing a little corn, building here and there mud cabins when actually necessary to shield them from the inclemency of tho weather, and using only their cloaks for bed and raiment. " A man," wrote the Archbishop of Armagh to the Queen at the beginning of her reign, "may ride south, west, and north, twenty or forty miles, and Bee neither, house, corn, nor cattle ; many hundreds of men, women, and children are dead of famine." The civilised Englishman who ha- planted their settlements in the country looked upon the inhabitants as a race of serfs, to be worked to death, to be bullied, and, if disobedient to orders, to be shot down without mercy. " Tho Irishmen," wrote one Andrew Trollope to Walsingham, " except in walled towns, are not Christians, civil or human creatures, but heathen, or rather savage and brute beasts. For many of them, as well women as men, go commonly naked, having only a loose mantle hanging about them; if any of them have a shirt and a pair of single solid shoes, which they call brogues, they are especially provided for. And the Earl of Clancar and the Lord Maurice came to present themselves to my Lord Deputy at Dublin, in all their bravery, and the best garment they wore was a russet Irish mantle, worth about a crown piece, a leather jerkin, a pair of hose, and a pair of brogues, but not all worth a noble. And their feed is flesh if they can steal any, for they have no occupation or have been brought up to any labor to earn anything. And if they have got no stolen flesh, they eat, if they can get them, leek-blades and a three-leafed grass, which they call shamrock, and for the want thereof carrion and grass in the fields, with such butter as is too loathsome to describe. The best of them seldom have bread, and the common sort never look after any." Savage, half-starved, hating their conquerors, the Irish were always on the watch for opportunity to rise against the English. Any leader who came forward to redress their grievances was sure of a following ; if the English troops in possession of the island had their ranks thinned, the Irish at once broke loose and robbed and murdered all within their reach ; the whole reign of Elizabeth was one incessant struggle to keep under Irish disaffection.—Gentleman's Magazine.