ENGLAND'S TREATMENT OF IRELAND.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XV, Issue 27, 28 October 1887, Page 23

ENGLAND'S TREATMENT OF IRELAND.

(A paper read before the Irish National League at Wanganui by Mr. W. Bunting.)

Accordingly we read in Haverty's '• History of Ireland" that at this period " the Parliamentary Commissioners in Dublin published a proclamation, by which and other edicts any Catholic priest found in Ireland after twenty days, was guilty of high treason, and liable to be hanged, drawn, and quartered and any person harbouring such clergymen was liable to the penalty of daath and losb of goods and chattels ; and any person knowing the place of concealment of a priest and not disclosing it to the authorities, might be publicly whipped, and further punished with amputation of ears." ''Any person absent from the parish church on a Sunday was liable to a fine of thirty pence ; Magistrates might take away the children ot Catholics and send them to England for education, and might tender the oath of abjuration to all persons at the age of twenty-one years, who on refusal were liable to imprisonment during pleasure, and the forfeiture of two-thirds of their real and personal estate. The same price of five pounds was set on the head of a priest as on that of a wolf, and the production of either head was a sufficient claim for the reward." •• The military being distributed in small parties over the country, and their vigilance kept alive by sectarian rancour and the promise of reward, it must have been difficult for a priest to escape detection, but many of them nevertheless, braved the danger for their poor scattered flocks, and residing in caverns in the mountains, or in lonely hovels in the bogß, they issued forth at night to carry the consolations of religion to the huts of their oppressed and suffering countrymen." Ludlow relates in his Memoirs (vol. I, page 422, de Vevay, 1691,) how, when marching from Dundalk to ( Castleblayney, probably near the close of 1652, he discovered a few of the Irish in a cave, and how his party 6pent two days in endeavouring to smother them by smoke. It appoars that the poor fugitives preserved them* selves from suffocation during this operation by holding their faces close to the surface of some running water in the cavern, and that one of this party was armed with a pistol with which he shot the foremost of the troopers, who were entering the mouth of the caVe after the first day's smoking. Ludlow caused the trial to be repeated and the crevices through which the smoke escaped having Been closed, '• another smoke was made." The next time the Boldiers entered with helmets and breastplates, but they found tbe only armed man dead, inside the entrance where he was suffocated at his post ; while tbe fugitives still preserved life at the little brook. Fifteen were put to the sword within the cave, and four dragged out alive ; but Ludlow does not mentiou whether he hanged these or not, but one at least of the original number was a Catholic priest, for the soldiers found a crucifix, chalice and priest's robes in the cavern. Mr. A. M. Sullivan, in his valuable work, " The Story of Ireland," referring to this mournful tragedy of history, so graphically described by Mr. Preudergast, pathetically writes as follows :— '• Of our kindred, old or young, sold into slavery in the ' tobacco islands,' we hear no more in nistory, and shall hear no more until the last great accounting day of those little ones, just old enough to feel all the panga of tmch a ruthless and eternal severance from loving mother, from fond father from brothers and playmates, from all happiness on earth, no record tells the fate. We only know that a few years subsequently, there survived of them in the islands, barely the lemembrance that they came in shiploads and perished soon — too young to stand the climate or endure the toil. But at home in the rifled nest of the the parents' heart what a memory of them was kept 1 There tbe image of each little victim was enshrined ; and father and mother, bowed with years and suffering, went down to the grave} • still think* ing, ever thinking \ ot the absent, the cb.erißb.ed one, whom they were

never to see on earth again, now writhing beneath a planter's lash, or filling a nameless grave in Jamaican soil. Yes, that army of innocents vanish from the record here ; bat the Great ' God who marked the slaughters of Herod, has kept a reckoning of the crime that in that hour so notably likened Ireland to Bachel weeping for her children." Of the Irish regiments (or " Irish swordsmen as they were called in the European writings of the time) who elected to go into exile, preferring "to roam where freedom and their God might lead" rather than hebondsmen under a bigot yoke at home, we read that, " foreign nspfons were apprised by the Kilkenny Articles that the Irish were to be allowed to engage in the service of any State in amity with the Commonwealth. The valour of the Irißh soldier was well-known abroad. From the time of the Mnnster plantation by Queen Elieabeth numerous exiles bad taken service in the Spanish army. There were Irish regiments serving in the Low Countries. The Prince of Orange declared they were born aoldiers, and Henry the Fourth of France publicly called Hugh O'Neill the third soldier of the age, and he said there was no nation made better troops than the Irish when drilled. Af enta from the King of Spain, the King of Poland, and the Prince do Conde were now contending for the services of Irish troops. Between 1651 and 1664 thirty-fwr thousand (of whom few ever saw their loved native land again) were transported into foreign parts. While roads to Connaught were, as I have described, witnessing a stream of hapleßs fugitives, prisoners rather, plodding wearily to their dungeon and grave, a singular scene was going on in London at an office appointed for the purpose by Government. A lottery was held, whereat the farms, houses and estates from which the owners had thus been driven, were being " drawn " by, or on behalf of, the soldiers and officers of the army, and the " adventurers," that is, petty shopkeepers in London, and others who had lent money for the war on the Irish. The mode of conducting the lottery was regulated by public ordinance, and not unfrequently a vulgar and illiterate trooper " drew " the mansion and estate of an Irish nobleman, who was glad to accept permissioa to inhabit, for a few weeks, merely, the stable or the cowshed, with his lady and children, pending their setting ont for Connaught. This same lottery was the " settlement " (varied a little by further confiscations to the same end forty years subsequently) by which the now existing landed proprietary was planted upon Ireland. Between a proprietary thus planted, and the 1 bulk of the population, as well as the tenantry under them, it is not to be marvelled that feelings the reverse of cordial prevailed. From the first they scowled at each other. The plundered and trampled people despised and hated the " Cromwellian brood," as they were called, never regarding them as more than vulgar and violent usurpers of other men's estates. The Cromwellians, on the other band, feared and hated the serf peasantry, whose secret sentiments and desires of hostility they well knew. Nothing but the fusing spirit of nationality obliterates such feelings as these ; but (no such epirit was allowed to fuse the Cromwellian "landlords" and the Irish tenantry. The former were taught to consider themselves as a foreign garrison, endowed to watch and keep down, and levy a land-tribute off the native tiller of the soil. So they looked to and leaned all on England, without whom they thought they must be massacred. " Aliens in race, in language, and in religion," they had not one tie in common with the subject population, and so both classes unhappily grew up to be what they remain very much in our own day, more of taskmasters and bondsmen than landlords and tenants,

Under what is known as the '• Penal Code," from 1700 to 1775 the bulk of the population were forbidden to educate their children, to attend religious worship, to carry arms, to learn a trade, or to hold property. The schoolmaster and the priest had each a price on his head, and Statutes of George I. and George 11. went so far as to make it felony to send an Irish child abroad to receive the education forbidden at home. There was one circumstance which, apart from the shocking barbarity of the " Penal Code," has made it rankle in the breast of the Irish to the present hour, namely, that it was laid upon them in flagrant violation of a solemn treaty signed between the English and Irish commanders, duly countersigned by Royal Commission ars on King William's part at the close of the Williamite struggle in 1691. There is, in fact, no more bitter memory in the Irish breast than that which tells how the treaty of Limerick was violated, and there is not probably on record a breach of public faith more nakedly and confessedly infamous than was that violation. Although the splendid army of Scandinavians, Dutch, Swiss, Prussian?, Hugenot-Frencb, and English, which the Prince of Orange led into Ireland had defeated the raw levies of the Irish Boyaliats at the Boyne, and more by happy accident than generalship driven them from their position at Aughrim, he wad •gain and again defeated before the walls of Limerick, which city was defended by General Sarsfield, in command of the Irish armies of King James. At length William, who was a brave soldier and a statesman, saw the wisdom of arranging terms with such a foe, and, accordingly, on October 3, 1691, articles of capitulation were negotiated whereby the Irish army, retaining itß arms, colours, bands, and transport stores, marched out with honours of war, free to enter the service of King William, or to sail to France where King James, now resided as guest and ally of Louis XIV. The " civil artices " of the treaty of Limerick stipulated, in substance, that there was to be no proscription, confiscation, no disarmament, and that the exercise of the Catholic religion should be as free as it had been in the reign of King Charles 11.

After the rough draft had been agreed upon, but before the fair copy waß signed by Sarsfield, the arrival of a French fleet with considerable aid in men, money, and stores, was announce I to the Irish commander, and he was entreated not to sign the tr ■ . Sarsfield seemed stunned by the news 1 He was silent for a mum t, and then in mournful accents replied :—": — " The treaty is signed t Our Iwnour is pledged — the honour of Ireland. Though a hundred thousand French' men offered to aid us now, we must keep our plighted troth !" He forbade the expedition to land, with a scrupulous sense of honour contending that the spirit if not the letter of the capitulation extended to any such arrival. The French ships, accordingly, were

used only to transport to France the Irish army that had volunteered for foreign service, soldiers and civilians, nobles, gentry and clergy, there sailed in all 19,025 persons. Most of the oflcers, like their illustrious leader, Sarsfield, gave up fortune, family, home and f rien'di , refusing the most tempting offers from William, whose anxiety to enroll them in his own service was earnestly and perseveringly pressed upon them to the last. Full of anguish was that parting, whose sorrowful spirit has been so faithfully expressed by Mr. Aubrey de Vere, in the following simple and touching verses— the soliloquy of a brigade soldier sailing away from Limerick :—: — " I snatched a stone from the bloodied brook, And hurled it at my household door ; No farewell of my love I took ; I shall see my friend no more. " I dashed aoross the church-yard bound, I knelt not by my parents' grave ; There rang from my heart a clarion's sound, That summoned me o'er the wave.

" No land to me can native be That strangers trample, and tyrants stain ; When the valleys I love are cleansed and free, They are mine, they are mine again. " Till then, in sunshine or sunless weather, By the Seine and Loire, and the broad Gar ne, My war-horse and I roam on together Wherever God will. On I On I " These were not wholly lost to Ireland, though not a man of them ever saw Ireland more. They served her abroad when they could ho Longer strike for her at home. They made her sad yet glorious story familiar in the courts of Christendom. ' They made her valour felt and respected on the battle-fields of Europe. And as they had not quitted her soil until they exacted terms from the conqueror, which, if observed, might have been for her a charter of protection, to did they in exile take a terrible vengeance upon that conqueror for bis foul and treacherous violation of that treaty. These men's deeds are the proudest in the history of Ireland. History may parallel, bat it can adduce nothing to surpass the chivalrous devotion of the men who comprised this soctnd great armed migration of Irish valour, faith and patriotism. These self -expatriated Irish battalions, when serving as an Irish brigade in the servioe of France, took heavy reprisals on the English power, confronting it on every battle-field, and deciding by their impetuous valour the fortunes of many an eventful day. The ever-glorious day of Fontenoy — a name which, to this day, thrills the Irish heart with pride. At this great battle, fought lltti May, 1745, by a French army of 45,000 men, under Marshal Saxe, in presence of the King and Dauphin, against an English force of 55,000 men, chiefly English and Dutch, under the Duke of Cumberland, victory was snatched from the British commander at the clohe of the day by a decisive charge of the Irish regiments. It was on the arrival of the despatches which announced the fate of Fontenoy that George 11., much of a soldier and little of a bigot, is said to have exclaimed : " Curse upon the laws that deprive me of saab subjects." No sooner, however, had the Irish army sailed away for France than the treaty covenants, despite the protests and endeavour! of King William, were cast to the winds. Angered at the idea of having no spoil by confiscation to divide, the aati-Stuart faction — " the Pro* testaDl Interest.of Ireland " as they called tbemselves-now dominant in the Irish Parliament refused to approve the king's treaty, and by stopping supplies compelled King William to yield. "It was," as an Irish writer remarks, " the old story; whenever the English sovereign or government desired to pause in the work of persecution and plunder, if not to treat the native Irish in a spirit of conciliation and justice, the Colony, the plantation, the garrison, the Protestant interest, screamed in frantic resistance. It was so in the reign of James the First, Charles the First, Charles the Second, James the Second, and it was so in the reign of William and Mary, any attempt of king or government to mete out to tke native Catholic population of Ireland any measure of treatment, save what the robber and murderer metes out to his helpless victim was denounced — absolutely complained of— as a daring wrong and grievance against what was and is still called the Protestant interest, or our glorious rights and liberties, " an occurrence, I may add, ever repeating itself." In 1867 (twenty years ago), on the rumour that the English Government intended to grant some modicum of civil and religious equality in Ireland, this same Protestant-interest faction screamed and yelled after the old fashion, complained of such an intention as a grievance, and went through the usual vows about our glorious rights and liberties. Even now at this present hour the same howl is raised by the same Protestant-interest class against the Home Rule movement. Thereupon commenced the prospective legislation known as the penal code. A Beries of the most terrible laws that can be imagined were passed in the very teeth of the articles that were signed at Limerick. "It would," as the eminent Irish writer just quoted remarks in continuation, " be little creditable to aa Irish Catholic to own himself capable of narrating this chapter of Irish history with calmness and without all-conquering emotion." For my part I content myself with citing the descriptions of it supplied by Protestant and English writers. " The eighteenth century," says ope of ttieae, (CasaeU's-Godkin'a-history of Ireland," vol. ii. p. 116) writing on the penal laws of Ireland, " was the era of persecution, in which the law did the work of the sword more effectually and mor« Bafely. Taea was established a code framed with almost diabolical ingenuity to extinguish natural affection, to foster perfidy and hypocrisy, to petrify conscience, to perpetuate orutal ignorance, to facilitate the worh *f tyranny, by rendering the vices of slavery inherent and natural i» the Irish character, and to make Protestntism almost irredeemably odious as the monstrous incarnation of all moral perversions." •• Too well," he continues, "did it accomplish its deadly wort of debasement

on the intellects, morale, and physical condition of a people sinking in degeneracy from age to age, till all manly spirit, all virtuous sense of personal independence and responsibility, was nearly extinct, and the very features, vacant, timid, cunning, and unreflective, betrayed the crouching slave within." In the presence of the terrible facts he is called upon to chronicle, the generous nature of the Protestant historian whom I am quoting warms into indignation, anable to endure the reflection that they who pthus laboured to deform and brutify the Irish people are for ever reproaching them before the world for bearing traces of the infamous effort ; he bursts forth into the following noble vindication of the calumniated victims of oppression :— " Having no rights or franchises no legal protection of life or property, disqualified to handle a gun even as a common soldier or a gamekeeper, forbidden to acquire the elements of knowledge at home or abroad, forbidden even to render to God what conscience dictated as his due, what could the Irish be but abject Berfs ? What nation in their circumstances could have been otherwise? Is it notama«ing that any social virtue could have survived such an ordeal ? that any seeds of good, any roots of national greatness, could have outlived such a long tempestuous winter 1 " 11 These laws," he continues, " were aimed not only at the religion of the Catholic, but still more at his liberty and his property. He could enjoy no freehold property, nor was he allowed to have a lease for a longer term than thirty-one years ; but as even this term was ong enough to encourage an industrious man to reclaim waste land* and improve his wordly circumstances, it was enacted that if a Papist should have a farm producing a profit greater than one-third of the rent, his right to such should immediately cease, and pass over to the first Protestant who should discover the rate of profit 1 " " This was the age," says an Irish writer, •' that rave to Irish topography the • Oorrig-an-Affrioo,' found to thickly marked on every barony map of Ireland, ' The Matt Both I ' What memories cling round each hallowed moss-clad atone or rocky ledge on the mountain eide, or in the deep recess of some desolate glen, whereon for years and years, the Holy Sacrifice was offered up in stealth and secrecy, the death penalty hanging over priest and worshipper 1 Not unfrequently, Mass was interrupted by the approach of the bandogs of the law ; for quickened by the rewards to be earned, there sprang up in thobe days the infamous trade of priest-hunting, ' five pounds ' being equally the price for the head of a priest as for the head of a wolf. The utmost care was necessary in divulging intelligence of the night on which Mass would next be celebrated ; and when the congregation bad furtively stolen to the spot, sentiies were posted all around before the Mass began, yet in instances not a few, the worshippers were taken by surprise, and the blood of the murdered priest wetted the altar stone." WWI might our Protestant national poet. Davis, exclaim, contemplating this deep night-tima of Buffering and sorrow : — '• Oh 1 weep those days, the penal days, When Ireland hopelessly complained I Oh I weep those dayß, the penal days, When godless persecution reigned." • • • • " They bribed the flock, they bribed the Bon, To sell the priest and rob the sire ; Their dogs were taught alike to run Upon the scent of wolf and friar. "" Among the poor, Or on the moor, We've hid the pious and the true — While traitor knave And recreant slave Had riches, rank, and retinue ; And exiled in those penal days, Our banners over Europe blaze." (2b be continittd.)