The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (12 page)

Though his men were few, Strongbow arrived and conquered Wexford, Waterford, and Dublin. In 1171, Henry II came with an army to check on things for himself. The Irish kings accepted him as their overlord, “the Lord of Ireland,” as did the bishops, and the pope confirmed the sanctity of the English invasion. So if the English are interlopers in Ireland, they are interlopers whose interloping began in the twelfth century—a fairly long historical stake—and with the blessing of the pope.

Despite the arrival of Norman law and order, Ireland remained a strife-torn place—in part because the Normans conformed themselves to many Irish customs and habits. Ireland had never been united, and it remained a land of disparate parts, many of which, in the north and west, remained untouched by the Normans. Subsequent Norman invasions were the doing of enterprising knights who created their own feudal estates that were only later recognized by the Crown.

Still, Ireland clearly benefited from Catholic Norman law, where it was imposed, dismantling the vagaries of paganism. The Irish gained other benefits too from their colonization by the English. A year after the Magna Carta was promulgated in England (1215) it became law in Ireland. Before the end of the thirteenth century (1297), Ireland had a parliament of its own.

The triumph of English language and law, however, proved deceptive, for not only did the Irish find themselves a part of a greater Gaelic revival, of which the “gallowglasses”—Scotch mercenaries from the Highlands and western isles of Scotland, often the descendants of Vikings—were the sword arm, but the old Norman feudal lords swiftly became culturally Irish themselves. Laws might be passed prohibiting intermarriage, or requiring the supremacy of English language and law, but in truth, the sod of Ireland was fast slipping from a distracted England. Even in “the Pale,” the Dublin-centered seat of English authority in Ireland, Irish customs and language were repealing those of England, in practice, if not in juridical rulebooks. The English made feeble attempts to rid the Irish of their recidivist barbarisms, but it was not until the arrival of the Tudor Dynasty (1485–1603) that the Crown began to take things in hand.

Under Henry VII (who reigned from 1485 to 1509), “Poynings' Law” was promulgated, making all acts of the Irish parliament subordinate and subject
to the approval of the English parliament; and this time, English supremacy was meant to stick. More serious, though, was King Henry VIII's declaration of himself as head of the Church in England. When this led to an Irish rebellion by the Fitzgeralds, to whom successive English monarchs had delegated authority in Ireland, it was crushed. Henry VIII declared himself not only head of the English Church but King of Ireland and pressed all Irish kings to submit. In exchange, he would give them English titles and full English rights. The Irish assented, but in an Irish way: they took what benefited them from the law and planned to ignore it whenever it collided with convenience.

Religion was now injected into the continual strife of Ireland. In English eyes there were at least three categories of Irishmen: the wild Irish beyond the Pale, the Old English (the Anglo-Norman families who remained loyal to the Catholic Church), and the small section of Protestant English settlers within the Pale. The Irish (including the Anglo-Irish) were proud of their fighting prowess and their ruthlessness against their enemies—and fighting they always were, whether in rebellion against the Crown or in affrays between themselves. There was always some Irishman raising a standard against another, and in their apparent bloodlust the Irish had not advanced in civilization and humanity, in English eyes, since the days of MacMurrough, who had once, in front of his English allies, seized the severed head of one of his hated enemies and gnawed on it, offending the Englishmen's innate sense of moderation—decapitation, okay; gnawing, no way.

Yes, that's more or less how the English saw it. It was cheap to live there, colorful in a way, tantalizingly foreign, but also more than a little sketchy and dangerous—and cheap only if you discounted the risk of crime and mob violence, for the native Irish were not just poor but shockingly lacking in moral scruple. In the words of Sir Henry Sidney, writing at the time of Queen Elizabeth I, “Surely there was never a people that lived in more misery than... [the Irish] do, nor as it should seem of worse minds, for matrimony among them is no more regarded in effect than conjunction between unreasonable beasts. Perjury, robbery and murder counted allowable. Finally, I cannot find that they make any conscience of sin. . . .”
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Queen Elizabeth I, wearied by the constant stream of murderous news from Ireland, endorsed this view and discovered in Irish barbarism a scope for English duty: it was necessary “to bring that rude and barbarous nation to civility.”
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Indeed the common view among English observers was that there was no more barbarous land on the planet. If Ireland were ever to be made habitable for civilized people, harsh measures were necessary—and at length, one part of the answer seemed to be the establishment of “plantations,” the opening up of Ireland with land grants for English settlers. But the settlements remained precarious. Hugh O'Neill, the Earl of Tyrone, and Rory O'Donnell, the Earl of Tyrconnell, led a fierce rebellion against England, burning out the colonists wherever they could find them. The rebellion lasted nine years (1594–1603)—nine years of fire and bloodshed, disease and famine, killing tens of thousands; and it raised for England the haunting specter of Ireland as a seat not only of rebellion but of foreign invasion: an army of four thousand Spaniards had arrived in Ireland to aid the rebels. After enormous hard slogging the English defeated the Irish rebels and granted them lenient terms—they were allowed to keep their lands, if not their private armies and political authority. But after four years of chafing under the restraints of peace and the recusant fines levied on Catholics by the Protestant authorities, “The O'Neill” and O'Donnell fled the country in “the flight of the Earls” (1607), apparently hoping to raise a foreign army to invade Ireland and drive out the English. Instead, their departure allowed King James I of England (who reigned from 1603 to 1625) to declare their lands forfeit. Ulster, which had been one of the most “Irish” parts of Ireland, was now to become an enormous plantation for English and Scotch settlers—complicating the religious differences in Ireland even further.

For the Irish, Catholicism was a matter of principle and identity, even if they might be poorly catechized. For the English, Anglicanism was a matter of state policy; it was the only way to make sure that conflict was avoided and everyone agreed on the same faith (except it wasn't and they didn't) and to guarantee freedom of religion (except for Catholics and some Protestant dissenters). The lowland Scotch Presbyterians were different altogether. They were certain, as Calvinists, that they were saved, just as they were convinced that everyone else was predestined to hell. This could make them uncomfortable neighbors, especially as England fell into a civil war between Anglican Royalists and Puritan Roundheads, with the Catholic Irish becoming allies of the former and targets of the latter.

The Irish rose in rebellion—a phrase that could be inserted virtually anywhere in Irish history—under the leadership of Sir Phelim O'Neill and
Rory O'More as putative allies of the king against parliament in 1641, but paradoxically they also pursued the objective of driving the Protestants from Ireland. It is true that the Stuart kings leaned in a Catholic direction (Charles I's wife was Catholic, Charles II was a crypto Catholic, and James II publicly embraced the faith), which made the Stuarts particularly attractive to the “Old English” in Ireland, but it is equally clear that the rebels and the king had separate goals that only sometimes worked in concert. There was no way, for instance, that Charles I could condone or countenance the massacre of the Protestant men, women, and children of Portadown (and elsewhere) by the rebels; and loyalist armies took to the field to fight the Irish, while a Scotch army arrived in Ulster to fight the Presbyterian corner against the royalist Anglicans.

After the execution of Charles I in 1649, Oliver Cromwell, leader of the parliamentary armies, put Ireland in his sites; his enemy was the whole bloody island. Catholics were the enemy, loyalists were the enemy—and indeed they had been one and the same after the Catholic Confederacy (led by Anglo-Irishmen) had made a formal alliance with the Royalists. The whole island needed to be subdued and made Puritan. The result was slaughter on a massive scale: Ireland lost at least a quarter of its population (estimates go as high as half). Some fell by the sword, others fled to find sanctuary. If the rising of 1641 had given Protestants their martyrs, Cromwell's murderous troops gave the Catholics plenty in return—and in Ireland, neither Catholic nor Presbyterian was inclined to forget. Cromwell judged the massacre of Catholic men, women, children, babies, priests, and monks at the town of Drogheda to be God's judgment; other Irish towns rapidly capitulated to avoid the same fate. With Ireland firmly in his hand, Cromwell multiplied the Ulster plantations, exiling Catholic landholders to the west, to the rocky lands of Connacht and County Clare, and waged an unceasing war of persecution against the Catholic Church.

With the restoration of the monarchy under the charming and broadminded Charles II, hope returned to Ireland, but Protestant extremism at home limited Charles's options. While James II, his brother, was much more active in expanding toleration—and even preference—to Catholics, he was a far less savvy politician; James lost his throne in a Protestant coup d'etat mounted by his son-in-law William of Orange. James II then went to Ireland, raised an army, and marched on Londonderry in an event that became an epic in Irish history. The city fathers felt they had no alternative but to let James's army in, until thirteen young apprentices slammed the gates shut (“the Apprentice Boys” are now a Protestant fraternal society famous for its marches in Northern Ireland); the Protestant commander Robert Lundy thought resistance futile and snuck out of the city to escape (“Lundy” is now a term of abuse in Protestant Northern Ireland); and when the besieging Jacobites demanded the city's capitulation, the Protestant answer came back then (and now), “No surrender.” Of course another great Protestant rallying cry was “no popery”—though the pope, and the Catholic Habsburgs of Austria, supported Britain's Protestant King William III against the Catholic James II, because the Habsburgs and the Vatican were at odds with James's ally France.

The “Siege of Derry,” begun on 18 April 1689, was broken by English ships on 28 July. James's other crippling defeat came at the hands of William himself, who led his army to defeat the Jacobites at the Battle of the Boyne on 12 July 1689. After two more years of hard fighting, the Jacobites were finished,
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and with defeat came swingeingly punitive anti-Catholic laws—enacted, it is important to note, by the parliament in Dublin, not London. All this was the result of the Irish fighting on behalf of the former king of England. Catholic Irishmen could no longer vote, hold office, bear arms, or even transmit property to their heirs (instead they became tenant farmers
for Protestant landlords). From the rebellion of 1641 the proportion of Irish land held by Irish Catholics fell from far more than half (about 59 percent) to an estimated 14 percent in 1695 to only 7 percent in 1714.
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