We might remember the scene in Galway a few years later, where high-born ladies, plundered of all their property by the rapacious soldiers, sinking with shame before the gaze of the public in their ragged clothes, covered themselves with embroidered table-covers, or a strip of tapestry taken from the walls, or lappets cut from the bed-curtains, or with blankets, sheets, or table-cloths. “You would have taken your oath,” says the contemporary writer, “that all Galway was a masquerade, the unrivalled home of scenic buffoons, so irresistibly ludicrous were the varied dresses of the poor women.” Why do not the Colonial historians give this scene as showing the habitual taste and pleasure of the Galway ladies?
Dr. Mahaffy has some other lights to throw on Irish history. “The contempt for traders as such … is,” he says, “like all such prejudice in Ireland, the survival of the contempt which the meanest members of any Irish clan felt for any profession save that of arms, and the preying on the churl.” The despisers of trade whom he is describing in this passage are the English landowners of the Williamite settlement, who had finally ousted the Irish from their lands, and taken them over as Protestant Englishmen, men of “a better race.” This conquering class naturally felt a contempt for their victims, the evicted Catholic Irish, who were allowed for the benefit of their lords and rulers to plough and to trade, while deprived of civil and social rights. But I do not know how those lordly squires would like to have heard that they represented the prejudices of “the meanest member of an Irish clan,” accustomed to prey on “the churl,” whoever he was. As for the Irish clansman who is supposed to look on traders as outcasts, he appears to be a fiction of the essayist’s fancy. Where in Irish records will proofs be found of contempt for a trader? Their story seems to be quite the other way. It may be convenient, however, for the defaming of the Irish to despise and ignore those records. Moreover, since Irish abbeys and cathedrals have been pronounced by Mr. Litton Falkiner not to be like the English ones, why need an Irish writer stoop into their ruins to seek out the story written there? No, it is easier to keep the slander running, to swell its volume, and to increase its violence. Yet in those ruins any man who will may look upon the countless tombs of Irishmen who (so long as the conqueror’s law allowed their desolate companies to enter the ancient shrines) were borne by their friends to rest in the roofless nave or before the high altar under great slabs with the signs of their trade, the tailor’s instruments, the carpenter’s tools, and the mason’s, the labourer’s plough, and the trader’s ship, deeply graven beside their names – no emblems of shame in those last sanctuaries of the Irish people.
Social life in Ireland, through all the ages, Dr. Mahaffy describes as especially immoral. The young girls, he says, were generally accessible to the squire and his sons all through Irish history, and suffered no disgrace, but married all the better for such an adventure. “All through Irish history” is a liberal and characteristic phrase to use of English squires and their sons. The tradition of absolute landlord power still lives in the Irish country-side, when girls were told the price at which they might save their family from being driven out of the home held by their ancestors for hundreds of years, and left to die on the roadside of hunger, or in the coffin-ship of plague. With security of tenure for the Irish poor such ordeals have passed into history. As for reports of English tourists, they resemble the travellers’ tales which everywhere and at all times various countries have heard on the manners of their neighbours. It is well to remember Gibbon’s reflection on general charges of this sort. Manuel, Emperor of the East, visited England in 1400, and coming from Constantinople was shocked at English conduct: – “The most singular circumstance of their manners,” he reported, “is their disregard of conjugal honour and of female chastity. In their mutual visits, as the first act of hospitality, the guest is welcomed in the embraces of their wives and daughters; among friends they are lent and borrowed without shame; nor are the islanders offended at this strange commerce.” “We may smile at the credulity, or resent the injustice of the Greek,” Gibbon reflects, “but his credulity and injustice may teach an important lesson; to distrust the accounts of foreign and remote nations, and to suspend our belief of every tale that deviates from the laws of nature and the character of man.”
English writers have forgotten a grave disadvantage to themselves in the moral tale of the good and bad man (besides its incredibility and its dullness). In this version of Irish history the Englishman’s triumph remains a poor thing, destitute of interest or value, where the fame of the victor is abased and confounded by the worthlessness of his foe. The Irish warriors are mostly described as drunkards, cowards, and barbarians. Dr. Mahaffy likens Shane O’Neill to a Moor or a Zulu. Hugh of Tyrone “was a polished courtier on the surface, with a barbarous core.” Here is Mr. Bagwell’s portrait of Shane, whose organisation and defence of Ulster cost Elizabeth over £147,000 of English money (in modern money probably over £1,500,000) without counting the enormous cesses laid on the country, and three thousand five hundred of her soldiers slain. “He is said to have been a glutton, and was certainly a drunkard.” The story of drunkenness seems to have originated in his mud-baths, such as are now commonly ordered for rheumatism. Once started, the fable was persistent. “That drunken brain was, nevertheless, clear enough to baffle Elizabeth for a long time.” His conduct of a war which cost Elizabeth so much is described: – “Shane, who had been indulging as usual in wine or whisky, came up at the moment.” “Shane, who was never remarkable for dashing courage, retired into the wood.” “Shane, whose reputation for courage is not high, slipped out at the back of his tent.” So, I believe, did de Wet, instead of waiting to be killed. At the last, “the love of liquor probably caused his death”; here indeed Mr. Bagwell contradicts the Lord Deputy Sidney himself, who boasts that Shane was tricked and murdered by a Scotsman in Sidney’s pay, the last of a series of attempts at assassination. From the point of view that “barbarians” are usually childish, Mr. Bagwell tells how the important chiefs, MacWilliam Burke and MacGillapatrick, were given titles and robes of Earl and Baron, “in the belief that titles and little acts of civility would weigh more with these rude men than a display of force.” He complains that the best-laid English military plans of occupation of this country, instead of proceeding without interruption from the natives, might be “frustrated by one of those unexpected acts of treachery in which Irish history abounds.” However, even in treachery the Irish were incompetent. “Irish plots are commonly woven in sand.” “In this, as in so many other Irish insurrections, there was no want of double traitors; of men who had neither the constancy to remain loyal, nor the courage to persevere in rebellion.”
With such a rabble we can only wonder that there was any need of an English army at all; or how the conflict could last a year (not to say a few hundreds of them); or why England should have sent over her very best generals, her stoutest governors, and a prodigious deal of her gold. It was the bogs, apparently, that swallowed up those inconceivable hosts and coins.
Under the “savage” theory military matters lose all interest; but they are given to us with pitiless detail. Expeditions of soldiers