Dissensions between St. Leger and Ormonde.
St. Leger and Ormonde were now at open war. When leaving Gowran for Scotland the latter received an anonymous letter warning him that he was sent there only that he might be the more easily caught and put into the Tower. The writer affirmed that Lennox had said as much, and that the boasting of the Lord Deputy’s servants had been to the same effect. The pretext was that the Earl obstructed Irish reforms. Ormonde seems to have partly believed the letter, for he sent a copy to Russell, and begged him to procure an impartial inquiry. He then went to Scotland, declaring that his loyalty was not of that timorous sort which fears inquiry or shuns danger. ‘If,’ he wrote, ‘I saw all the power of the world upon a hill armed against his Majesty, I would rather run to his Grace, though I were slain at his Majesty’s heels, than to leave his Highness and save myself.’276
They both go to England, 1546.
After his return from Scotland Ormonde wrote several letters to Privy Councillors in England, in which he attacked St. Leger’s administration as expensive and wasteful. A graver accusation against a servant of Henry VIII. was that he concealed much which it imported the King to know. The letters were seized on ship-board by the Lord Deputy’s brother, and detained for some time in Dublin. Ormonde refused to state his grievances before the Irish Council, as being necessarily under St. Leger’s influence, but preferred to run all the risks of a voyage to England. The Irish Government left all to the Privy Council. St. Leger accordingly went over to state his own case, having first secured certificates of character from the Irish Council, from Desmond, Tyrone, Thomond, and Upper Ossory, and from several Irish chiefs, all of whom willingly came to Dublin at his summons, and ‘wept and lamented the departing of so just a governor.’277
Intrigues of Irish officials.
Lord Chancellor Alen was not favourable to St. Leger. He quarrelled regularly with every deputy; but there may be some truth in his allegations, which are little more than a statement of the insoluble problem of Irish government. The King’s writ did not run much further than in former days. The revenue was almost stationary, and was supplemented annually by 5,000l. of English money. Leinster was not reformed. Irishmen were quiet, but might not long remain so. The chiefs continued to wage private war, and were not to be tamed with abbey-lands in their own countries, or farms in the Pale. ‘I cannot,’ said Alen, ‘learn that ever such barbarous people kept touch any while, or were ever vanquished with fair words. Let Wales be example.’ Interrogatories were sent to Irish councillors on these and similar points, and as to whether either St. Leger or the Chancellor had been corrupt in any way. Questions were asked as to the demeanour of every councillor, as to whether Alen’s account of St. Leger’s overbearing conduct at the Council Board was true, as to the behaviour of Ormonde and others there. In replying to Alen’s charges, St. Leger complained of their vagueness, and detailed his strenuous exertions to overcome the inherent difficulties of his task, and here most people will sympathise with him. He thought that Irishmen on the whole kept their word as well as Englishmen, ‘and if Irishmen use their own laws, so doth the Earl of Ormonde, and all the Lords Marchers in Ireland.’ We have here a line of argument very common in our own day, but very rare in that of Henry VIII., and St. Leger must be credited with unusual breadth of view. The Irish customs were in truth necessary; for there was then no way of enforcing English law, and the difficulty of applying it fully has not disappeared even in the reign of Queen Victoria. As to mismanagement of the revenue, St. Leger gave Alen the lie direct, and accused him of conspiring with Walter Cowley to defame him; but this the Chancellor positively denied. The Lord Deputy begged that he might not be wearied with interrogatories, but called before the Council, and confronted with his accusers. ‘Then,’ he said, ‘let me be rid of this hell, wherein I have remained six years, and that some other may serve his Majesty as long as I have done, and I to serve him elsewhere, where he shall command me. Though the same were in Turkey, I will not refuse it.’278
St. Leger exonerated from blame. Alen and Cowley imprisoned.
The English Government came to the conclusion that St. Leger deserved no blame. Alen could not be quite acquitted of factious conduct; but he was a faithful servant, and hardly to be spared from Ireland, which had the quality of transmuting wisdom into foolishness and honesty into self-seeking. He suffered a short imprisonment in the Tower, and had to surrender the Great Seal, which, after being refused by two other lawyers, was given to Sir Richard Rede. But his property was restored to him immediately after Edward’s accession; he became Lord Chancellor again, and received the constableship of Maynooth, and many other favours. In 1550 he seems still to have been grumbling against St. Leger, who could then afford to speak of him as his old friend. Walter Cowley, the Irish Solicitor-General, was also sent to the Tower. It appears that one William Cantwell held a lease for life of three farms in Kilkenny, and that others had seized them while he was learning English at Oxford. There may have been a question of title, for it was not uncommon in Henry VIII.’s time to grant the same property to several people at once. Believing that he had been kept from his own by Ormonde, St. Leger espoused Cantwell’s cause; and it was to get the Earl out of the way that Cantwell wrote the Gowran letter, and another found at Ross. Cowley, who was more or less under Alen’s influence, declared in the Tower that his report against St. Leger had been revised by the Chancellor; but this was solemnly denied. ‘I was,’ said Alen, ‘never of counsel with article of it. God is my Judge, I would be ashamed to be named to be privy to the penning of so lewd a book;’ and years afterwards he told Paget that Cowley had confessed the truth of this disclaimer. Perhaps he spoke in fear of the rack; in any case, the Privy Council or the King decided that he was a liar, and he was certainly a plotter like his father before him. The old man was deprived of the office of Master of the Rolls, and the young one of that of Solicitor-General. Both were employed again in the next reign. St. Leger was reconciled to Ormonde, and in spite of his prayers was restored to his government with increased honours and an hereditary pension.279
Murder of Ormonde.
Ormonde never saw Ireland again. He kept fifty servants in London, who invited him to sup with them at Limehouse. After supper the whole company sickened, and seventeen in all died. The Earl was carried to Ely House in Holborn, where he lingered for several days, but at last succumbed. There seems to have been no inquiry into this tragedy, and one might suspect that the Government took this means of releasing themselves from a man who had become inconveniently powerful, and whose services were too eminent to attack openly. Henry had no particular scruples about assassination, when, as in Cardinal Beaton’s case, he could not reach his enemy by other means; but he would hardly have been likely to poison a subject against whom he could always compass an Act of Attainder. The fact that Ormonde’s loyalty was above suspicion may have rendered this course difficult, and Henry may have seen in him a possible Earl of Kildare. He was ambitious, very powerful, impatient of interference, and by no means tamely subservient to the ruler of the hour. There is no reason to suppose that Hertford or Wriothesley were capable of such a crime. Warwick was capable of anything; but if he had suspected the Seymours, he would hardly have allowed the matter to be hushed up. An anecdote of Ormonde’s son, the famous tenth Earl, perhaps points to a suspicion against Leicester’s father; but it is not likely that the mystery will ever be cleared up. The ‘Four Masters’ say St. Leger had boasted that either he or Ormonde should never return to Ireland; but this is not mentioned by older annalists, nor in the official correspondence, and it is just the sort of story that would have been concocted afterwards. Ormonde’s vast estates passed quietly to his heir, a boy of fourteen, who became the most famous and powerful man of his age and country. The boy was educated at the English Court, and 200 marks a year out of his lands in Ireland were assigned for his support.280
All Deputies had difficulties with the Butlers