exactions might have been tolerated if the people had been repaid by protection; but forced as they were to pay black mail at the same time to the Irish borderers, the double burdens had the effect of driving every energetic settler out of the pale, and his place was filled by some poor Irishman whom use had made acquainted with misery.[1]
Nor was extortion the only advantage which the Irish deputies obtained from their office. They prosecuted their private feuds with the revenues of the State. They connived at the crimes of any chieftain who would join their faction. Every conceivable abuse in the administration of the Government attended the possession of power by the Geraldines of Kildare, and yet by the Geraldines it was almost inevitable that the power should be held. The choice lay between the Kildares and the Ormonds. No other nobleman could pretend to compete with these two. The Earls of Desmond
- ↑ The wretchedness of the country drove the Irish to emigrate in multitudes. In 1524, twenty thousand of them had settled themselves in Pembrokeshire; and the majority of these had crossed in a single twelvemonth. They brought with them Irish manners, and caused no little trouble. 'The King's town of Tenby,' wrote a Welsh gentleman to Wolsey, 'is almost clean Irish, as well the head men and rulers as the commons of the said town; and of their high and presumptuous minds [they] do disobey all manner the King's process that cometh to them out of the King's exchequer of Pembroke.'—R. Gryffith to Cardinal Wolsey: Ellis, first series, vol. i. p. 191, &c.
The premises, considered, some saith the King's deputy, by extortion, chargeth the King's poor subjects and common folk, in horse meat and man's meat, by estimation, to the value of a hundred pound every day in the year, one day counted with another, which cometh to the sum of 36,000 pounds yearly.—State Papers, vol. ii. p. 13. Finglas says that coyne and livery would destroy hell itself, if it was used there.—Finglas's Breviate.
