Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/277

HISTORY.] IRELAND 261 ryV. because all his jewels and his plate that he can spare, and those which he must of necessity keep, are pledged to lie in pawn." The nobles waged private war unrestrained, and the game of playing off one chieftain against another was carried on with varying success. The provisions of the statute of Kilkenny against trading with the Irish failed, for markets cannot exist without buyers. The brilliant reign of Henry V. was a time of extreme misery to the colony in Ireland. Half the English-speak ing people fled to England, where they were not welcome. The Act of 1 Henry V. c. 8 ordered all " Irishmen and Irish clerks, beggars, called chamber deacons, to depart before the feast of All Souls, for quietness and peace in this realm of England." Soldiers were drawn by high pay to Henry s French wars, and a contemporary writer, Robert Redman, recounts how they " with very sharp and missile balls (catapultariis pilis) wounded their enemies severely, easily avoiding their onset by their own swift ness of foot. Their valour in that siege (of Rouen) was remarkable ....... They showed very great animosity to the French, whom they plundered of their goods, and whose children they seized by force as slaves to the English, after the price had been fixed by bargaining." The Irish wars had not been a good school of humanity. The disastrous reign of the third Lancastrian completed the discomfiture of the original colony in Ireland. Quarrels between the Ormonde and Talbot parties paralysed the Government, and a " Pale " of 30 miles by 20 was all that remained. Even the walled towns, Kilkenny, Ross, Wex- ford, Kinsale, Youghal, Clonmel, Kilmallock, Thomastown, Fethard, and Cashel, were almost starved out ; Waterford itself was half ruined and half deserted. Only one par liament was held for thirty years, but taxation was not remitted on that account. No viceroy even pretended to reside continuously. The north and west were still worse off than the south. Some thoughtful men saw clearly the danger of leaving Ireland to be seized by the first chance comer and the Libel of English Policy, written about 1436, contains a long and interesting passage declaring England s interests in protecting Ireland as "aboterasse and a poste" of her own power. Sir John Talbot, immortalized by Shakespeare, was several times viceroy ; he was almost uniformly successful in the field, but feeble in council. He held a parliament at Trim which made one law against men of English race wearing moustaches, lest they should be mistaken for Irishmen, and another obliging the sons of agricultural labourers to follow their father s vocation under pain of fine and imprisonment The earls of Shrewsbury are still earls of Waterford, and retain the right to carry the white staff as hereditary stewards, but the palatinate jurisdiction over Wexford was taken away by Henry VIII. The Ulster annalists estimate the great Talbot very differently from Shakespeare : " A son of curses for his venom and a devil for his evils ; and the learned say of him that there came not from the time of Herod, by whom Christ was crucified, any one so wicked in evil deeds " (O Donovan s Four Masters}. In 1449 Richard, duke of York, right heir by blood to the throne of Edward III., was forced to yield the regency of France to his rival Somerset, and to accept the Irish viceroyalty. He landed at Howth with his wife Cicely Neville, the beautiful Rose of Raby, and Margaret of Anjou hoped thus to get rid of one who was too great for a subject. The Irish government was given to him for ten years on unusually liberal terms. He ingratiated himself with both races, taking care to avoid identification with any particular family. At the baptism of his son " false, fleeting, perjured Clarence " who was born in Dublin Castle, Desmond and Ormonde stood sponsors together. In legislation Richard fared no better than others. The rebellion of Jack Cade, claiming to be a Mortimer and cousin to the duke of York, took place at this time. This adventurer, at once ludicrous and formid able, was a native of Ireland, and was thought to be put forward by Richard to test the popularity of the Yorkist cause. Returning suddenly to England in 1450, Richard left the government to James, earl of Ormonde and Wiltshire, who had married Lady Eleanor Beaufort, and was deeply engaged on the Lancastrian side. This earl begun the deadly feud with the house of Kildare which lasted for generations. After Blore Heath Richard was attainted by the Lancastrian parliament, and returned to Dublin, where the colonial parliament acknowledged him and assumed virtual independence. A separate coinage was established, and the authority of the English parlia ment was repudiated. William Overy, a bold squire of Ormonde s, offered to arrest Richard as an attainted traitor, but was seized, tried before the man whom he had come to take, and hanged, drawn, and quartered. The duke" only maintained his separate kingdom about a year. His party triumphed in England, but he himself fell at Wakefield. Among the few prisoners taken on the bloody field of Edward Towton was Ormonde, whose head long adorned London IV". Bridge. He and his brothers were attainted in England lit 61 and by the Yorkist parliament in Ireland, but the import ance of the family was hardly diminished by this. For the first six years of Edward s reign the two Gerald ine earls engrossed official power. The influence of Queen Elizabeth Woodville, whom Desmond had offended, then made itself felt. Tiptoft, earl of Worcester, became deputy. He was an accomplished Oxonian, who made a speech at Rome in such good Latin as to draw tears from the eyes of that great patron of letters Pope Pius II. (^Eneas Sylvius). But his Latinity did not soften his manners, and he was thought cruel even in that age, Desmond was beheaded, ostensibly for using Irish exactions, really, as the partisans of his family hold, to please Queen Elizabeth. The remark able lawlessness of this reign was increased by the practice of coining. Several mints had been established since Richard of York s time; the standards varied, and imitation was easy. During Richard III. s short reign the earl of Kildare, Richard head of the Irish Yorkists, was the strongest man in Ireland. m - He espoused the cause of Lambert Simnel (1487), whom Henry the Irish in general seem always to have thought a true } ,._ Plantagenet. The Italian primate, Octavian de Palatio,, knew better, and incurred the wrath of Kildare by refusing to officiate at the impostor s coronation. The local magnates and several distinguished visitors attended, and Lambert was shown to the people borne aloft on " great D Arcy of Platten s " shoulders. His enterprise ended in the battle of Stoke, where the flower of the Anglo-Irish soldiery fell. " The Irish," says Bacon, " did not fail in courage or fierce ness, but, being almost naked men, only armed with darts and skeins, it was rather an execution than a fight upon them." Conspicuous among Henry s adherents in Ireland were the citizens of Waterford, who, with the men of Clonmel, Callan, Fethard, and the Butler connexion gene rally, were prepared to take the field in his favour. Water- ford was equally conspicuous some years later in resisting Perkin Warbeck, who besieged it unsuccessfully, and was chased by the citizens, who fitted out a fleet at their own charge. The king conferred honour and rewards on the loyal city, to which he gave the proud title of urbs intacta. Many doubtless believed that Perkin was really the duke of York ; but it is now certain that he was an impostor, Mr Gairdner s researches having quite dispelled the "historic doubts " with which Horace Walpole and many smaller mystery-mongers amused their excessive leisure. Other events of this reign were the parliament of Drogheda, held