Jl. BOOK papal missionaries was Sanders, the calumniating historian of the English Reformation; we may add also that he was one of those victims to his party animosity, whose career ended in personal wretchedness and political discomfiture." The warfare by sir Edward Stafford's dispatch of 26 Dec. 1583 to Elizabeth, from Paris. He says of the French prince, monsieur, or the heir presumptive of the crown of France, When he heard of this villanous act of Somerfield's confession, he grew in a great choler, and swore deeply, which he commonly doth not, that the Jesuits only were the setters on of these enterprises, and that, if he were king, he would rather hang them with his own hand, than suffer any of them to live, with many bitter words against them.' Hardwicke's State Pap. v. 1. p. 217. This prince did not live to succeed Henry III. He was the duc d'Alençon, who had so long sought Elizabeth's band. He was buried 27 May 1584. Murdin's State Pap. p. 405. 57 Dr. Sanders went from Rome to Madrid, in November 1573. The king of Spain gave him 320 ducats, and he was remaining in that country in 1574. Murdin, p. 243. On 1 July 1579, he landed from thence, with a small Spanish force, in Kerry, with Fitzmorris, to begin a new rebellion, which, after the usual portion of calamity from such transactions, was suppressed. Camden, 208-11. The chief authors of it perished. Other revolts followed as ineffectually. In 1580, seven hundred Italians and Spaniards were landed in Ireland ; Camd. 213; and Sanders at last, in 1584, being forsaken of all company, and troubled in mind for the adverse success of the rebellion, wandered up and down thro woods, forests and hills, and found no comfort, and was miserably famished to death. Camd. 258. The official declaration, in 1580, thus speaks of him and his exploits: The pope's hostile proceedings, in open wars against her majesty in Ireland, where one of this company, Dr. Sanders, a fugitive, and a principal companion and conspirator with the traitors and rebels at Rome, was, by the pope's special commission, a commander, as in the form of a legate, and some time a paymaster for those wars.' Hollings. 1361. Mr. Ellis, in his Second Series, has printed, from the British Museum, the address of Father Sanders to the Catholic nobility and gentry of Ireland, to stir them to rebellion,' v. 3. p. 92–7. It is dated 21st Feb. 1580, and thus, with wilful falsehood, speaks of Elizabeth: What mean you, to put yourselves in so horrible danger of body and soul, for a wicked woman, neither begotten in true wedlock, nor esteeming her christendom, and therefore deprived by the vicar of Christ, her and your lawful judge? Forsaken of God, who justifieth the sentence of his vicar; forsaken of all Catholic princes, whom she hath injured intolerably; forsaken of divers lords, knights, and gentlemen of England, who [for] ten years past take the sword against her. See you not that she is such a shameful reproach to the royal crown, that whoso is a friend indeed to the crown, should so much the more hasten to dispossess her of the same? See you not, that the next Catholic heir to the crown, FOR THE POPE WILL TAKE 58 XXXII. excited and maintained by all these agitators, and CHAP. by the restless chieftains against the government of Elizabeth and its religion, produced much bloodshed, devastations, and misery to the people; but was unable to wrest this interesting and self-afflicting Island from the English crown. It was greatly benefited by some English and Scottish colonists, whose superior cultivation, and wiser life, founded many towns and peopled many districts, which lessened and checked the vicious and destructive wars of the native peasantry. Of these conflicts, one of the last will sufficiently describe their general nature; and the features which an antient traveller GOOD ORDER THAT IT SHALL REST IN NONE OTHER BUT CATHOLICS, 59 In 1585, the rebellion began in Ulster, where a popish bishop had formed a new consociation,' Camd. 288; and spread into Connaught. They began it unawares to harry the country villages with fire and ravenous depredatigns, and to destroy forts and strong holds. They invited the Hebridian Scots to join them. The governors, Richard Bingham and earl Clanrickard, with the horse, defended the champaign country; while the governor's brother entered the woods BOOK soon afterwards remarked and sketched, as he visited the country, may now be recollected, as affording a gratifying evidence that IRELAND NOW IS the pleasing contrast with what IRELAND THEN WAS, in every civil, social, natural, and national object of comfort and improvement. Her remaining evils are as removable as those which have disappeared; but order, loyalty, tranquillity, education scriptural and intellectual, intelligent religion, and useful knowlege, must be added to her native spirit, her kindly sensibilities, her spontaneous disinterestedness, her plain-hearted honesty, and her teachable docility; or her best qualities, as well as her deteriorating ones, will become only instruments of mischief and torment to herself, to her neighbors, and even to her more distant friends." with the infantry; hunted them from place to place so hotly, and driving away 5000 head of cattle, that in about forty days they came out of their lurking holes from famine, and submitted themselves. Others persisting, with 2000 Hebridian Scots, to make an irruption into Connaught, Bingham attacked them with his men, levied in haste; hunted them night and day thro by-ways and hard passages, in the thickets and woody countries near the lake Earne, then retiring, as if afraid, to invite them to assemble and advance. They collected, and came forward in battle array, with banners, sounding their bagpipes. He busieth them awhile with light skirmishes, till, by retiring, he had drawn them from the bogs to more firm ground; and till all his forces, in great silence, were come together. Then he sharply charged them; and having slain many, made them give ground, when presently his small shot charged them in frout; and he himself set upon them in flank with his horsemen so courageously, that he put their main battle to rout, and drove them to take the river, where they were al slain or drowned, saving fourscore, which swam over into Tyrol. Those which were gone the day before another way, to gather booty, were afterwards almost all of them slain by J. Bingham, and the inhabitants of Sligo. There were slain about 3000 men, and their principal leaders. Of the English few were slain, but many hurt. This was certainly a notable victory; and profitable both for the present and for future times.' Camd. Eliz. p. 290, 1. Philippus Honorius, who reported the state of England to Philip II. at the time of the Armada, expressly ascribes the last insurrections in Ireland to Gregory XIII. His words are post ultimos illos motus, Gregorii XIII. papæ instinctu factos.' Angl. Descript. p. 232. 60 The descriptions of Ireland, by Spencer and Davies, are familiar to many. W. Lithgow's account, who visited it in 1619, before he went to Malaga, is less known. There are more rivers, lakes, brooks, strands, quagmires, bogs, and marshes, in this country, than in all Christendom besides. Travelling there in the winter, all my daily solace was sink-down comfort: boggy, plunging deeps kissing my horse's belly, while with ever-mired saddle, body and all, and often set a swimming, both I and my guides were in great danger of our lives. I was never before reduced to such a floating labyrinth, considering that in five months space I quite spoiled six horses; and myself as tired as the worst of them. The barbarian Moor, the moorish Spaniard, the Turk, and the Irishman, are the least industrious and most sluggish livers under the sun. Their fabrics are advanced three or four yards high, pavillion like incircling; erected in a singular frame of smoke-torn straw, green long-pricked turf, and rain-dropping wattles. Their several rooms or chambers, halls, parlours, kitchens, barns and stables, are all inclosed in one, and that one in the midst of a mire, where, in foul weather, they can scarcely find a dry part whereupon to repose their cloud-baptized heads. Their shirts are woven of the wool or linen of their own nature, and their penurious food semblable to their ruined condition. These only titular Christians are so ignorant in their superstitious profession of popery, that neither they, nor the greatest part of their priests, know or understand what the mystery of the mass is, which the one daily see, and the other celebrate. Ask him of his religion? He replieth, what his father and great-grandfather were, that will he be also. Hundreds of better than the common sort have demanded of me, if Jerusalem and Christ's sepulchre were in Ireland, and if the Holy Land were contiguant with St. Patrick's purgatory. At the sight of each new moon, they bequeath the cattle to her protection; or if sick or sore, they solicit her to restore them to their health. Most part of them in all their lives, have never a third part food, nature's clothing, nor a secure shelter for the winter cold. Our colonized plantations there are daily molested and nightly incumbered with these blood-sucking rebels. Their barbarous cruelty is ever executed, at all advantages, with slaughter and murder upon the Scotch and English dwellers there. These woodcarnes are but the hounds of their hunting priests, against what faction soever their malicious malignity is intended, partly for entertainment, partly for particular spleens, and lastly for a general disturbance of the country, for the priests greater security and stay. Their ploughs are drawn by horse-tails, wanting garnishing. They are only fastened with straw or wooden ropes, to their bare rumps, marching all side by side, three or four in a rank, and as many men hanging by the ends of that untoward labor. It is as bad a husbandry as I ever found among the wildest savages alive. The Irish have thousands of both kingdoms daily laboring beside them, yet they cannot learn, because they will not learn to use garnishing. So obstinate are they in their barbarous consuetude. The ale-house is their church; the priests their consorts; their exhortations, Fill and fetch more; their text, Spanish sack; their CHAP. XXXII. BOOK II. prayers, carousing; their singing of psalms, the whiffing of tobacco; their last blessing, aqua vitæ; and all their doctrine, sound drunkenness.' Lithgow's Travels and Description of Ireland, in Morgan's Phenix Britannica, vol. 1. p 212-6. Such were the results that followed the Jesuit mission in Ireland, which, eighty years before this picture was drawn, had succeeded in turning the minds of the native chiefs from the Protestant Reformation and improvements, to the papal superstitions, [see note 52,] and thereby led the bulk of the national population into lasting and ever renewed enmity against the British government, against more enlightening religion, and that civil progression which has made EngHand and Scotland so much happier, so much more respectable, and so much more respected. |