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.60 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 all 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. 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 CHAP. 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 England and Scotland so much happier, so much more respectable, and so much more respected. CHAP. XXXIII. ELIZABETH DECLINES A WAR TO RESIST PHILIP IN PORTU- XXXIII. WHEN the states of Holland in 1582, as their dif- CHAP. ficulties increased, solicited Elizabeth to take the government and defence of their country, the prospect of personal and national aggrandizement, from the union of the Netherlands with the English crown, might have tempted an ambitious mind to an acceptance of the proposal. But Elizabeth, contrary to the wishes of her most favored counsellor, declined the invitation, from her aversion to usurp the rights of another,' as well as from her desire not to pledge her government, until the last necessity, to an inveterate warfare with the Spanish power. She permitted them to have occasional supplies, with the hope of their obtaining equitable conditions of peace and safety, from their antient but oppressing 1 That her moral delicacy on this point did not satisfy Leicester, we see from his letter of 8th March 1582, to earl Shrewsbury: Touching the matter of the Low Countries, I cannot say much; but this much with grief I think on-to see such a country REFUSED as that is For to her majesty they wholly and simply offered themselves before monsieur was accepted. But her majesty's goodness was such that she would not possess what appertains to another. Few princes have so II. 2 BOOK Sovereign; and by her refusal, left the splendid prize to be obtained by the heir presumptive of France; who, by undertaking the enterprise, opened a new carcer of aggrandizement to his nation, which if his abilities had not been inferior to the great emergency, or if his life had not been unexpectedly abbreviated, might have realized in that age, one of the favorite schemes of the French revolutionists, and of Napoleon, to the unceasing peril of the British islands, by extending the sovereignty of France to the Rhine and the Zuyder Sea. He was inaugurated duke of Brabant; but his military efforts were defeated by the Prince of Parma, and in his 2 Norris was allowed to be there with some English troops and adventurers, whom the States employed advantageously in Friesland. Camd. p. 231. Our valuable antiquary imputes the new habits of drunkenness in England to have been an importation from the Netherlands by these soldiers: The English, who of all the northern nations had been least drinkers, and most commended for their sobriety, learned, by these Netherland wars, to drown themselves with immoderate drinking; and by drinking to others healths, to impair their own. Ever since, the vice has so spread itself over the whole nation, that in our days the first restrains thereof by severity of laws came forth.' ib. 231. What the moist climate led the Dutch to practise, and our troops to imitate there, was continued by them from habit when they returned home, where the cause or excuse for it had no existence. The act of 4 Jac. 1. c. 5. imposed a fine of five shillings on every person convicted of drunkenness. "The duc d'Alençon went from England with great honors to Antwerp; but the English serving in these parts so little liked the idea of fighting for French power, that six hundred of the best soldiers went over to the Spanish army, and a part of them were of great use to the prince of Parma. Camd. 242. Lord Talbot describes a singular instance of intrepidity in a British seaman on this occasion: The evening before Alençon embarked, lord Howard went to see that the ships were in readiness. Being aboard, in the night, by the forgetfulness of a boy, the ship was set on fire in the gun-room. Before it was espied, it had almost got to the powder. By great chance, a man of lord Howard's laid himself flat in the flame, and tumbled [rolled himself] in it, and so stayed the fire from the powder, till water came, otherwise it had blown up the ship, and all that were aboard. He was scorched both hands and face, and his garments burnt. It is thought her majesty will well reward him for his labor. It was one of the greatest ships.' Lodge's Illustr. v. 2. p. 259. |