Irish Review (Dublin)

Irish History in English Magazines (Continued) Author(s): Miriam Alexander Source: The Irish Review (Dublin), Vol. 3, No. 26 (Apr., 1913), pp. 99-103 Published by: Irish Review (Dublin) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30063721 . Accessed: 16/06/2014 11:20

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By MIRIAM ALEXANDER

(Continued)

C.W.C. waxes eloquent over the Treaty of Limerick. He discreetly avoids all allusion to the fact that it was violated before the ink had dried; that the intention of William's representatives was, from the very first, to violate it. Unfortunately for Ireland they met in Patrick Sarsfield a man too essentially honourable and chivalrous to realise such inherent perfidy. Like Richard Grace, he held that a gentleman does not betray his trust, and for that high- souled belief Ireland has paid through two centuries of blood and tears. C.W.C. writes of King William's leniency. He does not write of the Irish families who had taken no part in the war, and yet were dispossessed in order that their estates might be granted to King William's mistress. He also makes the very remarkable statement, that the Irish " despised the leniency of King William." Considering that the proof of that alleged leniency was what Greene has described as " the most terrible legal tyranny under which a nation has ever groaned," it is possible that they did not recognise the sentiment by the name applied to it by C.W.C. William admittedly took into his service any Irish soldier he could get. He was a judge of soldiers. C.W.C. goes on: " William's wisest policy, as Froude has pointed )ut, would have been to expel the Catholics as Louis XIV. had the Hugenots. In any case, their Hierarchy should have been sup- pressed, and stringent laws passed against the importation of foreign Priests. The real upas tree of Ireland was the Roman Catholic religion which overshadowed the land in the seventeenth centuries." This point of view is, of course, entirely a matter of opinion. There are people who hold toleration the most hideous of crimes, and C.W.C. is evidently one of these. But whatever his personal feel- ings, his remark that the Church of Rome "overshadowed" Ireland, in the eighteenth century, implies an ignorance so profound that it can hardly be genuine. If he will take the trouble to study the Penal Code of which he apparently has never heard, he will learn that, in the Ireland of the eighteenth century, " a Papist was not presumed to exist." He will learn that a Roman Catholic might not, on penalty of outlawry or death, own land; follow any known 99

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profession; be employed even in the most menial position; possess sword, pistol, horse, or servant; be married, christened or buried; educate his chieldren at home or abroad. He will learn that the Protestant friend who aided him-and in many cases the Protestants stood nobly by their Catholic neighbours, as the Catholics them- selves are the first to admit-ran the risk of a year's imprisonment. C.W.C.'s ignorance transcends itself when he writes of the Irish Catholic. To drag religion into an article professedly historical is nearly always a mistake; but since he has not only done so, but, with the most lamentable ill-taste has flung in a bitter gibe at a creed he does not profess, and of which he is evidently entirely ignorant, it would be interesting to learn in what manner the Irish Roman Catholic in Penal Days displayed " to congregations wide, devotions every grace, except the heart?" Certainly it was not at those secret masses on hillside and in glen of which the alter stones still remain. In no part of his article does C.W.C. betray greater ignorance of his subject than in those words about the Roman Catholic Hierarchy, for if he had known anything, he would have known that the very course he declares should have been adopted was adopted, and that for close on a century the men, whose privilege it was to preserve the Irish Catholic from becoming an absolute Pagan, took their lives in their hands. Priest hunting was at times and in places a recognised sport, and more than one Irish squireen of the eighteenth century bore the soubriquet " Burnchapel" before his name. In Davis's words:

" They bribed the flock, they bribed the son To sell the priest and rob the sire; Their dogs were trained alike to run Upon the track of wolf and friar

What wonder that our step betrays The freed man-born in Penal Days!" What wonder indeed! When those who share C.W.C.'s views and his ignorance, gibe at the peasant, label him "idle," "thriftless," "slovenly," "untruthful," terms far too often heard in Ireland, does no thought ever come to them of the five generations during which I00

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his ancestors were less than the beasts? The five generations during which, to survive, the Irish Catholic had to practice every possible subterfuge-had to hide every suggestion of prosperity. Is it to be wondered at that the nation is slow at forgetting the lesson inculcated through five generations; slow at losing the trace of what one of their own poets so aply called " The old hereditary badge of suffering and scorn?" There is no crueller chapter in all history than the story of that slow, deliberate, moral destruction of the Irish nation, anad no finer than the story of those men-the Priests and the schoolmasters- " God's second priest," who " handed on the torch," who kept the race from utter degradation, and led it literally "through night to light." ...... C.W.C., not content with open mis-statements, is fertile in what must reluctantly be described as the untruth by implication. Read- ing his article, one would assume that Ulster was the only part of Ireland where any trade had ever been carried on. The South of Ireland in point of fact did far more in the illicit wool-traffic with the Continent, and Connacht's trade with Spain has almost passed into a proverb. Then again, when bewailing the emigrations from Ulster, C.W.C. writes as if no single man had ever been driven overseas from Leinster, Connacht or Munster, whereas the estimate of the Irish soldiers who' died in French service in the first fifty years of the eighteenth century is close on five hundred thousand. C.W.C., in the articles, mentions the emigration of twenty thousand Ulster Protestants, and again, of thirty thousand, and- when the Test Act was imposed-of a number vaguely stated as "many thousands more"; but -e makes no mention of the greatest emigration of all-that which took place after " The Turn out." Indeed, the most singular thing about his whole article is its silence on three of the best known incidents of Ulster history. The revival of Cromwell's policy, by which a thousand families of Ulster Catholics received a notice couched in much the terms dear to the Lord Protector: "A-B. You are given twenty-four hours to take yourself to hell or Connacht." Finding, when they attempted to stay, that their houses were burnt over their heads-the unhappy "Papists" had no choice but to obey and emigrate on foot to Con- nacht, where, among the trackless wilds ruled by Humanity Dick, they were treated with a mercy denied them in civilised Ulster. C.W.C. ignores this incident. He also ignores the "Battle of the Diamond "-not, indeed, that it is an affair which any Irishman need wish to remember, though it is unfortunately a part of Ulster-and iOi

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Irish history. He indulges in a reference and an omission, both very characteristic. The reference is to the White Boys-the omission is of their Northern Protestant equivalent, the Peep-o'-Day- Boys. But it is in his last historical pronouncement that C.W.C. touches the zenith, for though he ignores the Rebellion of '98, as far as Ulster is concerned, he has a word for it. He refers to it as " that last frenzied effort of the Celts and Roman Catholics to extir- pate the Protestants." As an epitome of what happened in '98 this is quite the most startling inaccuracy ever perpretrated by any professional defamer of Ireland; for here are facts - All the chief leaders of '98 were Protestants-Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Wolfe Tone, William Orr, Arthur O'Connor, the two Sheares, Henry Joy McCracken, and James Hope. They were enthusiasts - visionaries perhaps - men who saw their country's best interests stultified by an aristocracy, more or less corrupt, and a yeomanry altogether brutal. If C.W.C. can prove that the extirpation of Protestants was ever promulgated, or even suggested, by a single one of these men-then he has discovered some source of Irish history hitherto unknown. There were admittedy atrocities-there always are in every rebellion-but posterity, which has never been allowed to forget the burning of the barn at Scullabogue, and the massacre on Wexford Bridge, has been carefully kept in ignorance of the butcheries at Dunlavin and at Carnew-of the appalling outrages committed be- fore, during and after the Rebellion by the yeomanry, and of Beresford's Riding School. To anyone knowing the facts of the case, the moderation of the rebels must appear extraordinary, for they were men goaded to frenzy, by a series of insane brutalities and insaner injustices. Now why does C.W.C., who professes to epitomise Ulster's history, entirely ignore "the Turn-out "-to give the Ulster Rising its local name? Henry Joy McCracken, William Orr and James Hope were all Ulstermen-and every child not brought up in utter ignorance knows of the large share Ulster took in the matter. To an Irish reader the reason for C.W.C.'s silence on this most important incident of Ulster's history is obvious and lamentable. He stands for that small body of extremists which, possibly from lack of moral courage to admit itself in the wrong, still upholds the ideas inherited from forefathers who did their utmost, not only to ruin the Irish people morally, but to destroy all traces of their civilization. J02

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He is merely carrying on a tradition and had he not carried it on under the aegis of "Blackwood" his somewhat hysterical effort, backed up by authorities avowedly biassed and made from the ambush of initials, might be passed over as unworthy of notice. " The Wrongs of Ulster," however, is Irish history as given to England by one of England's best known magazines--and for that reason, if for no other, Ireland has the right to demand statements which will satisfy an historical expert-has a right to facts instead of a perversion which, at worst, is a premeditated fabrication, and at best that half- truth so truly described by Tennyson as "ever the blackest of lies."

1o3

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