William Francis Thomas Butler

“ But with confiscation and accompanying colonisation came the introduction of a new element, alien in blood, in religion, in ideals, bringing a disturbing factor into the nation's life, preventing the steady development among the older element of such a feeling of loyalty and of content with the regime finally set up under James I.
It is so hard for us nowadays to realise this spirit of loyalty, that modern writers often altogether overlook or deny its existence. ”

“ He told a Kilkenny audience that nowhere in the Austrian dominions, or in the various German States would a man's creed shut him out from military command. In the United Kingdom alone did a man's religion exclude him out from the service of his lawful sovereign.
It is not from the ranks of the old Irish gentry, whether of pure Irish or of Anglo-Norman descent, whether Protestants or Catholics, not from the Ormonds or Fingals, the Clanrickards or Inchiquins that the majority of the leaders of Irish national movements in later times have sprung. ”

“ There seems no reason to believe that the spirit of loyalty to the person of the monarch which we find so marked among the Catholic nobles and gentry under the Stuarts would not have grown, and spread downward among the people, if unhampered by the constant vexatious interference of the State with both the conscience and the estates of all Catholics, until it finally became a feeling of attachment to existing institutions. ”

“ A very curious German publication, published in 1883, also throws further light on the German attitude. It purports to be a correspondence between two German students, one of whom is visiting in Livonia and one in Ireland, and the comparison drawn between the two ancient kingdoms is, in the light of recent events, very instructive. The Irish peasantry are ruled by English landowners, the Letts by German ones. Where the Germans conquer, he says, they reorganize, and the people benefit. Where the English conquer, they sink to the level of the peasantry they misrule. ”

“ The large resident landlord population could not fail to develop a certain amount of sympathy for the lower orders with whom they were in daily contact. The lower orders often transferred to the new landowners some part of the attachment they had felt for their former chiefs. In particular a close bond often united those few of the old houses who had retained their lands with their tenants. And bad as the eighteenth century in Ireland was it does not perhaps after all compare so unfavourably with the same period in Continental countries. ”

“ In Ireland the colonist is marked off from the native by race and religion, but the language of the former has been adopted by the latter. In the Baltic provinces the two elements are separate in race and in language, but the peasantry of Lettish or Esthonian blood has the same Lutheran religion as its masters. And both landowner and peasant have over them a foreign master differing from them both in race, in religion and in language. ”

“ Yet the evil seed of hatred and distrust sown by the oppressors of the seventeenth and eighteenth century bears evil fruit up to the present day. Bohemian peasants even now instinctively distrust the nobles of their country, even if they belong to their own race, and are in sympathy with the national cause. ”

“ But in Ireland the wood, the turf bog, the mountain pastures belonged to the landlord. [17] Each tenant dealt as an individual with the owner of the soil. He was personally free, for under James I. the last traces of serfdom had been abolished; but on the other hand, as a tenant at will he stood absolutely at the landlord's mercy. Different conditions, of course, prevailed in Ulster from the first, amongst the Protestant settlers, and in that province after bitter struggles the "Ulster custom" was recognised at least as regards Protestant tenants. ”

“ A common religion, common disabilities began to draw the two older elements together. The conscious idea of a nation begins to appear. But the test of nationality becomes almost a religious one. The descendant of the planter of Leix or the undertaker of Munster, if a Catholic, begins to be classed as an Irishman. The Protestant heirs of Brian of the Tributes feel and speak as Englishmen.
By the year 1641 we find somewhat more than half the island still in possession of Catholics, some of them the descendants of planters of the previous generation. ”

“ The poorer among the colonists in many cases adopted the religion of the people among whom they dwelled. And for the mass of the people there was always the possibility of escape from all disabilities, and of a rise into the dominant caste provided only that they embraced the dominant religion. ”

“ His confiscations were carried out at the expense of the old Irish; his colonists were almost all British; they were exclusively Protestant. No Catholic and no "mere Irishman" could acquire any lands once set out to colonists. To the two elements of the population the Celtic or "mere Irish" and the Anglo-Norman or "old English," whom we may now begin to call the Anglo-Irish, had been added under Elizabeth a third element the new English. This was strengthened under James; kept apart as far as possible by a system of dense colonisation from the older elements ”

“ But if, in the seventeenth century, the earth-tillers actually benefited by the confiscations, the eighteenth century saw a great deterioration in their position. Up to the epoch of the penal laws the State had attempted to secure some fixity of tenure for those who actually cultivated the soil. ”

“ This was the case with a very large proportion of the English nation at the time. But under James Puritanism had made strides, High Church Anglicanism had developed and grown definitely apart from Rome, the Scots in the north added a strong fanatical element. ”

“ Many if not most of the communes owned and still own mountain pastures, forests, etc. A free peasantry, too, survived in many districts. There are still some Protestant communities in Styria and others of the Austrian lands. ”