Irish peerage

“ The reform of Irish history must begin in our own country, among our own people. Since it is public opinion that at the last decides what our people shall learn of their father-land, we ourselves must be the keepers of our fame and the makers of our history. Let us in Ireland therefore remember that we have an ancestry on which there is no need for us to cry shame. Chivalry, learning, patriotism, poetry, have been found there, even “in huts to which an Englishman [62] would have hesitated to give the name of a house.” ”

“ With characteristic zeal and industry begotten of their love of justice and fair play, “that the world may know” a Murray, a Linehan, a Roache, a Gargan and hosts of others of beloved memory have shed lustre on Ireland not only as men of Irish blood but as disseminators of historical truths as to the priceless part taken by men of Irish blood from the earliest days of the country’s history until the present time for the permanency of American institutions and government. In no man’s heart do the Stars and Stripes awake a more sincere and ardent patriotism than the Irish-American. ”

“ We can no more deduce the political character of the Irish from the history of the past seven hundred years than we can estimate the quality of genius in an artist whom we have only seen when grappling with a burglar. The political character of a people emerges only when they are shaping in freedom their own civilization. To get a clue in Ireland we must slip by those seven centuries of struggle and study national origins, as the lexicographer, to get the exact meaning of a word, traces it to its derivation. ”

“ It is not, however, for the Conquest only that this knowledge of the true state of Ireland ought to be acquired. The light it throws on the Irish people, their inherited and unchangeable tendencies, is of value from the parallel it presents to the latest modern developments. ”

“ No Irishman can read the history of his country from 1691-1775 without a feeling that is almost akin to horror. But these dreary annals form very instructive reading for the man of to-day who would wish to understand modern Ireland. It is always unjustifiable to blame England in any treatment of Irish history. She was, after all, the conquering nation, and the age was not an age of humanity or toleration. Still the fact must be looked squarely in the face that it was under English rule that the Irish people underwent sufferings hardly paralleled in history. ”

“ For these reasons very little is said about pedigree in Ireland these days. The army that is advancing does not look back. The decaying nobility dare not question nor criticise lest they may be trampled upon. The only people who talk about their ancestors are the peasants, who trace their descent from the Irish kings. ”

“ The motives which form the distinctive characteristics of the Irish people are, and always have been, enthusiastic devotion to their religious convictions, unflinching loyalty to the principle of nationality, and a passionate attachment to the soil of their fatherland. Is not the history of England's rule in Ireland a heart-breaking record of systematic oppression upon each and all of these inherent principles of Irish character? ”

“ The Irish are, unfortunately, not so; and yet, what is English or Scottish history to compare with Irish? Ireland was a land of saints and scholars when Britons were painted savages. Wise and noble laws, based upon the spirit of Christianity, were administered in Erin, and valuable books were written ere the Britons were as far advanced in civilization as the Blackfeet Indians. In morals and intellect, in Christianity and civilization, in arms, art, and science, Ireland shone like a star among the nations when darkness enshrouded the world. ”

“ Irishmen are often taunted with the fact that their history is yet unwritten, but that the Irish, as a nation, have been careless of their past is refuted by the facts which I have mentioned. A people who alone in Europe preserved, not in dry chronicles alone, but illuminated and adorned with all that fancy could suggest in ballad, and tale, and rude epic, the history of the mound-raising period, are not justly liable to this taunt. Until very modern times, history was the one absorbing pursuit of the Irish secular intellect, the delight of the noble, and the solace of the vile. ”

“ And there are, beyond question, three millions of former Irishmen, citizens to- day of the United States, on whom the glance of many an English statesman, with any just pretension to the name, must fall. Therefore do we say that now England must respect Ireland.
That respect is daily heightened by the greater comfort and easier circumstances, though still far too wretched on the whole, of the Irish at home, which have been mainly brought about by the help received from their exiled countrymen. ”

“ Another historian takes up the same taunt—a true scholar and worker who has added to our knowledge of the close of Stuart rule in Ireland. “The Irish,” says Dr. Murray, “are indeed a strange race.... No monument marks the site where the Irish hero and the Irish thinker repose.... The graves of a patriot like Owen Roe O’Neill, and of a statesman like Archbishop King ... are unknown. The thrill that an Englishman feels in Westminster Abbey when he enters the presence of the mighty dead is denied an Irishman, for he has not taken care of the dust of his immortals.” ”

“ Then again, as to history, all the world knows that since the Flood the Irish have never done any thing else than make love, illicit whiskey, and beat each other. What nonsense, then, to talk about the ancient cultivation of the land, of its high rank in literature, and its excellence in art. A stone bishop, with a nose like a negro, and a crosier like a garden-rake, are the only evidences of our ancestors' taste in sculpture; and some doggrel verses in Irish, explaining how King Phelim O'Toole cheated a brother monarch out of his smallclothes, are about the extent of our historic treasures. ”

“ It is very certain that Ireland of all countries, if left to itself, would never of its own will allow history to lie in a backwater among the flotsam of the current. History was the early study of the Irish, the inspiration of their poets and writers. Every tribesman of old knew, not only the great deeds and the famous places of his own clan, but of the whole of Ireland. In the lowliest cabin the songs of Irish poets lived on for hundreds of years, and dying fathers left to sons as their chief inheritance the story of their race. ”

“ The Irish, nevertheless, have by long effort been brought under authority to the English mind in history, and an Anglicised Ireland now lies in the wake of England, a laggard in the trough of the wave, rocked by the old commonplaces of the early Victorian age. The hope that our people may win out of that trough lies to a great extent in the new sails set by the National University, if they may at last catch the fresh breezes of Heaven, and be swept into the open sea of free knowledge and candid thinking. ”

“ It is a triumphant proof that Irishmen are not indifferent to Irish history—a fault of which they have been too frequently accused; and as many of the clergy have been most earnest and generous in their efforts to promote the circulation of the work, it is gratifying to be able to adduce this fact also in reply to the imputations, even lately cast upon the ecclesiastics of Ireland, of deficiency in cultivated tastes, and of utter neglect of literature. ”

“ While the Irish soldiery spilled their blood in the field, the bards exerted their genius in the closet, to forward the interest of the royal fugitives, and by their songs and poems, proved no mean auxiliaries to the cause in which the nation had embarked. They roused the people to arms, in defence of the legitimate monarch, and excited the utmost enthusiasm for the professor of the ancient faith, and the descendant of the renowned Milesian race of Ireland. ”

“ It is the outcome of a desire and a want which have been long felt that the Irish people should know accurately and intimately everything connected with the past history of their country, with its literature, its music, its antiquities, and its art. The same idea which is now taking visible shape, presented itself to the minds of the leaders of the Young Ireland movement fifty years ago, when a series of little books was published which have since been the companions, the inspiration, and the delight of two generations of Irishmen at home and abroad. ”

“ Several of the early kings of France and other countries were educated in Ireland, which was for three or four centuries the most learned country in the world. Great numbers of Irishmen were employed as professors and teachers in the schools and colleges of England and the Continent. Charlemagne, Charles the Bold, and other monarchs of the Middle Ages called learned men from Ireland as guests and as tutors in their courts, and the influence of Irish scholars was greater than that of those from any other country. ”

“ A half-commiserating tone of patronage is quite as offensive as open contempt; and yet there have been instances where English Catholic writers, while obliged to show some deference to Ireland and the Irish, in order to secure the patronage and support of that country for their publications, have at the same time, when they dared, thrown out insinuations against peculiarities of Irish character, and made efforts to discredit Irish historical documents. ”

“ The flowing verses of the Anglo-Norman were impossible for men who delighted in the trammels of the native prosody; and in the heyday of French influence, the patrons of letters in Ireland probably insisted on hearing the foreign compositions in their original dress, as these nobles were doubtless sufficiently versed in Norman-French to be able to appreciate them. But a still more potent factor was the conservatism of the hereditary Irish poet families. A close corporation, they appear to have resented every innovation, and were content to continue the tradition of their ancestors. ”

“ This bishop he brought over to the king's interest, and gained his entire confidence by a conversation carried on between both parties in private. The Duke always spoke in English and the bishop in Irish, as neither understood the language [Pg 615] of the other so as to venture upon communicating his sentiments in it with any degree of accuracy or precision." [17]
The Irish themselves never neglected literature, and whenever their political star was in the ascendant the fortunes of their bards and learned men rose with it. ”

“ Tales of heroes, triumphs of ancient kings, were written in the form in which we now know them, genealogies of the tribes and old hymns of Irish saints. Clerics and laymen rivalled one another in zeal. In kings' courts, in monasteries, in schools, annals of Ireland from the earliest to the latest time were composed. Men laboured to satisfy the desire of the Irish to possess a complete and brilliant picture of Ireland from all antiquity. ”

“ In English history, where certain general lines of knowledge have been laid down as the common property of educated men, serious lapses are held a reproach: in Irish history an ambassador from the United States to Great Britain and Ireland can allow himself to tell us that an “Ulster Scot” is no more an Irishman than a man would be a horse if born in a stable. ”

“ For Ireland history is not a subject in itself. In our primary and intermediate education Irish history is now a department of English language and literature. At the age when impressions made on a youth’s mind are certain to become the all-compelling habits of his later life, it is suggested to him that the history of his country is less important than the rules of English grammar, and that the achievements of his father may at the best rank with the model sentences in which English essayists write of Friendship and Gardens and Christmas. ”

“ Never did a champion leave his followers at his death and decline to more terrible despair. Friend and foe admit his immensity. He was the greatest Irishman that ever lived or seemingly could live. In his own person he contained the whole genius of the Celt. Ireland could not hold his emotions, which overflowed into the world for expression. He rose on the crest of a religious agitation, but, Emancipation won, he had the foresight to associate the Irish cause with the advent of Reform and Liberalism throughout Europe. ”

“ We do not think it possible to get a real insight into the Irish questions that loom so very large in politics to-day without reading of some of the methods adopted in ‘settling Ireland’ in Tudor times. ”

“ From the beginning of the fourteenth century English power in Ireland was on the decline. The Irish princes, driven to desperation by the exactions and cruelties of the officials, adopted generally a more hostile attitude, while the great Norman nobles, who had obtained grants of land in various parts of Ireland, began to intermarry with the Irish, adopted their language, their laws, their dress, and their customs, and for all practical purposes renounced their allegiance to the sovereign of England. ”

“ CHAPTER I. HOW THE ANCIENT IRISH PEOPLE WERE GOVERNED BY THEIR KINGS AND CHIEFS.
There were in Ireland, from times beyond the reach of history, kings, who were of various grades according to the extent of the country or district they ruled over. The highest of all was the king of Ireland, who lived in the royal palace at Tara. He was called the Ard-ri [ard-ree] , i.e., ‘High king’ or Over-king, because he claimed authority over all the others. There was also a king over each of the five provinces—Leinster, Munster, Connaught, Ulster, and Meath—who were subject to the Ard-ri. ”