King of Ireland

“ Those old, barbaric Irish kings and chieftains must have been lovers of the beautiful, for they almost invariably fixed their strongholds not only in the fairest parts, but in places commanding the fairest prospects. There are hardly two other places in Ireland the surroundings of which are more beautiful than those of Tara and Uisneach, or from which fairer prospects are to be seen. They were, from far-back antiquity, the seats of those by whom the country was supposed to be ruled, for it often happened that he who was styled chief king had but little control over his vassals. ”

“ An Irish body, on Irish soil, no matter what its constitution, could not remain aloof from the needs, and blind to the facts, of Ireland, like strangers in another land. The good-will of the people abounded; even the poorer farmers showed in a better dress, in cleanliness, in self-respect, how they had been stirred by the dream of freedom, the hope of a country. The connection with England, the dependence on the king, was fully accepted, and Ireland prepared to tax herself out of all proportion to her wealth for imperial purposes. ”

“ The last chief king of Ireland of the ancient line was the Maelsechlainn whom Brian had for a time dispossessed, and when he died in 1022 no king of Tara was ever after able to enforce even the slight general control exercised in former times, and the king James, who united the rule of England and Scotland, was the next real king of the whole of Ireland. ”

“ The progress of the ill-fated monarch through Ireland, from Kinsale to Dublin was, in every sense, a royal one. The Irish masses, ever grateful to any one who makes sacrifices, or who even appears to 258make them, in their behalf, turned out in all their strength. A brilliant cavalcade, headed by the dashing Duke of Tyrconnel, escorted the king from town to town. His collateral descent from King Edward Bruce, freely chosen by Ireland early in the fourteenth century, was remembered. James was, therefore, really welcomed as King of Ireland. ”

“ Thirdly, it will be easily seen, that the author of the pamphlet delivers his sentiments upon this particular with the utmost caution and respect, as any impartial reader will observe.
The second paragraph, which it is said will be taken notice of as a motive to find the bill, is what the author says of Ireland’s being a dependent kingdom; he explains all the dependence he knows of, which is a law made in Ireland, whereby it is enacted, “that whoever [Pg 134] is King of England shall be King of Ireland.” ”

“ Well, one might say, it had been for Ireland if she had developed that assimilating power which made her successive conquerors in process of time the feeders of her greatness, but the Irish would not and could not. Instead, they developed the pride of race that no momentary defeat could down. They became inured to battle and dreamt of battle when the peace of an hour was given them. When the four kings of Ireland were feasted in Dublin by King Richard II. of England, an English chronicler remarked, "Never were men of ruder manners" ”

“ The King of Ireland’s Son was home again, but as he kept asking about a King and a Kingdom no one had ever heard of, people thought he had lost his wits in his search for the Enchanter of the Black Back-Lands. He rode abroad every day to ask strangers if they knew where the King of the Land of Mist had his dominion and he came back to his father’s every night in the hope that one would be at the Castle who could tell him where the place that he sought was. ”

“ They do not want another nation, and an unfriendly one, to tell the world what Ireland and its people are. The ear of the world has been held by England with regard to Ireland, particularly in this country, since the foundation of it. Very few men in America who were not Irish have realized that the Irish question is, as I have said, more largely material than sentimental. In 1696, the King of England sent to Ireland a commission of five men to examine the country and report to the king and council as to the best means of holding the Irish in subjection. ”

“ Two races certainly were mingled in the ancient Irish, the fair or auburn haired with blue eyes, and the dark haired with eyes of gray or brown. The Milesians appear to have reached Ireland through Spain. They came swiftly to power, more than a thousand years before our Lord, and divided the country into four provinces or kingdoms, with an ard-ri, or high-king, ruling all in a loose way as to service, taxes, and allegiance. The economic life was almost entirely pastoral. Riches were counted in herds of cattle. ”

“ We see here the full contrast between the ideal of kingship in Ireland and that which grew up among the Norman conquerors of the Saxons. The Irish king was always in theory and often in fact a real representative, duly elected by the free suffrage of his tribesmen; he was not owner of the tribal land, as the duke of the Normans was; he was rather the leader of the tribe, chosen to guard their common possessions. The communal system of Ireland stands here face to face with the feudal system of the Normans. ”

“ So the King of Ireland’s Son and Flann, Fedelma and Gilveen bade good-by to the Queen, to the Spae-Woman and to the Spae-Woman’s house, and started their journey towards the King’s Castle with MacStairn the Woodman who walked beside their horses, a big axe in his hands. ”

“ It is compiled in a very artificial way from the pedigrees of various Irish dynasties, in a way so artificial that one name, the origin of which can be traced to the sleepy blundering of a copyist, a name which never belonged to any man, is found as the name of a king of Ireland in the list, with appropriate details telling how he acquired the sovereignty and how he lost it, and101 how many years he reigned. On the other hand, we are told that the fivefold division of Ireland was older than the Gaelic occupation. ”

“ The political aspect of affairs in Ireland is ever and ever improved by the periodic and frequent visits of royalty. These ought to do much good, for the idea should be fostered that the people of Ireland have the same king as Britain across the Channel. Some there be, in both islands, who would have this forgotten, and many happy ideas for the encouragement of Irish affairs have been strangled by hands both from within and without the green isle. ”

“ From time immemorial two adverse parties have always existed among the Catholics of Ireland. The first are called the 'old Irish.' They are most numerous in Ulster, where they seem to have their head-quarters; for even the Earl of Tyrone placed himself at their head, and maintained a protracted war against Elizabeth. The second may be called the 'old English,'—a race introduced into Ireland in the reign of Henry II., the fifth king in succession from William the Conqueror; so called to distinguish them from the 'new English,' who have come into the kingdom along with the modern heresy. ”

“ The kingdom of Ireland has been, is, and of right ought to be, subordinate unto, and dependent upon the Imperial Crown of Great Britain, as being inseparably united and annexed thereunto; and the King, with the consent of the Lords and Commons of Great Britain, in Parliament, hath power to make laws of sufficient force to bind the kingdom and people of Ireland. ”

“ Yet, from the hour of that union of the houses of York and Lancaster, it needed no extraordinary wisdom to foresee that the exemption of the Anglo-Irish nobles from the supremacy of their nominal King must come to an end, and the freedom of the old Irish from any formidable external danger must also close. The union of the Roses, so full of the promise of peace for England, was to form the date of a new era in her relations with Ireland. ”

“ In fact all the Irish monarchs may be best described not as Kings of Ireland, but Kings of the Irish. They had no power to alienate, or transfer, the tribe lands from the people, and held them only in trust for their voluntary subjects. Modern Irish landlordism is founded on the feudal, not the tribal, system. Hence its unfitness to satisfy a people in whom lingers the heredity of the ancient Celtic custom. King Brian, the most absolute of all the Irish rulers, is described by some annalists as “Emperor of the Irish.” ”

“ The Anglo-Irish, who formed the majority of the Supreme Council, connected by blood and language with England, had entered into the war, purely as one of religious liberty. Nationally, they had, apart from the civil disabilities imposed on religious grounds, no antipathy, no interest, hostile to the general body of English loyalists, represented in Ireland by the King's lieutenant, Ormond. On his side, that nobleman gave all his thoughts to, and governed all his actions by the exigencies of the royal cause, throughout the three Kingdoms. ”

“ While England was Catholic, it showed no mercy to Catholic Ireland; I doubt much, if Ireland had become Protestant to a man, when England had become Protestant as a nation, that she would have shown more consideration for the Celtic race. But the additional cruelties with which the Irish were visited, for refusing to discard their faith at the bidding of a profligate king, are simply matters of history. ”

“ The cause of Ireland has found a hundred fields of foreign fame, where the dying Irishman might murmur with Sarsfield, "Would that this blood were shed for Ireland", and history records the sacrifice as made in no other cause.
Ireland, too, owns an empire on which the sun never sets.
REFERENCES:
Sigerson: Bards of the Gael and Gall; O'Callaghan: History of the Irish Brigades; Mitchel: Life of Hugh O'Neill; Green: The Making of Ireland and its Undoing, Irish Nationality, The Old Irish World; Taylor: Life of Owen Roe O'Neill; Todhunter: Life of Patrick Sarsfield ”

“ I have but one wish under heaven, and that is for the liberty and prosperity of Ireland. I am for leaving England to the English, Scotland to the Scotch; but we must have Ireland for the Irish. I will not be content until I see not a single man in any office, from the lowest constable to the lord chancellor, but Irishmen. This is our land, and we must have it. ”

“ He says, "The Irish, whom we have seen such good soldiers in France and Spain, have always fought poorly at home"! They had not fought poorly at home. It took four hundred years of English effort to complete, merely on its face, the conquest of Ireland, and all of that long sweep of the sword of Time was a time of battle. The Irish were fought with every appliance of war, backed by the riches of a prospering, strongly organized country, and impelled persistently by the greed of land and love of mastery ”

“ 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. ”

“ Our aim is the establishment of an Irish Republic, for the simple and sole reason that no other ending of our quarrel with England could be either adequate or final. This is the one central and vital point of agreement among all who are worthy of the name of Irish Nationalists-that Ireland is a separate nation-separate in thought, mind, in ideals and outlooks. ”

“ I trust that the opportunity of making a great advance on this question of Irish government will not long be delayed, and when that opportunity comes my firm belief is that a greater measure of agreement than hitherto as to the ultimate solution will be found possible, and that a keener appreciation will be felt of the benefits that will flow to the Irish communities and British people throughout the world, and that Ireland, from being disaffected, impoverished, and discouraged, will take its place as a strong, harmonious, and contented portion of the empire. ”

“ Let the end of a great life become sublime in the history of Great Britain and Ireland by a deed of magnanimity and wisdom. It is not too late to win Irish loyalty for a union which leaves her as free as England—the only union that can satisfy Ireland and make the British Empire more powerful than ever. ”

“ While the knowledge of Right was advancing over the face of Europe, like the sun, from the east, Ireland was still in the darkness, without the quiet of the sepulchre. Every nation, in its turn, made some noble acquisition in freedom, or religion, or science, or dominion. Ireland lay, like the form of the first man, with all the rapid splendours of the new creation rising and glowing round him ”

“ Her coming to the throne, together with her fanatic devotion to the Reformation and an equal hatred of the old religion and all who clung to it, ushered in for Ireland two and a half centuries of almost unbroken misfortune. You cannot make people over. Some may take their opinions with their interest; others prefer to die rather than surrender theirs, and glory in the sacrifice. The proclamations of Elizabeth had no persuasion in them for the Irish. Her proscriptions were only another English sword at Ireland's throat. ”

“ The Fenians stood for an Irish Republic, and so do we. No policy which left England in control of the Irish Nation could be regarded as final. There is only one way, and that is to get the absolute and complete independence of Ireland, free from English rule and English domination. ”

“ It is true that towards the end of the period we may see the faint beginnings of a new national spirit, a spirit raised not as in other countries, by common traditions and a common history, but one aroused by the unwise policy of England. But the beginning was faint and could come to nothing until a great leader appeared and until England's difficulties made Ireland's opportunity. ”