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THE NATIONAL
DEMOCRAT 77
June, 1907
IN THE LIBRARY.
Tublixhers are requested net to tend boalg; for review‘
The (Editor: will venture to apply far mcfx work: as they
may deem it desirable to natiee.
FOR POLITICAL BOURBONS
STUDIES IN IRISH HISTORY: I603-I649. Being
a Course of Lectures delivered before the Irish
Literary Society of London. Second Series.
Edited by R. Barry O’Brien. Dublin 2
Browne and Nolan, Ltd. 33. 6d.
.UNDER the presidency of Mr. Barry O’Brien the
Irish Literary Society of London has been disen-
gaging many activities in the neglected department
of Irish history. This new-born enthusiasm which
is planting Flanders with memorials has raised other
monuments calee peremzius in the figure of two
volumes representing courses of lectures delivered
before the Society in the last two years, and will,
no doubt, be still further fruitful with the continu-
ation of similar organised endeavour. The first
'volume, with Sir William Butler’s eloquent and
provocative study of Cromwell’s campaign in Ire-
land, has been before the public for some time.
The second series, which is now in our hands, takes
up the knotted threads of Irish history at an earlier
date, and in four papers covers the period which
extends from the Jacobean plantation of Ulster to
the arrival of Cromwell in 164.9.
The tragedy is played out in a prologue and
three acts. The Rev. Mr. Cox-speaker
of the prologue-tells of a nerveless, prostrate
country, prey to the thieving founders of a thieving
aristocracy. The history of the Plantation of Ulster,
in State papers and Patent Rolls, is a mere narrative
of brigandage, tricked out with chicane and perjury.
No absurdity was too grotesque to serve the pur-
pose of these bandits; They hardly troubled to be
hypocritical. The bare word of a professional
‘beggar is enough to justify the conversion of a
barony from its legal owners to the private use of
His Majesty’s Attorney-General.
Into this cockpit of strug ling rapacities descends
one of England’s master-statesmen. VVentworth
was the first of a long line of these masterful
Englishmen with easily interchangeable mottoes-
"‘ Thorough ”, “resolute ‘government’’, or some
other less succinct Indian phrase. His success was
equal to the success of the greatest of them. Irish,
Anglo-Irish, and Puritans--he antagonised all in
turn. He reformed out of existence the Irish
Church, which had grown Calvinist, following the
general law of these sectarian churches wherever
they come into Contact with a predominant
Catholic population. His other amazing project
of Connaught plantation fell through, not by reason
of its brazen illegality, but through pressure of ex-
ternal circumstances. He destroyed the trade in
woollens, and gained a reputation as the founder of
a linen trade which existed in Ireland since the
beginning of the fifteenth century. Above all, he
squeezed and cozened the Irish into grants, and still
more grants of ready money for his royal master.
Then came 1641, with a land transfer in Ulster,
and, incidental to the reconveyance, a history-
massacre of more Protestants than were to be found
within the four seas of Ireland. And so the
country drifted into the maze of 1645.
The difiiculty, like the contemporary welter in
Germany, had its origin in the land. Some medu:
vivuemli-another Edict of Nantes-might have
been arrived at in Ireland and in the Empire if the
only cleavage had been along religious lines; but
in both countries difference of belief involved a
change in the ownership of the soil. The Supreme
Council at Kilkenny or the signatories to the
Treaty of Augsburg might fix whatever arbitrary
date they chose, at which the operation of transfer
was to be regarded as legally complete, but both
parties soon discovered that no barriers within their
power to set up could stem the movement until the
angry passions that had been liberated had run their
full course. In modern history there is no parallel
to the ferocity of these religious-agrarian wars that
followed. The horror of the Thirty Years’ XVar
stands without other example than the contem-
porary war in Ireland.
There is no more discouraging and profitable
reading in Irish history than this period ofthe Con-
federation. The headship of O'Neill had given the
native Irish some idea of national unity in action.
The Confederation, by introducing other elements
not fully assimilated to the nation, complicates the
action, and adds the interest of a modern political
intrigue. The intrigue is especially modern in its
failure. These “large, simple-minded ” Irish of
Rinuccinils description, successful at the Yellow-
ford and Benburb, in tithe-war and agrarian agita-
tion, were no match for the chamberings of
Ormonde or the lobbying at Oxford. At the same
time one reads with a certain satisfaction the early
correspondence of .Secretary Bellings. There is
something that satisfies what are not merely snob-
bish instincts in the weighty proceedings of the
Council. ‘It is the first example, we meet since
O’Neill (and the last up to the present hour) in