A Folio volume of, for the most part, unpublished documents
drawn from the Record Office of the Vatican, ranging over the whole period between 1216 and 1547, and referring exclusively to matters connected with the history of the British Empire, must be a publication calculated to attract the attention of an English student. Nor, on the whole, will he be disappointed in his expec- tation of finding matter of interest in this volume, although much is of secondary importance, as illustrative of merely specific relations between particular Sees and the Court of Rome. We owe this publication to the praiseworthy assiduity of Father Theiner; the present Keeper of the Vatican Records, who has distinguished himself by a display of literary activity in contrast to the dead blank that marks his predecessors' tenures of the same office. Doubtless he has no little opposition to contend against in his in- novating tendencies for publication, which must be taken into account against any deficiencies that may appear in his labours as editor. If Father Theiner neither communicates all he might communicate on his subject, nor gives what he does give with the accuracy of an unimpeachable editor, we must yet be thankful to him for having broken the rule of dead silence which previously was absolute in his province, and for having rendered public materials of capital importance.
The title of the present volume is a singular misnomer for a collection that comprises documents on topics so foreign to purely Irish and Scotch interests as Henry's VIII.'s divorce suit. There are also several errors of the kind which proceeds from an editor's relying too much on the accuracy of his copyists. Re- peatedly documents are given in the table of contents in an order which does not tally with that in which they really follow on each other—an error that must materially detract from the 'value of a table of reference. Also the punctuation of the text is often faulty, obliging the reader to exercise his own ingenuity to establish its true sense. In one instance indeed the editor must be charged with excessive negligence. In the most important
• Vetera Monumenta Hibernoruni a 8cotorion Historian 111marenas. QUM es Vaticani, Neapolis, as Fiereutite Tabulariis deprompat et Oodles Chronologies &forma Augustine Thaner. Roma Typie Vaticaals. 1864. document in the whole collection, a Latin letter of Henry marked MCCCXXXI., there ;occurs a capital passage which, as now printed, cannot bear construction, and absolutely requires a full stop to be transferred, so as to bring within the same sentence a portion of the following one. Still more puzzling is it to read a précis, by the editor, of a document dated 1226, and which according to it should be a Papal injunction to the Irish Bishops to bestow a subsidy on Sing Charles of England. On looking at the text, we find the King's name to be given only by his initial, which is printed K. Now in 1226 Henry III. reigned, and we presume that Father Theiner hastily misread H. for K., and then, jumbling together in his feverish activity reminiscences of events which are centuries apart, thoughtlessly referred the allusion to Charles Stuart, never looked at the document again once it had been tossed to his amanuensis, and so has startled us by the dis- covery of an unknown King of England.
The contents of this volume must be divided into two portions, the one comprising the Irish and Scotch documents which give its title to the book ; the other consisting of a series of papers con- nected with the proceedings for breaking the marriage of Henry VIII. The documents in the first section are unconnected. They touch on a variety of subjects, mostly of special bearing, and it is difficult in a notice of this kind to pick out bits of sufficiently general interest. The staple matter is of course ecclesiastical. Dispensations to contract marriage within forbidden degrees of kinship, Papal grants of privileges to particular foundations, letters of confirmation to Bishops elect, constitute the bulk of the docu- ments. There is, however, one series, consisting of Papal rescripta to the Scotch Bishops during the struggle for independence under Robert Bruce, which illustrates strikingly the degree in which the Popes, who then resided at Avignon, under a painful sense of their own temporal necessities, fawned on the King of England because he acknowledged their spiritual authority. In the contest waged with Scotland the Pope, especially John XXII., comes out as the avowed auxiliary of the King of England, with a string of fulmi- natory rescripts, some addressed to Robert Bruce, others to divers Bishops, in which Bruce and his partizans are stigmatized as rebels and schismatics, are subjected to ecclesiastical penalties, and are summoned to appear at the bar of the Papal tribunal. In fact the Pope of Avignon, clinging desperately in his woeful plight to the countenance of the King of England, readily showed himself agreeable to all the demands, however one-sided, of this powerful Sovereign against the remote and pauperised Scots.
The Irish papers are better adapted for extracts. There are here some delectable peeps into the conditions of society in Ireland. It appears that in the first half of the fourteenth century there was an heretical movement in Ireland which attained formidable pro- portions, and of which we cannot remember having met with any mention before. Certainly it attracted the serious attention of the Pope, and it also manifestly was not suppressed without difficulty. On the 6th November, 1335 (after having a year before already stirred up the Archbishop of Cashel to act vigorously), the Pope writes a long epistle to King Edward III., invoking the sharp action of the secular arm against these sectarians, in which he gives some account of their particular impieties. " Oh horror 1" exclaims the shocked Pope, " it has come to our ears that in the midst of a Catholic population there have arisen some who assert Jesus Christ to have been a sinful man, while others, bowing to evil spirits, think of the Sacrament of Christ's body differently from what the Catholic and Roman Church thinks, saying that this Sacrament is not to be worshipped nor in any way adored, and affirming that faith and obedience are not due to the decrees, and decretals, and apostolical messages, they have drawn many faithful to their superstitions to the contempt of the Sacraments of the Catholic Church." The heresy thus denounced gave considerable trouble. It appears to have acquired a large following, and was countenanced by the open adhesion of Alexander, Archbishop of Dublin, "the notorious champion of heretics," as he is called by the Pope. On the orthodox side the leading zealot appears to have been Richard, Bishop of Ossory, and it would be a matter for investigation how far the furious contest waged between these ecclesiastical dignitaries for at least tea years, did not derive fuel from other and more temporal causes than points of merely speculative interest. It is difficult to fancy a large portion of the Irish population of that day set in move- ment by doctrinal impulses. But these documents fail to disclose more than the fact that a struggle of a very serious nature was carried on in Ireland for a long while, which contracted in some degree a religious complexion, enlisted in it the active co-opera- tion in divided camps of the Irish Episcopacy, and was not sup- pressed until after 1347, when Papal Legates were instructed to bring the recalcitrant Archbishop of Dublin to trial. So great was, however, the Archbishop's political influence, that we find the Pope, in consideration of it, permitting the King to hold intercourse with him, in spite of being under the ban of excommunication. As regards the relations of the Irish popu- lation with their foreign lords, the Church appears to have acted with a proper sense of duty. There is abundant evidence in this volume of the Church having stood forward to advocate the claims of justice against the arrogant tyranny of the English settlers. The Pope must be allowed to have spoken with praiseworthy boldness to the Sovereigns of England in behalf of their hardly used and but too often outraged Irish subjects. We find repeated remonstrances against the glaring injustice which rejected Irish testimony in suits against an Englishman, and the systematic wrong done by the exclusion of Irishmen, however competent, from ecclesiastical preferment. But the volume also affords ample proof of the barbarous and singularly corrupt morals which existed amongst the dignitaries of the Irish Church. Taken to- gether with the fact that the Court of Rome is not prone to publish facts of this order, the proofs to be culled from these pages are startling. It is not once, but over and over again that we meet with the highest dignitaries cited to trial for charges of the grossest kind. Indeed it would seem as if the Archbishops in Ireland had been especially given to wicked ways. In 1303 we meet with an Archbishop of Tuam who is represented as a perfect devil of cupidity and savage ferocity, indulging in foully indecent sacrilege, and inflicting outrageous torture on a poor priest who objected to the perpetration of such shamelessness. Twenty years latter there is a long indictment against the Arch- bishop of Armagh, who was not a whit better, and under whose spiritual supervision the diocese appears to have become- a pande- monium of lust and licence. As an excuse for his shortcomings in keeping up discipline amongst his loose monks, it is stated that being ignorant of the Irish tongue, he could not chide them. But this Archbishop had an especial eye to profit. He sold a silver- gilt image of St. Michel, together with many precious vessels, he robbed the Archiepiscopal Chapel of its rich vestments and pontifical ornaments, and finally carried his money-making pro- pensities to the length of actually stripping of their rafters the roofs of certain manses belonging to his See, together with their churches, and selling the timber. When a country is blessed with a plentiful sprinkling of such pastors, we cannot be astonished that shameful ruin and destitution should mark the property and edi- fices of the Church. The state of squalor into which Irish Sees were but too frequently reduced cannot be more vividly ponrtrayed than in the matter-of-fact Consistorial description of the cathedral city of Cloyne on a vacancy in the See in 1517. " In the Island of Ireland there is the city of Cloyne, lying in forests, stretching towards the east, with about twelve houses of osier and thatch, to the left whereof runs the river called Sinin in that tongue, and about one day's journey from the sea. On the right, towards the west, stands the cathedral, half destroyed, roofless, with only one altar covered with a straw matting, having a tiny sacristy with only one vestment and a cross of brass. There is a belfry, with two bells in it." And then the notary finishes by saying, " Rarely is mass celebrated here. A body of an Irish saint lies in the church, but his name witness knoweth not,"—altogether a telling piece of historical evidence to the forlorn, debased, God-forsaken plight which prevailed in the social and religious conditions of ancient Ireland.
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