IRELAND UNDER THE TUDORS.*
THE third and concluding volume of Mr. Bagwell's exhaustive work on Ireland under the Tudors, covers the period of the Desmond and Tyrone rebellions (1579-1603). It is a monu- ment of careful and patient research, and tells the whole story in greater detail than is to be found elsewhere. But, useful as it must be to the historian and the professed student, Mr. Bagwell's work is not likely to be widely read. The Elizabethan conquest of Ireland is not a chapter of history that either English or Irish can contemplate with any satis- faction, or gain much by studying. Mr. Bagwell, too, is stronger in his facts than his conclusions. Like Mr. Froude,
he regards the conquest as necessary and inevitable. Bnt he is less alive to the brutalities it involved ; or, rather, he prefers to state his facts, and leave the conclusions to the reader. Like Spenser, he attributes the protracted and cruel nature of the struggle to the poverty of the Crown. Unpaid soldiers, he remarks, are necessarily oppressors. This no doubt was one factor, but it was far from the only one. The desire to carve out fortunes and estates in the conquered country was responsible for quite as much. That the soldiers were unpaid was not the fault of Elizabeth and her Ministers. During the last ten years of her reign, she is estimated to have spent the enormous sum, for those days, of four millions on the Irish War. Of the straits she was put to, to find English soldiers to serve in Ireland, Mr. Bagwell has discovered some striking evidence :-
"' Better be hanged at home than die like a dog in Ireland,' had become a Chesthire proverb. Sometimes it was necessary to set sufficient watch in all the highways, footpaths, and bye-lanes, for the apprehending of such soldiers as shall offer to escape before God sends a wind.' And it is not difficult to see how Shakespeare made the study for his immortal picture of the ragged regiment with whom Falstaff refused to march through Coventry. You appointed twelve shires,' says the Mayor of Bristol, to send men here for Cork. We protest unto your lordships, there was never man beheld such strange creatures brought to any muster. They are most of them either old, lame, diseased, or common Rodys ; few of them have any clothes ; small, weak, starved bodies taken up in fair, market, or highway, to supply the place of better men kept at home. If there be any of them better than the rest, we
find they have been set forth for malice We have done what we could to put able men into silly creatures' places, but in such sort that they cannot start or run away.' " Mr. Bagwell sets himself strongly to combat the view that religion had nothing to do with the Tudor wars in Ireland. It was the energy of the Friars and Jesuits, he says, that made
the people resist, and it was Spanish or Papal gold that enabled the chiefs to keep the field. This contention he estab-
lishes to the full ; but what he does not appear to see is that this religious resistance was the natural outcome of the attempt,
which he regards as wholly right, necessary, and inevitable, to force the Reformation upon a people who were unwilling to receive it. Bacon clearly perceived how much this attempt was aggravating the Irish difficulty. There is no doubt, he wrote, " but to wrestle with them now is directly opposite to their reclaim, and cannot but continue their alienation of mind from this Government. Besides one of the principal pre- tences whereby the heads of the rebellion have prevailed, both with the people and with the foreigner, is the defence of the Catholic religion ; and it is this that bath likewise made the foreigner reciprocally more plausible with the rebel. There- fore a toleration of religion (for a time not definite, except it be in some principal towns and precincts, after the manner of some French edicts) seemeth to me a matter warrantable by religion and in policy of absolute necessity." Mr. Bagwell has made nonsense of this passage by closing the brackets after the words " not definite ; " and some of his objections to Bacon's suggestion are not of much account. The real difficulty was that the war between Elizabeth and the Papacy was being too fiercely waged to admit of any partial truce in Ireland. But Bacon's advice was not altogether without effect, for while the Penal Statutes continued in force, no effect was given to them during the closing years of the reign.
Mr. Bagwell devotes a chapter to the Armada, and his account of the fate that befell the Spaniards who were wrecked on the Irish coast is the fullest that has been published in this country. Roughly, he estimates their loss at twenty ships and ten thousand men. It was only in those parts of Ulster• and Connaught where the power of the chiefs was unbroken, and
• Ireland under the Tudors. with a Succinct Account of the Earlier History. By Richard Bagwell, M.A. In 3 vols., fol. III. London Longman, Green, and 0o. 1890.
not always there, that the Spaniards received any effectual help. Elsewhere they were either slaughtered at once, or handed over to the English authorities for execution. A curious account of the Irish by one Francesco de Cuellar, a refugee who spent three months in Ulster, has lately been disinterred, and is printed in full by Mr. Bagwell. The im- pressions of the Spaniard are not much more favourable than those of the English adventurer, Fynes Moryson ; but they relate to a wilder part of the country :—
"The habit of these savages is to live like brutes in the mountains, which are very rugged in the part of Ireland where we were lost. The men are well made, with good features, and as active as deer. They eat but one meal, and that late at night, oat-cake and butter being their usual food. They drink sour milk because they have nothing else, for they use no water, though they have the best in the world. At feasts it is their custom to use half-cooked meat, without bread or salt. Their dress matches themselves—tight breeches and short, loose jackets of very coarse texture ; over all they wear blankets, and their hair comes over their eyes. They are great walkers and stand much work, and by continually fighting they keep the Queen's troops out of their country, which is nothing but bogs -for forty miles either way. Their great delight is robbing one another, so that no day passes without fighting, for whenever the people of one hamlet know that those of another possess cattle or other goods, they imme-
diately make a night attack and kill one another They sleep on the ground upon rushes full of water and ice. Most of the women are very pretty, but badly got up, for they wear only a shift and a mantle, and a great linen cloth on the head rolled over the brow. They are great workers and housewives in their way. These people call themselves Christians and say Mass, but most of their churches, monasteries, and hermitages are dis- mantled by the English, and by their local partisans who are as bad."
The account of the Desmond War, and the devastation of Munster as a matter of set policy by Grey, is a story of un- equalled horrors. Mr. Bagwell repeats Spenser's much-quoted description of Munster at the end of the war, but lays the blame not on the people, but on the poet's friend and pro- tector, Grey. He has discovered what he believes to be an unpublished dialogue among the Irish State Papers for 1598, which he attributes to Spenser. It purports to give the ocular testimony of the writer, Thomas Wilson, and is dedi-
cated to Essex. The interlocutors are Peregryn and Silvyn- the names of Spenser's sons—and they describe the state of affairs in King's County in 1598. The dialogue, he tells us, is much in the style of that between Irenwus and Endoxus. It should be worth printing, though it is not easy to see why Spenser should have been unwilling to put his name to it, if it were really his.
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