PACATA HIBERNIA.* THE remarkable—we bad almost said remorseless—narrative known as
Pacata Hibernia is of very great value, and is not unfamiliar to earnest students of Irish history. It deals entirely with the province of Munster, and embraces a period of three years. It commences with the joint entrance of Lord Monntjoy upon the Viceroyalty of Ireland and Sir George Carew upon the Presidency of Munster in 1600, and ends with the suppression in 1603 of the Munster insurrection, which was caused by the landing of the Spaniards at Kinsale. "But its atmosphere," as its latest editor says, "unlike that of any modern book treating of the times, is the atmosphere of the age ; in every sentence we breathe the air of the six- teenth century ; we are in the presence of actualities, face to face with real and actual men, can almost hear them speak, and feel around us the play of the passions and the working of ideas and purposes so characteristic of that age, so foreign to our own. Such an experience must bring enlightenment. Pacata Hibernia, once well read, is certain to produce a lasting effect upon the mind of the reader. The book deals with the stormy conclusion of a stormy century, the lurid sunset of one of the wildest epochs in our history." Besides, the recent revelations of the State Papers give a fresh importance to such old histories as this. Mr. Standish O'Grady brings to the editing of the narrative knowledge based on these Papers and on other researches. The results of his work are to be found in very full and elucidatory notes and in a preface, which, although here and there floridly eloquent, is an important contribution to Irish history.
Mr. O'Grady is too confident, perhaps, that Thomas Stafford, who gave himself forth as but the editor of Pacata Hibernia, was also its author. As be puts it-
"Paeata Hibernia was plainly written by one man, a man who was through the Munster wars with Carew, who was very close to his person and entertained for him a great and sincere personal admiration. It is the outcome of a single mind : the uniformity of the style, the simplicity and unity of the point of view prove that It was written shortly after the events, and long before its first publication in 1636. The battle-smoke clings still to the pages,—the wrath of the soldier fresh from scenes of blood burns there still. He still hates his foes; applauds anything and everything done for their destruction ; cannot see or even suspect that there was any good thing in any of them. A Lieutenant Thomas Stafford served under Carew, and is mentioned once only —at the storming of Dunboy. He was almost certainly the writer of Pacata Hibernia. If so, what an amazing suppression of self !"
But does not this very " suppression of self " suggest the possibility that the book is written not by one man, but by several, and that Stafford was really the editor P The narrative is not only distinguished by "actuality," but in places at least by tedium, as if one or other of the spectators of events were requiring to be hurried. Whether Pacata Hibernia was written by one man or by a Homeric syndi- cate is, however, of secondary importance. It is a military epic of a character—in parts of a sordid character—leading up to that great and decisive battle of Kinsale in which the Spaniards were defeated in their very remarkable and tactically defensible attempt to make Ireland—the Ireland of Tyrone—the stepping-stone to an invasion of England.
• Pacata Hibernia ; or, A History of the Ways in Ireland during the Reign of Queen flied eth, especially within the Province of Munster under the Government of Sir Georg.. Cates; and Compiled by his Direction and Appointment. Edited, and with an Introduction and Notes, by Standish O'Grady. 2 vols. London : Downey and Co.
"Many times," writes the author, Stafford or another, with characteristic caution, "I heard the Earl of Thomond tell the Lord President that in an old book of Irish prophecies ,
which he had seen, it was reported that towards the latter days there should be a battle fought between the English and the Irish in a place which the book nameth, near Kinsale. The Earl of Thomond, coming out of England and landing first at Castlehaven and afterwards at Kinsale as
aforesaid, in the time of the siege, myself and divers others heard him again report the prophecy to the President, and named the place where, according to the prophecy, the field should be fought. The day whereupon the victory was obtained the Lord President and the Earl rode out to see the dead bodies of the vanquished, and the President asked some that were present what name that ground was called ; they, not knowing to what end he demanded it, told him the true name thereof, which was the same which the Earl so often before had reported to the President. I beseech the reader to believe me, for I deliver'nothing but truth ; but as one swallow makes no summer, so shall not this one true prophecy increase my credulity in old predictions of that kind."
A reperusal of Pacata Hibernia with the aid of Mr. Standish O'Grady's researches in the Calendar of Irish State Papers and elsewhere, as revealed in note., produces upon the mind an effect not unlike that caused by a reading of Mr. Lang's recent exposure of latter-day Jacobitism, Pickle the Spy. One is practically forced to the conclusion that all the leading Irishmen of Tyrone's day, with the exception of himself and Hugh Roe, were double-dyed traitors :—" For money or land there appear to have been few things to which even the greatest of them would not stoop,—stoop lower even than the basest men of our own time. From reputation after reputa- tion the perusal of these documents, now brought to light out of the dark archives of the State, strips away all the glamour and glitter, revealing not men greater than them- selves, but—at least as judged by modern standards of private honour and public principle—a great deal worse." Stafford does not reveal the worst. He does not tell, for example — apparently he did not know it — how Carew and the Lord-Deputy of Ireland despatched James Blake into Spain, with instructions to poison his friend and associate, the brave and chivalrous Hugh Roe. With Mr. Lang's story of the old and the young Glengarry com- pare Stafford's (and Mr. O'Grady's) of the two Brians, Lords of Leitrim. When the father, Brian of the Ramparts, was beheaded at Tyburn for rebellion, his son, Brian of the Battle- axes, wrote a letter to the Privy Council informing them that in his opinion his father had met with a fit punishment for his "fractiousness " and " inviting the Government to appoint to his father's seigniory such an excellent young man as him- self." This request being refused, the young Brian took a leading part in the Tyrone rebellion. By way of completing his tale of treachery, he then proposed to betray the Catholic: and dynastic cause to Sir Conyers Clifford, President of Connaught. On the other side, men like Carew and Mount- joy were equally unscrupulous. Indeed, as Mr. O'Grady says, " All the Viceroys and Presidents and chief military men sought to assassinate, or were willing, should the occasion arise, to assassinate, insurgent lords whom they were unable to conquer." There seems to have been nothing savouring either of national or of religious principle in the Munster movement which the Carew of Pacata Hibernia came to
crush. The men who had sworn to defend the Irish cause renewed their oaths to Queen Elizabeth on the Bible when Carew triumphed. It is a terrible story, with hardly a single redeeming feature or not utterly ignoble personality in it, that is here told. We may lay the flattering unction to our souls of autres temps, autres moeurs, yet Pacata Hibernia some- how recalls some memorable incidents in recent Irish history.
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