Part 3

It is speculation to suggest how this would have been remedied had the State been left free to work out its own destiny. Clearly the executive would either have become frankly hereditary or frankly elective. Probably at that time it would have become hereditary, especially as the son generally claimed to succeed from his father unless there were special reasons why he should not or could not. But then, what of the kings of stateships and territories? Had these also become hereditary the State from top to bottom would have become impossibly rigid; but there are reasons to suggest why this would not have been so. For one thing, the kings of stateships were elected by the voice of the freemen, whereas the kings of the higher executives were elected by their own courts. Moreover, the stateships served immediate and local needs that required the consent of the freemen for their continual adjustment. The two operating together would undoubtedly have compelled, without any of the complications of a _righ-damhna_, the perfectly free election of the executive head and leader of a stateship. Therefore had the monarchy become hereditary there would have been two contradictory principles in the State; there would always be a tendency to bring one into line with the other; and it is not very difficult to see which principle would finally have prevailed.

Any arrogation of power by the monarch (and it is the first principle of monarchs to arrogate power) would have struck athwart the rule of the people in their most familiar and immediate life. A moment always arises in history (always has arisen and always will arise) when a monarch and a people front one another with the claim to real power. In such issues the people always win in the end, even when their rights in the State are most degraded. How much simpler would the issue be when the people, as in the Irish State, held the land, the final source of all wealth, in their own possession in corporate stateships? In the crisis that later befell all States no nation could have faced the future with greater assurance than Ireland, had Fate not thrown a sterner destiny before it.

In the same dispute another fault of the State was involved--in fact, was one of the causes that led to the invasion of the foreigner. For the dynastic war was really the struggle of the provinces for the hegemony. The O’Neills of Meath and Ulster, the O’Conors of Connacht and the O’Briens of Munster contended together in the names of their provinces; and the Mac Murchadhas of Leinster, having no part in the war, were driven into a false isolation. This was only possible because the provinces had interposed an authority between the executive of the State and the stateships that had no real function. They could materially hinder, and could not materially help, the smooth working of the State. Had the provincial or territorial courts not existed the result would have been as deft a balance between a centralised and decentralised State as can well be imagined. The interposition of the provincial courts reduced the central authority almost to a futility except when a masterful personality held the monarchy. They broke the balance between the centre and parts of the whole, and in the result snapped the connection that existed between them. The only real link they needed they possessed in the Councils that met under the presidency of the Monarch in national assembly to adjust and continue the government of the country: the Council of Brehons, the Council of Rulers, the Council of Historians, and so forth. Each Council decided its own affairs, and the Monarch and his higher officials held the whole in co-ordination. That was a real and a vital connection. No other was needed. The provincial courts could only--possessing as they did, for the most part, powers almost equal to the monarchy--break that connection, and so disturb the balance of the whole. They did so in the outcome of things, occupying the place that they did; and they did so deliberately, creating local loyalties in order to increase their power. They were, and could not help but be, a disruptive element in the State.

Undoubtedly the dynastic war of the eleventh century, pressed to its logical consummation, would have ended this false value. The dynastic war of the first centuries between Connacht and Ulster had ended in the elimination of Ulster as a rival; and, however the later war would have ended, a strong central authority must eventually have emerged and the provincial kingships have been reduced to a merely nominal position in the economy of the State, without possessing the power to dispute the monarchy or its executive hold on the Nation. This in its turn would have required a national army; and would have answered another defect. For when in the fifth century Ireland disbanded her national militia, the Fianna Eireann, she lay a prey to any invader at a time when armies had become national necessities.

Such criticisms are, it is true, speculative. Even as such, however, an attempt has been made to keep them close to the development that the events themselves suggest--to the development that, as history proves, all nations must finally obey. In the eleventh century, it must be remembered, Ireland was almost the only country in Europe with a national State. Other nations were not to achieve their States for centuries; and even then many of them now famous did not create States so careful in its parts and so concerted as a whole. It is not at all likely that Ireland, had she been left alone to work out her own destiny, would have continued with a broken State without correcting the causes of its disruption. She would have proved a startling exception to the course of history had she done so. Yet the main value of such criticisms is that they permit an examination of the Irish State at a moment when its inherent weaknesses had worked themselves out to the surface. At the height of Brian’s power those weaknesses existed, but they were held in submission by his personal strength. After his death they at once rose to the surface, just because of the strength with which he had held them in submission and the manner by which he had risen to power. They then demanded a remedy contained in the State itself, and not dependent on the strength of a master mind. And in looking to the old Irish State for instruction it is important to note its weaknesses once they revealed themselves, and to perceive the development by which they would have been corrected.

Yet, while criticism is good, it is proper to look on the other side of the coin. In the light of its own day the Irish State was a remarkable achievement, but in the light of any other day it would be hard to find a statecraft so complete, so wise and so soundly based on a people’s will while compact in itself. It was at once both aristocratic and democratic: in fact, it makes these modern expressions to seem, what they are, false entities, for it shows them to be parts of one whole, obverse and reverse of the same thing. The Normans when they came commented on the familiarity that existed between the members of a stateship and its king. The king, in fact, was generally required to foster his children with some freeman’s family. Yet to be a king a man had to be pure of birth, perfect of body, without physical blemish, and of considerable training in the laws and arts; while the oath he took, even though it were not always kept, is sufficient to show the moral qualities expected of his office. The arts did not exist at the whim of a lordly patron, but were maintained at the people’s charges. Each stateship conceived it an honour that Poetry, Music and History should be accorded the highest rank in its economy. Their professors were furnished land for their maintenance, and sat as equals at the king’s table. The same was true of the Doctors of Medicine. These were all public servants, serving the public and maintained at the public charge. Those that came overseas to learn in the schools were, apparently, not charged for their tuition, but had only to conform to the legal responsibility laid on such schools, for they came in such numbers that the Council of Brehons had to make special regulations for them. And the _Baile Biatach_, as we have seen, had land apportioned him for the maintenance of public hospitality. These things were not then, any more than they are now, precisely familiar virtues among the nations.

So for the State itself, as an organisation. Its faults we have seen; but, even so, it found as wise a balance as any nation has yet found between a centralised and a decentralised system. Authority, to be sure, depended a good deal from the personality of whoever exercised it; but then history has shewn that this was not an attribute exclusively monopolised by the Irish State. In the last resort, not only in the theory but in the practice and working of the State, that authority was based on a free people. The State’s only property, and the final source of all its wealth, the land, was owned by the people in corporate stateships; and those corporate stateships had its assemblies of freemen which discussed and adjudicated its affairs. The national life was one of high ideals--of Art; of physical and mental aristocracy; it held in high esteem its intellectual leaders; it prized its scholarship--but these ideals were rooted in the possession and husbandry of the soil. The student will need to search well before he betters the Irish State; and the more truly he search the more deeply he will wonder at the strange tragedy that it should have been hindered at a critical hour of its development.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] A parallel instance may serve to show how the working of the State, taken at a moment of indecision, was turned against itself. In the fifteenth century England was plunged into a dynastic war. Those who have read the documents of the time will know with what perfidy that war was marked. The English barons openly sold their swords to the highest bidder as a natural thing. Treachery and insecurity were rife on every hand. Now, if an enemy had invaded England at that moment, and had been willing to pay the extra prices that would have been demanded of a foreigner, and, where this was not possible, had turned passion and party strength against passion and party strength, taking care to balance the contending forces evenly, such an enemy could have entrenched himself in the country, and in the course of time have defied ejectment. England was spared this misfortune; Ireland was not.

V. THE BROKEN STATE.

Henry of Anjou and England when he came to Ireland, with a somewhat munificent gesture made grants of large tracts of territory to his underlings. It was nobly done; to make gifts of other people’s property to one’s own friends requires a noble mind. Therefore the lordly underlings settled along the waterways of the territory allotted to them, built castles, and from these castles raided the economic life of the country around them. At first the stateships received the newcomers as strangers coming into the country, who would in time become part of its life. They did not conceive of such a thing as an attempted national conquest. Then when they rose to resist, they were handicapped. They had no national army; and, though the freemen could be called upon for military service, they could not be called for more than six weeks at a time, and then not during Spring or Harvest, whereas the Normans lived only by the sword in the close militarist organisation known as feudalism. The eleventh century in Ireland had seen a long dynastic war, but it had also seen a full scholarly and artistic activity. With the coming of the Normans all this activity was stilled and hushed for two centuries. And that was the sign-manual of the new era that had dawned.

After a while, preoccupied as they necessarily were with their economic life, the people invited their Hebridean cousins to come over as a paid militia. They came, at first into the north, and were quartered on the stateships; and from the time of their coming the Normans began to be pressed back toward Dublin, and the annals record the taking one by one of the Norman castles. That was the first attempt to throw off the national danger that was now appreciated. The second was to restore the executive authority. O’Neill, O’Brien and O’Conor had contended in rivalry, but the Ui Niall dynasty held the more ancient claim; therefore in 1258 Aodh O’Conor and Tadhg O’Brien made a hosting together to Brian O’Neill to offer their submission to him if he would lead them against the foreigner. He did so, but was overthrown and slain. Therefore an offer of the monarchy was sent to Hakon of Norway five years later. He was on his way over when he died at sea. Finally an invitation was sent to Edward Bruce by Domhnaill O’Neill in the name of Ireland. Bruce came in 1315, was crowned Monarch of Ireland, and carried a war throughout the country that wasted the land. When he fell three years later at the battle of Faughert, the country was in a desperate condition; but the invader was thrown back to a small tract of country around Dublin that became known as the Pale.

Such were the attempts, made too late, to restore the State and eject the invader. One was dependent on the other. It was clearly impossible to restore the State until the invader had first been cast out. His presence in the country necessarily acted like an obstruction in the blood, and made it impossible for the body of the State to resume its health and perfect its functions until the poison had been expelled. This was so in the natural law of things; but, in addition to this natural and inevitable result, the invaders, in order to maintain their position in the country, set to work to create division between the scattered portions of the broken State. That was easy to do. The leaders in the different parts of the country have been blamed (by none more than by their nation) for serving their own sectional interests instead of the national unity. But how were they to discover the national unity, and how were they to distinguish, as we now can distinguish, between sectional and national interests? The history of mankind proves that in a broken State it is a simple task to create discord, and a giant’s task to create unity. The invaders acted at first from a common centre; and the nature of the case robbed the Irish Nation of any common centre from which to act. That was the first difficulty. Secondly, there are always men in every Nation who are willing to sell their honour. So long as Nations can repel invasion that fact does not become an active danger within the security of its State; but directly an invader enters a country, with gold and honours in his gift, it becomes almost impossible to overtake the poison that runs in every direction. Men grow suspicious of the most honest purpose if that purpose is not at once apparent; and if it is at once apparent it is thereby at once revealed to the enemy. Finally, most men are near-sighted; they judge of large issues by their immediate effects, and so mistake those immediate effects for the large issues, making it easy for an enemy to drive divisions in between sectional interests. These things are so, not necessarily because men are corrupt, but by the nature of things; and their combined result was the broken State of Ireland.

A further difficulty was the fact that the Nation had new elements cast into it that it had to digest; and in some places it had those new elements cast into it in large numbers. The Normans were mostly driven out of the north; but others had settled and made their positions secure in other parts, the De Burgos in the west, for instance, and the FitzGeralds and Butlers in the south. The old State was broken by their forcible seizure of land; but then we find it automatically setting to work to mend the broken fabric, to restore the stateships, and to include the stranger within its ancient constitution. In that it was successful. The De Burgos and FitzGeralds became, as the English declared, more Irish than the Irish themselves. The former publicly repudiated their very names, and took Irish names, as Mac William Uachtar and Mac William Iachtar. They simply displaced, or depressed, the kingly households of earlier territories. The same was true of the FitzGeralds, though with them, as far as we can judge, there were certain changes introduced, not into the stateships, but into the larger territories in which these were comprised. The chief of these changes seems to have been that the FitzGeralds held their kingships by right of primogeniture and not by election. Yet in the main the changes were not many or fundamental. Irish was spoken as the native language; Irish courts were kept, of brehons, poets and historians, exactly as the older Irish kingships had maintained them; and by force of marriage in a few generations the intermixture of the new blood was hardly to be discovered beside the permanence of the old. Only the Butlers in the south-east kept their connection with England. The others broke away from the common centre of the invader, and became included in the elder national continuity.

Nevertheless the State was scattered. The stateships continued their life; the parts, that is to say, were complete, except for a portion of country around Dublin and another about Waterford; but they were only parts, for the whole was in disrepair. And now a definite war between State and State was declared, the end of which has not yet been seen. By the Statutes of Kilkenny in 1367 every sign of national life in Ireland was penalised by English law. It was forbidden to hear an Irish poet, to take judgment from a brehon, to foster children in the Irish way, to speak the Irish language, and even to wear a beard as the Irish did, or ride a horse barebacked. It is true these things were only forbidden within the Pale, because only within the Pale had the invader any authority; but they were in fact, and afterwards became, a declaration in Ireland of a war between an English State and an Irish State. They were an intimation that the old Irish culture and State were marked for extinction. It is interesting to remember that at the moment this declaration was made England had little culture, no literature, only the beginnings of law, and a very rudimentary State. The Statutes of Kilkenny were very like a young vulgarian raging against an elder’s manners that made his own lack of courtesy apparent.

Fortunately at this time England herself was plunged into a bitter dynastic war. The immediate result on Ireland was that, relieved from the pressure of her neighbour, a great period of prosperity began. The beginnings were slow, for the land was wasted after the Bruce campaign; but the progress quickened with each decade. It began with the integration of the Normans in the middle of the fourteenth century; and it continued till the end of the English Wars of the Roses. The poet took up his song again; the historian his pen; and the scholar his books. Great convocations of learned men were held; and new law tracts were written, drafted for changed conditions. The stateships became the centres of new activity. Corn was exported in considerable quantities. The guilds of artisans became busy again, to judge from the exports of woollen, linen, leather and metal wares. The literary activity--or at least such of it as escaped the soldiers’ burning--has remained to us. The other activity can only be discovered by the trade books of other countries; for Ireland, having no organised State of her own, could keep no record of her commerce. But these books reveal the considerable trade Ireland conducted with the continent of Europe. The Irish ports, chiefly on the western and southern coasts, with their own corporate stateships, became the avenue through which the industry of the internal stateships supplied the demand of Europe. And since there was no Irish State to create a medium of exchange, at least one of the territories, that of the O’Reillys, had to mint its own coinage for the conduct of its trade.

It seemed as though once again the Irish State was about to complete itself. But once again an invading soldiery brought ruin. This time it was the final ruin. England had settled her dynastic war, and turned her attention to Ireland. The old methods were renewed with a new perfection of craft. The Statutes of Kilkenny became an active weapon of offence; and with each new monarch of the Tudor dynasty the war between State and State was carried to a closer issue. The Irish language was interdicted; the Irish manner of dress was forbidden; and finally every attempt was made to blot out every memory of the Irish stateships and to create English counties in their stead. Kings of territories were offered pompous English titles if they pledged to abstain from the use of their simple Irish titles. To help them to a decision they were offered the land over which they ruled, to be held by feudal knight’s service and to descend by feudal right of primogeniture. Those who accepted this offer at once found the stateships in rebellion against them, for that land did not lie in the gift of any man but belonged only to the freemen. They rose in protection of their rights since time immemorial; and they rose to repudiate their elected officer; with the result that a soldiery was sent against them that burned their crops and left their land a waste.

Such was the last phase of the war by which the State was to be broken, not only as a whole, but in its several parts. The country far and wide became acquainted with a soldiery whose business it was to tear out all memory of the National State. At the end of that war there arose a figure who saw clearly all that was involved. That was Hugh, the descendant by Irish election of the O’Neill monarchy. He had worked long to link all parts of the country together under his leadership; and, knowing the power against which he was opposed, he had entered into treaty with the Spanish Crown to assist him. Feeling that these Spanish promises were not sincerely given, so often had they been made and as often broken, he thought to save what he could from the wreckage.