Ridgeway. Scian Dubh
“Dutch boor” and the inhuman Georges. The foul fiend himself could not have devised laws more diabolical in their character or destructive in their application. So close were their meshes and sweeping their folds, that the possibility of escape was obviously out of the question; as their victim was met and entangled at every turn, until at last the fatal blow descended, and the unequal contest was ended. But more infamous and unjustifiable still, when “the foul invader” found himself occasionally unable to cope successfully with his brave and chivalrous antagonists, he had recourse to a darker and deeper treachery than even that which characterized the stealthy and unexpected stroke of his midnight dagger. He adopted the guise of friendship; and professing to forget the past, lured into his power with festive blandishments the chiefs of many a noble following, whom he dared not meet in open fight, but who, at a given signal, and while the brimming goblet circled through the feast, were suddenly set upon and foully murdered ere they could draw a dagger or leap to their feet. In corroboration of this assertion, we have only to refer to Mullaghmast, where a deed of this description was perpetrated; and of a character so cruel and dastardly, that the names of those concerned in the inhuman plot are now desecrated by every individual raised above the brute, or inspired with the hope of heaven.
Nor was there any mode of propitiating the satanic spirit which seemed to actuate the English against their opponents, from the first moment that they set their foot upon Irish soil; for, when, in the lapse of years, a portion of the inhabitants in the vicinity of the Pale, professed their readiness to conform to the manners, laws and customs of the invader, their overtures were rejected, and they were still held at the point of the sword, as “the Irish enemy,” and denied the protection of the laws that they were ready to obey. In short, every move of the English, established beyond any possibility of doubt, that their sole object was the utter and complete extirpation of the natives, and the subsequent establishment upon their conquered shores of a dynasty from which every drop of pure, Celtic blood should be excluded forever.
But that day never arrived, and with God’s help never shall. However she might have suffered or failed through an occasional traitor, Ireland, as a whole, fought against English usurpation from the moment that she became aware of its ultimate aims, and felt its growing power within her borders. There was, besides, in the two races, those opposites of character—those natural antagonisms which repelled each other with a force and vehemence not to be neutralized or unified by any process within the reach of even the most humane or astute ruler. They were too different peoples, with habits of thought, moral perceptions, and ideas of chivalry at total variance with each other as entertained by them individually. The great bulk of the English colony was composed of unprincipled freebooters and degraded Saxon serfs; the Conqueror having, a century previously, turned the masses of the English into swine-herds, banished their language from court, and reduced them to a condition of the most abject slavery. Hence their stolid brutality, the low plane of their intelligence, and their systematic murders. But, how different the condition of the Irish in this respect. Far ages previous, both learning, refinement, and the chivalrous use of arms, pervaded their shores. Evidences of the truth of this assertion lie scattered around us in every direction. Girald Barry—the English Cambrensis, William Camden, Archbishop Usher, Vallancey, Lord Lyttleton, and a host of others, all bear witness to the profound learning and noble chivalry of the Irish from the earliest periods; while the various educational institutions throughout the continent, founded shortly after the introduction of Christianity into Ireland, establish, upon a basis the most immovable, the truth of an assertion made by one of the authors just mentioned, namely, that “most of the lights that illumined those times of thick darkness proceeded out of Ireland”. As may be presumed, then, a people so refined and chivalrous—so sensitive to all that was noble and elevated—a people who, as in the case of Alfred, had educated the very kings of the invaders, as well as plucked their subjects from Paganism, were averse to meeting the usurper on his own plane of warfare, and that consequently, the very pride and dignity of their arms walled in, as it were, the tyrant from any of those cold-blooded and dastardly atrocities which so disfigured his own career.
Notwithstanding that, after four hundred and twenty years of outlawry the most cruel and unrelenting, the Irish were, (12th James I. 1614.) at last, admitted within the pale of English law, and recognized nominally as subjects at least, so long had they been subjected to the grinding heel of oppression, and the baneful influences of continuous warfare, and so long, also, had the usurper been accustomed to treat them as enemies, that this recognition of their claims upon humanity availed them but very little. Under the new regime, their freedom was merely technical only; for now the terrible ban of the Reformation, intensified by the cruel spirit evinced throughout the whole of Elizabeth’s infamous reign, was upon them, and their persecution, which had so long been regarded as a matter of course, experienced but little diminution through the attempted toleration of her weak and pedantic successor. Still, frightful and unprecedented as was the ordeal through which they had passed, they preserved their nationality, and clung to their traditions, hoping one day to rid themselves of their oppressors, as they had already done in the case of the Danes; and in this way has the case stood between both parties up to the present hour.
Although long previous to the Reformation, the atrocities practiced upon Catholic Ireland by Catholic England were of a character the most revolting, and although the murderous hand of the invader was never stayed by the knowledge or conviction, that both parties professed a common creed and knelt at a common altar, yet the intensity of the sufferings of the Irish, or what may be termed their studious, refined, and systematic persecution, began with the civilisation of Elizabeth. The new creed of the three preceding reigns had not, up to that period, acquired sufficient strength to exert its deadliest influence against the ancient faith of the people, or to be introduced as a new agency of oppression in the case of Ireland; but now, no sooner had the “Virgin Queen” ascended the throne, than the heart of the tigress leaped within her; and, breaking loose from every restraint, human and divine, she at once pounced upon the unfortunate Irish, and sought to bury her merciless fangs, with one deadly and final crash, in their already bleeding and lacerated vitals. The coarse, cruel fibre of an apostate and libertine father, and the impure blood of a lewd mother, had done their work in her case. From the first to the last moment of her reign, she combined the courtesan with the assassin. She was the murderer of Essex, said to have been her own son and paramour; and was, at the same time, the mistress of more than one noble besides Leicester. According to her own countryman, Cobbett, she spilled more blood during her occupancy of the throne, than any other single agency in the world for a commensurate period; while her treatment of Ireland, under the “humane guidance” and advice of such cruel wretches as Spenser, was neither more nor less than absolutely satanic. For fifteen long years she never ceased to subject that unhappy land to famine, fire and sword. Every device that her hellish nature or that of her agents could concoct for the total extirpation of the people, was put into the most relentless requisition by her. Under the guise of the most sincere friendship, her deputies, times without number, betrayed many of the leaders of the Irish into accepting their hospitality, and then foully set upon them and murdered them while they sat unsuspecting guests at their festive board. And yet, notwithstanding her penal laws, her blood-thirsty soldiery, and all her revolting persecutions, the Irish were more than a match for her in the open field, and ultimately embittered the closing years of her life. From the first moment of the invasion, the O’Neills—Kings and Princes of Aileach, Kings of Ulster and Princes of Tir-Eogain—as well as other chiefs and leaders, fought the Pale incessantly: and now, after a lapse of nearly four hundred years, again evinced to the world, that Ireland was still unconquered, and regarded England as a tyrant and usurper. And yet the opposition of those chiefs and rulers to the hirelings and paid assassins of this infamous woman and her corrupt associates, was of a character the most chivalrous. Unaccustomed to cowardly deeds of blood, these proud warriors preferred to meet the enemy face to face, and decide the issues of the hour in fair, open fight. They could not entertain the Saxon idea of disposing of an adversary by the stealthy knife of the professional murderer; and hence it was that their pride and chivalry had ever been taken advantage of: the invaders being convinced that no reprisals of a character sufficiently dastardly or atrocious to meet their own depredations, would be indulged in by their chivalrous opponents. In evidence of the spirit that actuated both parting individually in this connection, we may refer to the massacre of Mullaghmast, on the one hand, where the English,