During the reign of the first Stuarts the full significance of this weapon seems to have been grasped.  We see an unlimited traffic in the right to tax; estates confiscated and assigned to time-serving officials, and endless abuses arising from the corruption of the courts, the judges being appointed by the very persons who were presently to invoke the law to their own profit.  The tribal system was submerged, and the time of uncertainty was taken advantage of to introduce unlimited abuses, to assign to adventurers a fat share of other men’s goods, to create a class legally owning the land, and entitled, in virtue of that ownership, to a share of the cattle and crops which they had done nothing to produce.

The Stuarts were at this very time sowing the seeds of civil war in England by the introduction of like abuses, the story of which has been repeatedly told; and we are all familiar with the history of the great uprising which was thereby provoked, to the temporary eclipse of the power of the crown.  The story of the like uprising at the same epoch, and from kindred causes, in Ireland, is much more obscure, but equally worth recording, and to this uprising we may now turn.

Its moral causes we have already spoken of.  There was, first, the confiscation of the abbey lands, and the transfer of church revenues and buildings to Anglican clergy—­clergy, that is, who recognized the sovreign of England as the head of the church.  This double confiscation touched the well-springs of intense animosity, the dispossessed abbots using all the influences of their order in foreign lands to bring about their re-installation, while the controversy as to the headship of the church aroused all the fierce and warring passions that had been raging on the Continent since the beginning of the sixteenth century.

There were, besides, the griefs of the dispossessed chieftains, whose tribal lands had been given to others.  Chief among these was the famous house of O’Neill, the descendants of Nial, the old pagan monarch whose wars are thought to have brought the captive of Slemish Mountain to Ireland.  The O’Neills, like their neighbors the O’Donnells, descendants of Domnall, had been one of the great forces of tribal strife for eighty generations, and they now saw their lands confiscated and given over to strangers.  But they were only representatives of a feeling which was universal; an indignant opposition to arbitrary and tyrannous expropriation.

The head of the O’Neills had made his peace with the Tudors on the very day Queen Elizabeth died, and the tribal lands had been guaranteed to him in perpetuity.  But within four years plots were set on foot by the central authorities, possibly acting in good faith, to dispossess him and the chief of the O’Donnells on a charge of treason; and in 1607 both fled to the Continent.  Their example was followed by numberless others, and the more restless and combative spirits among the tribesmen, who preferred fighting to the tilling of their fields, entered the continental armies in large numbers.