of Ireland did not constitute a nation or possess any common interest or bond of union.  There was no trace of an organization by which the Irish tribes could be united into one people.  The ceaseless civil wars had indeed supplanted the original tribesmen by the mercenary followers of another set of rival chiefs; but there had been no union; and the mass of the people, still under the influence of their native customs, were probably in a more wretched condition than they had ever been before.

CHAPTER III.

Ireland under the Tudors.

We have seen that at the close of the Middle Ages Ireland was in the condition that some people in England now consider the panacea for all the woes of the country; it possessed a subordinate Parliament and England interfered as little as possible in its local affairs.  Henry VIII attempted “to govern Ireland according to Irish ideas”; having no army of his own, he appointed the most powerful of the Norman barons his deputy.  But this deputy used his authority precisely as an Ersefied Norman (who possessed no more patriotism or national feeling than a Celtic chief) might have been expected to use it,—­that was, to aid him in a succession of family quarrels and tribal wars in which, allied with some of the native septs he attacked others.  Even the towns outside the Pale fared little better than the remoter districts; there was actually a civil war between Cork and Limerick.  The state of affairs in Celtic Ireland during the brief period from 1500 to 1534 as stated in the annals (which, however, only deal with a part of the country, hardly referring to what took place in Leinster or Munster) has been summed up by Dr. Richey in the following words:—­

“Battles, plunderings, etc., exclusive of those in which the English Government was engaged, 116; Irish gentlemen of family killed in battle, 102; murdered, 168—­many of them with circumstances of great atrocity; and during this period, on the other hand, there is no allusion to the enactment of any law, the judicial decision of any controversy, the founding of any town, monastery or church; and all this is recorded by the annalist without the slightest expression of regret or astonishment, as if such were the ordinary course of life in a Christian country.”

At length, in 1534, matters came to a head; the Lord Deputy broke out into open rebellion.  We can learn from the State papers of the period what the condition of Ireland then was.  The Pale—­now but the remnant of a fraction—­was constantly invaded and ravished by wild tribes, and was itself becoming Ersefied; for the poorer English settlers had either fled back to England, joined the Celtic tribes in despair, as their only way of escaping from the harshness of the English lords, or been crushed out of existence; and, as had already happened elsewhere, their place had been taken by Irish retainers.