Popular oratory will have it that England has always been keen and aggressive in regard to the incorporation of Ireland within the Empire, but as a matter of fact, the very opposite has been the case.  From the time of Pope Adrian’s Bull, Laudabiliter, in 1154, which granted to Henry II. the Lordship of Ireland, but which Henry left unemployed for seventeen years, to that of the Irish petition for a legislative Union in 1703, which remained unanswered for nearly a century, vacillation and hesitation rather than eagerness for aggression have been the characteristic marks of English policy in Ireland.  Far-sighted statesmen could point out the benefits to Ireland from such a connection, but as a rule it was the presence of actual foreign danger that forced the British Parliament to act.  For four centuries the Lordship of the English Kings over Ireland was largely nominal.  It was only when the religious quarrels of the sixteenth century became acute that the Tudors—­already alarmed at the action of the Irish Parliament in recognising and crowning a pretender in Dublin Castle—­found themselves compelled to assert direct Kingship.

From that time till the legislative Union every enemy of England could safely count on finding a foothold and active friends in Ireland.  It is much too late in the day to indulge in any recriminations on this score.  The issues were the most tremendous that have divided Europe; each side was passionately convinced of the rightness and justice of its cause.  There were, in Pitt’s words relating to a later day, “dreadful and inexcusable cruelties” on the one side, and “lamentable severities” upon the other, just as there were all over Europe.  But in the case of Ireland every evil was exaggerated and every danger intensified by the system of dualism which encouraged resistance from within and invited interference from without.  For England and English liberty it was more than once a question of existence or extinction, and the knowledge of the constant danger from the immediate west did not tend to sweeten the situation.

In Elizabeth’s time the menace was from Spain; Spanish forces twice succeeded in effecting a landing on the Irish coast, and were welcomed by the inhabitants.  Spain was then the most powerful enemy of England and of civil and religious liberty all the world over; Elizabeth was declared by the Pope to have forfeited the crown of England, and if the Armada had been successful at sea, the Spanish army in England would have found enthusiastic supporters in Ireland.  Later on it was in Ireland, and by the aid of subsidies from an Irish Parliament, that Strafford raised 10,000 men to invade Scotland and England in support of Charles I. against his Parliament, and, incidentally, to drive the Scottish settlers out of Ulster.  As the Articles of Impeachment put it, his object in raising the Irish army was “for the ruin and destruction of England and of his Majesty’s subjects, and altering and