For the Cause of Liberty: A Thousand Years of Ireland's Heroes - Couverture souple

Golway, Terry

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0684855577 ISBN 13 : 9780684855578

Editeur : Simon & Schuster, 2001

Synopsis

Book by Golway Terry

A propos du livre

Extrait :

Chapter One: Conquest

The first King of England to dispatch troops to Ireland did so with the blessing of the Pope. The King was Henry II; the Pope was Adrian IV -- the only Englishman to sit on the throne of Saint Peter.

Adrian gave his assent in 1155, long before the Reformation, long before religious differences were introduced to Ireland as a means of distinguishing friend from foe. Henry II and Adrian considered themselves modernizers, and Ireland, they decided, required modernizing. The native people who populated the island, the Gaels, were descendants of Celtic tribes who had conquered Ireland and the rest of Europe centuries before the birth of Christ. The Romans never made it to Ireland, and so the Gaelic Irish developed a flourishing civilization and language that bore few traces of Roman influence. But the Irish had enthusiastically embraced the Church of Rome. Patrick, a native of Britain who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in Ireland, converted the island to Christianity without a struggle in the fifth century.

Detached not only from the Continent but from the neighboring island to the east, the Gaels were different, different in their practice of Christianity, different in their law and customs. Religious irregularities such as divorce and the active leadership of women in religious life were permitted in Gaelic Christianity, while little heed was paid to the Papacy. Ireland had a vibrant, distinctive literature, filled with heroic tales of pagan warriors, when the rest of Europe was thrashing through the dark ages. The most famous of these legendary warriors was Cuchulain, a great champion who was slain in defense of his homeland.

In its political life, Ireland, unlike England, had yet to develop a strong, centralized monarchy, although there was no shortage of kings. Indeed, there were dozens, scores, of them scattered throughout the island, ruling over communities called rí túathe. While there was a High King, or ard rí, he did not rule as Henry ruled in England. The High King's position was mostly ceremonial, although one of them, Brian Boru, gained fame when he united the island's disparate communities and then defeated the Vikings at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014.

The island's customs certainly puzzled its powerful English neighbors, who saw in such cultural difference evidence of ignorance and barbarism. Gaelic Ireland was rural and socially mobile. Land was not enclosed, and property rights were unclear. The family, not the individual, was the basic unit of Gaelic society. When a king died, all male descendants were eligible to succeed him. The eventual successor was chosen in an election and given a Gaelic title -- for example, the head of one of Ireland's most prominent families, the O'Neills (or Ui Neills), held the title of The O'Neill. A hereditary class of lawgivers, called Brehons, presided over a complex regulatory system that baffled outsiders. People who considered themselves wronged fasted until their antagonist agreed to submit the dispute to arbitration. Poets were accorded special places in a king's court as well as in society, for they were regarded as the keepers of cultural memory, a unifying force in an island of many small and often fractious kingdoms. Harpers, too, were important members of society's elite -- the harp began appearing on Irish coats of arms in the thirteenth century, and it serves as modern Ireland's state emblem.

Pope Adrian made his view of the Gaels clear in giving his blessing to Henry's proposed incursion. "You have expressed to us your desire to enter the island of Ireland in order to subject its people to law and to root out from them the weeds of vice," Adrian wrote to Henry. "We, therefore...do hereby declare our will and pleasure that...you shall enter that island and execute whatever may tend to the honour of God and the welfare of the land."

These people thought to be trapped in the weeds of vice were, in fact, the keepers of Europe's cultural memory. Just as the Romans hadn't made it to Ireland -- a land they called Hibernia because of what seemed to them to be a cold, winterlike climate -- neither had the Vandals, Visigoths, and other warriors whose victories over Rome ushered in the dark ages. During the last centuries of the first millennium, Irish monks patiently copied the great works of Western literature, while scholars traveled to devastated Europe to reintroduce the very idea of civilization.

Still, Henry and Adrian believed that the Irish themselves required an introduction to civilization. But Henry didn't act immediately on the Pope's blessing. In the meantime, one of Ireland's many kings, Dermot MacMurrough, was looking for outside help to further his political ambitions on the island. So, in 1167, he invited troops from England -- they were French-speaking Normans who had settled in England after William the Conqueror's invasion -- to help him. Three years later, the Earl of Pembroke, also known as Strongbow, traveled from England to Ireland to fight alongside MacMurrough. He eventually married MacMurrough's daughter, and when MacMurrough died, Strongbow succeeded him as king of the region known as Leinster, one of Ireland's four provinces. The others became known as Ulster, Munster, and Connaught. Eventually, each province was subdivided into counties, for a total of thirty-two.

Henry II found Strongbow just a bit too ambitious, a possible threat to England's ambitions in Ireland. So, sixteen years after receiving Adrian's approval, he led an expedition to Ireland in 1171 to put Strongbow in his place. The cost of making his point was high: the troops he led into Ireland in 1171 have, in a sense, never left.

From the very beginning of the English presence in Ireland, the invaders regarded the natives as aliens and savages, and themselves as the keepers of civilization. "The Irish live like beasts," complained an English visitor, who insisted that the Irish were "more uncivil, more uncleanly, more barbarous...than in any part of the world that is known." Later visitors would complain about a variety of local customs, from drinking the blood of living cattle to the communal ownership of land. Indeed, the more the English saw of Ireland, the more they found reason to be appalled: they didn't like the Irish diet, the overt sexuality of many Irish women (and the fact that married Irish women kept their family names instead of adopting their husband's), even Irish hairstyles and clothing. (Or the lack thereof. One observer remarked that the poor rural Irish "show their shameful parts without any shame.") Pope Adrian's successor, Alexander III, shared this distaste for Gaelic ways. He wrote to Henry II of the "enormities of vice with which the people of Ireland are infected." Alexander said it was up to "the noble king of the English" to bring order to "this barbarous and uncouth race."

But many of the Normans who had marched with Strongbow and some who arrived later with Henry were of a different view. They remained in Ireland, formed settlement communities mostly along the island's east coast, intermarried with the native Gaels, and assimilated into Gaelic Ireland. They were considered, in the phrase of that day, hiberniores hibernis ipsos, or "more Irish than the Irish." Eventually, they would become known as Old English, as opposed to new English settlers who arrived in later centuries.

Henry II did not press his expedition in Ireland, and for centuries there was no systematic attempt to spread the small English settlement. Some Irish chieftains accepted Henry as their lord (but not their king), but some didn't. The Normans established an Irish Parliament in 1297 in an attempt to centralize administration around the old Viking city of Dublin, but its jurisdiction reached only a small portion of the east coast. That area, a few hundred square miles of some of Ireland's most fertile land, was known as the Pale. Outside its borders, Gaelic Ireland made its own laws, lived by its own customs. The people there were said to be "beyond the Pale."

When new English influences began to replace the fading Normans, the Irish Parliament set out to make sure those within the Pale remained apart from those beyond. In 1366, Parliament passed a series of laws, called the Statutes of Kilkenny, designed to prevent the Norman-like assimilation of English settlers into Gaelic Irish society. Among other restrictions, the laws forbade the English living in Ireland from marrying the natives, speaking the Irish language, and playing native Irish sports such as hurling. In addition, Irish "babblers, rhymers [and] harpers" were barred from mixing with the English.

Still unvanquished, Gaelic Ireland remained a threat to the English settlement centered in and around Dublin. Small military engagements were common through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with the Irish often using their knowledge of the terrain to good advantage over the better-equipped English. English political disputes, too, were having an effect on Ireland, as they would for the remainder of the millennium. England's civil conflict, the Wars of the Roses, ended with the ascension of Henry VII, founder of the Tudor dynasty, but portions of the English settlement in Ireland remained loyal to the cause of the defeated Richard III. In an attempt to gain greater control over the country and to tighten England's loose administrative ties to Ireland, the Crown packed the Irish Parliament with Tudor supporters. And, in 1494, the Irish Parliament was persuaded to pass a law subordinating itself to the English Crown. The legislation was called Poyning's Law, named after England's top administrator in Ireland at the time, and it was a milestone in Anglo-Irish relations. Until Poyning's Law, the English settlement could claim to be a self-governing entity under the Crown. The new statute, however, rendered the Irish Parliament meaningless, and the legislature would become a symbol of Ireland's political degradation for nearly four hundred years. The Irish Parliament could pass bills only after the Crown had given its sanction, and could meet only with the monarch's approval. A viceroy, or Lord Lieutenant, was dispatched as the Crown's chief representative in Ireland. An administrative nerve center called Dublin Castle became the seat of English administration for Ireland, and it would continue to serve the Crown until 1922.

Still, the English in Ireland nervously watched as their influence, and indeed the Pale itself, shrank while Gaelic Ireland not only seemed to prosper, but became downright emboldened. The Gaelic leaders recruited well-armed mercenaries from Scotland called gallowglasses. Conflicts between settlers and natives continued to erupt, and the English colonists asked for help from the Pope, who, they hoped, would call for a crusade "against the...Irish enemies."

Henry VIII came to the English throne in 1509, and soon there would be no more appeals to the Pope. Rather, the Pope -- and those who remained loyal to him -- would be considered among the King's enemies. Henry's secession from Rome and his claim to be the spiritual head of the new, state-supported Church of England was a decisive moment in Irish history, changing forever the relationship between the two countries. The Gaelic Irish and the Old English did not abandon Catholicism and refused to accept the King's claim to be a spiritual as well as a political leader. The English already regarded the Gaelic Irish as backward aliens, and Ireland's refusal to disown the Pope was interpreted not only as evidence of Irish ignorance, but also as proof of their disloyalty to the Crown. The Gaelic Irish in turn defensively embraced their Catholicism as a badge of nationality. But it was England, not Ireland, that made political and even racial distinctions between Catholic and Protestant in Ireland, and those distinctions, brutally enforced, would define Irish society for the next five hundred years.

In 1534 -- the year after he annulled his marriage, married Anne Boleyn, and was excommunicated from the Catholic Church -- Henry put down a rebellion led by the son of one of Ireland's most powerful families, Thomas FitzGerald. Members of the FitzGerald family were descendants of Norman settlers and had served both Henry VII and Henry VIII as the Crown's top administrators in Ireland, holding the title of Earl of Kildare. The FitzGeralds moved in two worlds, for they had the respect of Gaelic Ireland even while they served the English Crown. Thomas FitzGerald held the formal, Crown-granted title of Lord Offaly and the informal nickname of Silken Thomas, for he and his allies wore silk fringes on their jackets. Silken Thomas cared little about the politics of religion. But he did care about his family's place as one of Ireland's leading families, and he feared that the FitzGeralds were losing their coveted influence with the King. Silken Thomas was determined to show that London could not take the family for granted. An armed challenge was a rather dramatic way of making his point, and an ineffective one. An English army attacked FitzGerald's forces in Maynooth, County Kildare. The rebels were forced to surrender, and they were promptly given what was called the "pardon of Maynooth." They were executed. Silken Thomas was hanged, and his family's lands confiscated.

Land, Henry decided, could make believers out of dissenters. He demanded that all privately held property in Ireland be surrendered to him so he could regrant the holdings. Landowners therefore would hold their property at the Crown's pleasure, subject to their continued loyalty. Control over the island was made even tighter in 1541, when the Irish Parliament declared Henry VIII to be the King of Ireland instead of merely being its lord. Ireland, Parliament said, was to be "knit forever to the imperial crown of the realm of England." This was a sign of England's new determination to Anglicize its neighbor, politically as well as culturally. Many of Ireland's chieftains and nobles swore their allegiance, with some of them promising to give up their Irish customs and clothes. Henry VIII also was proclaimed head of the new state religion in Ireland, the Church of England, later to become known as the Church of Ireland.

Queen Elizabeth, who succeeded to the throne in 1558, was determined to see that the process of Anglicizing Ireland continued. The Crown organized the provinces of Munster in the south and Connaught in the west, with each supervised by a Crown-appointed president, to bring local government in line with English law and customs. Elizabeth said she wished to direct "that rude and barbarous nation to civility" through "discreet handling rather than by force and the shedding of blood." If, however, force became necessary, she authorized her administrators to "oppose yourself and your forces to those whom reason cannot bridle."

Reason, at least Elizabeth's interpretation of it, indeed was having a hard time in Ireland. As the Queen pushed, the Gaelic Irish pushed back, aware that a struggle for land and power was taking shape. Sporadic but strictly local rebellions were constant and costly, beginning with an uprising in 1559 in Ulster, the northern province and the least penetrated by English influence. Other rebellions broke out in the late 1560s and again ten years later. Gaelic chieftains attempted to link up with England's rivals in Europe, specifically Catholic Spain, and Spanish and Italian troops landed in 1580 -- eight years before the Spanish Armada set sail -- to help foment rebellion. Elizabeth was forced to garrison Ireland with thousands of troops, an expense that left her nearly bankrupt. The native Irish in the province of Munster found themselves pushed aside t...

Présentation de l'éditeur :

Ireland's struggle for freedom reaches back much further into the annals of history than most of us can imagine. Since the eleventh century, when legendary King Brian Boru united the chieftains of Ireland to resist Viking invasion, countless individual leaders have fought to preserve and protect Ireland's political and cultural autonomy. In a chronicle of unprecedented breadth and authority, FOR THE CAUSE OF LIBERTY tells the stories of these heroes, including both men and women, Catholics and Protestants, who enabled the Irish to free themselves from the yoke of colonial oppression.
Journalist Terry Golway reconstructs the entire thousand year history of Irish nationalism, covering each benchmark event in Ireland's political evolution and presenting a vivid, epic tale of both the famous and unsung patriots who changed the course of Ireland's history. Among these are Wolfe Tone, a leader of the 1798 rebellion who cut his own throat rather than submit to a hangman; Kevin Barry, executed at age eighteen rather than turn informer on the eve of independence in 1921; and Bobby Sands, an IRA militant who died on a hunger strike in 1981, calling international attention to the conflict in Northern Ireland.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Simon & Schuster
• Date d'édition: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0684855577
• ISBN 13: 9780684855578
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 400