the island. He landed with an army at Waterford, and received the general submission of the native chieftains. But the Lords of the Pale held sullenly aloof; and Richard had no sooner quitted the island than the Irish in turn refused to carry out their promise of quitting Leinster. In 1398 his lieutenant in Ireland, the Earl of March, was slain in battle, and Richard resolved to complete his work by a fresh invasion; but the troubles in England soon interrupted his efforts, and all traces of his work vanished with the embarkation of his soldiers.

With the renewal of the French wars, and the outburst of the Wars of the Roses, Ireland was again left to itself, and English sovereignty over the island dwindled to a shadow. But at last Henry the Seventh took the country in hand. Sir Edward Poynings was despatched as deputy; the Lords of the Pale were scared by the seizure of their leader, the Earl of Kildare; the Parliament of the Pale was forbidden by the famous Poynings' Act to treat of any matters save those first approved of by the English King and his Council. For a while however the Lords of the Pale must still serve as the English garrison against the unconquered Irish, and Henry made his prisoner the Earl of Kildare Lord Deputy. "All Ireland cannot rule this man," grumbled his ministers. "Then shall he rule all Ireland," replied the King. But though Henry the Seventh had begun the work of bridling Ireland he had no strength for exacting a real submission; and the great Norman Lords of the Pale, the Butlers and Geraldines, the De la Poers

and the Fitzpatricks, though subjects in name, were in fact defiant of royal authority. In manners and outer seeming they had sunk into mere natives; their feuds were as incessant as those of the Irish septs; and their despotism over the miserable inhabitants of the Pale combined the horrors of feudal oppression with those of Celtic anarchy. Crushed by taxation, by oppression, by misgovernment, plundered alike by Celtic marauders and by the troops levied to disperse them, the wretched descendants of the first English settlers preferred even Irish misrule to English "order," and the border of the Pale retreated steadily towards Dublin. The towns of the seaboard, sheltered by their walls and their municipal selfgovernment, formed the only exceptions to the general chaos; elsewhere throughout its dominions the English Government, though still strong enough to break down any open revolt, was a mere phantom of rule. From the Celtic tribes without the Pale even the remnant of civilization and of native union which had lingered on to the time of Strongbow had vanished away. The feuds of the Irish septs were as bitter as their hatred of the stranger; and the Government at Dublin found it easy to maintain a strife, which saved it the necessity of self-defence, among a people whose "nature is such that for money one shall have the son to war against his father, and the father against his child." During the first thirty years of the sixteenth century, the annals of the country which remained under native rule record more than a hundred raids and battles

between clans of the north alone. But the time was at last come for a vigorous attempt on the part of England to introduce order into this chaos of turbulence and misrule. To Henry the Eighth the policy which had been pursued by his father, of ruling Ireland through the great Irish lords, was utterly hateful. His purpose was to rule in Ireland as thoroughly and effectively as he ruled in England, and during the latter half of his reign he bent his whole energies to accomplish this aim. From the first hours of his accession, indeed, the Irish lords felt the heavier hand of a master. The Geraldines, who had been suffered under the preceding reign to govern Ireland in the name of the Crown, were quick to discover that the Crown would no longer stoop to be their tool. Their head, the Earl of Kildare, was called to England and thrown into the Tower. The great house resolved to frighten England again into a conviction of its helplessness; and a rising of Lord Thomas Fitzgerald followed the usual fashion of Irish revolts. A murder of the Archbishop of Dublin, a capture of the city, a repulse before its castle, a harrying of the Pale, ended in a sudden disappearance of the rebels among the bogs and forests of the border on the advance of the English forces. It had been usual to meet such an onset as this by a raid of the same character, by a corresponding failure before the castle of the rebellious noble, and a retreat like his own, which served as a preliminary to negotiations and a compromise. Unluckily for the Geraldines, Henry had resolved to take Ireland seriously in hand,

and he had Cromwell to execute his will. Skeffington, a new Lord Deputy, brought with him a train of artillery, which worked a startling change in the political aspect of the island. The castles which had hitherto sheltered rebellion were battered into ruins. Maynooth, a stronghold from which the Geraldines threatened Dublin and ruled the Pale at their will, was beaten down in a fortnight. So crushing and unforeseen was the blow that resistance was at once at an end. Not only was the power of the great Norman house which had towered over Ireland utterly broken, but only a single boy was left to preserve its name.

With the fall of the Fitzgeralds Ireland felt itself in a master's grasp. "Irishmen," wrote one of the Lord Justices to Cromwell, "were never in such fear as now. The King's sessions are being kept in five shires more than formerly." Not only were the Englishmen of the Pale at Henry's feet, but the kernes of Wicklow and Wexford sent in their submission; and for the first time in men's memory an English army appeared in Munster and reduced the south to obedience. A castle of the O'Briens, which guarded the passage of the Shannon, was carried by assault, and its fall carried with it the submission of Clare. The capture of Athlone brought about the reduction of Connaught, and assured the loyalty of the great Norman house of the De Burghs or Bourkes, who had assumed an almost royal authority in the west. The resistance of the tribes of the north was broken in the victory of Bellahoe. In seven years,

partly through the vigour of Skeffington's successor, Lord Leonard Grey, and still more through the resolute will of Henry and Cromwell, the power of the Crown, which had been limited to the walls of Dublin, was acknowledged over the length and breadth of Ireland. But submission was far from being all that Henry desired. His aim was to civilize the people whom he had conquered to rule not by force but by law. But the only conception of law which the King or his ministers could frame was that of English law. The customary law which prevailed without the Pale, the native system of clan government and common tenure of land by the tribe, as well as the poetry and literature which threw their lustre over the Irish tongue, were either unknown to the English statesmen, or despised by them as barbarous. The one mode of civilizing Ireland and redressing its chaotic misrule which presented itself to their minds, was that of destroying the whole Celtic tradition of the Irish people—that of "making Ireland English in manners, in law, and in tongue. The Deputy, Parliament, Judges, Sheriffs, which already existed within the Pale, furnished a faint copy of English institutions; and these, it was hoped, might be gradually extended over the whole island. The English language and mode of life would follow, it was believed, the English law. The one effectual way of bringing about such a change as this lay in a complete conquest of the island, and in its colonization by English settlers; but from this course, pressed on him as it was by his own lieutenants and by the