chieftains of Ulster to take advantage of the distressful state of Britain: they addressed themselves to Robert Bruce, and pathetically entreated his assistance to enable them, as brethren and kinsmen, to avenge themselves upon the com mon enemy. They offered to receive a sovereign from Scotland, to rescue and preserve them from the oppression of the English. Edward, the brother of Robert Bruce, was named and accepted by the chieftains of Ulster, who were assured, that he should speedily be sent to their deliverance with a formidable force. The intelligence was spread through their province with joy, and extensive preparations were made to ensure success. 6. In May, 1315, Edward Bruce landed about 6000 men in Ulster, to assert his new claim to the sovereignty of Ireland. The Irish lords of Ulster and many others flocked to his standard. The English settlers of the north were butchered without mercy, their castles levelled, and their townš set on fire. Almost all Ireland in a short time declared for the Scot. Some battles were fought, and vast desolation, both from the sword and famine, spread through the land. Edward Bruce was solemnly crowned at Dundalk, and his brother Robert landed in Ireland with a powerful army. The general dearth obliged Robert almost immediately to return with a part of his army; yet the forces which he left behind were instantly increased by a conflux of the discon tented Irish and numbers of degenerate English, and amongst the others by the De Lacys and their numerous adherents. 7. War, pestilence, and famine united to complete the calamities of that unfortunate country, when the English lords, expecting no vigour from their own government in England, determined to rally amongst themselves, and entered into an association to support the interests of Edward II. with their lives and fortunes. In order to give countenance to their zeal and loyalty, the royal favour was extended to the most distinguished among them. John Fitz Thomas, Baron of Ophaly, was created earl of Kildare; Lord Edmond Butler received the title of earl of Carrick. Desmond and Kildare eminently exerted themselves in resisting the general insurrection. 8. The English at length marched with a considerable force into Connaught, with a particular view to subdue Fedlim O'Connor, who had most perfidiously joined the Scotch invader. His forces were collected, and the contending parties met near the town of Athunree, where a desperate engagement at length terminated in favour of the English army.* This disaster had little influence on Edward Bruce; he continued his destructive progress without molestation to the very walls of Dublin. Thither the earl of Ulster had retired; and his sister being married to Robert king of Scotland, raised so much suspicion of his secret disloyalty, that the chief magistrate of the city imprisoned him: nor could all the authority of the English government procure his enlargement. The English interest was much weakened by the defection of the powerful family of De Lacy. The heads of it were formally summoned to appear and defend themselves against the charge of treason. They resented the indignity offered to their grandeur, by slaying the messenger. To revenge this outrage, their lands were seized, and they fled into Connaught to unite with their Scottish ally. 9. The disastrous prospect of affairs in Ireland drove the English government to the unchristian and scandalous shift of prostituting the spiritual powers of the church to the profane use of state policy, and perhaps of forwarding the unjust and wicked designs of corrupt men. It is here particularly noticed, because it drew from the more reflecting and better instructed part of the Irish nation a solemn publication of their national grievances, and displayed such a portrait of English oppression and wickedness as more than softens the harsh terms in which the Irish historians usally represent them. The court of Rome found its interest in keeping up the arrogant policy by which Adrian had made and Alexander had confirmed the grant of Ireland to the English monarch: and England deemed it prudent to render every adventitious power ancillary to her ultimate design of subjugating that country to her absolute sway. So powerfully therefore did the English agents press the mutual interest of both courts to resist the erection of a new Scotch dynasty * This effort to regain the kingdom of Ireland, by young Fedlim O'Connor, was defeated in the loss of this battle. It was the most bloody contest that had ever taken place between the two nations; it happened on the 10th of August, and continued from the rising to the setting sun. The frish attacked with the most ferocious impetuosity; but they were neither armed nor disciplined; they were rather headed than commanded by their young warlike chieftain. Such was the enthusiasm of his army, that above 10,000 of them fell in the field; amongst which were twenty-nine subaltern chiefs of Connaught. Tradition states, that after this decisive battle, the O'Connor family, like the Fabian, was so nearly exterminated, that throughout all Connaught not one of the name remained (except Fedlim's brother) who was capable of bearing arms. in Ireland, that a solemn sentence of excommunication was published from the papal chair against all the enemies of Edward II. and nominally against Robert and Edward Bruce, who were then invading Ireland for the purpose of securing to the latter the throne, to which the generality of that nation had called him. 10. This interposition of the pontiff had been expected; and to guard against it the Irish presented to Rome a most affecting remonstrance on the wretched state of their nation, and the oppression they had long endured from the English government.* This remonstrance produced so strong an * Extracts from the Irish Remonstrance to Pope JOHN XXII. It is extremely painful to us, that the viperous detractions of slanderous Englishmen, and their iniquitous suggestions against the defenders of our rights, should exasperate your holiness against the Irish nation. But alas, you know us only by the misrepresentation of our enemies, and you are exposed to the danger of adopting the infamous falsehoods which they propagate, without hearing any thing of the detestable cruelties they have committed against our ancestors, and continue to commit even to this day against ourselves. Heaven forbid, that your holiness should be thus misguided; and it is to protect our unfortunate people from such a calamity, that we have resolved here to give you a faithful account of the present state of our kingdom, if indeed a kingdom we can call the melancholy remains of a nation that so long groans under the tyranny of the kings of England, and of their barons; some of whom, though born among us, continue to practise the same rapine and cruelties against us which their ancestors did against ours heretofore. We shall speak nothing but the truth, and we hope, that your holiness will not delay to inflict condign punishment on the authors and abettors of such inhuman calamities. Know then, that our forefathers came from Spain, and our chief apostle St. Patrick, sent by your predecessor, pope Celestine in the year of our Lord 435, did by the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, most effectually teach us the truth of the holy Roman catholic faith, and that ever since our kings, well instructed in the faith that was preached to them, have in number sixty-one, without any mixture of foreign blood, reigned in Ireland to the year 1170. And those kings were not Englishmen, nor of any one nation but our own, who with pious liberality bestowed ample endowments in lands, and many immunities on the Irish church, though in modern times our churches are most barbarously plundered by the English, by whom they are almost despoiled. And though those our kings, so long and so strenuously defended, against the tyrants and kings of different regions, the inheritance given them by God, preserving their innate liberty at all times inviolate; yet, Adrian IV. your predecessor, an Englishman, more even by affection and prejudice, than by birth, blinded by that affection and the false suggestions of Henry II. king of England, under whom, and perhaps by whom, St. Thomas of Canterbury was murdered, gave the dominion of this our kingdom by a certain form of words to that same Henry II. whom he ought rather to have stript of his own on account of the above crime. effect upon pope John XXII. that his holiness immediately transmitted a copy of it to the king, earnestly exhorting him Thus, omitting all legal and judicial order, and alas! his national prejudices and predilections, blindfolding the discernment of the pontiff, without our being guilty of any crime, without any rational cause whatsoever, he gave us up to be mangled to pieces by the teeth of the most cruel and voracious of all monsters. And if sometimes nearly flayed alive, we escape from the deadly bite of these treacherous and greedy wolves, it is but to descend into the miserable abysses of slavery, and to drag on the doleful remains of a life more terrible than death itself. Ever since the English appeared first upon our coasts in virtue of the above surreptitious donation, they entered our territories under a certain specious pretext of piety and external hypocritical shew of religion; endeavouring in the mean time, by every artifice malice could suggest, to extirpate us root and branch, and without any other right than that of the strongest, they have so far succeeded by base and fraudulent cunning, that they have forced us to quit our fair and ample habitations and paternal inheritances, and to take refuge, like wild beasts, in the mountains, the woods, and the morasses of the country; nor can even the caverns and dens protect us against their insatiable avarice. They pursue us even into these frightful abodes, endeavouring to dispossess us of the wild uncultivated rocks, and arrogating to themselves the property of every place on which we can stamp the figure of our feet; and through an excess of the most profound ignorauce, impudence, arrogance, or blind insanity, scarce conceivable, they dare to assert, that not a single part of Ireland is ours, but by right entirely their own. Hence the implacable animosities and exterminating carnage which are perpetually carried on between us; hence our continual hostilities, our detestable treacheries, our bloody reprisals, our numberless massacres, in which since their invasion to this day more than 50,000 men have perished on both sides: not to speak of those who died by famine, despair, the rigours of captivity, nightly marauding and a thousand other disorders, which it is impossible to remedy, on account of the anarchy in which we live; an anarchy, which, alas! is tremendous not only to the state, but also to the church of Ireland; the ministers of which are daily exposed, not only to the loss of the frail and transitory things of this world, but also the loss of those solid and substantial blessings which are eternal and immutable. Let those few particulars concerning our origin, and the deplorable state to which we have been reduced, by the above donation of Adrain IV. suffice for the present. We have now to inform your holiness, that Henry, king of England, and the four kings his successors, have violated the conditions of the pontifical bull, by which they were impowered to invade this kingdom; for the said Henry promised, as appears by the said bull, to extend the patrimony of the Irish church, and to pay to the apostolical see annually one penny for each house; now this promise both he and his successors above mentioned, and their iniquitous ministers, observed not at all with regard to Ireland. On the contrary, they have entirely and intentionally eluded them and endeavoured to force the reverse. As to the church lands, so far from extending them, they have confined them, retrenched them, and invaded them on all sides, inso to redress the grievances complained of, as the only sure expedient to bring back the Irish to their allegiance, and much that some cathedral churches have been by open force noto-f riously plundered of half their possessions: nor have the persons of our clergy been more respected; for in every part of the country we find bishops and prelates cited, arrested, and imprisoned without distinction; and they are oppressed with such servile fear, by those frequent and unparalleled injuries, that they have not even the courage to represent to your holiness the sufferings they are so wantonly condemned to undergo. But since they are so cowardly and so basely silent in their own cause, they deserve not that we should say a syllable in their favour. The English promised also to introduce a better code of laws and enforce better morals among the Irish people; but instead of this they have so corrupted our morals, that the holy and dove-like simplicity of our nation is, on account of the flagitious example of those reprobates, changed into the malicious cunning of the serpent. We had a written code of laws, according to which our nation was governed hitherto; they have deprived us of those laws, and of every law except one, which it is impossible to wrest from us; and for the purpose of exterminating us they have established other iniquitous laws, by which injustice and inhumanity are combined for our destruction. Some of which we here insert for your inspection, as being so many fundamental rules of English jurisprudence established in this kingdom. Every man, not an Irishman, can on any charge however frivolous, prosecute an Irishman,; but no Irishman, whether lay or ecclesiastic (the prelates alone excepted), can prosecute for any offence whatsoever, because he is an Irishman. If any Englishman should, as they often do, treacherously and perfidiously murder an Irishman, be he ever so noble or so innocent, whether lay or ecclesiastic, secular or regular, even though he should be a prelate, no satisfaction can be obtained from an English court of justice; on the contrary the more worthy the murdered man was, and the more respected by his own countrymen, the more the murderer is rewarded and honoured; not only by the English rabble, but even by the English clergy and bishops; and especially by those whose duty it is chiefly, on account of their station in life, to correct such abominable malefactors. Every Irishwoman, whether noble or ignoble, who marries an Englishman, is, after her husband's death, deprived of the third of her husband's lands and possessions, on account of her being an Irishwoman. In like manner, whenever the English can violently oppress to death an Irishman, they will by no means permit him to make a will or any disposal whatsoever of his affairs: on the contrary, they seize violently on all his property, deprive the church of its rights, and per force reduce to a servile condition that blood which has been from all antiquity free. The same tribunal of the English, by advice of the king of England, and some English bishops, among whom the ignorant and ill-conducted archbishop of Armagh was president, has made in the city of St. Kenniers (Kilkenny) the following absurd and informal statute; that no religious community in the English pale, shall receive an - Irishman as novice, under pain of being treated as contumacious contemners of the king of England's laws. And as well before as |