so well known in England--made it a capital offence for a settler to
marry an Irishwoman or to adopt the Irish language, law, or costume. The
Act no doubt provided a good many ruffians with legal and even
ecclesiastical fig-leaves with which to cover their ruffianism, and
promoted among the garrison such laudable objects as rape and
assassination. But as a breakwater between the two races it did not
fulfil expectation. The Statute was passed in 1367: and two centuries
later Henry VIII. was forced to appoint as his Deputy the famous
Garrett Fitzgerald whose life was a militant denial of every clause and
letter of it. With the Tudors, after some diplomatic preliminaries, a
very clear and business-like policy was developed. Seeing that the only
sort of quiet Irishman known to contemporary science was a dead
Irishman, English Deputies and Governors were instructed to pacify
Ireland by slaughtering or starving the entire population. The record of
their conscientious effort to obey these instructions may be studied in
any writer of the period, or in any historian, say Mr Froude. For Mr
Froude, in his pursuit of the picturesque, was always ready to resort to
the most extreme measures; he sometimes even went so far as to tell the
truth. The noblest and ablest English minds lent their aids. Sir Walter
Raleigh and Edmund Spenser were both rather circumambulatory on paper;
the work of each is 'a long monotone broken by two or three exquisite
immortalities. But they were both as concise in action as an Elizabethan
headsman. Sir Walter helped Lord Grey, the recognised pattern in those
days of the Christian gentleman, to put to death seven hundred
prisoners-of-war at Smerwick. Spenser, being no soldier, leaned rather
to famine. In his famous book he recommends the destruction of crops,
houses, cattle, and all necessaries of life so that the Irish should
"soon be compelled to devour each other." The Commanders-in-Chief and
the Deputies specialised in poison, as became men whose wealth and
learning enabled them to keep in touch with the Italian Renaissance.