As an evidence that Henry had the spiritual welfare only of the people
of Ireland at heart, and that the building up of the Church there was
his sole object, no sooner did he land in that country, than he
parcelled out the entire island among ten Englishmen--Earl Strongbow,
Robert Fitzstephens, Miles de Cogan, Philip Bruce, Sir Hugh de Lacy, Sir
John de Courcy, William Burk Fitz Andelm, Sir Thomas de Clare, Otho de
Grandison and Robert le Poer. At one sweep, in so far as a royal grant
could go, he confiscated every foot of land from Cape Clear to the
Giant's Causeway, denied the right of the inhabitants to a single square
yard of their native soil, and made the whole country a present to the
persons just named. Perhaps history does not record another such
outrageous and infamous act, and one so antagonistic to every principle
of right and justice. Had there been a preceding series of expensive and
bloody wars between both countries, in which Ireland, after years of
fruitless resistance, fell at last beneath the yoke of the conqueror, it
could be readily understood, that the victor would seek to indemnify
himself for his losses, on terms the most exacting and relentless if
you will; but in the case under consideration, no animosity existed
between the two nations until the ruler of one, without even a shadow
of provocation on the part of the inhabitants of the other, made a
deliberate descent upon them, and ignoring the benefits conferred
gratuitously by them, previously, on his own ungrateful land, subjected
them to every barbarity and wrong known to the history of crime.

For upwards of four hundred years of the English occupation--that is,
from the landing of Strongbow down to the period of James the First,
there was no legal redress for the plunder or murder of an Irishman,
by any of the invaders, or for the violation of his wife or daughter.
The laws of the Pale, enacted under the sanction of the King and the
people of England, subsidized, in effect, a horde of ruthless