kept with those to whom promises had been made, and the
habit of rewarding treason with concessions must be brought to an end.
"Till great men suffer for their offences," they added, significantly,
"your subjects within the English pale shall never live in quietness,
nor stand sure of their goods and lives. Therefore, let your deputy have
in commandment to do justice upon great thieves and malefactors, and to
spare your pardons."[322]

These were but words, and such words had been already spoken too often
to deaf ears; but the circumstances of the time were each day growing
more perilous, and necessity, the true mother of statesmanship, was
doing its work at last.

[Sidenote: Henry awakes at last.]

The winter months passed away, bringing only an increase of
wretchedness. At length opened the eventful year of 1534, and Henry
learnt that excommunication was hanging over him--that a struggle for
life or death had commenced--and that the imperial armies were preparing
to strike in the quarrel. From that time onward the King of England
became a new man. Hitherto he had hesitated, temporized, delayed--not
with Ireland only, but with the manifold labours which were thrust upon
him. At last he was awake. And, indeed, it was high time. With a
religious war apparently on the eve of explosion, he could ill tolerate
a hotbed of sedition at his door; and Irish sedition was about to
receive into itself a new element, which was to make it trebly
dangerous.

[Sidenote: The religious element is introduced into Irish sedition.]

Until that moment the disorders in Ireland had arisen out of a natural
preference for anarchy. Every man's hand was against his neighbour, and
the clans made war on each other only for revenge and plunder and the
wild delight of the game. These private quarrels were now to be merged
in a single cause--a cause which was to lend a fresh stimulus to their
hatred of England, and was at once to create and consecrate a national
Irish spirit.

[Sidenote: The pope finds in the Irish a ready-made army.]

The Irish were eminently Catholic; not in the high sense of the
word,--for "the noble folk" could "oppress and spoil the prelates of the
Church of Christ of their possessions and liberties" without particular
scruple,[323]--but the country was covered with churches and monasteries
in a proportion to the population far beyond what would have been found
in any other country in Europe; and there are forms of supers