make common cause
they might perhaps have shaken the English grasp from their necks, for
it was commonly corrupt and feeble. Sir Henry Sidney was the strongest
and best governor sent to the island during the century, but he was
able to do little. Though the others could be bribed and though one of
them, the Earl of Essex, conspired with the chiefs to rebel, and though
at the very end of Elizabeth's reign a capable Spanish army landed in
Ireland to help the natives, nothing ever enabled them to turn out the
hated "Sassenach."

[Sidenote: English colonization]

England had already tried to solve the Irish problem by colonization.
Leinster had long been a center of English settlement, and in 1573 the
first English colony was sent to Ulster. But as it consisted chiefly
of bankrupts, fugitives from justice and others "of so corrupt a
disposition as England rather refuseth," it did not help matters much
but rather "irrecuperably damnified the state." The Irish Parliament
continued to represent only the English of the Pale and of a few towns
outside of it. Though the inhabitants of the {349} Pale remained
nominally Catholic, the Parliament was so servile that in 1541 it
destroyed the monasteries and repudiated the pope, [Sidenote: Religion]
shortly after which the king took the title of Head of the Irish
Church. Not one penny of the confiscated wealth went to endow an Irish
university until 1591, when Trinity College was founded in the
interests of Protestantism. Though almost every other country of
Europe had its own printing presses before 1500, Ireland had none until
1551, and then the press was used so exclusively for propaganda that it
made the very name of reading hateful to the natives. There were,
however, no religious massacres and no martyrs of either cause. The
persecuting laws were left until the following century.

[Sidenote: Commercial exploitation]

The rise of the traders to political power was more ominous than the
inception of a new religion. The country was drained of treasure by
the exaction of enormous ransoms for captured chiefs. The Irish
cloth-trade and sea-borne commerce were suppressed. The country was
flooded with inferior coin, thus putting its merchants at a vast
disadvantage. Finally, there was little left that the Irish were able
to import save liquors, and those "much corrupted."

With every plea in mitigation of judgment that can be offered, it must
be recognized that Englan