he Shannon was taken by assault,
and its fall carried with it the submission of Clare. The capture of
Athlone brought about the reduction of Connaught, and assured the loyalty
of the great Norman house of the De Burghs or Bourkes who had assumed an
almost royal authority in the west. The resistance of the tribes of the
north was broken in a victory at Bellahoe. In seven years, partly through
the vigour of Skeffington's successor, Lord Leonard Grey, and still more
through the resolute will of Henry and Cromwell, the power of the Crown,
which had been limited to the walls of Dublin, was acknowledged over the
length and breadth of the land.

[Sidenote: Henry's Irish Government]

But submission was far from being all that Henry desired. His aim was to
civilize the people whom he had conquered--to rule not by force but by
law. But the only conception of law which the king or his ministers could
frame was that of English law. The customary law which prevailed without
the Pale, the native system of clan government and common tenure of land
by the tribe, as well as the poetry and literature which threw their
lustre over the Irish tongue, were either unknown to the English statesmen
or despised by them as barbarous. The one mode of civilizing Ireland and
redressing its chaotic misrule which presented itself to their minds was
that of destroying the whole Celtic tradition of the Irish people--that of
"making Ireland English" in manners, in law, and in tongue. The Deputy,
Parliament, Judges, Sheriffs, which already existed within the Pale,
furnished a faint copy of English institutions; and it was hoped that
these might be gradually extended over the whole island. The English
language and mode of life would follow, it was believed, the English law.
The one effectual way of bringing about such a change as this lay in a
complete conquest of the island, and in its colonization by English
settlers; but from this course, pressed on him as it was by his own
lieutenants and by the settlers of the Pale, even the iron will of
Cromwell shrank. It was at once too bloody and too expensive. To win over
the chiefs, to turn them by policy and a patient generosity into English
nobles, to use the traditional devotion of their tribal dependence as a
means of diffusing the new civilization of their chiefs, to trust to time
and steady government for the gradual reformation of the country, was a
policy safer, cheaper, more humane, and more statesman