have divided Europe; each side
was passionately convinced of the rightness and justice of its cause.
There were, in Pitt's words relating to a later day, "dreadful and
inexcusable cruelties" on the one side, and "lamentable severities" upon
the other, just as there were all over Europe. But in the case of
Ireland every evil was exaggerated and every danger intensified by the
system of dualism which encouraged resistance from within and invited
interference from without. For England and English liberty it was more
than once a question of existence or extinction, and the knowledge of
the constant danger from the immediate west did not tend to sweeten the
situation.

In Elizabeth's time the menace was from Spain; Spanish forces twice
succeeded in effecting a landing on the Irish coast, and were welcomed
by the inhabitants. Spain was then the most powerful enemy of England
and of civil and religious liberty all the world over; Elizabeth was
declared by the Pope to have forfeited the crown of England, and if the
Armada had been successful at sea, the Spanish army in England would
have found enthusiastic supporters in Ireland. Later on it was in
Ireland, and by the aid of subsidies from an Irish Parliament, that
Strafford raised 10,000 men to invade Scotland and England in support of
Charles I. against his Parliament, and, incidentally, to drive the
Scottish settlers out of Ulster. As the Articles of Impeachment put it,
his object in raising the Irish army was "for the ruin and destruction
of England and of his Majesty's subjects, and altering and subverting
the fundamental laws and established Government of this Kingdom."
Strafford fell, but the insurrection and massacre of 1641 were the
natural result of his intrigues with the Irish Parliament and the Irish
chiefs. It was under the impression of this manifest danger that
Cromwell--a century and a half before his time--abolished the Dublin
Parliament and summoned Irish representatives to the first United
Parliament at Westminster.

As the power of Spain declined, France came to be the chief menace to
England and to the peace of Europe. Again Ireland instinctively allied
herself with the enemy. Tyrconnel now played the part of Strafford, and
with the aid of French troops and French subsidies, and a sympathetic
Irish Parliament, endeavoured to destroy the Ulster Plantation, and make
Ireland a jumping-off place for the invasion of England. The Irish
Parliament, in the meantim