dopted, Ireland might have evolved an
adequate government and prosperity of her own. It is true that she was
more backward than England, but yet she had a considerable trade and
culture. [Sidenote: Irish misery] Certain points, like Dublin and
Waterford, had much commerce with the Continent. And yet, as to the
nation as a whole, the report of 1515 probably speaks true in saying:
"There is no common folk in all this world so little set by, so greatly
despised, so feeble, so poor, so greatly trodden under foot, as the
king's poor common folk of Ireland." There was no map of the whole of
Ireland; the roads were few and poor and the vaguest notions prevailed
as to the shape, size and population of the country. The most
civilized part was the English Pale around Dublin; the native Irish
lived "west of the Barrow and west of the law," and were governed by
more than sixty native chiefs. Intermarriage of colonists and natives
was forbidden by law. The only way the Tudor government knew of
asserting its suzerainty over these septs, correctly described as "the
king's Irish enemies," was to raid them at intervals, slaying, robbing
and raping as they went. It was after one of these raids in 1580 that
the poet Spencer wrote:

The people were brought to such wretchedness that any
strong heart would have rued the same. Out of every
corner of the woods and glens they came, creeping forth
upon their hands, for their legs would not bear them.
They looked like anatomies of death; they spoke like
ghosts crying out of their graves. They did eat the dead
carrions, happy where they could find them; yea and one
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another soon after, inasmuch as the very carcasses they
spared not to scrape out of their graves; and if they
found a plot of watercresses or shamrocks, there they
thronged as to a feast for a time.

The Irish chiefs were not to be tamed by either kindness or force.
Henry and Elizabeth scattered titles of "earl" and "lord" among the O's
and Macs of her western island, only to find that the coronet made not
the slightest difference in either their affections or their manners.
They still lived as marauding chiefs, surrounded by wild kerns and
gallowglasses fighting each other and preying on their own poor
subjects. "Let a thousand of my people die," remarked one of them,
Neil Garv, "I pass not a pin. . . . I will punish, exact, cut and hang
where and whenever I list." Had they been able to