he married a Protestant, the marriage
was void; the children were illegitimate. And, if one Catholic
married another, it required the presence of a priest, and if a
priest landed in Ireland for twenty minutes, it was death! To this
ferocious 'Code', Sir Robert Peel, in our own day, added the climax,
that no Catholic should quit his dwelling between the hours of sunset
and sunrise, an exaggeration of the 'Curfew Law' of William the
Conqueror. Now, you will hardly believe that this was enacted as a
law. But Mr. Froude alludes to this code. Yes; he was very honest; he
would paint England as black as she deserved. He said of Queen
Elizabeth that she failed in her duty as a magistrate; she failed
towards Ireland in her capability of being a great ruler. And then he
proceeded, after passing sentence, to give us the history of her
reign, and showed that, in very many cases, she could not have done
any different. For instance--oh! it is the saddest, blackest, most
horrible statement of all history; it makes you doubt the very
possibility of human nature--when you read that Spenser, the poet,
who had the most ardent, most perfect ideas in English
poetry--Spenser sat at the council board that ordered the wholesale
butchery of a Spanish regiment captured in Ireland, and, to execute
the order, he chose Sir Walter Raleigh, the scholar, the gentleman,
the poet, the author, and the most splendid Englishman of his age!
And Norris, a captain under Sidney, in whose veins flowed the blood
of Sir Philip, writing home to Elizabeth, begs and persuades her to
believe in O'Neill's crimes, and asks for leave to send a hired man
to poison him! And the Virgin Queen makes no objection! Mr. Froude
quotes a letter from Captain Norris, in which he states that he found
himself in an island where five hundred Irish (all women and
children; not a man among them) had taken refuge from the war; and he
deliberately butchered every living soul! And Queen Elizabeth, in a
letter still extant, answers by saying: 'Tell my good servant that I
will not forget his good services.' He tells us that 'The English
nobility and gentry would take a gun as unhesitatingly as a fowler,
and go out to shoot an Irishman as an Indian would a buffalo.' Then
he tells us, with amazement, that you never could make an Irishman
respect an Englishman! He points to some unhappy Kildare, the sole
relic of a noble house, whose four uncles were slaughtered in cold
blood--that is the only