The Rebels of Ireland Read Online Free PDF Page A

Smith’s son. And it was Anne herself he’d been courting. And nobody knew except him. His eyes were shining at the thought that he had takenpart in such an adventure. And if Anne, for whatever reason, had felt she must deceive their father, he scarcely gave it a thought.

    Lawrence cleared his throat. He was looking serious. If there had been friction between Martin Walsh and his eldest son, they were both careful to hide it from Anne and Orlando, especially since their mother had died. Respectfully, therefore, he indicated that he would like to speak with his father apart.
    â€œAre we sure,” he quietly asked, “of the family’s religion?”
    For that was where the danger lay.
    If the Reformation, like a series of earthquakes, had opened great chasms across Europe, the tremors in Ireland, at first, had been minor. King Henry had closed some monasteries and disposed of their land; there had been outrages, like the burning of holy relics in Dublin and the loss of Saint Patrick’s Staff. But the reign of the boy-king Edward—in which there had been a Protestant revolution in England—had been so short that the Protestants hadn’t had time to make much headway across the water in Ireland, before Queen Mary had brought her father’s kingdom back to Rome. Bloody Mary, they called her in England, yet you had to feel sorry for her. Proud and royal, she had seen her poor mother rejected and humiliated. No wonder she was so fiercely loyal to her Catholic heritage. Had she even understood the disgust of her English subjects, who valued their island independence, when she married her cousin Philip II of Spain? Childless, deserted by Philip, she had soon died and the English had told her Spanish husband not to show his face there again. In Ireland, however, the reign of Mary had been quiet enough. The lands of the monasteries Henry had dissolved were not given back to the Church—Catholic Irish gentlemen were not so pious that they wanted to part with this welcome windfall. But in things spiritual, Mary’s reign had been a return to normality.
    No, it was in Elizabeth’s long reign that Ireland’s religious troubleshad really begun. Yet for all this, you could scarcely blame the queen.
    The watchword of Queen Bess had always been compromise. There must be a national Church, it was argued, or there would be disorder. But the English Church that Elizabeth designed was such a clever amalgam that, it was hoped, moderate Catholics or Protestants could find it acceptable. The message to her subjects was clear. “If you will outwardly conform, you may in private believe what you like.”
    But history was against her. The whole of Europe was separating into armed religious camps. The Catholic powers were determined to fight back against the Protestant heretics. King Philip of Spain, having failed with her half sister Mary, even offered to marry Elizabeth to secure England for his family and the Catholic faith. But Elizabeth’s subjects were becoming more Protestant, even Puritan, and when in 1572 the French royal family organised a great massacre of Protestants on Saint Bartholomew’s Day, in which thousands of innocent women and children were killed, the Catholic cause in England was hugely damaged. But the greatest blow to Elizabeth’s hopes of compromise had come from Rome itself.
    â€œThe Pope has excommunicated the queen.” His grandfather Richard had come home with the news one day. It was one of the earliest events in his childhood that Martin Walsh remembered. “And I could wish,” his grandfather would always say afterwards, “that he had not done it.” Catholics no longer owed the queen any allegiance. Soon the Council in England, afraid that Catholics might be traitors, clamped down on them. Priests arriving from the continent were arrested as spies and insurgents. A number were executed. And when, at last, Philip of Spain had sent