Standish O'Grady; selected essays and passages

IRISH POLITICS AND POLITICAL HISTORY 1 63
those times reveals the fact that assassination, as a safe
and economical method of getting rid of inconvenient
persons, was universally practised ;
and that there was no
occasion at all for Froude's elevated hands of pious
horror relative to the poisoned wine which Master Smith
of Dublin, by the direction of the Viceroy and consent
of the Queen, administered to Shane O'Neill and his
household.
Nor can we defend these people by reference to con-
temporary moral standards. These men were worse
than the rest. Outside the little group of State initiates
and their hired rufHans, there were few English or Irish
gentlemen of that day who dreamed that such things
were being done, or who, hearing of them, that they were
done, would not have been struck with horror. The
statesmen of the sixteenth century were worse than their
contemporaries who were not statesmen ; and, like all
bad men, shrouded their proceedings in a cloak of dark-
ness. The paper in which Carew relates the assassination
of Hugh Roe was written in cypher. Had Cromwell
and Ireton been educated in Tudor methods they would
have poisoned Charles the First in prison, written letters
steeped in tears to all the courts of Europe ;
and celebrated
his obsequies with a splendid funeral. That was what
Burleigh would have done. Henceforth we shall have to
dismiss a great many of our conventional notions with
regard to the men of Ehzabethan times. Mr. Froude's
picture of the upright. God-fearing, and civilized Englishman
contending against a flood of Celtic barbarism, is
doubly untrue, for the Englishmen were the reverse of