THE GREAT GERALDINE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XIX, Issue 19, 6 February 1891, Page 27

THE GREAT GERALDINE.

(From the /ration.)

The Hon. Emily Lawless is continuing her series of studies of the heroic figures who stand out in the Irish chronicles. The current number of the Nineteenth Century contains a sketch of Geroit Mor, or Gerald the Great, the Gelaldine who was Lord Deputy when Lambert Simnel was crowned in Christchurch Cathedral. The picture of the big Lord Deputy is good, and the impotence of the King, Henry VII., in his Irish territory, very humorously shown. This was Geroit Mor : " A big, broad-shouldered man, with a good-natured, dominant face, already beginning to get somewhat heavy about the region of the lower jaw. Though little or no blood is traceable in his veins, there seems to have been a considerable share of it in his nature, however it got there. ' The Earl being soon botta and soon cold were well beloved,' says Holinshed. <He was open and playne, hardly able to rule himself when he was moved ; in anger cot so sharp as short, being easily displeased and soon appeased. A vehement, sharp-spoken man, evidently dangerous aa gunpowder when opposed, but easily mollified when once the occasion tor anger was past ; nay, not difficult to move to laughter, even at his angriest, and liking a jest, though it were lomatimes at his own expense. 1 " He was " essentially an out-oL-door man. He loved to ba in the saddle. He loved fighting for its own sake — too much so, thoaa who liked him not averred — and would have made a raid — most Irishmen of his day, or, perhaps, of any day for that matter, would — were it but to recover a strayed kid. Everything we learn of him bears the same stamp. His talk — what scraps remain— smacks emphatically of the open air. He quickly sickened of courts and courtly places, even when not kept in them a prisoner. His son's speech, oft quoted, to Wolsey might have fitted quite as naturally into the mouth of his father — ' I slumber, my lord, in a bard cabyn, while your Grace sleeps in a bed of downe ; I ssrve under the cope of Heaven when you are served under a oanopie ; I drinke water out of my skull, when you drinke wine out of golden cuppes ; my courser is trayned to the field, when your genet is taught to amble. When you are begraced, crouched, and kneeled to, I find small grace with any of our Irish rebels, 'cept I myself cut them off by the two knees.' Wolsey, we are told, having all this suddenly fired at him, 'rose up in a fume from the councayle table, perceiving Kildare to be no babe.' No Kildare, neither the seventh, eighth, ninth, or any of the name, was a ' babe,' and their tongues were to the full as ready as their swords. 1 ' Quantum mutatus ah illo ! Miss Lawless does not mean her reference to extend to date. They have lost both sword and tongue and taken to the Pigottist quill for the composition of I.L.P.U. pamphlets. The crowning of Simnel was an amusing tragi-conaeJy. "Edward the Sixth, King of all England and Ireland — or was the order, one wonders, for the occasion reversed ? — he was duly proclaimed." By the way, did the English of Ireland anticipate the English of England in crowning their kins; King of Ireland 1 He was " taken to the Cathedral of Christ Church, and there, in presence of the Lord Diputy, the Chancellor, and other fundionaries, solemnly crowned, the Bishop of Meatb preaching the coronation sermon. And— royal crowns being of late years, unfortunately, not needed in Ireland — one was borrowed for the occasion from the head of the statue of the Virgin, 'in St. Mary's Chuich by the Dame-gate ' Still wearin? which — picture the scene ; the lad (he was only fifteen), the crowd, the church, the bishop, the crown — scarce likely, one would say, to be a fit— be was mounted upon the Bhoulders of ' Great Darcy of Platten,' talhst man «f the day in Ireland, and, so hoisted and so becrowned, marched back from the Cathedral to the Castle, all his train following." They did these things better in the other Ireland.