all the English prisoners and send them safe to Dundalk. He showed his resentment at the outrages committed by the people of Kinnard by burning their houses. Rather than that such excesses should go unpunished, he threatened to join the English. Charles, watching the course of events from afar, now opened negotiations with the Confederation. But no lasting agreement was reached and Ormonde treated the army of the Confederation as rebels, only differing in form of disloyalty from the Gaels of the North. Ormonde was himself a Protestant and so too was his army. Indeed, after Charles had perished on the scaffold and Ormonde had fled to France, thousands of his men went over to the army of the parliament. In Munster the royalist forces were under the command of Lord Inchiquin, a renegade Gael known as Murrogh the Burner. Inchiquin made an attack on Cashel, where many men and women had fled for safety, taking their valuables with them. Piling up turf against the enclosure, Inchiquin set fire to it; a general assault followed, and men, women and children were slain, to the number of 700. The Franciscans of Cashel had hidden the fleeing Protestants in their chapel, even under the altar. Inchiquin rewarded them by putting thirty priests to the sword.

The Puritan soldiers fought with fiery zeal. Under the inspiration of men like Sir Richard Boyle, the Earl of Cork, the strife was embittered by religious hate. Boyle was an adventurer who had grown great by the merciless use of power. At the

This

commencement of the uprising of 1641, he wrote a letter to Lord Warwick, saying that there were few or no natives of the country who were not wellwishers to the rebellion. He therefore suggested that the opportunity would be a good one "To rid the Popish party of the natives out of the country and to plant it with English Protestants." With this object in view he urged the passing of an act "To attaint them all of high treason and to confiscate their lands and estates to the crown." course, he believed, "Would utterly dishearten them and encourage the English to serve courageously against them, in the hopes to be settled in the lands of them they shall kill or otherwise destroy." This letter was addressed to Sir William Parsons and that worthy replied saying, "I am of your mind that a thorough destruction must be made before we can settle upon a safe peace." The Long Parliament was filled with a like spirit, witness the following resolutions, passed by its members: "The Lords and Commons assembled in the Parliament of England do declare that no quarter shall be given to any Irishman, or to any Papist born in Ireland, who shall be taken in hostility against the Parliament."

So long, however, as Owen Roe O'Neill kept the field, so long the Irish remained unsubdued. In 1646 O'Neill inflicted a severe defeat on the parliamentary forces at Benburb. A year later he and Preston came within a few miles of Dublin. O'Neill was for an immediate attack; but Preston wanted to com

municate with Ormonde, who held the city. Once more dissension lost the Irish people the golden moment. Ormonde gave the city into the hands of the parliamentarians and fled to France. Broken in health, declared a traitor by the council of the Confederation, O'Neill died a year later and Ireland lay at the mercy of the enemy.

Erin has had many devoted sons, but none more true to her best self or more terrible to her enemies than Owen Roe O'Neill. While he admitted the overlordship of the English king, his aim was virtual independence. A devout Catholic, he stood for religious freedom. His ideal was Ireland for the Irish. But the Confederation was ruled by men of narrow vision and they spurned the very man who alone could have won their cause. Once more disunion robbed Erin of her hopes. An elegy by an unknown poet, translated by Dr. Sigerson, shows how bitterly the people rued his loss:

I stood at Cavan o'er thy tomb;

Thou spok'st no word through all my gloom;

O want! O ruin! O utter doom!

O great lost heir of the house of Niall!

I care not now whom death may borrow;
Despair sits by me night and morrow,
My life henceforth is one long sorrow,
And thou beneath the sod.

Katherine Tynan Hinkson pictures the dead warrior awaiting the predestined hour, which shall bring the heroes of Erin once more to face the foe:

Owen Roe O'Neill,

The kingliest king that ever went uncrowned,
Sleeps in his panoply of gold and steel,
Ready to wake.

A magnificent keen has been set by Sir Charles Stanford to words by Charles Perceval Graves, mourning the hero's fate. It is an elegiac strain that will vie with the most eloquent grief of Beethoven or Handel.

Ex. 39. Lament.

The landing of Cromwell and his Puritans ushered

in the darkest hour of Erin's story. The Ironsides and their grim captain came as ministers of the wrath of God. They looked upon the Irish, not as men and women made in the image of God, but as children of the devil. Some of them believed that, when the Savior was shown the kingdoms of the world, Ireland was hidden from his sight as the peculiar appanage of the fiend. It had been spread abroad that, at the storming of Cashel, some forty Irish were found who, when stripped, had tails near a quarter of a yard long." In the eyes of an ignorant, passionately prejudiced people, these things were proof, strong as holy writ, that the Irish were not human, but bestial. The zealots of the day raged against the Irish in a strain which, to the ears of our colder faith, sounds like religious insanity. A sample is quoted by Hardiman from a book printed in London in this same year of the taking of Cashel. Says the author:

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I beg upon my hands and knees that the expedition against them may be undertaken while the hearts and hands of our soldiery are hot, to whom I will be bold to say briefly: Happy is he that shall reward them as they have served us and cursed is he that shall do that work of the Lord negligently. Cursed be he that holdeth his sword back from blood. Yea. Cursed be he that maketh not his sword stark drunk with Irish blood, that doth not recompense them doubly for their hellish treachery to the English; that maketh them not heaps upon heaps and their country a dwelling place for dragons, an astonishment to nations. Let not that eye look for pity, nor that hand to be spared, that pities or spares them; and let him be accursed that curseth them not bitterly.

The Cromwellian expedition was conducted in the