May, 1652, the Parliamentarians had no more valuable and efficient allies than Rinuccini, and after his departure from Ireland in February, 1649, the Roman Catholic Bishops who succeeded to his office and adopted a policy little less ruinous than his. The troops, too, of the various factions afforded powerful aid to the Parliamentarians by their insane dissensions, continually thwarting and opposing one another, and often being on the point of meeting each other in actual conflict. Their idiotic dissensions were equivalent to an army of Irish volunteers in aid of the Parliament. During the whole of this period the Irish were almost uniformly defeated by the Puritans. The only very remarkable exception to this disgraceful truth occurred at the siege of Clonmel by Cromwell himself, where, as also at the siege of Kilkenny, he learned that his atrocious policy of massacre at Drogheda and Wexford was not so successful as he expected it would be.

Clonmel was defended by Hugh O'Neill and some 1,500 of Owen Roe's Ulster soldiers. Hugh was the last of a series of four very remarkable and able men, who played an important part in the history of their country from the reign of Elizabeth to the time of this siege. Cromwell had just taken the city of Kilkenny, having granted the garrison honourable terms of surrender. He complimented them on the gallant defence they had made, and declared that but for the

treachery of the civic authorities, he would have raised the siege. At Clonmel O'Neill made a heroic defence, till his last charge of powder was spent; and he then withdrew the remnant of his soldiers unobserved, by night. The siege was undertaken early in April, 1650, and a practicable breach having been quickly made, the assault was ordered.

"The first attempt to storm was defeated with so much slaughter that the infantry refused to advance a second time; and Cromwell was forced to appeal to the cavalry. Lieutenant Henry Langley and several other officers of horse gallantly volunteered; the private troopers followed the example of their officers, and a second storming party was formed under the command of Colonel Culin. The second assault was so fierce that the Irish were driven from the breach; but O'Neill had by this time built a new wall at the head of the street which the breach faced, and lined the adjacent houses with musketeers. The assailants were unable to overcome this new obstacle. Culin and several others fell. Langley's left hand was cut off by a blow of a scythe, and the greater part of the detachment was either killed or wounded. In these two assaults Cromwell lost more than 2,000 of his best soldiers. He would not venture on a third; but changed the siege into a blockade, and determined to wait the slow effects of famine."*

These two examples afford evidence that the terror excited by the massacres of Drogheda and Wexford, which is put forward in miserable palliation of those savage atrocities, did not quite answer by its success Cromwell's anticipations. Upon the whole, however,

* Cooke Taylor, vol. ii., p. 38.

the conduct of the Irish during this period affords a most disgraceful exemplification of the proverb

Quem Deus vult perdere, prius dementat."

If any trading Irish patriot, who has not yet entered the rat-trap, disputes the truth of what I have here just written, with pain and shame, I pledge myself to produce chapter and verse in proof of every statement

I have made.

It may be safely assumed that the civil war would, at all events, have ended in the certain victory of the Long Parliament, having regard to the overwhelming superiority of force of England and Scotland, and the necessary division in Ireland between the Covenanting Presbyterians of Ulster and the other three Irish parties; but if these had presented a firmly united front to the enemy, and conducted the war with mutual trust, bravery, and such leadership as Montrose gave his Irish brigade, the peace that would have closed the war would have been very different indeed from the inhuman barbarity of the Cromwellian Settlement.

VII.

I now gladly return to the proper object of my essay. I again request the special attention of the

1

reader to the following facts. In July, 1638, Archbishop Laud writes to Strafford :

"The Scottish business is extream ill indeed, but what will become of it God knows, but certainly no good, and his Majesty hath been notoriously betrayed by some of them. There is a speech here, that they have sent to know the number of Scotchmen in Ulster; and that privately there hath been a list taken of such as are able to bear arms, and that they are found to be above 40 thousand in Ulster only. This is a very private report, and perhaps false, but in such a time as this I could not think it fit to conceal it from your lordship, coming very casually to my ears."

This estimate, of course very loose, was made three years before the massacre of 1641. In 1657, Major Morgan, Member of Parliament for the County of Wicklow, in a debate respecting the lands of the Lords Clandeboy and Ards in the County of Down, stated that "in the north the Scotch keep up an interest in garb and all formalities, and are able to raise 40,000 fighting men at any time." These statements (though of course far from accurate, together with the fact, always to be borne carefully in mind when speculating upon the Protestant population of Ulster after 1641, viz., that there has never been any pretence at a second Plantation of Ulster after the supposed extermination of the men, women, and children of the first), are utterly inconsistent with anything remotely approaching to truth in the allegations of Clarendon and Temple. Clarendon himself, in his short view of the

state of Ireland, says: "The Scots in Ulster were very numerous and possessed considerable towns in 1648."*

The excellent Dr. Oliver Plunket, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Armagh, judicially murdered in 1681, writes to Rome in 1673 as follows:

"In the diocese of Down and Connor, as also in many other dioceses, there is a large number of Presbyterians (who are especially numerous in Ulster), of Anabaptists, and Quakers, and hence these dioceses [viz., Roman Catholic] are exceedingly poor. And it must here be remarked, that the Presbyterians, who are an offshoot of Protestantism, are more numerous than Catholics and Protestants [viz., Protestants of the Established Church] together."

If Temple's calumny were true, Ulster ought to have been by far the most Roman Catholic province of Ireland. It is, however, and has ever been since the Plantation of Ulster, certainly by far the most Protestant. It is believed that till the famine of 1846-7, which fell more heavily on the Roman Catholics than on the Protestants, the former, in spite of the Penal Laws, had been gaining on the latter. Dr. Bourke, Roman Catholic Bishop of Ossory, in his Hibernia Dominicana (Brussels, 1762), gives the following account of the relative numbers of Protestants and Roman Catholics in each province :

* Clarendon's Rebellion, vol. viii., p. 83.