news of the king's death in London shocked the land. Charles, as already mentioned, had flung himself upon the loyalty of the Scottish parliament, in which the Lowland covenanting element predominated. His rebellious subjects on the southern side of the border, thirsting for his blood, offered to buy him from the Scots. After a short time spent in hagging over the bargain, those canny saints sold the unfortunate Charles for a money price of four hundred thousand pounds -an infamy for which the world has not a parallel. The blood-money was duly paid, and the English bore their king to London, where they murdered him publicly at Whitehall on the 30th January, 1649.

A few weeks after this event the uncompromising and truehearted, but impetuous and imperious nuncio, Rinuccini, bade adieu to the hapless land into whose cause he had entered heart and soul, but whose distractions prostrated his warm hopes. He sailed from Galway for home, in his ship the San Pietro, on the 23d February, 1649.

And now, while the at-length united confederates and royalists are proclaiming the young Prince of Wales as king throughout Ireland, lo! the huge black shadow of a giant destroyer near at hand is flung across the scene!

LIX.-HOW CROMWELL LED THE PURITAN REBELS INTO IRELAND. HOW IRELAND BY A LESSON TOO TERRIBLE TO BE FORGOTTEN WAS TAUGHT THE DANGER OF TOO MUCH LOYALTY TO AN ENGLISH SOVEREIGN.

'Tis the figure of the great Regicide that looms up at this period, like a huge colossus of power and wrath. The English nation caused Oliver Cromwell's body to be disinterred and hung in chains, and buried at the gallows foot. Even in our own day that nation, I believe, refuses to him a place amidst the statues of its famous public men, set up in the legislative palace at Westminster. If England honored none of her heroes who were not good as well as great, this would be more intelligible and less inconsistent. She gave birth to few greater men, whose greatness is judged apart from virtue; and, if she honors as her greatest philosopher and moralist the corrupt and venal lord chancellor Bacon, degraded for selling his decisions to the highest bribe, it is the merest squeamishness to ostracise the "Great Protector," because one king was among his murdered victims.

England has had for half a thousand years few sovereign rulers to compare in intellect with this "bankrupt brewer of Huntingdon." She owes much of her latter day European prestige to his undoubted national spirit; for, though a despot, a bigot, and a canting hypocrite, he was a thorough nationalist as an Englishman. And she owes not a little of her constitutional liberty to the democratic principles with which the republican party, on whose shoulders he mounted to power, leavened the nation.

In 1649, the Puritan revolution had consumed all opposition in England; but Ireland presented an inviting field for what the Protector and his soldiery called " the work of the Lord." There their passions would be fully aroused; and there their

vengeance would have full scope. To pull down the throne, and cut off Charles' head, was, after all (according to their ideas), overthrowing only a political tyranny and an episcopal dominance amongst their own fellow countrymen and fellow Protestants. But in Ireland there was an idolatrous people to be put to the sword, and their fertile country to be possessed. Glory halleluja! The bare prospect of a campaign there threw all the Puritan regiments in ecstasies. It was the summons of the Lord to His chosen people to cross the Jordan and enter the promised land!

In this spirit Cromwell came to Ireland, landing at Dublin on the 14th August, 1649. He remained nine months. Never, perhaps, in the same space of time, had one man more of horror and desolation to show for himself. It is not for any of the ordinary severities of war that Cromwell's name is infamous in Ireland. War is no child's play and those who take to it must not wail if its fair penalties fall upon them ever so hard and heavy. If Cromwell, therefore, was merely a vigorous and "thorough" soldier, it would be unjust to cast special odium upon him. To call him "savage" because the slain of his enemies in battle might have been enormous in amount, would be simply contemptible. But it is for a far different reason Cromwell is execrated in Ireland. It is for such butcheries of the unarmed and defenceless non-combatants the ruthless slaughter of inoffensive women and children -as Drogheda and Wexford witnessed, that he is justly regarded as a bloody and brutal tyrant. Bitterly, bitterly, did the Irish people pay for their loyalty to the English sovereign; an error they had just barely learned to commit, although scourged for centuries by England compelling them thereto ! I spare myself the recital of the horrors of that time. Yet it is meet to record the fact that not even before the terrors of such a man did the Irish exhibit a craven or cowardly spirit. Unhappily for their worldly fortunes, if not for their fame, they were high-spirited and unfearing, where pusillanimity would certainly have been safety, and might have been only prudence. Owen Roe O'Neil was struck down by death early in the struggle, and by the common testimony of friend and foe, in him

the Irish lost the only military leader capable of coping with Cromwell.* Nevertheless, with that courage which unflinchingly looks ruin in the face, and chooses death before dishonor, the Irish fought the issue out. At length, after a fearful and bloody struggle of nearly three years' duration, "on the 12th May, 1652, the Leinster army of the Irish surrendered on terms signed at Kilkenny, which were adopted successively by the other principal armies between that time and the September following, when the Ulster forces surrendered."”

LX.-THE AGONY OF A NATION.

HAT ensued upon the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland has been told recently in a book written under most singular circumstances-a compilation from state records and official documents-a book which the reader may take in his hand and challenge the wide world for another such true story.

About one-and-twenty years ago an Irish professional gentleman, a member of the bar, a Protestant, educated in England, belonging to one of those noble Anglo-Norman families who early indentified themselves in sympathy with Ireland as the country of their adoption, "received a commission from England to make some pedigree researches in Tipperary." He was well qualified for a task which enlisted at once the abilities of a jurist and the attainments of an archæologist. By inclination and habit far removed from the stormy atmosphere of politics, his life had been largely devoted to the

A

He died 6th November, 1649, at Cloughoughter Castle, county Caven, on his way southward to effect a junction with Ormond for a campaign against Cromwell. . He was buried in the cemetery of the Franciscan convent in the town of Caven. popular tradition, absurdly erroneous, to the effect that he died by poison-" having danced in poisoned slippers"-has been adopted by Davis in his Lament for the death of Owen Roe." The story, however, is quite apocryphal.

tranquil pursuits of study at home or in other lands. His literary and philosophic tastes, his legal schooling, and above all his professional experience, which in various occupations had brought him largely into contact with the practical realities of life in Ireland, all tended to give him an interest in the subject thus committed to his investigations. His client little thought, however—for a long time he little dreamt himself— that to the accident of such a commission would be traceable the existence subsequently of one of the most remarkable books ever printed in the English language-" The Cromwel lian Settlement of Ireland," by Mr. John P. Prendergast.

It would be hopeless to attempt to abbreviate or summarize the startling romance, the mournful tragedy of history-"the records of a nation's woes"-which Mr. Prendergast, as he tells us, discovered in the dust-covered cell of that gloomy tower in Dublin Castle yard, apparently the same that once was the dungeon of Hugh Roe O'Donnell.* I therefore relinquish all

"I now thought of searching the Record Commissioners' Reports, and found there were several volumes of the very date required, 1650–1659, in the custody of the clerk of the privy council, preserved in the heavily embattled tower which forms the most striking feature of the Castle of Dublin. They were only accessible at that day through the order of the lord lieutenant or chief secretary for Ireland. I obtained, at length, in the month of September, 1849, an order. It may be easily imagined with what interest I followed the porter up the dark winding stone staircase of this gloomy tower, once the prison of the castle, and was ushered into a small central space that seemed dark, even after the dark stairs we had just left. As the eye became accustomed to the spot, it appeared that the doors of five cells made in the prodigious thickness of the tower walls, opened on the central space. From one of them Hugh Roe O'Donel is said to have escaped, by getting down the privy of his cell to the Poddle River that runs around the base of the tower. The place was covered with the dust of twenty years; but opening a couple of volumes of the statutes--one as a clean spot to place my coat upon, and the other to sit on-I took my seat in the cell exactly opposite to the one just mentioned, as it looked to the south over the castle garden, and had better light. In this tower I found a series of Order Books of the Commissioners of the Parliament of the Commonwealth of England for the affairs of Ireland, together with domestic correspondence and Books of Establishments from 1650 to 1659. They were marked on the back by the letter A over a number, as will be observed in the various references in the notes to the present sketch. Here I found the records of a nation's woes. I felt that I had at last reached the haven I had been so long seeking. There I sat, extracting, for many weeks, until I began to know the voices of many of the corporals that came with the guard to relieve the sentry in the castle yard below, and every drum and bugle call of the regiment