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tices, to kill all the males able to bear arms, inhabiting in places where the rebels (as they were falsely styled) were harboured! O, much-abused country! how little is the world acquainted with thy horrible sufferings! how inadequately does it appreciate thy real character! To what wretched historians has thy sad tale been confided! Will the justice of heaven never avenge thy wrongs, nor vindicate thy rights? Must centuries still roll on, and behold the countless blessings, which heaven has lavished, with liberal hand, on one of the fairest portions of the globe, blighted and blasted by a wretched policy, worthy only of ruthless eastern despotism?

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CHAPTER XIX.

Examination of the cruelties said to have been

perpetrated by the Irish.

"I could a tale unfold, whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul; freeze thy young blood;
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres ;
Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
Like quills upon the fretful porcupine."-

-Shakspeare.

THE frauds and falsehoods which we have exposed to the reprobation of the reader, respecting the immense number of persons said to have been murdered during the insurrection of 1641, have, we trust, prepared him to lend an impartial ear to the exposure of frauds and falsehoods far more gross and shocking, respecting the pretended cruelties of the insurgents.

In Chapter XVII. we have allowed the accusers to prefer their charges in their own language, without exaggeration or extenuation. It is the only fair course of procedure. We pursue the same plan here; and lay before the reader the revolting statements of May, Temple, Whitelock, Leland, Carte, Hume, and Mrs. Macauley :

"People of all conditions and qualities, of every age and sex, daily presented themselves, spoiled and stripped, with no coverings but rags or twisted straw to hide their privities: some wounded almost to death; others frozen with cold; some tired with travel, and so surbated that they came into the city creeping on their knees!!!!

"They appeared like walking ghosts in every street; and all the barns, stables, and outhouses were filled with them, where they soon died in so great numbers, that all the churchyards of Dublin could not contain them!!!"'421

"Some had their bellies ript up, and so left with their guts running about their heels. But this horrid kind of cruelty was principally reserved by these inhuman monsters for women, whose sex they neither pitied nor spared, hanging up several women, many of them great with child, whose bellies they ript up as they hung, and so let the little infants fall out; a course they ordinarily took with such as they found in that sad condition. And sometimes they gave their children to swine. Some the dogs eat: and some, taken alive out of their mother's bellies, they cast into ditches. And for sucking children, and others of a riper age, some had their brains knocked out; others were trampled under foot to death. Some they cut in gobbets and pieces; others they ripped up alive. Some were found in the fields, sucking the breasts of their murdered mothers. Others lay stifled in vaults and cellars; others starved in caves, crying out to their mothers rather to send them out to be killed by the rebels, than to suffer them to starve there."422

"They drowned many hundreds, men, women, and innocent children, in the rivers. Some they sent to sea in a rotten vessel, without any sails or rudder, to be cast away and great numbers of the English, after they had done all drudgeries for the rebels in hopes of mercy, had all their throats cut by them and with some of them the execrable villains and monsters would make themselves pastime and sport, before their death, trying who could hack deepest into the Englishmen's flesh and so with the highest torture and cruelty mangled them to death.' 92423

"Sometimes they enclosed them in some house or castle, which they set on fire, with a brutal indifference to their cries, and a hellish triumph over their expiring agonies. Sometimes the captive English were plunged into the first river, to which they had been driven by their tormentors. One hundred and ninety were, at once, precipitated from the bridge of Portnedown. Irish ecclesiastics were seen encouraging the carnage. 421 May, 86. 422 Temple, 89. 423 Whitelock, 49.

The women forgot the tenderness of their sex, pursued the English with execrations, and imbrued their hands in blood. Even children, in their feeble malice, lifted the dagger against the helpless prisoners!!!"424

"They gave a loose to the mortal hatred they bore the English, and rivers of blood were inhumanly shed. The island, formerly renowned for its piety, was now become a scene of massacres, which it would be shocking to humanity to repeat. Every thing that the ferocity of their minds and the brutality of their nature could suggest, was put in practice by the common soldiers."425

(6 An universal massacre commenced of the English, now defenceless, and passively resigned to their inhuman foes!!! No age, no sex, no condition was spared. The wife, weeping for her butchered husband, and embracing her helpless children, was pierced with them, and perished by the same stroke. The old, the young, the vigorous, the infirm, underwent a like fate, and were confounded in one common ruin. In vain did flight save from the first assault. Destruction was every where let loose, and met the hunted victims at every turn.”426

"Slaughtering the English was represented by the priests as the most meritorious of religious acts!! They exhorted the people with tears in their eyes to rid the world of these declared enemies to the Catholic faith and piety. Many of the rebels would say, after bragging of the number of barbarous murders they had committed, that they knew if they should die, their souls would go immediately to heaven."

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"Some thousands of English were burned in their houses; others were stripped naked, and, in hundreds in a drove, pricked forward with swords and spikes to river sides, and from thence pushed headlong into the stream. Some were manacled and thrown into dungeons, and there left to perish at leisure. Others were mangled, and left to languish in the highways, Some were happy enough to suffer the milder death of hanging. Other more unfortunate wretches were buried alive. This was the fate of a poor little infant, who, whilst he was putting in the grave, cried out to his dead parent, Mammy,

424 Leland, III. 147.
426 Hume, III. 542.

425 Carte, I. 177.
427 Macauley, III. 71.

save me!' yet could not his innocent cry pierce the heart of the hardened wretch from whom he received his fate. Some were mangled and hung upon tenter hooks!! Some with ropes round their necks, were dragged through woods, bogs, and ditches, till they died. Some were hanged up by the arms, and then cut and slashed, to see how many wounds an Englishman could endure. Some were ripped up, and their entrails left hanging about their heels. These kinds of cruelties were exercised on children of all ages, and many women with child suffered the same fate. Children were forced to carry their sick and aged parents to the place of slaughter!! There were of those barbarians some so ingenious in their cruelty as to tempt their prisoners with the hopes of preserving their lives, to imbrue their hands in the blood of their relations. Children were in this manner impelled to be the executioners of their parents, wives of their husbands, mothers of their children!! and then, when they were thus rendered accomplices in guilt, they were deprived of that life they endeavoured to purchase at so horrid a price. Children were boiled to death in cauldrons. Some wretches were flayed alive. Others were stoned to death. Others had their eyes plucked out; their ears, nose, cheeks, and hands cut off; and thus rendered spectacles to satiate the malice of their enemies. Some were buried up to the chin, and there left to perish by degrees. One Protestant minister was put into a cask, lined with iron spikes, and then rolled up and down till he was dead!!! Parents were roasted to death before their children, and children before their parents!!!"'428

To establish the falsehood of these hideous portraits of cruelty, a few lines might suffice. Those lines would carry conviction. It would be enough to state the simple fact, that the originals were drawn by the miserable and abandoned falsifiers, who have so long deluded the world with a belief that there were 100,000 persons massacred in one week, 200,000 in a month,

428 Macauley, III. 71, 72.

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