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but held fast to the thought which was ever present in his mind. As the night went on, and he became more collected, he went back, and persisting in his account obtained attention at last. The castle gates were closed and the watch manned; Macmahon and Lord Maguyre were taken; and Roger Moore, and the rest, finding that their stroke had missed, escaped out of the town. Dublin was saved. Unhappily there had been no Owen O'Conolly to sound the alarm in the Ulster farmhouses. The Ulster farmers, dispersed, surprised, and isolated, became the helpless victims of Irish ferocity on a scale on which it has rarely had an opportunity of displaying itself.

It does not fall within the purpose of the present history to relate circumstantially the scenes which followed. Inasmuch, however, as Catholic historians either deny their reality altogether, slur them over as enormously exaggerated, or lay the blame on the Protestants as the first beginners of violence; and inasmuch as the justification of the subsequent policy of England towards Ireland depends upon the truth of events of which the recollection was kept alive for a century by a solemn annual commemoration, it is necessary to relate briefly the outline of those events as recorded by eyewitnesses, who were examined in Dublin, fresh from the scenes which they had witnessed,

munition; and it was agreed among
them that, at the same hour, all
other his majesty's forts and maga-
zines of arms in the kingdom should
be surprised by other of the con-
spirators. Further, that all the
Protestants and English through-
out the whole kingdom that would
not join them should be cut off,
and so those Papists should become
possessed of the Government and

the kingdom at the same time.

'As soon as I heard that intelligence I repaired to the Lord Justice Borlase. We assembled the Council, and having sate in Council all that night as also all the next day, Oct. 23, we caused the castle to be strengthened with armed men,' &c.- The Lords Justices to the Earl of Leicester, October 25, 1641.' MSS. Record Office.

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before commissioners of known integrity;' men of CHAP. all stations and of both nations, whose evidence is the eternal witness of blood which the Irish Catholics have from that time to this been vainly trying to wash away.1

On the morning of that fatal Saturday there appeared, before the houses of the settlers and their tenants, in the six escheated counties, gangs of armed Irish, who demanded instant possession, and on being admitted, ejected the entire families, and stripped most of them to the skin.

Many resisted and were killed; many, the young vigorous men especially, who could save their own lives by flight, sought shelter for their women and their little ones in the houses of their Irish neighbours, with whom they had lived in intimacy. The doors of their neighbours were opened in seeming hospitality; but within there were not human beings--not even human savages-but ferocious beasts. "The priests had so charmed the Irish, and laid such bloody impressions on them, as it was held a mortal sin to give relief or

1 The sworn depositions remain, as I said, in Trinity College. Already, in Sir John Temple's time, the Catholics had begun to declaim against these evidences of their cruelty, and lively attestations given in to perpetuate the memory of them, to their eternal infamy.'Temple, Preface, p. 16. Dr. Curry dismisses 'the enormous heap of malignity and nonsense,' as he calls it, on the ground of a supposed discovery that, in infinitely the greater number' of the depositions the commissioners' attestation of them as being duly sworn' is struck through with a pen, thus re

ducing their value to random state-
ments.-Review of the Civil War in
Ireland, p. 176. No doubt these
volumes of evidence were justly
painful to Dr. Curry. An exami-
nation of the originals, however,
shows that the erasures, so far from
being found in 'infinitely the
greater number,' are found in rela-
tively very few, and so far from
invalidating the authority of the
depositions, are rather a proof of
the scrupulous care with which the
commissioners distinguished be-
tween fact and hearsay.-Compare
Reid, History of the Presbyterians
in Ireland.

BOOK protection to the English." Fugitives admitted to shelter are sacred in the Arab tent or the Indian wig1641 wam. These helpless ones were either betrayed to the ruffians out of doors, or murdered by their hosts. There were of course exceptions. An entire nation cannot at once and universally put off the feelings which connect them with their kind. Some families were sent with escorts to the sea; nor does a universal massacre appear at first to have been anywhere deliberately designed.2 Passion, however, was exas

L

1 Temple.

2 The contemporary accounts agree mainly that, during the first week, there were few or no deliberate murders. On October 24, Lord Chichester, writing from Belfast, says that the Irish had taken Charlemont, Dungannon, Tonderagee, and Newry, with all the military stores in them. Fires were visible all over the country; farms and villages burning; but, so far, Lord Chichester could not learn that 'they had slain more than one man.'

'Lord Chichester to the King, October 24, Belfast.' MSS. Ireland Record Office.

All the accounts agreed, on the other hand, that the pillaging, stripping, and burning were universal. Colonel Audley Mervyn, who was present in Ulster during the first three months of the insurrection, says that 'they were surprised so suddenly that the Irish servant, who overnight was undressing his master, the next morning was stripping master and mistress. In the twinkling of an eye, corporations, towns, villages were blazing; men, women, and children, of all ranks, exposed by hundreds naked on the mountains, and dying of cold.' But the forbearance, such as it might be, was soon ended.

'Nakedness and famine,' Colonel Mervyn says, 'were judged overslow executioners. Then entered the sword, destroying at first with the scabbard on, the rebels, under pretence of convoy, inviting the scattered and hidden Protestants into a body, that so they might make each surviving man an executor to the last murdered in his presence, and so the whole line one by one extinguished; the Irish priest, as ordinary, administered for all.

"Out of the county of Fermanagh, one of the best planted counties with English, I could never give account of twenty men escaped, except, which is most improbable, they should flee to Dublin. Having enquired from prisoners by name for such and such, they have informed me they were all massacred. The Blackwater, in Tyrone, had its streams dyed in blood, there being at one time 200 souls murdered on the bridge and flung down the river.'-Relation of Occurrences, by Colonel Audley Mervyn.

On December 1-I am particular about these dates, because it is insisted that the story of the massacre was an afterthought, made up in the following year to justify the confiscation of the estates of the insurgents-on December 1

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perated by the failure of parts of the scheme, which СНАР. would have given the leaders political control. The ill-success at Dublin was not the only disappointment. Sir Wm. Cole saved Enniskillen. Naked men, flying for their lives, carried the alarm to Derry, Coleraine, and Carrickfergus, and the inhabitants had time to close their gates. Murder, the Irish writers say, was begun only in retaliation. The first blood, they affirm, was shed at Island Magee, early in November, when three thousand Catholics were killed by the garrison of Carrickfergus.1 Were this story true,

a petition was presented to the English Parliament, signed by the Irish Council, stating that there were then 40,000 rebels in the field. Their tyranny,' says this document, 'is so great, that they put both man, woman, and child that are Protestants to the sword, not sparing either age, sex, degree or reputation. They have stripped naked many Protestants, and so sent them to the city-men and women. They have ravished many virgins and women before their husbands' faces, and taken their children and dashed their brains against the walls in the sight of their parents, and at length destroyed them likewise without pity or humanity.'

On December 14 the following letter from Ireland was read in the English Parliament:

'All I can tell you is the miserable state we continue under, for the rebels daily increase in men and munition in all parts, except the province of Munster, exercising all manner of cruelties, and striving who can be most barbarously exquisite in tormenting the poor Protestants, cutting off their ears, fingers, and hands, plucking out

their eyes, boiling the hands of
little children before their mothers'
faces, stripping women naked and
ripping them up,' &c.

Even Richard Beling, the pas-
sionate defender of the Catholics,
one of the authorities for the charge
that Parsons and Borlase did not try
to stop the rebellion, but let it ex-
tend for the sake of the expected con-
fiscations, half confirms in shame,
Sir Phelim O'Neill's barbarities.

'O'Neillus,' he says, 'Neurium aliasque munitiones ceipt, nec consternatus animo dum Baronis Maguyre sortem rescit arma abjicit. Sed ad vindictam potius respiciens plures in suâ Provinciâ turbas ac tragoedias excitat, paucisque cum copiis iisque inermibus plurima præstat contra ejus provincia Anglos et Scotos multum animo consternatos, etiam minus si vera referuntur in Catholico viro probanda.'- Vindicia Catholicorum Hiberniæ, by Richard Beling, 1650.

1 The Irish defences have taken

many forms. Nicholas French,
titular Bishop of Ferns, in the book
in which he compares Ireland under
the Cromwellians to the Bleeding
Iphigenia, insists with admirable
audacity, that there had been at first

BOOK there is something naïve in the complaint that soldiers appointed to keep the peace should have used strong

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