measures when the country was in the hands of bands of robbers, who were confessedly plundering the entire province. Every detail of that business, however, is preserved, and can be traced to the minutest fibre of it. The date was not November but January. horrid persecutions were now intended, and cruel massacres to be suddenly executed upon all professors of the same. By these and other delusions they have drawn together infinite multitudes of people, and caused them to take arms and an oath for the defence of their religion and the delivery of the kingdom from the present government, which they resolve no longer to endure, but will, as they say, under your majesty, have a governor designed unto them out of their own nation. Thus enraged and armed by these pretences, they march on, furiously destroying all the English, sparing neither sex nor age, throughout the kingdom, most barbarously murdering them, and that with greater cruelty than ever was yet used among Turks and infidels. I will not trouble your majesty with the sad story of our miseries here. Many thousands of our nation are already perished under their cruel hands, and the poor remainder of them go up and down desolate, naked, and most miserably afflicted with cold and hunger, all inns and other places in the country being prohibited, under deep penalties, to entertain or give any kind of relief to them, so as here we sit, wearied with the most lamentable complaints and fearful outcries of our poor distressed countrymen, and have no means to afford them any redress, nor indeed any great hopes long to preserve ourselves and this city from the fury of the rebels who threaten us with ruin and desolation. The Lords Justices have not been wanting to use the best means they could for the preservation of this place, not only by the most earnest representations of their condition here, and the impossibility to subsist without succour out of England, but by raising of men and gathering together such forces as the place could afford. Yet, notwithstanding all their endeavours (besides the 2,000 men under Sir H. Tichborne now besieged in Drogheda), they are not able to bring into the field above 3,000 men, both horse and foot, most of them citizens, many of them Irish, who, we have just cause to suspect, will, on the first encounter, desert and carry over their arms to the rebels. In this position we daily expect to be besieged by strange multitudes of people, who have already come from all parts, and have on all sides encompassed this city, which is of itself no ways defensible; and if it were, yet they will hinder our markets and so bring a famine among us, which at this present they may the more easily effect by reason that many thousands of the despoiled English women and children are now come in to take sanctuary among us.'-'Sir JohnTemple to the King, December 12, 1641.' MSS. Record Office. CHAP. II. 1641 BOOK I. 1641 Alaster Macdonnell had destroyed some English families in their beds at Kilrea. Seventy or eighty old men, women, and children, had been killed on the road by the same party near Ballintoy and Oldstown. On the Sunday following, January 9, a party of the expelled farmers, maddened by their losses, accompanied by a few soldiers from Carrickfergus, slew in revenge thirty Catholics at Island Magee.1 Thirty persons put to death, in the frenzy of provoked rage, on January 9, 1642, when the cries of perishing men and women were going up from every corner of Ulster, have been converted into three thousand at the beginning of November, and the crimes of the Irish represented as the self-defence of innocent victims defending themselves against unprovoked assassination. When will the Irish Catholics, when will the Roman Catholics, learn that wounds will never heal which are skinned with lying? Not till they have done penance, all of them, by frank confession and humiliation—the Irish for their crimes in their own island-the Catholics generally for their yet greater crimes throughout the civilized world--can the past be forgotten, and their lawful claims on the conscience of mankind be equitably considered. Forbearance did not last beyond a few days, if so long. Rallying from their first surprise, the Protestants gathered into bodies and made fight; and from that moment the conduct of the rebellion fell entirely into the hands of the most violent. Charle mont Castle, the strongest fortress in Ulster, was The particulars are given exactly by Dr. Reid, History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, vol. i. pp. 326, 327. The Catholics, it is to be admitted, are able to quote this extravagant story from Lord Clarendon. Lord Clarendon's imagination was capable of a wide flight, when a stone could be thrown at Presbyterians. surprised on the fatal 23rd of October by Sir Phelim O'Neill. Lord Caulfield, who was taken there, was afterwards murdered.1 A deed being found in the muniment room with the great seal upon it, Sir Phelim forged a commission from Charles, attached the seal, and went forward in the King's name. In fortnight, with the exception of the few places mentioned as having escaped, every town, village, fort, or private house belonging to a Protestant in the six counties and in Down and Monaghan was in the hands of the insurgents, while the roads were covered with bands of miserable fugitives dragging themselves either towards Dublin, or Derry, or Carrickfergus, pursued and harassed as they went by bands of wretches, who were hunting them like starved jackals. Murder when the spirit of it has gone abroad becomes a passion; and man grows more ferocious than a beast of prey. Savage creatures of both sexes, yelping in chorus, and brandishing their skenes; boys practising their young hands in stabbing and torturing the English children-these were the scenes which were witnessed daily through all parts of Ulster. The fury extended even to the farm-stock, and sheep and oxen were slaughtered, not for food, but in the blindness of rage. The distinction between Scots and English soon vanished. Religion was made the new dividing line, and the one crime was to be a Protestant. The escorts proved in most cases 1 Not by Sir Phelim's order, or with his consent. Lord Caulfield and his family were carried as prisoners to Sir Phelim O'Neill's house, and Lord Caulfield, in Sir Phelim's absence, was shot dead by his foster brother.' 'Sir Phelim on his return,' says a contemporary 1641. CHAP. II. 1641 Hood of innocent unresisting people, how little ge and terror can be depended on for cool observa and how inevitably the murdered were confounded afterwards with the enormous multitudes which indisputably perished in the civil war which followed. The evidence proves no more than that atrocities had been cited on a scale too vast to be exactly comprehended, while the judgment was still further confounded by the fiendish malignity of the details The confined and furious stuggle that ensued separate history. The purpose and eve it their sight before stripping them The priests mul Des monly andint the mods with their sacrament of the union before they go to murder umii, assur ing them for their metus 7vice, if they chance to be billed, they shall escape purgatory and go To heaven immediately.. dred English at Belturbet were stripped naked and turned out in the bitter cold, without a single mg to er them. They report and greligion is the cause of but that is false, for they och liberty and freesce in Ireland, and them rebel thing of 1642 the King gringover, uneasy Antrim and work demands no more than the briefest e leading incidents. It is almost enough the blood spilt in the winter of 1641-2 shed out till, according to the elaborate 1 of Sir William Petty,' out of an entire of a million and a half, more than half a , by sword, famine, and pestilence, been lestroyed. piracy had spread over the island, and the rovinces soon followed suit with Ulster. no second surprise, and scanty as they mber, the Protestants were not long in insurgents feel that their game was not Wicklow and Wexford broke out in The expelled colonists in Dublin, burnge, were drilled and armed; Sir Charles stle Coote, a veteran from the siege of a few hundreds of them into the Wickand made free use there of shot and ant of means pinioned the Lord Jus ked of, wrote , I hope he t have set I laid to heart before his majesty fix Temple thought the rebellion was 1 Political Arithmetic of Ireland. CHAP. II. 1641 |