BOOK 1. but gangs of assassins. In the wildest of remembered winters the shivering fugitives were goaded 1641 along the highways stark naked and foodless. If some, happier than the rest, found a few rags to throw about them, they were torn instantly away. If others, in natural modesty, twisted straw ropes round their waists, the straw was set on fire. When the tired little ones dropped behind, the escort lashed the parents forward, and the children were left to die. One witness, Adam Clover, of Slonory in Cavan, swore that he saw a woman who had been thus deserted, set upon by three Irish women, who stripped her naked in frost and snow. She fell in labour under their hands, and she and her child died.1 Many were buried alive. Those who died first were never buried, but were left to be devoured by dogs, and rats, and swine. Some were driven into rivers and drowned, some hanged, some mutilated, some ripped with knives. The priests told the people 'that the Protestants were worse than dogs, they were devils and served the devil, and the killing of them was a meritorious act.' One wretch stabbed a woman with a baby in her arms, and left the infant in mockery on its dead mother's breast, bidding it Suck, English bastard.' The insurgents swore in their madness they would not leave English man, woman, or child alive in Ireland. They flung babies into boiling pots, or tossed them into the ditches to the pigs. They put out grown men's eyes, turned them adrift to wander, and starved them to death. Two cowboys 6 1 Temple. Robert Maxwell, Archdeacon of Dowu, afterwards Bishop of Kilmore, deposed that, by Sir Phelim's order, they murdered his brother James Maxwell. His wife, Grizzel Maxwell, being in labour, they stripped her naked, and drew her an arrow flight to the Blackwater and drowned her. They cut a collop boasted of having murdered thirty women and children, and a lad was heard swearing that his arm was so tired with killing, that he could scarce lift his hand above his head. The towns could not hold the numbers which flocked into them, and the plague came to add to the general horrors. In Coleraine, in four months, six thousand were said to have died of the pestilence alone.1 The scenes in Dublin were still more frightful. Sir John Temple was so affected by the terrible spectacle passing under his own eyes, that his language in describing it rises into a tone of profound and tragic solemnity. Multitudes of English daily came up in troops, stripped and miserably despoiled; persons of good rank and quality, covered over with old rags, and even without any covering but a little twisted straw to hide their nakedness. Wives came lamenting the murder of their husbands, mothers of their children barbarously destroyed before their faces. Some, overwearied with long travel and so surbated,2 came creeping on their knees; others, frozen with cold, ready to die in the streets. The city was thus filled with most lamentable spectacles of sorrow, which in great numbers wandered up and down in all parts, desolate, forsaken, having no place to lay out of each buttock of Mr. Watson, and afterwards roasted him alive. They threw Mr. Starkey and his two daughters into a turf pit. They cut the flesh off living English cattle to make them die in torment. Maxwell knew a boy that killed fifteen men with a skene, they being disarmed, and most of them in the stocks. . . . A woman killed seven men and women in a morning, and 1 Reid. But in all these cases 2 The feet too bruised for walk ing. СНАР. II. 1641 BOOK I. 1641 their heads on, no clothing to cover them, no food to fill their hungry bellies. The Popish inhabitants refused to minister the least comfort to them, so as those sad creatures appeared like ghosts in every street. Barns, stables, and outhouses were filled with them, yet many lay in the open streets, and there miserably perished. The churches were the common receptacles of the meaner sort of them, who stood there in most doleful posture, as objects of charity, in so great multitude as there was scarce passage with them. Those of better quality, who could not pass themselves to be common beggars, crept into private places; and some that had not private friends wasted silently away and died without noise. So bitter was the remembrance of their former condition, and so insupportable the burden of their present calamity to many of them as they refused to be comforted. I have known some that lay almost naked, and having clothes sent, laid them by, refusing to put them on; others that would not stir to fetch themselves food, though they knew where it stood ready for them, but they continued to lie nastily in their own rags, and even in their own dung; and so, worn out with the misery of the journey and cruel usage, having their spirits bent, their bodies wasted, and their senses failing, lay here pitifully languishing; and soon after they had recovered this town, very many of them died, leaving their bodies as monuments of the most inhuman cruelties used towards them.'1 The circumstantial minuteness of the picture is itself a guarantee of its fidelity. Far the larger portion of these miserable people died. The Dublin 1 Temple, pp. 93, 94. churchyards could not hold the multitudes that were crowding into them, and two large fields were enclosed as cemeteries before the forlorn wretches could find rest even for their bones. Of the numbers that perished it is rash to offer so much as a conjecture. In the midst of excitement so terrible, extreme exaggeration was inevitable, and the accounts were more than usually hard to check, because the Catholics in their first triumph were as eager to make the most of their success as the Protestants to magnify their calamity. In the first horror it was said, that 200,000 persons had perished in six months. For these enormous figures the Catholic priests were responsible. They returned the numbers of the killed in their several parishes up to March 1642, as 154,000. To these may have been conjecturally added the crowds who died of exposure, want, or the plague, in Dublin and the other towns. Sir John Temple considered that 150,000 perished in two months, or 300,000 in two years. At the trial of Lord Maguyre, the figures were sworn at 152,000. Such guesses, for they could have been little more, prove only that in the presence of occurrences exceptionally horrible the balance of reason was overturned. Clarendon, on cooler reflection, reduced the number to 40,000. Sir William Petty, followed by Carte, to 37,000. Even these figures will seem too large when it is remembered how appalling is the impression created by the slaughter in 1 They murdered, up to the end of March last, of men, women, and children, 154,000, as is acknowledged by the priests appointed to collect the numbers.'-' The Lords Justices and Council to the King, March 16, 1643.' Hibernia Angli- BOOK I. 1641 cold blood of innocent unresisting people, how little rage and terror can be depended on for cool observation, 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 committed on a scale too vast to be exactly comprehended, while the judgment was still further confounded by the fiendish malignity of the details.1 The confused and furious struggle that ensued would require a separate history. The purpose of 1 A moderate and possible estimate of the number of those who were killed in the first two months of the rebellion is contained in 'A True and Credible Relation of the Massacre of the English Protestants in Ireland; by a gentleman who was eyewitness of most of the passages which he describes; who was forced, with his wife, to abandon house, estate, and country, for fear of the rebels, and arrived in London January 15, 1642.' Printed: London, 1642. This writer says: 'They have murdered and starved to death of the English in the Province of Ulster and other provinces, of men, women and children, above 20,000. They have stripped ladies and gentlewomen, virgins and babes, old and young, naked as ever they were born,turning them into the open fields. Many hundreds have been found dead in ditches with cold and want of food and rayment. As for the Protestant ministers, they hang them up, then cut off their heads, afterwards quarter them, and then dismember them, stopping their mouths therewith. Many of their wives they have ravished in their sight before the multitude, stripping them naked to the view of their wicked companions, taunting and mocking them with reproachful words, sending them away in such shameless manner, that most of them have died for grief. 'The priests and Jesuits commonly anoint the rebels with their sacrament of the unction before they go to murder and rob, assuring them for their meritorious service, if they chance to be killed, they shall escape purgatory and go to heaven immediately. . . . Five hundred English at Belturbet were stripped naked and turned out in the bitter cold, without a single rag to cover them. . . . They report and allege that religion is the cause of this war; but that is false, for they have had too much liberty and freedom of conscience in Ireland, and that hath made them rebel, 2 In the spring of 1642 the King himself spoke of going over, uneasy perhaps at the terrible results of his correspondence with Antrim and Ormond. The Long Parliament declined to trust him. Sir John Temple, on April 25, when the King's |