BOOK I. 1649 who were deserting the cause of Christ; and soon after he shook the dust from his feet and returned to Italy. Ormond came back at the invitation of the Council; leaving Owen Roe to his own devices, the Catholic Lords made a final peace with the King, and with Ormond as his representative, and prepared to act against the common enemy. Events in England appeared to favour their prospects. The ascendancy of Cromwell and the army created the same agitation among the Ulster Presbyterians as it had caused in England and Scotland. They failed to see that Cromwell, and Cromwell only, could give effect to what was true in Presbyterianism; -that they were fighting for the husk, while the substance was with the Independents and the Lord General; and, on the news of the King's execution, half Monro's soldiers declared openly for Charles the Second. Prince Rupert landed at Kingsale, and the broken remains of the Cavaliers came over in thousands to assist in saving Ireland. The peace had come too late to save Charles; but it seemed for a moment as if a coalition of enemies might revenge his death, and that Catholic, Royalist, and Presbyterian, united in common loyalty to the name of a king, would, in Ireland at least, carry all before it. Ormond, with Lord Taafe and the Earl of Castlehaven,1 led eighteen thousand men into the Pale, seized Drogheda and Dundalk, and proceeded to besiege Jones in Dublin. Ormond was in haste, for he knew that he had no time. Cromwell, when his work in England was over, had accepted the Irish command, and was preparing to put a close at last on these scenes of disgrace and shame. 1 1649. Owen Roe and his Irish still held aloof. With the Kilkenny Lords his quarrel was irreconcilable; and, forming a clearer estimate than others of Cromwell's strength, he endeavoured to make a separate peace for himself. It was a crisis in which English statesmen cared more for principle than policy. At other times, before and since, such a chance of dividing Irish interests would have been snatched at. But the stern answer came back from the Parliament, that the innocent blood which had been shed in Ireland was too fresh in their memory, and that House did detest and abhor the thought of closing with any party of Popish rebels.' To an ear which could still hear, these words were as the doom of the judgment day. Owen Roe perhaps felt it so, for he soon after died, and was spared the sight of the vengeance now coming for the atrocities of his kinsman, which none had condemned more bitterly than he. Ormond re ceived before Dublin the same lesson in another form, was raised in haste. A fortnight later Cromwell СНАР. II. 1649 had landed. 1 August 2, 1649. BOOK I. 1649 SECTION V. JUSTICE to Ireland-justice in all times and places— means protection and encouragement to the industrious, the honest, and the worthy; repression and punishment of the idle and the mutinous, who prefer to live at their own wills on the spoil of other men's labours. The earth-tillers' of Ireland had, from immemorial time, been the drudges and the victims of those of their own race who, thinking it scorn to work, had been supported by others' toil-who, calling themselves rulers, were in no point morally superior to their own wolves, and had nevertheless usurped to themselves the name of the Irish nation, claimed before the world to be the representatives of their countrymen, and, while clamouring over their wrongs, had meant only at bottom that they were deprived of their own power to oppress. It is in human nature, and beyond others in the Irish form of human nature, that men should obey and honour their born superiors, however worthless those superiors may be. Yet there is in the Irishman's nature also a special appreciation of just dealing; and though the Celtic peasant is said to prefer the tyranny of his own chiefs to the orderly rule of the stranger, the experiment which of these two feelings is the stronger has as yet scarcely had fair trial. Justice, in the true sense, has been the last expedient to which England has had recourse in her efforts to harmonize her relations II. 1649 with her wayward dependency. She has taken those CHAP. who have made the loudest noise at their own estimation. She has regarded the patriot orator, the rebel, and the assassin as the representatives of Ireland. She has thought alternately, and with equal unsuccess, how she can coerce or conciliate those who give her trouble. How to encourage industry and honest labour, how to prevent oppression and save the working peasant from being pillaged by violence or unjust law, she has rarely troubled herself to consider. For the first and last time a government was about to be established in Ireland which, for the ten years that it endured, was to administer the country in the sole interests of honest labour-where the toiler was to reap the fruit of his toil, the idle and the vicious to the fruit of their devices. The perverseness of reap tradition has made these years a byeword of tyranny. They form the blackest page in Irish annals. The victims of the Cromwellian settlement have had the making of the history, and English carelessness and prejudice have given them possession of the field. But the last word is not yet spoken, and the Irish poor will learn one day who have been their true friends —they have not been troubled with very many. repre Before Government could begin, however, Ireland had first to be conquered; and had Irish patriotism been more than a name, the conquest would have been impossible. The Confederate Catholics had sented themselves in one of their first programmes as able, if united, to bring 200,000 men into the field. Their factions were at last over. Owen Roe's followers, seeing no escape open to them, made up their quarrel with the Kilkenny lords. All the force which Catholic and Anglo-Catholic Ireland could provide was at Ormond's disposition; and the Rathmines defeat had drawn closer the discordant parties. The Ulster Scots had been driven into frenzy by the execution of Charles the First. The English soldiers in Ormond's army were some of the very best and most determined that the Royalist party could furnish. The Parliament held not an inch of land beyond Dublin and Londonderry walls, and an invading force would have to carry its supplies with it through every mile of its advance. With these prospects, Oliver Cromwell landed on Dublin quay on 15th August, 1649. The force which he brought with him was small-nine thousand infantry and four thousand horse. They were not soldiers merely they had entered the service on the understanding, that their wages were to be Irish lands. They were to take the place of those among the native proprietors who by rebellion had forfeited their holdings. A vast military Protestant settlement, extended over the whole fertile parts of the island, was to terminate the Irish difficulty at once and for ever. After stepping on shore, the Lord General made a speech to the remnant of the ruined colonists. As God, he said, had brought him thither in safety, he doubted not by Divine Providence to restore them to their just liberties and properties. To all who were zealous for the establishing of truth and peace, to all who would assist in restoring the bleeding Ireland to its former tranquillity, he promised favour and protection from the Parliament. General Jones's troops had fallen already into Irish habits. Wages, as usual, had been irregularly paid, and the soldiers, according to immemorial custom, had paid them |