II.

were determined to shake off a chain under which for CHAP. a hundred years and more the whole nation had groaned."1

In such a humour nothing was needed but opportunity, and they might have thought Providence itself was inviting them at that moment, to rise and free themselves. There was no Viceroy and no army. The Lords Justices, Parsons and Borlase, were unpopular even among the English, and had no local influence or connections. The whole country had been exasperated and alarmed by Strafford's inquisitions. No one knew whether he might not rise the next morning and find himself a landless outcast. The High Church Commission and the political crisis in England had set the Protestants quarrelling among themselves. The gentlemen were for the King; the Ulster settlers were for the Dublin Government and the Long Parliament. There were eight thousand disbanded Catholic soldiers in the country, collected with the view of fighting Calvinists in Scotland, and far more willing to undertake the same business at home. Lastly and chiefly, England's difficulty was Ireland's oppor tunity.' The war between the King and the Parliament was on the point of breaking out, and neither side would have means or leisure to attend to Ireland. The scattered handful of men which the Lords Justices could dispose of would be overcome at the first effort; and, if it proved necessary or desirable to colour the rising under a decent name, nothing could be easier than to pretend that the troops were taking arms in the King's name and for the King's service, against the revolted Parli ment. Add to this the

เ

1 'Grave jugum sub quo a centum et quod excurrit annis tota natio ingemiscit excutere statuunt.'

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natural fear that if the Puritan party became dominant in England the Catholic religion would be in danger of violent extinction; and that, with a combination of conditions so propitious the Irish chiefs should have designed a universal insurrection requires no explanation. The miracle would have been if they had remained quiet.

But in so tangled a business there were many interests and many intervening purposes. The native Irish saw their way clearly. Protestants, Scotch and English, Anglican and Puritan, were their universal and deadly enemies. On the other hand, the Anglo-Normans of the Pale were Catholics, like the Irish, but they had not forgotten their connection with England. Ormond, though an Anglican, was one of themselves; he was the chosen general of the army which had been disbanded; and again, most of the English families who had settled in the South, were ardent Royalists. Thus it was no easy matter to agree on a common course. From the first there can be traced two principles and two parties, which continued divided throughout the whole rebellion and perplexed the action of it. The great Catholic nobles-Lord Gormanston, Lord Fingal, Lord Antrim, Lord Castlehaven-had no sympathy with murder and pillage. They were gentlemen with an honourable purpose, and loyal at heart to the English crown. They believed, that by loyalty at such a crisis, they could purchase the restoration of the Catholic religion, and perhaps of the six confiscated counties; but they had no intention of letting the settlers be destroyed, or of staining their cause with acts which the conscience of mankind would condemn.

No scruples of this kind restrained the kinsmen of the dispossessed chiefs of Ulster, or those others of the old blood who had been threatened by Strafford's inquisitions. To them the English were piratical and heretic invaders, who were robbing them of their lands, liberties, and faith-who had shown no mercy and were entitled to none-whom by any and all means they were entitled to destroy from out of the midst of them. It mattered little with the O'Neills and Maguyres who was king of England. They desired to be quit of England. If Charles turned Catholic, an English king would still be an English king. Catholic or Protestant he would not restore the confiscated counties. Ireland was theirs, to live in at their own will and in their own way, and they meant to have it. The aims of two parties so wide apart were necessarily irreconcileable, yet each was willing to have the assistance of the other for immediate measures in opposition to the Puritans. Each had sufficient confidence in its own resources to believe that it could control the work when the beginning was once made.

With the Barons of the Pale the King himself was in private communication. The Irish Parliament had passed the vote by which the army had been raised, avowedly to assist the Government against the revolt of the Scots. When Strafford had been executed and the Parliament had forced Charles to dismiss the Irish troops, he was not to be blamed if in his extreme difficulty he turned his eyes to such of his subjects as seemed loyal and had promised effective service. An Irish gentleman, one of the Burkes of Clanrickarde, had gone over, to see and speak with the King on the part of the Irish nobility, in the summer

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of 1641.

The King sent him back with a letter of credit,' and a private message to the Earls of Ormond and Antrim, that they should keep the disbanded men together, add if possible to their number, and, when opportunity offered, should seize Dublin Castle and give them back their arms.

Ormond, understanding better perhaps than his master the danger of attempting such an enterprise, hesitated to obey; and, Antrim at Ormond's desire, sent back Captain Digby, the Constable of Dunluce, for more precise instructions. Charles repeated his commands, even directing Antrim explicitly, if he could collect the army, to declare openly against the English Parliament.

Antrim at once communicated with the leading Barons of the Pale and with the Ulster chiefs. His intention, as he afterwards admitted, was to move the Parliament at Dublin to act as the King desired, and to vote formally for the reassembling of the army. If the Lords Justices interfered, he meant to carry out his master's orders fully, take Dublin Castle, and arrest everywhere the leading Protestants who might threaten to be dangerous.2

The fools,' Lord Antrim said, 'well liking the business, would not expect our time and manner for ordering the work, but fell upon it without us, and sooner and otherwise than we would have done, taking to themselves and in their own way the management of the work, and so spoiled it.'

'The fools' were the native Irish, who had other and more practical objects than the Earl of Antrim.

1 You are to repair to Ormond and Antrim in Ireland, who are to give credit to what you say to them from us. C. R.'-'Information of

the Marquis of Antrim,' Hibernia
Anglicana, Appendix, p. 49.
2 Ibid.

For years past there had been uneasy symptoms that the volcanic elements were working towards a new eruption. In 1634 Emer Macmahon, afterwards the notorious Bishop of Clogher, informed Wentworth that mischief was in the wind; he himself, as he said, having been employed to feel the pulse of France Spain. Flights of friars and priests, with old soldiers who had served on the Continent, had been observed latterly crossing back through England to Ireland.' Whispers were abroad that an insurrection

CHAP.

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