which terminated the siege might have equally prevented its commencement, had Tichburne been aware of the true character of the enemy with whom he had to deal.

In the mean time Sir Phelim had been proclaimed a traitor: the ships, of which we have just mentioned the arrival, had brought copies of proclamations offering rewards for his head and that of several others; these were posted in the market-place. He now turned towards the north, the greater part of his army having scattered, and many of his friends being prisoners. A council of war, held by the duke of Ormonde, agreed in the expediency of following up these favourable occurrences with a considerable force now at their command; but the step was countermanded by the lords-justices, who seem to have thought more of goading the lords of the pale to desperation, than of terminating a rebellion to which they seemed to have entertained no objection, unless at intervals when it appeared to menace the existence of their own authority. The duke of Ormonde sent notice to lord Moore and Sir H. Tichburne of the constraint which had been imposed upon his movements, and these gentlemen expressed their astonishment, and "could not possibly conceive what motives could induce the lords-justices to send such orders." They sent a messenger to Dundalk, towards which town Sir Phelim had sent his cannon. This messenger brought back word, "that Sir Phelim O'Neile, and colonel Plunket, had been the day before at that place, and had got together about five hundred men; that they would fain have led them out towards Drogheda, but the men did not care to march; that with great difficulty, and after hanging two of the number, they at last got them out of the town, but as soon as the men found themselves out of the place, and at liberty, they threw down their arms and ran all away; that towards night Sir Phelim himself went away with Plunket, and left three field pieces behind him; and that there were not three gentlemen of quality left in the county of Louth."*

The report of the earl of Ormonde's approach had been sufficient to scatter the rebel force about Atherdee and Dundalk. His recall renewed their courage, and hearing the circumstance, they rallied their forces and resumed the posts they had abandoned. Lord Moore and Tichburne, after reducing the environs of Drogheda as well as their means admitted, directed their march towards Atherdee. About a mile from this town they came in collision with a strong party of nearly two thousand rebels, which they routed without suffering any loss; and, proceeding on their way, occupied the town. Having garrisoned a castle in the vicinity with one hundred and fifty men, to awe the county of Louth, they pursued their march to Dundalk, which Sir Phelim held with a force of eight hundred strong. Sir Henry Tichburne assaulted this town, and carried it by storm with the loss of only eighteen men. Sir Phelim escaped in the dusk of evening.

The state of the Ulster rebels was now become a case of desperation. The town of Newry had been taken by lord Conway, and a

11.

Carte's Ormonde, I. P. 288.

F

Ir.

strong force of Scotch, under Munroe, which had been landed at Carrickfergus. Their encounters with the English troops had been little calculated to raise their hopes; they had received no assistance from Spain, and their means were reduced to the lowest. In the month of April, it is mentioned, Sir Phelim had not in his possession more than "one firkin and a half of powder left;" the people sent in petitions to be taken to mercy, and their leaders prepared to fly the country. Sir Phelim fled from Armagh, which he burned, to Dungannon, and from Dungannon to Charlemont, while his followers left him and scattered among the passes of Tyrone.

po

But Munroe had other views, or was not equal to the occasion. Prompt, stern, and peremptory in the assertion of a military control over all persons and places which were not able to resist, he seems to have been deficient in the most obvious and ordinary operations which his sition in the face of an insurgent province required. With an army of two thousand five hundred brave and hardy soldiers he continued inert for two months, until Sir Phelim, who was not deficient in activity, once more contrived to rally his scattered friends and soldiers, and made his reappearance in arms. He was joined by Alexander MacDonell, known by the name of Colkitto, and a numerous force collected from Armagh, Tyrone, Fermanagh, and Donegal, together with no inconsiderable remains of his former army. Relying upon this formidable body, and encouraged by the inactivity of the enemy, he marched to attack Sir William and Sir Robert Stewart, June 16. The action was better maintained than usual by the Irish, but in spite of their numbers and personal bravery, they were at length routed with a heavy loss.

It was at this period of the rebellion that colonel Owen O'Neile landed in Donegal with a large supply of arms and ammunition, and what was more wanting, officers and soldiers, and thus gave a very important impulse to the subsiding agitation; his arrival was no less efficient in impairing the authority of Sir Phelim, who had till this event been the chief military leader of the insurrection.

From this, a detail of the further events in which Sir Phelim was in any way a party, would lead us into notices which can be more appropriately pursued further on. He was excluded from any leading station by the distribution of the provinces to other commanders, but long continued to maintain a doubtful importance in the rebel councils, more from the influence of his father-in-law, general Preston, than from his own personal influence.

In 1652 he was tried for his life before the commission issued in Dublin, by the Commonwealth, for the trial of the offenders during the rebellion, and his end is more to his honour than any action of his previous life. He received an intimation that a pardon should be the reward of his evidence to prove that king Charles I. had authorised him to levy forces against his government in Ireland. Sir Phelim refused to save himself by a declaration so unwarranted and scandalHe was accordingly tried and executed for the massacres committed by his authority in 1641.

ous.

Our next memoir is that of a partizan on the other side.

SIR CHARLES COOTE.

SLAIN A.D. 1642.

SIR CHARLES COOTE was descended from a French family of the same name; his ancestor, Sir John Coote, settled in Devonshire. The brave leader whom we have here to notice, came into Ireland at an early age. He served under Mountjoy, in the war against Hugh, earl of Tyrone, and was present at the siege of Kinsale, when he is said by Lodge to have commanded a company: the latter fact we doubt, as his name does not occur among the lists of captains, which Moryson gives; yet it seems to derive some confirmation from the fact of his having been appointed provost marshal of Connaught, by king James, in consideration of his services to queen Elizabeth. The appointment we should observe was but reversionary, and to take effect on the death of captain Waynman, who held the office at the time.

We must pass lightly over the incidents of a long period of Coote's life, which have no sufficient interest for detail. In 1613 he was made receiver of the king's composition-money in Connaught; 1616 he received the honour of knighthood, and the next year had a grant of a Saturday market and two fairs, on the festivals of St James and St Martin, at Fuerty near the town of Roscommon. In 1620 he was vice-president of Connaught; and was sworn of the privy council. In 1621 he was created a baronet of Ireland.* In addition it may be generally stated, that he had received large grants in different counties, and was much employed in various magisterial offices, of which the enumeration and the dates are to be found in all the peerage lists.

He was a colonel of foot in 1640. At the breaking out of the rebellion in 1641, he was one of the earliest and most considerable sufferers. His linen works in Montrath were pillaged, and the entire of his property in that town was destroyed in December 1641. In the Queen's County, in Cavan, in Leitrim, and Sligo, his property every where met the same treatment, to the amount of many thousand pounds; and his estates were so injured as to remain nearly unprofitable till the end of the rebellion.

In 1641 he obtained a commission to raise a thousand men, which he speedily effected. It was during the investment of Drogheda, by a rebel army under Sir Phelim O'Neile, (as related in his life) that the lords-justices, alarmed by the near approach of rebellion in the border county of Wicklow, were compelled to cast aside their ineffi ciency for a moment; they detached Coote with a small party to the relief of the castle of Wicklow. Coote was no unwilling instrument: he was a man of that rough, stern, and inflammable temper which is easily wrought to fierce and extreme courses by the impatience of resentment. Had he met with no personal injuries, his fiery temper would have been sufficiently excited by his intolerance of disloyalty; but as always must happen, his own wrongs lent animosity to

the natural indignation of the stern partisan, and his vindictive feelings were disguised under the pretext of a general cause, and the name of just retribution; for by this time the fiendlike atrocities of Sir Phelim O'Neile had excited general terror and pity. With his own implacable resentment burning in his heart, Sir Charles marched to avenge the victims of O'Neile's cruelty, and to strike terror into the rising spirit of insurrection.

The rebels had some days before surprised Cary's fort, Arklow and Chichester forts-had besieged the houses of all the English gentry in the surrounding country, and had committed great slaughter upon the inhabitants and were actually on their march to Dublin. At the approach of Coote, they retired and scattered among the Wicklow mountains. He pursued his march to Wicklow, the rebels possessed the town and had invested the castle, which was in a condition of extreme distress. They did not wait to be attacked, but retired on the appearance of the English soldiers. Coote entered the town and caused numerous persons to be seized and executed as rebels; his party also had caught the angry spirit of their leader, and numerous acts of violence occurred. Historians of every party have agreed in their representations of this transaction, and it has left a stain on the memory of Coote. This we cannot pretend to efface; we are not inclined to make any concession to the exaggerations of the party historians on either side, but we equally revolt from the affectation of candour which compromises the truth, for the sake of preserving the appearance of fairness. Coote has been the scape-goat of impartiality. Leland, who is in general truth itself, in his historic details, and more free from bias than any historian of Ireland, mentions his conduct in terms of denunciation-which we should not advert to did they not involve some injustice. The following is Leland's statement: "this man was employed by the chief governors to drive some of the insurgents of Leinster from the castle of Wicklow which they had invested; he executed his commission, repelled the Irish to their mountains, and in revenge of their depredations committed such unprovoked, such ruthless, and indiscriminate carnage in the town, as rivalled the utmost extravagance of the northerns. This wanton cruelty, instead of terrifying, served to exasperate the rebels, and to provoke them to severe retaliation."

We perfectly agree with those who consider that no personal resentments, or no crimes committed by other rebels elsewhere, can be called a justification of the cruelties inflicted upon the people of Wicklow, if it be assumed that they were not involved in the offence. And even if they were, we must admit that the conduct of Coote was violent, sanguinary, and beyond the limits of justice and discretion; it was unquestionably vindictive, perhaps also (for we have not seen any minute detail) brutal and savage. But we are bound to repel the affirmation that it was unprovoked, and the assumption that the sufferers were unoffending persons executed to gratify private revenge. We cannot suffer even Sir Charles Coote to be painted in gratuitous blackness, to balance Sir Phelim O'Neile in the scale of candour. Wicklow town was at the time a nest of rebellion, and the retreat of every

discontented spirit in Leinster. The oppression and rapine of the iniquitous castle-party, the agents and dependents of the lords-justices, had filled the strong tribes of the Byrnes, the Kavanaghs, the Tooles, and all who lived in their circle with well-grounded hostility; and few at the time in the town of Wicklow were free from liability to suspicion. To what extent Coote received informations, true or false, on which he acted in the heat of the moment, cannot be ascertained; that such must have been numerous and grounded on the facts is not to be doubted. It was Coote's notion that the exigency of the crisis (for such it then appeared) demanded the display of severe and exemplary justice; we differ from this opinion, but see no reason to call it worse than error. He therefore resolved on a stern duty, which would, under the circumstances, have been revolting to a humane spirit; but which harmonized well with the "seva indignatio" of Coote. That he "committed such unprovoked, such ruthless, and indiscriminate carnage in the town as rivalled the utmost extravagance of the Northerns" is a statement that yet requires to be proved: we deny the charge.

The defeat of the English at Julianstown bridge carried consternation to the government and inhabitants of Dublin. Coote was recalled from Wicklow to defend the metropolis; he obeyed the order. He had approached with his party within a few miles of Dublin, when his march was intercepted by Luke Toole, with a force generally supposed to amount to a thousand men. Coote's men amounted at most to four hundred, but the rebels were routed so quickly and with such slaughter that it is said, this incident made Coote an object of terror during the remainder of his life. He then resumed his march and was made governor of Dublin. He endeavoured to secure the city, a task attended with no small embarrassment, as the fortifications were in a state of utter dilapidation; the city wall had fallen into ruin, and having been built four hundred years before, was ill adapted to the altered state of military resources.

While thus engaged, Coote was frequently called out into the surrounding districts, to repel incursions or repress manifestations of insurrection. On these occasions he was uniformly effective, but acted, there is reason to believe, with the fierce and thorough-working decision of his character. On the 15th of December he was called out by the report that three hundred armed men had plundered a vessel from England at Clontarf, and deposited their plunder in the house of Mr King, where they took up their quarters. For some time before, there had been a considerable disposition to insurrectionary movement along the whole coast, from Clontarf to the county of Meath. Plunder and piracy had become frequent under the relaxation of local jurisdiction, consequent upon the general terror; and the fears of the government at last awakened them to a sense of the necessity of guarding against so near a danger. Several of the gentry also of these districts had committed themselves by acts of no doubtful character; and it was with their known sanction that strong parties of armed men were collected in Clontarf, Santry, Swords, Rathcoole, &c.: these parties committed numerous acts of violence and overawed the peaceful, while