was hot, feverish, charged with rumours. In this case there was no safety in quiet, and there was no power on which they could rely. The royal authority was manifestly tottering. Sir William Parsons, the most active of the Lords Justices, leaned strongly towards the Parliament; he was one of the most unprincipled and rapacious of the land-jobbers who had, during the last generation, been the curse of Ireland. He had been chief agent in the scandalous proceedings against the O'Byrnes, and if we may believe the account of Carte, who has described this period with far greater means of information than any other historian, Parsons ardently desired and purposely stimulated rebellion in order to reap a new crop of confiscations. Week after week, as

the attitude of the English Parliament became more hostile, the panic in Ireland spread and deepened; and as the shadow of approaching calamity fell darkly over the imaginations of the people, strange stories of supernatural portents were readily believed. It was said that a sword bathed in blood had been seen suspended in the air, that a Spirit Form which had appeared before the great troubles of Tyrone was again stalking abroad, brandishing her mighty spear over the devoted land.1

I can only give the briefest sketch of the confused and horrible years that followed. The great Irish rebellion broke out in Ulster on the night of October 22, 1641. It had been noticed before, that a large concourse of strangers from distant parts of the kingdom had been thronging to Dublin, and on the evening before the outbreak in the North, the Lords Justices received in

1 See the depositions collected by the commission of Dean Jones, &c. A Remonstrance of divers remarkable Passages concerning the Church and Kingdom of Ireland, presented by Henry Jones,

D.D., and Agent for the Minis ters of the Gospel in that Kingdom, to the Honourable House of Commons in England (pp. 41, 53). (London, 1642.)

telligence, of undoubted weight, of a conspiracy to surprise Dublin Castle. Every precaution was taken to protect it, and for six weeks after the insurrection broke out in Ulster almost the whole of the other three provinces remained passive. On November 12, indeed, a furious popular and agrarian rising broke out in Wicklow in the territory of the O'Byrnes-who had been, as we have seen, so recently and so flagitiously robbed of their property and all the English were plundered and expelled from the land which had been confiscated; but the Catholic gentry of Munster and Connaught stood firm to their allegiance, and although predatory bands appeared in a few parts of Leinster the general defection of the Pale did not take place till the beginning of December.2 Although there is no doubt that a few Leinster gentlemen were connected with the plot from the beginning, it is almost certain that the great body were at first completely loyal and were only driven into the rebellion most reluctantly. Carte has strongly maintained, and Leland fully supports his view, that the policy of the Lords Justices was directly responsible for their defection. It is certain that the Lords Justices, representing a powerful party in England, were keenly desirous of obtaining as large forfeitures as possible, and their policy was eminently fitted to drive the Catholic gentry to despair. They began by recalling the arms which they had entrusted to the nobles and inhabitants of the Pale. They then, at a time when the Wicklow rebellion and the multiplication of robbers made the position of unarmed men peculiarly dangerous in the country districts, issued a proclamation ordering all persons who were not ordinary inhabitants of Dublin to leave the city within twenty-four hours, and forbidding them to approach within two miles of it. By this

'Carte's Ormond, i. 210.

2 Ibid. i. 242.

measure the inhabitants of the neighbouring districts were forced into perpetual intercourse with the rebels, compelled to support them by contributions, and thus brought at once into the meshes of the law. The English Parliament recommended the offer of a pardon to such rebels as submitted, but the Lords Justices in their proclamation excluded Ulster, which was the chief seat of the rebellion, confined their offers to Longford, Louth, Meath, and Westmeath, which had been slightly disturbed, and clogged them by such restrictions as made them almost nugatory. Above all, they prorogued the Irish Parliament, contrary to the strong remonstrances both of Ormond and of the Catholic gentry, at a time when its continuance was of vital importance to the country. It contained a large proportion of those who were subsequently leaders of the rebellion, but it showed itself strongly and unequivocally loyal; and at a time when the Puritan party were rising into the ascendant, and when there was a great and manifest disposition to involve as many landed proprietors as possible in the guilt of the rebellion, the Catholic gentry regarded this Parliament as their one means of attesting their loyalty beyond dispute, and protecting in some degree their properties and their religion.1

1 Leland, iii. 138-144. Lord Castlehaven has some remarks on the subject of the prorogation which are well worthy of attention. He says: To say these Members were all along concerned in the rebellion or engaged with the first contrivers of it, is to make them not only the greatest knaves but the veriest fools on earth, since otherwise they could not have been so earnest for the continuance of the Parliament, whilst sitting in the Castle and under the Lords Justices' guards,

who upon the least intelligence, which could not long be wanting, had no more to do than to shut the gates and make them all prisoners, without any possibility of escape or hope of redemption.'-Lord Castlehaven's Memoirs, pp. 33, 34. See, too, Carte, i. 225230. Warner's Hist. of the Rebellion, pp. 121-128. The conduct of the Lords Justices is defended by Temple, and Hallam (whose account of this time, however, is very inaccurate and imperfect) adopts the defence.

Whether these measures were really taken with the intention that has been alleged, or whether they were merely measures of precaution, has been much contested; and the question is, perhaps, not susceptible of any positive solution. One fact, however, concerning the defection of the Pale is not questionable. It is, that the rebellion only assumed its general character in consequence of the resolution of the English House of Commons which determined, in the beginning of December, that no toleration should be henceforth granted to the Catholic religion in Ireland. It was this policy, announced by the Parliament of England, that drove the Catholic gentry of Ireland very reluctantly into rebellion. In Wicklow, it is true, and in the adjoining county of Wexford, the rebellion, as I have said, assumed an agrarian character; and in many different parts of the country bands of simple robbers were soon called into existence. But in general the rebellion out of Ulster was a defensive religious war entered into for the purpose of securing a toleration, and ultimately an establishment, of the religion of the Irish people. Some of the Catholic gentry, and especially Lord Clanricarde, exhibited in this trying period a loyalty that could not be surpassed; and during all the tangled years of civil war that followed, the Catholic party showed themselves quite ready to be reconciled to the Government if they could only have obtained a security for their religion and their estates.1 In Ulster, however, the rebellion

1 Hallam says with great truth: "The primary causes of the rebellion are not to be found in the supineness or misconduct of the Lords Justices, but in the two great sins of the English Government, in the penal laws as to religion, which pressed on almost the whole people, and in the sys

tematic iniquity which despoiled them of their possessions.'Const. Hist. ii. 390. The long series of encroachments on the landed rights and on the religion of the people, which made it at last abundantly plain to the Irish Catholics that it was a fixed design of the governing classes to

assumed a wholly distinct character, and was speedily disgraced by crimes which, though they have been grossly, absurdly, and mendaciously exaggerated, were both numerous and horrible. Hardly any page of history has been more misrepresented than that which we are now describing, and it is extremely difficult to distinguish truth from fiction; but without entering into very minute details it will be possible, I think, to establish a few plain facts which enable us to discern clearly the main outline of the events.

It has been asserted by numerous writers, and is still frequently believed, that the Ulster rebellion began with a general and indiscriminate massacre of the Protestants, who were living without suspicion among the Catholics, resembling the massacre of the Danes by the English, the massacre of the French in the Sicilian Vespers, or the massacre of the Huguenots at St. Bartholomew. Clarendon has asserted that there were 40,000 or 50,000 of the English Protestants murdered before they suspected themselves to be in any danger, or could provide for their defence;' and other writers have estimated the victims within the first two months

root them from the soil, and that under the Puritan ascendency their religion would be almost certainly proscribed, have been treated in detail by Carte in his Life of Ormond, and his account is fully corroborated by the letters of Strafford, by the uniform attitude of the English Parliament towards Catholicism, by the private correspondence as well as by the published declarations of the rebels, and by numerous depositions which exhibit in the strongest light the panic under which the rebellion began. The causes are summed up with great