dand many of them wept at our parting from them, that had lived so long and peaceably amongst them, as if we had been one people with them.'

All this took place in Ulster at the time when the rebellion was at its height, and when the power of the rebels was most unbroken. The county of Cavan was, however, a very favourable specimen. It is said to have been freer from murder than any other county in Ulster,2 and it is also the county about which we know the most. It appears, however, to me at least, quite certain that in the other counties in Ulster, the dominant character of the rebellion was plunder and not massacre, and that the chief object of the rebels was only to expel the English from the houses and territory they had occupied. In carrying out this enterprise, great numbers were brutally murdered, but great numbers also were suffered to escape. In Fermanagh 6,000 women and children were saved by Captain Mervyn.3 Numbers of Protestants were sheltered by the mother of Sir Phelim O'Neil. From Armagh and the surrounding country many hundreds of plundered English were sent under

1 Clogy, pp. 241-243.

2. Whether it was owing to this manner of their assembling, which put the common Irish immediately under a regular command, or to the particular humanity of Philip Reilly, it is certain that there were fewer cruelties committed in this (scarce any being murdered) than in any of the other counties of Ulster.'-Carte, i. 174. In Clogy, as I have noticed in the text, there is no evidence of murders in this county. Borlase, on the other hand, speaking of the Cavan rebels, says: None were more treacherous and fierce than

they, as great inhumanity and cruelty being acted by those of Cavan as of any other place.'Hist. of the Rebellion (ed. 1680), p. 31. This statement is either one of the many evidences of the untrustworthiness of Borlase, or it shows that the atrocities generally committed were immeasurably less than has been alleged. In Bedell's diocese, comprising the whole county, more than ten to one of the inhabitants were Catholics.

3 An Exact Relation of the Occurrences in Donegall, Londonderry, Tyrone, and Fermanagh, p. 7.

Irish convoy to Dublin.' Thousands of fugitives, we are told, thronged the city, and great numbers of others found a refuge in Derry, Coleraine, Carrickfergus, and Belfast. Of the earliest depositions, a large proportion recount the hardships and losses of Englishmen who were either plundered or kept for long periods prisoners by the rebels, in a manner which would be perfectly unintelligible if the usual fate of Englishmen at Irish hands was death. Carte, basing his narrative on the manuscript journal of a Protestant officer who was in the service in the beginning of the rebellion, describes with some minuteness the proceedings of the rebels for nearly a month after the rebellion broke out in the counties of Antrim, Derry, and Down. There is not a trace in this narrative of the massacre of Englishmen who were not engaged in combat, though it is clear that those who lived in the country districts were driven from their homes, and that the Irish on three different occasions acted with much perfidy to prisoners. The rebels were evidently an undisciplined and almost unarmed rabble, and when they came in contact with the regular troops who formed the garrisons of the strong towns, they were often slaughtered almost without resistance. In the first week of the rebellion, near Dromore, Colonel Crawford with his troop 'killed about 300 of them without the loss of one man on their own side.' Next day, Colonel Maxwell, hearing that a party had planted themselves in an ambuscade among the bushes

6

near the same town, issued forth, and starting them like so many hares out of their forms, killed about 150 of them.' On November 8, the Protestants at Lisnegarvy repulsed Sir Phelim O'Neil and his forces with the slaughter of 88 of their number and without the loss of a man of their own in the skirmish.' The rebels, however, had some successes, and on November 15, we are told, those in Down, after a fortnight's siege, 'reduced the Castle of Loargan-Sir William Bromley, after a stout defence, surrendering it upon terms of marching out with his family and goods; but such was the unworthy disposition of the rebels that they kept him, his lady, and children, prisoners, rifled his house, plundered, stripped, and killed most of his servants, and treated all the townsmen in the same manner.’ 'This,' our informant adds, 'was the first breach of faith which the rebels were guilty of (at least in these parts), in regard to articles of capitulation; for when Mr. Conway, on November 5, surrendered his castle of Bally Aghie, in the county of Derry, to them, they kept the terms for which he stipulated, and allowed him to march out with his men, and carry away trunks with plate and money in them to Antrim." Two cases of aggravated bar

Carte,i. 186-189. Carte adds: 'Whether the slaughter made by a party from Carrickfergus, in the territory of Maggee, a long narrow island, running from that town up to Olderfleet (in which it is affirmed that near 3,000 harmless Irish men, women, and children, were cruelly massacred), happened before the surrender of Loargan, is hard to be determined, the relations published of facts in those times being very indistinct and uncertain with regard to the time they were committed, though it is confidently

asserted that the said massacre happened in this month of November.' A similar assertion has been made by Clarendon, and in the catalogue of cruelties committed by the English, published by the Irish; but Leland has shown from the MS. depositions in Trinity College that this massacre did not take place till the beginning of January, and that the victims were only thirty families. See Leland's Hist. of Ireland, iii. 128, 129, and, on the other side, Curry's Civil Wars, i. 195-205. It is quite incre

barity occurred in the county of Fermanagh, where the rebels took the small castles of Lisgold and Tullagh, and massacred the defenders after they had surrendered upon composition.1

The letters of the Lords Justices, written during the first panic of the rebellion and intended to paint it in the blackest colours, describe it, no doubt with perfect truth, as accompanied by many acts of atrocious barbarity, but they always dwell chiefly upon the plunder, and their language is certainly not that which would have been employed in describing a general massacre. Thus on November 5, when there was ample time to have obtained full intelligence of the massacre if it had taken place, the Lords Justices inform the Privy Council that the rebels 'have seized the houses and estates of almost all the English in the counties of Monaghan, Cavan, Fermanagh, Armagh, Tyrone, Donegal, Leitrim, Longford, and a great part of the county of Down, some of which are houses of good strength, and dispossessed the English of their arms, and some of the English gentlemen whose houses they seized (even without any resistance, in regard to the suddenness of their surprise),

they attacked the rebels. It is certain that there was nothing resembling a massacre committed by the rebels in the first few days of the rebellion. It is equally certain that before a week had passed the troops slaughtered numbers of the rebels without the loss of one man on their own side. Considering how strongly anti-Irish were the sympathies of Petty, his conclusion is very remarkable: As for the bloodshed in the contest, God best knows who did occasion it!'-Polit. Anatomy of Ireland, ch. iv.

1 Carte, i. 189.

the rebels most barbarously not only murdered, but, as we are informed, hewed some of them to pieces. In these their assaults of the English they have slain many, robbed and spoiled thousands, reduced men of good estates in land, who lived plentifully and well, to such a condition as they left them not so much as a shirt to cover their nakedness.' In another letter of the same date, intended to be read before the House of Commons, they state that no age had produced in this kingdom an example of so much mischief done in so short a time, as now we find acted here in less than a fortnight's space by killing and destroying so many English and Protestants in several parts, by robbing and spoiling of them and many thousands more of his Majesty's good subjects, by seizing so many castles, houses, and places of strength in several parts of the kingdom, by threatening the English to depart or otherwise they will destroy them utterly, and all their wickedness acted against the English and Protestants with so much inhumanity and cruelty as cannot be imagined to come from Christians even towards infidels.'2 On November 25, they wrote: 'The Ulster rebels are grown so strong as they have sufficient men to leave behind them in the places they have gotten northwards and to lay siege to some not yet taken, as Enniskillen in Fermanagh and Agher in Tyrone, and yet to come many thousands to besiege Drogheda. . . . They have already taken Mellifont, the Lord Moor's house, though with a loss of about 120 men of theirs, and there in cold blood they murdered ten of those that manfully defended that place.'3

It is, to me at least, entirely incredible that the writers of this despatch should have dwelt so particularly on the enormity of the slaughter of ten soldiers, under circumstances that might have occurred in any

Nalson, ii. 889, 890. 2 Ibid. p. 893. 3 Ibid. pp. 900, 901.