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Corbridge in the county of Armagh. Two cases are told of houses crowded with English or Scotch whichprobably as the result of a siege—were burnt, and all, or nearly all, within them reduced to ashes.2 A Presbyterian minister, who was carried a prisoner by the rebels, relates how, though his own life was spared, he saw not less than twenty-five murders committed in a single night. A ghastly story is told of forty or fifty Protestants in Fermanagh who were persuaded to apostatise and then all murdered. One witness from the county Monaghan had seen fourteen or fifteen killed

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December to the latter part of the following Lent.' It is said that they were sometimes seen by day and night walking upon the river, sometimes brandishing their naked swords, sometimes singing psalms, and at other times shrieking in a most fearful and hideous manner.'-Temple's Hist. of the Rebellion, pp. 116123. On the whole, there is no real doubt about these murders, but it is impossible to speak with confidence about the number of the victims.

In Jones's report there are several depositions about the drowning at Corbridge. The

number of the victims is variously stated at thirty-eight, forty, sixty-two, and a hundred and twenty. A gentleman named Creighton, who was one of those who escaped, gives evidence which shows how the massacre occurred. He and many others had been imprisoned fourteen days in Glaslocke Castle, and fourteen more in Monaghan gaol. They were then sent under an escort to Corbridge, where another party attacked the escort, seized

the prisoners, killed sixteen at once, and next morning murdered forty-six more at Corbridge. Mervyn asserts that two hundred persons were drowned at one time in the county Tyrone. (An Exact Relation of the Occurrences in Donegall, &c.)

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2 Lisgoole and Tullin, Jones's Report, pp. 36, 70. Of the two deponents who speak of this episode, one says that Lisgoole contained a matter of fifty souls,' and that two persons only (who were drawn out of the window) received quarter, and that in Tullin there were thirty or forty Scots. The other deponent speaks of Lisgoole only, but says that it contained seven-score persons, men, women, and children,' and that one only escaped. Both deponents derived their information from the rebels. As we have already seen, these massacres are noticed by Carte. Mervyn says they were committed the day after the surrender. Neither he nor Carte speaks of the burning. (An Exact Relation of the Occurrences in Donegall &c. p. 8.)

by the Irish as he passed in the county.' A gentleman from the same county, who was for three weeks a prisoner of the rebels, had seen 'thirty persons hung or otherwise killed in one day at Clonisse.' Another in the same county, who for twenty-eight days was a prisoner, relates how the sept of the O'Hughes killed twelve whole families in a night, and seven families the night following. He had heard that above twenty families were slain between Kinnard and Armagh by the rebels, and that after the repulse of Lisnegarvy 'Shane M'Canna murdered a great number of British Protestants.' A fourth witness from Clounish,' in the same county, stated that, of his own knowledge, the rebels, when marching through the county Monaghan, had murdered at least eighty Protestants, that by their own relation they had robbed, stripped naked, killed and drowned forty-five of the Scots at one time, and that the same band had murdered two Protestant preachers in the county Tyrone and one missionary in the county Armagh. A yeoman in the parish of Leagne Caffry, in the county of Fermanagh, had heard that the rebels murdered about threescore English Protestants that lived in good manner within the said parish.' Another from Newtown, in the same county,' had heard that Captain Rory, and some other of his company, had murdered of the said parishioners to the number of forty, or thereabouts.' In the parish of Levileglish in the county Armagh 'divers Englishmen were most cruelly murdered, some twice, some thrice hanged up.' The county Cavan appears to have been by no means entirely free from the atrocities that were so common in Monaghan, Fermanagh, and Armagh, for the deposition of a witness from Slonosy, in that county, states that, though he himself was only robbed by the rebels, he had seen 'thirty persons, or thereabouts,' barbarously murdered, and about 150 more cruelly wounded.' I have spoken

of the honourable humanity of O'Reilly at Belturbet, but there is some, though only hearsay, evidence that, at a later period, Belturbet was the scene of a dreadful tragedy. Margaret Stoaks, of the county Fermanagh, relates how, in her flight to Dublin, she heard that handicraftsmen and tradesmen and others of the English that were remaining at Belturbet were killed and murdered by the rebels about the last of January past, and the rebels hanged the men and drowned the women and children.' The rector of a parish near Dungannon, in the county Tyrone, tells how, on the very first day of the rebellion, the Protestant minister of Donaghmore was murdered, and how, not long after, two other Protestant clergymen, as well as eight other persons, underwent the same fate. Two widows of other Protestant clergymen gave evidence of the brutal murder of their husbands before their eyes, and six or seven cases are related in these depositions of the murders of women or of children, sometimes with circumstances of extreme ferocity. One Scotchman, who had prosecuted an Irishman for some cause before the rebellion, was, with a rare refinement of malice, taken by his enemy from the gaol to a public-house, where he was made drunk, and in that condition hanged, and there are a few other cases of the isolated murders of individuals. The miserable condition of the fugitives, and the perils they encountered in their flight, are described in the Report in moving but not exaggerated terms. The city of Dublin is the common receptacle of these miserable sufferers. Here are many thousands of poor people, sometimes of good respects and estates, now in want and sickness, whereof many daily die, notwithstanding the great care of those tender-hearted Christians (whom God bless); without whom all of them had before now perished. We, with such other of our brethren, ours and their wives and children coming on foot hither

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through ways tedious and full of peril, being every minute assaulted, the end of one but leading to the next danger, one quite stripping off what others had in pity left. So that in nakedness we have recovered this our City of Refuge, where we live in all extremity of want, not having wherewithall to subsist, or to put bread in our mouths. Of those of our brethren who have perished on the way hither, some of their wives and children do yet remain. The children also of some of them are wholly deprived of their parents and left for deserted orphans.'

I have thought it advisable—omitting the numerous depositions which relate only to acts of robbery or violence to give a full abstract of those which describe acts of murder, for the document I am citing is the most comprehensive and, in my opinion, the most trustworthy we possess on the subject to which it refers. It forms as complete a catalogue as the Government Commissioners in Dublin were able to make, of the crimes perpetrated by the Irish in Ulster for four months after the rebellion broke out, and those four months include the surprise of the English and the whole period during which, with the exception of a few fortified towns, the rebels were undisputed masters of the province. Several depositions contain only hearsay evidence, flying rumours caught up and repeated by ignorant and panicstricken fugitives. It is very difficult to distinguish in them the cases of those who were murdered in cold blood from the cases of those who perished in fight; and it must also be remembered that during the latter part of this time the English had been waging what was little less than a war of extermination against the Irish. On the other hand, it is no doubt perfectly true,

The Lords Justices,' says Ormond, 'were at first in great

VOL. I.

fear and temporised, but when some regiments of Englishmen

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as the commissioners allege, that great numbers of murders took place of which no evidence was obtained. In the case of a fierce popular rising against colonists who were scattered thinly over a very wide extent of country, this was almost necessarily the case; and no impartial writer will deny that the rebellion in Ulster was extremely savage and bloody, though it is certainly not true that its barbarities were either unparalleled or unprovoked. They were for the most part the unpremeditated acts of a half-savage populace, and, with the exception of Sir Phelim O'Neil and his brother, it is probable that none of the leaders of the rebellion were concerned in them. The accounts which Temple has given of the atrocities committed by these chiefs, or by the ferocious rabble that followed them, are on the whole believed by Carte, and they are in part corroborated by the confessions of Sir Phelim himself.1 In the

were landed in Dublin [in Dec. 1641], and others of Scotch in Ulster, they took heart and instigated the officers and soldiers to all cruelty imaginable.'—' Memorial on the Affairs of Ireland,' in the Carte papers quoted by Prendergast, Cromwellian Settlement (p. 56). Mr. Prendergast has gathered in the following pages some striking particulars of these instances of cruelty (pp. 57, 58).

In his last moments he declared that the several outrages committed by his officers and soldiers in that war, contrary to his intention, then pressed his conscience very much.'-Dean Ker's testimony, Nalson's Hist. Collections, ii. 529. His defence is said to have been 'that at the Newry the English and Scotch army put all to the sword, and

not till then was any such thing done by his party.'-Hickson's Irish Massacres, ii. 183. Dean Ker, who was present at the trial and death of O'Neil, positively asserts that the Puritan judges offered him his life, and even his liberty and estate, if he could bring any material proof that he had a commission from Charles I. O'Neil answered that the outrages committed by his aiders and abettors, contrary to his intention, now pressed his conscience very much, and that he I could not in conscience add to them the unjust calumniating the King, though he had been frequently solicited to it by fair promises and great rewards when he was in prison. The offer was renewed at the gallows, but was again indignantly declined. If the Dean's story be true, and