collecting false testimony to great perfection. It was the plain interest of all such persons to represent the whole Irish people as guilty of such crimes that it would be impossible to restore their estates. Under successive commissions, of which those to Dean Jones were the earliest, an immense mass of depositions were collected, which form thirty-two folio volumes of manuscript, in Trinity College, at Dublin, and which supplied the chief materials from which Rushworth, Temple, and Borlase derived those long and sickening catalogues of horrors which made a lasting impression on the English mind. No one, I think, can compare the pages of these historians with the pictures of the rebellion furnished in the narrative of Clogy, in the correspondence of Ormond, Clanricarde, and the Lords Justices, and in the report and depositions of the earlier commissions I have cited, without perceiving the enormous, palpable exaggerations they display, and the absolute incredibility of many of their narratives. Hearsay evidence of the loosest kind was freely admitted. Supernatural incidents are related without a question; and the immense number of the murders spoken of staggers all belief, especially when it is remembered that all the writers who speak of a general massacre place it in the first weeks of the rebellion, concerning which we have so much detailed evidence. Ormond, who had, titles, in a country where the prerogative was irresistible and unlimited, and in an age when it was even ridiculous to have any scruple about the manner of getting into possession of Irish lands. Too many of the council, constantly resident in Dublin, and thereby having the chief management of affairs, were of this sort of men, and . . . were possibly the less concerned at the progress of the rebellion and the increase of forfeitures, in which they at the helm could not fail to have a share, and were likely to make the most advantage.' - Carte's Ormond, i. 221. 1 Clarendon, as we have seen, describes the massacre as a sudden surprise of an unsuspecting and peaceful people, which would imply that it took place the first day of the rebellion, a statement probably, beyond all other men the best means of knowing the truth on this matter, appears to have thought very lightly of the evidence of the depositions. At the time of the Act of Settlement, when the claims of the 'innocents' were canvassed, the House of Commons, which consisted mainly of Puritan adventurers and desired to restrict as much as possible the estates that were restored, proposed that none of those whose names were found in this collection might be accepted; and it is a very significant fact that Ormond, who was then Lord Lieutenant, positively refused the proposal.1 'His Grace,' adds the best historian of the rebellion, who had himself carefully examined these documents, 'it is probable, knew too much of those examinations and the methods used in procuring them to give them such a stamp of authority; or otherwise it would have been the clearest and shortest proof of the guilt of such as were named in them.'2 Carte, who examined this period with the assistance of private papers of the most valuable description, emphatically recorded his distrust of these documents. The authority of Lord Castlehaven is of 3 that is most certainly untrue. 1 Carte's Ormond, ii. 263–5. bellion, p. 298. Striking evidence of the methods at this time employed in procuring evidence in Ireland, will be found in Mr. Gilbert's preface to the Hist. of the Irish Confederation, ii. XXV-XXX. One of the best and most temperate examinations of Temple's statements is in an old book which is now almost forgotten-Henry Brooke's Trial of the Roman Catholics (1762). 3 He says: 'Anybody that considers the methods used in the time of Sir W. Parsons to get indictments founded upon slight or no grounds, and without adhering to the usual methods of law, or the violence of the Com less value, for he was a Catholic, and a commander of the rebels, but there is no reason to doubt that he was a man of truth, humanity, and honour; and his testimony is that of a contemporary. While admitting fully that great atrocities were committed by his co-religionists during the rebellion, he denounces in indignant language the monstrous exaggerations that were current, and positively asserts that Sir John Temple, in the catalogue of horrors he extracted from the depositions I am referring to, speaks of many hundreds as then murdered who at the time the book was published were alive and well.1 The work of Sir John Temple, derived chiefly from this source, is the origin of the most extravagant accounts of the rebellion, and it would be certainly difficult to speak too strongly of the horrors it relates. He asserts that within the first two months of the rebellion more than 150,000 Protestants had been massacred, and that in two years ' above 300,000 Protestants were murdered in cold blood, or destroyed in some other way, or expelled from their houses.' The latter number exceeds by nearly a third the estimated number of Protestants in the whole island, and it was computed that it was more than ten times the number of Protestants who were living outside walled towns, where no massacre took place. The writers, who paint the conduct of the Irish in the blackest colours, can say with truth that Temple held no less a position than that of Master of the Rolls in Ireland, and that being present in Dublin he was an eye-witness of much of what he related, but they have usually concealed, in a manner which it is more easy to explain than to justify, some facts that throw the gravest doubt upon his veracity. He was for a time completely ruined by the rebellion,1 but was afterwards compensated with confiscated property, and he was animated by the bitterest feelings of revenge, and was also one of the keenest and most unscrupulous speculators in the events of that disastrous time. He obtained the direction of the mills at Kilmainham when the former landlord was accused of participation in the rebellion, but he was soon removed from the post, the commissioners who were appointed to inquire into the grievances of the army having reported that he had made a prodigious and illegitimate gain by taking a toll of the corn ground for the soldiers, to the great prejudice of the army. He was one of the most vehement opponents in Ireland of the Cessation, or truce with the Irish, which took place in 1643; and by order of the King he was imprisoned in Dublin for circulating false representations of the state of Ireland, for taking and publishing scandalous examinations intended to make it appear that the King had authorised the rebellion, and for betraying his oath as a privy councillor.3 His book was published for the purpose of preventing the subsequent peace by representing the whole Irish nation as so infamous that any attempt to make terms with them was criminal. It was a party pamphlet, by an exceedingly unscrupulous man, who had the strongest interest in exaggerating to the utmost the crimes that 1 He writes: 'My own private fortune, you know, is wholly ruined, and such are our necessities here, as admit of no thought of a present reparation of any private loss.'-April 25, 1642. English Record Office. 2 Carte's Ormond, i. 442. 3 See Carte, i. 441-443. 'Letters on State Affairs,' cxcvii. Prendergast, pp. 66, 67. See, too, on the great unveracity of Temple, Warner, pp. 65, 71, 296. were committed. It fell in, however, with the dominant Puritan spirit and policy, and although the Irish from the first protested against it, their protests were but little regarded.1 In their remonstrance, dated March 1642, Lord Gormanstown and the other Catholic nobility and gentry vainly begged that the murders committed on both sides should be strictly examined, and the authors. of them punished with the utmost severity of the law.2 In 1643, when the Cessation, or first peace with the King, was agreed upon, the whole body of the Catholic nobility and gentry, by their agents at Oxford, urgently petitioned the sovereign' that all murders committed on both sides in this war might be examined in a future parliament, and the actors of them exempted out of all the Acts of indemnity and oblivion.'3 In the peace of 1648 they again expressly excepted from pardon those of their party that had committed murders or other outrages. An impartial examination, however, of the crimes on both sides they never could obtain, and the writings on the Catholic side were burnt by order of the Parliament.5 The Government, however, appears to have looked with disfavour on this book after the Restoration. In 1674 we find Lord Essex, who was then Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, writing to the Secretary Coventry: 'I am to acknowledge the receipt of yours of the 22nd of December, wherein you mention a book that was newly published concerning the cruelties committed in Ireland at the beginning of the late war. Upon further inquiry I find Sir J. Temple, Master of the Rolls here, author of that book, was last year sent to by several stationers of London to have his consent to the printing thereof; but he assures me that he utterly denied it, and whoever printed it did it without his knowledge. This much I thought fit to add to what I formerly said upon this occasion, that I might do this gentleman right in case it were suspected he had any share in publishing this new edition.'Essex's Letters, pp. 2, 3. 2 Lord Castlehaven's Memoirs, p. 21. Borlase, p. 58. 3 Walshe's Remonstrance, see Curry, i. 221. 4 Carte, ii. 52. 5 Prendergast, pp. 70, 71. Mr. Prendergast gives some curious extracts from one of the very few Irish pamphlets that have survived. |