booters or mobs, and it is far from clear upon which side the balance of cruelty rests. The truth is,' as Warner truly says, 'the soldiers and common people were very savage on both sides;' and nothing can be more disingenuous than to elaborate in ghastly pictures the crimes that were committed on one side while concealing those that were committed on the other. From the very beginning the English Parliament did the utmost in its power to give the contest the character of a war of extermination. One of its first acts was to vote that no toleration of the Romish religion should be henceforth permitted in Ireland, and it thus at once extended the range of the rebellion and gave it the character of a war of religion. In the following February, when but few men of any considerable estate were engaged in the rebellion, the Parliament enacted that 2,500,000 acres of profitable land in Ireland, besides bogs, woods, and barren mountains, should be assigned to English adventurers in consideration of small sums of money which they raised for the subjugation of Ireland. It thus gave the war a desperate agrarian character, furnished immense numbers of persons in England with the strongest motive to oppose any reconciliation with the Irish, and convinced the whole body of the Irish proprietary that their land was marked out for confiscation. In order that the King's prerogative of pardon might not interfere with the design of a general confiscation, the King was first petitioned not to alienate any of the lands which might be escheated in consequence of the rebellion, and a clause was afterwards introduced into the Act raising

1 Dec. 8, 1641. Borlase, Hist. of the Irish Rebellion, p. 34. So, again, at the time of the truce between the King and the Irish, in 1643, the Parliament protested against any peace with the rebels, among other reasons, because the

Papists 'under pretexts of civil contracts would continue their antichristian idolatry.'-Ibid. p. 129.

2 Carte, i. 301, 302. Lord Castlehaven's Memoirs, pp. 32,

33.

the loan by which all grants of rebel lands made by the Crown and all pardons granted to the rebels before attainder and without the assent of both Houses were declared null and void. The Irish Parliament, which was the only organ by which the Irish gentry could express their loyalty to the sovereign in a way that could not be misrepresented or denied, was prorogued. Not content with denouncing vengeance against murderers or even against districts where murders were committed, the Parliaments, both in England and Scotland, passed ordinances in 1644 that no quarter should be given to Irish who came to England to the King's aid. These ordinances were rigidly executed, and great numbers of Irish soldiers being taken prisoners in Scotland were deliberately butchered in the field or in the prisons.2 Irishmen taken at sea were tied back to back and thrown

into the waves.3 In one day eighty women and children in Scotland were flung over a high bridge into the water, solely because they were the wives and children of Irish soldiers.4

If this was the spirit in which the war was conducted in Great Britain, it may easily be conceived how it was conducted in Ireland. In Leinster, where assuredly no massacre had been committed, the orders issued to the soldiers were not only to kill and destroy rebels and their adherents and relievers, but to burn, waste, consume, and demolish all the places, towns, and houses where they had been relieved and harboured, with all the corn and hay therein; and also to kill and destroy all the men there inhabiting capable to bear arms.'

'Leland, iii. 161. Carte, i. 301, 302.

2 See much evidence of this in Prendergast, pp. 67, 68; Curry, i. 306.

3 Carte's

Ormond, i. 481.

'Letters on State Affairs,' ccc. Napier's Life of Montrose, pp. 391, 392.

5 Warner, p. 165. Feb. 23, 1641-42. Carte, i. 283. 'Letters on State Affairs,' lx.

But, horrible as were these instructions, they but faintly foreshadowed the manner in which the war was actually conducted. I shall not attempt to go through the long catalogue of horrors that have been too often paraded; it is sufficient to say that the soldiers of Sir Charles Coote, of St. Leger, of Sir Frederick Hamilton, and of others, rivalled the worst crimes that were perpetrated in the days of Carew and of Mountjoy. The soldiers,' says Carte, in executing the orders of the justices, murdered all persons promiscuously, not sparing (as they themselves tell the Commissioners for Irish Affairs in the letter of June 7, 1642) the women, and sometimes not children.' Whole villages as well as the houses of the gentry were remorselessly burnt even when not an enemy was seen.2 In Wicklow, in the words of Leland, Coote committed such unprovoked, such ruthless and indiscriminate carnage in the town, as rivalled the utmost extravagance of the Northerns.' 3

1 Carte, i. 323.

2 Ibid. i. 290.

3 Hist. of Ireland, iii. 146. Carte says of this county: Hard was the case of the country people at this time, when, not being able to hinder parties of robbers and rebels breaking into their houses and taking refreshments there, this should be deemed a treasonable act and sufficient to authorise a massacre. This, following so soon after the executions which Sir C. Coote (who, in revenge of his own losses and the barbarities of the Ulster Irish, certainly carried matters to such extremities as nobody can excuse) had ordered in the county Wicklow, amongst which, when a soldier was carrying about a poor babe on the end of his pike,

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he was charged with saying that he liked such frolics, made it presently be imagined that it was determined to proceed against all suspected persons in the same undistinguishing way of cruelty.' -Life of Ormond, i. 244, 245. See, too, 259. Lords Fingall, Gormanstown, and the other Lords of the Pale wrote to the Lords Justices: We have received certain advertisements that Sir Charles Coote, Knight, at the Council Board hath offered some speeches tending to a purpose and resolution to execute upon those of our religion a general massacre.'-Borlase, pp. 40, 41. He was immediately after made Governor of Dublin, and the appointment showed the Catholics clearly the spirit of the

The saying,Nits will make lice,' which was constantly employed to justify the murder of Irish children, then came into use.1 'Sir William Parsons,' writes Sir Maurice Eustace to Ormond at a later stage of the rebellion, has, by late letters, advised the Governor to the burning of corn, and to put man, woman, and child to the sword; and Sir Arthur Loftus hath written in the same strain.' 2 The Catholic nobles of the Pale, when they at length took arms, solemnly accused the English soldiers of the inhuman murdering of old decrepit people in their beds, women in the straw, and children of eight days old; burning of houses, and robbing of all kinds of persons without distinction of friend or foe.'3 In order to discover evidence or to extort confessions, many of the leading Catholic gentry were, by order of the Lords Justices, tortured upon the rack.4 Lord Castlehaven accuses the men in power in Ireland of having by cruel massacring, hanging, and torturing, been the slaughter of thousands of innocent men, women, and children, better subjects than themselves;' and he states that orders were issued to the parties sent into every quarter to spare neither man, woman, nor child.' 5 'Scarce a day passes,' writes Lord Clanricarde from

6

Galway, without great complaints of both the captains of the fort and ship sallying out with their soldiers and trumpet and troop of horse, burning and breaking open houses, taking away goods, preying of the cattle with ruin and spoil rather than supply themselves; not only upon those that were protected, but upon those that were most forward to relieve and assist them . . . killing and robbing poor people that came to market, burning their fishing-boats and not suffering them to go out, and no punishment inflicted on any that commit outrages. He describes how, on one occasion, under his own eyes, 'four or five poor innocent creatures, women and children, were inhumanly killed' by the soldiers of Lord Forbes.2 General Preston speaks of the soldiers 'destroying by fire and sword men, women, and children without regard to age or Munster appears to

1 Letters on State Affairs,' Carte's Ormond, xcix.

2 Ibid. cx. I have found two honourable instances of English officers setting their faces against these crimes. In A Letter sent by Roger Pike from Carrickfergus to Mr. Tobias Siedgewicke, living in London, June 8, 1642, we have an account day by day, apparently by an eye-witness, of the proceedings of the army, written from a strong English point of view. In the beginning of May 1642, it states, at Newry: 'The common soldiers, without direction from the General-Major, took some eighteen of the Irish women of the town, and stript them naked and threw them into the river and drowned them, shooting some in the water; more had suffered so, but that some of the common soldiers were made examples of and punished' (p. 5).

sex.'3

In another contemporary journal of the northern campaign, it is stated that on May 10 (1642) ' a lieutenant was shot to death with us for killing a woman.'-Diurnal of the Most Remarkable Passages in Ireland, from the 5th of May to the 2nd of June, by C. J., an eye-witness of them (London, 1642).

3 See Warner. Lord Upper Ossory wrote to Ormond (Dec. 23, 1641): The Lord President of Munster is so cruell and merciless that he caused honest men and women to be most execrably executed; and amongst the rest caused a woman, great with child, to be ript up, and take three babes together out of her womb, and then to thrust every one of the babes with weapons through their little bodies.'-'Letters on State Affairs,' Carte's Ormond, 1.