Massacre may be disposed of in the words of the zealous, oldtime, Protestant historian, Rev. Dr. Taylor (in his "Civil Wars of Ireland"): "The Irish massacre of 1641 has been a phrase so often repeated even in books of education that one can scarcely conceal his surprise when he learns that the tale is apocryphal as the wildest fiction of romance." He also says: "The stories of massacre and of horrid cruelty were circulated in England because it was to the interest of the patriot party in Parliament to propagate such delusion." The Scottish troops and Scottish planters are on the other hand accused by the Irish of sallying out from Carrickfergus and driving Irish women and children, variously estimated at 1,000 and at several thousand, to dreadful death over the fearful Gobbins cliffs on the peninsula called Island Magee." 5 The present writer is unable to say how much truth, if any, is in this charge. The pro and con have been as hotly disputed as those of "the Great Popish Massacre." The singer of Ireland's woes and Ireland's joys, Ethna Carbery, believing the truth of it, sang a fierce song of it BRIAN BOY MAGEE I am Brian Boy Magee-my father was Eoghan Ban I was wakened from happy dreams by the shouts of my startled clan; In the creepy cold of the night the pitiless wolves came down- And they hacked and lashed and hewed, with musket and rope and sword, I fought by my father's side, and when we were fighting sore Oh, tall were the Gobbins cliffs, and sharp were the rocks, my woe! (Sleep soft in your heaving bed, O little fair love of my heart! May I hear an enemy plead while I laugh and deny.) In the dawn that was gold and red, ay, red as the blood-choked stream, I crept to the perilous brink-great Christ! was the night a dream? In all the Island of Gloom I only had life that day Death covered the green hill-sides, and tossed in the Bay. I have vowed by the pride of my sires-by my mother's wandering ghost By my kinsfolk's shattered bones hurled on the cruel coast By the sweet dead face of my love, and the wound in her gentle breast To follow that murderous band, a sleuth-hound that knows no rest. The fearful cruelties perpetrated by Sir Charles Coote, leader of the English army in Leinster, and by St. Leger, English commander in Munster, it was, combined with fear for themselves and their estates, that at length drove the Anglo-Irish Catholic lords of the Pale and their fellows of Munster, leisurely to join in the Rebellion-after the great success in Ulster gave them confidence of a like success elsewhere. Connacht was for a much longer time restrained from casting its lot with the rest of Irelandmainly through the influence of the leading and loyal Catholic lord there, Clanrickarde (British Deputy), the head of the Burke family. When the Lords Justices Parson and Borlase sent out Coote to ravage Wicklow he was ordered to spare none above a span high. And it is related by various historians that when his soldiers caught Irish babes upon their spears for sport, he said he "liked such frolics."6 The Irish army of Leinster securely held for Ireland almost all of that province except Dublin and a little radius around it, which Ormond and Coote were enabled to raid. Philip O'Dwyer I shall go to Phelim O'Neill with my sorrowful tale, and crave A blue-bright blade of Spain, in the ranks of his soldiers brave, I am Brian Boy Magee! And my creed is a creed of hate; Love, Peace, I have cast aside-but Vengeance, Vengeance I wait! When my brothers moaned in their blood, and my mother swung by her hair. 6 From Dublin, under date 25th February, 1642, the Government issued for the guidance of its generals, the very clear and explicit command, "to wound, kill, slay and destroy by all the ways and means you may. all the rebels and adherents and relievers; and burn, spoil, waste, consume and demolish all places, towns and houses, where the said rebels are or have been relieved and harboured, and all hay and corn there, and kill and destroy all the men inhabiting, able to bear arms. (Carte's "Ormond.") Sir Charles Coote, typical of the English generals in this war, employed rack and dungeon and roasting to death, for appeasing of the turbulent natives. He stopped at nothing-even hanging women with child. Lord Clarendon, in his narrative of the events of the time, records how, after Coote plundered and burned the town of Clontarf, "he massacred townpeople, men, and women, and three suckling infants." And in that same week, says Clarendon, men, women and children of the village of Bullock frightened of the fate of Clontarf, went to sea to shun the fury of the soldiers who came from Dublin under Colonel Clifford. But being pursued by the soldiers in boats and overtaken, they were all thrown overboard-and drowned." Coote and Clifford were not better or worse than the average of the pacifiers of Ireland. One could quote here more instances of the blood-freezing kind than would fill a large book. But for our purpose one or two samples are as good as a thousand. Castlehaven sets down an incident characteristic of the humanity of the English troopers. He tells how Sir Arthur Loftus, Governor of Naas, marched out with a party of horse, and being joined by a party sent out by Ormond from Dublin: "They both together killed such of the Irish as they in the south had taken Cashel. And when the nobility arose there, they easily held the greater part of the province, driving St. Leger, the English Deputy, back into Cork. The greater part of Connacht was, soon after, under control of the Irish rebels. And when the great and historic Synod met in Kilkenny in May of '42, and nobility, gentry and lay leaders, foregathered with the ecclesiastics of the country, and formed the Confederation of Kilkenny, the Irish practically owned Ireland, English power merely clinging by its teeth to some outer corners of the country. met... but the most considerable slaughter occurred in a great strait of furze, situated on a hill, where the people of several villages had fled for shelter." Sir Arthur surrounded the hill, fired the furze, and at the point of the sword drove back into the flames the burning, men, women and children who tried to emerge— till the last child was burned to a crisp. Says Castlehaven in his Memoirs, "I saw the bodies and the furze still burning." It should be particularly noted that the suckling infant sometimes aroused in the British soldiers the same blood-thirst that did the fighting rebel. The butchering of infants was more diligently attended to during this period than in any previous or subsequent English excursion through Ireland. It is matter of record that in the presence and with the toleration, of their officers-in at least one case with the hearty approval of a leader-the common soldiers engaged in the sport of tossing Irish babes upon their spears. The old English historian, Dr. Nalson, in his history of the Civil Wars (Introduction to his second volume) states "I have heard a relation of my own, who was a captain in that service (in Ireland) relate that . . . little children were promiscuously sufferers with the guilty, and that when any one who had some grains of compassion reprehended the soldiers for this unchristian inhumanity, they would scoffingly reply, 'Why? nits will be lice!' and so despatch them." CHAPTER XLIX THE WAR OF THE 'FORTIES THE Confederation of Kilkenny proved to be perhaps more of a curse than blessing to Ireland. The establishing of the Confederation was the establishing of a Parliament for Ireland. As, to please the Catholic Anglo-Irish (the "New Irish") lords and gentry, the Confederation proclaimed its stand "for faith, country, and king"-meaning King Charles of England-so also to please the same party the susceptibilities of their king was supposed to be saved from hurt, by naming it a Confederation instead of a Parliament. In England Charles and his Parliamentary Government were now at bitter odds-beginning the great civil conflict there. Most of the Anglo-Irish, including all of the Catholic Anglo-Irish, espoused King Charles' cause. And though to appease his Puritan opponents he loudly proclaimed his hostility to popery, and refused to relax the anti-popery laws, the Catholic Anglo-Irishwhose affections for English royalty could seldom be shakenheld, not him, but the minions of the Parliamentary party, responsible for all of Ireland's woes. And they fostered the belief that Charles was a friend of Ireland and of the Catholic faith. It was the same absurd loyalty, which, crossing Ireland's national claims, was, for centuries before, handed down through all generations of this particular portion of the Irish public. A portion of the Old Irish, the real Irish, now, as always, taking this absurd loyalty by contagion, believed also in a crossed fealty. But the vast majority of these wasted no love and no reverence upon a foreign king who held them by force. Yet for unity's sake they yielded the point to the New Irish, and subscribed to the battle-cry "for faith, for country, and for king." The Confederation of Kilkenny then, which might have been a great blessing to Ireland, eventually proved to be Ireland's curse -in this, the country's greatest, fiercest struggle. Not entirely because the New Irish in it were given their way from the start; but more because a clique of the most unnational and reactionary of them secured inside control-the control of the Supreme Council of the Confederation's General Assembly. Ormond, the head of the main branch of the Butler family, who was then the chief power in Ireland standing for King against Parliament, found this clique to be his ready tool-even though he was a bitter hater of popery and opponent of all concessions to popery. He was reared in England, a ward of the British Government-reared Protestant, and imbued with the deepest animus against the religion to which the Butler family had hitherto clung. The President of the Supreme Council, Lord Mountgarrett, was kinsman to Ormond-being head of the Kilkenny family of the Butlers. Consequently, Ormond, while bitterly hating Irishism and Catholicism, was able to work this Irish Catholic Parliament to his own and England's advantage. And through the cruel wars of the 'Forties the protest of the great majority of the Assembly who were truly Irish, and of the great bodies of truly Irish fighting men in the field, could but seldom counteract the prejudicial machinations of the Ormondite faction. When Father Peter Scarampi, envoy of the Pope, came there with moral and material help for the Irish rebels, the Ormondist, pro-British, faction quickly disgusted him, and put him on the side of the Irish Nationalists. And the same happened, when, in succession to the envoy came the Papal Nuncio, Rinuccini, who eventually had to break openly with the Ormondist faction, leave them in disgust, and denounce them. As matters got more and more critical for King Charles in Britain and his following there lost power, he was more and more willing to court the Kilkenny Confederation through his representative Ormond. And the Kilkenny Supreme Council was always eager to act the part of the willing coy maiden whenever Ormond whispered-even though his anti-Catholic bias made him presume to tone down each grudging little concession that his master would yield. They were again and again right heartily willing to accept from Charles bare toleration for their religion-without actual repeal of the anti-popery laws-and a mere modicum of their other liberties as Irishmen. As was ever the case with the New Irish, if their property and their religion were left unmolested they were tolerably content to be ruled by England as England wished. Now they were content to let England hold the Irish church lands for use of her foreign church, and hold Ireland in the fetters of Poyning's law.1 1 This famous (or infamous) law established the supremacy of the English Parliament over the Irish Parliament within the four seas of Ireland, forbidding |