He left in command his general, Ireton, who, on his death soon after, was to be succeeded by Cromwell's son, Henry.

It took his successors, however, another two years to finish up the remnant of work that he had left unfinished.

Waterford, Limerick, and Galway still held out. Scattered bands of fighters here and there, and an army of the North, about five thousand foot and a thousand horse, under Heber MacMahon, Bishop of Clogher, kept Ulster resistance still alive.

But MacMahon, very little of a military man, though he swept the enemy before him at Toome, at Dungannon and Dungiven, was disastrously defeated near Letterkenny-when he had persisted in engaging the enemy under disadvantageous circumstances, and against the pleadings of military counsellers. There he lost half his army, and with the remnant of it was overcome at Enniskillen. He was hanged, and his head set above Derry gate, as a warning to "traitors"-the term always applied by Englishmen to such Irish as perversely persist in doing their duty by their own country instead of their country's conqueror.

The few towns-Waterford, Limerick, Galway'-and the scattered fighting forces were gradually conquered, or capitulated. Till on the 12th May, '52, Articles of Kilkenny signed by the Parliamentary Commissioners on the one hand and the Earl of West Meath on the other-yet fiercely denounced by the Leinster clergy -practically terminated the longest, the most appallingly dreadful and inhumane, and the most exhausting, war, with which unfortunate Ireland was ever visited.

One of Galway's gallant defenders, a young man, Geoffrey Baron, condemned to the scaffold by the conquerors-for the same crime for which through the ages since, other thousands of Ireland's young men have made sacred to us the gallows steps-asked and was permitted to dress for his execution. He went to his room, chose from his wardrobe a suit of white taffetie, and, so garbed, joyously climbed the gallows stairs and went to his death for Ireland.

Incidentally, let it be here set down that on the day these lines are being penned I lift the newspaper, read a report of six young men-"rebels"-just hanged in Cork, and of the chaplair., Canon O'Sullivan's announcement, "They went to their death like school-boys going on a holiday."

The centuries roll on, the struggle grows ancient, but the spirit, proud, glad, indomitable, weakens not, nor changes ever.

CHAPTER LI

THE CROMWELLIAN SETTLEMENT

BUT Ireland's sufferings, great and terrible as they had been, were yet far from ended. True, she had quaffed her chalice to the last bitter drop, but it was ordained that she must now lap up the poisoned dregs.

Peace had been proclaimed over the torn land. But peace is a bitterly ironical term to apply to the state of things in Ireland now. This may well be realised by reading any description of life in Ireland during these years. Hear this description of a place in time of "peace"-taken from Lynch's "Life of Bishop Kirwan":

"Along with the three scourges of God, famine, plague, and war, there was another which some called the fourth scourge, to wit, the weekly exaction of the soldiers' pay, which was extorted with incredible atrocity, each Saturday-bugles sounding, and drums beating. On these occasions the soldiers entered the various houses, and pointing their muskets to the breasts of men and women threatened them with instant death if the sum demanded was not immediately given. Should it have so happened that the continual payment of these taxes had exhausted the means of the people, bed, bedding, sheets, table-cloths, dishes, and every description of furniture, nay, the very garments of the women, torn off their persons, were carried to the market-place and sold for a small sum; so much so, that each recurring Saturday bore a resemblance to the Day of Judgment, and the clangour of the trumpet smote the people with terror, almost equal to that of doomsday."

When the wars were ended and "peace" had been established then was the exhausted remnant of the nation condemned to shoulder its bitter burden-slavery worse than death, and a terrible exile, worse than either-the transplanting of all of the Irish race who were still alive, in Ulster, Leinster and Munster, to the barren bogs of Connacht; so that the smiling fields of the fertile three-quarters of Ireland might be divided among the children of the conqueror. It was the great Cromwellian Settlement.

One of the articles of the peace provided that the Irish soldiers could, if they would, enter the army of any foreign power friendly to England. Thirty-five hundred of them, under Colonel Edmund O'Dwyer, went to the Prince Condé; five thousand under Lord Muskerry, to the King of Poland; smaller numbers to other Continental armies; and about thirty thousand to the King of Spain.

Because by far the greater portion of the Irish who were able to bear arms had been killed off, few young men now remained to Ireland. And of these few remaining young men, and of the young women and boys and girls, numbers were, during the following years shipped into slavery to the American colonies and the West Indies. The numbers thus sent to slavery are variously estimated at between thirty thousand and eighty thousand.2

On the Continent, in almost every country, the exiled Irish came in course of time to adorn all ranks and all classes. One historian says, "They became Chancellors of Universities, professors and high officials in every European state. A Kerryman was

1 There is a tradition that, as a result, on some of the smaller islands of the West Indies up till a little more than a century ago, the negroes still spoke Gaelic.

2 Prendergast in his "Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland" names four Bristol merchants who were the most active of the slave trading agents. For illustrating the formal legal way in which the horror was commercialised Prendergast quotes "one instance out of many" the case of Captain John Vernon, who as agent of the English Commissioners (who then governed Ireland) contracted "under his hand, of date 14th September, 1653" with Messrs. Sellick and Leader of Bristol to supply them with two hundred and fifty women of the Irish nation above twelve and under forty-five years of age. Also three hundred men between twelve years and forty-five years of age.

Following the conquest of Jamaica in 1655, after thousands of the Irish had, through years before, been shipped into slavery, the Governor of that island asked for a thousand girls from Ireland to be shipped there-to the most appalling kind of slavery.

Secretary Thurloe's Correspondence, Vol. 4, gives Henry Cromwell's reply to this modest request-in his letter of September 11, 1655:

"Concerninge the younge women, although we must use force in takeinge them up, yet it beinge so much for their owne goode and likely to be of soe great advantage to the publique, it is not in the least doubted you may have such number of them as you thinke fitt to make use upon this account. . . . I desire to express as much zeal in this design as you would wish, and shall be as diligent in prosequution of any directiones judgeinge it to be business of publique concernment. . . . Blessed be God, I do not finde many discouragements in my worke, and hope I shall not, soe longe as the Lord is pleased to keep my harte uprighte before him."

And under date of September 18, 1655, Henry of the Uprighte Harte, writing from Kilkenny, again to Thurloe, says in the course of his letter, "I shall not neede to repeat anythinge about the girles, not doubtinge but to answer your expectationes to the full in that; and I think it might be of like advantage to your affaires there, and to ours heer, if you should thinke fitt to sende 1500 or 2000 young boys of from twelve to fourteen years of age, to the place aforementioned. We could well spare them, and they would be of use to you; and who knowes but that it may be the meanes to make them Englishmen, I mean rather Christians." Comment upon this—especially the final pithy sentence-would surely spoil it.

physician to Sobieski, King of Poland. A Kerryman was confessor to the Queen of Portugal, and was sent by the King on an embassy to Louis the Fourteenth. A Donegal man named O'Glacan was physician and Privy Chancellor to the King of France, and a very famed professor of medicine in the Universities of Tolouse and Bologna."

"There was not a country in Europe, and not an occupation, where Irishmen were not in the first rank-as Fieldmarshals, Admirals, Ambassadors, Prime Ministers, Scholars, Physicians, Merchants, Soldiers, and Founders of mining industry."

Of the fearful condition of Ireland now, Prendergast gives us a terrible picture: "Ireland, in the language of Scripture, lay void as a wilderness. Five-sixths of her people had perished. Women and children were found daily perishing in ditches, starved. The bodies of many wandering orphans, whose fathers had been killed or exiled, and whose mothers had died of famine, were preyed upon by wolves. In the years 1652 and 1653 the plague, following the desolating wars, had swept away whole counties, so that one might travel twenty or thirty miles and not see a living creature. Man, beast and bird were all dead, or had quit those desolate places. The troops would tell stories of the place where they saw a smoke, it was so rare to see either smoke by day, or fire or candle by night. If two or three cabins were met with, there were found none but aged men, with women and children; and they, in the words of the prophet, 'became as a bottle in the smoke,' their skins black like an oven because of the terrible famine."

In September, 1653, was issued by Parliament the order for the great transplanting. Then all the fertile fields of the Irish natives of Ireland were declared to be the property of the British soldiers who had won them by the sword, and of the English Adventurers who had purchased the sword and financed the expedition into Ireland-and, under penalty of death, all the ancient inhabitants were ordered to repair themselves from the ends of Ireland to the wastes of Connacht, where their lot was to be laid henceforth. Under penalty of death, no Irish man, woman, or child, was to let himself, herself, itself, be found east of the River Shannon, after the 1st May, 1654.3

3 Edward Hetherington was hung from a tree near his own house while a placard struck upon his breast, and another upon his back, warned the rest of the Irish world that this was-"For not transplanting."

Certain artisans and labourers who would be absolutely needed by the British Settlers were excluded from the edict of banishment. There was also a clauseevidently put in more for effect than for anything else that people who could prove themselves innocent of having been rebels or having aided, harboured, or

To the countless thousands of weak, weary, and starving creatures-worn old men and women, and weakling babes-direct sentence of death would have been ten times more welcome and infinitely more merciful. That was a fearful winter of '53-'54; fearful for the tottering old and the crawling young, who, from the four ends of Ireland were dragging their skeleton frames over the hills and the plains, and forcing themselves along every highway that headed to the west, to deeper misery, more painful starvation, and slow and painful death. The Lord and the commoner, the palsied old man and the toddling orphan child, all alike were driven forth from their homes, and goaded over the blood-stained flints to their dread Siberia.*

The Barony of Burren in Clare, to which the first batch of these unfortunates were consigned, was such a God-forsaken region that it was popularly said to have not wood enough on which to hang a man, water enough to drown him, nor earth enough to

sympathised with rebels, and who were guiltless of any offences against British soldiers, settlers, or sympathisers, would be excluded from the edict of banishment. This was "a concession of mercy" to the Irish nation. And its value may be estimated by the fact that a fair-minded one of the British Settlers themselves, Vincent Gookin, in his Vindication of the Irish Transplanting, records his protest against "the narrowness and straightness of the Parliament's concessions of mercy to that nation which doth not declare one in five hundred pardonable either for life or estate."

This same Vincent Gookin in endeavouring to show the vital necessity to the new colonists of holding back from banishment the working portion of the Irish people, sheds light for us upon the manual accomplishments of the common Irish worker then. And his testimony is valuable in view of the constant English assertion that the Irish were in a state verging on savagery (which, considering the circumstances, might well have been the case). Gookin says: "There are few of the Irish commonalty but are skilful in husbandry, and more exact than any of the English in the husbandry proper to the country. . . . There are few of the women but are skilful in dressing hemp and flax, and making of linen and woollen cloth. . . . It is believed that to every hundred men there are five or six carpenters at least of that nation, and these more handy and ready in building ordinary houses, and more prudent in suppiying the defects of instruments and materials, than English artificers."

4 From the Government records, Prendergast gives us samples of the official description of the migrating Irish, both the high brought low, and the lowly still lower:

"Sir Nicholas Comyn of Limerick numb on one side of dead palsy, accompanied only by his wife, Catherine, aged thirty-five, flaxen hair, of middle stature, and one maid servant, Honour MacNamara, aged twenty, brown hair, middle stature having no substance."

"Ignatius Stacpool of Limerick, orphant, eleven years of age, flaxen hair, full face, low of stature; Catherine, his sister, orphant, age eight, flaxen hair, full face having no substance."

"James, Lord Dun Boyne in County Tipperary, describes himself as likely to be accompanied by twenty-one followers, and as having four cows, ten garans, and two swine."

The grinding of the mills of the gods brought it around that among the multitude of poor creatures who, in pain and suffering, were now driven from Cork into exile, was the grandson of the poet Edmund Spenser, who in his time had driven forth the native Irish that he might enjoy the lands of which he robbed them.