day fixed, and up to the very evening before no hint of what was
intended had reached the Lords Justices. By the merest chance, and by an
almost inconceivable piece of carelessness on the part of the
conspirators, it was divulged to a man called Conolly, a Presbyterian
convert, who went straight and reported it to Sir William Parsons. The
latter at first declined to believe in it, but, Conolly persisting in
his story, steps were taken to strengthen the defences. The guard was
doubled; Lord Maguire and Hugh McMahon were arrested at daybreak next
morning; the rest, finding that their stroke had missed, fled with their
followers.
If this part of the rising failed, the other portions, unhappily, were
only too successful. The same day the Protestant settlers in Armagh and
Tyrone, unsuspicious of any danger, were suddenly set upon by a horde of
armed or half-armed men, dragged out of their houses, stripped to the
skin, and driven, naked and defenceless, into the cold. No one dared to
take them in, every door was shut in their faces, and though at first no
actual massacre seems to have been intended, hundreds perished within
the first few days of exposure, or fell dead by the roadside of famine
and exhaustion.
Sir Phelim O'Neill--a drunken ruffian for whom even the most patriotic
historian finds it hard to say a redeeming word--was here the
ringleader. On the same day--the 23rd of October--he got possession of
the fort of Charlemont, the strongest position in the new plantation, by
inviting himself to dinner with Lord Caulfield, the governor, and
suddenly seizing him prisoner. Dungannon, Mountjoy, and several of the
other forts, were also surprised and taken. Enniskillen, however, was
saved by its governor, Sir William Cole, and Derry, Coleraine, and
Carrickfergus, had also time fortunately to shut their gates, and into
these as many of the terrified settlers as could reach them crowded.
These were few, however, compared to those who could find no such haven
of refuge. Sir Phelim O'Neill, mad with excitement, and intoxicated with
the sudden sense of power, hounded on his excited and undisciplined
followers to commit every conceivable act of cruelty and atrocity.
Disappointed by the failure of the more important part of the rising,
and furious at the unsuccess of his attempts to capture the defended
towns, he turned like a bloodhound upon those unfortunates who were
within his grasp. Old Lord Caulfield was murdered in Sir Phelim's house
by Sir Phelim's own foster-brother; Mr. Blaney, the member for Monaghan,
was hanged; and some hundreds of the inhabitants of Armagh, who had
surrendered on promise of their lives, were massacred in cold blood. As
for the more irregular murders committed in the open field upon
helpless, terrified creatures, powerless to defend themselves, they are
too numerous to relate, and there is happily no purpose to be gained in
repeating the harrowing details. The effect produced by the condition of
the survivors upon those who saw them arrive in Dublin and
elsewhere--spent, worn out, frozen with cold, creeping along on hands
and knees, and all but at the point of death--was evidently
ineffaceable, and communicates itself vividly to us as we read their
descriptions.
The effect of cruelty, too, is to produce more cruelty; of horrors like
these to breed more horrors; till the very earth seems covered with the
hideous brood, and the most elementary instincts of humanity die away
under their poisonous breath. So it was now in Ireland. The atrocities
committed upon one side were almost equalled, though not upon so large a
scale by the other. One of the first actions performed by a Scotch
force, sent over to Carrickfergus by the king, was to sally out like
demons and mercilessly slaughter some thirty Irish families living in
Island Magee, who had nothing whatever to say to the rising. In Wicklow,
too, Sir Charles Coote, sent to suppress a disturbance amongst the
O'Byrnes and O'Tooles, perpetrated atrocities the memory of which still
survives in the region, and which, for cold-blooded, deliberate horror
almost surpass those committed in the north. The spearing by his
soldiery of infants which had hardly left the breast he himself openly
avowed, and excused upon the plea that if allowed to survive they would
grow up to be men and women, and that his object was to extirpate the
entire brood.
Here and there a faint gleam falls upon the blackened page. Bedell, the
Bishop of Kilmore, who had won the reverence even of his fiercest
opponents, was allowed to remain free and undisturbed in the midst of
the worst scenes of carnage and outrage; and when a few months later he
died, was followed weeping to the grave by many who had been foremost in
the work of horror. As to the number of those who actually perished,
either from exposure, or by the hands of assassins, it has been so
variously estimated that it seems to be all but impossible to arrive at
anything like exact statistics. The tale was black enough as it really
stood, but it was made blacker still by rumour and exaggeration. The
real number of the victims grew to tenfold in the telling. Four thousand
murdered swelled to forty thousand; and eight thousand who died of
exposure, to eighty thousand. Even now every fresh historian sets the
sum total down at a different figure. Take it, however, at the very
lowest, it is still a horrible one. Let us shut our eyes and pass on.
The history of those days remains in Carlyle's words, "Not a picture,
but a huge blot: an indiscriminate blackness, one which the human memory
cannot willingly charge itself with!"
XXXVI.
THE WATERS SPREAD.
So far the rising had been merely local. It was now to assume larger
dimensions. Although shocked at the massacre, and professing an eager
desire to march in person to punish its perpetrators, Charles' chief aim
was really that terms should be made with the leaders, in order that
their troops might be made available for service in England.
In Dublin courts-martial were being rapidly established. All Protestants
were given arms; all strangers were ordered to quit the city on pain of
death; Sir Francis Willoughby was given the command of the castle; Sir
Charles Coote made military governor of the city. Ormond was anxious to
take the field in the north before the insurrection spread further,
before they had time, as he said, to "file their pikes." This the Lords
Justices however refused to allow. They were waiting for orders from the
English Parliament, with which they were in close alliance, and were
perfectly willing to let the revolt spread so that the area of
confiscated lands might be the greater.
None of the three southern provinces had as yet risen, in the Pale the
Anglo-Norman families were warm in their expressions of loyalty, and
appealed earnestly to the Lords Justices to summon a parliament, and to
distribute arms for their protection. This last was refused, and
although a parliament assembled it was instantly prorogued, and no
measures were taken to provide for the safety of the well-disposed.
Early in December of the same year Lords Fingal, Gormanstown, Dunsany,
and others of the principal Pale peers, with a large number of the local
gentry, met upon horseback, at Swords, in Meath, to discuss their future
conduct. The opposition between the king and Parliament was daily
growing fiercer. The Lords Justices were the nominees of Parliament; to
revolt against them was not, therefore, it was argued, to revolt against
the king. Upon December 17th they met again in yet larger numbers, upon
the hill of Crofty, where they were met by some of the leaders of the
north. Rory O'Moore,--a man of no little address, who was personally
clear of the worst stain of the massacres, and who had lately issued a
proclamation declaring that he and his followers were in arms, not
against Charles, but the Parliament--was the principal speaker on this
occasion, and his arguments appear to have decided the waverers. They
agreed unanimously to throw in their lot with their co-religionists.
From that moment the rising had become a national one. The whole island
was soon in arms. Munster followed Leinster, and Connaught shortly
afterwards followed Munster. Lords Thomond, Clanricarde, and a few
others stood out, but by the end of the year, with the exception of
Dublin, Drogheda, Cork, Galway, Enniskillen, Derry, and some few other
towns, all Ireland was in the hands of the rebels.
Even then the Lords Justices seem to have but little realized the
gravity of the crisis. They occupied their time chiefly in preparing
indictments, and cheerfully calculating the fast-growing area of land
open to confiscation. In vain Ormond entreated to be allowed to proceed
against Sir Phelim O'Neill. They steadily declined to allow him to leave
the neighbourhood of Dublin.
The northern rising had by this time nearly worn itself out by its own
excesses. Sir Phelim's efforts to take Drogheda were ludicrously
unavailing, and he had been forced to take his ragged rabble away
without achieving anything. Regarded as an army it had one striking
peculiarity--there was not a single military man in it! Sir Phelim
himself had been bred to the law; Rory O'Moore was a self-taught
insurgent who had never smelt powder. They had no arms, no officers, no
discipline, no organization of any kind; what was more, the men were
deserting in all directions. In the south there was no one either to
take the command. The new levies were willing enough to fight, but there
was no one to show them how. The insurrection seemed in a fair way of
dying out from sheer want of leadership.
Suddenly reinforcements arrived in two directions almost at the same
time. Owen O'Neill--better known as Owen Roe--an honourable and gallant
man, who had served with much distinction upon the Continent, landed in
Donegal, accompanied by about a hundred French-Irish officers. He
instantly took the command of the disorganized and fast-dissolving
northern levies; superseded the incompetent Sir Phelim, who from that
moment fell away into contempt and impotence; suppressed all disorders,
and punished, as far as possible, those who had been foremost in the
work of blood, expressing at the same time his utter detestation of the
horrors which had hitherto blackened the rising.
Almost at the same moment Colonel Preston, a brother of Lord
Gormanstown, and an officer who had also served with credit in the
European wars, landed in the south, bringing with him a store of
ammunition and field artillery, and between four and five hundred exiled
Irish officers. The two forces thereupon began to assume a comparatively
organized appearance. Both, however, were so far perfectly independent
of each other, and both openly and avowedly hostile to the king.
To effect a union between these northern and southern insurgents a
meeting was summoned at Kilkenny in October, 1642, consisting of over
two hundred Roman Catholic deputies, nearly all the Irish Roman Catholic
bishops, many of the clergy, and some fourteen peers. A council was
formed of which Lord Mountgarret was appointed President. Owen Roe
O'Neill was at the same time confirmed in the command of the northern
forces, and Colonel Preston in that of the southern. The war was
declared to be a Catholic one, to be known henceforward as the Catholic
Confederacy, and between old Irish and Anglo-Irish there was to be no
difference.
Charles's great aim was now to persuade the Confederates to unite with
one another in his support. The chief difficulty was a religious one.
The Kilkenny Council stood out for the restoration of the Catholic
Church in all its original privileges. This, for his own
sake--especially in the then excited state of feeling in
England--Charles dared not grant, neither would Ormond abet him in doing
so. Between the latter and the Catholic peers there was, however, a
complete understanding, while between him and the Dublin Lords Justices
there was an all but complete breach.
The King decided upon a _coup de main_. He dismissed the Lords Justices,
and ordered several of the more Puritan members of the Privy Council to
be tried for treason. The result was a rapid exodus of nearly the whole
governing body to England. Early in 1644 Ormond was made Lord-deputy,
and a truce of a year was entered into with the Confederates. Only the
extravagance of the latter's demands now stood in the way of a
complete union.
XXXVII.
CIVIL WAR.
The passionate excitement which the news of the Ulster massacre had
awakened in England seems to have deepened, rather than diminished, as
time went on, and the details became more known. Nothing that has
happened within living memory can be even approximately compared to it,
though, perhaps, those who are old enough to remember the sensations
awakened by the news of the Indian Mutiny will be able most nearly to
realize the wrath and passionate desire of revenge which filled every
Protestant breast. That the circumstances of the case were not taken
into consideration was almost inevitable. Looking back with calmer
vision--though even now a good deal of fog and misconception seems to
prevail upon the subject--we can see that some such outbreak was all but
inevitable; might have been, indeed ought to have been, foreseen. A
wildly-excitable population driven from the land which they and their
fathers had held from time immemorial, confined to a narrow and, for the
most part, a worthless tract; seeing others in possession of these "fat
lands" which they still regarded as their own--exiled to make room for
planters of another race and another faith--what, in the name of sense
or reason, was to be expected except what happened? That the very
instant protection was withdrawn the hour for retribution would be felt
to have struck. The unhappy Protestant colonists were absolutely
guiltless in the matter. They were simply the victims, as the earlier
proprietors had been the victims before them. The wrongs that had been
wrought thirty years earlier by Sir John Davis and the Dublin lawyers
had been wiped out in their unoffending blood.
This point is so important to realize, and the whole rising has so often
been described as a purely religious and fanatical one, that it is worth
dwelling upon it a minute or two longer. It was a rising,
unquestionably, of a native Roman Catholic community against an
introduced Protestant one, and the religious element, no doubt, counted
for something--though it is not easy to say for how much--in the matter.
In any case it was the smallest least vital part of the long gathered
fury which resulted in that deed of vengeance. The rising was
essentially an agrarian one--as almost every Irish rising has been
before and since--and the fact that the two rival creeds found
themselves face to face was little more than a very unfortunate
accident. Could the plantations of James the First's time have been
formed exclusively of English or Scotch Roman Catholics, we have no
reason, and certainly no right to conclude that the event would have
been in any way different, or that the number of those slaughtered would
have been reduced by even a single victim.
It was not, however, to be expected that the English Protestants of that
day would realize this. It is not always fully realized even yet. The
heat awakened by that ruthless slaughter, that merciless driving away of
hundreds of innocent women and children, the natural pity for the youth
and helplessness of many of the victims has lasted down to our own time.
Even to us the outrage is a thousand-fold more vivid than the
provocation which led to it. How much more then to the English
Protestants of that day? To them it was simply a new massacre of St.
Bartholomew; an atrocity which the very amplest and bloodiest vengeance
would still come far short of expiating.
It is easy to see that any negotiation with those implicated in a deed
which had produced so widespread a feeling of horror was a proceeding
fraught with peril to the royal cause. Anger does not discriminate, and
to the Protestants of England, North and South, old Irish, and
Anglo-Irish, honourable gentlemen of the Pale, and red-handed rebels of
Ulster, were all alike guilty. Nor was this Charles's only difficulty.
The Confederates declined to abate a jot of their terms. The free
exercise of the Catholic religion, an independent Irish parliament, a
general pardon, and a reversal of all attainders were amongst their
conditions, and they would not take less. These Ormond dared not agree
to. Had he done so every Protestant in Ireland, down to his own
soldiery, would have gone over in a body to the Parliament. He offered
what he dared, but the Irish leaders would listen to no compromise. They
knew the imminence of the situation as well as he did, and every fresh
royal defeat, the news of which reached Ireland, only made them stand
out the firmer.
Charles cut the knot in his own fashion. Tired of Ormond's discretion
and Ormond's inconvenient sense of honour, he secretly sent over Edward
Somerset, Earl of Glamorgan, to make terms with the Confederates, who,
excited at finding themselves the last hope and mainstay of an
embarrassed king stood out for higher and higher conditions. The
Plantation lands were to be given back: full and free pardon was to be
granted to all; Mass was to be said in all the churches. To these terms
and everything else required, Glamorgan agreed, and the Confederates,
thereupon, agreed to despatch a large force, when called upon to do so,
to England, and in the meantime to make sham terms with Ormond, keeping
him in the dark as to this secret compact.
It was not long a secret Ormond seems to have had some suspicions of it
from the beginning, and an incident which presently occurred made
suspicion certainty. The town of Sligo had been captured by the
parliamentary troops under Coote, and in October, 1645, an attempt was
made to recapture it by a party of Irish under a fighting prelate, the
Roman Catholic Archbishop of Tuam. In the struggle which ensued the
Archbishop was killed, and upon his body was found a copy of the secret
treaty which was straightway despatched by Coote to London.
It awakened a sensation hardly less than that with which the news of the
massacre itself had been received. It was tie one thing still wanting to
damage the royal cause. Charles, it is true, denied it stoutly, and the
English royalists tried to accept the denial. The Irish ones knew
better. Ormond, whose own honour was untouched, did what he could to
save his king's. The Confederates, however, admitted it openly, and
Glamorgan, after suffering a short and purely fictitious imprisonment,
remained in Ireland to carry out his master's orders.
The already crowded confusion of the scene there had lately been added
to by a new actor. Rinucini, Archbishop of Fermo, had been despatched by
Pope Innocent X. as his nuncio, and at once threw himself into the
struggle. To him it narrowed itself to one point. The moment, he felt,
had now come for the re-establishment of the Catholic religion in
Ireland, and if possible for its union with one of the Catholic Powers
of Europe, and in order to achieve this object, his great aim was to
hinder, if possible, anything like a reconciliation between the Catholic
insurgents and the king.
Meanwhile, peace had been made in England. Charles was a prisoner, and
the final acts of that drama in which he plays so strangely mixed a part
were shortly to be enacted. In Ireland there was no pretence at peace.
On the contrary, it was only then that hostilities seem really to have
been carried on with vigour. At a battle fought upon June 4, 1646, near
Benturb, Owen O'Neill had defeated Munroe and his Scottish forces with
great slaughter, and from that moment the whole north was in his power.
In the south Rinucini was rushing from town to town and pulpit to
pulpit, fiercely arousing all the Catholic animosity of the country
against both English parties alike. In this he was supported by Owen
O'Neill, who, with his victorious army, hastened south to meet him.
Together the chief and the legate marched in September of the same year
into Kilkenny; took possession of the Council Chamber; flung the
Moderates assembled there, including old Lord Mountgarret and the rest
of the Council, into prison. Ormond was in Dublin, helpless to meet this
new combination. No orders came from England. The royal cause seemed to
be hopelessly lost. All Ireland was swarming with the troops of the
insurgents. Lord Inchiquin, who had for a while declared for the king,
had now gone over to the Parliament. O'Neill and the legate's army was
daily gathering strength. It needed but a little more energy on their
part and Dublin itself, with all its helpless crowd of fugitives, must
fall into their hands.
In this dilemma Ormond came to a resolution. To throw in his lot with
Rinucini and the rebels of the north, stained as the latter were in his
eyes with innocent blood, was impossible. Even had they been disposed to
combine heartily with him for the royal cause he could hardly have done
so; as it was there was barely a pretence of any such intention. If
Charles could effect his escape and would put himself in their hands,
then, indeed, they said they would support him. In that case, however,
it would have been as king of Ireland rather than England. Ormond could
not and would not stoop to any such negotiations. He wrote to the
English Parliament offering to surrender Dublin into their hands, and to
leave the country. The offer was accepted, and a month later he had
relinquished the impossible post, and joined the other escaped Royalists
in France.
XXXVIII.
THE CONFUSION DEEPENS.
The indescribable confusion of aims and parties in Ireland begins at
this point to take even more rapid and perplexing turns. That "poor
panther Inchiquin," as one of his opponents derisively calls him, who
had already made one bound from king to Parliament, now, upon some fresh
offence, bounded back again, and made overtures to Preston and the
Moderates. Rinucini, whose only policy was to hinder any union between
the Catholics and Royalists, thereupon fled to O'Neill, and together
they opposed the Moderates tooth and nail. The latter were now seriously
anxious to make terms with the Royalists. The king's trial was
beginning, and his peril served to consolidate all but the most extreme.
Ormond himself returned late in 1648 from France; Prince Rupert arrived
early the following year with a small fleet of ships off Kinsale, and
every day brought crowds of loyal gentlemen to Ireland as to a final
vantage ground upon which to try a last desperate throw for the
royal cause.
In Dublin the command, upon Ormond's surrender, had been given by the
Parliament to Colonel Michael Jones, a Puritan officer, who had greatly
distinguished himself in the late war. The almost ludicrously involved
state into which things had got is seen by the fact that Jones, though
himself the leader of the Parliamentary forces, struck up at this
juncture a temporary alliance with O'Neill, and instructed Monk who was
in the north, to support him. The king's death brought all the
Royalists, and most of the more moderate rebels into line at last.
Rinucini, feeling that whatever happened, his project of a separate
Ireland had become impossible, fled to Italy. Even O'Neill, finding that
his alliance with Jones was not prospering, and that the stricter
Puritans declined with horror the bare idea of holding any communication
with him or his forces, gave in his adhesion. Old Irish and Anglo-Irish,
Protestant and Catholic, North and South, all at last were in arms for
the king.