Dublin, commanded by Jones, the Parliamentary general, upon one side,
and all Ireland under Ormond and the now united Confederates on the
other. Cromwell, it was known, was preparing for a descent upon Ireland,
and had issued liberal offers of the forfeited Irish lands to all who
would aid him in the enterprise. He had first, however, to land, and
there was nowhere that he could do so excepting at Dublin or
Londonderry. All the efforts therefore of the Royalists were
concentrated upon taking the capital before it became the starting-point
of a new campaign. Marching hastily from Kilkenny, Ormond established
himself at a place called Baggotrath, near Rathmines, and close to the
walls of the town. Two nights after his arrival he sent forward a body
of men under Colonel Purcell to try and effect a surprise. Jones,
however, was on the alert; drove Purcell back, and, following him with
all the men at his command, fell upon Ormond's camp, where no proper
watch was being kept. The surprise was thus completely reversed. Six
thousand of the confederate troops were killed or forced to surrender,
and Ormond, with the remainder, had to fall back upon Kilkenny.
[Illustration: JAMES, DUKE OF ORMOND. (_From an engraving by White,
after a picture by Kneller_.)]
The battle of Baggotrath does not figure amongst the more famous battles
of this period, but it was certainly the turning-point of the Irish
campaign. With his crippled forces, Ormond was unable again to take the
field, and Jones was therefore left in undisputed possession of Dublin.
A week later, in August, 1649, Cromwell had landed there with 12,000
troops at his back.
XXXIX.
CROMWELL IN IRELAND.
Cromwell had hardly set foot upon Irish soil before he took complete
control of the situation. The enterprise, in his own eyes and in those
of many who accompanied him, wore all the sacred hue of a crusade. "We
are come," he announced, solemnly, upon his arrival in Dublin, "to ask
an account of the innocent blood that hath been shed, and to endeavour
to bring to an account all who, by appearing in arms, shall justify
the same."
Three thousand troops, the flower of the English cavaliers, with some of
the Royalists of the Pale--none of whom, it may be said, had anything to
say to the Ulster massacres--had been hastily thrown by Ormond into
Drogheda, under Sir Arthur Ashton, a gallant Royalist officer; and to
Drogheda, accordingly in September Cromwell marched. Summoned to yield,
the garrison refused. They were attacked, and fought desperately,
driving back their assailants at the first assault. At the second, a
breach was made in the walls, and Ashton and his force were driven into
the citadel. "Being thus entered," Cromwell's despatch to the Parliament
runs, "we refused them quarter. I believe we put to the sword the whole
number of the defendents. I do not think thirty escaped. Those that did
are in safe custody for the Barbadoes.... I wish," he adds, a little
later in the same despatch, "all honest hearts may give the glory of
this to God alone."
From Drogheda, the Lord-General turned south to Wexford. Here an equally
energetic defence was followed by an equally successful assault, and
this also by a similar drama of slaughter. "There was lost of the
enemy," he himself writes, "not many less than two thousand; and, I
believe, not twenty of yours from first to last." The soldiers, he goes
on to say, "got a very good booty in this place." Of "the former
inhabitants ... most of them are run away, and many of them killed in
this service. It were to be wished that some honest people would come
and plant here[12]."
[12] "Cromwell's Letters and Speeches"--Carlyle.
The grim candour of these despatches needs no comment. We see the whole
situation with that vividness which only a relation at first hand ever
gives. The effect of these two examples was instantaneous. Most of the
other towns surrendered upon the first summons. The Irish army fell back
in all directions. An attempt was made to save Kilkenny, but after a
week's defence it was surrendered. The same thing happened at Clonmel,
and within a few months of his arrival nearly every strong place, except
Waterford and Limerick, were in the Lord-General's hands.
That Cromwell, from his own point of view, was justified in these
proceedings, and that he held himself--even when slaughtering English
Royalists in revenge for the acts of Irish rebels--a divinely-appointed
agent sent to execute justice upon the ungodly, there can be little
doubt. As regards ordinary justice his conduct was exemplary. Unlike
most of the armies that had from time to time ravaged Ireland, he
allowed no disorder. His soldiers were forbidden by proclamation to
plunder, and were hanged, "in ropes of authentic hemp," as Carlyle
remarks, when they did so. The merciless slaughter of two entire
garrisons is a hideous deed, and a deed, too, which appeals with
peculiar force to the popular imagination. As compared to many acts
perpetrated from time to time in Ireland, it seems, if one examines it
coolly, to fade into comparative whiteness, and may certainly be
paralleled elsewhere. A far deeper and more ineffaceable stain rests--as
will be seen in another chapter--upon Cromwell's rule in Ireland; one,
moreover, not so readily justified by custom or any grim necessities
of warfare.
The final steps by which the struggle was crushed out were comparatively
tedious. Cromwell's men were attacked by that "country sickness" which
seems at that time to have been inseparable from Irish campaigns.
Writing from Ross in November, he says, "I scarce know one officer
amongst us who has not been sick." His own presence, too, was urgently
required in England, so that he was forced before long to set sail,
leaving the completion of the campaign in the hands of others.
In the Royalist camp, the state of affairs was meanwhile absolutely
desperate. The Munster colonists had gone over almost to a man to the
enemy. The "panther Inchiquin" had taken another bound in the same
direction. The quarrels between Ormond and the old Irish party had grown
bitterer than ever The hatred of the extreme Catholic party towards him
appears to have been if anything rather deeper than their hatred to
Cromwell, and all the recent disasters were charged by them to his want
of generalship. The young king had been announced at one moment to be
upon the point of arriving in person in Ireland. "One must go and die
there, for it is shameful to live elsewhere!" he is reported to have
cried, with a depth of feeling very unlike his usual utterances. He got
as far as Jersey, but there paused. Ireland under Cromwell's rule was
not exactly a pleasant royal residence, and, on the whole, he appears to
have thought it wiser to go no further.
His signature, a year later, of the Covenant, in return for the Scotch
allegiance, brought about a final collapse of the always thinly cemented
pact in Ireland. The old Catholic party thereupon broke wholly away from
Ormond, and after a short struggle he was again driven into exile. From
this time forward, there was no longer a royal party of any sort left in
the country.
Under Hugh O'Neill, a cousin of Owen Roe, who--fortunately, perhaps, for
himself--had died shortly after Cromwell's arrival, the struggle was
carried on for some time longer. As in later times, Limerick was one of
the last places to yield. Despite the evident hopelessness of the
struggle, Hugh O'Neill and his half-starved men held it with a courage
which awoke admiration even amongst the Cromwellians. When it was
surrendered the Irish officers received permission to take service
abroad. Galway, with a few other towns and castles, which still held
out, now surrendered. The eight years' civil war was at last over, and
nothing remained for the victors to do but to stamp out the last sparks,
and call upon the survivors to pay the forfeit.
[Illustration: ST. COLUMBA'S ORATORY, KELLS.]
XL.
CROMWELL'S METHODS.
The total loss of life during-those weary eight years of war and anarchy
has been estimated at no less than six hundred thousand lives, and there
seems to be no reason to think that these figures are exaggerated.
Whereas in 1641 the population of Ireland was nearly one and a half
millions, at the end of 1649 it was considerably under one. More than a
third, therefore, of the entire population had disappeared bodily.
Nor were the survivors left in peace to bind up their wounds and mourn
their slain. In England, once the fighting was over, and the swords
sheathed, there was little desire to carry the punishment further; and
the vanquished were, for the most part, able to retire in more or less
melancholy comfort to their homes. In Ireland the reverse was the case.
There the struggle had been complicated by a bitterness unknown
elsewhere, and had aroused a keen and determined thirst for vengeance,
one which the cessation of hostilities only seemed to stimulate into
greater vehemence.
The effect, especially amongst the Puritans, of the Ulster massacres,
far from dying out, had grown fiercer and bitterer with every year. Now
that the struggle was over, that Ireland lay like an inert thing in the
hands of her victors, her punishment, it was resolved, should begin. Had
that punishment fallen only on the heads of those who could be proved to
have had any complicity in that deed of blood there would not have been
a word to say. Sir Phelim O'Neill was dragged from the obscurity to
which ever since the coming of Owen Roe he had been consigned, tried in
Dublin, and hanged--with little regret even from his own side. Lord
Mayo, who had taken a prominent part in the rising, and was held
responsible for a horrible massacre perpetrated at Shrule Bridge, near
Tuam, was shot in Connaught. Lord Muskerry was tried, and honourably
acquitted. Other trials took place, chiefly by court-martial, and though
some of these appear to have been unduly pressed, on the whole,
considering the state of feelings that had been awakened, it may be
allowed that so far stern justice had not outstepped her province.
It was very different with what was to follow. An enormous scheme of
eviction had been planned by Cromwell which was to include all the
native and nearly all the Anglo-Irish inhabitants of Ireland, with the
exception of the humblest tillers of the soil, who were reserved as
serfs or servants. This was a scheme of nothing less than the
transportation of all the existing Catholic landowners of Ireland, who,
at a certain date, were ordered to quit their homes, and depart in a
body into Connaught, there to inhabit a narrow desolate tract, between
the Shannon and the sea, destitute, for the most part, of houses or any
accommodation for their reception; where they were to be debarred from
entering any walled town, and where a cordon of soldiers was to be
stationed to prevent their return. May 1, 1654, was the date fixed for
this national exodus, and all who after that date were found east of the
appointed line were to suffer the penalty of death.
The dismay awakened when the magnitude of this scheme burst upon the
unhappy country may easily be conceived. Delicate ladies, high-born men
and women, little children, the old, the sick, the suffering--all were
included in this common disaster; all were to share alike in this vast
and universal sentence of banishment. Resistance, too, was hopeless.
Everything that could be done in the way of resistance had already been
done, and the result was visible. The Irish Parliament had ceased to
exist. A certain number of its Protestant members had been transferred
by Cromwell to the English one,--thus anticipating the Union that was to
come a century and a half later. The whole government of the country was
at present centred in a board of commissioners, who sat in Dublin, and
whose direct interest it was to hasten the exodus as much as possible.
For the new owners, who were to supplant those about to be ejected, were
ready and waiting to step into their places. The Cromwellian soldiers
who had served in the war had all received promises of grants of land,
and their pay, now several years due, was also to be paid to them in the
same coin. The intention was, that they were to be marched down regiment
by regiment, and company by company, to ground already chosen for them
by lot, then and there disbanded, and put into possession. A vast
Protestant military colony was thus to be established over the whole of
the eastern provinces. In addition to these an immense number of English
speculators had advanced money upon Irish lands, and were now eagerly
waiting to receive their equivalent.
As the day drew nearer, there arose all over Ireland a wild plea for
time, for a little breathing time before being driven into exile. The
first summons had gone out in the autumn, and had been proclaimed by
beat of drum and blast of trumpet all over the country, and as the 1st
of May began to approach the plea grew more and more urgent. So evident
was the need for delay that some, even among the Parliamentarians, were
moved to pity, and urged that a little more time might be granted. The
command to "root out the heathen" was felt to be imperative, but even
the heathen might be allowed a little time to collect his goods, and to
provide some sort of a roof to shelter him in this new and forlorn home
to which he was being sent.
It happened, too, that some of the first batches of exiles were ordered
into North Clare, to a district known as the Burren, whose peculiarity
is that what little soil is to be found there has collected into rifts
below the surface, or accumulated into pockets of earth at the feet of
the hills, leaving the rest of the surface sheer rock, the very streams,
whose edges would otherwise be green, being mostly carried underground.
The general appearance of the region has been vividly described by one
of the commissioners engaged in carrying out this very act of
transplantation, who, writing back to Dublin for further instructions,
informs his superiors that the region in question did not possess "water
enough to drown a man, trees enough to hang a man, or earth enough to
bury a man." It may be conceived what an effect such a region, so
described, must have had upon men fresh from the fertile and flourishing
pasture-lands of Meath and Kildare. Many turned resolutely back,
preferring rather to die than to attempt life under such new and
hopeless conditions, and stern examples had to be made before the
unwilling emigrants were at last fairly got underweigh.
Yet even such exile as this was better than the lot of some. The wives
and families of the Irish officers and soldiers who had been allowed to
go into foreign service, had, of necessity, been left behind, and a
considerable number of these, the Government now proceeded to ship in
batches to the West Indies to be sold as slaves. Several thousand women,
ladies and others, were thus seized and sold by dealers, often without
any individual warrant, and it was not until after the accidental
seizure of some of the wives of the Cromwellian soldiers that the
traffic was put under regulations. Cromwell's greatness needs no
defence, but the slaughter of the garrisons of Drogheda and Wexford,
reckoned amongst the worst blemishes upon that greatness, pales beside
such an act as this; one which would show murkily even upon the
blackened record of an Alva or a Pizarro.
Slowly the long trains of exiles began now to pour out in all
directions. Herds of cattle, horses laden with furniture, with food,
with all the everyday necessities of such a multitude accompanied them.
All across that wide limestone plain, which covers the centre of
Ireland, innumerable family groups were to be seen slowly streaming
west. There were few roads, and those few very bad. Hardly a wheeled
conveyance of any sort existed in the country. Those who were too weak
to walk or to ride had to be carried on men's backs or in horse litters.
The confusion, the misery, the cold, the wretchedness may be conceived,
and always behind, urging them on, rebuking the loiterers, came the
armed escort sent to drive them into exile--Puritan seraphs, with drawn
swords, set to see that none returned whence they came!
Nor was there even any marked satisfaction amongst those who inherited
the lands and houses thus left vacant. Many of the private soldiers who
had received bonds or debentures for their share of the land, had parted
with them long since, either to their own officers or to the trafficers
in such bonds, who had sprang up by hundreds, and who obtained them from
the needy soldiers often for a mere trifle. Sharp-sighted speculators
like Dr. Petty, by whom the well-known Survey of Ireland was made,
acquired immense tracts of land at little or no outlay. Of those
soldiers, too, who did receive grants of land many left after a while.
Others, despite all regulations to the contrary, married Irish wives,
and their children in the next generation were found to have not only
become Roman Catholics, but to be actually unable to speak a word of
English. Many, too, of the dispossessed proprietors, the younger ones
especially, continued to hang about, and either harassed the new owners
and stole their goods, or made friends with them, and managed after a
while to slip back upon some excuse into their old homes. No sternness
of the Puritan leaven availed to hinder the new settlers from being
absorbed into the country, as other and earlier settlers had been
absorbed before them; marrying its daughters, adopting its ways, and
becoming themselves in time Irishmen. The bitter memory of that vast and
wholesale act of eviction has remained, but the good which it was hoped
would spring from it faded away almost within a generation.
XLI.
THE ACT OF SETTLEMENT.
Cromwell was now dead, and after a very short attempt at government his
son Richard had relinquished the reins and retired into private life.
Henry Cromwell, who had for several years been Lord-Lieutenant in
Ireland, and had won no little liking by his mild and equable rule, also
honourably resigned at the same time, and left. Coote, on the other
hand, and Broghill, both of whom had acquired immense estates under the
Cromwellian rule, were amongst the foremost to hail the Restoration, and
to secure their own interests by being eager to welcome the king. Such
secular vicars of Bray were not likely to suffer whatever king or
government came uppermost.
To the exiled proprietors, who had fought for that king's father and for
himself, it naturally seemed that the time had come for their sufferings
and exile to end. Now that the king had been restored to his own again,
they who had been punished for his sake should also, they thought, in
fairness, again enjoy what had been theirs before the war.
[Illustration: HENRY CROMWELL, LORD-LIEUTENANT FROM 1657 TO 1660. (_From
a Mezzotint_.)]
Charles's position, it must be acknowledged, was a very difficult one.
Late found as it was, the loyalty of Coote, Broghill, and others of
their stamp had been eminently convenient, as without it the army in
Ireland would hardly have returned to its allegiance. To deprive them of
what they had acquired was felt to be out of the question, and the same
argument applied, with no little force, to many of the other newly-made
proprietors. The feeling, too, against the Irish Catholics was far from
having died out in England, and anything like a wholesale ejection of
the new Protestant settlers for their benefit, would have been very
badly received there.
On the other hand, decency and the commonest sense of honour required
that something should be done. Ormond, who had been made a duke, was at
once reinstated in his own lands, with a handsome additional slice as a
recompense for his services. A certain number of other great proprietors
and lords of the Pale, a list of whom was rather capriciously made out,
were also immediately reinstated. For the rest, more tardy and less
satisfactory justice was to be meted.
A Court of Claims was set up in Dublin to try the cases of those who
claimed, during the late war, to have been upon the king's side. Those
who could prove their entire innocence of the original rebellion were to
be at once reinstated; those, on the other hand, who were in arms before
'49, or who had been at any time joined to the party of Rinucini, or had
held any correspondence, even accidentally, with that party, were to be
excluded, and if they had received lands in Connaught might stay there
and be thankful.
A wearisome period of endless dispute, chicanery, and wrangling followed
this decision. As the soldiers and adventurers were only to be
dispossessed in case of a sufficiency of reserved lands being found to
compensate them, it followed that the fewer of the original proprietors
that could prove their loyalty the better for the Government. At the
first sitting of the Court of Claims the vast majority of those whose
cases were tried were able thus to prove their innocence; and as all
these had a claim to be reinstated, great alarm was felt, and a clamour
of indignation arose from the new proprietors, at which the Government,
taking alarm, made short work of many of the remaining claims, whereupon
a fresh, and certainly not less reasonable, clamour was raised upon the
other side.
The end of the long-drawn struggle may be stated in a few words. The
soldiers, adventures, and debenture holders agreed at length to accept
two-thirds of their land, and to give up the other third, and on this
arrangement, by slow degrees, the country settled down. As a net result
of the whole settlement we find that, whereas before '41 the Irish Roman
Catholics had held two-thirds of the good land and all the waste, after
the Restoration they held only one-third in all, and this, too, after
more than two millions of acres previously forfeited had been
restored to them.
XLII.
OPPRESSION AND COUNTER OPPRESSION.
No class of the community suffered more severely from the effects of the
Restoration than the Presbyterians of Ulster. The church party which had
returned to Ireland upon the crest of the new wave signalized its return
by a violent outburst of intolerance directed not so much against the
Papists as the Nonconformists. Of the 300,000 Protestants, which was
roughly speaking the number calculated to be at that time in Ireland,
fully a third were Presbyterians, another 100,000 being made up of
Puritans and other Nonconformists, leaving only one-third Churchmen.
Against the two former, but especially against the Presbyterians, the
terrors of the law were now put in force. A new Act of Uniformity was
passed, and armed with this, the bishops with Bramhall, the Primate, at
their head, insisted upon an acceptance of the Prayer-book being
enforced upon all who were permitted to hold any benefice, or to teach
or preach in any church or public place.
The result was that the Presbyterians were driven away in crowds from
Ireland. Out of seventy ministers in Ulster, only eight accepted the
terms and were ordained; all the remainder were expelled, and their
flocks in many cases elected to follow them into exile.
This persecution was the more monstrous that no hint or pretext of
disloyalty was urged against them. They had been planted in the country
as a defence and breakwater against the Roman Catholics, and now the
same intolerance which had, in a great measure forced the latter to
rebel, was in its turn being brought to bear upon them.
The Roman Catholics, on the other hand, now found themselves indulged to
a degree that they had not experienced for nearly a century. The penal
laws at the special instance of the king were suspended in their favour.
Many of the priests returned, and were allowed to establish themselves
in their old churches. They could not do so, however, without violent
alarm being awakened upon the other side. The Irish Protestants
remonstrated angrily, and their indignation found a vehement echo in
England. The '41 massacre was still as fresh in every Protestant's mind
as if it had happened only the year before, and suspicion of Rome was a
passion ready at any moment to rise to frenzy.
The heir to the Crown was a Papist, and Charles was himself strongly,
and not unreasonably suspected of being secretly one also. His alliance
with Louis XIV» was justifiably regarded with the utmost suspicion and
dislike by all his Protestant subjects. It only wanted a spark to set
this mass of smouldering irritation and suspicion into a flame.