testimony of Lord Clanricarde is of great value, for he was not only a man of the most stainless and sensitive honour, but was also peculiarly fitted to judge impartially between the opposing parties, for he was at once a sincere Roman Catholic and a devoted servant of the English Government. He speaks of the crimes that had been committed in Ulster with the utmost abhorrence, and adds: 'I believe it is the desire of the whole nation that the actors of these crying sins should in the highest degree be made examples of to all posterity; yet God forbid that fire, sword, and famine, which move apace here, and might be easily prevented, should run on to destroy mankind, and put the innocent and the guilty into one miserable condition.' In May 1642, long after the English Parliament had decreed the absolute extirpation of Catholicism in Ireland, a general synod of the Roman Catholic bishops and clergy of Ireland was held at Kilkenny, in which they unanimously declared the war against the English Parliament, for the defence of the Catholic religion, and for the maintenance of the royal prerogative, to be just and lawful. They resolved to send ambassadors to the Pope and the Kings of France and Spain; and they took active measures to organise their party. They at the same time expressed, in the most formal and emphatic terms, their detestation of the robberies, burnings, and murders which had been committed in Ulster, and they solemnly excommunicated all Catholics who should for the future be guilty of such acts.2 The original instructions they issued to General Preston are still preserved, and they are well worthy of perusal, as evincing the spirit in which they undertook the war. They ordered that strict martial law should be observed; that all rapes and insults to women should be 1 Lord Clanricarde's Memoirs, p. 146. 2 Warner, pp. 201, 202. Carte, i. 316, 317. promptly and severely punished; that the whole army should take the Sacrament once a month, and always before battle; that you shall take special care in your march and camp to preserve the husbandmen, victuallers, and all other of his Majesty's subjects from the extortions, pressures, violences, and abuses of your soldiers.' In Wicklow and the adjoining county of Wexford the struggle assumed an agrarian character. Predatory bands traversed the country in many directions, and a war such as I have described was naturally attended on both sides by many crimes; but it is certain that in three provinces from the beginning of the rebellion, and in the fourth province after the accession to power of Owen Roe O'Neil, the Irish chiefs laboured earnestly to give a character of humanity to the war; and it is, I think, equally certain that in three provinces out of four the actual conduct of the Irish compares in this respect very favourably with that of their enemies.2 There is one other question connected with this subject on which it is necessary to dwell. I mean the part 1 MSS. English Record Office. 2 Carte expressly says that 'in Munster and Leinster very few murders were committed.'-Life of Ormond, i. 177. But, of course, in a war lasting for ten years, and in which the Lords Justices had ordered that no quarter should be given, there must have been many acts of savage retaliation. In March 1641-2 Sir Henry Stradling writes from Kinsale: There is very little quarter given on either side.'-Irish Papers, English Record Office. In a letter dated Nov. 25, 1641, the Lords Justices describe the savage agrarian outburst in the territory of the O'Byrnes in the counties of Wicklow and Wexford. In both of these counties all the cattle and horses of the English, with all their substance, are come into the hands of the rebels, and the English themselves, with their wives and children, stripped naked, and banished thence by their fury and rage.' - Ibid. Cromwell apologised for his massacre at Wexford by alleging two horrible instances of massacre in that city, with which he had 'lately been acquainted,' but as far as I know there is no other evidence of these tragedies. See Carlyle's Cromwell, pt. v. which religious fanaticism bore in the rebellion. It is, I believe, perfectly impossible to examine with any candour the evidence on the subject without arriving at the conclusion that the fear of the extirpation of Catholicism by the Puritan Parliament was one cause of the rebellion in Ulster, and the chief cause of the defection of the Pale. Even before the famous vote by which the Parliament decreed the absolute suppression of the religion of the Irish people, this fear was very reasonable. Ormond, as we have seen, expressly attributes to it the extension of the rebellion. It appears again and again in the depositions of the witnesses who gave evidence before the commission of Dean Jones. It was alleged as a chief motive of the rebellion in all the papers of justification put out by the rebels,2 and it appears quite as clearly in 1 Jones's Remonstrance, pp. 18, 26, 34, 35, 42, 43, 45, 46. 2 Thus the Ulster rebels, on taking arms, alleged that the Parliament of England... gave them reason to apprehend by some Acts they were about to pass concerning religion, and by threats of sending over the Scotch army with sword and Bible in hand into Ireland, that their whole and studied design was not only to extinguish religion (by which they lived altogether happy) but likewise to supplant them, and rase the name of Catholic Irish out of the whole kingdom.'-Carte's Ormond, i. 182. The Catholics of the Pale, in their very able remonstrance (March 1742, Curry, ii. 333-346), dwelt upon the same fact as a leading cause of their insurrection. On Nov. 10, 1641, some of the rebels sent to Lord Dillon a list of their grievances and of their demands. The former were (1) that the Papists are severely punished (though they be loyal subjects to his Majesty) in the neighbouring counties, which serve them as beacons to look unto their own countrie;' (2) the incapacity of Papists to hold office; (3) the Act of Uniformity; (4) that their lands and liberties are taken from them by quirks and quiddities of law, without reflecting upon the King's royal intention;' (5) that the mere Irish' are not allowed to purchase land in the escheated counties.-Irish MSS. English Record Office. The remonstrance of the gentry in Cavan (which Bedell consented to draw up) says: 'We find ourselves of late threatened either with captivity of our consciences, or utter expulsion from our native seats.' See, too, on the effect of the English measures against Catholicism in producing the Irish rebellion, Nalson, ii. 536. their private and confidential correspondence. From the beginning of the rebellion there is no doubt that priests were connected with it; they exerted all their spiritual influence in its favour, and they were sometimes associated with its worst crimes. Among the depositions taken in 1642 there is a very curious but unfortunately a very brief account of a great meeting of the heads of the Romish clergy and of some of the leading laymen of their faction, which is said to have been held in October 1641, in the abbey of Mullifarvan, in the county of Westmeath. Dean Jones himself was the deponent, and he states that he received his information from a Franciscan friar, a guardian of the Order,' who was present. According to his account, the question discussed at this meeting was the course that should be taken with the Protestants. One party contended for 'their banishment, without attempting their lives,' arguing that a more sanguinary course would draw down the curse of Heaven upon the nation, and would provoke the English to a war of extermination. Another party maintained that a general massacre was the only measure which would be decisive and efficacious. 6 'In which diversity of opinions, howsoever,' says the deponent, the first prevailed with some, for which the Franciscans (saith this friar, one of their guardians) did stand, yet others inclined to the second; some again leaning to a middle way, neither to dismiss nor kill.'2 1 See several of their letters in Lord Clanricarde's Memoirs, especially pp. 67, 104, 105. 2 Jones's Remonstrance, pp. 32, 33. These are the only words in the deposition relating to the division of opinion. The reader may compare them with Mr. Froude's version. The italics are my own. 'At the beginning of October the leading Catholic clergy and laity met at a Franciscan abbey in Westmeath, to discuss a question on which their opinions were divided-the course to be taken with the Protestant settlers who were scattered over the country. That they must be dispossessed was a matter of course-it was the price of the Nothing is said about the conclusion arrived at, but the event showed clearly that the complete expulsion of the English from at least the confiscated lands in Ulster was the great object of the insurgents. Macmahon, the titular bishop of Down, is accused of having instigated the worst cruelties of Sir Phelim O'Neil. A priest named Maguire is said to have been the leading agent in the treacherous murder of forty Protestants to which I have already referred, who had abjured their faith. The Bible was sometimes torn and trampled on by the infuriated mob; Protestant churches were occasionally wrecked, and several Protestant ministers were murdered. Priests undoubtedly supported the rebellion from the pulpit, and even by the sentence of excommunication; and they were accused, though on much more doubtful authority, of forbidding any Catholics to give shelter to the fugitives.3 It was inevitable that they should throw themselves vehemently into the conflict, for their religion was in imminent danger of annihilation, and the Lords Justices gave express orders that all priests who fell into the hands of the soldiers should be put to death. It was equally inevitable that in the Puritan accounts of the rebellion, and in the report of a Commission consisting exclusively of Protestant clergymen, everything should be done to magnify the part played by the Catholic priests. But on the whole I think a candid reader will rather wonder that it was not larger, and will be struck with the small amount of real religious fanaticism displayed by the Irish in the contest. Carte asserts that co-operation of the Celts; but whether by death or banishment was undecided. According to the priests, heretics were disentitled to mercy. The less violent party considered that massacres were ugly things, and left an ill name behind them.'-English in Ire- 1 Carte's Ormond, i. 176. Borlase, Hist. of the Irish |