IRELAND IN TEE SEVENTEENTK CENTURY THE IRISH AIASSACHE.S OF J(;4l-2. I.ONIiON : I'llINniJI) IIY .Sl'OTTI.SWOUDK AKl) CO., KK\V-BT1IKMT KQIIAItB ANU I'AULIA.MKNT STllBKT IRELAND IN TIIE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY OR THE IRISH MASSACRES OF U;il-2, THEIR CAUSES AND RESULTS. Illustrated by Extracts from the unjniblished State Pajnrs, the uiqnihlishcd MSS in the Bodleian Library, Lambeth Library, and the Library of the Royal Dublin Society relating to tlie rUmtations of 1G10-3U ; a Selection from the unpublished Depositions rclatiny to the Massacres^ ivith facsimiles; and the Reports of the Trials in the Hiyh Court of Justice in 1G52-4, from the unjmblished MSS in Trinity College, Dublin. BY MARY UICKSON. WITH A PREFACE BY J. A. FllOUDE, M.A. VOLUJIE I. ' Our ancestors wf re guilty of abon:iii;itile and atrocious crimen, to wliicb the present generation, thank God, looks back with all the horror and indignation they deserve' {IlUloriail Athlress to the Irish Catholics by Rev. C. O Connor, D.D.) ^ LONDON : LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 1884. /! 11 riijhts le^ervrd. O'NEILL LIBRARY BOSTON COLLEGE Dft /^ I/O I* PEEPACE. This book needs no prefatory recommendation from me or from any one. It tells its own story, and will recommend itself by its internal merits. Nevertheless I am glad to welcome a publication which may bring about a solution of a most important historical question. The great rebellion of 1G41 broke out on the 23rd of October of that year, and was alleged to have been accompanied by a series of massacres of helpless unarmed Protestant colonists, many of them women and children, who had in some cases been promised protection and a safe convoy to English garrisons by the Irish insurgents. On the recovery of the country the estates of the insurgent Irish gentry were confiscated by the Long Parliament, and were sold to pay the cost of the reconquest. A High Court of Justice sat to try the survivors charged with being actors in the massacre, and such of them as were found guilty were executed. Protestants who had retaliated upon the Catholic Irish, at Isle Magee and other places, by crimes of a similar kind, were also tried and variously punished. The anniversary of the day on which the insurrection broke out was observed with peculiar solemnity for a hundred years. The Irish massacres of IGll became part of European history, and held a place of infamy by the side of the Sicilian Vespers and the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. We are now asked to believe that the entire story was a Vi PREFACE. fabrication, invented by the Puritan English as an excuse for stripping the Irish of their lands ; that there never was any massacre at all ; that not a Protestant was killed save in fair fight and open war ; and that the evidence collected by commissions and published to deceive Europe is so extravagant that a glance suffices to detect its worthlessness. Tliis account of the events of 1G41 and of the years succeeding has been allowed to grow without serious contradiction till it has come to be universally received and believed by the Irish people, both at home and in America ; and, being believed, it lies among the causes which have exasperated the Irish race into their present attitude. They regard themselves not only as having been robbed, but as having been made the victims of abominable calumnies. Nor is it only irresponsible agitators who tell them so, but reverend and grave historians, some of whom go so far as to say that there could have been no massacre. Thus, in the absence of any clear rejoinder, judgment is going by default, and we are sliding into an acknowledgment that the Long Parliament and their officers in Ireland were the real criminals, and successfully carried through a conspiracy so base and infamous that Sir Phelim O'Neil and his confederates seem innocent in comparison. The Irish Rebellion and Cromwell's reconquest were not done in a corner. Catholic Europe, with the Pope at its head, was deeply interested in the struggle and the issue of it. The l)arbarities of which the Irish were accused and were said to have been found guilty were published to the world, and, involving as they did the character of a Catholic nation, it might have been expected their publication would have drawn forth at once an indignant contradiction. Hundreds of exiles who had been in Ireland at the beginning of the insurrection were scattered over France, Spain, and Italy, and might have repudiated, had they been able, the tremendous accusa- tion against their countrymen. They did nothing of the kind. Individuals among them here and there after a lapse of years PllEFACE. Vll asserted that they had no share in the massacres at Portadown, at Shrule, at Silver Mines, Portnaw, Macroom, and other places, but it never seems to have occurred to them to deny the general fact. And no writer of credit. Catholic or Protestant, who had lived through the rebellion thought of denying it. Not only Temple, Borlase and Clarendon, but the Catholics Clanricarde and Castlehaven, Father Walsh the Franciscan friar, Philip O'Keilly of Crom Castle, Mr. Kearney the Catholic brother of a Catholic bishop, with other Irish Catholic writers of the seventeenth century (whose narratives are hereafter printed for the first time from the Carte MSS.), all admit that massacres were committed, however they may venture to palliate or excuse those crimes. The Rev. Charles O'Connor, D.D., a highly respected Pioman Catholic priest of the last century, made the same admission. The confidence with which the innocence of the Irish of any such crimes is now insisted upon has been the growth of time ; of the unwillingness of the English to keep alive painful memories when they trusted and hoped it was needless to do so because ancient enmities between classes and creeds and the two islands were fast dymg out ; and also of a conscious- ness on the part of the English that they have much to repent of in regard to Ireland, which has made them care- less of defending themselves against particular charges. Yet passion ran hot in the seventeenth century, and in times of violent excitement right and wrong are strangely confused. Tilings antecedently improbable may have happened notwith- standing, and the modern popular Irish view of the matter may be the correct one after all. It may be so, but it has not yet been proved to be so : and on a question which touches so deeply English honour and affects the feeling between England and Ireland to this hour, no uncertainty should be allowed to rest which inquiry can remove. If this modern Irish theory, so confidently proclaimed by Irish popular orators and writers, is right, we are bound to admit it. The Long Parliament viii mEFACE. committed a frightful crime which remains unatoned for ; which ought to be pubhcly confessed ; and atonement so far as possible ought to be made. On the other hand, merely to connive, from some feeble notion of conciliation, at the growtli of a false theory so certain to envenom Irish feeling and widen the breach between the two nations, is as foolish as it is cowardly and wrong. No conciliation will be good for any- thing which rests on a basis of cowardly lies. There have been lies enough in our dealings with Ireland, and wo know by this time what fruit has grown of them. The evidence on which the Long Parliament professed to have acted is i^reserved in thirty-two volumes of MS. depositions in Trinity College, Dublin. Mr. Prendergast, in his ' Crom- wellian Settlement of Ireland,' ignores or depreciates this evidence, and Mr. Prendergast carries weight as an authority, having been appointed by the Government to calendar the earlier Irish MSS. Mr. Gilbert, after being employed by the Historical MSS. Commission to report upon the deposi- tions, has declared them to be utterly untrustworthy, invalid on the face of them. But Mr. Prendergast is prejudiced against the Cromwellians, and Mr. Gilbert's report is largely composed of extracts from Mr. Prendergast's works and from violent Nationalist writers like Curry and Carey. It is true that Mr. Gilbert, whose labours in other departments of historical research have been great and valuable, also quotes Burke and Warner in support of his views on the untrustworthiness of the depositions, but he admits that Eeid, an historian whose accuracy and impartiality are acknowledged by all, disputes the truth of Warner's and Burke's verdicts. Moreover, Mr. Gilbert does not give us a single specimen in full of any one of the depositions. He and Mr. Prendergast have their con- scientious opinions, as Eeid had his, but a large portion of the public interested in an important historical question desire a fuller inquiry and to have the depositions printed in order that readers may form their own independent and impartial PREFACE. IX judgment upon them. I greatly wished that they might be calendared with the rest of the State Papers, and I anticipated no objection to this from any quarter. Sir Thomas Hardy, the late Deputy Keeper of the Records, felt as I did, and strongly recommended that a calendar should be made of those MSS. The Irish are so confident that the depositions are worthless that I supposed they would welcome any investigation which could only prove that they were right. On the part of the English, sad as the revelations of our ancestors' iniquities might be, there ought not to be, and I believed there would not be, any present unwillingness to look truth in the face, however unpalatable the exposure. When I found that the depositions were not likely to be calendared with the rest of the Irish State Papers I thought at first of examining them myself and publishing my own account of them; but I suspected my judgment on the same grounds on which I suspected that of Mr. Prendergast and Mr. Gilbert. They are in sympathy with popular ' Irish ideas,' and I am equally in sympathy with the Pro- testant traditions of my own country. I concluded that I at least could not usefully interfere any further when I was informed by Miss Ilickson that she was about to make an accurate transcript of a large number of the depositions and to prhit them that readers might judge them indepen- dently, andjhali she would add in her work some unpub- lished documents relating to the plantations of 1G12-39. Though I could not hope, and she did not hope or indeed wish, that her verdict would be considered final, her main object being to furnish full materials for others to form an independent judgment on, it seemed to me from what I knew of her writings, her love of justice as well as her love of her native country, that her book could not fail to be valuable. She has no English prejudices, she is the descendant of some of the exiled and transplanted Irish and Anglo-Irish of 1G49, she is keenly alive to the wrongs which her country has X PREFACE. suffered at English hands, and on some points she is in full sympathy with Irish Nationalism. I had myself smarted under her criticisms, hecause I had, as she conceived, written hard things of Irishmen and Irish ideas. Miss Hickson has already written works on local history, and papers on Irish matters in the * Journal of the Royal Historical and Archaeo- logical Association of Ireland,' and in the Reliquary edited hy Llewellyn Jewitt, F.S.A., which have heen all commended for their ability and historical research hy Mr. Lecky, the Rov. James Graves, Mr. W. M. Hennessy, M.R.I.A., and others. She is therefore, I think, well qualified by fairness of mind, in- formation, and love of patient historical research to make a good transcript of some of those much talked-of, little known documents, and to arrive at an impartial judgment upon them. Her work is now finished, and the result of it lies in these two volumes that every one who is interested in this sad Irish question may now read. It will be seen that while she regards the histories of Temple and Borlase as exaggerated and often unjust, she believes that the vast majority of the depositions taken before the commissioners are valid and authentic accounts of real events. She has transcribed and printed a large number of the depositions themselves (adding notes at the end of each, sifting the evidence and collating it with contemporary narratives by Catholics which she has printed from the Carte MSS.), and she has pointed out with considerable humour {v. pp. 134, 135) the mistakes into which the impugners of their authenticity have blundered in their haste to condemn them. The impartiality of her mind is shown by her selecting for publication, not only the authentic depositions, but one or two of the very few in the immense collection which she considers can be justly called exaggerated and unauthentic {v. vol. i. pp. 302, 326, vol. ii. p. 88). A further proof of this is that while she firmly believes many of her countrymen in 1G41 committed frightful crimes, she ex- plains better than any previous writer the causes which drove TREFACE. XI them into fury, and she is careful to transcribe and print iti extenso their own memorials and narratives explaining those causes. The cardinal objection urged against the depositions by Warner and Gilbert is, that large portions of them, in some cases several pages, have had cancelling lines drawn across them by the pen of the official who wrote them, who thus made a tacit confession that much of the evidence was worth- less. If this objection can be proved valid, it is hardly necessary to say the controversy over the depositions is vir- tually at an end, and they may be set aside as of no authority. But Miss Hickson maintains that Gilbert and Warner's cardinal ol)jection is based on a cardinal error on their part. Reid partly intimated as much long ago. Miss Hickson amends his intimation (r. pp. 128-132). She states, and the photograph she has had made by an eminent artist of one of the very depositions on which Mr. Gilbert bases his objection, uiKpicstionably supports her statement (as docs Mr. Waring's sworn evidence on Lord Muskerry's trial at p. 199 of her second volume), that those lines which Warner and Gilbert have mistaken for cancelling lines are not really cancellings at all, but lines of abbreviation drawn over superfluous words and long inventories of stolen or lost goods, which the official copyist, employed to make transcripts of all that was important in the depositions for transmission to the king, was directed to omit. Miss Hickson points out that in no case have the liH(!S been drawn over the words ' jurai. coram vohis ' or over the 'jiivdi.' alone, which, either of them, standing intact above the signatures of the commissioners, stamp the deposition as sworn, any more than over the relations of murders or the na-mes of rebels ; and that those drawn over the superfluous tautology and inventories are made designedly light so as to leave every word and cipher perfectly legible (r. pp. 129-130). She recommends readers who wish for further evidence than the photogrnph to examine for themselves the transcripts in the xii PTIEFACR. Harleian MSS. and to compare them with the originals in the College. Thus her work cannot he regarded as a mere connter- statement of opinion against the popular Irish theory. It presents the reader with a statement of facts hitherto un- noticed, powerfully supported by the photograph, and she asks him to use his own eyes and his own unbiassed judgment on them. She has published for the first time — and this is perhaps the most valuable part of her most interesting work — the proceedings of the High Court of Justice, and has thrown clear fresh light on Cromwell's administration. The docu- ment which she gives from the Council Books of the Common- wealth, in which he orders the debenture of one of his soldiers, who had killed a poor Irish carpenter named O'Byrne, to be given to the man's widow and children, is very interesting and curious (ii. vol. ii. p. 28G). I can only repeat my hope that an authoritative Calendar of the depositions may yet be made by the Government, and that photographs of a few of the most important MSS. may form part of it. The clear ascertainment of the truth or untruth of a story which touches so deeply the honoin- of English action in Ireland will do more towards allaying hatreds between classes, creeds, and nations, than the most absolute reversal of the Act of Settlement of 1600-70, which arose out of and had its justification in the crimes charged on the Irish in the depositions. J. A. F. CONTENTS THE FIRST VOLUME. PREFACE INTRODUCTION ....... DEPOSITIONS Massacres of Protestant Colonists on the first turee days OF THE Rebellion ...... Massacre of Protestant Colonists at Portadown in November 1G41 ....... Massacre at Corbridoe and Truaoh . . . " . ,, Clouness ..... „ AUOUER ...... ,, LiSSAN ..... ,, SCARVAOTJ AND LouniUUUCKLAN . SUFFERINOS OF PrOTESTANTS AT COLERAINE The Murder of Lord Caulfield .... Massacre of Protestant Colonists at Kinard ,, at Carrickmacross ..... The Murder of Mr. Blaney, M.P. Massacre of Protestant Colonists at Tully Castle on Christ MAS Day, 1G41 ...... Massacre at Lisgoole ...... Deposition ok Ambrose Bedell TAGK V 1 167 1G7-174 17G-188 189-205 191 193-198 199-201 198 202 204 204 207 213 2D5-217 21G 218 XIV CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME. DEPOSITIONS— con face ]>(iijc 1"J!*. INTEODUCTION . THE PLANTATIONS -The ClIURCIIES-TITE GRACES— THE REBELLION— THE MASSACRES-THE BAY OF RECKONING. /, In December, 1G15, Arthur Lord Chichester, at the King's desire, resigned the office of Lord Deputy of Ireland, which he had held for nearly ten years, into the hands of three Lords Justices, pending the arrival of his successor Sir Oliver St. John. The last years of Chichester's rule were troubled at home and abroad. A plot had been discovered in Ulster (of which more hereafter), and the King was greatly angered at the slow progress of the plantation. Yet if the cx-Lord Deputy had enriched himself, he had on the whole served his sovereign zealously and Well. That the great work of the Ulster plantation, begun soon after his arrival in Ireland, had in 1G15 only progressed as far as the beginning of the end, was not his fault. The foundations of the work had been well laid. The province which had never been more than nominally conquered by the Angevin, York, Lancaster, and Tudor sovereigns, had succumbed to the peaceful policy of James. The lawyers had succeeded where the soldiers had failed. O'Neil and O'Donnell, the two great northern chieftains with their ill-fitting English coronets, perplexed and terrified by a new kind of warfare in disguise, against which they felt themselves powerless, preferred to go into exile.' If O'Neil, old ' Leliiiid and most liistorians of credit dishuUcvc that O'Neil was guilty of a, conspii-acy against the Government in 1607-8. They consider lie fled, les( he Bhould bo detained a prisoner in London. One of the persons who accused him of plotting treason was a Mr. E\ustacp, a man whose character made Iiim a very VOL. I. B 2 INTRODUCTION. as he was, had a chance given him to fight it out once more in open war as in the days of his youth he might possibly have accepted it, but when he was presented with a smooth- spoken, half-friendly, half-peremptory request to come into England and submit to the King's arbitration his differences with the Protestant Bishop of Derry in confederacy with his own former vassal O'Cahane, he most wisely, so far as his personal liberty was concerned, preferred to fly secretly to the Continent. Had he gone to England ho would have remained to the last day of his life a prisoner in the Tower. After the * Flight of the Earls ' the petty chieftains of Ulster were left to wage an unequal and desultory warfare sure to end in their destruction. O'Doherty's insurrection was speedily ended by his capture and death, the whole of his territory of Innishowon passing to Chichester. Sir Donnel O'Cahane ' (who had sided with the English against O'Neil) upon a bare, and it would appear very unfounded, suspicion of complicity in O'Doherty's treason, was first imprisoned in Dublin, whither he had gone of his own accord to clear himself, and was then transferred to the Tower of London, where after a long imprisonment he died. Sir Neil O'Donnel, against whose treasons his own fosterers had borne witness, with his son, described by the Lord Deputy as a * toward youth ' but as. 'proud spirited as his father,' and Sir Cormac MacBaron O'Neil, were also imprisoned in the Tower, while Con MacGregy O'Neil, a boy of twelve or thirteen, the son of the absent Earl, was entrusted to the safe keeping of Sir Toby Caulfield in the strong fort of Charlemont. It would of course be quite impossible to give here more than a very brief outline of the condition of the Ulster plantation, and of the other plantations accomplished or projected between 1G09 and 1G41, when the rebellion broke out, with the results of which this book is mainly concerned. uiitrustwoi-thy witness. He was popularly called ' Mad Eustace,' from the general belief that lie was half insane. i\Ir. Prender laud as possilile, in order that his wealth might be greater.' In other words, Jiunian nature being tlio same in all times and jjlaees, the Jhtlhs did not wait for tlie sixteenth century, or Spenser's arrival in Ireland, to rack- rent, and we may bo quite sure they carried on wars for the special purpose of froMingftiidirti on their land. Compare with the above, Dr. O'SuUivan's words fjuotcil at p. 5, noie. Grace O'^Falley {Gralnuailo) told the Elizabethan Ciovernment that the Irisli chiefs in C'onnaught extracted rackrents from their tenants who ' feared ' to refuse to pay them. MSS. liolls House. In tlio Ulster Journal of Arch(eoln(/y (vol. iv.) will bo found a highly curious letter respecting the request made to tlie English Government by Tyrone to have soldiers sent to apprehend and luring back to his lands some of his tenants who had fled to the binds of liis tipifrhl oiir>. INTRODUCTION. 7 pay a profit rent, and the cunning land bailiff, agent, or ' driver ' as he was more appropriately called. King James's ablest assistant in the Ulster plantation was his Attorney-General, Sir John Davies, himself a Celt by descent, but of that branch of the Celtic race which, like its cousins in Scotland and unlike its cousins of Ireland, seldom allows its imagination to overpower its judgment. In the Historical Tracts of Sir John Davies there is no trace of that selfish, land-grabbing spirit, which is sometimes but too apparent in the letters of Chichester and his successors. Sir John writes in a tolerant and kindly spirit of the Irish, does ample justice to their good qualities, shows how some of their bad ones are due to English misgovcrnment, but fearlessly condemns those old somi- barbarous customs which have re- tarded their prosperity. In religion he was strongly opposed, as the Protestant Celt almost always is, to Iloman Catholicism, and he denounces with true Celtic fervour the political action of its ecclesiastics in Ireland ; but he is quite as severe on the shortcomings of the Established Church. The following passages in his letters show how the keen-witted, kindly hearted, Celtic Attorney-General of James I. saw to the root of the old Irish difficulty :— ' In England and all well-ordered commonwealths, men have certain estates in lands and possessions, and their in- heritances descend from father to son, which doth give them encouragement to build and plant, and to improve their lands, and make them better for their posterities. But by the Irish custom of Tanistry ' the chief of every country, and chief of every ' ' Tlio tdiiaiste was not necessarily Lhc sou of the chief, he might be his bi-otlior or nephew, but lie should belong to lusfme (family). The succession of property by the law of tanistry secured that there should always bo an ofiicial aristocracy possessed of sulHcient estate in land to m.-iintaiu their dignity ; while the custom of gavelkind on the other liand, by the great subdivision of property Avhich it effected, tended to deprive the majority of freemen of all political rights, under a constitu- tion wiiore property was an essential element of political power. . . . The estates ofjiafhs, the lowest of whom had ten cciles, were subdivided, and a number of small poor proprietors were created.' — Introduction to O'Curri/s Lectures, p. 133. 'J'liis descriiition, l>y an enthusiastic admirer of ancient Irish laws and customs, does not place the ' humblest clansman ' in a very happy position. The official aristocracy no doubt had a good time of it, but as to the 'vested rights' of tho number of small poor projirietDrs, they were rather loss than those of the poor. 8 INTRODUCTION. sept, had no longer estate tlian for life in their .chiefries, tlie inheritance whereof did vest in no man. And these chiefries, though they had one portion of land allotted to them, yet they did consist chiefly in cuttings and cosherings, and other Irish exactions, wherehy they did spoil and impoverish the people at pleasure. And when their chieftains died their sons or next heirs did not succeed, hut their tanists, which were elective and purchased their election by the strong hand ; and by the Irish custom of gavelkind the inferior tenancies were partable among all the males of the sept, both bastard and legitimate ; and after partition made if any one of the ^ept died, his portion was not divided amongst his sons, but the chief qf the s,ept made a new partition of all the lands belonging to the sept, and gave every one his part according to his antiquity . . . the barbarous manners of the Irish must needs be imputed to those unreasonable customs, which made their estates so uncertain and transitory in their possession. For who would plant or improve, or build upon that land which a stranger, whom he luiew not, would possess after his death ? For that, as Solomon saith, would be one of the cottiers in the 'congested districts' of the -west at this day. Coinmonting on tiio above passage in Sir John Duvius,' Historical Tracts, the late Archdeacon Rowan, D.I)., in his intoreating Hamlhook to Killarney called Lake Lore, most trnly says ' that if the art of man or devil had hecn tasked to invent a cnstom likely to he productive of fraud, violence, intr'guc, and corruption and family feud, it could not have hit on a more fruitful source of those evils than tanistry.' — Lake Lore, p. 72. The truth is it sprang out of, and helped to perpetuate, a series of clan ■\vars. On the death of a cliief, if his son was a child, it became necessary to ap- point an adult chief in his ply|Ce, who could use the lamh laidir (strong hand) against his aggressive neighbours. Archdeacon Eowan gives the following extract from a Discourse on the Slate of Mnnster, written two hundred and eighty years ago, by tlio ancestor of the K;u"l of Koninaro, describing a war of succession for lands in a part of the county Cork called Duhallow : — 'The county of Duhallow is a great house of the Irisliry, and McDonogh is called the chief lord thereof. There is a great controversy about the chief lordship of that country, which one Donogh MacCormac doth at present enjoy, and his kinsman, Dermot MacOwen, doth sue against him. Dermot alleges tluit he himself is seised thereof as by a right descending to him by his father, whose fatiier's eldest brother died seised thereof, whose father's grandfather died seised tliereof. Donogh MacCormac saith that his great-grandfather whs the eldest brother, and that the youngest brother from whom Dermot is descended did murder his elder, and usurped Duhallow ever since, and that his (Donogh's) own father was murdered by Dermot's father! T?ut Dermot answers that Donogh's groat-gi'andfathor was a bastard, and tliat his Dermot's was a lawful son, and that as for the killing of Donogh's father, his (Dermot's) father did it in revenge for the killing of his father, 60 that it was but one for anoihor I '—Lake Lore, p. 74. The fratricidal strifes between the last Desmond Earls were greatly due to the infUionco of tanistry after they had married amongst the Irish. INTIIODUCTION. 9 strangest vanities midcr the sun. And this is the true reason why Ulster and all the Irish comities arc found so "waste and desolate at the present day, and so they will continue to the world's end, until those evil customs, tanistry and gavelkind, be abolished by the law of England. . . . Again, the Irish custom of gavelkind did breed another mischief, for thereby every man being born to land, bastard as well as legitimate, they all held themselves to be gentlemen. And though their portions were ever so small, and themselves ever so poor, for gavelkind must in the cud make a poor gentility, yet tliey scorned to descend to husbandry, merchandise, or any mechanical art or science. . . . And those poor gentlemen were so affected unto their small portions of land, that they rather chose to live at home by theft, extortion, or coshering, than to seek any better fortune abroad." — {Ilistorical Tracts and Letters hi/ Sir John Davies.) Let poctiy or romance or the theories of enthusiastic Irish antiquaries disguise the facts as tliey ma}^ it is certain that the old Irish clan system was the paradise of the chief and the priest, the Brehon and the bard, and the purgatory of the ' humblest clansmen.' Brehons, bards, and priests (who were often Brehons), had a real vested interest in the soil, a co- proprietorship in all the good things going ; the chief's power rested mainly on tliese classes and his own lamh laidir, or sword; but the right of the 'humblest clansman' to a co- proprietorship with them was in nme cases out of ten a mockery, a delusion, and a snare. A co-proprietorship with his fellows in barbarous poverty and semi-slavery was generally all that was left to him. That he did not sooner recognise the fact was because of that unfortunate tendency in the Irish Gael to cling, like the Galatians of old, to ancient customs and ordinances, no matter how worthless they had become, as well as to his credulity and willingness to follow any leader who flattered his vanity. The chiefs, Brehons, and bards naturally clung to their old paradise, and led the ignorant credulous masses by the ears after them. The Irish lament of Con O'Neil's bard, which has been turned into spirited and graceful English verse by Sir Samuel Ferguson, is eloquent on the sorrows of Ireland under the approaching plantation, but it is with the sorrows of the chiefs and his 10 INTRODUCTION. cluine uassails, the brave, coshering, figliting, hunting Irish 'gentlemen,' he is concerned. There is truth as well as pathos in the old Gaelic lament, but the lament is for the destruction of a class the least useful to the common weal ; and if the world was not to stand still or retrograde, such a destruction was inevitable. The hunting grounds of the chief and his daine ^lassails north, south, east and west, must be broken up by the plough of the ' Sassenagh churl ' ' and the Celtic clansman, and the haggards of both must be protected alike from Sassenagh landlord and Celtic chief. This was undoubtedly the good vfork intended by James L, but unfortunately, that king, like his grandson, was much given to intending and saying wise things and doing very unwise ones. Thus his first intention was to make no very large grant of land to any one undertaker, lest he might people it with tenants-at-will or manage it by deputies of deputies. But afterwards he made immense grants of whole territories to Chichester and Lord Castlehaven, and, as lleid observes, those territories remain to this day the least pro- sperous districts of Ulster. Still James did succeed, to some extent, in abolishing tenancies-at-will, and making the * humblest clansmen * freemen, instead of abject dependents on their lords. Mr. Prendergast and the late Eev. Dr. Russell, noticing this fact in the preface to the second volume of their * Calendar of the Irish State Papers,' say : * Sir John Davies takes credit for the King's desire to settle and secure under-tenants, but the political design of the measure was no less plain and unmistakeable.' Thus, whatever the English rulers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did in Ireland, thoy fail to please the ' ' For the plain must Lo broke Ey the slmro of the stranger, And the .stonemason's stroke, Tells the woods of tlicir danger, The green hills and shore Be with white keeps disfigured. And the Mote of Rathniore J5o tlie Saxon churrs iiaggard ! ' Lays of the Western Gael, p. 181. INTRODUCTION. 11 ruling scliool of critics in the nineteenth century, and are accused of evil intentions towards the country. When the English ruler gives, as did Elizabeth, a patent grant of all the clan territory to the Irish chief (though in point of fact, he had often ' grabbed ' to himself a half or third part of it, spite of the Brehons, long before the English law interfered with him or them), she is accused of having disregarded the rights of the ' humble clansmen ; ' when another English ruler compels the Irish chief to make freeholds and grant leases at a moderate rent (using no exactions), he is accused of disregarding the rights of the chief. As to the charge of ' political designs,' surely it is out of place in the mouth of any Irishman of the mixed race, and no other Irishman exists (Celts and Saxons being as extinct in Ireland as the ancient elk) at the present day. The English had conquered the old Irish clans, they wished to bind the two islands together in that union suited to their natural position, they wished to plant Ireland extensively — too extensively we must admit — and not in the wisest way, with English and Scotch colonists. I cannot see any real evidence to jprove that they ever enter- tained the absurd and impracticable project of 'exterminat- ing ' the Irish people. The notion that they ever did entertain it, belongs to that romance of history which, in the case of Ireland, so often passes for truth, not only with ignorant enthusiasts, but with educated men and women. Elizabeth over and over again disclaimed any intention of ' exterminating ' the Irish ; James, whatever were his vices and weaknesses, had a strong liking for the Irish Gael, and loved to trace his descent from their kings. Cromwell and his ollicers, as we shall see, protected the native Irish who were disposed to live in peace and goodwill with their Pro- testant neighbours, and took part with them against the English, Scotch, or Irish Protestants, soldiers or civilians, who acted unjustly towards them. I am aware that this latter statement will be received with a derisive outburst by a certain school of commentators on the Cromwellian settlement of Ireland ; but that ' itching to deride ' the poet writes of, is a poor argument against historical truths, which every intelligent 12 INTRODUCTION. reader can study for himself in the documents hereafter printed for the first time. Ah-eady in 1G09-10, the hill sides and plains of Ulster began to be dotted here and there with those white-walled keeps and cottages which were such an eyesore to Con O'Neil's bard, and which Con himself had on his death-bed cursed, warning his clansmen that for them to allow such buildings to be erected in their territory was as though the ' crow should build a nest for the hawk.' A few of the better- disposed chiefs were wisely submitting to the new rqiime, and many of the humblest clansmen were doing the same. But for the duine uassails, or small-acred gentlemen of the sword, who hoped by the sword to become large-acred at the expense of their neighbours — for these products of tanistry and gavel- kind there was clearly no place left unless they changed their ways, which they would not or could not do. Thej'^ swarmed on the skirts of the planted districts, and with their kerns and fosterers did their best to carry out Con Mor's traditional behests, and to make the planter's life a burden to himself and the State. The best that can be said for the poor kerns — * wood-kerns ' as they wore called, from their Robin Hood life in the woods of Truagh and Tyrone — is 'like master, like man,' and for their masters that they M'cre the bravest of soldiers, the best of horsemen and huntsmen, hospitable and openhandcd to a fault. What was to be done with them was the burning question of the hour. Chichester answered it in the only way that was left open to him. He superintended in per- son the shipment of hundreds of duine nassdils and wood-kerns for the military service of Sweden and Poland, and he bribed those of the latter who would not leave the country, to hunt down one another, a temptation to which they readily yielded. The first difficulty that presented itself in connection with the shipment of the levies for foreign service, was the choice of leaders for those hot-spirited gentlemen. Chichester tried to solve it by selecting for each company taken from a clan one who would be captain ; an O'Doherty to lead the ' thirty tall fellows' of that name 'whom he brought down,' he says in his letter to the King, ' kom the mountains of In)iishowen ' INTRODUCTION. 13 to the port of CarlingforJ, an O'llanlon for the O'llanlons, an O'Cahane for the O'Cahanes, a MacKenna for the Mac- Kennas of the ' Green Woods of Truagh ' (celebrated in an exquisite Irish air), and so on. But he forgot the metal he had to work on. Amongst those shreds of clans where could the rightful O'Hanlon, O'Doherty, or MacKenna be found (O'Cahane was in the Tower, and his brother had submitted to live peacefully on the plantation) whom the rest would consent to obey and acknowledge as leader or chief? Tho result may give Englishmen a new and strange glimpse of the old Irish characteristics. ' I find,' writes Chichester to the English Privy Council, on October 8th, IGOQ, ' that these idle young gentlemen of Ulster are all equals, and so jealous and emulous of one another, that they had rather be com- manded by an Englishman than by one of their own kinsmen, so I must humour them as best I can.' ' The King was very averse to allowing any man of English descent to leave Ulster, but he had to give way on this pohit, for without the English- descended leaders the Irish would not stu-. Ultimately they accepted for captains some of the old ' servitors,' i.e. officers who had commanded Irish soldiers in the army of Queen Eliza- beth — Throckmortons, Butlers, Sanfords, Tyrrels, Plunkets, &c. To these ' servitors ' the Irish had become greatly attached. But when this difficulty had been got over, others still more serious arose. Eight hundred exiles under their chosen captains left Carlmgford in one day for Sweden, but the rest proved recalcitrant at the eleventh hour. Sir John Davies, naturally appreciative of Celtic humours and tempers, wrote to Salisbury on October 19th, 1G09, that the shipments were stayed, 'because the priests had given out a report amongst the people,' that the Government ' never intended to send the exiles to Sweden at all, but to take them out of sight of shore and to throw them overboard, drowning every mother's son of them ! ' ^ The Jesuits, on the other hand, disdaining this clumsy lie, according to Sir John, laboured to > Chich'stcr to Privi/ Council, October 8tk, 1G09. MSS. Rolls House. » Sir J. Varies to Salis'mn/, October Vdth, 1G09. ]\JSS. Ui'lh House. 14 INTRODUCTION. dissuade the exiles from embarking by assuring them, that it was a mortal sin for Roman Catholics to assist a heretic prince like him of Sweden, who was fighting against an orthodox power. Those imaginary perils to their souls and bodies made many of the unfortunate recruits fly back again to the woods from the shores of Lough Foyle. A select number of bolder spirits who did sail from thence were only a day or two at sea, when they changed tlieir minds, muti- nied, rose in a body upon their chosen captain, the master and the crew, overpowered them, broke the compass, took posses- sion of the ship, and, at the risk of their lives, steered her straight for a ledge of rocks near the coast, hoping by hook or crook to regain it ; but contrary winds, and the usquebaugh in which they had freely indulged, detained them until the troops from a neighbouring garrison came out and made them prisoners. The same kind of mutiny took place in other ships, which were run ashore by the mutineers in Scotland- and the north of England, from whence most of them managed to find their way back to Ireland, leaving the unfortunate ' servitors ' to write piteous letters from Newcastle, and other ports, detailing to the Government their sufferings and losses, and (of course) claiming * compensation.' To the modern Liberal of that 'jelly-fish ' type described in a well-known speech of the Duke of Argyle's, those trans- portation schemes of 1609-20 seem monstrous cruelties, and those who directed them the worst of tyrants. A wiser school of Liberals may say, and not without some show of reason, that it would have been better to have left this race of dume uassails and their followers alone, to work out, like their cousins of the Scottish Highlands, slowly and painfully, their own way to a better form of civilisation. A higher power, however, of which James and his officials were the weak and unworthy instruments, had otherwise ordained it. The wild creaghting life of Ulster was to be changed into a life of prosperous agricultural and commercial industry, the results of which we see in the Ulster of to-day (or at least in that portion of Ulster from which the daine vassails were elimi- nated), the garden of Ireland, filled with the sturdy, industrious, INTRODUCTION, 15 freedom-loving men of the mixed race ; jealous of their rights as tenants and as traders, hut respecting also the rights of others, peaceahle and loyal in the highest sense of the word, which is law-ahiding, yet not without a due share of personal loyalty too, that ' loyal passion for our temperate kings ' of those later days, a far safer thing for kings and people than the old fulsome loyalty that waited on the Stuarts. But hefore the first foundation of this modern Ulster could he completed, those poor, hot-spirited, generous gentry of the sword must depart. Nuiuhers of them did actually go to Sweden, Poland, Germany, S[)ain and the Low Countries, of whom not a few rose to high disLinction in that military service for which alone they were litted ; hut many others, as we have seen, returned to Ulster, and their return was in most cases a very great disservice to their country. A few extracts from the immense mass of depositions taken in connection with the plot already mentioned as trouhling the last years of Chichester's Deputyship, will fully show this, and illustrate the state of the plantation between 1014-25. Li the former year Con MacGregy O'Neil (the young son oi the fugitive Earl of Tyrone) was still living under the charge of Sir Toby Caulfield, in the fort of Charle- mont. The knight and his family seem to have grown fond of their charge, then about fourteen years of age, and this was probably the reason that he had not been transferred, as boys of his rank usually were, to an English college for his educa- tion. However this may have been, there he was in Charlo- mont fort in 1G14, and around him, a small and all unconscious ' head centre,' the returned exiles, duine uassails and idle gentlemen of the sword, began to weave their webs, or rather cobwebs, of conspiracy. For more reasons than one I will here give Mr. Prcndergast's account of their designs, as it api)ear3 in his preface to the fifth volume of his Calendar of the Ii-ish State Papers : — ' The conspirators expected to obtain the person of Con Mac- Gregy, through the aid of ono Ned Drumane (probably Drum- 16 INTRODUCTION. mond), a person confided in by Sir Toby Caulfield, whilst the deliverance of the three Ulster knights in the Tower, Sir Donell O'Cahane, Sir Neil O'Donnoll, and Sir Cormac MacBaron O'Neill, was to be obtained by sparing the lives of Mr. Beresford, Mr. Kowley, and Sir Kichard Hansard, from the general mas- sacre, in order to exchange them for the imprisoned knights in the Tovfer.'— {Calendar Jas. I., 1G14-1G25, xyrcfacc) Mr. Prendorgast is one of many Irish writers on 1G41 wlio have denied the possibility of a massacre of the English colo- nists in that year, on the ground that the Irish were too kindly natured to commit such an act. But in the above passage Mr. Prendergast, writing in a more judicial and impartial tone than in his ' History of the Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland,' admits the fact, which his own valuable researches have helped to bring to light, viz. that a * general massacre ' of all the English in Ulster, except three, was actually planned by the Irish in 1614. No less than thirty-eight conspirators were found to bo involved in this plot, the chief of whom were Alexander Mac- Donnell, nephew of Sir Eandal MacDonnell of Dunluce, Lother MacDonnell, the illegitimate brother of Sir Randal, Coll MacGillaspuic MacDonnell, of the Hebrides, Rory Oge O'Cahan, son of Sir Donnell, Brian Crossagh O'Neil, illegiti- mate son of Sir Gorman MacBaron, MacBrien O'Neil, another illegitimate scion of the house, Laughlin O'Laverty, a priest, Edmund O'MuUarky, a Franciscan friar, two brothers of Sir Neil O'Donnell, and three sons of MacPhelimy O'Neil, who had been killed in the service of Queen Elizabeth. In reward for these services his three sons had been supported and educated for fifteen years at the expense of the Government, and were constant attendants at the Protestant Church service. If we except Rory Oge O'Cahan, whose father, as I have said, had been hardly treated, not one of these petty gentlemen had much to complain of. Even Rory Oge had been left in possession of a good freehold estate of 830 acres. Alexander MacDonnell's acknowledged motive for attempting to murder and plunder a whole country side, was that his uncle, Sir Randal, had not given him a large portion of his INTRODUCTION. 17 estate, iiistoatl of a small one to the exclusion of the knight's own sons. Sir Randal, following the wise example of the Thomond O'Brians, had loyally submitted to the Government, and was created Viscount of Dunhicc in 1G18, for having (as the patent warrant for passing the patent, dated May 28tli in that year, says), 'like a valiant and worthy gentleman per- formed many and faithful services to the Grown, and wisely and worthily behaved himself in helping to settle a general peace in Ireland, and in reducing to civility the barbarous people of those parts where he doth reside.' ' Had the nephew been as wise as the uncle, no doubt he, too, would in time have been promoted to a high place in his native country, but, as one of the conspirators confessed in his deposition, made on April 21st, 1C15, 'Alexander McDonnell sent word to his uncle by Hugh MacNeil and John Oge Stewart, that if he. Sir Randal, refused to give him a larger proportion of land, he would sell what he had to Mr. Rowley, or Mr. Beresford (agents for the English planters), and go and seek his fortune otherwise ; ' that is, seek it by an alliance with Brian Crossagh, and the half-savage, piratical clans of the Hebrides. In the end more than half of the conspirators made depositions before the authorities, ' informing ' against one another, endeavouring to throw the whole blame on one another, notwithstanding their solemn promises as ' gentle- men ' to be true to their bond of union, written in the presence of the friar Mullarky, after they had drunk plentifully of some aqua vit(B, * extraordinary good aqua ritce ' says one of the deponents (whose memory lingers lovingly over the draught as though relishing it again), which the holy man had brought with him to Brian Crossagh's house. Each one of those depositions, especially that in which the passage about the friar's aqua viUe occurs, and which will be found at length in the appendix,^ is a graphic half-comic, half-tragic revelation of that restless, vain-glorious, and wildly sanguine tempera- ment, which has shown itself from age to age in a certain class of Irishmen, who, sometimes with a just cause for dis- content, often without it, have engaged in equally insane • Lodge, vi)l. i. p. 20i5. 2 t^gg Appendix A. VOL. I. C ] 8 INTRODUCTION. plots, wildly planned, miserably organised, falling to pieces of themselves through the follies, treacheries, and intemperate habits of the plotters. The romance of history, before alluded to, seeks to persuade us that those idle gentlemen of the sword, who wished to make the poor boy in Charlemont the instrument of their ambitions, only desired an equal partition of the land and freedom for their 'humble clansmen.' The reality is that nothing was further from their thoughts than the improve- ment of their own condition by any kind of useful work on their freeholds, or a partition of freeholds amongst their followers. What they had at heart was the revival of a weak imitation of the fighting, drinking, coshering, tyrannical regime of Shane Diomais, and this the following deponent, Dermot O'Mollane, like Sir Randal MacDonnoll, was de- termined, as far as in him lay, to prevent. Knight and yeoman alike were beginning to see that the new regime of the plantation, whatever were its defects, had its positive advantages too, that under it the cottage as well as the castle w(!re their owners' homes, free from the unreasonable demands «nd coshering encroachments of every idle, unbidden guest. TJie Examination of Donnel O'Mollane, taken before Sir Thomas Philips, April 20th, 1G15,' ' The last day of January last being a holiday, this deponent having brought his wife home that day, according to the custom of the country, Eory Oge O'Cahane came to the house of this deponent's father, with six men in his company on foot, ho boi)ig mounted on a horse with a sword by his side ; and one of bis six men in his company carried a fowling-piece, whose name is Rory O'Doherty, ono of tlio O'Dohcrtys of Innishowen, and ho had also a powder-bag and a bag of bullets. The other five men were: Turlogh O'Mollane MacJames, Patrick O'Mollane Mac- Manus, Shane O'Mollane, IMacConogher MacShane, and two rhymers of the sept of the Creeries, whose Christian names he knoweth not. They being come into this deponent's father's house, Rory O'Doherty, standing in the house with his fowling-piece, hindered the people, who could not conveniently pass by them. ' 1\ISS. Rolls House . TNTnODUCnON. 19 Upon whicli this deponent wished him either to go forth of the house, or else to put his fowhng-piece from him ; which he said he would not do, nor yet depart the house until his master, meaning Rory O'Cahane, went forth ; to which this deponent replied, that he and his master had his (this deponent's) good leave to depart. Then the said Rory O'Cahane said ho would not go forth until he had drunk his fill, whether this deponent would or no, if drink were to he found in the house, and he said that this deponent made more of the worst horse-hoy that camo with Sir Thomas Phillips' soldiers than he did of him ; to whicli this deponent replied that the people belonging to Sir Thomas came only when they were sent for or invited, and that he (Rory Oge O'Cahane) came before he was sent for or invited, and that therefore he had this deponent's leave to go when he pleased. Whereupon the said Rory Oge O'Cahane said that one day before long ho might bo ablo to do this doponont as nnicli goodwill in Limavaddy as Sir Thomas, and that he would find a way to be even with him, this deponent, for that night, and many other things, he said he would remember. Whereupon this deponent, dis- trusting that some mischief might be done, desired those men that belonged to Sir Thomas Phillips to help him to put the said Rory Oge and his people forth out of the house, which they per- formed, and being put forth, the door was shut after them. Whoroupon Rory Oge O'Cahane drow his sword and ran at tho door, thinking to come in again. Then this deponent gave his father's sword and his own rapier to Sir Thomas's men for their defence, and so kept him out of tho house all that night.' Here wo have the new and the old in full conflict, the young chief carryhig on the old coshering, which grow such an intolerable burden on the tenant that, after the Eestora- tion, Acts of Parliament had to be passed against it. In 1G15 the ' humble clansman ' had no other resource than his sword in the hands of the English soldier. That the clansman was perfectly willing to resign his sword for that purpose is good proof, . taken with other evidence given hereafter, that Dr. 0' Sullivan is mistaken when ho says, in his introduction to Professor O'Curry's lectures, that the Irish ahvays preferred to be the tenants of the chiefs, rather than to live under the English ' servitors.' Six weeks after O'Mollane had made this deposition, Gorrie MacManus O'Cahane made the following c 2 20 INTRODUCTION. confession of the conspiracy, before Chichester, Henry Sarsfield, William Methwold, and David Miilhallon ; — ' About May last was a twelvemonth, Eery O'Ciiliano, Alex- ander MacDonnol Sorley and Loddor MacDoiuicl, liico Mac- Donnel, James Oge MacHenry, Gory MacHenry, James Mac- Brian O'Mullane, Art James O'Mullane, and the deponent, were all at one Gill's honse, and after they had drunk beer they all went out to the top of the hill, where Eory O'Cahane, Alexander and Lodder MacDonnel, James Oge ]\IacHenry, James Mac- Brian and this examinee closed together, and then Alexander and Eory brake out in this manner, and declared unto the rest their discontent, and how their lands were disposed of to others, and themselves left to tnist to small portions and to mend their estate. They then determined to surprise Derry, Coleraine, Lifford, Culmore, and Limavaddy, and said they would burn and spoil the towns and kill the inhabitants, and Eory O'Cahane said they would take off Sir Thomas Phillips's head, and that they would gather all the mcTi they could together and would go into rebellion, and would kill and spoil all such as would not assist them and take their part. And this being done, they called all the forenamed company that were in Gill's house, and acquainted them with the plot, who all consented thereto willingly ; and took every one an oath of secresy in the same place before Eory O'Cahane, who took a book out of his pocket for tliat purpose. The plot was to be put in execution about August next, and in the meantime they intended to furnish and prepare men and arms, Tlioy then plotted that when they went to burn and surprise Coleraine, they would send for Coll MacGillenaspic into Scotland, who was sure to assist Alexander and his kinsmen in that action. . , . He says that the prisoners and himself did all agree to deny this plot, and to be all upon one tale, being in the jail of Derry before he was sent hither, and that Eory Oge Cahane was detei-mined this summer to go about Ulster to beg helps of tlie gentlemen, and to take what help they could give him.' Coll MacGillaspic, mentioned in this confession, was the son of Gillaspic MacDonnell who lu>lpod to mnrdcr Shane Diomais in 1567, and who afterwards made his home in Colonsay. The genealogy of this branch of the ]\IacDonnells has been mnch confused, hut according to the Ecv. George INTRODUCTION. 21 Ilill,^ before mentioned, writing in the Ulster Journal of jLrcJucologij, vol. ix. p. 308, ' this Coll MacGillaspic waa Coll ciotacJi (or, as it has been corrupted, Colkitto), i.e. Coll the lefthanded, who was hung by one of the Earl of Argyle's officers, and his son, Alaster MacDonnell, was the leader of the Scotch allies of the Irish rebels, who was killed at the battle of Knockanos in 1G47, while another of his sons, James MacDonnell, was also in arms with the Irish in 1641-2. He was the loader in the cruel and treacherous massacre of a number of the English and Scotch Protestant soldiers (his comrades) in the regiment of his cousin. Colonel Archibald Stewart, at Portnaw, on January 2nd, 1G42 (N. S.), a massacre which has been wrongly described as one committed on a number of farmers and their families, while quietly sleeping in their beds. The full particulars of this massacre and the retaliatory one, in which a number of poor, inoffensive cottiers in Island Magee were indeed the victims, together with James MacDounell's curious and most characteristic letter to his * Coozen Archibald ' Stewart, the Colonel of the murdered soldiers, are now for the first time printed. Admirers of gavelkind and the * nationalisation ' of Irish land, will do well to note that the complaint of those Irish conspirators was not that they were left without land, but that they were left to trust to ' small portions ' of it. Rory O'Cahane as we have seen had received a grant of more than 800 acres, and is said to have been educated at the king's ex- pense in Trinity College, Dublin. An estate that required no mending or impt'oving by the exercise of their brains or hands in a peaceful fashion, although it might be enlarged by their swords at the expense of their neighbours, was what they ' Mr. Hill says : ' Coll cw^«c/i M;icDonncll left four sons, Gilbispuio, Angus, Alcx.mder or Alaster, and James. The two Last-named camo to Antrim, on the disjiersion of the family from (Jolonsay, and wore noted ius leaders of the Irish in IGil. The must distinguished of the brothers was Aliustor, who has been almost invariably calli;d Coll cioiach. Even Eeid speaks of him as Alaster the noted CoUkiltagh. The same oversight occurs in Dr. O'Donovan's account of tho Mac- Donnells.' Mr. Hill says that Alaster MacDonnell was rather a hindrance than a help to Montrose, as he turned aside to make plundering raids on his private enemies among the Campl^elis. 22 INTRODUCTION. hankered after ; each duine iiassail, or Uttle gentleman, lord of a lubberland of his own, wherein flowed never-failing streams of * extraordinary good aqua vitce,' and all the hnmhle clansmen's pigs ran about, with knives stuck in them, ready to be coshered or cut up for his suprenie benefit. When the whole project for bringing about this old Irish Elysium tumbled to the ground like a house of cards, some of its projectors were hanged, some imprisoned, some pardoned, and young Con MacGregy O'Neil was sent safe out of harm's way to Dublin, from whence, by order of the King, he was soon transferred to Eton. Before the Irish State papers of 1614-25 had been calen- dared by Dr. Russell and Mr. Prendergast, it was possible for intelligent students of Irish history to accept the erroneous statements of certain Irish writer^ respecting this conspiracy, to the effect that it had no real existence, but that ' a criminal gamester, named O'Lcnnan, was bribed by Chichester to invent it.' Cathal O'llara, Esq., a gentleman of good position, deposed that ho knew that O'Lcnnan was the confi- dential attendant of Alexander MacDonnell. But whatever may have been the character of O'Lcnnan, he was not the first who revealed the conspiracy. His depositions may be read at length in the Calendar, but they are so immaterial compared with those made by thirty-three other witnesses, and with the full confession of the chief conspirator, Brian Crossagh O'Neil, himself, that I have not thought it worth while to give any extracts from them. On the eve of Chichester's resignation, the King wrote to him expressing extreme displeasure at the general mis- management of the Ulster plantation, * revealed to him,' he says, by his close examination of ' Sir Josiah Bodley's accurate and orderly survey of the work.' Few of the undertakers had fulfilled the conditions of their grants, the chief of which were to make freeholds, and grant leases for at least twenty- one years, to require only a fixed moderate rent, and to use no ' Irish exactions.' He gives the planters notice that if matters are not mended within a twelvemonth he will resume all the land ; and lie adds: 'My lord, I expect that in this INTRODUCTION. 23 service you will spare no man, English or Scottish, for no private man's interest is able to counterbalance the perpetual safety of a kingdom.' ' After Chichester's resignation things grew worse. Irish tenants were willing to pay much higher rents than English leaseholders, and Irish labourers were willing to work in a lazy way for half wages. Commission after commission was issued to inquire into the breaches of the conditions of the grants, and all told the same talc of towns half built, lands waste, rackrents, no leases, tenancies-at-wih, and general mismanagement. The English tenants had almost all iled rather than pay rackrents ; the Irish tenants were every- where, not only on the grants allotted to their own chiefs, aud on the lands of the Protestant bishops where it was law- ful for them to remain, but on the grants of the undertakers, most of them living in the old barbarous, nomad way, others plundering their wealthier neighbours. The ' gentlemen of the sword ' were nearly as numerous as ever ; some of the English undertakers, amongst others the Earl of Castlohaven,''^ who, like Chichester, had obtained a grant far larger than the original plantation scheme allowed, had leased to twenty of them a large tract of land, and they had in turn about three thousand Irish tenants-at-will under them, whom they ruled and ilccced in the old fashion. In the last years of James's life he had serious thoughts of resuming possession of the six escheated counties for the breaches of the articles of plantation ; but a long petition from ' MSS. Kolls House, IGll. * Pyiiiiar, in his Survey of 1018-19, says of Lord CastlelKivcu's grant: ' I find planted on this land some few liiiglish families, but they have no estates (leases), foi' since the old Earl died, the tenants, as they tell me, cannot have their leases made good unto them unless tliey will give treble the rent which they paid before, and yet they must have but half the land which they enjoyed in the late Earl's l.iuio.' 'J'horo wore oidy eleven lOnglish tenants, 'all the rest of tho tenants are li'ish.' The whole grant seems to have compriseil 12,000 acres. — llarris'a Hibcriiia. 15y an inquisition taken at Dungannon in Jlay 1G31, Sir Piers Crosbio, wlio had married Lord Castlehaven's widow, was found to be possessed of 3,000 acres in the barony of Omagh, county of Tyrone, all of which he had demised to tho O'UonncU}-?, O'iMeaghers, and MacCans. — History of Two Ulster Manors, by Lord Bebiiore. 24 INTRODUCTION. Lord Biilfour, Sir Archibald Acheson, and Sir Francis Annesley, detailing the no doubt very real difficulties in the way of the undertakers, and entreating him to have patience, stayed his hand. In 1G24, however, the London Companies' rents were doubled as a penalty for their shortcomings. The Companies had been the greatest defaulters of all on the lands, although Sir Richard Cox absurdly says that ' the in- comparable city of London was the very life and soul of the plantation.' ' It is true that the high rents and fines im- posed upon them by James and Charles compelled the Companies to rackrent, and in later times they did much to atone for their first faults. But from first to last the Scotch, not the Londoners, were the life and soul of the Ulster plantation. With the northern province in this unsatisfactory state, James might well have hesitated to begin further plantations, but this was so far from being the case that, before Chichester resigned, projects were on foot for extending them over two- thirds of the island. Leland says that, * in his passion for plantations, the King was actuated by the fairest and most captivating motives,' although the historian allows that the passion was unwisely indulged. It may be admitted that James's motives in planting Ulster were excellent, and that, as Mr. Lecky shows, the rights of the natives were not wholly disregarded in that plantation scheme. But no impartial student of the State papers, which have been arranged and calendared since Leland wrote, can doubt that the King's motives in planting Ely O'Carroll, Wexford, Longford, and other small territories, were largely alloyed with unscrupulous covctousncss of the basest kind. His vicious favourites, who ' contrast, v'ith Cpx'b eulogy the fullowing report fro^i Falkland; — ' The couiitry is in a miserable state through the Londoners' fault. Their castles and foits are so neglected as to be at the mercy of the enemy, who may jsurpriso them at pleasure; they have also wasted ai^d spoiled his Majesty's woods . . they liavp neglected to plant with IJritish as they were bound to do . . . The Londtiners strive so suddoidy to raise their rents highly, jhat their tenants are grown very poor, and many have left (heir lands, being in worse case now tiian when they came there.' {^Falklaitd lo the Kiigli^h Council, August IQ'2'^. MSS. Rolls IlnUSC.) INTRODUCTION. 25 had •// nf Kuropcan Ikmocriuv/, by Sir Erskine I\Iay, vol. i. p. aO.) INTItODUCTIOX. 33 were, after jill James's promises, to be uprooted from their loved old homes, and new divisions of the land, new customs, new laws of a strange civilisation, for which they were as yet wholly unfitted, were thrust suddenly upon them. It was not the case of a vast province long wasted by war and irreclaim- ably turbulent chiefs, which had to be recovered like Ulster for the good of the Commonwealth, but of a comparatively small strip of territory peopled by a fairly docile, peaceably disposed race, who under the civilising influence of the Ulster planta- tion and the Pale, their neighbours north and south, would soon have become loyal sul)jects. But the greed of James ' and his favourites was unappeasable, and we must sorrowfully^ admit that, on this occasion as on many another, that envy which is the besetting sin of the Irish in all times and places greatly helped to gratify it. Passage after passage of the Longford memorial proves this to have been the case. Thus at the very outset we find the memorialists complaining that ' John ]\lclriel O'Farrell had unfairly obtained two cartrons of land, the rightful property of his eldest brother's son, and that Donogh Duff McBrian O'Farrell, a poor freeholder, having but three demi-quarters of a cartron, " got from the Com- missioners " half a cartron, and more augmentation.' ^ The very smallest ' augmentation,' as the memorialists call it, of a poor neighbour's allotment drew upon him the burning wrath of the rest, even although it in no way injured them; they not only murmin-ed against his good fortune, but also pro- ceeded to ' inform ' against him as a rebel, or an ex-rebel, in order to deprive him of every acre, old or new, that he possessed. From other passages in the memorial, we see that the ' ' A prince so poor before lie came to tlic throne of Engliinrl, I liat, if lie had not been .supported by the pension -wiiicli Elizalielh allowed liini, lie could not liave maintained the gai'b of many of our English gf'ntry, and who, being conic to the throne, not only squandered its sacred patrimony upon profane and debauched favourites, but oppressed his people with almost infinite monopolies and projects, which the nation never before heard of, and wliicli were all illegal, to make those favourites rich, while he continued the poorest king that ever governed iOiio-land.' Coke's Relation of the. Courl avd Slate from James I. to Anne, p. 124. ^ V. Apj>endi.r G. VOL. I. D 34 INTRODUCTION. system of riindale in old Longford was almost as bad as that which existed in Gweedore before Lord George Hill attempted to improve that place.' Thus Geoffrey O'Farrell complained that he was, by the plantation, dispossessed of a quarter of a cartron in one townland or farm, the third part of a cartron in another, three half-quarters of a cartron in another, half a cartron in another, and the sixteenth part of a cartron in a fifth farm. In fact, the Commissioners and Surveyors of Longford in 1620 must have been often as bewildered as the poor man in Gweedore in 1854 who, when asked to point out his hereditary estate, consisting of no less than thirty-two mere shreds, or scraps of land, rundaled through different farms, gave up, in despair and fear of his brains being over- taxed to lunacy, the work of ascertaining their exact limits, amongst the scraps and shreds of his jealous and quarrelsome neighbours. If an English Commissioner or Surveyor had never set foot in Longford, it is to be feared that gavelkind and rundale would have spoiled all the well-meant attempts of the poor O'Farrell clansmen to improve their land, and would have kept them for centuries in a state of chronic strife and poverty. Their virtues were all their own, their faults were mainly the products of the old clan system, brought into ' ' Tliey divided and subdivided, and sold the land -vvitliout being interfered with, or in anywise controlled. One instance of subdivision nmy be mentioned, ■where a sniuU field of about half an acre was hold by twenty-six people ! . . . The land is never let, sold, or devised by the acre, but by a ' cow's grass,' a com- plomont of land well understood by the people, although, as it varies according to the quality of the land, it comprises for this reason a rather indefinite quantity. . . . In some ciises a tenant having any part of a townland (no matter how small) had his proportion in thirty or forty different places, and without fences between them, it being utterly impossible to have any, as the proportions were so very numerous and fre(iuently so small that not more than half a stone of oats was required to sow one of such divisions. ... A man who had some good land at one extremity of a townland was sure to have some bad at the other, a bit of middling good land in the centre, and bits of other quality at other corners, each bounded by his neighbours' pivtches of property, without any fence or ditch between them. Under such circumstances could anyone wonder at the desperation of a poor man who, having his inheritance in thirti/-two different places, abandoned them in utter despair of ever being able to make tliem out? ' ' Fights, trespasses, confu- sions, disputes, and assivults, were the natural and unavoidable eiJii-sequences of this system, those evils were endless and perpetuated. {Facts from Gweedore : Hatcluird Sons, I'icciidilly, laSI.) INTKODUCTIOX. 85 harsh and premature conflict with an advancing civihsation which they misunderstood and dishked. The plantation of Ely O'Carroll, projected by a covetous Irishman of the old native race, who had adopted an English name, and acquired estates in Leinster and Munster, went hand in hand with that of Longford. The fact of the chieftain being a child, and one of the King's wards, made the attempts to destroy his title peculiarly unjust. But no considerations of justice or regard for his ward's rights weighed for a moment with James ; the minority and dependence of the Irish Naboth only made the task of spoliation easier to the British Aliab. Leitrim, Iregan, and Fercal (the territories of the O'Dunns and O'Mulloys), O'Fox's country, part of Clancolman in Mcath, and the MacCoghlans' country, were next undertaken. On December 31, 1620, St. John wrote to the English Council that the freeholders of Eercal and the rest were likely to come in at once and submit to the plantations ; but he complains that, although a year has elapsed since the plantations of Long- ford and Ely O'Carroll, few of the undertakers have come to reside on their lands, and he begs the English Council to remedy this evil, and to impress upon the undertakers how imi)ortant it was that they should not content themselves with merely extracting rents, but that they should reside in Ireland, plant, build, and set a good example to the natives, otherwise the latter will ' return to their old ways, and refuse the friend- ship or protection of the English.' ' St. John's vain attempts to remedy those abuses, and the burden laid upon him in every way, led to the despatcli of nine Commissioners from ' Olio of the Commissioners sent over in 1613 to inquire into Irish grievances, Sir Ciiarles Coriiwallis, wrote on October 22d, iG13, to the Earl of Nortliainpton as follows : ' By Avhat we have already heard, it seems that great oppressions have heen offered to the people by the soldiers. ... If yoiir lordship will bo pleased to pardon me for a speech delivered in so coarse and homely words, 1 cannot forbear to toll you what one of good understanding answered to ono that asked his opinion of tliis people and government, which was that he would use no long discourse, but in a few words deliver his conceit, and that was that ' those Irish arc a scui'vy people and are as scurvily governed.' The judgment was a bitter one, but bitterness is strength, and Irishmen might do better to profit by it rather than quarrel with it. A eounl.ry split up into jealous clans and factions, and governed by ecclesiastical politicians, can never be otherwise judged. i> 2 36 INTRODUCTION. Englanil, authorised to inquire into the never-ending griev- ances, real and imaginary, of Ireland ; and in a few weeks after their arrival, that is in April 1622, St. John resigned the Lord Deputyship. He was succeeded hy Henry, first Viscount Falkland, who was to finish the plantations begun hy his predecessors. The smaller chiefs, as St. John expected, submitted to the planta- tion of their lands ; the O'Rourkes of Leitrim also, the Lord Deputy reported, ' seemed glad to make their dependence on the Crown, and to relinquish the old overgrown title of O'Rourke,' Their chiefs legitimacy was doul)tful ; he was a very young man, residing in London as a ward of the King, who had granted to him and his mother small pensions. The pension of Brian O'Rourke was, however, according to his own account, always in arrear ; and in the Appendix will be found some curious and amusing petitit)ns, in prose and verse, from him to his royal guardian, on the subject of his debts and a long imprisonment he suffered for the not very serious offence of celebrating the festival of St. Patrick's night too uproar- iously in the streets of London. He was evidently, however, a scapegrace, and his clan could not have suffered by his enforced absence, or the confiscation of his rather dubious rights. The case of the chief of the MacCoghlans' country was a very different one. Sir John MacCoghlan, who had been created a baronet, and who had been a loyal servitor of the Crown, consented, while he resided for a time in London, to the plantation of his territory, but on his return to Ireland — at the instigation, according to the Deputy, of the Roman Catholic priests, who were emboldened by the rumours of the Spanish marriage treaty — the chief refused to surrender his lands at Banagher, on which the Government desired to build a fort. The English Council wrote, directing that if Sir John agreed to surrender Banagher he was to be treated with all the consideration his great services to t]ie Crown in the wars against Tyrone deserved, but that if he refused, his Majesty would ])e highly displeased, as he required the place, and could not dispense with it. Ultimately Sir John surrendered Banagher, and in other respects did not fare badly, but the INTKODUCTION. 37 plantation of MacCoglilan's territory was accomplished, not without earnest protests on the part of the clan. Brian ]\Iac- Coghlan alleged that, of the three hundred acres which he had inherited, one hundred and sixty had heen granted to St. John, and Kedagh MacCoghlan alleged that, of two hundred and eighty acres of his inheritance, ninety had also heen given to the Lord Deputy, and that one Terence MacCoghlan had ohtained a share of the rest. Protests were also sent in hy the O'MulIoys, O'Foxes, and O'Rourkes, of unfair divisions and false measurements, hut they had little or no effect. The task committed to Falkland of receiving all those protests, and quieting the disturhanccs consequent on their failure, was an onerous one, and it might well he supposed he would have hesitated to add to it ; hut this was so far from bchig the case, that he had hardly assumed the reins when he of himself began to urge upon the King and Council the necessity of extending plantations in every direction. Falk- land's marked anxiety on this point drew from the English Commissioners before mentioned, who were still investigating Irish grievances, the following remarkable remonstrance: — Coviviissionors for Irish Affairs to the, English Council,^ July 1G23. May it please your Lordships, — According to your directions we have taken into consideration the Lord Deputy's letter of the 3rd of May last, wherein we find, as we conceive, an overture of much matter in preparation to make plantations hereafter in several places in that kingdom. Though we do acknowledge that plan- tations made upon just grounds and duly established, according to the true intention of them when they were first propounded, are good for the securing and settling of many disordered ter- ritories in that country ; yet, considering that works of this nature have been much practised by the private aims of many particular persons, only to get large tracts of land into their own families for their own profit, without any care of settling them for the strength and satisfaction of the country, as was intended they should, and withal remembering that they are causes of much discontent and exasperation to the people whom they concern, ' MkiS. R.dls House. 38 INTRODUCTION, and that the late plantations are yet in their infancy, and far from being settled in that good order and strength as we hope in time they will arrive to, if they receive no interruption ; we think it unreasonable to think of any more plantations for the present. But that your lordships may be pleased, by your favoural)le letters, to take knowledge of the Lord Deputy's care to advance the King's profit, and the good estate of that kingdom, by propositions whicli he intends hereafter to make unto your lordships to which you will give a willing ear, and to let him know that you think he doeth his Majesty good service if he can settle any disordered Irish country, by breaking the dependencies of the people from their chief lords, and disposing the land in orderly manner amongst the natives and servitors, to their good contentments, with reservation of profitable rents and tenures to his Majesty. And that to this purpose you will take order, according to his advice, that nothing shall be done here whicli may turn to his Majesty's disservice in that kind. All which we humbly submit to your lordships' better judgment. Humphrey ]\rAY. Hen. TIolcuoft. Wir^LiAM Jones. Richard {illegible). Humphrey Winche. The chief, indeed the only, plantation actnally carried out by Falkland was that of the O'Byrnes' territory in Wicklow, and it brought upon him, but still more upon Sir William Parsons, an immense amount of odium. For nearly two hundred years historians have heaped censures on the latter for his share in this plantation of Ranelagh and Cosha, and yet in truth he seems to have played quite a subordinate part in the transaction. But Carte has been the authority followed by all later writers, and Carte, like his patron Ormond, de- tested Parsons for his Puritanism and active exertions against the rebels in 1641-3. Carte's story of the O'Byrne case shortly stated is, that at the close of her reign Queen Elizabeth had directed her Lords Justices to grant by letters patent to Phelim MacPheagh O'Byrne the lands of Eanelagh and Cosha occupied by him and his clan ; that, the Queen dying before the patent was made out, King James gave similar directions respecting it ; that Sir Richard Graham, an old servitor, coveting the lands, endeavoured to dispute INTRODUCTION. 39 Plieliin's title, but that when an inquisition was taken before Sir WilHam Parsons the jurors found for PheHm ; that Graham and others still disputed the title, and that Lord Esmond and Phelim's brother, Piedmond MacPheagh O'Byrne, assisted them in doing so ; that Sir William Parsons produced a hook of surveys taken by him to prove that the land was the inheritance of freeholders, not the absolute estate of Phelim ; that hnally Esmond, Parsons, Graham, and the Lord ])cputy Falkland, imprisoned two of Phelim's sons and himself, in Dublin Castle, on suspicion of treason, bribing and torturing many persons in order to make them give perjured testimony against the prisoners ; that in 1G28 Commissioners were appointed to in(piire into their case, before whom Mr. Eustace of Castlemartin and other men of honour and good social position were examined ; that the Commissioners found that the prisoners were innocent and set them at liberty, but that part of Phelim's lands was granted to Sir William Parsons.' This long sensational story told by Carte, less for the clearing of the O'Byrnes than the censuring of Parsons (who for his surveying work would probably in any case have obtained land in Wicklow), has been accepted by many modern historians, without any examination into Carte's authorities. They are nothing more nor less than a copy of Phelim's own petition, and a number of uncertified and un- signed copies of depositions, made in his favour before the Commissioners of 1628, which are preserved in the library of Trinity College, Dublin. All the original documents connected with the case, except a few of Falkland's letters and state- ments, have been lojig ago destroyed or lost, and not a single deposition, original or copy, remains of those taken against the O'Byrne chief. We are therefore left with most imperfect materials whereon to form an impartial judgment of this famous case, which occupied the attention of three Lord Deputies in succession. In the preface to his ' History of the L-ish Catholic Confederation,' Mr. J. T. Gilbert, F.S.A., rejects the depositions relating to the massacres of 1641-2 hereafter ' Carte's Life of Ormond, vol. i. p. 35. 40 INTRODUCTION. given, because some of them were made by farmers, traders, labourers, &c. He also says that many of those depositions are ' mere copies ' of lost originals (in which he is, as we shall hiereafter see, wholly mistaken) and that they arc therefore of no value. The remarkable fact to wliicli 1 now desire to call si)ecial attention is that, while Mr. Gilbert rejects what he believes to be copies of depositions made by persons in humble life in 10-11, he is at great pains to print in the lirst volume of his al)Ove-mentioned history, an immense number of un- certified and unsigned copies of depositions made in 1G28, by very humble, ignorant, clansmen of Phelim O'Byrne and by acknowledged thieves, vagrants, and street beggars. The evidence of farmers, traders, and industrious poor people (against whose integrity there is not a particle of evidence) respecting the massacres of Protestants in 1641, according to Mr. Gilbert's reasoning, is worthless, but the mere un- certified copies of depositions made by the ignorant kerns of the O'Byrnes, and by men who, according to Phelim's own petition, written when he did not know they were al^out to appear as witnesses for him, were thieves, traitors, and vagrants, is to be accepted as entirely trustworthy against Sir William Parsons. Men like Lysagh Duffe ' and Walter Butler," who swore in favour of Phelim against Parsons, would manifestly have sworn anything against anybody for a bribe of a few pounds. Butler indeed frankly admitted that ho would have sworn against his own father from motives of self-interest. When such men's evidence is accepted by Tory writers like Carte, and modern writers of the Nationalist or * Home Rule ' schools, I think I may be fairly excused for complaining of the absurdly ' romantic ' and unreal way in which the facts of Irish history are treated. Even if we admit that those uncertified copies of depositions in favour of Phelim O'Byrne are probably accurate copies, it is certain that in the history of no other country under the sun but Ireland, would such a mass of rubbish, as most of them are, be accepted as good evidence against statesmen, judges, and magistrates. ' ('. Appendix J. - II. Appendix K. INTRODUCTION. 41. The only trustworthy evidence given in favour of Phclim and his sons was that of Mr. Eustace of Castlemartin. It clearly shows— if the copy, which is all that we have to trust to, be correct — that, as I have never doubted, the Esmonds, Grahams, and probably Sir William Parsons, were anxious to obtain part of the lands of Ranelagh and Cosha, and that for that purpose they used rather unscrupulous means to prevent Phelim obtaining a patent grant of the whole territory. But it is essential to the right understanding of this important case, that the reader should note, that Mr. Eustace's evidence shows just as clearly, that Phelim's anger with Esmond, Graham, and Parsons, who tried to prevent his obtaining the patent grant, was not one whit greater than the anger of his brother and the ' humble clansmen ' with himself, for attempting to * grab ' the whole territory in which they had vested rights. Mr. Eustace's statement in favour of Phelim will be found at length in the Appendix, but I wiU here quote that part of it which shows that, if the English undertakers had never cast covetous eyes on Wicklow, Phelim's claim to the O'Byrne lands there would have been resisted by his brother and their clansmen. Mr. Eustace says : — ' I do well remember and know that since the time that Phelim MacPlieagh O'Byrne procured letters out of England for confirm- ation of the first instructions to pass to him the whole territory of Eanelagh, that his oavu brother Eedmond, and all the natives of llanelagh and Cosha, that were supposed freeholders by gavelkind of the most part of the said lands, did always join together to do him all the mischief they could ; as will appear by their working together to hinder Ihm from passing a patent all the time of Lord Grandison s government, and in the now Lord Deputy's time. And part of the same natives do now also accuse him more than any others, and have all their dependencies upon none but such as have got part of the said Phelim's estate or patrimony or others that are his known adversaries.' In the eyes of Mr. Eustace and Carte, the estate was Phelim's, and the ' common sort,' as they call those whom Mr. Lccky calls ' humble clansmen,' should have been well content to have their dependency on him. All this is natural 42 INTRODUCTION. enough in high Tory thinkers Hke Carte, but it is surely strange to find writers Hke Mr. Gilbert, professedly advocates of ' national ' and ' popular ' rights in Ireland, making of Plielim a hero-chief, who stood up for the same rights and whose land was * grabbed ' from him by the covetous under- taker, all the while tbat Mr. Eustace's truthful words show that in the eyes of his clansmen Phelim himself was the most shameless and unkindly landgrabber of all ! In flat contradiction to Dr. O'Sullivan's statement, that the Irish clansmen always in the seventeenth century sided with their chief against the English undertaker, preferring the former as landlord, we find the ' humble clansmen ' of Ranelagh eagerly helping Parsons and Esmond against Phelim MacPheagh and j)referring to become their tenants. The truth is, that the contest for the territory was quite as much between the chief and the clansmen, as between him and the English undertakers and servitors. I know it will bo said that he, as a native chief, had a better right to the lands than the latter, if tanistry and gavelkind were to be abolished. But those who think with me t\mt the salus jwpuli, the good of the * humble clansmen,' was the chief thing to be considered, and that they probably understood it better than do some of their professed champions at the present day, will see no reason to regret that they, the clansmen, were able, in conjunction with the English undertaker, to prevent Phelim from obtaining his sweeping patent-grant of the whole clan territory. The line taken by the clansmen may have been due to the old Celtic failing of jealous envy, but it is quite as likely that they felt that if their religion was not interfered •with, and their freeholds were assessed like those of Long- ford, at a moderate rent, fixed by arbitration, they would be far better off than if they remained under their chief, with his sweeping patent, to be ' flayed alive,' as Mr. 11. P. Hore has it, by uncertain cosherings and exactions. As regards the King's share in the O'Byrne case, I have been unable to find any evidence that he ever really intended to grant the whole territory to Phelim MacPheagh. The following documents in the Carew IMSS. in the Lambeth INTRODUCTION. 43 Library, which Carte has studiously omitted to notice, seem to show that, whatever James may have professed, ho had no real intention of conlirming the patent-grant promised by Elizabeth : — ' Kinrfs Warrant to Sir Patrick Maule, February 20tli, 1617. ' On request made on behalf of the freeholders of the Byrnes' country, county Wicklow, the surrender of their lands hath been accej)ted and grants made in fee farm, notwithstanding the King's title to many parcels of that land. As the iidiabitants thereof, pleasing themselves with their barbarous customs of tanistry and gavelkind, and their petty cavils, do impede the reducing of that country, to that civility which other parts of this kingdom have embraced, we have thought good to quicken them to pass these lands, by demanding our right to their intrusions, concealed wardships, lines for alienations without license, mesne profits, reliefs and sums of money for respite of homage. Sir Patrick Maule having offered to discover divers things of that nature in the Byrnes' country and in Clancappagh the O'Tooles' country, and to make the title of them good to us, we do bestow three parts of four out of all the benefit that shall be made thereof, on him, and order that a grant of these shall be made unto him ; anl that a Warrant bo given to our Lord Chancellor to issue Commissions to enquire of the premises in the said territories, and to command the Barons of our Exchequer to enquire thereof at the Exchequer bar. His Majesty's counsel and all other officers and ministers are to assist Sir Patrick Maule, and before any letters patent of any lands in the said territories are passed the composition shall be first made by the possessors for their hitrusions jects, short of that * hydra,' as he termed a parliament. The Irish, even as early as 1G28, had begun to understand the value of that policy, summarised in this century in Daniel O'Connell's maxim, ' England's difficulty is Ireland's oi:)])ortunity,' and they naturally enough hastened to take advantage of the King's necessities. If it were not an Irish hand that drew that Antwerp caricature, before referred to, roprosonting Jamos with his empty pockets following his impoverished daughter, the representative of continental Protestantism, we may be sure it was well known to Irish exiles in the Low Countries and Spain, and to their kindred in Ireland. But these latter were at present full of deferential loyalty. A deputation of the chief Catholic Irish noblemen and gentlemen waited on Ealldand in Dublin, and offered large sums of money to assist Charles in his need, provided that certain concessions or * Graces ' as they were called, were granted by his Majesty.' The chief Protestant landowners also offered to contribute if some of their grievances were redressed. Unfortunately it was inevitable at that time that the redress of a Eomau Catholic grievance in Ireland should immediately become the foundation of a Protestant one, and vice versa. Falkland, weary of Irish grievances in general, irritated and disappointed and unpopular with all parties, could only suggest that they should send agents to Charles to make their offers and their desires better understood. This they did. And now began that long series of negotiations concerning the ' Graces ' (as the Irish were pleased to call what the English would have called ' rights '), which had such a disastrous ending more than thirteen years later and which brought out so fully the cardinal failing of the unhappy king, an absolute incapacity ' Carlo, vol. i. p. 102. Leliind, vol. iii. p. 3. 48 INTRODUCTION. for practising the suin-eme virtue of truthfulness. Mr. Hepworth Dixon most truly says of Charles that with all his taste and skill in art and dress, his superficial dignity and accomplishments, ' he was in the presence of the nobler verities a fool. No love of truth as truth, no loyalty to fact as fact, sustained his life. He saw that policies of deception have a first success ; he could not see the weakness, shame, and danger that are sown in every violated oath.' ' Charles made his promise of the Graces with the fixed and deliberate design of breaking it, and that from motives as mercenary as any that ever actuated his shrewder father. The Irish agents on the part of their employers offered him a voluntary contribution of 120,000L in subsidies of 40,000L yearly, to be paid in quarterly instalments, and he in return promised to grant the much coveted * Graces,' the most im- portant of which were the following : — 1. No inquisition in future to be made to find the King's title to any lands which have been in the quiet possession of their owners as loyal subjects of the Crown for the last sixty years, and this grace to be confirmed by an Act of the next Parliament held in Ireland. The Connaught landowners to have their titles fully secured against such inquisitions, by the enrolment of their old grants, or else that new grants be made to them, and duly enrolled, and an Act in the next Parliament to be passed, confirming them in the quiet pos- session of their ancient estates. 2. The Ulster undertakers to have their estates confirmed to them upon payment of SOL fine, upon every thousand acres in a year's time, and upon their consenting to have their rents doubled from the date of the new patents. 8. Abuses in the Court of Wards to bo abolished, and that when inquisition into inheritance of lands by descent is made, the Court be prohibited from making any inquiry beyond the last deceased ancestor who had held them. Fees in all law courts to be regulated and reduced, and also sheriffs' fees. 4. Subjects to be allowed to sue their liveries of estates oustre le mains and other grants in the Court of Wards, and ' //(■*• M,iJ(s/i/'s Tourr. \>y lI(;|i\vorl li. Dixon, vol. iii. n. ;i;i2. INTRODUCTION. 49 lawyers and students of the Inns of Court to be allowed to study and practise as lawyers, without taking the oath of supremacy, provided that they take instead of it an oath of allegiance to the King as a ruler in all things temporal. 5. Soldiers to be called into their garrisons and not per- mitted to oppress the people by taking from them provisions or money. Provosts-marshals' powers to be restrained, and martial law only to be used in time of open rebellion or war. G. Jurors and witnesses in private causes, unless they have been guilty of gross misconduct, not to be summoned before the Star Chamber. 7. No extraordinary warrants of assistance touching clandestine marriages, christenings, and burials, or any other contumacies against the jurisdiction of the Established Church, to be issued by the Lord Deputy or any other governors ; nor are the clergy of the Established Church to keep private prisons for such delinquents, but they are to be committed according to the ordinary course of law by the King's officers to the common gaol, and all unlawful exactions of the said clergy to cease. 8. Nobility and gentry having estates in Ireland to bo obliged to reside there, and not to leave it without license, except it bo on official duty if they are employed by the Government. The first and second of the above-mentioned Graces were those on which the petitioners' hearts were most naturally set. They were designed to prevent further plantations, which left almost every landowner, Catholic and Protestant, in Ireland, with a sword hanging over his head • in the shape of an inquisition into an ancient Crown title, unheard of within the memory of living men. But these tM'o were the very Graces which Charles was inwardly determined not to ' 'It weiicli, Sir Robert Dillon, Cliiof Justice of the Common Pleas, Sir Richard Ring- ham, CItief Commissioner of Connauglit, being displeased with some purchases of land 1 had made in Munslcr, all joined together, and by their letter complained against me to the Queen. . . . Rut I so fully answered and cleared all their ob- jeelions, and delivered such full and evident justification for my acquittal that tho Queen was pleased to use these words : " By God's death, all those are but inven- tions against this young nuin, and all his sufferings have been to be able to do us service, and those complaints are urged only to forestall him therein. But wo find iiim a man fit to bo employed by ourselves, and we will employ him in that service, and Wallop and his adherents shall know that it sliall not be in the power of any of them to Avi'ong him, and Wallop shall not be our treasurer any longer." And, arising from the Council, she ordered me to be relieved of all my charges, and the fees during my late restraint, and tlien gave me her royal hand to kiss, whieh 1 heartily did, thanking God for my deliverance.' — 3JS, Autobiography of liichurd, Earl <>f Cork, (pioted by Lodge, vol. i. p. 154. 54 INTRODUCTION. dispatched a Roman Catholic agent on a secret mission to Ireland, ' to feel underhand,' as Wentworth says in a letter ' to Cottington, * the pulses of the Irish Catholics.' He was directed to inform them that Lord Cork was determined to urge on the revival of the Sunday fines (which had of late years been discontinued), and that the only way they could hope to escape the tax was by sending over agents to offer the King 20,000L for six months, which when they did, Wentworth would prevent the imposition of the fines. It is extremely probable that Lord Cork was made acquainted by his own secret spies and friends (for he had such of both creeds in Ireland) with every move of Strafford's agent, and that he merely suggested the revival of the penal tax to stir up strife between the new Lord Deputy and the Catholics, and to make him believe that the subsid}'- could not l)c col- lected at all, or at least not until a Parliament was called, and the Graces passed into law. The Catholics hesitated to send a deputation to England, lest they might be cajoled to agree to large subsidies, and at length the King, to hasten matters, wrote a formal letter to the Lords Justices, threatening that if the money were not given, the Graces would be abridged and the fines levied on the recusants, ' according,' he was careful to add, * to their Lordships' advice.' The Lords Justices were afraid to enter the royal letter on the Council books, lest if it were read by the Roman Catholics, a violent clamour would be raised against them.^ Moreover, the threat of abridging the Graces terrified all parties and creeds in Ireland, and brought them once more with open purses to the King's feet. They consented to pay him 20,000L in quarterly assessments for the next year, in addition to that 120,000/. they had already advanced upon the shadowy security of the promised Graces. 'J'lie first council summoned after Wentworth's arrival ' ' Tlic iiitstrumciit I employed is liiiiiself a Papist, and knows no other than tliat the resolution of tlie Slate liere is set upon that course, and that I do this in private, and well wishing- to divert the present storm, which else would fall heavy uiion them all, being- a thing framed and prosecuted liy the Karl of Cork.' ^ f^lrafVord's CorrcspoiKhnce, vol. i, p. 74. '^ Jycland, vol. iii. p. 9, INTRODUCTION. 55 gave the ex-Lords Justices a foretaste of what was to come. He kept them and the few others he had summoned waiting for a considerable time ; and when he appeared, after briefly explaining the necessity for the continuance of the subsidies to maintain a Protestant army, and giving the judges directions to make known during their approaching circuits the King's intention of issuing a Commission for the Remedying of Defective Titles, he dismissed the small assembly with scant courtesy. At their next meeting the Commission was read. Offered under the guise of a boon to the Irish landowner, and a highly beneficial measure to the whole country, it was really an ingenious device to increase the King's revenues, so as to make him less dependent on the supplies of English money, and also to bar all hopes of granting the first of the before-mentioned Graces, that which limited the Crown's title to sixty years. The granting of this first Grace, much more the making it law, and the existence of the proposed Commission for Remedying Defective Titles, were in fact incompatible with one another. The Grace was to prohibit all inquiry into the Kiug's title to lands which had been in the undisturbed pos- session of their owners for sixty years ; the Commission authorised or directed an inquiry mto the title of lands held from any date since the arrival of the English in 1172, and if the slightest flaw or breach of covenant or articles of plant- ation was discovered therein, the whole became vested in the Crown, and the owner, whether Catholic or Protestant, 0' or Mac, De Burgh or FitzGerald, or Nugent or Denny,' or ' In 1639 Strafford conipelled Sir Edward Deiin^' to take out new letters- patent of the Kerry estate, granted to his grandfather for his gallant services against the Spaniards who invaded Ireland in 1679 and effected a landing near Dingle. The new letters-patent, which cost 500/., also compelled Sir Edward to bring in on his estate eight new tenants of the British race, which of course involved the dispossession of ns many Irish, whom ho had never disturbed after tho war was ended and a peace settled. It wns those new tenants who suffered in 16'U. The older Elizabethan tenants on the estate were almost all spared, and tlicir descendants remain to this day. William Ambrose, a very small landowner (a Catholic) near Tralee, had also a new gi'ant of his lands in 1G39, on which his family had been settled for two or three hundred years at least. IIo forfeited in 1G49. 56 INTRODUCTION. Preston must consent to pay a considerable sum for new letters-joatent, and also jorobably an increased Crown rent, as well as to plant his land more extensively with new English colonists, for whose accommodation some of the old tenants mnst be displaced. No class of Irish landowners, groat or Bmah, could hope to escape a squeezing under this new benevolent Commission for settling the perpetually unsettled island.' Nevertheless, as, like some Acts of the British Parlia- ment in later times, it seemed to offer those landowners an indefeasil)le title, it was not unacceptable to a few of them. But when it was placed before the board, as the first business of the hour, just after their promise of the 20,000L for the ensuing year, a chill fell upon the assemblage. Lord Cork was silent, Lord Mountnorris and the Chancellor re- served, while Sir William Parsons took no pains to conceal his discontent. He expressed his opinion, says AVentworth,"'^ writing to Secretary Coke, * that it was very doubtful the Council could bind the kingdom to continue the subsidy for a year, but I told them tliat there was no noccssity for the King to take them into council about that business at all, for that rather than fail in my duty towards his Majesty I would undertake to make the country support his army at the 'peril of my head ' — the truest words perhaps he had spoken since his arrival in Dublin Castle. He then threw out some hopes of an approaching parlianient, * upon tlio very name of which,' he says, ' it was strange to see how their moods changed and how instantly they gave consent to my proposition with all possible cheerfulness.' • A few days Iwforo ho blartod fur Iroliind, Wont worth wrolo to the King entreating liini not to carry out an intended grant of concealed lands in Munster to Hay, Earl of Carlisle. ' Such a grant,' Wentworth writes, ' woidd impede all my hopes to advance your Majesty's revenue in Ireland upon the Commission for Defective Titles, which is one of the hopefuUest fruits now left us to gather in for your Majesty's advantage.' He advices that, first, the inquisition be made and the defectivo title found, and then he adds : ' Your Majesty may after more evidently exercise your bounty, as seems best to your good pleasure.' The Crown and the courtier sjitisfied, no other thought needed to be taken. — Straffonl's Correspondence, vol. i. p. 92. * J^eland, vol. iii. p. 13, and Strafford's Correspondence, vol. i. pp. 98, 99. The whole letter (to Coke) is very curious. INTRODUCTION. 57 With that absokite blindness and deafness to the signs of the times in both islands, which characterised him, he never seems to have understood the real signification of this eager- ness for a parliament, and how the word acted like a spell on the Anglo-Irish and English-born comicillors he was en- deavouring to cajole or coerce. He asks Coke, in his next letter, to praise the Chancellor Lords Cork, Ormond, and Mountnorris, and to say that * the King will think of their desire for a parliament, and between this and Christmas give them a fair and gracious answer ; for the very hope of a parliament,' he adds, ' will make them go on willingly with their payments.' Coke complied with this suggestion, and wrote that the ' King had the parliament in his intention.' The history of Wentworth's rule in Ireland has been written by many able pens, but it is, after all, best studied in his own letters, of which a new edition is much wanted. He was an admirable letter- writer on every subject grave or gay, and his strength of will, power of influencing and controlling men of all ranks, and sarcastic wit, shine out in every letter, whether his correspondent be a Secretary of State, to whom he details Antrim's boastful promises and foolish projects for invading tlio Scottish isles, or a busy gatherer of court and society gossip like Garrard, to whom he comments on Lady Carlisle and Wat Montague and Jermyn ; or Laud himself, to whom he relates his dealings with ' church cormorants.' But the only part of Wentworth's rule with which we are here concerned is that which related to the plantations and the Commission for Remedying Defective Titles. The ' fear ' which Denny's diary noted as pervading the minds of ' manie men ' from the hour of the Lord Deputy's arrival grew and spread not only in Leiiister, Munster, and the wilds of Connaught, but amongst the Scotch settlers of Ulster, who naturally enough felt they had strong claims on the son of James the First. In October, Wentworth wrote to Coke that he had received a letter from the King touching his promise of a re-grant of lands in Ulster to Sir Archibald Acheson, upon his payment of certain fines and an increased rent, but that he (Wentworth) had stayed the re-grant as well as a request of 58 ■ INTRODUCTION. Sir Archibald's for 750Z. due to him from the Crown, and also re-grants desired on the same terms by Sir John Hume, the Earl of Annandale, and others. Coke wrote in reply : — ' Sir Archibald Atcheson did press me much and often both in England and Scotland to move his Majesty for letters to your lordship, that his lands in Ulster might be re-granted upon a fine and doubled rent. The Earl of Annandale and others made the like instance, all grounding upon the general letters and instruc- tions and the great service, pretended thereby. But for my part 1 never thought so, and by concurrence of your lordship's censure am fully satisfied that their purpose was indeed to settle their own estates, and to bar the Ci'own from the possibility of im- proving its revenue. And therefore I never gave furtherance to any such motions, but always informed his Majesty how prejudicial such letters would be to his service, as in particular I showed upon a petition preferred by the Lord Bourke, whereby, under colour of renewing his barony ' and raising it to a vis- countcy, he attempted to get a confirmation of that land which was in question between him and the Lord of Cabir before the Commissioners. And whereto Mr. Attorney showed plainly tliat neither of them had the right, the land behig clearly escheated to his Majesty, and to be conferred by him on that pretender to it that offers most.' This is a good exemplification of the real meaning of the Commission for Eemedying Defective Titles. In innumerable cases it was merely used as a means of confiscating the land, and enabling the King to confer it upon the highest bidder. In all cases it was, as I have already said, designed to put an end to all hope of granting the Graces which limited the King's title to sixty years and checked plantations. As the spring approached, Wentworth was busied with jireparations for the promised parliament. Without the parliament he knew the continuation of the supplies was hardly to be expected, and yet, he equally well knew, the first thing sure to be moved for, when it met, was the confirmation of the two Graces which the King was determined not to ' Etlniund Bourko, otli Iwiroii Rourke of Caatlecoiiiiell, niarriod Tlioniiifrojcctor, was highly distasteful to Wentworth, who wrote to the King that he dared not even communicate such a proposal as that for the magazine to the L'ish Council, for ' I am sure,' he adds, ' they would never consent that such strength should be entrusted to the grand- son of the Earl of Tyrone ; and for myself, I hold it unsafe that any such store of arms should lie so near the great Scottish plantations in those parts, lest if their countrymen grow troublesome, and they partake of the contagion, they might chance to borrow those weapons of his lordship for a longer time and another purpose than he would have cause to thank them for. They are shrewd children, and not much won by courtship, especially from a Roman Catholic' ' Eeid, commenting on this application of Antrim's, asks : ' Can it have had any prospective connection with the rebellion which Ijroke out three years after, in which the Earl acted so conspicuous a part ? ' There can be little or no doubt that it had, although the hidden links of the connection cannot at the present day be fully discovered. Antrim was no friend at heart to Wentworth — it would be difficult to say to whom the shifty and treacherous Earl was a true friend — and Went- worth regarded him with contempt and the profoundest mistrust. But the King, urged on by the Queen and her Bonuin Catholic counsellors, open or concealed, pressed Went- worth to favour their Boman Catholic favourite, and his marriage with Buckingham's widow increased his Court ' SLrafTord's Corycspondincc, vol. ii. p. 187. VOL. I. F 66 INTRODUCTION. influence. When the Scotch insurrection began, while Went- worth was forcing on the Ulster Presbyterians, women as well as men, the ' black oath,' as it was called, binding them to renounce all sympathy with their co-religionists in Scotland, he received another letter from Charles, directing him to receive new propositions from Antrim, and this he was com- pelled to do, although resolved not to entertain them. The eighteen propositions, and the names of the commanders Antrim proposed to arm and employ in the maintenance of the English Government in Ulster, will be found in the second volume of Strafford's * Correspondence.' The chief of those commanders were Lord Magenis, Lord Maguire, Phelim O'Neil, Hugh McMahon, and Art Oge O'Neil, and as they were all chief rebels in 1G41, their selection throws a good light on Antrim's projects. Wentworth's letter to Windebank detailing his iilterviews with Antrim, are, as his biographer. Miss Cooper, observes, masterpieces of sarcastic humour and irony. ' He (Antrim) told me,' writes the Lord Deputy to the Secretary on March 20th, 1G38, ' that instantly upon the receipt of his Majesty's letter he had sent off to the O'Neiles, the O'Haras, the O'Lurgans (if I mistake not the name), the MacGennisses, the MacGuires, the MacMahons, the MacDonnells (as many O's and Macs in short as would startle a whole council board at this side only to hear talked of), and all the rest of his friends, requiring them in his Majesty's name to meet him with all their forces; so that this business is now become no secret, but the common discourse of his lordship and the whole kingdom.' It may be imagined what the ' discourse ' of the Ulster Presbyterians would have been, on hearing of all the O'b and Macs, who were to be let loose upon thorn under the Catholic Earl. Wentworth, coming to practical points, how- ever, proceeds : — ' I desired next to know what provision of victual his lordship had thought of, which for so great a number of men woiild require a great sum of money. His lordship told me he had not made any at all, in regard he conceived that they should find suflicicut in the enemy's country to sustain them ; but his lord- INTRODUCTION. G7 sliip proposed to transport over with him ten thousand live cows to furnish his troops Avith milk, which he affirmed had been his grandfather's (Tyrone's) play. I told his lordship that seemed to me a great adventure to put himself and friends upon, for in case, as was most likely, the Earl of Argyle should draw all the cattle and corn of his country into places of strength, and lay the remainder waste, how could he (Antrim) in so bare a country feed either his men, his horses, or his cows ? And then I besought him to foresee, what a misery and dishonour it would be for him to engage his friends whore they could not fight, but must starve. To that his lordship replied, they would do well enough, feed their horses with leaves of trees, and themselves with shamrocks. To this I craved leave to inform his lordship, I had heard there were no trees in the isles, but if trees as yet at least no leaves, so there was no pressing haste to transport hia army, for that the season of the year would yet give him one or two months of consideration in that respect. . . . His lordship said he did not intend to make a formal Avar of it . . . besides that all those islanders " did so adore him " (his very word) that once he landed, he was Avell assured all Avould fight for him, none against him, and that rather than not go, he Avould go upon the isles Avith three huiulred, and Avitli that number do more than another could do Avith tAventy thousand. I told him if that Avere so, it Avas a very sure business, nor Avould there be need of any of those great and troublesome preparations, but my doubt was that the Earl of Argyle Avould not so easily quit possession. . . . His lordship said the Islesmen hated the Earl of Argyle, and that he had not in all those isles above two hundred pounds of his own inheritance. Which raiseth a neAv doubt Avith me at least, for the Earl of Argyle avc knoAv indeed, but those other pro- prietors in the isles, Avhether Covenanters or no, is a iion liquet here, and I am confident it is his Majesty's purpose not to have the Earl of Antrim trouble himself to conquer those, that for aught I knoAv are very good subjects already ; though perchance they should possess those lands Avhich this lord pretends belonged to his ancestors (methought he said) thirteen hundred years ago.' ' WentAvortli was convinced that Antrim had neither ability, iior money, nor credit, to raise an army at all, but that his sole object Avas to obtain from the Government money and arms for his clan, to make a raid on the Campbells, in Avhicli he, uotAvithstanding his vain boastings, Avould be worsted, after ' StrafTorcVs Coircspondence, vol. ii. p. 302. f2 08 INTRODUCTION. doing enormous mischief to the King's cause, in both islands. Besides, he added again, that the Irish Council would never consent to trust with unlimited supplies of money and arms (if they had them to give) the ' grandson of Tyrone and old Kandy MacDonnell.' He also complained that the ]\Iac- Donnells of the Isles had committed brutal crimes in Down, taking away by force a young lady (the daughter of a merchant in that count}^ from her home into Scotland to compel her to marry one of them. Those men Antrim now proposed to enrol in his troops, but Wcntworth utterly refused to allow them to come into Ireland.' His insight into Antrim's cha- racter was quickened by dislike of the Earl's religion, and jealousy of his favour with the King and Queen ; but Wentworth failed to see that Windebank, to whom he wrote his opinions so freely, was a Koman Catholic in heart and even less to bo trusted than Antrim. It is probable that every line which Wentworth wrote about Antrim was shown to him by the secretary, or at least its import told him.^ In September 1639, on the break-up of the King's hollow peace with the Scotch, Wentworth was summoned to England and was soon after created Earl of Strafford, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and a Knight of the Garter. During his absence from Dublin, his relative, Sir Christopher Wandesford, acted as Lord Justice. The want of money to maintain troops in both islands to crush the Presbyterians, compelled the King once more to have recourse to parliaments. It was decided ' ' The Earl of Antrim himself told us at this Coimcil Board that lie intended to send into Spain for some of the Irish regiments there, which we dis- allowed of, in regard they had spent most of their lives in the King of Spain's service, and if tliey returned hither might hecoino the occasion of great disonUsrs. And his lordshij) spared not at this board to move me, the Dctpuly, to grant liis Majesty's pardon to two persons to be employed as commanders in this expedition, who, for a most blooily murder and cruel rape bai-barously committed in the north of Ireland, even so lately as since I, the Deputy, entered into this govern- ment, escaped hence and are now, it seems, m Flanders, wliich pardon I confess I denied to grant.' — Lord Deputy and Council to Sir Henri/ Vane, June 4, 1639. ^ Windebank liad been made Secretary of State through the inlhience of Laud in 1632. Having been accused of protecting and releasing from jirison several Jesuits and friars, he fled to I'rance in Deeendier 1640. — Prynne's Brcviate of the Life of Land, jip. 121-113, 117, and Ikr Majesty's Tower, vol. iii. p. 355; Brodie, vol. ii. p. 2/31. INTRODUCTION. 69 to cjill one ill Dublin on March IGtli, and at Westminster on the 13th of the following month. The King demanded from the Irish Parliament six subsidies, and they might have been granted but that Strafford was detained at Chester, on his way to Dublin, by a fit of the gout. He arrived at the Castle on March 18tli, before which time the Council had decided to limit the supply to four subsidies, on the plausible ground that if six were granted, that being the number laid on the people in the last Parliament, they might fear that such a charge w^ould be in future * unchangeably and continuously laid on them.' The Council represented that they therefore judged it best to grant but four subsidies for the present, with an engagement from the parliament that more should be given hereafter ' should the occasions of his Majesty require it.' Strafford consented to this arrangement, and on March 23rd wrote to the King as follows : — ' Now this very evening the supply was propounded in the Commons House, and four subsidies assented to, Avitli all possible cheerfulness, together with a declaration that they will further supply your Majesty with their estates and fortunes to the very uttermost ; desiring that this their declaration may bo printed together with the Bill for their subsidies. This I take to be of more advantage to your Majesty in itself and in the consequence than the grant of srx subsidies would have been, and amongst other reasons which may convince it to be so, I dare undertake (as little beloved as some will have me to be by this people) that if your Majesty would, it will be in my power to persuade them after Easter to give you four subsidies more, payable the next two years after the former levied. In one word, your Majesty may have with their free good-wills as much as this people can possibly raise. Next, your Majesty may as safely account yourself master of their lives and fortunes, as the best of kings can promise to find amongst the best of subjects ; and that if those in England comply with the hke alacrity you will be at the end of the war before it begins.' The Commons tacked on to the preamble to the Bill of subsidies a long encomium on Strafford, and the King's good- ness in sending them * so just, wise, and profitable a governor ; ' and not satisfied with this. Lords and Commons drew up a 70 INTRODUCTION. long declaration of their willingness to grant further supplies to aid his Majesty ' against the Covenanters of Scotland,' though they were in doing so * to leave themselves nothing but hoses and doublets.' Strafford took all those professions for truth. His despatches to the King and Windebank up to the last which he wrote from Dublin Castle, on Good Friday, 1640, are jubilant with triumph and pride over the deep love which he imagined the Irish entertained for him, and the exposure of the calumnies of his enemies, who had re- presented him to the English as an * unpopular Vizier, Bashaw, or anything else that might be worse.' He left Ireland, for a time as he purposed, but for ever, as the event proved, on April 4th, 1640, and at Chester was again laid up with a violent attack of gout, so that he was obliged to have his letters from thence written by a secretary, an un- usual thing with him. On April 10th, he was so far recovered, as to be able to write once more with his own hand, to Winde- bank, a long letter, in which he says ^ : — ' I cannot but observe boAV cautious still your great friend my Lord of St. Albans is, lest be might seem to express liis affections towards the King with too much frankness and conlidence. Lord ! how willing he is, by doing something as good as nothing, to let you see how well contented he would be to disserve the Crown, if it were in his power, as indeed it is not. But if his good lordsliip and his fellows were left to my handling, I should quickly teach them better duties, and put them out of liking with their perverse, froward humours. . . . The Lord Roche is a person in a lesser volume, of the very self-same edition ; poor soul ! you see what he would be at, if he knew how. But seriously, let me ask you a question. "What would these and such like gentlemen do, were they absolute in themselves, when tliey are thus forward, at that very instant of time, when their estates are justly and fairly at the King's mercy. In a word, until I see punishments and rewards well and roundly applied, I fear very much the frowardness of this generation will not be reduced to moderation and riglit reason.' Strafford and his master were like somnambulists, living in a kind of waking dream, all unconscious of what was going Straiford's Correspondence, vol. ii. p. 404. INTRODUCTION. 71 on in the real life of both islands. In this letter the former adds, apijarently in reply to a suggestion made by Windebank, that if any of the laws transmitted from Ireland appear objectionable to Charles, Sir George Eadchffe, the Chancellor and the Chief Justice, will send over explanations or alterations of them, but that as to sending over agents from Dublin it was a thing never done, and that the settlement of the Byrnes' lands in Wicklow will yield the Crown 2,000L yearly. From a former letter of his, it appears that those lands were let by him in fee farm for that sum to Sir Eobert Meredith and Sir Philip Perceval, but this was either in trust for himself, or he re- tained part of them in his own hands, for Radcliffe, writing to him on October 28th, 1G40,' says : * We have put your lands in the Byrnes, Cosha, Sliillclagh, and Kildare, into good order and shall go on with the rest. I hope to have fair rentals of all entered into the book.' ^ Everything in Strafford's letter to Windebank relating to St. Albans and Eoche was probably (like the letters about Lord Antrim) communicated by the secretary to his English and Irish co-rcligionists, and it is easy to conceive how deeply it would irritate the latter. At the same time that Strafford was thus haughtily showing the Irish Catholics that their late generous offers and servile professions would not procure for them a single concession, much less the long coveted * Graces,' he drew up and sent to Sir George Eadcliffe in Dublin, his astounding, and, as Eeid well calls it, ' nefarious ' Life and Con-espondcnce of Sir George Radcliffe, pp. 190, 192, 211. ^ In several of his letters Wentworth expresses his udniiratiou of the county Wicklow — ' the finest mountain country,' lie says, ' I ever saw.' He built a hunting lodge in Cosha, and hopes that the King will one day come there in a ' progress or hunting journey.' — Correspondence, vol. ii. pp. 60, 106. The happiest days of his life in Ireland were those spent in Wicklow in the summers of 1637-8, as appears from his letters to Laud. His Connaught progress was more a trouble than a pleasure, but in Wicklow the cares of state were laid aside. On May 23d lio writes from Cosha to the Arclibishop : ' At present I am playing tlio Ilobin Hood, and licro in the country of woods and mountains hunting and chasing all the outlying deer I can light on ; but to confess truly, I met with a very shrewd reliuko the other day, for, standing to get a shot at a buck, I was so damnably bitten with midges, as that my face is all mezled over since, it itches still as if it were mad. I never felt or saw such midges in England.' — Ibid. p. 173. He dates some of liis letters from the ' Park of Parks, Cosha.' 72 INTRODUCTION. project,' for transporting all the Scotch colonists of Ulster, except a very few of the Episcopalian royalists, back to Scot- land, thus uprooting the whole plantation made by James the First.' The strangest part of this wild and incoherent docu- ment is the passage which shows that Strafford, when he penned it, understood the temper of the Scotch Presbyterians as well as King James himself did, when he explained to Archbishop Williams his reasons for not promoting Laud : ' He knows not,' said James, who, with all his weakness, had more of his mother's intellect than his son had, ' the stpmach of that people, but I ken the story of my grandmother the Queen Regent, that after she was inveigled to break her pro- mise made to some mutineers of them at a Perth meeting, she never saw a good day, but from thence being much beloved was despised of all in Scotland.' Strafford, combating the objec- tions which might be expected to be urged against his project, that the Ulster Scots had not been convicted of rebellion, that some of them had taken the * Black Oath,' and that it would be a hard case to banish bo many people on mere suspicion, leaving the greater part of Ulster untenanted, wrote : — ' To this I answer that many thousands of them never took the oath, and as I certainly hear, they now publickly avouch it to be an unlawful oath, and for aught I see they will shortly return, to any that dares question them, such an answer as Eobert Bruce, Earl of Carriek, made to Sir John Comyn, who charging him with breach of oath taken at Westminster to King Edward, replied by cleaving Sir John's head in two.' He adds : * What commonwealth will not give way that a few landlords, for they are but a few, should receive some small prejudice where the public safety and certain peace of the whole is concerned ? ' The * many thousands ' in the former passage becoming ' a few landlords ' in the latter betrays such confusion of thought and blindness to facts that one knows not what to ' ' Had this nefarious project succeeded, it would not only have overturned the foundations on which the Preshyterian Cluirch chiefly rested in Ireland, but it must have terminated in the ruin of Protestantism and the desolation of the northern province.'— Roid, vol. i. p. 260. INTROPUCTION. 73 think of this strange document.' RadcKffe discreetly drew his pen across the whole, and endorsed it with these words : ' Proposition, Scots, crossed out hy me and rejected.'' It is doubtful that he ever ventured to lay it before the Council, but very certain that, in one way or another, its contents were soon known to the Puritans and Presbyterians like Sir John Clotworthy and his brother at Moneymore. This, and Windebank's revelations to St. Albans and other Eoman Catholics, had, no doubt, much to do with that sudden alteration in the temper of the Irish Parliament, which seemed so unaccountable to Carte. It had been pro- rogued three days before the departure of Strafford, and did not meet again until June. By that time the Protestant members, oflicors of the army, on whom Strafford had relied to balance parties in his favour, were drawn off to command the newly raised troops of seven thousand men, mostly Roman Catholics, who were to rendezvous at Carrickfergus in July. The supreme command of these, and of the thousand men of the old army who were Protestants, was given to Ormond, and the Sergeant-Major-General was Sir William St. Leger, Lord President of Munster, a commander likely to be very unpopular with the Catholic soldiers, as he was a strong opponent of their Church, and the son of that Sir Warham Si. Leger who had hanged James FitzGerald of Desmond and killed Hugh Maguire, Lord of Fermanagh, in 1599. With a large majority in the army and in the parliament, the Irish lloman Catholics were naturally emboldened to press their grievances on the Lord Deputy's attention. The Commons presented him with a remonstrance against the exactions of the ecclesiastical Courts, and the clergy of the Established Church for christening, marriage fees, &c., and they appointed a Committee to consider the best manner of assessing the promised subsidies. They drew up a declara- ' ' Strafford's eneniies, about the time lie drew up this project, spread a report that his reason was affected, and that he had been miid for some months in his earlier life. See his angry letter on those reports.' — Correspondence, vol. ii. p. 253. Suppressed gout in the .system rendered him very irritable at times. 74 INTRODUCTION. tion that, after the first subsidy had been levied, it was the will and pleasure of the parliament that the rest should be assessed * in an easy parliamentary and moderate way ' on each man, according to his estate. The declaration was entered on the journals of the House, and the Lords were asked to join in it and to enter it amongst their ordinances, but they referred the matter to the Chief Justices, who decided that they could not so enter it. The Lord Deputy, weary of these oppositions, prorogued the parliament until October, when it met in a still more discontented mood. On October 20th, the Commons resolved that no one should be taxed for the subsidies beyond the tenth of his real or personal estate ; at the same time offering to pay with the second subsidy on December 1st, 1G40, that which would not fall due until June 1st, 1641. This was the most they would consent to, and the King was so highly incensed that he ordered the leaf on which the resolution was written to be torn out of the journals of the Ilouse, which was done in presence of several of the members.' This ebullition of impotent wrath availed but little. The Irish Houses decided to send a committee and two agents to lay before the King a long list of their grievances, and of charges against Strafford ; and, to forestall any attempt to dissolve the parliament, they pressed that it might be con- tinued, or that if it were dissolved a now one might be im- mediately summoned with power to receive the complaints of his Majesty's Irish subjects. It would be impossible to give in these pages even an outline of all the grievances which swelled the long re- monstrance which the committee appointed by the House of Commons carried over to lay before the King. The chiefest were the increase of monopolies injuring Irish trade, the hearing of civil causes at the Council Board which ought to have been brought before the Courts of law ; the delay to the granting of the Graces, designed to prevent plantations and limit inquisitions into the titles of landowners ; and the op- pressions and exactions of the courts and clergy of the Estab- ' Leland, vol. ii. p. 55. Carte, vol. i. p. 203, INTRODUCTION. 75 lisliecl Church. Enough has been ah-eady said of the two important Graces, so long promised and so shamelessly refused, but the last-mentioned grievance of the Established Church Courts and exactions calls for equal notice, inasmuch as it had quite as great a share in bringing about the re- behion and massacres, as had the unwise extension of planta- tions. While Chichester was labouring, in 1G14, to pacify the discontented Catholic Irish of Ulster, by allowing them as large a share of the planted land, either as chief owners or lessees, as the conquered clans could in that age expect to be allowed, complaints poured in upon him from Sir Henry O'Neil, and many others, of the oppressive and novel manner of tithing adopted by the few resident and many pluralist absentee rectors and vicars of the Established Church. The poorer people of the province, English, Irish, and Scotch, were almost wholly dependent for food on the scanty supply of oatmeal that the half-reclaimed land afforded, and on the milk of their cows. Money was very scarce, and the clergy and their bailiffs insisted that a large portion of the tithes should be paid in millc. The mass of the people had no alternative but to refuse this demand or to starve. Chichester, seeing this, ordered that for the present the tithe milk should not be exacted, but that the clergy should bo content with the ample provision already made for them, until churches, rectory houses, and schools had been erected and some real work done. The Bishops and clergy complained to the King that the Lord Deputy was injuring the Church, and he was compelled, in self-defence, to write to the Privy Council. He represented firmly but temperately that * the clergy were for the most part non-resident, that there were few churches in repair, and no rectory houses ; neither,' he says, ' do the clergy endeavour to build any, yet nevertheless intending still to make their profits most amongst the Irish, who first felt and complained of this new tithing, they did farm the tithe milk unto certain kern, bailiffs errant and such extor- tionate people, who either by immoderate avarice, or malice infused, did exact and take away the same rudely, to the 76 INTRODUCTION. extreme displeasure of the poor people, whose daily food and blood it is, and with like envy (disadvantage) to the minister of the Gospel and his profession.' He adds that when he first heard of these ' violent courses,' he thought it very doubtful whether ' that manner of tithing, before the people were persuaded to conformity, could be fitly called a planting of religion, and an advancement of the Protestant Church,' and that already a clergyman and a bailiff had been murdered, attempting to carry it out.' In 1614 not one in five hundred of the poorer Irish of Ulster could understand or speak a word of English, the only language in which their new teachers (?) could address them. In truth they did not attempt to address them at all, save through their tithe collectors with harsh demands for the milk, which was the poor people's ' daily food and blood.' Here and there an undertaker like Thomas Blennerhassett and Sir James Belford in Fermanagh had, according to Pinnar's survey taken in 1619, ' begun ' a church or ' laid out a plot ' for one, but over vast parishes in Ulster the ruins of such Eoman Catholic churches as had not been spared to turn them into stables or barns, were all that remained to show that any form of Episcopalian Christianity had ever existed there. Nor did matters imjirovo in the Establishment as years went on. In 1628, Sir John Bingley, in a curious and interesting paper, which he drew up for the Government, detailing the rapid revival of Eoman Catholicism all over Ireland, says : ' In very deed our Protestant bishops and ministers are very unwise, the greater number of them are profane and drunken fellows ' even in Dublin, and the * ministers in the country do exact of their parishioners more fees and duties than are ever taken in England, which is a great scandal.' A Discourse ujwn the State of Ulster, which is among the Carte MSS. in the Bodleian Library, and is hereafter printed for the hrst time, gives a truly sad picture of Ulster between 1629 and 1634.^ Numbers of the Irish, notwithstanding all ' V. Appendix M., for the whole letter, which is well worth reading. ' V. Appendix L. INTIIODUCTION. 77 the measures talccn by tlic King to prevent it, were still tenants-at-^YilI, subject to the old eosherhigs and ciittings in addition to money rents, mider such of their own chiefs as had lands in the plantation, and also under the City companies, the undertakers, and the bishops. The added pressiu-e of conformity to Protestantism and increased tithes and fees for the support of it, expected from the Irish tenants on the bishops' lands, made them move off to the lands of the English and Scotch undertakers, where it was illegal for them to remain. So long as they could pay a higher rent than the English tenant, the undertakers welcomed them, and when they failed to do so, or Commissioners came to inspect the land, they were compelled to move off once more. ' Pared to the bone,' as the Englishman Mr. Froude says, ' flayed alive,' as the Irishman Mr. II. P. Ilore as truly puts it, by every species of exaction, the unfortunate tillers of the soil were thrown back upon and confirmed in those nomad habits which it had been the professed object of the plantation to wean them from. They fled with their lean cattle to the mountains and woods, from the tithe collectors, just as their fathers and grandfathers had fled from the rent collectors of the O'Ncil and the O'Donnell. But in the latter case the ties of blood and creed, always so powerful in Ireland, to some extent at least, softened the mutual wrath of oppressor and oppressed. And then a mediator was always at hand (as we have seen him in full force in the house of Brian Crossagh O'Neil in 1G14) in the person of the wandering friar from Spain or Italy, with his bottle of ' extraordinary good aqua vita3 ' who felt that the best chance of getting back the 110,000/. a year his Church had lost in Ireland lay in the union of the chief and clansman against the heretic intruders. Yet, if the poor Irishman had known it, his bondage under the latter was less hopeless and injurious than his old bondage to chief and priest, which kept him a wilhng serf, one of the mere ' ITnttian dice for whom in games of battle The Isolds of eaitli compete.' The improvement of the Established Chui-ch on Laudian 78 INTRODUCTION. principles was as dear to Wentworth's heart as the extension of plantations. Both formed part of his grand scheme for making the King * as absolute,' he says, ' as a sovereign conld be.' Unfortunately for his success, the one project counter- acted the other. When the plantation came to be laid out, the land was there, but the plants he looked for to set in it were wanting. There was no lack of rich and noble absentees, desirous of large grants in Connaught, Leinster, and Munster, on which they never intended to reside ; but colonists of the right stamp, English and Scotch farmers, hardworking, peace- able and thrifty, were not to be had, as the Lord Deputy complained in his letters to Laud. The Archbishop of Can- terbury sympathised with his friend, and wondered how men could be so foolish and ungrateful to their joint paternal government. He wrote from Lambeth on May Idth, 1G38 : — ' The plantations of Ormond and Clare are a marvellous great work for the honour and profit of the King, and safety of that kingdom, and you have done very nobly to follow tliat business so close ; but I am sorry to read in your letters that you want men extremely, to fill that work, and this is the more consider- al)le a great deal, that you should want men in Ireland, and that all the while there should be here such an universal running to New England, and God knows whither, but so it is, when men think nothing is their advantage, but to run from government.' Laud's waking dreams did not permit him, any more than Wentworth, to see that what was necessary was for men to learn for themselves the secret of self-government, that they could not be governed successfully otherwise, or by any set of rules applied by force external to themselves.' Under the first Stuart King, Irish lilpiscopalian Protestantism had been a huge political machine ; under his successor it had become, Avithout renouncing its politico-religionism, what Perronet called it in later days ' Eome's ape without her name.' Never- theless, Wentworth, Laud, and Bramhall deserve credit for ' ' Scotland has ever shown itself to be possessed of the most indispensable quality of a hardy vigorous people, the determination to be itself, and not what external force might desire to make it.' — Fall of the Monarch)/, by S. Rawsou Gardiner, p. 134. INTRODUCTION. 79 rescuing from desecration not a few churches, which had been turned, even in Dubhn, into stables, tennis courts, and taverns. This is the best that can be said for their rule in Irish Church affairs. * It is hard to say,' writes Bramliall to Laud from Dublin in 1G33, 'whether the churches be more ruinous or sordid, or the people more irreverent. Even in Dublin we found one parochial church converted into the Lord Deputy's stable, a second to a nobleman's dwelling house, the choir of a third into a tennis court, with the vicar for keeper. One bishop in the remoter part of the kingdom holds three and twenty benefices ; seldom any suitor petitions for less than three vicarages at a time.' The necessity for this petition is explained in a letter from Laud to Wcntworth a year later. * Indeed, my lord,' he writes, ' I knew the state of that Church was very bad, but that it was so stark naught I did not believe : six benefices not able to keep the minister in clothes ! In six parishes not six come to church ! Good God ! stay the time {i.e. have patience) you must till there be some more conformable people : on with your endeavours for moneys given to charitable uses, for righting the Crown in patronage, for entering the benefices in the first-fruit office. Do all your judgment leads you to upon the place, and where six parishes will not find the minister clothes, the King's first-fruits will buy no lace. And while you prohibit arts to be taught in the country, God send you art enough to get back your money from the friars ! But I doubt it much.' ^ The fate of the Protestant Episcopalian Church in Ireland had passed beyond the region of fears and doubts when Laud wrote this. As a missionary Church it was an utter failure. He might build churches and ' restore ' cathedrals, in which, as Canon Kingsley somewhere says of similar buildings in England, the English Church liturgy sounded like the ' rattle of a Hhrivelled kernel in its slion,' but the people would not enter them, save in one small diocese — that of Kilmore in Cavan, presided over by the saintly Bedell. In the whole line of Ulster Protestant bishops between 1G04 and 1G41 he alone ' SLraffurd's Corrcspniulcnce, vol. i. p. 253. Life of Ennnhall, p. 145. 80 INTRODUCTION. was really fitted for his high task. It was not that the rest were by any means exceptionally unworthy men. On the contrary, some of them were prelates, whose blameless lives and learning would have made them, like their celebrated Archbishop, the amiable and learned Usher, highly useful in England. But in Ireland they were worse than useless. Even Usher and Bedell were well nigh powerless in their State trammels. One of the darling objects of Bedell's life was the translation of the Scriptures into Irish, that it might bo circulated among the people ; but in this as in other important matters he was hindered, in fact utterly foiled by the opposi- tion of the secular power," which was then the more or less conscious tool of Jesuitism. Mr. King, an exemplary clerg}'^- man whom Bedell had employed to make the translation, was bitterl}^ persecuted, deprived of his benefice, which was given to a discreditable pluralist, and all the appeals which Bedell made on behalf of his friend were disregarded by Usher, who could not contend with Wcntworth. A real missionary Church, with bishops like Bedell, and resident clergy of self-denying and blameless lives, understand- ing and speaking the tongue of the Irish people, supported entirely by funds from England, asking nothing from the Irish but to be permitted to labour amongst them for their souls' sakes, and preaching fearlessly against the oppressions and rackrents alike of the covetous undertaker and tlio native chief, as Latimer preached against the covetousness of the courtiers and landlords of Edward the Sixth's reign, would have made the western Gael as devout Protestants as the eastern Gael of Scotland, or as their kindred in Wales and Cornwall. In Bedell's first letter to Laud in 1630 he tells the Archbishop that the parish churches in Kilmore diocese are all in ruins, that the people are beggared by the exactions of the friars, and the Anglican and Roman clerg}'-, and by the contributions they must give for the support of the soldiers. He notices also the oppressions of ' our ecclesiastical courts, which in very truth, my lord,' he adds, ' I cannot excuse and do seek to reform. There are seven or eight ministers in each ' Life of BcdeU, y. 95. INTRODUCTION. 81 diocese of good sufficiency, but, which is no small cause of the continuance of the people in Popery, all Englishmen, who have not the tongue of the people, nor can perform any Divine office in Irish nor converse in it, and these hold many of them two, three, four, or more vicarages apiece.' He absolutely refused to appoint any ministers to the country parishes who were not well versed in the Irish tongue and men of exemplary life. Of a Mr. Brady, who came to him socking a benolico, furnished with letters of recommenda- tion from Lord Cork and Sir William Parsons, he wrote to the Primate : ' On examining him, I fomid him a very raw divine, and unable to read Irish, and therefore I excused my- self to these lords for not admitting him.' In a letter of a later date he relates the bitter and malicious opposition he met with from the Dean of Kilmore, who wished to retain a plurality of benefices, to one of which Bedell desired to appoint a converted friar of the native race, named O'Crean. ' There is no lack of fitting men,' he writes to Usher, * for besides Mr. Crean, whom Dr. Sheridan hath heard preach as a friar in that very place, in which I now account it would be for God's glory he should plant the truth, where before he endeavoured to root it out ; besides him we have Mr. Nugent and sundry in the College, two trained up at the Irish lecture, one of whom hath translated your Grace's catechism into Irish, and we have Mr. Duncan and others ; with what colour, then, can we pass by these and suffer Mr. Dean to fatten himself with the blood of God's people ? ' ' Of the many converts he made among the Irish only one fell away from the truth in the terrible year of the rebellion and massacres. The Reverend Denis Sheridan, a favourite Irish convert of his, was so respected by his Eoman Catholic countrymen that he and his family remained unharmed in 1641-9, and were able to give a temporary shelter to a few English Protestant neighbours in Cavan. But Bedell, like all men of his stamp in all times, had many bitter enemies, some of the bitterest of whom were professing Protestants of the well-to-do and higher classes. Undertakers and officials who ' Bcdcli's Life, by Buruet. VOL. I. a 82 INTTIODUCTION, had, like Mr. Bye-Ends in glorious John's immortal allegory, * got most of their estates by looking one way and rowing another ' — their sons eager to ape fashionable corn-tiers who had gone over to Kome, traders always most zealous for religion when he ' is in his silken slippers ' — all set upon the man whoso life was a reproach to them. He says in his letters that they spoke of hira to the Primate as a * Pajiist,' an * Arminian,' a ' double dealer,' a * niggard,' and an ' usurer.' He drew on himself a haughty rebuke from Wentworth for his mild but earnest remonstrance against the oppressive and irregular way in which a Eoman Catholic sheriff quartered the soldiers upon the poorer Protestants. At the same time he advised that the Sunday shilling tax should not be imposed upon the Eoman Catholics, but that more Protestant churches should be built, and zealous Irish-speaking ministers appointed to instruct the poor people, and bring them by persuasion and gentle means to listen to the truth. From first to last the poor of both Churches loved and respected Bedell. * The common peojile heard him gladly.' Here and there even Roman Catholic priests in Ulster openly expressed the same feelings towards him, although they well knew how uncompromising an opponent of their Church he never ceased to be. In truth, Bedell was not a Churchman at all, in the sense that word was and is understood by the majority. ' Christianity,' as a great writer has said, * com- prehends the Churches, but is not comprehended by them,' and Bedell was a Christian missionary in the fullest, deepest, and truest sense of the words, just as some of the early ministers of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland were so.' This was the secret of the influence he exercised in life and death over the • His son-in-law Clogy tells us that ' the Bishop often preached in his epis- copal habit, but not always, and used it seldom in the afternoon; nor did he,' adds the biographer, ' love the pomp of a choir, nor instrumental music, which he thought filled the ear with too much pleasure, and carried away the mind from serious attention to the matter. And when another bishop justified those things, because they served much, he sjvid, to raise the affections. Bedell answered that, in order to the raising of the affections, those things that tended to edification only ought to be used, as otherwise it would be hard to make stops, and on such pre- tence an infinity of rites might be brought in. And the sense he had of the excess of superstition fi-om what he had observed during his long stay in Italy, INTRODUCTION. 83 fierce, ignorant, misguided tribes of Ulster in 1G41. In his humilitj^ his simplicity of life, bis piety, bis Christ-like charity, his painful study of the Irish language for their souls' sakea, his intercessions with their rulers and task-masters, they re- cognised in a confused way something akin to the Kieran and Patrick, who, as their old legends told them, had brought Christianity to Pagan Ireland ; and, reputed heretic as he was, they refrained from harming him while he lived, and when he died they did not refuse to him, as they did to almost every other Englishman, a grave in their churchyard, but mingled with the half-triumphant, half-mournful volleys they fired over it, the strange prayer, so significant of their natural piety and their acquired credos, ' Bequiescat in imco, idtimus Anglorum! ' Turning now to the great rival Church in Ireland, the Eoman Catholic, we find her, early in the reign of James the First, after the scare of the Powder Plot had in some degree subsided, rapidly regaining her old influence and position. In IGll, a Scotch bishop who visited Ireland wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury, stating that the defection of those who had a short time before professed Protestantism was so great, that ' out of hundreds who used to attend the churches, there now in many places resort to them not half a dozen.' This the bishop attributed to the influx of Jesuits, and foreign- bred priests, which he adds, * is so great that it seems as if the chief burden the ships coming hither bring with them are these men, and they are publicly maintained by the natives in the corporate towns.' The shilling Sunday fine laid by the Act 11 Elizabeth, on recusants, was seldom or ever levied, and when it was, the sum which it amounted to was never given, as the Act directed, to the destitute poor. When the wealthy recusants, who did sometimes pay it, complained of this to the King, Chichester gave the incontrovertible reply that all the poor in Ireland were recusants, and that the money was therefore given to the repair of churches, bridges, and ' other charitable uses.' ' So completely, if we are to made him judge it necessary to watch carefully against the beginnings of that disease.'— Clogy's Life of Bedell. ' 'The money,' he writes, ' is left in the hands of the Clerk of the Crown to G 2 84 INTOODUCTION. believe the Lord Deputy, had the Established Chnrcli in Ireland become that worst kind of idol, the ' rich man's charm and fetish of the strong,' the Chnrch of the rich and great. That the money was not spent on the repair and maintenance of chm-ches we know. The conduct of the Roman Catholic members in the Irish Parliament of 1613, trenching on his darling prerogative, re- vived James's Protestant zeal. They sent over a number of agents to represent their grievances, and with one of those James entered into a long political and theological argimient, such as his soul delighted in. He placed before this Irish Catholic named Talbot (probably a kinsman of the brothers who were to figure so disastrously in Irish politics after the Restoration) the works of Suarez and other Jesuits, who had maintained the right of the Pope to depose princes and kings, and required him to disavow all belief in that dogma. Talbot refused, declaring that he could not pronounce an opinion on a matter * of faith,' but must submit himself to the judgment of the Church. He was sent to the Tower, and his companions were ordered to return to Ireland. James had good reasons to dread the monstrous pretensions of the Roman Catholic Church. Talbot's conduct was but as a straw, yet it indicated the coming storm. The political religionism of the Jesuits was busy in both islands. Their missionary work was supplemented in 1621, by the institution of the Congregation de Propaganda Fide. The wife of James had been won over to Roman Catholicism, and some of her ladies-in-waiting and the courtiers were of the same way of thinking, secretly or openly. James's self-conceit and self-interest alone prevented his following their example. The Jesuits cared little for the conversion of the * wisest fool in Christendom ' in his old age ; but his vices, his love of arbitrary power, and his poverty, made him a use- ful tool in furthering their grand schemes for destroying the bo employed upon the rebuilding of chui-ches and bridges and other charitable uses, because the poor of the parishes, wlio are not yet indicted, are not fit to re- ceive the same, being recusants thcnisulvcs, who ought to pay the like penalty.' — MSS. Rolls House. INTRODUCTION. 85 palatine's rule, and securing a Roman Catholic succession on the throne of England. For, as Isaac D'Israeli has well said, ' in the darkness of the Court of Eome, one perpetual dream then hovered over the tiara, the conquest of England by inva- sion, or, scheme more consonant to the subtle genius of Italian policy, the rule over England by intrigue.' ' In October 1G22, Endymion Porter, one of the Prince's gentlemen of the household, was sent to Madrid to hasten on the marriage negotiations between his master and the Infanta.'* Porter was well known in Spain, having some years before resided there, making an open profession of Romanism, while he held a post in the household of Olivarez, Duquc de San Lu9ar. Every step in this marriage treaty was known in Ireland, through the priests and the merchants trading with Spain, probably sooner than it was in England. Porter had not been long in the Spanish capital, when the Lord Deputy wrote from Dublin to the English Privy Council that ' many ill-affected men began to show great boldness,' and that the priests were infusing into the mhids of the people hopes of a great alteration in religion. As the treaty progressed, or seemed to progress, James's W'hole Irish policy was reversed and the Irish Roman Catholic revival progressed in right earnest. The island swarmed with Jesuits, friars, and priests, from Italy and Spain, who cai;iied on their worship, not as they had hitherto done, by a conni- vance in private houses, or the chapels attached to them, or in a few country chapels, but all over the island, in cities and towns and parish churches, monasteries and convents, as though no penal law had ever existed. The friars of Multi- farnham Abbey, of whom we shall hear more hereafter, in connexion with the rebellion and massacres, with many other friars of different religious orders, made public collections for cidarging the monasteries. In September 1623, a Protestant clergyman, attempting to road the funeral service at the burial of Lady Killcen, is attacked by a crowd of Roman Catholic ' Commentaries on the Beiffn of Charles I., hy Isaac D'Lsraeli, vol. i. p. 24 I. ^ Karrafi.vc of the Spa7>ish Marria(je Treaty, translated for the Canideu Society I'y 8. 11. Gardiner. 86 INTRODUCTION. women, and beaten severely.' Another Protestant clergyman in Meath, in the heart of the Pale, going to read the service on Sunday as usual in his parish church, finds it already occupied by a Eoman Catholic priest, and a congregation of some forty persons, who compel the heretic to retire. Sir Hugh Culmo writes to the Lord Deputy in October, 1623, from Cavan, informing him that twelve friars in their robes have come to that town, ' carrying matters with a high hand, attended by two thousand Irish, to the great terror of the poor English there.' ^ A few days later, before this terror has subsided, one Henry Dowdall, whom the Lord Deputy's letter describes as ' a gentleman of more wealth than wit,' at the fair of Kells, boasts to a crowd of people that their most gracious prince was married on August 17th to the Infanta, the Eight Honour- able the Duke of Buckingham carrying the cross before his Highness. Mr. Smith, the vicar of Kells, hearing this wild talk, ventures on a mild remonstrance that ' it is best to be sparing of such reports,' whereupon Mr. Dowdall, who comes of a sturdy race, answers, 'It is I, Harry Dowdall, that report the matter, and will make it good ! ' And the poor vicar has no more to say, or fears to say it. Captain Arthur Forbes, as sturdy a spirit in his way as Mr. Harry Dowdall, writes to Falkland his report of the Cavan friars, saying that they * alleged they had a warrant under his Majesty's great seal and subscribed by the Council, especially by my Lord of Canterbury, and that they give out that they will come to his (Forbes's) parish church ; which if they do,' he adds, * unless I surely know it be with his Majesty's tolerance, I will make the antiphonie of their mass to be sung to the sound of mus- kets.' ^ English Liberals and Broad Churchmen of the present day must not think scorn of the * poor English ' of Kells in 1623, or condemn too severely the threats of Captain Forbes. Simul- taneously with the grand Roman Catholic revival came loud rumours, and confident Irish boasts, of the approaching return of Tyrone's heir, who was to drive out all the English and Scotch, and destroy the plantations. Those 'poor English' of ' MSS. JRulU House. « Ihid. ■■> Ibid. INTRODUCTION. 87 Sir Hugh Culmc's letter had probably, some of them, lived through the days of the St. Bartholomew, as well as that later day when all England was thrilled with the nearer horror of the Powder Plot, their fathers had lived through the days of another Spanish marriage, and had seen the autos da fe of Smithfield. These things considered, we, of this self-complacent nineteenth century, may well refrain from censuring or despising the timid or the brave colonists of Ulster in 1622-3. Falkland himself grew uneasy, if not alarmed, and some of the English Council shared in the uneasiness. As James stooped lower, the Spanish demands rose higher, and the English people's wrath and disgust higher still. The Council ordered the Lord Deputy to issue a new proclamation against the Jesuits and friars coming to, or remaining in, Ireland.' This order had hardly been received by Falkland, when it was openly reported in Dublin, by the Eoman Catholics, that a counter-order from the King would be speedily sent over, and that all proceedings against the priests would be suspended. Falkland did not know what to believe, or how to act. On January 24th, 1G22, he wrote to Sir Edward Conway, the second secretary of James, saying, that ' some of the Irish Council advise that the proclamation should not be put forth until he hears again on the subject from England.' He asks directions as to what he is to do, adding ' if the King's resolution on this point wavers, the peace of this kingdom is not assured. The papists accuse my letters to his Majesty and the Council to be the cause of this proclamation, and they have quoted my own very words in those letters to me, yet I cannot be betrayed by my ser- vants, as I always write with my own hand, and do not trust a secretary. They profess to have their information from the Spanish ambassador, and he from his Majesty. If I provoke their malice by doing my duty I do not care, having learned that I owe a sacrifice to my King.' This letter had hardly reached London before the counter- order predicted by the priests reached Falkland. ' His Majesty having in contemplation a match with Spain, wrote the Council, it was his pleasure * that the laws against the Eoman ' JilSS. liolls House. 88 INTRODUCTION. Catholic Clmrch should he suspended, hut no tumultuous as- semblies of Catholics are to he permitted.' It is likely enough that James did hahhle the contents of liis Deputy's despatches to Gondomar,' the chiefest lay agent of the Jesuits and the Congregation in working out their grand scheme of the Catholic succession and the conversion of England, but Falkland's wife and son-in-law were Roman Catholics, and he, like his Sove- reign, was surrounded by spies, lower in station than those great ones, and equally indefatigable. The collapse of the Spanish treaty was a bitter disappoint- ment to the Irish Catholics. Wild rumours circulated among them of an approaching war between Spain and England, in which of course they would be found on the side of the former country. Tyrone, so ran the common talk, was to land im- mediately in Waterford or Cork. Sir Charles Cootc, President of Connaught, wrote from that province to Falkland in May, 1624, that eighty priests and friars, all armed, with a crowd of armed attendants, had assembled a few days before at Sir Hugh O'Connor's house, and that if some course was not taken to check their plottings, * all the English would have their throats cut on a sudden.' A Franciscan friar had re- vealed to a friend of Sir Charles that five priests were to go to Scotland and to stir up the people there to rebel. ' One Donell MacSwiney,' he adds, ' is head of the Connaught priests, as their Vicar-General, and a very dangerous man. He sent to Galway fi*om O'Connor's house for a barrel of wine, and drank it there amongst his companions, and paid for it all himself.' Coote's reports of the militant appearance of this clerical gathering, and of the priests sent to stir up rebellion in Scotland, were probably exaggerated by his fears, but his account of Bishop Swiney's drunken habits is fully borne out • ' Not one of his English dupes, not Charles, not Bucldngham, not Laud, not Wentworth, could perceive as yet, that Gondomar was leading them through violent means to yet more violent ends, tiiat he was driving all these victims to the Tovv^er, the assassin's knife, the court of justice and the axe.' . , . He summed up his gains in one joyous sentence : ' The King will not be able to help his chil- dren on the Rhino, he will not be able to oppose the Catholics anywhere.' — Uer Majesty's Totver, vol. iii. p. 98. INTRODUCTION. 89 by the deposition of Ambrose Bedell, given hereafter, and by what Clogy says ho ' saw at the See House of Kilmore in 1641. It is further borne out by what Clogy tells us of the remark made by an Irish Eoman Catholic, in Bedell's presence, when evidence was being given of the drunken habits of a Protestant minister, ' that it was plain the King's priests were as bad as the Pope's priests.' Sir John Bingley's account of the two Episcopalian churches in Ireland in 1G28, which I have already quoted, shows that the Eoman Catholic Church popularly supposed nowadays to have been at that time depressed and proscribed, was on the contrary virtually supreme in Ireland. Its Archbishops, Bishops, Deans, Vicars-General, Abbots, Priors, and Priests habitually resided in the island taking all the tithes and dues of their office, as amply as the Protestant bishops and clergy :— ' They adore the Pope and the King of Spain,' continues Sir John, * more than God Almighty himself. They have roofed and repaired their nunneries, abbeys, and religious houses of Domini- cans, Franciscans, and Carmelites, and above all the dangerous and blasphemous Jesuits, subverters of the King's royalty, and the priests do cheat the people egregiously. There are in Dublin at present fourteen houses for the exercise of the mass and one more remarkable than the rest for the Jesuits, in which about eighty persons are received each one in his habit agreeable to his degree ; and they have their altars adorned with images and other foolations [sic), popish trash as fully as in Rome and more. Tliey pJso practise Judaism ; for every Easter Day in the morning before sunrise ^ they eat a lamb roasted its head and its appurte- nances, as was prescribed to the Jews in the Levitical law, and the poorer sort make lamb pies on Good Friday, and bring them ' Swiney's brother had been converted to Protestantism by Bedell, and main- tained in his house for some time. — See Burnet's Life of Bedell, p. 146-168, and Depositions. * It is likely that some eucli superstitious practices did prevail at this time, because, until a recent period, within the recollection of persons advanced in yejirs, it was the custom in Ireland to have a joint of lamb dressed for dinner on Easter Sunday. Wiis this a relic of the early ages when the long contest respecting the proper date for celebrating Easter was going on between the Irish and English churches ? 90 INTRODUCTION. to the priest, who sets them on the altar and sprinkles them with their hlasphemous holly [sic) water, and the lambs are eaten on Easter Day so roasted. . . . These priests and monks commit a multitude of gross abuses and cheat the poor people, and divers of the better and more judicious sort of papists groan under the burden of them, and desire that they had but two or three priests in a country place ; for the burden is heavy and the oppression of the people great.' And then he concludes, with the passage already quoted, laying the blame on the responsible parties, the Bishops and Ministers of the Established Church. The truth and impartiality of the substance of this report of Bingley's cannot be doubted, but just because of both it utterly failed to make an impression on Church and State. Had it unscrupulously espoused the cause of one church or the other, or of Irish or English partisans, it would have been noticed, and its author rewarded. After Falkland's departure, while Lords Cork and Loftus were Lords Justices, pending the arrival of Woiitworth, a fraternity of Carmelites began to exercise their religious rites in one of the most public parts of Dublin, close to the Castle. The Protestant Archbishop and the mayor with a troop of soldiers entered the monastery chapel, while mass was being celebrated, and attempted to disperse the congregation, who turned upon them with such violence, that the soldiers and their leaders, armed as they were, had to fly for their lives. The English Council, hearing of this encounter, once more reversed its policy and ordered the monastery and chapel to be razed, and fifteen other religious houses in the city to be confiscated to the King's use. A Roman Catholic college which liad lately been erected in or near Dame Street was also seized and handed over to the University authorities, who converted it into a Protestant school. But this check was temporary, and in a few months all was as before, the Lord Deputy poising the two churches in the political balance, or pitting them one against the other, the better to extort money from both for the King to support his despotic schemes in cither island. Four years after the order of Council for INTRODUCTION. 91 confiscating the Dublin monasteries was issued, Bedell writes from Kilmore to Wentwortli, defending himself against the charges made by his enemies, that he had opposed the levying contributions, in a moderate and regular way, for the suj^port of the army. Dating his letter * The day of our joyful deliver- ance from the Powder Plot,' he goes on to say : — ' Indeed if I had any such intention that had been not only to oppose his Majesty's service, but the service of the Highest Majesty, and to expose the public peace and my own neck, to the skeans of the Eomisli cufc-throats. I, that know that in this kingdom of his Majesty, the Pope hath another kingdom, far greater in number, and as 1 have already fully signified to the Lords Ji^stices and Council, which is also since justified by themselves in print, constantly guided and directed by the orders of the new ComjregaUoii dc Fropnganda Fide lately ejected at Rome, and by the means of the Nuncio at Paris and Brussels. ... I, that know that there is in this kingdom, for the moulding of the people of the Pope's obedience, a rabble of irregular regulars commonly younger brothers of good houses, who are grown to that insolency as to advance themselves to be members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy in bettor ranks than priests ; insomuch that the censure of the Sorbonne is fain to be employed to curb them, Avhicli yet was called in again, so tender is the Pope of these his creatures. And that they have brought this people' to such a sottish senselessness, that they care not to learn the ten commandments as God spake them, but flock in great numbers to the preaching of new superstitions and detestable doctrines, such as their own Irish priests are ashamed of, and at these sermons they levy collections — three, four, five and six pounds ; shortly I that know that the clergy and these regulars, have at a general meeting like a synod, as they style it, holden at Drogheda, decreed that it is not lawful to take the oath of allegi- ance, and if they be constant to their own learning, do hold his Majesty to be lung only at the Pope's discretion.' Bedell's long residence in Italy gave him a thorough knowledge of the religious and political designs of the Roman Catholic Church. But Wentworth disregarded his words as Falkland had been obliged to disregard Bingley's, the majority of the Catholic Irish, many of whom were now enrolled in the new army, which was kept idle at Carrickfergus, waiting for 92 INTRODUCTION. its pay, were left to the monks, while the Ulster Preshyterians were fined and imprisoned for their refusal of the 'black oath,' and their sympathy with their co-religionists in Scotland. On June 30th, 1641, a few weeks after Strafford's execution, the Protestant Archbishop and clergy of Tuani sent in a long remonstrance to the Lords Justices, Sir William Parsons and Sir John Borlase, against the * usurpations and exactions ' of the rival church. This wail of the Establishment over the consequences of its own policy, of the defection of a people it had never really sought to win, over their refusal to pay wages for work left undone to those whom they esteemed ' hireling shepherds,' would provoke a smile if we did not know the tragedy that was impending. Every Church living, wrote the Connaught clergymen and their archbishop, ' hath a Romish priest as constantly as a Protestant minister.' He might with more truth have said that for every one of the latter, holding half a dozen benefices, there were a dozen priests and friars ad libitum. ' The latter,' continues the remonstrance, 'swarm hie ille et uhique. There are monasteries and convents like the Irish nunnery in Lisbon ; the titulary Archbishop and his suffragans, do so publicly and powerfully exercise Church jurisdiction, and such obedience is given them, that the jurisdiction of our Church is altogether neglected. The natives, wearied with the charge of a double clergy, do much repine at our ministers ; they think what they pay unto us, though far short of what they cheerfully pay to their own priests, to be heavy and burdensome, which makes them question our ancient customs, keep back our tithes, conceal our glebes, deny the Protestant ministers any plan of residence in the parishes, and maliciously indict their proctors.' The nunnery at Lisbon referred to in this remonstrance was the convent of Bon Succes, for Irish Dominican nuns, founded by a native of Kerry, Dominic O'Daly, who had been a friar in the abbey of Tralee, nominally dissolved in the sixteenth century, but really inhabited by monks and not in ruins, until the end of the seventeenth. He went to Portugal in or about 1G12, and became censor of the Inquisition, con- fessor to the Portuguese Queen, and in 1655, ambassador to Introduction. 93 Louis XIV., all the while his father and kinsmen remained tenants on the estate of the Dennys and Herberts in and near Tralee, enjoying, like the rest of the Roman Catholics of native race around them, toleration for their religion and facilities for acquiring lands and wealth, which many of them turned to good account, insomuch that in 1641, before they plunged into a fatal rebellion, the O'Connors, the MacEllis- trims, the MacEligots and Walshes, with many others, all lloman Catholics, owned large tracts of land around the town, for which they paid merely nominal chiefries to the Protestant owners in fee. This remonstrance from Tuam, if it shows the unreasonable expectations of the Established Church, shows equally well the absurdity of the statements made by some Protestant, and all Roman Catholic writers, who would fain persuade their readers that the Irish Roman Catholic Church was grievously oppressed and debarred from exercising its rites immediately before the rebellion of 1641.' The very reverse was the fact ; Roman Catholicism was virtually, though not ostensibly, supreme in Ireland in the spring and summer of 1641 ; the Roman Catholics had a majority in the army and in the parliament, their bishops, priests and friars were well supported by their flocks, every Catholic nobleman had his chaplain or confessor openly residing in his house. As more than one of those Roman Catholic noblemen and gentlemen confessed, when the fatal results of the rebellion began to make them repent of having ever embarked in it, their clergy in Ireland had no reasonable excuse for urging it on, much less for encouraging the people to extirpate the Protestants. A few Irish priests and friars, and one Bishop (Dease of Meath) admitted this to be the truth. But they were a weak minority, hated and calumniated by the orthodox Romanists, whose object was not at all the mere remedying of Irish grievances, but the old grand object, dating from 1621 or 1605, the estab- • In Oct.olier, 1637, Wentworth, writing to Windebank, says that the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Cashol received fully two thousand pounds a year out of Ireland, an immense sum for those daj's. — Strafford's Correspondence, vol. ii. p. 111. The Archbishop (Thomas ^Valsh) generally resided in Spain, where he died ia 1654. 94 INTRODUCTION. lishment of a Roman Catholic succession on the English throne, and the establishment of the supremacy of the Pope in both islands. England was the first thought of the Roman Catholic Church put into commission, Ireland the second, but it was expedient to put Ireland in the front against the Puritans (as they were nicknamed), who were opposing the religious and political mission of the church in both islands. According to the work of a Jesuit priest of the present day, ' in the reign of Charles I. when Parliament was anxious to limit the royal prerogative, the life of a priest often became a question of state.' It would be more correct to say that the life of a priest did, of necessity, unhappily become a question of state, when he ' was found disputing the right of a Protestant King to govern a Protestant country, or if not disputing it, assisting that King to crush the Protestant Parliament, and to establish a despotism in England for the benefit of a Roman Catholic successor, who might be able to say, ' Vctat est moV,' the ' ??ioi,' as in the case of the old King, who in his youth spoke those words, finally merging in the Jesuit confessor behind the throne with his bastilles and dragonnades. On November 12th, 1640, Lord Deputy Wandesford pro- rogued the Irish Parliament until January 26th following, the Committee meantime going over to lay their remonstrance before the King and the English House of Commons. Wandesford would have prorogued the Houses in Ireland sooner, but that he vainly hoped to get the Act for the * * To the intriguing spirit of this man (Father Parsons), whoso whole life was a series of machinations against the sovereign of his country, the succession to its crown and the interests of the secular clergy of his OAvn faith, were I to ascribe more than half the oilium under which the Knglish Catholics laboured for two centuries, I should only say what has been often said with truth. Having gained an ascendency over the minds of many, he infused his spirit and spread his maxims, and to his successors of the Society bequeathed an admiration of his character and a love of imitating it, which has helped to perpetuate dissensions, and to make us to this day a divided people. His writings, which are an exact tran- script of his mind, are dark, imposing, problematical, and seditious.' — Rev. Joseph Eerrington, D.D., Roman Catholic historian, quoted in Notes and Queries, 18/54. Dr. Berrington was a well-known and respected Roman Catholic writer of the last century, but his works have been carefully put out of sight, and out of fashion, since the order to which Parsons belonged has regained power in England. INTRODUCTION. 95 Connanglit plantation passed. Strafford, although well-nigh overwhelmed by the King's difficulties, was still from England, urging on that now hopeless Connaught ' project, when his deputy fell ill and died on December 3rd. Sir William Parsons and Lord Dillon were appointed Lords Justices, but the Irish Committee disapproving of Lord Dillon, Sir John Borlase was appointed in his stead. During the autumn and winter rumours were cu'culated in both islands of coming troubles in Ireland. On November 21st, the day after Strafford's impeachment, the Lord Chief Justice brought under the notice of the English House of Commons the in- formations of a Mrs. Anne Hussy, a convert from the Roman Catholic Church, against an Irish priest, named O'Connor, who in conversation with her told her, that * many thousands were preparing and in pay to cut all the Protestants' throats.' In the preceding October, Laud had received a long statement or ' discovery ' of a plot against the Protestant Church, him- self and the King, from Sir William Boswell, the English ambassador at the Hague. The name of the discoverer who penned this statement and gave it to Boswell for transmission to Laud is unknown to this day, but the ambassador says he was introduced to his notice by a * friend ' of good character and position. He (the discoverer) had been a Eoman Catholic priest in the employment of the papal legate in London, Cuneus or Coneys (a Scotchman), for several years, and in this way became acquainted with the traitorous designs he re- vealed to the ambassador. The King and the Archbishop he said were to be put to death in one way or another, and the Scots incited to rebellion and to destroy the Church of England, but the Prince of Wales was to be spared, that he might be converted to Poman Catholicism and placed on the throne. The chief laymen concerned in this vast plot were, according ' In October Ridclifib wroto to Strafford : ' I am altogothor of opinion to prorogue the Parliament here if I could get the Connaught Act passed ; ' and on November 6th the Lord Lieutenant wrote in reply from York : ' I have -\vrit to London to prorogue the Parliament there (in Ireland) ; in the meantime the Con- naught Act to be ijassed, if possible, may ha.'—Life and Correspondence of Bad- clifc, pp. 20i, 210. 96 INTRODUCTION. to the anonymous discoverer, Captain Eeid, a lay Jesuit (or Jesuit of the robe courte, as the French have it), at whose house in Long Acre the plotters used to meet ; Sir Toby Matthews ; two or three Scotch Catholic noblemen ; the chap- lain of the Marquis of Hamilton, who is, however, said to have withdrawn from the plot when he discovered its whole object ; and one Chamberlain, a secret agent from Cardinal Richelieu to Scotland, with other lay and clerical members of the Eoman Catholic Church. Some of them, it is said, were unknown to one another, and but few were fully acquainted with the designs of the chief conspirators — the Jesuit Fathers. Reid figures conspicuously in the Irish rebellion of 1041, as the secret agent of the King and Queen to the Roman Catholic gentry of the Pale. He was arrested and examined on the rack in Dublin, a fact which has been made mucli of by the censurers of Parsons and Borlase, but the severities used towards him were due probably to his name having been mixed up in the revelations of this plot the year before, and to his house in London having been a special meeting-place for the Jesuits and their friends. It is possible that this ' discoverer ' of 1640 may have been an impostor, but Boswell and other gentlemen of credit and intelligence were inclined to believe his story ; and at all events it is absurd to denounce him, as some Protestant writers have done (in their weak inability to resist * fashions ' in religion and politics), as a perjurer, without being able to produce an iota of proof in support of this charge. It is re- markable that the three or four events which he stated the conspirators designed to bring about did actually take place within ten years. The King and Laud were both sent to the scaffold, and Charles II. lived and died a Roman Catholic. It is very likely that the Jesuits were well content to let Charles I., like his father, go— provided that the church had the guiding of his exiled heir with a hope of ultimately restoring him to the English throne a Catholic, with a Catholic for his heir presumptive. On March 16th, 1641, the Lords Justices Parsons and Borlase received a letter from Sir Henry Vane, then Secretary INTRODUCTION. 97 to the King, informing them that his Majesty desired to give them notice, that by advices from his ministers in Spain and elsewhere he found that immense numbers of EngHsh and Irish Roman CathoHcs from the Continent had lately passed into Ireland, under pretence of going to ask leave to raise soldiers for the Spanish and French services, and that among the ' Irish friars in Spain a whisper ran ' as if a rebellion was expected in Ireland. It is doubtful whether this letter was not merely another petty piece of dissimulation on the part of the unhappy King. It is not consistent with his professed friendship for Spain, nor with his projjosals, only a few weeks later, to send thousands of Irish Catholic officers and soldiers to that country. It may have been a vain attempt to conciliate tlic Irish Protestants, who were eagerly pressing for the execution of Strafford. Another despairing effort in the same direction may have been the letter which he addressed to the Lords Justices on May 3rd, a week before the re-assembling of the Irish Parlia- ment (prorogued from March 5tli), expressing his pleasure that all the ' Graces ' of 1G28 should be granted, and that bills should be prepared and transmitted for his consideration, prci)arator3' to making the most important of them law in the approaching session in Dublin. But the time had passed for satisfying the Irish with false promises and flattering words. Both Houses in Ireland had learnt their lesson by experience, and by the example of the English Parliament. While returning formal thanks for his Majesty's gracious intentions, they requested, or rather demanded, that they should not be again })rorogued until all the promised ' Graces,' especially those limiting the Crown title to sixty years, and checking plantations, had become the law of the land, and every grievance had been redressed. In the course of their impeachment in the winter session of the Chancellor Bolton, Chief Justice Lowther, Bramhall, and Sir George Eadcliffe, the Chancellor had questioned the legality of their proceedings against him, on the ground that the Irish House of Lords had no judicature in capital cases. After long and stormy debates the question was referred, as was inevitable, to the considera- VOL. I. u 98 INTRODUCTION. tion of the English ConneiP and Upper House, and this afforded a plausible excuse for the delay of the return of the bills which were to make the * Graces ' law. The Irish Houses, however, were determined not to lose more time than they could help, and they pressed on with vehemence the al)olition of the High Commission Court, pro- nouncing its late sentences against five Presbyterian ministers in Ulster null and void. They condemned the exaction of tithes in kind by the clergy of the Establishment, and then proceeded to other measures, which, taken in connexion with the subsequent rebellion, had a deep signilicance, A Bill was passed for restraining the exercise of martial law in the government of the army, even in war time, and a Committee of both Houses was appointed and authorised to search the Government magazines and public stores in Dublin, in order to ascertain the quantity of gunpowder and arms they con- tained. The pretence for this search was that Strafford's friends designed to revenge his death on some of the members, who had borne witness against him. Sir John Borlaso, who was master of the Ordnance, as well as Lord Justice, refused to allow the Committee, one of whom was Lord Maguire, to inspect the magazines, assuring them, with a touch of grim sarcasm, that there was no powder placed under the Parlia- ment House for their destruction. The Irish army, old and new, remained in Carrickfcrgus all through the winter, spring, and early summer idle, with large arrears of pay due to officers and soldiers, which the Government Avas unable to meet. On May 12th, 1641, the Lords Justices wrote to England that the country was most fearfully robbed and harassed by the soldiers. The people did not complain. 'Wherein,' the Lords Justices thought, ' there was a mystery,' boding no good to the State, the soldiers being almost all Roman Catholics. • ' Tho question (of judicature) was seriously clcLated in the English House of Lords and in the English Council, and the King persuaded to suspend the Acts of grace and favour to his Irish suhjects \intil this weighty point should be deter- mined. The subsequent disorders in both kingdoms seem to have prevented tho formal determination.' — Leland, vol. iii. p. 77. The truth was that the King required no persuasion, but gladly availed himself of an excuse for putting oft'th© granting of tho ' Graces.' — V. yippnulix. INTllODUOTION. 99 On May 13th, tlic day after StratTord's execution,' the King issued warrants, directing Colonels Taafe, Garret, and John Barry, John Butler, Kichard Plunket, George Porter, and Christopher Belling (all Roman Catholics), to transport each of them a thousand of the Irish soldiers to Spain. At first there seems to have been no opposition to this scheme, except on the part of the priests, for on June 30th the Irisli Council wrote to Vane, saying that Colonel Belling had sailed on the 7th of the same month for Spain, with the thousand men according to his warrant.^ He went away 'very quietly,' they add, * although we are informed there was great underhand labouring among the priests, friars, and Jesuits to dissuade the disbanded soldiers from departing the kingdom, which also you may partly observe by the enclosed examina- tions.' The enclosures were depositions made by persons who had heard the friars preaching to the soldiers near Dublin, not to depart the kingdom, as ' there might be soon much need for them at home.' The priests and friars' en- deavours with the remaining six thousand seem to have been more successful, for they remained in Ireland, and were not disbanded ujitil the beginning of June. Ormond's letter on the 9 til of that month to Vane says the disbanding has been effected ' with reasonable content to the common soldiers.^ They do not, however, appear to have been sent away to their homes, but rather held together in hopes of foreign service, for all through July, August, and the early part of Septem- ber, the King was pressing the English House of Commonsto allow them to embark for Spain. On August 3rd, the Lords Justices wrote that they were doing all in their power to send the troops away, but that the Catholics in the Parliament were influenced by the priests to oppose their departure. Ou September Dth,^ the King again signified to the English Parliament that the Spanish ambassador complained that he had incurred great exj^ense providing ships and provisions for the promised levies, and prayed that, at least, four regiments should be sent to Spain. The Parliament, however, absolutely ' Ciirto, vol. i. p. 268, 270. « F. Appendix. ' Nalsoii, vol. ii. 11 '2 100 INTRODUCTION, refused the request, and issued orders that a stop should be put to all ships in the ports having any such levies on board, and that merchants should give security that their ships should not convey soldiers to Spain. The Parliament feared that if the soldiers went to Spain they might return to Ireland better disciplined and armed under the command of veteran Catholic officers to carry out the designs of their Church. In point of fact it mattered little whether the soldiers went or stayed, although had they gone and returned under Owen O'Neil, there would probably have been fewer massacres in the first year of the now inevitable rebellion. By the end of September they were dispersed all over Ireland — idle, discontented, and impoverished — ripe for any mischief. The Irish Parliament sat until August 7th,' daily expect- ing the return of their Committee from London, with the promised bills for the ' Graces,' and the making void the Con- naught plantation project. ' On that day,' says Carte, ' the Houses decided with the consent of the Lords Justices to ad- journ ; ' but Leland more truly says that ' they were very reluctant to adjourn,' and that the ' solicitude the members expressed for a continuance of the session served but to con- firm the Lords Justices in their earnestness for a recess.' The anonymous chronicler, whose MS.,^ entitled an ' Aphoris- ' MSS. Rolls House. * Carte, in his preface to the Life of Ormond, justly describes this MS. as written with so much partiality and fury, and as containing such notorious falsehoods, that it is wholly unworthy of credit. Yet one cannot regret that it has been printed, for it shows, as nothing else perhaps could, the incurable stu- pidity and ferocioiis bigotry of the Nuncio's party. The anonymous author, who was probably a priest in the Nuncio's train, not only slanders Protestants indis- criminately, but assails with furious malice the noblest and best Eonian Catholic names in Ireland. His MS. unites in a hulici'ous fashion the pedantry of the old Irish hedge schoolmaster and tlie scurrility of a fishwife. Tlius Oliver Darcy, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Dromore, is described by liim as a ' Caiaphas and the first-begotten of Beelzebub,' Lord Taafe as a ' common cogging gamester,' Castle- haven as a ' parricide,' Ormond as a 'traitor and purloiner of puldic money,' Mus- kerry another traitor; but the climax is reached in the description of the Catholic Ulanricai'do, who is set down as an ' Acearon {sic) of unbelief, Anion of a Catholic nation, Amorrheus of kingly sceptres, Babel of Ireland's war, Bcla of the Com- monwealth, Cozbie of honesty, Doeg of destiniction, Horeb of holy religion, Horma of all ecclesiastical censures, Jubus of Church immunities, Jeroboam of Christian people, Joas of God's assistance, Ishbosheth of all confederacy, Iscariot INTRODUCTION. 101 mical discovery of Treasonable Faction,' has been edited for the Celtic and Archaeological Association of Ireland by Mr. J. T. Gilbert, F.S.A., confirms Leland's account of the adjourn- ment having been forced on by the Lords Justices. There is some evidence in the letters of Sir William Parsons himself hereafter given' to show that there was even in 1641 no real intention of granting the * Graces,' and that the King desired to delay the Committee in England until the Parliament in Ireland had been prorogued. At all events it is clear that Sir William Parsons was averse to the stopping of the Counaught plantation project, and that he probably adjourned the Houses for the purpose of preventing the * Graces ' becoming law that session. At the same time it must be admitted that the violent and unreasonable conduct of some of the Catholic members greatly helped on this design. With the usual im- patient turbulence of Eoman Catholic politicians under the control of fanatical "^ priests, they pressed on the judicature question and other impracticable demands which, if granted, would have deprived England of all control over Ireland. Their best policy would have been to abandon their absurd aspirations for ' national independence ' for a country so divided by races and clans and creeds that it could not be called a nation at all, and to continue in session, concentrating their attention on such measures as were practicable for the benefit of trade and agriculture, while they waited for the return of the Committee bringing the all-important bills for the limitation of the Crown title to lands, and the stopping of plantations. Such a quiet and determined policy would probably have defeated the designs of those who wished to prevent those just and reasonable bills becoming law that present session. But not for the first time or the last in their of murder and massacre, Pharos of all native interests, and Pharisceiis of godly union and association.' — Aphorismicnl Discovery of Treasonable Faction, vol. v. p. 125. lather Walsh, the Franciscan, is 'a chief Mercury of Beelzebub.' After those specimens it is probable that readers will be disposed to think Carte's judg- ment of this MS. is more correct than Mr. Gilbert's, who considers it a valuable and impartial historical record. ' V. ^ppencUx. Lecky's Hrslory of Eighteenth Century, vol. ii. p. 384, 102 INTRODUCTION. sad history, the Irish threw awuy the siihstance for the shadow, and the Lords Justices found Httle difficulty in taking ad- vantage of their divided councils, and breaking up the assembly of noisy orators. They appointed a Committee to sit during the i-ecess, which was to terminate on November 9th. The rest departed to the provinces, some to superintend in peace and hope, in their pleasant country demesnes, the harvest homes and operations, reaping the sunnner and sowing the winter corn, receiving their rents from prosperous and con- tcaited tenants ; others, less peaceably disposed, thriftless, broken-down noblemen, and gentlemen who had long ago anticipated theirs, to brood over their debts, disappointments, and grievances ; foregathering with the disbanded soldiers and the political priest, plottmg, conspiring, sowing the wind to reap the whirhvind. Three weeks after the adjournment the Committee, with the exception of Lord Dillon, who had gone with Charles to Scotland, arrived in Dublin with (accord- ing to Carte and Leland) the bills for the * Graces,' promised thirteen years before, duly licensed under Poyning's Act, to be made law in the approaching November session. Foremost amongst the discontented nobles of the Irish Parliament of 1641, was the Lord Maguire already mentioned, as one of the Committee who desired to inspect the magazines of Dublin Castle in the summer of that year. Cuconnaght Maguire, chief of his sept and lord of Fermanagh, surrendered that country to Queen Elizabeth, who regranted it to him by letters patent. His son Hugh, who succeeded him in the lordship and estate, was killed by Sir Warham St. Leger in rebellion, and King James granted the country to Connor Roe Maguire, a lesser chief of the tribe, who had remained faithful to the Crown. Cuconnaght Maguire, the younger brother of Hugh, having, however, also submitted to James and done good service, that King decided to recall his patent of the whole country to Connor Roe, and to divide the land between him and his kinsman Cuconnaght. Connor Roe, therefore, was obliged to surrender his patent grant, and Chichester divided the land, setting apart the larger portion for Cucon- naght, as the son of the old chieftain, and giving the smaller INTRODUCTION. 103 to Connor Roe. Each liekl his portion for a few years, until the plantation of Ulster hegan, when the greater part of Fer- managh was taken up for the new colonists.' Three baronies of the seven which the county contained, had been promised to Connor Roe, but the plantation deprived him of more than two of these.^ Carte says that he was left in possession of the Avhole barony of Magherstefana, comprising 6,480 acres, and had also a pension of 200/. a year, equivalent to about twelve hundred or a thousand at the present day. His son Brian succeeded to the lands, had a pension of 1001. , and was created Baron Maguire of Enniskillen, and at his death the title and estate descended to Connor, Lord Maguire of Enniskillen, in 1041. He is said to have been a man of extravagant and dis- sipated habits, but the revenues he derived from his dimin- ished estate, diminished through the breach of the King's solemn promise, must have been very insufficient to maintain the state and dignity of a Baron, of which he had probably exaggerated notions. His own confession of his treasonable plottings, hereafter given, shows him to have been a weak, bigoted man, without much courage, physical or mental. The real ' head ' of the conspiracy, in the full sense of the word, was Roger More, or O'More of Ballyna, in Kildare, a descendant of the chiefs of Leix (a territory comprising the eastern and southern portions of the present Queen's County), and related in blood to many of the old Anglo-Irish families. Carte exaggerates his good qualities,^ but he was undoubtedly a man of considerable ability, handsome in person, agreeable in manner, and a very brave soldier. He served through the ' Sir John Davis, in his letters to .Salisbuvy, says of Fermanagh that if ho were to describe it as it is, his description Avould appear a ' poetical fiction,' so rich and beautiful was the country. * ' Connor Roe INIaguire luitli his Majesty's word for the whole barony of Mnghorstc'fana, the whole barony of Clanoallio, the lialf liarony of 'J'ircannada, and the half barony of Knockaninny, which contain 390 /affics, or 12,287i acres, and do take up five of the least proportions, two of the middle, and two of the greatest, and are to bo passed to him according to his Majesty's royal word. Howbeit, we do think it convenient that he do keep in his possession only one great proportion of 2,000 acres, and do make freeholds Ln the rest in such manner as shall be prescribed unto him by the Commissioners.'— Prr. the Koyal Commission on Historical Manuscripts,' by Mr. J. T. Gilbert, F.S.A., calls for more respectful and serious notice, for its own sake, and because it is swelled by long ex- tracts from the published works of the very few historians who profess to have examined the depositions, giving their opinions upon them. I shall therefore content myself with briefly re- viewing these opinions, and answering, as it is not difficult to do, the charges which Mr. Gilbert has not only in his official report, but in more than one of his published works made against the veracity of those depositions. The two trust- worthy writers he has quoted in his report are Reid and the Rev. Dr. Warner, a clergyman of the Established Church in Ireland, who wrote towards the close of the last century a rather dry, but on the whole fair and candid history of his native country. Fairness and candour are much rarer quali- ties in an Irish historian than literary skill ; and for this reason, if for no other, Warner's history will always have a certain value. He begins his account of the depositions in the following words : — ' They are contained in two-and-tliirty lai-ge volumes and deposited in the College Library in Dublin, besides one tliat con- tains the examinations that were taken by Archdeacon Bysse, for the province of Munster, which Borlase, among his other falsehoods, says was smothered with great artifice.' Here, at the very outset, it is needful to point out that Warner is mistaken. However prejudiced Borlase may have been, this statement respecting the depositions taken by Bysse is founded on actual facts. Those facts have been brought to light in the present century, by a writer whom Warner, were he living, would bo the last to doubt, and who is an authority even with Irish Roman Catholics. That writer was the Rev. W. Maziere Brady, D.D., a clergyman of the Anglo-Catholic or High Church school, and therefore no admirer of Borlase. Dr. Brady had no idea of confirming Borlase's statement about Bysse's col- lection of depositions when he gave, in his ' Clerical and Parochial Records of Cork, Cloyne and Ross,' the following ' .See Appendix to Eiyhth Report of Historical MSS, Co?)i)ni6sio)i, p. 572. INTRODUCTION. 123 extract from the MSS. in Trinity College, Dublin {F.F. 2, ID). I have compared his extract with the original and fomid it correct, but 1 prefer to give it as it stands in his book rather than from my own copy. 'Castle Lyons, 1631. John Eveleigh, Vicar, afterwards Chancellor, and Dean of Ross. 1641, Philip Tiisse, Archdeacon of Cloyne, the name is spelt Bishe in the Liber Munoruvi. The following extract respecting him is from the MSS. in Trinity College F.F. 2, 19 : " Richard Gethin bemg examined before the Commissioners on the 23rd of October, 1G52, deposed that Archdeacon Philip Bisse, a Commissioner appointed to enquire conceriiiug the murders and losses in the rebellion of 1641, was waylaid on his return between Cork and Youghal, and murdered by one Gerald of Dromadda. His trun]( which contained all tlio depositions taken by him, was sent from his lodgings at Youghal to Lord Inchiquhi, Commander-in-Chief of Munstcr. lie took it to the King, then at Oxford, but had no opportunity to show it to his Majesty, and he left them in trust to Mr. Lott Pereigh (formerly secretary to Sir William St. Leger, late presi- dent of Munster, now deceased), whose wife and sons reside at, or near Audley End, in Cambridgeshire, where the trunk was taken care of, and as deponent believes was sent to London to Sir Philip Percival. He (the witness Gethin) thinks that Mr. Bettesworth, agent to the Protestant forces in Munster, could say something about it." ' To those who remember the state of Oxford in 1643, when Inchiquin went over with Bysse's collection of depositions, the words ' had no opportunity to show them to the King ' will be full of significance, and will do much to confirm Borlase's truth, as to the artifices used to * smother ' those documents. Mr. Gilbert in the preface to Belling's History of the Irish Catholic Confederation, lately published, quotes passages from the examination of the Rev, John Dod, taken by a committee of the English House of Commons in 1643. Mr. Dod had spent seven weeks in Oxford, just about the thno Lichiquin visited the King there, and he swore that during those weeks he saw a great number of Irish rebels in that city, amongst others one Thomas Brady of Belturbet, * a noted rebel ' was much in favour with the King's friends. Dod further swore that he 124 INTRODUCTION. saw there three Franciscan friars — Anthony Geoghegan, Brian O'Gorman, and Thomas Nugent — and three Jesuits — Sutton, Eoche, and O'Eeilly— who were all ' daily encouraging the soldiers to fight against the Parliament,' that * masses were said daily in almost every street in Oxford,' and that there were * at least three thousand Irish there.' Many of these were Roches, FitzGeralds, Condons, MacCarthys, Longs, from Cork and Waterford, where Bysse had been murdered by a FitzGerald of Dromadda, after taking the depositions which were to deprive them of their estates, so that it is easy to understand that they would, if possible, try to ' smother ' by force or ' artifice ' those important documents. Inchiquin, whose mother was a FitzGerald, cousin to the murderer of Bysse, was at this time a professing Protestant, and his chief object in going to Oxford was to obtain from Charles the post of Lord President of Minister, vacant by the death of St. Leger. But to the intense wrath and disappointment of Inchiquin Charles conferred the post on Weston, Earl of Portland, one of the worst of his Jesuitizcd courtiers.' Portland knew nothing of Ireland, and never set foot in it, before or after his appointment, which was probably brought about by the Jesuit wire pullers, whose puppet he was, for the very purpose of * cushioning ' those depositions, taken by Archdeacon Bysse, and the facts of his murder. Charles was then doing all in his power to win and conciliate the Eoman Catholics of Ireland and England, and it was very unlikely therefore that he would afford an * opportunity ' for the delivery of the de- positions against the former to himself. If they were so delivered, he could not but authorise proceedings against the Irish, so as usual he solved the difliculty by another policy of deception, hoping they would be placed in the hands of Port- land, his new Lord President of Munster. Inchiquin, however, partly from conscientious motives, partly from anger and dislike to his successful rival, did not hand over the depositions to Portland, but gave them in charge to Pereigh or Perry, the ' A man of ' big looks and mean and aly'ect spirit,' He was a .suspected Roman Catholic, and his ■wife and children open ones. His four tlaughtors wuro all nuns. — V. Brodie, Burke's Extinct Pccr(uje, and Clurondon's Hidory. INTRODUCTION. 125 secretary of his father-in-law St, Leger, the late president, who appears to have given them to Sir Philip Percival.' Thus there can be no doubt they passed through many hands in both countries, and for a time sank out of sight before they came to be required by the Attorney-General in 1G52, for the prosecution of the Munster rebels in the High Court of Justice. It was to ascertain their whereabouts at that time, that Mr. Getliin was examined as above, before the House of Commons, and it would appear that it was through his examination they wore discovered ; for as we shall hereafter see they were produced and closely inspected in the Court in 1G52-4. Had they passed into the hands of Portland they would assuredly have boon destroyed and many rebels' estates saved. Gethin was one of the executors to Inchiquin's will when he died (it is said a Eoman Catholic) in 1674. The murderers of Bysse were never brought to trial. It is prob- able they were killed in the civil war. After this vain attempt to dispute the truth of Borlase's statement about the Munster depositions, Warner proceeds to comment upon the whole collection in the college library : — * In those books,' he says, ' besides the examinations taken by the (Royal) Commissioners, there are several copies of others, said to have been taken before them, which are therefore of no authority, and there are many taken ten years afterwards before justices of the peace appointed by the Commissioners of the English Parliament. ... 1 took a great deal of pains and spent a great deal of time in examining those books ; and 1 am sorry to say that they have been made the foundation of much more clamour and resentment than can be Avarranted by truth and reason. There is one circumstance not taken notice of, I perceive, by anybody before me, that though all the examinations signed by the Commissioners are said to be on oath, yet in infinitely the greater number of them the words " being duly stvorn " have the pen drawn across them, with the same ink with which the examinations were written, and in several of these, when such words remain uncrossed, many parts of the examinations are struck out. This is a circumstance wliicii shows that the bulk ' It is extremely likely that Inchiqiiin himself was not at all anxious to pro- duce the Waterford depositions compromising his mother's relatives; but he could not make up his mind to destroy them, and so passed thcn> on to Perry. 12G INTRODUCTION. of tliig immense collection is parole evidence. . . . But what will put the matter out of all doubt, with impartial people, that no other examinations in these volumes are to be depended on than what are sworn is, that no other are to be found in the MS. collection in my own possession, and its duplicate in the British Museum, signed with the same signatures of the Commissioners, which I saw so often repeated in the two-and-thirty volumes in Dublin, and which is therefore as much an original as that (Dublin) collection. Here then {i.e. in the duplicate in the Museum) only is it that we can expect the most authentic account of the Irish Massacre, and I conceive the reason for making a duplicate collection was, to send one copy to the King and Council, and the other to the English Parliament.' Eeid, the next authority in point of credit,' qnoted by Mr. Gilbert, differs wholly as we shall now see from "Warner. After quoting the latter's words about the bulk of the depositions being 'parole evidence,' the historian of the Irish Presbyterian Church, whose candour is admitted by all Roman Catholic writers of any eminence, says : — ' Entertaining some doubts of the accuracy of this sweeping assertion of Warner's, I consulted the books of depositions in the college library, and assisted by a friend, examined a good many of the volumes, time not permitting me to go over the whole, with a view of determining this point, which was readily done, by referring to the beginning of each deposition, but we could not find a single one in which the words " being duly sworn " were crossed with the pen or otherwise obliterated. It is pro- bable that some such cases do occur, but to assert, as Warner has done, that they occur in infinitely the greater number of them, is a very incorrect and exaggerated statement. It is also to be remarked, that Warner's computation (of the numbers ' I pass over as utterly unworthy of nolioo the vulgar ravings of Michael Carey, an Irish-American writer, whom Mr. Gilbert quotes at some length. Reid says he notices Carey's worlc, published at Philadelphia in 1819, only 'on account of its flagrant demerits as a work of historical inquiry.' It is, he saj's, a mere echo of John Curry, but more partial and disingenuous than that Irish writer. Any one who has read Curry's account of the death of the great rebel Earl of Desmond will see that that so-called historian is not only partial, but ridiculously ignorant of what he professes to know most about. Mr. Gilbert also gives long extracts from Curry in his official report, while lie omits the candid admission of the Rev. Dr. O'Connor, a Roman Catholic ecclesiastic, that the Irish Catholics- in IG'II 'committed ati-ocious crimes.' — X. Reid, vol, i. p. ;iM. INTRODUCTION. 127 massacred) is founded not on the depositions whose authority he so rashly impugned, but upon a copy of a part of them hi his own possession, all of which were duly sworn and authenti- cated by the Commissioners. A duplicate of this copy he states was deposited among the MSS. in the British Museum. This volume I found out, and carefully examined. It is No. 5,999, vol. iii. of the Harleian MSS. It is marked " Original. Be- ceived at the Board 10th Nov. 1643," and corresponds with the description given by Warner of his own copy. But I found it to co]itain only extracts from no more than about 200 depositions. ... It is therefore quite impossible, that a correct enumeration of the number who perished could be furnished from any examination of these extracts. They could furnish the inquirer with only a portion of the murders per- petrated, the full catalogue of which Avas not completed mitil ten years afterwards, when the republican authorities renewed the inquiry by appointing commissioners for the purpose. These commissioners took a vast number of additional and most important depositions, and they bound over the several deponents to appear at the subsequent assizes for each county, to prosecute such of the most noted of the murderers as could be then found — a circumstance which renders these depositions, taken with the view of being afterwards repeated, on a public trial for a capital offence, and at a time when party feeling had in a great measure subsided, of more value than the depositions contained in the Harleian and Warner MSS., which were taken at the very hottest period of the rebellion, and without any view of being subjected to the ordeal of examination at a pubhc trial. The greater part of the thirty-two volumes in Trinity College is composed of those valuable supplementary depositions. I perused with some care the entire volume marked "Antrim," and all the depositions contained in it relative to the rebellion were taken before the parliamentary commissioners in 1G53, by whom, let it be observed, a fact not generally known, the retahatory murders alleged to have been committed on the Irish at Island Magee, and other places, are as clearly and impartially investi- gated as the original massacres by the Eoman Catholics.' — Hist. Presbyterian Church in Ireland, vol. i. p. 827, note. Beid is the only historian who has called attention to the fact, that the Cromwellians prosecuted the murderers of the Catholics at Island Magee. Mr. Gilbert's report wliolly ignores it, as well as the murder of Archdeacon Bysse. After 128 INTRODUCTION. quoting part of the above passage from Eeid, Mr. Gilbert observes: — ' Had Dr. Eeid examined the entire collection, as has been done {sic), for the purposes of this report, he would have found that Warner's statement was in the main correct. "Innumer- able instances " occur in which not only the words " duly sworn and examined " have been struck out, but also many passages, in some cases entire pages, have been so dealt with. Of this a notable example is furnished by the volume for the county Waterford, in which few pages can be found that are not thus cancelled.' Reid, engaged as he was in writing a long history of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, involving tedious researches into ecclesiastical records, could not possibly have found time for an exhaustive study of the depositions in the College, but so far as he did study them, he displayed all that accuracy and thoroughness which, as I have said, characterised his work in every department of history. It is much to be re- gretted that he and some fair-minded Roman Catholic layman were not employed by the government of their day to calendar and arrange the depositions. Warner tells us he ' took much pains and spent much time in examining them,' but, as we shall see, never were time and pains more wasted. The strangest, the most incomprehensible thing, however, is, that Mr. Gilbert, F.S.A., accredited with such talents for research by the Government and the public, sitting down to make an exhaustive search into those documents for the purposes of an official report, should have accepted and done his best to make the world accept the gross mistakes of Warner for truth. When, with the kind permission of the College authorities, I first opened the books of depositions in the summer of 1881, I had no intention of copying them for publication, and there- fore turned over the leaves hastily, reading onlj^ a few here and there. As I did so, the number of crossed-out words and passages in the Munster volumes especially, made such an impression upon me, that I felt it would be a waste of time to read them, and judged that, as Warner had said, the bulk of the collection must be parole evidence of little or no value. I 43 ?44 i-^ I^■TllODUCTION. 129 also noticed that, as he said, there were many copies of depo- sitions, hi some of the vohunes, which could not be worth much. But the fact that the crossing out strokes drawn over the words ' dull/ sworn ' at the beginning of many depositions, and over whole passages and pages in some, were so light as to leave every word beneath them perfectly legible, arrested my attention and puzzled me. If misstatements or mistakes had been made in such documents, it seemed unlikely they would have been left open to inspection in this way. For it was quite evident the strokes had been drawn in all cases, so lightly, with the design of not obliterating a word or a cypher. I also plainly perceived, but not until after a close inspection with the help of magnifying glasses (indispensable in such re- searches), that those crossing out strokes were of later date by some weeks, or even months, than the lines beneath them. Then, remembering the book of duplicate extracts in the British Museum library, referred to by Warner and Eeid, which I had examined (and in part copied nine years before), I began to suspect that all those crossing out strokes in the Dublin books had been made, not for the purpose of cancelling or altering the depositions, which would, of course, amount to an invalidating of them, but for the simple purpose of abridg- ing them for the official copyist, who was employed to make the duplicate extracts. To ascertain if this suspicion of mme were correct, I read steadily on for many days the crossed out passages as well as the uncrossed ones, collating them carefully with my copies of the duplicates in the Museum book, and by degrees I satisfied myself that it was entirely so. Those crossing out strokes, about which so much fuss has been made, are not as Warner and Mr. Gilbert and even Eeid have supposed can- ceilings— they are nothing more than lines drawn to show the official copyist what he might omit, when he was making the duplicate books for the King and Parliament. In some in- stances they are, as we shall see by indisputable evidence to be given hereafter, marks of abridgment made by the official in charge of the depositions, who had to deliver the volume of Archdeacon Bysse's collections from Waterford and Cork, to the VOL. I. K 130 INTRODUCTION. Attorney-General for production in the High Court of Justice in 1652-4, when some of the rehels in those counties were being tried on charges of murder.' The depositions were useful as evidence of murder, because in no case has the pen stroke been drawn across the relation of a murder or massacre. The said official, Mr. Waring, when examined in court, swore that he had crossed out no such relations, but only passages relating to losses of money, lands, and goods. And in every single case where the words ' duly sworn and examined ' have been crossed out, by a light pen stroke at the beginning of a deposition, the more emphatic Latin equivalent * Jurat coram nobis ' (sworn before us) stands clear and intact at the end above the signatures of two or more Commissioners, and opposite the signature or mark of the witness, proving beyond all question that the document is sworn and valid. Distrusting my own judgment, I asked more than one lawyer and magis- trate, and was assured by them that the Latin form above the signatures of the magistrates or Commissioners stamped the deposition as sworn. The error of Warner was that when he saw the words ' being duly sworn ' crossed out at the begin- ning, he gave up reading further, thinking the whole document must be mere parole evidence. Had he read to the end, he would have found his mistake. Now, as regards the long passages in the body of the depositions, sometimes covering three or four pages, over which the pen strokes have been lightly drawn, it is necessary to remember that the Commissioners were authorised to take sworn evidence, not alone as to murders, but as to spoliations, robberies, burnings, &c. Mr. Gilbert suggests that the fact of the deponents giving evidence of their losses of houses, lands, goods, cattle, clothes, &c., as well as of the murders of their husbands, wives, parents, or other relatives, renders the whole evidence untrustworthy. In many parts of Ireland at the present day a boycotted farmer's cows or horses are mutilated, his hay or corn burnt by a party of 'moonlighters,' who then drag him out of bed and shoot him before his wife's ' V. Notes of proccoiliiigs in tlio High Court of JuHlico. Trial of Lord Miiskorry. INXrvODUCTION. 131 eyes. According to Mr. Gilbert's reasoning (?), if the un- fortunate widow conies forward to claim compensation from the parish or baronj^ for her cows and corn, her evidence as to the murder must be rejected as worthless. To such extra- ordinary and absurd shifts are the assailants of these deposi- tions driven to make good a 'case' against them. Fortunately for all classes in this country judges and magistrates are not likely to adopt Mr. Gilbert's suggestions. The unforliniato dc^pononts in 1(M1-1 swore not only as to the murders and massacres which they had seen committed, but also swore as to the losses they had sustained, mentioning in detail the houses, lands, leases, rents, cows, horses, sheep, swine, hay, corn, farming implements, furniture, clothes (some of tlieni were left without a shred of clothing, when they were turned out in the frost and snow), of which they had been deprived, assigning to every item of their property its real or supposed money value. The reading of those long and minute inventories was and is extremely tiresome, not to be undertaken unless there was a specifll necessity for it. The officials of 1641-4 thought so, and therefore, when the duplicate extracts for the King, council, and English Parliament, were about to be made, evidently what they did was this. They took each deposition sworn before the royal Commissioners, or magistrates, and drew the pen first across the words * being duly sworn,' to avoid cumbersome tautology, and then across the long inventories, at the same time care- fully ' totting ' up the specified values of each article, or piece of property, or animal, as it was set down in money, and interlining the sum total just at the end of the crossed out inventory. The copyist then set to work and made an accurate copy of the whole deposition, excepting the passages over which the light strokes had been drawn, and carefully put in the sum total instead of the long items. Wishing to ascertain whether this sum total was correct, I was at pains to add up all the items in many of the depositions, and found it was so. The reason that so many crossed out passages appear in the Cork, Kerry, Waterford, and Limerick depositions is plain enough. In those counties there had been few, in fact no K 2 132 INTRODUCTION. plantations imtler the Stuart Kings — they were peopled by the old Irish and Anglo-Irish FitzGeralds, Roches, MacCarthys, O'Sullivans, &c., and a good sprinkling of Elizabethan colonists, who had intermarried with these. The massacres therefore were very few, bnt the plunderings of the rich farms in Cork, Waterford, and that portion of Limerick called the Golden Vale, enormous. As I have already said, it is only the rela- tions of plunderings and spoliations that are crossed over, and therefore in the volumes which contain most of these relations the crossed out passages are most numerous. In many of them three-quarters of a page or more are crossed oat, leaving perhaps only four or five lines relating a murder intact, in others the pen strokes are drawn over inventories covering five or six pages.* I have hereafter given copies of some of those depositions in which the crossings out occur, which may answer as specimens of many hundreds in the Munster volumes. In the Antrim books very few crossed out passages appear, because the depositions in them were taken by the Parliamentary Commissioners in 1G52-3, and no dupli- cate copies of those seem ever to have been made for trans- mission to England. It was those Ulster volumes that Reid chiefly examined, which accounts for his saying that he found very few crossings out in them. As regards Warner's assertion that many of the thirty-two volumes contain copies of depositions which can be of no value, it is in a certain sense quite true. But here again his exami- nation has been strangely superficial and hasty. In some of the volumes the first eight or a dozen pages are filled with copies, certified or uncertified, and turning them over one is inclined to go no further. But if we examine these volumes closely, page by page, to the end, we shall find that they con- tain the originals of nearly all these copies, as well as other originals, of which no copies seem to have been taken. It is very convenient to the searcher to have the copies and originals ' The deposition relating to the plundering of Castletown, the residence of the Waller family, is curious, from the long lists of furniture it contains, with the value affixed to each article, from the bedrooms to the scullery. In this case five or six pages are crossed out. INTRODUCTION. 133 thus together, in the same vokimc, as they can he collated, hut in some of the volumes the two are hound up together confusedly, and it is not easy to hring them together for that purpose. In other cases the originals and copies are in separate volumes. There is no index, the paging is not accurate, so that to arrive at anything like a fair knowledge of the whole collection, one must spend many months over it, working on an average five or six hours each day. I spent from six to eight months over the hooks in Duhlin and the British Museum, and yet I felt I had not done the work as thoroughly as I wished to do it. I am inclined to think that in the whole thirty-two volumes there are not more than a hundred or a hundred and fifty copies wanting originals. I douht that there are so many. Having disposed of the more serious charges made against the depositions, I will now hriefly notice others, made quite as seriously hy the critics, hut certainly, I venture to remark, in themselves the very reverse of serious, rather, on the contrary, strangely inconsistent and ahsurd. I will set them down in due order, and answer them seriatim. 1st. The Koyal Commissioners who took the earlier depo- sitions were men of no special eminence in the Church. 2nd. The deponents, or most of them, at least, were farmers, tradesmen, servants, and lahourers. 3rd. Some of the deponents could not speak English, and were examined through an interpreter, who may have misre- presented what they said. 4th. The depositions of a few persons contain stories of apparitions, omens, &c., which they heard of, or supposed they had seen. 5th. The Commissioners were bigots, who described the insurrection of the Irish in 1641 as * a combination of a bloody and anti- Christian plot against the Church and State in Eng- land, meant to extirpate Protestantism and those who pro- fessed it.' In answer to the first charge, it is only necessary to say that Dean Jones and Archdeacon Bysse were men of good position and family, as well as dignitaries of the Church, and 134 INTRODUCTION, that the rest of the Eoyal Commissioners were resident vicars, or curates of county parishes, intimately acquainted with the sufferings of their flocks. It was much wiser to select such men rather than eminent hishops or pluralist rectors, little acquainted with the country or the people, and if such had been selected, the selection would have been made a charge against the Commission. I would also ask whether, if a number of poor Ptoman Catholics were murdered to-morrow, by a number of ill-conditioned Protestants in Ulster or Con- naught, and that the parish priest of the former or his curate came forward to witness to the outrages on his flock, would his evidence be rejected by the impugners of the veracity of the Commissioners of 1641, because he, the Roman Catholic pastor, was a man of no * special eminence ' in his Church ? To charge the second, I answer that it was inevitable that the vast majority of the deponents should be persons of the humbler classes. The few Protestant noblemen and gentlemen of high position in the country, although they suft'ered much, when their castles or mansions were besieged, were themselves comparatively safe. Some of them, however, like Lord Caul- field, Mr. Champion, and Mr. Blaney,* were murdered in a most cruel and treacherous manner, but the majority were prized as hostages, when they were made prisoners, and the whole tone of feeling prevalent in the Roman Catholic and Cavalier High Church party inclined them to favour rank and wealth, and to think little of the sufferings of the * com- mon sort ' of either creed or island. The humble Protestants, farmers, yeomen, traders, artisans and labourers, living with their families in small country towns or villages, or in lonely farm-houses, were the real sufferers by the rebellion. To as- sert, as Mr. Gilbert does, that because they were not rich and noble, their evidence is untrustworthy, is monstrously unjust and foolish. And in proof of the injustice and folly of such a line of argument, I may here note that the only depositions (with one exception) I could find, which were unmistakeably exaggerated and untruthful, were two or three made by gen- tlemen of good position. One of these gentlemen, who held ' V. Doposition XXIV. INTRODUCTION. 135 the office of High Sheriff in a nor thorn county, swore that Irishwomen were in the hahit of not only murdering helpless Protestants, but eating them, not from hunger, but from sheer depravity of taste, and he adds, that 'one very fat' Irish- woman who was brought before him, as a magistrate, charged with murdering and robbing such persons, owed her plump- ness to the abundance of this horrible food. Two other gen- tlemen named Eedfern made a long deposition, evidently a strange mixture of truth and exaggerated nonsense, but care was taken to sift it closely, and the deposition of Lady Staples of Lissan shows that certain portions of it were true. One poor, ignorant, Protestant woman swore that she was told by her neighbours, Irish Catholics and English Protestants, that Colonel Manus O'Cahane, a commander in the rebel army (unquestionably a cruel and fierce fanatic), was m the habit of breakfasting on the heads of murdered Protestants ! Her Catholic neighbours probably told her this absurd tale to amuse themselves with her fear and horror, and frighten her out of the little wits she ever possessed. But without adopting Thomas Carlyle's estimate of the number of fools in these islands at any given time, one can well understand that amongst a thousand or fifteen hundred deponents, who had lived through the horrors of 1641-2, there would inevitably be a few weak-minded, ignorant persons who swallowed all man- ner of exaggerated tales and boastings of the Irish peasants, and mixed those tales up with true relations of what they had actually seen for themselves. Such depositions must be ac- cepted with great caution, and only after they have been care- fully collated, with others of a more trustworthy kind. Bor- lase and Temple have greatly injured the cause they professed to defend by printing garbled extracts from many depositions, some of them not trustworthy throughout. As regards the third charge in the above series, the only deponents (with the exception of half a dozen, who gave very short and unimportant evidence about affairs at Dunluce Castle in 1G41) that were examined through an interpreter, because tlie^' could not speak English, were the poor Catholic Irish of Island Magee, and its neighbourhood, who witnessed 1 3 6 INTRODUCTION. against Protestant murderers. Mr. Gilbert, and the Roman Catholic historians Mdio think with him about the depositions, and who have studiously concealed the fact that those Catholics were examined by the Cromwellians in order to prosecute and punish the Protestant murderers, will hardly venture, now that those examinations are made public, to censure the Cromwellians for talcing them in the only way it was possible to take them, through an interpreter. For the fourth charge, it will be seen by any one who reads the depositions with common care, that the stories of apparitions, haunting Portadown river and other places where terrible massacres were committed, originated, not with the Protestant deponents, but with the Irish Roman Catholic people themselves. Of the few deponents who repeat those tales, only one lady, Mrs. Rose Price,' whose deposition is hereafter given, alleges that she saw a spectral figure late one winter evening wailing in the river, where her five little children and friends had been drowned a few days before. Her mind and heart, racked with grief and horror, and the superstitious tales of the Irish living near the place, probably conjured up this vision of which she had so often lieard. But there is a yet more probable explanation of the supposed spectre or banshee. A hundred persons or more, men, women and children, were drowned at one time at Portadown by the Irish. The supposed spectre, which appeared there a few evenings later, may well have been a poor, forlorn, bereaved woman, who stole from the woods or mountains (where she had been hiding since her children or friends were drowned), to wail over their corpses, sunk in the river or washed down in its currents to the ocean. In the dark winter evening this distracted and solitary mourner holding that mournful 'Wake of the Absent,'^ described in Gerald Griffin's pathetic poem, would have appeared to poor Mrs. Price and to others in that superstitious age and wasted and troubled land a visitor from another world. And as to the cries and bowlings heard at Portadown bridge at night, they are still more easily explained. The country was full of ' V. Depositions X. XI. XII. XVII. 2 V, Book of Irish Ballads by D. F. MacCarthy, p. 76. INTRODUCTION. 137 wolves and probably of clogs, starved out of the waste homes of their murdered or banished masters, and many of these animals were certain to come at night to devour the bodies of the murdered, quarrelling and howling over them. Superstition would magnify and transform all these sights and sounds. But because the deponents in 1641 (when even highly educated men believed in witches and apparitions) repeated supersti- tious talcs, or believed in them, is surely no reason for reject- ing their testimony on other matters, especially when it is confirmed by the depositions of many who appear to have been wholly free from superstition. At the present day numbers of the Irish people believe in the existence of ghosts and fairies and in apparitions like that alleged to have been seen at Knock in Connaught, a few years ago. Yet surely no judge, magistrate, or jury would say that, because a man or woman believed in such things, his or her evidence in a court of justice on a trial for murder or robbery must necessarily be worth- less.' The fifth charge of the series — that the Commissioners were bigots because they believed that one of the main, if not the main cause of the war, was a desire to destroy Protestants, and extirpate Protestantism — is sufficiently answered by the proclamation of Sir Plielim himself, and the open declarations of his followers, as well as the letters of the Nuncio. On the very first da}^ of the rebellion, as Mr. Flack's deposition before mentioned shows, the Irish Catholics stamping on his open Bible, laid open in a puddle, said, * It is this book, plague on it ! which has bred all this trouble ! ' Lady Brown's testimony, also before referred to, that the Lord Castlcconnel promised her restitution of her lands and goods if she would go to mass, and assured her that none but Catholics should be allowed * to hold a foot of land ' in Ireland, shows equally well the ' One of llio spies sent to look up Tyrone's movements on tlie Continent wrote a long letter in IGIO, in which he says : ' The Irish pray to God night and day for the confusion and overthrow of Sir Robert Cecil, thinking him to be the only fount of all their misery, and not only that, but that ho is inspired by an evil spirit that foretells him all things. They further say Scotland is full of the black art, and that the Scots are the wickedest nation in Christendom.' — MSS. Rolls House. 138 INTRODUCTION. mainsiDrings of the rebellion. The Commissioners must have been deaf and blind as stones if they did not see and know that the chief conspirators (amongst whom there was not one Protestant) and their immediate followers under Eiver Mac- Mahon, the militant bishop of Cloghcr, had plotted to extirpate Protestantism from Ireland. If it be said that some of them afterwards consented to fight under Ormond, I answer that they did so only because they expected and believed that Ormond was likely to become a Koman Catholic. They told him their expectations, and when those expectations were dis- appointed, and it became plain he would not leave the Church of England, almost every Irish Catholic, Colonel Walter Plunket, and Lord Muskerry, with a very few others excepted, fell away from him, saying for themselves and their soldiers that though their courage was * bullet proof,' it was not * ex- communication proof.' They would and could not stand against the excommunications and the nailing of the chapel doors against them. Even for the time that Muskerry and Plunket adhered to Ormond, they had to pay a severe penalty at home and abroad. The former's speech, after his sentence in the High Court of Justice in 1653 hereafter given, shows that his sufferings under the Cromwellians were not exceeded by those lie underwent at the hands of his bigoted co-religionists in Spain. In fact he thanked his judges in the High Court for showing him the mercy denied him by his own.' I venture to hope I have sufficiently answered the above string of objections against the depositions. One more made by Mr. Gilbert in his report, when he treats of the case of Henry O'Neil of Glasdromin in the Fewes, will be fully answered hereafter in the notes to the depositions, in which his name occurs. I must not omit, however, to notice here a most singular piece of evidence, brought forward against the Protestant clergymen of Ireland in 1G41-9 by Mr. Gilbert in his preface to Belling's ' History of the Irish Catholic Confedera- tion,' or as Mr. Gilbert calls it the Irish Confederation, whereas it only comprehended the third part of the Irish nation, if so much. Amongst the old records of the Catholic family ' See Notes of Proceedings in ll\":h Court of Justice. INTRODUCTION. 139 of Bluiidell, in Lancashire, Mr. Gilbert found the following note : — ' An English parson that lived in Ireland told me, that one of his own coat born in Wirral in Cheshire and beneficed in Ireland, killed with his own hands one Sunday morning, fifty- three of his own parishioners, most or all of them as I re- member women and children. This was told me at Chester, A.D. 1G44, in the hearing of Mr. Kalph Bridoke, chaplain to the Earl of Derby.' All that is wanted to perfect this tale is to add that this Anglo-Irish pluralist of murder breakfasted, lilce Colonel O'Ca- liane, on the ' one Sunday morning ' (a weekday would be too commonplace) on the heads of his fifty-three victims. Mr. Gilbert, who will not accept a duly certified copy of a de2)0si- tion against an Irish rebel, lay or clerical, or even an original deposition with the very smallest appearance of a flaw in it — a very gnat of a flaw — swallows wholesale this enormous camel of the anonymous English parson's, borrowed from one who borrowed from another. I fear that this English parson, if he ever existed, was, when he told the anonymous writer of the note this outrageous fiction, in one of those mad fits to which the scholastic ' brother Martin,' as Dean Swift confesses, is often liable. It is a pity that Mr. Gilbert, who has done good service to historical literature by publishmg many valuable historical records, as well as by writing an extremely interesting history of Dublin, should occupy his pages with such miserable nonsense as this extract from the Blundell family papers. Eanaticism and party spirit, happily for the world, help by their exaggerations to defeat the object they have at heart. Critics have pronounced those depositions a ' heap of perjuries,' without ever having examined them, and educated and clever men, like Edmund Burke, * who to party gave up what was meant for mankind,' and while he declaimed with all the brilliant and insincere eloquence of the Irish orator on the iniquity of the penal laws, took care to hold fast the estate of his Catholic relatives the Nagles, acquired by his father under a trust lease to evade those laws, have not hesitated to join in 140 INTKODUCTION. the pronouncements of those ignorant critics. But the intelli- gent and impartial minded student of those depositions will not be sorry to find that they are not at all so unfavourable to the Irish Roman Catholics as fanatics and party politicians would have us to believe. The deposition of Mrs. Price, already mentioned, which has been especially attacked ))y ignorant critics, because it told the truth about the Portadown massacre, and the O'Cahanes, bears a pleasing testimony to the merciful way in which Owen Roe O'Neil treated her and a crowd of other prisoners, and to his denunciation of Sir Phelim's cruelty and violence. In like manner, the Rev. John Kerdiffe, a Protestant clergyman, relating how he and his parishioners were made prisoners by the Irish under Colonel Richard Plunket, accompanied by an Irish friar named Malone, says :— ' Colonel Richard Plunket treated us with great humanity and in like manner did Friar Malone at Skerry ; only this, beside his rebellion, was condemnable in him, that he took our poor men's Bibles wliicli lie found in a boat and cut them in pieces, casting thern into the fire, with those words, that he would deal in like manner with all Protestant and Pui'itan Bibles.' Sir John Temple's garbled extract ' from this deposition omits all mention of Friar Malone's * great humanity ' to the prisoners, saying only that he burnt the Protestant Bibles. Such instances of kindness on the part of priests and friars were rare, but on that very account it is the more necessary to mention them. They were not overlooked by Cromwell, who specially ex- empted from banishment or death two friars, who at Cashel had endeavoured to save the lives of the Protestants. One, Daniel Bawn, an Irish Catholic, saved a few lives at Corbridge and elsewhere, as the deponents gratefully record, and they also mention that the priest Crelly, or Crowley, whom Con Magen- nis appointed to govern Newry, treated many Protestants kindly. But for such gleams of good breaking forth from either side, now and again, those sad chronicles of 1641-9 would be ' V. Deposition XVII. The abstracts of depositions given by Sir John Temple are many of them thus garbled, and some are wholly untrustwortliy. INTRODUCTION. 141 iiitolerabl}' distressing to read. But the truthfulness of the Protestant witnesses, who are so careful to record the good, as well as the bad treatment they met with, cannot be doubted. Those who believe that a general massacre of all the Protestants in Ireland began on October 23rd, and those who believe that no massacres took place, m Ulster until December or January, will find no support for their beliefs m the deposi- tions. The latter are fond of quotmg a letter of old Lord Chichester's from Belfast to the King, written on October 24th, in which the writer says that up to that date the rebels ' had killed only one man.' But surely many Protestants might have been murdered in different parts of Ulster before Lord Chichester wrote, unknown to him or his neighbours in Belfast. That they were so murdered in parts of Fermanagh we know. On the morning of the 23rd, before ever Lord Chichester put pen to paper, a party of the Magukes mm-dered' Mr. Champion, a gentleman of good estate m that county, together with six of his friends at his own gate, allegmg that Lord Maguii'e had given them special directions to mmxler him. On the 24th, the day Lord Chichester wrote to the King, they cut the throat of the husband of Margaret Larmenie ^ of Clounish in Fermanagh, before her face, and soon after murdered fourteen other Protestants in the same place. On the same day they murdered Mr. Adams, the Protestant rector of Waterdi'um, in Fermanagh, his brother-m-law, and several of his parish- ioners, among them Joseph Berry, a man eighty years old, and Sarah, the wife of George Brent, with her unborn child. They wounded Mrs. Adams and her daughter, and stripped them of all they possessed. On October 23rd the Kev. Mr. Mather, of Donamore in Tyrone, was mm-dered by his own servant, who then became a soldier under Sir Phelim O'Neil. On the 26th the rebels murdered Thomas Loisanie, Francis Hillard, John Craven, and his son (as they were flying from Markane in Fermanagh to Dublm), callmg them ' English dogs ! ' and telling them they should * go no farther to carry news to England.' ' V. Deposition III. * V. Deposition II. 142 INTRODUCTION. The sufferings of the fugitives in the bitter frost and snow of an early winter were extreme. Thomas Richardson of Newry, a tailor, deposed on oath that after Con Magennis had taken that town, all the English Protestants who were not put to death were stripped of their goods and clothes, and driven out. His deposition continues : — ' Whereupon this deponent and his wife and five small children, going away, were again stripped of their clothes (which they had begged) and flying away naked for safety in the fi'ost and snow, one poor daughter of his, seeing him and her mother grieve and cry for their misery, she in the way comforting them, said, she was not cold, nor did cry, yet presently after she died of cold and want.' Another Newry witness swore that when the Protestant fugitives, after being wounded and stripped, ' would call upon God Almighty to help them, the rebels would in a most scorn- ful, contemptuous manner say to the distressed company, ' Call upon your God, and see if He can save you ! ' and speak other profane words ; the women being more cruel and scorn- ful than the men, swearing and vowing they would kill all of the English kind.' (See Deposition Ixxxvi.) Lady Staples ' (the wife of Sir Thomas Staples), of Lissan, who was taken prisoner by the O'Quins, after they had seized on Moneymore in October 1641, swore that, * looking out of the window of her prison, she saw a poor Scotchwoman and her five small children, mentioned in the deposition of John Redfern the elder, with several others of the British, driven along by the rebels to be murdered, who * cut and slashed ' them, as they passed by her window, amongst them being one Archy Laggan, miserably cut, his arms half cut off, his head cut, one of his ears half cut off, and hanging down, besides several other grievous wounds, insomuch that she heard him cry out and beg of the rebels for ' God's sake to give him leave to lie down and die ! ' William Clark of Killulta swore that he with sixty other Protestants was imprisoned in the Church of Loughgall, and from thence taken by Manns Roe O'Cahane and his followers ' V. Dopobiiiou XXI. INTRODUCTION. 143 to Portadown Bridge, that on their way thither other Pro- testant prisoners were brought in, and that the Piev. Mr. Fullarton, Minister of Loughgall, and a Mr. Gladwith, were killed before they reached the bridge. About a hundred reached it alive, and these, with the exception of Clark, one William Taylor, George Morris, Taylor's mother and little brother, were all flung over the bridge and drowned. When some of the miserable creatures in the water attempted to swim to the shore, O'Cahano's followers put out in boats on the river and knocked them on the head with their oars, clubs, and guns until all had perished.' Clark purchased his life with a bribe of 151., equivalent to perhaps to 150L or 180/. at the present day. We are not told how Tajlor and Morris managed to escape, but Mrs. Taylor, who was enceinte, and her little boy of five, had but a brief respite, for they were flung into the Tollwater at Glenarm a day or two after the Portadown massacre ; the mother scrambled to the shore and died that night with her newly-born baby, the little boy of five sank and was drowned.^ The O'Cahancs and MacKennas, with some of the O'Han- lons and O'Neils, were the chief actors in this atrocious massacre, which took place in November or December IGll. Clark swore that the rebels told him it was perpetrated by Sir Phelim's orders. Joan Constable of Dromaddagh, in Armagh, swore that her husband was murdered by the O'Hanlons under Manus O'Cahane. Shane O'Hanlon boasted in her presence and in the presence of a priest named O'Corr, that he had helped to drown Mrs. James Maxwell,who was enceinte. The revolting details of this murder are given in more than one deposition. Mrs. Constable adds that the priest O'Corr re- buked O'Hanlon, and told him that the blood of that inno- cent child would cry to heaven for vengeance. James Maxwell, himself brother to the rector of Tynan, was dragged out of his bed, where he lay ill of fever, and cruelly murdered. He had been an intimate friend of Sir Phelim, and had lent him a considerable sum of monej^ and the debt, as the Eev. Kobert Maxwell says in his deposition, was thus settled. One of the " Y. Deposition XI. ' V. Dcposilioii XII. 144 INTRODUCTION. O'Hanlon sept has l)een made a kind of hero of romance hy modern Irish writers on the Tories or Eapparees of the seven- teenth century, but no punishment could have been too heavy for the base and ferocious murders perpetrated by this sept in 1641. They justly forfeited everything when the day of reckoning came about. Some of the O'Quins and O'Cahanes were nearly as merciless as the O'Hanlons. On December 24th, 1G41, the castle of Tully, held by Captain Hume, surrendered, on promise of quarter, to Eory Maguire and his followers.' But as soon as it was taken all within it, seventy-nine in number, the Hume family, consisting of Lady Hume and her two sons and their servant, one Grier only excepted, were mercilessly stripped and murdered. At Kinard Castle, or House, where Sir Phelim resided, his English Pro- testant tenants and servants were plundered and harassed, but their lives were spared until about Christmas, when they were all murdered in their beds at night. Mrs. Boswell, an English- woman who had nursed a child of Sir Phelim' s, and had been sent for by him to come from London to live at Kinard, was amongst the murdered, her body left on her doorstep, her husband's flung into a well in his garden, and their infant child, with a skean sticking in its heart, was thrown on a turf stack. ^ In the first week of December, 1641, Longford Castle sur- rendered on written articles of quarter to the OTarrclls, and other Irish who had besieged it for some time. The quarter was shamefully broken. Mr. Martin, a merchant, was murdered with his infant child before his wife's face.^ Mrs. Trafford's husband, a clergyman, was also murdered in her presence. Her deposition, with Mrs. Martin's, will be found in full hereafter. About the same time Lisgoole Castle in Fermanagh, garrisoned by a Mr. Segrave, was burnt by the Maguires, when about eighty Protestants, men, women, and children, perished in the flames. ' Sir John Temple says that all in Tully Castle were murdered, but Captain Hume's deposition hereafter given shows that he and liis family aud Grier wera spared. * V. Deposition XXII. ' V. Deposition XCVI. INTRODUCTION. 145 All these frightful massacres and murders, and many more, mcludiug those at Lurgan, witnessed to by Sir William Brownlow, took place before Christmas, 1G41, with little or no retaliation on the part of the Ulster Protestants. The sudden- ness of the attack had stunned and well-nigh paralysed them ; the publication of the royal commission seemed to leave the English portion of them without support or defence, and the Scots had no ammunition to defend themselves if attacked, but at first they were spared to create a division favourable to the purposes of O'Neil. About and after Christmas, they too began to suffer, and then their old motto, Nemo me impune laccssit, vindicated itself. Many years ago Leland said that the massacre of the Catliolic Irisli at Island Magce did not take place, as some Irish writers had stated, in November, 1641, but in the beginning of the following January, 1642 (N.S.). Yet the stale falsehood has been again and again repeated by later Irish writers, who have magnified the scores murdered in the island into thousands, and have boldly asserted that those murders were the cause of all the massacres of Protestants between November and Christmas, 1641. The depositions of the Magec relatives of the murdered people, hereafter given, will convince all who are worth convincing that Leland was right, and that this cruel massacre in Island Magee was a re- taliation for innumerable massacres of Protestants, which had been going on in different parts of Ulster from October 23rd until Januar}' 3rd, 1642. It was also a special retaliation for the treacherous massacre of a number of Scotch Protestant soldiers, which took place on the night of January 2nd, at Portnaw. That massacre, as I have alread}'^ said, has also been much misrepresented. But every detail of both is now fully exposed in the depositions of Catholics and Protestants, taken with an even-handed impartiality (unknown to the officials of the Stuart kings) l)y the Commissioners and magistrates for the High Courts of Justice in 1652-4, and in the curious letter of James MacColl ciotach MacDonnell, all hereafter printed for the first time. This haughty and treai,cherous bigot, and his better-known brother Alastcr (wrongly called by the Eev. Mr, VOL. I. L 146 INTRODUCTION. Meelian and many others Alaster Colciotach or Colkitto), had been brought into Ulster by their cousin, the Earl of Antrim. They were also related in blood to Colonel Archibald Stewart, who, as I have already mentioned, gallantly defended Bally- mena and its neighbom-hood in the first month of the rebellion. Colonel Arthur Chichester who, with good reason, placed little confidence in Antrim and his clan, suspecting that Alaster MacDonnell was secretly planning with the O'Neils and O'Cahanes to surprise Carrickfergus, arrested and imprisoned him. But Colonel Stewart interceded on his behalf, and gave security for his fidelity, so that he was released from imprison- ment. Stewart naturally supposed that this friendly service and the ties of Scotch cousinship would bind the MacDonnell brothers to him, spite of their Eoman Catholic creed, and he also hoped that they would conciliate and control the Irish Catholics. He gave them accordingly, and Tirlogh O'Cahane, commissions as captains in his regiment. The soldiers under the command of those three Catholic captains were their co- religionists, Highlanders or Islesmen and Antrim's tenants. The rest of Colonel Stewart's regiment was mainly composed of British Protestants ; but all of different creeds and nation- alities lived together, apparently on the best terms, as brother soldiers in their garrison at Portnaw, until Christmas, 1641. About that time Mr. Canning, a Londonderry planter, fearing to live any longer unprotected on his estate in the country, applied to Colonel Stewart for a guard of soldiers to convey him and his family safely to Portnaw. Stewart imme- diately ordered Alaster and James MacDonnell's companies to perform this service, but then the cloven-foot began to appear. The MacDonnells, O'Cahane, and all the Catholics in the regiment absolutely refused to move to the assistance of Mr. Canning. Colonel Stewart then sent some companies of Protestant soldiers to convey the unfortunate gentleman and his family to Portnaw. After they had gone, the diminished Protestant forces remained quietly there, side by side with their Catholic comrades, fearing no harm from them. At dawn, or a little before it, on January 2nd, 1642 (N.S.), the Protestant com- panies of Captain Glover and Captain Peebles were aroused INTRODUCTION. 147 from sleep by a stir in the camp. A little alarmed, but still utterly unsuspicious of clanger from the MacDonnells, they half dressed themselves and went out of doors. In the faint light of the early winter morning they saw approaching at a little distance a number of men bearing the English and Scotch colours, and a white flag. Thinking that their colonel was about to draw his troops together for some purpose, the Protestant soldiers sent a messenger in haste to the approaching columns to ascertain if this was the case. The man, one Murdoch, ran forward on his errand towards the soldiers who were bearing the colours of his country and his regiment, and the Protestants who stood in the background, looking after him, saw to their horror and amazement a Highlander advance out of the columns with a drawn sword, which he drove through the body of their unfortunate messenger. Before they could grasp their weapons to defend themselves, their Catholic fellow-soldiers, led on by Alaster and James MacDonnell, bore down upon them on the right hand and on the left, ' well-nigh encompassing them,' says the deposition ' of one of the half-dozen survivors of Captain Peebles's troops, and with volleys of shots, and stabs of dirks and swords, murdered more than sixty of the un- armed men. Three or four Irish Protestants, related or connected by blood or marriage with the Highlanders, were spared by Alaster MacDonnell and his soldiers ; the rest fled to the country, where many of them, with their wives and children, were afterwards murdered. From Portnaw the MacDonnells and O'Cahane marched across the Bann, and assisted by the MacMullans, and one John Mortimer, a tenant of the Earl of Antrim, burned and plun- dered the whole country northwards, murdering men, women, and children, and taking Bally money and Oldstown. They marched to Dunluce Castle, but being denied admittance by Captain Digby, who held it for Antrim, they burned the village, against the will of Alaster MacDonnell, who by that time seems to have got weary of commanding, or rather of trying to command, the murderous rabble in his train. His allies the O'Cahanes issued an order, that the English language ' V. Deposition XXIII. L 2 148 INTRODUCTION. should not be spoken in the camp on pain of death by hang- ing. ' Upon this,' says one of the Protestants (whom they spared but kept prisoner among them) in his deposition, * Alaster MacDonnell bade his sokliers and those of us he had protected not speak English for twenty-four hours, being ready to fall out with the Irish that made such a proclama- tion.' Another witness, James MacConnell, deposed that he saw the corpses of more than a hundred persons, whom the rebels had murdered, lying on the roads and fields between Portnaw and Kihoquin. Some of the Magees were present with the Irish, when many of the Scotch and English were murdered. Tirlogh Oge O'Cahane and his brothers Manus and Conogher, with twelve of their followers, two days after the massacre at Portnaw, burnt the house of John Spcnce, murdered him and his wife, and his old blind mother, between eighty and ninety years old. The O'Donnells and O'Boyles, about the same time stripped and drowned in the sea near Ballycastle one William Erwin and his wife, striking the former with a pike when he attempted to swim to shore. After James MacDon- nell had taken Oldstown, promising quarter for life to the besieged, twenty poor women, with their children in their arms, were murdered as they came out of the castle, and their stripped corpses left unburied near the walls.' From the curious letter before referred to, which he wrote from Oldstown on the 11th of January to Colonel Stewart, it would seem as if this massacre at Portnaw was designed to initiate and assist Strafford's old project of banishing all the Scots in Ulster to Scotland. The whole fierce, treacherous, and overbearing spirit of the man shines out in this letter. ' CoosEN Archibald, — I received your letter ^ and to tell the truth I was ever of that opinion, and so was the most of all those gentlemen, (of my company) that your own self had no guilt in you. But certainly had I not begun when I did, I and all those > V. Depositions XXXIII. to XLA^III. * It would appear that Stewart had written to liim, proljahly entreating him to cease from his murderous work, and reproaching liim wilii what he lia