“On Friday, the 22nd of this month, after nine of the clock at night, this bearer, Owen Connolly, servant to Sir John Clotworthy, Knight, came to me, the Lord Justice Parsons, to my house, and in great secrecy (as indeed the case did require) discovered unto me a most wicked and damnable conspiracy, plotted and contrived, and intended to be acted, by some evil affected Irish Papists here.”

With these words begins the historic letter written on the 25th of October, 1641, by the Lords Justices, Sir William Parsons and Sir John Borlase, and thirteen members of the Irish Privy Council, to the Earl of Leicester, the absentee Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.

The objects which those who planned this conspiracy had in view, the means by which they were to be accomplished, and the conduct of those who took part in the insurrection which resulted from it, are among the most controverted questions of Irish history. Those who have taken sides against the rebels represent the rising as an ebullition of blind hatred against the English and Protestant inhabitants of Ireland, entertained by the native and Catholic population, who were resolved on expropriating and exterminating them, and setting up a government independent of the Crown of England, and establishing the Catholic Church in Ireland. Those who have sided with the rebels argue that the conspiracy and the insurrection were the result of legitimate grievances, for the redress of which insurrection afforded the only means; that the insurgents were loyal to the Crown, sought, not religious ascendancy, but religious freedom; that, while it is true that one of the objects of the conspirators was the recovery of property of which they or their ancestors had been violently and unjustly deprived, they were averse to the unnecessary effusion of blood, and had no design of harming, much less murdering, their English and Protestant fellow-countrymen. As to the conduct of those who took part in the rebellion, English and Anglo-Irish writers have made charges of wholesale massacre and shocking cruelty against them. These charges have been not only repelled, but retorted on the Irish Government, and the officers and soldiers who acted under their orders.

In addition to sketching briefly the main incidents of the rebellion, I propose in this paper, so far as its necessary limitations will permit, to discuss these different questions, and to see if it be not possible, with the materials in our possession, to come to a conclusion upon them.

As a preliminary step it will be necessary to endeavour to place ourselves in the position of a native Irish Catholic in the year 1641, so as to see what was his lot, and of what, if any, grievances he had just cause to complain. A short historical retrospect will help to an understanding of this matter.

In the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity had been passed. By these statutes Catholics were liable to a fine for not attending church; while those who failed to take the Oath of Supremacy could not obtain a university degree, practise at the Bar, hold the office of a magistrate, or sue out the livery of their lands.

The legal fine for not attending church was, indeed, only twelve pence, and was intended to go to the relief of the poor. But much more was exacted by clerks and officers for fees, and the proceeds of the tax were diverted from its statutory destination, the relief of the poor, on the pretext, as explained by Sir Arthur Chichester, the Lord Deputy, that the poor of the parishes were not fit to receive the money, being Catholics themselves; and therefore ought to pay the like penalty. Towards the close of the reign of James the First, the Catholics put forth a remonstrance in which their position is summarized in these words:—“That their children were not allowed to study in foreign universities; that all the Catholics of noble birth were excluded from offices and honours, and even from the magistracy of their respective counties; that Catholic citizens and burgesses were removed from all situations of power and profit in different corporations; that Catholic barristers were not permitted to plead in the courts of law; and that the inferior classes were burdened with fines, distresses, excommunications and other punishments, which reduced them to the lowest degree of poverty.”

From this it will be seen that the grievances under which the Catholics of Ireland, as such, laboured at the accession of Charles the First, were not confined to any rank or class, but were suffered by the highest as well as the lowest.

The same observation is equally true of another grievance to which I am about to refer, a grievance that had not ostensibly any connection with the race or the religious belief of those who complained of it, but at the same time in fact pressed almost exclusively upon the native Irish, and those who professed the Catholic faith. This grievance may be briefly described as insecurity of land tenure.

In the reign of James the First the great case, reported by Sir John Davies, under the name of the Case of Tanistry, decided that lands should descend, not according to the native custom by which the Tanist succeeded to a limited interest in the property, the estate itself being vested in the tribe, but should descend according to the law of England. In consequence of this decision, the owners or those who claimed to be owners, in order to obtain what they believed would be an indefeasible title, surrendered their estates to the Crown and took a new grant, on payment of certain fines and the expenses of the letters patent, and on the terms of paying a fixed quit rent. Unfortunately astute lawyers were able to pick holes in the patents. Sometimes the officer whose duty it was to enrol them had neglected to do so. Sometimes the lands were wrongly or insufficiently described. Sometimes they had been valued too low, or even too high. In any of these cases, and in many others, the letters patent, if impeached, would turn out worthless. I need not remind you, as you have recently had the advantage of hearing a learned discourse on Strafford’s government in Ireland, what use he had made of these flaws, for the purpose of confiscating the properties of the owners of land in Connaught and Clare, in order to procure money for his master, and land for the English plantation. You will remember that among the graces which Charles promised the Irish in return for £120,000, which they gave him, were one for freedom of worship, one for confirmation of titles, and one for limiting the right of the Crown to recover lands to a period of sixty years, after an uninterrupted and undisputed possession, and how basely Charles and Strafford behaved when the money had been paid over.

Such was the posture of affairs in Ireland when Strafford, broken in health, was summoned to England to take command of the army fighting against the Scots. This army having been defeated at Newcastle, he returned to London, there to meet his accusers, to be condemned to death, and to be sacrificed by the King who had promised that “the Parliament should not touch one hair of his head.”

Strafford’s successor was Sir Christopher Wandesford. The Irish Parliament met in June, 1640, in a very different temper from that displayed in their last preceding session. They had caught something of the spirit of their brethren in England, with whom they had been brought into touch by the proceedings against Strafford. The Commons drew up a Remonstrance of Grievances, and appointed a committee of sixteen, including four members of the Lords, to lay it before the King. In it they remind him of their liberality in contributing to his necessities, and of the fact that in them, the Catholic people, lay the strength of his revenue, and proceed to complain of their wrongs: the arbitrary decision of causes and controversies before the chief governor, the perversion of law by the judges in order to gratify the Court, the cruel punishments employed to repress freedom of speech and writing, the extended powers of the High Court of Commission, the increase of monopolies, the exorbitant fees exacted by the clergy, the denial of the Graces, and other grievances.

This committee did not receive the final answer from the King until he was on the point of setting out for Scotland. They returned to Ireland three weeks after the Parliament had been prorogued, bringing back the answer, with all the Bills which had been transmitted to England for the approbation of the Council there before being passed. Among these were the Bill for Limitation, which protected from the claims of the Crown all estates that had been enjoyed without claim for sixty years; the Bill for relinquishing the title of the Crown to the four Connaught counties, the county of Clare, and large tracts of land in Tipperary and Limerick, the title of which had been found for the King by several inquisitions, and which were ready to be disposed of on survey to British undertakers. These Bills were all to be passed when the two Houses met, and meanwhile care was to be taken to notify them to the whole nation.

These concessions, though, if intended to be honestly carried out, which might well be doubted, they might satisfy the Lords and Commons by whom they were obtained, failed to satisfy the native chiefs, and the Catholic population. The Ulster plantators of James, and the Munster plantators of Elizabeth, and the Leix and Offaly plantators of Mary, and the Wicklow plantators, who were enjoying the lands of the Byrnes, were all to remain in undisturbed possession of their estates. The Catholic religion was still to be under a ban, and those who professed it were to pay their twelve pence for every Sunday and holiday that they did not attend the parish church, and were to be exposed to the disabilities imposed by the Act of Supremacy on those that failed to take the Oath. Besides this there were sinister rumours in circulation. Sir William Parsons was reported to have said at a public entertainment in Dublin, “that within a twelvemonth no Catholic should be seen in Ireland.” A letter was intercepted coming from Scotland to a person named Freeman, in Antrim, stating that a covenanting army under the command of General Lesley was coming to extirpate the Roman Catholics of Ulster, and leave the Scots the sole possessors of the province. The English House of Commons had passed a vote that no toleration of the Romish religion should be allowed in Ireland, and they had shown their intolerance by having eight Catholic priests arrested for saying Mass in London, and having seven of them executed. Sir John Clotworthy, the employer of Connolly, the informer already mentioned, and a man well acquainted with the designs of the faction that governed the English House of Commons, was reported to have declared there in a speech “that the conversion of the Papists in Ireland was only to be effected by the Bible in one hand and the sword in the other.”

The consequence was that a genuine and general alarm spread among the Catholics of all ranks throughout Ireland. At the same time the circumstances were favourable for striking a blow for religious liberty. The Scots, who had far less to complain of than the native Irish, had obtained religious liberty by taking up arms. Why should not the Irish, more especially seeing that the troubles in the sister isle made their attempt all the easier?

Roger O’More, commonly called Rory O’More, was descended from the chief branch of the O’Mores of Leix, whose lands had been confiscated for the benefit of the English colony planted there. He was connected by intermarriage with considerable families of English blood. He was handsome, courteous, and able, a man of high character, and the idol of the Irish, who celebrated him in their songs, and relied so much upon him that they used to say: “God and our Lady be our help, and Roger O’More.” He it was that, in connection with the son of the great Tyrone, contrived the rebellion.

As early as February, 1641, O’More had secured the adhesion of the best gentlemen of quality of Leinster, and of a great part of Connaught, subject to his getting the adhesion of the gentry of Ulster. In order to obtain their adhesion he, in February, 1641, approached Lord Maguire, Baron Enniskillen. Lord Maguire consented to join, and a meeting was held next day to which all the Ulster gentlemen then in town were invited. They readily engaged in the plot. It was desired to obtain the adhesion of the Lords of the Pale, who, though English in blood, and possessed of estates that had been the property of the native Irish, were Catholics, and smarting under the affronts put upon their religion, and apprehensive of further severities. Colonel Plunket, who was one of the first to join the conspiracy, and had, as he affirmed, broached the subject to Lord Gormanstown, and got his approval, undertook to win them over. But he effected nothing. By and by we shall see how they were forced to join.

It was ultimately arranged that the rising should take place on the 23rd of October. Every man had his place assigned to him. The Ulster gentry under Sir Phelim O’Neill, were to seize Derry; O’More, Colonel Byrne, Lord Maguire, and Bryan O’Neale were to lead the attack on Dublin Castle, which was to be made by two hundred men, to be provided equally out of each province by the principal conspirators. The secret of the plot had been kept with extraordinary success. It had been communicated to as few persons as possible, and those only who were leaders. The conspirators felt assured that the common people would unhesitatingly follow their native chieftains in any enterprise against the Saxon intruder, and in this, as the event proved, they were not mistaken. There was this disadvantage, however, in not taking the people into their confidence, that the latter were left in ignorance of the objects which their leaders had in view, and the means by which those objects were to be obtained. Apparently the people were allowed to form their own opinions on these subjects, and it may be that they thought, and that they proclaimed that amongst those objects was the erection of Ireland into an independent kingdom, and the establishment of the supremacy of the Catholic Church, and that among the means to be adopted for effecting those objects was the extirpation and expropriation of the English and Protestants.

Owen Connolly was a Protestant, and Sir John Clotworthy, his master, was bitterly anti-Irish and anti-Catholic. How the secret came to be disclosed to him as it was by Oge O’Neill on the night of the 22nd, is a mystery; but it was, with the result that the attempt on Dublin Castle was forestalled.

Some fresh light has been thrown upon the events of this period of Irish history by the recently published volume, issued by the Historical Manuscripts Commission, containing the manuscripts of the Marquess of Ormond, preserved at Kilkenny Castle, the second of which gives at full length the whole of the letters from the Irish Lords Justices to the King, the Earl of Leicester, Lenthall, Speaker of the House of Commons, Sir Henry Vane, Sir Edward Nicholas, Lord Falkland, Secretary of State, and His Majesty’s Commissioners for the affairs of Ireland. This correspondence commences with the famous letter of October 25th, 1641, already quoted, and continues without interruption down to the 15th of January, 1644, when a letter is written to Sir Edward Nicholas. This is the first complete series of these despatches ever published. The originals were destroyed in a fire in Dublin Castle.

Whatever justification there may be for the charges of neglect of duty made by Carte against the Lords Justices, in not taking precautions against a rising as to which they had warnings, there can, I think, be no doubt but that from the time when at nine on the night of the 22nd of October, 1641, Owen Connolly made his disclosures to Lord Justice Parsons, down to the date when these letters cease, the Council, according to their lights, left no stone unturned to crush the rebellion. Parsons and Borlase have been accused of postponing the suppression of the rebellion in order to promote the confiscation of Irish estates. But both of these continued to attend the meetings of the Council, and to sign the letters, down to the end of June, 1643, and Borlase continued to attend and sign the letters to the very end. The letters afford a continuous record of the measures taken by the Lords Justices and Council for stamping out the rebellion.

Parsons immediately on receiving Owen Connolly’s communication repaired to Borlase, and they at once summoned a meeting of the Council, which sat all that night and all the next day. They caused the Castle to be strengthened with armed men, and the city to be guarded, and proceeded to have such of the insurgents as they could lay hands on apprehended. The first was Hugh MacMahon, whom they examined, and who, to use their own words, when he saw they “laid it home to him, confessed enough to destroy himself and impeach some others.” Calling to mind a letter they had received from Sir William Cole on the 11th of October, they determined to secure Lord Maguire immediately, and succeeded in arresting him in a cockloft in an obscure house far away from his lodging. He was also examined, and admitted knowledge of the conspiracy, and ultimately made and delivered to the Lord of the Tower the written statement to which I shall refer hereafter.

When the hour approached for surprising the Castle a large number of strangers were observed to come to town in great parties several ways, who, not finding admittance at the gates, stayed in the suburbs. The Council issued a proclamation commanding all men, not dwellers in the city or suburbs, to depart within an hour on pain of death, and making it alike penal in those who should harbour them. This had the desired effect. The concourse departed. On the following day the Council sent into all parts of the country another proclamation giving information of the failure of the plot to seize the Castle, so as to dishearten the insurgents, and to encourage the friends of the Government.

Meantime the rebellion had broken out in various places throughout the country. The Council did not know whether to believe MacMahon’s statement that all the counties in the kingdom were in the plot; but if it were so they say, “Then indeed we shall be in high extremity and the kingdom in the greatest danger it ever underwent, considering our want of men, money, and arms to enable us to encounter such great multitudes as they can make if all should come against us.”

It was no wonder that the Lords Justices and Council contemplated a general rising with dismay. “The army we have,” they say in their letter of October 25th, “consisting of but two thousand foot and one thousand horse, are so dispersed in garrisons in several parts of the four provinces, for the security of these parts ... as, if they be sent for to be all drawn together, not only the places whence they are to be drawn ... must be by their absence distressed, but also the companies themselves coming in so small numbers, may be in danger to be cut off in their marches, nor indeed have we money to pay the soldiers to enable them to march.”

The Council soon had reason to know that the insurrection was general. Lord Blaney came to Dublin at twelve o’clock on the night of October 23rd, with news of the seizure of his house at Castleblayney, and of a house of the Earl of Essex at Carrickmacross. At three o’clock on the morning of the 24th they learned that the store of arms and ammunition at Newry had been seized. In a postscript to the letter of October 25th they write: “As we were making up these our letters the Sheriff of the county of Monaghan and Dr. Teate having fled, came to us and informed us of much more spoil committed by the rebels in the counties of Monaghan and Cavan, and that the sheriff of the county of Cavan joins with the rebels, being a Papist and a prime man of the Irish.” On the 5th of November they write that the rebels had seized the houses and estates of almost all the English in Monaghan, Cavan, Fermanagh, Armagh, Tyrone, Donegal, Leitrim, Longford, and a great part of Down, and were beginning to threaten the English plantations in the King’s County and Queen’s County, that Dundalk had surrendered to them without a blow, and that they were marching on Drogheda. On the 13th of November they announce that the Byrnes and others had risen in Wicklow; on the 22nd that some other parts of Leinster had joined; on the 25th that the whole county of Louth, both gentry and others, had joined; that some of the Wicklow rebels had come to within four miles of the city of Dublin, and that the cattle and houses of all the English in both Wicklow and Wexford were in the hands of the insurgents; on the 30th that several other counties had risen, and on the 14th of December that the defection then appeared to be universal throughout the whole four provinces.

The burden of these letters, which are steeped in the gall of bitterness towards the Irish Papist and his religious teachers is principally, in the first place, a wholesale charge of acts of barbarity against the rebels, and in the second place, frantic appeals for help in men and money and material of war.

Now with regard to those charges it is to be observed first, that much weight is not to be attached to accusations made in general terms; and, second, that charges of this kind were very useful as excuses for barbarities committed by the Government troops, and as stimulants to the English Parliament and people to send over the required supplies, and therefore very likely to be greatly exaggerated; and third, that the writers of these letters may have more readily given credence to reports of such excesses having been perpetrated, because, if their first letter is to be believed, Owen Connolly had told them that it was part of the design “that all the Protestants and English throughout the whole kingdom that would not join with them should be cut off, and so those Papists should then become possessed of the Government and kingdom at the same moment.”

It is of importance, therefore, to see what were the actual objects which the organizers of the rebellion had in view. Presumably they would include two, namely, religious liberty, and the restoration of the confiscated lands. Now, we have documents which will throw great light on this question. One is the oath which, as mentioned in the letter of the Council to Leicester, of November 25th, 1641, was administered to all who joined the rebels; another is the written statement made by Lord Maguire and delivered by him, about 1642, to Sir John Conyers, the Lieutenant of the Tower. The oath was to maintain and defend the public and free exercise of the Catholic religion, to bear faith and allegiance to King Charles, his heirs and successors, and to support them against anyone who should attempt anything against their persons or estates, or endeavour to suppress their prerogatives, or do any act contrary to regal government, as also the power and privileges of Parliament, the lawful rights and privileges of the subjects. This oath, it will be observed, asserts:—

1. Religious liberty.

2. Loyalty to the Crown.

3. The power and privileges of Parliament.

4. Rights and privileges of the subject.

Speaking of Lord Maguire’s statement, Carte, Book iii., § II., says, “It carries with it an intrinsic evidence sufficient to merit belief, and hath accordingly been universally allowed to be a just and faithful account of that affair.” We may therefore, I think, rest satisfied that this statement contains an authentic account of the objects that the conspirators had in view, and the method by which they proposed to accomplish them. So far as it relates to the matter in hand it is to this effect:—Roger O’More approached Lord Maguire, and after representing in general the many grievances of the natives, especially the old Irish, who upon several plantations were turned out of their ancestors’ estates, and the favourable opportunity which the insurrection of the Scots and the disturbances in England afforded the gentry of Ireland to free the nation from like grievances in future, to get good conditions for themselves, and to regain the whole, or at least good part of their ancestors’ possessions, obtained from Maguire an oath of secrecy, and then disclosed to him the project for an insurrection, urging it as the only method of recovering his lordship’s vast estates and the power of his ancestors, and as being absolutely necessary for maintaining the Catholic religion which undoubtedly, he said, the Parliament of England resolved to suppress. Here, then, we have plainly stated the objects the conspirators had in view, namely, the restoration of the lands which had been ‘planted,’ and the preservation of the Catholic religion, which was threatened with extinction. It will be observed that in the design thus disclosed there is no mention of erecting Ireland into an independent kingdom, the establishment of Catholic ascendancy, or the extermination of persons of the English race or of the Protestant faith. So far from the last-mentioned being one of the objects in view, “there was,” says Maguire, “a fear of the Scots conceived, that they would presumably oppose themselves, and that would make the matter more difficult; to avoid which danger it was resolved not to meddle with them or anything belonging to them, and to demean ourselves toward them as if they were of us, which we thought would pacify them; and if the Scots would not accept that offer, we were in good hope to cause a stir in Scotland that might divert them from us.”

Lord Maguire and the northern gentry generally consented to join in the plot on the strength of these representations, and at a meeting of the leaders, including Sir Phelim O’Neill, and Lord Maguire, held on the 5th of October, 1641, at Loughrosse, county Armagh, final arrangements were made for a general rising to take place on the 23rd, “all forts and arms should be seized, all the gentry made prisoners for their own better security against any adverse fortune or disappointment, and that none should be killed, especially of the gentry; but when of necessity they should be forced thereto by opposition, a rule to be observed likewise by those appointed for seizing the Castle of Dublin.”

Furthermore, there is the “Remonstrance of the Gentry and Commonalty of Cavan of their Grievances, common with other parts of this Kingdom of Ireland,” addressed to the Lords Justices and Council in the early part of November, 1641, which was drawn up by Bishop Bedell. In this they complain of the oppression of governors who “respected more the advancement of their own private fortunes than the honour of his Majesty or the welfare of his subjects,” of finding themselves “of late threatened with far greater and more grievous vexations, either with captivity or utter expulsion from their native seats.” They further declare “that ... we harbour not the least thought of hostility towards His Majesty, or purpose any hurt to His Majesty’s subjects in their possessions, goods, or liberty; only we desire that your lordships will be pleased to make remonstrances to His Majesty for us of all our grievances and just fears, that they may be removed, and such a course settled, by the advice of the Parliament of Ireland whereby the liberty of our consciences may be secured unto us, and we may be eased of other burdens in civil government.” The Remonstrance then proceeds thus:—“As for the mischief and inconveniences that have already happened through the disorder of the common sort of people against the English inhabitants, or any other, we, with the nobility and gentlemen and such others of the several counties of this kingdom as are most ready and willing to use our and their best endeavours in causing restitution and satisfaction to be made, as in part we have already done.” The Remonstrance winds up by a request for a speedy answer so as to avoid “the inconvenience of the barbarousness and incivility of the commonalty, who have committed many outrages without order, consenting, or privity of ours.”

We have thus in black and white an account of the aims and objects of the leaders of the rebels, and of the means by which they hoped to succeed, and neither Catholic ascendancy, nor disloyalty, nor racial or religious antipathy, to be gratified by massacre, finds a place in their programme or plan of campaign. To do violence to any person on account of his religion is, indeed, a thing wholly averse to the Irish nature. No Protestant ever suffered persecution at the hands of the native Irish in Ireland, for his faith; and when Protestants fled from persecution, in the reign of Queen Mary, to Ireland, they were harboured and protected by the Irish Catholics. Nevertheless, the massacres of Protestants alleged to have taken place in this rebellion have ever since been cast in the teeth of the Irish Catholics, and made the excuse for organized oppression and persecution. The butcheries of Cromwell were justified on the ground that they were a just punishment for such barbarities, though the people that he butchered were never shown to have had, and in many cases could not have had, hand, act, or part in them.

I have gone carefully through all the letters and documents penned by the Lords Justices and Council, and while general charges of murder and cruelty are made and repeated again and again, and though the writers can be specific in their statements as to all other matters, in two cases only do they give any details by which the accuracy of their statements can be tested; one is the case of the killing of Lord Caulfield, who was undoubtedly shot dead while a prisoner on the 1st of March, 1642; the other is the case of Huibarts, who held the island of Lambay, and may have been killed while resisting an attack.

If the Lords Justices and Council confined themselves to general charges of massacre and barbarity, the English pamphleteers were, in all conscience, sufficiently precise. It is needless to say that the news of the rebellion caused a great commotion in England. Leicester received the letter of the 25th of October on the night of Sunday the 1st of November. He at once caused the Council to be summoned, and they resolved to go to the House of Commons the next day as soon as it sat, which they did, notice being first given to the House “that the Lords of the Council had some matters of importance to impart to them”; whereupon chairs were set in the House for them to repose themselves, and the Sergeant sent to conduct them. Clarendon describes the scene. “As soon as they entered the House the Speaker desired them to sit down, and, then being covered, Littleton told the Speaker that the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, having received letters from the Lords Justices and Council there, had communicated them to the Council, and since the House of Peers was not sitting, they had thought fit, for the importance of the letters, to impart them to that House,” and so referred the business to the Lord Lieutenant, who, without any enlargement, only read the letters he had received, and so the Lords departed from the House. “There was,” says Clarendon, “a deep silence in the House, and a kind of consternation; most men’s heads having been intoxicated from their first meeting in Parliament with the instigators of plots and treasonable designs through the three kingdoms.”

The King, who was then in Scotland, received letters from Ulster telling him of the outbreak there. These he sent on to the Parliament, with a letter saying that he was satisfied that it was no rash insurrection, but a formed rebellion, which must be prosecuted with a sharp war, the conducting and prosecuting of which he wholly committed to their care and wisdom, and depended upon them for carrying it on. This exactly fitted in with their wishes, as up to the time they got this letter they had no authority to levy troops or make war. They appointed a committee of both Houses for the consideration of the affairs of Ireland, and providing for the supply of men, arms and money for the suppressing of that rebellion. The Lord Lieutenant was a member of the Committee, which sat every morning, and he communicated to them all the letters he received, to be consulted upon and to be then reported to the two Houses, which thus acquired a great accession of power and patronage.

Soon after the news of the rebellion was spread in England, the Press began to pour forth a stream of pamphlets. Some of these were devoted to advocating the plan adopted by the English Parliament for raising the necessary funds for prosecuting the campaign against the rebels, by giving grants of land that should be forfeited to those who advanced money for the purpose. In 1642 they decreed the confiscation of 2½ millions of acres in Ireland, and undertook to allot them to those who made advances, on the following scale: 2,000 acres in Leinster to anyone who advanced £600; and the same quantity in Munster, Connaught, and Ulster respectively, to those who advanced £450, £300, and £200 respectively. Others of those pamphlets were devoted to thrilling descriptions of massacres and atrocities said to have been committed by the Irish rebels. These were, Ormond says, “received as oracles,” and the extirpation of the Irish “preached as gospel.” As I said before, they were not open to the imputation of being wanting in details. They were most circumstantial. They describe the doings of such well-known rebel leaders as the Earl of Clare, whose portrait is given in one of the pamphlets, the great Lord MacDavo, Lord Matquess, Don Luce, Limbrey, Cargena and others, in such well-known counties, Monno otherwise Conno, and Warthedeflowr, and in such well-known towns as Rockcall, six miles from Dublin, Lognall, Toyhull, Kilwood, Kilmouth, Tormoy, and Cormack. The collection of these pamphlets made by Thorpe, and now in the Library of the Royal Irish Academy, as well as those in the British Museum, enable one to judge of the way in which the ear of England was poisoned for the purpose of exasperation against the Irish Catholics.

Two months after the outbreak the Government issued a commission to seven Protestant ministers to take evidence upon oath as to the amount of the loss sustained by the British and Protestants that had been “separated from their habitations,” or “deprived of their goods,” the names of the robbers, and what traitorous speeches were uttered by the robbers or others. It is to be observed that in this Commission there is no mention of murder or violence. By a supplemental commission of the 18th of January, 1642, it was extended so as to include an inquiry as to “what violence was done by the robbers, and how often and what number have been murthered or perished afterwards on the way to Dublin or elsewhere.” This addition was an afterthought, and the fact is very significant, as pointed out by Prendergast, Cromwellian Settlement, p. 60. A mass of such depositions was taken, and are now in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin. I have not perused them, but every historian who has done so, and has formed an impartial judgment upon them, has pronounced them to be practically worthless as evidence against the rebels. In the first place they were exparte statements, made in the absence of those whose conduct they impugned. Secondly, they were very largely hearsay, and not the evidence of eye witnesses. Thirdly, many of them are not made on oath. Fourthly, they were to a great extent made by persons intending to make claims for restitution and compensation, and may therefore be expected to be exaggerated, if not unfounded. Fifthly, they bear internal evidence of untruth, many of them deposing to apparitions and other supernatural phenomena. Sixthly, they in many instances gave evidence of the deaths of people who long survived the rebellion. Seventhly, many of the deponents were illiterate. Lastly, they afford no safe basis for a calculation of the numbers stated to have been killed, for the same alleged outrage is obviously referred to in different depositions.

The calculations made by English writers of the numbers slaughtered by the Irish are curiously conflicting. Milton, in his observations on the “Articles of Peace between the Earl of Ormond and the Irish,” set down the number “assassinated and cut to pieces by those Irish barbarians” at 200,000, which was about the total Protestant population of Ireland, inclusive of soldiers in garrison and officials in Dublin. The Lords Justices and Council in their despatch to the King, dated March, 1642-3, in opposition to any accommodation with the rebels, upon an alleged acknowledgment “by their priests appointed to collect the numbers,” set the number down at 154,000 “before the end of March last, ... besides many thousand others since that time.” Temple, whose object also was to obstruct the peace, says that in the first two months of the rebellion 150,000 had been massacred, and that “there were 300,000 Protestants murdered in cold blood or destroyed in some other way, or expelled from their habitations from the 23rd of October, 1641, to the cessation made on the 16th of September, 1643.” Petty fixes the number at 37,000, Walsh at 20,000. The Rev. Dr. Warner, a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, who describes many of the depositions as “incredible,” “ridiculous,” and “contradictory,” carefully examined the thirty-two closely written volumes which are in the library of Trinity College, with the result that he concluded that “the number of people killed upon positive evidence collected in two years after the rebellion broke out, adding them all together, amounts to only 2,109, on the reports of other Protestants, 1,619 more, and on the reports of some of the rebels a further number of 300, the whole making 4,028. Besides these numbers there is in the same collection evidence on the report of others of 8,000 killed by ill-usage.” These numbers he considered were the utmost to which “the cruelties of the Irish out of war” could be extended, though, having regard to the nature of several of the depositions, he could not in his conscience charge them with such a number of murders. In corroboration of his figures he quotes a letter which he copied from the Council books in Dublin written on the 5th of May, 1652, from the Parliament Commissioners in Ireland to the English Parliament, in which the Commissioners tell them that it appears “besides 848 families there were killed, hanged, burned, and drowned 6,062.”

That the rebellion at its first outbreak was not accompanied by any massacre, or even by considerable effusion of blood, appears from documents now extant. Lord Chichester wrote to the King from Belfast on October 24th, 1641, “The Irish in the northern parts of your kingdom of Ireland two nights last past did rise with force and have taken Charlemont, Dungannon, Tonragee, and Newry, with your Majesty’s stores there ... and have slain only one man.” The letter of the Lords Justices to Leicester of October 25th, does not make mention of a single case of violence to the person. The Remonstrance of the Gentry and Commonalty of Cavan already referred to, issued in the early part of November, 1641, speaks not of massacres or murders, which the Remonstrants would undoubtedly have deemed worthy of condign punishment, but of acts which would be proper subjects of restitution and satisfaction. The first instance of homicide committed by the rebels given by the Lords Justices in their correspondence is in a letter to Leicester of December 3rd, 1641, in which they announce the death of Mr. Huibarts. It is not until the 14th of December that any massacre is mentioned, when they state, in a letter of that date to Leicester, that the garrison of Longford had been massacred.

Your attention has already been called to the pregnant fact that in the first commission of inquiry issued by the Lords Justices and Council, which is dated December 23rd, 1641, no reference is made to murder or personal violence.

It thus becomes abundantly clear that during the first two months of the rebellion, not only was there no general massacre by the rebels, but there was little bloodshed. Indeed the Lords Justices, in their proclamation of February 8th, 1642, assert that the design of a general massacre had failed.

A period of several months elapsed between the end of December, 1641, and the organisation of the rebels under the Confederates. During this period, no doubt, it was that the serious cruelties were committed by the insurgents, for the proceedings of the Confederates were characterised by humanity, and the Supreme Council would not have tolerated murder under any circumstances, or under any provocation. Among the propositions they made to the King in March, 1644, was the following:—“Forasmuch as your Majesty’s Catholic subjects have been taxed with many inhuman cruelties which they never committed, your Majesty’s said supplicants, therefore, for their vindication, and to manifest to all the world to have such heinous offences punished, and the offenders brought to justice, do desire that in the next Parliament all inhuman murthers, breaches of quarter, and inhuman cruelties committed on either side may be questioned in the said Parliament (if your Majesty so think fit), and such as shall appear to be guilty exempted out of the Act of Oblivion and punished according to their deserts.” This principle was embodied in the fifteenth article of the first treaty between the King and the Confederates, signed on the 28th of March, 1646, and in the last treaty signed on the 17th of January, 1648-9.

If we wanted further proof of the scrupulous humanity of the Confederates, the following facts would supply it. The delegates of the Confederates in 1644, in an official communication made to the Marquis of Ormond as representative of the King, declared that one of the results that they most earnestly desired in connection with the removal of their grievances was that when the condition of Catholics and Protestants had been equalised they might all “be united more than ever before,” and neither party “have occasion to envy or oppress the other.” These aspirations were met in the following month by an ordinance made by the Parliament at Westminster, by which the Lords and Commons declared “that no quarter shall be given hereafter to any Irishman or any Papist whatsoever born in Ireland, who shall be taken in hostility against the English Parliament, either upon the sea or within this kingdom or dominion of Wales,” and they followed this barbarous declaration by a decree for carrying it out. In pursuance of this enactment many Irish sailors were brutally murdered, being tied back to back and thrown overboard, and in one instance seventeen Irish soldiers, fighting in the King’s army, when made prisoners, were hanged. Prince Rupert promptly hanged an equal number of his prisoners, at which the English Parliament was greatly shocked, and remonstrated with the Prince, threatening to retaliate, and justifying the butchery of the Irish. Rupert does not appear to have taken any notice of this amazing document, and probably would have hanged or shot a prisoner of English or Scottish blood for every one of Irish blood or the Catholic religion that the Parliamentarians had murdered. But the Confederates were too humane to countenance such atrocities; and they refrained from defiling the records of their assembly by any declaration or ordinance such as that which the pious champions of civil and religious liberty in England, to their eternal infamy, had placed upon their rolls.

What murders were committed at sea under this ordinance never will be known. But Bulstrode Whitelocke, a member of the Long Parliament, under date of May, 1644, records the following significant incident: “At the taking of Carmarthen by Captain Swanley, many Irish rebels were thrown into the sea.” Under date June, 1644, he records that “Captain Swanley was called into the House of Commons and had thanks from them for his good services, and a chain of gold two hundred pounds value.”

It is not to be denied, however, that in the earlier stages of the rebellion murders, and possibly outrages, were committed by the insurgents. It was, of course, necessary that if resistance was offered to the seizure of strongholds or arms, it should be overpowered by force, even to the extent of taking life; and what are described as massacres were probably, in many instances, homicides committed unavoidably in cases of such resistance. But apart from such occurrences, no doubt, lives were taken by the rebels. According to a declaration made under hand and seal by the Rev. John Ker, Dean of Ardagh, given by Nalson, vol. ii., p. 528, Phelim O’Neill, in the course of his trial, at which the Dean was present, said that there were several outrages committed by officers and soldiers, his aiders and abettors in the management of the war, contrary to his intention, which now pressed his conscience very much, and the Dean adds, that he heard several murders and robberies proved at the trial to have been committed by him, and that he had nothing to plead in his defence. This is probably true. It was hardly in human nature, even Irish human nature, to refrain from taking a signal and sanguinary vengeance on those by whom, or for whom, they were oppressed and plundered. Besides, there can, I think, be little doubt but that the massacres began with the butchery, possibly in the beginning of November, 1641, but not later than the beginning of January, 1642, of innocent persons, men, women and children, inhabitants of Island Magee, by the garrison of Carrickfergus; and the murders committed by the rebels in Ulster may not unfairly be attributed in a great measure to reprisals for this horrible carnage. Whatever massacres there were must have been practically confined to Ulster, for there were but few English or Protestants elsewhere, and as the Irish carefully avoided molesting the Scots in Ulster, who were by far the majority of the Ulster population, the numbers slain cannot have been large. There is no doubt, too, but that O’More was strongly opposed to all unnecessary violence, and when we remember that the generals of the Federation, which commenced its session at Kilkenny in October, 1642, were directed by their commission to protect the husbandmen, victuallers, and all other subjects of his Majesty from the extortions, violences, and abuses of the soldiers, we may be pretty sure that little or no blood was unnecessarily shed after the eminent men who led the troops of the Confederation took up their commands.

It is needless to refer to the measures taken by the rebel leaders to check the outburst of pillage which marked the struggle before the Confederation was formed, and to protect the Protestants and the English from molestation. The well-known instance of Bishop Bedell, whose house was the asylum of numerous refugees, and who was himself treated with marked respect while he lived, and buried with all possible honour when he died, is only one example out of many of the conspicuous humanity of the men who were responsible for the insurrection.

But let us look at the reverse of the picture. That the Irish “Papist” was regarded by the English as a creature outside the pale of humanity is evidenced by the ordinance excluding him from quarter already quoted. That the Scotch concurred in this estimate appears from the fact that they adopted this ordinance. That he was to be exterminated was, as Ormond wrote to Clanricarde, “preached as gospel.” That such a gospel was not to be a dead letter appears from documents under the hands of the Lords Justices and Council. “We have hitherto,” they write on the 7th of June, 1642, to the Lords Commissioners for Irish Affairs, “where we came against the rebels, their adherents, aiders, and abettors, proceeded with fire and sword, the soldiers sometimes not sparing the women, and sometimes not children, many women being manifestly very deep in the guilt of this rebellion, and as we are informed, very forward to stir up their husbands, friends and kindred to side therein, and exciting them to cruelty against the English, acting therein and in their spoils even with rage and fury with their own hands.” We have also the directions given by the Lords Justices and Council to Colonel Crawford for his expedition to County Wicklow, and to Colonel Gibson for his expedition to County Kildare. These were to go to these counties and remain there as long as they could find provision for their men, and in their journey to kill, slay, and destroy all rebels; to destroy by fire and sword all their goods, houses, and corn. It is easy to understand how these orders would be interpreted. They meant the extermination of the people by fire and sword, or by famine; for, so long as there was food for the soldiery, the soldiery were to remain; when they left there would be food for no one.

In their despatch to the King in opposition to an accommodation with the rebels, already quoted, the Lords Justices and Council admit the policy of extermination, but only partial extermination, be it observed. “And howsoever it be true,” they write on the 16th of March, 1642-3, “that all the peril and damage we undergo, and all the arms we desired to have used and borne here, is but (by God’s blessing) to bring on a safe and lasting peace, yet we can no way apprehend that it can be done till the sword have abated these rebels in numbers and power, yet not to the utter extirpation of the native which is far from our thoughts (though some to render us the more odious report so of us).”

A characteristic example of the methods of the Lords Justices and their troops is given in their letter of June 7th, 1642, to the Lord Lieutenant, describing the capture of Baldungan Castle, situated twelve miles from Dublin. Colonel Crawford took it by storm, and found therein to the number of 120 rebels, whom immediately his men put to the sword, saving a popish priest, whom Colonel Crawford brought to Dublin, and whom the Provost Marshal hanged. “This sharpness,” they write, “held with them when they maintain castles against us, will doubtless discourage them from presuming to keep castles against us hereafter, when they still find just vengeance thus taken on them for their boldness therein. There was then found in that castle an English gentleman whom the rebels had taken prisoner a few days before, and whom our men now released.”

This despatch would do credit to Cromwell. There is a touch of unconscious irony in the contrast between the treatment of the one English gentleman captured by the rebels, and the 120 rebels captured by the English.

The letters reek with such incidents. Ormond takes a priest at Ballymacur, Westmeath, “who was then immediately hanged.” Monck, on his way to join Ormond, captures a castle at Knock, near Trim, “killed four score men which had maintained it against him, and took some prisoners, who were instantly hanged.” Monck, again, took at the castles of Rathcoffey and Clongowes Wood, in Kildare, “three score and ten prisoners, and amongst the rest some priests, whom with the rest he brought hither to be proceeded with as we should think fit, which was all the quarter he gave them, and we have appointed them to be executed by martial law.” “We lately sent abroad two parties of the army, one towards Catherlagh, thirty-two miles from this city, and the other towards Arklow, thirty-six miles from hence, with direction to burn and spoil all the way, as they went and came, which they did accordingly.” Lord Inchiquin in Cork took fifty prisoners, “divers of them men of quality, and most of them officers in the army of the rebels, which fifty prisoners Lord Inchiquin caused to be hanged the next morning, saving only Colonel Butler, son of the traitor Lord Viscount Ikerrin, and one Purgett, Commissary General of the rebel army, which two still remain prisoners.” Lord Lisle’s performances are thus described: “Lord Lisle hath now caused that house”—Lord Fingall’s house near Virginia—“and all the villages and towns adjoining to be burnt, as also all the corn, hay, and turf in all that country round about them. He still proceeds in burning, wasting, spoiling, and destroying all the country about him, and all the rebels’ corn, hay and turf, and in depriving the rebels of all the cattle he can ... so as by that time he returns thence he will, by God’s assistance, have all that country in such a condition as that the rebels shall have neither house to lodge, nor food, nor fire, which course also we have begun, and God willing, shall hold in other places, as we shall be enabled by supply of provisions, and we have hoped (by the blessing of God upon our endeavours) if we be strengthened from thence, as we expect, suddenly to drive the rebels into such extremities as many thousands of them and their foreign aids (if they should arrive) must perish and starve through hunger and cold.”

This, of course, was a sentence of death on every man, woman, and child in the districts thus condemned to desolation.

In their letter to the Lord Lieutenant, of December 28th, 1641, the Lords Justices make two damning admissions. First they say that Sir Charles Coote, on his return from raising the siege of the Castle of Wicklow, had a skirmish with a numerous body of the rebels, slew some of them, and in that journey slew and caused to be hanged others of them, and amongst others one woman that had been active in robbing and spoiling the English, and had about her at her apprehension some of the clothes of the English she had robbed.

Now, this is merely an ingenious device to endeavour to mix up punishment inflicted on rebels in arms, with what is evidently a massacre of unarmed peasantry perpetrated during “that journey,” in which women, and probably children, were butchered at the instance of the notorious Sir Charles Coote.

The second admission is that four people were murdered at Santry, which they make light of, observing that therein “only four persons were slain, whereas they might have slain many more if they had intended a massacre.” The heads of the victims of this butchery were brought in triumph to Dublin, on poles, and there exhibited. One of them turned out to be a Protestant. This incident had momentous consequences, as we shall see.

O’Connell was quite justified in saying, as he did to O’Neill Daunt, when speaking of the rebellion of 1641: “History has been so completely falsified, that not only is the truth unknown, but the foulest falsehoods have passed current as gospel truths; the characters of the two contending parties have been quite reversed.”

But I must hasten to sketch the leading events of the insurrection.

I have already referred to the murders at Santry. The neighbouring gentry were alarmed at this occurrence. It seemed a precursor of what they might expect themselves, and they held a meeting and assembled their followers. The gentry of the Pale had been placed in a very difficult position. Being Catholics, they were distrusted by the Lords Justices. Being English, they distrusted the rebels. The Lords Justices ordered all persons not ordinarily resident in Dublin to return to their homes. The gentry of the Pale requested to be furnished with arms sufficient to enable them to defend themselves when they were thus surrounded by the rebels. This was at first granted to a limited extent, but when troops were promised from England, the arms supplied were largely withdrawn. The gentry were thus left defenceless. An attack was made by the Government troops on the house at Clontarf of one of them, named King, who owned the village of Clontarf, on the pretext that the fishermen of the village had plundered a bark that lay off the coast there, and that some of the booty was found in his house. The consequence of all this was that the gentry came to the conclusion that their only course was to join the rebels, who thus obtained a considerable accession of strength, both in numbers and weight, though the Lords Justices made light of the matter in their letters. This occurred in December, 1641.

In March, 1642, a Synod of the Ulster clergy met, and it was there suggested that an assembly of clergy and laity should be held to organize the national movement. This proposal was adopted, and the General Assembly of the Confederate Catholics was held at Kilkenny in the following October. They at once proceeded to organize the country, appointing a Supreme Council, and provincial Councils, and commanders of the armies in the four provinces. They made provisions for the administration of justice in the districts under their control, the levy of contributions, and the machinery of government generally. Their seal bore on it the legend: “Pro deo, pro rege et patria, unanimes,” their coins, “floreat rex.” The oath to be taken by the Confederates was similar in terms to that already mentioned.

The Confederates addressed a petition to the King, through Ormond, praying his Majesty, “with heads lower than our knees,” “to assign a place where with safety we may express our grievances.” In this they complain of the condition whereunto the misrepresentation of his ministers in Ireland, united with the malignant party in England, had reduced them, and of the resolution taken by some malevolent persons in England, “to supplant their nation and religion,” and they disclaim any intention of disturbing his Majesty’s Government, or invading any of his prerogatives, or oppressing any of his British subjects, of what religion soever, that did not labour to suppress them. They refer to the petition which they had addressed to the Lords Justices, “but therein,” they say, “we found, instead of a salve to our wounds, oil poured into the fire of our discontent, which occasioned that intemperance in the commonalty that they acted some unwarrantable cruelties upon the puritans, or others suspected of puritanism, which we really detest, have punished in part, and desire to punish with fulness of severity, in all the actors of them, when time shall enable us to it, though the measure offered to the Catholic natives here, in the inhuman murdering of old, decrepit, people in their beds, women in the straw, and children eight days old, burning of houses, and robbing of all kinds of persons without distinction of friend from foe, and digging up of graves, and then burning the dead bodies of our ancestors, in time of cessation, and in breach of public faith, have not deserved that justice from us.”

The King refused to receive delegates from the Confederates, but granted a commission to Ormond, Clanrickard, and others to hear what the delegates had to say. “Albeit His Majesty has not thought fit to admit any of them to his presence who have been ... actors or abettors in so odious a rebellion,” as the Commission expressed it. This passage went near to wrecking the project, for in the safe-conduct sent to the delegates these words were used, and the Confederates were highly incensed at being accused of rebellion. However, they ultimately consented to attend at Drogheda, and the meeting took place on the 17th of March, 1643.

The first result of these negotiations was a truce or “cessation” as it was called, which was originally for a short period, but afterwards renewed from time to time.

Ostensibly Ormond was the King’s mouth-piece in this affair, and he was authorized to make certain concessions, in return for which the Confederates were to furnish the King with 10,000 men for service against the English rebels. But Charles, who never could act straight, granted a secret commission to Lord Glamorgan, not under the Great Seal, empowering him to make further concessions. He accordingly concluded secret articles with the Confederates on August 25th, 1645. But the secret leaked out. Glamorgan was brought before the Castle Chamber on a charge of treason, on the 26th of December, 1645, and committed. He was examined on the following day, and released on the 30th from close custody, but still kept under a certain restraint. The fatal battle of Naseby had been fought on the 18th of June previous. Charles was in dire straits, and, as might be expected, he repudiated Glamorgan’s authority, in a statement given on the 24th of January, 1646, at Oxford, which was to be communicated by the Speaker of the House of Lords to both Houses. In it he says that Glamorgan had only a commission to raise forces, and concluding by asking for a safe-conduct, in blank, to be sent “for a messenger to be immediately dispatched into Ireland to prevent any accident that may happen to hinder his Majesty’s resolution of leaving the managing of the business of Ireland wholly to the two Houses, and to make no peace there but with their consent, which, in case it shall please God to bless his endeavour in the Treaty with success, his Majesty hereby engages himself to do.”

The “treaty” here referred to is a treaty with his rebellious English subjects. If such were made, the King was prepared to hand over his loyal Irish subjects to the tender mercies of the English puritans.

But the negotiations for the treaty with the Confederates went on meantime, and the treaty itself was signed on the 28th of March, 1646. It consisted of thirty articles, and dealt substantially with all the grievances complained of. Collateral with it there was an agreement that the Confederates should furnish the King with 10,000 men, of which 6,000 were to sail on or before April 1st, and 4,000 on or before May 1st. The treaty was to be conditional on the fulfilment of this agreement, and it was deposited in duplicate in the hands of Lord Clanricarde to be held by him as what lawyers call an “escrow,” until the agreement had been fulfilled. It was found, however, that the position of the King’s affairs was such that it was not practicable to carry it out, and that it would be more for his Majesty’s interest that the men should remain in Ireland. The condition was therefore waived.

Everything now appeared to be arranged, when one of these incidents occurred to mar the prospects of Irish nationality, of which the history of Ireland is so full.

The Confederates had been obliged to rely very largely on support from abroad, and among those who contributed most liberally was the Pope. Unfortunately, he not only contributed material support and moral support, but he sent a Nuncio with instructions placing the full establishment of the Catholic religion in Ireland above and before reforms in the political government.

The presence of the Pope’s representative imparted great strength to the Confederates; it was also productive of unexpected consequences. The Nuncio, Rinuccini, was not satisfied with the treaty. He did not think it conceded enough. In February, 1646, in anticipation of the conclusion of peace, he had a protest against the treaty drawn up and signed by several of the prelates, based on the principle that those who entered into it, or supported or favoured it, violated their oath. The peace was proclaimed by Ormond in Dublin on the 30th of July, 1646, and the Confederates ordered its proclamation on the 3rd August. A meeting of the congregation of the clergy was to be held at Waterford on the 12th of August. An attempt made to proclaim the peace there on the 9th failed, as the Mayor and Corporation refused to allow the function to take place. It was then proclaimed at Kilkenny, and the herald and pursuivant proceeded to Limerick, but the attempt at a proclamation provoked a riot, in which they were severely mauled. Finally, the bishops and clergy denounced the peace at Waterford on the 12th, and further efforts to proclaim it were abandoned. On the 1st of September, Rinuccini directed the clergy to publish to their flocks at High Mass, and otherwise, that they were not to adhere to the treaty on pain of excommunication.

Efforts were made to compose the dispute. The Confederation answered the Nuncio and the ecclesiastics; the latter replied, and stated that they would agree to nothing until a new General Assembly was called; and they formed a new government, called “The Council and Congregation,” which was to hold office until the meeting of a General Assembly, to be held on the 11th of January, 1646-7.

The Assembly was held accordingly, and debated the matter at great length, and with great heat. Bellings, who had been the Secretary from the foundation of the Confederation, contrasts the proceedings with the quiet and dignity with which those of the previous assemblies had been conducted. A bishop whom he mentions, could always, he says, get a shout of applause by merely waiving his hat. After a powerful speech by Colonel Walter Bagnall in favour of the treaty, which produced a great impression, the treaty was rejected on the 2nd of February, by a majority of votes. A new oath was then framed containing further clauses for the advantage of the Catholic religion.

The clergy thus won a disastrous triumph. Up to this the arms of the Confederates had been successful. In the previous June, Owen Roe O’Neill had won his famous victory over Monroe at Benburb. But now all went wrong. The Leinster army was defeated at Dungan Hill. The Munster army, under Lord Taaffe, was defeated at Kanturk on the 13th of November, 1647, and these reverses were followed in rapid succession by other defeats. Everywhere there was confusion and disunion. Owen Roe O’Neill sided with the Nuncio. The General and officers of the Leinster army at first took the other side, and only abandoned it when the General found that his men were not “excommunication proof.” The bishops were divided, and so were the convents and monasteries. No doubt, the laity, especially the common people, were bewildered. The Council revoked O’Neill’s patent for the command in Ulster. He threw the letters directed to him and to his officers into the fire, and he and his officers published a sharp declaration against the Council’s proceedings, to which they replied with equal asperity. The Assembly met in September, 1648, and accused the Nuncio. He embarked from Galway on the 23rd of February, 1649, and, needless to say, never returned.

Meantime, efforts had been made to conclude another peace. Ormond, after he had been obliged to surrender Dublin to the English Parliament, had left Ireland; but Clanricarde, who had, in conjunction with Colonel Jones, won the battle of Kanturk, began to distrust the Parliamentarians, and made overtures to the Confederates. Ormond returned to Ireland in October, 1648, and concluded a peace with the Confederates on the 17th of January, 1649.

But it was too late. Events had marched with fatal rapidity in England. On the 5th of May, 1646, the King had surrendered himself to the Scots, to be by them handed over to the English Parliament. His head fell on the scaffold on the 30th of January, 1649. Cromwell landed in Ireland on the 15th of August, to find that Ormond had been defeated by Colonel Jones in the battle of Rathmines. We know what followed. Those who have listened to, or have read, the brilliant lecture on Cromwell, delivered before this Society, by Sir William Butler, need not be reminded of the tragic occurrences of that dark time. But in any case they are beyond the scope of this paper. The “Rebellion” of 1641 ended with the treaty of 1649.

The period we are about to deal with is one of the most important, perhaps the most important of modern Irish history, as the events of that time influenced the destinies of Ireland more profoundly than anything that went before, and by their effects, continue to profoundly influence them even in our own times. It is also the most confused, not to say confusing, period of the history of Ireland or any other country that a student can attempt to deal with. Carlyle, rarely just to Ireland, in this instance describes it with both force and faithfulness, when due allowance is made for his prejudices. “The history of it,” he says, “does not form itself into a picture, but remains only as a huge blot, an indiscriminate blackness, which the human memory cannot willingly charge itself with! There are Parties on the back of Parties, at war with the world and with each other. There are Catholics of the Pale, demanding freedom of religion under my Lord this and my Lord that. There are Old-Irish Catholics under Pope’s Nuncios under Abbas O’Teague of the excommunications and Owen Roe O’Neill demanding, not religious freedom only, but what we now call ‘Repeal of the Union,’ and unable to agree with the Catholics of the English Pale. Then there are Ormond Royalists of the Episcopalian and mixed creeds, strong for King without Covenant; Ulster and other Presbyterians, strong for King and Covenant; lastly, Michael Jones, and the Commonwealth of England, who want neither King nor Covenant. All these plunging and tumbling for the last eight years, have made of Ireland and its affairs, the black unutterable blot we speak of.” The object of this paper is to remove some of the blackness, and attempt to set forth clearly, if possible within the limits allowed, the relations and interactions of these various parties.

A brief reference to the rebellion of 1641 in Ulster gives us the most convenient starting-point. The dispossessed Clansmen, availing of the troubles between Charles I and the English Parliament, suddenly seized on their ancestral lands and drove out the settlers. Much has been written of the cruelties of both sides in a keen struggle for existence in a semi-barbarous age. The insurgents have been charged with a massacre of Protestants, the number of slain, according to some accounts, being greater than that of the whole English population of the island, as if the outbreak were one undertaken from religious motives. Religion had nothing to do with it. It was the eternal Land Question in its original and most crude form—nothing more. It was unfortunate as furnishing a valuable pretext that was readily availed of for a general confiscation by the Puritan Parliament that the settlers were Scotch and English Protestants, but it cannot be doubted that, had they been Spaniards or Italians with an Archbishop at their head, they would have fared in precisely the same manner. From the point of view of the great mass of the Irish proprietors both Old-Irish and Anglo-Irish, it was an enormous tactical blunder.

A detail of the rebellion which had serious consequences, was the use of a forged Commission from Charles I, whereby some chiefs and others of the old proprietors who were hanging back, were induced to come out. Charles was in Edinburgh collecting evidence against the Inviters at the time of the outbreak, but was unwilling to leave until he had finished. Seeing, however, the use that would be made of any hesitation on his part in putting down a rebellion alleged to have been organized under his Commission, he ordered the Parliament to arrange for sending an Army into Ireland. That Assembly strung to the highest pitch of fanatical fury by the grossly exaggerated accounts of the Lords Justices and others interested in future forfeitures in February, 1642, passed an Act whereby 2,500,000 acres of Irish land in parts not concerned in the rebellion, were offered as security to whomsoever should subscribe towards the raising of the army.

On the 8th April, 1642, the King offered to go to Ireland and take command of the English garrison against the rebels, but the Parliament, believing he intended only to bring those troops into England, told him if he went, it would be looked on as an act of abdication. It can easily be seen that the rebellion was a great advantage to the Parliament, since the King could not withdraw his troops from Ireland without giving support to the story circulated by the Parliament, “that he and his Popish Queen had authorized the rising.” But, apart from the loss of popularity suffered by the King, the most important gain to the Parliament was the power to raise money and troops under the Act of Confiscation. The subscriptions obtained from the adventurers, or, as we should now call them, shareholders, were not to be paid into the Royal Exchequer, but to a Committee composed of Members of the House of Commons and Adventurers, and these were to appoint the Commander and Officers, the King being allowed only to sign the Commissions. The lands of the Irish were not to be set out to the adventurers until Parliament should declare the war at an end. The King was also deprived of the power to pardon the insurgents, for the effect of pardons would be to deprive the adventurers of their security. In this way, the mass of the Irish proprietors would be forced into rebellion, while for that reason the King would be prevented from entering into any terms with them, whereby he might call the English garrison in Ireland to his assistance in the coming struggle with the Parliament, or receive help from the insurgents.

In considering the attitude of the Parliament and the English people in all these matters, it must not be forgotten that they were then about to be forced into a life and death struggle against an autocracy. They knew that Strafford had, but a short time before, declared the King’s Government to be as autocratic in Ireland as that of any absolute monarch in Europe, and that both he and the King had lively hopes of bringing about the end of parliamentary government in England. They had an acute dread that the King’s power in Ireland might be greater than it really was, and that it would be used to crush their liberties. For this reason, if for no other, they were more determined than ever to extinguish the Irish as a nation. We know now that Charles was an admirer and correspondent of that Alexis Romanoff, who, after swearing to uphold them, had destroyed such germs of representative Government as then existed in Russia, and which the Russian people are still vainly striving to recover. After bearing with the King’s tyranny, vacillation, and faithlessness through many years, the time was now rapidly approaching when the conflict between the principles of autocracy and those of popular government would have to be decided by the sword.

Of the religious intolerance shown by all parties in these dissensions, it can only be said that men’s minds were yet quite unprepared to accept, or even understand, anything like toleration, and when opposing creeds met in open hostilities, both sides were often disgraced by cruelties that showed they were little influenced by such Christian principles as they were supposed to hold in common.

The Executive Government in Dublin Castle was, during most of the period with which we are concerned, in the hands of the Lords Justices in the absence of Lord Leicester, who had been appointed Lord Lieutenant, but who, already inclining to the popular side in England, never took up his office. The Lords Justices were, nominally, Sir William Parsons and Sir John Borlase. Parsons, from a needy and vulgar adventurer, by the grasping chicanery then, and long after necessary to the establishment of a great position in Ireland, had wormed his way into his present eminence. Sir John Borlase, the Commander of the Ordnance, was an old soldier, well stricken in years, and practically a nonentity by the side of his powerful colleague. The English garrison in Ireland, already largely imbued with Puritan principles, was under the command of the Earl—afterwards Marquis—of Ormond.

The character of Ormond has been viewed from so many standpoints, that it is difficult to decide impartially between the extremely different views given of it. He was originally a Catholic, but taken to England by the Court of Wards in his youth, had been brought up a Protestant. By birth, the head of one of the greatest Catholic Anglo-Irish families of the Pale, amongst whom he had many relatives and connections, he naturally sympathised with them in their troubles, but he also shared with them the firm belief that they were not Irish, but merely English colonists in Ireland. A fervent Royalist, devoted to the King and his interests, as long as there was any chance of helping him, he was distrusted by the Lords Justices, especially Parsons, “the guiding spirit of confiscation and destruction,” to such an extent, that even on such military expeditions as he undertook against the insurgents by their orders, he was constantly thwarted, interfered with, and even recalled when he had gained some success, lest, by his means, the King’s party should grow too strong for that of the Parliament. He was in a most difficult position, and it always seemed to me an error to denounce Ormond as a traitor to the Irish cause. He entered into no engagements to serve it, though he was disposed, as far as possible, to favour his kinsmen and dependents of the Pale, but he was, first of all, an English colonist, a soldier in the King’s service, with no pretensions to any feeling of Irish nationality, which, as a matter of fact, far from having displaced the narrower ties of clanship, was even then, only approaching the throes of birth.

For some years, the Catholic Anglo-Irish proprietors, especially of the Pale, had been endeavouring, but in vain, to come to some accommodation with the King, heedless of what might befall their hereditary enemies, the Old-Irish. They had addressed petitions and remonstrances to Charles, but these, for the most part, had been suppressed by the Lords Justices. It would be impossible, in this rapid sketch to trace the course of these earlier negotiations. The passing of the Acts of Confiscation were a rude awakening for the Anglo-Irish. They were at once made to feel that for all their claims to English descent, they were looked on by those in power in England not as Englishmen, not even as “merely Englishmen with bad accents,” but purely and simply as Irish Papists, fomenters and favourers of rebellion and murder, whom it would be meritorious to exterminate.

They were accordingly forced, though, as they truthfully declared, most reluctantly, to ally themselves with the Old-Irish. This they did in a half-hearted way, being, most of them, rather inclined to temporise with the King through Ormond than to boldly adopt the policy of their allies, and by securing with their help the command of the country, be in a position to dictate terms. At a Synod of the Clergy of the Province of Armagh, in March, 1642, it was decided that an Assembly, representative of the whole of Ireland, should be convened. In May, a meeting of the clergy and principal laity took place at Kilkenny, and a Supreme Council of nine members was chosen as a Provisional Government to arrange the convention of the General Assembly. When the Lords Justices heard of the establishment of the Catholic Confederacy, they and the Irish House of Commons took steps to prohibit all intercourse with Catholics, and the House resolved that no one refusing the Oaths of Supremacy should be allowed to sit. The General Assembly of the Confederation held its first meeting on October 24, and the Rev. Father Meehan, in his History of the Confederation of Kilkenny, draws a glowing picture of the scene in St. Canice’s, where, for the first time probably since the battle of Clontarf, the representatives of the Irish nation assembled together for a common national object. Every county and every borough had chosen its representatives, and the body thus deputed was practically an Irish Parliament, though out of respect for the King, not having been summoned by his writs, it disclaimed that title. Its first business was to elect a new Supreme Council of twenty-five members. There were also Provincial and County Councils. The cumbrous procedure adopted, whereby every member of the Supreme Council had to be consulted in all important matters, did much to hamper its action, and was productive of delays in a time when rapid decision was most needful, and this contributed in some measure to its ultimate failure to effect the objects for which it was called into being.

Amongst the most important of the first declarations of the Assembly, was their resolution to maintain the rights and immunities of the Catholic Church agreeably to the Great Charter. They commanded all persons to bear faith and allegiance to the King, and to maintain his just prerogatives, while they denied and renounced the Irish Government administered in Dublin Castle by “a malignant party to his Highness’s great disservice and in compliance with their confederates, the malignant party of England.” The Church was to re-enter on its ancient rights, all ecclesiastical property was to be vested in the Bishops, but Abbey lands were not to be restored by the lay possessors, many of whom were sitting in the Assembly itself. This question of the Abbey lands at once became a bone of contention between the Religious Orders and some of the most powerful of the laity, and was a potent factor of the disunion which followed. The Assembly did not enter into the question of the ownership of land, beyond refusing to recognise the results of the insurrection. Land was to be considered the property of those who were in possession on October 1, 1641. On this point Gardiner says: “The land policy proclaimed was a policy of land owners, and was unlikely to conciliate those who had formed the strength of that agrarian revolution which had well nigh swept the English out of Ulster. It is, however, impossible to doubt that if the efforts of the Assembly had been crowned with success, it would have found itself powerless to reinstate the English and Scottish colonists in the lands which they had recently lost, and it is not very probable that Catholic Ireland would have granted to Protestants, a toleration which was denied to Episcopalians in Presbyterian Scotland, and had lately, when Charles’s authority was supreme, been denied to Presbyterians in Episcopalian England.” On this point of Gardiner’s, it may be remarked that where questions of religion alone were concerned, and apart from temporal considerations, Catholic Ireland has always shown an example of tolerance even in ages when tolerance was unknown in countries supposed to be more advanced in modern civilization.

While the land question threatened to divide the Old-Irish of Ulster from their co-religionists of the South, the Assembly deliberately—perhaps because it could not help itself—adopted a scheme of military commands which from the outset made for disunion. Owen Roe O’Neill was chosen General for Ulster; Preston for Leinster; Garret Barry for Munster, and Colonel John Burke for Connaught, the last with the title of Lieutenant-General, as it was hoped the Earl of Clanricarde would take the chief command in that province. No Commander-in-Chief was appointed, and nothing like concerted action between the various armies was ever seriously attempted. O’Neill had, moreover, little friendship for the Supreme Council, and was on bad terms with the Leinster General, Preston, who was father-in-law of Phelim O’Neill, Owen’s rival, who had but lately claimed the chieftainship of the O’Neills on the ground of lawful heirship, while Owen Roe, though possessing incomparably greater personal merit, was sprung from an illegitimate branch. Of the continued state of war which existed, it is impossible to give any detailed account here. It was a series of skirmishes and petty sieges, in which one side harassed the other without either gaining a decisive victory. The Royalists, under Ormond in Leinster, and the other English General, Murrough O’Brien, Lord Inchiquin in Munster, were in the greatest distress for want of provisions, pay, and munitions, and concerted action by the Irish forces under a skilled commander like Owen Roe, for instance, would soon have forced them to terms, but no such united effort was made. The Scottish army, which had landed in Ulster under Leven and Monroe, remained under the command of the latter, and possessed itself of the greater part of the province and extended its raids and forages as far as Sligo, but for the most part afterwards remained inactive, and was only distinguished by some massacres of the unarmed peasants. Of the general conduct of the war, Gardiner says: “There was no strategy on either side, it was an affair of skirmishes and sieges, of raids over the wide expanse of pasture-land, for the purpose of sweeping off the herds of cattle which were the main wealth of the people. Wherever an English force could penetrate, its track was marked by fire and the gallows. Exasperated at the Ulster murders, and seeing in every Irishman a murderer or a supporter of murderers, the English soldiery rarely gave quarter, and, unless the accounts of their enemies are entirely devoid of truth, when they did give it, it was often violated. The peasants retaliated by knocking stray soldiers on the head, and by slaughtering parties too weak to resist. Yet, whenever ... the Irish forces were commanded by officers of rank and authority, they were distinguished for humanity under circumstances of no slight provocation. The garrisons of fortified posts captured by the Irish, were uniformly allowed to find their way in safety to a place of refuge. On the whole, the balance of advantage was on the Irish side.”

The history from now until the arrival of Rinuccini is almost entirely that of a long series of tedious negotiations between Ormond, acting for the King, and the Supreme Council, for a cessation of arms. Ormond had recently been made a Marquis, and his commission as Commander-in-Chief of the English troops had been enlarged, so as to leave him independent of the nominal Lord Lieutenant, the Earl of Leicester. Parsons still remained Lord Justice, and the King, did not venture to interfere with him. Leicester had got as far as Chester on his way to Ireland, but Charles, foreseeing that he would side with Parsons and make him still more powerful, summoned him to Oxford, this being practically the recall of his commission as Lord Lieutenant. The English interest in Ireland therefore remained in the hands of the Lords Justices, nominally acknowledging the King, but in reality, devoted to the Parliament and the policy of confiscation, and in those of the Marquis of Ormond, entirely devoted to the King, but with some sympathy for the Catholic nobility and gentry, especially those of the Pale, as he saw they had been driven through despair at the threatened confiscation, to join the Old-Irish in their uprising.

Reynolds and Goodwin had been sent over by the Parliament with £20,000, to attempt to win over the English garrison. The King, when he heard of their presence at the sittings of the Privy Council, denounced them as rebels, and severely reprimanded the Lords Justices. Soon after, he sent warrants for the arrest of Reynolds and Goodwin, but they had fled to England.

Charles, by this time at his wits’ end for forces to check the growing strength of the insurrection in England, had turned his thoughts to Ireland, and determined to enter into negotiations with the Confederates for a cessation so as to enable him to withdraw the English garrison from Ireland. He had proposed to make Ormond Lord Lieutenant, but left it to him to accept or decline the office. Ormond, however, advised him “to delay the sending him an authority to take that charge upon him,” and proceeded to the treaty with the Confederates as Commander-in-Chief of the Forces. Amongst the reasons other than the King’s wish, which influenced Ormond in seeking a cessation, were the almost complete exhaustion of supplies of money and food for his troops. The £20,000 brought by Reynolds and Goodwin were spent, having for only a short time barely sufficed, as Carte pithily puts it, “to give soldiers twelve pence a week to keep them from drinking water.” Though Ormond had defeated Preston at Ross, he had no provisions to enable him to keep the field, and was at once obliged to return to Dublin with a starving army clamouring for food and pay. The Lords Justices besought the English Parliament to send money, but the Parliament wanted all the money they could lay hands on, including that subscribed by the Adventurers for the Irish War for their own war against the King, so that it may be truly said that the liberties of the English people were literally paid for by the spoliation of the Old-Irish and Anglo-Irish proprietors.

In January, 1643, Charles issued a commission to Ormond, Clanricarde, and others, to treat with the Catholic leaders, and this step was, of course, at once resented by the Lords Justices. The officers of the English garrison made some protest, but weary of waiting for supplies, which the English Parliament was unable to send, Ormond succeeded in getting them to place their hopes in the King’s power to satisfy their complaints. The King’s Commissioners and those of the Confederation met at Trim on St. Patrick’s Day, 1643, and the latter presented their Remonstrance of Grievances. In that document they described the disabilities they were under on account of their faith, the exclusion of their sons from University education and public employment, the tricks and chicaneries of the Puritan officials striving to make fortunes out of their unhappy position, Parsons being the worst of these; the boast of Parsons and others, that Catholics would be forced to change their faith, and the intention of the English Parliament to pass Acts for the extirpation of the Catholic religion in the Three Kingdoms. It denounced the misconduct of the Lords Justices, their dependence on the English Parliament, the Confiscation Acts passed at their instigation, which had forced the Anglo-Irish to take up arms in self-defence. It declared the Irish Parliament completely independent of that of England, and that the latter had no right to legislate for Ireland. That the Irish Parliament had sunk under the Lords Justices to be a mere section of their own partisans, where the majority of the members of the House dare not appear. The document concluded by praying for a Free Parliament, in which all matters affecting Ireland might be discussed irrespective of Poynings’ Act, and that no Catholic should be, on any account, excluded from sitting and voting. If these favours were granted to them, the Confederates were ready to send an army of 10,000 men to England to defend the King’s prerogative.

Against this remonstrance, the Lords Justices sent a strongly-worded protest to the King against his entering into any treaty with the Irish. They recalled the events of the first rebellion; the Irish did not really care for their religion, but were so ungrateful for the care the English had taken of them as to massacre 150,000 men, women and children of that nation.

“Astounding as this statement was,” says Gardiner, “there was one point in the argument of the Lords Justices which had been passed over entirely by the Irish Commissioners. If the Irish, after all that had passed, were suffered to consolidate their power, would they allow the English to live on an equality with themselves?... Cynicism, however, has seldom gone further than the cool anticipation of slaughter which followed. They remember, say the writers, ‘that in the best of former times the Irish did so exceed in number, as that the Governors never cared or durst fully execute the laws for true reformation for fear of disturbance, having some hope always by civil and fair entreaty to win them to a civil and peaceable life; so if peace should now be granted them before the sword or famine have so abated them in number as that in a reasonable time, English colonies might overtop them.’ ‘No peace,’ the Lords Justices repeated, ‘could be safe or lasting till the sword have abated these rebels in number and power.’”

Ormond, while considering the proposals of the Confederates as totally inadmissible, condemned the representations of the Lords Justices as tending to countenance a scheme of extirpation iniquitous in the attempt, and impossible to be executed.

Charles was desirous of coming to terms with the Catholics without giving them any real power, so that he might strengthen his army in England. Though the manner in which even the rumour of an Irish Catholic army was received in England showed how dangerous it was for Charles even to think of it, still, by entering into negotiations he might gain time in Ireland, and be enabled to withdraw the English garrison—at any rate, temporarily. He first dismissed Parsons, and appointed Sir Henry Tichborne Lord Justice in his place, while Borlase, too old and inefficient to be of consequence, was allowed to remain. The King next authorized Ormond to treat for a cessation of arms for a year, and privately wrote to him to bring over the Irish garrison to Chester as soon as the cessation was agreed on.

The cessation was not, however, so speedily arranged as the King desired, and the Confederates were not so anxious to see Charles enter London in triumph as to forego the interests of religion and country. The earlier negotiations were broken off on Ormond’s refusal of the free Parliament asked for in the Remonstrance of Grievances. Nevertheless, delay was favourable to the Confederates, and their power was still extending over the country. In June, 1643, Ormond, conscious of his desperate military position, “and,” as Gardiner thinks, “perhaps willing to establish beyond dispute, the necessity of coming to terms with the insurgents, told the Lords Justices that he was ready to break off the negotiations if they could find any possible way of maintaining the troops.” They were unable to help him in any way, and Ormond set out once more, this time with the reluctant consent of the Castle Government, to attempt to come to terms with the Confederates, but after nearly three weeks of fruitless effort, he resolved to attack Preston once more. Preston wisely avoided a battle, and Ormond’s army in a starving condition, was obliged to retreat to Dublin.

Ormond and the Lords Justices had now no alternative but a cessation, and knowing that the King was willing to treat for a free Parliament, he prepared to resume negotiations. Some of the irreconcilables of the Privy Council bitterly opposed any cessation, but on the King’s order, Parsons, Sir John Temple, and others, were arrested as traitors to the King for having sided with “my rebels of England.”

Amongst the Confederates, the nobility and gentry of Norman or English extraction were willing to accept such terms as would restore to the Catholic Church its former jurisdiction, and would give them, through Parliament, the control of the Government and the assistance of the King’s troops against the Puritan army under Monroe. They foolishly believed that if the King “gained the victory over his enemies in England (he) would have either the will or the power to support in England the system which found favour at Kilkenny.”

The Old-Irish, especially of Ulster, and the clergy took a more accurate view of the situation, and were against any cessation, as it would only give time for the enemy to regain strength, and for disunion to spread in their own ranks. In these opinions they were strongly supported by Father Scarampi, who had recently arrived as Papal Legate. His views are embodied in a document drawn up by those of the Old-Irish most in his confidence, which is worth quoting at some length, as it is the whole case of the national party as distinguished from those who thought more of the King’s and the English interest, than that of their country. “We should undoubtedly,” they say, “carry on our work to establish the Catholic Faith, the authority of Parliament, and the security of our country by arms and intrepidity, not by cessations and indolence. For this there are the following reasons: That peace will ever be made between the King and the Parliament is improbable, nor would it be to our advantage, for if they combined, we should be necessitated to surrender. It is likely, however, that before long one side will become powerful enough to dictate to the other. If the Parliament prevail—which God forbid—all Ireland will fall under their arbitrary power; the swords of the Puritans will be at our throats, and we shall lose everything except our faith. Should the King triumph, we may expect much from his goodness and kindness, and much from the Queen’s intercession. It is uncertain, however, what laws or terms may be imposed on us in such circumstances. The King, should he succeed by the aid of the Protestants, would be in a manner engaged to them. They, as usual, would oppose freedom of religion in Ireland, and insist on the punishment of our ‘rebellion,’ as they style it, to enable them to seize our properties and occupy our estates. It would probably be thought a sufficient concession to the Queen to allow us to return to the miserable position in which we were before the war. On the other hand, if we now adopt proper measures, the party eventually triumphing in England will find us in arms, well provided, with increased territories, and stronger in foreign succours. Thus they would not so readily invade us, or swallow us up, so as to leave us without the free exercise of our faith, or some share in the administration of the kingdom.”

“It was the banner of Irish nationality,” says Gardiner, “which was here unfolded, and those who upheld it were at least not afraid to look in the face the stern fact that no English party would willingly tolerate the organisation of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, or the organisation of a purely Irish Government. If the opportunity of England’s divisions was to be seized to any profit, Ireland must become a nation strong enough to hold its own. To gain for itself the sentiment of patriotism, to cherish, in defiance of all assailants, its own traditions and its own beliefs, would be worthy many a struggle and many a defeat, if only, through suffering, it might be attained.”

The national party were not strong enough in the Assembly or the Council to successfully oppose the cessation; Ormond was permitted to resume negotiations, and the Articles for a Cessation for a year were signed on September 15, 1643. A narrow district on the East Coast, another round Cork, and such fortresses as were held by the Royal troops, were to remain in the hands of the English Commanders. All the rest of Ireland, outside Ulster, was in the power of the Confederates. If Monroe’s troops accepted the Cessation, they were to share its advantages; if not, Ormond’s army was to remain neutral, whilst the whole force of the Confederates was to march against them, and the King was even to be asked to allow Ormond to co-operate.

On these conditions, the Supreme Council agreed to pay £800 to relieve the garrison of Naas and £30,000 in money or beeves for the use of the regiments withdrawn to England in support of the King. The Confederates were also to send Commissioners to Oxford to discuss with Charles the terms of a permanent peace.

Such in brief was the Cessation, and from its very articles which prove the Confederation not only masters of almost the whole of Ireland, but so well provided with money and supplies as to be able to come substantially to the assistance of the King, we can estimate their folly in voluntarily throwing away a position they were never able to regain. Ormond’s diplomacy had triumphed. He had prepared the ground for the future sowing of dissensions in their ranks. He could now look forward to helping the King with the Irish garrison whose cause with this addition might triumph, and before the time expired, they could be back in Ireland flushed with victory, replenished in every way, and easily able to overcome the disunited insurgents. The Confederates had gained nothing, but had placed themselves in danger of losing all. An Irish writer declares “that the Puritans in Dublin did swear that if the Irish did hold out for one month more all the Parliamentarians would have deserted Leinster.... The enemy had no commander of any repute but Ormond, Tichborne, Hume and Monk, while the Irish had O’Neill’s victorious army ... ranging at pleasure in the counties of Meath and Dublin and Castlehaven taking the garrisons whereunto he marched, the enemy not daring to relieve any for fear of the Ulster (O’Neill’s) army. All the Irish got by this bargain was the release of a few prisoners.”

It is necessary only to allude to the attempt made by Randal McDonnell, Earl of Antrim, to raise by his own efforts 10,000 Irish soldiers for the service of the King, as it had no effect on the course of events.

In March, 1644, the Confederates’ Commissioners arrived at Oxford to treat with Charles for a permanent peace. Amongst the first conditions submitted, they required that no standing army should be maintained in Ireland, that all offices should be vacated whereby any titles to lands were found for the Crown since the first year of Elizabeth, that all attainders since that period and all grants and leases from the Crown should be revised in a free Parliament in which they would form the large majority. These conditions were found to be inadmissible by the King, as practically meaning the extinction of his authority in Ireland, and it is difficult to see how they could have been put before any English King, and especially one in the difficult position of Charles, with any hope of success. They accordingly modified their demands, and now asked for the freedom of their religion, the repeal of the penal laws which prevented them from holding public appointments, a free Parliament, and the repeal of Poynings’ Law during its session, the annulling of all Acts of the Irish Parliament since the prorogation of 7th August, 1641, to which they imputed the subsequent troubles, the vacating of all outlawries and attainders against Catholics since that date and of all offices found for the King’s title to lands since the year 1634. They also demanded the establishment of an Inn of Court and Catholic Colleges, a free and indifferent appointment of all Irish natives without exception to places in the public service, that an Act should be passed formally declaring the independency of their Parliament on that of England. If these conditions were accepted by the King, they were ready to send 10,000 men to his assistance, as well as money and supplies. Though unwilling to agree to most, if not all, of these conditions, Charles accepted the memorial for consideration as the basis of a future treaty.

Agents were also nominated at the desire of the King to represent the Irish Privy Council and the Protestant Royalists. These, headed by Archbishop Usher, set out for Oxford, but before they could arrive, Sir Charles Coote headed a Commission sent by the extreme Puritan party in Ireland, and hastened to the King with a memorial praying that he “would abate his quit rents and encourage and enable Protestants to re-plant the Kingdom, and cause a good walled town to be built in every county for their security, no Papist being allowed to dwell therein.” That he should “continue the penal laws and dissolve forthwith the assumed power of the Confederates, and banish all Popish priests out of Ireland, and that no Popish recusant should be allowed to sit or vote in Parliament.”

Archbishop Usher protested against the intolerant demands of these fanatics, but he desired that all the penal laws should be enforced and all Papists disarmed. The King vainly represented to them how useless it was to expect the Confederates, superior in power, and possessed of more than three-fourths of the Kingdom, to resign themselves disarmed to the mercy of those whom they have provoked by their resistance. Even in time of peace, he said, the penal laws were too odious to be strictly executed. It was, therefore, plain that no treaty with the Confederates could be made “on the terms proposed by the Protestants, and it was scarcely less evident that the most violent of this party,” in the interests of the English Parliament, “laboured to obstruct a treaty upon any terms whatever.”

However, Charles was keenly aware of his own necessities, and seeing that of the three Irish parties, that of the Confederates alone had the means to help him if they could be won over, treated their agents with particular attention, and as Leland says somewhat disparagingly, “answered their propositions with that courtesy and condescension which he had been taught by his misfortunes.” He was willing to refer the great difficulty of the independence of the Irish Parliament to be temporarily decided by both Parliaments. He agreed to pass an Act for removing the incapacity of Catholics to purchase lands and hold public offices, and to allow them places of education. Instead of reversing Acts of Parliament and attainders, he proposed to grant a general pardon, and to assent to such an Act of Oblivion as should be recommended by the Lord Lieutenant and Council. He was willing to summon a new Parliament in Ireland, but without the suspension of Poynings’ Act. With regard to the penal laws, he contended that as they had never been rigorously enforced, so his recusant subjects, in returning to their duty, should have no cause of complaint that they were treated with less moderation than in the two last reigns.

Though the negotiations were interrupted, the agents of the Confederation were conciliated by these declarations of the King, and said they confessed that, placed as he was, he could not well make further concessions at present, and hoped that when their General Assembly was aware of his situation they would modify their demands, though they themselves had no authority to recede from them. The King dismissed them with an admonition that would have had some weight from a man of firmer and more trustworthy character, but even as he was, his words were in a sense prophetic. He advised them to bear in mind his circumstances and their own, “that the existence of their nation and religion depended on the preservation of his just rights and authority in England, that if his Catholic subjects of Ireland would consent to such conditions as he could safely grant and they accept, with security to their lives, fortunes, and religion, and hasten to enable him to suppress his enemies it would then be in his power to vouchsafe such grace to them as should complete their happiness, and which he gave them his royal word he would “then dispense in such a manner as should not leave them disappointed of their just and full expectations. But if, by insisting on particulars which he could not in conscience grant, nor they in conscience necessarily demand, and such as though he might concede, yet, at present, would bring that damage on him which all their supplies could not countervail ... if they should thus delay their succours until the power of the rebels had prevailed in England and Scotland then they would quickly find their power in Ireland but an imaginary support for his interest or their own; and that they (the English rebels) who with difficulty had destroyed him, would without opposition root out their nation and religion.” The Confederate Commissioners returned to Kilkenny, and Ormond was empowered by the King to treat with the Supreme Council on the basis of the amended memorial. Meanwhile the war dragged on between the Confederates and the Scots and other adherents of the Parliament who refused the truce, while Ormond’s garrisons remained neutral. In the South, Lords Inchiquin and Broghill continued ravaging the country and capturing posts from the Confederates. They expelled the Catholic inhabitants of Cork, Youghal, and Kinsale, and wrote to the King asking him to proclaim the Confederates as rebels “and that they were resolved to die a thousand deaths rather than consent to any peace with them.” Supported now by the Parliament which sent a fleet into the Shannon, and disappointed at the King’s refusal to make him Lord President of Munster, Inchiquin soon after openly joined the Parliamentarians, and adopting a canting style, declared that “he was acting for the Gospel, and that if he died for it he should be held as a perfect martyr.”

The negotiations for the peace with the Confederates were resumed by Ormond in September, 1644, but it was soon evident that even if the political articles could be rendered acceptable to both parties, the religious ones promised to upset everything. The Irish demanded not only the repeal of all laws that hindered their freedom of worship, but those against appeals to Rome, and the portion of the Act of Praemunire against Papal jurisdiction. Though Charles would agree that the penal laws should not be enforced, he still would not consent to their repeal, and was absolutely resolved not to alter the Acts of Appeals and Praemunire. In this resolution he was strengthened by the action of the Ormondist faction in the General Assembly headed by Lord Muskerry and Geoffrey Browne. These declared privately to Ormond that they would accept the King’s terms on sufficient guarantee being given that the lives and properties of the Irish would be safe. They would not press for the repeal of the penal laws which they thought would fall into abeyance when Charles was restored to power. The King now yielded somewhat and ordered Ormond to promise that the penal laws should be suspended as soon as peace was made, and that if restored to his rights by Irish aid, they should be absolutely repealed, “but all those against appeals to Rome and Praemunire must stand.”

Ormond, feeling the difficulty of his position as a Protestant native of Ireland with many connections amongst the gentry of the Pale, and, perhaps, also, through a belief that the King would conduct the negotiations without him, wrote offering to send his resignation, but Charles would not hear of it, and urged him to complete the treaty. While so many estimates have been formed of Ormond’s conduct and capacity at this juncture by Irish partisans, it may be useful to quote an English opinion. Gardiner, reviewing his conduct in these transactions says: “Of all living men Ormond was perhaps the least fitted to conduct that negotiation even to the temporary sense of which it was alone capable. His virtues and his defects alike stood in his way. He was too loyal to throw off his shoulders the load which Charles had placed upon them, but he was at the same time so completely wanting in initiative power that he never thought—as Strafford under similar circumstances would assuredly have thought—of suggesting a policy of his own, or even of criticising adversely the one imposed on him by his master. Yet it ought to have been evident to Ormond that an Irish army was not to be gained by haggling over the privileges to be accorded to the true Irish Parliament, and the true Irish Church.” Even if the 10,000 men had been really forthcoming, they would have been of little avail unless those Irishmen were heartily engaged in the King’s cause.

Before the Oxford negotiations were broken off Charles had had an opportunity of winning their confidence. The English Parliament urged Monroe to break the Cessation and sent him a commission as Commander-in-Chief of all the English as well as the Scottish forces in Ulster. He complied with their orders, seized Belfast, and defeated Castlehaven’s army sent against him by the Supreme Council, who offered to place all their forces under Ormond’s command if he would unite with them against the Scots. Ormond refused to do so without the King’s positive order, and at that time, Charles withheld. No doubt he was afraid to take a step which would have cost him most of his army in England; “But what,” says Gardiner, “is to be thought of a policy which based itself on the co-operation of an Irish army in England when it was impossible to grant to the Irish the co-operation of an English army in Ireland?”

The King was apparently also sensible that some other intermediary than Ormond would be needed to bring about the only end he had in view—the strengthening of his army by any means against the Parliament. He soon found, or, rather, had ready to his hand, one far more likely than Ormond to come to speedy terms with the Confederate Catholics, and we accordingly approach the consideration of a series of transactions in which the King’s conduct has provided a fertile theme for discussion Whatever may be thought of his mode of conducting these negotiations, there is no doubt that nothing in his whole career injured him so much in English opinion or contributed more certainly to his tragic end.

When the Irish agents were at Oxford Charles had already been discussing his chances of Irish aid with Lord Herbert of Raglan, the Catholic son of the Marquis of Worcester. He and his father had generously placed their great wealth at the disposal of the King who had but lately acknowledged having received no less than £250,000 from them. He now conferred on Lord Herbert the title of Earl of Glamorgan by warrant, but in order to keep the whole transaction private, though the warrant was presented at the Signet Office, no steps were taken to render it valid by patent. Glamorgan offered—and his offer was eagerly accepted by the King—to induce the Confederates to enter into a private treaty for bringing over the 10,000 men on terms more liberal than Ormond was authorized to grant, he was also to bring 6,000 from Wales, and as many as he could get from Lorraine and the Low Countries to Lynn in Norfolk, where the Parliament’s Commander was ready to betray his post. Glamorgan, sanguine of success, was to be the Commander-in-Chief of the whole of this Catholic army. He chiefly relied on the Pope and other Catholic princes whom he expected to eagerly support a scheme from which the Church was to reap many advantages. The Commission to Glamorgan was issued without the Great Seal, but he soon overcame that difficulty. Any seal was good enough to show to Irish Confederates and foreign courts, and it is believed that he and Endymion Porter cut off a genuine seal from some other document. Charles, completely won over by the assurances of Glamorgan that he would soon be furnished with the means of overcoming all his difficulties, was ready to confer the highest honours. He offered the hand of the Princess Elizabeth to Glamorgan’s eldest son, and conferred on Glamorgan the higher title of Duke of Somerset, though in the case of this title also, the legal formalities were for the present avoided. Though Charles so highly appreciated Glamorgan’s enthusiasm, he apparently did not credit him with much discretion. In writing to Ormond that Glamorgan was about to visit Ireland on his own private affairs, he added, “His honesty or affection to my service will not deceive you, but I will not answer for his judgment.”

Ormond was fully aware of the King’s resolve to conclude peace with the Confederates on Muskerry’s conditions, and it was for this reason he had tried to shift the responsibility for complying with them to some one directly from England. Charles, as we have seen, refused to accept his resignation, but he now sent Glamorgan to persuade those of the Confederates who were opposed to peace on Muskerry’s terms, and to assure them that the penal laws, though unrepealed, would never be enforced. Charles desired that Glamorgan should be guided in everything by the advice of Ormond, but so desperately resolved was he on getting help from the Confederates, that he actually gave “the feather-brained Glamorgan a commission to succeed Ormond as Lord Lieutenant in the event of the death or misconduct of the latter; in other words, in the event of his persisting in his refusal to carry out the negotiation on the lines indicated by his last instructions.” At the same time it is evident that Charles did not think there was any likelihood of Ormond being replaced by Glamorgan, and that he counted rather on their working heartily together. “You may engage your estate, interest and credit,” he instructed Glamorgan, “that we will most readily and punctually perform any our promises to the Irish, and as it is necessary to conclude a peace suddenly, whatsoever shall be consented unto by our Lieutenant the Marquis or Ormond, we will die a thousand deaths rather than disannul or break it; and if upon necessity anything to be condescended unto, and yet the Lord Marquis not willing to be seen therein or not fit for us publicly to own, do you endeavour to supply the same.” Taken in conjunction with the instructions to Ormond, it is plain that Glamorgan was to act with him, but with powers to give the Confederates those assurances which Ormond as a Protestant Royalist might not feel himself free to give, that the penal laws would be suspended until peace was declared and repealed as soon as Charles’s restoration to power would make it safe for him to do so.

On January 6, 1645, Charles issued a Commission under the Great Seal to Glamorgan to levy troops not only in Ireland but on the Continent, and this was followed on the 12th by a letter to him in which the King said, “So great is the confidence we repose in you, as that whatsoever you shall perform, as warranted under our signature, pocket signet, or private mark, or even by word of mouth, without further ceremony, we do on the word of a King and a Christian, promise to make good to all intents and purposes as effectually as if your authority from us had been under the Great Seal of England, with this advantage that we shall esteem ourselves the more obliged to you for your gallantry in not standing upon such nice terms to do us service, which we shall, God willing, reward.... Proceed, therefore, cheerfully, speedily, and boldly, and for your doing so this shall be your sufficient warrant.”

These commissions and instructions of Charles can only be viewed as the words of a desperate gambler willing to promise anything that would provide him with another stake to hazard in the game. He was not, however, dependent only on Glamorgan for Irish and Continental assistance. His Queen, Henrietta Maria, had escaped to France, and was actively engaged in procuring troops. She had been kindly welcomed by the Queen-Regent, Anne of Austria, but the Prime Minister, Mazarin, looked on her coldly. France, exhausted by her long but victorious struggle with the Emperor for those Rhine Provinces she was again destined to lose, was not in a position to make any effort from sentimental motives to help Charles. Mazarin had also no interest in seeing those troubles ended which prevented England from interfering with his designs on the Continent. He therefore received favourably Father O’Hartigan, the Confederate agent at Paris. His plans were such as to lead to the practically complete independence of Ireland. Mazarin, however, would not help unless everything was done in the name of Charles, and with the approval of the Queen of England. O’Hartigan was soon able to report that he had her support. A joint committee of English and Irish Catholics had been formed in Paris and had resolved that the Catholic Church should be first established in Ireland as a step to its establishment in England. By this resolution it was hoped to obtain considerable help in money from the Pope and other Catholic princes, but it was not so much of the interests of the Church in England O’Hartigan was thinking, as of Irish independence. Sir Kenelm Digby was to go to Rome to solicit the help of the Pope. O’Hartigan, writing privately to the Supreme Council at Kilkenny, recommended that after the enemy had been expelled from Ireland, the long talked of Irish army might be despatched to England to replace Charles on the throne. There was another scheme in which the Duke of Lorraine was to play the leading part. He had been deprived of his Duchy by Richelieu, and as a Catholic prince of the Empire, had fought against France. Mazarin was anxious to give his energies some other outlet, and told the Queen that if the Duke could be induced to lead his troops into England, money would not be wanting. The Duke engaged to enter England with 10,000 men, and the Prince of Orange was asked to supply the ships to carry them, as well as 5,000 the Queen was assured would be raised in France.

These projects—for they were never more than projects—show why Glamorgan had a commission to raise troops abroad as Charles placed no faith in O’Hartigan. O’Hartigan’s letter, in which he expressed his real hopes, had been captured by a Parliamentary cruiser and sent to Ormond. Charles therefore warned the Queen that O’Hartigan was a knave, and in a letter to Ormond mentioned that the Prince of Orange had consented to supply the ships for the continental troops. He urged Ormond to conclude peace, and said that he would consider the Irish army a good bargain even if he had to consent to Poynings’ Law being suspended, and to Ormond’s joining the Confederates against the Scots; he would make no further concession regarding the penal laws than he had already promised. A month later, when his position in England had become still more critical, he wrote “If the suspension of Poynings’ Act for such Bills as shall be agreed on between you there, and the present taking away of the penal laws against Papists by a law will do it I shall not think it a bad bargain, so that freely and vigorously they engage themselves in my assistance against my rebels in England and Scotland.” But even now Ormond was to make a better bargain if possible, and not to mention these greater powers except in the last extremity.

Even if Ormond were as willing as the King to make these concessions, he had to carry on his negotiations with the help of a Privy Council that would not be likely to view them favourably. For this reason the King decided that Glamorgan should now start for Ireland with powers not only as commander, but to enable him to treat with the Confederates “not indeed without Ormond’s knowledge, but in substitution for him if it proved to be necessary.” Charles gave Ormond a further commission with full powers to treat with the Confederates in such matters as had to be agreed to “wherein our Lieutenant cannot so well be seen in, as not fit for us at present public to own.” He urged him to proceed with all secrecy, and promised on the word of a King and a Christian, to ratify whatever Glamorgan should grant to the Confederates, “they having by their supplies testified their zeal to our service.”

In the meantime the King’s cause had grown much weaker, and it was doubtful even if the Irish army could be landed in England, or, if landed, whether it could be of any help. Not only was Charles severely defeated at Naseby, but his private papers were captured at Sherburne, and his instructions to Ormond made known to the Parliament. Glamorgan on his arrival in Ireland found that a new factor had been introduced into the negotiations by the General Assembly’s adoption of the demand of the Catholic clergy that they should be confirmed in the possession of the churches actually in the hands of the Confederates with the property appertaining thereto as well as all derelict churches. The Confederate Commissioners had been instructed to yield nothing on this point, and as Charles refused to concede anything more than he had done already, and as Ormond concealed his powers with regard to the penal laws, the treaty again broke down. Glamorgan seeing that he could do nothing with Ormond, accompanied the disappointed Confederate Commissioners to Kilkenny, where he privately resumed the negotiations, and acting on the very loosely-worded and wide instructions given him by Charles on March 12, he concluded a secret treaty with the Confederates.

By this instrument, which comprised what were called the Religious Articles, and which was signed on August 25, 1645, he agreed on behalf of the King to the free and public exercise of the Catholic religion. This, though set forth more definitely than Ormond would probably have agreed to, may be looked on as not exceeding the terms Ormond was authorized to grant. But in two other clauses Glamorgan’s treaty was far in advance of anything Ormond would grant or to which indeed Charles had consented, unless we regard the secret commission as empowering Glamorgan to promise anything as long as he could get the troops Charles so sorely needed. Glamorgan agreed that all churches fallen into the hands of the Catholics since the rising in Ulster, and the derelict churches “other than such as are now actually enjoyed by his ‘Majesty’s Protestant subjects,’ were to remain in their possession.” Next, he agreed that the Catholics were to be exempt from the jurisdiction of the Protestant clergy, and their own clergy were not to be “molested for the exercise of their jurisdiction over their respective Catholic flocks in matters spiritual and ecclesiastical.” This naturally left open the question of appeals to Rome, since there must be some authority over the clergy to decide what were civil and what were spiritual cases, and it was scarcely likely that the Confederates could consent to its being vested in the King.

Charles had not heard of the question of the churches before Glamorgan started, but when he did he wrote to him on July 31, and said he would consent only to the Catholics building chapels for themselves, and absolutely refused to allow them to retain any of the churches.

It seems probable that the King was sincere when he declared that he would look on the giving up of the churches as the abandonment of his religion, and that Glamorgan, eager to obtain the 10,000 men from the Confederates, had exceeded his instructions, but hoped to have his fault overlooked by Charles in view of the great assistance the Irish soldiers would be to his cause. At the same time, Gardiner, who has discussed this question very freely in his History of the Great Civil War, and in a special article in the English Historical Review, does not make sufficient allowance for the shifty vacillating character of Charles, and it is quite permissible to assume that when he gave his general instructions in such vague terms to Glamorgan, he contemplated the possibility of having to disavow any action he might take under them, while, if such action were not questioned by his enemies, he was quite ready to profit by it. It would, however, seem that Glamorgan knew he was acting in a way the King would very likely not agree to; for when he signed the treaty he handed the Confederates another document called a defeasance, in which he declared that he did not intend to bind the King to consent to anything “other than he himself shall please, after he hath received these ten thousand men being a pledge and testimony” of the loyalty of his Irish Catholic subjects. This document was not to be disclosed to Charles until Glamorgan had done all in his power to induce him to agree to the religious articles.

On this point Gardiner says, “It was hardly within the bounds of possibility that Glamorgan’s action should prove beneficial either to his master or to the Irish people; but he was surely right in thinking that if a military alliance was to be formed with the Confederates it could only be by the acceptance of their own terms. It was childish to expect the hearty co-operation of the Irish if their Church was to be maintained in the position of a merely tolerated sect, the organisation of which was in constant danger of a sudden application of the Statutes of Appeal and PrÆmunire; and if the ecclesiastical lands and buildings set apart for religious use by their ancestors, and now recovered after a deprivation of less than a century, were to be forcibly torn from them, and restored to the professors of an alien creed, from whom they had nothing but persecution to expect.”

The Supreme Council of the Confederates at once proceeded to test the new alliance they thought they had formed, and on August 29, asked Ormond to join his forces with theirs against the Scots under Monroe in Ulster, but Ormond gave no reply though pressed by Glamorgan, who assured him that the Confederates would now send the 10,000 men to England, and would resume the treaty for the political articles with Ormond. Glamorgan begged Ormond to grant as much as possible and let the Confederates appeal to the King for the rest. Ormond was, of course, kept in the dark as to the secret treaty for the religious articles by which the Confederates had been persuaded that they would get all they wanted from Charles, so that they were willing to accept such instalment as Ormond would offer.

The Confederates accordingly once more sent Commissioners to Dublin, and the discussion with Ormond continued for another two months, but Ormond refused absolutely to exceed his instructions or to yield anything in matters of religion. On November 20, a few days after Rinuccini arrived there, Glamorgan went to Kilkenny. He found the Supreme Council agreed that if Ormond persisted in refusing the terms they demanded as to religion, the political treaty should be published by itself whilst the religious articles should be kept secret until ratified by Charles. They also promised that the 10,000 men should be sent without waiting for the King’s ratification, but Glamorgan was to swear not to employ them in the King’s service until the religious articles were agreed to, and if refused, he was to either compel his consent by force of arms or bring the whole force back to Ireland.

We are now able to take up in its proper order the consideration of Rinuccini’s mission. In the winter of 1644 the Confederates had sent their Secretary Bellings to solicit help in money from the Pope and other Catholic princes. He was favourably received by the new Pontiff Innocent X, and was greatly surprised at hearing that the Pope would send a nuncio who would act directly in his name and report to him concerning the position of Irish parties. In the first instance the Pope selected Luigi Omodei, but as he being a Milanese was a Spanish subject, and his employment might give offence to France, and as the Pope wished to be perfectly impartial between France and Spain, he selected Giovanni Battista Rinuccini, Archbishop of Fermo, who, as a subject of the Duke of Tuscany, could be regarded as neutral. Bellings, in after years, when his thoughts were perhaps embittered by disappointment, said it was a job to please the Duke of Tuscany. Rinuccini was born in 1592, a member of a noble Florentine family, and at the time we speak of was in his forty-third year. His father was Camillo Rinuccini, and his mother Virginia, daughter of Pier Antonio Bandini, sister of Cardinal Ottavio Bandini. He was educated first by the Jesuits in Rome and afterwards went to the University of Bologna in his eighteenth year. Then he studied law at Perugia, and took his doctor’s degree at Pisa, and distinguished himself so remarkably that he was elected a member of the Cruscan Academy though only in his twenty-first year. His first appointments by the Roman Court were those of Chamberlain to Gregory XV, and Secretary to the Congregation of Rites. When Urban VIII became Pope he continued his advancement, and made him Civil Lieutenant to the Cardinal Vicar, and soon after Archbishop of Fermo in 1625. At Fermo Rinuccini seems to have found his most suitable sphere of work, for he proved in all respects an excellent Archbishop, and was so loved by the people and felt so true an interest in them that he declined the metropolitan See of Florence in his native Duchy in 1631. In a religious sense he appears to have been an eminently holy and good man, though perhaps more than ordinarily imbued with the intolerant opinions of the age he lived in. He had, moreover, but small knowledge of the ways of men who live wholly in the world, and was absolutely ignorant of the feelings of people in political matters who had always possessed representative government of which he, as an Italian brought up amongst the despotic courts of the Peninsula, had no experience. The Pope, it must be remembered, was then a great temporal prince, and his government was as despotic in practice as any in Europe. He, too, appears to have shared the belief of Rinuccini, that it was only necessary to gain over the Sovereign of a country, and that no regard need be paid to its other inhabitants, heedless of the fact that where free institutions exist, a king who is disliked or distrusted by his subjects soon ceases to have any authority whatever. England was then leading the way in that struggle for popular liberty which was to continue in revolutions and bloodshed until our own time; but on the Continent at that epoch the great mass of any population simply did not count in political matters. To this ignorance and inexperience of Rinuccini’s of the feelings of men like the Irish who had lived under representative institutions however limited, and were striving to regain and extend them, must be attributed much of his failure in dealing with Irishmen of various parties. He was too autocratic in his methods, and being a man of resolute and inflexible character, determined to bend others to his will utterly regardless that such a course might cause him to lose many whom it was his interest to conciliate. He had, moreover, an exaggerated sense of his own dignity, and a fondness for details of etiquette, dress, and ceremonial, which, though to some extent natural to one brought up in the most ceremonious court of a ceremonious period, was carried by him to a point bordering on the ridiculous. It must be said of him, however, that though he had the ecclesiastical patronage of Ireland in his hands for some years, his appointments were made in the interest of the Church, and no charge of favouritism can be made against him. His object was the restoration of the Church in Ireland “in its full splendour,” and with this before him he did not pause to consider local feelings or local experience of the difficulties in his way in an age and in circumstances when such an enterprise could only be considered Quixotic. From these characteristics it may be inferred how well fitted he was to strike the final blows that broke up the newly-formed union of the Irish nation.

For a hundred years the Catholic Church had been conducting the counter-Reformation, and had already recovered the allegiance of a great part of Europe. To Innocent X it appeared that the time was ripe for restoring his spiritual authority in England. The Catholics there were still a numerous and wealthy body and comprised amongst their leaders many of the most ancient and most highly placed of the nobility, and would afford a solid foundation for such a reconstruction. The difficult position in which the King was placed seemed to render him a peculiarly suitable object for overtures, and if he could be restored chiefly by the aid of the Catholics and the Pope it was hoped that the Church might gain great advantages if not complete re-establishment. We find in the secret instructions given by Innocent to Rinuccini that these expectations are clearly expressed, and show, moreover, how badly informed the Pope was as to the true state of feeling regarding the Catholic Church in England. In the concluding paragraph the Pope says: “In fine, this rebellion in England has already caused so many divisions in religion and so many disputes amongst the Protestants themselves, that all who have some belief in a future life are beginning to waver, and would become Catholics if they were not restrained by the fear of losing their property and temporal comforts. If, then, by means of this Catholic army, you can obtain from His Majesty the revocation of the penal laws against the Catholics, the abolition of the proposed Oath of Fidelity and freedom in religion, that is that the Catholics be able to hold all appointments in the Kingdom and in Parliament like his other subjects, we may hope in a few years for the conversion of the whole Kingdom—a most important step towards the eradication of heresy from the whole North, and without which the Irish can never hope to enjoy in peace the conditions granted in favour of the true faith in Ireland.”

The Catholic army here referred to was to consist chiefly of the troops who had for the past three years formed the subject of negotiation between Charles and the Confederates. It is well to bear in mind the Pope’s instructions with regard to this army as showing that both in his eyes and in Rinuccini’s, the Irish were to be merely the convenient instruments of the greater design. He says: “To ensure success in these negotiations two points remain to be well considered; first, that the requisite conditions be well weighed so that the services we hope from this Catholic army be efficacious; the second, to facilitate by every means the agreement between the King and the Irish.” The first of these conditions may be reduced to the following articles:—

“1. That the Irish army shall never agree to land in England with less than ten or twelve thousand effective men, that they may be able to defend themselves without danger of being cut to pieces by the English who serve under the King.

“2. That two sea ports be placed in their hands to disembark their troops in England, and that those places be under the command of persons in their confidence.

“3. That the generals of the army and all the officers ... besides the governors of the said places be appointed by the Irish.

“4, 5. The fourth and fifth articles are unimportant and need not be quoted.

“6. That permission and authority from the King be accorded to the English Catholics to form themselves into a body of cavalry proportionate in strength to join them when and where appointed by the Irish general to serve in his army and under his command....

“7. That the Catholic general of this cavalry be a person whom the Irish can entirely trust, and must, therefore, be first accepted by their own general.”

That the political freedom of the Irish people, the independence of their Parliament, the right of Catholics to sit therein, in fact the political articles which the Confederates had demanded and which Charles was willing to concede were altogether a secondary consideration in the eyes of the Pope is evident from the following:—

“To facilitate the agreement between the King and the Irish, that articles must be so framed that nothing essential to the full establishment of the Catholic religion in Ireland be omitted; matters of less moment may be remitted, in particular those tending to changes in the Political Government, as they would, without any doubt, retard the agreement.” This passage illustrates the inexperience of the Pope of the power of a people with free institutions, and that he had yet to learn that a people politically free may follow any religion they please. It was scarcely likely that the Catholics, possessing, as they inevitably would, a large majority in the Irish Parliament, would long submit to the disabilities under which they laboured in religious matters.

As to any aspirations for the complete independence of Ireland, the Pope promptly threw cold water on them. In his letter of June 3, 1645, before Rinuccini left Paris, the Cardinal Secretary writes: “Nor is he (the Pope) too well pleased with the rumours which are spread by some Irish Catholics, that they desire to throw off their allegiance to the King because he has not chosen to grant the concessions they demand; and his Holiness would also desire that they should speak with greater moderation of the articles of peace. And, further, he wishes them to understand that he desires to see them continue obedient to the royal power, hoping, however, that from the King himself and from the protection of the Queen, they may gain all they desire. To this end your Excellency’s persuasions and warnings must be directed; His Holiness rests securely on your prudence, whenever you can convey news to him of the Irish, whether it be of rebellion or refusal of submission to the King, and that you will warn your followers in this matter.”

It cannot, however, be doubted that the Pope was entirely within his rights as head of the Catholic Church in endeavouring to promote its extension and well-being, and, however ill-chosen the time and circumstances, that this was his only object is plain from the following passage in the same letter, as well as from his more formal instructions: “Your Excellency is aware that the intentions of His Holiness respecting the affairs of Ireland do not go beyond the limits of pure benefit to the Catholic religion, and that your mission never had, and has no other aims than to procure its free exercise, to restore ecclesiastical discipline, and to reform the habits of the Catholics relaxed by a long course of free living. In all that touches on the civil government your instructions have been so framed as by no possibility to excite the jealousy of either the King or Queen of England; nor does the Holy Father work to any other purpose in spirit, since he concerns himself solely in the propagation of the Catholic religion without a single thought of prejudicing the temporal power of anyone whatsoever.”

Unfortunately for the good intentions of the Pope, he was, by attempting to seize this imaginary opportunity for an extension of his spiritual authority, taking the most certain course to further prejudice the already shaky temporal dominion of Charles I.

Rinuccini left Rome towards the end of March, 1645, and reached Genoa on April 15. He was received with much honour by the Doge and Senate, and writes to the Pope evidently with great pleasure of the ceremonies that took place and the honours paid to him. “I was escorted from my house by a cortÈge of almost all the nobility.... At the foot of the stairs four Procurators met me, placed me in the midst of them, and conducted me to the presence chamber, where the Doge waited. He descended four steps from the raised part of the room ... and conducted me to the canopy on his left hand, but to a seat a little lower than his own.”

Having left Genoa he proceeded by Marseilles and Avignon to Paris, where he arrived towards the end of May, and was cordially received by the Queen Regent, Anne of Austria, for whom he had a Golden Rose sent by the Pope. This Rose was the subject of much correspondence, as there seems to have been some doubt as to whether the Queen would receive it with sufficient gratitude. He seems to have at once constituted himself an extra Nuncio at Paris and entered on a lengthy correspondence on French and Spanish affairs without the knowledge of the resident Nuncio. He has been accused by Bellings and others of not wanting to go to Ireland, and of intriguing to replace the Nuncio then at Paris. Mazarin evidently suspected or accused him of some such design, for we find that though Rinuccini’s letter is missing, the Private Secretary’s reply points out that “no one can answer Cardinal Mazarin with greater force than Your Excellency when he complains that His Holiness sent you to France, not merely on your way to Ireland, but that you should adroitly contrive to establish yourself as Nuncio in Paris,” and supplies him with the reasons to be advanced in refutation of this charge. Some grounds were doubtless given for Mazarin’s suspicions through the Pope as he afterwards explained having inadvertently omitted to give Rinuccini letters for the Nuncio at Paris.

Rinuccini had also been favourably received and encouraged by Gaston Duke of Orleans, and by CondÉ, but nothing practical resulted from the politeness of these princes. Mazarin, from whom he hoped considerable help in money and ships, was very cautious, and his influence over the Queen Regent was very great. The news of Naseby had completely damped any ardour there may have been for the Irish cause as a means of keeping England weak. Rinuccini found that the Queen Henrietta Maria of England would not receive him publicly as Nuncio, because it was contrary to law in England, and through fear of the harm it might do her husband in the eyes of his Protestant subjects. He is much concerned about this, and whether he should go to a private audience and if there uncover his head. The Pope taking a larger and more sensible view of the matter tells him:—“However, if the Queen either for fear of injuring the King her husband, or for any private reason, does not think it well to receive you at a public or private audience, His Holiness does not wish her Majesty to have any trouble about the matter, since he will be satisfied with any resolutions of a Queen so pious and so zealous for the Catholic faith. I am, however, to add that should your Excellency not be disposed to accept private audience, that you may not put in doubt the prerogative of the Nuncio to appear covered before all queens (even if in France at similar audiences a Nuncio does not appear covered) still we do not see how any doubt can rest on the prerogative whilst at all public audiences the right to be covered is established.”

With Secretary Bellings the Nuncio was on very friendly terms, but perhaps because he was desirous to keep him with him so that he should not reach Ireland first as he considered that Bellings would put the interests of Charles I before those of the Pope. Scarampi, the Papal Legate in Ireland, writing at this time says that if peace were concluded between the English royalists and the Catholic Confederation without Rinuccini’s consent, it would be fatal to the Church’s interests.

Rinuccini prolonged his stay at Paris over three months. He had some excuse for this delay, since in his letter of 3rd July, 1645, the Pope says:—“A fortnight ago your Excellency was told if by chance the Queen of France should give you any motive for remaining in that country, Your Excellency might, under some pretext, prolong your stay in that country; but since His Holiness sees that this has not happened ... he has resolved that Your Excellency shall proceed on your journey in the manner first arranged.” However, this hint was lost on Rinuccini, who was evidently in no hurry to exchange Paris even for Kilkenny. It is true he had, or at any rate made, many excuses on the score of difficulty in finding shipping. However, the Pope became impatient, and there is a marked change of tone in the succeeding letters. 14th August—“Let Your Excellency go on your way rejoicing with the blessing of the Holy Father upon you.” 21st—“Your Excellency will hasten your going to Ireland; every day’s delay may produce the worst effects.” 28th—“If you have not already done so, you must set out.” 11th September—“We await with much anxiety news of your Excellency’s arrival in Ireland.” 18th September—“The displeasure of His Holiness increases at your Excellency’s delay in your departure for Ireland, and he laments to see that all the negotiations, missions and provisions which Your Excellency has continued to introduce, tend still more to retard it. He commands, therefore, that Your Excellency with all promptitude, shall set out at once for that island, that you do not delay in any part of France in expectation of letters or information from Spinola, whom you have sent on before, much less wait until the frigates which were to be provided by Invernizzi in Flanders to accompany you shall be put in order.... The General Assembly, if they had known of Your Excellency’s presence, would not perhaps have dissolved without coming to some conclusion, and God knows from what they have lately done, if Your Excellency be not there, whether they many not precipitately form some revolution as little beneficial to the Catholic religion as to its free exercise.” This seemed to have its due effect, for the Pope’s next letter found Rinuccini in Ireland. It is an important document as setting forth the view that must necessarily be taken by any person of sound judgment of Charles’s negotiation through Glamorgan. The Pope refers to a letter received from the Legate in Ireland describing the powers possessed by Glamorgan and the conclusion of the secret treaty, and goes on to say, “Father Scarampi having become aware of this agreement, he remonstrated by letter not only with the Bishops, but also with the Council ... on the small foundation they had in any negotiations with the Earl, whilst the mandates which he had produced were subscribed by the King and his secretary only, signed with the small seal, and in consequence deprived of the necessary authority, the King having no power in himself to dispose of the political affairs of these kingdoms. The whole foundation of the negotiation, therefore, rested on the Earl, which being made by another, could not bind the King if he did not choose to be bound; moreover, being a convention made with the Bishops, it would scandalise the world to see that in the published articles of peace no mention was made of the Church, of ecclesiastical property, or of the authority and jurisdiction of the Bishops, which all remained at the mercy of the King, should he not wish to make peace or observe it; and inasmuch as the Catholic laity when satisfied with the articles which had reference to themselves, would not care to make a stand for others however important, in which their own interest was not involved, would have abandoned them. Although these reasons appeared very strong to the Council and the Bishops ... yet they had remitted the whole affair to the Earl, had declared themselves satisfied on their part with his proposals on ecclesiastical matters, and consented to the publication of the treaty of peace.... His Holiness commands me to say that if by letter from Father Scarampi or from others to be relied on, you are convinced that the peace between the Catholics of Ireland and the King of England is established with the articles and in the manner described, he will be content that you do not prosecute your journey to Ireland, and that you shall wait for further orders from His Holiness; but if the intelligence your Excellency receives does not convey the assurance that the peace is certainly concluded, then you will at once pursue your journey. But should the peace be established with these same articles and in the manner described, then His Holiness desires that neither Your Excellency nor Father Scarampi shall do anything to express approval or disapproval, but remain, so to say, entirely passive.”

It is a curious thing that notwithstanding the Pope’s clear view of the powerlessness of Charles’s position, he should have been willing to treat with him at all.

Rinuccini writing from Limerick on October 25, gives an exciting account of his voyage. He sailed from the island of St. Martin or Isle de RÉ, on Monday the 18th, and the wind being favourable, expected to reach Waterford on Thursday. On Thursday, however, there was a fog, and owing to its being full moon, the sea was so rough that it was thought better to keep out to sea. In the grey of the morning on Friday they saw a large vessel in full sail and a small frigate giving them chase. These were commanded by Plunket, an Irishman, who, having joined the Parliament, had been ordered to watch the approaches to Ireland. The Irishmen with the Nuncio and Secretary Bellings in particular, knowing the fate awaiting them if captured, immediately armed, resolved to resist to the last. The Nuncio was ill in bed, the sea being no respecter of persons, “my illness greatly aggravated, and already for two whole days without any attendance whatever from my servants, as they were prostrated by sea-sickness, and as little able to hear as to obey any order.” Nevertheless, he felt his courage rise to a higher pitch than ever before, and prepared in his own heart to give up life and liberty in whatever way God should dispose of him, even if it seemed to him necessary that he and those in his care should be carried captives to London. However, his fortitude was not put to this test, for the chase ended at nightfall. He attributes their escape to a miracle obtained for him by St. Peter, whose image formed the figurehead of the ship; but Father Meehan sententiously remarks, “that he must have subsequently learned that the escape of his pursuers was still more wonderful, for Plunket’s cooking galley having caught fire, and being alarmed for his magazine, he was obliged to shorten sail and thus suffer the San Pietro to escape.” The chase had driven them a long way to the west and they had some difficulty in making the land, but they succeeded next day in reaching Kenmare Bay, where they landed on the 21st of October, 1645. His first lodging was in a shepherd’s hut, and he remained there two days “not so much to repose after our trial as to return thanks for our safety.”

Before leaving Paris he drew upon the Pope for 15,000 dollars; Cardinal Antonio Barberius gave him 10,000, and Mazarin 25,000, altogether 50,000. 20,000 were spent for arms and munitions, and these were now landed. The rest of the money was brought in specie. From Kenmare he started for Limerick with an escort furnished by the Supreme Council and the surrounding gentry. “On his journey he was much pleased at the fine appearance, hardihood, and activity of the men and the beauty and modesty of the women. He was amazed at the fecundity of the latter. There were married couples, he reported with astonishment, which were blessed with no fewer than thirty children still living, whilst he had been told families of fifteen and twenty were quite common.” He was hospitably received at Ardtully Castle by Donough M’Carthy and his wife, a sister of Lord Muskerry and niece of the Marquis of Ormond. At Macroom Castle he was received by the Lady Helena Butler, sister to Ormond and wife of Muskerry, who was then in Dublin. These names are mentioned to show incidentally the close connection between Ormond and the Anglo and Old Irish proprietors. At Dromsecane he was met by Richard Butler, Ormond’s brother, a member of the Supreme Council, at the head of two troops of horse, thence by Clonmeen and Kilmallock to Limerick. Limerick, hitherto neutral, had been persuaded by Scarampi to join the Confederation, and the Nuncio was received with full honours by the clergy, corporation, and the garrison. On November 12th he halted within three miles of Kilkenny, and received a deputation of welcome from the Council. Next day he entered his litter surrounded by a vast concourse of people and set out for the city. He left the litter on approaching the gate, and donning the Pontifical hat and cape mounted a richly caparisoned horse. A canopy was held over him by leading citizens, bare headed in spite of the rain which fell in torrents. At the Market Cross, a beautiful structure erected in 1400 and destroyed in 1771 during the oppression of the penal laws, he halted, and listened to a Latin oration, and then on to the cathedral of St. Canice, where he was received by the Bishop of Ossory. Here from the high altar he bestowed the Pontifical Benediction and the Te Deum was intoned by all present.

Having rested for two days he visited Lord Mountgarret and the Supreme Council who then occupied the ancient castle of the Ormonds. “At the head of the hall was seated Lord Mountgarret, President of the Council, who rose as I approached, but received me without moving at all from his place.” Rinuccini concludes his complaint to the Pope by saying that the reception was arranged by Bellings as one acquainted with Italian etiquette. The Pope replied that a hint should be conveyed to Mountgarret in the shape of an account of the Nuncio’s reception by the Doge of Genoa, who advanced four steps to meet him. Possibly Mountgarret knew it already, but thought the representative of the Irish nation should not condescend so much as the head of a small Italian Republic. The Nuncio addressed the President and Council in Latin, and assured them that the object of his visit was to assist the King as well as procure for the people of Ireland the free and public exercise of their religion and the restoration of the churches and church property. The Council made a grateful acknowledgment in an address to the Pope.

Muskerry and the other Confederate agents were still in Dublin and did not return to Kilkenny until the day after the Nuncio arrived. They found that the old Irish had resolved to rely entirely on the Nuncio, and the Pope, and such other Catholic princes on the Continent as might be induced to help them. The two parties in the Confederation grew daily more estranged, and henceforth were called “Ormondists” and “Nuncioists.” Rinuccini had no trouble in persuading the Old Irish to stand by him. They believed that notwithstanding his protests, he came to form a grand Pontifical army, and that they could rely on the Pope and through him on all Catholic princes for support and aid in throwing off the yoke of England completely. The Nuncio’s comparison of the intelligence of the two parties is not very flattering to the Old Irish. “Nature even,” he says, “seems to widen the breach of difference of character and qualities, the new party being for the most part of low stature, quick-witted and of subtle understanding, while the old are tall, simple-minded, unrefined in their manner of living, generally slow of comprehension, and quite unskilled in negotiation.” And yet it was these simple-minded men whom Rinuccini encouraged in breaking up the Confederacy and in setting aside those whom from his own account by their greater knowledge of affairs, and especially of England, were more likely to justly estimate the chances for and against the success of the Nuncio’s projects. Well has it been remarked of Rinuccini that “With hazy notions as to the meaning or strength of party divisions in Ireland, he made little allowance for local conditions in pursuing his aim of securing the full predominance of the Roman Catholic religion.”

Glamorgan was courteously received by the Nuncio, who, taking him and his credentials at once at their proper value, distrusted him and his power to induce the King to ratify the religious articles. Glamorgan, on the contrary, thought the Nuncio would throw no obstacles in the way of either treaty, and wrote to the Lord Lieutenant that the political treaty would be signed in a day or two. “I am morally certain,” he adds, “a total assent from the Nuncio shall be declared to the propositions for peace, and in the very way your Lordship prescribes.”

Rinuccini finding the Council on the point of coming to terms with Ormond for the political articles, while the religious ones were to be reserved under the secret treaty for the King’s acceptance, protested against the action of the Council. He then set to work to gain control of Glamorgan, who became as wax in his hands, and promised on behalf of the King that even if Ormond accepted the political treaty, it should not be published until Charles had confirmed his own secret treaty of August 25th, and that he would demand their ratification as soon as he landed with the Irish army in England. Rinuccini further induced him to make what was practically a second treaty, by which the King was to bind himself to never again appoint a Protestant Lord Lieutenant, that he would admit the Catholic Bishops to sit in the Irish House of Peers, pass an Act for a Catholic University, and grant the Catholics the churches and ecclesiastical revenues, not only those re-captured by the Confederates before the date on which Ormond’s treaty was signed, but all those taken after that signature and up to the confirmation of the religious articles by the King. Glamorgan, eager to lead 10,000 Irishmen to the help of the King, was ready to promise anything, and as Chester, the only port at which they could now be landed, was threatened by the Parliamentarians, the Supreme Council agreed to allow him take an advanced guard of 3,000 men there at once. But Glamorgan could not do so until he had Ormond’s consent to his appointment as commander of this force, and to the arrangement with Rinuccini by which the political treaty was not to be published until the religious articles, of which Ormond knew nothing as yet, had been ratified. To obtain Ormond’s consent Glamorgan set out for Dublin on the 24th December. On the 26th he was summoned before Ormond and the Privy Council on the demand of Lord Digby. On October 17th the Catholic Archbishop of Tuam had been killed at the siege of Sligo. On his body was found a copy of Glamorgan’s treaty, which was at once sent by the Scots to London and was thence forwarded to Ormond. Ormond at once saw that this revelation of the King’s duplicity would be fatal to his cause with the English people, and making a desperate effort to save the credit of Charles, had Glamorgan arrested on a charge of treason in exceeding his instructions. Charles took Digby’s advice and brazenly denied his instructions to Glamorgan, and declared his “amazement that any man’s folly and presumption should carry him to such a degree of abusing our trust.” The comedy was sustained by Glamorgan’s declaration that he had made the concessions on his own initiative through excess of zeal, and that what he had done was in no way binding on the King. Charles, moreover, disavowed Glamorgan in a letter to the Parliament, “That the Earl of Glamorgan having made offer unto him to raise forces in the Kingdom of Ireland, and to conduct them to England for his Majesty’s service, had a commission to that purpose and to that purpose only. That he had no commission at all to treat of anything else without the privity and directions of the Lord Lieutenant, much less to capitulate anything concerning religion or any propriety (i.e. property) belonging either to church or laity.”

Of this disavowal Gardiner says, “It can be no matter of surprise that Charles should have acknowledged what he could not help acknowledging, and should have sought to cast a discreet veil over that which could not be concealed. His really unpardonable fault was that after engaging on such a negotiation with the Irish Catholics he should now have announced his ‘resolution of leaving the managing of the business of Ireland wholly to the Houses, and to make no peace there but with their consent.’ What sort of peace the Houses would establish in Ireland he knew full well. Rinuccini had looked into his heart and estimated his motives to more purpose than Glamorgan.”

Nevertheless, in spite of the perspicuity with which Rinuccini had examined the stuffing of this Stuart puppet he had urged the Supreme Council to hold out for conditions which he should have known very well Charles had no more chance of being able to grant than if he were an inhabitant of another planet.

The Confederates had demanded the release of Glamorgan who had himself made strong representations to Ormond that his imprisonment was a great disservice to the King. He was released on bail and returned to Kilkenny where he pressed the Council to complete the political treaty with Ormond on which all parties were agreed, and to give him at once the 3,000 men for the relief of Chester. On the 29th September he wrote to Ormond that the Council was only awaiting the meeting of the General Assembly to be empowered to conclude the peace, and that the men were ready to sail when the treaty was signed.

It is difficult to believe that Rinuccini could have had any real belief in the King’s powers or those of anyone acting in his name; but whatever the amount of his faith in the dwindling royal authority, it had at last received a rude shock, and he accordingly passed into an opposite phase of distrust. He now thought that Glamorgan by acting as agent between Ormond and the Council had played him false, and that his whole object had been merely to get the Irish regiments into England, leaving the Irish to content themselves with the political articles. He endeavoured, therefore, to prevent any agreement between Ormond and the Confederates, the more so that he had received a copy of the Pope’s treaty with the Queen, in which she had agreed to much more than anything Ormond or even Glamorgan would have conceded. Sir Kenelm Digby had signed with the Pope on behalf of the Queen a treaty by which the entire liberty of Catholic worship and a completely independent Parliament were to be granted to Ireland. Dublin and other towns garrisoned by the King’s troops were to be handed over to Irish or English Catholics, while the forces under Ormond were to join the Confederates against the Scots and English Parliamentarians. As regards England the King was to concede everything required by the Pope’s instructions to Rinuccini already quoted, and to revoke all laws placing the Catholics in an inferior position to the Protestants. This was to be confirmed by the next Parliament, and meanwhile the Supreme Council was to send into England 12,000 infantry under an Irish commander, and these were to be supported by 2,500 or 3,000 English Catholic cavalry. The Pope was to send 100,000 crowns, about £36,000, on ratification of the treaty by the King, a similar amount on the landing of the Irish in England, and the same payment annually for two years if required.

Rinuccini therefore protested against any treaty with Ormond until it should be known whether the Queen’s treaty was accepted by the King. “Preposterous as these terms were,” says Gardiner, “Rinuccini was, from his point of view, perfectly right in adopting them.” It is, however for adopting such a point of view at all that Rinuccini is to be blamed. How could he possibly place reliance on the desperate promises of a poor fugitive wife eager to save her husband by any means when he had been unable to trust her husband when his power was not so reduced as it had since become! Glamorgan, now completely in the hands of Rinuccini, wrote to Ormond urging him to accept the Queen’s treaty, and referring to the expenses he had in equipping the troops which would come to £100,000. He says “How cold shall I find Catholics bent to this service if the Pope be irritated I humbly submit to your Excellency’s better judgment? And here I am constrained ... absolutely to profess not to be capable to do the King that service which he expects at my hands unless the Nuncio be civilly complied with and carried along with us in our proceedings.”

This was an extraordinary letter to a man who if anything was anti-Papal. Ormond replied that he did not know what was meant by the advantageous peace to be obtained of the King by the Queen’s entreaties. “My lord,” he continued, “my affections and interest are so tied to his Majesty’s cause that it were madness in me to disgust any man that hath power and inclination to relieve him in the sad condition he is in; and, therefore your lordship may securely go on in the ways you have proposed to yourself to serve the King without fear of interruption from me, or so much as inquiring the means you work by. My commission is to treat with his Majesty’s Confederate Catholic subjects here for a peace upon conditions of honour and assistance to him and of advantage to them; which accordingly, I shall pursue to the best of my skill, but shall not venture upon any new negotiation foreign to the powers I have received.”

Glamorgan thereupon delivered himself up entirely to the Nuncio and wrote a long Latin oath by which he swore him unlimited obedience. An agreement was drawn up between the Nuncio and Glamorgan on the one hand and the Council on the other, by which the cessation with Ormond was to be extended to May 1, 1646, the extension being for the purpose of allowing the Nuncio to obtain the originals of the Queen’s treaty, as the Council had refused to support the new demands on the King merely from the copy. Rinuccini agreed that if he could not produce the original within the time he would be contented with whatever terms Glamorgan might get from Charles.

In view of this temporary agreement between the Nuncio and the Supreme Council, it seemed as if the troops could now start for Chester. On February 24, 1646, Glamorgan wrote to Ormond that not 3,000 but 6,000 men would be sent, and that he was going to Waterford to hasten the shipping. On March 8 bad news arrived. Chester had surrendered to Brereton and the port was closed against Charles’s Irish army. Still more ominous things happened at home, for a Parliamentary fleet had sailed up the Shannon and seized Bunratty Castle, thus showing that the Parliament felt itself so sure of overcoming the King it was at last in a position to commence active measures in Ireland. The Supreme Council wrote to Ormond that unless he would join forces with them they would neither make peace at Dublin nor send an army to England. Still they could not abandon the negotiation with the Lieutenant of a King who had not the power, and probably not the will, to fulfil the engagements made in his name. They now proposed to Ormond that the conclusion of peace should be postponed to the middle of June, so that Glamorgan should get ships together to carry the army to some port in Wales. In the meantime Glamorgan would send his brother to get a confirmation of his own treaty as to the religious articles from the King. If these were accepted, and if Ormond would agree to join forces with them against the Scots and Puritans, the Council would give him £3,000 for the pay of his troops.

On these terms Ormond signed on 28th March the peace on the understanding that it was to be kept secret until the 1st May. The articles which related to the civil government included some much-needed reforms, especially the admission of Catholics and Protestants to office on equal terms. Religious matters were postponed pending Charles’s answer. The Confederates agreed to send the 10,000 men, of whom 6,000 were to start on 1st April, and the remainder on 1st May. Ormond gave them a written promise that if the Confederates were attacked before the latter date he would join them against their assailants. It was too late. Like Chester, South Wales had now been occupied by the Parliament, Cornwall as well, and there was not a foot of English ground on which the army could land with any chance of maintaining itself. Officers and men refused to leave Ireland. Charles himself wrote that “the foot was to be kept back, as it would be lost if it should now attempt to land, we having no horse nor ports in our power to secure them.”

In May Rinuccini went to Limerick to support the Confederate army besieging Bunratty, and took credit for having, as he says, “adroitly prevented” the despatch of 10,000 Irish infantry to Charles. It was not much to boast of, helping the destruction of the man on whose continuance of power both he and the Pope were relying for the attainment of their religious aims. The original cessation of arms, when the still united Confederates could have made themselves masters of the whole country and treated with King or Parliament was a fatal error; but having decided to back the King and prevent the rise of the power that was destined to destroy them both, they should have helped him quickly. By insisting on conditions which would only tend to make him more unpopular in England, they had wasted valuable time and allowed their intended ally to be weakened and their common enemy to gain strength. The only merit Rinuccini had was that his delays prevented a useless waste of Irish lives; but it is evident that was not in his thoughts when pressing for the acceptance of the Queen’s treaty, as had that been accepted he would have consented, would have been bound by the Pope’s instructions to consent to the despatch of the troops. Charles, to do him justice, was the only one to warn the Irish against starting on account of the danger and uselessness of such a proceeding.

It has been necessary to enter into such a detailed account of these important negotiations that space does not admit of more than a brief reference to the chief events during the remainder of Rinuccini’s mission.

He now set himself to work to annul the lately concluded peace, and found a strong supporter in Owen Roe O’Neill, who with his followers persisted in the belief that the Pope would help the Irish to shake off the yoke of England. While we must sympathise with O’Neill’s true-hearted and enthusiastic patriotism, we must remember the Pope’s positive instructions to Rinuccini on that point. Rinuccini, moreover, warned O’Neill against nourishing such hopes, and expressed his annoyance at his calling his force the “Pontifical Army.” At the same time the Nuncio was only too glad to make use of O’Neill to overthrow the Confederation. After Owen Roe’s brilliant victory over the Scots at Benburb, on the 5th June, Rinuccini supplied him with funds and accompanied him to the siege of Bunratty, which surrendered in July. Ormond’s peace was proclaimed in Dublin on 30th July and at Kilkenny, but Rinuccini and the majority of the clergy procured its rejection at Limerick, Clonmel, Waterford, and other places. The Nuncio held a convocation of some of the clergy at Waterford, and on 12th August declared that the Confederate Catholics supporting the peace were perjured for having failed to obtain for the Church first of all such terms as they had sworn to obtain by their Oath of Confederation. He also issued an interdict against the places that had accepted it, ordered their churches to be closed, and the sacraments refused to the inhabitants. This exercise of his powers cost him a severe snub from Rome. The Cardinal Secretary wrote: “Moreover, having seen a printed paper, in which the authors and supporters of the peace between Ireland and the Marquis of Ormond are pronounced to be perjurers and a protest which the Ecclesiastical Congregation has made in these precise [Latin] words, ‘For these and other reasons moved only by our conscience and having only God before our eyes, that it may be known to all and singular both in Ireland and abroad, we have not given and should not give our consent to any such peace unless according to our oath it contains conditions for Religion, for King, and for Country, etc., etc.’ And this paper is subscribed first by your Excellency and then by the Archbishops, Bishops, and ecclesiastics of Ireland. It appears to His Holiness and to us that in this your Excellency has departed from your instructions, because it never was intended to maintain the Irish as rebels against the King, but simply to assist them in obtaining the assurance of the free exercise of the Catholic religion in Ireland.... From the specimen which I have taken from this printed document, in which occurs the Latin words I have quoted, your Excellency will be able to regulate your conduct on such other occasions as may present themselves, and thus observe the tenor of your instructions.”

All the same Rinuccini returned to Kilkenny in triumph, imprisoned most of the Supreme Council, and formed another entirely subservient to him, of which he constituted himself the President. He next excommunicated all adherents of the peace, though eight of the Bishops, including his own nominee De Burgo, Archbishop of Tuam, and the Jesuits and Carmelites, in fact all the regular clergy except the Dominicans and Capuchins, held the censures to be invalid, and appealed against them to Rome.

A plot was now formed for the escape of Charles from the Scots to Rinuccini and the clerical party and the joint armies of O’Neill and Preston, who were now reconciled by the Nuncio, marched to besiege Dublin.

Rinuccini must now have not only a Supreme Council but a Lord Lieutenant of his own. Glamorgan when first he arrived had brought a document sealed with the King’s private signet appointing him Lord Lieutenant in the event of Ormond’s death or misconduct, and Glamorgan now qualified himself for the office of Viceroy by swearing complete submission to the Nuncio. He would do no act without his approval, and would be ready to resign his office at any time into Rinuccini’s hands. Rinuccini thought the opportunity of installing him would soon occur.

Ormond’s position was indeed now desperate. The defences of Dublin were dilapidated, and he had neither provisions nor ammunition. The King had been surrendered to the Parliament by the Scots, his cause was hopeless, and Parliamentary cruisers swarmed on the Irish coasts. Ormond accordingly, having been always in the English interest, appealed to the Parliament for help, and offered to surrender to them. Meanwhile O’Neill and Preston quarrelled outright, and on a false alarm that Parliamentary troops had arrived, the siege was raised. O’Neill and the Nuncio retired to Kilkenny, while Preston remained and commenced still another negotiation with Ormond. The Parliament had refused Ormond’s conditions of surrender, and he was now willing to make a treaty which should unite the English Royalists with the moderate Catholic party on the basis of toleration under the King’s authority against Rinuccini on the one hand, and the Puritans on the other. Rinuccini threatened Preston with excommunication, and Preston who had boasted of being “excommunication proof,” hastened to Kilkenny. Ormond then put an end to his anomalous position by surrendering Dublin to the agents of the Parliament on July 28, 1647, and joined the other Royalist refugees in France.

Rinuccini’s supremacy in the Council did not remain long undisputed. The moderate party were crushed only temporarily. On the meeting of the General Assembly the old Council were released from prison, and the feud between the two parties was more furious than ever, swords being drawn in the council chamber. The Parliamentary commander of Dublin, Michael Jones, marched to the relief of Trim and defeated Preston with a loss of five thousand men and all his guns and baggage. In the South, Inchiquin, at present for the Parliament, had taken Cahir, and attacked Cashel, which he burnt, shooting hundreds of the inhabitants and twenty priests who had crowded into the cathedral, and when attacked in his turn by the Munster army under Lord Taaffe at Knockanos, the Confederate forces were completely routed and their camp and artillery captured.

And now the whole scene became still more confusing, all parties seeming to change into new and kaleidoscopic combinations. Inchiquin who thought he had not been rewarded sufficiently by the Parliament, and having after all more sympathy with Irish than English proprietors, made overtures to Preston. Ormond was approached in Paris and a coalition was formed against the Parliament between the moderate Confederates and the Royalists. Rinuccini issuing excommunication against all who countenanced this arrangement, fled to O’Neill’s camp at Maryborough. Preston and O’Neill joined forces and there was civil war between the Confederates. Jones, who suspected many of his own troops of loyalty to Charles, was delighted at this, and so bitter was the hatred between the clerical party and the moderate Catholics that O’Neill and the Nuncio actually went so far as to treat with the Puritan commander for help against their co-religionists at Kilkenny. In October, Monnerie the French agent thought Rinuccini about to fly from Ireland. “Your Eminence,” he wrote to Mazarin, “knows the Nuncio’s inclinations”—doubtless his desire to be in Paris—“and I will merely say that now he receives as many curses from the people as he formerly did plaudits.” In September Glamorgan, now Marquis of Worcester, sailed from Galway to France, and the Nuncio’s troubles were increased by the appearance in October of O’Mahony’s Apologetic Discussion of his conduct. The Nuncio had the book condemned by the magistrates. He returned to Kilkenny only to hear of the defeat at Knockanos. Rinuccini found he had now but little authority, “being now,” says Bellings, “better known, and his excommunications by his often thundering of them grown more cheap.” He retired in disgust to Waterford in January, 1648. Inchiquin took Carrick-on-Suir for the Parliament in February, but declared for the King in April, and endeavoured to come to terms with the Confederates on the basis of the Status quo ante, until Ormond should return. Rinuccini, and in this case he was perfectly right, refused to treat with such a blood-stained traitor to every party, but the Supreme Council fearing the growing strength of the English Parliament, in spite of the Nuncio’s protests and threats, made a truce with Inchiquin. Rinuccini at Kilkenny and supported by a majority of the Bishops, then excommunicated all who adhered to the truce, and put the terms concerned under an interdict. The Council appealed to Rome. Rinuccini escaped by night from Kilkenny to O’Neill’s army at Maryborough and thence to Athlone and Galway, where he convened a National Synod, while the clergy opposed to him at Kilkenny declared his censures null and void. The Jesuits, Barefooted or Discalced Carmelites and cathedral clergy were opposed to him, while he was supported by the Franciscans and Dominicans. He bitterly complained of the conduct of the Jesuits, and charged them and their Provincial, Malone, with the greater share of the blame for the loss of Ireland. He even went so far as to declare the Irish people were Catholics only in name. In his instruction to Father Arcamoni, who was to represent him in the appeal to Rome, he says, “It may be, therefore, by the will of God that a people Catholic only in name and so irreverent towards the Church should feel the thunderbolt of the Holy See and draw down upon themselves the anger which is the meed of the scorner.”

Ormond landed at Cork on Michaelmas Day, 1648, and on the 16th of January, 1648-9 concluded a peace with the Supreme Council, consolidating the Royalist interests in Ireland. The Council finally renounced Rinuccini at the beginning of the negotiations, and ordered him to “intermeddle not in any of the affairs of this kingdom.” The Carmelites of Galway having resisted the interdict by which their church was closed, Rinuccini ordered their bell to be pulled down. John De Burgo, a nominee of Rinuccini to the Archbishopric of Tuam, supported the Carmelites, and demanded the Nuncio’s warrant. “Ego non ostendam,” said Rinuccini; “Et ego non obediam,” retorted De Burgo. The Nuncio was blockaded in Galway by the Catholics Clanricarde acting with the new Royalist Confederation, he being determined that no Synod should be held in Galway in support of the censures. Rinuccini, who had kept a frigate ready, seeing how useless it was to remain longer where he had worn out his welcome, sailed for Havre on 23rd February, 1648-9. He did not proceed to Rome until November. His agents had been supporting his cause against Father Rowe, Provincial of the Carmelites, on the part of the Supreme Council. Rinuccini was received with all the usual honours by the Pope; but Innocent is said to have reproached him in private with rash conduct. In March, 1650, the Pope granted power to certain Bishops to absolve those who had fallen under the Nuncio’s censures, but a general absolution was refused, as it would seem to make the Pope decide that the censures were unjust. Rinuccini was warmly welcomed on his return to Fermo, where he died of apoplexy in 1653.

We have now followed as far as possible within the limits allowed us the history of this most distracting period, and before concluding it may be well to glance back and survey its most distinctive features.

We have seen how the rising of the dispossessed clansmen in the North furnished a pretext for the confiscation of practically the whole of Ireland, irrespective of its share in the rebellion, and how the Parliament was thus enabled to raise money for an invasion to extinguish the Irish nation and put the Subscribers in possession of their security. The Parliament diverted these funds to carrying on its own war against the King. The Confiscation Acts united the hitherto discordant Anglo-Irish and Old-Irish elements in a great national movement for common defence against further religious persecution and further spoliation by a wealthy and powerful neighbouring, but not neighbourly, people. While they acted loyally together they had extended their authority throughout the greater part of the country, and were so near a complete conquest that the English power was brought so low that its representatives were reluctantly compelled to sue for a cessation. A section of the Anglo-Irish Confederates imagining themselves still English, looking only towards England, and never dreaming that a day might come when they with the poet Spenser’s grandsons would be forced to transplant to Connaught as Irish Papists, urged the granting of a truce, and though the Old Irish protested against this throwing away of their advantages, they respected the Oath of Confederation too much to make any violent opposition. By granting the truce, by negotiating at all, the Confederates committed the fatal error from which their future ruin followed. It is all very well to blame Ormond, but he was only doing his duty to his sovereign and his party; the Irish had beaten him to his knees, and their trusted representatives should have kept him there until their position in Ireland at any rate was secured. Had they, disdaining Ormond’s overtures, relentlessly pursued the war to an entirely successful issue—and that they could have done so is evident from O’Neill’s brilliant victory over Monroe at Benburb when their strength was almost exhausted—they would have been in a position to treat with King or Parliament; and, moreover, that Continental assistance they vainly sought when through the Cessation their stability had become doubtful, would not have been withheld. The Parliamentarians in their struggle with the King showed better judgment. When their early efforts for an accommodation with him failed, they destroyed him and came to terms with his son. The Confederates should have avoided all treaties until they were in a position to treat on their own terms with either King or Parliament. On the whole, it might have been better had they been in a position to treat with the latter; but whichever prevailed, Ireland, even without foreign help, but with the prestige of an armed and united nation like the Scots, would have been able to enter into a confederation of the three Kingdoms on honourable conditions, instead of being dragged in, gagged and bound, the victim of violence, fraud, and corruption unsurpassed in the history of nations. The Confederates, however, failed to take the tide of victory when it served, and wasted their time in a series of futile negotiations with a man who certainly had not the power, even if he had the will, to grant them what they haggled for. There is nothing more sad in all Irish History than to read that when Cromwell with a comparatively small army had subjugated Ireland in a few months, 40,000 Irish “swordsmen” took service in foreign countries. They had missed their chance.

Three things, says an Arab proverb, cannot be recalled: “The sped arrow, The spoken word, The lost opportunity.”