1641. tional power of the crown ceased. From the moment of that usurpation, resistance to the parliamentary power was loyalty, not treason. The Irish Catholics were the first and last in arms for King Charles. Their * Even the false and fastidious Strafford bore private testimony Catholics from the province of Ulster, and enforce 1641. the covenant by the rope and sword. Under these menaces and alarms, some few of the northern Catholics associated and armed in self-defence against those whom they considered enemies to God and to their King. "The commotions," says King Charles, " in Ire land were so sudden and so violent, that it was hard at first either to discern the rise, or apply a remedy to that precipitant rebellion. Indeed that sea of blood, which hath there been cruelly and barbarously shed, is enough to drown any man in eternal infamy and misery, whom God shall find the malicious author or instigator of its effusion." causes the Irish to In this precarious state of affairs, different causes Various co-operated to drive the natives into arms. Accord- which drove ing to various opinions, some were excited by the arins. success of the Scotch covenanters, who, by their irruption into England, had obtained the sum of 200,000l. to induce them to return quietly into their own counrty and lay down their arms; others, from the dread of the menaces of the covenanting army in Ireland, that they would extirpate every priest and Papist out of the nation: many took them from zeal to their own, or systematic abhorrence of the reformed religion under all its different forms and denominations; some of the old Milesian Irish seized upon this moment of confusion and weakness in the * Eixwv Baciλinn. p. 50, 51, &c. Whether Charles or Dr. Gauden wrote this book, the prelate must be allowed to have known and expressed the royal sentiments. 1641. English government, to revive and enforce their ancient claims, which they still considered as usurped by the English, and withholden from them by no other title than of force: no inconsiderable portion of the nation was stimulated into insurrection by their clerwho had been educated abroad, in hopes of progy, curing a civil establishment of the Catholic religion, and by other foreign emissaries from courts, the politics of which prompted them to weaken the power of the British empire by the internal dissentions of its subjects. Many individuals, bereft of their possessions by plantations and forfeitures, persecuted for the exercise of their religious duties, or prevented from any useful or permanent occupation by the effects or abuse of the penal laws, or the indolence of their own dispositions, composed a formidable body of malecontents, who sought redress, preferment, or existence in the confusion of an unsettled and weak government. But the main source of the evil lay in the existence of real grievances, which formed a plausible rallying point to all; namely, the too well founded apprehension of an immediate general massacre or extermination of the whole body of the Catholics*. There prevailed at * This, amongst many other documents, appears by a remonstrance presented at that time by the northern nobility and gentry to the King, which is to be seen in Des. Cur. Hyb. 2 vol. 86, and contains the following passage. "There was a petition framed by the Puritans of this kingdom of Ireland, subscribed by the hands of many hundreds of them, and preferred to the house of commons of the new parliament of England, for suppressing our religion and us the professors thereof residing within this kingdom of Ireland: which, as we are credibly informed, was condescended unto by both this time a conviction, that the armed force in Ireland 1641. was generally hostile to the King, and that the English parliament had either by concession or usurpation acquired the government of the kingdom of Ireland *. All the remonstrances of the Catholics expressed their loyalty to his Majesty, and tenders of service against his enemies; for such from that time they considered the covenanters, and all those who supported or adhered to them. rebellion the lords On the 23d of October, 1641, the lords justices Universal issued a proclamation, by which they declared," that declared by a discovery had been made of a most disloyal and de- justices. testable conspiracy, intended by some evil-affected Irish Papists, universally throughout the kingdom." houses of parliament, there, and undertaken to be accomplished to their full desires, and that without the privity or allowance of your Majesty." Dr. Anderson in his Royal Genealogies, p. 786, says, "That the native Irish, being well informed, as they thought (in 1641) that they now must either turn Protestant or depart the kingdom, or be banged at their own door, they betook to arms in their own defence, especially in Ulster, where the six counties had been forfeited." About this same time a very strong and dispassionate remonstrance from Cavan, said to have been drawn up by the protestant bishop Bedel, and in which he himself joined with the inhabitants of his diocese against the new contribution, was presented to the lords justices: and Burnet, in his life of Bishop Bedel, owns, that this remonstrance gives the best colour to their proceedings of any of their papers he had ever seen. (Vid. my App. No. XXII.) * Dr. Warner (Hist. of Reb. p. 5.) says, "So that he might further testify his resolutions to make his Irish subjects easy under his government, in the beginning of May, he appointed the Earl of Leicester, and not the English parliament, as Ludlow says, lord lieutenant of that kingdom," 1641. This misrepresentation of the universality of the con. spiracy drove the lords and gentlemen of the Pale immediately to represent in a petition to the lords justices and council, that they and other innocent persons might seem to be involved as Catholics in the general terms of the proclamation; whereupon on the 29th of the same month, the lords justices sent forth an explanatory proclamation, declaring, that by the words "Irish Papists, they intended only such of the old Mere Irish in the province of Ulster, as had plotted, contrived, and been actors in that treason, and others, that adhered to them; and none of the old English of the Pale, or other parts of the kingdom." The Irish goaded to defence. We draw a veil over the scenes of blood and horror, arm in self- which actually defiled this tragedy, as well as over the fictions, which have disgraced most of the English narSuffice it to say, that there appears ratives of them *. Suffice it to • There are no bounds to the exaggerations of our historians, as to the number of Protestants said to have been massacred by the Irish in this rebellion. Sir John Temple says, that 150,000 Protestants were massacred in cold blood, in the two first months of it. Sir William Petty coolly calculates 30,000 British killed, out of war, in the first year. And Lord Clarendon laments, that in the first two or three days of it, 40 or 50,000 of them were destroyed. Dr. Warner, though adverse to the Irish, confesses, that he could only collect from positive evidence and report for the first two years, that 4028 were killed, and that 8000 died of ill usage; which he says was corroborated by a letter in the council book at Dublin, written on the 5th of May, 1652, from the parliamentary commissioners in Irejand to the English parliament: which, in order to excite the parliament to greater severity, or at least less lenity towards the Irish, tells them, that it then appeared, that besides 848 families, there |