CHAPTER IV. CHAS. I. A.D. 1645. The publication of "The Naseby papers" has often been made the subject of grave accusation against the puritans; upon what grounds it is difficult to perceive. They are charged by Clarendon with a want of honesty in publishing garbled extracts; by Hume, with want of delicacy in exposing to the vulgar eye letters designed only for the queen. But the cabinet was seized upon the field of battle, and it is absurd to say that confidence was either imposed or violated. Had its contents been made public merely to degrade the king, and to exhibit him to his subjects as a weak, uxorious man, the victim of his wife's caprice, the charge of malice might have been sustained; and some of the leaders in the popular cause were generous enough to deplore, even at the time, the violation of that respect which is due to a matrimonial correspondence. But though addressed to his wife, the letters printed are in fact on affairs of state; few of them are of a private nature; and several were suppressed by those to whom the captors assigned the work of publishing the correspondence, out of compassion to the king,-a service for which they were rewarded at the restoration.* Charles had no reason to complain; for the publication of the Naseby papers was not a matter of * Ludlow, p. 60. The Naseby papers are printed at the end of Ludlow's memoir. There is one letter which delicacy ought to have suppressed, in which Charles writes to the king of France with pitiful complaints of the queen's misbehaviour, and the insolence of her woman, Madame St. George. Yet even this was of importance, as it shewed the thraldom in which the king was held, soon after his marriage, not only to the queen, but to the court of France. It is dated 12 July, 1626. Except in the suppressions alluded to above, there seems to be no pretext whatever for Clarendon's charge of garbling the correspondence. IV. CHAS. I. A D. 1645. retaliation, but of self-defence. The puritan leaders CHAPTER had entered on the war deeply convinced of the king's duplicity and heartlessness, but unable at the time to lay the proofs and evidences before the public. These papers supplied them with all that was required: they shewed that he was governed by the queen; they revealed his hatred of the parliament, and his resolution to be avenged upon it when the time should come; they disclosed his project, a hundred times denied, of obtaining the assistance of the king of France, the duke of Lorraine, and all the sovereigns of the continent, against his own subjects; above all, they discovered his tenderness to the papists and his favour to the Irish rebels; the fact that he had solicited their assistance, and had already made with them a dishonourable peace. "All which," says Milton, though suspected vehemently before, and from good grounds believed, yet by him and his adherents peremptorily denied, were, by the opening of that cabinet, visible to all men under his own hand."* The parliament, then, were justified: as upright men, it was their duty to clear themselves from the charge of aspersing the king unjustly; as leaders in the state it was no less their duty to inform the people of the real intentions of the sovereign, and "on what terms their duty stood, and the kingdom's peace."t Ireland had now been for several years in a state of insurrection. In 1641 a frightful massacre first announced the intention of the papists to extirpate * Eiconoclastes; published by authority; 1649; ch. xxi. p. 181. † Ibid. p. 182. N IV CHAS. I. A.D. 1645. CHAPTER the protestants; and with such ferocity was the design pursued, that not less than one hundred and fifty thousand victims fell a sacrifice to their murderous rage. The number has been disputed; it has been reduced to fifty thousand on the one hand, and exaggerated to three hundred thousand on the other.* On one point both sides agree: a plot was formed, under the direction of the priests and native chieftains, for the total extirpation of the heretics in Ireland; and comparatively few escaped. It was executed with a barbarity of which, except in the annals of the church of Rome, Europe has had few examples; and although an accurate census was then unknown, the protestant population of Ireland must have been capable of a computation sufficiently exact to furnish an approximation at least to the true number of the sufferers. The massacre subsided into an armed rebellion, organized by sir Phelim O'Neile, MacMahoun, the earl of Antrim, and others. The utmost ferocity still marked their progress, and nature recoils from a bare recital of the horrors which were inflicted and endured. * Hume says, that probably the sufferers must have been, by the most moderate account, near 40,000. On which Harris, a writer of extraordinary research (Life and Writings of Charles I.), observes: "It were to be wished Mr. Hume had told us where this moderate account is to be found; for my own part, I have sought for it in vain." (p. 337.) Clarendon says, "Forty or fifty thousand were murdered before they suspected themselves to be in any danger, or could provide for their defence." (Book iv. 29.) Milton gives 154,000 as the number of massacres "in Ulster only, by their own computation." (Eiconoclastes, ch. xi.) He adds, thoughtlessly enough, that this sum, added to the other three provinces, makes up a total of slaughter four times as great. But Ulster was the only protestant part of Ireland, and the slaughter was of course nearly confined to it. May (Hist. Long Parliament, book ii. p. 4.) gives 200,000 “in the space of one month;" and sir John Temple, master of the rolls in Dublin, 300,000 "within two years." Hist. Irish Rebel. p. 12. IV. A.D. 1645. Thousands of the protestants were murdered in CHAPTER cold blood, without distinction of age or sex. Thousands were stripped to their very shirts, and CHAS. I so turned out to perish of cold and misery. Great numbers were burnt alive, or drowned, or mutilated. In Antrim, nine hundred and fifty-four were murdered in one forenoon. In Armagh, Tyrone, and the neighbourhood, five thousand prisoners were slaughtered in three days.*"All the waters of the sea," says the earl of Castlehaven, himself a member of the church of Rome, "cannot wash out the guilt of that rebellion, which began most bloodily against the English in a time of settled peace without the least occasion."+ The king had all along been suspected of conniving at this rebellion. The rebels boasted of the queen's favour, and shewed a commission authorising their appearance in arms, signed by the king himself. Of the queen's misconduct there is no doubt whatever. The earl of Antrim fled, soon after the massacre broke out, to her court, where he not only found a shelter, but was treated with consideration, and sent back to Ulster with secret instructions and supplies of ammunition. He was an Irish papist, a leader in the rebellion from the first. He boasted publicly at the restoration that he had acted throughout under the king's authority; and his estates, which had been forfeited, were restored to him by Charles II. on the express ground that "whatever intelligence, correspondence, Temple's Irish Rebellion, &c. All the writings of that age abound in facts which refer to the Irish rebellion. † Harris's Charles I. p. 336. Bates, Troubles of England, p. 45. IV. A.D. 1645. CHAPTER or actings the said marquis had with the confederate Irish catholics was directed and allowed by letCHAS. I. ters, instructions, and directions, from our royal father and our royal mother.") The only possible answer to these charges is that which Hume advances; that Antrim, though concerned no doubt in the rebellion, was not implicated in the massacre, having joined the rebels two years later. A feeble apology if true; but unhappily for the royal cause at variance with the facts. Ludlow commanded the parliamentary forces sent over to Ireland to quell the rebellion, and must be supposed to have known who were his opponents. His words are these: "It is well known that the earl of Antrim had his head and hands deeply and early engaged in that bloody work."+ The correspondence of lord Strafford, published at his death, proves that, before the massacre broke out, Antrim had applied to the king for permission to arm his followers; that the minister had resisted, on the ground that Antrim was a papist, and a dangerous discontented man; that Charles had, notwithstanding, insisted on his being allowed to raise and commission a body of troops; and that the remonstrances of Strafford, then Mr. Wentworth, were finally overborne by a flat command from the sovereign. Lastly, the lords and commons, in their declaration concerning the rise and progress of the Irish rebellion, dated July 25, 1643, mention the earl of Antrim by name as "a notorious rebel," who had already been seized * A letter written by command of king Charles II. concerning the marquis of Antrim, to the duke of Ormond, July 10, 1663. Ludlow, in appendix. + Memoirs, p. 383. |