bishopric and country by the persecuting covenant, was preferred to that see. The Romish priests were solemnly bound to an unlimited and unreasoning submission to the pope, without either profession or bond of allegiance to their natural sovereign, and were full of the dangerous doctrine of the pope's universal sovereignty, both civil and spiritual, and of his authority to excommunicate and depose princes, to absolve subjects from their oaths of allegiance, to sanctify rebellion and murder, and even to change the very nature and essential differences betwixt virtue and vice. Clergy of such a dangerous spirit and antichristian principles were suffered to erect a spiritual despotism in Ireland, under the papal authority, which has been the bane of its civil and religious freedom and happiness ever since. The papists were encouraged by the success of the Scottish covenanters, and so undisguised were the proceedings of the priests and jesuits, that the government became alarmed; but, nevertheless, no precautionary measures were adopted. The priests exercised their offices as openly and as safely as the protestants, and they suffered no restraint or inconvenience; but, says Coxe, "all this was overbalanced by their bigotry and natural malice, which opened one of the bloodiest scenes that ever was seen in the world."

At this period Ireland enjoyed the blessings of peace, plenty, and security; her trade and domestic manufactures were in a flourishing state, her taxes were merely nominal, and every man enjoyed his property and liberty in perfect security. Both papists and protestants were equally partakers of these advantages, and they were united by the strong ties of interest, family alliances, and relationship. The papists enjoyed the full and free exercise of their religion, in the same degree as the members of the reformed catholic church, and, in point of fact, had no cause of complaint, except of being deprived of supremacy, of which they ever will complain in a protestant country. Roger More, a man of indigent fortune, but of noble descent, and Owen O'Neale, a colonel in the Spanish service, first formed the diabolical project, and then proposed it to lord Macguire and sir Phelim O'Neale, to extirpate the reformed catholic inhabitants, who were chiefly of English descent. The popish priesthood were doubly engaged in this horrible conspiracy, both by their own inclinations and by the authority of the pope, who promised to supply them with money. Cardinal Richlieu, who was the chief promoter of the Scottish rebellion, and of the extirpation of the reformed catholic church there, was also a prime insti

gator of this horrible massacre. The Spanish ambassador likewise made liberal promises of assistance both in men and money.

It was resolved that Macguire, Macmahon, More, Plunket, Paul O'Neale, an active priest, and others, should seize Dublin Castle; whilst other chiefs and priests undertook to secure the fortified places throughout the kingdom, on the same day. The lords justices had received some dark and mysterious intimations that some dangerous designs were in agitation, which they disregarded till their slumbers were broken by one O'Conolly, a protestant, who had been most unaccountably trusted with the secret, and who gave positive information to their lordships the night previous to the intended outbreak. The justices fled in terror to the castle, alarmed the city, and reinforced the guards. Macguire and Macmahon were taken, and the confession extorted from them of a general insurrection and massacre; but it was too late to prevent the execution of the horrid design. Sir Phelim was barbarously punctual to the villanies he had promised to perform, and he seized the persons, cattle, and goods of the protestants; when an universal massacre ensued, and neither age, nor sex, nor infancy, were spared. In vain did the unsuspecting victims appeal to their ruthless extirpators, by all the tender obligations of social ties; companions, neighbours, friends, relations, dealt with their own hands the fatal blow. Neither the pious son pleading for his aged parent, nor the tender mother interceding for her helpless children, made the slightest impression on the relentless and bigotted hearts of the papists. The weeping mother, who would not be comforted, and the heart-stricken son, were alike doomed to witness the massacre of those whom they loved, and then to be themselves offered up a sacrifice to that demon of blood who presides in the Romish church. The affectionate wife, weeping over the bloody remains of her husband, experienced the same horrible death which she deplored. Popish women added yet a deeper stain to this scene of blood, by the wanton exercise of the most execrable cruelty; for, in the frenzy of religious fanaticism, they committed more atrocious acts of cruelty than even the men, and excited their children, both by example and precept, to stain their young hands with the blood of so-called heretics.

The popish priests, as they have been in every age since the christian world was afflicted with the papal supremacy, were the foremost in every scene of extirpation and blood; they represented the slaughter of the protestants as the most meritorious of religious acts, and exhorted their people to extirpate and

rid the world of these declared enemies to the Romish faith. They assured their people that to murder the protestants would be an excellent preservative against the pains of purgatory, and even help some of their suffering friends out of it; and they refused to administer any of their so-called sacraments to their adherents but on condition of their mercilessly murdering all the protestants, of whatsover age, sex, or condition. In consequence many thousand protestants were burnt alive in their houses; others were stripped naked and turned out to perish in the cold, and multitudes were drowned in the sea, and in rivers and lakes; some were manacled and thrown into dungeons, where they were left to perish from hunger and cold; others were left to perish from their wounds on the highways or fields; others were buried alive; and this was the fate of a poor infant, who, whilst being thrust into the pit beside its murdered parent, piteously cried, "O mammy, mammy, save me!" Yet could not his innocent cry pierce the stony heart of religious bigotry. Some were mangled and hung upon hooks; some dragged by ropes round their necks through woods and bogs till death relieved their sufferings; some were hung up by the arms, and then cut and stabbed to see how many wounds a heretic could endure. Pregnant women had their bowels ripped up, and were then left to perish with their offspring. Some of these barbarous extirpators had the ingenuity in their cruelty to tempt some of their victims, with the hope of preserving their lives, to imbrue their hands in the blood of their relations. Children were, under these impious expectations, impelled to be the executioners of their parents, wives of their husbands, and mothers of their children; and then, when they were thus rendered accomplices in guilt, they were themselves deprived of that life which they had wickedly endeavoured to purchase at so fearful a price.

Many who escaped the assassin's knife were turned out to suffer the rigours of a very severe winter, their houses having been plundered and destroyed, and their lands wasted; amongst the multitudes who experienced this treatment, the greater number, through feebleness of age, sex, or constitution, sunk under the severity of cold and hunger; and many of those who were able to reach Dublin, died of the diseases they had contracted through cold, fatigue, and fright; others, of keen sensibility, reflecting on the horror of their fate, being reduced from a state of affluence or comfort to all the miseries of want and poverty, and having to mourn the loss of parents, children, husbands, or wives, abandoned themselves to despair,

refused all the comforts that were offered them, and sought relief in death from their multiplied calamities as their only resource. Such numbers of these houseless refugees died in Dublin, that the churchyards were not sufficient to contain them, and two large pieces of ground were enclosed and set apart for that particular purpose. Nor was the exercise of rapine and blood confined to the lower class of rebels; men of rank not only stimulated the sanguinary inclinations of their bigoted followers, but practised these enormities themselves. The unhappy protestants have been too hastily blamed for not assembling together in bodies for defence; but the papal massacre was too sudden and universal to admit of concentration or communication among them. They were, besides, deceived by the crafty deportment of the popish barbarians; whenever any small number did draw together for defence, they were disarmed by promises of safety given under hand and seal; but on their surrender, the maxim of keeping no faith with heretics was immediately verified, and the confiding protestants experienced the same fate at the hands of their popish countrymen as had been imposed on others. Nor could the miserable condition of their excruciating pangs, anguish of mind, and agony of despair, assuage that lust of cruelty and blood, which sacerdotal precept, and their own bigotry, had kindled in the breasts of the devotees of a religion which has a natural propensity to be "drunken with the blood of the saints and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus." The number of protestants who died from the multiplied inhumanities of the papists, is, according to their own exulting computation, which we may be sure is short of the real amount, one hundred and fifty-four thousand! 1

Lord Clarendon says, that many of the popish nobility were entirely guiltless of the Irish rebellion and horrible massacre 2; and the papists, he says, enjoyed so much liberty and protection, that in general they were so well disposed towards the government, that it was necessary to deceive them, by stating that the rebel chiefs acted with the king's approbation, and under his authority and commission. To confirm this falsehood, they shewed a commission as if from Charles, authorizing them to execute the late bloody massacre, and to which they affixed an impression of the great seal of England, which they had taken off some grant or patent. This fatal stratagem acted immediately on the fervid bigotry of the native

1 Macaulay's Hist. of England - Clarendon's Hist. of the Rebellion. — Nalson's Collections.

2 MS. cited in Nalson's Collections, ii. 590.

Irish; and the puritan and covenanter chiefs propagated the malicious calumny amongst their followers, which increased their own malice and increased the king's embarrassments, so that he added another fatal item to his other concessions, and committed the whole management of the war in Ireland to the two houses of parliament. There would not have been any rebellion or massacre in Ireland had it not been for the infectious example of the rebels in Scotland, of which the papists took advantage in the hope of gaining the same ascendancy for popery as had been accomplished by the sword for presbytery. Some men, says Charles, "took it very ill not to be believed, when they affirmed, that what the Irish rebels did, was done with my privity at least, if not by my commission. But these knew too well that it is no news for some of my subjects to fight, not only without commission, but against my command and person too; yet all the while to pretend they fight by my authority, and for my safety. . . . . So that, next to the sin of those who began that rebellion, theirs must needs be, who either hindered the speedy suppressing of it by domestic dissentions, or diverted the aids or exasperated the rebels to the most desperate resolutions and actions. I offered to go

myself in person upon that expedition; but some men were either afraid I should have any one kingdom quieted; or loth they were to shoot at any mark here less than myself; or that any should have the glory of my destruction but themselves. Had my offers been accepted, I am confident neither the ruin had been so great, nor the calamity so long, nor the remedy so desperate 1."

After the KinG's departure from Edinburgh, the principal covenanting leaders conducted matters to all appearance with moderation, as if they were satisfied with the revolution they had effected; but the inferior actors began to talk of its being their duty to press a similar revolution in England, and the women were clamorous against the leaders and such of the ministers as spoke of peace, and of fulfilling their own expression of being "a contented people with a contented king." But the moderation of the chief, and the clamouring of the vulgar covenanters, or "the under-spur-leathers," were well understood to be only political manoeuvres to give the semblance of the popular voice to that armed rebellion, on which they had already determined. "The wives of Edinburgh (whose help to the cause was always ready at a dead lift),