CHAPTER IV
Proceedings of the Confederation of Kilkenny—Arrival of Owen Roe O’Neill and Rinuccini
OUT of the chaos of a popular uprising, and a number of minor councils, which could decide only for localities, there sprang into existence the National Synod, composed of clerics and laymen of the Catholic persuasion, because, at this period, few, if any of the Irish Protestants were in sympathy with the insurrection, or revolution, which is a more fitting term. The “oath of association” was formulated by the venerable Bishop Rothe, and, somewhat unnecessarily, seeing that the King of England was using all the forces at his disposal to crush “the rebellion,” pledged true faith and allegiance to Charles I and his lawful successors. The fundamental laws of Ireland and the “free exercise of the Roman Catholic faith and religion” were to be maintained. Then came the second, and most important, part of the solemn and, as some thought, stringent obligation, which bound all Confederate Catholics never to accept or submit to any peace without the consent and approbation of their own general assembly.
A constitution was framed which declared the war just and constitutional, condemned racial distinctions such as “New” and “Old” Irish, ordained an elective council for each of the four provinces, and a national council for the whole kingdom, condemned, as excommunicate, all who might violate the oath of association, or who should be guilty of murder, assault, cruelty, or plunder under cover of the war.
The bishops and priests, very wisely, decided that a layman should be elected president of the National Council, and Lord Mountgarret was so chosen, with Richard Belling, lawyer and litterateur, as secretary. Both were men of moderate opinion and free from any taint of prejudice.
It was decided that the Supreme, or National, Council should hold its first session in the city of Kilkenny on October 23, 1642, the anniversary of the rising; and “the choice of such a date,” says McGee, “by men of Mountgarret’s and Belling’s moderation and judgment, six months after the date of the alleged ‘massacre,’ would form another proof, if any were now needed, that none of the alleged atrocities (of 1641) were yet associated with that particular day.”
Between the adjournment of the National Synod, in May, and the meeting of the Council in October, many stirring events occurred. The confederate general in Munster, the aged Barry, made an unsuccessful attempt to capture Cork, but had better success at Limerick, which surrendered to the Irish army on June 21. Soon afterward the Anglo-Irish leader, General St. Ledger, died at Cork, and the command devolved upon Murrough O’Brien, Baron of Inchiquin, who had been brought up from an early age as one of Parsons’ chancery wards, and had, therefore, become a Protestant. Furthermore, he had grown to be an anti-Irish Irishman of the blackest and bloodiest type. In Irish history, he is known as “Black Murrough the Burner,” because the torch, under his brutal sway, kept steady company with the sword, and both were rarely idle. He served the king as long as the royal policy suited his views, but, when it did not, his services were at the disposal of the opposition. Murrough had served his military apprenticeship under Sir Charles Coote and was a past master in all the cruelties practiced by his infamous instructor. The curse of the renegade was strong upon him, for he hated his own kin more bitterly than if he were an alien and a Briton. Of the ancient royal houses of Ireland, those of MacMurrough and O’Brien present the strongest contrasts of good and evil.
The Irish forces succeeded in taking the castles of Loughgar and Askeaton, but Inchiquin inflicted a severe defeat upon them at Liscarroll, where the loss was nearly a thousand men on the side of Ireland, whereas the victor boasted that there fell only a score on his side. There were also some skirmishes in Connaught, where the peculiar inactivity of Lord Clanricarde produced discontent, and led to a popular outbreak in the town of Galway which General Willoughby speedily suppressed, with every circumstance of savage brutality. Affairs in Leinster continued rather tranquil. Ormond was raised by the king to the dignity of marquis, but does not seem to have been trusted by the Puritan Lords Justices, Parsons and Borlaise. The fall of the year was signalized, however, by the landing in Ireland of three able generals, all of whom fought on the national side—Right Hon. James Touchet, Earl of Castlehaven, who had been imprisoned as a suspect in Dublin Castle, but managed to effect his escape; Colonel Thomas Preston, the heroic defender of Louvain, who debarked at Wexford, bringing with him 500 officers of experience, several siege guns, a few light field-pieces, and a limited quantity of small arms; and last, but most welcome to Ireland, arrived from Spain Colonel Owen Roe O’Neill, who made a landing on the Donegal coast with 100 officers, a company of Irish veterans, and a quantity of muskets and ammunition. He immediately proceeded to the fort of Charlemont, held by his fierce kinsman, Sir Phelim O’Neill, who, with commendable patriotic self-sacrifice, resigned to him, unsolicited, the command of the Irish army of the North, and became, instead of generalissimo, “President of Ulster.”
Simultaneously with the arrival of Owen Roe, General Lord Leven came into Ireland from Scotland with 10,000 Puritan soldiers. He had met O’Neill in the foreign wars and expressed publicly his surprise that he should be “engaged in so bad a cause”—to which Owen replied that he had a much better right to come to the rescue of Ireland, his native country, than Lord Leven had to march into England against his acknowledged monarch. Leven did not remain long in Ireland, and the command of his troops fell to General Monroe—a brave but slow man, on whom the advice of his predecessor to act with vigor was thrown away. Monroe’s dilatory tactics enabled O’Neill, who had wonderful talent for military organization, to recruit, drill, and equip a formidable force, mainly made up of the men of Tyrone and Donegal—as fine a body of troops as Ireland had ever summoned to her defence. The valorous clansmen were speedily molded into a military machine by their redoubted chief, who set the example of activity to all of his command.
When the Supreme Council of the Irish Confederation met in Kilkenny, according to agreement, one of its most important acts was the appointing of generals to command in the several provinces. It named Owen O’Neill commander-in-chief in Ulster, General Sir Thomas Preston in Leinster, General Barry in Munster, and General Sir John Burke in Connaught. Fighting was resumed with vigor. Preston met with alternate successes and reverses in his province, but, on the whole, came out victorious. Barry and his lieutenants did brilliant work in Munster, and routed both Vavassour and Inchiquin. O’Neill played a Fabian game in Ulster, training his army in partial engagements with the enemy and husbanding his resources for some great occasion, which, he saw, would surely come. But the brightest laurels of the campaign were gathered by General Sir John Burke, who, after other brilliant exploits, compelled General Willoughby to surrender the city of Galway to the Irish forces on June 20, 1643; and the national flag waved from the tower of its citadel until the last shot of the war was fired nine years thereafter. Clanricarde, who could have had the command in chief, paltered with time, and thus lost the opportunity of linking his name with a glorious exploit.
All the Irish armies, and particularly that under O’Neill, occupied excellent strategic positions, and the hopes of the military chiefs and the nation rose high when, suddenly, there came a blight upon those hopes in the shape of a cessation of hostilities—in other words, a prolonged armistice—agreed to between the Anglo-Catholic majority in the National Council on the one side, and the Marquis of Ormond, representing the King of England, on the other. The Anglo-Catholics were again duped by pretences of liberality toward their religion, as their fathers had been in the days of Elizabeth; and this ill-considered truce wrested from Ireland all the advantages won in the war—which had already lasted two years—by the ability of her generals and the courage of her troops. Vain was the protest of O’Neill, of Preston, of Burke, of Barry, of the Papal Nuncio, of the majority of the Irish nation. Charles was in straits in England, fighting the Parliamentary forces arrayed against his acts of despotism, and Ormond promised everything in order to end the war in Ireland, temporarily at least, and so be enabled to send needed succor to a sovereign whom he loved and served much better than he did God and country. With incredible fatuity, the Anglo-Catholic majority in the National Council listened to the voice of Ormond, and voted men and money to support the cause of the bad king who had let Strafford loose upon Ireland! We are glad to be able to say that the “Old Irish” element, represented by the brave and able O’Neill, was in nowise responsible for this act of weakness and folly. O’Neill saw into futurity, and frightful must have been that vision to the patriot-hero, for it included the horrors of Drogheda and Wexford, where the thirsty sword of Cromwell bitterly avenged on Ireland the foolish and fatal “truce of Castlemartin”; another lesson to nations, if indeed another were needed, to avoid mixing up in the quarrels of their neighbors. Ireland invited ruin on that dark day when she voted to draw the sword for the ungrateful Charles Stuart against the Parliament of England. The temporary concession of Catholic privileges—designed to be withdrawn when victory perched on the royal banner—was poor compensation for the loss of advantages gained at the price of the blood of brave men, and the sowing of a wind of vengeance which produced the Cromwellian whirlwind. If King Charles had ever done a fair or manly act by Ireland—even by the Anglo-Catholics of Ireland—the folly of that country might be, in a measure, excusable, but his whole policy had been, on the contrary, cold-blooded, double-faced, and thoroughly ungrateful. In this instance, the Anglo-Irish Catholics brought all their subsequent misfortunes on themselves. As if to emphasize its imbecility, the National Council placed Lord Castlehaven, an English Catholic, in supreme command over O’Neill in Ulster. Owen Roe was, of course, disgusted, but was also too good a soldier and too zealous a patriot to resign his command and go back to Spain, as a man of less noble nature might have done. Meanwhile, Monroe and his army of 10,000 Lowland Scotch and Ulster “Undertakers” kept gathering like a thundercloud in the north. In Scotland a body of 3,000 Antrim Irish, under Alister MacDonald, called Cal-Kitto, or “the Left-handed,” were covering themselves with glory, fighting under the great Marquis of Montrose in the unworthy royal cause. And we read that the Irish Confederate treasury, about this time, is somewhat replenished by funds sent from Spain and Rome. Even the great Cardinal Richelieu, of France, to show his sympathy with Ireland, invited Con, the last surviving son of the great O’Neill, to the French court, and permitted the shipment of much needed cannon to Ireland. But all of those good foreign friends of the Irish cause were sickened and discouraged by the miserable policy of armistice, so blindly consented to by the lukewarm “Marchmen of the Pale” who had assembled in Kilkenny.
Many Irish Protestants, particularly the High Church element, were ardent royalists and refused to take the oath of the Covenanters prescribed in Ulster by General Monroe. They were driven with violence from their homes, and many fled for succor to their Catholic brethren, who treated them with hospitable consideration. In Munster, the ferocious Inchiquin, and still more savage Lord Broghill, son of Boyle, first Earl of Cork, foiled in their ambitious schemes by some royal refusal, broke out most violently, pretending the armistice was violated, and seized upon three leading Southern towns—Cork, Kinsale, and Youghal, where their excesses were too horrible for narration—murder and arson being among the lightest of their crimes. Ormond, in his peculiarly adroit way, succeeded in still further prolonging the truce, and stated that he had power from the king to come to a permanent agreement with the Confederates. The cause of Ireland about this time lost a true and ardent friend and champion in the death of the good Pope Urban VIII, who was succeeded by Innocent X—a Pontiff whose noble generosity is still gratefully remembered by the Irish nation. It was to one of their worthy predecessors, in the time of the Elizabethan wars, O’Donnell’s bard referred, when addressing Ireland, in allegorical fashion, he sang:
“O! my dark Rosaleen!
Do not sigh, do not weep—
The priests are on the ocean green—
They march along the deep!
There’s wine from the Royal Pope,
Upon the ocean green,
And Spanish ale to give you hope,
My dark Rosaleen!”
Nathless the truce, those two bad Irishmen, Inchiquin and Broghill, continued to do base work in the South, where their cold-blooded atrocities struck terror into the wretched people of Munster. They even corrupted old Lord Esmond, commandant of Duncannon fort, which partly commanded the important harbor of Waterford from the Wexford side. Esmond was blind and almost senile, and, perhaps, too, was terrorized by the brutal threats of Inchiquin. But Lord Castlehaven and the Confederate Irish immediately laid siege to the place, and, after ten weeks of beleaguerment, succeeded in retaking it. The traitorous commandant perished in the assault, and thus escaped an ignominious death, which his crime had richly merited. Several other Munster towns, held by Inchiquin and his officers, were successively attacked and taken by the Confederates. In Connaught, however, the latter met with serious reverses. The town of Sligo was captured by Sir Charles Coote, Jr.—a worse scourge than even his infamous father—and, in an attempt to recover it, several gallant Irishmen perished. Archbishop O’Healy, of Tuam, fell into the hands of Coote and was barbarously tortured to death, Sunday, October 26, 1645. It must be remembered that these hostilities were the work of the Parliamentary forces, which were opposed by the “Old Irish” party. The royal troops had been sent to England to assist Charles, or else lay supine in their garrisons, as did also the Anglo-Irish, waiting for further developments.
The king sent the Earl of Glamorgan, an English Catholic, who had intermarried with the O’Brien family, to Ireland to negotiate a new treaty with the Confederates. He succeeded in having a preliminary document drawn up, signed by himself for Charles, and by Lord Mountgarret and Muskerry on behalf of the Confederates. Ormond, with his customary dilatoriness, haggled over the provisions regarding toleration of the Catholic Church in the kingdom, and thus frittered away much valuable time, which the Parliamentary forces made good use of. Ormond caused the treaty to be greatly modified, and while the negotiators were working on it at Kilkenny, there arrived in Ireland a new Papal Nuncio, in the person of the famous John Baptist Rinuccini, Archbishop of Ferns, and, afterward, Cardinal. He came to represent Pope Innocent X, who sent also substantial aid. The Irish in exile and their friends sent, through Father Luke Wadding, a further contribution of $36,000. The Nuncio complained that he had been unreasonably detained in France—it was greatly suspected by the intrigues of Cardinal Mazarin, who had succeeded Richelieu, Ireland’s true friend. In spite of this trickery, however, he managed to purchase, with Pope Innocent’s funds, a 26-gun frigate, which he called the San Pietro, 2,000 muskets, 2,000 cartridge boxes, 4,000 swords, 2,000 pike-heads, 800 horse pistols, 20,000 pounds of powder, and other much needed supplies. (McGee.) A ludicrous cause of one of his delays in France was the obstinacy of the wife of Charles I, Henrietta Maria, daughter of Henry of Navarre, who insisted that she would not receive the Papal Nuncio unless he uncovered in her presence. Rinuccini was proud and fiery, and, as representing the Pope, declined to remove his biretta, which so angered the queen that, after six weeks’ parleying on this point of etiquette, the pair separated without coming to an interview. Such is the farcical folly of “royal minds.”