By an Inquisition taken on the 14th June, 1612, the possessions of this Abbey were found as follow:—“The site, a water-mill, a garden, an orchard, a park called Legan Park, the old orchard containing two acres; the silver meadow, nine acres; the wood meadow, ten acres; and the doves’ park; 80 acres of underwood; Killingwood, being great timber, containing twelve acres; Ardagh, twenty acres, being the demesne lands; and the grange and town of Tullyallen,” etc.
In 1615, July 20th, Sir Garret was created Baron Moore of Mellifont, by King James I. In 1619, Baron Moore obtained a royal grant of St. Mary’s Abbey, Dublin, from the same King; and in 1621, he was created a Viscount, with the title of Viscount Moore of Drogheda. St. Mary’s Abbey, Dublin, passed from the family some fifty years later.
As has been said, no trace of the expelled religious remains after the suppression of Mellifont. It, however, may be assumed, that some few of them lingered around the hallowed spot to which their affections clung, and that they shared the labours and dangers incident to the Catholic missionaries of the period, as is well known their brethren in other parts of Ireland did after their expulsion. It cannot now be ascertained whether, or not, an unbroken line of titular Abbots of Mellifont was maintained after the dissolution of the Abbey; but, in 1623, an oratory in Drogheda, belonging to the Cistercians, was served by five or six Fathers of the Order under Patrick Barnewall, who had been appointed Abbot of Mellifont by the Pope; and in 1625, he received the abbatial benediction in the church of St. John, in Waterford, at the hands of the Most Rev. Thomas Fleming, Archbishop of Dublin. This Patrick Barnewall belonged to the Bremore branch (Co. Dublin) of the ancient and illustrious family of that name. After having studied the Humanities, Philosophy, Theology, and Canon Law in the Universities of Douay and Paris, he was ordained priest, and discharged missionary duties in Drogheda. In a sketch of his life given by a fellow-labourer, it is related, that one night as he lay awake, St. Bernard appeared to him and told him he would be a monk of his Order. Though he relished the idea, yet he did not immediately correspond with his inclinations till he was grievously afflicted with a severe sickness, when he remembered the vision, and being urged by his two sisters, who had consecrated themselves to God, he entered the Novitiate of the Order in Kilkenny, and was at once restored to health. Soon after his profession he was appointed Abbot of Mellifont by Apostolic authority; and he admitted novices into the Order at his “hiding-place” at Drogheda, whom he sent to be educated at the Cistercian College, Louvain, and to other Continental Colleges. He was a very learned man, particularly in Canon Law, and was consulted as an authority on this subject. During the siege of Drogheda, in 1641, his goods were seized and himself cast into prison, but through the influence of some powerful relatives he was liberated. He died in his father’s house in September, 1644, and was buried in the church of Donore, which formerly belonged to Mellifont. John Devereux, a native of the Co. Wexford, who had been educated at Louvain, was appointed by the Pope, Abbot of Mellifont, in 1648. He, with Father Luke Bergin and Father Patrick Grace, both natives of Co. Kilkenny, Father Malachy O’Hartry, a native of Waterford, Father John Bryan, a native of Drogheda, and Father Plunket, constituted the new community of Cistercian monks under Abbot Patrick Barnewall, when he opened the oratory in Drogheda, in 1623. Whether all or any of them perished in the general massacre of Drogheda, under Cromwell, we cannot tell, but they disappeared thenceforth, and John Devereux seems to have been the last titular Abbot of Mellifont.
In the Rebellion of 1641, Mellifont and its owner, Lord Charles Moore, son of Garret, the first Viscount, became involved. On the 21st November, just a short time after the outbreak, the rebels under Sir Phelim O’Neil, when on their way to besiege Drogheda, made a halt at Tullyallen, and “sent a party of 1,300 foot down to Mellifont, the Lord Moore’s house, which their design was suddenly to surprise; but, contrary to their expectation, they found there twenty-four musketeers and fifteen horsemen, who very stoutly defended the house as long as their powder lasted. The horsemen, when they saw themselves beset so as they could no longer be serviceable to the place, opened the gates, issued out and made their passage through the midst of the rebels, and so, notwithstanding the opposition they made, escaped safe to Drogheda. The foot having refused to accept of the quarter at the first offered, resolved to make good the place to the last man; they endured several assaults, slew one hundred-and-forty of the rebels, before their powder failed them; and at last they gave up the place upon promise of quarter, which was not kept, for some of them were killed in cold blood, all were stripped, and two old decrepid men slain, the house ransacked and all the goods carried away.”
The above is from Sir John Temple’s History of the Irish Rebellion, and it has been quoted by Catholics and Protestants alike when alluding to Mellifont; they each add, however, a little spice to suit the palates of their respective readers. Of this attack on Mellifont we have no less than four versions, two of which deserve but little credence, viz., that already given, and that of Dean Bernard. The account given by the latter is fuller, and enters more minutely into detail, so that some particulars tax the capacity of the most credulous; as, for instance, when he tells us that twenty-four musketeers killed one hundred-and-forty rebels though they had only “six shots” of powder, “some only four,” and that they rammed in six bullets together, and how each shot killed several. Verily, every bullet had its billet there! That be sharp practice without doubt! He also tells, how the loss on the part of the garrison was thirteen killed, “whom a Friar was so forward for deed of charity as to procure them burial in the church adjoining.” Thank goodness, he has the grace to credit even a Friar with some remnant of humanity! He does not say that the rebels stripped all. They could not have done so; for eleven escaped to Drogheda. These godless Papists capped their iniquity in this holy man’s estimation when they “threw a fair church Bible into the mill-pond.” The last charge on the sheet is—“Their best language to them all was ‘English dogs,’ ‘rogues,’ etc.”
Before producing the other two versions, let us examine the characters of both these witnesses as drawn by Protestant writers. Sir John Temple wrote his History in 1656, from the “Depositions” preserved then in Dublin Castle, but which are now in Trinity College. These “Depositions” comprise the list of murders, burnings, etc., said to have been perpetrated by the Irish on the English Protestants during the war, and fill thirty-two volumes. He was some time Privy Councillor, but was removed by Ormonde, and Carte tells how “two traitorous and scandalous letters against his Majesty written by Temple were read in Committee.” And Dr. Nalson, another Protestant writer, accuses him of having been in league with the Parliamentarians, whom Ormonde describes as those who became the “murderers of his (the King’s) royal person, the usurpers of his rights, and destroyers of the Irish nation; by whom the nobility and gentry of it were massacred at home, and led into slavery, or driven into beggary abroad.” In 1674, Temple protested that the work was published without his knowledge, as appears from State Papers, Dublin edition, p. 2.
Dean Bernard was Primate Ussher’s chaplain, and like his master, was a Puritan. During the siege of Drogheda he watched over the Primate’s library lest the rebels should attack the magnificent palace which had been built with the fines from the recusants. He was afterwards Cromwell’s chaplain and almoner, in either of which capacities, it would be quite unreasonable to expect justice to the Irish from him.
As to the “Depositions” themselves, they are summarily dealt with by the Rev. Dr. Warner, another English Protestant historian of that Rebellion. “There is no credit to be given to anything that was said by these Deponents which had not others’ evidence to confirm it.” And again, the same Dr. Warner, who went through the drudgery of perusing and examining these “Depositions,” says: “As a great stress has been laid upon this collection in print and conversation, and as the whole evidence of the massacres turns upon it, I spent a great deal of my time examining the books; and I am sorry to say, that they have been made the foundation of much more clamour and resentment than can be warranted by truth and reason.” It was in them that Temple found the story of the ghosts of the murdered Protestants, in the River Bann, at the Bridge of Portadown, shrieking for revenge, and one in particular, who was seen there from the 29th December to the end of the following Lent!!! He sets down the number of English and Protestants who were “murdered in cold blood, destroyed some other way, or expelled out of their habitations in two years by the Irish, as exceeding 300,000,” though, according to Petty, there were not at the outbreak of the Rebellion 20,000 English Protestants in Ulster, where nearly all the murders were said to have been committed. Dr. Warner also tells how he saw in the Council books at Dublin, the letter which the Commissioners of the Irish Parliament wrote to the English Parliament, urging them to show no mercy to the Irish, but rather, to revenge the murders and massacres committed by them. They tell them, “that besides eight hundred-and-forty-eight families, there were killed, hanged, burned, and drowned, six thousand and sixty-two.” Dr. Warner considers 2,000 about the correct number. A prodigious number to be sure, but how far less than Temple’s 300,000. Warner says, finally, at p. 296 of his work so often cited: “It is easy enough to demonstrate the falsehood of every Protestant historian of this Rebellion.”
The Rev. Mr. Carte, an English Protestant clergyman, who wrote the celebrated Life of the Duke of Ormonde, tears all Temple’s assertions in pieces, and demonstrates from indubitable authority the falsehoods of his statements. Writing of these “Depositions” he says, at Vol. II., p. 263: “Anyone who has ever read the examinations and depositions which were generally given on hearsay, and contradicting one another, must think it very hard upon the Irish, to have all those without distinction to be admitted as evidence.” And in the Preface to the collection of Letters affixed to the Life he alludes to the “uncertain, false, mistaken, and contradictory accounts, which have been given of the Irish Rebellion, by parties influenced by selfish views and party animosities, or unfurnished with proper and authentic materials and memoirs.”
It is obvious from the first pages of Temple’s History what the scope of the work is. It is a gross libel on the whole Irish nation from the earliest times. In one page, he twice applies to them the epithet of a beastly race, and, no doubt, worthy to be rooted out, to make room for Royalists of his type, who worshipped the rising sun.