A letter from Dublin, dated December 21, 1654, four days before Christmas, says the 'transplantation is now far advanced, the men being gone to prepare their new habitations in Connaught. Their wives and children and dependants have been, and are, packing away after them apace, and all are to be gone by the 1st of March next.' In another letter the writer naïvely remarks, 'It is the nature of this people to be rebellious, and they have been so much the more disposed to it, having been highly exasperated to it by the transplanting work.' The temper of the settlers towards the natives may be inferred from a petition to the lord deputy and council of Ireland, praying for the enforcement of the original order requiring the removal of all the Irish nation into Connaught, except boys of fourteen and girls of twelve. 'For we humbly conceive,' say the petitioners, 'that the proclamation for transplanting only the proprietors, and such as have been in arms, will neither answer the end of safety nor what else is aimed at thereby. For the first purpose of the transplantation is to prevent those of natural principles' (i.e. of natural affections) 'becoming one with these Irish, as well in affinity as idolatry, as many thousands did who came over in Elizabeth's time, many of which have had a deep hand in all the late murders and massacres. And shall we join in affinity,' they ask, 'with a people of these abominations? Would not the Lord be angry with us till He consumes us, having said—"the land which ye go to possess is an unclean land, because of the filthiness of the people who dwell therein. Ye shall not, therefore, give your sons to their daughters, nor take their daughters to your sons," as it is in Ezra ix. 11, 12, 14. "Nay, ye shall surely root them out, lest they cause you to forsake the Lord your God." Deut. c. vii. &c.'
In this way they hoped that 'honest men' would be encouraged to come and live amongst them, because the other three provinces (that is, all the island but Connaught) would be free of 'tories,' when there was none left to harbour or relieve them. They would have made a clean sweep of Munster, Leinster, and Ulster, so that 'the saints' might inherit the land without molestation. If any Protestant friends of the Irish objected to this thorough mode of effecting the work of Irish regeneration, Colonel Lawrence 'doubted not but God would enable that authority yet in being to let out that dram of rebellious bloud, and cure that fit of sullenness their advocate speaks of.'
The commissioners appointed to effect the transplantation were painfully conscious of their unworthiness to perform so holy a work, and Were overwhelmed with a sense of their weakness in the midst of such tremendous difficulties, so that they were constrained to say: 'The child is now come to the birth, and much is desired and expected, but there is no strength to bring forth.' They therefore fasted and humbled themselves before the Lord, inviting the officers of the army to join them in lifting up prayers, 'with strong crying and tears, to Him to whom nothing is too strong, that His servants, whom He had called forth in this day to act in these great transactions, might be made faithful, and carried on by His own outstretched arm, against all opposition and difficulty, to do what was pleasing in His sight.'
It is true they had this consolation, 'that the chiefest and eminentest of the nobility and many of the gentry had taken conditions from the king of Spain, and had transported 40,000 of the most active, spirited men, most acquainted with the dangers and discipline of war.' The priests were all banished. The remaining part of the whole nation was scarce one-sixth of what they were at the beginning of the war, so great a devastation had God and man brought upon that land; and that handful of natives left were poor labourers, simple creatures, whose sole design was to live and maintain their families.'
Of course there were many exceptions to this rule. There were some of the upper classes remaining, described in the certificates which all the emigrants were obliged to procure, like Sir Nicholas Comyn, of Limerick, 'who was numb at one side of his body of a dead palsy, accompanied only by his lady, Catherine Comyn, aged thirty-five years, flaxen-haired, middle stature; and one maid servant, Honor M'Namara, aged twenty years, brown hair, middle stature, having no substance,' &c. From Tipperary went forth James, Lord Dunboyne, with 21 followers, and having 4 cows, 10 garrons, and 2 swine. Dame Catherine Morris, 35 followers, 10 cows, 16 garrons, 19 goats, 2 swine. Lady Mary Hamilton, of Roscrea, with 45 persons, 40 cows, 30 garrons, 46 sheep, 2 goats. Pierce, Lord Viscount Ikerrin, with 17 persons, having 16 acres of winter corn, 4 cows, 5 garrons, 14 sheep, 2 swine, &c. There were other noblemen, lords of the Pale, descended from illustrious English ancestors, the Fitzgeralds, the Butlers, the Plunkets, the Barnwells, the Dillons, the Cheevers, the Cusacks, &c., who petitioned, praying that their flight might not be in the winter, or alleging that their wives and children were sick, that their cattle were unfit to drive, or that they had crops to get in. To them dispensations were granted, provided the husbands and parents were in Connaught building huts, &c., and that not more than one or two servants remained behind to look after the respective herds and flocks, and to attend to the gathering in and threshing of the corn. And some few, such as John Talbot de Malahide, got a pass for safe travelling from Connaught to come back, in order to dispose of their corn and goods, giving security to return within the time limited. If they did not return they got this warning in the month of March—that the officers had resolved to fill the jails with them, 'by which this bloody people will know that they (the officers) are not degenerated from English principles. Though I presume we should be very tender of hanging any except leading men, yet we shall make no scruple of sending them to the West Indies,' &c. Accordingly when the time came, all the remaining crops were seized and sold; there was a general arrest of all 'transplantable persons. All over the three provinces, men and women were hauled out of their beds in the dead hour of night to prison, till the jails were choked.' In order to further expedite the removal of the nobility and gentry, a court-martial sat in St. Patrick's Cathedral, and ordered the lingering delinquents, who shrunk from going to Connaught, to be hanged, with a placard on the breast and back of each victim—'For not transplanting.'
Scully's conduct at Ballycohy, was universally execrated. But what did he attempt to do? Just what the Cromwellian officers did at the end of a horrid civil war 200 years ago, with this difference in favour of Cromwell, that Scully did not purpose to 'transplant,' He would simply uproot, leaving the uprooted to perish on the highway. His conduct was as barbarous as that of the Cromwellian officers. But what of Scully? He is nothing. The all-important fact is, that, in playing a part worse than Cromwellian, he, acting according to English law, was supported by all the power of the state; and if the men who defended their homes against his attack had been arrested and convicted, Irish judges would have consigned them to the gallows; and they might, as in the Cromwellian case, have ordered a placard to be put on their persons:—
'FOR NOT TRANSPLANTING!'
In fact the Cromwellian commissioners did nothing more than carry out fully the principles of our present land code. Nine-tenths of the soil of Ireland are held by tenants at will. It is constantly argued in the leading organs of English opinion, that the power of the landlords to resume possession of their estates, and turn them into pastures, evicting all the tenants, is essential to the rights of property. This has been said in connection with the great absentee proprietors. According to this theory of proprietorship, the only one recognised by law, Lord Lansdowne may legally spread desolation over a large part of Kerry; Lord Fitzwilliam may send the ploughshare of ruin through the hearths of half the county Wicklow; Lord Digby, in the King's County, may restore to the bog of Allen vast tracts reclaimed during many generations by the labour of his tenants; and Lord Hertfort may convert into a wilderness the district which the descendants of the English settlers have converted into the garden of Ulster. If any or all of those noblemen took a fancy, like Colonel Bernard of Kinnitty or Mr. Allen Pollok, to become graziers and cattle-jobbers on a gigantic scale, the Government would be compelled to place the military power of the state at their disposal, to evict the whole population in the queen's name, to drive all the families away from their homes, to demolish their dwellings, and turn them adrift on the highway, without one shilling compensation. Villages, schools, churches would all disappear from the landscape; and, when the grouse season arrived, the noble owner might bring over a party of English friends to see his 'improvements!' The right of conquest so cruelly exercised by the Cromwellians is in this year of grace a legal right; and its exercise is a mere question of expediency and discretion. There is not a landlord in Ireland who may not be a Scully if he wishes. It is not law or justice, it is not British power, that prevents the enactment of Cromwellian scenes of desolation in every county of that unfortunate country. It is self-interest, with humanity, in the hearts of good men, and the dread of assassination in the hearts of bad men, that prevent at the present moment the immolation of the Irish people to the Moloch of territorial despotism. It is the effort to render impossible those human sacrifices, those holocausts of Christian households, that the priests of feudal landlordism denounce so frantically with loud cries of 'confiscation.'
The 'graces' promised by Charles I. in 1628 demonstrate the real wretchedness of the country to which they were deceitfully offered, and from which they were treacherously withdrawn. From them we learn that the Government soldiers were a terror to more than the king's enemies, that the king's rents were collected at the sword's point, and that numerous monopolies and oppressive taxes impoverished the country. There was little security for estates in any part of Ireland, and none at all for estates in Connaught. No man could sue out livery for his lands without first taking the oath of the royal supremacy. The soldiers enjoyed an immunity in the perpetration of even capital crimes, for the civil power could not touch them. Those who were married, or had their children baptized, by Roman Catholic priests, were liable to fine and censure. The Protestant bishops and clergy were in great favour and had enormous privileges. The patentees of dissolved religious houses claimed exemption from various assessments. The ministers of the Established Church were entitled to the aid of the Government in exacting reparation for clandestine exercises of spiritual jurisdiction by Roman Catholic priests, and actually appear to have kept private prisons of their own. They exacted tithes from Roman Catholics of everything titheable. The eels of the rivers and lakes, the fishes of the sea paid them toll. The dead furnished the mortuary fees to the 'alien church' in the shape of the best clothes which the wardrobe of the defunct afforded. The government of Wentworth, better known as the Earl of Strafford, is highly praised by high churchmen and admirers of Laud, but was execrated by the Irish, who failed to appreciate the mercies of his star-chamber court, or to recognise the justice of his fining juries who returned disagreeable verdicts. The list of grievances, transmitted by the Irish House of Peers in 1641 to the English Government, cannot be regarded as altogether visionary, for it was vouched by the names of lords, spiritual and temporal, whose attachment to the English interest was undoubted. The lord chancellor (Loftus), the archbishop of Dublin (Bulkeley), the bishops of Meath, Clogher, and Killala were no rebels, and yet they protested against the grievances inflicted on Ireland by the tyranny of Strafford. According to these contemporary witnesses, the Irish nobles had been taxed beyond all proportion to the English nobles; Irish peers had been sent to prison although not impeached of treason or any capital offence; the deputy had managed to keep all proxies of peers in the hands of his creatures, and thus to sway the Upper House to his will; the trade of the kingdom had been destroyed; and the 'graces' of 1628 had been denied to the nation, or clogged by provisoes which rendered them a mockery. And yet, in the face of such evidence of misery and misgovernment, the Archbishop of Dublin asserted in a charge to his clergy, that 'all contemporary writers agree in describing the flourishing condition of the island, and its rapid advance in civilisation and wealth, when all its improvement was brought to an end by the catastrophe of the Irish rebellion of 1641'—the very year in which the Irish Houses of Lords and Commons agreed in depicting the condition of Ireland as utterly miserable!
But Archbishop Trench not only contradicts the authentic contemporary records, in picturing as halcyon days one of the most wretched periods of Irish history, but also wrongfully represents one of the saddest episodes of that history. He reminded his clergy 'that the number of Protestants who were massacred by the Roman Catholics during the rebellion was, by the most moderate estimate, set down as 40,000.' His grace seems to have been unacquainted with the contemporary evidence collected by the Protestant historian Warner, who examined the depositions of 1641, on which the story of the massacre was based, and found the estimate of those who perished in the so-called massacre to have been enormously exaggerated. He calculated the number of those killed, 'upon evidence collected within two years after the rebellion broke out,' at 4,028, besides 8,000 said to have perished through bad usage. The parliament commissioners in Dublin, writing in 1652 to the commissioners in England, say that, 'besides 848 families, there were killed, hanged, burned, and drowned 6,062. Thus there were two estimates—one of 12,000, the other of 10,000—each of which was far lower than the estimate of 40,000, which his grace calls 'the most moderate.' It turns out, moreover, that the argument based by Archbishop Trench on the false estimate of those said to have been massacred, is wholly worthless for the purpose intended by his grace. The disproportion of Protestants to Roman Catholics, which appears by the census of 1861, cannot be accounted for by the statistics of 1641—be those statistics true or false. For the proportion of Protestants to Roman Catholics was higher in 1672—thirty years after the alleged massacre—than in 1861. The Protestants in 1672, according to Sir W. Petty, numbered 300,000, and the Roman Catholics 800,000; while in 1861 there were found in Ireland only 1,293,702 Protestants of all denominations to 4,505,265 Roman Catholics. It follows from these figures, as has been already remarked by Dr. Maziere Brady, that there has been a relative decrease of Protestants, as compared with Roman Catholics, of 395,772 persons. And this relative decrease was in no way affected—inasmuch as it took place since the year 1672—by the alleged massacre of 1641.