The records of the times in which he lived do not show that O’More went extensively into Munster, but he did excellent missionary work among the Anglo-Catholic nobles of his own native province of Leinster. He found them, as a majority, very lukewarm toward his project, influenced, no doubt, by fears of the consequences to themselves should the contemplated revolution prove abortive. Although not a trained soldier, O’More had keen military foresight. The army raised by Strafford in Ireland was mainly made up of Catholics—for he does not seem to have discriminated very much in the matter of creed—and these troops were, in consequence, regarded with distrust, and even intense hatred, by the people of England, to whom the very name of Catholic was, in those days, odious. The vacillating king, influenced by the prejudices of his English subjects, resolved to get rid of his Irish army, and gave such of the regiments as might so elect permission to enter the service of Spain. Some did volunteer, but O’More prevailed on many of the officers to keep their battalions together, and thus secured the nucleus of a well-trained military force at the very outset of hostilities. Among the influential Irish officers who acted on O’More’s suggestion were Colonel Plunket, Colonel Sir James Dillon, Colonel Byrne, and Captain Fox. These, with O’More, constituted the first Directory of the Irish Confederates of Leinster. Meanwhile active communication was kept up with their friends on the Continent, and emissaries were coming and going all the time between the two organizations. The head of the movement abroad appears to have been John O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, who, however, died suddenly—some writers aver by the hand of a poisoner—early in 1641; and the military exiles immediately transferred their allegiance to his cousin, Colonel Owen Roe O’Neill, with whom we have already made acquaintance. It was agreed among the allies that the uprising for Irish liberty should occur about the 1st of November, and October 23, 1641, was finally decided upon as the fateful day. The date was made known to only the most trusted chiefs of the projected insurrection.
Everything appeared to prosper with the plans of the patriots until the actual eve of the rising. On that night (October 22), as fate would have it, there dined with Colonel Hugh MacMahon—to whom was intrusted the command of 200 picked men who were to surprise the Castle—several Irish officers concerned in the conspiracy. Among the guests was one Owen O’Connolly, an unworthy creature for whom MacMahon would appear to have entertained an unaccountable friendship. According to tradition, O’Connolly remained with Colonel MacMahon after the other guests had gone to their several abodes, and, in a moment of inexcusable weakness, the unhappy host, who must have been rendered reckless by wine, confided to his traitor-guest the secret so momentous to Ireland. O’Connolly was more than half intoxicated, but, unknown to MacMahon, he was in the service of a strong government supporter, named Sir John Clotworthy, and the danger which menaced his patron made the fellow sober enough to outwit his foolish informant. In order to divert suspicion, he pretended, after a time, that he wished to retire, and left his sword in MacMahon’s room. He managed to reach the rear door of the lodgings, and made his way over all kinds of obstacles, in the dark, to the castle, where, after much trouble, he succeeded in getting audience of Sir William Parsons, to whom he related what Colonel MacMahon had revealed to him. Parsons, observing that O’Connolly was still under the influence of strong drink, at first refused to believe him; and was on the point of turning him out of doors, when something in the rascal’s earnestness made him pause and consider. As a result of his musing, he sent for his colleague, Sir John Borlaise, Master of the Ordnance; the latter immediately advised the summoning of the council. Several members of that body soon appeared, and the deposition of the informer was formally taken. A squad of soldiers surrounded MacMahon’s lodgings and captured him. Lord McGuire was also taken, but Colonels Plunket and O’Byrne, Rory O’Moore, and Captain Fox, who were also in the city, succeeded in making good their escape. MacMahon, on being arraigned before the Privy Council in the Castle, at daylight on the memorable 23d, defiantly acknowledged his share in the plot, and declared that it was then too late for the power of man to prevent the revolution. He showed great courage, as did also his colleague, Lord McGuire, but MacMahon’s bravery could have been much better spared than his discretion, the want of which sent himself and his companion in misfortune to the scaffold, and, undoubtedly, lost to Ireland the best chance she had ever had of severing the connection with Great Britain. This unhappy result teaches a harsh, but useful, political lesson: Never to confide a secret that concerns a great cause to a dubious “hanger-on,” and to avoid the cup that inebriates when one is the possessor of such a secret, or whether one is or not. O’Connolly’s treachery was rewarded by a grant of lands from “the crown,” and he was afterward a colonel in Cromwell’s army. His ultimate fate is involved in obscurity. But his name is embalmed in the annals of enduring infamy.
The Lords Justices of England, in Dublin, once made aware of the situation, lost no time in putting the Castle and city at large in a posture of defence. The guards were doubled and reinforcements were summoned, by special messengers, from neighboring garrisons. Two tried soldiers were invested with the military power—Sir John Willoughby, who had been Governor of Galway, assumed command of the Castle; and Sir Charles Coote—one of the blackest names in Irish annals—was made military governor of the city. The Earl of Ormond—afterward Duke—was summoned from Carrick-on-Suir to assume chief command of the royal army. Thus, the Irish capital was again preserved, through folly and treason, to the English interest.
MacMahon made no vain boast before the Privy Council, when he declared that the rising was beyond the power of man to prevent. Ulster did its full duty, and, on the morning of October 23, the forts of Mountjoy and Charlemont and the town and castle of Dungannon were in the hands of Sir Phelim O’Neill or his chief officers. Sir Connor MacGennis captured Newry; the MacMahons took Carrickmacross and Castleblaney, the O’Hanlon’s, Tandragee, while O’Reilly and McGuire—a relative of the lord of that name—“raised” Cavan and Femanagh. (McGee.) Rory O’More supplemented a brief address of the northern chiefs, wherein they declared they bore no hostility to the king, or to his English or Scotch subjects, “but only for the defence and liberty of themselves and the native Irish of the kingdom,” with one more elaborate, in which he ably showed that a common danger threatened the Protestants of the Episcopal Church with Roman Catholics. In all the manifestos of the time, there was entirely too much profession of “loyalty” to a king who was constitutionally incapacitated for keeping faith with any body of men whatsoever. Never was the adage that “Politics makes strange bedfellows” more forcibly illustrated than during this period of Irish history. The manliest of all the declarations issued was that of Sir Connor MacGennis, from “Newry’s captured towers.” “We are in arms,” wrote he, “for our lives and liberties. We desire no blood to be shed, but if you (the English and their allies) mean to shed our blood, be sure we shall be as ready as you for that purpose.”
CHAPTER III
Horrors of Civil War in Ulster—Battle of Kilrush—Rory O’More Disappears from History
AT first the civil war in Ulster—for in the main it was the Old Irish against the Anglo-Irish settlers of the Elizabethan régime, or their immediate descendants—was carried on without ferocity, but the Scottish garrison of Carrickfergus, in the winter of 1641, raided Island Magee, in the neighborhood, and put to the sword or drove over the cliffs, to perish in the breakers beneath them, or be dashed to pieces on the rocks, 3,000 of the Celtic-Catholic inhabitants, without regard to age or sex. Protestant historians claim that acts of cruelty had been committed on the Anglo-Irish settlers by the Celtic Irish before this terrible massacre was accomplished. There may have been some isolated cases of murder and rapine—for bad and cruel men are to be found in all armies—but nothing that called for the wholesale slaughter at Island Magee by fanatical Scottish Covenanters, who made up a majority of the Carrickfergus garrison. Christians, not to mention Mohammedans and savage heathens, have shed oceans of blood in fierce persecution of each other, as if they were serving a furious devil, rather than a merciful God. They forget, in their unreasoning hatred, that the gentle Messiah, whose teachings they profess to follow, never made the sword the ally of the Cross. The man made mad by religious bigotry is a wild beast, no matter what creed he may profess. Let us, as Americans, be thankful that we live under a government which recognizes the equal rights of all the creeds, and permits every citizen to worship God in peace, after his own fashion. May the day never come when it shall be different in this Republic!
The frightful event we have chronicled naturally aroused the worst passions of the angered Catholic population of Ulster, and some cruel reprisals resulted. We are sorry to be obliged to state that credible history ascribes most of the violence committed on the Irish side to Sir Phelim O’Neill; but no charge of the kind is made against O’More, MacGennis, McGuire, Plunket, O’Byrne, or any of the other noted chiefs of the period. It is impossible to arrive at any accurate statement of the number of those who perished on both sides, outside of the numerous battlefields of the long struggle; but it is certain they have been grossly exaggerated, particularly by English writers, who took for granted every wild statement made at the period. But, even granting that all the charges made were true, which, of course, we do not admit, the fact would not stamp the charge of cruelty on the Irish nation. It was an age of cruelty—the age of the Thirty Years’ War in Germany, which gave to the world the horrors of the sack of Magdeburgh; the age of the wars of the Fronde in France, and almost that of the Spanish atrocities in the Netherlands. And Cromwell was soon to appear upon the scene in Ireland, to leave behind him a name more terrible than that of Tilly in Germany or of Alva in the Low Countries. In fact, in the seventeenth century, Europe, from east to west, was just emerging from Middle-Age barbarism, and Ireland, most likely, was neither better nor worse than most of her sister states. We love and respect the Irish race, but we do not believe in painting it whiter than it is. The nation, plundered and outraged, was goaded to madness, and whatever crimes were committed under such circumstances may well be attributed to the workings of temporary insanity. It is, however, regrettable that around the history of the Irish insurrection of 1641 there should linger blood-red clouds, which even the lapse of two and a half centuries has not been able to dissipate.
On the Anglo-Irish side of the conflict, the name of Sir Charles Coote stands out in bloody pre-eminence. Like Sir Phelim, he had the grand virtue of physical courage—he feared nothing in mortal shape—but in all else he was a demon-brute, and his memory is still execrated throughout the length and breadth of the land he scourged with scorpions. His soldiers are accused of having impaled Irish infants on their pikes—their mothers having been dishonored and butchered—without rebuke from their inhuman commander. On the contrary, McGee, a very painstaking and impartial historian, quotes Sir Charles Coote as saying that “he liked such frolics.” (McGee’s “History of Ireland,” Volume I, p. 502.) It is not unpleasant to note that, after a career of the most aggressive cruelty, he was finally killed by a musket-shot during a petty skirmish in the County Meath, and it is popular belief that the shot was fired by one of his own band of uniformed assassins.