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,