She dare not own the martyrs in her cause;
But they, our poets, they who justify—
They will not let thy memory rot or die!”
CHAPTER IX
Sad Fate of the Vanquished—Cruel Executions and Wholesale Confiscations
THE subsequent fate of other chief actors in this great political and military drama is summed up by a learned historian thus: “Mountgarret and Bishop Rothe died before Galway (the last Irish stronghold of this war) fell. Bishop MacMahon, of Clogher, surrendered to Sir Charles Coote, and was executed like a felon by one he had saved from destruction a year before at Derry. Coote, after the Restoration, became Earl of Mountrath, and Broghill, Earl of Orrery. Clanricarde died unnoticed on his English estate, under the Protectorate. Inchiquin, after many adventures in foreign lands, turned Catholic in his old age; and this burner of churches bequeathed an annual alms for masses for his soul. A Roman patrician did the honors of sepulture for Father Luke Wadding. Hugh Duff O’Neill, the heroic defender of Clonmel and Limerick, and the gallant though vacillating Preston, were cordially received in France, while the consistent (English) Republican, General Ludlow, took refuge as a fugitive (after the Restoration) in Switzerland.”
The same accomplished authority (T. D. McGee) informs us that under Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate, “A new survey of the whole island was ordered, under the direction of Sir William Petty, the fortunate economist who founded the House of Lansdowne. By him the surface of the kingdom was estimated at ten and a half million plantation acres, three millions of which were deducted for waste and water. Of the remainder, above 5,000,000 acres were in Catholic hands in 1641; 300,000 acres were college lands, and 2,000,000 acres were in possession of the Protestant settlers of the reigns of James I and Elizabeth. Under the Cromwellian Protectorate, 5,000,000 acres were confiscated. This enormous spoil, two-thirds of the whole island (as then computed), went to the soldiers and adventurers who had served against the Irish or had contributed to the military chest since 1641—except 700,000 acres given in ‘exchange’ to the banished in Clare and Connaught, and 1,200,000 confirmed to ‘innocent Papists’ who had taken no part in the warfare for their country’s liberty. And,” continues our authority already quoted, “Cromwell anticipated the union of the kingdoms by a hundred and fifty years, when he summoned, in 1653, that assembly over which ‘Praise-God Bare-bones’ presided. Members for Ireland and Scotland sat on the same benches with the Commons of England. Oliver’s first deputy in the government of Ireland was his son-in-law, Fleetwood, who had married the widow of Ireton, but his real representative was his fourth son, Henry Cromwell, commander-in-chief of the army. In 1657, the title of Lord Deputy was transferred from Fleetwood to Henry, who united the supreme civil and military authority in his own person, until the eve of the Restoration, of which he became an active partisan. We may thus embrace the five years of the Protectorate as the period of Henry Cromwell’s administration.” High Courts of Justice were appointed for dealing with those who had been actively in arms, and many cruel executions resulted. Commissions were also appointed for the expatriation of the people, particularly the young. “Children under age, of both sexes, were captured by the thousands, and sold as slaves to the tobacco planters of Virginia and the West Indies. Secretary Thurloe informs Henry Cromwell that ‘the Council have authorized 1,000 girls, and as many youths, to be taken up for that purpose.’ Sir William Petty mentions 6,000 Irish boys and girls shipped to the West Indies. Some contemporary accounts make the total number of children and adults, so transported, 100,000 souls. To this decimation we may add 34,000 men of fighting age, who had permission to enter the armies of foreign powers at peace with the Commonwealth.”
As there was no Irish Parliament called under Cromwell’s régime, the “government” of Ireland consisted, during that period, of the deputy, the commander-in-chief, and four commissioners—the Puritan leaders, Ludlow, Corbett, Jones, and Weaver—all of whom looked upon the Celtic-Catholic Irish, and, in fact, all classes of the Irish people, with bigoted hatred and insolent disdain. And these men had, until the Restoration, absolute dominion over the lives and liberty, the rights and properties of the nation they hated!
The Act of Uniformity, which played such a terrible part in the reigns of Elizabeth and James, was put into relentless force. The Catholics were crushed, as it were, into the earth, and Ireland again became a veritable counterpart of the infernal regions. Priests, of all ranks, were hunted like wild beasts, and many fell victims to their heroic devotion to their flocks. Catholic lawyers were rigidly disbarred and Catholic school-teachers were subjected to deadly penalties. “Three bishops and three hundred ecclesiastics” perished violently during the Protectorate. “Under the superintendence of the commissioners,” says McGee, “the distribution made of the soil among the Puritans ‘was nearly as complete as that of Canaan by the Israelites.’ Such Irish gentlemen as had obtained pardons were obliged to wear a distinctive mark on their dress under pain of death. Those of inferior rank were obliged to wear a round black spot on the right cheek, under pain of the branding iron and the gallows. If a Puritan lost his life in any district inhabited by Catholics, the whole population were held subject to military execution. For the rest, whenever ‘Tory’ (nickname for an Irish royalist) or recusant fell into the hands of these military colonists, or the garrisons which knitted them together, they were assailed with the war-cry of the Jews—‘That thy feet may be dipped in the blood of thy enemies, and that the tongues of thy dogs may be red with the same.’ Thus, penned in (according to the Cromwellian penal regulation) between ‘the mile line’ of the Shannon and the ‘four-mile line’ of the sea, the remnant of the Irish nation passed seven years of a bondage unequaled in severity by anything which can be found in the annals of Christendom.”
When the news of Oliver Cromwell’s death, which occurred on September 3, 1658, reached Ireland, a sigh of intense relief was heaved by the persecuted nation. Many a prayer of thankfulness went up to the throne of God from outraged Irish fathers and mothers, whose children were sweltering as slaves under tropical suns. Cromwell himself had passed away, but the “curse of Cromwell” remained with Ireland for many a black and bitter day thereafter.