1641, October.
On returning to the complicated web of religious interests and excitements at the close of the year 1641, some dark threads remain to be unravelled.
The following letter was written in London on the 4th of November, 1641, and indicates the alarm excited by intelligence just received from Ireland:—[266]
Irish Rebellion.
"This week hath brought forth strange discoveries of horrible treasons hatched by the Papists in Ireland, and that upon the 23rd of October past, they should have been put in execution throughout the north of that kingdom upon all the Protestants at one instant, who were then designed to have their throats cut by them; but, God be thanked, the night before, being the 22nd October, one Owen Connellie, a servant of Sir John Clotworthy, a member of the House of Commons, being then newly made acquainted with the wickedness of the plot, by a friend of his, that the next day should have been an actor in it, went (though with much ado) to the Lords the Justices in Dublin, and revealed it: whereupon the gates were instantly commanded to be shut, and a matter of thirty-eight that were in town of the conspirators taken, whereof the Lord Marquis and Mac Mahon are the chief, and have since confessed, that by the next morning they expected to come to their aid twenty well armed Papists, out of every county in Ireland, that they might all, upon a sudden, have surprised the castle with the ammunition, and so commanded the city and the lives of all the inhabitants. The treason being thus discovered did spread apace throughout the north of Ireland, where the rebellion first began, and in several places in several bodies are of the Papists up in arms above 10,000 men, which doth much perplex the poor Protestants, and [there is] great fear whether they shall be able to suppress or resist them. Whereupon our Parliament hath ordered my Lord of Leicester, Lord Lieutenant, and all other commanders here, speedily to repair thither, and do furnish £50,000 to carry along with them, which the City of London advances for providing of men and arms to secure that kingdom. Some blood the villains have shed, and committed great outrages, and taken some castles and places of strength; but if they had taken Dublin, upon the rack divers have confessed, in a short time they would not have left a Protestant alive in the whole kingdom; but God, in His mercy, hath prevented that slaughter, and hath turned part of it upon themselves. The traitors give out the late tyranny of the Lord of Strafford upon them moved them to it; and that, by the example of the Scots, they hoped to purchase such privileges, by this means, in their religion, as otherwise they never expected to have granted to them. You see the distempers of the three kingdoms—God forgive them that have been the cause of it, and then to be despatched into the other world, that they may trouble us no more in this again."[267]
1641, October.
Irish Rebellion.
It is difficult for us—now that the reformation has become a remote event, and Protestantism holds undisputed supremacy; now that the principles of liberty are well understood, and the asperities and virulence of old controversies, except in a few cases, have, been softened down—to enter into the anti-papal feelings which moved our stout-hearted fathers more than two centuries ago. At that period, the Reformation, under Elizabeth, had lasted little more than eighty years. The parents of some who were now living had witnessed the cruelties of the Marian persecution; the men and women under Charles the First, had, as boys and girls, in ingle-nook at Christmas-tide, felt their blood run cold whilst listening to stories of the Smithfield fires from eye-witnesses. A few, then in London, had actually beheld with their own eyes a scene which stirs our hearts when only represented by the pencil—Elizabeth haranguing her troops at Tilbury Fort. More had heard, with their own ears, the current contemporary talk about the Spanish Armada, as it sailed up the channel, and had caught the first tidings of the proud armament being scattered to the winds—just after the subsiding of the storm which sunk the accursed ships—and they could never forget how the nation drew breath after a gasp of most awful suspense in 1588. These last events were about as near to the times we are describing, as the Battle of Waterloo is to our own. The gunpowder plot was an incident of no very distant occurrence; only as far back in the memory of members of the Long Parliament, as the Bristol riots, and the Swing rick burning in our own. Numbers of the gentlemen in high-crowned hats and short cloaks, who walked into the House of Commons in 1641, filled with alarm respecting Popery, had participated in the sensation produced by that discovery, which is celebrated now only by a few boys on the 5th of November. Besides all this, the sufferings of French Huguenots were fresh in everybody's mind. Refugees who had escaped the galleys were still in London. The massacre at Paris, commemorated by the Pope's medal, hardly fell beyond the recollections of existing persons, whilst new religious conflicts in France, and the siege of Rochelle, had occurred but a few years before. The thirty years' war in Germany was not concluded; and the battle of Prague, the execution of the Protestant patriots in front of the Rathhaus, the expulsion of the disciples of Huss, and the barbarities of the Papists throughout Bohemia, were in everyone's memory.
1641, October.
With so many alarming events recently connected with Popery, and while the question of the Reformation in Europe appeared unsettled, and Jesuits were intriguing, and catholic tendencies had reached such a height in the Church of England, it is no wonder that staunch Protestants at home, who made common cause with staunch Protestants abroad, had such an intense dread of their old enemy. It was then with the Puritans of England, as it has ever been, and still is, with the Protestants of France. The latter have never forgotten the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. They have cherished, more than we have, the traditions of a suffering Church, a Church struggling to keep its ground against neighbours as powerful as they are antagonistic. Catholic tendencies do not appear amongst the descendants of the Huguenots; the line is distinct between the two Churches, and the trumpet of defiance, in the case of French Protestantism, gives no uncertain sound. A like relative position to papal Europe was maintained by the Puritans of 1641, with animosities even more intense, inasmuch as the tragedies remembered were more recent, and the danger apprehended seemed just at hand: and it explains how the outburst of a neighbouring rebellion on the part of the spiritual subjects of the Pope, struck terror in all Protestants throughout this kingdom, from the Orkneys to the Land's End.