Harsh warfare.
On March 21 Tichborne marched with 1200 foot, four troops of horse, and provisions for two days to Ardee, where on the 23rd he found more than 2000 Irish pretty strongly posted on the right bank of the Dee. He drove them over the bridge into the town, with a loss of 600 men, turned their position by fording the river with his horse, and pursued them with further slaughter far into the open country. After consulting Lord Moore and the other officers Tichborne then decided to make a dash at Dundalk, before which he arrived about nine in the morning of April 26. Sir Phelim showed himself with his horse, but made no fight until the English came up to the first gate, which they forced open under a heavy fire. The suburbs were then occupied, but a castle annoyed them there, an officer and some men were killed, and many wished to retire. But the wind was in their favour, and Tichborne ordered some houses to be fired, and came up to the gate of the inner town under cover of the smoke. The Irish in the castle were driven out by heaping fuel against the door, and from the walls Tichborne’s musketeers could fire right into the market place. Sir Phelim and his men then began to pour out at the north gate over the bridge, and the whole town was soon in English hands. Dean Bernard, who was present, remarks on the amount of plunder which the Irish had collected in Dundalk. The victors found plentiful dinners ready dressed in many cases, and consumed 4000 turkeys and other fowls in a week. A hundred and twenty Protestants had been imprisoned by O’Neill under threat that they would be killed if the town were in danger. There had been no time to hurt them, if, indeed, that was intended, and they were released. Ardee and Dundalk were both plundered by their captors, the former in a tumultuary way, and the latter more systematically. ‘The number of the slain,’ says Tichborne, ‘I looked not after, but there was little mercy shown in those times.’[307]
FOOTNOTES:
[287] Hume’s Hist. of England, note N to chap. xxxix., ed. 1854; Hickson’s Ireland in the Seventeenth Century, i. 163, 336; Exhortatio appended to O’Mahony’s Disputatio Apologetica, 1645, p. 125, para. 20; Clarendon’s Hist. iv. 24; Petty’s Economic Writings, i. 149-154, ii. 610; Warner’s Rebellion and Civil War, 2nd ed. p. 297; Froude’s English in Ireland, i. 111. Lecky’s Eighteenth Century, ii. 154; Reid’s Presbyterian Church, chap. vii. Bishop Henry Jones, who knew as much as any one, says that within twenty years of the Restoration there were people who ‘openly proclaimed, contrary to all evidence, that there was then no such rebellion of the Irish, neither such massacres of the British and Protestants in Ireland,’ letter of May 27, 1679, printed in the preface to Borlase’s History, 1680. In Special News from Ireland, from a gentleman in Dublin, London, March 1, 1642-3, it is stated that 144,000 Ulster Protestants were killed, wounded, or missing. There would be a tendency to say that all who escaped from Ireland had been murdered.
[288] In the list of murders committed on the Irish, affixed to Clarendon’s volume on Ireland, it is said that ‘this was the first massacre committed in Ireland of either side,’ and that the number of innocent men, women, and children killed was over 3000. Miss Hickson has conclusively shown that the number of victims was about sixty, and that the date was January 8—Ireland in the Seventeenth Century, i. 151, 255.
[289] Hickson, Deposition, p. 22; Creichton’s Memoirs in Swift’s Works, xiii. 13.
[290] Lodge’s Peerage, by Archdall, iii. 140, for Charlemont. Leslie’s and Montgomery’s letters in Contemp. Hist. i. 362; Chichester to the King, October 24, in Benn’s Hist. of Belfast, p. 97; Rushworth, part iii. chap. i. Reports received at Rome describe the progress of the rising ‘con sacheggiar le case dei Calvinisti, havendo anche fatto prigione il giovine principe milort Cafild in contracambio del duca di Macquera (Maguire) sequestrato in Dublin.’—Roman Transcripts, R.O., December 18, 1641.
[291] Hickson, Depositions, pp. 1-9 and 26.
[292] Crichton’s deposition in Contemp. Hist. i. 525.
[293] Jones’s Relation, 1642, reprinted in Contemp. Hist. i. 476. This is confirmed by the depositions of Philpot and Ryves, Hickson, i. 308.