Inchiquin and the Parliament.
He is distrusted,
and voted a traitor, April 14, 1648.
Inchiquin’s espousal of the Parliamentary cause had been generally attributed to his disgust at the King’s foolish appointment of Portland to be President of Munster over his head. But the motives of men are, for the most part, mixed, and he may have thought, as was indeed the fact, that he was taking the best course to protect the Protestants of southern Ireland. Ormonde could do little for them, and the masters of the sea could do much. But Parliament was torn by factions, and help was sent to Ireland grudgingly. Having gained two great victories and successfully maintained the three seaports, Inchiquin thought he deserved better treatment. Besides all this, he disliked the Independents and dreaded their growing power. In November 1642 he assured Ormonde that he was no Roundhead; and in August 1645, after Naseby and after his expulsion of the Roman Catholics from Cork and Youghal, he told his brother-in-law, Michael Boyle, that he would waive all dependence on Parliament if he could see safety for the Protestants by any other means. Even before the battle of Knocknanuss he was distrusted in Parliamentary circles, and after it he began to draw towards Ormonde. The Confederacy was evidently on the decline, and there was some chance of a general combination against Owen Roe O’Neill. Purely selfish considerations would probably have confirmed him in his allegiance to the Parliament; for since Cornet Joyce’s raid it was easy to see that the ‘Roundheads’ were going to win. On March 30, after the letter from Inchiquin’s officers had been considered, three members of the House of Commons were appointed to go as commissioners to the Munster army. A fortnight later Major Elsing, one of the officers who refused to follow their general, reported his defection to the House, who thereupon recalled their commissioners, cancelled all Inchiquin’s powers, and voted him a rebel and traitor. Before declaring himself openly he had taken the precaution of bespeaking a welcome in France in case the worst came to the worst. Broghill, his rival in Munster, was also intriguing with Ormonde and the Queen; but in his case it came to nothing. His cousin, Sir W. Fenton, and other officers who refused to declare for the King, had been imprisoned by Inchiquin, and this may have tended to prevent Broghill from joining him.[123]
Inchiquin’s truce with the Confederacy
Rinuccini’s opposition.
The truce condemned by the bishops, April 27.
Inchiquin having declared himself a Royalist, there was nothing to prevent those who had made the Ormonde peace from coming to terms with him also. When the late raid was fresh in his memory, even Rinuccini had seen the necessity of doing something of the kind. Now that Kilkenny and Waterford seemed safe he strenuously opposed any cessation or truce on the ground that it would leave things as before. Inchiquin’s change of front had left him without allies, and this was the time to crush the author of the Cashel massacre. The Supreme Council urged that they were in no condition to maintain a war, and that even if they were it would be bad policy to drive Inchiquin to desperation. The result would be to deliver Cork, Youghal, and Kinsale to the Parliament, who would always grant him fair terms for such valuable possessions. Inchiquin was certainly very anti-Catholic, ‘yet, as we are informed, he suffers our priests to live and mass to be celebrated within his quarters,’ and he would allow tithes to be paid in Tipperary and ‘Cashel and all the churches which were profaned there’ to be restored to their old uses. Michael Jones was making great preparations in Dublin, and the Confederacy would soon have to reckon with him. ‘Your lordship knows by experience,’ they reminded the nuncio, ‘that when the enemy insulted over your lordship at the walls of Waterford, and stood at defiance with us at the gates of Kilkenny, how slow our forces were drawing to a head, when after orders upon orders, ten times at least, issued by us, one on the neck of another, to General Preston, General O’Neill, and the Lord Taaffe, scarce three thousand men could be brought into the city before the enemy retreated.’ But Rinuccini above all things dreaded the return of Ormonde, and persisted in opposing a truce ‘with any of a contrary religion,’ though he was willing to agree to an ‘accommodation, confederacy, or some such like contract,’ based not upon the status quo, but upon a distinct advantage to be gained. He held a meeting of fourteen bishops, who decided that no one could with a safe conscience agree to the truce. There was a minority of six, but, according to the custom on such occasions, they signed with the rest.[124]
Rinuccini goes to the Ulster army.
The truce concluded in his absence, May 20.