They had at their mercy, during the whole period, a man of high rank, their avowed, zealous, and active enemy, a Protestant and Orangeman. Yet, while numerous persons of inferior classes were piked and butchered, the Earl of Kingston was unmolested, and left at liberty on their evacuation of Wexford. It were to be wished that General Lake had shown similar generosity to Mr. Cornelius Grogan, whose hasty and unmerited execution by martial law savoured of deliberate murder as strongly as the death of most who were slaughtered by the rebels.
On many occasions during that dreadful struggle, jests were so strangely mixed up with murder, that it was not easy to guess which way a scene would terminate—whether in tragedy or comedy; so much depended on the sobriety or intoxication of the insurgents.
One or two anecdotes (out of hundreds worth recording) will serve to show in some degree the spirit of the times; and we will preface them by observing, that the district (the barony of Forth, in County Wexford,) most active in rebellion, most zealous and most sanguinary, was the identical point whereon Strongbow, the first British soldier who set foot in Ireland, had, six hundred and twenty seven years before, begun his colonization. Most of the Wexford rebels, indeed, were lineal descendants of the original Britons who came over there from South Wales and Bristol, and repeopled that district after their countrymen had nearly exterminated the aboriginal natives.
The rebels had obliged Major Maxwell, with the king’s troops, far too precipitately to evacuate Wexford; and that officer, by the rapidity of his movements, gave neither time nor notice to the loyalists to retreat with him. It was therefore considered, that Archdeacon Elgy, a dignitary of the Protestant church, was the most likely subject for the rebels to begin their slaughter with; and the general opinion ran that he would have at least a dozen pikes through his body before dinner-time on the day the insurgents entered.
Of this way of thinking was the divine himself: nor did the numerous corresponding surmises prove erroneous. Sentence of death was promptly passed upon the archdeacon, who was held to aggravate his offences by contumacy.
A certain shrewd fellow, yclept a captain among the rebels, however, saw things in a different point of view; and, though without any particularly kind feelings toward the archdeacon, he, by use of a very luminous argument, changed the determination of his comrades.
“What’s the good,” said he, “of piking the old man? Sure, if he’ll give in, and worship the Virgin in our chapel, won’t it be a better job? They say he’s a very good Orange parson, and why shouldn’t he make a good green priest, if he’ll take on with Father Cahill? Devil the much harm ever he did us!—so, if yees agree to that same, I’ll tell him, fair and easy, to take on with the Virgin to-morrow in the big chapel, or he’ll find himself more holy than godly before the sun sets.”
The concluding joke, however trite, put them all in good humour; and the orator proceeded: “Come a couple of dozen of ye, boys, with wattles on your shoulders; give me the colours and cross, and we’ll go to Parson Elgy.”
In fact they went to the archdeacon, and Mr. Murphy, the spokesman, told him very quietly and civilly that he came to “offer his reverence life and liberty, and a good parish too, if he would only do the thing cleverly in the way Father Cahill would show him.”
The reverend doctor, not comprehending the nature of the condition, and conceiving that they probably only required him to stand neuter, replied, in a quivering voice, “that he would never forget the obligations: he was well content with the cure he had, but not the less indebted to them for their kind offer to give him a better.”