Furthermore, there is the “Remonstrance of the Gentry and Commonalty of Cavan of their Grievances, common with other parts of this Kingdom of Ireland,” addressed to the Lords Justices and Council in the early part of November, 1641, which was drawn up by Bishop Bedell. In this they complain of the oppression of governors who “respected more the advancement of their own private fortunes than the honour of his Majesty or the welfare of his subjects,” of finding themselves “of late threatened with far greater and more grievous vexations, either with captivity or utter expulsion from their native seats.” They further declare “that ... we harbour not the least thought of hostility towards His Majesty, or purpose any hurt to His Majesty’s subjects in their possessions, goods, or liberty; only we desire that your lordships will be pleased to make remonstrances to His Majesty for us of all our grievances and just fears, that they may be removed, and such a course settled, by the advice of the Parliament of Ireland whereby the liberty of our consciences may be secured unto us, and we may be eased of other burdens in civil government.” The Remonstrance then proceeds thus:—“As for the mischief and inconveniences that have already happened through the disorder of the common sort of people against the English inhabitants, or any other, we, with the nobility and gentlemen and such others of the several counties of this kingdom as are most ready and willing to use our and their best endeavours in causing restitution and satisfaction to be made, as in part we have already done.” The Remonstrance winds up by a request for a speedy answer so as to avoid “the inconvenience of the barbarousness and incivility of the commonalty, who have committed many outrages without order, consenting, or privity of ours.”
We have thus in black and white an account of the aims and objects of the leaders of the rebels, and of the means by which they hoped to succeed, and neither Catholic ascendancy, nor disloyalty, nor racial or religious antipathy, to be gratified by massacre, finds a place in their programme or plan of campaign. To do violence to any person on account of his religion is, indeed, a thing wholly averse to the Irish nature. No Protestant ever suffered persecution at the hands of the native Irish in Ireland, for his faith; and when Protestants fled from persecution, in the reign of Queen Mary, to Ireland, they were harboured and protected by the Irish Catholics. Nevertheless, the massacres of Protestants alleged to have taken place in this rebellion have ever since been cast in the teeth of the Irish Catholics, and made the excuse for organized oppression and persecution. The butcheries of Cromwell were justified on the ground that they were a just punishment for such barbarities, though the people that he butchered were never shown to have had, and in many cases could not have had, hand, act, or part in them.
I have gone carefully through all the letters and documents penned by the Lords Justices and Council, and while general charges of murder and cruelty are made and repeated again and again, and though the writers can be specific in their statements as to all other matters, in two cases only do they give any details by which the accuracy of their statements can be tested; one is the case of the killing of Lord Caulfield, who was undoubtedly shot dead while a prisoner on the 1st of March, 1642; the other is the case of Huibarts, who held the island of Lambay, and may have been killed while resisting an attack.
If the Lords Justices and Council confined themselves to general charges of massacre and barbarity, the English pamphleteers were, in all conscience, sufficiently precise. It is needless to say that the news of the rebellion caused a great commotion in England. Leicester received the letter of the 25th of October on the night of Sunday the 1st of November. He at once caused the Council to be summoned, and they resolved to go to the House of Commons the next day as soon as it sat, which they did, notice being first given to the House “that the Lords of the Council had some matters of importance to impart to them”; whereupon chairs were set in the House for them to repose themselves, and the Sergeant sent to conduct them. Clarendon describes the scene. “As soon as they entered the House the Speaker desired them to sit down, and, then being covered, Littleton told the Speaker that the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, having received letters from the Lords Justices and Council there, had communicated them to the Council, and since the House of Peers was not sitting, they had thought fit, for the importance of the letters, to impart them to that House,” and so referred the business to the Lord Lieutenant, who, without any enlargement, only read the letters he had received, and so the Lords departed from the House. “There was,” says Clarendon, “a deep silence in the House, and a kind of consternation; most men’s heads having been intoxicated from their first meeting in Parliament with the instigators of plots and treasonable designs through the three kingdoms.”
The King, who was then in Scotland, received letters from Ulster telling him of the outbreak there. These he sent on to the Parliament, with a letter saying that he was satisfied that it was no rash insurrection, but a formed rebellion, which must be prosecuted with a sharp war, the conducting and prosecuting of which he wholly committed to their care and wisdom, and depended upon them for carrying it on. This exactly fitted in with their wishes, as up to the time they got this letter they had no authority to levy troops or make war. They appointed a committee of both Houses for the consideration of the affairs of Ireland, and providing for the supply of men, arms and money for the suppressing of that rebellion. The Lord Lieutenant was a member of the Committee, which sat every morning, and he communicated to them all the letters he received, to be consulted upon and to be then reported to the two Houses, which thus acquired a great accession of power and patronage.
Soon after the news of the rebellion was spread in England, the Press began to pour forth a stream of pamphlets. Some of these were devoted to advocating the plan adopted by the English Parliament for raising the necessary funds for prosecuting the campaign against the rebels, by giving grants of land that should be forfeited to those who advanced money for the purpose. In 1642 they decreed the confiscation of 2½ millions of acres in Ireland, and undertook to allot them to those who made advances, on the following scale: 2,000 acres in Leinster to anyone who advanced £600; and the same quantity in Munster, Connaught, and Ulster respectively, to those who advanced £450, £300, and £200 respectively. Others of those pamphlets were devoted to thrilling descriptions of massacres and atrocities said to have been committed by the Irish rebels. These were, Ormond says, “received as oracles,” and the extirpation of the Irish “preached as gospel.” As I said before, they were not open to the imputation of being wanting in details. They were most circumstantial. They describe the doings of such well-known rebel leaders as the Earl of Clare, whose portrait is given in one of the pamphlets, the great Lord MacDavo, Lord Matquess, Don Luce, Limbrey, Cargena and others, in such well-known counties, Monno otherwise Conno, and Warthedeflowr, and in such well-known towns as Rockcall, six miles from Dublin, Lognall, Toyhull, Kilwood, Kilmouth, Tormoy, and Cormack. The collection of these pamphlets made by Thorpe, and now in the Library of the Royal Irish Academy, as well as those in the British Museum, enable one to judge of the way in which the ear of England was poisoned for the purpose of exasperation against the Irish Catholics.
Two months after the outbreak the Government issued a commission to seven Protestant ministers to take evidence upon oath as to the amount of the loss sustained by the British and Protestants that had been “separated from their habitations,” or “deprived of their goods,” the names of the robbers, and what traitorous speeches were uttered by the robbers or others. It is to be observed that in this Commission there is no mention of murder or violence. By a supplemental commission of the 18th of January, 1642, it was extended so as to include an inquiry as to “what violence was done by the robbers, and how often and what number have been murthered or perished afterwards on the way to Dublin or elsewhere.” This addition was an afterthought, and the fact is very significant, as pointed out by Prendergast, Cromwellian Settlement, p. 60. A mass of such depositions was taken, and are now in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin. I have not perused them, but every historian who has done so, and has formed an impartial judgment upon them, has pronounced them to be practically worthless as evidence against the rebels. In the first place they were exparte statements, made in the absence of those whose conduct they impugned. Secondly, they were very largely hearsay, and not the evidence of eye witnesses. Thirdly, many of them are not made on oath. Fourthly, they were to a great extent made by persons intending to make claims for restitution and compensation, and may therefore be expected to be exaggerated, if not unfounded. Fifthly, they bear internal evidence of untruth, many of them deposing to apparitions and other supernatural phenomena. Sixthly, they in many instances gave evidence of the deaths of people who long survived the rebellion. Seventhly, many of the deponents were illiterate. Lastly, they afford no safe basis for a calculation of the numbers stated to have been killed, for the same alleged outrage is obviously referred to in different depositions.
The calculations made by English writers of the numbers slaughtered by the Irish are curiously conflicting. Milton, in his observations on the “Articles of Peace between the Earl of Ormond and the Irish,” set down the number “assassinated and cut to pieces by those Irish barbarians” at 200,000, which was about the total Protestant population of Ireland, inclusive of soldiers in garrison and officials in Dublin. The Lords Justices and Council in their despatch to the King, dated March, 1642-3, in opposition to any accommodation with the rebels, upon an alleged acknowledgment “by their priests appointed to collect the numbers,” set the number down at 154,000 “before the end of March last, ... besides many thousand others since that time.” Temple, whose object also was to obstruct the peace, says that in the first two months of the rebellion 150,000 had been massacred, and that “there were 300,000 Protestants murdered in cold blood or destroyed in some other way, or expelled from their habitations from the 23rd of October, 1641, to the cessation made on the 16th of September, 1643.” Petty fixes the number at 37,000, Walsh at 20,000. The Rev. Dr. Warner, a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, who describes many of the depositions as “incredible,” “ridiculous,” and “contradictory,” carefully examined the thirty-two closely written volumes which are in the library of Trinity College, with the result that he concluded that “the number of people killed upon positive evidence collected in two years after the rebellion broke out, adding them all together, amounts to only 2,109, on the reports of other Protestants, 1,619 more, and on the reports of some of the rebels a further number of 300, the whole making 4,028. Besides these numbers there is in the same collection evidence on the report of others of 8,000 killed by ill-usage.” These numbers he considered were the utmost to which “the cruelties of the Irish out of war” could be extended, though, having regard to the nature of several of the depositions, he could not in his conscience charge them with such a number of murders. In corroboration of his figures he quotes a letter which he copied from the Council books in Dublin written on the 5th of May, 1652, from the Parliament Commissioners in Ireland to the English Parliament, in which the Commissioners tell them that it appears “besides 848 families there were killed, hanged, burned, and drowned 6,062.”
That the rebellion at its first outbreak was not accompanied by any massacre, or even by considerable effusion of blood, appears from documents now extant. Lord Chichester wrote to the King from Belfast on October 24th, 1641, “The Irish in the northern parts of your kingdom of Ireland two nights last past did rise with force and have taken Charlemont, Dungannon, Tonragee, and Newry, with your Majesty’s stores there ... and have slain only one man.” The letter of the Lords Justices to Leicester of October 25th, does not make mention of a single case of violence to the person. The Remonstrance of the Gentry and Commonalty of Cavan already referred to, issued in the early part of November, 1641, speaks not of massacres or murders, which the Remonstrants would undoubtedly have deemed worthy of condign punishment, but of acts which would be proper subjects of restitution and satisfaction. The first instance of homicide committed by the rebels given by the Lords Justices in their correspondence is in a letter to Leicester of December 3rd, 1641, in which they announce the death of Mr. Huibarts. It is not until the 14th of December that any massacre is mentioned, when they state, in a letter of that date to Leicester, that the garrison of Longford had been massacred.
Your attention has already been called to the pregnant fact that in the first commission of inquiry issued by the Lords Justices and Council, which is dated December 23rd, 1641, no reference is made to murder or personal violence.