Father Mooney recorded this horrid statement from the lips of some of the very soldiery who perpetrated it.
When Dr. Patrick O'Hely, Bishop of Mayo, and his companion, Father Cornelius O'Rorke, were arrested in the County Kerry, soon after landing, they were loaded with chains and imprisoned in Limerick till Sir William Drury arrived.
"The two prisoners were first placed on the rack, their arms and feet were beaten with hammers, so that their thigh-bones were broken, and sharp iron points and needles were cruelly thrust under their nails, which caused an extreme agony of suffering. For a considerable time they were subjected to these tortures, which the holy confessors bore patiently for the love of Christ, mutually exhorting each other to constancy and perseverance.
"At length they were taken from the rack, and hanged from the branches of a neighboring tree. Their bodies were left suspended there for fourteen days, and were used in the interim as a target by the brutal soldiery."
Here began, it will be seen, a sort of process, or at least arraignment, torture, and execution; although anything like a trial is wanting.
But in the fearful deaths of Rev. Daniel O'Nielan, (March 28th, 1580,) Rev. Maurice Kinrehan, Rev. Maurice Scanlan, and his companions, [Footnote 293] in the same year, no pretence of examination was made; the soldiery either killing them on the spot, or wreaking on them any and every cruelty that wanton malignity could devise or suggest.
[Footnote 293: These three in 1580, and the three Franciscans, of the same names, nearly and at the same places in 1582, must be identical.]
In the case of the heroic Cistercian, Abbot of Boyle, Father Gelasius O'Quillenan, and his companions, arrested while in Dublin, in 1580, there was not the wanton cruelty of lawless soldiers, or the mere bloodthirstiness of officers accustomed to every barbarity. Here the action proceeded from the very highest English authority in Ireland, in the days of Lord Coke, who tells us in those legal treatises which have come down to us as oracles, that he never knew of torture having been used in England.
The abbot and his companions underwent preliminary examinations.
"John O'Garvin, then Protestant Dean of Christ Church, was among those who assisted at his first interrogatory, and, having proposed many inducements to the abbot 'to abandon the popish creed,' Gelasius in reply, reproved him for preferring the deceitful vanities of this world to the lasting joys of eternity, and exhorted him 'to renounce the errors and iniquity of heresy by which he had hitherto warred against God, and to make amends for the past by joining with him in professing the name of Christ, that he might thus become worthy to receive a heavenly crown.' The holy abbot and his companion were then subjected to torture, and, among their other sufferings, we find it commemorated that their arms and legs were broken by repeated blows, and fire was applied to their feet. The only words of Gelasius during all this torture were, 'Though you should offer me the princedom of England, I will not forfeit my eternal reward.' Sentence of death being passed against them, they were led out with all possible ignominy to execution. They, however, were filled with consolation; the sight of the joyous sufferers excited the admiration of the assembled multitude, and many even of the heretics declared that they were more like angels than men. It was on the 21st November, 1580, that they were happily crowned with martyrdom. The garments which they wore, and the implements of their torture, were eagerly purchased by the Catholics, and cherished by them with religious veneration."