"Then the minister Challoner, furious at the cries of pity raised by the people, said to the bishop: 'Why delude ye the ignorant people? Why end ye your life with a lie, and a vain boast of martyrdom? Tell the multitude that ye are traitors, and that it is for treason and not for religion ye suffer.' To these unjust words the bishop answered: 'Far be it from us, who are about to appear before the tribunal of Christ, to impose upon the people. But also far be it from us to confess ourselves guilty of crimes of which our conscience tells us we are innocent. Nor yet do we vainly ambition the title of martyrs, though for us to die for Christ is gain. You know that you are yourself guilty of that prevarication of which you accuse us; for but a few hours ago, sent as you said by the viceroy, you offered us life and freedom if we would subscribe to your heresy. Leave us, then, son of darkness, and calumniate not our innocence.'
"Then the minister departed and left the martyrs in peace. As they mounted the middle of the ladder, again there rose the cry of the people; and a third time, when he was about to be thrown off, the groans of those who beat their breasts rose louder than before. Thrice he prayed, as he stood there: once for all the bystanders; secondly, for the city of Dublin, and all the Catholics of this kingdom, that they may serve God piously, faithfully, and perseveringly; a third time he prayed for all heretics, and for his persecutors, that they might be converted from the evil of their ways.
"The Bishop's head was hardly cut off when an Irishman seized it, and, rushing into the centre of the crowd, was never found, although the viceroy offered a reward of forty pounds of silver. The Catholics gathered up his blood, and contended for his garments, despite the resistance of the soldiery. The priest Patrick followed the same road, singing, as he mounted the ladder, the canticle of Simeon, 'Now, O Lord! dismiss thy servant in peace,' and, after the example of the bishop, he prayed for the bystanders, blessed them, and forgave all his enemies. The rope being put round his neck, he hung for a short time, was then cut down half alive, mutilated, and cut in pieces. The soldiers, warned by the loss of the bishop's head, resisted the unarmed crowd, who strove to catch the martyr's blood and other relics, and wounded many. The day after, the bodies were buried at the gallows' foot, but in the stillness of the night were removed by the Catholics to a chapel."
We cannot enter on the other sufferers of this reign whose records are carefully collected in the Memorials.
The reign of Charles I. opens with the deeply interesting life of Francis Slingsby, showing how, even amid all the terrible persecutions of the church, God called his own elect to the light of his truth, and endowed them with firmness. He was a son of Sir Francis Slingsby, an English knight settled in Ireland, and was born in 1611. After being educated at Oxford, he travelled on the continent, and at Rome was converted to the faith; and, at the tomb of St. Aloysius, firmly resolved to enter the Society of Jesus. At the earnest entreaty of his father and mother, he returned to Ireland; but after an interview with Archbishop Usher and Lord Strafford, he was thrown into prison. Cardinal Barberini exerted his influence with the queen of England, and, in May, 1635, he was admitted to bail. His stay in Ireland was not fruitless; for he converted his mother, his younger brother, his sister, and several others. This increased his dangers, and, the General of the Society urging him to come at once to Rome, he proceeded thither in 1636; but learning that his friend Spreul, whom he had converted, and won to the order he himself had chosen, had been struck down by disease, he returned to Ireland, tended him in his illness, and then both reached Rome in 1639. Renouncing all his worldly prospects in favor of his brother, he began his studies, and, after his ordination, entered the novitiate of the Society of Jesus in 1641; but died at Naples before he could return to Ireland to labor in the field where his words, example, and fetters had preached so eloquently. The sketch of this heroic young man, and that of Maurice Eustace, son of Sir John Eustace, and a novice in the Society of Jesus, who, returning to his family by permission of his superiors, was seized, tried, hung, drawn, and quartered, on the 9th of June, 1588, form a most interesting addition to our biographies, and show us in Ireland, two young imitators of St. Aloysius and St. Stanislaus, whose virtues and example can be held up to the young with the power that flows from the fact that they lived among scenes and trials so familiar to us.
When the civil war began between the Puritans and Charles I., the persecution, bitter already under the king, became fiendish under the Parliament. Hitherto some form, some limit, had been observed; but the Puritans revelled in blood with all the ferocity of tigers, and with as little scruple.
"The Parliament of England resolved, on the 24th of October, 1644, 'that no quarter shall be given to any Irishman, or to ayn papist born in Ireland;' and their historian, Borlase, adds, 'The orders of Parliament were excellently well executed.' (Hist, of Rebellion, p. 62.) Leland and Warner refer to the letters of the lords-justices for the fact that the soldiers 'slew all persons promiscuously, not sparing even the women.' Cromwell declared on landing in Dublin that no mercy should be shown to the Irish, and that they should be dealt with as the Canaanites in Joshua's time. It is impossible to estimate the number of Catholics slain in the ten years from 1642 to 1652. Three bishops and more than 300 priests were put to death for the faith. Thousands of men, women, and children were sold as slaves for the West Indies; Sir W. Petty mentions that six thousand boys and women were thus sold. (Political Anatomy of Ireland, p. 187.) A letter written in 1656, quoted by Lingard, puts the number at 60,000; as late as 1666 there were 12,000 Irish slaves scattered among the West Indian Islands. (Letter of Rev. J. Grace, written in 1669, ap. Moran, p. 147.) 40,000 Irish Catholics fled to the continent, and 20,000 took refuge in the Hebrides and other Scottish islands. (Moran, p. 99.) In a word, as Sir W. Petty writes, the population of Ireland in 1641 was 1,466,000, of whom Catholics were about 1,240,000; in 1659, the whole population was only 500,091, of whom Irish were only 420,000, so that very nearly or quite one million must have perished. (Sir W. Petty, Polit. Anat. p. 13, ap. Moran, and Hardinge's Census of 1659.)"
In this general and fearful slaughter of priest and people, records were impossible; and of many of the priests and religious who perished no trace remains. At the sight of such appalling massacres the mind shrinks back to seek refuge in doubt; but that doubt vanishes before the records of the butchers, who, reeking with slaughter, asked mankind to admire their work as a mercy of God, and even in our day, their descendants ask us to praise them as champions of religious freedom.
We can scarcely be accused of being too severe in our language when Merle d'Aubigné, a professed eulogist of Cromwell, admits that he used "a greater severity than had perhaps been exercised by the pagan leaders of antiquity."
Although, necessarily, for many of their victims there are no details whatever, nevertheless nearly one-fourth of this whole work of Mr. O'Reilly is devoted to memorials of those who perished by the hands of the Puritans in the brief period of twenty years; and he might well close it by the formula at the end of each day in the Roman martyrology, Et alibi aliorum plurimorum Martyrum et Confessorum, etc.—"And elsewhere of many other martyrs and confessors," whose names, though unrecorded on earth, are written in the Book of Life. Cromwell, Ireton, Inchiquin, and Coote marked their path in blood. Drogheda, Wexford, Cashel, Limerick, witnessed general massacres, where neither age nor sex could rouse a spark of human feeling in the insatiate butchers. The intense and cruel fanaticism seems to have been either a diabolical possession or a mental disease.