COURSE OF THE INSURRECTION
A course of cowardly assassination thus commenced was continued by the insurgents in their progress to attack Monastereven. Their numbers had increased to ten or twelve hundred men, and they were commanded by a ruffian called M’Garry. Such Protestants as they unfortunately met with were put to death, and a solitary dragoon, seized as he crossed the Curragh, was inhumanly murdered. About four in the morning they approached the town and made their preparations for attacking it.
On the 24th of May there was not a regular soldier in Monastereven; and an infantry company, with a troop of horse, both yeomanry, formed the little garrison. After a feint on the canal, and a movement by the high road, which was repulsed by a charge of the cavalry, they pushed boldly into the town, and a warm conflict took place in the main street. The well-sustained musketry of the infantry threw the head of the rebel column into confusion, when the cavalry charged home, and the rout was complete. Fifty bodies were found lifeless in the town; and as the horsemen followed the flying rebels vigorously, as many more were cut up in the pursuit. The repulse of this attack was most honourable to the defenders of Monastereven. The gallant action was achieved by loyalists alone, and of the brave men who fought and bled that day fourteen of the troop were Roman Catholics.
The outbreak of the 23rd of May was attended by many acts of cruelty inflicted upon isolated families, who, either from mistaken confidence or inability to reach a place of safety, exposed themselves to the fury of savages, whose natural truculence was often inflamed to madness by intoxication. Many individuals of great worth and respectability perished thus. Mr. Stamers, the chief proprietor of the town of Prosperous, was torn from the house of a lady where he had obtained a temporary shelter, and murdered in cold blood. Rathangan was, indeed, a scene of extensive butchery. Mr. Spencer and Mr. Moore were slaughtered there, although they had surrendered their arms on the assurance of being protected. They were murdered in the open street, and their wives had the horrible assurance that, with the shots they heard, the existence of their beloved partners had terminated. Thus Mr. Spencer, that worthy gentleman, ‘who was an active and intelligent magistrate, and as remarkable for the amiableness and affability of his manner as the benevolence of his heart, fell a sacrifice to the fanaticism of those savages, to whom he had been unremittingly a kind and generous benefactor. As his house, at the hall door of which he was so brutally murdered, was a short distance from the town, Mrs. Spencer, who was led to it in the midst of these monsters, had the anguish to see the mangled corpse of her husband lying at his door’ (Musgrave).
A number of other victims were immolated by these bloodthirsty savages, and, until relieved by Colonel Longfield on the morning of the 28th, Rathangan was a constant scene of atrocity, in which even woman forgot her sex and barbarously participated. The murders at Rathangan, while they exasperated the royalists to acts of desperate retaliation, operated against the perpetrators in another and unexpected way. The few Protestants in Leinster and the south, who had mixed themselves with the conspiracy, suddenly became alarmed, for the war had now assumed a religious rather than a revolutionary complexion. Suspicion once aroused finds abundant causes to confirm it; and while some Protestants quietly seceded from their fellow-traitors, not a few sought favour with the Government by a secret betrayal of their guilty companions.
Musgrave illustrates this point:—‘I shall mention here an incident which throws light on the spirit of the conspiracy and rebellion, and the secret designs of the great body of the rebels. One Dennis, an apothecary and a Protestant, was the county delegate and chief conductor of the plot in the King’s County, which was to have exploded in a few days; but the wanton massacre of Protestants at Prosperous and Rathangan having convinced him that their extirpation was the main object of the Romanists, though they had with singular dissimulation concealed it from him who was their leader, he repaired to Tullamore to General Dunn, who commanded the district, threw himself on the mercy of Government, exposed the whole plot, and betrayed the names of the captains, who were immediately arrested. He said to the general, “I see, sir, that it will soon be my own fate.”’ In the course of this history nothing will be more apparent than the incompetency, military and diplomatic, of many of the functionaries to whom extensive powers were confided. One while unnecessary severity was employed, and at another mistaken lenity marred every advantage which stringent measures might have effected. In military conduct the royalist commanders were too often found deficient, and almost in every instance, either to imprudence or imbecility, the insurgents were alone indebted for moments of doubtful and envanescent success. The affair at Old Kilcullen was about one of the worst military offences committed by an incompetent commander. Yeomanry officers always behaved with boldness, and frequently displayed both tact and talent when left to their own resources, while many from whose high military rank and standing something like ability might have been looked for, proved the truism of the adage, that as ‘the cowl does not make the monk,’ neither does an aiguilette constitute a general. Learning that some three hundred well-appointed rebels had assembled at Old Kilcullen, and that they had entrenched themselves in the churchyard, General Dundas proceeded to dislodge them. His force consisted of only forty dragoons and some twenty Suffolk militiamen. The rebel position was on a height—one side protected by a high wall, the other secured by a double fence—a hedge with a dike in front. Would it be credited that an English general could be mad enough to assail three hundred men thus posted with forty dragoons? Mus-grave thus narrates the transaction, and his account has been considered by those engaged to be perfectly correct:—
General Dundas ordered the Romneys and the 9th Dragoons to charge the rebels, though it was uphill, though the ground was broken, and many of the rebels were in a road close to the churchyard in which not more than six of the cavalry could advance in front.
‘They, however, charged with great spirit, though their destruction was considered by all the spectators to be the certain and inevitable consequence of it; for what could cavalry do, thus broken and divided, against a firm phalanx of rebels armed with long pikes? Nevertheless they made three charges, but were repulsed in each; and at every repulse the general urged them to renew the attack.
‘It was with the utmost difficulty that Captain Cooks and Captain Erskine could prevail upon their men to renew the charge after the first defeat. In the last charge, Captain Cooks, to inspire his men with courage by example, advanced some yards before them; when his horse, having received many wounds, fell upon his knees; and while in that situation the body of that brave officer was perforated with pikes; and he, Captain Erskine, and twenty-two privates were killed on the spot, and ten so badly wounded that most of them died soon after.’
Shamefully discomfited, Dundas fell back on the village of Kilcullen bridge, and occupied a pass in every way defensible. So thought the successful peasants who had garrisoned the churchyard and deforced an English general. They prudently declined any attempt to force the bridge, forded the Liffey at Castlemartin, and took up a position between Naas and Kilcullen—thus cutting off General Dundas’s communication with the capital.