The next morning Baganel Harvey was in the greatest anguish of mind when he beheld Scullabogue House and the barn, where the murdered Protestants were to be seen in every attitude. They lay so close, that several were standing up against the walls, and many lying in heaps in each other’s arms among the ashes of the timber of the house, while their bodies looked frightful, being burned to a cinder. He turned from the scene with horror, wrung his hands, and told those around him that ‘as innocent people were burned there as ever were born, and that their conquests for liberty were at an end.’ He then said privately to a friend, ‘I see now my folly in embarking in any cause with these people. If they succeed I shall be murdered by them; if they are defeated, I shall be hanged.’ Now convinced of the sanguinary feelings of his followers, he was determined to put a stop to it, as far as in his power lay, and that day he issued a proclamation, had it printed, sent many copies to Vinegar Hill, Wexford, and Gorey, and distributed them over the country.
On Saturday, the 9th of June, 184 skeletons were cleared out of the barn, thrown into a ditch near the place, and slightly covered with clay.
There is every reason to believe that this horrible atrocity occasioned to all but the lowest barbarians, who were banded with the rebel forces, feelings of alarm and disgust. Almost the last act of Baganel Harvey before he was deprived of his command was the publication of a general order to restrain future acts of violence, under the penalty of death; and he originated a subscription—in which many rebel leaders joined—to pay for the interment of the poor sufferers.
Years afterwards, record all the authorities who have dwelt on this cruel episode, it was the greatest wish of such of the Wexford rebels as survived, to prove that, in whatever crimes they might have participated largely, they were wholly unconnected with the burning of Scullabogue.
FATHER M. MURPHY OF BALLYCANOO AND THE HERETIC BULLETS
Of the rebel chiefs, the priests were decidedly the most despotic, and too often the most unrelenting, to the unhappy men who became prisoners to the banditti they commanded. One of the most truculent of these spiritual chiefs was Father Michael Murphy of Ballycanoo, a prominent church-militant general in the Wexford campaigns, who met his fate at the battle of Arklow. After the priest’s death the following edifying epistle, addressed to a Dublin tradesman, was found on his body; this letter, as Musgrave suggests, in the constant hurry and confusion in which he had been kept, probably in preparing for the attack of Arklow, the Father had neither time nor opportunity to forward:—
Gorey, 6th June 1798.
Friend Houston—Great events are ripening. In a few days we shall meet. The first-fruits of your regeneration must be a tincture of poison and pike in the metropolis against heretics. This is a tribunal for such opinions. Your talents must not be buried as a judge. Your sons must be steeled with fortitude against heresy, then we shall do; and you shall shine in a higher sphere. We shall have an army of brave republicans, 100,000, with fourteen pieces of cannon, on Thursday before Dublin; your heart will beat high at the news. You will rise with a proportionate force.—Yours ever, M. Murphy.
Decipher B.I.K.M.Q.Y....
The plans disclosed in this letter came near to complete realisation; but for the events of Ross and Arklow, who can say that the results foreshadowed in the intercepted letter of the slain priest might not have been realised to the very letter?