Part 35 (1/2)

In like manner, Murrough O'Brien, the Baron of Inchiquin, the descendant of so many Catholic kings and saints, whose name was a glory in itself, and so closely linked to the Catholic glories of the island, was converted, by the education which he had received, into a most cruel oppressor of the Church of his baptism. His expeditions, through the same country which his ancestors had ruled, were characterized by all the barbarities practised at the time by Munro, Coote, and all the parliamentary leaders of the Scotch Puritans, and would have fitted him as a worthy compeer of Cromwell and Ireton, who were soon to follow.

The name of Cashel and its cathedral, where he murdered so many priests, women, and children, around the altar adorned by the great and good Cormac McCullinan, would alone suffice to hand his name down to the execration of posterity.

Ormond and Murrough being the two chiefs of the ”peace party,”

what wonder that the prelates, who had so earnestly labored at the formation of the Kilkenny Confederation, and the Nuncio at their head, refused to have aught to do with projects in which such men were concerned, when it is borne in mind also that several provisions of that ”peace treaty” were directly opposed to the oath taken by the Confederates? But, unfortunately, Ormond was a skilful diplomat, had been dispatched by the king, and was supposed to be carrying out the ideas suggested to him by the unhappy monarch. His representations, therefore, could not fail to carry weight, princ.i.p.ally with the Anglo-Irish lords of the Pale, many of whom, influenced by his courtly manners and address, declared openly for the proposed peace.

Thus did the peace sow the germs of division and even war among the Irish. The unity among the Catholics, so full of promise, was soon broken up; and those who had met each other in such a brotherly spirit in the day when the native chiefs and Anglo- Irish lords a.s.sembled together at Tara, who swore then that the division of centuries should exist no longer, began to look upon each other again as enemies. Without going at length into the vicissitudes of those various contentions, it is enough to say that in the end war broke out between those who had so recently taken the oath of confederation together. Owen Roe O'Neill, the victor of Benburb, and the only man who could direct the Irish armies, was attacked by Preston and other lords of the Pale, and died, as some historians allege, of poison administered to him by one of them.

This was the result of the intrigues of Ormond; nevertheless, Charles continued to place confidence in him, and though he had been twice obliged to resign his lieutenancy, and once to fly the country, the infatuated sovereign sent him back once more.

If was only at the end of the struggle, when the ill-fated king was at length in the hands of his enemies, that Ormond could be brought to consent to conditions acceptable to the national party. But then it was too late; the parliamentary forces had carried every thing before them in England; England was already republican to the core; and the armies which had been employed against the Cavaliers, once the efforts of the latter had ceased with the death of the king, were at liberty to leave the country, now submissive to parliamentary rule, and cross over to Ireland, with Cromwell at their head, to crush out the nation almost, and concentrate on that fated soil, within the short s.p.a.ce of nine months, all the horrors of past centuries.

By the death of Owen Roe O'Neill just at that time, Ireland was left without a leader fit to cope with the great republican general. The country had already been devastated by Coote, Munro, St. Leger, and other Scotch and English Puritans; but the ma.s.sacres which, until the coming of Cromwell, had been, at least, only local and checked by the troops of Owen Roe, soon extended throughout the island, unarrested by any forces in the field. The Cromwellian soldiers, not content with the character of warriors, came as ”avengers of the Lord,” to destroy an ”idolatrous people.”

That their real design was to exterminate the nation, and use the opportunity which then presented itself for that purpose, there can by no doubt. It was only after a fair trial that the project was found to be impossible, and that other expedients were devised. Coote had previously acted with this design in view, as is now an ascertained fact, and had been encouraged in the course he pursued by the Dublin government. 1 (1 See Matthew O'Connor's ”Irish Catholics.”) The same might be shown of St.

Leger, in Munster, toward the beginning of the insurrection. At all events, all doubt in the matter, if any existed, ceased with the landing of Cromwell in 1649, when the real object of the war at once showed itself everywhere.

The result of this man's policy has been painted by Villemain, in his ”Histoire de Cromwell,” in a sentence: ”Ireland became a desert which the few remaining inhabitants described by the mournful saying, 'There was not water enough to drown a man, not wood enough to hang him, not earth enough to bury him.'”

The French writer attributes to the whole island what was said of only a part of it. To this day, the name of Cromwell is justly execrated in Ireland, and ”the curse of Cromwell ” is one of the bitterest which can be invoked upon a person's head. But, at present, the fidelity of the Irish to the Stuarts concerns us, and a few reflections will put it in a strong but true light before us.

Ever since the restoration of Charles II., many Englishmen have professed great reverence for the memory of the ”martyr-king.”

Even the subsequent Revolution of 1658 left the monument erected to him untouched. Many British families continued steady in their devotion to the Scotch line, and the name of Jacobite was for them a t.i.tle of honor. Yet what were their sufferings for the cause of the king during his struggle with the Parliament, and after his execution? A few n.o.blemen lost their lives and estates; some went into exile and followed the fortunes of the Pretenders who tried to gain possession of the throne. But the bulk of the nation--England--may be said to have suffered nothing by the great revolution which led to the Commonwealth.

On the contrary, it is acknowledged that the administration of Cromwell at least brought peace to the country, and raised the power of Great Britain to a higher eminence in Europe than it had ever known before. As usual, the English made great profession of loyalty, but, as a rule, were particularly careful that no great inconvenience should come to them from it.

Treated with contempt and distrust by Charles and his advisers, so insulted in every thing that was dear to her that it is still a question for historians if, in many instances, the king and the royalists did not betray her, Ireland alone, after having taken her stand for a whole decade of years for G.o.d and the king, resolved to face destruction unflinchingly in support of what she imagined to be a n.o.ble cause.

After the landing of Cromwell, when to any sensible man there no longer remained hope of serving the cause of the king, when the desire which is natural to every human heart, of saving what can be saved, might, not only without dishonor, but with justice and right, have dictated the necessity of coming to terms with the parliamentarians, and of abandoning a cause which was hopeless, ”on the 4th of December, 1649, Eber McMahon, Bishop of Clogher, a mere Irishman by name, by descent, by enthusiastic attachment to his country, exerted his great abilities to rouse his countrymen to a persevering resistance to Cromwell, and to unite all hearts and hands in the support of Ormond's administration. .

. . All the bishops concurred in his views, and subscribed a solemn declaration that they would, to the utmost of their power, forward his Majesty's rights, and the good of the nation. . . .

Ormond, at last, either sensible that no reliance could be placed on them, or that the treachery of Inchiquin's troops was, at least, on the part of the Irish, a fair ground of distrust and suspicion of the remainder, consented to their removal.”-- (”Irish Catholics.”)

”At last!” will be the reader's exclamation, while he wonders if another people could be found forbearing enough to wait eight years for the adoption of such a necessary measure.

And the only reward for their fidelity to King Charles I. could under the circ.u.mstances be destruction. They waited with resignation for the impending gloom to overshadow them. Terrible moment for a nation, when despair itself fails to nerve it for further resistance and possible success! Such was the position of the Irish at the death of Charles.

Who shall describe that loyalty? After Ormond had met with the defeat he deserved in the field; after the cities had fallen one after another into the hands of the destroyer, who seldom thought himself bound to observe the conditions of surrender; after the chiefs, who might have protracted the struggle, had disappeared either by death or exile, the doom of the nation was sealed; yet it shrank not from the consequences.

The barbarities of Cromwell and his soldiers had depopulated large tracts of territory to such an extent that the troops marching through them were compelled to carry provisions as through a desert. The cattle, the only resource of an agricultural country, had been all consumed in a ten years' war.

It was reported that, after every successful engagement, the republican general ordered all the men from the age of sixteen to sixty to be slaughtered without mercy, all the boys from six to sixteen to be deprived of sight, and the women to have a red- hot iron thrust through their b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Rumors such as these, exaggerated though they may be, testify at least to the terror which Cromwell inspired. As for the captured cities, there can be no doubt of the wholesale ma.s.sacres carried out therein by his orders. Of the entire population of Tredagh only thirty persons survived, and they were condemned to the labor of slaves.

Hugh Peters, the chaplain of Fairfax, wrote after this barbarous execution: ”We are masters of Tredagh; no enemy was spared; I just come from the church where I had gone to thank the Lord.”

The same fate awaited Wexford, and, later on, Drogheda. Cromwell, when narrating those b.l.o.o.d.y ma.s.sacres, concluded by saying, ”People blame me, but it was the will of G.o.d.”

The Bible, the holy word of G.o.d, misread and misunderstood by those fanatics, persuaded them that it would be a crime not to exterminate the Irish, as the Lord punished Saul for having spared Agag and the chief of the Amalekites. Whoever wishes for further details of these sickening atrocities, committed in the name of G.o.d, may find them in a mult.i.tude of histories of the time, but chiefly in the ”Threnodia” of Friar Morrison.

Certain modern Irish historians would seem not to understand the heroism of their own countrymen. ”Bitterly,” says A. M.

O'Sullivan, ”did the Irish people pay for their loyalty to an English sovereign. Unhappily for their worldly fortunes, if not for their fame, they were high-spirited and unfearing, where pusillanimity would certainly have been safety, and might have been only prudence.”

But the verdict of posterity, always a just one, calls such a high-spirited and unfearing att.i.tude true heroism, and spurns pusillanimity even when it insures safety and may be called prudence, if its result is the surrender of holy faith and Christian truth. Safety and prudence characterized the conduct of the English nation under the iron rule of Cromwell, as under the tyranny of the Tudors. Can the reader of history admire the nation on that account? Who shall affirm that the result of the craven spirit of the English was the prosperity which ensued, and that of Irish heroism destruction and gloom? The history of either nation is far from ended yet; and bold would be the man who dare a.s.sert that the prosperity of England is everlasting, and the humiliation of Ireland never to know an end.