BOOKS.
THE IRISH REBELLION OF 1641.*
LORD ERNEST HAMILTON, continuing his studies of Ulster history, has written an interesting book on the Plantation of 1610, the rebellion of 1641 and the long and confused civil war which Cromwell and Ludlow at last brought to an end. As there have been very few impartial students of Irish history, except Mr. Bagwell, it may be said at once that the author has evidently tried to be fair, and that his conclusions on some disputed points will not commend themselves to the rival partisans who still fight over again the controversies of long ago. Furthermore, Lord Ernest Hamilton has given abundant details, especially about the rebellion, which have been accessible only to the specialist, in the hope, we may presume, of arousing greater interest in Irish history. Though the Nationalists are fond of adducing pseudo-historical arguments for their case against England, it is notorious that Irish people know little and care less about genuine historical research. The fables which pass as history in Ireland, such as the pious belief in an Irish Golden Age contemporaneous with our Anglo-Saxon Kings, could not have survived so long among an educated community. There would not be so much hot disputing about the events of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries if any considerable body of Irishmen had endeavoured to find out the facts about that period. As it is, most Irishmen, having attended Roman Catholic schools,• have had to accept a grotesque travesty of Irish history, with a strong anti-English and clerical bias, in much the same spirit as they accept the Lives of the Saints, and they are thus predisposed from childhood against modern historians who would question their cherished legends. " Truth is faced in the histories of other countries. In histories of Ireland it is never faced." Lord Ernest Hamilton points out, for example, that Irish Nationalist writers gloss over the massacres of Protestants in Ulster in 1641-2 and point to the reprisals which followed as a typical case of English inhumanity to the innocent and harmless Irish. He seeks to redress the balance of historic truth by showing that there were wrongs on both sides. His treatment of a difficult period is not exhaustive nor always clear, but he is, at any rate, an honest historian. To English readers his account of the turmoil in Ireland during the Civil War will be comparatively novel, as it explains the situation with which Cromwell had to deal.
The rebellion which began on October 23rd, 1641, at Dungannon, at a time when Ireland was exceptionally prosperous, was an anti-English movement, led by the old feudal chiefs of Ulster. Their repeated rebellions had led to the Plantation by which feudalism was suppressed and the province was colonized with English and Scottish immigrants. The author shows that the Irish chiefs were not unfairly treated in the redistribution of the land, but they resented the suppression of their traditional privileges, such as the practice of quartering a host of idle retainers on the poor peasantry. Sir Phelim O'Neil, the leader of the revolt, had been restored to the large estates of which his family had been deprived, not by the English Government but by the rebel Tyrone. He was, however, so extravagant that his land was heavily mortgaged. His fellow-conspirator, Lord Maguire, also owed all that he had to English bounty. His • TA. Irish Rebellion of 1041. By Lord Ernest Hamilton. London : Jobs )(array. tIls• net./ grandfather had been restored to a large barony in Fermanagh ; his father had been made an Irish peer. But Maguire brooded over the estates that he might have had if the English had never some to Ulster, if his rival kinsmen had been put out of the way, and if his grandfather had not parted with much land in return for an annuity. The author points out that the old system of " tanistry," under which the heir to an estate was elected from the kinsfolk, conduced to improvidence on the part of the tenant for life, who knew that his son might not succeed him. The impoverished scions of old Irish families thus owed their poverty to their spendthrift ancestors. But, in the Irish way, they attributed all their misfortunes to the English Government and eagerly joined in the rebellion. In the generation preceding, many decent and hard-working people from England and Scotland had settled in Ulster and introduced modern methods of farming and new industries. Their prosperity excited the envy of the Irish, who had been dispossessed of lands which they did not use and had been relegated—in some cases at least—to the less fertile districts. It is probable that, but for the rebellion, the native peasantry, freed by English help from their degrading servitude, would have gradually acquired civilized habits and coalesced with the settlers. The influence of their old chiefs and of the Roman Catholic priests, bitterly jealous of the Anglican and Presbyterian ministers who came with the settlers, unfortunately kept the two races apart. The Ulster rebels aimed at the extermination first of the English and then of the Scottish colonists. They proposed at a later stage to expel the older Anglo-Irish population of the Pale, of the type now called " West Briton," and to restore the old Celtic and feudal Ireland of Brian Bora. Lord Ernest Hamilton shows how this purely reeled programme alienated the more civilized Roman Catholic gentry of Leinster and Munster from the Ulster insurgents, and divided the forces of rebellion. If England had not been distracted by the quarrel with Scotland and by the approach of civil war between Charles the First and Parliament, Sir Phelim O'Neil and his hordes might have been quickly suppressed. As it was, Protestant Volunteers saved Antrim and Donegal, and a force under the orders of the Dublin Government held Drogheda. But until a small Scottish army under Monro was sent to Ulster in April, 1642, at the request of Parliament, the rebels had the province at their mercy. The Roman Catholics of the South revolted when they saw the impotence of the Government, but their Supreme Council at Kilkenny held itself aloof from the Ulster rebels and pursued a different policy. The nature of the relations between them and Charles the First must remain obscure. That the King would have been glad to use their troops against the Parliament may be taken for granted. Whether he would have conceded them full religious or political liberty is another question. In any case, their intervention in England would have been ineffective, for the fighting value of the Irish Roman Catholics was very low, as Montrose found to his cost. Jones, and Cromwell after him, scattered them like chaff.
The author devotes much space to a detailed account of the rebellion in the several Ulster counties, and of the massacres perpetrated by the rebels. It is well known that the sworn depositions of the survivors are still preserved at Trinity College, but this gruesome evidence is usually belittled or ignored. N. Lecky never examined it, but thought it valueless. Miss Hickson, one of the few competent and impartial scholars who have examined the documents, came to the conclusion that the depositions were in the main trustworthy and that, in a number of cases, they were confirmed by independent evidence. Her account of the depositions, published some twenty years ago, has doubtless served the author as a guide. Even if we remember that the seventeenth century was not a sentimental age, it must be allowed that the rebels displayed an unusual degree of barbarity. The worst massacres were not perpetrated in the excitement of actual revolt, bat were carried out, weeks or months after, on helpless prisoners, by way of revenge for defeats in the field. Early in May, 1642, for example, several hundred Protestants imprisoned at Armagh were slaughtered an 1 the town was burnt. Mr. Starkey, a very old Presbyterian minister, and his two daughters " were all three driven out, absolutely naked, to a bog-hole, where they were thrust under the water with pikes." At Kilmore, in February, 1642, twenty-four men, women and children were burnt alive in a cottage by a mob, headed by an Irishwoman. Many Protestants were drowned in the Blackwater. Eighteen Scottish infants were impaled alive on hooka at Charlemont. Sir Phelim O'Neil's creditors were marked out for destruction, like Mr. James Maxwell of Kinard, who, with his sick wife, was torn from his bed and flung into the river. The victims were always stripped, as in Armenia or Bolshevik Russia, because their murderers coveted their clothes. Doubtless some of the deponents exaggerated t' a numbers of the slain, as uneducated people always do, but it is beyond doubt that all the settlers who failed to escape to the towns held by the volunteers or the English and Scottish troops were exterminated. Miss Hickson estimated the total number of victims at not less than 25,000 in Ulster. Lord Ernest Hamilton is inclined to reduce this estimate. But, as he says, the numbers appal us less than the cold-blooded cruelty which the rebels displayed. As the Protestants were onlyhuman, there is no need to wonder that when their turn came they exacted vengeance and, under leaders like Coote, destroyed all the rebels whom they could catch. Cromwell, of course, was not responsible for this work. His task was to put down all armed resistance to the Parliament as quickly as possible. His refusal of quarter to the Drogheda and Wexford garrisons was a deliberate act of policy, designed to show that opposition to his disciplined veterans was useless. The insurgents who surrendered to him were always given fair terms. The author says that, before Cromwell went to Ireland, the practice, in the case of a fortress taken by assault, had been for the victor to hold the officers to ransom and put the rank and file to the sword. If that be correct,' Cromwell's policy of treating officers and men alike had a good deal to be said for it, from a modern standpoint. The pacification of Ulster was completed, after Cromwell left, by tl:e Anglo-Irishman, Sir Charles Coote, who with some English troops and Protestant vohmteers routed the last rebel army under the Bishop of Clogher at Scarriffhollis, June 21st, 1650. The Bishop, who is said to have been a capable soldier and an honest man, was taken and hanged. Sir Phelim O'Neil, the original contriver of the rebellion, skulked in hiding, but was at last taken in February, 1653, by Lord Caulfield, whose father he had murdered. The injury that this O'Neil inflicted on his country cannot be over- estimated. The bitter memories of the massacres of 1641 still separate the Ulster Protestants from the Irish Roman Catholics.
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