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Parliament's Provisions for Ireland -
Continued Lethargy of the Lords Justices - Their Weak-kneed Government
drives many into Rebellion - Sir Phelim O'Neill prepares to invest
Drogheda - Six Hundred Raw Recruits sent with Roper to the Relief of
Drogheda - Five Hundred slain in a Fog at Julianstown - The Lords
Justices summon Sir Charles Coote to Dublin - Cruel Conduct of Coote -
Lisburn attacked and burned to the Ground by Sir Phelim O'Neill - Lord
Gormanston calls a County Meeting at Crofty Hill - The Northern Chiefs
appear and the Rival Parties amalgamate.
Ireland had been specially entrusted
to Parliament by the
King, and during the whole of November, 1641, the English
House of Commons devoted a portion of each day to careful
consideration of the subject, and how best to deal with the
situation, with regard to which doleful reports were frequently
forwarded by the Lords Justices. Having resolved that
£50,000 should immediately be borrowed from the city of
London, for which full security should be given, orders were
passed that £20,000 should be sent over to Ireland without
delay, that ships should be sent to guard the coasts, that
a force of 6000 foot and 2000 horse should be raised and sent
to Dublin, that provisions should be at once collected and
sent to the relief of the city and its garrison, and that the
arms and ammunition then lying in the magazine at Carlisle
should be transported to Carrickfergus. It was further resolved that
negotiations should be opened with the Scots for
a force of 2000 foot to be landed in Ulster.
Further communications being received
from the Lords
Justices and Council in Dublin, giving details of fresh
successes of the rebels in Ulster, the capture of Dundalk, and
the danger of Drogheda, the perils with which Dublin was
threatened, and stating that unless at least 10,000 foot and
1000 horse were immediately sent over, Ireland was in danger
of being utterly lost, and the peace of England herself
threatened, the Commons resolved to comply in full with
the wishes of the Irish Government, which included a petition
for; £100,000 to enable them to carry on the war. The
estimate for Ireland was raised to £200,000, and Leicester,
as Lord-Lieutenant, was authorized to raise 3500 foot and
600 horse, while arms were provided for a further levy.
While the Parliament in England thus
acted with commendable celerity and decision, the movements of the Irish
Government were marked by its ancient lack of energy. The
Earl of Ormonde having been appointed Lieutenant-General,
he urged upon the Lords Justices the necessity for prompt
measures, and proposed to march at once with all the troops
that could be spared from Dublin against the main body of
the rebels, then in the County Louth, and composed largely
of an undisciplined rabble. This the Lords Justices would
not permit Ormonde to do, alleging that they lacked arms
with which to supply the troops. At the same time it must
be remembered that the Pale was disaffected, and that in
Dublin there were but 3000 foot and 200 horse, and that the
capital was surrounded by armed bands, who had already
made food scarce, and who threatened to cut off the water
supply. A large area had to be defended, and many of the
citizens were not to be trusted.
Sir William Parsons and Sir John
Borlase were now
themselves eyed with suspicion. "To be weak is to be
miserable", and weak and miserable the Lords Justices undoubtedly were.
Letting we dare not, wait upon we will,
they acted with a timidity highly reprehensible in those who
are called upon to lead; and the distrust and disdain with
which they treated the lords and gentlemen of the Pale who
were not yet involved in any disloyalty led many to conclude
that their conduct was purposely calculated to drive the
Catholic landed gentry into rebellion. Castlehaven declares
that "they were often heard to say that the more were in
rebellion, the more lands should be forfeited to them", a
statement which has led to the association of the names of
the Lords Justices with that of a company of adventurers
formed in London at this time, who calculated on the confiscation of ten
millions of acres in Ireland as soon as the
work of reduction should be completed.
The actions of the Lords Justices
affected the whole
country. As soon as it was announced that men and money
were being sent from England to their succour, they concealed their
natural cowardice under a mask of arrogance,
and demanded from the Catholic lords of the Pale the return
of the arms with which they had entrusted them, thus leaving
them without means of defence. By this demand they
created enemies for themselves and the Government, and
only succeeded in getting back 950 out of the 1700 arms
they had given.
This step was followed by several
other measures equally
unpopular and unwise. A proclamation was issued commanding all persons
not citizens of Dublin to leave the
city within twenty-four hours, on pain of death. The reason
given for this measure was, that landholders, by flying to
the capital for protection, had left their lands undefended;
but the effect produced by it was that numbers on finding
themselves thus denied protection in Dublin, sought it by
joining the rebels, and thus swelled their ranks. The Irish
Government also suppressed, or rendered ineffective by their
exceptions and qualifications, the order of the English Parliament to
offer a general pardon to all rebels who tendered
their submission within a given time, a measure which could
hardly have failed at that moment to produce most beneficial
effects; and the object of the Lords Justices in this suppression is
patent enough when it is seen that in the few counties
least affected by the rebellion, where the pardon was offered,
it was combined with a general exception of the freeholders.
This fact, and Castlehaven's statement, prove that the Lords
Justices looked for a rich harvest of forfeited lands.
The feeling thus produced in Dublin by
these errors of
judgment on the part of the Government greatly encouraged
the northern Irish, who now marched towards Drogheda under
the command of Sir Phelim O'Neill. On the 24th of November they took
Lord Moore's mansion at Mellifont, being incited
to do so by his offering the Government to raise, clothe, pay,
and command 600 men until money came from England.
The foot-soldiers who attempted to defend Mellifont were put
to the sword, but the mounted men escaped to Drogheda.
The women were stripped, and the place plundered.
The approach of the rebel forces of
Ulster towards the
south was already producing its effect on the wavering
allegiance of the Pale; nevertheless the Lords Justices
adopted no efficient measures of defence. Before the end
of November the insurgent army had established its quarters
on the northern banks of the Boyne, and preparations were
being made to invest Drogheda, from which the Lords
Justices now received a pressing dispatch for aid from Sir
Henry Tichborne.
Qualified men were scarce, but 600 raw
recruits were sent
under a young commander, Major Roper, to reinforce Tichborne, and Sir
Patrick Wemyss, with fifty horse of Ormonde's
troop, accompanied them. The short journey could easily
have been made in a day, but the new levies were ill disciplined and
mutinous, and insisted on proceeding by easy
stages. On the second day they had only reached Balrotheray.
At seven o'clock on the morning of the 20th of November
Roper halted at Lord Gormanston's, and learned that the
Irish had crossed the Boyne to intercept him, and he was
told to move with the greatest caution. Roper, with the
carelessness of youth, did not even trouble to warn his
officers, and the march was continued in loose order. A
thick November fog shrouded Julianstown bridge, over which
the inexperienced and undiscerning 600 marched into a valley
of death, in which awaited their coming a greatly superior
and better-armed force under the command of Hugh O'Byrne,
Rory O'Moore, and Philip MacHugh O'Reilly. The fight in
the fog was sharp and decisive; and when it lifted, the sun
shone on the complete Irish force, "who did not lose a man",
and on nearly 500 corpses of Roper's raw recruits, Roper
himself, with two captains and 100 men, reaching Drogheda
shortly after the arrival of Wemyss. Ormonde expressed
much surprise on hearing of this defeat. "The men", he
said, "were unexercised, but had as many arms, I think,
within a few, as all the rebels in the kingdom, and were as
well trained as they"; but the fog accounts for much, and
also the presence in the ranks of the insurgents of many of
Strafford's disbanded army. This success gave fresh confidence and
courage to the rebels, who levied contributions on
the surrounding districts, causing thereby no slight alarm
to the Government, while the arming of the Irish with the
dead soldiers' weapons added not a little to the terror of the
loyalists.
In their extremity the Lords Justices
summoned Sir
Charles Coote who had been dispatched against insurgents
in Wicklow on the very day of the defeat at Julianstown to
return to guard the capital. Coote was a marvellous mixture
of courage, courteousness, and cruelty. On one occasion he
invited a bumpkin to blow down the barrel of his pistol, and,
on the yokel's acquiescing, Coote in the act blew out his
brains. He lost his own life later by charging at the head
of seventeen men at some thousands of the enemy. In
Wicklow, Coote's troopers murdered and massacred to their
hearts' content with the approval of their commander, who,
on seeing infants impaled on their pikes, frankly declared
that "he liked such frolics". Neither age nor sex was
spared, and priests were usually shot on sight, no close time
for ecclesiastics being recognized by Coote. Fathers Higgins
and White of Naas were thus given up by Sir Charles to
the tender mercies of his troopers, although the priests had
been each granted a safe-conduct to Dublin by his superior
officer, Lord Ormonde, who complained of this barbarity.
On his return to Dublin Coote's
conduct was highly
approved of by the Lords Justices, who appointed him
Governor of Dublin; but the Catholic lords accused him of
having uttered a threat at the council board "tending to
a purpose and resolution to execute upon those of our religion a general
massacre". "The character of the man",
says Curry, "was such, that this report, whether true or
not, was easily credited." "All this while," Castlehaven
tells us, "parties were sent out by the Lords Justices and
Council from Dublin, and most garrisons throughout the
kingdom, to kill and destroy the rebels; but the officers and
soldiers took little or no care to distinguish between rebels
and subjects, but killed in many places, promiscuously, men,
women, and children ; which procedure not only exasperated
the rebels, and induced them to commit the like cruelties
upon the English, but frightened the nobility and gentry
about; who, seeing the harmless country people, without
respect to age or sex, thus barbarously murdered, and themselves openly
threatened as favorers of the rebellion, for
paying the contributions they could not possibly refuse,
resolved to stand upon their guard."
Carrickfergus, Chichester's old
stronghold, was filled with
the Protestants of Down and Antrim; but Sir Phelim O'Neill
recognized the fact that if he hoped to take Carrickfergus he
must begin with Belfast and Lisburn, and accordingly he
directed Sir Con Magennis to attack the latter, which he did
at the head of several thousand men equipped with their
newly-acquired arms and also with two field-pieces taken at
Newry in the initial stages of the rebellion. The sole strength
of Lisburn consisted of Lord Con way's troop, commanded by
Sir Arthur Tyringham, ex-governor of Newry. Fighting
was kept up in the streets, which were so slippery with frozen
snow that the shoes of the horses had to be frosted, which
being done, the cavalry gained a great advantage over the
infantry, whose "brogues" slipped from under their wearers
and laid them on their backs at the mercy of the foe.
Chichester sent gunpowder from Belfast, and followed it up
with a troop of horse and a company of foot, with the result
that the Irish were completely discomfited, and set fire to
the town, of which "every corner was filled with carcases".
"The slain were found to be thrice the number of those that
fought against them." Lisburn was burned to the ground.
Next day the rebels burned the residence at Brookhill of
Sir George Rawdon, who had only returned from Scotland
the evening before.
Early in December, Lord Gormanston,
who appears to
have been for some time in secret communication with Rory
O' Moore, issued an order to the Sheriff of Meath to assemble
the principal inhabitants of the county at Duleek, but the
place of meeting was subsequently changed to Crofty Hill,
about three miles to the south of Drogheda. Among those
who attended this meeting were the Earl of Fingall and
Lords Dunsany, Louth, Netterville, Slane, and Gormanston.
When the meeting had grown in dimensions to about 1000,
the number was largely augmented by the sudden appearance
of a party of the insurgent chiefs from Ulster, consisting of
Rory O'Moore, Philip MacHugh O'Reilly, Hugh O'Byrne,
Colonel MacMahon, Hugh Boy O'Reilly, and Captain Fox,
who rode up "in the head of a guard of musketeers, whom
the defeat at the bridge of Julianstown had furnished with
arms".
As the Irish chiefs approached the
hill, the principals,
by whom they were evidently expected, pressed forward to
meet them, and Gormanston asked "for what reason they
came armed into the Pale", and O'Moore, in a speech which
had plainly been prepared, replied that "the ground of their
coming thither and taking up arms, was for the freedom and
liberty of their consciences, the maintenance of His Majesty's
prerogative, in which they understood he was abridged, and
the making the subjects of this kingdom as free as those of
England"; and he added much to the effect that he and those
with him had been goaded into action by penal laws which
excluded them from the public service and from educational advantages,
for, said he, "there can be no greater
mark of servitude than that our children cannot come to
speak Latin without renouncing their spiritual dependence
on the Roman Church, nor ourselves be preferred to any
advantageous employment, without forfeiting our souls".
Finally he complained that while their primary motive had
been to maintain the King's prerogative, the Ulster chiefs
had been denounced by the Lords Justices as rebels; he
therefore called upon all true sons of Ireland to join the
common cause.
Gormanston, as prearranged, now
demanded "whether
these were not pretences, and not the true grounds indeed
of their so doing, and likewise whether they had not some
other private ends of their own"; and on receiving a solemn
declaration of their sincerity and wholehearted devotion to
the ends to which they had pledged themselves, he cried
aloud: "Seeing these be your true ends, we will likewise
join with you therein" a sentiment which was received with
loud applause by all present. "And thus", said a probable
eyewitness, "distrust, aversion, force, and fear united the
two parties which since the conquest had at all times been
roost opposite, and it being first publicly declared that they
would repute all such enemies as did not assist them in their
ways, they appointed a second meeting of the county at the
hill of Tara." |
