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While such a barbarous and murderous decree imprints its inextinguishable and sanguinary stain on the records of that Parliament and party, it requires the most unblushing impudence and effrontery to continue the outrageous abuse of the Irish, for the pretended murders and massacres of 2 or 300,000 men, women, and children, out of a population not exceeding 225,000 in the aggregate!

The reader may perhaps flatter himself with the fond hope that these orders were not, nor intended to be, carried into operation. Let him not

"Lay this flattering unction to his soul,"

A few pages hence, he will find that the sanguinary rulers found sanguinary ruffians, to carry their sanguinary mandates into effect, in the true spirit of desolation in which they were conceived.

Far different was the spirit by which the calumniated Irish were actuated. They denounced the strongest sentence of excommunication not merely against murderers, but against thieves, spoilers, robbers, and extorters; as well as against all such as should favour, receive, or any way assist them; and, lest this denunciation should

*"Articles agreed upon, ordained and concluded, in the general congregation, held at Kilkenny, May, 1642.

"We declare [the present] war, openly Catholic, to be lawful and just; in which war, if some of the Catholics be found to proceed out of some particular and unjust title, covetousness,

prove ineffectual, they ordered their generals to punish offenders in the premises, under pain of interdiction.

These orders are signed by three archbishops, four bishops, and twenty-one other dignitaries of the church, of various degrees. They were enacted in a grand council, held in Kilkenny, in May, 1642. What a glorious, what an honourable contrast for Ireland, between the spirit they display, and that of the murderous ordinance of the Long Parliament, that no quarter should be given to any Irishman! or that of the lords jus

cruelty, revenge, or hatred, or any such unlawful, private intentions, we declare them therein grievously to sin, and therefore worthy to be punished and restrained with ecclesiastical censures, if (advised thereof) they do not amend.

"We will and declare all those that murder, dismember, or grievously strike; all thieves, unlawful spoilers, robbers of any goods, extorters; together with all such as favour, receive, or any ways assist them, to be excommunicated, and so to remain until they completely amend and satisfy, no less than if they were namely proclaimed excommunicated:

"We command all and every the generals, colonels, captains, and other officers of our Catholic army, to whom it appertaineth, that they severely punish all transgressors of our aforesaid command, touching murderers, maimers, strikers, thieves, and robbers; and if they fail therein, we command the parish priests, curates, or chaplains, respectively, to declare them interdicted; and that they shall be excommunicated, if they cause not due satisfaction to be made unto the commonwealth, and the party offended. And this the parish priests or chaplains shall observe, under pain of excommunication of sentence given ipso facto."420

420 Rushworth, V. 519, 520.

tices, to kill all the males able to bear arms, inhabiting in places where the rebels (as they were falsely styled) were harboured! O, much-abused country! how little is the world acquainted with thy horrible sufferings ! how inadequately does it appreciate thy real character! To what wretched historians has thy sad tale been confided! Will the justice of heaven never avenge thy wrongs, nor vindicate thy rights? Must centuries still roll on, and behold the countless blessings, which heaven has lavished, with liberal hand, on one of the fairest portions of the globe, blighted and blasted by a wretched policy, worthy only of ruthless eastern despotism?

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CHAPTER XIX.

Examination of the cruelties said to have been

perpetrated by the Irish.

"I could a tale unfold, whose lightest word

Would harrow up thy soul; freeze thy young blood;
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres ;
Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
Like quills upon the fretful porcupine."-

Shakspeare.

THE frauds and falsehoods which we have exposed to the reprobation of the reader, respecting the immense number of persons said to have been murdered during the insurrection of 1641, have, we trust, prepared him to lend an impartial ear to the exposure of frauds and falsehoods far more gross and shocking, respecting the pretended cruelties of the insurgents.

In Chapter XVII. we have allowed the accusers to prefer their charges in their own language, without exaggeration or extenuation. It is the only fair course of procedure. We pursue the same plan here; and lay before the reader the revolting statements of May, Temple, Whitelock, Leland, Carte, Hume, and Mrs. Macauley :

"People of all conditions and qualities, of every age and sex, daily presented themselves, spoiled and stripped, with no coverings but rags or twisted straw to hide their privities: some wounded almost to death; others frozen with cold; some tired with travel, and so surbated that they came into the city creeping on their knees!!!!

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"They appeared like walking ghosts in every street; and all the barns, stables, and outhouses were filled with them, where they soon died in so great numbers, that all the churchyards of Dublin could not contain them!!!"421

"Some had their bellies ript up, and so left with their guts running about their heels. But this horrid kind of cruelty was principally reserved by these inhuman monsters for women, whose sex they neither pitied nor spared, hanging up several women, many of them great with child, whose bellies they ript up as they hung, and so let the little infants fall out; a course they ordinarily took with such as they found in that sad condition. And sometimes they gave their children to swine. Some the dogs eat: and some, taken alive out of their mother's bellies, they cast into ditches. And for sucking children, and others of a riper age, some had their brains knocked out; others were trampled under foot to death. Some they cut in gobbets and pieces; others they ripped up alive. Some were found in the fields, sucking the breasts of their murdered mothers. Others lay stifled in vaults and cellars; others starved in caves, crying out to their mothers rather to send them out to be killed by the rebels, than to suffer them to starve there."

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"They drowned many hundreds, men, women, and innocent children, in the rivers. Some they sent to sea in a rotten vessel, without any sails or rudder, to be cast away: and great numbers of the English, after they had done all drudgeries for the rebels in hopes of mercy, had all their throats cut by them and with some of them the execrable villains and monsters would make themselves pastime and sport, before their death, trying who could hack deepest into the Englishmen's flesh and so with the highest torture and cruelty mangled them to death.' 9423

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"Sometimes they enclosed them in some house or castle, which they set on fire, with a brutal indifference to their cries, and a hellish triumph over their expiring agonies. Sometimes the captive English were plunged into the first river, to which they had been driven by their tormentors. One hundred and ninety were, at once, precipitated from the bridge of Portnedown. Irish ecclesiastics were seen encouraging the carnage. May, 86. 422 Temple, 89. 423 Whitelock, 49.

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