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cupied, cannot be doubted. Fifty castles and three hundred villages consumed in six days! Illustrious achievement! Attila or Genghis Khan might have studied the art of desolation to advantage under my lord Sussex. With what propriety or decency writers belonging to that nation dare to stigmatize the cotemporaneous Irish as savages and barbarians, let the world judge. And be it observed, that my lord Scroope made as pleasant an inroad beyond the borders, in a different direction, at the same time; and equally signalized his humanity and his taste for bonfires.* With similar exploits might be filled a dozen chapters for the edification of the reader: but I presume it can hardly be necessary. Let me, however, without offence, offer a gentle hint to Englishmen, and more especially to their writers, that whenever the subject of savages and barbarians is started, it would not be improper to bear in mind the homely, but instructive proverb, " Men of glass, throw no stones." To this lesson, hardly one of them ever pays due attention.

The barbarity of the English warfare, about that period, was very impartially dealt out to other nations besides the Scotch and Irish, who had no particular preference. The French and Spaniards‡ were under equal obligations.

* "The Rode of the lord Scroope, warden of the west marches of England, into Scotland.

σε

Who, the 17th of April, at ten of the clock at night, with three ́ thousand horse and foot, came to Ellesingham, on the Wednesday at night, and burned that town in the morning, being from Carlisle twenty miles. On Thursday, he burned besides Hoddam, the Maymes, the town, and all the houses, which is the lord Herryes'; that day they burned Trayletrow, which is the lord Maxwell's; they burned the town of Reywell, which is the lord Copland's and the lord Homeyne's. They burned the house of Copewell, and the demesne of the lord Copland's. They burned the town of Blackshieve, which is the lord Maxwell's; item, the town of Sherrington, of the same; item, the town of Lowzwood, of the same lord's.39369

"Twenty days together did the lord Talbot, with fire and sword pass through Picardy and Artois, destroying all that stood in his way, and so returneth UNENCOUNTERED. 99870

"The protector with 25,000 men, entered, burnt, and ransacked Flanders and Artois.

"The earl of Mortaign, son to the duke of Somerset took by assault St. Avyan, and slew there 300 Scots, and hanged all the Frenchmen; because having once sworn to king Henry, they revolted."371

The English, in their invasion of Spain, in the year 1566, committed such scenes of havoc and destruction, as would have become a horde of Scythians. "The town [Cadiz] they burnt, saving only the churches. The walls they battered, and towers demolished. The island itself they burned, razed, and spoiled, LAYING ALL WASTE BE

369 Cabala, 175. 370 Daniel, II. 140. 371 Whitelocke, Part I. 138.

FORE THEM, and leaving the rubbish to declare the ruins which the English had made."72"

The army, "coming to Vigo, found every street fenced with a strong barricado, and but only one man in the town; the inhabitants making towards Bayon, as fast as they could drive. Then waS BOTH THE TOWN, AND ALL THE COUNTRY FOR SEVEN MILES COMPASS, SET ON A FLAME."373

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PART II.

FROM 1602 TO 1641.

Having in the first part of this work presented a cursory view of the state of Ireland to the close of the reign of Elizabeth, I now proceed to submit to the reader a sketch of the affairs of the country, from the accession of James I. to the commencement of the insurrection of 1641, which forms the second division.

This division is subdivided into seven chapters

I. The confiscation of six counties in Ulster.

II. The confiscation of 385,000 acres of land in King's and Queen's counties, Leitrim, Longford. and Westmeath.

III. The act of indemnity passed anno 1613.

IV. The pretended security of person and property in Ireland for forty years previous to the insurrection.

V. The graces, as they were styled, solemnly pledged to the Irish by Charles I. and perfidiously withheld.

VI. The frauds and corruption practised in packing the parliaments held in 1613 and 1634.

VII. A view of the administration of lord Strafford generally.
VIII. The plantation of Connaught.

CHAPTER XI.

Pretended plot of Tyrone and Tyrconnel. Depredation of James I. Extensive system of confiscation. Gross partiality and injustice. The doctrine of equivalents. Miserable logic of sir John Davies, attorney general of Ireland.

"What a king ought not, that he cannot give. And what is more than meet for princes' bounty, IS PLUNDER, not a grant.-Young.

I. The confiscation of six counties in Ulster.

THE unceasing spoliation perpetrated on the Irish, for four hundred years by its proconsular governors, from the invasion by Henry II. till the reign of James I. was speciously covered, as has appeared in Chapter III. with the mantle of rebellion, which was always within reach. The deputies of the kings of England, or the deputies of those deputies, or even the provost marshals, could, at any time, to suit their purposes, excite a rebellion, or what, in the castle style, was denominated a rebellion. Every act of resistance of insult, outrage, or aggression, was thus designated in proclamations, and afterwards in histories. The prescription was simple. It had been administered times without number, and never failed of success.

It

was only, as I have already stated, to make an inroad, or to commit some depredation on such of the Irish nobility or gentry as might be selected for the purpose, the more flagrant the better; provoke them to resistance; proclaim them traitors; let the armies loose to destroy them; and then confiscate their estates.

James changed the system; and substituted the fraud of the fox for the violence of the lion. He accomplished the same end, without the expense of raising a soldier, or firing a gun; and acquired, without disbursing a shilling, six entire counties in one province, and nearly five in another. Pretended plots and conspiracies were easily fabricated; they were unexpensive; and succeeded to admiration, so as to render unnecessary the apparatus of a rebellion, which would have obliged the "peace-loving" James to open the doors of the temple of Janus, to which he had an unconquerable aversion.

A catch-penny letter was dropped in the castle, containing an absurd development of a spurious plot, of which the earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnel were asserted to be the principal agents.* It

* The import of the letter was as follows: "That he was called into company by some Popish gentlemen, who, after administering an oath of secrecy, declared their purpose, to murder or poison the deputy; to cut off Sir Oliver Lambert; to pick up one by one the rest of the officers of state; to oblige the small dispersed garrisons by hunger to submit, or to pen them up as sheep to their shambles. That the castle of Dublin, being neither manned nor victualled, they held as their own; that the towns were for them and the country with them, the great ones abroad and in the North prepared to answer the first alarm; that the powerful men in the West are assured by their agents to be ready as soon as the state is in disorder, That the Catholic king had promised, and the Jesuits from the Pope had warranted, men and means to second the first stirs, and royally to protect all their actions. That as soon as the state is dissolved, and the king's sword in their hands, they will elect a governor, chancellor and council; despatch letters to king James I. trusting [from] his unwillingness to embark in such a war, and to his facility to pardon, [that he] would grant their own conditions of peace and government, with toleration of religion: that if the king listen not to their motions, then that the many days spent in England in debates and preparations would give them time enough to breathe, fortify, and furnish the maritime coasts; and at leisure call to their aid the Spanish forces from all parts." The writer of the letter declares, “that he interposed some doubts on them, which they readily answered; and he pretended to them to consent to further their projects, and that he took the method of this letter, to give notice of their designs, though he refused to betray his friends; in the meantime he would use his best endeavours to hinder any further practices." And he concludes, "That if they did not desist, though he reverenced the mass and catholic religion equal to any of them, yet he would make the leaders of that dance know, that he preferred his country's good before their busy and ambitious humours."374

374 Plowden, I. App. 48,

was pretended to be from a Catholic, who had been tampered with by the traitors, and whom they had endeavoured to seduce into the conspiracy, but whose loyalty rendered him incorruptible. The conspirators, it was stated in the letter, had determined on poisoning the deputy, cutting off Sir Oliver Lambert, picking up, one by one, the rest of the officers, starving the garrisons, &c. &c. It is a stupid and clumsy performance, and carries the strongest marks of fabrication on its face.

*

This trick of fabricating plots, and dropping letters to betray them, forms an important feature in the history of the oppressions of the Irish, as it was a potent and infallible instrument to crush and destroy them.

In this affair there is a degree of mystery, which, at this distance of time and place, and in the wretched state of Irish history, it is impossible to develop. Means were used to terrify the earls, who fled to the continent. They might, it is true, have been guilty, and have fled through consciousness of their crimes: but it is to the last degree unlikely: for, as Leland observes, "It seems extraordinary, that the northerns, who were still smarting under the chastisement they had received in the late rebellion, whose consequence and influence were considerably diminished, and who were very lately reconciled to government, should precipitately involve themselves in the guilt of a new rebellion."875 And it will not be denied, that, if they were guilty, there would have been some evidence to substantiate their guilt, which never was produced: for it is hardly within possibility, that a plot of so great magnitude as was pretended, should have existed, without affording such evidence. James I. finding the clamour that was excited in Europe, by the merciless spoliations and depredations practised in Ulster, issued a proclamation, in which he lavished the most scurrilous abuse on the earls, utterly destitute of truth. He charged them, among other things, with regarding "murder as no fault, marriage of no use, nor any man worthy to be esteemed valiant that did not glory in rapine or oppression."76 This tirade is as excessively gross and unseemly, as it is wholly destitute of truth, and is a disgrace to the memory of the monarch. There never was a period in Ireland, that could justify this Billingsgate attack.

Dr. Leland, assuming that the earls published no vindication of themselves, seems disposed to infer from thence, that their silence arose from the consciousness of their guilt, which made them acquiesce in the justice of their fate. But there is no satisfactory proof of this silence: for the non-appearance of such a vindication, above an hundred and thirty years afterwards, in the time of Leland, is by no

*"A letter dropt in the Privy Council Chamber, intimated a traitorous scheme of rebellion formed by the earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnel, and other Irish lords and gentlemen of the north; that they had solicited assistance from Spain and Brussels, and intended to begin the war with surprising the castle of Dublin, and assassinating the lord deputy and council."377

375 Leland, II. 498.

376 Leland, II. 500.

377 Leland, II. 498.

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