226-335 THE MURDER OF BROWNLOW TAYLOR THE MURDERS OF MR. AND MRS. MAXWELL MASSACRE OF PROTESTANT COLONISTS AT PORTNAW, ON THE MORN- NIGHT CRUELTY TO ENGLISH CATTLE AT AUGHER AND ARMAGH INTRODUCTION. THE PLANTATIONS-THE CHURCHES-THE GRACES THE REBELLION-THE MASSACRES-THE DAY OF RECKONING. IN December, 1615, Arthur Lord Chichester, at the King's desire, resigned the office of Lord Deputy of Ireland, which he had held for nearly ten years, into the hands of three Lords Justices, pending the arrival of his successor Sir Oliver St. John. The last years of Chichester's rule were troubled at home and abroad. A plot had been discovered in Ulster (of which more hereafter), and the King was greatly angered at the slow progress of the plantation. Yet if the ex-Lord Deputy had enriched himself, he had on the whole served his sovereign zealously and well. That the great work of the Ulster plantation, begun soon after his arrival in Ireland, had in 1615 only progressed as far as the beginning of the end, was not his fault. The foundations of the work had been well laid. The province which had never been more than nominally conquered by the Angevin, York, Lancaster, and Tudor sovereigns, had succumbed to the peaceful policy of James. The lawyers had succeeded where the soldiers had failed. O'Neil and O'Donnell, the two great northern chieftains with their ill-fitting English coronets, perplexed and terrified by a new kind of warfare in disguise, against which they felt themselves powerless, preferred to go into exile. If O'Neil, old 1 Leland and most historians of credit disbelieve that O'Neil was guilty of a conspiracy against the Government in 1607-8. They consider he fled, lest he should be detained a prisoner in London. One of the persons who accused him of plotting treason was a Mr. Eustace, a man whose character made him a very VOL. I. B as he was, had a chance given him to fight it out once more in open war as in the days of his youth he might possibly have accepted it, but when he was presented with a smoothspoken, half-friendly, half-peremptory request to come into England and submit to the King's arbitration his differences with the Protestant Bishop of Derry in confederacy with his own former vassal O'Cahane, he most wisely, so far as his personal liberty was concerned, preferred to fly secretly to the Continent. Had he gone to England he would have remained to the last day of his life a prisoner in the Tower. 1 ་ After the Flight of the Earls' the petty chieftains of Ulster were left to wage an unequal and desultory warfare sure to end in their destruction. O'Doherty's insurrection was speedily ended by his capture and death, the whole of his territory of Innishowen passing to Chichester. Sir Donnel O'Cahane (who had sided with the English against O'Neil) upon a bare, and it would appear very unfounded, suspicion of complicity in O'Doherty's treason, was first imprisoned in Dublin, whither he had gone of his own accord to clear himself, and was then transferred to the Tower of London, where after a long imprisonment he died. Sir Neil O'Donnel, against whose treasons his own fosterers had borne witness, with his son, described by the Lord Deputy as a 'toward youth' but as 'proud spirited as his father,' and Sir Cormac MacBaron O'Neil, were also imprisoned in the Tower, while Con MacGregy O'Neil, a boy of twelve or thirteen, the son of the absent Earl, was entrusted to the safe keeping of Sir Toby Caulfield in the strong fort of Charlemont. It would of course be quite impossible to give here more than a very brief outline of the condition of the Ulster plantation, and of the other plantations accomplished or projected between 1609 and 1641, when the rebellion broke out, with the results of which this book is mainly concerned. untrustworthy witness. He was popularly called 'Mad Eustace,' from the general belief that he was half insane. Mr. Prendergast makes a great mistake in stating in his Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland that Eustace was so called because he lost his wits on losing his estate in 1649. See Answers of Sir Garrett Moore to interrogations put to him. MSS. Rolls House, March 13, 1609. 1 MSS. Rolls House, March 30, 1610. 2 The extent of the lands escheated in Ulster for the purpose of plantation has been variously estimated. Carte sets it down at half a million of acres. Pynnar,' the best authority, says that the six plantation counties contained more than two millions of acres; that of these a million and a half were unprofitable and profitable lands which were left to native proprietors; that 400,000 were forfeited, of which 100,000 went to churches, schools, and corporations, 240,000 to undertakers and colonists of British race, and 60,000 to native Irish grantees. Reid accepts Pynnar's estimate, and says that the statement made by Roman Catholic and some Protestant writers that all the natives were dispossessed is 'a decided exaggeration.' Cox says that 511,465 acres of the six counties were distributed among the English and Scotch planters, Trinity College, and the Established Church, the free schools, and the natives, of which Connor Maguire had 5,980 acres. It is doubtful, however, that Maguire had even this much, less than half of what had been promised him by James.' At the other end of the political pole from Cox stands Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, who, in his Bird's-Eye View of Irish History,' republished from his Young Ireland,' discards all these estimates, and adopts one made by the Rev. George Hill, a Protestant clergyman in Ulster, by which it would appear that the six escheated counties contained four million of acres, all of which were granted to English and Scotch, with the exception of a few shreds of freeholds' in the most barren districts. But the extent of land forfeited by the Irish of Ulster in 1649-50 seems to tell against the accuracy of Mr. Hill's statement. In a document which, from its connection with the depositions, I shall have to notice more fully hereafter, an official copy of a decree, made by the Court for the adjudication of the claims at Athlone in 1655, Henry O'Neil of Glasdromin, in Armagh, is stated to have claimed no less than 10,000 acres, which his father had been granted by 2 Reid, vol. i. p. 86. Cox, vol. ii. Carte says he had more; but this is unlikely. 1 Harris's Hibernia, vol. ii. James I. at a rent of forty shillings and a hawk yearly. This grant, like Maguire's, is said by Harris to have been reduced, but it is evident that O'Neil was in possession of the whole in 1641, and he claimed it in 1655, and again in 1663, under the patent grants of James. The truth is that it is now impossible to ascertain the exact amount of land granted to the colonists and the natives, but the statement that all the latter in the six counties were dispossessed and left without land cannot be accepted by any one who has examined the history of the plantation with an unprejudiced mind, as Mr. Lecky has done,' who sums up the question with his usual candour and fairness, when he says that the assignment of a large part of Ulster to the native owners distinguished that plantation broadly and favourably from similar acts in previous times.' The second great charge made against the plantations, north and south, that they disregarded or confiscated the proprietary rights of the 'humblest clansmen,' receives some support from Mr. Lecky. He considers that their position was in many respects superior to that of an English tenant. In the very early times Professor Eugene O'Curry describes in his interesting lectures, the humblest clansmen,' no doubt, had a fair position. But since, as Dr. Todd, also an Irish scholar of high repute, truly says in his notes to the ancient Irish MS., the Wars of the Gaill with the Gael,' the clan system made a national army a mere rope of sand against an invader, it was inevitable that the Brehon law and tribal customs must come into conflict with newer laws and forms of civilisation and must give way before them as years went by. And we have the most indisputable proofs before us that the position of the 'humblest clansman' of the Irish chief in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was miserable in the extreme. An Irish antiquary, as learned and patriotic as Dr. Todd or Professor O'Curry, the late Mr. Herbert Pole Hore, in an article on the 'Brehons and their Laws' in the Ulster Journal of Archaeology (vol. v.), admits that if some of the Anglo History of England in the Eighteenth Century, vol. ii. p. 110. |