Harleian MSS. and to compare them with the originals in the College. Thus her work cannot be regarded as a mere counterstatement of opinion against the popular Irish theory. It presents the reader with a statement of facts hitherto unnoticed, powerfully supported by the photograph, and she asks him to use his own eyes and his own unbiassed judgment on them. She has published for the first time-and this is perhaps the most valuable part of her most interesting workthe proceedings of the High Court of Justice, and has thrown clear fresh light on Cromwell's administration. The document which she gives from the Council Books of the Commonwealth, in which he orders the debenture of one of his soldiers, who had killed a poor Irish carpenter named O'Byrne, to be given to the man's widow and children, is very interesting and curious (v. vol. ii. p. 236). I can only repeat my hope that an authoritative Calendar of the depositions may yet be made by the Government, and that photographs of a few of the most important MSS. may form part of it. The clear ascertainment of the truth or untruth of a story which touches so deeply the honour of English action in Ireland will do more towards allaying hatreds between classes, creeds, and nations, than the most absolute reversal of the Act of Settlement of 1660-70, which arose out of and had its justification in the crimes charged on the Irish in the depositions. J. A. F. MASSACRE OF PROTESTANT COLONISTS AT PORTNAW, ON THE MORN- MASSACRE OF IRISH CATHOLICS AT ISLE MAGEE, ON THE 234-25 ASHru Oo. WICKLOW. INTRODUCTION. THE PLANTATIONS-THE CHURCHES-THE GRACESTHE 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 '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. Rol's House, March 13, 1609. MSS. Rolls House, March 30, 1610. |