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My Temple Borase, and Clarendon, but an Creuer Catene and Castlebaren, Father Waish the Francis can triar, Pamp Okey of Crm Castle, Mr. Kearney the Catholit of Care bebop, with other Irish Catholle writers of the seventeenth century (whose narratives are hereafter printed for the first time from the Carte MSS.), all admit that massacres were com mitted, however they may venture to pailiate or excuse those crimes The Kev, Charles O'Connor, D.D., a highly respected Roman Catholic priest of the last century, made the same admission.'

This is a tolerably complete account of the evidence, to which we must add the thirty-two volumes of manuscript depositions in Trinity College, Dublin. We accept the whole, subject to the single qualification that both Protestant and Catholic writers, and especially such of them as mingled in the events they describe, reflect more or less the passions and prejudices, the partialities and animosities to be expected under the circumstances. This rem equally to Protestant writers like Temple an

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merely repeat the statements of Curry and quote occasional concessions made by Protestant writers. We refer to the histories, sketches, or catechisms of Daniel O'Connell, who ignores the massacres altogether, and complains that the Catholics were accused of being the authors and perpe'trators of assassinations and massacres of which they were only the victims'*-of Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, who says that the soldiers in the Irish army 'never massacred one Protestant in cold blood 't-of Thomas D'Arcy Magee, Martin Haverty, and O'Neill Daunt, who hold that the Protestants were the first to begin the massacres by murdering three thousand Catholics in Island Magee-and of Mr. John P. Prendergast, who says: "No murders were com'mitted or even any man in arms killed by the rebels till late in December. The principal Protestant writers on the same side are Mr. J. T. Gilbert, the well-known Irish annalist, and the Rev. George Hill, a Unitarian minister.

The whole question has been re-opened in recent times by Mr. Froude,¶ Mr. Lecky,** and Mr. Gardiner.tt We are all familiar with the strongly anti-Irish view taken by Mr. Froude of the transactions of the seventeenth century. Mr. Lecky discusses the question of the massacre in a chapter which is a masterpiece of historical criticism, though it fails, as we shall see, on several important points to do full justice to the facts in evidence. His position is that the rebellion did not begin with a general and premeditated massacre of the Protestants, but that murders and barbarities did occur on a very large scale, and that the Protestants were as fierce in their retaliation as the Catholics in their first attacks. His judgement, though very different from that of Dr. Curry, who denies the Catholic massacres altogether, is regarded as on the whole more favourable to the Catholic side than that of any previous historian. Mr. Gardiner substantially accepts the conclusion of Mr. Lecky. He puts a colour upon the rebellion and the massacres entirely at variance with the evidence.

It is at this point that Miss Hickson interposes with her

* Memoir on Ireland, Native and Saxon.

Bird's-eye View of Irish History.

Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland, p. 61.

§ Appendix to English Report of Historical MSS, Commission. Historical Account of the Settlement of Ulster.

English in Ireland.

**History of England in the Eighteenth Century. ++ Fall of the Monarchy of Charles I.

two volumes, containing 217 of the depositions taken before Royalist and Republican Commissioners, either in the years following the outbreak or after the civil war had been brought to an end by very stern treatment. The chief interest of her book consists in the publication of these documents, along with an historical and explanatory introduction, which enables us to understand their exact judicial value as well as the motives and causes of the rebellion, and the conduct of both English and Irish in the years that preceded and followed it. We are grateful to her for the contribution of many original documents, which serve to enlarge and correct the basis on which the history has hitherto been written. Though Mr. Froude describes her as something of a Nationalist, she is singularly free from prejudice; being about equally severe in her strictures upon Protestants and Catholics. In any case, she presents us with a large body of facts as the materials for our own independent judgement, quite regardless of the effects they may have upon the character or feelings of either Englishmen or Irishmen. She writes in a flowing and agreeable style, and her criticism of other writers is eminently temperate and fair.

6

The question under discussion cannot be properly understood without a right appreciation of the causes or motives of the rebellion. While some Protestant writers hold that it had no justification whatever, but merely revealed the passionate hatred which had consumed the Irish for generations, Catholic writers have spoiled their case by a needless exaggeration. They have always declared the two causes to be the confiscation of the estates of the Irish, and the persecution of the Catholic religion. Writers like Mr. Hill maintain that the Ulster plantation was the gigantic wrong' that sowed the dragon's teeth of rebellion, and the fact that the most widespread and cruel massacres occurred in Ulster might seem to countenance this view. But it is impossible in that case to understand the plan of the insurrectionary leaders, which was to drive out the English settlers but not to disturb the Scots, who were five times more numerous in Ulster than their English brethren. The Ulster plantation was not the greatest grievance of the Irish, because, as Mr. Lecky justly concedes: the assignment of a large part of Ulster to the native owners distinguished 'that plantation broadly and favourably from similar acts in ' previous times.' Of the two million acres confiscated to the Crown, one million and a half were actually given back to the natives, and though only sixty thousand acres of the

four hundred thousand reserved for planting purposes were assigned to Irish proprietors, the native peasants lived on among all classes of planters under a far better tenure than they ever possessed under their Irish chiefs. Mr. Hill talks of the sufferings inflicted on the natives by their transplantation, but he himself assures us again and again that the Government could not carry out the plan of removing the natives because the English and Scotch settlers, though commanded to displace them and to settle their lands with their own countrymen, could not possibly dispense with the services of the Irish. The natives were not, as Mr. Hill says, universally settled upon inferior lands, because they had their portions among the settlers themselves for the greater security of the plantation, and Davies expressly mentions that they were removed in some places from the woods and 'mountains into the plains and open countries,' so as to be under the watchful eyes of the planters.

The fact is that the Ulster settlement affected the chiefs more than the peasantry, according to the favourite idea of Chichester, who, as Mr. Hill admits, ' had more regard for the large mass than for a few of high rank' (p. 127). The great wrong done to the peasantry was in the confiscation of the lands of the sept, under the plea that they belonged to the chiefs, but the Irish should recollect that it was the chiefs themselves who betrayed the peasantry by accepting from the English king those patents which made them owners in fee of the lands. Long, however, before the introduction of the English tenure, the position of the humblest clansman' was miserable in the extreme.t But in 1641 the peasantry were

*It is a mistake to suppose, with Mr. Hill, that the king confiscated the whole of six Ulster counties. Carte estimates the forfeited estates at above half a million of acres;' but Pynnar, who is the best authority on the subject, gives the estimate in the text, so that it is ridiculous for Nationalists to talk of the plantation as if it had displaced the whole native population of Ulster. As Ulster now contains nearly two millions of people, or almost one-third of the whole population of Ireland, there was surely room enough then for the six hundred thousand, of all races and creeds who peopled its plains and its mountains. Besides, in 1609 Ulster was almost without people, and in 1641, as Pynnar says, the fourth part of the land is not fully inhabited.'

† Mr. Herbert P. Hore, who is an authority on the Brehon laws, admits that if some of the Anglo-Irish squires of the last century ' rack-rented their tenants, an O'Bourke or an O'Flaherty of the sixteenth century literally flayed them alive '-the Irish saying of that day being, as Miss Hickson tells us, that such a chief was a cormorant over his