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At last that happened which the wiser heads had long foreseen. After many weeks of strange stillness, in an instant the storm burst. The Irish in Ulster suddenly (October 23, 1641) fell upon the English colonists, the invaders of their lands. The fury soon spread, and the country was enveloped in the flames of a conflagration fed by concentrated sense of ancient wrong, and all the savage passions of an oppressed people suddenly broken loose upon its oppressors. Agrarian wrong, religious wrong, insolence of race, now brought forth their poisonous fruit. A thousand murderous atrocities were perpetrated on one side, and they were avenged by atrocities as hideous on the other. Every tale of horror in the insurgents can be matched by horror as diabolic in the soldiery. What happened in 1641 was in general features very like what happened in 1798, for the same things come to pass in every conflict where ferocious hatred in a persecuted caste meets the ferocious pride and contempt of its persecutors. The main points are reasonably plain. There is no question by whom the sanguinary work was first begun. There is little question that it was not part of a premeditated and organised design of indiscriminate massacre, but was inevitably attendant upon a violent rising against foreign despoilers. There is no question that though in the beginning agrarian or territorial, the rising soon drew after it a fierce struggle between the two rival Christian factions. There is little question that, after the first shock, Parsons and his allies in authority acted on the cynical anticipation that the worse the rebellion, the richer would be the forfeitures. There is no question that the enormity of crime was the subject of exaggeration, partly natural and inevitable, partly incendiary and deliberate. Nor finally is there any question that, even without exaggeration, it is the most barbarous and inhuman chapter that stains the domestic history of the

kingdom. The total number of protestants slain in cold blood at the outbreak of the rebellion has been fixed at various figures from four thousand to forty, and the latest serious estimate puts it at fiveand-twenty thousand during the first three or four years. The victims of the retaliatory slaughter by protestants upon catholics were countless, but Sir William Petty thinks that more than half a million Irish of both creeds perished between 1641 and 1652.

The fated international antipathy between English and Irish, that like a volcano is sometimes active, sometimes smouldering and sullen, now broke forth in liquid fire. The murderous tidings threw England into frenzy. It has been compared to the fury with which the American colonists regarded the use of Red Indians by the government of King George; or to the rage and horror that swept over the country for a moment when the tidings of Cawnpore arrived; and I need not describe it. The air was thick, as is the way in revolutions, with frantic and irrational suspicion. The catastrophe in Ireland fitted in with the governing moods of the hour, and we know only too well how simple and summary are the syllogisms of a rooted distrust. Ireland was papist, and this was a papist rising. The queen was a papist, surrounded at Somerset House by the same black brood as those priests of Baal who on the other side of St. George's Channel were described as standing by while their barbarous flock slew old men and women wholesale and in cold blood, dashed out the brains of infants against the walls in sight of their wretched parents, ran their skeans like Red Indians into the flesh of little children, and flung helpless protestants by scores at a time over the bridge at Portadown. Such was the reasoning, and the damning conclusion was clear. This was the queen's rebellion, and the king must be her accomplice. Sir Phelim O'Neil, the first leader of the Ulster rebellion, declared that

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he held a commission from the king himself, and the story took quick root. It is now manifest that Charles was at least as much dismayed as any of his subjects; yet for the rest of his life he could never wipe out the fatal theory of his guilt.

That catholic Ireland should prefer the king to the parliament for a master was to be expected. Puritanism with the Old Testament in its hand was never an instrument for the government of a community predominantly catholic, and it never can be. Nor was it ever at any time so ill fitted for such a task as now, when it was passionately struggling for its own life within the protestant island. The most energetic patriots at Westminster were just as determined to root out popery in Ireland, as Philip II. had been to root out Lutheran or Calvinistic heresy in the United Provinces.

The Irish rebellion added bitter elements to the great contention in England. The parliament dreaded lest an army raised for the subjugation of Ireland should be used by the king for the subjugation of England. The king justified such dread by trying to buy military support from the rebel confederates by promises that would have gone near to turning Ireland into a separate catholic state. Meanwhile we have to think of Ireland as weltering in bottomless confusion. Parliamentarian protestants were in the field and royalist protestants, anglicans and presbyterians; the Scots settlers to-day standing for the parliament, to-morrow fighting along with Ormonde for the king; the confederate catholics, the catholic gentry of the Pale, all inextricably entangled. Thus we shall see going on for nine desperate years the sowing of the horrid harvest, which it fell to Cromwell after his manner to gather in.

CHAPTER VII

THE FIVE MEMBERS-THE CALL TO ARMS

I

THE king returned from Scotland in the latter part of November (1641), baffled in his hopes of aid from the Scots, but cheered by the prospect of quarrels among his enemies at Westminster, expecting to fish in the troubled waters in Ireland, and bent on using the new strength that the converts of reaction were bringing him for the destruction of the popular leaders. The city gave him a great feast, the crowd shouted long life to King Charles and Queen Mary, the church bells rang, wine was set flowing in the conduits in Cornhill and Cheapside, and he went to Whitehall in high elation at what he took for counterrevolution. He instantly began a quarrel by withdrawing the guard that had been appointed for the Houses under the command of Essex. Long ago alive to their danger, the popular leaders had framed that famous exposition of the whole dark case against the monarch which is known to history as the Grand Remonstrance. They now with characteristic energy resumed it. The Remonstrance was a bold manifesto to the public, setting out in manly terms the story of the parliament, its past gains, its future hopes, the standing perils with which it had to wrestle. The most important of its single clauses was the declaration for church conformity. It was a direct challenge not merely

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to the king, but to the new party of episcopalian royalists. These were not slow to take up the challenge, and the fight was hard. So deep had the division now become within the walls of the Commons that the Remonstrance was passed only after violent scenes and by a narrow majority of eleven (November 22).

Early in November Cromwell made the first proposal for placing military force in the hands of parliament. All was seen to hang on the power of the sword, for the army plots brought the nearness of the peril home to the breasts of the popular leaders. A month later the proposal, which soon became the occasion of resort to arms though not the cause, took defined shape. By the Militia Bill the control and organisation of the trained bands of the counties was taken out of the king's hands, and transferred to lords-lieutenant nominated by parliament. Next the two Houses joined in a declaration that no religion should be tolerated in either England or Ireland except the religion established by law. But as the whirlpool became more angry, bills and declarations mattered less and less. Each side knew that the other now intended force. Tumultuous mobs found their way day after day to hoot the bishops at Westminster. Partisans of the king began to flock to Whitehall, they were ordered to wear their swords, and an armed guard was posted ostentatiously at the palace gate. Angry frays followed between these swordsmen of the king and the mob armed with clubs and staves, crying out against the bishops and the popish lords. The bishops themselves were violently hustled, and had their gowns torn from their backs as they went into the House of Lords. Infuriated by these outrages, they issued a foolish protestation that all done by the Lords in their absence would be null and void. This incensed both Lords and Commons and added fuel to the general flame, and the unlucky prelates