The sea ringed the Green Island round; the white cold winter descended upon it; and, while the wretched remnant of its Protestant inhabitants from all parts were gathered in stables and outhouses about Dublin, or on other spots of its eastern fringe, whence they could gaze across towards the mother-lands and call to them for help, the spectres of the murdered, it was said, haunted the interior desolation. Take this fragment from the deposition afterwards made by "Elizabeth, the wife of Captain Rice Price, of Armagh," when she was examined on oath as to what she had seen and suffered in the Insurrection. "She and other "women whose husbands were murdered, hearing of divers apparitions and visions which were seen near Portadown "Bridge since the drowning of her children and the rest of "the Protestants there, went unto the Bridge aforesaid about twilight in the evening, and then and there on a sudden "there appeared unto them a vision or spirit, assuming the shape of a woman, naked, with elevated and closed hands, "her hair hanging down, very white, her eyes seeming to "twinkle, and her skin as white as snow; which spirit "seemed to stand straight upright in the water, often repeating the word Revenge, Revenge, Revenge; whereat this "deponent and the rest, being put into a strong amazement "and affright, walked from the place." It is but the disordered fancy of a poor bereaved woman, and probably dressed up in the telling; but the historian might labour long before he could devise a more exact image of the state of Ireland in the winter of 1641-42, as it appeared to the Protestants of Britain, than this ghastly one of the naked female figure emerging each nightfall from the pool of an inland Irish river, stretching up clenched hands in the solitude, and calling, ere she sank, Revenge, Revenge, Revenge!1

1 For summaries of the facts of the Irish Insurrection see Rushworth, IV. 398-421 (in reality, with extra pages, 54 pages in all); May, 79-87; Clarendon, 120-121). An earlier authority, much followed by these, is the History of the Beginnings and First Progress of the General Rebellion raised within the

Kingdom of Ireland upon the 23rd day of October, 1641, published, in 1646, by Sir John Temple, Master of the Rolls in Ireland. See Hallam's Const. Hist. 10th ed. III. 391-393, and notes) for a calm estimate of the degree of credibility belonging to the original accounts of the massacres.

CHAPTER VI.

AFTER THE RECESS, OR FIVE MONTHS OF ABORTIVE REACTION (OCT. 1641-MARCH, 1641-2):—THE GRAND REMONSTRANCE-TUMULTS IN LONDON, AND ARCHBISHOP WILLIAMS'S BLUNDER-CHARLES'S COUP D'ÉTAT, OR ATTEMPTED ARREST OF THE FIVE MEMBERS-HIS DEPARTURE FROM LONDON-BISHOPS' EXCLUSION BILL PASSED.

WHEN the English Parliament met again after the Recess (Oct. 20, 1641), the King was yet in Scotland. The Plague being still in London, and the mortality considerable,1 the Houses were not very full at first. The Movement party, however, was strong enough at once to resume action. Pym had taken no holiday at all, but had remained in town, or at Chelsea, all through the Recess, as Chairman of the Committee of Vigilance appointed by the Commons. He was never in greater force. In his Report, given in on the first day, of what had been heard and done by the Committee during the Recess, he struck, though cautiously, a note of alarm. The news from Scotland was not reassuring. General rumours of The Incident had reached London some days before, and, along with these rumours, letters from Hampden, Stapleton, Fiennes, and the other Parliamentary Commissioners attending the King at Holyrood. These letters conveyed more than was meant for the public ear. Whatever suspicions had been entertained before of some unusual motive in the King's visit to Scotland were now converted into positive belief. Was there no connexion between that plot against Argyle and Hamilton in Scotland, which had happily failed, and some

1 Letter, in S. P. O., from Thomas Wiseman to Admiral Pennington, of date Oct. 7, reports 239 deaths from

Plague in the city in the preceding week.

similar conspiracy by desperate men in England against the Parliament or its popular chiefs? If Scotland had her Montroses, Crawfords, Cochranes, and the like, had not England her Digbys, her Percys, her Wilmots, and army-men of still wilder character, ready for anything; and was it so sure that the two groups were not in correspondence? In these circumstances what could the two Houses do but require Essex, as commander-in-chief for the King south of the Trent, to do as Leslie had done for the Scottish Parliament, and give them a guard of trained-bands ? 1

RESUMED ACTIVITY: THE GRAND REMONSTRANCE.

These necessary preliminaries over, the Commons took up their work precisely at the point where they had left it off. They resumed their dealings with the Lords for bringing the thirteen impeached Bishops to trial, again demanding, through Pym, the sequestration of those Bishops from their places in the Lords till their trial should be over. Not only so; but, on the second day of their sittings (Oct. 21), they introduced a new Bill for the total exclusion of Bishops from Parliament and civil offices, in lieu of the former Bill which the Lords had rejected. This new Bill, which fixed the 10th of November next as the date when it was to come into effect, passed the Commons on the third reading on the 23rd of October, and was on the same day sent up to the Lords, with a request that it might be passed there with all speed, as a Bill which much concerned the good of the Commonwealth. The Commons also insisted that all the Bishops without exception should be suspended from their votes on this particular Bill, so that it should be carried by the votes of the lay peers alone.2

Suddenly into the midst of these questions there came a vast and horrible interruption. It was on the 1st of November that the first news of the Irish Insurrection reached London; and for many days men could think of nothing else.

1 Parl. Hist. II. 910--917; Rushworth, IV. 388 et seq.; Clar. Hist. 119; Baillie, I. 391-393.

2 Commons Journals of Oct. 21 and Oct. 23; Lords Journals of Oct. 23 and Oct. 28; Parl. Hist. II. 916, 917.

Not at first was the worst known; but even from the first enough was known. One can see yet, in the discussions which took place immediately in the two Houses, and in the records of the state of feeling out of doors, the struggle between two passions of nearly equal strength. There was an agony of desire, on the one hand, to send help to the Irish Protestants and put down the insurrection; and there was a dread, on the other hand, lest the King should, in our modern phrase, be able to make political capital out of the emergency, by converting it into a reason for raising an army, ostensibly for immediate service in Ireland, but really for ulterior ends. The one feeling showed itself in resolutions for raising men and money in certain ways as soon as possible, and for meanwhile accepting with thanks the services of 10,000 Scots, under some of Leslie's late officers, offered for Ireland by the Scottish Parliament. For the Irish calamity was being simultaneously discussed in the Scottish Parliament, in the King's own presence or vicinity, and there, owing to circumstances, with greater power to come to a practical conclusion. The Scots could easily spare for Ireland ten thousand of their blue-bonnets recently disbanded from about Newcastle; but, as Ireland belonged to the English crown, it depended on the King and the English Parliament to say whether they would accept such help. The King, on his side, demurred about introducing so many armed Scots into what was a purely English dominion, unless there were to be in the field an English force of equal or greater numbers, and officered by himself. To what use, towards a counter-revolution in England, such an army might be turned could not escape the popular sagacity, even if the King's intentions at the moment were taken in good faith, and those dark suspicions were false. which supposed that the King's own hand, or the hand of the Queen for him, might be detected in the Irish Insurrection. The citizens of London let Parliament know that they would be ready with loans and subscriptions for the relief of their Irish Protestant brethren, but would like assurance that the application of the moneys and the conduct of the enterprise should be in the right hands. But the Parliament's own in

structions, in letters sent by both Houses to their envoys with the King at Edinburgh (Nov. 10), indicate best both the intensity and the complexity of the emotions of the time. "You shall represent to his Majesty," they say, "this our humble " and faithful declaration that we cannot without much grief "remember the great miseries, burthens and distempers, "which have for divers years afflicted all his kingdoms and "dominions, and brought them to the last point of ruin and I destruction; all which have issued from the cunning, false, " and malicious practices of some of those who have been "admitted into very near places of counsel and authority "about him." They went on to attribute even the Irish Insurrection to the continued influence of these bad counsellors, the removal of whom they prayed for; and they wound up, almost threateningly, thus: "If herein his Majesty shall "not vouchsafe to condescend to our humble supplication, "although we shall always continue, with reverence and "faithfulness to his person and to his crown, to perform "those duties of service and obedience to which by the

laws of God and this kingdom we are obliged, yet we "shall be forced, in discharge of the trust we owe to the State and those whom we represent, to resolve upon some such way of defending Ireland from the rebels as may concur to "the securing ourselves from such mischievous counsels and designs." Here, therefore, there were two new developments of the policy of the party of movement. There was to be an attack, if made necessary by the King's conduct, on his present "evil counsellors ;" and there was to be some assumption by Parliament of that power of the Militia, or the arming of the subject, which had hitherto been in the King's prerogative. The Scottish "Incident" had awakened them to the necessity of the first; that and the Irish Insurrection together had suggested the second. It is curious to observe, however, that while the idea of a blow at the "evil counsellors" was Pym's, the suggestion of assuming some control of the Army was Cromwell's. On the 8th of November, or three days before the date of the above-quoted instructions to the English envoys at Edinburgh, Cromwell had moved that the Commons,