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Home Ireland under Tudors and Stuarts, 1485-1688 Part 3 |
Part 3Five months after Strafford's execution the Irish Rebellion broke out (October, 1641), That the Irish should have risen is not surprising. They had the memory of past injustice to stimulate them. The suppression of the Irish race in Elizabeth's reign had been carried out, it has been said, with a ferocity that was hardly exceeded by any page in the bloodstained annals of the Turks; whilst the confiscations of their land in Ulster during James 1's reign, and the threatened confiscations in Connaught under Strafford, had appeared to the Irish to be monstrously unjust. But besides the memory of the past they had the fear of the future. The Scottish Covenanters and the Puritan majority in the Long Parliament now threatened to be supreme; and it was believed, not altogether without ground, that they would root out the Roman Catholic religion from Ireland (It was reported in Ireland that a member of the Long Parliament had said that the conversion of the Irish Papists could only be effected with the Bible in one hand and the sword in the other, whilst Pym had prophesied that Parliament would not leave one priest in Ireland).The rebellion broke out on the night of October 22, 1641, and for ten and a half years Ireland was to suffer from almost incessant warfare. The centre of the rebellion was at first Ulster, where the English and Scots were driven from their homes and endured the most fearful hardships, and from Ulster it spread to Wicklow. In a rebellion at such a period some massacres were perhaps inevitable; and modern historians estimate that about four thousand Protestants were killed, and that double this number died of famine or exposure. These figures are horrible enough, but to the Puritan imagination in England the number of victims was far greater, and by some people was put at one hundred thousand, and by others even as high as three hundred thousand (This number is a third more than the total estimated Protestant population in Ireland). It was natural, therefore, that the Long Parliament should pass, in angry vengeance, two laws against the Irish Catholics, the one declaring that no toleration should be granted to the Catholic religion in Ireland, and the other confiscating two and a half million acres of land in that country for the benefit of those who subscribed towards the suppression of the rebellion. The chief result of such laws, again, was to embitter feeling in Ireland, and led to many Catholic gentlemen joining in the rising. |
Chronology |
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