THE MASSACRE OF 1641.

Southland Times, Issue 18847, 12 June 1920, Page 2

THE MASSACRE OF 1641.

To (he Editor. Sir, —In I he discus-sion between us of the Irish question, my intention tmd practice was to ignore side issues, and see if more ligh( and less heat could not be extracted from our flint and steel. A letter rigned “Veritas’ - appeared in your columns on Wednesday, which seems to me to require some attention. I don’t need to point to his glaring inconsistency in objecting to my introducing references to the past (done for the purpose of a better understanding of the present) ami then making a headlong plunge into past history himself. You have in a line tried to make him see it. What seems to me to be required, is to settle unee and for ever that bogie of a massacre in 1041; for, as in the case of the immortal Mrs ’Arris, bosom friend of riarey Gamp, “there aint no rich person." Those blood-curdling quotations from the letter read in the House of Commons, re mass-acres of Protestants in Ireland were simply part of the “gentle art of propaganda - ' as it was understood by (hose then in power. Temple’s assertion that 105,000 (not 150,000) Protestants perished in two months and 800,000 in two years is a grotesque instance of official exaggeration, for there were not in all Lister at the time more than 40,900 Protestants; the Scotch Presbyterians were not affected by the rising, as long as they refrained from interference. In tlie library of Trinity College, Dublin, amongsT a vast array of priceless treasures in books, manuscripts and antiques, one can sec a collection of some fifty sacks of documents referring to the woful massacre of 1641. The British Government of that period paid one Thomas Waring various sums of money for his zeal in collecting those documents which consist of statements purporting to he made by the victims who escaped from that alleged awful butchery. Considerable light has recently been thrown on the history of those documents by Mr J. B. Williams, who is a constant gleaner amongst the State papers in London. He says: “In an age when Papists were considered capable of any villany and when the whole English nation literally lost its reason over Titus Oates’ trumped up (and by no means new) tale, the depositions, of course, found acceptance by seventeenth century Englishmen in the mass. And from this standpoint the so-called massacres of IG4I have always been put forward as both a cause and a palliative of (he deeds of (he pseudo commonwealth in Ireland. Cromwell himself, in his Wexford despatch, mokes mention of atrocities supposed to have been perpetrated by the Irish in that town as an excuse for his own bru- ,

tality. But if he believed in the wholesale massacres by the Irish, when he in 1649 .slaughtered hundreds of women at the market cross of Wexford, he had the best of reasons for knowing that his nominal masters, the self-styled Council of State, had no trust whatever in the depositions. This mass of evidence was never issued to the public, though it was eagerly awaiting the confirmation of all the stories that had been circulated. The publication in 1642 of Bishop Henry Jones’ Remonstrance had whetted the public appetite for more horrors, but they were never to be gratified, for the simple reason that the bogus depositions were found to murder so many people who were still alive, years after their supposed death, that the whole vile business would be exposed to the mockery and contempt of the world. Lord Clarendon published a history of the rebellion of 1641, and from the edition appearing in 1720 the following interesting extracts from a contemporary pamphlet by an English Royalist will throw light on the doings of the Commonwealth Commission to inquire into the massacres. It is publicly known that Cromwell’s pretended High Court of Justice passj ed through all parts of Ireland and picked | out all who could be in any manner tainted : with the spilling of English blood, there j were taut a few of the many thousands said ito be murdered found to be real. And it is I well known there were not so many Proj testants of the English nation living in Ire- | land in the beginning of that rebellion as 1 have been stated to be murdered. Also it is j undeniable that the first massacres commitj ted at the time of the said rebellion (which occasioned all the mischief thereafter happening) were all done on the Irish, and the several murders perpetrated in cold blood upon them, did twentyfold exceed those which were committed upon the English . . . and when at Athlonc the black book was produced which contained examinations taken in 1641 of murders said to be committed, it was so falsified, by (he evidence of living witnesses sworn in the book 1 to be murdered, that, for shame it was laid ( aside as no evidence. And several persons I have since acknowledged that the evidence i of murders given by them was taken from people who rushing away in terror, swore ; that all they left behind were murdered, I when all or most of them were afterwards j found to be living. And yet all these mistakes, though well known, remain yet unrcclified.” When all (he various accounts of the rebellion of 1641 are boiled down it appears that not more than five thousand j were put fo death, though others died from I exposure in their wild, headlong flight from .the vengeance of the outraged natives. In referring to the matter Green, in his history of the English people, gives this as the probable number and he follows Lecky and Gardiner. It is to be hoped we shall hear no more of the massacres of 1641. Certainly no fair-minded person, in face of the authorities who have let in light on the subject, can repeat the exploded fables of the awful brutality of the Irish in those times. Perhaps you will allow me in another letter to take up the atrocities of ninety eight to which your correspondent refers/—; I am, etc., lONA.