of a priest, and did not reveal it to the proper authorities, was made liable to the punishment of a public whipping and the amputation of his ears; to be absent on a Sunday from the service at the parish church, subjected the offender to a fine of thirty pence; and the magistrates were authorized to take away the children of Catholics and send them to England for education, and to tender the oath of abjuration to all persons of the age of one and twenty years, the refusal of which subjected them to imprisonment during pleasure, and to the forfeiture of two-thirds of their estates real and personal.[1]

During this period the Catholic clergy were exposed to a persecution far more severe than had ever been previously experienced in the island.  In former times the chief governors dared not execute with severity the laws against the Catholic priesthood, and the fugitives easily found security on the estates of the great landed proprietors.  But now the Irish people lay prostrate at the feet of their conquerors; the military were distributed in small bodies over the country; their vigilance was sharpened by religious antipathy and the hope of reward; and the means of detection were facilitated by the prohibition of travelling without a license from the magistrates.  Of the many priests who still remained in the country, several were discovered, and forfeited their lives on the gallows; those who escaped detection concealed themselves in the caverns of the mountains, or in lonely hovels raised in the midst of the morasses, whence they issued during the night to carry the consolations

[Footnote 1:  Hibernia Dominicana, 707.  Bruodin, 696.  Porter, Compendium Annalium Eecclesiasticorum (Romae, 1690), p. 292.]

of religion to the huts of their oppressed and suffering countrymen.[1]

3.  In Scotland the power of the commonwealth was as firmly established as in Ireland.  When Cromwell hastened in pursuit of the king to Worcester, he left Monk with eight thousand men to complete the conquest of the kingdom.  Monk invested Stirling; and the Highlanders who composed the garrison, alarmed by the explosion of the shells from the batteries, compelled[a] the governor to capitulate.  The maiden castle, which had never been violated by the presence of a conqueror,[2] submitted to the English “sectaries;” and, what was still more humbling to the pride of the nation, the royal robes, part of the regalia, and the national records, were irreverently torn from their repositories, and sent to London as the trophies of victory.  Thence the English general marched forward to Dundee, where he received a proud defiance from Lumsden, the governor.  During the preparations for the assault, he learned that the Scottish lords, whom Charles had intrusted with the government in his absence, were holding a meeting on the moor at Ellet, in Angus.  By his order, six hundred horse, under the colonels Alured and Morgan, aided, as it was believed, by treachery, surprised them at an early hour in the morning.[b] Three hundred prisoners were made, including the two committees of