Had the king effected his escape, Harry Furness had determined to return to Abingdon and live quietly at home, believing that now the army had grasped all power, and crushed all opposition, it was probable that they would abstain from exciting further popular animosity by the persecution of those who had fought against them.  The fury, however, excited in his mind by the murder of the king after the mockery of a trial, determined him to fight to the last, wherever a rising might be offered, however hopeless a success that rising might appear.  He would not, however, suffer Jacob and William Long any longer to follow his fortunes, although they earnestly pleaded to do so.  “I have no hope of success,” he said.  “I am ready to die, but I will not bring you to that strait.  I have written to my father begging him, Jacob, to receive you as his friend and companion, and to do what he can, William, to assist you in whatever mode of life your wishes may hereafter lead you to adopt.  But come with me you shall not.”

Not without tears did Harry’s faithful companions yield themselves to his will, and set out for Abingdon, while he, with eight or ten comrades as determined as himself, kept on west until they arrived at Bristol, where they took ship and crossed to Ireland.  They landed at Waterford, and journeyed north until they reached the army, with which the Marquis of Ormonde was besieging Dublin.  Nothing that Harry had seen of war in England prepared him in any way for the horrors which he beheld in Ireland.  The great mass of the people there were at that time but a few degrees advanced above savages, and they carried on their war with a brutal cruelty and bloodshed which could now only be rivaled in the center of Africa.  Between the Protestants and the English and Scotch settlers on the one hand, and the wild peasantry on the other, a war of something like extermination went on.  Wholesale massacres took place, at which men, women, and children were indiscriminately butchered, the ferocity shown being as great upon one side as the other.  In fact, beyond the possession of a few large towns, Ireland had no claim whatever to be considered a civilized country.  As Harry and his comrades rode from Waterford they beheld everywhere ruined fields and burned houses; and on joining the army of the Marquis of Ormonde, Harry felt even more strongly than before the hopelessness of the struggle on which he was engaged.  These bands of wild, half-clad kernes, armed with pike and billhook, might be brave indeed, but could do nothing against the disciplined soldiers of the Parliament.  There were with Ormonde, indeed, better troops than these.  Some of the companies were formed of English and Welsh Royalists.  Others had been raised by the Catholic gentry of the west, and into these some sort of order and discipline had been introduced.  The army, moreover, was deficient in artillery, and not more than one-third of the footmen carried firearms.  Harry was, a day or two after reaching the camp of Lord Ormonde, sent off to the West to drill some of the newly-raised levies there.  It was now six years since he had begun to take an active part in the war, and he was between twenty-one and twenty-two.  His life of active exertion had strengthened his muscles, broadened his frame, and given a strength and vigor to his tall and powerful figure.