The King decided upon a coup de main.  He dismissed the Lords Justices, and ordered several of the more Puritan members of the Privy Council to be tried for treason.  The result was a rapid exodus of nearly the whole governing body to England.  Early in 1644 Ormond was made Lord-deputy, and a truce of a year was entered into with the Confederates.  Only the extravagance of the latter’s demands now stood in the way of a complete union.

XXXVII.

CIVIL WAR.

The passionate excitement which the news of the Ulster massacre had awakened in England seems to have deepened, rather than diminished, as time went on, and the details became more known.  Nothing that has happened within living memory can be even approximately compared to it, though, perhaps, those who are old enough to remember the sensations awakened by the news of the Indian Mutiny will be able most nearly to realize the wrath and passionate desire of revenge which filled every Protestant breast.  That the circumstances of the case were not taken into consideration was almost inevitable.  Looking back with calmer vision—­though even now a good deal of fog and misconception seems to prevail upon the subject—­we can see that some such outbreak was all but inevitable; might have been, indeed ought to have been, foreseen.  A wildly-excitable population driven from the land which they and their fathers had held from time immemorial, confined to a narrow and, for the most part, a worthless tract; seeing others in possession of these “fat lands” which they still regarded as their own—­exiled to make room for planters of another race and another faith—­what, in the name of sense or reason, was to be expected except what happened?  That the very instant protection was withdrawn the hour for retribution would be felt to have struck.  The unhappy Protestant colonists were absolutely guiltless in the matter.  They were simply the victims, as the earlier proprietors had been the victims before them.  The wrongs that had been wrought thirty years earlier by Sir John Davis and the Dublin lawyers had been wiped out in their unoffending blood.

This point is so important to realize, and the whole rising has so often been described as a purely religious and fanatical one, that it is worth dwelling upon it a minute or two longer.  It was a rising, unquestionably, of a native Roman Catholic community against an introduced Protestant one, and the religious element, no doubt, counted for something—­though it is not easy to say for how much—­in the matter.  In any case it was the smallest least vital part of the long gathered fury which resulted in that deed of vengeance.  The rising was essentially an agrarian one—­as almost every Irish rising has been before and since—­and the fact that the two rival creeds found themselves face to face was little more than a very unfortunate accident.  Could the plantations of James the First’s time have been formed exclusively of English or Scotch Roman Catholics, we have no reason, and certainly no right to conclude that the event would have been in any way different, or that the number of those slaughtered would have been reduced by even a single victim.