It was not, however, to be expected that the English Protestants of that day would realize this.  It is not always fully realized even yet.  The heat awakened by that ruthless slaughter, that merciless driving away of hundreds of innocent women and children, the natural pity for the youth and helplessness of many of the victims has lasted down to our own time.  Even to us the outrage is a thousand-fold more vivid than the provocation which led to it.  How much more then to the English Protestants of that day?  To them it was simply a new massacre of St. Bartholomew; an atrocity which the very amplest and bloodiest vengeance would still come far short of expiating.

It is easy to see that any negotiation with those implicated in a deed which had produced so widespread a feeling of horror was a proceeding fraught with peril to the royal cause.  Anger does not discriminate, and to the Protestants of England, North and South, old Irish, and Anglo-Irish, honourable gentlemen of the Pale, and red-handed rebels of Ulster, were all alike guilty.  Nor was this Charles’s only difficulty.  The Confederates declined to abate a jot of their terms.  The free exercise of the Catholic religion, an independent Irish parliament, a general pardon, and a reversal of all attainders were amongst their conditions, and they would not take less.  These Ormond dared not agree to.  Had he done so every Protestant in Ireland, down to his own soldiery, would have gone over in a body to the Parliament.  He offered what he dared, but the Irish leaders would listen to no compromise.  They knew the imminence of the situation as well as he did, and every fresh royal defeat, the news of which reached Ireland, only made them stand out the firmer.

Charles cut the knot in his own fashion.  Tired of Ormond’s discretion and Ormond’s inconvenient sense of honour, he secretly sent over Edward Somerset, Earl of Glamorgan, to make terms with the Confederates, who, excited at finding themselves the last hope and mainstay of an embarrassed king stood out for higher and higher conditions.  The Plantation lands were to be given back:  full and free pardon was to be granted to all; Mass was to be said in all the churches.  To these terms and everything else required, Glamorgan agreed, and the Confederates, thereupon, agreed to despatch a large force, when called upon to do so, to England, and in the meantime to make sham terms with Ormond, keeping him in the dark as to this secret compact.

It was not long a secret Ormond seems to have had some suspicions of it from the beginning, and an incident which presently occurred made suspicion certainty.  The town of Sligo had been captured by the parliamentary troops under Coote, and in October, 1645, an attempt was made to recapture it by a party of Irish under a fighting prelate, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Tuam.  In the struggle which ensued the Archbishop was killed, and upon his body was found a copy of the secret treaty which was straightway despatched by Coote to London.