It awakened a sensation hardly less than that with which the news of the massacre itself had been received.  It was tie one thing still wanting to damage the royal cause.  Charles, it is true, denied it stoutly, and the English royalists tried to accept the denial.  The Irish ones knew better.  Ormond, whose own honour was untouched, did what he could to save his king’s.  The Confederates, however, admitted it openly, and Glamorgan, after suffering a short and purely fictitious imprisonment, remained in Ireland to carry out his master’s orders.

The already crowded confusion of the scene there had lately been added to by a new actor.  Rinucini, Archbishop of Fermo, had been despatched by Pope Innocent X. as his nuncio, and at once threw himself into the struggle.  To him it narrowed itself to one point.  The moment, he felt, had now come for the re-establishment of the Catholic religion in Ireland, and if possible for its union with one of the Catholic Powers of Europe, and in order to achieve this object, his great aim was to hinder, if possible, anything like a reconciliation between the Catholic insurgents and the king.

Meanwhile, peace had been made in England.  Charles was a prisoner, and the final acts of that drama in which he plays so strangely mixed a part were shortly to be enacted.  In Ireland there was no pretence at peace.  On the contrary, it was only then that hostilities seem really to have been carried on with vigour.  At a battle fought upon June 4, 1646, near Benturb, Owen O’Neill had defeated Munroe and his Scottish forces with great slaughter, and from that moment the whole north was in his power.  In the south Rinucini was rushing from town to town and pulpit to pulpit, fiercely arousing all the Catholic animosity of the country against both English parties alike.  In this he was supported by Owen O’Neill, who, with his victorious army, hastened south to meet him.  Together the chief and the legate marched in September of the same year into Kilkenny; took possession of the Council Chamber; flung the Moderates assembled there, including old Lord Mountgarret and the rest of the Council, into prison.  Ormond was in Dublin, helpless to meet this new combination.  No orders came from England.  The royal cause seemed to be hopelessly lost.  All Ireland was swarming with the troops of the insurgents.  Lord Inchiquin, who had for a while declared for the king, had now gone over to the Parliament.  O’Neill and the legate’s army was daily gathering strength.  It needed but a little more energy on their part and Dublin itself, with all its helpless crowd of fugitives, must fall into their hands.