In this dilemma Ormond came to a resolution.  To throw in his lot with Rinucini and the rebels of the north, stained as the latter were in his eyes with innocent blood, was impossible.  Even had they been disposed to combine heartily with him for the royal cause he could hardly have done so; as it was there was barely a pretence of any such intention.  If Charles could effect his escape and would put himself in their hands, then, indeed, they said they would support him.  In that case, however, it would have been as king of Ireland rather than England.  Ormond could not and would not stoop to any such negotiations.  He wrote to the English Parliament offering to surrender Dublin into their hands, and to leave the country.  The offer was accepted, and a month later he had relinquished the impossible post, and joined the other escaped Royalists in France.

XXXVIII.

THE CONFUSION DEEPENS.

The indescribable confusion of aims and parties in Ireland begins at this point to take even more rapid and perplexing turns.  That “poor panther Inchiquin,” as one of his opponents derisively calls him, who had already made one bound from king to Parliament, now, upon some fresh offence, bounded back again, and made overtures to Preston and the Moderates.  Rinucini, whose only policy was to hinder any union between the Catholics and Royalists, thereupon fled to O’Neill, and together they opposed the Moderates tooth and nail.  The latter were now seriously anxious to make terms with the Royalists.  The king’s trial was beginning, and his peril served to consolidate all but the most extreme.  Ormond himself returned late in 1648 from France; Prince Rupert arrived early the following year with a small fleet of ships off Kinsale, and every day brought crowds of loyal gentlemen to Ireland as to a final vantage ground upon which to try a last desperate throw for the royal cause.

In Dublin the command, upon Ormond’s surrender, had been given by the Parliament to Colonel Michael Jones, a Puritan officer, who had greatly distinguished himself in the late war.  The almost ludicrously involved state into which things had got is seen by the fact that Jones, though himself the leader of the Parliamentary forces, struck up at this juncture a temporary alliance with O’Neill, and instructed Monk who was in the north, to support him.  The king’s death brought all the Royalists, and most of the more moderate rebels into line at last.  Rinucini, feeling that whatever happened, his project of a separate Ireland had become impossible, fled to Italy.  Even O’Neill, finding that his alliance with Jones was not prospering, and that the stricter Puritans declined with horror the bare idea of holding any communication with him or his forces, gave in his adhesion.  Old Irish and Anglo-Irish, Protestant and Catholic, North and South, all at last were in arms for the king.