never been strictly carried out in Ireland, and during the reign of James I their severity had been relaxed still further—­a line of conduct which had no parallel in any Roman Catholic country in Europe at the time.) Thereupon in 1641 the Roman Catholics of Ulster broke into open rebellion, and soon afterwards they applied to the kings of France and Spain for aid; and the Pope issued a bull granting a full and plenary indulgence and absolute remission for all their sins to all who would do their utmost to extirpate and totally root out those workers of iniquity who in the kingdom of Ireland had infected and were always striving to infect the mass of Catholic purity with the pestiferous leaven of their heretical contagion.

The stories told of the actual outbreak of the rebellion are interesting as an illustration of the universal habit of exaggeration about Irish affairs, to which I have already alluded.  Clarendon affirms that 40,000 English Protestants were murdered before they suspected themselves to be in any danger; Temple states that in the first two months of the rebellion 150,000 Protestants had been massacred.  The Jesuit, O’Mahony, writing in 1645, says “Persevere, my countrymen, in the path you have entered on, and exterminate your heretical opponents, their adherents and helpers.  Already within four or five years you have killed 150,000 of them, as you do not deny.  I myself believe that even a greater number of the heretics have been cut off; would that I could say all.”  He had doubtless obtained his information from the returns made by the priests engaged in the rebellion to the military leaders, the figures of which were much the same.  Yet Lecky (who, though in certain passages of his history he shows himself to be somewhat biassed in favour of the Irish Roman Catholic party, is on the whole a remarkably fair and impartial historian) argues with much force that there is no evidence of anything like a general massacre, and brings down the number murdered to about 8,000.  Still, that there was a widespread rebellion and all the consequent horrors of civil war, there can be no doubt.  The rebels of Ulster at one time tried to identify their cause with that of Charles I by producing a forged commission from the king—­which annoyed the Royalists and made the Parliamentary party all the more bitter.  Charles certainly did his utmost to bring about a peace—­no doubt being anxious to obtain the assistance of his Irish subjects in his Scotch and English wars.  But his efforts were thwarted by the Papal Nuncio, whose instructions from Rome were that the Holy See could never by any positive Act approve of the civil allegiance of Catholic subjects to an heretical prince; and thus the Royalist cause became as completely lost in Ireland as it was in England.  Before the peace was finally concluded, Charles was a prisoner in the hands of his enemies.