In the absence of a parliament, the government of Ireland was vested in the deputy, the commander-in-chief, and four commissioners, Ludlow, Corbett, Jones, and Weaver.  There was, moreover, a high court of justice, which perambulated the kingdom, and exercised an absolute authority over life and property greater than even Strafford’s Court of Star Chamber had pretended to.  Over this court presided Lord Lowther, assisted by Mr. Justice Donnellan, by Cooke, solicitor to the parliament on the trial of King Charles, and the regicide Reynolds.  By this court, Sir Phelim O’Neill, Viscount Mayo, and Colonels O’Toole and Bagnall were condemned and executed; children of both sexes were captured by thousands, and sold as slaves to the tobacco-planters of Virginia and the West Indies.  Sir William Petty states that 6,000 boys and girls were sent to those islands.  The number, of all ages, thus transported, was estimated at 100,000 souls.  As to the ‘swordsmen’ who had been trained to fighting, Petty, in his Political Anatomy, records that ’the chiefest and most eminentest of the nobility and many of the gentry had taken conditions from the King of Spain, and had transported 40,000 of the most active, spirited men, most acquainted with the dangers and discipline of war.’  The chief commissioners in Dublin had despatched assistant commissioners to the provinces.  The distribution which they made of the soil was nearly as complete as that of Canaan among the Israelites; and this was the model which the Puritans had always before their minds.  Where a miserable residue of the population was required to till the land for its new owners, they were tolerated as the Gibeonites had been by Joshua.  Irish gentlemen who had obtained pardons were obliged to wear a distinctive mark on their dress on pain of death.  Persons of inferior rank were distinguished by a black spot on the right cheek.  Wanting this, their punishment was the branding-iron or the gallows.

No vestige of the Catholic religion was allowed to exist.  Catholic lawyers and schoolmasters were silenced.  All ecclesiastics were slain like the priests of Baal.  Three bishops and 300 of the inferior clergy thus perished.  The bedridden Bishop of Kilmore was the only native clergyman permitted to survive.  If, in mountain recesses or caves, a few peasants were detected at mass, they were smoked out and shot.

Thus England got rid of a race concerning which Mr. Prendergast found this contemporary testimony in a MS. in Trinity College library, Dublin, dated 1615:—­

’There lives not a people more hardy, active, and painful ... neither is there any will endure the miseries of warre, as famine, watching, heat, cold, wet, travel, and the like, so naturally and with such facility and courage that they do.  The Prince of Orange’s excellency uses often publiquely to deliver that the Irish are souldiers the first day of their birth.  The famous Henry IV., late king of France, said there would prove no nation so resolute martial men as they, would they be ruly and not too headstrong.  And Sir John Norris was wont to ascribe this particular to that nation above others, that he never beheld so few of any country as of Irish that were idiots and cowards, which is very notable.’