At Carrickfergus the horrors of approaching exile seem to have shaken the firmness of some of them; for on September 23, 1656, Colonel Cooper, who had the charge of the prison, reporting that several would under their hands renounce the Pope’s supremacy, and frequent the Protestant meetings and no other, he was directed to dispense with the transportation, if they could give good Protestant security for the sincerity of their professions.

As for the third beast—­the tory, the following extract gives an idea of the class to which he belonged, or, rather, from which he sprang.

’And whereas the children, grandchildren, brothers, nephews, uncles, and next pretended heirs of the persons attainted, do remain in the provinces of Leinster, Ulster, and Munster, having little or no visible estates or subsistence, but living only and coshering upon the common sort of people who were tenants to or followers of the respective ancestors of such persons, waiting an opportunity, as may justly be supposed, to massacre and destroy the English who, as adventurers or souldiers, or their tenants, are set down to plant upon the several lands and estates of the persons so attainted,’ they are to transplant or be transported to the English plantations in America.’[1]

[Footnote 1:  Act for Attainder of the Rebels in Ireland, passed 1656.  Scobell’s ‘Acts and Ordinances.’]

No wonder that Mr. Prendergast exclaims:—­

’But how must the feelings of national hatred have been heightened, by seeing every where crowds of such unfortunates, their brothers, cousins, kinsmen, and by beholding the whole country given up a prey to hungry insolent soldiers and adventurers from England, mocking their wrongs, and triumphing in their own irresistible power!’

Every possible mode of repression that has been devised at the present time as a remedy for Ribbonism was then tried with unflinching determination.  John Symonds, an English settler, was murdered near the garrison town of Timolin, in the county Kildare.  All the Irish inhabitants of the town and neighbourhood were immediately transported to Connaught as a punishment for the crime.  A few months after two more settlers were murdered at Lackagh.

’All the Irish in the townland of Lackagh were seized; four of them by sentence of court-martial were hanged for the murder, or for not preventing it; and all the rest, thirty-seven in number, including two priests, were on November 27 delivered to the captain of the “Wexford” frigate, to take to Waterford, there to be handed over to Mr. Norton, a Bristol merchant, to be sold as bond slaves to the sugar-planters in the Barbadoes.  Among these were Mrs. Margery Fitzgerald, of the age of fourscore years, and her husband, Mr. Henry Fitzgerald of Lackagh; although (as it afterwards appeared) the tories had by their frequent robberies much infested that gentleman and his tenants—­discovery that seems to have been made only after the king’s restoration.’