The number of secular priests who were victims to this persecution cannot be correctly estimated.  The religious orders, who were in the habit of keeping an accurate chronicle of the entrance and decease of each member, furnish fuller details.  An official record, drawn up in 1656, gives the names of thirty Franciscans who had suffered for the faith; and this was before the more severe search had commenced.  The martyrdom of a similar number of Dominicans is recorded almost under the same date; and Dr. Burgat[502] states that more than three hundred of the clergy were put to death by the sword or on the scaffold, while more than 1,000 were sent into exile.

The third “beast” was the Tory.  The Tory was the originator of agrarian outrages in Ireland, or we should rather say, the English planters were the originators, and the Tories the first perpetrators of the crime.  The Irish could scarcely be expected to have very exalted ideas of the sanctity and inviolable rights of property, from the way in which they saw it treated.  The English made their will law, and force their title-deed.  The Anglo-Normans dispossessed the native Irish, the followers of the Tudors dispossessed the Anglo-Normans, and the men of the Commonwealth dispossessed them all.  Still the Celt, peculiarly tenacious of his traditions, had a very clear memory of his ancient rights, and could tell you the family who even then represented the original proprietor, though that proprietor had been dispossessed five or six hundred years.  The ejectments from family holdings had been carried out on so large a scale, that it can scarcely be a matter of surprise if some of the ejected resented this treatment.  There were young men who preferred starving in the woods to starving in Connaught; and after a time they formed into bands in those vast tracts of land which had been wholly depopulated.  The men were desperate.  It is difficult to see how they could have been anything else, when driven to desperation.  They were called robbers; but there was a general confusion about meum and tuum which they could not understand.  Strangers had taken possession of their cattle, and they did not comprehend why they should not try to obtain it again in any possible way.  Young men, whose fathers had landed estates of L2,000 a-year, which were quietly divided amongst Cromwell’s Life-Guards, while the proprietor was sent out to beg, and his daughters compelled to take in washing or do needlework, could scarcely be expected to take such a change in their circumstances very calmly.  A man who had been transplanted from an estate worth L2,500 a year near Dublin, which his family had owned for four hundred years, and whose daughters were given the munificent gratuity of L10 a-piece by the Council Board, and forbidden for the future to ask for any further assistance, might certainly plead extenuating circumstances[503] if he took to highway robbery.  Such circumstances as these were common at this period;