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Chapter Seven 217
with the exception of some four strongly-held fortiications. Unfortunately, O’Neill, who claimed to be acting on behalf of King Charles, was neither a strong nor capable leader, and in a brutal chapter of Irish history, a chapter which is only now being acknowledged, many of the planter families were mercilessly butchered by his forces. What follows is part of one historian’s account detailing the awful events which occurred during the Ulster rising and which are since referred to as ‘the Great Popish Massacre.’
“In Ulster, the insurgents, led by Sir Felim O’Neill, swept across the province. Mas- sacre, rape, torture, burning, looting and destructuion followed. The leaders of the revolt could not stop their followers in this; the peasantry had seized the chance to ight their own war against those who had for decades ousted them from their land and treated them with contempt, The number of deaths has never quantiied, but the undoubted atrocities committed against civilians inaugurated a new phase of warfare that was even more undiscriminating in its brutality and savagery than the battles of the previous century, and was to culminate in the horrors of Drogheda and Wexford in 1649.”
Regrettably, violence begets violence, and the cruelties inlicted by O’Neill’s followers though great and shamefully inexcusable, were exaggerated by the English propagandists . In fact, the polemical poet John Milton went so far as to incorrectly state that 600,000 Eng- lish were slaughtered-these overstated igures were afterwards used as an excuse to justify the extensive and bloody carnage carried out by their own troops. Shortly after the dreadful slaughter in Ulster, an English army marched from Dublin, as one writer said, ‘to terrorise the inhabitants into peace.’ The army had orders “to wound, kill, slay, and destroy all re- bels and their backers; and to burn, spoil, waste, consume, and demolish all places, towns, and houses where rebels had been relieved and harboured, and to kill and destroy all men inhabiting, able to bear arms.”
As mentioned, the insurrection, at irst conined to Ulster and a few districts in Leinster, now spread across the entire island. The events which helped to spread and enlarge the area of revolt were:
1. The demand of the Lord Justices that the Catholics of the Pale should surrender their arms.
2. Two decrees of the English Parliament: one on December 8, 1641, commanding