The effect of cruelty, too, is to produce more cruelty; of horrors like these to breed more horrors; till the very earth seems covered with the hideous brood, and the most elementary instincts of humanity die away under their poisonous breath.  So it was now in Ireland.  The atrocities committed upon one side were almost equalled, though not upon so large a scale by the other.  One of the first actions performed by a Scotch force, sent over to Carrickfergus by the king, was to sally out like demons and mercilessly slaughter some thirty Irish families living in Island Magee, who had nothing whatever to say to the rising.  In Wicklow, too, Sir Charles Coote, sent to suppress a disturbance amongst the O’Byrnes and O’Tooles, perpetrated atrocities the memory of which still survives in the region, and which, for cold-blooded, deliberate horror almost surpass those committed in the north.  The spearing by his soldiery of infants which had hardly left the breast he himself openly avowed, and excused upon the plea that if allowed to survive they would grow up to be men and women, and that his object was to extirpate the entire brood.

Here and there a faint gleam falls upon the blackened page.  Bedell, the Bishop of Kilmore, who had won the reverence even of his fiercest opponents, was allowed to remain free and undisturbed in the midst of the worst scenes of carnage and outrage; and when a few months later he died, was followed weeping to the grave by many who had been foremost in the work of horror.  As to the number of those who actually perished, either from exposure, or by the hands of assassins, it has been so variously estimated that it seems to be all but impossible to arrive at anything like exact statistics.  The tale was black enough as it really stood, but it was made blacker still by rumour and exaggeration.  The real number of the victims grew to tenfold in the telling.  Four thousand murdered swelled to forty thousand; and eight thousand who died of exposure, to eighty thousand.  Even now every fresh historian sets the sum total down at a different figure.  Take it, however, at the very lowest, it is still a horrible one.  Let us shut our eyes and pass on.  The history of those days remains in Carlyle’s words, “Not a picture, but a huge blot:  an indiscriminate blackness, one which the human memory cannot willingly charge itself with!”

XXXVI.

THE WATERS SPREAD.

So far the rising had been merely local.  It was now to assume larger dimensions.  Although shocked at the massacre, and professing an eager desire to march in person to punish its perpetrators, Charles’ chief aim was really that terms should be made with the leaders, in order that their troops might be made available for service in England.