Is Ireland a Nation? [pp. 65-83]

Is Ireland a Nation?
in the "pacification" of Leinster. All au thorities are agreed as to Coote's cruel and
sanguinary nature. Warner tells us, "He
was a stranger to mercy;" and Lord Castle haven gives an appalling account of the sav age conduct of the troops under his com mand who, he says, "killed men, women,
and children promiscuously." It is related
of him that when remonstrated with by less
savage colleagues for the needless cruelty he
showed in massacring children, he replied
with the brutal phrase, "Nits will be lice;"
and on another occasion, when his atten tion was directed to a soldier who had run
his bayonet through a child's body and was
carrying it over his shoulder, he is reported
to have said, "he liked such frolics." Le land also records "his ruthless and indis criminate carnage." To Cosby alone,
however, belongs the infamy that must
attach for all time to the massacre of Mul laghmast, which I quote from A. M. Sulli van'sStory of Ireland,page 230 and following:
"In 1857 Sir Francis Cosby, commnanding the
Queen's troops in Leix and Offlily, bformed a diabol ical plot for the permanent conquest of that dis trict. Peace at the moment prevailed between
the government and the inhabitants; but Cosby
seemed to think that in extirpation lay the only
effectual security for the crown. Feigning, how ever, great friendship...... he invited to a gr'and
feast all the chief families of the territory; atten dance thereat being a sort of test of amity. To
this summons responded the flower of the Irish
nobility in Leix and Offaly, with their kinsmen
and friends the O'Mores, O'Kellys, Lalors,
O'Nolans, &c...... Into the great Rathli rode many
a pleasant cavalcade that day but none ever came
forth that entered in...... The invited guests were
butchered to a man, one hundred and eighty of
the O'Mores alone having thus perished."
There was, indeed, one chief who escaped
the fate intended for him and his clan by
the base and faithless Cosby-that was the
ancestor of Richard Lalor, M. P., the present patriotic member for the Leix division
of the Queen's County.
"He noticed, it is said, that while many went into the Rath, none were seen to reappear outside,
Accordingly he desired his friends to remain be hind, while he advanced and reconnoitered. He
entered cautiously. Inside, what a horrid spectacle
met his sight! At the very entrance, the dead
bodies of some of his slaughtered kinsmen! In an
instant he himself was set upon; but drawing his
sword he hewed himself out of the Fort, and back
to his friends, and they barely escaped with their
lives to Dysart. He was the only Irishman, out of
more than four hundred who entered the Fort
that day, that escaped with life."
From that day out the chief of the
O'Mores, Rory, lived but to avenge his
fallen kinsmen. The base traitor Cosby
was struck down on the bloody day of Glen mabere, when the gallant men of Wicklow
routed Lord Gray de Wilton, on the 25th
of August, r58o. It is related that Owney,
the son of Rory O'More, slew with his own
hand Alexander and Francis Cosby, son
and grandson of the Mullaghmast murderer,
and defeated their troops with great slaugh ter at Stradbally Bridge, May I9, 1597,
twenty years after the act of sanguinary
treachery which he had lived to avenge.
In Leinster as in Connaught, in Munster
as in Ulster, the cruel work of extermina tion went on under the orders of the Lord
Deputy, and it is plain from the instances
here given of the barbarous conduct of the
English commanders and their soldiers, in
all of the four provinces, that they acted on
a fixed and preconcerted plan, the object
being to get rid of and stamp out the Irish
race by every means in their power. The
most inhuman butcheries, accomplished by
the foulest strategems that could be conceived in the minds of the basest and wickedest of mankind, were unscrupulously resorted to for the purpose.
The English Protestant historian Fynes
Moryson says: "No spectacle was more
frequent in the ditches of the towns, and
especially in the wasted countries, than to
see multitudes of these poor people, the
Irish, dead, with their mouths all colored
green by eating nettles, docks, and all things
they could rend above the ground."
s1887.]
67