THE IRISH REBELLION OF 1641
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the rising of race against race, and that the race which rose in rebellion was the lower in civilisation, and considered that it was suffering under grievous wrongs at the hands of the Government of their conquerors. Probably no fairer or more weighty account of the Rebellion of 1641 has been written than that of Mr Lecky, who says--"No impartial writer will deny that the rebellion in Ulster was extremely savage and bloody, though it is certainly not true that its barbarities were either unparalleled or unprovoked. They were, for the most part, the unpremeditated acts of a half-savage populace." [1]
Wentworth's government bore hardly on the Ulster Scots, and there are traces in his letters that he had in view a plan even more thoroughgoing than dragooning and religious persecution. He certainly did not like these Irish Presbyterians, and feared their sternness. There seems to have floated in his mind some half-formed plan of getting quit of their troubling for ever by driving them out of Ulster in a body. [2] It was not fated, however, that Wentworth was to carry out his plan; the Scots were to remain, and their stern determination to have their own way was destined to trouble the Irish dictator of the nineteenth as it had done his prototype of the seventeenth century. Wentworth was by far the ablest,...continue reading »
[1] History of England in the Eighteenth Century, by W. E. H. Lecky, vol. ii. p. 143. Compare also Gardiner's Fall of the Monarchy of Charles I., chaps. xv. and xvi.
[2] Reid, vol. i. p. 273.
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Page 65
The Scot in Ulster:
Sketch of the History of the Scottish Population of Ulster
by John Harrison
1888