tion. 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.

In Dublin courts-martial were being rapidly established. All Protestants
were given arms; all strangers were ordered to quit the city on pain of
death; Sir Francis Willoughby was given the command of the castle; Sir
Charles Coote made military governor of the city. Ormond was anxious to
take the field in the north before the insurrection spread further,
before they had time, as he said, to "file their pikes." This the Lords
Justices however refused to allow. They were waiting for orders from the
English Parliament, with which they were in close alliance, and were
perfectly willing to let the revolt spread so that the area of
confiscated lands might be the greater.

None of the three southern provinces had as yet risen, in the Pale the
Anglo-Norman families were warm in their expressions of loyalty, and
appealed earnestly to the Lords Justices to summon a parliament, and to
distribute arms for their protection. This last was refused, and
although a parliament assembled it was instantly prorogued, and no
measures were taken to provide for the safety of the well-disposed.
Early in December of the same year Lords Fingal, Gormanstown, Dunsany,
and others of the principal Pale peers, with a large number of the local
gentry, met upon horseback, at Swords, in Meath, to discuss their future
conduct. The opposition between the king and Parliament was daily
growing fiercer. The Lords Justices were the nominees of Parliament; to
revolt against them was not, therefore, it was argued, to revolt against
the king. Upon December 17th