ches. To these terms
and everything else required, Glamorgan agreed, and the Confederates,
thereupon, agreed to despatch a large force, when called upon to do so,
to England, and in the meantime to make sham terms with Ormond, keeping
him in the dark as to this secret compact.

It was not long a secret Ormond seems to have had some suspicions of it
from the beginning, and an incident which presently occurred made
suspicion certainty. The town of Sligo had been captured by the
parliamentary troops under Coote, and in October, 1645, an attempt was
made to recapture it by a party of Irish under a fighting prelate, the
Roman Catholic Archbishop of Tuam. In the struggle which ensued the
Archbishop was killed, and upon his body was found a copy of the secret
treaty which was straightway despatched by Coote to London.

It awakened a sensation hardly less than that with which the news of the
massacre itself had been received. It was tie one thing still wanting to
damage the royal cause. Charles, it is true, denied it stoutly, and the
English royalists tried to accept the denial. The Irish ones knew
better. Ormond, whose own honour was untouched, did what he could to
save his king's. The Confederates, however, admitted it openly, and
Glamorgan, after suffering a short and purely fictitious imprisonment,
remained in Ireland to carry out his master's orders.

The already crowded confusion of the scene there had lately been added
to by a new actor. Rinucini, Archbishop of Fermo, had been despatched by
Pope Innocent X. as his nuncio, and at once threw himself into the
struggle. To him it narrowed itself to one point. The moment, he felt,
had now come for the re-establishment of the Catholic religion in
Ireland, and if possible for its union with one of the Catholic Powers
of Europe, and in order to achieve this object, his great aim was to
hinder, if possible, anything like a reconciliation between the Catholic
insurgents and the king.

Meanwhile, peace had been made in England. Charles was a prisoner, and
the final acts of that drama in which he plays so strangely mixed a part
were shortly to be enacted. In Ireland there was no pretence at peace.
On the contrary, it was only then that hostilities seem really to have
been carried on with vigour. At a battle fought upon June 4, 1646, near
Benturb, Owen O'Neill had defeated Munroe and his Scottish forces with
great slaughter, and from that moment the whole north was in his power.