the entire population had disappeared bodily.

Nor were the survivors left in peace to bind up their wounds and mourn
their slain. In England, once the fighting was over, and the swords
sheathed, there was little desire to carry the punishment further; and
the vanquished were, for the most part, able to retire in more or less
melancholy comfort to their homes. In Ireland the reverse was the case.
There the struggle had been complicated by a bitterness unknown
elsewhere, and had aroused a keen and determined thirst for vengeance,
one which the cessation of hostilities only seemed to stimulate into
greater vehemence.

The effect, especially amongst the Puritans, of the Ulster massacres,
far from dying out, had grown fiercer and bitterer with every year. Now
that the struggle was over, that Ireland lay like an inert thing in the
hands of her victors, her punishment, it was resolved, should begin. Had
that punishment fallen only on the heads of those who could be proved to
have had any complicity in that deed of blood there would not have been
a word to say. Sir Phelim O'Neill was dragged from the obscurity to
which ever since the coming of Owen Roe he had been consigned, tried in
Dublin, and hanged--with little regret even from his own side. Lord
Mayo, who had taken a prominent part in the rising, and was held
responsible for a horrible massacre perpetrated at Shrule Bridge, near
Tuam, was shot in Connaught. Lord Muskerry was tried, and honourably
acquitted. Other trials took place, chiefly by court-martial, and though
some of these appear to have been unduly pressed, on the whole,
considering the state of feelings that had been awakened, it may be
allowed that so far stern justice had not outstepped her province.

It was very different with what was to follow. An enormous scheme of
eviction had been planned by Cromwell which was to include all the
native and nearly all the Anglo-Irish inhabitants of Ireland, with the
exception of the humblest tillers of the soil, who were reserved as
serfs or servants. This was a scheme of nothing less than the
transportation of all the existing Catholic landowners of Ireland, who,
at a certain date, were ordered to quit their homes, and depart in a
body into Connaught, there to inhabit a narrow desolate tract, between
the Shannon and the sea, destitute, for the most part, of houses or any
accommodation for their reception; where they were to be debarred from
entering any walled town, a