Irish Channel; and sworn depositions told how
husbands were cut to pieces in presence of their wives, their children's
brains dashed out before their faces, their daughters brutally violated
and driven out naked to perish frozen in the woods.

[Sidenote: Its effect on England.]

Much of all this was no doubt the wild exaggeration of panic, and the
research of later times has shown how fraud lent a terrible aid to panic
in multiplying a hundredfold the tales of outrage. But there was enough
in the revolt to carry terror to the hearts of Englishmen. It was unlike
any earlier rising in its religious character. It was no longer a
struggle, as of old, of Celt against Saxon, but of Catholic against
Protestant. The Papists within the Pale joined hands in it with the wild
kernes outside the Pale. When the governing body of the rebels met at
Kells in the following spring they called themselves "Confederate
Catholics," resolved to defend "the public and free exercise of the true
and Catholic Roman religion." The panic waxed greater when it was found
that they claimed to be acting by the king's commission, and in aid of
his authority. They professed to stand by Charles and his heirs against
all that should "directly and indirectly endeavour to suppress their
royal prerogatives." They showed a Commission, purporting to have been
issued by royal command at Edinburgh, and styled themselves "the king's
army." The Commission was a forgery, but belief in it was quickened by
the want of all sympathy with the national honour which Charles
displayed. To him the revolt seemed a useful check on his opponents. "I
hope," he wrote coolly, when the news reached him, "this ill news of
Ireland may hinder some of these follies in England." In any case it
would necessitate the raising of an army, and with an army at his
command he would again be the master of the Parliament. The Parliament,
on the other hand, saw in the Irish revolt, the news of which met them
but a few days after their reassembly at the close of October, the
disclosure of a vast scheme for a counter-revolution, of which the
withdrawal of the Scotch army, the reconciliation of Scotland, the
intrigues at Edinburgh were all parts. Its terror was quickened into
panic by the exultation of the royalists at the king's return to London
at the close of November, and by the appearance of a royalist party in
the Parliament itself.

[Sidenote: The new Royalists.]

The new party had been s