Ignorant of the failure of the plot, the people of Ulster rose on the appointed day. Charlemont and Dungannon were surprised by Sir Phelim O'Neil, Mountjoy by O'Quin, Tanderagee by O'Hanlan, and Newry by Macginnis. In little more than a week all the open country in Tyrone, Monaghan, Longford, Leitrim, Fermanagh, Cavan, Donegal, Derry, and part of Down, were in their hands. The other colonies in which there were English or Scottish plantations followed their example, and the greater part of Ireland was in a dreadful state of anarchy and terror. The Protestant people on the plantations fell beneath the butchering revenge of the insurgents, or fled wildly into the fortified towns. The horrors of the Irish massacre of 1641 have assumed a fearful place in history; the cruelties, expulsions, and oppressions of long years were repaid by the most infuriated cruelty. Men, women, and children, fell indiscriminately in the onslaught, and they who escaped, says Clarendon, "were robbed of all they had, to their very shirts, and so turned naked to endure the sharpness of the season, and by that means, and for want of relief, many thousands of them perished by hunger and cold." Great care has been taken by Catholic writers to contradict these accounts, and to represent the atrocities committed as of no extraordinary extent. They remind us that no accounts of these barbarous slaughters were transmitted in the reports to the English Parliament, which would have been only too glad to spread, and even exaggerate bloody deeds of the Catholics. They reduce the number of people slain during the whole insurrection to about ten thousand, instead of the grossly exaggerated statements of Milton in his "Iconoclastes," that there were one hundred and fifty-four thousand in Ulster alone, or of Sir John Temple, that three hundred thousand were slain or expelled altogether. But nothing less than a most frightful massacre could have left the awful impression which still lives in tradition, and the calculations of moderate historians do not make the number massacred less than from fifteen thousand to twenty thousand. The Earl of Castlehaven, a Catholic, says that all the water in the sea could not wash from the Irish the taint of that rebellion. Whilst remembering the vengeance, however, we must never forget the long and maddening incentives to it. Much blame was attached to the Deputy-Governors, Borlase and Parsons, who, shut up in security in Dublin, took no measures for suppressing the insurgents. They were charged with purposely allowing the rebellion to spread, in order that there might be more confiscations, in which they would find their own benefit; but it must not be forgotten that they had few soldiers on whom they could rely, for these were nearly all Catholics; nor did the insurgents escape without severe chastisement in many places, for wherever there was a trusty garrison, the soldiers easily repelled the