The following letter was written in London on the 4th of November, 1641, and indicates the alarm excited by intelligence just received from Ireland:--[266] [Sidenote: _Irish Rebellion._] "This week hath brought forth strange discoveries of horrible treasons hatched by the Papists in Ireland, and that upon the 23rd of October past, they should have been put in execution throughout the north of that kingdom upon all the Protestants at one instant, who were then designed to have their throats cut by them; but, God be thanked, the night before, being the 22nd October, one Owen Connellie, a servant of Sir John Clotworthy, a member of the House of Commons, being then newly made acquainted with the wickedness of the plot, by a friend of his, that the next day should have been an actor in it, went (though with much ado) to the Lords the Justices in Dublin, and revealed it: whereupon the gates were instantly commanded to be shut, and a matter of thirty-eight that were in town of the conspirators taken, whereof the Lord Marquis and Mac Mahon are the chief, and have since confessed, that by the next morning they expected to come to their aid twenty well armed Papists, out of every county in Ireland, that they might all, upon a sudden, have surprised the castle with the ammunition, and so commanded the city and the lives of all the inhabitants. The treason being thus discovered did spread apace throughout the north of Ireland, where the rebellion first began, and in several places in several bodies are of the Papists up in arms above 10,000 men, which doth much perplex the poor Protestants, and [there is] great fear whether they shall be able to suppress or resist them. Whereupon our Parliament hath ordered my Lord of Leicester, Lord Lieutenant, and all other commanders here, speedily to repair thither, and do furnish £50,000 to carry along with them, which the City of London advances for providing of men and arms to secure that kingdom. Some blood the villains have shed, and committed great outrages, and taken some castles and places of strength; but if they had taken Dublin, upon the rack divers have confessed, in a short time they would not have left a Protestant alive in the whole kingdom; but God, in His mercy, hath prevented that slaughter, and hath turned part of it upon themselves. The traitors give out the late tyranny of the Lord of Strafford upon them moved them to it; and that, by the example of the Scots, they hoped to purchase such privileges, by this means, in their religion, as otherwise they never expected to have granted to them. You see the distempers of the three kingdoms--God forgive them that have been the cause of it, and then to be despatched into the other world, that they may trouble us no more in this again."[267] [Sidenote: 1641, October.] [Sidenote: _Irish Rebellion._]