These vague tidings ran through England like wildfire, and then there followed details of unparalleled barbarities. It was reported, that in the county of Armagh alone, a thousand Protestants were forced over the Bridge of Portadown, and drowned in the River Bann. A wife was compelled to hang her own husband. Two-and-twenty people were put into a thatched house, and burned alive. Women, great with child, had their bellies ripped up, and were then drowned. Three hundred Protestants were stripped naked, and crowded into the Church of Loghill, a hundred of whom were murdered, one being quartered alive, whose quarters were flung in the face of the unhappy father. A hundred men, women, and children were driven like hogs for six miles to a river, into which they were pitched headlong with pikes and swords.[271] These instances are only a few taken from the reports: page after page in Rushworth, and other collections, is filled with the like enormities. The computation was that between one and two hundred thousand persons perished in these massacres. Common sense, knowledge of human nature, and the recollection of rumours in our own time respecting Indian massacres and Jamaica atrocities, must lead us to suspect the accuracy of these reports. Allowance should be made for exaggeration at a time of maddening terror, and in the case of an excitable and imaginative people like the Irish. It should also be remembered that our poor sister island had endured wrongs from a Protestant Government; that the Puritans had alarmed the Papists; that the Papists had exasperated the Puritans; and that mutual intolerance increased mutual hatred. But, after all fair abatements, that Irish Rebellion must be regarded as one of the blackest crimes recorded in history, as an outburst of demoniacal fury, which nothing could excuse, and which the utmost provocation could but slenderly palliate.[272] If, as supposed by some, it was a desperate stroke for Popish ascendancy in Ireland, encouraged by the example of the Scots, who by rising in arms had asserted their right to a Presbyterian Government, it must be admitted by all to have been, as Carlyle says, "a most wretched imitation." [Sidenote: 1641, October.] It is not our business to investigate the sources of the Irish rebellion, or to weigh evidence as to its horrors. Enough is admitted by historians of every school to shew that it was a very great calamity, and all to be done here is to indicate the impression it made in England, and how it further complicated the already intricate causes which conspired to complete the great ecclesiastical revolution of the age.