INTRODUCTION.

THE manuscripts included in this volume consist of so much of the large collection at Kilkenny Castle, other than correspondence, as, falling chronologically within the period covered by the correspondence printed in Volume I. of the present series of the Ormonde Papers, is of historical importance, and has not been already dealt with in earlier reports. The letters printed in Vol. I. date from 1572 to 1660. Substantially, however, those letters are the correspondence of James, 12th Earl and 1st Duke of Ormond. By far the greater number of them belong to the two decades between 1640-1660; and are concerned with the Irish Rebellion of 1641, the period of the Civil War in Ireland, and the exile of Charles II. and his Court. The documents here printed have precisely the same range, and illustrate the same phases of seventeenth century history. With the exception of the manuscripts illustrative of the early life of the great Duke of Ormond, which belong to the reign of James I., the whole of Vol. II. falls within the same period, and deals with the same great events. But they have more to do with the decade 1641-50 than with 1651-60. Inasmuch as the manuscripts, though belonging to the same period, are conversant with quite separate episodes in its history, it seems most convenient to deal separately with each of them in this introduction.

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I. Letters of the Irish Lords Justices, 1641-1644 :—

The volume from which these transcripts are taken is a large folio handsomely bound in calf, lettered on the back Manuscripts," and comprising 728 closely-written pages of manuscript in seventeenth century handwriting. It does not contain, and apparently has never contained, any title or other preliminary indication of the nature of its contents. It commences with a full transcript of the well-known letter of the Lords Justices and Council of Ireland, dated October 25, 1641, to the Earl of Leicester, the Lord Lieutenant, detailing the plot for the seizure

of Dublin Castle and the revelations of Owen Connolly in regard to an intended rising. This letter is followed by consecutive transcripts of the letters sent by the Lords Justices and Council to the King, the Lord Lieutenant, the Speaker of the House of Commons, the Secretaries of State, the Commissioners for Irish Affairs at Westminster, and other officials; and the volume includes, practically, all letters sent from Ireland by or with the authority of the Irish Privy Council to official persons in England relative to the progress of the Irish Rebellion and the measures taken for its repression down to January 15, 1643-4. The period thus covered is the whole period during which William Parsons and John Borlase, and, later, Borlase and Sir Henry Tichborne, were successively Lords Justices; that is from the outbreak of the rebellion, in October, 1641, to the assumption by the Duke, then Marquess, of Ormond, of the active duties of the Viceroyalty in Jan., 1644. Ormond was appointed on Nov. 13, 1643, but was not sworn in until January 21, 1643-4, and the authority of the Lords Justices therefore lasted to the beginning of the latter year. Of the series of letters sent by the Lords Justices and Council, several have been printed in Rushworth's and Nalson's Collections, in Temple's and Borlase's Histories of the Rebellion, in the collection of State Letters which forms the third volume of Carte's Life of Ormond, and in the more modern collections edited by Sir John Gilbert. But no approach to a complete series of these despatches has ever been printed, nor, inasmuch as the records of the Irish Council were destroyed in the fire at Dublin Castle in 1711, did it seem likely that an authentic consecutive record of the proceedings of the Irish Government in the early days of the rebellion and war in Ireland would ever become available. But the fact that accurate transcripts of these despatches remained in existence after the destruction of the originals was made known by Carte in the preface to his invaluable work; and it is impossible to state the facts as to the authorities for the proceedings of the Irish Government from the outbreak of the Rebellion to Ormond's appointment to the Viceroyalty more lucidly than Carte states them in the following paragraph :—

"The Council Books of Ireland were burnt in the fire which "happened in the castle of Dublin, and consumed the Council "Chamber, in the year 1711. The Duke of Ormonde's papers

"have supplied a great deal of this loss for the years wherein he "had the government of that kingdom, and possibly might have "supplied it entirely for his time, if many of his bound books "of Collections had not been lost by his lending and com"municating of them too freely. Besides a multitude of papers "which he imparted to the Lord Chancellor Clarendon, in order to "his drawing up of that Historical View of the Affairs of Ireland "during the Rebellion which was printed in London in 1720, "which papers after his death the Duke of Ormonde endeavoured "by repeated instances with his executors to recover, there were "several bound volumes containing all the papers which were 'interchanged in his treaties with the Irish Confederates and all passages in those treaties. I have seen among his Grace's papers various references to these books, which yet I have not "had the good fortune to find. Two other books, the one containing the Letters by the Lords Justices of Ireland to the King, the "Lord Lieutenant and the House of Commons of England from the breaking out of the Irish Rebellion till Jan., 1643-4, when the "Duke of Ormonde entered upon the Government of Ireland: "the other containing all the papers presented or prepared by "all parties to be offered to the King and Council of England in "order to the settlement of Ireland after the Restoration seem "likewise to be lost. But this loss is repaired by copies of these "two books, taken in 1680, which are in the library of the Duke of Chandos, whose generosity and humanity distinguish him, as "much as his dignity, above the rest of the world. These his "Grace, ever ready to encourage any public work, vouchsafed to

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communicate to me, and they served to complete the series of the "letters of those Lords Justices, many of which I had met with among the Duke of Ormonde's papers, attested by Matthew Barry, Clerk of the Council, and which being collated with the copies in "those books I found to be exactly the same; so that there cannot "be the least reason to dispute the authority of the rest."

The volume from which the letters here printed are taken is a duplicate of the copy known to Carte, apparently taken for the use of the Duke of Ormond, who in 1680 was Lord Lieutenant, and of whose anxiety, despite the freedom with which he seems to have lent his manuscripts, to make his collection of the Irish State Papers of his own time as complete as possible there is plenty of evidence.

No episode in Irish history has been more keenly canvassed by partizans of opposite sympathies or prejudices than the Rebellion of 1641. The extent to which the rising was organised and premeditated; the degree in which the accounts of the massacres are entitled to credence; and the question to what extent the spread and violence of the insurrection may have been aggravated by the policy of the Lords Justices, are all of them matters which, even now, too often appear to rouse those who treat of them to passionate declamation. They are therefore topics best avoided in an introduction to an official report. Those who look for a discussion in these pages of the effect of these letters of the Lords Justices on the controversy which they help to illuminate must necessarily be disappointed. And comment on the contents of the letters must be confined to a bare statement of the period they cover and the persons to whom they are addressed.

The volume, it should be stated, consists exclusively of letters. It includes no proclamations or other acts of the Irish Government. Neither does it include letters sent by that Government to its subordinates in Ireland, such as the Presidents of the provincial administrations of Munster or Connaught, nor to the Commanders of the army or expeditionary forces. It is practically confined to letters in the nature of reports sent by the Lords Justices to those personages in England to whom they were responsible, or whom they had been instructed to keep informed of the progress of events in Ireland. But as such they form a complete official record of the views of the Irish Government for a space of two years and three months, i.e. from the outbreak of the rebellion on October 21, 1641, to the termination of the government of the Lords Justices by the appointment of Ormond to the Viceroyalty.

It is to be observed further that, though entitled "Letters of the Irish Lords Justices," these documents may be more correctly described as despatches of the Irish Privy Council; for each one of them was signed by the Councillors present at the Board on the date of its despatch. Thus, though in some cases the signatures are few in number and the letters bear internal evidence of having been despatched in the interest of a clique, in general the signatures are numerous, and indicate the concurrence of all