placed round their middles, were dragged through bogs till they expired.

Some were hung by the feet to tenter-hooks driven into poles, and in that wretched posture left till they perished.

Others were fastened to the trunk of a tree, with a branch at the top, Over this branch hung one arm, which principally supported the weight of the body; and one of the legs was turned up, and fastened to the trunk, while the other hung straight. In this dreadful and uneasy posture did they remain, as long as life would permit, pleasing spectacles to their blood-thirsty persecutors..

At Clownes 17 men were buried alive; and an Englishman, his wife, five children, and a servant maid, were all hung together, and afterwards thrown into a ditch.

They hung many by the arms to branches of trees, with a weight to their feet; and others by the middle, in which postures they left them till they expired.

Several were hung on windmills, and before they were half dead, the barbarians cut them in pieces with their swords. Others, both men, women, and children, they cut and hacked in various parts of their bodies, and left them wallowing in their blood,' to perish where they fell. One poor woman they hung on a gibbet, with her child, an infant about a twelvemonth old, the latter of whom was hung by the neck with the hair of its mother's head, and in that manner finished its short but miserable existence.

In the county of Tyrone no less than 300 protestants were drowned in one day; and many others were hanged, burned, and otherwise put to death.

Dr. Maxwell, rector of Tyrone, lived at this time near Armagh, and suffered greatly from these merciless savages. This clergyman, in his examination, taken upon oath before the king's commissioners, declared, that the Irish papists owned to him, that they had destroyed, in one place, at Glynwood, 12,000 protestants, in their flight from the county of Armagh.

As the river Bann was not fordable, and the bridge broken down, the Irish forced thither, at different times, a great number of unarmed, defenceless protestants, and with pikes and swords violently thrust above 1000 into the river, where they miserably perished.

Nor did the cathedral of Armagh escape the fury of these barbarians, it being maliciously set on fire by their leaders, and burnt to the ground. And to extirpate, if possible, the very race of those unhappy protestants, who lived in or near Armagh, the Irish first burnt all their houses, and then gathered together many hundreds of those innocent people, young and old, on pretence of allowing them a guard and safe conduct to Coleraine; when they treacherously fell on them by the way, and inhumanly murdered them.

The like horrid barbarities with those we have particularized, were practised on the wretched protestants in almost all parts of the kingdom; and, when an estimate was afterwards made of the number who were sacrificed to gratify the diabolical souls of the papists, it amounted to 150,000. But it now remains that we proceed to the particulars that follow.

These desperate wretches, flushed and grown insolent with success, (though attained by methods attended with such excessive bar

barities as perhaps are not to be equalled) soon got possession of the castle of Newry, where the king's stores and ammunition were lodged; and, with as little difficulty, made themselves masters of Dundalk. They afterwards took the town of Ardee, where they murdered all the protestants, and then proceeded to Drogheda. The garrison of Drogheda was in no condition to sustain a siege; notwithstanding which, as often as the Irish renewed their attacks, they were vigo rously repulsed, by a very unequal number of the king's forces, and a few faithful protestant citizens, under Sir Henry Tichborne, the governor, assisted by the Lord Viscount Moore. The siege of Dragheda began on the 30th of November, 1641, and held till the 4th of March, 1642, when Sir Phelim O'Neal, and the Irish miscreants under him, were forced to retire.

In the mean time, 10,000 troops were sent from Scotland to the relief of the remaining protestants in Ireland, which being properly divided into various parts of the kingdom, happily suppressed the power of the Irish savages, and the protestants, for several years, lived in tranquillity.

After James II. had abandoned England, he maintained a contest for some time in Ireland, where he did all in his power to carry on that persecution which he had been happily prevented from persevering in in England; accordingly, in a parliament held at Dublin, in the year 1689, great numbers of the protestant nobility, clergy, and gentry of Ireland, were attainted of high treason. The government of the kingdom was, at that time, invested in the earl of Tyrconnel, a bigoted papist, and an inveterate enemy to the protestants. By his orders they were again persecuted in various parts of the kingdom. The revenues of the city of Dublin were seized, and most of the churches converted into prisons. And had it not been for the resolution, and uncommon bravery of the garrisons in the city of Londonderry, and the town of Inniskillen, there had not one place remained for refuge to the distressed protestants in the whole kingdom, but all must have been given up to King James, and to the furious popish party that governed him.

The remarkable siege of Londonderry was opened on the 18th of April, 1689, by 20,000 papists, the flower of the Irish army. The city was not properly circumstanced to sustain a siege, the defenders consisting of a body of raw, undisciplined protestants, who had filed thither for shelter, and half a regiment of Lord Mountjoy's disciplined soldiers, with the principal part of the inhabitants, making, in all, only 7361 fighting men.

The besieged hoped, at first, that their stores of corn, and other necessaries, would be sufficient; but by the continuance of the siege their wants increased; and these at last became so heavy, that, for a considerable time before the siege was raised, a pint of coarse barley, a small quantity of greens, a few spoonsful of starch, with a very moderate portion of horse flesh, were reckoned a week's provision for a soldier. And they were, at length, reduced to such extremities, that they ate dogs, cats, and mice.

Their miseries increasing with the siege, mav, through mere hunger and want, pined and languished away, or fel dead in the streets; and it is remarkable, that when their long expected succours arrived from England, they were upon the point of oeing reduced to this

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alternative, either to preserve their existence by eating each other, or
attempting to fight their way through the Irish, which must have in-
fallibly produced their destruction.

These succours were most happily brought by the ship Mountjoy,
of Derry, and the Phoenix, of Coleraine, at which time they had only
nine lean horses left, with a pint of meal to each man. By hunger,
and the fatigues of war, their 7361 fighting men were reduced to
4300, one fourth part of whom were rendered unserviceable.

As the calamities of the besieged were very great, so likewise were the terrors and sufferings of their protestant friends and relations; all of whom (even women and children) were forcibly driven from the country 30 miles round, and inhumanly reduced to the sad necessityof continuing some days and nights, without food or covering, before the walls of the town, and were thus exposed to the continual fire both of the Irish army from without, and the shot of their friends from within.

But the succours from England happily arriving, put an end to their affliction, and the siege was raised on the 31st of July, having been continued upwards of three months.

The day before the siege of Londonderry was raised, the Inniskilleners engaged a body of 6000 Irish Roman Catholics, at Newton, Butler, or Crown Castle, of whom near 5000 were slain., This, with the defeat at Londonderry, so much dispirited the papists, that they gave up all farther attempts at that time to persecute the protestants.

In the year following, 1690, the Irish who had taken up arms in favour of James II. were totally defeated by William the Third; and that monarch, before he left the country, reduced them to a state of subjection, in which they very long continued, at least so far as to refrain from open violence, although they were still insidiously engaged in increasing their power and influence; for, by a report made in the year 1731, it appeared, that a great number of ecclesiastics had, in defiance of the laws, flocked into Ireland; that several convents had been opened by Jesuits, monks, and friars; that many new and pompous mass houses had been erected in some of the most conspicuous parts of their great cities, where there had not been any before; and that such swarms of vagrant immoral Romish priests had appeared, that the very papists themselves considered them as a burden.

But, notwithstanding all the arts cf priestcraft, all the tumid and extravagant harangues of Hibernian orators, and the gross and wilful misrepresentations of their self-styled liberal abettors in this country, the protestant religion now stands on a firmer basis in Ireland than it ever before did. The Irish, who formerly led an unsettled and roving life, in the woods, bogs, and mountains, and lived on the depredation of their neighbours; they who in the morning seized the prey, and at night divided the spoil, have, for many years past, become comparatively quiet and civilized. They taste the sweets of English society, and the advantages of civil government.

The heads of their clans, and the chiefs of the great Irish families, who cruelly oppressed and tyrannized over their vassals, are now dwindled, in a great measure, to nothing, and most of the ancient popish nobility and gentry of Ireland have renounced the Romish religion.

It is also to be hoped, that inestimable benefits will arise from the establishment of protestant schools in various parts of the king