The “tradition” here noted is radically defective. In the first place, there is no Ulster county in Ireland. Perhaps the province of Ulster was what the writer was aiming at. In the second place, the “Irish massacre” mentioned never happened. For a long period, writers in the English interest asserted that on October 23, 1641, the Irish Catholics rose and slaughtered in cold blood thousands of English and other Protestants then in the country. But the charge is now rejected as untrue by impartial historians. W. J. O’Neill Daunt brands the story of such a massacre as “a thorough and most impudent falsehood,” and as being another of those “stupendous calumnies” circulated by the enemies of the Irish people. Other authoritative writers similarly testify.
“It has been represented,” says Prendergast, a Protestant,[10] “that there was a general massacre [by the Irish], surpassing the horrors of the Sicilian Vespers, the Parisian Nuptials, and Matins of the Valtelline, but nothing is more false.”
Consequently, as there was no massacre by the Irish Catholics, then as charged, Thomas Casey’s “father and mother and all his family” could not have perished in it. In February, 1642, however, a dreadful massacre was ordered—not by the Irish Catholics, but by the English lords justices. The mandate was issued to Lord Ormund, the lords justices signing the fearful instructions, being Dillon, Rotheram, Loftus, Willoughby, Temple, and Meredith.
The mandate for the massacre as issued to Ormund was, “That his lordship do endeavor with his majesty’s forces to wound, kill, slay, and destroy, by all the ways and means he may, all the said rebels, their adherents, and relievers; and burn, waste, spoil, consume, destroy, and demolish all the places, towns, and houses, where the said rebels are, or have been, relieved or harbored, and all the hay and corn there; and kill and destroy all the men there inhabiting capable to bear arms.”
The orders were only too well obeyed. Men, women and children perished alike. The English soldiery made no distinction between age or sex. In their savage fury they committed massacre after massacre. The English garrison of Carrickfergus alone murdered 3,000 men, women and children in that neighborhood. Lord Broghill perpetrated like cruelties in Cork and Waterford. In County Wicklow Sir Charles Coote was guilty of a massacre so horrible that after it, to use his own language, “not a child, were it but a hand high, was left alive.”