ABSTRACT
All this was calamitous enough; but the evil did not end here. Their enemies were, for the most part, men of barbarous habits, miserably accoutered, and unaccustomed to obedience. It would need the most exact discipline to keep in order bodies of men, circumstanced as the Irish were on the present occasion. The British were of course disarmed, and ignominiously led away in herds, as totally disqualified and unworthy to live any longer intermingled with the people by whom they were now conveyed into banishment. The Catholic priests, who had been the principal / instigators of the insurrection, sedulously taught their hearers, that a Protestant was a sort of being whose neighbourhood was pestilential to the true votaries of the cross, and that, wherever he dwelt, he brought down the displeasure and curse of the Almighty upon the country in which he was harboured. Hatred and contempt are powerful inciters to cruelty. The British, circumstanced as they were, were hated as heretics, and despised, because they were in the power of their enemies, and could make no retaliation to any contumely that might be heaped upon them. Insult went first, and plunder speedily followed. The Irish took from the fugitives the valuables they were carrying away with them; they next stripped them of their clothes. The season was now become inclement and severe. The unhappy wretches, who were suffering every species of privation and inconvenience, could not always help, in the bitterness of / their hearts, reproaching their conductors with perfidy, who had first disarmed them on the faith of the most solemn engagements, and now took advantage of their helpless condition to rob them of all that remained to them. The Irish, in the topics of heresy, and the assured damnation of their victims in another world, found copious matter for recrimination. From words they proceeded to blows. The vigorous and the infirm, men, women and children of the English, were mingled together in this calamitous march. The rebels had, of course, no consideration for the infirmity or inability of those they conducted, but goaded them along like beasts.
