“ Shipped for the Barbadoes.” 339 
O'Neill, their favourite general, had for a time taken the side of the Parliament 
against the royalist Ormondites. The professions of toleration of all creeds 
made by the dominant party led many to hope more from negotiations than 
from a hopeless resistance. The Declaration quotes Cromwell’s words to the 
Governor of Ross on 19th October, 1649 :— 
“ For that which you mention concerning liberty of religion, I meddle not 
“ with any man’s conscience ; but if by liberty of conscience you mean a liberty 
“to exercise the Mass, I judge it best to use plain dealing and to let you know, 
“ where the Parliament have power that will not be allowed of. ”’ 
It goes on to warn them that by English Acts of Parliament the estates of the 
inhabitants had been sold to those who subscribed for the cost of the Irish War 
and that it only remained for the complete success of the invaders to put the 
purchasers in possession. The common people might receive more moderate 
usage at the moment for the better support of the Puritan Army but the inten- 
tion was “ to root out the commons also and plant this land with colonies to be 
“brought hither out of England, as witness the number they have already sent 
“hence for the Tobacco Islands, and put enemies in their places.” Here if 
nowhere else in that ravaged and distracted island, might Carlyle find, had 
he cared to seek for them, a few men in touch with God’s fact. 
In his vituperative reply dated from Youghal in January, 1650, Cromwell 
says : “* And as for the banishment it hath not hitherto been inflicted upon any 
“but such who being in arms might justly upon the terms they were takeu 
“have been put to death : as those who are instanced in your Declaration to be 
“sent to the Tobacco Islands. ” 
The statement was notoriously untrue. Cromwell may, as Carlyle 
says, have come to Ireland with a God’s truth in the heart of him, 
but like many other pious men of a visionary type he seems to have 
been as capable of dissociating himself from the plain facts of a situation 
as the most unveracious and disobedient Celt of his biographer’s own Celtic 
dithyrambics. Before leaving London and on arriving in Dublin (and we who 
realize in the Irish difficulty, the salt, estranging factor of seventy miles of sea, 
are not surprised to learn that his chaplain Peters found the Lord Lieutenant 
“as sick at sea as any man I ever saw in my life.”) he had addressed his army 
and warned them to treat the Irish as Joshua had treated the Canaanites. They 
were to overthrow the empire of Babylon and establish in its stead the new 
Jerusalem. To this end they were to show no mercy but to smite with the edge 
of the sword. Joshua 6. 21. The army had been mutinous but it now saw 
its title clear to heavenly mansions and to the subter-celestial manors of 
slaughtered Gibeonites and Amalekites, not foreseeing that the survivors 
should themselves eventually succumb to the daughters of Heth. 
In the wake of the retreating armies descended the slave hunters. The Gov- 
ernment by General Orders of the Council of State issued permits and entered 
into contracts with Bristol merchants for the capture and shipment of the 
unarmed inhabitants, now chiefly women and children. Many scoundrels 
engaged in the enterprise without direct Government authority. Some of 
