Mellifont Abbey, Co. Louth Part 5

He (O'Donnell) went into the house and was entertained; for he was well known there especially more than in other places."

In 1599, according to the family pedigree, Sir Garret Moore and Sir Francis Stafford were the only English house-keepers in the County Louth; all the lands being wasted by the Ulster rebels. The next important event at Mellifont was the great O'Neil's surrender there to the Deputy, Lord Mountjoy, on the 24th March, 1602. The Lord Deputy sent Sir Garret Moore, as an old acquaintance of O'Neil's, with Sir Wm. G.o.dolphin to parley with him, and O'Neil returned with them to Mellifont, where (on his knees, it is said by English writers,) he made his submission to the Deputy. Here, again, we have further proof of what has been stated before, that it was Irishmen who retained this country for the English Crown; for when Sir George Carew sat down before Kinsale, where O'Neil was defeated, his army consisted of three thousand men, of whom two thousand were Irish.[8]

Five years later, that is, in 1607, O'Neil was again at the "fair mansion of Mellifont to bid good-bye for ever to his good friend, Sir Garret, the fosterer of his son John." He tarried two days with him, and then said farewell. Having given his blessing, "according to the Irish fas.h.i.+on," to every member of his friend's household, he and his suite took horse, and rode rapidly by Dundalk on his way to Lough Sw.i.l.l.y, where a s.h.i.+p awaited him to bear him from his native land for ever.

By an Inquisition taken on the 14th June, 1612, the possessions of this Abbey were found as follow:--"The site, a water-mill, a garden, an orchard, a park called Legan Park, the old orchard containing two acres; the silver meadow, nine acres; the wood meadow, ten acres; and the doves'

park; 80 acres of underwood; Killingwood, being great timber, containing twelve acres; Ardagh, twenty acres, being the demesne lands; and the grange and town of Tullyallen," etc.

In 1615, July 20th, Sir Garret was created Baron Moore of Mellifont, by King James I. In 1619, Baron Moore obtained a royal grant of St. Mary's Abbey, Dublin, from the same King; and in 1621, he was created a Viscount, with the t.i.tle of Viscount Moore of Drogheda. St. Mary's Abbey, Dublin, pa.s.sed from the family some fifty years later.

As has been said, no trace of the expelled religious remains after the suppression of Mellifont. It, however, may be a.s.sumed, that some few of them lingered around the hallowed spot to which their affections clung, and that they shared the labours and dangers incident to the Catholic missionaries of the period, as is well known their brethren in other parts of Ireland did after their expulsion. It cannot now be ascertained whether, or not, an unbroken line of t.i.tular Abbots of Mellifont was maintained after the dissolution of the Abbey; but, in 1623, an oratory in Drogheda, belonging to the Cistercians, was served by five or six Fathers of the Order under Patrick Barnewall, who had been appointed Abbot of Mellifont by the Pope; and in 1625, he received the abbatial benediction in the church of St. John, in Waterford, at the hands of the Most Rev. Thomas Fleming, Archbishop of Dublin. This Patrick Barnewall belonged to the Bremore branch (Co. Dublin) of the ancient and ill.u.s.trious family of that name. After having studied the Humanities, Philosophy, Theology, and Canon Law in the Universities of Douay and Paris, he was ordained priest, and discharged missionary duties in Drogheda. In a sketch of his life given by a fellow-labourer, it is related, that one night as he lay awake, St. Bernard appeared to him and told him he would be a monk of his Order. Though he relished the idea, yet he did not immediately correspond with his inclinations till he was grievously afflicted with a severe sickness, when he remembered the vision, and being urged by his two sisters, who had consecrated themselves to G.o.d, he entered the Novitiate of the Order in Kilkenny, and was at once restored to health. Soon after his profession he was appointed Abbot of Mellifont by Apostolic authority; and he admitted novices into the Order at his "hiding-place" at Drogheda, whom he sent to be educated at the Cistercian College, Louvain, and to other Continental Colleges. He was a very learned man, particularly in Canon Law, and was consulted as an authority on this subject. During the siege of Drogheda, in 1641, his goods were seized and himself cast into prison, but through the influence of some powerful relatives he was liberated. He died in his father's house in September, 1644, and was buried in the church of Donore, which formerly belonged to Mellifont. John Devereux, a native of the Co. Wexford, who had been educated at Louvain, was appointed by the Pope, Abbot of Mellifont, in 1648. He, with Father Luke Bergin and Father Patrick Grace, both natives of Co. Kilkenny, Father Malachy O'Hartry, a native of Waterford, Father John Bryan, a native of Drogheda, and Father Plunket, const.i.tuted the new community of Cistercian monks under Abbot Patrick Barnewall, when he opened the oratory in Drogheda, in 1623. Whether all or any of them perished in the general ma.s.sacre of Drogheda, under Cromwell, we cannot tell, but they disappeared thenceforth, and John Devereux seems to have been the last t.i.tular Abbot of Mellifont.

In the Rebellion of 1641, Mellifont and its owner, Lord Charles Moore, son of Garret, the first Viscount, became involved. On the 21st November, just a short time after the outbreak, the rebels under Sir Phelim O'Neil, when on their way to besiege Drogheda, made a halt at Tullyallen, and "sent a party of 1,300 foot down to Mellifont, the Lord Moore's house, which their design was suddenly to surprise; but, contrary to their expectation, they found there twenty-four musketeers and fifteen hors.e.m.e.n, who very stoutly defended the house as long as their powder lasted. The hors.e.m.e.n, when they saw themselves beset so as they could no longer be serviceable to the place, opened the gates, issued out and made their pa.s.sage through the midst of the rebels, and so, notwithstanding the opposition they made, escaped safe to Drogheda. The foot having refused to accept of the quarter at the first offered, resolved to make good the place to the last man; they endured several a.s.saults, slew one hundred-and-forty of the rebels, before their powder failed them; and at last they gave up the place upon promise of quarter, which was not kept, for some of them were killed in cold blood, all were stripped, and two old decrepid men slain, the house ransacked and all the goods carried away."

The above is from Sir John Temple's _History of the Irish Rebellion_, and it has been quoted by Catholics and Protestants alike when alluding to Mellifont; they each add, however, a little spice to suit the palates of their respective readers. Of this attack on Mellifont we have no less than four versions, two of which deserve but little credence, viz., that already given, and that of Dean Bernard. The account given by the latter is fuller, and enters more minutely into detail, so that some particulars tax the capacity of the most credulous; as, for instance, when he tells us that twenty-four musketeers killed one hundred-and-forty rebels though they had only "six shots" of powder, "some only four," and that they rammed in six bullets together, and how each shot killed several. Verily, every bullet had its billet there! That be sharp practice without doubt!

He also tells, how the loss on the part of the garrison was thirteen killed, "whom a _Friar was so forward for deed of charity as to procure them burial in the church adjoining_." Thank goodness, he has the grace to credit even a Friar with some remnant of humanity! He does not say that the rebels stripped all. They could not have done so; for eleven escaped to Drogheda. These G.o.dless Papists capped their iniquity in this holy man's estimation when they "threw a fair church Bible into the mill-pond."

The last charge on the sheet is--"Their best language to them all was 'English dogs,' 'rogues,' etc."

Before producing the other two versions, let us examine the characters of both these witnesses as drawn by Protestant writers. Sir John Temple wrote his History in 1656, from the "Depositions" preserved then in Dublin Castle, but which are now in Trinity College. These "Depositions"

comprise the list of murders, burnings, etc., said to have been perpetrated by the Irish on the English Protestants during the war, and fill thirty-two volumes. He was some time Privy Councillor, but was removed by Ormonde, and Carte tells how "two traitorous and scandalous letters against his Majesty written by Temple were read in Committee." And Dr. Nalson, another Protestant writer, accuses him of having been in league with the Parliamentarians, whom Ormonde describes as those who became the "murderers of his (the King's) royal person, the usurpers of his rights, and destroyers of the Irish nation; by whom the n.o.bility and gentry of it were ma.s.sacred at home, and led into slavery, or driven into beggary abroad." In 1674, Temple protested that the work was published without his knowledge, as appears from _State Papers_, Dublin edition, p.

2.

Dean Bernard was Primate Ussher's chaplain, and like his master, was a Puritan. During the siege of Drogheda he watched over the Primate's library lest the rebels should attack the magnificent palace which _had been built with the fines from the recusants_. He was afterwards Cromwell's chaplain and almoner, in either of which capacities, it would be quite unreasonable to expect justice to the Irish from him.

As to the "Depositions" themselves, they are summarily dealt with by the Rev. Dr. Warner, another English Protestant historian of that Rebellion.

"There is no credit to be given to anything that was said by these Deponents which had not others' evidence to confirm it." And again, the same Dr. Warner, who went through the drudgery of perusing and examining these "Depositions," says: "As a great stress has been laid upon this collection in print and conversation, and as the whole evidence of the ma.s.sacres turns upon it, I spent a great deal of my time examining the books; and I am sorry to say, that they have been made the foundation of much more clamour and resentment than can be warranted by truth and reason." It was in them that Temple found the story of the ghosts of the murdered Protestants, in the River Bann, at the Bridge of Portadown, shrieking for revenge, and one in particular, who was seen there from the 29th December to the end of the following Lent!!! He sets down the number of English and Protestants who were "murdered in cold blood, destroyed some other way, or expelled out of their habitations in two years by the Irish, as exceeding 300,000," though, according to Petty, there were not at the outbreak of the Rebellion 20,000 English Protestants in Ulster, where nearly all the murders were said to have been committed. Dr. Warner also tells how he saw in the Council books at Dublin, the letter which the Commissioners of the Irish Parliament wrote to the English Parliament, urging them to show no mercy to the Irish, but rather, to revenge the murders and ma.s.sacres committed by them. They tell them, "that besides eight hundred-and-forty-eight families, there were killed, hanged, burned, and drowned, six thousand and sixty-two." Dr. Warner considers 2,000 about the correct number. A prodigious number to be sure, but how far less than Temple's 300,000. Warner says, finally, at p. 296 of his work so often cited: "It is easy enough to demonstrate the falsehood of every Protestant historian of this Rebellion."

The Rev. Mr. Carte, an English Protestant clergyman, who wrote the celebrated Life of the Duke of Ormonde, tears all Temple's a.s.sertions in pieces, and demonstrates from indubitable authority the falsehoods of his statements. Writing of these "Depositions" he says, at Vol. II., p. 263: "Anyone who has ever read the examinations and depositions which were generally given on hearsay, and contradicting one another, must think it very hard upon the Irish, to have all those without distinction to be admitted as evidence." And in the Preface to the collection of Letters affixed to the Life he alludes to the "uncertain, false, mistaken, and contradictory accounts, which have been given of the Irish Rebellion, by parties influenced by selfish views and party animosities, or unfurnished with proper and authentic materials and memoirs."

It is obvious from the first pages of Temple's History what the scope of the work is. It is a gross libel on the whole Irish nation from the earliest times. In one page, he twice applies to them the epithet of a beastly race, and, no doubt, worthy to be rooted out, to make room for Royalists of his type, who wors.h.i.+pped the rising sun.

Carte, in his Life of Ormond, Vol. II., p. 135, gives an account of the attack on Mellifont as follows:--"This detached body of the northern rebels appeared on November 21st in sight of the town of Drogheda, within four miles of it, presuming (as was imagined) upon some party within the place. Sir H. Tichburne, Governor of Drogheda, had the week before sent a party of fifteen horse and twenty-two foot to Mellifont (formerly an Abbey of Bernardine monks, founded by Donagh O'Carroll, prince of Ergall, about A.D. 1142, but then an house of the Lord Viscount Moore's, three miles from town), as well as to secure that place from the incursions of roving parties, as to keep abroad continual sentinels and scouts, that might inform him of the rebels' motions. His orders were not well observed, nor his party so vigilant as they ought to have been; for on the 21st, the rebels on a sudden encompa.s.sed the house, and (after the soldiers' powder was spent) took it with a loss of some one hundred and twenty of their own number (among which were Owen M'Mahon and another captain), and eleven of the soldiers, with most of the arms. As the Irish were breaking into the house on all sides, the troopers causing the great gate to be opened, sallied out, and opening themselves a way through the body of the rebels, got safe with the rest of the foot soldiers sore wounded to Drogheda."

This may be accepted as a true, unvarnished account of this much magnified attack; especially as Tichburne himself, who cannot be accused of partiality towards the Irish, and who was Governor of Drogheda at the time of its occurrence, seems to have been Carte's authority for it, as appears from a reference to a letter written by Tichburne to Ormond, but not given in the collection of Letters mentioned above. There is no question here of quarter given, or of faith broken; no cold-blooded murders, no gruesome picture of gory corpses unburied, nor of fiendish glee on the part of rebels dancing round their watch-fires in presence of their stark and naked victims strewn around!!! Pity such absurdity should be believed or repeated in our time, when it should have been relegated to the same lumber-heap as the story of the ghosts of the Bann!

We have yet another account from a paper or Report published in London by two parties who only give their initials, T. A. and P. G. It was "printed by Edward Blackmore, at the Angel, in Paul's Churchyard, in 1642," and is now to be found in the _Contemporary History of Affairs in Ireland_, so ably edited by Sir John Gilbert, at Vol. I., Part II., p. 420. There is a discrepancy in the dates, but that is immaterial, as only one attack is said to have been made. It tells us, "That on the same day (April 30), three or four hundred rebels came before Mellifont, three or four miles from Drogheda, where Lord Moore had left on Tuesday before a garrison of four-score foot and about thirty horse; the rebels plaid hotly upon them until the horse were ready within; but as soon as the horse were ready, they, with the foot, sallied out, and killed about thirty of the rebels."

This cannot be far from the truth, as it seems to be free from the exaggerations in which Tichburne dealt, when recounting the numerical strength of his and the enemy's forces, ascribing to the latter poltroonery and cowardice in action, and crediting them with excessively heavy losses.

The predisposing cause, why the Ulster Irish were ready for rebellion was the misery the native inhabitants endured since the Plantation of the six forfeited counties, some thirty odd years before. Even the remnants of the estates allowed them by the Crown were filched from them by the greed and cunning of unscrupulous Commissioners, who enriched themselves on the ruin of the Irish. Prendergast (_Cromwellian Settlement_, pp. 49-50,) thus describes the condition of the old Irish n.o.bility and gentry then:--"Little they (the Planters, who got the forfeited estates) thought or cared how the ancient owner, dispossessed of his lands, must grieve as he turned from the sight of the prosperous stranger to his pining family; daughters, without prospect of preferment in marriage; sons, without fit companions, walking up and down the country with their horses and greyhounds, coshering on the Irish, drinking and gaming and ready for any rebellion; most of his high-born friends wandering in poverty in France and Spain, or enlisted in their armies." The immediate cause of the Rebellion is thus stated:--"A letter was intercepted coming from Scotland to one Freeman of Antrim giving an account that a Covenanting army was ready to come to Ireland under General Lesly, to extirpate the Roman Catholics of Ulster, and leave the Scots in possession of that province; that resolutions to that effect had been taken at their private meetings, as well as to levy heavy fines on such as would not appear at their kirk for the first and second Sunday, and on failure the third, to hang at their own doors without mercy, such as remained obstinate" (Carte's _Ormond_, Vol. I., p. 160). This notion prevailed universally amongst the rebels, and was chiefly insisted on by them as one of the princ.i.p.al reasons of their taking up arms.

The Rebellion broke out, then, on the 23rd October, 1641, and the actors in it were a "tumultuous rabble" as Ormond called them, intent chiefly on plundering and driving off the English settlers, yet before the end of the month the princ.i.p.al towns of the North were in their hands. Leland, a Protestant historian, writes:--"That in the beginning of the insurrection, it was determined by them that the enterprise should be conducted in every quarter, with as little bloodshed as possible" (_History of Ireland_, Vol.

III., p. 101). At p. 131, the same historian writes:--"The Lords Justices might have stamped out the insurrection at once had Ormond's advice to levy a large number of troops been attended to; for the Irish were then formidable only in numbers, and not six hundred of them had proper arms.

But their purpose was rather to fan it, in order to gratify their personal greed by extensive forfeitures." Warner, who has been so often quoted before, writes at p. 176 of his History:--"It is evident from the Lords Justices' letter to the Lord Lieutenant that they hoped for an extermination, not of the mere Irish only, but of all the old English families who were Roman Catholics." They issued a most truculent order to Ormond "to burn, kill, spoil, waste, destroy, the rebels, their relatives, houses and property." One of these Lords Justices is thus referred to by Carte: "He was a man of mean extract, scarcely able to read and write ...

plodding, a.s.siduous, and indefatigable, greedy of gain, and eager to raise a fortune; which it is not difficult for a man of indifferent parts to do, when he is not hampered with scruples about the ways of getting it"

(_Ormond_, Vol. I., p. 190). This same Lord Justice, with three members of the Privy Council, was put under arrest for disobedience to his Majesty, King Charles, and for complicity with his enemies, the Parliamentarians of England. The Lord Justice was deposed and imprisoned, but he retained his ill-gotten property.

As has been said, the rebels became masters of the princ.i.p.al towns in the North without meeting any check, when they attacked Mellifont. Lord Moore was then in Drogheda with Sir Henry Tichburne, the Governor, with whose policy and methods he, both before and afterwards, identified himself; and, as an active agent of the Lords Justices, he was specially odious to the Irish. During the siege of Drogheda, he more than once, by his alertness and personal bravery, saved the town from falling into the hands of the besiegers. With the exception of Lord Moore and a few of the older families, both the Lords Justices themselves (who governed the country in the absence of the Lord Lieutenant), and their ruthless instruments were men of no fortune; or, were such as became enriched by the plunder of the Irish. Tichburne, in a letter to his lady, alludes to one of the commissions entrusted to him for execution, in which fiendish work Lord Moore was a.s.sociated with him. After his return from the burning of Dundalk,[9] which he left a smouldering heap of ruins, he describes the results:--"There was neither man nor beast to be found in sixteen miles, between the two towns of Drogheda and Dundalk; nor on the other side of Dundalk, in the County of Monaghan, nearer than Carrickmacross, a strong pile twelve miles distant" (Tichburne's _Siege of Drogheda_, p. 320). And in the same page he says, all this magnificent ruin and desolation were inflicted on the peasantry "without one penny of charge to the State, and that for the s.p.a.ce of seven months, all under his command subsisted on the spoils" taken from the unfortunate people in that district. "The country and fields about Dundalk," he says, "were abounding in corn, which I allocated to the several companies, etc." The ghosts of the Bann must have been glutted with vengeance!!!

And now Lord Moore's career is drawing to a close. After having been engaged in many successful skirmishes, raids, and minor actions, he burned with a desire for the honour of measuring swords with the great Owen Roe, who had defeated all the forces. .h.i.therto sent against him, and, according to O'Neil's Diary, he affected to despise O'Neil. He was therefore dispatched with a body of troops to dislodge that consummate strategist from a position occupied by him at Portlester Mill, within five miles of Trim. Borlase tells us that Lord Moore was killed in that engagement, August 7th, 1643, "through the grazing of a cannon bullet which he foresaw, yet took not warning enough to evade." The Author of the _Aphorismical Discovery_, who is commonly supposed to have been O'Neil's secretary, gives another account of his death. It is right to mention that this author was by no means a monk, nor was he a clergyman at all, as is evident from his apology in the Introduction, where he tells the reader that he was by profession a "sworde carrier," and that it was "alienat" to that profession to aspire to literary avocations. "The General" (O'Neil), he writes, "not well pleased with his gunner, for he perceaved he shooted too high, and did little hurte, the peace was charged, the Generall tooke a perspective gla.s.se, and saw wheare my Lord Moore stoode. It being charged, the Generall did levell the same against Moore, gave fire, his aime was soe neare home, that he hitted him a little above his corpise, wherupon all dismembred, presently fell dead, the trunke of his bodie fallinge downe, and some of his members whisling in the aire to take possession by flight in some other field, or make such speede to accompany his soul to h.e.l.l to be a.s.sured for winter quarter next springe."

Lord Moore was succeeded by his son Henry, who, when Governor of Dundalk, in 1645, was more than suspected of plotting with the Parliamentarians to deliver up that town to Monroe. He was relieved of his charge by Ormond, who was then Lord Lieutenant, and being a minor, was sent by him to England (out of harm's way), to the Court, where he was kindly received by the King, who ordered livery to be granted him of his father's lands (_Carte_, Vol. IV., p. 154.) Lady Alice, his mother, was, it appears, inveigled into a plot at the same time to deliver up Drogheda to the Scots; for a wax impression of the keys of the gates having been given her, she caused the gunsmith of the troop, which Lord Henry commanded, to make false keys; but, being discovered, her ladys.h.i.+p, with others, was sent to Dublin. There, on examination before the Council, they confessed all. (_Ibid._) Her Ladys.h.i.+p's end was a tragic one, as we read in Lodge's _Peerage_. "Lady Alice, younger daughter of Sir Adam Loftus, Viscount Elye, who broke her leg near the fort (Drogheda) by a fall from her horse (occasioned by a sudden grief arising from the first sight of St. Peter's Church, Drogheda, where her dear lord lay buried), on Wednesday, 10th June, 1649, and dying the 13th of a gangrene, was that night buried by him in the family tomb."

There is another entry at the same place in Lodge. "Lieutenant-Colonel Francis Moore, sixth son of the first Viscount Mellifont, and brother to Lord Charles who was killed at Portlester Mill, who was an officer in the army for the reduction of Ireland, and in 1654, had a pension from the then Government of 10/- a week, and five of his brother Charles' children had 3 17s. a week in 1665, out of the district of Trim" (Lodge's _Peerage of Ireland_, Vol. II., pp. 99-100). This Francis Moore had been an officer in the King's army, but soon after the arrival in Ireland of Jones, the Parliamentarian General, he went over to him and took the Dundalk troops with him. It was from Cromwell's government he had his pension, but the pensions granted to Lord Charles' children were continued to them after the Restoration, and Lord Henry mentioned above, was created Earl of Drogheda, in 1661,--thus confirming the historic truism, that the ungrateful Stuarts heaped favours on their enemies and treated their best and most devoted adherents with cold indifference. As an ill.u.s.tration of this we have the instance of one of the chief actors in those troublesome times, Sir John Clotworthy, changing sides three times:--first, fighting in the King's name and commission against the Ulster Irish; next, siding with the Parliamentarians, his Majesty's deadliest enemies, and going over to England as the spokesman of a deputation sent to the Parliament of England to protest against the return of King Charles II., on rumour of peace and terms being negotiated between them; again, on King Charles'

arrival in England, hieing over to tender his homages and congratulations--and lo! the reward of his fidelity and loyalty (?)--he was created Viscount Ma.s.sereene. It is only one instance of several hundreds that may be cited. The unfortunate rebels whose banner bore the legend, "_Vivat Carolus Rex_"--"Long live King Charles," and who remained faithful to him to the last, were, by an irony of fate, robbed and banished by the Cromwellians, who were put in possession of their estates and confirmed in them by Charles II.!!!

In the foregoing pages, the authorities quoted are Protestants, and all, without exception, hostile to the Irish. Their testimony, nevertheless, is favourable to the rebels, save where the question of religion crops up, then their prejudice blinds their judgment, and hurries them into most glaring absurdities. One more fact about that saddest page of our history.

Before the outbreak of the Civil War in 1641, there were 1,200,000 Irish Catholics in the country; at its close in 1652, the number had fallen to 700,000, and these were ordered under pain of death to transplant to Connaught--the remnant of a broken and plundered race!!!

Henry, the first Earl of Drogheda, did not long enjoy his honours; nor did his son and successor, Charles, who was succeeded by his brother Henry, the third Earl, who, on the eve of the ever-memorable Battle of the Boyne, entertained a party, amongst whom was one of King William's highest officers. On the morrow, July the 1st, the booming of King William's fifty pieces of "dread artillery" echoed along the hills and the valley of the Boyne, and shook the old abbey walls to their very foundations; and on that night, the oaken rafters of Mellifont rang to the cheers and toasts of the "glorious, pious, and immortal memory" of the Prince of Orange, on whose side Earl Henry commanded that day a regiment of foot. It may be interesting to mention here, that on the morning of the battle, the Irish Catholic soldiers wore sc.r.a.ps of white paper on their caps--emblematic of the livery of France; the followers of the Prince of Orange wore green boughs torn off the trees.

Charles, Lord Moore, son of Henry, the third Earl, married Jane, heiress of Arthur, Viscount Ely, who received as her portion the suppressed Abbey of Monasterevan, a Cistercian monastery founded by O'Dempsey, in the 12th century. It was called Rosglas by the Irish, and the Valley of Roses, in the list of monasteries of the Order in Ireland. When it came into Earl Charles' possession, he changed the name to Moore Abbey, and made it his residence. The sons of this Lord Charles, Henry and Edward, became earls successively, and Edward, the fifth earl, having settled down permanently at Monasterevan, sold Mellifont and some of the property in its immediate vicinity to Mr. Balfour of Townley Hall, in 1727.

The condition of Ireland at that time was truly deplorable. The Penal Laws were in full force against the unfortunate Catholics, who were reduced to a state little better than slavery. Dr. Johnson wrote of them some fifty years later:--"The Irish are in a most unnatural state; for we see there the minority prevailing over the majority. There is no such instance, even in the ten persecutions, as that which the Protestants of Ireland have exercised against the Catholics. Did we tell them we conquered, it would be above board; to punish them by confiscations and other penalties was monstrous injustice" (Boswell, at 1773).

With the Moore family departed also the very shadow of Mellifont's diminished greatness, and "time's effacing finger" almost completely obliterated what was once a gorgeous national monument, which stood out clearly as a finger-post on the ways of time. Gradually the fabric fell into decay, the owl hooted on the landing of the grand stair-case, and the daw and martin flitted unmolested through the deserted halls. The gardens and walks and bowers disappeared beneath a crop of tangled brushwood, the product of neglect. Soon the roof fell in, the walls became seamed with many rents and toppled over with a crash; then Mellifont, the "Honey Fountain," the Monasthir Mor, or Great Abbey, as it was called, the foundation of saints and kings, the abode of the pious and the learned, the house pre-eminently of prayer, the asylum of the poor and friendless, became a shapeless acc.u.mulation of rubbish. True, a mill was erected about 100 years ago close to the site of the church, and, no doubt, it was told to strangers who then visited the ruins by people who professed to know all about monks, that it had more activity and exhibited more of the bustle of life than when the silent, slumbering monks dwelt there. But a mill in that hallowed spot was a huge incongruity and a wanton disregard for all its honoured a.s.sociations. In 1884, the few remaining ruins became vested in the Board of Works, and the excavations which revealed the plan of the church, as described in Chapter I., were carried out. It only remains to be said that in Mr. Balfour of Townley Hall, the estimable gentleman who now owns Mellifont and some of the property formerly belonging to it, his tenants have found a liberal and generous benefactor, who enjoys the merited esteem and respect of all who know him.

As one ascends the hill over Mellifont, and, pausing on its summit, gazes on the lovely scenery around him, particularly along the valley of the Boyne, which Young called one of the completest pictures he had ever seen, then glances at the quiet valley beneath him, and remembers what prominent parts those who once trod that favoured spot played in our country's chequered history, his soul is filled with solemn thoughts too big for utterance. There, came the firm and gentle, yet dauntless, Malachy side by side with Oriel's proud Chief, and hand in hand, they knelt and prayed and consecrated it to the living G.o.d for ever. Thereon, rose up the magnificent temple on which neither cost nor labour was spared, that it might be worthy of Him Who deigns to dwell in tabernacles made by man; and generation succeeded generation of monks, who calmly dwelt in that peaceful valley, which, by their skill and enterprise, they converted into a garden of delights and a terrestrial paradise. The bishop and the king found there a resting-place when life's weary struggle was over, and their end was sweetened by the cheering hopes of a glorious immortality. The poor man and the homeless found there a welcome and a shelter, their wants being liberally attended to; and the blessings of a free education and of spiritual consolations were diffused on every side from that centre of learning and piety. The knight and baron came, the belted man of war made his home there, enjoyed his ephemeral honours, but he, too, is gone, severing all connection with it both by name and t.i.tle, leaving no trace behind. The king and the knight have been brushed aside; and the old chess-board, Mellifont, alone remains. Impressed with these reflections, we take a glance beyond the grave, and there, we behold these actors pa.s.s before the great, most just, and supreme Judge, to receive the requital of their deeds, and to each is meted out reward or punishment according to his deserts. We, too, the spectators, are hastening towards that same goal; our future is indubitably in our own hands, according as we do or do not now live up to our convictions, and the dictates of our consciences.

And, now, we cannot help asking ourselves, what shall Mellifont's future be? At present it is a blank; but, shall the lamp of piety and learning be rekindled, and the light burst forth anew there as in the days of its splendour? We know not; but we do know that, although G.o.d's ways are inscrutable, His wisdom and power are infinite. To Him be all glory for ever and ever. Amen.

APPENDIX I.

LIST OF ABBOTS OF MELLIFONT.

Saint Christian O'Connarchy, Founder and first Abbot, Bishop of Lismore and Legate of the Holy See, 1150.

Blessed Malchus, brother of preceding.

Charles...o...b..acalla, 1177, made Bishop of Emly.

Patrick, term of office not known.

Maelisa, appointed Bishop of Clogher in 1194.

Thomas, 1211.

Carus, or Cormac O'Tarpa, elected Bishop of Achonry in 1219, resigned that See in 1226, returned to Mellifont where he died.

Mathew, 1289.

Michael, 1293.

William M'Buain.

Hugh O'Hessain, resigned 1300.