Page:Abstract of the bloody massacre in Ireland.pdf/19

 solacing themselves, while they were digging down old ditches upon them.

They brake the back-bone of a youth, and left him in the fields; some days after, he was found, having eaten the grass round about him: neither then would they kill him outright, but removed him to better pasture, wherein was fulfilled that saying, The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.

In the county of Antrim, they murdered nine hundred and fifty-four Protestants in one morning; and afterwards about twelve hundred more in that county near Lisnegary, they forced twenty-four Protestants into a house, and burnt them all.

Sir Phelim O‘Neal boasted, that he had slain above six hundred at Garvah, and that he had left neither man, woman, nor child alive in the barony of Munterlong. In other places he murdered above two thousand persons in their houses, so that many houses were filled with dead bodies.

Above twelve thousand were slain in the highways, as they fled towards Down. Many died of famine; many died for want of clothes, being stripped naked in a cold season: some thousands were drowned, so that in the province of Ulster, there were about one hundred and fifty thousand murdered by sundry kinds of torments and deaths.

The Popish English were no whit inferior; yea, rather exceeded the natural Irish in their cruelty against the Protestants that lived amongst them, within the pale; not