Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 59.djvu/225

 Ormonde proclaimed on 30 July. Excommunication followed on 1 Sept. (Confederation and War, vi. 69, 131). A few days later the supreme council of the confederates were in prison and the clergy dominant at Kilkenny (, p. 204). Walsh claims to have ‘saved both mayor and aldermen from being hanged, and the city from being plundered by Owen O'Neill’ (Hist. of Remonstrance, p. 587; Confederation and War, vi. 24, 296). In 1647 he attacked in nine consecutive sermons the ‘Disputatio Apologetica’ of Cornelius Mahony [q. v.], in which the right of the kings of England to Ireland was denied.

In revenge for this conduct Walsh was deprived of the lectureship in divinity to which he had been appointed at Kilkenny; he was driven from the house, and even forbidden to enter any town which possessed a library; while Rinuccini accused him of having infected the nobility of Ireland and destroyed the cause (Remonstrance, p. 587). Having the support of the supreme council, however, and of the aged bishop David Roth [q. v.], Walsh stood his ground and continued to preach and write. Rinuccini afterwards described him as ‘turned out of his convent for disobedience to superiors, a sacrilegious profaner of the pulpit in Kilkenny Cathedral, who vomited forth in one hour more filth (sordes) and blasphemy than Luther and Calvin together in three years’ (Spicilegium Ossoriense, iii. 72).

On 20 May 1648 the supreme council agreed to a cessation of arms with Inchiquin. Rinuccini excommunicated all adherents of the truce, and laid an interdict on all the communities, whether of cities, towns, villages, or hamlets, who accepted it (Confederation and War, vi. 240). The supreme council, of whose party Walsh was now the soul, repudiated Rinuccini and appealed to Rome (ib. p. 243). During June an oath to maintain their authority, notwithstanding Rinuccini's censures, was prescribed by the council, and taken by ten peers and many other men of influence (Remonstrance, App. p. 33). The Franciscans, however, closed their church in obedience to Rinuccini's interdict, and in July the council arrested Paul King [q. v.], and made Walsh guardian in his stead. King retaliated by helping to bring O'Neill's army to Kilkenny after Rinuccini's final departure; and the queries addressed to Roth as to the validity of the nuncio's censures, and the answers of Roth and of his council of sixteen theologians, were both penned by Walsh while the tents of the Ulster army were visible from the walls. This was Walsh's first published work, and the whole of it was reprinted by him in 1674 with his history of the ‘Remonstrance.’ Thomas Dease, bishop of Meath, was the only bishop who formally adhered to the opinion of Roth and Walsh; but they had a very respectable minority among the clergy on their side, including most of the jesuits, who were nearly all of Anglo-Irish blood. About this time Walsh, at the request of the society, delivered a panegyric on St. Ignatius in their chapel at Kilkenny (Remonstrance, p. 88). Among the gentry also, especially the lawyers, Walsh's party had a large majority.

Ormonde returned to Ireland at Michaelmas 1648, and soon went to Kilkenny, where Walsh met him for the first time (Dedication to Four Letters). The peace with the confederates was settled and approved by nine bishops on 17 Jan. 1648–9, and the defeated nuncio left Ireland. In June a quarrel among the Franciscans at Kilkenny compelled Walsh to take refuge in an old castle, where he remained until rescued by Castlehaven (Contemporary Hist. ii. 31;, p. 77; Remonstrance, p. 587).

After Cromwell had taken Kilkenny in March, Walsh became a wanderer, and the clerical party persecuted him to the utmost ‘wherever he sheltered himself from the common enemy, the parliament's forces’ (ib. p. 585). Castlehaven, however, who commanded the Munster army, made Walsh his chaplain. At Limerick soon afterwards Terence Albert O'Brien [q. v.], bishop of Emly, threatened to seduce Castlehaven's troops unless he would part with Walsh.

When Castlehaven sailed for France in the autumn of 1651, Walsh was without a protector, and hid himself miserably wherever he could. The parliamentary commissioners in Dublin gave him a passport in September 1652, and he went to London, where his presence was winked at (Contemporary Hist. p. 591). In September 1654 he went voluntarily to Madrid, where the dominant party in his own order imprisoned him for over two months (ib. p. 589). Being suffered to go to Holland, he found his friends there unable to protect him against persecutions originating at Rome, nor was he allowed to return to Ireland during the protectorate on account of his obstinate royalism. Till the eve of the Restoration he was forced to ‘shift and lurk in England the best way I could, having but once in that interim gone to Paris for a month, not daring then to stay not even there any longer’ (ib. p. 590). One of his London lurking-places was the Portuguese embassy (ib. p. 43).

In October 1660 Walsh addressed a letter to Ormonde in favour of fair dealing with