Page:Studies in Irish History, 1649-1775 (1903).djvu/34

Cromwell in Ireland brought with him to Ireland was the army of spies, sympathisers, and traitors which he had already established there.

I turn to review briefly the forces hastily got together by Ormond with which to oppose this - formidable invasion.

Worn and wasted through eight years of almost continuous civil war Ireland presented in this summer of 1649 a spectacle the parallel of which could only have been found in the condition of the Kingdom of Bohemia in the middle of the Thirty Years' War. A land and people so rent by controversy, so broken by battle, so suspicious from repeated treacheries, so marched and counter-marched over, that to the eye of Carlyle, when he tried to study it, it appeared a sight "such as the world before or since has never seen the like; the history of it not forming itself into a picture, but remaining only as a huge blot—an indiscriminate blackness—which the human memory cannot charge itself with." This picture is but partly true. The human memory is and has been too lazy to wish to charge itself with the study of any Irish business, preferring the blot explanation, as a writer who is doubtful of his orthography will frame his words in undecipherable characters. We must go back to our retrospect. Since its commence- 22