London still retained some sense about nonsense. In January 1642, a tract entitled No pamphlet, but a detestation against all such pamphlets as are printed, concerning the Irish rebellion, denounced the ‘many fabulous pamphlets that are set out concerning the rebels in Ireland’ as forgeries. But similar accounts of the Thirty Years War made them seem likely. John Erwyn led a party of Scots soldiers to Edward Mullan’s house in Ireland on Sunday 2 February 1642. He drew his sword ‘and wounded the said Mary Mullan in her head, and forehead, and cut her fingers, at which time she cried out, “Dear John, do not kill me, for I never offended you”, repeating this to him two or three times, whereupon he thrust her under the right breast and she gave up the ghost … And after a time the said Erwyn took a mighty lump of fire and put it on the said Mary Mullan’s breast, expecting she was still living.’
Mary’s words sound like the desperate self-defences of women accused of witchcraft by violent neighbours. Particularly telling is the test to see if Mary is really dead; it sounds as if Erwyn expects Mary to be impervious to weapons. A pamphlet called Treason in Ireland told typical stories, and invited its readers to see the sponsors as traitors of the worst and cruellest kind:
Henry Orell, when they slew his wife an ancient woman, and ravished her daughter in the most barbarous manner that ever was known; and when they had done pulled her limbs asunder, and mangled her body in pieces without pity or Christianity … The woman and her maid a brewing, for it was an alehouse, where they brewed their own drink. The maid they took and ravished, and when they had abused her body at their pleasure, they threw her into the boiling cauldron.
The terror in England was almost a panic. On one public fast day at Pudsey the congregation was thrown into turmoil because of reports that the Irish rebels had invaded the West Riding and had reached Halifax and Bradford. ‘Upon which the congregation was all in confusion, some ran out, others wept, others fell to talking to friends, and the Irish massacre being but lately acted, and all circumstances put together, the people’s hearts fainted with fear.’ Fears were not allayed till it was discovered that the supposed rebels were actually refugees. Elizabeth Harding testified that her lodger had remarked, on hearing of the Irish rebellion, that ‘the worst of the plot was not yet discovered there, and that the Protestants heels would go up apace’. Devonshire petitioners were terrified when refugees told them of ‘their wolvish enemies, that the bounds of that kingdom shall not limit their malicious tyranny’. Many Londoners, like Nehemiah, believed that ‘he that will England win/ Must first with Ireland begin’. Wallington added, ‘now, all these plots in Ireland are but one plot against England, for it is England that is that fine, sweet bit which they so long for, and their cruel teeth so much water at. And therefore these blood-thirsty papists do here among us in England plot what may be for our overthrow, to bring in their damnable superstition and idolatry among us.’ Parliament thought that the English Catholics were to have risen at the same time. The counties that felt especially exposed – North Wales, Cheshire and Lancashire – began asking London for help.
People felt they were already at war, and believed that the rebels would find a fifth column of supporters poised to help them. In Parliament ‘new jealousy and sharpness was expressed against the papists’, said Clarendon, ‘as if they were privy to the insurrection in Ireland, and to perform the same exploit in this kingdom’. Considerable numbers of English Catholics were said to have gone over to Ireland to help the rebels. Jesuits were (as usual) thought to be behind it all. Pym was quickfooted as ever, and managed to make political capital from it all: ‘the papists here are acted by the same principle as those in Ireland; many of the most active of them have lately been there; which argues an intercourse and communication of counsels’. One pamphlet revealed a plan to blow up and burn the chief English cities and to land an army. When another plot was revealed in London, ‘the poor people, all the countries over, were ready either to run to arms, or hide themselves thinking that the Papists were ready to rise and cut their throats’, wrote Richard Baxter. Some counties asked for help in rounding up the local Catholics who were believed to be on the brink of helping to launch an invasion.
There is no evidence that English Catholics had any such intentions, and most of them probably shared their countrymen’s dislike and fear of the Irish; one, John Carill, of Harting in Sussex, actually sold lands to raise money for an army to suppress the rebellion, a tactful move to appease his neighbours. But it made little difference. Ardent Protestants saw events in both Ireland and England as signs of a general European Catholic conspiracy to eradicate Protestantism. The worst-case scenario envisaged the Irish landing in England, backed by Spain and France; then they could turn against the Dutch too. It was believed that the pope was behind this, for he had given plenary indulgences to all those who made war on his behalf. As fears of a Catholic invasion spread, England was seen as a tiny, gallant Protestant nation, encircled by conniving Catholic superpowers keen to blot it from the earth.
As with more recent conspiracy theories, the immediate result was loss of civil liberties. Trunks and possessions of suspected persons heading for Ireland were ordered to be searched. Letters were intercepted and read. Even foreign ambassadors’ reports came under scrutiny. Irish soldiers returning home from fighting for the kings of France or Spain were detained at the ports and questioned. A register of Irish residents in Middlesex and Westminster was drawn up, and all over England and Wales Irish Catholics and priests were arrested. English and Welsh Catholics found themselves secured and disarmed too. Catholic peers and bishops in the House of Lords came under renewed political attack. And yet another army began to be raised to put down the rebellion.
The question was, could the king be trusted with such an army? What if it were used against the king’s critics at home? After all, the rebels themselves unhelpfully claimed to be fighting for the maintenance of the royal prerogative against the Puritans in Parliament. They also claimed they held the king’s commission under the great seal. In London the queen and other advisers were openly attacked as the authors of the rebellion; at the beginning of 1642 Pym claimed that the king had granted passes to the rebels. Clarendon claimed in his History of the Rebellion, written after his exile from court in 1667, that some chose the Parliamentarian side because they saw the king as the ally of the Irish rebels; he also thought that the idea of the king as a secret supporter of Catholicism was a key factor in dividing the nation. It was not only the godly who were terrified by the Ulster Rising. Royalists were also revolted; Wales, for example, suffered more Irish invasion panics than most areas, but eventually became staunchly Royalist. It seems as if the rebellion in Ireland only galvanized anti-monarchical spirits when added to a premix of godliness, dislike of Laud and anxiety about the Catholics at court. Parliamentarian propaganda sought to link Laud with popery, tyranny and barbarity, while Parliament fashioned itself as the upholder of traditional liberties. For the rest of the war, Parliament would harp on this note, constantly pointing to papists within Royalist circles or forces, asserting that some Irish rebels had been recruited into the king’s armies, while Royalist forces were compared with the rebels at the taking of Marlborough, at which the prisoners ‘were used after the manner