The list of grievances, transmitted by the Irish House of Peers in 1641 to the English Government, cannot be regarded as altogether visionary, for it was vouched by the names of lords, spiritual and temporal, whose attachment to the English interest was undoubted.

The lord chancellor (Loftus), the archbishop of Dublin (Bulkeley), the bishops of Meath, Clogher, and Killala were no rebels, and yet they protested against the grievances inflicted on Ireland by the tyranny of Strafford.

According to these contemporary witnesses, the Irish nobles had been taxed beyond all proportion to the English nobles; Irish peers had been sent to prison although not impeached of treason or any capital offence; the deputy had managed to keep all proxies of peers in the hands of his creatures, and thus to sway the Upper House to his will; the trade of the kingdom had been destroyed; and the 'graces' of 1628 had been denied to the nation, or clogged by provisoes which rendered them a mockery.

And yet, in the face of such evidence of misery and misgovernment, the Archbishop of Dublin asserted in a charge to his clergy, that 'all contemporary writers agree in describing the flourishing condition of the island, and its rapid advance in civilisation and wealth, when all its improvement was brought to an end by the catastrophe of the Irish rebellion of 1641'-- the very year in which the Irish Houses of Lords and Commons agreed in depicting the condition of Ireland as utterly miserable! But Archbishop Trench not only contradicts the authentic contemporary records, in picturing as halcyon days one of the most wretched periods of Irish history, but also wrongfully represents one of the saddest episodes of that history.

He reminded his clergy 'that the number of Protestants who were massacred by the Roman Catholics during the rebellion was, by the most moderate estimate, set down as 40,000.' His grace seems to have been unacquainted with the contemporary evidence collected by the Protestant historian Warner, who examined the depositions of 1641, on which the story of the massacre was based, and found the estimate of those who perished in the so-called massacre to have been enormously exaggerated.