Note 31 — PREFACE.

None benefited more largely by these “plots of rebellion” than the house of Ormonde. “His Grace (says Lord Anglesey in his letter to the Earl of Castlehaven) his Grace (the Duke of Ormonde) and his family, by the forfeiture and punishment of the Irish, were the greatest gainers in the kingdom, and had added to their inheritance vast scopes of land, and a revenue three times greater than his paternal estate, as it was before the Rebellion, and most of his increase was out of their estates who adhered to the peace of 1648, or served under His Majesty’s ensigns abroad.” In the anonymous and curious pamphlet “The Unkind Deserter,” it is asserted that the Ormonde estate was but 7000l. per annum before the civil wars in Ireland, and that in 1674 it was close upon 100,000l. a year; which increase arose from the King’s grants to him “of other men’s estates,” &c. &c. &c. The history of the last Rebellion in 1798, and of the Union, would furnish many anecdotes of a similar increase of the wealth of Irish families; not indeed by forfeitures, (for the mode had passed,) but by intriguing and bullying the government out of every place at its disposal, from a mitre to a cornetcy of dragoons,—by the wholesale and retail sale of the country: (a vote upon a single stage of a question has been hired, like a job-carriage, by the night;) by corrupt dabbling in every species of public work; in short, by every disgraceful practice of the fraudulent tradesman, the scheming adventurer, and the sturdy mendicant. The philosopher Kirwan was wont to quote a calculation he had made, that the money spent on carrying the Union, would have built a bridge from Howth to Holyhead.