XI

There was no lack, say apologists of the Irish Parliament, of useful legislation on subjects with which a landed gentry was qualified to deal. There was a fatal lack of legislation on one momentous subject with which a land-owning gentry ought to be qualified to deal, but from which the Irish Parliament resolutely turned its eyes. For half a century before the union, that body steadfastly abstained from inquiring into the causes of disaffection among the peasantry. It even repressed a report upon the subject which the chairman of the committee had begun to read.

The condition of the peasantry was still horrible and heartrending. The revolution of 1782, by loosening the fetters of trade, had brought increase of prosperity to the merchant and manufacturer. It had brought no relief to the tiller of the soil. A little before this Arthur Young had travelled in Ireland and had been shocked at seeing the insolent despotism of the petty country gentlemen, whom he called the vermin of the kingdom, over their serfs; the horsewhip freely used, the serf not daring to lift his hand in defence, the total denial of legal redress, since a justice of the peace presuming to issue a summons would at once have been called out. Landlords of consequence had assured Young that many of their cotters would think themselves honoured by having their wives and daughters sent for to the bed of their masters. He had even heard of the lives of people being made free with. The middleman and the tithe-proctor were ruthless as ever. To the payment of tithes a drop of bitterness had been added by the exemption, through an abuse of political influence, of the grazing farms, which left the whole burden of maintaining a hostile Church on the back of the cotter. The peasantry, on the other hand, maddened by suffering, took a fearful revenge on the oppressor or his agents. Agrarian murder and outrage prevailed. There were cruelties worse than murder. Middlemen and tithe-proctors were “carded”; that is, lacerated with boards full of nails drawn down their backs, buried up to their necks in pits full of thorns, made to ride on saddles stuck with spikes, their ears and noses cut off. A clergyman was met riding in great agony with his head wrapped up; his ears and cheeks were found nailed to a post. That the Irish when excited are capable of dark atrocities is a feature of their character which it is useless to disguise. Debility when excited is apt to be most cruel. The trait showed itself plainly in the hamstringing of soldiers and the houghing of cattle, as well as in the torturing of middlemen and tithe-proctors. Law and police were paralyzed. The peasantry were one vast conspiracy bound together by awful pledges, the betrayal of which was death. No evidence could be obtained though there might be plenty of eye-witnesses. Perjury in the common cause was no sin.

It was supposed that the Whiteboys had their meetings in Catholic chapels. But there is no ground for taxing the Catholic Church as a body with any share in the criminal part of the movement. The Catholic clergy of Ireland were then, as they are now, a peasant clergy, sympathizing with their class. They depended on that class for their stipends. Some of them their sympathy might betray into complicity, more or less active, with agrarian crime. More of them might be guilty of failure to exert their religious authority as ministers of the sacraments, the confessional, and death-bed absolution, on the side of law. But their record on the whole appears to have been as clear as, considering what persecution they had undergone, and that the law was their enemy as well as the enemy of the peasant, it was reasonable to expect.

The mansion of an unpopular landlord became a besieged fortress. Absenteeism of course increased. To a rather later date belongs the story of an agent who, having complained to his absentee landlord that his life had been threatened, received the reply, “Tell the villains that they need not hope to intimidate me by shooting you.”

“I am well acquainted,” said a statesman not oversensitive to popular wrongs, “with the Province of Munster, and I know that it is impossible for human wretchedness to exceed that of the miserable tenantry of that province. I know that the unhappy tenantry are ground to powder by relentless landlords. I know that far from being able to give the clergy their just dues, they have not food and raiment for themselves; the landlord grasps the whole. Sorry I am to add that, unsatisfied with present extortion, some landlords have been so base as to instigate the insurgents to rob the clergy of their tithes, not in order to alleviate the distresses of the tenantry, but that they might add the clergy’s share to the cruel rack-rents already paid. Sir, I fear it will require the utmost ability of Parliament to come to the root of these evils. The poor people of Munster live in a more abject state of poverty than human nature can be supposed able to bear. Their miseries are intolerable; but they do not originate with the clergy; nor can the legislature stand by and see them take the redress into their own hands. Nothing can be done for their benefit while the country remains in a state of anarchy.”

The miseries might not originate with the clergy, but the popular wrath did originate specially with the exactions of the tithe-proctor. Grattan proposed commutation. But then the tithe of pasture agistment, as it was called, could no longer have been evaded. That simple reform was put off for more than a generation, with the most calamitous results.

Dublin was gay, mansions rose, claret flowed, wit sparkled, the dance went round. Nor was there lack of social polish or of culture of the classical kind. On the other hand, there were extravagance, waste, and debt. Wild and spendthrift characters appear among the leaders and mirrors of society. Beauchamp Bagenal, as Sir Jonah Barrington tells us, “had visited every capital of Europe, and had exhibited the native original character of the Irish gentleman at every place he visited. In the splendour of his travelling establishment, he quite eclipsed the petty potentates with whom Germany was garnished. His person was fine, his manners open and generous, his spirit high, and his liberality profuse. During his tour, he had performed a variety of feats which were emblazoned in Ireland, and endeared him to his countrymen. He had fought a prince; jilted a princess; intoxicated the doge of Venice; carried off a duchess from Madrid; scaled the walls of a convent in Italy; narrowly escaped the Inquisition at Lisbon; concluded his exploits by a celebrated fencing match at Paris; and he returned to Ireland with a sovereign contempt for all continental men and manners, and an inveterate antipathy to all despotic kings and arbitrary governments.”

Duelling was the social law. The attorney-general fought a duel; the provost of Trinity College fought a duel. Refusal of a challenge was social death. The viceroy’s secretary, when challenged by a disappointed applicant for place, deemed it necessary to go to the field of honour. Robert Fitzgerald was so addicted to duelling that he wore a chain shirt under his vest.

What can have produced such characters? Was it anything in Irish blood or air, or was it the absence of the commercial element with its sobering influence? The story of Robert Fitzgerald, nephew of the bishop of Derry, seems to bespeak a wild domestic despotism exercised by the squires. Fitzgerald is said to have confined his father in a cave with a muzzled bear. He put to death one of his household, for which, however, he was hanged. The matrimonial adventurer from Ireland was also a figure well known in the sister isle.

Of intellectual fruit there was not much except oratory, pamphlets, and pasquinades. Swift was an Englishman born in Ireland and banished to the place of his birth. Burke’s genius as well as his physiognomy was one-half Irish, and his Irish half had its share in that splendid but mischievous outburst, his essay on the French Revolution. His heart turned to Ireland, and some of his best thought was given to her case. But he hardly belongs to the Irish Pantheon.

Oratory, both Parliamentary and forensic, flourished. Grattan, Flood, Yelverton, Foster, Fitzgibbon (afterwards Lord Clare), Curran, are great names in their different ways. Nor was the oratory all in the style supposed to be Hibernian. Foster’s style, for example, was grave and weighty. So generally was that of Flood.

In Parliament there were lively scenes. Grattan and Flood having parted company in politics, and Flood having defamed Grattan, Grattan poured upon Flood a furious torrent of the most personal invective; telling him that his talents were not so great as his life was infamous; that he had been silent for years and silent for money; that he might be seen passing the doors like a guilty spirit waiting the moment at which he might hop in and give his venal vote; that he was a kettledrum, battering himself into popularity to catch the vulgar; that he might be seen hovering over the dome like an ill-omened bird of night, with sepulchral note and broken beak (Flood having a broken nose); and winding up by telling him in the face of the country, before all the world, and to his beard, that he was not an honest man. Flood retorted with equal fury, and a wild scene ensued. It is not difficult to believe in the genius or the patriotism of these orators; but it is difficult to believe in their unimpassioned wisdom.

The Penal Code had ere this lost much of its cruelty. Time, security, and intercourse had softened the feeling of the Protestants against the Catholics, whose passive loyalty had been proved by their inaction when Great Britain was twice invaded by Stuart pretenders. The most odious enactments of the code, those which involved personal degradation and outrage on family affection, had fallen into desuetude or been evaded. Protestant friends would hold land for a Catholic in confidential trust, and ostensibly assume the guardianship of his children, leaving the real guardianship to the kin. The attempts of informers to take advantage of forfeitures were discouraged by the courts. Protestant fanaticism was dying out everywhere except in rural Ulster, and was giving way among the educated to indifference and even to scepticism. The spirit of Voltaire was abroad. Chesterfield, as viceroy, brought it with him, laughing at religious intolerance, and saying that the only Catholic of whom he was afraid was the reigning beauty of Dublin. The whole system of the Catholic Church, though still nominally subsisting only by connivance, was openly and securely carried on. Conspicuous Mass houses were built. The Catholic hierarchy and priesthood were forming friendly relations with a government which had once designated all Catholics as enemies. Catholics of the upper class educated in France came back from the land of the Encyclopædists tinctured with its liberalism. Catholics were admitted by connivance into Trinity College. A central committee had been formed to guard Catholic interests, which in the penal era would have been treason. After 1782, relief bills were passed. Catholicism was recognized by law. All restrictions upon the maintenance of the hierarchy, freedom of ordination, or additions to the priesthood were abrogated. Catholics were made capable of acquiring property in land, though under the guise of leases for nine hundred and ninety-nine years. The Gavelling Act, passed to break up their estates, was repealed. It was unfortunately too late to restore the Catholic gentry, which had been decimated by the Penal Law. In 1783 a bill was passed opening to Catholics the profession of the law in all its branches and grades except the rank of king’s counsel and the judicial bench, repealing the law against the intermarriage of Catholics with Protestants, that against foreign emigration, that making an Anglican license necessary for schools, and that restricting the number of apprentices permitted in Catholic trade. The laws against the possession of arms and the exclusion from command in the army were left. Otherwise of the Penal Code the political disabilities almost alone remained.

The principal relief bill was introduced by Sir Hercules Langrishe, the friend and correspondent on Irish politics of Burke, who pleaded the cause of the Irish Catholics with all the vehemence of his nature, a measure of sympathy with the religion probably mingling in his heart with love of freedom and justice. Burke had less feeling for the grievances of Protestant Dissenters or of Anglican clergymen liberally inclined, who sought the relaxation of tests. He afterwards sent his son, whose ability he fondly overrated, as his representative to Ireland, in the affairs of which the aspiring youth meddled, and with farcical results.

The Presbyterians of Belfast had before this been relieved of the Test Act and their other religious bonds and humiliations. But the relief had come too late to turn them into good friends of the Anglican Church or of British connection. Revolutionary and republican sentiment had, with religious scepticism, taken root in Belfast.

The revolution of 1782 had not been democratic. The Volunteers were property holders and their leaders were peers. But the withdrawal of the Volunteers was not followed by political calm. Among the populace of Dublin, especially, excitement continued and showed itself detestably by hamstringing British soldiers. The cry was now for two drastic measures of change: the political emancipation of the Catholics, and a reform of Parliament substituting freedom of election for nomination and clearing the legislature of pensioners and placemen. The two combined evidently meant death to Protestant ascendancy and to oligarchy, both of which naturally shrank from suicide.

The struggle grew fierce, and now not only was the American Revolution fresh in recollection, but the French Revolution, advancing with thunder tread, was filling the minds of the people everywhere, and especially those of the oppressed and suffering, with vague visions and hopes of change. Even to the hovel of the Irish serf, a vague hope, not of a society regenerated on the principles of Rousseau, but of deliverance from the middleman, from the tithe-proctor, and from the English connection, which he thought was at the bottom of all his sufferings, had begun to make its way.

Of reform, the leader was Grattan. Opposition to reform found a mighty champion in Fitzgibbon, afterwards Lord Clare, a strong man, fearless as he was able, and a very powerful speaker, but violent and overbearing, as well as reactionary to a degree which charms the reactionary historian. Fitzgibbon had a very coarse but rather effective shield-bearer in Dr. Duigenan, the son of a Catholic farmer intended for the priesthood, but captured by the Protestant clergyman of his parish.

Grattan and the reform party failed to get admission for Catholics to Parliament. They failed to purify the House itself by substituting free election for nomination boroughs, or by the effective exclusion of pensioners and placemen from the House. They succeeded in extending the electoral franchise to all holders, whether Catholic or Protestant, of forty-shilling freeholds. Unfortunately, they could hardly have done worse than by giving political power to the mass without its natural leaders. Protestant demagogues playing for the Catholic vote were certain to appear. Another bad effect of the measure was the multiplication of cotter holdings by land-owners who would absolutely control the cotter’s vote. On the other hand, to ask the Protestant oligarchy to part with its exclusive possession of Parliament was to ask it, not only to resign power, but even to cast a shadow on its property, for the Act of Settlement had hardly even yet become perfectly sacred as the title-deed of proprietary right. Not all the advocates of Parliamentary reform were in favour of Catholic emancipation. Flood among others was opposed to it.

Of the British government Pitt was now absolute master. Early in his reign he had glanced at Irish politics and it seems had thought of union. But the Channel was still wide and Irish government was still left to the Castle. Pitt, however, had tendered Ireland a commercial agreement framed, like his commercial treaty with France, in the spirit of the first statesman who read Adam Smith. Introduced by him with great ability and at first with general acceptance, his measure in the end was wrecked by a combination of British protectionism, Whig faction, and Irish jealousy on the subject of legislative independence; to the last of which Fox, carried away by faction, scrupled not to appeal. Commercial union would have strengthened the political connection, and by furthering commercial prosperity might have done something to allay Irish discontent. Latterly, Pitt’s thoughts had been engrossed by the struggle with France. They were now turned perforce to the political state of Ireland, which was evidently becoming very perilous; at that time, unfortunately, with no happy result.

The Whigs opposed to the French Revolution, Portland, Spencer, Fitzwilliam, and Windham, had coalesced with Pitt without renouncing their general principles, which they wished to apply to Ireland, regarding that field, it seems, as especially their own. At their instance Fitzwilliam was sent over as viceroy, believing, and it seems with reason, that he bore Catholic emancipation and general reform in his hand; though he had no written instructions, nor, it appears, any verbal instructions sufficiently clear. He went hastily to work, opened his budget of concessions prematurely, and too promptly brandished the besom of administrative reform, dismissing from office one of the great place-hunting house of Beresford, which by assiduous intrigue had filled the public service with its nominees. The Beresford carried his plaint to the headquarters of the Tory party in London, and told Pitt that Fitzwilliam was turning out all the faithful supporters of the government. What followed is still a mystery. There was a long, unaccountable, and apparently inexcusable silence on the part of Portland, broken at last by disclaimer, rebuke, and recall. Fitzwilliam, stung to fury at this treatment, trampled on official rules and did serious mischief by his publication of confidential letters betraying an incipient design of union, which to Irish patriotism at that time was maddening. At the bottom of all the misunderstanding and trouble was the king, into whose miserable mind had been instilled, it appears by Fitzgibbon, the belief that by consenting to Catholic emancipation he would break his coronation oath. The two great Tory lawyers, Eldon and Kenyon, to their honour, told the king the truth. It seems probable, however, that the union of the coalition government was imperfect, as that of coalition governments is apt to be, and that this may be the account both of the want of clearness in Fitzwilliam’s original instructions and of the strange silence, ending at last in an abrupt dismissal, which ensued.

Fitzwilliam left Dublin amidst passionate demonstrations of popular disappointment and grief. His place was taken by Lord Camden, one of the Tory section of the Pitt government, who came to face Irish rebellion aided by Revolutionary France, while England, placed in extreme peril by French victories and the secession of her allies, was struggling for her life and was unable to afford military support to the government of Ireland.

Catholic emancipation and reform of Parliament, had Fitzwilliam been allowed to grant them, would, Grattan thought, have averted the crisis. They might have staved it off, but it would probably have come in another form. That the new power thus called into being would be as loyal as Grattan himself to British connection was a highly precarious assumption. The course of the French Revolution would have not been stayed, nor would the wild hopes which it excited have been extinguished. The aspirations of Tom Paine’s disciples at Belfast would not have ceased. The cotter’s hunger would not have been appeased nor would he have been reconciled to the payment of tithe and Church cess. The blind hatred of British connection as the supposed source of all evil to Ireland would have continued to work. The State Church would at once have been attacked. The Castle government, bereft of its two supports, nomination boroughs and patronage, would inevitably have lost its hold. Chaos would then have come. Material order might have been preserved by a sufficient military force. Otherwise there was apparently nothing for it but union.

In Presbyterian Belfast, hatred of the State Church and the English government which supported it, bred by Episcopal intolerance, had developed, especially among the young men, into rationalism and acceptance of the doctrines, both religious and political, of Tom Paine. The connection of sympathy with the exiles in America had been kept up, and the spirit of the American was combined with that of the French Revolution. Thus was formed the circle of United Irishmen. The professed aim of this association, perhaps originally its real aim, was only the reform of Parliament. But it soon became revolutionary, aiming at independence of England and the foundation of an Irish republic, to be brought about by the aid of revolutionary France. Its soul was Wolfe Tone, a young man of talent, literary and practical, and of generous instincts, wild, dissipated, recklessly adventurous, burning with hatred of England. Other leading members of the circle were Jackson and Emmett. Most of the set were plebeian. But there was one recruit from the aristocracy, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, son of the Duke of Leinster, fired, like Lafayette, with the enthusiasm of liberty, but distinguished and made an object of sentimental interest only by his rank and by his tragical end.

The outbreak was now imminent. Grattan, with his few steadfast adherents, seceded from Parliament, where he had better have stayed to moderate as far as he could the fury of repression. This he owed to the country on which he had imposed the constitution of 1782, a system fraught, as he might have seen, with disruption and capable of being worked only as it had been worked, by Castle influence. The bond of loyalty to England, which was strong in his own breast, he assumed to be general. Neither he nor, with reverence be it said, Burke, excellent as the general principles of both might be, correctly read the situation, which was one of a very special kind. Burke’s letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe on the subject of religious emancipation is accounted one of the greatest of his works. But Fitzgibbon might with reason have replied to it that of the real Irish problem it offered no practical solution. It did not show how a national Parliament of Ireland, with a great Catholic majority, and uncontrolled by Castle patronage and influence, to which reform would have put an end, could be kept in secure harmony with the Parliament of Great Britain. Burke, however, now and then, glances timidly at the policy of union. Grattan could think of nothing but his two Parliaments linked by eternal affection. After Grattan’s secession, the oligarchy closed its ranks, and the Parliament thenceforth went thoroughly with the government, or even beyond it, in the policy of repression.

The Castle understood its danger. In Irish conspiracies the informer is never lacking. Besides, there were Catholics, who though patriots, wishing to avert civil war, communicated with the government, and furnished it with information for that purpose. Among these may fairly be numbered Arthur O’Leary, on whose connection with the government and acceptance of a small pension from it, lately revealed, prejudice pounces as a proof that the best reputed and most eminent of Irish Liberals was a rogue. Arthur O’Leary wrote well, and the spirit of his writings was thoroughly liberal as well as loyal. Nothing seems to have been expected of him beyond general information of Catholic tendencies and movements such as one who desired to avert civil war might honestly give. By its secret intelligence the government was enabled at a critical moment to seize some of the leaders of the conspiracy, while Lord Edward Fitzgerald met his death in resisting arrest.

The fire, smouldering everywhere, burst into a flame in Armagh, a Protestant district into which Catholics had intruded by outbidding Protestant holders of farms whose leases had expired. The Protestants, banding together under the name of Peep o’Day Boys, proceeded to oust the intruders, burning some of their houses. The Catholics combined for mutual protection under the name of Defenders. Outrages were committed on both sides. In a pitched battle, on a small scale, called the battle of the Diamond, the Catholics were worsted and a number of them were killed. Many Catholics were driven from their homes, and the fugitives spread through the country the belief that the Protestants were bent on extermination.

The United Irishmen, disciples of Tom Paine, cared nothing for the quarrels of sects. But disaffection of any kind was grist to their revolutionary mill. They coalesced with Defenderism, and by superior intelligence got control of the movement, which they organized as an expectant army of revolution. Their task was made easy by the habits of conspiracy formed among the peasantry in the agrarian war. There were secret oaths, passwords, military gradations of command. There were even reviews under pretence of digging the potatoes of patriots who were in prison. Everything was ready for a rising as soon as French succour should appear. All the blacksmiths were making pike-heads, the young trees were being everywhere cut down for the shafts. Muskets in plenty would come with the auxiliary army from France. Wolfe Tone had visited Paris, of which in its revolutionary phase he gives a lively picture, and received a promise of aid; Hoche, with whom he had an interview, being eager for the enterprise.

Among the people generally the rebellion was agrarian rather than religious, religious only as the Catholic peasantry believed that they saw in Protestantism a badge of general enmity. But that belief made the war between the sects internecine. It does not appear that any but a few of the lowest and coarsest of the priesthood took an active part in the rebellion. The order, as a whole, could hardly look with pleasure for the conquest of Ireland by an atheist revolution. The French, in fact, had they become masters of Ireland for a time, would probably in the end have found themselves there, as in Spain, confronted by a hostile priesthood carrying with it the people.

In the extremity of danger, surrounded by gathering rebellion, Castle government had now to strike or fall. It struck, practically proclaiming martial law. But it was without the only safe means of military repression. Of regular soldiers it had few. Those few behaved well. Some of them earned by their conduct the blessings of the people. But in the main repression had to be entrusted to yeomanry and fencibles, little controlled by discipline, and infected, as a militia is always apt to be, and as in this case they were in an extreme degree, by the passions of the hour. These men, sent forth to disarm the people, in their search for concealed arms burned, slew, pitch-capped, flogged without stint or mercy, and turned a great district of the north and midland into a hell. The people retaliated with equal atrocity where they had the power. A large number of suspects were arbitrarily shipped on board the fleet, where it was believed they helped by their infection to beget the mutiny at the Nore. Lord Moira, a patriot Irish nobleman, protested vehemently in the House of Lords, but his exaggeration and partiality broke the force of his appeal. To control the excesses of repression and restore military discipline, the gallant Abercrombie was put in command; but he lost his self-control, reviled the troops in an imprudent manifesto, broke with the government, and left matters worse than they had been before.

In Ulster, fraternities of strong Protestants, which had existed informally since 1689, were now formally organized as Orange Lodges. They embodied an intensely sectarian feeling and committed their share of outrages, but they lent the government powerful aid.

Conspicuous among the ruthless agents of repression was the head of the Beresfords, whose riding-house at Dublin was a daily scene of torture. Conspicuous also was Judkin Fitzgerald, the field of whose operations was Tipperary. Fitzgerald’s apologists plead that his policy was successful. It might be so, but the cause of public order does not gain in the end by outraging that law of natural justice on respect for which public order must ultimately depend. Fitzgerald, savagely flogging a man on whom he had found a note in the French language, which not knowing French himself he could not read, was presently assured by one who could read the note that it was perfectly harmless. He nevertheless continued the torture of the lash till the victim nearly expired. Such a case seems to defy apology. Fitzgerald, however, was not only protected from question by an Act of Indemnity, but rewarded with a title. On both sides all hearts were fired with the satanic madness of civil war.

French aid had been promised. To the unspeakable discredit of the British admiralty, it came. An expedition which had long been in preparation under Hoche was allowed to sail from Brest and unopposed to make the coast of Ireland at Bantry Bay. A storm which prevented a landing, the bad seamanship of the French, whose naval service had been shattered by the revolution, and the separation of the frigate which had the general on board from the rest of the fleet, saved Ireland from temporary conquest and Great Britain from the consequences of that disaster. It is remarkable that the peasantry in the neighbourhood of Bantry Bay received the soldiers of the government well and shared their potatoes with them. Was this loyalty or fear? Had the French landed, would the potatoes have been still more hospitably shared? An expedition afterwards fitted out in Holland, now a vassal of France, at the very crisis of the mutiny at the Nore, was weatherbound till the mutiny was over and was then crushed by Duncan at Camperdown. A small French force under Humbert afterwards landed, and at Castlebar put the militia to shameful flight. But it was presently surrounded by superior numbers and forced to surrender. There were still some faint demonstrations, in one of which the arch-enemy of England, Wolfe Tone, met his doom. He imprudently betrayed his identity to his captors. His French commission availed him not. He escaped the gallows by suicide. He was a genuine enthusiast, and he was at all events on one of the only two practicable lines of action. Separation was the sole alternative to union. But had Tone got the upper hand, with his fanaticism and a savage peasantry thirsting for Protestant and English blood at his back, the political millennium in Ireland, as in France, would have opened with a reign of terror.

Disappointed of aid from France, the rebellion took the field by itself. There was a great rising in Wexford, headed by Father Murphy, a fighting priest, a compound of Wat Tyler and John Ball, who gave himself out as a supernatural personage, and persuaded the people that he could catch bullets in his hands. The father showed a natural genius for war. His peasants fought desperately, and the Irish pike proved a formidable weapon in their hands. The rebels gained one or two successes in the field, and took the city of Wexford. They perpetrated fiendish cruelties. At Scullabogue they burned or butchered a barn full of Protestants. At Wexford they dragged their prisoners to the bridge, stripped them naked, hoisted them up on the points of their pikes, and threw them into the river. At Vinegar Hill, a name of ghastly memory, the rebel headquarters, a batch of Protestants was every day brought out after a mock trial to be massacred. The people being here under priestly leadership, the character of a religious crusade was given to their warfare, and every Protestant was a mark for their murderous fury. On the other hand, Protestants in the north who at the outset had been revolutionary, seeing the rebellion assume the character of a Catholic crusade, passed to the side of government and repression. One or two men of property were forced into leadership by the rebels; otherwise property was entirely on the side of the government.

After Scullabogue, Wexford, and Vinegar Hill, there could not fail to be a terrible outpouring of vengeance. It came in full measure, as we learn from the correspondence of Cornwallis, a soldier of high distinction and character, who was sent in place of Camden as viceroy to close the scene. He is much afraid, he says, that any man in a brown coat who is found within several miles of the field of action is butchered without discrimination. The Irish militia, he says, are totally without discipline, contemptible before the enemy when any serious resistance is made to them, but ferocious and cruel in the extreme when any poor wretches either with or without arms come within their power. In short, murder appears their favourite pastime. The conversation of the principal persons of the country all tends to encourage the system of blood, and the conversation even at his own table, where he does all he can to prevent it, always turns on shooting, burning, hanging. If a priest has been put to death, the greatest joy is expressed by the whole company. “Who fears to speak of ’98?” said a patriot bard in other days. The answer is, every one who is not utterly lost to reason and humanity. These militia men, it is to be borne in mind, were Irish, not English, and their murderous enmity was the enmity of one section of Ireland to another.